#I think it is also most persuasive expression of my core idea?

[cassandrasimplex]

"Method acting" is a reference to the Stanislavsky Method, a system of acting based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who created a formalized structure intended to teach and increase EMPATHY.

The entire framework is about enhancing awareness and understanding of one's own emotions and observing and empathizing with the emotions of others. The idea is that the most persuasive way of convincing an audience that you feel a certain emotion is to actually feel it and let your natural expressions of that feeling show, so the audience's own capacity for empathy will be engaged and they'll feel it along with you.

But before you can feel something on cue, before you can enhance your natural expression of it to be visible "in the the back row" of the audience, you have to create a internal catalogue of your own reactions to life and events; you have to learn to observe, recall, and relive as many emotional reactions as you can.

In order to do this as a character, and not just as yourself, you also have to add to that inner catalogue everything you observe OTHERS feeling. In order to have convincing reactions to situations you've never been in, you have to be able to empathize as strongly and fully as possible with people who have. You MUST be able to understand how others think and feel; you must become "a keen observer" of others' emotions and thought processes. In order to portray a sincere reaction to the given circumstances, when they are not ones you personally have ever experienced, you must be able to immerse yourself in the real-life reactions of other people around you in your daily life and add their inner states to your own repertoire. The credibility of your performance relies on how deep and nuanced your understanding of yourself and other people is.

Which means the Stanislavsky Method is a framework for learning to better empathize with others. That's literally what it teaches. Empathy. With other human beings. Empathy. Empathy. I cannot stress that sufficiently. Empathy is at the core of portrayal when you summon an emotion on cue, and empathy is at the core of the audience's belief that you genuinely feel it.

Modern "method acting" has strayed far enough from that origin it doesn't deserve the name, and it trades dishonestly on the established reputation of that century-old formal school of acting while violently rejecting its central premise.

The Stanislavsky Method is not about "provoking" fellow actors to feel a genuine response by recreating a situation THEY'VE never experienced to enhance their portrayal. That's called emotional manipulation, and when it's done to recreate a negative emotion without consent or warning it's just flat out abuse. It damages the trust between actors and thereby damages the performance as a whole.

In a competition as a teenager, I once had to portray a physically-abused wife. I had no experience of that type of domestic violence to draw on, but I did have training in the Stanislavsky Method. One of my fellow actors had to strike me in the face onstage, and I had less than a second to believably summon an entire complex set of emotions to react to it. I'd never been married, let alone struck by a man I was stuck in a physically-abusive 1950s marriage with, but I had to summarize whole decades of destroyed trust, devalued love, fear, imprisonment, determination, exhaustion, and excruciating unfounded hope in less than a second. Those characters had been married to each other more than twice as long as we teenaged actors had been ALIVE, and I had to show that in the middle of pretending to be slapped.

That was difficult for me at 15, but my fellow actor had the more difficult task; his own father physically abused his mother, and he had to come to terms with all his own intense emotions about that, at 15 years old, in order to convincingly portray the abuser.

We did not win the competition; we were disqualified because the judges believed the other actor had actually, physically struck me onstage during the performance. We were too believable. We had to recreate the scene for them repeatedly, in private, from multiple angles, before they admitted there was no physical contact and we had been wrongly disqualified.

We did NOT achieve that level of verisimilitude by my fellow actor "surprising" me by physically striking me onstage. That's lazy, and would have destroyed the chemistry and trust between us onstage and off in everything we performed together afterwards.

We achieved it by practicing the physical motions hundreds of times, while talking through things like his fear of accidentally hitting me in the face for real and feeling like he was recreating his father's abuse. He had to become his own therapist for an incredibly intense and ongoing situation in his own real life, and he had to trust me enough to let me be part of that process. I had to learn from him how his mother reacted, why she would stay with an abusive husband, why she would try to hide these facts from her teenaged son. He had to be a "keen observer" to describe this to me, and it stretched my teenage capacity for empathy and imagination to the limits to FEEL, in my own heart, everything she was going through to the greatest extent I could.

Just fucking slapping me in the face to get a "real reaction" would NEVER have produced the same result. Never. It would have produced the reaction of a teenager who had just been hit in the face by a trusted friend. And it would have done my friend and fellow actor incredible psychological damage.

Instead, it deepened the trust between us tremendously. It made us better able to portray a middle-aged married couple in general, not just during the two seconds of slap. It made us better friends, and it enhanced our ability to work together afterwards. That director cast us across from each other in everything he could after that because it made us work so well, so seamlessly together. I could turn my back to him completely during an improv scene and still know exactly what expression was on his face, what gestures he was making, how he would move, because we'd established such incredibly strong empathy with each other working on that one scene.

Robbie sending Gosling presents is the same kind of work my fellow actor did when he dug into his own personal trauma to help me recreate his mother's reactions: a consensual and deliberate attempt to help another actor understand a situation better and examine their own emotions within the recreation. It builds trust and affection between people who must, MUST trust each other on- and off-stage.

Actors don't practice trust falls for the fun of it. (It's not fun.) Trust is vital to cooperative portrayal, even when what's being portrayed is violence and betrayal. When what's being portrayed is trust and affection, developing it becomes absolutely crucial. We might have convinced the judges that he'd struck me onstage without that kind of work, but we'd never have convinced the audience that a middle-aged man had just yet again slapped a middle-aged wife he'd been married to -- and abusing -- for 40 years without it. Without the trust, it would have just been one actor fake-slapping another actor.

I'm still friends with that actor 35 years later. I can't think of him without wanting to give him a big, happy hug and hear everything about his life. I'd still trust him with my own.

Anyway, modern "method acting" is an offense to the name; it's lazy, it's damaging, it's unconvincing, and it ruins both performances and actors. It weaponizes empathy instead of building it, it often becomes justification for outright abuse, and I flinch every time I hear it mentioned because I know how incredible and outright fucking magical the alternative -- the origin of the term it exploits -- can be.

[edhayne]

I Love Scamp

The TV adaptation of Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling illustrated book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse was the most watched BBC programme on Christmas Eve. Maybe I’m getting overly sentimental in my old age, but I thought the understated short film brought the tale of unusual friendships to life beautifully.

However, what really grabbed me was the accompanying documentary which lets us into the author’s world and his meticulous way of working. It’s a fascinating watch and reaffirmed my belief that committing pen to paper remains one of the purest forms of creative expression.

Before I’m accused of being a technophobe, I’m not advocating that we all unplug our computers and ignore the opportunities that technology enables. Even I’m not that naive, but I am suggesting that we’ve neglected an important craft that deserves a renaissance.

Still not sure what I’m on about? Let’s cut to the chase. I’m referring to the lost art of scamping.

Watching Charlie work his magic over Christmas served as a reminder of just how powerful drawing can be during the creative process. So powerful in fact that a hand drawn scamp is capable of not only enhancing an idea, but also playing a valuable role in protecting it.

Let’s start with how they can make an idea better, sometimes even serendipitously. When talking about one of his most popular sketches, captioned ‘the greatest illusion is that life should be perfect’, Charlie reveals that whilst the ink was drying, his dog walked over the drawing ‘clearly trying to make the point’. It’s an anecdote that captures the possibility that comes with hand-drawn work. Yes, Charlie got lucky, but he was using a medium that lends itself to ideas being built upon organically.

There’s also something to be said for the originality that sits at the heart of a scamp, with our thoughts given the freedom to flow onto the page. It’s why I always loved the pencils handed out at BBH. No doubt some of the world’s greatest advertising campaigns started with one of them, a blank sheet of paper and a relentless pursuit of excellence.

If being creative is about doing new original things, defaulting to image libraries when an idea is in its infancy makes little sense to me. Of course, the right kind of accompanying creative reference is invaluable, but placeholder visuals so early on can distract from the core idea and lead to subjective feedback. Why? Because you’re asking the client to takeaway rather than build upon what’s in front of them.

Naturally the agency blames the client ‘for being too literal’, but if we’re armed with this intel, why do we continue to try and sell creative that sort of looks finished, but is nothing like what we really want to make?

We’ve all been there. “What you’re about to see is not the final execution”. “Think of it like a posh scamp”.

It’s a dangerous game and whether we like it or not, creative presentations are passed around internal stakeholders who understandably aren’t always up to speed on the intricacies of a ‘posh’ scamp. Take away the agency disclaimer voice over and it’s hardly surprising that so many good ideas move onto death row without a fair trial.

It’s why I believe the protective role a ‘common’ scamp can play in the creative process is one of its biggest strengths. Ideas are fragile and need to be nurtured. Like a handwritten letter, there’s something more human and therefore persuasive about a new concept presented in its rawest form, particularly given how rare a technique it’s become.

From a strategy perspective it’s why we often include a photograph that captures the organised chaos of a client/agency workshop when presenting back. Even if the day was largely unproductive, (FYI – many ideas are bad ideas), the sea of luminous post it notes with illegible scribbles conveys a sense of shared ownership and a feeling that brief was interrogated from every angle.

Thankfully Charlie Mackesy wasn’t referring to the output from a workshop when he revealed “it blew his mind that he was sitting talking about a film which began with drawings”. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but when you look at the quality of his craft, the medium he embraced and the cultural context, there’s a reason why he’s been so successful at selling his work alongside his team.

One of the most important jobs in advertising is to shorten the odds of a client buying great ideas. Like a penalty shoot-out in football, it’s a fallacy to suggest it’s a lottery. That’s why the best agencies obsess about creating the right conditions for a successful meeting. And whilst the humble scamp might not always be the answer, it’s certainly not a bad place to start. Just ask Charlie.

[northernweird]

Weird’s Ultimate Alignment System:

I have been thinking about conflict of Law vs Chaos a lot recently. And I mean a lot more than usual. I was a big fan of D&D’s nine grid alignment, but ultimately it’s incredibly fiddly prone to malfunction and cause endless arguments. It’s especially dangerous if alignment has mechanical consequences, like it does in some OSR systems which I am reading currently. A lot of these systems drop the Good vs Evil angle, to focus on more primordial and weird conflict. Unfortunately they or their users almost immediately define Law as pro-social pro-hierarchy pro-status quo and Chaos as social darwinist mutant degenerates. Good job reinventing Good and Evil all over again, and somehow making it mildly faschy sounding?

I think Cosmic Order vs Chaos conflict should be more fundamental, any parallel to modern philosophies and politics merely projection on the part of people, the actual details going just slightly beyond the scope of the characters stuck in the middle. It would be useful to ground it into older lore, something that the actual players would be familiar with. Looking at ancient Greece, they defined primordial chaos as general void, that’s cool, until you think about it for a moment and realize we have circled back around to premise of Status Quo vs Destruction, which is quite flexible but oh so well trod.

This is where my law for medium awareness and self-reference comes in. What was the primordial void from which TTRPG’s came about? War Games. Endless ranks of soldiers clashing together to make measure of their equipment and their immortal leaders’ tactical merits. But wait a minute. If Chaos is Endless Conflict then what does that make Order? Peace? No that doesn’t sound quite right to the present state of TTRPGs. Besides the organized armies of depersonalized soldiers sounds perfectly in Order’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Did we not go far enough?

Because what are Roleplaying games if not continuation of noble human tradition of storytelling and play? Huddled around a campfire with no rules binding them but the magic circle and the whim of the narrator. Where the end goal were the epic highs and lows of collective past and identity. Of myths, tragedies, and heroes.

Presenting new Order and Chaos: Rules-Reference Fundamentalism vs The Unfettered Narration. (please take these tongue in cheek). Order wants everything bound together by strict laws, rules, exceptions, and examples. Every interactions and transaction must be clearly defined and overseen to be valid. Every person’s total worth must be determined by math and spreadsheets. The soldiers must be unquestionably loyal to their commanders, their freewill abstracted into binary of a morale check when going gets tough. Chaos wants to bring the world of roleplaying games back to its original roots. Back to the cozy darkness of prehistoric caves. Back when imagination and emotional connection of the audience were the actual limit to what could be accomplished. The Chaos isn’t just godmodding jerk on the rpg forums however. Chaos is perfectly aware of the innovation that has come through the conventions of storytelling over past thousand years. They understand the importance of tension and release, suspension of disbelief, and the etiquette required to create and maintain a magical circle within which play and story can flourish. They just prefer not to define these invisible lines with distinct rules, going by the feel and reaction.

Of course now these abstractions are perfectly grockable to the players, but they still should be obscure to the characters. The characters aren’t medium aware enough to understand the true scope of the conflict, so it might be good to conceal it behind the long history of scars across the tissue of material plane. PCs may at first even struggle to notice that there are two distinct side at conflict, mislead by the fact that Order and Chaos primarily prefer to fight in their own circles despite their fundamental conflict about what the world ought to look like. The other side simply doesn’t know how to have a good fight! The Art of [Competitive Balance]/[Mythical Feuding] Just Means Nothing to Them!

[blubberquark]

Losing is Fun

When VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy came out in 2010, they were radical departures from established concepts of game difficulty. Games used to have autosave or save slots, but also lives and health, so that when you overwrote your save in a low-health state you could paint yourself into a corner. Other games had regenerating health, or let you restart over and over from the last checkpoint.

Instead, VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy both had a binary state of life or death. Every hazard was lethal. In VVVVVV, the landscape was riddled with autosave checkpoints. Super Meat Boy was difficult, but levels were short. Restarting was instantaneous. There was no "Game Over" screen, no death animation that could not be skipped, just getting back into the action instantly with a single button press. Most importantly, unlike Super Mario World, neither game has a penalty for dying 50 times in a row.

Super Meat Boy could have been different, with lives and mushrooms and coins, and when you are low on of lives, you might be tempted to go back to the equivalent of "Donut Plains" to farm some 1UP mushrooms. But Super Meat Boy was innovating on Super Mario World by being easier in one way and much, much more difficult in another. There is a very different concept of difficulty, failure, and losing.

Instead of being “easier”, these games took the sting out of failure states, and got the player back into the game quickly.

When I am making a game, I try to focus the difficulty into the game's core gameplay, and in the core loop. If it's a puzzle game, I want the puzzles to be difficult and engaging, not the stuff around it, and I don't want the player to be able to grind his way through the meat of the game by spending effort on all the other parts. That means I'd rather make a boss fight just a little more forgiving by default than give the player the option to grind. I’d rather make platforming easier in order to put emphasis on puzzles.

In my experience, about nine times out of ten, when you identify a difficult section in the game during playtesting, it needs to be dealt with for players of all skill levels. The solution is rarely to just give the player “more health” to tank the hits. It’s usually better to more clearly telegraph what is required to overcome the challenge, to put the required tutorialisation earlier in the game, or to re-design the level/boss/timings/attacks for all skill levels. During playtests, I have often observed players struggle and fail at a certain point because they tried the wrong strategy over and over convinced that they could win by executing their flawed strategy perfectly rather than thinking of an alternative.

Some games can't have difficulty settings. I can think of some persuasive games, for example Depression Quest, Dys4ia, and You Have To Burn The Rope, whose central idea would be undermined by difficulty settings. I can also think of un-gamey interactive experiences such as Proteus, The Stanley Parable, Mountain, or Windosill, where difficulty is just not applicable.

In cases in which difficulty is applicable, there is rarely only one way to implement it. The Curse of Monkey Island had a "regular" mode and a "harder mode" with more puzzles, but no "easy mode". The different difficulty settings in Mobility change the game's goals and platforming mechanics. The difficulty settings in VVVVVV slow down the game by up to 40%. You could give characters more health, more lives, drop more loot, change the sizes of hitboxes, remove obstacles from levels, let the player jump farther, or make the enemy AI stupid.

More drastic interventions like increased jump distance can turn easy mode in a completely different game, such that getting better at easy mode won't help with normal mode. With increased jump distance in a platformer, solutions that work in hard mode might not even work in easy mode either.

Other games have a different focus. Nuclear Throne is a coffebreak action roguelike-like about dying and retrying. If there was an "easy mode" and a save/reload function, players might be tempted to crank the difficulty so low they can beat the game in one run. This is clearly not what the designers intended. Vlambeer's next game Luftrausers was even more explicitly focused on dying and retrying.

Reasoning like “so that players of all skill levels can complete the game like the designer intended“ implies that the designer intended the player to beat the game in the first place. Saying “all games should have difficulty settings“ is an expression of a certain expectation of what games “should“ be, and definitely incompatible with moral objections to the term “walking simulator“.

Ending a run of Papers, Please in starvation and poverty is just as “valid“ as doing your duty for Arstozka, just as valid as getting caught helping dissidents, just as valid as buying fake documents and fleeing. Still, it’s conceivable that such a game could have difficulty settings - but it doesn’t need to.

Balance your game so that the difficulty lies in the core gameplay, not in minigames, movement, or ancillary mechanics. Limit the downsides of failing minigames.

Re-work situations that are too difficult, rather than giving the player “more health“. Make it easier to dodge or seek cover rather than tank hits. Make sure the player knows which parts are supposed to be difficult, and what is impossible. Tell the player the information necessary to beat the next challenge - unless the challenge is a riddle. These changes often solve the same problem that difficulty levels would solve. Corollary: Remove grinding and resource hoarding when possible.

If applicable, rethink your failure states, implied failure states, save system, penalties for losing, ease of restarting, distance from save points, and permanent progression.

When your players lose too often, make losing fun!

[fimflamfilosophy]

“Is DnD Still Popular?”

To some of you giant nerds, the question, “Is DnD still popular,” is probably one of the stranger things you’ll read today, but within a specific context it makes a lot of sense. Speaking of, the show “Stranger Things” presented a popular, physical look at what DnD beasties might feel like, even if it didn’t present an honest view of what DnD games really play like. Along with more online media referencing the game and sites like Roll20 making it easier to join a group, it makes sense. Is this a temporary boom or has the roleplaying community seen a lot of permanent additions to its nerdy hobby?

I wouldn’t have numbers to say, myself, but for what it’s worth, roleplaying is always a very personal experience. And for a few of us, the question isn’t, “Are people still playing DnD?” Of course they are - it’s all anyone plays! The question is, “Can you get anyone to play anything else?”

What Is DnD?

For some people, Dungeons & Dragons has become so intertwined with the concept of roleplaying that people think DnD and roleplaying are synonymous. If you roleplay, you play DnD. Originally, this had a kernel of truth. There are articles about the history of the system, and during its inception the game had a hard time taking off. Fundamentally it was asking people to play make-believe, but with a system of mathematical rules and designs. We know now that this type of thing is like catnip to massive dork-faced neckbeards, but at the time it wasn’t expected to have much appeal.

Eventually it did get off the ground, and it became the standard for the entire concept of a roleplaying game. And as with all “firsts to the market”, there have been many competitors and copycats, but it’s difficult to pry the audience away when you need everyone to use the same system. In economics they call this “network utility value” - that is, a fax machine is useless if only one person owns one. You can only send faxes to other people with fax machines, so if another company tries to invent their own offshoot of the fax machine, they’ll never get anyone to adopt it because everyone is already using the existing fax machine network. Everybody knows DnD, which means that if you go to a convention or look for games online, you know you’re going to find more players for that system than any other.

Why Does DnD Continue to Work?

In early editions of DnD, there were a lot more rules, and as a result more freedom to design your characters. When I first started roleplaying, it was during the 3rd edition of the system, where you could still allocate skill points to become better or worse at specific skills like lying, climbing, forgery, or crafting. This meant that with good planning, you could play a sub-optimal wizard and make up for it somewhat by investing a lot in your “persuasion” skills to rely on talk more than magic.

But being the system that everyone has to learn isn’t enough to stay on top forever. Other systems like GURPS have taken hold by now, and some types of popular nerd media have introduced their own completely unique systems designed to simulate their specific media universes. The owners of DnD had two choices: either make the game more open and try to eat the lunch of other companies, or make all of DnD easier to play in general to capture a broader audience.

So they released 4th edition! We don’t talk about 4th edition. And then they quickly released 5th edition (and a few mumbled apologies), which streamlined a lot of things about the game to the extent I’m not sure why they even let you control your character stats at all now. Skills became baked in with your level, and most of the game is about choosing abilities when you level up. It’s become very similar to playing an MMO, and I believe that’s the point.

One of the big things you always see in a complicated roleplaying system is players spending hours putting together a character. For your experienced player, this is a labor of love. You really care about the small details and want to make sure you get it right, or you’re a Win-At-All-Costs type who wants to make sure you’re rolling the biggest numbers. Either way you’re familiar and know what you’re doing, but it presents a hurdle to new players, and that hurdle has been largely done away with in 5th edition.

No matter how old you are, how experienced you are, how creative you are (or aren’t), or how much you know about any aspect of the game, you can play 5e DnD. I think you could play as young as seven years old and have minimal problems, because all you have to do is choose a job and virtually everything else is filled in for you, as if by a program, as if a video game. An experienced player can help a new one whip up a character within fifteen minutes, and that new guy will be rolling dice at the dragon about as well as everyone else.

DnD is the Worst System

But DnD’s accessibility is also its greatest downfall. Because everything is sort of programmed out, you find a lot of players eventually growing bored with the same-old, and they try to find ways to inject new life into the system. They invent new races, new classes, new abilities, and so on - they call this “homebrew”. yet many people are bad at creating balance and fairness for something they personally intend to play, and DnD recognizes this problem. It has a lot of supplemental books telling you all you need to know about other races and classes you might want to play, and in theory they are as fair and powerful as anything in the base system.

Yet no amount of homebrew or supplementary material will solve DnD’s core problem: it’s rigid. If you want to play, you need a battle mat, because every spell, every action, can travel or act within a certain number of squares and you always need to know exactly where you’re standing. Players are expected to be able to take a certain number of actions per turn based on their level, and do an expected amount of damage. Monster encounters are built loosely around the concept of “Challenge Rating”, which is meant to imply a group of four players will find a CR of 5 suitably challenging if they are all level five. Basically it plays like “X-Com”.

And as you lock people in these mechanical, video game-styled designs, you find people champing at the bit. Not everyone wants to choose their abilities at level up or have their skill proficiencies dictated by what level they are. Some people want to express truly outlandish concepts, or play something that isn’t specifically designed around the idea of walking room to room blasting monsters. You’ll see people in roleplaying communities often asking, “Does anyone have any good ideas to homebrew [this idea] and make it work?”

Fans of DnD argue the homebrew approach works. Yes, it’s complicated and frustrating to invent entirely new classes and races for a single game where you don’t know how long you’ll play or what level you’ll reach, but DnD’s strict rules and design philosophy is a perk to those people, not a drawback.

Yet a fact of note is that a quote from a game I run got into a popular “Out of Context DnD” blog. The quote was, “ Mecha-Jesus unleashes a barrage of flames from his palms, but the train-snake martially dodges out of the way!”

It received 337 notes, and I was a little surprised by that. The game is a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior setting where the team boss decided to kill God as revenge for one of the gang members dying. Also featured in that day’s session was a battle between two men operating bucket cranes in a duel to the death above a giant grain silo, among eight other equally implausible events based loosely on Dante’s Inferno. For me, Mecha-Jesus is not a 300 notes event - it’s literally every other Friday.

What Do You Want to Play?

In my view, DnD often poses the question, “Are you even roleplaying?” I mean really. A lot of players feel like they are because they do an accent and come up with a backstory, but if you set yourself next to another player who has the same character stats and you’re playing together in the same game, has the system really given you the tools to solve problems all that differently? And the answer is is broadly, no.

I understand the counter-argument. Every player is unique. But in their way each Paladin in “World of Warcraft” is unique too. They have different gear, different competencies of player, and may take different abilities, but fundamentally they’re expected to crash dungeons and use what they’re given to kill monsters. The only advantage DnD has is that the GM can allow his players to interact with scenery items or talk to things, and you’ll see debate on exactly how much leniency a GM should give his players to act outside DnD’s base mechanics.

That’s a mentality. Some people like the safety of the system. They like to know what all the monsters are, what the risks are, what the rewards are, and have it all neatly lined up where you can see it. They want to join an Adventuring Guild that will bureaucratically assign a dungeon for them to attack so they always have something to do and a sure reward for doing it. The GM went through the trouble of drawing that dungeon out, after all. DnD is extremely safe.

And then there’s the alternative. I actually learned to roleplay among theater nerds who were already big into the concept of improv and narrative. One of them used to joke, “If you think DnD is the best system for the game, you know it’s not character-driven,” because any time you’re fine with trying to build an actual human around a set of level-up choices, you’re probably not designing the strongest possible personality.

Going back to media making DnD more popular, the first televised introduction to DnD I can personally recall is an episode of “Dexter’s Lab” where they address exactly this conflict. In it, Dexter runs a game where he forces his friends to play by his rules, where he wins. When Dexter rolls poorly, he turns the dice over to a better number and declares his evil wizard “fried” the team of adventurers. Then his sister, Dee Dee, takes over, and with no knowledge of the game’s rules at all, embarks on an improvised session of pure roleplaying where the guys tell her what they do and she tells them what happens. The sheets are just guidelines for them, and if they say they can do something Dee Dee accepts it.

Dee Dee’s roleplaying is open. It’s a void, and for some people, when you look into the void it looks back. How do you control everyone when they can do anything? It requires a certain level of trust that some players have a difficult time not abusing, yet weirdly everyone I’ve ever known who would lie and cheat during a roleplaying game actually preferred DnD, and I think I know why.

Rules Can Be Broken, but the Suspension of Disbelief is Immutable

The grognards that break the rules in DnD do so because the rules are so strict that they ironically can be easily broken. If the system says people take a certain amount of damage when they fall, and you find a way to throw to them that elevation consistently, by gum they’ll damn well take that damage. It’s in the rules! A friend I know combats this by saying if his players exploit the rules, then the monsters will start exploiting them too, to discourage arms races of bullshit.

What I’m describing is often called “rules lawyering”. So named because it involves finding a rules passage, interpreting the rule so the wording sounds like it favors an exploit, and then leveraging that into a powerful ability players were not meant to have. Because DnD requires you to know absolutely everything about your relative locations and words like “Attack” can have important diverging meanings depending on context, it’s a system extremely vulnerable to lawyering.

But with a more open system based on narrative and characters, it becomes harder to lawyer something you shouldn’t. In an open system, you build what the game calls for without consulting a bunch of charts and level guides. If you’re super heroes, you build super heroes. Cyborgs are cyborgs, Orcs are orcs - it’s whatever, and if you try to do anything outside the believability of the game, the GM tells you no. He has more authority in a more narrative game because the GM leads the narrative.

I’m personally fond of the Hero System, which ascribes massive ranges to all forms of weapons (a gun or eye laser can reach you down a long hallway) so the only general questions that need to be asked are, “Are you close enough to punch a guy?” and “Are you bunched up close enough to all be hit by this grenade?” You don’t need battle mats and the games play a lot more intuitively. There are two books of rules in Hero and they can be specific, but most of the rules revolve around character design rather than how to play, and fiddly things like physics or bursting through walls are meant to be decided depending on the type of game, at the GM’s discretion. There are guidelines, but they’re only that.

So if someone tells you they can punch through a wall in your noir investigator game, you tell them no, because the rules are just guidelines and in this game you can’t just drive your fist through a concrete brick even if you can find figures in the book that say maybe you can, because the book also says maybe you can’t - you’re expected to play the narrative, not the game. You can punch through walls in the super hero game where that’s typical, but not in this one.

From DnD to Anything Else

Of course, the open systems also present an opportunity for players to be very different in skill sets and abilities. You could imagine DnD is like “Power Rangers”, where everyone’s a different color and has different weapons but they’re basically all pretty much on the same level. An open system will wind up more like “Avatar the Last Airbender”, where one player is going to be Toph and someone else is going to be playing Sokka. 

It’s important in DnD that everyone be the same, because a lot of the game is spent in a 20ft x 20ft room full of skeletons (or Putties) - Toph would single-handedly dominate every challenge. Whereas in a narrative-driven game the ability to crush everything with a rock doesn’t actually solve half your problems and whoever’s playing Sokka probably winds up more active than the person playing Toph.

At the end of it all, that’s why the question for me is whether you can take the players out of DnD and take DnD out of the players. Everyone plays DnD, but can you get people to play Sokka and have a good time if Toph is in the party? Personally I think it helps to start people on systems other than DnD, and then they can go into DnD if they like being in small rooms full of skeletons.

Of course, trying to start people on anything but DnD is usually defeated by the network utility! Everyone knows DnD! It’s THE system synonymous with the hobby! A few too many times I’ve seen people play a DnD game and say roleplaying just isn’t for them because it’s boring. All you do is wait for your turn and then roll dice at goblins.

But all I can say to that is, you never roleplayed, man. You joined a pen-and-paper video game. I agree, throwing dice at goblins sucks. I used to have a friend who would compulsively roll dice when he got bored waiting for turns in games like that, and when asked what he was rolling for, he’d joke, “I’m killing the dragon! I’m killing the dragon!” Him, enjoying the experience of DnD combat in between other people’s turns.

In many groups that’s all DnD is, silly accents and go-nowhere backstories aside. Acting is hard. But if you’re very lucky, and you know just the right people, it’s possible to land in a game that is pure story and character, and those things are a rare treasure and a real blast.

[letsmustafa]

COMMUNICATION

I) Introduction :

“Communication is your ticket to success, if you pay attention and learn to do it effectively”  - Theo Gold (Author of Positive Thinking)

The very vital ingredient of life is to share feelings, expressions, to be get heard and add meanings. In fact, the key to life is means to communicate. In other word, we can say, only through communication can human life hold meaning. The process of understanding each other, express ideas, sharing opinion and passing of information or facts. And therefore, it’s imperative to be potent with effective communication skills and techniques in order to enrich the communication process more meaningful and efficient, eventually to be successful in any desired aim or task. We all are bind in relationship whether at home, workplace or in social affairs. Base of successful relationship is communication, and to do it effectively we have to be master in the art of effective communication. To communicate effectively, one must understand the emotion behind the information being said. Understanding communication skills such as; listening, verbal and non-verbal communication, and managing stress can help better the relationships one has with others.

“Your ability to communicate is an important tool in your pursuit of your goals, whether it is with your family, your co-workers or your clients and customers”  - Lee Brown (American politician, criminologist and businessman)

For many, communication seems like a gift. In reality, it is a skill that can be learned through education and practice. Thus, I strongly believe that, each and every individual can grow and become successful in their respective filed and achieve their desired goal if they are championed in effective communication and eager to learn and adopt it as their essential skill set.    

II) About Me :  

Born and brought up in defense area, a town in India, my upbringing has great influenced of military culture. Being retried naval personnel, my father has always given utmost important to disciplined life be it in education, sports or workplace. My mother, a housemaker, truly believe in freedom of open thinking and expression. She has been source of inspiration for us as siblings to pursue our dreams and has her immense support in every manner to achieve it. I, being the youngest, had more privilege to be with her and get nurtured under the shadow as the wife of warrior, a tough warrior in real life. 

As a defense ward, I was fortunate for having had my schooling in military school throughout and chance of meeting and interacting with colleagues coming from different part of the country. Spending my early life with friends, each one with special personality may it be their language, culture, living style, faith etc., was actually the great learning. I must say, defense kids are breed apart. They can adjust everywhere and has ability to manage life with everyone because of their wide exposure in their initial days. They are really blessed with skills to express themselves quite effectively and bond easily to create value network in life.      

Post completing my graduation, I moved to metro city New Delhi. City with full of scope and hope. Opportunity in every field and avenue to fulfill our dreams. I did my post-graduation (PG) here with an ambition of successful career in corporate world, and hence PG in an MBA with finance and marketing as specialization. Since then I’m a working professional in different sectors namely IT/ITES, HR Consulting and Real Estate respectively. My work domain largely involved; business development, marketing communication (MarCom), client relationship (CRM) and event management. My key result area (KRAs) also involved the part of database management (DBMS), management information (MIS) and team handling. 

With having experience of 12 years in different sectors and domain altogether, I always find a scope of learning, improvement and areas to challenge myself to upscale a level ahead from where I was last standing. Upgrading the communication tactics and strategy is organization demand to align with sophisticated corporate purpose and achieving core objectives. Sometime rejection and disapproval are obvious outcome. However, answer to all is keep on brushing and strengthening the communication strategies, keep it effective and nurture leadership quality with dynamic approach simultaneously.

“When you give yourself permission to communicate what matters to you in every situation you will have peace despite rejection or disapproval. Putting a voice to your soul helps you to let go of the negative energy of fear and regret”  - Shannon L. Alder (An inspirational author)

III) Communication strategy and leadership:

Taking role as senior executive level, it’s important to quickly establish or elevate communication skill sets or program. I understand that, the higher we go, more people within the organization would want to know about what we are going to do and how will we do it. We may have inherited hundreds of staff distributed across the world, to whom we may need to communicate regarding our renewed mission, strategy or brand objectives. Furthermore, there may be numerous other stakeholders outside the company that we have to communicate to, like investors, banks, customers etc. Disciplined communication strategy is essential to get across the critical message to key stakeholders without it being drowned by the noise or lost in translation.  

It is crucial to implement excellent communication strategy for success in business world. To encourage members of a company to work together effectively. How team and team members within a company interact determines whether projects will run smoothly or be fraught with challenges. This is where leadership comes in. Good leadership and effective communication go hand in hand. Leaders interact with every team and a large number of employees, how a leader communicates sets the tone for the rest of the organization. Good leader should able to motivate, persuade and encourage others to work towards a common goal.

“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall” - Abraham Lincoln (Statesman, lawyer and former US president)

It’s essential to identify the leadership style for better understanding on how we must interact with, and perceived by, employees across the organization. Irrespective of the position, we need to develop our individual leadership style and cultivate the essential habit of self-awareness. Even before entering the managerial position, leadership qualities are required depending upon the context and situation. It may be goal oriented, action based, people centric, behavioral etc. Excellent communication skills are required to manage a team at workplace or to manage organization efficiently. And communication gets affected by different leadership styles. To conclude, effective communication and leadership together gives an effective leadership communication. Communication makes a leader effective who develops better understanding in teams. These understanding bring a sense of trust in employees on the leader and on each other, work together, which further reinforce congenial relations with team members and creates an excellent work atmosphere. This enhance the dedication towards work and eventually helps to achieve the desired targets. Conceptual model of effective leadership communication can be explained as below –

Strategic Narrative -

There has been a tangential shift in the way communication is being approached in organizations today. This tangential shift from a formal directive method of communication to a more engaging and inclusive conversational style. The distance between the sender and the receiver is getting shorter and the need for inclusivity and relationship building through communication is getting stronger. One of the major reasons for this shift is the evolution of the workforce and the relationships they hope to make in the workplace. Formality and hierarchy have made way for equality and a flatter organization structure. It’s a common refrain in executive suites these days: “We need a new narrative.” Therefore, story telling is very effective way to excite, attract customers, to engage and motivate. A story that is concise but comprehensive.

“Storytelling can be described as the art of communication using stories and narratives”

When a person needs to be motivated or action is desired out of him/her, communication in the form of stories will generate a stronger reaction when compared to passive data given to him/her.

Active Listening, Receiving and Implementing Feedback –

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen” - Ernest Hemingway (An American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman)

Effective leaders know when they need to talk and, more importantly, when they need to listen. employees’ opinions, ideas, and feedback are valuable. And when they do share, actively engage in the conversation—pose questions, invite them to elaborate, and take notes. It’s important to stay in the moment and avoid interrupting. It’s critical, though, that you don’t just listen to the feedback. You also need to act on it, to build up the faith, trust and transparency. By letting your employees know they were heard and then apprising them of any progress you can, or do, make, they’ll feel as though you value their perspective and are serious about improving.

IV) Conclusion :

Communication is the core of effective leadership. To influence and inspire the team, we’ve to be championed in transparency and practicing empathy. Need to understand how other perceive one’s perspective basis on verbal and non-verbal cues. Figure out the scope of improvement and development process and align the plan to guide and track progress.

[astroismypassion]

Hey there! I see you were having technical difficulties. I got you a coffee the other day, and I think you said you started working on my chart? Lol. Anyways, my birthday is 05/20/1993, in Edmonton Alberta, Canada at 12:22am. Ty! :)

And this is the second part! ;) 

CAREER, PROFESSIONAL LIFE, PUBLIC IMAGE 

You have Sagittarius North Node in the 11th house. This indicates your “life purpose”. You might be inclined to like to be unlimited, unrestricted and untied to anything in your life. You could very much like the idea of a boho life or a traveler's life. Never settling anywhere, always expanding new acquaintances, researching and expanding your horizons. You might like to travel and meet the locals, natives of the city or a country. You might have quite a “loner” mentality in this lifetime. You have potential to become a life coach, a mentor to others or some sort of host in your community. You might bring people together from all walks of life, from all ethnicities, countries, cities and places. You are fascinated by them as well. Because 11th house here wants to teach you how to spend time alone as well. But furthermore, how to stand up in your community, your friendship group, clubs and with your hobbies and interests. You might have very idealistic views for the future, even your hope and dreams might be quite idealistic. You have Scorpio MC. You have most of your 10th house in Scorpio, but a bit of Sagittarius there too. You have Pluto in the 10th house. Here, be careful of any coworkers trying to damage your reputation or setting you up for something. Or blame you for something you didn’t do. It can seriously damage your career and profession. life. But where there is Pluto there is also great power in your hands. You might instantly know what “the crowd” wants. Which duties and responsibilities are expected from you and what your bosses and authorities want from you. You can be very persuasive, even manipulative at times in this area. You have Aquarius Saturn in the 2nd house. You have a very wide 2nd house with Aquarius, Pisces and Aries there. You have Capricorn, Aquarius in the 1st house. With Neptune and Uranus there too. You might see yourself as a bit unconventional, odd, quirky and weird at times. You think you stick out for your looks as well. There could be body dysmorphia type of attitude that you have towards your physical appearance. You might surprise others often with a totally new style of clothing, haircut or attitude. People never know what to expect from you. This ties to the second house and your fluctuating self worth and self esteem as well.  

ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS 

You have Capricorn Part of Fortune in the 1st house. This represents where your natural luck and where you might experience good charm. It happens in the area of professional life, career, your duties and responsibilities. Those areas affect your personality, character, ego, self image and self esteem. They  might grow or become weaker and affected by Capricorn themes. You have Pisces Lilith in the 2nd house. You might have an unclear, confused attitude when it comes to your finance, income, money, material possessions, belongings, your self worth, self esteem and work ethic. You might think you have more or less money than you actually have. You could also make money through broadcasting a trait or a talent. You could earn your income through spirituality, healing practices, your own art, photography or videography. You might “forget” about money sometimes. Or you might feel like you are not “deserving” of it. Like you could have an attitude that money is bad or that it only brings troubles. It can easily slip through your hands as well. You might spend your money on technology, spirituality, health, healing practices, something that you value and helps you “escape” it. You might spend your money on odd or unusual, unconventional items that others might not view as a priority. You could also spend money for vacation, tarot cards or crystals. You have Leo Juno in the 7th house. This indicates your ideal spouse, a “soulmate” type of partner. This is not just a romantic partner, it can indicate what you desire from your ideal friendship as well. You like someone who is compromising, giving, generous, cooperative. Someone who is not afraid to show you attention, affection, appreciation and spend time with you. You give yourself wholeheartedly and you expect the same from others. You are generous with your time and attention with those who you truly love. But you aren’t going to waste time on those that are undeserving of your company and compassion. You like your relationship reciprocated. You have Aries Ceres in the 3rd house. This means how you like to be nurtured and how you nurture others. You might be the one who gives tough love to others or confronts them with their issues or just bluntly tells them haha. But it’s because you value honesty so much. You have Leo Chiron in the 7th house. There is a past wound, a hurt in regards to your one on one relationship. You might have often experienced being taken advantage of you, because of your good will. There seems to be a power struggle as well. When you’re on your own it’s good, but as soon as you enter a relationship conflicts, drama and arguments seem to happen. You can feel in power or completely powerless. Ahh, Chiron in the 7th house is a tough placement to have… it’s quite challenging to “heal” it too. Because it usually stems from a pattern from early life. If your parents had a lot of arguments or even legal conflicts, such as divroce, you might have been greatly affected by that. You have a lot of Cardinal Earth. You desire to be the number one in your field of choice and you are great at materializing things. Even your possessions, dream house, money, skills. You’d benefit from a vision board or a moodboard, which serves as an inspiration for your future. You have a great power to actually put your words into practice. 

CHART RULER

Your chart ruler is Saturn. The chart ruler of the 1st house is in the 2nd house. This means your personality, ego, self esteem, characters best expresses itself through 2nd house topics, such as your talents, skill set, work ethic, what you have to offer. And it goes vica versa here. Topics of the 1st house, like your personality, character might develop though you working on the 2nd house matters. Here is an additional video on this topic by an excellent fellow astrologer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNH8LM4csaw . 

HOUSE RULERS 

The ruler of the 1st house is in the 2nd house. 

The way you look depends on your self-esteem. Life is oriented to discovering personal values and creating self-esteem. Appearance is a source of security issues.

The ruler of the 2nd house is in the 1st house. 

You spend money on haircuts, manicures, facials and clothes. You earn money with your appearance. Self-esteem has an effect on your behavior and mannerisms. Your appearance makes you look wealthy.

The ruler of the 3rd house is in the 7th house.

You talk, read, write, and learn about relationships. You give relationship advice. Your communication style can be overly compromising or confrontational. You want a partner you can talk to. Your mind is oriented toward thinking about your partner. 

The ruler of the 4th house is in the 3rd house. 

Home is a place to have lively conversations. Cultural upbringing has a strong bearing on your thoughts. Feeling included or rejected by your family influences your day to day interactions.  Home is a place where people come and go. You bring your private inner self with you when you write, keep a journal or blog.

The ruler of the 5th house is in the 5th house. 

You always have time to stop and smell the roses. You like to be entertaining to attract attention. You pursue hobbies for self-satisfaction. Self-expression comes through music, art, dance and theater. You are flamboyant. Romance and fun go hand in hand. 

The ruler of the 6th house is in the 5th house. 

Your interest in health and exercise manifests through an interest in sports or dance. You want a creative work environment. Your work environment is a theater, dance studio, music hall or art studio.

The ruler of the 7th house is in the 4th house. 

Being tactful and diplomatic is part of the core of who you are. You want a partner with whom you can make a home and start a family. Your partner is your family. 

The ruler of the 8th house is in the 4th house. 

You have sex to feel emotionally secure. Death affects your family. Peak emotional experiences occur in the privacy of your own home. Shared resources add to feelings of emotional security. Inheritances help or hinder your family. 

The ruler of the 9th house is in the 3rd house. 

You write a travel blog. You pick up an accent, you incorporate foreign words into everyday conversation and you talk about faraway places. Your interest in religion compels you to write or keep a diary. You have siblings from other cultures or religious upbringings. You find meaning through writing and literature. You find meaning in the written word. 

The ruler of the 10th house is in the 10th house. 

You want to become known for what you do. Getting out in the world and making a name for yourself is important to you. You want to be known for something. Your career builds your reputation.

The ruler of the 11th house is in the 8th house.

You associate with people who are involved in the occult. Your friends have emotional baggage. You keep your group involvements hidden. You don’t talk about your long term hopes and wishes.

The ruler of the 12th house is in the 8th house. 

You get in touch with your spiritual side through sexual relationships and experiencing death. Dreams encourage you to dig deep. You want a sexual partner who desires to escape from reality as much as you do.

[kpopisamood]

Queen’s Clan { 8 }

Summary: y/n is plagued by nightmares. She realizes that the more she runs away, the less frequently they haunt her. However, in running away, she’s also running straight into her ultimate demise. Will she be saved in time by those who would lay down their lives for her, even if they don’t know of each other’s existence?

Monsta X/Reader, Human/Vampire(s), Reverse Harem

Warnings: future smut?, violence, language

Word count: 1.97k

Tag list: @noonaduck @lovinggalaxies @elenaramos1 @girlwith-thecinder-blockgarden

***

You ever get so drunk you need someone to help you stumble back home? You make that special someone listen to your drunken ramblings and boisterous laughter while bumping them into things as they try to avoid you getting injured?

This was sort of like that, minus the laughing.

Add the cussing.

You were a strong, independent woman who didn’t need a man let alone two to help you waddle to your room. Both Minhyuk and Jooheon kept trying to assure you this was no bother and that it was their sacred duty to do this sort of thing for you. Frankly, all this Queen talk was starting to get annoying. You weren’t some fragile being who needed an adult wherever you went. You were a bit lost at the new influx of information, and you were still forty-three percent sure these assholes belonged in some special institute somewhere, but you’ve been alone for a few years now and you could handle your own. If anything, these guys made things worse. The second they came in, everything fell apart. You had a stable routine of knowing when to move on but no, these geniuses decided they knew what was best and took you.

Fuck. That.

An idea popped in your head. Let’s see how far these guys would really go for their “Queen”. It was probably going to be a cruel joke, but dammit, this was probably the only way to see if they were being serious.

“I feel very faint, you guys. I think I’ll need help changing into something less dirty.” You sighed heavily, leaning to minhyuk’s side as they helped you up the stairs.

Jooheon slightly stumbles, almost causing you to fall completely onto Minhyuk and stammers that he’s willing to help with whatever needs you had.

Time to up the ante.

As soon as they helped hobble you into your room and light discarded you on your bed, Minhyuk went straight for your bag that you hadn’t unpacked yet. Throwing an arm over your face dramatically, you whimpered out that it was too hot in your room and needed to get rid of these clothes now.

Minhyuk was going through your clothes as fast as he could, trying to find something that was light and wouldn’t restrict you in any sort of way but you had other ideas.

“Can I wear your clothes?” You asked sheepishly peeking through your hand. They wouldn’t give you their clothes so casually, right?

“I’ll go get mine!” Jooheon exclaimed, running out the door before either of you could stop him.

Minhyuk eyed you warily, and approached you slowly. “I could have gotten you an outfit quicker than it’ll take him to get clothes, My Queen.”

“I know, I’m just not really wanting to get near that bag right now. Too many memories.” You explained, looking anywhere but him.

Jooheon rush in with a fancy looking suitcase and opened it on the floor in front of you, searching for anything you might like.

“Actually, wait,” You started. This was it. If they did this last thing you might have to somewhat accept that they thought of you as a Queen. “Could you maybe give me the clothes you’re wearing and perhaps...join me in bed?” You asked Jooheon, grabbing his hand from searching his case and giving him your best sultry eyes you could, tilting your head in a way that made your request seem innocent when really, your intentions were anything but.

Jooheon fell back from his squatting position straight onto his rear before he went into action. He stood and started pulling his shirt up, and Minhyuk suddenly got what was going on.

It was when Jooheon started trying to pull his pants and underwear down that you stopped it.

“Okay, okay! I believe you guys now!” You freaked out, shielding your eyes from Jooheon’s almost naked appearance.

“Believe?” He asked, still halfway in between getting undressed for you.

“She was testing us, idiot.” Minhyuk laughed. “She wanted to see how far we would go for her and I think she got her answer.” He smirked at you before rolling his eyes at Jooheon and telling him to get dressed.

“That wasn’t very nice, Y/N.” Minhyuk warned you softly. “One could have easily mistaken you wanting to take Jooheon to bed tonight. What would you have done if we were too quick for you to stop us?”

Truth be told, you didn’t know. If you had suddenly found yourself with two naked boys wanting to give you all their attention, you’d be done for. You don’t know if you would have stopped them had they went too far and the thought of them even getting in such a position was starting to make your heart beat quicker.

“I-I don’t know.” You shook your head miserably, head still hidden in your hands.

Jooheon was shocked, albeit mad as hell. He did the only thing he could think of before sulking out of your room. He went up to your side and bent down, whispering lowly in your ear and caused your eyes to widen and face to redden. His smirk told Minhyuk all he needed to know and Minhyuk followed him out, wishing you a good night’s sleep before closing the door gently behind them.

In your room, you were still shaken up over what he had said to you. You’ve never been talked to like that by anyone and for someone to say these words so openly and shamelessly had you feeling heat in your face and your core. You realized this was a bad prank to pull, but his words had left you feeling like your soul was leaving your body.

“The next time you ask me to join you in bed, you’ll need to beg, my Queen.”

***

The following morning Ms. Kudrow arrived bright and early without warning, much to everyone’s chagrin. Hoseok had let her in and let her start setting up a projector and some files, leading you to believe she was putting you through some sort of schooling.

Hyunwoo was also downstairs with you and Hoseok, eagerly anticipating what she had to say. Changkyun and Minhyuk were still sleeping and when Jooheon came in, you tried not to meet his eyes.

Ms. Kudrow cleared her throat before turning on the projector. A bright light enveloped the now dark room and she pushed a button on a remote she had to reveal a list of names.

“These are all the Royal Ardetha’s,” she started. “You’ll need to learn all of them and make some sort of peace with them now that they know of your existence. Most of them only want power and will be very forthcoming with you but others will be a bit closed off to you since they don’t really know who you are.” She clicked her button again, this time revealing pictures of several women and a couple elderly men.

“These people are The Council; they’re a group of traditionalistic members of the Royals that most likely birthed some of today’s Royals. We age differently in our world.” She explained, seeing your confused frown. She clicked the remote again, revealing more pictures of the Royals, this time with groups surrounding them along with houses and characteristics listed to the side.

“The Royals are all very different from each other. We have the wild ones who want to rebel,” she clicked to the next picture, revealing a night club and a very intimate image of a girl almost being swarmed by men and women. “Then we have those who keep to themselves and could possibly want to join The Council once they reach of age.” She clicked again and revealed a picture of a mansion that looked like it was taken in the 1800s. There was a woman in a simple ball gown with her hair pinned up, several men standing behind her with stoic expressions while she had a soft and elegant gaze towards the camera.

“As I said, you’ll need to learn all you can about them. There is a gathering that will take place soon and many of these Royals will be there with their respective Clans. It will be a formal setting and it usually happens once a year to discuss treaty lines and power exchanges. I’d advise you not to make enemies out of any of these people yet but I’m sure you knew that.” She clicked again to reveal a blank page with the word “Kings” as the title.

“One thing for certain is that you don’t speak to any of the Kings there.” Just as you’re about to tell her you can speak to anyone you damn well please, she continued. “Kings and Queens are very different in social aspects. The Kings attending this gathering already have a set of rules they follow from the traditionalistic ways and will only be there to court Queens. Forgive my language, Your Grace, but Kings attend gatherings for the sole purpose of breeding and extending their lineage. I know I just said you don’t want to step on any toes, but I’d like to advise you against any sort of interaction with them. They can be very persuasive and have been known to take over a Queen’s entire estate and leave her with nothing. It’s a politics game the moment you step into their territory and you won’t leave unscathed.” She said gravely.

She went to the projector and turned it off, while Jooheon went to turn the lights back on. She came over to your side of the table and slid a few documents towards you.

“I’ve brought along several files on the Queen’s who have accepted the invitation to go as well as what they’re like and who is in their Clan. Some Queen’s have actually Bonded together to form one bigger Clan to ensure more power and they could be very valuable to have as friends. That being said, I’ve also brought the files on your estate and the deed to the house your mother had, should you choose to relocate there. I’ve also brought forms for you to fill out since I see your Clan numbers have grown. You’ll need to write out their names and relations to you so you can keep them, the papers and your Clan, with you. If you should have any questions, I’ve also left my office number and your Clan will answer any as well. I’ll be back in a few days to run by some things you’ll need to have before the gathering that’s coming up in a few weeks and we’ll go from there.” She said quickly, grabbing her bag and slinging it on one shoulder, leaving the dining room and you heard the echo of the front door shutting behind.

“What the actual fuck?” You sighed, slumping down and putting your head in your hands. Papers on papers surrounded you, reminding you of your high school days when you had to study for a huge final and you felt completely overwhelmed. This was an actual lifestyle that they had. An actual way of life governed by people who were like them at one time.

And all these people are saying it’s your life as well.

What the actual fuck.

Please do NOT repost! All rights reserved!

[tinkadreamchaser]

Vargas Arithmancy/Numerology

So, today I found out Arithmancy is real and not just Harry Potter. Numerology is the actual term for assigning meaning to numbers, Arithmancy is assigning numbers to letters and words. I’m still reading up on that, though, so apologies if I’m wrong. Of course I immediately had to apply it to fictional characters and so you get this.

In my Vargas Astrology post I took a swing at figuring out their birthdays, and that will be useful later from what I’ve read, since a few numbers need a birth date. As a reminder, I estimated Scriabin to be born on October 27, 1997 and Edgar on August 24, 1964

There are five important numbers in Numerology, the Life Path number, the Expression/Destiny number, the Birth Day number, the Heart’s Desire number and the Personality number.

Life Path number

I’m gonna start with the Life Path number, just like I started with the sun signs in the astrology post. Seems like they are similarly important. And like I said, this one needs the birth date. Or rather, the digit sum of the birthdate. There is actually an order to it, that tells you how to reduce the numbers in the birth date.

The next bit is some simple math. First, you have to reduce the month, then the date and lastly the year. All of those numbers are then added up and reduced until we get a single digit number.

For Scriabin, that’s the month October = 10 = 1+0 = 1, the day 27 = 2+7 = 9 and the year 1997 = 1+9+9+7 = 26 = 2+6 = 8. That makes 1+9+8 = 18 = 1+8 = 9.

For Edgar, it’s the month August = 8, the day 24 = 2+4 = 6 and the year 1964 = 1+9+6+4 = 20 = 2. And so for him we have 8+6+2 = 16 = 1+6 = 7.

Now we have the Life Path number 9 for Scriabin and 7 for Edgar, but what does this mean? The Life Path number is like our Sun Sign in Astrology, it’s supposed to give an idea of who someone is, what’s important to them, how they behave, and so on.

Honestly, this is just a fun little exercise, but a few aspects of the Life Path 9 could fit Scriabin, I think. 9’s have a lot of charisma and self-confidence, which draws a lot of attention from others and is often used by them to get the things they want in life. A downside of the Life Path 9 is that they may develop a negative obsession with success and freedom, especially in financial matters. Also, since the 9 is the last number in numerology (excepting the master numbers 11 and 22), it’s considered an ‘old soul’ and in a way, a sage. Which plays a large role in that they keep offering insight, guidance and advice to others. Honestly, what I read about this was all phrased very kindly, but to me they sound a lot like smartasses.

The number 7 is funny to me, because one website described it as a blend of Virgo and Scorpio, which are the Sun Signs I pinned on Edgar and Scriabin respectively. And since the Life Path number is there since birth, this is just such a neat little thing! And actually, there is so much more in this Life Path that fits really well in my opinion. 7’s are analytical, they search for knowledge and the answers to mysteries. They enjoy deep, abstract and philosophical conversations, but can get easily overstimulated and withdraw as a form of self-preservation, which makes them loners most of the time. That in turn gives them a lot to learn about relationships. And since they are so reflective, they will eventually be forced to also go deep within themselves to confront themselves. Which I can imagine, if this went wrong for whatever reason, could have some very bad results for them. Since the goal of this kind of self-discovery is trusting yourself to set yourself on a path of achievement, it must be detrimental to suddenly find oneself ridden with another person in your brain. Also, the people on Life Path 7 distrust their own judgement a lot anyways, so it’s all just a bundle of trust issues.

Expression number

Next up is the Expression number, which is also called Destiny number. This one is tricky here, because it comes from your full name at birth, the one on your birth certificate. Which in Scriabin’s case could be considered the note Edgar wrote in Chapter 29. It’s what I’m going to go with at least. It works by assigning numbers to each letter of the alphabet and then calculating the digit number of your name.

SCRIABIN VARGAS

13991295 419711 = 1+3+9+9+1+2+9+5+4+1+9+7+1+1 = 62 = 6+2 = 8

EDGAR VARGAS

54719 419711 =  5+4+7+1+9+4+1+9+7+1+1 = 49 = 4+9 = 13 = 1+3 = 4

The Expression number is often called Destiny number because it shows the kind of person you were meant to become. It doesn’t mean you will become like this, just that it is the goal you should strive towards, the one for which you have the tools to achieve.

Scriabin’s Expression Number is 8, but I also calculated a 3 for just his first name. The three has a stronger focus on social skills and communication than the 8, but the 8 also includes having an ability to judge people well. This does not mean having any deep connections with them, though, which is something 8’s often lack. Close relationships with an 8 are difficult since to them it feels as though their peace is disturbed. Really, the Expression number 8 is one of material gain and they seek financial security, which I don’t think fits well with Scriabin? But they can’t all be winners. There are still some other parts of the number 8 that fit fairly well, like that they can turn to being impatient and commanding if they get too ambitious. They do have good leadership skills, but if there are no emotion or connection to support that, it’s easy for them to become domineering and controlling. 8’s also tend to see an idea that is different from their own as wrong.

And Edgar is a four, which is a number I’ve seen before described as ‘four legs on a table’. It’s stable, it’s down-to-earth and it can be stubborn as hell. Yes, tables are stubborn, and tables with four legs are always harder to just tip over! But really, 4’s are kind of fixed in their ways, just as Virgo’s are. And they are occasionally loyal to a fault, which I figure could prove to be difficult, since the thing that makes them happiest is being around people with the same moral compass as them. But if they are specifically loyal to someone who does not share their integrity... sounds like a tough situation to be in. Now, 4’s are hard-working, which if they take on too many challenges can make them frustrated to the point of coming off as aggressive and bossy. Also, they’re not gonna do anything without a plan. Another cute little bit is that they are considered good parents, since they tend to be good with kids.

Heart’s Desire and Personality numbers

I’m going to do the Heart’s Desire and Personality numbers here, since they are also calculated from the names. The first is calculated by only adding up the vowels, the other by adding up the consonants.

SCRIABIN VARGAS

---91-9- -1--1- = 9+1+9+1+1 = 21 = 3

139--2-5 4-97-1 = 1+3+9+2+5+4+9+7+1 = 41 = 4+1 = 5

EDGAR VARGAS

5--1- -1--1 = 5+1+1+1 = 8

-47-9 4-97-1 = 4+7+9+4+9+7+1 = 41 = 4+1 = 5

So for Scriabin, the Heart’s Desire number is a 3 and Edgar’s is a 8. That they share the Personality number 5 is intriguing to me. 5’s value expression of personal freedom greatly and in most aspects, 5 is a Personality number that fits Scriabin much more than Edgar. They always know all the gossip, have a wide circle of friends and socializes often, but won’t settle down in any way. That means jobs, homes, partners, you name it. They just can’t commit to anything long-term.

And the Heart’s Desire numbers in this case are also kind of off, but I’m gonna give them to you anyways. 3’s are likely to want to express themselves through art, in any medium, which includes acting among things like music or decorating. Scriabin does get artistic with his imagination, I guess. And 8’s usually wish to be primary figures in organizational matters, to take over big projects.

Something more interesting is the meaning associated with certain letters in a name. The first letter of a name (the Cornerstone) represents that persons approach to life, while the last letter (the Capstone) shows how they accomplish things and follow through. Basically, the beginning and end of any task they undertake. The first vowel is important too, since it shows what the person values the most. It’s also a part that people rarely get to see.

So, for Scriabin it’s S-I-N. Which is hilarious. S in the beginning shows a magnetic presence and strong persuasive skills, N is all about imagination and free thinking, while I is - because of course - soft-marshmallow-y compassion and creativity.

And Edgar is E-E-R, I guess. I don’t know the rules when a first vowel is also the first letter. But E stands for freedom being a driving force for that person, and also has some romantic and expressive energy. R is all hard work and shows a commitment to support and uplift people.

Birthday number

But let’s move away from the names and take a look at the last core number, which is the Birth Day number. This only looks at the day someone was born, no math needed. Again, I’m going with what I pinned them as in my Astrology post. Edgar is a 24 and Scriabin a 27.

Birthday number 24 seems to me like a sweetheart. They’re loyal to their loved ones, able to be nurturer, protector and provider, but are also supposedly good at maintaining balanced and stable relationships. Then again, they also have a tendency for self-sacrifice and are very aware of their place in the world and the role they play in it. If something upsets their principles, they become narrow-minded and stubborn. One website said they ‘have drastic manifestation of emotions’, which yeah, that made me laugh.

27’s are funny, because one website described them as natural aristocrats, while another quite literally said they can make people do things. And once again, people born on the 27th are often great artists. They also can have difficulty with accepting a different point of view. And most importantly, if there are negative connections in their life they should cut those off, before they are driven to retaliate, since that exponentially increases the negativity in their life.

 Aaaand that’s another ridiculously long post about me focusing way too hard on psychoanalysing fictional characters with spiritual means. Who know, next I’ll bust out my tarot deck and do a reading for them!

[rantshemlock]

you heard it right folks, for the second year in a row i watched 

Every Halloween Film

it took around 18 hours. there are eleven movies now after all. next year there will be twelve, and next year i will throw myself into the river thames if i make myself watch Rob Zombie’s Halloween II again. 

this time i wrote it out as a journal. it is a mess. i will not edit it. if you read the entire thing you dont get a prize. im very, very tired. i watched eleven movies today. i like five of them. 

9:27- I boot up Halloween (1978). I don’t know if this is the movie I’ve seen the most in my life, but I’ve certainly seen it dozens of times, and it never loses its impact. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m reading into micro-expressions on actors’ faces and I don’t know how much any of this was ever intended, but it certainly enhances my own reading of the film. I catch the expression of slight annoyance on Judith’s face when Michael walks into her room; it’s clear she had just no idea this was coming.

9:37- The staging of the opening of Halloween is so like a nightmare, a comparison I keep using this year for the movies I watch, but there’s a sense of being placed in the immediacy of what’s happening with no context and a burden of responsibility that only exists in dreams in the first few opening scenes. You don’t know where you are or what you’re supposed to be doing, but something huge and terrible is happening and the thick, dark shadows combined with the pale white-blue light the film uses makes everything emerge out of the black but never truly divorce itself from the darkness.

The way Loomis talks about Michael like some kind of animal is such a point of fixation for me. He calls Michael ‘it’ and wants ‘it’ to be locked up for life. Maybe it’s just being of a crazy persuasion myself but being the responsibility of a doctor who despises you and refers to you as an untreatable evil doesn’t feel like it would be much help to me. I just don’t think Loomis is a great doctor, is my point.

Laurie’s introduction is such a surge of light in a film that has up until now been shot almost exclusively in darkness. We are shown someone good, normal, happy, but the long, distant shots mean we are not accompanying her on this journey from her perspective; we are following her. Halloween legend suggests Michael doesn’t start stalking Laurie until she approaches the Myers’ house, but it feels like his eyes are lingering on her long before she does that. He casts a long shadow over her life before she even knows he exists.

9:42- The fact the film approaches the idea that it doesn’t make sense Michael would know how to drive a car but doesn’t explain it at all is weirdly funny. Just fuck it man, he can drive.

9:45: I really love the focus on Michael as a physical being. The fact we see him touch someone with his hands, open a car, steer while driving, run his hand over a fence… All of this adds a sense of Michael being tangible that I think is so vital. Michael Myers is a human being, not a demon, and that’s precisely why he is scary. Halloween as always meant to be a movie about the person next door; the fear comes from the fact that something inside your apparently nice, normal neighbourhood is rotten to the core. Laurie herself is incredibly on edge almost from the start; she knows something is wrong. She just hasn’t figured out what yet.

9:57- The gravekeeper’s insistence that something like this happens in every town is probably right on the money. It’s definitely what the film wants you to understand. The apparent nicety of your hometown doesn’t mean it’s free of violence, only that you’re trained not to notice it.

10:01- at exactly 0:33:16 Michael drives by in the background right behind Loomis without Loomis noticing, which is hysterically funny to me. I imagine Michael finds this incredibly funny too.

10:02- Laurie saying she’d “rather go to the dance with Ben Traimor” smacks of being a teenager and gay and saying the name of the first kid you know who’s nice to you because you guess that’s what having a crush is?

10:05- Loomis’ insistence at 0:37:12 that Michael killed and ate a dog raw is incredible to me. Also, I can’t say “Michael raw dog” to my friends without them screaming hysterically at me. They’re fuckers, and I hate them

10:07- From Loomis’ description, he met Michael when Michael was six, already condemned by the doctors as an incurable patient, and stopped treating Michael and turned to insisting he be locked up by the time Michael was fourteen. I think about this a lot.

10:13- “I’m not about to let anything happen to you.” I’m always very touched by Laurie’s immediate assertion of her position as a protector of children.

10:19- Lindsay caring literally only about watching horror movies is incredibly relatable. Truly a hero I can finally understand.

10:28- The house across the street, Lindsay’s house, is almost as haunting as the Myers house itself. It’s certainly a beautiful spectacle, the huge white building with its pillars and vast, blank windows, looming out of the darkness like a moon-lit tombstone. Laurie always seems so lonely when she watches it from the outside.

10:33- The head tilt after Michael pins Bob to the wall is so fucking iconic. It’s the first time it was done, I believe, and while it’s a cliché now it’s still chilling. The way Michael just studies Bob’s corpse, thoughts completely unable to be interpreted. The fact he turfs up in a ghost costume wearing Bob’s glasses moments later is so strange; there’s really no reason he would do that at all, other than the idea he finds it funny. There’s more showmanship to what Michael does than people recognise a lot of the time, I think. It’s like he really wants his work to be seen.

10:43- The shot of Annie on the bed under Judith’s tombstone has to be one of the most beautiful shots in the franchise. The perfect arrangement made just for Laurie to walk in on and experience in one precise way is so meticulous. Michael’s obsessiveness nature manifest in so many ways. The final showdown between Michael and Laurie is only around ten minutes long but it’s an incredible endurance test of a scene; the way Michael grows out of the shadows like he’s being formed within them is still beautiful and terrifying.

I think a really underrated part of this sequence that makes it so frightening is how Laurie is pointedly not alone; the neighbourhood she’s in is populated, and there are people around her. But when she runs to the neighbours for help, screaming and banging on the doors, they choose to ignore her. Seeing something they don’t like in their neighbourhood, they shut it out.

10:50- the closet scene is an incredible piece of filmmaking. There’s really never been anything before or since. I love art with a lot of lines and shadows and seeing the shadow of Michael moments before he breaks through the door is so haunting.

10:52- Laurie desperate and holding the knife in her hands is stunning. I love her.

10:54- I love the brief glimpse of seeing Michael’s face and how it stops him dead in his tracks. The fact he looks so painfully normal is so important too.

10:55- There’s a lot to be said about Loomis confirming Michael is ‘the Boogeyman’. I think Michael’s definite physical humanity in this movie is so important because it contrasts so strongly against the dehumanisation of him by the characters around him. We can only accept there’s a nightmare inside our neighbourhoods if we choose to believe it isn’t natural to it; that someone like that could not form there, but must have been artificially summoned, like a demon. Later movies and the remakes run with this idea; that Michael is somehow an outsider, but I think that defeats the entire point. Michael is part of this world just as much as Laurie is, whether we want to believe it or not.

10:57- I should be starting Halloween II but unfortunately, I have to go to the pharmacy. It might be Halloween, but prescription medications wait for no slasher villain.

11:13- I start watching Halloween II (1981). I like that this movie starts off with Mr Sandman. Horror movies having nursery rhymes in them now is another cliché, but this is such an interesting pick for Michael. I suppose it fits with him being the Boogeyman; he’s a creature of nightmares that slinks into our homes only through dreams. Allegedly.

I like the decision to pick this movie up right after the last one stopped, something that it looks like 2020’s Halloween Kills will be duplicating. It just makes a straightforward kind of sense.

11:21- The hysteria of Loomis screaming “I shot him six times!” over and over is sort of funny and sort of sick. There’s a slight traumatised, obsessive lunacy in Loomis the same as there is in Michael. I like the parallels between them. Loomis raised Michael more than Michael’s own parents did; it makes sense he’d have a lingering affect.

11:23- The shots from Michael’s perspective both in the first movie and this one are great. I love that we’re challenged to be inside his mind. We follow Michael a lot in this early opening. There’s an obvious strategy to his actions in this film, but the randomness of his kills are new. In the first movie, all the kills either get him something or revolve around Laurie. In this one, he kind of just does whatever, a theme that carries on for the rest of the movie.

11:24- A difference I don’t like so much in this movie is that the neighbours are so much more keyed into each other; they pay attention to the screaming and the strange noises, watch out for things that look out of place. I feel like it clashes with the first movie’s themes of isolation simply through your neighbours not caring what happens to you.

11:32- Ben Traimor getting hit by a cop car which crashes into a van and then explodes is one of the funniest fucking things that’s ever happened in this franchise. It is so completely fucking inexplicable and suddenly violent and pointless that it becomes hysterical, which is unfortunate given it’s meant to be a serious scene.

The breakdown scene that follows, where the Sheriff Brackett finds his daughter Annie is dead however is excellent. Charles Cyphers manages to carry the weight of the tragedy pretty effectively for a film that can veer into the goofy too easily, and Dr Loomis’ more measured delivery on his beliefs about Myers is Donald Pleasance at his best.

Halloween II isn’t any longer than Halloween, but the pacing is worse. It lets go of the original’s constant, haunting tension and delivers a sloppier movie as a result, too padded with side characters and people passing through the world with no consequence. The character of Brett is probably one of the most obnoxious characters in the franchise, which is saying a lot.

11:46- Laurie literally not knowing it was Michael Myers who was after her until she’s told is weirdly sad. Like of course she didn’t know, but it’s still sad. She feels very small and vulnerable in this movie, very lost in the big, empty hospital. The fact her parents are inexplicably missing and never shows up makes me crazy. I always wonder if there was a dropped plot thread where Michael was meant to have killed them, or something, because there’s really no explanation.

11:53- The musical stings in this movie are so odd. They’re too bleepy. Don’t know what the hell happened.

11:55- I take the laptop into the kitchen to make a sandwich while I watch the movie. It’s early for lunch but I don’t eat breakfast and I can actively feel my braincells hurting me.

12:01- I’m fascinated by the shots in this of the faint dream Laurie has of seeing a boy in the hospital when she was a child. I can never decide if these are real or not; if she’s unlocking some strange, contextless memory from childhood or just imagining it, instinctively feeling the connection between her and Michael without knowing the truth.

12:04- Bud’s off-screen death is so unsatisfying. Also, so continues the trend of Michael being mistaken for people’s boyfriends. Guess he’s just boyfriend material. Seems unbelievable to me she wouldn’t notice how dirty his hands are, though. And Jesus, the boiling her to death kill is really pretty brutal and graphic, after kills in the first few movies are so relatively restrained.

12:07- Michael writing SAMHAIN on the wall is so over the top. Yeah, I can believe he’s fucking 21 years old. Michael is a performance art student.

12:09- Laurie having Michael’s ability to go deadly still and silent is neat. I like them having links. They’re siblings after all. Runs in Myers family.

12:11- The needle into the side of the head kill is bizarre. Also, the head-tilt here feels cheap. I have already started stealing candy from the bowl intended for trick-or-treaters. In my defence, I could, and I wanted it.

12:20- I like that Laurie has an instinct to run, hide and defend herself. I don’t know if it’s the trauma of surviving or a prenatural sense that Michael is coming for her, but I like it. I don’t like that this entire movie is like twenty minutes longer than it needs to be, or how little Laurie is actually in it.

12:28- The reveal that Laurie is Michael’s sister is so great. It fits so well. I say bullshit to anyone who doesn’t like it. The repetition and obsessiveness of Michael’s behaviour, the strange links and parallels between Laurie and Michael. The fact that the two of them are just as much parts of Haddonfield as each other. It just feels right for them to be related. They are related.

12:31- Laurie crawling on the street begging for help as Loomis ignores her again – this man is truly useless.

12:33- Michael walking directly through a glass door is hysterical.

12:38- Laurie calling Michael’s name, stopping him for a second, blinding him with a shot… This last sequence is fantastic. There’s an enormous amount of pity in seeing Michael blindly stumbling around, swinging his knife, unable to see but still so desperate to kill. The fact she stops him by calling his name is great. The way it almost, for a second, perks some recognition inside him. I think a lot about Michael’s sense of identity. Who does he think he is? I guess we’re never going to find out.

12:43- Halloween III: Season of the Witch time. There’s a trend now of saying this is really the best Halloween movie. I can’t really argue with people’s personal takes, but there’s always a sense to that to me of denying the classic to favour the underdog. People love an underdog. But Halloween III definitely does kind of rule. As much conspiracy thriller as it is horror movie, Halloween III is deeply weird and creative, but packed with great performances and truly memorable special effects, with a killer soundtrack to boot.

1:11- Halloween III is so distinct feeling; it almost feels like a John Carpenter movie, but more like The Thing than Halloween. The film is less aesthetically distinct than Halloween; it takes place over days, in many locations, following the characters as they dig into the conspiracy behind the menacing Silver Shamrock company. It’s well-written and often pretty witty and builds an incredible sense of menace and strangeness. The little company town surrounding the Silver Shamrock factory is bizarre and frightening and although the film can be a little heavy-handed in its depiction of a surveillance state, it certainly builds up atmosphere.

1:20- The scene of the old drunk being taken out by the corporate men in black rules in how suddenly violent and horrible it is. We love a horror movie.

1:26- Some of the digital effects leave a little to be desired but god the practical effects are fucking incredible, and so goddamn memorable and horrible.

1:33- The over-the-top niceness of the Silver Shamrock owner is so pitch-perfect. He’s so nice that it’s obviously, blatantly menacing. What owner of a big corporation like this just gives shit away for free? I mean, come on. I really love the apparent legends that surround him, though, the reputation of being a genius and a great man.

1:48- The complete calmness with which the whole plan gets revealed is so good because you really sense how fucking little threat our heroes pose; no one here thinks they have a chance in hell of stopping Silver Shamrock. The plan in itself is absurd, but like, who cares. It’s fun. The fact Cochran is like, delighted to show off his big ideas because he’s so confident nothing will stop them. And in a way he’s right; at least partially, the heroes do ultimately fail.

2:00- the speech Cochran delivers about the power of Samhain rules. It’s so intense and menacing. Fucking great performance here.

2:07- As much as I like the ending, I think how much it drags on kind of kills some of the tension. Feels like it could have been cut back. The imagery at the very end is fantastic though; it’s so weird. The way this movie embraces strangeness is great; I’ll always take a film that tries to be something different and weird over anything that plays it safe.

2:20- Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Jesus we’re starting down a dark path now. Halloween 4 is pretty thoroughly ‘ok’ and even has a couple of good moments but God. The decision to return to just being about Michael Myers after risking and flopping with an anthology movie is fine by me, but Halloween 4 plays it as safe as possible and lacks any of the flair or charm of the original. It just doesn’t have any style, and the forced drama falls short. Jamie Lee Curtis’ absence also feels like a sucking void in the film; it’s too painfully obvious that she was meant to be in this movie, and the fact she isn’t, the fact she died off-screen in some completely nondescript way is so depressing. The filmmakers assumed no one watching gave a shit about Laurie, and that’s so wrong and so disheartening.

2:25- the other doctors hating Loomis really adds to my reading of him as a man on the brink. He must be insufferable to know.

2:30- It really feels so painfully fucking unfair that Laurie would go through so much to just die in a random car accident. Or maybe there’s a kind of poetry in her dying without Michael’s involvement; just part of her own life.

2:36- Donald Pleasance is such a mensch. As stupid as these movies get, he never stopped bringing his fucking A-game and giving them as much respect and gravitas as he could. What a fucking legend.

2:41- Loomis seeing Michael in the diner is so fucking good. Loomis’ quiet pleading, asking Michael not to go back to Haddonfield but just take him instead, the quiet God damn you. Such a great moment. Would be better if Michael didn’t just suddenly teleport out of the room with no explanation, but you can’t have it all.

2:42- Why are later Halloween movies so fond of explosions.

2:43- The kids literally chanting ‘Jamie’s an orphan’ at her is incredible. Not in a good way.

2:50- I fetch the kitten to keep him on my lap because my house is colder than Michael Myers’ black heart.

2:55- Michael looking at Laurie’s photos… Ugh.

2:56- Why do people not just believe Loomis when he says Michael is back. We have this thread every week, comrade.

3:06- Michael just kinda standing around in the background doesn’t really do much in terms of fear. It’s just silly. And his mask looks ridiculous.

3:12- This film is a masterclass in failing to raise tension.

3:23- There’s an attempt to manufacture conflict by having the police clash with a group baying for mob justice, but it all feels completely inert. Nothing in the film carries any weight or drama, and the tension is all derived from using familiar music stings to try and kick your brain into recognising it’s an appropriate place to feel something.

3:25- The kitten bites me, drinks my water, and goes to sit in a box instead. I hate him. The kill where Michael stabs someone through the gut with a shotgun and pins them to the wall is the most flagrantly absurd thing I’ve ever seen. The fact she’s immediately found also really kills the tension. Also why is Michael so fucking strong. He’s so strong.

3:31- I can see the intention with the roof scene, but there’s too much unintentional comedy and Michael is so unthreatening that it doesn’t hold together at all. I especially hate how Michael will just suddenly appear out of nowhere; the first movie utilises his forming out of the shadows so well, but it doesn’t fucking work the same if he’s just there, in a formerly empty and well-lit corridor. He’s not being beamed in by a spaceship.

3:39- God this film is slow. Michael’s hands look absolutely terrifically fucked up. I wish Laurie was here.

3:41- It is insufferable how this film has like ten climaxes. Jamie running to inspect Michael really just doesn’t make any sense. I understand why the filmmakers did it, but it doesn’t make sense. They allude to some connection between the two, but it’s really underplayed and doesn’t pay out well when so much of the movie is her being flatly scared of him. They could have – and should have – acted more on the idea of her finding some sort of familiar connection between them. Famously, the movie ends with the idea Jamie might have somehow inherited Michael’s drive to murder, but the plot thread disappointingly gets dropped after this movie.

3:47- It’s time for Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. God, this movie is such a non-entity in the franchise. It doesn’t have 6’s turbulent history or 4’s dramatic ending. It just like, occurs. It occupies space and time. It tries to further the connection between Jamie and Michael, turning it into something psychic and supernatural, and begins to introduce elements of the Cult of Thorne before that takes over as the plot of 6, but none of it is interesting and I also hate the attempt to make Halloween a supernatural franchise.

4:04- The totally legal for sure stream I’m using starts fucking up so everything takes a break while I find somewhere else to watch it.

4:05- Contemplate if life is worth it.

4:06- Film returns. It’s not worth it.

4:27- If screaming at kids was always Dr Loomis’ brand of psychiatry no wonder he couldn’t help Michael.

4:30- You really need to put in more effort than this if you want to make someone being murdered in broad daylight scary. If you’re not putting in the kind of effort Midsommar does to sell the death, you aren’t gonna get there. Halloween as a franchise seems obnoxiously dedicated to doing shit in the middle of the fucking day, for something who built the power of the original scares so much off of the quiet and darkness of the shadows.

4:39- Imagine leaving a traumatised child alone because you want to get laid. Tina’s character is fucking absurd. There are far too much entirely interchangeable faces in this movie screaming incoherently.

4:57- The scene of Michael desperately trying to run Jamie over with a car while the camera swings around hysterically and then the car inexplicably exploding is like peak mid-sequel Halloween. It really exemplifies how much the franchise started relying on noise and flash instead of like, being scary.

5:02- Loomis begging Michael to ‘fight the rage that drives you’ and saying that killing will never drive the anger out is too little too late, ain’t it. I like the idea of an appeal to his emotions but there’s so little emotional weight to the rest of the movie that it fails to maintain a meaningful tone. All the moments where Jamie is communing with Michael are supposed to drive tension I guess, but it mostly is just very silly.

5:09- Every set in this movie look so much like a set. Considering the first movie was just shot in a house I don’t understand why they didn’t do the same. I like the prospect of Loomis trying to talk to Michael, to get through to him emotionally, but seeing Michael just standing there in the really goofy fucking mask they gave him this film is just ridiculous. Donald Pleasance can only do so much.

5:19- Again we return to the idea of getting through to Michael emotionally. Jamie calls him uncle and asks for him to take his mask off. He does, even. But there doesn’t feel like there’s any understanding of who Michael is; there’s no consistent psychology or examination, only the gut feeling that family has to be important. But we know how Michael feels about family, and it’s not tender. He speaks his own language.

5:21- Where the fuck did Loomis even get a giant chain net and tranquiliser drafts.

5:25- Sure why wouldn’t a guy with a machine gun show up and just start slaughtering everyone like who the fuck cares.

5:28- I take a break to gather my thoughts and feelings emotionally so I can handle watching Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.

5:32- I change the cat litter to avoid watching Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.

5:40- I start Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.

5:50- The woman calls into radio station and says she’s in love with Michael Myers is the only person in this film I respect.

5:51- The decision to bring back Tommy Doyle as a conspiracy theorist who’s obsessed with Michael is a great concept, which is why I’m glad Tommy Doyle is in Halloween Kills so I never have to say Halloween 6 makes a point again. Paul Rudd (yes, that Paul Rudd) is shockingly terrible in this movie, and also, I don’t like him as an actor, so nothing about this performance endears him to me. I have no fucking idea what they directed him to do. It is miserable.

6:01- I am straight up not having a good time bro.

6:03- This is the only Halloween movie in a long time to actually try and show off its location; Halloween 5 could be set literally anywhere and is unfollowable, but Halloween 6 at least attempts to ground the movie in Haddonfield and show that this is a normal neighbourhood. Unfortunately, this movie takes place in nonsense magic doo-doo land so any attempt to ground us in anything is a waste of fucking time.

6:13- There’s a lot of reasons I don’t like this movie; I think the additions of mythology are absurd and go against the themes of the original, the conclusion is dumb as hell, the story is boring. It isn’t scary and it isn’t well-shot or well-written. But on a more abstract level, I hate its schlock, cheap understanding of what obsession and trauma does to someone. I fucking loathe that it uses rape as a shock tactic and how much abuse it puts its female characters through for no catharsis.

6:50- This curry I’m eating sucks ass. I want that on the record.

7:22- Jesus fucking Christ it’s finally time for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. I love this movie. I love it for the ambition it had. It might not be a as fully realised examination of trauma after time as Halloween (2018) is, but I admire it for its vision. It doesn’t try to mimic the style of the first film, and I guess there’s a certain loss in aesthetic as it’s more akin to Scream or other fairly uniform 90s slasher movies in appearance, but it’s a far more confident movie than the other middling Halloween sequels. It has a clear understanding of what it wants the movie to be and is genuinely tense and thrilling because of that, as well as more readily grounded in reality. It has a genuine respect for the original that others fail to and tries to build an original film that follows it in a meaningful sense.  

7:56- Laurie is really condemned to be around people who don’t listen to her but as much of a horrible little punk shit her son is, narratives about inherited or family trauma make me go insane, so this all affects me still.

8:01- I like the discussion of fate in Frankenstein as parallel to the discussion of fate in the first movie. It’s silly, but I like it, and that’s on me.

8:07- One of the smartest moves this film makes is using its own score. A lot of the middling sequels just lift from the original without any care, but H20 puts in some effort into building up some actual atmosphere.

8:13- I like that Laurie is a mess but still holding it together. She’s jumpy and always watching, with a bottle of alcohol a little too close beside her. It’s not exactly the most monumental depiction of lifelong trauma, but the film makes an effort. I love its effort. I love Jamie Lee Curtis as well.

8:26- This film brings back a theatricality to the presentations of Michael’s victims that I feel the movies sorely lack. If it doesn’t look like an art project why bother? I was going to say I wish there was more development of the relationship with Michael and his nephew, but I don’t. I want more Laurie. Love Laurie.

8:28- Michael’s not good with keys. I love the fact that his hands and eyes are so clear, though. It brings back that kind of essential physicality he had in the original. Him making contact with Laurie, the shot of the two of them through the glass looking at each other is so fucking good.

8:34- Laurie standing in the drive with a fucking axe screaming Michael’s name as the Halloween them kicks in fucking rules so goddamn hard. The final fight scene between these two is an all-time great.

8:39- Laurie pulling a gun on a cop so she can kidnap the coroner’s van so she can make sure Michael is actually dead is fucking incredible. She’s the best person who’s ever been written. The final conclusion of the film, with Michael reaching out to her when he’s pinned down, and it’s unclear if he’s asking for help or trying to reach out to hurt her one last time but his eyes are filled with desperation is one of the best moments in any of the films, and the power of Laurie just delivering the killing blow makes it even better. The fact they both get to be so vulnerable and so human and have a moment, just a moment, where their hands touch for any reason other than violence is so fucking strong. I love this fucking movie.

8:45- Halloween: Resurrection. Because after just seeing Laurie fight for her life and get out alive, triumphing over Michael once and for all, obviously what we want is to have the whole thing turn out to be bullshit and a fake out and for Laurie to die in the first five minutes of this film? Fuck this movie man. Like fuck this movie.

8:59- as bad and stupid and shallow as this movie is, the slight manipulation Michael performs is pretty great, and Laurie’s line “Are you afraid of me?” is an all-time great. This film doesn’t earn Laurie’s death, though, and it doesn’t deserve Jamie Lee Curtis. I’m not even totally against the idea of finding out what Michael would do if all his family was dead, but this movie’s option of ‘be in a reality show being filmed in his house’ is probably the answer I never, ever, ever wanted.

9:03- I have given up.

9:25- People make a big deal out of the ending scene where Busta Rhymes electrocutes Michael Myers in the nuts but it is really the only moment of levity in what is otherwise the most boring experience anyone can have.

10:00- I am eating leftover candy and contemplating my life.

10:17- I boot up Halloween (2007). I have accepted death.

10:19- Yeah, what Halloween was really lacking was a guy yelling “I should crawl over there and skullfuck the shit outta you!” before hitting on his teenage stepdaughter. The level of overt grossness and extremity that Robert Zombert brings to this franchise is so fucking putrid and unnecessary. All he brings to this franchise is insane amounts of unbridled misogyny and pop psychology. I said the same thing last year and I’ll happily say it again; this movie’s idea of what makes a serial killer is like something from a daytime TV movie. I’m sure it was intended to be edgy, but the demonization of the working class and sex workers and the position of Michael as the lower-class outsider to the nice suburbs is the most conformist class politics in existence. Halloween (1978)’s depiction of a serial killer who was a part of and came from inside the nice, safe, upper middle-class suburb will always be a far, far more revolutionary statement than this.

10:44- I don’t believe this really gives Michael ‘more backstory’ since it basically just re-treads what the first movie did, but it sure does it worse. The film just takes an incredible amount of time to say ultimately nothing at all. What really gets me is that this does really destroy the Michael is the big bad boogeyman myth simply because the childhood it gives Michael doesn’t fit with who he is. The change just feels forced. The suddenness of his violence feels forced. There doesn’t seem to be any observation here other than it would be scary if a nice kid was actually murderer.

10:56- Why does Michael’s mother own a huge projector. The melodrama of her killing herself is so absurd.

11:03- Michael Myers gets called the F-slur so many times in this movie that I’m officially adopting him as part of the LGBT community.

11:12- people criticise the original for not having the most natural of dialogue for its teenage girl characters, but the teenagers in this film are so incredibly obnoxious that it’s borderline unbearable to watch. Their dialogue is unnatural too, because it’s the kind of shit a weird old man really, desperately wants teenage girls to say.

11:23- There isn’t a scene in this that doesn’t drag on for too long in a completely unfunny, charmless way. It’s also insanely aggravating how Zombie is incapable of holding the camera still for longer than a couple of seconds at a time, and why everyone in the movie always has to be twenty feet away at all times.

11:25- This movie is just the first movie but longer with people screaming fuck constantly and added rape scenes. It is so insanely fucking worthless it really defies description.

11:28- I could be hanging out with my friends but I’m watching a bad movie. Contemplating life again.

11:45- I wish Robert Zombert wasn’t so horny.

11:51- I like truly never want to hear screaming again. There’s so much noise in this movie all the time. There isn’t a fucking second of silence in this film that couldn’t be filled with someone screaming hysterically or shit breaking. There isn’t a moment where the camera holds still and lets us take in the information in the frame without wobbling deliriously or swinging around like it’s on a fucking office chair.

12:10- I wonder if I can go see Doctor Sleep tomorrow. It’s technically not Halloween anymore, but if I manage to watch all these films within twenty-four hours I think it still counts.

12:13- We’re on Halloween II (2009). I like that this movie opens up with an explanation of what the symbolism of the white horse represents, in case you’re too stupid to figure it out for yourself. I like that the flashback is also completely drained of colour, in case you’re too stupid to figure out that it’s a flashback, even after it had a title card explaining it was. Just in case you thought Michael turned into a kid again, or something.

12:17- Glad we’re back to the constant screaming and camera swirling, just in case you thought for a brief second you’d have a moment of fucking peace.

12:21- I joked about the absurdity of Ben Traimor in Halloween II (1982) getting hit by a van and then exploding but it really doesn’t match up to the pointless fucking spectacle of violence that occurs roughly every ten seconds in Halloween II (2009). There’s no reason whatsoever to have the coroner’s van full of rapists crash into a cow and have the most incredibly bloody crash scene ever while one of them screams fuck over and over, but it happens. It isn’t scary, funny, or interesting, but it sure happens. That just about sums up this movie. Loud, bloody, and gratuitous, but not, y’know, interesting.

12:39- What an exploitative ‘I think crazy chicks are hot’ vision of trauma this is.

12:48- The idea of Loomis cashing in on his fame and becoming a celebrity psychologist is a good idea, but in classic Rob Zombie way, it’s done in the least interesting way possible.

1:04- What the fuck is happening.

1:13- it is like fucking incredible how boring this movie is. None of these scenes have any purpose. It’s just stuff, it’s stuff to put on film, with no larger thesis or point. I don’t fully understand why anyone bothered making this movie.

1:29- Great, a party sequence. That’s what this film really needed. More pointless noise and scenes that go nowhere. It was way too quiet and plot-heavy until now.

1:31- Does Mr Zombie know he can just make music videos. Like wouldn’t it be easier.

1:55- The ending scene in this movie is so incredibly incoherent and unwatchable. The bringing of the strange psychic ghosts that haunt Michael and Laurie and making them real, physical presences only makes the film more incoherent. It’s all jerky, wild camera movements, strobe lighting and screaming from here on out. Michael is such a non-entity in this film. He’s in at least half the movie, but he’s not himself. He’s just like a big guy with a beard and one line.

1:59- The slo-mo is so unnecessary. Like you fucking had to make this movie even longer? For who? For what?

2:00- I wish we were all dead.

2:01- I think I’ve seen Blade Runner 2049, a movie I deeply love and cherish, less times than I’ve seen Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

2:02- Feel depressed about this.

2:03- If I ever hear Love Hurts again, I’ll kill myself.

2:04- Spent two minutes in silent contemplation.

2:06- It’s finally time for Halloween (2018). It’s hard to understate how much respect I have for this movie. Like I said earlier, I admire H20 a lot for its attempt to be a reaction to Laurie’s trauma and grief, but it does not manage to pull this off with anywhere near as much grace and effectiveness as Halloween (2018). And on top of that, the film is stunningly shot, the only film on par with the original in terms of how beautiful and memorable the cinematography is.

2:10- The distance from which we see Michael initially is so great; there’s so much restraint. He’s unmasked for a good portion of the early movie, but the film holds back in a way that makes his face completely unreadable and instead focuses on people’s reactions to and fear of him. It gives a sense that he’s almost too frightening to be fully captured on film. We can never really understand the legend of Michael, the same way people who don’t see him ‘in the wild’ can’t; we can only see him through legends.

2:14- The soundtrack in this movie is a fucking incredible beast. John Carpenter is God, frankly.

2:17- I adore Laurie’s portrayal in this movie. She’s so cold and defensive towards people who don’t believe or respect her, but there’s a painful, raw vulnerability to her as well. She’s traumatised person who has run the gamut of people refusing to understand or respect her trauma or the worldview she’s developed. There’s such a profound mixture of power and pain, a sense of immense dignity to her. She’s sick to death of the lack of respect and cruelty she’s faced. I just love how much emotion was put into her performance, how much the filmmakers really cared about making her a fully realised expression of trauma and the way people react.

2:24- Dave blowing up a pumpkin with a firecracker is the most accurately teenage thing that’s ever happened in these movies.

2:25- Laurie standing on the sidewalk outside the school in a mirror of how Michael did rules. The callbacks in this movie are always so underplayed that they feel like they take actual meaning, rather than just being a case of demanding fans look at something cool they recognise.

2:31- I am deliriously sleepy. Laurie’s breakdown at family dinner is so painful. She carries so much grief; she is, in her eyes, the only one who does and who may ever know the truth, surrounded by people who can’t understand her because trying to put themselves in her world hurts them too much. I think Laurie’s daughter’s description of what it was like growing up in a survivalist environment filled with anxiety and paranoia is so key; it was traumatising for her to grow up in a trauma-based environment. I hope she gets more time in the next movie.

2:43- This is the third movie in the franchise where Michael kills people in a public toilet, but definitely the best time it’s been done. Michael throwing teeth at the journalist writing about him is something that is so insane that it’s now burned itself directly into my brain and I am incapable of not tweeting ‘i wish michael myers would throw teeth on me’ at least once every three weeks.

2:46- The gravity that’s given to Michael putting the mask on is mesmerising. Again, I love the physicality of his hands and motions; this movie doesn’t forget he’s a real, physical person.

2:52- I’m obsessed with Michael’s decision not to kill the baby. He’s on a random murder spree, killing anyone who he sees without any particular cause, but he passes right by the baby. Looks at it, and then chooses not to. He made an actual choice not to. I always wonder what was going through his mind at the time.

2:59- Alyson’s costume was a really great way to have her end up with the same silhouette as Laurie in the first movie without having her just straight up dress like her grandma. Nice touches.

3:01- “You are so getting dry-fucked tonight” is probably one of the most wretched lines of dialogue in this franchise.

3:09- Laurie hunting for Michael is so good. She’s so fucking ruthless in this movie; she’s afraid but she’s fucking tuned in completely to her revenge hunger.

3:13- Sartain is a character I really love. The set-up is obviously that he’s Loomis 2, Laurie even refers to him as “the new Loomis”, and he reflects and subverts this in interesting ways. I like that he calls Michael “property of the state”; it’s his own way of dehumanising Michael. To him, Michael is an asset, something to be poked and prodded and studied. But of course, unlike Loomis, his obsessive interest in Michael is far more appreciative.

3:16- This film’s ability to just use silence is so good.

3:17- The first time Alyson sees Michael is incredible. The musical sting. Fuck me. God, I love this movie. And God I love this fucking soundtrack.

3:22- The twist of Sartain turning and killing the cop, protecting Michael and trying to seek out what it feels like to kill is great. Also, the way he stroked Michael’s face? I hate to break it to you, but if you don’t think they were fucking? Grow up.

3:30- I love the drama of Michael’s corpse arrangements. Back to the good old art student days, I see. He’s having a midlife crisis. Every time Laurie and Michael see each other is so fucking powerful. The connection between the two of them is so vibrant. And her shooting half his hand off? Iconic. Really excited to see how the makeup department carries that on next film.

3:39- The final showdown sequence is incredible. Laurie and Michael nearly being on equal terms sounds like it should make it boring, if she can match him hit for hit, but the film never drops a level in tension. It manages to be surprising not just for us but also for Michael, who obviously wasn’t expecting to be on the back foot with Laurie, which only makes the scene more intense.

3:42- WHY IS HE SO STRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

3:43- The performance of Karen screaming she needs help and she can’t do it only to shoot Michael point blank and then have Laurie emerge out of the shadows the way she does is one of the best fucking moments in cinema. The three women working together to defeat Michael and kill him where he stands, absolutely kicking the shit out of him and then setting him alight is fucking incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a triumphant fucking ending in anything. The Strode women’s win feels like such an incredible fucking win. I have no fucking idea how Halloween Kills is going to follow this up.

3:46- I love this movie. The house burning down with Michael inside it is so striking. The way fire is shot is so powerful, and the ending shot of the Strodes? With Alyson holding the knife? A perfect movie.

3:47- I have died.

[inthestars011]

thoughts on aries sun (1H), leo moon (6H), pisces rising, aries venus (1H), pisces mercury (1H) & sagittarius mars (9H)? thank you 🖤

hi! I’d like to note I’m just learning astrology and am no means a professional and I’m still learning new things everyday. I’ll pick this apart and tell you a bit about each placement that I know of and I will tell you little things about what I think about how it interacts with one another however less of it will be about the chart as a whole and what it means when everything is together because I’m still piecing that together and trying to understand that for myself.

Aries sun, first house- okay I’m an Aries sun and I found that I never really related to my Aries sun fully. It was almost funny to me because a lot of the traits were the person I wish to be sometimes and not the person I really was. (Which is funny because I later found that was my midheaven which is a lot to do with that). anyways I found out that my Aries sun was in my tenth house and this made a bit more sense because it meant that yes I had Aries energy but my Aries energy is really expressed in career, in first impressions, in role models, in competition, in my father figure etc. and this made more sense because when I thought about those areas, yes, those are the areas that I probably acted more competitive and brave in and I do value those traits but I use them more in my career and in competition and have never been that way in romantic relationships friendships in my emotional life In my family life etc. The house placement helped me understand why my sun was in Aries and why maybe I didn’t feel very much like an Aries person. however for you, your case is the typical Aries person in and out. yes there’s other aspects of your personality that matter and we will dive into but the first house is the house of self, and sun is the core you. So when the sun is expressed In the first house the sun naturally being bright and flamboyant is going to shine through you, meaning, you and other people probably really see and get why you have an Aries sun, this placement seems to obviously fit you. Sun in the first constantly questions who am I? And your life is really respresented around your shaping of your identity. And your sun is in Aries which means you’re probably rather competitive, brave, creative, impulsive and yes maybe even a little self centred. However if anybody needs to be self centred it is you because sun in the first house basically means your life path is to find yourself, to make a name for yourself and to do things for yourself. your Pisces rising is actually rather selfless though. so this makes me think you have to learn in life when you must choose to do things for yourself and when you must choose sacrifice. Your constant issue will be learning which is the right path to take when it comes to That. You are seen as an open book however and you give a what you see is what you get vibe. you aren’t the type that people are to meet and become friends with and be like oh you’re different than what I first thought, you tend to exhibit an honest image. overall you’re a really independent person and you learned that the person you can most rely on is you.

Leo moon, 6th house- first of all your fire sun in the first with a fire moon? You got mad fire energy. I assume you’re super creative and impulsive and a little dramatic too but definitely a fun person. Leo moons are very dramatic when expressing emotions, doesn’t always have to be a pity party though sometimes it’s almost funny because they tell it through elaborate stories and make everyone intrigued. Your emotions come out in a storytelling way and your life is almost like a movie or a sitcom which makes you generally entertaining and fun to be around. All fire moons however can be blunt when dealing with emotional matters and think truth comes first which is good for some people and can be a little much for others so I’d watch that. One thing about Leo is they are super generous so when you emotionally connect with someone you want to give them everything you can and people really appreciate that about you. You have an innate confidence as well that people probably find super attractive. With moon in the sixth your emotional health has an almost direct correlation to your physical health, so when you are upset you may find yourself feeling almost physically ill. Sometimes a Leo moon in 6th house can have a need for attention and therefore be a hypochondriac however that is not everybody. Although you would seem spontaneous with the moon in Leo you actually need routine and to get things done to feel emotionally okay and being moon in Leo you may be explosive or emotionally dramatic if this does not happen or someone threatens your routine. You naturally like taking care of people with moon in the 6th (usually practically) and make a good nurse however with your moon in Leo you do like the attention as well and want to be recognized for when you are doing these good deeds or at least have the same done for you. You are caring but not to the point of being sacrificial which is actually really good and healthy.

Pisces rising- people may find that you seem kinda spacey or ethereal looking. You may have especially glossy pretty eyes. Even though you have a lot of Leo and self energy, a Pisces is rising is always noted for being able to intuitively pick up on others feelings and being extremely sensitive to them. If you don’t yet have this gift you are yet to develop it, and your life path pretty much involves sacrificing yourself for something, which may be difficult as it’s natural for you to do things to serve yourself (which isn’t always bad) but you will eventually learn to serve others and that is your journey.

Aries Venus in the first house- the Venus in the first house almost balances your sun in the first house softening you a little to the public. You’re probably very friendly and people like to be around you. You are warm to others. You are also probably incredibly physically attractive and persuasive. People may find this to be superficial charm however because you do have an inherent need to be liked by others ( which goes against your very self first attitude). You have a very sexy wild charm people can’t resist. It’s likely with Aries Venus in the first you have a beautiful and athletic body. The type of beauty you hold is usually bold striking and sexy due to Aries. Although with your Aries sun and your Leo moon you do put yourself first, a close second is relationships, love is actually a huge priority for you, it’s like your life supply. You tend to be childlike and fun in love. You aren’t afraid to flirt and are usually the one to make the first moves in love. However you do love the chase which may make u jump from relationship to relationship not liking when things get stale and too stable. You don’t like easy love and it entices you more to win someone over because you love the game, and even more the game loves you.

Pisces mercury in 1st house- When you talk people listen. Whether loud or quiet your voice commands people, you have a very bold presence. You love to talk and communicate with friends and really do love to hear what others have to say but you may have a little habit of interrupting people, just because you have such good ideas and inferences you want to communicate them right away before they disappear. People may find your personality changes due to who you’re around a lot. You are very mentally quick and can be distracted just as quick as well. You have lots of nervous and bubbly energy. You aren’t very logical and you are usually thinking about things in an emotional and creative way. People may find you talk in spirals and it’s rather confusing. Your imagination is so vivid that sometimes you may believe your own fantasies. You could naturally be a good poet as you have a very creative and emotional mind. However you are super vulnerable to believing everything that is said to you and need to make sure you aren’t trusting every word you hear.

Sag mars 9th house- Lots of firey energy bursts that burn brightly but burn out quickly. You apply force and then move on, you aren’t good at sticking through to the end. Same as when you get angry, you do feel the rage and probably act on it harshly but after you’re mad and you’ve talked to out you’ve probably moved on from it already. You’re super bluntly honest also!!! which could definitely be gentled out as it can hurt others more than u realize. Chances are you’re rather adventurous, love travel and maybe even have a sporty side. Sagittarius and 9th house are both known for adventure and travel so it’s totally highlighted here and I bet you love that shit. It’s usually highlighted that you’ll have lots of fun travels as well as a good education. You have very strong opinions and sometimes could use to be more open minded to other people’s thoughts even if they differ to yours. I find this placement tends to have a great sense of Humour as well.

Overall- Stellium in the first, your life is very self focused. When it comes to relationships, when it comes to your general life path and when it comes to how you communicate and learn as well. I think your Pisces rising is almost there to balance that out, because though yes you are very driven and motivated and should be here to do great things for yourself and improve yourself always, there is something that you often need to sacrifice to have those things.

Pretty fire dominant, you’ve got lots of creative potential, you’re dramatic, you’re fun, you’re intense , you’re competitive and you’re an honest person. Embellish these parts of you but learn to accept and flourish more soft and stable parts of you as well. Like your Pisces mercury and rising, there is a very soft watery part of you that sometimes shows itself and it’s okay to show that part of you, it’s okay to sacrifice and it’s okay to be soft sometimes.

Your lack of earth however shows you might need some stability and some work on your common sense. which is okay to accept, we all have things to work on.

you’re such a beautiful amazing human being and I hope this made sense ❤️🌸

[cielrouge]

Parasite Q&A

I was lucky enough to make it for the opening night of Parasite at the IFC Center, followed by a Q&A with Director Bong Joonho, Song Kangho (Kim Kitaek) and Park Sodam (Kim Kijung).

NOTE: This wasn't a spoiler-free Q&A, so official warning for movie spoilers ahead, including the ending.

The Element of Smell in the Film

The moderator first began the panel asking Director Bong about the element of smell and how big of a role it plays in the film. Bong admitted that smell is a sense that's not typically easy to feature or express on-screen, since "cinema is a medium of sight and sound." However in this case, Bong felt compelled to feature smell as a persuasive element since it was a theme that "demanded to be on-screen" for this film.

Bong added that "usually the poor and the rich rarely have the chance to smell each other," so Parasite is a story that features the two families (the Kims and the Parks) come in contact via smell through unique situations - i.e. Kiwoo's tutoring of Dahye or Kiteak's chauffeuring of Mr. Park. Particularly, Mr. Park often crosses this "artificial" line between the rich and poor with smell.

At the climax of the film,  the "madness of smell" eventually overtakes Kitaek - Bong noted that for this scene, "I believe everyone has a certain common trait and even with the underprivileged like Kiteak and the rest of the Kim family, they still have a sense of self-esteem that still wants to be protected," which explains why Kitaek snapped the way he did during this scene

Kijung's Final Scene at Dasong's Birthday Party

When asked about this scene, Bong admitted that he advised the actress, Park Sodam, to play this scene as if Kijung was going to survive.

Park further noted that "because of the direction that I got from Director Bong, I do hope that audience, as they watch the film, thought that Kijung was going to live. The idea was to portray Kijung as a resilient character who was going to survive anything."

Both Park and Bong noted that all of Kijung's lines weren't scripted and ad-libbed for the shooting of the scene so when Kijung curses when she first gets stabbed, this was Park's genuine reaction. Park added what was running through her mind when shooting this scene was how she was "very sad at the fact that I, as Kijung, would never be able to another dinner with this family." She admits getting attached to this role as Kijung in Parasite and still feels this way when she thinks about it.

During the audience portion, Song was asked whether or not Kitaek flees the scene at Dasong's party because it's driven by pure instinct or rather he believes that Kijung will still be able to survive on her own. Song admitted that Kitaek himself "was swept in the total panic of his scene," so his flight-or-fight reaction wasn't illogical and understandable.

Audience Q&A Questions

The history behind Director Bong and Park Songho's 20-year collaboration: The pair first met back in 1997 when Bong as an Assistant Director in a film where Park played a supporting film, since at that point, Park was still very much immersed in the theater world. Bong confessed that he basically invented an excuse to schedule a meeting with Park after admiring his work as a supporting actor on the film, and Park called this meeting unexpected but good.

Balancing Genre Lines and Comedic Elements: Bong's use of comedic elements in all this films was highlighted, followed by the question of how he balances the lines between different genres. Bong admitted, "to be honest, it just happens, since tonal shifts happen naturally," since Bong often finds it difficult to stick to one genre. He also noted that "all my actors contain the essential l core of the film on set," and how praised how the "their performances always carry rich emotions, which in turn, holds the weight of the film."  

The most difficult storyboarding segment: Bong admitted that all of it is difficult, but the segment post-climax where the Kims are fleeing from the Park household after Dasong's birthday party in the rain was specifically emphasized - since it transitions like a "road move," and this was the only sequence in the entire film that was actually shot on-location. So, they had to work with the special effects team with how high the water was going to be on-set. This scene is also important in the way it demonstrated how literally the rain "only pours downward from the rich neighborhood to the poor neighborhoods."

The meticulous set designs - Bong revealed that about "90% of this narrative was shot on set," and both the Kim's semi-basement apartment and the Park's lavish mansion were sets that had to be built for the film.

[buzzdixonwriter]

You Don’t Say

For me, one of the unforeseen benefits of Facebook and other social media is that it gives me a chance to do rough drafts of ideas, assembling my thoughts and getting feedback before committing to more permanent form.

And sometimes, like asteroids colliding in space, two separate ideas / posts slam into one another and either create something new and unexpected, or else shatter themselves and reveal interesting aspects of their nature heretofore hidden from view.

That happened recently with a pair of Facebook posts I made on Dennis Prager and Harlan Ellison.

Let’s get the turd out of our mouth first.

. . .

Dennis Prager is a purveyor of herpetology lubricants admired by many on the right-leaning-nazi side of the spectrum, primarily because he keeps his mouth closed when chewing.  Half of what he says is repackaged self-evident truths of the “Don’t eat the yellow snow” variety, a quarter is opinions that if not startling original are at least not genuinely harmful, and the remain quarter is egregious bullshit for which he deserves a public pants down spanking.

Hmm, what?  Oh, yes; purely metaphorically, of course.

I long since wrote off Prager as a. utterer of inanities, but recently his turdmongering was forced on my attention by someone who posted a link to Prager’s argument that the “left” (i.e., basically anybody who thinks Auschwitz was a Bad Idea) is inflicting harm on both the American body politic and the universe at large by denying people like Prager the right to drop the N-bomb whenever they feel like it.

As some of you no doubt already knew, Prager is a member of what polite bigots used to refer to as “those of the Hebrew persuasion”.

That a person from an ethnicity that historically suffered hatred so vicious and specifically targeted that a special word had to be created for it (“anti-Semitism” because the original word -- “Jew-hatred” -- was too damned ugly even for bigots to use) now has his knickers in a twist because he’s “not allowed” to use the only other word of equal or greater impact -- also coined specifically by oppressors for expressing unrestrained hate and contempt against those oppressed -- is so rich in irony that all I can do is swipe a phrase from Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station and say Dennis Prager has “all the self-awareness of a dog licking its own asshole in the middle of the street”.

First off, he’s lying: Neither the “left” nor American law prevents him from dropping the N-bomb whenever he feels like it and I invite him to go down to the intersection of Normandie and Florence in South Central and drop it at the top of his lungs for as long as he is able and please make sure to take plenty of video recorders along because I really wanna see what happens next.

Second, why the fuck would you want to say that? Seriously, other than in an evidentiary context (a cop giving testimony in court, a journalist reporting what some bigoted politician says, etc.), who today gains anything from repeating the word other than inflicting unjustified distress on people who have done nothing to deserve it?

(This is the point where a bunch of alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and say “but whatabout all the times when black people say it?” and to those trolls I’m gonna say STFU & STFD; if you can’t grasp the difference in context then you’re too damned stupid to be allowed out in public except at the end of a leash and with a ball gag in your mouth.)

It’s a word specifically created and designed to be used to brutally oppress people who did nothing to deserve that brutal oppression.  Why would anybody outside that group use it except to participate in that brutal oppression?

. . .

Least there sit any in the cheap seats who presume the above rant was targeted at Dennis Prager simply because he was Jewish, guess again, ya yutzes.

Few writers enjoyed as brilliant and as incendiary a career as Harlan Ellison, and I count myself privileged to have been one of his friends.

Ellison, as many of you know, also was Jewish, a damned tough little bastard, singled out for hatred and abuse as the only Jewish child in his backwater Ohio school, growing up with nerves & balls of chromium, a bona fide Army Ranger, and a writer so honest and fearless that when he wrote about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s he did so by infiltrating and joining a street gang to get first hand experience and insight on the kids who ran in that crowd (and as icing on the cake, James Caan played him in the TV version!).

Top that, Dennis.

Harlan’s electric eclectic career features many highpoints, but the one I want to focus on is his brief 4-year run as TV critic for the legendary Los Angeles Free Press (a.k.a. The Freep) from 1968 to 1972.  

What’s interesting is that Harlan did this while at the same time at the height of his demand as a TV writer.

You got any idea how hard it is to make a living while you’re gnawing on the hand that feeds you?

Harlan may have been crazy, but damn it, he was honest.

Back to the issue at hand.

Recently I’ve been re-reading his TV criticism columns, collected in two volumes, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.

The depressing thing is that all the evil we see today was in place back in those days, and the same smug pious frauds and their dimbulb marks kept congratulating themselves how wonderful they were as things continued to spiral out of control.

Oh, we've had good moments when we made changes that improved the lot of people who'd previously been marginalized, but the core cancer is still there. Harlan was no cock-eyed sentimentalist -- he was often filled with anger and could vent it spectacularly at deserving targets -- but he did have hope that somehow we could keep nudging the ball further towards the goal lines.

The columns make fascinating reading; they are nowhere near as dated as one might suspect. Sometimes they offer diamond-like brilliant dissections of a particular instant in the cultural gestalt, other times they examine the unseen (well, to most audiences, that is) tides of Hollywood that shape our media, sometimes he turns his attention to bear on seemingly insignificant and forgotten local programming only to show with McLuhan-esque clarity how that tiny piece of seemingly insignificant fluff is symptomatic of a much wider, much vaster, and far more serious problem.

One entry caught my eye in particular, the March 7, 1969 column on a failed ABC pilot called Those Were The Days.

Harlan sat in the studio audience watching the taping of that pilot, and his column praised the courage and insight of producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, the brilliant performances of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, and the raw honesty of the pilot’s sharp comedy and writing.

Those of you not in the cheap seats have already realized this was the second failed pilot for what would eventually become All In The Family over at CBS (there was an even earlier original pilot called Justice For All back when Archie and Edith’s last name was Justice, not Bunker.)

I remember the hoopla when All In The Family finally aired in January of 1971 as a mid-season replacement.

You might count Archie Bunker as the white Dolemite insofar as the comedy sprang from the shock of all the crude and vulgar things he said.

Lear and Yorkin were mocking that mindset, belittling bigotry, exposing the Babbittry of millions of “good” Americans who lacked either the self-awareness or the courage to take a long introspective look at themselves and realize how badly they were failing as citizens of this country.

Audiences weren’t supposed to like Archie Bunker.

And that’s where Lear and Yorkin made their fatal mistake.

No, audiences didn’t like Archie.

They loved him.

. . .

Asteroids collide, and sometimes they form new planets, and sometimes they shatter and expose what lies beneath.

Prager’s modern day Babbittry crashed into Harlan’s half-century old anti-Babbittry, and from the explosion a stark truth revealed itself.

It’s almost impossible to make an outlaw a villain in popular media.

No matter how many banks they rob, stages they hold up, sheriffs they shoot, the mere fact that somebody wrote a song / dime novel / movie about ‘em makes them into heroes.

Demi-gods.

People to be admired.

Emulated.

Professional wrestling knows this.

You can never be so big a heel that you won’t have a legion of followers.

And you can turn a heel into a baby face in the blink of an eye and none of the fans will remember the despicable acts the wrassler did just last week.

You put an Archie Bunker on TV, you do not get millions of people to recognize themselves in his hateful / hurtful behavior and change their ways.

Oh, hell no; you get millions of people to applaud him for saying and doing what they say and do in private.

And now that it’s all big and bold and brassy on TV, why it becomes even easier to say it in the privacy of your own home, then over the fence with the neighbors, then in the bar down the street, then on the street itself, and then against people who have done you no harm, who have committed no sin other than the heinous crime of not being exactly like you.

I remember watching and liking All In The Family when it first came on because I, like millions of other Americans, got the joke:  Archie was no hero.

But it wasn’t long before the voices cheering Archie began to drown out the voices laughing at him.

Lear and Yorkin tried undoing their damage with Maude and The Jeffersons and Good Times and other spinoff shows, but the bigot was out of the bottle.

Archie Bunker, even though written in a way to ridicule his use of bigotry and stereotypes, became a champion and defender of those who clung to said bigotry and stereotypes.

So tell me again why you want to drop that N-bomb, Dennis.

Explain to me -- even while you talk out of both sides of your mouth and claim even if everybody can use they word maybe they shouldn’t use the word -- how that does anything to help anybody…

…other than bigots and hate mongers.

Your argument is as circular as the thumb and forefinger gesture white supremacists use to signal one another, a gesture deliberately chosen because it lets them transgress openly by lying about the truth meaning of their gesture.

And Harlan, you were right about Those Were The Days as it began evolving into All In The Family.  Absolutely brilliant -- but absolutely deadly.

Not airing All In The Family wouldn’t have eliminated racial / ethnic / sexual prejudice in the United States…

…but it would have denied those ideas a voice.

The narcissist always proclaims, “I don’t care what they say about me so long as they spell my name right.”

Well, that’s what we got with Archie Bunker.

None of the bigots cared if we made fun of their ideas…

…just so long as they got their ideas out there.

Because ideas are made legitimate by their presence.

Now clearly, this is a bade that cuts both ways.

Ideas once unthinkable -- liberty and justice for all in the form of racial and gender equality, f’r instance -- need to be championed in public.

But we need to shout down and stamp out the bad ideas.

The United States took their foot off the neck of the defeated white racists after the end of the Civil War, and as a result jim crow came roaring back, and things did not change for millions of Americans for another entire century.

We allowed bigots and hate mongers and slavers to be whitewashed and glorified and forgiven for their crimes against humanity…

…and in the process we allowed them to continue victimizing African-Americans more and more.

Every song about the Ol’ South, every novel glorifying plantation life, every movie showing happy field hands, every statue commemorating murderous traitors as men of honor and principle, every single iteration of that idea made millions of people’s suffering not just possible but inevitable.

. . .

Now this is the point where the alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and ask “did you ever drop the N-word?”

Not in casual conversation, no.

I was born and raised in the South (Appalachia, mostly); my father’s side of the family were almost all Southerners.

Almost all.

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in New Jersey and met my grandfather when both served in the U.S. Army medical corps in WWI.  When my grandfather died in his 40s, my grandmother originally moved back to New Jersey, but her three children (dad and two aunts) felt heartbroken at having to leave their Southern cousins and friends behind so even though she carried no particular love for the South, my grandmother moved her family back and stayed there for the most of her life (she and one of my aunts moved out to California to be near us, but that’s another story for another post).

One thing my grandmother absolutely refused to tolerate was use of the N-bomb anywhere near her, especially under her roof or in the homes of her children.

This included both the -er and -ra variants, because Southern racists who didn’t want to appear as uncultured and as boorish and as bigoted as their backwoods cousins preferred the second pronunciation because they could claim they were actually speaking respectfully about “colored people”.

So I grew up in the rare white Southern home where the N-bomb merely wasn’t used, it was actually denounced as wrong.

Now, don’t go thinking my grandmother was some great paragon of virtue; she wasn’t (she was hell on wheels, in fact, but that’s another story for another post).

But she did recognize there was something wrong with the use of the N-bomb, and whether she demanded her children never use it in any form to keep them from appearing to be boorish, bigoted louts, or whether she just thought it was simple good manners of the golden rule variety not to use it, I dunno.

But I do know we never used it, and when my parents heard our neighbors or schoolmates use it, we were reminded in no uncertain terms that we were never to use it.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t used it.

A couple of decades ago I wrote a screenplay based on the life of Robert Smalls, in particular his incredible escape from Civil War Charleston by hijacking a Confederate gunboat and sailing it right past Ft. Sumter to join the Union fleet, bringing his wife and several other escaping African-Americans with him.

As a skilled harbor pilot, Smalls enjoyed certain privileges other enslaved African-Americans didn’t.

For example, he was allowed to go about the streets of Charleston unescorted…

…provided he wore a big diamond shaped brass tag around his neck.

Like a dog.

The tag indicated to slave catcher patrols that he was one of the “good” ones, that he could be trusted because he was helping his masters in their struggle against the Union by guiding blockade runners into the safety of Charleston harbor.

But knowing Southerners the way I do, and knowing the kind of low class good ol’ boy types they recruited for such jobs, I couldn’t imagine the slave catcher patrols being particularly courteous to him, even when they knew they had to let him pass because clearly he had the protection of some high positioned muckamuck.  

And I could easily imagine them flinging the N-bomb at him with great glee, taunting him, daring him to act “uppity” so they could beat the crap out of him and teach him some manners and remind him of his place.

So I used the word in their dialog in my script.

Would I use that word today?

Probably not.

It’s not that crucial to the story, and if the viewer doesn’t grasp the concept that these are bigoted bully scum from their actions and attitude, then I’ve failed my job as a writer.

Have I ever quoted people who dropped the N-bomb?

Yeah, I have, in the past.

I’ve quoted Richard Pryor and Blazing Saddles and Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

I would excuse it then as the aforementioned evidentiary context but ya know what?  I don’t quote those lines anymore.

I still think Pryor is hilarious and will recommend his routines to anyone I think might be interested, but he as a member of the African-American community at large (because like any other ethnic group, African-Americans have numerous sub-cultures and sub-communities among them), he could say things in a way neither I nor any other white person could say them.

(And, yeah, there’s a big debate going on to this very day among African-Americans about the appropriateness of that word and you know what?  Whatever decision African-Americans reach for themselves is their business and should not involve any input whatsoever from we white folk; we not only can’t use the word, we can’t even comment on how they choose to use it.  Period.  Full stop.)

Blazing Saddles when it came out used the N-bomb to be deliberately transgressive, to make a sympathetic point re how unfairly African-Americans were treated.

All well and good.

But nine years earlier there had been a movie called A Patch Of Blue and while it wasn’t a raucous comedy like Blazing Saddles it tried making a point about race relations in America and it was a really. Really good movie and it made some important points but today is virtually unwatchable not because of any flaws in it but because the times have changed.

Ditto Blazing Saddles.

We don’t need to approach the problem that way any more.

Quentin Tarantino?  I really like what he does as a director and a screenwriter but his use of the N-bomb to show us how transgressive his characters are is really shallow.  I have a strong feeling his movies are going to be considered embarrassingly passé’ in a generation or two, much the same way as benign-yet-stereotypical characters in 1940s movies render many of them passé’ today.  

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction lose nothing by changing the N-word to something else.  

Maybe an argument could be made for its use in Django Unchained or The Hateful 8 but even there I think substituting another word wouldn’t significantly change the tenor or tone of either movie.

So I stop quoting those lines from Tarantino’s films, at least not fully.

I can admire his skill / talent / craft without signing off on his problematic elements.

Let me offer an analogy: If a creator can get the same dramatic effect by pretending to shoot somebody but not actually blasting them with a gun, then they can get the same dramatic effect by using something evocative of the N-bomb without actually dropping it.

(By the way, for those who may be curious, my mother was from Naples and a bona fide card carrying member of Mussolini’s Fascist Youth Brigade, but that’s another story for another post.)

. . .

We are plunging into a new cultural conflict -- and while I think there will be violence, I don’t see it being violence on the scale or level of political organization as the Civil War -- and we can only win by refusing to let the bigots and the hate mongers spew their bullshit in the marketplace of ideas.

There is no compromise with an oppressor.

Stand up to it every time you encounter it.

Make it unthinkable, never acceptable. 

  © Buzz Dixon

[lady-of-lies]

Like a whole new beginning pt.5

A/N: I’m so sorry for not posting in a while but I’m on summer vacation and I’m doing a lot of traveling and activities with friends and family and don’t have much time over for my hobby that is writing. I promise I will try to post more though!! this is the anticipated fifth part of my series and I think there is only going to be one more so stay tuned fort that! thank you all for your patience! also, a big thanks to @naomiiiiiiiiiii04 for giving me some ideas and @jilldsumner for the wonderful comment!!!

Prompt: None this time

Word count: 1228

Warnings: None? maybe some angst

Loki Laufeyson x reader

This evening can not be described as anything less than a disaster. Loki had after much persuasion gotten Thor to change out of the ridiculous outfit, but he insisted in keeping the beanie, claiming it was one of the most comfortable headpieces he had ever had adorning his head. A head that Loki after tonight, is sure that Thor have never used as more than just a hatrack. 

They had been off to an awfully good start by arriving half an hour later than the appointed time. Jane and Darcy had not looked happy where they were seated, mindlessly chewing on two, very dry, breadsticks. As the night proceeded, Thor had gotten slapped by Jane in various places so many times that Loki had straight up lost count. Darcy had gone home with a red dress instead of the green one she was sporting from the beginning thanks to a very clumsy waiter filling up their wine glasses, and Loki himself had been stared at the whole evening like he was some sort of exotic animal in a zoo. 

Just as he had suspected, the only thing keeping him from just leaving the restaurant and his “company” in the dust was what he had told himself before leaving his room. You are doing this for Embla. She is not going to be thrown out on the street again and left to die in the cold, she is depending on you. And as he flopped down on his bed he could only be described as, worn out, tired and frustrated, he was in lack of better words exhausted. Loki released a deep sigh as he straightened up and started to undress one piece of clothing at a time. Several minutes had passed before he realized his helmet was empty and his room was quiet and unmoving. 

Embla was gone

She must be here somewhere he thought. But as it turned out, she wasn’t. He had turned on each and every piece of furniture he owned, cushions, trinkets and books alike. Not a single thing was left untouched, but Embla was nowhere to be found. This lead Loki to enter a certain area in his mind that he had thought himself to have closed a long time ago. The room of panic, despair and fright. All emotions he had inflicted on others, but thought himself immune to thanks to all the years of his father’s torment. His feelings just confirmed a hunch he had nursed since he first found Embla in that bush. He loved her. And he couldn’t go back to living a life without her in it.

He exited his room for the second time that night, he had to find her and unless she had grown a pair of wings she had to be somewhere on this floor, all he had to do was to find out where. But in his hurry Loki forgot something very important. He forgot he wasn’t living alone. He shared this building with some very… special people. People that would not be too happy to find out that he had kept a secret from them, especially not a living secret. While that was a minor obstacle he had to get over at some point he may have wanted to remember the fact that in this building that he shares with said people, have security cameras everywhere.

He started his search in a quiet and slow manner, not wanting to catch someone else's attention. He was thorough, going from room to room whisper yelling the name of his beloved friend in hopes of her to simply come out from whatever hiding place she had found. A good place at that. It was like she had simply vanished from the face of the earth, a phenomenon with which Loki was very familiar. Suddenly he found himself understanding how Thor must have felt all those times he had just disappeared without telling his brother a single word. All the nights he had spent in hiding and all the times his brother had expressed the worry he had harboured in his absence. It all made sense. But he didn’t like this feeling. Not one bit.

Loki searched his whole floor. Twise. But Embla was still nowhere to be found, the feelings of desperation and despair only grew with each passing second that he was separated from his one, and only, friend. He was starting to give up. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Maybe she didn’t disappear, perhaps she simply left. The possibility that yet another “person” that he cared about had abandoned him was a thought he didn’t want to even consider, but the more time he spent searching and the more times he came up empty handed, the more he started to believe this to be true. 

He admitted defeat after many and long hours spent searching after someone who clearly didn’t want to be found. At least not by him. with his head hung low and his body heavily dragging itself back to his room he gave up. Loki was one to rarely give up, but one can only go through so many complexities before you start to question yourself from the very core. As he once again walked over to his bed Loki sunk down on the soft mattress, running his hands through his hair and pulling on the loose strands, a motion he repeated over and over again until it looked more like a bird’s nest than the hair of a prince. It was as if he believed that the pain would wake him up from this nightmare. But it never did.

The familiar voice of F.R.I.D.A.Y dragged him back down from whatever place his mind had taken him to and alerted him that the whole team required his presence in the common area immediately. Loki wasn’t in the mood for socializing. Especially not with the man who claimed to be his brother but still wanted to take away his last sliver of happiness in this god forsaken realm. Nonetheless, he started his journey down to the right floor. The elevator ride was agonizingly slow, he felt like he was standing in the moving metal box for decades instead of minutes and the closer he got to his destination, the more his temper started to make itself known.

He wasn’t in the mood for this today. They could go on their blasted missions all they want but they can’t make him come along against his will. Well… technically they could since it was one of the conditions he had agreed to upon his arrival here, but he is the god of mischief, magic, mayhem and lies and he would show them just how powerful he is.

When the elevator door slides open he was so riled up one could have thought he was about to fight a war. For him, maybe that's exactly was he was about to do. He was going to beat his brother all the way down to Hel for not keeping his promise and leaving Embla alone, of course she didn’t leave him, It must have been Thor's doing. Or that was what he told himself before stopping short in his tracks. Because before him stood all the members of the Avengers. And one white, very small and blind looking kitten. 

permanent tag list:

@sdavid09

@theincaprincess

@indelwen-of-mirkwood

@deepestfirefun

@themarauderstheoutsidersandpeggy

[phanchester]

my opinion on the new selfishness vs selflessness video (SPOILERS)

I saw a lot of other people do this, so I thought that I might express my views on the decision made in the new Thomas Sanders video. If you couldn’t tell from the title, this post will have spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the new video and you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read this post. Also, I will be making references to the video, so I would highly advise you watch it if you are just reading this because you follow me or it came up for some reason. Otherwise, you can just scroll past.

You know, it’s kind of funny. I was just having this conversation with my friend (@heystobit123) and we were questioning, well, selfishness vs selflessness. My friend was arguing that you should always give to others before yourself, no matter what. However, I was arguing that you need to do things for yourself as well and not everything should be for others. Although we were talking about filling the water jug, which is totally different and a very minor problem compared to the wedding-callback dilemma, it still questioned the same morals. Simply put, my friend was Patton and I was Deceit.

The meaning of selfish is, with a quick Google search, “lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.”. However, was going to the callback really selfish? Sure, Thomas wanted to go to the callback for himself which meant missing someone else’s wedding, but the callback was an amazing opportunity. Even if he didn’t get the role, he would know he tried and that he got a callback, which is simply fantastic.

Selfishness and doing things for yourself are different. True, sometimes doing things for yourself is selfish. And of course, a lot of people say that you should give more because giving makes you feel better and all that shiz. However, that is more directed to people who do everything for themselves and nothing for others because well...if you do everything for others, you will eventually feel empty inside while missing things which you really wanted to do. Once, I did everything for others. I would sacrifice myself to give others a chance, I would always do things last so other people could do things first and I would miss out on things to benefit others. However, while doing that, I missed fabulous things which I could have benefited from enormously and which frankly, I would have found quite enjoyable. I was talking about this with one of my friends (@fujoshilife101), and the simple reply was “Why don’t you just do things for yourself?”. And that’s when it dawned on me. I had a choice. We all have a choice. And that is important to consider.

In my opinion, Deceit was right. As selfish as it sounds, sometimes when you choose between doing something for yourself and something for others, you should choose yourself. Now, that does not mean that you should do everything for ourselves - don’t misquote me on that. However, the philosopher Max Stirner was right on that count. Plus, Deceit’s case was, in my opinion, a lot more persuasive with more evidence to back him up. That is, of course, my opinion, so of course you can disagree with me and side with Patton and I will be happy to answer any questions about my perspective.

However, I believe that Thomas intended to make it that way. All of us viewers (well, most of us) came into the video with the idea that Deceit was a villain (even if you think he is misunderstood) and that we would probably side with the core sides, no matter the dilemma. This is just the beginning of Deceit’s arc and really, his true introduction to the series. And you know what? I can’t wait.

[arcticdementor]

Near the beginning of Ibram X. Kendi’s celebrated best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes something that strikes me as the key to his struggle: “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be anti-racist.” Kendi’s parents were “saved into Black liberation theology and joined the churchless church of the Black Power movement.” That was their response — at times a beautiful one — to the unique challenges of being black in America.

And when Kendi’s book becomes a memoir of his own life and comes to terms with his own racism, and then his own cancer, it’s vivid and complicated and nuanced, if a little unfinished. He is alert to ambiguities, paradoxes, and the humanness of it all: “When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers.” He sees the complexity of racist views: “West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African-Americans as ‘lazy, unambitious, uneducated, unfriendly, welfare dependent, and lacking in family values.’” He describes these painful moments of self-recognition in what becomes a kind of secular apology: a life of a sinner striving for sainthood, who, having been saved, wants to save everyone else.

…

Liberal values are therefore tossed out almost immediately. Kendi, a star professor at American University and a recent Guggenheim Fellowship winner, has no time for color-blindness, or for any kind of freedom which might have some inequality as its outcome. In fact, “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethno-state, but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.” He has no time for persuasion or dialogue either: “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.” All there is is power. You either wield it or are controlled by it. And power is simply the ability to implement racist or antiracist policy.

The book therefore is not an attempt to persuade anyone. It’s a life story interspersed with a litany of pronouncements about what you have to do to be good rather than evil. It has the tone of a Vatican encyclical, or a Fundamentalist sermon. There is no space in this worldview for studying any factor that might create or exacerbate racial or ethnic differences or inequalities apart from pure racism. If there are any neutral standards that suggest inequalities or differences of any sort between ethnic groups, they are also ipso facto racist standards. In fact, the idea of any higher or lower standard for anything is racist, which is why Kendi has no time either for standardized tests. In this view of the world, difference always means hierarchy.

…

He’s capable of conveying the complicated dynamics of that violent mugging on a bus, but somehow insists that the only real violence is the structural “violence” of racist power. After a while, you realize that this worldview cannot be contradicted or informed by any discipline outside itself — sociology, biology, psychology, history. Unlike any standard theory in the social sciences, Kendi’s argument — one that is heavily rooted in critical theory — about a Manichean divide between racist and anti-racist forces cannot be tested or falsified. Because there is no empirical reality outside the “power structures” it posits.

…

He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy that won’t yield racial equality in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

…

I once thought I understood what sex and gender meant. “Sex” meant male or female; “gender” meant how you express that sex. Simple enough. I also thought that homosexuality was defined as a sexual and emotional attraction to someone of your own sex, as would be implied by “homo” meaning same, and “sexuality” meaning, well, sexuality. This baseline agreement on basic terms was a good start for a reasoned debate. You can tell someone’s sex by their chromosomes, hormones, genitals and secondary sex characteristics. You can tell someone’s gender by the way they manifest their sex and sex characteristics. People have infinitely different ways to express their maleness or femaleness, and cultures create different norms for these expressions. And my basic position was that we should expand those norms and accept all types of nonconforming men and women as very much men and very much still women.

But now I’m confused, and I don’t think I’m alone. Slowly but surely, the term “sex” has slowly drifted in meaning and become muddled with gender. And that has major consequences for what homosexuality actually is, consequences that are only beginning to be properly understood. Take the Equality Act, the bill proposed by the biggest LGBTQ lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, backed by every single Democratic presidential candidate, and passed by the House last May. Its core idea is to enhance the legal meaning of the word “sex” so it becomes “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity).”

The Act provides four different ways to understand the word “sex,” only one of which has any reference to biology. Sex means first “a sex stereotype”; secondly “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related condition”; thirdly “sexual orientation or gender identity”; and last “sex characteristics, including intersex traits.” Yes, at the end, we have “sex characteristics” in there — i.e., biological males and females — qualified, as it should be, by the intersex condition. But it’s still vague. “Sex characteristics” can mean biologically male or female, but can also mean secondary sex characteristics, like chest hair, or breasts, which can be the effect of hormone therapy. So in fact, the Act never refers to men and women as almost every human being who has ever existed on Earth understands those terms.

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In these lesson plans, here’s the definition of homosexuality: “a person’s sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted.” Homosexuality is thereby redefined as homogenderism. It’s no longer about attraction to the same sex, but to the same gender. I’m no longer homosexual; I���m homogender. But what if the whole point of my being gay is that I’ve always been physically attracted to men? And by men, I mean people with XY chromosomes, formed by natural testosterone, with male genitals, which is what almost every American outside these ideological bubbles means by “men.” I do not mean people with XX chromosomes, formed by estrogen, with female genitals, who have subsequently used testosterone to masculinize their female body — even though I would treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve in every context.

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Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

That’s the price of merging gender with sex. It’s time the rest of us woke up and defended our homosexuality.