#but i do think he has a bigger influence on how the party operates that he perhaps realizes

[revvethasmythh]

One thing I find really fascinating about this last ep is that the confrontation with Laudna, in Orym's own words, "brought [him] back to himself, a little bit." Because of this, he chose not continue his plan of using Ishta, a blade Dorian refers to as "clearly a threat." Orym turns away from it and admits it's probably a good thing he's been diverted from this path.

Meanwhile, both Laudna and Dorian use Orym and his (now defunct) desire for the sword as a point of comparison and/or mental justification for their own ill-advised risks. Laudna leads with, "Just as Orym wishes to wield that sword, I wish to wield Delilah" (obviously this was said before Orym gave up the sword, but his doing so has not, as far as we know, dissuaded her from this path at all), and Dorian holds the Gambler's Blade "thinking to himself about Orym last night, and how serious he was, how dedicated he was to the cause of wanting this sword that was clearly a threat" and sits with the reality of the situation he's in and decides to take an extra risk on his own life.

All three of them, in some manner, are pinging on the same concept: that the stakes to this fight are enormous and taking a massive risk might be necessary to finish this mission. But in this specific scenario, Orym is the one who backed off, re-evaluated his position, and decided the potential risk (to both the cohesion of the team, and his own mental health/morality, presumably) wasn't worth it. But the impression was already made. Laudna still wants to bring Delilah into this fight (something she'd already basically decided, but chose here to really double down on), and Dorian made the active decision to lower his chance of survival for a better chance to hit. Both of them doing the opposite of what Orym ultimately did, while still keeping Orym in their minds as they do so.

[mercy-misrule]

kinnporsche thoughts

ok this is just me rambling about the way kinn and porsche communicate, spurred on by ep 7′s mirror interaction.

right off the bat: i’m not on anyone’s ‘side’ here. there is no sides, its just messy interpersonal interactions. you don’t win or lose those. in this house we love kinn and porsche equally.

man, i love what we've learned and confirmed about kinn and porsche this episode.

Porsche deals with stress by escalation. when he's vulnerable, he's really likely to fall back on antagonistic actions or speech until the other person is ready to commit a form of violence.

violence is a place where Porsche can feel safe, in control. He’s capable of defending himself physically in a way that he isn’t able emotionally. When you have been made repeatedly vulnerable over a long period of time, like Porsche has in his childhood, and then found power in violence, like in his underground fights, of course that’s going to be on the backburner as a way to solve conflict.

but Porsche is a man capable of violence but not a violent man, if that makes sense. he is willing at any moment to match a punch, but he doesn’t start there.  When he escalates situations verbally, he is essentially asking for the other party to start the fight so he can end it.

Even when he’s not seeking a violent response, Porsche’s entire way of communicating is by lovingly teasing. There’s no maliciousness to it, he laughs easily and he wants the other person to be in on the joke.

But you see this backfire with him and Kinn, when Kinn is questioning him about the minor family and the bike Vegas is promising him. In Porsche’s mind, this interaction is silly, he’s teasing Kinn, because at no point does Porsche consider Vegas an option.

Kinn on the other hand, has spent his life in bitter competition, has seen how Vegas operates, and already knows that Porsche makes connections easily. For a man who has been told to remove himself from Porsche’s influence, who already deals with a baseline of trust issues, is recovering from an injury which has sidelined him, making him feel less powerful...no wonder he lashes out here, tells Vegas that he can do whatever he wants.

If Porsche’s maladaptive coping mechanism is provocation in the face of stress, Kinn’s is forcibly pulling back and lashing out. Can’t get hurt if you hurt them first! Kinn has huge control issues, and hurting someone emotionally is a form of control. It gives you the powerful position in an interaction because the other person is in recovery.

This really plays out in the final bathroom scene. Porsche has been emotionally hurt by Kinn, and is vulnerable. Therefore, he immediately escalates into attempting to get Kinn to fight him. He instantly goes do ‘why don’t you kill me’ as a way to spark a fight. He follows up with a pointed accusation about Kinn’s murder of his ex.

This is a wiiiiild decision from our boy here, and it tells me a lot about Porsche. Number one, fucking reckless. He’s antagonising a man, who by all accounts committed a heinous act of domestic violence, fueled by the exact same scenario he is in.

Number two, even under stress, he’s thinking. This nasty, dangerous jab at Kinn was a test. It was testing him to see if it was true. You watch Porsche’s eyes dart all over the place, watching Kinn’s expression, after he throws it out there.

Kinn not denying is so fucking wild too, because then as far as Porsche knows, it’s true. According to the knowledge he has, Kinn murdered his lover, based on suspicions of betrayal. And its common enough knowledge that everyone seems to know something.

We as the viewers know there is more to it then that, but Porsche doesn’t.

Still, what really gets Porsche, what makes him leave, isn’t Kinn’s previous violence, but Kinn being emotionally cruel.

This is such a good moment to watch. The way Kinn goes still, the way he squares himself, feels bigger, becomes very calculated. Leaning into Porsche’s space, one hand over the gun on the counter. And the slow, precise way he calls Porsche a whore, designed to hurt him as much as possible.

Porsche’s responding slap is nothing like the punch he would have thrown if Kinn had responded to his provocation with physical aggression. It really feels like Porsche is very poorly armoured against emotional damage, because of the way it hits him so hard.

Then you know, they have emotionally devastating and incredibly hot sex against a mirror.

There isn’t a winner here, both ways they are communicating anger or hurt are deeply flawed, and end up backfiring, but the way they move forward is by continuing to try and talk.

What I’m really interested in is seeing how their communication styles evolve with one another. Both of them carry a lot of fear of loss, of rejection and if they can believe in one another enough not to lash out when distressed, that’s going to be amazing

[otnesse]

Commentary on Peace Walker’s lionization of Che Guevara

Well, guys, as I promised earlier, I’m going to do coverage on a particularly infamous aspect of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and quite frankly if you ask me, one of its worst elements. Sorry for the delay, didn’t realize that Peace Walker was actually released on April 29 in Japan and not the 30th. I’m basically going to cover the game’s lionization of Che Guevara in the various briefing files, and in particular Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller’s lionizing of that monster. For a bit of background, Peace Walker was the second canon PSP entry into the Metal Gear series, after Portable Ops (yes, Portable Ops is in fact canon, and if you ask me was a superior game to Peace Walker in terms of story and characterizations at least, but I digress…). The game has some controversial elements, namely it being very overtly anti-American even by its usual standards, not to mention pushing left-wing values to a far greater degree. One of these values is in the blatant promotion of Che Guevara in the briefing files (in the main story itself, ie, strictly going by the actual missions you undergo, the Che love was at least limited to the Sandinistas and to Vladimir Zadornov, with it being left ambiguous as to whether Snake and Miller actually were fond of him, and while you could argue that the Sandinistas’ sympathetic portrayal could point toward a promotion, Zadornov’s promotion was definitely meant to be a negative since he was planning on having Big Boss reenact Che’s well deserved execution after successfully changing Peace Walker’s target to Cuba in a disinformation op. The Briefing Files, however, aside from obviously Amanda and Chico, members of the Sandinistas, they also had Big Boss and Miller singing praises for that jerk.).

My commentary is on how Big Boss and Miller’s promotion of the guy was a complete and total betrayal of their characters, and also a betrayal of the explicit themes of the game, and also how it’s just one sign of Kojima just being a hack writer, not to mention was extremely poorly done even if we were to assume Kojima intended for Big Boss and Miller to be seen as the villains.

Out of character

For the first part, I’ll cover how the gushing for Che Guevara was completely out of character for Big Boss, and especially for Kazuhira Miller, aka, Master Miller from MG2 and MGS, not just going by past entries, but even when taking into account Peace Walker itself and any supplementary materials. I’ll give separate sections for the two of them, since it’s going to be lengthy.

Big Boss

For Big Boss, I’ll acknowledge that he was meant to be the main villain in the MSX2 games, or at least the main antagonist. However, his singing praises for Che Guevara even knowing that tidbit still didn’t make any sense at all, for a variety of reasons. First off, the games, namely Metal Gear Solid 2, strongly implied that Big Boss adhered to a more, for lack of a better term, right wing outlook. For starters, the New York Mirror review for Nastasha Romanenko’s book gave brief coverage on the official reports of what went down on Shadow Moses. In particular, as you can see with the screencaps down below, they specifically called the Sons of Big Boss a “radical right-wing group”, and the group itself for all intents and purposes, was modeled after Big Boss (even Liquid, despite hating his father, nevertheless was influenced by his ideology).

And then we get into the character Solidus, who unlike Liquid, or even Solid Snake, practically idolized his “father” (I put it in quotes since Solidus is a clone of Big Boss, as are Liquid and Solid), to the extent that he was practically ecstatic that Raiden shot out his eye and made him look even MORE like his dad. Aside from that, as you can see below with these screencaps, he was also depicted as a proto-Tea Party type, heck, a proto-MAGA type even, basically wanting America to return to the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. There’s definitely no way Solidus would have been the type to sing praises for a scumbag like Che Guevara, knowing that, and considering his idolization of Big Boss, it’s also unlikely Big Boss would have sang praises for that creep either.

There’s also the fact that in MGS3, he wasn’t fond of Communism at all, and had already interacted with a guy similar to Che in many respects (well, other than maybe in terms of sexuality), Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, as both were renowned sadists, and even directly attempted to cause nuclear war. In fact, even before the torture, Big Boss, more accurately Naked Snake at that time, learned a bit about Volgin’s past, in particular his involvement in Katyn, and presumably Bykivnia and Kurapaty as well due to EVA’s references to similar massacres occurring in Western Belarus and the Ukraine, as you can see below:

His reaction in that conversation with EVA, in particular Volgin’s personal role in executing those guys, had him downright horrified. Bear in mind that Che Guevara actually DID do several of those things himself, shot innocent and unarmed people, and if anything, unlike Volgin who at least allowed Snake to have weapons on hand to fight him, Che outright dithers when confronted with people using guns, even if they’re his own allies based on his interaction with Jorges Sotus, and to a lesser extent Jesus Carreras. It says a lot when even someone like Volgin, a psychopathic mutant, had more honor than Che Guevara. Plus, in Peace Walker, Big Boss when recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis implied that he blamed that event for his ultimately having to kill The Boss (with Miller even noting it was uncharacteristic of him to get into hypotheticals), as you can see in these screencaps below.

The reason that ties in to Che Guevara is because, believe it or not, Che is the reason why the CMC nearly caused the Cold War to become hot. He and Castro even attempted to launch nukes at the United States, and it actually spooked Khrushchev enough that he had to muzzle Che and agree to end the standoff with the United States via the Turkey Deal (or retrieving Sokolov). Knowing that bit, it’s extremely unlikely Big Boss would have been particularly fond of the guy who essentially set the ground for Operation Snake Eater and his having to kill The Boss. And that’s not even getting into how he tried to stop a nuke being launched not just once in the game, but TWICE, and the second time was a perfect opportunity for him to emulate Che Guevara and succeed where Che failed. When Paz hijacked ZEKE, she revealed that she intended to nuke the Eastern Seaboard and pin the blame on MSF under Cipher’s orders, and yet Big Boss fought her in an attempt to stop her. That definitely wouldn’t have been something Che Guevara would have done, and if anything, he bragged to the London Daily Worker that he WOULD have launched the nukes at America preemptively had they been allowed to remain.

Heck, in Portable Ops and even Peace Walker, or at least the backstory for those games, Big Boss specifically served western interests after Operation Snake Eater. In the former, Big Boss was revealed to have participated in the Mozambique War of Independence, and a comment made by Null, aka, Gray Fox, aka, Frank Jaegar, after being bested the second time around, implied that Big Boss had fought alongside the Portugese during that time (Jaegar at that time was siding with FRELIMO), as you can see from the following screencaps:

And in the tape detailing how he and Miller met (not to mention the extended version included in the Peace and Harmony Blues drama tape that was later included in the Japanese version of Ground Zeroes, specifically chapters 1 and 2), it was mentioned that Kazuhira Miller at the time was a mercenary operating with an implied communist rebel group in Colombia, while Big Boss was clearly siding with the Western-backed government.

I think the events proper for Peace Walker was the first time Big Boss explicitly sided with Communists (not counting Portable Ops, since it’s implied the Russian soldiers renounced their Communism after being abandoned by the Soviet government), and even there, he did it more out of his own personal motives of getting closure regarding The Boss’s true motives after learning she may have somehow survived Snake Eater than out of any liking of Mena/Zadornov’s objectives.

Besides, Big Boss is former CIA, and grunt or not, he'd still need to have at least some degree of knowledge about Che, namely stuff like how Che tried to commit to the Cuban Missile Crisis and make it a hot war, among other things like his instituting gulags in Cuba. And let's not forget, when Gene in Portable Ops tried to pull a similar stunt, Big Boss was genuinely horrified by what he was planning to do.

Kazuhira Miller

Now we get to Kazuhira Miller, aka, Master McDonnell Benedict Miller. Unlike Big Boss, Miller was consistently up to that point depicted as a good guy (probably the closest he got to engaging in villainy was in MGS1 regarding manipulating Snake into arming REX, and even there, he was dead three days before the events of the game, and that had been Liquid who did so). He was also shown to be a huge Che fanboy, and if anything he was depicted as being an even bigger fanboy than Big Boss himself in that game. And Peace Walker also retconned his origins by revealing he was in fact born in Japan with bi-racial ancestry (Japanese and American Caucasian), as he originally was third-generation Japanese American. He was made clear to have more love for America than his own home country of Japan, and only recognized the meaning of peace when talking to his hospitalized mom. He also was mentioned to have been influenced to get into the mercenary business by Yukio Mishima’s suicide, though he does imply that he wasn’t on the same political spectrum as him. Him singing praises for Che Guevara doesn’t work well at all, especially considering that he repeatedly stressed that they not allow another Cuban Missile Crisis to happen, and going by his comments in these screencaps below (in the same briefing file as Big Boss’s uncharacteristically going into hypotheticals, and if anything happened immediately before then), he was fully aware about how Japan itself was almost nuked again thanks to that event (with the only difference being that the Soviets were more likely to nuke them), as you can see with the following screencaps.

Having him sing praises for Che Guevara, whom as I pointed out earlier actually attempted to launch nukes and jumpstart World War III, comes across as ESPECIALLY distasteful knowing that bit, since it comes across as him basically cheering for the guy who tried to wipe out his fellow Japanese, to say little about the Americans, whom back then, he idolized. It would be the same thing as a Holocaust survivor singing praises for Adolf Hitler after narrowly surviving being killed by him. It also doesn’t match up at all with his characterization in MG2 or even MGS1 (and believe me, Liquid posing as Miller or not, his statements to Snake would have been what Miller himself would have said since Snake didn’t seem suspicious at all about him.), the latter regarding the bit about Meryl after she was captured. Even his not being fond of Japan doesn’t cut it, especially when, ignoring that he put that to the side after his mom was hospitalized, the character Sokolov ALSO wasn’t fond of the Soviet Union at all, risked crossing the iron curtain alongside his family to get away from it, and would have been free as a bird had the CMC not happened, and almost got away again until The Boss interfered. Even THERE, however, he still retained at least some degree of love for Russia itself, as when Gene decided to try to nuke Russia (or at least, that’s what Gene led everyone to believe at the time), he secretly went against Gene and adopted the alias of Ghost to aid Big Boss specifically to prevent a nuke from being launched there, being THAT against harming Russia despite hating the Soviet policies. I would have expected Miller to not be fond of Che Guevara at all for that reason.

Overall

The whole thing also didn’t work since if they were meant to be seen as heroes, it ticks off a whole lot of players who are fully aware of some of the crap Che Guevara caused and know his true nature, and regarding painting them as a villain, the problem is that the story DOESN’T depict them as villains for that. Heck, they don’t even STATE any bad things Che did other than maybe dying, and if anything, the way everyone was talking, you’d think he’d walk on water. If Kojima wanted to depict Big Boss and Miller as villains by having him sing praises for Che, the very least he could have done was make sure to specifically reference Che Guevara’s role in nearly causing the Cold War to go Hot by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his being upset at the nukes being removed.

Apparently, if Kojima’s secretary is of any indication, the reason the Che love was in the game was because Kojima himself tried to force in his socio-political views into the game in blatant disregard for the narrative and characterizations therein, as you can see below with links (screencaps will have to be in an addendum post since, unfortunately, I've hit my limit regarding screencap postings):

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/900937994143649792

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/1179860611297153038

https://twitter.com/Kaizerkunkun/status/1190763430497542144

Themes

The Che praise doesn’t work too well with the themes either, since he was not a peaceful man, even called himself the opposite of Christ, and tried to start a nuclear war. It definitely goes against the stated themes of the game, which was peace, not to mention the anti-nuke themes of the overall franchise. Heck, if anything, specifically referencing Che’s attempt at nuking the US and causing Nuclear War, and by extension outright condemning him for it would have worked much better with the themes of anti-nukes, especially considering that they made sure to reference Vasily Arkhipov’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis at one point, not to mention referenced both Katyn and the fact that the Turkey silos were already rendered obsolete even before the Turkey Deal made removing them required due to the advent of nuclear subs in Snake Eater earlier. And without the references to that, or any other bad stuff, you’re literally left thinking that he must be a good guy. I’d know because I fell for that myself, especially after getting the game (I didn’t follow the briefing files, but I did follow the cutscenes on YouTube back when it was still in Japan, and I also was baffled as to how people were talking about Big Boss and Miller were Che fanboys since the cutscenes never even pointed in either direction, and if anything, Big Boss nearly being killed by Zadornov would probably point to him NOT liking Che afterwards due to nearly being forced into Che’s fate).

The only thing it did was just have Kojima force in his political and social views, and I’ll be blunt, that kind of crap is something I have distaste in, I hate having propaganda pushed onto me. Ironically, Kojima or at least the Benson books for MGS1 and MGS2, instilled that view onto me. So my anger at Kojima doing that, after learning what Che was truly like in one of the Politically Incorrect Books (either Vietnam War or the 1960s one), is very much personal as well as political and social.

Aftermath

Well, as I said, I did buy into the narrative around the time Peace Walker was released, but then I learned I was being tricked by Kojima after reading the PIG books. I’d argue that event definitely was a watershed event for me. Not only did it have me lose any respect I might have had for Kojima, it also influenced my outlook on life, left me becoming distrustful the second I started picking up how they’re trying to push an agenda instead of, say, actually teaching the material in college. It also may have influenced my later views on Star Wars and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (specifically, George Luca’s open admission to basing the Ewoks/Rebels on the Vietcong, and especially modeling the Galactic Empire after American soldiers; and Linda Woolverton admitting that she was trying to push a radical feminist agenda in Beauty and the Beast, the same one she tried to push in that awful Maleficent movie. Though I also was becoming disturbed with Belle for reasons other than that bit due to researching the French Revolution, though I will acknowledge Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller’s fanboying of Che Guevara, and in particular their reference to Sartre and his infamously singing praises for Che as “the most complete human being of the century”, certainly worsened my views on Belle, thinking that she may turn out like Sartre and throw her lot with the Jacobins and other groups.). It also left me distrusting of whatever Metal Gear had to say, may have also led to my not liking Chris Redfield after Resident Evil 5, or heck, some of the more anti-American commentary in 5 and other games, and also Dead Rising. It also influenced my decision to become a Dead or Alive fan (especially when before, I wasn’t particularly fond of the game due to the fanservice stuff), and in particular a Tina and Bass fan. May have also influenced my later distaste of Greg Berlanti’s writing of Arrowverse shows, in particular Supergirl starting with Season 2 (though that also had Heroes Redemption as a factor, which predated Peace Walker, thanks to how it changed Claire Bennet).

[charming-mage]

Exposed by the Media Prompts Part 2

I didn’t expect that much Exposed by the Media prompts. I thought the well was dry. I was wrong. Should’ve known not to underestimate the internet and reality TV shows.

Exposed by the Media Prompts Part 1

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Lies in the Media is a Different Beast: Adrien grew up in the media spotlight. He knows it’s usually not a good idea to confront the rumors in the tabloids. It gives the rumors some credibility. When he sees Lila confront a rumor that bothers her a bit too much, he doesn’t stop her. Confronting a lie in the media needs a different method than someone lying in your personal life. Just because he’s doing the high road doesn’t mean he’s going to stop her from committing a crucial mistake.

Civilian Friends Are Okay Now: It’s well known Ladybug won’t make friends in her hero persona. She’ll be friendly and kind, but with a polite distance. People accepted it after a while. This changes after Lila’s interview on the Ladyblog. People assume Ladybug changed her mind about it since there’s no retraction article.  Civilians become more pushy and want to have more personal relations. From regular people to higher ranking citizens. (ex. No more formality, more personal rapport, friendship, or even the start of an epic romance.) A few uncomfortable situations and angry citizens forces Ladybug to address this.

Total Drama Island: The Miraculous users find out one of the prizes in a new season of the Total Drama Island reality TV show is an important Miraculous artifact. It could be anything from a Miraculous to a secret Guardian book. The heroes and villains are forced to participate as none of them found the item in time. Marinette and Adrien go in their civilian selves while Hawkmoth sends in Lila. Lila tries hard to hide her true self, but the contestants do find out.

Forgot to Log Out: Lila forgets to log out of her social media accounts in the school library. She gets distracted by something and clicks on minimize instead of the close tab on her browser. Since Lila didn’t log out of her session and the next person who gets the computer didn’t bother to do so either, her tabs are still there. The person is a noisy gossip and scrolls through them. They are intrigued by what they find. They decide to take screenshots and uploads them to the school website forum page. For the drama of course. (This is based on my experience when I was in high school and the library in my city. It was common to just close the browser and not bother to log out. The next person only logged out if they needed something from their own account. It’s not worth it to log in and out just for some internet searching.)

Dear Abby: Marinette, needing advice from a third party about Lila’s lying, sends an email to the Dear Abby column. (Or France’s equivalent.) She figures since Abby has no connection to either her or Lila, the writer can give her unbiased advice. She does her best to make the details as vague as possible so everyone in her life (including Lila) can have privacy. Her message is replied to and included in an article weeks later. Her request and Abby’s reply becomes popular amongst readers. Marinette did make a mistake, though. One of the examples she gives about “Lemon” is unique enough that someone eventually finds an interview on the Ladybug suspiciously similar to the lie. Marinette stopped watching new Lila interviews because it enraged her too much. She doesn’t want to deal with Lila after school hours as well. So she’s not aware Lila also mentioned it in an interview. Dear Abby readers dig through the interviews and discover nothing but lies. The Dear Abby column and the Ladybug drama gets big enough to be covered by the media.

Real Life Works Differently Than Fiction : A few classmates end up in a situation like Lila tells in her stories. Believing in Lila, they do what Lila claimed she did thinking it would work out the same. It doesn’t turn out so well. They get scolded by involved parties not to do that again. A reporter on the scene interviews them. It comes out why they did it. Lila’s lies are exposed as the fiction they are.

Tsurugi Influence: Kagami’s status as Adrien’s girlfriend makes Lila switch targets. Marinette is in the back burner until Lila deals with her new love rival. Her plans to deal with Kagami backfires and brings media attention. Lila was too used to love rivals not doing any major action towards her. The wrath of the Tsurugi family is brought upon her. She realizes afterwards how influential and powerful the family is.

Adrien’s Phone is Stolen Again: And this time the phone thief is caught. Lila steals Adrien’s phone to post social media posts an hour later gushing about Lila/or talking about in her a positive light. By the time Adrien finds out, he can’t take back what “he” said without controversy. Which Mr. Agreste would not like. That’s Lila’s plan anyway. The problem is that Lila makes these posts while Adrien is on a surprise live interview. (Which she is unaware of.) The interviewer asks Adrien about the new posts while Adrien is clearly not on his phone/laptop. On a hunch, a quick search by Adrien leads to the discovery that his phone was stolen. The model confirms it’s his personal account and not a media team behind it. The content of the posts make Lila the main suspect.

You Can’t Delete Me Now : Lila gets in a controversy. She starts deleting comments and defending herself. Gabriel is busy in a meeting and doesn’t find out in time to stop her. Commenters get so mad at her, one of them gets the bright idea to hold up signs resembling post/comment/ or tweet. Somewhere in their message includes a line saying, “You can’t delete me now.” The idea catches on and it becomes a trend to walk around in public or near photo shoots holding signs with their comments. Everyone includes the now famous phrase in their sign.

Lila’s Wild Ride: Lila manages to steal the monkey miraculous. However, she learns the hard way why the Guardian needs to think carefully when matching someone with a miraculous. (Lila is not good at using the monkey miraculous’ power. At all.) Xuppu easily figures out what happened and makes sure to give Lila a very memorable time. The wilder it is the better. A live news crew captures footage of Ladybug furious “that lying Lila Rossi” stole a miraculous. Chat Noir is worried they’ll see a new Hawkmoth ally soon. There’s more chaos as the criminal underworld, opportunistic people, and die hard Ladybug fans enter the scene. Meanwhile, the French government is not pleased with the Italian government. An Italian diplomat’s daughter stealing a Miraculous from Ladybug herself looks very bad for relations. Looks like a secret operation that got exposed to the more paranoid members.

Hell’s Kitchen: Gordon Ramsey hosts an amateur cooking competition. An older Lila Rossi is one of the competitors. Ramsey doesn’t like her food. (or the drama she starts. And sabotaging the other competitor’s food.) Sadly for him, her cooking is barely better than the worst ones so she is able to scrap on to the next round. The execs love her for the drama. When the season airs, the contestants notice the footage was edited to make Lila look innocent. They get hate from Hell’s Kitchen fans about their meanness and most of them do what they can to defend themselves. People become interested in what Lila is like in real life. The only requirement for the prompt is for Lila to be an adult. Ramsey would not let lose on a minor.

Collaboration Gone Wrong: The Gabriel brand does a collaboration with a brand outside the fashion industry. It could be anything as long as it gets the other brand to be on the same set as Gabriel staff. Gabriel decides to give Lila bigger roles starting with this. Lila is beyond happy. A bump in the road appears when an intern around her age pulls her aside and asks her to stop lying. Lila doesn’t of course and secretly does her best to ruin the credibility of the intern before they get the idea to tell someone else. Unbeknownst to the Gabriel model, the intern is a close relative of the collaboration company’s CEO. The intern just doesn’t advertise that fact. Doesn’t want special treatment. Heads start rolling when the CEO finds out what Gabriel’s muse has done to their beloved family member. Permanently damaging a profitable business relationship is the least of Gabriel’s worries when the media gets wind of the scandal.

[artsy-hobbitses]

So is this like a Riot or a like a Civil War🤔 kinda thing that's happening

I mean riots definitely happened a lot during the Clampdown!

It was followed by a massive War after when the Decepticons became an independent entity from their alliance with the Autobots, and the main issue is that while on Cybertron, all the city states seemed to fall under a planetary government ie. a single Council or Senate with one generally overarching policy (excluding colonies), Earth comprises of 195 countries with their own styles of government and very different national policies influenced by history/culture/religion, which makes Megatron’s attempt at ‘streamlining’ them to fit how he believes the world should be run in TTB much more egregious. (TLDR this man had good intentions and genuinely sparked a great revolution millions of people benefited from. However, he comes from England and specifically has experience working in England’s environment/rule which colors his perspective of the world. He struggles with diplomacy and the notion that the good he did for England will not necessarily benefit every country in the world—some which don’t have the same issues—the same way, and him using an iron fist to try and enforce this only made matters worse/more people adversed to his agenda, hence him becoming more and more of a polarizing and feared figure. Think of it as somewhat the issue in MCU Avengers: Civil War where they straight up launch international operations in a country that never asked for it, was never informed of it, never had a say in it and people needlessly ended up as collateral damage. But worse, because Megs is no Captain America)

Of course, between him and Zeta Prime, it’s clear who’s the bigger problem in the long run, but it’s not to say that he doesn’t have massive issues, even if initially (and still to some extent) good-intentioned.

The Autobots don’t actually want any part of this power play which mainly concerns him and Zeta (Both are the ones interested in consolidating power for their own purposes—-one for what he believes is for the greater good and the other for personal benefit), but their interference whenever Megs or Zeta tries to bulldoze a country’s government/people into compliance with their plans means that they’re A Problem for both and thus unwillingly the third party in this war who try to resolve international issues diplomatically, help evacuate citizens/refugees out of warzones and help to uphold country freedoms and agency from the other two by beating Megs/Zeta back if necessary.

The Autobots have a no-contact policy with Zeta and will absolutely fight him on sight, but they do sometimes reach out to Megatron’s forces to convince them to leave X country/state alone. Sometimes it works! Sometimes, when Megatron is outright there for resources, it doesn’t, then they gotta throw hands.

[shinobicyrus]

A few interesting things are coming to a head simultaneously in the wake of the Proud Boy Putsch - mostly how corporations have been responding.

Dominion Voting Systems - the Canadian-based company that’s been pulled into insane conspiracy theories accusing them of fixing hundreds of thousands of votes and also being a Chinese/South American Communist Multi-National Corporation founded by a dead dictator - is now suing Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell for damages.

These damages include tangible business losses of two hundred million dollars along with harassment and death threats against their employees - some of whom were forced to move or even go into hiding over what are, again, bullshit and inflammatory accusations that have no basis in reality.

I doubt Powell will be the first - the Far Right Media has been repeating this Dominion Voting Conspiracy for a while in support of their Dear Leader. We might start seeing them backpedal in a panic as they suddenly remember that REAL news agencies have to deal in FACTS when discussing real-world people and groups or risk legal repercussions for the damage these lies do.

You think they would have learned when far-right commentator Alex Jones, who is still dealing with legal fallout by the parents of Sandy Hook victims after he spread around the batshit “theory” that they were paid actors and the tragic deaths of their very real children were some fake, anti-gun false-flag operation. This lead to these grieving parents being harassed and threatened by Jones’ viewers and listeners. 

This segues nicely into both twitter permanently banning Trump from Twitter and with (*checks latest update*) oh wow, with Google, Apple, and Amazon removing the far-right social media app Parler.

The Amazon development is more recent and a bigger deal, because while people could still get Parler on their android on iphones by just going online, Amazon taking it off of their cloud hosting service effectively removes it from the internet until they can find another host.

Now, on normal day I would be concerned that Amazon now has so much monopolistic power that a decision by them has effectively removed a fairly notable website with a (frighteningly) large base that has been surging in popularity. However, the Right calling “foul” about this entire thing is frankly...hilariously ironic.

Because this is the same pro-business cult that says that a private business has the right refuse service to anyone. Like say...a baker refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding. A thing that they have successfully argued in court that private businesses have a right to do. Corporations are people, remember!

Frankly, it’s the deepest irony that fringe far-right politics - which in the Age of Trump, has effectively taken over the Republican Party - are suddenly finding that they are coming up short in both their “marketplace of ideas” as well as the real market, where all of their precious money lives.

As much as the right wing may claim some “anti-conservative” bias on the part of big tech, this “bias” didn’t stop QAnon, the Alt-Right, and White Nationalism, and countless far right causes, hashtags, and influencers to surge on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to the point that they became dangerous vectors of radicalization.

Ultimately, Big Tech’s been profiting off of all of this turmoil for years. Alex Jones and Info-Wars was hugely popular until his claims got so crazy that he made himself a legal liability to the companies hosting him. The same is happening to Parler and all of these far-right idols and “news” sources that have been peddling in lies, delusion, violent rhetoric, and hyperbolism so much that they’ve detached from reality and forgot about real-world consequences.

Real world consequences that big, powerful, profit-centric corporate monopolies (coddled by both parties but virtually treasured by conservatives) are now categorizing as big honking liabilities. And liabilities are bad for business.

Now, call me a cynic, but Trump, Parler, and the far-right conspiracy sphere aren’t being exiled by Amazon, Twitter, or Google because they suddenly grew a conscience and looked in the horror at the unhinged monster their algorithms created.

They just did the math and determined that they can’t make money off of it, anymore.

[panncakes]

i’m building my case against rungtiva (all us in this tunnel vision are right sue me) mostly because it’s not monday yet and i just want to have this written out before any big reveal.

so i think - other than her having access to a lot of information through varying different channels (including doctor bunn) and therefor probably being in the most powerful position (information is power after all) while still being able to hide behind her grieving older sister/business woman in a town full of powerful men persona - the most incriminating pieces of evidence we have against her (admittedly it’s not a lot yet) are her arriving at the crime scene in episode 2 still wearing her evening gown and her confrontation with por in episode 9.

in episode 2 she’s not only seen arriving at the crime scene in the morning; she is seen arriving at the spa (listen it took me a minute to realize jane’s home was at the spa okay) which i think implies her not having been home. in a show like this i don’t think they’d include this scene and not have it link back to a flashback at some point, especially not while she’s dressed like that. if they wanted to imply she was out early that morning she would’ve not still been dressed in her evening clothes; they are suggesting either she never came home after the party or if she did come home she didn’t stay there.

two points of note; the only other person still wearing their evening clothes at the crime scene is jane herself and usually in film not changing out of last night’s clothing is an indication of a love affair.

in episode 9 we get probably the most insight in rung through her conversation with por. the most obvious moment of por calling rung out is when she tells him that because she is a woman she is not nearly as influential as he is and he replies with ‘you and i are no different’.

now what we know about por is that he holds a lot of power in the shadows of the town; he’s a mafia boss who operates in a ‘grey legal area’ and seems to have a lot of people on payroll as well as a few connections to the more obvious powerful men in town. he’s also shown to be a very proud man; i don’t think he’d compare his influence to be equal as rung’s unless she indeed holds a lot of it; and i’d even wager that a man like him would sooner claim power equality to someone who holds more than him than the other way around.

por doesn’t seem to know everything that’s going on but he seems to understand rung on a different level than bunn does. when she says ‘i’m sure someone will stand by me and do the right thing’ he reads it as a threat and not as a plea for justice. now as someone who has been shown to appreciate deeds over words i wonder what por knows rung has done to warrant that reaction.

this all to say that this part of the conversation seems to confirm what a lot of us have guessed from rung constantly being involved with the right people at the right time; she holds a lot more influence than she wants to be known.

she also immediately ends the conversation after he makes the above statement.

now onto the part of the conversation i initially didn’t pay a lot of attention to other than ‘huh rung claiming to care for tan as a brother is weird considering we haven’t seen them acknowledging each other once’.

i think that’s the wrong thing to focus on though because por very clearly calls her claim to care for pued as a brother in question. rung has claimed to care for pued before; when talking to bunn she spoke about how ready she was to accept him as her brother in law, so her now claiming the same thing shouldn’t be anything of note. except it obviously is to por and rung immediately changes the course of the conversation after he says this by focusing on how tan couldn’t have killed pued.

now by itself this line might not be really all that important but if you add rung arriving at the crime scene in her evening clothes... i’m starting to wonder if they are hinting at rung and pued having had an affair? pued obviously has a thing for power; rung might be one of the most powerful people in town; they cared about each other and por refuses to acknowledge it as a family connection...

this doesn’t mean that rung killed jane per se; but it does add more complexity to the relationship dynamic between jane/pued/rung. did rung know about what situation jane was in? or was that all done behind her back? and if it was indeed pued who killed jane, which is still likely, would it not add rung to the suspect list of pued’s death even more? or did they want jane out of the way because she became a threat to the life they wanted together? did the guilt get to pued and was he about to confess to bunn and did rung silence him? would she sacrifice her sister for her power? would she sacrifice her lover?

rung’s motivations remain the most unclear out of all the characters but it is seems that she is very good at using chaos to put herself into powerful positions. i wonder if she cares a lot about who answers for all these deaths as long as she and whatever investments she might have remain unharmed?

this is all a very long winded way to say; i think rung has been playing a bigger role than we are aware of and i think we might get more insight on this soon. even if she is not the killer; she might still be the one pulling the strings behind the scenes.

[shelovescontrol91]

Creating celebrity partnerships is a fine art, and succeeding requires a careful pairing on both the celebrity and the brand. For some brands, perfecting this recipe means reaching out to celebrities and convincing them that your business aligns with their values. Canadian water brand Flow, on the other hand, uses a strategy where the celebrity comes to that conclusion by themselves.

“[Our partners] have all organically come with us and met us through what we're trying to do in the first place,” Flow founder Nicholas Reichenbach says.

Take the partnership development process between singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes and Flow. The partnership officially began four years ago, but Mendes’s appreciation of the brand dated years prior, when he personally discovered the water brand in 2015. The company then sent Mendes a letter, and when he met the Flow team things clicked between the two parties.

As a brand, Flow set itself apart from other water brands in its efforts to use the minimum amount of natural resources necessary in its production, which include its completely recyclable packaging. The integration of its sustainability practices into the brand’s ethos was what drew Mendes to the brand.

“As I've gotten older, I’ve realized the importance of changing the world for the better, even if it's in small, incremental ways, and how important that is for me — how that actually drives me to keep doing what I do,” Mendes says.

Such a partnership, where a celebrity cares about brand values just as much as the product itself, seems to carry weight in the Influencer Age. A 2021 survey by Pipslay Research found that 59% of Americans say celebrity endorsements influence their purchasing behavior. For many customers, brands are tied to their ethics: 62% of Americans agreed that celebrity endorsement is a reflection of brand quality and integrity.

Living out your values as a way to help your partnership thrive

As a brand's morals are now just as important as the brand's product, having the right business partnership isn’t enough. If your business fails to clearly relay its values to the consumer, the partnership can fail à la Kylie Jenner and Pepsi. But living out the values that attract the right celebrities and consumers can be difficult when problems like labor shortages or pandemic issues threaten to cut a business entirely. As an alternative, Reichenbach says business decisions don't necessarily have to act purely for profit's sake. Instead, Flow implements a philosophy he calls the triple bottom line.

The triple bottom line is simple: Take care of the people, profit and planet. Though the idea sounds idealistic, Reichenbach has found power within this concept when Flow had to figure out how to ship its spring water to U.S. consumers. Instead of relying on the same Canadian spring as always, the business found a spring in Virginia. By bringing operations stateside, Flow was able to hire the local community, save money on logistics and even go carbon-neutral for the first time. For Reichenbach, this type of business model is the value-aligned way to make profit and something businesses have emphasized more since the pandemic.

"In anything that you're succeeding as an entrepreneur, you've got to really stick to your values as a person because there's so much noise in the world today. The more you convolute your values, the less clear your happiness is, too," Reichenbach says.

A forward-thinking mindset

Because of the sustainability concerns of today’s youth, Reichenbach adds that businesses can’t afford to make choices between the planet or profit — business decisions need to consider both. This value Reichenbach places on the next generation is something that resonates with Mendes, who also sees the investment in the young consumer as an important part of the partnership.

"It's a new age vision for companies and CEOs. I think that that's the type of company that celebrities and people with voices need to get behind, because it's [up to the companies] to inspire the next generation to have that mindset,” the singer-songwriter says. “Nowadays — especially younger generations, like my sister, who's 17 — you can't get anything by them. There is no room for fakeness and lies and manipulation. They are really on top of it. And I think one of the most amazing things is that I've always known Flow was a great company with true intention. But the more that we've been announcing my relationship with Flow, the more people reach out to me being like, 'Wow, I love this company.'"

To keep the partnership strong, Reichenbach cites trust and transparency as the company's main strategy. However, Mendes and Reichenbach's mutual enthusiasm for the company's sustainability initiatives also seems to be at the core of this particular connection. And there's plently to be enthusiastic about — with Flow's plans to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Reichenbach says it feels the water brand is writing its first album.

Mendes is there to support it every step of the way.

“With Flow, it’s that when you stand for something that's bigger than yourself, you have the energy of 10 people. That’s the beauty of it. I felt from Nick and the team that Flow was about something bigger than them. It wasn't about becoming the most talked-about water in the world,” Mendes says. “I'm very careful with brands that I work with, and I consider Flow to be part of my history and part of my future. It’s much more than just a partnership. It really feels like a purposeful thing.”

[onslaughtsixdotcom]

Scaling Up Dragon Heist

Around April or May of 2019, I started to run Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, one of the official WotC 5e hardcovers. I’m still not done with it, although that is largely the fault of COVID and my own extensions to the campaign. 

I think Dragon Heist is one of the better 5e modules by WotC. I think it’s got a strong playground for the characters, and Waterdeep has 30+ years of publication history to draw on. The release of the module also heralded in a HUGE amount of third party extension content, including the famous Alexandrian Remix. I hadn’t heard of this before I started running my campaign and having ideas about how to do it, so it didn’t influence me--although I’m sure we came to a lot of similar conclusions and ideas, based on common perceptions of what the actual flaws are of the module.

Still, despite those flaws, I think they help the module rather than hinder it. It gives the DM a shitload of room to improvise and draw in the margins, rather than some other 5e adventures which feel like they can’t be fucked with in the least.

Here’s the kicker: I started my adventure at level 4. We had a pre-existing party that I had run through the classic N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God. (Fun fact: A map that I drew is the 3rd Google Images result for that. Woah.)

The party spent a few real-world weeks traveling across about 7 days of overland travel where I ran some drop in one shots; including Mike Krahulik’s Dusk (a Twilight parody) and a really fun 2 hour diversion where the players saw an ancient blue dragon take off the roof of a church during a wedding. Then they arrived in my city: Dawnharbour.

I don’t run the Forgotten Realms. I find it not to my taste. Most of the names suck. The lore is invariably boring or weird, and not the fun kind of weird. I was going to run Dragon Heist, and I was going to put it in my own city. I gave the players some justification previously for why they would want to go there: The cleric’s sister had been kidnapped by the Cult of the Reptile God and turned into a Yuanti; a snake person. The bard had stolen a golden statue of the Reptile God and wanted to melt it down and plate his violin with it. I told the cleric that they would need a high level magic user and someone in Dawnharbour could probably help them; ditto the bard needing a highly skilled magical blacksmith. The third player didn’t really care where they went since he was on the run from his home country. So, off to Dawnharbour. They reached level 4 when they got to the city.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of my city or everything I changed for the campaign. Instead, I’ll talk up some hard and fast ways to make the adventure work for a higher level party. Most of them revolve around the encounters. I’m assuming the party will start around level 4 or 5.

Chapter 1

The book opens with the players in the Yawning Portal, a famous tavern with a big ass well to a megadungeon underneath. (More on this later.) They’re hanging out doing whatever when a troll and some stirges pop out of the well. The book says that the players get attacked by the stirges while the owner of the bar, a typical Forgotten Realms 15th level Fighter running a fucking bar for a living deals with the troll.

A troll is CR 5. They can handle a troll. If they can’t, you have a bigger problem.

Next up the book leads them to a Zhentarim warehouse. When they get there it’s abandoned and there are (ugh) 3 Kenku. Kenku are like tengu if they sucked. They’re bird people who can only speak in mimickry, like parrots. They can only repeat words they’ve heard before. This is stupid as fuck (especially when a player wants to be one) but more importantly, they are incredibly weak. I think the kenku are just hanging out or they got captured by the Zhentarim who left them there after they bail or something like that. Whatever.

I put the Zhentarim there instead. I put like 20 Zhentarim. I used the Spy statblock; they don’t have a lot of CR and at level 4 or 5, the players are real slice and dicey about killing them. They can basically carve through two of these dudes in a turn. It was *really* fun to just have the players mow down these mooks. They used the 2nd floor to their advantage, casting Grease on the stairs and creating a bottleneck and then picking them off with ranged attacks and spells. I think I might have given the Zhents 1hp and treated them as minions (see 4e). 

I think I had the police show up after they were all dead; someone heard the commotion and called the cops. I think I also put an NPC there; I shuffled around a bunch of the NPCs the module uses. (They got their quest to save Volo from Bigby in the Yawning Portal; instead of finding Volo here, I think they found my equivalent of Renaer Neverremember.) There was a day’s break between this and them going into the sewers in the next part.

The sewer introduces the Xanathar’s minions. I believe a Duergar is actually there and I took this as a sign--I made most of Xanathar’s mooks Duergar, and then decided--this dude is a Beholder and he has a Mindflayer for a lieutenant. The Xanathar’s forces should ALL be classic D&D dungeon monsters, like rust monsters and umber hulks and ropers. This gives you a wide variety of weird shit you can throw at your players at different CR levels, and the idea of a gangster Beholder who thinks hiring a bunch of umber hulks to go shake down a local deli is fucking hilarious. But, it doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Throw some umber hulks or something in this lair. Go nuts--the weirder, the better. Xanathar’s crew should have no qualm about hanging out with a gibbering mouther or a carrion crawler.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is the least developed chapter in the book. It also revolved around a bunch of Forgotten Realms faction nonsense that I wanted nothing to do with. I used this time instead to formally introduce the Xanathar, the Cassalanters and Jarlaxle. After they foiled his plans to rig a goldfish competition (think a dog show but for fish), the Xanathar became convinced the players worked for the Zhentarim and invited them to have a sit down about their intentions; if they worked for the Zhents he wanted to formally declare war. The players hated the Zhents--they killed an NPC they liked back during N1, partially to set this all up. Xanny was cool with that.

The Cassalanters were a way to introduce a new player. They call up the Blackstaff to say, hey we have a magic item, can you send a guy here to deliver it? (Magic item possession is illegal on the streets in my setting, but if someone important hires you to transport it, then you can do it. This makes being a courier a very lucrative job; lots of people are just carrying around other people’s stuff for a living.) They almost immediately knock out the new player sent to pick up the item, and replace him with their dofflegagher. The idea was that the dofflegagher player would then infiltrate the Blackstaff’s organization.

Blackstaff is no dumbass and hired a random dude off the street--my new player. Then, Blackstaff hired the rest of the party to go rescue him--mostly as a ruse to snuff out the Cassalanters and get evidence that they were shitty.

When they encountered the Cassalanters, I used a Cambion; one of their servants turned into him. This guy slowly became a recurring lieutenant; he was basically the Goldar for the Cassalanter’s Lord Zedd and Rita Repulsa. At the time, I hadn’t read any lore for Cambions; I’m not particularly concerned with monster lore the way the guys who make the game write it. I literally thumbed through my deck of monsters, saw this winged devil horn dude, and said, “Right on, he looks like he’ll work.” A Cambion is CR5, more than suitable for the encounters the party will have with him over the next few levels. The Fiendish Charm ability is fun and can really fuck with the players; I ruled, of course, that anyone under its affect would obviously be free if the Cambion was killed. Even after it was killed, he just kept on coming back, because he’s from Hell and killing him on this plane doesn’t really do anything.

As the players continue to face the Cassalanters, a go-to seems to be spined devils. This is fine but not very powerful for a level 4, 5, 6 party. Therefore I suggest supplanting it with barbed devils. They’re CR5. Adding one or two of those to an encounter with spined devils can make this a real fun encounter that isn’t too horribly overwhelming, especially if at least one of your martial characters has a magic weapon (which they fucking should; they’re level 5!)

IMO you can also introduce Jarlaxle in this chapter; a fun way is through his Zardoz Zord persona. It could simply be that Jarlaxle knows Volo (or any other NPC the players know) and wants to invite them to a free meal to get to know them. In my game, Jarlaxle operates openly as himself (I found it would just complicate things if he was someone else) and invited the players to his yacht shortly after they met the Xanathar, to formally tell them all about the Vault of Dragons, the Stone, and how everyone they have met in the city is after it.

Chapter 3

I am not the biggest fan of this part of the module. I think nimblewrights and similar creatures are really dumb and don’t fit my D&D world. A lot of the stuff in this chapter is investigation stuff, and you can play that out however you like. It doesn’t drastically need scaling up, though you may have to account for something like Zone of Truth that they might not normally have access to. It also helps if you do the opposite of the book, and make the police a bunch of shitheads who don’t care about the city--this way the players are actually motivated to help. I’ve seen a LOT of posts that open with “the fireball happened and my players shrugged and said they would let the police handle it.” Horrible! The police should either be incompetent, apathetic, or (best case) both. They don’t care who did this and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to catch them. Now it’s completely on the players.

IMO it also helps if you do the leg work to make the NPC someone they actually care about. In the book it’s an NPC they’ve never met but they have a mutual acquaintance through--it would be nice if they get invited to a dinner with this NPC or something similar prior to this. Or, change it to be any NPC they like who you don’t mind killing. Hell, they’re level 5 or 6 at this point--if they got a cleric, they can even cast Revivify and wake the dude up. They could even cast Speak With Dead and immediately find out who blew him up or what he was doing here!

Moving on, there’s the Gralland Villa. I retooled the name to actually sound like a good name; sue me. 

The book has a bunch of Zhents hanging out here. A simple way to make this dramatic and hard is to pull the trigger and make the players fight their way in. The stone is right here at the villa and they need to steal it. Sounds simple enough.

Things got complicated for my party when a recurring NPC appeared. She was an ex girlfriend of the bard in our party; they were both Tieflings. She now worked for the Zhentarim and was basically their second in command. And she was here to steal the stone, come Hell or high water. The bard, still in love with her, was perfectly content to let her steal it and even cover her getaway. The rest of the players, not so much, but when the chaos was ensuing and she was literally running past them with the stone in hand, made the decision that it was smarter to try and help her escape and then figure out how to get the stone from her later, than try and get it from her now.

This led literally directly to chapter 4.

Chapter 4

By now it’s obvious: I used all 4 bad guys.

I ran through the chapter and picked the coolest maps and best encounter ideas, including the rooftop chase, the theater, the sewer and the courthouse. I weaved them together carefully, and all the changes I had made to the groups paid off when they entered the theater, chased by barbed devils and our Cambion friend, only to have an Umber Hulk with the Xanathar’s logo painted on his face crash through the stage, flanked by two Duergar. Add in some Drow gunslingers and it was a fucking party.

(the large hexagon is where somebody cast Darkness; the big scuffed circle is a grody spot on my grid tiles. I still need new ones...)

The courthouse had a great scene where the Cassalanter dofflegagher impersonated the chief of police, interrogating the players for the code word to activate the stone (I added one; who cares?) until the real chief of police showed up! The players had to do an entire encounter with this guy while handcuffed; thank god for verbal only spells, right? 

From here the stone ended up with the players, and then it ended up with Jarlaxle who they are working for. Jarlaxle attuned to it and told them the Vault of Dragons is inside Undermountain; 3, 5 levels deep? Who knows? And it requires 3 keys: The Crown of Asmodeus, the Ring of Winter, and the Robe of the Archmagi.

I gave these 3 magic items to the Cassalanters, the Xanathar and Manshoon. This is a pretty common hack and it means the lairs in the book actually get used. I made up one of the magic items (Crown of Asmodeus) and stole another from a module I don’t intend to run as written (the Ring of Winter is, I believe, in either Tomb of Annihilation or Storm King’s Thunder). They’re fun!

So the rest of the campaign has been the players bouncing between going deep into Undermountain, the megadungeon underneath the Yawning Portal, and going to the 3 different villain factions to steal their shit. 

The villain lairs are NOT statted for level 5 players AT ALL. The players have no hope of actually killing ANY of the villains at level 5; to fight the Xanathar is a pure TPK at level 5. But at level 8, like where my players are now? One of them died and then got Revivified; the others all survived or made their saves when they were hit by death or disintegration. (In the spirit of the Xanathar, I rolled every eye beam randomly, rerolling if I had used that ray in the last round.) That’s about the best you can hope for with a Beholder IMO! 

The rest of the lairs you can mostly run as-is. Any very low CR mooks, basically anything lower than 1 or 2 CR, I would probably replace with a higher CR variant. We’ve already discussed what you can replace them with above, and if you’ve made it this far into the module, you should have a pretty good sense of what your players can handle.

[residesatshamecentral]

@me-fish​ asked about my Watchmen OCs, so here’s the deeply self-indulgent story that’s just been sitting in my head since I got into Watchmen. This gets very dark and messed up, so warnings for: Nazis, trauma, trauma being worked through in unhealthy ways, abusive family relationships, un-German names for German characters and wanton messing with the Watchmen canon.

Okay, so first things first, this starts in an alternate version of Germany rather than America, just after World War One and there are crazy vigilantes there too. The story begins with Theo Wolf senior, who is the father of my main character. Now, Theo went through some pretty rough stuff in the trenches, and what with with the wonderful attitudes to mental health care, he just didn’t recover from them properly. He has exactly one friend, Heinrich (we’ll get to this guy in a moment) who he fought beside in the trenches. He ends up working through his problems by becoming a vigilante called the Shooter. As the Shooter he is basically Rorschach with a gun and a motorcycle, and he just wears a black balaclava. Hey, he doesn’t have much money or imagination, ok? I see him as looking something like this:

Now the brains of the operation here is actually his wife Anna. Anna is an heiress, although most of the family money’s been lost, and the whole world thinks she’s too good for Theo. She’s beautiful, brilliant, talented and secretive, and as thoroughly messed up as her husband. She moonlights as a vigilante called the Shadow, but she mostly doesn't really have to because her methods are much more subtle than everyday crime fighting. She mostly targets wealthy criminals, charms her way into their social circles, and gains access to their homes one way or another. After investigating them carefully, she utterly destroys them, either by outing them in ways that can’t be smoothed over, or by terrorizing them as the Shadow until they turn themselves in. Also, she carries a sword as the Shadow, because that’s cool and I like Kill Bill. Here’s what she looks like:

Now these two are... more or less a functioning team for about ten years, and their marriage pretty much works. They have a son, Theo junior, and manage to shield him from the effects of their crimefighting. But as things get... worse (pre wwii Germany, remember?) Anna has a bit of a personal crisis. She feels they’re just not doing enough good, and unless they make a difference, what’s the point of what they do? She starts getting in over her head, taking on bigger and bigger targets, until one day, she’s approached by an intelligence agency. Now I could never decide if it’s an English, German or American network, but they blackmail her into working for them, and this is where things start to fall apart. She’s forced to leave her family at some point, and pronounced legally dead.

This is where things really start to go to hell. Because Theo Senior is a codependent mess when it comes to his wife. He sulks around for a long time, unsure how to look after a kid on his own, then ends up getting arrested as the Shooter. His friend Max gets custody of Theo Junior, and basically hushes up the whole thing.

Max... is not a good choice of father figure. He raises Theo Junior was well as he knows how, which basically means keeping him under his thumb while Max flirts with every political party vying for power in the country. He eventually places his bets on the Nazi party, because hey, what could go wrong there? 

Theo Junior and Max have a difficult relationship. You can’t help loving your foster-father, but Max is pretty controlling and tyrannical, and Theo brings his own problems to the mix. He’s stubborn, brilliant, unreliable and recklessly honest. He becomes a police detective though he’d certainly be thrown out of the force of Max didn’t protect him. Over the next ten years he proceeds to piss off some very important people, a fact that he will come to regret.

When things get... worse, Theo becomes a major liability for Max. Max, being in deep with the Party at this point, feels that he has two choices: he can let his foster-son go on embarrassing him until he gets himself killed and Max disgraced, or he can do something about it. That ‘something’ ends up being getting Theo imprisoned. With Theo safely locked away, Max can get on with his career, which ends up being a very bloody one. 

Arsehole.

Skip a few years. Theo, rather damaged and upset, leaves the ruins of Berlin for America. He’s clear in his own mind what happened: A monster, who on some level he still sees as a second father, kept him subservient for years before finally betraying him. Through all that time, he forgot his real heritage - didn’t his parents fight people like this? And isn’t he sort-of complicit in Max’s crimes, if only because he didn’t stop him? In America, he steals a ton of money from the local crime rings and uses it to set up a new identity. By day he is Walt Wolf, a rude German-American socialite. By night though, he is a vigilante, Red Mask. Here’s what he looks like in and out of costume:

His sole purpose is to seek out German war criminals being employed by the US government and bring them to justice. One day, he’s sure, he can find and confront Max. In the process though, he meets a friendly ornithologist called Dan Dreiberg. The begin a partnership/sort-of relationship, that allows Theo to heal, a little, from the past. Dreiberg is mourning the death of his last partner, and his friendship with Theo helps him stop dwelling on the past. As for Theo, Dreiberg’s influence causes him to re-evaluate what exactly he wants from all this. Is it justice? Revenge? Both? Is he planning to kill Max when he finds him, or turn him in? Make your own mind up, because I certainly haven’t.

What is Dan doing there? Where’s Rorschach? Hey, I told you this was self-indulgent! Dan is there, and Rorschach is dead, and how that works is not my problem! Dan is hunting war criminals with an angry vigilante, so don’t tell me that’s not a good payoff :-D

[aion-rsa]

Critters: The Making of a Comedy Horror Cult Classic

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Rupert Harvey knew he was on to something with Critters after one memorable test screening.  Specifically, it was the scene where the Critters, who had already been terrorizing the Brown family, were standing on the doorstep of the family’s home talking in their guttural language with subtitles translating for the audience…until one of them is blown to gooey bits by a shotgun blast (wielded by none other than E.T. mom Dee Wallace), and the other lets out a subtitled “Fuck.”

“It totally destroyed the audience,” Harvey recalls. “They just howled. We lost the next scene because they were laughing so hard and I thought: ‘Okay, this is probably going to work.’” 

It had already taken a lot of work for Critters to get this far. 

Bringing Critters to Life

Released on April 11, 1986, the horror comedy about a small town and farm-dwelling family under attack from little furry space aliens with a taste for human flesh was unfairly dismissed by some as a Gremlins knock-off. 

But that did a disservice to the unique tone of Critters; a sci-fi comedy featuring belly laughs alongside genuine moments of terror. A film that owed as much to 1950s sci-fi B-movies as it did anything else, with its tale of picturesque Americana under attack from aliens. 

It also overlooks the film’s quirkier narrative aspect like the pair of shapeshifting alien bounty hunters who arrive on Earth to hunt the Critters down, with one of them assuming the form of a popular Jon Bon Jovi-esque rock musician. 

This surreal sci-fi tone, coupled with the copious violence, occasional bad language, and general unpredictability of it all helped give Critters the feel of a rebellious younger brother to the more mature Gremlins.  

To many, it was the cooler, edgier movie and one that boasted underlying themes that remain universal to this day. 

More importantly, the accusation of imitation was incorrect. If the two films were related, it wasn’t by design with screenwriter Brian Dominic Muir first writing the script for Critters back in 1982, two years before Joe Dante’s film hit cinemas.  

“I don’t think I saw Gremlins until we were in post-production,” Harvey, who produced Critters and worked on two of its three original sequels, tells Den of Geek. “It was certainly not something we were thinking about very much at the time, if at all. 

We were dealing with very different creatures and the fact that they were so different in concept meant I wasn’t terribly bothered by it. Gremlins were these mythical, earthbound, magical beings whereas Critters were extraterrestrial. People who say there are similarities are just influenced by the fact Gremlins was such a huge success, but it was a much bigger budget movie.” 

Muir’s script didn’t see the light of day for nearly three years before he showed it to friend and fellow budding filmmaker Stephen Herek who developed it further. That was where Harvey came in. 

The three men met while working on Android, a distinctive low budget sci-fi film Harvey was producing alongside independent movie trailblazer Roger Corman.  

“Brian gave me Critters to read and l loved it,” Harvey recalls. “It was an archetypal American story about foreigners invading the homeland. It’s quite prescient given the current state of politics in America. There was this quintessentially American setup with this almost pioneering family struggling through adversity to come out the other side.” 

35 years on, that notion of protecting the homeland is one Harvey feels is reflected in the inward-looking politics increasingly prominent in America and the UK today. That sentiment was already bubbling under the surface when Critters came out in the Reagan-era of the 1980s.

“It was novel to look at that then through the lens of Critters,” he says. “No one was seeing the film in those terms but that human fear of outsiders coming in has always been there and has been a fundamental part of cinema and drama since forever.” 

Harvey agreed to develop the film under his production company, Sho Films. Though he mulled over an offer to produce a low budget version of Critters with Corman, everything changed when Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema came calling. 

Writing Critters

“New Line was really a mom-and-pop operation at that point. They hadn’t made A Nightmare on Elm Street yet. They weren’t the New Line of today, but Bob offered to double our budget, so I did the deal.” 

Even so, Shaye took some convincing on the choice of director. 

Herek would go on to helm Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, and a string of big budget Disney movies in the years that followed but had never directed prior to Critters, having previously worked as an editor. 

“Stephen, to his credit, even though he had no leverage other than a script we wanted to make, absolutely insisted that nobody would direct it but him and if he didn’t it wouldn’t get made,” Harvey says. “He stuck to his guns and there was never any shift in that position on Brian’s side. I had to convince Bob on several occasions to go ahead with us and, even during production, to actually stick with Steve. But we were all very glad that he did.” 

On the writing side, Harvey enlisted Sho Films’ in-house writer Don Opper. A fellow Roger Corman acolyte, Opper had written and starred in Android where he also worked with Herek and Muir. 

He was seen as the ideal candidate to work alongside Herek after Muir became unwell. 

“Brian, unfortunately, became quite ill not long after we started making Critters,” Harvey says. 

Muir was reportedly battling Hodgkin’s disease at the time. Though he recovered, the writer, who often wrote under the pseudonym August White for Full Moon Entertainment later in his career, sadly died from cancer aged 48 in 2010.  

“He was a very sweet, nice man,” Harvey recalls. “In Brian’s absence, Don worked with Stephen on polishing the script. One of the ways was to enhance the family and their relationships.” 

By then the distinctive looking Opper had also been cast in the pivotal role of Charlie McFadden, the town drunk and a conspiracy theorist convinced the fillings in his teeth are picking up signals from outer space.  

Like a cross between Randy Quaid’s deranged pilot from Independence Day and Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, Charlie would eventually emerge as a fan favorite, appearing in each of the three Critters sequels. 

He was one of several quirky locals introduced early on in Critters with much of the first third of the film dedicated to establishing the Brown family, their farm, and the characters of the fictional Kansas town of Grover’s Bend where the Critters land.  

In one picture postcard scene of the perfect nuclear family, the Browns gather round the breakfast table in a primary colored kitchen, blissfully unaware of the approaching danger and disruption to follow. 

That slow build-up may be less commonplace today, but it’s something Harvey believes was crucial to the success of the film. 

“That was one of the things that appealed to me about the script,” he says. “If you set that up properly and the audience is in there with you. They gain an understanding of the family dynamic right away and they are engaged. It helps you then feel for each one of them subsequently…The rules are the same, and they have been since the first Greek dramas; storytelling is still about humans and the human condition. Just making stuff about what the monsters are doing has no appeal.” 

Critters came during a time when horror comedies were commonplace in multiplexes.

“Studios started to notice in test screenings that the audience response was often bigger when you capped a scare or moment of high tension with a bit of wit or humor,” Harvey explains. 

Post-screening surveys bore this out; using humor to emphasize or punctuate a terrifying moment drew a bigger response from the audience. Regardless of the visceral impact of the scare itself. It made it more memorable to viewers.

The Cast of Critters

It helped that Critters boasted an impressive cast to bring the script to life.  

Blade Runner’s M. Emmet Walsh appeared as the grouchy local sheriff while Dee Wallace, who had starred in E.T. only a few years earlier, was also convinced to sign on as the Brown family matriarch Helen. Billy “Green” Bush was cast as the hardworking man of the house Jay Brown with Nadine van der Velde as his high school teen daughter April. 

Despite some impressive names, Harvey ranks the casting of future Party of Five and ER star Scott Grimes in the role of mischievous central teenage protagonist Brad Brown as the most significant. It’s Scott who first discovers the Critters and Scott that begins to fight back against them using his slingshot and potent firecrackers coming off like a hellish Kevin McCallister from Home Alone. 

“Scott was tailor-made for the role,” Harvey says. “He was at the center of the craziness and he had the audience’s sympathy and support because no one was paying attention to him.” 

For all the acting talent on display, however, much of the movie’s success rested on the tiny shoulders of a few hedgehog-like puppets. 

“The biggest challenge was making the Critters appear to be a viable threat as the antagonists,” Harvey says. “We were really fortunate that we found the Chiodo Brothers.” 

A trio of siblings who specialized in stop motion and animatronic work, the Chiodos were relative newcomers to the movie business and would go on to projects like Elf and Team America: World Police. 

“We knew from the script we were dealing with a fur ball that got around fast by rolling around and was all teeth and voracious,” Harvey says. “That was the extent of the design parameters. They came up with the drawings and the details as to how they would work.”

Harvey cites the Critters’ distinctive, almost limbless design as both a blessing and a curse.  

“From a construction and manipulation point of view, they were relatively straightforward,” he says. “But from an action perspective, there was not a lot you could do with them.” 

While other projects, like New Line’s later Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, would struggle with glitchy animatronics, there were no such problems with the Chiodos’ creations with each running impressively well thanks to a crack team behind the scenes.

“Even though the Critters were fairly simple creatures, there were times for some of those shots, when we had 10 guys running different cables and things to them to get them right,” Harvey recalls. “They had eye movement, mouth movement, lip movement even their little arms and legs move because these things needed to look as believable as possible. But it was still tough to make these things that rolled around something scary and frightening rather than cute and laughable.” 

That was where Billy Zane came in. A good horror villain needs a good victim. Cast in the role of April’s unsuspecting boyfriend Steve Eliot, the then unknown Zane ended up falling afoul of the Critters in arguably the film’s standout gory death after encountering the furry fiends while enjoying a makeout session in the family’s barn. 

“It was the first thing he’d ever done. I think he’d arrived in L.A. a week before,” Harvey says, recalling how uncomfortably hot that barn scene was for everyone involved. “It was 100 degrees in the barn. He had little furry creatures stuck to his stomach and was covered in fake blood. It was so hot and sticky. We stayed there for the whole day, getting all the inserts and various other bits and pieces to make the scene…But that setup in the claustrophobic space of the barn helped to make the scene much scarier because we could set it up in a kind of way that made the punchline, the payoff, much more visceral.” 

The Bounty Hunters

For all the machinations of the Critters themselves, it’s their pursuers from outer space, the two faceless bounty hunters, who almost steal the show.

Especially after one decides to take the form of fictional hair metal superstar Johnny Steele, the singer of “Power of the Night” a song so pitch-perfectly cheesy, you had to wonder if Steele is a real artist rather than musical theater actor Terrence Mann. 

“I went to see Terrence who was appearing in Cats on Broadway. He’d been suggested by a friend and was seriously interested in doing the film,” Harvey says. “We had a friend in New York who was in the music business and had a recording studio. He put together some tracks and we created this imaginary band that he stole the identity of the lead singer from.” 

Despite some striking similarities to artists of the time, Harvey insists Johnny Steele wasn’t set up as a deliberate lampooning of any one artist.

“The band was generically inspired by particular bands of the time,” he says. “There wasn’t any one group or individual. We were post punk and before real heavy metal. There was more of a glam goth influence.” 

Teaming up with Charlie and Brad, the bounty hunters eventually destroy the Critters though it comes at a cost to the Browns, with the family home blown-up in the process. It was a powerful symbol of the way these invaders had shattered their lives but not their spirit. Unfortunately, New Line Cinema didn’t like it as an ending. 

“Bob wanted it changed so that the house was rebuilt in the end but I was against it so we had a few arguments about that, but it was Bob’s money, and we did it and it came out very successfully.” 

Shaye and New Line would occasionally prove tricky customers, with Harvey often forced to traverse the familiar pitfalls of independent filmmaking.

“We were in production and things were really tough and there was one point in time when Bob and I sat down in the trailer and he explained to me some things that I won’t go into,” Harvey says.  “Things were very tricky for a week or two financially, but they sorted themselves out. That was a typical attribute of an independent movie. ‘Oh God you’re spending $150,000 dollars a day, can you spend $100,000?’. Not unheard of but no fun at the time.” 

For all the trials and tribulations of the film, cast, and Critters themselves, however, he has fond memories of working on the film.

“We weren’t stuck in Los Angeles in some smoke-filled space,” he said. “The set was built on Newhall Ranch, this huge bucolic area of land outside of L.A and there we were for five weeks shooting in relatively hot temperatures.” 

Critters Sequels and What’s Next

After a quick turnaround in editing, Critters was released in cinemas, proving to be a hit with over $13 million made at the box office off a budget of $3 million. This kind of success made sequels inevitable.

Though Harvey was unavailable for the second film, he returned for the third and fourth movies, which were filmed back-to-back and released direct to video.

“By then video cassettes were a huge component to New Line’s early success and helped finance the Nightmare on Elm Street and Critters sequels and all of the other movies that they then started making in order to become the powerhouse they became,” Harvey says. “I think it funded something like 40 to 40 to 50 percent of New Line production for that period of time.”

Harvey was initially hesitant to get involved, citing Shaye’s wishes to make the sequels for even less money than the first film. However, he ultimately relented after agreeing to film them back-to-back.

Harvey has mixed feelings about the two sequels, particularly the third movie, which he had conceived as being “much darker and much more violent” than what eventually made it to the screen.

“I wanted to do a George Romero homage for the third film,” he says. “I was very much interested in the claustrophobia of the tenement building in New York City, that kind of atmosphere. Boy, did it ever turn out differently.”

Having also agreed to direct the fourth film, which was set in space and wrap up the franchise, he found himself too busy to oversee work on the third movie.

“It was different. I didn’t have as much to do with Critters 3 because I was directing the fourth film. We were shooting back to back. We had a week down in between the two. All the time we were shooting Critters 3 I was prepping Critters 4.”

While the fourth film featured both a young Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif on top scene-chewing form, the third entry has become among the most noted in the years since thanks to the presence of a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the main role.

“It’s the movie that shall remain nameless on Leo DiCaprio’s resume,” Harvey jokes.

He doesn’t have a lot of memories about DiCaprio on set though there was already a sense he was destined for big things.

“One day he told me he needed some time off. He had to go and audition for this movie. After he came back I asked ‘How did it go?’ and he said ‘Robert De Niro is really great’. he’d been off auditioning for This Boy’s Life…And of course, when he did that movie, it was like, ‘Holy shit. Well, where was that actor when we were making Critters 3?’” 

While Leo is unlikely to return to the Critters franchise anytime soon, Harvey, who had no involvement in a recent TV revival, believes that there is life in the old furballs yet.

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“It’s not a franchise that’s going to go away,” he says cryptically. “Whatever comes next needs to be something that is responsive to contemporary sources. I can’t really say too much about it, because nothing is final. All I can tell you is that I don’t think this is the end.”

The post Critters: The Making of a Comedy Horror Cult Classic appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[orbemnews]

Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil-Finding Field In 2019, Mohamad Bazzi, a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, launched an expedition to Tunisia in search of fossils. He and his colleagues traveled to the phosphate mines around the city of Gafsa, where 56 million-year-old rocks record a time of rapidly warming oceans and mass extinctions, particularly of apex predators like sharks. Mr. Bazzi made some distinctive choices for this paleontological expedition. For starters, his team hired Tunisians to help dig, rather than bringing students from his university. Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues also chose to reach out to the residents of Gafsa wherever possible, holding impromptu lectures on the area’s fossil history to interested onlookers. This was a contrast with the secretiveness of many paleontologists in the field, who might worry about their sites being raided for the fossil black market. The fossils the team collected from Gafsa are important for learning more about how animals adapted to the hothouse world of the Eocene, a period that may foretell what’s in store for the planet in coming years if carbon emissions don’t slow. But while Mr. Bazzi’s team removed the fossils from Tunisia, they did so under an agreement with local institutions that Mr. Bazzi himself insisted on: After he finished his research, the remains would be returned. Historically, these specimens are seldom returned, and locals may never see them again. But Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues are part of a movement among the next generation of paleontological researchers, one attempting to change scientific practices that descend directly from 19th century colonialism, which exploited native peoples and their natural histories. Over the last few decades, multiple countries have demanded the return of looted art, antiquities, cultural treasures and human remains from museum collections in North America and Europe. Countries such as Mongolia and Chile have likewise demanded the return of collected fossils, from tyrannosaur bones to the preserved remains of giant ground sloths. “There’s a consistent pattern with these specimens of high scientific or aesthetic value, where they’re taken out of the developing world and shipped abroad to be displayed and shown to a wider audience elsewhere,” Mr. Bazzi said. “There should be some balance so that local parties have a say in what happens to them.” Many countries with less money to spend on funding their own scientists are home to important fossil deposits that could drive major advances of our understanding of the prehistoric world. If the field of paleontology is to move forward, these researchers say, it’s important to figure out how to study specimens in these places without extending colonial legacies. That will take the development of a different approach to the field, more like the ones being tried by Mr. Bazzi and other scientists that rely less on extraction and more on collaboration with and the development of local institutions. While many cultures throughout human history have long traditions around collecting or studying fossil remains, the discipline of scientific paleontology — as well as the formation of modern natural history museums — arose in the 18th century, when European powers were actively colonizing large swaths of the globe. According to Emma Dunne, an Irish paleontologist at University of Birmingham in England, European scientists were part of a colonial network that sucked natural wealth — including fossils — into imperial capitals. In the 20th century, some countries pushed back. Brazil and Argentina provide government funding of paleontology. Those countries and others, such as Mongolia, established laws forbidding the export of fossils from within their borders. The two South American countries also mandate that foreign researchers work with local paleontologists for research on fossils found in the country. “You still do have non-Argentinian researchers working with local ones, for example,” said Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a Mauritian paleontologist based at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. “But you definitely see that there is a bigger local influence.” Even in the aftermath of colonialism, however, fossils from across the globe still tend to end up in American and European museums. Some are collected through approved scientific expeditions. But because fossils are also traded privately, fossil-rich countries with fewer resources and legal protections often see interesting and potentially valuable finds put up for auction in Western markets. Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years. In some cases, researchers have raised concerns about the ethics of working on such privately collected fossils — particularly those which may have been exported illegally. At the same time, paleontologists in Western countries have bristled at the rules required by countries like Brazil. In one case in 2015, David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, dismissed questions about his team’s lack of collaboration with Brazilian researchers on a specimen found there. “I mean, do you want me also to have a Black person on the team for ethnicity reasons, and a cripple and a woman, and maybe a homosexual too just for a bit of all round balance?” he said in an interview at the time with Herton Escobar, a Brazilian science journalist. Dr. Martill said in an interview in December that he chose his words poorly. But he said he remains opposed to laws that dictate where fossils go. In 2020, he was a co-author of a paper on another find exported from Brazil and described without a Brazilian co-author. “I do not think governments should dictate who works on fossils,” he said. “I think scientists should be able to choose who they work with.” These sorts of controversies are one example of the way the discipline’s colonial history lingers, Ms. Raja-Schoob says. But there are others. Much of global paleontology is still conducted in languages like English, German and French. And according to an ongoing research project by Ms. Raja-Schoob and Dr. Dunne, countries with higher G.D.P.s — places like the United States, France, Germany and China — tend to report more fossil data, in part because they have the money to invest in academic paleontology programs. Many institutions around the world have neither the tools nor enough government support for sophisticated studies of fossils. But that is something scientific institutions from wealthier countries can help with. “We have to ask why we’re bringing this knowledge to the centers, rather than spreading it out,” Dr. Dunne said. “We can work with things like 3-D scans of fossils, we can work with digital data sets. The problem obviously is getting funding for museums to do this for themselves.” Ms. Raja-Schoob said that academic funding could promote geology and paleontology in more countries. “Why not put that money into local people doing something?” she asked. “At the end of the day we are all going to be using that data. So why should they not also benefit?” While the fossil riches present in the rocks of North Africa and the Levant have long drawn fossil hunters and scientists, Mr. Bazzi said, the majority of fieldwork has resulted in fossils being exported to European or American institutions. Mr. Bazzi’s parents are from Lebanon, while his colleague Yara Haridy — a doctoral student at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde — was born in Egypt. Because of the lack of opportunities, neither can find steady academic work in paleontology in the Middle East. As part of their trip to Gafsa, both wanted to try to start building up paleontological resources instead of just removing them. That was part of what led Mr. Bazzi and Ms. Haridy — after many careful conversations with local participants over coffee and tea — to the ruins of a museum in the small mining town of Métlaoui. The museum had been burned down during the protests of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution that helped trigger the Arab Spring. It had not been restored, and on their third day in Tunisia, a mining engineer told them it might be worth visiting. Stepping carefully through the ruins, they found an unexpected wealth of fossil material: immense turtle shells, crocodile jawbones, dinosaur vertebrae and even ancient human remains, all scattered across dusty floors and charred rubble. The collection had to be salvaged, the team decided, but not taken out of the country. “Every other question we got was, ‘Oh, are you guys going to take this stuff?,’” Ms. Haridy said. “And we told them, no, it’s yours. It should stay here. It’s part of this region’s story.” Instead, they partnered with the people of Métlaoui to help them save the remains. Within a day, the town’s mayor and other community authorities had assembled local workers and students from Gafsa University. Mr. Bazzi’s team handed out gloves and masks and a stream of Métlaoui residents went to work pulling fossils from the ruins. “It was a pretty big operation,” Ms. Haridy said. “Everyone got really excited.” The team cataloged the bones before boxing and sending them to a government facility in Gafsa. The hope is that the museum remains will provide the nucleus for an ongoing paleontology program at Gafsa University; Mr. Bazzi has been helping to supervise interested students. One such student, Mohammed Messai, said that he didn’t know much about paleontology before meeting Mr. Bazzi, but that he’s now made identifying the fossils recovered from the museum part of the research for his master’s degree in science. It’s important for paleontologists to build genuine partnerships with local researchers, Ms. Haridy said. Not only does this create community engagement and prompt people to regard fossils as worth protecting, it also helps ensure that specimens are properly studied when they are returned to their country of origin. “There’s this problem where even if a country demands fossils back, like Egypt did for a long time, a lot of the paleontological knowledge doesn’t necessarily return with it,” she said. Without investing in independent paleontology programs in the countries in question, fossils can end up “consigned to a dusty room, where nobody knows what to do with it.” But efforts to create more inclusive and distributed paleontological networks face considerable headwinds. “Funders don’t necessarily put any emphasis on the ethical side of the research,” Dr. Dunne said. “We do rely a lot on other countries for their data. Fossils are worldwide, they’re global, they don’t respect political boundaries. But we should be identifying these patterns of colonial bias in our research and stopping them.” To some extent, the presence of these conversations is itself a sign of change. “When I began paleontology some 45 years ago these issues were of no concern,” Dr. Martill said. “Today, they seem to be dominating paleontological discussions. Perhaps it is me who is now out of touch.” He added that, “a fantastic new generation of paleontologists emerging and they are flexing their muscles and demanding different things.” For now, Mr. Bazzi’s team hopes to drive funding toward local paleontology in Tunisia. “Ideally, the Tunisian government would just believe these people on their own and agree that their fossils are important and worthy of preservation, and is of international interest,” Ms. Haridy said. “But they tend to get interested once scientists are actually actively trying to visit and actively trying to work with people.” “You now have local people starting to drive this themselves,” Mr. Bazzi said. “Eventually there will be no need for others to come and do it.” Source link Orbem News #Colonialism #field #FossilFinding #Uprooting

[radramblog]

WA election aftermath

The aftermath of an election is always a tenuous time, with seats in doubt for some time well after the election is called, and a massive number of people effectively gaining and losing their jobs. In a two-party system, there’s always a winner and a loser, and as a result at least one side is going to have emotions running high.

I’d like to delicately consider the results of this election, and the potential impacts of such on the state. With that in mind…..

Holy shit I knew this was going to be an easy labor blowout but I didn’t expect that kind of result.

I don’t think I’ve seen a bigger blowout in any election, ever. It’s absolutely farcical. I love it. I can’t stop grinning thinking about it. The Liberal Party got fucked. This feels like vengeance for all those years suffering under Premier Barnett, cunt as he was.

Alright, bit more seriousness, let’s break it down.

Labor

Labor winning this election was pretty much a matter of course. There was no universe in which they didn’t succeed, even the opposition knew that. The people have seen the state government’s response to COVID-19, and how well it went for us, and saw the opposition dragging their heels and arguing against them, which is not a good look. I think there are three big things that brought Labor so far forward this election, and I genuinely think that COVID-19 was one of them- it might literally have been the best thing to happen to WA Labor last year, and I mean that without a hint of irony.

The second big thing was Clive Palmer. More specifically, that WA Labor got to have Clive Palmer as an enemy. Now I don’t know about over east, but it’s presumably less pronounced since he got a couple seats there at some point. But Clive Palmer is monstrously unpopular over here, and his attempt at subverting WA border restrictions for his own ends was not something anyone wanted to see- so the current government completely shutting him out was very welcomed. I do genuinely think that the dislike for Clive Palmer gave WA Labor a huge advantage, since they were the ones standing up to him. We all saw his fucking annoying advertisements 2 years ago in the Federal election, and we kicked his farce of a party out then- it’s no surprise that we don’t want him around now.

Last but certainly not least, of course, there is Premier McGowan. Marky boy is probably the most approved-of politician I can think of in recent memory, cultivating a minor cult of personality that isn’t locked to one side of the political compass like, say, Trump’s. That does, of course, leave him as a bit of a centrist, which is not exactly great in my eyes, but it could be a lot worse.

Labor now has a massive amount of power, holding every seat they had and gaining many more. And while the opposition is rather weak, it’s likely that any influence the Libs/Nats would try to have isn’t something I’d want to see anyway. Regardless, now that the immediate threat of election is over, Labor does need to be held accountable for mistakes they make, because they are far from perfect- McGowan’s position on fracking is a good example.

Liberal

I never thought I’d feel any form of sympathy for a Liberal leader, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for Zak Kirkup. He’s a relatively young politician essentially thrown out as a lamb to the slaughter, becoming the first Labor/Liberal leader in 90 years to lose their own seat in a state election.

With that said, I feel no reason to similarly sympathise with the remainder of the party losing their seats. They’ve got to rebuild now, with a maximum of 3 seats to work with, which leads me to believe they’re going to need a complete redo of their positions/branding/policy if they want to succeed next time around. They might end up straying dramatically from their political positions, which could be good, or it could be very bad.

I’m interested to see what happens to the Liberal party in the coming weeks. But I suspect they aren’t going to be especially relevant in government for some time.

Nationals

The Nats look set to become the new opposition, a sentence I never thought I’d say or write, but it does sort of make sense. If the Liberal party continues to suffer, they may end up in that position for quite some time, which would make WA a pretty unique political landscape in the country as far as I am aware (hahah I don’t know shit about other states politics)

I’m not super aware of Nats policies aside from their regional focus, which doesn’t apply too much to me specifically. But if their regional focus includes big business operating in rural WA (which a lot of it does) then colour me disinterested. If they are the major opposition, though, then I’m expecting some amount of increased regional spending on Labor’s behalf as appeasement, or to get them to agree to other bills. We’ll see.

Greens

If you go by total vote counts, the Greens actually have a fair few more than the Nationals- but that’s not exactly how that works, is it. We didn’t have any seats, but hey, at least that means we didn’t lose any seats.

Maybe next time, folks.

Others

At time of writing, the third most dramatic swing in votes was in One Nation, everyone’s favourite xenophobes- except, it’s a 3.7% swing away from them, which is huge considering they now only have 1.2% of the votes. It felt like at the last election we kicked Pauline’s grotty arse out of the state, but now I’d be surprised if they made much of a reappearance here at all.

The fact that the No Mandatory Vaccination party has the 5th most votes total is both staggering and terrifying. They’re still about a third of the Nationals, but that such a fucking hellscape of a party got that high upsets me greatly- especially since I don’t want to know where their preferences ended up.

The WAxit party only has about 4000 votes, so I guess we aren’t seceding after all. But hey, apparently more people want to vote for that than to legalise weed (by ~1500 votes), so they’ve got that going for them.

At time of writing, the Animal Justice Party, the Daylight Savings Party, the Health Australia Party, and the Great Australian Party (which I only found out afterwards is an offshoot of One Nation) all have exactly 0 votes counted for them. Better luck next time, or better yet, just don’t bother next time.

[shipaholic]

Omens Universe, Chapter 19

2 chapters to go -!!

Link to next part at the end.

(From the beginning)

(last part)

(chrono)

---

Chapter 19

A smoking pile lay on the ground. Crowley looked down at it, still processing what he’d just seen. A sword, a crown, and a set of scales. Smoke rose from them in wisps. Crowley knew one thing for certain; he was blessed if he was going to touch them.

“Why… why did they disappear?” Aziraphale said, half to nobody.

War, Famine and Pollution. One moment they’d been gung-ho about Adam using his terrifying powers, the next - vanished. Nothing left of them except a heap of unsettling artifacts.

Crowley looked to the tall figure remaining. Death’s eye sockets looked back at him, pinpoints of bright blue in their centres.

“Where did they go?” he said.

Death’s head tilted towards him.

THEY HAVE GONE. THEY EXISTED BECAUSE HUMANITY DREAMT OF THEM. HUMANITY DREAMS NO MORE. HUMANITY THINKS NO MORE. HUMANITY IS NO MORE.

In a small voice, Aziraphale said, “But… you’re still here.”

Death grinned.

YES. I AM STILL HERE.

Crowley shivered. So. No more humans. Nothing but the washed-out things standing about the house. Adam got them all.

“We’re the only ones left,” Aziraphale murmured.

“You had to point that out, didn’t you?” Crowley muttered.

Adam stared around the garden. He seemed to take in that he was now one of five sentient creatures left on Earth. He looked from Aziraphale and Crowley, to Death, to Spacedog at his feet. The little dog had shrunk into an unhappy ball. Even his helmet looked smaller than usual.

“All right.” Aziraphale sounded a little like his old self. He raised his chin and spoke briskly. “Why did you spare Crowley and myself?”

Adam’s gaze wandered back to the two of them. Crowley tried not to flinch.

“We’re in the eye of the storm,” he said, dramatically.

There was a pause.

Crowley wrinkled his nose. “Come off it.”

Adam grinned. Only with one corner of his mouth, and for half a second, but still.

“Yeah, it sounds cool when people on TV say that. Actually, I want to see Zadkiel.”

Crowley moved protectively towards Aziraphale. Aziraphale did the same towards him. They bumped into each other a bit, but Crowley felt he managed to play it off.

He glared at Adam. “No.”

“Why?” Aziraphale said.

Adam shrugged. “I just thought he was cool. He saved my life. You two were pretty useless - no offence. He was much better.”

“He’s not a party trick,” said Crowley.

“Don’t you want to be him? I thought you wanted to spend the rest of your lives together.”

“Yeah, well, I hoped the rest of my life would take a bit longer,” Crowley snapped.

“I’m not killing you. Why don’t you understand? You’ll be fine. Better than fine. You’ll never feel anything bad again.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, quietly.

Crowley turned to him. A tiny flutter of hope whispered to him that perhaps Aziraphale was going to say something brilliant and save the day.

Aziraphale slipped his hand into Crowley’s. Crowley felt their fingers intertwine, and for a moment cared about nothing else.

“I think we’ve lost,” Aziraphale said, softly.

Crowley felt coldness squeeze his insides. Then, a hollow sense of loss.

“Yeah. I know,” he mumbled.

Aziraphale gave a sad smile. Crowley wondered if there was anything they could have thought of. Probably not. The only thing they could have done that would have made a damn bit of difference was to fall in love sooner. Been braver. Dared Heaven and Hell to destroy them. They would have - of course they would have. But oblivion was coming either way. They could have died on their own terms.

He supposed they still could.

“Do you want to?” he asked Aziraphale.

Aziraphale’s eyes were very bright and very sad. “Be him again? One last time?”

He paused in thought, his hand still laced with Crowley’s.

“I don’t think I want to do that to him,” he said at last. “And I rather want you to be the last thing I see.”

A lump in Crowley’s throat made it suddenly hard to breathe.

“Yeah. Same.”

He faced Aziraphale.

“We’re ready. Do your worst.”

Adam sounded bored. “So you’re not fusing then? Fine. Bye.”

Crowley braced himself.

Nothing happened.

He looked back up. Adam was frozen in thought.

“Hang on. Can a fusion have more than two people in it?”

Crowley blinked. He’d never thought about it before. The idea of fusing with anyone else had never occurred to him.

“Er… I don’t know?”

A disturbing light came into Adam’s eyes. Crowley wanted to shrink back from it.

“Wow. I bet you can. How cool would that be? A massive fusion that just gets bigger and bigger. You could keep on adding to it ‘til it’s got dozens of eyes and wings and arms and it’s bigger than a house - no, bigger than a planet. Big enough to eat the solar system.”

Aziraphale squeezed Crowley’s hand so tightly they’d both lose circulation if they had blood. Crowley’s heart was a jackhammer in his chest. He wanted to run away, but his legs had frozen to the lawn.

“That’d be brilliant. That’s way better than turning everyone into a stupid puppet. I want to be a fusion.”

Adam locked eyes with them.

Crowley felt his brain turn inside out, and his eyeballs begin to scream.

Adam crooked a finger. Crowley felt it hook into his brain and jerk him forward.

He and Aziraphale took halting, marionette footsteps across the grass. Their joined hands anchored Crowley to reality. His body was no longer his. It forced him to stagger forwards, a robot operated by an indifferent user.

Adam’s cherubic eleven-year-old smile was all he could see, getting bigger and bigger until it made up the whole world.

Crowley felt his gem flare. The light was all wrong.

The three of them dissolved together, and Crowley no longer existed.

~*~

He was a colossus, straddling the sky.

He was tiny and overwhelmed in an ocean of someone else’s thoughts.

He didn’t know what this was. This was hell.

He was a fusion. He knew that much. Forced together like jigsaw pieces that didn’t match, crammed together by an impatient child until they broke.

He wanted to recoil. He stopped him. One of him stopped the other two.

The one that was powerful held the two that were not so they could not escape. But they were all him, and his mind was splintering. He was cringing in a corner and he was the entire room.

He was ghastly. He was shameful. He shouldn’t exist.

A word rang inside him.

Abomination.

All three of them felt that.

He felt…

He didn’t know how to describe it. It was something big and complicated. The closest, simplest word was… sad.

The two tiny parts of him struggled towards each other and became one slightly less tiny part, swimming within a much larger one. It made little difference - they were still insignificant within the whole.

All the same.

Adam, let’s talk

Adam was not his name.

I know, but humour us

I don’t want to.

Well. Can’t argue with that, I suppose. Except arguing is at least seventy percent of all I’m good for. The rest is hair

He flicked his head from side to side. Wind roared in his ears. He must be miles off the ground.

Trying to push me out? Am I a flea in your ear?

Yes.

It’s your fault I’m in here, you know

He tried to wash the voice out with a rich wave of drowning static.

I wouldn’t aim that power at your own mind, if I were you. Which I am

Don’t tell me what to do.

Yes. Who gets to tell who what to do? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You’ve put the whole world just as you want it. No will except for yours. Nobody in opposition means you always get exactly what you want. Ideal world

At least now I’m in control, I can put things right. You’re acting like anyone around me had free will before. They didn’t. Your people - the demons - scooped out my mum and dad’s minds long before I got the chance to. And the demons didn’t have free will either. They were all following some big plan because they’d get tortured if they didn’t. No-one was doing what they actually wanted. Most of ’em didn’t even really know why they were doing it. And I didn’t know anything. I just thought my life made no sense. I’ve made it make sense now. That’s all I wanted.

You’re trying to make the world simpler, so you can understand it?

Maybe.

Has it worked?

Yeah. It’s worked brilliantly.

Do you feel better?

…

Adam

…

I’m sorry

Why?

I could have helped you understand why your life made no sense, and I didn’t even try. I was thinking about myself. I do that a lot

It doesn’t matter.

It does. I came back for the humans. I wanted to save them. You’re human, too. I want to save you

I’m not human. I’m a monster with a scary rock in my head.

So’s Crowley, and he’s all right

That’s not -

Can I tell you about Crowley?

…

Hang on a mo

There was a bwip inside his mind, and the small annoying part separated into two even smaller parts.

Gosh, this is strange. We appear to be communicating within the fusion. We’ve never done that before. I suspect it’s only working because this fusion is not very stable. We’d have fallen apart by now without Adam holding us together with his immense influence over the state of reality

Yes, Aziraphale, we all got there five pages ago. You were going to say nice things about me, get on with it

So I was. No need to take that tone, my dear. Adam

Yes.

Oh good, you’re still there. Now. The thing about Crowley is that before I met him, I was terribly lonely and I didn’t even know. There were many years before She even made the Earth, when I felt like a cog in a machine that no-one actually wanted to be there. I convinced myself I must be happy as long as I was fulfilling my duty to the Great Plan. But really, I had nothing in common with the rest of my side. I always stood out. And standing out can make a person very detached. If nobody understands you, why should you understand them? It was a revelation, becoming friends with a demon. Someone I should have had nothing in common with. It made me better. The thing that Crowley has given me is… patience, and tolerance, and time. I just want others to have what I have now. That’s a gift. Love is a gift

I don’t love anyone.

I know. That’s a tragedy. Everyone has let you down terribly, to provide you with nothing in your life worth loving

I dunno. Maybe I just can’t do it.

I don’t think that’s it at all. Really, I don’t. I know that was Hell’s plan, to surround you with Satanic influences. But please understand, I’ve seen first-hand that the very best among us can come from Hell

Angel

Yes, Crowley?

That’s. That’s. Thank you

Any time

Uh. OK. I think it’s my turn now. Adam? First of all, I’m more responsible for the raised-by-demons thing, so sorry about that. And second… I was shoved off a cloud and took a million mile freefall dive into boiling sulphur. So I know something about cock-ups. Sometimes you mess something up so badly there’s no way back. You can’t ever be what you were before. You’re changed. And you’ll never be forgiven. It’s hard, but the only way through it is to carry on. Your life will be different, but it can be good. In some ways, it’ll be better. But you have to make it a life, not burn everything down because the world burned you first

The fusion felt something. It rose from the pit of his stomach. He recoiled from it, even as the smaller parts leaned into it.

That’s good. Stay with that feeling

No, I don’t want it.

It’s good. It means you’re human

Leave me alone. I want to go home -

He stopped. This wasn’t an alien planet. There was no home to return to. Everything had followed him here.

Adam, you’re not broken. Stay with this

He tried to kick them out. The voices in his head. He controlled reality, he could destabilise this fusion, easy -

It wasn’t working. The voices were tiny, but they held the three of them together, whispering encouragement all the while.

You think either of us is good at this? It only comes with practice. If you’re unforgivable, then forgive yourself

How? How can I be good? Or normal? I’m Satan’s son, he’s in my head, he’s in my head right now -

No. He’s gone. He’s not in here. It’s just you. You don’t have to be him. You can choose what you are

He felt tears dripping down his face. He looked down - a long way down - and saw them splash on the ground in puddles like lakes.

I can make myself human.

Yes

OK.

He reached in and accessed a power.

~*~

Their world blurred.

The past eleven years spooled backwards on three separate tape-reels.

If freezing time was stopping a bullet in mid-flight, this was catching the bullet and being yanked back into the muzzle of the gun.

Crowley’s gnawing despair as Armageddon approached lessened as the boy he was overseeing shrunk from a child to a toddler to a baby in his arms.

Aziraphale, watching the angels prepare their battle armour and muskets, experienced his heart receding from his gullet and back to its proper position. The paperwork on his desk grew back to mountainous.

Adam, tiny on the grass, undestroyed the world. The white wave he unleashed on the planet receded back into his body. Humans regained their minds and resumed shopping and sipping coffee and figuring out how to spend their Saturday. And then the rest of it, his entire life all whipping like a roll of film in the wind, rewinding. He got smaller and smaller, until he could fit in a basket, and the basket passed from Harriet back to the nuns, back to Crowley’s back seat, back to a graveyard, back to Hell -

Adam grabbed at the fabric of reality with a tiny fist and tore.

His gem winked out of existence.

Time made a noise like a record-scratch.

Then it rocketed forward again.

He was back in the basket, on to the hospital, to Sister Mary, to the wrong delivery room, to a man in a very silly cardigan, to -

“You know, Deirdre, I think he looks like an Adam…”

---

(Link to next part)

[koorinohebi]

OC ABCs: Y1 through Y5, please!

1. How old were you when you created them?

Let's see. Oh wow, to be honest I had to do a bit of math here since I've had Kiomi for so long. SOOOOOO long. And guess what. Even I'm surprised to remember that I created her back when I was 13 years old. It's been what, 17 years since then. Man, time sure flies. 

2. What inspired you to create them?

Often times my inspiration to create characters (either making an OC or taking up a canon) is due to friend influence. Kiomi was probably the only one that doesn't share that. Because I was relatively new to the Naruto fandom back when I first made her and I just wanted some interaction from people who played in the verse. (I didnt even know what canon was back in the day. Like, I had no idea that they were called that.) So I made a character with attributes that I liked, elements that I like, etc. while learning all about jutsus and stuff, and how the verse operated. I'm a bit rusty now specially since I've been on a very long Hiatus, but yeah. My inspiration for her came from the desire for interaction and story weaving. That's when I met my first friend in the verse, which just so happened to be an Orochimaru. They were very apprehensive and iffy about OCs but apparently, we were able to hit it off well enough that they were comfortable about interacting with my muse. So apart from just story building, my friend's Orochimaru was part of the inspiration, specially for the environment that she grew up in.  

3. Were they different when they were first created?

Well, for starters she's less of a brat now than she was back then. She was so problematic when I first made her. She was so ridiculously rebellious to the point where she throws things at her lord when she becomes pissy and throws tantrums. (One thing hasn't changed though. If Kabuto tells her to behave, she behaves. xD) She's better at handling that now. 

Her personality is fleshed out better too. Years of interaction with Muns and Muses alike have allowed me to explore her persona and characteristics. That enabled me to add the layers that were necessary to make her feel more organic. 

Let me just say that I love Naruto movies and plotting with friends. Back when all I had was the fact that she's from Yukigakure and that her family was part of a genocide, I was wondering how to tie stuff into the verse more properly. Because of the history of the Kazahana's in the Land of Snow, the technical advancement the place had, I've been able to incorporate that knowledge into creating information for her clan. 

Those are just some of the changes that's happened for my muse over the years, but I think my favorite part of the changes is the fact that she has some bonds now that are relatively real. Something that she believes is worth fighting form. Loss is a very big part of her character evolution. The more loss she experience, the more her personality shifts. She's always tethering along the threshold of wanting and protecting bonds, and not wanting to have anything to do with it. 

I love the fact that she doesn't feel the desperation for a bond until it's there. Back then, she really wouldnt have given a crap. But now, when she experiences something genuine, she develops an eagerness to protect it. However, when it comes to bonds, the one thing that hasn't really changed is the fact that she'll try to avoid it as much as possible, until she realizes that she can't. 

Kiomi's also actually pretty defiant. But I found that mellowing over the years too. When she realized how that gets her into too much trouble, she eventually toned it down. However, it's been replaced by her chronic lying-- which isn't too good a thing either. But the chronic lying is basically her defense mechanism now, because from the start she is bad at dealing with people. Being honest lands her in disadvantageous situations, so she resorted to lies. (She just doesn't know it yet, but that'll get her in bigger trouble. Dont tell her, okay? ^_~ ) Also, being a liar helps her interact better with strangers for intel gathering. When she's faced with strangers, you can bet your horses that the first thing she lies about is her affiliation with Otogakure, because she's learned that not a lot of people trusts shinobi from the Hidden Sound Village. So it's not too strange to see her pretending to be a civilian. It's also the reason why she's often without her hitai ate. 

But you know what, Kiomi is inherently a good kid at the core. It’s just that she ended up growing up in an environment that didn’t allow for too much of that. This is why if you’ll notice in some of my threads, she’s actually quite nice to people in similar situations such as her.

 4. do you enjoy writing them more than other characters?

I do, actually. Among all of my OCs, I have an attachment to Kiomi. It's probably because I've had her for so long that I can't get enough of her and her growth. 

This has reached the point where, if ever I go RPing on another verse or when I return from a long Hiatus (like I have done as of recent) I always end up penning for Kiomi. It's not that I like my other muses any less, it's just my one brain cell has a tendency to pick what it likes and it does like this particular muse. 

I'm surprised how well she can adapt to other verses as well, which makes it easier for me to integrate her in certain verses whenever I get a burnout for Naruto. For example, I've played her in Devil May Cry before wherein the two verses kind of semi-merged. It was fun. From shinobi, she casually just got a job in Devil May Cry for devil hunting, I got to make her her own Devil Arm, etc. I've played her in a Fate Stay Night setting where she's the master of the world's oldest bully and even if they dont get along very well, they're able to function as a master-servant team when the need arises. Otherwise she's Gil's personal mongrel. I think one of my favorite crossovers had to be in Magic The Gathering where she's an apprentice to Sorin Markov. 

So yes, I do love writing for her, so much. 

5. what’s your favorite thing about them?

My favorite thing about Kiomi is her personality. Specially now that I can play on the complication of her emotions. 

The best thing that ever happened to her was the fact that she made bonds that she didn't want to lose while knowing for a fact that her the friends that she made belonged to the enemy side. That gave her a lot of things to think about. Decisions of whether she throws away years of loyalty for something new is something I enjoy playing out. Although eventually I know where she returns and whom she returns to, depending on how much she grows attached to the other muse and how willing both parties are to make it canon, that's the only time that it may change.

The good thing about the Next Gen setting is that Otogakure has better relations with Konoha...at least compared to when the entire Naruto series began. This allows Kiomi to have a little freedom in terms of socializing with the little friends that she actually made. 

Love's an aspect that I want to explore, but yeaaah. That's hard for her because she dislikes the notion very much. Although I'm sure that if the right person comes along, the possibility of her opening up and feeling for the other person still exists. As much as there's an RP outside tumblr where she does love someone. I do have her as a mutli-ship so basically all bonds are different per verse. 

One of my other favorite thing is that she works well with people she hates. It's really funny because I find that-- for starters, Kiomi dislikes Sasuke with a passion. This is pretty much a classic case of Genius vs Hard Work. Sasuke's pretty much a stark reminder of everything that she wants. He's chosen by Orochimaru, he's strong and talented, he's a cut above the rest, for sure. All her hard work gets blown out of the water along with her desire to be the vessel because a favorite exists. But above all, she's actually pretty jealous that he still has a family in the form of his brother. But yes, she hates him so much, but apparently whenever I roleplay with Sasuke's they seem to have certain areas for synergy. Mainly because Kiomi will prevent him from getting killed (that's her job). So she'll help him out, tend to his wounds, spar with him, etc. So there's a certain dynamic there which I enjoy. That's why, to be fairly honest, Sasuke interactions is probably one of my favorites because the rawness of Kiomi's feelings come out. And I really love the fact that I can make this hate canon so easily because she doesn’t need an initial validation from him. She can just hate him on her own until such a time when they meet. It’s great because the more he ignores her, the more she gets pissed off, the more she works harder. Even up to Next Gen, Sasuke’s still her goal, albeit with decreased animosity. *Cough*Frenemies Please*Cough*

( Here’s an ugly doodle from ten years ago.)

It's a freaking meme for me, but I love how she gets into a fight with every Katon user she meets. She didn't get Katon'd, sure, but her worst run in was probably with an Itachi who Tsukuyomi'd her. That was really fun to play out but stressful. They became associates after. xD 

Also, her awful way of phrasing some things. Sometimes, when she has a hard time of expressing herself, she ends up blurting things that's easy to misinterpret. It's pretty funny, all the trouble it causes. 

[queenarticlearchive]

Limp-wrist Section:

(Please read with a camp accent, stressing every second word)

New Musical Express

27 September 1975

Julie Webb

Forget those ‘Queen split’ stories - everything is just lovely. Elton is lovely as well. Freddie Mercury tells it like it is. By Julie Webb

It’s easy to understand how “Queen to split” rumours get under way. The band’s expected large summer gig never happened and the non-appearance of either an album or a single kept the silence at deafening point.

From America we heard that Brian May was offered a job with Sparks and in England there were stories to the effect that the band’s management situation was none too amicable. And throughout all this time the band remained stumm, giving no interviews and neither confirming or denying anything. Even a promised visit to see the band at Rockfield Studios was “put off” at the last moment. Is all well in Mercury’s trousers?

Still, all is now resolved. Queen now have a new manager, and their biggest headache in How The Hell Are They Going To Finish The New Album in time for November release. They are also planning a major British tour for late November and a single for October, so it’s time to zip up and get going.

It was three dishevelled members of Queen who were finally brought to bay at the studios in London. John Deacon was absent since they were adding vocals and I was informed he doesn’t participate overly on that side of things. Two members of Hustler - a quite different group - were sitting in the control room aghast at the meticulous way the band record.

If they sand “no no no” once, they sang it twenty times in the space of about ten minutes. And on each occasion someone would find fault. It must get exceedingly tedious.

The track in question is a Mercury composition “Bohemian Rhapsody” very much an operatic opus, taxing the vocal cords to the hilt. On playback it sounds truly magnificent, undeniably Queen yet with greater depth than on any previous efforts.

Mercury is bouncing about saying “Hello dear” to new arrivals. Brian May still looks fragile and Roger Taylor sits down rather wearily. They are scheduled to carry on recording till two a.m.

Mercury seems like he’s itching to talk and, yes, there’s plenty to ask. Like what happened with the old management, Freddie?

He takes a deep breath.

“As far as Queen are concerned they are deceased. They cease to exist in any capacity with us whatsoever. One leaves them behind like one leaves excretia. We feel so relieved.”

It appears to be an almost rehearsed answer. I plod on. How did the change of management come about - why change?

“We felt there came a time when we had got far too big for them to handle. We needed bigger handling. We needed a change. But I don’t want to delve into trivia…”

And on so to John Reid, new manager, also manager of Elton John.

“Actually we were approached by - and we ourselves approached - a series of top class managers to make sure we made the right choice. John Reid happened to be the choice because he flashed his eyes at me and I said ‘Why not’,” Mercury laughs.

“He’s great, actually, I thought he could do with another piano player so we could play duets all night. I said ‘What’s better than one piano player? - two piano players. In a way it’s just what we wanted and the combination is going to be startling. It’s the sort of combination we’ve wanted for years. The whole situation of record deals and his whole method of work, his whole approach is so right.

“He came in to negotiate the whole structure of recording, publishing and management.”

Mercury was present at the recent much-publicised John Reid birthday party last week (“we’re both Virgos you know”). This he pronounced “lovely”.

“I met his ‘other client’. He said ‘You must meet my other client, my other client wants to meet you.’ Elton John was wonderful - one of those people you can instantly get on with. He said he liked ‘Killer Queen’ and anyone who says that goes in my white book - my black book is bursting at the seams.”

The subject switched to the new album. Apart from the aforementioned “Bohemian Rhapsody” what other tracks are there?

“Well the album is called ‘A Night At The Opera’. We’ve finished all the backing tracks and it’s beginning to sound better than we expected.

“With ‘Rhapsody’ we’ve squeezed to our limitations for four octaves and not slowed down the tape! John Deacon had written a lovely little ditty called ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and Roger has written ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ including lines like ‘I’ve got a feel for my automobile’.

“Brian has an outrageous mammoth epic track ‘The Prophet’s Song’ which is one of our heaviest numbers to date. He’s got his guitar extravaganza on it. You see, Brian has acquired a new guitar specially built so he can almost make it speak. It will talk on this track.

“Then there’s ‘Good Company’ written by Brian, a George Formby track with saxophones, trombone and clarinet sounds from his guitar. We don’t believe in having any session men, we do everything ourselves, from the high falsetto to the low bassy farts it is all us.

“Another track is ‘’39’ a little spacey number by Brian, a skiffle style of number which we’ve never tried before and the albume ends with something totally unexpected, a little virtuoso track by Brian. There’s also ‘Sweet Lady’ a heavyish ditty in stupendous ¾.”

Apart from ‘Rhapsody’, Mercury himself has penned four tracks, “one is called ‘Death On Two Legs’ I’m not going to say anymore - just listen to the words carefully kiddies. A nasty little number which brings out my evil streak. The words came very easy to me.

“There’s also a lovely little ballad, my classical influence comes into it, Brian is going to attempt to use harp, real life-size harp. I’m going to force him to play till his fingers drop off. It’s called ‘Love Of My Life’.

“‘Seaside Rendezvous’ has a 1920’s feel to it and Roger does a tuba and clarinet on it vocally, if you see what I mean. I’m going to make him tap dance too, I’ll have to buy him some Ginger Rogers tap shoes.

“‘Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon’ (not the Kinks’ or the Small Faces’) is a short track, just one minute six seconds. A very perky spicey number dear. Brian likes that one.”

Summing up, Mercury says “There were a lot of things we wanted to do on ‘Queen II’ and ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ but there wasn’t space enough. This time there is. Guitarwise and on vocals we’ve done things we’ve never done before.”

In order to finish the album on time Mercury says they will “work till we are legless. I’ll sing until my throat is like a vulture’s crotch. We haven’t even reached the halfway stage yet but from the things I can hear we have surpassed anything we’ve done before musically.”

All right. Now to the other stuff.

Is it true about Brian being offered a gig with Sparks? Was there any serious thought of splitting up the band? Own up…

Mercury is contemptuous of the whole thing.

“About nine months ago Brian was approached by Sparks who said they would like him to join them as guitarist. But we all treat that sort of thing as everyday and mundane. We’re so involved in what we do - anyway we’ve all had offers to join other bands. We don’t give it a second thought.

“But while, say, Roger and I would tell them to piss off Brian takes his time about being nice to people so sometimes they get the wrong idea. Brian is really too much of a gentleman which I am not - I am an old tart - but not for one moment did he consider leaving us.

“But that was nine months ago, so long ago that that rumour went out with the Boer War. Still it’s very flattering to get offers.”

The November British tour, however should dispel any split rumours forever. Preparations are already being made for that.

“I’m thinking of being carried on stage by Nubian slaves and being fanned by them - in fact I’m auditioning for them now. I shall personally select the winners. But where to find a slave?

“I’m also looking for a masseur. The other one is no longer with us.

What happened to him? “His fingers dropped off.”

Trouble with Freddie, he’s always concerned with his health. Still there are reasons.

On the last American tour a couple of gigs were cancelled due to throat problems.

“My nodules are still with me. I have these uncouth callouses growing in my interior (throat). From time to time they harm my vocal dexterity. At the moment however” (he allows himself a smile) “I am winning/”

How can he ensure the problem won’t recur?

“I’m going to go easy on the red wine dear. And the tour will be planned around my nodules. Actually I came very near to having an operation but I didn’t like the look of the doctor and I was a bit perturbed about having strange instruments forced down my throat.”

After the British tour the band go once again to America and thence on to Japan. Japan hold fond memories for Mercury.

With a faraway look in his eye he say “I will be able to be reunited with my bodyguard. I must stress we all had one each - our own personal bodyguards that is. Mine was called Hitami and was the head of the Tokyo bodyguard patrol. His entire job was to pamper and cossett me throughout the tour and make sure no harm was to come to my person. He was very sweet, he gave me this lovely Japanese lantern which I treasure.”

Is there any likelihood Queen may do some American gigs with Elton John?

“Well funny you should say that. We had an offer to do two gigs in L.A. but we were far too busy so we couldn’t do them. But although we’re all the same family Reidy won’t put us out as a package. He knows the difference in the audiences we appeal to. He wants us to be a force of our own in America to maintain what we have, and to do everything bigger and better.”

Mercury is not quite sure if Seattle is on their American itinerary. He remembers a young lady from that part of the world quite vividly.

“A young American tart” he starts getting very angry at the memory of it all, “came in and pilfered my contents … my jewels, bracelets etc and she was just evacuating the room when I accosted her by the elevator.

“I pulled her by the hair, dragged her into the room, emptied the contents of her bag in the room and everything but the kitchen sink came out. I retrieved my things, and said ‘get out, you Seattle shagbag.’

Why hadn’t there been any recorded material from Queen for so long? (Yeah, I know that was an abrupt change of subject).

“Actually that was the way we planned it dear, but we should have a single taken from this album out in October. The album comes out in November when we start our world tour. We’re planning on a much broader scale than before dear.”