#bailiwicks

[godspeedmajortom]

I’m fascinated by how variations of Sea Power's “Want to Be Free (Remix)” provide a musical theme for death and endings that follows Harry and his foils throughout Disco Elysium.

The first place you hear it is as “The Field Autopsy” while inspecting the Hanged Man’s body. It's barely recognizable as the original song, though. It's sluggish and muddy and bilious. The piano melody has been lowered and sustained to an ominous funereal organ and combined with deep strings. A lilting viola line in the lush layers of the original "Want to Be Free" is isolated here and contrasts with the low organ, rising like the stench off a corpse. If you do the autopsy first thing as Kim suggests, Harry – freshly, grotesquely awakened from his apocalyptic bender – is not in a much better state than a corpse himself.

The music underscores a visceral scene of death and decay, our introduction to the Hanged Man, the first of Harry's foils. Both Harry and Lely are agents of state-sponsored violence as a cop and mercenary, respectively. They bear similar physical scars from the neglect of the systems they grew up in. They both desperately want to escape the horrorshow of their lives, using drugs and dark fantasies to cope with the terrible things they see and do but finding little more than self-destruction in the nihilism. The Bloated Corpse of a Drunk taking the Hanged Man's place in Harry's first night dream makes their connection explicit: you should be dead, Harry. This may as well have been you.

The next place you hear a variant of "Want to Be Free" is in the washerwoman's shack in the fishing village. “Live With Me” is wistful and melancholic. The gentle piano and cooing vocals evoke the wind and waves on the bay, an escape calling outside the salt-rimed shack. But this is a place of death, or at least its potential, as the return of the high viola from "The Field Autopsy" reminds us. This is where Ruby hid when Harry's arrival made her fear for her life, where she contemplated killing herself if things got even worse. This is where Harry can end up if no one vouches for him at the RCM tribunal finale, where his wounds will grow infected without medical care, where there is little left to do but return to drinking and wait to die.

But true to the song title, the shack also offers Harry the possibility of learning to with himself as he emerges from his bender. Here is a mirror free from the damage and trauma of attempting to destroy himself where he can reflect on who he was and who he wants to become. He can choose to keep or let go of his past coping/defense mechanisms like his facial hair and The Expression. He can choose to embrace or reject the self-defeating fantasy of fascism. The shack marks a midpoint of the game, when the hangover has worn off but before the case is closed. So "Live With Me" scores the balance between potential endings: abandonment or acceptance, relapse or recovery, death or life. Harry breathes in the sea air, breathes it back out, and takes another step.

I didn’t realize this until a recent replay, but “Live With Me” also plays when you visit the Working Class Woman to notify her of her husband’s death. Since this is an optional sidequest, I understand why they didn't create original music for it. But they didn't reuse "Rue de Saint-Gislaine", the song for the rest of the Capeside Apartments (including the Smoker on the Balcony's apartment when you talk to the Sunday Friend). The Working Class Husband is another mirror for Harry who has met his end, and "Live With Me" plays to mourn him.

Victor Méjean died from an accident while inebriated, a fate that also could have befallen Harry on a previous drinking binge. The striking thing about Victor's death is how easily he could have been overlooked and forgotten. He died at the end of a pier in a fenced off, abandoned part of town. His wife wasn't concerned about his days-long absence. It's only by virtue of Can Opening and Jamrock Shuffling that Harry will know about or find him. Victor literally and figuratively died slipping through the cracks – of the rotted boardwalk, yes, but also of any sort of social safety net. This is what happens to alcoholics in Revachol. This is what will happen to Harry if he continues drinking and hasn't built his own personal safety net with Kim or Cuno to prevent the RCM from abandoning him. As Harry informs Billie of her husband's death, it's only natural for him to think of his own possible endings, and the soundtrack reflects that.

The final version of the song you hear is “Burn, Baby, Burn” blasting from Sad FM on the boat ride to the Sea Fortress to find the Hanged Man's killer and Harry's last dark reflection: Dros, The Deserter. Dros shares Harry's penchant for clinging to political ideology to give meaning to his life and obsessing over women he can't be with. He lives in bitter isolation, refusing to move beyond the failures of the past, his personal shortcomings and the evils of the world alike. He's emblematic of yet another possible outcome for Harry: not literal death, but despair-induced stagnation that leaves one living like a ghost in the mortal realm.

By the time Harry gets in the boat to the island, his fate at the end of the game is set. The RCM (specifically Jean) has all they need to decide whether to accept or abandon their prodigal lieutenant-yefreitor. Should his former partners leave him, Harry can return to the shack and the circle of drunks who have also given up on life. Or he can return to the island, where he would take Dros' place as the creepy old man haunting the fortress, scaring children, and staring at the mainland with longing and resentment. But even if Harry returns with his unit to Jamrock, simply resuming his old life will not keep him from returning to the depths of despair. The RCM broke him; the RCM will not save him. Neither outcome helps Harry become a person he truly wants to live with.

"Want to be free/It will last forever/Eternally," croons the boombox on the boat. The lyrics echo the self destruction that Harry sought before the game's events: freedom forever from pain, the ultimate release of death. At least that's what the Ancient Reptilian Brain would see in those words. But there's tension in the lyrics as the desire for freedom and exhortations to "burn, baby, burn" repeat. The bridge offers an alternative vision of verdure not consumed by the disco inferno: "And the trees are green and overhanging/Feather-light, free, and everlasting." Perhaps a less moribund future exists for Harry, even if only in the next world, as a new person.

[artbyblastweave]

Hey I was wondering since you are very familiar with superhero comics/media and I am not: I remember reading on TVTropes about how there was some comic arc where Superman is basically forced to kill the Joker/does it under extremely understandable circumstances, but then immediately jumps off the slippery slope and becomes a horrible mass murderer. SO, I was wondering if Amy in Worm is a commentary/take on this, on what kind of warped understanding of morality taught by someone's family environment would one have to have to actually believe breaking one's principles once while being forced to by a serial killer would make you into an irredeemable villain forever, and what kind of trauma and warped understanding would you have to have for that to actually be TRUE and for you to actually do horrible things afterward. Emphasizing that that kind of moral arc is not how normal humans work and there would have to be very unusual circumstances for it to happen. But since I don't know about superhero comics I can't really elaborate on this, so I wonder what you think of the idea.

So the specific arc you're talking about was Injustice: Gods Among Us, and the tie-in comics produced as a backstory for that video game- which came out in 2013 onward, so the times don't line up for Amy to be a commentary on that arc specifically. In particular, Superman has basically the exact opposite issue that Amy does; he killed Joker because he murdered an entire city, and he justifies his subsequent slide towards tyranny on the grounds that he wasn't being proactive enough to stop things like that beforehand. Kind of a common refrain in "Superman loses it" stories- refer in particular to the "I did love being a hero. But if this is where it leads, I'm done with it" scene from the Justice Lords arc of the old Justice League cartoon. (Batman is occasionally painted as having a "murder-is-like-potato-chips" problem, refraining from killing because he wouldn't be able to stop. Depends on the writer, though.) What Amy absolutely is commenting on is what I think was a very pervasive idea in cape comics in the years when Worm was being formulated- the idea of the hero/villain binary as a real and meaningful thing, two meaningful categories of people which you can switch between as a discreet and meaningful action. Black Knight, Hawkeye, Rogue- all superheroes who started as supervillains, two distinct statuses which they held. Characters like Deadpool and Harley Quinn start as villains and drift towards a third-position antiheroic middle-ground that's treated as noteworthy for not really falling into either camp- in turn sort of generating what basically amounts to a third cluster, a coherent trinary. (A lot of 90s anti-heroes reifying the binary in how they're marketed as violating it.) Not actually many heroes I can think of who've gone full villain and had that stick, but definitely heroes who've flipped for a time in a meaningful way- Hal Jordan becoming Parallax sticks in my head. And at least since the 80s you've had writers making post-modern gags about powered people who opt out entirely and have day jobs using their powers for something mundane. (The X-Men are all over the place in here.) And subdued but gradually swelling in popularity is where Worm lands- the idea that what you're actually looking at here is a mob of agents, with their own granular agendas, alliances, outlooks, lines in the sand, and relationship to the law-as-written- that when a hero starts acting villainous or a villain does something heroic, when they approach a fifty-fifty split without actually changing their label, it's an indictment of the idea you can actually broadly group them so neatly in the first place. And there's a lot of clunky dialogue in parts of Worm where characters are treating the hero/villain binary as a real tangible thing- "hero behavior, villain behavior-" in a way that seems hilariously naïve and awkward from where I'm sitting in 2023, and indeed was probably kind of a no-duh moment even in 2011. Anti-heroes had been around for a while. But I do think that those sequences were written in conversation with an assumption about the genre that wasn't totally dead in the water at the time, an assumption that Amy holds as a way of showing how treating the categories as innate will drive you nuts when they fail to model reality. I genuinely believe that the MCU and DCEU have killed this binary dead in the general consciousness, though. These days a "superhero" is whoever the protagonist of the movie is, and the idea that that can encompass a whole range of moralities is pretty strongly cemented. A supervillain is whoever fights the star of the movie once and then dies. It's whoever is creating a problem right that second, not a social role you hold for a prolonged period. In this way and some others, Worm hasn't been commenting on the dominant paradigm of superheroism in some time- it's becoming kind of a period piece.

[centeris2]

okay this is a very silly nitpick especially for something that looks nice

But I would have given Holdsworth more bee-things. Like a honeycomb knit/crochet pattern to her shawl, or hexagon shaped glasses, or hexagons instead of squares on her skirt. Just like. More obvious bee theming to her design. You don’t have to slap on yellow and black stripes and wings on her, but just lil touches so you go “oooh!” when you find out about her and bees. Maybe a cute little bee brooch if you wanna be more direct in “hey, look, bees!”

anyway that’s my two cents

[empressyu123]

Okay bro. i was rewatching “Sofia the first” (don’t judge me I was going through my childhood)

until i noticed something.

WTF DOES BLUD EAT? how is his waist so small????

look at Miranda then look back at Bailiwick. or any character this guy has my dream waist!

[grandvampiress]

LUNEL HOUSEHOLD

Being a werewolf never made it easy for Maia to blend within her hometown. When she heard about the embarkment requests for Bailiwick Bay, she took the opportunity without a second glance. In this budding little community, will she find someone that will look beyond her monstrous tendencies?

Maia Lunel:

Aspiration: Family/Fortune Personality: 3 - 8 - 9 - 4 - 1 Sexuality: Gay LTW: Become Celebrity Chef OTH: Cuisine/Baking Role: Baker (Home Business); will open a restaurant upon unlocking comm. lots and enter the Culinary career once career requirements are met

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Video: Nessi Gomes Shares Brooding and Cinematic "Moving Mirrors"

New Video: Nessi Gomes Shares Brooding and Cinematic "Moving Mirrors" @nessigomesmusic @heygroover @romainpalmieri @DorianPerron

Guernsey-born and-based singer/songwriter Nessi Gomes is a Channel Island-Portuguese singer/songwriter, whose work draws from both sides of her ethnicity, the essence of the traditional, emotional Fado of Portugal with British modern, progressive pop. Gomes’ full-length debut, 2016’s Diamonds & Demons received airplay and critical praise across the European Union and the UK, and was supported by…

[vanvelding]

On the one hand what Blinken actually said about social media is that it has a tendency to push emotionally affecting images at the cost of context, history, and accuracy. That's true, but then it's always been true of media that what is shallow and invective is in demand.

When Mitt Romney says banning TikTok is a good start, you definitely get the impression that he wants to return us to the days of legacy media. He says disproportionate support for Palestine is the reason--and that's worth examination--but an opinion you don't like being popular on a platform does not constitute a reason to ban that platform, just a pretext fueled by your ability to sell your own, unquestioned, opinion.

Also-but Blinken and Romney also spent 5 minutes bitching about Hamas not taking deals to get a cease fire when:

Now that there is a deal they'll take, someone else is backing out.

[paw-tizm]

“Excuse me, They asked for no pickles.”

A little bugiwick shipping, as a treat :3

[graphicpolicy]

Graphic Policy’s Top Comic Picks this Week!

Graphic Policy’s Top Comic Picks this Week! 11 #comics to check out. #comicbooks

Wednesdays (and Tuesdays) are new comic book day! Each week hundreds of comics are released, and that can be pretty daunting to go over and choose what to buy. That’s where we come in Each week our contributors choose what they can’t wait to read this week or just sounds interesting. In other words, this is what we’re looking forward to and think you should be taking a look at! Find out what…

[followthebluebell]

hi! sorry to bother you, but i remember seeing posts about something like lifetime wellness studies (?) for cats on certain brands of cat food, and thought you might know something about that. would you know how i'd go about researching if a particular brand or line of cat food has done those studies?

So, to get a lot of controversy out of the way immediately, my solid stance is that the BEST food for your cat is the one that they'll eat and won't wreck their digestive system. Some cats will eat nothing but fancy feast kibble and that's fine. It's not poisoning them unless they've got some horrible reaction to an ingredient.

Basically, I don't judge owners based on the food that they feed their cat. My own cats eat mostly Friskies wet food.

There aren't many companies that run lifetime tests on their food due to the sheer length of time those studies require, as well as the costs. Remember, the lifetime of a cat is like 15+ years, although most lifetime studies are only ten. That's a long time to study, so really the only companies that CAN afford to do this are the big ones. I know Purina, Science Diet, and Royal Canin do. I know a few others do. I think Iams and Eukanuba, but don't quote me there; my bailiwick is cat stuff, not dog stuff.

The best way to find out if a company has done a lifetime study is to contact the company directly and ask to see the study itself.

Some brands might be tricky and try to claim that they are 'WSAVA Approved'. This is not a thing. The World Small Animal Vet Association has set guidelines for cat and dog food that includes a lifetime feeding test, BUT they don't personally vet these companies. Instead, the wording you're looking for will be more like '[BRAND] meets the standards set by the World Small Animal Vet Association'.

[clockwayswrites]

Just curious, have you ever considered using Gentleman Ghost as a villain? I ask because there’s like one one-shot and one comic of him interacting with or fighting with Danny Phantom in all of Ao3 and Tumblr.

He’s the most iconic ghost villain he should have more fights with the most iconic ghost hero.

Nope! Not even on my radar as a charcter. Reading about him I think there's actually more interesting things to be done with pharaoh Tuck and the Hawks lol But I'm not one for writing big battle/fight scenes. Just not my bailiwick and all!

I'll always go to character focused things first. One can see that really clearly in 'A Broken Sort of Normal'. We skip all of the actual fight scenes, really. And those who've been around since 'Sunshine and Madness' know how little we actually saw of the big showdown. Even during the fight it was more about the emotions.

[fursasaida]

Our problem with Syring and Seldowitz is essentially rhetorical and jurisdictional. You don’t get to say it like that. You don’t get to say it like that. The FBI agents investigating Syring for harassing James Zogby could turn right around and search James Zogby’s home on equally spurious accusations of terrorism, and that would be proper—that’s their bailiwick. Harassing Arab Americans is not an acceptable quest for a random retired foreign service officer in his Virginia condo. That’s the FBI’s job. You can green-light the shipments of MK-84 bombs to Israel to kill thousands of Palestinian children, give them the diplomatic green light to do it, and veto condemnation of killing four thousand children at the UN, but you can’t brag about it. That’s hate speech.

The thing is, though, “God, I wish the Israelis would just kill these people” is something you can sigh into a scotch and soda with your co-workers at the hotel bar after a day of frustrated “diplomacy.” Nobody would bat an eye. It’s just blowing off steam. But if you’re recorded saying it to a halal cart vendor in Manhattan, you have violated the social contract. If you stay within the system, almost everything is allowable: structural violence demands a certain politeness.

Seldowitz is a shocking example of abandoned pretense, but Syring is a more telling one: a fixation all out of proportion to any actual concern, coldly and methodically maintained. Logical and knowing but completely insane at the same time. If we produce Seldowitzes, we can be shocked and horrified. We can console ourselves that he was a personally corrupt asshole. When I think about what Syring did, I am not shocked, to be honest; what does shock me is the realization of how many Patrick Syrings there are who kept their feelings within the bounds of the “acceptable.” How many are still out there, diligently working away—and applying their personal fixations in a work-appropriate context.

-- Josef Burton, former State Department employee, on Stuart Seldowitz (the man who harassed the halal cart vendors in NYC), and a sort of spiritual predecessor of his, Patrick Syring (also a former State employee who has now been jailed twice for his harassment campaign against the Arab American Institute). "Impolite Society." 12/20/23.

[the1920sinpictures]

1920's Wedding photo of Muriel Bailiwick's Uncle Jack and Aunt Connie. FB.

[dduane]

Do you think the Powers that be would ever offer Carmela the Oath even though she’s past latency?

I have to say that I don't see it as something the Powers would do, or indeed, need to do.

Some people, I think, are potentially far more effective without wizardry than with it. We are after all dealing here with a young woman who once yanked out an extremely hidden firearm and shot the Lone Power with it point-blank (and snickered and said "Oops!" afterwards), and who stopped a violent alien insurrection with a block of Valrhona chocolate.

What we have to remember is that, in its way, wizardry's a bit of a kludge. If everything was working as originally intended, it wouldn't have been needed. But then the Lone One came up with that new and interesting concept It added to the worlds, and since the aftermath, all the greater Pleroma's code has needed constant tweaking. (eyeroll) After all, the addition of wizardry to the equation inevitably costs more energy... and the whole concept of things since the Lone Power's annoying addition of entropy has required saving energy. It's a pain to maintain the balance.

Doubtless there are some of the Powers—most likely the ur-demiurge we'd identify with Thoth, this seems like it'd be in Their bailiwick: code is after all language—who sit around tsk-ing at the mess the code's gotten into, and meanwhile side-eyeing with a certain dry satisfaction those creatures creative enough to intervene unusually effectively in the world without needing to have wizardry added on.

My image of the larger meta of this whole situation, therefore, is of the Powers standing around some kind of viewing instrumentality (why do I keep coming back to that pool in Jason and the Argonauts? Who knows) waiting to see what she's going to do next.

...And laying bets. :)

[grandvampiress]

ROUND 1: Roommates

On the last day of their round, Leila asked Nathan out on a date to The Lake to unwind from running a business for two consecutive days

They relocated back to their house pretty quickly though, because there was no bench in The Lake to do some public woohoo so a home sofa woohoo will suffice ; )

Leila hasn’t rolled any cheating wants so far! I’m giving her until the next round to change her mind before I permanently set her as a hopeless romantic romance sim : ]

[mapsontheweb]

The British Islands

The British Islands is a political term that refers to the islands of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as the British Crown Dependencies of the Isle of Man, Bailiwick of Guernsey, and Bailiwick of Jersey. The label United Kingdom and the Islands is also used to mean the British Islands. Meanwhile, the British Isles is a geographical term that includes all of Ireland and the British Islands, excluding at times Guernsey and Jersey—collectively called the Channel Islands.

by anthro.atlas