#and he wants ford to be the acolyte of an acolyte?

[twilights-stuff]

Just finished my art of Stan and Ford for my GFxSW AU. Just to be clear, this au took place during the time of the Galactic Empire and both Stan Twins are in their salt and pepper era. Really loving the whole red and blue thing they have going on.

Bonus art, a wip of Grand Inquisitor!Bill and Ford in this au, The Master and The Apprentice:

[themsource]

Gravity Falls AU - 7alt8: Stanley Pines

I love Gravity Falls and I recently finished Book of Bill XD

So! AU idea splurge time!

What if Stan had never broken Ford's science project? Had let Ford go off to West Tech and stayed in Glass Shard Beach?

What if Bill had taken an interest in Stan to be his "partner" rather than Ford? Wanting someone he thought was stupid enough to never be disloyal to him and yet strong enough to be of use, and decided to prey upon Stan's loneliness and daddy issues as a heartbroken teen at 17 before stealing him away with the promise of 'never having to be alone ever again'?

You get this, a Stan that's spent the last 43 years as Bill's acolyte in the nightmare realm and seems to have gotten perpetually stuck in the angsty 90s. A Stan that doesn't return to his world until it's time for him to start taking it over one country at a time in Bill's name with the henchmaniacs at his side.

...a missing twin that has been sought after by his brother for the last 43 years.

[squatch-and-stretch]

Debridement

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 >

Fiddleford McGucket & Ford Pines & The Axolotl | 6,686 words | Axolotl’s Acolyte AU

The truth of Bill’s past actions and future intentions come to light. Fiddleford, Stanford, and the Axolotl have to figure out how to free Ford from Bill’s influence and keep their dimension safe.

[Ao3 crosspost]

Fic under the cut

Fiddleford wakes up on the couch, unsure of when he fell asleep, how long he was out, and why he woke up. The Axolotl exists as a calm presence blanketing his mind, so he doesn’t panic at first.

“Fiddleford!” a familiar voice shouts from the entryway, a whole lot more fearful than he’s used to hearing it. “Fiddleford!?”

“Stanford?” Fiddleford calls back, fighting to free himself from the tangle of blankets.

It ain’t a particularly successful attempt, as he does end up face down on the floor, only saved from a broken nose by the Axolotl throwing out one of his arms before he can. Not that a broken nose would stick anyway.

They pull themselves free of the tangle, and only make it as far as the doorway before Ford is skidding to a halt in front of him.

“Fiddleford,” Ford breathes, halfway to a whine. His eyes are big and brown and frightened.

“Stanford,” he replies hesitantly. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I talked to Bill.”

The Axolotl helps him suppress a shiver at the name, but does nothing to keep him from sneering. The expression feels like the last resort of a coyote with its paw in a trap.

“And?” he bites out, hiding the fear beneath cold anger. He’s never been much for doing so, but Ford always has brought out the worst in him.

“You were…” Ford swallows thickly. “It was him. He tried to… get rid of you.”

“Uh-huh.”

This clearly isn’t the response Ford was going for. Fiddleford has always been too quick to forgive, but he ain’t going to this time, even as the Axolotl’s disapproval weighs heavily across his shoulders.

He hasn’t actually apologized, Fiddleford reminds them. That’s all I want.

“His plans for the portal were… less than altruistic,” Ford continues, fishing around like he’s not sure what Fiddleford is looking for.

“Coulda told you as much,” Fiddleford says, not helping at all. “Figured Ax here kinda implied it.”

He taps a knuckle against his head to emphasize the point. He feels the Axolotl’s rush of confusion-surprise-warmth at the nickname.

“I did imply it,” the Axolotl confirms. “Perhaps I should have been more direct?”

Oh yeah, Ford needs direct.

“Yes, in hindsight I find its warnings were quite clear,” Ford agrees, strained.

Fiddleford raises an eyebrow at him. Ford continues to wring his hands behind his back before quickly glancing up at Fiddleford, and then just as quickly looking away.

“I… I am… unsure of how to best proceed.”

Damn close to an ‘I don’t know’, but still far from an ‘I’m sorry’.

“You are being petty,” the Axolotl notes.

“Yup,” Fiddleford agrees, both to Ford’s helpless statement and the Axolotl’s accusation.

“I would like your assistance,” Ford admits, painfully, “However, I understand entirely if you would rather leave, as you said.”

Huh. Fiddleford nearly forgot about that. Now that he’s out of the heat of the moment, he finds that he doesn’t actually want to leave at all. Not when he’d be leaving Ford with a homicidal demon that’s revealed his true nature and a cracked door between their dimensions.

But Ford doesn’t need to know any of that.

(It’d be easy to leave if he just forgot. He could leave, guilt free, and force Ford to take care of things on his own for once. Just a few words typed through the dial, and—)

The Axolotl takes that train of thought and throws it right off the tracks. Fiddleford shakes his head, tries to focus back in on the conversation.

“Uh-huh, and why did I want to leave again?” Fiddleford prompts.

Ford’s brows furrow.

“I… he made an attempt on your life in my body,” Ford says slowly. “It made you—“

“Uh-uh, he didn’t make an attempt on my life, he damn well succeeded three times over,” Fiddleford snaps, advancing on the man, “and oh yeah, it was three times, I woulda bled out bad if there weren’t someone lookin’ out for me. And that someone sure as shit wasn’t you.”

Ford winces, shrinking with each word.

“You… you should go,” Ford says, voice trembling. The Axolotl shifts uncomfortably. “Even without Bill, I have constantly put your life at risk. I should never have asked this of you. Any of this.”

“No, ya shouldn’t have,” Fiddleford says, and his voice starts to go soft against his will. “But you did, and here I am.”

Ford nods, staring at his feet.

This is getting nowhere, and Fiddleford is starting to feel bad himself.

“I just want an apology, Stanford,” Fiddleford sighs.

“Direct, just as you said,” the Axolotl notes, pleased.

Ford looks up, eyes full of surprise and confusion and, devastatingly, tears. Ah hell. Maybe Fiddleford did go a bit too far.

“How could a simple apology ever make things right? All this time I was bringing about the end of the world, placing my trust in the wrong beings, ignoring the one person who actually had my best interests at heart and hurting him terribly in the process—“

“It won’t make things right,” Fiddleford agrees, and Ford’s lip wobbles. “But it's a good a place as any to start.”

He’s not sure if it's him or the Axolotl that has him opening his arms, but Ford blinks at him in shock either way. He sways on his feet, before closing the distance between them in a few stumbling steps. Ford collapses into him like a lost child, fisting his hands into the back of Fiddleford’s shirt and burying his face in his shoulder. As soon as Fiddleford closes his arms around him, Ford erupts into great, heaving sobs interspersed with stuttered fragments of apologies.

“Oh hun,” Fiddleford sighs, lifting a hand to run his fingers through Ford’s hair. “It’s okay, we’re gonna figure this out, promise.”

He holds Ford to his shoulder, swaying the two of them gently back and forth as Ford cries. Eventually the sobs petter out into sniffles, and then quiet, hitching breaths. Once they steady, Fiddleford lets him go, and Ford takes a step back.

He refuses to meet Fiddleford’s eyes, just wipes at his own and ducks his head. Fiddleford has a feeling his ruddy cheeks are only partially from the tears.

“We’ll talk about this later, m’kay?” Fiddleford says gently. “We can come up with a plan, but for now you need some rest.”

Ford opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a loud whine. He seems confused by this for only a moment, before he snaps his mouth shut and furiously shakes his head.

Fiddleford frowns.

“It is midday. I do not believe he has slept since early last night,” the Axolotl informs him.

“You ain’t gonna be any help t’anyone if you’re burnin’ the candle at both ends, hun,” Fiddleford scolds gently. “Y’need to sleep.”

Ford just continues to shake his head, jaw locked tight. When Fiddleford reaches for him, he stumbles away until he hits the wall.

“He is frightened,” the Axolotl says, as if Fiddleford can’t tell that himself. “You have encountered Bill Cipher before, have you not?”

“In hindsight, yup, I reckon I have,” Fiddleford says absently as he watches Ford sink to the floor. It’s a fight not to reach out to him.

“Primarily at night, and only after you convinced Stanford Pines to get some sleep,” the Axolotl continues. Ford curls his knees to his chest and fists his hands into his hair. “Therefore, it stands to reason…”

“Bill possesses you in your sleep,” Fiddleford concludes. Ford flinches, nodding into his knees. “Shoot.”

“Indeed,” the Axolotl sighs. “I can only leave you briefly. I could not stay with him long enough to let him sleep properly.”

“What’d happen if ya did?”

“Think of us as two ends of a clay rope. The clay dries faster as you pull at it, and becomes more brittle over time. If you pull too far for too long, we stretch thin until we break,” the Axolotl explains. “Your body would likely remain intact, but our souls, intertwined as they are, would be irreparably shattered.”

“… yeah, reckon we should avoid that,” Fiddleford agrees faintly. That’s a fun new thing for him to be terrified of.

“No entity in this realm could forcibly pull me apart from you in such a manner,” the Axolotl reassures.

That is good to know. Now that Fiddleford has one less thing to imminently worry about, he can go back to worrying about Ford, same as he always has. The other man is curled up on the floor and working himself right back up into a proper panic.

Fiddleford kneels down, but doesn’t approach. Ford’s wide eyes dart to him, bloodshot and terrified but drained dry of tears.

“I hear ya hun, no sleeping until we get this figured out for ya,” Fiddleford soothes, and Ford relaxes slightly. “Can ya talk right now?”

Ford thinks for a moment, opens his mouth, closes it, and finally shakes his head.

“That’s okay. How ‘bout we get ya sat down somewhere more comfortable?”

Ford nods.

“Want a hand up?”

Ford considers, shakes his head. Fiddleford straightens up himself, and leads the way to the kitchen/dining room. After a while, Ford follows and collapses into one of the chairs at the table.

“Let’s get some food in ya,” Fiddleford says, grabbing a cup from the cabinet first and filling it with water. “How’s soup sound?”

“Mm,” Ford hums approvingly. Fiddleford can’t quite tell if that’s a sign that he’s getting his voice back, but he’s willing to wait it out either way.

He should probably be in a bit more of a rush. There is a homicidal demon in his best friend’s head, and it's trying to tear its way into their dimension. He needs to figure out how to kill it.

“We will do no such thing,” the Axolotl says firmly, and Fiddleford nearly drops the cup before he can place it on the table.

“What?” he breathes, not quite believing his ears.

(Does he hear them with his ears, or is it more of a telepathy thing?)

(Not the point, because what?)

“Bill Cipher is only attempting to enter this realm because his own is collapsing,” the Axolotl says, voice soft with pity. “He is not fundamentally evil, just misguided and desperate.”

The statement makes Fiddleford’s brain buzz unpleasantly, all confusion and betrayal and anger.

“‘Not fundamentally evil’?” Fiddleford echoes distantly, turning away from the table. “He killed me, and we both know he enjoyed it.”

The Axolotl shifts uncomfortably.

“Well, yes, but—“

Amongst his tangle of emotions, anger starts to win out.

“No! There’s no buts!” Fiddleford snaps. “I know y’all operate on a different set of morals, but that shit ain’t gonna fly here! I ain’t no judge and jury, but I’m more than willin’ to be the executioner!”

“You are being selfish,” the Axolotl notes after a lapse of uncomfortable silence.

“Selfish? I’m fuckin’ selfish?” Fiddleford slams his hands down on the counter. He sees Ford flinch out of the corner of his eye, but it hardly registers. “Fuck! Alright, fine, then how ‘bout this? What would happen if he made it here?”

It’s a gamble, because he doesn’t know the answer, but the Axolotl’s discomfort grows. He knows it's paying off.

“… this realm as you know it would cease to exist.”

Jackpot. Fiddleford barks out a laugh.

“Oh yeah, I’m bein’ real selfish tryin’ to protect my whole damn dimension from ceasing to exist!”

The Axolotl’s presence begins to weigh more heavily upon him. Against his will, the anger begins to slip through his fingers.

“We need not escalate to execution,” the Axolotl tuts. “I will not allow your realm to be destroyed, just as I will not allow Bill Cipher to be destroyed.”

“He’d damn well deserve it,” Fiddleford grumbles, but it's hollow now. The anger has been drained from him by force.

The Axolotl radiates disapproval, but doesn’t deign to reply to their lowly vessel.

Fiddleford sighs sharply, and grabs a pan from the cabinet. He sets it on the stove, turning up the heat as he goes about gathering his ingredients. There’s a couple cans of soup in the cabinets, but he’s suddenly fixing for a decent distraction.

He’s got butter sizzling away in the pan and a knife in hand to chop the veggies when something hits the back of his head. He jumps, and sends an accusatory glance over his shoulder. Ford sits at the table, slightly less actively panicked.

He sets down the knife and picks up what was thrown at him— a carefully folded paper airplane. He unfolds it, and finds two words written upon it in slightly shaky cursive.

‘You okay?’ it says.

Fiddleford chuckles fondly and folds the airplane right back up to throw it back to Ford. He catches it before it can nail him in the forehead.

“I’m doin’ fine. Just a bit of a spat with the Axolotl livin’ in my brain, y’know how it is.”

Ford’s eyes widen, mouth falling open. He looks scared, and Fiddleford curses himself for the way he ended his sentence. Yeah, he reckons Ford does know about fighting with some separate entity in your own head.

“Really, it's fine,” Fiddleford says. “We just disagreed on what to do about… well, ya know. I’ll sit down and tell you all about it once I’m done cookin’.”

Ford nods anxiously. His hands worry together beneath the table.

Fiddleford ain’t exactly happy to leave him to it, but he really needs to be alone with his own thoughts for a while longer. As alone as he can be, anyway.

He picks the knife back up and gets to chopping— diced carrots, celery, and potatoes end up in the pot. He pokes at them idly with a wooden spoon,

Fine, let’s say we don’t kill him, Fiddleford thinks unhappily. We need him out of Ford’s head. That’s nonnegotiable.

“I agree,” the Axolotl says, clearly happy that they’re back in the same book, if not necessarily on the same page. “Bill Cipher operates in deals; that is the only way he can possess beings in this realm. Stanford’s deal may have a loophole we can exploit.”

And if it doesn’t? Fiddleford wonders.

“We remove him by force, without damaging Stanford Pines or Bill Cipher any more than necessary.”

Is that a risk? Damaging Stanford?

“I am afraid so. I am not necessarily familiar with how Bill Cipher operates in the Mindscape, but it is an exceedingly delicate location. If we do not approach him carefully, I expect he will do as much damage as he can on the way out,” the Axolotl says.

Fiddleford recalls trying to pull a real unhappy tomcat away from his queen before they ended up with another litter, recalls the way he dug his claws in and hissed and spat.

“Precisely,” the Axolotl agrees, catching onto his train of thought. “Memory, processing of sensory input, motor functions, any could be damaged or lost completely.”

Fiddleford feels sick. He squished a potato beneath his spoon. It’s not cooked through just yet.

“However, this is all theoretical. I cannot risk entering the mindscape of Stanford Pines alone. It could draw me too far from you for too long, and you cannot join me.”

“Uh-huh,” Fiddleford notes out loud. “I wouldn’t be too sure. Seems like the sorta thing a spell might cover.”

Ford makes an inquisitive noise.

“You wanna go grab some of your spell books while I cook? Reckon we might be needin’ ‘em.”

Ford hums an agreement, and scurries off to go gather his books. Should keep him busy for a bit.

Fiddleford pokes at a carrot, and figures it's cooked well enough. He dumps the veggies into a separate bowl, and adds some more butter into the pot. He pours in an about-equal amount of flour, and gets to whisking.

“Do you truly believe that you will be able to follow me into the Mindscape?”

“Heck if I know,” Fiddleford mumbles, whisking away. “I never really paid too much attention to Ford’s witchcraft, but I reckon if anyone could figure out how to do it, it’d be him.”

“We shall see,” the Axolotl muses.

Just as the roux starts to come together, Ford returns to the kitchen, books piled precariously in his arms. He sets them down on the table with enough force to knock his cup off the edge. Luckily, it’s empty and made of plastic, so no harm done, but Ford makes no move to pick it up. He sits back down and tilts his head at Fiddleford.

“We’re lookin’ for a way into the Mindscape,” Fiddleford explains. “Ax can get there on their own, but it ain’t quite so easy for me. D’ya reckon you’ve seen anything like that?”

Ford nods enthusiastically, and pulls a few books from the pile to start flipping through them.

Fiddleford slowly starts pouring broth into the pot, whisking all the while. Despite the circumstances, the situation itself is rather soothing. The smell of food, the sound of Ford turning the pages, the familiar motions of cooking a well-known recipe, it feels good. Even the pressure of the Axolotl against the back of his eyes, watching him cook with quiet interest, ain’t so bad.

The carton of broth empties, and Fiddleford sets it aside and turns up the heat. He whisks away idly until it starts to simmer, then throws his cooked veggies in along with the rest; frozen corn, peas, and green beans, some herbs and seasonings. He leaves the pot simmering away on the stove as he turns back towards the table.

“Find anything?” he asks, not particularly expecting a response.

“Yes! Well, no, but I know there’s a perfect spell in one of these books,” Ford says, shoving one across the table towards Fiddleford without looking up. “Help me look.”

Now there’s another familiar sight and sound. It’s like they’re in college all over again.

“I don’t know what I’m lookin’ for here,” Fiddleford says, idly thumbing through the pages. They’re all yellowed and stained with mysterious fluids, as all good books should be.

“Should be under P, for relating to possession,” Ford instructs idly. “Maybe. Probably? Good place to start.”

Fiddleford snickers fondly, and flips to the Ps. There’s spells for pacification, pathfinding, perception, phoenixes (this one just sets the nearest bird on fire), plagiarism, pleasure (Fiddleford quickly flips away, face flushed), plumbing…

“Ah-hah!” Ford crows, cutting off Fiddleford’s search. “Here it is! If someone is possessed, this allows you to follow the entity in! But it only works if they’ve been possessed recently…”

Fiddleford clicks his tongue, closing his own book to tap his fingers against the cover. His leg jack-rabbits beneath the table.

“Ax is always here with me,” Fiddleford says. “Is it the same with Bill?”

“Not exactly,” Ford says, shrinking a little at the mention of the demon’s name, “he can keep an eye on me through any Eye of Providence, but he only communicates with me directly when I’m asleep or meditating.”

“D’you reckon we could consider any individual time he takes over your body as a new possession for the sake of this spell?”

“It’s hard to say for sure, and it would be dangerous to test,” Ford says, “If Bill takes control, he could hurt you again.”

“I ain’t too fond of the idea either, but it might be the best chance we got,” Fiddleford says, standing up. “Ax reckons they can pull that demon outta your head if they get in there, but I’d need to go too.”

“Why is that?” Ford asks, all bright-eyed curiosity.

“They could leave me alone long enough to push Bill outta your head temporarily, but we can’t be too far apart for too long. I dunno how it all translates between physical and mental space, but Ax reckons our souls will explode if they go fartin’ around in your noggin for too long.”

“Ineloquent but not inaccurate,” the Axolotl notes, amused.

Fiddleford catches a glimpse of Ford’s frown before he turns back to the stove.

“Fiddleford…” Ford says.

“Mmhmm?” Fiddleford hums.

“Are you happy?” Ford asks carefully, and Fiddleford freezes. “With the Axolotl, I mean, are you happy?”

The Axolotl’s presence goes still and silent.

Is he? He’s not sure. His first inclination is a quick dismissal, of course he’s happy, everything’s fine. But that’s not exactly true, is it? He’s keeping it together pretty darn well if he does say so himself, but things are bad. Catastrophically bad. Apocalyptically bad.

The question is, is any of it the Axolotl fault? Are they making things better or worse?

Fiddleford went through the portal, which was bad. The Axolotl is the only reason he survived and returned to his own realm, which was good. This was not the Axolotl’s fault, thank you Bill and Ford.

Fiddleford died a few times yesterday, which was bad. The Axolotl brought him back, which was good. It was also kind of existentially terrifying in a way he hadn’t really considered after the portal incident. This was not entirely the Axolotl’s fault, thank you Bill.

He came to realize his best friend was possessed by a murderous demon that’s trying to end the world, which was bad. The Axolotl could help deal with that, which was good. They also refused to kill the fucker though, which was bad. This was not the Axolotl’s fault, thanks again Bill, you equilateral sonuvabitch.

The constant presence of another being within his head was… not easy to classify. He shared everything with the Axolotl; his thoughts, his body, his emotions, his actions, nothing was his own anymore. The religion he’d lived by for almost thirty years had been torn apart and pieced back together into the vague shape of some neotenic celestial salamander, which he had been desperately trying not to think about too hard.

To a certain degree, Fiddleford can acknowledge that the Axolotl is terrifying. They were so very inhuman, in the way they speak and act and think. They could take Fiddleford over at the drop of a hat, puppet him around to do whatever they wanted, push him away into the dark recesses of his own mind to rot. They can kill him again and again and again and it won’t ever stick, won’t even matter, but it’ll hurt like hell the whole time.

But they didn’t do any of that. Even when they forced Fiddleford into the back seat, it was only ever to try to help, even if their idea of help could be a bit misguided sometimes. Most of the time, maybe. They have a downright charming sense of wonder about the world around them, acting like an extraordinarily well-spoken child when they encounter new things, which seems to be most things. They’re mostly a kind and calming presence. Out here with no one but Stanford, bless his heart, something like that was sorely needed.

“… should I look for a way to safely separate you two? I’m sure I can figure something out,” Ford says after a long lapse of contemplative silence.

The Axolotl remains quiet, but as Fiddleford searches, he finds a trace of them. They feel so small, curled up in the back of his head, guilty and confused and scared.

“I’m fine, Stanford,” Fiddleford assures, and it’s not exactly a lie; he’s as good as can be, given the circumstances. “Let’s take things one at a time, ‘kay? Ax ain’t threatening the world as we know it.”

“I like the world as you know it,” the Axolotl says, soft and small.

Fiddleford stands over the pot and pets the back of his own hand with his thumb, hoping the Axolotl knows it’s for them. Without his input, his fingers intertwine, and Fiddleford takes a moment to smile at them before he turns to the fridge and grabs a carton of cream. He pours it into the simmering pot slowly, stirring all the while.

“I suppose you have a point,” Ford says, piling the unused spell books back into a neat little stack, but continuing to thumb through the two he pulled out. “I… should thank you. For staying, and for working through all of this with me. You are a singularly extraordinary man, both in intellect and compassion.”

“Oh hush, you’re embarrassing me,” Fiddleford says weakly. The heat on his face has a whole lot of nothing to do with the pot simmering away on the stove in front of him.

“I only speak the truth. Thank you, Fiddleford,” Ford says softly, “and thank you as well, Axolotl, for keeping him safe.”

The Axolotl buzzes with self-satisfaction, and a bit of amusement as well. The latter probably has more to do with Fiddleford’s internal monologue of goddangit Stanford, why would you say that, how can you sound so sweet after everything, I’m tryin’ to be angry with you, c’mon, than anything Ford said.

“‘says you're welcome,” Fiddleford mumbles, continuing to stir the soup.

He throws in some salt and pepper, and runs a finger along the back of the spoon. It’s still too thin, but it tastes nice. Just needs a bit more salt.

“Supposing the spell works, what exactly do you plan on doing?”

“The spell is ‘Plan B’, as you might say,” the Axolotl says through Fiddleford’s mouth, but they let him keep stirring the soup. “What were the exact terms of your contract with Bill Cipher?”

“… I’m afraid there’s little chance of finding a loophole,” Ford says, sounding embarrassed. “The termination clause was… not particularly well thought out.”

“Oh?” Fiddleford prompts.

“… ‘from now until the end of time’,” Ford admits.

“Oh,” the Axolotl says.

“Oh you dumb son of a gun,” Fiddleford groans, but he ain’t exactly surprised.

“He was incredible! Everything he said, everything he offered, it was better than I could have ever imagined!” Ford defends. “I know now that it was all lies, but at the time, until mere hours ago, I was absolutely enchanted.”

“He is good at what he does,” the Axolotl admits, voice thick with compassion. “You were fooled. It was not your fault.”

Maybe a little his fault, Fiddleford thinks bitterly, but he keeps that thought to himself. Even if he didn’t exactly make a deal with the Axolotl of his own free will, he’s still possessed by an interplanar deity himself. He’d be one to talk.

“That’s kind of you, but I made myself an easy mark,” Ford says painfully. “I was raised by a liar and a conman, I should have known better.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Point is, ya didn’t. Ya done got yourself possessed and now we gotta deal with it.”

“Astute as ever, Fiddleford,” Ford grumbles.

“I just mean there’s no sense beating yourself up about it.” Fiddleford turns around to gesture at him with the spoon. “We’re gonna fix it, ya hear?”

“… yes, of course,” Ford says, not sounding particularly convinced. Oh well. Ford’ll be plenty convinced once they succeeded.

The soup has come together well enough, so Fiddleford pours about-equal portions into each bowl and sets them on the table, one in front of Ford, the other by his seat. He grabs a spoon for each of them, and sits down to eat. Ford hums appreciatively, but continues to flip through the book.

“Eat, Stanford,” Fiddleford instructs, tucking a hand under the cover of the book and forcing it shut.

“I think there’s another spell that might help us! I just need to find it,” Ford says. “I think I wrote it down in one of my journals, let me just—“

Fiddleford hooks his foot around the leg of Ford’s chair and pulls him back in just as he moves to stand.

“You can go check after you’re done eating.”

“Really, Fiddleford, take this seriously,” Ford huffs haughtily, turning in his chair so he can stand without pulling out. “We have far bigger concerns than—“

“Stanford Filbrick Pines, you’d best keep your rear right where it is and eat your dang soup,” Fiddleford demands, breaking out his best Dad Voice. He feels like he’s used it more on Ford in the past few months than he ever has with Tate.

“… fine.”

Ford, a grown adult man, fully pouts as he spoons some soup into his mouth. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and unfortunately, absolutely adorable.

They eat quietly, silence only interrupted by the sounds of their spoons clicking against the bowl. The Axolotl is a satisfied presence blanketing his mind. Sure seems like they just enjoy warm liquids (excluding coffee, of course), and Fiddleford can’t really fault ‘em for that.

Fiddleford keeps eating, and his gaze falls to the window. It’s snowing again, the sky an even shade of dull grey that makes it impossible to tell what time it is. His and Ford’s snowmen are now indistinguishable icy lumps, barely protruding from the newest layer of snow.

For the first time in a while, he lets himself think about Tate and Emma-May. He wonders if they’d have fun up here, in the forest and the snow. He imagines the four snow people standing out there in the yard, and maybe a little snow axolotl draped around his shoulders too. It makes him feel a little sick in a way he tells himself is giddiness.

“You love them, do you not?” the Axolotl prods, and his grip on the spoon tightens until it hurts. Not that that means much, because his fingers always hurt either way. “Why does the idea of them being here displease you?”

Of course I love them, Fiddleford insists. It’s just… dangerous, up here.

“A partial truth,” the Axolotl says. “You cannot effectively hide things from me, Fiddleford McGucket.”

Y’aint supposed to mix the personal and professional.

“This is not simply professional. You love him too.”

“Stop!” Fiddleford stands up, slamming his hands on the table. “I can’t fuckin’ do this right now!”

Ford freezes with his spoon lifted, mouth parted dumbly.

“Shoot, sorry, not you, keep eatin’.”

Ford frowns, returning his spoon to the bowl.

“Fiddleford…”

“Don’t worry about it, Stanford, I promise, I’m doin’ just fine,” Fiddleford reassures. He forces himself to smile, sit back down, and eat another spoonful of soup.

“… I apologize. I should not have pushed. I just… want you to be happy,” the Axolotl says softly. “I know I have not made that easier for you.”

Y’sure haven’t, Fiddleford thinks, and it’s immediately followed by a rush of guilt. He can’t tell if it’s his or the Axolotl’s. It’s fine. It ain’t your fault. I’m grateful, really. I just… can’t deal with this right now.

“It will be alright. Once we deal with Bill Cipher, we can fix things with the rest of your family.”

Sure, Fiddleford thinks, not entirely convinced. The rest of his family, implying that Ford was already the other part of it. Hah.

The Axolotl can sense his uncertainty, of course, but decides against saying anything.

“Is this sufficient?” Ford asks, interrupting his thoughts to shove his bowl across the table.

It’s mostly empty, except that he ate around the celery, as usual. It’s not something he’s about to fight him on (he learned pretty soon after moving in that Ford’s pickiness was not a choice, and he was far more frustrated with it himself than Fiddleford would ever be), so he waves him off.

“Yeah yeah, go ahead.”

Ford nods, pleased, and scurries off to get his journals. He doesn’t make any move to put his dishes in the sink, much less wash them himself, but it’s not like Fiddleford expected him to.

Fiddleford finishes off his own soup, and then steals Ford’s celery just to keep it from going to waste. Once he's done eating, he gathers the dishes— including the cup on the floor— and gets to cleaning. Ford soon returns, journals in hand, and starts scanning through them. He only gets a few pages into journal one before groaning loudly.

“Nevermind, this spell is useless.”

“‘S that so?” Fiddleford chimes in, scrubbing the pan clean.

“Well, not entirely. In fact, it would be incredibly beneficial, especially if we could modify it to protect a person instead of an area… perhaps a bracelet or necklace…” Ford cuts himself off with a sharp sigh. “But no, one of the ingredients would be nearly impossible for us to obtain.”

“What’s that?” Fiddleford sets the pan beside the sink to dry.

“I already have some mercury samples and moonstone, but unicorn hair? It’s hopeless.”

“... because unicorns aren’t real?” Fiddleford offers, even though he knows that isn’t the right conclusion.

“Oh unicorns are real alright,” Ford says unhappily. “Painfully, irritatingly, infuriatingly real.”

Fiddleford blinks. After everything he’s seen here, unicorns should not be a surprise. In fact, they seem pretty benign.

“So what’s the problem?” Fiddleford asks. He knows from Ford’s tone that he’s asking for an earful.

“They’re the single most insufferable beings in Gravity Falls! Technicolor manes that hurt to look at, eyes so large and sparkly that they’re downright unnerving, and they won’t even entertain so much as a conversation with anyone who isn’t a maiden of pure heart! Sure, I wanted some hair to run some experiments, but she wouldn’t let me get a word in after I asked!”

“That does sound troublesome,” Fiddleford agrees, trying to hide a smile. He doesn’t do it on purpose (anymore) but it’s always fun to see him all riled up like this.

“I doubt you’ll have better luck than I did, but maybe she’ll listen to reason now that the safety of our entire dimension is on the line…” Ford frowns, “or maybe her grove exists in a pocket dimension that Bill wouldn’t have access to? Hard to say, and I don’t care to visit her to find out.”

“Alright, well, let's circle back a bit,” Fiddleford says, sitting down across from him. “What’s this spell do? You mentioned protection?”

“Yes! Placement of moonstones and mercury within an area surrounded by a circumference of unicorn hair will create a ward against metaphysical creatures of malicious intent. Since we already have a…” Ford wrinkles his nose, “connection, it may not work to banish him from my head, but it may be able to prevent further damage.”

“I believe I understand,” the Axolotl cuts in, speaking through Fiddleford. “If we constructed a barrier around the cabin, we would be trapping part of him in here with us. It would work as I do; I am but a fragment of the Great Axolotl Fiddleford met on the other side of the portal. I am bound to him, and cut off from the Great Axolotl. We cannot communicate. Bill Cipher works in a similar manner, though the part of him within Stanford Pines is currently able to communicate with his physical form in the place between realms. If we constructed this barrier, we would sever that communication. A part of Bill Cipher would remain within Stanford Pines, and while he would be weakened, he would still be able to possess Stanford Pines and cause untold damage to his Mindscape. Both would be trapped within the cabin.”

“If he managed to open the portal, would his physical form be able to pass through it?” Ford asks, brows furrowed.

“I believe so,” the Axolotl says. “The open portal would create a gap in the barrier, and with a physical form, I would not doubt his ability to break through the barrier entirely, given enough time.”

“But let's say we make the barrier, cut most of Bill off from Ford, and destroy the version within Ford’s head…?” Fiddleford offers.

“This would entirely sever Bill Cipher’s connection to this dimension,” the Axolotl offers. Their voice sounds neutral coming from Fiddleford’s mouth, but he can feel their discomfort. “However, I have made my stance on destroying Bill Cipher clear.”

“But this is just a part of Bill! It’ll be like losin’ a finger or somethin’!”

“I do not wish to harm him either,” the Axolotl says. “Besides, I am but a severed fragment of the Great Axolotl, but I am still an entity in my own right. Bill Cipher would be the same.”

“Do you have any better suggestions on how to protect this dimension?” Ford asks impatiently, clearly just as irritated by the Axolotl’s pacifism as Fiddleford is.

The Axolotl remains silent. Fiddleford can feel just how uncomfortable and conflicted they feel, but he’s hard pressed to feel too bad about it. Still, when something inside your head is feeling a certain kind of way, it's hard not to empathize.

“I know y’aint happy about it, but sometimes you gotta do somethin’ you don’t like for the greater good. As far as we know, this is the only way to keep our entire dimension safe.”

“I know,” the Axolotl muses miserably. “I will do what must be done to protect this dimension.”

“Thank you, hun. I know it ain’t easy,” Fiddleford mumbles, placing a hand on his chest and rubbing his thumb across his collarbone soothingly. It feels strange, a self-soothing action for the sake of someone else. The Axolotl just continues to sulk.

“They’ve agreed to it?”

Fiddleford nods. “Reluctantly.”

“Good,” Ford nods, and while he doesn’t smile, the stress on his face eases slightly. “However, there’s still the matter of procuring unicorn hair in the first place.”

“I’ve got a purehearted god in my head, y’reckon that’s close enough?”

“Perhaps…? If all else fails, I am not above resorting to violence for the greater good.”

Fiddleford’s heart flutters, and the Axolotl makes their displeasure known. He can practically feel them frowning at him.

“I don’t fancy your odds against a horse with additional weaponry, but I don’t mind my own.”

Ford’s face flushes. “What’s that supposed to mean!?”

“It’s been a good couple of years since I’ve wrangled a horse, but I reckon it's like riding a bike,” Fiddleford says with a confident grin. “Besides, it’s not like they can kill me.”

Ford doesn’t seem pleased by that response, the amusement in his eyes at the first part dying away by the second.

“Does it not hurt, once the Axolotl heals you?”

Fiddleford considers lying, but the Axolotl’s disapproval (tinged with guilt) weighs heavy. He sighs.

“Nah, it sure hurts. Can’t kill me though.”

Ford looks over Fiddleford, at all the places that used to be covered in blood, with big, sad, guilty eyes.

“Your… injuries, from yesterday, do they still…?”

“Ain’t so bad,” Fiddleford says, running a hand through the hair over where his skull had been bashed in. The contact doesn’t hurt none, but it’s still throbbing with one hell of a headache. “Y’know me, I’d be hurting in some way or another either way.”

“I am aware,” Ford agrees, “I never wanted to make that worse for you, but it’s all I seem capable of as of late.”

Fiddleford swallows thickly.

“You already apologized. Don’t need you beatin’ on yourself anymore than you already have,” Fiddleford says. “Besides, that wasn’t you. That was all Bill.”

“Who I am possessed by because of my own stupidity,” Ford continues bitterly. “Who used my hands to— to kill you.”

“Ford, c’mon. We’re fixin’ things, y’hear? All you’re doin’ right now is poking at wounds that haven’t quite healed.”

Ford seems just as unconvinced as ever, but he nods.

“Right, of course.” He snaps his journal shut and stands up. “We should have a few hours of daylight left, shall we pay the unicorn a visit?”

“Are ya sure? It’s been a busy day for ya…”

“Of course. I literally cannot rest until we have some form of protection against Bill,” Ford insists, turning towards the door before pausing and looking back at Fiddleford. “If that’s alright with you, I mean? Are you feeling up to it?”

Fiddleford smiles. So much for old dogs and new tricks.

“Sure, as long as it ain’t too far. Lemme get dressed.”

“Of course,” Ford agrees. “I have some extra sweaters in my room if you need them. You still have the wardrobe of a Californian.”

“Oh hush,” Fiddleford dismisses, but he heads to Ford’s room first.

[stargazerlily7210]

Alright, here's a big claim for the finale (whether I actually believe/want any of these individually is besides the point. This is purely about how these all vibe together):

Sutekh is ultimately acting as RTD's Harbinger for opening the Classic Who floodgates as he sees fit.

Susan Triad will still turn out to be Granddaughter Susan. It will be revealed that the smattering of Susan Twists across The Doctor's travels will turn out to have been her Time Lord (aka. 'Complex Space-Time Event') consciousness calling out to her Grandfather for help. And, speaking of that, the Kind Woman RTD mentioned who is on a far away planet with something vital to The Doctor and Ruby, will be either one of Susan Triad dream selves or Carol Anne Ford herself. The something vital will either be the hope/confirmation/proof/information needed to unlock Susan's Memories and restore Susan Triad to her full Regenerated Susan Granddaughter self or Baby Ruby.

Ruby's mom is either revealed to just be an innocent, albeit unfortunate person turned acolyte of Sutekh (think, the speech Harriet/Sutekh gave about 'The Vessel. Which, presumably is the TARDIS but could honestly be referring to any/all of the current female presenting mystery based characters, as well.) The Trickster working under Sutekh. Or, more likely, Ruby herself.

The 'heartbreaking' moment we keep hearing about will either be Mel's death (as victim or sacrifice, hard to say), Ruby's death (imagine she learns she's a manifestation somehow brought about by the fight with Sutekh. Then defends her self sacrifice claiming it's fine because she doesn't really exist) or a reveal that refocuses this all back to The Doctor's foundling status.

The Doctor (and Ruby, or Mel, depending on who dies) will escape Sutekh in 2024 by using the oddly solid time window/'memory'/recording of the TARDIS to enter the Memory TARDIS (aka. The consciousness of the TARDIS itself that's defending itself against Sutekh's control). Which is shielded from Sutekh, but doesn't have the power to do anything else... Until Tales of the TARDIS gets revealed as The TARDIS calling out for help by using the time=memory=reality hack that Tales of the TARDIS has been alluding to.

If it's Mel who died, she will get brought back to some sort of existance (whether fully back to life, or only within the confines of the Memory TARDIS) through the magic of the Memory TARDIS. Kind of like how Clara was semi undead and had her own TARDIS.

If it's Ruby who died, the 15/Ruby scenes we saw bookending the Pyramids of Mars TotT episode will be something like a mix between the 'literally living on through memory' magic mentioned above and the Teacher Clara Shadow in 12's Mind Palace TARDIS. But she will ultimately be brought completely back to life.

Mrs. Flood will remain an off-putting mystery but will seemingly be on The Doctor's side, albeit away from any of the immediate action for the majority of, if not the entire episode. However, whether her identity gets revealed this episode or not, we will get confirmation that she is a Time Lord herself... and she'll inevitably be revealed as The Monk (for even longer winded reasons that ultimately amount to nothing).

[usagirotten]

REVIEW: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is more of the same but more boring

The competition between platforms to have a wide range of content in their catalogs and for users to think that they have many options has become increasingly normalized in recent months. The content that each one offers has everything: very good things, good things, not-so-good things, things that are terrible, and some more that are just filler and will hardly ever have moderate success. Disney+, a giant in animation cinema and now aims to be one of its platforms, has content that advocates a lot for the nostalgia that exists in very good works and that several generations have enjoyed, its new content in its new acquisitions is a separate case. Since George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to this entertainment giant, things have not gotten better, television series and films have been left halfway between what could have been and what is, being more specific, Star Wars has been a very painful franchise in recent years in terms of story development and in the creation of a universe that tries to connect everything, leaving aside the canon that they have been handling for decades. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, The Acolyte and now Skeleton Crew try to make this new canon in this new universe have a more direct relationship from the Return of the Jedi film, creating new adventures with new characters that tell new stories whether they work or not. It's the turn of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, something completely new that is aimed at younger viewers with a high dose of nostalgia that will possibly help this not be another failure of this franchise.

What is Star Wars Skeleton Crew about?

A group of children are about to have the adventure of their lives. A sudden but important discovery causes them to be lost in the galaxy. They will use everything they have and know to find their way home among space pirates in the era of the New Republic. If we do an exercise of objectivity and honesty as spectators and fans of this franchise since Star Wars arrived at Disney, this franchise has been stagnant and is going from bad to worse, offering a recycling of what we already know and already know and transforming it into something modern for the new generations, we have already seen the same garbage of space western that opened with Mandalorian and that has not managed to have a point of originality in the works that they have recently presented. This contest is joined by Skeleton Crew by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts who offer us an adventure very much in the style of an 80s family movie where a group of children are the protagonists of the adventure of their lives, knowing with this the capacities that each one has, the value of friendship and of working as a team, of valuing what they have and of growing to be better, a formula already very used that falls into the cliché that no matter the age we all have the opportunity to improve and what does not improve is precisely the originality in the stories. Skeleton Crew is set in a new timeline and takes place after the events of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi when the Empire was defeated and now it is the New Republic who has taken control of protecting peace throughout the galaxy to avoid conflicts and the emergence of a new planetary war or for the domination of everything.

On the planet At Attin, which is far from any war contact, there are very special residents. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is a restless child obsessed with stories about the Jedi. He wants to have adventures beyond pretending to be a Jedi master with his best friend Neel (Robert Timothy Smith). This is partly an escape so he doesn't feel alone and abandoned by his father Wendle (Tunde Adebimpe), who, as is already cliché, gives more importance to work than to caring for and spending more time with his son. A very similar case applies to another pair of best friends from the same school environment, a girl named Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) rebellious and transgressive by nature, and her best friend KB (Kyriana Kratter) a more thoughtful girl and aware of the importance of things and, who are bored of their routine suburban lives doing the same thing, what these children want is to find something that will get them out of all this and make them live an adventure like they have always dreamed of. Wim and Fern meet after a very unfortunate situation that takes them to the office of their school principal, once reprimanded and punished Wim tells Fern that he found an abandoned Jedi Temple, following the structure of a children's movie from the 80s Wim in company of Neel return to explore this discovery in more detail but they do not count on the fact that Fern and KB have gotten there first and together they discover that it is not a Temple but an abandoned spaceship. Questions come, questions go from where it is, who it is from, how it got there, how long it has been hidden, why no one knew of its existence, and course, we must not tell anyone else because this will be our secret pact of best friends forever since we know the characters then we already identify them as the adventurous boy, the rebellious girl, the intelligent and more aware girl and the funny fat guy who in this case is like a blue elephant, who does not contribute anything but is fun. In their exploration, they find a droid called SM 33 (Nick Frost) Wim in his excitement accidentally presses a button that puts the ship into operation and heads into space having a specific point of automatic return, very convenient so that from this point things begin to develop. Now these restless and annoying children are lost in space millions of kilometers from their planet without the slightest idea of ​​how to return or where they will go, SM 33 transports them to the only place he knows a landing base populated by aggressive space pirates and dangerous bounty hunters, there they will meet Crimson Jack (Jude Law) a mysterious man who possesses the power of the force, along with this they learn that At Attin is not just any lost planet in the galaxy but is a planet full of treasures that barely appears on the maps of the galaxy and that its exact location is not entirely known, these manipulative children reach an agreement with Jack to help them return home in exchange for a treasure. This is the premise of the series, we have the good but unlovable children and the bad pirates who look for these good but unlovable children so that they guide them to this peaceful planet and rob them of everything and enslave its population, the planet also has its secret, a series of satellites that surround it and make it invisible and here we ask ourselves, what is this planet hiding? Are the legends that there are treasures there true?

A series of the Star Wars franchise and saga that involves children, it aims to give a new twist to a simpler story to tell, one that has a high dose of comedy and involuntary action where we already know how things will end, these children will come out ahead of this adventure with the already trite moral discourse about friendship, love, the importance of family, the responsibility of parents towards children, education, teamwork, trust, and all this while they walk the path of the hero that will make them better. In these 2 episodes we can deduce without much effort that everything that happens and will happen is in favor of a script written by Christopher Ford, Jon Watts and Myung Joh Wesner that is based on things already done in movies like E.T. (1982), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), the Indiana Jones adventure saga and the classic series Lost in Space and the modern but nostalgic Stranger Things, where these children take on the role of adults to solve impossible situations that give it that touch of nostalgia. The series desperately tries to take advantage of the resources it has which the youngest audience can identify, living an adventure in the Star Wars universe I don't think is something that excites or captivates an entire generation that doesn't understand the power of this nostalgia, a youth work subtly but blatantly directed at a more adult audience and of course at the dissatisfied fans of this franchise who are quite right in wanting all this to end or to transform into what it should be. The writers along with their directors Jon Watts, David Lowery, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Jake Schreier, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Lee Isaac Chung make a great effort to make these children try and feel natural in balance with the dangers they face and that we can believe that they are in genuine danger without traumatic consequences but with a lot of fun, as viewers we know well that nothing will happen to them no matter how much they face unimaginable dangers. The episodes currently airing are: - Episode 1. This Could Be a Real Adventure. The native children of the planet At Attin discover a surprising secret that will lead them to live the adventure of their lives. - Episode 2. Way, Way Out Past the Barrier. After activating a mysterious ship, they become lost in space, which is the beginning of an unexpected journey. In technical terms we already know what it is offering us, the retrofuturistic style and setting of the planet At Attin is impeccable, a society that lives isolated from the galaxy and that evokes the 50s on Earth, however, it is not far from other representations in the science fiction genre and how our planet could look like in a very hopeful, illogical and very unbelievable future, the atmosphere they recreate feels more peaceful than what we have seen before and we go from those desert scenarios to something more friendly and familiar but at the same time a jewel of the Old Republic, a lost planet that has acquired with the passage of centuries and millennia a certain mysterious and legendary nuance. We can say that the main flaws of this series are that its story is not original at all, that the easy way to take something already done and transform it pretending that this is modern focused on a new generation and that it is successful is to fall again into a comfort zone in which they no longer know what to do with this franchise and create meaningless and increasingly absurd content, the second thing is the casting of children, they have not understood that for this to work it is essential that we sympathize with the characters and that the actors do a good job, this does not happen here again. The cast is made up of Jude Law, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Tunde Adebimpe, Kerry Condon, Marti Matulis, Jaleel White, Fred Tatasciore, Mike Estes, Dale Soules and Nick Frost as the voice of SM 33 who do more than what is asked of them but the development of their characters is very little convincing so far. The music composed by Mick Giacchino is perhaps the most redeemable feature, it moves away from what we know but has that touch of the classic themes of the saga, exciting pieces that are far above the action we see, a work that if maintained like this could become a classic. There is not much to talk about this anymore, even though it is under the protection of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni it does not guarantee that this will be a success, we recognize that Mandalorian in its first and second seasons surprised everyone and placed these 2 creators in a very high place within a franchise that has not managed to have a balance with the force that it boasts so much, on the contrary, the flaws have been evident and they insist that the path to follow is the one that the studio itself imposes on them without having the more creative freedom to do better and more convincing things and not just the filler in a catalog with works that in the long run no one will remember as something that contributes and enriches what is already known. In conclusion, it is neither too late nor too early to say that this series is completely unnecessary in this universe, children's and adventure stories had their time and moment contributing something important to cinematography, a phenomenon that they try to replicate not in the best way, hopefully, this studio will focus on what it should do and not be overwhelmed by a nostalgia that in our days is useless, unconvincing and trite. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is now available on the Disney + platform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f19gfOMZTtg Read the full article

[andrewlovely]

Homecoming

USS George H.W. Bush USS Gerald R. Ford They dock in my hometown and dominate the landscape. Holy Roman Empire Such power is seductive… You can’t take your eyes away Two Bechtel A1B nuclear reactors Five squadrons of multirole air superiority strike fighters

Who could oppose them? And who would even think to? We are nothing. Provincials on the outskirts of Rome

I want to believe in Big Brother I want to rest easy knowing that Father protects the world And beam with pride whenever I see his warships coming on the horizon. Guardians of the Free World Sentinels of the West

But I’ve been too close and seen too much I know too much and I know better

Satanism in the frat house Machiavelli’s acolytes thirsty for blood But they’ll settle for red death and sexual assault. A brood of vipers A school of sharks who eat their own young

They turn on each other out of a kind of boredom Or simply because they know of nothing else better to do. Brotherhood is betrayal

Patio get-togethers with smoked salmon queso carrot dips and forced laughter. Amidst the bad jokes and the desperate cackling my dad’s friend tells me how much he loves Batman and how much he misses killing people.

Post 9/11 lonestar quarterback varsity cheerleader pep-rally culture Band of Brothers jingoism and Republican family values Post Reich Fourth Reich zeitgeist propaganda films Our dear beloved Hero of The Fatherland Our dear beloved American Sniper scouting the aisles of HEB for Always Ultra Maxi Pads and cheap microwave dinners.

I’m getting Laguna Beach flashbacks and Homeland Security Orange Terror Alerts. Over a million killed in Iraq, But Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple is somehow the pinnacle of moral depravity. Wealth is health.

Long gone the Comanche trails we used to hike and the old wooden watchtower where the good Christian children warned of strange nightly rituals and animal sacrifice. Now they paved the sacred grounds with another shopping mall and you can buy arrowhead souvenirs where every burger joint meets every coffee shop. Interstate I-95 on the next exit. Highway marker 279. Food and gas in 16 miles.

I woke up on some European toll road federal highway built by Colonel Sanders’ military junta. I could just as easily have been driving back from San Antonio Airport. Home of the 1999 NBA Champions. The signs are the same everywhere But they all lead back to the same source.

Rick was a driver for Halliburton. Always spoke to me in a heavy drawl about the importance of having a good attitude. “We gotta fight ‘em over there so we don’t fight ‘em over here, Andrew.” I always thought that was just the way he talked. Turns out it was the highballs and the VA drug cocktail he drank every morning. He wasn’t even from Texas.

I never did find out who “they” were. The ones we were supposed to “fight over there.” But apparently they were in cahoots with whoever it was he fought in Vietnam.

Rick had a pretty good attitude about driving a truck I guess. About as good of an attitude as you could have really. He went to church every Sunday and blew his brains out on the Fourth of July. A patriot to the very end. Yeah, they used him up pretty good alright.

Beverly was a Dallas debutante with a sweet disposition, if maybe wound up a bit too tight for the likes of Austin. I probably seemed alien to her and maybe too polite, or too gentle for the rugged “boys will be boys” expectations that southern women seem to cater to and delight in.

She always asked me if I wanted more sweet potato casserole with a mixture of disappointment and confusion. I think I just seemed strange to her. But she was nice enough, and everyone was always “doin’ good, ya know And we’re all just doin’ fine… And you know, Doyle just bought that new boat he was wantin’ And I think we’re finally thinkin’ ‘bout sellin’ that old house finally.”

Beverly eventually jumped off the roof of a nine story parking garage. But that just got swept under the rug right alongside everything else.

There was a murder in Dallas and all Americans carry it three layers deep in different forms of societal conditioning and infra-red shades of misplaced anger and resentment. “The military industrial complex now permeates all aspects of our national identity and daily life: the political, the economical, even the spiritual.”

Ordinary citizens are buried and there’s nothing left, they’re all used up. Empty vessels filled to the brim and then discarded At the brink, at the brink, the cracks always form at the brink!

Lightning strikes splitting down Dick Van Dyke’s milk bottles, crazing through the glass, and just at the moment of critical eclampsis, the water cannot hold, it’s too late for the light, too late for Japanese Kintsugi, and everything not saved will be lost.

There will be no apotheosis, no final reckoning with the cowardly and dastardly adversaries who always hid themselves, but who, thinking their time nigh and the hour at hand prepared duly and dutifully beforehand to be utterly invincible, their case bulletproof, their charge noble and steadfast, now suddenly dare to reveal themselves, [and what a gift (!)], so you can finally stand up and fight, so you can finally show yourself, and show your power, and fight them head-on, and fight them in the light of daybreak, and fight them in the light of high noon, and with no more evasions, and with no more doublespeak, and with no more shadows, no…

There will be no final apology, no great apocalypse, just a tired whimper and a bewildered release.

Now the casket was lowered with military honors, and we all saw that, we all saw it. But The Beast was never slain. It gave the eulogy at its own funeral dressed in drag. Hairline trigger fingernail painted black. The CIA has operatives with dreadlocks and man-buns now. They meet all their diversity quotas. All of the bureaucratic vestiges of The Republic have been allowed to persist. They carry on the day-to-day affairs of The Empire and seem to please the people Conjuring up images of some past glory or vaguely reminiscent of some new half-promise half-remembered. It’s been a successful rebrand.

We all live on three job credit cards, but if we can just figure out which bathrooms we’re allowed to use, we’ll probably be OK. - Lovely

[sweetperversiongirl]

Friendship, love, and the stubby apple tree

Arthur x Eames Warnings: Students, ex friends

- I don't understand why you're puffing up your hood like that, mate," Yusuf shrugged. - I think it's as plain as it ever was. Well, he's a bit dressy. Well, he likes clothes, that's true. Who doesn't? Look at you... 

Eames swipes a blade of grass pulled off the lawn and frowns irritably, casting a sideways and unkind glance at the approaching company. They are chatting merrily and don't seem to notice anyone or anything around them. 

- What about me? - He looks down at his outstretched legs, wiggling his feet. 

Yusuf lets out an obscenely loud snort. A couple of students sitting on the lawn three meters away turn around. Eames pokes the Hindu unhappily under the rib. 

- No, really. Really? - Yusuf rolls his eyes and smirks ironically, dodging the other's elbow too deftly for such a hamster. Eames barely restrains himself from slapping him. - Eames, you're like a walking advertisement for Tom Ford clothes. These sneakers cost, what, a thousand bucks? And jeans no less, that's for sure. I don't care about that Jew or his suits. 

- That's right, Yusuf. You don't understand. It's jeans and sneakers. I don't care how much they cost. What is he, 19? He looks like a high school punk. What's the point of showing off?Shirts, ties. And the hair... Hell, I could just wrap it around my arm and cut it all the way off. 

He wrinkles squeamishly, plucks another blade of grass and sends it into his mouth to replace the one he has already safely chewed. The company, meanwhile, approaches and passes within a meter of them. 

- Shit. The shoelace comes undone. 

Cobb, one of Arthur Weig's entourage, stops and gets down on one knee. 

- Hi, Eames," Arthur says, turning ninety degrees. 

He looks at Eames with squinted eyes, and there are little devils dancing in them. It seems like they're about to pop out and scatter all over the lawn. And those dimples on his cheeks... They make everyone melt like jellyfish on hot sand. Even the toughest teachers love that skinny bastard. And the girls are always hanging around him... 

Eames stares at Arthur for a few seconds, putting his palm up against the sun. He snorts dismissively and turns away to Yusuf, ignoring the greeting. No, he's not like that! He's not like that. He's not like that. With those dimples and protruding ears... Let him test his charms on his wretched minions. 

Arthur only shrugs his shoulders. 

- How are you, Yusuf? 

- Hello, Arthur. I'm all right. How are you? - The traitor is flattered by the pleasantries, for which he is immediately elbowed in the chest again. 

- I'm fine. Is Eames not in the mood, as usual? 

- Arthur, baby, you better get out of here," Eames snapped irritably and nodded toward the waiting company. - Your acolytes are all impatient. You can't keep people waiting that long. It's indecent. 

Arthur smiles nonchalantly as Eames plucks another herb from the lawn and pops it into his mouth. At this rate, he'll soon be chowing down on all the grass on the university lawn. 

- These are friends, Eames. I wish you could understand that," Arthur announces, as if he were addressing an imbecile. - See you, Yusuf. 

He waves goodbye to Yusuf and leaves. Ims wants to pull off his sneaker and throw it at the pompous brat's head. But of course he doesn't. It's a lot of honor to throw Tom Ford sneakers at a bunch of glossy Jews. 

He and Arthur have lived - and continue to live - in neighboring houses since their early childhood. Their parents are friends, and the hedge between the yards has a passageway that isn't even covered by a wicket. 

Eames and Arthur are far from being so friendly. They've been feuding, not much more than that, since high school. And if anyone asks Eames why, he just snorts and doesn't say anything intelligible. Just because... 

The trouble is that Eames, no matter how hard he tries, can't remember why. He and Arthur were thick as thieves when they were kids. Spent weekends together, climbed into each other's rooms through the window on the branch of an old, gnarly apple tree. 

The apple tree is still in the same place, just as old and stubby. And no one even bothered to cut the branch down. Eames had been threatening to do it for years, but he couldn't get around to it. 

Yusuf climbs awkwardly off the lawn and grunts like a panting hedgehog. Looks like someone needs to stop eating burgers and pizza," Eames thinks with a chuckle and follows him, picking up his sweatshirt and backpack. 

- It's about time you guys got together for a beer," Yusuf says authoritatively as the two of them slowly make their way to campus. - You're obviously in some kind of trouble. And they're not solving them on their own, as you can see. So why don't we just sit down and have a heart-to-heart? 

- We don't have any problems," grimly grumbles Eames. - You can talk to him yourself if you like. He might even be kind enough to give you a place among his henchmen. Somewhere between Cobb and Ariadne. 

- You know, buddy, you can be such an asshole sometimes. 

- Of course I am. I'm not Arthur, not like their highnesses. 

- Asshole. 

- Pfft... 

- Yeah, yeah. A real one. 

*** 

Nash is throwing an end-of-school-year party. It's the perfect excuse to go out and get pissed. Eames would never miss a chance like this. And make sure Arthur and his entourage show up. With Friends," Eames concludes wryly. For some reason, today is the day when he feels that something really important must happen. He is electrified and the air around him vibrates. 

Eames calls the first girl he comes across, the one he chooses among the many contacts on his cell phone. The girl predictably agrees to go to the party with them, chirping with ill-concealed enthusiasm. Eames hums, as he would have expected, and promises to pick her up at seven.

At the beginning of eight, the three of them, including Yusuf, show up on Nash's doorstep. He greets them in person, smiles lusciously, and hands them each a plastic glass of cheap beer. Nash is a creepy slug and doesn't like Eames at all. However, his parties always turn out to be quite bearable. He knows how to keep a crowd occupied, and that's what counts. Tonight, though, the most important thing for Eames is having beer, or should I say, an exorbitant amount of it. He's serious about getting drunk. 

Eames tries not to think about the reasons for this boring desire to plunge into inadequacy. But they certainly have nothing to do with Arthur, who right now is demonstratively making out with some strange girl. I don't care if he swallows her whole, what does it matter to Ims? They're not even friends. If they were, he'd be sure to tell Arthur that this skinny hen with the pink strands in her perehid hair was no match for him at all. Next to the brilliant Arthur Weig she looks like Quasimodo with Marilyn Monroe in his arms. 

But they are not friends," Eames reminds himself, "not anymore. And it's certainly not his own fault. It was Arthur who had once decided to distance himself from him, he remembers that for sure. Eames has never even thought of pushing him away. Why should he? He had been very comfortable with Arthur, and there was something about him that he didn't have. Let him have his puppy dog eyes now, for all Ims cared. He'd learned to spend his time well enough without Arthur. After all these years, of course, he'd learned. Not that it came so easily to him right away. 

- If you don't stop staring at him like that, you'll see a hole in the back of his head," Yusuf teases. 

The beer had already given him a decent buzz and now mocking Ims had become his raison d'être again. 

- I'm not staring at anyone," Ims snaps and drinks the remaining two-thirds of the glass in one gulp. Immediately he reaches for the next. 

- Оh... Not at all," Yusuf grins evilly. - And you're certainly not trying to drink yourself into a piglet's mouth. Look, there's someone touching your girl now, while you and Artie are trying to establish a telepathic link. 

Eames doesn't even turn his head in the direction Yusuf is pointing. He doesn't care about the girl or who's groping her; he doesn't care about the fact that his eyes are already blurry and all the partygoers are doubled up to the point of nausea. Right now, for some reason, his chest felt so tight that he wanted to punch someone. No, not anyone, of course, but one particular Jewish-looking prick. 

Not to look at him like Eames owed him something. So he doesn't suck up to that defective Barbie of his with low social responsibility. Hands itching, knuckles itching, Ims just needs a fight. Somehow he's a hundred percent sure that as soon as his fist meets the pretty, swarthy face, he'll finally let go. Except that the trouble is that he can't bring himself to just walk up and punch Arthur for no apparent reason. 

The idea comes to him all by itself. If Eames were the least bit more sober, he certainly wouldn't have thought of it, but he's not sober now. He's already drunk out of his skull and can't go to any sea. Even beer. Even if it's Arthur and an over-hydrated blonde splashing around in it. 

Yusuf stares intently at Eames. He clearly suspects that this isn't going to be good. If he weren't so drunk, he'd grab Eames under the armpits and drag him out of the damn party before he could do any more damage. But Yusuf is just as stoned, so he just smirks mockingly and rubs his hands together in anticipation. 

Well, gentlemen, you want a show? I'll give you a show. Eames has always liked to attract the attention of the crowd. Right now, he didn't give a damn how he decided to make a splash here. The main thing is that he's decided, and now you can't stop him with a tank. He must provoke Arutra, or he'll explode. I can't take any more of this crunching.

With a lazy, unsteady gait, he makes his way through the crowd of guys and girls who are just as drunk as he is. He shoved someone with his shoulder, stepped on someone's foot, but he didn't apologize. He didn't have to worry about any moral issues right now. Ims conscience is sound asleep, dreaming colorful dreams. 

Arthur stands with his back to him and whispers in the blond's ear, probably some high-minded vulgarities of his own. Eames spits nervously: "Damn Casanova, how does he ever get laid? No wonder girls fall for his expensive clothes. 

- Hey, kid," he pats Arthur on the shoulder with his palm. - Can I have a minute of your precious attention? 

The curmudgeon's reaction was enviable; it's worth noting, he didn't even flinch. It was as if he was just waiting for Eames to get his hands on him. 

- Hey, man, back off. We're kind of busy here," the blonde squeaked nastily. 

- Shut up, Aisha," Arthur barked, too impolite for such a well-mannered Jew. 

Holy shit! Aisha? Seriously? What is she, some kind of snotty hippie? Eames snorts contemptuously and looks at the blonde, telling her to fuck off and let the big boys talk. But who's going to talk? Eames certainly won't. 

He thinks briefly before he finally loses the last vestiges of resolve and pulls Arthur to him, hooking his fingers into the fabric of his nauseatingly white fancy shirt, and presses his parched lips against the other man's ajar lips in amazement. Arthur is clearly confused, Eames is triumphant, but the jubilation lasts only a second. Until a hot, strong palm rests on the back of his head and Eames's cheeky, wet tongue is in his mouth. 

Eames is so shocked that he can't even move. Arthur isn't acting at all the way he envisioned when he conceived all this unhealthy shit. He growls hoarsely in a kiss, pressing Ims firmly against the back of his head with his palm, grabbing the belt on Diesel's jeans with his other hand. 

Arthur tastes like beer and expensive cigarettes, and a little like strawberry lip gloss for a cheap blonde Barbie-Aisha. His tongue is sassy and greedy, and so insistent that Eames himself does not know at what point or why he begins to give in to this vile provocation. But as if on the periphery of his alcohol-impaired consciousness, he feels himself responding to Arthur. And with just as much enthusiasm. 

- Follow me," Arthur commands, pulling away from Ims's mouth as abruptly as he sucked on it a few seconds ago. Grabbing his arm, he drags him somewhere behind him. 

The crowd goes wild, whistling approvingly to the point of gagging. Eames resists, tries to wrench his hand from his dead grip, but Arthur is no longer the frail and weak boy he remembers him as when they were teenagers. He's strong and tenacious, and seems very determined to... 

What exactly, Eames has no idea, but suddenly realizes that he'd really like to find out right now. 

They go out into the courtyard. There, as in the house itself, it is annoyingly crowded. Everyone is drinking and smoking and partying. Having fun and smoking and drinking. And no one seems to care about the two boys who never once sneak around the corner. 

Finally Arthur lets go of Eames' wrist and pushes him against the wall. Starts unbuckling his belt.

 - What the fuck are you... Are you out of your fucking mind?" yells Eames, his voice finally breaking through. 

He tries to push Arthur away. Apparently it's not very convincing. Or he's very determined. Either way, he has no intention of backing down. And Eames isn't one hundred percent sure if he really wants Arthur to stop. He feels his knees treacherously shaking, and his spine is aching. And his pants are suddenly too tight for an exceptional straight man who suddenly decides he's being groped by an ex-friend.

- Did you expect me to hit you? - Arthur grinned venomously and somehow too bitterly as he tackled Eames's waistband and fly. - I have to disappoint you, my love," he drops and runs his hand right down the elastic band of Eames's boxers. 

Eames is completely speechless. He only hisses through his teeth as Arthur jerks him off in a dark corner of someone else's house. He looks him straight in the eye. Eames looks away with pleasure. He feels humiliatingly helpless as he whimpers and thrusts his hips against the sassy, hot palm that is squeezing his erect cock with such stupefying force. But there is absolutely no power not to look into those black eyes. He seems to drown in them. Drowning in Arthur. And suddenly for a second he thinks he recognizes that stray gaze.

 - How long has it been? - he wheezed, leaning back and leaning the back of his head against the rough wall. - How long, Arthur? Tell me... I must... 

- Always... - Arthur's voice is as husky and muffled as ever. - I've loved you since you were a child, you bastard. But you don't care... And then it was... - he kept fondling Eames' cock. Not so rough anymore, almost gentle, but still just as insistent. 

Eames realizes he can't hold out much longer. It's as if some kind of spring in his lower abdomen is being unleashed. His waist and balls ache like they never did with the sexiest chick in the world. It's definitely not normal, but he doesn't care about anything right now. Everything that's happened to him up to this point. Everything but Arthur. 

- Then why...? Why did you... push me away? Why didn't you say anything to me? We were... were friends... 

Arthur is stubbornly silent, only wrinkling so painfully that the rest of the air is knocked out of his lungs. Continuing to press on the caressing palm, Eames decisively pulls back the strap of Arthur's tight pants and runs his hand into them. Squeezes Arthur's hard and ungodly flowing cock with his fingers. 

- Eames... God... I... oh, fuck... - Arthur moans muffledly and immediately pours himself into Eames' palm, hopelessly soiling his underwear and obviously expensive pants. 

Eames follows him with a long howl exactly two seconds later. 

They stand, eyebrows furrowed, trying to catch their breath. Eames is sober as a whistle. So is Arthur, it seems. Or maybe he wasn't drunk at all. Nothing would surprise Eames now. Except that somehow a flock of rabid butterflies fluttered in his stomach. And that he really - really! - wants to kiss Arthur again. 

The latter, of course, is still abnormal, but who said Eames ever considered himself normal? He wouldn't hesitate to spit in the man's face. Just as he hadn't thought twice about kissing Arthur the first time. Even if it was pure provocation on his part then. Or maybe it wasn't, who knows? Eames, here, couldn't be sure of that anymore.

 - Arthur," he called softly, finally pulling his cum-soaked hand out of Arthur's pants. Without thinking long, he wipes his palm on the wall beside him. 

Arthur tilts his head back and lifts his stubborn chin. Now he reminds Eames again of the boy he once had the nerve to sneak into the bedroom, even in the middle of the night. The one he'd always so secretly admired, but somehow couldn't admit it in time, even to himself. 

- If you're still going to punch me in the face, know that I regret nothing," Arthur said hotly, nervously zipping up Eames's fly. - So you might as well hit me. I won't even resist. I'm tired. 

- Puppy, you're such a fool, you know that? - Eames laughs softly and pulls Arthur to him. He sighs convulsively and bites his nose into Eames's neck. 

- I have missed you, Eames... So missed you...! Forgive me... 

Arthur sobs tearfully and sniffs his nose loudly. The collar of Eames's hoodie is getting suspiciously damp. 

It's his turn to sigh. His eyes begin to tingle treacherously. Perfect. Now he's going to snot like a silly girl. Although, to be honest, he doesn't care. Somehow Eames was no longer ashamed of exposing herself to Arthur. 

- If you try to run away from me again, I'll bury you right under our apple tree," he threatens grimly, and holds Arthur tighter to him. 

He laughs nervously and then bursts into a roar, clutching at Ims's hoodie with his fingers like a drowning man at a straw. 

Eames strokes his boy's disheveled hair. How nice that he never bothered to cut down a branch on the apple tree after all these years.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I had met him (Akira Kurasawa) when he was here for the New York Film Festival. At  that time I was starting a campaign [out of concern for] color fading in  film. I wanted all these filmmakers around the world to make a change  and be aware of the history, preservation, and restoration [of film]. So  I got ten minutes to speak to [Kurosawa].

They said, “You can speak to him for ten minutes.” He was in this  hotel. I walked in and Akira Kurosawa took his watch off, put it down  and said, “Talk,” and I talked fast—faster than I’m talking now, much  faster—and I was explaining this whole thing, how all our cinema’s going  to be destroyed. And then he said, “Ten minutes are up. I will consider  putting my name on this.” I said, “All right,” and that was it. I  thanked him very much, left.

Then he saw Raging Bull about four months later and he sent  me a telegram saying, “I saw your film, I like it, I will put my name on  this.” Some years later, he was talking to Francis [Ford] Coppola and  he said, “You know, I want somebody to play Van Gogh. I like that guy  Scorsese, he had his eyes—he was just so manic when he spoke to me that  time about film preservation. Do you think he would do it?” And Francis  said, “Sure, call him up.” So he wrote me this beautiful letter, and  what could I say? I told him I would try it.

He sent me the script and I remember I was in my trailer doing Goodfellas. In between long takes, I’d be memorizing this script. The worst part was that he started shooting Dreams and I was late on my film, so he was waiting for me and that was a bit nerve-wracking.

- Martin Scorsese on meeting Akira Kurosawa

In 1990, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa release Dreams, his 28th feature film which marked the first film in 45 years on which he was the sole author of the screenplay. The film would go on to define Kurosawa’s back catalogue and involved another legendary filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, this time taking on an acting role.

Made up of eight different vignettes, Dreams was categorised as ‘magical realist’ picture and was, according to Kurosawa himself, inspired by actual dreams that the filmmaker had actually experienced throughout his life. It was this level of integrity that propelled the film into a new space.

The idea of the auteur director  has been a controversial one at times given the sheer number of people  required at every stage to produce a film. But it hangs together for me  when you look at the films of say, Martin Scorsese or Akira Kurosawa,  both directors with very distinctive visual languages and ways of moving  the camera. Granted, neither director would be who he is without their  crack teams of actors, writers, composers, cinematographers, etc. However it  is part of their genius to consistently pull those teams together to  realize visions that none of the individuals involved could fully see on  their own. Though the final product may be the result of millions of  dollars and thousands of hours of work by hundreds of people, the films  of an auteur take shape foremost in the directors’ mind’s eye (and paintings and storyboards) rather than the writer’s script or producer’s conference room.

These directors are driven, like painters, to realise their visions,  and in Kurosawa’s case, that drive lasted right up until the end of his  life. (It was his wish to die on set, though an accident that left him  unable to walk and put an end to his directing career three years before  the end of his life.) A painter himself,  his films have always been colorful and painterly, and his final few projects were intensely so.

One of those last films, 1990’s Dreams, the  first of his films for which he alone wrote the screenplay, not only  originated fully in Kurosawa’s mind, but in his unconscious. A departure  from his typically epic narratives, the film follows various Kurosawa  surrogates through eight vignettes, based on eight recurring dreams,  each one unfolding with a surreal logic all of its own. In the fifth  short episode, “Crows,” Kurosawa casts Scorsese, his fellow auteur and his equal as a visual stylist, as Vincent Van Gogh.

The camera begins in a gallery, moving restlessly before several Van  Gogh paintings and behind an art student—identifiable as a Kurosawa  stand-in by the floppy white hat he puts on in the next scene, when he  wanders into the French countryside of the paintings. The fields,  bridge, and barns are rendered in Van Gogh’s brilliant colors and skewed  lines - and the student journeys further in to meet the artist himself:  Scorsese in red beard and bandaged ear. This is the only episode in the  film not in Japanese; the student speaks French to a group of women, and  Van Gogh speaks Scorsese’s New York-accented English, giving a lesson  on “natural beauty”.

It is not  the most convincing performance from Scorsese, but that hardly seems to  be the point. This is not so much Scorsese as Van Gogh, but rather Van  Gogh as Scorsese, and Kurosawa dreams himself as a younger acolyte of  his American counterpart.

[fantasticstoryteller]

Kingdoms ch.1

The army quickly overran the small castle. The moat, which had been created to repel intruders, was quickly forded. The walls, built high and smooth as possible, were quickly scaled due to the superior numbers of the oncoming horde. They built ramps out of their own bodies to reach the top of the walls. Soon enough, the ones that made it inside reached the drawbridge and cut the ropes holding it up.

Less than an hour afterwards all of the inhabitants of the castle had either been killed or rounded up. Those that weren’t dead were taken to the courtyard and bound roughly with rope. The leader of the army smiled as he strut in front of his prisoners. The moonlight over the castle bleached all color from the scene, but the leader knew who he was looking for.

Spotting his target a hand darted down and hauled the bound man up. “And there you are,” purred the leader of the army. “Are you ready to submit?”

Long hair, glowing gold even in the moonlight, framed the angular face. “We will never submit to you,” his captive said.

“Oh, never is a long time,” the army leader said. “All right,” he ordered his men, “throw the rest of these into whatever excuse for a dungeon this castle has.” He shook the one he was holding. “This one is going to need—a more personal treatment,” he said.

The reigning monarch, the Queen of the Arachnid kingdom, surveyed her court. Many of the couriers were arguing about the best action to take over the heinous actions of the Golden kingdom. They were pretty evenly split down the middle on whether they believed it was better to attack the Golden kingdom to reclaim Death’s Lands, or to wait and see what happened. There was only one opinion she wanted to hear.

Her emerald eyes scanned the court until they fell upon one of the priests. The priests, who were ostensibly not taking sides. As representatives of the Goddess, they were neutral to all courtly debates. As fellow humans, they had their own opinions.

Queen Mary banged her scepter against the ground, the hard bronze striking sharply against the stone. “I have heard all positions,” she said with a calmness that she did not feel. “And I will make a decision. High Priest Parker!” she called. The court stilled as she rose from her throne, the wispy linen hanging off her tall, lean frame. “I desire the consultation of the Goddess,” she said as she stepped away from the throne (a large bronze affair depicted with all the different spiders of the kingdom) and towards the group. She led the priest, who obediently followed in his dark linen robes, to the gardens.

None of the court—not courier, priest, or servant—dared to enter the garden while the Queen was in there. For a moment the two simply strode through the tall, ridged trees. The light purple blossoms scented the air. “Has the Goddess granted you with advice?” she asked.

High Priest Parker, Peter, the child she’d grown up with, bowed slightly to her. “No, Majesty,” he said simply. “The Goddess has granted me no wisdom for this occasion.”

It was nothing more than she’d expected. Wisdom from the Goddess usually came in the form of warnings for natural disasters, not advice on how to help a country whose prince had been captured by another nation. A brutal nation. The Ajax were not known for their gentle treatment of prisoners.

“And you? Peter?” she asked transforming them from Queen and High Priest to Peter and MJ, old childhood friends.

The carved bronze staff Peter held creaked in his grip as he stared out, unseeing, at the garden. “I want to save him,” he said quietly.

“Good,” said Queen Mary, with a firm nod. She put a hand on his shoulders. “You will take my army, you will save him, and you will make sure those bastards know what will happen to anyone who dares to threaten our allies.”

Dark brown eyes met emerald green ones. “With pleasure,” he said firmly.

That night he knelt in the temple, in front of the alter of the Goddess. He felt the change in the air behind him as the Goddess blessed the world with Her presence. “You have asked for no blessing, my priest,” she said, her voice that of an old, careworn woman.

“I deserve none,” Peter responded without hesitation. “Ajax is a country defined by its soldiers.” He opened his eyes and stared at the statue, not seeing the carved marble. “They are a horde, eating into their neighbors. If I was a true councilor I would council caution. I would council for us to sit and wait as we build our own reserves of military forces. And I would council this because Ajax will not be satisfied with what it has gained from its neighbors—and if they keep up, they will soon be neighbors with us and it will take all we have to keep our people safe from them.”

“Tell me my priest,” said the Goddess, “why have you not counseled your queen so, when this is what you believe?”

Peter remembered Wade. The two of them had only met a few times before, but a bond had sprung up between them. The cheerful, loud, crude person had become someone Peter cared for. Someone he loved. “I have to save him,” Peter said. He knew it was the wrong thing, that this was the wrong time to attack the golden kingdom—but it was true. He was willing to do whatever he had to in order to find and rescue Wade. His other half.

Two hands of the Goddess reached over and held themselves over his glands, coolness coating them. “You do,” she affirmed. “With this blessing, you will not receive your heat until after you and your mate are home and safe. Call on me in the morning and I will grant the entire army this blessing.”

“I—I am not worthy of this,” Peter said as guilt roiled through his gut.

“This is a matter,” the goddess said implacably, “that must be resolved. You must rescue your mate. Ajax must be halted in its conquest. Whether you feel you are worthy or not, you are My Priest.”

The presence of the goddess faded from the temple, but Peter still did not rise. The acolytes knew better than to bother him as he spent the night in contemplation and prayer.

[ljones41]

"STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" (2019) Review

"STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" (2019) Review Despite its success at the box office, the second film in the Disney STAR WARS Sequel Trilogy, "STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI", proved to be something of a publicity disaster. Many film critics loved it. An even greater number of moviegoers disliked it. Many have attributed this schism within the STAR WARS fandom as a contributing factor to the box office failure of "SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY". To regain the universal love of the fandom, Disney Studios and Kathleen Kennedy of Lucasfilm brought back J.J. Abrams, who had directed "STAR WARS: EPISODE VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS", to handled the trilogy's third entry, "STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER".

Disney Studios and Lucasfilm heralded "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" as not only the end of the franchise's Sequel Trilogy, but also the end of the Skywalker family saga, which began under George Lucas. The 2019 movie began a year after "THE LAST JEDI". The Resistance under Leia Organa has been hiding from the ever growing threat of the First Order, which has been ruled by her son, Kylo Ren aka Ben Solo. Leia has also been training Force acolyte Rey, while orchestrating the Resistance's attempts to rebuild the organization and form contacts with other worlds and factions throughout the Galaxy. However, the film's opening crawl reveals that Emperor Sheev Palpatine is still alive, despite being tossed down the second Death Star's reactor shaft by Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader, while being electrocuted in "STAR WARS: EPISODE VI - RETURN OF THE JEDI". Palpatine vows revenge against the Galaxy for its rejection of him and his power. Leia charges Poe Dameron, Finn and Rey to search for Palpatine and destroy him. Kylo Ren also seeks Palpatine with the intent to kill the latter and maintain his own supremacy of the First Order. Kylo Ren eventually manages to find Palpatine on the remote planet of Exegol. He learns that his former master, Snoke, had merely been a puppet of Palpatine. And the former Emperor wants him to find Rey and kill her in order to remove any possible threat to the resurgence of the Sith Order. When I learned that J.J. Abrams would return to the "STAR WARS" franchise to conclude the Sequel Trilogy, my reactions were mixed. On one hand, I disliked his handling of "THE FORCE AWAKENS". On the other hand, I completely loathed what Rian Johnson had done with "THE LAST JEDI". And when Abrams had promised to do right by the Finn character, which had been so badly mishandled by Johnson . . . well, some part of me did not know whether to welcome Abrams' return or be leery of it. There were aspects of "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" that I liked. I was impressed by Dan Mindel's cinematography for the movie, especially in scenes that featured the planet of Pasaana. I thought Mindel did an excellent job of utilizing the country of Jordan for those scenes, as shown below:

I was also impressed how Mindel shot the visual effects for the last duel between Rey and Kylo Ren among the second Death Star ruins on the Endor moon. Some of the film's action sequences struck me as pretty memorable, thanks to Abrams' direction, Mindel's cinematography and stunt coordinator Eunice Huthart. I am referring to those scenes that feature the heroes' occasional encounters with the First Order on Psaana and aboard the First Order star ship. I was also relieved to see the trilogy's three protagonists - Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron - and Chewbacca spend a great deal of the movie together. The four characters managed to create a pretty solid dynamic, thanks to the performances of Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Joonas Suotamo and it is a shame that audiences never got a chance to experience this dynamic in the trilogy's other two films. There was an aspect of the film's narrative that delivered a great deal of satisfaction to me. It is a small matter, but involved Rey's Jedi training. I am very relieved that Abrams finally allowed Rey to receive substantial training from a mentor, who happened to be Leia. A year had passed between "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Rey's first scene established that Leia had been training her during that year. The movie also established in a flashback that Leia had received her training from her brother Luke Skywalker. Why did I find this satisfying? Most of Luke's own Jedi training had also occurred during the period of a year - between the events of "STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK" and "RETURN OF THE JEDI". And during this period, he had received his training from . . . you know, I have no idea on how Luke managed to complete his training. Even after so many years. To this day, it is a mystery. And this is why I am grateful that Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio had made it clear that Leia had continued Rey's training between "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". The performances featured in the movie struck me as pretty solid, especially from the leads - Ridley, Boyega, Isaac and Adam Driver. The movie also featured solid, yet brief performances from returning cast members such as Kelly Marie Tran, Domhnall Gleeson, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Billie Lourd, Lupita Nyong'o, and the late Carrie Fisher. Dominic Monaghan, Naomie Ackie, Keri Russell and Richard E. Grant all made nice additions to the trilogy. It was great to see Billy Dee Williams reprise his role as Lando Calrissian. He was one of the bright spots of this film. Hell, it was even nice to see Denis Lawson as Wedge Antilles again, despite his brief appearance. But if I must be honest, I was not particularly blown away by any of them - including the usually outstanding Boyega. Actually, I take that back. There was one cast member who provided a moment of superb acting. I refer to Joonas Suotamo, who did an excellent job in conveying a true moment of grief and despair for Chewbacca's character in the film's second half. But I do have a complaint about one particular performance. And it came, from all people, Ian McDiarmid who portrayed the surprisingly alive Emperor Palpatine. How can I put this? This Palpatine seemed like a ghost of his former self. No. Wait. That was phrased wrong. What I meant to say is that McDiarmid's portrayal of Palpatine in this film seemed like an exaggeration in compare to his performances in the Original and Prequel Trilogy films. Exaggerated . . . ham-fisted. I found McDiarmid's scenes so wince-inducing that I could barely watch them. However, aware of McDiarmid's true skills as an actor, I finally realized that his bad performance may have been a result of J.J. Abrams' direction. The latter's failure as a director in Palpatine's scenes and failure to visualize the character as a subtle and manipulative villain really impeded McDiarmid's performance. Unfortunately, McDiarmid's performance was not my only problem with "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". I had a host of others. Many film critics have bashed J.J. Abrams for trying to reject what Rian Johnson had set up in "THE LAST JEDI". I find this criticism ironic, considering that Johnson had rejected a great deal of what Abrams had set up in "THE FORCE AWAKENS". Not that it really matters to me. I disliked "THE FORCE AWAKENS". I disliked "THE LAST JEDI". And if I must be brutally honest, I disliked "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Like the other two films, I thought the 2019 movie was pretty bad. My first problem with "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" was its main narrative. Basically, the entire story revolved around the heroes and the First Order's search for the now alive Palpatine. The film's opening crawl pretty much announced to movie audiences that Palpatine was alive without bothering presenting this revelation as a surprise. It is simply the old case of "tell and not show" that has hampered a great number of fictional works throughout time. I believe this narrative device especially does not suit a plot for a motion picture or a television series, because it comes off as a cheat. It is lazy writing. Worse, most of the main characters spend a great deal of the movie searching for Palpatine. And when they finally discover him, no one bothered to ask how he had escaped death after being allegedly killed by Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader in "RETURN OF THE JEDI". How did Palpatine survive being tossed to his death, while being electrocuted by Force lightning? Well, STAR WARS fans finally learned the truth in the film's novelization written by Rae Carson. The only major character who immediately managed to find Palpatine was Kylo Ren, who used a Sith wayfinder . . . or compass. Meanwhile, Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewbacca had to resort to following clues to lead to first a Sith dagger, and later, a Sith wayfinder - traveling from one planet to another at a dizzying speed. This whole search for a wayfinder and Palpatine struck me as unnecessarily rushed. I do not think it is a good thing when a person complains about the fast pacing of a movie with a 142 minutes running time. For me, this exposed the hollow nature of the movie's narrative. As I had earlier stated, the majority of the film's narrative is centered around the protagonists' determination to find Palpatine. A part of me wonders how did the Resistance and the First Order had planned to kill him, once he was discovered. And yes, the First Order's leader, Kylo Ren, also wanted Palpatine's dead. But how did any of them plan to kill him? The movie never conveyed any of the other characters' plans. Worse, this search for Palpatine had transformed the movie into some space opera version of both the INDIANA JONES and NATIONAL TREASURE movie franchises. Was that why Abrams had decided to expose Palpatine's return or resurrection in the film's opening crawl? So he could have his major characters embark on this "Indiana Jones" style hunt for Palpatine from the get go? Or relive the whole "map to Luke Skywalker" search from "THE FORCE AWAKENS" that proved to be so irrelevant? Well guess what? The "Search for Palpatine" proved to be equally irrelevant. Watching Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewbacca hunt down artifacts that would lead them to Palpatine was one of the more ridiculous aspects of this film. I felt as if I had watched a hybrid STAR WARS/INDIANA JONES/NATIONAL TREASURE movie. It was fucking exhausting. Returning to Palpatine, I was unpleasantly shocked to learn that during the thirty years he was missing, he had created a new fleet of Star Destroyers, each ship equipped with a planet-killing laser. Thirty years. Is that how long it took Palpatine (or his clone) to create a fleet of planet killing Star Destroyers? Is that why he had taken so long construct these ships? If one Star Destroyer can destroy a planet, why did he bother to wait so long to use any of them to re-take the Galaxy? Three decades? I wish I could say more, but I do not see the point. Is a Star Destroyer strong enough to be used as a "base" for a laser powerful enough to destroy a planet?

I have also noticed that the lightsaber duels featured in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" . . . well, they were bad. Quite a travesty, if I must be honest. I have never been that impressed by the lightsaber duels in the Sequel Trilogy, but even I must admit that Kylo Ren's duels with both Finn and Rey in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" were somewhat better than the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader duel in "STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE". But after the 2015 movie . . . dear God. Rey and Kylo Ren's fight against Snoke's guards in "THE LAST JEDI" struck me as something of a joke. But Rey and Kylo Ren's duels in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" were simply abysmal. Dan Mindel's cinematography and the movie's visual effects team could do nothing to hide the laughable nature of the duels. Both Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver seemed to spend a great deal of their time slashing at each with no semblance of swordsmanship whatsoever. Where is Nick Gillard when you need him?

Not surprisingly, "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" revealed a number of Force abilities that appeared for the first (or second time) in the STAR WARS franchise. The Force bond between Rey and Kylo Ren, which was created by Snoke in the previous film; allowed the First Order leader to snatch a necklace from the Resistance fighter's neck in a violent manner - despite the fact that the pair was thousands of miles from each other. And in another scene, while Rey faced Palpatine and Kylo Ren faced the Knights of the Ren, she was able to hand over a lightsaber to him - despite being miles apart. How did they do this? I have not the foggiest idea. I do not even understand how Abrams and Terrio managed to create this ability in the first place. And frankly, I find it rather stupid and implausible. Force healing. For the first time in the history of the franchise, a Force user has the ability to heal. How did this come about? I have not the foggiest idea. If this had been the case during the events of the Prequel Trilogy, chances are Anakin Skywalker would have never become a Sith Lord. The Force healing ability made its debut in the Disney Plus series, "THE MANDALORIAN" . . . I think. However, Kylo Ren had the ability to use Force healing. So did Rey. I do not know who taught them or how . . . fuck it! I will just treat this as another plot device that came out of Lucasfilm's ass. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" also revealed that the "resurrected" Palpatine had the ability to transfer one person's essence into the body of another. How? More contrived writing.

Speaking of contrivance, there is the matter of one Leia Organa. Although a part of me still believes Lucasfilm should have killed off Leia Organa in "THE LAST JEDI", in the wake of Carrie Fisher's death a year before the film's release; I must admit that Abrams did an admirable job in utilizing old footage of the actress from "THE FORCE AWAKENS", digital special effects and Billie Lourd as a body double for some of Leia's scenes. But I hated the way Leia was finally killed off. It was similar to Luke's ludicrous death in "THE LAST JEDI". I HATE how Disney Studios and Lucasfilm portray the Force as some kind of energy that can kill an individual if it was used too long or too hard. As if the Force user was some kind of goddamn battery. I really hate that. And this is why I dislike Leia's death just as much as I disliked Luke's. In fact, this movie seemed to be filled with contrived writing. As for the Rebel Alli . . . I mean the Resistance, I noticed that their numbers had grown since the end of "THE LAST JEDI". Had Leia managed to recruit new members for the Resistance's cause during the year between the two films? If so, "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" did not hint one way or the other. I mean there were barely enough Resistance members to crowd the Millennium Falcon in the last film's finale. And the narrative for "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" seemed to hint that aside from Maz Kanata, hardly anyone new had bothered to join the Resistance during that year between the two films. So . . . if this is true, why did the number of Resistance members seemed to have tripled during that year between the two movies? Among the new members is one Beaumont Kin, portrayed by "LOST" alumni Dominic Monaghan. Speaking of characters - the arcs for the major characters have proven to be as disastrous as those featured in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" and especially "THE LAST JEDI". I was surprised to see Maz Kanata as a member of the Resistance. Her recruitment into the organization was never seen on screen. Even worse, the former smuggler and tavern owner was basically reduced to a background character with one or two lines. Actress Lupita Nyong'o's time was certainly wasted for this film. Although I thought Rose Tico was a promising character, I never liked how Rian Johnson had used her as a very unnecessary mentor for Finn in "THE LAST JEDI". However, my hopes that J.J. Abrams would do her character justice in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" proved to be fruitless. In this film, Rose had been reduced from supporting character to minor character, who spent most of her appearances interacting with Monaghan's Beaumont Kin in three or four scenes. What a damn waste! Speaking of waste . . . poor Domhnall Gleeson. His character, General Armitage Hux, was another character whose presence was wasted in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Audiences learned in the film's second half that he had become a mole for the Resistance, supplying the group information on the First Order's movements. The problem with this scenario is that film had Hux explained that he was simply betraying his leader, Kylo Ren. But his reason for this betrayal was never fully explained, let alone developed. Harrison Ford returned in a brief cameo appearance as the ghost of Han Solo. Wait a minute. Let me re-phrase that. Ford returned as a figment of Kylo Ren's imagination . . . as Han Solo. How was his performance? Unmemorable. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" also featured a good number of new characters. Probably too many. I have already mentioned Resistance fighter Beaumont Kim. Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio also introduced Jannah, a former stormtrooper who had deserted from the First Order like Finn. When she was introduced, I had assumed that Finn's background would finally be explored. Never happened. Worse, Abrams only allowed Jannah - a new character - to speculate on her background in one line spoken to Lando Calrissian. And nothing else. Next, there was Zorri Bliss, a smuggler and former paramour of Poe Dameron's, who provided the Resistance with information on how to interpret the Sith dagger in their possession. Aside from this task, Bliss managed to miraculously survive the destruction of Kijimi, her homeworld to participate in the final battle against Palpatine and the First Order. Through her, audiences learned that Poe was a former spice smuggler . . . a drug smuggler. More on this, later. And finally, we have Allegiant General Enric Pryde, who came out of no where to become Kylo Ren's top commander. It occurred to me that Pryde turned out to be the Sequel Trilogy's General Grievous. I love the Prequel Trilogy, but I never liked Grievous. He should have been introduced a lot earlier than the Prequel Trilogy's last film. And Enric Pryde should have been introduced earlier than "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". It would have made his brief conflict with Hux a lot more believable. I read somewhere that the character of Kylo Ren aka Ben Solo is the most popular in the Sequel Trilogy. I am a firm admirer of actor Adam Driver and I thought he gave a solid performance as Kylo Ren. But . . . the character has never been a favorite of mine. I could complain that Kylo Ren is bad written, but I can honestly say the same about the other major (and minor) characters. Yet for some reason, Lucasfilm, a good number of the STAR WARS and media seemed to think the stars shined on Kylo Ren's ass. I hate it when the glorification of a story or character is unearned and then shoved down the throats of the public. In "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER", Kylo Ren's character arc proved to be just as rushed and full of writing contrivances as his relationship arc in "THE LAST JEDI". Honestly. Unlike Anakin Skywalker in the Original Trilogy, Kylo Ren's redemption was never properly set up in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". It merely sprung up in the film's last third act so that Abrams (the unoriginal storyteller that he is) could allow him to mimic his grandfather's arc. Looking back on Kylo Ren's character, he should have continued his arc from the end of "THE LAST JEDI" - as the main villain. Instead, Abrams and Lucasfilm brought back Palpatine so they could have Kylo Ren repeat Anakin's arc and avoid dying as the film's Big Bad. This decision only brought about bad writing. And then we have Poe Dameron. In some ways, Poe proved to be the worst written character in this trilogy. It almost seemed as if Lucasfilm, Abrams and Rian Johnson did not know what to do with him. His death was initially set up in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" and he spent most of that film off-screen, only to make a miraculous re-appearance near the end, with no real explanation how he had survived the crash on Jakku. In "THE LAST JEDI", Johnson had transformed Poe into some hot-headed Latino stereotype, who questioned the decisions of the Resistance's two female leaders - Leia and Admiral Holdo. And "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" made another revision to Poe's character. The movie revealed that Poe had a past romance with the smuggler Zorri Bliss and was a spice runner (drug smuggler). How quaint. Abrams and Terrio took the only leading character in the Sequel Trilogy portrayed by a Latino actor and transformed him into a drug lord. Where the two writers watching "NARCO" or old reruns of "MIAMI VICE" when they made this decision to Poe's character? God only knows. I do know that in my eyes, this was another mark of racism on Lucasfilm's belt. Speaking of racism . . . what on earth happened to Finn? Following Rian Johnson's shoddy treatment of his character in "THE LAST JEDI", J.J. Abrams had assured the franchise's fans that he would do justice to Finn. And he failed. Spectacularly. Did Finn even have a character arc in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER"? The former stormtrooper spent most of the film either participating in the search for Palpatine, while keeping one eye on the constantly distracted Rey, like some lovesick puppy. He seemed to lack his own story in this film. "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" could have provided the perfect opportunity for Lucasfilm to further explore his background as a former stormtrooper. With the creation of Jannah, I thought it would finally happen. Instead, the movie focused more on Jannah's questions about her origins. And Lucasfilm and Abrams wasted the chance to even consider at subplot regarding Finn and the First Order's stormtroopers. Boyega also spent most of the film hinting that he had something important to tell Rey. Many believe he was trying to confess that he loved her. That is because the movie DID NOT allow him to finally make his confession. Even worse, audiences learned that he wanted to confess his suspicions that he might be Force sensitive. And Lucasfilm confirmed this. Why on earth could they NOT confirm Finn's Force sensitivity on film? Why? What was the point in keeping this a secret until AFTER the film's release? I also noticed one other disturbing aspect about Finn . . . or John Boyega. I just discovered that John Boyega had been demoted by Disney Studios and Lucasfilm from leading actor to supporting actor. Only this had happened a lot sooner that I thought. In the studio's Academy Awards campaign for "THE FORCE AWAKENS", it pushed Boyega for a Best Actor nomination. But in both "THE LAST JEDI" and "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER", the studio pushed him for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Yet, for all three movies, Lucasfilm and Disney also pushed a white actor for Best Actor. They pushed Harrison Ford (along with Boyega) "THE FORCE AWAKENS". They pushed Mark Hamill for Best Actor in "THE LAST JEDI". Yet, both Ford and Hamill were clearly part of the supporting cast. And they pushed Adam Driver for Best Actor for "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". Hmmmm . . . Driver went from supporting actor to lead actor, while Boyega was demoted from lead actor to supporting actor. A few more notches in Lucasfilm/Disney's racist belt. God, I am sick to my stomach. And poor John Boyega. He was poorly misused by Lucasfilm, Disney Studios, Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams. As for Rey . . . I am completely over her as a character. Although I found her Mary Sue qualities annoying, I found her arc in "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" a complete mess. The only good that came from her arc was the fact that Leia had trained her in the ways of the Force for a year. Otherwise, I had to grit my teeth and watch her behave in this chaotic manner throughout the entire film. Every time she and her friends were in the middle of some situation, she would get distracted by Kylo Ren's presence and break away. Why? So she could kill him . . . I guess. Apparently, killing Kylo Ren was more important to her than completing a mission for the Resistance. Why? I have no idea. The movie's narrative never explained this behavior of hers. And it gets worse. Rey eventually learns that she is Palpatine's granddaughter. Granddaughter. Palpatine managed to knock up some woman years ago and conceive a son after he had become Emperor. That son conceived Rey with her mother before dying. Palpatine, who had been alive all of these years, never bothered to get his hands on Rey . . . until this movie. Why? I have no idea. During Rey and Kylo Ren's final duel, she managed to shove her lightsaber blade into his gut. And then she used the Force to heal him. Why? Perhaps she felt guilty for nearly killing him. Who knows? Later, she is killed by Palpatine (who could not make up his mind on whether he wanted her alive or dead) before Kylo Ren Force healed her. And then she planted a big wet kiss on his pucker. Lucasfilm and Disney claimed that the kiss was an act of gratitude on her part. I did not realize that gratitude could be so sexual. Nevertheless, Lucasfilm and Disney ensured that the only leading male that Rey would exchange bodily fluids with was one who shared her white skin. Despite the fact that this . . . man had more or less abused her - mentally and physically - since "THE FORCE AWAKENS". There was no real development that led to this sexual kiss of gratitude. But I guess Disney and Lucasfilm were determined that Rey would not exchange a kiss with the two non-white men. Another notch on Lucasfilm/Disney's racist belt. Oh . . . and by the way, the film or Lucasfilm had established that Rey and Kylo Ren were part of some Force dyad. What is a Force dyad? Two Force-sensitive people who had created a Force bond, making them one in the Force. And this happened because Rey and Kylo Ren were grandchildren of Sith Lords. I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life, especially since it was established in "THE LAST JEDI" that Snoke - a creation of Palpatine, by the way - had created their mental bond. How he did that I have no idea. You know what? I could go on and on about "STAR WARS: EPISODE IX - THE RISE OF SKYWALKER". But I now realize it would take a goddamn essay to explain why I dislike this movie so much. I should have realized that J.J. Abrams' promises that he would fix the problems of "STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI" was worth shit in the wind. He, Chris Terrio, Disney Studios and Lucasfilm only made the Sequel Trilogy worse . . . as if that was possible. Not only was "THE RISE OF SKYWALKER" a waste of my time, so was the entire Sequel Trilogy. And it wasted the acting skills of its talented cast led by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver for so many years. 

[bigskydreaming]

There’s just...there’s just so much I need to know!

Are all the Academy X kids back? DJ? Kidogo? Loa? Wallflower? Blindfold? OMG IS TAG BACK, SHOW ME JULIAN REUNITING WITH HIS BFF, DEAD FOR YEARS AND NOW BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE.

There’s just...imagine, an entire class of mutant teenagers who were all tragically killed and now are resurrected into this new world that’s so different from the one they last saw, like everything’s changed in the blink of an eye. What’s that even LIKE? How do they feel about owing their return and resurrection to one of their own former classmates, who’s now part of this group of five mutants revered on Krakoa with idol-like status as the ones who like...defeated death for the mutant race? How do all the kids who died on M-Day like Hydro, never even having time to know what happened, feel about learning about the Decimation and why they died in the first place? How do the kids who died on the bus like DJ feel, trying to reconnect with their classmates like Julian and Cessily and Santos who have been through SO MUCH since they last saw them, literally lived through wars and the threat of extinction and are so changed now by experiences they can’t ever (hopefully won’t ever) be able to relate to?

Is Jay Guthrie back? What’s it like for Sam and Paige and the rest of their siblings to suddenly have him back? What does Sooraya feel about this? How do she and Jay interact now? How does the every mutant is automatically a citizen of Krakoa thing work....all the Guthrie kids are mutants, but their mom Lucinda isn’t...is she allowed to come and go, according to Krakoa law? There must be exceptions made for some humans to live on Krakoa, surely, given that Corsair is part of one of the Dawn of X line-ups....who makes the distinction and how?

Speaking of the Summers, what’s up with Gabe’s resurrection? How does that work? Does he remember everything, and his past crimes are forgiven on the basis of the amnesty law, so long as he plays nice? Or did Xavier take advantage of being the man who puts all the mutant minds back in their shiny new bodies and conveniently rearrange a few memories regarding why Gabe hates him so much, and now Gabe gets along with everyone just fine?

OMG ARE PETRA AND SWAY BACK AND IF NOT WHY NOT.

What about Kevin Ford aka Wither? Selene was one of the mutant villains granted amnesty when she came to Krakoa, does that mean her former pawns are granted the same resurrection treatment as any other mutant, and if so, how does Kevin feel about being resurrected by Josh....the very person who killed him in the first place?

Oooh, and Clarice....not to mention Jono. What’s it like for some of the more heroic descendants of Clan Akkaba to now be living on the same island as their long distant villainous ancestor, Apocalypse himself?

Speaking of Apocalypse, anyone else catch that bit of gossip from Bar Sinister about how gladly Apocalypse would trade in any of his later Horsemen for his original four....with Hickman having made a big deal about alluding to some long ago war Apocalypse and his original Horsemen waged on Krakoa against some other dimensional foes.....with those Horsemen dying or imprisoning themselves to stop them? Who wants to bet that was to set up a storyline where like, maybe part of Apocalypse’s conditions for working with Xavier and Magneto on all of this was to have his original Horsemen resurrected as well somehow? Like SOMETHING’S going to happen there.

Oooh ooh ooh......what about the fact that ALL OF LOGAN’S 13378427842 dead mutant children are now potentially alive again? CLAN SNIKT? ADRIAN CORBO? WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF JIMMY?

And and and and and they better fucking bring back Chris Bradley and I will literally pledge my firstborn if somebody writes in a scene where Bobby Drake gets to see his little buddy alive and well again, sans Legacy Virus. Look, it doesn’t matter that I’m probably never going to have a firstborn, its the thought that counts, shh, its allowed.

What about Magneto’s original Acolytes, the ones who died when Asteroid M crashed? Chrome, Delgado and Anne-Marie, etc? What might their reactions be upon say, running into Traitor McBetrayal, Fabian Cortez?

IS SIENA BLAZE BACK OMG PLZ LET SIENA BE BACK I WILL....crap, already pledged my firstborn. Ugh, second is the best?

SPEAKING OF....I forget what launched this tangential thought but Mikhail Rasputin anyone? HIS BABY SISTER IS ONE OF THE FOUR WAR CAPTAINS OF KRAKOA, LIKE...TALK ABOUT *SCREEECH* WAIT, SAY WHAT? REVELATIONS TO WAKE UP TO.

Just how long are they gonna tease the whole ‘no but really there’s ANOTHER Summers brother’ plotline this time?

OMG are Emplate, the M twins and Monet all supposed to play happy family in a shared environment, holy shit could you imagine the epic staredowns everytime Marius and Monet run into each other in like Krakoa’s town square or the market or something and Jubilee just stage whispers “Awkwaaaaard.”

Holy shit, how are Ev and Angelo going to react to coming back to life and discovering that Jubes is now a MOM???

What about depowered mutants we haven’t seen get their powers back yet, are they all repowered now thanks to Hope? Is Dallas Gibson on Krakoa, shadow powers intact? What about Shola and Freakshow and Wicked, aka the only interesting characters Claremont has invented in 30 years, no, Lifeguard and Slipstream DO NOT COUNT.

WHAT DOES ALL OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE RETURN OF THE 2099 UNIVERSE IN A COUPLE MONTHS, LIKE HOW ARE THE X-MEN 2099 and X-NATION GONNA LINE UP WITH ALL OF THIS?

And will we get Twilight and Clarion and December back, and finally some kind of answer on whether December is a descendant of Bobby or Emma or both?

Is Leon Nunez, the REAL mutant behind Ink’s powers, a resident of Krakoa because the amnesty law got him out of jail and did he take the power back from that LOSER and did Ink get his stupid ass kicked to the curb because everyone was like lol nobody even likes you and you’re not even a mutant, go be an Avenger ITS WHERE YOU BELONG?

Probably not, but look a guy can dream.

What’s St. John gonna think about this new twink running around using his name, HE’S the only real flamer in town! Or is he just not gonna care, and retire to spend his time resuming his career as a romance novelist? (THIS IS CANON, I DID NOT MAKE THIS UP).

Most importantly, WHAT THE HELL IS THE PREMISE OF THE MARAUDERS BOOK AND WILL I LIKE IT AND WILL BOBBY BE WRITTEN WELL AND SINCE IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE HELLFIRE CLUB AND EMMA’S A KEY PART OF THE BOOK WILL WE GET CHRISTIAN THERE TOO AND WITH SIMON AS PART OF THE MARAUDERS LINEUP WILL I FINALLY GET THE CHRISTIAN/BOBBY/FIRE-GUY-EVEN-IF-SIMON-IS-A-SUBPAR-SUBSTITUTE-FOR-JOHNNY LOVE TRIANGLE I NEED AND DESERVE?

OMG and Daken’s on Krakoa too, oh shit, is Bobby gonna finally get to be the hot girl? So many gays, so little time...whoops, Bobby can make clones of himself too.....oh shit did I make it weird, WHO CARES, BOBBY HAS POTENTIAL LOVE INTERESTS NOW, PLURAL, NOT SINGULAR, HUZZAAAAAAAAH.

And also all the other stuff is still interesting too. But like. Bobby boyfriend. Make it happen.

[toshootforthestars]

The problem is that words like “viability” and “success” mean different things to different people. Tallying up 700,000 subscribers and $35 million in annual revenue would be clear markers of success to a person who just wants to run a viable, mid-sized business that pays people good wages to write interesting things. But those numbers mean something wholly different to an unfathomably rich person like [Ev] Williams, who is always in search of the next billion-dollar idea. MEL succeeded in publishing work that people wanted to read, but perhaps not in providing whatever it is a razor company was looking for when it decided to launch a publication.

It’s tiring to keep living in cycles where headcount at some point becomes bodycount for editorial operations, either through incompetence, negligence, or hubris of would-be media barons. And these notions of what a successful media company actually looks like will only become more distorted as more of them are placed in the hands of rich people who suffer from a terminal disconnect from reality.

The last several years in media has brought breakneck deals between former media upstarts that mirror the legacy newspaper mergers they thought they were innovating beyond. Vox Media gobbled New York magazine, Vice handcuffed Refinery29, BuzzFeed grabbed HuffPost at the end of last year. When these mergers happen, employees always get the same gaslit song about how cuts won’t be made. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti told The New York Times last fall that everyone should feel good about his company’s merger with HuffPost. A few months later, he went about gutting HuffPost’s newsroom.

If there was a tipping point in the business of journalism, we’re likely far past it. I was writing about these same problems as a Serious Media Business Reporter Person almost six years ago. Not much has changed since then, except the names and the amount of us who have lost or left jobs.

The channels for distributing news, and the ad dollars that flow in the direction of the eyeballs they capture, are dominated by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube. The audience, either perceived or real, for the information created by journalists, is atomized beyond any historical comprehension. And the economics? Largely controlled by a collection of wealthy figureheads and tech acolytes whose motivations and interests vacillate from apathetic altruism and curious benevolence to reckless hostility.

The future seems bleak as hell, so is it a surprise writers are gleefully (or, warily) jumping to Substack? Substack, much like Medium, is another deal with a devil you only partially know that doesn’t want to share the granular details of its proprietary product. But, given the toxic atmosphere in media (I will save my rant on the ways newsrooms are hostile and traumatic to anyone who doesn’t resemble a 54-year-old white man for another day), the economics and freedom, even at a newsletter company with opaque motivations, are favorable by comparison.

And yet, there is another option: collective action. There’s a reason there’s been an explosion in new unions and bargaining units within media companies in the recent years. It’s the same reason there’s been further expansion in nonprofit news, news cooperatives focused on marginalized communities, or even (ahem) subscription-based blogs focused on community. 

If the work is actually about speaking truth to power, that belief system has to matter in our own house.

At this point getting laid off, being a surveyor or survivor of the wreckage in this industry, should only lead to one conclusion: Nobody is coming to save the day. We have to do it ourselves. As long as journalism remains beholden to wealthy dilettantes, be they Ev Williams, Jonah Peretti, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos, The Newhouse family, or a swarm of locusts wearing a Tom Ford suit and Jordans that have formed a hedge fund, any endeavor will ultimately be poisoned by the bias and interests of its benefactor. Because money will always look after more money, not the interest of journalism or the people who want to read a chronicling of the world as it is ground to dust in money’s path.

Justin Ellis: Rich People Are Never Going To Save Media

Defector   /   26 Mar 2021

[squatch-and-stretch]

Scar Tissue

Chapter Two

< Chapter One | Chapter Three >

Ford Pines & Fiddleford McGucket | 2,035 words | Axolotl’s Acolyte AU

Fic under the cut.

When Ford regains awareness, he’s standing at the base of the stairs. Fiddleford is on his knees in front of him, arms wrapped tightly around his stomach. In the dim light, Ford can see dark stains all over Fiddleford’s clothing and matting the hair from his temple to his chin on one side. That is concerning, and as Ford takes a sharp, startled breath in, he realizes just what those stains are. The metallic scent of blood hits him like a physical blow to the stomach, making it twist with worry.

“Fiddleford! My stars, what happened to you?” Ford asks, reaching for his friend’s less bloody shoulder, the one where the strap of his tank top isn’t ripped.

Fiddleford flinches, scrambling away.

“It’s… Fiddleford, it’s me,” Ford says gently, keeping his hands held up placatingly.

“Where— where’s the lights, let me see—“ Fiddleford starts, voice fast and frantic between gasps of air. Ford moves towards the light switch, and Fiddleford freezes like a frightened animal.

“I’ve got the light,” Ford explains gently, flicking it on. Fiddleford blinks hard as light floods the room, pupils contracting to reveal blue irises.

It is blood that’s staining his shirt and soaking his hair, Ford realizes, still wet at the source and drying into a dark shade of red-brown around the edges.

“Y-your eyes, lemme see your eyes!” Fiddleford demands, shakily shifting up onto his knees to get a better look at Ford’s face.

Ford leans down, satisfied to let him do whatever comforts him for the time being. It is an oddly specific request though, and Ford has no idea what he’s looking for.

Well, perhaps he has one idea, and it would explain what he’s doing at the base of the stairs with no memory of how he got there and a throbbing headache, but if Fiddleford is covered in blood, terrified, and looking at Ford’s eyes specifically… There are implications that Ford doesn’t even want to consider.

“It’s… it’s you?” Fiddleford says, strained.

He reaches out a bloody hand, and Ford sits down before him and catches it. It’s cold and tacky against his skin. He runs his thumb soothingly across the back of Fiddleford’s hand, and it twitches weakly in his grip.

“It’s me. Who else would it be?” he asks, even if he’s afraid he already knows the answer.

Fiddleford pulls his hand away, clenching it into a fist that he buries against his torso, holding himself tight.

“Y’know damn well who it’d be, Stanford,” Fiddleford grits out, trying so hard to sound tough even as tears well up in his eyes.

“Fiddleford, what… what happened?”

“Your demon tried to— no, he did kill me, at least twice!” Fiddleford explains, “He used— he used your hands, Stanford, if the Axolotl hadn’t gotten me all fixed up my last thoughts woulda been that my best friend killed me.”

“No,” Ford breathes. He can’t believe that. He just can’t.

“The hell d’you mean no?” Fiddleford snaps, but it comes out more like a sob. “I’ve got the bruises of your fingers on my damn throat!”

Fiddleford tilts his head to show it off, but even on the side of his throat that isn’t soaked in blood, there’s no sign of broken capillaries beneath the skin.

“There’s nothing there,” Ford says gently. “I think you’re confused.”

“Don’t you dare,” Fiddleford sobs, pawing at his throat as if he expects to suddenly find evidence of what happened by doing so. “Look, there’s—“

His hand goes down to the ripped strap of his tank top. The skin from his collarbone down to the collar of his shirt is soaked in blood, but there’s no evidence of a wound. Fiddleford stares, running his fingers over the undamaged skin in shock.

“No… no no no, what— Ford, Stanford, you gotta believe me!” Fiddleford begs. “You’re the only one here, and you ain’t bleeding! Where else would all this blood be from?”

“… I’ll figure this out,” Ford says slowly. He doesn’t have an explanation, but it couldn’t have been Bill. It just couldn’t have been. “You’ll be okay, Fiddleford.”

“Damn right I’ll be okay! I’ll be okay once we find a way to get that demon out of your head for keeps!”

“It wasn’t Bill! It couldn’t have been Bill!” Ford insists. “You’re just confused. You have a lot of blood on you, it must be frightening.”

“It’s my blood! It’s my blood that Bill took outta my body by stabbing me with a broken lamp and throwing me out a window!” Fiddleford shouts.

“In times of stress, we can’t let our emotions get the best of us,” Ford says carefully after a long lapse of silence. “I’m sorry to say this, but there’s just no evidence of your accusations.”

Fiddleford looks up at Ford with such raw hurt that he almost wants to take the words back. But he can’t, and Fiddleford is pulling himself up to his feet before he can even try.

“Fuck you, Stanford,” Fiddleford says icily. The curse sounds strange in his drawl.

“Fiddleford—“

“No, I ain’t puttin’ up with this. Maybe I’ll come back when you get your head outta your ass, but until then, I’m gone.”

“Fiddleford, wait—“

“If the next words outta your mouth ain’t ‘you’re right and I’m sorry, let’s work together to find a way to kill Bill Cipher’, I swear to the lord above—“

“I… you’re a mess,” Ford says instead. It’s the best he can do. “At least get yourself cleaned up and changed? There will be questions if you go into town looking like that.”

“There’s always questions,” Fiddleford grits out, but he turns away from the door. “Just… shut up.”

“I’m not…?”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” he growls, shaking his head and skulking towards the bathroom.

“Let me—“ he can’t ask to wash his friend, that wouldn’t be proper and besides, he doubts Fiddleford would appreciate his touch right now. “Let me know if you need anything?”

“Why don’t ya go clean up my room?” Fiddleford grunts. “Maybe you’ll find some evidence there.”

Before Ford can reply, Fiddleford steps into the bathroom and slams the door behind him.

Ford sighs, but goes upstairs to do as he was told. As he touches the handrail, a sharp stab of pain jolts up his arm. As he looks down at his palm in the dim light bleeding from the living room, he sees a bloody shard of something embedded on the side of his hand near the base of his index finger.

His stomach twists. Fiddleford had mentioned something about a broken lamp and window, hadn’t he?

He carefully plucks the object out of his skin and looks it over. If he had to choose between glass and ceramic, he’d guess ceramic, but it’s hard to tell while covered in blood and barely lit. He shoves it in the pocket of his pajama pants to deal with later.

As he pushes Fiddleford’s door the rest of the way open, he finds the room to be in relatively good shape. The chaos seems to be entirely contained to his bed and the window above it. Whatever attacked Fiddleford— and yes, fine, Ford might be able to accept that he was attacked, but it wasn’t by Bill— went after him in his sleep, while he was helpless.

Ford was never the protective type. He tends to be the one being protected, but the idea makes him sick.

It wasn’t Bill, but he will find whatever did this to Fiddleford and see that it never happens again.

He flicks on the light, and the room becomes a far more grizzly sight. The lamp is missing from Fiddleford’s bedside table, with the lampshade discarded on the floor and the shattered body laying near the foot of the bed. The blankets, of which there are many, were clearly thrown off in a hurry, and are spotted with blood. There’s a thick stain across Fiddleford’s pillow, and a smear leading from the pillow to the broken window. As Ford approaches, he can see that the window was broken outwards. Outside, in the dim light not blocked by Ford’s body, he can see blood on the ground.

Something must have gotten around the locks and alarms Fiddleford had rigged up, found its way to Fiddleford’s room despite the fact that Ford was closer to the entrance, and tried to kill him in his sleep. Somehow, Ford managed to get a piece of ceramic stuck in his hand, and ended up at the base of the stairs with Fiddleford collapsed in front of him. These events may or may not have been related.

The Principle of Parsimony, Ford’s mind insists, one should always favor the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions. He’s making a lot of assumptions.

There are three predominant hypotheses;

One: it’s just as Fiddleford said, and Bill tried to kill him.

Assumption 1: Bill would need to have possessed him. This is something he is able to do, and has done in the past. Ford is not aware of what occurs while possessed.

Assumption 2: Bill would need a motive. He was terribly upset about Frilliam, and hadn’t talked to Ford since the Axolotl’s arrival. Combined with his general distaste for Fiddleford and how distracted Ford had been lately, a motivation did exist.

However, it was his Muse. He wouldn’t. He could, he even may have had reason to, but he just wouldn’t. Ford refused to believe that.

Two; something else had attacked Fiddleford.

Assumption 1: The window was broken from the inside, so it must have come from inside the house. Assumption 2: To do so, it must have gotten past the locks without any visible damage to the door, and bypassed Fiddleford’s alarms.

Assumption 3: It was going after Fiddleford specifically. It would have had to have walked past Ford’s own room to get to Fiddleford and attack him directly, and it hadn’t caused any damage or made enough noise to wake either of them before it attacked.

Assumption 4: It was intelligent. The way it used the environment, namely the lamp and window, would imply this, as would its specific targeting of Fiddleford and quiet navigation to his room.

Assumption 5: It somehow got mistaken for Ford, as possessed by Bill. This implies that it was humanoid in shape, around 6 feet tall, and perhaps has yellow eyes.

The only anomaly that Ford can imagine fitting the description is the shapeshifter, which would add two additional assumptions to the total: that it managed to escape the cryogenic system and the bunker, and that it managed to find the cabin despite incredibly limited exposure to the outside world. Ford can admit that this hypothesis is incredibly unlikely, but nothing is impossible in Gravity Falls.

Three; Fiddleford, or perhaps the Axolotl, did this to themselves.

Assumption 1: Fiddleford or the Axolotl would want to do this to themselves. Bill had been known to be clumsy in Ford’s body to the point of injury, but beating your vessel over the head with a lamp and throwing it out the window went well beyond clumsy. This seems especially unlikely, considering what little he knows about the Axolotl. They seemed disconnected from humanity, but far from cruel.

Assumption 2: Fiddleford or the Axolotl would be able to do this to themselves. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, but the human body is hardwired against such self-inflicted brutality. Fiddleford had personally struggled to give himself injections, often recruiting Ford’s help in college. The Axolotl would theoretically be able to bypass that, but the injuries Fiddleford described would have required considerable strength and flexibility to be self-inflicted.

Assumption 3: Fiddleford has gotten a lot better at acting. The sheer terror Ford had seen from him would be hard to fake.

Hypothesis three requires three assumptions, but both two and three would require a separate explanation for how Ford ended up injured and at the base of the stairs. Two additional assumptions each.

Objectively, the most plausible hypothesis is incredibly clear. He just can’t bring himself to believe it. He’ll clean up the room, check the rest of the house for clues, and then contact Bill. He’ll help him make sense of all this.

[iwantedtowriteyouthis]

It's been 10 days since my 10 day retreat. (Edit: actually, 20 now but I didn't get to paint this draft until now!) I haven't yet been able to draft up my thoughts for this blog, but I will. And life, in the meanwhile, carries on.

I spent my first days out with with Mohit, a local Puneite who, almost as soon as the Noble Silence ended, invited me to stay with him and his family in a suburb of the city. He wanted to tour me around the important sites, but admitted that he hasn't yet been himself. We would have to hire a tour guide. Not a problem, I said lead the way!

We started by going his place, for a home cooked meal, to have a tour and look at his family mementos and childhood drawings. I got very excited about the cutlery holder which I imagine is fairly standard in Indian homes, but which represented to me the richness of the treat I was getting to experience. They don't have these in restaurants or hostels, where I chat mainly with foreigners, or on occasion traveling Indians. Home life - the settled-in and staying-put life in another country - It's not normally accessible! I was stoked to look around the kitchen and fridge.

Mohit brought me to the local shrines and temples, snapping selfies and sharing his life stories. We drank sweet lime juice from the street vendor he visited in his school years, a vigorous man caught in time, plying the same crowd on the same spot; his mechanical press, cracked cart, and faded umbrella other relics from those days long past.

We visited his old school, well-regarded for fostering leadership qualities in its well-rounded, only male students. It reminded me of my own high school, though dustier, on larger grounds, and with 50 students crowded into each classroom. Unfortunately, we arrived too far ahead of the final bell, and left before I could investigate an empty classroom and interview an Indian teacher.

Still driving around in search of 'unmissable' experiences, we went to the German Cafe near the Osho compound, which was the site of a terrorist attack a few years back. In fact, we later discovered, this day was precisely the 10-year anniversary of the event. A small vigil was up on the sidewalk, but it was business-as-usual inside.

I'd been craving a massage after the long painful sits in Vipassana (yes, craving - I know enough to name it, but I indulged myself anyways). They were offering them next door at quite a low rate, and the quality was consistent. But good enough! We returned home for a simple meal, mediated, then went to watch a movie at the cinema, deciding that Ford vs Ferrari was the most appropriate option available.

I should fast-forward a little. The next day, after extended farewells, I ran some errands in Pune (experiencing and overcoming the standard litany of logistical challenges), walked past the Osho compound itself with its red-robed foreign acolytes and forbidding perimeter walls, and took my overnight bus straight to Palolem beach, heading directly to Kashish Yoga on arrival to reunite with my wife after two weeks apart!

Lindsay and I spent a weekend together at Patnem beach, walking-distance south of its more popular neighbor. Great eating, swimming, shopping and catching up. I joined her for two days at her Yoga teacher training all-inclusive (reading her copy of Little Fires poolside while she was busy in classes), then one night beachfront (where we returned a few days later - the second weekend), then left for two nights at the Tribe eco-resort a few km north of town.

Here we'll slow down again, because Tribe really captured my interest during my too-short stay. It's a fledgling project, just beginning to become a sustainable business. But they've been in the business of sustainability for a few years now, organizing beach cleans and dog spaying/neutering, creating a wildlife sanctuary and reintroducing biodiversity into an ex-cashew plantation. The main dorm is an open-air raised wooden platform beneath a thatched roof, with impressively effective bug nets cocooning the single mattresses. Private living spaces are simply shacks of varying sizes spread throughout the property, with reclaimed fabric curtains and short ladders.

There's a feeling of immersion, being well removed from the beaten path by distance and dirt roads, as well as a different mentality - not to *take* enjoyment from the natural wonders of the Goan landscape, but to *give* it the richness back after decades of exploitation.

There's also community, with volunteers coming to stay for months at a time to build, restore, and support. One couple from Quebec offered yoga and a Cacao ceremony during my short stay. Everyone shares what they have. It felt good to offer my Ambigrams and I Ching readings to the folks, and then, the morning I left, a formal Acro lesson - my first ever!

This Acro class deserves an explanation. Lindsay had volunteered me to teach her classmates some moves, and it was important to me to do it right. These are full-fledged 500-hour teachers, almost, after all! I planned a flow that would be accessible to beginners, but included some challenges for any who could master the basics. I strategized how to introduce concepts in a sequence that was logical and safe... And then I fretted some more! Wouldn't it make sense to practice teaching the class? I went round after breakfast on Saturday morning to advertise my offering... The time came, and so did the people! They listened, they tried the things. They gave each other insightful feedback and good spotting. Nobody got hurt and folks seemed to be having fun. I'd say it went pretty well!

Later that afternoon, the embodiment professionals were a touch more prudent, conscious of their comfort boundaries, learning lots and having fun, but feeling more secure with me basing or spotting and guiding through the trickier moves. Also a good class, just a bit more 'me' centered. This does wonders for my ego.

One more low-key weekend at the beach, with plenty of sun and sand and sea, tasty treats and resort-like treatment at our small hostel, then a strange jilted week ahead. I thought I might catch Carnivale in one of the four major cities it's in by overnighting in Margao on Monday. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the parade had passed through prior to my arrival, and had already moved north. So instead today I am on the train to Hampi, the not-so ancient capital of the Vijayanagar Empire, now an extensive city of ruins. They say one can spend months there fully taking in the majesty. I'll be racing through in a day and a half. Luckily the travel, though long, is relaxed. Soon we'll say long to the South of India and the heavy heat. We've begun to book our stays in the mountains... So stay tuned for the next adventures!

Graham

P.S. The man below me on the train to Hampi brought an electric kettle for the journey!

[justforbooks]

I’ve been trying to remember, was it The Sorrow And The Pity they were lining up for when, sick to death of the medium-is-the-message windbaggery of the pseudo-intellectual – now there’s a term to blast me back – in front of him, Alvy actually produces Marshall McLuhan from behind a lobby card? The association strikes me as a natural one, since I’m about to gather with the other acolytes in an art house cinema. Will anyone in the queue reference or be moved to imitate the McLuhan moment, I wonder?

And where were they? Was it at the Regency at 68th street? (Was it even called the Regency? It hardly matters, since it’s gone now, like the New Yorker at 88th, the movie house at 72nd and Broadway, the Thalia {{which does show up at the very end of the movie, when he runs into Annie after they’ve stopped dating and introduces her to a young, young Sigourney Weaver, fresh out of Yale}}, the Metro, the Bleecker and, of course, Theater 80. With all the rep houses having ceded their real estate to condos and their authority to Netflix, who is curating the tastes of the city’s undergraduates? How will they even know about The Sorrow And The Pity? Mondo Cane? How can the budding homosexual flower without the occasional force-feeding of a double feature of Now Voyager and All About Eve? To wit – and to extend this parenthetical yet further: in senior year, at the last meeting of our Japanese literature seminar before Spring break, the professor – ageing, erudite, one of the few, perhaps only, Western recipients of countless Japanese cultural laurels – asked us our plans for the coming week. I allowed as how I would be staying in town in order to write my thesis. ‘Well then, of course you’ll be going to the Bette Davis festival every day down at the Embassy.’ He said it as if stating an obvious prescription, like recommending medical attention for a sucking chest wound, or ‘You’ll want to call the fire department about those flames licking up the front of your house.’ Only a self-destructive lunatic would think he could survive the week by missing the Bette Davis festival. I took his advice and went every day. Did it help my thesis any? Hard to say. It was a long time ago.)

The time when a Woody Allen retrospective would have evoked that kind of fierce cinéaste devotion seems long gone, having been tempered out of us not just by the years (such performative loyalty is really the province of the youngsters who nightly go to Irving Plaza right near my apartment, passing the hours sitting on the pavement singing the songs of the artists they are about to see), but by Woody Allen himself. The tsunami of mediocrities like Hollywood Ending and Melinda And Melinda effectively obliterates why Manhattan mattered so much. I can’t help feeling like he’s dismantled the very admirable legacy of his earlier work by his later, overly prolific efforts. It’s a more benign version of Ralph Nader (with the key difference that I hate Ralph Nader, whereas Woody Allen simply makes me a little bit sad).

Then again, no one worth a damn doesn’t make the occasional bit of bad work: there are episodes of The Judy Garland Show that are absolute train wrecks of creaky squareness, made all the more ghoulish by the presence of an aphasic gin-soaked Peter Lawford, and I take a back seat to no one in my love for Judy Garland, the most talented individual who ever lived (ladies and gentlemen, my Kinsey placement); I read a lousy late Edith Wharton novel this summer, The Children, that was a tone-deaf, treacly muddle; I don’t care for Balanchine’s Scherzo à la Russe and I’ve said it before, even though it is considered a cinematically signal moment by the Cahiers du Cinema crowd (zzzzzzz), I’m no great fan of the movie Kiss Me Deadly.

Perhaps taken as a whole, the twenty-eight films will start to exert their own internal logic and I will see and delight in how Allen mines his themes over and over again. Or perhaps it will be like the Broadway show Fosse, where a surfeit of the choreographer’s vocabulary made all of it suffer and the entire thing looked like the kind of shitty entertainment that takes place on a raised, round, carpeted platform at a car show. I’ll see, I guess.

As one might expect for the 1:30 p.m. showing on the Friday before Christmas, there are only about a dozen of us waiting. Our ranks swell to about thirty people closer to show time, but at first it’s just me and more than a few men of a certain age (whose ranks I join with ever greater legitimacy each day), about whom it might be reasonably assumed that we spend an inordinate amount of time fixating on when next we might need to pee. Thoughts of age stay at the forefront in the first few minutes of the film, when Woody Allen himself (who, it must be said, in later scenes, stripped down to boxers, kind of had a rocking little body in his day) addresses the camera directly and tells us that he just turned forty. I’m older than that by two years.

How many times have I seen this, I wonder? Unquantifiable. The film is canonical and familiar and memorized, almost to the point of ritual. Perhaps this is the spiritual solace the faithful find in the formulaic rhythms of liturgy. It’s as comforting as stepping into a warm bath. Diane Keaton is enchanting, there is no other word for it. She comes on the screen and you can hear the slightest creaking in the audience as corners of mouths turn up. There is Christopher Walken, a peach-fuzzed stripling. And there, doe-eyed, with drum-tight skin: Carol Kane playing Alvy’s first wife, Allison Portchnik.

Allison Portchnik. Oy. I am generally known as an unfailingly appropriate fellow. I have very good manners. But when I fuck up, I fuck up big time. Suddenly I am reminded of how, three years ago, I was on a story for an adventure magazine, an environmental consciousness-raising whitewater-rafting expedition in Chilean Patagonia (about which the less said the better. It’s really scary. Others may call it exhilarating, and I suppose it is, the way having a bone marrow test finally over and done with is exhilarating. And Patagonia, Chilean Patagonia at least, while pretty, isn’t one tenth as breathtaking as British Columbia). On the trip with me were Bobby Kennedy, Jr., hotelier André Balazs and Glenn Close, among others. Everyone was very nice, I hasten to add.

After lunch one day, my friend Chris, the photographer on the story, came up to me and said, ‘I’d lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes if I were you.’

I laughed, but Chris reiterated, not joking this time. ‘No, I’d really lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes. The lunch line . . .’ he reminded me.

And then I remembered. I had been dreading this trip (see above about how totally justified I was in my trepidation) for weeks beforehand, terrified by the off-the-grid distance of this Chilean river, a full three days of travel away; terrified of the rapids and their aqueous meatgrinder properties; terrified of just being out of New York. All of this terror I took and disguised as an affronted sense of moral outrage, that such trips were frivolous, given the terrible global situation. I explained it to Glenn Close thusly:

‘I was using the war in Iraq to try and avoid coming down here,’ suddenly, unthinkingly invoking the part of Annie Hall where Alvy breaks off from kissing Allison because he’s distracted by niggling doubts: if the motorcade was driving past the Texas Book Depository, how could Oswald, a poor marksman, have made his shot? Surely there was a conspiracy afoot. Then, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. helping himself to three-bean salad on the lunch line not five feet away, I switched into my Carol Kane as Allison Portchnik voice and said, ‘You’re using the Kennedy Assassination as an excuse to avoid having sex with me.’ Then I followed that up with my Woody Allen imitation and finished out the scene. Nice. No one pointed out my gaffe or was anything other than gracious and delightful.

Despite how well I know the material, the film feels so fresh. All the observations and jokes feel like they’re being made for the first time, or are at least in their infancy. By later films they will feel hackneyed (in the movie Funny Girl, the process of calcification is even more accelerated. You get back from intermission and Barbra Streisand already feels like too big a star, a drag version of herself ), but here it’s all just terrifically entertaining. And current! Alvy tells his friend Max that he feels that the rest of the country turning its back on the city – It’s the mid-70s. Gerald Ford to New York: Drop Dead, and all that jazz – is anti-Semitic in nature. That we are seen as left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. And so we remain, at least in the eyes of Washington and elsewhere, a pervy bastion of surrender monkeys. There was an Onion headline that ran after a sufficient interval of time had passed post-9/11, that essentially read, ‘Rest of country’s temporary love affair with New York officially over.’

Rest of the country’s perhaps, but mine was just beginning when I saw the film at age eleven. By the time the voiceover gets to the coda about how we throw ourselves over and over again into love affairs despite their almost inevitable disappointments and heartbreak because, like the joke says, ‘we need the eggs,’ (if you need the set-up to the punchline, what on earth are you doing reading this?) I am weepy with love for the city. Although, truth be told, it doesn’t take much to get my New York waterworks going.

Walking out, my friend Rick, thirtyplus years resident said, ‘I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.’ I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, ‘Do things around here seem really wet to you?’ I wrote a book that got translated into German a few years back. There was a fascination among the Germans with what they perceived as my Jewish sensibility; a living example of the extirpated culture. I’ve said this before, but I felt like the walking illustration of that old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chop down all the trees and then name the streets after them. At least a dozen of the reviews referred to me as a ‘stadtneurotiker’, an urban neurotic, a designation that pleased me, I won’t lie. Especially when I found out the German title for Annie Hall.

Der Stadtneurotiker.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[rolandfontana]

The Man Who Murdered the Sixties

It’s been a half-century since Charles Manson and his loopy minions conspired to commit a series of murders that still fascinate and flabbergast the world.

Manson, who died in prison in 2017, would savor the attention he continues to attract, including in this summer’s Quentin Tarantino film (“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) and several new books,  including my own.

In March 1967, at age 32, Manson was a fresh federal parolee who stumbled into San Francisco as American ingenues in peasant dresses and bellbottoms—runaways, hitchhikers, and lost souls—were streaming in for the Summer of Love. His timing was impeccable. The patchouli-scented sexual revolution created a perfect petri dish for his predation.

Using prison-honed talents as a con man and middling skills as a guitarist and singer-songwriter, Manson soon began building a cult of as many as 35 young hippies, three-quarters of them women.

He would spin campfire lectures for his stoner clan featuring Psych 101 dogma about projection and reflection. He basted their brains in a mix of Jesus Freakiness, Dale Carnegie hucksterisms, Norman Vincent Peale’s sunny-sided platitudes (“You are perfect!”), and the buggy self-help triangulations and “dynamics” of his prison-library Scientology.

Charles Manson. courtesy Oxygen

They believed he was a godly mystic.

The writer David Dalton nailed Manson in eight words: “if Christ came back as a con man.” Joe Mozingo of The Los Angeles Times said, “He was a scab mite who bit at the perfect time and place.”

Using the playbook of pimps and cult patriarchs, he isolated troubled young women from their past lives and controlled their bodies and minds. He was the Wizard of Oz for libertines, and he as much as told them so.

Susan Atkins, who became one of Manson’s most prolific killers, said Manson often mocked his own followers’ blind faith.’

“He said, ‘I have tricked you into doing what I want you to…It’s like I’ve got a bunch of slaves around me,” she told a grand jury in December 1969, after her arrest.

The Enigma of Charles Manson

Manson was an enigma on many levels.

The “Manson Women” Photo courtesy Oxygen

He was a racist and sexist imbued with the old-timey sensibilities of an Appalachian upbringing. He preached female subservience and racial segregation, and his young followers lapped it up in the midst of a flowering civil rights movement and on the cusp of modern women’s liberation.

Many were willing to kill for nothing more than Manson’s validation.

“You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time,” Manson once said, “…especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from.”

Just 29 months after Manson began assembling his naifs into a communal Family, these “heartless, bloodthirsty robots…sent out from the fires of hell,” as a prosecutor would describe them, carried out a series of proving-ground murders in Los Angeles over four weeks in the summer of ‘69 that still has a place of prominence in America’s storied pantheon of crime spectacles.

The primary motive was money to allow the Family to finance a retreat to California’s Death Valley to ride out the race war that Manson predicted was coming.

The first victim, the Family’s good friend Gary Hinman, was Killed on July 27. Two weeks later, on Aug. 9 and 10, Manson followers killed the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and five others in acts of casual savagery that remain a peerless mashup of celebrity, sex, cult groupthink, and bloodlust.

Police outside 10050 Cielo Drive in Hollywood where the blood-splattered bodies of Sharon Tate and her four friends were found. Photo by George via Flickr

“It had to be done,” one of the killers, Leslie Van Houten, explained after her arrest. “For the whole world’s karma to be completed, we had to do this.”

Writer Dalton, who covered Manson for Rolling Stone, called him “the perfect storm” for 1969.

“It was the conflation of mystical thinking, radical politics, drugs, and all these runaway kids fused together,” Dalton told me.

“The world seemed to be in death spiral of violence, and we thought the whole hippie riot was about to begin to save use all. We were going to take over and everything would be cool. In fact, the opposite was happening, embodied by Charlie Manson.”

The implausible Manson story cannot be separated from the context of its era, as some Americans were asking essential questions about what their country ought to be.

The half-decade of 1965 to 1970 saw ghetto riots, the emergence of a vibrant new psychedelic culture, shocking political murders, riveting space exploration, escalation of the war in Vietnam, and burgeoning protests of the same.

Two months alone in the summer of 1969 brought an extraordinary series of events. On June 28, a police morals-squad raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, touched off three days of rioting—and ignited the gay rights movement. On July 18, Ted Kennedy, surviving male heir to the American political tragi-dynasty, fled the scene of a fatal car wreck on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass. On July 20, the world watched on TV as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their stiff, bouncing strolls through moondust.

Among the viewers was a small group of friends and kin gathered at the home of Sharon Tate. Twenty days later, on Aug. 9—50 years ago today—four members of the same group would be savagely murdered by Manson’s second kill team. A week after that, more than 400,000 peopled endured organizational bedlam to attend the Woodstock Festival, 100 miles north of New York City. That same weekend, Hurricane Camille pounded ashore on the Gulf Coast, east of New Orleans at Pass Christian, Miss., killing 256 people.

The Sixties created Manson, and his crimes were an exclamation point to a turbulent decade.

A ‘Child of the ‘30s’

But as he liked to say, “I am a child of the ’30s, not the ’60s.”

He was born to a prostitute mother and drive-by father in 1934 and raised by relatives in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia coal country. He became a chronic juvenile delinquent who flailed his way through a Dickensian childhood. A tiny boy who grew into an elfin but sinewy man, he was locked up in reform school, jail or prison for all but a few years of his life from age 13 to the grave.

He spoke or wrote a million words about his life and crimes—in court, in letters, in media interviews. He bleated many excuses for his wasted life, almost always beginning with a lack of parenting and proper education.

Manson often played crazy, but that was a studied tactic. As Vincent Bugliosi, his prosecutor and biographer, told Time magazine before he died in 2015.

“His moral values were completely twisted and warped, but let’s not confuse that with insanity. He was crazy in the way that Hitler was crazy…So he’s not crazy. He’s an evil, sophisticated con man.”

Manson preached a homespun version of liberation theology—the freedom to be you. But a switch was flipped in the fall of 1968, when the Beatles released their White Album.

Manson convinced his followers that the world’s most famous band was sending him direct messages in the lyrics, including those of “Helter Skelter.” He imagined that Paul McCartney’s song presaged a race war that would induce the Family to retreat to a desert hideout, then emerge heroically and install Manson as a world leader and master breeder.

Manson recast his horny young stoners into a classic apocalyptic cult, prepping for end times. Growing impatient for the race war, Manson decided to “show blackie how to do it” by committing a series of murders and leaving clues meant to implicate the Black Panthers, that era’s subject of America’s ever-changing moral panic.

The starry-eyed plan was a failure on every level.

Before Manson “got on his “Helter Skelter” trip,” according to Paul Watkins, another follower, “it was all about fucking.”

Five former members of the Family, all senior citizens now, are still imprisoned, 50 years along: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles Watson, Bobby Beausoleil and Bruce Davis.

Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was imprisoned for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. Photo via YouTube

Many others have died, including Watkins and Susan Atkins.

Most renounced Manson long ago, although Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, an early acolyte who served 34 years in prison for a 1975 assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford, self-published an autobiography last year that was largely dedicated to minimizing Manson’s culpability.

Atkins, who once seemed to enjoy her public profile as an illustrious sexpot murderess, had a personal reckoning before her death from brain cancer in 2009.

“In hindsight,” Atkins wrote in her memoir, “I’ve come to believe the most prominent character trait Charles Manson displays is that of a manipulator. Not a guru, not a metaphysic, not a philosopher, not an environmentalist, not a sociologist or social activist, and not even a murderer.

David Krajicek

“His long-term behavior is one predominantly of a practiced manipulator.”

She called him “a liar, a con artist, a physical abuser of women and children, a psychological and emotional abuser of human beings, a thief, a dope pusher, a kidnaper, a child stealer, a pimp, a rapist, and a child molester. I can attest to all of these things with my own eyes.

“And he was all of these things before he was a murderer.”

This essay is adapted from David J. Krajicek’s new book, Charles Manson: The Man Behind the Murders that Shook Hollywood (Arcturus).

The Man Who Murdered the Sixties syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/