#Originally intended to be the cover piece but is now the first pic to this IS dedicated to my Paracosm Sora as KH2 Sora AT LAST

[solannecontinuum]

Even if it makes me blind I just wanna see the light Breathe in, leave it all behind I just wanna see the light.

SAN HOLO - LIGHT.

SON OF GOD ILLUSTRATION SERIES. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

[jerryb2]

I mean….you all knew this was coming ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ : the Star Wars Art of one Mr. Drew Struzan. 

And look, the man has done so much and has such a diverse portfolio that Star Wars is only one very small part of his career. If you want to explore some of his other works, then might I suggest that you check out his website. 

As for me here, we’ll be sticking strictly to his SW art. Now, with that out of the way, here we go…

*cracks knuckles*

I have to admit that before I really started to dig into this, I didn’t realize just how many Bantam Era (and beyond) Star Wars books this man has illustrated. Nearly 50 titles, ranging from novels to comics, short stories & even an RPG supplement. 🤯 

And so, after much consideration, I decided to just pull all the titles that feature his art off my bookshelf and take a few pics for you guys:

First off, I just want to point out that I don’t have every book he’s ever illustrated. Some of them are just harder than hard to find, are hilariously expensive, or I just don’t have an edition that features his art prominently - you’ll see what I mean. Right off the bat though, you can see that he was really hitting his stride in the mid-90′s, with all but a handful of these coming out between ‘94 & ‘99. One of the highlights from this time for me, is The Callista Trilogy.

I just want to stress that The Callista Trilogy is a highlight for me only because of its gorgeous cover art. 🤣 Other than that, this book series needs to go lay down. 

Anyway, the designs are all really striking and even after all these years, absolutely iconic. And you can really see Struzan’s distinct visual style at play here; not a painting in the same vein as something from Dave Doorman, and not a simple trace. Rather, something that is stylized in a very particular, very subtle way, almost to the point where it appears photo-realistic at first glance. Beautiful.

Next up is this trio of trilogies (good use of words, me), collected in these Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) hardcovers: 

Once again, these covers are just striking, particularly The Black Fleet Crisis. This is actually what I was referring to when I said that I don’t always have the best editions for a Drew Struzan appreciation post. 😅 

Because these are hardcover collections of paperback books, we actually miss out on a good bit of the art. For these SFBC special editions, the publisher just took all three and basically photoshopped the best bits of each one together. The one that suffers the most here is obviously The Corellian Trilogy, where they didn’t even try to blend everything together, and instead just separated everything into columns. I don’t personally mind it (and I do love having the hardcover editions of these books) but if you want to see the covers as they were originally intended, just pickup those mass market paperbacks. 🙂

There’s a lot more to get through, so I’ll just hit the highlights here; even though he didn’t illustrate The Thrawn Trilogy (that was Tom Jung, who I personally think did an okay-ish job at best), he did an absolutely amazing job with the follow-up, The Hand of Thrawn Duology in ‘98 & ‘99:

I’ve always loved these covers. And narratively speaking, they really do serve as one last hurrah on the Bantam Era. Oh, and also please note, Mara Jade on the cover of Vision of the Future, just as Zahn originally described her. ❤❤❤

If you step back and look at Struzan’s work as a whole, it’s all incredibly unified. I bring this up here because even though some of these are books relatively ‘meh’ worthy, Struzan maintained a level of quality that belied the mediocrity contained within. And also to say that he was definitely busy, particularly in 1994:

That’s right - all of these released in ‘94, within a few months of one another. These covers man… *chef’s kiss*

And look I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself: The Crystal Star was a hilarious joke until we all realized they were serious about it. 😳

Alright, that’s a little on the harsh side; it’s not nearly as bad as most make it out to be, and Waru as a source for unlimited power (citation needed 👀😉) isn’t any more ridiculous than the 50 other post-Palpy, hair-brained Imperial schemes that everybody else cooked up, so I guess it fits. And besides, I really wanna be nice to Vonda McIntyre here, but this book was just so so boring. 😴

*clears throat* Moving on, here we have a couple Barnes & Noble hardcover collections of The Jedi Prince Series:

The same thing applies here; cover art photoshopped from across 6 different YA novels to get these. They don’t look bad, far from it. But rather this series has some things that people would rather forget about, namely a supposed son of Palpatine (spoiler: he wasn’t) named Triclops who had - wait for it - 3 eyes. 

Like Tien. From DBZ. Yep. 🤦‍♂️

Moving further down the list, we have yet another pair of iconic cover designs, being I, Jedi (the only Star Wars novel written in the first person, and an appropriate riff on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot - yes ladies & gentlemen, that is as clever as Star Wars gets) and The New Rebellion.

Classics, no doubt….but for reals, did anybody else ever wonder why the X-Wing on the cover of I, Jedi is missing an S-Foil? Or how that one slipped through??? 👀

Ah, at last we arrive at what is arguably Struzan’s most famous work; the covers for Shadows of the Empire & The Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition.

It’s hard to overstate just how important Shadows of the Empire really was for Star Wars as a brand. In an era where SW books were already extremely popular, the Shadows of the Empire Multimedia Project basically served as a breakout hit and reignited interest in SW media across the board. This was in no small part due to the striking imagery captured on its cover - are you seeing a pattern here?

This success actually renewed Lucas’ interest in a theatrical re-release of the OT in 1997….which of course, feature more beautiful art from Drew Struzan:

These are my OG Special Edition VHS tapes from back in the day. I watched these so damn much as a kid. In fact, they’re basically the whole reason that I’m here, annoying the shit out of everybody today. 😁

After the Bantam Era concluded & the Star Wars publishing license went to Del Rey, Struzan did progressively fewer pieces for SW media. Here we see his contribution for the latter half of the Last of the Jedi YA series, and his kick-ass cover art for the Darth Maul comic: 

And when I say that Struzan did progressively fewer pieces for Star Wars, I am of course omitting his turn as the poster artist for the freaking Prequel Trilogy: 

Say what you will about the films, but these poster designs are nothing short of genius. 

Look guys, it would be pretty easy for me to downplay Struzan’s Star Wars portfolio as just one small part of his incredible career. But my dudes, this is literally just the tip of the iceberg. The man has been a professional illustrator for over 50 years, and his art has delighted and inspired generations. From Star Wars to Indian Jones, and from Back to the Future to Blade Runner - Drew Struzan has played an integral part in shaping popular culture. 

Here’s to you, sir. 🍻

[patolozka]

On Crowley and Mary Magdalene META

 So I was thinking about the whole ‘Crowley could be Mary Magdalene’ concept and I decided to put a few things together. I don’t want to persuade anyone of anything I was just thinking.

This META was written for @a-zira-fell and @azirafuck because they were feeding me with this stuff the last week.

 So here is it:

1. Before the GO show aired in May we knew that Crowley wore female clothes at Golgotha from the stills that were shown to us in April. (It was THIS meta by @intersexaziraphale that I read about it). But after the show I think we promptly forget everything about it because there were so many things to think about.

https://intersexaziraphale.tumblr.com/post/184424971273/so-i-realized-that-not-everyone-knows-what-i-do

2. In the show in the crucifixion scene there is this exchange between our duo:

C:           Come to smirk at the poor bugger, have you?

A:           Smirk? Me?

C:           Well, your lot put him on there.

A:           I'm not consulted on policy decisions, Crawley.

C:           Oh, I've changed it.

A:           Changed what?

C:           My name. "Crawl-y" just wasn't really doing it for me. It's a bit too... squirming-at-your-feet-ish.

A:           Well, you were a snake. So, what is it now? Mephistopheles? Asmodeus?

C:           Crowley.

A:           Hmm.

A:           Did you, uh... ever meet him?

C:           Yes. Seemed a very bright young man. I showed him all the kingdoms of the world.

A:           Why?

C:           He's a carpenter from Galilee. His travel opportunities are limited.

C:           That has got to hurt. What was it he said that got everyone so upset?

A:           "Be kind to each other."

C:           Oh, yeah. That'll do it.

 In the script there is no bigger change in the exchange and about Crowley there is not much more than that he is wearing black. But we saw how he looked like in the show.

 3. Then there is this Neil Gaiman’s tweet

Source: https://vintagefloof.tumblr.com/post/186199778332/confirmation-from-mr-gaiman-on-twitter-today-that

 4. And also this meta by @olliaaron about Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s clothing during crucifixion:

https://olliaaron.tumblr.com/post/186239033859/so-i-read-something-about-this-and-heres-an

 5. What do we know about Mary Magdalene

·         She may have been Jesus’s wife, but we don’t know for sure. {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         She is for the first time noticed as one of the women who “ministered to Christ of their substance.” (Luke 8:3) {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         She travelled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. (According to the four canonical gospels) {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         Mary as one of the women who travelled with Jesus and helped support his ministry "out of their resources", indicating that she was probably relatively wealthy. (Luke 8:2–3) {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         There is a statement seven demons had been driven out of her (Luke 8:2–3) and that prompted her to became Jesus‘ follower. {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         She was one of women who found the sepulchre of Jesus empty (with Salome and Mary the mother of James) and saw the “vision of angels”. (Matthew 28:5). {Eastons Bible Dictionary} The angel told them that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then the risen Jesus himself appeared to the women as they were leaving the tomb and told them to tell the other disciples that he would meet them in Galilee. (Matthew 28:1–10){ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         She hastens to tell Peter and John (John 20:1, 2), and again immediately returns to the sepulchre. There she lingers thoughtfully, weeping at the door of the tomb. {Eastons Bible Dictionary}

·         The risen Jesus appears to her but she at first mistook him for the gardener. After she heard him say her name, she recognized him and cried out "Rabbouni!" (which is Aramaic for "teacher"). She tried to touch him, but he told her, "Don't touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father”. The Gospel of John therefore portrays Mary Magdalene as the first apostle, the apostle sent to the apostles. (John 20:1–10) {CZ Wiki}

·         According to Luke 24:1–12 a group of unnamed women went to the tomb and found the stone already rolled away, as in Mark. They went inside and saw two young men dressed in white who told them that Jesus had risen from the dead. Then they went and told the eleven remaining apostles, who dismissed their story as nonsense. {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         After the resurrection she returned to Jerusalem. {Eastons Bible Dictionary}

·         In apocryphal texts, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a visionary and leader of the early movement whom Jesus loved more than he loved the other disciples. {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         The earliest dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is probably the Dialogue of the Savior, a badly damaged Gnostic text discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945. In saying 53, the Dialogue even attributes to Mary three aphorisms that are attributed to Jesus in the New Testament: "The wickedness of each day [is sufficient]. Workers deserve their food. Disciples resemble their teachers." The narrator commends Mary stating "she spoke this utterance as a woman who understood everything." {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         In Gospel of Thomas in saying 114: Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary go forth from among us, for women are not worthy of the life”. Jesus said: “Behold, I shall lead her, that I may make her male, in order that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.“ {ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         In Gospel of Philip: And the companion of the saviour [was] Mary Magdalene. [Christ] loved Mary more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples [were offended by it and expressed disapproval]. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."{ENG Wiki Mary Magdalene}

·         The Gospel of Mary: The Gospel of Mary was probably written over a century after the historical Mary Magdalene's death. The gospel does not claim to have been written by her and its author is, in fact, anonymous. Unlike in the Gospel of Thomas, where women can only be saved by becoming men, in the Gospel of Mary, they can be saved just as they are.

 Then there is this:

Source: https://azirafuck.tumblr.com/post/186236114966/so-i-was-already-on-board-with-the-whole-crowley

 6. How we can see Mary Magdalene in art

As you can see, majority of the paintings pictures Mary Magdalene with red hair and more so some of them even in dark colours.

Source of the pic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene

 7. Dan Brown

I’m a big fan of Dan Brown and of course I know his ‘Da Vinci Code’ is only a fiction but still…

According to Dan Brown, there was a woman in Jesus‘ life. According to him, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. And according to his book Leonardo da Vinci painted Mary Magdalene on ‘The Last Supper’, not John. And you know what hair colour does she have there? Red.

Source: https://cdn.getyourguide.com/img/tour_img-312981-148.jpg

 Some pieces from book Da Vinci Code about Mary Magdalene

"The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record... Moreover, Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor... If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible’s gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood." (The Da Vinci Code, 245; cf. 244)

“Behold the greatest cover-up in human history... Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father. My dear, Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel. She was the chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ” (Code, 249)

“Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.” (Code, 248)

“The Church, in order to defend itself against the Magdalene’s power, perpetuated her image as a whore and buried evidence of Christ’s marriage to her, thereby defusing any potential claims that Christ had a surviving bloodline and was a mortal prophet.” (Code, 254)

Source: https://www.westmont.edu/~fisk/articles/bruce_fisk_on_the_da_vinci_code.html (it’s a big article about why it all can’t be true, but it has its moments)

 And I add one of my favorites:

"Who is she?" Sophie asked.

"That, my dear," Teabing replied, "is Mary Magdalene."

Sophie turned. "The prostitute?"

Teabing drew a short breath, as if the word had injured him personally. "Magdalene was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church. The Church needed to defame Mary Magdalene in order to cover up her dangerous secret—her role as the Holy Grail." (Da Vinci Code, 205)

 8. Gender in Good Omens

We know that angels don’t bother themselves with gender. But to me it looks quite like Crowley was manifesting himself the first four thousands more as a female than as a male.

In the garden of Eden, he is a demon, of course, but still you can see a slit in his clothes. I don’t think Aziraphale has some too. It could be only that his clothes are ragged but still…

In the Noah’s ark he looks more woman then man on the second glance. His long hair, his dress with belt…

At Golgotha it’s most prominent. There you can see he presents himself as a woman.

And after that, only 8 years later, the big change. The short hair, the glasses, all male.

And only other occasion in which we can see Crowley as a female is with Warlock as his nanny. But that is a different story.

 9. So let me summarize it.

v  Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ follower and travelled with him.

v  Crowley knew Jesus, he showed him the world.

v  Mary Magdalene was a witness to Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

v  Crowley manifested himself as a woman during Jesus’ life and he was a witness to Jesus’ crucifixion.

v  Mary Magdalene was probably wealthy.

v  Crowley has no problem with money.

v  Mary Magdalene is often pictured as a woman with long, curly, red hair.

v  Crowley had for the first four thousand years long, curly, red hair.

v  After the crucifixion Mary Magdalene left and went to Jerusalem.

v  After the crucifixion Crowley left Palestine and went to Rome.

v  Out of Mary Magdalene had been driven seven demons.

v  Crowley is a demon.

v  Mary Magdalene saw an angel (or two angels) that told her Jesus had risen from the dead.

v  Crowley has no problem with seeing angels.

v  Jesus said to Mary Magdalene after resurrection: "Don't touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my father”.

v  Crowley is demon, that could do it. ¨

v  In apocryphal texts, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a visionary and leader of the early movement.

v  Crowley invented many things and was a leader of a sort on Earth.

v  Three Jesus’ aphorisms are attributed Mary Magdalene: "The wickedness of each day [is sufficient]. Workers deserve their food. Disciples resemble their teachers." She is also described as: "she spoke this utterance as a woman who understood everything."

v  Well, I don’t think like you but I think it’s a pretty good description of Crowley if you ask his co-workers.

v  Jesus said he may make Mary Magdalene male to become equal men.

v  Crowley changed after his death to male and also changed his name.

v  The Gospel of Mary was probably written over a century after the historical Mary Magdalene's death. The gospel does not claim to have been written by her and its author is anonymous.

v  Mary Magdalene’s gospel was found in Egypt covered in feathers.

 10. So I think Crowley could be Mary Magdalene. Crowley and Jesus could be together. Crowley could be the one painted all the time on all the Mary Magdalene’s pictures.

 The idea about Crowley being Mary Magdalene is not mine. It’s all tumblr.

[sonicfanj]

I’m a big fan of AUs and the freedom that fans have to explore Sonic or any fandom in ways that diverge from the source material, but with AUs and more recent Sonic stuff being what a lot of new fans brought in from the movie will see, the possibility of providing false information is far to high if we are not careful. That SEGA also spreads misinformation only makes matter worse and it is the heart of this particular post.

One of the biggest misconceptions of Sonic that SEGA perpetrates both through retcons and from Sonic Generations onward is that Sonic before the Sonic Adventure (Adventure henceforth )rebranding back in 1998/1999 is that “Classic Sonic “ as he is dubbed these days is possessed of an age of around eleven and is even shorter than Sonic’s 1 meter/3′3″ height. The height can actually be sourced to a profile of Metal Sonic’s that lists him at around seventy something centimeters as well as Generations making him shorter to account for the difference in proportions. But the truth is, Sonic was always listed at 1 meter tall, both before and after the Adventure redesign.

[Character height chart for reference - http://info.sonicretro.org/images/9/99/Classic_character_heights.svg]

Age on the other hand is where things get really strange. Again, a retcon for Generations makes sense to an extent, especially when you consider that the characters had their ages shuffled around as it was with the Adventure redesign. Amy aged up from 8 to 12 and Knuckles aged up from 15 to 16. Tails remained the same but Sonic actually received a subtle change. Bios that listed Sonic’s age before Adventure typically listed him at 15 to 16 years old. That would actually make him the same age or older than his Adventure onward counterpart. But it gets even weirder. According to the Sonic Technical Files (currently hosted by Sonnic Fansite Sonic Retro here - http://info.sonicretro.org/Original_Story) Sonic was actually originally thought about to be even older, around 18 years old. Suddenly, Sonic from his typically dubbed Classic Era is actually definitively older than his modern counterpart, yet is portrayed as a younger bubbly child from Sonic Generations onward. And I assure you, this is a retcon.

If you grew up in the 90s like I did and were introduced to Sonic when he debuted back in 1991, then you will remember the western advertising over embracing his teenager with an attitude description. And it wasn’t just in game ads, it was in all Sonic media available in the west. The US cartoons, the Archie and Fleetway comics, and so on, portrayed Sonic as an uppity teenager with an attitude problem (some cases being far worse than others). That teenager of a high school age mentality was the backbone for why the Archie Sonic comics were littered with teenager romance drama, which would look rather distasteful if you think about it post retcons now. But they were not at fault for portraying Sonic based on being high school age. The material and information they were provided told them as such and so they based their interpretations off of that available information.

But it wasn’t just a western mistake either. If not for input from key members of SEGA of America (henceforth SoA) Sonic would be rather different and would even have had a human girlfriend by the name of Madona who was anything but a child.

[Pic here - https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/sonic/images/d/dc/Madonna.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090313035151]

Madonna was not the only time it happened either as one of the last pieces of pre-Adventure release Classic Sonic material is the Sonic OVA or Movie produced by Japanese animation studio Studio Peirrot where a catgirl (read human girl with cat ears and a tail) was the main love interest and whom even Eggman/Robotnik wanted to marry (it’s weird, I don’t argue that). But more importantly, two of Sonic’s primary creators, Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima, were listed as Production Directors for the two episode Original Video Animation (OVA) and were rumored to be involved quite a bit with the film. You can typically find it on youtube though I recomend the subbed version, bad video quality and all, to get a better representation of the Japanese perspective. It’s really eye opening and was very nostalgic in when I first watched it post Sonic Generations release.

The thing is though, the OVA released in 1996, years before the Adventure rebranding, and is strongly believed to be how Naka and Oshima see the character. This is actually reflected in the Sonic Adventure redesign as Yuji Naka on record (a shame I can’t find the link) has stated that Sonic was redesigned to bring him closer to the original character idea and to erase the growing cute identity that he was developing due to marketing. He even goes on to say that Sonic was never intended to be cute and that being a cute mascot character would inevitably pit him against Hello Kitty which would not have ended well. Yet, SEGA retconned the Naka/Oshima Sonic into being a bubbly hyperactive kid who was much shorter and generally hyper cute compared to his more modern interpretation of the character. This retcon is only made even more complicated when SEGA decided they didn’t like their “New” Classic Sonic being treated as the same character as their Legacy Sonic and even retconned that come Sonic Forces to say that he was actually from a different dimension. Years after Sonic Forces release that decision still riles up many more dedicated fans as it breaks the series continuity. Arguably, it has too. After all, if Naka/Oshima Sonic is older than Legacy/Modern Sonic and has the same height yet New Classic Sonic is shorter and strangely mute then something had to be changed or it just starts to fall apart for a cohesive narrative. Of course Amy’s four year gain already threw things into question but on it’s own was fairly harmless considering her role in the franchise as the main female lead and primary love interest. But New Classic Sonic’s muteness is what this post will be carrying on from.

One of the biggest misconceptions of Sonic before the Adventure redesign is that he did not speak. The primary reason for this misconception I usually attributed to him not speaking in the classics. this is actually a false statement as Sonic speaks in Sonic the Hedgehog CD, SegaSonic the Hedgehog, and is quite the chatterbox in a Japanese only popcorn machine. Admittedly, these are all difficult to experience items, especially pre-Adventure, but by the time of Soinc Generations’ release a good deal of these could be researched and Sonic CD was readily available to the public again thanks in no small part to Christian Whitehead of Evening Star Studios. but even outside of the games SOnic was shown to talk quite a bit before the Adventure redesign. Again both the western comics and cartoons and even numerous Japanese comics all showed him speaking quite a bit before the Adventure redesign. Of a more canonical nature however, the Japanese instruction manuals for most of the games from the original onward will show Sonic talking.

So, where did this misconception gain enough steam to become a retcon? It’s hard to say, but there are a lot factors that could lead to it. Major fan backlash was threatened when Generations was first revealed if they got Sonic’s voice wrong and hat it’d be better if he didn’t talk at all. SEGA is known for overreacting to negative feedback at odd and seemingly random times and this appears to me to be yet another case of it. But his muteness only got weirder when people started latching on to him being mute as a matter of shyness. I don’t know where that one originated from, but Sonic’s shyness is actually a trait of his, but it is specifically tied to how he feels about his self-proclaimed Amy Rose. When asked about, Yuji Naka once said that Sonic does likely like Amy deep down, but is too shy to act on those feelings. Naoto Oshima expands further on that stating that Sonic has a boyish immaturity in regards to his feelings and thus won’t act on them but should he mature in that regard he would end up with Amy. In other words, boyish immaturity and shyness are part of Sonic’s character, but they only reflect on certain facets of his character. His shyness and immaturity of his feelings for Amy though were instead stretched out to cover most of his character resulting in New Classic Sonic being a mute, when Naka/Oshima, Legacy/Modern, BOOM! (just to throw in another iteration where he is shy about his feelings for Amy), and even Movie Sonic are all rather talkative.

So that there is three misconceptions about pre-Adventure Sonic that are perpetuated officially by New Classic Sonic effectively being placed over Naka/Oshima Sonic. Again, I don’t aim to bash fanfics and AUs as I love them and the way they explore the characters in new ways, but for the sake of new fans not being overly confused, it should be noted if your Classic Sonic is New or Generations based, or the Naka/Oshima, pre-Adventure version. There are hugely massive differences between them with things like height, age, and talkativeness being hugely noticeable. Otherwise, keep writing, drawing and having fun, and may all of the movie’s fans who find their way into the fanbase enjoy themselves

[gunterfan1992]

Bubblegum and Marceline in the “Come Along with Me” Intro?

As many of you know, I’m now a firm believer that Marceline and Princess Bubblegum are alive in the Ooo 1000+ world. (You can read my elaborate explanations here.)

However, over the last few days, I’ve become interested in the idea that not only are they alive, but that they are actually in the finale’s intro. Let’s take a look...

If you freeze the intro at about 0:02, you’ll see a humanoid wearing a parka staring through what looks like a collapsible telescope. There are several things interesting about this shot.

First, the critter that the person is riding on is the duck-rock that appeared for the first (and last) time in season one’s “Evicted!” You know who else first appeared in that episode? Marceline. It is extremely odd that this minor, minor character makes a call-back in the finale’s intro of all things, especially considering that with only a few exceptions (e.g. Gibbon, the two-headed duck), none of the other creatures showcased here were featured in the original series timeline. What is more, when the duck-rock first appears in “Evicted!” it’s in during montage that plays over the “House Hunting Song” (the tune that notably features the chorus, “Oh Marceline!/Why are you so mean?”). Now, what’s important to note is that when the duck-rock is on screen, its during a very particular portion of the song that goes as such:

You know you should have stayed And fought that sexy vampire lady. But Jake was feeling terrified, He was super scared of her vampire bite. Which is understandable 'Cuz vampires are really powerful. They're unreasonable And burnt out on dealing with mortals. [emphasis added]

Why does this matter? Because it’s the portion of the song that transitions from the first half of the track (focusing entirely on Finn and Jake trying to find a new house, with nary a mention of Marceline), to the second half, which focuses almost entirely on Marceline. This fact, given the above, suggests that the duck-rock’s inclusion was intended to cause the viewer to think of the last time that they saw the critter, and in doing so think of Marceline.

Second, if you freeze the intro at about 0:025 (seriously, you have to be quick), you’ll see that the telescope the person is using is engraved with two letters: an “M” on top of an “A”. I’ve seen a few people online argue that this is an inverted version of Adam Muto’s signature (e.g.), but that seems like a rather nonsensical thing to put in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot (why would he have inverted the letters?), especially when you consider a) Steve Wolfhard, not Muto, boarded the intro, b) just how many lore-based easter eggs are crammed into this intro, and c) Adam doesn’t like it when people put him in the show. No, I think the letters must have a deeper meaning (UPDATE, see footnote 1). Now, who do we happen to know who could conceivably be around in this world and whose initials are “M” and “A”? That’s right, the immortal Marceline Abadeer (in fact, I can’t seem to find any other character with those initials) (2):

(Marceline marking her property with initials is not out of character—in fact, it is exactly how Marceline marked her territory in “Evicted!”, although “Evicted!” featured only the M. This is almost certainly due to the episode airing before Marceline’s last name was even considered. Still, the fact that we’re getting what seems to be a second allusion to “Evicted!” is telling.)

Notice also that the person is covered from head to toe by a baggy coat, snow pants, and mittens. As Reddit user thadwdavis notes, “This person is fully covered which, if I remember correctly, has only been true of two characters: Gunter when Orgalorg was leaking out, and Marceline in the sun.” The character, indeed, is out in the daylight, and the sun in frozen regions can be brutal to humans (and thus vampires). Also, the person is wearing bright red boots, which—not to play too much into sexist stereotypes—definitely look feminine, given that they have pronounced heals. You know who else loves to wear vibrant, red lady boots with distinct heals in many of her episodes including her debut episode? That’s right—Marceline (3). Finally, I think it’s important to note that this individual resembles a human; the Ooo 1000+ world seems to be populated with decidedly un-humanoid individuals (e.g. the pups, Shermy, Beth); in fact, if you watch the intro, you won’t see anyone else who even vaguely resembles the duck-rock rider. The same is true for “Graybles 1000+” and “Lemonhope II”. Of course, this is not the most convincing piece of evidence, but I’d argue it’s just one more clue that this is Marceline.

Now let’s talk about Bubblegum. Her appearance is intertwined with the presence of the elementals in the intro. If you pause the intro at 0:00, you can see Patience St. Pim’s ice sphere that she froze herself in at the conclusion of Elements, meaning she is (likely) still in ice-stasis:

A few seconds later, just before we enter into Shermy and Beth’s cave, you can clearly see what the new flame elemental firing a tank round at the new slime elemental, the latter of whom is holed up in the ground:

You know which elemental seems to be missing? Candy.

Or wait? Is it? Check out this frame, around the 0:01 mark (immediately after St-Pim’s sphere):

Pink hands! As Uncivilized Elk points out in his dissection of the intro, “Pink in Adventure Time should of course make one think of gum.” While he postulates that the individual might be Aunt Lolly, I would wager that this is Princess Bubblegum. On Tumblr, Wolfhard explicitly stated that all the elementals are in the intro. Given the obviousness of Fire, Slime, and Ice, the fact that the candy elemental is for the most part hidden suggests that it is Bubblegum. How so? Well, if that wasn’t Bubblegum in the prison, Wolfhard would have likely redesigned the elemental to keep us in the loop, like he did with the others.

It’s also thematically fitting that in the future, when the Ice Thing has gone banana-nuts (presumably after all his loved ones, e.g. Turtle Princess, have died or moved on), that Bubblegum might have been kidnapped by the flying menace, just like Ice King used to do. Everything stays, amirite?

If that’s the case, then is that mysterious figure on the duck-rock actually Marceline trudging through the Ice Thingdom, searching for Bonnie? That would explain why she is in the Ice Thingdom with the telescope; she is literally surveying the land, trying to find her boo. If this is true, it’s kind of a bummer that this is the last we see of them. But as Reddit user JohnEnderle puts it, “[It’s evidence that] they're probably still in love and still having adventures a thousand years later.”

That makes me smile!

Footnotes

(1) This is further supported by the fact that the only text snippets appearing in the intro are these two letters, the letter “G” emblazoned on Gibbon’s Pup Kingdom, the strange tombstone/statue marker reading Fin[n?] ... Jer[maine?]”, and PB’s “World’s Greatest Uncle” mug. These all have pretty clear meanings: "M.A.” must mean something, too. UPDATE: Steve Wolfhard posted a pic of “Pawn Swan”, who has the same symbol as a tattoo! While this might be evidence against the idea that these are Marceline’s initials (awww), it still doesn’t really explain what the heck they mean. Maybe Pawn Swan really digs the Scream Queens?

(2) Some people have noted that a very similar symbol appears at about 1:10 during the “Come Along with Me” montage (video here). This is true, although the symbols are noticeably different: that rune, seen on the upper-right, is upside down, its bar is bent (not straight), and it has a dot underneath it. It is also a bit wider (comparison). Are they connected? While it is possible, I should note that intro has a lot of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments that directly hint at the show’s lore. Given this, as well as the fact that the two symbols are not identical, I’m more inclined to believe that we should take what we find in this intro at face value. My two cents.

(3) The figure’s outfit is also somewhat similar to what Marceline wore in “Everything Stays”, during the scene in which Simon leaves her. It is not identical, though. Also, I swear I remember her wearing mittens at some point in the past, but I can’t seem to verify this mental image.

[cutiecrates]

Cutie Reviews: Kawaii Box June 19

I don’t have much to say for this one, but I decided not to include the prices and such. I know I probably should but I don’t actually know if it serves any purpose...

Word of the month: Ma-meido - Mermaid

Chocobar Z & Marukawa Kirby Mix’n‘Match Gum

This is unusual, I’m beginning with the snack items first. For this month we got 2 of them, the Kirby Gum and a Special Surprise Treat, something they also did last month, but it was a bonus item rather than a snack. So this is an item I’m semi-familiar with, pretty sure I had one before.

This is pretty much a chocolate umaibo; but it’s not of the Umaibo brand and they have their own chocolate flavor. This reminds me a lot of it, but it has a bitter aftertaste and it’s much thicker. It also brings to mind a chocolate breakfast cereal, it’s pretty yummy. But I wasn’t able to locate it on Blippo.com.

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Our next item is a delicious Kirby packaged gum set. Basically you have so many flavors of gum that you can chew separately or mix to get a new flavor, as you can see by the pic.  

I had this years ago back when it first came out and it’s essentially the same, but I noticed right away that before it only had 4 flavors (Yogurt, Mystery, Apple, and Orange), and you could make a few of the same combinations, one of which was actually cola, which was removed because it’s is a flavor now, along with white grape/muscat and soda.

Of course, being a curious person I sat down and tested everything; and once I did I still had a good amount left over. Here was what I thought: 

Cola - a little tangy, tastes like cola candy.

White Grape/Muscat - normal muscat/WG candy, but my tongue felt like I had a little salt on it from this one. No idea why. 

Soda - typical ramune or soda flavor, very yummy, hard to mess up.

Orange - tastes like orange tic-tacs. I loved these when I was little.

Apple - a sweet apple, delicious~

COMBINATIONS

Soda + Apple = Champagne - It was unique but I’m not sure if I liked it or not. It confused me.

Soda + Cola =  Gingerale - Same as above, and I’m not sure it reminded me of gingerale either.

Soda + WG/Muscat = Melon Soda - A strong melon taste with a hint of grape! Very tasty.

WG/Muscat + Apple = Wine - Weird -_- but it tasted better over time.

Apple + Orange = A fruit mix? - I mostly taste orange and couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.

Soda + Apple + Orange = Vitamin Drink - It was very tasty with a strong citrus flavor.

WG/Muscat + Apple + Orange = Pear - Like the gingerale one, I found it hard to tell if I liked it and if it tasted like what it was meant to be. This one felt a little more successful to me, but I was still unsure.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

None of the flavors tasted badly, I really like them. The flavor lasts for a bit, maybe like 10-15 minutes; and weirdly enough, every piece I spit out had a really pretty pearlescent color and they all came in a different color of the rainbow! I’d recommend these; especially if you like Kirby!

Round Neko Plushie Charm

(Sorry about the items in the background~)

Our next item is an adorable plushie charm based on a round kitty. They’re the purrrfect size to roll around in your hands and squish on when you don’t have a squishy available or just want something different. They also come in a variety of cute kitty colors and patterns and they are completely stuffed with filling.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

As cute as the kitty is I have to admit, the face detracts a fraction of cuteness away from it in my opinion, but I still think it’s very sweet looking. It’s decent looking in terms of sew job and if you like firm plush then I think this would be a good one to get; but I prefer squishier, softer plushies and if you look at the picture, doesn’t the whole thing feel a little unbalanced? It might be easier to see in person, but it kind of bothers me a little.

Dreamland Puffy Stickers & Mermaid Nail Stickers

I love panda bears, so I thought this pastel themed sticker sheet we got was very cute! Besides the panda we also have cute flowers and clovers, birds, and bubbles. Oh, and if you’re wondering they’re sadly not scented.

Rating: ♥ ♥ 

This bothered me, because I ADORED these. But they get a 1 or 2 out of 10 on the puffy scale, they have a very slight puff to them in appearance, but when you press them they’re very hard. I find them ultra-kawaii but if you’re looking for actual puffy stickers, then you’re not going to be satisfied with these.

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Besides adorable panda clovers, we also get a cute mermaid themed nail sticker set by Snow Fox. Specifically these are their 3D Design Nail Stickers, due to have a 3D element in the form of cute little diamond accents. These are perfect for summer or if you just like mermaids; I especially love how they look like Ariel.

So.. because I didn’t use these yet, I decided not to rate them. Also, I’m pretty sure they’re just like any other sticker; there isn’t much you can say about them and you could probably use them on other things if you wanted to.

Aiko Little Mermaid Face Towel

As of late we have been getting adorable exclusive Kawaii Box/Blippo.com goods featuring the adorable Aiko-chan~ They always fit the theme and they’re made in really good quality too, I love them and it’s such a nice touch to personalize the box more x3 But you can also buy them off of Blippo.com. 

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

It’s on the smaller side, but it’s perfect for a hand and face towel/rag/wash cloth. The details are really nice, it’s spot-on with the theme, and it feels very soft, and it’s small size makes it very handy for putting into numerous things you might want to bring with you.

Little Twin Stars Key Cover

This item is a bit random (in my opinion) but it’s still cute! This is a Sanrio original item you just pop on over your keys to add a touch of adorableness every time you pop them out, and it includes a ball chain so if you don’t plan to use it for the intended purpose, you can just turn it into a cute charm or keychain. 

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I like Little Twin Stars, but Lala has always been my favorite out of the two. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get her, but I still think they’re both really sweet and adorable. The chain is good and the key cover is made from rubber with really nice, but simple and bright detail. It even has molded on writing on the back for the branding that looks amazingly crisp and clean.

Our Little Mermaid Notebook & Puffy Narwhal Sticky Notes

To go with our theme, we have these 2 cute writing stationery items by Tree in Art; a gorgeous mermaid notebook, which I’m sure you can tell is a lot bigger than what we usually get in these boxes; I was surprised! And it came in a few variations, all with a lovely watercolor/pastel theme.

The paper is basic lined, nothing fancy, but it has Discover Your Senses written on the bottom of each sheet. I like how it seems to go with the image.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

So I know you can judge paper quality by doing various things or using various pens and coloring tools on them- but I don’t really know paper at all, so I can’t really do that. But I mean, I didn’t notice anything wrong with the paper the one time I’ve used it thus far, I wish the pages were a little more decorative though to match the outside.

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I don’t really know anything of the Tree in Art brand, but so far I’ve been liking what we get. It’s very soft and sweet looking, like this puckered lip narwhal sticky note set o3o

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

I really like the detail they put into the backing of these, you can see it in the pic right? It’s a very cute touch to go with the very cute sticky note image. I could see these floating around quite quickly in the office or school among friends~

Also, these tear very easy. Not easy enough that they won’t stick to each other, but easy enough there’s no issues tearing them off.

Kawaii Jellyfish Pen

Our last item, and one of my most favorites in this months box is an adorable Jellyfish themed pen :D besides having a cute, simple design on the tube using various pastels and pink tones, there’s an adorable jellyfish charm hanging from the top, the main attraction! The jellyfish feels like a light plastic and has fabric strands as the tentacles; it can also be taken off if you wish to turn it into a keychain, or a charm for a necklace or something.

The pen is a fine tip, and these came in a few color variations if I recall.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ 

I love love love it~ it’s so adorable and fun looking, and I love fine tip pens x3 you need to give them a few seconds to dry when using them, but they right so smoothly. It’s also really fun to use the pen and watch the jellyfish wiggle around on the tip.

♥ Cutie Ranking ♥

Content - 5 out of 5: I really liked this box, all the items were well-made and seemed thought out, and like usual we got a mix of things. I didn’t see any real quality issues or problems.

Theme - 4 out of 5: Only half of the box fit the mermaid/sea theme; but to be fair, the other half seemed to fulfill the fantasy side. Lately Kawaii Box has been confusing me with its themes and items, but I felt like this one was really obvious :3 perfect for summer too!

Total Rank: 9 out of 10 Cuties. Besides one or two little issues with a single item (and they were minuscule and only my opinion), I felt like this box really picked up the pace after the past two or three boxes. I liked them but with their confusing themes and lack of items fitting them, this one nailed it! Everything is really kawaii and fun, I’d recommend this box!

♥ Cutie Scale ♥

1. Mermaid Notebook - I love the gentle colors and overall sweetness of the cover. I do wish the pages were a little more matching with it, but I still really like it.

2. Jellyfish Pen - it’s so cute the way it sways around~

3. Narwhal Sticky Notes - Very cute, I love how decorative the clear backing is to go with them.

4. Kirby Gum - I love Kirby, and I really did like this gum so it was really fun to experience how it changed over time.

5. Aiko Hand Towel - Perfect for the summer season x3 Aiko-chan looks so cute. 

6. Dreamland Puffy Stickers - Very sweet and cute, they give me a dreamy vibe that I love to look at them; but I was disappointed by the lack of puffiness.

7. Mermaid Nail Stickers - They’re so pretty, I’m a little afraid to use them~

8. Chocobar Z - It was delicious~

9. Neko Plushie - I was surprised by this because I love cats. But I don’t know, I just wasn’t feeling it.

10. Little Twin Stars Key Cover - it’s cute but I don’t know when I’ll use it and I feel like out of everything its the least practical for me.

[nataliesewell]

monster prom pop quiz results

I was bored, so I decided to try and record all the questions and answers in Monster Prom’s Stupidest Pop Quiz Ever(tm). It’s really likely I haven’t found them all, so I’ll come back and add to this from time to time.

The pop quiz consists of three questions; the first two go towards determining your highest stats at the beginning of the game, while the third chooses your possible prom date (this isn’t set in stone; you can still try to pursue a different character in the actual game). The order of the questions is randomized.

Other links: Vera Walkthrough

You can find the questions and their results under the cut!

stat questions

What is your spirit emoji?

a. Caucasian guy with a turban because fuck stereotypes. +CREATIVITY

b. Octopus emoji. Best animal on Earth. I know 5 mixed drinks, 3 drug cocktails, and 17 sex positions that involve one or several octupi. +FUN

c. Snowman, because that motherfucker is in the middle of a blizzard and he’s fuckin’ smiling. He doesn’t give a fuck about blizzards. And he has a kickass hat. +BOLD

It’s your chance to fix global warming. Go ahead!

a. Global warming isn’t real. I invented it, and now science is claiming authorship because science is a lame copycat with no original ideas. +CREATIVITY

b. Nah, the world is doomed. But I’ll start investing in ships and start a profitable business for the “soon to be covered by water” world. +WEALTH

c. It’s time to be a real hero: I’ll lead a mission to the sun in order to... invite the sun to the party of its life! We’ll have so many hilarious misadventures that the sun will eventually become... cooler. ;) +FUN

Be a visionary: what will the next big social media craze be?

a. Bull$hit: it’s Facebook, but each time someone shares news that isn’t supported by real facts, they’re taxed, and the money goes to the people exposed to that bullshit. +WEALTH

b. Greek Agoras: like literal Greek agoras re-instated in our cities. Places where philosophy and arts are discussed by the greater minds. That’s the social media I want to log into! +SMARTS

c. Rbert: from now on, a socially awkward guy named Robert will do everything he’s commanded to do through the app by its users! +CHARM

You wish you were raised by...

a. A mysterious old man who saved me from the streets in order to raise me as his disciple in the ancient ways of rad DJing! +FUN

b. A pack of wild wolves... who also happens to be tech moguls who own some of the most profitable companies of Silicon Valley. They would be kick-ass role models AND wild wolves! Sick! +WEALTH

c. A really progressive marriage between a kick-ass venomous snake and... actual fire. I love fire and I see no issue with being raised by it. +BOLD

You build a 100ft statue commemorating an event so that in 1000 years archaeologists can learn something about the people of our time. What does the statue represent?

a. That glorious instant when your friend stopped you from texting embarrassing stuff to your ex while hella drunk. +FUN

b. That mind-blowing twist in your favourite TV show that clearly changed the life of everyone forever, unlike all that boring stuff they show on the news. +CREATIVITY

c. Your least favourite political figure... being devoured by rabid rhinoceri... which are also covered in badass tattoos. +BOLD

Which is the coolest mythological creature?

a. The invisible hand of the free market. +WEALTH

b. A sphinx... who’s super turnt up and ready to party! And she raps all her riddles (she still kills you if you don’t answer them correctly... but she raps the riddles)! +FUN

c. This weird creature I drew when I was six and which is clearly super derivative from other mythological creatures... but it’s super cool and it’s my OC and my spirit animal, okay? +CREATIVITY

You’re elected president for a day. What’s the first law you pass?

a. You can deduct taxes by writing sonnets instead. Amount of taxes deducted are calculated based on the beauty of the sonnets. +CREATIVITY

b. Trivia fact: presidents don’t pass laws... so is this a trick question or are you just being an idiot? +SMARTS

c. One dollar bills will now include a picture of me and the inscription “Beware: Too Much Awesomeness.” My presidency might last a day, but my fame will last forever! +CHARM

A radioactive possum just bit you... what superpowers did you get?

a. The superpower of always choosing the right combination of emojis to get the desired reaction from all people: seducing my loved ones, burning my enemies, settling an argument, and even conveying complex emotional thoughts. +CHARM

b. Uh, probably rabies? I’d go to a hospital immediately. +SMARTS

c. The incredible power of writing fanfiction so compelling that the actual creators of the TV shows decide to go with my ideas and crazy ships. +CREATIVITY

School is outdated and lame. We need a new school subject asap!

a. Critical thought. I mean... damn, this country could really use a subject like that in schools. +SMARTS

b. Turning people into your puppets through emotional warfare and deception 101. +CHARM

c. How to correctly punch a crocodile without terrible consequences. +BOLD

If you had to have sex with animal... which animal would it be?

(You don’t get six answers; the three answers you get are randomized.)

a. A great white shark. I have to fuck an animal, let’s at least make it a story worth telling! +CHARM

b. A swan. They’re classy. Plus it reminds me of that myth of Leda and the Swan, so at least by bestiality standards it has a certain chic appeal. +CREATIVITY

c. A human being, because I’m the kind of douchebag who loves to find loopholes in stupid questions like this one. +SMARTS

d. A purebred horse. At least I can keep his semen and sell it. It’s worth a lot! Who said there was no silver lining to bestiality? +WEALTH

e. A dolphin. They’re the only other animal that fucks just for pleasure, so at least we can both do our best to have a good time, right? +FUN

f. No on can make me fuck an animal. If I fucked an animal, it’d be of my own free will. As a matter of fact, I already have fucked an animal, so the joke’s on you, pal. +BOLD

The coolest reality show would be...

a. Twelve experts on the various arts of seduction live in a house where they must face a common challenge: seducing a potato into marriage... somehow. +CHARM

b. Eight rich people fight in weekly challenges to see who’s the best at giving money to you. +WEALTH

c. People in various positions of power must face all sorts of questions relevant to their field, and if they fail, they lose their jobs... and society wins. +SMARTS

You get the chance to produce a movie. It’s based on...

a. The most influential Russian novelists of the XIX century... have gone nuts! They don’t remember anything about last night and now they can’t find the manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov; and Dostoyevsky has to deliver it TODAY! +FUN

b. Two cool guys walking away from rad explosions. And they don’t look at the explosions. THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE EXPLOSIONS! They reflect on life and love... AND IT IS SUPER DOPE AND KICK-ASS BECAUSE THEY DO SO WALKING AWAY FROM NEVER-ENDING EXPLOSIONS! +BOLD

c. Something about superheroes, but with a love triangle between a beauty yet somehow relatable girl (maybe she’s always stating she’s a mess?) and two of the super hot superheroes, which are also like vampires or pirates or both. Instant hit! +WEALTH

Democracy is just broken. What would be the best way of choosing the leaders of modern society?

a. Whoever can play the most heartbreaking violin solo wins. +CREATIVITY

b. You put all the candidates in an empty room... with a wild grizzly bear. Whoever kills the bear should be our president. If everyone dies, then it’s obvious: the bear should be our president. +BOLD

c. We create a reality show called “America’s Next Top President” where the candidates compete in all kinds of physical and mental challenges. Voter turnout would increase and we would turn a profit on it! +FUN

If you could put a curse on your worst enemy, what would it do?

a. I’d curse them to fall in love with a wonderful person and be happily married before they realize that all this time... their partner was a wild panther in disguise! Then the panther viciously devours my enemy. Classic! +BOLD

b. The curse of always meeting obnoxious people at parties who are super into new fad diets that feel the need to explain them in detail. +CHARM

c. You can’t rely on the effectiveness of a curse. I prefer to take care of my enemies the old-fashioned way: by exposing them to unsafe doses of radiation over the course of several years. +SMARTS

What would be the coolest prize you could find in your box of cereal?

a. A tiny piece of sharp metal, so every scoop will be full of thrill and danger! +BOLD

b. The phone number of the sexy tiger on the front of the box. He’s so passionate about breakfast and health that he’s surely also a grrreat lover. +CHARM

c. A sample of a more nutritious breakfast option, so people are encouraged to stop eating that colorful crap. +SMARTS

What inanimate object do you think would make the best girlfriend or boyfriend, provided you went criminally insane?

a. A human-size pillow depicting a character created by myself. As a matter of fact, I have all the needed paperwork and I’m only waiting for the conservative narrow-minded laws of our country to finally step forward into waifu and husbando territory, as was clearly intended by God. +CREATIVITY

b. A dildo, duh. +FUN

c. An ATM. Sugar baby life, here I come! +WEALTH

Which god do you pray to each night before sleeping?

a. Praying is kind of lame. I have a group text set up with some deities: Dionysus, Bastet, Loki... coolest cats in town. +CHARM

b. Praying is for fools. I took some compromising pics of a god molesting a tree, and now I blackmail him for whatever I want. A lot more effective. +SMARTS

c. Oh, I pray to all kinds of gods. I have this business where people pay me to deliver their prayers every night. I’ve even started to look for a Chinese factory to outsource the prayers. +WEALTH

prom date questions

What is the sexiest type of knowledge a lover can have?

a. How to set stuff on fire. ❤️DAMIEN

b. All the principles to build a financial empire. ❤️VERA

c. Lyrics to all Disney songs. ❤️MIRANDA

d. Obscure 80s movie trivia. ❤️LIAM

e. Sports things. ❤️SCOTT

f. How to make a killer cocktail out of anything. ❤️POLLY

Your partner just gave you a cool gift for your anniversary but you totally forgot! Quick, come up with an idea for a great gift!

a. The head of their fiercest enemy. ❤️VERA

b. A silly toy that makes silly noises. ❤️SCOTT

c. The abstract concept of gratefulness. ❤️LIAM

d. A pony. Always a pony. ❤️MIRANDA

e. Anything on fire. Or a weapon. No, no: a weapon on fire. ❤️DAMIEN

f. Anything capable of leading them to an overdose of some sorts. ❤️POLLY

What would be a deal-breaker for a potential lover?

a. The person lacks taste. ❤️LIAM

b. The person is mediocre. ❤️VERA

c. The person is a coward. ❤️DAMIEN

d. The person is boring. ❤️POLLY

e. The person hates the outdoors. ❤️SCOTT 

f. The person lacks manners. ❤️MIRANDA

What would be a killer accessory?

a. Sunglasses... at night. ❤️POLLY

b. A fabulous purse made from the skin of your worst enemy. ❤️VERA

c. Coolness itself. ❤️LIAM

d. Fancy brass knuckles. ❤️DAMIEN

e. A necklace with your own name... in case you forget! ❤️SCOTT

f. Shiny armor. ❤️MIRANDA

The world will end tomorrow... What will you do today?

a. Nobody ends the world but me! I’ll end the world today. ❤️DAMIEN

b. It’s okay! We invented the apocalypse to take care of the overpopulation of commoners. ❤️MIRANDA

c. I’ll finish my novel... whoever comes after the end should know my legacy! ❤️LIAM

d. 100 push-ups... no, no 200 push-ups! ❤️SCOTT

e. They always tell you the world is ending... I’ll profit on other people’s hysteria. ❤️VERA

f. I always party as if there were no tomorrow... so who cares? ❤️POLLY

Which criteria would you use to name your children?

a. Meh... no name? It’s just too much work! ❤️POLLY

b. I will research for a name that is pun-proof and joke-proof. No one will pick on them. ❤️VERA

c. A non-heteronormative name to give them freedom to define themselves on their own terms. ❤️LIAM

d. Just a swear word. ❤️DAMIEN

e. My name + “II” (the Second). ❤️MIRANDA

f. Something simple and friendly, like Bobby or Mary. ❤️SCOTT

If you were an ice cream... which flavour would you be?

a. Double creme de la Gruyere and meringues. ❤️LIAM

b. Spicy chocolate. No... chocolate on FIRE! ❤️DAMIEN

c. Success. ❤️VERA

d. Tequila and coke. ;) ❤️POLLY

e. Rainbows and gummy bears. ❤️MIRANDA

f. Meat! ❤️SCOTT

What would be your dream first date?

a. An art exhibition experimental enough to give you a seizure. ❤️LIAM

b. A sweaty and manly wrestling match. ❤️SCOTT

c. A professional meeting where you charm your date with some astonishing business advice! ❤️VERA

d. A wild party in international waters. ❤️POLLY

e. A lovely walk in the forest... after rescuing your date from a dragon! ❤️MIRANDA

f. Crimes. ❤️DAMIEN

You find a genie in a bottle. You can ask for whatever you want. What do you ask for?

a. A rainbow that you can eat! ❤️MIRANDA

b. I don’t ask for anything. I drink the genie from the bottle. I can grant my own wishes! ❤️DAMIEN

c. Before asking for anything, you try to negotiate up to the three standard wishes. ❤️VERA

d. Infinite confetti! ❤️POLLY

e. ...His friendship! ❤️SCOTT

f. Him to not be so cliched. Genies and wishes... so mainstream! ❤️LIAM

What would be the most appealing in a love partner?

a. A big... horn. ❤️DAMIEN

b. Sharp wits. ❤️LIAM

c. Kawaii eyes. ❤️MIRANDA

d. A very tsundere personality. ❤️VERA

e. Soft fur. ❤️SCOTT

f. A taste for party. ❤️POLLY

[theonyxpath]

Here’s our Onyx Path gang, minus yours truly as I took the pic, at Mader’s, the enduring German cuisine restaurant in Milwaukee, where we had our Onyx Path Summit dinner after seven hours of Summitting. So if our heroes look a bit beat, well, seven hours of meeting after most of us flew in that morning, and then some imported beer, will start to tell.

Beat, but happy.

Matthew sits in Mader’s Big Giant Chair for the first time!

Even though, right now, we’re all a bit beat and cranky and some of us are sick since we went from the Summit to the con to flying home. Our Monday Meeting was a bit disjointed accordingly, so I’m just going to give ya’ll a run through of the highlights of the Summit and the MidWinter Convention that followed.

Wednesday was the Onyx Path Summit, and we started off with a person by person review of last year. Where did they see Onyx Path? Sometimes that was TTRPG industry-oriented, sometimes creatively, sometimes where we are in the eyes of our fan community.

My piece of that was to let our folks know, as best as we can tell before all the numbers are crunched for taxes in April, where the company stands financially. In general, I can share here that we are doing well, much better than last year, and we remain in the black every year since we started.

Which means we made a “profit” although our accountants might phrase it differently. Each year we decide where to use that profit, and we’re really careful because we’re not talking millions here. The year we had the booth backdrop and signs made, those were the expenses our profits covered.

This year, we’re going to put it towards staff raises, crew bonuses, and raising our freelancer pay scales again.

Eddy Webb prepares to surprise his TC: Aberrant demo players with a startling plot development.

Then, we were run through a team analysis exercise that Matthew pulled from his past experience as a corporate trainer. Like many of these sorts of things, we wound up divided into some amount of four types of employees.

Matthew’s title for this was “Know Your Role!”, obligatory wrestling reference, and it was a useful way to take a look at how we relate to each other and a nice break from the nitty-gritty of running Onyx.

But back we went anyway, and the rest of our day was determining where we are aiming in 2019. Internally, we intend to continue the refining of our processes, with the extra challenge of adapting to getting more books into retail stores via our friends at Studio2 and IPR.

Many of our projects that have been running very late took gigantic leaps forward in 2018, while we delivered early, sometimes months early, on our newer Kickstarter projects. We want and expect that to continue through 2019.

Elements of the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant playtest.

Externally, we are aiming towards Visibility. Again, something we already started with the Onyx Pathcast, getting projects into stores and other venues, and supporting the many Actual Play and other online media projects highlighting our stuff in 2018.

For 2019, we are looking for more ways to spread the word about our game lines, our worlds, and certainly we have started with a bang with Matthew’s addition of The Gentleman Gamer to our social media. Expect to see much more as the year progresses.

Much in the way of both strategies and tactics were discussed, and many excellent ideas have been logged for use this year. But the amazing and gratifying thing was how while our ideas were really all over the place, their intent was consistently on the same target.

From a group with such a wide range of experience, this was a joy to hear.

Dixie about to make a point during the Onyx Q&A

Thursday, Dixie, Eddy, Matthew, and I, recorded the Onyx Pathcast for the next day. “Live” from MidWinter, as it were. You can find it here, on PodBean as always, or at your favorite podcast venue: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/e/episode-34-liveish-from-midwinter/

We wanted to chat about the con, of course, but also to use the venue to announce the projects we were going to announce at the Onyx Path Q&A Thursday afternoon. We wanted our community to know what we announced there, but a day later so that the info went out but the folks who took the time to sign up for the Q&A heard it first.

First, we have a project we have added a lot of blood to in our various notes to each other: V5 (blood) Cults of (blood for) the Blood Gods (of blood)! V5 Cults of the Blood Gods.Yes, we follow up V5 Chicago By Night with a book detailing the Hecate including Clan Giovanni, the various religions that have sprung out of vampire culture like the Church of Caine, and much more!

Next, although some people may have already been aware, we still wanted to include announcing that Scion: Demigod is currently being written, as a lot of people assumed that it was coming and we want to be sure everybody knows it’s on the project progress list now.

Scion: Demigod will not only provide more Pantheons and the expected continuing advancement of characters through the Demigod range of abilities, but it will also provide new rules that enhance and focus on the changes that are occurring to a character as a Demigod.

Since Scion: Demigod continues what we could call the core Scion game experience, we also announced two projects that expand on just what Scion can be.

I’ve been talking about Scion’s potential in these blogs and elsewhere pretty much from the point that we announced we were doing a new edition, and what I’ve been describing as a solid core Scion game experience are the four core Scion books, Origin through God, and the supplements directly linked to them.

Then, there’s the projects that add and expand the options and the range of what it is to play Scion. These are projects that investigate different ways to engage with the game.

Mighty Matt McElroy ponders a deep Q&A question deeply.

First, there’s what we’re currently calling Scion: Dragon, which adds another “faction” to the ongoing struggle between the Titans and the Gods. They represent the seemingly ever-present myths in so many cultures of serpents and snake people, wyrms and dragons, and the idea that all of these creatures and possibly even those who are counted in various Pantheons, have their own secret agendas.

Scion: Dragon is being developed by the talented and dangerous Danielle Lauzon.

Bear in mind with both of these new Scion books that we have not even started the actual writing of the text for them yet, so anything I share here is pretty darn general and may be tweaked completely before that writing is finished.

Mike Hollywood gets the good dogs and excellent cats playing Pugmire together!

Second, we have what we’re currently calling Scion: Masks of the Mythos, which takes the Eldritch beings of the Cthulhu Mythos and tackles how to deal with them, and the baggage they bring, as a Scion game.

Harlem Unbound creator Chris Spivey is our developer for Scion: Masks of the Mythos, and we’re really looking forward to his take on such aspects as Mythos Cults and Lovecraft Country

We’ll certainly be talking more about all of these projects as things continue to develop with them!

Thursday was also the day MidWinter was running an industry professionals track and Eddy had his Developers’ Bootcamp to run, while the rest of us sat in on games, set up the booth, or had sit-downs with folk. I hear it went well, and that led to our Onyx Path Q&A later that afternoon.

Eddy’s Developer Bootcamp project flowchart

For years, we did this as a standard panel in a room full of chairs sort of thing, but lately we’ve adopted a smaller venue fitting maybe a dozen to twenty people and we have snacks and drinks in a wood paneled conference room.

Which we find lends itself to more open discussion and actual conversations. This year was no different, although we still have some rough edges to smooth down with such things as who talks when, the folks there certainly got a taste of the creative jabbering we can do when we’re all together.

A LOT of questions were answered, I hope satisfactorily, and calling it a live-action AMA would not be too far off-base.

Our Onyx Path Q&A session in the dramatic Founder’s Room.

This pretty much takes us into the full con experience days, where we had a ton of gaming sessions thanks to the Wrecking Crew led by Scott Vigil, plus individual game demos run by our creators – from Pugmire and Mau, to They Came From Beneath the Sea!, V5 Chicago By Night, and a very special playtest demo for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant.

There was also the premiere of a playtest of a Scion LARP written and created by Dystopia Rising creator Michael Pucci that gave us lots of ideas for how to bring that Scion thing to live-action.

And so, as we Onyx Path folk left Milwaukee in stages through the weekend, we bid a fond farewell to another successful MidWinter convention, and a fantastic and energizing Onyx Path Summit. Seems like we all left ready to work on:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

They Came From Beneath the Sea! (TCFBtS!) has a little more than a week to go and we’ve passed through the first couple of Stretch Goals including getting Larry Blamire to illustrate a horizontal scene usable on a screen, two entries for a book of additional soggy Threats, a T-Shirt, two added Adventure Scenarios, and we are rising up on the next goal!

TCFBtS! has some very different additions to the Storypath mechanics we’ll be explaining during the KS that take an excellent 50’s action and investigation genre game and turn it to 11! You can see the actual play here:

Check out the teaser:https://youtu.be/kxLydk4t76s

Hope to see you there back in the 50’s, fighting watery menaces and cracking wise!

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Michael Gaydos

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast is a breakdown of our terrific triad’s experiences during the Mid Winter Convention. The panels, the demo games, etc.!

http://bit.ly/2QLulAJ

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

On our channel Matthew Dawkins is recapping his campaign of Scion that he’s named “Tokyo Noir”. It sounds like a lot of grisly fun and mixes the children of Bishamon, Kissh?ten, and Loki in a murder mystery. Matthew is involving viewers in deciding the direction of the game, so get in early with your suggestions! https://youtu.be/cKpHy3W4Z-E

YouTuber Stuart Armstrong has put together an interesting video on crossing over They Came from Beneath the Sea! with the World of Darkness! Check it out and give his channel a subscription: https://youtu.be/2wBFny9mSng

One of our forumites, Cinder, has started a written recap of their campaign of They Came from Beneath the Sea! It’s in its early stages right now, but you can subscribe to the thread for updates: http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/cavaliers-of-mars-and-pugmire/1278691-explorers-of-the-fathoms-tcfbts-actual-play

The Story Told RPG Podcast interviewed Matthew Dawkins regarding They Came from Beneath the Sea! and his fun, informative interview can be found here for all interested listeners: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/bonus-episode-4-they-came-from-beneath-the-sea-with-matthew-dawkins

The Twin Cities by Night Crew have a Scion 2nd Edition three part series that will be released this week.

The murder of a Scion of Ra halts the progress of the sun across the sky. In response a group of strangers are unknowingly brought together by their divine heritage to investigate the crime.

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! http://bit.ly/2w0aaEW

And we’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This week, we’re offering PDF and PoD versions of the Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition on DTRPG and the traditionally printed version will be opened up for ordering via stores!

CONVENTIONS

New convention notices coming soon!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Redlines

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Manuscript Approval:

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Editing:

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Indexing:

Scion Origin (Scion Second Edition)

Scion Hero (Scion Second Edition)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – Bunch of art out for approvals – some corrections being made.

The Realm – Contracted.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff –

Chicago By Night – Rolling on contracting next bits.

C20 Player’s Guide – Getting more art coming in and going to WW for approval.

Aeon Aexpansion – Going over the notes.

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – KS rolling.

EX3 Lunars – Updated KS finals are in.

Signs of Sorcery – One more piece and then over to layout.

In Media Res – Contracted.

Hunter: The Vigil 2 – KS art in progress.

Shunned By the Moon – Got the notes, contacting artists.

Book of Oblivion – Contracting.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Geist 2e

Proofing

Scion Hero – Indexing.

Scion Origin – Indexing.

M20: Gods and Monsters

Pugmire Roll of Good Dogs and Cats

Trinity Core – Errata closed.

Trinity Aeon – Errata closed.

Ex3 Dragon Blooded – inputting errata.

CtL2e Condition Cards – Sending to WW for approval.

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg)

At Press

Wraith 20th – Preparing to ship to fulfillment shipper.

Wraith 20 Screen – Preparing to ship to fulfillment shipper.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Scion Screen – At Studio2.

Changeling: The Lost 2e – PDF and PoD versions on sale at DTRPG, physical books able to be ordered in stores, on Wednesday.

CtL2 Jumpstart – PoD proof ordered.

Fetch Quest – Manufacturing finishing.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: 

Post Onyx Path Summit: Forward Into 2019!

[lz-01]

as promised here, i am going to talk abt my previous library reads:

laurell k hamilton catchup

so i read the following from the anita blake series:

dead ice

wounded

crimson death

serpentine

sucker punch

dancing

beauty

rafael

i really liked crimson death mainly bc i’ve adored damien from his first appearance all the way back in book 7 and i was happy to see him finally get some time center stage

serpentine was cool but only bc it gave me more bernardo spotted horse, who i’ve been fascinated w since book 9

sucker punch was by far the best of these recent works bc it was more of a callback to the action adventure, anita-working-cases plots of the early books

rafael was a bit of a letdown tbh

i also did a catchup on the merry gentry series including:

divine misdemeanors

shiver of light

i’d actually read divine misdemeanors before but couldn’t remember anything for the life of me. shiver of light concluded the longrunning plot in this series w the birth of merry’s 6-father-having triplets. it was weird, idk

amelia atwater-rhodes’ YA books

when i was a teen, i was obsessed w amelia atwater-rhodes bc she was the already-published-at-14 genius i wanted to be. rereading her work as an adult was interesting bc you could see her youth in how her early works mostly feel like the start to larger stories that she never got around to writing. they’re quick reads but honestly i had to take a break from her writing style before i finished everything and haven’t gotten back to it.

here’s a list of what i did read tho:

in the forests of the night

demon in my view

shattered mirror

midnight predator

token of darkness

all just glass

the kiesha’ra series [also called the shapeshifters series]

the first six books are all set in the world of the den of shadows, a supernatural underworld ft. vampires, witches, and to a lesser extent, shapeshifters. each book is a totally independent story except all just glass, which is the follow-up to shattered mirror

the shapeshifters series is set more in a historical fantasy world where avian and serpent shapeshifters have a longstanding feud w each other

one thing that’s cool abt her writing is that she slipped in queer relationships during a time and in a genre where NOBODY was writing same-sex couples; later in the shapeshifters series, the main couple is FF

mexican gothic by silvia moreno-garcia

such a good book, omg; i kept hearing people rave abt this and i’m so glad i read it; really do highly recommend this suspenseful piece w fantasy/horror elements

tamora pierce’s tortall-verse

when i was a kid, there were very few books to read abt girls being action heroes. when pierce was a kid, there were none unless they were male-centric fantasy babes like she-ra (the original, not the current adaptation). correcting that imbalance and giving girls the role models they craved has been a central part of pierce’s writing. that being said, looked through a modern lens of critical theory, her works do have some problems, like a stubborn clinging to white feminism, fetishization of ethnic cultures, and a white-heroine-saves-the-poor-poc narrative

works included in the tortall verse are:

song of the lioness series

the immortals series

protector of the small series

beka cooper series

daughter of the lioness series

tortall: a spy’s guide

tortall and other lands: a collection of tales

numair chronicles

historically, my favorite pierce books were always the immortals series. i thought it was very cool that the protag was designed as a person of color. i then realized after reading a spy’s guide and looking at the character pics pierce supervised that daine, the protag of the immortals series, was never intended to be poc. she is, in fact, white, which is not how the original cover art depicted her At All. but now knowing that she’s actually white, it opened up a whole can of wow-this-is-problematic-writing worms bc it turns the entire 3rd book of the series into that white-heroine-save-the-poor-backwards-poc narrative, which is gross. 

that being said, these books still have some merit and it is solely bc of the mage numair

out of my recent reread, i would actually have to say that the beka cooper series is my favorite. i think bc they are all centered locally in tortall, it keeps pierce away from the temptation of her usual spiel. it also shows us a vastly different side of tortall bc it deals w the lower and working classes, which we don’t really get any exposure to otherwise.

the daughter of the lioness series made me want to throw things. you know, these were recently published works, and it just would have been So Easy to not turn this into another white-heroine-saves-the-poor-poc narrative. just change the pov character to Dove, one of the local princesses, who is a key character in her own write. put the saving of her and her people in her hands and her words rather than bringing in Aly, a white heroine from a foreign nation. but it’s like pierce can’t help herself. idk. really interesting plot but there are some basic craft choices that lead to some culturally insensitive mistakes that could have been avoided

that being said, it’s still worth it to give pierce’s works a read bc she is such a way-paver in the YA genre.

[pyratetm-a]

alright, i said i’d rewrite it to be more thorough, so here we go.  the infamous why amanda and her hector are not dmtnt compliant and never will be post.  this isn’t a reflection on the rpc, but it is on disney, because that movie was trash, and i’m not changing my stance on it.  at all.  full stop.  

x.  it cheapens the point of jack sparrow and the pearl.  first and foremost, in the established canon pre-dmtnt, jack sparrow was given the wicked wench - a ship he utterly fell in love with - to captain, and made to transport slaves.  when he set those slaves free on an island cutler beckett could not find (without knowing where it is), he was branded as a pirate and the wench was set on fire and sunk.  jack made a deal with davy jones - 13 years as captain to have her raised from the depths - and he would join davy jones’s crew.  to totally rewrite that as, oh, jack got it because some random dude died in a fight with salazar is literally cheapening the established sacrifie he’d made in pre-existing canon.

x.  it ignores pre-established canon on the compass and its origins.  jack bartered with tia dalma for that compass years ago, it has never, ever been mentioned it does anything beyond finding what the owner wants most in the world, and it’s not even like this is an obscure bit of something from a book.  it was literally in dmc.  tia dalma physically asks jack about the compass he bartered from her.  again, a case of ignoring the canon that came before it without even a cursory wiki check.

x.  it fucks with the timeline.  pre-dmtnt, cotbp took place in the mid-1740s.  now the timeline’s been shifted so much because of this trash heap of a movie, isn’t it supposed to be in the 1750s?  but somehow the kid will and elizabeth had is all grown up?  but timeline wise it’d have hector having a child while he was cursed?  which makes no sense because he was cursed, could not reach orgasm, and most importantly, could not achieve an erection because he had no heart beat.  it does nothing at all to check itself against the other canon pieces to make sure it works.

x.  it cheapens elizabeth’s sacrifices and independence.  so wait.  you mean to tell me because lizzie got a little dick from her blacksmith/pirate she’s suddenly going to forget everything she’s lost (her father, her home, james, her former life), forget that she was made pirate king, and become the good little housewife that goes back to corsets and dresses when she has a ship (the empress), and a territory as a pirate lord (singapore).  the same elizabeth that learned to use a sword after being kidnapped by cursed pirates.  the same elizabeth that got one up on hector barbossa (only the one, though).  the same one who made sure jack was sacrificed to the kraken.  the same one who stood up to sao feng.  the same one who used his belief she was calypso.  sure, sharon.

x.  everyone lost about fifty iq points to make the female lead seem smart, when the truth is the writers couldn’t write a smart female anyway.  carina’s badly written.  outside of her not needing to be hector barbossa’s daughter (nah, i don’t count that either, so don’t ask), she’s badly written in a way that makes it obvious they had no idea what they were doing, so they made everyone else stupider to compensate.  jack sparrow is not fucking stupid.  jack sparrow is wickedly smart.  that’s kinda been the point of all the other movies.  she could have been an interesting character, but it also pushes forth inaccurate tropes that aren’t historically sound.  women were teaching university at this point.  so...there’s that plot point as bullshit.  the first female professor of anatomy (which was the first female professor period) was in the 1730s in what would become Germany (Germany was not a unified nation at this point, it was several nation states ruled by several princes and also a good portion of it was part of the austria-hungary empire).  don’t fuck with me disney, i got historical sources.

x.  it makes everyone an exaggeration of surface qualities when it comes to pre-established characters.  gibbs is literally the only one that’s not wildly ooc.  that’s it.  jack is not stupid.  he has a drinking problem - literally all of them do, welcome to the 18th century - but he knows his limits and he’s not really stupid enough to pass them.  hector barbossa, the man who sailed an entire ship and crew over a waterfall at the end of the world and laughed on the way down would n e v e r be content to have a fleet of ships that cannot be attacked.  his vanity is not in his clothing or his looks.  that much gold on a ship is fucking stupid, it would make it capsizable.  these are not stupid men.  and yet according to dmtnt they sure are.

x.  will’s job is not a curse.  it’s a duty.  as long as he’s doing the duty, he should not be all barnacally.  the reason davy jones was squiddy is because he didn’t do the fucking job.  shit, even the lego games got this shit right, how did the movie fuck up so badly?  the “curse” is the squiddy-ness in the attempt to encourage jones back to his job.  will in this movie was bullshit all the way around, his characterization was so fucking bad.  and we’ve got the ending scene of awe where he was decidedly not fishy after ten years, so.  shrug emoji.  also, if all the “””curses””” of the sea were broken, will would have dropped dead, y’all.  his heart.  it’s in a chest. that’s not the one he’s attached to.  think about it.

x.  the guillotine was not even a thing until 1789, where it was used in the french revolution.  do you know what the french revolution was not?  georgian era.  this is early industrial revolution era.  no, these are not mix and match.  and potc is clearly end of the golden age of piracy.  you know when that was?  early dates are 1730s.  it finally really started to sputter completely around 1750.  fuck you, disney, this is what i’ve dedicated my life to studying.

x.  and lastly, it just ignores fourteen years of pre-established canon.  i’m not tossing out 20 books and four other films for a movie that can’t even agree with itself (the magic in this movie makes no goddamn sense, when at least it did in the other four), much less everything that made it even possible.  if you do, great.  but understand i’m gonna want to do an au where it doesn’t exist, so it’s going to require plotting.

this isn’t everything, and it got saltier than i intended, but again:  not slamming anyone, but this is my stance on it.  the 20+ books and first four films are all i’ll consider canon, considering the newest film ignores all of it.  if they had called it a reboot, i’d have no issue with it (beyond terrible writing) but as it stands...i just can’t.  hector barbossa is important to me as a character, and it speaks volumes that after geoffrey rush has said he’ll keep coming back to hector as long as he stays believable and interesting, and has now said he’s done.  because he had a huge part in shaping hector from the beginning, which is fantastically lacking in dmtnt.  even in the bts pics they all look miserable, when the ones before are actually kind of fun to go through, because it’s obvious they were having a blast.  so, now you know, there are most of my issues, even though it’s been said before, but i think this time i’ve covered it in greater detail.  again, this does not mean i won’t rp with characters from it, but we’re going to have to have a sit down and plot session to make things work.

[cyberkevvideo]

Throne of Night, Annex of Encounters Part 2 (Book 4)

Today’s entry discusses some of the additional encounters found in book 4, that I haven’t already done builds for. From what I’ve been looking at, I saw just enough extras that I couldn’t combine two books in one entry. Sometimes it just works out that way.

That said, there’s one piece of art that I just couldn’t put stats to because I have no idea what Gary had in mind for her. She is a bald drow, called the Jezzavon drow, that has a very particular tattoo that covers parts of her head, forehead, and ends at the bridge of her nose. Given that Gary has created his own class archetypes, traits, feats, and racial abilities, I’m guessing this drow was an original design. She also appears to be an NPC that the PCs would talk to only, and might not have any actual stats because she’s not meant to be engaged physically.

Like the last one, the post will contain art and links to the bestiary stats.

As always, for space reasons, I’ll be cropping the entry.

All images shared here were done by the forever fantastic and amazingly talented Michael D. Clarke, aka SpiralMagus

I do not have a Patreon or a Kickstarter, but I do have a Ko-Fi page (linked) for those who wishes to support me monetarily. There is no pressure or obligation to do so.

Finally, before I get to it, I hope everyone’s staying safe right now.

Continuing the style of blog entries, bestiary encounters will be divided up by book and (hopefully) order of when the encounters might occur. This is a sandbox AP so there’s no expected linear direction. While none of the books from this point explicitly state it, I’m going to estimate that these were all written with the same mindset as “Way of the Wicked”, and as such, will put down the approximate levels PCs might be expected to be at.

Starting things off, it’s Book Four: City of Night (Level 13-16):

The PCs either learn of the threat of a nearby drow city, Taaryssia, or perhaps bring their plans to get revenge against the queen of the drow who banished them to fruition. The journey to the city is not without is perils, but they pale compared to the countless dangers within this haven of evil. The drow city is a roiling cauldron of intrigue and treachery.

Five drow nobles house vie for control of the city. The PCs (if they’re drow) likely come from the destroyed sixth house. Each house proudly wears amulets made of mithral and various gemstones to show their allegiances.

It should noted that Taaryssia is also known as “The City Without Mercy” in some of Gary’s original notes from back in 2012.

After appearing within the city, the PCs might want to unload some of their gear and hunt down a merchant of some sort. This brings us to our first NPC

Slimy Demodand Merchant (CR 16)

What’s actually kind of interesting is, if you don’t think this creature’s build to be “merchant” enough, you could add 1 level of expert, and it’d leave the stats alone and CR alone. Having “Will +16″ and “hp 251″ isn’t going to break the game in the slightest, especially since, again, he shouldn’t be fought. Just put the 8 skills ranks to Diplomacy, Linguistics (for Undercommon), and Profession (merchant).

Quasit Demon (CR 2)

To be perfectly honest, there’s two ways this could go. My immediate thought was this was someone’s familiar, or a lost quasit that the PCs might encounter and make into their own familiar with the feat, Improved Familiar, assuming they aren’t an archetype that already gives them a quasit for free (ie. Demonic Apostle). It’s the route I’d go, but I can see a GM or two wanting to take a completely different route, and using this little buy as a spy for one of the drow houses. In which case, the GM will be looking for more of a sneaky quasit build. After all, one of the story threads is that if you’re dwarf, someone rats you out and you end up being capture, and thrown into their gladiator arena.

House Sathys Drow (CR 6)

While I can’t say for sure, this is either a high ranking captain from the drow house, which as we see from the emblems legent, fail at stealth missions, or the drow noble of the house. If you use the latter, he’ll need to be given the extra abilities that drow nobles have compared to the standard lesser drow, making him CR 7. More levels of fighter could be added if he’s someone the PCs square off again, but he seems like someone that is to be negotiated with, and his house is to be added to the final battle against the tyrant house that oppresses all of the drow houses thanks to their squad of demons backing them up. If the PCs are playing the drow, they might even have some history with him, and he could possibly owe their house a favour.

Shemhazian Demon (CR 16)

This is easily my favourite picture done by SpiralMagus. It looks so incredible.

Sandbox adventures are very interesting. Given the background, it was likely once an incredible drow city. Maybe once the home of the overlords. The shemhazian could be one of the pets of the tyrant queen, and taking this down before it joins in the final battle might be something that adds favour and potential victory to the PCs’ side. There might even be a rumoured minor artifact there for the explorer dwarves, or something the drow PCs definitely know they need to find, but it’s hidden under all that rubble.

Ancient Magma Dragon (CR 17)

Again, less of a personal encounter, and more of a “come and get us!” move. Hopefully. There’s always the chance that the PCs decide to not wait for the dragon to leave and hunt for food, and just attack it outright, provoking it and getting it to chase them (or hunt them if they’re using teleport). I’ve brought this up before, but given the art for the dragon and the egg...

I believe that the intended purpose was less to fight the dragon, but more to get it to attack the enemy for you. If this egg was stolen and placed within enemy lines? Even if they have high ranking demons, a magma dragon will severely mess them up. As for the type of dragon chosen, it’s straight out of the bestiary and it’s high enough level to be an actual threat.

As for how the PCs would even know to go looking, talking to someone from House Vakazar might provide them with some answers.

Drow Cultist Troop (CR 11)

Fiendish Drow Cultist Troop (CR 12) (as above, but with the Fiendish Simple template)

If everything has gone well, the PCs have gathered their own army (if they’re playing drow, hopefully it’s under their House’s banner too), and they’re taking down the tyrant queen. While I only list one of each, it’s more likely that there’s 2-3 of each group. This isn’t including any demons that are hiding in the background, or any drow that might (possibly) have the half-fiend template. Chances are that the drow armies will fight amongst themselves while they go after the queen herself, and her demon bodyguards.

It should be noted that the troop subtype came out with the release of Bestiary 6, so chances are this isn’t what Gary original envisioned. Looking further, there was supposed to be a mob creature template in the Advanced Bestiary, but never made it to printing. Maybe because it’s too much like it’s 3.5 counterpart. Thankfully we do have troops now, so that deals with a lot of the issues that could have presented themselves.

As for how exactly this would go down, my recommendation is read Book 6 of “Way of the Wicked” because something very, very similar happened near the beginning of that, and it’s more than likely that a lot of the same mechanics would have been used here too.

-----------------------------------------

That does it for this post. If there’s any other encounters that take place in this book, I am currently unaware of them. Next time we do Book 5, and given how many pics I’ve found for that one, chances are Book 6 will be mixed in too. No guarantees though. Just a strong feeling.

[annacakes]

Guns of Gamara - First Appearances (click for full resolution)

Instead of studying for my HSC I spent the last few days drawing this for a Guns of Gamara AU i’ve had for awhile. i tried to take things from the 84 Voltron including insp. for their outfits, leadership roles in the group, and the overall plot, as well as making parallels to Legendary Defender. 

(also, Galra!Lance was inspired by another drawing of Galra!Lance so if anyone can link me to that post, i’ll be forever grateful!)

Keith is a half-Altean/half-human hybrid who accompanied Colleen and Matt Holt, and Shiro to Kerberos as a co-pilot/apprentice

Alteans found them on Kerberos due to Keith’s bloodline and they are captured

Keith gets sent to Altea as “Alteans belong to Altea”, has his Altean physical features “unlocked” through the use of distilled quintessence, and is placed in a minor fighting ring since he’s only an Altean-hybrid rather than purely Altean

Keith escaped Altea with the help of Kolivan and his team before they caused an uproar as a distraction on Altea among other things

Colleen and Matt don’t fight their captors and are simply sent to a refugee camp as they are allowed to keep their free will

Shiro attempts to defend the others from any dangers the Alteans pose by trying to reason with them. This is seen as an act of defiance and is sent to a holding prison where his free will can be taken from him (Shiro also isn’t in the pic is bc i only decided he’s in the AU while writing this sooooo)

Shiro is also Sven’s twin brother and at the age of five, were left orphaned. An American family adopted Shiro, and a Norwegian family adopted Sven, however each family let the two brother’s stay in contact with each other until Sven moved back to the US to join the Garrison.

Empress Allura uses a mixture of quintessence, Altean magic, and other lesser ingredients to keep herself, and her closest advisers alive for thousands of years, including Coran who has been acting as a secret informant for the Guns of Gamara for the majority of her reign

He acts as an informant for the Gamara bc while he was fiercly loyal to King Alfor and his family, he had worked as his adviser long enough to know that he would not approve of how Allura rules in the slightest, and so places his hopes in a group of rebels to try and stop her

He gets caught however, and flees Altea heading towards the last operative base belonging to the Guns of Gamara.

The base however, had recently been attacked by Alteans and had been kept in one piece with the bodies of the members still inside, rather than being destroyed and an act that warns those who seek out the rebels as to what would happen to them if they rebelled against Empress Allura

Coran finds Lance unconscious, and badly wounded but alive and quickly gets him to a healing pod on one of the Gamara’s largest battleships. Finding no other survivors, he destroys the base and flies towards the outskirts of the Solar System as it lies beyond Altea’s Empire.

Lance eventually wakes up and joins Coran on the bridge where he explains his situation and Lance begins to explain what happened to the Gamara

The Altean ship Keith stole interrupts their conversation as the ship heads for Earth

Not knowing where the ship came from, why the ship is in such a hurry, or who they were, Coran and Lance followed the ship to Earth

Coran camouflaged the ship in the desert whilst Lance dressed in clothes that covered every inch of his skin including his face. He takes a smaller speeder and heads towards the crash site alone.

Pidge enrolls at the Garrison under a fake name in hopes of finding her mother and brother. 

Sven helps her get into the Garrison using her fake identity because he knows what it feels like to have someone close to you go missing without a trace, and hopes that Pidge might discover something that can lead to some answers

Hunk is Pidge’s best fried at the Garrison and can occasionally calm down Pidge’s temper. When he can’t Sven acts as damage control and often gets her out of trouble

Hunk follows Pidge to the roof, worried that she might be caught out of bed after hours on the night of the crash

They sneak away from the barracks when the lock down is called but are unaware that they are followed by Sven who gives them a fright when he makes his presence known when they are spying on the Garrison at the crash site

Sven (being an instructor) tells them they should go back to the barracks despite Pidge’s protests having seen Keith on the surveillance cameras

Before they could do so however, Lance creates a distraction using a blaster/shooter/gun that was mounted onto the speeder to distract the Garrison

Pidge, Hunk, and a reluctant Sven follow him into the building where they find Lance carrying a barely conscious Keith

As Lance doesn’t know that Keith is only a hybrid-Altean, he intended to take him back to the ship to investigate whether he was on their side or not

Knowing that the Garrison will soon be returning, Lance lets Pidge, Hunk, and Sven follow him to his speeder where they all get on and head towards the Gamara battleship

The Garrison chase them for a short time, but they eventually lose them

I imagine Lance’s return to the battleship goes a little like this: Lance: Coran! I’m back open the cargo door! Coran: Did you find who the ship belonged to? Lance: An Altean apparently. I have him with me, but he’s unconscious right now Coran: Okay well- Lance: And a few others native to this planet Coran: a few native inhabitants? Bring them onboard then, I trust that you trust them of course Lance: Of course! Pidge, Hunk, Sven: ?? Alteans????? native inhabitants??????? what

Once on the ship, Lance takes Keith and puts him in a healing pod while Pidge, Hunk, and Sven meet Coran in the bridge: Hunk: y’know i always thought aliens would look more alien Coran: i don’t know, you look like an alien to me Lance: *entering the bridge while taking off his excess clothes* what did you think an alien would look like? Hunk: well, i was expec- *sees Lance* Lance: what? what were you expecting Hunk: you. i was expecting you

Keith eventually wakes up from his healing pod and gets a quick interrogation by Lance and Coran but stop once they find out he’s and Altean-hybrid that recently escaped Altea

Before deciding on what they can do next (considering that two aliens are now on Earth, Keith no longer looks human, and Pidge, Hunk, and Sven have recently been declared missing or so the radio Pidge tuned into says), an Altean ship that had been chasing Keith begins to orbit around Earth

As a group, they decide to leave the Solar System and travel to a base light years away that has been abandoned by the Gamara for millennia so the Altean ship follows them, leaving Earth alone

Now that Lance is awake, the battleship (originally of Galra design) can now “jump” to further distances at hyperspeed

They lead the Altean ship away from Earth, and eventually lose them once they make a “jump”

They land the ship on an uninhabited planet that’s nearly completely covered in forest save for a large patch of ground that used to be the landing platform

Once inside the abandoned Gamara base, they activate it’s computer system which leads them to eventually find Slav who had been hiding in the base

Both Coran and Lance finally explain in full why they are here, and what has happened throughout the rest of the universe for the past 10,000 years

Keith, Pidge, Hunk, and Sven all agree to help them fight against the oppressive rule of Empress Allura

They all eventually realise after some time that they are in dire need of both allies and weapons and so make a plan:

Sven and Slav are sent to investigate the strange wormhole and destroy it if need be (Hole in the Sky)

Keith, Pidge, and Hunk are sent to rescue Kolivan and his team who had recently been captured and sent to a holding prison

Coran and Lance are first sent to Altea to the last Galra ship that had once belonged to Zarkon that held every Galra secret including the location on where Lotor and his generals were being cryogenically frozen (in the AU, by the time Zarkon plans to destroy Altea, Lotor is an adult). They then head to that planet and unfreeze(?) Lotor and his generals

Whilst in the Guns of Gamara, Lotor is on their side as long as their goal is to take down Empress Allura, though he still is morally grey and his methods are questionable at best

Whether or not Lotor’s generals betray him in this AU is still up for debate as I began this AU before s4 came out, so they were always going to stay with Lotor but now idk

I think that’s just about all the headcanons I have for this AU now, I might add some more/save them for the next group shot of all the important characters I missed^^

[lunasong365]

Yes! the cover from the local arts paper promoting our upcoming program, Alexander Nevsky!

Full article under cut.

Consider today’s military warriors and the implements of battle they don. Underneath all that intimidating technology is a human being whose identity vanishes and appears to the enemy as an anti-human robot, part of the psychology of today’s warfare.

Now, dial the calendar back seven and three-quarters centuries and focus on Europe. Lose the uniform, the rifle, the communications gear, the enhanced visual technology, all of it. Dress the guy in either shredded clothes or cumbersome armor, and arm him with swords, bows, and variations of clubs as he makes eye contact with the warrior he’s about to cut to ribbons or bludgeon to a pulp. Burden him with disease and infections resulting from the wounds, inflicted by unsanitary weaponry. This was the modern soldier in the 1200s.

And there was no shortage of soldiers in the 13th century. Or wars. Peace in that era was evasive as countries invaded one another over rivalries, revenge, land grabs, and religion. Zoom in closely on almost any area, especially central and northern Europe, and you would find some sort of skirmish.

Inevitably, there were heroes. Mel Gibson made Scotland’s William Wallace famous in his 1995 film “Braveheart.” In 2011, Jonathan English’s “Ironclad” told the story of a handful of Knights Templar defending Rochester Castle against the despotic King John, played by Paul Giamatti, refining his snarl for the eventual role of U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades in “Billions.” Perhaps most significantly, in 1938 the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein filmed the bio-pic “Alexander Nevsky.”

On Jan. 6, 7, and 8, Neal Gittleman will lead the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, chorus, and soloist Ryu-Kyung Kim in a live performance of the music to accompany a screening of the film at the Schuster Center.

For 196 years, beginning in 1095, the Papacy in Rome launched four major crusades to the east. There were several goals to these wars, ranging from recapturing Jerusalem from Islam to contesting paganism and heresy in lands where Christians lived but did not rule. These incursions met with varying degrees of success and some deeply affected the futures of countries.

In 1193, Pope Celestine III sanctioned the Northern Crusades, pressing the Kingdom of Sweden to advance east into areas deemed rife with paganism. The Swedes controlled Scandinavia, leaving the Teutonic Knights to capture what are now Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. By 1203 the Knights maintained control, but the Estonians pushed back for more than 30 years, finally losing in 1236. The loss expanded the Holy Roman Empire to Lake Peipus, which formed part of the border between Estonia and the Russian republic of Novgorod. On April 5, 1242, 19-year-old Alexander Yaroslavich led his troops to victory over the Teutonic Knights, whose win was aided when many German soldiers fell through the ice and drowned because their armor was too heavy for the ice to hold (you won’t see that in the movie). As a sign of extreme adulation, Alexander’s troops renamed him “Nevsky,” a reference to the nearby Neva River. The Germans never challenged the Russians again for centuries. Nevsky, the son of a prince, became a prince himself and used his position as a skilled politician and negotiator. In 1252, he was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (the supreme ruler of Russia).

In 1938, with relations between Germany and Russia fraying, 40-year-old Russian Director Sergei Eisenstein began production on a paean to Alexander Nevsky and his victory. Eisenstein was born in Riga, less than 100 miles from the battle his movie would present, so he had a historical connection to the event, as well as a point of view about Germans.

Eisenstein’s career bridged cinema’s silent and sound era, and he was a pioneer in the use of the montage, a cinematic device to show the passage of time. But he had not directed a released movie in nearly a decade because of an extended trip to the United States and Mexico. His attempts at finishing films in both countries ended in failure due, in part, to politics: Sergei was a communist and that meant trouble in the West. Upon his return to the USSR, “Alexander Nevsky” was his comeback project.

The film is about the battle, but to get to a running time of 112 minutes, Eisenstein and co-writer Pyotr Pavlenko (installed to keep Eisenstein in line with Soviet film-making requirements) added a couple of backstories. The first was about two warrior friends competing for the hand of a Novgorod maiden. The other concerned a woman, whose father was killed by the enemy, wh chooses to fight on the ice alongside one of the competing warriors.

Sergei Prokofiev’s music is, of course, a cornerstone of 20th century Russian romanticism. Its strikingly beautiful main theme is immediately recognizable, especially if you’re a fan of Woody Allen’s hilarious 1975 farce “Love and Death.” After the film’s release, Prokofiev restructured the music into a 40-minute, seven-movement cantata for orchestra, chorus, and mezzo-soprano that sings about the battle’s casualties.

The experience of hearing a soundtrack by a live ensemble gives a motion picture punch and life that a recorded soundtrack cannot impart. Given the age of the film, despite restoration and an updated recorded soundtrack, this is one movie whose accompaniment by a live orchestra will offer a thrilling evening.

Dayton City Paper spoke with Maestro Neal Gittleman—a man whose Russian heritage vibrates through his bones and his baton to electrify the orchestra’s Russian-written pieces—about his knowledge of and connection to “Alexander Nevsky.”

Why did Eisenstein and/or the Russian government choose Prokofiev for this film?

Neal Gittleman: It was the first collaboration of “the two Sergeis.” The whole project was closely monitored by the Mosfilm studio (and, presumably, by Stalin), so whoever had the idea of putting them together, it was certainly endorsed by the “powers that were.”

The government hired a couple of film professionals to work with Prokofiev. What might they have been concerned about?

NG: Paranoids are concerned about everything!

How do you know when to play as the movie progresses?

NG: My score has time codes indicated in it for synchronization.  I have three things to look at: 1. the score; 2. a video screen showing the film (so I don’t have to look up at the big screen); 3. a second video screen showing an analog clock that’s synced to the film so the times on the clock correspond to the time cues in my score. The last time we did “Nevsky” (November 1998), it was a real clock, physically synced to the film projector.  Now, everything’s been digitized, so instead of looking at a real clock, I’m looking at a video of the real clock that’s synced to the video of the film.

Are there different scores for the movie and the cantata version?

NG: Yes. Here’s the sequence…

1. 1938:  Prokofiev writes the score for the film (simultaneously with the filming).

2. 1938:  Prokofiev records a rough (and I mean rough) soundtrack for Eisentstein to use in the editing process, intending to rerecord everything once the film has a final edit.

3. 1938:  Stalin sees a rough cut of the film with the temporary music track and loves what he sees.

4. 1938:  Mosfilm tells the Sergeis that they’re done.  If the “Great Leader and Teacher” loves it, don’t change a thing.  So the rough cut is the version that’s released, complete with the hideous-sounding temp soundtrack.

5. 1939:  Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact is signed, and suddenly, the Nevsky film is (to use a modern-day parlance) politically incorrect.  It’s pulled from theaters immediately.

6. 1939:  As he had done with “Romeo and Juliet” when politics delayed its premiere, Prokofiev created a concert suite from the Nevsky soundtrack music.  This is the cantata version that became the standard way people heard the music.

7. 1986:  John Goberman, longtime producer of “Live from Lincoln Center” on PBS, decides to re-adapt Nevsky for concert performance…film projection accompanied by live orchestra and chorus.  The original material from the 1938 film score is long since lost.  Goberman engages composer/conductor/arranger William David Brohn, to do the reconstruction of the music.  Brohn lines up the cantata version with the film, which accounts for about 35 minutes of the 55 minutes of music in the film.  For the rest, Brohn reconstructs the missing stuff by ear.  The result is a reconstruction of the soundtrack score that allows us to hear the music as Prokofiev imagined it should be heard.

Vaughn-Williams wrote his seventh symphony for a movie, and orchestras present it as a stand-alone work. Are there any other film scores of note that became stand-alone works?

NG: I can’t think of any complete film scores.  But there are things like Bernstein’s “On the Waterfront” suite, which was made because Lenny was so irritated at how his music had been chopped up, faded-in, and faded-out in the film soundtrack.

The Battle On the Lake is a riot of music. What is particularly difficult about performing it and how do you prepare the DPO for it?

NG: It’s got a lot of notes, but it’s not particularly difficult.  Or, let’s just say there’s a lot of other stuff that Prokofiev wrote in other pieces that’s a lot harder.  “Nevsky” was created on a very short timeline, so I’m sure he wrote it specifically to (a) sound very impressive and (b) be fairly straightforward to play.

This music seems to look back to Tchaikovsky and other late Russian romantics. Did Prokofiev write anything else this lyrical?

NG: Prokofiev could write whatever he pleased.  He had some serious chops!  I don’t really hear all that much Tchaikovsky in the score (well, maybe a little in the sack of Pskov scene and the battle aftermath) but if you hear that, maybe it’s there!

~Pat Suarez

[drtanstravels]

Note: This post was written over the course of many months, beginning on Friday, May 3, 2019. To document as accurately as possible the entire excruciating process, I just kept adding more and more to it as events unfolded. I was initially going to cover both our experiences with buying and selling an apartment in Singapore, however, as we encountered seemingly perpetual red tape, endless delays, and the process as a whole dragged on, this piece got painfully long so I decided to edit into two separate parts, thus far resulting in this still rather lengthy first chapter solely about selling our apartment. Enjoy.

We decided quite a while ago to buy a new apartment and, despite how long it has taken, we initially thought it would be a lengthier process, because the plan was to also keep our current place and rent it out. If we sell our current apartment, we achieve our goals about two years earlier and don’t have to deal with the stress that coincides with being landlords, however, that doesn’t free us of the burden of dealing with real estate agents. The bulk of these people in Singapore are just awful, plain and simple. Okay, we initially encountered a couple while selling that weren’t too bad and the pair that ultimately got the job done were fantastic. I have previously written about what we went through to simply rent an apartment in New York City, but selling one and buying another in Singapore isn’t a whole lot of fun, either. So, what makes dealing with the bulk of Singaporean real estate agents so bad? Well, there are the obvious lies and deception that come hand-in-hand with making major secondhand purchases, but it’s usually used car dealers who get the bad rap, however, as you keep reading, particularly when I’ve finished writing the next chapter about buying an apartment, you’ll learn that the word “room” can mean almost anything to a Singaporean estate agent. Then there are the endless personal questions and comments that these awkward, giggling, little socially-stunted people make that have absolutely nothing to do with them or the process of buying or selling a house. Add to this them ignoring all regular communal time constraints when calling or messaging you, and you’ll be pulling your hair out within days.

Anna initially put our house on the market on Tuesday, April 23, 2019 and I was originally going to begin writing this piece when the entire process was completed, but in under two weeks I had accrued so many weird anecdotes and tidbits that I felt I was going to forget some nugget of gold that had occured during this entire course of action. Instead, I compiled the stories that took place as they happened instead of just putting them into the notes on my phone, until this entire debacle was completed. As you will find out, we painfully tolerated some real estate agents when we were looking at apartments to buy, which was almost immediately after we had put our place on the market. However, the only way these people can get any worse is when you have something of which they know they can make a nice little commission, the standard market rate in Singapore being 2%. When Anna first listed our place for sale she used my phone number as the main point of contact. Now, here I sit, writing this portion over two weeks later on Friday, May 10, 2019 and I have kept my phone on silent the entire time due to the constant calls and messages from real estate agents that were late to the party, yet still want a piece of the action. Here’s an example of one I received yesterday:

So much to decipher there; is his or her name Adnic? Anna told me that PN stands for PropNex, “Singapore’s largest listed real estate agency,” but why would I want this person coming over on a Saturday morning when each entire week spent dealing with these people leads to a big Friday night being required in order to de-stress and unwind? And who the hell is this Angie to whom they wish to speak? Anyway, Anna had dinner with some of her family on the Wednesday, the day after listing the property, and her auntie has bought and sold many apartments in Singapore, as well as overseas, so she gave Anna some advice and also listed our place in Singapore’s national daily newspaper, The Straits Times. Needless to say my phone blew up the next day and these people are like the hybrid of a vulture and a leech. My day consisted of just constant calls and messages, the calls mostly impossible to understand speed-mumbling and the messages indecipherable and full of typos, the example above being par for the course. Some would call four or five times in a row, hoping to get an answer, others would send a followup message just minutes after their initial message just to see if I had received it, because they still hadn’t heard back from me yet. In fact, one of them even sent me a bunch of articles about himself, some of them in Mandarin and from almost four years prior:

His mother definitely has this on the fridge

You know he has this framed somewhere

Anna was home when the phone first started ringing and it was her suggestion that I should ignore the calls and just respond to messages, which suited me fine. Still, real estate agents here want exclusive rights to your apartment, meaning that they can be the only person to market it, but we didn’t want that so Anna and myself had to devise a standard response to each of these messages that I was receiving in order to find the agents that were at least attempting to be legit. This is what Anna came up with and saved it in the notes in my phone so I just had to copy and paste the the top portion as a reply to each message:

Hi, in order for us to authorise you as our agent;

Please advise if you are an exclusive agent or can do open market, and

What is your lowest commission rate?

In the interest of convenience, please continue to communicate via message/WhatsApp.

(If they say non-exclusive and can offer a rate in writing of 2% or less, we can send them the pics and unit no.

Asking price $XXX,XXX)

I was copying and pasting this reply so frequently that I made the mistake of copying the entire thing, including the section in brackets, and sending it to a couple of agents before realising my mistake and quickly deleting it. If we received the answer from an agent as outlined in the underlined section that was intended for my eyes only, they would then receive the following message:

Thanks for your interest, we will be free to let you view our apartment and take photos on Tuesday or Thursday, 1-5pm. Please SMS to confirm viewing.

It was all getting a bit much and we would need to clean up before people viewed our apartment the following week so I went out shopping to get some of the supplies we would need. While I was out I received a phone call and figured it would just be Anna so I answered without looking. It turned out to be one of the vulture-leeches, he was in the area and wanted to speak to us personally. I told him I would be home in 30 minutes and he agreed to meet me at our place for what I assumed was an opportunity to have a look through the apartment and get some pictures early. Nope, he just wanted to give me his spiel on letting him have exclusive rights to the apartment, however, he did raise some good points. I let him know that Anna is the main breadwinner and decision maker in this process so it would be best if he spoke to her, but he’d need to wait until she returned home from work. He hung out alone at the nearby shopping mall until Anna was home and then went through his exclusivity speech again to Anna, pointing out that open market sale wasn’t an option for him, he only does exclusive sales. We said we would talk over his offer, which had its pros and cons, and then get back to him, but after discussing it we decided against his offer of exclusivity. He messaged me the following night, Friday, to ask if we had talked about it, and this was where I learnt two valuable lessons about him and most other real estate agents trying to sell properties:

He was full of shit.

He truly couldn’t care less what time he contacted me.

Despite previously saying that he only does exclusive sales, he had no problem with trying to sell on the open market when he realised we wouldn’t use him otherwise. Also, he would continue to hassle me the entire weekend, going as far as messaging me at 11:00pm on Sunday night! Here are some of the highlights of what I continued to receive over the course of the weekend, check out the times of some of them:

Desperation is a stinky cologne! I wouldn’t even message my own parents that late on a Sunday night, and you can see that there is a deleted message toward the end, because this guy was pissing me off so badly that I initially responded a little less diplomatically so Anna ultimately wrote that final reply. Still, when someone tries to point out that you don’t appreciate being contacted on that day or at that time, it takes a special kind of stupid to reply to the message. On a later occasion he texted me at 3:30am, beginning his message with an apology for contacting me at that time, but he was worried he’d forget what he wanted to ask me if he waited. Just write it down and inquire later in our agreed upon timeframe!

Monday was just as stressful, constantly dealing with real estate agents’ phone calls and messages, as well as cleaning up the place, trying to rearrange the clutter. I also cooked dinner that night and accidentally knocked a bottle of olive oil off our extremely small bench, smashing it on the ground and covering the floor with oil and shards of glass. To make matters worse, we had run out of floor cleaner so after I finished picking up as much broken glass as I could find without slipping over, I had to find a place that sold floor cleaner at 9:30pm and mop the house, putting me in a rather bad mood that ultimately scared the dog.

Tuesday was finally here and I started getting our place into the best shape I could quite early. Nobody was supposed to arrive until 1:00pm, however, the first agent showed up at 12:30pm and complained about why I hadn’t finished cleaning and that I wasn’t ready for him. I politely reminded him that I wasn’t expecting anyone for at least another 30 minutes, but he just told me he could give me tips on tidying and then started to unplug all of our devices and rearrange our furniture until I put a stop to that. He said our apartment needed to look “less cluttered, less lived in,” so I then passive-aggressively explained to him that, unfortunately for him, we still do live in it and the reason we are selling is that, although we love our current apartment, we have just outgrown it and the place simply isn’t big enough, there isn’t space for everything, but we’ll need to continue to live there until it is sold and achieving that is his role in the whole situation. It’s a nice apartment at a decent price in a highly-sought after part of town, if he can’t sell it, maybe he should try another line of work. Anyway, he spent the next hour filming our property and taking photos, not letting me in the same room as him and not allowing any of the agents that came at the correct time to enter the apartment, instead forcing them to stand in the stairwell in the heat. He even whined that out house is too dark and I need to find a way to make it lighter, especially the bedroom. Yes, that’s because we sleep in there, not use it as a photo-booth, and it’s kind of ironic that he described the place as “bright” in his video. He was an obnoxious douche and was more than a little liberal with the truth, but the video he put together (which is no longer available) wasn’t too bad and if he one day allows me to teach him pronunciation, grammar, and sentence structure, I may just take some of his decluttering tips.

Many more real estate agents arrived over the course of the day, most of them polite, some quite critical, and pretty much all of them trying to make the same jokes and starting the same conversations; “How’s the weather up there?” and, “Have you eaten?” were all questions I had to answer multiple times, as was making up excuses for where Anna was and that’s where I made my biggest faux pas. The agents always try to get personal information out of you, especially about income, which is none of their business when we’re using them to sell our apartment. There was no problem with me telling any agents that I’m a freelance writer, but Anna didn’t want any of them knowing what she does for a living, because they might try to lowball us on our place if they knew she was a surgeon. The first time an agent asked where she worked, I kind of panicked, leading to this exchange:

Agent: “So, where is your wife?” Me: “At work.” Agent: “Oh, where does she work?” Me: “Near the hospital.” Agent: “Oh, what does she do, is she a nurse? A doctor?” Me (kind of panicking): “Canteen.”

It didn’t help that Anna used to do pole dancing for exercise a few years ago and we still have the pole in our house. “So, is your wife a dancer, too?” she asked in a very judging manner. Yes, now this particular real estate agent thinks that I’m married to a stripper that also needs to work in a hospital canteen during the day to make ends meet. Another agent asked if the pole was to hold the ceiling up and could it be removed. God, some of them are dumb, we live on the third floor of a four-storey building, I’d be equally worried for the people that live above us if that were the case!

It’s now the first week of June, 2019 and we’ve had some agents bring people to check out our apartment. We’ve had around 10 different potential buyers look through, but it only seems to be the same two or three real estate agents out of all of the ones marketing it that are getting the people in. Our apartment clearly has an industrial design, however, one of the first agents who showed people through described it as “countrysides look.” Firstly, I don’t think the word ‘countryside’ can be pluralised and secondly, a countryside design would be the complete opposite of industrial. When I hear “countryside” I picture lace curtains, doilies, vases of flowers, floorboards, that type of thing, not exposed bricks and beams to go with the mostly cement floor. He also told the people that we had vinyl flooring in the living room when that portion is clearly marble, one of the only remaining original features of the entire apartment from before we renovated it when we first purchased the place seven years ago. Was he even trying? The agent who made the video of our house, a film that was apparently based on a true story, contacted me on Friday, June 7 to tell me that he had some people who wanted to look through our apartment the following day and was wondering if our place had two bathrooms. It took all of my energy to refrain from telling him that the answer is in that stupid little movie that he made and instead told him it has only one. He then asked how many bathrooms our neighbour’s place had! I wouldn’t recognise my neighbours if I saw them in the street, let alone know how many toilets they have, but I assume it would be the same amount as us, as all of the apartments in our building were built with an identical floor-plan. He also asked what time on Saturday suited me best so I told him 3:00pm, but on Saturday morning I received a message saying that he would see me at 2:30, half an hour earlier again, but at least he told me this time, unlike the day he made his home movie. Before long it was 2:20pm and my stomach was starting to cramp, I had to go to our only bathroom urgently, but I was also worried that he may arrive earlier than the agreed upon time again, on this occasion while I was in a rather compromising situation. Fortunately, I managed to complete my business quickly with enough time remaining for the aroma to adequately dissipate and the viewing went off without a hitch, however, the agent had grown a really bad moustache since we had last met.

When you’re looking at spending every cent you have on an apartment, there is an endless list of questions you could ask — Does the traffic get noisy? How much hot water does the current tank give? Have any murders ever been committed there? For some reason though, we kept getting asked the same two questions time and time again from potential buyers;

Which direction does the apartment face?

What race are our neighbours?

The second question seems to be a real selling point in Singapore and the potential buyers asking this are always relieved to find out that our neighbours are all Singaporean-Chinese. People here can be a tad biased at times and I still have no idea why, but many in this country don’t want to live anywhere near members of particular races or nationalities. I’m sure, though, that they wouldn’t have any problems with the eccentric, old Singaporean-Chinese guy that lives behind us who usually wears nothing but a faded old towel or sometimes his clothes on backwards, meditating outside on mouldy, discarded office furniture, testicles swaying in the breeze, surrounded by a fort of more hanging towels, as well as having banana peels, clam shells, and other meticulously arranged, but ultimately unusable food items drying on the ground outside his apartment full of clutter, trash, and plastic bags. His joint is constantly infested with rats and they are always running around the general vicinity of his apartment, but he’s fine:

A visit from some government officials while resplendent in a faded towel, as seen from our kitchen window

Maybe he got in a fight with the rats and they kicked him out on this particular night

The irony is that his place is worth a fortune!

From his point of view

I really wish I had a marker at the time to draw a moustache

Today is Monday, July 29, 2019 and we’ve had quite a few people look at our apartment, but no official offers, the main complaint being that, despite being listed as a “walk-up” apartment, it doesn’t have an elevator, some viewers even perplexed at this exclusion, because climbing two small flights of stairs is just too much effort for many. Why bother even looking at it at all? We also realised that it has been the same four or five agents getting people to look at our apartment and they suggested that we get the agents that haven’t done anything to take their listings down from property websites to avoid saturation, which isn’t a bad idea. This morning I sent those agents the following message:

Hi _____,

My wife and I own the property you have listed at 20 Tiong Bahru Rd. I am writing to request that, due to a complete lack of viewers, that you cease to list our property. This is not open to negotiation.

Thank you, Tim Abel

Most of them just did it and replied to let me know, which was appreciated, but one decided to call me and try to weasel his way out of it, which went something like this:

Agent: “Good day, sir, in reference to your message, what I’ve been doing is collating all of the offers on your property in order to ascertain what –” Me: “YOU HAVEN’T BROUGHT A SINGLE PERSON TO OUR PLACE IN THREE MONTHS, TAKE THE LISTING DOWN!” *click*

These guys are terrified of complaints that will damage their reputation so almost immediately after I hung up on him I received a text message that said:

Hi tim.will abide. Apologise n tks

I think that translates into “Hi, Tim, I will take the listing down as per your request. Apologies and thank you.”

Fast forward to what is now mid-December, 2019 and we’re still sitting here, waiting to sell our apartment. We ended up going with one of the female agents as an exclusive agent and she initially brought a reasonable amount of people around to our place to have a look, but even her interest waned over time to the point where she didn’t even have our place listed toward the end. Fortunately her contracted period as our exclusive agent expired. We did receive a couple of offers, but they were either quite low or rescinded after the people who made them opted for a different apartment. We ultimately chose to go with a pair of other agents at the recommendation of a friend who was able to sell her place quite quickly, instead of going through all of this hassle. To try to make the process go even smoother with these guys, I went on a crazy decluttering spree, spending many hours of many days going through certain areas of the apartment and just throwing stuff out, much to the behest of my lower back. Anna chipped in on the day the agents came to take photos and videos, managing to throw out five shopping bags full of old shoes alone, as well as several boxes of books. This cleaning process resulted in us finding some items we had completely forgotten about or didn’t even know we had. A good example is that we can never find a pen that works when we need one, yet I found three unused and rather expensive pens still in their boxes that were gifts at some of Anna’s conferences. The absolute highlight for me though, had to be two books Anna wrote in primary school, the first when she was about seven years old, detailing her family’s trip to California with interesting tidbits such as finding her cousin’s bra, her friend playing with it, and then putting it on her soft-toys. The other book was a mystery about a kidnapping and ransom, written when she was roughly eleven or so:

Anna’s artistic abilities haven’t really evolved

This might help explain why we watch so much Law & Order: SVU

As a result of all of this cleaning and carrying so many loads of heavy items down to the bins downstairs, I was barely been able to stand upright properly for a few days, plus all of the dust that had been stirred up as a result had us constantly sneezing, but it did feel nice having less crap around the place. As a result I wasn’t looking forward to the whole moving process, but that wouldn’t happening anytime soon.

The agents came around on Saturday, December 13, 2019, took their photos and videos, as well as sat down and had a chat to us, these guys actually asking questions and showing a genuine interest, so that was a good sign. They also informed us that this time of year isn’t a good one for the housing market so it probably wouldn’t be until January or February until we hear anything, but an online virtual walkthrough of our place was still put up on their website on Monday, December 15, 2019. From Saturday, January 4, 2020 we had a steady flow of viewers for our house and it wasn’t just people who were bored on the weekend and had decided to spend it snooping through other people’s apartments, these ones seemed genuinely interested in purchasing, and by Tuesday, January 21, 2020 we had accepted an offer and sold our place! What nobody else could achieve in eight months, our new agents pulled off in one, a month that happened to include the Christmas and New Year period, as well as being just prior to Chinese New Year. Pretty impressive.

This now left us with the headache of dealing with banking procedures and bureaucracy in order to finalise the sale of our apartment, as well as sort out the place we wanted to buy and it was the second one that would prove the most frustrating, but that’s a story for next time. Stay tuned for the story, whenever it is eventually finalised, that coincided directly with this one; The Hell That We Experienced In The Real Estate Process In Singapore — Buying.

Boy, that was nine months of fun Note: This post was written over the course of many months, beginning on Friday, May 3, 2019.

[kevinf83-blog]

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[cutiecrates]

Cutie Reviews: Tokyo Treat May 18

Ahhhh, I took a bit longer than I would have liked to. But with good reason.

Sorta.

Basically, I spent the past few days going through all of the old crates to sort the items and dispose of the boxes/crates. They take up a lot of space when you order so many, and I bought some cute little boxes to sort the items by type and take them to my room.

I still have some to go through, but I made a lot of progress. I think I threw away about 20 boxes. But I did keep a handful of them either because I had use for them, or someone I know did. It’s actually been kind of fun going through them :3 and oddly therapeutic.

Anyway, let’s get on with it! If you like anime, manga, and video games, this box is perfect for you!

Theme: ANIME SNACK ATTACK

So, as you can see, we’re having an anime (and manga and video game) theme. Three things I adore!

LUCKY TREAT

The Lucky Treat is full of anime inspired items, and Pokemon! One of the most popular merchandising brands you find in these boxes lately. Like literally, nearly each box I've gotten recently seems to have some form of Pokemon item in it (not counting the makeups. But I know they have pokemon beauty products.)

MINUTE MAID CRAFTZ CHERRY & PEACH

I'm putting this here because the image of this is the very first one in the post. You can see it on the right-hand side there. Anyway, this is a drink by Minute Maid, a very popular juice brand that I like x3 It combines the sweet, flowery tastes of cherry and peach- I think this would perfect for spring time!

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

If you like Peach then you'd like this drink, basically. The Peach is overwhelmingly strong, and there is a faint cherry-ness to it, but it mostly blends into the peach. It was refreshing~

Sriracha Rice Chips & Don Taro Udon Snack

First up we got some delicious looking Sriracha chips made from brown rice and soy beans. As you can see on the bag in the pic. These are gluten free and flavored with a spicy kick! Perfect for those intense scenes; or when you start feeling yourself getting tired and need a wake-me-up.

Although, there was one little problem with mine...

Seeing this nice, big clean slice in the bag had me worried a teensy-bit. It came like that out of the box and it wasn't tampered with as far as I know- so I can only assume it was a last-second manufacturing thing that went unnoticed. It happens.They seemed fine, so I just put them in another bag.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Besides a tiny bit of staleness they tasted really good x3 They had a "deep crunch" to them, being sorta soft (which was either staleness or due to being made out of bean and rice) but still crispy. Oddly they reminded me of chicken-flavored ramen.

They are spicy, but it has to build up. It sort of lingers on the tongue for a few minutes but otherwise you won't notice it just eating a couple. It wasn’t really hot though for being made with sriracha. But I really like eating it so maybe I just didn’t notice?

Our next item in the pic is a snacking noodle dagashi, flavored after a real udon bowl.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥

Honestly they tasted a lot like those chips did. Minus the rice-bean texture. They're not bad or anything, but I'm not super-obsessed with snacking noodles; or noodles as a whole. I have to be in the mood for them. But they didn't taste bad, as I said, and if you really like crunchy snacks (or ramen) you would probably like these.

MENTAIKO UMAIBO & SENZU BEAN EDAMAME

Oh, our usual Umaibo and share pack snacks! How I love and sometimes detest you~

Depending on the flavors that is.

Our Umaibo is one I've had, maybe two other times by now. Mentaiko is "salted, creamy pollock roe", or fish eggs if you're not familiar with the term.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥

Not being a fish person, I've never tried fish eggs before. They haven't appealed to me. So I can't say if this tastes accurately or not- to me it reminds me of their cheese-flavored ones. I’m not a big fan of this, but it’s not bad either. It's not as strange to me as it originally was the first time I tried it.

Now, I've already given my opinions of these "share packs" so I won't waste time doing it again. For this month we get packs of this edamame themed snack with a light flavoring on them. First of all, each bag is 64 calories, making this a nice snack for those who worry over their weight or just want something a little healthier.

Apparently chosen to represent the "Senzou Bean" from Dragonball. Each bag also has a cute design, made to look like a mesh bag or pouch filled with edamame!

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

If they reminded me of anything on smell alone, I'd say "cheez-its and some green vegetable". Their taste and texture is about the same too, but I do get an edamame vibe. I think its adorable how they look like them too x3 and they have a light saltiness to them that is pleasant.

Besides the snacking noodles, I’d say these were the top in crunchiness.

DRAGON BALL CHEESE PUFFS

You read that right: Dragonball Cheese Puffs. These are 91.9 calories for the bag, and include a fun card as part of a game series. I know they've made these, but I'm used to seeing the gummy ones; but because I only buy those types, it was neat to try another kind.

So... as you can see, I got Vegeta! He's my favorite x3 I can't ever use the card for its intended purpose- but I'm happy regardless.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

They're basically like any other cheese puff-based snack. However, the flavoring was actually very light on the cheese and tasted more like the corn its made out of. But it didn't taste bad, and the crispy texture is nice. These are good as long as you're not expecting a huge, cheesy flavor.

ALMOND TOFU CHOCOBI & CHOCOPIE

I think I'll swap things around and start with the Chocobi; it hasn't been in the box for a while. This time, rather than a fruit it's flavored after a specific dish: Almond Tofu, a smooth and healthy Japanese dessert. I've never tried it before but I assume it's like yogurt or pudding with a jelly texture.

The box is 139.4 calories, and was made in celebration of yet-another Crayon Shin-chan movie. This one features stickers from different regions in Japan, the one I got says Aichi. But to be honest, the only one of these I recognized was Hokkaido. I kinda wish I got that one~

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥

As usual Chocobi as a texture is pretty nice. It's crispy, and they come in such a cute shape!

However... as usual, they also go stale VERY quickly.... So I've never been a fan of them.

Now these, the flavor isn't as odd as past ones I received. It's kind of like sweet, very light coconut, maybe a tiny bit almond x vanilla-ish. I really like almonds and tofu, but I didn't come to this snack knowing what to expect so I can’t say I’m being picky.

Our other item here I was a lot more excited for, meanwhile. The Petite Chocopie by LOTTE! It's basically chocolate covered cake and marshmallow cream- but since when has that ever been a bad thing??

Per each cake/pie its 74 calories, which isn't that bad if you want something sweet. According to the back they also have a type that features a chocolate drizzle rather than coating, and has chocolate and marshmallow cream inside~

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Right off, if you don't like dark chocolate then you probably won't like these. I don't think they're made with it, but they certainly tasted like it. My mom thought so too, and she hates dark chocolate- which is a shame because I really like it. But at least I know it'll be safe from her ;3

These were pretty good, but I did have one complaint. As you can see in the picture I took they don't really sync up with the photo on the package. Which is common, I know, but what the actual item lacks in thickness it also lacks in taste unfortunately. With the rich chocolate and cake/cookies under it, the marshmallow cream is too thin- you barely taste it, if at all.

SHIN-CHAN GUMMY, SPLATOON GUMMIES, AND THOMAS THE TRAIN CHEWY CANDY

This single piece of Shin-chan Gummy is available in soda/ramune, and cola flavors. As much as I enjoy soda/ramune, I really, REALLY wish I got cola. Or maybe one of each. The image in the booklet is a tiny bit misleading because you only get 1.

I kinda had to leave it in the package because by the time I got to it (a week ago, just about) it had like... melted into the plastic. At least I assume. I tried to remove it and it was not coming. I took the picture, then I mangled it to get as much as I could out.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥

I LOVED how this tasted. Exactly like the soda/ramune flavor I like. However, I couldn't necessarily judge the quality of the gummy due to unforeseen issues. As noted above...

The next item I got was another one I was excited for cus who doesn't love Splatoon, am I right?

I only have the first game for now, but I'll be getting the Switch VERY SOON, so I'm excited to get the second on x3 I also have a cute pink water-filled squid I got from the toy store like a year or so ago.

Anyway, these gummies are available in Orange and Melon. There's also a very rare gummy shaped like an octopus that can be found in certain bags. Mine wasn't one of them. One bag is 155 calories, which is kind of lame due to how small it is. BUT at the same time, I've seen worse.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Not only are the gummies really cute, but they taste very good too. I was also happy to see that the bag is zip-lock style and they lasted for 4 months with no sign of aging!

I was so excited when I got them back in May that I couldn't resist trying them then (=´3`=)

The gummy texture... I can’t really describe. It's chewy, but not hard, and they don't take five minutes to eat either. More like a few seconds.

Our last item in this picture is the Thomas the Tank Engine Chewy Candy!

The inner-child in me was really excited to see this. Not only because the candy itself sounded good, but I grew up on the Thomas the Tank Engine stop-motion cartoons x3 Ironically, now that I'm older he seems a lot more popular. That or I just never noticed it before. There's also another sense of irony here though. Back in August, I was re-watching the super old original stop-motions I grew up on; not for any real reason, I was just bored and like the background noise.

Okay, so anyway the candy is a grape chewy candy by Lotte. It looks a lot like gum but it's kind of thicker, and what's fun is that each piece has a little puzzle on it, or you can fold the wrapper in certain ways to make shapes or "toys". Each stick, or the whole pack is 85 calories. I can't actually tell.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

It pretty much tastes exactly like grape hi-chew, the only difference is the texture. So if you like Hi-chew or grape candy you'd like this. If you don't then... you probably won't.

(Oh, and if you're curious my favorite is/was James~)

BORUTO GUMMY & BORUTO PINEAPPLE JELLIES

Our last items of the box are these two "Boruto" snacks! Boruto, if you never heard of the series is essentially a sequel to "Naruto". A series I was very fond of. However, I don't like Boruto. It's not because of the characters or anything, but because of some "decisions" they made I just didn't agree with. Besides the cute packaging and decorative detail on the bag, the jellies each feature a decorative lid design based on various Boruto characters. Each Jelly is 19 calories, and are pineapple flavored, with real pineapple juice!

This box was essentially full of nostalgia for me x3 when I was younger I loved eating little jellies. They became pretty scarce as I got older though, and one day they kind of just stopped showing up. It's a bit disappointing.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

They taste really good, it's not an overwhelming Pineapple flavor. I love the slippery, soft, squishy texture~

Our final item is this Boruto energy-drink flavored Hand Gummy :3 Hand Gummies are popular and fun, being based on the game Rock-Paper-Scissors. I've gotten one or two other gummies like this before, but if I recall they were much smaller- but I got scissors both times, including this one!

That's usually my go-to gesture and always has been ;D But you can also look at is as "peace sign" too if you wanted. Anyway, these are energy-drink flavored, but the booklet assures us that no energy drink ingredients were actually used in making this. It's simply BASED on a fizzy, sweet-and-sour pineapple energy drink.

That rested any concerns I had, because I'm one of those who people who avoids energy drinks at all cost. If I want energy I'll just eat sugar.

Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

It pretty much tastes like the jelly, but the flavor was stronger. I also really liked its super-soft texture x3

♥ Cutie Ranking ♥

Quality - 4 out of 5. The only real reason why I marked it down was because of that slice in the rice chips bag. I'm sure this was an extremely rare thing though, I usually don't have any problems with any of the items I get in this box.  

Content - 3 out of 5. I didn't hate anything at all this time around- which is almost as rare as the above mention. Usually I find one item I detest, and I pretty much only disliked one item, and even then it wasn't that bad...

Theme - 5 out of 5. Besides a couple of items, it was pretty much covered in anime stuff!

Total Rank: 12 out of 15 Cuties. I genuinely LOVED this box in comparison to the April box. It had a couple of faults but nothing serious that I couldn't overlook. Considering how excited I was for this, I feel like they could have done better- but they did really good! Maybe like a... B+

♥ Cutie’s Scale of Yummy ♥

1. Cherry x Peach Drink - It was so refreshing~

2. Splatoon Gummies - I can't say I prefer orange or melon flavors in comparison to ramune, grape, or cola- but they tasted so good and looked adorable!

3. Thomas Grape Chewy Candy - Loved. Loved. Loved!

4. Hand Gummy - I liked this just a little bit better than the jelly. It's very soft and chewy, I'd recommend these if you can find them, they come in many flavors.

5. Pineapple Jellies - I loved their soft, wiggly-jiggly texture~

6. Chocopie -  I loved the soft, cakey texture and its dark chocolate-esque taste~

7. Rice Chips - Delicious!

8. Shin-chan Gummy - I was disappointed with this because it was delicious! I just wish it hadn't stuck to its packaging. Well, that and I wish we got maybe one or two more~

9. Edamame snack - They tasted good but I just liked other stuff better.

10. Dragonball Cheese Puffs - I liked how they tasted, but I felt like it might have been a tiny bit misleading cause it didn't taste like cheese to me. I don't know if its because the information in the booklet was wrong, or... I’m very happy with the card I got though!

11. Mentaiko Umaibo - It tastes better than when I first tried it. But I can't say it's in my top 5 Umaibo list...

12. Udon Snacking Noodles - As I mentioned, these I have to be in the mood for. They don't taste bad but it's not something I'd probably reach for.

13. Almond Tofu snack - I really am not just a fan of Chocobi...

Alrighty, here we are at the end of another review. I'm sorry if it seemed like the quality started lowering so far down. I'm feeling kinda tired and my head hurts suddenly, and after trying to write these twice I really didn't want to have to try again you know?

Anyway, I hope you'll stay tuned for the next review :3 it'll be May's Doki Doki crate, then we'll be moving onto June stuff!

Until then, stay cute!