#You know there will be more when theres a roman numeral right there :)

[idkamilost]

I lowkey wanna make another meme.. like the 910 pickles one.

Pikmin shall be my next victim :)

[greenninjagal-blog]

I really like your fic recs and I don’t really keep very up to date with the latest sanders sides stuff on ao3 so, favorite fics from the past week?

Oh uh... lets see today is 8/5/2020... and I’ll do my fav fics that have just been posted or updated this week: 

Swept Away - Part Three of my favorite Sirens au, where Logan gets swept up in a storm and wonders if anyone will miss him (they will).

The Variables -  Logan bought a house in the middle of nowhere so he could avoid having to ever talk to anyone else ever again. The ghosts have other plans.

You Can Picani Family You Want - Emile fosters two kids and quickly learns he’ll do anything to see them smile.

Atypical Destiny - LAMP soulmates are determined to make their polyamory work, even if no one else thinks it will.

‘Cause Every Time We Touch, I Get This Feeling - Touch starved Janus falls for touchy-feely Patton.

Rays on My Skin - Virgil is six when he discovers that he has multiple soulmates and absolutely none of them speak his language. Oh and also three of them don’t know he exists.

If You Give a Side a Lion - Remus and Roman have some things to work out, but first it looks like theyre gonna have to save the universe, along with three other guys, an alien prince, and his assistant. A Voltron AU that I didn’t know I needed.

The Story of Emile the Seer - Emile is unfortunately born with the ability to see the future. Theres a lot of awful things people would do about that.

Alleyway - Logan finds a baby in a dumpster in an alley and decides to keep it.

Slower Than Words - Virgil can’t see. Patton can’t hear. But theyre stuck in a cell together while people conduct unethical experimentation on them, so maybe they can learn to communicate?

Old Scars, Future Hearts - Virgil has a problem asking for help when he’s overwhelmed, but this time? This time the others are already angry at him. And they wont want to help him if they’re angry at him, right?

the shapes in the silence - Virgil turns into a cat-sized Dragon when he gets overwhelmed which only becomes a problem when Patton finds him hiding in the pantry and thinks he’s a figment from imagination and not another side. And if the Light sides like him so much as a dragon....well maybe he should stay that way.

breathing and other rhythms that used to be easy - A Nightmare brings Virgil back to the dark side of the mindscape, just to check, just to make sure, just to see that Deceit and Remus are still breathing and thats it. In and out. They won’t even know he was there.

Road Trips and Missing Persons - Patton goes out for groceries and doesn’t come back home because he gets kidnapped by a child with a knife. Virgil is on the run from his crazy mother after she killed his father. Janus will do anything to get to his brother before his mother does. Remy isn’t actually dead. And Logan will strangle his entire family for not answering their phones.

Bounty - A sequel to Abduction in the Space Family series: Space, aliens and Virgil is a human in the middle of it all. Excellent series, 20/10 and I will cry about it. thanks.

The Curse of Hanahaki - In which Remus plays himself by cursing Imagination so that anyone who falls in love will cough up flowers. Aka Hanahaki but with a tangible plot.

fall out of in love with me - Deceit asks Remus to make him a potion to dilute his intense feelings for Virgil before they crush him at the absolute worst possible time for Virgil.

A Wager. - Virgil meets professional gambler and they mage a wager they both come out winning in.

i’ll sink for you - Deceit can hypnotize anyone, but Virgil is all to willing to be his plaything. 

Save the Moment - Patton takes pictures of everything. Janus notices more than he should.

Lavender - Patton can’t handle the sound of Logan and Roman’s argument, but thankfully Janus steps up to the plate. 

Mind Over Matter - Being a human in Space is just asking for trouble. Being forced to fight in fighting ring just makes Virgil another sad statistic. However, choosing not to fight his clearly harmless opponent....that makes him different.

The Apartment - Virgil moves into his first apartment and becomes best friends with the elderly man who lives next door and tells fond stories of his numerous grandkids that can never seem to make time for him. Virgil is unaware this is how to get himself adopted into a new family.

sweet tea in the summer - Roman and Patton are the sweetest of lovers through the years.

How two exasperated doctors adopted three robots - Rival Scientists Janus and Logan both have the great idea to see what their company is hiding on the same night. They were not prepared for the answer, but they can definitely get used to it. (Bickering Loceit? uh hell yeah.)

Breathe Out - Virgil will become minion for one chance to get out of the closet, thanks. aka: The other darksides are terrible, and Janus thinks that he and Virgil might be able to work well together, and somehow that puts Virgil on track becoming a Light side whether he wants to or not. (And I gush because everything this author writes is amazing)

The Debate - Part of The Other Side of the Mirror au, where Janus, Remus, and Virgil are Thomas’s core sides and big bad scary Logan shows up to ruin everything. Except that he’s actually helping and Janus might have to reconsider if the other sides are actually as bad as he’s made them out to be. 

And It Fell Away - Patton and Virgil are part of the Earth Kingdom army. Janus is part of the Fire Kingdom infantry. It seems that the only thing they all have in common are their need to escape the current battle and then the war itself, if just to save their own lives.

Come Alive - Patton tries to end it all but not-so-friendly vampire Janus stops him. Now there’s just an agreement: Patton spends one year as a vampire in the underworld city for the supernatural, and if they decide living still isn’t worth it they can take a stake to themselves, but...Janus is willing to bet they can find at least one person whos worth it. Ft: everyone falls in love with Patton at first sight, as it should be.

by the book - Librarian Virgil runs the adult section of the library, but his most interesting visitor is the tiny child who talks too fast and has really super attractive dads.

Pen Pal - Logan’s roommates all get together and Logan doesn’t think he has a place there with them, so he withdraws and turns to his pen pal for company.

Wedding Crashers -  While standing at the alter for his arranged marriage to a princess he will never love, Logan doesn’t think his really lovers are coming for him. He’s pleasantly surprised.

You Haunt Me And I Like It - Ghost Virgil has had a lot of roommates before without ever needing to show himself, but this one is just too skeptical for him to leave alone.

Wow that is a lot more than I thought I had! 

Looking for more fics? I’m got more lists here on my Fic Rec Masterlist!

[caltropspress]

FEEDBACK LOOP #7: Curly Castro’s “Weapon 13X” featuring Breeze Brewin

There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby and he kept crying and he said, “God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them!” He kept crying and somebody led him away through the crowd.

—Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (1962)

Gun flash beats the child’s head in, maniac teeth dance in a bloody grin blue lies, badge confessions, yng dude dead just beyond his mama’s arms

—Amiri Baraka, “Stop Killer Cops”

Police said Cleaver and Hutton were holed up at 1218 28th Street with two 9 mm automatic pistols, two AR-15 and one military-type M-14 automatic rifle, and a large supply of ammunition, some armor-piercing.

—Berkeley Barb, Volume 6, Number 15, Issue 139

1.

“Weapon 13X” is a diptych. Two verses; one pivot—or volta, for you bookworms. Curly Castro is first with a séance that summons the mysteries of Clarence 13X and Weapon X. These nullified variables and Roman numerals come together in an elixir mix so potent that it would make Aes Rock choke on the amalgam. Castro opens the fission gate and discharges two-hundred forty thousand mega-therms on the city of brotherly love, the city of bombs from above onto a 6221 Osage Avenue row house. Shameek just got bust in his arm, leg, leg, arm, head. The Black man is God personified, and Logan is regenerative. Adamantium claws. Mathematical jaws. Science dropped and experiments performed. Spark this like metal does when dragged across concrete.

2.  “Harriet would grab her balls, / This my gun, and this my rifle.”

Harriet Tubman gets cast by Kubrick for Full Metal Jacket, recites the Rifleman’s Creed, but it was actually a pistol she kept buried within the folds of her calico. She sallied forth seeing visions from the overseer’s heave of a weight—made her skull snap. Don’t sleep. “When the caliber’s inside you,” you can’t necessarily count on “the muzzle smoke revival.”

3.

Quelle Chris provides production, lest we forget his 2019 Guns album with its Dada-bullet, double-barreled barrage album art. The title track armed to the teeth: “Ain’t no cracking that code, / Ain’t no safety on locks, / Might as well get you one, / Procrastinating will get you popped.” The machine gun funk outs finks and COINTELPRO cooperators, conspirators, dispiriters. Here, Castro’s got those same turncoats and sucker MCs in his sights, so to speak.

4.  [The oppressor] teaches the Negro that he has no worth-while past, that his race has done nothing significant since the beginning of time, and that there is no evidence that he will ever achieve anything great. (Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933)

Castro makes a promise, provoked by those who came before him, those who brandished firearms in the faces of their enemies:

We never will disarm: these are the lies that you were sold, When your glory tripped up, you trade your weapons in for gold. With Yakub in the schools, trade your dreams, knowledge folds. Found the tome, Mis-Education Negroes…

Dr. Yakub sloshing liquids in the lab—Bunsen burners explode and the lab leak is viral whiteness. Tricknology replaces Biology. Castro is looking back while moving forward. “Doomed to repeat it”-type forewarnings. He knows the ledge and also wants his people to.

5.

aim     get your sights & its sound in abstract or journal movements to a peace settlement

dude shot my man

dead,          precious lord blow off theres no willy in th blues theres no you.

—from Tom Weatherly’s Maumau American Cantos (1970)

Castro is a “gunhand, cybernetic with spray cans, / Basquiat, baklava, Mau Mau.” That’s likely an intentional malaprop—surely his militant stance calls for a balaclava. Even still, Castro doesn’t stutter. He will still sh-sh-shift his voice on you—the dynamics of his delivery raise stakes and get guttural, scraping against sewer plates. He’s potent, even if Basquiat’s pistol appears flaccid with its hand-scrawled linework. In another piece, Basquiat starts the decolonization process at the point of a safari helmet. The image detonates.  

6.  Free country? Man, I should fuck you up for sayin’ that stupid shit alone.

“This film is a call to racial violence!” a film critic shouted at Roger Ebert after a screening of Do the Right Thing. She worried Bed-Stuy would set fire to theaters, but Lee’s 1989 film wasn’t The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. An amerikan psychotic turn to theater violence would be postponed until Aurora in 2012, and it would be white violence, which would come as a shock to none who have tracked the trajectory of white violence. Displacement is white violence, too. White violence is a sine qua non for gentrification. And so Castro allies himself with “Buggin’ Out battle brownstone houses, some Bird fans, / While Mookie turns the radio up and launched the trashcan.”

7.  “We are the weapons.”

Of late, Castro has consistently been proving you’re out your depth, with verses so allusive they suggest a strong “Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith, nobody blink. / They don’t now who the fuck that is” vibe. So what, though? At this point, Castro’s a vet, an elder. The youngins need to catch up or cash out. Get KRS-One bookish, kiddies, or be left behind. Be the weapon or never prosper. Create your own mythos: “Omega built a mother by the sun and Cyclops sent / a blurred Baraka poem capable to raise the dead. / Yet instead I use the sword...”—with Wu-Tang pronunciation of the w in “sword,” of course. History moves backwards and forwards at the same time. Language is lost and recovered. The poem is “blurred” because it’s been duplicated on a mimeograph—a machine that involves a “drum.” The words are ink-smudged. Baraka’s former partner, Diane di Prima, shouted, “"Power to the people's mimeo machines!” Accuse and attack, Baraka sloganeered. We’re talking about agency—by hand-crank, handgun, or mic check.

8.

Castro creates imagery like Emory Douglas did with paint: painfully bold and saturated with color like blood soaks clothes. Baraka called Douglas’s art a combo of “expressionist agitprop and homeboy familiarity,” which applies to what Castro does on the track. I quote Mao who called literature and art “part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause,” and Mao quotes Lenin who called lit and art the “cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.” And Baraka also said Douglas’s work:

functioned as if you were in the middle of a rumble and somebody tossed you a machine pistol. It armed your mind and demeanor. Ruthlessly funny, but at the same time functional as the .45 slugs pouring out of that weapon.

The Panthers were trapped and tear-gassed in a West Oakland basement. Eldridge Cleaver told Bobby to go out naked—unarmed as the day he was born not quite eighteen years earlier—but he emerged from the burning house fully dressed, with dignity, and he was searchlighted and shotshotshotshotshotshotshot dead.

Castro needs Brewin to make the cypher complete—a two-man killarmy using loud words in quiet wars, no silencer.

9.  “Before blurting out, try analysis, brother.”

Breeze’s Yo, listen… at the start of his verse is comparable to Sir Thomas Wyatt intoning Whoso list to hunt… to begin his 16th-century sonnet. The amalgam here is less Five Percenter plus clandestine government experimentation and more a deconstruction of the both violent and sexualized language of braggadocio. “Anything you say isn’t played like Miranda Rights,” and so we’re already with our hands behind our backs, silenced by an pig officer’s gag order. The competition doesn’t get played; they play themselves.

Sir Thomas Wyatt sets it off like so:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, hélas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore Fainting I follow.

Breeze has wanted to stay pleasant to the ears—you know, like Lauryn Hill phone sexing—so this isn’t new territory but rather a well-worn path. Wyatt’s wearied and “so sore” by “the hunt,” the pursuit of his love interest, even though he knows “where is an hind.” Still, “as she fleeth afore / Fainting [he] follows.” He can’t help himself.

Love is lost within violent pursuit. Breeze speaks of a “plan to strike” and “zero in” on a “target,” his quarry. He and Castro are “talking about broads often, no doubt, / We broad and burly as hell, / Brag about the hunt, you was jukin’ a girly gazelle.” Breeze’s assault is dizzying, a salvo from all angles: “Hit ’em with some counter clay rebuttals that’s subtle but still befuddle if dude slow.”

10.  “It’s nothin’, I gotcha, and that’s word to Super Lover Cee.”

Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud’s 1988 single “Girls I Got ’Em Locked” articulates the carceral embrace of “locking” a girl down, which—consequently—requires violence to enforce: “Don’t ever touch a girl owned by me or I’ll ruin ya’, / Slap you with my mic simultaneously as I’m doin’ ya.” The girl is commodified, and Super Lover Cee takes a proprietary attitude toward the relationship. If you overstep, you’ll be ruined, that is, you’ll fall. And while you’re prostrate, you’ll be slapped with the phallic mic simultaneously. Is the Super Lover doin’ her or you, though? What’s truly getting him off? That hypermasculine posturing skews homoerotic. Breeze Brewin laughs at you for subscribing to the nonsense: “Dag, if that was what you believe then your world be a hell.”

11.

Liberal discourse suggests policing your impulses. Put down the gun—don’t touch it. “Touchy subjects,” like racism (apparently), get the “We need to have a conversation” treatment. Look, don’t touch. Don’t touch the exhibit of stolen artifacts—those Benin bronzes in the British Museum. Beneath the topic of orignoo gunn clapping, Curly Castro’s track is about the x’s and o’s of eros as well. Many gestures meant to protect women are merely some other man staking his claim, adorning her with “diamonds in letters plain,” as Wyatt writes of the collar around the deer’s “fair neck.” Wyatt’s sonnet warns against overstepping (or even half-stepping). The collar reads Noli me tangere (touch me not)—she belongs to someone else. It’s a bad touch example. Like his fellow Indelible J-Treds, Breeze Brewin is the living circle-circle-dot-dot: nobody can touch him.

12.

Let’s bring it back to Little Bobby Hutton. When Eldridge Cleaver told him to leave the ambushed basement naked, he was thinking of Bobby’s safety. He thought the extreme measure of appearing on the street without clothes would be enough to convince the pigs he wasn’t armed. Cleaver was naïve to think so. Bobby Hutton was right to emerge clothed. In doing so, he rejected the indignity of the auction block, the lynching, the mutilation and spreading of souvenir flesh. The searchlight made Bobby Hutton the subject of a spectacle, yes, but he refused to consent to the psychosexual desires of white supremacy. He refused the castration ritual. Little Bobby Hutton, in effect, threw down a challenge to the cops: Use your imagination once again. Try to think of a few situations where your own weapon might be used against you…used against you…used against you.

Images:

Emory Douglas, The Black Panther, Vol. IV, No. 78, 1971 (detail) | Weapon X (detail, issue unknown) | Emory Douglas, Rat Subterranean News (1970) | Harriet Tubman with gun sketch | Anti-Mau Mau British propaganda poster | Newspaper headline from Negroes with Guns | Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (date unknown) | Jean-Michel Basquiat, Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, and Amorites on Safari (1982) | Screenshot from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) | Two images from the Berkeley Barb, Volume 6, Number 15, Issue 139 (1968) | Emory Douglas, The Black Panther (miscellaneous poster) | Medieval depiction of the hunt (unknown) | Image detail from the Berkeley Barb, Volume 6, Number 15, Issue 139 (1968)

[twdmusicboxmystery]

8s = 8 Year Time Jump?

Okay Peeps! I’ve been wanting to get a theory posted about this for a while, and it’s something that I’ve mentioned briefly here and there this season, having to do with the time jump. I thought it would be a super-epic sprawling post, but it’s really not. I’ll be linking to several posts I’ve written before so you can get more details, and that will keep this post relatively short.

It has to do with all the 8s we’ve seen in the show since S4 and especially around Beth. Let’s do a little recap of some of the major instances of 8.

We saw a TON of 8 clocks around Beth. Most of the clocks we saw in the background of Grady read 8:00. Details HERE.

Then there’s all the 8:20 clocks, which represent something specific about death and resurrection. Details here: (X, X, X,)

When Daryl leads the walkers into the basement in Alone, there’s a tray down there with 8 pairs of scissors. (X). I’m mentioning this one for a specific reason. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

There’s Eugene’s 8-ball reference in S6. (X)

There’s the fact that in Still, Beth and Daryl pass the grandfather clock, and it reads 8 minutes before the hour. When they pass it again, it chimes. Which means 8 minutes have passed. Again, very significant. (X)

Then there’s a prominent number 8 behind Beth in 5x09, during Ty’s death hallucination.

We have some 8s in Roman Numerals (X).

Quite frankly, there are also a lot more random 8s that I haven’t mentioned here. These are just the most significant. Click the links above for more details, understanding that I doubt I even have all the instances recorded. There have been TONS of them.

Okay, so what’s up? What’s my argument about 8s? If you read through these old theories, you’ll see that most of them argue that the 8s must point to S8. Because that’s what we thought. They must show that she’ll return in S8. How could they not, right? But she didn’t. We were disappointed not to see her in S8.

Was that a little discouraging? Sure. Uh, you know, for most people. ;D

I’ve even justified it with the fact—yes fact!—that Andrew Lincoln was originally supposed to leave in S8, but ended up staying until S9. But the more I look at all the 8s around her, the more convinced I am that we were simply wrong and they NEVER pointed to her return in S8.

I just don’t think it can be a coincidence that we saw all those 8s, and then, after 2 time jumps, we’re now exactly 8 years post-Coda.

Thesis: I think the 8s pointed to her returning after 8 years (for the characters in the show; not us). Take a second look at the instances I���ve pointed out in the past. Look past the actual number and to the way the symbol actually functions.

Clocks at Grady: The 8:00 clocks are often in the rooms of patients who have just died. We’ve always assumed that pointed to Beth’s own “death” in 5x08. And it probably did, but as @wdway pointed out HERE, the symbol for the number 8 in the Hebrew alphabet is X (X Theory) and it means “new beginnings.” (Which we can also tie into baptism/rebirth/beth = water, but that’s a whole other post.) So I think these clocks were meant to symbolize Beth’s own death (which is why we so often see her and the 8 clock with dead patients at Grady) but that she’ll return after 8 years for a new beginning.

Daryl and the 8 pairs of scissors: Remember the last thing he said was, “Go up the road, I’ll meet you there.” Beth: “I’m not gonna leave you.” Then he sees 8 pairs of SCISSORS (another Beth symbol from Grady). See what I mean? I’m thinking this showed that the meeting up the road wouldn’t happen until 8 years later and that they wouldn’t truly be together again like they were in S4 until 8 years had passed.

Grandfather clock in Still: This one is probably the most significant. I mean, we literally had them pass the clock—you know, the one with roman numerals and the latin inscription that means “time escapes”—and when they pass it again, 8 minutes have gone by. I mean, we all know there was a billion pounds of symbolism going on in that golf club, and we have a literal representation of 8…units of time passing. Again, now we are exactly 8 years post Coda. Think that’s a coincidence? Yeah, me neither.

Eugene’s 8 Ball reference is honestly a little less clear, and I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on it. On one hand, the wolves showed up right after he made this reference, so it could show that the wolves wouldn’t return/truly be beaten until 8 years later. But he also associated the 8-ball reference with “end game,” so maybe it shows that the end game (a.k.a. Beth) wouldn’t be seen for 8 years. Again, not sure on this one. Just spit-balling.

And of course the 8 behind her in 5x09 is probably pretty obvious at this point: that she wouldn’t be seen after that until 8 years had passed.

I also want to throw in that TD has read a LOT into all the time references around Beth. Yeah, there’s the clocks, but we’ve gone much deeper than that. References to resets, messing with time, time travel, time slippage. You get the idea. I’m wondering now if we were really over-thinking it. Maybe all those time references, starting from Gimple saying they were messing with time in S5, especially right after Coda, simply were a way of referring to (without actually saying) that a great deal of time would pass before they went back to Beth’s arc and told us what the hell went down during those missing 17 days.

So this is where I’m currently at in my thinking. Does it mean she’ll show up in S9 for sure? Not necessarily. Unfortunately.

I still think there’s a good chance we’ll see her this season, but I can also see the back half being very taken up by the Whisperers and them not quite getting to Beth. (I’ve said before that her return in S10 would have a certain symmetry because of all the Xs; X = Roman Numeral 10). So I think it could go either way.

If we don’t see her, I’ll be disappointed but I believe more than ever that we’ll see her somewhere, and soon. I think the only thing we can say for sure right now is that we’ll see her somewhere in this new arc that began with Rick leaving. That’s why we’re seeing so many Beth symbols, Beth parallels, images of her, her voice, etc. She’s coming in this arc.

But if the show starts moving really slowly again (we haven’t heard any peeps about another time jump anytime soon) then we might still be 8 years post-Coda in S10.

See what I mean? So yeah. Those are my thoughts about where we’re at heading into 9b.