#actually manages to capture the 80s sound v well

[art--harridan]

[Image description: A digital drawing based on the film Sing Street, depicting the character Conor Lawlor. It depicts a shot from the music video they made for The Riddle of the Model, so Conor is wearing his outfit for that. The gloved hands of Raphina hold a mirror, which shows Conor. He looks forward, mouth open as if he's in the middle of singing a lyric. The background of the mirror is green, while the background of the piece is an electric teal. This background also has red wavy lines on that follow the shape of the drawing. There's some fainter waves in the background, which are light teal and purple respectively. The actual drawing uses a textured brush, with clean lines and grainy shading. It's a dark purple.]

Inktober - Day 29 (Navigator)

Film - Sing Street (John Carney, 2016)

[vaguely-concerned]

The Mandalorian Chapter 15 reactions; *nobby nobbs voice* ‘s all gone a bit percychological, sir

 - so from both chapter 6 and now this: rick famuyiwa is incredible at portraying prolonged discomfort and tension (and also at getting din’s endless love for that baby across through the stress of being separated from him. this is the very first episode with no baby in it at all, isn’t it? wow that’s a heartbreaking milestone to reach im crying)

I liked this episode SO MUCH but I had to pause it pretty often and take a breather because it all made me so viscerally uncomfortable on din’s behalf -- not just the armour and having to take the helmet off and be seen for the (almost, ilu IG-11) first time in decades, people keep touching him in this episode when he clearly doesn’t want them to but can’t stop it and it makes me want to claw my own skin off in sympathy, it’s so awful. that’s really neat film making to manage to keep that tension steady almost all the way through!!! 

honestly this episode felt a little bit like psychological horror, with the cheering storm troopers and din in the wrong armour and clearly not digging it and there’s the palpable absence of baby and that ever present dread of being Perceived when you’re not ready for it; everything’s turned upside down from how it should be. and it’s playing with that discomfort both in the main character and in us, the audience, in having the familiar be made unfamiliar and also introducing these questions that shake up everything (that feeling you get of ‘but... if it’s not the helmet, and not the armour, but there’s his face, but we’ve only seen that face once before so it’s still basically new to us, is this... is this still him. is this still Dad’ (oooh I wonder if we’re... sort of getting some of the ??? the baby would be feeling about it too?) we’ve all imprinted on that t-shaped visor like little baby birds, and this was a very clever episode to break us out of that and start to really get used to the thought of him having several faces that are real simultaneously, in a way, and not just a voice. it’s all very smart and interesting and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of incoherent thoughts about this in the weeks to come lol)    

- the actual reason din can’t take off the helmet is that if people were able to see his wide confused puppy eyes they would no longer find it in themselves to send him on long arduous side missions and would help him immediately just so he’d feel better, and that would rob us of like 80% of the content for this show 

mayfeld in this episode: clearly a casualty of this. he literally sees one glimpse of the vulnerability there and then within five seconds goes on to materialize a few redeeming character traits after being a complete jackass for an episode and a half. (I mean. he was 100% still an imperial so I’m a bit ‘hm.’ about how easily especially cara let him off the hook, but with the way it was set up I guess it would have been quite shitty of them to just throw him back in prison so I mean I GUESS. I would be endlessly grateful someone got my awkward bff out of there alive and well too I suppose)

- I actually think din’s sense/integrity of self has gotten so much stronger and more resilient (though probably still quite fragile pls handle with care precious cargo within); if this had happened in the first season I think it might honestly just have killed him (and if it weren’t for IG-11 it probably would have lol)

- can you beLIEVE din is so bad at lying that they literally should plan for contingencies over it fjkasdlhfskajdhfsdj     

- very grateful for the scene with the spear throw that’s basically there to reassure us ‘uh-huh, he absolutely knows how to use it, don’t worry about that part at least’

I want to make a whole post about that fight scene, though, it’s just so GOOD! there’s so much storytelling and characterization in it! even out of the armour din has some real hand to hand MOVES!! he clearly came out of that aching all over, he can barely get back in his seat!!!

- so what I’m mainly taking away from this is that din absolutely cuts his own hair and you know what? he does a good job considering the conditions he has to work under, I love him  

I still find it so goddamn darling that he meticulously maintains that little mustache/stubble combo under there even when there’s every reason to believe no one will ever see it 

I suppose we can also gather that he did not ask cobb about whatever insane feat of magic he’s come up with to avoid helmet hair, but I don’t care looking a bit frazzled and tousled is exactly right for him (he’s so put together when he’s in the armour and a MESS when he’s out of it and I  l o v e  it) 

- boba fett is honestly so fucking hot in this I don’t know what to do with myself haha. he’s so CALM and CALCULATED and COLLECTED in his newly painted armour and he’s GOT THIS and he made that ‘I’ve got one of those faces. one of jango’s many, many, many faces’ joke and he’s so thicc now, he looks like he could easily lift me over his head with one hand and he’s just quietly steady and undramatically supportive and sdalfhsdjhfsa 

- ...din does know who the clone troopers were, right. I mean of course he does. he has to. but does he though. I’m sure he does and just wasn’t thinking. 

- no matter how stressful it was I’m still really grateful that in the end taking the helmet off was something din got to do himself -- it’s under some duress, but it’s still his choice and for the sake of the baby, and almost in two more manageable steps between putting on the storm trooper gear for a different helmet before taking it off altogether. it’s not something done to him by gideon, for example, that would be. so much yuckier and worse. he still has that control and agency intact, even if it’s been tested really hard, and now gideon doing that doesn’t hold the exact same nightmarish power anymore because there’s already a little space opened in din’s mind for different things it can mean, if you see what I mean. I’m not sure I see what I mean actually I just have a lot of feelings haha. so I guess thank you mayfeld for being decent about it and helping him towards that realization that he can still be himself outside these really really inflexible structures he’s set up around himself for like. stability and keeping himself upright for a really long time, and that even someone halfway decent won’t disrespect the boundaries he still has about it at any given moment. man there’s a lot in this episode isn’t there

- the sigh din gave when he saw even more pirates coming and knew he had to get back up... never has a single moment in cinema better captured how I feel about being alive. most relatable man in the world din djarin

- it was really cruel of them to make me listen to din’s dead bleak voice say ‘the child is gone’ again, it wrecks my heart every goddamn time 

- again... I wish carano wasn’t Like That in real life because the cara & fennec scenes should have been everything I could ever dream. ah well fennec was still wonderful and if I just allow myself to think in-universe for a few seconds it was really touching that din would entrust cara with his entire armour, that’s some prime BrOTP energy right there

I love that we got two female characters who were just allies and working together, no competition or nothin’. listen the bar is low but it’s nice to see something actually leap gracefully over it as well lol

- this was one of those with some pretty big open plot holes (why, exactly, would a scan of a completely unknown face be helpful to get into this classified system lol), but a) I don’t care, the emotional storyline was so sound it doesn’t really matter and b) eh handwave handwave let’s say mayfeld programmed that little stick with the good shit and overrode the code saying there needed to be an identity match within the system, it’s all fine 

- I know I joke a lot about this but din really is one of the most relatable characters I’ve ever had. just watching him struggle with eye contact and going pretty much nonverbal under enough stress is like. wow a bit close to home there could we, perhaps, nOT?? (honestly though these are trauma/anxiety things I really don’t see portrayed a lot, especially in protagonists, it’s so odd but healing to see it in a character I love and who’s EXTREMELY competent in many other settings)

- din repeating gideon’s speech back to him word for word (except for the crucial detail that he calls grogu ‘him’ instead of ‘it’ 😭😭😭) and saying nothing else is truly Everything. I’ve said some stuff about din’s deliberate and thoughtful relationship to language in the past and this is such an amazing example of it; he’s remembered that pitch perfect all this time, he’s kept it around in his head and mulled it over and then redeployed it to change the meaning of it completely from dehumanization to love. can you. can you even imagine. and it’s yet another example of his hilarious wonderful petty streak and I can never get enough of it fasjhdfkjalhs    

- din always noticing the children first and foremost Y_______Y (the kids running by is the only thing you see him sort of acknowledge when he’s walking into the covert in season 1 too)  

- please... please I just need him to be able to hold that baby against his chest all safe and sound and okay again I can’t it’s........ hh

NO SEASON END CLIFF HANGER ON THIS I AM  B E G G I N G  YOU 

- I would be having some thoughts about how much space there actually is on slave 1 and what that might mean (do not kill boba again please don’t kill him again), but honestly there’s only ‘GET BABY’ hours in here now, I can’t speculate about anything

[wowzers-howzers]

Ok *slaps hands together* got some good good content right here. Rohan x wife!reader x Jotaro

Reader is joot’s wife, sex pollen stand trope, you know the deal. It’s obviously smut so like yea. Also, it’s a collab with @sacreddarknesss and we listened to Dreamscape the entire time we wrote. Brit Knee is an OC me and my friend came up with on the fly.

Mori mori mori moriocho radioooooo

Morioh was a quiet town, save for the occasional unruly stand user. Rohan sighed to himself in boredom. The only bad part of this town was the fact that there was nothing to do. When inspiration is lacking, the only thing to do was wander around until it struck.

The artist stands up, slowly stretching his back out. Hearing a few pops, he smiles to himself. Maybe he could go check on that new cafe downtown? Or maybe he could people watch down at the beach? Options.

Rohan checks his Rolex and notes that it’s a little after lunchtime, prime time at the cafe. He decides to go there and packs up his camera and a small sketch pad should inspiration strike him.

Walking briskly down the sidewalk, Rohan sees a streak of pink in the corner of his eye. Odd; He slows his walk to a stop and looks around cautiously. Something isn’t right.

Rohan’s emerald eyes flit across the street and at the various suburban homes lined up neatly as far as he can see. Nothing seems off, until he notices an unusual plant breaking up the monotony of the pristine lawns. It looks to be a large Calla lily in full bloom. That shouldn’t even be possible, Morioh doesn’t have the proper climate to support those. Odd.

Deciding to investigate, Rohan crosses the road and silently creeps toward the flower. Inspecting the leaves, suddenly a fine mist sprays out from the stalk of the flower. A sickly sweet scent envelopes Rohan in a stupor. His senses are overwhelmed with the strong smell and he finds himself on his knees coughing. His eyes are watering from the aroma.

“What the hell?!” He shouts, covering his mouth with his shirt. Rohan quickly scans his surroundings, hoping to find the stand user, but he has no such luck. Damn. He fishes his phone out of his messenger bag and dials Jotaro’s number. He was given orders to call Jotaro should any stand related problems arise.

Rohan waits with bated breath as the line rings several times. His hands grip his pants tightly, knuckles turning white from strain. Rohan feels his entire body burning, like a flame swallowing him up. A haze falls over his vision. This stand could pose a serious threat if he doesn’t get Jotaro here now to take it out.

Finally, the line clicks and a female voice greets him on the other side.

“Hello? Who is it?”

Rohan’s throat tightens up and his mouth goes dry.

“Get Jotaro,” he manages to sputter. He hears a commotion on the other end as (y/n) fetches her husband. Rohan swallows roughly, trying to ignore the pulsating tension flowing through his body.

“I don’t know where he is. Are you okay?” Concern is evident in her voice.

Rohan clenches his jaw.

“Enemy stand. Go to the old bookstore. I’m across the street,” he gasps out.

The dial tone drones on. He hopes that she is hurrying. He doesn’t know how much more he can deal with choking every time he breathes.

Rohan lays down on the cool grass, his senses heightened and feeling every blade of grass against his skin. His head pounds with what feels like a migraine and his vision swims deliriously.

He can’t get the sound of her voice out of his head. The soft tone plays on repeat.

Jotaro’s wife was a wildcard. She was a powerful stand user, but she rarely used her powers, preferring to be a support on the back lines. She had a quick wit and didn’t hesitate to give verbal lashings to anyone she believed deserved it. The image of her stuck in his head. No matter how hard he tried, he could never quite capture her in drawing. Her soft features, silky hair, lovely curves. Wait. Rohan tried to snap himself out of it. He had never thought of her in any sexual way, mainly out of respect to Jotaro, but now? He couldn’t help imagining her plush thighs in his hands, her gasps for more, how warm and soft she would feel around him. What was he doing?

Rohan feels a new tension in his stomach and notices his pants tightening slightly. He moves to sit up and groans at the friction. Why was he so hypersensitive? It must have something to do with that stand.

Panicking slightly, he realizes that he may not be able to actually fight the stand user. His mind is too clouded and stuck on his base desires. Part of him has the sick desire that (Y/N) will help him with that after they defeat the stand user. Rohan imagines her form, covered in glistening sweat after an exhausting battle, chest moving up and down as she pants.

His thoughts are interrupted when he hears a shout of his name. Oh. His name. The way it flows out of her mouth has him whining. More. He wants her to say his name more. (Y/N) sprints across the street and kneels down next to Rohan.

“Are you hurt? What happened? Did you see the user?” She rapidly fires questions at him. Rohan stares at her in a daze, unable to speak. She frowns slightly and puts a hand to his forehead.

“You’re burning up!” She shouts, but Rohan can only comprehend her soft skin on him, hoping to feel even more. He barely chokes down a whimper when she takes her hand back.

Her (e/c) eyes shoot around her surroundings, looking for anyone who may be watching. She slowly stands up, clenching her fists as she calls out her stand.

She notices movement behind the curtained window of the house whose lawn they were in. Bingo!

Bounding to the door, (y/n) quickly rips the door open and grabs the user before they have the chance to even react.

“What did you do? Tell me what you did!” She yells at the cowering man in her grasp. He looks back at (y/n) in utter disbelief, how had he been found out so quickly? He smirks as he stands up slowly, looking over the female, assessing how much of a threat she is. (y/n) glares at the man, his long blonde hair parting on the left side, with hints of a strawberry pink highlight going down the middle of the part. His blue cyan eyes look her up and down rapidly, perhaps if he activates his stand in time he could have a chance of seducing her.

He smiles widely now that he has the skeleton of a plan forming in his mind. He adjusts his belt buckle, showing off both the gender symbols, his entire outfit screaming 80’s. The white bell bottom pants, the pink v-neck shirt, and the bedazzled pink scarf around his tense neck showing off one of his many amazing hobbies.

“Why hello there beautiful, what brings you over to my humble abode?”

“Well I can’t kick your ass without coming inside now can I?”

“Aweee easy kitten, I don’t mean much trouble. I just wanted to help your friend out there, it seems like he was a little wound up.”

“What the hell did you do to him!”

“Heh, well sugar, I’ll tell ya, if you let me have a little fun with ya.” His smile grows wider as (y/n) glares harshly at him, ready to kick his ass into the next millennium.

“Listen, I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but there is now way in hell I would ever even consider ‘messing around’ with you. Now tell me what the hell you’ve done to my friend or I’ll beat your ass!”

“Oooh~, kinky. Well, my dear, my name is Brit Knee and it seems that I’m going to have to teach you a lesson on how to be much nicer to people, you naughty little thing.~”

(Y/n) grimaces in disgust. Fucking cretin. Brit waves his hand up dramatically in the air as his stand materializes, a bright pink stand covered in calla lillies emerges from the ground. It’s face is made from one giant calla lily, and it makes a noise which roughly sounds like a horse neighing. It raises its petal covered arms and fires lillies at (y/n), who quickly doges out of the way.

“That’s it!” (y/n) yells summoning her stand, a giant dolphin-human hybrid emerges from behind (y/n).

“Tell me what you did,” she growls out, grabbing him by the collar and lifting him in the air. Brit chokes at the pressure on his neck.

“Fine!” He sputters. (Y/N) drops him to the ground abruptly, standing over the pathetic man ready to fight if he tries anything.

“Bare Naked Ladies is an aphrodisiac, but I can’t take away its effect,” he cries. “Once you inhale it’s fumes, if you don’t have sex within 24 hours you die!” Brit whimpers on the ground, curling into a ball. “I can’t do anything now so please don’t kill me!”

(Y/N) scowls in disgust. This stand’s power is absolute hedonism. What’s this about dying? She never knew a stand could do something like that.

“What do you mean? Are you even telling the truth?” She interrogates the bawling man.

“I said what I meant! He will die! I swear I’m not lying! Please don’t kill me!” He continues cowering like a little bitch.

“Well how do I stop it?” She questions.

“Well...uhhhhh...hmmm...my best recommendation is take him to a whore house,” he mutters under his breath.

“A what?!”

“Get him a prostitute!” Brit Knee cries out.

“He’ll have to fuck it out of his system!”

“What the fuck kinda stand is that?!” She screams.

“I’m sorry! Please don’t kill me! I am creature I cannot help this!” He cries. (y/n) glares at the broken man before her, almost pitying him. But then she pushes her pity aside and decides to deck him in the face.

-Time skip-

Rohan is curled against the ground, cradling his massive headache. (Y/N) slowly approaches him, hearing him groan in pain.

“How could I be so stupid? Putting my face in a plant! I, the great Rohan Kishibe, have made an utterly terrible mistake!” He cries out to himself.

“Shut up, stop being a baby,” (Y/N) scowls at him. “I found the stand user, he’s done. Let’s get you fixed up,” she leans down to pick up the smaller man.

Rohan cries out almost immediately after (y/n) touches him, which makes her pull away in shock. She sees him sweating and clenching his jaw. Rohan struggles to get to his feet alone.

“Don’t touch me,” he breathes out.

“Are you okay to walk?”

“Who did this?” Rohan demands.

“Brit Knee bitch,” she solemnly answers. “Sorry, that was a joke,” she trails off.

Rohan doesn’t even acknowledge her, “Where is Jotaro?”

“I don’t know. I’ll take you to the hotel in the meantime, you’re in no state to go anywhere alone right now,” she reasons, offering an arm to Rohan again, which he promptly refuses.

“We can call Koichi when we get back. He may know where Jotaro is.” (Y/N) looks sympathetically to the artist. He was drenched in sweat and visibly struggling to keep a grip on himself. He walked with a drunken stupor and (y/n) couldn’t help but grab his shoulders to steady him.

“Please,” he begs her, “I don’t know if you should do that.”

“Well I do know that you can’t walk so unless you have a better idea, this will do,” she snaps at him. Picking him up in her arms, she speedwalks to the hotel, ignoring any passerby’s who look oddly at the pair.

(y/n) enters the hotel, doing her best to ignore the gazes of the staff and any guests who happen to walk by. They probably thought she was having an affair, as they knew that she had checked in with her husband who was definitely not the man she was carrying up to her room right now. Rohan tries his hardest to ignore the problem arising in him, but it’s hard to do when the woman you’ve been silently pining after is holding you in her arms. (y/n) quickly makes her way to the suit and enters, using her foot to kick the door closed. She makes her way over to the bed, gently setting him down, much to his dismay.

Rohan breathes in the smell of the sheets and notices how much they smell like her. How many times had she and Jotaro laid in this bed together? If only she knew how badly he wanted to take Jotaro’s place, holding her and loving her until neither of them could stay awake.

Oblivious to Rohan’s thoughts, (y/n) quickly dials Koichi’s home phone. She bounces leg to leg, praying for someone to pick up soon. The line connects and she smiles brightly, happy for a breakthrough. Rohan notices her smile and can’t help but breath out heavily, wishing he could make her smile like that.

“Hello, this is the Hirose residence. Who is this?”

“Hey Coochie,” (y/n) laughs to herself at her joke, “Is Jotaro there?”

Rustling is heard on the other end as Coochie goes to check, a distant sounding “yes” is heard as he readjusts the receiver.

“Yes he’s here, want me to get him Mrs. Kujo?”

“That would be lovely, thank you.” He sets the phone down and runs off leaving (y/n) on hold.

(Y/N) worriedly looks toward the artist resting on her bed, hoping that Jotaro has an answer on what to do about this. The phone is picked back up and a gruff voice answers.

“(y/n), what’s wrong?”

“Well, ya see, um…” she trails off. “Rohan got attacked by a stand, I took care of the user but there are some...residual effects.”

“Residual effects?”

“Um, he is, uh, incapacitated by, well I don’t know how to put it. The user said something about fuck or die.”

“What?”

“Fuck or die? I don’t know but he made it clear that if Rohan doesn’t get release within 24 hours, he will die.”

“Well isn’t there a strip club in this town? Take him there. He has enough money to get a happy ending,” Jotaro reasons.

“I don’t think so? Even if they did, I really doubt it’d be like American strip clubs where money will get you anything.”

“Does he have anyone who he can call for this?”

“What, like a booty call? Him? Fat chance of that, but I’ll ask,” she answers. Calling out to Rohan, “Do you have anyone who um, you could ask for, hm how should I put this? A favor? Of the sexual kind?”

“I’m not a whore,” he shoots back.

“Yea that’s a no from him,” she informs her husband.

“No wonder he is so awful. Can’t even get laid. Well, do what you have to do.”

“What? What are you saying Jojo?”

“Fuck him. Quick and easy. It’s not like we have any other options. We can’t just let him die. Good grief, woman, what do you think I’m saying?”

“But! I can’t just! I-I can’t do that!” She protests.

“Why not? You aren’t cheating on me, and it’s not like he will come back for more. If that’s the only way to save him, I’ll allow it.”

“Jojo! I feel like I should have a say in this!”

“Okay. What do you want to do about this? Do you have any better suggestions?”

“Not really, but there must be some other way,” she worries her bottom lip between her teeth.

“What’s the issue then?”

“I-I don’t want to do this alone…”

“Good grief, speak your mind!”

“Please come back. We can do it...together?”

“I’ll be there in 5 minutes,” he abruptly ends the call.

(Y/N) let’s out an unsteady breath. What had she just agreed to? A threesome with her husband and Rohan? How would that even work? She glances over to Rohan, seeing him panting.

Five minutes pass agonizingly slowly. Finally, the door to the room is opened and quickly slammed shut as Jotaro stalks into the room.

Jotaro glares at the man on the bed, “Pathetic.”

Rohan scoots away from the side of the bed closest to Jotaro, inadvertently bumping right up against (y/n).

“Are you sure this is the only way?” (Y/N) looks at Jotaro.

Rohan covers his lap under the fluffy duvet and looks down.

(Y/N) rubs his back, to which Rohan responds with a low gasp.

Jotaro’s eyes squint, “It seems this is the best course of action.”

Rohan looks between the two, silently praying that one of them will break the tension and just start.

(Y/N) shakily puts her hand against Rohan’s chest.

“Don’t worry, we will take care of you,” she soothes.

Rohan shudders at her low voice and pushes against her touch. Jotaro gets the message and stands behind (y/n) resting his hands on her hips.

She nervously pulls Rohan forward into her grasp and gently kisses him.

It’s like a shock to his system. Rohan can’t help himself as he wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her back onto the bed, her legs straddling him. Jotaro leans over and leaves soft kisses up and down (y/n)’s neck, ending by sucking against the junction where her neck meets her shoulder.

Rohan’s hands roam all over her body, coming to rest on her chest. He gives an experimental squeeze, eyes lighting up when he hears her shuddering groan. Jotaro holds her hips tightly in his own grasp, hot breath fanning across the back of her neck. The taller man pulls her ass towards himself and slowly grinds against her, feeling himself start to harden.

(Y/N) reaches a tentative hand down to Rohan’s lap, and squeaks in surprise when he roughly grabs her hand and pushes his hard length against it. Rohan shakily sighs, finally getting some form of friction. Taking his lead, she massages him, pressing the palm of her hand firmly along his cock.

She sighs as Jotaro, kneels behind her, giving her support from the awkward angle she was in. He gently caresses her ass, ghosting his large hands over her heat.

Rohan whines against (y/n)’s touch and quickly breaks apart from her soft kisses to take his shirt off, finding the constriction unbearable.

“Calm down there buddy,” (y/n) laughs nervously, only to be met with Rohan’s lust-blown eyes. His mouth is parted slightly, panting. Rohan looks to Jotaro, as if asking permission to do something. Jotaro nods slightly. Rohan roughly pulls your shirt up and off of you, leaving you in a bra. Jotaro makes quick work of that, flinging the now useless garment somewhere in the room.

You gasp in shock and Rohan greedily takes one of your nipples into his mouth, already roughly grabbing and massaging the other one.

“R-Rohan!”

He growls against you and lightly nips at your sensitive chest. Jotaro, not one to be outdone, pulls your pants down and off of your legs, leaving you in your underwear. He presses one hand roughly against your clothed slit. Your back arches against him.

Rohan pulls you down to sit on his lap, relishing in the heat between your legs rubbing against him deliciously. Jotaro glares at him, resigning himself to holding your head back for heated kissing.

You wiggle your hips, gyrating on Rohan, sending him into even more of a frenzy than before. Jotaro snakes an arm around you to reach down your front side. His hand momentarily rests against the elastic band of your panties before diving underneath, teasing you with one finger against your lips. You whine against him, trying to adjust your hips to feel more, but Jotaro refuses to give in and finger you. Instead, he gently presses against your clit, adding more and more pressure every time you move against him.

“J-jojo, please,” she whines needily.

“Please what?”

“Please go in, please use your hand, I can’t take the teasing,” (y/n) grinds against Rohan and Jotaro’s fingers.

Suddenly, Jotaro dips his fingers into her wet pussy, roughly finger-fucking her. She screams out, slamming her hips down, making Rohan moan as well.

Hearing him, (y/n) looks down and sees how painfully clothed he still is.

“Rohan,” she mewls. “Take your pants off, please~”

He visibly shakes, hearing her beg and say his name so sweetly is like music to his ears. He slides his pants down, leaving him in only boxers. (Y/N) palms against him before grabbing him through the thin material. He gasps at her hard touch. Keening against her for more, Rohan bucks his hips into her grasp.

(Y/N)’s thighs squeeze against Jotaro’s hand, prompting him to take his hand out, seductively licking her moisture from his fingers before giving her another open-mouth kiss.

Tasting herself on him, she moans against him, tilting her hips against him to give him a roll. Jotaro breathes out heavily before pulling back and stripping off everything. (Y/N) finds herself licking her lips, watching her husband take it all off for her before he rejoins her on the bed. Jotaro presses his thick length against her still clothed pussy, rubbing in between her thighs, groaning at the feeling.

Rohan watches with rapt attention, the pure eroticism of the action making him drool. He watches (y/n)’s face as it contorts in pleasure. Rohan grips himself, tugging himself out of his boxers, grabbing her hand to grip him directly.

His tip is leaking, after being so needy and wanting for so long, he can’t take much more waiting.

Jotaro grabs (y/n)’s hips, hands playing with the band of her panties before ripping them off.

“H-hey! Those were my good ones!” She protests.

“Shut up, I’ll buy you more,” Jotaro silences her, one hand holding her neck, not putting pressure on it yet, but just holding it there. Rohan, taking the moment she is distracted, runs his fingers through her folds, gathering up moisture.

She squeaks in shock, watching as Rohan puts the finger in his mouth, sucking her essence off of him.

“Exquisite,” he sighs, gazing at her adoringly.

“Mine,” Jotaro replies, possessively grabbing (y/n)’s body, positioning himself at her entrance.

“Me first,” he grunts, relishing in the feeling of her tight walls clamping down on him.

(Y/N) let’s out a shaky gasp, never getting used to how well her husband fills her up, just how large he is. Jotaro finally bottoms out, only to pull her hips back up before dropping her back on his dick. Rohan watches, eyes stuck on the sight of her cunt swallowing the large dick whole.

“Make yourself useful,” Jotaro glares at Rohan, prompting him to stimulate her clit while she bounces on his cock. Rohan eagerly complies, using his hands to rub against her.

(Y/N) cries out, overstimulated from Jotaro’s dick jackhammering into her combined with Rohan’s skilled hands working her clit.

“G-Gonna cum,” she gasps out, thighs clenching, hips bucking against Jotaro.

“Cum for me, show him how well I treat you,” Jotaro growls in her ear.

(Y/N)’s orgasm hits her like a freight train, spasms ripping through her body as her vision whites out from the pleasure. Her pussy clenches onto Jotaro’s cock, bringing him to release too.

He holds her hips steadily against his own, panting in her ear as he empties himself out into her. Rohan finds himself transfixed by the sight of Jotaro’s cum oozing out of her.

“Here. Your turn,” Jotaro removes himself from her folds still breathing heavily.

“Blow his mind, honey,” he whispers against her ear. (Y/N) shudders at the gravelly tone in his voice before nodding, falling down to cage Rohan between her arms. Her arms support her weight, not wanting to just fall against the smaller man. He is broken out of his stupor when she lines herself up against his cock and sinks down slowly.

To say Rohan enjoyed it would be an understatement. It was pure bliss, Jotaro’s cum acting as a lubricant, allowing him to slide against her velvety walls. The warmth made him feel like he was melting underneath her, eyes rolling back as she finally reached the bottom.

Giving an experimental roll of her hips, Rohan’s arm shot up to her back, his nails digging in in pleasure.

“A-Ah~ (y/n)! Please,” he begged. Oh how the mighty fall. The great Rohan Kishibe, reduced to a begging fool at the slightest provocation. If he had the mental wherewithal to be ashamed, he would be, but right now, the only thing he could think about was how warm and wet her pussy was as she bounced up and down on him.

(Y/N)’s sweat-covered body warmed up again, the angle Rohan’s dick hitting her in just the right way. Her back arched, pushing her pelvis against him. The new position added just the right amount of friction against her clit with every bounce of her body.

“Rohan, I’m, fuck, I’m cumming!” She shouted, her hips losing rhythm as she ground herself against him, clenching down. Rohan moves his hands to her hips and roughly pulled her up and thrust into her, not wanting to lose the delicious friction.

Gasping out, (y/n)’s body went into overdrive, the added pleasure wiping her out entirely. “F-fuck~!”

Rohan moaned his approval, hips canting to meet her hips every time he dropped her down onto his dick.

“So close,” he cried out. Unable to hold out any longer, Rohan slammed with more fervor. Like an animal seeking release, Rohan held her body tightly against him until finally the coil of tension snapped, crying out as he rode out his orgasm.

“(Y/N)!” Rohan couldn’t help but scream her name, shooting his cum inside her to mix with Jotaro’s. His vision was filled with stars, drool spilling out of his parted mouth, body entirely blissed out.

Jotaro watched in amusement, he knew his wife was a dream in bed. He watched as she rolled off of Rohan to the side. Picking her up in his arms, he carried her to the bathroom to clean her up.

“You’re welcome,” he said, kicking the bathroom door closed to clean (y/n) up.

Rohan, thoroughly spent, stared up at the ceiling, unable to move from his pure exhaustion. His body finally started ramping down, finally relaxing after hours of pure tension.

[dndeed]

Critical Role Miniature Rollout: C2E45

With Andrew Harshman

A review of the minis used on Critical Role. 

Talk about a stressful episode. A dungeon crawl in the truest sense.

Check below deck for stowaways and crawl to the finish line, it’s time for Critical Role Miniature Rollout Campaign 2 Episode 45!

The Characters

Twiggy SteamForged Games Twiggy Figure Official Twiggy Art by Ari @ornerine

Sadly, per usual, we are deprived of a clear, in-focus view of a new PC miniature. I have searched the internet in vain for a better photo of the Twiggy mini. Fortunately, even at odd and blurry angles, this figure looks brilliant. The vivid sculpt and whimsical pose recreates the art very well and properly captures the spirit of this wonderfully played character. In a funny way, the pose almost looks a little threatening. With a little imagination one could see it as less of a cutesy twirl and more of a strutting, arms stretched out “Are you not entertained?!” intimidation stance. In any case, it’s excellent. Nice work Ari and Steamforged.

The List

Campaign Coins DEVEN RUE COMPASS ROSE

Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom

Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Vaulted Diagonal Walls

Dwarven Forge Diagonal Wall Pack

Dwarven Forge Dungeon Floors

Dwarven Forge Ladders

Dwarven Forge Medieval Furniture Set

Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Vaulted Corner Door with Narrow Ancient Door

Dwarven Forge Vaulted Dungeon Elevation

Dwarven Forge Chamber of Sorrows Pile of Skulls

Dwarven Forge Small Treasure Pile

Dwarven Forge Plinth Arch

Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Fancy Table

Deadly Foes Dressing: Candelabra

Tiny Furniture Dark Magister reading corner

Tiny Furniture Dark Magister workplace

Tiny Furniture Librarian reading corner

Tiny Furniture Librarian's bookshelves

Tiny Furniture Beast hunter reading corner

Tiny Furniture Beast hunter bookshelves

Tiny Furniture Bedroom set v.2

Legendary Realms Bookcase

D&D Icons of the Realms Tomb and Traps Case Incentive

Deadly Foes Dressing: Candelabra

Kingmaker Dungeon Dressing: Raised Dais

Axe N Shield Single Flyer Risers - Clear Mithril

Steamforged Games Critical Role Miniatures

Prototype Steamforged Games Critical Role Miniatures

Waterdeep Dragon Heist #004a City Guard

Waterdeep Dragon Heist #004b City Guard

Tyranny of Dragons #041 Blue Dragon

Harbinger #69 Large Fire Elemental

Blood War #27 Living Flaming Sphere

Desert of Desolation #32 Rot Scarab Swarm

Elemental Evil #024 Earth Genasi Fighter (Invisible)

Rage of Demons #051 Human Wizard (Invisible)

Monster Menagerie #021 Bryn Lightfingers (Invisible)

Monster Menagerie #024 Illydia Maethellyn (Invisible)

The Terrain

Heirloom Sphere: Secret Study Dwarven Forge Dungeon Floors, Dwarven Forge Diagonal Wall Pack, Dwarven Forge Ladders, Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Fancy Table, Dwarven Forge Vaulted Dungeon Elevation, Dwarven Forge Medieval Furniture Set, Deadly Foes Dressing: Candelabra, Tiny Furniture Dark Magister reading corner, Tiny Furniture Dark Magister workplace, Tiny Furniture Librarian reading corner, Tiny Furniture Librarian's bookshelves, Tiny Furniture Beast hunter reading corner, Tiny Furniture Beast hunter bookshelves, Legendary Realms Bookcase

This is approaching full sized TV set production value. Mighty impressive! The Secret Study is easily the most expensive collection of room contents in Campaign 2. Excluding the Dwarven Forge that makes up the actual room structure, the components within are pricier than any other C2 space. Easily a couple hundred dollars (assuming they were ordered prepainted). Man that’s a lot of qualifiers.

The bulk of the terrain pieces are from Tiny Furniture. They recently did some updates to their site, so if you cannot find an item from the links above, check their Etsy page. They produce top quality stuff and their paint jobs are excellent. I recently saw a collection of Tiny Furniture items in-person and they were very handsome. 

Heirloom Sphere: Nexus Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom, Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Vaulted Diagonal Walls, Dwarven Forge Plinth Arch, Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom Vaulted Corner Door with Narrow Ancient Door, Dwarven Forge Chamber of Sorrows Pile of Skulls, D&D Icons of the Realms Tomb and Traps Case Incentive, Dwarven Forge Small Treasure Pile,  Kingmaker Dungeon Dressing: Raised Dais

Transportation Sphere Altar D&D Icons of the Realms Tomb and Traps Case Incentive

This model works really well for this purpose. Not originally a teleportation device, this piece is actually a sarcophagus. And not just any sarcophagus, Acererak’s sarcophagus. Or at least that’s the suggestion as it is from the Tomb of Annihilation minis series. It’s a cool figure, worthy of the Tomb of Annihilation/Horrors name.

Dragon Treasure Hoard  Dwarven Forge Small Treasure Pile

I guess blue dragons aren’t really known for their organizational skills, this hoard is a mess. Coins, bones, goblets, chests, and tomes all thrown into a heap. Nary a single coin rolled. Sloppy. For all these reasons, I really like this sculpt. It’s got so much variety in the objects making up the model. The colors are great and there’s even a big shiny gem inlaid in the main plastic cast.

Teleportation Landing Kingmaker Dressing: Raised Dais

[80′s synth line plays] Raised Dais, Raised Dais, oh, oh, oh Raised Dais. That joke was a real stretch, but the use of this mini certainly was not. Yet another wonderfully useful bit of terrain from the Pathfinder Miniature Battles series. The paint is maybe a little flat, but everything else is solid. I’m impressed with the scale of this figure. It’s large and looks great on the battle mat.

The Monsters

The Guardian Dragon Tyranny of Dragons #041 Blue Dragon

So this is exactly the problem with this miniature. Confusion about whether it is flying or not as was expressed by the CR cast during combat. That and the ridiculous aftermarket price, unreliable removable flight stand, and exceptionally plain paint job. Look at that sloppy line of white that runs across each row of teeth and overall lack of shading. Older prepainted blue dragons though not as readily available and long out of retail spaces are significantly more impressive. 

In terms of practicality, this is a good miniature choice for this encounter though. I still see retail stores with Tyranny of Dragons booster packs which may contain this model. It’s understandable and entirely acceptable that this miniature was used as opposed to some old and less common out of print mini. What is good about this dragon is the pose. It’s unique and it’s interesting. The blue dragon has the appearance of hovering in a most intimidating fashion. “Intimidating hover” sounds like it should be impossible, but they managed it in this sculpt. 

First Fire Elemental Blood War #27 Living Flaming Sphere Mini images in this section sourced from minisgallery.com

Cast in translucent plastic and topped with two layers of paint this flaming sphere looks properly fiery. Dandy spell effect figure here. Also, it looks vaguely Street Fighter hadouken-like, so extra points for that.

Actual Fire Elemental Harbinger #69 Large Fire Elemental

This monster is a little simple looking. The pose is pretty relaxed, bordering on boring. I think it would have benefited from also being made of translucent plastic, but this was in the first DDM miniatures set, so they weren’t doing anything that fancy yet. Despite it’s rudimentary nature, I like this elemental very much. The height and jack-o'-lantern type face really work for me.

The Terrain/Monsters

Mimic Tiny Furniture Bedroom set v.2

Handsome wardrobe, Molly would have loved this. Based on his clothing, I’m pretty sure blood hunters have favored enemy wardrobes. Quality furniture piece a nice armoire for sure.

The Spells

Invisible Party Members Elemental Evil #024 Earth Genasi Fighter (Invisible), Rage of Demons #051 Human Wizard (Invisible), Monster Menagerie #021 Bryn Lightfingers (Invisible), Monster Menagerie #024 Illydia Maethellyn (Invisible)

Now I’ve been known to complain about invisible miniatures and I still stand by my opinion that from a production perspective they are wholly uninspired and lazy. They’d be much better served in a nonrandom spell pack. But I must admit I was wrong about their usefulness at the table. Matthew Mercer has used them to great effect as seen (har har har) in this combat.

Closing Remarks

A high standard was set in 2018 for Critical Role miniatures, but it’s nothing 2019 can’t handle. I’m confident 2019 will be even more impressive.

#criticalroleminiaturerollout

[richardhandelcarpfishing]

My Journey Through The Old Skool Days

I started my Carp fishing in the early ’80s, after leaving school.  I discovered there was more to fishing than small local rivers with only Roach & Dace and the odd Perch in the offing.  At this time, I was living in Ipswich and there where only a couple of tackle shops.  These shops had a very basic, limited range of carp gear which the majority of which was match kit and when I say carp gear, it’s not as you think of it today.  The choice of hook was poor (to say the least), I stuck to size 8 hooks.  They were pretty good and served me well for many years.  Rods on the other hand; were a mixture of all sorts, as I could only afford one at a time.  I started with an SS6 and a bodex, this was an early carbon rod if my memory is correct.  I also had a cork handle rod that my dad got for me.  I then got myself a pair of ss7’s, which were the bees knees, as far as I was concerned, they were secondhand and reels were a mish-mash as well.  I can’t actually remember or even recognize them in the photography.  At the time I lived at home and didn’t get paid that much, I gave my mum & dad a little bit of rent and saved the rest for bait.  This has always been a key factor in my view.  If you have the best kit in the world you will not catch fish, however, with the right bait and a good selection of bait, this is the key to catching carp.

Until I could save up money to buy better stuff, I just stuck to what I had and get the odd bits second hand from friends.  At this point in my life, I had not discovered mail order or even fishing magazines!  All of my money went on bait, beer and trying to save up for a pair of rods.  As for buzzers, I had the right mixture of a Heron and a rolon.  This was rubbish, if you got a screamer in the night, you would need to check with a torch first.  You had to check which line was going – if the line was pulled tight, it would set the alarm off.  This was fun until I realized what was going on.  I then managed to get together enough money for a pair of Optonics.  I was planning on doing this first, as sitting up all night listening out for coins to drop off my spool a tin was taking its toll on me.  Trying to do nights in the week and the odd two nigher at the weekend was putting years on me!  I even had my ever faithful fairy bottle top bobbins. I have even done a week trip in the early ’80s like this.

The lake I was fishing was a club water,  at this time consisted of 4 lakes over a massive area.  They were full of bars and gully back bays which were full of pads.  There were only a handful of carp anglers, I think there were about 6 fully kitted out carp anglers.  They had clearly been fishing for some years and had a greater understanding of the lake.  In though’s days, they clearly were never going to help you.  They were still a friendly bunch of lads and we all enjoyed pike fishing over the Winter months.  It was perceived that carp didn’t feed over these months, the social pike trip helped us bond with the lads and finally started getting the odd snippet of information handed down.  I started to catch the odd fish, at that time 1 or 2 fish a season was good going.  My best year was 7 carp, I was amazed and totally hooked on carp fishing.  One year, I had a take on the opening day and lost the fish around the corner of a point.  This was the only carp take for that year, it was very hard going, to say the least.

I could never afford a bivvy, so I started off with bits of plastic sheeting tucked up around the spokes of a brolly, this helped until the wind blew (as there were no pegging points).  I slept in a large sail bag my dad had given me.  This was when I started seeing what other anglers were using as I was being allowed to look inside their bivvy’s.  You had to be invited in and not just peer in – it was just not done.  You can imagine my face when I finally spotted the old Argos sun-loungers, that bit of kit jumped to the top of my list.  They were a death trap though, we had watched people collapse in them and finding it very hard to get out.

The best way around the lack of bivvy problem was to go halves with a friend and then double up on a swim together.  If they couldn’t fish that weekend, you got it to yourself, then you both just needed to save up again to get another one.  This worked well and slowly we started to look a bit more like carp angler’s or as we called ourselves Specimen Hunters.

Those first few years on Barham pits (near Claydon), is where the carp bug really kicked in and is still well and truly with me.  We had some laughs in though’s days.  There was no barrow other than a wheelbarrow, which I hadn’t seen anyone use yet.  We used an old pram base was perfect until we got bored and started to race them up and down, you can guess the rest!  Let’s just say the wheels all buckled up and that was the end of that!  We did muck about somewhat back then, I will come to that later on.

This was the time also when I discovered PVA Bags, at this time they were made by Duncan Kay.  Wow!  How they changed my fishing.  After playing around with them, I realized that if you left the air in them and got the wind in the correct direction you could drift a bag under overhanging trees and pick up fish that way.  Inevitably, it would be a tench or bream.  This was a bit frustrating and costly but occasionally worth it if you spotted a fish in these swims.

By 1984, I had sorted out my kit (well sort of), I had better rods but they were still not a pair.  Other kit had become more important, we then moved on to Weybread pits on the Suffolk Norfolk border.  There was a small pit in the middle of the complex, where we settled on for a few years.  This enabled me to hone the art of carp fishing and was more of a runs water.  This was a very valuable period of time in my carp fishing life.  I had learned so much from other anglers and the group of friends I was with.  This was where a couple of lads could empty the lake most weekends.  We learned the art of floater fishing, we went through a stage of trying to capture a carp floater fish on all the rods we owned one by one.  This sounds crazy and it did at the time, but it gave you a greater understanding of how to play fish.  The minimum and maximum pressure you could put on them without getting a hook pull and margin fishing is the key to a lot of fish captures.

To this day, this is still my favorite style of fishing.  It is the most rewarding and possibly the most intense you can get from carp fishing.  We had discovered that black-eyed peas were an amazing bait.  They were very cheap to buy, easy to prepare and you could easily color/flavor them and they stayed on the hook.  Also at this time, we had started to play around with boilies.  I did have a go around 1980 but without much success.  It was hard to find any information regarding ingredients at first, so I just stuck to stuff out of my mum’s kitchen!  Things then started to kick off in ’84 – I purchased the odd book, which for the life of me I can’t remember the names.  Unfortunately, over the years I moved around a lot and I so wish I hadn’t binned so much stuff.  I used to keep everything there was to do with carp fishing; I read so much, just sat and made up bait recipes.  So many in fact, that I never ever used them all!  Somewhere very successful for me, others not so much but it just was a fantastic time to be in the carp fishing world – a voyage of discovery.  I do miss bait making these days but with work, kids and family stuff I just don’t have the time.  Also the ready-made frozen bait market so advanced today, why bother?  Use your time to go fishing!  I do like to play around with hook baits, stick mixes and ground bait, in the past two years they have got me very excited again, there is just so much choice, back to the ’80s.

Transport in those days was also great fun.  We use to share lifts for a couple of years and I still can’t believe we would get all that tackle for two people in my Mini Clubman estate.  It was bigger than my mates one but he still got two people’s kit in.  They were stuffed to the gunnels but we got it all in and it worked well.  I would like to see you get today’s kits in an original mini, now that would be fun!  I ended up with an Escort estate, much to the dismay of my girlfriend, as everyone else had flash Escort, she just didn’t understand carp fishing!

In the photo you can see my first proper bivvy and a pair of rods, you may have spotted the third.  We hoped the bailiff never did, if he did, he mostly turned a blind eye, which was a help.  I had an old groundsheet as a sleeping bag cover, landing net in though’s day’s where very heavy and hard to move about, unlike the modern slimline ones.  We were good at cooking on the bank, that was one thing that wasn’t too bad.  There were plenty of options for cooking as camping equipment was very common.  Most of the summer months, I would kip out under the stars, this was just an amazing time to be fishing, I did have a brolly pole just in case the weatherman was wrong!  I sorted out the issues with the Argos sun-lounger by cutting a V at each end of a piece of wood, this stopped the bed collapsing but in the end, I found the best way was to dig a groove in the ground for the legs and use pegs to peg it hard into the ground.  This worked well and worth the effort – no more trapped in a bed with a rod trying to play a fish and get out.

Weybread Middle Pit was where I honed my skills and I certainly had plenty of carp in the first year there.  I remember turning up the day before June 16th and we were all set up by 8 am, we just sat feeding the carp bread in the margins most of the day.  They were just everywhere.  The following morning was a different matter, we had carp but not in the numbers we were seeing the day before.  The carp had learned about pressure even then.

It was hard to find a lake with twenty’s in, let alone a 30+ and then you needed people to tell you about them and the location.  This all took time, part of the complex we fished had 1 and I’m not sure to this day, why we started on middle pit but there were 2 or 3 twenty’s.  I think we must have thought it was a better option.  I had over 53 carp that year.  I learned so much, watercraft was a key factor, understanding the topography of the lake and the feeding patterns.  I was up there every weekend from Friday to Sunday, even if I worked Saturday morning, I would go straight after work and set up.  The more you are there, the more you learn and that is certainly true today.

Fish care was in the long grass in though’s days.  We did all had a sack to retain the carp in and tried to do our best.  There has always been an urge for me to look after the fish and return it safely for the next person to catch.

They may not have all been the biggest fish in the world but back then, we certainly thought they were and took photographs of them all.

There was another thing that I remember about the ’80s, that has all but been forgotten –  playing tricks on each other (and scoring points for the idea of the trick and the reaction of the person).  Some of the best ones I can remember was turning the bivvy around, giving them a run and watch them try and find their way out in a sleepy daze or removing the elastic bands from under the bed chair a putting string to just hold the material in place, then watching them lay on the bed and fall onto a nice hard floor.  Other ones I can remember, putting food coloring into beans, blue and green were the best, switching the rod’s over and leaving the line in its original buzzer was a fun one.  Never leave your keys about as someone would put something in your car which would generally be horrible.

There was a group of five of us that fished together back in the early ’80’s; Mike, Carl, Paul, Andy, and I.  It was probably one of the best periods of my carp fishing career.  For the company and laughs, the innervation and discovering so much between us all.  Without a doubt, without this group of people, I think the start of my fishing career, wouldn’t have been that much fun.  Unfortunately. I had to move down South and time changes with family and stuff – we lost contact with each other.

I have fond memories of the ’80s and the old skool kit.  I wished I’d kept more of it but this wasn’t to be.  However, I love the modern day carp kit and the advances which have happened over the years.  As I get ever closer to 55, I am glad of my Aqua bivvy and 5 season sleeping bag.  How well would we be at sleeping on the Argos sun-loungers?  I bet we would all be doubled up with back pain and walking with a stick.  I could go on about all the other inventions and improvements.  The key one for me has to be bait.  As the ’90s began, fishing tackle started to take a leap forwards with proper bivvy, Kjc Rod pods, Wavelock brolly.  Winter fishing became a thing of the future for all carp anglers.

Not sure if you class the early ’90’s as old skool.  However, looking back at the amount of money I could send on carp fishing.  It was certainly a turning point for me.  The tackle I could buy and the lakes I discovered, the industry was starting the beginning of great things to come.

I hope this has been an incite to old skool fishing and my time through the ages.

Until Next Time

Richard

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My Journey Through The Old Skool Days My Journey Through The Old Skool Days I started my Carp fishing in the early '80s, after leaving school. 

[the-grendel-khan]

Letter to an interested student.

I had the good luck to chat with a high-school student who was interested in doing the most good she could do with hacker skills. So I wrote the letter I wish someone had written me when I was an excitable, larval pre-engineer. Here it is, slightly abridged.

Hi! You said you were interested in learning IT skills and using them for the greater good. I've got some links for learning to code, and opportunities for how to use those skills. There's a lot to read in here--I hope you find it useful!

First, on learning to code. You mentioned having a Linux environment set up, which means that you have a Python runtime readily available. Excellent! There are a lot of resources available, a lot of languages to choose from. I recommend Python--it's easy to learn, it doesn't have a lot of sharp edges, and it's powerful enough to use professionally (my current projects at work are in Python). And in any case, mathematically at least, all programming languages are equally powerful; they just make some things easier or more difficult.

I learned a lot of Python by doing Project Euler; be warned that the problems do get very challenging, but I had fun with them. (I'd suggest attempting them in order.) I've heard good things about Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, as well, though I haven't used that method to teach myself anything. It can be very, very useful to have a mentor or community to work with; I suggest finding a teacher who's happy to help you with your code, or at the very least sign up for stackoverflow, a developer community and a very good place to ask questions. (See also /r/learnprogramming's FAQ.) The really important thing here is that you have something you want to do with the skills you want to learn. (As it is written, "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.") Looking at my miscellaneous-projects directory on my laptop, the last thing I wrote was a Python script to download airport diagrams from the FAA's website (via some awful screenscraping logic), convert them from PDFs to SVGs, and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. It was something I was doing by hand, and then I automated it. I've also used R (don't use R if you can help it; it's weird and clunky) to make choropleth maps for internet arguments, and more Python to shuffle data to make Wikipedia graphs. It's useful to think of programming as powered armor for your brain.

You asked about ethical hacking. Given that the best minds of my generation are optimizing ad clicks for revenue, this is a really virtuous thing to want to do! So here's what I know about using IT skills for social good.

I mentioned the disastrous initial launch of healthcare.gov; TIME had a narrative of what happened there; see also Mikey Dickerson (former SRE manager at Google)'s speech to SXSW about recruiting for the United States Digital Service. The main public-service organizations in the federal government are 18F (a sort of contracting organization in San Francisco) and the United States Digital Service, which works on larger projects and tries to set up standards. The work may sound unexciting, but it's extraordinarily vital--veterans getting their disability, immigrants not getting stuck in limbo, or a child welfare system that works. It's easy to imagine that providing services starts and ends with passing laws, but if our programs don't actually function, people don't get the benefits or services we fought to allocate to them. (See also this TED talk.)

The idea is that most IT professionals spend a couple of years in public service at one of these organizations before going into the industry proper. (I'm not sure what the future of 18F/USDS is under the current administration, but this sort of thing is less about what policy is and more about basic competence in executing it.)

For a broader look, you may appreciate Bret Victor's "What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change?", or consider Vi Hart and Nicky Case's "Parable of the Polygons", a cute web-based 'explorable' which lets you play with Thomas Schelling's model of housing segregation (i.e., you don't need actively bitter racism in order to get pretty severe segregation, which is surprising).

For an idea of what's at stake with certain safety-critical systems, read about the Therac-25 disaster and the Toyota unintended-acceleration bug. (We're more diligent about testing the software we use to put funny captions on cat pictures than they were with the software that controls how fast the car goes.) Or consider the unintended consequences of small, ubiquitous devices.

And for an example of what 'white hat' hacking looks like, consider Google's Project Zero, which is a group of security researchers finding and reporting vulnerabilities in widely-used third-party software. Some of their greatest hits include "Cloudbleed" (an error in a proxying service leading to private data being randomly dumped into web pages en masse), "Rowhammer" (edit memory you shouldn't be able to control by exploiting physical properties of RAM chips), and amazing bug reports for products like TrendMicro Antivirus.

To get into that sort of thing, security researchers read reports like those linked above, do exercises like "capture the flag" (trying to break into a test system), and generally cultivate a lateral mode of thinking--similar to what stage magicians do, in a way. (Social engineering is related to, and can multiply the power of, traditional hacking; Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" is a good read. He gave a public talk a few years ago; I think that includes his story of how he stole proprietary source code from Motorola with nothing but an FTP drop, a call to directory assistance and unbelievable chutzpah.)

The rest of this is more abstract, hacker-culture advice; it's less technical, but it's the sort of thing I read a lot of on my way here.

For more about ethical hacking, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Aaron Swartz; he was instrumental in establishing Creative Commons licensing, the RSS protocol, the Markdown text-formatting language, Reddit and much else. As part of his activism, he mass-harvested academic journal articles from JSTOR using a guest account at MIT. The feds arrested him and threatened him with thirty-five years in prison, and he took his own life before going to trial. It's one of the saddest stories of the internet age, I think, and it struck me particularly because it seemed like the kind of thing I'd have done, if I'd been smarter, more civic-minded, and more generally virtuous. There's a documentary, The Internet's Own Boy, about him.

Mark Pilgrim is a web-standards guy who previously blogged a great deal, but disappeared from public (internet) life around 2011. He wrote about the freedom to tinker, early internet history, long-term preservation (see also), and old-school copy protection, among other things.

I'll leave you with two more items. First, a very short talk, "wat", by Gary Bernhardt, on wacky edge cases in programming language. And second, a book recommendation. If you haven't read it before, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderfully fun and challenging read; it took me most of my senior year of high school to get through it, but I'd never quite read anything like it. It's not directly about programming, but it's a marvelous example of the hacker mindset. MIT OpenCourseWare has a supplemental summer course (The author's style isn't for everyone; if you do like it, his follow-up Le Ton beau de Marot (about language and translation) is also very, very good.)

I hope you enjoy; please feel free to send this around to your classmates--let me know if you have any more specific questions, or any feedback. Thanks!

[theplaguezine]

HAMMERFALL

Interview with  Joacim Cans and Oscar Dronjak by Daniel Hinds

(conducted October 2006)

In an age of blandness and banal brutality, Sweden's HammerFall continues their crusade of classic heavy metal played with power, feeling and pure class.  Inspired by the likes of Accept, Judas Priest and Helloween (not to mention the legions of lesser-known acts that rocked the 80s), the mission has remained true for a decade now and the brand new Threshold marks one of the band's most triumphant recordings to date.  Vocalist Joacim Cans and guitarist Oscar Dronjak are the songwriting foundation of HammerFall, as well as two of the nicest guys you could hope to talk to. How do you feel about Threshold now that it is done and out? Oscar: Obviously, we're happy with it, but that's kind of a given.  I think it turned out more powerful than I would have hoped for.  When we recorded it, we were behind a lot in time, so we kept catching up and never had to time to really sit down and listen to what we had recorded.  The first time we actually listened to the whole album, all the songs, was the very last day of the recording.  But everybody felt good and was relieved that it sounded good.  From that experience and now a few months later, the initial reaction is still the same: I think it's a very strong album, I'm very proud of it. What led to you guys being behind, time-wise - just a lot of little things? Oscar: Yeah, there were a lot of things - a lot of small things make up a big thing in the end.  It started out we had to cut a couple of days to record a video and we decided to just lose them and not put them on at the end.  We also had some technical difficulties with air conditioning, stuff breaking down because it was too hot for the computers and they started to go crazy as well.  Eventually, we had a day and a half when everything was just completely down because of the heat.  So we constantly kept running but I think that worked to our favor in the end. Did you do anything differently in the studio? Oscar: Since we worked with the same producer in the same studio, we tried to keep the same templates basically of how to do things.  I know what we did a little bit differently this time is we had Joacim sing every day and a lot of hours every day, he sang for like 6 or 7 hours every day, and he never did that before.  I think that is one of the reasons that his voice sounds the way it does because he really pushed it on this album and the result is better for it.

Joacim:  When we were done with the Chapter V recordings, I left with a really good feeling that I wanted to return as soon as possible because I had so much fun recording that album.  So I think the basic setup was like a carbon copy of Chapter V: same studio, same producer, same catering lady, same room.  I wanted to have the bedroom I had on the Chapter V album because I wanted to capture the spirit.  I'm really weird when it comes to things like that.  We did a signing session in Sweden for a week and I had my place in the bus, my seat, and I sat there every day.  I don't know why it ends up like that, but everyone went to their seats and I mean, it's a small bus, who cares?  But, hey, that's my seat!  (laughs)  The recording process on this album was really different from the previous one because we were behind schedule from day one.  Usually when we are done with a production, we are sitting there with five days left, not knowing what to do.  So I thought it would be the same now, that every Saturday we could go out and have dinner, go out and hang in the bars and have a few beers and part and so on, but we did not have time.  We had so much pressure and so much work ahead of us all the time and I don't really know what we did wrong.  We had problems with the air conditioning system, creating like a heat wave in the studio and eventually the computer crashed because of the heat, so that cost us like two days.  The very last night, I remember sitting in the studio and he said, 'Now we have to listen to the songs,' because no one knew if we were done or not.  And, thank god, we were done and I could leave the next day because I had my daughter visiting the last couple of days in the studio.  There was a lot of frustration going on but I think that we managed to convert the frustration into something good and maybe that is kind of the energy and the heavier parts on the album.  Because also, when we were done with all the vocals, we went back to the first two songs just to compare and it was such a difference.  The character of my voice was really different and we said, well, we cannot have it like this, so we had to re-do the first two songs. Which songs were those? Joacim:  "Carved in Stone" and "Titan." Cool, "Titan" is one of my favorites on the album. Joacim:  Well thank you; it's one of my favorites, too.  We managed to actually improve the vocals a lot, compared to the first recording that we did.  So, all in all, it was a lot of hard work, a lot of frustration, but we managed to handle it in a good way. Will you work with Charlie again in the future? Oscar:  I absolutely hope so.  He is the perfect producer for us at this point, really accentuates our strengths and helps us hide our weaknesses. Threshold is your first #1 album in Sweden since Renegade - what do you attribute that to? Oscar:  A little bit has to be timing, but also because of the…  Normally when we do an album, we're not in the press, we don't do anything else except for writing the songs and recording the album, so nobody really hears the name HammerFall.  But this time, as things happened, we've done two videos together with sports teams in Sweden - we did a curling video and an athletics video.  Those two things are of course cross-promotion into a territory where we might not have that many fans to begin with, in sports, but also because sports is such a big thing it becomes more of a household thing for people.  So I think that helped a lot to raise the awareness of the band. How did the video for "Hearts on Fire" with the Women's Olympic Curling team come about? Oscar:  It started with the girls wanting to roughen up the image of curling a little bit, to make it more rock 'n' roll I guess.  They thought it was too weak of an image that they had and they just approached our booking agency to see if there was any way that we could help them change that image for the Olympics that were coming up.  It just happened that they wanted to work with us and that's what we did.  We had a song that we already did a few years ago as a video and single, so we just had fun, goofed around a little bit.  It was their video anyway.  It came at a really good time for us because we were bored at home, nothing else was really happening, so that was fun. Moving on to the new songs, why did you choose "Natural High" as the first single? Oscar:  Apart from "The Fire Burns Forever," that was the natural choice for a single in the way the song is structured and the way everything comes together, so to speak. But it is also very representative of the album and of HammerFall in 2006: it's catchy, a lot of melodies, but also kind of hard under the surface. What is the story behind "Shadow Empire?" Joacim:  It's a dark, futuristic vision about this person, it is me in the sense that I'm singing, but, 'I open up my eyes--'  I forgot the rest of the line but one of the lines I do like. (laughs)  It is kind of more like a humoristic line, when he's looking in the mirror and if the mirror tells the truth, then who the hell am I?  He's kind of half-man, half-robot, like a Robocop kind of thing.  He needs to avenge the people who put him in the position where he's at; he's not comfortable being half-robot, so he's kind of an avenging machine, lurking the streets. Was "Reign of the Hammer" always meant to be instrumental? Oscar:  Yes.  There is an interesting story behind that song that differs from the rest of the album, in that it is ten years old.  It was written by Stefan, the other guitar player, in '96.  What happened was he just found a cassette demo of the song, he had forgotten all about it.  He found it about two weeks before we went into the studio, played it for me because he was really happy with it.  I thought we needed another song and this was a really good one so why not do it.  So we just recorded it and it turned out really well, I must say. Finally, "Titan" has a really classic Accept feel to it. Oscar:  This song came together really easily and then I hit a stumbling block midway through and couldn't get past that.  Once I did get past it, everything just went [really fast] and it was finished.  It took a couple of months from when I started it to when I finished it, but most of that time was just waiting for the right inspiration. You guys haven't done any covers lately. Joacim:  I think we need to be careful of what songs we cover nowadays because journalists focus too much on them.  I think we have enough songs on every album now that we don't really need to add a cover.  I'm not saying we aren't going to do [any more], but we've always tried to find the more obscure bands that meant a lot to us that people have no clue they even existed.  Like Stormwitch for instance.  Right after we did the Stormwitch cover, "Ravenlord," in '97, a label put out a best of Stormwitch album and they sold pretty well on that one.  I mean, the first cover we did was Warlord and there are still people out there believing this is a HammerFall song.  And I said, 'No no no no, it's Warlord.'  'Who??'  "WAR-LORD!'  At least we're not pretending that we wrote the songs, we try to explain to the fans, 'Hey, if you like this song, go check out the original.'  Sometimes it is really hard for the new generation of metal fans to go back to the early 80s and find something that they like because the productions are different. I'd love to hear you guys take on a classic Riot song... Joacim:  Uhh... you never know.  From the Guy Speranza era or…? Yeah, that was my favorite, but any of their stuff, I like the later stuff, too. Joacim:  Every era of Riot is really good, I would say.  It's different.  When they put out Thundersteel, that was like, 'Wow!  What happened here?'  But then they've had their ups and downs from Nightbreaker on, I would say.  I haven't heard the last one though; it just came out a couple weeks ago in Europe I think. What are your feelings about some of the past albums, starting with Glory to the Brave? Oscar:  It's very naïve, in a good way, enthusiastic debut album from five band members who were just so happy and so thrilled to record a heavy metal album.  We did not have a budget of anything basically, so the production suffers a little bit from it, but the intensity and energy of the playing makes up for it.  I'm very happy with how everything turned out, but everything we've done since then I think has been a step up. How about Legacy of Kings? Joacim:  That was the most rushed album that we have done so far.  Releasing the first album, we thought this was kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity: record an album and that's it.  But since everything happened so fast in Europe after that release - we got to tour with Gamma Ray first of all.  Well, second of all actually because we did Tank and Raven first.  But everything just happened and it was like, wow, what have we done?  We charted top 40 in Germany, we did the touring, we did our first headlining tour, and then the label said, 'You need a new album out as soon as possible.'  Legacy of Kings has some really, really good songs, like "Heeding the Call" for instance is one of my favorite songs to play live, but it seems like Legacy of Kings is the big brother to Glory to the Brave.  It's Glory to the Brave with a big production.  With money actually; we didn't have any money on the first album.  Personally, I was not so satisfied with my vocal effort on that one.  I was in bed for four or five weeks before it was time for the vocals because I got like… what do you call that... not bronchitis, but something else… It was not in my testicles either; it was in the testicle look-a-likes you have in your throat, what do you call them? Tonsils...? Joacim:  Yes!  Tonsillitis or something they call it.  I was living alone back then, I didn't have anyone to talk to and your vocal cords get kind of lazy.  Then you go into the studio and try to perform, you are under a lot of pressure and you've got three days to do all the songs.  All in all, it's a good album, but I felt when we were done with that album that I knew I could do it better.  And people say, 'Well, why didn't you do it better then?'  Well, I'm sorry, I just couldn't. Renegade… Oscar:  The first three albums, Renegade included, for me…  I didn't really know how to write an album back then.  It was more like writing ten or eleven songs and we had an album.  From Crimson Thunder on, we wrote a full album from start to finish.  I'm more aware of what needs to go on the album and the diversity I'm looking for.  On Renegade, and this goes for Legacy of Kings and Glory to the Brave as well, the fast songs are kind of similar to each other, which makes these albums not as complete as the ones that come afterward.  Having said that though, it's really a minor complaint and I really like them and don't think we could have done anything better at that point in time.  I would never do anything differently. Moving on, how about Crimson Thunder? Joacim:  Crimson Thunder was like the new era of HammerFall because that was the first one where Jesper Stromblad of In Flames wasn't part of the writing team.  Up until Renegade, it was me, Oscar and Jesper writing more or less all of the material.  But we felt that he had too much to do with In Flames and we really wanted to prove that we could write songs without him.  Maybe not all of them, but the majority of journalists thought that he was writing songs for HammerFall - no, he was writing songs with us, not forus.  Since he was in a successful band, they thought that without him, HammerFall would be nothing.  I think with Crimson Thunder, we showed a more mid-tempo side of HammerFall and I think the mid-tempo songs are more what HammerFall is all about.  Still, HammerFall to me is the variation we show on Threshold now, that you have a lot of different types of songs - you have the faster songs, the mid-tempo and the slower - and they all represent the band.  Crimson Thunder is probably the slowest album that we have done.  Of course, "Hero's Return" is pretty fast, but…  I don't know what to say now. (laughs)  It's a good album. It's an album that didn't really strike me right away but has really grown on me over time. Joacim:  Yeah.  It has "Hearts on Fire" and that is probably the biggest hit we will ever [have].  Every show, everywhere we play, people start screaming "Hearts On Fire" already after the first song and as soon as you start playing it, people go crazy.  That was a big hit at least.  Not like a big Billboard hit, but a big HammerFall hit. One Crimson Night - are you happy with how that came together? Oscar:  Yeah.  It was from a legacy perspective, this was what it was, one night in the history of HammerFall, one night on the tour, capturing everything, hopefully the essence of a show.  The DVD should be better, but I think it was a little bit too dark.  We had people filming who did not know exactly what we were going to do on-stage, so they missed a couple of things.  Not necessarily any big things, but if you know every detail of what was going on on-stage, you still miss it, as we do from a band point of view.  I think a double-live album is every band's dream.  I grew up in the 80s with Priest…Live! And Live After Death, all those albums, so I'm really happy with how everything turned out and that we got to do it. Finally, how about Chapter V? Joacim:  On Chapter V, I was really proud of the production on that album and out of that development came Threshold.  It was almost three years between Crimson Thunder and Chapter V and I think that was like a small comeback album, because Oscar had a motorcycle accident.  We didn't really know if he'd be able to play again because he broke his arm in a very bad place.  It took him a long time to work up his technique again.  I think with Chapter V we were able to add some new elements, like "Knights of the 21stCentury" was twelve minutes long, something that no one thought we would do probably.  Vocally, when I was working in the songwriting process with the vocal melodies, a song like "Fury of the Wild" sounded different in the first version.  I listened to it and thought, well, it's good, but it's nothing special.  It felt like I was playing it too safe.  Then I decided to just throw all the files into the trash bin and start all over again.  Then I came up with what ended up on the album and I think that song represents the new, fresh HammerFall you have on the Chapter V album. Do you have any long-term goals or plans for HammerFall? Oscar:  Musically, we don't have any plans or goals at all.  Of course, we have to plan ahead, with band members having families and stuff, to make sure we have a 6-month advance on most things.  We try to keep ahead a little bit, but we don't' have any long-term goals as to where we want to be.  We're always trying to improve our status or improve the awareness of people as far as HammerFall goes, but you can't really force anyone to do that either, so you just try to have fun and that's the most important thing.  If you're not having fun, there is something wrong. Was it the plan to have Hector as a running theme on all the album covers from the beginning or just a happy accident? Oscar:  Yes.  We wanted to have our Eddie, basically.  We wanted to have a guy who was well thought out and who could follow us from album to album for as long as we wanted it to go on, like a mascot kind of thing. How was the US tour with Edguy last year? Oscar:  It was a lot of fun.  I think we were on the road for three or three and a half weeks and we went to Canada for the first time, too, that was really cool.  With Edguy, it's always fun to tour with those guys, they're really cool guys and we've known each other for years and years.  So it was a fun tour and a good success, in terms of audiences as well.  It was our first headlining tour and we definitely relished the opportunity to play for longer than 30 or 45 minutes, which is the longest times we played on the tours before that.  It was a chance to go over to the US and show people, look, this is what HammerFall is more or less. What do you guys do to pass time on tour?  Do you work on music at all? Oscar:  Not at all actually.  I can't really write on the road, I need to be in a certain mood when I write songs.  I like to be at home, be relaxed and comfortable.  I write songs because I'm happy not because I'm stressed out or have to worry about the next thing we have to do or the next show or whatever.  The pressure on the road is on stage because that's when you have to perform.  The rest of the time, I see as a vacation kind of.  We work really hard for 6 or 8 months on the songwriting before we record the album and then we have another two or two and a half months of studio time, so it's a lot of work for us to do an album and going on tour is like a pressure-free zone.  At least a creatively pressure-free zone.

Joacim:  On the last tour, I tried to study actually, Business Economy.  It took me two and a half weeks to get into this tour mode, the tour low that you hit and when you hit it, you can't get out of it.  As soon as you get into it, you do nothing.  You sleep, you watch movies, you try to find electronic stores somewhere to buy some neat, cool things, and then you do your show.  And then you are alert again, after the show, that is also a natural high, getting offstage.  Then you party a little bit and go to bed and sleep way too long, then you eat too much.  Touring is the most boring thing you can do; at the same time, it's the best thing you can do, as soon as you hit the stage.  But you need to work your brain, do something. Any chance of returning to the US for this tour? Oscar:  I sure hope so, I really hope so.  We will have to wait and see, but that is something that we are working on and trying to accomplish.  I can't give you any details yet, we don't even have a schedule, a tentative plan, but it will happen I'm pretty sure.  The European tour is all set for January and February, so if we come back here, it will be in April or March at the earliest. Can you talk about the symbolism of the sun and moon that appear on the images of Hector and elsewhere? Joacim:  It's always been there.  I don't know why it came there in the first place.  The artist who did the artwork for Glory to the Brave, we just told him we wanted to have a character symbolizing HammerFall.  We wanted to have our own Eddie, like Maiden.  Someone who could follow us on every release, in different locations doing different things.  He did this and put the sun and the moon there.  I don't know why he did that but we adapted that and made it into something really, really cool.  He gets a lot of power from the sun and the moon.  There is one song on the Renegade album about how he became the man that he is.  He was left alone on the battlefield and then he got power from the sun and the moon.  On the Crimson Thunder album, his opponent, you can see in his hands something is glowing and there is something missing on the breastplate of Hector.  He took some power from him; he took away the sun I think.  The sun and the moon also represent to me heaven and hell, good and evil, black and white - total opposites.  Hector is good to the good people and really bad to the bad people. (laughs)  I mean, nothing is black, nothing is white, everything is in between.  There's also a line in "Natural High" - 'I'm south of heaven, north of hell,' and that just represents where we are on Earth.  Even though I'm not a Christian guy or a religious guy, I just believe in myself and everything that I see.  Everything I can touch, I believe in.  If I can't really touch anything…  I don't believe in playmates. (laughs) Yeah I've noticed you don't really write about religion or even politics. Joacim:  I think you get enough of that by watching television, the newspapers.  As soon as you take a stand for something, you will offend some people and they don't understand sometimes.  You try and write simple lyrics for everyone to understand because you have to keep in mind that the majority of the HammerFall fans are non-English speaking persons.  Even though it is really simple and you cannot interpret it wrong, they do so.  We have a song on the first album, "Steel Meets Steel," a song about a Templar at a Crusade in Jerusalem.  And this is written from a Templar's point of view, how he sees things, but they thought that we were against Jews.  And I thought, 'Wow, the Templars didn't fight the Jews, did they?  I thought they fought the Arabs or the infidels.'  And then the same person claimed that "The Dragon Lies Bleeding" there is one line, 'The battlefield is shining red,' and he said, 'Is that the blood of the Jews you are referring to?'  What?  What are you on??  Are you stupid or what? (laughs)  I don't want to be political or religious, I don't think there is room for that in heavy metal music. What are your feelings about the reunions that have taken place in recent years (Priest, Maiden, Sabbath)? Joacim:  Some of them make sense.  Both Priest and Maiden obviously make a lot of sense: they are pulling in a lot of people, they are putting out a lot of albums that the fans appreciate.  Too many bands get back together first recording a new album and then they want to tour this album and they want to play the majority of the songs from the new album.  And to be honest with you, nobody cares about the new songs; they want to hear the old stuff, period.  I think what Accept did a couple years ago in Europe, they got back together, they did a couple of festivals, and that was it, no new album.  I think that is what you have to do.  You have to realize that a lot of these bands are older now, they get back together and want to record an album, but they want to sound modern, they try to write songs the way the young guys are writing them today.  But they have different influences.  These guys grew up in the 70s and they made something out of their influences that became heavy metal, the heart of heavy metal, like Judas Priest.  Halford quit to do his own thing and then when he decided to quit dong the more aggressive stuff, the rest of Priest were like, 'Hey, now we want to do this aggressive stuff,' and it didn't really work.  As long as you have something to provide to the fans then, okay, do an album, but it is not necessarily the best thing to do. Magnus did some benefit shows in South America a couple years back - has the rest of the band been involved with anything along those lines? Joacim:  Mmm, yeah, I heard something about that. (laughs)  It's a personal thing.  He's doing so many things outside of HammerFall… I just read today he was doing something else and was like, 'Okay.'  It feels like he has 48 hours where I have 24, I don't know how he keeps up with everything.  But I am so involved in HammerFall and everything concerning HammerFall, I don't have time to do anything else.

www.hammerfall.net

[netunleashed-blog]

Best 360-degree camera 2018: 10 cameras to capture everything

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=2528 Best 360-degree camera 2018: 10 cameras to capture everything - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=2528 Are you in the real world yet? Forget the 3:2, 4:3 and 16:9 camera formats, and embrace the world as it is – a 360-degree landscape in which anything can happen, anywhere. That's the selling point for a new breed of 360-degree cameras that usually put two fisheye lenses back-to-back in a variety of designs to let you capture the world in a whole new way. However, do be careful about claims of high resolution; 4K may sound a lot for a standard video, but when those pixels are shared around a 360-degree landscape the end result won't look as detailed as you might expect.  In the emerging genre of 360-degree cameras, anything goes In the emerging genre of 360-degree cameras, anything goes, and the product you choose will depend as much on what kind of activities you want to capture as the quality of the camera itself. Is the 360-degree format still a novelty? Yes, probably, but standards are being raised quickly, with 4K, livestreaming and post-crop editing features now to the fore.  Did GoPro just change the 360° game? Possibly, though this highly innovative spherical camera will be too rich for most people's blood. The Fusion can capture 360° video in 5.2K resolution video at 30fps (or 3K at 60fps). Nice, but its real trick isn't 360 at all; an 'over-capture' mode films in 360°, but only to allow the creation of standard 16:9 video from the footage – so, much like post-focus on modern cameras, the Fusion allows post-framing. Why did no-one think of this before? Now add GPS, a compass, accelerometer, gyroscope, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3D audio, and compatibility with existing GoPro mounts, and the waterproof (to a depth of 5m) Fusion could be a semi-pro videographer's dream. It was Ricoh that put 360° video creation into the mainstream with its Theta S a few years ago, but for all the brilliance of its form factor, it produced barely 25 minutes of rather soft video on one charge. The souped-up follow-up looks the same, but is capable of 4K video recording, 4K live streaming, and even records 360° spatial audio thanks to its four microphones – and for 80 minutes. Android-based and Qualcomm Snapdragon 625-powered, the Theta V vastly increases the ISO and has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so can be operated remotely via an app. Thankfully, it retains the standard tripod thread its forbear had.  There's something to be said for creating a product that apes a market leader yet slashes the price, but this budget effort from Detu only just manages to make the grade. Stylistically very similar to the Ricoh Theta S, the Detu Twin has less resolution, but goes beyond being simply a handheld 360 camera by  including a standard tripod thread on its undercarriage. The results are basic, and the app will only share videos of 30 seconds or less, but the biggest issue is its drastically short battery life. However, it's easy to use, and one of the most affordable 360 cameras around, so may suit those looking to dip their toe in the genre.Read our in-depth Detu Twin review  With a similar form factor to Ricoh's Theta 360 cameras, this pocket-sized dual-lens shooter has been brought down a peg or two in terms of specs since Samsung decided it needed to help justify the existence of its own Gear VR. For example, while the original Gear 2016 captured 15MP still images, this new version achieves barely half that. It's also got a smaller battery, which means you're going to have to carry around a USB-C-compatible portable charger. Has Samsung gone off the whole idea of 360° cameras? Perhaps, but the cute, splash-proof Gear 360 remains very easy to use, with plenty of free editing software, so if nothing else it helps make the new medium accessible.Read our in-depth Samsung Gear 360 (2017) review If you're a semi-pro videographer wanting to experiment with 360-degree video, the Yi 360 VR gives you most of the tools you need. A serious-looking product that's more about core quality than novelty features, its standard tripod thread lends versatility, while its 5.7K resolution, consistent color and endless manual tweaks are all plus points. Those looking for waterproofing, over-capture and a 24fps mode – albeit at a slightly lower maximum resolution – should consider the GoPro Fusion, but there's no doubt that the Yi 360 VR is a highly ambitious, great value 360 camera that semi-pro videographers will love. Read our in-depth Yi 360 VR review Do you actually need to shoot in 360°? Sometimes, 235° is more than enough (such as for this all-sky video of a solar eclipse ), which is why Kodak created the PixPro SP360 4K, which has only one spherical lens. Shockproof, freeze-proof, dust-proof and splash-resistant, this Wi-Fi and NFC-connected camera comes with dozens of mounting accessories, which may help to explain the high price. And while it may be solid and pocket-sized, as if one of these wasn't pricey enough, if you want to shoot in 360° you'll have to by this product twice (Kodak thoughtfully sells a Dual Pro two-pack). You can operate it remotely from a phone, upload to YouTube and Facebook, and make use of a lot of bundled editing software, but we're still not convinced about the absence of true 360° capture.  No one in their right mind thinks 360° video is going to take over from regular video. Why else would the Insta360 One include FreeCapture, a mode that allows users to film in 360° before transforming the results into a traditional 16:9 aspect ratio? It's a little like the feature on the similarly 4K-capable GoPro Fusion, although that's where the comparison pretty much ends. A reliable 4K 360° camera for video and stills, the Insta360 One proffers another advanced tool in the shape of Bullet Time, a fast frame-rate slow-mo mode that, rather bizarrely, requires users to wave the camera rapidly around them on… a piece of string. It's odd, but effective – the slow-mo effect you can add this footage looks like something out of The Matrix. It comes with a tripod thread for remote shooting, too.  It might be known mostly for its sat navs and sports watches, but Garmin has produced a whopping-good 360 camera. The feature that catches the eye on the VIRB 360 is its ability to capture in maximum 5.7K resolution, and there's a very simple reason for that awkward figure: 4K doesn't cover a 360 landscape well. Better yet, you can now stitch 5.7K footage using Garmin's free VIRB Edit software. Its four microphones produce wraparound sound, too, while waterproofing, GPS, a gyroscope and an accelerometer give it a notable Garmin feel (it collects data about your adventures as you go, which you can overlay onto your 360 videos). Here's an ambitious effort – not at popularizing the new video format of 360°, but at creating a does-it-all action cam. Dust-proof, shockproof and water-resistant, the 360fly 4K does that rare thing of capturing video in both wide-angle 360º and first-person POV modes. With just one lens, and an app with a clear layout, you can shoot, upload and share stunning and immersive 360º video just as easily as with any other action camera. It's also got an accelerometer, compass, GPS and gyroscope for oodles of data. The drawbacks? The video is soft around the edges, and the audio is basic.  LG's effort at 360° – and a definite alternative to the Samsung Gear 360 – is worth looking for if you want a simple and thoroughly affordable way to enter the world of wraparound video. Equipped with dual fisheye lenses that are flush with the body of the camera, the well-designed LG Cam 360 lets you toggle between 360° and 180° photos with a long press, and is generally a breeze to use. It comes with a handy protective case and has a standard tripod thread, enabling you to mount it on most supports. The only downside is the lack of a decent microphone, although it does pick up audio clearly enough if the source is close. It's just been discontinued by LG, so grab it while you can.  Best action camera: 10 cameras for the GoPro generationBest GoPro camera: ultimate action cameras and accessories Source link