#also! i scraped by in my latin test so i do not have to take more latin for my degree! the one thing i might have had to do this summer

[incomingalbatross]

Summer off... GOOD.

[renthony]

Hi! Could you talk about what it’s like being an independent media researcher and how you became one? Did you go to school for communications or media studies? How do you make money?

I’m about to graduate college and I really want to go into the media studies field but I haven’t really figured out what the best way for me to do that is. I have a lot of similar research interests as you (animation, censorship, media analysis, queer media) and I’m disabled so I’ve been worried about not having the energy for a traditional 9 to 5 sort of job, so I’d love to hear more about how you’re able to do the research you’re passionate about!

Honestly, I got here by accident, and I'm still figuring things out as I go. I don't make much money and right now I feel like my work is in a period of transition. I have plans, but some days it feels like I'm barely making baby steps.

I started writing when I was pretty young, and I read every single "how to write" guide I could get my hands on via the library or bookstore. I wrote constantly. Short stories, various false starts at baby's first novel, even newsletters for school activities and community clubs. I was most focused on fiction at first, but I learned a lot about nonfiction as well.

I got involved in online writing communities back when forums were still a big deal, and I joined Twitter back in 2009 when it was still new and there was a massive author and freelancer community. (Anyone else remember before retweets were a thing? We had to copy, paste, and manually type out "RT @[user]" like barbarians.) I learned an absolute fuckton about the craft and the industry by talking directly with other writers, literary agents, editors, and various other people in the field. From the time I was like 14, I was interacting with professional writers, sharing my work for feedback, and racking up rejection letters from magazines and literary agents (which was a badge of honor in the communities I was hanging out in, because it meant you were working hard and refusing to quit). When I was 17, my best friend even scraped together money from their shitty fast food job to pay for us to attend a major writing conference in Denver, where we participated in all kinds of classes and panels with industry professionals.

My mother was also writing at the time, and I got a lot of support from her. She had a blog that got a decent amount of interaction, because this was right around the rise of the Mommy Blogger and my mom wrote from the perspective of a socially-isolated tattooed punk mom who never planned to have kids (which was unusual in a landscape of perfect housewives with perfect photogenic babies with weirdly-spelled Mormon names they chose when they were kids). Eventually my mom started writing for a website owned by Yahoo, to supplement the household income while staying home to care for my little siblings. When I decided I wanted to take a whack at freelancing, she gave me a lot of advice on how to get started. I also had a writing class at school taught by a teacher who made it a class project to submit to magazines, so I basically got a head-start on freelance life. I wrote a lot of random articles for a website that's since gone defunct, and I submitted a lot of short stories to contests and magazines. Didn't really make a lot of money, but I learned a ton and got a lot of experience.

When I made it to college, I studied anthropology and French. I'd planned to study history, but switched my track after a single semester because anthropology suited me better. I took a lot of AP classes in high school and did well on all the standardized testing, so I managed to get a full academic scholarship and skip right past a few of my gen eds. Unfortunately for me, I had a lot of difficult life experiences during that time period, and I started to struggle in pretty much everything that wasn't directly related to my degree. I failed Latin so bad I didn't bother to go to the final exam, because even a perfect grade wouldn't have saved me. I fucked up my algebra grade beyond salvation. Those two classes alone tanked my GPA enough that I lost my academic scholarship, and I wound up dropping out entirely. Grades in my required courses were solid, but the scholarship requirements meant I had to do well across the board or lose my funding.

My mother still has debt from getting loans to pursue a master's degree, and I knew damn well I didn't want that kind of student debt piling up on me, so I opted for dropping out. Sometimes I regret it a little, but I honestly think it was the best option. I was having so much emotional upheaval on top of the academic stress that I needed time away to figure myself out. I graduated high school early, so I was like two years younger than everyone around me, and I didn't have many friends. I lived at home and came to campus just long enough to go to class, so I had nothing in common with my classmates who lived in dorms and participated in campus activities. I missed orientation because I registered late, the administration sent me to the transfer student registration day instead of the new student registration day, and I didn't get any "here's how you navigate university life" support. I didn't know I was supposed to have a one-on-one academic advisor for a year and a half, and when I finally met him, his only comment on the matter was, "wow, I wondered why you hadn't come to see me yet!" without any sort of inquiry into how a fuckup on that scale was allowed to happen in the first place. I wasn't set up for success by university administration, and I burnt out hard. I dropped out.

My wife encouraged me to do what was going to be best for me mentally instead of letting finances dictate my next step. She had a steady job, and even though we were still pretty broke, her support let me drop out of college and focus on recovery. A lot of people gave me shit because their perception was that I was dropping out of college to become "just a housewife," and they couldn't fathom why. From my perspective, I'd been given a lifeline.

I took care of our shitty little one-bedroom apartment. I read a lot of books and played a lot of Minecraft. When I felt up to it, I did some more freelancing. My wife was working unholy hours in a factory and we didn't get to spend much time together. I started doing tarot reading as a side hustle, and we started making vague plans to move somewhere better for us, but saving up was hard.

Things felt stagnant for a long time. I didn't write very much, I wasn't really doing anything related to my studies. I wrote when I had energy, and I kept scraping together extra cash doing tarot readings while my wife started working a new job in a lumber yard. Her support is the only reason I was able to recover and figure myself out, so big shout-out to my beloved working woman wifey. God, I love her.

Eventually we packed up and moved to a different state so we could be closer to my family. I got a job baking for a coffee shop. I wrote whenever I could. When I got laid off from the coffee shop, I realized there was no way in hell I could keep working a regular job without sacrificing my health, so I went back to writing full-time. (The Queen of Cups was written during this period.)

At some point I started getting back into anthropology and history research, just for fun. I didn't have money to finish my degree, but I had enough academic experience to know how to track down and evaluate good sources. I wasn't really trying to do anything for career purposes, I was just incredibly bored and wanted to study something again, so I got really, really into studying local history. Once I read everything I could about that, I jumped to another topic I was interested in, and then another. Media studies became my biggest focus as a natural outgrowth of my interests in speculative fiction, animation, and the history of the entertainment industry. I studied anthropology in school because I loved learning how and why humans do the things we do, and media studies always felt like an obvious facet of that. It's part of why I was always obsessed with cave paintings and paleolithic sculptures--people make art! It's what we do! It's what we've always done!

Anyway, I now live in a university town that has resources available to the public, and I have friends who work in various university libraries or as professors. I started making use of whatever I could get access to. I read a lot of nonfiction books from independent researchers pursuing their own passion projects, I got really into video essays on YouTube, and I had the epiphany that you don't actually have to finish college to study and write about things as long as you put in the quality research and source all your information. At some point I started calling it my "DIY academia," which my university-employed friends found utterly delightful.

Honestly, I credit my formal-academia friends with a lot. They've all been an incredible source of support and reassurance, and have helped me track down quite a few sources I was having trouble getting my hands on. Everyone do yourself a favor and make friends with someone who works in a university library.

I started a Patreon several years ago (in like 2017 I think?), primarily for my fiction writing, but there's plenty of other things that have shown up there over the years (art, cosplay, essays, etc.). As I started getting more into my DIY academia, folks started expressing interest in seeing me write about it. My tumblr posts about media generated a decent amount of attention, I'd managed to build up a platform, and it wasn't hard to say, "okay, screw it: I have freelance experience and I know how to write a paper, does anyone want to pay me for it?"

I haven't been submitting to existing publications like I used to, mostly because I don't have a decent portfolio assembled. My old freelance work in high school and college was for a platform that closed down a decade ago, and no matter how popular they get I can't bring myself to include tumblr posts alongside professional credits. My current plan is to build a portfolio on my website showing off the commissions I've been taking, and then start submitting to magazines and newspapers again between my other work. I'd love to eventually write for something like Polygon or IGN.

It's hard. I love research, I love writing, and I love sharing information with people, but having to DIY everything is really, really hard. I often feel like I'm just throwing nonsense into the void in the hope someone will like it and leave a tip in my Ko-Fi. I don't have formal academic credentials beyond "I was planning my senior thesis about the ethics of investigating ancient burial sites, but then I dropped out." I just have a neurodivergent brain, a handful of special interests, a wife who works the graveyard shift in a lab to pay our bills, and the ability to hyperfixate on research for absurd lengths of time.

The most common advice I used to get about freelancing is that you just have to keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. It's been years since then, but I think the advice still applies. Read a lot, learn a lot, and write about the things you're most interested in. Search around and look for magazines and newspapers and websites that accept unsolicited freelance submissions. Read the other articles they publish to see how your work stacks up. Submit, submit, submit. Rake in rejection letters and keep them as a reminder of how hard you're working. If you're up for it, start a Patreon to post the things you don't submit elsewhere. The worst thing that can happen is that people don't give you money, but maintaining it still helps you lay the groundwork for a portfolio and a reader base.

I deal with a lot of hellacious impostor syndrome. I worry a lot that I'm just a hack who doesn't actually know what they're talking about. Like I said, I got here totally by accident, but whatever I'm doing seems to be working for me. I'm broke, but my work is being read, and opportunities for more work show up when I least expect them. I'm not sure what's next for me, but I'm excited to figure it out. Money's tight, but I keep enduring despite the chaos. I throw things at the wall, I see what sticks, I clean up whatever flops and then try it again later. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It's hard, but so is everything else. I like it better than a lot of other things I could be doing.

[adhdtoomanycommas]

ADHD, Gifted Programs, and Accidental Accommodations

So one big thing has been on my mind pretty consistently since I got diagnosed last year at the age of 30—why did it take so long to figure this out?  At no point in my K-12 education or my 4 year bachelor’s degree schooling did any teacher or counselor question or suggest I may have ADHD, despite the fact that I check nearly every single box on every diagnostic criteria (both inattentive and hyperactive!)

One obvious reason is sexism.  Pretty early in my reading on the subject, I learned that ADHD is dramatically under-diagnosed in girls and women. Partly this is because of different presentations, but a lot of it is just that the stereotype people have in their heads of what an ADHD kid looks like is always a boy.  

But the other big reason, and the one I want to talk about today, is the fact that one of the few ADHD diagnostic boxes that I didn’t check was “bad grades.”  So really, the question is, why weren’t my grades bad?

That’s not to say I was especially good at school work. My backpacks, desks, and binders were always a complete mess, and I NEVER did the homework.  I would do the big projects (at the last possible second, of course) but daily homework just straight up didn’t happen.   If there was time left at the end of class I would sometimes quickly do the homework for the next day, and occasionally jot down some approximation of it in the minute or two before class started, but when I was actually at home, I never touched it.

But here’s the thing with ADHD brains:  We can focus on things with no problem, as long as we find them interesting.  And I’ve always read quickly enough that doing the reading for class was usually interesting. And for the most part, the class content itself usually seemed interesting enough.    But probably most importantly, I consider tests interesting. There’s always been enough of a challenge racing-the-clock game-like aspect to them to me that I would stay engaged on the tests, and even if didn’t completely know the material, I was good at using logic to get a pretty good guess (like using all those tricks they teach for standardized tests—narrowing down the options on a multiple choice question, looking for answers in the other questions, etc.)

So even in the classes where turning in the daily homework counted for part of the grade (math and language classes mostly) I was usually able to scrape a B with only the occasional C thrown in,  and everything else was A’s.  

But part of my saving grace was the “gifted” classes.  I was very lucky that, despite not knowing about her own (probable) ADHD,  my mom knew enough about how she worked as a student to know that me (and my brother) really needed to be engaged and challenged in order to thrive.  Because of this, she advocated for us hard—she insisted we be allowed in my elementary school’s “gifted” program in kindergarten (based on our test scores of course)  even though the “gifted” program officially wasn’t even available until first grade.  And when we moved to a different state, she advocated for us again and got us included even though the “gifted” class was “full.”   She knew that nothing would make us fail faster than being bored in class, so she made sure that there was at least one day a week when we would be challenged and actually get to engage with material we found interesting.  

Aside,  despite how essential they were for me to thrive in school,  the entire concept of “gifted” programs and “gifted” kids is problematic as hell.  Half of the screening is basically just looking for class signifiers and seeing whose parents had enough free time to give them a head start (or whose parents have the time to advocate for their kids the way my mom did for me).  Not to mention there’s likely a massive racial bias. So in all this discussion of why I did ok despite my ADHD, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of privilege at play here determining who gets access to these types of programs.  

This is also why I keep putting “gifted” in quotes--  I don’t think there is anything inherent about academic ability. Also, academic ability, reading ability, testing aptitude, etc. are definitely not indicative of intelligence. Plus the entire concept of the measurability of intelligence is based on eugenics ideas, so clearly one should take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt.

Nowadays the term all the parenting blogs like to use for kids like me, with ADHD (or dyslexia, or autism, or whatever else) who also test well enough to be flagged as “gifted,”  is “Twice Exceptional”  which is a term that makes me immediately want to punch whoever uses it. Seriously,  it makes me gag.  Like, it doubles down on the “special” euphemism and seems entirely designed to make parents feel better about their kid without any consideration to how the kid feels.  No kid wants to be singled out, especially one who’s already probably pretty socially isolated (which I could digress about but that’ll be another essay for another day), and being Twice singled out certainly doesn’t help anything.  

But ultimately the teaching in the “gifted” class itself wound up being really good accommodations for ADHD. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they were better than the accommodations in the separate classes actually intended for kids with ADHD and other learning issues, though since I wasn’t diagnosed as I kid I can’t actually speak to that as I don’t have any experience there.  But in the gifted classes, firstly, we were given more specific subjects as opposed to the overviews we got in regular classes.  And it’s way easier to be engaged on specific subjects like ice age mammals, or the wreck of the Titanic, than it is to be engaged with a broad list of dates or categories.  We did logic problems that were presented as games, but that were indirectly teaching us the basics for higher level math. In 6th grade, we did research projects and got to pick our own subjects completely, so we could write about whatever we were hyperfixating on at the moment (mine was on medieval warfare as depicted in the Bayeux tapestry).   And if we happened to get excited and blurt out an interesting fact vaguely related to whatever was being discussed, that was likely encouraged instead of reprimanded like it would be in the normal classroom. This continued into high school, as honors and AP level classes tended to be a lot more discussion based rather than the top-down approach at other levels, as well as affording more opportunity to choose one’s own subjects.

The story you’ll hear from (or about) a lot of ADHD kids (especially undiagnosed) flagged as “gifted” is of hitting a wall at some point, academically speaking.  That did happen to me briefly, in middle school. We started being assigned a lot more long-term projects, and there was a bit of a learning curve while I figured out how to put things off Until the last minute and not Past the last minute.  But thanks to some patient teachers who believed in me (which I might not have had outside of honors classes), I managed to pull out of it and improve my grades (with the exception of the only report-card F of my entire academic career, from a sadistic gym teacher who seemed to think that enough berating would cure asthma).

Even more stories I’ve read and heard from people who were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult say they hit that wall academically when they started college—the first time they were really self-guided in their studies.  But again, there, I was saved by an honors program.  In this case,  it was the Honors Tutorial College,  a truly strange program at Ohio University.  I was tracked into HTC by one particular professor who very much wanted HTC to expand into the art program and decided that because I had both strong test scores and a strong art portfolio (and probably, lets be real, because I was the daughter of one of the other professors) that I was the perfect person to be the first student in the new program.

OU’s website describes HTC as “flexible curriculum and one-on-one tutorials with renowned faculty that allow your curiosity to take the lead in your education.” It’s rigorous, but comes with a lot of perks, like waiving certain gen-ed classes,  being able to take classes without first taking the required prerequisites,  and designing one’s own independent study classes individually with instructors.  And those perks are (as far as I know entirely accidentally) the perfect accommodations for an ADHD student (and probably pretty good for Autistic ones as well, based on some of my peers in the program).

A lot of the gen-ed classes I waived were ones I probably would have been bored in and thusly not done well.  Being able to skip pre-reqs meant that, for instance, for my English requirements I was able to take far more interesting classes like Shakespeare’s Comedies,  YA Lit,  and Playwriting instead of English 101, 102 etc.  If I wanted to learn about something in particular, I had help finding a professor willing to help me in an independent study/tutorial class.  Being the pilot of the program meant I was able to shape it so that I could get an art degree without ever having to choose one medium (which as far as I know is still an option for anyone pursuing an HTC Studio Art degree).  And at the end of the program, when we were required to complete a massive thesis project and paper (at basically graduate level), not only could I choose my subject to meet my hyperfixations, but I had individual help from a professor keeping me on task on the less-fun parts at every step of the way.  

HTC students are required to keep their GPAs above a high threshold. At one point one of my grades (in Latin class) was low enough to hurt my average, and I was called into HTC headquarters for a check-in meeting.  I was asked why my grade had fallen, and I explained that the class wasn’t that interesting (at that level it was mostly grammar) but that it was getting better as we were moving up into translating more actual historical material. That explanation was entirely accepted.  Imagine if “it’s not interesting enough” was considered a valid excuse for grades slipping for everyone, how much less stressful school would be for ADHD kids!

So ultimately it’s pretty much been having the luck and privilege to get myself flagged for “gifted” classes that kept my grades up throughout my school years.  Accidental accommodations have continued into my adult life as well. At my most recent office job, for instance (which I lost due to covid layoffs), I had a pretty hands-off boss who just didn’t care if I doodled, got up to stretch my legs every once in a while, and listened to audiobooks at my desk all day as long as the work got done.  

I didn’t need a diagnosis to get these accommodations, because they were given freely, which meant I was able to succeed even without knowing about my own ADHD.  If I had been diagnosed, and had had to ask for accommodations, I wonder if I would have done as well as bias against people with ADHD means people wouldn’t have expected as much from me.  

So if you’ve made it this far, I’ll ask for the same for others that I got for myself.  If you are a teacher (or a manager in an office setting),  I strongly encourage you to consider how to make your classroom, office, etc. more accessible in general, without someone having to disclose a diagnosis or be singled out for accommodations.  The biggest easiest one you can do is to allow (or even encourage) doodling in lecture settings. Even for neurotypicals,  there have been plenty of studies proving people retain information better when doodling, so everyone should know by now that someone doodling doesn’t mean they’re not listening.   If at all possible, encourage discussion and contribution. ��Give everyone breaks to stretch and move around.  And give as much freedom as possible on what to learn about.  You might be surprised what people are capable of when these reasonable steps are taken to give everyone room to thrive.  

That’s all for now,  hopefully you got something out of this unwieldy ramble.   I’d be curious to hear if you’ve run into any accidental accommodations in your life and how they’ve helped.  Until next time!

[chiseler]

Myrna Loy: Keeping Cool

If an actor is said to be “underplaying,” what does that mean exactly? It might mean not doing the obvious thing and not displaying the obvious emotion. Or it might mean feeling various emotions but holding them back and only sharing a tiny portion of them. This is a risky strategy, because most audiences might just think you can’t “act,” at least not in the expected way. When Myrna Loy made The Rains Came (1939), she was thirty-four years old and an established star. The film is what used to be called a “well-mounted” production, filled with dramatic incident and exotic settings and lots of extras and love crises and natural disasters. The role of Lady Edwina Esketh, a dissolute, promiscuous noblewoman who redeems herself through sacrifice and love, would seem to provide a juicy opportunity for showboating. It’s easy to imagine Bette Davis in the role, her eyes popping with restless desire. Whereas Loy had the kind of eyes that always seemed half-closed even when they weren’t.

Loy’s playing of Lady Esketh is cool, modest, almost non-committal, and this approach can seem alienating at first, but if you focus closely on what she’s doing, her under-the-radar work starts to pay dividends. The film’s producer Darryl Zanuck called her into his office midway through the shooting and complained about her performance, but Loy stuck to her own interpretation. She was known for her dry handling of light comedy, high comedy, even farce, and she refuses to play Lady Esketh full out as temperamental or mercurial, as practically any other actress of her time would have done. Instead, Loy keeps her cards close to her vest and lets her knowing attitude do the rest. Her expressive voice is light and almost fey, but very grounded, with ringing intonations, and this makes it different from a huskier yet more vacillating voice like Jean Arthur’s.

Even when Lady Esketh changes her tune, Loy doesn’t go all Noble. In fact, underneath the self-sacrifice her Lady Esketh seems to be as flip and above-it-all as ever, somehow, and this works well for the film. “I hate scenes,” she tells her lover George Brent, and this would be a laugh line for a Davis or a Joan Crawford, but Loy is an actress who actually does hate “scenes” or drama. She’s basically detached, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings. It’s just that she doesn’t parade them around as other performers do.

This instinct Loy had for underplaying didn’t always work out so well. In Parnell (1937), Loy and Clark Gable do a lot of walking around and talking quietly to each other, and they come off like zombies in period dress. But her moderation in many other films was so unusual and original that Loy fashioned her very own type of screen character. She was almost never a working girl, but more usually a wife, a mistress, a lady with money and time for play, so fetching that she got away with lots of nose wrinkling and eyelash fluttering without ever seeming coy.

As a young girl, Loy had seen Eleonora Duse on the stage, and she had admired the restraint of that fabled actress. “Oh, I could have cried all over the place in many of my films, but it just didn’t feel right,” she said in her charming 1987 memoir, Being and Becoming. “The audience loses respect for the character. It seems that instinctively I’ve done this kind of underplaying a good deal in my work. That brand of acting had impressed me since first seeing Duse. She had an inner light, you see; you’ve got to have it…You can’t be thinking about how many people you’re having for dinner.” According to Loy in her book, nearly all of her leading men and many of the other men she met developed crushes on her, and that’s understandable. She had the damndest nose, turned up at the end and elaborately structured, and that reserved, hard-to-get manner that promised the deepest bliss if you could melt some of her reserve.

Loy was born in Montana, and she began her career early as a dancer in live prologues for silent films. She was an extra in the original Ben-Hur (1925), and for the next nine years she made eighty-odd movies, mostly in bits. As a maid in Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926), Loy just walks across a room. She’s a lady in waiting to Lucrezia Borgia in Don Juan (1926) and a chorus girl in the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and she was continually cast as vamps and tramps, often of Chinese, Latin or all-purpose “foreign” extraction.

In her first full talkie, The Desert Song (1929), Loy plays Azuri: “That name means tiger claws!” she informs us, in a hilariously BEEG! accent that she came up with herself. She’s very sexy in that movie, but she’s also making a kind of joke of sex, and this campy attitude also informs her Yasmini in John Ford’s The Black Watch (1929) and her gypsy temptress Nubi in The Squall (1929). Loy is enjoyably over the top in these roles and in some of her other vamp parts of this time, and she worked so often in this exaggerated fashion that maybe she was just all tired-out by the time she became a star in 1934 with The Thin Man, and so she made a low-key style out of this tiredness.

Loy is a hoot in The Truth About Youth (1930) as a gold-digging singer with a temper, and she was time-stoppingly lovely in her brief role in Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931). She had one promising scene with Robert Young in New Morals for Old (1932), but then the film drops her entirely. Loy steals Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) with just a couple of naughty lines, socking them home in an attention-getting way that’s rather far removed from her later laidback delivery, but she was still being cast as vixens in racist concoctions like The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), where her Fah Lo See delights in having men whipped, and Thirteen Women (1932), where her hypnotic half-caste takes methodical revenge on a bunch of sorority girls who spurned her. It must have taken much stamina and patience to wait out all these years and all these small and unworthy parts. She had a lead in a modern dress version of Vanity Fair (1932), which was shot in ten days at a poverty row studio, sometimes from 4AM to 4AM. Loy does an intriguingly subdued Becky Sharp, but maybe she was too exhausted to play it any other way.

The speedy director W.S. Van Dyke took her in hand in 1933 at MGM, and her parts began to improve. She thrived with John Barrymore in the sophisticated comedy Topaze (1933), and she fell in with her best partner, William Powell, in Manhattan Melodrama (1934), where she also tussled with Clark Gable. The Thin Man was made by Van Dyke in sixteen days, and it set up a long-running formula for Powell and Loy that proved irresistible. As Nick and Nora Charles, a private detective and his heiress wife, Powell and Loy struck up a bantering attitude with each other that still feels like a fresh and attainable ideal of marriage.

The mystery plots of their six Thin Man films were usually perfunctory, but that didn’t matter because audiences really came to see Nick and Nora verbally jousting and keeping each other entertained. Just listening to them is a pleasure: Powell with his deep, plummy voice and Loy with her bright, high, tinkling one. “They hit that wonderful note because he always did a wee bit too much and she underdid it, creating a grace, a charm, a chemistry,” observed George Cukor.

Nick and Nora are party people, and the running gag in their films is that they always want to get a rest or take a break but they never seem to, and that suits Loy’s Nora just fine. She married Nick for excitement and great sex and teasing that always goes right up to the edge of being dangerous but never topples over into hurt feelings (it did just one time, in After the Thin Man (1936), when Nick drunkenly mentions making a mistake and Nora for a brief moment thinks he means he was mistaken in marrying her because her family is so stuffy). Nora can be slightly dizzy, but she is also flexible and tough. “There’s a girl with hair on her chest!” says a cop in The Thin Man, after Nick and Nora have just gotten out of a scary scrape with a gunman and she comes out blithely crying for more action.

As she watches Nick shooting the ornaments off their Christmas tree in The Thin Man, Loy shoots Powell an only semi-loving “You are beyond belief” look, a very modern kind of juicily sarcastic look that is also in some sense unreadable. Nora’s love for Nick is a private and multi-leveled thing, and Loy will only reveal a small bit of it. They both see the fun or absurdity in practically any situation, even things that would irritate most of us. “We were married three years before he told me he loved me,” Nora says in The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and she relates this in an admiring way, because they both like to avoid the obvious, or look askance at it.

The seven or so other films Loy made with Powell were often ordinary, but they were always redeemed by their give-and-take, their rapport, his two-drinks-in silliness and her quizzical, nearly deadpan reaction to him. Loy is at her peak in Libeled Lady (1936), playing a quasi-bitch in the first half but then softening beautifully when she falls for Powell. It’s clear that she’s a former dancer because she always moves gracefully, and distinctively: there’s a difference between the louche posture of her call girl in Penthouse (1933) and the ramrod straight posture of her rich playgirl in Libeled Lady, which suffers from unimaginative direction from Jack Conway. Loy too seldom worked with top directors. She’s at her womanly best in Test Pilot (1938) with Gable and Spencer Tracy, and she brought all of her tenderness to the smallish role of the wife in her most famous movie, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but it seems a shame that she never worked at length for Lubitsch, or Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks.

As an older woman, Loy concentrated on progressive politics as her career wound down. She played one hilariously timed scene where she fussily picks paint colors in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), but she had little chemistry with Cary Grant, who needed a more extreme woman to react to. Loy was a mother and feminist heroine in Belles on Their Toes (1952) and she worked in a more histrionic vein in Lonelyhearts (1959) and From the Terrace (1960), proving that she could play this way if she wanted to, but it isn’t much fun seeing her argue with a nasty Robert Ryan or stumble around drunk as Paul Newman’s mother, so far from her usual context.

She worked on stage and bowed out gracefully with Summer Solstice (1981), a short teleplay about an aged married couple where she was still teasing and fun loving with her mate, Henry Fonda. They called Loy the perfect wife, but her own four marriages didn’t work out, and the second one, to rental car heir John Hertz, Jr., was particularly bad. Hertz gave her a black eye once, and surely there is a special place reserved in hell for the man who gave Myrna Loy a black eye. As so often with these stars, real life did not live up to screen life, and she herself did not get enough of the pleasure that she gave to us.

Loy was one of the rare stars who seems to have been much like the person we see on screen: tolerant, sophisticated, nice without being sugary, dignified without being rigid, treating life with amused sang-froid. She was the sexiest and smartest of role models, all the more attractive and suggestive for keeping so many things to herself.

by Dan Callahan

[banshee1013]

Through The Looking Glass

A little something for my Family Business Supernatural RP Twitter family.

Don’t worry, gals - we’ll go on our hunting trip with the boys soon. First, gotta lay some groundwork... 

*********************************************

I think… I think I've actually figured it out. 

How to get to Dean's world. To Sam, and Cas, and Jack. 

And maybe even get them back here, too. But, one thing at a time. 

A mirror stood propped against the closet door in my spare bedroom. Standing in front of it, I wonder if I have the strength, and the courage to try. 

Maybe not - but I certainly have the will. This is something I've wanted since… well, a year ago, when I first discovered this universe existed.

And even more so after meeting them, talking to them - even if only through the "magic" of Twitter. 

Yeah, "magic" - because that doesn't exist in this world. I can't draw a sigil, light a concoction on fire, and mumble some Latin to make it happen.

It's going to require more… MUCH more.

 **********************

 @Redbanshee: Hey Dean… are you there?

@DWImpala67: Yeah… what's up? Are you ok?

@DWImpala67: I mean, you never DM me…

  @DWImpala67: Cee? You ok?

 @Redbanshee: Yeah, I'm here. Sorry, just… trying to figure out how to approach this…

@Redbanshee: Out with it, I guess. So, I've figured it out… I think.

@DWImpala67: Figured what out?

@Redbanshee: How to get there. To your world.

 @DWImpala67: Uh. That's not possible.

@DWImpala67: … is it?

@Redbanshee: It might be. I guess we'll find out. Where are you?

@DWImpala67: At the Bunker. Why?

@Redbanshee: And Sam? Cas? Jack?

@DWImpala67: Jack and Sam are. Cas is still not back from Heaven.

@Redbanshee: OK… ok. Just… head outside the Bunker, ok? By the door.

 @DWImpala67: … why?

 @Redbanshee: Because, for the first test, I don't want to try to breach the Bunker's defenses. I can visualize the outside well enough, and it's safer.

 @Redbanshee: Dean? Still there?

 @DWImpala67: Yeah, I'm still here.

@DWImpala67: I just don't know how you're going to do this…

@Redbanshee: Well, if it works, I'll explain how it happened.

@Redbanshee: No sense in talking about it if it doesn't work.

 @DWImpala67: Ok, I'm outside now.

 @Redbanshee: OK. Here goes nothing…

 ********************************

 I started to prepare myself, visualizing the outside of the Bunker, as I'd seen it a million times on the show. 

I checked my phone - Twitter was still up, the DM to Dean still active. Do I have everything? I'm going to a place where monsters - real-life monsters - exist. But I'm entering at a relatively safe place with that world's greatest Hunter waiting for me, outside a literal fortress. I should be ok, at least for this trial run. 

Then I thought of something…

"Alexa… what time is it in Kansas?"

"It's 7:54 pm"

 OK then.

I closed my eyes and focused hard on the image in my mind. I envisioned the position of the sun, how it would be dipping toward the horizon and heading into late twilight. I imagined the smell of the dust and brush outside the Bunker door, how the gravel and dirt would crunch under my feet… and walked toward the mirror. 

I walked into the mirror…

 … and miraculously, through it.

 ***********************************

 I felt a tingle, like the prickle of course hair, across my skin. The brush of the carpet turned into the crunch of dirt, and kicked up a dust cloud I could smell as I stumbled slightly at the change of footing. The air was cool and dry, and a light breeze brushed a lock of hair across my face. The light through my closed eyelids changed hue, going from the pale white of LED lights to a golden glow.

 My eyes were still closed when I felt two hands on my shoulders, stopping me in my tracks.

 "Holy crap… Cee… is that really you?" Dean's deep, gravelly voice, right in front of me.

 I opened my eyes to a flannel-covered chest an arm's length away. Blinking, I slowly looked up… and up, damn he was tall… and found myself staring into the face of…

Jensen Ackles.

 OK, a way more world-weary version, with a few more worry lines and a fresh cut at his temple from the vamp hunt he had just returned from. Eyes wide, the fading sun catching them and sparking them ivy green. Mouth slightly agape in surprise. But the resemblance was UNCANNY.

 "Wow. I guess Jensen really *was* born to play you…"

 The hands at my shoulders squeezed, hard, as if to test my solidity. I flinched, and convinced I wasn't a figment of his imagination, his hands lifted and hovered briefly before falling to his sides as he continued to stare, wordless.

 I was not yet convinced I was here. I reached up and poked him in the shoulder… HARD.

 He was solid, all right… and as he was not prepared for it, I actually managed to knock him a little off balance.

 "Holy shit.". Both of us, at the same time.

 The next thing I knew, my face was buried in his flannel shirt, his arms wrapped around me in a tight hug.

 I wrapped mine around his waist and might have even bounced a bit. "Ohmygod Dean!" I might have squealed a little. "It's… it's really you… YOU!"

We broke the hug and finally I saw it, live and in concert - that soft, sweet, beaming smile, his eyes crinkled in the corners.

 "C'mon… we gotta talk about this… how the hell… Sammy's gonna lose his shit!"

 He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and guided me into the Bunker.

 ***********************************

 The walk into the Bunker was surreal - the grunt from Dean as he hefted the heavy outer door open, the scrape of metal as it closed. The tap of shoes on metal as we climbed the spiral stairs down. The squeak of the inner door hinges as it opened, and again as it closed.

 The sight of the glowing map table, the ancient radio and electronic monitoring equipment. The hum in the air I felt more than heard.

 Sam Winchester, standing in the archway leading to the Library.

 Sam. Fucking. Winchester. Staring at me like I were a ghost.

 Like Dean, he was the spitting image of Jared Padalecki, the actor that portrayed him. But Jared's soft smile and puppy-dog eyes were gone, replaced by ones with a harder edge to them.

Not that I can blame either of them - I know the things they've seen, and fought, and endured.

Dean's hand at the small of my back urged me down the stairs, and Sam met us at the base. He grew taller, and taller… and taller, as I descended and by the time I reached the last step I was craning my neck back in order to meet his puzzled hazel eyes.

 I thrust my hand out, grinning like an idiot. "Hey, Sam, it's me… Celina, from Twitter…"

 Ignoring my outthrust hand, he gave a tentative squeeze of my arm, testing much like Dean had - then pulled me into his giant hug. I thought he was going to suffocate me for a minute as my head barely reached his ribcage, and discovered that, yes, breathing was still a required activity here which probably ruled out astral projection. I happily squeezed him right back, then broke the hug to catch my breath.

 He grabbed my shoulders, holding me out at arm's length. "But…h- how?" he stammered.

 Dean clapped a hand on his shoulder and led the way past the map table and into the Library.

 "That's next on the agenda."

 ********************************************

 I was sitting at the table in the Library. THE. BUNKER. LIBRARY.

I swirled the glass of whiskey Dean had poured for me. Raised it to my nose and inhaled the heady aroma before taking a long pull. It burned my throat as I swallowed, and it was *delicious*.

 Confirmed, once again - all five senses present.

Sam sat at the table across from me, laptop open, fingers tapping against the keys. Dean sat on my right, his own glass already empty. He rose and walked to the trolley where the liquor was kept up to pour himself more, and after consideration, brought the entire bottle back to the table. Sitting back down, he tipped another finger's worth into my glass.

"Thanks." My gaze took in the room, noticed the quiet. "Where's Jack?" I asked to no one in particular.

 "In the Dean-Cave," Dean said, rolling his eyes. "Watching 'Star Wars' for the umpteen millionth time." 

"Oh cool! Can I go see him?" I started to rise from the chair.

 "Not so fast," Sam said curtly from behind the laptop, and Dean reached for my arm, pulling me gently back to my seat.

 I got it. Like good dads, they wanted to vet the relative stranger who miraculously appeared on their doorway before exposing him to me. I totally agreed  - especially since I was still unclear how this all worked, and wouldn't have the slightest idea how to explain it to him how I got here, anyway.

 I also knew his first question would be if I were there to take him to Disneyland as we had talked about - another thing I didn't have an answer for - yet.

 Sam looked up from the keyboard and switched to full interrogator mode. "Ok, so… HOW did this happen? How are you here?" He gestured toward the laptop. "There's nothing in the lore about traveling between universes that doesn't require a powerful witch and archangel grace."

 I took another swig of the whiskey to gather my thoughts. How to explain this?

"I walked through a mirror," I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

 "You walked… what? Like 'Alice in Wonderland' or something?" Dean asked, skeptical.

 "Yeah, I know what it sounds like… but that's what I did. " I turned to Dean. "What did it look like… when I came through?"

 His eyes unfocused, recalling. "There was… a… shimmer, sorta like, I dunno, light… bending around something." He scowled, uncertain.

"That's… impossible." Sam declared. "Something like that would *have* to require some form of spell - and we know for a fact that doesn't work in your world."

 I nodded in agreement - I knew they had already experienced that lack when Balthazar had thrown them into my world several years ago.

 "That doesn't mean there isn't… power there, for lack of a better term." I paused, trying to find the words. "It's belief… believing in something *so strongly*, that it comes into being."

"Tulpa." Dean and Sam said simultaneously. A grin flashed across my face, hearing the fandom squeal in my head: "I love it when they talk in unison!"

 I shook my head. "Can't be. A Tulpa is a real thing… creature?... here, but not where I'm from. This was *literally* the power of… positive thinking."

 I thought of all the self-help gurus making millions off this idea - "The Secret", et al. Jesus, could they be right?

 I mean, I've tried visualizing winning the lottery for *years* to absolutely no avail. Of course, would help if I actually bought a ticket. The Lord helps those who help themselves, or something.

"So you're trying to tell me you just… WISHED your way here?" Dean demanded, incredulous. "Like… friggin' OZ? Clicked your heels and said 'There's no place like home'?"

I couldn't help but laugh at his expression - brows furrowed and lips downturned to a frown, as if outraged at the idea.

His scowl deepened at my laughter, but Sam snorted.

"Wow, Dean… that's two literary references in under 5 minutes. That's gotta be a record!"

 "Shut up!"

 Sam laughed again, turning back to me.

 "Walk us through what you did," he said patiently.

 So I did. I told them about visualizing the Bunker grounds and the door, focusing on it, and walking through the mirror… "Oh, and Twitter. I had a DM open to Dean when I did it." I shrugged. "I thought it might act as a sort of… I dunno, GPS?... to guide me here."

 "Well, that begs another question, " Sam mused. "How do you get back?"

 My brain stopped for a moment. I hadn't stopped to consider *that*. HAHA, oops. "Uh… I dunno?"

 Dean rose from his chair to glare down at me. "You… wished yourself here, without an exit plan?" he growled.  "A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS, and Chuck breathing down our necks?"

 "Dean…" Sam interjected as I involuntarily backed away at his tone.

 Yeah, just as intimidating in person, if not more so.

 "I don't believe this!" Dean threw his arms up in exasperation.

 "I'm s-sure it's not that hard…" I stammered. "Maybe just, uh, kill the Twitter feed, or… just stop believing…"

 But that was going to be difficult. I have living, breathing, SHOUTING proof that it was ALL REAL, and all RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.

 And it would be bad news bears if killing Twitter was the key - what if my battery died while I was here? Would I just pop out of existence, and back to my world?

Actually, that could come in handy if it were the case, and a pack of monsters were after me. But what if it happened and I didn't want to leave?

 What if I ended up in some… limbo somewhere?

 I was snapped out of my musing by Dean's hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see an apologetic look on his face.

 "Sorry, kiddo." he sighed. "I'm just worried about you. You're not safe here."

 That was the crux of the outburst, wasn't it? Dean's overwhelming need to keep everyone SAFE. I smiled wanly up at him.

 "Well, only way to find out is… to try it." I reached into my pocket for my phone… and realized with a jolt - of course I wouldn't have signal here. Verizon might exist in this universe, but I sure as hell didn't have an account with them. A check of the signal indicator confirmed my suspicions.

 I showed the phone to Sam before Dean snatched it out of my hand to look for himself. "Well, that's just great." He pinched his nose with his fingers.

 "Dean, we'll figure it out…" I said, reaching a hand to tug at his sleeve. "I.. I’m sorry. Please don't be mad… I didn't know how else… I had to try it to see if it would work!"

My eyes betrayed me, leaking several tears.

 Dean took a deep breath, and sighing it out, sat back down. "I know we will," he said, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze. Seeing the tears, his face fell and he reached to wipe them away.

 "Hey, hey… none of that. It's gonna be ok, kiddo, I promise."

I had to laugh at that. "Kiddo, huh? I'm older than you, sonny."

 Dean smirked. "No way… and it doesn't matter because you're new here, so you're still a 'kiddo'."

 Sam matched Dean's smile, and reached over for my free hand. "Besides… it's really good to see you!"

 "It's… amazing to see you guys, too. You have no idea…" Dammit. My eyes were betraying me again.

 Sam released my hand and came around to the other side of the table. Leaned over to hug me, his chin on the top of my head, arms wrapped around my shoulders.

 Dean grabbed my recently freed hand and squeezed both, then pulled me up, Sam rising along with me. Dean pulled us both into his arms and I found myself squished between them.

I've had photo ops like this, with their doppelgangers. Those were awesome.

 This was SO MUCH BETTER.

Dean released us, and Sam let go as well. We were still standing there when Jack walked in.

 "I heard shouting… oh, hello!" He waved at me, a happy, if puzzled, smile on his face. "Who are you?"

 "Oh… hi Jack…" I said weakly, as Sam said "Jack! Uh… I thought you were watching 'Star Wars'?"

 Jack turned to Sam. "I was, but the movie ended and I was putting on the next one when I heard shouting, and I came to see what it was." He turned to Dean. "I thought it was Cas… is he home yet, Dean?" A worried frown creased his innocent face.

 "I'm sure he's fine, Jack," Dean said reassuringly. Jack smiled, of course believing him. "I'm sure you're right." He turned back to me, and his head cocked like a puppy, expectantly, awaiting an answer to his earlier question.

 No sense in putting it off… besides, he was just SO adorable and I unbelievingly happy to see him. "Hey Jack… you're not gonna believe this, but it's me… it's Celina. From Twitter."

 His head cocked the other way, expression puzzled. "But… how can that be?" He turned to Sam. "You said we couldn't go to where our Twitter friends were…"

 "We're still trying to figure that out, Jack…" Sam said calmly. "But it's real. It's really her."

 "It's really me, Jack." I walked slowly around the table, approaching him, my hand held out to him.

For the third time, I found myself poked and squeezed, before being squished.

"Is it true? Is it really YOU?" he asked excitedly. "Does this mean we can go to Disneyland!?" He was practically bouncing at this idea, and I couldn't help but laugh.

And I totally called it with the Disneyland thing.

"I dunno, Jack, we'll have to see. This was just an experiment and we're still working out the details," I smiled up at him, grabbing his hands and squeezing. "but I sure hope so. We would have SO MUCH FUN!"

Jack smiled winningly down at me, eyes bright. "We would. I hope we can go."

"We'll work on it, Jack, I promise," Sam said. "Why don't you go watch your movie so we can get back to work figuring this out?"

Jack looked at me forlornly. "Will you be here when the movie is over?"

"I don't know, sweetie," I said hesitantly, then smiled back up at him reassuringly. "But I promise I'll say goodbye before I go, if I can."

"Okay!" He gave me another hug. "It was so good to see you! Bye!" He turned away and headed back to the Cave.

I turned back around. Sam and Dean looked at me expectantly.

"So… what now?" Dean inquired, looking at me, then at Sam. Sam shrugged.

"Since I'm here…" I hesitated. Was it too much to ask? Too bold? I took a breath…

"Wanna tour?" Dean asked, beaming.

"HELL. YES!"

**************************************

Dean led the way, Sam following. He took me to the armory, but refused to let me fire any weapons ("Later, kiddo." "Dean… I'm OLDER THAN YOU!" "Yeah, whatever…"), the infirmary, the gym ("Wow, you have a gym?" "Yeah…” "Surprised you actually found your way here, Dean…").

Then a short series of steps to the garage. Dean flipped on the lights… and there she was.

Dean's Baby, gleaming in the light of the overheads.

"Oh… wow." I breathed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dean beaming at her like a proud papa.

"Well, you gonna go say Hi, or what?" He gave me a gentle shove toward her.

I approached her slowly, reverently, like the holy artifact she was. The Most Important Object In The Universe. Grazed a hand over her fender, and reaching the driver's side door, leaned in the window.

The initials on the back window deck.

The army men in the ashtray.

I could imagine the Legos in the vent.

I reached in and brushed fingers over the front seat leather. I glanced up over the roof, to the two men standing in the Bunker doorway.

Dean leaning against one of the shelves, grinning at me like a fool.

Sam leaning against the doorjamb, arms folded, eyes rolling. "You're worse than he is!"

Dean laughed and sauntered over to join me at the door, leaning in next to me. "Pretty awesome, right?" I nodded, not trusting my voice.

Gently moving me back, he opened the driver's side door with a flourish and a small bow, sweeping his hand toward the driver's seat.

"Go on, try it out." He faked a frown. "One time only deal."

Grinning like a kid in a candy store, I slid into the seat. Placed my hands on the steering wheel. I couldn’t reach the pedals, obviously.

I bit my lip to keep from crying, and glanced over at Dean. His smile was soft, holding out a hand to assist as I climbed out of the seat, and reached behind me to close the door. Still holding my hand, he led me to the trunk. Fishing the keys out of his pocket, he opened the trunk lid, the inside emblazoned with protective sigils, and raised the false floor, propping it up with the sawed-off shotgun.

I've seen the contents of this trunk hundreds of times, but nothing prepared me for the reality.

Burlap bag filled with salt. A flask marked with a cross - Holy water, of course. An ancient-looking urn full of what could only be holy oil. Several different varieties of religious artifacts. Machetes, and daggers made of several different metals and materials.

The grenade launcher.

"So, you guys almost done with the idol worship? I'm STARVING" Sam huffed from the doorway. Dean glanced at me and rolled his eyes. I snorted and Dean laughed as he lowered the false floor and closed the trunk lid.

He draped an arm over my shoulders. "Sam's right, we need some grub." My stomach took that moment to loudly grumble to accentuate his point. Dean laughed again. "Ok then. Any suggestions?"

"Any chance I could get one of your famous cheeseburgers?"

Dean grinned and gave me a squeeze. "Hell yeah! Let's go!"

We headed back to Sam and the door into the Bunker. Sam flipped off the lights and followed as Dean led us to the kitchen.

 ************************************************

 While Dean made the burgers, Sam asked me what it was like, to live in a world without monsters? I explained to him that we still had monsters, but ours were harder to find since they looked just like us, and even harder to get rid of because of it.

 What about angels, or demons? Nope, none of them either - although every organized religion wants you to believe otherwise.

 "I'm really bummed I missed meeting *your* angel, though…" I said sadly. I was not about to admit the gigantic crush I had on him… or rather, the character as portrayed on the show depicting their lives.

 But… Sam and Dean were *exactly* as they seemed on the show… so one would have to assume Cas would be as well. I gulped, and figured it was probably a good thing he wasn't here so I didn't have the opportunity to make a COMPLETE fool of myself.

 Dean served the burgers, Sam grabbed the beer, and we sat around the table in the kitchen. The burgers were phenomenal, the beer cold, and the company was, in a word… AWESOME. I had to stop for a moment to take it all in - sitting in the kitchen of the Bunker, with Sam and Dean Winchester, eating burgers and drinking beer. It was all so surreal.

 Sam, noticing my glazed look, nudged me. "Hey, you ok?"

 I blinked and refocused, then smiled at him. "Yeah… yeah, I'm great." I waved a hand around the room. "It's just… this." I grabbed his hand, then reached across the table to take Dean's. "You… both of you. I can't believe I'm here…" I swallowed down a wave of emotion. "I can't believe it's real…"

 The hand holding Sam's started to tingle… then my arm, and the rest of my body. The smell of the kitchen and the burgers began to fade…

 "CEE!" I heard Dean's voice shout. "HEY! Hey…c'mon, come back!"

 I felt sharp pressure on my arm, and the room began to solidify again. Sam's hand squeezing my upper arm, Dean pulling on the other.

 "OK… ok, I'm back." I shook my head to clear it. I felt two sets of concerned eyes on me.

 Squeezing Dean's hand, I met Sam's concerned gaze. 

  "Well… I think I figured out how to get back…"

 ***********************

 "So let me get this straight," Sam stated, all business. "you felt yourself being pulled back when you began to question the reality of being here?"

 "Yeah… I guess? But I've tried repeating it, and haven't been able to." I sighed.

 "OK, so," Dean asked, "what do we do now?"

 I smirked at him. "Any more vamp nests nearby? Would love to go see if choppin' up some fang is as easy as it looks on TV."

 "NO." Dean growled. "HELL. NO." I threw my head back and laughed.

 Sam scowled. "Seriously… we have to figure out how to get you back home."

 I sighed. I knew he was right, and there were still so many unanswered questions.

For instance… was the passage of time different here?

 "Dean… what time is it?"

 Dean glanced at his watch. "Goin' on 11… why?"

 So I've been here three hours… what if that were three WEEKS back home… three MONTHS… YEARS…

I felt the panic growing… but it couldn't be that big of a time difference. I talked with these guys on Twitter practically *every day*, and there was no indication that time passed any differently here than there. If anything, it was only a matter of minutes, certainly less than an hour or two.

 "OK…" I breathed to calm down and focus. "Here's the deal..." I thought back to the tour we took of the Bunker. I didn't recall seeing any floor-length mirrors - this might present a problem. "Are there any mirrors… like, big ones? Floor-length?"

 "Yeah… in the gym." Sam answered.

 "Ah, right. So… I'm gonna go say goodbye to Jack like I promised. Then I'm gonna do the opposite of what I did to get here - stand in front of the mirror and visualize the room I came here from." Took a deep breath, let it out. "But I'm gonna have to do it alone, and it has to be quiet. I have to focus, and you guys being there will keep pulling me back."

 Sam nodded. "Sounds like a plan." He stood and offered me a hand up from the kitchen table, drawing me to my feet and leading me out of the kitchen to the Dean-Cave, with Dean taking up the rear.

 I peeked inside. "Return of the Jedi" was playing, Jack sprawled on the couch like your average teenager, fully engrossed in it. I grinned, thinking I should introduce him to the Star TREK movies next.

 "Hey, Jack…" I said loudly over the din of the battle on the screen. Jack lifted up to peer over the arm of the couch, saw me and waved, smiling happily. "Hi! Have you come to watch the movie with me?"

 "No, I'm sorry, Jack… I have to go. I came to say goodbye, like I promised."

 Jack fumbled for the TV remote to pause the movie, and came to give me a hug goodbye. He then stood back with a somber look on his face.

"Did you figure out how to get back home?"

 "I think so. I'm going to go try it now." Before he could ask, I offered, "And if it works, I'll start working on how to get you over to my world so we can take that trip to Disneyland, ok?"

 He beamed. "Okay! And we'll still talk on Twitter, right?"

 His smile was infectious, and I beamed back at him. "Of course! I'll talk to you tomorrow." He waved goodbye and went back to watching his movie. I turned and left, a smile still on my face, but it vanished when I looked at the boys.

 It was time to say goodbye.

 And I was suddenly so very tired. I stumbled, and Dean caught me as I fell.

 "You ok?" Hands on my shoulders, a worried frown pulling at the corners of his mouth.

 "Yeah… just… really tired. I think there must be some sort of energy drain by being here as well." I took a deep breath, rolled my neck and shoulders to rouse myself.

"Ok… let's get you to the gym and get you home." Dean guided me down the hall, hand on my back in case I tried to fall again.

We reached the entrance to the gym, and I sighed. "OK guys, this is where you get off."

 Dean snorted, and Sam rolled his eyes. "Really, Dean? What are you, twelve?"

"Hey, she started it!" he choked, trying to hold back the laughter, and I couldn't help but laugh with him. What an idiot… and I loved him. I reached up on tiptoes to wrap my arms around his neck to give him the biggest hug I could muster and a kiss on the cheek. He hugged back, hard, briefly lifting me off my feet before setting me back down.

Giving me a kiss on the forehead, he let me go.

"It was really awesome seein' you, Cee," he said, his voice rough, the green eyes bright. I smiled into them and patted him on the cheek.

 "We'll do it again soon, ok?"

 Then Sam spun me around to say his goodbyes. After a giant moose hug and a kiss to the top of my head, he leaned down to look me in the eyes.

"You focus in there, ok, and you get home safe," he said, his voice cracking.

 "And you DM us the second you get back, you hear me?" Dean insisted.

 "I will. First thing." I grasped each of their hands for a final squeeze. "See you around, boys."

 I turned and walked into the gym. Turning, I take one last look at Sam and Dean Winchester, standing in the hallway. I blew them a kiss and closed the door.

 *************************************

 Silence. Not even the hum of the hidden electronics in the walls to break my concentration.

 I focused on the feel of the carpet under my feet, the hue of the LED lights in the bedroom… I *did* have the lights on, right? Yeah… the sound of the ceiling fan whirring.

 I closed my eyes and walked toward the mirror.

 I walked into the mirror…

 … and once again, through it.

 Again, my skin tingled, and I stumbled briefly as my feet left the rubberized floor of the gym and onto the low pile of carpet in my spare room.

 I opened my eyes. I was home.

 First thing I did was look at the clock - 9:23 PM. Converted to Kansas time - no time difference between here, and there. Good to know.

 My phone began to beep repeatedly, as messages stockpiled while I was out of signal range began to arrive. I ignored them and fired up Twitter, to do as I promised.

 To let the boys know I made it back.

 *************************************

 @Redbanshee: DEAN! SAM! I made it back!

 @DWImpala67: Oh thank G… UGH. We gotta come up with a new saying for that.

@DWImpala67: That's awesome! I'm so glad you're safe.

@ItsSam1983: That's great news, Celina. I'm so relieved!

@Redbanshee: That was… something, wasn't it?

@DWImpala67: Yeah it was something all right…

@DWImpala67: It was CRAZY. INSANE. DANGEROUS.

 @DWImpala67: …and it was awesome to see you, and now that we know it works and you can get back home, I hope you come to visit again soon.

@ItsSam1983: What my brother said. It was foolhardy, but also amazing, and awesome to see you in person.

@Redbanshee: I can't wait to do it again, I had THE BEST TIME. And I'll have sweet dreams about those burgers, Dean…

@Redbanshee: Speaking of dreams, I'm about to pass out here on the floor, so I'm gonna hit the hay. Can you tell Jack I'm ok, and I'll work on the Disneyland thing?

@ItsSam1983: You bet. Don't be a stranger.

@DWImpala67: Go get some sleep, kiddo.

 @Redbanshee: UGH WITH THE KIDDO THING.

@Redbanshee: … but I love you anyway. :)

@DWImpala67: … I know. :)

 @ItSam1983: Rest well, Celina.

@Redbanshee: Hey Sam… call me Cee. :)

@ItsSam1983: You got it… Cee :) 

*****************************************

 FIN

[ao3bronte]

Smutember: Exhibitionism

Masquerade on AO3

8: Exhibitionism

She spends most of the night wide awake, oscillating between being furious at herself for letting her emotions get the better of her and being furious as Chat for being right.

She’s an idiot.

She runs her hands down her face and groans at her ceiling, cursing her inability to sleep. Not that she doesn’t deserve the punishment but she’s got a trigonometry quiz tomorrow and she’s not looking forward to failing at yet another thing in her ridiculous life.

How could she have thought that this was a good idea? Friends with benefits? Really?

It wasn’t as if she could keep her feelings at bay anymore, especially with the way she’d responded yesterday. The press hadn’t seemed to pick up on the impromptu slap, the proximity of their bodies as well as the podium having hid it from the press. But the fact remains that she’d lost her proverbial marbles in that moment and the entire internet was blowing up with theories as to why Ladybug looked like she was going to commit arson with her eyeballs when Le Parisien’s reporter had asked Chat Noir about his love life.

She had three options.

One: Admit defeat and tell Chat Noir she was falling in love with him.

Two: Admit defeat and tell Chat Noir that they should stop sleeping with each other.

Three: Fuck him senseless and hope he forgets about it.

“Well that settles that,” she murmurs, rolling over onto her side.

~

Marinette putters through her trig test, if only barely, and proceeds to spend the rest of her morning mentally berating herself. It’s the same argument every time; on the one hand, she's more or less accepted that she's an awful human being for being possessive over a guy she's not even dating. On the other hand, she can't deny that she wants to make him hers.

She looks down at her desk and barely keeps herself from faceplanting against it.

Instead, Marinette cups her chin in her palm and tries to follow her teacher's lecture on marketing strategies but it's hard when the very source of her conflict sits three rows in front of her.

Adrien doesn't raise his hand to answer the question, which is fairly unusual considering his seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of the subject. He's slumped in his seat today, the epitome of couture; she's seen him pose similarly in the Agreste spread in last January's Vogue.

They're still friends of course, and she's able to talk to him as freely as any other boy nowadays. It's a far cry from the disaster she'd been in her troisième but thankfully, with two and a half years of being a public superhero now under her belt, she's plowed through most of her social anxieties. More than anything, it was Alya who had given her the courage to get over herself; you're never going to make it as a fashion designer, she'd said, if you can't even talk to any of the models.

Mind you, just because she could talk to him without having an aneurysm doesn't mean she likes him any less. In fact, between all the time they’d spent together being collective third wheels during lunch breaks with Alya and Nino, her feelings had only gotten stronger.

And yet...

She still didn’t have a chance with him. He's so focused on work and school and extracurriculars, not to mention he has a secret model girlfriend now. When he'd first mentioned her in February, Marinette had all but shut down completely. She'd ripped the posters of him from her walls, cried in the shower, and then, in an ironic twist of fate, she'd had to fight an akuma later that evening which of course led to drowning her sorrows with orgasms thanks to her own secret boyfriend friend with benefits.

Anyway, she still has a crush on him but she's no homewrecker. Adrien has never looked happier and Marinette can't help but be happy for him, even if it makes her kind of miserable. She may not be part of his happiness but she still loves him enough to support him, even if it hurts like hell.

So Chat Noir it is. If she can't have the boy of her dreams, she may as well have the next best thing. Her partner and confidant, her equal in all things and the only person on the planet she can speak frankly with when it comes to this Miraculous world of monsters and magic. Kind and wholesome and utterly cheesy in every sense of the world, she probably has a lot more in common with Chat than her and Adrien ever would.

And it's with that realisation that spurs her to run home the second the bell rings and throw all caution to the wind, changing her clothes, transforming, and texting him as soon as she's launched herself from her balcony.

Ladybug I want to talk to you.

She's covered two arrondissements by the time he responds.

CB When?

Ladybug Now, if you've got a minute.

CB Where are you?

Ladybug In the Latin Quartier. I can meet you somewhere else if that's easier.

CB La Tour Eiffel in ten?

Ladybug I'll be there.

~

She doesn’t hear so much as feels him land, the wrought iron lattice of la Tour Eiffel vibrating in response to his body weight. She shifts ever so slightly to acknowledge him as he sits down beside her, legs dangling over the drop off below.

“You wanted to talk?”

Marinette steels herself, “I want to apologise for being selfish. I shouldn't have put you in that situation yesterday.”

Chat nods, sensing that she isn't quite finished.

“I also wanted to tell you that I’m…I’m not…I want to keep doing this. Us.”

“Define ‘us’.”

Chat’s going in for the kill and Marinette honestly can’t blame him.

She swallows uncomfortably, “Friends. Partners. Maybe…something more.”

“Maybe?”

“For now,” she replies, swinging her feet back and forth, “I need time.”

“Okay…” he trails off, “So where does that leave us?”

“Exactly what we were before. Friends with benefits, except I’m going to try and be less of an idiot.”

He chuckles, “Could you repeat that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“I’m an idiot and I’m sorry,” she snarks back, pulling one leg up over the landing so she could lean closer.

“One more time?”

“Don’t push your luck kitty,” she presses, mock punching him in the arm. He nearly closes the gap between them, their noses brushing against each other. He looks down at her lips and smiles softly, his eyes bright with mischief.

“You know, it’s still broad daylight. Anyone could see us,” he whispers, his breath ghosting against her lips, “We could give them quite a show.”

Marinette bites her lip and watches as Chat slinks closer, a grin slowly spreading across his features. Of all the kinks Chat could have…

“It’s risky,” she murmurs, shivering as his hands card through her hair and slip down her shoulders.

“It’ll be fun,” he sing-songs, his nails skimming his back and sides, “Come on…”

Marinette leans into his ministrations, throwing her head back as he grazes his teeth against her jugular, “I still say it’s too risky.”

“I dare you,” he hums into her skin, “And you never back down from a challenge.”

“Using my words against me,” she chides breathlessly, “You’re awful.”

“But I’m your awful, if you’ll have me.”

She recoils just enough to look into his eyes and see the honesty, the desperation there. He wants to be hers, he wants her to claim him, be owned in every sense of the word.

Fuck.

She grabs him by the back of the neck, smashing their lips together, and it’s everything Marinette has ever wanted. God, she’s so needy, so needy for control and she climbs over top of him, situating herself in his lap and yes, this is what she’s been waiting for. She grabs two fistfuls of his hair and tugs, pulling his head back so she can deepen the kiss, consuming everything he’s willing to give her and he moans and cups her ass with his hands, pushing her body flush.

She grinds her centre against him and it feels amazing, the friction between their suits just right. He can feel every ridge of her body against him and he takes advantage of the way her nipples harden against his chest, pinching them between his forefingers and thumbs. She keens softly and contorts her body so he has better access to her chest, cupping and tweaking and flicking until she’s moaning with every breath. He loves making her sound this way, desperate and heady with pleasure, and the noises alone are enough to bring him to his knees.

“Please,” she cries against his lips, her movements increasing in tempo against him. He scrapes his claws down her stomach before removing his hands altogether so he can use them as leverage to grind her against him even faster. The friction between their suits and her clit is enough to drive her to distraction, throbbing and aching and overwhelming. It’s astounding how fast he can get her off, how his hands and lips can bring her to orgasm faster than she can believe. She latches her lips against his neck and sucks to give her something else to focus on, desperate to ride this out a little longer.

Chat groans as she nibbles his skin and screws his eyes shut at the pleasure/pain devastating his senses, the smell of her arousal and the sound of her cries overwhelming him. He’s this close to coming for her—

Marinette takes his earlobe into her mouth and sucks, “Come for me.”

The way she says it likes she owns him, like she controls him, sends him flying. He comes hard, screaming her name into her hair as his vision blanks and his body shudders; it feels like he’s both floating and drowning, the sensation of her against him overpowering. It feels like she’s everywhere and no where as she grinds against him one last time, stuttering a list of curses a mile wide as she comes herself and he tries to watch but his vision shimmers, his senses overwrought with stimulus and pleasure every time.

She’s still trembling when he opens his eyes, her body on his chest pressed against him. He smiles at the sight and turns his head to glance through the lattice, spotting a hoard of tourists pooled around the base of the tower. He opens his mouth to say something but eventually decides against it, proud of putting those social marketing skills of his to good use.

Later that night, when #Ladynoir trends so hard it nearly breaks the internet, Marinette can barely find it within herself to be embarrassed.

Instead…she kind of feels proud.

[whatisonthemoonarchive]

Okay Boomer......

The American public is slowly waking up from the progressive nightmare with the realization that indeed, black people are not their enemy. Due in part to being lectured on civil rights by dual citizens of Israel, or alternately by refugees of places like Somalia or Latin American localities bearing the actual namesake of Conquistadors. Our principle enemies are very, very close. The division in some cases are being actualized in our own households like a personal reenactment of the American civil war. Who the fuck cares about statues of Confederate soldiers or that of founding father/slavemasters? It's importance escapes middle class taxpayers who are busy scraping about and paying the taxes that fund this grandiose theater.

The CHOP experiment in Seattle collapsed spectacularly as quickly as it started and not for the reasons that we are led to believe. Black (and White) gangbangers die every weekend with yawning observation from the masses. As a good example, just take a look at the predicted death toll in Chicago alone next week after Independence Day celebrations. It probably will not get near the attention that Jesse Smollet's public gyrations brought to the airwaves. Last week, both the Mayor and the City of Seattle were named in a class action lawsuit brought by the residents, property and business owners in the described neighborhood. Who could have predicted that, I wonder? This undoubtedly will result in breathtaking settlements and fees that will be covered once again, by the taxpayers. I thank God that I made the decision to remove my family from Seattle a few years ago but I still have to work daily in the city and can easily observe it's devolution into open anarchy. Of course, Governor Jay Inslee is no where to be found....perhaps hiding out in his suburban bunker stroking his guns.

When has the blame not been associated with the leaders of these various catastrophes? Well, as a matter of fact, we as recovering cult victims have already witnessed something quite similar, routinely. Recent history is also very instructive concerning the results of various Communist world revolutions. There is an engineered disconnect between the glamorized revolutionary leaders and the inevitable consequences. By engineered, I am of course referring to indoctrination as we see in our major Universities and Community Colleges. Most discerning adults have already witnessed the phenomena but dismiss it as a rite of passage until they are personally assaulted with it. Usually in the form of foaming invective at a family gathering during holidays.

What is to be done to maintain civil society as we have known it so far? Responsible citizens probably should not wait to let shit happen and then lurch at an opportunity to litigate any and everyone whether they have an inheritance, access to public funds, or not. We also have numerous heroic examples of restraint by property and business owners dealing with rioters and looters. Usually testing the limits of the laws established with the forbearance of our leaders and the good intentions of the Governed. We do have the power to control our destiny and by and large, exercise that power on a moment to moment, daily basis. Self Government combined with the awareness of a just and loving creator allow us to make incremental contributions within our families, communities and society. We have the obligation to exercise our independence frequently, without allowing the matter to descend into rancor and discord. Children and young adults are thirsty for attention and quite deserving. It could be represented as simply as a positive comment in a forum or as quiet intervention with kids hanging at the Mall unsupervised. We don't have to contrive events if we just take the initiative in the moment. It largely depends on our own disposition at the time. Cults are organized to take advantage of these situations and are fairly successful due in part to the distraction and/or burdens of parents. They tend to shrink from exposure and usually aren't as intimidating as presented. Those who have aspired to positions of authority and use their positions to deprive citizens of their right and responsibilities will also be exposed. It's just a matter of time that we will all be judged by our actions.....or inaction. I hope we can use every opportunity afforded to us during public holidays to reflect upon "self evident" truths and incorporate them into our lives. 

Your friend, Frank F

[ciathyzareposts]

Curse of Enchantia – 20000 Leagues Under Quality Game Design

Written by Alfred n the Fettuc

One of the greatest things about The Adventure Gamer blog is that we have the opportunity to find out exactly how good the games we didn’t play back in the day actually are. Sure, it’s always great to read more about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Monkey Island, but it’s the unknown games that really get my attention. Sometimes you can find a diamond in the rough, some unknown great game. For example, it’s thanks to this game that I finally got around to play Gateway and I don’t regret one second of it, it was a great game! Sometimes, time has just forgotten excellent games that you never took the time to actually play.

And sometimes not. Sometimes games are forgotten because they are utterly horrible garbage.

Please tell me you’ve come to release me of my misery

I don’t think a game has ever managed to piss me off so strong so fast. I’ve barely sunk an hour into it and it’s already shown me the a nice selection of cardinal sins of game design. This game got it all : stupid puzzles, interface nightmare, grating music… and I think I barely scraped the surface of it all… my dear friends, I think it’s going to be a long walk in the dark.

But first things first : Let’s start at the beginning. Last time we left our beloved hero, he was shackled upside down to a cell wall by his feet. My only hope is that the hero is actually delirious from the blood gushing into his head and he would wake up eventually into a video game design company and after shattering the fourth wall, the game would become good… Not a chance? Maybe not, but it would make a great premise for an adventure game, wouldn’t it?

So, let’s first talk a little bit about the interface. I think if you look widely at 2D adventure game interfaces circa 1992, we have three main examples of successful interfaces. First we have the “verb and object” SCUMM system of Lucasarts, which in my mind is the most well known interface at the time. Created for Maniac Mansion and perfected with each iteration of Lucasarts games (removing the excess verbs), it gives you freedom to do whatever you think of without guiding you too much. The other example is the Sierra interface (post-parser) where you choose an icon (take, talk, use…) and point at something on the screen. Add to that specific icons depending on the game series (I’m thinking about the tongue in Space Quest or the zipper in Leisure Suit Larry) and you have another perfect interface giving you freedom and letting the developers go wild with anticipation on your nonsensical attempts at trying anything on anything. The third one is obviously the simple “point, click and something happens”. It started with Gobliiins or Legend of Kyrandia (or anything more obscure) and would become the mainstream interface of modern adventure games. Less interactivity but much more simple. You just click on things and see something happen.

Now a little pop quiz : what’s the common thing between these three interfaces? Watch out, the answer is going to be a hard one : You point and you click. This is why our beloved genre is often referred to as “point and clicks”. It’s because you point your mouse at something and you click. You would think it’s the only logical way of playing a graphical adventure game, wouldn’t you? Well you’d be wrong. Here, things are a little different.

The first menu (wait until you see the submenu detailing all the different “use” commands)

Clicking the right mouse button brings up a menu. Here you find several actions. From left to right : inventory, take, use, look at, talk, fight and… I don’t know… jump I guess. Or cheer. We’ll see. The three last are save/load, sound options and credits/percentage completed/points (yes there is a points system but we’ll address this later as soon as I understand exactly what you have to do to gain points, which is still a little unclear for now). Until that, so far so good, right? But you can’t take an icon, let’s say the eye and look at your shackles. Not here. Here, when you click on an icon, it brings you to a submenu with what’s surrounding you. And then you can interact.

e.g. : The shackles

At no time can you move your pointer out of this menu and click directly on the screen. It seems not so bad when told like that, but you have a few other things going. When you click on something that does nothing, you get a simple thumb down. The look option only serves as a matter to see what’s around you considering there is no description whatsoever. And the worst comes when you’re pretty sure you could interact with something but you can’t (for example : the torch) or the other way around, where you can interact with something you never would have noticed (for example : the wall on the right beneath the water pool. No, I didn’t see anything special about it but the interface allows you to interact with it, so it must be special in some way).

And now, my personal favorite : the submenu when you try to “use” stuff

And then when you can interact with something, you have the “use” submenu, which is baffling to say the least. You have, from left to right, the options to : use a key in a lock, use a keycard in a slot (or let’s say putting anything in anything), pushing/pulling something, eating something, wearing something, throwing something, pulling? Or opening a drawer? And putting lego bricks onto each other. Okay, I admit my defeat, it’s time to open the manual. Turns out I’m right about most of these icons, except the second one (“insert”… yeah different icon than “unlock”), the seventh one which is “give”, and the last one which is “tie/attach”. I’m a bit bummed out there is no actual lego brick involved.

Finally, and then I’ll stop rambling about the interface because I feel a lot of you have already stopped reading, there is the “talk” option which only gives you two possibilities : Hi and Help. Turns out it’s also the solution to the first puzzle because you have to yell “help” for the guard to enter and yell “SHUT UP” (in a way that I’m kinda surprised it’s never been done into a meme) before exiting the cell and dropping the key by accident.

My guess is that the guard’s voice was done at the end of beta-testing by a guy who was listening at the music for a month too long.

The guard’s animation is pretty funny, though. You can get a glimpse of the key flying off on the left of the shackles.

So, let’s get going. I hungrily grab the key and free myself of the shackles with the “unlock” function (yeah I’ve tried, the “insert” function gives you the thumb down). Then, going through the cell highlights the right wall as usable so I push it to discover… a paper clip! (which I guess, must have time/space-traveled from the same place I did) What do you do with paper clips, boys? You unlock doors with them! Thank god Brad appears to be a typical teenager with unlocking/thievery skills as they all are.

Thumbs up, Brad! You can now go break into the principal’s office!

Exiting the cell, you enter a long corridor with some kind of weird one-legged monster jumping around, a locked door and a fishbowl. I knew from a first attempt at playing the game that you absolutely need the fishbowl in the third place you visit, so I tried going on without taking it… turns out the monster doesn’t let you pass! On one hand it’s always irritating to see two completely unrelated elements moving on the plot (the monsters leaves his spot because I take the fishbowl) but on the other hand, it seems this game doesn’t allow dead-ends! Thank you Almighty adventure games gods!

Anyway, another weird thing about this game starts in this corridor : you have obvious dangers for your health that you can try to avoid (said monster for example, chases you with an axe, and giant knight statues try to crush you with their weapons) but it doesn’t seems there is any consequence for getting crushed several times in a row. You still can’t die, maybe points are being subtracted from my total but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Add to this the fact that the corridor is full of gems and gold coins to collect for nothing else than added points and the whole thing seems like a very slow and pointless action-ish sequence. I go to the other end of the corridor trying to avoid the weapons of the knights and grabbing as much loot as I can, just in case it shows any use later on.

This is where I use my famous Latin skills and compliment the use of comic book onomatopoeia.

The other end of the corridor holds a door that opens on emptiness, Roger Rabbit style. Brad hovers a bit mid-air, then looks at the camera and shows a “HELP” sign before plunging into the waters below. For now I have to say that the cartoon slapstick comedy kinda works so let’s hope it keeps going.

Fifty years after The Road Runner show and it’s still funny.

Brad then finds himself underwater, which is the famous scene I was never able to pass as a kid. He starts turning blue immediately but wearing the fish bowl on his head makes him breathe underwater (don’t try this at home, kids!) I didn’t have the patience to wait ten minutes in order to see if he could beat Guybrush Threepwood in a snorkeling contest.

The fact that I don’t have anything in my pockets doesn’t really explain why I sunk directly at the bottom of the ocean though… it must be a really heavy fishbowl.

I proceed to free the fish from its trap because that’s what an nice adventurer would do and I explore my surroundings. I find a suspicious patch of dirt and burrow through it to find… an earthworm! Score! At this time the freed fish comes back to me and gives me a seashell. I’m reassured. I thought this action would remain altruistic and unrewarded! This is not the adventurer’s way.

Thumbs up Brad! You now have an earthworm in your pockets!

A few more steps to the left and I find some kind of shop (including neon signs and all) that seem to sell an oxygen tank. Saying “Hi” to the shopkeeper shows that he wants an earthworm for it. So far so good. I give him the worm and… the shopkeeper swims away with the tank! What? Have I been conned?

So long and thank you for all the worms.

I’m sure that if I don’t give the shopkeeper the worm, something completely unrelated would block my progress later in the same area but I really don’t get what happened here… Anyway. I keep going and find myself in front of a nest of electrical eels with a big turtle hovering near them. My first try is to use the “jump” option on the turtle but despite a few tries, it doesn’t work. I then try to give the turtle the seashell and it works!

  To infinity and beyond!

The next obstacle on this VERY linear path is a huge shark coming from the west and pushing me away. I try a few things, including fighting it with the paperclip but to no avail. I try to look around a bit more which is pretty fast considering there is not much space to scan between the eels and the shark and I find a… weapon of sort… I want to say a flail? In a very obvious spot that doesn’t bode well for pixel hunting later in the game.

Yep. Obvious.

I use it to fight the shark (which requires a few tries considering you have to use the “fight” option at a very precise moment when the shark charges you) and the shark is electrified!

So I guess it’s more a taser than a flail… my bad.

A few more steps and… you know it… another obstacle! This time it’s a huge oyster blocking the way. I try to put the taser in its mouth. But no, this time you have to jump over it. And if you’re unlucky enough to choose the “jump” option when the mouth of the oyster is open, it simply doesn’t work. Your timing has to be right for it to work.

  Another problem solved!

Finishing this long path, I find myself in front of a huge bathtub plug. I can unplug it with my flail/taser/stick and I’m sucked into a cave. Ready for more adventuring!

Pictured : the lack of common sense and self-preservation of the average adventure game protagonist.

And with that I think it’s a good place to stop. Sorry about the short gaming time but I feel like my explanation of the interface already made this post way longer than expected. A last piece of rambling before you go… The underwater section is obviously made as a tutorial of sorts. You take a few steps, are in front of a problem and are usually handed the solution pretty easily. However, little Alfred never managed to get through this section. Maybe little Alfred wasn’t too bright, which is a distinct possibility. However, my guess is that the game doesn’t do a good enough job to give you incentive to keep going and that little Alfred’s tastes were already honed by games like Monkey Island or Space Quest to not see the trainwreck of game design this game so blatantly is.

In these two short sections, we’ve already seen nonsensical scoring options, avoiding unnecessary dangers that don’t do anything, one incomprehensible reaction from a NPC (the fish getting away with the tank I thought I just bought), pixel hunting, timing issues with the shark and the oyster, same grating music loop again and again… If these sections were supposed to show you a panel of what the game will have to offer you, I think we’re in for a good time!

Finally taking my revenge on the underwater section after 25 years!

Anyway, see you next time, folks! And I promise more adventuring, less rambling!

Session time : 45 minutes Total time : 45 minutes

Inventory : Paperclip Score : 54 Percentage complete : 11%

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/curse-of-enchantia-20000-leagues-under-quality-game-design/

[topicprinter]

A few months ago, I had a brilliant idea for a website. Then, I had an even brillianter idea: build the website, but outsource all the work.Every great website starts with an MVP: the minimum viable product. It demonstrates the idea in its simplest form to test whether anyone is interested. When Twitter launched their MVP, you could only tweet pictures of Russet potatoes. Slack famously launched with language support limited to pig latin. Netflix is now so synonymous with instant streaming that you may have forgotten its first version, which required you to select a movie, then wait several days until Reed Hastings arrived at your house to act out the plot himself.I had a simple plan to build my MVP:Write a quick design specification.Find a rock star freelance developer with 10 years of experience in whichever web framework is the trendiest and most bleeding-edge.Offer said freelancer $4/hr so that I can maximize site profits.Watch the MVP blossom into a thriving web property frequented by millions of passionate users demanding that I take their money.You may be surprised to learn that this plan did not work. I'm not writing this from my luxurious $200 million Silicon Valley two-bedroom apartment. I didn't grab headlines with an outrageous buyout from Facebook. Instead, I'm writing this from my regular one-bedroom apartment after receiving a half-finished product and somehow becoming my freelancer's freelancer.The ideaI follow the keto diet and like trying new recipes. There are plenty of good ones online, but they're spread across dozens of blogs, each with a different structure. These blogs tend to be slow and hard to navigate because keto bloggers rarely have experience with web development.My idea was a keto recipe directory. It would aggregate recipes from across the web into one easy-to-use website.Initial sketch of siteFinding a freelancerMost of the site's heavy lifting was web scraping -- crawling recipe blogs and pulling out the relevant data. This is a common job on freelance developer sites like Upwork or Fiverr. I could probably find someone for a low price, but I might end up with code that crumbles to pieces if I try to iterate beyond the MVP.Oh, wait! This would be a perfect job for my friend Ferngully (who agreed to let me write about her under the condition that I assign her a silly pseudonym). She recently quit her job to travel but was due back in a few days to look for full-time work. She would probably have time to freelance in the meantime. We had worked together in the past, so I knew she was a solid developer and that we work well together.I reached out to her, and she was immediately on board. She knew from our past work that my code reviews are pedantic and whiny rigorous. She told me she was excited about the challenge of meeting my tough standards.I wrote a design document that laid out the components of the website at a high level. Ferngully would handle the backend scraping tasks, while I would build a simple web frontend to display the recipes.Architecture diagramWhy aren't we live?When I was initially discussing the project with Ferngully, she asked if I had any deadlines. "No deadlines. Just focus on writing good code."It's the same thing I tell any developer working on a side project with me. I'd rather receive high-quality code on Thursday than hastily slapped-together code on Monday. I estimated that Ferngully's portion would take 30-50 hours to implement. We'd be done in about a week. Maybe two or three if my estimates were off or if she worked fewer than 40 hours per week.At the time, I was in a busy period with my day job. It could be months before I'd have time to build the frontend. Certainly, I'd be the bottleneck.After I finished the design document, I thought about how anticlimactic it would be if Ferngully delivered the scraping code only to have it sit in a drawer for months. I spent a few evenings putting together a basic frontend. It displayed some sample recipes I scraped by hand. We'd be ready to add in the full recipe data and launch as soon as Ferngully completed her work.Screenshot of website MVP, populated with data scraped by handThat's when I started getting anxious.It took me a week to complete the web portion, but I still hadn't seen any code from Ferngully. What was she doing?Before I built the frontend, the project was stress-free. Now that we had a site ready with dummy data, it felt like we had a living thing that we were keeping caged. With each passing day, my code was withering into obsolescence. I just wanted to show my site to the world so that I could get to the part of this process where Mark Zuckerberg invites me for champagne on his personal-information-collecting superyacht.Working under low bandwidthFerngully sent me her first code review at the end of the second week. It was a partial implementation of the first backend component. She had averaged 15 hours per week, but she was starting her full-time job the following Monday. Her hours were sure to go down after that.I revisited the design document to see if I could trim anything out. It called for the backend to programmatically upload recipe data to the website's data store. I could reduce Ferngully's work if she just wrote data to a local filesystem instead. Then, I'd use existing command-line tools to upload that data to the website.Okay, maybe the limited time was a good thing. If I could trim elements out of the MVP and still achieve the same thing, it wasn't really in its most minimal form.I was optimistic that we could wrap this up in a few more weeks.Becoming my freelancer's freelancerUnfortunately, Ferngully's job reduced her availability even more than I had anticipated. Over the next month, she averaged less than five hours per week on development. At this rate, it would take us months to finish.If this was another freelancer, I would have just thanked them for their work and found a new developer. But Ferngully was not only my friend but a friend going through the stress of a new job. I didn't want to add to her plate by pushing for more hours or overhauling the project plan. Nevertheless, I was kicking myself for how lax I had been earlier when she asked about deadlines.Maybe I could reassign some of her work to me. No, I'd be annoyed if someone hired me for a job, then did it themselves. I revisited the design document to see if we could simplify it further, but I couldn't find anything to cut out. Then, I began thinking about whether I could adjust our development process to shift some time expenses from her to me.Wait a second. What was going on? I outsourced this work to save myself time, but now I was restructuring the project to optimize for Ferngully's time in place of my own. How did I become my freelancer's freelancer?Simplifying code reviewsRegardless of who was freelancing for whom, I wanted us to complete the project, and quickly. The biggest time expense I could cut was my famously picky code reviews.The reviews were expensive for both of us. I put a lot of thought into my code reviews, and it took time for Ferngully to implement my suggestions. With days or weeks of latency between review rounds, we were also burning cycles just remembering context for where we were in the review.To save time, I decided to stop giving Ferngully notes. When she sent me her next changelist for review, I merged it in, tweaked it a bit to match my standards, and boom -- we had our first complete backend component. Only two left!This doesn't make senseFerngully was less enthused about my clever new time-saving technique. The tough reviews gave her technical growth. Without those, this project was just work, and she had enough of that at work.I debated whether I could keep doing notes. Even when I was skipping them, I wasn't sure I was actually saving time overall with a freelancer. If I started writing them again, I'd definitely be in the negative timewise. I'd be paying a freelancer a nontrivial hourly rate, and it would cost me more in time than writing the code myself.We talked it over and decided it no longer made sense for Ferngully to help build the MVP. With the first component completed, it was a convenient time for her to transition off the project.Implementing it myselfThe Saturday night after I wrapped up with Ferngully, I continued where she left off and resolved to keep going until the MVP was live. By 2 AM, the first version was complete. I was embarrassed by how plain it looked, but it was done.Screenshot when the MVP was finally completeI quickly realized that I should have done the project solo from the start.A prototype requires so many small decisions about tradeoffs. Do I spend an extra hour to fix a bug that only affects 10% of recipes? Which modules should have automated tests? It would be impossible to specify these answers ahead of time to a freelancer. Working solo, I can just follow my intuition.Building it myself also made it so much easier to fix weaknesses in the design. Even on a team of two, design flaws incur high frictional costs. When Ferngully spotted an issue, she had to confirm it with me, I'd update the design document, she'd read it, throw away some work, then finally reimplement it according to the new design. When I work solo, that whole process is almost instant.Finally, by outsourcing the backend, I was obscuring a core part of the business from myself. When I got my hands dirty with web scraping, it sparked ideas for recipe data I could use in future iterations of the site and gave me better insight into the site's design constraints.TakeawaysDespite the issues, this process taught me important lessons about creating new websites and working with freelancers. The biggest lesson was: if you're a developer, build your own MVP.If you choose to work with a freelancer:Discuss target completion dates.You don't have to set rigid deadlines, but figure out up front if you're in the same ballpark.Agree on weekly bandwidth.Your freelancer may have other clients or priorities. Find out how much time they'll be able to dedicate to your project.This article was originally published on my blog.