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holly-louisexox · 2 months ago

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Ribcage X Andy Biersack- Part 29

Masterlist

"There's one thing you should know about me Delia Vincent, I don't date. Got no heart to break and emptiness is safe, keep it that way."

He was adamant in his choices...

...But then things changed.

Author's note:

Trigger warning: Mention of the deadly C word (Cancer) and PTSD. Please be kind to yourself if this upsets you.

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After Delia was released from the hospital, she could not wait to escape Seattle. Thankfully the tests had come back with no evidence of anything meaning she was in the clear; all she was left with were crutches to accommodate her broken ankle. Standing in the airport awaiting the Ohio flight to be called for boarding was all she was looking forward to, although she was also extremely glad that Andy was also flying to Ohio so that she did not have to travel alone in this state; she would have been embarrassed to travel through the airports with a chaperon hot at her heals.

"D, make sure you message all of us as soon as you get a SIM card for your new phone, you've been such a great friend and we have got to stay in contact so I need your new number! Hopefully, we get to work together again soon!" Shevy Rambles "I'm going to miss you so much."

"Of course, I will Shevy, it's been such a pleasure working with everyone." Delia smiles.

"Come here." Shevy calms her tone before pulling Delia into an awkward hug; trying to hug someone whilst on crutches was not a fun experience, Delia felt as if she was fighting to stay balanced; but she welcomed the hug from her new best friend regardless.

"Shevy, please try not to break Delia anymore than she already is." Andy laughs slightly whilst he keeps a watchful eye on Delia's wobbling; the last thing he wants is for Delia to fall and hurt herself more than she already was.

"Make sure you look after her Andy." Shevy is strict as she carefully pulls away from the hug with Delia and stares at Andy "Please don't hurt her."

"I wouldn't dream of it." Andy smiles wrapping an arm around Delia's waist to stabilise her balance and to keep her close to him protectively.

"It's good to see you happy again Andy." CC grins looking between him and Delia.

"It's nice not having to pretend like I don't care anymore. I'm sorry for all the shit I put you all through for so long." Andy apologises. "Thank you for not giving up on me though."

"We could never give up on you Andy." Jake states placing a hand on the singer's shoulder.

"Hopefully you'll be able to join us on our next tour Delia." Lonny speaks up but it's almost a plea.

"I would love to, if you'll all have me." Delia nods making the group, apart from Andy, all cheer a yes.

"Of course we want you on our next tour, I need you with me on our next tour." Andy smiles down at Delia due to their slight height difference before placing a soft kiss on her lips when she looks up at him.

"Okay kids, enough PDA please, some of us are still missing our partners." Jinxx laughs making the two of them pull away.

"Oh Andy, I nearly forgot, I passed your number onto Officer Davies for any updates regarding the whole situation. Although I imagine that psycho will spend a long time behind bars." Lonny states.

"Righ, thanks, Lon." Andy nods tightening his grip on Delia, the thought of Sam made him feel sick. When he saw Sam standing over Delia at that gas station he could have killed him, he wanted to kill him.

"As glad as I am that Sam is in prison, I feel bad for the families of those other women. I managed to survive, they didn't." Delia confesses sadly.

"I think that's a normal response D but without you, Sam would still be out there. Those families are probably grateful for you as you're the one who escaped and got him put behind bars." Lonny explains as the whole group looks at her with sympathy evident in their eyes.

"I guess you're right Lonny." Delia sighs as she puts on a smile to the group.

"American Airlines flight to Cincinnati, Ohio is now boarding. Please make your way to gate 15." A male voice is heard over the tannoy system which instantly makes Delia freeze up; she knows it is not Sam announcing the flight. But the accent, the authoritative way of speaking, gave her unwanted flashbacks of Sam.

"Hey, you're okay." Andy tries to comfort Delia by gently rubbing her side as he sees the terrified expression on her face, the nurse at the hospital had spoken to Andy privately about the high possibility of Delia suffering PTSD from what had happened. The nurse told him some common signs and symptoms and how to handle it. "It's just a staff member announcing our flight, is it a flashback?"

"Yeah, sorry it's just, the accent and the way the guy said it. It made me think of Sam." Delia confesses; in her mind, she kept telling herself that the situation could have been worse. She was told that the emotions she felt could last anywhere between 6 to 12 months, but she didn't want to acknowledge it. She had been through similar stuff with her dad, but she had ignored it and threw herself into work as a distraction, that's what she wanted to do again.

"D, you trust us right?" Shevy asks wrapping an arm carefully around Delia's shoulders.

"Of course." Delia nods.

"You're going to be okay, we're all here for you. Andy is going to be only a short drive from you and you're going to be with your parents. Nothing is going to hurt you." Shevy breaks it down so that Delia's frenzied mind can process it all. "So why don't you catch that flight with Mr clingy next to you and go see your parents, I know you miss them."

"Thanks Shevy." Delia smiles.

"I'm not clingy Shevy." Andy shakes his head.

"Of course you're not." Shevy grins looking at the two of them after she had removed her arms from around Delia's shoulders "Have a wonderful time at home you two!"

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"They keep looking at me." Delia mumbles to Andy as she noticed the couple in the row opposite them glancing her way occasionally.

"They're probably jealous of how gorgeous you are." Andy compliments trying to get a smile on Delia's face, he does not want to question her or try to brush off her concerns for fear of upsetting her.

"Whilst I appreciate the compliment, look at me, Andy." Delia sighs not able to accept the compliment fully or believe Andy "I've got this hideous cast and crutches, I'm covered in bruises... I'm far from attractive right now."

"You're always going to look beautiful to me Delia, cast and bruises or that killer eyeliner you wore every show day that made your eyes stand out in any crowd." Andy is sincere "I'm sorry you had to go through what you did but I'm here for you, anything you need, you're important to me Delia."

"Thank you, Andy." Delia smiles weakly "Could I have a hug?"

"Of course." Andy smiles back before gently wrapping his arms around Delia's shoulder and softly kissing the top of her head.

"I'm going to be stuck on the sofa." Delia starts laughing suddenly which catches Andy off guard a little.

"What?" Andy asks in confusion.

"I won't be able to get up the stairs to my room, I'm going to be stuck to the sofa." Delia continues to laugh despite feeling tears fall down her face as she realises how shit her situation is.

"We'll find a way to get you up the stairs, even if I have to come over daily to carry you up and down them." Andy teases, although deep down he is also serious, he really would do that for Delia if it meant her being comfortable and getting well-needed rest. "Though sofas are pretty comfortable too."

"That's true." Delia continues to laugh as she leans further into Andy's side.

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"This is the car you've rented out whilst in Ohio?" Delia is shocked as she looks at the Audi A5 that sits outside the airport for them.

"Yeah, it's the same model I have in Los Angeles. They're comfortable and easy to drive, plus they look cool." Andy shrugs, he knew that Delia was talking about the cost of it but that did not matter to him. "Anyway, let's get you home."

After opening the car door and helping Delia get in the car, Andy climbs into the driver's seat before starting the engine. Thankfully Delia and her parents did not live far from Andy's parents so he knew exactly where he was going, it would make it easier for Andy to visit Delia whilst he was here too.

"You're sure you know where you're going?" Delia asks jokingly "You're not going to get us lost are you?"

"A city that I grew up in?" Andy states as he pretends to think about it "Considering you're only 20 minutes away from my parents I think you're okay."

"Is it bad that I'm nervous to see my parents again?" Delia's tone drops slightly "I've never been this long away from them, plus with everything that has happened and the state I'm in, going home seems different."

"I think that's a normal response, you know they're excited to see you though. Look how happy your mum was to hear you on the phone." Andy explains not taking his eyes off the road.

"That's true." Delia sighs still feeling her nerves. "Going home just feels different, I feel different."

"You're not different Delia, deep down you are still the same beautiful woman who drove me crazy, and you helped me realize what I was missing." Andy sincerely explains as he places a hand gently on Delia's thigh, making Delia's heart flutter. "How about tomorrow we go out, just me and you? We can get that SIM card sorted out, get some lunch, and try to ease you back into not being on the road."

"That sounds great." Delia smiles.

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"If you go and get the front door open, I'll get your stuff from the back of the car." Andy plans as he helps Delia step out of the door.

"I can take my backpack at least, you don't need to carry everything." Delia argues as she accepts Andy's hand to help get her out of the car.

"No, no. You go and see your parents, I've got this." Andy shakes his head slightly whilst smiling.

"You're not by any chance trying to impress Mum and Dad are you?" Delia teases smirking.

"Maybe a little bit." Andy scratches the back of his neck nervously "Plus I don't want you getting hurt anymore than you already are, it's been a long day; you should rest and-"

"Andy." Delia cuts him off before pressing her lips to his making him instantly relax "It's sweet that you care."

"I'm always going to care about you Delia, like I said, you're important to me." Andy smiles stroking Delia's cheek lightly before placing his lips on hers again. "Come on, let's not keep your parents waiting."

"Okay." Delia smiles as they separate.

Every hop Delia had to take on the crutches hurt her ribs, every hop made her grow more and more sick of her situation. Delia had never wanted to be able to walk normally as much as she did now, yet somehow she thought she deserved the pain she felt; after all, it was her idea to jump out of a window.

"Delia!" Delia's Mum exclaims in excitement after opening the door to see her daughter standing on the other side. "Nick! Delia's home."

"Mum." Delia smiles feeling tears fall down her face as her mother engulfs her in a hug.

"I'm so glad you're home petal." Delia's mum cries as she feels her husband's hand on her shoulder.

"Hey Lia, how are you feeling sweet?" Robert asks looking between his wife and daughter.

"Hey dad." Delia smiles looking up at her dad.

"You must be Andy!" Delia's mum grins as she carefully pulls away from Delia before wiping her eyes.

"Yes... Yes. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. I just erm... I have Delia's stuff." Andy stutters looking between Delia and her parents.

"Don't be silly! Come on in, I'm Tamara, this is my husband Nicholas." Tamara smiles moving aside to allow Delia and Andy to step into the house.

"It's a pleasure to meet you both." Andy smiles.

"Let me take one of those bags from you, son." Nicholas states grabbing a bag from Andy.

"Thank you, sir." Andy nods nervously allowing him to take the bag.

"Please, just call me Nick, son."Nicholas smiles which eases Andy's nerves ever so slightly. "Just leave them by the stairs, I'll sort them out later."

"Andy, will you be joining us for dinner tonight?" Tamara asks as Andy and Nicholas join them in the living room, Andy immediately takes a seat next to Delia on the sofa while her Mum and Dad were sat in the armchairs.

"That's a lovely offer but no, I'm going to be heading to my parents' house, they live about 20 minutes from here." Andy smiles while trying to make sure he doesn't stutter again.

"Oh that's a shame, you'll have to come over one evening though!" Tamara invites him smiling.

"I would love to." Andy smiles back politely fiddling with his hands slightly out of nerves.

"So Andy, do you live with your parents?" Nicholas asks staring Andy down making him all the more nervous.

"No, I live in LA, I'm just visiting my parents and honestly I wanted to make sure Delia got back here safely." Andy states before turning to look at Delia and smile.

"We did offer to help Delia fund a place of our own after she graduated uni as we knew her career choice could be a bit unstable to begin with, but unfortunately she inherited Nick's stubbornness." Tamara laughs slightly making Delia feel embarrassed.

"Mum!" Delia whines before hiding her face on Andy's shoulder without thinking through what she was doing and that she was in front of her parents.

"I know all about Delia's stubborn side, it's one of the reasons I fell for her." Andy laughs slightly as Delia's parents smile at the two of them.

"Tamara has put up with me this long somehow, good luck to you is all I can say, Andy." Nicholas laughs.

"Truthfully, I feel like I needed Delia to be stubborn." Andy begins seriously "I don't know what, if anything, Delia has told you about me; I wasn't great towards her to begin with. I went through some stuff and it left me quite bitter about everyone around me, the band and other crew acted like they were walking on eggshells around me. But Delia, never once backed down right from the beginning, she was like this fire in the team that somehow melted away the ice I was in."

"We all need a little fire to get us through the tough times, son." Nicholas smiles, secretly approving of Andy already. Delia rarely brought a boy home, but the ones she did he never really liked all that much. "I wouldn't have made it through the whole cancer situation if it wasn't for these two lovely ladies I have."

"Speaking of which, Nick, you must phone the doctors tomorrow." Tamara interrupts.

"Dad is everything okay?" Delia panics as she lifts her head from Andy's shoulder; making Andy feel cold and bare in her absence.

"Yeah, I'm sure it's nothing, just haven't had much of an appetite. Probably stress." Nicholas shrugs.

"Dad-" Delia starts before her dad cuts her off.

"Honestly Lia, I'm fine, it's you I've been worried about." Nicholas shrugs before smiling at Delia.

"I should really be heading to my parents, it was so lovely to meet you both." Andy breaks the silence before standing up.

"Oh yes of course!" Tamara also stands before pulling Andy into a hug "It was so lovely to finally meet you, Andy, thank you for bringing our Delia back."

"I hope you don't mind me taking Delia out tomorrow, I promised her we'd go sort her new phone out and grab lunch." Andy explains almost asking their permission.

"Of course, go have a nice time." Nicholas smiles shaking Andy's hand "Take care of Delia won't you?"

"Always." Andy smiles back.

"I'll walk you out." Delia states before grabbing her crutches and getting off the sofa.

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"Your parents seem nice." Andy smiles as he stands with his arms wrapped around Delia's waist.

"Dad seems to like you, which is a first for him. Normally he doesn't like guys I bring home." Delia chuckles slightly as she looks up at Andy.

"He clearly just wants to protect you, which is exactly what I'm going to do too." Andy speaks softly before gently kissing Delia's lips, making her smile.

"I can handle myself, Andy." Delia shakes her head slightly, she couldn't lie though, she did enjoy the caring side of Andy.

"That's not going to stop me from wanting to keep you safe." Andy grins before pecking her lips again "I'll pick you up at 12, that okay?"

"12 sounds good." Delia nods grinning "I'll see you tomorrow."

"I'll see you tomorrow, make sure to get some rest." Andy instructs kissing Delia once more before carefully unwrapping his arms from her and walking to the car allowing Delia to shut the front door behind him. No doubt Delia's parents were going to bombard her with questions about Andy as soon as she walked back into the living room, but she didn't mind; after all, she was finally happy...

...Or as happy as she could be anyway.

#andy biersack #andy black #andy bvb #cc bvb #jake bvb #jake pitts #jinxx bvb #lonny bvb #lonny eagleton #black veil brides #bvb #black veil brides fanfic #bvb fanfic

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linuxgamenews · 2 years ago

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Dwarf Fortress survival is due to exist on Linux

Dwarf Fortress colony sim game is due to release on Linux and Proton via Windows PC. Which is the result of the efforts from developer Bay 12 Games. Make its launch for both Steam and Itch. After years of hard work, developer Bay 12 Games is eager to announce the newly inviting release. Due to arrive for the fabled Dwarf Fortress will release on December 6th Originally released by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams in 2006. This new version of Dwarf Fortress reimagines. The deeply intricate, dwarven civilization management and construction game. Which is not going beyond its ASCII characters with a brand new pixel art tileset. A new helpful tutorial to onboard unfamiliar players. Due to offering a new soundtrack and sound effects. Plus a new user interface and navigable menus, and other quality of life additions.

Linux support:

We're also not able to approach Mac and Linux by ourselves. Since we've never notarized a Mac build or managed Linux libraries, and will need to get help with that to do it properly. But obviously we'd love to get that whole pipeline working so people can play on non-Windows computers.

This is the official Dwarf Fortress post in Steam News post. So the details from the Discussions seem to in fact be true. On top of that, having personally tested the game on Proton, it works without issue. However, for such an epic title, I certainly hope Bay 12 Games will stay committed to a native Linux build.

Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition - Release Date Trailer

youtube

These new additions make this version of the game the most approachable it has ever been. While still keeping the beloved core experience and complex simulation. Since this is what keeps it so popular for all these years. The classic version of Dwarf Fortress will remain available for download at no cost. and will continue to be supported, on Bay 12’s website. At launch, the game will release will come with its Fortress Mode. So you can lead a colony of dwarves, create your own settlement, and try to survive and thrive in a world of endless possibility. The Dwarf Fortress Legends mode will also be available at launch. The Adventure and Arena modes that players know from the classic version of the game will not be present in the Steam and Itch release at launch. But Bay 12 Games continues working hard on making sure these modes are their best when they arrive on Steam. While continuing to communicate with the community when further updates are available. Dwarf Fortress colony sim game will see a brand new soundtrack, with tracks even made in the Dwarvish language. Composed by Dabu, Simon Swerwer and Águeda Macias, the soundtrack will also be separately released for purchase on Steam and Bandcamp. While the game will release on Windows PC for sure, but playable on Linux via Proton. At least until we see a native build. Priced at $29.99 USD / £22.99 / 27,99€ on both Steam and Itch.

#dwarf fortress #colony sim #linux #gaming news #bay 12 games #ubuntu #windows #pc

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notjanine · 4 years ago

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2020 in books!

the only kind of new year’s resolution i made as a naive baby last january was to try to read 40 books for the year. (i read 37 in 2019, for context.) well, with all of my commuting time eliminated and an increased need for immersive escapism, i ended up surpassing that goal three times over lmao (thanks library ebooks!)

idk how to summarize my year in books in a way that makes sense but

(f) = fiction, (nf) = nonfiction, (p) = poetry.

books that rewired my fucking brain:

braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer (nf)- GOD?!?!?! good. dr. k is right. ostensibly a book about plants, but actually a book about shut up and go outside. consumerism and capitalism are doing their damnedest to fuck you up, but you can just choose to value different things. take care of yourself by taking care of your environment. etc etc.

wasp by richard jones (nf)- lissen. when i got this book, my wasp-phobia was so severe that i had to put it away face down on a high shelf because there are wasps on the cover and i couldn’t bear to RISK even GLIMPSING them. now i am like... a wasp evangelist. (also due to the bugs 101 course on coursera it’s so good.)

wag by zazie todd (nf)- i have a dog, but i am NOT a Dog Person (i.e. i love my dog, but please keep yours away from me, thanks.) this book helped me understand my little guy better, plus it gives actionable tasks and activities to do with and for your pup! plus, y’know, learning about things you’re scared of helps to lessen that fear. i’d recommend this to anyone who has, wants, or regularly interacts with a dog.

a closed and common orbit by becky chambers (f)- is this series complete fluff? absolutely. am i fundamentally different after reading this one? maybe.

the best we could do by thi bui (nf)- this is so far outside of my personal experience but somehow still made me come to peace with my relationship with my mom?? and it’s barely even about that?? idk. this is probably objectively the best book i’ve read this year.

books that were just fun as hell:

mexican gothic by silvia moreno-garcia (f)- this book made me YELL out loud

death on the nile by agatha christie (f)- i grew up on agatha christie shows, but never actually read her before this year! she really was That Bitch. read this before the movie comes out

cosmoknights by hannah templer (f)- i read this in one sitting through the worst headache i’ve had in years. it is a goddamn DELIGHT. this book has everything: spaceships. mech suits. fighting the patriarchy. a perfect otp. fun art in bright colors with clean lines. onomatopoetic WAPs from before the song gave that hilarious context. 800 lesbians. this is an antidepressant in graphic novel form.

stiff by mary roach (nf)- ms. roach is like the 4th most represented author on my bookshelf because she 1. stays writing about shit i’m interested in and 2. manages to talk about gross and ridiculous things without resorting to sensationalism. it takes skill to write a hilarious book about corpses.

black sun by rebecca roanhorse (f)- excellent sexual tension between a horny siren pirate and a hot doomed... monk, kinda? set in the pre-columbian gulf of mexico with magic and shit.

cuisine chinoise by zao dao (? n/f)- this graphic novel about chinese food history/mythology is BEAUTIFUL.

the color of magic by terry pratchett (f)- you’d think a hardcore douglas adams stan would have gotten to this sooner, but no, i had to date a nerdy white boy to get here. it’s fun though! i’m not gonna read them all, but this one was good. bonus: contains one (1) great himbo.

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir (f)- like 500 pages of action and mystery and jokes and space necromancy. harrow the ninth gets a special mention bc it has a meme reference that took me out so hard i had to close the book, lie down, and groan for an entire minute before continuing.

other minds by peter godfrey-smith (nf)- i love octopuses. on one tma bonus ep, jonny sims says that if a creature can choose to do evil, then it’s a Person. octopuses are People. but anyway frfr this has an explanation of the evolution of consciousness that is cool af. (this one is much better than the other recent popsci octo book which i will not name out of politeness.)

the perfect predator by steffanie strathdee and thomas patterson (nf)- i read this bc my microbiology prof recommended it and it’s cool as heck! it’s got adventure, drama, mystery, Science-with-a-capital-S. i’m biased bc i’m a bit of a microbes nerd, but i had a blast with this. (but only bc we know going in that everything works out okay; if i hadn’t known that, i would have been TOO stressed!)

books that were a little less fun but still very readable:

my sister, the serial killer by oyinkan braithwaite (f)- i couldn’t find this as funny as other people bc i, too, have a beautiful sister who’s an insufferable narcissist, so it hits a little too close to home, but. it is a wild ride.

piranesi by susanna clarke (f)- idek what to say! i went into this one blind just bc it had a cool cover and title, so i guess i’d recommend that for other people too.

the sixth world series by rebecca roanhorse (f)- monster hunting! a post-apocalyptic take that doesn’t feel tired.

the shades of magic trilogy by v.e. schwab (f)- easy escapism. some ideas feel a little first draft-y, but idk, it’s also a pretty simple premise (which isn’t a bad thing). it’s a decent urban fantasy set in ~georgian?-era london. very actiony. suffers from a bit of i’m-not-like-other-girls disease, but i didn’t even notice until book two or three, so.

the only good indians by stephen graham jones (f)- starts off a little ??? (and reeks of being Written By A Man) but picks up. the pacing’s great and there’s just a super fucking cool monster.

robopocalypse by daniel h. wilson (f)- this reads like a tv miniseries so much that i can’t believe it isn’t one yet.

confessions of the fox by jordy rosenberg (f)- not my usual cup of tea, fiction-wise, but still compelling. a fresh take on the white-male-english-professor-self-insert? but not insufferable. gets weird!

spinning silver by naomi novik (f)- rumplestilstkin, but make it interesting! a great, richly-told fairy tale, but like, large scale. good to read on a cold day while you’re wrapped up in a blanket with some hot tea.

interior chinatown by charles yu (f)- compulsively readable. a couple things bugged me, but not enough to make me dislike it. a fun companion piece to how to live safely in a science fictional universe. i like this guy’s style.

cannibalism by bill schutt (nf)- COOL. mostly covers the animal kingdom (fun), spends too much time on the donner party (less fun), ends with a SPICY take on prions that i cannot get out of my head!!!

buzz, sting, bite by anne sverdrup-thygeson (nf)- BUGS! broad but not overwhelming, neither dumbed down nor overly scientific, short enough to finish in a day or two. recommend this to literally everyone.

books that made me want to read everything else in the author’s ouevre:

the time invariance of snow by e. lily yu (f)- this FUCKS but it’s too short!!!

an unkindness of ghosts by rivers solomon (f)- okay this book is SO good and so well-written and interesting and blah blah blah all the good things, but... the whole time, i was just like?? why???? why is this what you’re choosing to write about??? (i did also read the deep and blood is another word for hunger after this one, and i did like them both, especially the latter, but i think they can do better! like i think they could write a perfect book and i am gonna be *eyes emoji* until then.)

the space between worlds by micaiah johnson (f)- a fine debut novel, but i want to see her do something a little more... idk, refined? i think she overreaches here, like it’s a little... idk looper? this is how you lose the time war? there’s a better comparison, but i can’t think of it, but you get the idea. and then halfway through it shifts gears to mad max. there’s something weird about one of the central relationships, like it’s not complex enough to take as long to resolve as it does. idk idk. there are just a lot of little nitpicky things. it’s not bad! but i think she can do better and i look forward to finding out.

postcolonial love poem by natalie diaz (p)- thinky! like i tried to read this before bed, but it’s not the sort of thing to parse out while you’re falling asleep, it requires more attention than that.

books that Learned Me Somethin:

smoke gets in your eyes by caitlin doughty (nf)- i am a self-professed death obsessed weirdo, fascinated by death and mourning, but i didn’t know all that much about what happens to a body between the dying and the funeral! this book isn’t big, but it covers a lot and doughty’s writing style is engaging and honest. it’s very memorable.

queer by meg-john barker and julia scheele (nf)- i’m gonna be totally honest and say Queer Theory is above my intellectual pay grade, but this book takes you by the hand and explains the basics.

vitamania by catherine price (nf)- LMAO my fellow americans, never take a supplement. this book is great and well-researched, but normal folks don’t need to read it, just listen to season two of the dream podcast, which definitely cribbed from this.

vegetable kingdom by bryant terry (nf)- this is a fine cookbook, my favorite of his that i’ve read so far. gets a special mention bc i had a religious experience just reading one of his kohlrabi recipes. absolutely gutted that i didn’t have an opportunity to try it this year, since the pandemic put the kibosh on all family bbqs.

the best american food writing 2020 edited by j. kenji lopez-alt (nf)- this really is just a great collection.

are prisons obsolete? by angela y. davis (nf)- yes.

i moved to los angeles to work in animation by natalie nourigat (nf)- before reading this, i had basically zero knowledge of how the animation industry works. now i know like three things.

the secret lives of bats by merlin tuttle (nf)- BATS! okay this book is more about the adventures of being a bat scientist than it actually is about bats, but there are bats in there. insectivorous bats basically shit glitter, you should know this.

books from valuable perspectives:

hood feminism by mikki kendall (nf)- a breakdown of who’s getting left out of feminist spaces, why that’s happening, and why it shouldn’t be happening.

all you can ever know by nicole chung (nf)- a (transracial) adoptee’s take on adoption and learning more about her birth family. the personal storytelling of this one really stuck with me.

motherhood so white by nefertiti austin (nf)- a single-mom-by-choice’s take on the foster system/adoption process. walks you through some things i always wondered about and some things i wouldn’t even have thought about.

this place by kateri akiwenzie-damm et al (? n/f)- i, like a lot of non- native americans, only know that history in broad strokes. getting this many highly specific stories in one dense and beautiful book felt like a lucky find. and taking that perspective into the future in the context of that history is v good.

empty by susan burton (nf)- eating disorder stories are important to me bc i care about food so much. this one is so relatable- not in its specificity, but rather its generality. it’s easy to empathize with her perspective because it’s like, Oh, i don’t have that exact problem, but i struggle with different problems in a very similar way. (feels like the opposite of roxane gay’s hunger, in a way.)

obit by victoria chang (p)- this exploration of grief is... woof.

short story collections are hard to evaluate bc you’ll never read one where every single story hits but i generally enjoyed these:

a thousand beginnings and endings edited by ellen oh and elsie chapman (f)

how long til black future month? by n.k. jemisin (f)

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado (f)

books i revisited:

the broken earth trilogy by n.k. jemisin (f)- i read the series backwards this time and like... i can’t really find any faults in these books, man. they’re just the best.

everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too by jomny sun (f... but is it really?)- half of this book’s sales are from me buying it for other people bc it’s the only way i know how to say i love you. i reread it every time just to make sure it still feels right and it always does.

other honorable mentions:

white is for witching by helen oyeyemi (f)- not to pit two bad bitches against each other, but this book does what akwaeke emezi’s freshwater was trying to do. it’s a little weird, a little haunted, a little of a lot of things. read this only in the dead of winter. (and with stephen rennicks’ score for the little stranger playing in the background.)

homie by danez smith (p)- there’s a lot going on here, but this just made me crack a smile a couple times in a way that no other book of poetry has ever done.

the murder of roger ackroyd and murder in mesopotamia by agatha christie (f)- That Bitch!

blues by nikki giovanni (p)- she sure has some Things To Say

the three-body problem by cixin liu (f)- interesting concepts, but... idk something’s missing? felt weirdly soulless to me. i’m probably not gonna read the sequels. but it did make some points!

the sisters of the winter wood by rena rossner (f)- i’m a slut for shapeshifting, okay. but this is a good fairy tale, it works!

parable of the sower by octavia butler (f)- i read this in march, when the pandemic was just kicking off and boy that was not the right time. def my least favorite of hers so far, but an octavia butler i don’t love is still better than a hell of a lot of other books. no idea when or if i’ll get to a good enough headspace for the sequel.

faves:

saturnino herrán by adriana zapett tapia (nf)- i got to learn new things about my mans and see some of his paintings i’ve never even seen online! GOSH.

on food and cooking by harold mcgee (nf)- yeah yeah, i’ve already mentioned this book half a dozen times on here this year, but i don’t care. this book lives off the shelf in my home bc i reference it like every other fucking day. this book is a part of me now.

#long post #final total for the year will be 120 by the end of the day!#and i had a pretty good hit rate. would probably recommend at least half #and only outright hated four

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callunavulgari · 5 years ago

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Year-In-Fic | 2019

How many fics did you write this year? What was your total wordcount?

This year I wrote 41 fics (technically 40 as the last was published today, but I wrote it in December so I’m counting it), for a total of 96,689 words. For even more interesting numbers, of that 96k, a little over 70k of them were written in the month of October alone, so I’m pretty proud of that.

Fic Roundup!

children of dust and ash | Bartimaeus | Bartimaeus/Kitty(/Nathaniel) | 1,801 words | Kitty summons Bartimaeus on a chilly fall day in her thirty-eighth year.

sweet music playing in the dark | DBH | 1,102 words | “I noticed some time ago that you seem to have an appreciation for jazz.”

Radio Ga Ga | Stranger Things | Harringrove | 1,143 words | There’s always another party in Hawkins, Indiana. It would be almost boring if it weren’t for Steve Harrington.

Sunlight | Marvel | Loki/Thor | 765 words | They aren’t quite out of the solar system when Loki appears at the arm of Thor’s chair, hair shorn short and a furious snarl on his face.

like the bough of a willow tree | Detroit Become Human | Hank/Connor | 1,214 words | There’s a human lost in his woods.

knocking on heaven’s door | Stranger Things | Harringrove | 1,748 words | “Just, get in the fucking car. I’ll drive you home.” Billy looked at him, very seriously, and said, “What if I don’t want to go home?”

no more dreaming like a ghost | KH | Axel/Roxas | 813 words | He is in the kitchen, the stove top still warm under his thighs, and everything smells of cherries. The pie is cooling on the windowsill, the sun slanting in warm and buttery, and it is like a dream. A memory. A wish.

Cheers | DBH | Hankcon | 6,368 words | “Are you coming in or not?”Connor blinks, jerks his eyes up and away from those hands and-The bartender has blue eyes. They match the spinning LED at his temple perfectly.

bury a friend (try to wake up) | Stranger Things | Harringrove | 1,587 words | Steve digs up Billy’s body on a Tuesday.

won’t be too soon ‘til I say… goodnight moon | KH | Riku/Sora | 4,549 words | The house was built in the fall of 1882.

you’ll never know what hit you | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane | 5,379 words | “C’mon, ghost,” Shane urges. “Make all my dreams come true. Fuck me up, fam.”

make this chaos count | EOS 10 | Ryan/Akmazian | 724 words | “You really should stop looking for me,” Akmazian tells him, fingers creeping across Ryan’s ribcage, mapping the architecture of his ribs.

eat you up whole | The Witcher | Geralt/Regis | 2,527 words | “How many mouthfuls do you think I could take from you before it had some effect?” Regis whispers, lips against his throat. Geralt can feel the pinprick of fangs. “Four? Six? Ten? More, even?”

forget the horror here | DBH | Hankcon | 4,390 words | “Hello,” the android says, it’s chest heaving, the gleam of its heart brighter, bluer than before.

summoning demons (and other bad first date ideas) | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane | 3,868 words | “If I let you out of that circle,” Ryan says, slowly. “Are you going to eat me?”

Itch | The Magnus Archives | Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims | 1,440 words | The boneturner takes from him two ribs - one for him and one for Jon.

the salt water sting | Dishonored | Corvo/Outsider | 2,163 words | The ship wrecks several hundred miles off of the coast of Karnaca.

a skeleton of something more | SGA | Rodney/John | 3,072 words | “John?” he murmurs, still coasting on the pain. His head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, if cotton were also made of glass.

in the woods somewhere | Teen Wolf | Derek/Stiles | 4,570 words | Stiles buys a house in Virginia.

Wake Up | The Magnus Archives | Martin/Jon | 550 words | “If you wake up,” Martin tells him, experimentally. “I won’t go through with it. You can tell me what a stupid idea it was, and we can laugh about it, and everything will be normal.”

Pas de Deux | KH | Axel/Roxas | 506 words | Roxas doesn’t remember what the sky looks like anymore.

try to wake up | Stranger Things | Harringrove | 1,226 words | They do not, in fact, bone down and praise Satan.

too late to come on home | LoZ | Gen | 1,391 words | “You look familiar,” the boy says in his strange, haunting voice. “Are you lost?”

patron saint of the lost causes | Harry Potter | Draco/Harry | 4,203 words | “Can’t you just, y’know,” he waves a hand and makes an obscene gesture, his cheeks flaring red. “Shag it out?”

wouldn’t you like to see something strange? | Teen Wolf | Sterek | 1,571 words | “I’d say you make my heart pound, but well…” Stiles nods meaningfully to his chest, where if you look hard enough between the slots of his ribs, you can see the lump of muscle that once was his heart, pointedly not beating. “You know.”

the night is softly, sweetly calling | Teen Wolf | Sterek | 2,938 words | Here’s the thing that Stiles never tells the Hales: his mother was strange too.

Haunt | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane | 1,486 words | Ryan couldn’t remember a time when the world didn’t believe in ghosts.

bite my tongue, bide my time | PJO | Nico/Percy(/Annabeth) | 1,376 words | “What’s wrong with you?” Nico asks, cowering when Percy places a gentle kiss on his collarbone.

Bird Song | Raven Cycle | Ronan/Adam, Gen | 1,445 words | On a dreary Sunday in early January, Ronan dreams himself a pair of wings.

kiss me hard until you’re done | Star Wars | Reylo | 3,082 words | He looks up at her from under heavy lids, dark hair sweeping forward to frame his face. “May I have this dance?”

beauty in the dissonance | Marvel | Tony/Loki | 1,411 words | When Tony dies, it isn’t for forever.

like real people do | Stranger Things | Harringrove | 2,808 words | “I’ve got the sight, man,” he says with a small shrug. “And look, I feel for you. You’re dead and I’m not, and that sucks, but unless you’re planning on doing something about it, I’d really appreciate it if you could stop feeling me up and let me get back to sleep.”

i’d rather drown in your ocean | Naruto | Itachi/Shisui | 1,630 words | The Uchihas are an odd sort. Everyone says so.

catch your breath | The Bright Sessions | Mark/Damien/Sam | 2,588 words | Mark had never assumed in a million years that he would ever see Damien again. He hadn’t factored in zombies.

Nightmare | The Magnus Archives | Martin/Jonathan | 1,424 words | “All right,” he says, taking Jon’s still outstretched hand. “Let’s give the dream what it wants.”

dreaming of the crash | Gravity Falls | Mabel & Dipper | 484 words | When the end of the world comes, they’re under the bed.

don’t we love it now? | Kingdom Hearts | Sora/Riku/Kairi | 1,784 words | When Kairi is eleven years old, she gets lost in the woods.

all this, and love too, will ruin us | Star Wars | Reylo | 1,102 words | Rey is awake to watch the sunrise

open the walls, play with your dolls | Coraline | Coraline/Wybie | 2,886 words | Halloween at the Pink Palace is a lot like any other time of year.

in every golden trace | Queen’s Thief | Costis/Eugenides/Irene | 4,645 words | For as long as Costis can remember, he’s had two names scored across the skin atop his ribs, one on either side of his rib cage, nearly perfect mirrors to one another.

a different kind of danger in the daylight | Shades of Magic | Lila/Kell/Holland | 6,930 words | Sleeping with Holland was never part of the plan.

Best story I wrote this year: Probably the night is softly, sweetly calling. I wrote this for the 18th of October, and it’s the much awaited third part of a Teen Wolf/Addams Family fusion that I wrote back in 2014. A lot of people have asked me to continue this series over the years, but I never did because I felt my writing style had changed too much and then I fell out of the Teen Wolf fandom completely. But I’d written another Teen Wolf fic a few days before (more on this later) and I was just... very nostalgic all of a sudden. My style of writing had changed, but to offset the change of tone, I wrote the story from Stiles’s POV instead of Derek’s and it made all the difference. I was pretty pleased with the result, and hope that it made everyone happy.

What’s your favorite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest. patron saint of the lost causes. There were a couple fics that I think I did a really good job writing this year, the one listed above and below included, but I think that this one was my favorite. Writing Drarry was a surreal experience, because even when I was in the Harry Potter fandom I didn’t really write for it (well, I didn’t publish what I’d written for it) and I was surprised by how easily it came to me. I tried to channel a lot of the feeling of men who had mothers when I was writing this one, because it seemed very right.

Okay, NOW your most popular story. All right, so technically my stats are all messed up this year because when I posted the third part of the Addams/Teen Wolf fusion, I also posted a chapter to Que Sera, Sera since so many people were subscribed to that story. So. From a purely stats standpoint, Que Sera, Sera was the most popular because it has a total of 25,790 hits, 2973 kudos, and 115 comments. BUT, I did not actually write anything new for that one so-

in the woods somewhere was the first fic I’d written for Teen Wolf since I wrote take me to church in August of 2017. It has over 900 kudos and some 5000+ hits. When I decided to do Dark Month this year, I knew that I wanted to revisit some of my old fandoms, so Teen Wolf was always going to be a given. I wrote take me to church as a cathartic goodbye to the show, the fandom, and of course, Stiles and Derek. It was my soft epilogue for the boys.

in the woods somewhere has a very similar feel to it. It’s post-canon, obviously, and features Stiles buying a house in Virginia and Derek slowly working his way back into his life. It is also very much in the ‘soft epilogue’ genre, leaning heavily into the magical Stiles Stilinski trope while maintaining the FBI agent direction canon was leading us in. Also it has a lot of comfort things for me - judicious descriptions of food, a packed witchy cabin in the woods, and warm shower kisses. Story of mine most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Possibly either won't be too soon 'til I say... goodnight moon or all this, and love too, will ruin us. The first of these two fics is almost 5k of spooky season Riku/Sora that was strongly inspired by Uzumaki-sama’s old fic Goodnight Moon. It was the second day of October and my prompts for the day were moon cycles, nightmare, cage, lookalike, mirrors, and glowing eyes, which was just asking for fic exploring doppelgangers and old haunted houses. I loved writing it, and maybe I should have expected it since Kingdom Hearts is such a quiet fandom nowadays, but it honestly stung that it didn’t get more attention.

The second of those fics was a Reylo fic (yes, yes, I know, it’s an awful ship, etc. etc.) that was very much written to be slow and melancholy and kind of surreal. Sometimes my smallest fics are my favorite, and I really liked this one. But alas, some things were not meant to be.

Most fun story to write: I had a whole lot of fun writing summoning demons (and other bad first date ideas). A lot of the fics I wrote this year, particularly during October, were really fun and easy to write. I missed writing every day. This one in particular though was about 4k of Ryan accidentally summoning Shane (the demon) while Shane was standing right next to him in his human suit. It let me play with a lot of body horror tropes that I don’t explore usually, and Buzzfeed Unsolved is a very fun, fresh fandom to dig around in. This is the second of the three (I think it was three, at least) fics that I wrote for the fandom during October and I had so much fun with it.

Story that could have been better? I don’t know about better, but Sunlight and Bird Song were both supposed to be significantly longer. I wrote Sunlight shortly after watching Endgame, and it was always going to be me working my way through my issues with that movie (Loki not really coming back, weird wonky time travel, Thor leaving his people after his whole arc was him learning how to be a good king) but I got distracted and had to go somewhere that day and just never got back to it.

Bird Song is actually a fic I’ve been meaning to write for years. Ages ago (and we are truly talking ages ago, like September 2015 ages ago), @kaikamahine gave me a prompt for E, 17, and hymnal, which basically balanced out to Ronan, churches, and wings. So day 20 of October was going to be Raven Cycle (with such prompts as stacked deck, darkness, wings, and fight fire with fire, it was begging for it) and I was finally going to write Ronan wingfic. It was going to be great. There was going to be Calla and Ronan interaction and found family themes and there was going to be a church, because obviously, but then I wasn’t doing so well and ran out of time, SO. Definitely could have been better.

Story I wrote to fix things: beauty in the dissonance, the 24th fic of October, was a Tony/Loki flavored story where both Tony and Loki are, in fact, alive. Sunlight was written as a direct response to Endgame, even if it was never finished properly. make this chaos count was the 4th day of October, and written because I’m still not fucking over Ryan and Akmazian. And then knocking on heaven’s door was written just after viewing s3 of Stranger Things. It was uh, less of a fix it fic and more a wallow in your grief fic, but it still applies.

Oh, and a different kind of danger in the daylight was technically fix it fic? I’m generally okay with how Shades of Magic ended, despite my favorite character dying because it came off as a good death. However, the recipient of my Yuletide gift wanted no character death and I wanted to write something post-canon, so presto, fix it fic.

Longest completed fic this year: a different kind of danger in the daylight, followed by Cheers. Both are hovering between 6 and 7k, which isn’t technically long, but since about 90% of my fic this year was written over the course of a day each... I’ll take it.

Fandom you enjoyed writing for most this year: I had a lot of fun with Buzzfeed Unsolved and The Magnus Archives, but I also had fun dipping briefly back into Harry Potter and Teen Wolf.

Favorite character you wrote this year: I had way, way too much fun writing Geralt and Regis in eat you up whole. I have literally no idea if it translated into good fic, but it was fun and just shy of porny and I just really like Geralt. I also had a lot of fun writing Lila in the Shades of Magic fic.

Most memorable comment(s) this year: I got two comments from @kaikamahine about a week ago that honestly made my day. @faorism reread one of my older Stranger Things fics and left a comment, which made me reread it, which was just very good. Every single comment I got on the new Teen Wolf fics with some variation of ‘missed you’ or ‘so glad you’re back’ made me fucking melt. The two different comments where the reader wasn’t even familiar with the material, just read and enjoyed because I wrote it. The comment on one of my Stranger Things fics that just reads, “What the FUCK this SLAPPED.” The comment directly above that one that is from one of my favorite writers in the fandom. The several comments on the single PJO fic I wrote this year which were different variations of “oh my gosh it’s you” and “it’s been so long.”

And of course everyone losing their collective shit over some of the grosser October fics. Namely Itch.

Fics you wanted to write but didn’t: For the most part, the fics I wanted to write but didn’t are the same as last year- Sabriel AU, Enjolras/Grantaire fic, found family Dishonored fic, bodyswappying Reylo, Sterek Bioshock and Carmilla AUs which I am likely to post as is sometime next year.

I still want to finish the Castlevania OT3 fic, the giant canon-divergent Bright Sessions AU where years after the series ends, Mark ends up running into Damien again in a small town in the middle of nowhere only to realize that he has a daughter, a farm, a life, and is just so drawn to it that he keeps coming back. I have the Wolf 359 post-canon fic where everyone has feelings and found family is a general theme and maybe Eiffel smooches an AI. I also have the smuttier Wolf 359 fic that’s been lurking in the back of my head for months where Eiffel and Kepler er, basically eiffel tower Jacobi.

Oh, and I have the Reylo fic where Rey (and Ben, through the bond) sit through General Organa’s funeral and keep coming back to each other afterwards. And that Final Fantasy 15 fic where Dino and Noctis do the nasty. And the Hera & Jacobi fic from October. And uh, the post episode 9 fic that’s been lurking about in my brain.

Oddest story: Probably i’d rather drown in your ocean? It was pretty spot on aesthetically for me, but it was weird to write Itachi and Shisui again, especially in a strange modern day vampire context? Also Itch and Nightmare were both Magnus Archive fics that were super gross (Itch) and just plain spooky and bizarre (Nightmare) but they were so fun to write. Hardest story to do: Cheers gave me some trouble initially but got a lot easier as I went on. I hit writer’s block pretty bad with the Shades of Magic fic too, but that seems to be what happens when I come up on deadlines. Easiest story to write? Most of October’s fics were a blast to write and super easy besides. Basically all of the Kingdom Hearts, Stranger Things, and Teen Wolf fic. And the Buzzfeed Unsolved.

Most mining of your own history in one story: Probably either open the walls, play with your dolls or no more dreaming like a ghost. Not in any way that really matters, but there are a couple familiar details.

Themes, or absence thereof: Mostly either spooky scary things or fix it fics. Sometimes both.

Where did you publish/archive your stories? Ao3, as per usual. Story I haven’t yet written, but intend to: The only thing that I currently have planned is the post episode 9 fic and a couple things that I’ve had planned for a while that may or may not come out.

Sexiest moment (excerpt): “How many mouthfuls do you think I could take from you before it had some effect?” Regis whispers, lips against his throat. Geralt can feel the pinprick of fangs. “Four? Six? Ten? More, even?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Geralt murmurs, and Regis laughs.

“I would,” he agrees.

“So, why don’t you find out instead of boring me with all the details?”

Regis pulls away from his throat, far enough that Geralt can meet his eyes again. He swallows at what he finds there. Amusement, yes, but also hunger, brighter than the moonlight reflecting in his eyes.

“A taste, first, I think,” Regis says in a low, cool voice, and then closes the space between them.

Geralt had forgotten the blood on his lip, but he remembers it when Regis catches him in an open-mouthed kiss. It’s wet and bruising, and Geralt is responding before he remembers he shouldn’t, fighting back the only way he knows how with the rest of him indisposed. He claws at him, bites at him, and the vampire laughs when Geralt catches his plump lower lip between his teeth and bites down. Regis gives his mouth one last darting swipe of the tongue before he is pulling away.

There’s a flare of color high on Regis’s cheeks and his ears are distinctly more pointed than they were five minutes ago, the sclera of his eyes gone red.

“Can’t say I’ve ever been bitten by a human before,” Regis tells him, leaning close like he’s divulging a secret. “It’s a rather exhilarating experience.”

“I’m all for a repeat experience,” Geralt quips, eyes narrowed. “Lean in just a little and we can see if I can manage to tear off your lips before you rip out my throat.”

“Please,” she whispers, and feels herself quiver like a taut bowstring when he touches her mouth gently, with the very tips of his fingers.

He smiles and leads her away, through the demons and goblins and fae that she came here to kill.

They make it as far as the parking lot before he is hitching her up the side of a gleaming Mercedes, hooking her legs around his shoulders, and hiking her skirts up over her thighs so he can duck his head beneath them. His fingers linger for a moment on the silver of the knives strapped securely to her thigh, and then he is reaching in, guiding her underwear to the side and getting his mouth on her, right where she wants it.

She must make some kind of noise, because he chuckles, tongue circling her clit in a slow, languid way that makes her think that he is savoring her, that he likes the taste of her on his tongue.And he must, because she knows what he is. Knows that just as he’s savoring the taste of her, he is eating her, feeding off of her want like the things that she hunts in the dark feed off of blood and marrow and souls. She knows, but it isn’t enough to stop her from tilting her head back, gasping for him, the distant wink of streetlights and stars so far away.

He makes her come with his mouth on her, with his fingers inside her, and even as she’s shaking around him, she knows that it isn’t enough. She wants more, wants to feel the heavy press of him inside around, wants to kiss his lips and taste herself on his tongue.

“Please,” she says, her thighs shaking, and he laughs, pulling away and easing her down, until her legs are looped around his waist instead of her shoulders. He reaches between them, and she knows what’s happening beneath her skirts, knows that he’s getting his cock out of his pants and pressing it against her, can feel it as he sinks slowly into her, the tight fit of it so sweet, so perfect that it makes her ache.

“You’re lovely,” he whispers, kissing her shoulders and fucking into her slow, a teasing stretch that makes her mouth water, makes her twitch.

“Is this what you wanted?” Hank jeers, one finger circling the rim of Connor’s hole. There’s a flush of angry blue across his cheeks. His hair is coming loose from its usually immaculate tail, curling against his forehead. His eyes are blue. His LED is not. “To lay back and take it? From a fucking machine?”

Connor whines, back arching as Hank dips the tip of his thumb inside, just enough to hold him open.

“That is it, isn’t it?” Hanks says softly. There’s a touch of triumph to his gaze as he fucks Connor open on his thumb. Something mean, too. Disdain, slowly unfurling in the curve of his lips. He shakes his head. “All this time, coming to this bar. Talking to me like you thought I was some kind of human, and you just wanted something like me to hold you up and take you apart.”

“No,” Connor gasps, but can’t help the twist of his hips when Hank adds another finger.

“No?” Hank says with a laugh. “Look at you.”

Connor’s cock jerks against his belly as Hank drags his pants the rest of the way down his thighs. They make it as far as his knees before they tangle, stuck on his shoes. His cheeks feel hot, and he- god, he wants to protest. Wants to say that Hank’s got it all wrong, that this is more. That he’s more.

But then Hank is flipping him over, until the arm of the couch is digging firmly into his belly, his ass high in the air. Hank pulls his fingers out, then leans over and spits, the cool slippery slide of the saliva trailing down the curve of his ass.

“All right, Connor,” he says. “This what you want? I’ll give it to you.”

No, Connor should say. It isn’t like that.

Instead, he says, “Please.”

Crackiest moment (excerpt):

“Did you just sneak into my house?” Stiles breathes, absurdly charmed.

Derek’s in his human disguise, everything dangerous about him hidden away from view, lurking just under the surface. He gives Stiles a look, and says, “Don’t be weird about it.”

He shuts the door behind him.

“I’ve got a nice monster knocking on my door just before the witching hour,” Stiles tells him playfully, making room for Derek to take a seat next to him. “How am I not supposed to be weird about that?”

Derek does something akin to rolling his eyes, the flames doing a little shimmy around the circumference of his eye sockets. He leans back against Stiles’s headboard, seemingly unconcerned that their sides are pressed together. Derek’s skin is very warm, human warm, and Stiles is all bones. He sucks up the warmth greedily.

“I’d say you make my heart pound, but well…” Stiles nods meaningfully to his chest, where if you look hard enough between the slots of his ribs, you can see the lump of muscle that once was his heart, pointedly not beating. “You know.”

“What’s the local legend about this thing?” Shane asks, hopping up onto the throne easily and spreading out, eyes on the night sky. He looks good. He always looks good, but Ryan likes him best like this, out here with the moonlight shining down on them and the camera catching all his best angles.

As Ryan watches, he blinks, and turns to look at Ryan, puzzled. “Ryan?”

Ryan clears his throat. “The locals say that if you make a wish while sitting on her throne, the witch will grant it.”

Shane gives him a wicked smile and hums a few bars of Genie in a Bottle. Ryan chokes out a laugh, crossing the space between them until he’s leaning up against the side of the throne himself.

Shane closes his eyes. “I wish, I wish with all my might, please dear god, let there be ghosts here this night.”

Ryan holds his breath.

“C’mon, ghost,” Shane urges. “Make all my dreams come true. Fuck me up, fam.”

All around them, the world is still.

Shane cracks an eye open and squints at him. “Did it work?”

“Jon?” someone asks, and Jon blinks.

Martin is standing before him. He’s wearing something out of another time, a costume of silken breeches with a well-cut waistcoat of a rich, opalescent blue. There’s a puffy cravat hugging his neck, and polished buckled shoes on his feet. Jon almost expects him to be wearing a wig, but his hair is the one thing that’s been left untouched, hanging loose around his chin.

“Martin?” Jon asks.

Martin seems to take him in, his eyes running slowly down Jon’s body, lingering at his wrists, his waist, his thighs. It’s a bold sort of move, one that Martin would never be half so blatant about if he were awake.

“You, er. Look nice,” Martin says, and Jon glances down at himself.

He’s sure that moments ago he’d been wearing the same thing he’d worn to the office, shabby coat, mostly clean shirt, a pair of nondescript trousers that didn’t have any stains. But now, he finds himself in a dress. The gown is long and brilliantly red, the skirts heavy around his thighs. There are embroidered patterns reminiscent of roses along the bodice and down the front of his petticoat.

“Well, shit,” he mutters, still staring. Experimentally, he moves his hips, and finds that the skirts swish obligingly with the movement.

“Yes, well,” Martin murmurs, cheeks flushing horribly. “You always did look rather good in red.”

“In red-” Jon repeats in horror. “Martin, I’m in a gown.”

Favorite dialogue (excerpt):

“Are you ever going to stop looking for me?” Akmazian asks him one night.

Ryan is tired. Akmazian is a shadowed figure in the dark that he tries not to look at too closely, because if he does, Akmazian will be gone.

“Maybe,” Ryan tells him, and turns over onto his side. Away from the shadow, the ghost.

The bed dips under the weight of a person who isn’t really there, and Ryan can feel Akmazian’s breath on the back of his neck, warm and damp.

“Don’t touch me,” Ryan says, and means, I don't want this to end yet.

“Wasn’t plannin’ on it, darlin',” Akmazian murmurs back, then drags his lips over the back of his neck anyway, just to be contrary. Ryan swallows, his throat dry, tongue thick in his mouth. He clenches his fingers in the sheets, eyes squeezed so tightly shut that his vision stains red behind his eyelids.

“Please,” Ryan says.

“You really should stop looking for me,” Akmazian tells him, fingers creeping across Ryan’s ribcage, mapping the architecture of his ribs.

“I know.”

“You’re never going to find me.”

Ryan laughs. “Never say never.”

There is silence behind him and then, “Ryan. Please. You’re hurting yourself.”

Ryan trembles a little when a hand lands on his hip, just this side of too solid.

“Don’t care.”

“You’re hurting the stars.”

Ryan is silent for a moment. Then, “I just miss you.”

A sigh.

“I know,” Akmazian murmurs, and leans over to place a kiss on Ryan’s forehead. “I miss you too.”

Ryan opens his eyes, turns to look, and like always, Akmazian is gone.

“Look,” Potter says, audibly slurring. “I’ve had an idea.”

Draco crosses his arms. “And what, pray tell, is this idea of yours, Potter?”

Potter leans forward, using a hand to prop himself up, until he’s well into Draco’s personal space. He smells like beer and whiskey, and his cheeks and jaw are more beard than stubble.

“Break your curse with me,” he breathes, a hand settling atop Draco’s blanket-clad knee.

Draco swallows. “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

“No, look,” Potter says, leaning in even closer, eyes a bit wild. “We can just… you know.”

“No, Potter,” Draco tells him. “I don’t know.”

But he does. He really does.

“You know,” Potter says again. “Shag it out.”

“I think that you’re confusing things again,” Draco says tiredly. He sets the book on the nightstand next to him. “Remember the terms of the curse? Love, Potter. Not sex.”

Potter’s nose wrinkles. “But sex is part of love. Usually, anyway. It’ll work, I know it.”

“It won’t,” Draco insists, slapping Potter’s hand away when it begins to wander up his thigh. “Do you really think that I didn’t shag my wife before she left me? Because I did. We tried for years. Years, Potter. Trust me, if the curse were going to break because of a fuck, it would have happened well before now.”

Potter blinks at him, his eyes wide. There’s a ruddy flush on his cheeks, and Draco’s not sure if he likes it.

“We could at least try,” Potter says, almost gently. He doesn’t touch Draco again, but he looks like he wants to, hand trembling where it lays on the bedspread.

It feels like there’s glass in Draco’s throat. He is so, so tempted. Here is what he wanted - or at least part of it - Potter in his bed begging to fuck him, and he’s going to have to send him away.

“I think you should leave,” he tells him, and Potter’s mouth shuts with a click.

Favorite lines (excerpt):

“Relax,” he croons, stroking her fingers before he pulls away. “Your secret is safe with me. Most of this crowd knows that I’m not on speaking terms with that side of my family. They won’t suspect you because of me.”

Her face is flushed, either from rage or humiliation. Possibly both.

“So you-”

“Yes,” he says, fingers dropping to caress the fabric of her gown, swirling a thumb around the sweeping petals of an embroidered rose. His gaze is sly, a bit predatory when he glances back up at her. “I know what you have under this pretty skirt of yours.”

Rey’s breath catches, and she feels something- a slow trickle of heat seeping in to pool around her navel. She shifts, thighs sliding together, and hopes that he can’t smell her.

“Just as I know exactly what you’re doing right now,” she tells him in a hard whisper, jerking away from his grip on her elbow.

His eyes widen, affecting a look of innocence - a ‘who me?’ - that isn’t quite as effective when his lips are also curling up into a slow, pleased smirk.

“And what exactly am I doing?” he asks, his eyes laughing at her.

She glares at him. That seems to be enough of a reply, because he chuckles before taking possession of her arm again and pulling her smoothly towards the dance floor. Once they’ve reached the edge of it, he stops, dropping her elbow in favor of dipping into a low, courtly bow.

He looks up at her from under heavy lids, his hair sweeping forward to frame his face. “May I have this dance?”

The dance floor is crowded, full to the brim of masked people sweeping by in jewel-bright dresses and dark suits. She knows not to - knows that this place is a lot like fae courts of old. You don’t eat the food, you don’t drink the wine, and you definitely don’t dance.

But she’s already drank the wine, so she might as well dance.

The ship wrecks several hundred miles off of the coast of Karnaca. The storm that ends them is a rare sort, fiercer than most, a huge bank of dark clouds that seems to come from the void itself, blooming on the horizon like a warning. The lightning cracks the world asunder, thunder deafening, but it's the wind and waves that will always be a ship’s downfall.

Corvo watched the wave approach, saw its frothing white caps and the way it had stretched, higher and higher, until it loomed over the ship.

They never had a chance, and by the time the wave came crashing down, Corvo was already holding his breath.

Much of what he remembers after are mere snippets: the gulping suck of the water around him, broken pieces of the ship spinning by along with those of the crew who were unlucky enough to be caught by the ship’s pull, sucked down into the void, devoured by the whale god himself. He remembers his first gasp of air once he’d surfaced, the tang of brine and salt heavy on his tongue as wave after wave battered his body.

He doesn’t think that most of the crew survived the first few minutes much less the whole night, and he is certainly alone when the sun blossoms on the horizon hours later, clinging to a piece of ship the size of his torso and kicking relentlessly towards the dawn.

Corvo grew up on the coast, his hair stiff with salt from the ocean breeze. He grew up in and out of the water, hauling cargo or gutting fish on the docks. He’s familiar with the ocean - how the pull of the tides work, which days its best to avoid the dock, how to escape the sea’s wrath when a riptide or an undercurrent tries its damndest to drown you.

So he knows that his chances of making it to land are slim. But Corvo has always been stubborn, his legs have always been strong, and his story is far from finished.

Stiles buys a house in Virginia. It’s a modest thing close to Quantico, but not too close, tucked away into the heart of the wooded Appalachians. The bones of the house is all stonework and sturdy dark wood, a rickety wraparound porch bracketing the house on all sides. The first thing that he’d bought for it were two overpriced rocking chairs he’d gotten from the nearest Cracker Barrel.

Over the course of a year, he fills the house with things. A soft, dark gray sofa. Several solid end tables. A pair of emerald lamps he gets from an antique shop. A moss-green throw that is warm as a hug when it’s wrapped around his shoulders in the dead of winter. His living room is a bit too mountain man chic, but he likes the way that it looks when he’s coming home from a long day at the academy, warm and inviting.

He gets his bed set from a woodworker a couple dozen miles down the road, a man with a gruff bristled gray face and a warm smile, who trades Stiles the custom set for some warding and a couple bottles of what he calls, ‘miracle elixir.’ The set is sturdy mahogany, a pair of wolves carved across the top of the curving headboard, runes filling the gaps between them. The chest of drawers and dresser are just as solid, and Stiles has to hire movers to help him get everything back to the house.

The bulky rednecks decked out in worn flannel that help him with it carefully avoid looking at the runes of the headboard, their eyes skittering away from the carvings like frightened rabbits. They exchange apprehensive looks when they see the herbs drying over the sink in his kitchen, but to their credit, stay quiet and hightail it out of the place when he pays them. Here in the Appalachian backwoods, no one talks about magic, but everyone knows it exists.

Stiles has people over every once in a while - flies his dad and Scott in from California, has Lydia drive down from Boston, or Kira from North Carolina - but mostly, he’s alone. It’s a strange thing to get used to, the silence of the nights out here, where the night sky is bright and clear enough to see the stars above him, not a hint of light pollution to be seen, and the trees rustling in a quiet wind is almost louder than the hoots and hollers of the local wildlife.

He’d thought it would be lonely, and to be fair, sometimes it is.

Some nights he comes home and collapses back onto his sofa, and would do anything to be right down the road from Scott and Melissa and his dad again. He has days where he craves Melissa’s pozole or his dad’s meatloaf so badly that he can taste the heat of it on his tongue.

But mostly, the quiet is nice.

He cooks himself soups that simmer in the slow cooker while he’s at the academy and roasts that he makes on the weekends. He experiments with food the way he never used to back in Beacon Hills, where he had his dad’s heart to worry about if he made anything, and fast food which was easier to grab when he didn’t. He takes a world tour through his kitchen - homemade pierogi, hearty paella, steaming pirozhki, spicy-smelling curries, and hand rolled sushi. The first time that he makes his own bread in the ancient oven that came with the house, the smell of it coming fresh out of the oven is so good that he nearly cries.

It’s three winters into living there before he hears a scratching at his door in the middle of the night, and when he goes to investigate, finds a large black wolf on his doorstep.

It’s favoring one of its paws, dark fur matted on one side of its head where he can dimly make out a sluggishly bleeding gash. It blinks at him, eyes glowing a bright, familiar blue, and Stiles spends a minute watching it before he smiles and steps aside.

Fic goals: Hey Heather, it was only 800 words, but you did technically write something original. Now, let’s do something original that’s a little longer. And while we’re at it, let’s do something novel length.

#heather says what #heather writes #2019 #new year's memes

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defenderadora · 6 years ago

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°✧｡ [ELIZA TAYLOR, CIS-FEMALE, SHE/HER] IT’S BEEN TWO YEARS SINCE ADORA JOINED VELIA FROM SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. APPARENTLY, THEIR NAME IS HARLOW WOLFE AND THEY’RE A WARRIOR. THEY HAVE BEEN FIGHTING AS A CATALYST MEMBER FOR A WHILE NOW. DIDN’T PEOPLE SAY THEY WERE NOT A BETA TESTER? I HEARD THEY TURNED TWENTY-EIGHT THIS YEAR. LET’S HOPE THEY MAKE IT OUT ALIVE.

hi sweeties! i’m ray and i’m exceptionally excited to be apart of this gorgeous rp. below the cut is some info about my lil babe harlow adora. if you’d like to plot hit me up or i’ll come to you.

CHARACTERISTICS

full name : harlow amelia wolfe

username : adora

velia level : seventy-one

birthplace : sydney, australia

age : twenty-eight

zodiac sign : cancer

sexuality : bisexual

height : 5′4′

build : petite and curvy

piercings : standard lobe || upper lobe || tragus || helix

tattoos : x | x | x | x

scars : one along her ankle from a childhood injury

song : please don’t go by joel adams

PERSONALITY

positive : determined || focused || survivor || resourceful || protective || brave

negative : blunt || cunning || restless || callous || resentful || grief-stricken || ruthless

BEFORE VELIA

harlow wolfe was born in the suburb of birchgrove to a middle-class family. her father worked in the tech industry and her mother a pediatrician. harlow is the middle child of two other siblings. an older brother (by three years) who has always been a protector (also being someone harlow idolized) and a younger sister (by seven years) who some would say was spoiled growing up. since harlow only had her brother as a playmate at home for seven years of her life, she steered away from the more feminine things in life and gravitated more towards the rougher things. instead of baby dolls or stuffed animals, harlow carried around toy swords and nerf guns, always itching to have a battle with her elder brother. despite her upbringing into more tough activities, she still had a big heart. too many times her parents would catch her nursing an injured animal back to health hidden away in her bedroom closet. for a while, she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian.

at the age of five, her brother, who was eight at the time, got into gaming and she soon followed. surprisingly, her favorite games were those with little violence. anywhere from life-simulation rpg (akin to the sims) to racing games. she also found herself fond of old-timey adventure games where the characters wouldn’t die. instead, they would respawn from the lasted saved spot (think legend of zelda (specifically wind waker), sonic, mario, etc). the next year, at the age of six, is when she met her best friend, darius. while searching for a new game to try out at the towns game store, she bumped hands with a little boy while they were reaching for the same game. almost immediately they became the best of friends, begging their mothers to exchange information so they could see one another again. darius was the one who introduced her to the more violent battle games in their early tweens.

the two stayed close (they tried dating but found it too odd so they decided just to stay friends) up until the age of twenty-five. harlow had met someone the year before who she thought was going to be her forever but darius didn’t trust this individual. turns out, darius’ intuition was correct. the person she met was a criminal who had been to jail numerous times for petty theft. harlow was unaware of this though. one day her prized class ring, as well as her grandfather's watch, her mothers pearls, and her brother's sports cards, went missing then somehow turned up in darius’ possession, causing her to believe that he had been the one to steal the items. turns out, it had been her partner who wanted to sell them off for some cash for drugs, and when they were almost caught, they dumped the items into darius’ bag.

harlow (stupidly) blamed it all on darius and never gave him a chance to explain his side of the situation. he had dabbled with drugs in the past and had quit, but she assumed he got back into them, something he had promised he’d never do again. once she found out that it had been her partner who stole the items, she assumed that darius had been the one who gave them the location of her families most valuable items and continued to resent him for betraying not only her but her family as well. she blocked his number and banned him from stepping foot on her families property.

VELIA

adora, harlow’s chosen username, was always a nickname she used in any of her game servers. she may or may not have binged ‘she-ra’ when she was younger and become absolutely obsessed with the warrior princess character. she had always been attached to powerful female characters who weren’t afraid to be themselves. the old harlow would have joined velia as a knight of the blood oath or a unity member. however, since she was joining a few months after the betrayal from the two people she loved most in life, she decided to join under catalyst. she had intended to use the simulation to get out her anger from real life drama, that is until she realized she couldn’t leave.

little did she know, darius had also joined the game (under achilleus) since the two had talked about it while promotions were happening. he joined under unity. since he was familiar with her usernames for past servers, achilleus ended up finding her and once he said her real name, she knew it was him. he had been surprised to see that she joined under catalyst but didn’t question her on the matter. this was the time for him to finally force her to listen to him. it took a few months but she finally found her sanity and forgave him for what she thought he had done. she actually found herself begging him for forgiveness for her stupidity. things were going well for a while, she was still angry at her ex so she still found herself not minding being apart of catalyst.

about the six month mark is when tragedy struck. adora found herself unable to hold off a pack of monsters, her life source depleting rapidly until achilleus came to her rescue. while he was able to assist her in their defeat, his life energy shrank to life-threatening levels. he had given adora his only healing potion from his own guilds mystical, which she had used on herself. achilleus died in adora’s arms that day, ending darius’ life in the real world as well. her best friend from childhood that she had just gotten back was gone.

after that day, her heart turned dark. while she had managed to keep her curser on green for her whole experience, she now didn’t care if it turned orange, or even worse, red. life was becoming meaningless without her best friend in it. without him, she trained harder than she ever had before, her player level rapidly rising. she finally found herself thriving within catalyst, becoming one of their best warriors due to her cunning and callousness.

months past, her curser showing no signs of returning back to green, when suddenly achilleus appeared before her, over the water, while she was fishing. long story short, he expressed his disappointment in who she had become after his demise. which is when she showed the apparition her precious wooden block that she had cut from a tree stump where she carved out each name of the people she has indirectly or directly killed. she remembers all of them. though, she keeps it a secret from her fellow guild members, knowing they wouldn’t approve of her keeping something with sentimental value that weakened her ruthless fighting spirit.

adora continues to see apparitions of achilleus where he is pleading with her to be good, to do better, telling her that he’s afraid she’s losing her humanity. she doesn’t see why it matters since she’s clearly already lost her mind.

she wishes to be her old self again, to make darius proud, but she feels as though she is too far gone. she can no longer be saved from her demons and maybe she doesn’t wish to be saved.

POSSIBLE WC

tbh i haven’t thought too much about this?? so this is to be determined as of right now. i’m very open to plotting though.

#『❤ooc❤』➔ this is super wordy and lameeee. sorry about this mess pls bear with me #veliaplot #veliaintro #death tw

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jaggedwolf · 6 years ago

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2018 LGBTQ Recs

The usual yearly list of stuff with lgbtq stuff I’ve consumed this year that I thought were a fun time. Probably will be dominated by queer women because uh, I’m the one writing this list, man. Last year’s list is here. Any media with content warnings usually has said warnings listed wherever it’s linked, or wherever you’d get it.

Games/Interactive Fiction

Heaven Will Be Mine - Made by the creators of We Know The Devil, HWBM is a visual novel about three terrible girls piloting mechas and fighting each other for the fate of space - while occasionally making out with each other. IDK even how to describe how awesomely specific the atmosphere of it is, but it’s such a good spiritual successor to WKTD. If WKTD was about desire that you were certain was an impossibility for you, a forever unsure longing for something out of reach, HWBM’s about having this thing you know you have no right to, power that feels unearned - but you have it anyway, so what are you going to do with it?

Butterfly Soup - Look, it’s literally self-described as a “visual novel about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love” do I have to actually say more words about this than that, I guess I can. I adore all four main girls, it gave me the gay high school coming of age stuff I’m always down for + sportsball team feels + two pairings I’m Invested in. I am looking forward to that 2019 sequel so much.

Hustle Cat - Dating sim where you are an employee at a cat cafe and can date one of the other employees but there’s magic things happening you’re trying to figure out??? A very cute game, you can pick your character’s pronouns and one of six protag designs, there are 4 male love interests and 2 female ones so you can knock yourself out with the pairings your heart desires. Would cat again.

Kindred Spirits - Yuna is a high school student used to eating lunch alone on the roof...and one day she’s joined by two female ghosts that are a couple, and want her help with matchmaking a bunch of potential couples they’ve spotted around their all girls’ school, since she’s the only one who can see the ghosts. Super entertaining, and whole host of pairs to get invested in.

TV Shows

One Mississippi - It kicks off with Tig (played by, yep, that stand-up comedian Tig Notaro) returning to her hometown in Mississippi after her mother’s death, dealing with her stepfather and brother as they all settle mom’s affairs. It’s darkly humorous little show with a surprising amount of heart. It also had a surprise!duet of a song from Fun Home that like, messed me up a little in a good way. Still sad it got cancelled after season 2.

Comedy Specials

Nanette - It’s a tour de force of talking about comedy, about Gadsby’s specific experience growing up where she did as who she is but also about the general experience of misogyny and homophobia. There’s a part in the middle where she reveals the darker truth behind a funny story she shared at the beginning that still takes my breath away whenever I think about it. The exploration of that instinctual minimization of experiences of bigotry (hahaha aren’t they stupid) which fundamentally, covers up the very real possibility of violence lurking around those stories. You’re funny, until you’re a threat.

Rape Jokes - idk what to say here, man, it’s a really clever and somehow funny standup special about sexual assault and the culture surrounding it.

Happy To Be Here - It feels a little like a fault of mine that this is the first Tig Notaro special I’ve actually watched/listened to, considering the ones that launched her to fame. But this is such a happy, funny time of a special, with Notaro talking about family life and her new kitten, all with her usual dry take on things. Way way lighter than the previous two specials in this list.

Movies

The Miseducation of Cameron Post - I had my doubts going into this adaptation. My favorite part of the book was certainly the first half, as much as I loved the whole, and knowing the movie would focus on the latter half’s conversion therapy plot put me off. I’m happy to say I was very wrong. The movie’s focus gives it a purpose it wouldn’t otherwise, there’s good usage of contextualizing flashbacks, and it communicates so well that precise horror of the slow erosion of one’s self. Cameron, Adam and Jane can take the piss out of the camp as much as they want, but being there still takes something from them.

Love, Simon - I watched this in theatres twice. For the record, I usually watch like, 5 movies in theatres a year if I’m not being dragged by family to them, so, uh, I really enjoyed this movie, even the ~mystery~ of which guy Simon was emailing, and him jumping to conclusions every time. Simon looks So Done and Tired in 90% of his scenes and honestly if that’s not the one truth about being closeted in high school what is.

Books

Of Fire and Stars - F/F fantasy YA romance, combined with arranged marriages that have to be snuck around and secret magic powers. There’s a subplot about one of the girls learning to ride a horse, is the level of fantasy tropes we’re at here. A quick, fun read.

Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th century - Read this for my gay and lesbian history class and liked it as the quick reader it was - lots of pointers to other sources, and like you’d want from any good history book, covers lots of different of viewpoints LGBTQ folks have had about lots of issues without ever doing the bullshit “All gay people thought X at this time period” claims. Intra-community arguing, always been a thing.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Spoilers, but the gay romance subplot in this novel uh, doesn’t end happily, but like, I really like Sammy Clay as a character, and the depiction of his life as a gay man writing superhero comics from the 40s well into the lavender scare and the congress hearings about comics promoting bad behaviour (read: gay) to impressional kids.

Podcasts

The Strange Case of Starship Iris - Uh, my new fandom obsession, in case that isn’t patently obvious. Tropey space opera podcast with a small disaster spaceship crew, and a clearly telegraphed f/f endgame that constantly delights me. Queer characters, purple aliens, found family feels, what else could I want from a space opera canon? (The answer is more episodes...please...)

The Penumbra Podcast - There are two main storylines, a sci-fi noir one and a fantasy one. I only listen to the sci-fi noir one but I love it, and the protagonist, angsty PI Juno Steel who suffers so well and also happens to be bi as hell. I also really like the Season 1 one-off episode The Coyote of the Painted Plains, or f/f Robin Hood fun-times. [I started listening to it and the other podcast listed below in 2017, but 2017 iteration of this list did not have a podcast section, because I was a fool]

Queer As Fact: Queer history podcast where every episode is the delightful experience of listening to a bunch of Australian history nerds talk about some cool queer person or object while being really smart and delightful. Apparently they sometimes record while sitting in a literal blanket fort and this makes me rank this podcast even higher in my heart.

#not on the list: critical role now has two canonically not-straight PCs and i love it but i feel like it doesn't quite fit on this list #then again one year i recced supergirl #so who knows #it's just a lot longer of a time commitment #recs #long post

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elizadoolittlethings · 6 years ago

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Mark Gatiss on The Madness of George III at Nottingham Playhouse, The League of Gentlemen, Doctor Who and Dracula

'I’m writing Dracula for the BBC with Steven Moffat which will go into production next year.'

This week will see the opening of The Madness of George III at Nottingham Playhouse with Mark Gatiss taking on the lead role. We catch him during rehearsals to talk theatre, Nottingham and the Netflix society…

You’re starring in The Madness of George III at Nottingham Playhouse – what drew you to this story?

Adam Penford, the artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse directed me in The Boys in the Band two years ago and I’ve known him since he was an assistant director at the National Theatre when we did Seasons Greetings together. He asked me if I would do The Madness of George III and I said yes.I’m a huge Alan Bennett fan – he’s one of my formative influences. I love the play and I was very flattered and thrilled to do it. I also love being King!

Why should people come and watch the show?

It’s a marvellous play – obviously it’s one of Alan Bennett’s best-known and best-loved works and I think it’s an ambitious project to do for Nottingham. And it’s very relevant actually – as all the best historical drama is – you can pick out threads which are pertinent to the way that we’re living now… and the idea of a slightly dysfunctional head of state (or leader) - draw your own conclusions!

What drew you to the character of King George III? What can people expect from the show?

He’s an intriguing man - I did George III and his ministers for history ‘A’ Level so I knew, at some stage, quite a bit about Fox and Pitt and the whole set up of the Regency. The big characters of that period, I find, as Alan Bennett does, very interesting and the king himself is a very sympathetic character I think – unlike George I and George II he feels properly British as opposed to German and I think he had a kind of sensitivity – they called him ‘Farmer George’ – he was interested in actually making a success of the monarchy and making his family into an ideal unit – you could cite it as the beginning of the modern monarchy. But then obviously his illness threw everything off track and his terrible relationship with his son came into sharp focus. I think he’s a very interesting and contradictory figure.

It’s a very moving and slightly harrowing drama about mental illness but it’s also a grand, sweeping, historical epic with lots of fascinating political characters - many of whom you can find modern comparisons for.

You said in an interview that before a play you feel ‘terror’ – what makes you so nervous/ terrified/ excited about performing?

Same thing as any actor – weirdly I went to see Alan Bennett’s new play Allelujah at the Bridge Theatre the other night and I got out of the car and saw my friend Sacha Dhawan tucked around the back of the theatre, pacing up and down, nervously going over his lines and I thought I wouldn’t interrupt as I knew exactly what he was going through.

Everybody goes through the same thing – you can’t really imagine why you put yourself through something so stressful and bowel-wracking yet again, but you do – and then you get through it and then it’s ok.

The play is set to be screened as part of the National Theatre Live – what makes this so exciting for audiences and cast alike?

The NT Live scheme I think is a fabulous thing and I’ve done one from Donmar – a nerve-wracking but exciting experience. To think you’re being beamed all over the world from the theatre at that point - it’s lovely to have a record of the show but also to know that it’s reaching far beyond the narrow confines of its original base.

I remember doing Coriolanus and getting a message from a friend in Canada who said they were sitting down in a small cinema on Vancouver Island to watch it – slightly thrilling idea that it was being beamed from Covent Garden all around the world.

NT Live is an amazing opportunity for Nottingham and the East Midlands as a whole – why is it important regional theatre gets a share of the spotlight and raises its profile?

I think the reasons are obvious – this is one of the first NT Live events from outside of London which throws a spotlight on the fact that there is great theatre happening outside the metropolis. It’s fantastic to make people aware and also celebrate regional theatre and its incredible contribution to the national whole.

Do you think performing in a city like Nottingham will be different to London and if so, how?

Yes, I guess so – I’ve toured a lot and there is an interesting difference from city to city. Different places have a certain feel to them and you can get the sense of how audiences are different especially compared to London. I think what’s wonderful is that Nottingham has such a loyal audience and I know Adam’s play about the miners’ strike [Wonderland] recently had an extraordinarily different audience profile to the one you might expect and we can only try and encourage more of that and get people to the theatre who wouldn’t normally think of going.

Why did you want to work with Adam Penford?

It was blackmail, mostly. No, I’ve loved working with Adam and I think he’s immediately done a fantastic job taking over as artistic director at the Playhouse – there’s a real buzz about it which I think is so exciting.

I was very flattered to be asked to play a classic part in a great play and with Adam directing, it’s a great package.

What led you to becoming a writer, actor, producer – who or what inspired you in your life?

Well it’s all I ever wanted to do and I’ve been fortunate enough to get away with it so far. I was genuinely inspired by all kinds of actors – particularly people like Leonard Rossiter and Alistair Sim - people who combined great comic timing with proper dramatic skill – who could make you cry and make you laugh. Those were my heroes.

Alan Bennett himself was a massive influence on me – a fantastic combination of melancholy and truth and proper “Northerness” which is what he’s managed to celebrate. I remember seeing a film of his called Our Winnie with Elizabeth Spriggs taking her daughter to a crematorium on a Sunday and every single thing about it rang so true. I remember thinking: “How does he know all this?” – it was like he’d taken a peek into my own life. That’s why he remains a hero.

If you weren’t an actor and writer, what do you think you’d be doing now in terms of your career?

The only other thing I actually wanted to be was a palaeontologist, but I didn’t have the Latin (as Peter Cook used to say).

What was the first ever production you starred in - were you ever cast as a tree in a school production?!

I was never a tree – the first thing I was in was definitely Old Macdonald had a Farm in 1971. Then I was a carpet bearer to the 'Tsar of all the Russias' in ‘Baba Yaga ‘– the house with hen’s legs. My first starring role was in an adaptation of a children’s radio series called Journey Through Badlidrempt and I played Brains! I can still remember the song I had to sing in it.

In an on demand, ‘Netflix society’ what continues to make the theatre relevant for young people?

Well I think everything goes in cycles. It’s very interesting what the Netflix revolution has done for storytelling. You could argue that longform stories and the boxset mentality has returned us to a similar era when people used to read very long serials or huge Victorian novels. I think it’s all part of the same desire and hunger for stories which people have always had and will continue to have. With theatre it’s genuinely different every night and actually watching people live in front of you is an entirely different experience.

The League Of Gentlemen at Motorpoint Arena Nottingham - first night review

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you were given that you pass on to young people working in this highly competitive industry?

My motto is “Work Hard, Be Kind” – that’s the clean version of it! I would say in terms of writing there’s no such thing as a would-be writer – just get on with it. Have a go. There’s nothing to stop you except the voice in your head telling you that you can’t do it. It may not be great, it may not be any good at all but unless you actually pick up that pencil or tap that keyboard for the first time you’ll never know. Don’t let that stop you from doing it. Generally, as Woody Allen once said: “90% of success is turning up”. There are a lot of people who don’t turn up and there’s always a thought that they might have been able to crack it had they had a go. Don’t hold yourself back – you’ll regret it.

Have you been to Nottingham before? What do you like about the city? What do you like about the theatre?

I toured there with The League of Gentlemen. I’d like to do the Robin Hood experience very much. I went to visit the theatre with Adam to have a look around all the departments. It’s a fantastic theatre – I love its history and the fact that John Neville, who’s one of my favourite actors, used to be the AD there.

I think it’s a fantastic regional beacon and I’m hoping it will once again really boost the East Midlands. It’s a brilliant stage with a brilliant history and you look at the walls of past productions and at John Neville’s past seasons and you can’t quite believe they did all these amazing plays in one season. It has a great history and a great future.

Do you have any other personal or professional links to the East Midlands?

Derbyshire – only because The League of Gentlemen was filmed there in Hadfield. I don’t really know much about the area but that’s the bit I know quite well.

What role/ character do people tend to ‘shout out’ to you the most?

It will be for Sherlock or The League of Gentlemen. Mostly people just say they like my work which is a very nice thing to hear.

What’s been your proudest career moment to date?

I’ve had a lot and I’ve been very lucky. One of my happiest experiences was making An Adventure in Space and Time – my drama about the creation of Doctor Who. That was a lot of things I love coming together at once and it was an almost entirely trouble-free shoot. A very beautiful experience. I’m always very excited about the future and the idea of playing this part is very exciting so hopefully George III will be one of them.

Do you ever get star struck?

Rarely – and I’m not being blasé about that. I always think of the story that the great Anthony Hopkins once told about his father meeting Laurence Olivier and talking to him about the football and Anthony Hopkins getting slightly sweaty that he wasn’t giving Lord Olivier the deference he deserved. His dad just looked at him and said “Well, he breathes air doesn’t he?”

However, the first time I was properly star struck was when I met Michael Palin who, again, was a huge influence on me. I got a bit tongue-tied around him.

Where in your home do you store all of your awards?

They’re on a small shelf that we’ve recently discovered damp under. That must be a metaphor for something.

After The Madness of George III, what’s next for you?

I’m writing Dracula for the BBC with Steven Moffat which will go into production next year.

The Madness of George III runs from Friday, November 2 until Saturday , November 24, including a special Gala performance on Thursday, November 22, with proceeds going towards Nottingham Playhouse’s 70th Anniversary Fund.

The Madness of George III will also be broadcast to cinemas across the globe as part of National Theatre Live on Tuesday, November 20.

For tickets visit nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk or call 0115 941 9419.

To receive one WhatsApp message a day with the main headlines, as well as breaking news alerts, text NEWS to 07790 586202. Then add the number to your phone contacts book as 'Nottingham Post'. Your phone number won't be shared with other members of the group.

#MG #mark gatiss #whats on #the madness of george iii #nottingham post #the man behind the genius #all things MG #interview

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spiralatlas · 7 years ago

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PAX Australia 2017 Day 3

There are no notes for Day 2 because I spent it socialising a little and sleeping a lot.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

David Gaider Q&A

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

Misc: I spent a chunk of the day in the diversity lounge which was fun. I met some great people at the Gender Diverse card game, and got to the semi finals of the Xena Nintendo 64 Fighting Game Tournament (there were only three rounds, but given how much I suck at fighting games this was still a happy surprise, and a sign of what a random button masher the game is)

The gender neutral toilets near the diversity lounge were very well done, unlike GCAP the original signs weren't visible and "with stalls/urinals" was in small letters like an afterthought.

I didn't break anything on Day 3 but did break a mug the next morning. Also the cinema in the Crown Casino is surprisingly inaccessible.

Despite the various mishaps I had a great time and will definitely come again next time we can afford it.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

I missed the second half of this to see David Gaider, feeling very annoyed at the programmer.

Anny Sims @ChattyAnny on twitter (I was too slow to get the others!) Keely Thirkell Hayley Williams Soap Pejovic

Most queer characters are just queer coded, with plausible deniability. "It's up to you".Tendency for queer characters to be villains. Indie games tend to be more queer friendly than AAA games.

Lesbians: First known queer character in games: 1986 Moonmist had side-character who was a lesbian murderer.

Other notable lesbian characters:

KOTOR 2003, Juhani, first queer Star Wars character

Gone Home 2013

Dragon Age Inquisition Sera (I thought Sam Traynor from Mass Effect 3 came first?)

Tracer from Overwatch 2016

Trans characters:

1988 Birdo from Super Mario Brothers 2 "A male who believes he is female"

Lots of others but all terrible. Jokes and villains. Trans women seen as threat. Poison from Final Fight 1989, "so you can hit a woman".

Krem DAI 2014 trans man, You can't go "Ok, cool".

Hainly Adams MEA 2017 trans woman. Tells you her deadname, this was patched.

Horizon: Zero Dawn 2017 trans man

Dream Daddy 2017 trans man. One throw away line about wearing a binder, had to be clarified by writers. Non binary people and cosplayers wear binders too!

How do you make it clear they're trans without them implausibly outing themselves or just having it be word of god?

Gay men:

1993 fmv Dracula Unleashed has speaking role

Tended to be background characters, jokes and villains again. No m/m relationships shown onscreen.

Dreamfall: the Longest Journey 2006 (not made super clear until 2015)

Steve Cortez Mass Effect 3 2012

Dorian DAI 2014

Dorian knew exactly what his sexuality was. Coming of age narratives get boring.

Bi Characters (no picture because they're invisible):

1993 Ultima 7 part 2 bi character propositions character regardless of gender.

"Slutty bisexuals". A lot of characters are playersexual and it never comes up outside the relationship.

Zevran DAO 2009

Borderlands 2009

Fable 2004 let player be bi, Fable 2 2008 added bi PCs

Playersexual:

Only queer in the context that they will date players of both genders, but you don't see that unless you play as both.

Dragon Age 2 2011, Anders only mentions his ex-boyfriend if you play as a male PC

Fallout 4 2015. Did have background queer characters.

Stardew Valley 2016

Non Binary:

1995 Chrono Trigger villain

Often robots, aliens or other non human

Frisk Undertale 2015

Life is Strange 2015

Zer0 Borderlands 2 2012

Turing Read Only Memories

Some games let you have gender neutral pronouns.

David Gaider Q&A

1999 Working on Balder's Gate 2, didn't talk about his sexuality at work. Figured he would always be writing stories for straight people.

He was shocked to hear Jade Empire was having same sex romance. Got to be lead writer on DAO after that. "So I can put same sex romances in, right?". More economical to have bi romances, but he would have been happier having some gay characters.

Feeling iffy about playersexuality after DA2, he asked for 2 straight, 2 bi, 2 gay for DAI. "Minority content" is weighed via the percentage of those who play it and those who appreciate it. Eg 5% play dwarves but most see it as a positive thing to be able to do.

Most of his time was spent on the actual plot but Dorian was the most personal writing.

He was targeted by Gamergate but it doesn't compare to, for example, how much Jennifer Helper was targeted.

10 years on Dragon Age was enough, his head would explode if he had to write another story about templars and mages.

How did you get the job: His story is very specific. He was managing a hotel and a comic book artist in his spare time. A friend was a character artist at Bioware but Gaider wasn't really aware of the specifics. Bioware told their employees "If you know anyone who does game related writing let us know", the friend gave them Gaider's LARP rule book without asking. Got a call, gave the stories he wrote in highschool, got offered a job. He said no, it didn't pay enough, but then he got fired from the hotel. It felt like a sign.

Who do you think will take the romance torch from Bioware: he’s not sure they're giving it up? EA treats romance fans as a reliable audience who don't need to be advertised to, even though it's why a lot of people play in his experience (though obviously those are the kinds of fans he will tend to meet). There is an underserved audience.

Most proud of: Lots of stuff he's not proud of. Wishes he'd been more involved in community discussions early on. Proud that the team tackled issues as they started arising. Proud of the company for standing by them. Most proud of Dragon Age 2 despite the mixed response. They had very little time to create it. It’s like a very big first draft. They had a plan but didn't get to compare notes once things were written, so he had to trust the team would stick to plan as much as they could despite things being cut on the fly. Team said they were happy in a post-game survey, didn't feel he was too dictatorial.

What does your writing look like, a screenplay? A cutscene does. But it’s generally structured like a tree that expands and then contracts back to the core path before expanding again. Flow charts.

Favourite relationship in a game? Morden in Mass Effect. Cried more than in a movie. Tali was his space girlfriend. Of the ones he's worked on, Morrigan will always be closest. She represents Dragon Age to him. Joyous time working with Claudia Black, first celebrity he'd worked with. Flemeth was originally Arabic, but that actress couldn't do it so they got Kate Mulgrew. They stopped looking for an Arabic actress for Morrigan and looked for someone who matched Kate Mulgrew. Claudia Black's audition tape was her reading Smack That like a beat poet. Gaider was very nervous, he'd never spoken to any actor before. First rule he was told was don't compare them to another celebrity, so naturally he said "I had Helena Bonham Carter in mind when I wrote Morrigan". Claudia Black said "So you're saying I'm a cheap Helena Bonham Carter ;D". She would say "Does he want me to do it more like Helena?" during recording.

Has being so closely associated with diversity had downsides? He may be gay but he's still white and a dude. He feels like it's all he talks about conventions sometimes. Teams need to sit down and look at what they've made. Lot of things made individually without concern for the bigger picture eg only 15% speaking roles in DAI were female until they stopped and looked at it and fixed it.

"We didn't think about it" is no longer a defense. He wants to help with that, but we should be helping other marginalised voices get into the industry and amplifying their voices.

Wishes it could just be expected and we didn't have to discuss it.

He likes dating sim mechanics in the context of a larger story. But he does like the idea of romance not being as tertiary as it's been in Bioware games, romance as part of the adventure eg a romantic adventure. He's not really interested in social sims or day to day relationships. "My idea of a spicy relationship is to have my life threatened."

Why do you think most AAA companies try to avoid discussions of lgbt stuff, why is it taking so long? Because it's Pandora's Box. There is more being added casually. But if they do nothing they get lumped in with the rest of the industry. As soon as they do anything there are 2 sides: 1. why are you doing this, you're politicising your game. 2. Why aren't you doing more, whatever you did is wrong and not good enough.

Not that flawed attempts should be above criticism. But by mostly focusing criticism on the games that did anything rather than nothing, people have increased the feeling that it's Pandoras box. He understands that it feels like those developers might listen to criticism but the dynamic is sending the wrong lesson.

My question: How do you think inclusion of non binary player characters can work with including gay and lesbian love interests instead of just having playsexuality? “We've thought about it”. He defined playersexual for audience, like Shroedinger's sexuality. He doesn't like it when the only way to have something show up is to have the character talk about it. eg asexual: character would have to sit you down and explain what asexuality is. Is unsexy as a feature. Explaining nuances of sexuality is off putting. If there was more nuance across the industry that would mean no one game has to do everything. Any one game can have only so much within it.

(This doesn't actually answer my question. I discussed it with my husband afterwards and even he didn't understand what I was asking, so I may have garbled it in my nervousness)

Are some choices "canon"? One of the features of Mass Effect and Dragon Age was the continuity of choices. No "canon" but there is a default. A lot of people feel like they have to play the whole series to get the full experience, was off putting, and he found the Keep a nightmare as a writer.

They had editors keeping track of which choices were incompatible. And that was just the third game. "Can you imagine for a fourth game? Phew! Not my problem :D"

Have you thought about the morals of gamifying romance, saying what people want to hear to get sex? Dragon Age didn't work that way, sex was not at the end. Some characters in DAI had no sex scenes, sex is optional for Dorian's romance. It's a game, everything is gamified, you can't simulate actual relationships. For proper reactivity you’d have to mark every response and keep track of inconsistency, but that’s too much work. Same with polyamory: too many variables!

Maybe get away from the approval system? Pay more attention to overall choices in major quests etc instead of individual lines.

Bi characters in DAI were bi from the start. Not the first thing that comes up during character creation eg Dorian started out as "the good Tevinter". Helps avoid too many assumptions based on sexuality. But once characters started solidifying they would think about who worked for what sexualities. There's no set way to write someone "as" bi, but the writer can have them talk about relevant things in other scenes. Sera's writer is a straight dude, he didn't want to write About The Lesbian Experience, and got lesbians in the company to check out what he was writing.

Have relationships gotten more or less complicated? In Balder's gate 2 there was a single sequence of romance scenes which you could get kicked off. Dragon Age had approval. If it gets complicated but the player can't see it or understand how reactions relate to their previous actions it just seems random or predetermined. Unless they say "I am angry at you because of X", but noone says that.

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

lostandhound1 on twitter

His notes.

He's not blind himself, and while he obviously cares a lot about accessibility had an unfortunate tendency to treat disabled people as a separate, if respected, "Other" to himself and the audience, even though I was right there in a bright red mobility scooter. He advocated person first language, "a person with blindness" etc, but not all disabled people like it and it shouldn't be presented as unambiguous best practice. I'm building up the energy to talk to him about it.

He's a sound designer.

Audio games: designed for people with a vision disability.

Audio game jam: the games tended to be about blindness as a bad thing. It felt victimising.

How can we make people feel powerful?

He was inspired by his dog's amazing sense of smell. The mechanic is that you follow an invisible trail using sound cues, a humming noise that gets louder and quieter.

Sighted people struggle with extracting information from sound. The game is more difficult for sighted people.

He had to add fruit on the ground as an accessibility measure for sighted people.

All music is diegetic: happening inside the world of the game, eg characters are singing.

There's a lack of much budget for audio games, since they're never going to make much money.

In 30 years current 30-something gamers will need accessible games.

Accessibility tends to be added as an afterthought or accident.

For example Pokemon has unique sounds for materials, collisions, monsters that accidentally make it accessible.

Sony reader: US only

Microsoft narrator: good but hard to use as a developer

EA: Proactively adding blind accessibility

Fighting games are often in stereo, blind players can play and even win tournaments.

Demand more from your games.

Developers: find a consultant. Address accessibility early.

It's about empathy. People with disability deserve the same stories to take part in as everyone else.

gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

daisyalesoundworks

binaural sound is going to make a big difference

audiogames.net: where blind gamers go to play games. They're supportive if you ask for advice and feedback.

People don't mind if you don't do immersive, game specific voices and just rely on the screenreader

Sound designers need more love to make VR accessible.

Braille games?? He doesn't know much about it.

Curb cut effect examples: curb cuts for wheelchairs but also useful for prams etc. Subtitles. Think about short term problems that benefit from accessibility as well eg the screen is broken, there's sunlight on the screen etc.

Sounds of a blind person navigating their desktop. To me it sounds like a mangled garble of little bursts of cut off computer speech, here’s a description of what’s going on.

#Conventions #pax 2017 #pax #panels #sexuality #accessibility #social justice

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jjsdiary · 7 years ago

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The future is now: Following the contributions by Jeff Koons and John Baldessari, Cao Fei (b. 1978) is the youngest and first Chinese artist ever to create a BMW Art Car. By employing augmented and virtual reality, the internationally acclaimed Chinese multimedia artist addresses the future of mobility such as autonomous driving, airborne cars and digitalization. In the presence of Dr Ian Robertson, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, and hundreds of invited guests, the reveal of BMW Art Car #18 was celebrated at the Minsheng Art Museum in Beijing on May 31.

Dr Ian Robertson, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG: “We were thrilled by the decision of an independent jury of international museum directors to have nominated Cao Fei. Considered as a lucky number in China, her vehicle is the official 18th rolling sculpture of the collection. For her project, Cao Fei chose an unprecedented and immersive approach, empowering the viewer to engage with the artwork through cutting-edge technology. This is truly a BMW Art Car for the 21st century!”

Cao Fei commented upon her BMW Art Car: “To me, light represents thoughts. As the speed of thoughts cannot be measured, the #18 Art Car questions the existence of the boundaries of the human mind. We are entering a new age, where the mind directly controls objects and where thoughts can be transferred, such as unmanned operations and artificial intelligence. Which attitudes and temperaments hold the key to opening the gateway to the new age?”

The BMW Art Car #18 by Cao Fei Cao Fei’s work is a reflection on the speed of change in China, on tradition and future. With her BMW Art Car project, she delves into a trajectory spanning thousands of years, paying tribute to Asia’s ancient spiritual wisdom as it swiftly spreads out into the third millennium. The multimedia artist approached the BMW Art Car in a way typical for her artistic practice, building a parallel universe. The body of work consists of three different components: a video focusing on a time traveling spiritual practitioner, augmented reality features picturing colorful light particles, accessible via a dedicated app (App Store: keyword “BMW Art Car #18”), and the BMW M6 GT3 racecar in its original carbon black. Paying tribute to the carbon fiber structure of the racecar chassis, Cao Fei’s holistic use of a non-reflective black incorporates the car into the possibilities of the digital world.

Within this concept, Cao Fei’s implementation of video art as well as augmented reality creates an environment of which the M6 GT3 is an essential part. In her video work, the practitioner executes spiritual movements, which echo in colorful streams of light. When the app is used within the premises of the car, these light swishes become an AR installation floating above and around the BMW M6 GT3 – involving the spectator as an interactive agent of participation. This narrative reflects on a traditional spiritual ceremony very common throughout Asia in which new objects such as automobiles are being blessed, in this case wishing good luck to car and driver. On a broader level, the light elements mirror what the eyes cannot see and the mind cannot picture.

During the course of over three years following her announcement, Cao Fei took part in a racing experience with female race driver Cyndie Allemann in Switzerland in 2015. During manifold visits to headquarters, she worked closely with BMW Group’s engineers, designers, and digital specialists. For her research, the artist also went on an extended BMW plant visit to Tiexi.

The Jury The jury of the 18th BMW Art Car consisted of the following members: Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); Chris Dercon, then Director, Tate Modern (London); Juan Gaitán, Director, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City); Gabriele Horn, Director, Berlin Biennale; Udo Kittelmann, Director, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Dr. Matthias Mühling, Director, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Munich); Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Gallery (London); Shwetal A. Patel, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India); Beatrix Ruf, Director, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); Bisi Silva, Director, The Centre for Contemporary Art (Lagos); Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing) and Adam D. Weinberg, Director, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).

Joint statement of the international jury on Cao Fei’s BMW Art Car project: “Cao Fei plays with many different dimensions in her artistic practice. In the international art world, she is well known for exploring virtual realities and digital platforms in her works, while eventually bringing her narrative back into the analogue world. We are not surprised that she picked a scenario that is on the one hand imaginary, even fictitious, but then on the other hand very concrete and physical.“

Quotes on the occasion of the World Premiere of BMW Art Car #18 The 18th BMW Art Car was revealed in the presence of Olaf Kastner (President and CEO of BMW Group, China Region), Jens Marquardt (BMW Motorsport Director), Augusto Farfus (BMW works driver) and Fan Di’an (President of China Central Academy of Fine Arts).

Olaf Kastner, President and CEO of BMW Group, Region China: “We are proud to present the first BMW Art Car designed by a Chinese artist, Cao Fei, who is also by far the youngest. She is a solid example of BMW Group’s commitment to promote the new emerging generation of Chinese artists. We are not only active in shaping the future of mobility, but also in developing strong social connections with China through cultural engagement initiatives, dating back as early as 11 years ago. China is undergoing huge and rapid developments, especially in the digital landscape. The 18th BMW Art Car pays tribute to the flourishing changes in the Chinese society.”

Jens Marquardt, BMW Motorsport Director: “The 18th BMW Art Car is perfectly suited to this era. Cao Fei took the logical step of creating the first ever digital Art Car. The augmented reality experience makes this BMW M6 GT3 unique. For everyone involved at BMW Motorsport it was both exciting and fascinating to work with Cao Fei and her team on this project. This makes 2017 a very special year in the history of BMW Art Cars. First, the BMW M6 GTLM Art Car of John Baldessari took to the track in Daytona, at the end of the season comes Art Car #18 by Cao Fei in Macau. This makes the tradition of BMW Art Cars livelier than ever.”

Augusto Farfus, BMW works driver: “It’s a huge honour for me to race Cao Fei’s BMW Art Car, the 18th member of the BMW Art Car Collection. I’m extremely proud that I get the chance to drive my second Art Car this year. This is absolutely unique for a racing driver. I’m really looking forward to diving deeper into this project and learning more about the artist’s ideas and her philosophy behind it.”

Fan Di’an, President of China Central Academy of Fine Arts: “Cao Fei’s achievement in creating the 18th BMW Art Car through augmented reality as a multimedia installation resonates with the rapid development and huge transformation of China over the past decades, such as globalization, urbanization and digitalization, which drives the flourishing development of contemporary art in China. In the increasingly digitalized world, technology has become an important means for artists to create. I’m delighted to see Chinese artists are at the forefront of digital art.”

The BMW M6 GT3 on the racetrack The BMW M6 GT3 has been the top model in the BMW Motorsport customer racing line-up since 2016. The car is powered by a 4.4-litre V8 engine with M TwinPower Turbo Technology, generating 585 hp – with the whole car weighing less than 1,300 kilograms. Technical characteristics of the BMW M6 GT3 are also the drive concept, six-speed sequential racing transmission, and high-performance motorsport electronics. In 2016 the GT car got off to a flying start, proving to be a race winner from the word go. Maxime Martin (BEL), Alexander Sims (GBR) and Philipp Eng (AUT) drove the BMW M6 GT3 to victory in the 24-hour race of Spa-Francorchamps (BEL). In addition, private BMW teams and drivers collected many more victories and titles over the course of the season with this challenger. The GTLM version of the car is competing in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Sims, Bill Auberlen (USA), Augusto Farfus (BRA) and Bruno Spengler (CAN) took turns racing John Baldessari’s BMW M6 GTLM Art Car during the 24 Hours of Daytona (USA). Again, it will be up to Farfus to race yet another Art Car, this time designed by Cao Fei, at the FIA GT World Cup in Macau (CHN).

Dimensions:

Length: 4,944 mm Width: 2,046 mm Wheelbase: 2,901 mm Weight: under 1,300 kg (without driver, depending on regulations)

Engine: Model: Based on the S63 production engine and slightly modified for the specific requirements of motorsport; with M TwinPower Turbo Technology Type: V8 Capacity: 4,395 cc Performance: up to 585 hp (depending on classification) Oil supply: Oil system, based on dry sump, specifically developed by BMW Motorsport Top speed: approx. 280 km/h

The BMW Art Car Collection Since 1975, a total of 19 artists from all over the world have created BMW Art Cars on the basis of contemporary BMW automobiles. The collection was inaugurated when French racecar driver and art aficionado Hervé Poulain in collaboration with the then current BMW Motorsport Director Jochen Neerpasch asked his artist friend Alexander Calder to design a car. The result was a BMW 3.0 CSL, which in 1975 was raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and became an instant favorite with the public: the BMW Art Car Collection was born. The home of the BMW Art Cars is the BMW Museum in Munich. In addition, they travel internationally for display in exhibitions and museums.

In November 2015, BMW Group announced two artists to create the next BMW Art Cars at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In addition to multimedia artist Cao Fei, American icon John Baldessari designed a BMW M6 GTLM, both joining the ranks of: Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Rauschenberg, M. J. Nelson, Ken Done, Matazo Kayama, César Manrique, A. R. Penck, Esher Mahlangu, Sandro Chia, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Olafur Elíasson and Jeff Koons. After its world premiere on November 30, 2016, during Art Basel in Miami Beach, the BMW Art Car by John Baldessari competed at the legendary 24 Hours of Daytona from January 28 to 29, 2017.

Over the summer, her multimedia installation will be displayed at the BMW Experience Shanghai, a brand and driving experience center, before her BMW M6 GT3 needs to prove itself on the racetrack of the FIA FT World Cup in Macau on November 17-19, 2017. A virtual experience of her BMW Art Car will also be on display at the UBS Forum during Art Basel in Basel in June 2017.

About Cao Fei Born in 1978 in Guangzhou, Cao Fei is one of the most innovative young Chinese artists to have emerged onto the international scene. Currently living in Beijing, she mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and chaotic changes that are occurring in Chinese society today. She exhibited her works and projects in Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern (London); New Museum, Guggenheim Museum, MoMA (New York); Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou (Paris). Cao Fei’s recent projects in 2016 include her first retrospective at MoMA PS1. Furthermore, Cao Fei received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) Best Young Artist Award in 2006 and Best Artist Award in 2016; Piedra de Sal Award at Cuenca Biennale in 2016.

About BMW Group’s Cultural Commitment For almost 50 years now, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in over 100 cultural cooperations worldwide. The company places the main focus of its long-term commitment on contemporary and modern art, classical music and jazz as well as architecture and design. In 1972, three large-scale paintings were created by the artist Gerhard Richter specifically for the foyer of the BMW Group’s Munich headquarters. Since then, artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Daniel Barenboim, Jonas Kaufmann and architect Zaha Hadid have co-operated with BMW. In 2016 and 2017, female artist Cao Fei from China and American John Baldessari created the next two vehicles for the BMW Art Car Collection. Besides co-initiatives, such as BMW Tate Live, the BMW Art Journey and the “Opera for All” concerts in Berlin, Munich and London, the company also partners with leading museums and art fairs as well as orchestras and opera houses around the world. The BMW Group takes absolute creative freedom in all its cultural activities – as this initiative is as essential for producing groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business.

About BMW Group’s commitment to culture in China BMW Group has always been committed to fulfilling corporate social responsibility through cultural engagement in China contributing to the development of Chinese art and culture.

In China, BMW Group kicked off BMW Culture Journey in 2007 to safeguard and promote Chinese cultural heritage. In the past decade, the initiative has visited six major eco-cultural preservation zones and over 270 intangible cultural heritage items and has donated over 16 million RMB to support 90 projects in urgent need of safeguarding.

The Tiexi plant in China is one of the world’s most advanced and sustainable automobile plants, which is also known as an “art factory”. There are many displays of artworks throughout, all of which are the result of a project called “10+10”, a cultural engagement program jointly initiated by the BMW Group, BMW Brilliance, LuXun Academy of Fine Arts and Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, to reflect on the relationship between industry, nature and humans under different cultural contexts.

The all-new BMW Brand Experience Center in Shanghai is a creative institution that harmoniously combines the strong BMW identity with Chinese elements, and offers free access to the public. The institution has a dedicated area to showcase the BMW Art Cars and allows the public to design their own art cars virtually. In addition to BMW branding events and experiential activities, it also hosts various programs regularly, e.g. innovation talks and culture journey workshops.

BMW | Art Car reloaded The future is now: Following the contributions by Jeff Koons and John Baldessari, Cao Fei (b. 1978) is the youngest and first Chinese artist ever to create a BMW Art Car.

#Art #BMW #Cao Fei #Car #Culture #Design #Fashion #Jeff Koons #John Baldessari

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networkingdefinition · 5 years ago

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Mobile Phones Quotes

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• A good example of the modern world is the Eurotunnel. And mobile phones – I like them. – Jools Holland • A good story remains a good story, whether it is on glossy paper or a mobile phone display, is carved into marble tablets or appears as a Bild headline. – Mathias Dopfner • A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn’t – Douglas Adams • Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it – these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies. – Quentin S. Crisp • As a result, we will continue to see more innovation on the Internet and on mobile phones than on consoles. – Trip Hawkins • At the start of 2005 the idea of downloading a song to a mobile phone was an idea, by the end of the year it was a reality. – John F. Kennedy

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Case', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_case').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_case img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because of technology, we don’t develop telepathy. We don’t use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why? – Marina Abramovic • Before mobile phones, I used to call my parents from a phone box and reverse the charges. – Tamara Ecclestone • Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks’ holiday and five random public holidays. There’s email and if you manage to get down to the town, there’s text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there’s this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty.” -Jonah Griggs – Melina Marchetta • Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don’t see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world’s mobile phones. – Evan Davis • Bullying behaviour can be communicated via text, mobile phones, internet, social networking sites, forums. But we can’t limit it because these messages are then reinforced by television which glamorises yelling, swearing and vulgar behaviour as the way to walk the red carpet of acceptance. – Louise Burfitt-Dons • Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It’s about who you are with and what you will do next. – Daniel Suarez • Enterprising law-enforcement officers with a warrant can flick a distant switch and turn a standard mobile phone into a roving mic or eavesdrop on occupants of cars equipped with travel assistance systems. – Jonathan Zittrain • Everyone on the set has a mobile phone, and I found by pushing a few buttons, they could be programmed into different languages. I fixed Robbie’s Coltrane to speak in Turkish. – Daniel Radcliffe • Everywhere you go, people have recorded or captured events in real time on their mobile phones. It becomes one of the first questions you ask when you go in to investigate something. – Jeremy Scahill • For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room. – David Nicholls • Have I got a black book? Yes, it’s called a mobile phone. I do get offers. There is no shortage of people if you want to go on dates – working in TV, living in L.A., it is there if you want it. – Simon Cowell • Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together. – Robyn • I always cheerfully say, “Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it’ll do,” but I do think it’s maybe a little bit alarming. Everybody knows that one thing we really have to do is to be more wherever we are, more present, that’s just kind of a commonplace. And the whole mobile phone thing is completely 100% the opposite – to never be where you are because you can always be somewhere else; and yet it’s so fun and addictive. – George Saunders • I am very aware of the fact that it’s highly unlikely anyone will write an article via their mobile phone. I’ve done it, but it’s painful. And it’s not just about the small keyboard and the small screen – though that’s awful. It’s the emotional experience of writing an article. – Sue Gardner • I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use Twitter. I don’t give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can’t be localized. – Daniel Suarez • I love the energy and the knowledge. I barely know how to use this thing [mobile phone]. I get by. – Naomi Watts • I originally welcomed the mobile phone as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom. – Tom Hodgkinson • I suddenly realized I was getting ten opening notes a day on my mobile phone, more than when I was in New York. But this is China, where nothing is surprising. – Ai Weiwei • I think kids are fairly similar. It’s just really the technology. Like, you won’t find kids in the 60s, or anyone for that matter, having mobile phones, texting, watching YouTube, and being absorbed in their technology. – Jared Gilman • I think to be a rich and successful person in Roman society would be pretty fabulous. They had all of the comforts we want now – central heating, baths, medicine. If I could choose not to indulge in all the things they did I don’t agree with, then I could be perfectly comfortable without a mobile phone, computer or anything. – Martin Shaw • I travel the world visiting global health programs as an ambassador for the global health organization, PSI, and sometimes the disconnect I see is truly striking: people can get cold Coca Cola, but far too infrequently malaria drugs; most own mobile phones, but don’t have equal access to pre-natal care. – Mandy Moore • I want to be buried with a mobile phone, just in case I’m not dead. – Amanda Holden • I was playing in the juniors at Wimbledon I forgot to turn my mobile phone off. It was lying there in my bag and it rang in the middle of a match, and it was one of my friends from school saying, ‘Murray, you’re on the telly!’ I learnt from that. I now put my phone on silent. – Andy Murray • I’m excited about the opportunities with mobile phones and being able to receive information on the go and relevant to what I’m doing at that moment in time. – Susan Wojcicki • Imagine if for years your habit is to use the phone when you’re having a massage on the bed, even one minute before going out to train? For 25 days I accepted this, because my first priority was to work on the field. However, I’ve said that from now if someone comes inside with a mobile phone, even in their bag, I’ll throw it in the North Sea. They’re banned. – Paolo Di Canio • In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. – Ray Kurzweil • In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others? – Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani • In Africa it’s difficult to carry the money, it’s difficult to have a banking system with tellers, with distribution of cash. So they are using their mobile phones. – Maurice Levy • In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They’ve got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens. – Mick Jagger • In the era of mobile phones and emails, you’re no more out of the loop in China than you are in Sydney. – Tony Abbott • Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure. – Howard Rheingold • Inspiration hits me at the most annoying times. Like when I am on my bicycle going back home from the studio at 3 a.m.. I’ve many crackly recordings into my mobile phone practically inaudible from the wind rushing into the handset! – Imogen Heap • It is high time that the E.U.’s internal market delivered substantially lower communications charges for consumers and business people traveling abroad. A mobile-phone customer should not be charged a higher tariff just because he — or she — is traveling abroad. – Viviane Reding • It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us. – Sherry Turkle • It’s hard to maintain both smack and crack habbits and remember to keep up mobile-phone payments. – Irvine Welsh • It’s hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It’s a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States. – Padgett Powell • Knowledge comes from our senses, extend our senses and we extend our knowledge. Let’s stop building apps for mobile phones and start building apps for our bodies. – Neil Harbisson • Life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. – Neil Harbisson • Many actors have protested about mobile phones going off in theatres, but the real menace now is people texting during a show. It may only disturb a few people around them, but for me, as an actor, when I spot them answering their emails, I am outraged. – Simon Callow • Many students don’t really like it (fashion). If they don’t like it, they won’t be able to tell you who the stylists are or the photographers. If they say they can’t remember the names but they recognize the work, I’ll say that’s bullshit because if you were selling mobile phones, you’d know all about the phones’ features and tariffs. – Louise Wilson • Microsoft Mobile Oy is a legal construct that was created to facilitate the merger. It is not a brand that will be seen by consumers. The Nokia brand is available to Microsoft to use for its mobile phones products for a period of time, but Nokia as a brand will not be used for long going forward for smartphones. Work is underway to select the go forward smartphone brand. – Stephen Elop • Mobile phone technology can help to bring financial services to the 80 percent of African women who do not have a bank account and bolster the growth of the world’s poorest continent. It’s not just about empowering women, it’s about economic growth. Unless we can make access to finance easier for women in their businesses, we will be missing out on a significant portion of growth within our economies – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala • Mobile phones … they’re not for communicating, they’re for broadcasting. Broadcasting The Show Of Me. – Adam Nevill • Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation. – Howard Rheingold • Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge. – Ray Kurzweil • Mobile phones are one of the most insecure devices that were ever available, so they’re very easy to trace; they’re very easy to tap. – Evgeny Morozov • Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who’s got the smallest. – Neil Kinnock • More and more we’re negating the validity of first-hand experience of people from other countries and other cultures… whether it’s on TV, the Internet, mobile phones or whatever – the world system we live in so values second-hand information. – Nitin Sawhney • Motorola has led the mobile phone industry in turning our vision of low- cost, yet quality, handsets for the developing world into a reality. In so doing, Motorola has played a major role in transforming the mobile phone from a luxury item for the few into an affordable tool for the many. – Rob Conway • My mobile phone battery runs out all the time because all the messages come straight to me. – Ed Balls • Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct. – Daniel Dennett • Old women with mobile phones look wrong. – Peter Kay • Power is not just for TV sets and charging mobile phones. This electricity is critical to the industrial development of this area. If there is electricity, small scale industry will grow. – Narendra Modi • Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat … (‘you’re breaking up’ is the cry of our time). – Rebecca Solnit • Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. – Matthew Parris • Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn’t linguistically sensible. – David Crystal • Smart mobile phones connect you with 1 billion users worldwide, basically for free – you don’t pay for the phone, you don’t pay for the Internet, you don’t pay for the wireless connectivity. Social networks let you add a new customer or a new agent, again for free. – Geoffrey Moore • So actually I only got a mobile phone the day after I left being Prime Minister. – Tony Blair • So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies. – Will Self • The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people’s intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people. – Lynne Truss • The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly. – Marcus du Sautoy • The biggest opportunity in 2013 is in Africa. It has seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. In Nigeria alone there are 100 million people with mobile phones. In total, 300 million Africans – five times the population of Britain – are in the middle class. – David Miliband • The brand is only as good as your products, so.. if people have a good experience on Virgin Atlantic or if they have a good experience on Virgin trains or.. if they have a Virgin mobile phone and they can get straight through to our people and they’re well looked after and then they’ll try the next product that we launch. – Richard Branson • The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It’s a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more. – Rem Koolhaas • The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical. – Marissa Mayer • The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you’re walking and looking at your phone, you’re not walking – you’re surfing the internet. – Mohsin Hamid • The mobile phone, the fax, emails. Call me old fashioned, but what’s wrong with a chain of beacons? – Harry Hill • The mobile phone… is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers. – Umberto Eco • The Muslim women that I have met are super-powerful and amazing and smart and they are, they’re not allowing themselves to be held back by the laws that exist. And you know, the Internet exists now, and mobile phones are freeing up stuff. I have a really good friend who’s from Iran and a really good friend who’s from Kuwait, and they talk about getting music on the black market and how that’s such an intense, amazing experience. And how they value the music so much more, because it’s such a risk to own it. – Larkin Grimm • The table was her stage. The mobile phone was the microphone. And the new moon was the spotlight. That kind of magic only Nana could make it happen. – Ai Yazawa • The two parts of technology that lower the threshold for activism and technology is the Internet and the mobile phone. Anyone who has a cause can now mobilize very quickly. – Howard Rheingold • The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal. – Ethan Zuckerman • Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumours – far more likely in the city. Well you know what, so is everything else! Including sex, coffee and conversation. – Dylan Moran • Theophilus Crowe’s mobile phone played eight bars of “Tangled Up in Blue” in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan. – Christopher Moore • There is a generation of skimmers. It’s not that they don’t want to read in-depth content, but they want to evaluate what the content is before they commit time. Especially on a mobile phone – you don’t have the phone, or cellular data, or screen size to be reading full-length content. – Nick D’Aloisio • There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but wherever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or televisions. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by a crystal ball. – Simon Blackburn • Think what we would have missed if we had never … used a mobile phone or surfed the Net — or, to be honest, listened to other people talking about surfing the Net. – Queen Elizabeth II • Today one can read the Gospel also on so many technological instruments. You can carry the whole Bible on your mobile phone, on your tablet. It is important to read the Word of God, by any means, but by reading the Word of God: Jesus speaks to us there! And welcome it with an open heart. Then the good seed will bear fruit! – Pope Francis • Today, most young women are exposed to technology at a very young age, with mobile phones, tablets, the Web or social media. They are much more proficient with technology than prior generations since they use it for all their school work, communication and entertainment. – Susan Wojcicki • Twitter is about the democratization of access to a platform that allows anyone in the world – who has a mobile phone and access to SMS – to have a voice and be heard. – Shailesh Rao • Until relatively recently, mass political movements were still about basic rights of food, shelter, education and self sufficiency. The reasons fewer people vote these days, or turn up for political meetings, is that for the vast majority of us those rights have been fulfilled. These days it’s in the adverts for mobile phones or foreign holidays where phrases like “Join the Revolution!” and “Cry Freedom!” are bandied about for a generation which knows nothing of their provenance. Just as now we have luxury illnesses to replace real ones, so now we have luxury politics. – John Diamond • We believe that within five years, 96 percent of British consumers will have access to the Internet, whether it be through a personal computer, a set-top box or a mobile phone. – Richard Branson • We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur. – Jean-Luc Godard • We try to ‘self-medicate’ ourselves against boredom with mobile phones in any given moment of free time. – Alex Bogusky • We use similar products. Our focus industry is healthcare and hospitality. But we haven?t done anything interactive. The first day full of seminars is full of things I thought would be useful: quick service restaurant and mobile phone applications. Businesses are providing more services and products by self-service means. – Milton Jones • When I first went on Britain’s Got Talent I was famous for my cheap suit, my wonky teeth and the fact that I sold mobile phones for a living. – Paul Potts • When I think about, say, 1995, or whever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. … Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn’t such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people or your trivia. – Rebecca Solnit • When I was a student I did a report on Madagascar, and ever since then it was my biggest dream to go there. Three years ago I went, and it was so different. We live in this high tech world with Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones, and there you land and you have nothing. Yet the people live and get by every day walking in the roads, living this super simple life, and they’re still happy. It is an experience that keeps you humble, puts things in perspective. – Irina Shayk • When thinking about how to deploy kind of professional and social networking into your business, it’s really not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And the reason is, just think about the fact that those businesses that adopt new technologies to operate efficiently and use them to get a competitive edge are the businesses that in fact, you know, it becomes one more competitive advantage. Whether it’s a fax machine or a mobile phone or a new way of doing financing or any of these things, you know, these are key things to do. – Reid Hoffman • When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years. – Muhammad Yunus • Woodstock happened in August 1969, long before the Internet and mobile phones made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It was a time when we werent able to witness world events or the horrors of war live on 24-hour news channels. – Richie Havens • Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones. – Jeremy Stoppelman

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

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equitiesstocks · 5 years ago

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Mobile Phones Quotes

Official Website: Mobile Phones Quotes

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webart-studio · 6 years ago

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Right here's how digital phrase of mouth and search have converged – Advertising Land

For a lot of trade practitioners, together with me, the Moz Native Search Rating Components report serves as a helpful and reference all year long to remain abreast of native search rating indicators (disclaimer, I’ve been a participant since 2014). One takeaway from the latest Moz report that continues to resonate is that this:

A enterprise’s buyer evaluations as a rating sign have elevated in significance by 17 p.c yr over yr and by 43 p.c over the previous three years.

Because the survey founder David Mihm instructed Moz, “In mid-to-large metro areas, even industries the place rating within the 3-pack was attainable with a handful of evaluations or no evaluations, now function companies with dozens of evaluations at a minimal — and lots of inside the previous couple of months, which speaks to the significance of a gentle stream of suggestions.”

The affect of evaluations on the Moz rankings underscores how phrase of mouth has advanced within the digital age to have much more influence a enterprise – to have an effect on not solely fame but in addition visibility.

Phrase of mouth goes digital

In a enterprise context, phrase of mouth dates again centuries to the daybreak of commerce. Who can say precisely when shoppers started sharing opinions of the companies they frequent? By the daybreak of the 21st Century, companies had found out the right way to form phrase of mouth in quite a lot of methods, similar to encouraging shoppers to overview them or convincing individuals with affect to speak about their manufacturers (as memorably mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Level).

Within the digital age, phrase of mouth exploded. The emergence of on-line platforms similar to Amazon, Fb and Google gave shoppers a method to share their opinions of companies in additional clear and everlasting methods. A dialog between two neighbors over espresso in regards to the high quality of a plumber or a physician now not grew to become a fleeting impression. Digital made these conversations scale and multiply past two individuals. If somebody raved in regards to the high quality of a restaurant’s beef tenderloin entrée or torched an auto dealership for having dangerous service, now the entire world knew.

One thing else occurred as properly: search engines like google started monitoring buyer rankings and evaluations as a rating sign. Google began to award companies with a heavy quantity of constructive evaluations by rating them favorably over companies that attracted solely a trickle of evaluations. That’s as a result of shoppers started to make use of search engines like google the identical means they might seek the advice of their buddies for recommendation a couple of enterprise: as a supply of word-of-mouth. Somebody searching for a motorcycle retailer close by would need to know not solely the place to go (triggering a necessity for correct location knowledge printed on Google) but in addition whether or not the retailer had a strong fame (which is the place buyer rankings/evaluations started to return into play). Google, desirous to ship probably the most helpful data in search outcomes, responded. And as Moz has reported, rankings/evaluations are extra necessary than ever.

Companies seize a possibility

At a time when digital is usually considered as disruptive, although, the emergence of on-line phrase of mouth has created a possibility for companies. Good corporations have realized that they will form their reputations and visibility concurrently. As a substitute of viewing Amazon, Fb and Google as a menace, they’ve employed these platforms to amplify their presence. For a lot of companies, doing so has meant asking clients to publish evaluations on the platforms that can give them probably the most visibility. Additionally, companies with a whole bunch and 1000’s of areas have invested in automated instruments that make it attainable for them to safe, publish, and be taught from evaluations on a bigger scale. In essence, they’ve automated phrase of mouth.

Immediately, automated phrase of mouth creates a virtuous cycle that impacts an organization’s fame, visibility, and high quality of service. The virtuous cycle appears to be like one thing like this:

Optimize search. A enterprise turns into extra findable by publishing correct location knowledge, descriptive content material and buyer rankings/evaluations. Doing so boosts the rating sign in outstanding methods as mentioned within the Native Search Rating Components survey and likewise builds a enterprise’s fame. Additionally, correct and dependable content material past rankings/evaluations additionally boosts a model’s fame by making a constructive first impression.

Purchase clients. Customers search for rankings and evaluations throughout a variety of web sites past an organization’s web site. By encouraging clients to overview them, companies not solely increase their search sign but in addition unfold constructive social sentiment. Let’s face it: individuals are extra more likely to proactively discuss a foul expertise at a enterprise than an excellent one. Firms must take steps to make sure that individuals share the positives. Asking a buyer nose to nose is a technique. Doing so by way of on-line instruments similar to e mail or textual content is a extra environment friendly means. This constructive social sentiment encourages a extra correct illustration of buyer conversions.

Enhance the expertise. The true energy of the virtuous cycle occurs when a enterprise depends on solicited data plus unstructured, natural textual content that individuals depart on social media to search for methods to enhance themselves. Companies that take to coronary heart evaluations and use them as a supply of suggestions to positively change their companies will create comfortable clients who usually tend to provide you with a constructive overview once you ask them – thus bettering your fame and boosting your visibility.

The excellent news about digital phrase of mouth is that companies will proceed to have a say on this course of. Manufacturers ought to:

Handle your buyer rankings/evaluations on an ongoing foundation. Monitor them, reply to them, be taught from them and encourage them – in every single place individuals are speaking about your online business on-line and offline.

Be proactive. Settle for the truth that your online business goes to get some unfavorable evaluations from sad clients. Reply to these clients to allow them to know you care. And steadiness these experiences by following up with clients and asking them to overview you on-line.

Thoughts your location data. I say this rather a lot as a result of it’s important: deal with your location knowledge and content material as a treasured asset. Comply with finest practices for making your online business findable with correct knowledge and descriptive content material that’s optimized for search.

Digital phrase of mouth and search have develop into intertwined. There isn’t any going again. And this evolution is nice. Google may give customers (and your clients) a greater expertise when individuals seek for a enterprise. And you may give them a greater expertise after they discover you.

Opinions expressed on this article are these of the visitor creator and never essentially Advertising Land. Employees authors are listed right here.

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funtubeweb · 7 years ago

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Dream Daddy: A Documentary Dad Selection

Dream Daddy is the hottest video game of the summer.

Based off hyper popular Japanese dating sims, the premise of this RS-RPG is incredible: you’re a single dad and you’re trying to meet and romance other single dads. Will you choose Goth Dad? Teacher Dad? Bad Dad? It’s up to you!

With Dream Daddy fever taking over the internet, we decided to jump on the bandwagon and offer you a dreamy selection of some of the coolest documentary dads we have in our collection.

Michael Bublé – Music Dad

Are you a fan of men with voices like honey and a smile that could stop you dead in your tracks? If so, we’ve got a crooner for you! Michael Bublé’s voice will sweep you off your feet and carry you off to dreamland if you choose this music dad.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/audacious/

Harry Jerome – Athlete Dad

Work up a sweat—on the tracks!—with Canadian racing legend, Harry Jerome. Fueled by pure determination and natural talent, this is the dad for all you bludgeoning athletes who don’t mind getting their hands dusty.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/harry_jerome_edu/

Christopher Plummer – Theatre Dad

The hills are alive with how much you love Christopher Plummer. This dad will regale you with a flawlessly performed Shakespearean soliloquy and debate you on the best Ibsen play (A Doll’s House, naturally) until you’re 100% charmed.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/30_minutes_mister_plummer

Arinze Eze – Art Dad

If your ideal date is discussing arts, culture, and travel, then Arinze Eze is the dad of your dreams. After a night of art and excitement, you can hop on a plane and experience a whole new world of adventure.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/where_i_belong/

Leonard Cohen – Folk Dad

Days filled with beautiful poetry and music could be in your future if you grab your guitar, jump in a the backseat of a car, and set off down the road with Leonard Cohen, the ultimate folk dad.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/ladies_and_gentlemen_mr_leonard_cohen/

Kent Nagano – Classical Dad

Your joy will reach a crescendo as nights at the symphony will become a regular occurrence. MSO conductor Kent Nagano can enchant you with his music while simultaneously answering all your questions about Beethoven.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/montreal_symphony/

Jeremy Charles – Food Dad

They say the way to a person’s heart is through their stomachs, and if that’s the case, this dad’s already booked a reservation at the centre of your heart. One of Canada’s top chefs, Jeremy Charles can handle the pressure or romance, all while serving up delicious meals for charity.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/theater_of_life/

Adam Beach – Actor Dad

Do nights of red carpets and film galas appeal to you? Want to be seen on the arm of Adam Beach, one of Canada’s finest actors? The spotlight’s the place for you if you pick this actor dad who can star in a Canadian indie just as seamlessly as a Hollywood blockbuster.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/reel_injun/

Bill Mason – Outdoor Dad

Want to go camping, hiking, or canoeing in the wild without fear? Want to catch fish and game with sticks and determination? Looking for a survivalist that’s also a storyteller? Bill Mason is the outdoor dad for you!

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/song_of_the_paddle/

Sylvester Clark Long – Adventure Dad

If you thought (Oscar®-winner) Leonardo DiCaprio was a catch in Catch Me If You Can, Sylvester Clark Long is the real deal. A master of disguise and the art of the bluff, you’re in for adventures of all shapes and sizes.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/long_lance/

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comiconverse · 7 years ago

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Game Review: Prey

Prey is a sci-fi “immersive sim” by Arkane Studios – and a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Available on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (PlayStation 4 version reviewed). Alan Stock bashes everything in sight with his wrench in case it’s a Mimic, whilst bringing you this review for ComiConverse.

Game Review: Prey

Prey is a game built on the back of giants. First, a gaming history lesson for anyone interested in the origins of this title (skip down a few paragraphs if you want to get to the actual review). To understand Prey’s influences and the long legacy which it builds on, we need to look at the “immersive sim”. These are games which focus on immersion, usually from a first person perspective. In this genre, open-ended gameplay allows you to tackle problems in various creative ways, with multiple ways to build your character. You can often make choices during the game which change the outcome of the story.

Welcome to Talos 1. Credit: Arkane Studios

It all began with Looking Glass Studios in the 1990’s – who pioneered the genre with the influential and critically acclaimed sci-fi horror System Shock and the dark fantasy Thief series. When Looking Glass reached the end of its life in 2000, many of its staff had moved on to other studios like Irrational Games and Ion Storm but continued to produce brilliant immersive sims inspired by those classics. Irrational Games made System Shock 2 – considered to be one of the best sci-fi games of all time, and years later they produced the Bioshock series, the spiritual sequels to System Shock 2 (under their new name of 2K Games).

Meanwhile came the defining cyberpunk title Deux Ex from Ion Storm, many of its developers having come from Looking Glass as well. Years later, Deus Ex got a successful series reboot by Eidos. Those early Looking Glass games were so influential that their presence is still found in many other games to this day too – and they are what Arkane Studios took their inspiration from with their Dishonored games and now, Prey. Arkane even has staff from those old companies. To me, it’s fascinating that one development studio almost 30 years ago created a genre – but even after its death, its staff continued the Looking Glass legacy in multiple new companies by using that gaming DNA.

The views of space are awesome from the station. A great touch is that as Talos 1 orbits the Earth, the sunlight dynamically moves through the rooms – changing the mood of each location with windows over time. Credit: Arkane Studios

For Prey, a sci-fi adventure game set on a failing space station overrun by hostile aliens, Arkane has openly said this is another spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Although Bioshock was the first game to take that crown, Prey is definitely the most System Shock game that we’ve had to date – and it’s not shy in acknowledging it. The 3D video technology used in Prey’s universe is even called “Looking Glass”. So, Prey takes its ideas and concept from the whole immersive sim backlog, as well as a host of other sci-fi horror games and movies. It has all the generic tropes you would expect from titles like Alien or Dead Space. But strangely, although Prey takes its brand name from an average 2006 sci-fi game, there’s almost nothing in common between the two – aside from shooting and a lone protagonist trying to survive an alien threat.

On paper, Prey reads like a checklist of sci-fi horror game cliches. Ill-advised secret research on corporate space station Talos 1 has ended in disaster. The aliens – known as the Typhon – have escaped confinement and killed most of the crew. You play as co-station boss Morgan Yu – but of course, an experiment has caused you to lose your recent memories. You fight or avoid the Typhon invaders using guns or abilities, both human and alien. You can customise your character and weapons as you wish using skill trees and upgrades.

Credit: Arkane Studios

You scour the environment as you go, rummaging in cupboards and boxes for crucial supplies and ammo, which you then have to manage in your grid-based inventory. Dead crew are everywhere, you uncover their backstories and learn more about the station by reading their emails and picking up audio logs helpfully strewn around the environment. Predictably, many of these messages contain passwords and keycodes to locked doors and safes. You are free to wander Talos 1 as you see fit, and approach encounters and obstacles using the approach that you want. That might be using stealth, all-out combat, hacking, secret shortcuts, using the environment to your advantage or maybe a special ability to problem-solve in a creative way. The few survivors on board give you orders and requests by radio and you don’t really know which of them to trust. Pretty original, right?

Loot everything. Thankfully, some smart refinements of looting mechanics in Prey make it quick and easy to clear out areas, removing a lot of the looting tedium found in older sims like Bioshock. Credit: Arkane Studios.

Fortunately Prey does have some of its own ideas. The most memorable of these is probably the Mimic, a spider-like Typhon which can take the form of a normal inanimate object. It will hide itself as something innocent looking, like a box or a cup – and when you least expect it’ll suddenly reveal itself and jump at your face. It’s an idea that’s been used before, RPG treasure chest monsters and popular Garry’s Mod creation “Prop Hunt” spring to mind – but Mimics aren’t just passive traps. If you shoot a Mimic but don’t kill it, it will scurry away and try to hide and transform again. If you’re quick, you can even see them morphing into objects. It’s a great idea that keeps you on edge when exploring and makes for some great and unscripted jump scares. When your character is weak in the early stages of the game Mimics induce real paranoia. Was that box there when you were last in this room? You’ll start bashing everything with your wrench and shooting suspicious chairs – just to be sure….

Ensnaring a Mimic with the Gloo Gun. Credit: Arkane Studios

Prey’s roster of weapons and abilities have their share of originality too. The Gloo Gun, which you find early on, allows you to slow and trap enemies with blobs of Gloo, allowing you to smash them at your leisure. Gloo can also be used to put out fires and even make makeshift pathways on walls, allowing you to climb to higher levels. As you progress through Talos 1, you gain access to Typhon abilities for yourself, with uses for both combat and puzzle solving. These include the Mimic’s ability to morph into an object, clumsily rolling past enemies disguised as a cleaning sign, for example – or you could use it to fit through small gaps. Then there’s the Lift Field, an ethereal column which pushes yourself or enemies into the air – which can be used with traps or maybe as a way to get to higher floors. Or the rather evil Phantom Genesis ability which summons an alien ally – by sacrificing a nearby human corpse.

Your brother Alex – is he a friend or a foe? Credit: Arkane Studios.

The ability skill tree is explained in the game’s lore, through technology called Neuromods. Just shove a massive needle into your eye (ouch) and they will imbue you with new skills. Neuromods are nicely tied into the storyline in a similar way to Bioshock’s ADAM. Acquire too many Typhon abilities and the station’s turrets will consider you alien – shooting at you on sight. It’s possible to do a “purity” run relying on human abilities alone, but the alien powers are too fun to pass up on. You quickly realise that Neuromods are a Very Good Thing and you want to find, or create as many as possible.

Just part of the large skill tree – you have to be selective about the path you want to take as Neuromods are in short supply. Credit: Arkane Studios

Which leads us to fabrication, another of Prey’s good ideas. Recycling machines around Talos 1 allow you to turn any junk or item that you pick up into their base components. This wonderful machine takes your unwanted nik naks and satisfyingly plops out cubes and spheres of matter in return, with compelling clinky-clunky sounds as they fall into the Recycler’s metal dispenser. You can then use this base matter to construct items at similar Fabricator machines. Once you find a Fabricator blueprint for an item, you can make that item as many times as you want at a Fabricator (if you have enough matter).

In gameplay terms, it’s a great solution to the genre’s problem of inventory junk and clutter. It allows you to reforge items you don’t need into something more useful, and as resources are usually low, difficult choices must be made. What’s more important to you right now – a medkit or shotgun ammo, or maybe risk it and just make a new Neuromod instead? Recycling also encourages you to scour the environment for items – for once you’re happy to pick up useless junk and banana peels, because you know you can turn it into sweet, sweet matter. There’s even an awesome weapon- the Recycler grenade – which blasts enemies, objects and you, if you’re not careful, into those wonderful little cubes and spheres.

At the start of the game you can choose the sex of your hero – Morgan Yu. It only affects the voice acting but it’s a nice touch to have. Credit: Arkane Studios.

Prey’s combat is a mixed bag. Although the weaponry feels meaty enough, many of the enemies aren’t particularly satisfying to fight. Most Typhon are made up of the wispy black alien smoke you see on the game’s cover and have the ability to teleport around, moving and attacking very quickly once alerted. This makes most combat frantic and enemies cause a lot of damage too. There’s little time for tactics and plans go out the window once shots are fired due to the combat’s pace and your low survivability – although fortunately the item/weapon wheel does pause time – allowing you to switch to an appropriate tool for the job.

The horrors of the Neuromod. Thankfully you only have to watch the eye-stabbing animation the first time you use it, with future uses being instantaneous. I hate to picture the reality though, of my Morgan stabbing himself in the eye about 50 times with Neuromods during my playthrough. Small mercies. Credit: Arkane Studios.

There are various types of enemy in Prey that do require different tactics and are fun to fight. But combat against the Phantoms and Mimics which you’ll encounter most the often just devolves into fast and chaotic battles. This goes against the more deliberate approach that the rest of the game tries to achieve – and their rapid movement makes the use of terrain and cover pretty meaningless. Still, getting the drop on unaware enemies is fun, and the game makes good use of combos similar to Dishonored, where one item or weapon followed up by another can bring creative destructive results. It’s just a shame that most of the amorphous black blobs that are the Typhon lack any kind of character. Aside from the Mimics they are mostly unmemorable – there’s nothing like the iconic Big Daddies of Bioshock or the creepy mutants of System Shock here.

Scanning the Typhon lets you unlock lore, tactical information and new abilities – providing a good incentive to stay stealthy or at least survive whilst your scan completes. Credit: Arkane Studios.

Although initially Prey comes across as a sci-fi horror title, the fear factor soon fades once you have discovered each of the different enemy types. There aren’t any that manage to disturb or unsettle once the initial encounters have been had. Although Prey does have a few creepy moments and the Mimics provide good jump scares, this isn’t a scary game overall. But the game doesn’t need scares to succeed – the atmosphere on Talos 1 is still excellent, just in more of a mysterious sci-fi vibe than a horror one. To be honest, I found it refreshing for once to enjoy wandering an abandoned space station populated by monsters without being terrified half the time.

Ah, the joys of Mimicking a coffee cup. Some objects like big boxes are awful to move around as – too many flat sides. Cups though, they can roll, baby! Credit: Arkane Studios.

It’s in Talos 1 that Prey’s biggest strength lies. The huge station is a thing of glory, with wonderful architectural design – a far cry from the generic sci-fi interiors we’ve come to expect from these games. Staff common areas look more like a luxurious hotel than a space station, but more familiar industrial sections like the Reactor and Hardware still have their own distinct look and feel. But cosmetics aside, it’s navigating and exploring Talos 1 that provides the real draw here. The station is massive and the open structure of the game allows you to explore much of it at your own leisure – with the main story and side quests providing direction when you need it. Although many sections are locked off initially, as you progress you will frequently be revisiting areas and unlocking new ones. Once you get the ability to go outside the station into space and explore the exterior in zero-g – the scale is awesome. Brilliantly you can see the various sections of the station you’ve been to from the outside and jump into airlocks you’ve unlocked from the inside, as a form of quickly getting around. Talos 1 feels more real and cohesive than any sci-fi setting in a game yet.

It’s awesome to fly around in Zero-G outside the station and it’s easy to control. Other sections have Zero-G too but it’s a shame there aren’t more gameplay and puzzle implications. Credit: Arkane Studios.

The environment design rewards thorough exploration with countless shortcuts and secrets to discover. Many of these have multiple avenues of access by using your items and abilities cleverly. Unfortunately, new enemies regularly appear when revisiting areas, and long load times between station segments (at least on console) makes getting around a bit of a drag towards the end of the game – when the story and side quests have you constantly running from one end of the station to the other. The area and plot pacing with the large amount of backtracking could have used a little work.

Uncovering the stories of the inhabitants of Talos 1 through the many side objectives and the emails and transcribes scattered through the station is a compelling reason to explore. The crew’s backstories, although short, paint snapshots of their life aboard. There’s lots of little sub-plots to discover – often told as much through the environment and nice details as the messages they leave behind. A nice feature is that you can hunt for staff via security terminals using their tracking bracelets to discover bodies and survivors, allowing you to find eventually find anyone you may have missed.

Another highly secure space station where everyone loves to send each other door codes via open emails. Credit: Arkane Studios.

The main storyline, although familiar to anyone who’s played the System Shock or Bioshock games, is still intriguing enough to enjoy – with plenty of mysteries and mistrust making you eager to uncover the truth. Prey begins with a great introduction – although anyone who’s played the demo will have already seen it. In true immersive sim fashion – there are a number of game endings based on the choices you make throughout, with a great finale not to miss after the credits have rolled. Fortunately, the story choices that you make don’t drastically affect the gameplay experience, so you won’t be missing out on any crucial content whatever you choose to do.

The hacking mini game is actually quite tough sometimes, and is decent as far as these go if you can accept that guiding a blob through a maze is a fair approximation of a hacker’s skills. Credit: Arkane Studios.

Prey won’t be for everyone – immersive sims just aren’t some people’s cup of tea. But for anyone who likes this kind of game, who likes adventure, who likes sci-fi, it’s a real winner. Prey is very polished and although yes, it borrows many concepts and tropes that we’ve seen before, it also refines and improves upon them, whilst adding its own innovations. There’s a significant amount of depth here and the difficulty’s a welcome challenge too – forcing you to think tactically and scavenge for resources (I recommend playing on Hard or higher). The game’s not perfect – the combat is a bit messy, the later stages of the game could have used more depth and less backtracking, and there are some technical issues. But, as an immersive sci-fi experience and a worthy homage to System Shock 2 – it’s fantastic. We’ve mostly seen it all before, but Arkane has just executed it so well. Talos 1 is an amazing setting that you’ll want to explore every inch of, to discover its secrets and the fates of the inhabitants. Long live the immersive sim.

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wanderlustjas-blog · 8 years ago

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Hola me amigos! Onwards and upwards! This one’s a bit longer than the last couple of posts :)

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(By the end of tour I dropped the ball and took fewer and fewer photos, especially the day sheets so pretend there’s one here)

DAY 17: Seville, Spain. As I mentioned in the previous post, I got a bit lazy on this day and my back was starting to hurt, so I decided that I was going to have the day ‘off’ and not go out exploring. I needed some time to myself so I just chilled out for a little while in our room, slept a bit more, took a long bath and just relaxed. Seville is beautiful and I will need to go back to check it out properly, but I was happy to miss a little bit to just get some “me” time.

So after the day to myself and the group back it was time to get ready for our optional dinner and Flamenco show. Unfortunately we were only allowed to take photos right at the end of the show, but it was pretty cool to see. It did drag out a bit, but when you’ve got food and wine you make the most of it.

We had the night to ourselves and we didn’t have to be up quite as early as we had been in Morocco, so we hung out in the beautiful summer night, bouncing around a few clubs/bars that were on the same street.

Amy and I ended up going into the Irish pub for a bit (whiskey for Amy, Bailey’s for me) and a couple of the other girls were there as well. Ryan came and hung over with us for a bit and ended up buying us dessert which was lovely.

We were out for a few hours and I feel like I caught a taxi home with Amy & Nads – not too early – but there were plenty of the group still out and about. Still had to pack all my shit up and say goodbye to the wonderful hotel suite :P

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DAY EIGHTEEN: We say goodbye to Seville and Spain for a few days because we’re on the road to Portugal! Final destination: Lisbon – or more accurately, Lisboa.

Logan and I were stilling behind Molly and Simone – we frequently sat together on the coach, the four of us. Now, I feel like I’m going to get the sequence of events wrong so sorry if this is out of order, but we’ll get there! (I believe) We were scheduled to stop once we’d gone over the border into Portugal for lunch and out firs experience of authentic Portuguese tarts.

We stopped in an adorable town called Tavira.

I think it was as we were coming into Tavira but poor Simo was suddenly not well. She blacked out/passed out on the coach a couple of times and it scared the bejeezus out of me. Luckily our very own Nurse-Nadia was there to help while we waited for the ambulance. Because we had to wait for Sim to be allowed to leave the hospital, had some extra time in Tavira which wasn’t bad. It was a very cute little place and it was a beautiful warm day, we just all felt so bad for Simone.

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Back on the road after our stop and Simone back with the group, we continued on to Lisbon! Before we stopped at our hotel, we visited some of the cities biggest monuments – monuments that are instantly recognisable….from other cities?

Christo Rei – Christ the Redeemer. Portugal’s answer to Rio’s famous statue. It was based on the one in Brazil when then one of the Cardinal’s of Portugal visited the original in Rio.

And we have the 25 de Abril Bridge. This suspension bridge look familiar to anyone? Often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco (although they were built by two different companies” the 25 de Abril Bridge is the largest suspension bridge in the world.

The city of Lisbon in the background

We had finally arrived! This would be our home for the next two days. Dropping our bags off at the hotel, we were out in the main city centre for a walking tour.

Logan and I had previously talked about getting a tattoo together in Lisbon. So we passed on the walking tour, grabbed a quick dinner before going exploring to find a tattoo parlour that we’d looked up previously. Walking around the city was great – its a very hilly place and its said to be similar to San Fransisco. We arrived at the tattoo place and asked them about our respective tattoos that we wanted.

It was far too much for either of us so we didn’t end up doing it. We wandered and got a drink, listened to some street music before meeting up with everyone else in the main square to head back to the hotel.

One of the guys who had been on the first part of our tour (and had finished his tour) had booked a room in the hotel we were in. He had managed to procure some weed (we think it was weed but you know) so the two of us hung out with him in his room for a few hours. It didn’t do too much for us and we think it may have been tea haha. Note to everyone: don’t buy drugs from the rando’s in Portugal – its not good stuff :P

So after a few hours we buggered off and went to bed to be ready for tomorrow.

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DAY NINETEEN: Today we were up an at ’em, we had three main stops for the day; the Belem District in Lisbon, the forested area of Sintra and finally the beach town of Cascais. We started our day with a quick tour of the Belem District on the waterfront.

Here we got to see the Torre de Belem, the Tower of Belem which was designed as both a defence system at the mouth of the Tagus river and as a ceremonial gateway to Lisbon.

Then we have the Monument to the Discoveries. It’s hard to get this bugger all in one shot as every side is different and so very detailed. Its placed along the river where the ships left from to trade with Asia.

Our final landmark that we saw in Lisbon was the Jeronimos Monastery. A UNESCO World Heritage sight, its dated back to 1495. I know that for me, its just amazing that buildings can be that old and still look so amazing fresh and new. For someone who comes from a fairly ‘young’ country, its just insane that there are buildings this old. Its always blown my mind. Small things you know :P

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Back on the coach and a half hour drive North-West, we arrived at the wonderful and very different area of Cascais. For those who know where I live, that’s what the drive through the hills reminded me of – driving around the winding roads through forest and it being just so peaceful. I immediately fell in love with the place.

The whole town of Sintra is also a UNESCO sight due to all of the architecture and the statues etc blah blah blah – I’ll try not to lecture too much! Anyway, its got 3 cool looking castles, pastel-coloured buildings, amazing pastries. Its well-known for cork products of all things! The shops were fun to look through. Shoes, bangles, jewellery, coasters etc etc.

We didn’t get too much time here before we had to move on. Looping back around via the coast, we had a quick photo stop for our first glimpse of Cascais.

Elodie, Ryan & Logan

We got here for lunchtime and Areti took the group to a restaurant for the ‘best peri peri chicken’. Everyone was really excited for that, meanwhile Logan and I dug into a bottle.

Lunch done and dusted, the group kind of disintegrated into smaller factions as we were set loose in Cascais for the afternoon. Some of us just HAD to get an ice-cream, we’d been talking about it forever and we needed it NOW. Luckily at the beachside, there were many ice cream shops so we were satiated.

Me being me, I will never say no to a swim and the beach was where I made a bee-line for. Mollie, Adam, Elodie and a few others grabbed their beach gear and enjoyed the rays. Knowing how easily I burn, I’m not great at sitting still for too long so I swam out to boats and back a few times.

Mojito Time

After a while, we knew we had to start making our way back to the pick-up point, so we reluctantly left the beach. But not before Mollie and I got a sneaky Mojito in on the way back!

Heading back to the hostel in Lisbon, we had an optional Portuguese dinner tonight – our second last night with the group – and for some who wanted to finish in Portugal, their last evening with the group! It’s a surreal thing being part of a tour. You bond really quickly because you need to. You’re sharing everything with the people around you. And then all of a sudden its just over, done, finished. The endings always suck.

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Dinner was mainly seafood. I remember that much….it was good I’m assuming, otherwise I’d remember it for being shitty. I just remember Logan got stuck sitting opposite Bianca and she got the staring treatment that I’d been getting for most of the trip. Sorry Logan, but I’m just so glad it wasn’t me for once!

After dinner we went out to this tiny little club. It was so small we barely all fit. But the music was just so me. It was perfect. I remember one of the girls calling me jukebox because I knew all the songs – it was 80’s fantastic and I could’ve stayed there the whole night!

But alas, we couldn’t stay all night as we had another venue to check out, the K Urban Beach Club. I drank faaar too much, but it was a fantastic time!

It was a lovely way to end the part of our Portugal section of the tour.

I vaguely remember getting a taxi with Kat…and maybe Nads….not quite sure! But we made it back to the hotel. It was a long day of driving coming up for the next day and I’d had plenty of alcohol whilst out so I passed out as soon as I hit the bed.

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OKAY! That’s all from me at the moment. We’re coming up to the final stretch of contiki now. One more full day then done! I WILL make it before January finishes :P

Thanks for reading along!

Contiki: Seville to Portugal Hola me amigos! Onwards and upwards! This one's a bit longer than the last couple of posts :)

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