#drawing these folks for the first time as part of a full illustration was certainly an experience but one that i loved

[aristidetwain]

Jenny and the Gang: An Interview With Joe Macaré & Nelson Evergreen

Today, October 24th, 2023, marks the 21st anniversary of Name’s Not Down, commonly regarded as the first completed Jenny Everywhere comic story. The work of Joe Macaré and Nelson Evergreen, it was formally released into the public domain on Jenny Everywhere Day last year alongside its sequel, Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, at my own instigation.

Having managed to track down both of these highly esteemed creators — long since departed from the Jenny Everywhere community — it was then my duty and my very great pleasure to conduct the first-ever joint Jenny-centric interview of two of the honoured few who shaped the character in her infancy.

Goggles on! Shift to Interviewspace in three… two… one…

How would you introduce yourselves to Jenny Everywhere readers?

Joe: My name is Joe Macaré (he/him), and I was raised in the Midlands (UK) and now live in the Midwest (US). I work in fundraising and communications, currently for a LGBT+ rights advocacy organization.

Nelson: I’m Neil Evans, a Welsh illustrator and comic artist occasionally going by the pseudonym Nelson Evergreen. I moved back to my hometown of Wrexham, North Wales in 2017, after twenty merry years in Brighton on the south coast of England. Illustration work this year includes a version of George Orwell’s 1984 (Oxford University Press), an anthology of weird — and often terrifying — Christmas folklore from around the globe (Cider Mill Press) and a 72 page graphic novel detailing the life of Mamie Phipps Clarke, the psychologist and activist whose research with her husband Kenneth was key to the abolition of racial segregation in US schools (Magination Press).  Between jobs I’m busy with various ongoing personal labours of love, a couple of which are, after years of agonisingly glacial/troubled development, tantalisingly close to shareable. You can find me at neil-evans.net!

How did you originally learn about Jenny, and what led to your creating full comics starring the character? If those are different questions, what did you/do you like about the character — was it the open-source nature of the project? The appeal of Jenny herself as a protagonist? Something else?

J: I was active on the Barbelith message board from 2000-200something; closer to the truth to say that around the time Jenny Everywhere was created I was deeply, deeply enmeshed on that forum and in that community. It was my first internet “home” and so it’s probably accurate to say that I was initially drawn to the character because it was a Barbelith creative project and therefore something I wanted to be a part of.  But also, when Steven “Moriarty” Wintle drew that first sketch, it definitely popped. Jenny, especially with the paragraph description attached, seemed like someone I knew, or someone I would like to know. An idealized avatar in some ways, but a plausible person in others.

N: I found Barbelith not long after I began “boxsetting” The Invisibles (very belatedly, it was close to the end of the comic’s run), and got quite addicted to the forum. It was a good place.  I’d been messing about making music in bands for a few years, neglecting the illustration/comic side of things, and wanted to get back into drawing… and Barbelith happened to have lots of folk who were very good with words. So I posted a few pieces of work and asked if anyone had any comic scripts they wanted drawn, and I’m guessing Moriarty/Steven’s Jenny thread must have appeared at around that time or very shortly after..? Joe and I had certainly already touched on the idea of working together, so when Jenny appeared I think we just took it as read that that was “the one”.  With Jenny, the initial appeal for me was the very unique nature of her potential: the dozens/hundreds/thousands of different ways the character could go, depending on who’s working with her. Also, I’m generally quite content in my own company - god knows, you have to be when you’re illustrating comics - but I loved the online hubbub around her at that time. There was something really… *cosy* about knowing others were working on their own versions of this character. So that was another huge part of the appeal, that sense of community.

Even though the multiversal gimmick is one of the first things people hear about Jenny, neither Name's Not Down nor Damn Fine Hostile Takeover make any direct reference to it. Was this a conscious choice, and if so, what motivated it?

J: For my part it was a conscious choice and it had a lot to do with the kind of comics I was reading at the time and being influenced by. At the time, complicated continuities and parallel universes seemed like slightly embarrassing excesses that characterized Marvel/DC superhero comics. They were prog rock, and were being challenged by a new wave of what Oni Press called “real mainstream” indie comics. Punchy, punky, often black & white, and very self-consciously influenced more by movies, TV, and music than by superhero comics. You could put fantastical elements in there but nothing that demanded a long explanation. Now, not only did the idea of making comics without multiverses become the mainstream, so that they were more like movies and TV, turn out to be onto a losing proposition and *the exact opposite of what happened,* for better or worse, but half the star writers and comics “thinkers” of the time later turned out to be predatory creeps. Whoops! But at the time, this was the cultural scene that shaped what I wanted to write. A comic you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading at the zine fair or dance party. Of course, goody nerd that I’ve always been, I couldn’t help but include Smallville references, so any attempt to be consciously cool was always somewhat doomed.

Were there any interesting, non-obvious inspirations or references baked into these stories, that you'd like to share? 

J: Oh god, sometimes I think those scripts were nothing *but* references and it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten some of them now. I mean I’d be very embarrassed by all the Smallville references were it not for the fact that I remember that in the UK, the show was aired in the Sunday morning block which made it perfect hangover television.  Clea was named after Clea Duvall. Bradley was named the somewhat obscure 2000 AD character. I think the most obscure influence/reference is having the character Lex, who considers himself a charmer, always introduce himself by saying “Greetings!” That’s a reference to eldest son Joey in the late 1980s BBC comedy series, Bread. That one was probably only noticed by other British people my age who grew up relating greatly to a show about a working class family with an absent father who constantly worried about money. The television I watched as a kid also led to me choosing Apollo Coffee as the name of the Starbucks stand-in, Starbuck and Apollo being a reference to the original Battlestar Galactica (the reboot had not yet come along!). “Damn Fine Hostile Takeover” is obviously extremely far from a serious piece of political polemic, but I do remember consciously wanting to introduce at least a small flavor of agitprop, compared to “Name’s Not Down” which is mostly just a power fantasy about beating up needlessly aggressive doormen to get into a club. The early political “analysis” I had at the time, which didn’t go much beyond big corporate chains being bad and small local independent coffee shops being good, was obviously influenced by stuff like Naomi Klein’s No Logo. And a sort of bastardized pop culture version of that, that had showed up in things like Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy. Oh, and a misunderstood El-P lyric. Speaking of Morrison, as befits a character created on Barbelith, that approach of “shove in references to everything you’re inspired by, watching, reading, or listening to at the particular moment you’re writing the comic” was very much inspired by Morrison in general and The Invisibles in particular. Although the Morrison comic I was most trying to emulate, at least in “Name’s Not Down” was Kill Your Boyfriend. But also, the whole reason I set those comics in a thinly fictionalized version of Brighton is because at the time, I was living in London and knew a bunch of people in Brighton (again, many of them through Barbelith, or adjacent to people I’d met via that place). They all seemed very impressive and cool to me at the time: people who put on club nights (It Came From The Sea), wrote about music (Careless Talk Costs Lives / Plan B), or on whom I just had a really big crush. I would take the train down to Brighton many weekends and it loomed large in my imagination. Although there’s no evidence of this on Google, I did not invent calling it “Right-On”: that’s another thing I stole or borrowed and can’t remember from whom or where.

How detailed were the scripts/how much freedom was there on the art end of things? Did you start from a synopsis, or a script, or a storyboard? Are there any notable ways in which the finished works differed from the original outline?

N: I can’t refer to them because I lost my copies in a hard drive calamity a couple of years later, but I remember being struck by how full of gusto and enthusiasm Joe’s scripts were. They really got me fired up to draw. The stage directions had the same infectious energy as the dialogue. I get some quite perfunctory scripts in my line of work — and that’s fine — but I do appreciate the ones that go above and beyond.  I think I’m right in recalling the scripts as being very precise..? Joe had a very clear idea of the pacing, and how the story and gags would flow from panel to panel. The dialogue was all there from the start. I remember reading through and immediately getting a clear mental picture of how it was all going to look. It was very tightly scripted but not in a way that felt restrictive, it was very free and easy to illustrate. And it gave me plenty of leeway to come up with hordes of characters/creatures in those big ensemble panels.

J: I no longer have the scripts so I’m going from memory, but: I wrote pretty detailed scripts but I definitely had panels or entire pages where I encouraged Nelson Evergreen to cut loose and add whatever details and weird characters sprang to his mind. This is as good a place as any to state that I got phenomenally lucky when Nelson agreed to collaborate. Of all the artists who were kicking around Barbelith at the time and who were at all interested in the project, he was perhaps the most talented and I certainly can’t imagine anyone else who would have drawn those comics as well, or that they would have been received as warmly had they been drawn by anyone else.

A mysterious bald man makes conspicuous cameos in both of your long-form Jenny comics. What's the significance of this character? Some of us in the Jenny Everywhere Discord suggested he might have been meant to be Grant Morrison themself, owing to the focus of the forum on which Jenny originally appeared; short of that, we have no idea… 

N: I *think* he was my addition, but again, without having the scripts to hand, my memory may be playing tricks on me. I mean, he *looks* like the sort of thing I’d have thrown in! I’ve always enjoyed the sight of one lone person looking utterly severe/unimpressed in the midst of general merriment, and I’m guessing I improvised MBM in one panel, he made me laugh, so I put him in another, and then another. Dave, the keyboard player in my band at the time, had that exact t-shirt, with the “Guides” logo, which he wore all the bloody time, and that must have seemed to me like the perfect outfit. So yeah, just a silly little running visual thing I threw in off the cuff to amuse myself really. Looking back at if from a distance, he *does* look quite significant, doesn’t he? Sorry! I feel like a right troll. 

You've stated in the past that you included the Jenny Nowhere cliffhanger in Damn Fine Hostile Takeover without a conscious plan for what that story might be about — but did you ever have any plans for further Jenny stories that didn't materialise? If so, what were they about? And if you had to write the Nowhere story, what might it be like?

J: The only idea I remember from “The Two Jennys” was that Jenny Nowhere would have made her base of operations the Right-On version of the ruined West Pier (the real world version of which in Brighton is now even more skeletal and not practical for even the most doomer supervillain to use as a hideout). I think it would have culminated in a Quadrophenia-style beach brawl between each Jenny’s followers (Nowhere’s gang all being various black-clad kinds of goths, punks, and techno-nihilists, in contrast to Everywhere’s more brightly colored subcultures). But it’s been long enough now that I can confess that at various points I was working on two or three other ideas for follow-up stories.  One was entitled “Dance-Off 2004” (the year kept changing as it got delayed) and the concept speaks for itself. Then there was “You Say Derby! We Say Die!” which was not a reference to the town in the Midlands but rather to my interest in roller derby which peaked circa 2007-2009 or so (and was named after the band You Say Party). But the last time I was kicking an idea around, it was 2012 and I was already thinking about something with a very different tone that was based around the idea of the Jenny Everywhere “gang” reuniting after going their separate ways. Lex now runs a pub and is married (to Lois from the coffee shop) with two kids. Bradley made a fortune designing extremely blasphemous videogames. Clea is an academic in San Francisco. Everyone quit smoking. Those three aforementioned sequels that never got made would appear as flashback panels, a montage of sorts, unfinished comics repurposed as “lost/secret adventures.” The tone for this was once again stolen from a Grant Morrison comic, namely the “zzzzenith.com” one-off sequel to Zenith. Less a sequel, more a bittersweet look back at an era.

If you've kept up with more recent Jenny projects to one degree or another, what are your thoughts on them? 

N: I haven’t, but they’re on the ‘to do’ list.

If you had limitless time and budget for it, what would be your “dream” Jenny project?

N: Limitless time and budget…? Oooooh. Multiverse versions of the Right-On gang. Sci-fi stuff, cosmic stuff. Stuff that’s wild to draw. The same snappy feel and flow of the originals, but with extra helpings of the rainy melancholy Joe brought in at the close of Damn Fine Hostile Takeover. 

Do you think you'll ever return to the character? How differently would you approach it if you did?

N: Time permitting, absolutely. It was fun. 

J: Well, the gap in time since I last toyed with the idea of a nostalgic sequel comic is now longer than the original time period between the first comics and that one. And those years mean that I both feel more distance from my version of the character, and the supporting cast I gave her, but also more unqualified affection. I joked about embarrassment earlier but it’s actually been long enough now that I’ve passed through and out of the period where I found anything about it embarrassing. What I was writing reflects who I was at the time and also maybe a little of where the zeitgeist was: the violence is cartoony, there’s no consequences to it, and there’s what I would call a Bush-era assumption that going out and partying is in itself halfway to being some kind of act of resistance. For me those comics are a memento from a very specific time in my life, and if I wrote something about that particular Jenny Everywhere now, it would definitely be an older, wiser version. As a sober 45 year-old living in Chicago, Illinois, looking back at something I wrote when I was a heavy-drinking Londoner in his early 20s, it’s even more bittersweet and melancholy.  Jenny and the gang were supposed to be reminiscent of various friends of my own. Over the course of 20 years, you inevitably lose touch with people. You move far away physically (I relocated to a different continent!), you drift apart. And sometimes you fall out with people, and sometimes people die, both of which have happened to me. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nila Gupta (rest in power) here, who was a big inspiration for my version of Jenny and for my general idea of a gang of cool anti-corporate people running amok in Right-On.  Losing people who used to be part of your life is individually tragic but it’s also the kind of experience you’re a lot more likely to have by the time you’re 45 than when you’re 23. If this answer sounds like it’s turning into a bummer, it shouldn’t entirely, because the flipside to that is you do develop some perspective, some better priorities, some sense of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.

N: Oh Nila… ❤️ I had no idea your Jenny was inspired by them. That's beautiful. 

And that's all, folks! They'll be reading this over, so I want to thank Joe and Neil/Nelson again, both for helping to create a character who still means so much to so many of us, niche though she may be… and for taking the time to bring us these insightful, entertaining, and often moving glimpses into the mental world from which Jenny — at least their Jenny — first sprung.

Happy Jenniversary, and thanks for everything!

[focsle]

Hi there! I’ve been doing a little project on the carbon impacts of the whaling industry and decided to read the current entirety of Going To Weather in one sitting as inspiration… honestly, all you do fascinates me but I am particularly impressed with how many fully rigged ships you willingly illustrated for all that! I’m curious if there was a specific way you studied them in order to draw them or if it’s more just a culmination of knowledge? I wish I understood all those intricacies better myself but it’s hard to figure out where to start…

Oh this is very kind of you to say haha! That’s a fascinating project—I’d love to see it when you’re done if you’d like to share it!

The secret is…they are absolutely not correct hahaha. If a tall ship sailor looked at my ships they’d be like ‘that’s wrong’ which is always why I’m like ‘shhhhh don’t look too closely’. But ultimately my aim is to tell a narrative, not draw a sailing guide. Regarding all the intricacies, I’m absolutely not drawing every line because there are dozens of them and I don’t consider it that important in the grand scope of telling a story. Same goes for tv and movies set on ships—often times their rigging is very much reduced for the sake of the readability of a set. Still, I try to get things vaguely correct looking, as far as the general structure of things so here’s where that helped:

The best way to understand how a boat works is to actually go sailing. But that is certainly not accessible for people in general, especially when it comes to square rigged tall ships (though opportunities DO exist). I’ve never been on a square rigger! No idea how they work! Would like to dabble someday. I’ve only worked on a fore-and-aft rigged vessel which is quite different, but it still gave me more of an understanding of how the sails actually work and what the lines actually do. Reading and watching things paled to being able to stand there and follow the lines to see where they went, and haul on them to see how they actually functioned. So if you ever get the opportunity to do any kind of sailing, that’s the best way to learn about how a ship works. I’m not a sailor by any means, but in my first venture into this I did start to learn a lot that I couldn’t really get from reading about it.

Watching videos helps too, though it’s sometimes hard to find ones that aren’t about operating contemporary sailboats. I found this series helpful just to get a basic understanding of how a square rig works.

Looking up diagrams can help too. I sometimes find diagrams of all the rigging challenging to parse in a 2d space, but when it’s broken down into smaller pieces I find that quite helpful. The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor by Darcy Lever has a lot of granular diagrams that are very well illustrated that I found helpful.

Finding a good model ship is also a decent way of starting to understand it. It’s in a 3d space in miniature so you can see the full scope of it at different angles, which I think is more helpful than drawings. It might not be completely accurate or have every single line represented, but it’s helpful to see how the lines lead to get the basic shape of them. I have a dream one day to have a model of the Charles W. Morgan. But good ones run for….thousands of dollars. So I’ve got a little wooden one that was my grandfather’s, but it’s still helpful to have on hand.

I also like looking at the illustrations of ships that my Whalers of Olde drew in their journals. It’s, again, not an accurate diagram, but they lived on that ship and in that life day in and day out, so when they draw them they tend to get to the spirit of the thing. I use their drawings to get a sense of what parts they felt most important to render, to inform how I render my own ships to get the point across even if they aren’t a perfect reflection of how a ship works.

I’m sure other folks have a wide net of resources beyond this, but these were some of the things that were helpful to me! But I certainly don’t have a vast accumulation of knowledge about sailing and it’s very much ‘that’s good enough to get the idea across in a comic panel someone will look at for 5 seconds’ ha!

[matthenslee]

Beginning with the End in Mind

I was taught by some of the best preaching professors in the world. This allowed me to jump into the pulpit, guns blazing with passion and fire. I just knew it would last until the ripe old age of 80 years old—at least if raising four daughters did not put me in an early grave!

I had been a student pastor or worship pastor for nearly 14 or 15 years. Then I had the opportunity to step into the pulpit full-time. While student and music ministry brought me great joy and preaching brings me great joy, the absolute favorite part of ministry for over 18 years has been in the preparation.

Each week seemed like I was opening a gift on Christmas morning. A new week, a different passage, and a fresh chance to dig in for my folks. It was a thrill!

However, as time went on, I began to notice a pattern develop in my sermon prep: I fizzled. I would start strong! Exegeting the passage faithfully, handling each pericope with care, but then I got to the end. I faded. 

I noticed myself begin to “mail it in,” especially as I made my way to the conclusion. At the very point I should be adding a large bow to the sermon with an exclamation mark the size of Texas, I am running out of steam.

So I made a change.

While I am a novice, I hope the change I made is of benefit to you. This change is simple, but it has revolutionized my sermon prep. It is an approach able to cross into business, sports, and life in general:

Begin with the end in mind.

See? I told you it was simple, but it works.

KNOW THE TEXT

Now, when I open up a brand new passage, my first few steps remain the same. Read the passage over and over, translate the passage, write the passage in my own words a few times, and then write it out from the Bible multiple times. This helps me to internalize the text and makes my next step—most times—a piece of cake.

SUMMARIZE THE TEXT

When you know the text deeply, it makes summarizing it a breeze. This is what many of my professors called the “sermon in a sentence” stage. This is the point where the main idea is discovered. The main point you will draw out from the moment you utter it to the time you conclude. (At 12:00 sharp, of course—since my mother might read this.)

While you will have other points, this is one point you want to stick. It will be the idea from which all your other points will flow.

MAP THE TEXT

Once I know my text, I mean really know my text and my main idea, I begin to map out my points. More often than not, it’s three points. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but I take the time to map it out in my notes to expand upon later.

This is also where my change took place. Usually, I would jump right into my explanations, illustrations, and applications of my points. Now I scroll down Microsoft Word a little bit and hit my conclusion out of the park.

CONCLUDE THE TEXT

Why do this? You certainly do not have to, but I do. When I was going through my explanations, illustrations, and applications at this point, I began to take the easy way out at the conclusion—sometimes even copy and pasting past conclusions so I could just be done. Lazy, I know.

Doing this pretty well at the beginning of my study time gives me fresher legs, so to speak. I am not tired, I am not ready to be done, and I am not (typically) out of coffee.

Instead, I am fresh. I’m as excited as I was when I began, and I’m writing with the passion and fire the text deserves. Since I know the text well and have my “sermon in a sentence,” I go ahead and write my conclusion during the early stages of my sermon prep.

This pays off in my studying. More importantly, it reflects in my preaching!

At this point, I am ready to return to the points I map out and explain, illustrate, and apply to my heart’s content. Since this is my favorite part of sermon prep, whether or not I have coffee left over is irrelevant.

In other words, I am right back to being a kid on Christmas morning. Opening a gift—often with internal (and sometimes audible) shrieks of joy from beginning to end.

This may not help you, but it continues to serve my people well. As you prepare, if you find yourself dragging in any point along the process, consider moving that part of your preparation up a little bit.

Do not make the same mistake I was making by “mailing in” any part of your preparation! From start to finish, let us leave our studies with zeal and enter our pulpits joyously prepared to proclaim the Word of God.

Want a lil' help doing this? Text-Driven Invitation: Landing the Plane Without Leaving the Text: https://amzn.to/4eqNunQ

[mxcosmic]

Siblings in summer for the @seasonsofthecitadel tpp zine, ft a whole load of fireflies

[warsofasoiaf]

What is your opinion of KOTOR 2? Favorite things about it, least favorite things about it, characters, etc.

Alright, it’s time for another video game review, so an early reminder, spoilers abound for both KOTOR1 and KOTOR2. There’s a cut of course. Overall, I thought it was a phenomenally well-written game and one of the greatest pieces of media to exist in the Stars Wars universe (although I haven’t read any of the Expanded Universe books so keep that in mind), and as is the usual case for Obsidian particularly in this era, developer constraints created a beautiful mess.

Before we can talk about KOTOR we need to talk a little bit about Star Wars and what it meant as a film. The original Star Wars isn’t a very creative story, it’s largely a conventional Hero’s Journey. It’s a pastiche of early adventure stories in a science fiction setting, but with the added benefit of video and sound effects to really make it come to life in a way that was only possible in the imagination of readers. This gave the series a wide deal of appeal. Folks who grew up on the 1950′s Flash Gordon serials or WW2 dogfight films could see a film with those things they loved from their childhood with a high budget to bring those things to life. Science fiction fans could visually see elements of their favorite books brought to life on the silver screen. Fans of movies can appreciate the cutting-edge (for the time, although I love me some practical effects in film) effects and the unfamiliar elements of science fiction with the familiar trappings of an adventure tale. 

KOTOR was something similar for the video game industry, particularly for the fans of Baldur’s Gate. The ability to create a Jedi character and go on a journey like the Bhaalspawn did in Baldur’s Gate was something that appealed to a significant number of RPG fans, and the critical success of the Baldur’s Gate series brought a lot of money and prestige to Bioware. Fans of RPGs and Star Wars got to see their medium and interact with it in a whole new light. Much like A New Hope, KOTOR1 was largely a traditional story where Darth Malak is an evil guy without much in the way of redemptive qualities. The two major wrinkles were that you could play as a Sith and have some moments of true player cruelty like ordering Zaalbar to kill Mission, but this makes sense for an RPG, having no player choice in a game really makes you lose the lightside/darkside dynamic. Of course, the bigger and more interesting drift from a traditional Star Wars story was the Revan twist. This took advantage of both the slower pace of games to spend time with your PC and form a connection, and the nature of Western RPG’s where the player envisions themselves partially as their avatar onscreen to make the reveal hit home. Ultimately though, the Star Wars morality was upheld. The Jedi were the unequivocal good guys, the Sith were the unequivocal bad guys. 

KOTOR2 decided to put the Force under the microscope. It had started in 2003, so Episode II had already come out, and this idea of the prophecy of Anakin bringing balance to the Force, and what we knew of the Jedi in the original Star Wars trilogy who were reduced to hermits hiding on the fringes of society, really gave the impetus to examine this idea of the balance of the Force as not necessarily benevolent. It’s not evil, per say, it’s just indifferent to the people that die to make it happen. So the game became a self-critical examination of the core structures of the Star Wars universe. The Sith are usually thought of as the bad guys, and a lot of that holds true, domination, subjugation, power, betrayal, all that nasty stuff aren’t really conducive to most conceptions of goodness, but are the Jedi good? Does their passivity lead to injustice and terror being wrought on others because the Jedi failed to act. That was the question behind the Jedi involvement in the Mandalorian Wars, was the Exile correct in going off to fight them or were the Jedi Council who forbade them correct? As befits the folks who wrote Planescape: Torment, the game has two journeys, one through the game world and the plot that unfolds and another more deeply introspective.

I’ll put the things I don’t like about KOTOR2 first because the list is small but it is worth noting. The game is very clearly a rushed product and it shows. The cut content shows a great deal of lost potential, and the bugs could make the game at times completely unplayable. The game suffered from the accelerated development, having barely half the development time, and you can see where the seams show. The UI is clunky and gets cluttered when you have to manage items. Level design is similarly a nuisance, as they are big sprawling expanses without a lot of content in them. Part of that is a necessity to the mechanics, smaller levels would have other encounter designs being agro’d into it, but the levels are still expansive, empty, and a slog to get through. The Peragus mining facility is too large by half, and there’s a lot of backtracking in these levels. Since side quests encourage finding a doodad or killing a few key figures scattered around a map, that means a lot of trekking through these big levels to find one particular item or enemy locked in a corner somewhere. That can be very tedious, particularly on repeat playthroughs. At times, it feels like legging your way through a swamp to get to the next piece of delicious content.

Which is a good segue into talking what I like about the game, because its writing and characters are superb. The character companions are twists of classic Star Wars archetypes. Atton is the scoundrel Han Solo non-Force user type, but ends up having a disturbingly dark backstory where he was a Sith interrogator and feared his own Force-sensitive nature. Bao-Dur is a man haunted by the weapon of mass destruction he created, a tech-head who ends up hating his most momentous creation but feels the need to use it yet again. Canderous has become the new Mandalore and is desperately trying to revitalize his dying culture because he’s been so broken by Revan’s departure. The Wookie life-debt is so toxic that it breaks Hanharr and Mira in their own ways. Visas is a Sith whose will is shattered. Each of these characters are fundamentally broken (save for the droids, unless you count the physical need to reassemble HK-47 as broken), and the Exile draws them to him or her. Through discovering more about them and resolving it, the Exile awakens the characters’ connection to the Force, oddly ironic since the Exile is cut off from the Force and is only rediscovering it. Like most Bioware RPG’s, you the player through your character guide the growth of these characters and form a relationship with them, or use them for your own ends.

Kreia, of course, deserves her own paragraph. Kreia is the Star Wars Ravel Puzzlewell, an embittered woman who wants to destroy the cosmic chains of the universe and loves the player character in a deeply obsessive way, one that’s played completely straight in how it makes the player uncomfortable. She is deeply resentful of the Force and wants to destroy it, and through the Exile, who managed to cut themselves off so utterly completely in a unique way, she sees the path. Of course, the reason why the Exile cut themselves off was the mass death at Malachor V was so overwhelming that he or she would have otherwise died. Of course, her obsession and overriding mission cares little for the Exile’s own pain, and so the manipulations begin, using you to lure out and destroy the Jedi and the Sith, and in the end, you disappoint her, either because you don’t learn her lessons or she discovers that the only reason you were the way you were was because you were afraid. She still is obsessed over you, though, and so when you finally confront her, she obliges that affection to explain everything, unusually honest for a woman whose Sith name is evocative of the word betrayal. And fortunately, she allows something that most monologue villains don’t allow, a means by which to tell her she’s full of shit. Certainly, it’s a little weaker coming from her as an option to you rather than the player character saying it themselves, but I think it’s stronger, since so much of the ending had to be cut anyway it reinforces the ambiguity of it, that the ending is what you believe. Personal belief has always been important for the Exile and Kreia/Traya, and letting that transfer to the player is, while perhaps not the most ideal, completely valid given how rushed the development was. 

The other Sith Lords are fascinating concepts of evil and personal belief as well as well, and really show the Dark Side of the force in a parasitic, corrupt sense and the horrible ends of taking belief to its extreme. Darth Sion is the Lord of Pain. He cannot die but he feels pain constantly, making eternal life not a blessing but a torture, though in it he found a twisted source of enlightenment. His pain fuels his anger and hatred (key ingredients of the Dark Side) and so he persists solely through the Dark Side. Darth Nihilus, on the other hand, had his body obliterated by the Mass Shadow Generator, and so persisted as a wound in the Force, consuming Force energy to feed his relentless hunger. He is not a human anymore but a force of endless consumption that cannot be satiated, this hunger pain pushes him past his own mortal existence but which can only consume, not live. This perfectly illustrates the Dark Side concept of pursuit of power even past the point of sustainability, for Nihilus will continue consuming until all existence has been eaten.

The game is dark and moody, as you explore a shattered galaxy. In the original game, the search led to the Star Forge and the revelation that you the player was Revan. The sequel shows that there was no grand conspiracy; the act of Malachor built Nihilus and Sion and the player themselves was something that you did. It was not a conspiracy of Jedi but rather the after-effects of a particular action, much the way Lonesome Road had the Courier’s delivery of the package to Hopeville to be something that destroyed Ulysses even though you never met him. The Mass Shadow Generator was meant to save the galaxy from the Mandalorians but birthed a new, more powerful tragedy. Bao-Dur even wonders if the subjugation of the people under the Mandalorians was better than the power of the Mass Shadow Generator, a powerful moment ordered by just a mere single Jedi, built by a mere tech specialist. In true Planescape fashion, a personal apocalypse is a galactic apocalypse and vice-versa. Torment lingers over this game, in the broken characters, in a parallel journey both outward and inward. In many ways KOTOR2 was Planescape: Torment in the Star Wars universe, albeit with its own personal flair.

Alright, that’s a good review. I can do character analyses of some of the major characters if you want.

Thanks for the question, Messanger.

[canaryrecords]

"Love - the absolute circle of trustfulness - that's the secret of it all. I love the birds, the snakes, the society person, the academic, and the baby - all creatures of the universe are alike, and they will never harm you unless you fear them." -Charles Kellogg, 1915 Charles Dennison Kellogg was unlike any performer in the history of the American stage. He developed a few key obsessions - the forest, love, vibration, fire - into an irresistibly charismatic package and then sold that package in the form of himself through an uncanny use of the press, a vigorous appetite for travel, and a need to be the center of attention through a serpentine five-decade career as a pontificator and showman. In the early decades of the twentieth century, he amused and astounded heiresses and industrialists, yogis and artists, scientists and, most of all, the plain folk of most states in the union with demonstrations of his vision of a wholesome and interconnected world of all living things. His memory has largely faded, but he left behind a memoir, riddled with gaps and touched with hokum, many photographs, hundreds of press notices and reviews in newspapers, over an hour of sound recordings, at least one fragment of film, and a legacy of naturalism and invention that has entered into the lore of his native California. Kellogg was born October 2, 1868, the fourth of five children to Henry Kellogg (b. 1822 in New London, Connecticut) and Mary E. Carlisle (b. 1845 in Jefferson, New York) in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California’s Plumas County in a settlement called Spanish Ranch “nearly a hundred miles from the nearest railroad,” according to Kellogg. His father’s involvement in a nearby goldmine in the 1850s paid off, and he used his share of the profits to establish a provisions store for the area prospectors. Kellogg wrote that his mother was the only white woman in the area, and that he “lost her in infancy.” In fact, she left the family when he was about 3 years old, and his autobiography gives us an indication of the wound her abandonment left through the pains with which he purposefully wrote her out of his life’s story. (She died in Long Beach, California in 1917.) In his auto-mythology, Kellogg was as a child close to a Chinese servant named Moon and an unnamed Indian woman, who, he wrote, “taught me to fear no creature [and] taught me, too, the habit of minding my own business, letting the other fellow alone - bird, bear, snake, Indian and other humans. […] My earliest recollection is sitting with the Indians about their campfires or watching the Chinamen boil their rice between stones.” The impressions of the sounds and feelings of the wilderness in early childhood embedded themselves deeply in young Charles. He recalled it as a period of immense freedom, a world with “no doctors, missionaries, telephone, telegraph, schools, saloons, poorhouse, jail or gamblers; no police for there was no disorder. There were birds, grizzly bears, deer, wolves, foxes, skunks, badgers, mountain lions, wild cats, snakes, and all the smaller wood folk.” It was also here that before the age of six, he witnessed a wedding for the first time and learned about death and funeral rites among the Chinese. In this powerful paradise of vivid experiences, he was “lonely, but not unhappy,” spending his days “always preoccupied with birds and insects, listening to them and talking to them in their own languages.” It was between the ages of four and six that he began to experiment with his ability to imitate birds, forcing air through this nose with his mouth closed. He claimed throughout his adult life that this remarkable ability came down to an anatomical formation in his larynx similar to that of a songbird. This claim, repeated thousands of times, often backed up with the validation of unnamed doctors, was, of course, utter nonsense, but it is not clear whether he believed it, on some level, himself. It was many years after Kellogg had been sent off to live with his mother’s relatives in Syracuse, New York at the age of six or seven that Charles realized that he was in possession of a remarkable skill. In Syracuse, he learned to work with tools, to build furniture and fireplaces - skills he valued and worked into his persona as a woodsman. He attended Syracuse University and sang in the choir, aware that a relative of his father’s (by marriage) Clara Louise Kellogg, had become a famous soprano. But apart from mentions of his education in the manly, manual crafts, the period from the ages of seven to twenty-two when Kellogg became a civilized, college-educated Yankee were never mentioned in Kellogg’s stories. They didn’t serve what he was selling about himself. Almost immediately after graduation, we have the first press notice of Charles Kellogg as a performer, August 1891 at Chautauqua, New York, a hotbed of aspirational “edutainment,” where he debuted his unique bird-imitation talent. Realizing that he was on to something, he gave at least a half-dozen concerts of music with bird imitation at YMCAs, churches, and meetings around Pennsylvania and New York at the beginning and end of the year and another half-dozen in California a few months later. There were more shows in California in 1893-94, then back to Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1896-97. All of February and March of 1898 was spent touring Pennsylvania and Ohio. January through April of 1900 was spent on the road through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, D.C., and Virginia, by which time he was claiming to have anywhere from a 9 1/2 to 12 1/2 octave vocal range. After getting married for the first time, he spent November 1900 to April 1901 touring the same states again plus Connecticut and published an article in Success magazine called “The Wickedness and Folly of Killing Birds.” In early 1902, through Horace Traubel, friend and executor of Walt Whitman, Kellogg met the naturalist John Burroughs, thirty years’ Kellogg’s senior, with whom he traveled to Jamaica during January and February. Kellogg held Burroughs (as wells as naturalist John Muir, with whom he also spent several days with at one point) in esteem and treasured the memory of their trip. Burroughs was certainly an influence on and model for Kellogg. Whether Kellogg was aware of Burrough’s fierce denunciation in a 1903 article for the Atlantic denouncing contemporary nature-writers tendencies to anthropomorphize the natural world is unclear, but it was major news among naturalists for years, ultimately drawing comment from President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904, Kellogg and his brother bought a 45 acre plot in North Newry, Maine, where they built the Kellogg Nature Camp, a Summer vacation resort for city folk wanting to spend time in with the woods. They built cabins connected by boardwalks, a common-house with a large fireplace (a specialty of Charles’s) and powered it with a waterwheel. It is now part of a nature reserve with many of the structures they built still standing. And each year during each late Fall, Winter, and early Spring, in an ever expanding radius, Kellogg began to cover the country with shows of his knowledge of and ability to replicate bird song - Tennessee and Kentucky by 1903, Nebraska and Kansas by 1907. By that time, shows regularly lasted two hours and received glowing reviews everywhere he went. His break came at the age of 43 in 1910, by which time he had left his first wife Emily and relocated to San Francisco and had ingratiated himself within a world wealthy socialites, where he was a favorite at parties. On December 4 The Call newspaper ran a, glowing illustrated full-page article on him titled The Man Who Sings With Birds in Their Own Language, which crystalized in print the stage-show that Kellogg had been assiduously developing, year after year, for nearly two decades. "He has the uttermost faith in the power of love and kindness,” the article asserted. “’It is all love," he says. 'Anybody who goes into the woods with the spirit of love in his heart without the faintest desire for destruction or possession can make friends with the birds if he is merely tactful and patient. Birds can read the heart better than men. They know their friends and are ready to love them.' In Kellogg's mind, there is no place for fear or hatred [...] Fear creates fear. Hatred breeds hatred. Love engenders love. These are the cardinal tenants of Kellogg's creed." His count of 3,000 performances in 24 years was, like almost everything else he said, likely an exaggeration but not so far from the truth that you could discount the claim out of hand. Twenty years of stories, stage patter, and tricks caught the public imagination. Less than a month after the article appeared in San Francisco, Kellogg went to Camden, New Jersey to cut his first trial disc for Victor Records on January 24, 1911 and then another four performances on the 28th. Victor didn’t release any of them. When Kellogg went back on the road on the east coast from October to December 1911, he had a new repertoire of claims for his abilities. This is when his press notices begin to claim that his throat is abnormally formed like that of a bird’s. And that: -He’d been to Paris and Berlin and received high praise. (His sister-in-law did invite him to perform at a private salon in Paris, where he met August Rodin, but not until 1912.) -His throat had been examined at Harvard. (He had been claiming that he’d “baffled scientists” there for years, and that they’d measured his vocal range from 64 cycles a second to 49,560 cycles.) -He speaks 15 animal languages and can communicate with bears, rattlesnakes, worms (who, he said, can sing), lizards, squirrels, etc. -That a man could (theoretically) be pinned motionless to a tree with the use of sound. -And, most crucially for his career from this point forward, that he could extinguish fire with sound. In February 1912 an article making many of these claims along with his belief that “vibration will ultimately take the place of electricity as a motive force” ran in syndication across the country in advance of his having signed with the Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters for whom he performed three shows a day (a matinee and two at night) for months across the west coast - Winnipeg, Spokane, Los Angeles, etc - from April 1912 until April of the following year and then, without his standard Summer break, for the rest of 1913 across the east coast plus Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, and Kansas. In New York City, he gave a demonstration of divination for water for another syndicated news article. He spent 1914 touring the west coast and midwest before returning to the Philadelphia area where he remarried to Sarah “Sad’i” Fuller Burchard on January 14, 1915 in Wilmington, Delaware. One month later, he went again to Camden, New Jersey in February 1915, where over two days he recorded the first four performances that were issued on discs. He was almost 47 years old and had spent the past 25 years on the road developing his act in halls, theaters, auditoriums, clubhouses, churches, tents, homes, and high schools. Kellogg’s assessment of vaudeville does not have the ring of disreputable behavior that has often been handed down through the years: “Back stage is not such a fry cry from the forest, for on these vaudeville stages I find conditions that are congenial to my own habits of the woods - conditions I do not find elsewhere in the world. In hotels, railroads, and even private homes, tobacco and other noxious odors, and not infrequently even uncleanliness such as cuspidors, are not unusual. System, punctuality and order are seldom the rule. In the forest, in all nature, punctuality, order, and system are the very breath of life. The stars, the tides, the migration of birds, the appearance of herbs, the trees, the flowers are all on time, giving that sense of harmony felt, and rejoiced in by all. Back stage, I find pure air in perfect ventilation, no tobacco, no bad odors, scrupulous cleanliness, system, order, punctuality - in a word, the perfection of organization, bringing quiet and a reposeful atmosphere in which to work.” Kellogg’s first vaudeville tour was a 1912-13 run at the west coast Orpheum chain, run by Percy Williams who was known as the first vaudeville impresario to pay high fees to the acts he wanted. The west coast Orpheum houses were run locally and, according to Joe Lurie Jr’s Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (1953), unlike many of the rowdier and down-market vaudeville theaters, “they were all fine, clean, well-appointed theaters, running clean shows, and were a credit to their towns.” Kellogg performed at shows with as many as eight other acts on the bill. The shows in Washington opened just after Bert Williams’ run and included a spoof of the domestic morality play Everywoman titled Everywife, the blackface comedy duo McIntyre and Heath, the Fearless Ce Dora (“one continuous thrill through the seven minutes which she spends revolving at railroad speed inside [a] golden globe”), and Thomas Edison’s early, abortive attempts at talking pictures. Through 1915 and 1916 Kellogg was headlining in the eastern U.S. for both Orpheum and B.F. Keith’s circuits of vaudeville houses in the eastern U.S. and Quebec as well as Majestic Theaters in the midwest and Texas, where others on the bills included dog acts, monkey acts, the Dennis Brothers’ rotating ladder act, and various acrobats, singers, and comedians. At the end of each show was Kellogg, standing in front of a painted woodland backdrop. Second on the bill for at least one of those shows was the Three Keatons, including 20 year old Buster, who was on the verge of leaving for Hollywood. Kellogg himself appeared second on the bill in late 1916 only under Nora Bayes, arguably the most popular singer in the U.S. His proclamations to the press at the time ranged from the flatly false (that he did not believe “that wild animals die unless molested by man or that they struggle with each other, because I have never seen them do either,” that he did not know his own age, that hat he spent 9 months of the year in the wilderness and came “into civilized society only when the call of a friend proves too strong to resist”) to the simply peculiar and the nearly-true (that he had “never read a book through - print disturbs me - although I believe in the teaching of the Bible as I have heard of them from others, because I have seen the proved true in my own life,” and “I have never tasted fish, flesh, or fowl, although I am not a vegetarian,” that dogs will die from long durations of discordant sounds) to the charming, bordering on visionary (“Fear - that’s what causes all sin. Fear of money, fear of getting caught, fear of wounded vanity, fear of public opinion, all all the rest,” and “I can take the recorded songs of a thousand birds and they will be harmonious. That’s because they are in tune with nature, while man and his instruments need to be attuned.”) Kellogg was an avid photographer, claiming never to take a gun (or a compass, claiming an inborn sense of direction) into the woods, but producing photographs prolifically from 1902 onward. We know that he had performed in Rochester, New York, home of the Eastman-Kodak company, by December, 1900, around the time of the introduction of the “brownie” camera - the first cheap, popular device for making photos. It is unclear whether he might at that point met Gertrude Achilles Strong (b. May 4, 1860; d. May, 1955), a recent divorcee and the daughter of Henry A. Strong, co-founder and first president of the Kodak company, or whether they met much later in the late 1910s in Hawai’i. Regardless, their meeting and relationship was pivotal for Kellogg. His first disc for Victor certainly sold very well, likely in the tens of thousands, and he claimed that he could earn $4,000 a week (a staggering $100,000 in today’s money - and more than half of the $7,000 a week that the Orpheum paid Sarah Bernhardt, their highest-paid entertainer) performing in the 1910s, and his family was relatively wealthy. But they weren’t Gertrude Achilles Strong wealthy. Almost no one was. When she died in 1955, she left behind a fortune of over nine million dollars, making her the single richest person in the history of the state of California at the time, well into the top half of the richest 1% nationally. In 1913, Kellogg bought over 88 acres in Morgan Hill, south of San Francisco, an area he dubbed “Ever Ever Land,” where he built an inventive and “environmentally responsive” open plan cabin that he called “The Mushroom.” Around 1920, Gertrude Achilles Strong bought his land and more than 500 additional surrounding acres. She built a mansion for herself there at a cost of $276,000 (four million today) as well as a house for Kellogg and his wife and put him on her permanent payroll as property manager. He built water systems for her property and built and patented a riding fruit and nut picker for the property, while he lived comfortably with his wife Sad’i and two young live-in maids for the rest of his life. Each winter from 1915 through 1919, Kellogg toured from coast to coast, stopping in Camden, New Jersey to record a few performances for Victor Records, where he cut a total of 26 performances, six of which the company the company destroyed without having issued them. On February 15 and 16, 1916, he recorded four light classical pieces, imitating birds and following along the well-known melodies, as if a bird were singing the tunes in its down language. On the 15th, Alma Gluck, a star of the Metropolitan Opera and one of the most popular sopranos in the U.S. also recorded three of her best-selling performances. Although she did not record on the 16th, and Kellogg possibly traveled more than 100 miles north to Dalton, Pennsylvania near Scranton to visit friends on the 17th when Gluck recorded “The Bird of the Wilderness,” with words by Rabindranath Tagore, he joined her again in Victor’s studio on the 18th for two bird-themed performances on which Kellogg provided bird imitations. When the single-sided 12” disc of “Listen to the Mockingbird” was released in the Spring along with a significant marketing push by Victor, its sales exceeded expectations. When “Nightingale Song” from a mid-19th century operetta called Der Vogelhandler (The Bird Seller) by the Austrian composer Carl Zeller, was released a month or two later as a less-expensive 10,” it became one of the best-selling records of the decade. Apart from the two sides recorded with Gluck, Kellogg’s recordings are evenly divided between the bird-imitation novelties with musical accompaniment (an unenduring genre that grew in popularity both on stage and on records in the early decades of the 20th century) and segments of his stage act in which he would lecture on his relationship with the wilderness with demonstrations of bird-calls interspersed. Seven of those sides remain a fascinating glimpse of Kellogg’s performing persona. The last of them, titled “Bird Chorus,” recorded without commentary on January 14, 1919 is an extraordinary and unheralded moment in the history of sound recording. Starting in January 1915 and through all of 1916, Kellogg added a section of his stage act in which he turned on “an orchestra” of six Victrolas borrowed from local dealers in each town, and played discs of his bird-imitation and then proceeded to perform with them, simulating, as one reviewer put it, “a voice from the deep forest.” For the “Bird Chorus” disc Kellogg simplified the process to a single disc of his own performing along with a live performance, ingeniously weaving two continuous sequences of songs together to give the impression of multitudes of birds singing together. It is the first instance of overdubbing. Notably lacking from Kellogg’s discography are examples of his most spectacular and longest-lasting piece from his stage act - the “Blade of Flame.” By the beginning of 1912, Kellogg introduced a gas burner on stage which produced a four-foot blue flame inside a glass tube. Kellogg told his audience that because all of nature is connected through vibration and because of the gift he possessed of a vocal range many times that of highly trained singers and larger than that of a grand piano, he could cause the “blade of flame” to dance and ultimately to extinguish it using only his voice. It was, next to his bird-imitating, his best-known and best-loved routine. He augmented it with a demonstration of the technique of building fire by wood friction (a skill he imparted to the then-nascent Boy Scouts). Naturally, his fire performances in enclosed theaters were of some concern to local fire departments, and he made it a regular public relations stop to visit fire houses in each town during the afternoons to demonstrate the act, reassuring them of his control of fire and wowing them along with the local press. The only footage apparently extant of Kellogg is one silent minute of a newsreel outtake Kellogg giving this demonstration for a group of Boston firemen on November 5, 1926. (The film, including ten precious seconds at the end of Kellogg demonstrating his bird-imitation technique facing the camera is available online at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections site.) He continued to elaborate the routine, using bowed tuning forks. In the mid-20s he arranged a series of radio broadcasts intended to demonstrate his hypothesis that vibrations broadcast at sufficient amplitude could extinguish house fires. His proposal was that in the future each house could be scientifically tuned such that fire departments would need only to broadcast the appropriate frequencies to put out the fires. The seed for the idea seems to have originated with Kellogg’s exposure to Herman Helmholtz’s book On the Sensation of Tone which had already been published in two editions in America before Kellogg began making theatrical use of its central concept, that the air around us is a medium through which vibration is transmitted in waves. Kellogg was so enamored with the idea that in May and June of 1913, Kellogg added a bit to his stage act in which he explained to the audience that mental vibrations are crucial in love and marriage and that “tuning” of a silent “mental wireless” to a compatible frequency with one’s mate was central to harmonious love. Newsprint reviews of his attempts to demonstrate this with his wife were decidedly snarky. The audience didn’t get it, and it was quickly dropped from the act. Kellogg’s greatest and most enduring “hit” as a showman was neither a stage-act nor a recording. It was a vehicle made from two large pieces. The first was a Nash Quad, a four-wheel drive truck capable of hauling four tons. The second was a 22-foot section of a fallen redwood log eleven feet in diameter. He obtained the former in early Summer 1917 from the Nash Motor Company in Kenosha, Wisconsin while they were being produced for use in the First World War. Kellogg convinced the company’s namesake president of a vision of the beauty of California’s enormous redwood forests (and, very likely, the publicity benefits of Kellogg’s scheme) and took the Quad to Bull Creek Flat in Humbolt County, where with the help of several axemen from the Pacific Lumber Company they spent months sawing off a section of a fallen tree, stripping its bark, and carving out its interior into a living quarters with beds, cabinets, kitchenette, and bathroom. Mounting it on the chassis of the Quad, he polished and varnished the whole thing a copper color and installed electric lights. By November of that year, he drove the wooden cabin-on-wheels that he dubbed the Travel-Log cross-country, stopping in Kenosha for work on the radiator and “finishing touches” (including their brand name, it seems). Using his celebrity and press-savvy, he toured the machine, giving talks on the beauty of the great redwoods and the dire need for their preservation, taking a piece of the forest to the people. In the process, he introduced America to the idea of a mobile home. It now resides in the Humbolt State Park’s visitor center, reportedly only yards from where the tree from which it was hewn grew for centuries. Kellogg recorded 11 more performances for Victor during the period 1924-26. Seven of them were discarded by the company without having been released. The remaining four were re-recordings of his first two records using the new invention of microphones. While he continued to perform, his schedule gradually slowed as he shifted his first to attention to Gertrude Achilles Strong’s property and then to a fascination with Fiji, where he first traveled in the Spring of 1925 from Hawai’i. Fixated on the idea of wooden lali slit-drums and their use in communication over distances, Kellogg arrived alone and presented himself as a naturalist to the Chief of the Native Department on the island of Suva, who showed him a the instrument and for him to visit to the island of Baqa to witness fire-walking (after Kellogg had given a demonstration of the “blade of flame” routine, having thoughtfully packed the gear needed for it, and gave a performance of “Narcissus” as a bird-imitator) in the company of a British medical doctor. Kellogg was suitably impressed and incorporated discussion of both lali drumming and fire-walking as further evidence of his central theme of the need for vibratory attunement in his subsequent performances through the 1920s and 30s. In 1929, Kellogg survived a near-fatal car crash immediately before he self-published The Nature Singer: His Book, a profusely photo-illustrated collection of impressions drawn from his life and career and a document of his own self-invention, which went through at least two printings (all of them signed; the first 1000 are numbered), wrapped in the attractive but exceedingly brittle birch parchment that he used as stationary and for press notices. That year, he also patented an automobile ignition that started with whistling. He continued to criss-cross the country, giving talks based on his experiences in nature combined with pleas for conservation. There was talk of a movie that never manifested. In 1940, he and Sad’i adopted a 9 year old girl named Shannon who had been born in Honolulu. (She subsequently married a Charles Newton, nine years her senior, in 1961, divorcing him in 1967, and died in 2007.) When in 1946 Paramahansa Yogananda published his Autobiography of a Yogi, describing his encounters with spiritual teachers and his travel in India and U.S., he briefly recounted in a footnote having seen Charles Kellogg do the “blade of flame” bit in Boston in the ‘20s. And that’s who Kellogg has been for the past century - a remarkable and unlikely figure at the intersection of science and art and showmanship and the spiritual. Charles Kellogg’s health declined through the 1940s before died of a heart attack on September 3, 1949 at the age of 80.

[theonyxpath]

Wooo! The Kickstarter for V5 Cults of the Blood Gods is going live tomorrow (or today depending when you read this), Tuesday, December 17th at 2pm Eastern US time! We’re doing this Kickstarter in order to create a traditionally printed book that we’ll print and deliver to backers and overprint more books in order to get Cults into stores!

Here are some of the highlights of the book, provided to me by developer Matthew Dawkins:

•           An in-character breakdown of the rise of esoteric beliefs among the ranks of the undead and how faith drives many of the major aspects of vampire culture.

•           A host of religions — from historic theocracies and globe-spanning conspiracies to fringe cults and mortal beliefs arising in the modern nights — introduced for incorporation into your character backgrounds or as supporting casts and antagonist groups in your chronicles.

•           The history, structure, and ambitions of the Hecata, the vampire group known as the Clan of Death, as well as a chapter dedicated to playing a vampire among the Necromancers, and the rituals for their Discipline: Oblivion.

•           Guidance on how to use ecclesiastical horror and construct cults in Vampire, making them a vivid backdrop for your own stories, including new coterie styles focused on cult play.

•           Faith-based story hooks and a full story centered on the activities of the Hecata, involving walking corpses, ghosts, ready-made characters, and the secrets of the most twisted family in the World of Darkness.

•           New Loresheets, Discipline powers, and Predator types for inclusion in your chronicles, encouraging player characters to engage fully with the material presented in this book.

Visually, as folks will see when the KS page goes live, it’ll be a gorgeous book featuring much of the same qualities and artists as V5 Chicago By Night.

Just fair warning: we continue to look for methods to cut shipping costs outside the US, yet the shipping for V5 Cults of the Blood Gods has shipping costs in line with our more recent KSs this whole year, rather than the shipping costs we were working with when we KS’d V5 Chicago By Night.

As I’ve mentioned before, we know the costs are high, but they are the costs quoted to us from our shippers here in the US, and passed on to backers. I continue to think it better to give our non-US backers a choice as to whether to back and pay the shipping costs and be part of the KS (including getting Stretch Goals, and all), rather than Onyx just not shipping outside the US as many TTRPG companies have decided to do with their KSs.

Basically, shipping costs are high, and they suck. We will keep searching for avenues that could cut those costs – never fear!

CofD Dark Eras 2 art by Alex Sheikman

Here are some brief nuggets of things we want you to know about this week, besides the V5 Cult of the Blood Gods Kickstarter:

If you haven’t seen the promos on our social media, Onyx Path is part of DTRPG‘s Teach Your Kids To Game sale! You can get the Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau core book PDFs half-off! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/rpg_teachkids.php

When I was at PAX Unplugged I sat down for an interview about art directing for TTRPGs in general, how I got started art directing for White Wolf, how art directing has changed since then, and specifically how I went about devising the look and feel and artistic style of Mage: The Ascension first edition and how the look evolved from edition to edition.

As is typical for me with interviews, I absolutely have no idea how it went. Like, did I talk too much, did I answer their questions at all interestingly, did I reveal too much? But I got a lot of really nice comments from folks about the Werewolf one, so hopefully this one sounds good to y’all. Thanks, Terry!http://magethepodcast.com/index.php/2019/12/14/mage-noir-with-matt-webb-and-the-art-of-mage-with-rich-thomas/

Lunars art by Gunship Revolution

Finally, we spent a lot of time setting up what everybody will be doing for the next couple of weeks, as today’s Monday Meeting was our last one for the year! From here until after New Years, we’re trying to give folks enough space to handle the holidays, while we still have projects rolling at full speed!

In fact, it’s not uncommon for freelancers – which is what the vast majority of our creators are – to use holidays to really dive into their freelance projects. Certainly, I always did that when I was freelance illustrating. Having a deadline is a great reason for ducking out on a long family event! (Not that I do that any more!)

But, never fear, true believers!

I’ll still be assembling the next two weeks’ Monday Meeting Notes with updates and Kickstarter news, and with some short year-end focused content! We just aren’t having the Monday Meetings those weeks.

And, of course, we hope all of you have happy holidays and plenty of time for playing in our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

V5 Cults of the Blood Gods goes live at 2pm Eastern US time on Tuesday December 17th!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast Is our Holiday Special 1: Podbean Live Test Episode! Check it out direct on Podbean, or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Just because it’s the holiday season doesn’t mean we’re stopping with our gaming streams! This week we’ve got Vampire: The Masquerade, Trinity Continuum, Scarred Lands, Hunter: The Vigil, Changeling: The Dreaming, and Mage: The Awakening, and we’ll undoubtedly be dropping a surprise stream or two into the mix as well!

Subscribe to twitch.tv/theonyxpath to keep up with our streams as and when they happen!

As ever, we’ve got a lot of YouTube content coming up too. This week, expect to see an interview regarding Pugmire and Dystopia Rising: Evolution, actual plays of Changeling: The Lost and Aberrant, and a behind-the-screen special for Scion!

Subscribe to youtube.com/user/theonyxpath to catch up on all our content!

Matthew Dawkins – The Gentleman Gamer – continues with his Gentleman’s Guide to Scion over on his channel, and will be doing a few V5 Cults of the Blood Gods videos too!

Subscribe to him on youtube.com/user/clackclickbang right here!

Mage: The Podcast recently had occultist S Rune Emerson walk through the history of Tarot and the symbology of the Mage the Ascension Tarot: http://magethepodcast.com/index.php/…-rune-emerson/

A group of podcasters and Storyteller Vault writers are looking for input on what kind of publications and podcasts WoD and CoD fans would like to see in 2020. If you complete their survey, you can be entered into a drawing for a $200 DriveThruRPG gift card. The survey is available here: bit.ly/wodcodsurvey2019

Here’s Occultists Anonymous returning with two new episodes

Episode 64: Small Details As the cabal waits to hear back about a meeting with the Union, Atratus begins to research vampires, Wyrd develops her labyrinth, and Songbird makes a phone call. https://youtu.be/UoyrYH_PM3A

Episode 65: Ignorant Fools   The cabal take the lead in meeting with the Union on behalf of the Phantasm Society, and perhaps many other supernatural beings trying to lay low. https://youtu.be/8sTnubeBl44

Red Moon Roleplaying recently concluded their Mummy: The Curse actual play and are currently running a Changeling: The Lost chronicle!  You can subscribe to their YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1wvSKstApo9vYYq1wEDtmQ

Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we are proud to announce the PDF and physical book PoD versions of the Aeon Aexpansion for Trinity Continuum: Aeon, a collection of additional material that came out of the Kickstarter, including:

Information about new noetic biotech, hardtech cyberware, military weapons, and other technologies of the early 22nd century.

Rules for creating and playing psiad and superior characters within the Trinity Continuum.

Rules for playing psions in the modern day setting of the Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook.

And more…

Plus we’re also releasing the Trinity Continuum Aeon Screen in PDF – all on DriveThruRPG

Conventions!

2020: Midwinter: January 9th – 12th, in Milwaukee, WI. Check out David Fuller’s Athens, Ohio Scion actual play tie-in adventure (soon to be coming to the Storypath Nexus community content site) that will be running at Midwinter. The event url is below: https://tabletop.events/conventions/midwinter-gaming-convention-2020/schedule/402

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Duke Rollo fiction (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Redlines

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Second Draft

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Buried Bones: Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Post-Approval Development

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Editing

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Mythical Denizens (Creatures of the World Bestiary) (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Post-Editing Development

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars – Contracted.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers – LeBlanc working away.

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed – Contracted.

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Cults of the Blood God (KS) – Ready for KS.

Mummy 2

City of the Towered Tombs

Let the Streets Run Red – Art notes and contracts finishing going out this week.

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn – Rich doing artnotes.

Scion Mythical Denizens – Finals coming in soon.

Deviant

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – Totally contracted.

Vigil Watch – Wrapping up AD stuff this week.

Legendlore (KS)

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

In Layout

Chicago Folio – On it.

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds – Haven’t forgotten it.

Pirates of Pugmire – With Aileen.

Proofing

Dark Eras 2 – Off to WW this week for approval.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

M20 Book of the Fallen – Getting it to PoD this week.

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – Approval needed, then Backer PDF out to backers.

VtR Spilled Blood

At Press

V5: Chicago – Shipping to the KS fulfillment shippers. PoD proofs ordered.

Aeon Aexpansion – PDF and PoD versions on sale on Weds at DTRPG!

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – Being printed.

Geist 2e Screen – Being printed.

DR:E – Being printed.

DRE Screen – Being printed.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties – PoD proof on the way.

Trinity RMCs

Tales of Good Dogs – PoD proof ordered.

Memento Mori – Backer PDF going out to backers soon.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today is the birthday of Wassily Kandinsky, a painter born in 1866 whose later paintings after WWI were completely abstract. Now most of our illustrations depict things rather than going for abstractions, but how they depict them stylistically, and why different people respond to the different approaches our illustrators use, is part of creating the moods inherent to our various game lines. There’s something else going on in our brains when we see art beyond just IDing that the piece looks like a thing, and Kandinsky was creating abstract art intended to evoke sound and meaning because he supposedly had a direct link to that part of the brain. According to popular thinking, he was one of those rare people who “hear color” and “see pictures” when he listening to music. There’s not really medical proof he indeed had synaesthesia, as it’s called, but he did recall hearing a strange hissing noise when mixing colours in his paintbox as a child, and later became an accomplished cello player, which he said represented one of the deepest blues of all instruments.

[acaseforpencils]

Mary Lawton.

Bio: I was born on Long Island, New York in 1958, and loved drawing and making art since I was pretty young. I remember really loving Rat Fink, the anti-hero of Mickey Mouse, and tracing pictures of him. I even had a plastic Rat Fink ring when I was eight. I am the youngest of a very loud and raucous group of six siblings who always encouraged me to make art. My parents were my biggest fans, they would parade their friends through my bedroom to show them the murals I drew on my walls. I read MAD and National Lampoon with a fervor, and I still remember some of the insanely hilarious cartoons I saw in those magazines, although Alfred E. Newman's face gave me nightmares. After backpacking in Europe for a while after high school, I moved to Boston in 1979, and became friends with a bunch of artists, some of them cartoonists and animators. We were all enamored of Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, who were bursting on to the alternative comics scene at the time. I devoured their comics, and also loved Roz Chast, B Kliban, William Steig, Mary Fleener, Gahan Wilson, and many others. I knew that I wanted to do what they were doing.

Find this print, here!

I was drawing very primitive, autobiographical strips about my childhood at that time. I sent them out to magazines and newspapers and they began to get published. It was a nice time to be an 'alt' cartoonist as there were so many markets and the pay was great. I also loved cooking, so I worked in restaurants during the day to make a living, and drew in my little bedroom/studio at night.  After ten years cooking and cartooning, I left Boston in 1989, moved to Manhattan, and worked at Chelsea Animation, an ink-and-paint studio on 23rd Street. Working there with a great group of like-minded artists was like going to a party every day. Non-stop hilarity. We all sat over our light tables wearing white cotton gloves, painting cels of all sorts of commercial animated films. At that time I took a few classes at the School of Visual Arts at night.  

Since then, my art has been in many magazines and newspapers, books, greeting cards, museums and galleries, and I've done a gazillion commissions. In the 1980's I sent samples of my cartoons to William Steig for his advice, because I just loved his drawings and books. He became my friend and mentor, and always encouraged me to send to The New Yorker. I did this for nearly thirty years and finally got one accepted in 2017. I have sold several to The New Yorker online, and a few more in their hard copy magazine. Around the same time, I was invited to join Six Chix, a comic strip by six women, a different one each day of the week, syndicated with King Features. It was created in 2000 by Jay Kennedy, the masterful editor at King, who died tragically in 2007.  Mine is the Thursday comic, and every six weeks I draw a Sunday. I love being part of this group of women cartoonists!

I have saved all of the rejection slips I got since I started sending out my cartoons in the early 1980's. They are in an album that now weighs 4.5 lbs. It's my reminder to never give up, to just keep returning to my work table. Persistence pays.

Favorite cartoon: I think my favorite cartoon that I have had published in the New Yorker magazine is my very first [editor’s note: the cartoon at the beginning of the interview], because it was so dang thrilling to finally be in that magazine. I happened to be in New York the week it appeared in print. On my way back home to Texas, as my plane flew over Manhattan at night I looked down at those lights below and I felt like I had really made it. It was a dream come true! Also, since it was an airplane cartoon, I shared it with the flight attendants, who all got a good laugh, and they brought me a glass of champagne. Later that year I was part of the Funny Ladies exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Liza Donnelly was so kind to invite me to be in the show. To be there on opening night and to meet Emma Allen and the cartoonists that I have admired for so long, felt like being at The Academy Awards. Only better.

I really love to draw political cartoons, so I'm also proud of the ones that have made it into The New Yorker Daily Cartoon.

Tools: I drew with Rapidograph pens for many years. I switched to dip pens, which I enjoy depending on the paper.  Lumpy or textured paper, ugh. Smooth paper, and it's perfect. I practiced using the dip pen by doing calligraphy for a long time, with lots of different nib sizes and shapes. At the moment I use Pigma Graphic in all sizes, but they are disposable, so I'm on the hunt for a new reusable pen so I don't add to the land fill. I sketch out cartoons in pencil most of the time, then ink in. I love Arches papers, and use them for finishes and gouache paintings. Or Bristol paper. I buy big sheets and cut them up. But every day, I use a lot of printer paper for roughs. The pencils I mostly use are the Faber Castell 9000, in a 3 or 4 B. I also love Ticonderoga pencils, not only for their beautiful name but they feel perfect on Boise all-purpose printer paper.  I love paint brushes of all kinds. I use gouache every day. It took me many years to learn about gouache, to finally get how it works. It's complicated because of its soluble nature. I looked at instructional videos on Youtube, and got the hang of it. I use black gouache for my washes, and Titanium White right out of the tube for covering up mistakes, or all sorts of highlights.  My old work lamp has a long arm so I can move the light all over my table, which is really handy.

Tools I wish I used better: Sketchbooks! That seems odd, but it's true. My sketchbooks are very messy, and not something I'm proud of, or want to save and look back on. I have seen beautiful sketchbooks which are themselves art pieces, but it's not my style! I mostly want to toss them into the recycle bin once they are full. Also, I wish I could use computer drawing tools.

Tool I wish existed: Can't think of one.    

Tricks: I don't look at social media much, and I think that helps my creativity, and certainly gives me more time to do stuff.    

Misc: I have three big-time men in my life, my husband and my two sons. Four, if you count my dog Buddy. All bring me a ton of joy. I've lived in Texas for 25 years, and I encourage visitors! We always like to show folks the Texas we know and love.  

Website, etc: 

Instagram

newyorker.com

sixchixcomics.com

funnytimes.com

narrativemagazine.com

thenib.com

Editor’s Note: If you enjoy this blog, and would like to contribute to labor and maintenance costs, there is a Patreon, and if you’d like to buy me a cup of coffee, there is a Ko-Fi account as well! I do this blog for free, and your support helps a lot! You can also find more posts about art supplies on Case’s Instagram and Twitter! Thank you!

[lowtldes]

your sharp and glorious thorn

rating: M (for game-typical violence)

ships: arthur morgan/original female character

chapter: 2/?

previous chapters: chapter one [tumblr] [ao3]

words: 6k

tags: slow burn, treasure hunting

warnings: game-typical violence

chapter summary: Arthur crosses paths with Iris sooner than he’d like.

also on ao3!

Arthur doesn’t like riding into Strawberry. It’s not that he’s nervous someone will recognize him from the time he broke Micah out of jail, it has more to do with the fact that he and Micah just about killed half the town.

No one is going to recognize him. No one is alive to recognize him. And it’s that that stirs guilt in his belly. He’s never been one to enjoy killing needlessly. Let alone half a town of innocent people.

Arthur lights a cigarette, pressing it between his lips to stop himself from gritting his teeth. No, Micah Bell has already ruined enough things for the gang, Arthur’s not going to let the mere thought of the man ruin his day now too.

STRAWBERRY. Arthur lets his eyes linger on the overhead sign as he takes a drag of his cigarette, passing through his exhaled smoke, looking as if a fog had parted for the tourist town to grace his vision.

He can probably stay the night here, before setting out again tomorrow. Watson’s Cabin, right up north in Big Valley. A tip worth looking into, especially since he was only a day’s ride out of Strawberry when he heard about it.

Back in Strawberry, barely two days since he beat that godawful old man and left his granddaughter with a bunch of dead bodies by the dam. He sighs. This robbery better be worth it, he’s spent far too much time away from camp, he’s gotta have something good to show for it when he gets back to Horseshoe Overlook.

“You… What the hell are you doing back here!”

Arthur tenses up. Hopefully they weren’t talking to him.

“Hey, hey, I’m talkin’ to you!”

Arthur sighs and stops his horse, Charon, right outside the hotel. The mayor’s reciting the same speech he hears every time he rides into town, it’s nothing but background noise now, just about as significant as the cigarette butt Arthur tosses into the dirt.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard ya,” Arthur grumbles and slides off his horse. He turns around, briefly looking for the source of the voice before he wrinkles his nose at the sight of the man.

It’s Jameson Cole, looking about as drunk as Uncle on his birthday. Whatever this man has to say to Arthur, it isn’t going to be any good. At least this isn’t going to be about that awful business with Micah.

“Mr. Cole,” Arthur greets coolly as the old man staggers towards him, bottle in hand. Jesus, the man hasn’t even crossed the road and Arthur can smell him from here. “I think it’s best you and I don’t talk.”

“You—y-you good fer nothin’ thief,” Cole hiccups when he’s close enough to Arthur, much to the dismay of Arthur’s sense of smell. “You kidnapper!”

“Excuse me?” Arthur says slowly, quietly, not keen on the attention the man’s words are drawing to the pair of them. The new Sheriff is an earshot away, dammit, Arthur doesn’t need those kinds of eyes on him right now. “I stole nothin’ you didn’t owe. If my memory serves right, it weren’t even you that paid. It was—”

“Iris! Oh, you bastard,” Cole wails, pausing to take another swig from his bottle. He jabs Arthur in the chest with his index finger. “You! You took ‘er! Stole her away and now I gotta beg on the street for a drink! Kidnapper!”

Folk are staring at them now. Women swiftly walking away from the scene, men eyeing Arthur suspiciously with their hands resting heavily on their guns.

Arthur’s spilled enough blood in Strawberry. He doesn’t want another fight on his hands, not here. He raises his hands in surrender, leaning back from old Jameson Cole and his whiskey stench. “You’re drunk, old man. Get out of here and stop makin’ a scene.”

Jameson Cole blinks blearily at Arthur, breaths coming out like wheezes. “You give her back. You give back Iris, oh, stupid little Iris, I’m afraid the house neeeeeds a cleaning! She ain’t been back since ya ran off with her!”

“I don’t have her, you old fool,” Arthur sneers, walking away from the man. “Maybe your granddaughter saw sense and ran far away from ya!”

Arthur shouldn’t care, the Coles are people he should be done with. If the world were in any way kind to him, he’d have never seen them again. But the knowledge that Miss Iris Cole didn’t return home after that whole mess with the treasure hunters doesn’t sit well with him.

Should’ve seen to it that she got home safe, he berates himself, you goddamn idiot, Morgan. What kind of man does that? Leave a woman out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bunch of dead bodies? This is why he loathes debt collection. Arthur’s already a bad man, he knows that, but collecting debts has always brought out a shade of himself he does not like any more than he likes his usual self.

Arthur sighs and mounts Charon again, muttering under his breath. “Don’t owe these people a goddamn thing. Ah, you fool, Morgan.”

He starts to ride out of Strawberry—so much for a night in the hotel—and takes the road leading in the direction of Owanjila.

“Hey, you!” Someone calls to him at the end of the main road—a young woman lugging a bucket full of fresh water. “Mister, I heard you talking to that awful old man.”

Arthur slows his horse, running a tired hand down his face. “Listen, Miss, I already told the man I don’t have his granddaughter—”

“But you’re heading out to look for her, right?” The woman presses, a bit of water sloshing out of the bucket. “That’s why you’re leaving town?”

“Yeah,” Arthur grunts, half shrugging. “I guess.”

“I work with Iris at the hotel,” the woman says, frowning softly, concerned. “She came to the hotel last night. Late last night, a strange look in her eyes. She told me Mr. Davis is dead and that she’s leaving.”

“Leaving? Where?”

“She didn’t say exactly,” the woman’s frown deepens. “I don’t think she quite knew where she was goin’ either. Just said. North. North of Big Valley. If you’re looking for her, you might want to start there.”

“Big Valley,” Arthur nods. The cabin he plans to rob is around there. Good. This won’t be a complete waste of his time. “Thank you, Miss.”

“Please find her, sir. She didn’t… she looked—she didn’t look quite right.”

Guilt stirs in the pit of his stomach. “I’ll get moving, then. Have a good afternoon, Miss.”

-

Iris ignores her rumbling stomach and walks along the road, treasure map clutched in one hand and Sammy's reigns in the other.

Her feet hurt. These old boots certainly weren’t made for walking, but she keeps on.

She knows where the treasure is. Or, at least, she'll know it when she sees it. There's no special instinct to treasure hunting, after all. Considering what Mr. Morgan did yesterday (or was it the day before?), it's as easy as sticking your arm into a hollow rock.

The treasure is by water, a shallow bed of water, according to the illustration on the map. And it's in Big Valley. That, she knows. Has to be. It's a gut feeling. Perhaps there is a special instinct.

Sammy lets out a whinny of protest, nodding his head and almost yanking the reigns out of Iris’s hand.

“I know,” Iris says. “I know, I know. But we're almost there, Sammy. We have to be. We ain’t riding back to Strawberry any time soon.”

Sammy huffs, sounding almost disapproving, but begins to follow again when Iris tugs on the reigns.

There’s that thundering sound again, her stomach groaning for food. Iris doesn’t have any food. She knows nothing of plant life, either. She only knows that eating the wrong plant can be a deadly thing. Better to be hungry for a day than to die by a plant.

The thundering sound continues, though her stomach has stopped its protests. The sound is distant, getting closer by the second. It's a rider, she realizes, the familiar galloping sound of a horse.

Iris stops and turns in the direction of the sound. Whoever it is, they’re heading straight towards her.

Oh. It’s the outlaw.

Iris clutches the map tight in her hand and stands close to Sammy, right next to the saddlebags. If he’s changed his mind and come back to rob her, she’s got one of the dead treasure hunter’s cattleman revolvers.

The memory of Mr. Morgan gunning down the treasure hunters is fresh on her mind again. He moves fast, Iris probably wouldn’t even be able to pull out her gun before he robs her. She’d at least like to try to get a few shots in, though.

He clicks his tongue and stops his horse when he’s close enough. His guns, notably, are in their respective holsters, not at all drawn and pointed at Iris when he dismounts his horse.

“Miss Cole,” he greets, hands resting on his gun belt. He’s exactly the same as when she first met him, lurking outside her homestead like a bad omen. Only this time, there’s no growl to his voice. There’s a roughness that’s still there, ever-present to the man’s voice, but this time around his greeting doesn’t sound like danger.

“Mr. Morgan,” she says back, voice feeble not with fear but with a tiredness. “You’ve… you’ve returned to rob me.”

Mr. Morgan tilts his head back, scrutinizing her from under the brim of his hat.

Iris is sure she looks as though some sort of fiendish wind has passed through. She hasn’t spared a moment to maintain a civilized appearance—her braid is all out of sorts from the wind and her fidgeting with it, her skirts are muddy from all the walking, her shoes are on the verge of falling to pieces, and she’s quite sure that her sore eyes are bloodshot, with darkened circles of exhaustion to complete the look.

Oh, she must look half-mad.

“No, ah,” the outlaw clears his throat awkwardly, scratching at his short beard. “No, I am not here to rob you.”

“Then what is this?” Iris frowns, hand tightening on Sammy’s reigns. “Have I stolen something of yours, then? Another debt that has to be paid?”

Mr. Morgan looks uncomfortable. “No.”

“Then why have you sought me out? I thought you’d have gone far, far away from Strawberry by now.”

“Well,” Mr. Morgan takes a step forward, cautious as though he might spook her. “The people in town said you haven’t been seen for a good while, and I didn’t like how I just left you in the middle of nowhere the other day, so I came out to… well, to check on ya.”

“Do you always check on your debtors after you’ve taken their money?”

He frowns. “Well, no. But—"

“Then why bother? You don’t have a to give me, or my granddaddy, or the entirety of Strawberry a second thought. A lapse of judgement is what you’re experiencing, Mr. Morgan. So allow me to direct you back to Strawberry, and we can go our separate ways.”

Mr. Morgan’s voice rises an octave, indignance lacing his voice. “Direct me back to Str—”

“To Strawberry, yes.” Iris lets go of Sammy’s reigns and crosses the short distance between them. She rests her hand lightly on Mr. Morgan’s arm and nudges him to turn around, pointing somewhere off behind him with the map clutched tight in her hand. “You can get to Strawberry simply by going back the direction you came from.”

Mr. Morgan resists at first, then obliges her light shoving and turns. “I know that, Miss Cole. You might think me a fool, but I’m at least a fool who knows where he’s going—is that a treasure map?”

“It is.” Iris swiftly retracts herself from his space and starts walking away, her sore feet screaming with each step. “And it’s close.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing this whole time? People are worried about ya, Miss Cole.”

“I’m sure the only person breaking a sweat is Gramps, since I’m not there to clean up after him.”

“Well, what about your job?” Mr. Morgan says, following hastily after her. “Ain’t the hotel manager wondering where you are?”

“The hotel manager is dead,” Iris reminds him, halting to glare at a spot in the distance. Little Creek River. “Those treasure hunters shot Mr. Davis in the head.”

“Shit. Well… well someone else must’ve stepped up in the hotel,” Mr. Morgan says slowly, trying to salvage whatever’s left of his persuasion attempt. “There’s gotta be somethin’ in town that you gotta get back to. You can’t just wander around forever.”

Iris briskly spins around to glare at him. Mr. Morgan’s standing close enough that her long dark braid whips across his chest at the motion. “My boss at the hotel is dead. My job is most likely up in the air at the moment, and this is a moment I’d like to take to reflect on how I’ve been living my life.”

Mr. Morgan presses his lips together. “But you got—”

“I have nothing in that town, in that life, except for my leech of a granddaddy!” Iris looks at the worn map in her hands and sighs. “I don’t know if I want to go back to Strawberry, Mr. Morgan. I feel as though I’ve been going through my life like a phantom, and I need to start going through it like a person. With… with some kind of ambition. Something to look forward to.”

“Those are some dangerous thoughts, Miss Cole.”

“Are they?” Iris sighs again. “Twenty-seven years wasted in Strawberry. Did you know I’ve never set foot outside of West Elizabeth? Let alone Big Valley? I’ve got nothing to show for my life.”

“You don’t…” Mr. Morgan scowls. “You don’t have to show anyone anything.”

“I want to show myself something,” Iris says firmly, steeling his gaze. He often hides underneath his hat, she’s noticed, and being close enough now to peek under the brim and catch his blue-green eyes feels like she’s discovered something hidden once again. “I don’t know what I plan to do with my life after this, but for now, all I know is that I want to find this treasure. I want to show myself that I can find it.”

“And where is this treasure, huh?” Mr. Morgan scoffs. “No need to get all protective. I ain’t gonna take it from ya. I just… you—you look like hell, Miss Cole.”

Iris feels her face heat up. She scowls and walks away from him again, towards the soft sounds of trickling water. “I’m going to get this treasure, with or without your bothering.”

She hears Mr. Morgan mutter something under his breath, but he keeps following her. Risking a glance back, she sees that their horses are following after them slowly.

Little Creek River looks shallow enough that the water would barely come up to her ankles. Iris does her best to ignore Mr. Morgan’s lingering, glaring hard at the map while she hears him light a cigarette.

This looks like the spot. The way the illustration’s lines are darker around this particular bend looks precisely the same as the area in front of her. Iris’ eyes flit back and forth between the map and the riverbend before her. The X looks to be about ten feet away, buried right in the bed of the creek.

“How do you know that this is the river in the map?” Mr. Morgan’s voice grates over her thinking. He stands by their horses, cigarette between his fingers and a curious look on his face.

“I like riding around the valley when I get the time,” Iris answers, folding up the map and walking towards the treasure spot, the soil wet beneath her boots. “Not as often as I’d like, but… I admire the landscapes long enough to guess right about which stone goes where.”

“Well, you found that treasure last time. I can’t argue with that.” He snuffs the cigarette and looks around. “Damn. It’s gonna be dark any minute now.”

“Scared of the dark, Mr. Morgan?”

“Nah. Just don’t wanna die like an idiot, is all.” He walks to where she’s standing in the creek, brows raised as she kicks around the silt. “The wildlife around ain’t something to underestimate. Especially in the dark.”

Iris glances at him before sticking her hands into the cold, cold water to dig. “Could we camp, perhaps?”

“We?”

“I’m assuming you’re not going to leave me alone until we get back to Strawberry.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Mr. Morgan sighs. “Just… get a move on with that, will ya? Sun’s already coming down, and I’d rather find somewhere with four walls and a roof.”

Iris snorts, extracting her hands from the silt and opting to dig into the spot beside her previous attempt. “I suppose that’s better than a tent. But I doubt the folk living up in these parts would be hospitable.”

“There’s a cabin a heard about. I was plannin’ to camp there for a night or two to scope out another place nearby. Vetter’s Echo, I think it was called. Heard the owner hasn’t been seen for a long time. Whoever they are, they’re likely long gone, I’m positive they won’t mind if we use their place as shelter.”

“What were you planning to head up here for, if not to find me for whatever’s nagging at your conscience?” Iris says, then snorts. “An outlaw with a conscience, how ironic.”

Mr. Morgan makes a noncommittal sound. “It’s none of your business. Anyway, the cabin should just be up the ways from here. There’s likely some provisions there, which we need, because you’re lookin’ mighty peckish.”

“Were you planning a robbery?”

“None of your goddamn business, Miss Cole. You don’t need to get involved with that,” Mr. Morgan says firmly, all but confirming her suspicions.

Iris quietly wonders if she does want to get involved with that. She digs deeper into the silt, dirt getting caught beneath her fingernails. What does she plan to do after all of this? She can’t go back to monotonous life in Strawberry. She refuses.

Her nails scrape against something solid in the dirt. Iris jumps at the contact. “Oh! I’ve found it!”

Whatever it is, it’s smaller than a buried treasure chest from pirate stories. Definitely not shaped like any container Iris has seen before. Her fingers find some part to grip and curl around it, pulling it out of the riverbed. The top of it emerges from the silt as she pulls it up, smooth and bone white under the water.

Iris manages to pull the treasure up halfway before she recoils with a shriek, falling backward into the creek and soaking up even more of her skirts.

Mr. Morgan is next to her in a second, boots splashing in the shallow water and hands hovering cautiously over her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Iris doesn’t answer, just stares wide-eyed at the human skull still stuck in the silt. The human skull she dug up with her bare hands. Her skin crawls.

Mr. Morgan eyes follow to where she’s looking. He breathes an astounded, eloquent, “Jesus.”

“I… I touched it. Him. Her. Whoever they were,” Iris whispers, distraught. “I…”

“Well,” Mr. Morgan mutters, wading over to the skull. “Looks like you found your treasure.”

Mr. Morgan pulls the skull out of the silt and water, standing to his full height. Something about seeing him—someone else—taking her findings in their hands kicks Iris back into motion. Splashing a bit in the creek, Iris scrambles to a stand and snatches the skull right out of the outlaw’s hands.

“Thought you were frightened of it,” he says, shrugging and raising his hands in surrender.

Maybe at first.

“I was just surprised,” Iris says, narrowing her eyes at the small grin on his face. She turns her attention back to the skull. “Whoever this dead fella was… he can’t hurt me. Why should I be scared?”

“It’s not every day you dig up a dead head with your bare hands,” Mr. Morgan offers, perhaps attempting to console her. “Surprise and, uh, fear—it’s reasonable.”

Iris doesn’t answer him, but she frowns anyway, looking down at the skull so maybe Mr. Morgan doesn’t see her flushed face.

It’s already dark, the sun had fully set while she was digging, but Iris sees something in the skull’s hollowed eye catch briefly under the starlight. The smallest of shines.

“Miss Cole,” Mr. Morgan says, standing much closer now to look at the skull over her shoulder. His clothes smell like cigarette smoke. “I think you’re gonna have to—”

“Yes,” Iris cuts his sentence off swiftly, quietly. She swallows hard. “Yes, I see.”

“Would you like me to do it? It’ll still be your treasure, even if you let me.”

“I can do it. I will do it.”

Iris readjusts the skull in her hands, turning it upside down. She keeps a firm grip on the jaw, fingers sliding into the small, stiff opening of the mouth. With her other hand, she hooks her fingers into both eye holes, grimacing.

Sorry, she thinks. Then she pulls her hands apart with a sharp tug.

There’s a crunch as the jawbone snaps clean off, Mr. Morgan standing so close that with the force of her tug she accidentally elbows him when the piece comes loose. He lets out a small, winded oof as her elbow collides with his gut.

“Oh, sorry,” Iris says quietly, out of polite instinct. She’s not really paying attention, instead gazing into the hollow of the opened skull.

“No harm done,” he mutters.

There’s still quite a bit of bone in the way, but Iris turns the skull back right side up and shakes its contents into her palm. Several gold coins fall out, along with two more gold nuggets, and a small scrap of paper.

“You’re telling me that all this was buried not even a foot into the ground, for any fool to find?” Mr. Morgan huffs. “I should give up robberies n’ just start digging.”

“Any fool with a map,” Iris corrects, staring at the gold bunched in her hand with wide, wide eyes.

“And you knew exactly where it was again,” Mr. Morgan muses, stepping back and adjusting his hat. “Think you got a knack for this, Miss Cole.”

“I do, don’t I?” Iris looks down at herself, holding the treasures tight in her hand and the skull in the other. No bag, no pockets. She looks back up, past Mr. Morgan’s impressed expression and instead squints at the horses grazing several feet behind him. “Sammy! Sammy over here!”

Sammy finds the grass more interesting than the gold Iris is holding. Typical, that horse never listens to anyone.

“I’ll get him,” Mr. Morgan says, waving a hand as he walks away from her. He takes Sammy’s reigns and starts leading the horse towards where Iris stands by the creek, and whistles for his own dark horse to follow. “Charon! Follow me, boy.”

“Charon?” Iris asks when he’s back within earshot. “How dramatic of you.”

“Thought it’d fit him well,” the outlaw smiles fondly, tugging Sammy’s reigns. “I stole him at this show just outside of Valentine. There was a man on the stage, no arms and no legs, telling old Greek tales.”

“And you stole his horse?” Iris asks, clutching the skull and gold close to her chest.

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “Some bastard thought it’d be funny to throw things at the storyteller. He had a fine horse. That’s Charon right here,” he jerks his thumb over his shoulder, pointing to his horse following him. “This here’s a dark bay Andalusian—a war horse. Thought it’d be nice to name him after that half-horse half-man the limbless man spoke of. The one who trained heroes.”

Iris frowns. She’s not the most educated person. Not educated like those city folks who stay at the hotel, but she has read some books, especially the ones educated city folk accidentally leave behind. A book about old myths from far away lands kept her up for weeks.

“Forgive me, Mr. Morgan, but I think you’re confused.”

He stops Sammy right in front of her and lets go of the reigns. “Confused?”

“The half-horse half-man you’re thinking of is Chiron. An easy mistake, I suppose, since the names are quite similar.”

Mr. Morgan stops and stares at her in disbelief. Perhaps he’s expecting her to laugh and joke, but she’s quite sure that Charon is not the figure he’s thinking of.

“Goddammit,” he exhales, voice rising an octave. He shakes his head, hiding beneath the brim of his hat. Iris wonders if he’s blushing. “So you’re tellin’ me I’ve been calling my horse some nonsense this whole time?”

“Not quite nonsense, no.” Iris walks over to Sammy’s saddlebag. “If I recall, Charon served as a ferryman to bring souls to Hades.”

Mr. Morgan hums, squinting at his horse as if to see if the story sticks.

Iris tries to fit the treasures in the small saddlebag, but the gun she picked off the dead treasure hunter is in the way. “If you keep the name, your horse is now death’s ferryman. Do you… do you see yourself as death, Mr. Morgan? Or I suppose the name could extend to you, making your horse the vessel and you the actual ferryman.”

“Well…” Mr. Morgan rests his hands on his gun belt, clearing his throat awkwardly. “I have killed some people… quite a lot of people. But it was them or me. Ah, I shouldn’t be saying these things to a lady.”

Before Iris can respond, she grabs the gun in the saddlebag the wrong way. Intending to extract it from the bag to make room, she accidentally hits the trigger and a shot fires a hole out of the bottom of the bag.

“Oh!” Iris startles back, ears ringing from the closeness of the gunshot. Sammy whinnies and rocks his head back and forth in a panic. Charon, on the other hand, doesn’t flinch at the sound.

“Jesus!” Mr. Morgan yells, hand instinctively falling to one of the revolvers holstered on his belt. “What the hell was that?”

“I… the gun—shit, I blew a hole through the saddlebag!”

“Why is there a gun in the saddlebag?”

“I took it from one of those treasure hunters you killed!” Iris snaps back at him. “What’s the problem with keeping it in on my horse, anyway? You got an entire armory on your war horse, Mister.”

Mr. Morgan sighs and runs a hand down his face. “Jesus.”

“Oh, this damn bag is ruined.” The saddlebag is useless now. The hole at the bottom is big enough for any of the treasures to fall out.

Mr. Morgan motions for her to come closer. “Alright, give the gold to me. I can put it in my satchel for the time being.”

“No!” Iris scowls, holding the treasures close. “Do you take me for some kind of idiot?”

“You’re an idiot if you think it’ll be a good idea to walk back into Strawberry holding that gold out for everyone to see.”

“How do I know you won’t just run away the moment I hand the gold over to you?”

Mr. Morgan places his hand on his chest, eyes serious. “I give ya my word that I won’t, Miss. I just wanna see you home safe.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Iris says. “You’ve made it clear several times that you rob people for a living.”

Something moves in Sammy’s saddlebag. A slow, sliding movement before it falls right out of the hole and lands on the grass with a thump. Her first gold nugget from the last treasure.

“Miss Cole, your treasure’s as good as gone if you try carrying it in that bag. I promise I won’t steal from you.”

Iris narrows her eyes at him, trying to look as threatening as she can, but the threat is lost the moment her hungry stomach rumbles as loud as thunder in the sky. Mr. Morgan’s lips quirk, the damned outlaw is trying not to laugh.

“Alright. Fine,” Iris frowns, stepping towards him. “Put it in your bag.”

Mr. Morgan flashes her a small, tight smile and moves for his satchel, opening it up for her to dump her gold into.

“You’re not keeping that skull, are ya?”

“I thought it could be a souvenir. A trophy for my findings.”

“I’m not carrying a dead fella in my satchel.”

“Oh, alright,” Iris says, slightly dejected. She turns around and tosses the skull back into the creek.

“Poor bastard,” Mr. Morgan says, watching the skull splash into the water. He picks up the last gold nugget from the ground and turns to his horse. “Come on, I’m sure there’ll be some food for you at Vetter’s Echo.”

-

The cabin is one of the smallest Iris has ever seen, and the moment she and Mr. Morgan hitch their horses a bad feeling settles in the pit of her stomach.

“Keep that gun with ya,” Mr. Morgan says. “We might find a holster for that in here. That means no more shooting holes through bags.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Iris asks, following him up the path. “What if someone is still living there? What if they don’t want us around?”

In the dark, the cabin looks eerie. What if whoever’s inside has gone mad from the isolation? What if they try to attack Mr. Morgan? Or if they try to attack her?

Iris tightens her hold on the treasure hunter’s revolver—her revolver. I’m a treasure hunter now too, I suppose.

“Then we rob whoever’s living in here,” Mr. Morgan shrugs, answering as if the answer was the simplest thing in the world. “Just enough to be on our way, we won’t let ‘em starve.”

“I saw camp supplies on your horse,” Iris suggests, casting a glance back at Charon in the trees. “Why couldn’t we just camp?”

“A fire and a tent ain’t gonna protect us if someone or some animal gets the wrong idea about approaching us,” Mr. Morgan answers gruffly. “Now if I was on my own, maybe I would’ve. But I think you’d be better indoors. Less chance for predators.”

Iris stops on the steps up to the cabin while Mr. Morgan quietly turns the doorknob. He grimaces when the door swings open with a rather loud creak, then takes a cautious step inside. Iris begins to follow him inside, but freezes when she hears a loud, loud rumble of breath.

“Shit,” is all she hears from Mr. Morgan inside before the roar of some kind of behemoth shakes the cabin.

There’s a shout from Mr. Morgan, and Iris makes it to the door to see a bear on top of him, roaring and clawing at him. The back of the cabin looks like it’s been torn open long ago, and judging by the old corpse on the floor next to Mr. Morgan, this bear has been the only occupant of the cabin for quite some time.

Iris screams, unsure what to do as Mr. Morgan gets mauled, fear freezing the blood in her veins. She’s never seen a bear up close, and her mind can’t fathom just how big a bear is. The walls of the cabin are practically hugging the creature.

Mr. Morgan cries out again, drawing a knife and slashing at the beast, and it’s only then that Iris registers that she’s here and that she can do something. Something, maybe, with the gun in her hands.

“What in high hell!” Someone screams, voice full of terror. Oh, it’s coming from her, she’s the one doing the screaming.

Mr. Morgan just barely dodges a swipe of the bear’s teeth before Iris finally kicks into motion, drawing her revolver and unloading every bullet left.

Which is about three bullets.

The bear roars as the bullets embed themselves into its hide, but it doesn’t seem to be too injured. Instead, it is still very intent on making Mr. Morgan its next meal. She watches Mr. Morgan continue his struggle, there’s a blur of the bear’s paws and suddenly a bleeding scratch on his arm.

Then she sees an old shotgun, lying on the ground between Mr. Morgan and the old corpse.

Iris has never fired a shotgun before.

She darts down for it, not really having to avoid the bear as it doesn’t even seem to be aware of her existence, and checks to see if the shotgun is loaded. Iris steps back into the doorframe and takes aim, this time being sure to not fire blindly and instead target the bear’s face.

In the heat of the moment, Iris forgets that some guns, powerful guns, not only pack a punch to whoever’s being shot, but also to whoever’s doing the shooting if they’re not prepared for it. Iris pulls the trigger, the blast of the gun deafening, and she sees the shot go right for the bear’s face before the recoil violently flings her back.

Iris hits the railing hard, promptly tumbling backward over it with a scream and free-falling several feet before she hits the ground.

She lies on the lumpy ground, flat on her back and blinking stars. Distantly, she still hears the bear’s growling, but now she hears Mr. Morgan’s ragged voice as well, calling out for her.

“Miss Cole! Goddammit! Miss Cole, you alive?”

Iris’ vision clears, and oh, the bear has left the cabin, breaking through the railing and heading straight for her. Its face is bloody, very bloody. Did I do that?

Oh, the bear looks very angry with her. Absolutely livid.

“Oh no,” she mumbles, disoriented, voice failing her as she starts backing away in the dirt. “Oh, please no.”

“Hey!” Mr. Morgan calls out, a desperate note to his rough voice. “Hey, you big bastard!”

The bear rises to its hind legs, towering over Iris and roaring. A shot rings out, and both the bear and Iris look back at the cabin to see Mr. Morgan standing by the broken rails, his hat gone to reveal a mop of short brown hair, pointing two revolvers at the bear with a furious look on his face.

Mr. Morgan fires both guns at the bear’s face. In that second, it’s as if there’s no end to the bullets. The speed of it takes Iris right back to when he gunned down those two treasure hunters before they could even blink.

The bear lets out one last groan before it collapses onto the ground, its big, bloody head landing right in front of Iris.

Mr. Morgan holsters his guns and starts walking over to her and the bear. “Did it get ya?”

Iris doesn’t directly answer. She only leans back to lie flat on the grass again, a twig poking into her head as she looks up at the night sky. “Oh my goodness.”

“I was not expecting that,” Mr. Morgan murmurs, kicking the bear’s paw as he inspects the corpse. “Thank you, by the way.”

Iris sits up, willing her heart to stop its panicked racing. “For what?”

“Shootin’ the damn thing. Saved my life.”

“Well, you killed it. I s’pose I should thank you for saving my life as well.”

“Nah,” he says, smoothing back his hair. “Makes us even, I guess.”

He then draws a knife, bends down, and begins cutting away into the bear.

“What… what are you doing, Mr. Morgan?”

“Arthur,” he says.

“Pardon?”

“Just call me Arthur.”

“Okay… Arthur. Well, then you can just call me Iris. I suppose there’s no need for formalities if you’ve fought a bear together.”

Mr. Morgan—Arthur—huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“I think camping might be safer, Arthur.”

“Yeah. That ain’t no four walls and a roof up there anyway.”

“Three walls and a dead man.”

Arthur snorts and tears at the bear’s skin. “Better him than us, Miss—uh, Iris.”

Iris plucks a leaf out of her hair. “Better him than us.”

[ayerayerproject]

Picking up the Pieces

by Sarah Ichioka

Sarah Ichioka writes the keynote essay for Plasticity, a photography series by visual artist Ernest Goh on plastic pollution found on Punggol Beach, Singapore. The photography series was made during Exactly Foundation Art Residency programme 2018-19.

Sarah Ichioka writes the keynote essay for Plasticity, a photography series on microplastics and plastic pollution found on Singapore’s Punggol Beach, by visual artist, Ernest Goh for Exactly Foundation Art Residency programme.

On each page, a new object catches my eye; like jewels, like candy. I turn them over in my mind’s hand, admiring their lustrous surfaces, vivid colours.

My consumer-lust is aroused from its never too-deep sleep. That red shaft would make a stunning cocktail ring; that green streak, a tasty topping for a cake.

Mysterious figures appear on the white horizon. Our gazes meet. A wide-eyed soldier hoists his bayonet aloft. A wrinkled beast—a yak?—cocks a smirk in my direction. And wait, is that a… missile?

But then, suddenly, my fantasy falls to the ground. A bent red bottle cap, its curved white logo instantly recognisable. Intrigue flattens to disgust. These aren’t exotic goods whose heft begs handling; they’re nothing but so many tiny bits of trash.

++++

People who spend their time in or near the water—surfers, divers, sailors—are amongst the most passionate anti-plastic campaigners, because they see and feel the effects of ocean pollution first-hand. Photographer Ernest Goh traces the origin of his personal anti-plastic journey to a wave-borne shopping bag that smothered his face. Other friends—a married couple—have shared with me their experience of snorkeling and watching pieces of discarded plastic float by—including food packaging designed by the husband’s very own company.

Even when mediated through photos or videos, for folks more frequently in shopping malls than in the surf, there is a visual aspect of the plastic pollution crisis that imparts an immediate sense of accountability. That object I see lodged in the sea turtle’s nose is most certainly a plastic straw, just like the one I sucked my kopi peng through this morning; that cigarette lighter inside the ribcage of the albatross chick’s carcass is unmistakably the same item that my husband hides beneath his cufflinks and credit card receipts.

This visually self-evident character differentiates our plastic pollution crisis from some of the concurrent, compound emergencies we humans have created. Take our carbon pollution crisis: I have to believe climate scientists when they tell me that my holiday flights hasten the thawing of the permafrost. Or our nitrogen pollution crisis: I have to trust hydrology experts when they say that runoff from fertiliser used to grow my lunch causes massive downstream dead zones. In such cases, obfuscation and denial are easier to sustain, whether by ourselves, by industry lobbyists or by politicians.

The comparative legibility of our plastic pollution crisis might suggest that it is more politically “solvable” than some of these other potentially existential, yet less easily illustrated crises we face.

Having accepted our culpability, how might we begin to atone for it?

One response offers an appealing narrative of consumer activism: maybe we can (mindfully) shop our way out of this mess, by opting for more durable, reusable items? Certainly making a habit of carrying a water flask, a canvas shopping bag, and a set of bamboo eating utensils is a decent place to start, not least as a conversation starter and signal of one’s concern.

Perhaps the problem can be solved if we try our best to #recyclebetter, as the current Singaporean campaign urges? Or is recycling merely a “fig leaf on consumerism” as Jane Muncke, Director of Zurich's Food Packaging Forum puts it?

Maybe we should just tidy up a bit more? When I was a kid, my father would take me for an annual volunteer clean-up of the coast near our California home. Ending the day with sore muscles and a sack full of bullet casings (from a nearby shooting range), cigarette butts, condoms, deodorant rollers, and crumbling chunks of styrofoam was deeply satisfying to me, as tangible evidence of my personal concern and participation. Last year, I chaperoned my daughter’s preschool class on a similar clean-up outing to Singapore’s East Coast Park. This time, I felt rather less contented, overwhelmed by the seeming futility of our attempts, observing casual littering by park users and the floating trash ready to wash ashore as soon as we’d cleared our patch of beach.

As it happens, in about the same timespan as that between my leaving university and becoming a mother, the global volume of plastic production doubled. The same report that documents this leap estimates that global industries have produced 8,300 million metric tons of plastic since 1950. 6,400 million metric tons of this plastic—that’s roughly 100 times the weight of the concrete used to build the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest manmade structure—have become waste, nearly 80% of which sits in landfills or our natural environment. Less than 10% has been recycled, while the remainder has been incinerated (as has until recently been standard practice in Singapore).

In Singapore itself, plastic waste per capita has increased nearly 20 percent over the last 15 years. Looking at this country’s plastic bag usage alone, about 2,640 bags are thrown away every three seconds.

Projecting forward current production and pollution trends, another report predicts by 2050 our oceans could contain more plastics than fish (by weight), while the plastics industry itself could consume 15% of our annual carbon budget, and 20% of global oil production.

While our plastic pollution crisis is so overwhelmingly large, it is also mind-twistingly small. Here I mean small in the sense probed by Goh’s photographs: the scale of the microplastics, and now nano-plastics, whose presence has been documented in nearly every corner of our terrestrial and aquatic habitats, and which are now entering our food chain, with unknown, but potentially toxic effects.

The proximity of Goh’s plastic-strewn Punggol beach to a seafood restaurant seems apt. We study the food chain and hydrological cycles as concepts in school, but when most of us enter the “real” world we conveniently forget the practical implications of our systemic connections with the rest of nature.

Understanding the interconnected nature of plastic pollution’s causes and effects is a kind of reawakening. It destabilises the narrative that sees human culture as separate from the natural environment. That story of separation has been a necessary psychological cover for the exploitation of living systems that underpins nearly every aspect of our current economic and political order. Once we remember that ecocide is suicide, will we continue it?

Have we trashed Earth beyond habitability? No problem, we’ll just migrate to Mars, as deckhands or stowaways on a tech oligarch’s spaceship. But wait, turns out we’ve already trashed outer space too. Parts of broken satellites and rockets currently amount to over 8 million kilos of space waste. Rather like ocean plastics, the larger bits of space waste are fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces, which interfere with digital communications and might even hinder future spacecraft launches.

So let’s turn our eyes back to our damaged and depleted, yet still living and magnificent planet.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle, refuse”? Yes of course, let’s do that. But politely declining plastic straws and rinsing our Coke bottles is simply not enough. Also—and in my view, more importantly—we must act not just as individual consumers but collectively, as concerned citizens and social beings.

With this in mind, let me leave you with an alternative “4 Rs” to consider:

Rebel: Let us raise our voices together, unashamed to share our grief, rage, and disgust at the devastation that our overconsumption-based society has unleashed all around us, clogging our commons and poisoning our sources of sustenance. Let’s insist on better, for ourselves, and for the complex living systems upon which our survival depends.

Root: Let us ground the solutions to our plastic pollution crisis in the lived history and culture of Singapore and its region*. What local wisdom and practices, from karung guni men, to metal tiffins, to banana leaf wrappers and beyond, might be usefully revisited for contemporary use? How might technological and behavioural innovations ground themselves in Singaporeans’ particular resources and values?

Relate: Let us decipher and then communicate the underlying systems that perpetuate this global crisis. Let’s understand for example, who benefits from the otherwise dangerous proliferation of plastics, and how they exert influence on policies and regulations. Let’s study why some national and local governments have taken action to solve the plastic pollution crisis more swiftly than others, and what successful changes early actors have made. Let’s explore how our plastic pollution crisis intersects with other economic, environmental and social systems.

And finally, Regenerate: Let us draw inspiration from the natural world to craft materials and manufacturing cycles that are truly waste-free. Let’s design, build, and inhabit systems that proactively repair past damage, clean up our rubbish, and co-create the conditions for our living world to flourish. It will be a beautiful sight.

Sarah Mineko Ichioka is a Singapore-based urbanist, curator and writer. She leads Desire Lines, a consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social-impact organisations. www.sarahichioka.com

*Ernest Goh’s MA thesis at Goldsmiths followed a similar vein, looking to historical urban successes to inspire contemporary applications. In Goh’s case, the water fountains of ancient Rome inspired the idea for new public water fountains for Singapore, which will be piloted as a part of this project at ADEX 2019.

++++++

Further reading: https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/

https://polymerdatabase.com/polymer%20classes/Plastics%20Industry%20Facts.html

https://polymerdatabase.com/Polymer%20Brands/Plastic%20Manufacturers.html

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/lookup.php (tip: enter “plastic” in the Issue search field)

https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/our-industries/energy-and-chemicals.html

http://singapore-companies-directory.com/categories/singapore_plastics.htm

[inikavulpixelreviews]

Let’s Talk About Pokemon - Z...eroara?

570: Zorua

Welp. This is it. It's all downhill from here. This is the highlight. The big triumph over my heart. We won't see another Pokemon be able to top this one across the entirety of this review series. (Unless of course something even more perfect graces us in a future Generation...)

That's right folks. If you know me from my personal blog, it may be no surprise that I absolutely adore Zorua here. I've done my best to not outright say it on here, but I wouldn't be surprised if I laid out less than subtle hints. If not, well, er. Here it is. Zorua, my absolute #1 favorite Pokemon. And if that's not enough, these two collectively are also my favorite evolutionary family to boot!

And while I'll make an entire segment to just gush about both of them, I'll cover the two individually since they're fairly aesthetically different from each other.

Zorua here is the absolute perfect fox creature for me. Literally the only absent bit to it is that it's not a baby nine-tailed fox. But we'll be fair since we've already come up with one, and this one has a cooler theme at least just stand-alone as a fox. The tricky and shady look to it isn't just a personality choice; this Pokemon can change its appearance on a whim. Emphasis on appearance though. It's not like ditto where it'll literally shapeshift, but rather more like an illusionist; only appearing to shape shift. Which can create situations where you can fake-out opponents (or cheese the computer-controlled trainers by making it take on the shape of a Poison type as they desperately try to hit it wish Psychic moves that just won't work for whatever reason.)

The lil guy's tuft of hair even takes on the appearance of a little leaf over its head. Giving it some Tanooki vibes! Which is a Japanese mythical creature I'm surprised took this long for us to get a representative of. And even then, it's a fairly indirect one. It loses the look entirely when it evolves, but it at least fits with Zorua between the “leaf” on its head and the ability to psuedo-shape-shift.

Not to mention, Zorua's also got a bit of sentimental value being not only the first Pokemon I've laid eyes on from Gen 5 (comes with being the first of the two revealed, alongside Zoroark). But also this little bit of self-trivia I suppose. By now, a lot of people that follow me on any social medias or art sites will see me draw plenty of Pokemon the day they're announced to exist in a trailer or what-have-you, especially if I like them a lot. Zorua's the very first time I've ever done this. I guess granting I didn't start taking art seriously until well after Gen 4 was released, but still.

Personal Score: 10/10

I'm not quite done talking about Zorua, but let's get a word in for Zoroark too before we really get into gushing mode.

571: Zoroark

Zoroark may understandably be a put-off given it had marketing advertising it as the next Lucario and it's another anthropomorphic canid. But Zoroark is leagues ahead of Lucario with an overall tighter theme and aesthetic. Zoroark looks much more animalistic; mostly enough to be firmly out of any uncanny valley that it would have fallen in, and its design elements flow much better than Lucario's rather clunky execution. So I didn't mind Gamefreak trying to push this one as the “your new favorite Pokemon” shtick they like to pull. That's very selfish I know, but...

It's also very unique given anthropomorphic foxes in fiction. A lot of them take after Renamon or the like to be very pretty and upright. While Zoroark's still a design I'd describe as “pretty,” it's also very gangly and menacing, complete with the shit-eating grin, long face, and a design the emphasizes a flow into aggressive forward...ness.

My one solitary issue with the design is that its midsection looks a bit too skinny. I get it, sleek, tricky fox. But that's a step too far, I feel.

Personal Score: 10/10

A pair of near-perfect tricky foxies!!

Overall:

Ohhhh no. We're not getting off Matt's wild ride that easily. It's my absolute favorite, so instead of an “overall” segment, I'm gonna take a number from Bogleech and say let's do a...

Top 10 Things I Love About Zorua and Zoroark:

1. A Fox

Let's get this out of the way since that's a given. But I don't meant to point that out because I'm shallow like that; I can get REALLY picky about how my fox monsters look. But rather, these two are plenty unique among the other fox or fox-like Pokemon. Sure, I love me some Vulpix, Fennekin, and some of the Eeveelutions, but they all end up sharing the same general cutesy look. Zorua on the other hand takes on a whole other personality from the previously established foxy Pokemon. And Zoroark too! Ninetales and Delphox generally lean more toward looking beautiful more than anything, but that's not Zoroark's sole focus here. Instead, we get a much cooler looking monster with a more gangly face, which is a type of fox-look sorely missing from the foxmons all the way up until now. The only downside is that it isn't full gangly crookedness like Murkrow. But that's fine by me.

2. The Kabuki Dancer Theme

More prominent with Zoroark, for sure, is the fact that these two take heavily after Kabuki theater. Zoroark's really rocking the tons-o-hair look, with the both sporting some red markings to look like makeup.

3. Their Color Scheme

It's hard to go wrong with black and red, sure. That's a pretty go-to color scheme for something shady or, dare I say, “edgy”. But it serves these two better than most given they lean more toward the “shifty shadows” type of critter than “ultimate edgelord” like Shadow or Reaper or what have you. Then you also add in the teal, bluish green. Just the absolute perfect amount. A tiny accent and little more. Not too obtrusive or anything, because too much of that color could've easily thrown the whole thing off. But they held their restraint. Thank goodness.

4. Their Faces

I've gone over Zoroark's face enough by now, and how wonderful it is. But Zorua's adorably smug look and sly fox visage is the totally perfect foxy face. Now flaws. Just a sleezy friend.

5. They're Fluffy as Hell

Okay, this one I will admit is shallow as heck. But I don't care. Zorua's got the good ol neck ruff that makes it look super huggable. Zoroark may be sorely lacking a tail, but it plenty makes up for it with that big, poofy head of hair. Hair so big and poofy that their Zorua children can sleep in it. That's cute as hell.

6. The Okami Vibes

Obviously not in art style or even saying they deliberately went for an Okami look, but they certainly look like they wouldn't be too out of place as a creature out of Okami wouldn't they? Zoroark's design even calls Ninetails to mind, even moreso than the actual Ninetales. While Okami does tend to favor ogre-ish and Oni-like designs for their monsters, they do have such creatures running around like the tricky Tube Fox.

7. They Don't Kill Each Other's Vibe

It happens far too often that a cute or unique Pokemon will evolve into an ultimate badass that, while cool, end up really losing out on the original form's charm. These two, while pretty drastically different, aren't so completely detached that I'd say Zoroark is missing the same aesthetic cues of Zorua or vice versa!

8. They're Even Fun To Use Ingame!

Because of their Illusion ability, they can end up having a unique play pattern different form most other Pokemon. Especially if you're playing in the single-player parts of the game. Sadly, Zoroark can be predicted into with online battles since you get to see team layouts, but in a regular casual playthrough of a Pokemon game it's definitely fun to watch the AI fall for your disguise tricks. Especially when you disguise your Zoroark as a Fighting or Poison type fighting a Psychic type and watch as they hopelessly attempt to use Psychic moves against a Dark type.

I've also got a fun fascination with shapeshifting, so. Even psuedo-shapeshifting like with these two is neat. Ditto is cool and all but. A fox that shapeshifts? Get outta here. Now you're just toying with me.

9. Ridiculously Photogenic

Yeah, I guess technically any Pokemon is subject to this but. Just looking at illustrations of them is always really nice. Especially when you find really good ones. TCG art is for the most part pretty great, so of course I'm a fan of the illustration on certain cards.

10. Extremely Fun to Draw

Yeah, maybe that's not a totally fair thing but. I really can't say I'd ever get tired of drawing these two. I could draw them into infinity if I really wanted to just never draw anything else ever. That's the true problem with the world! To many things that are also fun to draw! Keeping me from drawing Zorua constantly! Bah!

There are two shames to this line. One being you could say that these two are pretty much sequels to Riolu and Lucario, Pokemon I've previously tore into. And Pokemon's not seemed shy of introducing, I hate putting it this way but, “furrybait” Pokemon. So these two had a success formulated in much the same way as Lucario. But they both pull it off so much more tastefully than Lucario's nonsense design does.

The other bummer being that, in a post-Gen 5 world, their popularity has significantly fallen off. Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with Pokemon other than my absolute favorites getting some time in the limelight, but it's so annoying seeing repeated Pokemon Marketing All-Stars that you find boring getting things like Mega Evolutions or Alolan Forms with your top favorite Pokemon of all time sadly getting left out. Lucario can get a Mega, Charizard can get two, but not Zoroark?!

Anyway, sure, this review has gone on long enough. Fiiiiine. I got to sing all the praise I can. Fox Pokemon has historically been the best of the canid Pokemon. So hopefully all foxes from this point onward don't disappoint. You got high standards to live up to!

[Archive]

[olive-bell]

The Silhouette - American Folk Art

A silhouette was a photograph of a person that simply showed the outline of the person, usually in profile and filled with solid shadow. It was named after "Etienne de Silhouette," a French finance controller general who lived from 1709 to 1767. He was a known cheapskate, and his name became synonymous with anything done or created on the cheap, such as silhouettes. He even decorated a new house totally (to save money) by cutting out miniature silhouettes from black paper.

The silhouette's popularity stemmed in part from the fact that it was inexpensive (far less than having a portrait painted, for example) and could be made quickly, but it was also a lovely kind of art in its own right.

There are many different forms of silhouettes, but the most frequent were made with scissors from black paper. They're also known as "paper cuttings," "shadows," or "shades" in the United Kingdom. After the black shape was completed, the paper was attached to a white (or at least lighter) backing card, and your finished likeness was revealed. The silhouette was also popular in America, where you could get one created on the street for a dime and in minutes in places like Philadelphia. They were similar in size to a miniature image, and once the daguerreotype was produced, the silhouette swiftly fell out of favour.

However, silhouettes were still popular in the late eighteenth century (Georgian England) and early nineteenth century (the Regency). They even supplanted miniature portraits in the courts of France and Germany. The miniatures were popular among nobles as diplomatic instruments and among anyone who could afford them as personal symbols, as I explain in another piece.

By comparison, the silhouette made portable likenesses of loved ones affordable to practically everyone, and it could even be utilised as wall art. All you needed was someone who could do it (a "profile portraitist") and a few pounds. With time, their appeal swung back to the wealthy, who, "commissioned silhouettes in jewellery and snuff boxes to be painted and encrusted with precious stones Royalty commissioned silhouetted porcelain dinner services. Albums by common folk featured silhouettes of relatives and friends."

Furthermore, creating silhouettes was a popular parlour game in which everyone could participate. The finished sculptures may not have been works of beauty, but the process of creating them was undoubtedly enjoyable. (In contrast, "Shadows" was a game in which participants created shadow-images on the walls primarily with their hands; nothing was drawn or taken away from the exercise except a few laughs.) According to the Concise Britannica, silhouettes were created "by drawing the outline projected by candlelight or lamplight," which is almost certainly how the typical person achieved it. "However, as photography rendered silhouettes practically obsolete, itinerant artists turned to them as a form of antique folk art."

Full-length silhouettes were cut by Auguste Edouart, a Frenchman. Master Hubard, an American boy silhouettist who cut profiles in 20 seconds, was another itinerant. Cassandra Austen, Jane's loving sister, is a great example of a silhouette. (To get my April ezine, which contains illustrations with this essay, click the link at the bottom.) Have you noticed the subtler detailing? This was accomplished due to the fact that one's "shade" may be lowered ("using a reduction equipment known as a pantograph") before being painted on plaster or glass with "soot, or lamp black." Hair, caps, ribbons, frills, and other vital accoutrements of the day would have been 'dragged' out with progressively more and more diluted pigment after the face had been painted black."

Jane Austen's self-portrait is another silhouette style (with yellow background, see sample in download). It is a great example of the art, albeit more simply produced than the first. According to one antiques website, the silhouette of the past would have been created in one of the four formats listed below:

-        Paper, card, vellum, ivory, silk, or porcelain;

-        On glass, painted backwards;

-        Hollows are cut with a machine or, in rare cases, by hand. The figure is sliced away from the paper in this procedure, producing a negative picture. After that, a contrasting hue of paper or fabric is used to back the paper outline.

-        Freehand cut with scissors or a sharp edge, then pasted to a contrasting (typically light-colored) background.

John Miers was a notable silhouette artist in England during the late 18th to the early 19th centuries (the artistic Regency, in other words) (1756-1821). John Field had gone before him. A machine was employed by JC Lavater, a German who dabbled in science, to create "scientific" silhouettes. (I assume "scientific" implies "correct" in this situation.)

To sell or buy antique paintings online visit :

Folk Art Auction

[sending-the-message]

Creepy Kids from my Career as a Case Manager Part 1 DuShaun by creepykids

DuShaun J (Shaun for short) was a 15 y.o. black kid with an IQ in the Superior/Very Superior range. He lived in a trailer park outside a small town about 70 miles south of Chicago with his mother and her shitbag boyfriend. His file noted that the boyfriend was a felon and was certainly abusive to both DuShaun and his mother. The file painted his mother in more sympathetic colors but I was pretty skeptical. Shaun had fewer disciplinary issues at school than I would have expected. His only run-in with the cops seemed to have been a time he was caught spray painting the side of an abandoned, burned-out Dairy Queen on the edge of town and the cop had let him off with a warning (and made an astonishingly positive assessment of the quality of Shaun's work as an aside in the report). For one of the few black kids (demographics on the town list it as 91% white) in a broke-ass small town going to a shitty public high school to be that smart and stay under the radar somehow was pretty impressive.

He would have gone completely under our radar too, except teachers had begun to notice that he was coming to school sporting visible injuries (black eyes, lacerations, what looked like cigarette burns on his right arm) and had sometimes seemed to be in a daze. Statements noted that he had always been thin to the point of looking emaciated.

When I arrived, the trailer was a shit show (did I even need to say that?)--the only thing in the living room that didn't look scavenged from a dump in a post-apocalyptic wasteland was a brand television (with a ps4 attached) that was planted right in front of the beat-to-shit dark brown recliner where Shaun's mom's boyfriend (Dave) clearly spent most of his waking hours. The trailer smelled like old meat and cigarette smoke. The millipede that scurried across the wall as I was talking to the mom (Wanda) looked happy and fat--it's nice when families take good care of their pets, I think.

I knew Wanda was 32, although her face was so haggard and pitted she looked much older. She had probably been stunning, once, and I think she was probably highly intelligent although the intelligence was buried under years of trauma and mountains of heroin. Dave (41, white, never handsome, now flabby and dead-eyed) made faces while Wanda expressed saccharine, maudlin sentiments about Shaun. Dave used several racial epithets in a short conversation and also repeatedly speculated that Shaun was "probably a faggot." I didn't bait him, since he'd have taken it out on Shaun later, but I took some pleasure in the fact that it clearly made him uncomfortable when I gave him absolutely no reassurance or approval. (I'm a big, medium handsome white dude, not at all flabby.)

Shaun's bedroom was tiny, and the only furniture in it was a twin sized bed. It was impeccably neat, and the hideous green and brown carpet was clean. It's unprofessional of me, but I could barely pay attention to Shaun for a few minutes because I was mesmerized by the drawings he had done on his wall.

His walls were covered in urgent, explosive drawings of fantastic figures--mostly anthropomorphic, though many had wings and tails and animal heads--in different poses. Some were clearly dancing, some were holding spears or swords, some were flying or kneeling in prayer. They reminded me of cave drawings, or perhaps like if some savages had somehow traveled forward in time and been exposed to Klee and Basquiat and then gone back to their own era to have a second go at the walls in Lascaux. First taking in those walls was like jerking off during a fever dream. We are always told to look for something--anything at all--that a kid is halfway good at so we can use it to open a dialogue but this was more than that; looking at Shaun's work I was fairly certain I was looking at a work of genius.

Shaun was staring at me with big, brilliant eyes. Perfectly poised. Amiable enough but clearly diamond sharp. I was absolutely certain that he'd see me leading with something like "Boy howdy them's some nice drawings you got here!" as artless and hamfisted. He'd be polite but it would destroy any chance at trust. So instead I shook his hand, asked if I could sit on his bed, and explained a few of the concerns his teachers had expressed to lay out the reasons for my visit. Shaun sat on the floor and took it all in.

I assumed Dave was listening in (I could hear labored breathing outside the thin bedroom door, for one thing) and I really didn't need any info from Shaun about his relationship with his parents anyway. Living conditions would go in my report. I could see some of his injuries (healing black eye, a definite burn on his left arm) and they'd go in the report. No need to ask Shaun to piss in a cup--I was sure the kid was clean as a whistle. As soon as we had any reason we could piss test the mom and Dave and they'd be just as dirty any day of the week as they were now. The main thing was building a rapport with Shaun so we talked about sports and school. I asked him about the skateboard I saw in the corner (he was an avid skater) and we talked about music. He was surprised and dubious when I told him I liked Tyler the Creator too, and was clearly astonished when I said one of the reasons I liked him was that he had grown up from a smart, funny, glib kid who didn't give a fuck into an intelligent man with real shit to say.

"Yeah," Shaun said, "and now a lot of folk who used to fuck with him don't like him any more. He doesn't give a fuck about THAT either, though."

"Yeah, what did he say once, 'Anybody who's mad at me I don't make jokes about hurting women anymore and don't still squat in my dead grandmother's house can fuck off,' or something."

"Yeah," Shaun said and smiled, "petty little dick-riders hate transcendence."

We talked a little about his artwork, then. He asked me if I'd ever heard of the Dictionnaire Infernal, and I said that I had. It was kind of a catalog of demons--a hierarchy of hell. He nodded, and said he had seen a "fucking trippy" edition online illustrated by a French guy named Breton ("But not the famous surrealist guy, like I thought at first, just some boring dude who only did that one good thing") and that he'd had dreams about it. In the dreams he saw demons of his own. Demons and devils and spirits that his grandfather had told him about that were apparently mongelized constructs pulled from voodoo and African folktales and old Southern ghost stories. He had always been a good artist, but he said when he painted these dreams he felt he was on some next level shit.

He asked me which my favorite was, and I pointed to a leaping figure, bouncing high with his arms raised over his head in exultation. It looked like he was wearing a big amulet and he had a stag's head with huge, intricate antlers.

"Yeah. He's Joy. I like him too. That one down here, though..." he pointed a long, elegant finger at a horrible thing with big feathery wings and the face of a bird who appeared, somehow, to be shrieking, "that one's Vengeance. You don't wanna see that bitch--lady, excuse me--you don't wanna see that lady."

"She's like a banshee?"

"Yeah, kinda. But I think banshees s'posed to show up when you're already doomed? She fuckin' brings doom with her."

"Do you have titles for them?"

"Not gonna get titles. These are too personal. These motherfuckers gonna get names. Haven't named them yet either. Naming a thing is serious business--once you name something, you gotta be ready to own it."

I really wanted the conversation to keep going, but I had other appointments and had more than enough information.

Shaun clearly had a little more to say, though, so I stood up slowly but did not move toward or even look at the door.

"When me and mom were still in Chicago, before we moved down to this pit, I used to run with this kid Tariq whose family was Muslim. Real Muslim, not hood Muslim. And his pops told me once, when he found out I was an artist, 'There is an old story that on Judgment Day Allah will call the artists before his throne and place one of their artworks in front of them and he will tell them to bring it to life. If they cannot bring it to life--and who, but Allah, can?--they will be condemned.' I think about that a lot, every time I make something."

I wasn't sure what to say. "That's really beautiful," I said, and then added, honestly, "I don't know what else to say about that."

"Yeah...I guess not," he answered evenly, although I got the sense he somehow felt sorry for me.

A couple of months later, I had a dream (I guess it was a dream) that brought Shaun back into my thoughts in a big way. It was one of those dreams where I dreamed that I had just woken up in bed. My apartment was shaking and rumbling, at first like a train was going past outside but then instead of subsiding the shaking got harder and harder and I realized something huge was crashing around in my front room. I was too terrified to go investigate so I just sat up in bed as the crashing and rumbling grew closer. My door swung open and a huge, black skinned man jumped into the middle of the room. I tried to scream but couldn't and I tried to move but I couldn't. I realized the man had the head of a stag with enormous, gorgeously intricately curved antlers. He calmly turned on my light and stood in front of me: massive slabs of muscle; dazzling, ivory white horns with mesmerizing curves and curlicues; thick, sinewy legs terminating in cloven hooves, and the head of a stag with glistening fur and chaotic but infinitely kind eyes. He didn't smile at me--I'm not sure how a stag would smile at you--but those eyes were full of such kindness and such joy there was no need. He danced in the middle of the room and despite the crashes and the shaking the dance was hypnotic, soothing, and I felt myself drifting back to sleep as the Great God Beast leaped and spun.

As it happened, I had taken some time off starting the next day, but when I was back at work a week later I asked if anybody had heard anything about Shaun. I was not at all surprised to be told that I should update the file to reflect that his current whereabouts were unknown (with friends back in the city was a safe guess, everyone agreed) and that he had packed a bag in the middle of the night and left a note for his mom asking her to please not bother looking for him until she got her own shit together.

I was a little more surprised to learn that Dave was in psych care after a suicide attempt the night after Shaun bugged out of town.

"You're shitting me," I said to my supervisor as she filled me in.

"Hand to God. Most fucked up thing. Maybe he...felt bad?"

"Fuuuuck," I answered.

I don't like cops. But like I say, I'm a white dude with short hair who's in good shape and wears his polo shirts tucked in, so cops usually do like me. Having a rapport with cops comes in handy for me, and more important for the kids I work with. So I called one of the cops who had been involved with responding to Dave's suicide attempt or whatever-the-fuck it was. Cop was a dude named Joe, and Joe suggested we grab a beer because he'd need a beer or three to tell the story.

I had about half Joe's attention as he guzzled his second beer--the other half of his attention belonged to the blonde bartender with big boobs who ruffled what was left of Joe's hair every time she walked past. That was fine. One thing I've learned is that getting information from a cop is like buying pot from some shitbird campus dealer in college--you always have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time pretending you like them before they give you what you came for. Joe finally took a breath and gave me the Product: "So me and my partner show up just ahead of the EMT's. And that's good because neither of us wanted to do any kinda CPR or whatever on that piece of white trash, which was double true when we walked into his filthy bedroom and smelled that he'd pissed himself. Like a lot. Like, bro, I've never seen a grown man piss himself that hard and I've had drunk duty at the county fair. Fuckin blood everywhere, too. That old boy had really done a number on his arms. Multiple deep cuts. Don't know how he stayed conscious long enough to make 'em, don't know how he stayed alive long enough to get medical help either.

So the kid had just gone missing the day before. This guy is a known shitbird who we figured was knocking the kid around. I'd have bet money he killed the kid and buried him somewhere and then for some reason--maybe a combination of his fine Christian upbringing and whatever his last fix of heroin was cut with--he just freaked the fuck out with guilt and decided to end it. So I made sure he was in cuffs with a guard posted at the hospital.

When he comes to, he tells us this bullshit story about how some kind of fuckin woman with saggy tits and a head like crow came dancing this crazy dance in his room while he was sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. Wanda was at work so he was home alone and this bird-head bitch is just jumping around and he is too scared to yell or even move and he feels like he's having a heart attack and she's, like, feasting on his fear. And then finally she stops and looks him dead in his eyes and opens her mouth--beak, whatever--and just screeches. Said it's this awful, high pitched noise like a tornado siren that just goes on and on and he's shaking and crying and the more he sobs the happier she seems and then he says the head changes from a crow head to just being the head of an old woman with long, tangled gray hair and now she's grinning at him and still making the exact same shrieking noise and that's when he lost it. Grabbed a pair of scissors from beside the bed and went to work on his arms while the old woman kept screaming."

"Fuck," I said, sipping my Dewar's.

"No shit. Two weird things. First one's minor--Davey boy doesn't recall calling 911, although someone did make the call from his cell phone."

"Weird," I said.

"Yeah but I mean, the dude clearly had some kind of psychotic break plus he was probably fucked up on H. So who knows. But the other fucked up thing is--I mean it's a trailer park so surprise surprise, a lot of the neighbors are home midday. Several of them say they did hear noises coming from the trailer while all this was going on. Screeching noises it's hard to imagine a human being making."

"Heroin's a hell of a drug," I deflected.

"Yeah. Hell. When your vic is fucked up on drugs and also going nuts and your wits are a bunch of slackjawed white trash who are ALSO fucked up on H and probably drunk on top of that....Anyway, bro, I give no fucks anymore. The mom got a call from the kid, said he was in the city and doing okay. I didn't necessarily believe her when she told me, but then the kid called the station himself and we asked him to come back or let us know where he was exactly and he asked if we thought he was stupid but then he faxed us a copy of his social and his school ID so we're satisfied. Plus you have to figure a kid who has the presence of mind to take important paperwork with him when he hops town has a good shot of coming out the other end. So there's that."

"Yeah," I yawned, "there's that." And I threw down enough money to cover our drinks and wished Joe luck with his new friend the bartender and he winked at me and said "Yeah, bro," as I walked away.