#and also the rite of passage that is spiders georg

[zorangezest]

in honour of it being around my tumblr anniversary i have to say this site was the last place i thought i would be posting to consistently but. ive grown to love it a lot i would fight for this app like it were my country

[lunalaapunk]

I completed the Alolan Trials and am kinda working on the Gyms here in Paldea when I can so hopefully you don't mind me weighing in a bit, but

The culture in this time period, and the relationship between humans and Pokémon, is VERY different from what it is in Hisui. It Has Changed. We've come to a mutual understanding of helping and supporting each other, instead of competing for resources, and as a result we're very much post-scarcity. It's perfectly normal for strangers to walk up and just Hand You Things out of kindness- potions, TMs, food, Pokétoys, advice, the works! Healthcare is completely free of charge for you and your team in every region. Bicycles are The Main Way to get around, as are Ride Pokémon. Cars are pretty rare and required to travel slowly so even if someone DOES get hit, it's not the same as getting reduced to a red smear on the freeway because someone was texting at 80kph again. It's much, MUCH safer and more viable for kids to be on their own now than it ever has been.

Maybe critically- wild Pokémon are not competing for resources. Thus, they don't see humans as a threat. They actually approach because they're curious and want to possibly join you if they like your vibes enough. Unless something is seriously wrong, there is no intent to kill when a wild 'mon wants to battle.

For the youngest competitors (10+, I got my League championship at 24) it's a way to see the region they live in and bond with their Pokémon! It's considered a rite of passage to help you figure out what your relationship with these creatures is going to be. Some kids take on a few Gyms and decide they don't like battling and that's perfectly fine. Some go into the Contest circuit and compete in beauty and athleticism pageants for prize money. Some decide they simply prefer living a more stationary and 'normal' life with their Pokémon partner, and guess what, that's also cool and valid (that's literally how Larry exists and he's the happiest guy you'll ever meet). The Badges are a way to mark your progress and show your proficiency in battling and 'mon care! Getting all eight is not strictly required. (Starters are also specifically bred to be easy to care for and vocal about their needs.)

HOWEVER. Acquiring all eight badges and beating the local League grants you a full certification as a Trainer, and thus, you don't have to leave your buddies behind when you travel to other regions. Service Pokémon are exempt from this and can travel with you regardless if you're certified or not.

Red is... not the default by any means, he's an absolute madlad. The spiders georg of Trainers. I say that with love because he's also a good guy in general and so is his boyfriend.

tl;dr: Times have indeed changed, society is mostly post-scarcity and we coexist instead of competing because the Clans were right about that.

Okay I keep seeing this but like

What even IS the "gym challenge" for? A lot of other regions (probably in the future from my perspective) seem to have it, and it's literally just like. Eight battles you do? For badges?

Is it a bonding exercise, a way to cull bad trainers so they know to go for something else? And what even is the age range for it?

There's this guy literally named RED I'm seeing that did it when he was TEN. WHY IS A CHILD NAMED A COLOR TRAVELING ON FOOT LIKE THAT. Am I missing something here on a culture standpoint 'cause from where I am, Pokémon at worst are a very dangerous kind of power for someone who hasn't even hit PUBERTY yet and at BEST are a huge responsibility as living, breathing creatures with feelings of their own that I don't know a kid that young would normally have the emotional intelligence for!

........ please forgive me if I sound insensitive. My only experience is Hisui. Pokemon try to kill you here. Not knock out. Kill. I'm really hoping that's changed over the course of the centuries that follow my time period.

[prattmemory]

Mora-Amina

              “I ended my last book, Images Matters, with a childhood memory of my father's quiet hum — the hum of a man mourning the loss of his wife. On the night of my mother's funeral, surrounded by his entire family and all of his friends in our home, my father hummed my mother's favorite Roberta Flack song. Swaying back and forth while his eleven-and-thirteen-year old daughters sang over the record, he hummed instead of crying. A hum can signify a multitude of things. A hum can be mournful; it can be presence in absence or can take the form of a gritty moan in the foreground or a soothing massage in the background. It can celebrate, animate, or accompany. It can also irritate, haunt, grate, or distract.

              On that indelible night in the basement of our home, my father humming in the face of the unsayability of words. Even now, the memory of my father's quiet hum connects me to feelings of loss I cannot articulate in words, and it provokes in me a simultaneously overwhelming and unspeakable response. It is this exquisitely articulate modality of quiet— a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance— that moves me towards a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of quotidian practices of black communities[1].”

 You Heard of Roberta?

My initial response to these thoughtful words by Tina Campt was of course to make a dance. But once I read and reread this passage— three, four, five times— I was drawn to the mention of one Mrs. Roberta Flack, and left querying, which song was being referenced, which album? Knowing this was not the focus of Campt’s writing, I couldn’t help but to be inspired to go down my own sonic frequency rabbit hole. If I was going to make an embodied response to Campt, I would have to listen to Flack's catalog once again. Upon the first melancholy truthfully articulated chords, I was reminded of how penetrating Roberta Flack sound is. In the midst of this re-membering I realized I was veering away from what I initially intended my project to be, I wanted to make a performance and written piece about the Black utterance: the hum, the moan and the groan.

I wanted to speak to these Black utterances call and explore a Black embodied response through dance, this is a project that I will return to at a later date. Allowing this shift in my creative agenda, I viewed this as a chance to engage with a Diasporic spidering of thought. According to Nadine George-Graves, this is when, “The multidirectional process by which people of African descent define their lives. The lifelong ontological gathering of information by going out into the world and coming back to the self (George-Graves).” With this in mind, I gave myself over to Flack’s voice— a poetry in motion, gentle, penetrative and firm. I ruminated how its sound has played a distinct role in the transmission of Black dance aesthetics. This is specifically true of Black male choreographers. Often Flacks music is used to display a Black femininity as seen through the eyes of Black men.

I was struck by Flack’s voice; subversive in it's quiet deliverance, even when Flack is at the height of her vocal range, the pinnacle of story in song, her voice displays such technique and control that she is never screaming or yelling. Her sound is a centered power, crystal clear, shattering any emotional wall that the listener has erected. You never, ‘just listen’ to Roberta Flack, you become affixed to her sonics and in turn her story, resulting in a space time shift. You are brought to the scene of the loves lost crime she is depicting and are both seeing for the first time and reliving for the umpteenth time her and your story, you are sonically conjoined. Her singing makes short shrift of the listeners ears, cutting straight to the heart of the truth of the matter of all human existences. When a Black female dancer is chosen to respond to Flack’s call, this is a rite of passage, you have been anointed and are moving from mere female dancer to WO-MAN dancer. This is of great importance because you are faced with the herculean task of merging performing an embodied response to Flacks vocals and at the same time authentically portraying the character's story and point of view. This is something that can only be expertly transmitted through a body that has had mature living experiences.

The choreographers that have used Flack evidence both the traditional dance movements of Black dance aesthetics— driving speed, and frenetic energy— and at the same time displays movements of softer hues— languid arms, leg adagios and full all-knowing womanly undulations, and TIME to do so. When Flack is used it is slower, deliberate, patient even. It works less in the instantly demonstrative, and more inside of a deep, particular gendered Black femininity to tell stories of the girls, women and the mothers.

Examples of this are Donald McKayle’s Songs of the Disinherited, choreographed in 1972, the female solo Angelitos Negros , Billy Wilson’s Rosa choreographed in 1975, the all-female work featuring one female soloist to I Told Jesus  Kevin Iega Jeff’s The Yellow Dress, the song Do What You Gotta Do, and Ronald K. Brown’s For Mother, choreographed in 2005, the song Go Up Moses, these are all examples of specific female dance stories being conveyed through Black male choreographers. What may sound patriarchal, is actually an embodied expression of “speaking nearby[2]”, as Trinh T. Minh Ha would say. Perhaps expressing and paying homage to the Black women these men grew up with, were nurtured by and loved. These choreographies are odes to Black female stories and lives.

I performed Songs of the Disinherited while with Dallas Black Dance Theater in 2002. I was an ambitious young dancer that was awed and ready to work hard for Mr. McKayle. I was selected to dance the opening trio in the four-section ballet. I hoped I would have a chance to dance Angelitos Negros, but that was not to be, as there were women who had far more seniority than I did waiting to take on the mammoth dance task. They had been biding their time for the current soloist to leave. Learning the dance in secret hoping for their moment to display their worthiness, dance consecration of their WOMAN-NESS. Looking back at that time, I wasn’t ready, I had lived a bruising 24 years, but I was lacking the dance wisdom to apply to Roberta Flack’s question in the song, “ Painter of saints in the bedroom, if you have a soul in your body why have you in painting your paintings forgotten black people? Whenever you paint churches, you paint beautiful angels, but you never remember to paint a black angel.”

My chance to have a dialogue with Flack came in 2005 when I was chosen to dance in a newly commissioned work by Ronald K. Brown while at Philadanco. For Mother was a ballet that was choreographed and built on me and around me. This was an ordination, a crossing over of sorts, I was allowed into a very small club of Black women performers, a club that instead of a special hand shake, has special diasporic dance movements that very few can embody. These experiences are long ago, but unforgotten. The memories have stayed with me and informed me as an artist. A depth of re-memoring easily ignited from Tina Campt’s mention of Roberta Flack and a mourning father, humming instead of crying….

 [1] Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2017.

https://vimeo.com/29883239

[yeahwesaidthat]

TWWS: Late, Late, Late

Yeah, yeah, I know exactly how long it’s been, thanks. Blame life. But hey, at least I’ve got tons of material, including the CAH game referenced in the last post. 

I still need votes for the Best of D&D Tiebreaker! Please vote here!

There were some neck-in-neck competitor’s for this month’s MVP, but the title goes to SW for a snappy one-liner that had us all in fits of hysterics. So congratulations, SW!

Overheard at Random

SW: "You know when lumberjacks have a sleepover it's called a lumber party, right?"

About a downright evil video: KH: "Please send that to me so I can traumatise my friends."

Overheard at Work

Recovery on a Saturday: LH: (frustrated scream in the distance) CT: (calls back) "Same!"

About how KH holds her pen: Customer: (watches KH write): "They must've hated you at school." KH: "Yes they did!"

KH: "Remind me to tell you the joke about being in your mid-twenties." CT: "Isn't that the joke?"

About an unknown screechy noise: KH: "What is that lovely sound?" CT: "The suffering of a thousand souls."

Overheard on Skype:

About changes to the Doctor Who finale: KH: (about Missy/Master action): "Technically it would count as masturbation." AP: "MASTER-bation?" KH: "...FUCK, I DIDN'T EVEN MEAN TO DO THAT."

Synonyms for massage therapist: AP: "Masseuse? Massage-ist? Massage-inist? Hehe."

Overheard During Cards Against Humanity

Card: Being circumcised with a deli slicer MR: "Well, it could still be a Kosher deli."

Card: 55-gallon drum of lube RD: "That was someone's throwaway, wasn't it?" SW: "I dunno, that describes plenty of congressmen."

An ounce of [society] is worth a pound of [three years of semen in a shoebox].

After months of practice with [it being too late to stop having sex with a horse], I think I'm finally ready for [the sweet forbidden meat of the monkey].

After months of practice with [when you fart and a little bit comes out], I think I'm finally ready for [a miscarriage].

And the Academy Award for [rock-hard tits and a huge vagina] goes to [an asymmetric boob job].

And the Academy Award for [Meatloaf, the food] goes to [Meatloaf, the man].

In his farewell address, George Washington famously warned Americans about the dangers of [an empowered woman].

About the gay sorcerer card: MR: "He casts flaming sphere."

In the distant future, historians will agree that [a bunch of snot-nosed, know-it-all twentysomethings] marked the beginning of America's decline.

TSA guidelines now prohibit [three consecutive seconds of happiness] on airplanes. MR: "Thank you for flying United."

MGW: "Let's see what you chucklefucks are into..."

The Moment KH grossed-out the most hardened of men: Mmmmm, [the hot dog I put up my vagina ten days ago]...and it's still warm!

About all the ass-related cards: KH: "What is with all the anal?!" MR: "I dunno, it's like the Perfect Butt Storm."

What we've learned about each other: SW: "May it never leave this room." KH: "Oh no, some of it's going on the blog."

Overheard During D&D

About an enemy, in relation to the last post's/session's dick-stabbery: MGW: "We're like, 'There is no dick to punch! What do we do?!'"

About a killing blow, also in relation to the last post's/session's dick-stabbery: KH: "Can we say I stabbed him in the dick and he bled out?" RD: "You are one twisted fuck."

Hidden enemies: MGW: "Is that bush talking shit?" KH: "No, that's the other end."

Hidden enemies talking: MGW: "What a negative bush."

Good vs. bad locations: RD: "Remind me, where is everybody?" JB: "I'm in a bush. Digging around for holes. It's a thick bush."

Leveling up outside the fourth wall: SW (IC): "I feel strange now, guys - like I can wear medium armor."

Phrasing: JB: "You do things when I touch you. I'm talking to my tablet; I'm not talking to my penis."

About the annoying bard and his location: JB (IC): "I told you; he's singing among the stars." KH (IC): "Oh, is he dead?" RD (IC): "We should be so lucky."

Orc rites of passage: JB: "[The chief's] newly manhood-ed son." MR and SW: "Happy Orc Mitzvah."

Sword Bard = Sard, Bard Party = Bardy...: MR: "Come on Sardy, let's go Bardy!" JB: "Uh-uh-oooooh yeah!"

Applying for the Ministry of Silly Walks: MR: "I'm Tom-foolering myself forward."

Goliath logic: MGW (IC): "So, you see, [SW's character], when a man and a woman love each other..." SW (IC): "Oh, tectonic motion?"

Phrasing (again): MR (IC): "...And keep fucking it until it's dead. ...Fucking it with swords." SW (IC): "You've spent too much time in Waterdeep."

About character-related plot hooks for a triton: KH: "No hook." JB: "You're not gonna hook the fish?" MR: "You're not gonna bait him?" KH: "I fucking walked into that one." MR: "We got you right in the net - hook, line, and sinker."

About sentient skeletons: MR: "Just because you're undead doesn't mean you can't be fundead."

When a character trained with Stormtroopers: RD: "You couldn't hit the broadside of a barn from the inside."

Discussing stories: SC: "So I made up this sci-fi machination that doesn't exist..." KH: "So basically a Deus Ex Machination?" SC: "...Yes, that."

Player 1: "What's the name of the monster?" MGW: "Steve."

About (in)convenient infections: Player 2: "Is it a plot disease?"

About KC's monk/druid/bear form: MGW: "So you're Kung Fu Panda?"

About questionable ideas/druidic beast form limitations: Player 2: "Is biting a skull spider really a good idea?" MGW: "We're about to find out, aren't we?"

Trying to talk with a belligerent character: Player 2 (IC): "What does the sign say?" KH (IC): "Sign says 'words of the prophets written on subway walls.'" J (OOC): "Well, she's not exactly wrong..."

The same player keeps trying to listen in on KH's whispers: Player 2: "What language do you say this in?" KH: "Subliminal message."

About birthday wishes coming true for everyone's favourite murder child: SW: "Who knew Gruumsh was a member of the Make a Wish Foundation?" MR: "You're suggesting [child]'s terminal!" SW: "Have you seen the company her mother keeps?"

About murder child's mother (KH's character): MR: "She's one of the four soccer moms of the apocalypse."

About the Zone of Truth spell at a birthday party: MR: "Because it's a kids' party, it's the Discovery Zone."

About a previous adventure: MR: "That was a good time." SW: "That was a very good time. Fuck you, by the way."

About the rogue with loaded dice/"dice guy": JB: "This might get a little dicey." KH: (cringe) JB: "I'm on a roll." KH: (cringes, grabs notebook) JB: "You're not on my side? All six of them?" KH: "STOP IT!"