#currently mourning that the beautiful tv I play on colors everything SO dark because getting good bright screencaps that are color accurate

[astralprisms]

Xa'rok's guardian is an unfamiliar but ultimately friendly face amidst a sea of unfamiliar people - a tether to an old piece of themself they lost when they were exiled from their home creche - and one who seems to understand the allure and potential in illithid culture. They trust the guardian implicitly, at first because he's friendly and open-minded, quick to reassure and encourage, and later because his actions continue to prove his words true.

He looks like a githyanki, but the face the Guardian wears in this guise is actually a Githzerai, one [redacted] met briefly during his imprisonment at Moonrise Towers many, many years ago, before that body was destroyed and its mind caged, to be found, coincidentally, by a curious adventurer, who was given a boon for its release. By then the mind had forgotten the outline of its mortal shell, sustaining itself on the fortified psionic resolve inherent to all githzerai. But perhaps within the prism a spectator stirred, when Xa'rok took that mind up in conversation. It was a smart guise to take, as it gave the Emperor reason to caution his foolhardy savior to avoid the creche, not that they listened. After all, githzerai were the only beings the githyanki hated beyond even their former illithid masters.

Ironic that Xa'rok would fall for them both. But then, Xa'rok was never exactly a typical gith.

OG Guardian look back when Xa'rok was a short-lived Durge, though I didn't write down his skintone/specific hair sliders combo and fucked up attempting to color pick in screencaps when remaking him, much to my continued ire. Much more golden and saturated, I love the way the scar stands out starkly against this skin tone.

Tav Question

What does your guardian look like? (Submitted by @spacebarbarianweird)

[sojourners-truth-blog]

Old Enough to Teach, Young Enough to Learn..

My body clock is all the way thrown off because right now in Bangkok it’s 1:22am on Friday morning, while in Houston, it’s 12:22pm on Thursday. Even without an alarm clock my body naturally gets up around 5:00am-5:30am (this is all thanks to TFA institute!) but it has never had to adjust to THIS big of a time change.. Because my sleeping and eating patterns are out of whack, I’d figure I’d be somewhat productive and blog in the meantime..

So, prior to actually arriving here in Bangkok, me and the other fifteen teachers spent three days in Boston, Mass. for pre-departure orientation. The purpose of this was to become somewhat acclimated with the language, culture, ideas, food and hot button political issues prior to actually being in Thailand, which I appreciated a lot. We also had a chance to meet the other participants and become somewhat familiar with each other before leaving. 

As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I was concerned that I would be the only black participant, and my suspicious were certainly confirmed. Don’t get me wrong, this is not my first time (and definitely won’t be the last) being the only African-American represented at a conference, meeting, invitational, etc. I just think with the current state of race relations GLOBALLY, blacks definitely have to be a bit more cautious and aware of the world around them. Even in 2017, there are many places globally where it is not advisable for blacks to travel, something that my white and Asian counterparts will likely NEVER have to consider or experience. Being in a country where over 95% of the people are Thai, and blacks being virtually invisible, it’s easy to feel “othered”.. 

Even in the airport, I’m sure NO one else in my seminar group noticed that I had some folks doing double takes.. I don’t know if it was because of my skin color, the fact that my hair is short (I big chopped, AGAIN!) or because they thought I was a baddie! Ha.. Either way, I already peeped the stares..

Moving on, before pre-departure orientation, (in true Type A personality form), I had already googled and researched some things about the country, but there was SOOOO much that I didn’t know.  I knew that it would be HOT, but I’m coming from Houston, where it was 101 degrees when I left, so I felt like I was prepared. I also knew that similar to other Southeast Asian countries, skin bleaching is a REAL thing. Lastly, I had read that Thailand was considered “The Land of Smiles”, because of the people’s hospitality, so that was something I was looking forward to..

NOW, onto the things I didn’t know, and learned during PDO (pre-departure orientation):

King Rama IX:

Thailand is currently in mourning as their revered King Rama IX passed away in October of 2016. He was the longest reigning monarch, serving over 70 years in his position. Many Thai people saw him as a father figure, while others thought of him as a deity of some sort. Either way, EVERY household in Thailand has a picture, or shrine of King Rama IX. Also, we were warned about specific laws that prevent ANYONE from speaking ill against the king or the royal family, and is punishable by law. This means that not even in casual conversation, on social media, whatever should the royal family be spoken against.

King Rama IX’s oldest son will be his successor, and there are concerns from Thai people that he will not be as a great as a monarch as his father. His father was a monarch, a political leader, a community activist, a father, and so much more. Even when our program directors spoke about him, they would become very emotional speaking about his death and the impact he’s had on their lives.

As a result of his death, the whole country is in mourning and wears only dark colors to show their reverence and respect. This will continue for the course of the year until cremation in October 2017, a full year after his death. As a tourist, we aren’t necessarily expected to wear all black, but was suggested to wear darker colors and very modest clothing (dresses/skirts to the knees, no shoulders out, no open toed shoes certain places) to show respect

Comparison Statistics

70 million people reside in Thailand but it’s not very ethnically diverse (74% being native, 14% Chinese born Thai, and 12% other being Malay, Khmer or Hill tribes) VS. In the United States where there’s 320 million people and 72% are white (16% identify as Hispanic/Latino), 13% African-American, 5% Asian and 9% mixed race. 

In regards to capitals of influence, Bangkok is pretty much the capital for everything, VS. In the United States where DC is the political capital, New York is the business/finance capital, LA/Hollywood is the entertainment capital, Silicon Valley as the technology capital, Boston/Cambridge as the education capital, etc.

In politics, Thailand has been under a constitutional monarchy since 1932, but is also currently under a military coup since 2014, which arrested power from the civilian government and is responsible for ensuring harmony, unity and peace among civilians. While in the U.S…. I don’t even feel like discussing American politics right now, moving on!

Over 95% of Thais are Buddhist while in the U.S. 70% identify as Christian (including Roman Catholics, Protestant, Methodist, etc.) while only 1% identify as Buddhist.

 Greetings and Popular Sayings

Ben yung ai? Or Sabai dii? – How are you?

Farang – Westerner, white person, European (debatable whether this is a term of endearment)

Khop khun kha – Thank you (Just realized I was telling all the hotel staff Hello, instead of thank you! lol)

Mai pen rai – no worries, you’re welcome, don’t worry about it

Sawatdee– Hello, good day, good morning, good afternoon, goodbye, etc.

Aroy – delicious, yummy

Sanuk mai? – having fun? Enjoying yourself?

 Race Relations

There is propaganda all over Asian media, TV, commercials, billboards, etc promoting skin bleaching. We were actually warned before we came to NOT purchased sunscreen here in Thailand because many of them have bleach as an ingredient. I’m not trying to be out here looking like Sammy Sosa, so I heeded their advice. When talking about this with my seminar group, I posed the question “well, if the standard of beauty in Asia is very pale, white skin with European features, what is the perception of blacks or heavily melanated people?” The crickets! Haha! Nah, someone went on to explain that in Thailand it has nothing to do with racism, but is more a class issue. Meaning that people in rice fields have darker skin because they’re out in the sun working hard, while people who are very pale and have white skin are likely of a higher class, and have careers and job in office buildings. More on this later..

Food

Despite popular beliefs, Pad Thai is not the most popular food in Thailand but Papaya Salad is

We were all advised not to drink the tap water (which my Dad refers to as “city punch”,, Ha!). They said that the water here would mess up our American stomachs.. Also, because of septic issues, we were asked not flush anything but waste down the toilets, including tissue, meaning we have to wipe and put the tissue in a trash bin (this totally should not be under the category of food, but it’s about water, soooo, we flowing)

 European/American Influences

Thailand was one of only a handful of countries who were never colonized by European powers (other countries include Ethiopia, Liberia, China, Japan, Korea, Nepal, Iran, Bhutan and Afghanistan), HOWEVER, the influences are very evident in each country

American missionaries played a huge part in the social development of Thailand including their introduction to public schools and scholarships, public health and modern medicine (including vaccines surgeries, x-ray machines, etc) and the instruction to the printing press

This was only THREE days of learning, and I feel like I gathered SOOOO much information in those short days. I can only imagine what the next 30 days have in store for me..

[theliterateape]

Tomorrow Will Be Late

By Dana Jerman

EVERYONE REMEMBERS THE PARADES. In a way, that was all there was. So do I, of course, but I was fond of that time for lots of other reasons.

For instance it was August, and summer was unravelling at the seams, and the timing of it all seemed to be uncannily perfect. I was about to start grade nine and girls were bursting in front of me like exotic flowers attached to firecrackers, and I was feeling initiated and empowered into a coming of age.

And anyway, when do you see a parade at night? Parades the whole weekend. The Celestial Event happened on a weekend, but for some reason everyone agreed to reset the calendar so we didn't count the days. I guess because they weren't days. Either way it all fell together.

"Tomorrow Will Be Late," the posters all over town read. Here's what happened: Our sun wasn't going to rise- anywhere. The whole world would be dark for two days straight. Then everything would be fine again.

It was fun to live in a time when astronomical scientists were like rock stars and rock stars were like, well, like Scarlet Monk. My favorite. More about her in a second...

With a lost weekend of a heretofore unprecedented caliber, what was left to do but celebrate? Some people just slept through it all. Like my friend Mack. The whole thing freaked him out a little I could tell, and when he finally came out of his house the following morning he just talked like nothing had happened. And for him, nothing really had. But it changed others. And not entirely in a good way. I probably lost friends over it, but I don't remember them.

So, the parades. So cool. I'm pretty sure I kept one of those oversized lightpole posters depicting a cornucopia of exotic end-of-days fun. These were also happening the world over, and some of the magic of all of that curfew-less reverie in the streets shaped my idea of what music could be, and what art was capable of.

Later, some would call that time “The Breakout of The Potentials” citing the generational euphemism for those currently in their twenties, and the role that the worldwide young investors group, The Potentials, played in the staging of the parades.

Imagine hologram floats stretching the length of a city block, and highly choreographed dancers warping shape in utterly mesmerizing ionized liquid aluminum suits, and at the center of it all—as Lady Godiva on Trojan Horseback—Scarlet Monk 

The most incredible female pop star to date. A singer, a philanthropist, a dancer, an entrepreneur, and a rumored member of The Potentials, she was embraced and lauded the world over. I didn't call myself crazy about her until I saw those parades. Then it was all over. And for a good long while it was the celebrity crush that captured the market-fresh meat of my teenage heart. The kind of crush where, when I practiced kissing on the palm of my hand I thought of her. And I let the fantasy go to that place where I dream of what it would be like to marry her, and have a house and be a dad. It was never practical, but always perfect.

They had been best friends for nearly their whole lives, and workers for all that time, and now it was time to take a break and think, and drink. Mostly drink.

 Right, well, like I said, the Celestial Event brought out some crazy in folks. My aunt Rebecca, who lived out of town at the time, talks about taking note of the ridiculous amount of suicides by people whose skewed belief systems led them to think that, in this prolonged dark, they were in fact weathering the long descent into hell, and simply preferred to not.

But her younger sister, my dear mother Rachel, who to be fair had a job at the time that really sucked, decided, along with her best pal Madeline, to here forthwith quit her job and hole up in the den in the center of our house and write poems and drink vodka tonics or anything-tonics and watch the parades on TV.

Hanging out with them for an hour or so in those evenings before I took off on my bike made me feel a little embarrassed and kinda nervous, but also oddly grateful. They had been best friends for nearly their whole lives, and workers for all that time, and now it was time to take a break and think, and drink. Mostly drink.

Drink they did. Their loosened laughs pulled smiles down out of the loaded moon. They sat in that room with the end table lamps burning and the great comforter TV awash in endless magnified color projecting coverage. Not caring that the dark had caused a bit of an insect outbreak, and therefore an elevated spider population, and that their relatively inert bodies became blood banquet in response to such activity. Later they stood around in their undies laughing at one another in the bathroom mirror while they spot-checked with calamine lotion.

I didn't get bitten up so badly, but somehow I felt vaguely jealous.

"Jeremy, your mother has reached a moment of reckoning, and in such moments, one must make art and take joy. At least that's what somebody told me once. Something probably in there about courage too." My mother says to me. Referring to herself in the third person and patting me on the shoulder while she popped popcorn. The lady was making sense, but at the same time, she wasn't. Not to me. I'd never heard her talk like this before. But then again she'd never enjoyed this much time at home. 

That's something you'll have to keep in mind about the Celestial Event. In light of something we will never again see in the lifetime of our planet in its meagre solar system, everything became a pretty even split between fear and exhilaration. It was like knowing you could actually hold your breath for forty-eight hours. But then you had to do it to survive, like everybody else.

It was that very same something about Scarlet Monk that made me feel connected and beyond myself at the same time. I stared into her eyes in this one photo from her album liner notes, and they put me in awe of the world. And with her voice speaking to me in music, it was like she was a kind of protective muse, here to remind me that the adventure of the near future of my life was about to exist in all its bounty. And in so being, take me on a journey of incredible scope and feeling.

I was, in short, much like my mother: bulwarked and optimistic.

And it was a good thing, too. Because then I was ready for school. And I was ready for Diana.

Mack's story was basically the outline of a business plan.

Mack of course saw her and liked her first. He always kind of liked her—more than like—to hear him tell it, which became a little problematic when we took after one another. Constantly on long bike rides to find a place to kiss.

But that resolved once Melissa latched onto him and he finally had somebody to go with who was not a shit player at video games.

School wasn't that hard. In fact I kinda liked it more than ever. Our fantastic new literature instructor used black eyeliner like my Aunt Rebecca, which is to say intensely. And she was fascinated by what we each did over the course of the Celestial Event, so she had us working on our own personal science fiction epics all the time.

We did more writing than reading, which met with some protest, but not from me. In my story we had learned to harness gravity in such a way as to manage a reel on our orbit with that of our closest planetary neighbor. When we were together enough to terraform the now adjacent rock, we had thereby birthed a true sister planet.

On top of all that, everyone on the initial planet lived in one absolute and enormous city-structure. It was mostly after a dream I had that felt hyper-real. I started to call it “VURreal” since I wasn't sure yet if I wanted to incorporate a virtual reality aspect. But I had an idea that was where it was headed.

I almost had a sister once. So it felt good to build one on paper, even in planetary form.

Plus I wanted to have Diana in it somehow. Or just give the story to her, like as a birthday present or something once I was finished. But the beginning was always my favorite part:

“I chased her to the runway. Miles from the Arcology. It was night, and when I finally slowed and turned back, the complex was incredible. Scintillating and massive in its argent blue. Radio tower spindles beat a blinking path astride the impression of a paved curve.

“She kept running. Wind whipped at our hair and the frenzy in the silhouette was beautiful. I had never been out this far before. Hard to believe home was tucked into one of those cobalt corners of stylized steel that loomed like a frozen storm at the horizon. And so too when I turned again was there another storm right in front of me. A storm of mourning for her father's recently destroyed space vessel, and with it, his life. His six-year term on the one man mission to repair and update the remaining energy-comm sats was almost complete. And then he became an element of fire and spectrum, and everything was different for both of us.”

Mack's story was basically the outline of a business plan. In it, he gets to join The Potentials and makes his fortune building and tuning rocket-powered space pageants or something. A whole moon as an amusement ride.

I could have laughed when I read it, but he'd just make a face. Besides I was one to talk. My far-flung conjecture was, with current technology, more impossible than impractical. But that was sort of the point, I thought.

In any case, we really gave a shit, so we all got A's.

Diana wrote something brilliant and Garden-of-Eden-esque that I only remember the opening line for. Mostly because she memorized it, too, and stole it from herself to use again in a later poem: I see the moons before the sun— little bitten cookies with neat star-crumbles at one sunken edge. It will be the a picture I take to rescue myself here on the first day of spring.

Mom loved it. She adored Diana and asked for that poem constantly. Mom was like a child who enjoys repetition but still longs for the new-and-improved. I’m pretty sure that’s a contradiction we all share.

A little later on I got excited for the new Scarlet Monk record, but what really gave me a hard-on around then was my first love letter from Diana, which came while she was away on break visiting her dad, and man it was racy. She almost went overboard, talking about how thinking of me masturbating turns her on. About how hot it was that time in the North Woods when she showed me how to go down on her and I made her come twice. 

All it took was this set of five sheets of lavender paper to make me miss her so bad I caught headaches that went down into my scrotum.

She was quiet too, in her own way, and never went on like this. Even her handwriting was different from that of our collected passed notes. I'd swear sometimes I was standing stalk-still in the dust for how fast girls could change.

Mack caught a first whiff of this when Melissa snubbed him because she thought he had something for her sister. Chances are he did, but who knows if it wasn’t just Melissa's insecurity talking.

Then one day I come home and Mom says "We're moving, start packing." and soon enough we moved and that was that. She had grown tired of not working, but found another job instantly once she looked, and it wasn't too far away from where we'd been, and it was nicer.

Diana even visited me there once or twice. I thought about asking her to marry me, but every time I really looked into her eyes for any length of time I saw something drift. 

Have you ever tried to stop a wave from rolling back? Exactly. 

✶

IT WAS A SHORT WHILE PAST THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE CELESTIAL EVENT, and the day before my birthday when she told me she probably wouldn't call me again.

But before that there were minor celebrations and lots of remixed footage and replayed broadcasts of Tomorrow Will Be Late Festivities. And Mom tried to get me to read my sci-fi story aloud, and joked that she should quit her job again. And Madeline even stayed the weekend and laughed her eight-pitch-loony-bin-laugh while her new urban lumberjack boyfriend, who was younger than he looked and smoked cigars wrapped in red paper, taught me about five different card games, which I taught later to Mack, of course, but he only really ever liked and got good at one of them. Naturally it’s the one where you have to knock the cards out of your opponent's hand.

School was still out for just a nano-second longer when I stayed up almost the whole night one time. I stood naked in front of the mirror listening to Scarlet Monk and staring myself down. I didn't move, and took a long look at my whole body. Everyone else was moving at light speed and here, if I was changing, it seemed way to slow to tell.

But I charged myself up a little bit. Like a battery. Trying to not to think of anything in particular, and trying too to not reach out for the muse, but to let her just come and wash over me, and maybe tell me the future a little bit, and remind me that I'm really lucky, and that I'm whole—I'm a whole person who, even in the small amount of life I've lived up to now, has seen and done some remarkable things. And that there are so many incredible things left to do. This feeling of what is possible when you listen and relax—it just gets bigger.

And also, most importantly, that love is the best celestial event there is. I suppose I knew it all along, but I felt the parade of my heart march on in triumph for the time when I would have a family of my own.

And then it finally hits me that next year will be 2040, and even if I never feel this way again, there's no reason I have now to stop smiling.