#also tried some new stuff with rendering expect more in the future as i experiment 👍

[the-river-of-light]

happy lunar new year! have Emmy in a cheongsam

[alittlewhump]

Unbidden - Act 1, chapter 5

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Content warnings: None

Morgan awoke to the sound of humming. He stretched, groaning as his muscles protested. Evidently his choice of sleeping positions had not been ideal, but he'd been too tired to care when he'd settled in. The humming stopped, and Deckard Cain turned to him from where he had been tending a pot over a small fire nearby.

"Would you believe," he said, "that none of the Sisterhood would give me your name, friend? Such a strange thing."

He would believe it. He'd learned long ago that it was generally not worth the trouble to correct people once they'd decided what they wanted to call him. The strange thing here was how little Cain seemed to be troubled by his presence. He would enjoy it while it lasted.

"It's Morgan."

"Well, Morgan, we have much to discuss. But before we get started, let us eat. You must be famished after yesterday's events." He held out a bowl of steaming soup, which Morgan accepted gratefully. It was hot and filling, exactly what he hadn't realized he needed. He'd gotten cold overnight.

Morgan briefly summarized the request that had brought him here: to disturb the progress of the unidentified manifestation of darkness taking root in these lands. Cain filled in quite a lot of details while Morgan mainly listened, asking occasional questions for clarification. A great and ancient evil had come to light in Tristram, leading eventually to the tragedy that had befallen the city. Although a hero had been successful in defeating that evil, it seemed he had been unfortunately corrupted by the same. He had fled eastward, but to complicate matters, another powerful demon had arisen to trouble the area.

Cain suspected this new demon to be Andariel, the Maiden of Anguish. Quite a title. He shared what he knew about her: a venomous demon queen with the power to enthrall mortals unlucky or unwise enough to look her full in the eyes. Like most major demons, her power also manifested in a sort of influence that spread out from her like a miasma. By Cain's estimation, this would be apparent through increased emotional sensitivity in those affected, to complement the physical anguish she was capable of inflicting. That would be something to look out for; emotional regulation was the foundation that gave strength and clarity to the priests of Rathma. To have it disrupted would compromise his ability to act in the best interest of the Balance. Morgan would have to be careful about that.

He was enjoying the conversation, to his surprise. Cain had a vast wealth of knowledge and seemed eager to share it. He was explaining his interpretation of a particular prophecy when Blaise stalked up to them with a sour look on her face. She glared daggers at Morgan, crossing her arms.

"Good, you're awake. Come with me, we have work to do."

"We do?" He'd expected - hoped, if he was honest with himself - that her involvement would be finished after retrieving Cain. That was as far as Kashya had demanded it, anyway. "I thought you-"

"I thought this nightmare was over too, but I just finished arguing with Akara. One of our old commanders has risen from the dead to attack us, and she blames you." She looked back toward the gates. "I told her that's not how your stuff works, but she didn't believe me." That was a surprise - he would not have guessed she might speak up in his defense. He wondered what had changed. Maybe Cain had convinced her somehow. The man was good with words, with people, in a way Morgan knew he could never hope to echo. "So if you don't come with me to put her back in the ground, you're probably going to regret it," Blaise continued with a pointed look.

Well, Morgan couldn't argue with that. He stood and stretched, taking stock of his belongings as Cain pressed Blaise with questions. She bore them with more patience than he'd expected. One of the other scouts had survived the attack, but her recovery was not going well. It sounded like she'd been poisoned. A shame they hadn't kept the arrow; he might have been able to identify the toxin. But then again, if he tried to treat her and failed, they would be even less willing to trust him. If Cain was right, it would be a moot point anyway - he thought the resurrection was Andariel's doing, meaning that the poison was likely due to her influence. He had no experience with that type of venom.

"Oh, Morgan, I almost forgot," Cain called out as they were leaving. Morgan turned to see him holding something in an upraised hand. "You had better take another scroll of town portal, in case you should need to return with haste."

"Thank you." He accepted the proffered scroll with a small bow of his head, tucking it into his belt.

"Let's get a move on already," Blaise called. She had already started walking. Morgan jogged to catch up, already apprehensive about the journey ahead. Her mood had softened around the old scholar, but it seemed Morgan would not be privy to those benefits. He hoped this situation would be resolved quickly so he could begin planning his attack on Andariel.

The battle was over in short order. The reanimated rogue captain had called out to Blaise by name, which confirmed Cain's guess about her origins - only very powerful forces could resurrect both flesh and spirit. She must have been buried inexpertly, leaving her vulnerable to those malign forces. Most funeral proceedings not led by the Order of Rathma or other experienced practitioners were more for the benefit of the living than the dead. At any rate, it served only to fuel Blaise's already considerable anger, and she'd defeated the revenant with only a moment's hesitation. Several piles of earth were evidence of Morgan's attempts to provide support. Each golem was ever so slightly faster to rise than the last, but this enemy had been agile enough to render them all but useless until she'd stumbled over a previously flat spot of ground. Not an elegant solution, but effective enough in the end. Now Blaise was examining the body, brow furrowed.

"Hey. Ghoul... uh. Morgan." That was a surprise. Cain had called him by name in front of her, but he'd assumed she wouldn't be bothered to remember it. "If you do that... ceremony. Like in Tristram. Will it... help her?"

"The final rites will lay her spirit to rest, and consecration should prevent her from rising again." He'd planned on performing them anyway, as a matter of course. At the very least, they would prevent her from being wholly resurrected again - powerful magic could overcome a properly consecrated body, but it could not pluck a spirit back once it had passed on.

Blaise seemed reluctant to ask outright, but she did step in to help when he went to move the body back to the grave it had clearly clawed out of. He opted for a more thorough consecration ritual and a shorter liturgy, both of which seemed to be well received. Blaise didn't raise any objections, at least. The interment was easier than the last ones, the ground more yielding, but a frown crept onto Morgan's face as he stood up and surveyed his work.

"What are you making that face for? Didn't it work?"

"No, that's not it. Your commander is at peace now, but there are many restless dead here. It must be Andariel making them stir like this." He could barely hear their whispers at the edge of his awareness if he concentrated. It was a little unsettling; usually he could only just sense a hint of the spirit lingering on a set of bones, nothing near this strong. He lacked the natural facility with spirits that drew some of the acolytes to his Order. At any rate, their agitation was cause for concern.

"I don't have the supplies to handle this many."

"I guess we'd better take the fight to Andariel, then. Don't look so surprised," she added, folding her arms across her chest. "The Sisterhood doesn't want there to be a... demon queen or whatever just running loose. She's killing our people. And apparently bringing them back again, and that's just fucked up. I may not like you, but you're the only person who's come through lately and survived. So we might as well work together on this."

"Yes, of course. You're right." The suggestion was wholly unexpected, but sound. Their objectives aligned, at least on the surface. If that was enough for her to tolerate working with him a little longer, he wasn't about to turn down her assistance. She was many times stronger than him. Luckily, she seemed capable of putting aside her personal feelings temporarily in order to meet a goal. It was really about as favourable a partnership as he could hope to make.

Now seemed like an opportune time to present a peace offering of some sort. But given her previous overreaction to a completely innocent comment, he didn't really want to risk giving a gift that could be taken as a token of anything he didn't intend. Perhaps... knowledge? There had been few of his brethren in the Order who'd had trouble with the portal scrolls, but their difficulties had always been resolved with a little coaching. It seemed like it would be worth trying.

He plucked the scroll from Cain out of its spot on his belt and held it out to her. She eyed it suspiciously. "Here. These are useful. You should try it again."

"It isn't that far to go back, you know," she said, not making a move to take the rolled parchment.

"The object is to see if you can use it. Not to actually travel. You might need one in the future."

She snatched the scroll from his hands and unrolled it with a snap of her wrist. "I can't even read what it says," she grumbled.

"Neither can I," he said. She looked up from the parchment with a perplexed frown. "It's not words, it's more like a spell," he explained. The look on her face told him she was going to need more than that. "You just have to believe it's going to work. Try telling it that it's going to open a portal for you."

"You didn't have to tell it anything when you did it yesterday."

"I already know how it's going to work. I just have to... acknowledge that I expect it to let me travel somewhere, and think about where." It was much easier to do than to explain. "Just try," he urged. "You don't have to say it out loud," he added, in case that helped.

She looked back down at the scroll. Her lips moved a little, and shortly a small circle appeared in the air in front of her. Her eyebrows rose in surprise.

"See, it works for you. Now try to think about a specific place," Morgan advised. Slowly an image came into focus within the circle. It looked like the inside of a building. There were rows of beds lined up, presumably the barracks of the Sisterhood. Blaise looked cautiously pleased as the portal opened up fully now that it had a destination.

"I guess it's not so hard to use magic, is it?" she said with a smile. It was strange for a moment, having that smile aimed at him.

"Not this kind," Morgan agreed. There were many different types of magic and some of them were quite difficult to use even for experienced mages, but he suspected this would not be the time to get into a discussion on the topic.

"How do I close it?"

"It will close on its own when you come back through it, or if the spell is disrupted. Yesterday I tore the parchment to close it."

"Huh. Thanks."

Morgan nodded an acknowledgement and turned to go. The walk back would give him a chance to think about how to best approach the situation. Andariel was probably lurking within the nearby cathedral, if the patterns of undead were to be trusted. Demons often liked to pervert religious spaces, and major demons tended to draw flocks of lesser evils around them.

"Aren't you coming?" He turned back to see Blaise standing by the portal, hands on her hips.

"I'm walking. It isn't that far to go back," he parroted.

"This is easier, though. And faster."

"That looks like your sleeping quarters," he pointed out. "I doubt I would be welcome."

"Oh. Uh, yeah. Good point. I'll see you back outside the encampment, then." She turned and paused for a moment, then strode confidently through the portal. Morgan waited until it had flickered closed behind her before taking his leave. He would have preferred to be able to put more of the spirits to rest, but that could be seen to after Andariel had been defeated. There would be little point in wasting his energy on a task that was likely to be undone. He stopped at the cemetery gate and knelt, touching a hand to the soil. A thin line rose up, curling around itself in a simple sign. It marked the area as requiring the attention of a priest of Rathma. This way, if he was to fall in battle, the next of his Order to come along would be able to soothe the unquiet dead.

He raised another golem and started walking. With this new partnership, there could be a reasonably good chance of defeating Andariel. He wondered what state the cathedral would be in, and how many skeletons he might hope to find lying beneath its floors. He hoped there would be some stained glass still intact. Not for any strategic purpose, just because he liked it. It was his personal opinion, not endorsed by the priesthood, that artisans who spent their efforts on creating beautiful things were doing work for the Light. Of course beauty and skill did not appear in the list of attributes that added up to make the weight of a person's goodness or lack thereof, and it was really just idle musing on his part. Still, he appreciated beauty where he found it.

[hesesols]

A Man of His Word

Day 23 of Ichiruki month 2020

Summary:

The transition from boy to man comes with inner peace. It comes with the realization that he doesn't have anything to prove, that a blade should only ever be drawn to maim and kill; and that Rukia will go to the ends of the world to hunt him down and end him herself if he was dumb enough to get himself killed.

"Now get going! I promised my wife I'll be home by the end of the week so get your asses on the move!"

Rating: T (for Ichigo’s potty mouth)

FF/ao3

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It is universally acknowledged that Captain Ichigo Kurosaki of the Fifth Division, Hero of Soul Society is a powerhouse. He is the man who made the impossible possible, the feats he accomplished the stuff of legends.

Just ask anyone and they will gladly recount the most romantic story ever to grace the pristine city- retold and re-enacted for the public for as many times as the sun rose over the arches and columns of Seireitei and it still never gets old— the story of him rescuing the Kuchiki Princess from the Blades of Soukyoku or the time he spearheaded a rescue mission with his nakama from the Living World to infiltrate the depths of Hueco Mundo to save one of their own, defying official orders in favour of doing what's right.

The nobles will tell you with a haughty sniff that it's because of his bloodline. The noble Shiba ancestry renders him practically blue-blooded and his esteemed bloodline shines through and through even if one's father is disgraced and the rest of his clan equally uncouth.

The folks from the streets of Rukongai will tell you that he is a true man of the people for he champions causes dear to them. For the better of Soul Society, he led and spurred social reformations- speaking out against archaic customs, bullying and strong-arming indifferent nobles to his cause, championing better living conditions for all by way of schools, orphanages, clinics and roads being built.

Such a man to inspire such loyalty and following among so divided a crowd, to be so brave and bold in leading these reforms!

It's a no brainer then that he would be the ideal person to lead missions, especially dangerous missions into uncharted and unfamiliar territories for weeks or even months on end.

Think again.

Because Ichigo absolutely loathes being on missions.

Anyone who knows the man personally or have had the misfortune to go on such a mission with him will tell you in fact the man loathes doing anything that forces him to spend more than a day away from his wife.

.

.

.

Final year academy students shuffled nervously, sword arms shaking as they gathered behind the orange-haired Captain, one with a scowl so fierce that it seemed to stop Hollows dead in their tracks, paralysed them with fear before the man finished up the job with his twin blades.

Glaring at them, he barked harshly, "Don't just stand there like sitting ducks! Do you want to be eaten?"

They gulped as a collective before remembering their years of lessons and turned to face the horde, their zanpakutos drawn and gleaming.

It was their first foray into the Living World- a week-long field exercise that will count towards their final grade prior to graduation. Their academy instructor has reassured them with a beaming smile that it's all part of the new school curriculum. If nothing else, the experience would make sure that they're well prepared when they come face-to-face with Hollows on their own and made sure they blended in and behaved accordingly during missions, following procedures and obeying the direct chain of command once they're in the Living World.

The instructor even congratulated them on their luck as their accompanying seated officer for this particular mission was the one and only Captain Kurosaki.

Just imagine!

For the duration of this short excursion, they'd have the actual privilege of fighting alongside the legendary man, working under him even!

Well, thought Jun as she narrowly sidestepped a pincer from the disgusting-looking bug Hollow she was up against; it sure started off that way. For the first ten minutes or so every academy student was certainly gawking; stunned by the appearance of the tall, broad-shouldered man. His hair, they whispered, it really is as bright as the Sun; and the twin blades- they gasped; the only other person who's ever had the sheer gifted prowess is that of the Soutaichou!

The excited chatter was loud as expected. These bright-eyed Shinigamis-in-training would be lying if they told you that they didn't dream of being given the opportunity of working under such an esteemed man.

.

Jun would begrudgingly admit that she was one of those moon-eyed students, taken in for a split second by the legends woven of the Captain. She's one of the orphans- the first few actually who were taken in by the Kurosaki-Kuchiki Orphanage and she looked to him with as much respect and hero worship as one would expect.

That was until the man unceremoniously dropped them straight into the battle grounds. A dozen or so ugly Hollows snarling and growling away, hungry at the prospect of being fed. The infamous Captain then ordered them without a hint of preamble or motivating speech to fend for themselves or risk being Hollow-chow for the day.

The impact was jarring.

Seriously, she bit the insides of her cheek as she parried, what was she thinking? Wasn't there a Living World saying that says to never meet your heroes for they're sure to disappoint you?

Disheartened by reality, she tried her best, kido spells coming to mind as easily as breathing. Adrenaline pumped through her body, blocking and parrying as best as she could with her zanpakuto, trying desperately not to get herself killed.

Then, she slipped up.

In hindsight, it was the inevitable given the amount of thoughts swimming through her head- the fear that came with the self-doubt and she missed the killing blow.

She cursed.

The Hollow had no such qualms and made full use of the missed opening to dive in for the kill. Jun stumbled, upsetting her balance and the Hollow's gaping mouth loomed close to her face, enough for her to feel the putrid stench from its breath. She shut her eyes tight as she awaited the crush from the monster's jaw but the pain never came.

Instead what she heard was the annoyed voice of her acting Captain as he pushed her aside, overwhelming the Hollow's impending attack with sheer brute strength and in one clean slice purified the monster.

She fell flat on her ass on the ground, eyes wide in disbelief as she regarded her saviour. If he hadn't swoop in, she'd have been in a world of pain, possibly even made mincemeat and dinner by the Hollow.

"T-Thank yo-"

"You were distracted. That's your first lesson. Don't let fear cripple you. You can't give into fear during a fight! Now pick up that sword of yours and try again! I won't be there to save you every time."

With those parting words, the man shunpoed away; possibly to help out another classmate of hers, leaving Jun to her thoughts. She drew a shaky breath, getting up on her feet- the blade burning in her hands.

This time, she didn't miss; cleaving the Hollow's mask in two as she pivoted and that she realized, that was her first real encounter with the Captain Kurosaki.

.

.

Five days into her training, Jun has learnt enough to not be intimidated by the ferocity of Captain Kurosaki's scowl and know the kindness hidden deep and I mean- way deep behind his gruffness.

She was sincere and humble as she asked him for advice.

The Captain snorted, "Here's one: try not to get killed."

Jun pressed on undeterred and after much badgering, the taciturn man finally relented, addressing the group huddled around the burning fire. It's the closest they ever got to a motivation speech from their acting Captain.

"Alright, listen up 'cause I'm only going to say this once: it's meaningless to just fight. You fight to win! But even that's not enough. I'm not just fighting to win. I fight because I have to win. My advice to you is to find out what's your reason to win and hold true to it."

"Just like that?"

He rolled his eyes, mumbling something that sounded like amateurs under his breath.

"Believe me. It's much harder than it sounds. It takes courage to really dig deep and to know yourself. Finding out is actually half the battle. Once you figure it out, things will fall into place- bit by bit. I can't promise you that it'll be easy. But I can assure you that it can be done."

"What is your reason then?"

Someone in their group was feeling bold only to be mercilessly shot down by a snappish reply.

"That's none of your business!"

.

.

The excursion was eye-opening- expectations were met properly and Jun was given a real taste of what her future job role would entail.

By the end of the week, her connection and bond with her zanpakuto was stronger than ever, her confidence of her own abilities skyrocketed and rang in every strike that she parried.

She had also never felt so tired and bruised in her life. Her muscles ached and she needed a hot bath. Her bed, she never thought she'd say this but she missed her tiny quarters in the student dormitories.

Jun turned the corner, cutting through the bushes and passing through the backyard of some of the other barracks, eager to go to the Fourth Division to be cleared for her return back to her dorms.

She suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, making sure she's safely hidden in the shadows as she watched on. Realization dawned as she realized that she must be passing through the training grounds of the Thirteenth Division.

.

There was hardly another soul in sight and Jun had much trouble reconciling the fiercely scowling Captain she had served for the better part of a week with that of the smiling man standing less than six feet away.

Captain Rukia Kurosaki-Kuchiki, Captain of the Thirteenth Division, adopted sister of Captain Byakuya Kuchiki is a woman of short stature, demure and polite by all accounts but widely regarded as one of the most dangerous Captains among the ranks of Gotei 13. Powerful in her own rights, her Bankai is the stuff of nightmares, revenge is a dish best served cold as is absolute death striking her opponents down at the absolute zero temperature, her attacks so pretty that it's almost an honour to be cut down by her.

The other important thing to note is that she has the powerful Captain Ichigo Kurosaki at her beck and call. It's no secret that he adores her and will move heaven and earth if she so desires. People like to say that she's a lucky woman- the other half of a power couple, ushering the era of peace with her husband by her side.

In their ignorance, they forgot much of her humble beginnings, making light of her efforts; but Jun remembered. She remembered the kindness of the lady when she visited them in the orphanage. Those hands that pressed treats to her were just as callused as that of an experienced swordsman.

Watching them now, their Captain haori softly billowing in the winds. The woman's smile radiant and gentle; Captain Kurosaki's notorious scowl gone as he pressed the hand of the woman reverently to his cheeks, bending over to kiss her on her crown as the other hand rested tentatively on the barely-there baby bump. Of course, there were rumours that the two Captains were expecting their third. It's a girl this time, if rumours were true- Jun believed they were.

They were comfortable in the silence, soft in their gazes and warm in the arms of each other. Two- no, three children later, and they're still so obviously enamoured by the presence of each other and Jun realized, they were not lucky.

It's not the right word.

They were blessed- blessed to have each other, to have found each other and be able to hold on. That's the truth that they know deep within their souls as they brushed their lips chastely against each other.

She wisely crept away, careful not to make a noise lest the two became aware of her existence and thought that she was spying on them. She flashed back to the conversation by the fire.

It's clear to see what or rather who Captain Kurosaki's reason to fight and win at all costs, is.

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.

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FF/ao3

Another venture into the 'my babies are good parents' AU world. Happens before events that take place in The Good Life.

Review, reblog, comment, like or send me an ask to share a headcanon- alternatively reach out to me on the Seireitei Discord. I won’t bite I promise!

[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who: Why Does Everyone Keep Forgetting the Daleks?

https://ift.tt/3g81nbE

A scene that did not appear in New Year’s Day’s Doctor Who Special, ‘Revolution of the Daleks’.

SCENE: EXT. 10 DOWNING STREET, A PRESS CONFERENCE IS BEING HELD

PRIME MINISTER JO PATTERSON: …and so I introduce to you, our new, fully automated defence drones!

A “DEFENCE DRONE” GLIDES INTO VIEW.

JOURNALIST (RAISES A HAND): Hello, Jeff Typeface, Daily Exposition. Sorry but, um, isn’t that just a Dalek?

PM: A what?

JOURNALIST: A Dalek? About twelve years ago they transported the entire planet through space then rounded humans up in the streets and exterminated them?

PM: Hmmm. Doesn’t ring a bell.

ANOTHER JOURNALIST: Yeah, and a few years before that a bunch of them came flying out of Canary Wharf?

PM: Sorry, I’m completely drawing a blank.

JOURNALIST: Come on! They murdered one of your predecessors!

PM: Excuse me, but you can’t honestly expect me to remember every single British Prime Minister that suffered a violent death over the last two decades. We all know this job has the life expectancy of a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.

PM’S ADVISOR: Actually, Prime Minister, talking of your predecessors, Winston Churchill did try this exact same plan with a very similar looking contraption during the War, and I hear that went badly.

PM: I mean, I’m sure I believe you. I’m just saying this is all news to me.

JOURNALIST: Very well. Moving on, how will these “Defence Drones” help us deal with the Covid-19 pandemic?

PM: See, now you’re just making words up.

Doctor Who has always been a series that points and laughs at fans who want to try and piece together a consistent continuity across all its stories, but even by Doctor Who standards, forgetting an entire global invasion barely more than a decade ago (y’know, just before most of the show’s viewers were born, you absolute fossil you) might seem like a stretch.

Of course, the real reason Jo Patterson couldn’t remember the Daleks is that unlike say, the MCU, where weirdness layers upon weirdness to create a world that almost counts as alt-history, Doctor Who is, on some level, always reaching to be set in “our” universe. The key conceit of the show is that you might turn a corner, find a blue box, and suddenly be whisked away through space and time to a world of adventure. Which doesn’t really work if the British town squares of the Doctor Who universe all feature memorials to the victims of the Daleks and diet pills have to be tested for Adipose DNA.

But at the same time, Doctor Who just loves a great big Hollywood space invasion, and making these two core ingredients of the show mesh is a nightmare for continuity.

Let’s, for instance, take a look at the life of recently departed Doctor’s companion, Ryan Sinclair.

Life of Ryan

Ryan was born in 1998 or 1999. As a child, he attended Redlands Primary School at around the same time London was hit by a “terrorist attack” when shop windows dummies started shooting people. A year later a spaceship crashed into Big Ben, although this was later dismissed as a hoax. That Christmas Day, when Ryan was around eight years old, every human with O negative blood got up in a trance and went and stood on a tall building while a gigantic spaceship hung over London.

Still Ryan is a kid, he doesn’t watch the news, maybe nobody in his family is O negative and let’s face it, news of a lot of this stuff probably doesn’t get as far as Sheffield.

However, even in Sheffield he would have seen the regular “ghost shifts” that appeared all over the world, and at nine years old he would have been traumatised to have his home, like so many others, invaded by Cybermen before they all got sucked away by something.

His family make the wise decision not to turn on the news that Christmas, so he doesn’t hear about the “Christmas star” attack, or later that year a hospital being teleported to the moon, and while he probably remembers grown-ups getting very excited by Harold Saxon getting elected, fortunately most of his tenure as Prime Minister was erased from history.

Read more

TV

Doctor Who: Which New Doctors Are Now Canon?

By Chris Farnell

TV

Doctor Who: the genius of making the Cybermen an ideology

By Chris Farnell

Ryan would have noticed when CBBC was replaced by a giant eyeball shouting that “Prisoner Zero Has Escaped”, and, shortly after turning ten, he definitely would have noticed when the entire sky was set on fire to prevent a Sontaran invasion.

And then of course, the Earth was teleported across space, planets filled the skies, and Daleks roamed the streets rounding people up. He would have been about the same age as future astronaut and Mars colonist, Adelaide Brooke at this time, and she was profoundly affected by the experience.

After that it’s possible the government may have rounded up him and his classmates to offer up to the 456.

To round the year off, Ryan actually turned into Harold Saxon for a bit. This was probably, on balance, the worst Christmas of the lot.

2011 was largely uneventful except that nobody could die.

Ryan went on to see the Tenth Doctor light the flame at the 2012 Olympics, was briefly into that whole “mysterious black cubes” craze before they got banned for some reason, and while he was in high school the entire Earth was covered in dense forest overnight but that disappeared, and nobody ever mentioned it again. The Cybermen invaded again. Then, not long after Ryan left school, the entire world was taken over by a species of really gross looking mummified monks who claimed to have always been in charge, before they also disappeared overnight.

Not long after that, Ryan met the Doctor for the first time and was shocked, shocked, to discover that aliens exist.

Cracks in Time

Steven Moffat did give us one handy explanation for why nobody in Doctor Who remembers the Dalek invasion, or the giant steampunk Cyberman that invaded Victorian London, and probably much more. In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ the Doctor tries to persuade Winston Churchill that using his own force of Daleks to secure the country was a bad idea, and he turns to Amy, who would have seen that invasion, to back him up. She has no idea what’s he’s talking about.

Later it’s revealed this is because the TARDIS explodes, destroying the entire universe with it. The cracks in time left by that explosion erased all kinds of events from history, including, handily, anything that would cause the human view of the universe to deviate too far from the real-world status quo.

Of course, that does leave some problems. Adelaide Brooke, again, clearly remembers the Dalek invasion and it was a moment so formative and influential on her eventual Fixed Point In Time that even the Dalek she saw (who, I remind you, was working on a plot to destroy literally all existence) didn’t dare exterminate her because of its influence on the timeline. And since it’s not implied the crack in time could bring anyone back from the dead, it does make you wonder what history says happened to Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister) and all the many others killed by the Daleks.

But maybe you don’t need a giant retconning Crack in Time?

Because while the Doctor has often waxed lyrical about humanity being indomitable, creative, and curious, there is also a lesser innate human quality the Doctor sometimes mentions: our absent-mindedness.

The Forgetfulness of the Daleks

As well as the Dalek incursions in ‘The Stolen Earth’ and ‘The Army of Ghosts’, there was another Dalek visitation of Earth in the ironically named ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, which was set in 1963. During this adventure then-companion Ace points out she doesn’t remember anything about Daleks invading in the 1960s. The Doctor replies, “Do you remember the Zygon gambit with the Loch Ness Monster? Or the Yeti in the Underground? Your species has an amazing capacity for self-deception.”

Likewise, nobody remembers dinosaurs invading London, or the other time shop window dummies came to life and started killing people, or when the Earth encountered its exact twin. Without any cracks in time hanging around, Doctor Who falls back on an old staple of fantasy and sci-fi- that humans just ignore anything that doesn’t fit into their worldview.

As we’ve already mentioned, this turns up a couple of times in the new series as well. In ‘In the Forest of the Night’, the entire planet is overnight covered in forest for reasons that we’re not going to go into too closely because that story’s a bit of an embarrassment to be honest. As the forest disappears at the end of the story the Doctor says it will be forgotten outside of fairy stories, because that’s “a human superpower”.

It can even work two-way. In ‘The Lie of the Land’, the entire Earth is taken over by the gross-looking and mysterious “monks”. Using a psychic link, the monks convince humanity that not only are they humanity’s generous benefactors, but also that the monks have always been here, guiding human evolution. This is of course a lie, as the monks are actually one of the very few aliens not to have guided human evolution at some point.

After the Doctor does his thing and the monks’ statues are torn down, someone passes by the ruins of one and wonders what it was. Already, people are forgetting.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Which, if you think about it, is a Doctor Who story in itself. Imagine being an alien visiting Earth. Humanity must seem like the Silence, but in reverse- as soon as they stop looking at you they forget you exist. The Doctor really ought to take a look at that some time.

The post Doctor Who: Why Does Everyone Keep Forgetting the Daleks? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3bcKfBX

[teflonsos]

⌠ MIGUEL HERRAN, 21, CISMALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, RICARDO ‘RICKY’ ALONSO! according to their records, they’re a FIRST year, specializing in DRIVER’S ED; and they DID NOT go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of (5 a.m. cigarettes after a sleepless night, the smell of burning rubber after driving so fast you break the sound barrier, cheap vodka in an expensive shotglass, scraped knees and elbows from reckless parkour). when it’s the (scorpio)’s birthday on 11/04/98, they always request their CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. ⌿ kati, 23, est, she/her ⍀ @gallagherintro

STATS / PINTEREST / CONNECTIONS / CLASSES

INSPIRATION.

fernando alonso – formula 1

james hunt – formula 1

jp – redline

peter quill – guardians of the galaxy 

emmett cullen – twilight

mercutio – romeo & juliet

han solo – star wars

charlie pace – lost

vert wheeler – acceleracers 

BACKGROUND + CLICK FOR FULL BIO.

when ricky is born, there are expectations as the firstborn male but they are expectations that ricky refuses to meet. he’s stubborn, insolent, and straight up annoying. his dad is mysteriously never around and his mother suffers from chronic illness, so he generally has free range of the house and...free range to harass and drive out nanny after nanny

his younger sister is the balancing force in his life, proper in all the ways that he’s a mess and polite in all the ways that he’s uncouth. however, they get along really well and she’s his best friend in an otherwise large, empty house.

as he gets older, his father’s comings and goings are more noticeable to ricky and he realizes that he doesn’t really understand what his dad’s job actually is? and his father won’t answer his questions about it either. one night, when ricky is about ten years old, he sneaks downstairs to find his father covered in blood. at first he screams until he realizes, that’s not his father’s blood – it’s someone else’s.

put the pieces together, his dad is a blackthorne alumn, assassin, and...brotherhood member. 

ricky doesn’t really get the chance to be close with his parents, but he is super close with his grandfather. his grandfather is a big man with a full laugh who used to race formula one like, back in the sixties. he’s a big name, and ricky wants to be like him, and his grandfather is the one that gets ricky really into the sport. racing. 

ricky starts off by racing t cars, and when he’s fourteen and sneaking out to the track with his sister, things go awry. they’re stopped and kidnapped by brotherhood members. from conversations by the kidnappers, he can surmise that his father has something to upset the brotherhood and the kidnapping is a move to keep his father in his place. ricky have to listen to his father tell the kidnappers he doesn’t give a fuck about him (likely a bluff, but still stings) over the phone.

ricky’s father’s move doesn’t work, and he doesn’t get to them in time. ricky has to beg on the phone for his life. a gunshot rings out. everything else is a blur.

ricky wakes up the next day with a million questions, but there’s one answer: his sister will never walk again. a gunshot has left her without the use of her legs, but otherwise she’ll make a full recovery. she encourages ricky to continue his racing and tells him how much she believes in him.

he takes home trophies year after year while t car racing and people start to learn ricky’s name, to see him as an up and comer as they associate him with his grandfather. the next four years are hard work, but he’s healing from trauma with a new passion and a great support system.

ate age 19, he’s on the podium after his third formula three race, and he wins the championship, raining champagne on his teammates and laughing. his nights are busy, filled with parties and clubs, pretty girls and people willing to give him whatever he wants. 

he awaits the next season and the rise into formula two, but he’s getting ahead of himself. late nights spent partying before the race take their toll on him, and his sister says it best. “you shouldn’t go out there,” she says. “i have to go out there. it’s fine, i’m just a little hungover. besides, it’s raining today. i have the advantage.” but he never learns.

ricky crashes hard, lucky to get off with a tbi and some broken ribs, but the drugs in his system render him a pariah and no one will really want to sponsor him after that. everyone had high hopes for him, but now he just looks like another stupid kid. he’ll never forget the disappointment in his grandfather’s eyes. 

he spends most of the year blowing previous winnings.

after all of that bullshit, his grandfather sits him down. “you’re going to apply to gallagher academy,” he says. and that’s when he tells ricky everything, about his father’s profession, just like his grandfather’s brother and father before him. the legacy, the brotherhood, blackthorne academy, and ricky’s both riveted and horrified. “that’s what my sister got shot for?” 

ricky passes the test while the brotherhood still has its claws clenched tightly around the reigns of gallagher academy somewhere. he’s a good driver, the fastest, and he might’ve been the best if he wasn’t so irrational and drunk on his own pride (among other things.) 

before he can gain the skills to stop his father himself, someone else does. the news comes on ricky’s very first day of school: “dad’s been arrested.” and it’s like his whole world stops, because he always knew his father was bad, just someone else got to him first. 

PERSONALITY.

ADVENTUROUS: ricky is not afraid of risks, and actually, this is usually in a good way. he pushes himself to want and pursue fulfilling life experiences, so while he’s made stupid decisions, he never lets fear stop him from taking chances and trying new things, so he’s pretty open-minded 

CHARISMATIC: pretty good at putting on a smile and making himself likable when he needs to be, he has a nice smile and a good-natured spirit even if he can be a bit MUCH at times ! the kind of asshole that you can’t help but like anyway, he means well 

FLEXIBLE: one of his great strengths is his ability to go with the flow, it doesn’t change him around or turn him inside out when things don’t go his way, he’s pretty adaptable and able to adjust when there’s a wrench in his plans

SELF-DESTRUCTIVE: ricky has a habit of ruining things when they’re going good for him, he’s notorious for self-sabotage and it probably comes from a mix of feeling like he’s invincible so he pushes limits and because he’s almost comfortable in the label of fuck-up at this point, not wanting to get his hopes up too high

ENTITLED: whether he likes it or not, he comes from a good family and a past where most things have just been handed to him. so, while he’s worked hard, he’s never had to work...that hard. he feels entitled to success and certain things in life and he can be a bit of a dick about it, even out of touch with other ways of life. he tends to feel like he deserves things, such as his gallagher education or another chance at racing

SELF-CENTERED: apart from his sister, ricky very much puts himself first and can be a bit selfish. it’s mostly out of self-preservation, but most of his thoughts revolve around him. he actually puts a lot of pressure on himself, which is why he turns to unhealthy coping mechanisms and doesn’t look at how his actions affect others in his life

HEADCANONS.

when it comes to his memory loss, it’s pretty manageable. he keeps up with medication and IF he gets a good night sleep/eats well...it’s good on his brain. but sometimes he’s not so great about it! his most common habits are: putting something down and forgetting where he just put it, asking you a question he’s already asked, and he’s bad with names

used to be good at fighting games but now he isn’t and he still tries and it’s sad :(

as you can guess, he’s really bad at card games but he likes to gamble so he’ll just bet on other stuff. always ready to put money on the results of a sports game or something, loves to do fantasy brackets

really likes anime movies! watches a lot, but his faves are obviously redline, akira, princess mononoke, perfect blue, and ghost in the shell. he watches anime too and tbh probably a lot of anime i’ve never seen like naruto, one piece, and cowboy bebop. for my sanity please don’t talk to much about them with him bc i won’t know what to write.

loves to skateboard and snowboard, and is pretty good at it because really the main thing is confidence and he has plenty of that! 

loves to play pranks in class or on people, he’s got a whole repertoire of tricks he used to play on his nannies growing up and has no issue with playing them on a teacher with a stick up their ass

his primary coping mechanisms are 1) hating his father 2) cocaine and 3) acting stupid 

is bisexual and honestly doesn’t give a fuck! guys, girls, whatever, sex is sex and he’s gonna like who he likes. has never come out to his parents but has never known them well enough for it to matter. 

had a steady long term girlfriend but she broke up with him when he started to tank his future and started partying more, probably as self-preservation for herself and ricky feels guilty about how he treated her, doesn’t want to put anyone else through that

really likes german cars so it’s a bummer that he missed out on the berlin trip, he’s going to geek out and cry any time someone mentions berlin to him, he’ll be so jealous of their semester

has wicked good eyesight, 20/20 vision which is great on the track but he also has really good aim on a shooting range, he’s a pretty observant person as well 

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

BROTHERHOOD CONNECTIONS. Someone who also had someone close to them (likely a family member) that was also arrested for being involved with the Brotherhood by the strike team. Both Ricky and your muse are dealing with the shock of this together. 

FAN? SOMEONE WHO FOLLOWS RACING? Someone who watched Ricky’s rise and fall from grace by being invested in F1. It would make sense if they were a big fan of Ricky’s grandfather...and Ricky is the disappointment. Idk someone with predisposed opinions on Ricky. 

PARTNER IN CRIME. The two of them just vibe like immediately they both have the same chaotic energy and encourage each other’s recklessness to take chances and do stupid shit, are probably hilarious and can’t take anything seriously when they’re in the same room together, the kind of friends that other people can’t stand to see them together.

WHOLESOME FWB. They get along really well as friends and mainly just need to scratch an itch sometimes. None of that toxic shit, they probably lay around and talk about their crushes and are actually friends.

CONFIDANT. Late night rooftop conversations, this person can get Ricky to open up, is probably someone who is really chatty and comfortable with their own emotions and they encourage Ricky to be open about his. 

INFATUATION. Ricky doesn’t know your muse at all, just sees them in the hallway and thinks they’re super hot, probably an older and unattainable student that wouldn’t give him a second glance but he’s like...this is my future spouse. They just don’t know I exist. Has never talked to them and they might not even vibe if they ever spoke lol. 

ENEMIES? They simply don’t! Get along? Hate at first sight? They see Ricky smoking a blunt on campus and think he’s stupid irresponsible? He doesn’t remember their name when he should have? He makes a stupid immature comment that rubs your muse the wrong way? Any of the above, ready to fight at any moment. 

RACING BUDDIES. Another driver’s ed student who is willing to race with him after hours or practice together, they both wanna fuck the cars, they both are super competitive and bring that out in each other. 

OLD FAMILY FRIENDS. Their parents knew one another, likely on his dad’s (Blackthorne/spy) side, and they grew up closely. After the kidnapping happened, your character’s parent stopped speaking to the Alonsos and distanced themselves. Your character is probably the only one who knows about that part of Ricky’s past in any detail. 

GOT OFF ON THE WRONG FOOT. Ricky tried to flirt with your character but actually wound up pissing them off by seeming like an entitled white boy, which he is. He’s trying to prove to your character that he’s not so bad! This connection has nothing to do with feet I just had no better ideas for a name I hate feet. 

REALLY BAD SEX. your muse has ricky saved in their phone like [link]...prob a hookup that happens on one of the first days after he heard about his dad but...he’s fucked up and sad and he can’t get it up! It’s literally so embarrassing, maybe they’re both embarrassed, he wants to die when he sees ur muse around bc they saw his limp ass sad boy dick.

CAT AND MOUSE TYPE THING. essentially ricky has a bunch of attempts to flirt with your muse & your muse fucking hates it. Tom and jerry but like, if tom wanted to fuck jerry. I think of this gifset. 

[mychemicalficrecs]

Hiya! Not sure if you do this, but would you be able to suggest some non-ao3 finished frerard fics? It seems I've read ao3's entire collection 😅 Thank you so much, you're honestly my favourite blog on here xx

Thanks for your kind words, Nonny! And... congratz on reading the entire ao3 tag, there are a lot of works there :D

Frank/Gerard is such a popular ship that I was actually able to find quite a lot from outside ao3.

Non-AO3 Frank/Gerard

Thing-Thing by sinsense, 43k, NC-17. When Gerard signed the admissions paperwork for the Fordhaven School for Boys, he knew he was signing up for four years of sexual frustration. No one was gay at Fordhaven. Gerard was all-too-aware that he would be a virgin until he graduated. In his senior year, though, this stupid gay freshman disproves Fordhaven's straightness, and throws Gerard's entire world off-kilter. Now, in between drawing, avoiding bullies, running an incredibly serious tabletop RP game, failing out of math, and hanging out with friends, Gerard is also busy kind of falling for this asshole who's way too young for him. It's not what he planned on, but it's what's happening. In conclusion: high school sucks.

I Think I Thought (I Saw You Try) by thatsfinewithus, ~3,000, NC-17. Welcome to some weird AU world in which Gee only does awesome comics and Frank is a vampire.

They Came From Outer Jersey! by thatsfinewithus, 25k, R. New London Fire is an elite fringe government force assigned the task of protecting the earth from some of its more interesting threats: those from beyond the atmosphere or even the universe. They've handled dangerous cases before, but they've never seen anything like...ZOMBIES FROM SPACE. Vampires, long hunted in lore and legend, are now the earth's only saviors. There is little information as to who sent the creatures until Mikey Way, head of the NLF, finds out more by being abducted. Is it too late for him? Is it too late for the earth? Find out how six vampires, one government general, and one frustrated comic book artist save the earth in...THEY CAME FROM OUTER JERSEY!!

I never told you what I do for a living. by not0_fuckin_kay, 60k+, PG-13 to NC-17. Frank Iero, male nurse at Pete Wentz's private hospital and possibly more to one new patient he can't keep his eyes off of. When a new pateint is brought in with amnesia, just days before Christmas, and with nothing but the clothes on his back and a strange drawing, it's left to Frank to find out who he is and what happened to him. When he does, it changes Frank's life forever, as he's thrust into love and health scares he never thought would complicate his life. This is the story of how he tries to make it through, juggling his job and his love-life and just trying to make things better. With Patrick the doctor, Bob the ward supervisor, Travis the unlikely therapist, and Mikey, the sometimes wannabe homicidal geek.

Of All The Hidden Corners by moneyes, ~44K, PG-13. An epic, adventurous tale filled with alternate universes, lords, mischief, magical powers, snark, boyfriends, and luck of the bad kind.

All We Are by lightisbreaking, 21k, R. Set in the future, where humans are on the brink of evolution. For the select few born with a special awareness of their own minds - an awareness which gives them abilities beyond the norm, life is suddenly a very dangerous thing. Frightened of what this could mean, the government set out to make this new race of humans extinct, telling the public that these people are mentally unstable defectives and must be kept under observation for the safety of the public. All of this brings together a rather odd troupe of people, hiding from the government and eventually having to protect one of their own when he's taken into custody. Superpowers AU!

Tell Us a Story by bexless, imogenedisease, 32k, NC-17. The world as these kids know it is ending, and Gabe Saporta is throwing the party. High school AU based on the movie Can't Hardly Wait.

Stay Right Here by idktbh, swagneto, 28k, R. Frank is involved in an accident which renders him paralyzed from the waist down. When Frank begins to withdraw into himself, his relationship with Gerard crumbles and the band faces the hardest decision they'll ever make: whether to continue playing or not. This is a story about how MCR copes with the biggest obstacle of their career so far.

Return to Spirit Lake by inpurity, 22k, R. Gerard Way has left Spirit Lake when he was eighteen to study to become a veterinary surgeon, and with no intention of ever coming back. Twelve years later he is back, carrying secrets of a life spent away from his family and friends, and the weight of a dark, painful sorrow. His old home town has not changed, but his life, and the lives of the people he will meet along the way, will never be the same.

These Friday Night Lights by faux-disco-sins, 21k, PG-13. Gerard is the head cheerleader and wears the cheer skirt, Frank is on the football team, Pete is the school mascot, Ryan is the school’s hobo journalist, Jon does photography for the yearbook, Spencer and Patrick are in the marching band, Gabe and Ray are AV techs who do a ESPN spin-off for the school, Bob is the big scary lineman, and Mikey tries to fit in while ignoring the fact that his older brother is wearing a skirt in public.

Of Love And Superpowers by mcrnut, 20k, NC-17. Seventeen year old Frank Iero is in his last year at Mutant High. He has a couple of good friends, is doing okay in school and even though he has some issues with his Mother, life is pretty great. That is, until one day, when he overhears some of the professors talking about the well-known Anti-Mutant organization HSA and how they have already broken into two Mutant Academies and are heading their way. Frank and his friends have to stick their heads together and try to solve the mystery, and as if Frank didn't have enough to think about already, he finds himself falling for his friend's older brother, Gerard.

Cypress Grove by slashxyouxup, 24k+, NC17. My Chemical Romance fight off a town of sperm hoarding, men hating, PMSing maniac women in order to save themselves from certain doom! Also, Frank and Gerard get closer than close while pretending to not be completely in love with each other. Mikeyway is not amused.

Sleepwalker by lyrical_tragedy, 73k, NC-17. Frank Iero is one of the best cops in New Jersey so it’s only natural that his boss dumps a seemingly unsolvable case on him and his colleague Bob Bryar. With no leads whatsoever Frank enlists the help of Gerard Way, a reclusive young man who experiences strong visions and dreams of events from the past and visions of the future. However, none of them could ever begin to expect the terrifying chain of events that come into play once they delve deeper into the unknown, questioning Frank’s very beliefs on what the world actually holds. A story of visions, sacrifices, over protective brothers and love all in the midst of the attempted destruction of the world. The devil’s got your number and he will come calling, until it’s nothing more than hell on earth.

Patience Is A Virtue (You Might Be Good Looking, But You Can’t Sleep With Yourself Tonight) by eflorentino, 22k, NC-17. Frank Iero’s biggest hero is Gerard Way; the outspoken, obnoxious lead singer of the multi-platinum selling band My Chemical Romance. His world changes completely when he finds himself suddenly shoved into the limelight, playing sell-out shows every night and earning more than his usual $6 an hour. However, the infamously homophobic frontman isn’t what Frank expects, and after mixed signals and unsolved revelations he learns that, with Gerard Way, things are never simple.

But Nobody Cares If You're Losing Yourself by red_ones_fly, 16k, NC-17. It took me a while to work out that there was something wrong with Gerard, he kept it hidden well and, really, he didn’t even know something was wrong with him. To him it seemed like normal, everyday stuff. He never found any of his behaviour out of the ordinary. To him it was just reality.’ After Gerard's grandma passes away his behaviour becomes strange. He becomes less outgoing and more paranoid. As Frank tries to work out what’s going on with his friend/love interest, between school, learning psychology and dealing with the jocks, he doesn’t realise just how bad it is.

Parks and Recreation by vinvy, 35k+, PG-13. Gerard Way is an art school drop out with no prospects, student loans to pay off, and a dead end job. His mother works too hard and his little brother Mikey is keeping secrets. His boss runs shady contracts and smiles too much. It's nothing special and he tells himself that he'll learn to make peace with that- in the meantime he's got to carve out a living that doesn't involve artwork. Really, he's going to be okay. Then a crazy homeless kid comes along and screws up Gerard's Adventures in Normal Employment with his hippie magic and soulless eyes. Gerard can't shake the feeling that this guy "isn't quite right" but he's too busy fending off the freak accidents that are following him around to worry about that particular winged freak.

Empire Boys by noctecaelum, 30k, NC-17. In the city that never sleeps, it's tough to get your foot in the door. While Gabe Saporta may find it easy to blend into the socialite scene; Gerard Way spends his day blending eyeshadow at Bloomingdales. As newcomer Frank triumphs in Women's Lingerie, Gerard sparks a bitter rivalry in the vicinity of Lexington and 59th; but there's no use crying over spilt coffee because things are about to fire up. Meanwhile, on the Upper East Side, Gabe Saporta is none too pleased to read a socialite-bashing article, but when confronting the writer, he doesn't expect to meet fresh faced, pretty-boy William Beckett, who turns out to be the biggest tease this side of the Downtown Dunkin' Donuts.

The Evolution Index by theficisalie, 32k, NC-17. In a world where superpowers are just another thing that can get you sent to boarding school, Frank Iero and his friends know what it's like to operate under heavy levels of stress. After all, they did spend their formative years under the wings of the United States Government's most widespread and successful initiatives; a program that was created to protect and train young Americans with superpowers to become functioning members of society. And, as a side-benefit, the government realized that not only were telepaths great at taking drink orders, but they could also be trained to be highly successful secret agents. Under the guidance of Frank's volatile and (literally) power-hungry boyfriend Gerard Way; Frank, Mikey Way, and Ray Toro are an accomplished team of super spies. When a handful of people from Frank's sordid past crop up during an investigation of rash Superhuman disappearances across the country, the team finds themselves challenged both on and off the field as they fight to solve the mysteries plaguing their beloved nation. Frank knows all too much about uncovering things that he'd rather keep hidden, but can he and his team unravel the intricate web of crime and kidnapping surrounding Chicago without losing themselves in the process?

A Good Ocean Gone Wrong by xoxxblitz7, 32k, NC-17. Titanic AU - The Way's are one of the richest families in America and sometimes being an artist requires the need to travel. On the doomed maiden voyage of Titanic old friends are found, new love is formed and put to the test and the most luxurious crossing of the Atlantic ocean becomes a fight for survival.

A Fanfiction (In Which Gerard Has A Secret Stash of Star Wars Fanfiction) by sparklefap, 10k, R. Frank finds Gerard's bizarrely erotic Star Wars fanfiction, and is both disturbed and aroused by it. Those feelings won't do for Frank. He seeks revenge.

[morshtalon]

Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei II

(Part 2 of a series of posts on the franchise, I guess...)

As the novels went on to expand on the wackiness of the first 2 titles and keep the story mostly consistent in terms of setting and tone, keeping the same protagonists and offering a pretty direct continuation of the story, the game series decided instead to recontextualize everything and move the story to post-apocalyptic tokyo. Also, they reworked some of the mythos and demon characterizations, possibly at the time with the purpose of offering an experience that would suit the demon recruitment system better. Of course, this would end up meaning that MegaTen 2 laid out many of the building blocks that the franchise would later welcome into its setting, and it could be said that the series truly begins with this game. Or maybe with Shin Megami Tensei just after it. Or maybe the telenet version from before MegaTen 1 that has no connection with Atlus, plays like old Gauntlet games and in which Set is weaker than Loki. You decide.

Anyway, MegaTen II is a huge improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. There is an actual plot that makes a few twists and turns as you go along (and, notably, starts with a big, involved meta reference to MegaTen 1, which was pretty surprising to me); there is a top-down overworld linking places together, a welcome cue taken from other RPGs that were making themselves known at the time; the music is really awesome this time around, courtesy of a sound chip designed by namco (which, unfortunately, is rendered moot in the remake, but hey, credit where credit is due) that expands sound channels and makes the NES sound very clean; the graphics are still pretty cool (and, in Kyuuyaku, the overworld looks very, very good, particuarly the underwater parts of tokyo) and the interface was reworked to be more user-friendly, along with several new features that have been added.

That said, though, it is a pretty technically impressive game, but some of the more base, "essential" issues of the previous one can still be observed in the sequel. Once again, long treks through dungeons don't feel very stimulating. Battles are easier than ever and, besides the return of great stuff like the level-drain and introduction of spells like Mudo and all the fun that brings, they need even less player input than before. The introduction of guns makes the early to midgame a joke, and extremely powerful melee weapons make the late game a joke. You're gonna be hitting that auto-battle button an awful lot in this game, so get used to passively watching your guys massively overpower everyone until someone gets the unlucky end of a curse's hit rate, or you decide to fight Tiamat well before you should.

Still, the more enjoyable, more sectioned exploration with clearer goals, mixed up with more fun setpieces and interactions make things actually much less bothersome this time around. Large sections of the plot are dedicated to finding a collection of McGuffins, and while that always runs the risk of looking like padding for sections where the designers were slacking off on plot, there are a number of weird ways you actually come across the McGuffins themselves, so it keeps things fresh by adding a modicum of variety to them. It's also nice to go around exploring tokyo trying to collect everything. Furthermore, the more farfetched, loftier but clearer goal means that there is more satisfaction from the player in finding out things for themselves as they slowly build toward something, contrasting the previous game where the constant, shorter fetch quests felt like an endless, pointless string of errands straining your patience. Funny how these things work out, huh?

Plot-wise, this is the game in which stuff actually starts happening. It's surprisingly character based for a while, then turns into a collection of setpieces, then goes back into a linear, sort of stage-like structure before the end. I think it shines when it's experimenting with weird circumstances. Perhaps the most memorable moment to me is a part where, in order to progress, you need to voluntarily have your character commit a stupid mistake that results in the amputation of his arm, just so you can go back to a cyber lab you may have visited previously and get your missing arm replaced by a robotic one, all the while walking around losing HP and unable to perform certain actions in battle because of your lost arm. There's really no story going on here, it's just the game being quirky with its setpieces and working gameplay into that, and it works quite well.

I will say, however, the overall story made no damn sense to me. It seemed like you were fighting for a certain faction, then it's revealed that it was all actually a ploy and the real enemy is the one you were fighting for, but then, for all intents and purposes, future actions you take in the game - if you opt for the good/more complete ending - seem to still forward that faction's agenda, so... I don't know, it's a mess of betrayals and revelations that probably didn't go through many drafts. It's entertaining, though. Maybe I'm just dumb and didn't get a pretty simple plot, I dunno.

Also, as it starts getting close to the end, it gets repetitive. Most of the third act revolves around a pretty flowcharty progression structure where you go somewhere, there's a town there, then you head to the local dungeon, fight a boss, get their item which allows you to go to the next place, rinse and repeat. It starts feeling a lot like its predecessor, like you're running errands and not accomplishing much of anything, just waiting for the story to take you to the next cycle of the same crap, but it's nowhere near as annoying. I also heard that there are crucial clues as to how to progress in two specific spots that weren't present in the original version of the game, so there's your daily dose of old videogame bullshit padding right there. I'm glad the remake fixed that, though, because I definitely wouldn't have been able to beat the game without a guide otherwise, and guides sour the experience a lot, especially in these cases where exploration and figuring stuff out is basically the name of the game. Good on you, Kyuuyaku, for adressing the issue and making things not soar into the ridiculous.

Another gripe I have with it is that, if you opt for the good ending, the game basically gives you everything you need, no strings attached. The most powerful weapon in the game, some of the most powerful demons in the game, and the most powerful gun in the game, just like that. Kinda takes the tension off the final battle when it's so obvious anyone could have done it, and it takes the focus off the demons you tried to fuse and make strong by yourself (unless you know what you're doing and you can actually fuse a demon stronger than the one the game gives you, which is unnecessary). Also, the very last dungeon is super underwhelming, definitely not what I expected after the whole third act. Like, the final boss is just there, dude, after a normal corridor. It sucks.

Still, however, the particular reworking of demon personalities and the intro to their philosophical standings in the world formed the basis for how they would act in the franchise ever since, and MegaTen 2 has a much more important place in the series canon than its predecessor. That, along with its setting, tone, and gameplay changes, codified what later SMTs would basically be all about. I think this game deserves a 6 out of 10, maybe a few tenths higher for possible cool stuff I missed. It's more streamlined, more expansive, and more passionate than its predecessor. It has a bigger impact on the franchise, and it introduced far more things that would become series staples than 1 did (like Jack Frost!). I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, and if you can stand the relative boredom of a simplistic, undemanding combat system and the rudimentary plot of a 1990 NES game, I think MT2 is worth your time, even if just to check out how things began and how they evolved from MT1. Hell, I liked it, anyway.

Oh, also, guns have their damage output affected by your strength in this game. Like, what?

[hannahmcne]

Her Royal Highness - Chapter 4

Mal's door remained unlocked, but she didn't go anywhere except down the hall. Mainly because she couldn't remember where she'd come from and a piercing headache had started in the front of her brain, right behind her eyes. So, she hung out in her room. Not long after Ben left, Sophia came around and brought paper, writing utensils, books, and a little list filled with lots of numbers.

"What's this?" Mal asked, as she rubbed her head and squinted at the writing. She recognized the names written on the sides of the numbers, but her head still didn't feel like it was working correctly.

"A list of important phone numbers for the palace," Sophia answered. She had a tea set on the dresser and was preparing a cup for Mal. "My number is on there too." She said as she added a small pill to her cup, which fizzled into the drink and disappeared.

"What do I do with them?" Mal asked. She sounded flat-out exhausted as she tried to focus on the paper.

Sophia chuckled and took the list out of her hand, replacing it with the tea, which Mal stared blearily at in confusion. "For your headache," Sophia told her. "Drink up. Where is your phone?"

It was lying on the bed, locked. Sophia handed it to Mal, who quickly entered her password and then gave it back because the light hurt her head even more. She took a sip of the hot drink Sophia had given her and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. "Oh gosh." She moaned as her head cleared. "This heals everything."

Sophia opened the text app with a chuckle. While Mal finished her tea, Sophia entered her phone number and set the message 'Mal Bertha'.

"Look, Mal. Now you can contact me." Sophia explained to Mal, showing Mal her own phone screen, which had lit up with a green notification with her name in it.

Mal looked at the screen and watched as Sophia showed her how to label the number with a contact so that she'd know it was Sophia.

"Why are there two keyboards?" Mal asked, noticing a different panel at the bottom of the screen. She pointed to it so that Sophia could see what she was talking about.

"One is a picture keyboard." Sophia simplified. "There's a bunch of faces and animals and stuff. Want to see?"

Mal shook her head. Eventually, she'd be left alone, so she could explore the picture-keyboard then. She observed in bleary exhaustion as Sophia entered in a new number and sent her name through. This time, a little grey text box appeared with three dots in it.

"They're messaging back," Sophia explained to Mal, gesturing to the box.

'Ben Florian' was the name that came back. Mal frowned. "Is that Prince Ben, Ben?" She asked.

"Yes." Sophia nodded and watched Mal to see what her reaction would be.

"Oh," Mal replied lamely. The phone buzzed in Sophia's hand. A moving picture had appeared from Ben. It featured a middle-aged man with a friendly smile, who was waving with the caption: 'Hi'.

Sophia continued adding Belle, Adam, Lumiere, and a few other people. One of these was named Doug. When Doug first received the message with Mal's name from Sophia, he immediately texted back a paragraph. There wasn't much meat to it. It was basically "If you need me, come ask" "Sorry if I take a while to answer texts."

Sophia was very kind to keep Mal's saucer topped with headache remedy, but eventually, she had to slip away to refill the pot. Mal, who felt much better, took the books Sophia had brought and began to fill her little bookcase up. She discovered a surprise: a thick, white comforter hidden underneath the pillows on her bed. She traded her shock blanket for it and took the paper and pencils Sophia had brought her. Then, she hid out in the closet, which she liked because it wasn't as bright, and it was a smaller space. She did keep the door cracked open a stitch, so Sophia wouldn't wonder where she'd gone if she came back.

Mal liked to doodle. She'd done more than her fair share of graffiti on the Isle, decorated their hideaway behind the rock-pulley system, and spent a fair majority of her time in class drawing on scraps of grey paper. It was nice to work with all the new utensils instead of the emptyish ones she got on the Isle. As she was finishing putting the finishing touches on a rendering of her new home, the castle, she heard a knock at the door. She pushed the closet door open a little with her toes and called: "Come in!"

The door opened and revealed a woman who Mal had seen many times on TV. She cautiously climbed to her feet.

The Fairy Godmother flashed a beautiful smile. "Hello, Mal." She greeted, then curtseyed. "I'm the Fairy Godmother. I've been told you aren't what we were expecting."

The Fairy Godmother wore a blue dress with a retro collar and a pink bow fastened beneath her collarbone. Underneath her skirts, Mal could see the edges of a black and white polka-dotted fabric attached to the bottom of the knee-length dress. She wore blue plastic flats and wore her hair curly with a pretty silver clip in it.

Mal swallowed and managed a small bow, of some sorts. "It sounds like you were expecting Hades himself." She said softly.

"Not Hades, but a mini-Maleficent, perhaps." The Fairy Godmother's smile faded a little as her eyes began to travel. Mal shifted her weight and began twirling a lock of hair around her finger as the older woman studied her.

"White isn't really your color, is it, dear?" Fairy Godmother asked with a smile.

Mal smirked. "Just don't put me in yellow and we'll be fine."

Fairy Godmother laughed. "How old are you, dear?" She asked.

"Sixteen," Mal answered, leaning against the closet frame and kicking her leg up to rest against the doorframe. At her answer, the Fairy Godmother looked sad.

"My, you're much younger than I was expecting." The Fairy Godmother whispered. "You're about the same age as my daughter Jane."

"What are you here for, again?" Mal asked. This conversation was going way off track, in her opinion.

"To talk, mostly. I was curious, have you experimented with your mother's magic yet?" Fairy Godmother sat down on the bed and examined Mal even further.

The question startled Mal. Of course, she knew her mother had possessed some of the strongest magics in the land before her imprisonment. The fact she had created and executed this elaborate mess was a testament to that. But the idea that she would have similar powers hadn't occurred to her. The only thing she'd ever been able to do was make her eyes light up.

Fairy Godmother chuckled. "I suppose not, then? Can you try now? Do you know any spells?" Mal shook her head. Everything her mom had once crammed down her throat and into her head felt like years ago now. "Make something up." Fairy Godmother encouraged her. She bit her cheek as she crossed her ankles daintily and waited.

Mal raked her newly not-aching brain and quickly made a flimsy rhyme. "Snap my fingers like a thread, hurry to fix the hair on my head."

Upon her words, her fingers took a life of their own. A sharp green light appeared at the end of her fingernails. She flicked her hand left, then right, and then made a little circle around her face, all against her will. Her vision went green and foggy for a few seconds, and then she felt the strands on her head rearranging and straightening themselves into something that hopefully didn't look like she'd had a mental breakdown earlier and lost her cool at the future king of Auradon. Mal slumped back in exhaustion as soon as she had control of her hand back.

The Fairy Godmother applauded lightly. Mal stared in surprise at her fingers, and then quickly turned her attention back to the Fairy Godmother. Conversation now, panic over new revelation later.

"Well, Auradon discourages magic, I'm sure you know. You might be able to find books in the library to teach you about theory and things like that, but active practice is a punishable offense, usually with heavy fines and sometimes community service. And of course, spells work better if the lines match syllables, and if they're in multiples of three, seven, or with the same number of beats as your age." Laugh lines appeared in the older woman's face as she smiled proudly at Mal. "But, laws aside, you could very powerful one day, even without practicing magic. I hope you'll recognize that and use that power for good."

Mal had no clue what she was going to do at that point. She was still blown away that her first feeble attempt at a spell had worked.

The Fairy Godmother cleared her throat. "If I may, can I sample your magic? If there's any correlation to Maleficent's, it might help with decoding her curse. We have already sampled former cursed items, but it appears in different… context on Ben." She gestured to Mal's hands.

Mal swallowed and nodded. "Yeah. Anything to get me out of this mess." She outstretched her fingers and walked towards the Fairy Godmother.

At her words, the Fairy Godmother looked incredibly sorry. She took Mal's hand and spread her fingers out. She began to mumble, and the tips of Mal's fingers relit. A warmth spread through her palm. But the Fairy Godmother quickly let go. She shook her head. "Your magic is the same type hers is, but it's far too weak at the moment to be able to unravel her curse. It's also slightly warped."

"Warped?" Mal asked, alarmed. How could it be warped? She'd cast one spell her entire life and now she was damaged forever. Just her luck.

"It happens naturally." The Fairy Godmother assured her. "Everything in the world has a little magic, and your magic grows depending on where you live and how you use your powers. I bet the barrier over the Isle is what warped it the most." Fairy Godmother shrugged. "Anyways, we can't have you help us break it yet until you're a little stronger."

"How long will that take?" Mal asked.

"Well, you should have been growing your magic at a steady rate for several years now." Fairy Godmother explained. "For you to recover and exercise your magic enough to gain enough power would take two or three years of intense magical growth, which you won't be able to get in rhabdophobic Auradon."

Mal slumped her shoulders in disappointment. "Alright." She mumbled. Fairy Godmother patted her cheek.

"Cheer up dear. We'll figure this out. For now, are you alright? I heard you had a panic attack today. Has that happened before?" She folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head.

"Yeah, I did," Mal admitted. "And no. I've never had anything like that happen. I just, the walls felt like they were going to fall in so I went into the closet to hide."

"And couldn't stand up?" Fairy Godmother prompted, looking worried.

"Or hear or move or anything." Mal agreed. "It was like my brain was shaking and my body went stiff." The Fairy Godmother examined Mal as she moved her hands in explanation. Mal carefully sat down next to the wingless-fairy.

"Before then, had you eaten or drank anything?" The Fairy Godmother asked.

Mal shook her head. "No. Well, I had some candies on the way to the palace this morning, but nothing else since lunch yesterday. I missed dinner because my mom decided to inform me that I was leaving."

"That would play into it. You probably didn't sleep all that well either, huh?" Fairy Godmother nodded as if this all made sense to her.

"No," Mal admitted sheepishly.

"We have panic attacks like that at the school every year when finals roll around." The Fairy Godmother informed her. "People forget to take care of themselves. We get panic attacks and people passing out when they're exercising, among other things."

"Oh. So, I just need to keep on top of that?" Mal asked.

"That should do it. Of course, if it persists, see a doctor." Fairy Godmother smiled.

Mal made a face, and the Fairy Godmother laughed. A silence formed for a few seconds. The Fairy Godmother looked around the room. "Did you really not know you were coming here?" She asked quietly.

Mal withdrew into her frame and clammed up. "She sat us down in front of the TV and wouldn't say a word on why she was so excited. When they finally brought Ben out of his meeting with you and King Adam gave his statement to Auradon, she told us in celebration while she was dancing around the room. None of my friends or the other villains had any idea what to think. No one talked to me all day."

"So, it wasn't exactly a surprise when they showed up?"

"Well…" Mal trailed off. "I don't know. It all went so quickly." The Fairy Godmother crossed her legs and leaned forward to Mal. She waited until the purple-haired girl began to speak again. "I was angry at first, but then I managed to convince myself she'd been lying. I mean, Mom's had tons of elaborate plans to leave before. But when I came back they'd already packed up my things for me and the guards showed up about five minutes later to drag me away."

"On behalf of Auradon, I apologize." The Fairy Godmother whispered softly. Mal snapped into an upright and hostile position and furrowed her eyebrows at the Fairy Godmother.

"You'll apologize for this and not for the Isle of the Lost?" She accused. The Fairy Godmother looked taken aback.

"Why should we apologize for the Isle of the Lost? We had to protect ourselves from the villains." She explained with confusion evident in her tone.

"I find it funny," Mal said bitterly. "How you fought an entire war where both sides lost thousands of people and still refused to use the death row to eradicate the problem. It's your fault I'm here in the first place. If you had killed Maleficent, I wouldn't have to deal with this – this burden! Or if you had come up with a different solution to the Isle of the Lost: banished them outside the kingdom, removed their powers, again: killed them, then Mom never would have thought to create this spell in the first place. Who's to say it's her fault and not Auradon's?"

"We don't believe in killing or hurting people like that." Fairy Godmother explained to try and placate Mal. This only riled the teen up even more.

"And that's another thing!" Mal retorted angrily. "Auradon's famous honor code; despite the fact you imprisoned hundreds of your worst villains, murderers, and schemers on the Isle and refuse to provide them the basic essentials to life outside of the weekly trash delivery, you don't believe in removing a person's magic and allowing them to walk free for their lives? Haven't you heard what happened to Ursula's eye? Or my Mother's wings?"

The Fairy Godmother was silent. Then, she pointed at Mal's head. "Your horns, dear." She whispered.

Mal blinked in surprise. She cautiously reached up to feel the top of her head and fell two curved protrusions descending back into her skull. They felt like warm stone or ivory. But they were only there for a second, and then they were gone. She stared in shock at her fingertips, as if she were doubting what they'd felt.

Across the room, the door creaked, and someone knocked. Mal turned her sharp gaze to the entrance. After a few seconds delay, it opened a little more and Prince Ben appeared, looking sheepish. He cleared his throat and began to speak in a high, awkward tone:

"Erm, sorry, we're waiting for you in the library, and-"

"How long have you been standing there?" Mal interrupted his introduction. Ben wilted. Mal scoffed. "Long enough, then." She stood up and, after a moments' hesitation, took her new phone with her. Ben's face was red as she marched past him at a brisk pace. She stopped outside the door and pretended to wait for him and the Fairy Godmother, but truthfully, she didn't know where the library was.

Ben held the door for the older woman as she walked past, then took up the lead. Mal walked beside him. If she couldn't lead, she sure as heck wouldn't fall behind him. Ben curled and uncurled his hands like he wasn't sure what to do with them while they swung at his side.

Ben stopped outside of a pair of doors that were three times his height. Why anyone would need doors this tall, Mal didn't know, but she hoped some giant found them useful one day. Ben opened the door to allow the Fairy Godmother, who had remained silent during the walk down, and Mal, to walk through.

Mal sucked in a breath at the tall beams of the library. The ceiling was patterned opposite the floor, with the ceiling being the lighter inverse of the pattern on the floor. The room was a very large rectangular prism, with the wall ahead made of glass and looking out over the kingdom. The wall they'd just entered with their backs to had a beautiful mural of the castle, featuring a beautiful girl in yellow and a rose, among other things. It must have been the story of Belle and her Beast, Mal noted as she took in a ferocious, growling monster in a corner of the wall. The last two walls were made of books. Several other enormously tall bookshelves filled the magnificent room, but directly in front of her was a collection of rose-embroidered couches and chairs surrounded by a rosewood coffee table with dozens of papers and folders spread out on it. Belle and Adam were sitting in two armchairs and holding each other's hands. They looked up without a smile as the group entered the room.

"Come and take a seat." Adam invited in a weary tone. He raised a hand and beckoned the three towards him.

They did, and Ben and Mal ended up sitting next to each other on the two-seater so that everyone could examine them. Ben still hadn't said anything to Mal since telling her they were waiting for him. He twiddled his thumbs and did his very best to politely ignore her.

"We have about three months until Ben is due to become King." Adam began in a grave tone. "Mal has agreed to marry him, but only as a last resort. One of the new goals of this meeting is to ensure she is no more trapped than we are."

Everyone flinched at the King's harsh, straight-to-the-point words. Mal bit her tongue and examined the mural on the wall.

"The spell… it is too complicated to break at this moment." The Fairy Godmother admitted. "We don't know where to start." She picked up a manila file on the coffee table and opened it up. On the top was a black and white photo of what looked like a mess of spiderwebs.

"This is one micro-cubic traunct of the spell." The Fairy Godmother explained. She laughed at Ben's confused expression. "A traunct is the smallest portion of any spell. It's much like an atom in how magic is made up. Unfortunately, this one is, by far, the most complicated of any spell I've ever seen. In most cases, a simple undoing spell could sever small trauncts. However, Maleficent has done something rather unique in that these trauncts are backing each other up, and nothing we've tried thus far has severed their hold. We're going to have to unravel it or submit to it."

"Unravel it?" Belle asked.

"In order for us to unravel it, we have to find a hink, or a hole in the trauncts so we can loosen their hold and put them apart little by little. The spell won't be broken, per se, but we can pull conditions off the spell until eventually, it will be as though it has no power on you."

"Sounds like a lengthy process," Mal commented.

"It is." The Fairy Godmother admitted sheepishly. "I've never seen anything so complicated. We're looking at a year, maybe two years' worth of work."

King Adam made a sound in the back of his throat that sounded like the beginning of a groan, or like he'd been kicked or something; a defeated sound.

"There's no hope it'll be gone before Ben's coronation?" Mal begged.

"Unless there's a major breakthrough within the next ten minutes." The Fairy Godmother said. Mal turned her head away from the group and schooled her features to indifference. Ben leaned forward and started running his hands through his hair. The only sound was that of Mal tapping her hands on her knees.

"I think it's time to start talking about the kingdom's infrastructure when Mal becomes Queen." The Fairy Godmother said quietly. No one missed the use of the word 'when'.

"Right," Adam muttered. "What are the details of Maleficent's curse?"

"Mal must become Queen before Ben is twenty-five, otherwise the both of them will begin to experience excruciating pain. If Mal is murdered, then Ben will go with her. If she's maimed in any way that she's rendered unable to take the Queen's throne, the results will carry over onto Ben. She needs to have the ability to pass binding laws in Auradon and has authority over troops in Auradon's standing army." The Fairy Godmother rubbed the bridge of her nose as if to stem a headache off. "As far as Auradon's requirements go, Mal still has to pass the same tests Ben did. I can deliver them here if you would like?"

"Tests?" Mal asked.

"There's three of them," Ben explained. "I failed the last one due to this curse, but since it's consciously manageable, I'm still able to rule the Kingdom. Basically, the tests were made to answer three questions: Will you be able to rule the kingdom? Will you do it right? And is anyone controlling you?"

"Oh," Mal said because there wasn't much else to be said.

"Would you like to zoom through it?" The Fairy Godmother asked gently. "It probably wouldn't be worth discussing much more if you can't become queen anyways."

Mal shrugged. "Sure. Whatever." She turned her phone over, palm over palm, as the Fairy Godmother reached for a different, light blue folder.

"If you fail the first two, you will not be able to rule." The Fairy Godmother cautioned. Mal didn't seem concerned.

The Fairy Godmother withdrew a similarly blue-tinted paper to the one Ben had written on. Ben was especially anxious to see the results. He scooted forward on his seat to peer over her shoulder. As Mal scrawled her name on the first two lines, the entire room held its breath. Then it faded to blue, and the three royals and one fairy breathed a sigh of relief. Mal rolled her eyes.

Ben curled his nails into his palms as the Fairy Godmother asked Mal the second question. This, of course, was the goodness check. Belle and Adam both leaned forward in their chairs as the Fairy Godmother asked Mal to sign on the third line. Mal's hand hesitated on its way to the paper as she raised an eyebrow at the nervous royals. Then she scrawled her name and the date, and the black color changed to the same royal blue as the first question.

Ben sat back in cold shock.

This was Maleficent's kid, right? The mistress of all evil? The one who cursed Queen Leah's entire kingdom? Ben was dumbfounded. He glanced sideways at Mal and watched her tuck a lock of purple hair behind her ear as she chewed on her cheek and stared at the paper. Something softened in his heart and he had to look back at the paper to stop the awed smile from moving onto his face.

While he sat in his stupor, the Fairy Godmother removed all spells and enchantments from Mal, and then Mal signed her name. It came back red, just as Ben's had. The Fairy Godmother produced a gem, identical to the one in her office, and instructed Mal on how to hold it. She read the spell's aura quickly and determined it was the identical other half to Ben's spell.

And that was when Ben had another revelation.

Maleficent had raised a lady fit to be queen. He wasn't even sure Audrey would have been able to pass the test, cruel as she was. And extended from that, Maleficent had raised this girl while keeping in mind she would one day be his wife.

It couldn't have been Maleficent's intention to raise such a morally strong woman. Mal must have found the path of good herself while on an Isle where evil ran rampant. Ben was beyond impressed.

"We've talked." Belle began with a quick gesture to her husband and herself. "And we've decided to announce that Mal will be queen alongside Ben."

Fairy Godmother drummed her fingers together. "I think that's the right thing to do." She said finally. "Unless we wish to marry Mal and Ben and allow them to go their own separate ways?" She gestured to the two teens.

No one in the room had considered this alternative. It made the royals stop in their tracks.

The Fairy Godmother continued: "Of course, neither would be able to get married to other people until the curse is broken, if ever. So long as Maleficent's conditions are covered, they technically have their freedom."

Mal dug her fingers into her knees. Living alone in Auradon? That was a prospect she wasn't prepared to cover. She looked toward Ben to try and decipher his feelings. His eyes were wide; he looked like a deer caught in headlights.

"We need time," Belle said quickly. "We don't need to make decisions like that so quickly. We'll let Ben and Mal be the ruler of that decision."

"But-" Adam continued. "We need to know by a month before the coronation. That's when we were planning on announcing Mal since we wanted to keep the press away from you while you adjust to Auradon and get to know Ben."

Belle nodded in agreement. Mal crossed her arms and leaned back into the upholstery. The king and queen were actually, by her book, being pretty fair. A warm feeling was rising up inside her chest. And before she could stop them, two words spilled out of her mouth.

"Thank you." Mal blurted out. "For being so fair." She pulled her arms tighter around herself and turned back toward the mural on the wall. The air in the room suddenly felt very thick with... what?

"You're welcome, dear," Belle replied as if it were no big deal.

The sun dipped lower and lower in the sky outside. At first, Mal had tried to follow the conversation, but then she'd gotten lost among all the legal terms and political abbreviations. She only looked back at the group whenever her name was mentioned and did her best to look as if none of their words were affecting her. She was aware her edginess was tuned down by the fact she was wearing white instead of black.

As the day drew to a close, Belle and Adam got up to show the Fairy Godmother out. Mal, too, stood up to examine the large mural on the side of the wall. Ben remained sitting for a few seconds, and then stood up and walked up behind her. He was watching her with a curious expression as he stood behind her and watched her cross her arms and take in the large, beautiful painting.

"You good?" Ben asked in a whisper that tickled his lips as he spoke.

Mal exhaled through her nose. "Yeah," She agreed in a high, strong voice. then, softer and more guarded: "It's whatever."

"So... no?" Ben asked, watching her eyes flicker back and forth.

Mal didn't answer. The muscles in her arm tensed, and she acted as if he were not there. Then, she raised her hand to the wall and gestured to it. "This is a lovely mural. I used to paint things like this on the Isle."

"Oh, yeah." Ben nodded. "For Mom and Dad's first anniversary, Dad wanted to have the library redone, but the plans took too long to be drawn up. So, two years later, for their third, they began work. Mom was pregnant with me that year and the paint fumes were too much for her most days, so she never saw the progress until after I was born." Ben explained. He let his eyes flicker over the frame of Mal's shoulders as she listened to him and took a small breath.

Mal chewed her cheek in thought. "That's cool. And there's so much detail..." She smiled a little, and then returned to a neutral expression. Her eyes fixed on the floor. "So, this is really happening, huh? I was still kind of hoping I'd wake up and it'd be over."

"Yeah." Ben sighed. "But hey, you're going to be a queen."

"Ugh." Mal groaned. Ben laughed at her dismay and, while she was distracted, slipped an arm around her shoulders. Mal tensed up and shrank away from his grasp, but Ben didn't seem to notice.

"You'll be a great queen, and by the way, you did really good today. I know a couple of Auradon kids who wouldn't have passed the goodness portion of that test." Ben told her.

Mal's eyebrows furrowed. Why would that matter? Was that supposed to make her feel good about herself? 'Some Auradon kids can't do this, so it's amazing a daughter of Maleficent could.' "So... are you comparing the Islanders to Auradonia? That's it's amazing an Islander managed to best any Auradonian?" Mal frowned and turned to look at him.

Ben shook his head. "No." He disagreed. "It's just that you're a good person who comes from an entire island of bad. It's admirable." He reached down for her hand, but Mal jumped away and out from his grasp.

"What are you doing?" She hissed, guarding her hands against him and bracing herself as if she expected him to throw a punch. "And you said no before you basically regurgitated what I'd said." She narrowed her eyes and took a few careful, suspicious steps back.

"Calm down." Ben patted the air with his hands. "I just-"

"And for the record," Mal snapped, interrupting him. "Your parents created the Isle. It's their fault that I'm even here, that I was even born. Auradon is finally getting what's been coming for a long, long time."

"That's not true!" Ben disagreed. "Mal, I was just trying to-"

"I wish I could throw you onto that Isle." Mal hissed. Her eyes were alight with green magic. Ben searched through them and found nothing but weakness. Nothing but guarded faults. A vein began to pulsate in his neck and he balled his fists up. Mal dug in her feet, marched right up to him, and stuck a finger in front of his nose. "Don't you even understand?" She hissed. "You and everything you've grown up with?" She gestured around to everything around them, the furniture, the library, the beautiful mural. "It's abhorrible." She snapped. "You gave the children of your enemies nothing despite their innocence. Generations would have withered away in misery if your parents and their band of petty royals had had their way. I thought you believed everyone could forge their own paths and be anything they wanted in Auradon, despite where they came from."

"We do believe that!" Ben protested. He reached for the hand the hung at her side but she jumped back like he was a hot stone.

"Don't touch me!" She shrieked. "You're liars, all of you!" She began to back up to the door. Ben followed her in small steps. "You already think I'm like my mother, like Cruella, like the Evil Queen! It's your own fault and your own proposed goodness that made you foolish enough to allow my mother to spell your stupid crowns. It's Auradon's fault my mom has cursed me and you. So don't go feeling sorry for yourselves now that your 'happily-ever-after' has a kink. You deserve torment for all the evil you've caused."

Mal turned and fled out of the library. Ben dug his nails into the palms of his hands, turned, and ripped a pile of books off of a shelf to throw to the ground. They clattered to his feet and hid his shoes from view. He kicked them away and dropped down to the carpet, where he buried his face in his hands. She was so arrogant, and self-righteous and... right. Ben pulled his legs up to his chest. She was right.

[dxmedstudent]

I’m 22 weeks pregnant, and I’m a neonatal paeds reg. And today a parent asked me how I could understand what she’s going through with her ex-25 weeker when my pregnancy is so healthy and I was really stumped. I’m worried this is going to be a bigger sore point as I get further along in my pregnancy too and it just feels so awkward chatting about it with my seniors who are all men.

Hey! Paeds colleague :) First of all, congratulations on your expected little one. I hope the coming months bring you no problems and you have a healthy baby when your time comes.  Before I get into my rambles, I’d like to request for advice from medblrs who have gone through something similar (whatever country they practice in), because it’s not something I’ve had to personally experience (yet) to this degree. I can understand your concern, and your patient’s parent’s point of view. We can’t know everything. We can’t experience every disease, every tragedy firsthand. Not only would that make us the most unlucky person to ever exist, it’d also probably render us utter wrecks; a little tragedy, a little struggle is more than enough to knock most of us down for a while. I don’t believe that we have to experience every kind of suffering to be empathetic; even though we’ll never understand as if we’ve experienced it, we don’t need to, to be a kind or empathetic person. We just need to be able to listen. And to try our best to make their experiences less awful. We can’t afford to get too emotionally involved for a similar reason; deep down we’re caring people who just want to give everyone a hug and make everything better, and cry with everyone when things aren’t going well. And sometimes we do. But we need to be strong, for our patients and their families. I can see where she’s coming from. She’s a brand new mum, who had all these hopes and expectations for how her pregnancy was going to go, and what her baby was going to be like. Nobody expects a complex, premature delivery or a sickly preemie; she’s grieving for the way she thought things were going to go. On top of this, being a woman, you know just how much pressure our female peers get to be the perfect mother; many mums blame themselves when things go wrong. “Was it my fault? Could I have done anything different? Am I a failure as a mother because I didn’t protect my child?” This may well be at the back of her mind. She’s clearly hurting, and feels isolated, and sometimes people (whether they suffer from miscarriages, have a sick baby or lost a child) can find it really hard to see other people going through straightforward pregnancies and having babies. It’s absolutely not about you, it’s about someone who’s struggling with their own problems. “You don’t know how it feels!” is a natural response when we feel alone in our pain. I know you probably know and understand all this, but we always tend to blame ourselves. And I want to remind you that it’s not you. Your peers might understand to a point; some will be parents, pehaps they might even have had preemies of their own. But given that they are (presumably cis) men, they’ve not gone through a pregnancy themselves. And just like someone who hasn’t had a sick child doesn’t understand, someone who’s never felt personally responsible for life growing inside them may not understand how hard it is to be pregnant, particularly when working with people for whom that might be painful to witness. They may have children, but they aren’t there as a constant physical reminder to others. Women live in fear of messing something up, of being blamed, and of not measuring up to some kind of ideal of womanhood and pregnancy, and I think many people struggle to understand that. The thing is, she’s not being entirely fair to you; she has no idea how healthy your pregnancy is, or what you’ve gone through in the past. We never know what someone has been through. Or could go through in the future. But because our role is to be our patients’ (and their parents/relatives’) support, I think people assume that we’re… happy? Healthy? Have our lives in order? Because they need to believe that we’re in tip top condition and 100% focused only on them. When you’re going through hell, you don’t have the energy to worry about how someone else is feeling, and so sometimes our patients or their families don’t have much empathy towards us as people. It’s understandable, even if it’s not always fair. But it does mean that people will sometimes take things out on us because they see us as part of ‘the healthy’, the ‘neurotypical’, the ‘system’. We may be none of the above, but they won’t know that, and ultimately we’re usually a stand in for the image of what a doctor is. Most people don’t care to know more about who we are or what we’ve experienced, and that’s fine by us, because we’re usually private people who don’t feel the need to share our personal experiences often. It’s tempting to feel guilty about when things are going OK in our lives, because we’re surrounded by people facing tragedy; but that’s exactly why they’ve come to us. And if we don’t allow ourselves to experience the joy in our lives whilst we still have it, then we will only ever deal with tragedy; our own and other peoples. So please don’t let this taint your experiences of pregnancy; it’s a special time, and you have so much other stuff to worry about at work in a NICU. You’ll have enough time to empathise with paediatric parents; your kid will get snuffles and scrapes, and I hope nothing more serious. But you’ll have scares, and you’ll know the fear of parenting soon enough (if this is your first!). My paeds consultants used to say “becoming a parent changes you as a paediatrician”, and as a much older sibling, I understand, at least in part.  Some parents will go through horrific things, and you will hopefully never have to relate to them; nobody should wish tragedy on others, and I hope as few people as possible will have such personal experiences. You seem really empathetic; you’re clearly really aware that you can’t know how it is. So I don’t think that you’re necessarily doing anything wrong to rub people up the wrong way. I just think it’s an inherent risk of being pregnant around women who are having difficulties in pregnancy or with their newborns. I’ve seen this when I was working on gynae too; my pregnant SHO colleague once had a woman refuse to be clerked by her because she didn’t want to be seen by a pregnant woman. The good news is, most mums were perfectly fine with her, and most mums were fine with my pregnant colleagues in paeds. It’s a small proportion of really upset parents that might feel upset by the fact that you, too are becoming a parent. And there’s nothing you can do about that, apart from just to try to be understanding. You’re a paeds reg; clearly you’re a caring, hardworking person who tries your best, and that’s all you can do. But when you finish work, please don’t let the pain and the sickness and the hurt follow you home. You deserve to look after yourself and yours, too. As an aside, because I know what the paeds rotas are like (heh), don’t let them pressure you into working nights. I’m sure you’ve done your own research, but last time I discussed this with others, most pregnant docs were wary of working nights past 24 weeks because of the danger of IUGR. Hit up your occy health department and put yourself and your own little one first. Good luck, congrats, and let me know how you get on :)

[countlessstorieswithoutend]

So, I’m going to disclaim that there is no Kingdom Hearts game I don’t like, I’m not trying to make fun of people for liking any of the games, but you have to admit that Kingdom Hearts is hardly the most difficult thing to poke fun at.

...Especially given I heard that Nomura came up with the idea for Coded while he was drunk, and after hearing that I really couldn't resist, and one thing lead to another, and...

Well, here’s my idea of drunk Nomura.

Nomura: Dude, dude. It's about Sora.

Exec: ok, I expected that.

Nomura: ...Only not Sora.

Exec: Huh? You mean like Roxas?

Nomura: No, no, he looks the same, and acts mostly the same.

Exec: So how is he any different?

Nomura: ...He doesn't have Sora's memories.

Exec: *Braces himself for another convoluted plot device* You mean amnesia?

Nomura: No, but like if he were inside a computer.

Exec: ...Didn't we do that in Kingdom Hearts 2?

Nomura: No man, it'll be different, because he is like a...Data Sora.

Exec: Data?

Nomura: Yeah, like he's a program.

Exec: Um...why?

Nomura: It'd be so cool man! Like one of those video games!

Exec: *Losing hope*...you mean like all the other games?

Nomura: Yeah, but even MORE like that!

Exec:...

Nomura: And he goes through a bunch of worlds!

Exec: *Rallying* Yes, of course. Did you have a couple new worlds planned?

Nomura: They're all new!

Exec: What!? Sir, that's not going to be a simple task-

Nomura: Don't worry about it! because we can still use the assets from the older worlds.

Exec:...How?

Nomura: Well you see, they'll all look the same as the worlds from the first two games. And they'll hit a lot of the same story beats too. And have the same characters, and the same music-

Exec: Sir, how is that any different? We've already gotten some heat for using Agrabah three times-

Nomura: No, no! This time it'll be different!

Exec:...How?

Nomura: Because they'll be data worlds!

Exec: *Facepalms*

Nomura: Just wait till you see it, it'll be great, I have it all planned out-

Exec: Sir...what distinguishes the data worlds from the normal ones?

Nomura: None of our worlds are normal, man. They've got a big blue genie, and a talking rabbit in fancy clothes, and-

Exec: Yes, I know! *Tries to recompose himself* But...what is unique about the data worlds?

Nomura: Well, since it's a computer it can get bugged.

Exec: Bugged?

Nomura: Yeah, like start malfunctioning all over the place. Big hassle. Man, I remember when we were trying to program in the Bahamut summon, and there were so many details to render, and we had to program in how every part of the model would interact with the environment, and it kept clipping into the walls...it was a disaster. Had to cut it in the end.

Exec: You're going to give the fans a game with glitches in it?

Nomura: Not like, actual glitches, man! In-universe glitches!

Exec: *Considers*

...well, that could actually be pretty interesting, like if we created enemies that could cause Sora-

Nomura: Data Sora.

Exec: DATA Sora to experience different kinds of glitches. Like the screen could get varying degrees of messed up, or the controls could be altered at points, or the models start to alter...at some points we could maybe even do really weird stuff, like have him glitch through the floor and fall into a different area-

Nomura: Whoa, slow down, that's not what I meant at all.

Exec: Oh? What did you mean?

Nomura: I mean we're gonna put in blocks.

Exec: Blocks?

Nomura: Yeah. Bug blocks.

Exec: And what are these supposed to be?

Nomura: Blocks that are physical manifestations of the bugs in the computer.

Exec:...Anything else?

Nomura: Nah. Just blocks.

Exec:...just...blocks.

Nomura: Now you're getting it!

Exec:...but there are so many possibilities here, we could do a lot of different and interesting things with this concept-

Nomura: Look, man, are you trying to work the programmers to death? There's only so much they can fit on a cell phone.

Exec: A cell phone?!

Nomura: Yeah, cell phone game. Haven't done one of those yet, seemed like a good time. Oh, I'm so excited to play around with another system-

Exec: This is 2007! We can't possibly put a full Kingdom Hearts game on a cell phone!

Nomura: Oy. That's why I said we'd reuse the old worlds. Makes it easier.

Exec: Oh...I suppose that does make some level of sense.

Nomura: I have this all planned out man. I don't see why you're doubting me.

Exec: But...still, the fans might not be satisfied if there isn't even one world that's different from the ones in the previous games. Do you think somehow, we could...

Nomura: Oh, it's ok, I have ways of spicing this thing up.

Exec:...go on.

Nomura: There will also be a Data Riku!

Exec:...

Nomura: And a Data Roxas, and Maleficent and Pete are gonna get involved, and Sora's heartless is gonna come back and be a big enemy, and in the end the whole thing will have been planned out by Data Namine in order to prepare Sora for future events, which will lead right into the NEXT game, where-

Exec: OK, OK, stop. I think I understand now, I'll just approve your plan, and let you get to work.

Nomura: Thanks, man!

Exec: *Muttering* Why do I put up with this...

Nomura: Because you love me. Everyone does.

[reneeacaseyfl]

Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

It’s hard to believe that the computer graphics conference Siggraph is celebrating its 46th birthday this year, but the annual event certainly doesn’t show any signs of middle age. Held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Siggraph 2019 is all about the future of 2D and 3D digital worlds, attracting everyone from luminaries in pre-rendered CG to budding AR developers and VR artists.

Siggraph’s exhibition area opens today, adding to educational sessions that have been in progress since this weekend, and an “experiences” area that opened yesterday. I had the opportunity to attend the show’s official media preview and go hands-on with a bunch of this year’s most exciting innovations; here’s a photo tour of some of the best things I saw and tried.

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

There’s no shortage of sophisticated mixed reality hardware at Siggraph, but I was most impressed by a piece of software that really demonstrated VR’s educational and experiential potential. Christopher Evans, Paul Huston, Wes Bunn, and Elijah Dixson exhibited Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR, an app that recreates the world-famous Sistine Chapel within the Unreal Engine, then lets you experience all of its artwork in ways that are impossible for tourists at the real site.

The app begins with a modestly impressive ground-level recreation of the Chapel. Epic’s Unreal Engine lets you see realistic marble barriers and ceramic floor tiles if you look closely, and you’ll have no trouble making out the individual paintings as you approach them, though you won’t confuse the faux wall curtains or other elements with reality. Even so, Il Divino’s developers provide an impressive audio and lightly visual guided tour through the space, making the most of an interface that’s largely about teleporting from place to place within a large box, and looking at art.

But everything changes when the app opens up access to a mechanical lifter and wooden scaffolding that elevate you to the Chapel’s ceiling. All of the sudden, you can control your up-close views of the paintings, and experience Michelangelo’s masterpiece Creation of Adam from the same perspective as the painter himself. The developers use VR — including your own fatigue after a comparatively brief session — to suggest how difficult the act of painting for hours (and months) on end must have been, while offering insights into the pacing and order of the works.

There are thousands of eye-melting VR experiences out there, and an equal number of dull “educational” ones. Il Divino succeeds because it’s hyper-realistic in a different way, using virtual reality to both simulate and go past the original experience, enabling a form of education that feels more open to personal exploration. It will be available for free later this year from SistineVR.com.

Cinema, group and individual

It wouldn’t be Siggraph without an exhibition of computer-generated movies, and the VR Theater at this year’s show is worth seeing. Fifty guests at a time are welcomed into the venue to see a collection of five different realtime CG shorts developed by separate studios, most notably including Disney’s happy cartoon A Kite’s Tale, Faber Courtial’s impressively realistic space odyssey 2nd Step, and Baobab’s charming interactive Bonfire. Below, Disney’s Bruce Wright welcomes early visitors to the VR Theater.

Once inside, viewers are seated in chairs with individual VR headsets, headphones, and two controllers, collectively experiencing the five shorts over a roughly one-hour session. A bank of high-end PCs sits in the center of the room, powering and synchronizing the experiences, though there’s little ongoing sense of collaboration between participants. Instead, it’s a VR theater where everyone’s watching pretty much the same thing, albeit from whatever angle a specific head is on, and — in some cases — with differences attributable to the shorts’ interactive elements.

In a smaller room elsewhere at Siggraph, New York-based Parallux is offering a more clearly shared experience. The company has developed a short story for group viewing that’s akin to watching a Broadway show with friends, but you could be watching it from anywhere.

Here, Parallux CEO Sebastian Herscher gestures towards a table surrounded by Magic Leap AR headsets, which seated viewers use to watch Mary and the Monster, a unique spin on Mary Shelley’s creation of the Frankenstein story. Strong voice acting and solid motion capture bring the animated experience to life within a diorama-like stage setting. Magic Leap wearers can use their controllers as magnifiers to zoom in on the individual actors, akin to opera glasses.

Each viewer sees the play-like performance appearing on the same table, and it’s synchronized across all of the headsets at once; it can also be watched using VR headsets, and can be scaled to fairly large local or remote audiences. This is a glimpse into what could be the future of plays, experienced holographically and from any seat in the house you prefer.

Apart from the examples above, most of the VR displays I saw at Siggraph were focused on individual experiences. One interesting exhibit, MIT Media Lab’s Deep Reality, used live heart rate, electrodermal, and brain activity monitoring to create an intensely personal relaxation and reflection experience. After someone lays down and dons a VR headset, Deep Reality uses “almost imperceptible light flickering, sound pulsations, and slow movements of underwater 3D creatures [to] reflect the internal state of the viewer.” Who wouldn’t love to kick back and relax to something so personally attenuated at home?

Next-generation AR eyewear

Two of Siggraph’s most notable hardware exhibits were Nvidia’s new prescription AR eyewear and foveated AR headset — both still in research stages, but available to test with prototypes. The prescription AR glasses offered a vision-corrected, see-through AR display solution, including a demo of how the lenses let viewers see optically sharp projections that appear to float within the real world.

In the prototype form, the glasses had small, clear ribbons that displayed projected virtual images such as colored bottles or an Nvidia logo in front of the lenses. They didn’t require cables, and were as lightweight as modern, inexpensive plastic glasses are today.

A separate demo showed off Nvidia’s work on a Foveated AR Display, which the company suggests will use gaze tracking to enable multi-layer depth in AR images. In the image below, you can see how a specific small gaze area tracked by the headset becomes sharper to your eye as the background becomes softer and less detailed.

Nvidia is touting the Foveated AR Display as a “dynamic fusion of foveal and peripheral display,” and releasing a research paper to accompany the project. It’s unclear when the technology will actually appear in a shipping product, but interesting to see Nvidia diving deeper into the AR world at this stage.

Next-generation haptics and immersion

Some of the other innovations at Siggraph are wild, if not crazy. For instance, Taipei Tech is showing off LiquidMask, a briefcase-sized face haptic solution that lets your face feel hot and cold liquid sensations in VR.

LiquidMask can deliver feedback and temperatures between 68 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, potentially useful for underwater VR experiences — assuming, of course, that you’re willing to hook yourself up to something as large as this to experience those sensations.

Another company was taking steps towards a very different type of future with a gigantic prosthetic tail — something that one wouldn’t have expected to find at Siggraph. The tail can be used to augment someone’s existing sense of balance with a third stabilizing limb, or disrupt their balance for exercise or other purposes.

The prototype tail uses pneumatics, relying on a separate cabled air tank for motion, so there’s no need to worry about an imminent attack by The Lizard or Doctor Octopus. If it can be made portable (and quiet), it might wind up being useful for people with physical disabilities or motor limitations.

More small steps for Magic Leap

Magic Leap is offering two main demos at Siggraph’s “experience” area. Long lines were forming to try Mica, a demo of the company’s AI assistant, which presently can’t do much. Mica looks like a pixie-haired human woman, and at some point, will supposedly be able to speak with and guide headset wearers.

In the demo, you can look at her as she looks back at you, then silently follow her gestures to make an artistic collage together. It’s not particularly exciting stuff at this stage, but in a world where digital assistants such as Siri can spend years delivering hit-and-miss experiences, Magic Leap may well beat Apple to delivering a more compelling, fully-formed alternative.

Magic Leap’s other new demo, Undersea, lets users interact with a nearly photorealistic coral reef that appears within any room you choose, and a picture-sized portal window into the ocean on the wall. In addition to letting you walk around and view a piece of coral and small collection of fish, the demo lets you hold out your hand to generate bubbles and hold a fish in your palm, albeit with so-so tracking.

While the Siggraph demo is designed for a two-minute experience (and isn’t especially compelling), a full version of Undersea with more settings and depth has just been released for Magic Leap users. Regardless of how many or few of the $2,300 Magic Leap headsets have been sold, it’s clear at Siggraph that the company is working to actively push the platform forward.

Best of the rest

One of Siggraph’s greatest strengths is the diversity of computer-generated art it brings into focus for attendees. You mightn’t love all of it, but even some of the most basic concepts are thought-provoking.

John Wong’s RuShi interactive art exhibit above uses your birthdate and birth hour to generate, through some unspecified mechanism, a moving and colorful AI-based data flow that is presented on the central screen while prior users’ data appears on adjacent screens. It’s supposed to make you consider the amount of data about you that’s already being processed by AI in the real world, and whether that processing has any value.

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

Last but not least, David Shorey’s booth demonstrated the use of 3D printers to create real-world physical clothes that looked like they were straight out of video games and fantasy settings, including dragon scale-like fabrics that could be used for cosplay. His techniques yielded an incredible collection of different textures, surface treatments, and end products that look set to merge the worlds of CG and real-world fashion.

The future’s already here

My biggest takeaway from Siggraph 2019 is that the CG future some of us were expecting a decade or more ago is already here — if you know where to look. VR and AR aren’t ubiquitous at this point, but it’s obvious from this show that there are lots of smart people working to evolve CG from its early 2D roots into genuinely immersive, interactive 3D.

Attendees could spend nearly a week at Siggraph without fully grasping everything that’s underway with huge companies such as Disney and tiny groups of researchers across the world. Scenes like the one below, where a group of people are all sharing a computer-generated entertainment experience in VR, have become table stakes for VR as of 2019.

The question is “where does it go from here,” and there’s not just one good answer. If anything, Siggraph shows how many directions CG is heading in, and the reason is simple: hugely talented and creative people are now heavily invested in the futures of these technologies. At this point, the challenge is to polish and spread their ideas to as many people as possible, bringing what’s currently in the Los Angeles Convention Center out to everyone’s homes and public spaces.

Credit: Source link

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[velmaemyers88]

Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

It’s hard to believe that the computer graphics conference Siggraph is celebrating its 46th birthday this year, but the annual event certainly doesn’t show any signs of middle age. Held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Siggraph 2019 is all about the future of 2D and 3D digital worlds, attracting everyone from luminaries in pre-rendered CG to budding AR developers and VR artists.

Siggraph’s exhibition area opens today, adding to educational sessions that have been in progress since this weekend, and an “experiences” area that opened yesterday. I had the opportunity to attend the show’s official media preview and go hands-on with a bunch of this year’s most exciting innovations; here’s a photo tour of some of the best things I saw and tried.

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

There’s no shortage of sophisticated mixed reality hardware at Siggraph, but I was most impressed by a piece of software that really demonstrated VR’s educational and experiential potential. Christopher Evans, Paul Huston, Wes Bunn, and Elijah Dixson exhibited Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR, an app that recreates the world-famous Sistine Chapel within the Unreal Engine, then lets you experience all of its artwork in ways that are impossible for tourists at the real site.

The app begins with a modestly impressive ground-level recreation of the Chapel. Epic’s Unreal Engine lets you see realistic marble barriers and ceramic floor tiles if you look closely, and you’ll have no trouble making out the individual paintings as you approach them, though you won’t confuse the faux wall curtains or other elements with reality. Even so, Il Divino’s developers provide an impressive audio and lightly visual guided tour through the space, making the most of an interface that’s largely about teleporting from place to place within a large box, and looking at art.

But everything changes when the app opens up access to a mechanical lifter and wooden scaffolding that elevate you to the Chapel’s ceiling. All of the sudden, you can control your up-close views of the paintings, and experience Michelangelo’s masterpiece Creation of Adam from the same perspective as the painter himself. The developers use VR — including your own fatigue after a comparatively brief session — to suggest how difficult the act of painting for hours (and months) on end must have been, while offering insights into the pacing and order of the works.

There are thousands of eye-melting VR experiences out there, and an equal number of dull “educational” ones. Il Divino succeeds because it’s hyper-realistic in a different way, using virtual reality to both simulate and go past the original experience, enabling a form of education that feels more open to personal exploration. It will be available for free later this year from SistineVR.com.

Cinema, group and individual

It wouldn’t be Siggraph without an exhibition of computer-generated movies, and the VR Theater at this year’s show is worth seeing. Fifty guests at a time are welcomed into the venue to see a collection of five different realtime CG shorts developed by separate studios, most notably including Disney’s happy cartoon A Kite’s Tale, Faber Courtial’s impressively realistic space odyssey 2nd Step, and Baobab’s charming interactive Bonfire. Below, Disney’s Bruce Wright welcomes early visitors to the VR Theater.

Once inside, viewers are seated in chairs with individual VR headsets, headphones, and two controllers, collectively experiencing the five shorts over a roughly one-hour session. A bank of high-end PCs sits in the center of the room, powering and synchronizing the experiences, though there’s little ongoing sense of collaboration between participants. Instead, it’s a VR theater where everyone’s watching pretty much the same thing, albeit from whatever angle a specific head is on, and — in some cases — with differences attributable to the shorts’ interactive elements.

In a smaller room elsewhere at Siggraph, New York-based Parallux is offering a more clearly shared experience. The company has developed a short story for group viewing that’s akin to watching a Broadway show with friends, but you could be watching it from anywhere.

Here, Parallux CEO Sebastian Herscher gestures towards a table surrounded by Magic Leap AR headsets, which seated viewers use to watch Mary and the Monster, a unique spin on Mary Shelley’s creation of the Frankenstein story. Strong voice acting and solid motion capture bring the animated experience to life within a diorama-like stage setting. Magic Leap wearers can use their controllers as magnifiers to zoom in on the individual actors, akin to opera glasses.

Each viewer sees the play-like performance appearing on the same table, and it’s synchronized across all of the headsets at once; it can also be watched using VR headsets, and can be scaled to fairly large local or remote audiences. This is a glimpse into what could be the future of plays, experienced holographically and from any seat in the house you prefer.

Apart from the examples above, most of the VR displays I saw at Siggraph were focused on individual experiences. One interesting exhibit, MIT Media Lab’s Deep Reality, used live heart rate, electrodermal, and brain activity monitoring to create an intensely personal relaxation and reflection experience. After someone lays down and dons a VR headset, Deep Reality uses “almost imperceptible light flickering, sound pulsations, and slow movements of underwater 3D creatures [to] reflect the internal state of the viewer.” Who wouldn’t love to kick back and relax to something so personally attenuated at home?

Next-generation AR eyewear

Two of Siggraph’s most notable hardware exhibits were Nvidia’s new prescription AR eyewear and foveated AR headset — both still in research stages, but available to test with prototypes. The prescription AR glasses offered a vision-corrected, see-through AR display solution, including a demo of how the lenses let viewers see optically sharp projections that appear to float within the real world.

In the prototype form, the glasses had small, clear ribbons that displayed projected virtual images such as colored bottles or an Nvidia logo in front of the lenses. They didn’t require cables, and were as lightweight as modern, inexpensive plastic glasses are today.

A separate demo showed off Nvidia’s work on a Foveated AR Display, which the company suggests will use gaze tracking to enable multi-layer depth in AR images. In the image below, you can see how a specific small gaze area tracked by the headset becomes sharper to your eye as the background becomes softer and less detailed.

Nvidia is touting the Foveated AR Display as a “dynamic fusion of foveal and peripheral display,” and releasing a research paper to accompany the project. It’s unclear when the technology will actually appear in a shipping product, but interesting to see Nvidia diving deeper into the AR world at this stage.

Next-generation haptics and immersion

Some of the other innovations at Siggraph are wild, if not crazy. For instance, Taipei Tech is showing off LiquidMask, a briefcase-sized face haptic solution that lets your face feel hot and cold liquid sensations in VR.

LiquidMask can deliver feedback and temperatures between 68 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, potentially useful for underwater VR experiences — assuming, of course, that you’re willing to hook yourself up to something as large as this to experience those sensations.

Another company was taking steps towards a very different type of future with a gigantic prosthetic tail — something that one wouldn’t have expected to find at Siggraph. The tail can be used to augment someone’s existing sense of balance with a third stabilizing limb, or disrupt their balance for exercise or other purposes.

The prototype tail uses pneumatics, relying on a separate cabled air tank for motion, so there’s no need to worry about an imminent attack by The Lizard or Doctor Octopus. If it can be made portable (and quiet), it might wind up being useful for people with physical disabilities or motor limitations.

More small steps for Magic Leap

Magic Leap is offering two main demos at Siggraph’s “experience” area. Long lines were forming to try Mica, a demo of the company’s AI assistant, which presently can’t do much. Mica looks like a pixie-haired human woman, and at some point, will supposedly be able to speak with and guide headset wearers.

In the demo, you can look at her as she looks back at you, then silently follow her gestures to make an artistic collage together. It’s not particularly exciting stuff at this stage, but in a world where digital assistants such as Siri can spend years delivering hit-and-miss experiences, Magic Leap may well beat Apple to delivering a more compelling, fully-formed alternative.

Magic Leap’s other new demo, Undersea, lets users interact with a nearly photorealistic coral reef that appears within any room you choose, and a picture-sized portal window into the ocean on the wall. In addition to letting you walk around and view a piece of coral and small collection of fish, the demo lets you hold out your hand to generate bubbles and hold a fish in your palm, albeit with so-so tracking.

While the Siggraph demo is designed for a two-minute experience (and isn’t especially compelling), a full version of Undersea with more settings and depth has just been released for Magic Leap users. Regardless of how many or few of the $2,300 Magic Leap headsets have been sold, it’s clear at Siggraph that the company is working to actively push the platform forward.

Best of the rest

One of Siggraph’s greatest strengths is the diversity of computer-generated art it brings into focus for attendees. You mightn’t love all of it, but even some of the most basic concepts are thought-provoking.

John Wong’s RuShi interactive art exhibit above uses your birthdate and birth hour to generate, through some unspecified mechanism, a moving and colorful AI-based data flow that is presented on the central screen while prior users’ data appears on adjacent screens. It’s supposed to make you consider the amount of data about you that’s already being processed by AI in the real world, and whether that processing has any value.

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

Last but not least, David Shorey’s booth demonstrated the use of 3D printers to create real-world physical clothes that looked like they were straight out of video games and fantasy settings, including dragon scale-like fabrics that could be used for cosplay. His techniques yielded an incredible collection of different textures, surface treatments, and end products that look set to merge the worlds of CG and real-world fashion.

The future’s already here

My biggest takeaway from Siggraph 2019 is that the CG future some of us were expecting a decade or more ago is already here — if you know where to look. VR and AR aren’t ubiquitous at this point, but it’s obvious from this show that there are lots of smart people working to evolve CG from its early 2D roots into genuinely immersive, interactive 3D.

Attendees could spend nearly a week at Siggraph without fully grasping everything that’s underway with huge companies such as Disney and tiny groups of researchers across the world. Scenes like the one below, where a group of people are all sharing a computer-generated entertainment experience in VR, have become table stakes for VR as of 2019.

The question is “where does it go from here,” and there’s not just one good answer. If anything, Siggraph shows how many directions CG is heading in, and the reason is simple: hugely talented and creative people are now heavily invested in the futures of these technologies. At this point, the challenge is to polish and spread their ideas to as many people as possible, bringing what’s currently in the Los Angeles Convention Center out to everyone’s homes and public spaces.

Credit: Source link

The post Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/siggraph-2019-offers-a-sneak-peek-into-whats-next-for-ar-vr-and-cg/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=siggraph-2019-offers-a-sneak-peek-into-whats-next-for-ar-vr-and-cg from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186656747342

[weeklyreviewer]

Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

It’s hard to believe that the computer graphics conference Siggraph is celebrating its 46th birthday this year, but the annual event certainly doesn’t show any signs of middle age. Held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Siggraph 2019 is all about the future of 2D and 3D digital worlds, attracting everyone from luminaries in pre-rendered CG to budding AR developers and VR artists.

Siggraph’s exhibition area opens today, adding to educational sessions that have been in progress since this weekend, and an “experiences” area that opened yesterday. I had the opportunity to attend the show’s official media preview and go hands-on with a bunch of this year’s most exciting innovations; here’s a photo tour of some of the best things I saw and tried.

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

There’s no shortage of sophisticated mixed reality hardware at Siggraph, but I was most impressed by a piece of software that really demonstrated VR’s educational and experiential potential. Christopher Evans, Paul Huston, Wes Bunn, and Elijah Dixson exhibited Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR, an app that recreates the world-famous Sistine Chapel within the Unreal Engine, then lets you experience all of its artwork in ways that are impossible for tourists at the real site.

The app begins with a modestly impressive ground-level recreation of the Chapel. Epic’s Unreal Engine lets you see realistic marble barriers and ceramic floor tiles if you look closely, and you’ll have no trouble making out the individual paintings as you approach them, though you won’t confuse the faux wall curtains or other elements with reality. Even so, Il Divino’s developers provide an impressive audio and lightly visual guided tour through the space, making the most of an interface that’s largely about teleporting from place to place within a large box, and looking at art.

But everything changes when the app opens up access to a mechanical lifter and wooden scaffolding that elevate you to the Chapel’s ceiling. All of the sudden, you can control your up-close views of the paintings, and experience Michelangelo’s masterpiece Creation of Adam from the same perspective as the painter himself. The developers use VR — including your own fatigue after a comparatively brief session — to suggest how difficult the act of painting for hours (and months) on end must have been, while offering insights into the pacing and order of the works.

There are thousands of eye-melting VR experiences out there, and an equal number of dull “educational” ones. Il Divino succeeds because it’s hyper-realistic in a different way, using virtual reality to both simulate and go past the original experience, enabling a form of education that feels more open to personal exploration. It will be available for free later this year from SistineVR.com.

Cinema, group and individual

It wouldn’t be Siggraph without an exhibition of computer-generated movies, and the VR Theater at this year’s show is worth seeing. Fifty guests at a time are welcomed into the venue to see a collection of five different realtime CG shorts developed by separate studios, most notably including Disney’s happy cartoon A Kite’s Tale, Faber Courtial’s impressively realistic space odyssey 2nd Step, and Baobab’s charming interactive Bonfire. Below, Disney’s Bruce Wright welcomes early visitors to the VR Theater.

Once inside, viewers are seated in chairs with individual VR headsets, headphones, and two controllers, collectively experiencing the five shorts over a roughly one-hour session. A bank of high-end PCs sits in the center of the room, powering and synchronizing the experiences, though there’s little ongoing sense of collaboration between participants. Instead, it’s a VR theater where everyone’s watching pretty much the same thing, albeit from whatever angle a specific head is on, and — in some cases — with differences attributable to the shorts’ interactive elements.

In a smaller room elsewhere at Siggraph, New York-based Parallux is offering a more clearly shared experience. The company has developed a short story for group viewing that’s akin to watching a Broadway show with friends, but you could be watching it from anywhere.

Here, Parallux CEO Sebastian Herscher gestures towards a table surrounded by Magic Leap AR headsets, which seated viewers use to watch Mary and the Monster, a unique spin on Mary Shelley’s creation of the Frankenstein story. Strong voice acting and solid motion capture bring the animated experience to life within a diorama-like stage setting. Magic Leap wearers can use their controllers as magnifiers to zoom in on the individual actors, akin to opera glasses.

Each viewer sees the play-like performance appearing on the same table, and it’s synchronized across all of the headsets at once; it can also be watched using VR headsets, and can be scaled to fairly large local or remote audiences. This is a glimpse into what could be the future of plays, experienced holographically and from any seat in the house you prefer.

Apart from the examples above, most of the VR displays I saw at Siggraph were focused on individual experiences. One interesting exhibit, MIT Media Lab’s Deep Reality, used live heart rate, electrodermal, and brain activity monitoring to create an intensely personal relaxation and reflection experience. After someone lays down and dons a VR headset, Deep Reality uses “almost imperceptible light flickering, sound pulsations, and slow movements of underwater 3D creatures [to] reflect the internal state of the viewer.” Who wouldn’t love to kick back and relax to something so personally attenuated at home?

Next-generation AR eyewear

Two of Siggraph’s most notable hardware exhibits were Nvidia’s new prescription AR eyewear and foveated AR headset — both still in research stages, but available to test with prototypes. The prescription AR glasses offered a vision-corrected, see-through AR display solution, including a demo of how the lenses let viewers see optically sharp projections that appear to float within the real world.

In the prototype form, the glasses had small, clear ribbons that displayed projected virtual images such as colored bottles or an Nvidia logo in front of the lenses. They didn’t require cables, and were as lightweight as modern, inexpensive plastic glasses are today.

A separate demo showed off Nvidia’s work on a Foveated AR Display, which the company suggests will use gaze tracking to enable multi-layer depth in AR images. In the image below, you can see how a specific small gaze area tracked by the headset becomes sharper to your eye as the background becomes softer and less detailed.

Nvidia is touting the Foveated AR Display as a “dynamic fusion of foveal and peripheral display,” and releasing a research paper to accompany the project. It’s unclear when the technology will actually appear in a shipping product, but interesting to see Nvidia diving deeper into the AR world at this stage.

Next-generation haptics and immersion

Some of the other innovations at Siggraph are wild, if not crazy. For instance, Taipei Tech is showing off LiquidMask, a briefcase-sized face haptic solution that lets your face feel hot and cold liquid sensations in VR.

LiquidMask can deliver feedback and temperatures between 68 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, potentially useful for underwater VR experiences — assuming, of course, that you’re willing to hook yourself up to something as large as this to experience those sensations.

Another company was taking steps towards a very different type of future with a gigantic prosthetic tail — something that one wouldn’t have expected to find at Siggraph. The tail can be used to augment someone’s existing sense of balance with a third stabilizing limb, or disrupt their balance for exercise or other purposes.

The prototype tail uses pneumatics, relying on a separate cabled air tank for motion, so there’s no need to worry about an imminent attack by The Lizard or Doctor Octopus. If it can be made portable (and quiet), it might wind up being useful for people with physical disabilities or motor limitations.

More small steps for Magic Leap

Magic Leap is offering two main demos at Siggraph’s “experience” area. Long lines were forming to try Mica, a demo of the company’s AI assistant, which presently can’t do much. Mica looks like a pixie-haired human woman, and at some point, will supposedly be able to speak with and guide headset wearers.

In the demo, you can look at her as she looks back at you, then silently follow her gestures to make an artistic collage together. It’s not particularly exciting stuff at this stage, but in a world where digital assistants such as Siri can spend years delivering hit-and-miss experiences, Magic Leap may well beat Apple to delivering a more compelling, fully-formed alternative.

Magic Leap’s other new demo, Undersea, lets users interact with a nearly photorealistic coral reef that appears within any room you choose, and a picture-sized portal window into the ocean on the wall. In addition to letting you walk around and view a piece of coral and small collection of fish, the demo lets you hold out your hand to generate bubbles and hold a fish in your palm, albeit with so-so tracking.

While the Siggraph demo is designed for a two-minute experience (and isn’t especially compelling), a full version of Undersea with more settings and depth has just been released for Magic Leap users. Regardless of how many or few of the $2,300 Magic Leap headsets have been sold, it’s clear at Siggraph that the company is working to actively push the platform forward.

Best of the rest

One of Siggraph’s greatest strengths is the diversity of computer-generated art it brings into focus for attendees. You mightn’t love all of it, but even some of the most basic concepts are thought-provoking.

John Wong’s RuShi interactive art exhibit above uses your birthdate and birth hour to generate, through some unspecified mechanism, a moving and colorful AI-based data flow that is presented on the central screen while prior users’ data appears on adjacent screens. It’s supposed to make you consider the amount of data about you that’s already being processed by AI in the real world, and whether that processing has any value.

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

Last but not least, David Shorey’s booth demonstrated the use of 3D printers to create real-world physical clothes that looked like they were straight out of video games and fantasy settings, including dragon scale-like fabrics that could be used for cosplay. His techniques yielded an incredible collection of different textures, surface treatments, and end products that look set to merge the worlds of CG and real-world fashion.

The future’s already here

My biggest takeaway from Siggraph 2019 is that the CG future some of us were expecting a decade or more ago is already here — if you know where to look. VR and AR aren’t ubiquitous at this point, but it’s obvious from this show that there are lots of smart people working to evolve CG from its early 2D roots into genuinely immersive, interactive 3D.

Attendees could spend nearly a week at Siggraph without fully grasping everything that’s underway with huge companies such as Disney and tiny groups of researchers across the world. Scenes like the one below, where a group of people are all sharing a computer-generated entertainment experience in VR, have become table stakes for VR as of 2019.

The question is “where does it go from here,” and there’s not just one good answer. If anything, Siggraph shows how many directions CG is heading in, and the reason is simple: hugely talented and creative people are now heavily invested in the futures of these technologies. At this point, the challenge is to polish and spread their ideas to as many people as possible, bringing what’s currently in the Los Angeles Convention Center out to everyone’s homes and public spaces.

Credit: Source link

The post Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/siggraph-2019-offers-a-sneak-peek-into-whats-next-for-ar-vr-and-cg/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=siggraph-2019-offers-a-sneak-peek-into-whats-next-for-ar-vr-and-cg

[aion-rsa]

The Matrix 4 “Describes the Next 20 Years of Digital Life”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Even after the trippy and action-packed trailer dropped our first look at this new era of The Matrix, the fourth installment in the cyberpunk film franchise remains an unsolvable puzzle box. We certainly tried to decode the trailer for answers in our breakdown and analysis, but there’s so much that remains a mystery. How are Neo and Trinity back from the dead? Is this supposed to be a new version of the Matrix? Was Zion just another simulation all along? Why is there a new, younger Morpheus?

While director and co-writer Lana Wachowski isn’t giving away any of the answers, she did join fellow Matrix Resurrections writers Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell at a panel at the Berlin International Literature Festival to share what it’s been like returning to this beloved universe after so many years. And one of the best insights from Wachowski gives us a clue as to the themes and messages the new movie is set to tackle.

Wachowski revealed that star Keanu Reeves, who reprises his role as Neo, had a very interesting reaction after watching The Matrix Resurrections, one that hints at how the sequel rhymes with the original trilogy but also pushes the franchise forward.

“We showed the film to Keanu, and he really was blown away by it, and he said something that was typically Keanu, where it’s incredibly insightful,” Wachowski said. “He’s just sort of sitting there, and you don’t expect some incredible revelation to come out of him at that moment, like casual brilliance just kind of rolls off of Keanu. And he was just sitting there, and he goes, ‘Twenty years ago you told a story in which you described the coming twenty years and the problems of the nature of digital, virtual life and how it was going to impact us and how we think about it, and gave us a frame to be able to think about it and talk about it. And you took the same character and the same stories and the same stuff, and somehow you made it about the next twenty years.’ And he was like, ‘How did you do that?'”

Indeed, when it premiered in theaters in 1999, The Matrix was hailed as an innovative and forward-thinking cinematic revelation, not just for its advances in filming techniques but for the way it imagined the future of the internet as a digital space where people could have a life completely separate from the real world. Just look at the “residual self image” (or avatars) we create for ourselves on Twitter, Reddit, and/or Instagram today, or how these days things that are born on the internet can seem as real (or more real) to some users than those happening in the real world. The Wachowskis created The Matrix to discuss, among many other things, the way the internet could be one day used as a way to distort reality. It’s pretty clear now that they weren’t far off about the late 2010s/early 2020s…

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

But how have Lana Wachowoski, Hemon, and Mitchell updated this social commentary to tackle what the digital world might look like in the 2040s? The trailer for The Matrix Resurrections seems to look inwards, at reflections in mirrors that are slightly off, at the possibility of simulations inside of simulations, at an overly medicated central hero. Clearly, for these writers, things are only going to get more dystopian. If I had to guess from the context clues in the trailer, the movie seems to be getting at the way living an increasing amount of time plugged into a fantasy digital world will create a bigger disconnect within ourselves, creating a deeper crisis of identity between what humanity experiences digitally and in the real world, especially as tech companies figure out new ways to keep us consuming and engaging with more content online. It’s likely no accident that an evil tech corporation known as “Deus Ex Machina” seems to be the central villain of the movie.

You can watch the full panel below:

Wachowski also described the way returning to The Matrix helped her grieve the death of her parents, saying it was a healing experience for her.

“My brain has always reached into my imagination and one night, I was crying and I couldn’t sleep, and my brain exploded this whole story,” Wachowski said. “And I couldn’t have my mom and dad, yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life.

“It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again, and it’s super simple. You can look at it and say, ‘Okay, these two people die and okay, bring these two people back to life and oh, doesn’t that feel good?’ Yeah, it did! It’s simple, and this is what art does and that’s what stories do, they comfort us.”

The Matrix Resurrections opens on Dec. 22 in theaters and on HBO Max.

The post The Matrix 4 “Describes the Next 20 Years of Digital Life” appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[collaborativeprojectjwba3a]

Reflective Journal

Week 1

This week saw the beginning of character creation. I decided to start off with making the stuffed Bear as it should be much easier to create than either of the humanoid characters or the monster. I worked on developing its appearance by comparing stuffed bears from different eras and of different styles and determining which would work best in terms of animation. I wanted something that could suitably deform and be posed in ways that wouldn’t look unusual or impossible for the model. I settled on something that looks quite similar to the design from the original artwork as a lot of older designs featured more rigid skeletons and some more recent ones have heavily exaggerated body features (massive heads - little body) that wouldn’t look right in motion.

Week 2

I went straight into modelling the Bear this week. Working with Maya I have learned there is quite a sharp learning curve and I don’t want to have all my character designs finalised only to find they’re impractical to create and require further work in order to function. In conjunction with modelling the Bear I have been watching and reading various guides/tutorials on modelling for animation. Modelling characters is relatively new to me, in the past I’ve either used pre-existing character rigs or utilised MakeHuman to speed up the modelling process, often to ill effect.

Week 3

A continuation of modelling this week. At this stage I feel confident in taking my time with this. In my experience with Maya I am well versed with the compounding effect of doing something wrong/poorly and ignoring it only for its negative impact to be felt much worse later on. The Bear is simplistic by design and shouldn’t cause too many issues (it’s the humanoid characters that pose the greatest hurdle). However getting a good understanding of this now should only serve to benefit me later. Research into good modelling techniques continues and I’ve acquired more books on Anatomy for Art, Topology, Faces for Animation, Rigging and Sculpting, there is a mix of information that is both a bit simple for where I am at in my understanding of Maya as well stuff that is a bit beyond my current level, but I am finding it useful.

Week 4

Now satisfied with my Bear model I moved onto texturing. Texturing I have the least experience with (which showed greatly in my last project) but I am making an effort to get a better understanding of UV Mapping, the tools associated with it and the techniques that go into creating it. However I think I made a mistake in doing this before Rigging. Applying textures to my model has allowed me to see flaws in its geometry that I had not seen previously and address them, which subsequently meant retexturing it. Once I start rigging having the freedom to alter the model to ensure the best possible deformity means foregoing the textures. Now I’m going to have to retexture once I’ve rigged or avoid changing the model. Obviously the former is better in the long run and at least I’ve learnt for future endeavours.

Week 5

I’ve decided on the textures I want for the Bear, now it’s a matter of whether or not the rig will require me to change it, but so far so good. The rig for the bear is simple as complex movement isn’t necessary. Since the Bear is stuffed and doesn’t technically have joints I’m not bothering with IK Handles. When the Bear is limp the arms and legs should hang which means the elbows and knees should be able to bend the other way. It makes posing more time consuming but not impossible. As the Bear will mostly be inanimate for the duration of the film it’s more important that it looks good then. Rigging has been an on going process for me as it is something I have a lot of experience doing I’m just not particuarly good at it. That said I do enjoy it. The more technical, problem solving aspect is a nice break from drawing and modelling, which do have a level of technicality to them just not to the same degree as rigging. As per usual I’ve been doing research into rigs, watching tutorials and deferring to the few books I have on it to inform my process. Since the Bear Rig is simple by design I haven’t had too much trouble with it, once I weight paint it will show any real issues but for now the standard deformation is good if unrefined. I was also able to get the Blendshapes done this week. They’re very simple with all the expression in the eyes, rather than subdividing all of the emotions into smaller movements I just did it eye for eye. The Bear doesn’t need to express complex emotions so it’s limited to the most basic ones. The props for the Bear were also completed this week. They were very quick to model and texture, as far as rigging does it’s just a matter of posing them correctly which shouldn’t be too difficult.

Week 6

With the Bear more or less finished I moved onto designing the Father character. I have a lot of books on character drawing and anatomy which I purchased during previous years and a couple this year and has informed a lot of my drawing work over the past three years. The Fathers original design was based on some anatomy work I’ve done in the past drawing simple male body forms. I started with a more muscle figure and refined it into something a bit lankier as it was a better fit for the temperament of the character. The face was designed loosely off my own face as it was the easiest to reference, I tried to cartoonise it for a more stylised look than what I typically do. Hopefully this should all make rigging and facial animation far better and less uncanny valley.

Week 7

Modelling began this week and I picked up my research into topology for animation. Previous research had been geared towards more simplistic characters as well as covering some more basic stuff, I’ve now started delving into more complex stuff in an effort to get better results. So far I’m really happy with the work I’ve produced and am moving towards finalising the Mesh so I can begin rigging, blendshapes and finally texturing.

Week 8

With the geometry now complete I can look forward to making the rig. I am pleased with how it turned out particularly the head. There are some flaws and my process was a bit sloppy but that’s something that will improve over time. For now though it turned out better than I had expected and am hoping the rigging process doesn’t prove problematic or force me to make too many changes to the mesh.

Week 9

I created the Blendshapes for the Father this week. I’m holding off on rigging until I feel a bit more confident with my understanding of how I intend to do it. The Blendshapes are numerous and should cover enough micro-expressions to get every emotion I need to convey, I even accounted for some I know I don’t need incase the story elements change. Some of them look good, others I’m not so sure on. This has been on ongoing problem with Blendshapes and I but I’ve always put it down to the model itself being the issues.

Week 10

Holding off on the rigging, I began on creating the Daughter. In a similar vein as before I used an anatomical adult female as reference for the initial drawing which was refined and then scaled using a child as reference for the scaled down proportions. I then scaled up the head size and eyes while scaling the mouth and nose down to make her seem younger and more innocent. I’m a bit uncertain with how the face looks but that might just be my attempts at drawing a head I’m envision as 3D and trying to accurately represent it as 2D.

Week 11

I modelled the Daughter this week and am ecstatic with how it turned out. I was able to do it much quicker than previously by just streamlining the process now I’m more adept at it. A lot of the mistakes I made previously were avoided and the end result shows it. As always improvements can be made but I’m definitely more confident with this kind of work now.

Week 12

I’ve gone straight into creating the Blendshapes as the head is unlikely to change. I made even more this time around as her expressions are more vital than the fathers and it’s important I have enough versatility to get it all right when needed. Reaching a point of confidence I’ve rigged her too. Much like the Bear her Rig is on the simpler side as she does not move much. I’ve mostly just been testing the Key poses I know I need to ensure everything looks good.

Week 13

Having more or less finished work on the daughter and feeling all the more confident in my ability for it I returned to the Father character to get his rig done. It became apparent straight away that his geometry was sub-par. I remember being happy with it at the time but now having worked on the Daughter I’m not so sure. It may have been that I was working on him for so long that I became blind to the problems and that spending time away from it working on something else allowed me to see it through fresh eyes. Or it was the shear superiority of the Daughters mesh that made my improvement all the more obvious to me. Either way there is a clear disparity between them and I felt compelled to try and fix it. The advice given at the start of my first year was that if it goes wrong digital work is disposable, throw it away and start again. I debated this extensively as starting over would almost certainly net me a better mesh which would benefit me going forward. However at this point I’m closing in towards the end and I’m consciences of Submission. The Render Service that is being tested would mean I don’t have to worry about leaving enough time to Render so I could spend more time doing other things, which could be remodelling. With all that considered, I elected to spend the week working on the mesh, particularly the head, to try and improve it to a comparable level of the daughter. While improvements were made it’s still not quite up to par, but I can’t spend more time on it and need to just move on.

Week 14

This week I alternated between Weight Painting the existing meshes and developing the Set. The Weight Painting has been pretty straight forward but monotonous, I watched a few tutorials on it that covered some complex stuff and found it to be a bit beyond what I needed. I just need good deformation without any glaring issues which is easier said than done. Now more than before I’m noticing where the geometry is lacking in terms of vertices I can utilise. It’s important that I get to the point where I can start animating so I’m not going to worry with overcomplicating things and just work with what I’ve got.      The Set has been straightforward enough. I’ve made a standard room and given it enough furniture to convey what it is meant to be. It could use more details to make it a bit more natural and look less like a set but other than that it’s good for what it is.

Week 15

Continuation of Weight Painting has seen some issues arise but after some troubleshooting and swearing I’ve been able to resolve nearly all of them, some required more work than others and I may of had to repaint an entire model but it’s all good now. The set has been duplicated and altered for each camera angle so it doesn’t get in the way of any shots. I’ve tested the scaling and it’s all good so now it’s just a matter of getting the blocking all done so I can move on with Animation.

Week 16

I was able to block out the entire animation this week. I had some issues in doing so, most notably the entire animation was Splined, meaning all movements have ease-in, ease-out and transition fluidly from one position to the next. This isn’t even remotely ideal as it means there is a lot of unwanted movement that has to be removed as it will get exemplified when I add in more key frames. It shouldn’t have done this to begin with as it was set to Linear Tangents but right now I don’t have time to sort it out so I’m just going to work with it. I’ve also noticed issues with weight painting in some niche cases so I keep going back and forth between the scene and the referenced files fixing out of place weighting. With the Deadline looming nearer and mistakes popping up left and right it’s more about fixing what I can and just working through everything else so that I can stay on schedule. To that end certain issues with characters won’t be resolved and as such a lot of the camera work has been changed to show the Father as little as possible. If he’s in frame it’s either at a distance or the edge of it as an over-the-shoulder shot. Also at this point its very clear I won’t have time to make the monster so I’m cutting the animation short. It should still tell a complete story just not exactly the one I wanted.

Week 17

I went through and cleaned up a lot of the animation work, issues with clipping should be resolved and most of the easing should be gone. I still need to work on pacing and timing of certain motions, it’s still a bit robotic and some moments are needlessly quick. I also had to go through and fix some more weight painting issues with the characters, some of it’s not going to get better but I can at least make it less obvious. The book needed more blendshapes as it was a bit too noticeable when it was messing up, ideally it would be rigged but there isn’t the time for that now. 

Week 18

I am very much a perfectionist when it comes to most things. I like everything to be exactly how I envision it and am wholly disappointed when it’s not. Something I’ve been learning over the years is to accept that not everything can be as I want it to be and to not be so disappointed when it inevitably isn’t perfect. I am far better at that now than I have ever been. There are lots of flaws with this project and things that aren’t how I wanted them to be but I’m not upset by that. A lot of what I have done is far better than I could do last year or even 6 months ago and it will invariably be even better 6 months from now. There is a week left till submission and not much will change from here. The work has been submitted to Render though there are issues with it rendering in Arnold which is beyond my control at this point so I will just have to take it as it is. All I can do now is get everything else ready for Submission and potentially work on this afterwards to try and get a bit closer to my desired outcome.

Week 19

This week has mostly consisted of compiling everything while I waited to see the results of my Render Submission. It’s probably one of my least stressful submission weeks of the three years as I’m not having to Animate + Render + Compile everything all while none of it’s finished and I hate it all. Most things have been done just not arranged in a neat and tidy way suitable for submission.

That being said the results of my Render Submission weren’t promising. There was an issue with the Render Service rendering in Arnold that was resulting in all of the frames being covered in Watermarks and even covered in Watermarks it still hadn’t finished rendering. Having spoken with the technician, we attempted to better optimise my scenes for faster renders without losing too much quality. We didn’t make much progress. Instead we systematically went through each material/texture and changed it to VRay as the Render Service had no issue with VRay renders and it could be better optimised. Once that was complete it was submitted to Render again. There is a noticeable difference in quality between my Test Arnold Renders and the VRay render. Some of the materials couldn’t be accurately transferred across and as such look different. The biggest problem however came with “Scene Six” which either encountered errors during the rendering process, or was unfinished when I came to collect it. Furthermore it appears there was an issue with the visibility of some of the layers that meant multiple objects were rendered on top of one another resulting in some horrendous clipping. My intent was to fix the scene and Render it again but a reoccurring issue I’ve been having is that whenever I open the Scene it has to relocate the Reference files, when I try to redirect it to the right file it instantly closes the File Directory window and moves to the Next reference doing the exact same thing. Meaning I can’t open the file as it deletes all my Characters and Props from the scene and I can’t stop it from doing it. I have a lot of work still to do for other projects so it’s difficult to justify using up a whole day going in to Uni to render around 200 Frames. Since much else of the Animation is unfinished I don’t take mush issue with submitting as is. My plan has always been to continue working on it post-submission in order to get it ready for the Degree show.

[phooll123]

Always-connected Windows

 laptops show promise but still 

need work

Laptops with built-in cellular connections are poised to be an actual thing for consumers this year, after years of being only available to business customers. One of the biggest pushes for these connected PCs is from Qualcomm, which has been touting its Snapdragon platform as the future of mobile laptop computing. Windows on Snapdragon computers, which run on Qualcomm’s smartphone processors and modems, are finally making their way to store shelves this spring.

The Windows on Snapdragon platform does more than just provide an integrated cellular modem that frees you from having to rely on Wi-Fi. It’s a complete change to the core structure of Windows that allows it to run on processors originally designed for smartphones. Alongside that major architectural change come a number of benefits aside from integrated connectivity, including instant resume from sleep, significantly longer battery life, and quiet, cool machines. Basically, the new platform makes laptops work like how we’re used to smartphones working: instantly, quietly, and efficiently.

Microsoft tried and failed at this idea before

Of course, this idea has been tried before, and Microsoft has some significant failures (*cough* Windows RT *cough*) in its history that promised many of the same things. Qualcomm and Microsoft argue that this time around, things will be different, as processors are much more powerful and Windows on Snapdragon is not limited to just a handful of apps.

To get an idea of how this new platform works and how it’s different from the standard Windows 10 that’s available on hundreds of millions of devices already, I’ve been using one of the first Windows on Snapdragon PCs to arrive: Asus’ NovaGo convertible. Asus plans to sell the NovaGo in the US starting on May 1st for $599, which includes 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

The model I’ve been using won’t be sold in the US and has more RAM and storage than what we’ll be able to buy, so this isn’t a review of the device itself, but more of a look at how the platform that will run on various devices from HP, Lenovo, and others. (TL;DR on the machine: it’s a clunker of a convertible, with a dated design, no USB-C ports, and mediocre everything else — basically, what you’d expect from a $600 laptop.) I’ve been using the NovaGo as my primary computer to see how it can hold up to my daily workflow, what apps I can install and use on it, and how well those battery life claims hold up. While the experience wasn’t as bad as Windows RT or other earlier efforts, it still hasn’t sold me on the platform.

The first thing that struck me about using the Always Connected PC was just how little was different from the Windows 10 on every other laptop or computer I’ve used. The interface is the same; performance when switching virtual desktops, swiping through apps, using gestures on the trackpad, and interacting with the touchscreen are all the same, too. 

Fluid animations are certainly not a given, especially since this computer is running a tiny smartphone chip, but I’m happy to report they work as well here as on any other Windows laptop I’ve used.

Most modern apps, especially those downloaded from the Microsoft Store or preinstalled on the machine, opened swiftly, with little discernible difference between how they work on Intel-based computers. However, other apps were much more sluggish on the Snapdragon computer, leading to a frustrating experience (more on app stuff in a bit).

Since the processor in this computer is the same Snapdragon 835 chip found in countless Android smartphones last year, there are no fans necessary. The NovaGo is a dead silent machine, yet it remains cool under load.

Just as I recently found with Microsoft’s Surface Pro LTE, having an always-available LTE connection in my computer is fantastic. I don’t need to rely on sketchy public Wi-Fi, nor do I need to hassle with tethering my smartphone to get online. I tested the NovaGo with T-Mobile service, and it performed similarly to T-Mobile smartphones in my area. In addition, when the lid is closed and the laptop is in standby, it still maintains its connection to receive emails and other updates, just like a smartphone. I want this in every computer I use, even if I have to pony up for an unlimited data plan to use it.

Resuming the Windows on Snapdragon PC from sleep is similar to waking up a smartphone: you just hit the power button, and it’s ready to go. A cold boot takes a similar amount of time as an Intel computer, but I never felt the need to shut down the computer entirely, so I rarely encountered that.

Qualcomm boasts tremendous battery life from these Windows on Snapdragon PCs, and this particular model lasts quite a long time between charges. It doesn’t come close to the 20 or 24 hours that Qualcomm claims, but in my real-world usage, I’m averaging about 11 or 12 hours per charge. That’s a lot better than I typically see from a light and portable ultrabook, and significantly longer than the six or seven hours I get on the Surface Pro LTE.

It’s possible to download and install the Chrome browser on Snapdragon PCs (presuming you flip the switch from the out-of-box Windows 10 S mode to Windows 10 Pro, as was done on this computer), but you probably won’t want to. Performance in Chrome is rather bad, with sluggish load times, stuttery scrolling, and slow transfers between tabs. You’ll have a much better time sticking with Microsoft’s Edge browser, but that brings its own issues, namely poor compatibility with certain websites and a tendency to get overwhelmed after a few hours of use, requiring a restart of the browser.

The Chrome issues extend to web-wrapper or Electron-based apps, such as Slack, which have abysmal and frustrating performance. I ended up using Slack in a tab within the Edge browser, which performed much better than the Slack app downloaded from the Microsoft Store.

Windows on Snapdragon is a 32-bit platform, which means that any 64-bit (x64, in Microsoft parlance) apps will fail to install or run on it. As a result, a lot of more recent tools and utilities just can’t be used on this system, and I quickly ran into issues when my preferred Twitter app and screenshot tool both required x64 support, even though they are listed in the Microsoft Store. Your mileage may vary, but since x64 has been around for a number of years now, there’s a good chance that an app or utility you rely on now won’t work on the Snapdragon PC, and you’ll have to find an alternative or search around for a 32-bit version of the tool. 

(I was able to find an alternate screenshot tool easily enough, but suffering through the official Twitter for Windows app has been awful.)

And 32-bit support doesn’t guarantee that every app will work, either. I was able to install an email client, but it crashed every time I tried to set it up with my email accounts, rendering it unusable. Windows’ own Mail app also behaved oddly: it took three tries of adding and removing my Google accounts before it would support basic archiving. (This is despite Qualcomm and Microsoft assuring me that the app is compiled from the same source as what’s on Intel-powered machines.)

I did download and run Adobe Photoshop for laughs; it works about as you’d expect it to: slowly. The limitation against x64 apps means that virtually any modern game will not install on this computer, not that it’d run very well on this hardware if it did install.

Overall, while there were some definite pluses to using the Windows on Snapdragon computer (long battery life, silent design, and integrated connectivity), I couldn’t wait to go back to using any one of the other Intel PCs I’m used to. 

Between the app compatibility issues and the general feeling that I was always pushing the machine to the edge and it was barely holding on, using the NovaGo as my primary work computer hasn’t been a very pleasant experience. In fact, it reminds me a lot of using a low-end Chromebook.

This platform might work for the most casual of users who can live with the Edge browser and don’t rely on many third-party apps or utilities. But if you’re a heavy user looking for the holy grail of an always-connected computer that can last well beyond a workday away from an outlet, Windows on Snapdragon isn’t likely to be your answer. Chances are, we’ll see more connected PCs and soon, but the better ones are likely to be powered by Intel processors, not the same chip that’s in your phone.

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