#It is quite unstructured which I didn’t mind for the most part but the end was a bit random?

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Greta & Valdin

contemporary fiction following two gay siblings who live together in central auckland

Greta, in her 20s, getting her masters and living on a shitty academic salary, getting over an unrequited crush, and exploring a new relationship

Valdin, in his 30s, who quit science for a tourism show, whose ex (he still isn’t over) is in his orbit again when work sends him to Argentina, and has to confront what he wants for his future

navigating adulthood, OCD, a messy eccentric Māori/Russian family

[mpartg251]

My ideation for this week’s assignment was quite unstructured — it mostly consisted of thinking what sort of design I could conceptualize while keeping the spirit of the assignment intact. First off, I decided to go with a font that had a variance of sharp edges and round curves, and ended up using the font “Freestyle Script”. It worked wonderfully for my purposes, having both nice round shapes and sharp curves which increased what was available to use as a tool. Most of my experimentation was on Illustrator, cutting the letter forms that seemed most interesting to me and arranging them about until an idea struck. I knew I wanted to include both sharp and round shapes, and water came to mind, but simply making water didn’t seem right. I needed a focus, and with that, I constructed a fish being pulled out of the water, adding movement and interest to the piece. The fish itself was constructed out of many parts, with his body, fin, eye, scale, and tail all differing components. To balance out the scene visually, I carved up letters to make a sun. The overall feeling of the design came across sort of like calligraphy or perhaps ink-pressed block printing, which seems like an effective style for our first exploration.

[fullkingdomphilosopher]

Moriarty is not dead (yet)

Hello and a warm welcome to the three people who have somehow lost their way here. You are in for a ride. (Hope you read to the end.)   :)

Because today I feel the need to waste my time by sharing my thoughts about a fictional character into the void of the internet to get it out off my mind. It might get a little long and unstructured at points so please bare with me. But you have been warned. So without further ado let us discuss why (BBC Sherlock’s) Moriarty is in fact. not. dead. (I have read many illogical theories about this topic so I am not claiming in any way to have come up with everything myself. The following will be a mixture of canon facts,  my own thoughts and other people ideas. Irrelevant/not so convincing information will be stated in brackets or I will probably leave most of it out. Get comfortable and enjoy.)

Let us begin at the beginning by first taking a look at the information we get about Moriarty throughout the series. Please keep this general information in mind for later. (Here I will only comment if at all very superficially. Most are only general impressions I not necessarily agree with.)

(1) One can simply summarise season ones information about Moriarty the following way:  

1. Moriarty is a criminal mastermind (consulting criminal)

2. He is bored, insane, intelligent, rich and powerfull

3. Sherlock-fanboy

4. Has not too much will to live

(2) So now let us take a more or less objective look at season two or more precisely some parts of »The Reichenbach fall«.                                                  

•Near the end Moriarty sits at the edge of the roof playing “stayin‘ alive” which he then upon Sherlocks‘ arrival comments by saying: “ (...)The Final Problem. “Staying Alive”. So boring, isn’t it? It’s just… staying.(...)”.                              

This tells us the following (does it?) : 

1. Moriarty is bored of living and wants to die 

2. Moriarty has planned for Sherlock to die now

3. Both

•Later while convincing Sherlock to jump he makes the mistake to say: “ (Your death is the only thing that’s going to call off the killers.) I’m certainly not going to do it.” which leads to the conclusion that Moriarty needs to die to make Sherlock jump. And by no means do I deny that Moriarty is mad enough to go as far as to kill himself only to win against Sherlock. (If he could have been completly sure to win he definitely would do so without hesitation.) He IS insane after all.

•Before shooting his brain out while talking to Sherlock he seems very...emotional. Since he is (very quickly) convinced now that Sherlock is not an ordinary person moreover he even is HIM (Moriarty) he can/has to die now peacefully (because he doesn‘t feel alone anymore) forcing Sherlock to jump.

Okay so now let us be a little more sceptical. You are telling me that we fully accept Sherlock beeing able to fake his death with Mycrofts help and even with a list of different plans but for the guy whose LITERAL job it is to fake deaths and who has an equally high IQ (or even higher) than Sherlock, it seems unlikely? (Keep in mind Moriarty is actually the superior one in this scene. We will discuss this later.) Moriarty didn‘t even care where the two of them would meet. It‘s like you can almost hear him say: “Wherever faking your death is easier for you darling. I will win anyway.” He actually wanted Sherlock to survive because he has bigger plans for him. Just think about it: if you were a psychopath and bored your whole live and then finally miraculously you find an interesting fragile toy, would you break it quickly or rather carefully play with it for as long as it still gives you joy? Also faking ones death by a shot in the head seems possible at almost any location. Just saying. (This one is a little far stretched but if Moriarty IS Sherlock wouldn't he do exactly the same thing? Faking his death, disappearing for a while and then amazingly coming back from the dead? But let's not digress.)   He wants Sherlock to survive so badly he actually helps him by giving him hints (thats what the bored kind of criminal does). Did you notice how Moriarty after saying “I’m certainly not going to do it.” (You really think he would make such a dumb mistake while not even being pressured by anything?) turns his head back and expectedly looks at Sherlock?And he doesn't do so to watch him jump. If that was the case I believe he would give him his whole attention instead of shortly looking over his shoulder, no he waits for Sherlock to get it, to react. But let‘s continue with what happens before Moriarty “spontaneously” decides to kill himself. After their dramatic chat Moriarty shakes Sherlocks hand (which confuses Sherlock) and only lets go when he shoots himself. This might be a sign for his men/snipers for scenario “fake death” so they can shoot somewhere near him or anything like that. He could have faked his death by blood pakets in his coat, drugs, sleeping spray you name it. I don't really care how he did it (it‘s pointless to spectaculate about this) but I am quite sure if someone would find a way to do this it would be him.(Another thing is that while Moriarty drops dead to the ground he doesn't let go of the gun which is rather strange...and the blood only streamed from his head instead of splattering. But let us just write this off as a movie mistake. After all everybody makes mistakes. Also things on TV probably can't be too gory.)

(3) Season three. I think this is the most confusing season regarding the information about Moriarty. First of all we indirectly get to know from Anderson (yes I know very reliable source) that Moriarty‘s body wasn't found since his theory regarding Sherlock‘s death indicates that Moriarty‘s dead body with a sherlock mask on his face was used as Sherlock‘s dead body on the pavement. And while yes this is very ridiculous I think it is strange how Lestrade didn‘t correct him on the fact that it couldn‘t be Moriarty‘s body since it was found on the roof. (But admittedly this doesn't need to mean anything. Maybe Lestrade was just too fed up with him already.) However the confusing part just starts here. If we assume no body was found then how do they know Moriarty is dead? Who gave them this information? If you take a closer look it seems only people somehow related to Sherlock seem to know about Moriarty‘s death. But on TV they NEVER mention anything about it. They only report about how Moriarty supposedly was only an actor named Richard Brook paid by Sherlock to seem smart and about Sherlock falling or jumping to his death. Okay so they probably have got this information from Kitty but wouldn‘t it be very strange if Richard Brook committed suicide on this same roof before Sherlock jumped? Why would he do that? Also while still “playing” Moriarty since he didn't wear Brook‘s clothes? Nothing I can think of makes any sense how you could explain to the public why Richard Brook decided to commit suicide there. But then again even the papers only write about the death of the “fraudulent detective“ not mentioning anything about Moriarty or Richard Brooks death.  Why not? Wouldn't this cause even more drama? “Fraudulent Detective kills”    (or forces man to commit suicide). More drama means more readers/viewers so why not mention anything about it? Unless there is nothing to report about it since no body was found. Good you might say maybe Moriarty‘s men just took the body after Sherlock jumped but then how did Lestrade and Anderson knew he was dead? (Or was it just a ridiculous assumption of Anderson that Moriarty was dead? Well that would be a big coincidence.) Or maybe Mycroft‘s men took it and told Scotland Yard but why not make it public then? Or maybe really noone (except for Sherlock and Mycroft) knew about his death at this point? (Wouldn't Mycroft check for Richard Brook then?)  Wouldn't the reporters wanna interview Brook then? About this traumatic event he got pulled in? Drama is good not only for the press but also for an actor. Brook would love to get attention in this case wouldn't he? Wouldn't...you know Kitty notice Richard was gone and report on that if he was really dead? Wouldn't it be strange that Brook suddenly stops acting? Well we don't really get any information so from this (admitted mess) I just conclude that simply no body was found. (If you can explain this situation otherwise you are very welcomed to do so.) And you know this is really funny because a certain someone himself said that it can only mean one thing in a detective show when there is no body (looking at you Mr. Moffat) namely that the victim survived. (I suppose you could also explain everything if it indeed was twins this way: Moriarty is dead and Brook is with Kitty. But I personally am not really convinced by this. Not because Sherlock said it‘s never twins but think about it: How big is the probability for both of them beeing amazing actors? This theory that Moriarty has a twin brother is quite popular. A main argument for this is how Moriarty is left handed while Brook appears to be right handed. Well First of all he can just be ambidextrous and second Jim from IT also mainly used his right hand in the scene he was in. And the creators stated first it was planned for Moriarty to only appear in this scene as Jim from IT so it definitely is Moriarty. Or do you think Moriarty would want his twin brother to meet Sherlock? That would miss the point. Moriarty is fascinated or rather obsessed with Sherlock that‘s why he wanted to meet him. Also if you watch closely you can see how he grins when leaving turning away from Molly. His (probably nonexsistent) twin brother wouldn't have any reason to do so. So we know he is quite good at acting/manipulating. Also if you think about it it is the exact same strategy: He finds a person that is useful to him, wins their trust and gets into a relationship with them to be able to get what he wants with their help. The exact same thing he did with Molly he now did with Kitty. So that underlines that it indeed was him and not a twin brother. Also wouldn‘t a twin brother...you know...ruin the joke of the name “Richard Brook”? Anyway after faking his death he probably just stayed with Kitty and then broke up with her/left her after the situation calmed down again.)

(4) Ah yes now on to my favourite part: Season four. What do we get to know in season four? Right! EVERYTHING WAS PLANNED! So Moriarty knew(/hoped) Sherlock wouldn't die there and he also probably knew he had to fake his death because otherwise Sherlock couldn't fake his. So he had way more than enough time to plan how he is going to do it. Why don't we deal with why Moriarty killed himself now. The obvious answer in season two is that he kills himself so Sherlock has to jump and Moriarty beats him this way. Some may say he hadn't any other choice which I don't agree with. If there was a code to stop the killers then there also was one to make the killers shoot the victims immediately. Moriarty could have just counted from 5 downward and if Sherlock didn't jump in that time he would just give the command to kill John, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade. I mean what did he had to be afraid of? Beeing killed by Sherlock? Now that wouldn't make any sense would it if he decided to kill himself instead anyway? (Also it totally makes a lot of sense for Moriarty to squeak afraid when Sherlock holds him over the edge. That totally is what a person indifferent of life or without any future plans would do.) So you might be asking yourself why he would go as far as to make Sherlock believe he is dead especially when he knew Sherlock would survive the fall anyway? Why the struggle? Well that‘s simple. (That‘s the final problem: Staying alive.) He is playing a game. In case you didn't notice Sherlock played dumb/clueless in season 2 episode 3 with not only Moriarty but everyone around him since he couldn't be sure when Moriarty listens and wanted to have the upper hand in their little game. But everything Moriarty said on the rooftop was an act as well and if that is really the case he is not simply a good but a BRILLIANT actor.He had the upper hand all the time no matter what Sherlock did but he wanted Sherlock to believe that he is dead so Sherlock would feel he was superior over Moriarty. Great minds think alike. Also while yes of course Moriarty would be crazy enough to kill himself you can not tell me he wouldn't want to see Sherlock play with his sister, to see him struggle and fail. I mean his whole life purpose since he found Sherlock was to beat him so you're telling me he wouldn't wanna be there when what he has worked for finally happens? (I mean come on: he even paid over 30 million pounds in season one just to get Sherlock OUT to play and now he is fine with not seeing the ending? Why not watching Sherlock ‘fall‘? It is no secret he is OBSESSED with Sherlock.). He could still have killed himself afterwards. Also does he really trust Eurus THAT much? Okay so now you might ask why he didn't show himself in season four then. (No rush.) Patience is key my friend. (One last not very convincing thing in season four I just want to throw in: In one of Moriarty‘s recordings in Sherrinford in which he immitates a clock he stops after Sherlock screams. I guess it could be a coincidence but regarding none of the other recordings stopped showing only a quietly at the camera starring Moriarty it must be a gigantic one.)

So now if you think I am done then think again and get ready for the unstructured part of my little essay. (Yes even more unstructured than everything before.) Here follows other short information about Moriarty and clues why he is still alive from the whole show in no special order:

(- I will start with one not very convincing one you might actually have already known since you are on tumblr. The lyrics of the song “Who you really are” which plays at the end of episode three of season four repeatedly states:         “Moriarty is alive”. While I believe it probably somehow is possible to change the lyrics for anyone I don't really get why anyone would wanna do this unless it is official or someone is just trolling. Or both.)

-Moriarty is soo changeable

-Moriarty is a good hacker

(-What is this strange “Surprise, you didn't think I'd just dissappear did you?”-clip that was played after season three I believe? If it is supposed to be just one of the clips Moriarty filmed for Eurus why is the background different? I think there are actually clips of him with three different backgrounds? Why? Too much to shoot in one day? If you have any thoughts on this please let me now.)

-Contrary to some others I don't believe Moriarty is just Eurus puppet. I don't see any need for that. Eurus is just Moriartys client like many others on the show. They both have the same goal. Eurus actually was so interested in him because she noticed his interest in Sherlock so it is not that everything from the beginning was Eurus‘ brilliant puppet show. If any then it was him who used her but I don't want to dive into this topic now.

-Moriarty‘s problem is that he is supposedly the best and everyone else around him is boring and can't get to him. He is lonely and depressed. But why would he still want to kill himself after meeting Eurus?                                                     Isn't she interesting enough? Or did he still think Sherlock would beat her too? But wouldn't there then again be a point in living to beat Sherlock or kill him like he promised in season one?

-In the special “The abominable bride” I think Sherlock isn't looking after the answer to the question how Moriarty killed himself rather than why he did it.   And the Moriarty in his head turns around showing him the hole in his head asking something like if it was very obvious and saying maybe he just needs a Good back comb. Back comb. Comeback. Sherlock concludes in this moment that Moriarty faked killing himself to have a good comeback. So he actually does know now that Moriarty isn't dead.

-Moriarty IS the main villain/antagonist of the show. Even after his supposed death in season 2 he still reappears or gets mentioned in most of the other episodes and even at the end with Eurus. Why would a writer do that if it was pointless? I don't think they would want degrade him if Andrew Scott‘s amazing performance even made them rewrite the script to have more Moriarty. Mister Gatiss and Mister Moffat are the real Moriarty fanboys here. They just build up tension very slowly while also getting the attention mostly off him for now. Moriarty is Sherlock‘s equal. His shadow. So he SHOULD be endgame. It is simply impossible to create a bigger villain now since he reappeared in all the seasons until now. Unless the writers plan to write at least 5 more seasons of course.

-In season four Eurus tells Sherlock Moriarty wasn't interested in living but in the impact he would have by dying. But does he really trusts her so much?              Is he really okay with gifting her his favourite toy? Or is he maybe just using her as he does with everybody else? Maybe she isn't lying but simply  doesn't know he is still alive.

-You might say: “But Sherlock clearly says that Moriarty is dead. Especially after the special.” Well yes he does. But (1.) he was on drugs. (2.) he really needs to believe (or rather not really Sherlock but the audience) that Moriarty is dead. Otherwise his (anticipated) comeback would be too predictable and boring. (3.) Sherlock isn't always right but I admit he is most of the time so most importantly (4.) he still keeps playing. The game isn't over yet and he needs to play safe. He keeps on playing dumb/clueless like he did in “The Reichenbachfall” where he even lied to John about Moriarty not touching or writing anything so Moriarty feels superior. We never get the IOU conclusion he worked on all the time. He kept everybody including us clueless just as he does now in season 4 to have the upper hand again or at least not to be in disadvantage.

-Then you also might say something like: “But this isn't like in the Canon.” Ah yes. The Canon. (1.) Remind me again where does it say this in the Canon? Before the secret, psycho genius sister held captive in a maximum security prison on a secluded island or after?...You get the point? (2.) Originally even Sherlock should be dead in the Canon (Which I actually think might happen in season five). (3.) It isn't even against the Canon since in the Canon Moriarty dies in “The final problem” and not in “The Reichenbach Falls”. Him dying in season two would actually be more against the Canon.

(-Since Mycroft was with Eurus alone before and isn't really on her side maybe he actually is controlled by her too without knowing so? Maybe he unknowingly even helped Moriarty? But this seems rather unrealistic. Just a thought.)

-Now something I don't really get: Eurus said apparently she was Moriarty‘s revenge on Sherlock. His revenge for what? Killing himself for no real reason? That seems not very smart. Beeing his distraction in the big boring world? Or maybe they have a history we don't know of? It seems quite possible. If Sherlock was able to delete Eurus from his mind why couldn't he have done the same thing with Moriarty?

-Why does Eurus mention Moriarty has a brother who was a station master? Why was he jealous of him? Why WAS he a station master? Is he dead now or does he just got a different job if he isn't one anymore? Why is there all this train imagery in Moriarty‘s clips? Why is that important at all? Is this foreshadowing, simple taunting or am I missing something completely? (The last thing at the end of season four we see is Sherlock and John running out of a train station but I don't know if that has really anything to do with that.)

-Fight me on this one but the ending is too perfect. I didn't buy it for one second. I mean character development and friends bla bla but you want to tell me Sherlock suddenly wouldn't be bored without Moriarty? Sure the normal cases will keep him occupied for some time but eventually sooner or later they will just bore him again, don't you agree? You can't “cure” a sociopath. And without the right stimulation he might become the “bad” guy himself or simply die of boredom.

-Moriarty WANTS Sherlock dead. Just in a slow fun way. On John‘s blog Moriarty even wonders how Sherlock‘s skull would look like on his wall. He is obsessed obviously.

-Don't get me wrong I am not sad or mad about the fact Moriarty is supposedly dead. But rather on HOW he died. His death should be something big something grandiose. I am talking a whole city exploding why fireworks spell out his name -grandious. (Well maybe not that extra but you get the point.) I refuse to believe he would be fine dying in such a simple way without the world even knowing his name. Come on. It‘s “I-dance-while-stealing-the-crown-jewels-Moriarty” not “Jim-from-IT”. If he is still alive I am sure he will die in the last season but in a more exciting way.

(-While trying to get out the information if he really has a sister out of Mycroft Sherlock let's one if them say: “Nothing is impossible.”)

-Let‘s talk about my favourite clue at the end now because I am tired. Do you remember a certain little conversation Sherlock and Moriarty had when evil queen Moriarty came to visit and dishonored Sherlock‘s apple? Let me remind you:

JIM: You know when he was on his death bed, Bach, he heard his son at the piano playing one of his pieces. The boy stopped before he got to the end ... SHERLOCK: ... and the dying man jumped out of his bed, ran straight to the piano and finished it. JIM: Couldn’t cope with an unfinished melody. SHERLOCK: Neither can you. That’s why you’ve come.

Does any bell ring with you?  Sherlock is playing Moriarty‘s game: The death of Sherlock. But he doesn't play it to the end. So Moriarty will return to finish it. After all as Sherlock says Moriarty can't cope with an unfinished melody so he wouldn't die before finishing it.

All that beeing said I still also wouldn't be surprised (just disappointed because I feel Moriarty is the only one who is a match for Sherlock and could do so much more entertaining things.) if he really was dead. Because after all this is only fiction. In fiction there are often many logical explanation for events but only the ones the writers decided on will be the truth. (Unless you guys are up to rioting. Anyone has their adresses? Just kidding of course for legal reasons. I think they do a really good job with the show and while I must say I hate liars I respect artists. Imagine they would just tell us everything that would happen from the beginning. That would be boring. Looking forward to season five. I am sure we will get it before 2050. :))

So thanks to coming to my TED-talk. If you have any other helpful information I have missed, questions, opinions on this, criticism or anything else feel free to write me. And please tell me if you have really read to the end. I am curious if anyone has. :)

(Sorry for grammar mistakes and such. It has been a while since I wrote this much in English.)

[showersnstudies]

showersnstudies: a (re)introduction

hello hello! i wanted to take the time to write a bit of a longer introduction about me and this blog—a little reflection, a little hoping and dreaming!

some history

this actually isn’t my first time here! i created this page back in 2018, when i was still a sophomore in high school. now, nearly 3.5 years later, i’m about to enter my sophomore year of college. back then, i didn’t actually end up posting anything. then, a little over a year ago, i was about to enter my freshman year of college amidst the pandemic, and thought it would be a good idea to document the experience. the graphics, theme, etc., that i made then, that’s the iteration of this blog that i have now! however, when move-in was just around the corner, my university cancelled housing for freshmen because of covid-19 and i was forced to begin my first year of college online. of course, health and safety come first, but it was still a disappointing start to an experience i’d anticipated for so long. with that, i became very busy and focused on putting my mental health and my studies first. this blog fell to the wayside.

so how did my first year of university go?

i ended up not only spending my first quarter of freshman year online, but winter quarter as well. in the spring, i finally got to go on campus and experience a bit of campus life! it was so fun to see everything in person, although many things were closed because of the pandemic. academically, i feel like i learned so much, and took so many great classes! i met so many amazing, intelligent, talented peers and instructors. i also got involved in different student organizations. i truly feel like my mind has been opened in just the one year i’ve been in college. despite the overall positive experience, there were still a few things i wish i did differently, and of course, i would do anything to be able to have a college experience in a world without covid-19. however, since i can’t do anything about that, i’m trying to get myself to let it go and make the most of the experience i’ve been given.

and that brings me to...

sophomore year! i still have a little over 3 weeks before i move back onto campus. i have a lot of hopes and dreams for this year. the word to sum all of it up is intentionality. even though i was very happy to be on campus last spring, there was so much going on at all times and my days became very unstructured. i let classes fall to the wayside, hung out with friends until 1 am and didn’t get enough sleep, or just spent my time on my phone. i am a full supporter of taking breaks and not just spending every minute studying, but i do feel like i didn’t make the most of my time and take all the opportunities i could out of being at university! this year, i hope to maintain a better balance between my studies, my jobs, my extracurriculars, my social life and relationships, and my personal development. let’s break this down:

a) studies - last spring, i found myself often doing the bare minimum in my classes. i dislike feeling like this, because i feel like i’m wasting my time and my money. if i’m going to have to spend time in my classes anyway, i want to invest the energy into truly gleaning all the information i can and actually benefiting from the educational opportunity i’ve been given. after all, that’s what i’m at university for.

b) jobs - i had two work-study jobs last spring that i’m continuing in the fall. one of them is with the school magazine, and i find it pretty boring and sometimes frustrating (the team is overwhelmingly white, and it is very much a publicity job for the university). however, because it’s journalism-related, i want to make the most of the opportunity and take the chance to glean skills and experience from it that i can use to advance myself in the industry. my other job is a new one that i’m excited about! i’m working as part of the asian american studies program’s office at my school. i hope that with this job, i can develop my socializing and community-building skills, which i lack quite a bit of. i know this is a position that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone, so hopefully i can learn a lot from it. my goal is to build genuine connections with the other staff members, the faculty, the students, and the community members!

c) extracurriculars - at the beginning of my freshman year, i got involved in a ton of different extracurriculars. almost all of my free time would be taken up by different zoom meetings. once i was on campus, i stopped attending a lot of meetings and dropped some orgs. because i anticipate that sophomore year will not give me the same flexibility in time that i had in fall and winter quarter last year, when i was sitting alone in my bedroom at home, i want to be more intentional about what extracurriculars i participate in. there’s no way i can do every single thing, so i want to choose activities that are meaningful and/or beneficial to me. then, i want to invest actual effort into these activities, which i think will help me feel actually passionate about my work, rather than simply participating on a surface level.

d) social life and relationships - there’s kind of two aspects to this. one is with my friendships and peers. i want to be in community with those around me and develop deeper relationships with people who i share genuine mutual care with. i want to be intentional about who i want to spend time with, and then spend effort actually cultivating those relationships. i found last year that i was constantly meeting so many people! it was hard to tell who was just an acquaintance and who i could consider a friend. there’s so many different levels to it, and i definitely found my relationships in college to be a lot different from those i had in high school. therefore, intentionality is the focus for me this year! the other aspect is ~networking~. there’s really no better way to put this haha. i left freshman year lacking any sort of relationship with professors or mentors or people in the industries i’m interested in. i got set up with a few mentors through different student orgs, but had no idea how to maintain or actually benefit from those relationships. i really want to start creating those connections with professors and peers! i’m honestly not entirely sure how, because i’m a very awkward and antisocial person, but i hope that taking classes in person will aid somewhat.

e) personal development - one thing i really want to do during my time at college is to grow as a person. of course, i think this is in many ways a natural process that occurs through such a big change, but i want to be more intentional about it. college is the perfect time to do this in my opinion, and i truly want to become the person i want to be (or as close as i can get). i hope that i can lead a life that gives me more satisfaction; that i can do things that fulfill me; that i can become a kinder and more compassionate person; that i can become more involved in community-building, life-giving activities; that i can strive towards achieving my dreams; and that i can overall lead a more balanced, intentional life. most of all, i want to be happier.

so what about this blog?

last year, when i started blogging on here, i told myself it would be a space of enjoyment rather than obligation. however, i quickly fell to creating methodical posts about my high school experience and had all these other plans for posts that, well, ended up feeling like an obligation. it made me lose motivation to continue posting, because i started creating all these rules for myself, like ‘i can’t post anything else until i finish explaining my high school experience and college application process!’ it turned out to be the opposite of my intention. so...let’s try this again. i think maybe this will become a more reflective blog, the kind i loved from ye olde tumblr (mid-2010s tumblr was honestly the best). less about graphics and aesthetics and more about the ~vibes~. a little community (hopefully!) but if not, just a place for self-reflection and self-growth and self-documentation. i’m guessing once school starts i’ll get super busy and not have a lot of time to do all this reflection that i’m envisioning, but we’ll see. hopefully i can develop a sort of routine where there’s at least time for me to document my college years, because they are so very short. :,)

that’s all for now! it’s still a while since i start school, but we’ll see where this goes! future april, if you’re reading this, i hope you’re closer to your dreams!

[vroenis]

Part 2

This is part 1.

Can you tell how tired I was getting by the end? This is life under meds, but given the other benefits (I think?), I’ll take it for now.

When I woke up the next morning, I had a whole lot I was thinking about and it’s stuff I want to say given I said a lot, but didn’t cover this stuff. I’m still happy with part 1, I think that’s just how I write, moving from subject to subject more or less organically and it does show me to more unstructured even if there is a vague plan for how I want the piece to go.

Anyway let’s get going.

As always, mild spoilers for well, everything. If you haven’t seen this stuff and are mildly interested in watching them then ah, you may have a lot of catching up to do. I don’t think I’ll drop any real hard spoilers for anything but you never know.

Ghost In The Shell is an Outsider story

There are whole stacks of lore you could dive into with Stand Alone Complex in particular, with Motoko having been in an aircraft accident and getting her first shell (cyber-body) at a very early age, what that means, the thing with Kuze (avoiding spoilers here), and the extended cast - not that Paz, Boma and even Ishikawa get a whole lot of time anyway - but it’s not really that important.

Looking at just Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film, and even more-so his 2004 film Innocence (not really a sequel but usually regarded as such), the narratives cast the characters very much as Outsiders. In the first film, Section 9 is already at odds with the government in general and while it’s subtle, Aramaki as a department head is certainly different from his contemporaries, even if we don’t see much of it - again, so much more of this in Stand Alone Complex. Motoko’s early conversation with Togusa in the first film is probably the most telling as far as playing it loud. She speaks in pragmatic terms to why he’s there, but this is a precursor to what will ultimately transpire for herself at the conclusion of the film, something very intentionally written into the film. Batou is also an Outsider in more ways than one, not only in the role he plays in the department but in the very clear personal boundary between him and Motoko. There are boundaries between Batou and everyone and they become more apparent in the second film. Togusa is easy pickings so I’ll leave him alone, suffice to say if the film needs one, he’s the audience’s window of ignorance which is why he’s discarded so willingly half way in. He gets his time in the spotlight in Stand Alone Complex and it’s pretty amazing.

As for Motoko... I admit it is difficult separating my understanding of her character from Stand Alone Complex and attempting to just isolate what’s shown of her in the first film but I’ll try.

I mentioned the film’s centrepiece montage in my previous journal, in which we might say Motoko is the centrepiece but if so, she probably shares it with the city itself, and I feel much more is being said about the two together rather than separated simultaneously. This would be one of the first indications of Motoko’s sense of identity, of otherness, isolation, questioning. Again the scene that plays it most loud would be diving on the boat and her speech to Batou. There are other moments tho; single frames of her face, looks, movements that are lingered on, I feel like Oshii is constantly telling us about her and what she’s going to do, but more important than that, why she’s going to do it and how she feels.

Ghost in the Shell is a film about great emotion, and not like I’d know because it’s been a long time since I’ve looked into the discourse around it, but I suspect no-one really talks about it as a film about feelings.

I realise these days I talk more and more about moods and art being mood pieces. I labelled my Instagram account as being “A catalogue of moods” and I’m very fond of the use of the word in vernacular. It might seem flippant but it’s immensely empowered, especially for me as an individual when I understand my moods and can translate them into, via and thru art. I do appreciate many struggle with Oshii’s cinematic language as it can appear cold and detached and that’s fine, but it’s anything but for me - it’s immensely emotionally charged, it just appears differently to what audiences are perhaps accustomed to seeing. It’s a different language that perhaps takes time to learn, but it’s all there.

This couldn’t become more evident than in Innocence (the Ghost in the Shell 2 moniker I think was a western addendum). Batou takes centre stage and is  immediately presented as bluntly as possible as an Outsider, reaffirmed later by Aramaki who also cements Togusa’s position in limbo.

I should pause and say that within the GitS canon, I feel Togusa is definitely embraced by Section 9, so he’s not wholly an Outsider to the department, but for obvious reasons, he doesn’t fully share all of their daily or philosophical concerns - hence not wholly. He would also definitely be an Outsider to most other members of the force after joining Section 9, but unfortunately I’m not here to love Togusa, poor guy - I feel like he’s always a bit unloved. Someone write a giant essay in service to his greatness. He actually is great.

But I adore Batou in Innocence. I love his story, his struggle, his emotion. I love how present Motoko is without ever appearing on screen and then when she does, the impact she has on everything, especially with the lines she delivers, one of which I quoted to open the last journal. Batou is in many ways a shadow of what Motoko was and is/has become, just in physical form, mirroring her in a real world manifestation with the natural physical limitations that comes with.

For some reason I feel like I need to inject a comment about Batou putting the jacket/vest on Motoko’s body. I don’t know if people perceive this as an act of masculine modesty but it’s not how I read it. I did stumble on this action for years but as I began to interpret the films as Outsider stories, I realised that he does this as an act of inclusion, and that Motoko consents, permits him to and doesn’t immediately react with violence or technological recourse we know she is well capable of, indicates it’s mutual. Their inclusion isn’t just about the boundaries of the Section 9 department but extends beyond that, an inner circle that may only contain the two of them - inside which there are still boundaries between them Batou can never cross. Those boundaries become infinitely more apparent after the final events of the first film, and the second film effectively is all about how he feels about them. He is an ultimate Outsider, but so is Motoko in the state she now is in.

Section 9 is a department of stray dogs. Individuals who haven’t quite fit in where they belong, and found belonging with one another. Then, after a time, one of them moves on - at the conclusion of the first film, and then another feels an almost permanent and ultimate sense of separation - more or less the duration of the second film.

Ghost in the Shell isn’t about technology and sentience and hacking and corporations at all. It’s about loneliness and belonging and acceptance and affection. It’s about how that feels.

I’m Not Sure Why People Struggle With David Lynch Films

I need to stop talking about anime. Honestly I looked at the list at the start of the last journal and thought hell yea Sky Crawlers, Jin-Roh, Haibane Renmei and Lain let’s unpack some shit! but honestly I’ll run out of time and I should really draw from a variety of mediums and sources.

OK I’m not being facetious when I say Lynch’s films are fairly straight-forward narrative-wise. Again, it’s hard for me to position myself in a place where I’m not into the stuff I’m into and maybe that’s what gives me the cinematic language familiarity to parse them but that just sounds like wanker bullshit to me. I don’t mind if folks don’t like Lynch films, that’s fine. But they aren’t difficult.

So in the context of everything else, even on that short list on the last journal, plus how I keep trying to shift the discussion of works from the pragmatic reading of them to an emotional reading of them from a mood perspective, I feel as tho the same process can be applied to Lynch. So much about his films are about how they make you feel, or I’ll say - how they make *me* feel. It might be grandiose to assume I’m feeling the correct emotion, that these are the moods that David Lynch himself is attempting to create and evoke and thus, I am interpreting them correctly but hey - I enjoy the hell out of the films, feel I understand them and watch them over and over again so that’s all I’m basing it on.

That’s not to say there are things I dismiss as meaningless or that I don’t understand in his films, it’s just that I don’t have to parse them immediately at first watch and perhaps that’s the audience’s problem. I don’t know if reverse-diagnosis is appropriate but looking at how much hand-holding there is in other directors’ films might be just as telling. I mean I saw Nolan’s Tenet and was about the least confusing thing I’d ever seen in my life but apparently *that* confused people, and you know hey that’s fair I guess, but I mean Nolan did a whooooole lot of audience hand-holding in that film, I mean, the dialogue was terrible. There was so much unnecessary exposition, which I generally find in all of his films, so if an audience can’t follow that then OK sure, Lynch is going to be a problem.

The thing is popcorn cinema is totally OK. I watch it. I really love it, I’ve written about it before, it’s good Industry. There’s a lot of great creativity in popular cinema, I don’t at all think poorly of it and I love seeing a really well produced, Hollywood picture... but I guess if that’s all you consume, and I guess if folks’ short-format episodic media (aka series - think Netflix, HVO etc.) is more or less to the same standard, then it begins to make sense that anything outside of that isn’t going to make sense.

Long story short - Lynch films tell simple stories where the feeling of the film is as important as the narrative of the film. To understand the story, you have to understand the feeling, and vice-versa.

Surprise surprise, it turns out independent and deemed “fringe” film-makers... aka Outsiders... make films about Outsiders.

Now I wouldn’t know if any of the Marvel films thematically are about Outsiders or Outsider culture, they probably are and very loudly at that, but the reason I’ve never included one in my catalogue of moods is they all read the same way. Not only are Marvel films mostly indistinct from one other to me, they’re also mostly indistinct from much of popular culture in general. That doesn’t make them bad, some of them still have some pretty awesome stunts, visfx, even parts of the narratives, funny jokes etc. in them, but on the whole they’re not useful to me as things I deem truly valuable in the long-term.

It’s OK, I’m not at all going to lament the proliferation of Marvel films, a lot of them have been pretty cool and they keep people in work. Meow meow meow “the death of cinema” mate, sure - I find it more difficult to find the sorts of films I like but that’s always been the case. Humans will do what they do, it’s not a read on cinema, it’s about being an Outsider and what that’s all about. True, maybe weird shit like Lynch and Noe might be more difficult to make, but the weird-indie corner was also dominated by white men and that needs to change, so who knows what the future holds.

Can you detect the point at which I took my meds and started getting tired?

Ghost in the Shell // Innocence // What We Want // What We’re Left With

Growing up as an Outsider, I feel as tho the first Ghost in the Shell film carries the weight of isolation, questions of identity and belonging, ultimately of acceptance, empowerment and liberation. Then Innocence brings to bear very similar moods but states that things may not necessarily change for the better, they simply change state. I love that in both narratives, the main texts of hacking or corrupt corporations, crime etc. are the least common denominators and barely relevant to heart of the films. I think about the theme of icons in Innocence, icons operatively being the dolls throughout the film, and the final image of Togusa’s daughter’s gift. As humans we assume we’re to take the position of biological humanity as representative of sentience, taking moral priority over all other beings. Earlier in the film we think Togusa is in limbo, but  at the conclusion Motoko asks the question, or perhaps states that perhaps we’re all in limbo together.

I think that’s a significant part of what growing up as and being an Outsider is like, what it feels like. Christians have this saying about “living in the world but not of the world” (derived from a bible verse) and honestly I don’t think they know what it means because they just operate like a cult, but I think queers and folks with long term mental health conditions have a better idea. We are pushed out to the fringes of our social groups from an early age, long before we know or understand what’s different about us. Our peers and the adults around us do this to us because their social behaviours are so well hard-coded, even they may not even know precisely what’s different about us, they just do - and they’re right. We are different. And they don’t accept us.

Maybe I am starting to get a little more upset that weird/different art is becoming more difficult to fund and make, because it’s for us, for me. It speaks to me. You already have so much, and representation and inclusion is so important. I don’t just need queer cinema, I need weird cinema, I need moods. I need quiet, introspective, pensive, reflective, Outsider moods.

I still feel like an Outsider. I have a few people who understand more about me, but I don’t think I have a place, not in a real sense. I have never felt that. Art is one of the few places I feel any connection with anything, and connecting with people is a very odd thing to consider - honestly, I actually would really like to connect with people but the unique combination of being queer *and* autistic comorbid with bipolar makes it really tough, more difficult the older I get. And now all you want to do is fund Marvel movies. I can’t feed off of that.

I’m getting tired, I’m not making any sense. It’s time for bed.

[ipsomaniac]

saw a post about a sign of adhd being compulsive fidgeting, messing with your body etc but i guess it was deleted before i could reblog. but i wrote out a response so here it is for future reference.

rambly self-indulgent diagnostic wishful-thinking ahead:

so this is one of the things that has made me wonder whether i might have adhd or something - i am constantly doing stuff like this. i dont think pain is a particular component of it for me, but i incessantly seek physical stimulation in this way - cracking my bones, biting my nails, pulling out my hair, picking at scabs, changing my position, whispering/talking to myself, unconsciously making a weird noise by blowing air through the back of my teeth. this is compulsive behaviour that i find incredibly difficult to stop even when i know it’s annoying to others, and i often do it unknowingly. other things that have made me wonder:

- the general feeling of... not being able to access parts of my brain. the feeling that most of the time i am working against the grain and i simply can’t do the thing i am trying to do, even though i should be able to do it. i didn’t experience this much as a child (or at least, not in the subjects that i liked) because i did well within the structure of school, but i’ve felt crippled by it all through my adulthood once those structures were removed

- i guess this is linked to problems with executive function: low motivation and concentration, struggling with open-ended and unstructured problems or tasks, to the point that they occassionally cause me to have breakdowns in the context of work

- avoidance of things that require mental effort. e.g. i have, and have always had, a bizarre loathing of games. not make-believe games, but any game that has a set of systematic rules and a winner and loser i find to be almost a form of torture: like i’m so unmotivated my brain is actively repulsed. many people have remarked on how abnormal this is. that’s something i’ve had since i was a kid, but now, my brain’s inability to engage with mentally challenging things extends to so many things that i once enjoyed and which came naturally to me, but which have since become too painful: writing, drawing, composing music.

- the memory of how weird i was as a child. of course all kids are pretty weird, but i was weird weird: at my teachers’ insistance my parents had me enrolled in some sort of therapy type thing when i was 5, which i think was partly to teach me how to socialise, because i was so severely off base on that front. zero emotional regulation or sense of how to interact normally, moody, hyper-verbal, LOUD VOICE (still struggle with that), constantly felt like there were hidden rules of engagement which i didn’t understand.

i don’t actually think i have adhd because a lot of the classic symptoms don’t apply - i don’t have issues with timekeeping, i’m not especially disorganised, i’m not prone to losing things, i don’t struggle with focusing on details, i don’t make lots of careless mistakes, i’m not “scatterbrained” or “absent-minded”. probably most of my issues with executive function are just a result of depression. but i do have an ongoing sense - even in non-depressive periods when i may otherwise feel quite happy - that there is something broken in my brain, that there’s a disconnected gear in there, and it’s stopping me from accessing own mind. it would be nice to be able to point to that break and say, there it is, it’s got a name, it’s real.

[falcongumba]

Lesley Mok

Photo by Luke Marantz 

Lesley Mok is an immensely creative drummer, percussionist and composer who works in a wide variety of collaborative ensembles as well as writing music for her own projects. She is also part of Polyfold Musical Arts Collective, a really wonderful group of musicians who have been curating a concert series for musicians to present new works of music as well as running a small record label that already has a sizable catalog.

I’ve only known Lesley for a couple of years, but we have played together a few times in informal sessions and I always admired her original drumming and her strong voice as a composer.

In this discussion we talked about her entire trajectory as a musician as well as some of her upcoming projects and plans.

JT: You’ve told me before that you are originally from the Bay Area but I’m a bit curious about your family’s background. Where are your parents from? What did they do?

LM: Neither of my parents are creative professionals, though I'd consider both of them creative people. I'm a first-generation American, and like many immigrants at the time, both of them had an intense desire to climb the social ladder and make it for themselves in the United States. I think uprooting one's life and moving to an unfamiliar place takes a different kind of creativity--figuring out which bus to take, what to eat, how to communicate...they're cultural challenges that require creative thinking.

JT: And, were they the first ones to steer you into getting music lessons? Or was that something that you wanted on your own?

LM: My mom forced me to take piano lessons, but drum lessons were something I asked for.

JT: Before we get onto the drums. I read on your bio that you also played the flute, correct?

LM: Yes! In my elementary and middle school concert bands.

JT: I imagine studying flute and piano was likely helpful, no? You write a lot of music now.

LM: Definitely - it gave me a  good sense of tonal harmony, or at least what it sounded like and how it might move. It wasn't until recently that I started writing music,  but taking lessons at a young age gave me a lot to work from. It's like learning a language at a young age..you can't really forget it.

JT: That’s amazing! So how did you arrive at the drums originally?

LM: I don't really remember, to be honest, but I took lessons for a few years before joining the middle school jazz band. I would invite friends over to work on songs we learned in school. I was terrified of soloing and I remember wanting to work on trading 4’s so I wouldn’t embarrass myself during rehearsal.

JT: And was it already pretty geared toward a jazz thing? Or were you playing other kinds of music?

LM: I was drawn to jazz from the beginning - it always felt like the music I wanted to play. I wanted to be in a backing band for a singer - my favorite records were with Ella, Billie Holiday, and Nancy Wilson.

JT: What kind of form did that listening take?

LM: One of the first drummers I met, Scott Lowrie, introduced me to a bunch of records like Sonny Rollins Quartet, Sarah Vaughan with Basie, Miles Davis’ First Quintet...He would point out certain things that captured him, like how swinging Philly Joe’s ride cymbal was, or the vibrato in Sarah’s voice, or how relaxed Paul Chamber’s beat was. He would sing along to the drum solos and try to figure out what sticking Philly Joe would more likely play. He introduced to me a listening culture that made me more interested in the music.

JT: What was the transition to Berklee like?

LM: I had started to meet a bunch of other high school musicians in my junior year of high school through programs like the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Everyone could really play, and it inspired me to know that people my age were already so committed to music. I remember Cory Cox and Caili O’Doherty were mentors at the program at the time, and just hearing them play encouraged me to apply to music school.

JT: That’s cool because that's kind of a common thread for a lot of people that I know from the Bay Area. There were all these music camps, and a lot of people went and even if a lot of them didn't end up playing music professionally, they still would end up playing an instrument pretty well and having a really strong appreciation for music.

LM: Yeah, I studied with Akira Tana at the time and I remember he even recommended that I not go to music school; he was like “you should check out these other things”.

I think a lot of my hesitation about going to music school didn't have to do with music itself but how to make a living in music. At that time, coming from a more traditionally minded family, music wasn’t a legitimate practice or career. It wasn’t until college when I built up more confidence and commitment to music.

JT: I remember you telling me that you had a pretty good experience at Berklee.

LM: The first two years at Berklee were a little unstructured and I was sort of confused about how to move forward. I felt lucky to play in a few ensembles that I really enjoyed, including Jason Palmer’s ensemble (my first foray into odd meters and original music) and Ralph Peterson’s Art Blakey ensemble, but I didn’t have high enough ratings to get into some other ensembles. (Those of you who are familiar with Berklee’s rating system can maybe empathize!). I felt a bit discouraged with navigating what felt like a bureaucratic system.

In my third year, I applied to this program called the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, led by Danilo Perez and Marco Pignataro. I didn't get in my first time around, but then I think it was in my sixth semester or something I auditioned again and got in. That program was really significant for me.

Global gave me some clarity in my practice and I was able to prioritize my learning. It was also during this time when I started to think about bigger questions, not just how to play the drums and music, but you know...how to play music in a culturally and socially informed way.

JT: And what were some of the breakthroughs? Was there a teacher that was particularly empowering? Or was it just the benefit of being in the program?

LM: The program itself was very empowering, but Danilo, Terri Lynne Carrington and Ben Street were the three teachers that really influenced me. Bob Gullotti was also enormously influential as a teacher. We would work on playing Bird heads around the drums. He was so thorough with the way he thought about dynamics, articulation, and tambor, and if he didn’t feel like you played the essence of the melody, he would ask you to work on the same thing for the following week. I hadn’t thought much about drumming outside of a rhythmic and linguistic context up until that point so those lessons were super transformative. Bob would play every Monday night at the Fringe--I remember hearing him take a solo on sticks on a ballad at like 40bpm, and being like, “Holy shit, I want to be able to do that.” Bob passed away just last year--he was a completely dedicated teacher and I will always treasure our time together.

JT: When did you move to NY?

LM: I moved in September of 2017.

JT: Okay. And did you move because you felt that New York was a center for this music? Or was there another reason?

LM: There was never much doubt in my mind about moving to New York after school. I travelled between Boston and New York pretty often while I was in school to take lessons or see shows, so after I finished my final year at Berklee I moved here.

JT: There's usually all these logistical and life challenges moving here the first year. How did that affect you? Were you able to get to music right away? Or was there an adjustment period?

LM: It was a tremendous life change. I applied for a bunch of jobs the first week I moved here, and ended up working at a small entertainment law firm for about four months..that's how long I lasted! (Haha) It was super gruesome and I was pretty miserable. I was in the office for nine hours a day, and would head to my studio every day at 6pm and practice until 10pm or so. I would plan sessions on weekends or weeknights after work. Oddly enough, I think I practiced the most when I had that job just because I knew I had to structure my time really well.

It was an emotionally tough time, but it really made me question what was important to me. I think I was scared of what it meant to be a working musician but after working at the law firm, I knew it wasn't something I could do--my body and mind just rejected it. After I quit my job I felt like I had control over my own time and free will, and it was then that I really started pursuing music more fearlessly.

JT: Yeah, I feel like there’s a huge character building that happens in that first year and then the following years almost get easier by contrast or something.

LM: I’m definitely less stressed out than I was that first year. There are always challenges and self-doubt, but I feel like I can return to familiar rooms in my mind and trust that I’ll overcome the moment.

That said, I still worry all the time if my music’s any good, if anyone resonates with it, and if other people like playing with me, etc. (Haha)

JT: And in those first couple of years were you already able to find some people to play with or did it take some time?

LM: I was playing with a lot of really great musicians, but the more I questioned my own artistic values, the more I was able to also find a community of people I resonated with emotionally and artistically. I also moved to Bushwick in November 2018 and started playing with people with completely different value systems. To be honest, I couldn’t relate at first. I heard Weasel Walter for the first time and remember thinking how weird and overwhelmed and intrigued I felt. There’s a record he’s on with Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans, and there are long stretches of time where he doesn’t play anything I can identify as a sound from the drum set. Hearing him along with other musicians like Brandon Lopez and Matteo Liberatore made me think consciously about all the musical choices I can make in any given moment. My first year living in Bushwick felt like everything I had known and felt about music was flipped upside down. I had to learn to engage with creative music beyond the ride cymbal being the main timbral focus...beyond jazz.

JT: I remember you telling me that you didn't start writing your own compositions right away.

LM: Yeah, I didn't really start writing until the end of 2018 with my band The Living Collection. It's funny to think that my first foray into writing was for a large chamber-like ensemble because I feel like I still have huge gaps in my knowledge of harmony and traditional compositional methods.

But it's something that also I think freed me from thinking I had to do a certain thing or compose in a certain way. I learned so much through trial and error...I'd have the flute in one octave and then have bass clarinet in another octave only to realize that the flute was barely audible. I had random mistakes in my chart, or very inconvenient ways of writing things, or literally impossible parts to play, so it was really trial by fire. But I think I learned through having a supportive group of friends for a band who would share their thoughts with me, and criticisms as well.

JT: I think I listened to everything there is currently available from that band. The music is really beautiful. I was wondering what is your concept for the music of the group?

LM: I think it's changed a lot. Some of the first compositions we played had many independent, moving parts. I was drawing a lot of inspiration from Henry Threadgill at that time. I was writing entirely notated music at one point, after listening to more contemporary classical composers like [Helmut] Lachenmann. Recently I’ve been thinking more about the idea of musical democracy and non-hierarchical ways of playing, improvisation being a vehicle for these social-cultural processes involved: spirituality, community-as-oneness, and communal joy. I hope to establish a context in which everyone can participate in music as a necessary ritualistic function.

JT: That brings me to the work that you've been doing with Polyfold Musical Arts Collective. How did it come about and how did you all start fleshing out these ideas?

LM: Well, I'm the newest member of Polyfold. The collective originally started in Detroit and consisted of 20-something musicians. It took on a new shape when a few of its members moved to Brooklyn in 2017, so the current membership includes myself, Yuma Uesaka, Alex Levine, and Ben Rolston. The idea is basically to expand opportunities for improvisers to create original music. That usually takes the form of a monthly concert series, something we call Polyfold Presents, but we’ve also put together these “Sunday Salons,” informal workshops where people can bring their music or share ideas they’re exploring. The idea comes from something Geri Allen used to do with her students. We recently have been working on our record label...your record was actually the first we put out in awhile! So thank you for all your work on that.

*Lesley adds: (Juanma’s band was originally scheduled to perform at the April concert series, but when COVID hit, we commissioned him along with the other artists that we scheduled to perform, to perform a creative work of any kind. He ended up recording four full-length compositions remotely with his band. It was so well recorded and the process was so representative of the moment that we decided to put it out on the label. Check it out - ‘Folklore’ by Juanma Trujillo.)

JT: How, would you describe the role that you have in the collective?

LM: It's hard to say, the structure and the nature of the organization has changed over time, our roles kind of shift as we go. I just worked on writing the last grant. Trying to put into words what exactly is it we do and making sure we're holding ourselves accountable for those things.

JT: Has being part of this initiative been rewarding in a way that you didn't expect? Has it helped you see things in a different way?

LM: Yeah, for sure. It’s made me realize how important and powerful organizing is for the improvised music community and how we all sort of depend on each other.

JT: Yeah, I think I wanted to get your input on that because I’ve been kind of pleasantly surprised to see that you guys as a group of artists who are already playing together and are good friends are also welcoming people from outside your circle. In my time living here I can confidently say that this is somewhat rare.

LM: Yeah..I hope it becomes less rare. I've met some people that have really made it feel like home here.

I think it’s hard to feel a sense of community in a place like New York, where artists-entrepreneurs are constantly up against so many things. It seems like everyone’s competing for the same opportunities.

I think community building starts on a personal level...who you hang out with or talk to, who’s in your band, what kind of bills you’re curating if you’re a bandleader. All of these things are part of what makes a community. The 501c3 is just a status.

JT: So we’ve talked about your main projects, but I can also see that you're doing quite a bit of one off gigs with people just improvising. How has that been helpful in your development?

LM: I often feel like there's a lot of pressure to play written music or to present something really polished, which I also enjoy, but it’s nice to get to know someone intimately without the pressure of following a specific musical format. It’s really invigorating getting to know their musical perspective in an open space and forming a connection.

Depending on the improvisational context, I sometimes feel that there’s nothing I wish to contribute on the drum set. It’s encouraged me to work on different techniques that might produce different sounds and timbres and to search for percussion instruments that might give me a broader range of expression. My dream is to build a drum cage like the one in that iconic photo with Roscoe Mitchell!

JT: Are there any of the other projects that you have that you would like to talk about or mention any other experiences that have been meaningful to you recently?

LM: I recently spent two weeks in Newton, MA with my good friends Maya and Akiva. We had no agenda other than to play music if we felt like it. It was one of the more intimate and spiritually fulfilling experiences I’ve had in awhile. The music felt like an extension of our cooking together, our swims in the lake, our humming. I listened back to some of the recordings we made a few days ago...it feels both personal and non-precious. It reminds me of these words by Nicole Mitchell--

“If you practice your connection to the stars enough, you can go anytime you please. The Dogon mastered it, but the shoebox architects sold kids on rap videos over stargazing. Doesn’t matter how much pollution, or how many ceilings or drones are flying above, the stars are there. I promise. No wonder Lightin’ Hopkins, Jeff Parker, Jimi Hendrix and all the bluesmen made their own vessel guitars to communicate here. And ever better, I’m tellin’ you, there are no consequences, no punishments and no side effects except joy and more strength. Can you imagine? I’m thinking, maybe we can build a bridge from pain to hope and insight and take all our families there.”

JT: Thank you Lesley!

LM: Yeah, thanks so much for doing this.

You can learn more about Lesley on her website: https://www.lesleymok.com/

Lesley has all her releases available on: https://lesleymok.bandcamp.com/

[overwatch-does-stuff]

Overwatch: Accepted Parameters

Summary: Baptiste has always kept his head down, and that skill of avoiding conflict has gotten him far in Talon rank. However, a brush with the dark underside of the organization leaves his confidence in such a strategy shaken.

   Talon operative schedules were never quite as hectic as the schedules of the first-tier enlisted folk. Having more unstructured time was still quite strange for Baptiste, even though he had been promoted a few weeks ago. Mauga, though, took it in stride, like he always did. Mauga was the one who dragged Baptiste down to the one of the many break rooms to hang out with the rest of their squad.    Everyone was grouped around a center TV. On it was a game of rugby. Baptiste watched, and tried to discern the rules as the game went on. Mauga was not much help: the only clue he gave was when he got excited over something. Well, it seemed he was more excited about the tackling than the actual scoring.    Baptiste's comm buzzed- as a medic, he was technically always on call- so he ducked and slid out of his seat (causing several groans as he walked in front of the screen for a brief moment) and walked to the far corner of the room. He tapped his comm.    "Augustin: Dr. O'Deorain has requested assistance in her medical lab." The comm manager responded in their typical, dry voice. "Please report immediately."    "Understood." Baptiste said.    The comm call ended. He looked up right as the crowd around the TV cheered. The only person to look back to him was Mauga, who gave him a curious look.    "Something in the med lab." Baptiste tried to say, but he knew his words were lost in the excitement. He gestured to the door, and then pointed up to his comm.    Mauga nodded. With that, Baptiste left the room.    The walk to the med lab was a ways, so Baptiste kept a good jogging pace. It was exceedingly rare for Moira to ask for anyone to come to the lab, much less 'request assistance' from anyone, so what could be going on? There hadn't been a mission, at least not one that he knew about.    He turned a corner. The door was to his right. As he approached it, it opened automatically.    "How can I help?" were his first words as he entered.    On two separate beds sat two Talon operatives that Baptiste had never seen with his own eyes before. The one sitting upright on the bed closest to the door he immediately recognized as Widowmaker, the sniper with blue skin, which was hard to miss. The man laying down in the farther bed, however, did not look familiar in the slightest.    Moira came rushing back into the main room with two vials. She laid down one beside the bed with the man, and carried the other one with her as she approached Widowmaker. She did not look over to the door.    "Dr. O'Deorain, you called?" Baptiste said.    Moira's head darted in his direction for a brief moment. "You're here. Good."    Baptiste looked around again. Neither Widowmaker nor the man looked visibly injured. Widowmaker's complexion seemed a bit fuller than usual, suggesting that she was. . . well, it was hard to evaluate proper blood flow on someone who was supposed to look that pale. And the man seemed a bit dazed, staring up at the ceiling, but otherwise looking fine.    "Reconditioning required." Widowmaker said.    Her tone was strained. Moira was holding her arm and attempting to inject her with the needle, but she kept jerking away.    "You will receive reconditioning if you-"    "Reconditiong. . . no. . . required." Widowmaker pulled her arm out of Moira's grasp, before freezing.    Moira beckoned Baptiste with her finger. "Help me hold her."     “What is her current condition?" he replied.    "Do as I say, Augustin. She needs this injection." Moira readied her needle again.    Baptiste came over. Widowmaker did not respond to his approach.    "Hey, I'm going to touch you, okay?" He said quietly.    Again Widowmaker did not respond. He reached to her arm, before brushing her skin. It was lukewarm, like the flesh of someone that had been dead for only a few hours, and the comparison to the memory made him shutter.    "Come on, Augustin. She does not require a pleasant bedside manner." Moira hissed.    Baptiste raised an eyebrow. Consent was at the top of every doctor's check list, unless the patient was unconscious or gravely injured. Still, Moira was Moira, the head of the Talon medical division. Her word was law. So, Baptiste grasped Widowmaker's arm. There was a faint hint of protesting movement, before her struggling ceased.    "No. Hold her down." Moira commanded.    Baptiste took a deep breath, before bracing one arm against Widowmaker's shoulder and pressing her downwards to the bed. She bent like a doll in his grasp. She laid against the mattress, her face blank, but her eyes. . .    Baptiste looked away and muttered a few words of apology in french.    Widowmaker's voice was a whisper. "Gerard?"    She let out a fleeting breath as the needle entered her arm. Moira injected the dose, and her body went limp. Her eyes fluttered shut.    "Sedative? Why?" Baptiste asked.    "I am taking her to reconditioning. Stay here and watch over Sigma. Keep interaction to a minimum. If he gets out of hand, the sedative is by his bedside. Do not let him out." Moira replied, before walking to another corner of the room.    Sigma? Baptiste looked behind the doctor to the man in the other bed. Only now did he notice that, under the sheet, the man was tied down with thick black straps.    Moira came back with a rolling bed, and roughly slid Widowmaker onto it. She then rolled the bed out of the room. The door shut behind her, and Baptiste stayed still for a few moments afterwards.    Who was Gerard? What was reconditioning? Why the sedative? Would Widowmaker have resisted enough to warrant it? What little resistance she had put up seemed almost seizure-like. On and then off again. Almost like what she was fighting was internal-    Baptiste's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of quiet muttering. He looked over to Sigma.    "The harness is attached to the spine. If you break the spine then it is very difficult to harness anyone. But if you pick them up by the spine it is the most stable, except when it is not, and it breaks."    After a moment of hesitation, Baptiste approached Sigma's bedside. The man did not react, his gaze unmoving from the tile ceiling. Okay. . .    "The question can be defined as, where in the spine is the right place to lift?" Sigma continued.    "Um, hello?" Baptiste gave a wave.    "No, no, not right now. Focus. Anyways, the question. . ."    "Can I ask what you're talking about?" Baptiste took a seat on the other bed, where Widowmaker had been.    Sigma's head suddenly turned towards him. "Who are you?"    "I'm Jean-Baptiste Augustin, though you can just call me Baptiste." He said, pointing to himself.    "Hmm. You don't look like somebody I would imagine." Sigma replied. "However, there is not enough evidence to suggest that hypothesis is correct."    "Evidence?"    "Hmm. You aren't a nurse, are you?" Sigma raised an eyebrow.    "No, not a nurse, not exactly. I'm watching over you while Dr. O'Deorain gets something else done." Baptiste replied.    "Ah, yes, Dr. O'Deorain." He nodded slowly. Something returned to his eyes. "I am in her lab, am I not?"    Baptiste nodded as well. "That's right."    "Do you know why I am tied down?" Sigma asked.    "No, I don't actually. Moira told me not to untie you though, if that gives you any clues-"    Sigma gave a nasty glare, causing Baptiste's heart to skip a beat. "Excuse me, but you should refer to Dr. O'Deorain by her title. She worked very hard to get that degree, you know."    Baptiste took a deep breath. Okay. That went better than expected. Most people don't react well to being strapped to a bed, but Sigma seemed completely unfazed by the whole situation.    "I'm sorry. I'll call her 'doctor' from now on." Baptiste said.    "I should know. I also got my PhD, though in a very different sort of field." Sigma sat up slightly, as far as the straps would let him.    "Oh? Which field?"    Sigma laughed. "As if you don't know me! Though, I suppose not everyone is into astrophysics or related fields, so perhaps it isn't so strange that you don't recognize my face. . ."    Sigma's face was visibly old-looking. Strained and wrinkled, yet still maintaining the sharp angles of a younger man. The wrinkles had to be from stress. And, most startlingly, were the lines that faded down from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his temples. No, Baptiste was sure never seen a face like this one before.    A few beats of silence passed.    "Anyways, I'm Dr. Siebren de Kuiper. I would offer my hand and give you a proper greeting if I were able."    The name sounded familiar. Baptiste tried to figure out from where. News headlines when he was a teenager, maybe?    "Ha! Just a joke." Siebren continued. "Usually when I am tied down, it's for a reason."    Baptiste didn't know what to say to that.    "That was not a joke. Where is Dr. O'Deorain?" Siebren returned his gaze to the ceiling.    "She's doing something else at the moment. She'll be back soon." Baptiste replied.    "When will she be back? Only she can tell me what happened. Right now, I. . ." his breath shuddered, "I could have done anything."    "Hey, it's alright. Maybe I can help. Can you tell me more about what's going on with you? We can chat." Baptiste said.    "No, you don't understand. I could have done something. I could have done something without even knowing. Control, it's so easy to slip away from."    Disassociative episodes? Not uncommon for those with mental illness of some sort. Baptiste was no therapist, but no medic worth their salt was completely uneducated about mental health. The mind was part of the body, after all.    "When does this happen? Do you think there are triggers?" He continued.    "I. . . see, if I could remember, that would mean I'm stable. The fact that I am tied down must mean that I am not stable." Siebren continued.    "How are you feeling right now?" Baptiste asked.    "I'm not stable. I'm tied down. Am I being transported? What have I done?" Siebren's tone rose with every question. His breathing increased and his body began to shake with small tremors, dampened by the straps.    "Hey, you're alright. You were alright just a moment ago. You can be okay again." Baptiste kept his own tone even. He was well practiced in dealing with panic. "Let's take some deep breaths. I want you to breathe with me-"    "No! Get the sedative! I'm not stable. Don't you understand? That is procedure for the nurses, isn't it? And Dr. O'Deorain, she agrees, I am tied down! And- and-"    "Breathe. On the count of four, alright? Breathe in four, breathe out four." Baptiste elongated the words with his breaths.    Siebren's eyes darted around the room, and his lips moved, but nothing tangible came out. He trembled further. A strange feeling came over Baptiste, something akin to falling, making his breath catch in his throat for just a moment. He quickly steeled himself, ignoring the feeling as best as he could and focusing on keeping the cadence.    "In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. And repeat." Baptiste recited.    The rise and fall of Siebren's chest began to slow, eventually matching the beat of the counting. The feeling of falling faded away. Baptiste felt himself begin to relax, and Siebren looked less tense as well.    "Are you feeling better now?" Baptiste asked him.    Siebren blinked but did not reply.    "That technique is called square breathing. It's really simple, but rather effective, as you see. Even I feel better now." Baptiste smiled.    "Please don't tell Moira."    Baptiste barely caught the sentence as it left Siebren's mouth.    "Why? Is everything between you and her. . . all good?" Baptiste said quietly.    "Oh, of course." Siebren's tone still sounded small. "It's quite the contrary to what you are trying to insinuate. It's simply that I respect her highly."    "She's a doctor, a medic, just as I am. It's okay if you aren't pretty in front of her one-hundred percent of the time." Baptiste almost laughed in reply. He had gotten similar comments from other self-conscious patients in the past.    "No, no, you don't understand. Lapses in behavior are signs of instability. Instability means that I can't handle the privileges she has given me." Siebren said.    "Privileges?"    "She graciously gives some to me whenever I am stable. I can't handle them when I'm not."    "What are some examples of these?" Baptiste asked.    "Having someone to talk to is my favorite privilege." Siebren's eyes lit up. "When I'm feeling alright I get to leave my room and join her in her lab. It's nice not to be alone. Oh! And regular meals, on actual plates! That's rather nice as well. It helps to make me feel so normal again. I didn't get to have plates before."    Baptiste could feel his heart beating in his own chest, and he realized the reason why was because he had stopped breathing. He closed his mouth and swallowed his spit, before choosing his next words carefully.    "Those are considered your. . . 'privileges'?"    "Oh yes. I am fortunate to be able to earn them. Dr. O'Deorain is very kind." Siebren nodded.    Kind?    "Does she ever take your 'privileges' away?" Baptiste forced himself to keep breathing.    "When I am unstable, I can't handle them." Siebren replied, with only a slight bit of shame, but otherwise spoken like how he would have described the weather. It's raining. It's sunny. The ceiling is white.    "And when are you considered unstable?" Baptiste asked.    "Well, you just saw that, didn't you?" Siebren replied. "For a brief moment. If it had escalated. . ."    "No. No. That was not 'instability'." Baptiste placed his hand on Siebren's shoulder and met his eyes. "Everybody gets upset sometimes. Everybody panics. That's normal. You shouldn't be punished for that."    "You don't understand. Today is not a bad day for me. You wouldn't understand unless you saw what I am capable of." Siebren's tone was ice. "And the fact that I am being allowed to talk with you is evidence that, perhaps, that what I did before wasn't all that bad, in comparison to what I could have potentially done. Today is a good day for me."    "Today is a good day, isn't that right, Sigma?"    Baptiste flinched and turned to see Moira standing behind him. He brought his hand up from Siebren's shoulder and got up from his seat. He stood in between her and the bed where Siebren laid.    "Thank you, Augustin. Your attendance is no longer required. Sigma is my charge, and I shall handle him from here." Moira looked into him, almost through him.    Baptiste did not shrivel. "Perhaps a peer review of your methods is needed?"    "It isn't." She said. "You are dismissed."    Baptiste froze. He was all that was standing between a patient and clinical abuse. The tiny voice within him was screaming for him to stand his ground. Yet, his instincts told at him to comply, to keep his head down, to live another day. It was the instinct that had gotten him promoted so quickly in Talon rank. Comply. Odds were that he would never see Siebren again after this.    "You are dismissed." Moira repeated.    And before he knew it, his legs had carried him out the lab. The door behind him shut with a resounding click.    Mauga had tried to get a rise out him when he had first entered the breakroom again.    "Are you done playing nurse? We've still got a game to watch."    Baptiste did not reply. He climbed back into his spot on the couch beside him.    "Come on, Jean." Mauga gave an empathetic smile and patted him on the shoulder. "What's the matter?"    "It's nothing." Baptiste shrugged off his hand. "I'm. . . just sad that I missed some of the game."    "You here that, squad? This man's sad. Let's rewind all the plays, just for him."    The rest of the people in the room audibly groaned. Baptiste forced a choked laugh.    "That's the spirit! Come on, hit play!" Mauga slapped him on the back, causing him to cough.    And soon the room was filled with the sound of the excited announcer. Baptiste looked to the images on the screen but found that, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't discern the rules of the game.

[karkatvantasistrans]

Everyone heal your epilogue stress with another chapter of my Rosemary fic!!! Even if it is a little...dare I say........sadstuck. You can also read it on ao3 here.

Be Kanaya

When you return for training the next day, no one mentions it. You bump shoulders with Terezi while running from a crash of Time in the air behind you, and the sureness with which she hooks her arm into yours dissolves your weeks away from battle as if they had never taken place.

You wonder if Vriska feels just how erratic her control of Mind has become. You wonder if she encourages the chaos so she can feel in control of something, watching as space spits her aspect outwards, hitting the potential decisions of your allies as Vriska deflects the onslaught, cackles as it overwhelms Dave for a moment, drops him to his knees. You wonder why you bother aiming Mind at a wall at all as Karkat wretches, his matesprit opting to curse out Vriska rather than either source of the attack.

No one questions why this is.

When Dave’s time whips into Terezi’s control, you are in the sphere of influence this time, spiraled backwards into a time as a young grub when you grappled with the feelings you failed to have for a boy who, for all intensive purposes, you should have been the perfect kismesis for. You feel the smallness, the vulnerability rocket through you as you struggle to warp the space between the fraymotifing pair, and this time when Vriska laughs you swear it’s at your prepubescent shame, spilling out of every pore as the waves of purple escape the wall, embrace you instead.

If this is the case, no one mentions it.

Maybe there’s less to mention than you think.

Be Kanaya, one day later.

You would like to tell Rose about this.

Between the thorns of her disapproval, there is a unification of ideals that you crave every time you are left open on the battlefield, emotional wound of a girl as you heave and bleed.

She is not around for three days to ask where the blood comes from.

Maybe you don’t look quite hard enough.

Vriska mourns the loss of structure silently, the threat of your hard fought-for weekend creeping into the edges of her training schedule for the day. She pushes you harder, lights into each of your arms and bodies and torsos with a fresh intensity, delivering the promise of a weekend spent on self-repair.

Freeing you from the burden of unstructured time.

=>

There was an inkling you had, before your coupled departure, that the pressure Vriska put on you all to perform was not uniform. As you watch the blood trickle down Karkat’s forehead, bright red, unnatural saturation running over the hills of his face and through his bared teeth, this is confirmed. Head wounds bleed a lot: it’s something you’re all familiar with. But the intensity of his blood, of his entire approach to battle sets you all silently on edge. It’s different from the unhinged approach Terezi allows her aspect: endangering others is, in some way, part and parcel with your overall goals. But when Karkat fails, or refuses, for the hundredth time to deflect an attack, to focus his energy on himself over adversary, the message in the air is unmistakable.

He won’t let Dave defend him outside of battle.

When they pull their fraymotif together, hot red bursting over the wall in liquid waves, Dave shoots every attack back into history, vaccuums them from the timeline altogether.

These are the only times Karkat will defend himself: under the cloak of Dave, red explosion incomprehensible in their combination.

You all remember the first time Dave came between him and Vriska, the only one who’d allow himself the vulnerability to worry for Karkat out loud. To demand that Vriska stop launching attacks exactly where she knew they would hurt, pull the hot red of shame over the honest slice of agony.

Dave was the only one to begin to put a name to the truth in the air: that Karkat didn’t see himself coming out of this battle alive.

No one named it explicitly: Dave only pressed into Vriska, demanding, finger to her chest as the rest curled into his cape. Why Karkat’s focus was never re-directed to defensive practices; why no one had a problem with how much of the blood on the floor was always Karkat’s.

Vriska only lauded Karkat’s dedication in response, the comfort with his potential demise a tether binding the two of them together.

Dave and Karkat left together that day, returned separately the next.

Dave’s eyewear did little to hide his ire, but it was never brought up again. The only indication left was the hot anger on his face behind his matesprit’s back, the chill of inevitability sitting, fog-like, over the room.

You refuse to auspticize the comfort with Karkat’s death he shares with Vriska.

But you make a silent commitment not to let another boy be destroyed by her.

Be Rose

You haven’t left your room in four days.

Shuffling down the corridor, sleeve sliding along the wall, you text Kanaya as your mind churns with data. There is so much to absorb, you think, to consider in the accumulated mass of troll and human text alike. Your novels are annotated with brusque, splattered strokes in the room you’ve left behind, and you carry the synthesized conclusions with you in the well of your mind on your way to see her. You are excited, you think, to see someone who can be an audience. The inclinations of your heart burble deeper, muted, under the cascading cipher of the rational mind.

-– tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] at 17:01 -–

 TT: So, Kanaya, to what do I owe the pleasure of you summoning me from my lair?

 GA: Oh Its Status Has Been Updated To Lair Since We Last Spoke?

 GA: I’m Anticipating An Excess Of Macabre The Next Time I’m Over.

 GA: At Least As Far As Decor Is Concerned.

 GA: Otherwise A Demotion Back To Block May Be In Order.

 TT: I promise nothing but the most appropriately monikered interior.

 TT: Cultural norms on earth dictate such an abode if I’m to be consorting with a woman of the vampiric persuasion, I’m sure you understand.

 GA: Ah So It Is The Earth Equivalent Of Tidying Up Before Ones Matesprit Arrives.

 TT: Only if you like to adhere to banality, I suppose.

 TT: I’d like to think the supernatural element is a welcome expansion on the concept, however.

 GA: Hmmm.

 GA: Perhaps.

 TT: Anyway, Kanaya, you didn’t answer my question.

 GA: No?

 TT: What do you have planned for our rendezvous tonight?

 GA: Ah, That.

 GA: My Plan For Today Is As Follows:

 GA: [TACTICAL OMISSION]

 TT: Oh my.

 TT: I’ve suddenly found the motivation to hurry.

-– tentacleTherapist[TT] ceased pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] at 17:17 -–

– -- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began pestering tentacleTherapist[TT] at 17:19 –-

 GA: In All Seriousness Though I Did Have Something I Wanted To Run By You

 GA: Also Under The Heading Of A Tactical Omission Until You Arrive

 TT: I look forward to the unveiling of this top secret information, then.

 TT: See you soon, Kanaya.

–- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] at 17:21 –-

     Your hand does not feel like yours when you reach up to knock on her door.

                      -

                                                   You are awake in her bed.

Shift of skirt, hair bouncing off of shoulder, you orient yourself: face to wall and arm tucked under stomach. It’s with a bleary brain that you roll your head, unite your eyes in tandem with her figure.

“Welcome back.” It’s delivered dryly, spine to face, and she finishes typing before she turns to see you.

Her screen is filled with cascading geometric patterns you do not recognize. They hum together in time with the focus of her eyes on you: intricate and intense, the illusion of constant motion.

“I didn’t mean to drift off so soon into this visit, Kanaya. I’m sorry.” It’s sincere: it’s damage control.

The shake of her head is slight, but present.

“Is that what it’s called?”

What?

“…Pardon?” A pull of legs under thighs as your body urges you closer to her, upright. “Maybe I’ve got too much sleep between my ears still, Kanaya. Sorry.” You deliver a yawn for emphasis, try and send her a sleepy wink to cement your camaraderie.

“You weren’t sleeping.” A shift of her eyes, her whole body, as she spins back towards her husktop.

Away from you.

“You ended up that way, more or less, but when you came over you were not…present.”

The rip of guilt is hot, like a rope pulled up from your stomach, through your eyes.

“It was trance-like, but otherwise…unobtrusive. That being said,” A click of hesitation pops in her throat as she raises a knuckle to her teeth, swings her eyes back to you for the briefest moment.

“…it would be nice. If you could actually schedule being present when I ask you to come over.”

“Of course,” Reconciliation attempt comes too quick, too eager.

A trance.

“I’m sorry, Kanaya. I’m not always able to predict changes in state like that. Perhaps it would have been prudent to warn you, but…I did want to see you.” For all the rehearsed intimacy of your hand on her cheek, the emotion that claws its way out of you is still genuine.

You can work with a trance.

“This is a normal attribute of human soporofics?”

“Ah - only at certain echelons of consumption. It’s the sort of thing I’d enjoy alone, not necessarily on a day I’m planning to see others,”

This is not normal.

Fidget of fingers, soft disquiet of lost inhibitions beyond your own ability to predict.

This is not normal.

But you are fine, the moment has returned, the underestimation is to be expected from time to time.

Repentance re-adjusts itself, focuses on your girlfriend’s disappointment alone. An unexpected blip, but one whose only consequence is a ruined afternoon.

Salvageable.

“Would you like me to leave?”

“No…” Head turning, body with it, finally facing you in full.

“No. It’s alright. I’d like to at least spend some time together before I fall asleep.”

Be Rose, 41 minutes later

Kanaya’s hair is slick with sopor, gathered at her temples and rubbed in thick, decisive lines over her forehead. You can see the streak of her fingertips etched into the green on the back of her neck when she moves to turn off the light.

You have to remind yourself not to play with her hair as you sleep, subtract the buffer between slightly unpleasant nocturnal solemnity and nightmare.

Tucked with one arm to her chest, the other circling her back, you feel the gentle brush of lips and the edges of teeth on your forehead as she starts to drift to sleep. You think of how soft Kanaya’s hair always is when you wake up, sopor-treated silk, and wonder if the gentle frame of dry black on her face in those morning hours is the sign of a nightmare ripping through her mind.

You feel childlike, infantile as her arms circle you into her chest, disgust soaking you lightly until a fluid equally familiar pulls you under entirely.

You never did find out what she wanted to tell you

Be past Rose

“Kanaya!”

Did you forget?

You’re Kanaya Maryam.

You have just finished training with the rest of your friends, and have filtered out with slightly less urgency than the rest of them. Training in a group is more strenuous than you remembered, possibly because of Vriska’s overenthusiastic testing of your independently practiced abilities. Catching your breath at the hallway’s threshold, you turn to see Terezi walking towards you, hands shoved into her pockets.

“Terezi,” you greet, voice uneven with the remnants of exertion. Her face is illuminated as she steps into your your radius, reminds you of the energy brimming from your skin.

“Ah, sorry…” Hum of lambent skin lifts into the corners of her lips, over the hills of her cheeks as your phosphorescence pops, extinguishes. She is lit, now, only by the distant lamps of the hallway, glowing a soft red under her chin.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something!” Straight to business, no pretense:

“Was this you?”

Your eyes struggle to register, in the dark, what she is pointing to on the right side of her face. Something whips through you as you identify the “what” as bite marks, and you force your eyes back onto hers when you start to recognize the soft pucker of blood pooling around both scars.

You struggle to excuse your proclivity for blood theft.

“I’m afraid so.” Is all you’re able to cough up, dull throb of your face’s light bouncing off of hers in embarrassment. The pinch of teal in your gut Sings, shooting through your system as it begs to be reunited, made whole as you watch the way her blood pools lightly under the healed wound

“I didn’t expect there to be such a physical effect when I woke up, I admit I may have gotten…”

You struggle to find a better word, utterly fail.

“Snacky.”

She cackles, elated, head thrown back and uniform fangs exposed to the sky.

“That’s great!” She enthuses, and you hear the echo of an “eight” in her pronunciation.

“I didn’t mean to leave a mark,” You’re reassuring yourself, not her. She is positively jubilant over the revelation.

“I wasn’t exactly using every faculty of my think pan when that happened. I’ll admit getting cored left something to be desired in my…proclivity for foresight…” You tap your chin, lightly, a small bounce of light flickering with each collision of your nail.

“I don’t care about that at all!” It’s a dismissal and a reassurance: the Terezi special.

“Nothing wrong with a little battle scarring, Kanaya. But!” You feel the light slap of her cane on your ankle, soft repetitious tap communicating the post-strife excitement still rattling over her bones.

“What’s the story with your new spectrum imbibing lifestyle?”

You pause, hesitant, then surprise yourself by deftly pulling up the lip of your shirt, revealing the writhing mass of your stubbornly healing stomach.

The air is silent between you two for a moment, interrupted only by the wet slither of your churning organs.

“NEAT!” Comes her excited response, and you feel a warmth hit your bloodpusher as you immediately understand your comfort in trusting her with this.

[teachmoments]

I almost let this tradition lapse! Year End Survey 2017, y’all!

1. What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before? I’ve quit jobs before... but never because I HAD to. I’ve quit jobs because I wanted to. This year, I hit a wall where I knew I had to choose between continuing to be the type of teacher I’ve always aspired to be... or a well-paid button-pusher. I had the stones to say no to the latter and I’ve never done that before.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s Resolutions, and will you make more for next year? My biggest, stupidest NY resolution was to stop eating my favorite junk food - peanut butter pretzels... and despite having LOTS of opportunities, I made it 365 days. I was given a HUGE jar of them for Christmas and although we’re now safely ensconced in January, I’ve found I have lost my taste for them a bit. 3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Nope.

4. Did anyone close to you die? Nope! We made it through another year.

5. What countries did you visit?
 ZERO COUNTRIES! This answer has remained unaltered for the better part of the last ten years! Full disclosure, there is some talk about going up to Canada in ‘18. We’ll see.

6. What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017? Focus.

7. What date from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? July 10th, 2017. That was the day I definitively decided to leave the teaching position I had been working at for two years and go back to my old district.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? This will sound very small to most... but being able to go back to Middletown was an achievement. Some might say that’s a low bar, but I had all sorts of stupid feelings tied up in whether or not the decision was the right one.

9. What was your biggest failure? Although I work hard when I can, I have completely failed at drawing comics... which for a long time was the passion which sustained me through hard times. Honestly... I spent the lion’s share of ‘17 in a fairly depressed state. That spilled over to my artistic output.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing too serious. I wrenched my back out a little bit back in October but I’m OK now.

11. What was the best thing you bought? 2017 was the year of wireless headphones... which I thought were stupid but now can’t live without. No cords! Who knew? What’s that? EVERYONE knew? Ok. My bad.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My wife Ellen always deserves lauding but she’s become a real force to be reckoned with lately in the work she’s doing selling clothes on Poshmark. She’s made up a nice portion of the income we’ve lost with me moving back to a district where I’m paid a bit less. I should also say something nice about the team I work with, which welcomed me with open arms and made the transition back to Middletown a lot easier.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Trump. I feel like I’m in a low-level depression all the time when it comes to the state of our country.

14. Where did most of your money go? There’s not much extra money these days and that’s fine!

  15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? My sister got married in July, which was like a great big party. Cartoon Crossroads Columbus 2017. 

16. What song will always remind you of 2017?
 Meet Me in the Woods :: Lord Huron

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:


Happier or Sadder: Happier! Thinner or Fatter: Fatter. Richer or Poorer: Momentarily richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? I will always wish more more unstructured down time, sitting in the backyard with everyone, listening to music.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Being frustrated.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
 Christmas began all in a rush with the late end of school. My sister and her husband came down from New York. We spent most of our time here at the house. It was nice.

22. Did you fall in love in 2017? Sure.

23. How many one-night stands? Sure.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
 There was a lot of good television in M*A*S*H remained a strong contender for my time in ‘17 but this year will always be the year I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was pretty desperate to get away from the cacophony of insanity that’s been America lately and it was nice to plug into a show that preached someday, we conquer our petty human squabbles and get to go explore the stars.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Not really. I feel sorry for folks.

26. What was the best book you read? The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King. Wish I had broadened out from my sphere of interests more, but The Eyes of the Dragon is fantastic and an underrated part of King’s oeuvre.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? 


Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. 

28. What did you want and get? 

A new job. 

29. What did you want and not get? Nothing springs to mind.

30. What was your favorite film of this year? Again, firmly in my wheelhouse: IT. What an adaptation.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I was 35 and I have no memory of what we did. Whatever it was, it was low key.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? More time to draw comics.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2017? At work, I have branched out into being a lot more professional - four days a week, I wear a sports coat with a button-up shirt and slacks. I accessorize with lapel pins, which has become a small hobby of mine lately.

34. What kept you sane? 
Friday nights hanging out with my friends at Tolliver’s... Saturday nights hanging out with Ellen in my basement.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? EASY. Alison Brie. 

36. What political issue stirred you the most? 

37. Who did you miss? (in no particular order)
 I’m trying not to miss people. If I love you, I work to keep you in my life.

38. Who was the best new person you met? Oh, I work with a lady who absolutely cracks me up. We do “bets” at work all the time and that’s been a very fun and funny part of going back to my district. 

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2016: Money isn’t everything.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year: As with the last few years, I don’t have one, but I thought I’d leave the question up for anyone who would like to copy and paste this for their own. I always hate it when someone edits these things and then I’m left with a misnumbered and confusing survey.

For example, this survey is missing many questions. The person I copied it from probably didn’t take them out, but somewhere down the line there is some schmuck doing exactly that. I don’t want to be like him/her.

[nicolahoneyartistry]

My Favourite Bridal Hair & Makeup (Part 4) ** Happy Anniversary **

HAPPY WEDNESDAY 

My fourth blog in this series is Fi’s wedding, I thought it would be nice to share today as it is their third wedding anniversary.  The wedding took place at The Cowshed at Woodhall Farm in Codsall Wood Wolverhampton.

 THE LOVE STORY 

“ Sam and I are Christians and met on the opening of a new church called freedom church Worcester 6 years ago.

Since the beginning of our relationship we’ve loved spontaneous adventurous walks. On one of our early dates, I packed a surprise picnic for Sam. He was enjoying the food and said’ if you’ve packed skips then il will marry you now” you’ve guessed it, I had! You should have seen his face and no we didn’t get married in that moment.....

We dated for 3 years before Sam went out to get an sandwich and came back with an engagement ring by him. He proposed on a wet and foggy day up in the Malvern hills with no one around, it was dreamy.

With our love of street food, vintage Hollywood glamour, Star Wars and the outdoors we decided that a DIY wedding was definitely for us. After months of searching, we finally found The cowshed in Codsall.

As you can tell, we don’t mind the rain, in fact we love the rain and I ended up walking down the aisle in the pouring rain where I met Sam holding a red umbrella, it was honestly so us and so perfect!”

THE INSPIRATION

Fi loves vintage glamour and wanted this styling for her own wedding, I was so excited to create this look, Fi has really thick hair which is perfect to create vintage waves, she also has amazing alabaster skin which is also ideal to create a flawless 40’s makeup look. 

THE VENUES

Fi and her bridesmaids got ready over at the Roundhouse farm house in Boningale which was so pretty and quiet. Surrounded by sheep and chickens was the most idilic way to start the day. 

Fi and Sam did the legal bit at the incredibly majestic Victorian Council House in Malvern, Worcestershire.

An outdoor ceremony and the party was held at the Cowshed at Woodhall Farm in Codsall, Wolverhampton. 

The venue is an 18th century Cowshed, perfect for a DIY wedding as it is a blank canvas, built in 1700 it was a oat, corn and wheat store then through the 1800’s it was the home of 20 dairy cows. Then in 2014 the owner had the dream of having their own wedding in a candlelit old farm building so with the help from family and friends they converted it for their own wedding and now is shared with other lucky couples.

HAIR AND MAKEUP

I curled and pinned Fi’s thick hair and left it to set while I did the bridesmaids hair and makeup. I kept Fi’s eyes quite simple with just champagne gold and brown shades on the lids, (Urban Decay and MAC) with a winged liquid liner (Iglot gel liner and Kat Von D for even more definition) and lots of individual lashes, this makeup was all about the lip, a wonderful bright tomato red, (MAC: quite the standout retro matte) with a very light coverage foundation (The Ordinary serum foundation), a golden shimmery blusher (MAC Trace Gold) and very soft natural bronzer (Body shop Honey Bronze)

The Bridesmaids all had quite fresh natural makeup with a pastel pink lip and the hair was a combination of curls, plaits and unstructured buns. I then brushed out Fi’s curls with a paddle brush, added some Aveda anti humectant pomade to give the curls some shine and structure, then finished the look with a custom made birdcage veil made by Kate Brown- Bespoke Miliner .

Fi’s beautiful dress was from WED2BE by Anna Sorrano

THE REVIEW 

I am so happy and relieved that I found Nicola to be our wedding make up and hair artist. I got married last September and from the moment I met Nicola in my trial, she was so professional, inspiring and so talented! I felt so relaxed on the morning of the wedding day because in the trial she created my dream look of 'vintage glamour' within no time. She made sure I was happy and comfortable throughout the morning which so lovely of her. She knows her stuff and was always so accommodating to make my bridal 'look' was perfect before I went down the aisle. My husband LOVED the look she created too ( there were a few tears teehee) If you want a very creative and lovely artist to help make your wedding hair and makeup complete, Nicola is your gal!

Photos below by Emily and John - John Mark Arnold Photography

  As always, Bee Lovely 

  Nicky xx

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[ask-the-german-commander]

Haunted by a previous fate

Alright, I’ve finally written that angst piece I promised you all. At least I think it’s angst. Anyway, it’s a thought I’ve been wanting to share. I’ve put a little GerFra in there but that’s not the focus of the story. 

Word count: 3109, a bit longer than expected.

Enjoy! 

“Ludwig.” Francis walked over to me after the meting. He invited me for some coffee as usual. I accepted. It was always very delightful to have some coffee with him after such long, tiresome meetings. These meetings, yes, such chaotic and unstructured things, always drained me of all my energy. I cannot stand things that aren’t organized well. And of course since nobody else will, I end up being the one who tries to give the entire mess some form of structure, because that’s the German I am. However, it costs a lot of effort and I swear some day my voice will leave me for good if I have to continue screaming. Don’t even get me started about the patience it takes to deal with this bunch. Even if I told Francis and Arthur a million times to stop fighting, they never keep it. Of course both of them apologize to me afterwards. Alfred is loud and full of unrealistic ideas, but at least he doesn’t start a fight with others, even tho he was very close to get in a fight with Ivan more than once. I keep worrying about Feliciano who made falling asleep a habit during these meetings. I wonder if he never gets enough sleep or if he’s just always tired (the same goes for his brother). I keep waking him during the meetings, because I think it’s important that he knows what’s going on. But a few minutes later he already got distracted. As per usual, I brief him about the important things after the meeting is done. I can’t just leave him clueless, that would be very irresponsible. Amongst all this chaos, I am very grateful for Kiku’s calming presence and also Matthew’s. I must admit, sometimes I keep forgetting about him, which makes me feel bad. But I’m glad he’s there, at least it gives me someone normal to talk to. Having said this, it’s always such a relief when we end the meeting, but I never have a satisfying feeling. We never get everything done that’s on the agenda.

Francis and I went to our usual place and I treated him on his favourite kind of coffee. Just like every time, we sat down at a table near the window. I loosened my tie and my shirt a bit. Having the upper button closed, it always felt as if I was suffocating but I needed to look presentable, right? Francis observed me as I did so and had a little smirk on his face. Ah yes, he always liked it when it looked like I was undressing myself. What a silly man but who could blame him. If he’d do the same I couldn’t look away either. “Mon cher, how do you manage to look handsome in everything you do?” He asked teasingly before he took a sip of his coffee. I was silent for a second but had to smile as I grabbed my cup of coffee. “You tell me.” I said softly and took a sip. Hm, this was excellent coffee and just what I needed after such a day. Francis smiled charming at me after I had made my comment. His smile, it was one of the greatest things I’ve seen honestly. It was so sweet and charming and I loved seeing it on him. But of course I didn’t admit that on that day. No we had something more urgent to talk about. Or, well, Francis asked about it, because his curiosity knows no limits. 

 “Say Ludwig, you’re such a strong, and handsome, man. You’ve been through so much in your life that it seems you aren’t afraid of anything. You face all the complications and crises of the world as if it’s the most normal thing to you. You don’t lose focus or panic, like, I regret to admit, me. How do you do that? Do you even fear anything?” I was quiet. I had not expected this at all, it really came out of the blue. It was true, that I didn’t panic, because I am disciplined enough to keep my cool in a crisis. Panic just makes you inefficient and leads to nothing. But of course I worry a lot, way too much actually. Feliciano warned me not to worry too much but it hasn’t worked so far. I was sipping my coffee as I thought about Francis’ question. Honestly I had no idea how I should reply to this. But that probably wouldn’t satisfy Francis. Then I started to think back on what had caused me to be like this. 

 I know that I am very young for a nation, barely 200 years old. But yet I have matured much faster than the rest. Gilbert once told me that it has to do with the fact that I had to grow up fast. Since the day I became a nation in 1871 I had no time for playing around. It was serious from the start. From that day I could immediately feel my body getting stronger but I wasn’t growing yet. At first I wasn’t too concerned about that. But then I heard from my siblings what had happened to my predecessor, Holy Rome. They told me I reminded them of him a lot, not just in my appearance but also in my character, I suppose. I wasn’t sure how I should feel about the rest of my siblings. They were all quite sceptical at first when I became a nation. Obviously most weren’t very fond of the unity I had brought upon them. Many were happy being autonomous kingdoms and states, so they really weren’t waiting for some sort of unity, which would take that away. Luckily not all my siblings were sceptical. But still those first few years were a hard time for me. I tried so hard to resolve fights between them and strengthen my personal relationship with them, but the attitude of some just made it impossible. For example Bavaria wanted to have nothing to do with me at first and Saxony didn’t exactly like me either. I tried not to take it too personal, as Gilbert told me, but I couldn’t exactly shut it out either. 

But back to Holy Rome. I never really knew what happened to him before I started asking my siblings some questions. I knew he reigned for almost a 1000 years and that was truly admirable. But when I heard that he never physically grew out to be an adult, because there was no sense of unity among my other siblings, my perception of the Empire changed a bit. Here I thought he has always been strong but he wasn’t, at least not always. He’s been slowly dying since the 17th century, so I heard. In the 19th the French made a definite end to him. Then he vanished. Gilbert told me, that the unity wasn’t strong enough to keep him alive. Over the years the states and kingdoms all wanted power to themselves and eventually that killed him. I wasn’t an idiot. The states finally had autonomous power to themselves after Holy Rome was gone, of course they didn’t like me coming by and taking it from them with a unified Germany. And at this point the fact that I wasn’t physically growing started to scare me and stress me out greatly. Why, you might think. It takes time for a body to grow. No you don’t understand. I was scared to death that my fate would be the same as Holy Rome’s. 

 My siblings might have treated me well when I first appeared, but wasn’t a country yet. But I could see they didn’t really want me around when I became a nation. They tried to cling onto that individuality and the fact that Gilbert, Prussia, had the lead in this unified Germany didn’t please many of them either. I’ve always looked up to Gilbert and I’ve learnt many things from him. But I also had to learn that my siblings not always liked him and thought very different about him. So when I wasn’t growing and my scars from the unification weren’t healing I lived with the fear that I might vanish like my predecessor did, because the unification didn’t work. It didn’t help that I was still a child. It was a nightmare. The worst part was that I never told Gilbert about it. No I didn’t want to appear weak in front of him. He was so strong and I really wanted to be like him when I grew older, if I grew that was. These things were really stressing me out and I had legit nightmares about it. Sometimes I wasn’t able to sleep at all. The fate of Holy Rome haunted me. 

 Luckily after the first 10 years or so of being a nation, I finally started to grow. Slowly. but I did and I felt so relieved! I knew that the unification would work over time and I started to get less haunted by Holy Rome’s fate and the fear of vanishing. At that point I said to myself, that I would grow out to be stronger than him even, I would make it to adulthood and be the strongest country in Europe. How naïve I was. I was too blinded by what my brother Gilbert had learnt and told me. His militarism had made its way deep into my mind. So of course when 1914 arrived, I was enthusiastic about the war! It was my first war after all. We, the German Empire, were the strongest and we’d win this war swiftly! Nobody was a match for us. We were so sure of ourselves. It of course helped a lot that I was already full grown and that was just another sign of the German Empire’s strength. I remember tat Gilbert was so proud of who I had become to be. And I was so happy he said that. But as you all know the war was a disaster. In 1918 I was weakened greatly, much of my territory was taken away. Well, much of Gilbert’s territory actually. But that wasn’t what concerned me the most. I was physically feeling weak too, also because the political system of the time, the Weimar Republic, was just a big failure too. It was the most instable system I had ever experienced, the hyperinflation didn’t help obviously. I felt ashamed of the state I was in. And here again, the fate of Holy Rome started to haunt me. It was ridiculous, but those first few years after the war I had troubles to get my country back into an organized state and I’ve already explained that I don’t like unorganized things. My nights were sleepless. Unlike now I couldn’t keep my cool and I was worried where this chaos would lead me. To a dictatorship I regrettably must admit. You all know how that ended. But I want to mention here that in 1933 my strength was returning and when 1939 was upon us, I was ready to face another war. I hate to admit, but I wanted revenge for what the world had done to me and my brother, Gilbert. Little did I know it would only end even worse. So much worse. 

My country was in ruins after the war had finally ended. My people were starving, most of my men went missing or were dead. Almost half my territory was taken away. Don’t get me wrong, I probably deserved this punishment after the horrible things my country had done. At least I thought so. Gilbert was even in a worse state than me. As if this wasn’t enough, the allies decided to dissolve Prussia. My brother was going to vanish. My brother, to whom I’ve looked up to all these years, who had raised me and protected me, wasn’t going to be there anymore. I couldn’t believe it and I tried to plead for him but I was in no position to do so. It had been decided. And here again, the fate of my predecessor started to come back to me. Just like him, I was weakened by war. But at least the unity wasn’t falling apart. That wasn’t enough to keep me from worrying. The future at the time was uncertain for me. I had no idea what was going to happen and I didn’t have my fate in my own hands either. The Allies were deciding things for me. I was scared of the future. I had no idea how I was going to cope with everything. Not with the future and not with the past either. And the fact that Holy Rome was haunting me again didn’t help. I felt so weak and helpless; I really thought I wasn’t going to exist anymore either and that I, just like the ones before me, would vanish. Maybe it is just something very German to be in an existential crisis so often. When I look back it certainly is something I have experienced a lot since the day I became a country. I didn’t really have a childhood, not the one other nations had. There was just no time. The historical circumstance required me to mature much faster than others. I had to learn to adapt and cope with lots of problems and crises. These things were important and needed to be taken serious. There was no room to fool around. Nowadays it surprises me that I’ve managed to do so in a time span of 50 years, which is nothing in terms of nation age. 

The last existential crisis I had to face was the building of the wall, which had torn my country in half. As you might imagine my childhood fear came back but I managed to live with it for 40 years. By then I had gotten used to this fear returning every time I was divided and - it didn’t bother me too much from functioning properly anymore. But you could imagine my joy when the wall fell and once again I was unified. However, there is still a division between east and west, from which I’ve gotten one scar left. It’s been slowly healing but who knows when it will fully be gone.

“Ludwig?” I was ripped out of my thoughts by a familiar voice. Oh right, I was still in that café with Francis who asked me something. The question, that triggered all of this. I opened my mouth to say something but closed it again. No I couldn’t possibly tell him all this. I couldn’t bring up Holy Rome in his presence, I know he’d feel guilty about it again. Still, I should be honest with him. Nobody knows about my childhood trauma, maybe he as my best and closest friend should be the first one to know. Enough time had passed now anyway. 

“Were you lost in thought?” Francis said with a smile. I just nodded and took another sip of my coffee. Luckily it wasn’t cold yet. 

 “You ask me how I cope with this current situation of crisis?” I paused. He nodded. “That’s easy actually, I’ve never known much different. As long as I can remember I’ve always lived in a state of crisis.” I looked at my cup on the table, not wanting to see the expression on Francis’ face change. 

“Mon cher, that can’t be true… right?” He asked a little uncertain. I managed to look up and as I thought Francis’ expression had changed from joy to something concerned and sad. “You know I had to go through four different stages of political systems in not even a 100 years.” I said softly and tried to sound as neutral as I could. “That leaves its mark on you.” I added before taking another sip. For a moment nobody said something and I tried to analyse Francis’ behaviour. “But of course I had my moments of joy.” I finally added with a weak smile. It wasn’t a lie, it were just not so many moments. The most enjoyable moments and the time I was most carefree was before I became a nation. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. It seemed to cheer him up a little as I noticed the smile appearing back on his face. 

 “But does that also make you fearless?” He asked after another few moments of silence. Of course he wouldn’t let that go. I put my cup back down on the table. It was almost empty. I drink too fast when I’m lost in thought. 

 “Every nation got its fears.” I just said and hoped to put and end to this topic. “That is true yes. But it seems you have none Ludwig. You’ve faced the great quarrels of the past and you grew out to be even stronger afterwards. I couldn’t possibly imagine that you would be afraid of something at this stage.” He said rather careful. Well, there wasn’t really a way I could get out of this now, was there? The thought of confessing my fears to him made me uncomfortable. In the past I’ve always hid my emotions and fears in order to appear stronger, just like Gilbert had taught me. But since I’m with Francis I’ve learnt to open up more. I know he would never tell anyone, I trust him. 

 “It would seem so indeed.” I agreed on his previous comment. “But it’s not the truth.” I hesitated and noticed Francis’ expression was filled with expectation. “I…. “ I tried to get the words out of my mouth but it was much harder than I thought. My muscles tensed up and my hand was shaking a little. The other wasn’t an idiot and of course noticed. Suddenly I felt his hand take mine. “Don’t be nervous Ludwig. You know you can tell me.” His voice was so soft and soothing, it calmed me down. How did he do this? How could he always be so caring? 

 “Will you promise me not to think different of me?” 

 “Of course not Ludwig.” 

I nodded and took a deep breath. Alright, he had the right to know. Maybe it was best if we as close associates and friends knew each other’s weaknesses as well. Besides, the fear wasn’t that alive anymore these days. I am certain that I will be stronger than Holy Rome. I already am. And so I started to explain it all to him. But while I was talking, I couldn’t stop thinking, when it would be my turn to vanish like my predecessors did.

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

The log/event processing pipeline you can't have

Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a large number of embedded devices that our ISP operated on behalf of residential customers. (I wrote and presented previously about some of the cool wifi diagnostics that were possible with this data set.)

Lately, I've had a surprisingly large number of conversations about logs processing pipelines. I can find probably 10+ already-funded, seemingly successful startups processing logs, and the Big Name Cloud providers all have some kind of logs thingy, but still, people are not satisfied. It's expensive and slow. And if you complain, you mostly get told that you shouldn't be using unstructured logs anyway, you should be using event streams.

That advice is not wrong, but it's incomplete.

Instead of doing a survey of the whole unhappy landscape, let's just ignore what other people suffer with and talk about what does work. You can probably find, somewhere, something similar to each of the components I'm going to talk about, but you probably can't find a single solution that combines it all with good performance and super-low latency for a reasonable price. At least, I haven't found it. I was a little surprised by this, because I didn't think we were doing anything all that innovative. Apparently I was incorrect.

The big picture

Let's get started. Here's a handy diagram of all the parts we're going to talk about:

The ISP where I worked has a bunch of embedded Linux devices (routers, firewalls, wifi access points, and so on) that we wanted to monitor. The number increased rapidly over time, but let's talk about a nice round number, like 100,000 of them. Initially there were zero, then maybe 10 in our development lab, and eventually we hit 100,000, and later there were many more than that. Whatever. Let's work with 100,000. But keep in mind that this architecture works pretty much the same with any number of devices.

(It's a "distributed system" in the sense of scalability, but it's also the simplest thing that really works for any number of devices more than a handful, which makes it different from many "distributed systems" where you could have solved the problem much more simply if you didn't care about scaling. Since our logs are coming from multiple sources, we can't make it non-distributed, but we can try to minimize the number of parts that have to deal with the extra complexity.)

Now, these are devices we were monitoring, not apps or services or containers or whatever. That means two things: we had to deal with lots of weird problems (like compiler/kernel bugs and hardware failures), and most of the software was off-the-shelf OS stuff we couldn't easily control (or didn't want to rewrite).

(Here's the good news: because embedded devices have all the problems from top to bottom, any solution that works for my masses of embedded devices will work for any other log-pipeline problem you might have. If you're lucky, you can leave out some parts.)

That means the debate about "events" vs "logs" was kind of moot. We didn't control all the parts in our system, so telling us to forget logs and use only structured events doesn't help. udhcpd produces messages the way it wants to produce messages, and that's life. Sometimes the kernel panics and prints whatever it wants to print, and that's life. Move on.

Of course, we also had our own apps, which means we could also produce our own structured events when it was relevant to our own apps. Our team had whole never-ending debates about which is better, logs or events, structured or unstructured. In fact, in a move only overfunded megacorporations can afford, we actually implemented both and ran them both for a long time.

Thus, I can now tell you the final true answer, once and for all: you want structured events in your database.

...but you need to be able to produce them from unstructured logs. And once you can do that, exactly how those structured events are produced (either from logs or directly from structured trace output) turns out to be unimportant.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Let's take our flow diagram, one part at a time, from left to right.

Userspace and kernel messages, in a single stream

Some people who have been hacking on Linux for a while may know about /proc/kmsg: that's the file good old (pre-systemd) klogd reads kernel messages from, and pumps them to syslogd, which saves them to a file. Nowadays systemd does roughly the same thing but with more d-bus and more corrupted binary log files. Ahem. Anyway. When you run the dmesg command, it reads the same kernel messages (in a slightly different way).

What you might not know is that you can go the other direction. There's a file called /dev/kmsg (note: /dev and not /proc) which, if you write to it, produces messages into the kernel's buffer. Let's do that! For all our messages!

Wait, what? Am I crazy? Why do that?

Because we want strict sequencing of log messages between programs. And we want that even if your kernel panics.

Imagine you have, say, a TV DVR running on an embedded Linux system, and whenever you go to play a particular recorded video, the kernel panics because your chipset vendor hates you. Hypothetically. (The feeling is, hypothetically, mutual.) Ideally, you would like your logs to contain a note that the user requested the video, the video is about to start playing, we've opened the file, we're about to start streaming the file to the proprietary and very buggy (hypothetical) video decoder... boom. Panic.

What now? Well, if you're writing the log messages to disk, the joke's on you, because I bet you didn't fsync() after each one. (Once upon a time, syslogd actually did fsync() after each one. It was insanely disk-grindy and had very low throughput. Those days are gone.) Moreover, a kernel panic kills the disk driver, so you have no chance to fsync() it after the panic, unless you engage one of the more terrifying hacks like, after a panic, booting into a secondary kernel whose only job is to stream the message buffer into a file, hoping desperately that the disk driver isn't the thing that panicked, that the disk itself hasn't fried, and that even if you do manage to write to some disk blocks, they are the right ones because your filesystem data structure is reasonably intact.

(I suddenly feel a lot of pity for myself after reading that paragraph. I think I am more scars than person at this point.)

ANYWAY

The kernel log buffer is in a fixed-size memory buffer in RAM. It defaults to being kinda small (tens or hundreds of kBytes), but you can make it bigger if you want. I suggest you do so.

By itself, this won't solve your kernel panic problems, because RAM is even more volatile than disk, and you have to reboot after a kernel panic. So the RAM is gone, right?

Well, no. Sort of. Not exactly.

Once upon a time, your PC BIOS would go through all your RAM at boot time and run a memory test. I remember my ancient 386DX PC used to do this with my amazingly robust and life-changing 4MB of RAM. It took quite a while. You could press ESC to skip it if you were a valiant risk-taking rebel like myself.

Now, memory is a lot faster than it used to be, but unfortunately it has gotten bigger more quickly than it has gotten faster, especially if you disable memory caching, which you certainly must do at boot time in order to write the very specific patterns needed to see if there are any bit errors.

So... we don't do the boot-time memory test. That ended years ago. If you reboot your system, the memory mostly will contain the stuff it contained before you rebooted. The OS kernel has to know that and zero out pages as they get used. (Sometimes the kernel gets fancy and pre-zeroes some extra pages when it's not busy, so it can hand out zero pages more quickly on demand. But it always has to zero them.)

So, the pages are still around when the system reboots. What we want to happen is:

The system reboots automatically after a kernel panic. You can do this by giving your kernel a boot parameter like "panic=1", which reboots it after one second. (This is not nearly enough time for an end user to read and contemplate the panic message. That's fine, because a) on a desktop PC, X11 will have crashed in graphics mode so you can't see the panic message anyway, and b) on an embedded system there is usually no display to put the message on. End users don't care about panic messages. Our job is to reboot, ASAP, so they don't try to "help" by power cycling the device, which really does lose your memory.) (Advanced users will make it reboot after zero seconds. I think panic=0 disables the reboot feature rather than doing that, so you might have to patch the kernel. I forget. We did it, whatever it was.)

The kernel always initializes the dmesg buffer in the same spot in RAM.

The kernel notices that a previous dmesg buffer is already in that spot in RAM (because of a valid signature or checksum or whatever) and decides to append to that buffer instead of starting fresh.

In userspace, we pick up log processing where we left off. We can capture the log messages starting before (and therefore including) the panic!

And because we redirected userspace logs to the kernel message buffer, we have also preserved the exact sequence of events that led up to the panic.

If you want all this to happen, I have good news and bad news. The good news is we open sourced all our code; the bad news is it didn't get upstreamed anywhere so there are no batteries included and no documentation and it probably doesn't quite work for your use case. Sorry.

Open source code:

logos tool for sending userspace logs to /dev/klogd. (It's logs... for the OS.. and it's logical... and it brings your logs back from the dead after a reboot... get it? No? Oh well.) This includes two per-app token buckets (burst and long-term) so that an out-of-control app won't overfill the limited amount of dmesg space.

PRINTK_PERSIST patch to make Linux reuse the dmesg buffer across reboots.

Even if you don't do any of the rest of this, everybody should use PRINTK_PERSIST on every computer, virtual or physical. Seriously. It's so good.

(Note: room for improvement: it would be better if we could just redirect app stdout/stderr directly to /dev/kmsg, but that doesn't work as well as we want. First, it doesn't auto-prefix incoming messages with the app name. Second, libc functions like printf() actually write a few bytes at a time, not one message per write() call, so they would end up producing more than one dmesg entry per line. Third, /dev/kmsg doesn't support the token bucket rate control that logos does, which turns out to be essential, because sometimes apps go crazy. So we'd have to further extend the kernel API to make it work. It would be worthwhile, though, because the extra userspace process causes an unavoidable delay between when a userspace program prints something and when it actually gets into the kernel log. That delay is enough time for a kernel to panic, and the userspace message gets lost. Writing directly to /dev/kmsg would take less CPU, leave userspace latency unchanged, and ensure the message is safely written before continuing. Someday!)

(In related news, this makes all of syslogd kinda extraneous. Similarly for whatever systemd does. Why do we make everything so complicated? Just write directly to files or the kernel log buffer. It's cheap and easy.)

Uploading the logs

Next, we need to get the messages out of the kernel log buffer and into our log processing server, wherever that might be.

(Note: if we do the above trick - writing userspace messages to the kernel buffer - then we can't also use klogd to read them back into syslogd. That would create an infinite loop, and would end badly. Ask me how I know.)

So, no klogd -> syslogd -> file. Instead, we have something like syslogd -> kmsg -> uploader or app -> kmsg -> uploader.

What is a log uploader? Well, it's a thing that reads messages from the kernel kmsg buffer as they arrive, and uploads them to a server, perhaps over https. It might be almost as simple as "dmesg | curl", like my original prototype, but we can get a bit fancier:

Figure out which messages we've already uploaded (eg. from the persistent buffer before we rebooted) and don't upload those again.

Log the current wall-clock time before uploading, giving us sync points between monotonic time (/dev/kmsg logs "microseconds since boot" by default, which is very useful, but we also want to be able to correlate that with "real" time so we can match messages between related machines).

Compress the file on the way out.

Somehow authenticate with the log server.

Bonus: if the log server is unavailable because of a network partition, try to keep around the last few messages from before the partition, as well as the recent messages once the partition is restored. If the network partition was caused by the client - not too rare if you, like us, were in the business of making routers and wifi access points - you really would like to see the messages from right before the connectivity loss.

Luckily for you, we also open sourced our code for this. It's in C so it's very small and low-overhead. We never quite got the code for the "bonus" feature working quite right, though; we kinda got interrupted at the last minute.

Open source code:

loguploader C client, including an rsyslog plugin for Debian in case you don't want to use the /dev/kmsg trick.

devcert, a tool (and Debian package) which auto-generates a self signed "device certificate" wherever it's installed. The device certificate is used by a device (or VM, container, whatever) to identify itself to the log server, which can then decide how to classify and store (or reject) its logs.

One thing we unfortunately didn't get around to doing was modifying the logupload client to stream logs to the server. This is possible using HTTP POST and Chunked encoding, but our server at the time was unable to accept streaming POST requests due to (I think now fixed) infrastructure limitations.

(Note: if you write load balancing proxy servers or HTTP server frameworks, make sure they can start processing a POST request as soon as all the headers have arrived, rather than waiting for the entire blob to be complete! Then a log upload server can just stream the bytes straight to the next stage even before the whole request has finished.)

Because we lacked streaming in the client, we had to upload chunks of log periodically, which leads to a tradeoff about what makes a good upload period. We eventually settled on about 60 seconds, which ended up accounting for almost all the end-to-end latency from message generation to our monitoring console.

Most people probably think 60 seconds is not too bad. But some of the awesome people on our team managed to squeeze all the other pipeline phases down to tens of milliseconds in total. So the remaining 60 seconds (technically: anywhere from 0 to 60 seconds after a message was produced) was kinda embarrassing. Streaming live from device to server would be better.

The log receiver

So okay, we're uploading the logs from client to some kind of server. What does the server do?

This part is both the easiest and the most reliability-critical. The job is this: receive an HTTP POST request, write the POST data to a file, and return HTTP 200 OK. Anybody who has any server-side experience at all can write this in their preferred language in about 10 minutes.

We intentionally want to make this phase as absolutely simplistic as possible. This is the phase that accepts logs from the limited-size kmsg buffer on the client and puts them somewhere persistent. It's nice to have real-time alerts, but if I have to choose between somewhat delayed alerts or randomly losing log messages when things get ugly, I'll have to accept the delayed alerts. Don't lose log messages! You'll regret it.

The best way to not lose messages is to minimize the work done by your log receiver. So we did. It receives the uploaded log file chunk and appends it to a file, and that's it. The "file" is actually in a cloud storage system that's more-or-less like S3. When I explained this to someone, they asked why we didn't put it in a Bigtable-like thing or some other database, because isn't a filesystem kinda cheesy? No, it's not cheesy, it's simple. Simple things don't break. Our friends on the "let's use structured events to make metrics" team streamed those events straight into a database, and it broke all the time, because databases have configuration options and you inevitably set those options wrong, and it'll fall over under heavy load, and you won't find out until you're right in the middle of an emergency and you really want to see those logs. Or events.

Of course, the file storage service we used was encrypted-at-rest, heavily audited, and auto-deleted files after N days. When you're a megacorporation, you have whole teams of people dedicated to making sure you don't screw this up. They will find you. Best not to annoy them.

We had to add one extra feature, which was authentication. It's not okay for random people on the Internet to be able to impersonate your devices and spam your logs - at least without putting some work into it. For device authentication, we used the rarely-used HTTP client-side certificates option and the devcert program (linked above) so that the client and server could mutually authenticate each other. The server didn't check the certificates against a certification authority (CA), like web clients usually do; instead, it had a database with a whitelist of exactly which certs we're allowing today. So in case someone stole a device cert and started screwing around, we could remove their cert from the whitelist and not worry about CRL bugs and latencies and whatnot.

Unfortunately, because our log receiver was an internal app relying on internal infrastructure, it wasn't open sourced. But there really wasn't much there, honest. The first one was written in maybe 150 lines of python, and the replacement was rewritten in slightly more lines of Go. No problem.

Retries and floods

Of course, things don't always go smoothly. If you're an ISP, the least easy thing is dealing with cases where a whole neighbourhood gets disconnected, either because of a power loss or because someone cut the fiber Internet feed to the neighbourhood.

Now, disconnections are not such a big deal for logs processing - you don't have any. But reconnection is a really big deal. Now you have tens or hundreds of thousands of your devices coming back online at once, and a) they have accumulated a lot more log messages than they usually do, since they couldn't upload them, and b) they all want to talk to your server at the same time. Uh oh.

Luckily, our system was designed carefully (uh... eventually it was), so it could handle these situations pretty smoothly:

The log uploader uses a backoff timer so that if it's been trying to upload for a while, it uploads less often. (However, the backoff timer was limited to no more than the usual inter-upload interval. I don't know why more people don't do this. It's rather silly for your system to wait longer between uploads in a failure situation than it would in a success situation. This is especially true with logs, where when things come back online, you want a status update now. And clearly your servers have enough capacity to handle uploads at the usual rate, because they usually don't crash. Sorry if I sound defensive here, but I had to have this argument a few times with a few SREs. I understand why limiting the backoff period isn't always the right move. It's the right move here.)

Less obviously, even under normal conditions, the log uploader uses a randomized interval between uploads. This avoids traffic spikes where, after the Internet comes back online, everybody uploads again exactly 60 seconds later, and so on.

The log upload client understands the idea that the server can't accept its request right now. It has to, anyway, because if the Internet goes down, there's no server. So it treats server errors exactly like it treats lack of connectivity. And luckily, log uploading is not really an "interactive" priority task, so it's okay to sacrifice latency when things get bad. Users won't notice. And apparently our network is down, so the admins already noticed.

The /dev/kmsg buffer was configured for the longest reasonable outage we could expect, so that it wouldn't overflow during "typical" downtime. Of course, there's a judgement call here. But the truth is, if you're having system-wide downtime, what the individual devices were doing during that downtime is not usually what you care about. So you only need to handle, say, the 90th percentile of downtime. Safely ignore the black swans for once.

The log receiver aggressively rejects requests that come faster than its ability to write files to disk. Since the clients know how to retry with a delay, this allows us to smooth out bursty traffic without needing to either over-provision the servers or lose log messages.

(Pro tip, learned the hard way: if you're writing a log receiver in Go, don't do the obvious thing and fire off a goroutine for every incoming request. You'll run out of memory. Define a maximum number of threads you're willing to handle at once, and limit your request handling to that. It's okay to set this value low, just to be safe: remember, the uploader clients will come back later.)

Okay! Now our (unstructured) logs from all our 100,000 devices are sitting safely in a big distributed filesystem. We have a little load-balanced, multi-homed cluster of log receivers accepting the uploads, and they're so simple that they should pretty much never die, and even if they do because we did something dumb (treacherous, treacherous goroutines!), the clients will try again.

What might not be obvious is this: our reliability, persistence, and scaling problems are solved. Or rather, as long as we have enough log receiver instances to handle all our devices, and enough disk quota to store all our logs, we will never again lose a log message.

That means the rest of our pipeline can be best-effort, complicated, and frequently exploding. And that's a good thing, because we're going to start using more off-the-shelf stuff, we're going to let random developers reconfigure the filtering rules, and we're not going to bother to configure it with any redundancy.

Grinding the logs

The next step is to take our unstructured logs and try to understand them. In other words, we want to add some structure. Basically we want to look for lines that are "interesting" and parse out the "interesting" data and produce a stream of events, each with a set of labels describing what categories they apply to.

Note that, other than this phase, there is little difference between how you'd design a structured event reporting pipeline and a log pipeline. You still need to collect the events. You still (if you're like me) need to persist your events across kernel panics. You still need to retry uploading them if your network gets partitioned. You still need the receivers to handle overloading, burstiness, and retries. You still would like to stream them (if your infrastructure can handle it) rather than uploading every 60 seconds. You still want to be able to handle a high volume of them. You're just uploading a structured blob instead of an unstructured blob.

Okay. Fine. If you want to upload structured blobs, go for it. It's just an HTTP POST that appends to a file. Nobody's stopping you. Just please try to follow my advice when designing the parts of the pipeline before and after this phase, because otherwise I guarantee you'll be sad eventually.

Anyway, if you're staying with me, now we have to parse our unstructured logs. What's really cool - what makes this a killer design compared to starting with structured events in the first place - is that we can, at any time, change our minds about how to parse the logs, without redeploying all the software that produces them.

This turns out to be amazingly handy. It's so amazingly handy that nobody believes me. Even I didn't believe me until I experienced it; I was sure, in the beginning, that the unstructured logs were only temporary and we'd initially use them to figure out what structured events we wanted to record, and then modify the software to send those, then phase out the logs over time. This never happened. We never settled down. Every week, or at least every month, there was some new problem which the existing "structured" events weren't configured to catch, but which, upon investigating, we realized we could diagnose and measure from the existing log message stream. And so we did!

Now, I have to put this in perspective. Someone probably told you that log messages are too slow, or too big, or too hard to read, or too hard to use, or you should use them while debugging and then delete them. All those people were living in the past and they didn't have a fancy log pipeline. Computers are really, really fast now. Storage is really, really cheap.

So we let it all out. Our devices produced an average of 50 MB of (uncompressed) logs per day, each. For the baseline 100,000 devices that we discussed above, that's about 5TB of logs per day. Ignoring compression, how much does it cost to store, say, 60 days of logs in S3 at 5TB per day? "Who cares," that's how much. You're amortizing it over 100,000 devices. Heck, a lot of those devices were DVRs, each with 2TB of storage. With 100,000 DVRs, that's 200,000 TB of storage. Another 300 is literally a rounding error (like, smaller than if I can't remember if it's really 2TB or 2TiB or what).

Our systems barfed up logs vigorously and continuously, like a non-drunken non-sailor with seasickness. And it was beautiful.

(By the way, now would be a good time to mention some things we didn't log: personally identifiable information or information about people's Internet usage habits. These were diagnostic logs for running the network and detecting hardware/software failures. We didn't track what you did with the network. That was an intentional decision from day 1.)

(Also, this is why I think all those log processing services are so badly overpriced. I wanna store 50 MB per device, for lots of devices. I need to pay S3 rates for that, not a million dollars a gigabyte. If I have to overpay for storage, I'll have to start writing fewer logs. I love my logs. I need my logs. I know you're just storing it in S3 anyway. You probably get a volume discount! Let's be realistic.)

But the grinding, though

Oh right. So the big box labeled "Grinder" in my diagram was, in fact, just one single virtual machine, for a long time. It lasted like that for much longer than we expected.

Whoa, how is that possible, you ask?

Well, at 5TB per day per 100,000 devices, that's an average of 57 MBytes per second. And remember, burstiness has already been absorbed by our carefully written log receivers and clients, so we'll just grind these logs as fast as they arrive or as fast as we can, and if there are fluctuations, they'll average out. Admittedly, some parts of the day are busier than others. Let's say 80 MBytes per second at peak.

80 MBytes per second? My laptop can do that on its spinning disk. I don't even need an SSD! 80 MBytes per second is a toy.

And of course, it's not just one spinning disk. The data itself is stored on some fancy heavily-engineered distributed filesystem that I didn't have to design. Assuming there are no, er, collossal, failures in provisioning (no comment), there's no reason we shouldn't be able to read files at a rate that saturates the network interface available to our machine. Surely that's at least 10 Gbps (~1 GByte/sec) nowadays, which is 12.5 of those. 1.25 million devices, all processed by a single grinder.

Of course you'll probably need to use a few CPU cores. And the more work you do per log entry, the slower it'll get. But these estimates aren't too far off what we could handle.

And yeah, sometimes that VM gets randomly killed by the cluster's Star Trek-esque hive mind for no reason. It doesn't matter, because the input data was already persisted by the log receivers. Just start a new grinder and pick up where you left off. You'll have to be able to handle process restarts no matter what. And that's a lot easier than trying to make a distributed system you didn't need.

As for what the grinder actually does? Anything you want. But it's basically the "map" phase in a mapreduce. It reads the data in one side, does some stuff to it, and writes out postprocessed stuff on the other side. Use your imagination. And if you want to write more kinds of mappers, you can run them, either alongside the original Grinder or downstream from it.

Our Grinder mostly just ran regexes and put out structures (technically protobufs) that were basically sets of key-value pairs.

(For some reason, when I search the Internet for "streaming mapreduce," I don't get programs that do this real-time processing of lots of files as they get written. Instead, I seem to get batch-oriented mapreduce clones that happen to read from stdin, which is a stream. I guess. But... well, now you've wasted some perfectly good words that could have meant something. So okay, too bad, it's a Grinder. Sue me.)

Reducers and Indexers

Once you have a bunch of structured events... well, I'm not going to explain that in a lot of detail, because it's been written about a lot.

You probably want to aggregate them a bit - eg. to count up reboots across multiple devices, rather than storing each event for each device separately - and dump them into a time-series database. Perhaps you want to save and postprocess the results in a monitoring system named after Queen Elizabeth or her pet butterfly. Whatever. Plug in your favourite.

What you probably think you want to do, but it turns out you rarely need, is full-text indexing. People just don't grep the logs across 100,000 devices all that often. I mean, it's kinda nice to have. But it doesn't have to be instantaneous. You can plug in your favourite full text indexer if you like. But most of the time, just an occasional big parallel grep (perhaps using your favourite mapreduce clone or something more modern... or possibly just using grep) of a subset of the logs is sufficient.

(If you don't have too many devices, even a serial grep can be fine. Remember, a decent cloud computer should be able to read through ~1 GByte/sec, no problem. How much are you paying for someone to run some bloaty full-text indexer on all your logs, to save a few milliseconds per grep?)

I mean, run a full text indexer if you want. The files are right there. Don't let me stop you.

On the other hand, being able to retrieve the exact series of logs - let's call it the "narrative" - from a particular time period across a subset of devices turns out to be super useful. A mini-indexer that just remembers which logs from which devices ended up in which files at which offsets is nice to have. Someone else on our team built one of those eventually (once we grew so much that our parallel grep started taking minutes instead of seconds), and it was very nice.

And then you can build your dashboards

Once you've reduced, aggregated, and indexed your events into your favourite output files and databases, you can read those databases to build very fast-running dashboards. They're fast because the data has been preprocessed in mostly-real time.

As I mentioned above, we had our pipeline reading the input files as fast as they could come in, so the receive+grind+reduce+index phase only took a few tens of milliseconds. If your pipeline isn't that fast, ask somebody why. I bet their program is written in java and/or has a lot of sleep() statements or batch cron jobs with intervals measured in minutes.

Again here, I'm not going to recommend a dashboard tool. There are millions of articles and blog posts about that. Pick one, or many.

In conclusion

Please, please, steal these ideas. Make your log and event processing as stable as our small team made our log processing. Don't fight over structured vs unstructured; if you can't agree, just log them both.

Don't put up with weird lags and limits in your infrastructure. We made 50MB/day/device work for a lot of devices, and real-time mapreduced them all on a single VM. If we can do that, then you can make it work for a few hundreds, or a few thousands, of container instances. Don't let anyone tell you you can't. Do the math: of course you can.

Epilogue

Eventually our team's log processing system evolved to become the primary monitoring and alerting infrastructure for our ISP. Rather than alerting on behaviour of individual core routers, it turned out that the end-to-end behaviour observed by devices in the field were a better way to detect virtually any problem. Alert on symptoms, not causes, as the SREs like to say. Who has the symptoms? End users.

We had our devices ping different internal servers periodically and log the round trip times; in aggregate, we had an amazing view of overloading, packet loss, bufferbloat, and poor backbone routing decisions, across the entire fleet, across every port of every switch. We could tell which was better, IPv4 or IPv6. (It's always IPv4. Almost everyone spends more time optimizing their IPv4 routes and peering. Sorry, but it's true.)

We detected some weird configuration problems with the DNS servers in one city by comparing the 90th percentile latency of DNS lookups across all the devices in every city.

We diagnosed a manufacturing defect in a particular batch of devices, just based on their CPU temperature curves and fan speeds.

We worked with our CPU vendor to find and work around a bug in their cache coherency, because we spotted a kernel panic that would happen randomly every 10,000 CPU-hours, but for every 100,000 devices, that's still 10 times per hour of potential clues.

...and it sure was good for detecting power failures.

Anyway. Log more stuff. Collect those logs. Let it flow. Trust me.

Update 2019-04-26: So, uh, I might have lied in the title when I said you can't have this logs pipeline. Based on a lot of positive feedback from people who read this blog post, I ended up starting a company that might be able to help you with your logs problems. We're building pipelines that are very similar to what's described here. If you're interested in being an early user and helping us shape the product direction, email me!

[kanredfoxus]

Hi world!

               Ok, this is maybe the first time I consciously write to be read, even with clumsy words in a foreign language, but I want to be free, I want someone to know me or at least the parts of me that claim desperately to be heard. After the last sentence, those parts seem to be a pretty serious thing, but they are not, their just the little pieces of light that come to my mind and turns my heart on as it were a switch.

               I love fiction, through my entire life I’ve imagined thousands of stories, some included me as a way to make happened what I thought was impossible or just what I wasn’t brave enough to bring to reality. Others, most of them actually, were about fictional characters, some that already existed, in this case experiencing uncountable unknown paths, others were my own invention, as well as their world and choices.

               I’ve never been part of a fandom, I think there were only a couple times in which I had a friend who I could talk about the characters and stories which made my days bright and full of emotion. It sounds like I have never had a life, but in fact, I own one, one I really wanted to run from.  

Life is tough, in different ways, for each person. I would compare it with the four seasons, like a cycle of warm and cold moments, some warmer than others, some colder than others, but in between both warmness and coldness. Sometimes, even in the coldest days, warm can born inside the chest and it seems to be less cold, with lungs full of hope we breath letting this will of living take our whole body. Some days are just extremely cold, fingers can barely move, you just feel that there is nothing you can do against the weather, you still breath, but accepting that everything is alright If those wild winds take your last one.

What I was trying to expose is that everyone has the choice of happiness and hope as well as they can choose sadness and resignation, but its known that this is not the only thing that plays in this decision, the environment in most of the cases the weather’s responsible. I’ve been in both places, summer and winter, mostly winter and autumn I would dare to say. Ironically I’ve been experiencing this inner winter surrounded by the hottest temperatures available in your imagination.

You’ll be wondering about where I want to come with all of this, right now I’m doing the same. I started talking about how much I love stories, then I went to explaining the way a perceive life and after that I let you know that I live in a place that has nothing to envy to a sauna. Sorry for these unstructured thoughts, I’ve just finished a movie and remembered that what light my heart up have always been fiction. Whether there were happy endings or not, each story has been like a blanket in this known but not really beloved season. They make me feel like I own my life, that I can do something, that I feel, it humanizes this metallic body who is losing day by day the point of living. Basically, for me the unreal has given sense to the real.

I can’t tell if someone will read this post, I quite a ghost in media, but I if for some miracle reason someone does, I have two requirements. The first one, please forgive my grammatical mistakes, well, all the mistakes I could made because my language knowledge didn’t allow me to be aware. Second, I wish this text hasn’t bore you and if fiction is an important part of your life, let me know how.

Smell ya later!

[hmsng]

learn❜

yesterday i went to see ballet with my ma. i had no idea what it’s going to be about. or why i was there for that matter. but anyway. to my own surprise, the first part was fairly modern yet captivating. of course, older ladies didn’t seem to appreciate it all too much at first. but that’s on them. 

and it got me thinking about how life is a continuous cycle of learning. and eventually un-learning. in a sense. i can’t talk for all people but i vividly remember that as a child i found way more joy in life. and it’s not only cause i didn’t need to count taxes and support government. though that sure contributes to the joys of adulthood. but because the life was so raw and unstructured. it was-- well. alive. 

what i am trying to say is that as children we get to express ourselves without as many limitations as we face now. sure, our drawings might have looked like crap. excuse my language. composition or color scheme didn’t cross most of our minds. our dance moves were as uncoordinated as possible. and our poems made little no sense. but we were creating without the forced idea of creating. we were pouring ourselves out in whatever it was. for the most part, we didn’t even consider the result. we didn’t aim to be creative. or unique. or productive. we just went along with the feeling. which i really miss, needless to say. 

and now. looking at the bigger picture. excellence, in most cases, can only be reached by teaching ourselves how to forget everything that we have learnt. cliche but take picasso’s story. and it’s not only about art. business is not that different either. you can train almost anyone who is willing. but you can’t teach them how to have these innate traits that will make their connection to clients, partners or projects, more meaningful. 

once again, i feel like im barely scratching the surface with my limited verbal abilities. however, i find it ironically beautiful how we, human beings, set up these complicated structures and standards. we judge people based on how well they manage to take in all of that knowledge. their degrees. their accomplishments. but at the end -- we admire the ones who have the courage to let go of all that. we are inspired by those who get back in touch with feeling and life rather than structure, system and skills. 

on a side note, these days i find kids quite fascinating. they have not yet learnt to see world a certain way. they are still free to think however they like. in fact, it’s far more refreshing talking to them than communicating with adults as most of them are willingly drying their brains. and yes, i am envious of kids because they still have the luxury to live. only for the sake of living. and i am also sad. because i look at them and i wonder when this world will force them to forget all of that. 

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Juicing with Gary: Episode 1 with Flatiron Health

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Juicing with Gary: Episode 1 with Flatiron Health

(intro music) – [Gary] Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, Senior Vice President of Oncology, Flatiron Welcome to Juicing with Gary

Very excited about this morning, Amy Before we sit down and have a conversation, we're going to make a juice – [Amy] Okay – I have made a special juice for you – For me? – So I have called this one, Rising Blues

Would you like to know why? – Yes, please tell me more – Have you ever heard of a great group in the 60s called The Animals? – Oh, yeah, of course – Well, they had a great song ♪ There is a house in New Orleans ♪ ♪ They call the rising sun ♪ ♪ Mm, mm, mm, mm ♪ So I need your help to put this all together So, I'm gonna need some cutting skills You are a physician

– I'm a physician – Do you know how to use knives? – Sort of – Okay, what I'd like you to do is take these beautiful red apples and I'd like you to just cut them into quarters for me if you don't mind Now the cabbage they say, that if a male was to have one cup of cabbage a day provides 90% of the vitamin C necessary for their body And for a woman, 75%

– We always need a little bit more – Excellent, excellent, okay Turn on the juicer – Alright – Alright and take off the lid

So, let's get it in there and you can just push it right down Now look, look at this beautiful purple Oh yeah, you're getting juicy, you're getting juicy, okay – Alright, got it, okay yeah – This is gonna make a mess

Ehh, that's beautiful! Now okay, you can stop the juicer – Here we go – I'm gonna take mine and, Amy, sincerely, it's an honor to have you here And, cheers – [Amy] This'll be fun, cheers

There we go – Cheers, thanks for juicing Mmm – [Amy] The Rising Blues – Yeah, the Rising Blues, oh yeah

(drumbeat) – Well, Amy, thank you again for being here Thanks for juicing with me Now, I'm excited to learn more about you, to talk about Flatiron, to talk about cancer and oncology You're really trying to change cancer in so many ways and I'm so impressed by that But to get there, I want to go back to little Amy

How does a little girl decide that she wants to be a physician? – Well, I really thought in the beginning that I wanted to be a scientist and that became evident to me when I was a kid and I loved math and chemistry I ultimately got very interested in robotics and programming And, it turned out my chemistry teacher worked at NASA in a summer program and she invited me to come and show my stuff and see whether or not I could get into this summer program That ultimately led to a placement in the artificial intelligence lab and the responsibility for programming one of NASA's first robots – And you've been at Duke a long time

You've stayed at Duke quite a while You were a professor in the College of Medicine and then you got a PhD, I understand – I was tapped to become the Chief Resident at Duke which was usually a pretty big deal So I was very honored by this and stopped my oncology training to become Chief Resident Halfway through my Chief year, my husband got a phenomenal job offer to basically live his dream in Australia

I thought, okay, okay, now this is his chance to do his thing and so I'm gonna go ahead and leave medicine and go to Australia And, when we stepped back, what became obvious was that perhaps I could go to Australia with my husband but still have some way pursuing medicine and my training I completed my oncology training, still as an oncology fellow from Duke, but now doing the rest of my work in Australia – Phenomenal And then you come back to the States

– Yes – So, let's talk about Flatiron You've now found yourself in a senior role at Flatiron Can you tell me about the role, tell me about Flatiron? – Flatiron Health is a health technology company focused on using data and technology to accelerate cancer research and improve cancer care So, I mentioned at Flatiron, one of the things that we focus on is cleaning up the data that's in what we call unstructured documents

These are basically pdfs or digital paper So, the radiology report, the pathology report, the physician's medical case notes It's the probably the thing about Flatiron that's some of our most special secret sauce One of the interesting things that I think just basically gives a good example of how important it is to get every single data point right is whether or not a person is alive or deceased And, it turns out, that that's a really hard thing to know

We don't have a single reliable national dataset that we can rapidly pull from and use And so, we aggregate data across multiple sources Some of it we buy So, for example a grave site and obituary data Some of it we pull out of the electronic health record

And, some of it, we use that team of abstractors to pull out of places like the condolence card because the condolence card might be the best way to know that this patient has passed away And so, we pull all those kinds of data points together to now create one dataset around that variable Just that one single variable And you can imagine that, at Flatiron, we're doing that for every single variable you need for cancer research The part that I think really moves the needle most substantively is because we create these very clean datasets, we're then able to use those datasets for research and discovery

So, as a cancer patient, that leads to development of new medicines that then get back to you in the clinic – But our industry is not known for speed and you're talking warp speed This is a quantum leap for what we're used to So, what are gonna be the challenges because I don't know that the rest of us can keep up with that – Historically, it has taken somewhere between 14 and 17 years to go from a medicine that we think might work to widespread use in the population within whom it does work

That's how long it takes to develop a medicine At Flatiron, what we're seeing is we can speed up those cycles to 18 or 24 months and maybe even faster And, what we're seeing is that that's not just a notion for the future, but we're starting to see that happen today That we can speed those cycles up So, when I talk about speed, I'm talking about meaningful speed for patients

– And, Amy, I see and feel your passion, your knowledge, your experience I can understand that from a researcher's perspective and from a clinician's perspective But you've experienced it from a personal perspective Can you talk to me a little bit about your father? – Oh, my dad So, he was diagnosed in December of 2015 with a very rare metastatic cancer that had started within the bile tract

In trying to figure how to help think through his care, several pieces were important So, one is that he wanted receive this care at home Like, he didn't want to fly to Houston or New York or Raleigh, he wanted to stay in Orlando because he wanted to be a part of his community which meant that he needed to be a part of a doctoring network where the information could come to him and that was really important to him And, one of the things that I'm proud of within Flatiron is the way that we build our information networks, the way we build our software allows the best information to get to the doctor no matter what city you're in And, therefore, the patient, no matter what city you're in

So, that was kind of one thing that my dad demanded and I got to see in action The second thing was that since he had this rare cancer, every meeting that I had with a pharma client, every conference I went to I looked for the latest and greatest in cholangiocarcinoma care So I was able to look for the new drugs that were coming But the sad story, and I talked to my dad about this a lot, is that, a lot of those times, those drugs were still stuck in the lab or early phase trials and he didn't meet the requirements for those trials And so, now that we're starting to see ways that the discovery of new drugs and the figuring out of what works and what doesn't work is actually speeding up care

Although it didn't help my dad, his story helped inform how we think about how important that is He always told me, "let my story be a part of the future" And, I remember that from my time in the clinic My patients saying to me, "don't let my story end here" In our collaborative project with the FDA, what we're seeing is that, for patients with lung cancer, the majority of people are over 65 that are getting the immune checkpoint inhibitors, these new drugs that we're all talking about

Yet, almost none of those patients were included in the clinical trials Not only are we seeing that those are the patients getting the drugs, we're able to compare their survival compared to the younger patients who were treated in the clinical trials And, guess what? Age doesn't matter And, in fact, these drugs work equally well regardless of your age So that's an example of a proofpoint where, in working with the FDA, we have shown for patients sitting in front of me at clinic who's older in life, this drug is equally efficacious and is going to work equally well as a patient who's got the same biomarker as the younger crowd

And so, we're able to start using this to figure out how do we tailor care in the clinic – So this is true actionable information and we're finally making information available and actionable at the root level – At the root level The whole purpose of Flatiron is to make sure that every single cancer patient's story is a part of the future in the way that they want it to be – I'm gonna shift a little bit for a minute and I want to ask you a question

I mean, you are truly a leader in every single way I'm thinking about those people that want to aspire into leadership What advice can you give them? 'Cause you've become that leader What can you do to encourage them along? – Well so I think I have three parts to my advice The first is opportunity comes to the prepared

Be prepared and then go for it when interesting things come in front of you You don't know if you're gonna suddenly move to Australia and completely change your career over to informatics or you're gonna keep on the same path that you were on in leukemia-lymphoma You don't know what that's gonna look like, but jump for it The second is that mentoring counts Choose your mentors wisely

Have mentors that, when you come into the mentoring relationship, you understand what you're hoping to get out of that relationship, but you're also very explicit about what you're gonna give to the relationship And you treat that relationship with incredible respect and care and you show up and you're a part of that mentoring relationship Because, honestly, the mentors are gonna be who create your network and take you forward in life The last piece of advice I have for people, believe it or not, is to be a weeble You might remember that weebles wobble, but they don't fall down, right? Like, you're gonna get knocked against the head, it's not gonna be pretty, it's not gonna go the way you want, right? But, don't be afraid to just stand back up and keep on trying

Because the best way to get to the place where you want to be is to keep moving forward and not let things move you backwards – And those are three great examples The perseverance, as you said, and the weebles, you're right We all get knocked down, but how many times do we get up? We have to keep getting up and keep going for it Just like me and juicing

This is new to all of us, right? But, we're having a lot of fun doing it So, I'm going for it, right, and we're juicing – I love it – This has been a tremendous experience Thank you for spending a little time, having some fun juicing, and for helping us tell these stories

Cheers – Thank you (outro music)