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badartfriend · 3 years ago

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There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

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Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

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fmdtaeyongarchive · 4 years ago

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↬ killing me softly.

date: march 2020 - september 2020.

location: ash’s apartment studio.

word count: 2,018 words, excluding lyrics.

summary: ash: i am so sad, i am so lonely, i want someone to love me, my mental health is terrible. there, that’s the whole solo. no need to read it.

triggers: mentions of nightmares, death, and alcohol. blink and you’ll miss it suicidal ideation.

notes: creative claims verification.

march 2020.

the escaping memories of a nightmare shake ash awake in the middle of the night and by the time he’s regained his senses, he’s sitting up ramrod straight in his bed, the darkness of his room closing in around him like death.

the remnants of the dream are thin and wispy, like the thinnest clouds covering the moon and he grasps at what remains, only to come up with a few images that don’t connect to each other.

a dark street, cold metal.

time twisting in on itself and breaking down. the meeting of eyes and the flashing omen of years of torment.

his body crumpled on the hard black ground. the looming sense of death he’d had the chance to outrun and had only asked to come to him faster.

his heart cracking like a shattered television screen and his mind going white for the rest of time like some undiscovered stage of intoxication.

screaming.

howling.

back to the beginning and through the flames of hell all over again.

he nearly topples off the edge of his bed reaching for the light on his nightstand and only when its light shines its halo does his heart begin to calm its beating.

before it can ease completely, ash takes a pen out of his drawer, forgoing the paper he also keeps there to write two lines on the skin of the inside of his right arm in a sleepy scrawl:

i’d be howling for you before the shadows drag me under.

nightmares come to haunt him nearly every time he closes his eyes for days after that and the feeling he awakes with is always eerily similar.

it’s the fear of falling and the pain of every bone in his body shattering on impact upon hitting the ground.

he’d heard once on the playground in elementary school that you can’t die in your dreams. it’s a defense mechanism by your brain, they’d claimed with all the haughtiness of a know-it-all fifth grader.

ash knows now they’d been wrong. his mind is only at its most destructive when left unattended.

august 2020.

the nightmare only comes once a month or so now and it’s not something he’d have thought to raise in therapy if there hadn’t been a particularly bad episode where his manager had nearly been driven to swerving off the road by ash gasping awake in the back of the van on a way to a schedule.

she suggests writing down what plagues his mind at night when he can’t sleep, so he records a stream of consciousness that very night.

- did i lock the door?

- i hope those girls waiting outside of the building today didn’t find a way to get in.

- this apartment is too big.

- i’m lonely.

- should i call

- why am i doing this?

he stops.

early september 2020.

he’s so tired. it’s a shot to his ego to admit, but he’s on the verge of tears when the nightmare wakes him again and he’s not sure if it’s because of how much it had rattled him or because he’s been damned to another sleepless night.

ten minutes later, he’s in his kitchen with a glass of water in one hand and his phone in the other, scrolling through his contacts.

he passes by his mom’s number, his dad, hyoyeon’s, miyeon’s, jaewon’s.

he stops at youngjoo’s.

she can’t give him what he needs either, but, god, is he good at shaping her into the illusion of what he wants.

is he, though?

if he is, then why does he feel so lonely all of the time? why does his apartment feel too big and the emptiness inside of his body only grow, despite the fighting to put out the music he wants and taking the leap to go to therapy again and the success he’s seen in his professional life this year?

he’s so tired of searching for coping mechanisms in those who never asked to be used. should he call her and tell her that instead? or would he wake her? interrupt her night with someone who means more to her than he does? would she care at all if he said he can’t do this anymore?

this.

pretending sex means something it can’t? bringing her back between his sheets like a drug he’s sickly accepted his reliance on?

fighting for meaning in a life he can’t shake the feeling doesn’t have much to it at all?

the pain of his teeth presses into his lip and he keeps scrolling to the very end of his contacts where only one character identifies a number he should have deleted a year ago.

if he called, would he take him back? if ash begged and pleaded and apologized and swore he wanted to run away tonight and spend the rest of their lives together and never look back, would he take him back?

if he did, would the emptiness inside of ash finally go away?

it wouldn’t.

ash doesn’t love him anymore. he can’t see forever with him and that’s how he’d gotten here in the first place.

but it’d once been something real, something good, something that made him feel like he had purpose and a chance at happiness and that light in the distant gets fainter and fainter by the day now and he’s trying so damn hard to be better to the world and to himself and to feed that light so he can become one himself, but nights like this, it all feels so useless.

yeah, it's true, true, i'm stuck in the loop losing control, i can't get over in the void, i can't be sober

he switches his glass of water out for drinking vodka straight out of the bottle.

early september 2020.

the song doesn’t get out of his head, even as he tries to beat it back and in a few weeks, he has a rough draft of a track he hadn’t planned on making.

it’s a weird song for him.

it’s not that he’s questioning whether the chord progression is too cliche or if the samples he’s used sound amateur. it’s the entire song, its musical lean and the lyrics that lean more conceptual than he’s used to, that he’s doubting now. they’re open to interpretation, more of a poem than a story, and it reflects the nightmares he’s been having, but he can’t imagine showing the song to himself three years ago and having any idea it was a song he’d written.

he listens nervously to the same track on repeat over and over again, finding small details to change as an excuse to avoid thinking too much about if he’ll have to scrap the song altogether, or worse, send it out and risk the rejection that could come. he’s been rejected time and time again before, but there are only two fates he can see this song meeting: a release in the exact form he sees it having or being resigned to the depths of his computer files forever, never heard by anyone but him.

it’s different from what he normally does, but not different enough at the same time and that’s what makes him so nervous. he thinks he likes the work he’s done, musically at least, but it’s more experimental than what he’s done before. he hasn’t even had anyone else’s help on crafting the track that he can pass off responsibility to if it’s dubbed entirely amateur, and he doesn’t want to give into the help of anyone else either. this isn’t a song anyone else can touch. it’s his and his alone, and that’s an inflexible fact as set as the rotation of earth or the existence of gravity.

the questions run around in his head as the hi-hats and the dark instrumental rolls into his mind through the dull black headset over his ears while the screen slowly traces farther and farther right on the visual representation of his composition. he’s muted the vocal track so he doesn’t have to pay as much attention to his own voice crooning back at him with a delivery and lyrics he can’t let himself get caught up in if he ever wants to song to have a finished state, and he’s pleased with the instrumental alone.

it’s a little like something he’d create in order to sell it off to someone else who has a more experimental sound, and for a while, he considers the option of never bringing it forth as a possibility for himself. he can try to pass it off to someone else who’s more secure in displaying themselves as a part of this song than ash feels at the moment. no matter how he turns it over in his head, though, for some reason, he can’t bear to do that. this isn’t a song he wants to strip of its personality and give away.

it’s a great piece, honestly. he’s proud of all of the layers to it and how it includes new elements he doesn’t have much experience working with. on the surface, it’s far from the limited acoustic composition and production he’d been so attached to when he’d put out his first album. this is something that he would have never even considered back then, when he was twenty-one and desperate and the music he was releasing was a mirror of twenty-one year-old ash. ash is three years older now—years that have shaped him into a person more in tune with the sound he has in front of him: something a little more unique and a lot darker, jaded and pained and raw. it feels exactly like what he wants to make even beyond the surface changes. it strikes him that even if he stripped the entire instrumental back to a guitar and his voice like he’d been so fond of two years ago, it’d still sound like the ash of today and not the ash of years past, years that feel like whole lifetimes to him—and, in a way, this feels just like twenty-four year old ash. in all the worst ways, perhaps, but twenty-four year old ash nonetheless.

as he considers that idea, a few of the butterflies in his stomach flutter away and leave him with a slightly more peaceful feeling under his skin. he can’t try to shove himself into the safe bubble twenty-one year-old ash had crafted around himself for protection, a thin plastic veneer of false innocence and abject victimhood, doe-eyed, romantic, and lovestruck. ash can still be doe-eyed. he can still be romantic and maybe, with time, he’ll be able to fall back into the vulnerability of being lovestricken, but those don’t need to be the only characteristics with which he defines himself.

if he feels hopeless and broken and dirty, what’s so wrong with putting that into a song? why does it need to be sugar-coated and rose-colored and always, always relatable to everyone and not just himself?

the track loops around.

ash stops it halfway through to unmute the vocal lines of the song and listen to the full track this time, deciding he can’t tear the instrumental alone apart anymore.

listening back, ash finds himself over-analyzing how well-constructed it is in the eyes of critics. should he soften it? harden it? completely rewrite every word? his own exhale of resignation is blocked out by the dark headset over his ears, but with it comes a contrasting feeling of decisiveness in his chest.

he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. it could very well be too dramatic, too self-indulgent, too ‘sadboi trap’. for so long, he’s let himself get caught up in the question of what others want from his writing. always, it’s about who he’s writing for. for someone he wants to woo with pretty words of infatuation or executives he wants to please or other producers he wants to impress.

this one is therapy.

this one is for him.

late september 2020.

“are you still having nightmares?”

his therapist asks the question as if she’s wondering what he’d had for dinner last night.

“it’s been a month now. i’m not sure if they’ve decided not to come back or if i never let them leave in the first place.”

#fmdverification #&& when you're screaming but they only hear you whisper | self para #&& bring color to my skies | character development #&& queued

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anneapocalypse · 5 years ago

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RWBY 7.01 - 7.02

There is so much to talk about here. Spoilers!

(Please note that I’m not currently a FIRST member, so please don’t spoil me, thanks!)

We’re in Altas now! I love the aesthetic of Mantle, and I like that they didn’t go for the kind of full-on steel-and-glass futuristic aesthetic you might expect for all of Atlas. Instead, it’s more of a Victorian-futuristic look, with brick buildings and cobblestones and narrow streets.

Qrow’s new voice actor is killing it. Jason Liebrecht delivers a performance that is virtually indistinguishable from old Qrow if you aren’t listening closely for it. akisawana pointed out to me that he’s emoting more, which I think tracks for his character growth, but his voice and inflection is spot-on Qrow.

Themes of distrust build immediately, with Qrow uncertain if they should take to Ironwood. Weiss is concerned about the increased military presence in Mantle. We see the face of Winter Schnee on a screen, apparently the public face of Atlas military, and perhaps despite Weiss’s confidence we wonder if our heroes can trust her.

There is a fair amount of talky exposition in these first two episodes and some of it is rather on the nose, as the story quickly tries to get us up to speed with the situation and the general atmosphere in Mantle. People don’t love the surveillance state—we see some children throw a rock at one of the camera bots. But people love Atlas, and they’re proud of their city, even if difficult times.

And we meet Giapetto—I meant Pietro! Something of a convenient character, as he’s both high up in Atlas security and living and working down among the common people; he knows Ironwood, and Maria Calavera, and of course, his daughter has told him all about Team RWBY.

And as many of us probably suspected as soon as we laid eyes on this man, our sweet Penny has returned! I loved it through and through. “I thought you were dead” is one of those tropes in fiction that just always gets me, so Ruby’s face when she realized her friend was a live, and Penny’s face when she saw Ruby and recognized her… I needed a minute. It was just a truly delightful moment, made even more so by Penny’s exuberant tackle-hug.

I’m curious how it is that flightless Grimm are getting into Atlas, since I would think part of the appeal of a floating city in the first place is to keep them out. It wouldn’t stop flying Grimm, of course, but these monsters weren’t flying. EDIT: They weren’t in the floating city, they were down in Mantle, that’s my bad. Anyway, it was a fun battle to watch, as Oscar has learned a few things, and Blake backing up Yang and giving her that little nod was very sweet.

I am still banking on Oscar becoming the official new leader of Team JNR, making them Team ORNJ. Oscar’s outfits even have orange in them, and for nothing directly to do with his name. It’s a sign, I tell you!

Sadly, Qrow’s optimism must never go unpunished! and our heroes are promptly taken captive by the Aesop’s—er, I mean, the Ace Ops. ;) This feels more for drama than anything else, and it’s kind of reminiscent of Wash, Donut, Sarge, and Lopez being taken captive by the Feds in season 12 of Red vs. Blue. But there’s a valid reason: the did steal a ship.

I love how Weiss says, “Ironwood’s Ace Operatives” like they’re a big deal, but as soon as someone else acts impressed by them, she’s like, “They’re not that big a deal.” Oh Weiss! Some things about her never change, and the way she throws shade is one of those things.

I also think it’s pretty obvious that Weiss is still influenced by her upbringing, both as an Atlesian and as a Schnee. “Tyranny” honestly isn’t that much of an reach from what Ironwood’s doing. It’s easy to sympathize with him, because he’s just so goshdarn likable and he make a sadface and we do kind of know his heart’s in the right place—but he’s misguided as hell and even the people close enough to give him the benefit of the doubt can see it. Ironwood puts his faith in technology, and when his tech failed him he only doubled down, trying to make it stronger. And now that we know who the leak is from Atlas security, we can pretty much assume it’s only going to backfire on him harder next time.

“Robyn Hill and her Happy Huntresses” sounds very intriguing, and I’m always excited to meet new female leader characters! I’m also thrilled to hear we have an old Winter Maiden, and I can’t wait to meet her. Really appreciating the introduction of cool old ladies in recent volumes.

I love Blake’s expression of trust in Ruby’s leadership, which seems representative of everyone present. Ruby really is the reason they’re all here—it was her journey to Haven with team JNR that brought them all to where they are. She is not just the leader of Team RWBY but the leader of this whole expedition, especially with Ozpin having lost the trust of so many of them, and now absent entirely. They all trust her.

Ruby, by contrast, is not sure if she can trust Ironwood. I really like this. I like Ruby learning to be cagey and not bestow her trust and optimism on everyone she meets. This feels more like character growth than frankly anything we’ve seen before, and I will take it!

Ironwood has brought Penny and Winter into the inner circle. That alone I don’t really question; they’re both loyal and responsible. What I do question is his decision to tell the Ace Ops, given that… well, I know they’re supposed to be the best, and they did capture our heroes, but it’s also been kind of hard to take them seriously thus far and I question that their discretion and judgment is up to the level required.

But Ironwood doesn’t just want to tell them. He wants to tell everyone. And this is where we’re reminded, not just of the constant threat of Grimm, but that they’re drawn by negative emotions. This is a world where fear brings literal monsters, and in a world like that… the rules are just different. It’s easier to understand Ironwood’s protective instincts, I think, in that context. Managing the emotions of the public is a question of national security. It doesn’t make him right, but… it’s important context.

And here we come back to Ironwood’s reliance on technology and military might. He believes the Atlas military can keep the Grimm at bay and keep people safe. I think he’s vastly underestimating how little anyone outside of Atlas trusts the Atlesian military anymore. They won’t feel safe under his protection, especially in Vale—they might even actively resist his aid. And the more afraid and angry they are, the more Grimm will come.

There is something comical about the fact that Ironwood’s grand plan is… to rebuild Amity Arena. Oh, with a comm tower. That latter part makes perfect sense! Why it needs to be attached to a colosseum, less so. Style points, I guess? Morale booster? Sure.

It’s also comical how much our heroes buried the lede on Oscar being the new Ozpin. And here, we get confirmation that Oz is still gone. Not present, not communicating with Oscar. I thought maybe they’d come to an understand, but… nope. He’s just gone. Which feels ominous, but also makes me wonder: what if Ozpin really is gone from Oscar? What if he’s in someone else? We’ve kind of assumed that couldn’t happen, but we don’t really know for sure. It’s a far out theory, and I don’t really think it’s true, but wouldn’t it be wild if he was now in Ruby—if Ozpin’s presence were at the heart of her reticence, her keeping Ozpin’s full story from Ironwood.

Of course, it’s probably better character development for Ruby if she just did that on her own.

But that leads me to another point, which is that it just kinda seems foreshadowed at this point that Ozpin will probably, somehow, be removed Oscar. Everyone’s been thinking of the aura transfer machine from volume 3, and at this point I’d say it’s likely that’s what the machine was always for in the first place: Ozpin, who after so many lives might be tired of having to inhabit the bodies of unwilling hosts. Ironwood, with Pietro’s help, was probably trying to find a way to free Oz from the cycle of death and rebirth, by transferring him permanently into a synthetic body. It seemed like a possible solution when Amber was attacked. But the machine had to have been in development before then.

When Ruby tells Ironwood that according to Ozpin, all the lamp’s questions were used up, Ironwood says “Right… right” in such a way that makes me think he either knows, or suspects, that this isn’t true. Probably suspects. He walks to the window and says thoughtfully, “Oz told us that too, a long time ago.”

So Ironwood no longer fully trusts Ozpin. And Ruby can’t fully trust Ironwood. Even Qrow is uncertain. I think Leo’s betrayal was a real blow to him.

But the moment that I think truly cements Ironwood’s character is that despite all that, he returns the relic to Ruby for safekeeping. It is a gesture of good faith that I think is pretty unlikely to be anything but genuine. I cannot imagine him parting with that relic if he truly only wanted power for himself.

The Ironwood and Qrow hug was beautiful. Whether friendship or romance, there is definitely some kind of deep connection between the two of them. Enough that Ironwood needed to tell Qrow, personally, that it was good to see him, and underscore his sincerity. And Qrow, when James hugs him… he smiles. He looks affectionate. It’s honestly really sweet.

Our heroes are about to get weapon upgrades! I do think it’s interesting the way Winter says this: “While assisting the military, we will provide you with the best equipment our scientists can devise.” And if they are no longer assisting the military…? Yeah, I do highly suspect our heroes will fall afoul of Atlas military again at some point.

This feels a strong opening to the new volume, and it’s laying out these themes of trust and distrust quite heavily, which I think will be very interesting to watch play out among all the characters involved. Most of all I’m looking forward to more of a character arc (read: any character arc) for Ruby, but there is a lot going on here in this new Atlas-centric part of the story. I’m excited to see more.

#rwby7 #rwby spoilers

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syncogon · 4 years ago

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[GFS] twelve emails

“A-Long, Alien doesn’t suit you anymore. Give up sooner!” (ep 1)

“Look after Dr. Wei carefully...” (ep 4) (*)

“Alien will fail soon enough, and your brother won’t return either. Give up! You’re only a failure anyway!” (ep 5)

“You must be looking for the titanium chip. It’s in the hands of a friend close to you” “Who are you? Why do you never leave your name?” “A very old very old old man” (ep 11) (*)

“Old people may not be reliable. Sometimes enemies can become friends, and friends can become enemies. So you must rely on your own ability...” “Are you my brother?” “I have already answered this question, I am your friend. But I could also be your enemy.” (ep 20)

“Your Soaring Dragon isn’t yet ready for combat. You must train until you are one with your minicar in order to have a chance at winning B-levels... Old people may not be reliable, rely on your own strength, farewell!...” (ep 22)

“Friends cannot necessarily be trusted. Too much reliance will only cause the loss to be greater.” (ep 29)

“Learn to face difficulties on your own, and what you gain will be more than what you lost. There are still more difficulties ahead. If you don’t have the courage, then give up now.” (ep 30)

[attachment: Dragon Motor Data] “If you have already decided to give up racing, you may click “delete.” Then I will contact you no further.” (ep 34)

[attachment: Dragon Motor Data] [attachment: High-Power Battery Data] (ep 44)

“Lightspeed Dragon is no longer suited for Nationals, give up!” (ep 48)

“This is the last email I will send you. If you want your new minicar to surpass Lightspeed Dragon, you must return to the fundamentals, starting from speed! Stay well.” (ep 50)

(*) are perhaps from the old doctor. the rest from X

***

“this [oldman]... is he trying to encourage me, or beat me down?” - wei tianlong

***

He walked over to X, placing one hand on the back of his chair, and finally saw clearly on the screen the words that the youth was typing then erasing then typing again. [...]

A sentence of less than a dozen words, yet X had already been revising it for many minutes now. Memories that had been long buried for years now resurfaced in Wei Tianlong’s mind - this was the first email he’d received from user [oldman], that year he’d been preparing for Nationals for the first time. Compared to the ones that had come after, this first interaction could be considered warm. And not long after this, in seeking the truth, Wei Tianlong had walked right into the trap that K had laid for him long before, and Alien had fallen from the heavens, splintering and tumbling into the mud without even a gear to be recovered.

The prophecy had come true.

Later on, his brother had had minicars far more powerful than Alien, and even Wei Tianlong had slowly grown up and learned how to design and pilot products far more outstanding than Alien. But back then, his thirteen-year-old self had truly been too weak and naive, so weak that he couldn’t even protect his older brother’s purest dreams.

Perhaps growing up was just a bartering exchange. The tears he shed for loss and guilt eventually became the calm he needed to lift his head and look directly at the past.

When he thought about how the bitter poison he’d drunk that year had been the result of his brother painstakingly typing and revising word by word, Wei Tianlong couldn’t help but feel emotional.

Wei Tianfei had spent many years apologizing, being forgiven, apologizing again, being forgiven again, until finally he was able to walk out of the past calmly. But the X that was here now was no more than a fifteen-year-old youth.

“That’s Alien, you know,” Wei Tianlong whispered from behind X. “That was the championship car that accompanied you to stand on the highest podium in the nation. You don’t... feel sad at all?” [...]

“I don’t believe I gave you permission to spy on my emails.”

I’m not spying, Wei Tianlong thought indignantly, I am honestly and righteously reading the email that you wrote to me.

“The championship,” the resumed clacking of the keyboard nearly drowned out the youth’s murmur, “has long been a thing of the past.” [...]

“The one who’s the most sad... is probably your little brother.”

“My little brother, it’s time that he grow up.”

- “as though an old friend arrives”, chapter 2. (ten years after canon, wei tianlong travels back in time as a ghost.)

#go for speed #mine #translation #心疼阿飞always

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rkkyul · 5 years ago

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190801 MGA SEASON 5 + EPISODE FIVE + #5050 FEATURING : TEAM KT ⟨ ━━ ❀ ° PART ONE: PERFORMANCE, LION HEART + I GOT A BOY ( LINES / SONG ) ⟩

it hits her all at once, the overwhelming emotions trapping her before swallowing her whole. she’s going through the motions - watching heejin and minho rise from their seat beside her as their names are called, numbly following them up onstage. kyulkyung isn’t sure she’s breathing air, mouth opening in surprise and eyes widening as her teammates lead the way. perhaps her reaction is a bit dramatic, but oh is it genuine.

the whole experience was so surreal - to even be considered for the top performance of the week when she had failed to do so the entire show. kyulkyung was tired of being average, of resting on that safe middle ground between being the best and the worst. average. want an ugly word. their names weren’t called when the top performance was announced, but she was too high in the clouds to notice - hand clasped tightly around heejin’s as they awaited the announcement. was it disappointing? maybe a little, but to finally be at the point was certainly an ego boost.

semi finalist.

the words were strange to her. the woman who had allowed herself to persuaded into something she once found silly was now officially a semi finalist for the mga’s fifth season. oh, she couldn’t wait to tell her mom.

her heart was still racing when the trio once again returned to their seats, following throughout the hug minho gave them - adrenaline coursing through every part of her being as the show went on without her. kyulkyung listened, watched more talented performers leave them and she wondered how she had even managed to make it this far. she didn’t doubt her worth or talent, just wondered what happened to suddenly have luck on her side.

after the disaster that was 2018, the woman entertained the idea of this just being some cruel joke. zhou jieqiong? making it this far on her own? joonho would’ve laughed in her face. but she tried to not think about that.

she’s slapped back into reality when the contestants suddenly awake with life, their bodies moving in shock and excitement rising in hushed tones. moving her eyes from where they stayed fixated on her shoes, they follow the movements of the new appearances on stage

from sphere entertainment, please welcome CONVEX’s very own JINKI and JINWOOK, as well as our star trainee and winner of the last season of the MGAs, GO HOJUNG!

her ears hang tightly onto the world CONVEX, hoping a familiar someone’s name will follow but much to her disappointment, she’s left with unfamiliar faces and dismay. but she perks up, attentive in her seat as she patiently awaits the coaches from TRC to be announced. JINSOUL - kyulkyung can’t help the tiny noise that passes her lips, excitement enveloping her entire form when she lays eyes on her best friend. “hey, that’s my best friend!” she attempts to whisper to minho and heejin - practically shaking in her seat and definitely way too excited.

i can’t believe she didn’t tell me, despite her thoughts, kyulkyung grins anyway. her anticipation only grows as time passes. please let me get onto trc’s team. please. please. please.

and no, not just because that would mean jinsoul gets to coach her.

she’s just a tiny bit disappointment when the TRC group announcement rolls around and her name is passed up. just the tiniest bit. however, this is short lived when her name is revealed under KT. the company is a bit surprising, solely for the fact that she wouldn’t have chosen it for herself. out of everything, she was expecting nova the most. but getting picked to perform in a group for a company run by katie lee, that’s pretty amazing.

❀

"semi finalist? oh, god i can’t believe.” yea, she can’t either.

kyulkyung laughs at her mother’s enthusiasm over the phone - feeling her cheeks grow hot at the woman’s constant, unrelenting praises. it’s nice to hear the complements and she allows her ego to inflate with each syllable. her mother always complemented her, but it was nice to hear something the woman herself could also feel proud of.

the mgas were different than anything else she had done in life. there was no reliance on anything other than what her talent alone had to offer. there was no behind-the-scenes magic that needed to worked, no amount of bills slipped under the table and secrets to be kept. the fact made her prideful if anything.

after last year, it seemed as if everything wrong she had done had constantly stayed on her back - a quiet monster, the chill that ran down her spine and kept her awake at night. it was hard to put it past her, but somehow she had managed to tuck it away far enough, bury it so deep within that it never even became an afterthought. the process took time and trust, especially with her mother who felt almost as guilty as her.

“you know after last year, i worried about you. i felt like i set a back example.” kyulkyung clenched the phone pressed against her ear tightly in her grasp, fighting back whatever emotions spewed up. biting down on her lip, the woman pushed through whatever words left her mother’s mouth through the phone. perhaps the worst part about the whole situation was that her mother felt responsible, took on her daughter’s worries and that was not okay.

the woman’s voice is strained through the phone and she fears she’s holding back tears. “but i’m proud of you, for doing something and making it this far. i really hope you make it this week, jie.” me too, mom. she answers, burring herself further beneath the sheets - feeling the dull ache of attachment to the woman who can only speak to her through a phone or stupid screen.

“i wasn’t going to tell you this in case it jinxed you this thursday but chun and i are coming in next week - just in time for the finals. he has a business down there, but i figured i’d tag along just to see my girl.” and lying in her bed that night, phone tucked between her ear and pillow, making it to the finals next week meant so much more to her.

❀

once again,the week goes by rather smoothly with her teammates. except for the fact that they are busy, busy, busy.

the coaches and teammates are alike in the ways that they are helpful to a girl with minimal singing experience. and lucky for kyulkyung, this week she’s in a room full of incredible talents. of course yukhei and her scream over each other their first meeting, having only spoke to the boy over suwoong’s phone a few episodes ago and having got along pretty well. he’s just as fun as the woman expected and paired with talent to combat his upbeat nature.

the girl known for her singing and musical talents, yuri is just as amazing to work with as she expected. their team is full of power vocals, yuri and sia bringing enough to the table and offering whatever tips they had to ever so curious kyulkyung. “c’mon please... think of me please?” she begs yuri to sing such an iconic song - phantom of the opera being a personal favorite of the woman. she could never get enough of the tragic story that was erik and christine. ugh, it made her cry every time.

“i’d say i’d help sing it, but that’s a disgrace to phantom of the opera. it’s a sin.” kyulkyung pulls a hand to her chest, bowing her head in sadness before shaking her head at the thought. yuri is the only one who could do it justice while she couldn’t bare the embarrassment for herself.

kyulkyung’s delighted witrh yuri’s compliance, elated to hear one of the songs from her favorite musical from personally one of her favorites on the show. before being teamed up together, the woman had always admired her from afar - completely losing herself in her voice and loving every moment of it. just as expected, yuri’s voice complements the song nicely and she can’t help the long drawl she lets out, pressing a hand against her heart and swaying ever so dramatically to the tone of the other’s voice.

all shenanigans aside, the woman found herself in a situation that left her bewildered. she didn’t mind to help usually, but sia’s call for help left her a bit nervous. kyulkyung didn’t have experience with cutting or mixing music, but the other girl needed help and who was she to refuse? “i don’t care to, but you’ll have to lead the way some.” the woman admitted with a tiny smile, eager to help out in any way that she can.

the process wasn’t too difficult, but it was a process. creating the choreography with nakyung for the dance break wasn’t nearly as hard as creating the mix, but eventually they got it done ( and kyulkyung was there to offer any extra help whenever someone needed it ). the fact that they had managed to pull it off was extremely exciting for the woman, even going as far as to do a mini celebration dance whenever they finished it. yes, she was embarrassed with herself afterwards but damn was she proud.

turns out she’ll be heading back to hook & crook after the show with a little bit more than dance and performance tips.

❀

thursday approaches quickly and this time, kyulkyung’s a bit nervous when she climbs onstage. the semi finals held a lot of more meaning than the other performances and after being in the top 3 last week, she’s sure there’s an expectancy for both her and her team. in fact, the entirety of team kt had at least one episode’s worth of top 3 experience under their belt and it makes her wonder if they’ll be watched that much closer.

her hair, now faded a bit after a few washes, hangs loosely atop her head - the white nature of her top and shorts a contrast to the red bandanna that’s tied around her thigh. she’s standing on stage with her team, head held high and signature smile wide despite the nerves that light up when the judges and eyes of their first live audience lays upon them. “hello! we are FOH!CUS.” the team greets before being met with the thunderous clap of applause.

the noise is enough to brighten her smile and settle whatever negative emotions she felt. kyulkyung did not get stage fright, well not anymore at least. the eyes of an audience was not foreign to her especially after her time with knb. it was all just noise to her, eager eyes there to watch them perform and their entertainment for the night. they’d give them a show worth while, especially with all the pretty faces and power vocals up there.

in the most arrogant way possible, kyulkyung thought team FOH!CUS was hard to forget.

“hello! constant #5050, zhou jieqiong here again!” she will never forget that tiny bit of chinese at the beginning of her introduction - not until the very end ( it’s kind of a habit at this point, honestly ).

as the group arranges themselves for the beginning of the performace, yuri finds herself in the center - surrounded by her teammates and introducing the audience to chi chi’s lion heart. the vocals are soft as are their movements, the singer’s tone and charisma alone enough to draw attention and set the mood of their performance. kyulkyung’s sure the audience’s heart fluttered just a little as did hers when she heard yuri sing the song for the first time.

ah 넌 달라진 게 없어 여전해 난 애가 타고 또 타 사냥감 찾아 한눈파는 너

kyulkyung’s voice follow’s the other girl’s smoothly, a nice transition into her sweet tone and flowing nicely with the music. luckily for her, the movements during this part are minimal for her at least - allowing her voice to carry unfaltering and comfortably. singing live was something she worried a lot about, but with tips and a lot of help, her confidence grew little by little. her smile is delicate upon her lips, her legs carrying her into the next series of moments as they draw into the chorus.

chi chi’s choreography isn’t hard to follow, but it’s nice and fun to watch. the song and melody allows for an easy smile from kyulkyung, putting on an image of a girl in love and innocence. their movements and choreography are soft and flows nicely against the music, but that makes it so much better when the shock of their transition settles in.

lion heart suddenly comes to a halt and everyone is moving into new position - a new light overwhelming them as the beat changes entirely. the mix that kyulkyung and sia put together takes over the stage, the group moving in sync with one another in a way contrasting themselves just a few moments prior.

nakyung and kyulkyung were responsible for creating the choreography, transitioning them into the beginning of i got a boy and creating a whole new mood for their stage. the woman’s presence changes drastically, a more coy, cheerful look overtaking her frame as the upbeat tone of the music sounds. personally, she prefers songs like this to lion heart - feeling more like herself with peppy beats and modern lyrics. hahaha! eh let me introduce myself - kyulkyung points to yukhei as speaks, here comes trouble, whoo! there’s a playful grin on her lips as she moves - raising a hand to motion a ‘come here’ movement with her fingers, 따라해.

어떨 땐 오빠처럼 듬직하지만 애교를 부릴 땐 넘 예뻐 죽겠어

preparing for their performance was once again fun for the woman - this being what she looked forward to most when she joined the competition. and honestly speaking, kyulkyung learned a lot more than she thought she would. working with people was one thing especially on a show like the mgas, the fierce nature of the competition threatening to bring out the worst in people but so far, that hadn’t been the case ( at least for her ).

the way they move alongside one another on stage is exciting - no doubt a visual and talent overload for their audience and she wonders if this what being an idol felt like. and if that’s case, it makes her want that contract even more.

making it this far was exciting, but left her greedy more than ever. there was a lot pending on today’s performance, on her advancement into the competition that she undermined completely. coming in with no expectations and following through with nothing but the highest, that was surely a shock. but not only did she want a contract presented to her in the end, kyulkyung would also love for her mother to at least see her perform once.

귀 기울여 주는 너 너

her mother’s words drive her confidence, fuel the endless stream of energy that courses through her as they near the end of their performance. kyulkyung didn’t have a lot of lines, but she didn’t asked for many - leaving the singing up to the professionals and taking as many notes as she could. the coaches and her teammates helped equally and she matched their drive with one of her own, practicing up until the very last moment because she didn’t need the embarrassment up on stage.

she’s not as perfect as she’d like to be, but she knew what she had to work with and milked it for its worth. what she lacked in singing she made up with her dancing and countless expressions, enjoying every minute she was up on that stage.

as the performance neared its end, kyulkyung couldn’t help the bottomless pit of worry that began to sizzle deep within her stomach. no matter how good they did or how much the crowd loved their performance, one of her teammates would be going home.

it hurt to think about, but she supposed that’s just the nature of a competition and she’ll do anything in her power to make sure that person isn’t her.

#rkmga5 #rkmga5groups #❀ ° ～ once upon a time.#wc: 2674 #rkmason #rkheejin #rksuwoong #rkyuri #rkxuxi #rksihyeon #rknak #haseulrk #rkariel #rkxluda #etc: italics are chinese

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tech-specialist98 · 3 years ago

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iPhone XR Review

Apple gave everyone a glimpse at the future of the iPhone with last year's iPhone X, positioning it at the top of its lineup. With a “notch” and Face ID, the iPhone X was the iPhone of the future, and it came with a price tag that required you to pay EMIs well into the future.

The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus were meant to be the more accessible offerings, continuing Apple's “business as usual” model of delivering solid, incremental updates at prices that were only marginally higher than their predecessors.

With 2018, however, it seems the future is here, as Apple has gone all-in with the iPhone X (Review) design language across the entire lineup. For the second year in a row, we get not two but three new iPhone models, but this time, they all look pretty much the same — like the iPhone X, but at different sizes.

Physically, the iPhone XR₹ 47,900 sits between the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. It's priced in iPhone 8 Plus territory, which means Apple has eliminated the iPhone 8 (Review) price band altogether. This makes this year's most affordable new iPhone nearly Rs. 13,000 more expensive than last year's point of entry, which seems to be in line with Apple's push to increase prices across all its product categories.

It's not all doom and gloom though, as the iPhone XR is available in a variety of colours, to make you forget the hole that buying one is likely to leave in your pocket. While the “most affordable” new iPhone of the year offers more colour options than its more expensive brethren, Apple has removed certain features from the iPhone XR in a bid to keep its cost low.

Does this make the iPhone XR a compromised device? That's what we aim to find out in our review.

iPhone XR design and display

The last time Apple brought colours to the iPhone lineup in any sort of meaningful way was with the poorly received iPhone 5c. Launched alongside the iPhone 5s, the iPhone 5c (Review) — just like the iPhone XR — was the most affordable new iPhone on offer. However, its price tag wasn't as low as everyone expected hoped it would be), and the fact that it shipped with older technology obviously didn't help.

Apple has managed to avoid the same trap with the iPhone XR by making sure it ticks the same boxes as its two more expensive siblings, at least as far as the most important specifications are concerned. All three phones are powered by the same SoC, have the same primary rear camera, and come with other modern technologies including Face ID (the iPhone 5c famously missed out on Touch ID, introduced with the iPhone 5s).

That's not to say the iPhone XR is just like the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max₹ 99,265 in every respect. Its frame is made out of “aerospace-grade aluminium” compared to steel on the more expensive iPhone models, though it feels nearly as premium.

Both the front and the back of the iPhone XR are all glass, though Apple notes that only the front packs “the most durable glass ever in a smartphone”, so the back has to make do with something less expensive, like the second-most durable glass ever in a smartphone, perhaps. Both the fronts and the backs of the iPhone XS are iPhone XS Max have the aforementioned “most durable glass ever”. The iPhone XR is IP67 rated, just like the iPhone X, while the other two 2018 iPhone models are IP68 rated.

Physically, the iPhone XR sits between the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, and while we believe the iPhone XS form factor is ideal for most people, the iPhone XR represents a possible middle ground for those looking to experiment with a bigger iPhone without stepping up all the way to the iPhone XS Max, which can be rather too much to handle.

The iPhone XR is wider than some of today's other popular large-screen Android smartphones and at 194g, it's certainly one of the heavier ones as well. It is also noticeably thicker than the two more premium iPhone models of 2018, and the bezels around its display are a little more pronounced than those of the iPhone XS, though most users won't be be bothered by the latter.

Where you will have to settle for last year's technology is the display itself — and it's not even display technology from last year's most expensive iPhone, as the iPhone XR uses the same LCD tech as the iPhone 8.

This means you miss out on the richer blacks that the OLED displays on the iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max deliver. The LCD panel offers a lower contrast ratio and lacks HDR as well as Dolby Vision. That in itself isn't a huge deal, but the relatively low resolution (828x1792 pixels at 326ppi) also means that text doesn't look as sharp as it does on some other iPhone models — and, indeed, other smartphones out there. Unless you are making the move from an iPhone 8 or a really inexpensive smartphone, you will almost certainly notice that the quality is, at best, just about good enough.

“Just about good enough” is, of course, not what you expect when you pay north of Rs. 75,000 for a smartphone, especially when some phones that cost 10 percent of that amount sport higher-resolution displays. Granted, the panel on the iPhone XR is up there with the best LCD panels in other respects, including viewing angles and colour accuracy, but that doesn't take away from its relatively low resolution.

The other way in which Apple has cut costs is by eliminating 3D Touch. Some people probably won't even notice it's missing given that it wasn't always easy to discover its presence in older iPhone models to begin with. Some popular 3D Touch features such as the keyboard's trackpad mode and the ability to preview notifications have been implemented without 3D Touch, for those who did come to love those little touches.

The iPhone XR is available in yellow, white, coral, black, blue, and (Product) Red, which is a welcome change compared to the usual options available from Apple and other manufacturers. While we really appreciated the understated finish of our black review unit, we also quite liked the yellow and blue options in the brief time we spent with them at the global launch event.

iPhone XR performance, software, and battery life

The iPhone XR is powered by the same Apple A12 Bionic chip inside the iPhone XS duo, so it's no surprise that its performance is pretty similar. It handled everything that we threw at it with aplomb, something we've come to expect from a new iPhone, and indeed other smartphones in this price bracket.

PUBG Mobile defaults to the ‘High' frame rate and ‘HD' graphics settings, but we bumped them to ‘Ultra' and ‘HDR' respectively, and playing the game was still a pretty smooth experience. Extended sessions of games such as Asphalt 9: Legends were not a problem either, and we didn't run into any heating issues.

Benchmarks show that the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max both have 4GB of RAM, while the iPhone XR has to make do with 3GB of RAM, the same as the iPhone X. While this didn't really prove to be a problem in our experience, it's something to bear in mind if you like your devices to be “future proof”, as would be the case with the more expensive iPhone XS duo.

For the first time, iPhones now feature dual-SIM support, but instead of adding a second physical SIM slot, Apple has taken the eSIM route. This means that unless you purchased your iPhone in China, Hong Kong, or Macau — where Apple sells “true” dual-SIM iPhone models — your iPhone XR, iPhone XS, or iPhone XS Max includes an embedded SIM that can be activated as and when desired, in addition to a regular physical SIM slot.

In theory, this is meant to make things more convenient by letting you switch from one provider to another without having to swap physical SIMs. In practice, however, it adds an unnecessary level of complication, at least in its current form.

For one, only select operators — Jio and Airtel, at the moment — support eSIMs in India. This means that if your second SIM is from Vodafone, Idea, or any other operator, you have no option but to port your number to one of the aforementioned duo, which might not be be possible (or desirable) for everyone. Second, even the operators that do support it, don't make it easy for you to get an eSIM activated.

You can't get a new number activated on an eSIM — with both Jio and Airtel, you need to go to a retail store, do the necessary paperwork, get a physical SIM, and then convert it to eSIM so its number can be used with your iPhone. That's like going to your neighbourhood store and mailing yourself what you just purchased to get the “e-commerce” experience.

At least some of that is down to India's KYC norms, more than any technological limitations, but from the end user's perspective, the experience is far from ideal.

Even if you already have a physical SIM with all KYC procedures completed, Reliance Jio requires (at least at the time of filing this review) you to go to one of its retail units to get your SIM converted to eSIM, which is the next level of bonkers.

Thankfully, if you are on Airtel, the experience is a little better. You can initiate the “conversion” of your physical SIM via a text message and then just follow instructions that you will receive via email. We found this part to be relatively hassle-free.

As for actually using the iPhone with two SIMs on a daily basis, the experience is pretty much in line with what you get with Android phones. By default, your physical SIM is labelled “Primary” and the eSIM “Secondary”, but you can change these to whatever you like.

You can have multiple “Data Plans” — as Apple calls them — attached to your eSIM, but only one of them can be active can any given time. The term Data Plan, of course, is a little bit misleading, as you can have a voice-only plan as well.

You need to designate one of these to be the “Default voice line”, and the same (or the other) needs to be the default line for mobile data. Both lines support 4G at the same time, and the iPhone will let you use mobile data from one line while you are on call using the other.

Call history in the Phone app will show a label indicating the line that was used for each call, and tapping the entry will dial that number or contact using the same line. When initiating a new call, you can choose which line to use via a dropdown at the top, with your default line already selected.

However, there seems to be no way to choose which line is used when composing a new SMS message, which seems to be a big oversight. Existing conversations in the Messages app will default to using whatever number was used last in that thread. (Edit for clarity: It's possible to choose which line to use if you've never exchanged messages with a number but once a conversation starts, there's no way to change the number being used.)

Only one of the two numbers can be associated with iMessage and FaceTime at any given time, which is also a bit of a disappointment.

iOS of course also doesn't have the “dual apps” capability that some Android OEMs have added, which means you can run only one instance of apps like WhatsApp, further limiting your dual-SIM experience. You can use either of the numbers with WhatsApp and other services.

The iPhone XR offers the same “wider stereo playback” as the more expensive iPhone XS duo, and the resulting sound is pretty impressive. However, the iPhone XR lacks the “Gigabit-class LTE” found in the other two new iPhone models. This might be a problem some day, but that day isn't coming anytime soon given the pitiful state of networks in our country.

Though iOS 12 brings a host of new features, the experience using of using an iPhone in countries like India is less than ideal due to the features that apps like Apple Maps lack in these regions, something we've noted time and again. We encourage you to read our iOS 12 review to read our thoughts about new features including Screen Time, Shortcuts, and more that will greatly enhance how you use your iPhone.

In terms of battery life, our real-world experience was pretty similar to what we got with iPhone XS Max, in that the iPhone XR easily lasted us a full day, even when our workload was heavier than usual. In our HD video loop test, the iPhone XR lasted an impressive 13 hours and 19 minutes.

Though the iPhone XR is “fast-charge capable”, according to Apple, the company provides no fast charger in the box, which is a big disappointment. Wireless charging is supported.

iPhone XR cameras

The iPhone used to be the best camera phone in business, but that probably hasn't been the case since the days of the iPhone 6 Plus. It started with companies like Samsung taking a lead in low-light camera performance, and since then we've seen the likes of Huawei and Google surpass Apple when it comes to building a phone that's a solid overall performer when it comes to still photography.

Google has been somewhat of a flag bearer in this department with its Pixel range of flagships. While all three generations of Pixel phones might have been plagued by a host of reliability issues, there's been no denying their photography chops.

Even as other manufactures have relied on two, three, and even four sensors in a bid to deliver better image quality — often with mixed results — Google has stuck to a single sensor, while doubling down on machine learning algorithms to enhance the resulting images.

Given Google's success with this approach, it's no surprise to see Apple and others go down the same path, even if it seems that Cupertino is merely dipping its toes instead of going all-in. While the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max continue to feature dual rear cameras, the iPhone XR packs only one sensor at the back.

This, pardon the pun, serves dual purposes. First, it obviously reduces the cost of the more “affordable” iPhone XR, but more importantly, it gives Apple a device with which it can experiment a bit with its machine learning approach to photography.

As we noted in our iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max review, the more expensive duo also rely on machine learning in the form of Smart HDR to deliver great images, but the iPhone XR takes this a step further. Similar to the Google Pixel 3 and a bunch of other phones, the iPhone XR uses machine learning to offer Portrait Mode with the rear camera, which was earlier limited to iPhone models with dual rear cameras.

Even with a single rear camera, the iPhone XR does a good job when it comes to edge detection and the Bokeh effect in portrait mode, but it's not as good as the results we saw with the iPhone XS. We also noticed that some portraits taken with the iPhone XR had less detail compared to similar shots taken by the iPhone XS.

In the absence of a telephoto lens with 2X zoom, we noticed that we needed to be physically closer (than with the iPhone X/ XS/ XS Max) to the subjects of our shots to activate portrait mode. The resulting shots are actually wider, since the standard lens is being used rather than a narrow telephoto lens.You do get Portrait Lighting modes as well, though you are limited to three modes — Natural, Studio, and Contour — with Stage and Stage Mono still exclusive to iPhone models with dual rear cameras. Also note that portrait mode on the iPhone XR will work best with humans and not animals or objects, since the machine learning algorithms have been optimised for the former.In all respects aside from the obviously missing 2x telephoto lens, the performance of the iPhone XR's camera is identical to that of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, which is to say it's now up there with the best in the business. Read our reviews of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, as well as our comparison of the iPhone XS with some of today's best Android smartphone cameras, for more details.VerdictLet's go back to the question that we started with: is the iPhone XR a compromised device? It isn't; not in ways that would matter to most users. While we are not fans of its display, it does its job without being particularly great. In other areas such as performance and camera quality, the iPhone XR more than holds its own, and is a match for the more expensive iPhone models as well as other flagship phones.That brings us to its price. We've made it abundantly clear that we are not fans of the upward trend that we've seen across the entire range of Apple products. As we noted in our iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max review, even with the promise of regular software updates and better resale value, it's getting increasingly difficult to justify the price tags that Apple's phones command.With a starting price of Rs. 76,900, the iPhone XR isn't exactly a bargain, but it's better value for money than the iPhone XS, and certainly the iPhone XS Max. Heck, even the speaker grille at the bottom is symmetrical, so it shows no one was napping at the wheels while designing this one.Though Apple has discontinued the iPhone X in some markets, it's still very much around in India and available at pretty much the same starting price as the iPhone XR. As much as love the display on the iPhone X, the camera improvements that Smart HDR brings tilt the balance in favour of the newer iPhone, which also brings other niceties like dual-SIM support and a faster processor. The iPhone X is only for those who truly value the deeper blacks on the AMOLED display or are put off by the size of the iPhone XR, and cannot afford the iPhone XS.If you don't mind looking beyond the iPhone, recent months have seen the launch of plenty of great Android flagships including the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 (Review) and Huawei Mate 20 Pro (Review), as well as a host of other phones earlier in the year. Or you could go pick up a “value flagship” like the OnePlus 6T (Review) and save a bunch of money in the process.With that said, a new round of Android flagships is just around the corner as well, so you won't have to wait too long if nothing catches your fancy right now.

#iphone #iphone xr #apple ios #latest technology

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droneseco · 4 years ago

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Lanq PCDock Monitor Stand Tries to Do So Much, but Fails at Nearly Everything

Lanq PCDock

5.00 / 10

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The Lanq PCDock is a competent monitor stand with RGB lights, a fingerprint reader, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and some USB ports. But I can't quite figure out ... why?

Key Features

All-in-one desktop hub

Specifications

Brand: Lanq

Connection: USB-A

Ports: 2 x USB3.1, 2 x USB-C, Fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.0

Pros

As a monitor stand, it's solidly built

Qi charging pad is convenient

Cons

Drivers requires for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and fingerprint reader

RGB lighting doesn't integrate with anything

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The Lanq PCDock claims to be the new standard of monitor stand. With a built-in USB hub, fingerprint sensor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, Qi charger, and RGB lights—everything except a kitchen sink, in fact—is it everything you could want from a monitor stand? Probably not.

Crowdfunding Disclaimer

The Lanq PCDock is currently seeking backers on IndieGogo, with about a week left on the campaign. Back it now to save around 40-50% off the eventual RRP. Or don't.

The usual disclaimer applies here: crowdfunding is not a pre-order system, and there's no legal responsibility for the company to deliver anything to backers. Lanq—or Langqun Yunchang (Shenzhen) Electronics Co—appears to be a new company, with no previous products or crowdfunding history.

PCDock As a Monitor Stand

Two sizes of Lanq PCDock monitor stand are available—the Pro and Max—and they only differ by width. The largest Max size (as tested) measures 43.5W x 8.62D x 3.27H inches (1105W x 219H x 83D mm), while the smaller Pro measures 24.8 inches (631mm) wide.

One benefit of a monitor stand is that it frees up desktop space, allowing you to store a keyboard, mouse, and other bits underneath it when they're not in use. Both sizes of the Lanq PCDock offer 2.24 inches (57mm) of clearance underneath. That's just about enough for a mouse, but just shy of what's needed for an Xbox controller. It's deceptively small, in fact.

The PCDock Max size is designed to accommodate dual monitors, side-by-side, though I "only" have a 55-inch TV to test with on my gaming desk. It handled that fine, thankfully not collapsing at any point during testing. With ABS plastic legs on the side, the main frame is made of an unspecified metal (probably steel), and certainly feels sturdy.

If I did have two, or three monitors, I suspect I'd rather attach them to adjustable VESA mounting arms, so as to give me more control over the angle and tilt.

Lanq claims the PCDock stand will raise the monitor to the correct viewing height, thereby easing neck strain. I can't help but think monitor manufacturers have already considered this rather fundamental design aspect into their products, so this statement may be a little presumptuous. My work monitor actually includes a height-adjustable stand, as do many designed for use in an office.

RGB Lights

RGB lighting is not to everyone's taste, but it's a key feature of the Lanq PCDock. Offering either 60 or 120 LEDs depending on the size of the dock, these are pixel LEDs rather than a single color strip. A remote control is included, and a variety of attractive, if somewhat distracting, animations are pre-programmed.

You can also choose static colors, or you can change the speed of the animations to be less annoying. It really does look quite impressive, if you're into that sort of thing, which I am. I want all the RGBs.

Unfortunately, there's no integration here between the lights and desktop controller software. Your only method to choose how the lights behave is through that small remote control, so don't lose it.

Keen gamers who already have a lot of RGB kit will likely have already bought into a specific system, such as Razer Chroma, Corsair iCue, or even Philips Hue. This is therefore not going to appeal to them.

As a Hub

The Lanq PCDock is also a generic hub, offering two USB-A 3.0 ports, and two USB-C 3.2 ports, which have fast charging capability. However, these aren't Thunderbolt, so don't expect to be running a monitor off of them.

The exterior right-hand side of the dock feels like a sub-optimal placement. I'd much rather hide my keyboard and mouse cable underneath the monitor stand, and keep the cables off the desk. Useful as quick access for plugging in a USB stick perhaps; but my Razer keyboard also does that.

Ultimately, you wouldn't be purchasing the Lanq PCDock for the USB hub alone, so I'm not going to dwell on it; it's an ancillary feature that's useful to have.

10W Qi Charger

Also on the right-hand side you'll find a smartphone-sized rubber pad embedded into the top surface; this indicates the location of the 10W Qi charger.

This functioned much as expected, reliable triggering a wireless charge when my phone was placed onto it. But I can't say I found it all that useful. Modern smartphones tend to last me the entire day if I'm sat at my desk. It's only when heading out and about, using GPS, or taking videos that the battery doesn't last a whole day. In which case, I'm not at my desk.

Fingerprint Reader, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi

I've grouped these features together because they all require a separate driver download. The drivers come as a RAR file, and extract to reveal a bunch of DLLs, as well as a INF file, which you should locate and right-click on, then select "Install" in order to add them to your system. In 2021, I expect much better. A single driver package with an install executable should be an absolute minimum. But moreover, the fact you even need to install drivers for such generic features is almost unheard of nowadays.

It seems even more curious when you consider that in order to activate the Wi-Fi functionality, you either need to already have Wi-Fi, or an Ethernet cable plugged in. Are you going to unplug your faster, Gigabit Ethernet, to replace it with a less reliable and potentially laggy Wi-Fi connection? I doubt it. The only reason to use this Wi-Fi adaptor is if your existing one is a decade old, and only capable of 2.4Ghz. The Lanq dual-band Wi-Fi apparently goes up to 5.8Ghz.

The Bluetooth chip (BlueSoleil), worked briefly after a lot of fiddling and allowed me to connect to an Xbox controller. Until Windows decided something was wrong and disabled the driver. Fixing it required a restart and USB dance each time, which seemed like far more effort than it was worth.

I was unable to test the fingerprint reader, but in fairness, I don't think this is Lanq's fault. I disabled Windows login years ago, and now it won't let me re-enable it again. As a gaming-only Windows user, I don't need to secure my desktop in any way. Supposedly it can be used for Windows Hello, but there doesn't seem to be any deeper integration such as web payments, as I'm accustomed to on my Macbook Pro. That said, this might be the one killer feature for you, and if it is, you can probably justify the rest of the package too.

Should You Buy the Lanq PCDock?

The sales page seems to be aiming the Lanq PCDock at professionals and office workers, but the inclusion of RGB lighting would suggest gamers. Yet, the RGB lighting isn't integrated into any existing RGB system, which means gamers won't be interested in it unless this is their first foray into this kind of lighting system.

If the lighting was exposed to the connected PC system through the third-party "works with Razer Chroma" plugin or similar, it'd be a whole lot more useful. As it is, the reliance on a single point of failure (a tiny remote control) makes this aspect of the dock difficult to recommend.

Then there's the fact that the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and fingerprint reader require separate driver downloads. I can't remember the last time I had to install drivers for such basic features. My experience with Bluetooth dongles thus far on Windows 10 has been "plug and play". And even if the Lanq Bluetooth had worked reliably for me, which it didn't, a plug-and-play dongle from Pluggable is less than $10, and only a fraction bigger than the USB port it plugs into.

The whole thing feels like it was thrown together as part of a "design your ultimate monitor stand" competition. It's a mish-mash of nice-to-have features (if they worked), but none of them are individually compelling, and the whole is, well, less than the sum of its parts.

The Lanq PCDock is a sturdy monitor stand with some cool lighting and a USB hub, but at $200, the value for money simply isn't there.

Lanq PCDock Monitor Stand Tries to Do So Much, but Fails at Nearly Everything published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

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ancientbrit · 4 years ago

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Natter #4 7/4/2020

MI MG Natter #4 4th July 2020I hope you all have had a happy fourth - all fingers still attached and tummies filled. Pickle seems to be getting used to the bangs this year, or perhaps he is a little deaf. Usually, at the first bang, he disappears and hides under my bed. This time he has wandered upstairs and downstairs and doesn't seem to register the bangs much at all - which is good.

I am in contact with a guy back home who runs a regular allotment (PeaPatch here) blog, giving timely advice and other information related mostly to veggie & fruit culture. I find this very helpful as he jogs my memory on those extremely rare occasions when I forget. I know you think that I never forget, but I have to admit that there has been the occasional lapse ever since I stopped eating peanuts. Strange thing that. His words for July remind us that this month is the time to sow seeds for Fall and Winter veggie crops such as Chicory (does anybody actually grow this?), Chinese Cabbage, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, French Beans, Beetroot, Carrots, Radish, Turnips, and Peas - pick early varieties - early Snow peas are an especially fast to crop

.If you have had the forethought to already start Leeks from seed, now is the time to plant out those starts. The easiest way to do this is to use an old broomstick handle and thrust it vertically into the soil to a depth of about 5-6".Just drop the seedlings carefully, roots first into the holes and then just water in - that's all you need to do. The water will wash soil from the sides of the holes down onto the roots and it will remain cool and moist enough to thoroughly root the seedlings well. The idea of doing it this way, apart from the ease of planting and gaining support from the sides, is that the hole blanches the stem of the leek as it grows to gain more usable parts of the plant. If they are kept reasonably moist they should grow quite rapidly through the Summer and be ready to make fabulous potato-leek soup in time to keep cold days at bay. If you have never eaten P-L soup accompanied by chunks of Crusty artisan bread generously spread with butter - you haven't lived. Food of the Gods this! If you have been growing spuds and have lifted them already, you can follow with a crop of French beans to both nourish yourself and the soil, or if beans aren't your thing try a green manure crop such as Mustard. However, bear in mind that if you have ever had Club Root on your cabbage family plants, do not use Mustard as it is also a brassica. Use one of the Pea family, both for the Nitrogen root boost, but also for the foliage. And now for something completely different:- Once more my friend Valerie Robertson has presented her view on things English on the other side of the pond and is sent all over the world.

Val is a very highly qualified State Registered Nurse who knows whereof she speaks.

Here we go.

From: Valerie Robertson GAG 14 Hope all is well with all. All Quiet in the Western Front over this way. Seattle’s CHOP was liberated leaving an appalling mess The pubs are open today so the protesters have disappeared. BLMUK. is proving to be an embarrassment to those who donated, bent the knee and supported a cause that advocates the abolition of the nuclear family (that means dad is superfluous), defund the police, destroy capitalism and support censorship plus the necessity for every white person to acknowledge that they are all subconsciously racist and privileged, and own up to the “fact” that every institution is inherently racist and disproportionally White supremacy managed. That’s a big ask, which has bewildered the millionaire black footballers, academics & artists, Labour leader Sir Keith what’s his name, (why would a Labour leader accept a knighthood?) and all the national institutions taking the knee, which the other men in the street saw, as bowing to street fighter activists outrageous demands. Ie supporting racial divide and suppressing diversity of opinions and abolishing history. Our moral leader Canterbury Arch Runcton, is also confused. He’s a woke bloke that got it wrong at Easter. Streaming his Easter service from his kitchen with his toaster in the background. For God's sake, he must have a parlour with a row of books as a backdrop, in his palatial abode. He’s now having a think about the effigies in the Cathedral and wondering which ones to get rid of. Should he paint Jesus black? Jesus loves all the children of the world, be they yellow, black or white. What about the brown ones? They were precious in His sight too? He’s going to need a lot of colours. The Bournemouth beach sunbathing nutters are bright pink still. The Cambridge academia have just funded a two-year study into the history of slavery to enable the oiks to confront their iniquitous past and say sorry to all offended by history. Waste of time, as it’s been done before, over and over and you can’t change it. I’ve got a better idea for them to study. Research the Benin bronzes. There are 3,OOO of them but only 500 left in Nigeria, the rest in Europe and USA museums. They are exquisite. The Portuguese kicked off the Atlantic slave trade in 1400 from the port of Benin with gold, which the Africans turned into these fantastic plaques, I think but not sure. I’m too busy doing my epidemic virus studies to go to the British Museum and find out. And we are not allowed yet, to visit Portugal unless keen enough to fly to Spain and walk across the border to check up on the museum artifacts in Lisbon. It’s good to see Lewis Hamilton constructively addressing inequality in the motor racing world. The aggrieved black community can be placated and inspired by their own incredibly successful race if they listen. We have diversity, we have opportunity, we have laws, education, healthcare, social services, state welfare funding and overall, a tolerant multicultural society, who are very tired of the woke politically-correct champagne socialists agenda over the last decade. There are deep social and economic injustices which are nothing to do with slavery or racial prejudice. Lewis Hamilton lives in Monte Carlo to save paying a hefty U.K. income tax liability. He was raised in Stevenage and lived in a council house with his family partially supported by the welfare state. Is he a philanthropist who promotes the welfare of others by donating money for schools etc.? No he’s not if he’s a British citizen tax evader. Is he a Monacoan now.? Is he a hypocrite? I don’t know? Perhaps the academics can ask the uni students to research, write a paper and make up their own minds. Estate agents will not in future be using Master Bedroom in their ads. Connotations of slave masters etc. Uncle Bens rice is to be repackaged without the jolly black man, Aunt Jemima also and awaiting more news re. MasterCard, Master chef, Master Mind, Headmaster ( the lefty teachers union still keeping schools shut) Masters degree, a tricky one for Cambridge. We are living with the virus and hanging in with our self-imposed restrictions and socially distancing. The copper masks and latex gloves worked a treat when John needed to visit the GP surgery for a blood test to check prostate antigen level insomuch not coughing. Although London has seen a slight rise in the R rate, no doubt due to the mass protests, the infection rate remains stable and patients being more successfully treated with drugs, to avoid intensive care. The disproportionate ethnic infection rate is due to blood group, genetic disparity, and body mass ratio, and a difference in the percentage of T cells. These cells decline with age and are responsible for fighting off infection without causing a major auto-immune response. People past 65, have very few left. This theory explains why the young can come in contact with the virus but don’t succumb, however, if repeatedly exposed will catch it and manufacture antibodies and can still remain asymptomatic. Mass testing suggests that 40 percent of the population has been exposed with few symptoms, the silent spreaders who have the herd immunity. So we know the virus is still around and can’t trust the idiots to self-isolate if positive. All we can hope for is that they wear a mask and keep away from the elderly. Once the herd immunity and those who have recovered from it reach 60 percent, providing the medically vulnerable and fatties avoid it, the virus will find no host, cannot, therefore, multiply and shed and theoretically die away. So it’s a balance. As the months go on there is hope for more preventive medication to alleviate the symptoms and of course a vaccine. Last October, the WHO found that U.K. and USA were the best in the world prepared for a pandemic. Cameron had placed an order for millions of PPE equipment with a French company with the deposit to fund the manufacturer to make it. By the time U.K. needed it, we got the deposit refunded but the stocks were needed in France and they had sold some items at a higher price, to Italy. That’s Globalisation for you and the free market. Meanwhile, a couple who were distilling boutique gin in the midlands, altered their equipment to distill hand sanitizers and viral cleansing fluids as NHS were buying it in from abroad at an inflated price. They now supply the NHS cheaply and in the past 12 weeks have made 30 million pounds profit. Well done as they are donating a substantial amount to Covid research. No doubt as a tax saving incentive, but still commendable. There’s a lot to be said for self-reliance. The govt. with its 80 strong SAGE - the Scientific, Advisory Government Epidemic advisors, have caused the pandemonium. At the outset, the models and graphs predicting the scale have been proved wrong. Simple precautions were overlooked. Emptying geriatric wards, filling up care homes with staff untrained in infection control was scandalous. Mask wearing should have been made compulsory on public transport, supermarkets and shops at the outset and at least some sort of temperature checking and contact tracing at airports and ferries. So, onto local lockdowns and long term containment. Boris is getting on with Brexit and left Hanlon to contain the virus, Hope the strategy works. I have faith in the laboratory’s scientists and the trials and the guinea pigs testing the emerging vaccines. Meanwhile, tomatoes coming along, being well-nourished and in good shape and we are up to four playing again at croquet. Sainsbury delivering without hassle and Miles and Giles still surprising me with a tablespoon of Baharat in a nifty environment-friendly container. It made the lamb taste different. The kennels are open but missed the boat as all the rescue dogs are adopted and long waiting lists for puppies.

A dog called Nigger, I imagine a black or brown Labrador, who was loved and died in 1878, had a headstone in the animal cemetery in a Sussex village graveyard. The local stonemason has ground away the name as the villagers thought it might cause offence to visitors and that dog’s owners would understand as they were dead anyway and not around to ask permission. Just love kind people. The drought's over and it’s cool as we are and hope you are too. Take care Love from Val And from your fearless leader,Gordon

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fantroll-purgatory · 6 years ago

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Xártit Maileō

This is her: http://cottonsyrup333.deviantart.com/art/Fantroll-619615785

Alright, you’ve given her a kind of bare bones structure, which I can understand. Sometimes plotting out a troll can be difficult. The most significant theme I see here, of course, is Independence. You want to give her a story about coming into herself and becoming more independent. That’s a really good potential narrative! I’m going to try to organize things to fit that theme a little more soundly.

As for the name, we should touch it up, since I can’t find any origin for it!

I think Caluma Wollst is the way to go. Caluma is a shortening (Calumma) of a common name for Chameleons. I do want to keep the chameleon theme because the association with the change of color does kind of metaphorically fit with the literal change you want your character to go through. Mary Wollstone was a famous feminist, and her story of uprising and her public demands for independence and equal treatment make me think about the narrative you want for your fantroll! Caluma Wollst.

Planet: Beforus Blood: Ivy Green(looks like Kanaya’s color)

Now… it’s not often that I shift from a common blood color to an uncommon one, but I think making her a limeblood might be a good bet. If only because they’re historically oppressed on Beforus and her being under the control and influence of others makes more sense if she’s filling this sort of role. Jadebloods are too well-respected for the narrative to work as well with that.

Title: Maid of Light

I honestly think Page of Breath is probably the better role for her! Starting out very weak-willed and all the bonds and responsibilities and the weight of her blood all coming to her, but learning to become her own person with her own direction and goals, finding her independence.

Sign: Chamaeleon trollTag: alternateColoration

I think that her tag should be something that more reflects her desire to be herself, but also her current reliance. Maybe transformingCharge?

Quirk: - Writes a period between each letter “ l.i.k.e t.h.i.s ” to represent independence from others

- oo becomes oO to look like her lusus

I don’t think this is really a necessary addition when you already have the period thing, which works well enough for the theme you’re going for, especially considering I don’t think the “oO” will read particularly like the lusus (which I’m going to be changing anyways, sorry!).

Dreamer: Prospit strifeKind: syringeKind

Wh… why? Alright- I think that she should perhaps actually have NO strife specibus. Now I know that’s kind of weird, but. Beforus is a far less violent planet and limebloods have a tricky history, especially considering the coddling nature of Feferi’s rule on Beforus. So maybe she has to rely on others to protect her at first and can adopt a weapon later!

Lusus: 5ft tall lion w/ scales and chameleon eyes

I think we should Just do a chameleon. The lion is an interesting addition, surely, but it really doesn’t themeatically fit in place or have any cohesive attachment to her nature! It also allows us to focus on the solitary nature of chameleons. They prefer to live alone and are very independent. Maybe the lusus prefers to keep to herself and didn’t do much for Caluma, and maybe Caluma was forced at a young age to rely on the Beforan government?

Age: 7.4 sweeps(16yrs) Land: Land of Watches and Color

I think she should have a land and a quest that requires her to kind of work on her own and become her own hero. Like once she crosses a particular threshold, no one can come with her. She has to become the hero of her land and defeat something all alone, all by her own will. Maybe she even has to overcome the will of another creature that is trying to control her? Maybe that creature’s will is even covering the whole land. Land of Will and Sovereignty.

Consorts: Blue newts who like coins(change-oh the metaphors)

That’s a funny enough pun that I’ll allow it. And blue newts are good, because they also are solitary animals!

Fetch Modus: Independence cards- must do something on her own to captchalouge the card

Though this is a nice callback to the theme, it’s kind of confusing and not well-defined. Maybe it could be a Confidence Modus that requires her to perform something she’s usually afraid of doing in public- like singing? Or saying something she thinks out loud. In order to obtain her possessions.

Personality: - very passive in the beginning , always follows what others say - becomes independent towards the end and doesn’t overly rely on others

On to the design!:

Because of her general nature, I wanted to give her a somewhat generic looking design, a sort of neutral limeblood look. I tried to keep the silhouette of the hair you gave her while also making the hair more troll-y. I gave her horns that resemble her symbol’s curled bits. I also gave her a fuchsia cape to represent the kind of dependence she has. As she develops as a character, you could probably give her a more complex design that stands out more!

-CD

#nopresetsplease #Xártit Maileō #caluma wollst #limeblood #yellowgreenblood #jadeblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission

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theworstjedi · 4 years ago

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Parental Issues

3636 BBY

The boy’s eyes were ringed with amber. Friyr Illustratum. A hefty name he had chosen for himself. The old Shadow recognized the solemn conventions of a Darth name too well to mistake it as a mere surname. She had spent too many years hunting after their misused and discarded artifacts. As a young woman, she had never had much consideration for the Sith she encountered. She had certainly never considered that an apprentice could be treated the same as an object. But here he was, Alema’s greatest moral objection and the last attachment binding her to the mortal plane.

“Sit down,” she said.

He did as he was told. His fingers curled around the sand of the garden beneath his knees. He drew in on himself, shivering and defeated.

Friyr had been her sister’s last padawan. She had raised many. Alema had raised none. Friyr was her first Sith but the last before her old age reconsumated her into the Force. He was the last frayed string of her life and Alema the only Jedi with the desire to resolve it.

Alema lowered herself onto the sand slowly before him, like approaching a wounded animal.

Friyr shrank back as though sensing the inate revulsion. His blue-amber eyes cast elsewhere, as though looking at the slanted light on the ground.

3630 BBY

Alema’s finger traced down the grimy plastifilm. Rows of scribbled names next to call buttons passed by until she reached a nondescript X. Far be it from Caretaker Alema’kekori to visit shady apartments on Nar Shaddaa at the smuggler moon’s slinkier hours, but she had a sweet yam casserole to deliver.

She pushed the clean white button, and it depressed without complaint. This came as little surprise. It looked almost polished from all the use it’d seen. She waited. Listening to the quiet hum of speeders over head and relaxing her shoulders into the calmness of a night illuminated by ever burning lights.

Uhhh yah?

A sleepy little blue holo of Friyr Illustratum and his favorite baggy shirt popped to life next to the X. The white coarseweave her padawan wore now billowed down over his thighs. A stray sleeve had drifted partway down one of his broad shoulders. The looseness had a softening effect on his hard physic so that what Alema would normally class as “wiry” became “slim.”

She was glad Friyr was fond of long floaty tops. He had been growing into his thirties when she met him and though what someone approaching forty did with the agency of his body didn’t make her blink, she felt fondly enough of the young Jedi that she preferred a less casual audience with him.

Dunno what this is about, but th’answer’s prahhhably no.

Alema held up the wrapped tray as though Friyr were capable of seeing it. “And if I brought food?”

The holo-Friyr stopped grinding a palm into his eyes and swallowed a yawn. “Master?”

“One of them, yes,” Alema deadpanned.

“I’ll put on pants,” Friyr said quickly, then winked out as the apartment door buzzed her up.

Alema adjusted her plain plait of lekku with a smug line to her lips and let herself in.

___

Friyr had found more than a pair of pants when she came up, she observed. A pair of iconic Corellian green jedi robes hung over the plain shirt. It looked like they’d been cut for a woman from the way they tapered at the waist. Alema didn’t ask many questions about this; she was sure she’d seen it on him some long time ago.

He fidgeted with its fit over his shoulders in the doorway. “How’d you find this place?”

“Shoney said Boris had placed you in one of his resort homes,” the older woman said mildly.

She brushed past Friyr - who grumbled but flattened himself to the wall to accommodate the gargantuan twi’lek. A sense of curoisty compelled her in. This was an emotion to conquer, perhaps, but she didn’t find the mere pursuit of knowledge out of bounds. It upheld the second line of the Code, afterall.

The apartment was open floorplan to accommodate for a Hutt’s girth. And it was splendid. Somewhere between a spa and a living quarter, Friyr had high ceilings and cavernous walls. Even for a full bodied slug, the space was roomy and bronzed. The decorations were pleasant, in style, and large.

Though the attention laid in the details. It looked like Friyr had quarreled with the light fixtures and left traces of a Jedi sized panic attack here or there. Uncleaned food cartons and wires made little paths that followed his relentless pacing between the couch and a mess of screens and keyboards. Their plugs half in and out of sockets. He had never coped too well with empty metal spaces.

In her adventures, Alema stepped on something soft. She started backward, only to find a puddle of blankets and pillows on the floor near the door. It looked luxurious, but it was an odd mess to find anywhere outside of an unmade mattress.

“Bed’s too high,” Friyr explained at Alema’s pause. A hand on the small of her back urged her forward. She pranced over Friyr’s little bed to a red overstuffed couch. She straightened her shoulders, then turned to face her bemused padawan.

“I take it you’re well.” Alema seated herself straightbacked on the couch behind her and sunk into its fluffy maw. Underterred by this indignity, she set the small tray in the center of her lap. It was still warm in her hands, which was relieving. Nar Shaddaa was a big city to traverse from sector to sector, and she wasn’t sure she was keen to find the state of Friyr’s microwave.

“‘M ohhhkay.” Friyr shuffled to the coffee table by memory and seated himself opposite Alema. A few empty microwave meals were pushed back as he claimed the space upon which they sat. “You uh-- What’re you doin’ off Eedit?”

“The Hexagon Square Feast was today.”

Friyr snapped his fingers and pointed at the couch cushion next to Alema. “Riiiiiiiight. Right. How was that?”

“Taste for yourself.” Alema unfolded the geometry of her foil packaging. “It has marshmallows and sweet yams; I know you enjoy your sugar.”

Friyr’s lips twitched into a smile. “I dooo~” he purred.

Once the smell of carmelization spiced the air, his stomach betrayed subtlety with a wanting sound. Her padawan had a deceiving streak of flirtatiousness, but Alema knew confection and fruit purees were Friyr’s biggest vices.

Alema didn’t smile, but she did quicken her unwrapping, so she could trade the gooey homemade meal to Friyr for a sense of peace that sat around her shoulders. She had known that Friyr’s path of pursuing the war effort would bring lean times to an already lean man, but Jedi made no money. Perhaps credits here and there or a meal or two in return, but their life was spare. The Republic’s reliance on them as miricle workers, ground what Jedi were left on the front lines to their bones. Alema had come to know this as a Shadow, and so she understood the language Friyr’s simple display of hunger was speaking in a home that wasn’t exactly his own.

She watched him gnaw a fluffy clump of marshmallow off of his thumb with claspd hands. “I wanted to talk to you about-- Boris.”

Friyr sighed into his food. A wilt followed the line of his shoulders. “Talk then,” he murmured politely around his mouthful of yam.

Alema’s calloused thumbs traced the length of each other in turns as she delayed a second longer. “Couldn’t you ask the SIS for accommodation?”

Friyr’s defeated shoulders tensed. “Alema,” he said. His voice was rigid with a talk they’d gone over before. “You know s’not that simple. I gotta make some of my own way out here. It traces too easy if they give me everythin’. Boris is my alibi.”

“Boris is a Hutt,” she said patiently, but her voice had a tension to it too.

“I-- yah? Would it be better if he was Black Sun? Exchange? Any other of th’swoop gangs or pirates out here?” Friyr made a sweeping gesture with his fork in the mushy ‘tato.

Alema followed the motion. “I can’t judge the merit of an alternative keeper, Padawan. But I’ve seen girls in your situation. Effeminate boys too. The life they’re granted by their benefactors is only good on whim. As long as their benefactors are attached to them.”

She watched his lips purse.

“You are a convincing desperate damsel, but you play your role too well. We all did when we served the Republic.” Alema’s voice hitched. “I played a Shadow too well.” She had never sugar-babied for a Hutt, but the role had consumed her body, mind, and soul.

Friyr let out a clensing breath. His eyes closed. “I ‘preciate that. I really do. But no offense t’you, Master, ‘m dif’rent.”

“You aren’t. You let a gangster attach himself to you.” Alema’s voice hardened, and Friyr looked away expressionlessly. The half-eaten tray sat limply in his lap.

The passing traffic hummed between them. Headlights slatted growing columns on the floor. Alema could hear the faint sounds of a resonant argument from two aprtments down without trying. The silence was loud.

“Look,” Friyr finally said. “You knighted me. You knew I was always gonna try fer--” Friyr waved his arms to encompass the magnificently hollow room. “this.” The young knight exhaled deeply. “Boris-- is pretty terrible.” Friyr laughed uneasily. “But he’s got no ability to hurt me. Not in anyway that matters.”

Friyr held his hands out, and Alema took them if only because making him search for hers would take longer. He rubbed his thumb over the backs of his old Master’s knuckles, both pairs of palms flat from years of lightsaber work.

“It’s hard, I won’ lie.” Friyr’s voice broke as he hesitated between speaking and staying silent for a moment. “I see a lot of stuff I used to be on the other side of. Stuff I couldn’ make a dif’rence in. Keepin’ people in the gutter so a few Hutts can feed ‘em a meal at the end of the day? Like whatever, you got good at their game and then flipped it on ‘em. But ‘m a Jedi now. Shouldn’ I be doing somethin’ more than playing the game. Shouldn’t I stop this?”

“Those aren’t easy questions, but your only dedication as a Jedi is to the Force if you wish it to be,” Alema said evenly. “On the other hand, the Force is an extension of everyone. Your job could be to stop it, if they ask for your help.”

Alema brushed a pale shock of hair out of the human’s face and studied his broken alien features. He teased a smile.

A relief lived inside her ribcage. A worry that Boris was her padawan’s primary concern had spent too much time in the halls of her mind. That he had more quandry with his title, was-- relieving.

“That’s th’biggest way t’not answer a question ever.”

“The practice of being a Jedi, I find, is searching for answers yourself,” she cheeked.

Her eyes fell to the plate of root and melted sugar. “Is that good?” a note of curosity entered her voice.

Friyr’s gaze dropped down too. “Yah, I mean. I’m preddy into it.” Friyr’s pale blue eyes flickered between his old master and the lukewarm tray. “You uh--” He held it forward with a sheepish smile.

Alema stared. A steady of mild diet vegetable and starches had made garden salad the limit of her decadence. The casserole was positively unapaltable. “Well. Hm.” She tapped Friyr’s fork ridden fingers with a nearly grave hesitance. He folded the utensil into her fingers with a single motion, but it took far longer for Alema to select the most palatable part of the remianing plate. It was a difficult decision with Friyr’s predeliction for shoveling, but she found a reletively unharmed corner. Breaking the crust, the fork scooped up a small portion.

Friyr snickered. “Don’ need good eyes t’know yer a wuss.”

“Hush,” Alema snipped marmishly before sticking the fork in her mouth. Haste would make the experience easier. Sugar exploded like little stars across her palate. It settled like a coat on her tongue. “Oh Force.” She gagged, but forced a swallow.

“That’s what the dark side tastes like~” Friyr sniggered.

Alema rapped his knee with her palm.

#Friyr Illustratum #Alema'kerkori

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