#a fairly early sculptural experiment

[claypigeonpottery]

sold

this enormous planchette works great on a coffee-table sized ouija board lmao

[imponderabillia]

David Sylvian - Perspectives (Polaroids 82-84)

”In the early part of 1982 I had, for numerous reasons, decided to take a rest from songwriting. This was to be the first break I had had since I’d started as a child at the age of 12. It was therefore not surprising that to relieve the subsequent frustration caused by this action, I turned to the only other creative outlet I’d known, and which had been my main preoccupation until my discovery of music, drawing.

The freshness brought on by this change, the naive pleasure of working and learning in a virtually unexplored area for me opened many doors.

Not least of which being my new found appreciation of the world of the arts. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, a universe of creativity which had always been hidden from me, suddenly came to life. I had of course been aware of works by various famous artists before, but although I was able to appreciate a lot of what I had inadvertently seen, I had never felt anything emotionally from the work in the way that I could quite naturally feel from music.

Now all was changed. I first realised this whilst visiting a major exhibition by a painter living and working here in England, Frank Auerbach. The depth and intensity of emotion I experienced surpassed anything I had felt in music for a very long time, if at all. I explain this because through these and various other similar experiences my outlook on life and work changed (or maybe matured would be more appropriate) at quite a dramatic pace. In the midst of these changes came my first attempts at Polaroid montage.

It was during a visit to Hong Kong, one of the stops towards the end of a rather lengthy tour, that I first started working with Polaroid film. As was my routine throughout the tour, I would return to my hotel after the day’s performance and there I would stay for the remainder of the evening, reading and drawing sketches. On our arrival in Hong Kong we found ourselves with a day free. However, having been there fairly recently, and not having particularly enjoyed the place, I decided to spend the day at the hotel, and among other things write some letters and complete some rawings. By evening, having filled all the paper space available with notes and sketches and wishing to continue working on ideas formed while drawing, I turned to the only materials available to me at that time, the Polaroids. This is how it started and so it has continued since, constantly developing, trying to find different uses for the same materials, and when a new technique shows itself using it to the advantage of creating interesting photographs/pictures. I feel I must point out that although looking back I know there were other artists working with Polaroids in the same, or similar areas as myself (most notable of these being D. Hockney), at this time (the remaining months of ’82) I was working totally by means of self-discovery as I had no other possible guides. I gradually became more aware of the work of others towards the middle of ’83. Sometimes consciously (and I hope with humour) I place references in my work to that of others.

Prior to my work with the SX-70, my interest in photography was to be found in areas of concept and design. I never intended or expected to become personally involved in photography, indeed even now my knowledge of the practical side of the art is extremely limited. For this reason and also because of the nature of the work I do, I would not begin to think of myself as a photographer. I have far too much respect for the people who spend a large part of their lives working with the camera (Brassai, Kertesz, Riboud, Benton, McBean and Ray) and who give true meaning to the word.

I do not see the work in this book as an end in itself. Essentially I believe that there are only a handful of pictures I have produced which transcend the techniques used and show a possibility of standing up to time. The remainder are either very personal pictures and ‘or show and explore germs of ideas which may be followed up in the future by work in other mediums.

My experimenting with Polaroids is about at an end. Although I’m still working with the techniques I’ve developed in an attempt to produce pictures of a more lasting quality. I’ll soon be turning my interests to new areas, using, along with new ideas, the more valuable I have learnt from working with Polaroids."

[alaawritesablog]

Songs Of My Life: Bill Bragin

Bill Bragin is a man with many experiences both in the USA and the UAE. As you read ahead, you will see moments of realisation and learning throughout his life.

THE JOKER - STEVE MILLER BAND

“The Joker was the first 45 I've ever bought. It was probably the first record I bought as a child. I was probably 6 or 7 years old when I bought it, I got my allowance money and my parents let me pick out one record. It's a sort of blues rock song and the lyrics have fairly simple rhymes. In the time leading up to this interview, I have relistened to my playlist a lot and one thing I realised is how many of these songs had adult themes that I couldn’t pick up on until I was way older. Steve Miller was someone who listened to a lot of old-school blues so some of the lyrics he used are blues imagery. For example, “I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree”. So Steve Miller was my first vision of rock and, sort of, the first time I got to choose my own songs”

CRAZY HORSES - THE OSMONDS

“So, The Joker by Steve Miller Band has this slide guitar part that sort of reminds me of an excited little kid and I realised that a similar guitar part was in the song Crazy Horses by The Osmonds. So, The Osmonds were sort of like an early boy band. They were a Mormon family band from Utah, and were essentially the white version of the Jackson 5. They were sort of ripping off the Jackson 5, there is this one song of theirs that sounds extremely similar to ABC. A lot of their songs were very pop or were like power ballads, but this song was very different, it’s a sort of fake heavy metal song. And when I was in college, I had a radio show and I used to play it on almost every radio show. It's a song I used to love a lot as a little kid and my first concert experience was seeing the Osmonds live with my summer camp.”

DETROIT ROCK CITY - KISS

Hard rock was a large part of my upbringing. Kiss were making a kind of glam rock, but Kiss did it with a hard rock and metal edge. They all wore different make-up and had different characters. This reminded me of David Bowie, who was also a large part of my upbringing, and his many characters. Detroit Rock City was a song that came out in their 1976 album Destroyer and was played at the first big concert I attended on my own. This song really played with my head. It was about a man trying to get to a show and then dying in a car crash on the way there, but he is the one telling the story to you. The guitar solo is still something I can sing along to, to this day. 

Mustapha - Queen

The second arena show that I went to was to see Queen at Madison Square Garden for my birthday. I had my family buy me tickets to the show and the complete Queen catalogue. This was after Bohemian Rhapsody had come out. When I ask myself, why am I here in Abu Dhabi and why I listen to music that is not in English it brings me back to this song. It was probably the first time I heard a reference to Allah on a record. Freddie Mercury grew up in Zanzibar to a Persian family, so he was really connected to this region.

Watching The Detectives - Elvis Costello

This song was part of my introduction to reggae. I first listened to Elvis Costello on his third album and one thing about that album was that it came with a bonus live EP. One of the songs on that EP was Watching The Detectives. The baseline of this song is reggae, and this was around the time when many of these musicians were reggae fans trying to incorporate it into their music as much as they could. Different from the lyrics of Detroit Rock City, these lyrics are more complex. They're very metaphorical so you’re not quite sure what the story is. Elvis Costello, along with David Bowie, has to be one of my favourite artists. I must have seen them in concert 30-40 times. At my Bar Mitzvah, I had a centrepiece at the kid's table that was an Elvis Costello Styrofoam sculpture. He is someone that I have since gotten to know, so he is also one of the musical idols that I know personally.

King of Rock - Run DMC

I might’ve had a few 12-inches and singles, but King of Rock was the first hip-hop album I ever bought. This album first broke me out of being so rock oriented. Even though this song is considered rap rock today, it used only to be viewed as hip-hop. In the early days of rap, they used to sample a lot of rock records. When you listen to King of Rock today, you realise that they blurred the lines between the distinction between what is rap and what is rock. This brings me back to the first song on this playlist “The Joker” by Steve Miller Band. Both of those songs have really simple rhymes, almost like nursery rhymes, and they both have lyrics that brag about how cool they are. So King of Rock is not too far off from the music I used to listen to before and it’s what made me the rap fan I am today.

Rios, Pontes e Overdrives - Chico Science & Nacao Zumbi

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi are from a small town in the northeast of Brazil called Recife. They were the leaders of a musical movement called Maguebeat. Manguebeat consisted of artists from the northeast of Brazil that took the local rhythms and combined them with metal, hip hop and other Western genres. In 1995, I brought them over to the US to perform at Central Park for SummerStage for their first show outside of Brazil. Me bringing them over to Central Park meant they gained some respect in Brazil for what they were doing. This was when I realised my career had reached the point where my choices could have that much impact. When they were in New York, we went over to this hip-hop club and they knew the words to every hip-hop classic that came on. This interaction helped me realise that while they had all the same influence I did, everything they were doing was hyper-local and could only be from the northeast of Brazil. The way they fused together the hyper-global and hyper-local changed the way I view music forever.

Ana Mashoof - The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra

I was trying to find what the “Manguebeat” of the UAE is and who are the ones exploring the hyper-global and the hyper-local. I came across Noon and they were one of the first groups I came across that, to me, sounded like the UAE with three different musicians from different backgrounds. That mixture of hyper-global and hyper-local has been present in each person I bring over to The Arts Center (at NYU Abu Dhabi). They're all doing things with the same idea just within different contexts. 

One of the first concerts of traditional Khaleeji music that I went to when I first came to Abu Dhabi was by a group of Bahri musicians from Kuwait, that were part of a conference at NYU Abu Dhabi, Mayouf Mejally. I got to know Ghazi Al-Mulaifi an ethnomusicologist who was studying for his PhD at the time. We went with an NYU Abu Dhabi class to visit him in Kuwait when he had his first concert with his own band, where he started to take the traditional rhythms from the diwaniya of Bahri music and mix it with jazz and that band became Boom Diwan and Ana Mashouf has, sort of, become their theme song, for me. Ghazi now lives in Abu Dhabi and teaches at the University and we’ve done a lot of different projects together like the Cuban Khaleeji Project, which this song is from.

[laylasfinalmajorresearchproject]

Week 2

W/C 30.09.2024

During the second week I continued my artist research. After tutorials with Lauren and David I was referred to a few more artists that relate back to the themes that I had expressed a particular connection to. The themes I showed interest in initially being: Installations, Immersive environments, interactive design, creative tech in live music industries, set design, and immersive theatre.

Below is my initial mind map of interests that I included in my first pitch.

My tutorial feedback lead me to the artists:

James Turrell

Mariko Mori

Block 9

Derrick Jarmin

Olafu Elliason

James Turrell-

James Terrell "master of light" is an American artist that is known for working with light, and space movement. He investigates the 'materiality of light' and centres his practice on 'perceptual art'. His work was influenced predominantly by the notion of feeling in pictorial art.

Pictorial: "of or expressed in pictures"

Pictorial art: I interpret pictorial art as the visual communication of the artwork. Capturing depth and dimension within a piece that is communicated entirely visually.

He had an early interest in cosmological phenomena, which seemed to stem from his father's occupation in aeronautical engineering. His mother's christian beliefs also instilled this idea of everyone having their own 'inner light'. These concepts combined with his studies into perceptual psychology, I think, were quite clear inspirations for his work.

"Regarded as one of the founders of the mid-1960s California Light and Space Movement, Turrell invented signature forms that intensified the experience of sight and perception."

I feel as though his work and practice was quite futuristic in a sense. I think that the methods he used and his actual practice seems like quite modern ways of working and outcomes. His process seems to be fairly iterative, he worked initially, using gases to create flat flames that burned in even colours. These early works proved challenging to control, halting further experimentation in the medium. This being the turning point into high intensity projectors as lights sources.

I have always liked working with projections, and think he does this very effectively. He progressed into experimenting with scale, colour, architecture, shape and more. I like how his pieces are quite simple, sometimes as simple as recording the relationship between shape and colour. These ideas combined with the completely immersive nature of his work I think is the perfect way to highlight his method of pictorial story telling.

Mariko Mori -

Mariko Mori was another artists that was referred to me. With her works though I did like them I was more drawn to the sentiments and ideology of her practice. She explores universal questions at the 'intersection of life, death, reality, and technology'. I liked this idea of creating something that explores questions, perhaps something with quite a philosophical undertone such as themes like; life, death and reality.

Her work ranges from sculptures, to immersive installations. I looked closer at a specific piece of hers. it was a recent installation that she did called "Ring: One With Nature". It sees a 6 meter high ring installed at the top of a Brazilian waterfall. This piece was installed as a reminder of the unity between man and nature. It was unveiled just three days before the rio olympics in 2016, and was also built s an emblem of the unity of all the nations. These messages and ideals behind the pieces were again part of the reason I was drawn to her work. The interconnectivity between notions of, man and nature and, various nations I feel were nice sentiments to the design and I have always enjoyed the extra level of depth that these ideologies bring to the pieces.

Block 9 -

Block 9 were lead by the artists, Gideon Berger and Stephen Gallagher. The pair explore the space in which art, music, theatre and politics collide. They often work with the construction of complete immersive, alternative temporary realities. Their work 'incorporates a wide range of disciplines, from live music and performance programming, through video, set and lighting design to creative consultancy and art direction.'

They have worked closely with huge names such as; Glastonbury, Gorillaz, Skrillex, Lana Del Rey and Due Lipa. They have a firm footing in the design world within live music spaces, thus making them a perfect artist to research.

The artists Gorillaz, were also fun to look into as they have such a unique niche. They are a virtual band, that consist of 4 members. 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle and Russel Hobbs. The actual band was formed by Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett. I found the concept of this band so interesting, and can see how Block 9 would work so effectively alongside them. They had collaborated with them on various occasions. I looked into their 'The Now Now' tour. It was an international festival and arena tour that saw Block 9 collaborating with them to make new creative content. They designed a 'visual identity for the show which journeys through back-catalogue classics, across the pixilated landscape of ‘Humanz’ and into the unchartered territories of brand new album, ‘The Now Now’.'. The whole design of the project saw this journey to their new album. I like how they designed following this narrative while ensuring it stayed relevant to the music. The result constructed a more immersive, psychedelic world of light and colour.

Methodology: Production design, Art Direction, Video Direction, Collaboration.

I like this sense of escapism from the artists. The whole atmosphere being a place in which people can completely transcend and export the audience into a new world. I feel that this was a most appropriate artist group to research as it really conforms to the interests that I had identified and listed in my original pitch. Looking into other pieces of theirs I identified various other pieces that I liked which further reassured that these artists are worth having researched. Especially being that have always had an interest in live music spaces, it was useful to see that there are professional design positions within the live music industry.

[trkking]

Snow Park Goa: How to Reach the Main Spot?

Dreaming of experiencing the magic of snow in the tropical paradise of Goa? Snow City Goa is the perfect destination to beat the heat and enjoy a winter wonderland! Located in Baga, it offers an exciting array of activities that will make you forget you're in one of India’s hottest states. But how do you get there, and why should Baga Beach be your starting point?

Why Baga Beach? The Best Place to Begin Your Snowy Adventure

Baga Beach is not just a popular tourist spot in Goa; it’s also the closest and most convenient landmark to Snow Park. Being a well-known area with excellent connectivity, it serves as the perfect base for tourists. From Baga, the park is just a short drive away, making it easy to navigate, especially for first-time visitors. Plus, the vibrant atmosphere of Baga offers a mix of fun, food, and leisure, allowing you to seamlessly transition from a beach day to an ice-filled adventure at the Goa Ice Park.

About Snow Park Goa: An Icy Escape in a Tropical Paradise

Snow Park Goa is one of the top attractions in the state, providing an unforgettable experience with its unique snow-themed activities. You can enjoy a plethora of fun options like snow volleyball, sledging cars, and even an ice bar serving drinks in real ice glasses! Whether you're building a snowman or sliding down ice slopes, this park offers a perfect getaway from the tropical heat with a temperature maintained at -5°C.

Snow Park Ticket: Priced at ₹549 per person, it includes entry to the park, a certified instructor, and unlimited access to all rides.

Timeframe: Snow Park Goa Timings is between 11:00 AM and 7:00 PM, so plan your visit accordingly to make the most of your day.

Activities to Enjoy at Snow Park Goa

Snow Sculptures & Ice Slide: Create your own snow masterpiece or slide down the icy slopes.

Ice Bar: Sip on your favourite beverages served in glasses made entirely of ice.

Sledding Car & Snow Volleyball: For those who love a bit of thrill, these activities offer endless fun at highly reasonable snow park ticket prices.

DJ Party with Laser Lighting: Dance to groovy tunes on a snow-dusted dance floor – a surreal experience in Goa's warm climate.

How to Reach Snow Park Goa?

Getting to Snow Park is fairly straightforward:

By Air: The nearest airport is Goa International Airport, approximately 42.9 km from the park. From here, you can take a cab or taxi directly to Baga.

By Train: The closest railway station is Madgaon Railway Station, 49 km away. Trains from major cities connect to Madgaon, and you can then hire a taxi to Baga Beach.

By Road: If you’re in Goa, the most convenient way is to drive to Baga Beach, which is a well-known location with easy access to Snow Park.

Plan Your Visit to Maximize Fun

Arrive Early: Reach the park by 11:00 AM to avoid crowds and enjoy all the activities without rushing.

Dress Comfortably: Although you’re in a snow park, light and comfortable clothing is recommended as snow gear will be provided.

Follow Guidelines: Listen to the instructor’s briefing carefully and follow all safety protocols for a fun and safe experience.

Wrapping Up: The Ultimate Cool Adventure in Goa

Snow Park Goa provides a rare chance to experience a snowy wonderland in a tropical location. With easy access from Baga Beach and a host of activities to choose from, it’s a must-visit for anyone looking to add a unique twist to their Goa vacation. From making snowmen to enjoying a drink at the ice bar, there’s something for everyone here. So grab your Snow Park Ticket, head to Baga Beach, and get ready to chill out like never before!

[centralparkcollection]

10 romantic spots in London to take your partner

With its dreamy viewpoints, old architecture, and excellent dining opportunities, London is understandably a hotspot for romance. While preparing a romantic getaway to central hotels, London, bookmark these romantic spots to take your partner to. 

Tower Bridge 

It’s hardly quiet nor off the beaten track, but Tower Bridge is such an impressive structure to behold from the bankside – especially when you’re with your special someone. Besides, getting a selfie together with the bridge in the background is a must for your photo album.

Primrose Hill

Rising behind Regent’s Park, Primrose Hill is a grassy knoll that overlooks the royal park toward the urban skyline. It’s romantic at all times of the day but especially magical at sunrise or sunset. Check the timings while planning your trip to central hotels, London.

London Eye 

Book your ride on the London Eye to coincide with the sunset for the most romantic experience. Each turn lasts around 30 minutes and you can even upgrade the experience to include a glass of bubbles or rent out a private capsule for you and your significant other.

Italian Gardens

Gardens are always steeped in romance, but when they are modelled on typical Italian gardens, they’re a recipe for love! The Italian Gardens are located in the northern part of Hyde Park. Consisting of fountains and sculptures, they are a delight to roam at any time of day. Plus, they are generally fairly quiet. 

Leadenhall Market

This ancient marketplace with its Victorian architecture will take you straight back to yesteryear. Visit bright and early for a tranquil experience while you linger over pastries and coffee. On the other hand, return in the evening for a sophisticated cocktail in a swanky setting. 

Covent Garden 

The old Apple Market at Covent Garden is awash with stylish wine bars and dessert cafes. If you have West End theatre tickets, this is a great spot for a pre-show aperitif. The wider area contains some of the most romantic restaurants in London. Perfect for a date night while staying at central hotels in London,

Queen Mary’s Rose Garden

Located in Regent’s Park, Queen Mary's Rose Gardens presents 12,000 rose bushes of all hues. For the best experience, you will need to visit from mid-summer onwards when the roses are in full bloom. 

Sky Garden

If you want the romance and views of the London Eye without the hefty price tag, visit the Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch Street. Panoramas sweep across London from the deck while you can also explore the internal rainforest. Although you must secure your entry slot in advance, the attraction is free to visit. 

Richmond

This affluent waterside district is a joyful afternoon out from central hotels in London. Once there, you can rent a rowing boat, share a pub lunch, or follow the scenic riverside path.

The Hill Garden and Pergola

Venture to the northernmost stretches of Hampstead Heath to visit this Georgian-era arbour and ornate terrace with views across the entire woodland park. Don’t forget your camera!

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/16/2022: GRIMCUTTY

N.B. This review is very spoilery.

***

I love internet scare movies. I watch them all. It makes no difference to me whether they're as sophisticated as Kiyoshi Kurasawa's PULSE, as ludicrous as FEAR DOT COM, or as repulsive and pretentious as David Schwimmer's TRUST; expressions of paranoia about the interweb are invariably interesting to me, and often funny. Part of the problem is just the basic unfilmability of the online experience—it almost always comes off as silly unless it's as worked up as THE MATRIX. But the luddite hysteria that underwrites so many of these movies always brings to mind the backwards farmers in GLEN OR GLENDA who gravely warn, "If God had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings!" Truthfully, I do believe there are problems with social media and being chronically online, but my level of caution is nowhere near that which is evoked by the absolutely hilarious 2013 Canadian TV show Darknet, which I found utterly fascinating in its fantastical fearmongering. As a fairly online person myself, maybe there is something comforting about the outrage expressed by many of these productions, that is so hyperbolic as to be totally unreal.

I didn't mention Tate Moore (left) in this review because I just wasn't being that thorough, but she's really excellent and I hope she makes more horror movies.

GRIMCUTTY is satisfying to me because ultimately, it isn't really about what happens online—and it specifically does not accuse young people of being brainwashed, overstimulated potential victimizers and victims. Writer-director John Ross's movie clearly references Slender Man-style phenomena in which a meme metamorphoses into a real life threat, but his film is ultimately about parenting, and specifically about the dangers posed by not trusting one's children. Sara Wolfkind plays Asha, a teenager who sparks her parents' ire when she drops out of the track team. Although Asha is just not as interested in sports as her parents think she should be, they blame her choice on internet addiction, and begin implementing increasingly strict rules about device use and screen time. Unfortunately, this conflict corresponds with the growing popularity of a dark online game in which a monstrous entity called Grimcutty coerces kids into self-harm and violence against their parents. Grimcutty is real, but the gag is that it is actually feeding on the paranoia of controlling adults, and faith in it is spread not through antisocial web forums, but by a psychotic mommy blogger who is poisoning the minds of very online parents.

Asha's parents are played by the extremely funny Usman Ally in a great horror turn, and my secret girlfriend Shannyn Sossamon. Amusingly, Sossamon is in a 2005 internet scare movie called DEVOUR, in which a gang of misfit teens get hooked on an online game where they receive threatening phone calls from their own future selves that command them to do bad things. It's hard to describe because it's hard to understand, but it is an early reflection of meme-y internet challenges like the Blue Whale game, which is said to have driven young participants to suicide. GRIMCUTTY seems to refer most directly to the Momo challenge, which grew out of a decontextualized image of a sculpture by Keisuke Aiso, resembling an extremely scary chicken lady. This game takes the format of Blue Whale in that players are given increasingly dangerous dares that culminate in suicide. Of course, it's hard to parse the hoaxes and hype from the real damage done in at least some cases by these challenges, but an even bigger matter of curiosity is, why would anyone agree to participate in one of these games? The adults in GRIMCUTTY blithely remark that kids will do literally anything that becomes trendy, and it is exactly this condescending attitude that contributes to the ensuing horror.

The point there is salient: GRIMCUTTY becomes real not because kids are assholes, but because parents are willing to believe the worst about their own children. Oddly, the movie currently has its own entry on knowyourmeme.com, which the site notes is still being researched and evaluated. One of the pieces of information collected there is a negative review from Mashable that laments the movie's inability to "discover even deeper horrors within the depths of online culture." I think this completely misses the point of the movie, and I suspect maybe a lot of viewers are missing the point in a similar way. This is not about teen lemming mentality, nor is it about the dark bowels of the internet into which we should go only by the grace of god. It's about the threat young people face of being dehumanized and disempowered by adults who can't let them participate in the authorship of their own narratives. I'm not lauding it as a new masterpiece, but having seen a lot of movies in this subgenre, I can say that GRIMCUTTY takes an approach I find very refreshing.

[bleachbleachbleach]

💠華麗結晶💠

This feels like the kind of post that will languish in drafts for a year if I don’t write it right now, on a time limit, so here goes! This weekend involved a lot of Tourism and tams and my slow burn horror realization that all of the food was going to be held hostage by Socializing with the Regional Archetype Parents of my sister’s cohortmates. But before all that my family and I went to a museum and looked at glass flowers, so I spent a lot of time staring into the middle distance thinking about those. 

Specifically, these ones:

These are plum blossoms, and they are made out of glass. HOW. WHAT. And rest assured, this iPhone snapshot does not do their uncanny verisimilitude justice. In person, it’s completely unreal. They were made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th century, and now I’m obsessed with them.

Even more specifically, I wanted to know: 

Can Hitsugaya make flowers like these out of ice? 

(For Hinamori, obviously. They are plum blossoms, after all.)

We know from the SC that Hitsugaya does ice sculpture--enough to have a semi-regular column about it. Personally, I headcanon that the majority of these sculptures are in the vein of Ruth Asawa’s work, abstract and interested in negative space and in thinking about qualities of space, weight, volume. This headcanon mostly comes from the ash net vacuum ice wall thing he does with Matsumoto in TYBW. But canonically, mostly we just know that he made that very ornate but also ridiculous chair: 

[Colorful Bleach]

I find the chair hilarious, because add a few gargoyles and this is also 100% an Edward Elric chair, and I guess I can’t imagine Hitsugaya naturally posing with something he made like that unless he were explicitly told to, because this is also 100% one of those awkward Early 00s Soccer Team Photos where you have to pose with a ball in the most ridiculous way possible. (As a survivor of this era of soccer photography, we’re talking like... posed lying on the ground propped up on elbows, legs crossed and the ball balanced between your ankles. Why?)  Hitsugaya probably hates that photo, LOL.  But I digress.

We also know he’s made this bad boy:

[Episode 316]

Though maybe that doesn’t count, since I headcanon that he does do the ice sculpting manually rather than magically, and is meticulous about it. This ice blorbo took like 2 seconds and was definitely magical. Talk about phoning it in for Sad Ghost Kid though, ahahaha. (I am joking. The kid loved it, and all he wanted was to see snow. He didn’t want or need some rando showing off his mad art skillz at him. Ice Blorbo is perfect and the best thing about the entire episode.)

But while we’re talking about magical ice... As far as his capacity for artistic verisimilitude goes, we also know he’s made this weird little guy:

(Bonus headcanon: I think he developed this technique after the fight with Luppi. I don’t know how much he was able to keep track of re: Urahara’s fight with Yammi and his use of his blowup doll gigai while he was running around setting up his own attack, but afterwards he was definitely interested in/wary of Urahara. There’s something about this move that doesn’t feel 100% his style, but I am very attracted to the idea that it was inspired by a combination of his encounter with Aizen in the Central 46 HQ + glancing knowledge of Urahara’s gigai.) 

Though, again, this seems less in the vein of hyperreal sculpture than it is some kind of atmospheric mirage that’s making use of water/light refraction to create a double. So maybe it’s not quite what we’re looking for:

[Chapter 357]

Verdict: Given the examples we have to work with, I kind of feel like Hitsugaya could not, at present, make ice flowers on the level of the Blaschka glass ones. He has the most experience working with ice at scale, and producing things very quickly under duress. Even though the ice sculpting seems to take a different tack--producing things slowly, with no time limit--the projects we’ve seen tend to be fairly large, rather than flower-sized. Credit where credit’s due, Hitsugaya would have to work for it to get on the Blaschkas’ level.

However, I absolutely think that given enough time to do that work, Hitsugaya absolutely could and would. He’s already done work with flower motifs:

[Chapter 359]

So really, it’s just a matter of taking the scale down, and focusing on a different element of craft, both of which seem entirely within Hitsugaya’s wheelhouse and within the realm of things he would be interested in.

He probably spent his entire 10-year timeskip making tiny hyperrealistic ice flowers and learning how to do ice enamel coloring. They all finally had the time.

[demi-shoggoth]

2022 Reading Log, pt 11

It’s taken me a while to get up the energy to read this month, let alone reflect on what I’ve read. But here’s what I’ve been reading lately.

50a. Show Me the Bone by Gowan Dawson. I wanted to like this book; I really did. The concept is interesting: it’s about Georges Cuvier and his “Law of Association”, which claimed that the entire structure of an extinct or unknown organism could be inferred from a single bone or tooth (hence the title). And the thesis is interesting: it’s about how this original concept was distorted to fit multiple social, political and scientific agendas in England, culminating in its most visible incarnation of the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures, which make large, sweeping, and generally incorrect assumptions about the animals they depict. But the writing is so dull. The authorial voice embodies almost all of the bad habits of academic writing, to the point where getting through the book is a real chore. This is a book that I might come back to given a lot of free time and nothing else to read, but I’m too busy (and there’s so many books I’d rather enjoy) to struggle through it.

51. Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film by Craig Ian Miller. The title refers to the main thesis—that there are phases of werewolf movies where the monster represents different ideas, rather than being a monolithic “the beast within” signifier, as werewolves are often reduced to. The book talks about Larry Talbot as being representative of the American experience in WWII in the Wolf Man sequels, discusses the fear of disease and the division of mental and physical illness with An American Werewolf in London, the anxiety about teen subcultures and school shootings in Ginger Snaps, and a lot more. One thing I particularly liked about the book is that it discusses some movies about non-werewolf shapeshifters when they’re thematically relevant (like a compare/contrast between Cat People and its dumber, werewolf ripoff Cry of the Werewolf).

52. Drakōn by Daniel Ogden. Now here’s a dense academic book that actually reads well. This is a survey of dragons and snakes in Greek mythology, religion and culture, starting with a look at the various myths about dragons and dragon slayers, and then moving to anguiform gods and snake cults. Although the basic stories are fairly familiar to me, there’s a lot of material that was new, typically sourced from authors whose works are less known and translated than Ovid, Homer or Hesiod. The last chapter talks about early Christian dragon lore, leading of course to Saint George, and how this was influenced by Greco-Roman ideas of how dragons worked. The one thing I wish this book had were more images. A lot of pottery and sculpture is described without being illustrated—we get accession numbers (many of the pieces that are not shown are from the Louvre) and occasional “reproductions by the author”, but a lot goes without images. Especially since some of the depictions sound wild (like a Hecate with a snake body, snakes for hair and two dog heads emerging from her torso).

53. Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces by Laurie Winkless. This is yet another popular science book from Bloomsbury Sigma, and like the rest of the line, it’s very good. The theme of the hour is material science, namely about the properties of surfaces and friction. Each chapter looks into applied physics for one particular topic—breaking the sound barrier, the behavior of rock causing earthquakes, and how geckos stick to ceilings are all discussed, to give you an idea of the breadth of the book. Each chapter highlights how much we still don’t know about friction, while simultaneously discussing how much we do know and can apply, even if the exact mechanisms are still debated. I never knew that the physics of curling were so contentious.

54. Envisioning Exoplanets by Michael Carroll. See folks, this is why you need an editor. This book is by one of the foremost authorities on the hunt for exoplanets (planets outside of the Solar System), and talks about how we find them, what we have found, what the planets are like and which ones may be able to support life. The art is gorgeous, showing images of stars, moons and planets vastly unlike ours but still seeming familiar and realistic. Unfortunately, the book is very poorly organized. Topics will change between paragraphs, or even within a paragraph, without warning or transition, or seemingly any obvious relationship between topics. Technical terms will be used before they are formally defined. Units are used interchangeably (notably AU, kilometers, and no actual numbers, just approximations of distance compared to the Sun’s planets). The overall effect is very stream of consciousness, as if you were having a conversation with an expert who was only sort of invested in making sure they were understood. There’s good stuff in this book, but sorting it out was a frustrating experience.

55. The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories about Mystery Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan. I didn’t realize that this was a follow-up when I grabbed this from the library, but this is a sort of sequel to Is It All In Your Head? which I read last year. The topic is again psychosomatic illnesses, but this time how they are viewed and manifested in different cultural lenses. The titular “sleeping beauties” are children, usually female, who go comatose in Sweden as a response to the threat of deportation. Other stories highlight how particular combinations of environment, culture and trauma manifest as physical symptoms, and how the cycle of pathologising normal fluctuations in pain, attention and the like are perhaps a Western manifestation of culture bound illness.

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: a fresh look at quite possibly the 80s’ most hated band, A Flock of Seagulls! Spoiler: their music is good, people in the 90s and 00s were just mean. If you want to find out more about how having the absolute best hair in the business ended up backfiring on these poor sods, look no further than my latest video. Or the transcript of it, which follows below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’m going to be diving into a discussion of quite possibly the most derided and lambasted music group of the 1980s: A Flock of Seagulls. With a strange name, a perhaps painfully stylish aesthetic, and equally trendy and of-the-moment music, that was, for a time, inescapable in popular culture, their legacy forms a perfect target for the ridicule all popular things must face in due time. But even moreso than that, I think A Flock of Seagulls have become not only a punchline in and of themselves, but also a summation of everything that was dreadful and excessive about the early 1980s, with its “Second British Invasion” of synthesiser-driven New Wave. I can think of no better example of this kind of abuse than a famous line from the 1999 comedy film, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. The film is largely a love letter to the 1960s and its Mod aesthetics, and the protagonist, a super-spy unfrozen from this era in time, dismisses the history and culture of the 1970s and 80s as nothing more than “a gas shortage, and A Flock of Seagulls.” But at the time of this writing, we’re about as far away from Austin Powers as the film was from the release of this album, the band’s 1982 debut LP, so I think it’s been long enough that we can start to re-evaluate A Flock of Seagulls’ rightful place in music history.

While this self-titled album was the group’s first long-player, their first release was the 1981 single “It’s Not Me Talking.” Notably, this track was actually produced by the legendary Bill Nelson, who also released it on their behalf via his personal label, Cocteau Records. Ever since discovering this for myself, I’ve found the connection between Nelson and A Flock of Seagulls fascinating, and also satisfying. Despite the gulf between their respective reputations, I do think their work has a lot in common, at the end of the day: swirling washes of synth disrupted by screaming guitars, not to mention that shared interest in Midcentury rock and roll aesthetics.

Music: “It’s Not Me Talking”

These two acts would, of course, go their separate ways shortly after, and they ended up in completely opposite camps, with Nelson becoming a cult favourite with little crossover success, and A Flock of Seagulls going on to create what is, undoubtedly, one of the most iconic songs of the entire decade.

Music: “I Ran”

What does one even say about a song like “I Ran”? Over the years, it’s certainly gotten somewhat overplayed, but I can’t really hold that against it. It’s just a damn good song. Both ethereally menacing as well as catchy and rather accessible, “I Ran” takes the atmosphere suggested by “It’s Not Me Talking” and kicks it into another gear, with a harder-hitting hook and the introduction of that highly distinctive and of-the-moment echoing guitar effect. Some will hear it as little more than evidence that the song is hopelessly dated, but I’ve never thought of it as anything other than satisfying to listen to. If you ask me, I figure all art that exists is essentially “a product of its time”--nobody ever said Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David was a lousy sculpture, just because you can easily tell it was made during the Italian Renaissance. At any rate, I’d encourage everyone reading to go back and listen to it again, trying to maintain a little neutrality. I’d recommend the album cut of it, which is significantly longer than the single version, and features a rich intro that sets the scene before that famous guitar ever makes an appearance, which I think really adds to the experience. By some reckonings, A Flock of Seagulls are sometimes considered a “one-hit wonder,” but while they certainly are remembered chiefly for “I Ran,” this album’s other singles were moderately successful as well.

Music: “Space Age Love Song”

“Space Age Love Song” is perhaps the band’s second best-remembered single, and takes their sound in a markedly different direction than that of “I Ran.” “I Ran” won popular acclaim by finding a new home for the guitar, in the midst of a sea of synth, and pushed A Flock of Seagulls into a similar space as acts like the Cars and Duran Duran, who had enough mainstream rock sensibilities to sneak a lot of synthesiser usage onto American rock radio...much as one might sneak spinach into tomato sauce when feeding picky children. But I think “Space Age Love Song” is much more palatable to listeners of pop, synth- or otherwise. It’s softer in texture, and really almost dreamy, capturing the hazy, buoyant feeling of limerence as well as any pop song ever has. I’m tempted to compare it to another synth-driven classic, whose influence towers over this period in electronic music: the great Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love.” Much like “I Feel Love,” “Space Age Love Song” combines simple, almost banal love lyrics with an evocative electronic soundscape, painting a picture of an enchanting, high-tech future where human feelings like love have remained comfortably recognizable across centuries or millennia. A similar theme of futuristic love pervades the album’s second single, “Modern Love Is Automatic.”

Music: “Modern Love Is Automatic”

While “Space Age Love Song” uses simplistic lyricism to portray the relatable universality of falling in love, “Modern Love Is Automatic” gives us the album’s most complex narrative. In a world where “young love’s forbidden,” we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers prevented from being together by some sort of dystopian authority. The male member of this union, introduced as the “cosmic man,” is apparently imprisoned for the crime of loving, but the text suggests that he may escape from this prison--or, perhaps, even be freed from it. The title, repeated quite frequently throughout the track, is perhaps the mantra of this anti-love society, a piece of propaganda being drilled into us as thoroughly as it is into these subjects: Modern love is automatic, with no need for messy, unpredictable human input.

It’s also worth noting that the song is consciously set in “old Japan,” deliberately locating it in the “exotic” East. While East Asia was strongly associated with refined, perhaps futuristic culture, I can’t help but think there’s a more pejorative sentiment operating here, rooted in stereotypes of Asian cultures unduly policing sexual freedom, and other forms of personal expression and self-determination. Ultimately, despite its futuristic trappings, “Modern Love Is Automatic” isn’t really a song about technology at all, but rather authoritarianism. ��Telecommunication,” on the other hand, engages more directly with that theme.

Music: “Telecommunication”

“Telecommunication” was also released prior to the self-titled album proper, and was also produced by Bill Nelson. While structurally similar to “Modern Love Is Automatic,” with an oft-repeated title, brief verses, and a generally repetitive musical structure full of meandering guitar, its text quite plainly discusses the titular field of technology, in a seemingly non-judgmental fashion--though it could be argued that the fairly upbeat music suggests a positive outlook on things like radio and TV. The one hitch in all of it is the very end of the last verse, which sets the song in the “nuclear age”--a nod, perhaps, to the darker applications of 20th Century technology. “Telecommunication” is perhaps indebted less to figures like Moroder, and moreso to Kraftwerk, who first solidified the rich tradition of stoic synth thumpers about everyday machines like cars, trains, and, of course, nuclear energy. I’m also tempted to compare it to an earlier work of Bill Nelson’s group Be-Bop Deluxe, “Electrical Language,” another bubbly number that playfully bats this concept back and forth.

The theme of “quotidian technology” is also present on the cover of this album, which features an interior shot of a living room, centered around a television set. The TV displays a figure playing guitar--perhaps one of those heroic rock pioneers of the Midcentury like Buddy Holly, whom Nelson was so keen to imitate. But what’s most immediately striking about this cover is its beautiful colour palette, full of deep, saturated jewel tones, treated softly with an “airbrush” style effect. Despite being a somewhat mundane scene, the image also features fanciful, imaginative touches: the floor of this room is actually a miniature beach landscape, with the “floor” beneath the TV actually being the surface of the ocean, and the TV appears to be surrounded by a colourful, glowing group of birds. Given the beachy surroundings, we could perhaps interpret them as the titular seagulls. It’s tempting to think of this scene as a representation of how technology can sweep us away, out of our everyday existence and into something richer and more exciting.

But perhaps it’s not so simple--note also the open window in the top left, whose curtain appears to be agitated by some sort of motion in the air. Perhaps these birds are not the products of television fantasy, but rather have flown in from the window, and hence hail from the “real world?” Given how tracks like “Space Age Love Song” and “Modern Love Is Automatic” tackle the theme of the mundane meeting the fantastical, I think this complex and arresting image is a great fit for the album.

While their self-titled debut spawned multiple recognizable hits, A Flock of Seagulls never came anywhere close to recapturing its success. For the most part, they struggled to remain relevant as time wore on, largely abandoning the sonic footprint of their first album, and chasing after new trends in music technology such as digital synthesisers. They would eventually break up during the mid-1980s, and though they’ve reunited in order to perform live several times, the book is probably closed on A Flock of Seagulls. Personally, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if they had stuck to their musical roots a bit more. You get a bit of that on their third LP, 1984’s The Story of a Young Heart, which thankfully brings back that iconic echoing guitar, and does so without sounding too much like a simple retread of “I Ran.” Out of all their other work, it’s the album I would most recommend to admirers of this debut LP.

Music: “Remember David”

My favourite track on A Flock of Seagulls’ debut LP is “Messages”--not to be confused with the track of the same name by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark! Moreso than anything else on the album, “Messages” has this aggressive, insistent, driving quality, and feels less like yacht rock, and more like punk rock. Despite not being released as a single, I think it’s a very strong track that’s quite easy to get into. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Messages”

[canmom]

Animation Night 50: Stop Motion

It’s here! The big five zero! Almost a year straight of animation every Thursday! Fucking wild lmao.

This week, the focus is on a particular technique that’s so broad we can only give a little bit of scattershot overview... it’s stop motion animation!

Stop motion is where you arrange objects in a scene to take a photo for each frame, and then play your photos back at film speed.

It’s one of the oldest forms of animation, and it has a distinctive look: just like with drawings, there is no motion blur, giving every frame a kind of ultra clarity. The objects you animate can be pretty much anything: from everyday objects and paper cutouts to elaborate clay sculptures built around metal armatures or even living human actors (a technique known as ‘pixilation’).

And for all that it has some advantages over drawings (like with CGI, perspective is taken care for you!) it has plenty of finicky aspects: you gotta be careful not to jog the elements of your scene, leave fingerprints in the clay, etc. etc., and there’s no onion skins to help you make sure your arcs and easing etc. are good...

To give a briefer version of that very detailed history, the earliest stop motion animations actually predate film altogether, using stroboscopic discs like the Phenakistiscope, but things naturally really took off with the invention of film cameras. Early filmmakers used tricks like pausing filming to swap an object in or out of shot (the ‘stop trick’ or ‘substitution splice’), and stop-motion seems like a pretty natural evolution of that.

So in the early 1900s you get films like those of this moustachioed chap, Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, whose pixilation gif you can see there - and who was also one of the first people to animate in clay:

...and numerous others like J Stuart Blackton (who cut stop motion with live action in films like The Haunted Hotel) and Émile Cohl (who animated with objects from toys to Japanese masks).

There’s lots more stop motion films in the silent era - considerably more than ‘traditional’ hand drawn animated films which were only barely beginning to get started! One funny example that jumped out to me is Władysław Starewicz, who was trying to film beetles - but they wouldn’t fuck on camera and kept dying under the film lights, so he resorted to replacing their legs with wires and animating their corpses. Sadly this first instance of stop motion beetle porn has been lost to history. Also lost is the work of Helena Smith Dayton, who apparently adapted Romeo and Juliet in claymation - which sounds like quite an undertaking!

By this point, animated films were starting to hit ‘feature length’. The first to arrive were stop-motion adjacent techniques, such as the incredible cutout silhouette animation of Lotte Reiniger in The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Most of the early feature-length animated films also used cutout animation.

Starewicz, who had by now moved from Russia to Paris, returns to the story now with Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) (filmed by 1930, soundtrack added and released in 1937). This is technically not the first stop-motion feature-length film, predated a decade earlier by Argentinian film La Carmen Criolla o Una noche de gala en el Colón (1918) by Andrés Ducaud, but Ducaud’s film has been lost and Starewicz’s hasn’t.

Renard is an adaptation of the classic story collection of trickster-character Renard the Fox, and presents itself in a kind of storybook-like format. By now we’re well beyond the shaky, brief experiments of the early stop motion films: Starewicz’s characters have detailed models and are capable of fairly complex expressions, and cameras have gotten much, much fancier, with much more stable lighting allowing detailed outdoor scenes and remarkably lifelike animation of birds and foliage.

From here, stop motion really takes off, and we’ll zero in on a few specific strands. But I’ll briefly mention some little curiosities: one guy George Pal specialised in ‘replacement animation’: instead of adjusting a posable clay figure or puppet slightly for each frame in a sequence, he would carve an entire fresh wooden sculpture in each frame... but don’t get too excited, one of the main puppetoon series was straight-up a collection of minstrel archetypes because hoo boy animation history is racist as shit! :/

Meanwhile, before the last few decades of CGI, Hollywood films would usually turn to stop motion for special effects... and in the 50s those effects, especially when they concerned creatures, were pretty much synonymous with one guy: animator Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen would create little articulated puppet statues, and stop-motion animate them singlehandedly, working long shifts under carefully matched lighting. The studio could then composite them with the footage of live actors using travelling mattes and multiple exposures to clone the different layers onto a new film.

(The above interview shows some of his especially elaborate effects shots on Jason and the Argonauts, along with the miniature sets and models, and he talks about some of the difficulties of stop motion animation.)

Later on, the Americans would also put out some very visually distinct stop motion in the works of Henry Sellick of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline, etc. I’m probably going to devote a full Animation Night to him down the line, so more on that anon!

Now, the 60s! On the other side of the Iron Curtain, stop motion animation was taking off in Czechoslovakia in a big way. Most famous and influential of the Czech animators is filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, who got his start making black comedy short films consciously taking after the Surrealists. His early short films (like Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) in the gif above) were mostly fully stop motion; later on he made some renowned feature films like Alice (1988) and Faust which combine it with live action; his most recent films don’t use animation at all.

It’s honestly a bit tricky to get much of a picture of Švankmajer’s life and influences. From his birth to the 1990s, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a Leninist party, but his work only once addressed this directly, in a BBC-funded propaganda film made shortly after the fall of the USSR which naturally condemns Stalinism - so he probably thought that sucked. But while it’s easy to find various academic interpretations of his films, it’s harder to get the guy’s own words! But perhaps he might prefer it that way.

Anyway what draws me to Švankmajer is that his brand of surrealism seems to include a lot of weird body stuff. Sometimes he will - much like Starewicz above with his bugs and beetles - go as far as using actual animal tissue in animation, such as in Meat Love (1988) which depicts two cuts of meat on a date. But anyway, you know that stuff gets me, from ero-guro to Lloyd’s Lunchbox and Aeon Flux, anything that does something interesting with the physical grossnesses of occupying a body. And stuff like Dimensions of Dialogue definitely scratches that itch.

Another country with a strong tradition of stop-motion is... oddly enough, the shithole I happen to live in. The UK, while it hasn’t made a significant traditionally animated film since Watership Down and When the Wind Blows, produced a pretty vast amount of kids’ TV with stop-motion animation in the 60s and 70s (stereotypically, with a nice posh RP narrator to make everything cozy and throwing in a few jokes for the parents), often collaborating with studios from other European countries. Of course, some examples of ‘classic British kids’ animation’ are actually only tenuously ‘British’ - The Magic Roundabout (1965-77) is actually a French animated series dubbed with an original script.

Whether by nostalgia or just being weird, many of these shows have managed to achieve a kind of cult status. Examples include Terry Brain’s series The Trap Door (1984) (about clay monsters in a colourfully chaotic castle set), or The Clangers (1969-72, 74) (mouse things whistle at each other on the moon), as well as, sigh, Thomas the Tank Engine (1984-2021) (terrorised anthrophomorphic trains struggle to produce in a sealed dystopia), or The Wombles (1973-75) (twee Britishness at its most suffocating - as an antidote, one might want to look into the Borribles, a kind of chaotic ACAB satire of the Wombles, which would of course never see an animated adaptation.)

Since the 80s, this particular kind of stop motion has declined (with old stop motion series largely being replaced with computer animation if they keep going) - but occasionally you get charming exceptions the Swiss-British collaboration Pingu (1990-2006), in which claymation penguins who speak a nonsense language get up to surreal sight gags.

And then, of course, we hit Aardman Animations! Based in Bristol - not far from where I grew up! clearly i was doomed - these guys brought an especially high technical standard of character animation and filming to claymation. They’re best known for the Wallace and Gromit series about a cohabiting gay furry couple (tell me I’m wrong) of an eccentric, cheese-loving inventor and a more practically-minded dog. Beginning in 1989 with A Grand Day Out, the series saw three more 20-minute-ish shorts and then a feature film, of which the best known is most likely The Wrong Trousers (1993), which ada describes better than I could:

My lodger(??penguin) has driven my husband (35m) from my home and entrapped me in remote control trousers to enable a bank heist. AITA?

This launched a spinoff series Shaun the Sheep, and generally like it seems the Aardman formula can’t miss.

Outside of Wallace and Gromit, they are also known for Chicken Run (2000), a parody of WWII escape movies like The Great Escape with anthro chickens trying to get out of a farm. It’s a good movie - though for some reason I remember most the scene early in the film where a chicken is eaten and the other chickens sea its ribs, which was quite upsetting for like eight year old bryn (and now i draw guro and subject my friends to lloyd’s lunchbox for fun! weird how things turn out).

Of course, the UK is hardly the only country to have a long tradition of stop-motion kids’ animation - just one I have reason to know! I should definitely mention the East German (now just German) stop-motion series [Unser ]Sandmännchen, or [Little ]Sandman, which has the virtue of being both the longest-running animated series ever, running without pause since 1959, and also easily the TV series with more episodes than any other at, get this, 22,200 and counting.

Along with these TV shows, there’s plenty of stop motion in the indie short film side of things. These include the short films by ‘PES’ (Adam Pesapene), whose main shtick is to stop motion everyday objects as if they were similar looking foods:

...which means lots of inventive visual humour.

Kirsten Lepore is one of my absolute fave indie stop motion animators, and honestly I could try to describe her thing but just watch that video, it’s only a couple of minutes. (She’s also the creator of the Story From North America video, which I’ve played in Mogs’s list more than a couple of times!)

Guldies is one we’ve covered before on the first indie animator night, but check out his weirdly hyperdetailed heads morphing into things or like, various bad things happening to little guys. This is only scratching the surface: poring over my YT history I also find strange little things like this guy making military history videos out of LEGO. And of course I introduced DawnOfNSSD and their titty bionicles a couple weeks back. Then from Japan there’s the charmingly silly Chainsaw Maid series by takena, which is exactly what you’d expect, and the recent Pui Pui Molcar, which puts guinea pig cars in various movie pastiches idek....

So what’s the plan for tonight? I can only do a somewhat arbitrary slice of stop motion film, but our main features are going to be Alice and Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Švankmajer and The Wrong Trousers/A Close Shave by Aardman. The rest is going to be a selection of short films, maybe a few little surprises like this film I finally tracked down out of an obscure subconscious corner (which is CGI, but centres on a grotesque kind of stop motion).

So! Animation Night 50 begins in about half an hour at 7pm UK time, at the usual place, twitch.tv/canmom! I hope to see you there! ^^

[momentofmemory]

FICTOBER 2020 - day twenty-five

Prompt #25: “Sometimes you can even see.”

Fandom: The Old Guard

Characters: Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani

Words: 1937

Author’s Note: In the aftermath of a rough mission and all the philosophical questions it entails, Joe takes Nile to the Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark. All pieces mentioned were displayed in the Objects of Wonder: From Pedestal to Interaction exhibit, which ran from Oct. 2019- March 2020. Nile POV.

>> the sweetness remains

Nile scrolls mindlessly through Pinterest, wishing for not the first time that she’d been allowed to recreate her socials.

Copley had barred her from practically all of the actually useful ones, but she’d bullied him down to just having an account on Pinterest, with the argument being that no one cared about the site. Granted, she doesn’t really want to be on Pinterest either, but sometimes the comfort of an app with infinite scroll is all she’s looking for in a distraction.

And right now, she really, really needs to be distracted.

Overly photoshopped cat pics.

Memes ripped straight from tumblr or twitter.

The most white girl aesthetic imaginable.

Three slugs ripping through her abdomen and spitting her liver out the other side—

Nile breathes in sharply. Exhales.

Her thumb resumes scrolling.

Photos of downtown that feel like home.

Recipes for harvest butternut squash soup.

Tips for keeping braids fresh longer.

Nile scrolls, and scrolls, and breathes.

Her abdomen still aches every time her lungs expand, even though she knows it really doesn’t. It’s perfectly healed; not even a scar for her troubles. But it’s hard to forget how her instincts had screamed that a gut shot like that shouldn’t be survivable, even as she pushed herself towards the next target.

(She didn’t survive it.)

(She didn’t survive the next half dozen times it happened, either.)

“Did that phone of yours do something to offend you?”

“Whoa!” Joe’s sudden appearance next to her only makes her clench her phone tighter. She forces out a laugh and eases the tension out of her fingers. “Feel like you should know better than to sneak up on someone that’s part of a bunch of immortal warriors.”

“Most of them would have caught me coming long before you did.”

Nile snorts. She scrolls a few more seconds, then closes the app and opens Temple Run. The game’s ridiculously old, but she’s a millennial. Sue her for being nostalgic.

She can feel Joe watching her as she starts the round.

“Am I correct in thinking you enjoy the arts, Nile?”

It’s not the question she was expecting, and she winds up tilting the screen to the left a half second late, and her character falls off the bridge.

It’s okay though, because she can just use a gem and respawn in the same place, so it’s basically like not dying at all.

Right?

“Uh, yeah,” she says. She winds up restarting the round entirely. “The military was supposed to pay for my degree, but I don’t think I can cash that if I’m technically KIA.”

“That would present a certain set of problems,” Joe agrees. “Andy talk to you about that?”

“Yeah.” Nile’s stomach twists. “Guess it depends on how easy it is to schedule classes between firefights.”

She’s practically laying the opening for a talk out herself, but Joe seems uninterested in taking it.

Instead, he shifts beside her, propping an elbow on his knee. “What kinds of art did you want to specialize in?”

She dies again. This time, she begrudgingly uses the in-game save. "I prefer classic sculpture, but I’m not against modern.”

“You like what was modern art for me, then.”

Nile rolls her eyes. “I dread the day I become as weird as you guys.”

He laughs, patting her on the shoulder as he stands. “I suspect by that time you’ll be too busy tormenting our next recruit. But unfortunately, the exhibit we’re going to will be more in the contemporary style.”

It takes Nile a half second to register his words. “Wait, what?”

“The description said it would be 1960s to the present only. If it suits you, we could hold off on our discussion of it for another thousand years or so. I’m sure we can claim it as classic at that point.”

“What?” Nile locks her phone and zeros her attention on him, registering the mischievous glint in his eyes this time. “Museum?”

“The Aarhus Art Museum has a special exhibit on loan from the Tate Modern at the moment.” He glances down at her phone, the corner of his mouth forming a grin. “I’m told its purpose is to help move its audience’s attention from their devices.”

Nile scowls and looks back down at her phone. “I died a dozen times yesterday. I’m allowed my coping mechanisms of choice.”

And.

Whoops.

“Of course you are,” Joe says, offering his hand to her, and she’s once again surprised he doesn’t force the conversation. “But phones are portable. You can take it with you to the museum.”

Nile worries at the edge of her lip with her teeth. She doesn’t really want to go anywhere right now, but…

But Joe’s brown eyes are warm and welcoming, and his callouses help steady her when she takes his hand.

“You said contemporary sculpture?”

The grin he gives her is blinding. “For now.”

_________________

It’s a twenty-five minute drive from their safe house to the museum, and the route takes them next to the Bay of Aarhus for most of it.

Nile stares out at the water, determined to not give Joe any more ammunition for making fun of her regarding her phone.

It’s hard. She’d never considered herself a technology addict—never had enough time to be one—but she really, really wants to stop thinking about the fact that she knows what the inside of her liver looks like.

Or did look like, she guesses.

Nope, nuh-uh, not going there—

“D'you know about the Ship of Theseus?” She spits it out before she can decide against it. She figures if she’s thinking about it, she might as well talk about it. “And don’t say you were there for it. You’re not Andy and I at least know enough about you to know when you’re lying.”

The grin on his face tells her that he was very much intending to before she called him out on it. “It’s a thought experiment. The character Theseus owns a ship that, over a long span of time, has all of its parts replaced, until nothing of the original still remains.”

“Yeah, and so then the question is, is it even the same ship,” Nile finishes.

Joe weaves in and out of traffic, a pensive look on his face. “I assume you aren’t asking simply to test my knowledge of early western philosophy.”

“No.”

Nile looks down at her hands. She can still remember how horrifically mangled they were from her impromptu dive off a skyscraper, but at least—at least she’s pretty sure they’re the same ones she had before.

Though that might not last long.

“In your opinion,” she says, cautiously, “if—if there’s nothing left of the original—if you have to rebuild something that many times—”

“Nile.” The sound of the car’s turn signal distracts her spiraling thoughts. Joe nods towards the windshield. “We’re here.”

It’s a large, red brick square building, fairly nondescript but for the circular and multi-colored glass walking track at its top.

“Come on, he says, parking the car. “I find physical objects superior to mental ones for solving such issues.”

Nile doesn’t understand why the one time she wants to talk about something like this is the one time Joe decides to go full mysterious.

She climbs out of the car and follows him inside.

Despite her misgivings, she quickly discovers Joe was right. The exhibit is genuinely incredible, and there are pieces from multiple names she recognizes—Anish Kapoor, Donald Judd, Rasheed Araeen—and pieces she finds herself strangely moved by, such as Damian Hirst’s Away from the Flock, Richard Long’s Red Slate Circle, Rachel Whiteread’s Airbed II. Nile stares at that last one in particular for a long time: a concrete casting of an airbed, the artist’s presence made known in the negative space where her body had pressed the material down.

Joe, however, seems to be moving with a specific purpose in mind, and it’s not until they round one of the walls of the orange-pink room that Nile has a guess as to what it is.

In the far corner, bathed in the additional light of a single fill light, is a massive pile of multicolored cellophane wrapped hard candies.

Joe walks her over to it, an almost reverence to his steps.

“Untitled: Portrait of Ross in LA,” he says. “Are you familiar with the piece?”

She shakes her head, bending down to inspect it. It doesn’t look like much more than what she’d seen from a distance—candy, multicolored, on the floor. She looks to Joe for an explanation.

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died from AIDS,” Joe says. The grief on his face is hard to look at. “To honor him, he made this as a portrait—one hundred and seventy-five pounds of candy, representing Ross’s weight from when he was still healthy.”

Nile looks at the pile—it’s a lot, but it’s not a hundred and seventy-five pounds worth of a lot.

Joe notices her confusion and smiles. “Take one.”

“What?”

“Take one,” he repeats. “The purpose of the work is to invite you to partake in both enjoying his presence and lamenting the lack of it. A sort of communion—choosing to take part of his body into your own. It was a powerful statement when so many were afraid to even be in our presence at the time.”

Nile looks at the pile again, and just like with Airbed II, her heart aches at what isn’t there, rather than what is. She selects a red piece and brings it out of the pile, cupping it in her hand and considering its weight.

“What happens when it runs out?”

Joe selects his own piece—a green one—and it rolls around in the palm of his hand. “It has. Many times. But that’s the beauty of it—it’s the curator’s responsibility to replenish the pile, metaphorically granting immortality and new life to the loss.”

The cellophane crinkles in Nile’s hand as she unwraps the piece. “How do they decide where to get the candy from?”

“The only firm rule is the original weight. Outside of that, there are no set instructions for the candies themselves.” He chuckles, threading his fingers behind his neck and leaning back against the wall. “Sometimes you can even see these strange combinations of greens, oranges, and purples.”

Nile considers the candy. “Not your favorite?”

“It has an almost Halloween quality to it. I tend to prefer the rainbow.”

The candy in her hand feels heavier than it did before—weighed down with the knowledge of what it represents, what it’s taking away.

She slips the candy into her mouth and her eyebrows raise in surprise. “It’s sweet?”

“It’s candy,” Joe says, unwrapping his own piece. “Did you expect something else?”

“I thought it’d be…” She pauses, trying to parse out her feelings. “Bitter. Or sad, somehow. Considering.”

“It could have been,” Joe agrees. “But the portrait isn’t meant to represent just grief and loss. Candy is a happy thing—a reward for yourself, or a lover’s gift on Valentine’s. And even when it’s gone, the sweetness remains. Still lingering on the tongue, or dwelling in the mind. It is the love of friends and partners that keeps the memory alive—and what keeps this the same portrait, even though its pieces have been cycled through many times.”

The candy melts away on her tongue, and she closes her eyes in grief for its loss, appreciation for what it was, and hope for the pieces that would come after it.

She swallows the last piece of it down.

Her stomach settles.

[tossacointoyourarchivist]

tma headcanon for melanie

Below is a longer description, but I really like the idea that melanie gets into woodworking once the apocalypse gets wrapped up and there’s a happy ending for her and georgie

so for context, my grandfather lost his eyesight when he was in his early twenties. it’s a long story- he was in vietnam, was exposed to some nasty shit and had an aneurysm, the VA fucked around and wouldn’t treat him until his brain was damaged enough that it blinded him (still am lowkey bitter about that even tho this shit happened in the 60s-70s ish)

Now my granddad is not fully blind, but legally blind, so he does have some sight. He can’t see anything on his left side and what vision he has causes it to be kind of jumpy, but he’s able to get around fairly well with what sight he has.

One of the things my granddad does as a disabled vet is woodworking. He makes beautiful canes and wooden bowls, finding bits of wood and carving and sanding with its natural design. Shit, he made wooden swords that my cousins and I used to play with when we were little kids- I think he made something like a dragon egg within a wooden cage thing and it’s fucking cool.

Most importantly, my granddad said a lot of negative things about himself. Part of that is toxic masculinity, but a lot of it comes from the struggle of being blind in a community that wasn’t super accommodating for him. 

But this got me thinking- Melanie is a creator. She is a creative type, and podcasts are still a thing she can do once the apocalypse is over and everyone has a happy ending (is it obvious that i’ve not been listening to s5 yet?). But I think it would be so cool for her to have a hobby like woodworking.

(This is where the headcanon starts, sorry for the rambling)

Like, I think a lot about Georgie and Melanie doing woodworking as a kind of therapeutic activity to cope with trauma. I can’t speak to the experience of being blind, so I can’t touch on that. But, I do think that since trauma takes away a lot of our agency, having an outlet can help us regain that during the process of healing and recovery.

Maybe as the world comes back, they start salvaging broken things and rebuilding/re-purposing them, giving them away to people whose homes were destroyed during the apocalypse (probably all of them- again, haven’t listened to s5). Maybe Georgie helps Melanie with measurements until they can find a way for her to do it on her own, and Melanie gets super into the creative process. Like, within the next few years she’s carving little sculptures (yes, she does make a wooden hand flipping the bird and gifts it to Jon one birthday, along with a cat sculpture as his real birthday present) and no they’re not perfect wooden recreations of things, but they’re hers and representations of the world she feels around her. 

Georgie might not get super into the woodworking, but she enjoys painting flowers on some of the bowls that Melanie carves, before applying a finish to them. They work on a big project and make a cat tree for the Admiral that sits in the corner of their living room, with a soft cat bed where the branches start moving from the trunk of the tree and scratching pads along the base. 

And I’m totally stealing this from TAZ: Balance, but what if Melanie carves a surprise for Georgie, a project she works on for a month until she’s sure they’re perfect. She carves them out of oak, because it’s a sturdy wood and she wants that to symbolize their love as strong, something worth protecting and taking care of.

So she carves two wooden rings. Not really a marriage proposal, maybe neither of them are sure marriage is something they want- but Melanie wants the symbolic part, the declaration of her love to Georgie. There’s no doubt that they love each other very much already, but she wants to give this to Georgie because there’s just so much love in her heart that she feels like it could burst so she has to put some of it in this project.

Georgie cries a lil when Melanie gives her one of the oak rings, Melanie definitely cries when she holds Georgie’s hand and feels the ring on her finger. Melanie wears hers on a necklace when she does more woodworking, smiling every time she feels it against her heart.

(BRB gonna go cry now and put this in the happy ending of my fanfic)

[youarerageandserenity]

Borderlands Foam Wig Tutorial (Tyreen)

I was chatting with the lovely @void-noises-exe​ and it eventually circled around to offering to make a wig tutorial because you don’t see too terribly many, just thought I’d throw mine out ( especially because It was next to impossible to find good references of a foam version of Ty’s hair.) So this will be for foam wigs in general but Tyreen’s hair specifically (with a few pics of my Fiona wig from tales as well because they better accentuate my points) I didn’t plan on making this so I am missing a few pictures that might be helpful but here we go. This will not be short.

Supplies: 

-Craft foam (ideally, in small and XL sheets, but you can make do with whatever size you have available) 

- Spray paint as close to the BASE color of the wig you need (for Ty I used white, for Fiona a medium brown) ideally in a matte. 

- a FUCKLOAD of paints (i use cheap acrylics from the craft store ) in Black, and then several shades of the colors in the hair. (For Fiona i used i think four browns? Tyreens shaved sides have three browns, and the top had an additional yellow-brown i mixed) try to vary them in darkness levels to add depth.

- multiple paint brushes. I like to use around four or five of varying sizes and hardness levels.

- plenty Hot glue, and a hot glue gun (note: you COULD use other typres of adhesive, I like hot glue because its got great hold on foam, it sets FAST and worst case scenario I can take a hair dryer to it and melt it again if I need something to be undone.)

- scissors

- duct tape

-plastic wrap

-sharpie

-wig head

-Plenty of reference images

(optional supplies include a rotary cutter and or exacto-knife [trust me, itll make your life so much easier] ,  and patience. )

SO to start

1) Put your hair in a wig cap or however you plan on wearing it under your wig. Wrap your whole hair bit of your head in plastic wrap. Make sure you get over your ears and the baby hairs on your neck if you want to keep them. 

2) Wrap all the plastic covered bits in duct tape. This is easier for a friend to do on you, but not impossible to do alone, just make sure to get it all. It should be snug. Make sure you get as far down the back of your neck and down your sideburn area as you can. (Most characters have a bit of fringe hanging down in the back so its not the BIGGEST concern for them, but Ty’s got nada so you’re gonna want some good coverage for your hair line.) 

3) Take your sharpie and draw an outline of where your ear is, and along the hairline you’d like your wig to have. For short haired characters you dont want to cut too far behind the ear or your hair will peek out, so I like to underestimate how big my ear is and adjust as needed later. Dont make your wig hairline too high either, particularly if you’re making a wig for a character who has no fringe in the front. 

4) Take that bad boy off and cut along your outlines. Try it on again, adjust lines as needed. rinse and repeat. 

5) once you reach a semi-accurate mold of your head, you’re gonna wanna take it off and cut AT LEAST 4 (front, back, and both sides (I like to do 8, it will lay flatter) sections,coming to a point at the crown of your head. It should come out looking something like this. NOTE : they’re all still connected in the middle. If you’re doing 8, cut each of these 4 in half. )

6) Lay out your foam beneath this. If you dont have a piece of foam big enough to trace this bad boy onto, what I do is literally just break out the hot glue gun a bit early, glue a couple pieces together along the edges, until i get a nice big connected surface. Trace this guy on there as accurately as you can, cut it out, and then glue all your sides together. Now you should have a foam version of your duct tape hat. 

(Dont worry if the sides wont stay down, if you’re doing a character like Ty where thats an issue, we’ll get to that part later. ) 

7) (Optional but VERY helpful) Grab your wig head, and your duct tape head. Tape the duct tape back together and put something in it to make it hold shape, I use poly-fil. Tape the head-form to the wig head, and put your little foam cap on top of that. 

8)  Time to get creative. You’re gonna want to start from the bottom layers first. For Tyreen that’s the long fringe and her undercut. The strategy I decided on was to take a few large rectangular strips of foam, and lay them out everywhere I wanted the undercut to be and cut along the edges to match the hairline. I don’t have a picture of this exact point in the process but I have one from the beginning of the next step. Really the only thing to note at this point is obviously, your head is round and rectangles are not, for the curves where it sticks up along the edges, cut down where it sticks up in a little triangle and hot glue the ends together (you can sort of see this at the top left in the picture below). Dont worry about seams at this point, we’ll hide them later. 

9) This was not the case for Fiona who has very flat hair ( especially because of her hat) but Tyreen has a lot of volume especially towards the front of her head. For hair pieces that need volume, such as the ones that are glued down here, cut two of the exact same foam piece (i like to do them in little waves like the side, but also just a little arch is good for volume without flips such as the front piece) and glue the matching edges together. Make sure the hair triangle is facing the way youd like it to! Then Flatten out the top as much as you can, the bottom will keep the volume and the top ill be able to be covered by “2D” hair pieces. 

(NOTE: Honestly, it’s REALLY difficult to end up with an exact copy of cannon, and I ALLLLWAYS get carried away with the spikes. In the end, go by your reference images, but also follow your heart. Cosplay is half about having fun creating. )

10) Once youve started gluing, make sure to keep in mind where your part is (if you have one). For Fiona i didn’t trust myself so I glued in the hair at the part BEFORE anything, and left them ready to be glued down while I worked my way up to them. 

NOTE: All the hair at the parts of BOTH wigs is a single piece of foam.You want a nice wide base whenever possible to cover up the seams of all of the other edges of the hair. For your part, Carefully glue along the very end of your strip of foam and stick it down. It will be the last piece to be glueddown on top of everything else to make it look nice and clean. 

11) Slowly start working your way around the head, gluing down first anything that will need to be covered (3D pieces and bottom pieces) before getting towards the top where youll need to be more strategic about what is going down and what can cover your edges. I’d definitely recommend mixing 2D and 3D pieces if that’s something you want to experiment with, otherwise, such as in the pic below, it is possible to get volume from a 2D piece, simply by gluing it in a way where it wont lie flat against the head. 

12) in the picture above you can also catch a glimpse of Ty’s cow lick. Those are done exactly the same as our 3D pieces from before, only you trace the edges of the open end, and should end up with a triangular third side to be glued in, then just glue along the edges just like the hair part. 

13) Dont feel you have to overdo how many pieces the hair has, remember you may also paint in pieces and designs when it comes to the line-art! 

14) Once you’ve added everything from the bottom that you’d like to, go ahead and glue down your hair-part. 

15) So, obviously, I wasn’t a big fan of Tyreen’s undercut just being flat foam across half my head. So I took an exacto to it for what felt like years. REALLY over-do it on the edges, it’ll get rid of that harsh foam line and give it a little more of a natural blend. Also pay special attention to all of your seams in the foam. The more distressing there is there, the less youll be able to spot lines later. 

16) So once you have the overall structure of your wig and you’re thinking you might be happy with this, its spray paint time. (I’d recommend disposable gloves for this, you’re gonna need to maneuver it every which way to get the pain in every cranny and that paint does NOT like to come off easy.)  Theres really not much advice I can offer on it, just be patient, and do a couple layers, spray it from every angle and let it dry completely before moving on to the next step unless youre as impatient as I am and dont mind ruining a few paintbrushes. 

17) So, like the Fiona pic a few back or this one here, you should have a fairly flat evenly painted foam sculpture. Now is around the time you might start seeing all the inaccuracies in what you’ve made. You gotta push past that it’ll look great I promise. Time to get really creative. 

18) for Ty I started by painting the buzzed bits in a base brown, and started in on the line art and her roots while i waited for it to dry before going in with two more colors of brown for depth. 

19) For her roots I ended up using three colors. Black at the very bottom (which blends into the line art) a dark brown that matches more or less the buzz, and then after the fact, a custom yellowed-brown to blend better into the white and give us a little more texture. For this and the rest of the cel-shading in the hair, dab your brush before painting and try to mostly stick to light strokes in one direction (OR: if you have one, a particularly hard bristled paint brush does wonders for this) you don’t want the ends of your strokes to be too defined. 

20) Outline the edges of the hair and all prominent pieces, particularly the hot-glue seams, itll make them less noticable. (dont forget the little animation squiggles for Ty’s sides) and beyond that-- honestly, black out to your hearts content. These pics are from when I thought I’d finished. I really felt I’d over detailed. The next day I looked at a picture and realized there is always WAY more texture and outlining than I feel like I see. Honestly, you cant really over-do it, especially with fine solid black lines. 

21) The next day I came back at it with the yellowed-brown and LOTS more solid black lines. (Currently in the process of taming down where I got too excessive with the spikes on the side) 

22) Once it’s all dried, time to try on. Here’s where we address if you have a short haired character, and the edges of your wig just wont stay down -- invest in a little theatrical grade spirit gum. It’s not too terribly expensive, and unfortunately, I tried the cheaper halloween makeup kind, and it just wont hold how you need it too (and please for my sake, also make sure you get spirit gum remover) I took some hair gel (you could also use elmers glue) just to glue up as much of my hair as I could on the sides and the back of my neck to keep them from the spirit gum, and dabbed it along all of the prominent edges of the wig (namely, side and back) wait for it to get a little tacky and stick that MF-er down good. 

Aaaaand Voila??? 

Let me know if I missed any steps? Its fairly simple, once you get going -- just time consuming. 

[viktcrr]

「maxence danet-fauvel & nonbinary」⇾ samuels, viktor, the senior radcliffe student’s records show that he/they are a capricorn and 24 years old. he/they are studying visual arts, living in noland and can be observant, ingenious, reticent & dependent. when i see him/them i am reminded of a sculptor’s hands clay-ridden, the insistent hum of tv static, and a crying preacher inside a dusty funeral home.  ⇽「james & 21 & est & they/them.」

hllo !!! i’m james n here’s one of my big idiot muses <3 he’s not actually dumb he’s :/ a bit evil. bt thts okay hes still <3 beloved <3 LKDSFHLSADLKGFSHLKD anyways!

TW DEATH, HEAVY GRIEF, OVERDOSE / DRUG ADDICTION, HOSPITALIZATION, HYPERSEXUALITY, RELIGION MENTIONS, MENTAL ILLNESS

aesthetic.

old tvs and their static, worn tapes, horror movie screams, spilled ink, a sculptor’s hands, clay-stained, chicken scratch handwriting, messy notes, messy hair, scoffs and eye-rolls, bruised knuckles, sore throats, funeral homes and a crying preacher, shattered ceramics, knife fights, high ledges, vertically-striped pants, red lights, the moon shrouded in clouds, cigarette butts, graveyards and half-empty wine bottles, sitting there for hours and talking to nothing, about nothing, a god complex, gold rings adorning both hands, barbwire baseball bats, having never played baseball in your life, deep eyebags and broken mirrors, a permanent chip on one’s shoulder, yearning, longing, wishing.

basic info.

full name: viktor phillip samuels

nickname(s): icky vicky :/

b.o.d. - jan 2nd

label(s): the black hole, the crepehanger, the impious, the opaque, the tempest, etc.

height: 6′1″

hometown: rochester, new york

sexuality: pansexual uwu

pinterest

stats

inspired by: beetlejuice (beetlejuice), sid (toy story), jack sparrow (pirates of the caribbean), francis wilkerson (malcolm in the middle), azula (avatar: the last airbender), vicky (the fairly oddparents), stu macher / billy loomis (scream), marshall lee (adventure time), bojack horseman (bojack horseman), any it’s always sunny character :/

biography.

born to mama and papa (preacher) samuels in rochester, new york - fifteen minutes after his twin sister, tatiana samuels. years later, rosa samuels joined the gang.

was an awkward, quiet kid growing up, he didn’t interact well with others and preferred being left alone to dig up worms and draw on the walls of their childhood home. the only exception was his twin, really.

as he got older he grew out of this, but instead became like … sort of an asshole? maybe to compensate for years of childhood awkwardness. he’s the sort of person who will bite the hand that feeds him & developed into a full time nuisance by middle school, unlike tatiana who was much more subtle about her conniving manners.

always has been a fan of ‘darker’ materials. grim & creepy morbid shit. probably the biggest tim burton fan, ever since he was a kid … not a good look for a preacher’s son, but he never really felt ‘in’ with the rest of his family to begin with. classic black sheep syndrome.

drew disturbing pictures as a kid that probably prompted one or two or five phone calls home to assure everything was fine.

just really had a knack for art at a young age, from drawing to painting to playing with clay. it’s always been his Thing and probably is the only thing he’s good at.

being twins with tatiana was hard. they were near opposite besides both being quite mean-spirited. tatiana handled being in public better, left a better image behind - but viktor had talent, more than she did. they loved each other deeply - y’know, those unbreakable twin bonds as cliche as it sounds - but found each other as competition for their parents’ attention. a rivalry for affection.

in high school is when viktor really started to act out. it started extreme, like losing his virginity in their church and vandalism around the neighborhoods. faked being possessed in the middle of sunday service & almost had an exorcism performed on him.

his only redeemable trait was like … just his sheer talent in the arts. was in a 3D art AP course and specialized in sculptures. he could pretty much create anything he wanted with enough dedication.

because he was the problem child, the one who deserved to be disciplined for all his antics, tatiana could sneak away and get away with whatever she wanted much easier. on the bright-side, for her, i guess.

not a very motivated person - wasn’t planning on going to college, much less going to radcliffe but his parents literally wrote & sent his college application for him because they weren’t going to house a deadbeat but had too much heart to kick him out onto the streets. cool!

he’s actually pretty smart but he just doesn’t apply himself. has a minor in english because he didn’t care for an extra course-load, but he’s good at writing & analyzing literature. is going to use it to write and illustrate his own series of children books with a style similar to tim burton’s. not for the kids, but because he likes to leave a trail of terror in whatever he does.

has been experimenting with himself since high school but college is where he really had started to crack down on himself. was out as pansexual & nonbinary by his sophomore year of college just … not to his parents, who don’t really need to know.

if you asked him if he believed in twins having a psychic connection with each other - he’d tell you he wouldn’t know. it felt believable at times, but sometimes he had no idea what was going on inside of tatiana’as head. on the other hand - viktor had always felt oddly transparent to her, like she knew all of his moves before he did. the only person who could predict him accurately.

( TW DEATH, GRIEF, OVERDOSE / HOSPITALIZATION BEYOND THIS POINT )

when tatiana disappeared, viktor knew something was up. it was a twist in his gut, pure instinct that something wasn’t right. and it wasn’t right - and when she was proclaimed missing, they couldn’t find her.

and when tatiana died - viktor knew. it felt wrong, something cut so severely in him he could pinpoint her death to the second. he didn’t know how, or why, but he knew it. knew it before anybody else had.

afterwards he went on a sort of bender. he’d begun to struggle with a mild drug addiction late senior year of high school / early college, but he was managing it up until this point.

his mental health had also sunk to an all-time low, when it’d never been great to begin with. (manic & depressive episodes. once fixated on a sculpting project for six months and then knocked it off the table and destroyed it as soon as he finished it for no apparent reason.)

tatiana’s body wasn’t found immediately, and when it was … viktor went off the rails. ended up overdosing & being hospitalized. spent six months in & out of psychiatric care after that.

came back to radcliffe to finish his senior year because … for the reasons above, he hadn’t been able to complete it. just wants to get his credits and get out of here.

is still dealing with a lot of trauma & grief, especially since the one year anniversary of tatiana’s death was this month (january) - causes him to spiral and be unpredictable in regards of his mental health. he stopped taking his medication, so. :/ some days are alright, other days are pretty bad.

UPDATE: now that summer’s come n go ... viktor hs been thru <3 a lot <3 recently. switched therapists (his :/ last one got her license revoked) & started new medications, went to a treatment center briefly ‘cos .. he wasn’t doing too well :/ bt now he’s back baybey! trying to be better n trying to be sober but ... :/

personality.

the human embodiment of a gremlin that was fed after midnight. a goblin, if you will. one of those cats with a narrow head and really big ears … that’s them!

a big horror & halloween enthusiast. loves the old campy horror movies & probably has an abundance of masks from different movies. dresses like a grimy millennial beetlejuice more than they should because they just … love those black & white vertical-striped pants.

can appreciate the lore & cryptids at radcliffe and likes to feed into the fear that surrounds them. is probably the cause of a few ‘anomalies’ and ‘paranormal sightings’ because they’re just … a jerk.

fashion alternates between e-boy (they would be tiktok famous if they were 17 & didn’t think that a majorly minor based app was weird.), millennial beetlejuice, and goth in a crop top & sweatpants. big fan of crop tops and a big fan of sweatpants.

they can be really fucking mean? petty, aggressive, a major instigator. will literally spit in your face for little to no reason, you could just look at them the wrong way. the kind of person who will stick their gum into someone else’s hair. other than that? they’re like … sort of okay. they’re not always mean, just a dick about 90% of the time lmao

like okay yeah they’ll call someone a stinky bitch for no reason except they feel like it and believes it. it’s fine, they’re fine, we’re fine.

despite the fact that they’re probably getting into a fight whenever, considers themself to be a lover and not a fighter but that’a primarily because they fuck a lot. uses it as a coping mechanism, like they’re this big fancy carnival show that’s like ‘come one, come all! fuck the dead girl’s twin brother!’ and it’s … a Lot. might have a problem with hypsersexuality but they’re not fully aware of it.

the preacher’s whore son, basically :)

pansexual & nonbinary, switches between he & they pronouns often and without a pattern, but they have such a fragile grip on their identity that you could call them ‘dog-faced bitch’ and they’d turn around like. sup.

vastly impulsive … like i said, they destroy their own creations for the fun of it. spends all teir money on useless shit, will cheat on someone because they feel like it & likes the thrill, screams into the night sky frequently like a cat in heat.

will also spend months creating useless shit for no reason too. spent six of them sculpting a hollowed out tree the size of them & then took a sledgehammer to it.

they’re very super dramatic. would play the organ at church when nobody was looking after them and service was about to start. would just churn out these super haunting, creepy melodies like they were phantom of the opera. would do the same exact thing at home on their keyboard with the pipe organ setting whenever they got grounded until their parents took it away HBDSJFNGKH

will absolutely not talk about their ‘time away’ because it’s not anyone’s business, not even their own younger sister. still refuses to talk about tatiana’s death, or their mental health, or their addiction (fallen back into it but it hasn’t gotten severe … yet :/), or anything involving their own emotions.

will just change the topic abruptly, no warning. asks about the jonas brothers instead and they fucking hate the jonas brothers.

that being said they’re absolutely not over tatiana’s death & it’s to the point of obsession over it. like there’s some kind of secret that needs to be uncovered, even though there just. isn’t. tatiana was their rock and they were pretty much dependent on her. kept them grounded. could control them when nobody else could, got into their head easier than others. it’s sort of like rosa lost two siblings that day because viktor hasn’t been the same since.

emotionally unavailable while also crying twice a day. cries during their brawls but still wins. is stony-faced when they tell you they cheated on you with your much hotter best friend.

will tell you straight up what they want from you, no bullshit & no beating around the bush. just blunt. if they want to fuck, nothing else, then that’s it. if they feel deviation or developing feelings then they’ll ghost in less than a second. is awful like that but feels no shame.

but also emotional as shit and it’s confusing. will cry on a whim and then flip you off if you try to console them or ask them what’s up. will bite you.

they go to therapy but they just fuck around and wastes their therapists’ time … also is fucking their therapist, but that’s neither here nor there. so they’re not really getting the help they need.

likes to be intimidating but not … with their body or anything because they’re a TWIG but uses their love & knowledge of horror and creepy shit to their advantage. has an abundance of fake blood. has channeled the energy of jack nicholson and used it on tatiana’s boyfriends before (also is a big fan of sfx makeup & has dabbled in it)

probably chases kids around with a chainsaw without the chain on halloween every year.

generally never doing good, both mental health wise & morally. would probably steal candy from a baby for funsies.

i don’t know if there’s a good to them somewhere deep down, but they don’t see any issues with themself either. nothing really breaks through to them anymore because the only person who ever made them stop and think about their actions was tatiana, and well, y’know. :/

an introverted reclusive type who doesn’t like most people or going out, but does so anyway if it means a quick high & a cheap thrill.

pretty observant and likes to analyze people even though they’re often like … partially wrong. judgmental because they like to make people feel bad, not because they’re a righteous mighty person. because they’re not. so like, a hypocrite!

wanted connections.

a roommate… but it’s an absolute nightmare to live with him.

enemies… because viktor would have a lot of them…

familiar faces… people who knew tatiana or of her / were her friends. maybe even those who dated her, and who viktor would’ve tried to intimidate / scare at any given chance :/

pitiful glances… people who take pity on viktor and he hates it sooo much.

hooligan gremlin kids… just a friend group of grown ass adults who do drugs and fuck shit up around town like they’re edgy teenagers.

high school girlfriend… probably the one he lost his virginity to inside his family church :/

childhood acquaintances… people who knew him from his youth.

exes… good & bad terms, but mostly bad terms because viktor is an actual demon. probably cheated on them.

soft… i don’t know if he’s soft towards anyone and/or is capable of it but we can try. we can try.

unrequited… either viktor just doesn’t like them or he’s holding back because he’s :/ got issues with relationships & is self-sabotaging as one does

enemies with Tension… of the … spicy kind if you know what i mean. wink.

friends… old friends, new friends, bad friends, good friends, close friends, frenemies, etc. i don’t know how many he had but if your muse likes to cause a ruckus and fuck shit up then viktor’s your man.

hook-ups… current or old. friends with benefits, one night stands, anything and everything because he fucks around a lot.

ride or die… friendship but make it extreme.

bad influence… he’s just toxic to be around and brings out the worst in people :/

bad egg… he’s gotten into a few fights :/ maybe you witnessed it. maybe you were in it.

literally anything i wld love all sorts of plots.

[annakie]

An Annotated Mass Effect Playthrough, Part Nine

Previous Posts: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wheren we run out of sidequests, so we head back to the Citadel already.

With the quest log pretty empty, I didn’t feel like flying around the galaxy hoping to bump into something Hackett wanted me to do already, so let’s go finish up some of those loose sidequests and pick up some more!

I didn’t grab a screenshot of this, but one of the mods (faster elevators maybe?  Or MERe?  IDK!) COMPLETELY removes the scanning component from getting on and off the ship.

I don’t remember the exact origins of this, but one tick Annakie Shepard has is... she really really fucking hates being scanned.  And it probably was because of how long the scanning bit of getting on and off the ship here took, but I used to always try to outrun it if possible, or at least put up the effort.  I’m so glad it’s not here at all.

The only acceptable scan is Chakwas scanning her for medical reasons, and even that is just barely ok.

Anyway, here we are, freshly not-scanned, heading right down to C-Sec to... oh no what’s this?

Ah.  Yes.   Mikhailovich.  Here for inspection.

One of the reasons I cheat in Paragon points is that it’s nearly impossible to ever make Mikhailovich happy unless you don’t come back to the Citadel for a very long time.  So maybe I could have gone to Noveria and done the Paragon Point Cheat, but one cheat or another, doesn’t really matter.

The Mikhailovich encounter is another one of those things that didn’t have to be in the game, but is great worldbuilding.  Not everyone agrees with the Normandy being built, or the turian design, etc.   Mikhailovich is right that some of the things we built here could have been tested in a lab, you know.  It was a huge chunk of money, but it’ll be wrong later in thinking it’s a waste.  He also again shows that people aren’t sure that working super close with the turians is a good idea, which, again, he’ll be wrong about, but it’s a good thing to see differing opinions on a lot of things.

Anyway, I like this bit not only for that reason but to see Kaidan’s salute.

Finally, after lingering at the dock for who-knows-how-long while the Admiral inspected our ship, we get down to C-Sec, ready to...

Oh what’s THIS now?

Time for another interview, this one a little more voluntary.  

Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani, Westerlund News.

She’s a character I have very mixed feelings about.

On one hand, well, I used to love to punch her out.  And now I never do.

She’s clearly digging for an angle here in her interviews.  She’s reporting for humanity, not the council races or galaxy as a whole.  But answering her diplomatically here, she’s another character who questions you and what you’re doing, but doesn’t actually step over any lines.  It’s more when you get testy with her here, she gets touchy back.

It would be a shitshow with the fanboys I think if you took out the option to hit here.  But wow that moment... didn’t sit right, especially when it was an MShep doing it but it’s not a great look for Femshep either.  Nobody should hit ANYBODY unless it’s actually necessary.  Getting your feels hurt by a few tough, even unfair questions... does not call for punching.

Especially today when we’re already getting scary close to losing freedom of the press.  Being diplomatic with her really nets the best responses in 2 and 3, as well.

And maybe if we hadn’t just gotten raked over the coals by Mikhailovich it’d be less grating to then get questioned by a reporter.  But I find it interesting how the game keeps pushing and questioning Shepard, and maybe even trying to find holes where maybe Shepard or the Alliance isn’t completely right, or could be questioned.

Damnit, Chorban and Jahleed.  Just kiss, already, neither of you are trying to kill the other!!  

I do love that Chorban figures everything out based on your scans... just like... a couple of years too late.  Anyway, I already finished all the scans, no way I’m not finishing this quest with Chorban for that sweet XP.

And YOU, using a girl with no undercover experience and putting her in Chora’s de-- what’s that?  Conrad dies if I end this quest early?  SIGH.

Also... Gideon Emery.  So you’re fine.  All is forgiven.  I’ll do your dirty work.

Helena Blake!  I DEFINITELY won’t forget to go speak to her, get back on the Normandy, do another planet quest, realize I didn’t speak to her, then go back to the Citadel just to actually pick up this quest, then pretend later on in this update that I remembered to speak to her all along!

I mean, speaking as if I were someone who hasn’t played the next two games, this is DEFINITELY SUSPICIOUS right?

I guess in a way, we did pull our gun on Conrad all along.

Just give me the damn mods.

Honestly, I love this part of the quest because you can COMPLETELY fuck up by being too goody-goody.  I have probably had to reload after mindlessly clicking paragon answers more times than I care to admit.  This time, I remembered to not obey the law.

The second reason I wanted to come back to the Citadel is that after one planetary mission, Morlan’s Iconic Armor shop (which, again, is thanks to ME1Recalibrated) sells special armor for Kaidan, that looks like his ME2 armor, so he has his own unique look.  

A picture from later, once the armor texture is loaded correctly.  (Turns out it required a restart.)

I LOVE IT.  Thank you, MERecalibrated team!  Welcome to Kaidan’s look for the rest of the game.

Let’s head up to the presidium!

Whoops, shoulda brought Ashley along.  I’m sure whatever he wanted to talk about can wait til later.

BTW, that gif isn’t sped up.  

If you don’t have the console enabled and aren’t setting your out of combat runspeed to at least 800 whenever you’re anywhere you have a lot of running to do, then consider doing so.   I’ve found 800 is the perfect amount of fast without leaving me slamming into walls constantly

The annoying thing is that every time you have a major area transition or have to reload the game, you have to do it again, but after the first time it’s 4 keystrokes.

` then up arrow, then [enter], then ` again.

Also your companions may fall behind, but that’s only an issue for the places they have ambient dialog.  So mostly I start using it on the Citadel after going everywhere once, and then most of the time on the Normandy and sidequests.

Oh let’s talk to this nice lady.  Oh no, her sister has been kidnapped, how sad!

Well, the poor woman deserves my help, I’m sure it’s all on the up-and-up.  Sure, I’ll rescue your sister!  I’m glad we have this friendly relationship that will be profitable and non-lethal forever!

You DID know that Anderson and Udina comment on each major mission afterwards, right?  It took me more playthroughs than I care to admit to discover this.

Also, this is a kind of humanizing moment for Udina here.  He tells us how the council isn’t happy that we lost the prothean ruins at Therum, then Anderson stands up for us (we love you, Space Dad), and then he actually really backs off and says in a much softer tone “I know, I know.  But we all get judged on how you behave.”

And again, we’re not meant to love how he says it, but um, Udina is right.  Everything we do has repercussions throughout the Citadel, and sometimes the Galaxy.

Poor Liara, the only one left without an iconic armor in ME1.

Also, like Tali earlier, she hilariously has lines in quests we turn in or make updates to that she has no business knowing about.  I guess she read all the questlogs while traveling back to the Citadel.

While we’re here on the Citadel, let’s take a flycam visit around to the edge of the room, shall we?

So we’re heading out, towards this building, past the Mass Relay sculpture.

What you can see as soon as you’re near it and then over it, is that that building hides the seam where the water meets map.

From just beyond it, there’s the apartment-looking building, for whatever reason you can see through the textures on the other side, leaving just the roofs/floors visible (the slats).

It took quite a while to go this far, but eventually, you can find the invisible wall where the cars spawn from, and not long after, the map ends.  The map is very curved, btw, that’s no illusion.  There’s no chance you could see this far without flycam.

Looking back, you can see the bridges in the distance, but the Relay sculpture and where Shepard is standing is very far away, quite difficult to see even if the full-sized screenshot.

I love how huge these maps are.  It makes the illusions really work and the sense of scale works BECAUSE it is actually just... that big. 

Well, back to smaller issues.

Again, a great quest not only from a memorability perspective, but a worldbuilding one.

How does religion work in this galaxy?  Well, some people still have it.  Enough that there’s laws in governing how people are able to spread that religion.  I think that the council actually enacted a fairly sensible law here -- they cannot allow zealots to take over near the seat of government, but also people should be free to worship as they please.  

I myself am a person of faith who, despite being brought up in a HIGHLY Evangelical movement, now very much believes that people should be able to worship as they choose, (or not at all!) but also that faith is a private matter and shouldn’t be forced on others.  

So yeah, the hanar is being unreasonable, but should still be spoken to with respect.  It’s good that this particular hanar takes it well.

I am honestly dying to know how the hanar deal with the absolute proof that the Enkindlers were just... people.  I mean we saw the one hanar in ME3 react to Javik, but you have to think that the religion as a whole must get shaken up a great deal after the game ends.

Also... seriously read Mass Effect: Annihilation (the quarian ark book).

Anyway, I like resolving this peacefully and getting the hanar to leave peacefully.  Calling someone a big stupid jellyfish is hilarious in the moment, but not so nice once you think about it.  

Ah, Michael and Rebekah.

I love this quest because... it’s not cut and dry.

I don’t think either of them is wrong. I think they’re facing a tough choice and they both have good points.

For a long time, though, my response has been that it’s Rebekah’s body, her choice.  

But the funny thing was, this time when I was playing, I didn’t see this as just an allegory to a woman’s right to choose.  From Michael’s POV, it’s more of an allegory to Anti-Vaxx.  Obviously back in 2007 when the game came out Anti-Vaxx wasn’t nearly as much as a concern as it is now, so I love that this small part of the game actually grew more meaningful over time.  

Yes, there’s a SMALL chance you could hurt the child from the procedure, but a greater chance of harm if you don’t.  I had a harder time choosing this time, like, oh, am I going to lean a bit more towards being pro-choice, or pro-vaxxination?  I’m pro both of those things??

I still sided with Rebekah.  Mostly because I know the kid turns out OK either way.

Well, for a couple of years, at least.

Emily!  You changed your clothes!  What’s that?  You want me to plant bugs?  Won’t someone notice?

Guess not.  Not even this bug.

I’m sad that this is the last we’ll see of Emily Wong face to face.  But hey, a good reporter, and good person.  :salute:

Kahoku... thank you for finding out about Cerberus and telling us.  The first time we hear the word I think, in the game?  

You will be avenged.

Welp time to head up to the ship and go off on some sidequ--

I mean... Uh, time to go talk to Helena Blake, OBVIOUSLY.

(Also Liara you cannot climb that wall, stahp.)

I love them having just a bad bitch like Helena with her sneaky-plan to kill her business partners so totally above the board by Shepard, but hey, she’s just a concerned citizen giving tips to law enforcement, right?  She’s awful, and she knows it, and she’s cool with it.

Well, since Ashley magically appeared in the party without me going to the Normandy AT ALL, as long as we’re here, let’s go talk to Samesh Bhatia

A great moment for Ashley, remembering her friend, and treating her husband with so much care and kindness. OBVIOUSLY we can do this very easy thing for him.

Fuck, this just got a lot more complicated.

I love this quest because it puts you between a rock and a hard place.  Again, neither side is wrong.  Samesh SHOULD have his wife’s body back.  But it IS important research.

For a long time, I didn’t give a shit about the research and would get the body back, no matter what.

But so many more lives are saved with the research.  So this time I ask him to understand, and he does.  But it never sits quite right, either way.  

As my other SciFi favorite franchise* reminds us in one of its most poignant moments...  Sometimes the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the one.

Okay now we’re heading back to the Normandy for the first time this update, and next time, back out into space!

*Star Wars is a Space Opera, not SciFi.