#especially as a mentally unstable 20 some odd year coming off one of the most traumatic experiences she's ever had

[chronal-anomaly]

One day I'll talk about the impact of public relations and marketing in Overwatch and the impact that it had on Lena's sense of self.

[reluctantly-plus-ultra]

Rei

Totally random thought here, but can we consider how absolutely crazy the LOV plot could’ve been if they’d taken in Rei? Like, total crack theory, but there are so many fun ways that could’ve been spun.

-It all just starts off with them trying to take out the new number one hero, and nobody’s really sure who mentioned that Endeavor’s wife had been hospitalized (not exactly common knowledge), but it seems like a pretty easy way to take a hostage and lure him in

-Dabi’s kinda pushing against it, but that’s not super shocking as he’s always been a pretty grey-area villain, and if any one of them are likely to have doubts about kidnapping mentally unstable women and putting them in potentially life-threatening situations, of course it’s this crispy dude

-So they take some time planning this whole thing out, and when the time comes around to actually pull it off, it works without a hitch. In and out, nobody notices a thing- particularly not Rei’s caretakers who can’t tell the difference between the real Rei Todoroki and one of Twice’s clones (which is saddening in and of itself)

-They all get back to the base and are putting on this whole evil production, trying to really play up their front and frighten their captive a little bit, but part-way through Shigaraki’s speech about how she’s going to be the bait that helps bring down Endeavor, Rei just...Cuts him off?

-Everyone’s kind of a little taken aback, because nobody does that unless they have a death wish, but here’s this frail wraith of a woman looking completely undaunted while literally tied to a chair, helpless and surrounded by villains

- And she looks their leader dead in the eye and tells him that if they’re looking to take down Enji, there are better ways of doing it 

-LITTLE DID THEY KNOW they kidnapped a literal powerbank of info on their number one target, yes, but they also kidnapped a broken woman who has a story to tell, an army of skeletons in her closet, and more than a few grudges to settle.

-And so, this is how the League of Villains become the first group to hear the truth of what went on behind closed doors in the prestigious Todoroki household, and the facts churn more than one stomach. After all, they might be villains, but for the most part they’re not total monsters, and not a single one of them present can deny that the whole situation is ten variants of fucked up.

-If Dabi had to leave for a cigarette or two when Rei started talking about her children, well, that was his own business.

-When the whole tale is said and done, it doesn’t take long for the league to come to the consensus that hell, if Rei wants to join their cause and crush her husband’s career, they’re not in any position to stop her. They were on the hunt for new recruits anyway, this is really just a win-win situation.

-Things are different with her around; Rei might be part of the cause, but she’s not a true villain like the rest of them. She sets the ground-rules pretty early on; what she doesn’t and doesn’t agree with, what she will and won’t help accomplish. None of them really argue it, because it’s not like they can truly force her to become an evil-doer, and in some ways, it’s nice having a motherly figure around and knowing she wasn’t cleaning blood off the knives in the kitchen earlier.

-And with time, she does gradually become the den mother of sorts, in an odd, peculiar way. It was to be expected, as many of the LOV lacked parental figures, and Rei had a hole in her heart where her children had been stripped. That doesn’t make it any less strange to walk in on Rei patiently braiding Toga’s hair while the teen chatters on about boys and blood like the two subjects were interchangeable, but Rei missed the opportunity to have bonding time like this with Fuyumi, and she’ll be damned if she passes it up again.

-Eventually, this compassion spreads throughout the other members of the league, though, and it’s evident in all kinds of little ways. Compress is meticulous about finding her pretty objects and flowers every time they go out, something to brighten the woman’s day, especially after years of staring at the same four walls. Twice is particularly good at finding new rom-coms for him and Rei to binge when time allows for it. She and Kurogiri know how to make everyone’s individual favourite kinds of tea (and stronger drinks as well, with the exception of Toga)

-She sews Shigaraki a pair of gauntlets that cover one finger and leave the rest of his hand exposed so he can touch things and not have to worry about destroying them, and ooh boy, emotions are high that day.

-They often give her “progress reports” about how Shouto’s doing too, tell her about how strong he’s getting and what new tricks he’s learned from whenever they encounter her son in combat situations. Nothing will ever top the time that Twice came back with three missing teeth and a broken nose, and proudly told Rei Todoroki about how well Shouto could roundhouse kick

-Is it weird to be keeping a special eye on up-and-coming heroes, and be proud when they kick your ass? Probably. Most of them don’t care though, because that’s Rei’s son, look at the little squirt go-

-Poor Todoroki becomes doubly confused when a few of the LOV visibly perk up whenever he uses his ice, which makes no fucking sense, and you can guarantee that he and Midoriya theorize the hell out of it like the true conspiracy theorists they are.

-Dabi’s relationship with Rei is oddly strained, and nobody seems to understand how the typically mild woman manages to put their sarcastic edgelord into extreme defense mode. It’s remarkable to him that none of them have made the connections between Rei’s son Touya and the fire-wielder who they see every damned day, but he can’t tell if it’s worse or better that Rei herself hasn’t seemed to pick up on it either.

-and hAWKS, DEAR LORD HAVE MERCY HAWKS

-Of course, upon doing his undercover work in the league, he’d expected to come across a few surprises, but finally convincing Dabi to let him meet the league and immediately running straight into Endeavor’s wife was not anywhere on the list. It’s something he knows he should be reporting to the Commission as soon as he’s clear, but there’s just... Something not right about how this is sitting, and it causes him to wait things out a little bit.

-And then, upon getting to know her, and finding Rei to be surprisingly sweet and kind for the people she was affiliated with, some red flags were bound to go up. Like, he was confused as hell to begin with even seeing her in the League, but seeing her there and knowing that she’s helping take down Endeavor without being a complete nutcase? Not a good sign.

-So when he too finally gets the whole story, it completely rattles the entire world he stands on. Everything he’s thought of this man he’s looked up to his whole life, everything he thought he was surefooted in putting his faith in, has been completely shattered. It’s devastating and horrible, and a really hard pill to swallow.

-But beyond that, and despite whatever airs he puts on, Hawks is one smart chickadee and it takes him all of 2.36 seconds to figure out that the brooding 20-something-year-old with a vendetta against this same man and a fire quirk too powerful for his own good is none other than Rei’s son Touya without a doubt. He doesn’t blame himself for missing it before, but knowing Dabi and knowing the whole story of what went down suddenly brings things into a whole new perspective, and it unfortunately makes a lot of sense.

-Eventually, after about a month or so and neither Dabi nor Rei seeming to make any move to reconnect, Hawks intervenes a little, pulling Rei aside to nudge her towards the struggling young man. It’s a surprise to find out that she’s known all along, has known since the day they took her from the hospital, and she first laid eyes on him. “He’s different, older,” She says with a small smile, patting the winged hero’s arm, “But I’d recognize my son anywhere.”

-Hawks chooses not to mention how Endeavor had faced Touya in person and not even come close to the same conclusion, but the knowledge of the thing still simmers in his gut.

-She says she’s waiting for him to come to her and tell her himself, but Dabi’s a stubborn little shit, so when things get a bit too overwhelming for the fire-user one night and Hawks has to bring an absolutely drunk-off-his-rocker Touya Todoroki back to the league or risk him passing out in a gutter somewhere, he takes him straight to Rei. He’s a mess, has been for the last three hours since he first broke into Hawks’ apartment just after midnight and began info-dumping his story to him then and there, scuffed knuckles and bleeding scars indicating that he’s already had some trouble earlier in the night.

-Of course, Dabi isn’t in the mood to chat and takes one look at Rei before trying to walk right back out the door. But the strain is becoming too much for Hawks too, and it’s time to lay some old demons to rest.

-It’s a little uncomfortable, being a bystander to their reunion, but Hawks can’t honestly trust that Dabi won’t flee if he’s not blocking the way and tracking him down again would be an absolute pain in the ass. So instead, he tries his best to be a mute fly on the wall as Rei approaches her rigid prodigal son, and gently raises one hand up to his cheek, using the sleeve of her sweater to carefully wipe away the blood trails.

-”I knew a boy just like you once.”

-Hawks can’t deny that his heart breaks a little as Rei tells this unmoving statue of a man about her Touya, how kind and gentle and loving he was, how he played so well with his younger siblings, and always put them first. How much she loved him, how much they all did, how she’d treasured his crayon drawings and cried in secret when he burned, and the slowly crumbling look on Dabi’s face is something he never wants to see again.

-”What happened to him?” Dabi asks, voice wavering, and it’s devastating that he’s still trying so hard to keep that mask on, to hide behind a scarred face and dyed hair like he doesn’t already know who he is, like he wasn’t admitting it all in Hawk’s living room an hour beforehand, pacing a hole through the carpet.

-“Nothing that was his fault,” Rei answers quietly, finally letting the unshed tears roll down her cheeks, even as she smiles, “I’m just glad to see he’s still alive.”

-It takes half a second for both of them to be embracing in a crumpled heap on the floor of the warehouse, and damn it, even Hawks is crying when he hears Dabi call Rei “Mom” for the first time in twelve fucking years, both of them sobbing, though the tears aren’t all sad. There’s a relieved look on Rei’s face as she combs through Dabi’s hair soothingly, saying his name over and over again until it finally doesn’t feel strange to associate it with the broken man Hawks has come to know.

-Things are better from then on. Explaining this revelation to the rest of the league the next morning was… Something, but Dabi’s smiles come easier after that night, and Hawks is learning to appreciate how simple it can be to make him laugh. There’s a light in his eyes that wasn’t there before, and while Hawks knows he shouldn’t be making these kinds of promises, not with the orders he’s under, he swears he won’t let it flicker out again. Damned hero instincts and all that.

Honestly, I have a lot more ideas to run with this prompt, but I don’t want to make this unbearably long- let me know if y’all are interested in a part two!

[joemuggs]

DO YOU SUFFER FROM SPYMANIA?

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Spymania label, and to celebrate it they have released a record of unreleased tracks. It’s brilliant, you should buy it. In 2016 I wrote a history of the messy, messed-up, but brilliant Brighton scene that they found their feet in. Sadly it got lost in the archiving of the Red Bull Music Academy site, but I’ve still got the text, so here it is. And to prove I was there, here is me, in an inexplicably bad shirt, with the Spymania crew and friends:

Some Spymanians - far left is Hardy Spymania, next to him in blue t-shirt is Paddington Breaks, third from right leaning forward is MDK and that’s me in the bad shirt on the right.

25th Anniversary EP by SONGBIRD & WAFTA

From the town's 18th century genesis as a playground for aristocrats, Brighton has always been a space for outrageous hedonism. Being the closest point to London on the English south coast makes it an obvious place for escape and misbehaviour. With that has always come something grittier and grottier though. It's no coincidence that the best known fictional depictions of Brighton feature razor-carrying petty gangsters (Brighton Rock) and running street battles and hurried back-alley knee-tremblers (Quadrophenia). The novelist Keith Waterhouse famously said “Brighton always looks like a town helping police with their enquiries” – and it still does. Behind its facade of homeopaths, holidaymakers, students and media folk, it hides rampant corruption and organised crime, a heroin economy to match any British city, and sprawling estates that are among the country's poorest.

In the heat of the 1990s rave fervour when the world and its dog came down to Brighton to party their way through untold seven-day weekends, all of this ambiguity was expressed via a rather different electronic scene. While the superclubs along the seafront pumped to the sounds of handbag house, trance and big beat, hidden away in the nooks and crannies a techno style formed that became known on the European underground simply as “the Brighton sound” – and around it sprouted odd rave and electronica mutations that, though they might have seemed pisstakey or bloody-minded at the time, would alter the course of electronic music for a long time to come. All of this was surrounded by a dense web of art, theory, satire, in-jokes and meat-flinging cabaret, that could be perplexing, even off-putting, but has left a huge creative legacy from a tiny scene that punched way, way above its weight.

This scene of malcontents and squarepegs was by definition loose-knit – but if there was a centre to it, it was Cristian Vogel. Originally from the south Midlands, he and his friend Si Begg already had experience putting out cassette releases and primitive music software hacks (with the Cabbage Head Collective) before he came to Sussex University to study 20th Century Music in 1992. With a head full of Stockhausen and rave tapes, he was boshing out the techno, and by the end of 1994 had two releases on Dave Clarke's Magnetic North label and was resident at the Acid Box club nights in a little sticky-floored upstairs venue in Brighton's North Lanes.

This was the period when techno and hardcore were still part-fused, and along with headliners like Carl Cox and Luke Slater you could expect to hear Belgian hoover noises full-pelt gabber rolled into the more “intelligent” beats, all with nothing but relentless strobes and smoke to intensify the experience. It's a sign of how intense it was that the “chillout” in the backroom consisted of Richie Hawtin tunes playing and Tetsuo: Iron Man being shown on a couple of TVs, and felt genuinely laid back in comparison to the dancefloor. It could be shoulder-to-shoulder packed, or have ten people raving away, but it was pretty much always guaranteed to deliver mental obliteration. It's precisely this delirium you can hear in key early releases like Vogel's “Ninjah” or Tobias Schmidt's “Minus One”.

Si Begg and friends

Cristian, together with Si Begg founded Mosquito Records around this point, around which a motley crew of producers of monstrously banging but sonically razor sharp techno gathered. Neil Landstrumm, Tobias Schmidt (an ingenious pseudonym for one Toby Smith), Ibrahim Alfa and Russ Gabriel, as well as Begg and Vogel themselves, all released in the first couple of years. They were closely allied with the Scottish techno scene, notably through Landstrum but also the Sativae label run by Dave Tarrida and Steve Glenncross, and played to seething crowds north of the border, as well as absolutely huge ones in Germany, Poland and further afield. Yet even though the audiences were tiny back on the south coast, the local brand was inescapable: indeed Si Begg, who lived in London right through the nineties, recalls with some bafflement seeing untold German flyers with “BRIGHTON TECHNO” in big letters under his name.

All of this was great, but taken alone could simply have been another local flavour on the international techno scene. The four-to-the-floor certainly remained the heartbeat of the scene as The Acid Box became The Box, which became Defunkt, which became Freekin' The Frame, and the techno dons kept coming through: Blake Baxter, Shake Shakir, Claude Young, Beltram, Weatherall, Surgeon, Bandulu... but very quickly, things became about more than just that. There was a strongly disruptive element from the beginning in the form of a close alliance with the Brighton “clench” of the Church Of The SubGenius. If you don't know about the Church, that's a whole other rabbit hole to fall down, but for our purposes it's enough to know that the local bunch existed on the fringes of freeparty soundsystem culture and subverted its tendencies to crypto-mystical bollocks, and were big on collage and stencil graffiti, heavy punning streams of consciousness (“Bulldada” in the SubGenius parlance), mischief disguised as culture and vice versa.

Heavily influenced by this SubGenius mischief was Mat Consume, in-house designer, computer animator and frequent back-room DJ for the Vogel-related axis. His art, brain-bent ranting and noisily experimental sets became a vital part of the identity of the scene, helping coalesce obsessions with punk and Situationism and ambivalent embrace of digital progress among Vogel and compadres to the point where when they formed an umbrella organisation for their activities it was natural to call it No Future. Held loosely together by Vogel's partner and manager Emma Sola this acted as a booking agency for various acts, but just as much felt like a chaotic but fiercely independent joint art project between Vogel, Sola and Consume, throwing ideas and aesthetic forms out into the underground and forging alliances with equally bloody-minded creators.

Emma Sola

These included the likes of Canadian filmmaker and stencil artist Pablo Fiasco; animators and sound artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt aka Semiconductor; non-techno eclecticist club collectives Mufflewuffle and Slack; the combative cabaret night That Stupid Club which would feature subcultural saboteurs like Stewart Home, Dennis Cooper and The Divine David; and another more rave-influenced cabaret night called Monkey's Lounge full of spoken word, off-colour comedy, offal-flinging and pints-of-piss-drinking, run and compered by... um... me (under the names Rimmington Snuffporn Esq and DJ Dead, with help from my music production and DJ partner Jeffrey Disastronaut). It was at a Monkey's Lounge session that Consume physically pushed Jamie Lidell – already widely known as a wildly innovative techno producer via the Subhead collective and their Growth parties – on stage with the house band Balzac, immediately kickstarting a long running residency as their singer and marking the beginning of a performing career that still continues.

Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson and Hardy Spymania

Possibly the most important alliance of all, though, was with the Spymania crew. Their social circle was a motley bunch of Londoners, Midlanders and most notably a large contingent from Chelmsford, Essex. Many of the latter had been to school with Tom Jenkinson, a musician known originally as Stereotype and then, when the Spymania label itself was formed by Paul Fowler and brighton-based Hardy Finn, as Squarepusher. Their ethos was preposterous in all ways, fuelled by unstable fusions of questing intellects and Essex swagger. As teenagers they first congregated around a Chelmsford club night called Club Trout, run by future scene mainstay Jane Mitchell (and later exported to Brighton as Smooth But Halibut); they smoked themselves sarcastic to early tapes made by their friends Cassetteboy; everything they did was shot through with skater-stoner-hardcore-raver pisstake attitude. Their rickety old website, which remains live today, still gives a hint of all this. http://www.spymania.com/pgs/hardcore.html

Yet these were musical connoisseurs too, assiduously collecting hip hop, acid, Detroit techno, British electronica, and especially in the case of Martin “MDK” Wood, death metal, gindcore and anarcho punk. This pile-up of musical expertise and sarky dicking about was there from the first release, Squarepusher's Conumber EP – which featured everything from a track that was nothing more than a timestretched Jenkinson asking “can anyone lend me a fiver” to the jungle-acid fusions that would literally redefine how electronica was made from the Aphex Twin on down for the rest of the 1990s. The Spymania records that followed touched on illbient mismatched time signatures, Drexciyan electro-funk, Deicide samples, eerily blissed out atmospherics, Cassetteboy's peurile genius (via offshoot label Barry's Bootlegs), and a dozen more awkward twists and turns besides, always brain-frying, always funny, never settling on any sound that offered the casual listener an easy handle on what was going on.

A standardly Dada Spymania cover

This added up to a refreshing antidote to the chin-fondling seriousness and purism of much of the electronica scene. And when Finn, Wood and friends went raving at the Acid Box, they naturally found a kindred spirit in Mat Consume who would design almost all the Spymania sleeves, their grainy photocopy style a counterpoint to the garish clashing computer images and animated dancing baby skeletons of his No Future work. They in turn helped inspire Consume, with the urbane Lynton Million (a university friend of Jamie Lidell's), to set up Trash Records.

Trash was a label that would take the horrible and confrontational side of the scene to extremes, with anger and ugliness from label mainstays including DJ Paedofile, Chuck Shite and Shit & Cheap (aka Consume & Landstrumm – sample track name: “SuckingCocksForFishheads”), as well as impossibly intricate turns from the likes of Liddell and another Chelmsfordian Squarepusher contemporary and Rephlex recording artist, Matt Yee-King. Si Begg, too, was close to the Spymania team, and launched the rather more good-natured but equally ridiculous Noodles family of labels, featuring a slew of collaborations and AKAs (including Hardy Spymania's pleasingly literal Barry Pseudonym) from the No Future and Spymania families.

It was a messy and disparate little scene. The bulk of the rave action took place in the big clubs of Germany and the rest of Europe, but the creative processes were at least as much about what happened in smoky shared flats and workshops in Brighton's tatty backstreets as they were about big dancefloors. Vogel once described his metier as “the drug pub rant”, and a lot of work sprung from precisely these. Continually, though, the bulk of Brighton club culture, from the seafront clubs to the free parties on the beaches and Downs, tended to look askance at the belligerence and deliberate obfuscations of the No Future axis, or more often simply ignore it all. Perhaps the glorious cresting of the first wave of activity, and probably this scene's peak visibility in Brighton full stop, was at the Brighton Dance Parade of 1997. This attempt to replicate Berlin's Love Parade was never to be repeated – hippie mismanagement and Brighton's endemic corruption saw to that – but for one day only the ravers had their literal day in the sun.

The Trash crew: top - Consume, Hunter & Million / middle - Million & Consume / bottom - Cristian Vogel & Million

There, among floats pumping out free party trance and funky house, the No Future bus – stencilled all over by Pablo Fiasco with pictures of dead rock stars, and with a stunningly crsip rig playing weaponised techno whose angles and curves were a thousand times sharper and more present than any other music on the day – stood out like a septic thumb. This was also the year that Vogel's musical partnership with Lidell began in earnest – with Lidell's furious remix of Vogel's “(Don't) Take More”, which remains a brain-damage anthem to this day in some quarters, and their first release as the mutant electronic funk duo Super_Collider, “Darn (Cold Way O Loving)”. The latter track, amazingly, emerged on a major label, thanks to it being signed by Skint parent label Loaded, in turn licensed through Sony. It was a year to wave the freak flag high.

Despite untold hard drugs, fights and the incestuous nature of a town as small as Brighton, the scene and the various record labels involved remained vigorous and continued to diversify right through the last years of the nineties and into the new millennium. Super_Collider released one album on Loaded, and another on Rise Robots Rise, the label created by Vogel and Sola for ever more varied output including Catalan girl-punk and German dancehall. Lidell's ultra-experimental first solo album, Muddlin Gear, came out as a joint venture between Spymania and WARP in 2000, accompanied by deranged artwork and live films by Pablo Fiasco. Bands increasingly became part of the mix: whispering neo-Krautrockers Fujiya & Miyagi (on Paul Spymania's Massive Advance imprint), the terrifying Wevie Stonder (who he managed) and space-pop group Chungking (which I was in for a couple of years, and whose multi-instrumentalist James Stephenson played bass for Super_Collider live, creating a Chelmsford rhythm section with Matt Yee-King on drums - both of these two had also been in the aforementioned Balzac too).

No Future’s logo, designed with typical aggression by Consume

There were prominent fans too. John Peel asked the Trash collective to open Meltdown Festival in 1998. Thom Yorke and Radiohead's resident artist Stanley Donwood designed t-shirts for No Future. Vogel is namechecked on the Sabres Of Paradise Haunted Dancehall album, and Andrew Weatherall would frequently call him up, dumbfounded at his latest sonic advances. One memorable 1999 awayday for the Freekin' The Frame club to The End in London saw Róisín Murphy jumping on stage after the live Super_Collider show to duet with Lidell on an impromptu version of “Once in a Lifetime”, a very young Kieran Hebden repping UK garage, Chicks On Speed shouting their hearts out, and Chris Cunningham playing long segments of white noise to puzzled ravers, as well as sets from various No Future / Spymania stalwarts.

Inevitably, like all but the very biggest musical scenes, the micro-one in Brighton dissipated as people grew up, fucked up, or moved on – but its echoes continue. Vogel and Landstrumm continue to be significant forces in electronic music, both as influences on the post-Blawan generation and as musicians in their own right. Si Begg is a respected sound designer and composer. Matt Yee-King runs the computer music course at Goldsmiths college, and is a big noise on the “Algorave” scene. Paul Spymania is an artist manager and agent, and along with Scuba, brought dubstep to Berlin in the legendary Sub:Stance sessions. Semiconductor became artists in residence for NASA, among many other extraordinary commissions. Jamie Lidell supported Elton John. Consume is in Bristol, currently working on a giant mural of DJ Derek. Lynton Million lives on a small island, selling whisky. Ibrahim Alfa took several sharp diversions that are an epic tale in their own right, and is only now picking up where he left off with a Workshop issue of his “lost” album Once Upon a Time in Brighton. And so it goes on...

Unlike some electronic scenes, the one in Brighton was never particularly chic (although it certainly had massive cultural cachet in a few countries if not at home), and its records don't necessarily fetch silly money on discogs (like that's a measure of value, right?). But out of a tiny techno club and its committed few regulars grew something that filled an entire decade with utterly extraordinary art, music, humour and ideas, and which still has relevance and resonance for smart creative minds many years on. Those messy, aggro, awkward bunch of ravers and jokers somehow managed to hold it together just enough to build a creative world entirely of their own, with its own rules and its own distinctive identity: what more can artists hope for?

This history is dedicated to James Phillips, a vital part of this scene and always 100% one of the good guys. RIP

Some tunes:

Cristian Vogel: Ninjah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ydOFHo9JtI

Tobias Schmidt: Minus One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YjozNVF7_I

MDK: Sound of Saturday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV3KQHGxmcg

Subhead: Ruction (produced by Jamie Lidell) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5vNX_ylRQM

Squarepusher: Sarcacid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IY6cvGnVCA

Cristian Vogel: Bite & Scratch (Blake Baxter Detroit Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXIB7I3D7ss

DJ Paedofile: I was Rise in Clouds https://youtu.be/WcyrrAwqaQY

Buckfunk 3000 (Si Begg): Future Shock Planet Rock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp4b6PE0FkY

Cristian Vogel: Sarcastically Tempered Powers http://youtu.be/Q2G3204pfkY

Yee King: Goodnight Toby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbnZuv3xHog

Super_Collider: Darn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2kauFcGpw

No Future at Brighton Love Parade: https://vimeo.com/119001501

[yukipri]

So I’m back from the dead (literally). A Goodbye Message.

Hey there. Some of you may remember me.

Some of you may have wondered why I suddenly stopped posting, but the vast majority of you probably didn’t even notice, as is how it is. ^ ^;

I’m finally back, and it wasn’t an easy journey getting back.

Here’s what happened.

(Slightly long post, but please forgive me for not putting it under a cut, it’s sorta important)

On November 19th, I checked my blog as I always do, to learn that my blog was terminated.

No warning, no reason, suddenly BOOM gone. I’ve had this blog since spring 2012. It’s almost entirely sfw, I’ve always been hyper careful with tagging, and any questionable content has always been hosted on other platforms. Yet for some reason, I was one of many blogs caught up in what’s come to be known as the #TumblrPurge.

I followed all the steps. I emailed staff, first desperately, then more rationally, making my case. I figured that a bot had caught my blog, as I knew plenty of other more suspicious content blogs that were unharmed. At first there was hope, it’s just a glitch, it’s happening to a lot of people, they’ll give it back right away, some people have already gotten theirs back!

Nothing.

My methods of contacting followers were limited to my Patreon and Twitter, neither of which has much of a base. Followers who knew me on there were incredibly kind and supportive, and sometimes even reached out to staff on my behalf.

I didn’t want to spam, but I also was desperate. I emailed staff once a week. I tried using different categories. I tried adding attachments. My messages ranged from simple and succinct, to deeply personal and desperate.

I was honestly devastated. I spiraled into the worst depression I’ve ever been in. I could barely eat and vomited nonstop for a week. I gained 20 pounds in 2 weeks. I was completely out of control mentally, and even reached out to a psychiatrist friend in case I couldn’t handle it myself. I couldn’t draw, and thinking about projects that I once loved only hurt me more.

Talk about social media addiction, but I’ve legit never gone longer than a week without posting something for years, and especially since becoming a content creator, it felt sickening to not have the place where I drove myself to post constantly and consistently. It broke my schedule. It made me feel cut off from the world, and I felt claustrophobic and uncomfortable in my own skin.

I lost so many things with this blog. Yes, I was primarily a content creator, and while of course I had backups of all my art and some of my longer text posts, I lost so much more.

I lost, perhaps most importantly, all my interactions with my followers. I lost connections to so many people, people I hadn’t contacted in years and may not have even been active anymore, but who I always believed I would have this route back to. I lost memories, both online and of my personal life that I had recorded on here.

And as someone who unfortunately put so much of my identity and self-validation on my social media experience, I suddenly felt like I was absolutely nothing.

For the longest time, I thought I was su*cidal as a result of my depression (word bleeped out bc who knows what can get you flagged now). I certainly thought about death and dying daily.

But then, I realized what I was feeling wasn’t quite that. I didn’t feel like I wanted to die.

I felt like I was already dead.

Which, may sound like an exaggeration, but in terms of tumblr at least, it’s exactly the same. If I had died in rl, I would have dropped off the map, just like this. Suddenly stopped posting, no warning in advance. My blog may have existed, but in this case, no record of my existence even remained. To people who came looking for my url, I may as well have been dead. You wouldn’t have known any better.

Or who knows, maybe I was a criminal or had done something awful that resulted in my blog being removed. Maybe I had just had it with this site and had chosen to leave. Maybe I was just taking a much needed break. It would have been odd, since I prioritized communicating and always said when I needed a break, which was rarely ever. But either way, I had no way of telling any of you what had happened to me. My voice was gone.

Feeling like I was dead, after I recognized what I was feeling, was...disturbing, I guess. Kinda explained why I always felt like a corpse though.

(of course, feeling like I was dead contributed to thinking other things like maybe it’d be better if I really wasn’t around at all, but that’s a result, and not the main feeling.)

Anyway, I kept emailing staff, and I finally managed to come back. It took ten emails and over 2 months of waiting and wasting away and trying to come to terms with how I’m unlikely to get it back. I didn’t get my blog back until TODAY.

Now that I have come back, the landscape’s changed, as I had heard it had. They hadn’t even announced the adu*t content policy change when they terminated me. I honestly feel like I’m back in a world that’s moved on without me, and it’s made me feel very strongly how insignificant I was in the first place.

During my time being dead, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do. I regretted not doing my 25K follower giveaway sooner. I regretted not getting this or that content out. I regretted having kept certain long text posts and ask responses in my drafts yet unpublished.

But more than anything, I regretted not being able to say goodbye, and thank you all for my time here.

Yes, it’s had ups and downs, but tumblr was where I first found myself as an artist. Tumblr was what first made me interact with and find a group of people interested in what I created. Tumblr was where I was able to interact with those people, you. And I know I’ve had my ups and downs too, and different fandoms and different moods, but I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for letting me be a part of your experience here, however big or small that experience may have been.

I also learned the dangers of immersing myself too deeply on one online platform. So much of myself had been poured into this one blog, this one blog that can disappear with a legit snap of staff’s fingers. (my twitter handle was “Got Thanos’d on Tumblr” for a good month lol) I used to think that’s what made my content valuable, that I poured so much love and thought and everything personal into it, that’s what made it special, but in the end oh so very damaging when it was ripped away. As someone who spent almost all my time online creating content, it was an awful reality pill I had to swallow, and I don’t want ANYONE experiencing the same thing I did.

So please. The takeaway here, if I can be a cautionary tale, is to be aware that an online identity is more unstable than you think it is. It can go POOF. I’m lucky to be here, and that staff finally responded, and that I had the masochism to continue emailing staff weekly no matter how much I felt like I should stop breathing afterwards.

Also, please, if you have people on this site you care about, whether it be a friend or someone you think is neat, anyone you will miss if they suddenly disappeared, please go connect with them in other places beyond this site, which may become increasingly unstable. This can be another social media if they have it, an email, a chatting platform, anything. Even if you personally don’t use it yet, create an account so you can find them when you can no longer access your account, or they can’t access theirs and they can find you. Don’t regret it like I did.

As for me, after all of this, I don’t know if I can post content on here again.

I’d gone well beyond hoping for another chance at this community. All I’ve been thinking about these past two months was how I would have wanted to say goodbye.

Now that I have my account back, I’m currently filled with more numbness and bitterness than any joy or relief. I don’t know if I can create content anymore for a platform that has hurt me so deeply, no matter how much its community means to me. This experience changed me, and I’ve taken damage that isn’t going to go away so easily.

As I think about what to do moving forward, for now, you can find me on my accounts that I WAS active on these past two months. They aren’t the same, but they were all I had.

If you read this message until the end, thank you.

Again, I might decide to post on here again. I might not. But for now, here’s again what I’ve been wanting to say for two months:

Thank you, Tumblr. And goodbye.

-Kazu

(yukipri.tumblr.com)

https://twitter.com/YukiPri_Art

https://www.patreon.com/YukiPri

[anadventurousgirl]

‘You’re going to run around Malta. On your own. Call that a holiday?!’

What is a holiday? A holiday is our time to relax; to do exactly what we want to do. For many it is sitting by a pool or on a beach, leaving only occasionally to stroll around some ancient ruins. For others it is sleeping until midday before rising to eat, drink and party the night away. I have tried both of these and at some point they suited me. Nowadays I like activity and adventure. So for my end of summer holiday I chose to run around Malta on my own.

I was warned about the heat and reminded of the perils of solo female travel. But I don’t respond well to caution. I had four nights on the island and a route plotted; let’s just see how it goes!

Day 1: Thur Sept 6th 2018 – Valletta to Bugibba

Getting there

My alarm calls me from blissful sleep at 3am. Brew Dog gazes at me from his bed, perplexed. He’s not an early riser.

A surprisingly fast passage through security is frustrated by the fact my clear plastic bag is the wrong size. Who knew?! The hideously patronising security lady calls me ‘my darling’ at the end of every sentence as she insists I jam my toiletries into a bag specially designed not to fit them all. In return I deliver world class eye rolls in her direction. I’m pretty sure she was unaffected by their intensity.

In years past I always traveled dressed to the nines, wearing my highest heels. Today I fly in full running gear with my 8kg backpack containing all I need for the next five days. Everywhere I run this pack will be on my back. It needs to be as light as possible.

Instead of having the 6am beer most people are having (time doesn’t count in an airport) I go in search of a bar which will fill my water bottle and pouch for me. Once I get to Valletta I will be running straight away, so I need to be well stocked.

I always imagine that when I fly I may end up beside a deeply interesting person. We will engage in conversation, swap life stories, leave the plane friends, stay in touch and meet again in a far flung place in ten years time. Bless my romantic mind. Instead I am beside a couple whose aroma is booze and fags. She stares desperately out of the window as he complains about:

Having a female pilot

The plane not having taken off yet

Daylight

Being awake (we’re all wishing he weren’t)

There not being a television (despite wanting to be asleep)

The fact his wife wants a drink (I’m not surprised she wants one!)

That he’s flying Jet2 and not EasyJet (what’s the difference?!)

Blissfully he falls asleep quickly (I suspect his wife slipped him something) and man-spreads himself across us for the rest of the flight.

Better get running!

The bus from the airport is cheap and straightforward, depositing me at the Triton Fountain, which just happens to be my start point. After a few pack adjustments I am good to go and off I run. Oooo, downhill, yay! Just around this corner…oh, a shipyard with a security fence. That doesn’t look good. Back up the hill then and my first route diversion. The best laid plans eh!

Back on track and it is every bit as hot as I had imagined and then some. For 6 miles I follow my route fairly easily before it is blocked again…by a shopping centre. They may not have wanted a sweaty runner passing through but I’m grateful for Debenham’s air con. Resisting their Blue Cross Sale I emerge from the underground carpark and continue.

The heat is starting to take its toll and I’m briefly revived by a lemon Fanta from a street stand. A rub has started on my back from the shorts I am wearing. Wearing a backpack creates a fun new opportunity for pain when running. Any seams on your clothing are gently ground into your skin and I had made a mistake with the shorts I was wearing today. Luckily me reserve shorts had less seams and therefore less pain. But there was no where to change now, so it was a case of out up and shut up.

I am an idiot

My way is blocked again. Signs tell me my path crosses a military zone. You can cross it but not if red flags are flying. In the distance I can see one building with a red flag fluttering. It seems odd to only have one flying and I consider crossing anyway. Then I think about how stupid I would look if I got shot or blown up. Sigh. I divert again and have to run along a busy road. The views are lovely but the close proximity to cars is not. That evening, as I tuck into beer and pizza, I spot the Maltese flag flying from a nearby building and do a huge mental face palm. That was what I had seen in the distance, not a warning flag.

Cooling off in the sea at last

Other than my stupidity the only thing slowing me down is the heat. I stop for juice and water but this causes me stomach cramps. After 12.5 miles I spot a small bay with just one couple swimming. It’s time for a dip in the crystal waters. There is nowhere to change so I just swim in my shorts and sports bra. It feels perfect.

It is just a couple more miles to my Air BnB accommodation in Qawra, near Bugibba bay. Having showered I head out for the evening. Feeling strangely un-hungry but thirsty for beer. My host for the evening has told me where to go to enjoy the sunset and I do so before the beer awakens my hunger and I inhale a pizza.

The day has been eventful but little do I know how easy it will feel looking back. As I walk back in the darkness I decide to rise early and be on the road by 7am to try to beat the heat.

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Day 2: Fri Sept 7th 2018 – Bugibba to Bahrija, Rabat

Let’s go

Despite the sweltering heat and lack of air con I slept well. Rising at 6am, breakfast is a cup of tea and slice of flapjack. I leave the apartment by 7am, into the dawning day. Malta is already hot but bearable. For the first hour I happily jog along. Attempts to run in the shade are thwarted by others trying to walk there also – selfish. By 9am the heat is oppressive once more.

As I track the undulating coastline I lose my path once again. I regain it by dropping down barely used paths through allotment type areas. I look at my bare, scratched ankles and wonder idly about snakes. Losing my path had meant losing time and I am feeling low on fuel. Wherever I can I stop to take on sugary drinks but the heat stops me from wanting to eat a thing.

I am walking all of the uphills but more and more I am walking other sections too. The path is rocky and I have a slight propensity for falling over when running. Despite the fact I am getting better at falling without injuring myself I still prefer not to do it. With the backpack on my feet are not light on the ground. If I do go down the extra weight of the pack will take me down hard.

At the times I drop down to meet the sea I stop and pour water over my head. At some point I remove my trainers and let my feet soak in the salty water. My toes are getting pretty battered and sore. It’s trainer change time. After my experiences in Iceland I have chosen to bring a second pair of trainers. Pair two are lighter and more comfortable but have less grip; something which will make for some nervous moments later on!

Finally the fall comes, not on rocky ground but a concrete step. Only my pride is bruised my my GPS takes a slam as I hit the ground. This may explain why it keeps freezing during the rest of the trip.

The heat has me feeling lightheaded now. I force down a tiny bit of homemade energy food (plumpy nut!). It is a reminder once again of how far the human body can go on a small amount of energy…and a lot of stubborness.

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My holiday, my choices

It has been a while since I saw a town or village and my water is running out. Sitting under a low tree for some small amount of shade I make a deal with myself. I have covered 16 miles; if I want I can stop at 20. Once I have made this deal I am able to carry on. At the end of the day, this is my holiday. Being alone is not always great but at least I can make my own choices.

After another mile I come to a small beach area. I don’t know it at the time but I’m just above Popeye Village. A ramshackle fishing village built especially for one of my childhood favourite films. Now anyone who knows me knows I don’t sit still enough to watch films. The very fact that I watched Popeye many times (I even had the video!) means it’s a real tragedy that I didn’t know I was at this set!

I buy 2 litres of water and a coke from a stall holder and he gives me his chair to sit on in the shade. He can’t know how wonderful this felt.

Feeling much better for a drink and a rest I strike out again. As soon as I get going the punishing heat gets to me again. I am stopping every mile or two now but shade is hard to find with the sun so high in the sky. A dead lizard at the side of the road looks how I feel.

Coming to another beach area at 20 miles I push on. Suddenly there is a scarily steep climb on unstable ground. My trainers aren’t coping well but I make it up and wedge myself between two rocks for a rest in some shade.

As I prepare to move down the other side of the climb a Maltese man comes up to join me. We pass comment about the heat. He then asks if I’m alone and would I like to go swimming with him. I decline and explain I need to move on but am unerved to hear him close behind me as I move on.

Now it is perilously steep and slippery going down. At times I have to sit and slide down on my bum to get down safely. I want to get away from my companion but have to stay calm and not rush. Finally his footsteps subside and he turns back.

Spotting the next bay, Gnejna, I gratefully (not gracefully) make my way down. I have covered 22 miles on foot, it is another 4 miles to my accomodation. Enough. I have an ice cream, go for a swim and call a cab. This is a holiday after all!

Tonight I stay in a small country village, Bahrija. There are a few restaurants, all specialising in the local delicacies; rabbit and horse meat. As a vegetarian these don’t especially appeal so I stick to one of my freeze dried meals with snacks from a local shop. Strangely in four days of running I don’t see any rabbits or horses…perhaps they’ve eaten them all already?!

My fingers are hugely swollen in the heat and my toes look as if they have had a good fight amongst themselves; always prone to blisters, they are starting to bubble now. I empty a sachet of rehydration salts into my overnight water and set my alarm for 6am. As I fall asleep my legs twitch and jump over imaginary rocky paths.

Want to know how I get on with the second part of my run? I really hope so! So that you don’t miss out on my suffering pop your email address into the box below and you will be notified when Part 2 is published.

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Call that a holiday?! Running around Malta – Part 1 'You're going to run around Malta. On your own. Call that a holiday?!' What is a holiday?

[mutantinthefamily]

career opportunities

I am not a client, a customer, nor a service user. I am not a shirker, a scrounger, a beggar, nor a thief. I am not a national insurance number, nor a blip on a screen. I paid my dues, never a penny short and proud to do so. I don't tug the forelock, but look my neighbour in the eye. I don't accept or seek charity. My name is Daniel Blake, I am a man, not a dog. As such, I demand my rights. I demand you treat me with respect. I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less. Thank you.

For those struggling with an illness that is fought beneath skin and sinew, that cannot be understood or accounted for by box ticking and that is invisible to the naked eye but is a constant weight upon your life. I am one of those people and have been rejected, humiliated and made to feel insignificant by the state in a time of need. ‘I, Daniel Blake’ is a film that confronts the raw reality of humanity and society in Britain. The film took me straight back to the uncomfortable chair in a blank room sitting across from a so-called ‘healthcare professional’, this one actually called himself a ‘Nurse’ but I doubt he had any medical expertise. This was my first encounter with the DWP. I didn’t qualify for ESA (employment support allowance) because I didn’t score high enough on the point system. My calf muscles weren't wasting away and I managed to catch the door as he let it slam in my face on the way out. I suppose I can understand why I didn’t get through the first time, I mean on the outside I looked like a normal, healthy 24 year old. How was a ‘healthcare professional’ supposed to know how hyper mobility and chronic fatigue affected the body. They are unpredictable, volatile and at times aggressive conditions. But they aren’t there to understand how you suffer, they just want to know whether you can piss by yourself and pick up a pound coin. I walked away feeling humiliated and degraded. 

The reason I applied for ESA was because I had to leave my job at Dr Martens as it was affecting my health and being over-flexible wasn’t flexible enough for my recent promotion. I was due to be demoted after being there for 3 years without more than a day off sick and a track record of top sales. I battled through the chaos of boxing day sales, busy Saturdays and delivery, reeling from the sickening pain in my body. I said yes even though I should have said no. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t at all bad for a retail job, I had gained a lot of fantastic friends, opportunities and memories. But in the end I wasn’t treated with the respect, care or understanding I deserved. No matter how many leaflets and printouts on EDS I took in, because I wasn’t crippled in a wheelchair or bandaged up to the eyeballs I was never taken seriously. This will be a scenario experienced by many, including those with a mental illness. What can’t be felt or seen will never be believed. We wear our cloaks of invisibility with shame and guilt because we don’t appear to be different. One day I can feel on top of the world and the next I can’t even stand or get out of bed.

Due to my state of unemployment and having being denied ESA, I had no other choice but to go on the dole, another humiliating ordeal as some of you will know. Every week having to apply for jobs that I wasn’t physically able to do, but I had to fill in my little book to show I was actively looking for work, gold star Bianca. The disability officer had no idea what to do with me apart from advise me to apply for ESA. Eventually I escaped from the clutches of the Job Centre and ceremoniously binned my little book. Through a friend I began working in the office at Clarks, but soon that too proved to be too much for my body. I was making myself worse because I had no other choice or support. 

I re-applied for ESA and by this point I had been prescribed Naproxen for the pain, a very very strong painkiller that sent me sideways. Needless to say it helped during my assessment as it demonstrated my inability to work, I could hardly string a sentence together never mind clap my hands like a monkey. I was awarded ESA. It made me understand that you have to demonstrate your worst day even if it shares the week with some good. 

In the meantime I had also applied for PIP (Personal Independence Payment) and faced another round of assessments. I have never been awarded PIP and continue to fight for the support it provides. I am not destitute and have the support of my family but I cannot rely on that, especially when having to pay for my own treatment and the small things that help me. My parents and I have worked hard and have contributed enough to at least get a bit back to take some of the pressure off. Each time that brown envelope lands on the doormat I fill with dread at the prospect of having to face another healthcare professional, another blank room and 20 minutes to prove myself worthy. I am made to feel as though I am making it up, that my pain isn’t really there, that I am not crippled with exhaustion or that some days I am unable to walk from one room to the next. The anxiety of having to go to the assessment perpetuates my symptoms and I am reduced to a dithering mess, but then I guess that is it what they want to see. However, it hasn't been enough as I can still wash my armpits by myself. My struggle for PIP will continue for as long as invisible and psychological illnesses are not recognised as satisfactory health conditions. 

At the beginning of the year when I was suffering the most with knee pain, I could hardly stand never mind walk. So I applied for a Blue Badge, which would also relieve some of the anxiety I harboured about going to places and not having anywhere to park nearby. It isn’t just the knee pain that incited this concern but also the Chronic Fatigue as I get very tired quickly and so I just don’t have the energy to be straying far. I was faced with yet another assessment. This time I felt like a puppet on strings, my knees rickety and unstable, as if the nuts and bolts would come loose any second. I was forced to walk a certain distance, which took me outside and paraded in front of a bus stop queue of people. They probably didn't even think twice but for me it was humiliating, my weaknesses on display. The pain in my knees didn’t enable me to go very far and I got my blue badge, which has been a saving grace. A relief for not just the physical stress of having to walk far, but also the emotional turmoil that is actually the most draining. I do get the odd look mostly by the older generation, because I know I don’t look obviously disabled. But as the old saying goes: you should never judge a book by its cover. 

Most recently I was summoned to attend another assessment for ESA, even though I had been put into the Support Group only 6 months before. My first appointment was cancelled 20 minutes before I was supposed to be there as my paperwork hadn't been received. You would think they would have known this earlier. I was re-scheduled and I was a wreck, I didn’t want to go through it again. So there I was sat in the oppressive waiting room, made to wait for 45 minutes; prolonging the torture. This time I was shocked to find that the assessor actually looked me in the eye, her concern seemed genuine and she agreed that there was no reason for me to be there. I spent the rest of the day asleep and in pain because I was so drained. 

Is it any wonder that people who suffer with Invisible and Mental Health conditions don’t come forward and ask for help when they have to fight so hard to prove it exists. To be made to feel doubtful of themselves and how they feel, to have to answer questions that don’t relate to their condition but will determine their fate. To be made to feel less of a human being just because they suffer with what others can’t see. I may be progressing with my mobility and pain, but the Chronic Fatigue still looms large and is probably the most dilapidating as there is no cure. I am slowly learning to manage the condition and need all the help I can get.  

I have now come to realise that the beaming smile and friendly concern is a pretence in order to lull you into a false sense of security. They don’t understand you and they don’t really care. How can they when they don’t even look you in the eye, the only spark in theirs is the reflection of the computer screen. I wonder if they have a recurring sound reel constantly revolving around in their heads conducted by the almighty ‘Decision Maker’. I have come to pity them rather than myself; to have to sit in those uncomfortable chairs in those blank room with air conditioning drying out their skin and asking the same questions over and over and over and over again. Soul destroying. So remember that the next time you are sat on the other side of the desk, show them your worst because they certainly don’t care about your best. A friend of mine who I met through the CFS Clinic, was refused ESA and took the DWP to court, and he won. He now gets encumbered PIP and ESA, so there is a silver lining if you are willing to fight.