#even though there’s more to be revealed I’m revisiting issue 1 with the new information revealed in issue 7 in mind

[daydreamerdrew]

The Swamp Thing (2021) #1

[lizacstuff]

SCK/Edser ask (33 & 34 spec)

(asks under the cut)

Anonymous said: Do you know what happened with the second set of writers? I know Ayse left on her own accord but why the sudden shift from that second writing team to these new ones? I don't think they even announced that the writers were changing, the fans found out during the credits one day. If that second set of writers was still here, I'd be fully confident that we're going to get a great payoff with Serkan when he remembers but they're not, so my expectations are rock bottom at this point

Such a bummer! No idea what happened to them. I’m wondering if they signed on for a certain number of episodes and when those were done, they moved on? Only being around for 7 or 8 episodes is not a lot though. One wonder if it was them or the production company wasn’t happy with them? Though the episodes were pretty well written so I’d hope the production company didn’t jettison them. Or just a run of the mill scheduling conflict.

In any case I agree, I’d have so much more confidence in their execution of this story if they were still writing. 

With this new team, I honestly thought that episode 32 was decent, but 33 just sort of dashed that away it was so poorly executed. 

Anonymous said: Hi - I always value your thoughts on SCK so thanks for taking the time to reply to asks! :)

Something that’s been plaguing me since the amnesia plot began is that nobody seems to have told Serkan about the BIG DETAIL that his father was responsible for the death of Eda’s parents???! Like surely that would provide some crucial context to Serkan and raise several questions e.g how did I manage to stay in a relationship with this woman, we must have had a strong relationship/overcome huge problems/trusted eachother etc. It just baffles me that everyone seems to have forgotten about what used to be a major plot line. How do you think it could play out if Eda or maybe Aydan revealed that back story to amnesia Serkan?

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!  Agreed! This is a headscratcher. When he came back I kind of assumed that he knew that part of the history, at least at a superficial level, just because he sat down with Engin and heard the story from his perspective. I can’t imagine Engin would leave that part out, and it’s pretty integral detail in how Eda’s grandmother, and then Eda, ended up with 45% of the company. 

I also would guess that Selin would have told him about it, just because it allows her to paint Eda as potentially someone who was out for revenge from the beginning, someone who targeted him and manipulated him because of it.

So I think he must know, at least something about it about it, what’s frustrating is that it doesn’t seem like something that weighs on him or that he’s curious about. Or perhaps when he first heard about it he compartmentalized it and it didn’t weigh with him because at that time Eda was some evil person out to manipulate him, so he hasn’t paid it much attention, but now that he’s gotten to know her and realizes he has feelings for her, he hasn’t really revisited it? He’s very confused and has a lot going on and he’s thinking about her all the time, while trying not to, so it may have gotten lost in that tug-o-war. 

I do hope it comes up and they have a conversation about it. How has he not already asked her, “If my father was to blame for your parent’s death, why would you want to marry me?” Because regardless whether or not he’s in love with her, this is new information to him.  And he hasn’t dealt with the emotional fallout of finding out his father did that and hid that, and the affect it would have had on Eda.  One would hope that even robot Bolat would feel some compassion toward a woman his father was responsible for orphaning. 

Anonymous said: one of the asks you got about serkan not remembering things via their special "objects" had me thinking about one line he says waaay back during their breakup where he says something along the lines of he "doesn't need things for him to remember her" when he gets rid of her things at his house.. i know the writers aren't writing it with that in mind bc i know even most of the fandom doesn't remember it since it's been so long, but i still think it's quite apt for the situation 🥺

YES! it’s in episode 24, when she is over at his house and she notices that none of the things from their time together are there and she says something like that it’s probably for the best because if they’re here you can’t forget. And that’s when he says:

“In my opinion, things are not needed to remember a person.” 

I agree that it’s quite appropriate for the current situation. It’s not about the things or the objects, it’s about them. 

Anonymous said: i know people feel like we've been going in circles, at to some extent we ARE.. (i mainly think as long as the engagement games keep going it will feel like that) but serkan has made huge progress since he came back in 29.. the serkan in 29 or even 30 would not be reacting like the serkan in 34.. sure he still says things that are frustrating to eda and audience (mainly to rile her up, but also bc he prob doesn't realize it's hurtful) but his progress IS happening even if it doesn't feel like it

Oh, I 100% agree. Serkan has made huge progress, the things he said to Engin this episode would have been unthinkable in any other episode since the amnesia. Serkan going to the flower shop and helping her plant terrariums would also have been unthinkable pre 32. However, I get where the frustration is coming from because he always sort of circles back to a place in his interactions with her where it feels like little to no progress has been made. Though, as I said last week, I do think they show cumulative affect, when they have those big moments where they make progress, he’s further along than he was during the last big moment. But I think him stepping really far back in other interactions is one of the problems of the writing. They need more nuance and they need to let us see more into what’s going on in his brain. 

Anonymous said:  After everything that has happened I cannot see Eda appreciating a kiss from Serkan while he is still engaged to Selin. So maybe her first reaction after the kiss is to ask if he got his memories back and then something about Selin. When it becomes clear that they are still together then I could see her telling him off. Something like “when you’re engaged you aren’t supposed to be kissing other people and if you want to kiss other people then maybe you should not be engaged.” Or even “when we were engaged if I had found out you kissed someone else, it would have killed me” so you need to figure out what you want & stop hurting people. I could care less about Selin being cheated on because she is the worst but Eda deserves way better than that. Plus it would show Serkan that she really is a good person especially since it is very clear how much she dislikes Selin. She gave back the ring after he got engaged to Selin and unlike Selin, is not willing to accept crumbs given to her by anyone let alone Serkan. Maybe that finally results in Serkan dumping Selin by the end of the episode to chase Eda. Probably grasping at straws right now but I so badly want to be positive about this next episode. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yes, I could see something like this, but right now, if I had to bet money, I’d say that kiss is his fantasy, so we won’t actually be dealing with this issue. 

We shall see!  

Anonymous said: Will episode 34 finally be when Selin leaves? Surely 6 episodes of her is enough? 😭😭😭

It was spoiled for so long that she’d be leaving in 34, but at this point I don’t see how that would fit! She appears to have been at all the location shoots. 

What do we need to do to get rid of her? Some ancient good riddance ceremony? A gofundme? I’m in!!! Whatever it takes at this point I’ll do any ritual that will get rid of her. 

Anonymous said: I think it's interesting that Ayfer actually hasn't been that anti-Serkan since this amnesia storyline started (maybe its b/c she hasn't had too much time to think about it since she was spending all her time on Alex lol), even though it'd kinda be the perfect time to dig into it since Serkan is now treating Eda differently. But now Ayfer is better than Aydan, Miss "I knew your fiance was alive but didn't tell you." I thought what she told Eda before the restaurant was sweet. She gets 1 point.

Agreed, she gets one point. But just one. We’ll have to see how she does going forward. I kind of assume that she saw Eda’s devastation when Serkan was missing and it sort of snapped her out of her selfishness when it came to her not wanting Eda with Serkan. 

[megamanxfanfics]

Looking back at the 1st Nightmare Arc

Well folks, here we are.  It’s the end of the year and I successfully completed Season VI’s first arc!  Today, it’s all about celebrating with an honest take on how I feel it all went down. No backstories on what took so long this time.  Just all Mega lore and analyzing whatever I’ve managed to create in the Fanon.  So let’s dive into it.  This was an interesting one:

tl;dr?  -  Ep. 1: Boring Beginning, Exciting Middle Ep. 2: Steady Solid Stage! Ep. 3: Long Stage, Big Payoff Ep. 4: Strong Start, Very Expository Ep. 5: Another Long Stage, but not Draining Ep. 6: Reverse Pacing Ep. 7: Epic. As. Fuck.

Ep. 1:  I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but Boring Beginning. I wanted it to start just like the game with the exciting narrative intro, except.. written out, it’s not all that exciting, but instead - expected.  The same goes for Gate’s immediate monologue when you press start.  I took the safe, easy route and just added stage directions to his discovery of Zero’s “piece”.  Regardless, this was “A Broken World”, and I loved that title for a new Season #1.  Honestly, I feel like this one really picks up from the middle, onward.  Once we get into X’s first mission, the addition of the new reploids from the X5 ending didn’t really help at all.  I got rid of them almost as soon as I introduced them, but it was supposed to serve a purpose.  It was supposed to show us just how dangerous it is out there for noobies - especially the ones who think they know it all, like Cody.  Once X fights High Max though, we almost mirrored the X1 feeling, which is exactly what I wanted.  From here on, it’s pretty exciting and interesting to me.  Because now X is all intrigued and worried about these new “Investigators” that have sprouted up.  Giving X someone to fear again with High Max made for a really refreshing touch, too.  Once he gets home to learn about them from Alia, the episode heavily leans on flashbacks from Xtreme 2, but they serve as a nice re-introduction to our 8 Investigators. I also really liked their Re-activation scene.  That mirrored the vibe from Mega Missions when Doppler revived his select batch of Mavericks.  Once they pinpoint their locations and X finds out that 3 of the Investigators are in Brazil, he wants to go there first.  I feel such a hyped jolt of excitement at that Cliffhanger.

Ep. 2:  Steady Solid Stage! It took forever to write out, but upon reading it, the pacing is surprisingly smooth as X explores the Amazon Forest. Calling it “The Nightmare Is Real” based on a random Rescued Reploid’s words was a little weak at first, but it comes back around to get real meaning by the end. During the stage, X’s dialogue with Iso kept things interesting, while he pursued that near-impossible sub-tank. [I swear, you can only acquire this with a jump part equipped, or exposing AI with the fire blade or something...]. I really really didn’t want X to use his Ultimate Armor so soon, for nothing, because I’ve added stakes to such a game-breaking power up.  If he uses it, he blows out all of his stamina and needs to rest.  Period.  Using this to rescue Iso was not only a waste, but things probably would’ve gone down very differently, later.  Anyway, that fight with Commander Yammark was perfect. At first, I thought it was a little short, but looking back on it, I love how they both get solid blows in, but then come to a standstill when they realize they’re on the same side. Having Nightmare Zero intervene was absolutely the right choice!!  It gave us a new hook for something to come back to, as yet again, X had someone new to fear, like in X1.  Since it’s an evil Zero, I’ll even say like X2.  This is where the title “The Nightmare is Real” works, because... the Zero Nightmare was absolutely a sentient problem.  And it wasn’t going away any time soon.  X had to retreat and get out of there.  Thank God for Alia’s force-teleporting. Pushing Alia's Love Interest during the debrief was also a very exciting development.  I knew I wanted to do this, but at first I wasn’t sure if it was too soon to happen right here.  Now, I feel like it was just right. 

 Ep. 3:  Long stage, big payoff. Starting with Isoc’s report to Gate was actually not as boring as the 1st episode canon scenes. I made more of an effort to wake the scene up with stage directions or dialogue that makes more sense...  Them talking about the possibility of Zero still being alive also sets up mysterious intrigue.  Is he still out there??  And if so, how???  Will we see him???? Naming the entire episode, “The Outlier”, however is misleading.  I suppose that could connect to Ground Scaravich, who wasn’t one of Gate’s original creations (in my Fanon).  Still, giving X & Alia that slice of life romantic wake up scene at the near-beginning was absolutely refreshing.  Not only that, but I think it was very necessary. Things are all Doom and Gloom this Season, which is my forte, but this shows that at Home you can still find happiness in Loved ones.  The actual stage itself was an absolute pain in the ass and I knew it was going to be. I'm just glad it didn't completely burn me out.  His fight with Ground Scaravich was bad ass though.  X had the rare upper hand from the get-go as the menacer that Scaravich was afraid of.  So he came in with confident energy and tried to beat him down for information.  Of course, Scaravich didn’t let up and only revealed worse information, that those Reploids were being used for DNA Data.  But that cliffhanger I left at the end, with Zero Nightmare applauding X for his kill...!  It definitely helped me pursue a much sooner Chapter 4. 

 Ep. 4:  Strong Start with the Zero Nightmare fight. I had a big challenge here, because I didn’t want X to win yet.  We needed to build this feud and drag it out as much as possible. Zero Nightmare was gaining new motivation. He apparently knows about Zero’s existence, but thinks of him as a Fake.  And thus we have the title “Where Is The Fake?”. Having X get weakened and willingly teleport away was a really mature choice. I think it shows growth.  He could’ve done that plenty of times in the past.  But here we go, X is wounded again.. I didn't want this to become a trope or slow us down, but it brought upon some very necessary world building and character development for the new reploids. Very much, the expository episode, this was an important chapter, because it set up things for future episodes and kept me on track, months later when it was time to think about the bigger picture. Kassy & Hal went to the Magma Area while Tack checked out the Laser Institute.  The Nightmare System was in full effect now, and the goal was to show how dangerous the Nightmare actually is to some red shirts, before X goes in there.  How effective that actually was in my execution, remains to be seen.  At this point the episode title remains prominent, because X expresses sincere interest in finding the Real Zero, but they have... zero leads. (Sorry, I had to.)  The Villains even had an interesting follow-up about Scaravich’s death and there was an interaction, which vaguely eluded to something new happening, from Metal Shark.  So that will be something fun to look forward to.  Ending at the beginning of a new stage is always a cool cliffhanger. Believe it or not, I wanted this to go all the way through the Rainy Turtloid stage, which would have given the title prominence for a 3rd time.  But that’s okay.

 Ep. 5:  Another Long Stage, but its not half as draining as the Central Museum. In fact, all of the Reploid Interactions kept it really lively. Especially by the end. The Inami Temple was the first stage that I could hint at our location with the episode title - “Nightmare Rain”.  I wish I could’ve done that for the previous episodes, but it’s alright.  I took some interesting risks, during this stage write-through.  I almost forgot about that frickin Monbando Reploid unit. I took a real risk by giving him an AI, but he keeps things interesting, giving X someone to talk to, which actually added levity to the situation where appropriate. That Nightmare Zero encounter mid-stage was what it was all about for me, though. I'm really proud of that one, using the stage layout to my advantage in an innovative way. All of that Levy stuff with Rescue Reploid 6 was another interesting choice. I have more in store for her, but I'm really hoping there will be more of a payoff, than just an Easter Egg Cameo. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with her in the next arc.  Need I bring up X’s Reploid rescues in the Gaia Armor!??  That was a bright idea that I came up with after post-planning.  The original plan was to have X revisit the stage later, but I thought about how this Acid Rain was killing them, so...  time to settle the issue of an unused Armor. [X6 granting us the gift of using a modified Fifth Armor was nice, but it made me wonder, why can’t he access the Gaia anymore?]. The answer was just that he doesn’t really like it.  But he used it to his advantage here, and now I had a new challenge ahead of me. I had to get rid of it. Another challenge was posed when X discovered a fucking portal in one of the tunnels.  I wasn’t prepared for that!  But thankfully, I was able to come up with a viable excuse rather than just X being scared of the portal.  He ran out of teleporter rings!!!!  This gave me new Fanon Mega-science to add to the stakes.  Teleporter Rings now need a day to recharge, and it was clear that plenty more needed to be made.  This gave Alia & Douglas something to do, so in the end, this was all good.  But now it was time for X to face off against Rainy Turtloid.  He’d have to come back for the others later. [Time will tell, how well or poorly that is handled, depending on how long it takes X to actually get back there.]

 Ep. 6:  This one basically had Reverse Pacing, but I liked it. It started with a Climactic, Rainy Turtloid fight. I mean, this was Epic and fucking Brutal.  Thanks to my brilliant bring-back of the Gaia Armor, now Turtloid had to take it away and break the shit out of it. This is where “The Fight Becomes Dire” and I thought it was amazing.  In my planning phase, that was never remotely on the table, but it worked out wonderfully.  What was on the table was X possibly using his Ultimate Armor if the battle got too brutal, but I wanted to avoid that.  [I had done practice playthroughs where I managed to get X to win in Normal Armor and definitely in Falcon Armor with some select weapon spamming and pattern memorizing.  I was open to keeping it simple, I really was.]. But after X got smacked around like a bitch, it was time for payback.  Especially considering Turtloid’s motivation to fight was “But I have to listen to Master...”  Here we had the interesting case that both Men respected each other and didn’t want to fight, but they had to. {Even though X thought the Reploid Trapping and Nightmare acceptance was reprehensible}. X primarily focussed on that and tried to change Turtloid’s mind, but once his Gaia Armor was destroyed and X nearly died, it was time for some Ultimate payback.  I’m really surprised by how epic and dark it got. I’m very proud of it.  After the mission, due to some very necessary stakes and power limiters, X had to sit out for a day again, once again slowing our pacing down to a screeching halt. This one hurt me, I think.  At least he wasn't injured this time... As I stated before, when I made the decision to include the Ultimate Armor into this Season, I did so knowing that there needed to be a price. It comes with him using up all his stamina. Therefore, he can't spam it with every mission or battle. The same rules applied to his shotokan moves in Season I & II, which have basically been replaced by the Ultimate Armor at this point. With more opportunity at exposition, however, I was able to follow up on the new reploids, who were now in trouble at their respective missions. [This is the stuff I needed to give X motivation for his mission choices during the planning phase, but it just wasn’t there]. And yet, one was debatably set up too soon. I had a new dilemma, where X was forced to sit out, while Kassy & Hal are stuck at the Magma Area, hurt.  The choice to show X training the recruits in the meantime was a fun risk to take though. It showed productivity and progress in the downtime, hopefully eluding to the idea that these newbies can fend for themselves, while it inevitably takes X a while to save them in the future. I also got to develop Levy more and even create some juicy tension between her and Alia, which wasn’t originally planned. I had intended for a 2nd sex scene with Alia to happen at some point, but I didn't want it to be forced. Just more of an implied - ‘this is what’s happening while we wait’.  But the addition of Levy’s flirting played into Alia’s insecurities, which gave it more of a purpose.  And poor Douglas! Hahahaha.  I was so tickled when I put that in out of nowhere.  We got some much needed levity when he wanted to show X a new part, but instead he overheard them having sex and walked away with a “Nope!” lol!!! Its becoming very clear that I enjoy the in-between mission slice of life stuff Way more than the missions themselves. But then, when we get back to it... after X gave it a night, he and Signas found every excuse not to save Kassy & Hal yet, because my Stage Order plan still needed to be in play...  At least Tack discovered that Portal at Sheldon’s stage. This saved my Stage Order Motivation, but it was still weak.  If only Zero was around, then they could split the difference.  But what I liked about this was that it showed just how bad of shape that X and co. were in.  Yet again, the episode title remained prominent.  “The Fight Becomes Dire”!  The truth is, they were all over the place and X didn't know where to go first. For the first time in a while, our Hunters are overwhelmed and understaffed. And that was really noticeable here.  I still think the ending is kinda weak though. There's no real cliffhanger other than knowing that X will pursue Shield Sheldon next. But overall, I liked the flow of this. There's a lot of forced slow downs in the momentum to have us sit with the characters and their decisions. It makes for a very different, sort of dismal pacing, which adds to the atmosphere of this looming Nightmare that won’t go away.  One noticeable thing, however is that I failed to follow up on the Villains this time around. I had an ample opportunity to follow up on Gate’s thoughts for losing Turtloid again, who was debatably his favorite creation.  I really botched that up, but I simply didn’t think of it at the time before posting.  So who knows?  That could be possible room for improvement in a future edit.  Either way, the Villains are sure to be due for a check in soon. 

 Ep. 7:  Epic. As. Fuck. But it took a minute to get there. Shield Sheldon's stage was more complicated to write through than I originally thought. Its the shortest stage in the game and yet all those damn lasers and their angles made for quite the challenge. This in itself, was a “Laser Light Phenomena”. Another immense challenge that I wasn't expecting was Sheldon's battle completely Flipping the Narrative on X. Admittedly, I really had a hard time finding motivation for those 2 to feud. Especially since he wasn't holding a grudge based on the past. I noticed a while ago, all of Gate's creations are so very willing to sacrifice themselves for Gate's cause. Like, to a nonsensical degree. Maybe that's their degree of Maverickism. They're just crazy... Anyway, this Deadlock Standstill might really play into my favor, since this recent Portal Experience is going to change X's motivations. I... don't want X to take a backseat, but... Rescuing the Reploids is going to be his 1st Priority from here on in. Especially since he wasn't able to save Tack and the bunch. Again, thats where stakes come into play. I didn't come into this episode knowing I was going to make that decision. But when I saw the layout of the "Pocket Dimension" as I'm calling it, and I factored in the time Tack spent in there, trying to rescue the Reploids by himself, there was no way I could have them all just hang out at a narrow ledge by the gate, or stuck in the gateway, scared. I wasn't gonna pull a lame idea that they managed to somehow unlock the gate, like I did with Data. (That can be the one trait that makes Data special and could play into his advantage in the future. But no one else's). Nightmare Zero wouldn't spare them either. He'd absolutely kill them in bloodlust. So... stakes were created. X took too long to catch up to him and thats what he gets. That last battle with ZN though... I'm really proud of where it went. I had some obvious limits this time compared to past Zero fights. That could be an analysis for another time.. But, I was happy to get pretty gorey by the end, there. And that pay off Cliff Hanger was so satisfying! It gives me all the feels. 

The 2nd Arc is going to feel very different. But we ain't out of the woods yet. Rereading the 1st Arc served as a dual purpose. Not only could I gush about my favorite moments or be open about my choices and how things came out, but it is starting to reveal where else it's going. Kassy & Hal still need rescuing at the Magma Area. Cody & Data are at the North Pole! Tekk is at the Weapon Center. X still needs to save whoever is in the portal at Inami Temple!  Let alone revisiting the Amazon and Central Museum again.  Exposition is just waiting to happen, and now that Zero is back?? Things are going to get easier, but also a little bit harder for X. One thing I can definitely say is that seeing him will bring back some Unwanted Memories. And its gonna be very interesting to see how he deals with that. I'm definitely looking forward to writing the 2nd Arc out in the New Year.

Until then, folks.  I hope you enjoyed reliving this with me.  See you in 2021, which should hopefully prove to be a far more stable year than 2020. [God, I hope I didn’t just jinx everything...]

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

Hi Em, I'm a 15yo student who's obsessing over their type again. I know I'm xNFP 6w7, and I thought I was ENFP for a while but I'm weirdly not as bored or starved from social interaction as all my ENFP friends during lockdown. From my evidence below, am I likely to be INFP instead? (xnfp1)

I thought I was ENFP because I have a severe inability to process evidence, which is commonly cited inferior Si behaviour. Then I realised that the world was clearer and using logic is the best way to determine moral righteousness. My sense of morals seems to be an abstract but deeply felt gut impulse and my arguments based on these tend to be incoherent. (xnfp2)

When I came back to reality, I realised that my arguments and thoughts were much, much clearer during lockdown. I realised this is because of much less surrounding noise because everyone's opinion deserves thought and analysis which I'm apparently unable to devote to them. Now I'm hearing a lot less from everyone and I love it. (xnfp3)

The insight I now have is that my lack of ability to cope with noise is due to 1. overthinking and 2. improper mastery of logic. The thing about logic is that I'm good with it for Math and Science (my strongest subjects) but that's because I was taught these in a super linear fashion. I struggle with unstructured learning e.g. in Languages and life skills. (xnfp4)

This is because I have a lot of trouble 1. breaking down complex tasks into simple tasks which I can cope with and 2. dealing with complex tasks in the real world without simplification. And what I don't know how to do I don't do (that's human nature right). So I'm stuck. (xnfp5)

And this is, I daresay, my greatest weakness. I can't learn anything without help. Learning at home is excruciating because I can tell I'm not learning properly. My ENTP friend sent me a long lecture about economics the other day which was completely incoherent and I become like that when there's any background noise, or if I'm trying to do anything while thinking (including typing this). (xnfp6) Is what I've written inferior Te, inferior Si or just youth and inexperience with the world? Thanks!

----------------------

Hi anon,

I am going to read this all the way through but before I even start: the combination 15 years old and “I might be an ENFP, but” are two blazing sirens that indicate you should sit tight and spend more time developing as a person. 15 is on the young edge of when type even begins to make sense, in my opinion; and the whole “I think I’m an ENFP but [new evidence has appeared and instead of calmly integrating this evidence into what I already know about myself and what led me to type as an ENFP and presenting that whole picture to you I will only focus on the new evidence]” is so common I had to make a masterpost about it. People joke about it.

Reading through completely:

I am not saying you are not an xNFP 6w7, and truthfully from this I don’t know what exactly your type is though ENFP seems very possible and likely to me, but again, 15 is very young. Your personal development in the next 5 years is likely going to be absolutely staggering. There is so much change coming your way, and you may come out of it saying “yes, I was right all along” but you may be like “oh, once I have a large measure of independence and responsibilities that are truly mine and not backed by authority figures...this doesn’t fit at all.” In short, at your age, you are welcome to type but you should keep your mind very open to the fact that you might be very far off - and that’s healthy and normal.

With that in mind: assuming your friends are of similar ages...how confident are you they’re all ENFPs? Some might be ESFPs. Some might be ESFJs. It’s also worth noting that this is going to vary situationally; an ENFP who gets along with their siblings or who has a hobby that can still continue uninterrupted during quarantine like writing or playing an instrument might be doing significantly better than an ENFP who is only child or who finds their siblings annoying and who’s favorite hobby requires going out - and that’s just a tiny part of it - I haven’t even covered things like parental relationships, confounding mental health factors, and so on. It’s not to say that people’s pandemic responses aren’t revealing, but people’s pandemic experiences vary so much that you need to have a pretty complete picture of their specific situation to even begin to understand how they’re doing and why.

I am not sure what “severe inability to process evidence” means exactly, but...if you can’t process evidence you can’t type. That’s what typing is. This whole second part is also kind of a perfect example of why I need examples: “abstract but deeply felt gut impulse” describing morality is just...nothing. I have no idea what you’re trying to say - which doesn’t mean that doesn’t accurately sum up your experience to you, but I am a stranger who does not know you and when people say “my morals are abstract” it doesn’t mean anything because I don’t know what you mean by ‘morals’ and what you mean by ‘abstract’. This could be “I have a big-picture throughline that unites all my personal values”; it could be “I have difficulty implementing my personally held beliefs in the real world”; it could be “I perceive morals as formless shapes in the void.”

I will say that the idea that everyone’s opinion deserves thought and analysis could be Ne, but also it really sounds more like the Ti-Fe spectrum. Te fundamentally doesn’t believe this although you’re young enough that you don’t really have much Te influence yet, so this is something else you should revisit.  I also think the trend of understanding things best in a linear manner is a lot more in line with the introverted perceiving functions, as is the feeling of being overwhelmed by a lot of differing perspectives - a high Ne user should probably thrive in those conditions, even if they’re an INFP rather than an ENFP.

You don’t really provide examples in the 5th part which makes it difficult for me to draw conclusions; I don’t know what you see as complex, or what you see as simplification, or what you interpret as an inability to break down complexity.

Getting to the last part:

Most people have difficulty learning without help, especially at your age, and especially if we’re talking traditionally academic means of learning. Moving to at-home learning is a massive disruption that’s an issue for many people, and it’s not really something I’d type off because it’s so disruptive that there’s a good reason basically any type could be struggling.

I do wonder, based on some of the things you’ve said, and this is totally not coming from a place of expertise, if you have some kind of information processing issues going on - if lots of things seem incoherent and you struggle tuning out background noises, that doesn’t seem purely based in typology.

Anyway, my overall takeaway is youth and inexperience, and you’ll be better served by 1. Figuring out what’s going on with the background noises/being overwhelmed by tons of perspectives, 2. Cutting yourself some slack with distance learning/reaching out to teachers if you’re really struggling with independent study, and 3. Just letting time and experience do their jobs.

[ruminativerabbi]

The End of Privacy

I have been revised! The news came just the other day in an email from ancestry.com informing me that my DNA profile has been revised in light of serious amounts of new data that they have recently processed and which now allow them to refine my ancestral portrait based on the DNA sample I sent them last spring. And now for the results: instead of being of 96% European Ashkenazic heritage, 2% Sephardic, 1% South-East Asian (a true mystery) and 1% of indistinct origin (whatever that meant exactly), my DNA profile has now been revised to yield the completely un-startling result that, genetically speaking (as well as by disposition, worldview, and appearance), I am of 100% Ashkenazic/European origin. Was I surprised? Not very! And yet…I had come to like the idea of having some weirdly inexplicable Sri Lankan blood in me somewhere, something that, at the very least, could have turned into a good short story. I suppose I’ll get over it. I might as well! 

Joan took the test too and received similarly expected results. I suppose most people do. But, of course, not all do. I wrote to you last year about the remarkable way that a woman from Chicago discovered that her (apparently) 100% Irish Catholic father turned out to have started out in life as a 100% Jewish baby boy who was sent home with the wrong set of parents and whose real parents (i.e., the woman who gave birth to him and his biological father) took whom the (actually) Irish Catholic baby who grew up to be a Jewish man from the Bronx and the patriarch of a large, complicated Jewish family. (If you find that confusing, you can revisit that letter by clicking here.) There, I mused aloud about the malleable boundaries of identity, about what it means to be who we are—and what that means with respect to the ultimate definition of Jewishness or, for that matter, any kind of identity deemed to inhere in an individual at birth. To my great surprise, I actually received an email from the woman with the Jewish Irish Catholic father in response to what I wrote about her case and I was very gratified indeed by her very generous appraisal of what I had to say about her situation and her father’s.

You have to be a serious genealogist to take advantage of most of what these online DNA sites offer. When I visit the ancestry.com website, for example, I can see the names of more than a dozen people whom the site says are “almost definitely” my fourth or fifth cousins. (Fifth cousins are people, one of whose thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents was a sibling of one of the other person’s thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents.) I’ll have to upgrade my membership if I want actually to contact any of them, but I haven’t taken that step. Nor do I think I will in the future. (In all fairness, they’ve also dangled the names of two second cousins to see if I’ll take the bait. So far, I’ve resisted.) But it turns out that there is a lot more to all of this than learning the names of theoretical cousins possibly descended from theoretical siblings who lived in the eighteenth century.

One of the side developments of all this DNA testing is the discovery some men have made, not of distant cousins, but of children inadvertently fathered somewhere along the way and in any number of different ways. (This phenomenon, which will only become more common in the coming years, has touched one family in our congregation and it has touched my own family as well. Those two stories were different in detail, but identical in terms of result…and, although both appear to be having happy endings, it feels unlikely that there are not out there people whose entire lives have been or will be turned upside down by this kind of unanticipated revelation.) Another has to do with the forensic use of these data banks to solve crimes long consigned to the “cold case” bin and only now becoming solvable in the wake of the proliferation of these online DNA banks.  You may recall reading about the arrest of the man police accuse of being the so-called “Golden State Killer,” a violent criminal considered likely to be responsible for fifty rapes and a dozen murders committed between 1976 and 1986 whose identity was only revealed to the authorities after they uploaded DNA taken from the crime scenes to a site called GETmatch.com. (To read more about that specific case, click here. Making that specific case more interesting is the fact that although the suspect did not personally offer his DNA to any of the online testing sites, a few of his relatives did…and matching the crime-scene DNA to their profiles led to the arrest of the sole individual to whom they were all related.)

But the specific issue I want to write about this week has to do neither with the discovery of unknown offspring nor the solution of cold-case crimes. Instead, I’d like to write about an issue that feels as though it has the potential to dwarf both those issues in terms of the impact it could conceivably have on society.

To date, about fifteen million people have consciously and intentionally sent in samples of their DNA for analysis to sites like 23andme.com or ancestry.com. Another couple of million have signed up at a few less well-known sites. We are, therefore, talking about far less than 10% of American citizens, but the implications of this phenomenon are far greater than the numbers suggest. Just this week, a study co-written by Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Itsik Pe’er, and Shai Carmi was published in the journal Science that suggested just how important this whole phenomenon is…and how it will soon affect the lives of millions of people who themselves have not sent in their DNA for analysis.

To date, about sixty percent of Americans of North European descent—Brits, Germans, Poles, Danes, Swedes, etc.—can be identified through these databases regardless of whether they have personally sent in their DNA for analysis. And that number is only the beginning: within two or three years, the authors of the Science essay imagine that a full ninety percent of Americans whose families originate in northern Europe will be identifiable through their DNA even if they themselves have not personally contributed any DNA sample.

To me, that sounded unbelievable. It’s one thing, after all, for my ancestry.com page to say that mitchKK (whoever he is) and I are “highly likely” to be second cousins. (I think we probably are cousins, by the way—the 2nd K matches the odd way my great-grandparents spelled their last name so I’m guessing one of his grandfathers must have been one of my grandmother’s brothers.) But that only sounds plausible because we both contributed samples of our DNA and so opened ourselves up to being identified as each other’s relative. But how could this possibly work with people who specifically have not contributed their DNA? That’s what I set myself to trying to figure out.

I’m not sure I understand the Science article entirely correctly. (To try for yourself, click here.) But as far as I can understand, the whole thing has to do with third cousins because, it turns out, the way the tests work is precisely to identify people whose DNA samples match closely enough for them to be third cousins, i.e., the great-grandchildren of siblings. Most of us apparently have about 800 people in the world whose DNA matches ours to that extent. And if just one of those people is in the data base, then someone who truly knows what he or she is doing can extrapolate information based on other public records to find a trail to a sought-after individual even if that person has not personally contributed DNA of his or her own.  This does not bode well for people who value their privacy.

The authors of the Science article chose thirty DNA test results at random from the GEDmatch database and then, by analyzing that data and using public information available to all, they were able to identify third cousins of about 60% the people whose DNA they had selected for study. (GEDmatch, with only a million customers, is significantly smaller than its competitors but was amenable to allowing the experiment to proceed.). In an article describing the experiment published in the New York Times this week (click here), Heather Murphy quoted Yaniv Erlich, one of the authors of the Science article, as saying that, “to identify an individual of any ancestry background, all that is needed is a database containing two percent of the target population.” That stopped me in my tracks.  

Is that really possible? Graham Coop, a genetics professor at the University of California Davis who is cited in the Times article, thinks so and is quoted as saying that “society is not far from being able to identify 90 percent of people through the DNA of their cousins in genealogical databases.” In my opinion, anyone who doesn’t find that both startling and seriously unsettling probably hasn’t thought the matter through carefully enough!

I’ve been sensitive for a long time to the slow erosion of personal privacy in our American culture. For most of us, that thought conjures up almost funny images of some drone at the NSA poring over trillions of emails that could not possibly be of interest to anyone other than the person to whom they were sent. But the thought that society seems to be blundering almost unawares into a future in which personal privacy is a thing of the past and the fullness of an individual’s genetic heritage is suddenly a matter of public record regardless of whether that individual has or hasn’t chosen to become part the digital quarry from which amateurs like myself presumed such data could only be mined—that seems to me to be far beyond something reasonably referenced as a quirky innovation of the digital age. The right to personal privacy in life—to live free without the oversight of others and without their interference—is one of the fundamental privileges of citizens in a democracy. That we appear to be on the verge of losing control over that foundational right is just another sign of just how out of control things are as we barrel into the future only vaguely aware of what we ourselves have wrought.

[shinobicyrus]

The Not-Date

A belated birthday gift for my good friend @homebeccer. I probably failed attempting three different fics until finally ended up doing one that’s pretty much a continuation of last year’s fic with her OC Phuong. Happy Birthday Becs!

Tucker waffled for three days trying to think of someplace for Phuong and him to have lunch. 

The Nasty Burger always worked when he hung out with Danny and Sam- but Phuong was someone her barely knew. The idea of taking her to some trashy burger joint that had been demolished and rebuilt more times than there were Spider-Man reboots just felt...juvenile.

Not that any of his other options were any better. Restaurants were too formal, and a more casual cafe just screamed “lunch date.” Which is not what this was. At all. 

He’d done his best to be as clear as could be on that. Anything resembling a date was so beyond Tucker’s ability to handle. The last thing he needed was to send mixed signals with the wrong lunch setting.

(Hell, the last thing anybody needed was prolonged exposure to the smoldering, irradiated wreck that was Tucker’s Foley love life.)

Which still left him with...absolutely no idea where they should go. 

God, all this drama over Lunch. There was no word in English or Esperanto that could accurately express just how painfully pathetic Tucker was being, right now. Maybe the Germans had a word for it. This seemed like something they’d have covered. 

Nah, screw that. Confidence was the name of the game. He’s totally got this. He fights ghosts on a semi-weekly basis, has gone through inter-dimension portals, hacked a robot-ghost assassin, and briefly ruled a whole kingdom as a power-crazed tyrannical ghost-pharaoh...

Actually...scratch that last one. No need to revisit that. Teenager stuff, everyone goes through that phase.

The point was, Tucker was a grown man with a tech job, an apartment, alimony payments, and goddamn time travel experience.  He could handle a totally platonic lunch with a minimum of panic texts to Valerie. Sure, Ms. Hunts Her Prospective Love Interests may be in the eternal four-way-tie of scariest ladies he knows, but at least she’s safer than the alternative. There was desperate, and then there was desperate.

Sam would have broken his feeble protests on the not-date status of the lunch on the peak of a single raised eyebrow while balancing little James on her hip. Danielle would insist on being his wingman, Jazz would be a post-doc shark smelling ‘unresolved issues’ in the water, and Danny-

Danny would try to be supportive.

Valerie listened to his plight with the same patient silence she probably used for lying in wait with an ecto-rifle and suggested a practical, easy solution.  

The answer was, of course, Meatheads. Which Tucker of all people should have figured out sooner- because Meatheads. You ordered at the register, but after you sat down and they brought the food to your table. Perfect middle ground. 

Yeah, Tucker was counting this as a win. The bar was set ludicrously low. 

He goes early because it was easier than sitting in his apartment refreshing traffic conditions on his phone trying to math-out arrival times and debate how early is early before it’s back into descriptive German adjectives levels of pathetic again. Ordered some fries to settle the nervous queasiness, which didn’t really help because cajun seasoning is delicious but the very opposite of calming.

He didn’t think anything much over Phuong being five minutes late. She was new in town, and even with GPS going to new places was a hassle.

By the time she was fifteen minutes late he was guzzling his second ill-advised mixed fountain drink abomination and jittering his leg, constantly looking from his phone to the door as though she could slip in between the ticks of seconds. Jeez, get a grip, Foley. So she was fashionably late. Watch, she was going step through that day any second and you’re gonna feel like such fixating tool Vlad will probably swoop in and sue you for copyright infringement.

Twenty minutes he- he doesn’t even know. She’d text if she was running late, right? Even if she’d come to her senses and the ‘OMG You Saved My Life From A Ghost’ gratitude finally wore off she’d still...like...tell him.

She didn’t come off as someone who would bail without warning. All that time in her apartment, Tucker thought he’d gotten a pretty good indication what kind of person she was. Witty but hiding it behind that poker face. Tough too- most people would be screeching and next to useless when that ecto-heap of a ghost crawled out of her sink. Tucker had plenty of experience with tough, kickass women, but hers was an...ordinary, down to earth strength. The kind you built for yourself by hand, brick by brick. 

Sturdy. Decent. If she had something to say, she’d say it properly to Tucker’s face.

Half and hour late and no word. Checking his phone for the umpteenth time revealed it’d been a fully thirty-three seconds since he last checked. The couple a few tables behind him chatted quietly in a language that wasn’t English. Re-reading the last text conversation with her; they’d said 1:00, right? Yeah, and it was definitely today.

God, he was such a self-absorbed idiot. Phuong wouldn’t just blow him off- not without good reason. Plenty of perfectly normal reasons; in Amity, plenty of not-so-normal ones, too. Maybe he should call? Or send a text to see if she was okay? Then again, one text would probably lead another and then Phuong would quickly get an alarming amount of babbling text spam in her phone.

No, he should still send one. Just one. He typed up a quick, casual message that he immediately deleted, re-wrote to satisfy a criteria he couldn’t even be sure of, and by the time he had wasted yet another five minutes weighing tone (casual but maybe it’s too casual like he doesn’t care I mean the last one was waaaaay too desperate like wow stalker much?) and almost didn’t notice when Phuong barreled through the front door. 

She was panting like a marathon runner. Clothes wrinkled, hair wild and windblown. Tuck stared dumbly at her, so she was the one who spotted him and immediately made a beeline for his table, practically collapsing into the opposite chair and still breathing hard. 

“I’m...” she gasped out, wiping a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Am so sorry. There was a- I don’t even know.” She gestured wildly, flailing and failing to charade it. “I was just. Walking. Here. On time. And there was this...this noise. And then this thing- person. I...I knew her, but. No, there was an...explosion first?”

Tucker spied the rest of the tables in his periphery. They were getting a few looks, but besides the sudden hushed indecipherable chatter from the two behind them, it would take more than a slightly disheveled woman to grab someone’s attention in Amity.

“That...would explain the uh...you know you have a bit of glass in your hair?” Tucker reached over and carefully plucked a glimmering little chunk of marble-sized glass and wrapped it carefully in his napkin. 

She felt around her abused-looking hair. ”Crap! Is there any more?” She looked down at her the state of her shirt. “Shit, I look like a mess.”

Tucker slid his pop over to her. “Here, take a drink of this and just...breathe a little.”

She obediently took the cup, popped off the lid and guzzled straight from it rather than the straw. Tucker watched with almost morbid fascination while she keep chugging, throat working steadily, until she finally slammed it back down on the table like something much stiffer. An echo of leftover, half-melted ice settled hollowly. “I hate soda,” she said.

Blasphemy. Tucker had concocted - nay, perfected- that mixed drink formula himself, and the Illinoisan in him demanded she call it pop, dammit. Still, priories. “That’s fine. Let the hate flow through you. Feel better?”

She was surprised by the belch she replied with, looked sheepish, and nodded instead. 

“So.” Tucker folded his hands on the tabletop. ”Explosion?”

Phuong’s brow furrowed, like she was trying to remember something but second-guessed herself. “I...I think Ember McLain tried to kill me.”

“Ah.”

The caffeine seemed to have righted  her head. She narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious. “You don’t seem even a little surprised.”

“I mean, I’m a little more informed than most because of the Fentons- but yeah, we were kind of due for an Ember tantrum. She has this on-again/off-again thing with another ghost and when they go off-again, she tends to go off.”

“Like blowing up a hipster record store some people minding their own business might be walking past?”

“She’s pretty much the reason you won’t find a Hot Topic in city limits.” Seeing his opportunity, Tucker propped up his hands under his chin and grinned at her. “That doesn’t explain how you recognized her, though.”

“I...refuse to answer that questions on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”

“I didn’t know Ember’s albums were popular outside of Amity.”

“She was a world phenomenon- everybody knows her name!” Phuong burst out with what Tucker suspected was a lingering residue of musical thrall that had probably been implanted there since she was a teenager. Damn, talk about getting music stuck in your head.

“I’m only surprised you were into something so...mainstream.”

“So I’m not as picky with my music as I am with my movies. No one goes around singing lines from Hitchcock movies because they get stuck in your head.”

“Well, at least you survived an assassination attempt from your teenage-rebellion phase.”

“Only because some...some...super hero, I guess? He was literally wearing this black spandex.”

Years of training kept the grin off Tucker’s face. “Snow white hair? Glowing green eyes?”

“Yeah, that was the guy.”

“Congrats, you just got your first rescue from Danny Phantom. You’re practically an Amity...ite? Amityvill...ian? What would that be?”

Right there, Phuong looked like she had officially reached the tail end of her suspension of disbelief. “Danny...Phantom? You can’t be serious. What is he, some ghost superhero?”

“Pretty much. Keeps most of the meaner ghosts from getting too out of hand. Blowing up a shop was a little more extreme than usual- most the time it’s some floating boxes and a ‘Bewaaare’! Y’know. Wednesday stuff.”

By this point, Phuong’s fingers were carding through her already frazzled hair. “Of course there’s a ghost superhero. Why wouldn’t there be a ghost superhero. I find one nice apartment over the border with decent rent and now I’m getting blown up and there’s superheroes.” She looked up him, eyes screaming for sanity. “Please tell me he’s the only one. That’s there’s not like...a pack of super-friends or something I need to be on the lookout for.”

Their neighbors’ indecipherable conversation had picked up again- which Tucker found distracting. It was weird too- he couldn’t understand it, but he could almost swear he had heard it before. Japanese? Korean? Hindi? No...

Wait.

“Well, there’s...a couple,” he admitted, trying not to enjoy the bang as Phuong’s head met the table. “There’s the Red Huntress- she flies around on a rocket board in this red and black armor. Usually stays out of the limelight- not nearly as active in the media as Danny Phantom. Then there’s...well. I guess who could call her Phantom’s side-kick. Invisobelle.”

Two tables behind, a chair scraping and some muffled words. Tucker kept his face schooled. 

“Invisobelle.” Phuong sighed. “That’s just awful.” 

He shrugged. “Like I said, she’s just Phantom’s sidekick. Not nearly as popular or as active as him.”

Before Phuong could say anything else, her very discontented stomach gurgled a noisy protest. 

“I,” she announced, “am so hungry I would murder the cow myself if it was faster, and I don’t care how many calories it is or what my mom would say about it because I have goddamn earned it.” She cocked her thumb back towards the line at the register. “I’m going to go up to order. Have you eaten yet?”

He tried not to sound guilty. “Just some fries?”

“Okay, tell me what you want and I’ll do it for the both of us. And I’m paying. Don’t think I haven’t forgotten.”

“I know better than to argue with you about it,” Tucker said.

“Good man.”

After she left with both of their orders, Tucker waited until she was well out of earshot before standing up and approaching the couple two tables behind theirs. 

They both stiffened at his approach. One of them hunched behind an open copy of the Amity Park Angle that was three days old.

Dammit, he freaking knew he was hearing ghost-speak.

Danielle, as incognito as she could manage in aviators and a My Little Pony(TM) beanie gasped unconvincingly.

“Whoooaa, Tucker? You’re here too? No waaaayy! Only in small towns, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m completely buying this.” He pulled down the newspaper to uncover Wulf wearing a baseball cap over his flattened ears and sporting a pair of novelty shades that would be comically large on anyone but a literal giant wolfman’s long nose.

“Uh...Amiko Tuck! Kio surprizo!”

“Already tried that one, dude,” Elle warned him in a sotto whisper.

A distant, out-of-body perspective yanked him violently from solid ground so he could examine the situation from above just to confirm that yes, this really was his life and was something he had no choice but to deal with. An ache bloomed behind Tucker’s eyes- the start of a bad headache like his brain was punishing him for putting it through this. Fair enough. Taking off his glasses let Tucker both massage the pain out of his temples and make it much easier to not look at them.

“You two. Can turn. Invisible.” He hissed through the pain. “Why the hell-”

“They won’t let you buy food here if you’re not visible.” Danielle explained. “Company policy.”

Wulf picked up a large burger from a tray already littered with the wrappers of past conquest and munched on it demonstratively, like Tucker was still buying the cover story.

“And what, no one minded having a giant wolf-ghost-man just...hanging around the restaurant?”

Wulf swallowed the last of his burger and shrugged. “Ĝi estas Amity.”

Danielle nodded. “Yeah, nobody minded. Wulfy-Wulf even got a few phone numbers. He’s a total player.”

Tucker’s head canted, straining to process this new information. Wulf titled down his gunglasses and winked. 

“I. Well. Okay then. That’s just brings up a whole lot of other questions I’m not sure I want answers to.”

“Estas la oreloj,” Wulf tipped his cap like an old-timey gentleman and wiggled his ears, suspiciously similar to how a puppy might. “Ĉiuj amas la orelojn.”

“No. Stop that. No making me wanna pet you instead of yelling at the both you properly about violating my privacy like this.”

“We’re not spying on you, Tuck!” Danielle insisted. “We came here to be supportive!”

“Jee, ni estas ĉi tie por vi, Amiko Tucker.”

“Oh. You were here to support me. While hiding behind last week’s Angle.”

Dani hid her cringe behind an awkward smile. “We were here for you in spirit?”

Wulf chortled. “Heh. Spirit.”

“I am so unfriending Valerie for this, the traitor.”

“Aw come on, Tuck it’s not like- we just wanted to make sure you were okay!”

“I know you two don’t get why-” Tucker cut off what he was going to say, breathed, and tried again. “I get it, I do, but I’m just having lunch with a friend, okay? I’m allowed to have those, aren’t I?”

“Well yeah, it’s just-” Danielle sent an appealing look Wulf’s way. “It hasn’t even been a year since you and-”

“Ni ne diras ŝian nomon,” Wulf growled. 

Danielle rolled her eyes. “Fine. Since you and Voldemistress finishing signing the paperwork.”

“Elle, I get it. Trust me, I do. I am nowhere near ready to even start thinking about dating. Phuong’s a- look she’s pretty cool, and she’s new here, so she needs a friend to give her the Amity Survival Training. This is absolutely not a-”

“Tucker?” Phuong asked behind him.

“Dankon pro la averto, Wulf,” Tucker hissed, and turned around. His face burned under her scrutiny. “Uh...hey Phuong! You’re back. You wouldn’t believe who else had the idea to eat here today? Small towns, right?”

“Oh sure, he can do it,” Danielle grumbled.

Phuong, looking as though she hadn’t even heard him, was gaping past Tucker at Wulf. “Who...are your...friends?” The last word she said with skepticism. 

Tucker spoke up quickly to cut off Dani. “Oh. Right. Uh...Phuong, this is Danielle- she’s the cousin of my best buddy Danny, and...this is my very good friend-”

“Wulf,” he stood up to his full height and took off his hat in a way that reminded Tucker of old movies, when gentlemen stood up when a lady was present. “Estas plezuro renkonti vin. Ajna amiko de Tucker estas amiko mia.”

He held out his hand...paw. Sans the claws, thank God. Phuong looked down at the massive furry hand. Looked up at the enormous, wide-shouldered wolf-man that had at least a foot on her, and accepted the handshake like it had challenged her. “Nice to meet you,” she said. Her hand was pitifully small in Wulf’s palm, but he shook it gently. 

Tucker clapped his hands together. “Greeeaaat, everyone’s introduced so glad hey didn’t you say you two had to rush, Elle?”

“Huh?” Dani was hard to read with those stupid aviators, but thank God she decided to not be a little troll for once. “Oh yeah. Come on, Wulf. I forgot we had to the do that thing in that place that wasn’t here.”

“Eh? Oh! Jee, tre okupata. Ni vere devas rapidi-”

“You don’t have lay it on that thick Team Jacob she can’t even understand you.”

Plastering on a big smile, Danielle hooked her arm into Wulf’s. “It was nice meeting you Phuong.”

“Likewise. Maybe I’ll see you two around.”

Peeking over her sunglasses, she leered at Tucker. “I’m sure you will.”

“Good-bye, Danielle.”

Snickering, Danielle pulled Wulf along with alarming ease, considering their size difference. In his free paw, he held up a few scraps of paper and napkins with scribbled numbers on them. “Kio pri-”

“Dude, not now. Lot’s of things have changed in the dating scene since you’ve been alive. There’s like...a rule about not calling people right away.”

“Oh. Mi ne havas telefonon.”

“Yeah, there you go. Like phones, that’s a big one.”

Phuong waited until they were out the door. “Well they were...interesting. Wulf, especially.”

Tucker scratched the back of his head. “Yeah he. Uh. Definitely makes an impression.”

“Oh, I definitely got a few of those,” Phuong pursed her lips, chewing on a thought. “How long-”

“Since I was fourteen.”

“You two must be very close, then.”

“About as close as two guys that have saved each others’ lives get. Or...un-lives, depending on who you mean.”

“Lot of that seems to be going around,” Phuong noted with a conspiratorial little smile. Like it was their in-joke. Tucker smiled back.

A server came up bearing a tray of burgers. “A bacon-ranch half-pounder with a side of fries?”

“Oh thank God,” Phuong seized her tray and sat back down at the table. 

The server looked around the surrounding tables. “Uh...what happened to the-”

“He left, sorry.” Tucker said.

“Aw dammit. I mean,” blushing, the server hastily shoved the tray with Tucker’s food at him. “Enjoy.” And scampered. 

Phuong was already tearing into her burger with gusto. Tucker, taken aback, lingered over his food. She noticed him watching her, and asked with a full mouth. “Wahf?”

“Nothing. Glad I picked the right place.” 

“Thowwy-” She swalloed. “Sorry again I was so late. I would have called but whatever weird guitar blasts Ember was doing cracked my phone. I swear I’m not usually this bad.” 

“Trust me, happens to everyone eventually.”

“While we’re on the subject,” Phuong pointed a fry in Tucker’s direction. “Any other major Amity hazards I should know about? Because at this point, I’m pretty much numb to ridiculous bullshit, so you might as well give it to me all at once.”

“It’s...quite the list,” Tucker warned her. 

“I just had a literal blast from my black-leather past that almost gave me tinnitus. I can handle it.” She opened up her arms like she was inviting a hit. “Come on, what else is there? Are dragons real too? Vampires? Wizards? Government conspiracies? Is this whole town sitting on top of a portal to hell, or something?”

Tucker didn’t answer for a long moment- mostly internally debating whether Clockwork could technically count as a wizard.

“I don’t like how quiet you’re being.” Phuong said. 

“How about this? You eat, I’ll talk.”

“So do you usually go out to lunch with chaperones, or was that a one-time thing?”

They walked side-by-side down the sidewalk, parting for any fellow pedestrian going the other way. Offering to walk her home was only right, after having a literal scare from a raging dead rockstar on the rebound.

They’d been walking in amiable silence- so the question caught him off guard. “Relax,” she said. “I thought it was kind of sweet.”

“Sweet?” 

“Well, I’m guessing by how much you were trying not to look embarrassed while you were introducing them that their being there wasn’t your idea.”

“No, it was definitely not.”

“Thought introducing me to your ghost-friend was a bit too soon?”

“More like either of them. Danielle had a...weird upbringing and Wulf is...”

“Very loyal, seems like. And nice. At least...I think  he was being nice? I paid attention in enough Spanish classes to get the gist of it.”

“I’m actually kind of impressed,” Tucker said. “You dealt with the whole three hundred pounds of fur and claws way quicker than...well...anyone not in our immediate friend circle or non-furries.”

“What can I say? I’m learning to roll with the Amity Weirdness. After getting caught in the middle of a Rocky Horror Show street fight, the giant shaggy dog-man was pretty...tame.”

The emphasis at the end there. Tucker shook his head in mock disappointment. “I saw what you did there, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Also, he’s technically a giant shaggy wolf-man. He’s very sensitive about it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. And good side-stepping the topic, by the way. I almost didn’t notice.”

“Doing my best.” He shrugged away another rise of heat in his cheeks. It would be so easy for her to just ask, a few well-target words and Tucker knew he would unravel right in front of  her. It felt too much like his feet dangling over a precipice- a feeling he was disturbingly familiar with thanks to a best bro who could fly.

“I won’t ask about her.” Phuong reassured him, and Tucker could almost feel the phantom hand pressing down on his chest east. “But if your friends’ reaction to you going out to lunch with someone is to adorably fail at the covert part of a stakeout...”

“I didn’t take the divorce very well,” Tucker admitted. Understatement of the century. Take a nerd’s natural self-worth issues and throw in the colossal failure of a marriage crashing and burning, and of course clashing with someone who knew you well enough to say just the right things that would stick long after she left.

Phuong nodded to herself. “Y’know, if you ever want to talk about it with someone who wasn’t involved, even if you want to just vent-”

“I make it a rule to never talk about exes on a d-” Tucker stopped himself, wincing.

Of course Phuong noticed. “Never discuss exes on a what, Mr. Foley?” Her smile was just the right kind of smugly teasing, and- aw hell, this lady was so, so dangerous. “I thought this was just a nice, simple lunch between friends?”

“I-it is! I-I just. See, what I meant to say was-”

“And friends,” Phuong went on, as though she didn’t hear his pitiful stammering. “Are practically honor-bound to listen to another friend go on about bad exes and shitty breakups.

“And I,” she pointed at herself, “have had some truly awful exes. Seriously, you would’t believe.”

Oh, he could probably guess. “Bigots?”

“Just the three. I got pretty good at filtering out them out, especially the ones with a fetish. You?”

“Just two. Well...three, counting the homophobe. She thought our two month relationship would somehow trump a few years of friendship with Danielle and her girlfriend.”

Phuong snapped her fingers. “I knew it.” At Tucker’s questioning look, she said: “The aviators.”

“Ha. And that was her trying to be subtle.”

“Morbidly curious what she looks like going all-out, now.”

“She will probably hit on you just to see your reaction.”

“Being irresistible to all sexes is truly a curse,” Phuong replied smoothly. “Okay, my turn: stalkers?”

“Do hauntings count?”

Without skipping a beat: “Depends on what base you go to.”

Tucker choked. “What?”

“Well? Did I stutter? Come on, Foley, out with the dirty details. Was it like that unnecessary Ghost Buster’s scene with Dan Aykroyd?”

“...just second base. But I would like to state for the record that she looked way more alive when she was luring me in before the scary kill-murder banshee mode.”

“No judgments. I’ve dated my share of cold fish.” That poker-face delivery was so deadpan, Tucker couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “I take it you made it through scary kill-murder banshee mode unscathed or am I talking to a meat-loving ghost right now?”

“Don’t joke about that- they exist.” Tucker warned her. “And nah, nothing hurt permanently except my pride. Phantom showed up and saved my dumb ass.”

“Hmm. That’s two I owe him, now. Might need to start running a tally.”

“Good luck. He’s saved this town more times than I can count, and you are talking to an obsessive nerd here.”

“Have you ever thought about leaving?” Phuong asked him suddenly. “You said it yourself- this town is dangerous. Haven’t you ever thought you could just...move away? Get out of the spooky warzone and live a nice normal life?”

“Sure. My parent’s argued about it a lot when I was younger. They might still move away when Dad retires, but I...” He looked up at the city. The billboards for Mayor Masters’ re-election campaign, the ‘BEWARE’ posters warning about spectral overshadowing, the cackling ecto-pusses swimming past in the sky. “My other family is here. Danny and Sam, my godson, Danielle, Valerie- that’s her girlfriend, Wulf. I know I don’t matter that much. When you get right down to it, they could get along just fine without me.

“But...I’m not sure I could get along very fine without them.”

“I think,” Phuong touched the side of his arm. “You are forgetting that two of those people on that list were so worried about you getting yourself hurt again they put on hilariously terrible disguises and waited over an hour at a Meatheads...just to make sure you were okay.”

Tucker stopped walking. “Oh. I. Guess they did do that. Huh.”

Phuong waited a few heartbeats to let Tucker process this new revelation that his friends cared, and gave his arm a squeeze before letting go. "Does that mean there’s a chance we can have another lunch next week? I still feel bad about making you wait so long.”

“Really, it’s fine. I’m just glad you got through your first real ghost fight unhurt and not running for the hills.”

“Thanks, I think I- wait. That ghost in my apartment doesn’t count as a real ghost fight?”

“Nah, that was just pest control. It doesn’t get serious until the ghosts name themselves and start monologuing. But I wouldn’t object to an encore lunch. And no chaperones next time- honest.”

“Great. A week should give me time to replace my phone,” she took it out, thicker, older, but still serviceable if it wasn’t for the giant crack in its screen. “There wouldn’t happen to be ghost-attack insurance I can get on my next model, is there?”

Tucker’s mouth jumped ahead without his consent. “I can fix that.”

“You. Really?” 

“Yeah, for sure. May I?” She handed the phone to him, to examine. “Oh yeah, I’ve seen way worse than this. Just replace the screen, check to make sure none of the guts got jostled, an Ember-class screen protector; easy fix.”

“How much?”

“You just fed a bored tech geek with a project, consider it already paid for.”

“You’re...” She shook her head in disbelief. “Amazing. How soon can you-”

“Tomorrow afternoon, at the earliest. I can deliver it to your place, if you’d rather not wait.”

“You already know where I live, and I am a phone-addicted millennial getting psychosomatic hives from cell-separation. The sooner the better.”

“Consider it done,” Tucker pocketed it. “Tomorrow, then.”

“It’s a date.”

[elizabethrobertajones]

Pre-Wayward Sisters Rewatch Notes

1x09: HAVE SOME PATIENCE WHILE WE GO TO MISSOURI

I've been through here so recently but it still cracks me up in the intro when it recaps that Mary "is never coming back", and then the ground it goes on to cover with her which is literally just her season 12 arc she returns to deal with properly. It's pretty much neither here nor there, and while technically I'm rewatching this for Missouri, I have to admit I'm like 90% coming back here because of the phone call parallel to 13x01's prayer because I like tormenting myself and that really sealed the deal on if I would come back to rewatch, since I covered seasons 1-4 in the hiatus.

It's interesting to me that the recap covers so much of the already established Winchester Family History circa 1x09 because it's going over the mythos of the family that led us to this point where we go to the home to explore all this and dig down into the emotional drama behind everything... To actually expose some of the things that we've been sitting on until this point. Our first sight of John since the Pilot, and Mary's last moments in her chronological story until 11x23.  And beginning to get into the mystery of the evil that was done to Sam, and Mary's part in it.

The reason I say all this is because obviously when we get to the season 13 episodes introducing us to our Wayward squad, the recaps of the episodes are going to have to cover this same ground - to tell us who everyone is, to bring them into the fold and to tie their stories together. Hopefully by the proper Wayward Sisters episode when we've had all the new girls' stories, we'll get a recap with a very similar feel: just a straightforward "this is the family, do you want to find out more about them?" sort of explanation.

I also remember from the rewatch I did in the summer that the Home one stood out to me for being so focused only on the Winchester mythos and the surrounding ones were more about the monsters and fighting and "saving people hunting things" that the family focus felt far more important here even before the episode started.

It's weird, it makes me preemptively excited to see the family come together just because I know they'll have to do the montage, and like this one was in a low key way, it will high key be a special event, because it will be ABOUT the new family we care about.

-

I am momentarily distracted by how this episode opens on Sam's vision and then him obsessing over drawing the tree from outside the house over and over. I watched 1x17 last night with my mum and it reminds me of this season's great subtle mirroring and repetition of moments and ideas and motifs, when Dean is obsessing over his mystery symbol. That was the silly example of this to break the tension but to keep consistency through the season, subtly repeating ideas in a way that just keeps it all kind of the same aesthetic, of Sam and Dean doodling on motel paper... Anyway, reminds me of Dabb era's methods but they have 12 seasons of past canon to play with and in season 11 it was extremely blatant the way they revisited old ideas and told us they were shaking them up and doing them differently or just bringing them back for our consideration. I wonder if anyone ever collected up all the ways season 1 internally mirrors itself. It's really just a spiral of mirrors that unlike the character development spiralling closer and closer to a desired end, this spirals out and out that the more canon there is the more there is to reference and repeat, and so it grows exponentially in mirrored subject matter...

At this point Wayward Sisters is going to have a bit of a job navigating the story to tell its own stuff in a fresh way without falling back on the repeated ideas - I don't know if we should be looking for mirroring or if introducing the characters as part of Supernatural's main canon means they can be used by the narrative in this way but only when they get to their own show will they then build their own language. The new show means they can play around with new ways of telling things and the tropes will probably be very different all over the place. Like, for once I'm not expecting a new psychic character to massively mirror Sam, even though Home and how Missouri and Sam bond over his powers is obviously like the main reason to come back here to rewatch before we get an episode where she does it with her own granddaughter. I don't think there's anything evil behind Patience's powers especially if we're assuming they're inherited from Missouri and they're not going to introduce some weird ideas about where those powers came from - it's enough having them I think :P

On the other hand if Patience is being hunted by a hungry wraith that likes her powers then it IS a parallel to all the interest in Jack for HIS powers. We'll see how it shakes out but once they're in a show where they're the main characters (and I really hope Patience is the POV character - I think actually not long after I was talking about that somewhere I saw an interview suggesting she WOULD be, which is AWESOME) then the fact that Patience is/was a Sam and Jack mirror will be utterly by the by. Really I just hope they don't bend her to meet the perfect criteria for a mirror but develop her for herself and put Sam and Jack in her shadow.

-

Sam realises they need to go home and this is the motivation to reveal that he has been having psychic nightmares - the fact that someone is in trouble and needs saving and the only way to explain to Dean why he knows this is because he suspects he's psychic. For narrative parallels to whatever might happen in 13x03 purposes, I'm interested in how Patience's story compares to Sam's, as she is reconnecting with Missouri by the sounds of things, and has her own issues with being disconnected from her family probably - this episode is still filled with massive disconnects and both of their parents withholding information or just outright avoiding them, seemingly for their own protection. (Mary being rather more direct about protecting them in a heroic way than John, hiding in the shadows refusing to confront them with the mytharc knowledge about Sam). Patience is prooobably going to be out of the loop on what's happening to her, or out of the family loop, which means that this is going to be personal discovery for her too.

-

Oh hey and then Sam gets them through the door into the house by using a conditional amount of the truth (they're sam and dean winchester and they used to live here) just like in 13x01 Dean just used the truth to the sheriff and got her on-board and them out of jail with that frankness... Sometimes it pays.

-

OH GOD Dean having to relive the fire by telling it to Sam... and 13x01 starting with Dean re-imagining/dreaming/having a vision about it again :<

-

I swear I started this trying to tell myself I would not make this about Man Pain because this is the Wayward Sisters watch but I am an addict

-

Dean goes to make the call and there's a big blue shipping container thing beside him and it's so claustrophobic, like he's chosen the most confined secret space to make the call... It's in total contrast to the vast open space he prayed in - but he STILL shuffled into the shadow of the (blue) building in order to make the prayer and get that illusion of privacy and confinement. The wide shot as he goes in here shows him behind the car and weaving between gas station junk and between these two buildings/large structures. In 13x02 just the random car parked at the back stops Dean from being entirely alone and exposed. I'll take that as a commentary on his layers and how open he is being, although it's sort of awkward when both times, of course, he's going for a super private call that he's going to open himself up for completely, revealing deep down things that have never been exposed before.

People literally started loving Dean about this exact second of the show because he broke so wonderfully to cry and reveal he's not all his top layer stuff. I think someone on the superspecpod (2 of them?) said/agreed on this moment.

-

Of course we can assume Chuck is listening and not acting, not just because he's omnipotent and abnormally attached to Dean of all humans, but also because John literally did hear this voicemail and either already was in or came straight to Lawrence.

-

God the fact he makes the call in front of the men's room but then it's the buccaneer's room in 13x02... what a goofy episode... I hate it... Pfft

-

THIS IS SO HARD TO WATCH.

I rank Dean's pain proportionate to his experience, and this is definitely the worst he's ever been at this point, mostly because we never see him cry until then.

He certainly is dealing better than in 13x02 because he still has a job to do and it might be hard but at least he has some sort of focus and a reason for being there, and even if everything is all messed up (he has to be back here AND Sam has just revealed he's psychic) that's not completely and utterly unbearable in the same way losing Mary and Cas (and even Crowley) has made him shut down so hard in season 13. There's no forward momentum for him. Jack is not enough of a motivation >.>

-

SAM: All right, so there are a few psychics and palm readers in town. There’s someone named El Divino. There’s, uh –-[He laughs.]—there’s the Mysterious Mister Fortinsky. Uh, Missouri Moseley—

Dear lord bring back these other guys just to kill them off for the epic 13 years of continuity you could get for free.

El Divino would be hilarious because I'm guessing the divine -> cas connection would be especially hilarious to play on

-

These lines are moments apart:

SAM: [reading] I went to Missouri and I learned the truth. [...] DEAN: Why didn’t you tell him? MISSOURI: People don’t come here for the truth. They come for good news.

Yeah, not that she gave John any.............................. or did she not tell him EVERYTHING she suspected/read about what had happened to Sam in that night? Exactly how far-ranging are her powers? Could she have seen what Azazel did by proximity to the attack around the time it happened and to John? She could see that dude's wife was having an affair, which is out of his knowledge range, so does that mean she knew about Mary's deal, which is loosely coded as infidelity to John with Azazel?

Gaaaah.

-

but oh NO - Missouri takes one look at Sam and Dean and specifically analyses Sam's woes as missing his dead loved one and Dean's as his missing parent...

*flippy flippy to season 13's entire framing of their loss*

-

TBH Missouri getting annoyed at Dean asking where their father is is probably specifically because she knows exactly where he is, aka hiding in the spare room upstairs doing whatever angsty things John does, and she's trying to shake Dean off of asking, and she is probably not that great at lying when she is in the middle of it all instead of just cheerfully telling people what they want to hear.

-

Maybe the whack you with a spoon thing was also to make Dean so uncomfortable with her he wouldn't keep bugging her for info about things she did not want to admit right then.

Keep them on track

-

I do feel like she was here to challenge them, not to nurture them, and I think it's weirdly the same issue people are having with Mary in season 12 and Dean "parenting" Jack in season 13, where she is not actually meant to be a motherly character, and I have historically had no issues with her in the past, before fandom and everything needing to be tuned to being good to your fave or otherwise the Worst. She's interesting and introduced even just with that guy she lies to as being mercurial and emotionally untrustworthy. She lets them behind the veil as it were since they know she's really psychic but clearly using that power carefully and not being too accurate all the time for people when the truth hurts and her powers can be better used for reading people and working out what would be best to tell them... But for hunters it's a different story... but that doesn't change her default personality... Especially as the end of the episode reveals she has been withholding literally the object of this season's quest from them at this early stage. She literally plays them like her customers except with the personal plot info she can't tell them.

So when she goes through the door saying Dean's not the sharpest tool the shed, she is not a person in a position of emotional responsibility to them, we just see Sam and Dean as scared confused little ducklings (like Jack in season 13) and people being harsh with them, especially I think when we come back to them with years of seeing them grow up and grow harder, so they're all soft and fluffy and mostly unharmed at this point, it's so easy to be defensive of them... And I mean I AM because DEAN, but not so much I think this means Missouri is a horrible person or that she's cruel or Dean shouldn't give her the time of day in season 13 or whatever. I find her to be interesting and she's an obstacle they DON'T overcome because she is twice as fast as them with her psychic advantage so she can help them for the GREATER GOOD, but conceal their much more personal issue from them, making her a minor (friendly and great good-motivated) antagonistic as far as the stuff that matters on the character side of things goes.

In season 13 she has nothing to lose in hiding things from them or lying to them, I bet, especially as she appears to be the one asking them for help rather than them coming to her, so I assume she will be more open, and I also assume that with 13 years space in between, Dean is not going to hold a serious grudge for the way she treated him - because those words are just a few from a one-off meeting with her rather than a childhood of negging or something. Like with Mary she doesn't have responsibility over them as adults, or a moral obligation to them in the same way a recognised caregiver would.

If she can read inside their heads and treats Dean this way she is doing it for a reason and she's running circles around them to not reveal that John has been in contact with her or that even at this point perhaps she knows he's already in town.

-

OH NO the nursery scene... This is where it all happened. A dark energy in the room...

And now we know that Jack being born and sloping off to the nursery to hide in the corner was heralded by a wave of powerful GOOD energy, not the "toxic" energy of Lucifer and the same thing that Azazel corrupted this room with.

-

Also Missouri calling Dean an amateur for using an EMF meter might be more of the negging but this scene is Missouri being a serious professional at the ghost hunting thing just by  being herself... I think since she's coming back and it will be a less personally charged episode - pretty much has to be - then her natural competence at hunting will be an asset. She might not be able to handle wraiths as easily as ghosts but she certainly has a whole load of real spell ingredients and knowledge about things that really work for actual hunting. She's not a hapless bystander even if her day job is fortune telling...

-

Oh and then we have Sam out-psychic-ing Missouri. Probably because he's got demon blood but it is interesting what might happen with Patience - if she's more sensitive than Missouri as well, or if they have the same level of talent. It would change from being ominous about Sam - with Missouri as our default example of what the generic psychic of this world building can do as the season 1 intro of such a character, and how Sam is unnerving because he can do more - to a story about outgrowing the talent of your elders and forging your own way in the world with your own strength that only you can define since help can only go so far when you outshine them... In storytelling purposes I can't really imagine they won't make Patience as good as (but with a better innovative mindset) or better than Missouri (in raw power) just because "oh here's a slightly less psychic character" just doesn't really sparkle off the page as a hook. We'll see, but I can imagine it being kinda like the stuff that happens with Sam here, but not in an ominous way, just in a way that Patience is going to move on and join the Wayward Sisters.

Of course Missouri could just die and motivate her even if she has average/normal powers, because she won't be measuring herself against Missouri and it would be a motivation to be as good as she was from a start where her powers are a bit wonky.

(Although with Jack around I can see them being veeery tempted by her being super powerful but not knowing how to control it yet just for the sake of having a parallel.)

-

I am still not over Sam saying he can "see" Mary now before she appears to him, neatly book-ending this scene and 12x22 and Dean asking Mary to see HIM, and basically the fact they stole literally Mary's entire arc in season 12 from the staging of this scene.

And if you want to keep recycling it in reverse, she burns up again in 13x01 in Dean's dream, to cap that all off.

Wheee

-

It's weird having Mary on screen in this over-dramatic OMG it's MARY way where it's the most amazing thing that's ever happened, and then we got a whole season of her where she was just kinda around :P

-

SAM: What’s happening to me? MISSOURI: I know I should have all the answers, but I don’t know.

And yep she's still lying to them and hiding everything she knows, and as such even though she's kinder to Sam since he's probing her less and less snappy than Dean, she doesn't give him the exact advice and information he needs even though apparently she and John knew a hell of a lot for ages...

You know what I would like? This is a total pipe dream, but for her to tell Dean what she actually knew when they met her, and maybe even apologise for withholding information because John said it was for the best and all. Because Sam was FUCKED UP by all this and honestly considering it's all one emotional arc right through the show it makes you wonder what Sam being given actual information by someone other than Azazel when it amuses him to do so would have ever done to help him figure out who he was, what was happening to him, and how he should react to it.

He's sitting on these steps feeling probably somewhat the same as Jack did in 13x02 where he was sitting on that crate in the alley, although from a less aggressive situation, just, kinda reflecting on everything that happened. He sees there's a pattern in everything kicking off, and now Mary apologises to him... And he's got these powers he's only just daring to even voice exist and grappling with what will be his myth arc for basically ever... And Missouri lies to him and withholds information he needs. John knows stuff about Sam - he DIES knowing more about Sam than they ever did until waaay too late. He probably knew BY THEN that Sam had demon blood, which wasn't revealed until the end of season 2, but logically follows from John's last words to mean that whatever reveal about Sam came at the end of the season, this is what he was worried Dean had to save Sam from (or kill him) at the start of the season when he could last have any input on that. And he spent most of season 1 chasing Azazel or working out how to kill him rather than researching Sam so I go back to wondering if Missouri put most of it together herself.

I wonder how much she didn't tell John.

I wonder what she DID tell John the moment the credits rolled on the episode and they were free to talk plot without spoiling anything for us. Did Missouri get him a cup of tea, sit down with him and tell him her full professional opinion of Sam which kicked off the entire everything else John did re: Sam? It's only a couple of episodes before he's on the other side of the country chasing leads on Azazel.

I wonder if she'd tell us any of this 13 years later...

...

I bet she says basically nothing, but these are my hanging questions about season 1 and 2 which ONLY she can enlighten us on.

-

"Don't you boys be strangers!" "We won't." "See you around!"

welp, sorry Alpha Vampire and "see you next season" but this absolutely and emphatically takes the cake now she is actually returning at long last and it's not just an amusing line about her never coming back - it's an amusing line about her not coming back for thirteen freakin years.

-

Oh look it's JDM

-

This rewatch is so weird and messed up about what characters and plot things we're going to pass through. Sure the Wayward Sisters are utterly embedded in the show and even w/o the Patience thing go back more than half it's run - 3/4 of its run in fact - but they appear in such strange places tangential to massive happenings that following the characters around is going to be The Most Chaotic Rewatch Ever, for someone who likes meta-ing patterns.

I mean after this my next episode is to hop along to Claire's intro.

-

Anyway, John resisting going to see them but "not until I know the truth" which I assume is not the reason Chuck is being hands off in season 13 but I assume he thinks he has his reasons not to intervene.

John learned the truth from Missouri about monsters and the like, but now he's chasing the much bigger, plot important truths... It's going to mean he basically never sees his sons again, except for the prolonged contact at the end of this season/start of the next where he's sitting on whatever he knew about Sam which prompted his last words to Dean. I seriously, SERIOUSLY wonder if him saying he needs to know the truth ties back to "I went to Missouri and learned the truth" and that she DID tell John that Sam has demon blood and she put it all together between their initial contact and meeting Sam with his powers activated in their present day.

Oh gosh, I am sure someone has come up with that before, probably 13 years ago, but still. That's a good conspiracy to end on...

[agentelmo]

The X-Files MSR Analysis Series: Season 1 Episode 5

“Jersey Devil”

Previous episode analysis - 1x04 Conduit.

Ah yes, Jersey Devil.  The episode about two strange human beings driven by ancient, hereditary traits to survive - one a sexually-territorial male who stays hidden from the world, and his mate, who, guided by reproductive needs, leaves the safety of her ‘tribe’ in an attempt to procreate.  

Oh and there’s a couple neanderthals running around eating people, too.

What?

I love that the first line of my notes for this episode simply says: “Scully rocking the salmon and navy.”

She’s so beautiful in this episode - I mean, she’s beautiful in every episode - but she gets a few great wardrobe changes here and she looks so lovely.  Although the final outfit she dons is a zinger.  

My word. The 90′s, eh?

So we start with Scully arriving at the supposed basement office that clearly isn’t in the basement.  Seriously, watch how they they walk out of the office and straight into the bullpen.  

At first, I genuinely wondered if perhaps I’d not remember that they started in a normal office and get sent to the dungeons basement later (I last watched TXF over a decade ago guys, go easy on me) but a little Google research reveals that nope - this is simply a huge continuity error in this one episode.  Weird!

So anyway, Scully arrives, and to her amusement, finds Mulder catching up on some essential reading, perusing the latest issue of a fine gentleman’s literary publication.

You know... he was reading a dirty titty mag for filthy manslags. “Marty” will definitely be calling that super hot line, later.

Scully can barely contain herself.

I like the way Scully is totally chill with Mulder and his porn; she never gives him a hard time about it.  It’s an amusing aspect of Mulder’s character that’s mostly played for laughs - but the reality is he’s a man; he has needs and no one to satisfy them, (hands down ladies, no volunteers) despite the fact women do find him attractive.

I know, obvious statement is obvious.

But isn’t it true that one of the most unrealistic aspects of the X-Files is how celibate throughout the entire show he is?  I mean, just look at the guy.

....

Uhh... I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah.

I don’t care who calls him Spooky, if there’s a single guy at my place of work who is witty and intelligent and looks like that, I’m trying my luck.  So where are all the single FBI ladies?  (I swear to God I didn’t Photoshop that picture, by the way.)

I just always found it intriguing that a guy with what appears to be a moderately high sex drive, barely ever has sex even though he quite easily could.  Remember season 6′s Dreamland I, Skinner’s secretary?  Yeah... ‘nuff said.  

I guess he just doesn’t have Morris Fletcher’s way with women?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he doesn’t get laid.  It plays nicely into my theory that while Scully is around, Mulder rarely ever looks at another woman seriously - there are the odd few that he is physically attracted to, like Dr. Bambi Berenbaum from season 3′s War of the Coprophages, but it’s only a perfunctory interest - we never see these characters again.  

The only women who ever pose a genuine threat to the MSR are Mulder’s old flames - so it’s Mulder briefly revisiting old feelings from a time before Scully.  Otherwise, since meeting Scully, he’s never become romantically attached to someone new.  Isn’t that interesting?

So why might he prefer to turn to porn?  Well, all I’ll say is this - do you remember that in Dreamland I, after falling asleep watching porn the night before, Morris Fletcher’s wife tells Mulder he was mumbling something about “Scully” in his sleep.  Yeah.  I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks with that one.

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway...  that was quite a tangent, wasn’t it.  Man, who knew there was so much to analyse in a few seconds of Mulder looking at a copy of Hankypanky?  Which, by the way, is the best name for a porn mag, ever.

It is relevant, I swear.  Mulder’s sexual needs figure into the plot of this episode in a very indirect way.

No, really.   

It’s really surprising to me just how much Scully smiles so far in season 1.  She was so carefree back then, eh?  Had no idea what she was in for.  At this moment in time, she’s just a normal FBI agent working some weird cases with her sexy crackpot partner.  

S1!Scully enjoys simple pleasures, like how in this scene she seems to get a kick out of bringing him a weird case that she knows will pique his interest.  She enjoys holding court - she’s the one with the information and she likes to tantalise him with it. The UST is simmering nicely.

I love the way her face tracks his, begging for his attention.  And he responds with a bit of casual, flirtatious innuendo - she loves this little game they play with each other as much as he does, look a her.  I wish she would get lucky, Mulder.  HINT HINT.

For some reason she seems especially radiant and lovely in this episode.  I already mentioned this, didn’t I.  But seriously, let’s all bask in the glow of how stunning she is - she’s like a cross between Princess Diana and a 50′s pin up.

Don’t you think?  Is it just me?

Ahem... so moving along, they head on over to Atlantic City to see what this weird man-eating case is all about, and run into an immediate roadblock when the local detective gets all territorial with his jurisdiction over the case.  

Put a pin in this scene in your mind - human behaviour is under the microscope in this episode, and this detective guy is demonstrating some classic traits that are discussed in more depth later.

I love that when she means business and wants Mulder to stop what he’s doing and listen to her, she calls him Agent Mulder.  

Oh please, don’t give me fanfic ideas, because I can’t write fanfic for the life of me, but someone, somewhere, must have written a fic where they call each other Agent Mulder and Agent Scully in bed, right?  Someone PM me that shit.

So they leave and Scully is still in flirty tete-a-tete mode as they venture outside.  

Fuck, that man has a beautiful smile.  He really needs to smile like that more often.  It makes me giddy that Scully can make him smile and laugh so easily, especially considering what they just went through together in Conduit.  They’re so good together even at this early stage, it makes my heart hurt that it takes them 7 years to get their shit together.

Also, Scully’s comment about the Jersey Devil is another, more flippant, example of how she low-key reads Mulder’s mind regarding his theories on a case.  She’s joking about the murderer being the Jersey Devil, but that’s exactly what he suspects.  

I really am enjoying watching all of the regular dynamics of their later relationship play out for the first time in season 1.  Its’s so much fun.

Mulder, you realise you’re flirting right now, don’t you?  Come on, now... 

Look at her smiling back at him as he attempts to seduce her with the fantasy of what sounds suspiciously like a date; where they grab a hotel together *insert raised eyebrow here* and then go take in the sights and sounds of Atlantic City.  

He’s messing with her, of course, he just wants to focus on the case, but he enjoys the back and fourth and know she enjoys it too.  They have an unspoken understanding, and, in moments like these, they really do exist in a world of their own together.  

Of course, he doesn’t at all expect what comes next.

I cannot express enough how much I love how Mulder completely deflates when he says “you got a date?”  

I also love that a date is his immediate assumption - he says it so quick it’s out of his mouth before he even thinks.  Is this something he’s been worried about coming between them at some point?  I’d say so. 

He is well aware that she is a beautiful, intelligent woman, so of course she was bound to inevitably do what beautiful, intelligent women do - go on dates - have a personal life.  He probably didn’t want to have to acknowledge, that at some point, their little bubble was going to burst.  His deflated response is probably a reaction to thinking that time is now.

So would it be fair to say that Mulder is a little bit threatened by the idea that Scully wants a life that would take her away from him and their their work together.  Yes, definitely.   But I do think he’s willing to admit that to himself? Definitely not.

Even after learning she’s not going on a date, he remains deflated.  Their sparky, fun, UST-laden tooing and froing has been snuffed out, and Mulder unceremoniously throws the keys over to her in defeat.  He knows it’s not fair of him to punish her for having a life, but he kinda does anyway, since he ditches her to investigate alone.

Poor S1!Scully is just starting to learn here, that Mulder can be an inconsiderate dick sometimes.  Or as she’ll put it later - a jerk.

It’s a flaw of his character, which I guess gives him some depth and makes him more real.  

But mostly, it just makes him a dick.  A beautiful dick, but a dick all the same. 

Wait, hang on... that didn’t come out right. 

Unfortunately for Scully, leaving her to make a 3 hour drive, alone, after he was the one to make her come all the way out here in the first place, is the least of his future transgressions.

So lets enjoy his suffering a bit more, shall we?  Just look at his face when he hears she can’t spend the weekend with him fart-arsing around Atlantic City looking for cannibal cave men.  

Dude… seriously, stop pretending - we know you don’t like it when the real world takes Dana Scully away from you. 

Now we come to a scene that, only with 9 years of hindsight, becomes equal parts devastating, bittersweet and omg-squee-shippy-tastic!

Let’s break it down.

So first, Scully with children.  She’s a natural at it - attentive, loving, affectionate.  The little hug she gives the boy at the end; I can’t even--she would have been such a great mother.

Would have been.  

That’s the kicker, isn’t it.  Poor S1!Scully is completely oblivious to the fate that awaits her.  Our foreknowledge of future events makes these scenes painfully bittersweet now.   Despite the fact she would have been wonderful at it, her one chance at motherhood slips away after only a single year with William.  She never had, and now never will have, the chance to truly be a mother and raise a child of her own.  

I’ll let that sit with you for a while.  

Edit:  Ahem, yeah so... this was written before My Struggle IV, obviously.  As insane and unexpected as it seems, Mulder and Scully do have another child together making this point pretty much moot.  But I’ll leave it in for, you know, historical record? lol! 

Feels like a ton of bricks in the pit of my stomach just writing it.  In my work I have counselled women who have had to come to terms with infertility, and what it means for them to be a childless.  It’s an incredibly harrowing thing to accept for many of them, feeling incomplete; less of a woman; their bodies betraying them; denying them something they feel is rightfully theirs - and sadly what society tells them is the greatest contribution they could ever offer to the world - a body that can create life.  It’s perhaps, with my experience of these women, that I now look at Scully in a way that I didn’t when I was a teenager; watching the X-Files the first time around.

It makes me appreciate her strength, and her selfless, unwavering, devotion to doing what she thinks is right, regardless of the cost to herself, in a whole new way.

But for S1!Scully, all this talk about motherhood amounts to is a distant thought that, one day, she’ll meet Mr. Right and will start a family of her own.  Just like most of us assume, and never question, until it doesn’t happen.

Told you this would be devastating.

All hell is breaking loose at this party with only her and her friend to herd the gorilla-masked kiddies (another oblique reference to primitive human behaviour), but she’s enjoying herself despite it all. 

Doesn’t it feel strange to see Scully with a close friend that isn’t Mulder?  To see that she once had some small semblance of a life outside of him.  It makes me really realise how much she gave up for him and for their work together.  What motivates a person to do something like that?  Just a passion for the work?

It’s also very unfamiliar to see that Scully once contemplated not becoming a mother.  That actually, she felt she wasn’t cut out for it.  Although perhaps this is merely a cover for how she really feels.  We know from season 5′s Christmas Carol, that Scully has a fear of getting close to people, and tells Emily’s adoption officer that she avoided attachments before her cancer because she was scared of the pain of losing those she loved.  We know this changes for her though, as Scully will be forced to painfully acknowledge, in that same episode, that she didn’t realise how much she wanted to be a mother until she couldn’t have it anymore.  

Which makes sense when you realise that this scene here, in Jersey Devil, was probably one of very few times Scully considers, and actually tests out, whether she wants a life outside of her FBI career, before discovering she cannot conceive.

Scully’s friend, El, hitting the nail on the head.  She would be a great mother, but she has to choose it.  She has to decide what’s more important to her - career or family.  It’s not something she’s seriously thought about until now.

Being told she doesn’t have a life definitely affects Scully too, she plays it off as a joke here, but we know her actions after this conversation betray her true feelings.  She starts to wonder if her work with Mulder is overtaking her life, and that she doesn’t have much else outside of her career.  It worries her enough into taking action to change things.

Ah and then it comes to this part of their conversation.  The part that gets our little shipper hearts pumping.

You know what’s funny about this scene now?  The fact they’re basically discussing finding a man to have a child with.  Scully easily dismisses the idea of dating and having children with Mulder, but the irony is that this is now foreshadowing... because that’s exactly what happens.

7 years from now.

That’s some epic retroactive foreshadowing, right there.

But sticking with the present moment, what might Scully’s reason be for calling Mulder a jerk?  Well what did he do to her earlier that day?  The way he flirted with the idea of them spending some off-duty hours together in Atlantic City and then got weird when she said she had plans and ditched her when she couldn’t do what he wanted.  That’s definitely a jerk move.

She quickly corrects herself, acknowledging that his behaviour earlier that day maybe doesn’t wholly represent who he is, but still, I enjoyed the fact she basically admits that his ditching her bothered her more than just being slightly inconvenienced.  Hmm, I wonder why... eh, Scully?

Now, things start to get a bit more interesting.  As I mentioned before, Scully played off the fact she has no life as a joke but she’s clearly conflicted on whether she’s okay with such a skewed work-life balance.  She’s now questioning if she needs to spend more time away from work and start to build a life for herself.  And then...as if the hands of fate reached in themselves...

A WILD DIVORCEE DAD APPEARS! 

DIVORCEE DAD USES “CREEPER SMILE”.

IT’S SUPER EFFECTIVE???!

Seriously, why does she go on a date with this guy, he looks like a total creeper.  The way he’s like, hey, check me out being all fatherly with my I’m-single-and-ready-to-mingle smile.  Ugh.  Dana!

Back to Mulder now, working off a hot tip from a homeless HBO fan, he’s been hanging out like a hobo trying to catch a glimpse of this Jersey Devil.

Uh, I take it all back.  Maybe it was for the best Scully didn’t tag along on this one.  

Scully: What happened to ‘grabbing a hotel’, Mulder? Mulder: FBI cutbacks, Scully.  Wanna share my blanket? Scully: ...  

Can you imagine?  Them sitting together, in the cold, huddled under a tiny blanket...

Hmm... wait, I’m changing my mind again.

Mulder sees a dark, human-like figure in an alleyway, but is blocked from pursing it because he is stopped and arrested by the police, due to their mistaking him for a drunk.

Mulder redefining the meaning of the phrase “hot mess”.

So I’ve seen enough American TV shows to know that when you get arrested you get one call, right?  So Mulder’s one call - the one person he can rely on to help him out is.... *drum roll*

OMG! NO WAI!  Much unexpected! Very shock!

So much sass.  Mulder getting sassed by Scully is my favourite thing.  Like, ever.

Methinks she’s enjoying getting some sweet, sweet, revenge on him for ditching her, too.  Just a lil’ bit.

I love how he just smiles at the end, as if to say “alright, Scully. You win.”

Then, while shovelling his face with food, Mulder tries to convince Scully of what he saw in the alleyway.

Their usual back and forth ensues – Mulder puts forward a fantastic (albeit pretty on the nose) theory about what he saw in the alleyway.  Scully runs the gamut of reasons why it might not be what he thinks it is, making Mulder work for his theory.  Which is good on one hand, since it’s teaching him to be critical rather than willing to believe anything at the drop of a hat. 

But on the other hand, he’s actually right.  I think this dynamic would work better if he didn’t always guess pretty much exactly right all the freakin’ time.  I think Mulder needs to get it wrong a bit more often to 1. humble him a tiny bit and 2. not make it always seem like Scully’s scepticism is just getting in the way.

As it stands, the main purpose Scully’s sceptical, scientific, approach serves is keeping her and Mulder out of danger.  Without her pulling him back from the edge a lot of the time, I think he’d have got himself killed ages ago.  Which we’ll get a live demonstration of later in this episode.

Mulder then extends the invitation once more, for Scully to join the hunt, and for them to investigate the case together.  

Then the conversation turns veeeeeery interesting.

Scully catching Mulder off guard is another one of my favourite things.  His surprised head snap gives me Cheshire Cat face.  

She’s put her personal life above their work together twice now and, again, he does a piss poor job of hiding that he doesn’t like it.  

But notice something here.  When he thinks it’s another birthday party, he isn’t threatened.  He doesn’t ask her to cancel, he’s seemingly unaffected - disappointed no doubt - but notice how quickly his attitude changes when she clarifies that, this time, it is a date.

First up... wow, Mulder.  Can she cancel?  That was bold.

He can definitely sense she’s withdrawing, and he’s beginning to feel territorial about it.  As selfish as it might be, he wants their work and partnership to take precedence in her life, but she’s resisting. 

Although, it only seems to bother him when it’s a date, apparently.  HMMMMMM.  Sooo... a kid’s birthday party is less threatening than a date.  

I WONDER WHY.

Second... Ouch, Scully.

She’s clearly showing, once again, that her friend’s comment about not having a life got under her skin.   Why do I think this?  Well I’ve never thought of Scully as petty, but that below the belt comment about Mulder’s life was kinda petty.  I think in some small part she is resentful towards Mulder for the current state of her social life - she’s allowed herself to get swept up in his hurricane these past few months and is now a tiny bit sensitive to the assumption that she should drop everything to go Jersey Devil hunting with him.  

She’s trying to take back control and get out of this all-consuming bubble they’ve been living in.

Now the next scene is fucking gold.  Here’s where everything should hopefully fall into place.

Scully takes Mulder to meet her old university professor in Maryland.  Mulder is asking the Professor questions about the Jersey Devil and he explains to Mulder that the wild man myth is universal - almost every culture has one.  It represents an apparent symbolic fear of man’s dual nature as creators and destroyers of life.

Look at Mulder... Naww.. tell me more, teach!

The Professor starts to talk about how humans have hereditary traits which make us tribal and aggressively territorial, driven by selfish sexual and reproductive drives which makes cooperation beyond our perceived ‘tribe’ extremely challenging.

Now think about that for a second – what has been going on with Mulder and Scully since the beginning of this episode. 

First Mulder has been territorial with Scully; he wants her to himself – not to share her with the demands of a personal life.  He wants her to be as dedicated to the X-Files as him, but is finding it difficult to accept that she wants to go off and exist outside the bubble of their partnership - outside their “tribe”.  

He is also, on some subconscious level, driven sexually – because why the hell else would he petulantly accuse her of having a date the way he did?  He’s not threatened by her spending time with friends, but he is threatened by her spending time with other men.  Perhaps not consciously, but somewhere deep down, it bothers him that she would go on a date.  Both a kids party and a date result in her spending less time with him, so why does a date, specifically, sting more?

I do feel like I need to reiterate here, that I don’t think Mulder is in love with Scully at this point.  But he’s very attached to her, and seemingly, he doesn’t like to share.

Then we have Scully – who has spent a great deal of time this episode discussing her thoughts on becoming a mother, and deciding if she wants to prioritise finding a man and having a family over her career.  She then accepts a date with a man based on these discussions – so here, Scully is being driven by her reproductive needs.  

She is also driven sexually too though, I mean, we know she thinks of Mulder as being “cute”.  So she has definitely acknowledged a sexual attraction to him - and well, who wouldn’t.  

But also the shy smile she flashes the creeper divorcee dad suggests she finds him attractive too - she’s not wanting to start dating for the singular purpose of getting preggo, of course not.  Like Marty and his Hankypanky mags, she has needs too.

Now, pop your head into Mulder’s kitchen for a sec guys, c’mon just a sec.

FORESHADOWING!

Well, maybe... that damn alien invasion is gonna happen some day. Right, Chris Carter?!  RIGHT?!

The scene then transitions into referring to the Jersey Devil directly rather than a meta commentary on Mulder and Scully themselves, and I love that it was Scully’s intention for her old professor to talk some sense into Mulder, but instead Mulder gets the guy to admit that what he’s suggesting, about the Jersey Devil being a pre-historic human, is feasible in the realm of extreme possibility.  

Scully, ever the scientist, can’t argue with that one.

As much as she wishes she could.

Later that evening, Mulder sits in the basement-not-basement office looking subdued, staring at evidence photos, twiddling his thumbs... bored.  He really is useless without Scully.

Beautiful, beautiful Scully, on the other hand, is on her date looking OH SO NINETIES.  But still, lovely.

And OH MY GOD.  Divorcee dad is boring as fuck.

No one wants to hear how you fantasise about running people over with your car on a first date, Rob.

Now we could get meta-meta, and suggest that I myself, writing this analysis, am getting quite territorial over the MSR relationship and am threatened by this dude, and that’s why I mock him to pieces.  But honestly, there’s just something about him that feels super disingenuous and needy... he screams “please replace my wife and be my son’s surrogate mother” to me.  

I mean, they’re not even 30 minutes into their first date and the guy is asking Scully to go on family days out with his kid to the beach.  Fuck off, mate... how about you woo me a bit first, yeah?  Let me decide if I like you before saddling me with mothering your kid.  Geez.

Then he drops a real clanger... which, well - to be fair - isn’t that big a deal to S1!Scully.  But, knowing what’s to come, this comment is just unforgivable.

What a douche.

So let’s check in on Mulder again, what’s he up to during this torture.

Look at this lost puppy, slumped in his chair, staring at the clock.  I bet he’s checked that clock every five minutes since 7:30.

Mulder... it’s only been 25 minutes.  Get it together, man.

You can’t tell me he isn’t feeling shitty, thinking about her being out on a date.  Why else would he be moping in his office, and staring at the clock on the wall?  GETTING EXACTLY ZERO WORK DONE.  I’m getting Chinga vibes, here.

I don’t think he even really understands why, but he hates this.  He wants her there - he’s used to her presence now and he’s bizarrely at a loss without her there to focus him.

He then gets a call from the Park Ranger who tells him a body, that is possibly the pre-historic human they’ve been looking for, has turned up in the woods, and that it has been sent to the coroner’s office.

This gives Mulder the excuse he didn’t know he was waiting for to call Scully and try, once again, to pull her back into the bubble.

Look at how bored shitless she is.  She’s waiting for you to rescue her.  GO MULDER GO!

#SorryNotSorry

The next day Mulder and Scully go back to Atlantic City to inspect the body, but it’s not there to inspect.  Mulder theorises that the male neanderthal might have had a female mate, and they go back to the location where Mulder spotted her previously to see if they can find her again.

As they search, Mulder muses about what this neanderthal woman might be like.  He questions whether she’s that different from Scully and himself.  

Which is exactly the point of this episode - the fact that the two of them are also driven by ancient hereditary instincts.  The same way the neanderthal woman and her mate were.  Mulder and Scully’s personal life subplot reflect how the modern world has changed how we act on these instincts; but that ultimately we all want the same things.   Mulder wonders out-loud whether she feels emotion, or does she just live on instinct - spending her days looking for food.  To which, Scully replies...

I don’t know why, but I love that Scully knows how to make Mulder laugh.

Then just when we were starting to enjoy their being together, working as one again, Mulder goes and rushes off without Scully.

She calls to him several times, and he ignores her and then parkours his way to freedom.

Mulder and Scully: SYNCHRONISED PARKOUR MASTERS!  Although Scully does it in heels, so she wins.

Mulder is cornered by the neanderthal woman, which he should have seen coming, really, these guys do hunt and eat people, right?

She knocks him down and looms over him.  He basically looks like a 16 year-old boy who has never touched a girl before.  It’s kind of adorable seeing him pinned to the floor by a naked woman with a look of terror on his face.

Be gentle with me, please.

Never mind.

Scully arrives, just in time, to save Mulder.  Get used to that, Scully.

They then head out into the forest, to find neanderthal lady before Detective ThisTownAin’tBigEnoughForBothOfUs hunts her down with his SWAT team and kills her.

Sadly, that’s exactly what happens.  They gun her down before Mulder and Scully are able to intervene.

Mulder is devastated.  In no small part due to the fact that she’s a woman, alone, vulnerable - hunted.  She ticks all the boxes to mess with Mulder’s head and trigger his need to rescue.

Mulder seems quite emotional as he asks the detective why he killed her.  The answer he gets doesn’t give him any relief, in fact, I think it only leads him to despair more.  Searching the detectives eyes, not quite believing what he’s hearing.

Scully can see Mulder is on the edge; becoming too emotionally involved.  So she does what only she can.  

She steps in and speaks to him in their private language - where with just a look and a touch, she can bring him back to himself.  

I love this aspect of their bond.  It’s so subtle, but loaded with a quiet intimacy that’s always just below the surface.  These two work best when they are in this bubble together - just the two of them.  Every now and then, with just a small gesture, they forget everyone else and withdraw into their own private world.  

A week later, back in the FBI not-really-basement, Scully, is telling Mulder about the autopsy results of the neanderthal woman, and gets frustrated as Mulder excitedly prepares to meet a colleague at the Smithsonian - throwing himself further into his work.

Clearly still feeling conflicted about how to balance her work life against her personal life, she tries to convince Mulder that, he too, needs to do some work in that area.  But what she’s not understanding is that this is what Mulder does for himself - his work.  When he said before that he has a life, this is what he meant.  To him, this is living - it’s the life he chose and he’s not ashamed or embarrassed about it.

Mulder is a career non-conformist.  He doesn’t work by the rules and he doesn’t live his life by the rules either.

It’s at this point Scully gets a call from creeper divorcee dad, offering her a night out at a Cirque du Soleil show.  

Her complete and utter lack of interest in taking him up on his offer finally makes it click for her why Mulder would reject her offer of a day off, or to go get a beer.

Mulder has absolutely no interest in doing those things.  They hold no value for him, and no enjoyment, in exactly the same way that she realises she has absolutely no interest in dating this guy, or going to see Cirque du Soleil with him and his freakin’ kid.  Geez, man... stop it with the family days out.  Someone buy this man a copy of Dating for Dummies.

This epiphany affects Scully deeply, as I think she realises in that moment that working with Mulder and being an FBI agent is the life that brings her the most fulfilment and excitement too.  She never did want to date in the first place, it was a comment from her friend that made her question whether or not the way she lived her life was “okay”. 

Now it seems she’s decided it is.  She doesn’t care about conforming to what is expected of her anymore.

Reminds me of something Gibson Praise says about Scully in season 5′s The End.  

I think she reaffirmed for herself, this attitude of not caring what people think, in this very episode.  To be who she is, do what she wants and not give a flying monkey what anyone says.

So rolling it back a bit - when Scully gets the call from her divorcee date, Mulder answers the phone, and I’d say he is definitely aware of who it is by the way he walks out of the office without waiting for Scully.

He assumes she will not be coming with him because, well, she has a life now, right?  She has more going on than just work and he has every reason to believe she would rather be doing other things with her time, especially after that speech she just gave begging him to take some time off.  He thinks he’s got the message loud and clear - that she doesn’t feel the same way about their work as he does, and that this is how things are gonna be from now on.

It’s also a bit petulant of him, isn’t it?  The way he storms off after giving her the phone perfectly illustrates that.  Not to mention his dejected walk over to the requisition desk after he leaves the office.  The way he sounds so defeated as he asks for a car.

So despite trying to be “okay” with it, Mulder is still feeling threatened by this guy encroaching on their partnership – I’m sure of it.  The reason I feel so sure is that when Scully approaches him at the requisition desk, he straight away asks who it was on the phone.  

Why is he interested? If he isn’t bothered then why ask?  Mulder hasn’t shown any interest in her private life before.  For the most part, these two never discuss their personal lives.  At least, not at this stage.

Is the tension in this conversation not entirely palpable?  He really doesn’t like it, does he.  I still don’t think he has even realised why he doesn’t like it.  The guy is an Oxford educated psychologist and profiler – if he looked at himself for 5 seconds he’d know why – which is probably why he doesn’t. 

We don’t see this side to Mulder often, as the series progresses we tend to see this kind of thing more from Scully.  To be fair, it’s usually because women fawning over Mulder just seem to keep popping up all over the place.

But I love seeing this.  More jealous!Mulder, please.  I’m dying to see season 11 for the Mulder vs. Skinner fight that is apparently over Scully.  Not to mention it supposedly involving Skinner’s long harboured feelings for her.  Fuck yes, please.  Can we get some jealous!Mulder up in that, Mr. Carter?   

“You gonna have dinner with him again?”

WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MULDER? HUH?

You notice how he perks up slightly after hearing she’s not going to see the guy again?  You really need to hear the audio to notice it - but his voice changes. 

Ohhh burn.  Guess he didn’t like being told he doesn’t have a life, either, eh?

Every now and then Mulder lets slip the odd bitter comment, it’s something he’s doing right up until My Struggle I – revealing his true feelings through backhanded, sarcastic comments rather than outright saying what he feels.

You tell him, Scully.

Phew and that’s Jersey Devil done.  Another freakin’ long one!  I’m almost certain the next episode will be far shorter... much less MSR to work with.  This episode was chock full of it. Next up... 1x06  - Shadows.

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 11 September 2017

Just one favourite this week: Ninjak #0 by Matt Kindt and Francis Portela (with MJ Kim, Khari Evans, Roberto de la Torre, Sija Hong, and Juan José Ryp). Published by Valiant.

Ninjak #0 provides a capstone to Matt Kindt’s run with the character, giving both an encapsulation of Ninjak’s history to date and one final mission to propel the series further into a more in-depth exploration into the Ninja Programme and legacy, before handing the character off to Christos Gage and Tomás Giorello for their new Ninja-K series.

I very much like how Kindt plays with time in this story. After firing an arrow on the first page in the present, the book’s pages are bisected by that arrow’s path, with the top telling of the events immediately leading up to that first page--illustrated by Francis Portela--and the bottom offering snippet’s of Ninjak’s history--illustrated by MJ Kim, Khari Evans, Roberto de la Torre, Sija Hong, and Juan José Ryp. (You can see an example above). It’s an interesting and effective way of delivering a lot of simultaneous information and narrative at once and I was particularly impressed by everyone involved.

As time on the top converges with the arrow, the structure reverts to a standard one timeframe narrative as it leads into a teaser for the new Ninja-K series from Gage and Giorello.

Like with the previous recent zero issue offerings for Bloodshot Reborn and Divinity, this serves as an excellent primer for people interested in the character and in jumping into the Valiant Universe.

Quick Bits:

All New Wolverine #24 wraps up the “Hive” arc guest-starring the Guardians of the Galaxy and Leonard Kirk’s tenure as artist on the series. This arc was fun, with Tom Taylor delivering some very nice and heartfelt interactions between Laura and Gabby, as well as continuing to present some strong characterization with Rocket and Groot.

| Published by Marvel

Amazing Spider-Man #32 is a single issue story of Norman Osborn trying to reclaim his Green Goblin persona. It’s an interesting look into Osborn’s drive and potential, with some absolutely beautiful artwork form Greg Smallwood & Jordie Bellaire.

| Published by Marvel

Birthright #26 provides a jumping on point as it begins a new story-arc. It’s fairly exposition heavy, but Joshua Williamson still makes it feel interesting, even to old readers since there’s a bit of a shift since the last issue. As always Andrei Bressan’s art is beautiful.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Deadpool #36 is a transitional issue from Deadpool working for “Stevil” Hydra Cap and the forthcoming Despicable Deadpool, closing out some old plot threads and sending off the remaining supporting characters, while setting up Wade’s new status quo of reluctantly working for Stryfe. As usual Gerry Duggan mixes in humour while ultimately making Deadpool a tragic figure. 

| Published by Marvel 

Doctor Strange & The Sorcerers Supreme #12 is a fitting send-off to a series that still feels gone to soon. From Javier Rodriguez to this issue’s Nathan Stockman, the series has been great artistically, and this issue’s sideways widescreen format is well appreciated. Robbie Thompson also brings it back full circle to how this excursion started in last year’s Doctor Strange Annual by closing on the “Not So” Ancient One’s journey.

| Published by Marvel

Grass Kings #7 is still an inscrutable beauty. Part crime drama, part mystery, part family drama, part treatise on loyalty and community in an extremely independent society, Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins have something special here. This issue adds another layer to the problems that they’ve been having with Cargill, while more explicitly breaking open the mystery of a potential serial killer and giving us some more details on what happened in Bruce’s past that led him to coming home to the Grass Kingdom.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Gwenpool, The Unbelievable #20 is going to mess with your head. In a good way.

| Published by Marvel

Hulk #10 brings Mariko Tamaki’s second story-arc to a conclusion. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I did the first, but there have still been some entertaining moments. The character interaction between Jen and Patsy being particularly strong. 

Also, like the previous issue, the art shift part way through detracts. Both artists, Julian Lopez and Francesco Gaston, are good, but their styles kind of clash. Lopez uses a thick line and somewhat realistic style similar to Jesus Saiz, whereas Gaston has a thinner line and a bit more angular, stylized character composition--much like Georges Duarte, who started this arc. 

| Published by Marvel

Kill or Be Killed #12 pushes Dylan further into darkness, even without his little demon friends whispering not-so-sweet nothings into his ears. As always, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are creating a compelling, nuanced story month in and month out. There’s also some good development in Dylan and Kira’s relationship, but, as per the original dissolution, I’m expecting the other shoe to drop sometime soon. 

| Published by Image

Mech Cadet Yu #2 brings Yu and his adopted Robo back to the Sky Academy, where he’s officially accepted as one of the cadets. The story beats are pretty standard coming of age, living through adversity by being a fish out of water, ruffling the feathers of the establishment-type thing, but Greg Pak never allows it to feel old. Yu and his Robo are just too likeable characters to not enjoy seeing their advancement and acceptance. It also helps that Takeshi Miyazawa’s artwork is wonderful. 

Despite not being published under one of their more all-ages imprints like Boom! Box or kaboom!, this series remains something that I think that kids would get a lot of enjoyment out of as well.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Old Man Logan #28 is a work of art. I don’t know who made a pact with the devil in order to consistently get this level of artwork out of Mike Deodato Jr., but whatever they did since at least the Jeff Lemire Thanos series, Deodato has been producing some of the most beautiful, thoughtful, and compelling work of his career. He’s been a great artist for more than twenty-five years in the industry, but his work lately has been absolutely next level. His shading, page layouts, character designs & staging, and panel transitions are practically a masterclass on the art form.

| Published by Marvel

Pestilence #4 unveils some secrets as we head towards the conclusion. This has been a fairly bloody and brutal tale of knights vs. zombies from Frank Tieri and Oleg Okenev and it’s not letting up. It delivers a nice satisfying crunch.

| Published by Aftershock

Redlands #2 jumps the series ahead to modern day, fleshing out the sisters’ characters and the world that they live in, having pretty much taken over Redlands, Florida following the bloodbath back in ‘77. We’re still left a lot of details out, but we’re given a better look at some of the things going on, as a game of murderous cat and mouse between the sisters and an unknown potential blackmailer unfolds. Jordie Bellaire and Vanessa Del Rey are creating something interesting here and I’m definitely hooked to see what happens next.

| Published by Image

Retcon #1 is...something, I’m not really sure what. Interesting, though, certainly, and something I’ll continue to read for a bit. Ostensibly this is about a team of supernatural beings working for the government, but the interview in the back and the title suggest something else. If anything, the artwork from Toby Cypress is worth the price of admission alone. Still not sure what to think of the story.

| Published by Image

Sacred Creatures #3 again challenges me to decide whether or not I like Pablo Raimondi’s mix of traditional comics art with photography. I’m leaning towards yes.

| Published by Image

Secret Warriors #6 kicks off a two-part arc with the members of the Warriors back on their own. The bulk of the issue is devoted to Daisy tracking down who murdered Coulson and it leads to some humorous exchanges. Who would have known that life model decoys are anatomically correct?

| Published by Marvel

Spy Seal #2 feels even more like a European funny animal book than the first issue. To me it feels like Rich Tommaso is doing a take on something like Tin Tin, but with an anthropomorphic seal, and it’s just wonderful.

| Published by Image

Transformers: Lost Light #9 gives a kind of closure, or at least a transition, to the Natuica/Velocity/Skids character and story arcs. It’s kind of bittersweet when you consider the implications and I expect that James Roberts will undoubtedly revisit this somewhere in the future. Also, the reveal of who the “Grand Architect” is at the end of this issue is pretty epic.

| Published by IDW

Uncanny Avengers #27 is a pretty straight-forward conclusion to the team’s confrontation with Graviton. It’s mostly action, but there are some character moments cementing that this team can still work together fairly effectively. The artwork from Sean Izaakse again is very nice.

| Published by Marvel

Other Highlights: Babyteeth #4, Black Science #31, Clue #4, Curse Words #8, The Damned: Ill-Gotten #4, Defenders #5, Dread Gods #2, First Strike #3, Genius: Cartel #2, Ghost Station Zero #2, Harrow County #25, Hellboy & BPRD - 1955: Occult Intelligence #1, InSEXts #13, Jane, Lumberjanes #42, Mage: The Hero Denied #2, The Realm #1, Riverdale #6, Rocket #5, Rose #6, Runaways #1, The Shadow #2, Shadows on the Grave #8, Slam!: Next Jam #1, The Sovereigns #5, The Spirit: The Corpse Makers #4, Star Wars #36, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #12, TMNT Universe #14, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #24, Venomverse #2, War for the Planet of the Apes #3, Weapon X #8, Winnebago Graveyard #4, X-Men Blue #11

Recommended Collections: Britannia - Vol. 2: We Who Are About to Die, Elektra: Always Bet on Red, Kingpin: Born Against, Saucer Country, TMNT - Vol. 17: Desperate Measures

d. emerson eddy believes that uptown funk is going to give it to you. Don’t believe him? Just watch.

[christophercori]

Possible Blog/Journal Entry Nov 18, 2015

Ok. So, the following “entry” was written while In Brooklyn House Detention Center, overlooking the Carroll Gardens/ Crown Heights (right neighborhood?) shortly after being remanded back into custody after being out on ball for not even 30 days, following nearly 8 months on Rikers Island, which was excruciating enough in and of itself. Needless to say, my unexpected reintroduction into yet another lion’s den, after such a brief taste of freedom, was nothing short of a bad hit”, leaving the proceeding mood to be plenty somber. And so commences the woeful narrative of a young man in reflection.

House Lights:  Dim Music:  Cur ominous/dramatic, foreshadowing Jazz Note:  Written as if in Retrospection from some point in the future. So, let’s get this out of the way. between 21 and 25 I was in and out of jail. Yes, me the handsome suburban “white” boy. I had two major stints each lasting about a year (second on more like 3) with maybe a year and some change of freedom in between. You better believe there is nothing more soul-crushing than getting your life back together after a year in the “can”, just to have it taken from you all over again. Sure, I’m responsible for ending up there in first place, I made some poor, impulsive decisions I mean, sue me. Who makes many good decisions in their early twenties anyway? I just happen to have been in that small majority (oxymoron?) of poor suckers who get caught, mainly because I got to be one of those assholes so full of myself, I never thought it would happen to me. Some things I wish I could take back, but other aspects of it I am grateful for and would consider an instrumental part of my personal evolution. Why was I in jail you ask? Well the finer details will have to be suspend until a much lengthier piece comes into being, but the long short of it is the result of my menacing and hostile behavior resulting from emotional instability and substance abuse. Had I been healthier and more stable at the times of my arrest, probably none of it would have ever happened, but we can't turn back time and I've long since come to terms with paying the price of allowing myself to get spread so thin and become so unhealthy to the point where I’ve lashed out at those around me. While I’m far from playing the victim in any context, it's still ridiculous that I even did time for the petty bullshit I got myself wrapped up in, but in the end, I take responsibility for my actions and after all the insanity, I think I can say with confidence that I'm a better man for it.  Even more grateful am I than for the lessons I learned along the way, are the amazing people I was blessed enough to cross paths with, who also, totally did not deserve to be there, just as they felt about me. Some people just have “dumb luck” enough, I guess, to get their hand caught in the cookie jar, doing something the law makers” generally from upon. Rut just because you may have allegedly done questionable in the eyes of society, one cannot fairly or appropriately labeled a bad person”, something which needs serious clarification here. Just because you've been to jail or even have a felony as a result, doesn't mean society reserves the right to judge or even stigmatize you (even though they do, the fuckers). A majority of civilians, not much unlike yourself, have no idea how the criminal justice system really works (how could you without having experienced it first hand?) and to what degree it victimizes and deliberately, calculatingly dismantles the lives of some very good, if at most misguided, “impulse control lacking” individuals, who have had the misfortune of, more or less, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A majority of people who even end up arrested are victimized by some king of discrimination (a huge issue to be revisited another time), a mental breakdown we’ve all bad those moments), or guilt by association (some people truly are innocent and get caught in the crossfire of hanging with the wrong crowd). Now, once they have their slimy claws in you, they'll bleed you dry, break you down and do everything they can to kill your spirit, backing you into a corner where you're ready to hang it un or plead guilty just to get the hell out of jail (or onto state prison, which gets the clock ticking), which la not the most pleasant place to be to say the least. It's certainly not terrible (surprising, hub?), this is isn't Hollywood people, but it's no Holiday Inn either, as they say. So, after a couple of months of fighting the power, no matter how proud, strong, or rebellious you are, just about everyone sets themselves up to be haunted by this enslavement, in some way, for the rest of their lives. End of Entry #1 (to be expanded upon?)

Entry #2: Postured for a new day/first post launch of a new blog/publication whatever the kids are calling it these days. Hey Everybody and welcome to the disorienting documentation of my mind-boggling life (As if you care [laughs]). First, let me start by saying that I think this journey I am (we are) about to embark on is absolutely friggin’ ridiculous, but for some reason it appears to be one of the necessary evils of modern life for anyone who wants to be noticed for anything. Gone are the days of the next big thing showing up on a street corner, strumming a six string for space change. No those days are long gone and have been replaced by compulsive teenyboppers (is that even a category anymore?) and obsessive narcissists compulsively posting self-indulgent excrement out on every social media outlet available. Regardless of how socially retarded people have become as a result, for some freakish reason, it works People are gaining notoriety from this dysfunction, fame ever (or some bizarre degree of it) And even though human beings are gradually losing their ability to function naturally and normally in everyday life, thanks to their addiction to living though palm sized screens, this is how anything worth knowing about, gets circulated. Or at least that’s what the marketing professionals would like us to believe. While dinosaurs like me might go to the library, pick up a newspaper, drop by a community center, or peruse a bulletin board at a local coffee shop, the greater percentage of “society” is thumb-tapping their way through the search bar of their preferred information engine. I guess at the end of the day there’s nothing wrong with it except of course, the inability to say hello to a passing stranger, or get through a meal without checking for alerts, which is so incredibly rude, by the way. I suppose it's just about time that I catch up with the rest of the wonderfully dystopian populace. Like the old saying goes: “if you can’t fight��em, join'em”. So here I am world. From here on in you’re going to get to completely invade my privacy whether you like it or not. Because whether you care to cyberstalk me or otherwise, the people I'm looking for might just take notice and maybe, just maybe, it will bring me closer to my goals. So get ready world, as I post, tweet click, and ping my way through the twenty first century, while I attempt not to throw up all over myself and everything I value about my individuality. Here's to kissing that all Goodbye. Here's to my rebirth as a regular ratchet ho. End of Entry #2 Note: Disorienting originally was “Digital” after typing it up I see it probably should have been changed. Note: this could also be used as part of a fictional storyline/script as I'm not sure I could lower myself to actually publishing this.

Entry #3: Reminiscence Rant Can you remember when everything was just fucking awesome? I can. What, in God's most holy name, happened to those mind-bogglingly epic adventures? The endless nights and following morning where we wandered for miles peaking on LSD, experiencing the supernatural, making friends with homeless cartoon characters and stubborn runaway suburban kids calling themselves “gutterpunks” and “Occupiers”. What happened to the times when, all of a sudden, I'm on a subway wearing a stolen skintight glitter shirt, doing backflips next to a girl rocking a panda-bear cap with these stupid little gloves hanging like arms from either end of the accessory, while on the way to some disgusting, mold infested, totally illegal, basement rave with the illest DJs on the planet spinning the most face meltingly ass-shaking, torso-wiggling, abso-fucking-lutely, subatomically intoxicating dubstep that these ear pieces have ever had the pleasure of being blown away by. Bassdropping capsules of MDMA while being passed an endless chain of blunts until after what feels like no time at all, someone is shaking me awake, and just when I’m about to question if any of this is real, a fat glow in the dark Eskimo shapeshifter, ever so gently guides me to the exit which opens to reveal the painful slap In the face of bright, 8 in the morning daylight, only to look at mv fellow nightlife cohorts who are smiling, still wired, totally ready to continue the adventure; the words “what do we do now?” never once crossing the mind, as the flow that we're grooving with is unquestionably sure of itself. Man, how I miss those sacred moments. Will I ever get them back? Or is my yearning for them and desire to pursue or force moments like those into being. Exactly what is keeping them out of my life? Better yet, maybe those kinds of ridiculous things are only allowed to happen at certain points of one’s youth when even attempting to live so irresponsibly is even an iota within the realm of acceptable and to pursue such experiences is categorically “juvenile”? Well, fuck that!! I have faith, yet. One day, I'm gonna breath in the taste of that on-top-of-the-world air, no matter how old I get. I don’t care what anybody says. There’s no cut off age for soulshaking borderline religious experiences, never-going-to-feel-the-same-way-about-having fun. Sure, we all do have to accept reality and the responsibilities of adulthood, but that’s no reason to get bitter. Just because it’s not happening for us right now, and there seems like there are still people out there, yet to step off the “magical schoolbus.” But, how do we get back on? Does all of this fall into that realm of philosophical conversations we have at three O'clock in the morning, stoned, contemplating the meaning of life and the pursuit of happiness? It might just be. Maybe all of this just falls into the very personal narrative of my never ending quest to he truly happy, a point which I'm presently a ways from.

Having been there before, I know I'll be there again and while I'm not terribly depressed at the moment, it doesn't seem all that far away. In fact, I have a more or less framework plan for how I'm going to get there when I move on from where I’m at now, but the first step is getting out of this place. Part of me is just totally stunned at life’s great contrast. How can you go from being a happy go lucky, free spirits urban street showman, to living in a cesspool of society’s unwanted pregnancies, in what feels like a blink of an eye? Boy does time fly. What feels like yesterday, simultaneously feels like eons ago. A lifetime ago. Earlier today, some mad at the world hoodrat wannabee gangster told me I sounded like an old man, reminiscing over decades of life.

To which I responded: I’ve lived. That I sure have. I’m 23 years old and I've lived a lot of life, the details for which I’ve got little to show for other than my own words and the culmination of institution records labeling me as Bipolar, criminal, drug abuser. That's right. On paper, I’m a dual diagnosis, polysubstance abusing, mentally-ill criminal, presently laid up in jail, the lone “white-boy” in a sea of “brown” skin, for some strange reason perceived to be rich, Jewish or both, nicknamed after any celebrity I can possibly bear resemblance to, for allegedly roughing up my wife during a record breaking psychotic melt-down. In a world where the credentials hold more water than the person they represent, I'm a mentally-ill, drug addict, criminal who has a problem with women – who doesn't? Do you know how this looks? Seriously this is what I've been reduced to. These are the highlights of my "career”. In the eyes of society, I'm some kind of monster, a scumbag. I've somehow gotten myself lumped into the category which the mainstream media would call “marginalized”. Me, the kid in highschool with the long curly hair, who wore patchwork tie-dye jeans and Victorian blouses, looking like a white Jimmy Hendrix, or someone straight out of Prince music video, who just wanted to share the Love, pass the buds, and give everyone a hug. The kid who was dubbed “most likely to be famous” in his graduating class yearbook, who everyone knew just wanted to save the world, one smile at a time. And I still do, but my updated methodology is a bit more practical these days. Now, I have a stigma to live with, all of which completely overshadows and nullifies that at the age of 22 I incorporated and developed a thriving start-up, destined for success which was abruptly cut short by my untimely run in with the Law – a result of my unfortunate emotional instability which emerged from the fallout of a tumultuous and ultimately failed relationship with my now ex-wife, who I became married to and divorced from, all while behind bars. But that is another story for another time. We are, after all, just beginning to scratch the surface of this crazy rollercoaster which is my life. At this stage I don’t see the point of sugar coating any of It. No matter how bad any of it looks. I'm proud of who I am, the positive things I’ve accomplished (however overshadowed). I’m destined to achieve even greater success than that which I feel I have already tasted and I will never be ashamed of the nasty details. I love who I am and no matter how much this backwards system tries to victimize and marginalize me, I'm never going to let them snuff out this light. The End (For now)

[moriganstrongheart]

World of Warcraft Chronicle: Volume 1 – Review

by Blizzard Entertainment 2016, Dark Horse Books Hardcover, 184 pages, $39.99 USD

Rating: ★★★★☆

Good: Good presentation, well written Bad: Inaccurate maps, outdated or missing lore

​I was rather ambivalent when the first World of Warcraft Chronicle volume was release two years ago. I had wanted for so long for Blizzard to codify their Warcraft lore in a way that brought order and sense to the sprawling story they’d built over twenty five years. However, it was released as I was leaving the game and I didn’t have the spending money to purchase it. Now that I’m playing again and I have some spending money, I decided to buy all three volumes currently available. As of writing this review, I have not read the second or third volume; I wanted my opinion to be restricted to this volume for the time being. The first volume in the Chronicle does a good job at what it sets out to do: it tells the lore of Warcraft in a storybook-esque format, allowing fans of the universe to experience Warcraft lore from beginning to end as a narrative. However, there are few issues with it that I can’t ignore. Most of these issues I can attribute to a lack of quality control as they could have been easily resolved with rigourous revisions, or at least with some more solid decision making from the creative team in charge of Warcraft lore.

The most obvious failings in the volume are its maps. I can forgive that they have already become outdated as of me writing this review. Blizzard will inevitable release new locations in upcoming expansions that will change the layout of the world map. What I can’t excuse is how confusing some are and how some maps are missing from key moments in the lore. If the purpose of these maps is to give a visual representation of the world, then it misses some steps. Most readers will be familiar with the current World of Warcraft world map (pictured below). The pangea-esque pre-Sundering Kalimdor included in the books is just too different from the modern map for it to be recognizable as a map of Azeroth (also pictured below). I would have preferred that each iteration of the map pre-Sundering had lines drawn to mirror the modern Azerothian world map to allow the reader a point of reference. Legends would have also helped to properly identify elements on the map, instead of relying on labels and color-coded territories. I would have also liked to see more maps; Warcraft lore relies a lot on visualizing peoples and armies travelling the world. And considering that Azeroth itself has been touted as a character in the story of Warcraft, I think more maps would have helped to drive home how important the world is to the lore.

Map of Ordered Azeroth, pre-Sundering

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth world map

As I’m currently world-building my own world, I know how difficult it can be. When world-building, you are trying to explain a fictional world as if it were real, using academic terminology to describe something that is meant to be enjoyed fantastically. World of Warcraft Chronicle: Volume 1 unfortunately falls into the trap I’ve fallen for repeatedly in which they use the literary trope “no one really knows” when describing ambiguous moments in history. Sometimes it’s not as obvious, such as when an important turning point in lore is treated as inevitable and not worth explaining. My gut reaction when I encounter this trope is to respond: “Well, you should know. You’re the writers.” I consider this kind of writing lazy, a way to avoid explaining what could be construed as boring or controversial. In my opinion, these kinds of shortcuts should be avoided. Figure out a way to explain it, or don’t include the information at all. The fact that the writers resorted to this literary trope adds to my confusion as to what the Chronicle is supposed to be–the lack of detail in its maps being another factor. The volume is structured like a history textbook, with events told in chronological order and even has annotations in certain sections. However, the majority of the volume is also written like a storybook; each section is its own distinct narrative told as if it were a mythological legend. The alternating tone can be jarring at times, especially when it occurs within the confines of a single narrative. One moment the author is giving detailed descriptions of the actors in the narrative and provides insights that the persons living the events could not know, followed by a “no one really knows why” passage as if the story is being told from an actor’s perspective in the world. And so I can only assume that either the writers were aware of this flipping tone and were okay with it, or their quality control is lacking. Either way, I can’t excuse the misstep on Blizzard’s part.

It’s a shame, because I did enjoy how the volume is written. I don’t know how much involvement Chris Metzen actually had in the writing of this particular volume, though I know he wrote many of the original stories that would eventually be adapted here and his style of writing shines through in certain stories. I read the whole volume in one sitting, feeling rushes of memory as I remembered events from the books, short stories, comics and in-game events that the Chronicle makes reference to. It’s obvious that the volume is a labour of love as it shines with descriptions of people and places that have never existed, but somehow make it feel real. The size of the book is also nice, making it feel like a textbook rather than a work of fiction. The art is amazing as always, though I wish they would have used exclusively original art as I recognized some of it from short stories from previous products. I have debated with myself whether the World of Warcraft Chronicle could have easily been available online, similar to the existing WoWpedia and WoWWiki fansites. In the end, I don’t think that the intent of the Chronicle is to make a lore database or a textbook, but to provide fans with a hardcopy of the story they’ve grown to love over twenty five years; something to share with others, to read to their kids, or to revisit their time fighting alongside Thrall or saving the world with Varian by their side.

So far, the World of Warcraft Chronicle is worth adding to your collection if you have an interest in either Warcraft lore or world-building. It allows fans of the series to experience the narrative of Warcraft in a sensible, chronological order. Long-time fans invested in the story will also be able to reminisce about their time in Azeroth or their first time reading Warcraft lore in secondary media. For world-builders, Chronicle is a learning opportunity on how to build a vibrant, breathing world with history and interesting characters; there are some hiccups along the way, but none so damaging that we can’t learn from Blizzard’s twenty-five years of experience. I’m excited to read the following two volumes in the Chronicle, and would even be interested in revised versions as new lore is added to the World of Warcraft.

Personal Rant

The following includes my own personal observations based on my experience with Warcraft lore. These observations don’t impact the quality of World of Warcraft Chronicle: Volume 1, but as I have a long history with World of Warcraft, I want to spend some time discussing them. If interested in purchasing the Chronicle, reading this section is not necessary. Also, there are some mild spoilers for the Chronicle and for events not mentioned in the Chronicle.

I was happy to read the forewords from Chris Metzen and Christie Golden. Metzen is the closest thing I have to a hero within the game development industry, and his words to the reader is made all the more potent following his retirement later the same year. I can almost hear his deep, gravelly “I voice every other male character in Warcraft” voice as I remember how invested and influential Metzen has been to Warcraft. As for Golden’s foreword, I’m always happy to hear from her as she is my favorite Warcraft author, penning such stories as Rise of the Horde and Jaina: Tides of War, and has even been helping the World of Warcraft writing team with Battle for Azeroth. She reminds us that we are as much a part of the world as its characters. Also included in the foreword is Knaak. I have never been a fan of Knaak’s contributions to the universe–I consider Stormrage the worst World of Warcraft novel, Rhonin is my most disliked character (I was happy to see him removed in Jaina: Tides of War), the dragon aspects lore (which he helped to construct) is the most boring element in Warcraft lore and he always came off as a self-absorbed writer who constantly had to show how good he was. His foreword only reinforces his vanity as he boasts his writing credits from other book series I have no interest in, and he barely shows any interest in Warcraft itself. I can only hope we don’t see another writing credit from him in the near future. I was also happy to see that his time-travelling additions to the War of the Ancients weren’t so much as hinted throughout the Chronicle.

I ended up accepting most of the changes Blizzard inevitably had to make for the Chronicle. After twenty-five years of world-building and narrative, retcons and re-imaginings are bound to happen. I was never really interested in Titan lore, seeing them more as scientists than gods. The Chronicle still does not identify them as gods, though they have heavily reinforced the inspiration the Titans take from Norse mythology with new lore added in the recent Legion expansion. Because of my disinterest in the Titans, I am equally apathetic about the reveal that Azeroth itself is an undeveloped Titan. However, I am interested to see what will happen if the world-soul awakens or gets destroyed, as I imagine it would spell the end of the world either way. A diagram showing how each elemental, magical force and concept interacts is a nice addition, and it’s nice to see certain concepts like necromancy and the Void given concrete definitions. Legion seemed to give the Void a larger role, but it wasn’t until this volume that everything is given a tangible place within the universe. I’m not a fan of Blizzard shifting the big baddy to the Void now that Sargeras is gone, but I can understand the need. It makes sense given the changes they’ve made to Titan lore within the Chronicle, though I almost think it would have been better if they had never explained the Old Gods, the Void, the Light and so on. Mystery can improve the experience more than a detailed explanation. One thing I wish they would explain is Elune; apart from some conversations between Tyrande and Velen, there has been no concrete explanation as to what Elune is. Is she a titan? A naaru? A wild god? A “light lord”? To use a familiar expression, no one seems to know.

Finally, I wish they had spent more time on the titan-forged and the curse of flesh, as this was always one of the most interesting parts of the Old God-Titan lore. However, they spend more time on the contrived Loken narrative, which I felt was put together to force events to go down a specific path. In fact, a lot of the lore midway through World of Warcraft Chronicle: Volume 1 feels forced, as entities act out of character in an apparent effort to move the plot forward. Thankfully, the latter portion of the ​Chronicle makes up for it by detailing early to mid Eastern Kingdoms history, which I have more interest in.

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*** Scott & JT’s Vintage Vault Refresh reviews are a chronological look back at WWE PPV and TV history that began with a review of WrestleMania I. The PICs have revisited these events and refreshed all of their fun facts that provide insight into the match, competitors and state of the company as well as their overviews of the match action and opinions and thoughts on the outcomes. In addition, Jeff Jarvis assists in compiling historical information and the Fun Facts in each of the reviews. Also, be sure to leave feedback on the reviews at our Facebook page. Enjoy! ***

Monday Night Raw #117

June 26, 1995 Danville High School Danville, PA Announcers: Vince McMahon & Shawn Michaels

1) Smoking Gunns defeat Jason Ahrndt & Black Phantom when Billy pins Ahrndt with the Sidewinder at  2:15

Scott: So, after… well whatever the hell happened last night in Philly we open with the Smoking Gunns. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what pile of crap I watched last night. Of all the talent in that tournament, MABEL WON? Seriously? Then Mo mush-mouthed his way through reading the scroll as Shawn Michaels just alluded to on commentary. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that. At least Bret Hart won and we don’t have to deal with all this foot nonsense. The Gunns win in a pretty quick squash here, but as we continue I will delve more into last night. Grade: DUD

JT: Hey! We are finally back live here on Monday Night Raw and we are less than 24 hours removed from a very bizarre night in Philadelphia as the third annual King of the Ring is in the books. Vince McMahon and his old commentary buddy Shawn Michaels have the call for us here tonight. Michaels flamed out quickly last night, wrestling Kama to a draw and bowing out in the first round of the tournament. I would ask why they even bothered having him in it just to go that route, but whatever at this point. Vince notes that Michaels is here because the King is still cleaning out his mouth after the foot fiasco following his loss to Bret Hart last night. The Smoking Gunns head out to the ring for our opening bout as they look to rebuild their credibility and relevance a bit in the tag division. Vince and Shawn talk about Mabel shocking the world and winning the KOTR crown while Michaels quips about not realizing Mo could read. The Gunns make really swift work of these bums and pick up the win. Grade: DUD

*** Jerry Lawler joins us from the office of his personal dentist Isaac Yankem, DDS. He is there trying to get the brutal stench and smell out of his mouth after his tough loss in Philadelphia last night. Lawler vows that Hart will pay for what he did and that their issue isn’t over yet. He also mentions that Yankem, a former great wrestler, is promising to extract some revenge as well. ***

*** Barry Didinsky is in the aisle shilling the official King of the Ring shirt and hat as well as a Bret Hart hat and sunglasses combo. Order now! ***

2) Skip defeats Scott Taylor with a Frankensteiner off the top rope at 2:00

Scott: Ah Sunny…oh sorry. As I was saying, last night’s show was trash. They just had a recap to shill tomorrow’s Encore Plus of the show. Who would buy that? Anyway, Skip and my girl Sunny are here to pretty things up. I love how even Shawn rips Vince’s hair, even while a babyface. So it appears Sid begged off during last night’s tag team match. That’s an abomination. Even as a heel, Sid’s not a coward. They are totally ruining his character, turning into a typical WWF heel and not the heel he should be. Skip is getting roughed up by these jobbers before he wins matches, which isn’t helping his character in my opinion. Grade: DUD

JT: We head back down to the ring as Skip and Sunny hop on down to the ring to both fat shame the fans and beat down Scott Taylor. Michaels brags about his skills with the ladies as the Bodydonnas rant in the ring. Taylor actually starts off hot with a flurry until Skip drops him with an enziguri to take over. Vince and Shawn talk more about Jerry Lawler in the feud that just won’t ever go away. Taylor dropkicks Skip outside, where he stooges around a bit before turning the tide again. Skip chewing gum during these matches is pretty funny, as is Shawn’s clear disdain for his name. Skip hits a pretty crazy splash off the top rope to the floor and then wins with a top rope Frankensteiner, busting out the high spots in this throwaway bout. Even though he probably gives a bit too much to the jobbers, Skip has a really unique arsenal, even impressing Michaels in the end. If only he had a better name, maybe he could be a legit player, as he has really looked good in limited action thus far. Oh, and Sunny. He has her too. Grade: 1/2*

*** We check out footage from a celebrity softball game in Oklahoma City. Diesel took part of the game and all proceeds went to the families affected by the Oklahoma City bombing from earlier in the year. ***

*** We then join Todd Pettengill for a report filed last night from the Corestates Spectrum. Todd recaps all of the results from King of the Ring. He also reveals that Diesel will face Sid in a WWF Title Lumberjack Match at In Your House #2. ***

3) Man Mountain Rock defeats Phil Apollo via submission with the Whammy Bar at 1:00

Fun Fact: Tonight we say goodbye to Man Mountain Rock after a short stay in the Federation. He had asked to be an announcer when he came into the WWF, but his request was denied. During his run, he had several injuries, including a serious hernia. He also became addicted to pain pills and downers along with smoking marijuana. His substance abuse issues led to his release.

Scott: Wow, I thought they had shit canned Phil Apollo by now. Before this match we had Todd Pettengill doing a KOTR wrap-up and he announced the main event for next month’s IYH #2 from Nashville. It will be Diesel vs. Sid for the WWF Title, in a lumberjack match. That will likely be better than that snorefest they had in May. Man Mountain Rock has a cool WWF guitar, but that’s about as much as his charisma goes. He’s a mediocre worker at best, and poor Phil Apollo has to job to him. Grade: DUD

JT: Back to the ring we go as Man Mountain Rock is shredding his guitar in the middle of the ring for his prematch concert. Michaels takes shots at Bob Backlund for his stance on rock ‘n’ roll and then makes me chuckle when he says Phil Apollo has a big movie coming out: Apollo 13. Vince plugs the Superstar Line, where Jim Ross has more updates on the health of Razor Ramon. MMR picks up the layup win with the Whammy Bar. Too bad this is the last time we see the big guy because I felt like he was actually gaining some momentum and starting to establish himself a bit. The gimmick and look was pretty good, too bad he ended up flaming out so fast. Looks like Bob Backlund will win the war. Grade: DUD

4) King Mabel defeats Kenny Kendall with a belly-to-belly suplex at 1:45

Scott: So here we are. With all that talent in the tournament, they give the KOTR to this talentless hunk. I’m getting a sinking feeling that this guy is going to get a mega push over the next few months and that means…GULP… a WWF Title match. Ugh. This is an ugly squash to continue to push. Grade: DUD

JT: We waste no time getting to our next match and it is a big one as it is the first bout for Mabel as the new King of the WWF. In a nice touch, he is decked out in full royal regalia and is carried to the ring on a throne by some scrubs. That certainly adds to his presence. That said, he was clearly a very questionable and controversial choice to win the tournament, especially when you consider the other talent that filled it up. However, on the other hand they took it as an opportunity to make a new star, someone they have clearly been interested in pushing for a while now. Michaels calls “Mack Daddy Mo” the biggest piece of luggage you will ever see and jokes about his reading again, so I guess he isn’t a fan. Vince puts over the efforts of Savio Vega from last night as Mabel mows through Kenny Kendall, grabbing his first win as King. Grade: DUD

*** We pay a visit to the beach to check in on Waylon Mercy, who will make his official debut next week on Raw. He says that his opponents’ lives are going to be in his hands, you know what he means? ***

*** Todd Pettengill narrates us through a video package recapping this past weekend’s WWF Hall of Fame ceremony. ***

5) Savio Vega defeats Jeff Jarrett via disqualification at 4:45; Jarrett retains WWF Intercontinental Title

Scott: At least one positive came out of last night’s PPV, and that’s Savio Vega’s performance. He wrestled four times and almost won the tournament, and with that he’s earned an IC Title match against Jarrett, who for some bizarre reason didn’t wrestle last night. We had NO TITLE MATCHES last night. That’s bullshit. What color is Jarrett wearing? Looks like some kind of brown velour. It looks like it came off someone’s couch from 1978. Savio is taking full control and even caused some heel miscommunication with Jarrett decking the Roadie instead of the challenger. Jarrett eventually took control as Savio’s ribs are sore after Mabel’s post match beatdown, in which he also ended up attacking Savio’s friend Razor Ramon. Vega tries to make a comeback, however the Roadie trips him, and as a result Savio kicks him into Shawn Michaels at the broadcast table. Shawn and Roadie start jawing, then Jarrett tries to go after Shawn and Michaels starts throwing bombs. Roadie then ends the match by going into the ring and clotheslining Savio to force the DQ. The match really didn’t get going but it looks like we may have Shawn Michaels’ next feud. Grade: *1/2

JT: We head down to the ring for our main event of the evening as the Caribbean Legend Savio Vega is set to challenge Jeff Jarrett for the Intercontinental Title. As Jarrett and the Roadie strut out, Vince tells us that the premier of Jarrett’s music video “With My Baby Tonight” will air on Superstars this weekend. Vega had a monster night last night, winning three matches before falling to Mabel in the KOTR finals. It was a night that certainly put him on the WWF map as a threat. Not sure what the hell is going on with Jarrett’s tights this week. They are shiny plush shit brown. Roadie tries to jump Savio at the bell but Vega catches him and then works over Jarrett to compliments from Michaels, who is shocked he is a step ahead despite all his work last night. Jarrett turns the tide by slinging Vega into the corner but Savio came right back with a clothesline and right hands. Roadie gets involved again but Vega dodges a Jarrett charge and the two buddies collide on the apron. Michaels messes with Roadie’s hair and that draws Jarrett over to get in Shawn’s face. After a break, Savio pitches Jarrett back inside but Roadie punches the challenger and Jarrett gets to work with some kicks. The champ follows with a swinging neckbreaker and a nice suplex for two. Roadie got involved again but Savio fended him off and turned the tide, picking up a close near fall and then dropping Jarrett with a big uranage. Roadie again made his presence known, this time tripping Savio, who then dropkicked him right into the announce table. Michaels got in Roadie’s face again and Jarrett came to assist, leading to a brawl. Once the champ got back inside, Vega rolled him up but Roadie pounced and clotheslined Savio for the DQ and to save the belt for his pal. After the bell, Michaels got in the ring and he and Vega eventually ran off Double J and the Road Dog. This was a spirited match as Savio continues to impress, however it was all about getting Michaels into the path of Jarrett as it looks like these two will now start to feud. Roadie was real good here too, doing everything he could to help Jarrett retain and I also liked the psychology of Vega being a bit tired and Jarrett fresh after not competing last night. Grade: *1/2

Final Analysis

Scott: After the F-quality PPV last night, our episode tonight has the aforementioned King of the Shit Mabel, which at least means they’re going to strap the mini rocket ship on him. The Gunns get a win and perhaps can finally be the top babyface team they’re meant to be. We get an IC Title match which is nice, and then probably Shawn’s next feud is for the IC Title, which means he will probably win it because, well he’s Shawn. How did Undertaker lose to Mabel by the way? How did Mabel beat anybody? These next few Raws are going to be like a car accident. You probably know it’s going to suck but you can’t turn away. I won’t trash this Raw because they’re trying but there’s no light in this tunnel right now. FINAL GRADE: C-

JT: We bounce back from a tough night in Philadelphia with a pretty energetic night of Raw as they start to steer the course for the rest of the summer. We still have way too much damn focus on Jerry Lawler and his mouth issues and not as much mention or even appearance from Bret Hart. Also, I will say it was a treat having Shawn Michaels back in the booth after weeks of foot jokes from the King. Mabel is our King and we will see if the push works at all, but again at least they are trying to mix things up a bit up and down the card. The best course would be a slow burn push to build credibility but we will see. With Michaels on the face side, bumping him down to an IC Title feud makes sense because he can’t be in the main event picture with Diesel still there. It also helps elevate Jarrett and that strap a bit too. Over the course of 24 hours, Savio Vega is suddenly a reliable workhorse star for the company, and that is a good thing. Despite the grim night in Philly, I thought they actually rebounded well enough here with very focused stories and a quick paced show. We just didn’t really get a strong anchor match to really make it stand out. Final Grade: C

[hrothgarshoard]

Kickstarter projects backed

On my web page, over the years I’ve listed several projects that I’ve backed on Kickstarter. It was a clunky part of the page that didn’t really look all that attractive, even if the information in it reflected my personal views on several projects. So, I decided today to move that information here to my blog where I would add more kickstarter projects that I back as new entries. My hope is that it will be a little more organized and easier for people to find.

So, without further ado, here is just a copy/paste of the projects I’ve backed in the past.

SHROUD OF THE AVATAR

Pledge amount: $30

Pledge Reward: Early Alpha access and digital download

Estimated Delivery: Oct. 2014

Actual Delivery: Unknown

I backed this project because I grew up playing the Ultima series. I spend many a night at college going through Ultimas 4 and 5 (not sure if I ever finished them) and played Ultima Online for years. I backed this mostly for nostalgic reasons, but also in the hope that I could play in the Ultima universe again. However, since I only pledged at the digital download level, I have not been able to play. I live in the boondocks and do not have a connection reliable enough to download or play the game.

So, while I put the blame of not doing much with this project on myself, reading through the comments on kickstarter makes me believe that there are many others dissatisfied with the project. From physical rewards not having shipped a year and a half after the project ended, to graphic engines that look extremely old, this doesn't look like it measures up to the previous Ultima standards. Too bad, because Ultima was one of the games that brought FRP into the digital world.

2/10/17 EDIT: I recently talked to a friend who also backed this project. He plays the game on a daily basis and has very positive things to say about it. If and when I ever get a reliable internet connection, I may revisit this.

DWARVEN FORGE GAME TILES

Pledge amount: $305

Pledge Reward: 5 tile sets

Estimated Delivery: Oct. 2013

Actual Delivery: Probably Oct. 2013

If you haven't heard of Dwarven Forge by now, and you are into RPGs, you really need to check them out. Stefan Pokorny has launched multiple projects of miniature terrain made from his company design of "Dwarvenite." They are nearly indestructible and modular, so you can pretty much use them in any dungeon setting.

I will put one thing that should be obvious out there, though. Miniature terrain is great. BUT you must USE them! I got my shipment in, painted them up and then let them sit for probably 6 months before I actually worked on a dungeon. Once I did, they added a great level of visualization to the game, but I was stuck in my old battlemat and markers mentality and it took me far too long to start using them.

I am very satisfied with the quality of the product and its usability.

2/10/17 UPDATE: Honestly, I use this product less and less. It has nothing to do with the quality of the product, but more to do with me buying a 3d printer and printing my own dungeon tiles. More on that in a future post.

ST. FRANCIS IN ROME - THE RESTORATION

Pledge amount: $1

Pledge Reward: eternal salvation?

Estimated Delivery: not for a long time, I hope

Actual Delivery: I'm not quite dead yet.

This was a project that I backed for a dollar just because I wanted to help spread the word. I did my graduate work in Medieval History, so when I saw this project, I just had to be a part of it, even if it was a very small part.

The monks raised $130,000 to restore St. Francis's cell, and this past June it was reopened to the public. An official ceremony will be held in October. Take a look here for their latest update. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/671087979/st-francis-in-rome-the-restoration/posts/1307245 I'm glad that this project was successful and completed through Kickstarter.

REAPER MINIATURES BONES II: THE RETURN OF MR. BONES

Pledge amount: $255

Pledge Reward: Core Set plus extras

Estimated Delivery: Oct. 2014

Actual Delivery: around the same time

I missed the first Bones campaign and was thrilled to get in on the second. I got the core set, plus several other sets. In all, I'm pretty sure I ended up paying less than $1 per mini and that included a few dragons and giants in the mix.

Overall, I'm very pleased with this campaign. The mini quality isn't great and with some of the minis they tried to put too much detail into a plastic mini, making it nearly impossible (for me) to paint. I've since bought an air brush and tons of paint, so I'll be busy for some time to come. I'd back them again in an instant, even though it would mean more minis that may never get painted.

Update 2/10/17: I’ve actually sold off most of these minis over the past couple years. I just don’t have the time or eyesight to paint these, so I’ve kept a few for my own campaign and have sold many of the rest off at cons. I still think that this was an amazing deal and a great product, and I’ll very likely support them again in the future. I just need to know my own time limitations and plan accordingly.

CUSTOM CHAINMAIL DICE BAGS BY VITALITY HANDMADE DESIGNS

Pledge amount: $60

Pledge Reward: Small Combo #1

Estimated Delivery: April 2014

Actual Delivery: June 2014

This project came out when chainmail accessories was beginning to become very common. My daughter has a summer birthday and I thought I'd get one of these as a gift for her. They arrived in June, so I was actually able to give it to her on time. I got one for each of my daughters

The quality is good and they get used. I can't help but think that $30 is a bit pricey for a dice bag.  Still, I know it took a lot of work to accomplish and I wouldn't have been able to make it myself. If you want a dice bag, this is a good product.

2/10/17 UPDATE: My kids still use these bags, so I really have no complaint about this project. $30 may still be on the pricey end, but they have lasted well, my kids still use them and they show no signs of degrading. Overall a good project.

RHYTHM METAL DICE

Pledge amount: $17

Pledge Reward: d8 in brass

Estimated Delivery: July 2014

Actual Delivery: Still waiting

This was a project where I honestly don't know why I backed. I think it was because I wanted to get some metal dice. I had backed another project and pulled out of it because the creator was doing a poor job at backer communication. I became convinced that they didn't know what they were doing and backed out.

The Rhythm Metal Dice weren't overly attractive to me...they are just too complicated of a design. And $17 for a single die was overpaying pure and simple. So I just don't know why I backed this.

As of 11/2015, the dice still have not been delivered. There have been very few project updates. One did come in late Nov. 2015, but it was largely undecipherable. I couldn't figure out if they had the product in, what the shipping status was or what their plan forward was. I expect that this is $17 completely wasted.

2/10/17 UPDATE: There has not been an update in the past year. Fuck these guys.

HERO FORGE: CUSTOMIZABLE 3D PRINTED TABLETOP MINIS

Pledge amount: $60

Pledge Reward: 2 custom minis

Estimated Delivery: Oct. 2014

Actual Delivery: early 2015

This is one of those projects that is a great concept, but may not be the best for normal use. The Hero Forge software is actually very good and easy to use. The combinations available in faces, body types, poses, equipment, etc. really let you create a one of a kind miniature. As far as this part of the figure goes, it is great.

I bought one for each of my daughters for them to configure as they wished. Once they got around to doing it (which was a long time), they submitted the order and the minis arrived within about 3 days. GREAT!

One week later a dejected teenager hands me her mini in 3 pieces. She hadn't even gotten around to playing a game with it yet, but the staff had broken, as had the mini right at the ankles.  A close inspection of the break revealed that the mini was printed hollow instead of solid. So in the particular pose that it was designed in, there was virtually no support for the mini at the ankle area.

I contacted Hero Forge and they immediately agreed to replace it which was good. But they also told me that this type of thing was common and that a little superglue was the best solution. This response troubled me a little. If they were having that type of issue with the printed minis, then it tells me that they either need to print the minis solid, adjust the programming so it happens less often, or both. "Superglue" shouldn't be a customer service option when dealing with minis.

2/10/17 UPDATE: I see people asking on boards every now and then about this product and the responses are generally positive, so I am willing to accept that they may have improved their product reliability. I hope this is the case because it really is a great concept. I sincerely hope they succeed as a company.

RAVENFELL  28MM FANTASY VILLAGE

Pledge amount: $1

Pledge Reward: Troll outhouse

Estimated Delivery: April 2014

Actual Delivery: April 2014

Tom Tullius at Fat Dragon Games makes gaming terrain that you can print out on your printer, fold on the dotted line and BOOM you have yourself some 3D terrain. This is a low cost alternative to the Dwarven Forge game tiles and other terrain solution.

I backed this because I liked the idea, but I honestly just didn't think I'd use it enough to make it worth my while. Tom is a very nice guy though and if you are into paper terrain, his line of products is outstanding. I'd highly recommend even though I didn't pledge for a large amount.

TOME OF HORRORS COMPLETE II  

Pledge amount: $25

Pledge Reward: 3 minis cast in metal

Estimated Delivery: Dec 2014

Actual Delivery: Company bankrupt.

I backed this one in part because the project creator and I started talks on me providing cases for his line of miniatures. He had great plans for expansion, had run some other projects and it looked like it would be a good collaboration.

Well, his business went belly up, and fiasco ensued. The creator refused (probably on advice from his lawyer) to answer any questions/emails. I'm sure that there are legal actions in the works. What mucked things up even more is that Center Stage Miniatures got a license from Frog God Games to make their minis based on their (FGG's) book. Now, I don't know if the involvement went deeper than this and FGG was one of the creditors involved or what, but I found out today (Nov. 2015) that FGG has offered to give backers a dollar for dollar credit to backers of this project to use in their pdf store. Very cool of Frog God Games. I'm in the process of trying to claim this. Frog God Games puts out some good stuff.

2/10/17 UPDATE: I’m just adding this because I want to state how great FGG was to work with in this fiasco. They had no legal obligation to do what they did, but gave credit for their own product. I ended up getting a few .pdf modules. I’m not a big .pdf fan, but considering the situation, I felt it was more than fair. Kudos to FGG! 

SAVING THROW:  AN INSTRUCTIONAL WEB SERIES ABOUT RPGS

Pledge amount: $15

Pledge Reward: pdf of module

Estimated Delivery: June 2014

Actual Delivery: A little late, but not bad.

This project caught my eye because of its originality. They were proposing a web series where they would teach people how to play games. They also made a fun little spoof video that was fairly well made.

I'll be honest that I've never really even looked at the pdf module. I don't know what the content is or how good it was. That wasn't the reason I supported them. I just wanted to give a little something to promote a project that I thought was a good idea.

The video series itself was good, if a little basic (and had a little bad acting in it.) They did a multipart series on how to play Pathfinder. I'm an old-school D&D guy, so Pathfinder never really appealed to me and since there is a lot of overlap, I can't say that I was terribly interested in it. All the same, great concept and a good all-around series.

Saving Throw has also gone on to produce a bi-weekly series where they film a 5E D&D game being played. Now known as "Barky's Brigade", the series is well done. The adventures are well planned and (mostly) well DMed, the characters do a good job of acting in character, and I think everyone: players and viewers, have a good time with the show. If you haven't seen this, go to youtube and search for Barky's Brigade.

2/10/17 UPDATE: I’m pleased to see that the Twitch TV channel that Saving Throw has produced is growing and has regular programming on most every day. One of these days, I’m going to solve my internet problems so I can actually watch these live.

DWARVEN FORGE: CAVERNS GAME TILES

Pledge amount: Trade

Pledge Reward:

Estimated Delivery: April 2014

Actual Delivery: April 2014

This wasn't so much a pledge as a trade. I had exchanged emails with Stefan Pokorny and traded him several cases and dice towers for a set of the Cavern game tiles.

I found these tiles far superior to the dungeon tiles. The craftsmanship of the tiles were much more detailed. As much as I liked the dungeon tiles, these looked and felt better and were more true to gaming situations.

My only complaints with either of these gaming tiles is that they are a little heavy, and that they don't join together well. I'd like some sort of peg system to join the tiles together and may end up drilling inserts for metal pins between the tiles. This, however will take quite some time.

The only other thing I have an issue with (and this is true with all dungeon tiles I've seen so far) is that the walls of the tile take up 1/4 of the tile. When you lay a room out, a 20x20 room all of a sudden is only 15x15 because part of the tile is taken up by walls. I have not seen a solution to this yet.

2/10/17 update: Ok...there is now a solution to the above problem, but it involves a different product line from a different company. I still like Dwarven Forge items, but am slow migrating to the other solution.

ENEMY OF MAN: FEATURE FILM

Pledge amount: $15

Pledge Reward: Film and Script

Estimated Delivery: April 2014

Actual Delivery: Not yet filmed

MacBeth is my favorite Shakespearian play. In college, a friend and I (for a class on Shakespeare) enacted the final fight scene between MacBeth and MacDuff complete with choreography taken from Return of the Jedi, Ladyhawke, and The Princess Bride. I got an A in that class.

So when I saw a movie production on KS that was to feature this play and have some pretty darn good British actors lined up including Sean Bean, one of my favorite actors, I was down for it.

But, this seems to be another one of those productions doomed to go nowhere. The last update was in May 2015 with basically no news. I think this is another case of money thrown down the tubes.

TABLE TITANS VOLUME 1

Pledge amount: $30

Pledge Reward: Regular edition hardback

Estimated Delivery: Sept. 2014

Actual Delivery:Over a year overdue

I've read Scott Kurtz's PVP comic strip for years...over a decade in fact. He was an early pioneer in gaming comics online. His work is generally good and he gets involved with his community.

But Scott fucked up big time on this project. He was publishing a book of a comic already completed and published online. This was something that could easily have been completed by his 2014 delivery date. But he kept adding things that half his backers didn't pledge for and pushed back his delivery schedule time and again. The comic that he is producing now has been out for 2 years. His communication on KS has been abysmal and frankly he doesn't seem to give a damn that he is so far behind schedule anymore.

He claims books are now in the USA and will be out soon.

But you know what? Fuck Scott Kurtz. Fuck PVP, and Fuck Table Titans. I haven't read his strip in 6 months and probably never will again. Do yourself a favor and avoid Scott Kurtz like the plague.

2/10/17 update: OK...I did eventually receive my pledge reward. I sold it. I sold it quick and I doubt if I made any money on it. Fuck this project. I have no words on how disappointed I was with this. I feel better about the projects that have never delivered that I do with this one. 

this concludes this post. I have actually backed several other projects which I will soon get to reviewing. I would like to do more reviews in general, so take a look and help spread the word