#anyways have a great day/night paradoxers

[shroommush]

PARADOXCICLE DOODLES!!! EVERYONE SAY HELL YEAH!!!!

Paradoxcicle by @blipple-is-confused on ao3!!! GO READ IT!!!!

Guess what i like about paradoxcicle? Well, i like the ANGST

I like the COMFORT

I like the PLAIN FUN

And then theres whatever this is

I dont like wjatever this is

[keepingitformyself]

older (and wiser): ii

A/N: second chapter! i don’t know when the next time will be that i update. i start uni in a few days and i also am working through a personal issue i have to deal with. anyway— every place that’s mentioned like coffee shops, restaurants, etc..are real so if you’re ever interested in looking into those you can! cus they’re real! ALSO in case anyone hasn’t noticed the face claim for paul is paul mescal. please also keep in mind that this is based off of “past lives” meaning it will follow SOME key moments in the film. not all, just SOME. so if you haven’t seen it i’d recommend it, it’s a great film!

synopsis: you and wanda meet for coffee.

pairings: wanda maximoff x reader

genre: angst, some fluff

warnings: oh gee

part i

please do not repost my work anywhere for any reason at all. if you do see this happen to any of my stories, please let me know. thank you x.

you don’t know what to make of it when you hang up the call.

walking back into the living room, phone in hand, you gulp down your feelings, trying to process the aftermath of what had just happened.

paul looks up from the book in his lap, already closing it and setting it aside as you come into view. his eyes immediately catch the scrunch of your brows.

“talk to me,” he says softly, reaching for your hand and gently pulling you to sit next to him.

you want to escape the moment, but there’s nowhere to go.

“it was wanda.” you admit, your voice laced with an uneasiness that made you feel unsure of what he might say.

paul’s lips part slightly as quiet consideration washes over him. his gaze shifts to the side, and he seems lost in thought.

after a few seconds, he finally says, “oh.”

of course, paul had previously known of who wanda maximoff was to you. it was brought up fairly early in your relationship, both of you drunk on cheap whine, over a lazy night in when it felt like it was easier to be honest than anything else.

he knew there was an ex. he knew that much. an ex that had left you with the unbearable weight of what once was and how good it could be. something in you told you he deserved to know. so you did, you told him and you ended in tears laying against his chest.

fortunately, that night did very little in scaring him off.

wanda was your first—and last—real relationship in college, and coincidentally the one that also impacted you the most.

having her at your side built you up in so many ways. she inspired you so much during your time together. creatively, emotionally, or spiritually. you felt so much around her, so much for her, and she was just as equally showing of that.

there were so many sides of her that you enjoyed experiencing, so many sides of you that had come out because of her. it was something so equal in tenderness and intensity.

to you, wanda maximoff was like a paradox of ideas you felt you could actually understand.

but it wasn’t perfect. the end of your relationship with wanda had been devastating. you were both just months away from graduating when everything began to come apart at the seams. wanda had been cast for the lead in a series that would require her to go overseas for six months, while you had been offered an internship to shadow journalists abroad. you were both doing things you loved, and maybe not together, but you knew this was needed.

and despite your insistence that you could make it work long distance, wanda wasn’t sure she could handle being so far from you. for nearly three years, the two of you had been inseparable. the idea of such a drastic change felt impossible to her.

you agreed it would just be a break—nothing permanent. you promised you’d be back together in no time. but the distance only made things harder. wanda became incredibly hard to reach, always busy, always consumed by work.

it took a toll on her, and she became emotionally unavailable in a way that left you feeling more alone than ever.

determined to salvage what was left, you decided to fly out and see her. wanda had promised to meet you, had said she’d gotten the day off just for you.

you planned a whole dinner in your hotel room, excited to finally see her again. but wanda never showed up. you waited and waited, your heart sinking with every passing hour. when you finally heard from her, she chalked it up to being busy, apologizing profusely.

but it wasn’t enough. her inability to show up had made something clear: the relationship you both claimed to have cherished wasn’t there anymore. so, you ended things for good.

“why did she call?” paul finally asks. his voice careful where you feel like your answer to his question is one he isn’t fully sure he wants to know.

you put your hand over the one that holds yours, biting your lower lip as you find the words to say what you need to. how does one say that their ex misses them? and wants to see them?

“she wanted to see how i was doing,” you start. “i told her about everything, us being engaged, she said she saw and congratulated us.” you smile faintly, recalling the words, but it falters as you contemplate your sentence. “she wants to see me. she was…pretty insistent on it.”

“and what did you say?” paul’s curiosity is evident, though his tone remains measured.

“i said yes to meeting up with her.” you admit. you grip his hand tighter, bringing his palm to your lips and kissing it, as if letting him know that he has a say in this too. “but if you don’t want me to, i wont meet with her.”

paul remains deep in thought as he stares at your entwined hands. he could say no, could ask you not to go, but he knows that’s not who he wants to be. he wouldn’t want to keep you from something that might heal a part of you you’ve never fully recovered from—especially when it’s a part so closely tied to who you are now.

looking at you through his lashes, he smiles softly. your thumb hasn’t stopped rubbing the back of his hand. he’s certain none of this could ever truly hurt what you’ve built together. not when he has you now, so wholly.

“i want you to go see her.” he says finally, his words tinged with a gentle lilt. his eyes soften, and he adds, “if there’s even a chance that it’ll give you closure, or just help you carry less weight, then i think you should. i trust you.”

your eyebrows rise in surprise at his words. “you want me to?” you repeat.

“uh…well, no. it’s not that i want you to. it’s that i wouldn’t want you not to, d’you see? does that make sense?” he pauses, running a hand through his hair.

“look we’re gettin’ married soon, and i love you. from what i’ve heard about wanda, she meant a lot to you.in a way, she led me to you. i wouldn’t want to hold you back from somethin’ that might be good for you. if seein’ wanda is that, then you have my full support.”

your eyes lock with his, a grateful smile on your face at his understanding. you lean over to kiss his cheek,

“than you,” you murmur softly.

——

wanda was the first to arrive at the café you’d picked out. you’d agreed to meet by 2:15, but wanda had been restless, unable to stay in place once she reached her hotel just hours earlier.

caffè reggio felt enigmatic in its own way. the compact space, with small tables scattered across the room, gave it an almost congested feel, but the patrons kept to themselves, creating an atmosphere of quiet solitude.

the low lighting added an intimate touch, the kind wanda found herself grateful for; a setting that made sense for seeing you after all these years. still, she hadn’t expected you to choose a place that felt so…secretive. not that she was complaining.

as soon as she sat down, a server approached her with a gentle greeting and offered to read her the menu. she listened half-heartedly, her mind preoccupied, and eventually settled on an espresso martini and a dessert she barely registered.

“will that be all?” the server asked politely.

wanda hesitated, glancing at the watch on her wrist. it read 1:57 pm.

“actually,” she said, chewing the inside of her cheek, “i’m meeting someone in about fifteen minutes. could you come back in ten and fix me a vanilla latte for them? double shot, please.”

the server nodded, jotting it down before retreating.

the minutes felt like a drag as wanda waited. each minute passing made her heart feel heavier. she’d waited in the quiet corner she’d picked for the both of you. alternating between anxiously biting her lip as she stared out the window, or checking her phone for the time.

for a second, she feels grateful no one has seemed to notice her, making it easier to revel in her own anxious energy in peace.

when you finally entered, wanda exhaled quietly, her chest tightening as everything seemed to slow. she took in the sight of you, cataloging every detail. your hair was longer, your features more defined, carrying a depth of experience that hadn’t been there before her. for a moment, wanda froze, torn between wanting to disappear completely or letting you see her as she was.

but then your eyes met hers, and you smiled. a smile that was so familiar, it sent a deep ache through her chest. she rose quickly, her arms stiff at her sides, unsure whether to offer a handshake or reach for a hug.

you decided for her, stepping closer and wrapping your arms around her shoulders. your left hand brushed slightly against her back as you said, “it’s good to see you, wands.”

wanda tries not to break into to tears immediately at having you in her arms, of seeing you, of breathing you in. it’s all overwhelming in it’s familiarity.

you pull away first, looking up at her with a soft smile until you decide to sit on the chair across from her. wanda remained standing a beat longer, awkwardly smoothing her pants before sitting down.

“how…how are you?” she asked, her fingers twisting nervously in her lap.

“i’m really good.” you replied, taking a sip of the latte she ordered for you.

“that’s good.”

the words hung in the air for a moment, and you both began speaking at the same time.

“what have—”

“it’s really good—”

you both broke into quiet laughter, the sound cutting through the nervous energy. it felt shared, familiar, like all those years ago.

“you go first,” you offered, tone light.

wanda smiled nervously, glancing down before meeting your eyes again. “i just wanted to say…it’s really nice to see you again.” her voice was soft, almost hesitant. “and…you look good.”

“thank you,” you replied sincerely. “you do too.”

there was another pause, and you leaned forward slightly, gaze steady. “how have you been?”

wanda shrugged, a faint smile playing at her lips. “working. that’s really all i know how to do.”

you frowned at the self deprecating comment, shaking your head slightly. “you know, i’ve actually kept up with your work over the years.”

her brows furrowed in surprise. “really?”

“oh yeah,” you said, grinning triumphantly. “paul and i caught an early screening of his three daughters. it was incredible. it even brought him to tears—more than me, actually.”

wanda couldn’t help but smile, though she faltered slightly at the mention of his name. “he knows about us?”

you nodded, your expression gentle. “yeah. he’s a fan too, by the way.”

“that’s…kind of strange,” she admitted with a soft chuckle. “but also really flattering.”

the moment of levity passed, and wanda hesitated before asking, her voice quieter now, “when’s the wedding?”

your smile shifted, still warm but with a hint of wistfulness. you looked away briefly, as though picturing the scene in your mind. “next september, ideally. paul’s parents have this farm in ireland. it’s got these sprawling green fields and so many goats.” you chuckled lightly, glancing back at her. “it’s beautiful that time of year.”

wanda nodded, a faint smile on her lips as she absorbed your words, though her chest felt heavier with each one. “that sounds…lovely,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“i’ll send you a postcard,” you joke, a light laugh escaping your lips. wanda forces a smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. she wishes the context were different, that the distance between you wasn’t so vast, so final.

the silence lingers for a beat too long. it’s palpable, heavy with everything that’s been said—and everything that hasn’t.

you don’t why the next words come out of your mouth.

“you should come over for dinner.” you offer, your smile easy and disarming. you don’t want this to be hard for wanda. anyone could see there’s something still there. and you know wanda—you know her tells. there’s something she wants to say but can’t. this is your way of making her feel better about feeling it, regardless of if you can even help it.

“pardon?” her brows furrow. “to your place?”

you nod as casually as you can. “when do you leave?” you ask.

wanda looks away for a second, clears her throat. “i haven’t booked a returning flight yet,” she admits sheepishly. “was kinda hoping i’d find a reason to stay.”

you nod, smiling knowingly, but you don’t comment.

“come over for dinner,” you say again. “paul is an excellent cook.”

wanda almost smiles, recalling all the times you tried to cook for her but failed miserably. she was usually the one that did the cooking. it’s strange—comforting, even—to think that someone else is now treating you that way.

still, she hesitates. the idea of being in the same space as him, in the home you’ve built together, feels almost unbearable.

“only if you’re sure,” she says.

you sit up straighter in your seat. “it doesn’t have to be weird. i think you’ll like him. he’s a really good man, and i’d really love for you to meet him. and he already thinks you’re talented.”

wanda looks down at her hands, still processing your offer. “you’d really want me there?” she asks, voice above a whisper.

“of course,” you reply sincerely.

wanda shakes her head, her expression caught between hesitation and yearning. “i don’t know.” she says. “that kind of sounds like a lot… and i don’t want to make things awkward. for you or for him.”

you shake your head as if she had just said something silly. “it won’t be. paul knows about us, and he’s one of the most understanding people i’ve ever met. he’s never been anything but supportive.”

wanda let’s out a short laugh, the kind that almost cracks. you think you see tears forming, glinting faintly in the windows light.

“he sounds perfect.” she murmurs, a hint of sadness evident.

“he’s not perfect.” a soft chuckle. “no one is. but he’s perfect for me.”

wanda smiles sadly. “okay.” she nods. “only if you’re okay with it.”

“i’m more than okay with it.” you assure her.

a faint smile tugs at her lips and wanda nods. “thank you,” she says softly.

“thank you,” you reply, warm and firm. “for coming all the way to new york. for wanting to talk.”

you start to gather your things, ready to head out. “i do have to leave now,” you say with an apologetic smile. “i’ve got a meeting with an editor in half an hour.”

once you’re standing, you look directly into wanda’s eyes. “thank you for the latte. it was great seeing you.” you say, and mean it. “i’ll be in touch.”

and with that, you’re already on your way out the door.

[sparkles-rule-4eva]

🎵 Whoooo wants a nice little short 'n sweet post-Prime one shot with Sonic and Tails and some angst and also fluff and cuddles and nightmares and sadness and cuteness and the implementing of that one headcanon from the post I made about Sonic getting more cuddly and clingy when he's hurt or upset??? 🎵

Sonic Prime - Healing Hugs

Something had happened in the cave with Sonic. Tails was absolutely certain of it.

At first, it had just been pleasant changes, pleasant surprises. Sonic had suddenly switched to being a 100% team player, had started paying attention to each and every thing Tails instructed, and seemingly communicated with Shadow just as the Ultimate Lifeform arrived out of nowhere to Chaos Control the Paradox Prism to who-knows-where.

Then there had been the more weird changes.

Every time Tails opened his mouth, Sonic would drop everything to listen to every word with laser focus, even if it was about something as simple as what he was going to get for dinner or some cool comics he'd read. He was giving a lot more hugs, too, far more than usual. Sonic used to be a lot more selective about physical affection, but now, Tails couldn't seem to get through 30 minutes of a day without his older brother scooping him up in an embrace, however brief. Not that he was complaining, it was nice.

He kept catching the hedgehog lying around in the grass, fingering the green leaves with utter delight in his eyes. Once he found him on the beach, sitting in a palm tree and singing some kind of pirate-y sounding song. Another time he found him wandering slowly around the woods nearby, talking to the flickies about how pretty the trees were.

Something was off, but Tails couldn't put his finger on it. From his perspective, he hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary happen during the battle in the cave, but Sonic's change in behavior made it painfully obvious something had.

Especially when the more negative changes started manifesting.

Not negative in a sense that Sonic was doing anything wrong. But he seemed . . . a little rattled. Some of his hugs were far more than just quick side squeezes. Sometimes he'd stare at Tails with an oddly pensive, faraway look in his eyes.

In bed, one night about a week after the cave incident, Tails found himself tossing and turning. These thoughts were driving him up the wall with how often they'd been occupying his mind lately.

He wanted so badly to sit down with Sonic and ask him what happened. He knew something had happened. But whether Sonic was willing to talk about it was another question entirely. He knew something was different, but he also knew his brother. Sonic didn't like uncomfortable conversations. If he felt unsafe, he would run.

Tails knew better than to confront him with questions that Sonic would likely not want to answer. If he'd wanted to tell Tails what was going on, what was different, he probably would've told him already.

With an exhausted sigh, Tails gave up trying to sleep and sat up in bed, casting a quick glance at the digital clock on his nightstand.

3:47 a.m.

Great. Even when I'm not working on a project, I STILL end up sleep-deprived. He smirked. At least Sonic can't get ticked at me this time, it's not my fault.

Speaking of the Blue Devil, he was right down the hall. Conked out on the couch, where he often slept. In fact, he'd been sleeping there every night for the past week.

Since he couldn't sleep, anyway, Tails slipped out of bed and crept down the hall, having memorized which boards creaked and which ones didn't. He half-hoped Sonic was awake so he'd have someone to talk to, but as he emerged into the living room, he saw his brother sound asleep, half-curled on his side.

Tails blinked and looked closer.

Sonic was asleep, but . . . he was also clinging extra tightly to his pillow. And he looked . . . incredibly stressed.

Was he having a bad dream?

Tails took a couple steps towards the couch until he stood right beside it. In past experiences where he'd found his brother having a nightmare, talking it out rarely helped. Sometimes even waking him up didn't help, either. He usually just wound up disoriented and panicking, and sometimes even ran off to deal with his feelings alone out in the wilderness.

Tails really didn't want him to leave. He also didn't want him to be alone.

He reached out and ever so gently placed his hand over Sonic's clenched fist, both ungloved.

One thing he had discovered about his brother during hard times like this was that he became more clingy. On the rare occasion he was visibly upset, he'd sometimes come up and just hug Tails without a word. When he was sick or injured somehow (and actually allowing himself to be taken care of), he tended to snuggle more. If he was in enough pain, he'd hold onto Tails as tightly as he could. Sometimes he'd do the same with their other friends, but Tails was always his go-to.

Not that it happened very often. Tails only knew these things because he'd known Sonic for most of his life. Sonic had raised him. He'd seen more of Sonic than anyone else had.

Now, he rubbed a finger over his brother's fist for a moment, then very carefully tugged the pillow out of Sonic's unconscious grasp. He set it softly on the floor, then carefully clambered onto the couch next to him, lay down, and hugged him tightly.

Without waking up, Sonic wrapped his arms around him in return and held him close, burying his face between Tails's ears with a barely audible whimper.

Tails could feel his brother's heartbeat racing, so he snuggled in closer and softly began to purr.

And, with time, he felt Sonic start to calm down.

A couple minutes went by, and his heart rate slowed down just a bit. The tension coiled throughout his entire body started to unwind, and his spiked-up quills lowered slightly in a more relaxed position. His ears were still kinda droopy, but he seemed a lot more restful than he had a few minutes ago.

Tails smiled, still bundled up tightly against Sonic. And his smile only grew wider when he felt his brother start purring, too.

There was something infinitely comforting about being held, about snuggling with his brother, the person who loved him to the moon and back. The person he loved in exactly the same way. For those moments, the very problems that had been keeping Tails awake half an hour earlier seemed to fade. He was here, Sonic was here, no words were spoken or needed, and they would be okay.

Tails slept soundly for the rest of the night.

-

The sound of flickies singing from the treetops woke Sonic the next day. He blinked blearily as his eyes came into focus, and he realized that Tails had joined him sometime during the night.

Once upon a time, waking up to find him right there had made him jump. It didn't anymore.

He smiled, carefully adjusting one hand so he could stroke his little brother's bangs and give him a tiny scratch behind one ear. Tails mumbled something unintelligible in his sleep, and snuggled closer in Sonic's chest.

He grinned wider. Tails hadn't been snuggly to this level in a while. Granted, he'd always been the more snuggly one of the two of them, but still. It kind of reminded Sonic of the first couple years he'd been taking care of Tails, when the kit was between 3 and 4 years old.

His smile faded a little as he thought of Nine at that age, still alone, still being bullied and hurt, with no one to save him and show him the love and care he deserved.

He could only hope that the other Shatterverse variants were showing him such kindness now. The thought that he would never get to see him again made his heart ache in a way he couldn't quell.

Sonic studied Tails's sleeping face, noting the intense similarities and differences between him and Nine. He wondered whether Nine had always existed even before the Shatter event, as a part of his little brother that Tails would never bring to light. Was it the same with Mangey and Sails?

A tiny snort escaped him against his will as he thought about whether Mangey's existence was an implication that a part of Tails just wanted to go a little feral. Sometimes he couldn't blame him.

His suppressed laugh had Tails stirring, blinking open his big blue eyes. He looked back at Sonic, grinning sleepily. "G'morning."

Sonic ruffled his bangs again, smiling as Tails giggled. "G'morning, little buddy."

Stop calling me that!

He froze at the memory of Nine's angry shout, and Tails clearly saw it.

"Are you okay?" he asked with a gentle, inquiring frown, slowly sitting up.

Sonic sighed as he sat up as well, leaning back to stretch, then pulled his little brother close again. "I've got a story for you, bud," he admitted, deciding it was about time to open up about what had really happened in the cave.

Tails gazed up at him with surprise, but then smiled and nodded.

"I'm listening," he replied quietly.

AO3 version

Did I come up with this while hugging a giant pillow during my nap earlier today? Maybe :3

I also maybe just really wanted to implement that headcanon somewhere teehee

[deadsetromance]

IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

(not my gif!)

gerard way x gn!reader

summary: he's your roommate...but maybe he's more than that.

warnings: unedited writing, fluff, no use of [y/n]

note: so sorry i haven't posted in forever! i have a few requests and a few more half-complete drafts, so hopefully those should be up soon <3

you supposed there were worse roommates out there. actually, thinking about it, you realized how lucky you were.

you got along really well with your roommate, gerard. he’d been sharing an apartment for nearly two years now, and you were sure you knew him better than you knew yourself.

you know he forgets to take the coffee pods out of the keurig, and sometimes he leaves the heater running for too long.

you don’t think you’ve ever seen him sleep. sometimes you wonder if he’s a vampire or something, what with the scribbling coming from his room at all hours of the night.

to be fair… you’re hardly any better. you sleep little more than he does, when you do fall asleep it’s usually on the couch, and you leave the television on all the time.

you’re incredibly lucky, you realize. lucky that he’s as sweet as he is, bringing you coffee in the mornings, and stopping by your job on his commute. he’s even slipped a few drawings your way. some are drawings of you, others are silly little doodles he gives you when you’re having a bad day. sometimes, he’ll show you characters for the comics he’s working on, asking for your input.

you realize that you’re lucky that he’s so helpful, that he’s not a creep, that you both get along so well. you’re lucky that you’ve found a friend who will sit and watch television reruns with you when neither of you can fall asleep.

that’s why you slip a record under his door one night. you don’t know if he even likes sinatra, but you give it to him anyway. there’s no special occasion really, you just thought of him when you found in the wee small hours in the record store you visited. you don’t sign your name on the post it you stuck to it. all you write is “from one insomniac to another”. you feel embarrassed for some reason you can’t place, and something slithers in your stomach. maybe you shouldn’t have given it to him…maybe he doesn’t like sinatra. it’s too late now though, it’s already done.

☠︎ ☠︎ ☠︎ ☠︎

it’s late one night…or early, depending on how you look at it. you’re tired, whatever movie you were watching forgotten and on mute. you can hear gerard milling around in the kitchen, you can smell the coffee he’s brewing. you’re tired, but you can’t fall asleep.

“thanks for the record” gerard called from the kitchen. “i really liked it”

you smile, one of those hazy tired smiles, the kind you do when you’re between being awake and asleep. “i didn’t know if you liked sinatra, i hope it’s ok”

you miss the way he grins at you, too busy yawning.

“it’s great i actually…” he walked off in the middle of his sentence, a habit you’d noticed he had, only to come back with the disk in his hands. “do you mind?”

it didn’t matter if you said no, he already turned to put it on, smiling back at you as he dropped the needle to the record.

“what are we watching?” he asked, sitting next to you on the couch. close enough to be touching you, but still far enough to give you space. it’s like a paradox, you think, but then you tell yourself to shut up. you’re too tired to know what you’re talking about.

“i dunno, i stopped paying attention.” your eyes flit to the movie playing on the television, watching the car chase for a moment before turning your attention back to him. “you’re going to keep yourself up all night drinking coffee this late.” you might have frowned at him if you weren’t too busy beaming.

he knew you were teasing, you could tell by the glint in his eye. “i just need a few finishing touches on my project and then i’m done.”

you didn’t say anything more for a while, taking a moment to take everything in. the record playing softly in the background as you curled closer to gerard. his head resting on yours as you listened to his breathing, memorizing the pace of his heart.

it’s quiet…intimate, and you’re tired. tired and happy.

“you tired?” he questions softly.

“a little,” you don’t know why you’re whispering.

“do you work tomorrow?”

“yeah, i open,” you groan, rubbing your eyes. you think you feel him press a kiss to the top of your head, but you don’t want to get your hopes up.

it’s quiet again, though this time it’s too quiet. you’re left with thoughts of gerard running through your head, and you wish that one of you would say something. you should be ashamed, you scold yourself, thinking of him the way you do when he’s sitting right next to you.

“what are you thinking about?” he prods gently. he’s soft with you, the way he always is, careful not to overstep with his questions.

“nothing really,” you lie, because you’d rather not risk what comfort you have now. “what are you thinking about?”

it seems like he didn’t expect the question to be turned back on him. he hesitates, and the silence is thick…too thick. his face is illuminated by the light from the tv, and he looks nervous. you don’t think you’ve ever seen him look quite as terrified as he does now. the lighting shifts, and he’s blanketed in darkness again, but you notice something change in his eyes.

“i think i love you” he whispers against your ear.

you feel like you can’t breathe. you think you heard him wrong. you’re worried this is all a dream, a good dream, the kind that would leave you reeling when you wake up.

you want to hear him say it again.

you lean your head back against his shoulder, and he breathes out with a shudder. you watch the explosions on tv as your hand finds his. “i love you too.”

that’s it then, everything is out in the open. maybe you’re tired, but you sigh gently as he cups your face in his hands. thinking back, you can’t exactly pinpoint when your feelings for him changed, but you suppose it doesn’t matter now. he loves you and you love him. it’s surprisingly simple.

“can i…?” he doesn’t need to finish his question as you lean in closer to him. his breath is warm, and he smells like coffee and sleepless nights, and you’re waiting for him. your eyes are closed as you breathe him in, and they stay that way as he kisses you softly.

he’s…soft, softer than you imagine, and you can’t help but smile.

in the wee small hours of the morning, he is yours, and you are his.

[monster-ultra-yellow]

anyway what about a research expedition of some sort where they'll be outside of civilization for a while so of course they pack food for everyone. and quite a bit, too! after all, it'll be what? a month, maybe more, where they're in the wilderness away from wider society?

but one person there's a vegetarian, and pretty strict about it.

and nobody remembered while they were packing supplies. and nobody realized until their first night out in the middle of nowhere.

now this person can still eat, of course! there's still fruits and vegetables and carby things, but nothing really substantial. while everyone else in this research team is eating a great, big, hearty meal after working hard in the field for 8-10-12 hours straight, the poor vegetarians got nothing but a side of canned corn. it's not nothing, but it's not enough to replace all the energy they're burning outside every day of the week.

and it gnaws at them more and more every passing hour. they can't keep up with everyone else in the field without feeling faint. they can't focus on data analysis and paper writing because their minds consumed by the hollow inside them that's paradoxically growing ever greater as their stomach shrinks. they can't even sleep at night because their stomach is so crampy, and the rest of their team is being kept up too from how loud their gut is growling. but at least they have goddamn canned corn while everyone else gets to eat, right in front of them, every single day.

would they break whatever moral code keeps them vegetarian? or would they shamble back into the world after the research is done, weeks later, their clothes hanging off of their frame?

[kittykatninja321]

(Ok, I’m gonna basically repeat something I’ve already said in my mutual’s replies because the urge to yap about this has been keeping me up at night). Anyways, to me the drama of Dick and Jason’s pre-DITF relationship comes not from not from conflict between them (I don’t think Dick was mean to Jason for more than a day), but rather from the fact that the relationship never reached its full potential. I kinda see their relationship as somewhat paradoxical, while they do have a special connection on account of being in each other’s 1st brother, they’re not as close as they could’ve been, certainly not as close as Dick and Tim.

I just don’t think there’s any way they could’ve been super close. Dick is a young adult in a far away city dealing with his own life, realistically it’s not really his fault if he doesn’t have the time to hang with kid adopted brother every weekend. It’s not that I think that they never hung out, (there’s been retroactive additions to interactions between Dick and Robin Jason, which have been pretty cute for the most part), I just can’t see them being super best brothers. Maybe they could’ve gotten there if they had more time, maybe they were in the process of getting there, but Jason dies before they get the chance, the tragedy of their relationship comes from what could’ve been.

Another thing that leads me to this interpretation is the way Dick talks to Bruce about Jason’s death in Titans #55

Despite his intense reaction to the news earlier, when he talks to Bruce it sorta feels like he’s talking to Bruce about a relative that Bruce lost, but there’s a degree of separation between himself and Jason. Now this could totally just be me and no else see’s it that way, but that’s the vibe I got

But the main reason that I don’t think that Dick and Jason could have been particularly close follows the reasoning of “if Jason felt like he had someone like Dick Grayson looking out for him, he would’ve acted differently”. If there’s anything I think is a worthwhile take away from the infamous “Jason attacking Tim in Titans tower” issue is the part where Jason says something along the lines of “maybe if I had had the sort of friends Tim has, things would’ve gone differently for me”. Like YEAH Jason’s behavior pre-death does not align with the behavior of someone who has a robust social network/feels supported. He rushes to look for his mother after feeling rejected by Bruce because he’s desperate for family, and that sort of desperation doesn’t come out of nowhere. If Jason had felt like he had other lifelines I think he would’ve acted differently. So no I don’t think he could’ve had a super close knit relationship with Dick

To me the ultimate theme of Dick and Jason’s relationship pre death is “ mourning what could’ve been” which makes a great backdrop for all of the post resurrection drama. Like I genuinely lowkey think of brothers in blood as Jason’s honest attempt at brotherly bonding, he was leaving dead prey on Dick’s doorstep like a cat with a high prey drive. Murder just isn’t a love language for Dick the way it is for Jason 😔

[olivieblake]

I was saving Januaries for election night—the plan was to disconnect and wait for morning—but I couldn’t concentrate. Then I couldn’t concentrate for a few days. I finally picked it up, though, because you always make me feel like the world is a beautiful place, and I needed that.

Anyway, I sat down with Januaries and I teared up a bit when the first story was The Wish Bridge. What a great one. I’m not sure if I made a note of it when I read it before, but this time I fully cried when Lila learned about the phases of the moon.

It was so wonderful to see some of the old favorites. I hadn’t read A Year in January since it was first published and my goodness I forgot how much I liked it. Also a large spider crawled across my page when I started The Animation Games, so that was fun and fitting.

So okay. I happened to read Monsterlove when I was sitting around waiting to hear from my friend who was in the hospital giving birth. This is actually the first time someone I love has had a kid. I know it’s a lot, intellectually, but it’s not something I can really understand. And I know she’s been afraid in that way that people with bad parents are afraid, even though her baby is so wanted and so so loved. Monsterlove was moving and powerful and intimate, and I haven’t read anything like that before. Reading that story in that moment meant so very much to me.

Preexisting Conditions is my other new favorite! That is so exactly my thing. I won’t say anything else because spoilers but I found that ending hideously satisfying.

I’ll stop rambling but I spent a week reading Januaries and it was amazing. Also, you described the audiobook somewhere and I realized I need to listen to that eventually too. For The Atlas Paradox, the whole cast was great but I was completely blown away by the Belen chapter; if that voice actor has done more work for you, then I definitely need to check it out.

Happy new year! I hope you’re doing well 💙

omg thank you so much for this, I don't even know what to say, I'm so honored my work makes you feel the world is a beautiful place. I feel like that is the goal? the point? but many people don't walk away with that feeling or don't really receive that message and then I feel like I failed in some way. so. thank you

I am ALSO thrilled that monsterlove spoke to you because I knew it might mean something to other people who had also experienced that, but wasn't sure how it would read to someone who hadn't. what a wonderful thing to hear. and YAY okay so a lot of people have expressed how much they dislike preexisting conditions (which I don't get, since it's basically exactly the same story as the animation games but told more spitefully lol) and I personally had to fight for that story to even be in the collection. I like it!! I think it's funny! SORRY!!! but anyway thank you so much. "hideously satisfying" is exactly what I was going for, you understand me

yes, the actor who voiced belen is alex palting and she read "chaos theory" and "monsterlove," which were probably the two most demanding performances in the collection. she KILLED it, I truly think she should win awards for that performance. her rendition of violeta is my favorite thing. I also find the audio version of "the audit" to be soooo funny. I've listened to it multiple times

[blackswaneuroparedux]

‘Pimpernel of the Hellenes’, ‘Major Paddy’, ‘Enchanted maniac’: Will the real Paddy Leigh Fermor please stand up?

Paradox reconciles all contradictions. - Patrick Leigh Fermor

So one evening I was baby sitting my nephews and nieces here in our family chalet in Verbier, high up in the Swiss Alps. It was my turn to baby sit as the rest of my family enjoyed the fantastic classical music concerts and events showcased at the two week long Verbier 30th Festival. The little scamps had gone to bed and my father and I watched an old British war movie on DVD, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957). It was filmed by the legendary team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on the 1950 book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe’ by W. Stanley Moss. 

I’ve seen the film a couple of times before, but until now never really paid attention to where the title came from. My father said it was from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ And so it was. In the play, Oberon, the king of the fairies and the Queen are having a fairly bitter drawn-out fight over custody of a changeling Indian child, and this is how the pissed off king greets the queen when they run into each other, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”. Oberon is basically saying "Oh Lord, it's you..." and Titania's response is basically a flippant middle finger. One of the best modern reasons to read Shakespeare: to throw playful erudite shade at others.

Anyway, the historical background of the film is the German invasion of Crete in May 1941.  After an intense ten-day battle, Allied troops were driven back across the island, and many were evacuated from beaches along the southern coast. Some Cretans and British officers took to the mountains to organise resistance against the occupying forces.  The German occupation that followed was especially brutal. Dreadful reprisals followed every act of resistance. The German commander, General Müller, insisted on taking 50 Cretan lives for every German soldier killed; he became known as ‘The Butcher of Crete’.

As a Classicist side note, there had been a close association between Britain and Crete since the early 20th century, when archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans had uncovered the sensational remains of a Minoan palace at Knossos. The headquarters of the British archaeological school in Crete was a large villa alongside the site, known as Villa Ariadne. Several archaeologists, who knew the island and its people well, went underground after the German occupation to aid the Cretan resistance. Continuing in this tradition, scholar and travel-writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had got to know Greece in the 1930s, joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

During the German occupation, Major Paddy Leigh Fermor travelled to Crete three times to help organise local resistance against the hated German occupation. On the third occasion, in February 1944, he was parachuted in with a specific mission to kidnap German commander General Müller, to boost morale on Crete along with his erstwhile SOE comrade Capt. W. Stanley Moss MC (aka Billy Moss) of the Coldstream Guards. However, just after they parachute in, General Müller was replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe, who transferred from the Russian Front. Thinking that capturing one general was as good as another, Fermor merrily go ahead with the daring kidnap operation.

It’s at this point that the narrative of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ (1957) picks up. Dirk Bogarde plays Paddy Leigh Fermor, David Oxley plays Moss, and Marius Goring plays the taciturn German paratroop general. Blink and you’ll miss the late great Christopher Lee making a cameo appearance as a German officer in the dentist’s room scene.

The film naturally takes some liberty with the facts but it’s a cracking yarn of high adventure and drama. Xan Fielding, a close friend of Leigh Fermor from the SOE in Cairo, was taken on as technical adviser. The fact the film was shot in in the Alpes-Maritimes in France and Italy, and on the Côte d'Azur in France, far away from the craggy valleys and mountains of Crete itself. The director Michael Powell spent some time walking in Crete to get to know the island, but decided that, with the confused and volatile state of Greek politics, it was not suitable to film there.

Looking back years after he had directed it Powell didn’t think much of his own film. By contrast, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who was on set throughout the film shoot, was very happy with Bogarde’s portrayal of him with Byronic glamour. Watching the movie again ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ remains a classic and stands out from many British war films of the 1950s because of its realism. The British SOE men and the Cretan guerrillas look absolutely right for their parts. It is dramatic and full of suspense while filled with much boyish humour.

I was disappointed with one notable omission in the film that did happen in real life. According to Patrick Leigh Fermor, at dawn one day during the journey across the mountains, General Kreipe was looking at the mist rising from Mount Ida and began to recite, in Latin, the opening lines of Horace’s ninth ode:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto?

Behold yon Mountains hoary height, Made higher with new Mounts of Snow; Again behold the Winters weight Oppress the lab’ring Woods below: And Streams, with Icy fetters bound, Benum’d and crampt to solid Ground

(John Dryden 1685)

Leigh Fermor picked up on the General, and recited the remaining stanzas of the Ode. ‘Ach so, Herr Major,’ said Kreipe when Leigh Fermor had finished. Both men were amazed to realise they shared a classical education and a love of ancient Latin poetry.

Leigh Fermor later wrote that it was as though the war had ceased to exist for a moment, as ‘We had both drunk from the same fountains before.’ It brought captor and captive together with a strange bond. The scene was not reproduced in the film, as Powell and Pressburger probably thought it would make the men sound too academic for a popular cinema audience.

Leigh Fermor and Kreipe met again in the early 1970s, on a Greek television show, and got on famously together. The General said Leigh Fermor had treated him chivalrously as a captive. They remained friends until Kreipe’s death.

After sharing a late night drink with my father after the film, I began to muse on the figure of Paddy Leigh Fermor, a family friend and someone I met along with his wife, Joan, as a little girl. My grandparents, and especially my grandmother, knew Paddy briefly from their days during and after the Second World War. 

My father shared a few stories about him when he and my mother visited his beautiful home in Greece, where even at his advanced age he remained the most generous of hosts and the most outrageous flirt. 

One of my memories was getting into his battered old Peugeot in the drive way and trying to drive it when my feet could barely touch the pedals. It wouldn’t have mattered in any case as the brakes didn’t work as he cheerfully said later as we careened around a dirt road to go around the mountains for a drive.

Many years later in April 2022, I tried to visit the home of the late Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor - a sort of pristine shrine to their memory that one can also stay in any of the rooms as a vacation rental  - in the coastal fishing village of Kadarmyli in the Peloponnese, as part of a hiking and mountaineering sojourn around Greece with ex-Army friends. We couldn’t stay there as it was already rented out to other guests, and so we stayed higher up the mountain in a villa, but we swam in front of the Fermor’s home which was on the water’s edge.

You could never put your finger on Paddy Leigh Fermor. He hid behind his gift for telling yarns, and pulling Ancient Greek verses out of the thin air, as well as boisterously singing local Greek songs with a drink in his hand. 

Even after his death in 2011, the question keeps nagging as to who was Paddy Leigh Fermor?

The Dirk Bogarde film too seems to ask, who exactly is the ‘real’ Patrick Leigh Fermor - or the real anyone? Taking its title from a Shakespearian play concerned with dreams and disguises, magic and power, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ is all about questions of identity.

Under the film credits, we see Dirk Bogarde in uniform; then, unexpectedly, we see him in the flamboyant outfit of a Cretan hill-bandit. A title informs us that Major Leigh Fermor was also known by the Greek code-name “Philidem.” In other words, there are two of him (at least), and on one level the adventure the film is about to unfold reflects a conflict in his personality. It’s a conflict shared, unknowingly, by his Nazi opposite number, the fierce, arrogant General Kreipe (an unlikely “proud Titania,” but it’s true that he “with a monster is in love” – the monster of Nazism). Kreipe’s human side is so rigorously repressed by the demands of war and “glory” that he is genuinely unaware of it; ironically, this humanness, which constitutes the true manhood of this Teuton warrior, is revealed by a boy (equivalent to Shakespeare’s Indian Prince?) - who, in turn, is the most grown up person in the movie.

If “Philidem” appears under the credits, caped and open-shirted, a romantic dream-figure out of an operetta or a storybook, he is first seen in the film proper as a coarser, more down-to-earth version of the same thing – an ordinary Cretan peasant in a shabby suit, waiting for a bus. When he makes contact with the Resistance, his personality fragments further.

To some, he is the mystical Philidem, Pimpernel of the Hellenes and righter of wrongs. To others he is “Major Paddy,” the happy-go-lucky Englishman of popular movie myth conducting war as if it were a branch of amateur theatricals, a gentleman adventurer relying on breeding to get him through and making fun of the whole business. To Bill Moss (David Oxley), the newly arrived junior officer sent to assist him, he is the cool, fast-thinking professional soldier. And to himself? In his quietly passionate defence of Cretan life and culture, he seems someone else again: a scholar and aesthete outraged by the barbarism and folly of war, and by the moronic arrogance shown by his captive toward the Cretan people.

Whatever his persona, Leigh Fermor is a chameleon who never seems to change very radically in himself. Perhaps because he has this quality of seeming all things to all men – and being those things - he remains unfazed by the monolithic might of the German military machine. Fluent in Greek, he can also speak German like a German and is easily able to assume another disguise, that of a faceless Nazi officer. Although he and Moss make fun of themselves - “If only I had a monocle!” muses Moss when Leigh Fermor tells him he “looks like an Englishman dressed like a German, leaning against the Ritz bar” - they are able to effect the kidnapping with an ease that seems appropriately Puckish. General Kreipe is ignominiously thrust onto the floor of his own limousine, gagged, and sat upon by a couple of the peasants he so despises. Kreipe’s rage is compounded by his firm conviction that he has been snatched by “amateurs” - a belief Leigh Fermor and Moss slyly make no objection to, knowing how it will gnaw at his already shaky Master Race self-confidence.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, aka Major Paddy, aka Philidem, in the film’s closing moments, is far from being self-assured intellectual or dashing amateur adventurer or legendary outlaw of the hills. He’s just a tired man who wants to go home and rest up. “How do you feel?” asks Moss. “Flat” is the reply. “You look flat!” says Moss. “I know how I’d like to look …” murmurs Leigh-Fermor wistfully. Moss knows what he’s going to say, and joins in the litany: “Like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman – and leaning against the Ritz bar!” It’s easy to imagine them ordering drinks at that renowned watering-hole with all the suavity required by this little fantasy. 

Still, the film’s last images of Crete receding in the distance, until all we can see is the sea, suggests that maybe Major Paddy’s heart is really back in those hills in the “fair and fertile” land that has become as much a Powellian landscape of the mind for us as the studio-built Himalayan convent of ‘Black Narcissus’ or the monochrome Heaven of ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. And, as the film POV closing shots departs both Crete and this film, I began to think that being “dressed like an Englishman and leaning against the Ritz bar” would, for Patrick Leigh Fermor constitute yet another disguise. After all, he said he was of Irish aristocratic stock.

Traveller and writer Paddy Leigh Fermor is best known for two events. He’s known for leading the commando group in occupied Crete to kidnap General Kreipe. But he is also known for the boy who, at a mere 18 years old, set off with little money and a lot of nerve in 1933 to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was, in the words of one of his obituaries, a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene. Self-reliance and derring-do were lessons learnt from the cradle. When Fermor’s geologist father was posted to India, he and his wife left the infant with family in Northamptonshire and did not return until his fourth birthday. In retrospect, he took great delight in being sent to a school for difficult children and getting himself expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter eight years his senior. His school report infamously judged him ‘a dangerous mix of sophistication and recklessness’.

Sharing a flat in Shepherd’s Market, one of Mayfair’s seedier corners, Leigh Fermor schooled himself in literature, history, Latin and Greek.

He honed his character with the company of extraordinary people and the words of great writers - he had a prodigious memory for prose as well as poetry. He befriended literary lions such as Sacheverell Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. His travels began aged ‘eighteen-and-three-quarters’ when he rejected Sandhurst Royal Military College in order to walk the length of Europe from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He took with him Horace’s Odes and the Oxford Book of Verse though Leigh Fermor could recite Shakespeare soliloquies, Marlowe speeches, Keats’s Odes and as he modestly put it ‘the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge’ from memory.

Leigh Fermor was then a self-made man in the most literal sense.

Setting off from England in 1933, Fermor resolved to traverse Europe living like a hermit; sleeping in bars and begging for food. But his manly charms and boyish good looks found him being passed like a favourite godson from Schloss to palace by European nobility and he developed a lifelong penchant for aristocratic company. I his own words, ‘In Hungary, I borrowed a horse, then plunged into Transylvania; from Romania on into Bulgaria’. Having reached Constantinople in January 1935, Fermor continued to explore Greece where he fought on the royalist side in Macedonia quelling a republican revolution. In Athens Leigh Fermor met Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian countess with whom he fell in love. They were living together in a Moldovan castle when World War Two was declared.

Fluent in Greek, Leigh Fermor was posted as a liaison officer in Albania. Recruited as a Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was shipped from Cairo to German-occupied Crete where he lived disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years. On his third expedition to Crete in 1944, Leigh Fermor was parachuted alone onto the island and made connections in the Cretan resistance movement. While waiting for his compatriot Captain Bill Stanley Moss to land by water from Cairo, Leigh Fermor hatched a plot to kidnap German Commander General Heinrich Krieple. He liaised comfortably with Cretan partisans and bandits to pull off one of the war’s greatest coups de théâtre.

Disguised as German soldiers, Leigh Fermor and Moss stopped Krieple’s car at an improvised check point en route back to Nazi HQ in Knossos. Abandoning the General’s car after a two-hour drive, Leigh Fermor left a note indicating that the kidnappers were British so that there wouldn’t be reprisals against Cretan nationals. When the abduction of the unpopular commander was discovered, a German officer in Heraklion allegedly said ‘well, gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne’. It turns out that General Kreipe was despised by his own soldiers because, amongst other things, he objected to the stopping of his own vehicle for checking in compliance with his commands concerning approved travel orders. It’s why for instance the German troops, both in the film and in real life, dare not stop the General’s car as it drove through the check points at Heraklion.

Krieple was evacuated and taken to Cairo and Leigh Fermor entered the annals of World War Two’s most devil-may-care heroes. With characteristic panache, when he was demobbed Leigh Fermor moved into an attic room at the Ritz paying half a guinea a night. But his first travel book, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’, was not about the European odyssey or the Cretan escapades and centred on Leigh Fermor’s adventures in the Carribbean. Published in 1950, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’ was an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel ‘Live and Let Die’ (1954).

As a host and house guest, Paddy Leigh Fermor was much sought-after. At one of his parties in Cairo, he counted nine crowned heads. He was a confirmed two-gin-and-tonics before lunch man and smoked eighty to 100 cigarettes a day. His party pieces included singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani and reciting ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ backwards. In Cyprus while staying with Laurence Durrell, Leigh Fermor apparently stunned crowds in Bella Pais into silence by singing folk songs in perfect Cretan dialect. As Durrell wrote in ‘Bitter Lemons’ (1957), ‘it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes’.

He struck up a partiuclar friendship with the famous Mitford sisters, especially Deborah Mitford, later ‘Debo’, the Duchess of Devonshire. It was at the Devonshires’ Irish estate Lismore Castle that ‘Darling Debo’ and ‘Darling Pad’ met and began to correspond. A characteristic letter from the Duchess in 1962 reads ‘The dear old President (JFK) phoned the other day. First question was ‘Who’ve you got with you, Paddy?” He’s got you on the brain’ to which Fermor replies of a broken wrist ‘Balinese dancing’s out, for a start; so, should I ever succeed to a throne, is holding an orb. The other drawbacks will surface with time’.

After the war he travelled widely but was always drawn back to Greece. He built a house on the Mani peninsula - which had been, significantly, the only part of Magna Graecia to resist Ottoman colonisation since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Before his death in 2011 at the age of 96, he wrote some of the most acclaimed travel books of the 20th century.

His books contain some of the finest prose writing of the past century and disprove Wilde's maxim that "it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating".

Charm, self-taught knowledge and enthusiasm made up for the lack of a university degree or a private income. His teenage walk across Europe and subsequent romantic sojourn in Baleni, Romania, with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene are proof enough of that. But the difficulty of capturing such an unconventional and glamorous life is made harder by the certainty that Fermor was an unreliable narrator.

He was also an infuriatingly slow writer. Driven by a life-long passion for words yet hampered by anxiety about his abilities, Leigh Fermor published eight books over 41 years. 

‘The Traveller's Tree’ describes his postwar journey through the Caribbean; ‘Mani‘ and ‘Roumeli’ (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life. But it is the books that came out of his trans-Europe walk that reveal both the brilliance and the flaws. ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, 44 years after he set out on the journey. ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ appeared nine years later. Both describe a world of privilege and poverty, communism and the rising tide of Nazism, and end with the unequivocal words, "To be continued". Yet the third volume hung like an albatross around the author's neck. As the years passed, Fermor found it impossible to shape the last part of his story in the way he wanted.

Leigh Fermor was that rarest of men: a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means, and who mostly - and mostly magnificently - succeeded. Always popping off on a journey when he should have been writing about the last one, always ready to party, he was forever chasing beautiful, fascinating or powerful women, even when with his wife, Joan Raynor. She was the great facilitator who funded his passion for travel and writing, as well as women, from her trust fund. His love affairs were discreet but legendary.

Leigh Fermor was happiest among the rogues. Over a lifetime on the road, he sought them, and in turn they responded to his charm, nose for adventure, and his famous wit. He was a keenly-anticipated dinner guest - once outshining Richard Burton at a London society soirée, who he cut-off midway through a recital of ‘Hamlet’. As Richard Burton stormed out, the pleading society hostess said, “But Paddy’s a war hero!” to which Burton grouchily replied, “I don’t give a damn who he is!” 

His partnership with and then marriage to Joan Raynor was an open relationship, at least on Leigh Fermor’s side. Paddy saw in Joan his kindred spirit. Like him, she spent much of her youth travelling to where she pleased; largely in France, where the photographer and literary critic Cyril Connolly became besotted by her. Joan was the daughter of Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell of Dumbleton Hall, Worcestershire. She was not only stunningly pretty but also 'a beautiful ideal, with the perfect bathing dress, the most lovely face, the most elaborate evening dress', as the Eton educated Connolly described her. Joan also stood out from the upper-class beauties of her day in that she supplemented her mean rich father's allowance by earning her living as a decent photographer.

In 1946, she met Leigh Fermor in Athens, while he was deputy director of the British Institute. Joan met him at a time when he was then in a relationship with a French woman called Denise, who was pregnant with his child, which she aborted. The pair would travel to the Caribbean together under the invitation of Greek photographer Costas, falling madly in love.

She was the only woman that - after decades of sexual scandals - matched his own erratic behaviour. Stories of how they dined fully-clothed in the Mediterranean, dragging a table into the sea, as well as their myriad cats and olive groves, paint a restless couple, who, when not out articulating the peoples of their adopted homeland, kept themselves very busy.

The attraction between Paddy and Joan was instant. So many love affairs that Paddy indulged in seemed about as brief as the flame from a burning envelope and you expected this one with Joan to be too. But somehow, miraculously, it lasts. 

The two were apart a great deal, but in their case, absence did make the heart grow fonder. While Paddy was staying in a monastery in Normandy, supposed to be thinking monk-like thoughts that he would eventually put into his masterpiece A Time To Keep Silence, he was also writing sexy letters to Joan: 'At this distance you seem about as nearly perfect a human being as can be, my darling little wretch, so it's about time I was brought to my senses.' And: 'Don't run away with anyone or I'll come and cut your bloody throat.'

She tantalised him with descriptions of Cyril Connolly making passes at her; but she, like Denise, sounded a rather desperate note when she wrote: 'I got the curse so late this month I began to hope I was having a baby and that you would have to make it a legitimate little Fermor. All hopes ruined this morning.'

Fiercely independent - a trait that must have enamoured Paddy - they were best imagined as two pillars of a Greek temple, beside one-another but capable of holding up the roof of the world that they had built for themselves through the lens of ancient history and Hellenic culture. Indeed, it was said that they had a special ‘pact of liberty’. It is this unconquerable aura that led poet laureate John Betjeman to declare his love for her (he called her ‘Dotty’ and remarked that her eyes were as large as tennis balls). For Cyril Connolly, the photographer she shadowed, and with whom she had a scandalised affair during her first marriage, she was a “lovely boy-girl” and Laurence Durrell named her the ‘Corn Goddess’ because of her slender figure and short hair. But of all of these worthy candidates, it was the warrior-poet Patrick Leigh Fermor who finally won her heart.

To Joan, who described herself as a ‘lifelong loner’ in her diaries, her companionship with the uncomplicated Paddy was a relief. They had no children, nor did they want any - or so Paddy claimed. But those who knew Joan suspected she did want children but it never came to pass; and so she became a devoted aunt or dotted on other friends’ children. For both of them their dozens of cats gave them the next best thing to paternal satisfaction. Still, her morbid fascination with photographing cemeteries painted a much darker side.

Joan Raynor’s inheritance subsidised his peripatetic life at least until the enormous success of ‘A Time of Gifts’ in the late 1970s, which in turn created a new market for his previous volumes about Greece, ‘Mani’ and ‘Roumeli’.

With Joan’s tacit consent, Paddy enjoyed amorous flings, discrete sexual affairs with high society women and sampled the low delights of the brothel. This activity rarely made it into his private letters, but the exceptions could be piquant. Writing in 1958 from Cameroon, where he was on the set of a John Huston movie, he told a (male) friend: “ Errol Flynn and I . . . sally forth into dark lanes of the town together on guilty excursions that remind me rather of old Greek days with you.” In a 1961 letter to the film director John Huston’s wife, Ricki, with whom Leigh Fermor had been having sex with (and would die in a car crash in 1969). “I say,” the passage begins, “what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me?” Riffing on pubic lice and their crafty ways, he conjectures that, during a recent romp with an “old pal” in Paris, a force “must have landed” on him “and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things” - to Mrs. Huston, that is. As comic apologies for venereal infection go, the passage is surely a classic.

Like most high flying lives, it was far from blameless. Wounded women were littered in his wake. Some British visitors to Athens were less than impressed by this Englishman who posed as “more Greek than the Greeks”.

Some Greeks shared their disdain. Revisionist historians criticised his role in wartime Crete, and warned their fellow Hellenes that for all his fluency and charm, Leigh Fermor was no latter day Byron. His unoccupied car was blown up outside his Mani house, probably by members of the Greek Communist Party which he had vocally opposed. The accidental fatal shooting of a partisan in Crete led to a long blood feud which made it difficult for Leigh Fermor to re-enter the island until the 1970s, and possibly explains why he chose to settle in the Peloponnese rather than among the hills and harbours of his dreams.

His own books had already eclipsed those incidents, not only among readers of English but also in Greece, where in 2007 the government of his adopted land made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix for services to literature.

Travel writers such as the great Jan Morris have described Leigh Fermor as the master of their trade and its greatest exponent in the 20th century.

When ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, Frederick Raphael wrote: “One feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes; but then what volumes they would be!”

They are not for everyone. Leigh Fermor wrote that written English is a language whose Latinates need pegging down with simple Anglo-Saxonisms, and some feel that he personally could have made more and better use of the mallet. His exuberance is either captivating or florid. It is certainly unique among English prose styles.

Artemis Cooper, his patient and careful biographer wrote that “Paddy had found a way of writing that could deploy a lifetime’s reading and experience, while never losing sight of his ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy 18-year-old self … this was a wonderful way of disarming his readers, who would then be willing to follow him into the wildest fantasies and digressions”.

Those fantasies and digressions took decades to express. ‘A Time of Gifts’ had arguably been 40 years in the making when it was published in 1977. Its sequel, ‘Between the Woods and the Water’, did not appear until 1986. The third and final volume has been awaited ever since. Following Leigh Fermor’s death, a foot-high manuscript was apparently found on his desk.

Once he knuckled down to it, Leigh Fermor loved playing around with words. He was one of our greatest stylists and he was devoted to producing un-improvable books. But writing did not come easily to him, at least partly because it was something of a distraction from the main event, which was living an un-improvable life of unrepentant gaiety and fun.

For forty odd years, a legion of friends and admirers would beat a path to Paddy and Joan’s door. Artists, poets, royalty and writers came, all taking inspiration from their erudite hosts. A visit was an act of communion, a sharing of ideas and stories.

Leigh Fermor influenced a generation of British travel writers, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane, Rory Stewart, and William Dalrymple. Indeed when Bruce Chatwin died, it was Paddy who scattered Chatwin’s ashes near a church in the mountains in Kardamyli. 

When I was there in April 2022, I went to that same church to pay my respects.

But some of Paddy’s life energy was sucked out of him when Joan died in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. It was related that Joan said to her friend Olivia Stewart, who was visiting: 'I really would like to die but who'd look after Paddy?' Olivia said that she would. A few minutes later, Joan fell, hit her head - and died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. Joan had often quoted Rilke: 'The good marriage is one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude.' Now Paddy Leigh Fermor was all alone.

Leigh Fermor was knighted in 2004, the day of his birthday which he delighted in like a giggling schoolboy. But he missed Joan terribly.

For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, according to local Greek friends, he expressed a wish to visit England to bid goodbye to his friends, and then return to die in Kardamyli, though it is also stated that he actually wished to die in England and be buried next to his wife, Joan, in Dumbleton, Gloucestershire. He stayed on at Kardamyli until the 9th June 2011, when he left Greece for the last time. He died in England the following day, 10th June 2011, aged 96. It was reported that he had dined in full black tie on the evening of his death. Paddy had style even unto the end.

A Guard of Honour was formed by the Intelligence Corps and a bugler from his former regiment, the Irish Guards, delivered the ‘Last Post’ at Paddy’s funeral. As had been his wish, he was buried beside Joan. On his gravestone in Dumbleton cemetery is an inscription in Greek, a quote from Constantine Cavafy: “In addition, he was that best of all things, Hellenic.”

Although Joan had passed away at the age of ninety-one, after suffering a fall in the Mani. Her body was repatriated to Dumbleton, the place of her birth - ironic that her dream was to be as far as she could possibly go from the rolling humdrum Worcestershire hills. But perhaps she intended to return all along. When Paddy was buried beside her it seemed that the ‘pact of liberty’ that these two lonely souls had forged themselves could be tested in the great elsewhere. Joan was more than his muse (as many of her obituaries were at pains to declare) but his greatest adventure.

To come around full circle from the movie ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957) that I saw that night in Verbier, my father told me that rather poignantly, General Kreipe, the German commander Leigh Fermor had captured - once an enemy, and later a friend - left behind notes and photographs from across his life. On one of those notes, it was discovered, the following was scribbled from a brief visit to Greece: “Somewhere, amidst all the disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy, and” it concluded, “…of their lives together.”

His life with Joan and all that she meant to him was one part of the mosaic of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was. But it’s incomplete. 

Paddy didn’t like the idea of a biography, and neither did Joan when she was alive. But friends had persuaded them that unless Paddy appointed someone to write his life, he might find himself the subject of a book whether he liked it or not. In Artemis Cooper they couldn’t have chosen a better writer to chronicle Paddy’s life as a man of action and letters. Cooper, was the daughter of another accomplished diplomat and historian, John Julius Norwich, and grand-daughter of  Duff and Diana Cooper. As the wife of the historian Antony Beevor, she became a trusted friend of the Leigh Fermors. Cooper was too good of a historian to let her friendship lead her astray from being a faithful but serious biographer. Knowing this, she was told she could go ahead, but she had to promise not to publish anything until after they were both dead.

Paddy did not like being interviewed, and would keep her questions at bay with a torrent of dazzling conversation.  He was the master at deflecting discussions away from himself.

He was also very unwilling to let Cooper see many of his papers, though the refusal always couched in excuses. ‘Oh dear, the Diary…’ It was the only surviving one from his great walk across Europe, and I was aching to read it. ‘Well it’s in constant use, you see, as I plug away at Vol III,’ he would say. Or, ‘My mother’s letters? Ah yes, why not. But it’s too awful, I simply cannot remember where they’ve got to…’ It was quite obvious that he and Joan, while being unfailingly generous, welcoming and hospitable, were determined to reveal as little as possible of their private lives. 

While they were more than happy to talk about books, travels, friends, Crete, Greece, the war, anything - they would not tell her any more than they would have told the average journalist. But she persisted and got closer than most. He showed particularly gallantry in not talking about his romantic entanglements. But she soon twigged that anytime he described a woman as ‘an old pal’ it was a sure bet that he had an affair with her.

Intriguingly, Paddy liked to claim he was descended from Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, who came to Austria from Sligo. Paddy could recite ‘The Dead at Clomacnoise’ (in translation) and perhaps did so during a handful of flying visits to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, partying hard at Luggala House or Lismore Castle, or making friends with Patrick Kavanagh and Sean O’Faolain in Dublin pubs. He once provoked a massive brawl at the Kildare Hunt Ball, and was rescued from a true pounding by Ricki Huston, a beautiful Italian-American dancer, John Huston’s fourth wife and Paddy’s lover not long afterwards.

And yet, a note of caution about Paddy’s Irish roots is sounded by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, who also co-edited ‘The Broken Road’, the final, posthumously published instalment of the trilogy. “I’m not a great believer in his Irish roots,” she said of Leigh Fermor in an interview, “His mother, who was a compulsive fantasist, liked to think that her family was related to the Viscount Taaffes, of Ballymote. Her father was apparently born in County Cork. But she was never what you might call a reliable witness. She was an extraordinary person, though. Imaginative, impulsive, impossible - just the way the Irish are supposed to be, come to think of it. She was also one of those sad women, who grew up at the turn of the last century, who never found an outlet for their talents and energies, nor the right man, come to that. All she had was Paddy, and she didn’t get much of him.”  

And I think that’s the point, no one really got much of Paddy Leigh Fermor even as he only gave a crumb of himself to others but still most felt grateful that it was enough to fill one’s belly and still feel overfed by him.

Paddy never tried to get to the bottom of his Irish ancestry, afraid, no doubt, of disturbing the bloom that had grown on history and his past, a recurring trait. “His memory was extraordinary,” Artemis Cooper noted, “but it lay dangerously close to his imagination and it was a very porous border.”

Within the Greek imagination many Greeks saw in Paddy Leigh Fermor as the second coming of Lord Byron. It’s not a bad comparison.  

Lord Byron claimed that swimming the Hellespont was his greatest achievement. 174 years or so later, another English writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor - also, like Byron, revered by many Greeks for his part in a war of liberation - repeated the feat. Leigh Fermor, however, was 69 when he did it and continued to do it into his 80s. Byron was a mere 22 years old lad. The Hellespont swim, with its mix of literature, adventure, travel, bravery, eccentricity and romance, is an apt metaphor for Leigh Fermor’s life. Paddy Leigh Fermor was the Byron of his time. Both men had an idealised vision of Greece, were scholars and men of action, could endure harsh conditions, fought for Greek freedom, were recklessly courageous, liked to dress up and displayed a panache that impressed their Greek comrades. Like a good magician it was also a way to misdirect and conceal one’s true self.

What or who was the true Paddy Leigh Fermor?  

Like Byron, Leigh Fermor appeared as a charismatic and assured figure. He was a sightseer, consuming travel, culture, and history for pleasure. He was an aristocrat moving in the social circles of his time. He was a gifted amateur scholar, speculating on literary and historical sources. Leigh Fermor, Byron’s own identity, is subject to textual distortion; it emerges from a piece of occasional prose in his books and is shaped by the claims of correspondence on a peculiarly fluid consciousness. 

There is no hard and fast distinction to be drawn here between real and imagined, only a continuity of relative fictions that lie between memory and imagination as his biographer asserted. If there is a will to assert identity here, to disentangle fact and fiction, to give things as they really are and nail down the real Leigh Fermor then it is somewhere between the two. This is where we will find Paddy.

For many his death marked the passing of an extraordinary man: soldier, writer, adventurer, a charmer, a gallant romantic. As a writer he discovered a knack for drawing people out and for stringing history, language, and observation into narrative, and his timing was perfect. Paddy often indulged in florid displays of classical erudition. His learned digressions and serpentine style, his mannered mandarin gestures, even baroque prose, which Lawrence Durrell called truffled and dense with plumage, were influenced by the work of Charles Doughty and T.E. Lawrence. But one can’t compare him. I agree with the acclaimed writer Colin Thurbon who said, “There is, in the end, nobody like him. A famous raconteur and polymath. Generous, life-loving and good-hearted to a fault. Enormously good company, but touched by well-camouflaged insecurities. I would rank him very highly. ‘The finest travel writer of his generation’ is a fair assessment.”

As a child I didn’t really know who Paddy Leigh Fermor was other than this very cheerful and charismatic old man was kind, attentive, and took a boyish delight in everything you were doing. Only later on in adulthood was it clear to that Paddy was not only among the outstanding writers of his time but one of its most remarkable characters, a perfect hybrid of the man of action and the man of letters. Equally comfortable with princes and peasants, in caves or châteaux, he had amassed an enviable rich experience of places and people. “Quite the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met,” pronounced Lawrence Durrell, and nearly everyone who’d crossed paths with him had, it seemed, come away similarly dazzled. 

I am equally dazzled - more smitten in retrospect - for alas they don’t make men like Paddy any more. But every time I dip back into his books I think I discover a little bit more of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was because I find him some where between my memory and my imagination.

[louisissucha-teez]

how have we not yet discussed how johnlock guilty as sin? is?

okay so i'm not even gonna get into how The Reichenbach Fall coded 'downtown lights' by the blue nile is (atleast not right now, i have a lot to say already). so, reichenbach fall happens and john's boredom's bone deep, this cage (life, his marriage, whatever you wanna take it as) which was once just fine (because he had sherlock and they had quite a happening life) is decidedly not fine anymore. he feels guilty for feeling this way, he doubts his own grief for how strongly it takes a hold of him, how trivial everything else (read: literally his whole LIFE) feels in comparison to this loss. he doesn't even know what to say, how to act, except to ask am i allowed to cry?

he's remembering the great adventures they had together. the days when "the game is afoot" signalled words ready to be written, fickle mysteries waiting to entrap them but being lacerated by the greatest mind he ever knew, the man he can never leave behind even when he himself was left behind (for somewhere deep down, quite contritely, he blames sherlock for being the first to leave).

but these are all things of past now. all he can do is dream of cracking locks, throwing (their) lives to the wolves or the ocean rocks (because really, what have they not done in pursuit of a criminal?)

then, The Empty Hearse. john is trying to outrun the voices in his head, the memories haunting him. he goes out on a date with mary, put the hauntings to a pause and all that, only to crash into him tonight and no, this cannot be happening and mary is looking at him and calling out to him and he should answer, she is getting worried, he should tell her it's fine but is it? is it really fine?

he should be dead.

he's a paradox

he fell to his death.

i'm seeing visions,

john wants to punch him. or hug him. he loves him. he hates him. he wishes this happened like, oh, two years ago. he wishes this never happened. he wishes the dead would've stayed dead, buried in the cemetery he visited heaven knows how many times. he wishes he were the dead instead.

john punches him.

am i bad? or mad? or wise?

i will leave the nsfw part of the chorus to your imagination (i have a lot of it. way too much of it. someone write a fanfic please.)

but sherlock is, after all, much like an add¡ction. the withdrawal was misery and one slip and falling back into the hedge maze and they're on the underground, and they are about to probably be blown up and the last thing he would see is those clear, calculating, alive, eyes staring right back at him and oh, what a way to die

they could've died. they didn't, because of course sherlock wouldn't let him die, but they could've because not every fall can be a feint and sherlock fell from grace in john's heart and he just can't bear to open it up to him again. but of course, he can't escape his own heart, can do nothing but keep his longings locked in lowercase inside a vault. he feels these feelings but doesn't act on them, never acts on them (for someone (sherlock, probably) told him there's no such thing as bad thoughts, only your actions talk). so he keeps these fatal fantasies buried inside (let out only in the dead of night). again, nothing i want to say here that taylor didn't already say.

and how can i not talk about the bridge. what if he gave up on sherlock, on them? and what if he didn't? they're gonna crucify (him) anyway but does it really matter, when he chose him, when he'll always choose him, when sherlock has haunted him for years but he'd still choose him, religiously, when what they have is all that is holy, and without it all he knows is agony?

he's here, sherlock is finally here, an answer to john's million, billion, whimpering prayers, but he's still left longing for their trysts. is he allowed to cry?

(bonus point for why does it feel like a vow we'll both uphold somehow basically being the definition of johnlock from literally day 1)

[theoriginaleppieblack-blog]

Happy 81st Birthday to Jimmy Page! Here is a humble winter offering to our fandom's Holly King. A portrait of times past with Alexander Logan and Tristam Lindsay of Paradox. This Winter's Tale is an extremely loose retelling of a lost story from Pamela Rose's Paradox material, Christmas in Wales. I'll lead you to the fandom history of Paradox at Fanlore here and Ao3 here but long story short this is an adaptation of a story written in the early-1980s that I saw on the Old Web in the 1990s and I only partly remember. In fact, it may be a memory of a memory. I may have heard a summary or a discussion of a story that was already lost. The central motif though, of Alex going off to have a Ringo-In-A-Hard-Day's-Night sulk in his old Welsh borderlands Homes And Haunts and Tris rescuing him is true to the original. The original had more explicit sex and less handmade sweaters, I think, but I needed a central element and I had just finished these. It makes a nice tribute to Jimmy's mom and his gorgeous argyle vest. Also thank you to Fluffernutter, Symon, McCoy, Molly, Gallagher, Murphy, Kieran, Shamrock, Bianca, Finnegan, Flopsy, Callahan and Squeaker for providing the Rabit Angora yarn that these sweaters are made of. Anyway, here's Tris and Alex in

CHRISTMAS IN WALES, 1970

Here we see the two at an intimate party for Tristam's winter birthday. Someone--one of their bandmate's wives--can't help but ask about the matching sweaters. "A gift from a fan, meant to reflect your stage colors?" Jane Cameron guesses. (Author Note: Jane Cameron--expy of Maureen Jones and Sheila Neil--expy of Pat Bonham--have identical personalities in the original Paradox Material. Which like, alright, at least they didn't get too personal in adapting the wives but the only difference between them here is that Janey is nice and Sheila is shrewish. That and not great adaptations of USAmerican ideas of British working class accents. I've mixed a little of the ladies of British Folk like Sandy Denny and Sue Waterson into my version of Janey and a little competence, empathy and tenacity into my version of Sheila while not prying too much into people's lives. I don't want to be a creep. I just want to retell these legends of the peak of civilization in my own voice. Around this metaphorical electronic campfire. On this long winter night. I always imagined I'd do this. After the collapse. With less internet and dolls and more actual campfire and perhaps and acoustic guitar. But well, We all know now that we will be required to work during the apocalypse sooooo FOMO.)

"My Mother made them, actually." Tris replied, proudly. "They were for Christmas." (Author's Note: Tris's mother is a fragile, fey little thing in the original Paradox Material which is quite unlike my vague understanding of Mrs. Patricia Page, first of her name. I see no reason to change this for one thing Mrs. Lindsay's psychic ramblings are the first indication that Paradox live in a Magickal Realism universe, in this case the type where Magick works about twice as often and twice as strongly as the the strongest currently reported effects and some of the metaphorical stuff and astral stuff involved in occultism or mysticism or Theurgy happen IRL but not so much or so often that it breaks the world as we know it. Oh, and another good effect of Mrs. Lindsay's psychic rambling is that Alex is EXACTLY who she expected Tris to bring home to Mummy. Mrs. Lindsay says Gay Rights!)

ANYWAY -- Back to the story, Epppie!

Whenever they wear the sweaters together Alex, can't help but think about what a hero Tris was the day he received his first handmade made gift from Tris's Ma! Tris should feel like a hero on his birthday, after all. So, Alex let's his friends in, just a little, on the secrets of his and Tris's Christmas, the previous year, in Wales.

At the end of their autumn tour, Tris and Alex parted ways for the first time since -- well, nearly since they'd met. Alex had gone back home to the Black Country with Duffy Neal, Paradox's drummer (and Alex's childhood best friend). (Author's Note: There's a little stress here, Tris is all in with Alex, but Alex still has an extended kin network that he needs to nurture. And this is after a tour in which Alex spent as much time managing Duffy's emotions as he has working on his art, magick and sex--his Great Work with Tris.)

But fitting in back home proves awkward for Alex Logan. The support network of the Alex/Duffy/Sheila triad, with Duffy's supportive Aunt and Sheila's old-fashioned but tolerant parents is overwhelmed by relatives who previously would not have given them the time of day. Now everybody wants to see the what the Paradox money has done and see the improvements on the farm. Duffy and Alex both get gender-shamed about wanting to spend time with Billy Neal, Duffy's son (and Alex's godson). Duffy hides in showing off his motors and, of course, drinking. But Alex, really get's into it with someone -- Duffy's grandmother maybe. And Alex storms off. Possibly in his new sportscar or maybe it was in Guinevere, his old VW Beetle (Author's note: In my doll universe Guinevere has been upgraded to a VW Bus as portrayed by a 1970 Barbie Camper)

Alex drives around, visits his maternal Grandfather's grave, his old school, and even parks outside his estranged parent's house for a while, imagines going in, imagines a different life. He ends up going to a vacation cottage that he used to go to with his parents when he was a kid. The landlord lives in the gatehouse of the estate that the cottages are on and he just knocks on the door and rents it in cash. (Author's Note: The estate is this place that's like an Elizabethan farmhouse that became a 19th century super fancy hunting lodge that the family turned into a place where they could stash a son who had a bad war and his loyal batsman/valet/romantic friend. They were the one's renting the vacation cottages and, before that, letting Alex's maternal grandfather's folk set up on his land. This place becomes everything to Paradox -- it's their Bron Yr Aur, it's their Headley Grange, it's their once hoped for permanent home base studio. It becomes Alex's permanent home officially and Tri's in actuality.)

Alex is resolved to spend Christmas alone in the tiny cabin. He's kind of wallowing in it, tbh. His poor dog, Elessar, along for the ride. Alex Logan, 20-year-old millionaire rethinking his life choices.

Oh and it get's very cold. Maybe it snows. Yeah. I think they play in the snow later. Like there's a parody of a scene of a scene in A Child's Christmas in Wales. Later, after Tris shows up.

Anyway, poor Alex, he does get cold, and a bit hungry. Stil a bit stubborn. He's even taken off the scrying mirror necklace that Tris gave him. (Author's Note: There are two different stories about how he got that necklace. One is that Tris spontaneously gifted it to him just days after they met, almost at random, from an auction lot he was receiving at the time. A ploy to impress the beautiful young singer but a portentous gift for a first date/job interview. The other is that it was gifted to Alex on a milestone birthday, after careful consideration and with the solemnity of a marriage proposal.)

After some tribulations of his own Tris does show up. He just couldn't sit still for his family Christmas party, it was not at all a surprise when Duffy called to tell him Alex was missing. Tris verifies with his housekeeper back in London that Alex isn't back there before rousing their manager, Mick Royce to help him retrace Alex's steps. Secretly he uses his highly trained intuition as a guide. He uses Duffy's clues and what he know of Alex's path and even talks to Alex's younger sister for the first time, before he ends up at a certain vacation cabin over the border in Wales. He arrives with a hamper the size of a coffee table, repacked by his Mum and a present too. Mick grumbles about his ruined Christmas before he leaves Tris there. They'll get back in Alex's ride.

The present is a matching sweater for Alex. After the disaster at the Neal family gathering and the reminders of his own parent's rejection of him, Alex is overwhelmed that Tris's mother made him a gift like this.

Good food was also a great help.

And they passed a very pleasant Christmas in Wales, vowing to return in the Spring when the weather was better. And that's when their love affair with their future home began.

[kraro-school-life]

✦ 15. 1. 24 ✦ 📓 ✦ Monday ✦

✧⋆｡✎

It´s so late rn, but I achieved my goal of studying for 5h today! (I even did 6) Paradoxically, I am still feeling underprepared. Like what is even is all of this shit?? (I wrote 4 double pages of notes wth) Anyway... I knew chugging another coffee at 9pm wasn´t a good idea but oh well (*regretting 😭*). I just want the exam to be over hdsjnfwdeuniewmf

🌱🌿🪴 - 6h 3min on Forest ♫₊˚.🎧 ▷▷ Run For Roses - Nmixx

Have a great day/night !! ~ ♦️

[meowww-ffxiv]

Finished Dawntrail main story! :}

Blorbo thoughts below.

.

It was thematically appropriate that Mordred, who was a funeral priest and had by this point in his life performed many a send-off, to both his most beloved Hydaelyn AND to his enemies, who spent that life after so much death during the Seventh Calamity helping others find comfort and dignity in their and their loved ones' passing, to be here in Living Memory.

He asked Cahciua to verify first. Theodore's Echo, when empowered by Mordred, could detect the melody of souls and not just the aether they were cocooned in. So with her blessing, they performed such a search -- and I'm sure they found it was just as she said. That all of Living Memory was a hollow echo.

And then Mordred agreed to her request.

.

Theodore accompanied Erenville for much of the time there, because they were close friends and because Theodore had also lost his mother. They didn't speak much during, since Erenville seemed someone who would rather weather his own pains in private, but he took great comfort in the fact that someone refused to leave him to his own devices. Someone unjudgmental and patient, and quiet.

They didn't speak after, not just yet, but one day soon they would.

Liios in his own WoL-verse did, though.

In a quiet moment afterwards, Liios caught up with Erenville in the dimming lights of a seaside street, and asked, "How are you?"

Erenville wanted to walk away. But the warmth and calm with which that question was asked made some already-fragile thing inside his chest crack. So he blurted, "I don't have a name for it. This-- This--"

"Mm," Liios agreed, like he knew exactly what it was Erenville meant, and so spared him the need to explain it.

They walked together, aimlessly, through those darkened streets. Until Erenville eventually said, "Ptolemy told me that you lost your mother too, decades ago."

"Yes. It was a good death. She was calm. We knew it was coming," Liios replied. He, too, sounded calm. The smooth surface of a scar healed over. "Her parting tore me apart in a way that unmade and remade me."

He left space in the silence that followed, for Erenville to speak. When he didn't, Liios continued, "Once the first wave of died away, it revisited me in fragments. Mum's favorite coffee mug on the kitchen counter. Her name cited in research papers that I read. Letters addressed to her from old students and colleagues that took weeks to arrive, so by the time they got to us, it was already months after the funeral.

"Seeing the casket lowered into the ground wasn't as hard as knowing that she will never drink out of that mug again. Nor will she be there to answer questions I have about those papers and her opinions on their findings. Nor will she ever sit by the window of our house, smelling of jasmine and incense, answering those letters. It overwhelmed me, the void that Mum left behind."

Erenville's steps faltered. Liios slowed too, adjusting his pace effortlessly so they were still together, shoulder-to-shoulder. His eyes were on the sea and its gentle ripples, diligently averted from the tears pouring down Erenville's face.

"I told the housekeeper to stay out of our home for six months," Liios said. "I couldn't bear it -- to touch anything in that house felt like it would erase the last traces of her in the world. In this corner of the world that we once shared. Ptolemy was still unwell then, so he stayed at the hospital most nights, though I think he did so intentionally because it was me that he couldn't bear and not the house, nor her loss.

"Days went by. The dust gathered. Everything was untouched, just the way it was when she left for the last time, inert and lifeless. She departed anyway. I scrambled to hold onto her presence, to the point of destroying every opportunity I'd spent decades to earn for myself.

"But then we went to Eorzea, and I found her again. Paradoxically, she wasn't in that mausoleum I'd made of our home. She was a forceful and assertive woman, you see. She traveled to the least recommended places to render medical aid to those who might not have any hope of such help even existing. And Eorzea, Coerthas, being the dangerous frontier that it was... When I hiked into the mountains with my students and made our aetherological engineering 'projects' into helping install self-functioning lamps so the locals wouldn't slip in the dark, or some such... There she was. Rhaya Suvalli, the Miqo'te scholar who sprung my brother out of the grave my clan had already placed him into, just waiting for him to stop breathing. Rhaya Suvalli, up to her elbows in grease or blood, helping people. Because it was what she'd set her heart on. Because she had decided this was the right thing to do."

The sea-winds were cold at night. Erenville blamed them for the way he was shivering and not because of the feeling of seams rapidly coming apart under his skin.

But Liios turned and shrugged off the short cloak he'd been wearing, and tossed it around Erenville's shoulders. He continued, like he didn't see the tears still, "I turn ninety-two this year. Believe me when I say that what I just told you is a universal experience. So long as you continue to live, you'll find those you have outlived in the things they loved and cared about. And Cahciua was obviously a remarkable woman, so I'm more than certain you will find her with ease. Never mind the fact that you're one of the finest gleaners we've had in a generation."

...Being honest, Erenville had always had a mild aversion to Liios. Some of it was exactly because Liios reminded him of the most exhausting bits of his mother. Someone who seemed nice and cheerful, but was in fact very pushy and always deciding things on their own. The other part was just Liios himself, who was talkative and high-energy in a way that made Erenville want to exit the room. The audacity of the Warrior of Light to be shocked that Erenville wasn't yet thirty, when Liios himself felt overly young for his age. Which, cringe.

But in that moment, Liios's lopsided smile and the paltry attempt at a compliment left a warmth in Erenville's chest that, just like the grief he hadn't yet untangled, could not be extinguished.

He still snorted and shook his head, sullenly wrapping the cloak up to his nose to hide his face. But when Liios laughed, the tears slowed.

Erenville had no clear recollection of how he got from the streets back to the palace and into his bedroom, only that he didn't feel crushingly alone during any of it which meant Liios escorted him. And he would claim no recollection of why there was a green-and-brown cloak among his possessions now, either.

Erenville considered passing it back through Ptolemy, but his friend giving him an amused look and asking, "Are you returning a gift?" had him rescind the thought.

But faces had to be saved. So Erenville told Ptolemy, "You should be proud. He managed almost an entire conversation about himself without mentioning you more than once."

To which Ptolemy only laughed, a little sadly. "I made him promise to try and live for himself, after he returned from Ultima Thule," he said. "I see Svalin is as serious about his promises as he'd always been."

It gave Erenville the nebulous feeling that maybe the invincible Warrior of Light might be among the least okay people in Eitherys. But they could unpack that later. Cahciua would most definitely have pestered Liios, anyway. Erenville might try his hand at it.

.

Coming back to Meowdred for a moment. Every time he saw the aftermath of an Umbral Calamity, Meowdred wanted to descend to the Underworld and beat Emet-Selch to death a second time.

It was pointless. He knew that. Ascians didn't give a fuck. Emet-Selch most of all. Everything for the glory of their past, etc. He couldn't make them hurt the way they hurt these worlds they destroyed, because they were only inflicting that very same pain they suffered on those around them. But Mordred wanted satisfaction so badly. He wanted Emet-Selch to be affected by the raw fury and hatred and agony Mordred himself feel, reprised over and over, in hearing these stories.

But Emet-Selch, once again, would never be sorry. Nor was Azem sorry all those millennia ago, for having walked out on Emet-Selch and his own people.

They all must shoulder their harvests, of joy or of blood.

Somewhere in this was the uncomfortable realization on Mordred's end that he wanted Emet-Selch to care about him; about how he felt. While knowing the fucker didn't. And he knew too where this desire came from; they were very alike, and Mordred sought in Emet-Selch a kinship. An acknowledgement all their own, between them, and not an echo of Hades and Medeus of the Azem seat.

Nasty. Awful. Hate it. But it existed.

.

Liios had licked the new macguffin bestowed upon him by Sphene and the plot at least once by now. He had also stared at the helix shape for a long, long time, and wondered if it had anything to do with the spiral silhouettes so favored by the Ancients of Amaurot.

While in Elpis the first time, Liios had managed to gather some information about Azem. Apparently he was also a technological whiz just like him, with a love for inventing ridiculous devices to solve people's problems. Liios had no idea if that Azem -- whose name was apparently Helios, the comedy that fate was -- knew about the Sundering beforehand, but if he did, wasn't it just like him to leave behind a means by which to bridge worlds?

Ah, well. That was food for thought. For right now, Liios was spending his time trying to puzzle out how to use electrope like the Living Memory's civilization did.

[southeastasiadiary]

Day Twenty-One, Part One: A Day of Wats and Wandering

The description for today on my itinerary reads, “Free time to wander around and free visits. Overnight in Luang Prabang.” Now, as a lifelong overthinker, my natural response to a statement like this is, “Wander around? Where? And how will I know when I’ve wandered enough? How many free visits does one make?” It’s the typical Paradox of Choice. Having too many options, I tend to freeze. For example, the first time I ever went to the DeKalb Farmers Market outside Atlanta, I emerged empty-handed because, seriously, how do you know which of the 396 varieties of green beans to buy? And, after last night’s story, I’m loath to buy beans at the market now anyway.

So, today’s dilemma was: Should I stay in Luang Prabang or go to the Pak Ou Caves? Should I take the bullet train to Vientiane or, as Pindar suggests, “Seek nearer home.”

In the end, inertia made the choice for me, as inertia is wont to do. I slept in late, having gotten up early for the alms ceremony the day before and then having gone back into town for the Garavek Story Telling Show. That meant that it was too late to go to the Pak Ou Caves or Vientiane, each of which would’ve required an early start. So, after a late-ish breakfast, I read the guidebook, chose a few destinations, and took the hotel shuttle to the center of Luang Prabang, and began my own personal Great Wat Tour.

The town of Luang Prabang is about the size of Statesboro, Georgia, where I spent eleven happy years in the 1990s. Actually, the comparison to Statesboro is not at all a bad one. If you simply replace every church of any denomination in Statesboro with a wat (i.e., a temple, a monastery, or a combination of the two) here, you’d end up with much the same thing. I’ll spare you photos of every single wat I took pictures of today (suffice it to say, there were lots), and just give you the Reader's Digest version. Even having just been there, they do start to look a bit “samey” in snapshots. And, if you haven’t been there in person, I doubt it’s easy all to tell one from another. But here are a select few.

I’ll start with the Wat Mahathat (“The Temple of the Large Stupa”) mostly because, while I was there, one of the novices dashed out and rang this large bell to signal that it was time for chanting to begin.

The bell also serves as something of a town clock. You can always tell what time of day it is in Luang Prabang by whichever bell is being sounded in whichever monastery. Even more impressive than the bell is a massive drum that’s hung nearby and played on certain festive occasions.

The large stupa that gives the wat its name can be seen in upper left of this picture. I photographed it almost accidentally since my attention was really drawn to the beautiful, but far less significant golden stupa to the right.

The temple building is quite ornate and, y my eye, very Laotian in style.

A long row of spirit houses lines the rear of the property.

Some of the senior monks are given residences that almost look like tourist cabins.

The steps leaving the wat were littered with frangipani blossoms, a flower that has become a national symbol for Laos.

Since the Laotian word for frangipani is champa, and I’d just come from two countries where the Champa Kingdom was very important, this term can be confusing. In fact, however, the Laotian word champa has absolutely nothing to do with the Champa Kingdom. It’s just a linguistic coincidence.

Recalling that an early name for this territory was Lan Xang, “The Million Elephants Kingdom,” another common symbol is that of the elephant, which also appears nearly everywhere.

By the way, elephant trunks are a little like horseshoes in Southeast Asia. In depictions, they should always be raised, otherwise the luck “runs out.”

Even though I’d been to Wat Mai (“The New Monastery”) the other day, I knew I hadn’t seen everything that was there. So, in my free wandering today, I returned to Wat Mai and saw a building that served as a classroom for instruction in the tenets of Buddhism.

[grigori77]

Movies of 2023 - My Pre-Summer Rundown (Part 2)

The Top Ten:

10. SICK – Ultimately the year’s biggest horror cinema SURPRISE (so far, anyway) was also one of the year’s VERY FIRST standouts period, a brilliant little streaming sleeper from Peacock which snuck in under the radar but EFFORTLESSLY captured my attention AND the darker parts of my imagination. Best of all, though, it was SO COOL to see legendary revisionist horror screenwriter Kevin Williamson return to the “big screen” again after spending so long plying his trade on TV – I was VERY MUCH the target audience for Scream when it came out, I just ATE UP his delicious post-modern deconstruction of the slasher genre and its subsequent follow-ups (although Robert Rodriguez’ The Faculty, his fantastic take on alien invasion movie tropes, remains my very favourite of his offerings to date), even if it did lead to a fresh sub-genre which, paradoxically, became increasingly tired and toothless as the years progressed.  In the end, I think it’s probably A GOOD THING he took a step back – he just needed a chance to rethink things and find a fresh angle to come at the genre … and BY THE GODS has he ever found one with THIS.  Interestingly, for Williamson at least, the Pandemic couldn’t have come along at a better time, giving him fertile ground indeed in which to grow a particularly potent darkly comic slasher horror thriller which EASILY lives up to his masterworks.  Taking place in the early days of the original outbreak, when the first Lockdown was just starting, infection alerts and self-isolation were becoming a major thing and everybody was PANICKING over how much they really DIDN’T yet know about what was REALLY going on, the setting was already ripe for some pretty intense, chaotic storytelling … so adding a brutal serial killer with a penchant for killing off the idiots who flagrantly flaunted the COVID safety restrictions and purposefully went out of their way to pretend things were the same as normal was a damn slick move.  The main bulk of the narrative revolves around three college kids in some nondescript part of the US – Parker (Blockers and The Society’s Gideon Adlon), a well-off party girl who’s looking to make some major changes in her life, and her best friend Miri (up-and coming R&B artist Beth Million), who go to Parker’s family’s expansive country home to quarantine in comfort, and Parker’s newly-EX boyfriend DJ (Man of Steel and Teen Wolf’s Dylan Sprayberry), who turns up ostensibly to try and patch things up between them but may simply have come for a lucky hook-up – who are targeted by the killer who subsequently hunts them during a night of fraught tension, smartly staged stalk-and-slash set-pieces and a hefty dose of Williamson’s characteristic jet black-but-enjoyably geeky sense of humour, which is this time pitched to a particularly sharp edge of biting finger-on-the-pulse satire given the rich socio-political real-life material he’s able to mine here.  The small but extremely potent cast are all BRILLIANT, although the film really is DOMINATED by Adlon, who once again shows that she’s destined for GREAT THINGS INDEED in the future with a brilliant turn that runs an impressive gamut from irresponsibly entitled to vitally determined survivor once circumstances have fully driven her to take proper responsibility for all her childish behaviour, making for a compellingly sympathetic young heroine we find easy to start rooting for.  It probably helps the man behind the camera is John Hyams (All Square, Alone), son of legendary genre-hopping director Peter Hyams, who shows he’s definitely inherited his dad’s impressive skill by crafting a lean, tight and precise slice of horror cinema which takes full advantage of a tight budget and (mostly) a single location, which means the end result is a brilliant little comedy horror gem that I’d heartily recommend folk hunt down on streaming, or at the very least keep in mind for Halloween …

9. COCAINE BEAR – gods, if EVER there was a true story that seemed TAILOR MADE for cinema, it’s the bizarre tale of Cokey the Bear, AKA Pablo Eskobear, an American black bear that died after ingesting 34 keys of cocaine that were dumped out of a smuggler’s cargo plane over the Tennessee wilderness in 1985.  That being said, it’s not a huge surprise it’s taken Hollywood SO LONG to actually get it made, perhaps it’s just TOO CRAZY a concept for it to have been made before now.  Ultimately, the film takes A LOT of liberties with the truth to instead craft an entertaining story, but in the end that’s definitely the smart move, simply using the concept as a springboard to craft a gloriously batshit horror comedy with a JET BLACK sense of humour populated by an offbeat collection of quirky characters. Keri Russell stars as Sari, a nurse and single mother who has to brave the woods in order to find her young daughter Dee Dee (The Florida Project’s Brooklyn Prince), who’s playing hooky in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest with her best friend Henry (Sweet Tooth’s Christian Convery) right when Cokey goes on a drug-fuelled homicidal rampage; meanwhile, recently bereaved widower Eddie (Solo’s Alden Ehrenreich) and his best friend Daveed (Straight Outta Compton’s O’Shea Jackson Jr.) are two drug cartel enforcers reluctantly scouring the area in search of their lost product at the behest of Eddie’s overbearing St Louis drug kingpin father Syd White (the late, great Ray Liotta, to whom the film is dedicated); and then there’s hapless but dogged Knoxville detective Bob (the venerable Isaiah Whitlock Jr.), who knows he can bust White if he can just get his hands on the evidence.  All three parties converge in the park while the bear wreaks merry havoc in Elizabeth Banks’ third film as a director (after Pitch Perfect 2 and the CRIMINALLY mistreated and overlooked Charlie’s Angels reboot), which looks like it might FINALLY get people to start taking her serious BEHIND the camera as well as IN FRONT of it – this is a proper laugh-riot of a film which is also delightfully non-PC, and it’s liberally peppered with impressively blood-soaked effects to thrill the gore-hounds as well as an impressively well-realised digital animal character in the eponymous drug-addled beastie.  The cast are brilliant too, Russell and Ehrenreich both particularly impressing in their respective nominal lead roles while the two kids are EXCEPTIONAL (particularly Convery, getting to overact as one of the most hyperactive-yet-not-irritating kids I’ve ever seen on screen), and it’s both enriching and a little bit heartbreaking to watch Liotta once again acting his socks off in one of his very last film roles; that being said, several of the scenes are thoroughly STOLEN by the irrepressible Margo Martindale, who’s clearly having the time of her life in one of her most gloriously OTT roles as foul-mouthed, much put-upon park Ranger Liz.  Ultimately this is a horror comedy where the balance is definitely tipped very much in favour of the laughs over the scares, but that’s fine, because with a concept this batshit bonkers we were always gonna find it too funny to ever be remotely scary, so the end result is one of THE FUNNIEST MOVIES I’ve run across in the cinema so far this year, gleefully revelling in its own inherent irreverence.  It’s just about the most fun you could ever expect it to be, which is what you’d want from a movie about a cocaine bear, really …

8. ANT-MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA – coming off the back of 2022’s decidedly hit-and-miss big screen slate for Disney and Marvel’s current flagship property, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, THIS year’s first MCU release had A LOT of eyes on it.  Gods know, I definitely has TWO OF ‘EM … and it probably wasn’t the best title to be laying all this weight on, either – the Ant-Man movies in particular have always been a bit of a marmite property within the larger universe, with as many detractors as fans, which definitely didn’t help things here.  If this turned out to be third time unlucky for Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang and the rest, it could spell much larger disaster for the MCU overall, or at the very least signify that the cracks are definitely growing beyond the studios’ capacity to patch ‘em up on the run.  So I’ll admit, I went into this one with a whole lot of trepidation … was it unwarranted?  Well, being completely honest … not ENTIRELY.  Tried-and-tested comedy director Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man films have always been a pretty mad collection anyway, as much a full-blown comedy sub-franchise as the Guardians of the Galaxy movies or Thor under Taika Waititi, but even so they still managed to keep ONE FOOT on the ground even while the rest was playing EXTENSIVELY in the Quantum Realm, but this one may just have finally jumped the shark.  Granted, part of this film’s particular OTT outlandishness and unabashed WACKINESS is down to narrative necessity – giving too much away plot-wise unfortunately runs the risk of dropping some MASSIVE spoilers, but it’s at least safe to say that the vast majority of the story takes place ENTIRELY in the Quantum Realm this time, and it’s a place which is A WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT from anything we might have imagined from our very brief visits in Ant-Man & the Wasp and Avengers Endgame.  For a start, it’s A WHOLE LOT BIGGER than we thought it was, and MUCH more heavily populated by some truly WEIRD SHIT … the film also has some major heavy-lifting to do with regards to setting up the Big Bad for Phase 5 and 6 both – Kang the Conqueror (The Last Black Man In San Francisco and Creed III’s Jonathan Majors), a Multiverse-based Thanos level threat we first encountered (sort of) in 2021’s runaway hit first season of Loki.  Thankfully, this at least is one of the areas in which the movie definitely SUCCEEDED – Majors IMMEDIATELY makes his presence keenly felt as one of the franchise’s most interesting and effective supervillains, a near God Tier Bad Guy who’s clearly gonna give the whole Avengers roster a run for their money when they finally come face to face with him (in whatever form this ultimately takes).  The plot, such as it is, is pure scrambled bananas, a heavyweight mindfuck it’s best to just DISENGAGE and go with to get proper enjoyment out of – this is definitely a cinematic GUILTY PLEASURE, and trying to take it even remotely seriously immediately draws the eye to a thousand gaping plot-holes and glaring narrative stumbles.  At least the patented stunning, primary coloured visuals, winning sense of humour and cavalcade of delightfully wacky set-pieces (the clone-spawning “probability explosion” sequence is a particularly overblown, super-trippy highlight with an unexpected tear-jerk factor built in) are all fully functional and behaving correctly, and the thoroughly endearing cast all deliver admirably without a single off-note hint of miscasting – Rudd and Evangeline Lilly (returning as Hope van Dyne AKA the titular Wasp) are both pitch perfect as always, while it’s nice to see Michael Douglas and PARTICULARLY Michelle Pfeiffer getting to do a whole lot more this time round as Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, and the glaring Michael Pena-shaped hole is ALMOST filled by a few other quality comedic turns from the likes of deadpan laugh-MASTER Bill Murray and David Dastmalchian (here returning in a VERY interesting vut also very DIFFERENT role to what we’ve seen from him here before), as well as a surprise returning face (ahem) from the franchise’s past.  Meanwhile, alongside Majors there are some other similarly noteworthy series newcomers who make BIG IMPRESSIONS, from Z Nation and The Mandalorian’s Katy O’Brien (who’s been an growing favourite of mine for a little while now), who’s a completely EPIC badass I wanna see A LOT more of in the future as hard-nosed Quantum freedom fighter Jentorra, to Kathryn Newton (Supernatural, Freaky), making the role of Scott’s now (pretty much) full-grown daughter Cassie ENTIRELY her own, and she’s clearly got a MAJOR future ahead of her in the MCU herself now she’s started carving out her own super-powered secret identity. The movie may be another flawed, somewhat unwieldy and occasionally downright CLUNKY beast, but the franchise is definitely still managing to stand up, and compared to the likes of Thor: Love & Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever it definitely holds up a good deal better in its own right.  Most of all, though, it’s A WHOLE LOT of pure, unadulterated FUN, which is ultimately exactly what you want from a big primary-coloured superhero blockbuster.  With the arrival of the new (and, apparently, FINAL) Guardians of the Galaxy movie now imminent, it still remains to be seen if the MCU can be clawed back from the brink it’s still teetering perilously on the edge of, but this, despite all that’s still wrong with it, is at least a VERY SMALL step back in the right direction again …

7. THE PALE BLUE EYE – largely sneaking in under the radar on Netflix to start the New Year off, the latest offering from highly acclaimed indie writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass, Antlers) is, much as we’d likely expect from such a consistently varied, genre-hopping filmmaker, a strange, unique and deeply intriguing beast of a film.  Adapted from Louis Bayard’s well-received speculative fiction novel about a young Edgar Allan Poe aiding the investigation of a bafflingly macabre murder in the US Military Academy at West Point in the early 1830s.  Christian Bale returns with typical stoic, intense and magnificently brooding megawatt presence for his THIRD leading man tour of duty for Cooper (after Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) as Augustus Landor, a former West Point graduate-turned misanthropic former detective brought in to lead the investigation into the brutal hanging and evisceration (with additional heart-removal) of a young cadet that’s baffling the faculty and local police, which is soon compounded when additional bodies start piling up.  He’s aided in his endeavours by another cadet, the young Poe himself (played to PERFECTION by Harry Potter’s own Harry Melling, continuing his meteoric and deeply impressive rise to prominence with another TOUR-DE-FORCE performance here), while the clues lead to a variety of deeply troubling twists and revelations as well as an intriguing collection of suitably odd and often highly charismatic characters played by the sterling likes of Lucy Boynton, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney and a fascinatingly unusual turn from Robert Duvall, although the real standout here is a truly MAGNIFICENT career-best performance from Gillian Anderson.  Cooper piles on the story’s doom-laden gothic atmosphere to great effect throughout while cranking up the slow-burn and deeply uncomfortable suspenseful tension throughout, while the plot is nothing short of MACHIAVELLIAN in its levels of ingenious labyrinthine intelligence, dropping an ultimate denouement that you really have to be paying SERIOUS ATTENTION to see coming, and the production design, costumes, period detailing and, most of all, the thoroughly MOODY bleak-midwinter cinematography make for a freezing cold but thoroughly rewarding feast for the eyes for the more discerning film-fanatic.  Altogether Cooper’s delivered another winner, and I hope he continues to make films this good well into the future.

6. SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS – it’s interesting that, at least on here, the DC Cinematic Universe (AKA the DCEU) is currently WINNING OUT over the MCU, especially given the recent MAJOR upheavals that are now rocking the franchise as a whole (and look set to continue well into the remainder of this year and beyond).  Not least because, technically, once The Flash hits cinemas and the Universe essentially gets hit with a Hard Reset under the guidance of new DC Studios CEO James Gunn, none of this even MATTERS any more going forward … certainly this fact has NOT been lost on cinemagoers, who were already starting to pull back when Black Adam came out late last year and subsequently seemed content to STAY AWAY IN DROVES for this one, likely waiting to give it a go in the privacy and safety of their own homes once it hit streaming.  In a way this sounded a pre-emptive death knell for the DCEU which I’m genuinely sceptical about it recovering from … which is a shame, because 2019’s Shazam! was one of the franchise’s BEST FEATURES, a gleefully anarchic post-modern deconstruction of the overblown superhero antics the franchise largely glorified before while never taking itself particularly seriously but simply playing it with just the right amount of knowing wink-and-nod.  Even more of a shame, then, that this has proven to be SUCH a performance TURKEY, because it’s JUST AS GOOD as the first one, taking all of the lessons that were learned from the first movie to heart and delivering more of everything that really WORKED once more, even while trying something new and fresh at the same time to expand on this little corner of the Universe with impressive aplomb and consummate skill.  Returning director Drew Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation) once again delivers in HIGH STYLE and customary spooky flair as he and returning screenwriter Henry Gayden (Earth To Echo, There’s Someone In Your House), along with Fast & Furious franchise lynchpin scribe Chris Morgan, expand on the adventures of coming-of-age young hero Billy Batson (Andi Mack’s Asher Angel) and his (still unnamed) superpowered alter ego (Zachary Levi), alongside his now similarly gifted teenaged foster siblings, as the Daughters of Atlas – Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachel Zegler), a trio of immensely powerful but (somewhat) morally dubious classical Greek goddesses – come to claim their powers for their own in order to rejuvenate the Tree of Life and punish Mankind for its wickedness. The usual existential high stakes, then. Angel and Levi are, once again, ON FIRE here, the former star of Chuck in particular once again proving what an undisputable comedic MASTER he is while they both deliver MAGNIFICENTLY in the dramatic moments too, while their returning co-stars and sterling veteran support are once again just as great as before, It’s Jack Dylan Grazer particularly getting to really SHINE this time round in a particularly WEIGHTY role that nonetheless once again manages to utilise his own impressive comedic talents to full effect too, while it’s also GREAT to see This Is Us’ Faith Herman get a much more expanded role this time round as the irrepressible Darla; Djimon Hounsou, meanwhile, also gets a lot more to do as he returns as the enjoyably crabby and pompous Wizard Shazam, who’s none too happy with Billy for breaking the staff last time round and setting this all off in the first place. The Daughters, meanwhile, are FANTASTIC antagonists, Liu and Mirren clearly enjoying the opportunity to be flamboyant, majestic and over-the-top in proper Shakespearean style, while Zegler invests “Anne” with a good deal more moral fibre and complexity as the most sympathetic (and ultimately conflicted) of the trio.  Sandberg and co again deliver IN SPADES on the action, atmospherics, gorgeously exotic design and sheer creativity which made the first movie such an unexpected treat, while also delivering more of that winning, sometimes downright SCREWBALL BONKERS humour to keep it entertaining and let you know that, just like its predecessor, this film knows FULL WELL how ridiculous it is and is fully prepared to just OWN IT.  The end result is, once again, one of the best of the current slate of DCEU films, and it just makes it even sadder to think that they’re likely not gonna continue with this once the franchise reboots.  Gods know it don’t bode too well for The Flash, Blue Beetle or Aquaman & the Lost Kingdom, which is a shame cuz they also look pretty promising …

5. EVIL DEAD RISE – sometimes you just can’t keep a good franchise down, and that’s ALWAYS been the case with the Evil Dead movies. That being said, each movie has always happily been its own thing too, so even when Sam Raimi was making his original trilogy they were all movies you could easily pick up and watch as a standalone without needing to see the others too (although it was well worth doing it).  Better, though, is the fact that every offering so far has been consistently GREAT, even 2013’s sort-of reboot from Don’t Breathe and The Girl In the Spider’s Web writer-director Fede Alvarez, which did a genuinely spectacular job of bringing the franchise kicking and screaming into the new Millennium while also delivering something which was unapologetically old school in the very best way.  Thankfully this is definitely the way that the latest writer-director, relative newcomer Lee Cronin (The Hole In the Ground), has decided to do things, although he’s also taking this newly-rebooted story in a fresh new direction with a MAJOR setting change as the Deadites are, for the first time (at least on the BIG screen) unleashed in the big inner city.  It’s a bold move, but certainly has the instant charm of doing something we’ve never seen before, bringing the claustrophobic madness of the originals into a very different but equally close-quarters environment as we’re now seeing the demonically possessed monsters terrorising their victims in tiny apartment rooms, cramped corridors and malfunctioning elevators which make for a whole host of new opportunities to change up the scares, the action and the delivery of the thoroughly skewed plot.  Best of all, this is BY FAR the most female-centric film in the franchise to date, making for a much more interesting and far less testosterone-heavy atmosphere this time around as the women get to take the lead far more than they did in the previous movies.  The gods know that’s VERY MUCH my shit right there … Vikings’ Alyssa Sutherland is a veritable FORCE OF (UN)NATURE as Ellie, the downtrodden single mother trying to keep her three kids and her whole life from going off the rails until she’s taken over by the Evil when her calamitously foolish young wannabe DJ son Danny (Storm Boy and The End’s Morgan Davies) finds and reads from the Book of the Dead, while Picnic At Hanging Rock’s Lily Sullivan is endearingly vulnerable and fallible but ultimately steely as her Ellie’s estranged kid sister Beth, who comes home in a bad spot just in time to get thrown into the middle of the ensuing chaos; Gabrielle Echols (Reminiscence) and Nell Fisher (Northspur), meanwhile, are both similarly exceptional and thoroughly memorable as Ellie’s teen and pre-teen daughters Bridget and Kassie. The majority of the action plays out in the impressively squalid confines of the newly-condemned apartment building, turning uncomfortably familiar surroundings into downright TERRIFYING nightmarish hellscapes as the horrors unfold within, Cronin pulling out every trick in the book to deliver a knuckle-whitening scare-fest that skilfully works its way under your skin and grips your heart tight enough to make it explode with sheer anxiety, and, like every one of its predecessors, he has managed to pull it all off with the absolute BARE MINIMUM of digital assistance, this film representing another resounding triumph for spectacularly NASTY physical effects.  This is DEFINITELY the scariest thing I’ve seen so far in what’s ALREADY proven to be a genuinely GREAT YEAR for horror cinema, but more than that it’s ENTIRELY lived up to its legacy, earning its place in one of the greatest horror franchises of ALL TIME with pride.  I look forward to seeing what Cronin does next, and I can’t wait to see what the series is gonna throw at us next, either …

4.  PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH – my current top animated feature for 2023 is an interesting one because, while I am a MASSIVE fan of Dreamworks Animation Studios’ output in general and the Shrek films in particular, I have to admit that the FIRST standalone spinoff featuring Antonio Banderas’ awesome fairy-tale character left me somewhat underwhelmed … yes, I know, it’s a travesty, STONE ME!!!  I know I deserve it … but really, even with Salma Hayek on board it just didn’t reach the same levels of sheer unadulterated COOL that the Shrek movies did for me.  So I approached the EXTREMELY belated follow-up with a definite sense of trepidation, despite the intriguing new animation style makeover that’s clearly HEAVILY inspired by the recent success of the first Spider-Verse movie and the massive anticipation for its incoming sequel.  It looks GORGEOUS, but as we’ve learned to our cost over the years with this kind of filmmaking, looks DO NOT always automatically mean it’s gonna be a belter.  Thank the gods, then, that I was proven wrong THIS TIME … yup, for his sophomore spinoff movie, Puss FINALLY got a vehicle he could truly be PROUD OF.  It’s got a BRILLIANT premise about it which PERFECTLY fits with the amount of time that’s passed since the first one, and definitely means that the older fans among us (like myself) can definitely find A LOT to resonate with in terms of the themes here – Puss discovers that he’s only got ONE of his nine lives left and it sends him into a DEEP existential crisis as he realises that he’s pretty much WASTED much of the time he had, and technically that means he’s only got ONE CHANCE left to truly be alive.  So he abandons his riotous adventurer lifestyle and “retires” as a lapcat for one SERIOUSLY weird cat-lady, Mama Luna (High Fidelity’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph) … only for his past to catch up to him in the form of a quartet of bounty hunters, Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the Three Bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman and beloved up-and-coming British comic Samson Kayo).  This prompts Puss to escape onto the road for one final adventure reuniting with his long-lost love Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), who’s none too happy to have him back in her life after he abandoned her at the Altar, as well as a deeply odd new companion, Perrito (What We Do In the Shadows’ Harvey Guillen), a diminutive therapy dog who was masquerading as one of Luna’s cats, as they set out in search of the Wishing Star, a fallen star that can grant whoever finds it their heart’s desire, which means Puss could get his other Eight Lives back.  Except that they’ve still got the bounty hunters on their trail, along with (now decidedly) Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney), a magic-item collecting entrepreneur who has a score to settle with Puss which definitely coincides with his fervent desire to claim the Star for himself, and a mysterious Wolf (the irresistibly silky tones of Narcos’ Wagner Moura) who may actually be Death Himself, who has his own, much darker reasons for finding Puss.  Y’know how they say you judge a hero by the strength of the villains he faces?  Well with antagonists of THIS calibre, Puss just might have finally met his match … and even better, EVEYTHING ELSE about this movie is as strong as its villains – it’s one of the most well-written, well-directed and deeply, affectingly resonant movies that Dreamworks have EVER DONE, EASILY on a par with the rest of the Shrek canon and even matching up impressively well with the true Gold Standards like Kung Fu Panda and the How To Train Your Dragon movies, everyone involved in this project clearly giving it their all in a total labour of pure, unadulterated LOVE that pays VAST dividends on the screen.  The cast, of course, are among the greatest key ingredients in this, and as we’ve come to expect from these movies they’re all pulling their weight MAGNIFICENTLY – Guillen and Mulaney in particularly deliver SPECTACULARLY in their respective roles, while Pugh and her cohorts are at once hilariously good fun but also elevate their characters FAR ABOVE their one-note bad guy potential thanks in no small part to some VERY intelligent, well-rounded and deeply complex character development from the writers, but in the end the main weight of the film OF COURSE rests on the shoulders of Banderas and Hayek, and once again they’ve both proven they are MUCH MORE than capable of bearing it with grace, professionalism and a glorious evergreen twinkle in their eyes.  As for the animation and design, this is a BEAUTIFUL piece of work, definitely one of the year’s most visually arresting films as well as, quite simply, one of the most gorgeous films that Dreamworks have ever put together, the studio effortlessly adapting to the sexy new style that made Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Netflix’ Arcane such glorious feasts for the eyes, and the animation team deserve JUST AS MUCH praise as director Joel Crawford, a storyboard veteran who previous proved his helming pedigree in fine style with 2020’s wonderfully oddball The Croods: A New Age.  Ultimately, given the storyline, themes and the way the film ties things off so neatly, I suspect this really will be the last we see of Puss In Boots on the big screen, but if that really is the case then I gotta admit it’s ONE HELL of a swansong …

3.  RENFIELD – my current horror movie of the year sits very comfortably in the genre’s sub-category that I’ve always loved best, a horror comedy of particularly rare quality and gleeful abandon that made it one of the best and most entertaining viewing experiences I’ve had so far this year.  Yeah, like the best horror comedies it has enough genuine darkness that it CAN be genuinely scary when it wants to be, but by the sheer (literal) batshit craziness of its premise this is a BONKERS FILM, and so it wisely embraces its sheer lampoonery to full effect by delivering one of the most deliciously dark black comedies I’ve seen in a good while.  Not that it’s overly surprising – director Chris McKay cut his teeth helming The Lego Batman Movie before branching out into live action with Amazon’s criminally underrated time travelling alien invasion blockbuster The Tomorrow War, both of which were excellent vehicles for him to master the gloriously anarchic style that he finally unleashes fully formed for this brilliant alternative sequel to the classic Universal Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi.  That being said, the big box office draw here was always going to be Nicolas Cage, who replaces Lugosi as the infamous Count, clearly kicking into his typical “manic” setting here to chew the scenery with ruthless abandon and, as a result, frequently steal the show right out from under Nicholas Hoult as his titular ghoul manservant, the long-suffering Robert Montague Renfield, who just wants the opportunity to finally find a real, simple life for himself and thinks he can pull it off in modern day New Orleans, only for his Master to himself become inspired by Renfield’s newfound ambition and set his sights on world domination with the help of the Lobos, a brutal local crime family.  Thankfully Hoult DOES ultimately manage to hold his own in his scenes with Cage, like always proving ADEPTLY talented enough to deliver another winningly endearing performance while playing perhaps the single most pathetic specimen of his career to date … meanwhile the thoroughly adorable Awkwafina once again proves that she’s well on the way to becoming the PREMIER kooky goofball female comedic lead in Hollywood as Rebecca Quincy, the one truly honest cop in one of the most corrupt police forces in all of America, who winds up falling for Renfield’s hangdog charm and puppy-dog eyes as he inadvertently becomes the key to her quest to bring down the Lobos after they murdered her legendary detective father.  Shohreh Aghdashloo brings a much needed touch of class to proceedings as Bellafrancesca Lobo, the family’s seductively sly matriarch, while Space Force and Sonic the Hedgehog’s Ben Schwarz is a frequent non-PC laugh riot all on his own as her entitled constant disappointment of a son Teddy, and Ghosts’ Brandon Scott Jones is lovably flaky as the leader of Renfield’s endearingly pathetic support group for people trapped in toxic co-dependent relationships.  This genuinely is a DEEPLY FUNNY FILM, perfectly geared up for a maximum hit count with the one-liners, in-jokes and situations, but then there’s no surprise here since writer Ryan Ridley (adapting a pitch from The Walking Dead’s original creator Robert Kirkman) is a seasoned veteran of TV comedy, particularly well known as an alumnus of the similarly edgy and madcap Rick & Morty, and this carries a lot of the same twisted, anarchic charm as that rightly beloved series, just in a much more big budge live action form on the big screen.  It’s also SPECTACULARLY bloodthirsty when it wants to be, the welcome reliance on what are clearly LARGELY physical effects meaning that this movie is another gore-hound’s wet dream, even if the film does mostly play the horror elements for laughs throughout, and it’s an impressively inventive and chaotic beast in THAT regard too, delivering some of the most gloriously OTT splatter-fuelled action sequences I’ve seen in a good while whenever Renfield eats a bug and gets an ultraviolent power boost.  Altogether this is definitely some of the most fun I’ve had at the cinema so far this year, and I’ll admit I wouldn’t mind a bit more of this …

2. JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4 – and so, it has come to this … honestly, who’d have thunk it, back in 2014 when the first movie came out and (rightly) became a surprise sleeper hit that went a long way to revitalising Keanu Reeves’ career for a SECOND TIME as he found THE GREATEST ROLE HE’S EVER HAD, that almost a decade later it would’ve blown up into something THIS BIG?!!!  I mean sure, back then it definitely was The Little Movie That Could, but still … well, after two increasingly BIG sequels which each maintained a surprisingly impressive level of quality throughout, the fourth and final John Wick chapter is finally here, and GODS is it good.  I mean it’s FUCKING BRILLIANT.  It just might be THE BEST ONE YET.  Certainly it’s proving to be the most well received, landing BY FAR the best rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it genuinely seems like almost nobody has ANYTHING bad to say about this movie, even the CRITICS largely seem to LIKE this one. And it deserves every lick of love it’s been getting, this is definitely both the pinnacle of the series AND a perfect swansong for the greatest assassin in cinema history.  I don’t wanna give too much away about the plot, even those who HAVE seen what’s come before don’t deserve to be spoiled since, even if these movies have never exactly been SHAKESPEARE in their construction they do still frequently leave you guessing in the best ways as to how they’ll turn out, and this one definitely is no exception.  I’ll just say that, after all the killing John’s done to get to this point, his one-man-war with the international criminal network’s High Table has finally reached his zenith when Winston (the great Ian McShane), the Manager of the newly-demolished Manhattan Continental Hotel, gives him the means to finally find a way to get out and find peace while he’s still alive – namely by challenging the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (It’s Bill Skarsgard), a high-ranking Table member who’s taken it upon himself to rid the criminal underworld of the “cancer” that John and his constant disrespect have wrought, to single combat in a ritualistic duel in order to take his place at The Table should he win.  The subsequent battle that ensues as John sets about facilitating this duel and the fallout that follows as he fights his way to that final, fateful meeting fuels the film in HIGH STYLE, so that even though this movie’s almost THREE HOURS LONG it never feels overlong or outstays its welcome.  Once again the cast are all ON FIRE, Reeves once again proving that he is just about THE BEST LOOKING and most interesting action star working in Hollywood today when he’s mowing down endless bad guys with a stoic expression and the odd deadpan response, the role once again VERY MUCH playing to his strengths, while McShane and Laurence Fishburne (returning once again as the dethroned Bowery King) are both on fine form throughout, while it’s both a pleasure and privilege but also a genuine heartbreaking SHAME to watch the late Lance Reddick deliver one of his very last performances as Charon, the noble and quietly charismatic Concierge of the Manhattan Continental (at least he also shot one more turn as the character for the upcoming Ana de Armas-starring spinoff feature Ballerina, so it’s not QUITE the end); meanwhile the newcomers all serve admirably as well, with Skarsgard particularly impressing as one of the franchise’s best villains to date, slimy, entitled and exquisitely arrogant, the kind of Big Bad you just LOVE to hate, Wynnona Earp’s Shamier Anderson is a delightful revelation as Mr Nobody, a precocious up-and-coming hitman talent who certainly has a whole lot of potential for a possible future spinoff franchise of his own within this larger universe, Donnie Yen excels as usual as Cain, a former friend of John’s that the Marquis brings out of forced retirement in order to take the unkillable Baba Yaga out (clearly the filmmakers saw his blind badass take in Rogue One and they were like yeah, let’s have a whole lot more of THAT), Hiroyuki Sanada once more delivers effortless class and cool gravitas as Koji, the honourable and principled Manager of the Osaka Continental, and Scott Adkins is viciously impressive but also thoroughly surprising in an almost unrecognisable prosthetic getup as Killa Harkan, the brutish Head of the High Table in Berlin.  In the end, though, we’re once again here primarily to MARVEL at all the action exploits on display while wallowing in some of the richest and most well-crafted world-building there’s EVER BEEN on the big screen – this is a thoroughly fascinating universe, realised with exquisite precision with so many cool little winks and nods and in-jokes to make the geeks among us grin and chuckle with sheer joy over the immense bounty on display, while veteran stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski once again wrangles some of the VERY BEST cinematic action EVER COMMITTED TO FILM in a series of truly astonishing and thoroughly punishing set-pieces bravely executed with nary a visual effect in sight.  There are almost TOO MANY cool action beats in this movie to count, although the final BIG sequence, in which John fights his way up the spectacular but infamously punishing Stairs of Montmartre in Paris against an endless onslaught of thugs all determined to not let him reach the top, which includes one of the BIGGEST belly laughs I have EVER HAD at the cinema in my life, as much just over the joke’s sheer, ingenious AUDACITY, has to be the film’s undeniable highlight (closely followed by a genuinely INSANE run/gun/drive chase/shootout/fight sequence through the sheer chaos of the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe – every single one of these sequences is thrilling, they’re adrenaline fuelled and each is crafted with such precision but also such brilliant varied inventiveness that it NEVER leads to vicarious battle fatigue.  Best of all, though, as with the previous film’s there’s a surprising amount of soul and heart and heft to the film too, which ultimately leads to a climax which is both immensely satisfying but also pretty devastating in its emotional power.  Altogether then, this is EASILY my action movie of the year, I really can’t see that changing, as well as a fitting climax to an action cinema franchise which has come to SET THE BENCHMARK for the entire genre, and, honestly, just a damn fine movie in its own right.

1. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES – so what, then, could POSSIBLY have beaten John Wick Chapter 4 to the top spot?  If you’d asked me that at the year’s start I DEFINITELY wouldn’t have thought it could be THIS … I mean SURE, I love D&D as much as the next geek, but even so this felt like SUCH a shameless cinematic cash-grab from Wizards of the Coast and Disney (producing through Paramount) that I felt there was NO WAY it could REALLY be an actual GOOD FILM.  At best I was expecting to be mildly entertained by a serviceable guilty pleasure, something that’s good for a Saturday night-in with a pizza and a six pack, not a genuine MASTERPIECE of cinematic adaptation.  And yet, it turns out that’s EXACTLY what we got here – this is a film which is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT clearly made with the utmost love and respect for the source material because the only possible interpretation for the way they wrote this was by taking Player’s and Dungeon Master’s handbooks, a Monster Manual, some character sheets and a few dice bags and just turning the mini-campaign that ensued into a two-hour screenplay.  It’s clear that they are heavily steeped in love and knowledge of the game itself, or were at least CONSTANTLY advised by experts who are, because this movie is AT EVERY STEP a pretty much PERFECT representation of the Forgotten Realms setting, the bestiary and even the game mechanics themselves IN ACTION, and it EVEN colours the way that the plot is laid out, how the characters interact and how some of the action sequences go.  (Seriously – a perfectly executed knockout on a knife-wielding hostage taker with a hurled potato?  That’s the Barbarian’s player landing a Natural 20 Critical Hit on their Attack Roll.  It love it.) Sure, the results are likely to INFURIATE some people who think a little too highly about how FORMALLY WRITTEN their cinema is, but for most folk this actually makes for a refreshingly honest and pretty unique piece of cinematic storytelling that actually works DAMN NEAR PERFECTLY from start to finish.  It also helps that the writer-director duo in charge here are a pair of stalwart comedy movie veterans, namely Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly of Horrible Bosses, Vacation and Spider-Man: Homecoming fame, whose previous directorial collab Game Night actually likely provided a useful throughline for them to get into tackling this one.  The main cast of dysfunctional heroes that we follow through the story are even put together like a typical motely crew of player characters – Chris Pine once again proves that he’s at his best when he’s doing broad comedy, thoroughly delightful as self-centred, opportunistic roguish Bard Edgin Darvis, who, along with his platonic partner, tough-but-fair and sweetly naïve Barbarian warrior Holga Kilgore (played to absolute PERFECTION by Michelle Rodriguez in what’s UNDOUBTEDLY the best role she’s ever had, and definitely my FAVOURITE character here), enlists the help of bumbling, neuroses-riddled half-elf Sorcerer Simon Aumar (Detective Pikachu’s Justice Smith, twitchy, unsure of himself and UTTERLY adorable) and shape-shifting Tiefling Druid Doric (It’s Sophia Lillis, forthright, dependable and immediately done with all of Edgin’s shit) to help them knock over the accumulated fortune of their one-time colleague, Rogue-turned-nobleman Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant once again expertly bringing home the scheming sleaze persona he’s perfected in more recent years now he’s finally said goodbye to his earlier days as an upper class heartthrob) and foil the dastardly machinations of the monstrous undead Red Wizard Sofina (a genuinely chilling and unsettling turn from Shadow & Bone’s Daisy Head); meanwhile there’s a top-notch supporting cast of “DM-controlled NPCs” that help the story roll and breathe as effortlessly as the main stars, from Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page as deliciously dry Paladin Xenk Yendar, the obviously-overpowered PC from another campaign that the DM brings in to help the party out when things go COMPLETELY WRONG for them, and Chloe Coleman (Gunpowder Milkshake) as Edgin’s estranged young daughter Kira, to Bradley Cooper in a truly INSPIRED and genuinely hilarious cameo as Holga’s decidedly diminutive ex-husband Marlamin.  Every single one of these is a well-rounded, living-and-breathing vital person in their own right, and the writers have crafted them and their misadventures with proper precision throughout, while the world has been realised with genuine skill and clear loving attention to detail, as well as, yet again, a welcome reliance on real sets and locations and good old fashioned physical make-up and animatronics over pure digital effects wherever possible. There are some pretty spectacular action sequences on offer here (the Underdark sequence with a decidedly overweight dragon is a particular highlight, although my personal favourite has to be the scene in which Doric has to pull off an unexpected escape by Wildshaping between different animal forms, all unfolding in a spectacular unbroken “single” take), but in the end this film is, first and foremost, a COMEDY, and while there’s plenty of heart and pathos on offer, as well as more than a little genuine DARKNESS here and there, ultimately everything is VERY MUCH played for humour, and the end result is definitely the funniest film I’ve encountered this year (so far, anyway).  It’s also just about the most effortlessly ENDEARING film I’ve come across in a very long time, and I have to admit I am SO GLAD that it managed to defy my low expectations SO MUCH, I feel VERY HAPPILY HUMBLED that I was proved SO WRONG this time round.  I’m genuinely hopeful that we get LOADS MORE of this going forward, I can’t wait for a whole long campaign’s worth of movies to grow out of these humble beginnings. Best get those D20s rolling again, guys!

[riverdamien]

The Paradox of Solitude!

"Sloughing Toward's Galilee"!

"Christians/ Catholic Workers Gone Bad!

"Peniel: Where Jacob Wrestled With God!"

"The Paradox of Solitude!"

1 Corinthians 12:4-11

New King James Version

"4 There are [a]diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. 6 And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works [b]all in all. 7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all: 8 for to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by [c]the same Spirit, 10 the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kind of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as He wills".

======================

    Personally, fifty percent of my time or more is spent in solitude. Without solitude, I would not have survived these years. There is a paradox of solitude:

"Solitude is the place of great struggle and the great encounter- the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self"(Richard Rhor).

        In silence, one learns to listen to the silent voice within us, inviting us to voicelessness, to listen from the marrow of our being, listening from the most profound source of our lives. We must learn to go into the most profound waves of our being, learning to abide in Christ as Christ remains in us. We must

learn to be silent as the leaves fall around us, trusting in the blossom of the new flowers to come.

    It is in the solitude that the words of Oscar Romero speak to us:

    "Let us not tire of preaching love, for this is the force that will overcome the world. Let us never tire of preaching love. Even if we see waves of violence coming to drown out the fire of Christian love, love must win out. It is the only thing that can."

    It is, in practice, of love that one knows who is to be trusted, for in love, there is the Divine.

    For over thirty years, and more now, I have had twenty or more trains coming at me on one railroad track. I have learned that only through the practice of love for everyone, regardless of who they are, what they have done or will do, who they believe in, what they believe in, or their political party, is the Divine presence enveloping me upward into Christ's love!

    That I learned on the night I forgave the man who had killed my son and stabbed me with the needle that is now sending its death-dealing piece toward my brain.

    So, in the days ahead, I invite you to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself." Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

=========================

Put me in jail, then. Throw me behind your religious bars since you have dubbed me a breaker of your law. I live my days in the courtroom of your criticism. I move unbothered under the gaze of your gavel. I have no interest in defending myself before your bench. Go on, clench your fists, raise your voice to make your point. Type the rebuke that you must make on my page. Who asked you to come through anyway? Is this rage your duty? We operate under a different set of obligations and get worked up to frustration for different reasons, even though we both claim fidelity to God. If you were interested, which I doubt, here is where my passion lies: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, defend the rights of the orphan, plead the widow’s cause, and woe to you who unjustly enforce God’s Law. Why spend your energy policing me when that same energy could be used to love, fiercely? Justice, mercy, and humility. Go learn what this means. Drew Jackson

Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

=============

.

Temenos Catholic Worker

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

Dr. River Damien Carlos Sims, D.Min, D.S.T.

==========================

“People ask me why do you write about food,

and eating and drinking. Why don’t you write

about the struggle for power and security and

about love, the way others do? The easiest answer

is to say that, like most other humans I am hungry (M.F. Fisher!”

====================

(Temenos and Dr. River seek to remain accessible to everyone. We do not endorse particular causes, political parties, or candidates, or take part in public controversies, whether religious, political, or social--Our pastoral ministry is to everyone!

[iri-desky]

🕰️!!!!!!

HEY SODA!!

Ooh! You picked one of my favorites! This was the first one I created, actually!

((HUGGEEEE yapping session ahead. Beware))

It's called...

🕰 Time's Toll 🕰

The Story 💎

So there's this girl named Monica Bell. Monica is a pretty stand-up student, lives in Massachusetts with a relatively upper class family in somewhat of a creaky old house in a suburban neighborhand wherein her days feel particularly long, buuut everything's pretty much fine.

Monica doesn't really have many plans for the future. She's decided she's probably going to be a lawyer of some sort, given how it's the family business on her mom's side. But for the most part she has no aim.

This continues on until she decides to aimlessly wander out of bed one night for a glass of water at 2 AM, messes with one of her grandmother's old necklaces she inherited in a tired daze, and suddenly questions why the gem feels like it's pulsating...and why the sun is rising. She let's go of it and everything goes back to normal.

The next day (thank God it's a weekend) she decides to wear it around as she wonders if it was just some weird fever dream or hallucination. This wanders around with it, events keep repeating in some places but not others, and generally incredibly weird time fuckery ensues UNTIL she decides to rip off the necklace and smash it against a wall.

Nothing breaks, but the spirit of her estranged great uncle emerges.

His name's Rufus. He's kind of a nervous wreck.

Now obviously he's pretty damn happy he can see his old house again on the physical plane-- but he's kind of pissed. He's worried that Monica broke the necklace (she did not), but also about being freed in general. The whole time fuckery thing had to do with him trying to make Monica take off the necklace and put it back where she found it, never touching it again unless she needs to. The thing is is that Rufus' spirit was sealed away in there a long time ago, and also it was a very valuable necklace and you should've never even wore it unless it was a special occasion, Monica, and--his ramblings go on.

Monica is just generally baffled by how she's talking to a dead person.

Rufus suddenly realizes that Monica is in the dark about what even makes his existence possible, and he gets ready to explain it to her--

Until he notices the clock is starting to slow down by about half a second.

Now, unbeknownst to Monica, the presence of Rufus alerted something called The Stall to the family's presence in the house. The Stall is basically the thing screwing up the timestream. It causes anomalies, coincidences that seem too strong to be real, strong deja vu, all that-- everything that's ruining timelines up, down, and sideways (a timeline being an inappropriate way of measuring time in the way it functions in this story, anyway).

To help Monica do her part to stop this, Rufus introduced to her to her Dad's side of the family business.

Well, it isn't quite a family business. Moreso a job occasionally held by certain people around the world that has the potential to be passed down fraternally. But I digress. Monica comes from a family of Timekeepers. Or, as Rufus prefers to call it, Time Wardens. And boy oh boy is she gonna learn a lot about how time really works before this is all over.

The Characters ☁️

Monica (She/Her) - (14 - 16) A girl who somewhat glides through life, with little to no real long term goals. She's got that New Englander sarcasm and snark, and can be rather blunt. She's curious and wants to succeed, alhough she finds it hard to apply herself to things unnecessary according to her own Judgement, creating a paradox between her own wants.

Rufus (He/Him) [referred to as "it" occasionally] - (35 - 41 [biologically]) [chronologically, he's almost a century old] A really nervous guy who doesn't get emotions but still tries his best to communicate. Just generally inept. Brainy, skilled and precise in what he does and generally quite friendly but in a pathetic sopping wet cat way. Has mood swings and talks about the good old days a lot.

Also, every hour of the average 24 hour day has a time lord that lords over it, representing that hour. While I won't mention all of the lords, I will mention that all of them are named after the Roman Numerals that correspond to that hour. So, for example, 3 PM, or 15 on an average 24 hour clock, has a time lord named XV, or Exvee (written as such). They also have personalities that fit that time of day--Exvee (They/It/He) is a very energetic but somewhat lazy lord who's quite playful! His design resembles clouds and he can transform into different shapes.

🔔 The World 🔔

The Time Wardens have access to a seperate dimension called Clankerspace. Clankerspace is a pocket between space and time wherein them outside of it functions differently depending on where you ARE inside Clankerspace at the time (some spaces make it so time goes faster or slower on purpose, areas wherein time lords reside might make time go faster or slower depending on time of day and if their hour has passed yet [it's especially trippy for Midnight]). Clankerspace looks fairly steampunk in architecture and nature, which is mainly because it sort of functions as a clock itself. It's a seperate pocket of space that shows how time flows itself and it's structure, with the lords being gods contrived by men themselves.

There's plenty more lore but that's the gist of it !

I plan on making it a game or graphic novel. :)

Ask any questions if you want. Here's some songs I associate with it as a bonus 👍🏽