#figure collecting and such specifically for one figure to really make a pretty setup around but im worried abt how to keep her pristine

[fearandhungies]

okay question for anyone who follows me slash is mutuals with me slash maybe somehow sees this in the wild who happens to collect figures: what is the optimal way to un-dust them...

[stagefoot]

what sort of tools/gear do you bring on calls.

Thanks for asking! 😊

As someone who primarily does lighting, the most important thing for me is my wrench (6 inches. Anything more than that is overkill 😉 and will get in your way).

My wrench hangs from a locking carabiner, which I clip to my belt loop. (I had a non-locking one for a while, and the first time it opened and my wrench fell I went to a fortunately nearby store and got a mountain climbing one 😅)

Also on the carabiner is a piece of tie line that loops around my wrist as a safety, and a widget (which I don’t honestly use all that often, but it’s really handy when you do need it! I also can’t find a link to one right now, but if you’re not sure what I mean, just let me know!)

I also clip a roll of electrical tape (very useful!) to the carabiner when I’m not using it.

Everyone’s wrench setup is a little different, but this works for me. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted, so feel free to play around a little until you find a good configuration!

Beyond that, general safety things like gloves and steel toed boots.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given is to bring a change of socks. If I know I’m working eight hours or more, I try to throw an extra pair in my bag (if I remember) and I change them halfway through the day. It makes such a huge difference!

It’s always good to have a water bottle if you don’t have access to another source of water.

Another thing I don’t use often but is incredibly useful when I need it is a multi tool. Again, there are so many out there (I got mine as a gift, so I didn’t shop around) that you can find one with the features you want/find most useful. I mostly need a blade, pliers, and screwdrivers.

Beyond that, I always have a bottle with ibuprofen, gravol, antacids, and diarrhea pills (but that’s more just general preparedness than for calls specifically)

I also have a mini first aid kit (right now it just has bandaids, but even having those close at hand is very helpful).

I don’t need them often in my specific line of work, but I always have earplugs on me, and I recommend that everyone does! Our work can get very noisy and hearing damage is unfortunately pretty common.

I personally like my belt pouch, which is similar to this one and is exactly the right size for gobos to go home with you. (I also use it to collect tie line and little bits of tape)

I always have a phone charger (cable, block, and a power bank, just in case). I also have a Lightning to headphone jack adapter so I can use my phone to check audio playback (thanks, Apple 😐)

Another thing I ‘bring’ is @neil-gaiman’s advice:

“You get work however you get work, but people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

In my experience, this is true. On pretty much any given day I can at least manage two of those!

Ok. I think that’s everything!

Of course a rigger’s kit (for example) is going to look very different than mine, but for a general call these are all good, common things to have.

Thanks again for asking, I hope this answer helps! Feel free to ask if you’d like to know anything else 😊

[mitzirockerextendeduniverse]

[Hi! For... god, years now, I've had this massive Spreadsheet (yes, it requires a capital letter) of retro JRPGs I've wanted to (1) play my way through and (2) blog about. (1) was fairly easy after I stopped trying to play on original hardware, but I found it surprisingly hard to do (2) without it devouring all my free time. So instead of a dedicated blog, I'm just gonna do these short summary posts here whenever I beat a game. There's two in the backlog right now, starting with...]

What it is: The Tower of Druaga (ドルアーガの塔 Druaga no Tō) for Famicom, released on the 6th of August, 1985, developed and published by Namco. Based on the arcade game of the same name from June 1984, also published by Namco and chiefly designed by Masanobu Endō, creator of early scrolling shmup Xevious, it's the first game in - the Spreadsheet as a whole, yes, but also the Babylonian Castle Saga, a collection of (for the most part) vaguely RPG-like action games that tell the story of a prince named Gil, his lover, the priestess Ki, and their quest to restore peace to their loosely-Babylonian fantasy world.

What it's about:

I think the attract screen puts it pretty well! There's some more wrinkles to the backstory, which I mostly got from a strategy guide released at the time - an invading empire, the goddess Ishtar, the precise mechanics behind why, exactly, this is our heroes' last chance to save their kingdom - quite a lot for a mid-80s arcade game. It's pretty thin by RPG standards, but as a setup, it works, and I found it surprisingly engrossing.

How it plays: How do you make an RPG work in the arcade? Apparently, you turn it into a Pac-Man clone. Okay, that's a little flippant; Druaga may be a maze chase game, but there's a lot more going on in it than in most arcade games of its day. On the surface, it's a game about running around mazes, killing monsters, and grabbing keys to get to the next floor, until you defeat Druaga and rescue Ki on the top of the tower. All you have to do is fight your way to the sixtieth floor, right?

In any other arcade game of its era, maybe, but not here. Almost every floor of the tower also contains a hidden treasure that can only be revealed by performing a specific action unique to that floor. The higher Gil gets up the tower, the more he'll need them, from books to reveal the layout of darkened floors to a series of items that turn the increasingly common dragons from the most dangerous enemies in the game to an easily ignored afterthought. Pretty much every useful item in the game (there's several duds and a few traps) is needed to defeat Druaga, so knowing where they are and how to reveal them is absolutely key to beating the game.

The catch - because of course there's a catch - is that neither the treasures' locations nor their revealing methods are signposted at all. Every single one has to be trial-and-error brute-forced out, and they can get pretty arcane - entering a fairly long cheat code, defeating several enemies in a specific order, walking over a particular tile in a particular direction... The intent was for arcade-goers to 'solve' the game together, figuring out all its secrets over the course of weeks or months, but when you don't have a friendly mid-80s Japanese arcade crowd to help you out all you're left with is a mountain of guesswork. Or a walkthrough, which has been a standard bonus feature on its Namco Museum rereleases since the mid-90s.

What I thought: I had a lot of fun with this game! Admittedly I was using a walkthrough (in Japanese, because part of the purpose of the Spreadsheet is to practice my language skills) to bypass about half of the Intended Experience™, but the other half, the straightforward arcade action Pac-Man-with-a-sword gameplay loop, was engaging enough in its own right. Gil controls really well, you never feel like you're fighting the programming instead of the monsters, you can always tell why you died even if the game took a cheap shot, and its insanely generous continue system lets you jump right back to the level you were on with all your items intact when you run out of lives. It's still tough, but it's tough in a fair way, breaking up its fast-paced action into discrete digestible chunks with a chance to breathe between every floor. And frankly, though it is 1980s quarter-muncher hard, I've played indie puzzle platformers that were much worse.

And I do think it succeeds at distilling the RPG into an arcade format, though the result is only an RPG by the loosest possible definition. Despite the lack of numbers and exploration (well, in a sense) there's a distinct feeling of progression to Gil's journey up the tower, a kind of character growth uncommon to - basically any genre outside the RPG in 1984. As Gil collects treasures, he grows faster, stronger, better at navigating the labyrinths, to the point that, despite the increasingly tougher challenges the game throws at you, it almost gets easier the further along you get. With the continue system I mentioned, you can even jump back to floors you've already cleared (mostly to replace a particular item that occasionally breaks) and breeze through the monsters that once gave you so much trouble. It's this kind of thoughtful design that makes me really appreciate Druaga, more than I honestly expected to when I first booted it up. Give it a try, it's pretty good!

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok, I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion, and I wish I'd had a different experience with it, but Ode to Castlevania is quite possibly the least fun I've ever had playing Vampire Survivors. Part of that isn't really its own fault, because it's very jarring going back to it right after playing Halls of Torment, which does a lot of stuff better than it does, but part of it is definitely just that I don't like it very much. It's kind of a bummer as someone who's really enjoyed Vampire Survivors in the past and who's played Castlevania games on and off since the NES.

Probably one of the biggest internal issues I have with it (i.e. not comparing it to external stuff in other games) is that it's one of only two DLCs that just dumps all the new content on top of everything else already in the game instead of having a self-contained adventure mode. My previous least favorite DLC? The other one with no adventure mode.

When done well the adventure stuff is great at bringing back the sense of progression the game has without having to wipe your entire save file and start over, and it's also great for highlighting the new content and letting it shine on its own. It's also a good way to teach people the new, larger maps in more approachable chunks and give some direction for how to start tackling them.

But then there's also external comparisons to make, since I've been playing other stuff in the same genre that's improved on some stuff, and I'll use Halls of Torment since it's what I've played most recently. It's also another strictly 2D game that's heavily referencing classic games with its aesthetic and some of its design (specifically stuff like the first couple Diablo games in this case), so it's a more direct comparison in some ways than some of the fancy 3D games in the genre.

Visual clarity is so much better in Halls of Torment. Like holy crap you can actually tell what's going on so much better even with ridiculous late game builds and hundreds of enemies on the screen. With the exception of certain elemental DoT setups I can pretty much always see everything going on on the screen and the background level art, and even all the enemies well enough to navigate a path through them.

Vampire Survivors tends to deteriorate into having a zone of death around you that's mostly clear, and then the entire rest of the screen is the visual equivalent of unintelligible gibberish. It's still playable like that, but I can't actually see any of the fun Castlevania references in the level design or even the enemies half the time, which is half the point of this DLC.

The UI is also much better in Halls of Torment. There's so much more information easily available, especially in the pause screen. It's kind of annoying in VS having to just remember what has to be done for the next set of unlocks, while I'm HoT you can just pull it up in the menu at any time. Want to see what stats actually affect your weapons? In VS it sort of tells you in the collection, which you can't access while playing. Otherwise go look it up online. HoT again just has all this stuff in the menu.

And speaking of challenges/unlocks/achievements, the VS ones aren't usually all that interesting most of the time and just amount to "play the game with this character or weapon or whatever". The ones in HoT are easily the best I've ever seen in the genre, and probably some of the best I've seen in any game in a while. Some of them are also just "play the game and it'll happen" ones, but a lot of them are little mini-puzzles where you have to figure out a moderately clever setup you might not have otherwise tried to be able to pull things off in a single run.

There are other differences that are mostly just design decisions that aren't inherently better one way or the other, like the mutually exclusive upgrade paths for things in HoT that let you significantly change how a character or weapon plays from run to run, but that isn't anything wrong with VS, just something I appreciate about HoT.

I guess what it comes down to is that Halls of Torment has a lot of QoL features I miss, and it's built a lot of interesting stuff on the foundation from earlier games. Vampire Survivors was already getting kind of bloated, and the lack of adventure mode to give a more curated experience of the new content really kills any motivation I have to play through the rest of Ode to Castlevania.

[c0rpsedemon]

like. pullips are really the only fashion dolls i still actively collect (don't get me wrong i love my dolls but i do vastly prefer higher quality in favor of playlines + the 2ndhand market is full of scalpers + the current releases are looking p bleak (rip rainbow high. i had mixed feelings about you til the bitter end) + the only one of my doll shelves i've actually gotten myself to fully set up in the year and a half since i took them all down bc my room was being painted is my ever after high shelf + my madame alexanders + my skullectors + a few barbies and i have mixed at best feelings on the rest of them (might start selling off my mga dolls at the very least but also idk if i'd regret it bc i have a lot of trouble getting rid of objects, especially ones w faces, bc my object personification is a massive fucking problem). this is a bit of a big deal since i absolutely love love love to redo my figure setup so the problem is them and not me) so i do have a p good eye for them . i have only one pullip that i bought new and that's the moitie/mana sama pullip (vvvvv this one) and i got him(?) (ik this pullip is supposed to be a girl wearing moitie HOWEVER it's so obviously based on mana (famous vkei/goth band guitarist + founder of moitie) who is a real life guy who has worn this exact outfit before that it's hard to think of it as the moitie pullip and not the mana pullip and as such it's weird to she/her him bc that is a real life man) for ~190usd (it's been over a year and that's the current conversion rate. i don't really feel like digging)

and like. ok. pullip as a brand is a lot more prolific now (read: late 2022 when i got him) than it was years ago when all the other pullips i'm into were released. which is why i was able to get both this kinda ugly suoseiseki and this pretty suiseiseki for ~70usd each . however it is kinda weird to me that these two were released years apart (there were two rozen maiden pullip waves. one in 2007 and one in 2015. the suoseiseki is from 2007 and the suiseiseki is from 2015) and i could find a ton of listings for both suiseisekis and the 2007 suoseiseki but none for the pretty 2015 suoseiseki. additionally, while i got the twins both new in box for ~70usd each, literally Every Other Rozen Maiden Pullip that wasn't in some sort of distress was at least 120usd if not somewhere around 200 or 300usd. so idk what it is abt the twins that makes their prices significantly lower than the rest of the sisters

also, the rozen maiden pullips (both releases) are infamous for breaking (specifically at the wrist) to the point where my introduction to both pullips and rozen maiden was hearing a doll collector complain about how she only allowed herself to get one of them a year bc expensive but their wrists kept breaking and it was a pain tracking down ones with unbroken wrists. and like. idk you'd think that such a prevalent qc issue would lower prices but maybe the reason the others are all so high is bc finding ones with unbroken wrists is so rare and ig the twins just had this issue the least? or something like that? my twin pullips are currently in a warehouse in japan waiting for me to bite the bullet and pay an insanely high shipping cost for them and the rest of my recent spending spree to make their way over here but believe me if their fucking wrists break you all will be the first to know. here's the not ugly suoseiseki i couldn't track down btw . dapper lil girl.

meanwhile in kuroshitsujilandia, which has had a similar number of pullips to rozen maiden. which is kinda funny bc one of those is literally about dolls and the other just has a lot of nice outfits . and we get to see my dearest darlingest boy ciel . who i have two pullips of which are both sitting in the same warehouse as the twins and the rest of my ciel army. specifically, i have these two, the standard ciel i got for ~55usd on yja and the robin dress ciel i got for ~110usd also on yja. (see below)

now obv the latter is victim to the robin tax which afflicts all merch of him in that dress but if it's less than my mana pullip then surely the kuro pullips must be fairly cheap right? considering the extent to which the robin tax regularly gets taken? well it sure looks like it bc i've been eyeing a few other kuro pullips from a different release on mercari jp and that (near identical to the first) ciel is up for ~55usd, the sebastian is ~75usd (to be expected bc he doesn't have a near identical counterpart like ciel does), and the grelle is ~80usd (her merch also behaves similar to the robin dress on the aftermarket).

overall that's all fairly low esp compared to the brand new mana pullip, so this leads us to believe that the kuro pullips are on the cheaper end of pullips . now tell me why the hell the cheapest i've ever seen the book of circus ciel pullip is ~310usd.

anyways. the model of pullip prob def affects price somehow but overall this post has been a very longwinded way of posting pictures of pullips i like and bragging abt financial irresponsibilty as a result of a blow to my ego my pullip collection.

the price discrepancy between different pullips is fascinating to me

[muffinshark]

Hello, I’ve just started oil and digital painting but having issues figuring out the process and as you are my main inspiration, just thought I’d ask if you feel up to doing a detailed breakdown of your paintings/process. Thank you for your time :>>>

sure! I can't really give a detailed breakdown of the actual painting/rendering part because that's mostly experience gained from trial and error and also way more information than I can really put down here re: values, color, general technique, etc. (there are tons of speed paint videos on youtube that I would really recommend watching if you want to get an idea of how other people paint) but I can sort of... go through all of the steps of a painting from beginning to finish under this cut:

1.) thumbnails: after I know what I want to paint, I'll start with rough sketches on scrap paper to figure out composition, image dimensions, etc. I'll then do a small sketch in photoshop, and block in general colors and an idea of the lighting setup.

I tend to throw away the scrap paper after I finish a piece, so I only have the thumbnail sketches for the piece I'm working on atm:

2.) research and reference gathering: this step happens pretty much side-by-side with step 1. I collect as many references I can to help me with likeness, lighting, clothing, etc. etc. etc. If my piece is set in a specific time period (lately it’s been the 20s-40s nyc lmao), I'll research period-accurate clothes, interiors, props. Sometimes if I cannot get the right reference for the pose or lighting, I'll take a picture of myself. I know a lot of artists use PureRef, but I just dump all of the references I collect onto a huge photoshop file for easy access while I paint.

If you’re painting realistically, this is an important step! It is extremely difficult to paint realistically from your head. All of the old portrait paintings hanging in museums were painted with live models as reference. Professional artists use photo references all the time (you can actually find some of the reference photos that illustrators like Norman Rockwell and Alphonse Mucha took and compare them to the final illustrations). It will make things MUCH easier for you, and you will improve much more quickly as well.

3.) full-size sketch, color block-in : I'm more of a painter than a lineartist/draftsman, so my sketches tend to be pretty shitty, but all they really need to be is a guide for where to put the colors as they will eventually be painted over anyway. (The only exception to this is portraits; for those I will often do a detailed sketch with accurate proportions so I don’t have to worry about whether an eye is too high or if the nose is too long while I’m actually painting) I draw my sketch on a separate layer, set it on multiply, lock it. Then on a layer underneath, I paint in rough colors. Sometimes I'm lazy and will just enlarge my color thumbnail and use that instead of painting it over again.

sketch:

color block-in:

4.) merge sketch and color layers and start to paint: once I'm satisfied with the sketch and colors, I duplicate the sketch layer, lock it, and set it to invisible just in case I ever need it later as a guide. Then I merge the remaining sketch layer with the color layer, and lock the resulting layer. That's my base. I create a new layer over it and start painting. From here, it's just a lot of noodling around, rendering, and refining to get to the final painting! I know a lot of painters tend to keep all their elements on separate layers, but I like to work with as few layers as possible as it more closely resembles how I would paint in oils.

here's a wip of my current piece as well as a progression wip for an older one:

my actual painting process is just: slap down the colors i want, and slowly add more detail and shading until it’s rendered to to something that isn’t awful and messy haha

5.) textures, color adjustments: I generally don’t like the smooth, polished look digital art can lean towards, so I also add on textures and noise to make it look rough and imperfect and more like traditional media. Also minor things like fabric/wood textures that would take me a long time to paint freehand and just isn’t worth the time to do so. Then I play with color adjustments. Sometimes at this point in the painting process I’ll have changed my mind and want a slightly different color scheme/mood than what I started out with, or sometimes I’ll have migrated a little too far from the initial colors and want to go back --color adjustments are perfect for this.

initial thumbnail colors:

final colors:

aaand that’s basically it!

[ocpdzim]

Actually, DS9 is pretty much the only show I have watched where I have had opinions on ships besides “I hate them” or “They seem good for each other so I GUESS it’s fine but I’d rather look at something else.” These are as follows:

Most of the canon endgame ships, including Jadzia and Worf because I think getting married and remaining married until one of you dies counts as endgame, are actually pretty cute and I did not hate watching them (this is high praise for a ship coming from me). My favorite of them from a character standpoint is Ben and Kasidy, which tbh is also the only one I wasn’t immediately irritated by when it first started. The others I was annoyed with at first but eventually came around to, and ultimately they are mostly pretty well written too.

The only major canon ship I REALLY DON’T like at all is Ezri and Julian. I feel like they will commit so many medical ethics violations because due to lack of other providers they are literally each other’s doctor and therapist and both have a HISTORY of committing medical ethics violations when treating people they are close with (Ezri just generally, Julian specifically with romantic interests). Also it was so forced and rushed. Maybe it could’ve been fine if they’d had like an entire extra season to flesh it out but I would honestly have preferred if they just didn’t do it at all. Also I feel like poor Ezri should’ve gotten like a year to just exist and figure out her issues before being shoved into any relationships AND before returning to work as a therapist because holy shit she fucked up administering therapy so bad so many times.

The one non-canon ship I most think should have been canon if the writers had dared to because it would’ve actually worked really well is the O’Brien polycule. Miles and Keiko clearly care about each other a lot yet have kind of an unstable relationship as it is, but every time they bring a third person into it, it seems to help significantly. They should stay married but Miles should also date Julian and Keiko should also date Kira who is also dating Odo. I think this would eliminate like 90% of drama in these characters’ relationships and generally improve station morale.

Julian and Garak was fun when I was watching the show and discussing it with friends, I guess I would’ve liked to see it in the show if it was handled well because they have an interesting dynamic and it would’ve presumably put an end to the parade of really insufferable “Julian has a crush... on DAX and/or a GIRL WE NEVER SAW BEFORE” events, but at this point I have seen way too many out of character incorrect quotes posts about it clogging the tag and so now I’m kind of tired of it. I get the appeal but let’s post about something else sometimes. Alternatively, let’s make posts about the ship that incorporate the characters’ actual personalities even a little bit. Either is fine.

Quark and Odo should NOT date because Odo would not treat Quark right and Quark would not treat anyone right. Quark wants a relationship so bad but I think he is just way too much of an asshole to everyone he cares about and should be banned from romance forever, sorry Quark. However, and this is crucial, the ship is such an incredible comedy setup that I am still generally happy to see posts about it anyway. “Quark and Odo try dating but they are really bad at it and have a nasty breakup” would also have been a viable episode plot and a fantastic addition to the “Quark fucks up an attempt at romance really bad” episode collection.

Sisko and Dukat is a terrible ship if it’s requited, because Sisko not only deserves better than that but also has too much of a moral backbone to ever even consider dating a person who sucks as bad as Dukat does. HOWEVER, it is funny when people write Dukat as having just an absolutely doomed and miserable one-sided crush on Sisko, who just straight up hates him and has no positive feelings towards him at all. And honestly? Considering what we know about Cardassian flirting and what we know about the horrendous way Dukat treats women he canonically has massive unrequited crushes on, you could make a good argument that "Dukat has a massive unrequited crush on Sisko and is handling it so badly and that’s at least partially why he did this” is a valid read of several of his actions in the show.

I have no real interest in a ship between Jake and Ziyal for its own sake; it’s been boring in every way I’ve seen it presented even though one could in theory do interesting things with it. HOWEVER since the writers were so determined to introduce weird fucking horrible to watch romance subplots for these characters (all of which were thankfully brief, but like, still awful), I think it would’ve improved the show if they were in a relationship simply by virtue of the fact that they were around the same age.

[kevindayscrown]

The one where Kevin Day falls in love with an ice hockey player.

Part 12

Hope

Anything included in this head canon takes place the semester after the Foxes won the championship against the Ravens.

Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about varsity teams in the United States so excuse any false information. Head over to the directory to find the previous parts.

To say Eric’s parents were confused when they saw Kevin standing on their porch was an understatement.

Kevin waited impatiently, but he had enough composure to not start fiddling. Instead, he stood almost still, and when the door opened, he fixed his posture and flashed one of his press smiles at the couple.

Jiang Wei and Hien stood at the other side of the door, watching Kevin with a questioning look for a moment before that look turned into a welcoming one.

If he would admit that he’d paid such great attention to detail, he would say that Eric had definitely taken after his mother. The woman gave Kevin a warm smile that matched her son’s and her eyes lit up the same way Eric’s did.

 “Kevin Day, right?” There was a heavy accent lacing her words, but they were still clear enough for Kevin to understand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

That seemed to cause Kevin’s façade to falter for a moment. Judging by the almost affectionate welcome he received so far he could assume that Eric had perhaps spared his parents the uglier details of their former relationship.

“Eric has told us a lot about you,” the man said and Kevin offered yet another small smile.

“All good things I hope.”

His comment was dismissed with a laugh, as a small joke, but Kevin genuinely hoped that Eric hadn’t told his parents about their fight.

If he hadn’t, then had he told them about the sides of Kevin only he had seen?

“Is Eric here?” He eventually wondered when he was invited inside. He was immediately asked whether he wanted something to drink, and despite Eric’s mother's persistence, Kevin settled for a glass of water as he sat down on the couch.

“Thank you, Mrs. Jiang,” he said as he reached for the glass. She smiled warmly at him and shook her head.

“No need to thank me. Make yourself at home. Eric is out with a friend, but I’m sure they won’t be long.”

Kevin ended up spending about an hour getting to know Eric’s parents. They were kind and welcoming, talking to Kevin as if they knew him for years. It was no wonder that Eric had turned out the way he had. Kind, caring and empathetic, somehow easily seeing through Kevin and understanding him like no one else could. 

Without having meant to, Kevin ended up finding out a lot more about Eric than he’d originally planned, though he should have expected that, seeing as he’d come to his childhood home.

He saw photographs of when Eric was younger, skating and looking pretty much unrecognizable; he’d been much smaller and scrawny as a child. He was briefed about his childhood friend Riley, with whom Eric had apparently gone out. He learned about how Eric had always been a quiet kid, but without losing his voice.

Hien said that’s what made him a good leader. Kevin found himself agreeing, having seen Eric coordinate his team on the ice.

Eventually, they heard the door open, and Kevin suddenly felt himself becoming nervous and jittery, clenching his hand to keep himself from fidgeting.

There were words exchanged in a language Kevin couldn’t understand, but he could still recognize Eric’s voice. When he turned his head to the hallway, he spotted Eric, standing beside the person Kevin could assume was Riley.

“D- Kevin?” Eric asked, correcting himself quickly and sounding rather surprised and confused by Kevin’s presence.

Kevin stood up and caught himself thinking back to the day he had gone to Eric’s dorm to talk to him about Ichirou’s plan and to apologize.

The irony was not lost to him.  

“Kevin Day?! Holy-,” Eric’s friend started but when Eric glared their way, they stopped and coughed, though it was obvious they were bubbling with energy.

“Could we get some privacy?” Kevin asked almost sternly. Despite needing to resolve this as quickly as possible, he refused to show any kind of vulnerability or desperation, especially not in front of all these strangers.

“Sure,” Eric said and glanced at his parents for a moment. They only gave him an encouraging smile as Eric and Kevin turned around and headed up the stairs, to where Kevin guessed Eric’s room was.

Of course, the room was covered with posters of famous ice hockey players, some long retired by now, and there was a shelf with trophies on the wall, above a small desk.

Kevin took everything in, every small detail that could tell him more about Eric. There were a few books here and there, but most bookshelves were occupied by comic books.

“Did you come all the way here to admire my collection?” Eric eventually asked as he leaned against the desk, arms crossed in front of his chest. Of course, Kevin was getting nervous all over again, though he had enough self-restraint to keep his composure.

“No. That’s not what I came here for,” he said as he pulled the door close, being paranoid about anyone overhearing their conversation. “You didn’t tell your parents it was a setup.”

It wasn’t a question. It was more of an observation.

“No? Why would I do that? I would have to explain… background stuff. That’s not something for me to share with the world.”

Kevin didn’t fully understand that, so he said, “You could have told them after the winter banquet though. Explain why we-,” he stopped for a moment before saying, “broke up.”

Eric shrugged. “I didn’t think all hope was lost yet.”

Kevin felt a lump forming in his throat that he had to swallow down.

“Neil talked to you.” Another observation.

“That he did.” Eric looked smug at that. “He said that you can be very stubborn. That you need your time.”

Kevin supposed that was right, but he would still have Neil run laps for good measure.

“I thought about it.”

That made Eric tense slightly and stand straighter from where he was slumping against the desk.

“There’s a lot,” he continued, “that I need to sort out.” It was the first time he was probably admitting that aloud to himself. “But I made a mistake.”

That really seemed to surprise Eric. Kevin couldn’t blame him. When was the last time he’d ever admitted to making a mistake? Kevin had made lots of them, but he rarely looked back.

“I tried to- I tried to look past whatever I felt for you.” Somehow, even when confessing his actual feelings, he was still held back, his whole body tense. “I can’t do this anymore. I physically can’t,” he said as he pressed his hand to his own chest. “I’m fucking tired.”

Eric did not respond for a long moment. Kevin was almost worried he’d gotten past the point of no return, that Eric had actually lost hope, but suddenly Eric was coming for him like he had when he’d body checked him on the ice.

But this time, instead of knocking him back against the wall to yell at him, Eric pushed him against the door with a loud thud and pressed his lips hard against Kevin’s.

Kevin was too shocked to respond immediately, but eventually let himself go limp as he kissed him back, his arms wrapping around his neck and pulling him closer.

This time was different compared to their kiss in the attic. They weren’t lying to themselves with stupid excuses. Kevin felt himself become even lighter as if a hundred knots in his chest loosened.

There was something freeing about being able to make a choice.

“Eric, Kevin?” Hien asked from the other side. “I hope you boys aren’t fighting.”

Kevin and Eric stared at each other for a moment, chests rising and falling. Eric chuckled softly and pressed his forehead against the wall, by Kevin’s head. Kevin closed his eyes for a moment, arms still around Eric.

“No ma. We aren’t fighting. We’ll be downstairs in a moment,” he said. When they heard the sound of footsteps become faint, Eric leaned in again and kissed him again.

“You are full of surprises, aren’t you, Day?” He whispered against his lips.

Kevin said nothing and simply pulled him in for another kiss.

There was still a lot they needed to figure out – Kevin specifically. He’d barely scratched the surface of his own emotions; he’d barely started accepting the reality of everything.

Eric wasn’t going to be the solution to his problems, but Kevin was glad he wouldn’t have to do this alone. He had Eric, he had Wymack, and in a way, he had the foxes too.

He wasn’t alone.

[acesydneysage]

A Sydney and Eddie retrospective

@vablappreciationweek Favorite familial relationship: The Melrose Twins

Part 2, Books 4-6: The Heartbreaking Trilogy, Why Are You Doing This To Me This Is So Sad

Part 1 here

In The Fiery Heart, Sydney and Eddie definitely already love each othe like siblings. By the end of the book they prove that in the most painful way possible, but let's ge through some cuteness first while I steel my heart.

We get Adrian's perspective on this book, so it's nice to see Eddie talking about Sydney when she isn't around:

“Because it’s Sydney,”said Eddie from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, I could see an easy smile on his face, though there was a perpetual sharpness in his eyes as he scanned the world for danger. He and Neil had been trained by the guardians, the dhampir organization of badasses that protected the Moroi. “Giving one hundred percent to a task is slacking for her.”

When Sydney wants to soften Zoe's extreme opinions on vampires, she picks Eddie to be Zoe's driving instructor because she wants "someone approachable and friendly who’d show her not all dhampirs were evil creatures of the night."

When Sydney is being a sappy romantic and describes what love is to the group, Eddie is the one who lingers looking at her the longest, he can tell something is different about her. They really know each other by now. When Eddie let's Zoe drive outside of the parking lot, he knows Sydney so well that he knows what she's going to say, and what to say to make it better:

“I can’t believe Eddie of all people would do that. It’s irresponsible.”She nodded. “He said you’d say that and that I should tell you, ‘At least it wasn’t Angeline.’”I couldn’t help it. I laughed at that. “That’s true. He does have limits.”

Later when she tells Zoe frivolity might not be such a bad thing, they have a sweet little moment:

“Sometimes frivolity isn’t a bad thing.” Eddie, who didn’t seem put out about the dance, grinned. “Sydney, when we first met, I never would’ve thought those words could come out of your mouth. What happened to you?” Everything, I thought. I met his grin with one of my own. “We all need some fun. We should forget that dance and go out and see a movie that night. When was the last time we all did that?”“I think the answer is ‘never,’” said Jill.

When Neil comes up with his crazy plan to test the Stigoi vaccine, Eddie is very shaken up by the similarities to the event in Spokane that lead to Mason's death. While Sydney thinks that "if Eddie was involved, one Strigoi seemed feasible", what finally convinces Eddie to go is her magic. Although Neil puts her on the spot, she does ultimately make the choice to trust him with this dangerous knowledge about her:

Eddie wasn’t swayed, and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before. “I’m not denying the principles, but it’s too dangerous. And not just to you. I did something like this once . . .” A pain so intense that it tore at my heart crossed Eddie’s features. “Me and some friends. We thought we could take on Strigoi . . . and my best friend ended up dead. No matter how prepared you think you are, even against only one, the unexpected can happen.” [...] The more this got out, the more trouble I was in. And yet, as I looked into Eddie’s steady gaze, I was reminded of our friendship and all we’d been through. In a world of secrets and lies, there were few I could thoroughly trust anymore, but I knew then, without a doubt, that Eddie was one I could. Taking a deep breath, hoping I wasn’t being a fool, I held out my hand. A nervous glance around confirmed we were alone, and I brought forth a spark of fire in my palm that soon grew into the size of a tennis ball. Eddie leaned over and gasped, the orange flames reflecting off his face. “Maybe . . . maybe our odds have gotten better,” he said.

During the fight with the Strigoi they go after, we get a little more about their similarities, how they're both so dedicated to helping others, and they both seriously admire each other so much. You get a bit of that from Sydney's perspective,and how much she cares about Eddie:

I knew what agony Eddie had to be in because I shared it. We both wanted to help Neil. Doing nothing, even for a handful of seconds, went against every part of our beings. [...] For his part, Eddie was magnificent. It had been a while since I’d seen him fight, and I’d nearly forgotten that the adopted brother I joked and ate lunch with was a lethal warrior. [...] I had to act. I couldn’t just stand by and let Eddie be annihilated, not if there was anything I could do.

After the fight, Sydney is caught up in the euphoria of surviving a near death experience, and she makes pretty much zero effort to hide her relationship with Adrian from Eddie:

As soon as I was on the road with Eddie and Jill, I told them, “I need to see Adrian. Drop me off and take my car. He’ll give me a ride back.” Eddie looked totally surprised by that. “Why do you need to see him?” “I just do.” I didn’t feel like attempting an excuse, and Eddie wasn’t the type to badger me. The most I got was a curious look when we reached the apartment. His curiosity turned to panic when he realized I’d be leaving him alone with Jill. “Good luck,”I said as I got out, not entirely sure who needed it the most.

When Eddie figures out that they're together she tries to avoid the conversation, expecting condemnation, but he's very supportive. This is the last conversation they have before everything falls apart, and everything I tried to remove to shorten it felt like an important character moment, but the most relevant parts are bolded:

“Sydney . . .”Eddie’s light mood vanished, and even with my eyes on the road, his tone tipped me off that something serious was about to happen. “About that. About you going to Adrian’s . . .”I felt a tightening of my throat and couldn’t answer immediately. “Don’t talk about that,” I said. “Please.” “No, we need to.” Eddie knew. Eddie knew, and if the subject wasn’t so dire, I would’ve laughed. He was oblivious to his own social affairs, but guardians were trained to watch and observe. Eddie did that, and no doubt he’d picked up all sorts of little things between Adrian and me. We tried so hard to hide from the Alchemists, but hiding from our friends, who knew us and loved us, was impossible. “Are you going to lecture me?” I asked stiffly. “Tell me I’m breaking taboos that have been in place for centuries to preserve the purity of our races?” “What?” He was aghast. “No, of course not.” I dared a look. “What do you mean ‘of course not’?” “Sydney, I’m your friend. I’m his friend. I’d never judge you, and I’d certainly never condemn you.” “A lot of people think what we’re doing is wrong.” It felt strange and oddly relieving to acknowledge my relationship with Adrian to another person. “Well, I’m not one of them. If you guys want it . . . that’s your business.” “Everyone’s suddenly very liberal about this,” I said with wonder. “I just heard a similar thing from Trey and Angeline—about their own relationship, that is. Not about . . . other people’s.” “I think my ill-fated time with Angeline may be part of it,��� he said, with more humor than I expected, considering she’d cheated on him. “She talked enough about her people that after a while, it didn’t seem that weird. And, well, my race exists because humans and Moroi got together and had kids way back when.”I felt a smile start to grow on my lips. “Adrian says it wouldn’t be fair to the world if he and I had kids, what with the overwhelming power of our collective charm, brains, and good looks.” Eddie laughed outright, not something I heard very often, and I found myself laughing too. “Yeah, I can see him saying something like that. And that’s the thing, I think . . . the real reason I’m not that weirded out by you two. It goes against all sound logic, but somehow, you two together . . . it just works.” “‘Against all sound logic,’” I repeated. “Isn’t that the truth.” A little of his amusement faded. “But that’s not what worries me. Or the morality of it. It’s your own people I’m worried about. How long are you going to be able to go on like this?” I sighed as I took the exit for the meeting spot. “As long as the center holds.”

Eddie thinks Sydney and Adrian make sense. Obviously I agree that they absolutely do, but on a surface level it doesn't look like it. You have to know them and have a better understanding of their personalities to figure out how they actually fit together. What he's worried about is the Alchemists. Of course, by this point, since the ending of TFH is a sadistically drawn out torture, we already know from the ending of the last chapter that she's about to be captured.

I made it the door first... and found Eddie. His clothes were dirty and torn, and the right side of his face was swollen and red. There was a wild, half-crazed look in his eyes I’d never seen before. A feeling of dread settled over me, and the darkness and despair and fear that had left me alone for so long began to rear their collective ugly head. I knew, even without Eddie saying a word, what had to have happened. I knew because of that terrible look of pain on his face, a pain similar to when he hadn’t been able to save Mason. [...] “Adrian,” he gasped out. “I tried, I tried. There were too many. I couldn’t stop them.” He came forward and gripped my arm. “I tried, but they took her. It was a setup. I don’t know where she is. She tricked me, damn it! I never would have left her if she hadn’t tricked me!”

When they figure out it's a trap and he tells her to run, her first instinct was that she couldn't leave him behind. When they're running together through the woods the Alchemists start shooting at Eddie, specifically. He's running at Sydney's pace and she knows he would never leave her, the he would die to save her. And she knows she could not let him die.

Eddie won’t leave me, I thought frantically. He’ll never leave me. They want me, but they don’t care about him. He can live or die, and it won’t matter to them. But if he’s what’s keeping them away, they’ll shoot him and destroy his body. “Eddie,”I said, panting. “We need to split up.” “Never.” That answer wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was that out of all the things rattling around in my mind, Abe Mazur’s words popped up in the forefront:. Don’t think for an instant that I wouldn’t do terrible, unspeakable things if it could save someone I love. Because it was Abe, I’d naturally assumed he was talking about doing terrible, unspeakable things to other people. But as Eddie and I held on to each other, the words took on a whole different meaning. In that moment, I knew I would do anything to save Eddie—my friend—whom I loved. Even if it meant doing something terrible and unspeakable to myself.

The first thing established in the first paragraph of Bloodlines is that re-education is Sydney's greatest fear, literally her worst nightmare. But she faces that, she walks right back and turns herself in in order to keep Eddie safe. She tricks him into spliting up by claiming that it's part of a spell, and he believes her because he's seen her do extraordinary things.

“I tried,” he whispered. “Adrian, I tried. I never would have ever left her if I’d known. I would have stayed with her to the end. I would have laid down my life and—” I had to forcibly hit the pause button on my own feelings as I dealt with his. Eddie had lost another person. It was bad luck, that was all. He was one of the most badass , capable guardians out there, but he couldn’t believe that about himself, not when he kept seeing these failures laid at his feet. Looking into his eyes, I recognized the intense self-loathing consuming him. I knew the feeling well because I was carrying around a fair amount of it myself. “I know you would have,” I said. “There was nothing you could do.” He shook his head and stared off with a haunted look. “I was an idiot. I never should’ve bought into that spell stuff. After what I’d seen her do with fire, it just seemed so . . . well, real. I believed her. It made sense.” I smiled without humor. “Because that’s what she does. She’s trained to make people believe things. And outsmart them. You didn’t have a chance.” She also was willing to trade her own life to save her friend’s, but no one had trained her to do that. It was just something within her. Eddie wasn’t going to be swayed so easily, and I left him to his grief as I huddled with mine.

When Sydney's captured, Eddie feels like he failed her, just as he'd failed Mason in Spokane, and Jill when the rebels killed her. But still, he has faith in her, that she can hold on to herself:

“How much can they really change her, though?” asked Eddie. “I mean . . . she’s Sydney. She’ll be the same . . . right? She can fight them.”

In Silver Shadows,Sydney is in re-education, and she still finds it in her to be worried about her friends on the outside. Eddie's humiliation and guilt over having lost Sydney killed the kindling romance he had with Jill. There isn't much he can do to help find her at this point.

Once they find a lead on where she is, going to her rescue is very important to Eddie, but he also feels conflicted about leaving Jill with less protection. When the time comes, Jill convinces them to take Eddie because he needed to be part of her rescue, he'd been consumed by guilt this whole time, and that might be the only thing that would allow him to feel redeemed.

With some urging from Jill, he leaves her behind, and goes off to break into a prison again, to rescue a much worthier prisoner this time. After getting mostof the prisoners out, Eddie and Adrian go back into the burning building to get Sydney and the remaining people. After they bring her out to freedom, they have this moment where they hold each other and cry, it always makes me so emotional:

Eddie came last, and as we sized each other up, the tears hovering in my eyes finally spilled. “Eddie, I’m so sorry I lied to you that night.” He shook his head and pulled me to him. I heard tears choke up his voice. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry I wasn’t protection enough.” “Oh, Eddie,” I said, sniffling. “You’re the best protection. No one could have a better guardian than you. Or a better friend.”

I hope Eddie did feel redeemed, because Sydney pretty much immediately tricks him, and gives him the slip again. She does take the time to try to nudge his love life again first. Then she goes off with Adrian, going against the plan, because she thinks the other fugitives will be safer without her.

"Eddie shot me one last parting smile that nearly choked me up again." “I never thought I’d see Castile brought to tears,” said Adrian as he started up the Mustang. “This really hit him hard. Hell, it hit all of us hard, but he really beat himself up for it. He never forgave himself for you giving him the slip.” “Let’s hope he can,” I said, putting my seatbelt on. “Because it’s about to happen again. We aren’t meeting them at the safe house.”

Eddie was furious about this, but at least this time she didn't get captured. And soon enough he had something else to feel bad about, since Jill went missing right after he got back to her. She disppeared without a trace in the middle of the night, and there's another failure laid at Eddie's feet.

He's not in a great state in the beginning of The Ruby Circle:

Eddie appeared in the doorway. Seeing him almost always brought a smile to my face. In Palm Springs, we’d passed ourselves off as twins, sharing similar dark blond hair and brown eyes. But over time, he’d truly come to feel like a brother to me. I knew few others with such courage and loyalty. I was proud to call him my friend, and as such, it hurt me to see all the pain he felt over Jill’s disappearance. There was always a haunted look about him now, and sometimes I worried whether he was really taking care of himself. He hardly ever shaved anymore, and I had a feeling the only reason he bothered eating was so that he could keep training and stay in shape for when he located Jill’s abductors.

Sydney isn't doing all that great either, stuck in a hostile environment while she deals with her trauma and worries about Jill. When Sydney and Eddie sneak out of court to look for Jill, the power of Raptorbot can make him smile:

“It couldn’t have been that unexpected,” I argued. “I mean, why did he build a dinosaur body for her? Why not something more human? Or at least a more friendly animal?” “Because then there wouldn’t have been much of a movie,” said Eddie. “There’s still got to be a plausible backstory …” I said. A wry smile crossed Eddie’s features, and although the entire topic was absurd, I realized I’d hardly ever seen anything but a grim expression on his face since Jill had been taken. “I don’t think you can really sit down with a movie called Raptorbot Rampage and expect a plausible backstory,” he said. The attendant looked offended. “What are you suggesting? It was a fine piece of film. When the sequel comes out, people will be lined up out the doors to see this exhibit!” “Sequel?” Eddie and I asked in unison.

I love it when the twins talkin unison, even if they probably had opposite tones. And I really love Eddie being a fan of Raptorbot I'm sorry. He and Declan have matching Raptorbot pajamas, you can't change my mind. This is another exchange that screams siblings to me:

“We were probably his only customers today,” I remarked. “That’ll make us memorable—that and having someone who’s actually seen and liked Raptorbot Rampage.” “Hey,” warned Eddie. “Don’t judge until you’ve watched it.”

Later Sydney tries to tease him about it again, but he's focused on the search so his good humor doesn't come back. I think it's very sweet thet she saw something that had made him momentarily happy through the pain, and tried to press that button again.

Eddie is understandably very protective throughout this book. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, they actually run into Sydney's family, while they're trying to stay off the Alchemists' radar:

“Then get out of here. Hurry—before he comes out. Both of you.” I was stunned at this complete reversal in her behavior, but Eddie didn’t need to be told twice. He took hold of my arm and nearly dragged me to the car. “We’re going—now,” he ordered. I caught one last glimpse of Zoe before Eddie shoved me in the car, where Ms. Terwilliger sat waiting for us. A thousand emotions played over Zoe’s face as we peeled out, but I could only interpret a few. Sadness. Longing. As we quickly got back on the road, I found myself shaking. Eddie was driving and kept anxiously checking the rearview mirror. “No sign of pursuit,” he said. “She must not have been able to see which direction we went to tell him.” I slowly shook my head. “No … she didn’t tell him at all. She helped us.” “Sydney,” said Eddie, in a stern-but-trying-to-sound-kind voice, “she’s the one who turned you in the first time! The one who started that whole re-education nightmare.”

He doesn't really belive that Zoe had a change of heart, and he tries to be so gentle with Sydney, while anxiously trying to get her away.

With how sad he is in this TRC (he even has broody beard to show it), the bits where he gets excited about things are really adorable. He's very enthusiastic about meeting Malachi Wolfe:

“Are the Chihuahuas really trained to attack?” he asked. I couldn’t help but grin. “That’s what Wolfe claims. We’ve never seen them in action, though.” “I can’t wait to see his nunchucks.” “Do not touch them,” I warned. “Or any weapon, without permission. If he approves of you, he might lend you something too.” [...] “Oh, man,” breathed Eddie. “There really is a herd of them.” I’d seen Eddie fearlessly face down an attacking Strigoi, but he took an uneasy step back at the sound of the canine charge. I grinned and turned toward the door, waiting for Malachi Wolfe himself to answer.

There's a lot of hugging after Sydney leaves re-education. Sydney and Eddie hug a lot, but just in general. Good for her it's what she deserves. "“Eddie,” Sydney exclaimed, running to give him a hug. He grinned back. “You guys okay?” "

When Sydney and Eddie are preparing to infiltrate the Warriors of Light as recruits, she gets a super strength spell while he gets super excited about it, and they have the cutest arm wrestle in history:

“And how much stronger?” asked Eddie eagerly. “Like lift-up-a-car stronger?” Maude smiled. “Sorry to disappoint, but no. [...]” She glanced between Eddie and Sydney speculatively, her smile growing. “I’d say you’re strong enough to hold your own with a dhampir in an arm wrestling match.” “I would kind of love to see that,” I admitted. Eddie’s face said he would as well. Sydney groaned. “Really? That’s so barbaric.” Eddie leaned over and propped his arm up on the table that had previously held the canteen. “Come on, Mrs. Ivashkov. Let’s do this. Besides, if you’re squeamish about arm wrestling, how are you going to handle going head-to-head with the Warriors?” [...] Ultimately, Eddie pushed his strength to its limit and finally defeated her, but not without her holding her own for a while. I held up her arm triumphantly, like a victor at a boxing match. “My wife, ladies and gentlemen. Beauty, brains, and now brawn.” “Awesome,” said Eddie, in a rare moment of delight.

He's really excited about human magic in general, such an adorable nerd. And again, they really do admire each other so much. Following Sydney's blackmailing the Alchemists: "I hung up, and Eddie regarded me with awe. “That was pretty badass. But do you actually think it’ll work?”"

In the epilogue, Eddie pulled strings to live with Sydney and Adrian as a Guardian, and he's one of the people who's in on Declan's secret. He even chooses to sleepin Declan's room.

I sprinted out of the room and up the stairs, to the bedroom that doubled as both a nursery and Eddie’s room. I had high enough royal rank to finally be assigned my own guardian, and Eddie, in that noble way of his, had pulled strings to be assigned to us. I’d initially protested because I wanted him to stay at Court and have a semi-normal dating life with Jill. Eddie, however, felt obligated to be with us—both out of friendship to Sydney and me and for all the times Neil had helped him. We’d offered to turn the house’s small study into Eddie’s own bedroom, but he always ended up sleeping in Declan’s room anyway.

I'm really glad they didn't get separated by the end, it always makes me happy to think about them living together.

[hailing-stars]

@febuwhump day 25 car accident

turtle shells

summary

He set the karts up at the finish line, and frowned when Tony tried handing him a helmet.

“I’m Spider-Man,” said Peter. “I don’t need a helmet.”

“You do have a really thick skull, sure,” Tony told him. “But even your stubbornness isn’t enough to save you from a head injury.”

“That’s a low blow.”

“Truth hurts.”

OR

After Tony wins in Mario Kart, Peter decides they better have a real life race with go-karts to settle the score, with chaotic results.

It all started with a blizzard, and a Nintendo Switch.

The arctic blast that swept through the East Coast, and the snow that piled up as a result of the never thawing temperatures, trapped Peter inside the lake house. What was supposed to have been a weekend visit turned into a week-long visit, because Tony and May both didn’t want to risk him driving back into the city and getting stranded in the wintery nightmare.

So, Peter was stuck inside, and was forced to attend classes and do his schoolwork online, which took up considerably less time than going to school in person.

He spent most of the day bored out of his mind. That was where the Nintendo Switch had come in.

He had been laid out on the couch, under a thin blanket, with just the tips of his brown hair sticking out, when he let out a frustrated groan.

“This is so boring,” he complained.

The blanket got ripped off him, and Tony stared down at him. “Getting off the couch might help with that.”

“And do what?” asked Peter. “There’s nothing to do.”

“Why don’t you play some video games?” asked Tony. “Like a normal teenager?”

Before Peter could protest that he was even bored of video games, that was how long he’d been trapped inside, Tony was off collecting the Nintendo Switch controllers.

“Move your legs,” he ordered, when he got back to the couch.

Peter glared at him before he sat up and swung his legs off the couch, sinking his feet into the carpet. Tony threw a controller at him. It bounced off his arm and landed on the cushion.

“Hey,” said Peter. He rubbed his arm.

“Oh, stop. That didn’t hurt.”

“It’s the principle.” Peter picked up the controller. “What are we playing?”

“Mario Karts.”

“Mario Kart.”

“Yeah,” said Tony. “That’s what I said.”

“No you said -” He stopped, and shook his head, not understanding why old people bothered with video games if they were going to be so cringe about it. “Nevermind.”

Peter took control and breezed through the setup screen so he wouldn’t have to wait for Tony to figure it out. They picked their karts and their characters. Peter picked Toad, and Tony picked Peach, and then they were off to the tracks.

It started exactly how Peter expected it would. He was in the lead, and Tony struggled, or at least pretended to. Pretended because by the last half of the second lap Tony kept a pace that put him just barely behind Peter, and in the last half of the third Tony hit him with a shell and soared past the finish line, taking first place.

“How did you -” started Peter. It hit him. That Tony had just been pretending to be bad that whole just to catch him off guard and beat him at the last second. “You’re actually good?!?”

“I’m a stay at home dad, Pete,” said Tony. “What do you think Morgan and I do all day?”

“Pretty sure Pepper would disapprove,” muttered Peter.

“Relax, officer, we abide by screen time,” said Tony. He checked his watch. “Which reminds me, you have about forty-five minutes left. Just enough time for you to lose to your old man over and over again.”

“You’re the absolute worst,” he told him, on the count of suggesting he was young enough to still have screen time and the count of him having the audacity to be good at video games.

“Peter, I’m a literal tech genius,” said Tony. “And not to mention -”

“-savior of the universe I know. You mention it all the time, actually.”

Tony moved right past that criticism. “Just saying, how could you think I’d be bad at this? It’s my hometurf.”

“Whatever,” said Peter. “Let’s just start a new race.”

This time Peter was determined to win, and he figured, now that he understood Tony was a hassler and had to rely on petty tactics like turtle shells to win, he stood a better chance. Except he didn’t. Time and time again he came in second place, until Tony took a look at his watch and declared video game time was over.

“Go do your schoolwork,” said Tony, shutting off the system, despite Peter challenging him to one more game.

“I’m done with my schoolwork,” said Peter. “You’re just afraid you’re gonna lose.”

“Statistics aren’t on your side, bud,” said Tony. He put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Just admit that I’m better at Mario Karts.”

Peter shoved him away.

For the next couple of days, he let his slightly illogical and petty rage at being defeated in Mario Kart by someone who couldn’t remember to say the name correctly simmer into something creative.

He wandered into the garage with a brilliant idea. He’d build his own go-karts. He’d build two, with exactly the same specs, then he and Tony could have a real life race to see who was really the better racer.

*

By the time Peter finished his building and designing his karts, spring had arrived. The ground was soft with mud, and the air was warm in a way, but cold in others.

He set the karts up at the finish line, and frowned when Tony tried handing him a helmet.

“I’m Spider-Man,” said Peter. “I don’t need a helmet.”

“You do have a really thick skull, sure,” Tony told him. “But even your stubbornness isn’t enough to save you from a head injury.”

“That’s a low blow.”

“Truth hurts.” Tony shoved the helmel into his stomach, and Peter accepted it that time, though he didn’t plan on wearing it.

He got settled into the driver’s seat, appreciating his own handy work. The seat was comfortable and cozy.

He threw the helmet on the ground when Tony wasn’t looking. They waited for Morgan to wave the checkered flag Peter had picked up from the dollar store for this specific event, and once it was waved, Peter floored it.

He zoomed off, leaving Tony in his dust, where he belonged.

Peter was pretty confident he was going to win that time, up until he started to hear Tony behind him, getting closer and closer. He turned his head to gage his distance, but that turned out to be a big mistake.

His kart hit something that was on the ground, and jerked into another direction. The wrong direction. He hit a tree with enough force to fling him out of the cozy seat. He banged his head against the tree trunk, and fell first to his knees, then to his side.

Peter’s head hit the ground, and gave a muffled whine.

“Would I be a bad mentor if I said I told you so?” asked Tony, after pulling up and parking his go-kart.

“Yes,” said Peter, his face still in the dirt. “Technically you just did say it.” He wiggled around on the ground, hoping to find a comfortable position there, anything that might make the pounding ache in his head disappear.

“What’d you hit, anyway?”

“Don’t care.”

“Oh,” said Tony.

Peter looked over out of curiosity, but very much wished he hadn’t. Tony held up a now broken, giant plastic toy turtle shell. Nintendo was stamped across bits of the broken plastic, and it was a replica of the shells in the game.

“Guess these will always be your downfall.” Tony tossed the turtle shell inside of the wreck go-kart. “How bad is the pain, kid?”

“Bad enough that I’m still laying on the ground,” said Peter. “And not murdering that stupid toy.”

“To be fair your tires did a lot of damage to it.”

“I need to finish the job.”

Peter raised his hand, thinking he might muster enough energy to crawl over and at least chuck that thing into the lake, but the pain in his head blared. It pinned him to the ground. He groaned.

“Okay,” said Tony. He bent down and put a hand on his arm. “Let’s get you back to the house, Toad.”

*

Tony did most of the work walking back to the lake house. He helped Peter inside, and helped him to sit on the couch.

He made a few phone calls, and before Peter knew what was happening, a yellow portal appeared in the Stark’s living room. A confused looking Bruce Banner stepped out of it, and the ring of yellow disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

“You know, Tony,” said Bruce. “I’m pretty sure Strange is going to blacklist you if you keep abusing his wizard powers.”

“Abusing?” asked Tony. “This is an emergency. My kid hit his head.”

“He’s Spider-Man. He hits his head all the time,” said Bruce. “And Strange said you’re disrespecting the sanctity of the ancient arts.”

“Well I guess you’re gonna have to drive back to the compound, then,” said Tony. “You can take Peter’s go-kart. The one he wrecked, after so wisely refusing to wear a helmet.”

Bruce’s confusion turned to Peter. “You didn’t wear a helmet?”

“No lectures,” whined Peter. “Head hurts.”

Bruce sighed. He examined him, asking him questions and shining a light in his eyes.

“He’s probably got a concussion,” said Bruce. “But it looks like a mild one, so just keep him rested. No triggers, like screens. No phones. No TV or video games.”

“That’s perfectly fine with me, Dr. Banner,” said Peter. “Never playing video games again.”

“He’s dramatic,” said Tony. “And a sore loser.”

“Uh huh,” said Bruce, with caution.

He called Strange right away, probably wisely not wanting to get involved with an obvious Peter and Tony competition. Strange grumpily agreed to portal him back, and just like that, it was just the two of them once again.

“What can I do for you, kid?”

“Let me win at Mario Kart.

Tony laughed.

“I’m being serious,” muttered Peter, though it was only half true. “I need this.”

“Why?” Tony sat down on the armchair next to the couch.

“I dunno,” he said. His words were unguarded and way too honest. Peter blamed the concussion. “You’re just so good at everything. It’d be nice not to stand in your shadow.”

“Oh,” said Tony. “That’s easy. You’re better than the hero thing than I ever was -”

“-come on, Tony.”

“Seriously, kid, you understand people and they like you for it. And you’ve saved my life more than I’ve saved yours.”

“...What?”

“Yep,” said Tony. “There was the time with Squidward, the mission with those creatures that looked like trolls, that time on the boat…” Tony continued with his list, and Peter listened, shocked.

Maybe it was the concussion, but he’d forgotten about half of those instances.

“Okay,” said Peter, after Tony was finished with his list. He let his eyes slid shut. “You can have Mario Karts.”

“It’s Mario Kart.”

“I’m concussed,” said Peter. “What’s your excuse?”

“My parental right to troll my children whenever possible.”

“You’re the worst.”

“And I take pride in it. Now rest up, so we can redo our race with helmets this time, and I can beat you in real life as well.”

“Dream on,” said Peter, though he was the one about to fall asleep.

He started to drift off. He felt a blanket being tossed over him. Peter got lost in a dream where Mario Kart had an option to remove turtle shells from the game, and Morgan had learned to pick up her toys.

[sabrinajennings]

A Word About Character Development: Appearances

So this is a super hot button topic in which opinions are widely varied, and I'm actually kinda afraid to put my thoughts out there. So definitely don't think this post is meant to be dogmatic (btw NONE of my posts are meant to be dogmatic). I actually struggle really badly with writing characters physical appearances, so most of my opinion here comes as a reader.

1. Ditch the numbers: The only time I would ever describe someone by their height and weight would be to the police, and even then it would be their height and clothes size. I would never ever describe one of my friends to another using their size as a description and I hope they wouldn't describe me that way either. Yet for some reason I read descriptions like "She's 5'11", 125lbs" (btw that's probably an unhealthy weight for someone that tall). Reading a description from a friend (or love interest) that way sounds unrealistic.

It doesn't come off any better in the mirror either. How often do you stand before a full length mirror and think about your appearance in numbers?

Exceptions? If your character is especially tall or short their actual height may become relevant (I have an adult MC who is 4'11" and I have mentioned it.) otherwise words like tallish or on the petite side or average all work fine.

2. Instead try proportions: If you must describe your character's body (and you may find you can forgo such a description - l have found many of my favorite authors do) try proportions.

Examples:

'... Her skirt swirled around her ankles in the summer breeze; the vertical stripes drawing attention to her long legs.' (so it's not a great description - told you I struggle--but you get the idea and it is better, IMO, than 5'11", 125)

or "The western cut of the shirt accentuated his broad shoulders, drawing taut across them as he reached up to adjust his bolo tie."

3. Readers don't need full descriptions on page (or chapter, or even part) 1: I think this is a misconception that leads to the numbers and mirror descriptions. Authors seem to feel the reader needs to 'see' the character from the minute they are introduced when in reality what the character is doing is more interesting than what they look like. Plus readers tend to have pretty vivid imaginations so trust me, they aren't going to picture the character as a crash test dummy until you fill them in. If that's what your worried about, that the reader will picture your character differently than you do- well, I hate to say it, but you *might* have to loosen up on that idea a bit. I know you've spent hours plotting every contour of their face and memorized their scars and/or tattoos, and the way the sunlight glints off that one part of their hair, and the idea of anyone seeing them another way is anathema. But it'll be okay. If you work in some descriptive details here and there later the reader will adjust their idea gradually until it matches yours and it will be much more effective than an info dump on page 3.

4. (most) Readers aren't police sketch artists: Maybe I'm just really bad with art (okay no maybe- I'm hopeless at art) but when I read a description like: 'She had a heart shaped face with high cheekbones, a button nose, and hooded brown eyes framed by hundreds of tiny dredlocks...' I have no idea what this character looks like except for eye color and hair. This description may be perfectly clear to those of you who are artists, but I'm going to have to go to goolge images to try and figure it out. (actually I'm probably just going to imagine what I think they might look like my own way and go on). Once again I would never describe my friends like I was talking to the police.

5. Let them Smile: or frown actually. If you want to talk about their face tell me if their cheeks push their lower lids into a squint when they smile or how much their eyebrows close the upper lids when they frown. Describe dimples and scars. Let me know about nervous habits (do they bite their lip or tongue? Cross their eyes in frustration? Can they raise one eyebrow? (and which one or both independently)). These little things provide (to me at least) a much fuller picture than a description of shapes, and they make the character much more 3-dimensional.

6. Please not a clothes-horse: Wedding? Prom? Halloween? Actual superhero? Model actually during a fashion show? Okay then we probably need to know exactly what the character is wearing. Otherwise a vague (or nonexistent) description of their clothing will suffice. In a contemporary story this slows the pace too much, and in a historical work is slows the pace AND feels like you're trying to show off your research. Plus it makes the POV character feel a bit shallow to me if they are always talking about clothes. Tell me they have on jeans and a T-shirt (or their pj's, Or that they changed into their riding habit) and I'm good to go.

Exception: in addition to the above exceptions, if the characters clothing choices are a noted quirk (I have a character who basically collects pajamas), you should mention them, but a brief description will still get the point across. (example: the character I referred to previously will always be wearing a different pair of pajamas in a night scene, but I still don't go overboard with detail ('red plaid flannel', 'princess camo', 'mickey mouse'). The words on a graphic tee are another great example or a collection of eclectic color sneakers. If the outfit requires a multi-sentence description it needs to be a special outfit.

7. Furniture: Furniture descriptions are pretty rare, but I'm still going to mention it quickly. Basically everything I just said about clothes applies to home furnishings too. If you describe the trash can, it needs to be a really special trash can.

8. Building layout: Ooh this is a tough one. I struggle with this as a writer because I literally use like 2 basic blueprints in my head so if I'm not careful everyone's house comes out the same. Obviously you don't want that, but that's probably a rare problem. More commonly I see way too much detail and I get confused. Maps? They are a staple of certain sub genres but I'd rather not see them elsewhere. I would say most scenes are not dependent on the layout of the building so you can probably leave off the turn by turn tour. Action sequences seem most likely to require specific detail about the setup, and 1 method is to have 2 characters planning an attack which will involve going over the description of the building together. If that doesn't work you can have a single character assess the place in their head right before the information becomes relevant. A verbal blueprint in chapter 1 is probably going to be forgotten by the time we get to a fight scene in chapter 15.

But don't forget your characters are human too. (unless they aren't of course). So they might not remember the layout of a multi story building perfectly and realize only after they have made a mistake (oops we were having a major brawl over top of the jewelry store that has motion sensitive alarms and now the cops are here).

Personally I try not to describe any unnecessary rooms - even their location. If you tell me we are at a 3 story mansion, I will assume about 30 rooms even if you only describe 2. If you try to tell me where all 30 rooms are I will probably skip the description and review it if it becomes relevant.

Yikes that was a long post! Hope this helps someone!

[pandoriasbox]

Jade’s SSO Rambles - 3 Archaeology (Current System)

(Please keep in mind that these are my thoughts and opinions at the time of writing these rambles. I may change my mind in the future.)

Star Stable Online’s archaeology isn’t for everyone and that’s absolutely fine as it is a completely optional part of the game. However it does have a large impact on gameplay and not only because of Nic Stoneground and the AAE. It offers additional gameplay and a means of making shillings outside of the limited number of daily quests available. I also feel that if the game is expanded to include crafting that archaeology should play a large part in that and other future optional features. (I have some notes on ideas in the works that may link back to this but I won’t be covering anything in regards to potential future systems/mechanics and such in this particular post.)

Personally I love the idea of archaeology in SSO and I especially like how Epona’s archaeology functions. However the way the player is initially introduced to the archaeology system via Dino Valley feels incredibly outdated and I think it could be changed to better match Epona and improve the initial experience both to new players and the current digging experience for returning ones. I also have some notes on how Epona could be tweaked as well.

Also please note that there are technically minor spoilers in terms of Dino Valley/Epona and archaeology for those who haven’t unlocked these areas. (Nothing story wise though, just locations, names and game mechanics.)

Epona Praise

Epona has 4 collections and 4 areas you can find these items within. Each area is its own self contained section of Epona that doesn’t overlap with the others. This helps avoid confusion when hunting for specific collections and makes planning routes far simpler in my opinion. Each area has a “transition” between them such as the field and roads between Dews and the Marshes.

The layout of the dig sites and the general level design of each area is interesting to navigate without being excruciatingly frustrating. I do think that the Mirror Marshes and Shipwreck Shores could be improved (I will discuss this in my Epona suggestions) but once the player has established a route these are mostly negligible issues.

The available item pool from archaeology is relatively small and even with all the items filling your inventory stacked you still have 2-3 full inventory rows free. There are 4 collections with 4 items each, 4 junk items and 4 “interesting find” items. All of these make sense to find in Epona and the collections also give a hint to the history of Epona. In total if you had at least one of each item in your inventory it would take up 24 slots. I highly prefer the maximum of 4 junk items as this means I can repeatedly stack the junk to avoid taking up more space. I also greatly appreciate that only the tradable items can be pulled from golden dig sites and doesn’t include extra “valuable junk.”

While you can make a full run of Epona without having to stop and sell if you have 24 slots available the overall design of the region lends itself to doing so. There are two major areas you can go to for this, New Hillcrest and Crescent Moon Village both of which are located between major areas as transitions and optional pit stops in routes. Trailering is also really nice when it comes to planning routes as you can easily start at Wolf Hall Inn to begin with Dews or Crescent Moon Village to begin at Shipwreck Shores. There’s also the trailer at New Hillcrest for when you need closer access to Mirror Marshes or you want to turn in items for rewards to Chiron and Winterwell.

Overall I feel the pricing of the items picked up from Epona is pretty fair especially to end game players. At the levels where you unlock Epona there’s hardly anything the player is locked out of (besides due to reputation) and therefore the player often must pay the highest prices for apparel and tack. Epona gives end game players a means of grinding currency outside of the limited daily races and quests. For me personally I make most of my money off of Epona because I do work a full time job and I often only have time to run through the area on a semi daily basis to collect interesting finds and turn them in so I can sell the rewards for high shilling payouts. I think this is extremely fair for end game players and works perfectly with Epona’s archaeology. It is also optional and requires the player to hunt out each golden/interesting find dig spot across the entire map in order to earn it. Often meaning the player must plan a route and figure out how to navigate then adjust if they don’t run the full route. This also plays a huge part into why I personally love archaeology in the game as I adore more explorative features. (Such as hunting for stars, token photos and memories.)

Winterwell’s interesting find rewards I especially feel are well balanced both in how many you turn in as well as pricing. You have a chance of receiving higher priced items that could hit up to around 1,000-2,000 shillings or you can get something that is only worth 250-500 shillings. It’s a gamble and makes it so the player needs to keep hunting every day to find the interesting golden dig sites. I also greatly prefer the setup of having 2 single trade items and 2 double trade items. This means that the player has a 50/50 chance of getting something they can immediately turn in but also doesn’t clog up their inventory with 4 different items if you don’t find enough of each that day. In general Winterwell’s interesting find system and rewards feel far fairer and more interesting to me than Dino Valley’s.

I actually prefer the fact that after you get the Jones apparel the game won’t let you turn in items again to Chiron as it means I can simply chose to either skip or sell all of the excess items I receive from Epona. (I think if it were tack instead it should unlock the ability to buy additional ones after the first freebies.) I also really appreciate that both Chiron and Winterwell are within New Hillcrest and don’t require me to go outside of Epona or even the general area to turn everything in after I’m done.

Epona Suggestions

When Epona is updated I would love to see some adjustments made to the overall model/terrain and movement flow of the Mirror Marshes especially and to a lesser extent Shipwreck Shores.

The Mirror Marshes while it is supposed to be somewhat difficult to navigate should keep the actual digs arranged to allow for routing without too much trouble to players who are familiar with the area. I personally think adding more “underwater land bridges” would greatly help avoid water slow down (if this isn’t fixed in some other way.) There are some throughout the rivers and such where the player isn’t slowed down but I think some more mindful placing would be nice in terms of directions players will naturally move between dig spots. Or could do fallen logs if the collision isn’t difficult to path over. I would also avoid making dig spots that are extremely far out of the way. For example I have a problem with the current layout when it comes to the single dig spot over by the Moon Spring as there’s no natural reason to go in that direction.

Shipwreck Shores actually works fine as is since you can run through it with minimal getting stuck in the bigger holes thanks to the race course. However I feel it’s worth mentioning as the race course will likely get a change if the area does. Overall I like the idea of Shipwreck Shores being this location that may have once been underwater and now we’re moving over this jagged terrain that gave it its name. However I think the team can definitely adjust it so there’s less painful collision and getting stuck in holes while maintaining this feel and keeping a reasonable digging route.

For all areas of Epona (and Dino Valley) I think that the dig spots should be relatively in plain sight. Brush shouldn’t be mostly or partially covering them and placement should avoid having the spot in a very open area that makes it extremely difficult to find. It’s one thing where you go in a straight line between a few dig spots (like in the Mirror Marshes) but another to find those two dig spots in the red/pink dino bone area that are by the portal and tree amongst the dead brush/brambles. I’m not opposed to making it a little more difficult to spot in terms of a cursory glance, it’s fun to hunt down everything but it shouldn’t be difficult to spot when you know where to look. (Unlike the Dino ones I mentioned.)

There appears to be a bug with the coins received from Winterwell where sometimes they are called “Weird Object.” I might actually submit a bug report on this but thank you Cen for bringing this up.

Dino Valley Suggestions

Dino Valley in general I feel needs to be updated to match Epona as a bare minimum. A large part of the issues with it will likely have to be addressed with an entire update to the whole area. However I think the team should focus first on adjusting the item pools, payout and turning items in until they are able to do more with the entirety of Dino Valley.

Item pools should have their “junk” reduced down to 4 items max and should remain related to the valley’s history. I could see items such as dino eggs, used up kalter stone, ice crystal and broken pickaxes making sense. I would avoid using too many human tools or other items personally.

The golden “interesting find” sites need to have only the 4 tradable items available to be pulled from them instead of a chance of random higher paying junk. I would like to see the counts for trading these items match Epona’s 2 single and 2 double as I think this is better for inventory management and player interest/game feel. I’d also replace the tradable items with things that make more sense. At the very least I just don’t like having to turn in so many cellphones and action figures I dig out of the ice in a closed off valley that wouldn’t make sense to hold those. It’s really more of an immersion/lore nit pick.

Overall I think pricing should be adjusted for how much items in Dino are worth but this is something the team would need to decide the balance of based on the level the players who access Dino are at. Overall Dino doesn’t currently lend itself as well to regular archaeology like Epona does and I think that’s fine right now both as an early archaeology area as well as for grinding money for earlier leveled players. But I do think having it is a good boost for shillings grinding before players can access Epona. I would imagine most (non-end game) players who have access to Dino will be making a large amount of shillings from actual main/side quests instead of purely from world wide dailies like end game players do.

Small note on the dig sites I actually think the snow effect on them should be removed and the normal not gold interesting find ones should be more blue (like Epona’s) or otherwise made more noticeable for players. The current color scheme of Dino Valley makes it difficult to make the dig spots out against the ice/snow/rock that they are usually hidden against.

In general I would move many of the dig sites to more reasonable locations such as taking the ones off of the dangerous cliff side beside the elevator or in harder to reach (semi hidden is fine) areas such as the one you must fall down to get to the dig spot on the semi secret side path towards Icengate. If it’s possible to adjust the dig sites so they all have their own individual areas with transition points using the current appearance of the world that would be preferable but I wouldn’t expect it before a proper full terrain/area update. (The only area I think that works mostly well right now is the red/pink bone area. It could be tweaked a lot but I like how it’s sectioned off properly.)

I would like to see Professor Jura moved to Nic’s Camp so you can turn bones in right away in the same place as the interesting finds guy.

Update the Dino Valley dig site expression of “Nearby” vs “Close to” so it matches Epona’s. (Epona has it where nearby=junk, close to=collectable/tradable items.) Technically you could do the opposite and update Epona’s to match Dino since I guess Dino came first, it really doesn’t matter which as long as they match.

I made some notes in my Quality of Life UI rambles post as well, basically I would like to see it where when completing a dig there is no pop up pausing the player. It should do the items flying into your inventory and the shillings and rep you receive will float up and disappear much like after you turn in a race.

This may require a large inventory update/overhaul but I would like to see the game stacking items automatically in your inventory when you receive more than one of the same item. I’d also prefer this being implemented after we can remove items from a stack just in case.

I will have additional thoughts on the game’s archaeology system in the future and I plan on elaborating further on it in regards to potential new features as well as Dino Valley and Nic Stoneground. However I wanted to do a rambles post specifically about the current archaeology system and how I would like to see it upgraded before any new systems are introduced (or before updates to Nic’s quests and the terrain.) I also feel it’s important to point out how Epona has greatly improved not only the general archaeology experience but also the end game for players.

Again thank you for taking the time to read through this! If you have any thoughts of your own or questions feel free to reblog, reply or shoot me an ask!

[joecial-distancing]

2019 in review in review:

A few years ago I started tracking yearly goals, books read, movies watched etc in a year, along with overview blurbs, in private posts. End of 2019/beginning of 2020 I was really frazzled/burned out about a lot of stuff and just never finished up making the thing. 8 months later, got the urge to read back what I’d got done, then figured I’d maybe go ahead and see about finishing. 

Media tracking below the break. thoughts/blurbs written in 2020 italicized, 2019 not.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_____________________________~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Didn’t do so hot on explicit personal goals, but had a lot of stuff go ok around them this year.

School’s been fine/better than fine.

Job’s probably the biggest failing. Still with same job, haven’t made the firm moves to jump off, dragging my feet too much on exploring stuff w/ Columbia/NASA GISS.

Did not get better with covid, lol

Dating life still non-existent, but I’ve registered on apps, gotten more comfortable with selfies, improved general social life dramatically, been flirted with, updated my wardrobe, and generally started to get comfortable accepting that I’m a hot person.

Somehow got extremely better during covid.

Books

Grant (finished)

We stan a taurus legend

Guy was good at exactly one job, and was fortunate enough to have been in the right place/right time to get to do it.

Mort (discworld)

Definitely best discworld I’ve gotten to so far.

Don Quixote p. II

Really entertaining in a way that part 1 wasn’t; I was shocked how much the meta element landed for me.

Consider the Lobster (DFW collection)

had zero context on who DFW is/was when I read, and still don’t exactly tbh. Wanted to wait for a pause in The Discourse before diving into more of him, but dunno if I’m ever going to get that.

Crime and Punishment (revisited)

Weirdly didn’t get much more out of this than I did the first time I’d read it

Better Than Sex (HST Gonzo papers)

Xerox/widespread fax accessibility opening citizen access to mass media in a manner really reminiscent of what social media would go on to do at a much larger scale. Has a much more deliberate narrative arc than the other gonzo papers collections, also has that excellent HST richard nixon eulogy

The Brothers Karamazov

SPQR

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Didion collection)

Pet Sematary

Not my favorite King, but not bad

Sourcery (discworld)

still funny/charming, but Mort really made clear/reminded me how much the hapless sadsack Rincewind mold of protagonist wears on me after a while.

The Devil's Teeth

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Liked it a lot more once I realized it was doing a Fear and Loathing thing.

Homage to Catalonia

This should be the Orwell that gets taught in schools. Make it a followup to All Quiet on the Western Front or something, jeez.

Lyndon Johnson I

Having now finished all of them, this one’s probably the least-interesting but sets up a bunch of important context that the others still then feel the need to retread.

The Razor's Edge

Recommended to me as a “white guy discovers eastern mysticism” book, but also is more interesting in its treatment of that than I’d expected (helps it was written in the 40s). 

Cat's Cradle

There’s a part in this where Vonnegut’s making fun of people who try to bond with strangers over being Hoosiers, and my dumbass immediate thought was “ooh, Vonnegut’s a hoosier? Me too!”

Lyndon Johnson II

Robert Caro felt compelled to apologize for spending so much words lionizing Coke Stevens, segregationist opponent to Johnson’s senate run. His goal was pretty clearly to show lbj’s lack of campaign charisma by contrast, definitely definitely overcommitted in his own narrativising.

Libra

I want to go back to this after reading some more De Lillo.

Gravity's Rainbow

This book absolutely kicked my ass

Overstuffed and referential in a specific way that really keeps me hooked in instead of put off. When I learn about some piece of cultural context that I retroactively recognize as being referenced in this, I want to go back and reread the entire thing.

From Caligari to Hitler

Kind of fails both as film criticism and cultural analysis, but absolutely made me want to run for the hills when considering current relationship between mainstream movies and demands of pop culture.

I took a class on Weimar cinema in undergrad that I now realize was probably biting pretty heavily from this and never once referenced it.

Movies

Venom

Movie itself is not as fun as the Tom Hardy hype coverage. PG13 was the absolute worst space to aim for, PG- or R- versions of this could have been a blast.

Harryhauser Argonauts

Was tripping when I put this on, and it was all kinds of fun.

2001: a Space Oddyssey

First time seeing this, all-time classic for a reason!

A Good American (the NSA doc)

Dr. Strangelove

Mel Brooks History of the World p. I

Not my favorite Brooks, best joke was at the beginning.

In Bruges

Had been a while since I saw a proper dark comedy.

Spiderverse

Fukkin awesome!

Visually great, and extremely better than usual superhero stuff for being aimed at PG instead of PG-13.

You Only Live Twice

Highlander (Revisited)

I watched The Old Guard on netflix recently and it mostly just made me wish I was watching Highlander instead, because at least Highlander knows exactly how goofy it is

Moonraker

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Much like The Shining, I though this would have been 100% spoiled for me by cultural osmosis, but turns out it wasn’t, and even the scenes I had seen *totally landed* in-context still.

Kung Fu Hustle

Ichi the Killer

Really gross, really fun

Matrix Reloaded (watched thru highway scene) (Revisited)

The highway scene was not nearly as cool as I remembered it being.

John Wick 3*

Probably dumbest plot of all of them, best choreography. I like how every single fight had its own distinct flavor. “Knife museum fight” “horse fight” “halle berry dogs fight” 

Akira

A classic

Pet Sematary * (ugh, bad)

Why can’t john lithgow be in good movies anymore

The Revenant

MCU Spiderman

Fuck this was awful.

MCU Spiderman 2*

Really weird, complete Rorschach Test of a movie: it’d be totally valid to read into this that global warming is Fake News, for instance.

Lmao this was completely awful

Rites

Dredd (non-stallone)

oh hey Lena Headey’s in this

For All Mankind!

Watched in honor of moon landing anniversary

Lion King *

Watched it way too stoned, was like dark side of the moon + wizard of oz except instead it’s a lion king script reading + nature footage edited for lip syncing.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood *

Many scenes of very long setups for really stupid shaggy dog jokes, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I do kinda want to rewatch now knowing more about manson, which I knew pretty much nothing about beforehand

Blowout

A good john lithgow movie

also I think I like travolta in things.

Lord of War

A Good cage movie

I like when Eamon Walker shows up in stuff.

Taxi Driver

A classic

Snowpiercer

Watched in a bar with only one speaker working, which is the correct way to watch. Weirder and funnier than I thought it was going to be, which still doesn’t make it good, but,

dbz big green dub

Exorcist III

Brad Dourif just tearing it apart

Deep Red (argento)

Suspiria (1977)

Watched the remake in 2020, which was ok, but nothing tops the Goblin score.

Elf Bowling

Thanks, Gnome

Parasite *

Interesting to me that this one seems poised to hang around people’s good esteem for a while

TV

FMA: B

Rick & Morty

Saw some episodes, generally pretty funny, some misanthropy that’s probably appealing to a certain type of teen al a something like House, but ultimately I don’t totally Get the intensity of discourse about it.

Leterkenny

Mob Psycho 100

One Punch Man

Deadwood

Watchmen

Only watched like half of it. Was playing around with a lot of hefty imagery/thematics, but didn’t really seem ready to rise above playing (tho also I feel like it’s weird on some level to *expect* them to rise above that in the first place)

Music

New Avantasia

HEALTH/ show

lol remember concerts

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard/ show

Just learned about King Gizz in 2019 and got completely obsessed with them. I don’t tend to expand my music selection very readily, and a lot of what I currently *do* know is old/inactive stuff, so it was/is incredibly exciting to have an active group with good momentum just immediately win me over like that.

Mistimed the edibles and ended up with a really good finale and a really long subway ride home.

New Yeasayer

Sad they split up

Steve Wilson Tull remixes

Aqualung’s a good album and the sound mixing’s kinda bad, so I liked this project.

Stonefield

Opened for Gizzard. Really good as studying music

Video Games

Civ VI: Gathering Storm

Hades

Turns out Supergiant’s design proclivities all work *extremely well* on a roguelike

Baba is You

Untitled Goose Game

Cute, if maybe a bit overhyped

finally fucking finished Pillars of Eternity

Had fun with it, but too long, and really dour for how long it is.

Pillars II

Kinda drifted off it eventually, but I do genuinely like that the flavor of the fantasy is colonial era rather than medieval.

There’s a Balancing Bastard Factions element where it’s like the writers are just being smartasses after a while. Having to go extremely out of their way to make siding with colonizers seem like a competitive option.

Pokemon shield

Cuphead

pisses me off, which was a nice outlet when I was stranded by flight cancellations during thanksgiving

Celeste

Also very difficult, but really easy to stay patient with, which is nice.

Disco Elysium

None of the discourse made me want to play this, but people talking about the mechanical stuff it did got me extremely interested. Mostly Delivered IMO.

Breath of the Wild

You can approach the nodes of the main quest in the order you choose, and the second one I chose made ninjas start fucking spawning everywhere when I’m just trying to explore, and there’s no way to make it stop. May go back to it one day.

Podcasts

Relentless Picnic Patreon feed

The treats really helped me start distinguishing individual personalities, compared to the regular eps.

Picnic Discord!

<3

FatT Counterweight

Fun, but also I think Mechs are not my shit.

FatT Spring in Hieron/ end of that particular world

8 months since I’ve last tuned into FatT. ah well.

Law School

He’s in everythiiiing!

You Must Remember This: Manson family

*There’s* the context

Misc.

Kindle train guy

Times Square sleeping guy + kids taking selfies w/ him

toddler singing along after Psycho killer (a, ya, ya ya, ya)

drunk and dragged to a drag show

Central park football family

Soft Steel Drum Subway Busker

Weird old lady going to grand central for oysters

2018 in review (cards):

MySelf (CC)

Self: Tower

Blocked: 10 Cups

Ethereal/subconscious: 8 Swords

Material: 3 Swords

Past: Justice

Future: Page Wands

Attitude: Sun

External: King Swords

Hopes/Fears: 5 Coins

Trajectory: High Priestess

Also Self:

Hierophant

7 Cups

7 Coins

Blind Spot:

(self & others): 5 cups    ||    (others not self): High Priestess

(self not others): Moon   ||    (nobody): 3 Cups

[angryhausfrau-writes]

Something Old and Something New - Chapter 7: The 4077 Rides Again

It'd tookened his Ma a fair bit of convincing to get Radar to leave the farm and go to Dr. Winchester's wedding.

He'd'a still sent in the quilt square, of course. Cuz it means a lot to Max and to Hawkeye and to the rest of the MASH folks. And he don't like letting his friends down. But he really weren't sure about actually going to the wedding.

Partways cuz he ain't left home for further away than Patricia's hometown of Lancaster since he got back from Korea. And he knows – best he can, anyway, it ain't like he's got a feeling about it or nothin – that everything's gonna be ok while he's gone. Park Sung's more'n able to look after things for a weekend and the wedding's set between planting and harvest so there ain't much to be done around the place but rooting out weeds and looking after the animals. But still, Radar don't like leaving 'em in a lurch.

But the other part – which he don't really like thinking on, even though he'd been sure to tell Patricia and his Ma, just in case things went bad and they came home early – is that Dr. Winchester don't really like him all that much. Thinks Radar's too far beneath him to be worth considering. And Radar's used to being overlooked – he ain't the smartest or the handsomest or the best at anything, really. And plenty of the commissioned officers had been like that – rude and mean and thoughtless. But that don't mean it don't still hurt. And it don't mean he wants to spend a whole weekend getting looked down on like that by Dr. Winchester again.

Truth to tell, Radar'd been shocked to get an invitation at all – and written on the fanciest paper he's ever seen, with little flowers worked in it – nice enough to put in a picture frame and hang on the wall, and being used for writing on! But there'd been his name, wrote out in real pretty handwriting and under it a little note in the same writing saying how much Mrs. Dr. Winchester wanted to meet him.

But nothing from Dr. Winchester.

So it just feels like maybe he don't know Radar's coming, is all. And that maybe he and Patricia'll get there and Dr. Winchester'll be real mad and condescending and mean like he gets and they'll get throwed outta there.

Which would be too bad, cuz Radar's really looking forward to seeing all the folks from the 4077 who'll be there too – an it won't be everybody of course, cuz Dr. Winchester weren't there for the first half of the war, an he don't care for some of the folks from the 4077 even more than he don't care for Radar. But Hawkeye'll be there and Trapper and BJ and maybe even Max, who Radar's really missed – the one person who'd never ragged on him for being short or a kid or homesick or nothing. Though Dr. Winchester don't like Max any more than he'd liked Radar, so it ain't likely.

But his Ma'd just said “nothing ventured means nothing gained” in response to Radar's worries. And that's true enough. He wouldn't be where he is with Patricia if'n he hadn't'a talked to her that day in Kimpo and then wrote to her once he got back home. And he wouldn't have Park Soon's help here at the farm if'n he hadn't'a wrote to Hawkeye about the farm – and then told the truth of the matter when they'd found him out in his lies. And he could'a saved a whole mess of time if'n he'd'a just wrote the truth in the first place – been honest with his friends from the start, even though it'd been embarrassing to admit he were struggling.

His Ma'd been right, of course, so he and Patrica'd headed up to Ottumwa and got the bus out East. And that'd been all right, as things go. It's a good thing he and Patricia like seeing a lot of each other, though, boy, cuz it'd tookened near to a whole day to get where they were going – and the bus'd broke down once and it was almost like being back on an army transport – minus being shelled.

But now they're in Boston in the lobby of a real fancy hotel – the kind of place Radar ain't sure they ain't gonna get kicked outta, invitation or no. He feels like a real rube, standing there rubbernecking at all the gold and fancy chandeliers and all the folks dressed up real nice just to set in the lobby. But then he sees Max and Soon Li up by the check-in desk and when he comes up to 'em, Max smiles real big and hugs Radar and starts shooting the breeze like it ain't been no time at all since they'd seen each other. And Radar figures things oughtta work out all right after all. And he is really looking forward to seeing the rest of his friends from Korea.

--

Trapper and Hawkeye and all their house-guests cram into a cab over to Back Bay and the poncy hotel Charles's wedding reception is at. And they're a little early – mostly so the ladies have time to change into the fancy duds called for in the dress code – and ain't that a kicker, having a little printed card of what you can and can't wear included in the invitation instead of just saying to dress nice or whatever. But maybe that's normal for posh weddings, Trapper wouldn't know. All he knows is that he's glad the guys' instructions just say black tie.

At any rate, it's good they get there early cuz there's a little bit of a SNAFU when they try to check in cuz the concierge don't wanna accept their invitations as legitimate at first. But Margaret strong arms him into letting them in with the power of righteous indignation and the threat of a shiner. So they collect their keys and split off to their rooms – well, Sidney and Steve and Millie do, he and Hawkeye and the gals don't gotta split very far. Since ostensibly Hawkeye's taking Margaret to this shindig and Trapper's bringing Kat they've got a suite made up of a couple bedrooms, a bathroom, and even a little living room to divide up how they want.

“Charles must not have wanted to make any assumptions about the sleeping arrangements,” Hawkeye says lightly. “Either that or Marjory set all this up.”

“It could have been Charles, I suppose.” Margaret sounds pretty doubtful, though. “I mean, he can be surprisingly tactful sometimes. Though I doubt he knows the truth of the situation – he's probably just concerned about how it would look having unmarried couples sneaking into each others' rooms.”

The concierge had very pointedly informed Steve and Millie that they were in a room with two twin beds – not that that's much of a deterrent, in Trapper's experience. After you've fucked in an army cot, a twin bed is positively roomy. And Charles or Marjory or whoever set this up probably knows that. But it's all gotta look right on paper - hence their little setup.

“Yeah,” adds Kat. “We wouldn't want to give any of those little old rich ladies the impression that people have sex for fun.”

“Heaven forbid,” Trapper says in his best impression of his pearl clutching former mother-in-law.

“Fortunately for Charles's reputation as a pillar of Boston high society, my days of sneaking into the nurses' tent are long over.” Hawkeye gives Trapper an unbearably smarmy look and Trapper chucks one of the stupid little throw pillows at him.

Margaret and Kat roll their eyes at them and leave the line of fire to finish getting ready. Hawkeye and Trapper grin at each other – they've just been given implicit permission to fuck around like dumb kids for a while and they're gonna take full advantage of it. It might be the last chance at fun for the whole night, given what a wedding reception run by the illustrious Winchester family is bound to be like.

But before they can start an all out pillow fight, there's a knock at the door.

“Max! Soon Li!” Hawkeye exclaims, tearing the door open. “What brings you to our humble abode?”

“I come bearing gifts – or one gift specifically. I figured everyone'd wanna put their cards in with the quilt before we put it on the gift table. And I heard a rumor you got all this extra real estate, so I figured you wouldn't mind hosting.” Max looks around as she sets the quilt – wrapped in hideously gaudy wrapping paper – on the side table. “Radar wasn't kidding about your hotel room being palatial. I'm pretty sure it's bigger than my whole fucking apartment.”

“Just one of the many perks of having rich friends and a socially unacceptable relationship,” Hawkeye says glibly. “But we're happy to babysit the quilt – it'll give us a chance to catch up with everyone as they wander through. I'm assuming you and Radar told everyone else where to find us.”

“Speaking of catching up,” Trapper interjects as he goes from formally introducing himself to Soon Li to greeting Max - more interested in giving her a great big hug than the inner workings of all things Radar. “It's real nice seeing you again, Max,” he says into the top of her head – and then he pulls back and gives her a once over, “Kinda weird seeing you in men's civvies, though.”

Soon Li nods. “Men's clothes are so ugly. Like a flour sack.”

“To be fair, this looks like some quality tailoring. Just not the Max Klinger I remember.”

Trapper walks around her, taking in all the angles, seeming bemused. And that's right. Trapper wasn't there for the end of the war when Max had started wearing army issue fatigues and men's clothing. Partly it was trying to live up to the new rank and new responsibilities – people just tended to trust her more in “normal” clothing – and she was willing to sacrifice to make sure the 4077 ran smoothly. And partly it was the blue discharges being handed out like candy as part of Eisenhower's campaign bid. Why exactly the folks at home cared about that over things like being able to pay the bills and put food on the table, she still doesn't know.

But Max wanted out on a psycho – the respectable way – and not a blue discharge. So the uniform and the wacky costumes had replaced the Klinger collection. At least on the surface.

Max laughs. “Don't worry, I'm wearing a delightful little seafoam camisole and panty set underneath. Still the Max Klinger you know and love.”

“Oh yeah?” And now Trapper's looming behind Max, hands on her hips, tall and broad and full of the flirtatious intensity she remembers from Korea.

The kind of flirtation that says “I'm only joking - unless you're interested, and then I'm completely serious.” The kind of flirtation you had to use for situations like these. But it's also the kind of flirtation that won't be upset at Max's refusal.

So she just turns and pushes Trapper away playfully. “Stop it you lech. I'm a married woman now.”

“And Soon Li's one hell of a lucky gal,” is Trapper's easy response. And he winks at her across the room. So his complete inability to get jealous hasn't changed from Korea – good to know.

“Flattery won't get you a private fashion show,” Max teases. “But it may get you a discount on any future lingerie purchases.” She turns to Hawkeye, who'd been watching all this unfold with a sort of amused fondness. “Maybe something in powder blue lace?” It would look lovely against his skin tone and really bring out his eyes.

“Fuck.” Trapper sounds like he's been punched in the gut and had all the air knocked out of him. “You don't play fair at all, Max.”

She pats Trapper's cheek in gentle mockery. “I never have – and I don't see any reason to start now. Besides, someone has to keep my new tailoring business afloat.”

“Yes, Max, you must keep me in the station to which I've become accustomed,” Soon Li says with a laugh.

Trapper slaps Max on the back. “Good thing you make the big bucks, then, huh?”

“It's got to be lucrative, being Toledo's only Mob affiliated tailor,” Hawkeye jokes. Which may or may not actually be true, Max doesn't know.

She winks at him. “Watch out. You're consorting with a known criminal.”

“Better to be in bed with the mob than the cops,” Trapper says with a shrug. “At least their quota's just in dollars not arrested degenerates.”

“It's true,” Max says with a slightly bitter laugh.

Cuz it is. Uncle Habib's Mob affiliation is the reason Max is in business at all – bribes and the threat of Mob retaliation keeps the cops from looking too close. And as long as Max provides a veneer of honest commerce to the operation, the Mob doesn't look at her clients – or herself - too close either.

“Allah be praised for good old fashioned back-alley enterprise.”

“And naked greed,” Trapper adds.

“I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at nudity being your conversation topic of choice,” Sidney says as he and Father Mulcahy join the rapidly growing little party in their hotel room.

“Padre!” Hawkeye rushes up to him and kisses him exuberantly on the cheek. “It's been forever since we've seen you – what gives? You get sick of poker?”

“I hope not,” Trapper interjects. “I'm pretty sure a game'll break out at some point tonight.”

“And since you're here, we'll be able to write off our losses as a charitable donation to the orphan's fund,” Hawkeye adds with a laugh.

After a beat, the Padre laughs as well. “Don't you worry, I brought along a deck of cards and a collection plate. Though I've been doing more work with Deaf youths than orphans, now.”

Hawkeye and Trapper both seem to notice the pause – and they have some sort of silent conversation about it if the subtle facial expressions and hand gestures are any indication.

Francis touches the stem of his hearing aides. And his friends must have noticed these as well – they are certainly obtrusive. He knows Sidney has. Though he hasn't said anything, just making sure to enunciate clearly and speak facing Francis.

Or perhaps the hearing aids just feel large and clunky and obvious. He's still getting used to wearing them, after all. And they don't quite feel natural yet the way his glasses do.

He'd had surgery after coming back from Korea – promised as a miracle cure for his type of hearing damage. Apparently shelling had done a number on many young men and doctors were scrambling to find a way to reverse the damage. And Francis has seen his fair share of miracles in Korea, particularly of the medical variety, so he'd agreed to undergo the procedure at the prompting of the Philadelphia diocese, who were eager to have him go back to his old role of hearing confessions and leading youth group at the local Catholic Youth Center – both of which required he be able to, well, hear.

But the Lord often works in mysterious ways, as he'd kept telling himself during the worst of the Korean war. So when the surgery didn't work, it was obvious to Francis that he is meant to be deaf. And when they'd offered to try again with a second operation, he'd told them not to bother and spent the time recovering from surgery by learning sign language. Which is good because the healing scars behind his ears had prevented him from wearing hearing aids for several weeks and even now the aids are uncomfortable enough that he doesn't wear them all the time. Plus, they don't really restore all of his hearing – he still mostly depends on being able to read lips. And his friends obviously noticed that fact.

But all Hawkeye says is, “Certainly a noble cause – and one I'm more than happy to donate my disposable income towards.”

And he says all this while signing along.

“Where did you learn that?” Francis blurts out. No one other than BJ knew he was deaf – and he'd promised not to tell anyone.

And Trapper and Max and Sidney look just as surprised as he is. So it can't have been BJ spilling the proverbial beans.

Hawkeye shrugs. “My grandpa taught me. All the old fishermen used to use sign language on the lobster boats – easier than trying to yell at one another over a storm. And apparently it got to be common enough that everyone around town used it. Up until Alexander Graham Bell showed up and convinced everyone it would encourage Deaf people to have families together and lead to a decay in the moral fabric of America, anyway.”

“Good thing you've never cared about decaying moral fabric,” Trapper says with a sly smile.

And Max chimes in with, “Sounds to me like he probably just wanted to sell more telephones. What a scam artist.”

And then they're all laughing and joking around like they used to, with Francis right there in the middle of it. It feels like no time at all has passed – like Francis is still in Korea and it's terrible and wonderful and it feels like home the way the Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up and came back to administer over used to feel like. And he sinks back into the feeling of friendship and belonging the same way he sinks into the plush sofa he'd been pushed into by Hawkeye. Who always did like taking care of his friends.

Friends who keep filtering in and out of the hotel room – stopping in to drop off their cards to go along with the quilt, or just to say hi, or to sit and chat a while. The room gets a little crowded and Francis feels slightly, well, pressed. And Hawkeye looks like he's getting a little claustrophobic. So when Margaret and Trapper's date emerge from one of the bedrooms, he makes is way over to where Hawkeye's standing with Colonel and Mrs. Potter and says, “I'm going down to the reception now,” just to gauge where Hawkeye's standing.

“You want me to come with you?” And Hawkeye seems very eager to be out of the overcrowded room. And he's always looking for a way to help others. Even when he won't admit to needing help himself.

So Francis nods. “If you don't mind acting as translator for a while tonight. My sister the Sister couldn't make it – and I'm afraid crowds make things more difficult.”

“Sure thing Padre.” Hawkeye throws an arm over Francis's shoulders, indicates to Trapper that he's leaving, and starts directing them out the door. “Though you should know I mostly used sign language to pass notes in class – so sorry if most of my vocabulary involves insulting algebra.”

Francis laughs – partly from Hawkeye's disclaimer and partly because he can vaguely hear Trapper telling everyone in the hotel room to get the hell out, he's not the one running the reception. So they – plus Margaret, once she's done saying her goodbyes to Trapper's date and some of the other nurses - lead something of a stampede down to the ballroom. But it's more spread out than things in the hotel room had been, so that's a blessing.

With the hotel room cleared out, Trapper does an inventory of all the cards they've accumulated in a towering stack next to the quilt.

“Looks like we're just missing BJ,” Max says from where she's looking over his elbow. “He always did have a kinda California attitude about showing up on time.” Unlike her, who, as a good daughter of the Midwest, always showed up at least fifteen minutes early to appointments.

Trapper checks his watch. “We've still got a bit before the shindig's supposed to officially start. And rich people like to be fashionably late anyway.” He turns to Kat. “But if you want to head down now, I figure Max can take it from here.”

Max throws herself at him like some heroine from a bad romance novel. “Trapper! How could you! I am but a poor and delicate maiden. This heavy gift is too much for my frail arms to bear. Please! Won't some strapping young man help me with this task?” She feels up his arms. “Preferably one with real big biceps.”

Trapper blushes – and part of it may be that everyone's laughing at Max's ridiculous statement – but part of it could be that Max is still sort of thrown over as much of him as she can reach. It would probably work better if she was in heels, to be honest. But it's not her fault he's so tall and she's in flats.

“C'mon, Max, quit trying to snow me. It ain't gonna work.” He's doing his best to keep an aloof expression, but Max can see where the cracks are starting to form. And she's always been good at applying pressure in just the right way to get what she wants. And Trapper's a pretty easy mark, anyway, since he genuinely likes her and all.

“But Trapper, Hawkeye got you to fight that one guy just by saying you had a cute body. Is that it? Do I gotta start complimenting you?” She bats her eyelashes coquettishly. “You're so strong, and handsome, and-”

“Ok, ok, cut it out. I'll deliver the damn gift. Just stop doing that.”

Terminal embarrassment works pretty good too, it turns out.

Max flounces over to Soon Li, secure in the knowledge that the quilt isn't her responsibility anymore. “C'mon, sweetheart, let's get outta here.” And then over her shoulder, “Thanks again for being such a good friend, Trapper!”

He flips her off, but she and Soon Li are free and clear, and Trapper will get over it. Eventually. She might owe him for a while – but it's worth it.

With just Kat and Sidney left, and it getting later and later, Trapper turns to them and says, “You guys may as well get out of here, too. There's no point in us all being late.”

Kat shrugs. “Sure, I'll let Sidney take over as my date. It's no skin off my teeth. But you forgot to pin me, Trap.” She points meaningfully to her lapel.

Trapper wiggles his eyebrows lecherously and goes to get the corsage.

“Violets?” Kat arches an eyebrow at Trapper as he pins it to her dress. “Real cute, McIntyre.”

“Hey, you just told me your dress was purple, is all.”

“Lavender, actually.” She grins.

“All right, now who's being cute?” Trapper asks teasingly.

 Kat just sticks her tongue out at him and things devolve into something of a scuffle. Sidney sits on the back of the couch, egging Kat on when she gets Trapper in a headlock – and that's when BJ decides to finally show up. She and Trapper step away from one another, coughing awkwardly, and try to straighten out their fancy clothes.

“I think that's our cue to leave,” Sidney says into the unbroken silence.

 BJ just stands there looking taken aback. And the woman who must be Peg looks like she's trying not to laugh. But it's probably better to hotfoot it out of there – so Kat readily takes Sidney's arm and they kind of edge past BJ and Peg and out the door.

“You here to put your card with the quilt?” Trapper asks when it becomes apparent that BJ isn't going to say anything or move from where he's still standing in the doorway.

 And that seems to spark him into action – which is good, cuz by now they're officially late to the reception. And since they hadn't been invited to the actual  wedding   wedding, just the reception, Trapper wants to make the most of it.

 Not that he's gonna complain about not having to sit through some endless protestant Mass just to watch his friends make out.

Fine, he's a little sad he didn't get to go. But the reception – if BJ ever hurries it up so he can get to it –oughtta be good, seeing as they're pretty much treating it as a 4077 reunion being held on the Winchester's dime. And there's a lot worse ways to spend a weekend. Like standing here in a hotel room while BJ fumbles through his pockets for a card that his wife has meanwhile pulled out of her purse.

And it don't look like things are gonna get any less awkward anytime soon. So Trapper grabs the present from the side table, with all the cards kinda piled on top. And Peg puts their card on the pile and then gently chivies her husband out the door so Trapper can lock up. And it's probably pretty rude to just leave them there in the hallway without waiting so they can all walk down to the reception together – but Trapper just wants this errand over with so he can go sit with his friends some more. And Peg and BJ seem to be having a moment together anyway, so he sets out alone.

He's gonna kill Max for leaving him to wrangle the gift without her.

[doom-dreaming]

The Sacred Flock: General Info and How To Join

I've been meaning to write this up for a while and I'm finally getting around to it. This is the definitive "about" guide for joining and writing in the Sacred Flock 'Verse, otherwise known as the Twins' Pet 'Verse or The Menagerie. It has a lot of names. So! Here are the answers to (mostly) all your questions!

1) What is the Sacred Flock 'Verse? You may have seen mentions of this around the Calypso corner of Tumblr and wondered what it was. It's a collaborative, relatively-open AU in which the Calypso Twins acquire and keep human pets as trophies and status symbols to reinforce their godhood.

If this sounds like something you might be into, click the readmore!

What this AU includes:

collars (bells and leashes optional)

branding

microchip tracking

cannibalism; Troy’s got monster mouth mods and Tyreen likes to get in on the action too, sometimes

What this AU does NOT include:

incest or pedophilia

marrying the twins

having children with the twins (both of them have had sterilization surgeries in this AU)

2) Sounds interesting, how would I join? There are two levels of involvement. The first level is simply contributing to the 'Verse! Suggest ideas, write something, interact with our posts, and you're in! Further down in this post I’ve listed some of the established canon of this ‘Verse, along with some tags you can explore to get a basic understanding of what you’d be working with.

The second level is our Discord server. To get into that, you must be:

at least 18 years of age

willing to remain active and contribute ideas to the 'Verse

at least semi-interested in the ongoing narrative

In addition, you should interact with our members (most of whom are listed below) outside of the server enough for us to get a feel for what you're like and how well you'd vibe with the rest of us. This includes submitting an RP "audition" to @clockworkrobotic (Kat) so they can meet your character. We don't have a lot of hard-set rules about characters, but the main thing we ask is that they be canon-compliant. Borderlands canon is pretty crazy, but think about the type of people the twins would want to have as pets and keep it realistic (no crazy powers, etc.)

The actual auditioning process involves a character interview and questionnaire that we set up, so if you're interested in auditioning, send a DM to me or Kat and we can provide more info about the setup of the server, aside from what’s written below.

3) The Discord server sounds cool, if I ended up in it, what could I expect? First and foremost, it is a kink server. Our focus is on pet kink and ownership and obedience. If you act up or get into a big enough argument with our twins, they will punish you accordingly. That's not to say you're not allowed to be soft and mushy and have fun, but we have lots of highly-specific channels for other flavors of twin-loving, so heed where everything should go and you'll be fine.

It is a private kink server and we ask that you be respectful of what people are choosing to share.

(Further note: our twins are played by real people and they really do their best to stick to canon characterization, which means they can be pretty villainous sometimes. Go figure. If you're very sensitive to discipline or the occasional sibling shouting match, the main RP may not be the best place for you. We want everyone to have fun and we know that tolerance levels and triggers vary from person to person. The twins will get mean because we (the mods) told them to be, given the understanding that this is a server about being owned by two fairly awful individuals.)

4) You still haven't scared me away yet! Is there any established Flock canon I need to include when I contribute? Yes! Our canon is constantly evolving, and the structure of the narrative outside of the server is quite a bit looser, but we do have established aspects for this AU. A good tag to check out (included at the end of this post) is '#flock worldbuilding.' Some main points include:

the twins' powers are a little tweaked. The leech ability is paired with a healing ability, and the twins can trade these powers back and forth at will

the twins and their pets (us) live in a large building known as the Holy Inner Compound, located near the Cathedral, so it's part of the same Dahl refinery, but the twins have renovated to make themselves some comfortable living quarters

in the center of the Holy Inner Compound is a huge garden. The twins discovered early-on that their healing was just as strong and just as reckless as their leeching, and a burst of siren energy created a beautiful tree that bears a strange fruit. The garden has grown ever since, housing all kinds of vegetables, fruits, and flowers both native and foreign. A pond of fresh water feeds small streams that meander throughout the garden. A good tag to look at is '#tsf: the oasis' (tagged below)

there is a conditioning process that new pets go through. It varies from pet to pet depending on personality and comfort level around the twins (they want you to trust them, ideally) and ends with a collaring ceremony, a public, live-streamed ritual that involves an official collaring and a reminder to the cultists that the Flock is to be treated with the same reverence as the Twin Gods

we focus heavily on the more religious potential of the COV, leaning into ritualism and ceremony; the twins are still streamers with huge personalities, we just ramp up the religious undertones the game didn’t really explore

we have a huge collection of animal pets (affectionately referred to as petpets) and if you want to see them, @glowydruglord did some adorable illustrations for us. Just check out the '#pet pets' tag on my blog to find them

I've started posting some supplementary material and will continue to do so for the next month or so. This includes:

maps of the compound (sketched floor plans and screenshots of my accurate-as-possible Sims build)

detailed information on the progression of the conditioning process

breakdowns of the different areas of the compound

overviews of the ceremonies and rituals used to induct new pets into the Flock

I think I covered the most important stuff, and you can check out the tags below (check them from inside my blog to get relevant results) to take a look at what this 'Verse has to offer. Most importantly, please interact with us if you want to be a part of this! We're all very friendly and me and @clockworkrobotic especially want to get to know the people who are contributing. We'll be happy to answer any questions or just chat!

Here are some of our most active members!

@afterthedreamer @bettersafethandicks @circiva @vialandmortar @cacklefrendly @vaulttouched @constantfantasymind

If you would like to interact with and contribute to this AU, please respect our guidelines. We have a wide range of personalities and preferences and we would ask that you be mindful of what that can entail. One person’s kink can be someone else’s trigger. If you have a question or concern, please ask us!

[erinptah]

The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.