#efforts and it's not hard to see why; there is a gulf in style between the cerebral‚ postmodern work Woolf was producing and this rather

[mariocki]

All Passion Spent: Episode 2 (1.2, BBC, 1986)

"You really must not speak as though my life has been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would envy; I had position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. Truly loved, Mr. Fitzgeorge. I had nothing to complain of."

"Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered, face it, Lady Slane: your children, your husband, your splendour... were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. Perhaps you were too young to know any better, but when you chose that life, you know, you sinned against the light."

"You're right, of course."

"Course I'm right, old Fitz may be a comic figure, but he retains some sense of values."

"Don't scold me any more, Mr. Fitzgeorge. I assure you that if I did wrong, I paid for it. But you must not blame my husband."

"Oh, I don't. According to his lights, he gave you everything you could desire. He merely killed you, that's all. Men do kill women, and most women enjoy being killed - so I am told."

[popculturebuffet]

Battle of the Episodes: Celebrity Deathmatch: Rockstarmageddon Vs When Animals Attack

Hello all you happy people! And welcome to a minty fresh new segment on the blog cooked up by longtime fan and friend of the blog weirdkev27, named by me: BATTLE OF THE EPISODES! In this new segment I take two similar episodes from a show or franchise and put them up against one another and see which ones better. He pitched the idea to me for something he could do, he had two patreon reviews free so I suggested why not do it in April and here we are! 

Before I begin I will admit I’d forgotten PieGuyRulez had done a similar idea with his podcast ReCast, which I’d never seen and only vaugely heard of. However I feel what i’m doing here is still diffrent enough to keep doing, I have nothing but respect for the guy, and I promise to not do any topics he’s done. If you have any suggestions for this new segment, i’d love to hear them. I already have another one in mind for when I have a free moment on the schedule that I simply didn’t get around to next month.

But for our innugural contest, Kev being the one who pitched it picked the show and it’s a show i’m only passingly familiar with as I did see bits of it growing up: Celebrity Deathmatch. Celebrity Death Match was a late 90′s and early 2000′s tv show on MTV with a revivial on MTV2. It was born both out of a short done for MTV’s Cartoon Sushi, their equilvent of Oh Yeah Cartoons! and What a Cartoon, pitting Charles Manson against Marilon Manson, and that short was popular enough to lead to a special after the superbowl. Said special ended up being the highest rated progam MTV had broadcast at the time, so naturally it got a four season series.

The premise is exactly what it says: two celebrties battle it to the death in goofy claymation fights, one shall stand, one shall fall. Meanwhile our hosts Johnny and Nick banter and set up the fights, talk to interviewers etc. It’s essentially a combination of wrestling and celebrity mockery, and unsuprisingly given MTV’s teen audience who loved pop culture and a bit of the ultra violence it was a massive hit. 

The show later got a revivial a few years after it ended on MTV2, which fans often derided and which I saw more of as I was watching MTV2 at the time... look i’m not proud of the fact i watched “Where My Dogs at?” and i’m even less proud I watched “The Adventures of Chico and Guapo”. But with shows like that you can imagine how high quality the reboot was and how much fans flocked to it. Me I never took to either incarnation. I don’t HATE the show and do appricate it’s gorgeous claymation and copious use of Stone Cold Steve Austin. I love that beer drinking, hell raising, boss humliationg hellion, it’s just the combination of modern celebrity mockery, something that rarely ages well unless the joke is just funny on it’s own, and ultra violence never appealed to me as I was a pretty squeamish kid and teen.. i’ve grown out of that, but I just had no real desire to go back. It’s not a bad show but it’s not really one for me, but I get why i’ts well loved and popular. 

But being a death match fan, and given the similar premisses, Kev picked this to be our inagural contest. Pitting the original against the reivvial. For this he went with two death match time machine episodes: the original’s finale rockstarmageddon and the revivial’s when animals attack. Each episode has it’s own unique theme within the general theme of a dead person versus their successor... and a very much alive person one or both of the hosts thought was dead versus their succesor as a joke: the first is about rockstars and their supposed imitators, the second is about putting two animal themed people against one another.

Each Battle of the Episodes will have diffrent comparisons as every show or franchise is different, comics are also open for this by the by. So for this one i’ll be comparing time machine use, the person explaning the machine, individual episode theme, the joke about one of the “dead” combatants turning out ot be alive, and each of the three matches.  How many will also very, either 5 or 7 depending on how many talking points i have. So with that in mind LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE under the cut and see which episode walks away a champion and which episode walks away a bloody pile of clay on the floor. 

Doing the matches first as a lot of this stuff overlaps with the later bits. 

Round 1: Lenny Kravitz Vs Jimmy Hendrix VS Horatio Sanz Vs Chris Farley Whelp this was a bad start to BOTH episodes as these matches are the worst of each episode and all 6 matches period. So it’s less which is better as both are a black hole of comedy.. and more which one sucks slightly less. 

The Jimmy Hendrix vs Lenny Kravitz bout is just.. a black hole of comedy, It’s VERY clear the writers hated Kravitz but to me in 2020.. it just hasn’t aged well. I just don’t CARE about Lenny Kravitz. He had maybe one good song, are you gonna go my way, and that’s it. He was not good.. but he was an easy target for the time and an easily forgotten one now. It’s not smart, clever or even cathartic to watch him die. He’s also nowhere similar enough to Hendrix for the comparison to work: for one he had a vastly diffrent look most of the times and for another at most both played guitars and were not white. That’s it.  It just dosen’t work. 

The finisher here is just also... one of the objectively worst grossout bits i’ve seen in animation and i’m almost 30. That’s a LOTTTT of stupid gross gags that aren’t funny. The two vomit into each others mouths. Yes really. Not only is this really disprectful to hendrix death, as ODing on drugs is not something I really find funny nor the show makes funny, but it’s just.. horrifying to think about and gross and makes me want to , ironically enough, vomit thinking about. it’s just deeply unpleasant easily the worst thing i’ve encountered in my time reviewing so far, and it’s going to be a hard bar to clear. This match sucked and it left a bad taste in my mouth. 

Now as for the Horatio Sanz vs Chris Farley Match...

I honestly have never seen Horatio Sanz that i’m aware of and unlike Kravitz who at least is mildly memorable if not a very good musician, Sanz has just been.. forgotten. I don’t know anything about him and once again it feels like the show punching down, picking an easy target versus a legend. 

And speaking of easy targets the entire segment is just fat jokes. Just a ton of fat jokes. No really, it’s a battle of “Hog vs hog”, chris eats a lot and hte main joke is Chris Farley can’t stay alive long enough to fight. That being said while I find the joke in VERY poor taste, as Farley died of a heart attack and was a really good person and having his death be a punch line just bothers me.... I’ll admit it’s at least clever to have one of the death match time machine contestants come back again, and again, and again. It’s not Funny, it’s horrific.. but I can at least say they put in some effort ofr that one gag and given the horrifying lack of effort for the other match this one BARELY gets the W Winner: When Animals Attack: 

Round 2: Shaggy vs Bob Marley VS Christan Bale vs Adam West

This one’s a no contest... seriously the gulf between jokes is wide and deep.

The Shaggy Vs Marley bout is the best of Rockstarmageddon. It’s funny, the target actually deserves being made fun of as Shaggy was a talent vacum and is memorably bad in comparison to Kravitz, so I still like seeing him get roasted, and they find a lot of funny jokes to do with Bob Marley. I only have a passing familiarity with the guy and while they do the obvious weed joke, they also have him ask for a tiny hammer or a small axe, beat shaggy with his dreads and after using a ring post to kill him, MAKING HIS REMAINS INTO A BONG (hilariously called a “legal novelty smoking device by the commentators). This match shows me why the show was popular: not every match was GOOD.. but the ones that were were creative and a joy to watch. While I sitll feel it’s mildly punching down, it’s funny enough I don’t care. 

Bale Vs West just sucks both by comparison and just in general; The IDEA of having the current Batman at the time and the 60′s one duke it out is great.. but it’s very clear they didn’t like Batman begins nor have any actual christian bale jokes. While this was pre terminator rant and the much more iconic dark knight, if they didn’t have any good jokes , why do this. They just have nothing and are insulting a legitimately good movie instead of making anything funny and making cracks about everyone thinking Adam West is dead. More on that in a bit, but it’s just really not funny and really wasted my time... though West turning him into a batsignal of the cross was clever i’ll admit. 

Winner: Rockstarmageddon

Round 3: Dave Matthews vs Keith Richards VS Jamie Fox vs Ray Charles

Another mistmatch.. but this time in the opposite direction.

Dave Matthews Vs Keith Richards sucks. While there are some good gags up top, we’ll get to that in it’s own section, the match itself just isn’t funny and I really don’t get comparing the stones to dave matthews band. the two bands aren’t remotely similar. The most clever it gets is Dave injecting Richards with his blood, which mellows him out but also revitalizes Richards. There’s a few good jabs at richards but otherwise just nothing of susbtance and like Kravitz Dave Matthews Band has been largely forgotten and unlike Kravitz or Shaggy, just doesn’t seem like as valid a target.

Fox vs Charles on the other hand was a great misdirect, changing his opponent and “punking” fox, forcing him to go from someone he was ready to throw down with to someone he rejects. There are way too many mr mcgoo style I’M BLINDDDDD gags, but Fox is a much more deserving target, and they had far more clever gags, with charles pulling out a cat o n grammys, and using a piano to finish Jamie. It’s nothing GREAT... but at least it’s actually funny and actually picked a good target for the time, if not one that has aged well. 

Winner: When Animals Attack. 1 to 2

Round 4: Who Used the Time Machine Better?

Narrowly .. rockstarmageddon. While it had the same justification for it, the original taking on an upstart attempted replacement, the keith richards gag we’ll get to in a second is better than the farley gag for not being grossly insensitive and unfunny. But neither really use it well; Rockstarmageddon just uses it to mock artists they like and Animals uses it because the first one did. Neither really had a clever idea for it other than “get it this person sucks compared to that one. 

Winner: Rockstarmageddon. 2 to 2

Episode Theme: 

Similar to the time machine, this one comes down to which one had the better indvidual theme... and i’d have to say it’s Rockstarmageddon. It used the theme POORLY, but at least it both had an interesting idea, dead rock stars vs their successors in modern day, versus an easy one (animal matchups) it abandoned for the final match and used REALLY fucking insultingly in the first match. Seriously I don’t mind a WELL done fat joke, as an overweight guy myself, but this was just...

In it’s purest form. 

Winner: Rockstarmageddon 3 to 2

Special Guest:

Each episode had a guest for the time machine... and this one is again no real contest, Rockstarmageddon wins. 

For Rockstarmageddon the show brought back frequent guest star , wrestling legend Stone Cold Steve Austin, who I enjoy and was indeed part of my childhood and star of many video games and one of my brother’s all time favorite wrasslers. The show contrasts his blue collar hellion image with him having made the machine, getting quantum mechanics and unlike nick getting that Keith Richards is dead. Austin clearly gets the show, is fully on board playing along and has fun escorting Hendrix back to the machine and getting his revenge on Nick for doubting him that Keith Richards was alive. He just fits perfectly into the show. 

The revival.. could not get him, likely because he didn’t want to or saw the script and rightfully stone cold stunnered them, i.e. what he shoudl’ve done when Adam Sandler offered him Grown Ups 2. Seriously Adam why bring him in if he’s not going to do something wrestling related to you? This is why people don’t like your films. That and you keep giving your old buddy rob increasingly racist work. And david spade work. And nick swarsdon work. Please do keep giving Shaq work though he’s actually not half bad. 

So instead they bring in Einstein and the joke.. is that he swears a lot and drinks a lot and pulls his pants down at the end.> That.. that’s it. I mean the original , at least the episode given to me, didn’t make a GREAT impression, but at least it was creative. The Reboot came off as shockingly lazy and half assed, with lesser voice actors for our hosts and far less effort put in and this is the biggest emblem of that. Soooo

Winner; Rockstarmageddon 4 to 2

Final Round: Their Not Dead

The final round is a short one and while the winner is already decided, might as well. Both episodes do a joke about one of the guests NOT being dead.. but once again Rockstar is more clever about it. Nick is CERTAIN Keith Richards is dead, and forces Stone Cold to bring him to the present... only for Keith to show up, and there be two keiths. One fades away due to time travel stuffs, a REALLy damn good gag, and Nick’s dogged instance he’s not dead despite everyone knowing he isn’t is just damn funny. 

IN contrast all they have for the late great Adam West.. is insisting he’s dead. That’s it. that’s all they got. It’s not funny, it’s disprectful to Adam who while not an a list actor did a ton of stuff after batman. I mean the simpsons alone should shut them the fuck up...

This one short gag is a MUCH better one than that entire 7 minutes. It was also DEEPLY uncomfortable now Adam’s passed. So naturally

The Winner of this Segment and Overall; Rockstarmageddon. 

I wouldn’t say I LIKED either episode this go round, both had some pretty bad spots..but it’s very clear that while the original had it’s flaws, it was creative, had tons of energy, and a great voice cast. The revivial... has a good chris farley impersonator and that’s it. It’s very clear the people behind the reboot just don’t get the show and are doing the lazy bare minimum. While I didn’t LIKE most of the matches in Rockstarmageddon, I can at least respect the craftmanship: the animation, host jokes and energy is just BETTER. There’s a care and craft the revivial dosen’t have and the drop in quality is noticeable. 

So yeah overall the original wins.. but the episode chosen clearly wasn’t it’s best. That being said both had some good moments, and I would be open to watching more if any one wants to comission it. This experiment has been intresting so let me know in the comments if you want to see more of these and i’ll see you at the next rainbow. And please join my patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet. 

[genesisarclite]

Contrast

So, for a long time, I’ve entertained this idea of Adam having an absolute, full-on breakdown for whatever reason. This is one result of such a sad thought. Poor Adam doesn’t really understand what’s going on or why, only that he needed the comfort of one person in particular.

Written in kind of an unusual style, slightly experimental. Hope y’all like.

Eight days after the London op wrapped up, it was raining.

It was the kind of rain composed of thick, icy cold droplets that sent every living thing scurrying for shelter – the kind of charcoal-colored clouds and streetlamp haze that beckoned anyone who gazed at it to sleep. With her nearest window just barely cracked, Aria could hear the song of autumnal rain, pattering the sill and dripping from the eaves. It was the most beautiful lullaby to her, rivaling the sound of frogs and crickets on a warm summer night, and she could sleep to its cadence in minutes, it felt. When the rain fell, she slept at her best.

The chill that crept through that narrow gap couldn’t hurt her, curled up as she was in thick blankets. As the cool, damp breeze caressed her cheeks, the blankets held her fast and warm. The contrast was soothing.

She had been lying there, drifting toward sleep, for a while now. After spending an hour reading, she’d turned out her light and tucked in, leaving her apartment completely dark but for the light filtering through the windows. The glass was old and a little weathered, letting in a hazy ambience below the partly-drawn shades. The scent of wet streets and garbage wafted through the air, making her miss her parents’ Colorado home.

As she had just begun to slip into the dreamlike state of half-sleep, the sound of something rattling below her window startled her back awake. The curfew was still going on, though less violently than before, and there was talk of lifting it, but for now, no one dared venture outside during quiet hours. It was possible someone was trying to get into the building, but then, wouldn’t they just use one of the entrances, or something else on the ground floor?

Shaking herself awake with the military training she still remembered, she reached under her pillow for the pistol she always kept nearby before grabbing her tank top and shorts. After slipping them on, she stayed under the sheets, pistol at the ready, safety still on, and waited.

The sound came again. It was faint, the sound of something scratching on cheap siding. A window rattled below her; she squinted into the darkness.

Something curled over the sill, gleaming faintly in the light – four somethings, to be precise, all of them small and the color of carbon fiber. Fingers. They hauled a shape up to the window before one set rose to push the window up. The sound was quick and harsh – clearly, the intruder wasn’t attempting to be stealthy – before the owner of the hands pulled himself with a grunt up onto the sill, then through the gap to the floor.

Aria stayed still when she said, “Get out. You can’t wait out the curfew here.”

“The cur–” The shape straightened, water glittering in the faint light, but even before he continued, she knew the voice. “I didn’t... sorry, Aria, I thought I got through.”

“Adam?” Lowering the pistol, she quickly got out of bed, slipped on the jacket she kept for cold nights, and flipped on a table lamp. It cast enough light to bring him out of the darkness, while not being bright enough to disturb her vision. It was definitely him, clothing drenched, droplets beading on the coat and sliding off with the slightest movement, and he looked at her in what she assumed to be some sort of tired appeal. The shades were up. They were always up. “Why are you here?”

“I... I really thought I got through.” He shook his head. The light shifted across rain-soaked hair that looked jet black. “But then... then I got no response. So I had... I had to see. Make sure.”

His voice was unsteady; she felt her brow furrow, but didn’t dare get any closer, not yet. Adam was an enigma to everyone, and despite his kind disposition toward her, he was still rather distant from his team. He didn’t join the team-building outings on Friday nights – though, in all fairness, she usually didn’t, either – nor did he seem content just to stop and talk with anyone but her around the office. As quartermaster, she had been a sort of gatekeeper for the entrance to TF29, and though he never really had a reason to talk to her, he usually made time. But she was it, the only one he spoke to when there was no business to attend to. He was a mystery.

She didn’t know what to make of that. The handsome stranger who invaded her thoughts with no effort had made time for her, and now he was in her apartment, in the middle of the night.

She felt her stomach flip over. He was in her apartment in the middle of the night.

Butterflies danced in the pit of her belly.

“You lost me,” she managed to say, suddenly very aware of her thin tank top and shorts. She wore nothing under either, meant solely for basic modesty and nothing else, and the contrast between her light clothes and his street uniform felt like an impassable gulf. Cinching the front of the jacket a little closer, she gripped it with both hands. How so very small and vulnerable she felt.

“Curfew. I heard something happened in this area, and tried to contact you, but...” He looked away. “I didn’t get a reply. I got worried, so I came by.”

The butterflies were making it hard to breathe, dancing up into her throat now. “You... you were worried about me?”

“Yeah.” He still didn’t look at her. “Guess you’re okay. Nothing to worry about.”

She could remember hearing an altercation outside that had ended with several drones and at least two gunshots, but it had been cleared away quickly. He had braved the curfew, which had been going for nearly an hour now, to come to her, just to see if she was alright after that. It felt... strange. Dreamlike. Maybe she was dreaming. A lucid dream, probably. There was no way this beautiful battle angel would risk his life just for her.

“You were still at the office?”

“Had some stuff to clean up.” He looked back at her after a moment’s hesitation. “I was headed home when I heard.”

The unsteadiness remained. Her frown deepened. “That’s an excuse. Why’d you come?”

A notch appeared between his eyebrows. “It’s not an excuse, Aria. I really did come to make sure–” He took a deep breath; she watched his chest expand, light shifting across the expensive coat, droplets tracing the threads. “Look, it’s been... hard for all of us. Everything that’s happened, all we’ve been through... I thought, maybe, it was possible you’d gotten hurt. That’s all. So I called, and you didn’t answer, so I came by.”

She shook her head. “Then you could’ve tried calling again, or the landline I’ve got. Or, you know, just looked in with your... your x-ray vision or whatever, and checked. You had options.”

His mouth tightened before he said, “Aria–”

The pistol was still in her hand; she squeezed it for just a second. “No, it’s an excuse. Why did you really–”

He cut her off. “It’s not enough to want to see you?”

His voice hadn’t raised even a notch, but the sternness silenced her protests. The butterflies were fluttering around again as his words sunk into her bones. It seemed they sunk into his, too, because he took a small step back and looked away again, and in the dim light, his skin seemed to darken.

“Oh.” For a long moment, that was all she could think to say in response. “Why would you want to see me?”

Again, his mouth tightened. “I don’t know.”

All of the potential meanings of that innocuous sentence flitted through her mind. Lowering the pistol to the nearest table, she fiddled with her hands, eyes wandering to a spot on his arm and staying there. “If all you wanted to do was check on me, there’s quicker ways. If you wanted to see me, you didn’t have to come in the middle of the night and brave a curfew. Something else is going on.” With a quick breath, she looked back at him. “So, what?”

Even his profile was beautiful – carved with imperfections and strong, straight lines, edged by hair dark as the clouds outside and interesting shapes that drew her eye. He was taller than her, and bigger, and it was easier to feel that here, in the comparatively cramped confines of her apartment. He was unbelievably more powerful

Yet, he was nervous, shy, his body language uncertain, his inability to look at her screaming a thousand things those lips could not ever speak. He was harmless to her. She knew that. She had recognized his nature, buried under the hard plates and barbed wire that was his public facade, when he spoke softly or took a few minutes of his precious time just to be near her. She knew it when he asked if she was alright after they came out of the London op, as they were headed back for the VTOL, and he asked, and she replied, and it was done, but he didn’t leave.

And all he said was, again, “I don’t know.”

The helplessness in his voice shot her straight in the heart. She walked boldly to him and raised her flesh hand, placing it on his right cheek. A little gentle pressure, and he was looking at her. He didn’t pull away. He did nothing but gaze at her, she presumed, from behind opaque black lenses shining with pools of yellow light.

The sensation of him taking her other hand in his – strong, metal, carbon fiber, plastic, warm – tore down what was left of her defenses. He was vulnerable, more so than she’d ever seen him. That willingness to reach for her, without a word, his entire body pleading instead, was so simple and so human that it broke her the rest of the way.

“Adam,” she murmured, gently, offering him the same kindness, the same warmth, he had always given her, “tell me what’s wrong. Maybe I can’t help, really, but sometimes talking helps a little.”

Against her fingers, he was shaking. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Ever since he had so casually walked into the offices at TF29, she had been intrigued. Eventually, she was infatuated, helpless as he so casually kicked down all her defenses and weakened her inner protests with the occasional smile. Such a rare thing, his smiles were, that she treasured every one, feeling special because he gave them to her. He was beautiful, and a warrior, who stayed his hand and always did his work well. He was a living weapons platform who chose the soft touch, a mosaic of light and shadow that fascinated her.

Aria had known him for a while now. Peeling back his layers was a struggle. He didn’t actively fight her, but his defenses were so strong, his heart buried so deep, that she couldn’t reach it so easily.

Though, she was hardly any different. She also hid her heart away. She also didn’t open up to anyone but him.

She was in love with him, and in that moment, she wondered if he loved her.

But that wasn’t possible. Was it?

“Aria.” Her name came out in a rasp of breath, falling past his lips as though it pained him to speak. “Please don’t ask. Please don’t ask. Don’t ask. But I– I swear this is just for you. It’s not– there’s nothing else, I just– look, I just– I need– I needed to see–” A single breath surged into his lungs; she felt his fingers squeeze her hand. “Can I ask... if I ask... can you... would you...” Again came her name, and he looked at the floor between them.

Her hand smoothed up. Her fingers brushed his hairline. “Ask. I can always tell you no. Just ask.”

With a near-inaudible snick, the shades retracted, and dark eyes rose to meet hers once more. Her heart leapt a little in her chest at the sight of something he so carefully kept hidden away. “You’ve been such a good friend to me, you know? A real good one. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose you. I can’t... I don’t want to–”

“Adam.” She breathed his name, a lover’s voice.

The word struck his shell like a titanium arrowhead, shattering his defenses as though they were made of glass. She wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, or what happened next, but next she knew, he was shivering, her hands pressed to his cheeks and smoothing down onto his neck, wishing she could wrap every inch of him up within her. Then, he sent her heart tumbling into space when his lips landed on hers, soft, uncertain, as if afraid to hurt her, as if afraid one slight move wrong would break her like the glass she’d so blithely smashed apart.

His beard felt soft against her hands, her chin, the edges of her lips, the corners of her mouth, while his breath whisked across her skin, an evening breeze from her homeland. Every sensation was a thunderstorm, and when his arms slipped around her waist, she pulled herself the rest of the way. It didn’t matter why he was kissing her. She didn’t care. What she did care about was that Adam Jensen was kissing her, as deeply and gently as though he had loved her for a thousand years, still holding her so carefully, as though scared of breaking her.

She buried herself in him – in thick, damp hair, in startlingly soft skin, in expensive fabric – and breathed him in, earthy and musky, the scent of rain and city streets and a rose’s sweet twinge wrapped up in every strand. It was desperate. Foolish. Her heart pounded in her ears and thundered against her ribs.

The kiss softened. His lips moved to caress hers, and he cradled her head, tipping his own. She clung to him still. Her hand stayed in his hair.

Then his chest heaved. The kiss broke; shaky breaths filled the sudden quiet, and then he collapsed, breaking apart into countless tiny shards that glittered in the dark. Her lips still burning from the pressure of his, she somehow held him up, face buried in his shoulder. Against hers, he sobbed, openly, and it terrified her in profound ways.

But he had come to her.

The window was still open. Some rain fell in through it. Drones rumbled past, with the occasional robotic voice cutting through the din of water striking the dirtied ground. Cold, damp air whispered over her skin and through thin fabric, seeking places that felt far too warm.

This powerful warrior, who had faced nightmares given form, hordes of soldiers and machines, had come willingly to her, a woman so far below notice that she could only dream of this, so far beneath his league that she still couldn’t believe it was real... but talk of leagues and dreams and hopes had to end, because Adam Jensen had come to her to cry out something she didn’t understand.

Eventually, he was hollow, silently resting against her shoulder. In time, even that went away, as he pulled away, looked away, separated their bodies, rebuilt the unimaginable gulf, but she didn’t let him go, grasping his hands, stopping him from running away. When his eyes returned to hers, she said, “It’s okay.”

Tear-stained cheeks made for a face she had some trouble taking in. “It’s not. I didn’t want to make this... these things... awkward. I didn’t want–” He jerked out of her grip. She saw him close up again, the shades snapping back into place, the rawness in his expression fading fast; he briefly rubbed at his cheeks with both hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did any of that, and without asking, too.” A pause, then, “I need to go.”

“Adam? Adam!” She lunged for him, grabbing his arm, as he turned away and started back for the window. “Don’t you dare run away. Don’t you dare.”

He froze, but didn’t pull away this time. “Aria–”

“You know me, Adam. You know that if I really didn’t want you doing this, you would know. Much as I like you, I wouldn’t hesitate to bury my fist in your face.” When he faced her, visibly shrinking back, she loosened her grip and walked up to him again. “Hey. Don’t go back out there in a state, okay? Stay until you’re better.”

Again, his face turned away from hers. Light and shadow played across his features, shining in his hair, while the ruddiness of too many tears still stung his cheeks. “I got here, didn’t I? I’ll be–” But then, he stopped, lips working, before looking back at her, the corner of his mouth quirking for a just the briefest of moments. “Stay, huh?”

She released him. “Couch is pretty comfortable. You don’t have to sleep. Just rest until you’re better. Please?”

Those lips hardened. “You’re not just a friend, are you?”

“I–” Caught off guard, she stared at him, open-mouthed. After willingly returning his desperate kiss and holding him until he finally stopped crying, he was seriously asking that question of her? Was he oblivious, or willfully ignorant? The only thing she could think of in reply was, “Are you serious right now?”

Silence stretched between them for a long time. At her sides, her hands balled into fists, then relaxed, and she stared right back at him without flinching. In her arms, he’d felt so strong, even through the shaking and the tears drying on her shoulder. It had been so long since she’d found herself in a man’s arms that she had forgotten how good it felt to be with one she could trust. There was something appealing about his presence in an oddly primal way, and with him there, though she knew she could take of herself, she felt more at ease.

Then, he shook his head. “Look–”

“Since the day you walked into TF29, getting shown around by Miller, I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” Again, her hands clenched, and now the tension spread to her shoulders. “But looks, they fade, you know? So I thought I should get to know you, and you know what? The inside matches the outside. You’re nice to me and everyone else, and you throw yourself in harm’s way all the time, expecting nothing back. I read the memo. You were a cop, and now you’re an agent, and you’ve still got the cop years in you. You can’t help it.”

An uneasy shifting of his weight told her his defiance had begun to slip. “I... I really need to go–”

“Well, you can’t, because we had this discussion, and you can’t just leave after kissing me like a dying man and crying and having a full-on breakdown, and I don’t know what’s going on, but... but you have me, okay? You’re not alone and all. You can come to me, okay? I’m here, if you want me to be, because I like you, and I like being your friend, but I also like you, and I wasn’t ready for you to know, but now you do, okay? Are you happy?”

The shades retracted once more; he looked at her, blinking slowly. He was so beautiful, so vulnerable, so frightened and shy, so strong, so fierce, some mythological warrior stepping from the mists of antiquity and given form by the air, and she knew it was stupid and foolish to ascribe a normal man such artistic honors, but he was here, here, in front of her, and her thoughts were a mess and her heart was still tumbling through space.

“How... long?”

She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “I liked you the minute I saw you. I loved you later.”

His eyes were shining. “Love?”

“Stop it.” Raising her hands toward him, she spread her fingers, palms up, and looked at him in appeal. “Adam, please. Just stay for a little bit, okay? Don’t think about that. Just stay. Rest. Please?”

He came back to her and placed his hands in hers. Those fingers were strong enough to snap steel, but they held hers so carefully that she barely felt any pressure at all. Warm, smooth, all strange textures and interesting shapes, no pulse below the black plastic and sheets of carbon fiber. She wondered if it had taken him as long to feel again as it had her. If he could even remember what it was like to feel with organic fingers. The tiny pops in their joints. The patterns between from a lifetime of movement. Fingerprints. Blue veins under skin.

Then he squeezed, and stopped her thoughts flat.

“Yeah. I think I’ll stay for a little bit.” He looked at her worn couch on the other side of the room. “You said, there?”

“Yeah, there.” She stroked his palms with her thumbs. “It’s okay.”

He didn’t look at her. “Tomorrow is–”

“Not going to be awkward,” she insisted. “Not unless you make it awkward.”

Now his eyes returned to hers. “But you do love me. You said so.”

For reasons she couldn’t comprehend, that detail was important to him. “Yes, Adam, I love you.” After a long time of having to keep that part to herself, it felt good – and terrifying – to say it aloud. She had trouble looking him in the eye as she spoke, though, and they fell to his lips instead. Which was fine, because the shape of his lips, the careful styling of his beard, the contrast of pale skin and dark hair, were still very interesting.

Silence, then, “Aria, I...” As he trailed off, she saw his chin dip downward. The long, pregnant silence that followed made her feel awkward and unsure. Then, though, he turned his hands over to briefly thread his fingers through hers before letting go. “Alright. I’ll stay. I’m... I’m sorry I made this... well, you know.”

“You didn’t. I promise. Just rest.”

He finally moved away, going first to return the window to its original state. Only after he had finally taken up residence on her couch, lying on his side so that he had a clear view of the window, did she finally return to bed, though she kept her door open. If he needed her, she would be there, able to hear him clearly.

And she wasn’t entirely sure that she didn’t need him yet.

She wasn’t sure how long she slept, only that by the time she woke again, he was gone. She thought, though, if she dug around in her haze of sleep-memory, that she could conjure the sensation of someone stroking her cheek and the barest brush of lips on her temple during the night.

[myfriendpokey]

7 bubsys of the world

1. museum bubsy:

i love bubsy bobcat's ghastly, staring eyes, which look past everything around him, as if he were the dead theologian mentioned in swedenborg - who upon death simply moves without knowing into a new eternal house shaped exactly like his own, but which over time begins to grow dimmer, more transparent, he finds rooms he's never seen before, populated by dead and faceless men, themfurniture and writings fade, until we can only imagine some final increment of ghostliness leads to the awful truth that - - aaah!!

but of course the distance in bubsy's stare comes from a different location, not so much the gulf between the living and the dead as that between the living and the 90s. bubsy looks at us from the depths of a bubsy 3d that NEVER ENDED, that rather than being a temporary and ignoble home for the hovering bubsy spirit (as expressed in various promotional materials) has somehow become the final determining limit for where that spirit can go. bubsy can explore any kind of content, go on any kind of adventure.. once it is re-expressed within the conditions of this mangled polygonal plain..... i think that it's so easy (and so profitable!!) to fall into a sort of idealist conception of videogame history as one of various platonic bogeys (truth! gameplay! mario!) temporarily given shape in base matter before disintegrating to appear in some new form. we don't really think those material expressions have anything to say about their spirits, obviously mario isn't "really" as chunky and polygonal as he is in mario 64, just as videogames as a form can easily be distinguished from any of the various rather sad attempts to embody that form. so it's a real shock to find our credit rescinded and be told, no, this is what you have. bubsy is trapped inside his temporary emblem, inside a world he never made, drifting around haplessly and at last thrust towards that final refuge of the doomed, which is the effort to at least be Cultured.  do his unseeing eyes still register a sense of potential alterity in the artwork he consumes, or just the frozen parody of same?

2. personal bubsy:

interestingly very few of the bubsy fangames try to replicate the protagonist's canon personality at face value, very likely because it's unbearable. but maybe also for other reasons. the bubsy games themselves play with the idea of bubsy as either an actor seperable from the gameworlds he inhabits ("bubsy the bobcat in claws encounters of the furred kind") or as at least possessing a kind of bugs-bunny-ish awareness of an audience (who are all those quips addressed to?). but that's within the games' own conception of themselves as exciting blockbuster product - taking them as failures of one kind or another as it's become standard to do converts bubsy's actorliness from that of the starring attraction to a sort of jobbing z-movie shlub, mired in one contractual dispute after another and forced through a variety of ill-concieved ventures. and i say interestingly because as far as i can see there's little to support this good will or sense of implied interiority - i'm not aware of gex, say, or duke nukem being extended the same kind of escape clause from their own insufferability. maybe the sheer unbelievability of what these games are telling us about themselves, as mediated through some decades of bubsy trash-talk, gives them a plaintive quality.

3. omnipresent bubsy:

i made a bubsy bobcat fangame once because i thought it would be funny to have a fangame for a character nobody actually liked. it got picked up and reposted by a bubsy fanblog a few days later ("Added for the sake of Bubsy completeness... man this looks bad... but you can download it XD".)

4. dialectic bubsy:

to clarify: i made a bubsy bobcat fangame because i wanted to be funny, but i also wanted to be annoying. i was interested in the "indie games" scene (as distinct from the rpg maker one) and in 2009 the public face of that was very much High Designist, minimal, meaningful, squares, grids, programming, Passage, etc..

i was making a game for an experimental gameplay workshop open jam and figured since i lacked all qualification for this style of art i might as well deliberately disqualify myself from it and make something that was sort of ostentatiously mired in the same junky, unreflective commercial culture that stuff was trying to escape.  so it was partly a tease, but not a very dangerous one. bubsy was so visibly, universally reviled within videogame culture that it was hard to imagine any kind of sincere identification with the character taking place - using that franchise therefore meant being able to convert the ickier associations of the fangame format (unoriginal!! un-"challenging"!! made by and for hobbyists and women!!) into more aestheticised, and also more acceptable, forms of disagreeability ("punk" recontextualisation and deliberate badness, etc). so it's a funny ugliness but also one that relies on a sort of shared, unquestioned sense of what's genuinely "un-touchable" in this artsy context, and of course bonding over mutual agreement on what's beyond the pale of acceptable taste is one of the founding rituals of "gamer culture". i'd never played a bubsy game and probably only knew about the franchise from seanbaby or something like that.

what happened next is more interesting. i'd made a game called space funeral, which was popular enough on gamejolt to generate a fairly active fanart tag and even some fangames, a number of fangames all by different authors and with different approaches. and one of the fangame authors ended up playing my own bubsy fangame and decided to re-include bubsy as a character in space funeral 4 as something of a callback to that. i think (forgive me, i only browse the tag) this slowly became the occasion for some drama within "the community". Words Were Said re. furries and the appropriateness of same within this context, bubsy continued gaining more and more of a prominent role in the new fangame, "new bubsy" was also reimagined as a trans sex worker with an extremely prominent chest, these decisions appeared to be contentious, eventually the developer of SF4 declared that they were sick of the fandom, sick of the original game, and going to start a new project based entirely around their new bubsy character.... all of which is well and good and Culture In Action and frankly i stopped having any opinion about space funeral long before the first fangame came out. but what i'm interested in here is bubsy, and specifically the idea of how the deliberate reuse of the bubsy character acts as a way to thematise and re-engage whatever's felt to be awful, unacceptable, within some specific space. in rip van bubsy that means pushing against artgame's more apollonian efforts with a reminder of the garish, lumpen, unsignifying qualities of most actually existing videogames; in space funeral 4, the ironic repurposing and sexlessness of games like rip van bubsy and space funeral is itself critiqued by a sincere / artless / horned-up reusage of the same material which is similarly "unacceptable" within that framework. the travelling figure of bubsy appears as an index of dissent around the format...

5. negative bubsy:

i think it's a known and documented phenomenon that punk music has a weird, recurring affinity for the purest of pure MOR pop - sex pistols, the clash, nirvana all known abba fans, the minutemen covered steely dan, sonic youth the carpenters, madonna floats across michael azerrad's "our band could be your life" as eerily recurring presence and talisman... all of which might just be a catalog of private tastes. but it's also tempting, given that in seperate ways these were all very self-fashioned, ideological, image-alert bands, to take this taste for pure pop as to some extent  deliberate, as maybe part of the same self-fashioning. the very distance of abba from anything approaching punk, noise, art-rock, becomes a reason to like them - they become a kind of model of aesthetic autonomy, serenely detached from any kind of taste or wider expectation - abba are a vantage point from which you can critique punk rock itself. and punks and abba become comrades in their mutual distance from pink floyd("horseshoe theory").

why so many art games about bubsy? there are many perverse or ironic reasons, but i wonder if one of them could be that he occupies something of the same role within the videogames imagination. the idea of a franchise for a character nobody likes turns into an image of art for art's sake. the fact that bubsy is irredeemable from a "meaningful, expressive" perspective makes him useful as a point from which to hypothesize forms of art which deliberately avoid the meaningful or expressive - as in ulillillia's marvellous bubsy 3d videos, which transform the game into a oulipean suite of detached operations.

6. material bubsy:

the recieved idea of the mid-1990s mascot platformer audience is like the old analogy of the pre-revolution french peasant as a man walking up to his nose in water - while the ground is flat, he can persist indefinitely, but come the slightest decrease or pothole he will instantly drown. with the bubsy games as tipping point for the temporary demise of this form. but it's still curious that he was chosen, rather than, say, zool or cool spot, mascots who were "worse" on an objective moral level in that they were literally marketing contrivances to sell snack food to children. the videogames audience is traditionally able to accept any level of ghoulishness of this kind as long as it is presented in an appropriately humble,relateable way - the only sin really punished is that of pride, of getting above your station. so here we have a sort of martyr-bubsy, whose only real crime was not exemplifying videogame industry hubris and cynicism so much as making insufficient effort to cover for it...

well, maybe not, maybe we should honor the "disproportionate" scapegoating of bubsy as a real moment of disgust at the habitual crapness of mass media and avoid that charitable revisionism which is so easily rolled out to brands with the power to outlive many of their critics. but there is a  certain fascination that comes with those games blamed for or associated with some kind of crash, collapse - - like the atari ET game, they can no longer be regarded as "just games" operating within some fixed economic niche, they fall partly out of that niche and into the material world, they temporarily dispel the sensed changelessness of the industry. if ET really did destroy the industry it would be the best videogame ever made. bubsy never acquired this glamour, but it means that within the awful pantheon of named videogame characters he's one of the few which can be identified with any kind of negative drive, which gives him a special affinity for hobbyist games interested in tarrying with that drive.

7. official bubsy:

how many bubsys can you shut up? in 2016 a new, official bubsy game was released for pc and ps4, proving once and for all that that is not dead which can eternal lie, and came with a nauseating press-release-cum-interview with bubsy himself in which he ruminates smugly about his ensuing return to planet earth. the fake interviewer glosses the weird and largely negative history of the franchise (bubsy is a "gaming legend", apparently - i can't see anyone described as a "legend" without thinking of those awful laddish testimonials to the likes of boris johnson and raoul moat); bubsy throws in an unexpected jab at "unauthorized indie pixel games and deeveeart  portraits", suggesting he's at least seen space funeral 4; the overall  tone is that same bullying landlord chumminess of people deposed by scandal who pop up on the chat show circuit five years later with memoir in tow, blandly self-certain about the place they  deserve to keep in public life. whatever human meaning had accrued to the  franchise - in failure, in the way that failure could be used, repurposed, in wider ongoing arguments about culture - is firmly pushed away, in favour of that strangely anonymous recognition-without-history that constitutes ultimate value for any IP.

but it's also hardly unexpected - nothing dies anymore, even those forms whose only interest was in death, and we're of course not restrained by the threatening (litigious?) distinction between authorized and unauthorized versions of the same wretched official culture. better just to see it as yet another fan-bubsy to add to the catalog- a horrible-undead-persistence-under-capitalism bubsy, a bubsy that now signifies as well as everything else the monolithic stupidity by which "authorized" culture attempts to safeguard its possessions. so maybe we will see this new bubsy start to emerge places as well, an all-new emblem of the negative, emerging where you want it least... a bubsy for our time..!!!

[image tags: bubsy visits the james turrell retrospective, bubsy the bobcat in rip van bubsy starring bubsy, space funeral 4, “rabbid better than bubsy” by shinxboy on deviantart, bubsy animated tv show]

[brianna-lei]

Anonymous Butterfly Soup asks, batch 6

IT’S RIGHT NEXT TO THE BIG TOBLERONE I’M ALIVE

Being covered by a big gaming news site was one of my fantasies, so I’m elated this happened. The article is here, for anyone curious! 

More asks under the cut!! 

A note before I start -- if you submitted a bug, I saw it!! Thank you for reporting them!

Yes, she did! Her Facebook profile pic is her posing in front of a store at the mall, and you can see Jun’s reflection taking the pic in the store window

Akarsha didn’t realize, but Noelle totally heard it. Noelle kind of had a sense of what was up already, but actually hearing it worried her. She was debating whether or not to intervene when Min showed up. 

On a small note, Min trying to cheer Akarsha up slightly improved Noelle’s opinion of Min (even though Min and Akarsha almost end up fist fighting again afterward).  

Min plays video games too, imagine them playing Team Fortress 2 and later Overwatch together... Diya, Min, and Noelle have all seen some basic anime like Pokemon, Digimon, and Yugioh, but Akarsha’s the only real hardcore anime fan. I’m glad she met “Sakura”, “Yuki”, and Ester through the baseball club, because now she has weeb friends to talk about that stuff too. 

(Ester is less obvious about liking anime than “Sakura” and “Yuki”, but you can still tell by her outfit’s style. Lowkey but not lowkey enough)

I can totally relate to all of them, but I’d say Diya!

Yes, they grow close over the course of the year and Noelle has to try really hard not to cry LMAO They still keep in touch afterward. 

Yep, they both feel this huge gulf between themselves and their parents due to cultural differences. Many Asian immigrant parents are extremely conservative so it feels like they’re on a completely different wavelength from you, and at the same time they have complete power over you. It’s kind of a bad feeling.  

...Also, shadowing their faces saved me the work of drawing their different facial expressions. 

Min was actually out of town when the fire happened, so Diya had to call her and tell her what happened :( Diya (and eventually Min) sleeps on Noelle’s couch for a bit. Noelle and Akarsha aren’t living together at the time and Noelle has the nicer/cleaner apartment  

It sounds really miserable, but they’re ok in the end

Noelle's passion is math and science, so she definitely ends up doing something in STEM that she likes, just not what her parents were expecting. Akarsha is similar and becomes a software engineer -- They’re actually both naturally interested in those subjects, which says a lot about how bad the parental pressure really is.  

I like to think Diya and Min actually manage to break into minor league baseball and eventually MLB

Most of my outfit inspiration comes from my tumblr/twitter feeds. I wish I could recommend you fashion blogs, but I’m not following any?! They’re all just fandom mutuals who randomly reblog cool clothes sometimes. 

I used to have trouble deciding what clothes characters should wear, so every time I see an image of a cool outfit I save it for reference. After doing this since high school I now have...uh...

And those are just the unorganized ones, the ones i have in folders are like...

Now if I’m stumped for what a character should wear, I just browse these massive folders for inspiration. I can actually pinpoint the omocat jacket that gave me the idea for Min’s:

I thought, “it should be a warning: high voltage sign on the back!”, and then I just went on Google images and looked them up. 

Sorry if this isn’t helpful! 

I don’t think Min really minds, but The Squad is even better! Deke squad

Yeah, Akarsha’s parents wouldn’t approve either. Out of the main four, Diya is actually the only one whose parents are fine with it 

Ooh thank you this is an awesome compliment to receive!! 

I REALLY want to make merch some day! I’ve never made physical merch before and I’m a bit intimidated not knowing where to start/how to handle shipping, so it may take a while, though :( 

I didn’t give anyone last names and I doubt I ever will, sorry! Feel free to give them your own if you want 

This was intentional, but at the same time I can’t believe everyone IMMEDIATELY noticed. You guys are so in tune with 4/20

Diya and Akarsha are Indian, Min-seo is Korean, Noelle is Taiwanese, Chryssa is black, Liz is…mostly Irish, I think? “Sakura” is Pakistani, “Yuki” is Filipino. I’ve heard a lot of guesses for Ester, but she’s half black and half Chinese!

i got u son!!

Thank you, I really love hearing this because the feeling that this narrative was missing was what made me want to make this game in the first place! 

you might feel a bit more sympathetic to min when you reach her part of the story! Your mileage may vary, though

If you want to make a game like Butterfly Soup, try the program Renpy! It doesn’t require programming experience to use and there’s a lot of guides online on how to use it.  My NUMBER ONE BIG ADVICE IS MAKE A REALLY, REALLY SMALL GAME FIRST. My first game, Pom Gets Wi-Fi, was only 30-45 minutes long. If you make it any bigger than that, you almost guaranteed will never finish it. The dream game that you want to make is probably longer than that, so don’t make your dream game first! That’s kind of why I was so alarmed when Pom Gets Wi-Fi took off -- I’m very proud of that game and still love it, but it was like my test for the games I dreamed of making like Butterfly Soup. (Also, 17 is a great age to start making games, good for you!) Other stuff I’ve learned:  Programming: I mostly learned super specific things that can’t be easily applied to other situations. If you want to know how I did a specific thing in Renpy, message me! 

Writing: If you’re struggling to write something, it might be for a good reason. Maybe the scene is unnecessary or boring, your mental image of the scene doesn’t translate well to the format of your work, or the character motivations aren’t convincing enough. Deleting a scene altogether isn’t defeat, sometimes it’s the best path forward! Give up more! 

Artwise: Drawing for non-pixel art games takes FOREVER. The sheer amount of time it’d take to draw all the characters and backgrounds was so demoralizing that I found myself procrastinating because I didn’t want to tackle it. Not only did I have a large cast of characters (9 in the baseball club alone), but because of flashbacks, I had to draw half of them again as kids!

To anyone thinking about making a game by themselves, SERIOUSLY consider making it a pixel art game. If you’re that set on making a non-pixel art game, SEVERELY limit the number of characters and backgrounds you have to draw!! I’m begging u...learn from my mistakes... 

You’re welcome!!! :> 

I loved USC! The Interactive Media major was cool and fun -- I met a lot of good friends through the program! It was probably the best few years of my life. 

Unfortunately...I felt like it did nothing to prepare me for finding a job. There are very few classes for aspiring game artists and game writers. There wasn’t a single professor who worked as an artist at a triple A studio while I was there, and only one who was a major writer. I get that you gotta be self motivated, but I wish I had someone in the faculty I felt comfortable discussing my career path with. Some of the professors had clear favorite students and if you weren’t one of them, they’d make very little effort to reach out to you or interact with you. I know I'm introverted, but I never got this feeling with my general elective classes -- I had plenty of chances to talk to my writing professor, architecture lab professor, art teacher, etc., yet I came out of a lot of my Interactive Media classes wondering if my professors even remembered me.  

If you want to be a game designer or maybe a writer, and are really focused/outgoing with your professors, it could be the major for you, but if you want to be a game artist I’m not sure it’s the best place to be. 

I was actually crazy stressed out when it came out, so nope! It’s happening this weekend  

I was super nervous right after it came out because I was worried people wouldn’t like it! I put a lot into it, and actually teared up writing parts of it, so it was a ridiculous relief to see that people were touched by it. I’m really happy now and really want to make a sequel.  Also, I’m beyond grateful to my friends/mutuals/fans spreading the word and tweeting/posting about the game and making fancontent ;~; I really owe everything to them!  A few people wondered about how I was holding up attention-wise, and actually...as a fanartist I sort of thrive on this, haha. Also, this is much less intense than when I released Pom Gets Wi-Fi. For perspective, it took Butterfly Soup a week to reach the number of downloads Pom got in one day. 

Good!!! You’re welcome! 

you’re welcome!!! 

[bhrarchinerd]

In 1962, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Labor Department, prepared a memo on the use of federal office space for President John F. Kennedy. Into this document he tucked a succinct yet deeply considered set of recommendations for the design of U.S. government buildings. These “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” were adopted as official policy shortly thereafter and are seen as axiomatic by American architects and planners.

Moynihan wrote that federal buildings must testify to “the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government.” But he was silent about which styles would best express those qualities—deliberately so. “An official style must be avoided,” he cautioned. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa.”

That flow may soon be reversed. As first reported by Architectural Record and confirmed by The New York Times, the Trump administration is considering an executive order that will direct that U.S. government buildings with budgets greater than $50 million be designed in classical and other traditional styles. A draft document retains Moynihan’s ringing phrase about “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability,” but stipulates that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style.” All federal courthouses and federal buildings in and around Washington, D.C., would have to follow the work of Greek and Roman architects and their emulators in subsequent centuries. The late-20th-century Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, meanwhile, would essentially be banned from the federal projects covered by the order. The restriction would apply to renovation and expansion projects as well as new buildings.

Brutalism’s monumental concrete forms and the fractured geometries of Deconstructivism have attracted many other detractors, of course. But for the federal government to categorically discourage any architectural style is startling—and an utter misunderstanding of how architecture works.

The American Institute of Architects issued a statement saying it “strongly opposes” the move. Most architects today support using a range of styles for new buildings, as Moynihan did. But the AIA doesn’t speak for the cadre of die-hard classicists with whom the document originated. The National Civic Art Society (NCAS), a small Washington nonprofit, prioritizes the classical tradition in design and argues that contemporary architecture “has created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing.”

Donald Trump famously complained about the FBI’s Brutalist headquarters. But Trump, whose own tastes often run toward the garish, might otherwise seem an unlikely advocate for stately Greek- and Roman-influenced buildings. Once a fringe group, the NCAS has moved closer to Washington’s center of architectural power (such as it is) under the Trump administration. The White House recently appointed two of the group’s board members to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a panel that vets the designs for all governmental and some private buildings in the District of Columbia. The commission is an expert panel, but one of the new appointees, Justin Shubow, is not an architect. Shubow, who used to work for the conservative Federalist Society, made his name campaigning against Frank Gehry’s design for the new Eisenhower Memorial. The NCAS has received funding from the philanthropist Richard Driehaus, who also funds an annual $200,000 classical architecture award through the University of Notre Dame.

A lot of classically inspired architecture—including examples built in the modern era—is in fact beautiful. Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda at the University of Virginia and John Russell Pope’s 1941 National Gallery of Art are great buildings, both indebted to the Pantheon in Rome. But rewriting Moynihan’s guidelines to specify an official government style would be draconian. It would effectively exclude many working architects from federal projects, since even Richard Driehaus himself has admitted that very few specialize in classical design. (Those who do, of course, stand to do very well by the policy change.) And inducing nonclassical architects to add a column here or a quoin there, in order to satisfy regulations, would certainly not lead to superior design. The complex requirements of federal buildings, such as bulletproof glass for security and high standards of environmental performance, do not leave much money for highly refined details. The classical character of some buildings under this rule would be only skin-deep, says Robert Siegel, a New York architect who has designed buildings for the General Services Administration.  

“Trads”—supporters of traditional forms—claim that modern architecture is foisted on the public by a willful avant-garde. Yet the Art Deco Empire State Building and Maya Lin’s raw Vietnam Veterans Memorial have become two of the country’s most beloved designs. In fact, the style war being waged on the right is rooted in a misconception. Most American architects today work in a mode you could loosely call modernist, but not as a matter of ideology. It’s simply an efficient approach to creating buildings such as high-rises and hospitals with sophisticated modern needs, using contemporary materials and technologies. The neoclassical White House was constructed out of sandstone, a material that could be sourced in Virginia and that expert stonemasons knew how to build with; today, structural steel and curtain-wall glass are available everywhere, familiar to designers and builders, and provide flexibility at a reasonable cost.

Modern architecture—which embraced the idea that “form follows function” and includes movements such as Brutalism and Deconstructionism���is itself a century old now. And crucially, classicism and modernism are not opposites; they exist on a continuum, and choosing between them is unnecessary.

The great modernist architect Louis Kahn took enormous inspiration from the classical past, elements of which appear again and again in his buildings. More recently, the British Ghanaian architect David Adjaye designed a New York skyscraper featuring rows of arched windows with bronze accents—a tribute to the architectural ornament of an earlier era. Even Shubow’s nemesis, Frank Gehry, whose Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles are both defined by sweeping metal forms, has drawn repeatedly on ancient Greece and Rome in his work.

Which prompts the question: How would the government define classical and traditional, and how would it determine which buildings meet these subjective standards? Trying to adjudicate whether a design will “value beauty” and “command the admiration of the public,” as the draft document imagines, would be a farce.

The bigger question is why an ersatz Parthenon should be seen as more American than a Gothic Revival church, or a Southwestern pueblo, or a street of shotgun houses on the Gulf Coast. This directive would flatten and warp the rich architectural heritage of our country. It would also suggest that what’s most valuable in our built environment is what was codified by a white male elite before women could vote and black Americans had full legal rights.  

Already, the effort has reduced architecture to a silly game of semiotics. But good architecture is important because it can lift our mood, inspire us to creativity or spiritual reflection, and ease our anxieties. (These effects are borne out by a growing body of research.) Style has almost nothing to do with the qualities of architecture that really matter: scale, proportion, light, texture, the flow of spaces, and environmental sustainability.

A classicism mandate would signal to architects that innovation and progress are subversive, and to the public that a retread of the past is safer than the wide-open future. Frank Lloyd Wright argued the role of architecture is the opposite. “The architect must be a prophet,” he said. “He must keep open minded and he must keep his eyes on the future … if he can’t see at least ten years ahead, don’t call him an architect.”

But why should we care what the architect of Fallingwater and the original Guggenheim Museum thought, anyway? He wasn’t a classicist.

[mindfulwrath]

The Strange Case of Dr. Jones and Mr. Hector

I was hanging out in one of @fighteramy‘s streams and she played a song from the Jekyll and Hyde musical, which then caused me to listen to the whole soundtrack from the musical and instantly become obsessed with it, which then led to me re-reading the entirety of the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (it’s only 96 pages and you can find it online), and long story short, here’s a Lab Buddies fic in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Pain was not the whole of what Lalna had retrieved from the memory upload, but it was a large part, and by far the most palatable. At first he had not noticed the rest, or at least not remarked upon it; it came in fits and sputters, like rain upon a window, and at first left as much impression. He had known, of course, about the murders; had kept a tremendously close eye on them, both as a matter of personal interest and out of regard for scientific professionalism; and he had at times been taken by flights of dream or fancy wherein he would picture the scene as it must have fallen out. These brought him no pleasure, or if they did, he quickly quashed it or assigned it a more noble source; curiosity, perhaps, was responsible, or a delight in the impossibly tangled question of how such a monstrous Athena could have sprung, fully formed, from the restrained and laconic forehead of Dr. Jones.

It was because of these dim fantasies, these besmirched dreams, that at first he did not recognize the thread of veracity slowly stitching them to his mind. If before he had conceived the scene in the third person, an impartial observer like the cameras on every street corner, now he saw them in the first; a foreshortening of perspective from above to below, a greater strength of sensory detail. It became easier to lose himself in the imagining, or the recollection—sometimes he would find that he had dozed at his desk, eyes open, hand loosely curled around some innocuous implement, a faint smile gracing his face. He would wipe the expression away with alacrity, displeased and in small part alarmed by his vicarious pleasure at these half-remembered dreams. His work suffered for it, his attention drawn to brighter baubles of inquiry. The cloning program was, as a matter of course, a settled issue; his tasks and assignments, while not overtly forbidding him from attending to it, nonetheless trended in a different direction; Xephos never brought it up, and would rapidly change the subject if it was mentioned.

'I've been wondering,' Lalna said, over an afternoon meal.

'Have you?' Xephos inquired. The politeness of his interest did not quite manage to mask the barbs in his expression.

'Yes,' said Lalna, 'and at some length.'

'A rapidly growing length,' said Xephos. 'Out with it, come on.'

Lalna did not answer immediately, cautious of overstepping some well-hidden line in the sand and earning himself a sharpened rebuke.

'I've been wondering,' he said, 'about the transcription errors in our early cloning efforts.'

'Resolved, last I checked,' said Xephos. 'Has something come up that I wasn't made aware of?'

'No, no,' said Lalna, which was not entirely false, but by the same token, not nearly true. 'Just idle curiosity, on my part.'

'I should think you wouldn't have very much time for idling,' said Xephos.

'I don't,' said Lalna, recognizing immediately the unspoken threat of a heavier assignment. 'But seeing as one of those errors is still up and about, I thought—well, there was some relevance to the issue.'

'There's not,' Xephos said. 'That particular error has been carrying on quite well for a significant period of time. There's no cause to go stirring up trouble.'

'I had no intention of stirring up anything,' said Lalna. 'I only wondered what had gone wrong, to produce a copy so markedly distorted from the original.'

Xephos gave him a hard, penetrating look, under which Lalna fought to restrain his urge to squirm.

'A skipped line, perhaps,' he said dryly, 'or else several skipped lines, resulting in an improper translation with the syntax mangled. Certainly nothing was created that wasn't there to begin with; the only errors were by omission.'

'Oh, surely not,' Lalna said, frowning. 'You can't be suggesting that—that the only issue is some missing inhibitions. Information, I mean.'

Xephos's eyes gleamed, and Lalna was taken with the sudden and claustrophobic sensation of being surrounded by busy machinery, a sort of low hum that rattled the ice in Xephos's glass.

'There is, in all of us, a duality between good and evil,' he said. 'Perhaps in some, the balance is markedly more delicate.'

'Must you wax poetic at every possible opportunity?' Lalna asked, in a fit of exasperation.

'I am a scientist, and furthermore, an innovator,' said Xephos. 'It is my prerogative—more, my sworn duty—to wax poetic whenever poetry presents itself; and beyond that, as you must know, poetry of thought—the symmetry, the internal rhyme of an idea—is more efficient at wringing funding from the masses than anything short of abject patriotism.'

'A person would think you'd put that away, to save it for when you needed it.'

'Oh, no; it's a renewable resource, friend, and it grows in the using.'

Lalna did not press the topic further. There was a time when Xephos's amicable epithets had been an expression of affection, but that time had long since passed. Xephos no longer had friends, and he was well aware of it; Lalna was eternally wary of his friendliness, because he was in a position to know why.

Still, the conversation had given hime plenty else to muse on, and muse on it he did. He could not reconcile himself to the idea that the only distinction between himself and that mad and vicious creature which had so wrought havoc in the back alleys of the city, was a few simple omissions. Were decency, civility, propriety the only things preventing him from similarly grotesque preoccupations? Did such a wild abandon exist within him, simply waiting to be unleashed from its master? It seemed incredible. Certainly, there had been thoughts, fleeting impulses, base instincts of the primate brain, but all people were subject to such fits of internal violence. How often had threats of murder been cried out in heedless anger? How many cheap ceramics dashed, pillows beaten and papers burned in concession to that thoughtless hatred? There was not a man alive, he thought, who had not basked in the imagined glory of a crime of passion. There was no pair of human hands that had not itched for the taste of blood.

It was a vast gulf to span, between the impassioned imaginings of rattled minds to the actual commission of such gory deeds. If he fondly recalled the drunken empowerment from a stranger's helpless terror, it was only because the fondness was woven into the memory; if he yearned for the crazed zeal of that reckless murderer, it was only because of the strict sobriety of his own confinement. He was not forbidden from leaving the laboratories, just as he was not forbidden from working on the cloning project, but he was likewise discouraged from it by necessity. Perhaps now that the other failed clone had been made aware of its origins, the restrictions could be relaxed; there was very little left to hide; and if he pictured his first forays into freedom as midnight strolls through darkened alleys, it was surely a harmless fantasy. What a joy it would be, to walk beneath the open sky again; what delight, to mingle with his fellow-creatures; what bliss!

Sweet miss.

There had been some unfortunate side-effects to his prolonged isolation, ones that he kept well hidden, both from himself and from Xephos. He was not tremendously ashamed; he was only human, after all; and although Xephos seemed capable of drowning his baser desires, if he had them, beneath a steady tide of gin, Lalna could eke out no such reprieve from chemical pleasures. Neither food nor drink could satisfy the carnal itch, no distraction could subdue it. If there was shame, it was only that he was incapable of discovering a suitable surrogate; he felt his mind had betrayed him in this, refusing to accept even the most sensible of solutions in favor of a dogged determination to play slave to his body's whims.

If he envisioned those midnight strolls leading to a chance encounter with some comely stranger, surely it was only a symptom of this same malady. If he considered in vivid detail every touch and word and motion, constructed a perfect scene to make his pulse quicken and his hands itch, if he dreamed a hungry dream of replicating the crucial error and loosing its madness on the world again such that he might soak in the unfiltered memory of its cruelty, it was all born of the certainty that none of it would ever come to pass.

But if it did, oh, if it did, what utter bliss. . . .

[endenogatai]

Spain’s Glovo grabs $166M Series E for its ‘deliver anything’ app

Spain’s Glovo, an on-demand delivery app platform which operates in Europe, LatAm and Africa delivering food but also other urban conveniences from groceries to pharmaceuticals, has bagged another €150 million (~$166M) in a fast-following Series E round led by Abu Dhabi state investment company, Mubadala.

The raise follows a €150M in Series D that was announced in April, and $134M in Series C in mid 2018. The total raised since the business was founded back in 2015 is now around $488M.

The Barcelona-based startup says the latest raise has pushed its valuation past $1BN — putting it into a very exclusive Spanish unicorn club, with the likes of ride-hailing giant Cabify. (Glovo reckons it’s only the second privately held business in the country to achieve such a valuation).

Co-founder Oscar Pierre would not disclose the exact valuation investors are putting on the business now — beyond publicly acknowledging the unicorn milestone. “We’ve decided not to disclose valuation,” he said. “Even internally, all these valuation things it’s not something we care a lot about… Crossing the billion, I guess, is something worth announcing but not more details.”

Glovo’s new investor, Mubadala, is investing from a $400M fund announced earlier this year for backing European startups — which is itself backed by Japanese conglomerate, Softbank. Mubadala was also a backer of Softbank’s Vision Fund. (And the latter has made some very big bets in the on-demand delivery space, ploughing funding into DoorDash in the US and Rappi in Colombia to name two.)

Asked whether Glovo sees opportunities for expansion in the Gulf region in light of Mubadala joining its investor roster, Pierre said: “It hasn’t been part of the thesis of investment — so we’re not linking it.”

Glovo’s market focus remains fixed on three core regions where it currently operates: South America, South West Europe, and Eastern Europe and Africa — the strategy having been to target regions where competitors hadn’t already established themselves as the go-to on-demand delivery platform.

“Middle East for us it seems already a bit too competitive to go now,” he told us. “All our expansion playbook has been focused on going first to markets… [or where our competitors] were a second player. And the online food delivery market in Middle East is very developed already.

“So, never say never, but short answer is we’re not planning in the short term to launch there.”

Speaking in an on stage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin last week, Glovo’s other co-founder, Sacha Michaud, suggested the hyper competitive on-demand food delivery market is set for more consolidation in the short term. Though he said Glovo’s team will be head down “aiming for profitability” — rather than looking to go shopping for growth by buying rivals (or indeed being bagged themselves).

Pierre also told us the focus for the business in 2020 — now flush with Series E cash — will be achieving profitability. He said it’s hoping to achieve that in a little over a year’s time.

“Our plan is to use this money to go fully profitable as a company during early 2021,” he told TechCrunch. “I think that’s quite realistic. Still with a very high growth. So we’re expecting more than 2x-2.5x growth during next year.”

“Today we operate in 26 markets. And many of them are still in early stage, and they’re still in investment phase so I think first of all we’re going to use this money to take most of our countries to the positive operational profit stage,” he went on. “Our model is one where during the first 18 months you need to invest in a city — because you need to build the right capillarity, the right efficiency to start generating positive profits.”

Glovo launched its service in around eight new countries during 2019, per Pierre.

Which means there’s plenty of investment that still needs to go in to those markets over the coming year to bring them up to the required density to tilt for profitability.

So it looks likely that it will step off the gas a little on its blistering pace of growth and market expansions next year — as it puts more effort on deepening its footprint to push for the scale required to tip into positive margins.

Although Pierre also suggested there “might be a few new countries” it will ride into next year — noting, too, that it will have a larger marketing budget in 2020 vs this year.

“The rate of new cities that we’re currently launching is very high. Probably every week we keep launching at least ten cities — Italy for example has already like 60 cities launched and we think we can go to more than 200 so there’s a lot of cities still to penetrate,” he said. “We’ve had very good results in some African or Eastern European countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. And there’s some similar markets that we could go to. [There are also examples] in Africa, like Ivory Coast. It’s been a great success.”

“We do expect a lot,” he added. “2019 on relative terms [growth] was very high. It was like 3.5x. It’s very hard to maintain that growth with the current size that we have but it’s still going to be very high — it’s probably going to be 2x-2.5x”

A big chunk of Series E funding will be ploughed into expanding Glovo’s engineer team — with a plan to hire around 300 additional developers by mid 2020. This will build on the circa 150 devs it already employs in Barcelona and a new tech hub it’s building out in Warsaw.

As a whole the business employs 1,500+ staff at this point — not including the thousands of self-employed couriers (who it calls ‘Glovers’) who make the deliveries — but 2020 will see it significantly grow headcount, with both up to 300 more engineers being added and potentially even more hires related to running the ‘dark stores’ it’s planning to significantly ramp up next year too.

Asked why this on-demand delivery business is so tech intensive Pierre said it’s all about eking out small gains to reduce friction and yield incremental savings by automating and optimizing platform and UX interactions which — cumulatively — make the difference for this type of thin margins business.

“Overall there’s a lot of complexity in what we do. So we deliver anything in your city in 30 minutes. And in this 30 minutes you need to co-ordinate a lot of things. A lot of things have to go well, like the restaurant or the store has to receive well information, they need to receive well the preparation time to get that ready, of course all the logistics and all the routing and the despatching of the orders with the couriers needs to work very well, and then the front end for the user — it’s an industry where there’s a lot of competition and we’re all developing better and better features. So that also has to work out very well.”

“If we had 400 engineers there’s many more specialized [product] teams that we would build,” he added. “On the other end we are by definition a super high volume, low margin business — and next year we’re talking about doing more than 100M orders, maybe close to 200M orders next year. Which means that you optimize every single order by 20 cents, which seems nothing in a €20 basket, and you’re generating €40M extra and a bit there. And most of the efficiencies — they come through tech.”

Groceries will be the other big focus for Glovo in 2020, with Pierre noting the category is it’s second biggest, after food (i.e. restaurant meal) deliveries.

Since 2018 Glovo has experimented with opening a handful of so-called ‘dark stores’ in key cities — such as Madrid and Barcelona. These are delivery-pick-up-only warehouses for convenience store style grocery shopping — be it toothpaste, snacks or soft drinks — with stores strategically sited to ensure speedy delivery across a city.

It has around seven cities with dark stores operational now, according to Pierre. The plan is to launch over 100 more of these ‘Super Glovos’ (as it calls them) in 2020 — focusing on larger cities.

“We are building our own dark stores and it’s a model that we like a lot,” he told us. “We think it works everywhere. So far we have basically been rolling it out in our biggest cities. And we’re going to keep with that focus.

“What we’re very focused on now is making sure that the biggest cities, we have enough capillarity of dark stores to guarantee super fast delivery time. And for us super fast delivery time means 15 minutes. So that’s what we’re focusing on… Before launching more cities we’re very focused on how do we guarantee this 15 minute delivery time.”

As noted above, ramping up on groceries will also add headcount to the business. Pierre confirmed the stores are staffed by employees — and said between four to five people are needed per store to work as packers and store managers. So that’s potentially another 500 staff Glovo will be adding to its books next year.

It also partners with supermarket giant Carrefour to offer full supermarket shopping on-demand via the app in select markets. But it sees dark stores as supplementary to that partnership model — playing to the push-button convenience its business encourages.

And — again with an eye on profitability — providing opportunities for cross selling to bulk up order size.

The dark store play piggybacks on convenience, using the fixed delivery fee as a lever to encourage users to add a few more staple items to an urgent shopping need, because, well, they might feel bad if they shell out to just get a bottle of mixer brought to their door. (Super Glovos stock a limited range of items (<1,000 SKUs) to help keep delivery times down.)

“There’s a lot of people that order because they need something very urgently — like for tonight, and since they’re ordering maybe four or five items I think we do a pretty good job at cross-selling and adding more,” said Pierre. “So it’s pretty basic things but that people need… tonight, tomorrow and maybe the day after that. They don’t do the big basket.

“In Super Glovo you can find things like oranges, potatoes, bananas. We have started selling some meat in some markets — like simple burgers. Actually we tested selling Impossible Burgers in Barcelona. But most of it is not perishable — like 90%.”

“We believe that the best for the user is to have both,” he added, discussing dark stores vs supermarket partnerships. “To have a very fast, 15 minute, more like convenience option and also offer them maybe one or two great retailers, like Carrefour — maybe for larger baskets or for their unique brands. I think that’s the best user experience possible.”

Beyond food, courier services will be another area of product focus for Glovo in 2020, per Pierre.

“Surprisingly enough there’s a lot of people that use us for courier,” he said.” Like I forgot my keys or just send some documents from point A to point B. This is a service where we want to improve our product a lot because it does take a lot of orders.”

But that’s just about going to be the limit. He suggested Glovo will have limited resources to fully implement some of the other stuff it’s experimenting with (or has plans to) — as it works towards its overarching vision of becoming an ‘everything app’ for urbanities. Because thin margins like plentiful orders.

For example, he said it’s currently testing its own brand on-demand scooters in Argentina.

“Our users in Buenos Aires there’s 500 scooters — yellow painted Glovo scooters in the streets — and they can use them with the same Glovo account. It’s a test for us to learn about a new industry and stuff.”

“Here in Barcelona we are looking at the possibility to sell ticketing — like last minute tickets for cinema, for theatres, for football matches,” he added. “And of course sell digital tickets not printed tickets. So we like everything that gets the user closer to their city and makes it basically easier. And we’re going to be testing things but I think not rolling out, scaling massively.

“We have a mentality of testing things. But we don’t think we’re going to have resources during 2020 to do a full rollout.”

Asked what he sees as the end game for Glovo if, as he hopes, it achieves profitability in 2021– whether it’s an IPO or exit via acquisition — Pierre said the team is focused on staying independent, however that can be achieved.

“We’re very focused on that point where we can basically decide our future. More or less investor independent. I think we can reach that,” he suggested. “And then decide what we want to do. Glovo’s one of these projects that it’s so fun and there’s so much entrepreneurship in terms of launching new services and verticals. The reality is that’s, for us, very important — and we don’t see ourselves doing anything else.

“So I think our dream would be stay as independent. Maybe IPO. It’s a tool for us to give liquidation to all our shareholders and employees. But it’s not a goal per se. We have 18 months to be profitable, depend on us, and keep having a very big impact.”

Glovo’s Sacha Michaud: ‘I think there will be consolidation’

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