#andreas' might be a bit more obscure but...still

[secret-sector-antag]

🦇⚔ Dhampir Hunter V ⚔🦇

Intros/Profiles Part 2/?: S.C.A.R.E. 'd Straight

[Potential CW for brief descriptions of violence, medical talk. Nothing overly detailed/gory, but just in case]

Inga was a stubborn (at the time) 12 year old. Stories, that's what they were. Tales of beasts and monsters that roamed the night that would either snatch, punish, or harm children, especially the naughty ones. But she wasn't naughty. Or at least, she thought she wasn't. Apparently adults interpret you speaking up for yourself as "mouthing off".

...Anyway...

Schprekenheim had its fair share of creatures. There was this one time there was a knight that was made entirely of birthday presents! But as far as she knew, that one had been defeated quite a while ago. Surely, such a short walk from the library back to her home one night couldn't be entirely eventful, right?

Wrong.

It had happened so fast, but the effects were instant, as was the pain. She was ambushed by a group of what appeared to be vampires: pointy ears, pale skin, fangs...the standards. Only things that were a bit different were the eye colors- red, she did associate with supernatural beasts, but not blue-, as well as the hair colors- primarily red, but some had the stereotypical jet black look. Some even have white hair! She did try fighting back, also protecting her neck as she had been taught to do.

But the creatures laughed at this. They had no desire to suck her blood. They desired something a little more...somatic. And a tad bit emotional.

See, this creatures fed off of pain; the misery and the resulting tears of sadness. So they did what they could to produce it in their victim. In this case, it was ripping the books she had borrowed from the library to shreds and burning them to ashes, physically attacking her...and burning part of her face. For no other reason other then they could. She managed to get away, but obviously not unscathed. Her injuries were treated, but when tried to explain to the librarian and her parents what happened, they dismissed it as her being irresponsible and lying to get out of trouble.

With this injustice, and noticing the ever-creeping-up spike of similar incidents in the area, Inga vowed to seek revenge against these, and any sort of monster, that would harm children.

(...)

It started in a similar manner to Val and her monster hunting. Only difference being, while Val operated alone, Inga quickly gained a partner in her mission. Of course, they almost weren't, as Inga was quick to pin them against a tree and hold a stake to them. But this kid- Andreas, he said his name was- was different. Other than the look of "a little lad who loves berries and cream", he acutally looked...pretty human? Or at least a little more human- the pointy ears, paleness, and fangs (along with a few different shows of power against a swarm of the creatures) kind of gave his true nature away.

That show of "humanness" reared its head when Inga was suddenly ambushed and, as a result, lost quite a bit of blood. Considering they were practically in the middle of nowhere and just...waltzing into a hospital with a badly beat up kid and the vampiric appearance (so one would assume "YOU attacked her! Vampire!! Stake them!!"), Andreas couldn't see conventional medical help...well, helping. Thankfully, though, he knew someone (or rather, two someones) would could help.

(...)

The next thing Inga knew, she was laying in a bed, surrounded by medical equipment...but it wasn't like the ones she had seen when she got her burn treated. Kind of looked like a hodgepodge or some kid's beginning construction project. It was working, though, that's what was important. First one she saw was Andreas, who was fast asleep in a nearby chair. When she saw the door to her room open, she was expecting to see some professional looking adult in a white coat, carrying a clipboard, rattling off all sort of medical jargon. To her surprise, though, a kid about her age walked in. Said his name was Jude, and that he was her "doctor" of sorts. Following behind him was another kid, this one a bit younger and...way more peppy. Said her name was LilliBella (but to call her L.B.!).

With Andreas now awake and her a bit more "with" it, they explained what happened. She was in need of a blood transfusion and Andreas, feeling somewhat responsible for her having gotten ambushed, donated some of his blood. L.B. cheerfully refers to them as "blood brothers", but Inga, initially, isn't as thrilled. Thankful that he was there to help her in her time of need, yes, but...did that mean she was now some sort of creature of the night, too?

Weeell, that's where it gets tricky. No one really knows what sort of effect a blood transfusion with a vampire (or, y'know, mostly vampire) would have on someone who was 100% human. Both Jude and L.B. wanted to keep her nearby to see what sort of effect this would have, if it had any. Inga was initially against the idea and wanted to get back to fighting the monsters that caused her to have to deal with this...but after almost fainting once she tried to get out of bed, that idea went quickly out the window. Intrigued by this "monster hunting" business, Jude and L.B. demanded answers, to which Andreas obliged. Both had experienced some form of injustice from them as well, and wanted in on the fight.

With that, and the recruitment of more members who wished to gain some protection against the uptick in creatures, as well as fight back against them, the Supernatural Children's Association of Reconnaissance and Expulsion (or: S.C.A.R.E) was formed.

-----------------------------------------

Inga Karnstein/"The Queen"

Voice Claim: Alison LaPlaca 

Inga is the head of S.C.A.R.E. and runs the organization like a fine-tuned machine....or, at the very least, would like to. No one's been turned into a monster and switched sides, nor has their base been invaded, so there's at least that.

As Schprekinheim's paranormal problem began increasing and outside help was increasingly becoming a desire, she had gotten in contact with the KND, having heard of their work around pre-invasion. When it was suggested they look into Sector ANTAG- given their status- Inga was initially hesitant, especially with recruiting Val; considering her....unique circumstances. She does have her eye on this temporary recruit of sorts, but so far, she seems to trust her. With her priority target level being so high, the smaller amount of  potential traitors, the better.

Andreas Dragomir/"The Prince"

 Voice Claim: J. Michael Tatum 

Perhaps one of S.C.A.R.E.'s most efficient field agents, Andreas is essentially Val's de facto partner, as the two had (initially) clashed during a homework eating weredog swarm.

After the dust had settled, he told her that he’s from the organization that had sent the letter. According to him, S.C.A.R.E. appears to work similar to the KND- albeit with a more supernatural focus. While the two may be fighting for the same cause, there's still a liiiiiittle bit of tension between the two; mainly shown in the form of snappy remarks. It loosens a bit, though, when they discover that they’re both not entirely human (Does he flaunt that extra 25% of vampire over Val? Yeeeeeah, kinda). That extra 25%, though, does come with some drawbacks. Prolonged sun exposure, even with sunscreen, causes him 2nd degree burns and a form of “sun poisoning”. Being a different kind of vampire as well, Andreas does require specific forms of sustenance- in his case, red, sugary substances (juice, slushies, etc)...hangry vampires are a no-go. 

Having already been through the vampiric puberty process and having somewhat of a better hold on it, Andreas does show a bit of concern for Val when she starts having her spurts....there's a lot of rage behind them, it seems.

LilliBella "L.B." Althea/"Hex Girl"

Voice Claim: Kamali Minter

With all the doom and gloom that seems to surround S.C.A.R.E., LilliBella is a little beacon of light that seeks to aid others in their fight. She is the organization's resident sorceress that aids in developing potions, enchanted weapons, and providing knowledge on some of the beasts that are roaming through Schprekenheim.

She additionally works alongside the organization's "doctor", Judas Marlowe. While he may have more knowledge in the more visceral aspects of the body and some of the conditions it goes through, LilliBella has a better understanding of the more "supernatural" aspects the can be associated with them. Heck, she helps him out with his and keeps an eye on Inga and...possibly hers? This sort of power is what leads to her danger/priority target level being as high as it is...who knows what can be done if her knowledge and achievements fall into the wrong hands.

Judas "Jude" Marlowe/"Doc"

Voice Claim: James Callis 

Alright, so he's not actually a doctor, but....dude's got a sizable amount of knowledge in the field of medicine for someone his age. Just as good, right? Regardless, Jude is the organization's medical officer and seeks to help others- be that injured in battle or just needing to let something off their chest. Part of his determination is associated with trying to understand his biology a bit better- being considered a "half-lycan" and only just now beginning to enter a time where genetics start fighting over what side is more dominant.

As such, he works closely with S.C.A.R.E.'s resident sorceress, LilliBella Althea, who understands the more "supernatural" aspects of certain conditions. He may have a handle on the more visceral aspects of the body, but she has a slightly different insight that aids greatly...she did develop a potion that appears to suppress more animalistic aspects of himself that appear around and on nights with a full moon, after all. Like L.B., it is his knowledge that makes his danger/priority target level what it is.

------

*Jude and L.B. primarily spend their time at the base, but in emergency situations, they do have a similar amount of training/skills that will aid in battle as field agents...hence the double delegation.

[the-126-family]

Aww thank you! Turns out I have the flu lol I’ll be fine tho, just one more thing to do and I can chill. And I love these headcanons! Ah! A question for me? Oh boy here we go again 😂 (gotta be honest with you I have never thought about this before) Alright I think Mateo would be an artsy kind of guy (Had this headcanon since the tattoo ep and someone mentioned it) he likes to doodle and is pretty good at it! Marjan I think would definitely like something high energy such as athletics so definitely agree with that. Paul on the other hand I think likes more chill activities so I could see him liking knitting or maybe crocheting, something he can do while curled up on the couch (audio book or documentary on the background? Idk grasping at the straws here) Nancy would definitely like painting but I think she might also be a bit of a theatre nerd? (Can’t remember if I stole this from shesanoddbird or not-) maybe there is a theatre group that joins up and does mini shows (Mateo definitely watches and cheers her along with the rest of the crew) TK and here me out on this would maybe collect plants? He might like gardening and maybe he started it for Lou Two and ended up liking it? Carlos I think likes his car and maybe he collects model cars and builds them? Like the mini sets? Idk tbh. Judd I think would be a gamer. Like we’ve seen him game before but I think he might’ve pulled a few all nighters once or twice. Owen (idk if this counts as a hobby) would maybe like going to farmers markets? Not even to buy stuff half the time but to look around and get ideas. Tommy I believe would like those places you can get ceramics and glaze them, she’d do it with the twins, and it can get expensive but it’s fun. Maybe she joins a pottery class at one point? This got out of hand real quick lol! Thank you for the hugs and sending back some your way!!

Oh no I'm so sorry you have the flu!! That really sucks. I hope you get a lot of rest and to curl up under some warm blankets and maybe eat some soup!

I LOVE the idea that Mateo can draw! You're totally right, he designed his tattoo in season 1 and it was really good. I bet he does funny little doodles and puts them up around the firehouse to make people laugh.

Totally agree about Paul liking chill activities like knitting or crocheting -- maybe he made Marjan that fuzzy pink hat she wears in season 2 (or 3 -- I can't remember).

No you're so right about Nancy!! She definitely has a flair for the dramatic and I can totally see her joining a local theater group. I can see her loving to do comedic roles or super dramatic ones where she just really gets to have fun with it. The 126 always come to all her performances and she always gets the loudest applause at the end.

Yes about TK liking plants!! I actually think gardening is something both TK and Carlos would enjoy -- and Carlos could grow herbs and spices and stuff that he uses for cooking!

I can actually totally see Judd collecting model vintage cars/trains. He had to put them all on shelves when Charlie was born, because otherwise she would try to play with them thinking they're toys.

Ooh Owen would love farmer's markets to get his obscure ingredients for his smoothies! Maybe every weekend he, TK, Carlos, and Andrea meet up for brunch and go walk around a farmer's market. I think they would all have a great time!

Tommy would totally take her girls to one of those pottery places! She has some of their creations on her desk at work. I can also see Tommy liking word puzzles like Sudoku or crosswords or something like that -- something where you use your brain, but it's still relaxing.

Um, so what did you mean you're bad at characterization?? Literally these are all FANTASTIC -- and so are you!! I really hope you feel better soon. Having the flu sucks. Sending you lots of healing vibes and good thoughts!

[high-lady-of-earth]

Warrior Heart

Chapter 1

Riven x Light Fairy Reader

Plot: After the ending of Winx Saga season 1, the reader must navigate the rest of her second year in the shifting school environment. She wants to learn how to fight and defend herself.

Chapter 2

It had been a month since Alfea had been taken over by Rosalind. Headmistress Dowling was still missing and Headmaster Silva had been arrested. Professor Harvey was still teaching, but you could tell that he was on thin ice with Rosalind. Andreas of Eraklyon, Sky’s father, had taken over Silva’s role of training the specialists.

You were an air fairy in your second year. Your powers, which allowed you to manipulate the density of air particles, were firmly within your control and you had been one of Headmistress Dowling’s prodigies.

In your first year, you had roomed with Stella and Rikki. You were there when Stella had lost control of her powers and accidentally blinded Rikki, who was sent away by Queen Luna. After that incident, you had lost one of your best friends and the other began to pull away from you. You watched from afar as Stella’s life at Alfea began to fall apart. Her magic was irreparably damaged. You knew Stella felt incompetent next to you, who had been labeled by Dowling to be the “most talented fairy of your generation”. You tried not to use your powers near Stella, but you still could still feel her resentment, even though you weren’t a mind fairy.

Now, Stella was rooming with first years and you were alone. You had mended your friendship over the summer, especially after she had broken up with Sky. Her new roommates became your friends, even though you lived alone. If you were being honest, it was actually kinda nice to have a room all to yourself.

But now, things were taking a darker turn. Stella’s mother was currently residing in the school, and no one liked her. Queen Luna was cruel, especially to Stella. She doted on you because you were a powerful fairy, but you wished she didn’t. It made Stella feel even more inadequate when she didn’t receive the same attention from her own mother.

Bloom was Rosalind’s protege. She did everything Rosalind ordered, without asking any questions. Bloom and the other girls felt like Aisha had betrayed the rest of them and you honestly just wanted to graduate without anymore drama after your fourth year.

Sky was more of a mystery. You couldn’t tell how he felt about his father’s return. You knew that even though Sky might be happy to see his father, he would never forgive Andreas for Silva’s arrest and subsequent absence. Sky seemed to be dating Bloom though, after another breakup with Stella. He mostly kept to himself, only really hanging out with Bloom. Sky also wasn’t talking to Riven.

Riven and Dane turned out to be Beatrix’s lackeys. They followed her every step and worshipped the ground she walked on. You were disgusted by how much Riven had changed. Before this year, he had been arrogant, but now he was just a straight up asshole.

The specialist presence on campus has increased immensely. Rosalind cited the burned ones as the reason for more security. You couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable whenever you walked to class, the stares of the guards like needles in your skin. You also hated how vulnerable they made you feel. The older specialists were a constant reminder that you were defenseless and you hated that feeling. That was why you were currently at the specialists training field at ten pm, trying to smash a dummy.

You had seen the specialists do it when they were training. They would punch the dummy and it would fall. It couldn’t be that difficult. Ok well, unfortunately it was. You had tried to punch the dummy at least six times already, and it seemed like it was doing more damage to you based on the state of your knuckles.

You put your arms back into position and struck out, this time pushing more strength into your blow. Your fist collided with the center of the target on the dummy and it fell backwards a little bit. You let out a small squeal of excitement at the first amount of progress you had made.

“Why are you so excited? You only made the dummy move a fraction of an inch and it took you eight tries.” Said a voice behind you.

You whirled around to see a person standing behind you, their identity obscured by the darkness. It didn’t matter that it was dark. You knew by the cocky voice exactly who it was.

“It was six tries and no one asked your opinion, Riven.” You replied.

“Well, I wanted to give it anyway. And here’s another one: you’re punches are shit.” He said. You rolled your eyes. It didn’t matter that your punches were shit, you didn’t like being told by him.

“What are you doing out here? Running from your homicidal bitch of a girlfriend?” You said tauntingly.

“1) she’s not my girlfriend. 2) I could ask you the same question, Y/n.”

“So, you were running from Beatrix.”

“No, I was talking a walk, but your pathetic excuse for a punch ruined it.”

“You could just leave then. The dorms are back that way.” You said, pointing to the specialist hall.

“I’m just leaving now. Here’s a free tip: widen your stance and use your core.” Riven said as he walked off. You turned around and did as he suggested, widening the distance between your two feet. Then, you brought your arm back and swung while tightening your core. Your fist hit the dummy and it sailed backwards and hit the ground. You let out a triumphant cry of joy and walked back to your room.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When you woke up the next morning, the first thing you noticed was your knuckles. They were red and raw. If any of your friends saw your hands, they wouldn’t stop asking questions. You put on a sweater which was just a hint too big and pulled the sleeves over your hands.

You walked to your first class, which was taught by Rosalind. Her teaching style was way different from Headmistress Dowling’s. Instead of sitting at desks, you were told to stand around the edge of the room. All of the desks had been removed from the classroom and a table small table had been set up in the middle of the open space. On it were three bowls that contained water, dirt, and sticks.

“Good morning, class. Today, we will be learning how to use our magic without the guidance of our hands.” Rosalind said. The class chittered with excitement. This was the most exciting lesson for second years.

“We’re going to be doing things a little differently. Headmistress Dowling taught you useless magic. I will be teaching you how to use it offensively and we will practice on each other.” Rosalind continued. Someone spoke up.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to use our magic on other students!” Your classmate said.

“Using your magic on each other is the only way to hone your skills. This new rule will be put into place effective immediately.” Rosalind replied.

You watched as Rosalind called up two of your classmates. One was an earth fairy and the other was a water fairy. Rosalind proceeded to teach them how to draw on their magic without using their hands. Headmistress Dowling and already taught you this, so you zoned out. Instead of watching the two fairies in the center try to battle it out, you thought about last night.

You were surprised that Riven had helped you. A part of his first year self had come through and you were pleasantly happy about it. It was good to know that he wasn’t just Beatrix’s lap dog.

“Y/n and Fiora, you’re up next.” Rosalind said. You rolled your eyes. Fairy parents were so unoriginal with names for their children. Of course Fiora was a fire fairy.

You stepped into the center of the room. You reached out with your mind and the air around you condensed, becoming a thick shield. It was invisible, so no one could tell that you had already armed yourself.

“Y/n, are you ready?” Fiora said. She was holding a bunch of the sticks you had seen in one of the bowls. Well, it seemed like her plan was to torch the stick and throw it at you, just like the three other fire fairies had done in the last few rounds. How unoriginal, you thought. You were honestly bored of this already.

You nodded and reached out with your mind once again. Fiora’s eyes lit up as she used her powers and stared at the sticks, but nothing happened. She knit her eyebrows in concentration. The concentration turned to confusion when the sticks turned black.

“What are you doing?” Fiora said to you. Everyone was now staring at you intensely. Honestly, it was really simple. Fire needed oxygen to light, so you had removed the oxygen in the air from around your the sticks, creating a little bubble around them. Fiora was just heating them up to the point where they charred. You tell she was growing frustrated and angry so you drew your powers back from her.

What you didn’t expect, thought, was for her to launch two fireballs at you. You had still kept the shield of air up around you, so they hit the barrier and fizzled out. Fiora launched fireball after fireball at you and she began sweating. She was wearing herself out, but you weren’t even fazed. You wanted to end this, so you reached out with your power and formed a hand with the air in front of Fiora. You used the hand to push her towards the edge of the room.

Rosalind began clapping while the other students stared at you in awe.

“Now that is a perfect example of offensive mental magic!” Rosalind exclaimed.

Hi!! I hope you liked the first chapter of this:) I will be posting the next chapter in a couple of days.

[farfromsugafanfic]

Heartbreak Weather

Genre: Weatherman!Jin, Metropolis/loosely based off comic books, Rivalry, soft Enemies to Lovers

Pairing: Jin/Male Reader

Warnings: all the sexual tension lol, hurricanes

Synopsis: The rival weatherman at Channel 5 just so happens to be Kim Seokjin who you just so happened to have had a thing with in college. Sort of. When a hurricane brings the two of you back together again, the forecast calls for love and dredged up feelings.

���━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

"Will you please turn that off?" you asked, taking a sip of your coffee. Normally, you took it with a little vanilla-flavored creamer, but much like that morning's coffee, you were bitter.

"Aw, why? Seokjin looks so cute in his turtleneck this morning," one of the writers said, fawning over the Channel 5 weatherman. "Maybe you should start wearing turtlenecks. It might boost our ratings." 

You rolled your eyes as the red light came on indicating that you would soon be on camera. You set your coffee to the side and stepped in front of the green screen. 

"Good morning, Metropolis," you said. "You can expect some light rain on your commute today. It should clear up by lunchtime though and it will be partly cloudy for the rest of the day. You watched as the map viewers saw at home shifted as you shifted the topic. "As you know, a hurricane is forming a few hundred miles off the coast. We are currently predicting landfall early next week. I will be traveling to Diamond Beach as the storm approaches to give you the most recent updates. Thanks for watching Channel 4 News, now here's Andrea with traffic."

The red light switched from you and onto Andrea's camera on the other side of the studio. You let out a sigh and walked back to your desk away from the main set. 

"You went to school with him, right?" the same writer asked, still watching Seokjin on the screen. His station gave him more screentime because he was so well loved in the city, often they pan to him coming back from commercial breaks and whenever there was a view question or poll. 

"Yeah," you said. There was only one university near Metropolis that offered a robust meteorology program and most of the city's weather people came from it. You and Seokjin had gone through together, even graduating at the same ceremony. 

"Wow, was he still so stunning in college? Like, I don't think I could've focused if he was in my classes."

"Depends on who you ask."

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

5 Years Earlier

"Having trouble focusing?" you asked Seokjin as you noticed his dark eyes were no longer looking down at the computer screen. 

"Hmm, it's a bit hard when you look at the screen like that," he said, smirking and turning around to lean against the desk. "Tell me, what's a guy gotta do to get you to look at him like that?"

"Be a warm front." You watched as a warm front moved towards the city while a cold one moved simultaneously from the other direction. 

"What if I'm a hot front?" He turned to face you, his hip still leaning against the desk, but his body was close enough that it brushed yours as he moved. 

"Seokjin, stop." You clicked a few more times and turned to flip through your textbook. "It's a storm for sure. A thunderstorm or tornado. Shit, it could be anything, how are we supposed to figure this out."

"Its the weather, not heart surgery. We can be wrong fifty percent of the time and still good at our job."

"But, if we're wrong fifty percent of the time, we'll fail this class."

Jin sighed and crossed his arms as his eyes lingered down your body. "Listen, Y/N. We both know that you're going to stress about this for twenty minutes and then figure it out like you always do. Now, come on, let's take a break."

"And do what?" you asked, letting out a breath between your teeth, not tearing your eyes away from the screen.

"I don't know. I have a few ideas though" His breath was against your ear and his body heat radiated against your own. 

"Seokjin, this can't happen."

"Why not?"

"Cause I need to focus on school. I'm here on a scholarship. I can't risk distractions."

Jin sighed and looked down at the weather map on the screen. "It's a thunderstorm," he said. "The currents aren't strong enough for a tornado and based on the patterns, its the most logical." 

You quickly wrote down the answer and his reasoning, realizing that he was right. How he surmised the answer so quickly, especially when he was barely paying attention baffled you. 

"All right, now, come on," he said. "I'm taking you out for lunch and you can't deny me that. I know you're hungry."

"Fine," you said, shutting your textbooks and allowing the computer's screensaver to come on.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

Just hours later that same night, you found yourself looking up at the ceiling of Jin's bedroom. Soft cotton sheets wrapped around your torso and they felt softer than even the best sheets you'd ever owned. His shirtless form was turned away from you and you resisted the urge to reach up and run a hand through his dark hair. He'd let it grow long recently, the ends of his hair beginning to grow onto his neck.

"Stop staring at me," Seokjin said, you could hear the smirk in his voice. He turned around to face you. His eyes were calm and soft like the sheets, but you couldn't help but feel the sadness. The knowing.

"How'd you know?" Your voice was small.

"I could feel it. Your eyes hurt, you know?"

You did know. You knew how much it hurt Jin to see your eyes wander down the shape of his torso. That the way you always reached to push his ill-fitting glasses up the bridge of his nose hurt. That knowing he couldn't reach out and sneak his fingertips underneath the hem of your sweater.

"I'm sorry."

"I know, it's okay."

"It's not, Seokjin. We need to move on. Forget about each other. It's best for our futures."

"You know that's not true."

"Seokjin, we both want the same things in life. We'd be competing with each other for every job. We'd rush to get the story before the other. It wouldn't last."

"We don't know that unless we try."

"Seokjin, I don't want to give myself the chance to hate you."

You got up from the bed and buttoned your shirt, pulled on your trousers, and tied your shoes. Seokjin watched you, didn't try to stop you as you headed towards the door. Gripping the doorknob, you walked out and back down to the sidewalk below. 

Following that day, you didn't see Seokjin again. Sure, he still sat a few rows in front of you, he still presented in class, you glanced over his name in the paper when it was announced he was taking over the weather position for Channel 5. You saw him on billboards and on Reddit posts. Yet, you never met allowed your eyes to meet his again. Unless it was through the warm, freshly printed Metropolis Daily.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

Nearly no one was heading east towards Diamond Beach. Westbound traffic was full of cars heading into the city to weather the storm, while eastbound only consisted of a few cars. Mostly media and others who couldn't drop everything and run from the hurricane. 

You could just make out the Channel 5 van ahead of you. Focusing down on your laptop which was tracking the conditions minute by minute, you tried not to focus on the fact you would likely run into Seokjin. 

This certainly wasn't the first time a hurricane or tropical storm caused you and Seokjin to collide like convergent fronts. Every year you found yourself at Diamond Beach trying not to watch his broadcast from a few meters down the beach.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

Two Hours Later

"Hello, this Y/N Y/L/N reporting for Channel 4 news. Hurricane Roke is expected to make landfall later tonight. Most of Diamond Beach and the surrounding areas have been evacuated as Roke is currently a category four storm. I will be monitoring the storm and providing updates through Twitter throughout the night and I'll be back on the beach at 5am. This has been Y/N Y/L/N covering Hurricane Roke. Now, back to the studio."

You felt Jin's eyes on you as you gave your report. He was about two hundred feet down the beach. He wore a similar coat to your own and even with his hood pulled up you could feel the way his eyes cut through you. 

Once the red light on your camera went off, the one on Seokjin's came on and he began his report. It was nearly identical to yours, Seokjin adding his own flair and charm. Like you wished you could. 

Seokjin finished his broadcast and your filmographer began to pack up. "I'll see you bright and early in the morning?" she asked, her hair catching in the wind and obscuring her face. 

You nodded and helped her pack up the camera and other supplies, working quickly to prevent it from getting damaged from the wind or rain. Walking up the beach and back to the hotel felt like it took forever, especially with the heavy filming equipment. 

Your filmographer had already checked in earlier and headed to her room, carrying the camera and filming equipment. You kept the portable meteorological tools, already anxious to set it up in your room. Jin and his filmographer came in just as you got to the front desk. 

Giving them your name, you handed them your ID and the company credit card. The receptionist furrowed her brow and glanced up at you. 

"It looks like your room was accidentally double booked," she said. "I apologize, but due to the current situation, would you mind sharing?"

"Uh, sure, that's no problem. Who am I sharing with?"

The woman squinted at her computer. "Kim Seokjin."

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

"You're not even going to look at me?" Seokjin asked as the two of you set up your computers. He'd let you have the desk while he took the counter of the kitchenette. 

"Not until I get this setup."

Seokjin sighed and pulled out his phone. Service was already finicky, but he managed to pull up Spotify and got music to play. It was soft, as not to disturb your neighbors in the packed hotel. 

You smiled as you heard the familiar tune "Dancing Queen". Jin was a fan of older music and the two of you used to listen to ABBA's Greatest Hits when studying together. 

"You still listen to this?"

"Of course," he said. "It makes me happy."

It made you happy too and when you finished setting up your computer you peaked out the window. The storm was still a couple of hours from landfall, but the trees were already swaying wildly. 

"It's going to be a big one," Jin said, glancing at you and catching your eye. It was the first time you'd truly looked at each other since the day you'd left him on his own. It felt like a lightning bolt skewered you in half. 

"Yeah," you said, sitting down on the bed. "It is."

You traced the seams of the comforter with your index finger. The song switched and this time it was "Can't Help Falling In Love With You". 

Jin finished setting up his computer. Your screen and his looked nearly identical showing a map of the coastline and the storm approaching. He sat down beside you, closer than you would've thought an acquaintance would sit. 

"We should go to bed. Early start tomorrow." His voice commanded you to look at him. "Let's not fight over the bed." Placing down the two extra pillows down the center of the bed, he went to the bathroom to change.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

The storm was in full force when you made your way outside. The four of you: you, Jin, and your two filmographers tried to get onto the beach, but the sand cut your skin. Various debris already littered the beach. Mostly seaweed and tree branches, although you noticed a few shoes and patio furniture from the nearby condos.

"The hotel said we could report from outside," you said. "It'd be safer."

Jin chewed on his cheek and glanced out at the beach. The two filmographers began to set up their cameras and you did you best to ensure your hair didn't fall into your face. You stood away from the wind, finding it hard to breath with it blowing onto your face. 

"Seokjin! Stop!" His filmographer yelled, abandoning his equipment, he rushed towards the other man. You turned to see that Seokjin had taken off towards the beach, seemingly want to report from there no matter the circumstances. 

You looked over at your coworker and she gave you a curt nod, ensuring that she would watch over the equipment. She dragged both cameras inside the lobby one at a time. Giving her an empathetic look, you took off running towards the beach, hoping to catch up with Seokjin before he got entirely soaked. 

When you came to the edge of the beach, you saw that Seokjin was already halfway out, his filmographer not far behind. You sighed and continued out, knowing he was determined to give the report from as close to the middle of the storm as he could.

The filmographer neared the middle of the beach, fearing going any further. When you caught up to him, you stopped to catch your breath, even though it was nearly impossible with the wind. Your breath was swept away as soon as you drew it in. 

"He's crazy," the other man said. "I have no idea why he's doing this." 

"He always has to go the extra mile," you said, rolling your eyes. "Even if it's stupid and dangerous."

Seokjin turned back to look for his camera operator, only to see him halted halfway up the beach. Seokjin was three-quarters of the way up the beach now, reaching dangerously close to the rough tide. He noticed you still running towards him and smiled before a gust of wind knocked him off his feet.

⋆﹥━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━﹤

Your chest constricted when you saw Jin get thrown off his feet. He landed a few feet away in the sand. You ran as quickly as you could, falling to your knees beside him. 

"Are you okay?" you asked, looking him over. 

His eyes looked up at you, obviously taking in your features. Yet, his lips said nothing. 

"You crazy bastard! What the hell were you thinking? Rushing out here like that? You of all people should know how dangerous that is." You could barely catch your breath between words as you placed your hands on his arms to help him sit up. He didn't budge, however, his eyes just locked on your face. 

"What are you doing?" you asked, sighing and dropping your hands from his hands, looking down to meet his eyes for the first time.

He smiled when you finally met his eyes and leaned up to connect his lips to yours. It was brief due to the circumstances, but it felt like lightning coursing through your veins. 

"I ran cause I knew you would chase me."

[nitewrighter]

Ah okay!! How about Samir & Aedan being a bunch of sleuths trying to discover and dispatch the Talon scientists responsible for the creation of Andrea. Or basically Aedan asking Samir and maybe to an extent Sombra to find a way to completely trash all the cloning-related research that Moira got from his conception so that no more clones would be made to go through what he's gone through(the existential dread) or wind up becoming another killing machine like Andrea!

I really love this prompt! Though I think Aedan’s relationship to Talon’s cloning projects would probably be more complex than “TALON ONLY MAKES MONSTROSITIES AND OUR EXISTENCE IS ONLY SUFFERING.”

...okay did this fic turn into a “Mountains of Madness/The Thing” knock-off? Maybe. Do I still like it? Yes.

----

The four of them stood huddled together in front of a massive, ice-slicked steel door dug into the side of Monte Sarmiento. All of them were bundled up, virtually indistinguishable from each other save by the colors of their windbreakers layered over thick down jackets, and Marti’s black braid speckled by snowflakes. Their faces were mostly obscured by goggles and scarves, and what skin did show was chapped by wind.

“Secret South American lab?” Jaime had pulled one glove off and was picking bits of protein bar out of his teeth with his pinky nail, “Even for Talon, that’s... nnnot a good look.”

“Overwatch had them too,” said Samir with a shrug, “Though, granted, it was for Crisis-era prosthetics research.”

“I’m just saying!” said Jaime, he shuddered as an icy wind blew through and looked over his shoulder back at the snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera Darwin before pulling a glove back on, “At least we’re not in Argentina.”

“Overwatch’s was in Argentina, actually,” said Samir, and Jaime snorted.

“Focus,” said Marti, her goggles down over her eyes as she and Samir decrypted the code on the door.

“We’re sure this site’s abandoned?” said Jaime, “We won’t be activating any... ‘nuke from orbit’ failsafes, right?”

“Best intel Auntie and Lynx could get, and Winston’s satellite should intercept any signal it might send out,” said Marti, numerous lines of code running across the lenses of her goggles, “And the decryption should be complete... right... about... now.”

There was a deep whirring sound and the ice on the door fractured. The four of them flinched back as it fell down in sheets and shattered against the icy and rocky ground, opening into a dark, steel-lined corridor.

“Scout it out, Ebo,” said Marti, taking the small spider-like drone off of her back harness and setting it on the ground. The little robot scuttled into the darkness and one lens of Marti’s goggles lit up with a feed from what Ebo’s camera could pick up.

“...so when do we all get the cute little drone sidekicks?” said Jaime as the four of them lit up their flashlights and walked into the corridor.

“You’re welcome to build your own,” said Marti, shining her flashlight around the massive heptagonal hallway. There was a loud ‘thunk-CHUNK’ and the hallway suddenly lit up in unnerving red lights. It mostly eliminated the need for flashlights, but all of them hesitated to turn them off. There came a loud whirring and all of them flinched with alertness.

“Stay calm,” said Marti, holding up a hand to make them pause in their steps. she brought a hand to her temple, apparently focusing on Ebo’s feed in her goggles, “Security drones incoming,” she said. Jaime swung his rifle off of his shoulder and Samir materialized his rifle from hard-light, “Aedan, stay low. If they get your head the mission is scrubbed. Samir. Take drones at two o’clock to eight o’ clock. Jaime. Eight to two.”

Jaime audibly cocked his rifle. The drones came flying out of the darkness, unnerving things, radially symmetrical, somewhere between squid and jellyfish in their design, bearing some resemblance to the gwishin omnic but even more unnervingly reminding Aedan of the construction of his own mother’s combat suit with a strange tightness to their chassises. Aedan could already feel dread chilling his blood but both Samir and Jaime quickly and efficiently dispatched the drones. A few loud shots echoing off the metallic walls of the corridor and the drones spun and crashed to the ground next to them. About 7 or 8, virtual target practice.

“Not to jinx it but... seems a little underwhelming, right?” said Jaime, “As far as secret labs go?”

Both Marti and Samir gave Jaime a wary glance as if he might very well jinx it, but there was a sound overhead and all of them flinched, Jaime and Samir bringing their rifles to the ready, but only a few nonfunctioning drone chassis tumbled out of a duct. They glanced up at the duct, noting even more nonfunctioning drones jamming it. There was a scuttling sound and Aedan tensed, only to see Ebo scuttling back to Marti.

“...I guess at one point they were supposed to overwhelm any intruders with numbers,” said Marti, picking up Ebo, folding its legs back in, and tucking the robot back into a slot on the harness on her back. She glanced over at Aedan, stooping over one of the dispatched drones.

“Aedan, if you want to study it further, we can grab it on the way out---” Marti started but Aedan was folding and unfolding one of the wing-like appendages on the drones.

“Pseudo-organic...” murmured Aedan.

“Come again?” said Marti.

“Nothing just...” Aedan pulled himself up to his full height, “Technically they’re living things.”

“What?” Jaime tilted his head.

“Well... insomuch as a nanite is a living thing,” said Aedan, rejoining the group.

“...Are you good?” said Marti, as Aedan closed the distance between them.

“You need someone with experience in Talon’s science division,” Aedan answered with a level of obviousness.

“But are you good?” said Marti, “This mission is already hitting close to home with you---”

“Look, it’s just a practical exploration of one branch of the capabilities of nanite design,” said Aedan, irritated, “I’ve already gone through my whole stupid clone angst well before I even defected, I’m here to make sure something good actually comes of it. Which I can’t do if everyone is treating me like a Fabergé egg.”

“I’ll take your word for it...” said Marti, glancing off.

Aedan did his best to ignore the implications of her words as they continued walking forward. “I’ll take your word for it,” didn’t simply imply that she believed his words, there was another layer to it. “I’ll take your word for it,” easily translated to, “I believe that you believe that---and of course, just because you believe this about yourself or your situation doesn’t make it true.” But no, despite everything he strived for as a person, Aedan knew his very existence represented probably the ugliest side of Talon’s unfettered scientific ambition.

It’s why they brought me, thought Aedan as they reached another massive steel door and the three of them looked to him expectantly. There was a retinal scan terminal next to the door.

“Your time to shine,” said Marti, as Aedan stepped up to it.

“...couldn’t you have tried to decrypt it? Or blow it open?” said Aedan, stepping up to the terminal.

“We don’t know if that would have activated some self-destruct failsafe,” said Samir, “We want to see the lab how Talon would have seen it.”

“Of course,” said Aedan, bringing his eye to the scanner.

Two blue lines of light crisscrossed over his mahogany brown eye.

“O’Deorain, Moira,” an automated voice sounded from the computer, “Vocally confirm any guests with you for biometrics.”

A bit of panic flared up in Aedan’s chest, but he glanced back t his three compatriots and looked back at the terminal. Pitching his voice in the best approximation of his mother’s, he spoke, “O’Deorain, Moira, reporting. And three guests.”

“Accepted,” said the terminal, “Enter passcode.”

“What?” said Aedan.

“Verbally state your passcode,” said the terminal.

“Let me decrypt it,” said Marti, bringing her goggles back down over her eyes.

“Please enter passcode in the next... 40 seconds,” said the terminal.

“Will it decrypt that fast?” said Aedan, quickly.

“No,” said Marti, looking at him.

Aedan brought in a sharp breath through his teeth. His mother never had very good passcodes for anything, largely because she was dealing with Talon passcodes around every corner with Talon putting pressure on her to come up with new ideas all the time. What would she pick for here? What would she pick for now? Something obvious. Something reflecting her sensibilities.

“Please enter passcode in the next... 20 seconds,” droned the terminal.

“Uh, Aedan?” said Jaime.

“Darwin!” Aedan flinched at how loudly the word came out of him.

“Passcode expired. Please enter current passcode in the next...9 seconds,” said the terminal.

“Aedan--” Samir started.

“Beagle!” blurted out Aedan.

There was a pause of a few seconds, then another ‘thunk-CHUNK’ as the gears behind the door shifted, and the massive steel doors pulled away revealing a large lift.

“...How did you know that?” said Marti.

“Well,” Aedan shrugged, “Some side effects to Mum supplementing my memories with hers, I suppose, but mostly? We’re both lazy in our way. I mean, I supposed there would come a point where you get so exasperated with passcodes that you just defer to the passcode being the location the passcode is in so...” He trailed off and scanned the faces of his team members.

“Let’s just... get on the lift,” said Marti.

The four of them moved onto the lift. There were only two other floors. A main level, and what seemed to be a ship bay for evacuation or Talon drop ships. They opted for the main level. The lift hummed and all of them felt a distinct gut-sinking feeling as it plummeted.

All of them tensed as the doors opened to a massive chamber hewn into the mountain itself and supported by steel beams like the ribs of a massive beast. There were more ‘thunks’ and ‘whirrs’ as the auxiliary power lit up the lab, cold little white lights on footpaths thrummed up from the floor, creating an eerie lighting from below, and there were a few industrial lights shining down on a central lab table. Lining the lab walls however, were what appeared to be massive cylinders of tight bands of metal, each equipped with its own terminal and what appeared to be a generator.

“Full scan, Ebo,” said Marti, once again taking the little robot off of her back and sending it scuttling off into the dark recesses of the lab. Scalloping around the tanks, the little spider drone bustled around a corner into a corridor which Aedan assumed might lead to the generators for this lab.

“What are we looking at here?” said Jaime.

“I’d guess maybe cryogenic research?” said Samir, walking up to one of the metal cylinders and putting his hand on it, “Feels like it would be appropriate, given the location...”

“So we might just end up thawing out Talon agents if we touch the wrong thing,” said Jaime. He snorted. “Can you imagine just... being forgotten in a freezer for years?”

“...Overwatch actually had that happen with Doctor Zhou,” said Samir.

“Speculating gets us nowhere,” said Marti as she walked up to the first cylinder’s terminal. She brought her goggles down and activated the holographic screens of the terminal, her fingers racing across them to decrypt.

“It’s too warm in here for cryogenics,” Aedan said, mostly to himself as he headed to another cylinder He rapped a knuckle on the cylinder. The reverberation of the metal wasn’t quite hollow. He frowned and turned to the terminal, typing a few old Talon access codes. The holographic interface lit up, displaying flatlined vitals. Samir might be right, thought Aedan, It could be cryo... but another possibility was itching at the back of his mind. Aedan selected a button that said, ‘Open exterior shell,’ just as an excited huff came out of Marti.

“Got it--!” Marti started as the metal bands slid to the side but that tone of victory in her voice quickly shrank in her throat. Aedan glanced at his own cylinder and saw the bands sliding away from it, revealing glass and… yellow. His gut seized. All four of them stumbled away from the cylinders, shrinking in close to Marti in horror as the metal bands slid away to reveal two yellowish glass tanks, each with a naked man floating in it with dozens of wires stuck into his skin and a particularly unnerving wire ported at his temple. Mnemosyne, Aedan thought, mindlessly feeling at the side of his own head. It took a second to make out their hair in the yellowness of the tank, it was a bit long for amnio-tank regulations. How long had they been abandoned? How much did the biotics slow the keratinization process of the growth of hair?

“Blonde clones in tubes...” Jaime said, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice but somewhat blindly fumbling for Samir’s hand, “Like I said before: Not a good look.”

“Look at their faces,” said Marti, squinting.

The truth was their faces had that strange, anonymizing shadow of death upon them. The way death makes anything look so very remote from anything it looked like in life. They were in tanks of biotics, but all Aedan could think about were embryos and reptiles in jars of formaldehyde. But they could still pick up a sharp nose, a strong jaw, and thin lips.

“…Jack Morrison,” Samir said hollowly. Even without the scars, everyone could recognize that nose and that jawline from the posters that had colored their world since well before any of them were born.

“You’re telling me Talon devoted an entire lab to cloning Jack Morrison?” Jaime said, his face twisted up.

“It might not be just Jack Morrison,” said Marti, quickly heading to the lab’s central terminal, and Samir paled slightly.

“With all data on the SEP serum destroyed, it was their most logical bet,” said Aedan, “Short of grave-robbing other subjects from the Omnic crisis, but I doubt any samples there would be viable if they couldn’t scry the compound from genetic information.”

He felt Jaime’s eyes on him, shrewd and disturbed. Aedan pressed his own lips together, hating how much he still knew about how Talon thought. Hating how much he still thought like Talon.

Marti still had her goggles down, streams of data going over the lenses as she typed at the central terminal, “I’m getting the next one open.”

They all tried to keep steady, but the loud whirrs and ‘thunks’ which issued from Marti’s hacking efforts while all their eyes were fixed on the other clones in the amnio-tanks made all of them flinch.

A nervous laugh fell out of Jaime. “Keep expecting their eyes to open...” he said, his voice a little strained.

The metal bands slid away on the next cylinder, revealing not a blonde man but a floating amorphous pulp of black.

“Nanite amalgam?” said Aedan, tilting his head.

“What’s a nanite amalgam, again?” whispered Jaime.

“Baby reaper,” whispered Marti.

“They’re not ‘Baby Reapers,’” said Samir, “More like... Reaper goo coral colonies.”

“But we don’t--I mean Talon doesn’t usually let them get this big...” murmured Aedan, “It’s easier to observe cellular anomalies when they’re...” he trailed off and tapped at the monitor next to the tank with the black pulp. Aedan put a hand over his mouth.

“What?” said Marti.

“...it’s not a nanite amalgam. This... was an attempt at cloning Reyes,” said Aedan, his shoulders dropping, “Couldn’t maintain cellular cohesion. He...” Aedan took a steadying inhale, “In the most scientific terms... ate himself.”

Jaime’s lips pulled back from his teeth in some combination of repulsion and that odd scrambling need to use humor to try and maintain some mental grip on the situation but also knowing he shouldn’t do that for Aedan’s sake.

“Aedan, do you need to--?” Marti started.

“Open the next tank,” said Aedan, stiffly. Marti gave him a look and Aedan cleared his throat. “Please. If it’s... in your best judgment, team leader.”

Marti tapped away at the monitor again. The next tank was a similar black pulp but now in a roughly human shape, like a shadow.

“This one managed to maintain its hox genes...” murmured Aedan.

“I’ve found the ‘Emergency access’ channel--I’m opening the rest of them,” said Marti.

There was a series of clanks and whirring then and the rest of the tanks were revealed. These weren’t all identical clones. If Aedan had to make a comparison, he would say it was like An artist’s body of work as defined by a particular phase. There was Picasso’s Blue Period, and here was his mother’s “Try and create a supersoldier that combines the most terrifying aspects of both Morrison and Reyes with varying but all uniquely disgusting results” period.

“Subjects seven through eighteen,” Aedan said quietly, pressing one hand to the glass of an amnio-tank. He remembered McCree interrogating him shortly after his defection. Why does everyone always assume clones are made in bulk?

They weren’t made in bulk, thought Aedan, This is trial and error. This is throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks.

 There was a man in the tank with a ruddier skin tone than Jack’s but hair too light to be Reyes’s--or at least most of him--his arms and legs tapered off into cloudy black points, like a piece of wood that had only half of it burned.

“Couldn’t maintain cellular cohesion at the extremities. Organs were probably in a state of peril from the start and failed as it moved inward,” Aedan muttered.

“Uh--Aedan?” said Marti, but Aedan moved across the next tank, featuring a man with similar features midway between Reyes and Morrison, in somewhat complete form, but with the entire back of his head dissolved and trailing up 

“Could reconstruct most of his body but not the arbor vitae. Probably killed himself at the first attempt at a fade, yet the nanites still responded to the peripheral nerves. Very unusual,” he murmured.

“Aedan,” Samir’s voice was troubled but Aedan was too caught up in his observations, moving to the next tank. 

The clone in this one was... unfortunate. Really more of just a brain and spine surrounded by a black cloud of nanites. “The previous couldn’t maintain the integrity of the central nervous system, this one couldn’t maintain the integrity of the periphera--”

“AEDAN!” Jaime bellowed and Aedan glanced up. Jaime pointed to the end of the row of tanks. The last tank was empty--or at least, what was left of it was empty. What remained of the tank was jagged glass rendered virtually white from all its fissures. They had all been so busy looking at the tanks and monitors they didn’t catch the shards of glass sparkling in those cold floor lights at the base of the final tank. The glass definitely showed that something had burst out of the tank, rather than a force shattering it inward.

“...do we know... why Talon abandoned this lab?” the words came out of Aedan squeakier than he wanted.

“Well, mostly our prerogative is to secure any Talon site that’s tactically viable,” said Samir.

Marti pressed a button on the side of her goggles and a clear tension overcame her, “And you know what?” she said, her voice pitching higher than usual, “Let’s consider this one secured! Let’s go to the lift, everyone!”

“What?” said Samir.

“But there’s still so much to--” Aedan started.

“We are going to the lift,” said Marti through clenched teeth, “Now.”

There was a scuttling and Aedan, Samir, and Jaime all instinctively clustered close, only to see Marti’s drone Ebo scuttling out of a dark corridor of the lab. Marti un slung her shockcaster off her back and fired off several tether lines behind the little spider robot.

“Uh, Marti--?” Jaime started. 

“I said get to the li--” Marti shoved her goggles up off of her eyes as a horrible creaking, sloshing sound came out of the corridor behind Ebo, “NOW!” she shouted, “GO NOW!”

What lurched out of the corridor, Aedan couldn’t really compare to the nanite amalgams he had sent swarming over Urdr when he had defected with Rei. Too much of it was flesh-toned. But the black of nanites spiraled all over the whorls of skin and muscle making it up. Aedan didn’t try to make out how many eyes or hands were throbbing and blinking and clenching in it. Somehow, despite having far more eyes than any organism had any business having, all of those eyes fixed on them. Four dumb kids in brightly colored windbreakers standing smack dab in the center of the lab. Some of the eyes that looked at them were blue. Some were brown. Some had entirely too much pupil. Too much tapetum lucidum. Some were runny with tears and yellow gunk. The mass of nanite-spiraled muscles and flesh pressed out at Aedan like some creature trying to burst out of an amniotic sack. Aedan was frozen in place mouth hanging open, staring at this creature. This thing that came from a tank and was made of only a few smatterings of DNA and nanites, just like he did. He stood there, dumbly, until he felt felt Jaime grab his arm and he felt his own legs pumping as all four of them sprinted for the lift.

 Marti fired out a tether at Ebo, caught the little robot, then yanked back hard, whisking the drone into her arms. She hugged it close to her chest as she ran. It wasn’t clear if she was protecting it or she thought it might protect her. Jaime just kept running, gripping Aedan’s arm so hard it hurt as Aedan flailed behind him, unable to pull his eyes away from the crawling, clawing mass that pursued them. Samir tossed out a few turrets to slow it down but soon surrendered to the dead sprint to the lift as the pulsing mass of flesh and nanites and muscles and sinew and limbs that didn’t know if they were hands or feet but were still reaching out, feeling out, followed after them. The four of them scrambled into the lift and Marti feverishly slammed the ‘close door’ button as the mass sloshed and crawled and reached for them. Samir brought up a hard light shield and the fleshy mass pressed against it, not-quite-hands pressing white against the bluish light before the doors of the lift finally closed and the lift shot upward. 

“Guh--” some repulsed noise throbbed out of Jaime’s throat. Jaime, who never knew how to shut up for anything, was at a horrified loss of words. He suppressed a gag. 

“Subject Eighteen...” the words left Aedan in a breath, a manic laugh shook him, “You created something with SEP serum toughness, and nanite adaptiveness but it wasn’t--it wasn’t...”

“Aedan--” Marti touched his arm.

“It was adapting,” Aedan was babbling, “It was adapting. It knew not to give itself a mouth or vocal chords because maybe then we could hear it coming--”

Marti suddenly pulled him into a hug.

“Probably converted what labtechs were here into biomass...” Aedan’s voice was breaking. 

“Breathe, it’s okay,” said Marti.

“There’s a brain in there--maybe a lot of brains---maybe--” Aedan didn’t know why he kept talking. Maybe talking was all that kept the worst of the horror back. He felt Jaime layer himself around Marti in that same embrace.

“Tell me it’s not me--Tell me that thing isn’t me---” Aedan wasn’t quite sure when his face had gotten so wet with tears but it must have been bad because even Samir was piling into the hug now. 

“It’s not you,” Marti’s voice was half-muffled against the bulk of Aedan’s own coat. Aedan just sank to his knees, his breath heaving between hyperventilating and sobs, and the rest of the team sank with him. Their only comfort was the thrum of the lift itself, bringing them up further and further from the horror below.

[johannesviii]

Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 1997

Holy shit, almost none of this comes from the US year-end list. That feels weird. But yeah, a great year for the kind of music I like in almost every musical genre possible on radio.

Also, we’ve entered a series of years where it’s gonna get increasingly harder for me not to make top 20s.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will be stuff in French. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

A few honorable mentions really quickly.

Men in Black (Will Smith) - I liked this way more back in the day.

Mmmmbop (Hanson) - Back then, if you were a kid, you were almost contractually obligated to like this.

Vivo Per Lei (Andrea Bocelli & Hélène Ségara) - This is supposed to sound grand and epic but it kinda falls on the “silly” side of the spectrum.

Tubthumping (Chumbawamba) - Will make the next list. Spoiler, I know.

I Shot the Sheriff (Waren G) - But it didn’t shoot this top 10 list.

10 - L’Empire du Côté Obscur (IAM)

US: Not on the list / FR: #92

This is a French rap song which samples some bits of the French dub of Star Wars, and it’s sung by a guy pretending to be the evil Emperor, trying to convince you to join the dark side. And he has an audible lisp. And the music video is just as ridiculous as you’d expect.

If you don’t think that falls into the “so bad it’s good” category, there’s nothing more I can do.

9 - Barbie Girl (Aqua)

US: #94 / FR: #4

This is the only song from the US year-end list on my 1997 top 10 list. And I have nothing to say about it. It was a ton of fun at the time, it’s still a ton of fun now.

8 - Meet Her At The Love Parade (Da Hool)

US: Not on the list / FR: #36

This is an endurance test more than a song, per say. And yet, I put it on the second cd compilation I ever made in my life, and I’d gladly listen to it.

I told you my tastes made no sense, didn’t I.

7 - Around the World (Daft Punk)

US: Not on the list / FR: #44

The only reason this isn’t higher is because I find it too repetitive to be listened to on a loop, and yes, I’m aware of how ridiculous that sounds after putting Meet Her At The Love Parade on the same list.

6 - Mon Papa à Moi Est un Gangster (Stomy Bugsy)

US: Not on the list / FR: #15

They say music can have a really bad influence on kids. And yeah, if this list was made according to each song’s impact on my life, this one would be number one. The title means “My Daddy Is a Gangster” and as you can guess it’s about a kid who’s dad is a gangster and he’s explaining how it impacts him (he’s never sure his dad will be here to pick him up after school, adults keep asking him questions, he sees his dad’s face in the newspaper...).

But the dad himself sounds like he genuinely tries to be a good father, and that song taught me some life lessons which definitely prove hip-hop has a bad influence on kids. See for yourself.

Fils, tu sais, la vie c’est pas un film, ça dure pas une heure et d’mi deux heures et puis on rembobine (”Son, you know, life isn’t a movie, it doesn’t last 1 hour 30- 2 hours and then rewind”) // Les gangsters ne font pas d’vieux os, si “ouioui”, paf, derrière les barreaux (”Gangsters never die old, and if you hear a siren, boom, you end up behind bars”) // Choisis le droit chemin, c’est le seul par lequel on n’se fait jamais attraper, retiens bien (”So pick the right path, it’s the only one on which you’ll never get caught”) // Le savoir est une arme, maint’nant tu l’sais, le savoir est une arme bébé, ne l’oublie jamais (”Cause knowledge is a weapon, and now you know, knowledge is a weapon kid, never forget it”)

(...) Ne jamais respecter quelqu'un qui ne te respecte pas (”Never respect someone who never respects you”).

See? A bad influence, I told you. Terrible life lessons.

5 - La Neige au Sahara (Anggun)

US: Not on the list / FR: #50

In a more mediocre year, any song in this top five could top the list. I don’t have anything to say about this one, just please listen to it if you don’t know it yet. It sounds fantastic and Anggun is a great singer.

4 - Bitter Sweet Symphony (The Verve)

US: Not on the list (...yet...) / FR: #96

This barely makes the year-end list but it still counts, dammit, and the next list was so difficult to make I might as well put it here while I can.

If you ask me how the second half of the 90s sounded, it sounded like this song, and it had the strange privilege of being the first song I loved that my mother openly disapproved of. And I was nine. Being a kid and having your own tastes? What a horrible notion (she’s always been fond of forcing her musical tastes on me and only offering cds she liked and I didn’t, which is why the first cd I ever received as a birthday gift was Celine Dion, and it promptly joined her cd collection instead of mine - insert gif of Kuzco making gifts to himself here).

And I loved the music video. I wanted to grow up and look as cool as this jerkass walking in a straight line without a care in the world. My favorite part was when he walks over the car.

3 - Ameno (Era)

US: Not on the list / FR: #26

So. Uh. This is a nonsensical song in vaguely latin-sounding meaningless gibberish chanted by a pseudo-medieval choir over a dance beat.

This is going to be one of those songs, isn’t it.

Yes. And I loved it to bits. And I have the album. Fight me.

2 - Hasta Siempre (Nathalie Cardone)

US: Not on the list / FR: #8

This was a huge hit here and- hang on. This sounds like one of these goddamn Mylène Farmer songs that keep appearing on my lists, doesn’t it. Uhhhhh. Well. It’s because the same guy who usually works on her songs made the music for this song. Damn it

Anyway, using this kind of music to make a modern version of Hasta siempre, Comandante was a genius move, and, again, I strongly recommend you give it a try if you’ve never heard it before (tw: firearms but only used on bottles).

1 - Alane (Wes)

US: Not on the list / FR: #5

This was one of the biggest summer hits here at the time and oh my god does this sound fantastic. That guy’s voice. That guy’s voice. That song always throws me back to when I was a kid and how great summer vacations at home could be, and. Ugh. I know I sound like a broken record but. Please just listen to it for yourself if you don’t know it yet. Quite possibly the ultimate summer song for me. Nearly untouchable.

Also yes, it was on the first list of my favorite songs I ever made.

Next up: this next #1 will sound absolutely insane to you if you’ve never heard it before but I swear it was a massive hit here

[writteninsunshine]

Worker Bee - Andrea Rhodea/Reno - SFW-Ish

Title: Worker Bee Author: Donnie Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake Setting: The Honeybee Inn Pairing: Andrea Rhodea/Reno Characters: Andrea Rhodea, Reno, Honeygirl OC: Chastity, Honeygirl OC: Lacey, Honeyboy OC: Darnell, Honeyboy OC: Haddick Genre: Romance/Humor Rating: T Chapters: 1/1 Word Count: 1423 Type of Work: One-Shot, Part of the Honey Bucket series Status: Complete Warnings: Gay, Slash, Yaoi, MLM, AU - Canon Divergent, AU - Honeybee!Reno, Burlesque Dancing, Canon Mentions of Noncon, Reno Wears The Honeygirl Outfit Because Andrea’s Cool, Crossdressing, Crossdresser, Some Suggestive Touching Disclaimer: I don’t own anything. Summary: All Work Reno and no Fun Reno made Reno less money. AN: Hey guys, it’s me again! Just thought I ought to say, if you want vague updates and to talk to me more, I have Twitter and Tumblr, too! Twitter is Sunshinecackle, and Tumblr is Writteninsunshine! I also have a writing Discord that is currently pretty dead. xD I can PM it to people who want it on FFN, for everyone else, it’s here: discord.gg/FyaWw25 So, here we are again, with the start of the Honeybee!Reno fics! There will be quite a few of these, and I’m already in love with this AU. Reno works more as a Honeygirl, because he’s allowed to wear the outfit and Andrea is cool with breaking gender roles. Also, who wouldn’t want to put his tits in that outfit? Oof. I can’t help it. Buuut, I hope you guys like this! It’s mildly NSFW but not really more than suggestive.

Final Fantasy VII Fic Masterlist

Worker Bee ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Hands up by his shoulders, fingers curled in, Reno bobbed along with the gaggle of other girls, giggling alongside them to keep up. The quartet buzzed about, getting ready for the show and pausing to give gracious smiles and feather-light touches to return patrons. Reno diverted for just a second to run his surprisingly soft fingers under a man’s chin, drawing his eyes from the floor to see the sparkle in Reno’s own blue eyes.

Rejoining the swarm, he let the bumblebee butt on the back of his outfit bounce, no doubt keeping the man’s attention until he disappeared around a corner. Heading backstage to prepare for the show, a strong hand tugged him to the side and he looked up just in time to catch his boss’ smiling face. It was careful, sweet and gentle, something that fluttered Reno’s heart in his chest. A gentle kiss was pressed to his plump lips and it melted him in his heels, both arms wrapping around Andrea’s neck to keep him from losing his balance. “You’re going to do fantastic tonight, Reno.” Andrea purred into his ear, kissing it softly, “I’m looking forward to the show.” An ear to ear grin blossomed over Reno’s lips and he nodded, leaning in for another kiss to keep himself tided over until he was off work. “You bet your ass the show’s gonna be good,” Reno replied finally, having spent too long pushing back into kisses, lingering and needing more attention, “It always is.” His hungry mouth parted to invite the other’s tongue to explore, and Andrea gave him a fleeting taste of what was to come later. “You make a difference,” Andrea responded softly, breath washing over Reno’s lips as he spoke. He pulled away, finally, gently patting the back of Reno’s thigh, “Off with you, the show is about to begin.” He winked, provocative smile in place as he nodded in the direction that the other needed to go. Reno had to force himself to double-time click-clack backstage, getting into position with the other girls. “Andrea give you a personal pick-me-up, Honey?” Chastity questioned, shaking her head to toss her brunette to blonde ombre hair over her shoulders. Reno took up his spot beside her, copying the motion if only to show off how much longer his hair was than hers. At the very least, she giggled it off, playfully smacking his arm. “Show-off.” “You know he did.” Reno replied with a grin, “And you already know that about me, Honey Pop.” He winked, shifting into position as the lights dimmed on the floor, and the spotlights shone on the curtains. “Good luck!” “You, too, Honey!” Chastity chirped happily, just in time for the music to start. As the show began, Reno executed his moves in time with everyone else, keeping up with a kind of dedicated caution he never showed in his other job. Being a Turk sometimes meant he had to get creative, and he was valuable enough that his occasional upsets didn’t cost him too much. A lecture or two, a few disparaging comments from Rufus, and he was back on his feet with his job still as secure as ever. Here, however, the wild Turk he was in his day job took a backseat to the charm he turned up to eleven every night. The Honeybee Inn wasn’t a place where you wanted to stick out, at least not so much, so violently, and he wanted nothing more than to keep impressing Andrea Rhodea. The better he did at his job, the more the man seemed to grow attached to him. Even off-hours, they spent as much time together as was feasible. It had started as simply offering Reno somewhere to crash one night when he was practically sleeping on his feet, but things could never stay so simple in either of their lives. One night of cuddling in Andrea’s incredibly soft bed had turned Reno onto the finer things in life, and an odd kinship had been born. Around a lot of people, Reno had to tamp down on himself, even if he could get overexcited and his filters eroded under his opinions. Around Andrea, though, he could be himself, he could wear what he wanted to, do what he wanted to. When repairs on his home had become too costly, Reno had even badgered the other man into giving him a night job. As far as he knew, the other Turks didn’t know about his double life, and he wasn’t interested in divulging such things. No, this counted as Fun Reno time, and Work Reno had a restraining order on anything Fun Reno thought was a good idea. Okay, except for the occasional prank to light up the office. But beneath the bright lights, with the music pumping around him and the stage bringing attention to the veritable herd of them, everything fell away. He could cut loose and have the time of his life showing off for total strangers, faces obscured by the fluorescent glare blinding him to the dim room full of half-lidded eyes. Everything felt as comfortable on this stage as it did when he was in bed with the man he would call his sometimes-lover. It was no wonder that Andrea was on his mind more when he was working for ShinRa. Crawling out of his bed and slinking back plateside was the kind of walk of shame he actually didn’t appreciate. Even still, his mind was focused on the end goal, even as the finale of the show began, and he twirled into the arms of his designated partner like he was made for it. Reno was good at physical things, keeping his hands and feet busy kept his mind busier than paperwork every could. With one leg in the air, one arm above his head and his partner dipping him, he finished out the song while panting hard through his nose to avoid looking like he’d expelled too much effort. Following the others off stage, once the curtains cut to a close, Reno grinned at Chastity, who made a beeline for him as they were ushered to the back hallway where the dressing rooms were. Her comically tiny steps only fuelled Reno’s good mood, and she excitedly gestured with her hands as she spoke. “That was so good! I swear, we’re getting better all the time! I sure wish we could do another big show tonight.” “Well, everything else falls into place, don’t it? You get to dance again tonight, don’t you?” Reno drawled, smirking slightly as they rounded the corner towards the private rooms. “Yeah! I’m excited, it’s me, Lacey, Darnell, and Haddick.” She replied, clapping her hands several times in rapid succession as she shimmied along beside him to his usual private room. “You’re on Appointment Duty tonight, right?” “Oh, yeah, and I got some pretty big customers.” Reno almost cackled, shaking his head as he put his hands on his hips, “The kind that might get my shoe shoved up their ass if they try anything funny.” “Isn’t that like, everyone, though, Honey?” Chastity laughed, bending forward a bit to put her hands on her knees as she giggled happily. Parting her lips to speak again, she paused when a hand slid around Reno’s waist and he was tugged back into someone. Looking up, brows drawn in, she grinned the second she noticed it was Andrea. She waved with a little squeak of surprise, before giving a playful wink and turned on her heels to disappear into the crowd. “You did so well.” Andrea purred against Reno’s exposed back, kissing along the freckled skin there as he tugged the smaller in close. With his costume keeping them separated due to the large bubble of fabric and plastic, Reno was half-tempted to turn around, but Andrea managed to slot himself against the Honeyboy’s rump and kissed his ear anyway. “I always love watching you dance. You’re exquisite.” “I always love knowing you’re watching.” Reno nearly purred, finally managing to turn in the other’s arms before squeezing all the air out from between them. Andrea brushed the other’s hair out of his face, leaning in and tilting Reno’s head with two fingers on his chin to swipe his tongue against the redhead’s lips. With a little shudder, Reno melted against him, enjoying the strong hands dropping to his waist as they tugged him in tighter. “You have some work to do still, don’t you?” Andrea whispered against his mouth, and Reno licked at the other’s bottom lip. “I do, but as soon as I’m done, I’m gonna buzz on over to see you.” Reno winked, having to separate from his boss as someone cleared their throat behind him. “See you soon, Boss Man.” The redhead smirked as he gave a mock salute, taking a couple swinging steps backward before turning and fluttering to his first client of the evening. “This way, Honey~ Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.” ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ AN: I’ve been really loose with my ships and stuff lately, and honestly, I’m really loving playing with all of these. It’s too much fun, and I hope you guys are enjoying my ADHD brain on shipping the Remake. Reno’s gonna get a lot of attention! There will be at least 16 fics in this series, if every person on the list gets a single fic. We’ll see, though, I’m loving this Honeybeeno AU!

[oopsbirdficced]

@wishingyoucouldshowmelove asked: #29 “I'm carrying your child.” for Syd/Lyfia, please? Thank you in advance.

(This one's a bit of an emotional rollercoaster! Sorry about that. But there's a happy(ish?) end!)

Lyfia collapses into a chair, hands trembling. How can this have happened? Everything has been happening so fast, she's barely been able to keep up with it. First Asgard had been attacked- thought they'd struck first, she's come to understand- and a full half of the God Warriors had died, including her boyfriend. Then, only a few months later, Andreas had happened.

Now she's the Voice of Odin, replacing Lady Hilda in the highest office in Asgard. A ladies’ maid, now elevated to nobility! It's enough to make her head spin. Hilda has taken back up her post as the Polaris God Warrior, and tells Lyfia once she's a hundred percent healthy again, she'll be taking up post as Lyfia’s bodyguard.

Lady Hilda is truly Odin-sent, keeping herself and Lady Freya between Lyfia and those angry about her sudden elevation in status. Additionally, all three of them have been working nonstop coordinating both the relief effort and the rebuilding of Asgard’s capital city. Fróði and Sigmund have also been invaluable, but being around them is harder than being around Hilda and Freya.

And now… this news has to be the hardest to bear. She'd thought herself sick, maybe from overwork, but the doctor says she's over four months pregnant. She can't quite believe it- she's not even showing! The timing fits,though, and she has to struggle to breathe.

Hilda comes in looking exultant, a bundle of papers in her arms, but her happiness fades fast in the face of Lyfia’s obvious distress. She sets her papers down on a table and kneels next to Lyfia’s chair, catching her shaking, small hands in her warm, fight-callused ones.

“Lyfia what's wrong?” Hilda asks softly, and Lyfia’s chest hitches in a sob. “You went to the doctor, right?” She's looking increasingly worried, and it occurs to Lyfia that Hilda might this she's dying or something.

“I- I'm pregnant.” She says in a raspy little voice, and then bursts into tears for real. Hilda immediately draws her into a hug, humming an obscure lullaby, until Lyfia has cried herself out. Freya arrives at some point, sitting on the arm of the chair and rubbing Lyfia’s back gently. They let Lyfia get cleaned up and splash water on her face, Hilda quietly telling Freya what Lyfia’s outburst had been about while she does so.

“Do you know who the father is?” Freya asks gently once Lyfia’s returned.

“Was it consensual?” Hilda asks a bit more grimly. Freya shoots her sister a gently reproving look.

“Yes, we were together- dating. But he's- he's dead.” She bites her lip, breathing deeply. “Syd. Mizar Zeta Syd was the father.” She says, hands twisting together in her lap, face flushed. Freya looks deeply sympathetic, a hand reaching out to squeeze Lyfia’s shoulder. Hilda looks- oddly happy? She stands, collecting her papers, and brings them over.

“He's not dead. I just received word from his brother, Alcor Zeta Bud, that he pulled through and survived the fight with the Saints after all. They're on their way back now that they're fully recovered, they should actually be here today, hopefully.” Hilda looks quite happy. They're travel papers, among others, including a letter to Hilda, mistakenly still addressing her as the Voice of Odin.

“B-brother? I didn't know he had a brother,” she murmurs, not quite believing it.

“Their family were strong traditionalists, unfortunately. Bud was given to a servant to raise, because they were twins.” The set of Hilda’s mouth speaks volumes on her opinion of that particular bit of outdated, ignored law. No one follows those anymore, what on earth had possessed Syd’s parents? “When Bud came to me I granted him training and he earned his God Robe. He requested to stay on the sidelines, and I allowed it.” Hilda shrugs, and Lyfia nods slowly. The God Warriors have always been a strange mix of nobility and commoner. A knock comes at the door, and Freya goes to answer it.

“Lyfia! Are you okay?” Her head jerks up in surprise and she stares at Syd, looking a bit unhealthy and skinny, utterly lost and confused, trying not to cry again. He does have a twin, and they're identical. That's going to be confusing,” she thinks inanely

“Lady Lyfia, Voice of Odin, Mizar Zeta Syd and Alcor Zeta Bud request audience,” Hilda says stiffly formal, her way of notifying the two of her elevated status. Syd gapes, obviously shocked.

“Syd,” she murmurs, reaching for him. Freya, blessings upon her, shoos Bud and Hilda away and out the door. Lyfia stands and practically collapses into Syd’s arms, confused and overwhelmed. Syd guides them to sit in a nearby couch, holding her tightly. “I thought you died, Syd,” she murmurs, so emotionally tired she's reached a calm plateau.

“I'm so sorry, Lyfia.” He murmurs. “Bud thought for a while there I had died, so when he got me actual medical attention it took me a long time to heal.” She nods, snuggling close.

“No letter?” She asks, a touch sadly.

“Bud, for all he's apparently been stalking me most of my life, didn't know we were together. Or he thought it wasn't serious, I'm not sure which.” Syd kisses her head in unspoken apology. Lyfia nods.

“I'm so glad you're here.” She says, hesitating. Should she tell him? “Ah, Syd?” She asks quietly. He hums inquiringly. “I'm carrying your child,” she says in a whisper, unsure how he'll take the news.

“What- Lyfia?” He sounds bewildered.

“I'm pregnant, Syd. Over four months.” Gods, they're both still so young, they're both barely nineteen. What are they going to do? What is she going to do, if he rejects her?”

“Oh Lyfia.” He squeezes her gently. “Do you want to keep the baby?” He asks gently.

“I think so? I only found out myself a few hours ago.” She says softly.

“I'll be here for you, Lyfia. Whatever you choose.” Syd swears, and she believes him, relaxing into his embrace.

[phillipcole]

Post-AGT Appearance 796: Scott Shannon in the Morning May 1

The Celtics won April 28.

All 3 songs would sink a bit last week, with My Homeland 18 the John Williams Medley 20 and Please vote for Avonelle 31.  That would be the signal for my agent to cement some deals and release announcements.  The duet with Dolly Parton would open at Dollywood during the Memorial Day weekend, followed by a brief southern tour.  Also Beyonce would appear at 4 of my events in October whether our duet was released by then or not.  The press release would not include any statement from myself.  Fallout from my comments on Fox would be spreading but with limited reflections on me.  Shannon would make little preparation, content to just throw things at me in a low-energy interview.

Shannon: That of course was My Homeland, sung to the tune of the love theme from Titanic with Celine Dion herself.  Her duet partner penned the new lyrics.  That would be Phil Cole who joins us this week as he does each and every Monday morning.  Phil, how are you?

PBC: Feeling fine.

Shannon: And making a lot of news this week.

PBC: I guess.

Shannon: Would you like to talk about your activities last week?

PBC: If you wish, fire away.

Shannon: First, there’s your comments about Fox News getting a lot of attention.

PBC: I stand by everything I said.

Shannon: You really think Andrea Tantaros was hired for her legs?

PBC: I don’t know that, but...uh...we’re supposed to stare at them for the whole show.  That’s not my fault.

Shannon: And Bill O’Reilly.  He’s getting a fortune now in a contract buyout.

PBC: Good retirement deal.

Shannon: Would you be interested in getting his show?

PBC: No!  First that’s not permitted in my deal with SNL.  Secondly my upper respiratory  problems would be tough for a daily program of any time.

Shannon: Doesn’t seem to affect your tours.

PBC: As long as I can get the words out, my voice quality isn’t a big deal.  also that’s why I can’t sing most of these duets solo.

Shannon: And on that note, big announcement about your schedule.

PBC: Yes, it’s so good to have a date for the next duet and so Great to sing live with Dolly Parton.

Shannon: Have you met her yet?

PBC: Believe it or not, no.  We just missed each other, sang at the studio separately.  I’ve got 2 days before the first concert to rehearse.  I hope my throat holds up that week.

Shannon: And Beyonce will join you in October.

PBC: Yes, but that’s not the same as setting a date for the release of the duet.

Shannon: And still no mention of the remaining duet partner.

PBC: Glad you mentioned that. 

Shannon: You’re going to tell us who it is?

PBC: Not today.  Today’s routine is eliminating other suspects.

Shannon: Lots of fun, get on with it.

PBC: Thank you.  Ladies and gentlemen, I know a lot of you are wondering who is going to be the next person to sing a song with me bout my wife’s cousin Avonelle Hector Joseph.  I can’t believe the websites and things wondering, gambling, the paparazzi and reporters trying to follow me and everyone around to see who it might be.  Let me erase a few more.   First of all, if anyone thinks he knows based on seeing me with someone, let me assure you there are many fine singers and groups willing and eager to sing with me.  What’s harder to find is someone who wants me to turn one of their biggest hits into a campaign song for a candidate they never heard of who already lost the election!

Shannon: Ha ha ha.

PBC: So here’s a short list of people who will not be my duet partner in the remaining Avonelle Hector song.  Bobby Brown said no.  That’s his prerogative.

Shannon: Obscure reference there ha ha.

PBC: Or was it Chris Brown?  I sometimes confuse wife beaters.  It won’t be the Chainsmokers, because some of us are pyrophobic.  It won’t be Lady Gaga.  That’s not just because of Phillip’s feeble condition, but because when our team made jokes she kept her Poker Face on and never laughed.

Shannon: Good one.

PBC: Thank you.  It won’t be Ted Nugent because we don’t want to catch that cat scratch fever.  It won’t be Taylor Swift.  She should work with us.  It’s not too swift to say no too rashly.  It might even mean she’s in Zane.

Shannon: Ohhhhh.

PBC: It won’t be Demi Lovato.  Now that she’s one of the 100 most influential people in the world she’s got no Time for us.  Just remember Demi, I studied that whole list and I never heard of about 80 of them.  They just picked you so you’d sing at that party, because a Jeff Bezos karaoke would be unbearable1

Shannon: Is that all?

PBC: Enough, for this week.

Shannon: Will you have more next week?

PBC: No, next week’s routine is jokes about the songs that beat us out on the pop chart.

Shannon: That should be great.  Talk to you next Monday then.

PBC: Thank you.

Shannon: Have a great week.

PBC: You too.

Shannon: stay tuned for more great songs on WCBS.

[tech-battery]

The Razer Kishi Is the Smartphone Gamepad I've Been Waiting For

Betrayal, frustration, regret. These are just a few of the emotions I felt when I bought my first gamepad for a smartphone, the Logitech Powershell, in 2015. The sales pitch sounded so sensible. You’re already carrying a tiny computer in your pocket all the time, snap that phone into a controller case and you’d have the perfect mobile gaming device, right?

Sadly, the Powershell was a big-time piece of shit, with just a few, stiff buttons, painful ergonomics, and poor software support. In short, I felt burned. A lot can change in five years, though. Taking another look in 2020, I’ve found that today’s mobile gamepads have addressed many of the Powershell’s problems. (Some pretty successfully!) The newest of these is the Razer Kishi, which, while not perfect, gets you closer to turning your phone into a game console than ever before.

Between remote play apps and game-streaming services like Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud, a good mobile controller now promises more than just greater precision in App Store games. Freed from the limits of onboard processing power, smartphones can play current-gen AAA titles—as long as your internet connection and gamepad are up to the task. Personally, I was just hoping for a controller that could get me through Symphony of the Night and San Andreas for the 1,000th time. I ended up finding something more than that.

In the year 2020

These days, there are basically two options if you want to game on your phone using real buttons instead of simulated, onscreen controls. You can either get a hinged clip that attaches a Playstation-style gamepad to your device or buy a dedicated “telescopic” controller that clamps on either side of it, making your phone look a bit like Frankenstein’s Nintendo Switch. The former, while dirt cheap, is about as finicky as it sounds. The Kishi belongs to the latter category, a space that obscure Chinese brands have quietly dominated in the absence of major manufacturer interest.

The Flydigi Wee 2T is a particularly well-liked example of these strange telescopic gamepads and served as my reference point while assessing the Razer Kishi. At a technical level, the Kishi has a few nice features the Wee 2T doesn’t. The Kishi’s thumbsticks can be clicked in, as on Playstation and Xbox controllers. It also has analog trigger buttons, allowing the gamepad to sense how much they’ve been pushed in. Finally, the Kishi directly plugs into your phone via USB-C or Lightning ports instead of connecting via Bluetooth, meaning no lag or connection issues, no need to charge it separately, and a pass-through port that allows you to plug in your phone while gaming. (Neither controller, sadly, has a headphone jack.)

None of these features matter a whole lot, of course, if the controller sucks to use and hold.

How does it feel?

The first thing I noticed about the Kishi was that it was big, like really big. Clamped on a 6.25-inch LG G8x, the controller measures in at around 10.5 inches by 3.5 inches by 1.6 inches, slightly wider and significantly thicker than a Nintendo Switch. The second thing I noticed was how solid its grip on the phone was. With some creative jury-rigging, I was able to get the Wee 2T to stop bending like a ruler in the throes of simulated combat. Out of the box, the Kishi felt much sturdier, slipping off the phone only when violently shoved into a seat-back pocket.

At the most fundamental level, I’m happy to report that the Kishi did what a controller is supposed to do well. The Kishi’s buttons were more springy than click-y and the analog sticks were precise and responsive with no discernible dead zones. My only real complaint with its build was an ergonomic annoyance. Despite its sizable footprint, the Kishi actually felt a little cramped in my hands. While not crucial for older or slower-paced games, operating the right analog stick was slightly uncomfortable in my natural grip—initially, at least.

On my first night with the Kishi, I struggled to play 2016's Doom without showing my entire ass to Mars’s demon community. In time, however, I adjusted. A week later, I’d played through half of Far Cry 5's main campaign on a phone and had stopped noticing the controller much at all.

Oh yeah, about that

“Great, great, sounds good,” I hear you saying, “but what games can you play?” Well, most of them. While few mobile-first games have controller support, most of the console ports, emulators, and game-streaming apps you’d actually want to use with a gamepad support them. In my experience, every app that worked with a Bluetooth controller played nice with the Kishi. Using just emulators and streaming, a decent smartphone paired with a controller like the Kishi can potentially play most console games made before 2000 or after 2013, which is sick.

Whether that experience is actually any fun is dependent on the comfort of your controller, the quality of your connection, and how optimized the game is for a small screen.

Personally, streaming a small selection of games from the cloud wasn’t as enticing as playing the ones I already had in a more mobile fashion. While my girlfriend watched cable or played something else on the TV, I used the Kishi to stream titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 from the Xbox One or PS4 in our home. (Notably, Playstation’s official Remote Play app doesn’t support third-party controllers, but unofficial versions do.) And when I was away from our network, the Kishi was a pleasant way to sink even more hours into old favorites like Metal Gear Solid or Perfect Dark.

And yet...

Still, there were some small annoyances. The same rubber piece that gives the Kishi such a solid grip covered the LG G8x’s proximity sensor, initially posing a bit of a mystery as to why the phone fell asleep so easily and why it was so hard to wake up. Similarly, that tight fit meant I had to remove the phone’s case every time I wanted to connect it. And while having a controller I didn’t need to charge was convenient, I found the Kishi shaved a few extra percentage points off the phone’s battery every hour it was attached, whether it was being used or not. Forget to plug in the passthrough port or detach the controller for a day and you might return to find a dead phone.

Perhaps the greatest limitation was one common to all telescopic gamepads I’m aware of. Because the Kishi covers a phone’s headphone jack and its passthrough port doesn’t support USB-C or Lightning headsets, your main alternative to using your phone’s speakers is Bluetooth headphones. In practice, this results in an audio lag that is slightly disorienting in single-player games but could mean instant death in, say, an online shooter.

And then there’s the price. At $80, the Razer Kishi is significantly more expensive than its closest (weirdo) peers, the $50 Flydigi Wee 2T and $35 Saitake STK-7007F. Frankly, none of these devices feel as well-made as their MSRPs might suggest, but I can say the Kishi is by far the sturdiest.

He was a gamer boy

In the end, whether the Kishi is worth 80 of your hard-earned dollars is a question of how far you’re willing to go to for a gaming experience that still won’t be perfect. Having spent dozens of hours fooling around with the thing, I can happily say, “Yes, I’m a sick freak who is willing to go that far.”

Once I adjusted to the stick placement and had all my apps set up, the Kishi brought me delightfully close to having the everything gaming device I imagined years ago. At home, it was a fun way to putter around newer open-world games while lying in bed. On a plane, it let me play a few hours of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and temporarily forget where I was. Any annoyances I had about the controller’s ergonomics soon faded into the background. I began regarding the Kishi-and-phone combo as a single unit, a kind of turbocharged Game Gear to leave on my nightstand or throw in a bag.

After a few days with the Kishi—which we had taken to calling the “Game Girl” around the house—my girlfriend told me she kind of hated the controller. Why, I asked. “Because you’re so obsessed with it,” she said. She had a point. With little else to do in lockdown, tinkering with software settings to put every game I possibly could on the phone had become a game in itself.

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Vintage Quotes

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• A company has to be like that person who turns his cuffs up a different way, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette, who wears an obscure vintage watch. – Andy Spade • A wife says to her husband (or vice versa), “Do you love me?””Of course,” he replies. “I’ve been married to you for twenty years, haven’t I?”How satisfied would we be if we presented someone with a vintage wine and, upon asking his opinion of it, he replied, “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?”Love still needs expression between those who share it. – Leo Buscaglia • About 90 percent of the pieces in my home are vintage, and I’m a ruthless editor. I only live with things that I love. There is not one thing in my home that doesn’t have meaning to me. – Nate Berkus • After moving to New York, I started to love vintage shopping. – Mark Indelicato • All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite…Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. – Thomas de Quincey • All it takes is to pick up that one piece of trash you pass everyday on your way to work. Or to turn the water faucet off when you’re brushing your teeth from afar. Or to compost. Or to buy 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. Or to utilize vintage stores and secondhand markets. Or to fully devote yourself to only buying vegetables from local sources. It is remarkably easy to incorporate sustainable choices into our everyday, busy lives. – Shailene Woodley • All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. – Monique Truong • And out of the blue, I got a call from an editor friend at Knopf and she said that they were interested in putting out an update for their vintage paperback line. So I was more than thrilled and it was suggested that perhaps I could do a 1,000 word new introduction covering what’s happened with the whole Warhol thing since 1990 when the first edition hardcover came out and, uh, that was about August 1st and I sat down at my computer here in East Hampton and on on August 30th I’d written almost 10,000 words! – Bob Colacello • As for a signature accessory, I believe in something totally unique that I love and is very personal. It could be a fab pair of vintage earrings I picked up on my travels or a beautiful brightly colored hat or heels, or a fun clutch or handbag. Truthfully, though, the ultimate accessory is a big smile and positive energy! – Rosie Huntington-Whiteley • At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time. – Jon Pareles

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Vintage', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_vintage').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_vintage img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, I always go to vintage shops rather than going shopping for new clothes. – Karen Gillan • Being a celebrity stylist, there are many tricks of the trade that I use in my house and with my clients. The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser has so many uses, so it’s my secret cleaning tool for keeping my shoes – like the vintage Air Jordan’s I am obsessing over now – and my clients’ shoes, scuff and dirt free. – Brad Goreski • Being vintage like a fine wine Should make you proud of being old And being mature like a cheese Certainly explains the mould! Fester on undaunted into your 7th decade – John Walter Bratton • Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty. – James Russell Lowell • But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from…the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them. – J. B. Priestley • Chanel lambskin, vintage Vanson I’m on the bike doing wheelies in a mansion – Nicki Minaj • Clothes are my drug. I love Camden market – I have so many vintage pieces from there it’s unbelievable. Clothes are really important to me, they give me that feeling of happiness. I love being a bit free with it all and not giving myself rules. – Kaya Scodelario • Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista. – Peter Thiel • Espresso consumption is an aesthetic experience,like tasting a vintage wine or admiring a painting. – Andrea Illy • Everything can draw inspiration: a vintage cloth, a book, a street-when I was in Japan, I was deeply inspired by Japanese pharmacies. – Renzo Rosso • Everything I buy is vintage and smells funny. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a boyfriend. – Lucy Liu • Everything I commission – whether it is for me or for a client’s home or for a hotel or office – is absolutely unique to that job. I have everything made, or I find vintage and antique pieces at markets and auctions. – Kelly Wearstler • Everything I do is unfabulous. Im the most normal person. I love walking everywhere, and going to hole-in-the-wall places, like nail shops, because they do the best job. And I go to vintage stores rather than high-end boutiques, because I like to dress different from other people. – Ashley Benson • Everything kind of was leading towards that and I had so many specific ideas always about how exactly I wanted something to look. I would customize so many things in my wardrobe that were vintage or things that I was buying, and it just really all aligned and the timing was perfect. – Rumi Neely • Everything was just so spot on and character-building for me in terms of creating Celia [Bryant]. The ability to get to wear all these vintage pieces and immerse yourself in that world and get to wear all these amazing hats. And the shoes! – Lily Collins • For clothes, I like Dover Street Market and Acne. For vintage, I go to Mint just off Seven Dials. For shoes, it’s Church’s and Russell & Bromley. – Matt Smith • For my own style, I love vintage. 60’s and 70’s are my favorite. I love baby doll dresses and the soft colors. I try to mix a little bit of modern into that – maybe I’ll wear it with boots. At my school we wear a uniform, but we have one day a week we can wear whatever we want. – Elle Fanning • Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it. – Tony Visconti • Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones. – Andrew Bird • Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste. – Logan Pearsall Smith • He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: ‘I’ve got to go now.’ – Anthony Powell • How ironic that returning to a raw and ancient form of worship is now seen as new and even cutting edge. We are simply going back to a vintage form of worship which has been around for as long as the church has been in existence. – Dan Kimball • I adore vintage clothes. When I go on the road doing auditions for So You Think You Can Dance, I always research the cities we’re traveling to so I know where all the best vintage stores are. There are several stores and flea markets I love here in LA. Shareen is amazing with the best edit in town! Golyester is great. I really enjoy the Rose Bowl market. A word of warning: wear layers, comfortable shoes, be prepared to hunt, and fuel yourself with a bucket of cappuccino! Enjoy! – Cat Deeley • I always carry a good lipstick with me, like MAC in Ruby Woo. It has a matt finish, the essence of that vintage glamour look. – Paloma Faith • I always had a sense that clothes, be it uniform or vintage, could help to create a character. – Collier Schorr • I always have Aquaphor which is just for like chapped lips, especially in the wintertime when you’re traveling a lot. That’s just the worst combination of things. And always a really good pair of jeans. Something vintage-y, a little loose and boyfriend-y, but not over the top. They’re just comfortable but could still be dressed up or down. – Emily Ratajkowski • I always recommend rewiring vintage lighting. It’s not a bargain if your house burns down. – Lara Spencer • I am a huge comic book fan, and I love everything vintage: cars, movies, music, art, and style – especially the 1950s style. – Mateus Ward • I am grateful for what I call well-spent moments: Making a tuna fish sandwich with the works. Taking at least a half hour to eat it outside. Ironing my vintage tea towels while watching old black-and-white film noir movies and sipping one martini with extra olives – a quirky combination, but it works. – Sarah Ban Breathnach • I am more vintage than I am high fashion. – Katerina Graham • I am not a designer that buys vintage to be inspired. – Olivier Theyskens • I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses… I am the proud wife beside her husband… I am the writer who has written a new novel. – Ann Hood • I am vegetarian, so I don’t have clothes, shoes or bags made from leather or suede or any animal products. Shoes are hard to find. These are fake Uggs. And I’ve got a pair of vintage boots, which are PVC. – Leona Lewis • I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage. – Robert M. Parker, Jr. • I buy what makes my heart sing. So, it’s not that I follow one specific track. It’s sort of what I like. I love colors. I love unique pieces. I love vintage clothing. – Tracee Ellis Ross • I definitely spend the most money on shoes, partly because vintage footwear can be a little funky – in a bad way. I like to keep things pretty simple up top and then go weird with the shoes. – Chloe Sevigny • I did a lot of thrift and vintage. I would mix those pieces into some of the more inexpensive items from Express, Gap, Old Navy, and Clothestime. – Katy Perry • I do a lot of vintage shopping. I love going to second-hand stores. – Victoria Justice • I do a lot of vintage, of course, but I really feel so particular about clothing. I think it stems from acting, like if I’m not wearing the proper shoes for a character I feel totally off. – Morgan Saylor • I do take a computer to do some processing live and I might use a couple of plug-in synthesisers, ’cause obviously you can take quite a lot of power in terms of sound generation on a computer that I can trigger from a couple of keyboards. And it means I don’t have to take some of my vintage stuff and have it trashed by various airlines which has happened in the past. But I still take some vintage stuff with me, I’ll take that risk because I like using all that stuff. – Thighpaulsandra • I don’t at all want to resemble some of these young designers who ask hallucinating prices for rags that are so in fashion now, that six months later, they are old-fashioned! I love vintage boutiques, I love to customize my clothes. And then, with my friends, we regularly exchange togs. – Milla Jovovich • I don’t come from a wealthy or privileged background, and growing up I was always looking for the best quality at a price I could afford. My love of vintage is rooted in that. Drugstores were the mecca for the latest makeup trends and products. – Eva Mendes • I don’t get what’s happening to Jose Mourinho of late. He’s lapsing into the kind of Portuguese moroseness you get from staring at the Atlantic horizon and imagining you’re the last place in the world, while listening to endless renditions of the fado. His latest line about ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care’ sounds like vintage Joe Kinnear in the great days of the Wimbledon Crazy Gang. – Peter Chapman • I don’t know what the average income of Muslim-Americans is, but Muslim-American immigrants of recent vintage, I bet they have a very above-average representation in professional and business occupations. – Thomas Friedman • I don’t like new cars; I’m into vintage cars – there’s a Jaguar E-Type in the ‘Goldie’ video. – ASAP Rocky • I don’t like the idea of things being off-limits to kids – like a fancy sitting room where they can’t touch anything. I own vintage pottery cups, and I let my girls hold them. It teaches them to treat objects with respect. – Debi Mazar • I don’t really know much about the fashion world. I have a few stylist friends that help me find stuff. So they know all about the vintage fashion world; I just kind of describe to them what I want and they find a lot of it for me. – BØRNS • I don’t think fashion has to change every five minutes. I’d like these to be clothes you can wear for a long time – ten, 20 years; pass on to your daughter. Why buy vintage when you can open your own closet! – Tom Ford • I emcee how I feel for the moment. I’ll always be influenced by Tribe, but my EP and LP have a lot of different flavors! I’ll keep it vintage Tribe if Tribe decides to do another LP… which, in my heart, I’d love to do for the fans. – Phife Dawg • I find my dress sense tends to be a bit of a mixture between high fashion and unique vintage pieces with a little bit of street trends. For example, I might find a really nice, suede dinner jacket that I’d wear with a basic plain white shirt and some chinos and a pair of Nike trainers. – Tinie Tempah • I get my inspiration from books, pictures, art. I might find a vintage scarf and say, “I think this should be our color palette.” – Jessica Simpson • I got a job as soon as I could – 11 or 12. I started babysitting and then I got a part-time job at a pharmacy in England. I just remember loving the feeling of going out and buying my own clothes! I’d go bargain-hunting and get secondhand vintage stuff. – Natasha Bedingfield • I grew up in Texas, and people love their American-made muscle cars there. I grew up around people who loved cars and took care of cars and my dad’s a big car nut, so I learned a little bit about cars – how to love them, most importantly. I think that from the time I could remember, I’ve always envisioned myself in a vintage muscle car. – Amber Heard • I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. – Edgar Rice Burroughs • I have a lot of guitars. Yeah, I’m not like a guitar collector, I don’t have all vintage instruments. I don’t even own a Strat or Les Paul. I don’t have one. – John Petrucci • I have eclectic taste, and I love vintage style mixed with glamour and old world charm. – Sonam Kapoor • I have this threadbare caftan from the ’60s that I got at a vintage store years ago – it’s basically a muumuu. My friends are astonished that I wear it, but I love it. It’s this light fabric that just moves with me. – Gabrielle Anwar • I have this vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket. When I put it on, it has this supercool feeling to it. – Alicia Keys • I have two vintage typewriters. One just about works and the other hasn’t a hope in hell, bless it. But they’re both beautiful, and they’ll stay with me just as long as there’s a roof over my head. – Matt Roper • I jog at the Rose Bowl, and I collect antique and vintage furniture, so I’m there every few weeks for the flea market. – Theo Rossi • I just love vintage. I have far too many vintage dresses. – Karen Elson • I just think you would never kill and cut up a human to wear so why do it to animals? I just think it’s horrible, I would never wear fur, although I guess if it was a really vintage piece you might just get away with it. – Kelly Osbourne • I like a little bit of designer, with a bit of vintage and high street mixed in. I love it when you find those one-off key pieces, which end up becoming investment pieces. – Cara Delevingne • I like fashion because it’s sort of my job, so I’m into it when I have to be. But when I’m not working, I wear jeans and T-shirts. I go to vintage stores all the time to find funky T-shirts. – Kristen Stewart • I like old cars, old watches, anything with a vintage, antique kind of a feel to it. I’m just more in tune with that than anything else. – David Boreanaz • I like old movies, screwball comedies, vintage clothes, and basically I’m an old-fashioned gal. – Zooey Deschanel • I like the old, vintage Hollywood look. – Gwen Stefani • I like to experiment a lot, I just like to make myself look different to everyone else. Shopping at all different places from vintage to high-street, and then I just put it together myself. – Cher Lloyd • I like to mix and match vintage with designer. It’s how I create my own style. – Carly Rae Jepsen • I like vintage a lot. – Kesha • I like vintage shopping, but I also like to mix in high-end. – Theophilus London • I like vintage stuff. I go through a vintage store and find things that I feel like I fit right into them because of all the years that they’ve been used. – Channing Tatum • I like What Goes Around Comes Around for old concert tees. Oh man, I got this ‘Sgt. Pepper’ cartoon Beatles shirt there; it was, like, $300. I didn’t even know how much it cost – I thought it was gonna be, like, $80 at most – till I got to the register and was like, ‘Oh mah gawd!’ Good Lord. But it’s classic vintage rock, you know? – Kid Cudi • I live in a beautiful vintage building that was built in the heart of downtown Chicago. – Nate Berkus • I love Ali MacGraw and her style – I’m into vintage ’70s outfits at the moment. – Kim Kardashian • I love all vintage-everything, really. I love fashion. I’ve always loved it. And the fifties, I’ve always loved. – Elle Fanning • I love anything vintage. And I love Marc Jacobs and shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti. – Meagan Good • I love Fall Fashion Week because it means lots of layering, long sweaters and vintage coats. – Rachel Zoe • I love fashion! I love clothes! I really like vintage clothes, so in my closet there’s a lot of ’50s stuff. I go to the stores and shop around. – Elle Fanning • I love handbags. And shoes. Investing in like a great handbag or a pair of shoes can really make or break an outfit. It’s fun to mix and match high street with luxury brands and throw in a bit of vintage as well. – Miranda Kerr • I love hats! I collect vintage ones – I find them at antique shops in Kansas. – Lindsey Wixson • I love history. Everything is inspired by history, so that’s why I love vintage and antiques. – Kelly Wearstler • I love old, vintage cars. I’ve got a 1936 Dodge Touring Sedan right now and there’s only five of them registered in the world, and I absolutely love working on it. It’s gorgeous. – Danny Trejo • I love playing around with vintage fabrics and lace. – Helena Christensen • I love things that have a vintage feel to them, just because there’s a certain texture to them that we just don’t have anymore. In fact I think I’ve been stuck in the 50s or 60s for a while… – Amber Heard • I love to find a great vintage secondhand shop. – Bridget Hall • I love to shop vintage clothes; in London, I usually go to Relic and Alfie’s Market. I usually brunch around London Bridge, where I live.- Georgia May Jagger • I love vintage and I shop vintage a lot because it’s just such great value for money. – Lianne La Havas • I love vintage and prints. – Georgina Chapman • I love vintage cars because you can do so much more to them.- T-Pain • I love vintage clothes. I have a real passion which probably comes from the days of my mum who had this great dress up box that she put all her clothes from the 60s and 70s in – platform shoes and jumpsuits and boots. – Rachel McAdams • I love vintage shopping in flea markets, vintage stores and even Ebay. – Chelsea Leyland • I love vintage shopping, I think it’s really fun. And I love the feeling of finding the most amazing piece for less. – Emma Roberts • I love vintage, but it’s so expensive now. – Alexandra Roach • I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box. – Boy George • I really like the bohemian look, and I’m a great fan of mixing vintage and modern. – Kierston Wareing • I really love beautiful, well-made clothes. I don’t shop [a lot], so I tend to have pieces for a long time. I like mixing vintage with newer designers. – Sarah Jessica Parker • I shop at a lot of vintage stores because the prices are amazing, and I love the idea that there’s a history behind the piece I’m wearing. – Gabrielle Anwar • I shop only at thrift stores and vintage stores. In New York, I like a place called Star Struck, and a place called The Family Jewels. – Ezra Miller • I spent my first paycheck on a vintage Mercedes. – Jennifer Aniston • I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I didn’t consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day. – Martin Gore • I started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist’s career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L’Age d’Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn’t very good at it. – Guy Maddin • I think my mum was really very ahead of her time. She wore very little makeup. She really explored the way that she wore clothes in a very honest way. She wore a lot of vintage stuff and mixed it with bespoke men’s tailoring and things like that. That was a huge influence on me, seeing a woman in the spotlight carry herself in that kind of way. But mostly, for me, it was just that she was an incredibly honest and sort of natural person. – Stella McCartney • I used to collect vintage clothing – exquisite lace dresses, embroidered shawls and ornate jewelry – but that’s just not me any more. – Britt Ekland • I was a Knicks fan of the Kenny Sears-Carl Braun-Jim Baechtold vintage. I was even their ball boy when I was a teenager. – Marv Albert • I was always involved in low level motor clubs, competitions and with the Vintage Auto Association, and I believe this really helped me on my way. – Liz Halliday • I was collecting Barbies. I know… embarrassing. I sold them all on eBay, and traded them for vintage dishes. So I’ve collected two things. – Kristin Bauer van Straten • I was in a vintage pub rock band called Clover in the 1970s. – Huey Lewis • I was once in a long relationship with a man who ran a vintage clothes store but had been a chef, so I’d come home each night to a different three-course meal. I was quite fat, but so happy.- Paloma Faith • I was watching a collection of vintage ’80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes. – Ernest Cline • I was working at eBay, so I would just troll the vintage categories, find old amps and what have you. I was buying a fair amount of stuff and playing with it and then selling it back. – Bill Orcutt • I wear a lot of different jewellery. I love to look for it when Im abroad or if I find a great antique or vintage shop. – Lily Donaldson • I wear everything from hip-hop baggy pants to beautiful Armani dresses. I also like to mix vintage clothing with designer pieces. – Julia Stiles • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore the Marc Jacobs dress, so I love Marc Jacobs. He has a vintage flair. But I’ve always worn a lot of vintage stuff, so it hasn’t been a lot of designers. If I see something that I like, I just buy it. – Elle Fanning • I’ve been enjoying a couple of post-Oscar burgers. So I didn’t fit into a lot of the vintage stuff. I wanted to wear something that was a little bit more forgiving. – Anne Hathaway • If I have an hour in a city, I go to vintage stores first because it’s so much cooler to find a piece that is unique. I love the thought of some girl having worn it before and living her life in it. – Helena Christensen • If the October days were a cordial like the sub-acids of fruit, these are a tonic like the wine of iron. Drink deep or be careful how you taste this December vintage. The first sip may chill, but a full draught warms and invigorates. – John Burroughs • If you care about this country, if you want to take part in a citizen’s movement that helps heal the deep racial, economic, and cultural divides tearing us apart, you must read Eric Deggans’ Race-Baiter. No book of recent vintage so thoroughly dissects the media’s monetized appetite for division. Provocative, honest, and smart, Race-Baiter is a supremely important book. Read it and let the conversation begin. – Connie May Fowler • I’m a real Londoner. We have very grey weather in London, and I think it encourages a very eclectic and crazy fashion sense. I mix high-street stuff with more high-end fashion and vintage. – Emma Watson • I’m big on reworking vintage. Also, buying one great piece that lasts forever – to me, that is total sustainability. – Elizabeth Rogers • I’m definitely a vintage collector. I have a wardrobe of core basics that I like to spice up with different colors, new accessories, and I love to try on new things to invite something different. I find, with every new stage of my life, my self-image shifts with new duties and responsibilities, and so does my fashion style. – Camila Alves • I’m definitely an anomaly, but I’m making things. They’re selling, say, martinis, and I’m kind of making vintage Riesling. People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini. – Ben Folds • I’m doing a fun EP. It’s called ‘Songs in the Key of Phife: Eight Is Enough.’ It’s radio-friendly, but then a lot of it just has that raw hip-hop. Some of it will be vintage Tribe, but for the most part I’m just letting my voice be heard. – Phife Dawg • I’m into classic games like Donkey Kong, and also collect vintage tour t-shirts – everything from Olivia Newton-John to Duran Duran. I’ve got a Chicago one worth $100. – Michael Rosenbaum • I’m not a big shopper. I’m very very picky about what it is that I buy, I prefer to buy vintage and then I prefer to be very selective. – Jaime King • I’m not a vintage/thrift shop girl. I don’t have the patience. – Robin Givhan • I’m not going to try to be too young because at the end of the day, I’m not 20 anymore. I don’t want to sound corny or look corny doing young things. All the stuff that the kids are doing, that’s not my place. I believe that everyone followed me back then, they’re still here. That’s who I’m trying to talk to and relate to. All the trap music and all of that, it’s great but I can’t do that. I’m going to stay vintage Ginuwine and stay at the place that got me here. That’s what people want. – Ginuwine • I’m not the kind of guy who deserves to play a vintage guitar because I’m too rough on instruments. – Tommy Shaw • I’m shocked at how much I’m into Christmas pillows. There’s cheesiness, obviously, but then there’s really cute ones that are metallic that say “Ho Ho Ho” or “Merry” or cute vintage needlepoint ones. – Emily Henderson • In spite of all the skills that I do have, to relate to the normal world I have no applicable skills. I can speak Russian, I can speak French. I know about Chanel. Especially vintage Chanel. I know what Halston is. All of these things, but they can’t really be applied to a nine-to-five. – Johnny Weir • In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. – John Steinbeck • It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new.- Tony Visconti • It’s a mission for me to make sure that philanthropy doesn’t feel like a vintage hand-me-down from mom or dad. I want people to feel compelled to do something positive because they just love it, they’re excited about it, and it’s cool. – Usher • It’s so cliche to say florals for spring. I really like a vintage-like dress that’s floral. You can belt it; I like belts. I like wearing pretty dresses that are really comfortable, that you can spend the day in but also feel girly. – Brittany Snow • I’ve always loved fashion so much and I didn’t have access to the kind of fashion I really wanted, so I would do vintage shopping. – Rachel Roy • I’ve always loved vintage and I never like to have something someone else has. – Jillian Hervey • I’ve come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn’t properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That’s what shock is. – Darin Strauss • I’ve making videos since I was seventeen I was originally discollecting vintage hmmm… footages from different archives and setting moving pictures to classical music clips that meant a lot to me. Maybe there were places I have been where nice things have happened. I had a vision of making my life a work of art and I was looking for people who also felt that way. – Lana Del Rey • I’ve never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for — civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don’t care about — dark-and-weird-but-fun — and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me! – Ransom Riggs • Kit Kittredge was an amazing experience because I got to go to Canada, and it was my first era film, so I got to wear the 1930s clothes, the real vintage clothes. – Madison Davenport • Knitwear can play a vital part in layering. The simplicity of a lightweight cardigan makes it one of the best ways to layer outfits. I love granddad cardis for winter, worn over a vintage lace shirt, waistcoat and full skirt with slouchy boots. – Twiggy • Ladies, apologies, but isn’t ‘vintage’ just used stuff? – Bob Saget • Men should be judged not by their tint of skin, the gods they serve, the vintage they drink, nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin, but by the quality of the thought they think. – Adela Florence Nicolson • Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. – Julia Ward Howe • Most of my wardrobe is vintage, and I’ve worn dresses to the Oscars that I got for $10. – Winona Ryder • My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro. – Brandi Carlile • My grandparents in Istria had a frasca, which is about the most basic kind of grocery/restaurant. They sold wine from their own vineyard. I took control of the vineyard, hired a local winemaker, and bought another winery in 1996. We had our first commercial vintage in 1998. – Joe Bastianich • My home has a split personality. Some of the rooms are very French antique. Think Aubusson rugs, turquoise ceramic jugs, sandbag pillows, and broken birdcages. The other half is very Aztec. Neon ikat fabric pillows, vintage books piled up to the ceiling, and shutters from Bali. – Poppy Delevingne • My mom passed on her obsession of all things antique or vintage. I love to go thrift store shopping or explore any sort of garage sale. Treasure hunting is a family passion. – Zoey Deutch • My most cherished possessions are my grandma’s letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook. – Sandra Lee • My old vintage designs are so popular now. I must have been on to something. – Pierre Cardin • My style is quite clean, vintage, and almost French in a way. – India de Beaufort • My vintage Levi’s are my favorite on the show, ’cause they really fit. – Laura Prepon • My wife bought me a vintage Gibson guitar that isn’t just beautiful but has tremendous sentimental value. I have plenty of guitars for live gigs but this is one to treasure. – Bill Bailey • New York vintage is too expensive! – Kirsten Dunst • No amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity – Taylor Swift • No more rules, the freedom of dressing. The beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love. – Yves Saint Laurent • Nothing is more vintage than dying of Rubella. – Stephen Colbert • Of course I am grateful, and I’m sure you are, as you put it, a special vintage,” Bill said politely, “But I have my own wine cellar. – Charlaine Harris • Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime. – Shia LaBeouf • On the same Australian trip, I brought back a pair [of Ugg] for my then boyfriend who was a photographer. He wore them all the time. He used to wear them with Levis twisted jeans and a vintage T-shirt. This is 2002. They looked great on him. I guess it takes a certain kind of man to pull them off but they have other ones that are less typical of this, I think. – Alexa Chung • Once I graduated from NYU, I started making custom vintage tees for my friends and it just took off from there. – Charlotte Ronson • Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty. – Romola Garai • Our culture’s obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics. – Sloane Crosley • Paul Furlong is my vintage Rolls Royce and he cost me nothing. We polish him, look after him, and I have him fine tuned by my mechanics. We take good care of him because we have to drive him every day, not just save him for weddings. – Ian Holloway • Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s time was no better and no worse than that of our own – just different. – Jean Aitchison • Short boughs, long vintage. – George Herbert • Some things are better than other things: Google, Gmail, my vintage Montgomery Wards socket set (30+ years, still going strong), my Estwing framing hammer, and my Dremel rotary tool. – William Gurstelle • Tabitha was always trying unorthodox ways to set her up with guys. Although, to be fair to her sister, Tabitha didn’t usually knock the guy unconscious before she forced them together. Still, with Tabitha there was a first time for just about anything. And extreme blind-dating was very vintage T. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • The band is like a vintage car. You take it out to go for a spin for a couple miles, but you wouldn’t drive across the country. – Robyn Hitchcock • The best thing I ever bought is a vintage Oscar de la Renta short gingham dress that I wore to my rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding. – Kelly Wearstler • The biggest ones [online stores] I go back to are Amazon.com and eBay.com because it’s great for music and books… I collect vintage vinyl records. – John Varvatos • The C+ amps is vintage at this point, and it definitely has a certain sound to it. I wanted something that was going to keep Dream Theater in more of a current musical landscape, as far as being the producer and producing the type of album I wanted to hear. – John Petrucci • The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage. – Samuel Eliot Morison • The Humbling is not vintage Roth, despite its compelling premise. The bizarre series of episodes — mostly sexual encounters with women — which make up this short novel don’t play to Roth’s strengths. (…) The Humbling disappoints because it avoids these universal implications, and veers off into a baroque world of the unique and fantastic, never quite deigning to make its world concrete or to give its characters the honour of an independent will. – Philip Hensher • The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old. The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older. And it’s not just bridges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs. – Ed Rendell • The kinds of things I like with crystals are the really beautiful costume jewelry, vintage pieces, and they usually have that diamond shape. – Zoe Kravitz • The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage – it’s okay for clothes not that great for people – Karl Lagerfeld • The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon… In capitalist countries they reward artists because we’re ineffectual. – Danny Lyon • The Specials was always going to be an underground, underdog kind of movie. But I love when people bring that up, because it’s very early, vintage James Gunn. – Rob Lowe • There are so many cute vintage dresses made out of synthetics from the ’60s and ’70s – but they’re so itchy and hot. It’s not worth it! – Zooey Deschanel • There is a phenomenal amount of pressure on women in this industry: they are considered vintage by the time they hit their mid-30s. – Tori Amos • There’s a lot of really inspiring music coming around the bend – we tend to believe that to sound classic or timeless is to sound vintage or retro. It’s a little bit dangerous, because you’ll really miss a chance to make your mark as a generation. – Brandi Carlile • There’s a vintage which comes with age and experience. – Jon Bon Jovi • There’s nothing like a string of Xmas lights inside the house to make the whole family feel like they live in a vintage clothing store. – Dana Gould • This is not really currency that circulates. It’s like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, “Wait a minute. This has gone bad.” The answer is, “Well, that wine isn’t for drinking; that’s for trading.” These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving. – Michael Hudson • Time and again I hear how important the darker environment is to those at our vintage-faith worship gathering. Attenders feel they can freely pray in a corner by themselves without feeling that everyone is staring at them. – Dan Kimball • To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. – Christopher Hitchens • Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself. – Josh Lanyon • Vintage was brilliant! – Gavin Turk • Virginia Madsen big part in that movie [‘Class’] required her shirt to get ripped off, and looking back, it couldn’t be a more egregious, vintage, lowbrow, 1980s Porky’s-esque, shoehorned-in moment. Like, you would never have that moment in a movie that aspired to be what that movie did today. – Rob Lowe • We always need to have a smart black blazer in our closets. It’s just a nice clean way to dress up even something as simple as jeans and a t-shirt. And something I always have in my closet, I always have a vintage headscarf with me, to tie around my bag or protect my hair from the sun, it depends but I always find a use for it. – Nicole Richie • We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. – Carl Jung • When I look at asset prices; real estate, bonds, equities, vintage cars… I think that gold is actually one of the few assets that is relatively cheap, relatively inexpensive. – Marc Faber • When it comes to wine, I tell people to throw away the vintage charts and invest in a corkscrew. The best way to learn about wine is the drinking. – Alexis Lichine • When the choice is between a demanding relationship and a vintage pickup truck, I’ll choose the truck every time. – Amy Dickinson • When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you’re not just buying the fabric and thread – you’re buying a piece of someone’s past – Isabel Wolff • While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. – Neel Burton • While in a vintage restaurant…”the past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into. – Margaret Atwood • Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. – Neel Burton • Wine to me is something that brings people together. Wine does promote conversation and promote civility, but it’s also fascinating. It’s the greatest subject to study. No matter how much you learn, every vintage is going to come at you with different factors that make you have to think again. – Robert M. Parker, Jr. • Women can explore so much in dressing. But if I was a guy I would wear vintage suits constantly. With crazy ties! – Helena Christensen • Yeah, okay. You’re right. I was having dinner with Zombie Carl the other night. You know, steak, rare, and a bottle of vintage type A. He told me all his secrets, but too bad for you I promised him I wouldn’t tell. In exchange I asked him to gather his best undead buddies and stalk me through my friend’s yard. And oh, yeah, it was totally fine if they wanted to use me as an all-night-dinner buffet, because having organs is SO last year. – Gena Showalter • You deserve to die,” I whisper, suddenly realizing Iv’e said the words aloud. “Excuse me?” “Nothing.” “Not nothing. You just told me that I deserve to be maggot feed.” “Not maggot feed, just-” “Dead!” “Forget it” “I don’t know why I said that. Just daydreaming, I guess.” “Daydreaming about my death?” “Forget it”, I repeat. “Are you sure you aren’t still mad that I wouldn’t let you borrow my vintage fishnet leggings?” “More like I didn’t want to borrow them. – Laurie Faria Stolarz • You don`t have the same reaction to a girl walking around the street today in a nightgown and a vintage coat and sneakers, that you did six years ago. – Marc Jacobs • You may know more about vintage wine than the wine steward, but if you’re smart you’ll let your man do the choosing and be ecstatic over his selection, even if it tastes like shampoo. – Arlene Dahl • Your birthday is the vintage of your wine; the mark that warns you of your future. – Aesop • You’re drinking vintage Elvis Presley wine. – Elvis Costello

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[equitiesstocks]

Vintage Quotes

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• A company has to be like that person who turns his cuffs up a different way, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette, who wears an obscure vintage watch. – Andy Spade • A wife says to her husband (or vice versa), “Do you love me?””Of course,” he replies. “I’ve been married to you for twenty years, haven’t I?”How satisfied would we be if we presented someone with a vintage wine and, upon asking his opinion of it, he replied, “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?”Love still needs expression between those who share it. – Leo Buscaglia • About 90 percent of the pieces in my home are vintage, and I’m a ruthless editor. I only live with things that I love. There is not one thing in my home that doesn’t have meaning to me. – Nate Berkus • After moving to New York, I started to love vintage shopping. – Mark Indelicato • All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite…Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. – Thomas de Quincey • All it takes is to pick up that one piece of trash you pass everyday on your way to work. Or to turn the water faucet off when you’re brushing your teeth from afar. Or to compost. Or to buy 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. Or to utilize vintage stores and secondhand markets. Or to fully devote yourself to only buying vegetables from local sources. It is remarkably easy to incorporate sustainable choices into our everyday, busy lives. – Shailene Woodley • All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. – Monique Truong • And out of the blue, I got a call from an editor friend at Knopf and she said that they were interested in putting out an update for their vintage paperback line. So I was more than thrilled and it was suggested that perhaps I could do a 1,000 word new introduction covering what’s happened with the whole Warhol thing since 1990 when the first edition hardcover came out and, uh, that was about August 1st and I sat down at my computer here in East Hampton and on on August 30th I’d written almost 10,000 words! – Bob Colacello • As for a signature accessory, I believe in something totally unique that I love and is very personal. It could be a fab pair of vintage earrings I picked up on my travels or a beautiful brightly colored hat or heels, or a fun clutch or handbag. Truthfully, though, the ultimate accessory is a big smile and positive energy! – Rosie Huntington-Whiteley • At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time. – Jon Pareles

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Vintage', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_vintage').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_vintage img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, I always go to vintage shops rather than going shopping for new clothes. – Karen Gillan • Being a celebrity stylist, there are many tricks of the trade that I use in my house and with my clients. The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser has so many uses, so it’s my secret cleaning tool for keeping my shoes – like the vintage Air Jordan’s I am obsessing over now – and my clients’ shoes, scuff and dirt free. – Brad Goreski • Being vintage like a fine wine Should make you proud of being old And being mature like a cheese Certainly explains the mould! Fester on undaunted into your 7th decade – John Walter Bratton • Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty. – James Russell Lowell • But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from…the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them. – J. B. Priestley • Chanel lambskin, vintage Vanson I’m on the bike doing wheelies in a mansion – Nicki Minaj • Clothes are my drug. I love Camden market – I have so many vintage pieces from there it’s unbelievable. Clothes are really important to me, they give me that feeling of happiness. I love being a bit free with it all and not giving myself rules. – Kaya Scodelario • Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista. – Peter Thiel • Espresso consumption is an aesthetic experience,like tasting a vintage wine or admiring a painting. – Andrea Illy • Everything can draw inspiration: a vintage cloth, a book, a street-when I was in Japan, I was deeply inspired by Japanese pharmacies. – Renzo Rosso • Everything I buy is vintage and smells funny. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a boyfriend. – Lucy Liu • Everything I commission – whether it is for me or for a client’s home or for a hotel or office – is absolutely unique to that job. I have everything made, or I find vintage and antique pieces at markets and auctions. – Kelly Wearstler • Everything I do is unfabulous. Im the most normal person. I love walking everywhere, and going to hole-in-the-wall places, like nail shops, because they do the best job. And I go to vintage stores rather than high-end boutiques, because I like to dress different from other people. – Ashley Benson • Everything kind of was leading towards that and I had so many specific ideas always about how exactly I wanted something to look. I would customize so many things in my wardrobe that were vintage or things that I was buying, and it just really all aligned and the timing was perfect. – Rumi Neely • Everything was just so spot on and character-building for me in terms of creating Celia [Bryant]. The ability to get to wear all these vintage pieces and immerse yourself in that world and get to wear all these amazing hats. And the shoes! – Lily Collins • For clothes, I like Dover Street Market and Acne. For vintage, I go to Mint just off Seven Dials. For shoes, it’s Church’s and Russell & Bromley. – Matt Smith • For my own style, I love vintage. 60’s and 70’s are my favorite. I love baby doll dresses and the soft colors. I try to mix a little bit of modern into that – maybe I’ll wear it with boots. At my school we wear a uniform, but we have one day a week we can wear whatever we want. – Elle Fanning • Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it. – Tony Visconti • Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones. – Andrew Bird • Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste. – Logan Pearsall Smith • He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: ‘I’ve got to go now.’ – Anthony Powell • How ironic that returning to a raw and ancient form of worship is now seen as new and even cutting edge. We are simply going back to a vintage form of worship which has been around for as long as the church has been in existence. – Dan Kimball • I adore vintage clothes. When I go on the road doing auditions for So You Think You Can Dance, I always research the cities we’re traveling to so I know where all the best vintage stores are. There are several stores and flea markets I love here in LA. Shareen is amazing with the best edit in town! Golyester is great. I really enjoy the Rose Bowl market. A word of warning: wear layers, comfortable shoes, be prepared to hunt, and fuel yourself with a bucket of cappuccino! Enjoy! – Cat Deeley • I always carry a good lipstick with me, like MAC in Ruby Woo. It has a matt finish, the essence of that vintage glamour look. – Paloma Faith • I always had a sense that clothes, be it uniform or vintage, could help to create a character. – Collier Schorr • I always have Aquaphor which is just for like chapped lips, especially in the wintertime when you’re traveling a lot. That’s just the worst combination of things. And always a really good pair of jeans. Something vintage-y, a little loose and boyfriend-y, but not over the top. They’re just comfortable but could still be dressed up or down. – Emily Ratajkowski • I always recommend rewiring vintage lighting. It’s not a bargain if your house burns down. – Lara Spencer • I am a huge comic book fan, and I love everything vintage: cars, movies, music, art, and style – especially the 1950s style. – Mateus Ward • I am grateful for what I call well-spent moments: Making a tuna fish sandwich with the works. Taking at least a half hour to eat it outside. Ironing my vintage tea towels while watching old black-and-white film noir movies and sipping one martini with extra olives – a quirky combination, but it works. – Sarah Ban Breathnach • I am more vintage than I am high fashion. – Katerina Graham • I am not a designer that buys vintage to be inspired. – Olivier Theyskens • I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses… I am the proud wife beside her husband… I am the writer who has written a new novel. – Ann Hood • I am vegetarian, so I don’t have clothes, shoes or bags made from leather or suede or any animal products. Shoes are hard to find. These are fake Uggs. And I’ve got a pair of vintage boots, which are PVC. – Leona Lewis • I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage. – Robert M. Parker, Jr. • I buy what makes my heart sing. So, it’s not that I follow one specific track. It’s sort of what I like. I love colors. I love unique pieces. I love vintage clothing. – Tracee Ellis Ross • I definitely spend the most money on shoes, partly because vintage footwear can be a little funky – in a bad way. I like to keep things pretty simple up top and then go weird with the shoes. – Chloe Sevigny • I did a lot of thrift and vintage. I would mix those pieces into some of the more inexpensive items from Express, Gap, Old Navy, and Clothestime. – Katy Perry • I do a lot of vintage shopping. I love going to second-hand stores. – Victoria Justice • I do a lot of vintage, of course, but I really feel so particular about clothing. I think it stems from acting, like if I’m not wearing the proper shoes for a character I feel totally off. – Morgan Saylor • I do take a computer to do some processing live and I might use a couple of plug-in synthesisers, ’cause obviously you can take quite a lot of power in terms of sound generation on a computer that I can trigger from a couple of keyboards. And it means I don’t have to take some of my vintage stuff and have it trashed by various airlines which has happened in the past. But I still take some vintage stuff with me, I’ll take that risk because I like using all that stuff. – Thighpaulsandra • I don’t at all want to resemble some of these young designers who ask hallucinating prices for rags that are so in fashion now, that six months later, they are old-fashioned! I love vintage boutiques, I love to customize my clothes. And then, with my friends, we regularly exchange togs. – Milla Jovovich • I don’t come from a wealthy or privileged background, and growing up I was always looking for the best quality at a price I could afford. My love of vintage is rooted in that. Drugstores were the mecca for the latest makeup trends and products. – Eva Mendes • I don’t get what’s happening to Jose Mourinho of late. He’s lapsing into the kind of Portuguese moroseness you get from staring at the Atlantic horizon and imagining you’re the last place in the world, while listening to endless renditions of the fado. His latest line about ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care’ sounds like vintage Joe Kinnear in the great days of the Wimbledon Crazy Gang. – Peter Chapman • I don’t know what the average income of Muslim-Americans is, but Muslim-American immigrants of recent vintage, I bet they have a very above-average representation in professional and business occupations. – Thomas Friedman • I don’t like new cars; I’m into vintage cars – there’s a Jaguar E-Type in the ‘Goldie’ video. – ASAP Rocky • I don’t like the idea of things being off-limits to kids – like a fancy sitting room where they can’t touch anything. I own vintage pottery cups, and I let my girls hold them. It teaches them to treat objects with respect. – Debi Mazar • I don’t really know much about the fashion world. I have a few stylist friends that help me find stuff. So they know all about the vintage fashion world; I just kind of describe to them what I want and they find a lot of it for me. – BØRNS • I don’t think fashion has to change every five minutes. I’d like these to be clothes you can wear for a long time – ten, 20 years; pass on to your daughter. Why buy vintage when you can open your own closet! – Tom Ford • I emcee how I feel for the moment. I’ll always be influenced by Tribe, but my EP and LP have a lot of different flavors! I’ll keep it vintage Tribe if Tribe decides to do another LP… which, in my heart, I’d love to do for the fans. – Phife Dawg • I find my dress sense tends to be a bit of a mixture between high fashion and unique vintage pieces with a little bit of street trends. For example, I might find a really nice, suede dinner jacket that I’d wear with a basic plain white shirt and some chinos and a pair of Nike trainers. – Tinie Tempah • I get my inspiration from books, pictures, art. I might find a vintage scarf and say, “I think this should be our color palette.” – Jessica Simpson • I got a job as soon as I could – 11 or 12. I started babysitting and then I got a part-time job at a pharmacy in England. I just remember loving the feeling of going out and buying my own clothes! I’d go bargain-hunting and get secondhand vintage stuff. – Natasha Bedingfield • I grew up in Texas, and people love their American-made muscle cars there. I grew up around people who loved cars and took care of cars and my dad’s a big car nut, so I learned a little bit about cars – how to love them, most importantly. I think that from the time I could remember, I’ve always envisioned myself in a vintage muscle car. – Amber Heard • I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. – Edgar Rice Burroughs • I have a lot of guitars. Yeah, I’m not like a guitar collector, I don’t have all vintage instruments. I don’t even own a Strat or Les Paul. I don’t have one. – John Petrucci • I have eclectic taste, and I love vintage style mixed with glamour and old world charm. – Sonam Kapoor • I have this threadbare caftan from the ’60s that I got at a vintage store years ago – it’s basically a muumuu. My friends are astonished that I wear it, but I love it. It’s this light fabric that just moves with me. – Gabrielle Anwar • I have this vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket. When I put it on, it has this supercool feeling to it. – Alicia Keys • I have two vintage typewriters. One just about works and the other hasn’t a hope in hell, bless it. But they’re both beautiful, and they’ll stay with me just as long as there’s a roof over my head. – Matt Roper • I jog at the Rose Bowl, and I collect antique and vintage furniture, so I’m there every few weeks for the flea market. – Theo Rossi • I just love vintage. I have far too many vintage dresses. – Karen Elson • I just think you would never kill and cut up a human to wear so why do it to animals? I just think it’s horrible, I would never wear fur, although I guess if it was a really vintage piece you might just get away with it. – Kelly Osbourne • I like a little bit of designer, with a bit of vintage and high street mixed in. I love it when you find those one-off key pieces, which end up becoming investment pieces. – Cara Delevingne • I like fashion because it’s sort of my job, so I’m into it when I have to be. But when I’m not working, I wear jeans and T-shirts. I go to vintage stores all the time to find funky T-shirts. – Kristen Stewart • I like old cars, old watches, anything with a vintage, antique kind of a feel to it. I’m just more in tune with that than anything else. – David Boreanaz • I like old movies, screwball comedies, vintage clothes, and basically I’m an old-fashioned gal. – Zooey Deschanel • I like the old, vintage Hollywood look. – Gwen Stefani • I like to experiment a lot, I just like to make myself look different to everyone else. Shopping at all different places from vintage to high-street, and then I just put it together myself. – Cher Lloyd • I like to mix and match vintage with designer. It’s how I create my own style. – Carly Rae Jepsen • I like vintage a lot. – Kesha • I like vintage shopping, but I also like to mix in high-end. – Theophilus London • I like vintage stuff. I go through a vintage store and find things that I feel like I fit right into them because of all the years that they’ve been used. – Channing Tatum • I like What Goes Around Comes Around for old concert tees. Oh man, I got this ‘Sgt. Pepper’ cartoon Beatles shirt there; it was, like, $300. I didn’t even know how much it cost – I thought it was gonna be, like, $80 at most – till I got to the register and was like, ‘Oh mah gawd!’ Good Lord. But it’s classic vintage rock, you know? – Kid Cudi • I live in a beautiful vintage building that was built in the heart of downtown Chicago. – Nate Berkus • I love Ali MacGraw and her style – I’m into vintage ’70s outfits at the moment. – Kim Kardashian • I love all vintage-everything, really. I love fashion. I’ve always loved it. And the fifties, I’ve always loved. – Elle Fanning • I love anything vintage. And I love Marc Jacobs and shoes by Giuseppe Zanotti. – Meagan Good • I love Fall Fashion Week because it means lots of layering, long sweaters and vintage coats. – Rachel Zoe • I love fashion! I love clothes! I really like vintage clothes, so in my closet there’s a lot of ’50s stuff. I go to the stores and shop around. – Elle Fanning • I love handbags. And shoes. Investing in like a great handbag or a pair of shoes can really make or break an outfit. It’s fun to mix and match high street with luxury brands and throw in a bit of vintage as well. – Miranda Kerr • I love hats! I collect vintage ones – I find them at antique shops in Kansas. – Lindsey Wixson • I love history. Everything is inspired by history, so that’s why I love vintage and antiques. – Kelly Wearstler • I love old, vintage cars. I’ve got a 1936 Dodge Touring Sedan right now and there’s only five of them registered in the world, and I absolutely love working on it. It’s gorgeous. – Danny Trejo • I love playing around with vintage fabrics and lace. – Helena Christensen • I love things that have a vintage feel to them, just because there’s a certain texture to them that we just don’t have anymore. In fact I think I’ve been stuck in the 50s or 60s for a while… – Amber Heard • I love to find a great vintage secondhand shop. – Bridget Hall • I love to shop vintage clothes; in London, I usually go to Relic and Alfie’s Market. I usually brunch around London Bridge, where I live.- Georgia May Jagger • I love vintage and I shop vintage a lot because it’s just such great value for money. – Lianne La Havas • I love vintage and prints. – Georgina Chapman • I love vintage cars because you can do so much more to them.- T-Pain • I love vintage clothes. I have a real passion which probably comes from the days of my mum who had this great dress up box that she put all her clothes from the 60s and 70s in – platform shoes and jumpsuits and boots. – Rachel McAdams • I love vintage shopping in flea markets, vintage stores and even Ebay. – Chelsea Leyland • I love vintage shopping, I think it’s really fun. And I love the feeling of finding the most amazing piece for less. – Emma Roberts • I love vintage, but it’s so expensive now. – Alexandra Roach • I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box. – Boy George • I really like the bohemian look, and I’m a great fan of mixing vintage and modern. – Kierston Wareing • I really love beautiful, well-made clothes. I don’t shop [a lot], so I tend to have pieces for a long time. I like mixing vintage with newer designers. – Sarah Jessica Parker • I shop at a lot of vintage stores because the prices are amazing, and I love the idea that there’s a history behind the piece I’m wearing. – Gabrielle Anwar • I shop only at thrift stores and vintage stores. In New York, I like a place called Star Struck, and a place called The Family Jewels. – Ezra Miller • I spent my first paycheck on a vintage Mercedes. – Jennifer Aniston • I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I didn’t consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day. – Martin Gore • I started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist’s career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L’Age d’Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn’t very good at it. – Guy Maddin • I think my mum was really very ahead of her time. She wore very little makeup. She really explored the way that she wore clothes in a very honest way. She wore a lot of vintage stuff and mixed it with bespoke men’s tailoring and things like that. That was a huge influence on me, seeing a woman in the spotlight carry herself in that kind of way. But mostly, for me, it was just that she was an incredibly honest and sort of natural person. – Stella McCartney • I used to collect vintage clothing – exquisite lace dresses, embroidered shawls and ornate jewelry – but that’s just not me any more. – Britt Ekland • I was a Knicks fan of the Kenny Sears-Carl Braun-Jim Baechtold vintage. I was even their ball boy when I was a teenager. – Marv Albert • I was always involved in low level motor clubs, competitions and with the Vintage Auto Association, and I believe this really helped me on my way. – Liz Halliday • I was collecting Barbies. I know… embarrassing. I sold them all on eBay, and traded them for vintage dishes. So I’ve collected two things. – Kristin Bauer van Straten • I was in a vintage pub rock band called Clover in the 1970s. – Huey Lewis • I was once in a long relationship with a man who ran a vintage clothes store but had been a chef, so I’d come home each night to a different three-course meal. I was quite fat, but so happy.- Paloma Faith • I was watching a collection of vintage ’80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes. – Ernest Cline • I was working at eBay, so I would just troll the vintage categories, find old amps and what have you. I was buying a fair amount of stuff and playing with it and then selling it back. – Bill Orcutt • I wear a lot of different jewellery. I love to look for it when Im abroad or if I find a great antique or vintage shop. – Lily Donaldson • I wear everything from hip-hop baggy pants to beautiful Armani dresses. I also like to mix vintage clothing with designer pieces. – Julia Stiles • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore the Marc Jacobs dress, so I love Marc Jacobs. He has a vintage flair. But I’ve always worn a lot of vintage stuff, so it hasn’t been a lot of designers. If I see something that I like, I just buy it. – Elle Fanning • I’ve been enjoying a couple of post-Oscar burgers. So I didn’t fit into a lot of the vintage stuff. I wanted to wear something that was a little bit more forgiving. – Anne Hathaway • If I have an hour in a city, I go to vintage stores first because it’s so much cooler to find a piece that is unique. I love the thought of some girl having worn it before and living her life in it. – Helena Christensen • If the October days were a cordial like the sub-acids of fruit, these are a tonic like the wine of iron. Drink deep or be careful how you taste this December vintage. The first sip may chill, but a full draught warms and invigorates. – John Burroughs • If you care about this country, if you want to take part in a citizen’s movement that helps heal the deep racial, economic, and cultural divides tearing us apart, you must read Eric Deggans’ Race-Baiter. No book of recent vintage so thoroughly dissects the media’s monetized appetite for division. Provocative, honest, and smart, Race-Baiter is a supremely important book. Read it and let the conversation begin. – Connie May Fowler • I’m a real Londoner. We have very grey weather in London, and I think it encourages a very eclectic and crazy fashion sense. I mix high-street stuff with more high-end fashion and vintage. – Emma Watson • I’m big on reworking vintage. Also, buying one great piece that lasts forever – to me, that is total sustainability. – Elizabeth Rogers • I’m definitely a vintage collector. I have a wardrobe of core basics that I like to spice up with different colors, new accessories, and I love to try on new things to invite something different. I find, with every new stage of my life, my self-image shifts with new duties and responsibilities, and so does my fashion style. – Camila Alves • I’m definitely an anomaly, but I’m making things. They’re selling, say, martinis, and I’m kind of making vintage Riesling. People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini. – Ben Folds • I’m doing a fun EP. It’s called ‘Songs in the Key of Phife: Eight Is Enough.’ It’s radio-friendly, but then a lot of it just has that raw hip-hop. Some of it will be vintage Tribe, but for the most part I’m just letting my voice be heard. – Phife Dawg • I’m into classic games like Donkey Kong, and also collect vintage tour t-shirts – everything from Olivia Newton-John to Duran Duran. I’ve got a Chicago one worth $100. – Michael Rosenbaum • I’m not a big shopper. I’m very very picky about what it is that I buy, I prefer to buy vintage and then I prefer to be very selective. – Jaime King • I’m not a vintage/thrift shop girl. I don’t have the patience. – Robin Givhan • I’m not going to try to be too young because at the end of the day, I’m not 20 anymore. I don’t want to sound corny or look corny doing young things. All the stuff that the kids are doing, that’s not my place. I believe that everyone followed me back then, they’re still here. That’s who I’m trying to talk to and relate to. All the trap music and all of that, it’s great but I can’t do that. I’m going to stay vintage Ginuwine and stay at the place that got me here. That’s what people want. – Ginuwine • I’m not the kind of guy who deserves to play a vintage guitar because I’m too rough on instruments. – Tommy Shaw • I’m shocked at how much I’m into Christmas pillows. There’s cheesiness, obviously, but then there’s really cute ones that are metallic that say “Ho Ho Ho” or “Merry” or cute vintage needlepoint ones. – Emily Henderson • In spite of all the skills that I do have, to relate to the normal world I have no applicable skills. I can speak Russian, I can speak French. I know about Chanel. Especially vintage Chanel. I know what Halston is. All of these things, but they can’t really be applied to a nine-to-five. – Johnny Weir • In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. – John Steinbeck • It is easily overlooked that what is now called vintage was once brand new.- Tony Visconti • It’s a mission for me to make sure that philanthropy doesn’t feel like a vintage hand-me-down from mom or dad. I want people to feel compelled to do something positive because they just love it, they’re excited about it, and it’s cool. – Usher • It’s so cliche to say florals for spring. I really like a vintage-like dress that’s floral. You can belt it; I like belts. I like wearing pretty dresses that are really comfortable, that you can spend the day in but also feel girly. – Brittany Snow • I’ve always loved fashion so much and I didn’t have access to the kind of fashion I really wanted, so I would do vintage shopping. – Rachel Roy • I’ve always loved vintage and I never like to have something someone else has. – Jillian Hervey • I’ve come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn’t properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That’s what shock is. – Darin Strauss • I’ve making videos since I was seventeen I was originally discollecting vintage hmmm… footages from different archives and setting moving pictures to classical music clips that meant a lot to me. Maybe there were places I have been where nice things have happened. I had a vision of making my life a work of art and I was looking for people who also felt that way. – Lana Del Rey • I’ve never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for — civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don’t care about — dark-and-weird-but-fun — and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me! – Ransom Riggs • Kit Kittredge was an amazing experience because I got to go to Canada, and it was my first era film, so I got to wear the 1930s clothes, the real vintage clothes. – Madison Davenport • Knitwear can play a vital part in layering. The simplicity of a lightweight cardigan makes it one of the best ways to layer outfits. I love granddad cardis for winter, worn over a vintage lace shirt, waistcoat and full skirt with slouchy boots. – Twiggy • Ladies, apologies, but isn’t ‘vintage’ just used stuff? – Bob Saget • Men should be judged not by their tint of skin, the gods they serve, the vintage they drink, nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin, but by the quality of the thought they think. – Adela Florence Nicolson • Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. – Julia Ward Howe • Most of my wardrobe is vintage, and I’ve worn dresses to the Oscars that I got for $10. – Winona Ryder • My advice to new artists is to embrace a broader concept of timelessness than vintage or retro. – Brandi Carlile • My grandparents in Istria had a frasca, which is about the most basic kind of grocery/restaurant. They sold wine from their own vineyard. I took control of the vineyard, hired a local winemaker, and bought another winery in 1996. We had our first commercial vintage in 1998. – Joe Bastianich • My home has a split personality. Some of the rooms are very French antique. Think Aubusson rugs, turquoise ceramic jugs, sandbag pillows, and broken birdcages. The other half is very Aztec. Neon ikat fabric pillows, vintage books piled up to the ceiling, and shutters from Bali. – Poppy Delevingne • My mom passed on her obsession of all things antique or vintage. I love to go thrift store shopping or explore any sort of garage sale. Treasure hunting is a family passion. – Zoey Deutch • My most cherished possessions are my grandma’s letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook. – Sandra Lee • My old vintage designs are so popular now. I must have been on to something. – Pierre Cardin • My style is quite clean, vintage, and almost French in a way. – India de Beaufort • My vintage Levi’s are my favorite on the show, ’cause they really fit. – Laura Prepon • My wife bought me a vintage Gibson guitar that isn’t just beautiful but has tremendous sentimental value. I have plenty of guitars for live gigs but this is one to treasure. – Bill Bailey • New York vintage is too expensive! – Kirsten Dunst • No amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity – Taylor Swift • No more rules, the freedom of dressing. The beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love. – Yves Saint Laurent • Nothing is more vintage than dying of Rubella. – Stephen Colbert • Of course I am grateful, and I’m sure you are, as you put it, a special vintage,” Bill said politely, “But I have my own wine cellar. – Charlaine Harris • Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime. – Shia LaBeouf • On the same Australian trip, I brought back a pair [of Ugg] for my then boyfriend who was a photographer. He wore them all the time. He used to wear them with Levis twisted jeans and a vintage T-shirt. This is 2002. They looked great on him. I guess it takes a certain kind of man to pull them off but they have other ones that are less typical of this, I think. – Alexa Chung • Once I graduated from NYU, I started making custom vintage tees for my friends and it just took off from there. – Charlotte Ronson • Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty. – Romola Garai • Our culture’s obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics. – Sloane Crosley • Paul Furlong is my vintage Rolls Royce and he cost me nothing. We polish him, look after him, and I have him fine tuned by my mechanics. We take good care of him because we have to drive him every day, not just save him for weddings. – Ian Holloway • Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s time was no better and no worse than that of our own – just different. – Jean Aitchison • Short boughs, long vintage. – George Herbert • Some things are better than other things: Google, Gmail, my vintage Montgomery Wards socket set (30+ years, still going strong), my Estwing framing hammer, and my Dremel rotary tool. – William Gurstelle • Tabitha was always trying unorthodox ways to set her up with guys. Although, to be fair to her sister, Tabitha didn’t usually knock the guy unconscious before she forced them together. Still, with Tabitha there was a first time for just about anything. And extreme blind-dating was very vintage T. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • The band is like a vintage car. You take it out to go for a spin for a couple miles, but you wouldn’t drive across the country. – Robyn Hitchcock • The best thing I ever bought is a vintage Oscar de la Renta short gingham dress that I wore to my rehearsal dinner the night before my wedding. – Kelly Wearstler • The biggest ones [online stores] I go back to are Amazon.com and eBay.com because it’s great for music and books… I collect vintage vinyl records. – John Varvatos • The C+ amps is vintage at this point, and it definitely has a certain sound to it. I wanted something that was going to keep Dream Theater in more of a current musical landscape, as far as being the producer and producing the type of album I wanted to hear. – John Petrucci • The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage. – Samuel Eliot Morison • The Humbling is not vintage Roth, despite its compelling premise. The bizarre series of episodes — mostly sexual encounters with women — which make up this short novel don’t play to Roth’s strengths. (…) The Humbling disappoints because it avoids these universal implications, and veers off into a baroque world of the unique and fantastic, never quite deigning to make its world concrete or to give its characters the honour of an independent will. – Philip Hensher • The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old. The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older. And it’s not just bridges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs. – Ed Rendell • The kinds of things I like with crystals are the really beautiful costume jewelry, vintage pieces, and they usually have that diamond shape. – Zoe Kravitz • The minute you think that the past was better, your present is second hand, and yourself becomes vintage – it’s okay for clothes not that great for people – Karl Lagerfeld • The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon… In capitalist countries they reward artists because we’re ineffectual. – Danny Lyon • The Specials was always going to be an underground, underdog kind of movie. But I love when people bring that up, because it’s very early, vintage James Gunn. – Rob Lowe • There are so many cute vintage dresses made out of synthetics from the ’60s and ’70s – but they’re so itchy and hot. It’s not worth it! – Zooey Deschanel • There is a phenomenal amount of pressure on women in this industry: they are considered vintage by the time they hit their mid-30s. – Tori Amos • There’s a lot of really inspiring music coming around the bend – we tend to believe that to sound classic or timeless is to sound vintage or retro. It’s a little bit dangerous, because you’ll really miss a chance to make your mark as a generation. – Brandi Carlile • There’s a vintage which comes with age and experience. – Jon Bon Jovi • There’s nothing like a string of Xmas lights inside the house to make the whole family feel like they live in a vintage clothing store. – Dana Gould • This is not really currency that circulates. It’s like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, “Wait a minute. This has gone bad.” The answer is, “Well, that wine isn’t for drinking; that’s for trading.” These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving. – Michael Hudson • Time and again I hear how important the darker environment is to those at our vintage-faith worship gathering. Attenders feel they can freely pray in a corner by themselves without feeling that everyone is staring at them. – Dan Kimball • To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. – Christopher Hitchens • Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself. – Josh Lanyon • Vintage was brilliant! – Gavin Turk • Virginia Madsen big part in that movie [‘Class’] required her shirt to get ripped off, and looking back, it couldn’t be a more egregious, vintage, lowbrow, 1980s Porky’s-esque, shoehorned-in moment. Like, you would never have that moment in a movie that aspired to be what that movie did today. – Rob Lowe • We always need to have a smart black blazer in our closets. It’s just a nice clean way to dress up even something as simple as jeans and a t-shirt. And something I always have in my closet, I always have a vintage headscarf with me, to tie around my bag or protect my hair from the sun, it depends but I always find a use for it. – Nicole Richie • We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more. – Carl Jung • When I look at asset prices; real estate, bonds, equities, vintage cars… I think that gold is actually one of the few assets that is relatively cheap, relatively inexpensive. – Marc Faber • When it comes to wine, I tell people to throw away the vintage charts and invest in a corkscrew. The best way to learn about wine is the drinking. – Alexis Lichine • When the choice is between a demanding relationship and a vintage pickup truck, I’ll choose the truck every time. – Amy Dickinson • When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you’re not just buying the fabric and thread – you’re buying a piece of someone’s past – Isabel Wolff • While conversion of sugars to ethanol is the predominant reaction, it is only one of potentially thousands of biochemical reactions taking place during fermentation. As a result, wine contains trace amounts of a large number of organic acids, esters, sugars, alcohols, and other molecules. Wine is, in fact, one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. – Neel Burton • While in a vintage restaurant…”the past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into. – Margaret Atwood • Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. – Neel Burton • Wine to me is something that brings people together. Wine does promote conversation and promote civility, but it’s also fascinating. It’s the greatest subject to study. No matter how much you learn, every vintage is going to come at you with different factors that make you have to think again. – Robert M. Parker, Jr. • Women can explore so much in dressing. But if I was a guy I would wear vintage suits constantly. With crazy ties! – Helena Christensen • Yeah, okay. You’re right. I was having dinner with Zombie Carl the other night. You know, steak, rare, and a bottle of vintage type A. He told me all his secrets, but too bad for you I promised him I wouldn’t tell. In exchange I asked him to gather his best undead buddies and stalk me through my friend’s yard. And oh, yeah, it was totally fine if they wanted to use me as an all-night-dinner buffet, because having organs is SO last year. – Gena Showalter • You deserve to die,” I whisper, suddenly realizing Iv’e said the words aloud. “Excuse me?” “Nothing.” “Not nothing. You just told me that I deserve to be maggot feed.” “Not maggot feed, just-” “Dead!” “Forget it” “I don’t know why I said that. Just daydreaming, I guess.” “Daydreaming about my death?” “Forget it”, I repeat. “Are you sure you aren’t still mad that I wouldn’t let you borrow my vintage fishnet leggings?” “More like I didn’t want to borrow them. – Laurie Faria Stolarz • You don`t have the same reaction to a girl walking around the street today in a nightgown and a vintage coat and sneakers, that you did six years ago. – Marc Jacobs • You may know more about vintage wine than the wine steward, but if you’re smart you’ll let your man do the choosing and be ecstatic over his selection, even if it tastes like shampoo. – Arlene Dahl • Your birthday is the vintage of your wine; the mark that warns you of your future. – Aesop • You’re drinking vintage Elvis Presley wine. – Elvis Costello

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

[thrashermaxey]

Goldipucks and the Three Skaters: Suter, Johnsson & Reinhart

  Welcome back to another installment of “Goldipucks and the Three Skaters.” For first time readers, or those needing a refresher, this column is a play on the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story, except instead of there being three bowls of porridge I’m covering three skaters and declaring one too hot (i.e., doing unsustainably better than he should), another too cold (i.e., doing unsustainably worse), and a third “just right” (i.e., producing where he should be). I also assign each a 1-10 rating, indicating just how hot (rated 7-10, where 10 is the most unsustainably hot), how cold (rated 1-4, where 1 is the most unsustainably cold), or how “just right” (rated 4-7, where 5.5 is the most “just right”) he is.

  The three skaters featured this week are Ryan Suter, Andreas Johnsson, and Sam Reinhart. Stop here and see if you can guess which one is too hot, which is too cold, and who is “just right,” then see if you’re correct after you read on.

  Ryan Suter

Although he turned 34 in January, if you look at his production Suter doesn’t appear to be slowing down, having posted the 13th most points among all blueliners since the start of 2015-16. Naturally, this has poolies wondering if he could be the type who defies father time and continues to produce solid scoring, or whether, instead, he might be vulnerable to seeing his totals drop, and soon. It turns out that looking at data, some of Suter’s key numbers are trending down and he’s unsustainably benefitting quite a bit from the absence of Matt Dumba and unsustainable good luck, which collectively mean he’s unlikely to be able to continue at this pace in future seasons.

  For starters, Suter’s SOG rate is down for the third consecutive season, having dropped from 2.29 in 2015-16, to 2.00 in 2016-17, to 1.91 last season, to 1.68 per game for 2018-19. Moreover, Suter had never failed to average 0.5 SOG per game on the PP since coming to Minnesota, yet this season is on pace for two every five games despite Matt Dumba missing most of the campaign and that fact that in the 31 games before Dumba got hurt on December 15th Suter played over 3:30 on the PP in only eight, compared to 18 times in the 43 subsequent games. So Suter figures to see less PP time once Dumba is back to full health in 2019-20, and that should further hurt his already apparently waning PP production.

  It’s also notable that in prior seasons which saw Suter post 50+ points, his ratio of secondary assists versus primary was at or just above even, while this season he’s on pace for it to be nearly 1.75 to one (i.e., 25 vs. 14), which isn’t a good sign. Another concern is Suter’s offensive zone starting percentage this season is above 55% – likely due to Dumba missing from the line-up – after being 50% or less in five of the previous eight campaigns, including each of the prior two.

  Lastly, age is working against Suter, as since 2000-01 a total of 11 defensemen posted 45+ points in their age 34 season, compared to only nine hitting that threshold in their age 35 campaign, and with only one of the nine (Mark Giordano this season) having done so since the 2011-12 campaign. And remember how Suter’s SOG rate is 1.68 per game for 2018-19? That’s notable because all the 35-year-old d-men who posted 45+ points in a season since 2000-01 averaged at least 1.81 SOG per game in doing so, with seven of the nine being at 2.13 per game or greater.

  Given the above, it’s not too difficult to conclude that Suter is TOO HOT. Most likely he’ll have another 40 point season or two in him; however, chances are his days of 50+ points are done and even 45+ could be a tall order. So I’m assigning him a rating of 8.

  Andreas Johnsson

Lost amid the attention paid to higher profile Toronto star forwards, is the fact that Johnsson is scoring at a 48 point rate and has been getting regular shifts alongside Auston Matthews. But will Johnsson be able to maintain that coveted spot, and, if so, could he produce even better? I believe the answer to both questions is yes.

  First and foremost, Johnsson’s season-long production obscures that he started with three points in his first 18 games, meaning since then he’s posted 39 in 56 contests. It’s a similar story with his ice time, as he averaged a mere 11 minutes per game in the first quarter before jumping to 13 minutes per game in the second and third and rising to 15:01 per game since the start of the last quarter of the season. And beyond just a rise is scoring to accompany additional ice time, he’s shooting the puck more, with two SOG per game in the season’s final quarter.

  Another key is Johnsson makes Matthews better (more on this in a second), yet not at the expense of Johnsson’s own scoring. Case in point is that Johnsson’s IPP is 71.2% despite playing so often with Matthews, showing that Johnsson isn’t merely along for the ride but actually showing a nose for scoring. That bodes well for him to be able to raise his scoring pace further.

  In terms of making Matthews even better, Matthews has a higher Scoring Chances For when playing with Johnsson than when not, with it being a similar story in terms of High Danger Scoring Chances. Those scoring chances also have translated into actual goals, as Matthews has 65% of his goals scored while playing with Johnsson despite the two sharing the ice for 47% of Matthews’ shifts.

  In terms of the PP, although over 25% of the man advantage time Johnsson has received has been with Matthews, only one of his six PPPts came while Matthews was on the ice. The bad news is that might not lead to Johnsson gaining a foothold on a PP1 spot; however, it shows he still can score with the man advantage even if put on PP2. And despite receiving the 184th most PP minutes among NHL forwards, Johnsson’s PPPts rank is tied for 171st.

  Beyond these factors, and notwithstanding his slow start, Johnsson has a points per 60 scoring rate that puts him ahead of, among others, Jeff Skinner, Jonathan Marchessault, Evander Kane, and Filip Forsberg. Moreover, all but one player (Joe Thornton) who ranks above him in this area (and who’s played 40+ games) averages at least 30 seconds more PP time per game, proving Johnsson has done more with less and underscoring his ability to get points on goals scored while he’s on the ice.

  Based on how he apparently makes Auston Matthews a better player and at the same time is also able to score in his own right, plus has season-long stats dragged down by his slow start, Johnsson is TOO COLD. He’s not very cold though since there’s still the issue of him being unlikely to penetrate PP1. Accordingly, Johnsson gets a rating of 3, suggesting next season he should be a 60-65 point player.

  Sam Reinhart

With this being his “magical fourth year” and on a vastly improved Buffalo team, many figured Reinhart would easily best his career high in points. And sure enough, he’s done so, although perhaps not quite reaching the scoring heights some might have expected heading into this season, especially on the heels of a scorching 37 points in his last 41 games to end 2017-18.

  The question thus becomes, is what we’re seeing from Reinhart in 2018-19 what we should expect him to produce going forward, or instead just a stepping stone on his way to greater things? From where I sit, Reinhart has the talent to do more, yet his situation is such that he’s likely to produce roughly the same in future seasons as he is in 2018-19.

  In the real NHL, versatile players are great assets to their teams. Yet that same versatility often leads to subpar fantasy results. In the case of Reinhart, he’s able to play both wing and center; and in actuality, what that has meant in 2018-19 is him both hitting the jackpot by playing wing on a line with Jack Eichel but also centring Buffalo’s second or even third line alongside far less talented players. It’s similar to the what happened with Brayden Schenn during his tenure with Philly, where when Schenn played wing on a line with skilled players he produced well, but when forced to center the team’s less talented players he usually struggled.

  Looking at Reinhart’s deployment for 2018-19, he’s skated with Jack Eichel for about 55% of his total even-strength shifts, yet that’s where 70% (i.e., 33 of his 47) even strength points were accumulated. From that we can see if Reinhart was stapled to Eichel he’d be able to do more; however, the reality is he sees nearly as much time centring other lines – with weaker players – thus bringing down his totals. And with no apparent end in sight to this deployment pattern, Reinhart likely will continue to produce like he is now – in droves when on a line with Eichel but sparingly otherwise.

  Another concern is that Reinhart’s IPP this season is 64.6%, which, despite it not being that great, marks a career high. With now over 300 NHL games to his credit and no season even close to the key 70% IPP threshold which my research suggests is indicative of a player who already is – or can become – great, Reinhart simply might not the type of player who has a strong nose for scoring. This is not good to see in general, but especially considering the 45% of shifts he sees without Eichel, where, if he was a dominant player, he should have a higher IPP and more points to show for it. Reinhart also has an offensive zone starting percentage over 61% this season, marking the first time it’s been above even 54% in his career. With his OZ% unlikely to go much higher, he probably cannot count on more points coming due to that factor. This having been said, Reinhart has twice as many primary assists as secondary this season (28 to 14), so that could help pad his scoring a bit in future seasons or offset points he might lose due to these other factors.

  Based on the data and his suboptimal – for fantasy at least – deployment, Reinhart’s production level for 2018-19 is JUST RIGHT, and I’ve assigned him a rating of 5, suggesting that he still might be able to eke out a few more points per seasons, due mainly to his primary assist rate and the very real possibility he hasn’t peaked yet at age 23.

**

  Mailbag questions needed

I’m always in need of questions about fantasy hockey for me to answer in my monthly mailbag column. There are two ways for you to get your questions to me – (1) email it to admin@dobbersports.com with “Roos Mailbag” in the subject line, or (2) send me a private message at the DobberHockey Forums with your question (my username is “rizzeedizzee”.

    from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/fantasy-hockey-rick-roos/goldipucks-and-the-three-skaters-suter-johnsson-reinhart/

[theindustrialphotography-blog]

Andreas Gursky on the photograph that changed everything: 'It was pure intuition

It was 1990 and I was out driving with my family, sightseeing in and around Naples. Late in the afternoon, we came across this view over the harbour of Salerno. The sun was setting over the city so I had to hurry. I set up my tripod and my 4x5 inch camera, then took four frames. There was no time to weigh up whether it was worth it or not.Visually, everything was completely at odds with what I had been taught. My teachers, the conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, had told me to avoid photographing with sunlight, blue sky or strong shadows. But I thought the warm sunlight here made for something quite kitsch. Also, up until this point, human beings had been the focus of my work – but here there were none in sight. Yet I was overwhelmed by what I saw: the complexity of the image, the accumulation of goods, the cars, the containers. I hadn’t been sure the photograph would work. I just felt compelled. It was pure intuition.Only when I got back home and put together the first contact sheet did I realise what I had. I saw immediately that pattern, that pictorial density, that industrial aesthetic. This image became an important piece for me, a turning point. It opened up a new sense of possibility, stylistically and thematically. I tried photographing other ports, but I realised that wasn’t what had made the Salerno image work. It was the balance between great scale and a huge amount of sharp detail.

These are things I went on to develop. That same year, I made an almost monochrome view of innumerable men in black suits and white shirts on the trading floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. This was followed by a similarly large-scale image of the Siemens factory in Karlsruhe, Germany, with workers obscured by countless cables, boxes and things. Salerno, with its flattened composition and repetitions, made both those images possible.

After that, I homed in on airports and supermarkets, oceans and rivers, such as the Rhine [the subject of Rhine II which sold for a record-breaking $4.3m in 2011]. In the early 1990s, I began to work digitally, combining shots, excising certain details, repeating others. The final works were no longer simple straightforward shots, like Salerno, but constructed images. My focus is on the expanse rather than the detail. Critics talk about me always capturing scenes from a raised perspective, but my ceiling images were taken from below, and my Formula 1 work from straight on.

Distance is also an important factor, which is something else I inherited from the Bechers. If a photojournalist was commissioned to document a scene, they would get much closer. But by always keeping a distance, I allow the viewer to come up with their own opinion. While my images are all comprised of many details – which you can explore in depth because of the high resolution – that’s not what they are about. Each one is always a world of its own, created.

These days, I no longer go places without a plan, hoping to simply discover things. My process is much more conceptual and research-based. You don’t travel to North Korea – as I did in 2007 for my Pyongyang series – without working ideas out in advance. Similarly my Tulip series from 2015, taken from a helicopter, started with images I’d seen in a magazine.

That said, I do still stumble across things by accident. As I’m always telling my students: you won’t get anywhere sitting at a table thinking. You learn by doing. That’s how you move forward. And even if you do something wrong, the result may be much more interesting than what you went looking for.

Recently, I’ve been working with unsharpness. I was on a road trip with my wife, driving to Utah. Like any tourist, I was impressed by the landscape. One day I took pictures with my iPhone as we drove. I liked them. When we arrived at the hotel , I said to my wife: “OK, tomorrow you drive and I’ll try to get similar images at a higher resolution with my professional equipment.” The resulting image – of a flat, dry landscape with mountains in the distance – is mostly out of focus, though the resolution is high. It has a completely different perspective to my earlier works, which are sharp throughout.

I decided to try the same thing in Tokyo, shooting from a Shinkansen high-speed train. I spent three days there, alone, and took about 2,000 images. From the raised perspective of the train, I captured the miniature architecture, the density and irregularity of the buildings.

I’ve always been fascinated by Tokyo’s residential neighbourhoods. In Germany, my home country, everything is standardised: window openings, door sizes, they’re always the same. But in Tokyo, there is so much variation, you end up thinking something has gone wrong with the actual scene. That sort of “mistake” within a strict structure is what makes a picture interesting. The fields in my Tulip series have bits missing, colours missing. It’s like the printer malfunctioned.

Les Mées is a recent work that I relate back to Salerno. I’d heard about this photovoltaic plant near Marseille in France. Often, places like that aren’t very interesting, since everything is so rectangular. But here, the panels become part of the landscape. I also liked the fact that you could see the old world in the background, the mountains – and the modern world, the plant, up front.

All my landscapes are manmade. My interest lies in people, civilisation, human presence and activity. I couldn’t imagine taking a photograph of a mountain just by itself, though it is of course possible. One day I might.

[wagnerst]

The Terms "Model-Based" and "Model-Driven" Considered Harmful

I truly believe that abstraction is at the core of computer science and software engineering. Abstraction is essential to be able to cope with complexity and allows us to build the tremendously complex systems we build today. Yet, it is hard to clearly define what abstraction is.  Florian Deissenboeck and I were attempting this almost 10 years ago in an article that was published in a workshop on the role of abstraction in software engineering. I think we found some interesting ways to think about it, but it was extremely hard to wrap your head around the concept as such.

Similarly, models, which I would define in our context as abstractions of systems that have a specific purpose, are essential for software engineering, maybe for engineering in general. Especially in software engineering, almost everything we deal with is a model. Requirements written down are a model of a part of a system to be. Even the short sentence in a typical user story is a model. The sketch with boxes and arrows on the whiteboard indicating an aspect of a software architecture is a model of the software. The Java source code is a model of the software abstracting e.g. the details of the execution on the machine. I could go on and on. Models are essential for software engineering.

So what does it mean to call something "model-based software engineering" (MBSE) or "model-driven software engineering" (MDSE)? I would argue without models there is no software engineering. Yet, there is a large research community working on MBSE/MDSE. To this day, I have not fully understood what that is, although I have been working on things that were called "model-based" myself.

My first research project in 2002 was a collaboration with BMW in which we tried model-based testing of their MOST network master. We used the approach my valued colleague Alex Pretschner, now professor at TU Munich, built in his PhD project. We invested a lot of time discussing with the BMW engineers to build a detailed model in AutoFOCUS. This model was then quite suitable to generate test cases to be run against the actual network master. Interestingly, we found that many of the defects we found were found during the modelling. My personal observation was that the model became so detailed, it was almost a reimplementation of the network master software. Was there really a conceptual difference between our "model" and the code?

Over the years, I have thought about this a lot. This post is my current status of what I think about  MBSE/MDSE. I do not want to convey that everyone working in that field is stupid and does non-sense research. Quite to the contrary, I do think there is a lot of interesting work going on. My hypothesis, however, is the following:

Using the terms "model-based" or "model-driven" in combination with software engineering or software engineering techniques obscures what these techniques are actually about and are actually capable of. Progress in software engineering is hindered by this division in "model-based" and "code-based".

I sincerely hope that this might start a discussion in our community. To substantiate why this hypothesis may be true, I collected the following five observations:

Nobody knows what MBSE/MDSE really is. There is a great confusion in research and especially practice what this MBSE or MDSE should be. For many, it is working with diagrams instead of textual code. For example, a UML sequence diagram would be a model-based technique but text in a programming language describing the sequence of messages might not. For others, it needs to be mathematically formal. For other still, it is the name for using Simulink to program. A recent study by Andreas Vogelsang et al. showed this perfectly.

Practitioners don't adopt MBSE/MDSE. This point is a bit hard to discuss given the first one. Oftentimes, if practitioners state that they do MBSE/MDSE, they apply a certain tool such as Simulink. Or they have some UML diagrams of the system lying around (usually out of date). In the same study of Vogelsang et al., they investigate drivers and barriers for the adoption of MBSE. They found that "Forces that prevent MBSE adoption mainly relate to immature tooling, uncertainty about the return-on-investment, and fears on migrating existing data and processes. On the other hand, MBSE adoption also has strong drivers and participants have high expectations mainly with respect to managing complexity, adhering to new regulations, and reducing costs." So practitioners think the tools are immature and the whole thing might have a negative ROI. But there's the hope that it might help to manage complexity and reduce costs. This does not seem like a methodology I would like to invest in.

MBSE/MDSE is Formal Methods 2.0. I don't think formalisation and formal analysis is useless. It has its benefit and surely a place in the development of software systems. Yet, it is not the holy grail it was often sold to be. If I play the devil's advocate, it feels like after formal methods failed to be broadly adopted in industry, they are now simply renamed as model-based methods. Yet, putting some nice diagrams on top of a formal analysis most of the times won't make it easier to understand. In contrast, I love the work by people like Daniel Ratiu or Markus Völter on integrating formal verification in DSLs or common programming languages (see e.g. here). Is this "model-based"? Does it really matter whether it is?

Models are positioned as replacing code. I hear that less nowadays, but it is still out there. The story line was that the success of software engineering has always been based on reaching higher levels of abstraction. We went from machine code to assembly to C and Java. Models are supposedly then the next step in which we can abstract away all these technical details and everything will be easier.  I don't believe that at all, unless for very specific instances of "model". Abstraction comes at a cost. What we abstract away can come back and haunt us. For example, although Java hides null pointers from us most of the time, sometimes we suddenly see a null pointer exception pop up. It breaks the abstraction and suddenly makes the underlying details visible. As we are not used to dealing with null pointers in Java, this might be even worse than dealing with them directly in the first place. Furthermore, there are many arguments that can be made that there is a huge tool chain supporting us dealing with source code that is not directly available for various kinds of models. Finally, I fail to see how it is easier to work with graphical diagrams than with plain text.

The research community is split (at least) in two. Again, I will play the devil's advocate and exaggerate to make the point: On the one side, we have the MBSE/MDSE people claiming that models are the future and everybody still working on code just hasn't realised that. On the other side, we have the code people (e.g. in the maintenance community) who only analyse source code and ignore what these MBSE/MDSE people are doing for the most part. In the end, I believe, that leads to duplications of efforts, misunderstandings in reviews of papers and project proposals as well as a very confusing picture for practitioners. I don't think we project a consistent vision of how software engineering should be done in the future.

In summary, I believe that the extensive use of the terms "model-based" and "model-driven" in the software engineering community has done more harm than good. When I read that a method is model-based, I don't know if that means it uses graphical diagrams, it just uses additional artefacts or it is based on formalisations. I would be happy if my little rant here serves as the starting point in our community to bring the two fractions together so that we can work jointly on the next generation of software engineering methods, techniques and tools. 

[audience1102]

UNIT 12 Evaluation

 Unit 12 is about engaging with the audience and how their qualities and characteristics serve a purpose to the proposed question: ‘why do artists need a selected audience?’

This then interprets why do certain groups of people respond to art? And how do they relate to it in a way no one else would? And the simple reason being; there is just an appreciation for somebody’s work, it could be either they relate to it on a wider scale, it could also be that they have found something in an art form that is similar to themselves in quite a few ways, they have a common ground.

In my work that i had been working on for the last couple of months, i focused on my dreams that i had been having and proposed, ‘Do dreams affect our mood when we wake up?’ i had to think of a certain audience that may have related to my concept and either liked it for its eerie demeanour or simply the fact that they dreamt of the same things every night as do I. I can’t particularly think of any certain group of people in mind, however i think psychologists might have a curiosity about what i produce due to its’ dark nature.          

Artists like Yves Klein whose art was a cross of ambience and performance art attracted an audience of a certain quality as during his lifetime the subject of his work didn’t allow him to be part of the mainstream, thus, being put in an art underground scene where only select people of his following knew about, making him then and even maybe now still an obscure artist. The kinds of research activities to carry out on a selected artists’ audience could be brainstorms, selected society questions of what people want to expect in their work. Also, find the right crowd, in a sense figure out what kind of audience would be your ideal and then seek out that crowd in a subtle way so then you can draw them out like moths to a flame. In Ancoats in Manchester, is a mural dedicated to mental health by German artist Andreas Von Chrzanowski aka CASE. The piece depicts the still ongoing struggles with mental health in men, which according to statistics, is the biggest cause of death for young men in the UK. On Ancoats is a place called 42nd street, which is a counselling unit for young people, maybe this is linked in with the mural and the counselling, or maybe it is autobiographical to share with the public, for them to relate and think, we are not alone.   It has been directly painted on the wall on a very large scale, 3

For the dream purposes’ i had documented them directly from waking up and onto paper. i studied up on certain artists that i could try and get inspiration from including; Marc Chagall and Frank Auerbach. Because of the nature of the topic, my dreams were often filled with anxiety and sometimes fear (mostly anxiety) i wanted a darker looking approach because the unsettling images just deserved that bit of an edge and characteristic with a uniqueness opted with some simplicity. I did start by documenting my dreams through painting inspired by german artist Franz Marc then i saw the works of Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach and found a mutual grounding on the eerie psyche of their work and the opted on making a change to the approach than rather from what i was seeing but how i was reporting it on another level.The materials i had used in the beginning had been acrylic and watercolour based paint, then i moved to the simpler methods of charcoal and chalk which then did work in my favour. I then thought about the sized chalk i would want to use on the dreams i was making, whether the markings made significant impact on the outcome or maybe even emphasised some characteristics. i felt like i chose the right charcoal for the outcomes i practiced they made faint guidelines in the start of the process and then i could add more in darker shades and sizes. white chalk proved effective also as used in small quantities gave the figures depth in shadow and stature.

I felt like i have made 2 big steps in the final outcome, i produced 2 large scale pieces on a wall scale, depicting 2 variations, 1 being a duplicate of a dream and the other being an almost truthful version of how i feel like these negative thoughts can come across in a metaphorical way. i feel like i would be happy for a final outcome to be the 2 brown paper scales merged together and make the biggest piece imaginable. My practical skills worked as to plan for the scale and how those figures fit in with each other on paper in an order of individuality and relevance.