#fitz inner shadows

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

⚠️Vote for whomever YOU DO NOT KNOW⚠️‼️

[when-wax-wings-melt]

Star star star tell me about your fics !!!

I'll talk about alira(taor) of course <3

specifically about numbness

now I couldve played into sun and moon but I didn't bc I think both Keefe and Fitz are a mixture of both. in that they're both blazing hot and desolate.

I mention this with tam too. that all of them have gone a little numb. it isn't a thing reserved for empaths (although it's sooo interesting that feeling too much leads to numbness but anyway) but for all of them in different ways.

Keefe is vibrant and full of feeling all the time. but he tries so hard to prevent his inner emotion from affecting him (esp in letting his father feel it) that he accidentally blocked out all of it. his heightened empathy overwhelmed him because he didn't understand how to feel it and function anyway. He's numb but in a way that keeps him feeling.

fitz is numb in a selfish way, because his feelings aren't enough to stop him from doing what he knows is right. he can justify anything and he will, and it comes off as numbness or apathy to everyone, including himself. of course he can kill alvar and not feel guilty about it: this is what matters. this is what is necessary. he's not actually numb-- he just thinks he must be

tam is numb in a selfless way. he gives bits of himself up for other people and doesn't keep enough to survive on. he lets the shadow cloak his true feelings, but when they escape they are not vibrant but poignant, lonely, isolating. he is numb because he does not know how not to be.

I tried to convey this in a few ways. Fitz and tam don't feel bad from killing. Keefe can't deal with his emotions. hopefully it came through <3 I wanted to make sure all the nuances of their feeling (or lack thereof) came through

[ot5ismyhome]

33. Destruction Breeds Creation

To read from beginning click here.

*****

Coulson looked at agents- remaining agents- in front of him. They all had the hollow frightened look in their eyes. If he was alone, he would have adorned the same look but he had seen and gone through a lot to know that the team is just the reflection of the leader. When he spoke up, his ever-playful chirpy voice filled the room.

“No Darkhold. Base gone. If anybody has ideas now would be the good time to say it.” 

“Me and Fitz have been looking up about Loki. The normal ways used to kill a vampire will not work on him” started Simmons.

“How fucked are we?” Hunter quipped.

“He is a vampire and a witch” Fitz replied with a tilt in his head. “Sunlight, Holy fire, Stake, I guess even beheading cannot stop that guy. So, I will say very much.”

“That explains his powers. I knew something was up with that guy” Mack said. 

Simmons cut through the banter bringing the focus on the research. “Sir, All the powers, every single thing we saw out there was witchcraft. Actually, he is a winter witch. His powers are more prominent in colder weather. According to the data Agent Romanoff provided earlier, he can bring winter anywhere.”

“He needed the Darkhold to cast permanent winter. If he succeeds, we can’t turn it back. Maybe the book would help us turn it back but it’s just a theory” Fitz said. He sighed and placed his hands on his hips.

“But there is one thing that could bring him down. The Stake of the First Vampire”

“Now, we just need to know where it is” Hunter said looking expectantly at Lincoln.

“I have no idea,” Lincoln shrugged. 

“I will contact Jiaying. Trip and Thompson evacuate the city. Hunter and Elena run ops.”

The agents nodded to their Director’s order and took off. 

“Sir, I need permission to bring my daughter back here,” Mack asked. When Coulson gave affirmation, he left with Trip and Thompson.

…..

The young man walked into the Gothite Industries. He was stopped by the security.

“Who do you want to see?”

“Oh yes. Mr. Malick. You could say I’m his family. Hail Legion.” Nathaniel said the last two words in the guard’s ears. The guard immediately stepped aside.

“Sorry sir. I didn’t know you were... But I have never seen you around.”

“This visit is long overdue.”

…..

“We came across five bloody massacres and we still haven’t covered Brooklyn.” 

Elena sighed. “We need to prepare for the upcoming battle.”

“Hey. You there. What are you doing here?” shouted a man grabbing the duo’s attention. They turned around to see a policeman. “Don’t you know you have to vacate the city?” he shouted. “Fuckers. Making my job difficult.”

Back in the jeep Elena’s mind was racing on what to do. “We need to do something,” she told Hunter.

The policeman shouted racial slur at a black teenage boy who just exited the nearby shop. The police neared the terrified boy.

“What have you got there?” sneered the man, taking his gun out. “You are stealing, aren’t you?” he threatened the kid.

The kid started stammering and dropped the things down. He lifted his arms above his head.

“No sir, I left some mone-”

The kid’s eyes widened in surprise. He didn’t finish his sentence as he saw a man sneak behind the harasser and sucker punch him. The policeman went down to the ground, unconscious. Hunter turned towards Elena and made an ‘okay’ gesture with his hand.

Hunter approached the kid. “Hey are you okay?” he asked, still keeping his eyes on the police.

“You punched him.” 

“Yeah, if I hadn’t, he would have shot you”

Elena making her way towards them. “What’s your name?” she added looking at the boy.

“Flint”

“Flint, the city is in great danger. We need you to get out as soon as possible. There is a bus five blocks away. We will drop you there.”

“No. I can’t leave my sister. She is handicapped. I need to take care of her.”

“Then let’s get your sister.”

…..

Mack went to collect his daughter. When he reached school, he saw that it was a total mess. All the parents and children were running around trying to find each other. Mack joined them desperate to find his daughter.

“Hope” he shouted. There was no response. He called her for her again and again. Finally, he heard a feeble voice answering back.

“Hope” he shouted again.

“Daddy” a little girl shouted from inside the classroom. She ran to him and he swept her in his arms. 

“Daddy, what’s happening?”

“A bad guy had taken over the city. We need to get out soon.”

“You always said we should always fight back. Also help others. Aren’t we going to do that?”

“First, I’m taking my little princess to safety”

As he reached the Quinjet, he placed Hope on the seat. “Be here. Daddy will be back.” He turned to Trip, “Can you watch her till I come back?”

…..

Gideon Malick was on the conference call with the higher ups in the government. He used them as puppets in his master plan. What he didn’t expect was Loki coming back. He needed to put an end to it. For the Legion to grow over here, he needed to have control over The Council. Had Loki not come back, the ATCU would have been a success.

Gideon heard a rapport knock on his door. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He signalled to Giyera to be on alert as a young man stepped inside. The blood drained from the businessman’s face. His eyes widened and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

“You weren’t expecting me, were you? I have always wanted to hunt you down. But Barnes and Wilson were also about letting it go. They don’t know the inner turmoil. They don’t know what you did to me” Nathaniel said pacing the big office. Giyera was on his guard ready to attack on his boss’ order. Gideon had lost the ability to speak as he looked at his so thought dead brother.

“Finally, my time has come. Anarchy is here. The Council would never understand that” Nathaniel stopped his pacing and glanced at his petrified brother. “Gideon, you trapped yourself in the Legion and the government, bound by their history, rules, hierarchy” he spat the last word.  “You go around saying ‘Hail Legion’ and ‘God bless America.’ Say goodbye to all that. Say hello to anarchy.”

“Nathaniel-”

“I didn’t come here to listen to your pathetic pleas.” Nathaniel closed his hands around his elder brother’s neck and lifted him. Giyera ran forward to stop him. But he caught the bodyguard with his other hand and threw him against the wall. Giyera went down unconscious. He turned his attention to Gideon.

“You planned and tried to kill me back then. Just for this Legion. You know what? It all turned out good. Your organizations are all the same. More and more hierarchy. It diminishes one’s true potential. It creates unbalance. I’m going to destroy all that. Destruction breeds creation.” Nathaniel snapped the neck of Gideon Malick. He dropped his brother’s limp body and walked out. 

…..

Flint took the agents to his home. The door was slightly open and there were signs of forced entry. Elena and Hunter shared a look but didn't say anything.

"Tess" called out Flint. Hearing no reply, he panicked as he approached her room. He opened the door to see his sister lying on the bed. At first it looked normal but on closer look he felt something was not right.

Elena and Hunter noticed that Tess was pale. Her skin looked grey. Flint shook his sister awake but got no response. Hunter checked the pulse. He realised she must have just died now. There was no pulse but the body was still warm.

Hunter signalled Elena to scan the house. As she slipped away quietly, Hunter pulled the crying boy towards himself. He tried to get Flint out of the house but he resisted.

“Lad, we need to get out soon,” Hunter urged. But Flint pulled himself away from Hunter’s hold.

“My sister is dead, man. I’m not going anywhere” he shouted as he pushed Hunter further away.

Hunter’s eyes widened as he saw the figure in the bedroom doorway.

“Duck” he shouted as he drew out his gun and pointed at the man. The man came out of the shadows. He wore old crumpled clothes. His face was in contrast. His skin glowed healthy. His eyes were red and his fangs had descended. Hunter shot the man but it was in vain. He kept shooting again and again. Blood poured out of his chest but he kept walking. Hunter protectively pushed Flint behind him.

Elena was in the other room when she heard the gunshots. She hurried back to check on her companions. She saw an unknown man approaching Hunter and Flint. Hunter fired the next consecutive shots but it didn’t seem to stop the stranger. Elena took out her gun and shot the man straight through his skull.

The vampire fell down. Everyone breathed out in relief. Hunter kneeled down to examine the body. He noticed that the bullet was still lodged in the skull.

“Does a bullet kill a vampire?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Why isn’t he moving?”

“Do you want him to?” she said snarkly.

A new person appeared on the doorway startling the group. Elena swung around her gun raised. A man holding a baseball bat was standing there.

“He is a friend,” said Flint, putting himself between the two. Both of them lowered their weapons.

The newcomer was Mike Peterson. He was in the apartment next to Flint’s. He and his son were on the way to the evacuation bus when he had heard the commotion. So, he came to check on his neighbours. Hunter gave his gun and ammo to Mike. He asked them to head to safety.

“What should we do with him?” Elena asked pointing at the wounded vampire on the floor.

“Simmons would have fun cutting him up.”

*****

Chapter 34

[myheartisafish]

2021 january reads roundup

it’s a new month! and a perfect time to ✨reflect✨on the month’s reads! this january, i finished 5 books:

1. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

2. A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

3. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (reread) 

5. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami 

thoughts below the cut~

Assassin’s Apprentice:

This read was definitely a surprise for me- I love buying 80s and 90s fantasy paperbacks from the used bookstore and I usually don’t expect very much from them. It’s definitely a childhood book that’s setting up a huge fantasy series, which is why some people find it slow- I would go into it expecting a lot of focus on the inner world of the main character, and not a lot of focus on action-packed plotting. For me, it ended up being surprisingly emotional, and had profound themes of grief and loss. The character building of the two main characters, Fitz and his mentor-figure Burrich, was so, so impressive, as well as the character building for Fitz’s dead father, Chivalry, who is never onscreen yet still affects every plot beat of the book. Give this book a try if you like atmospheric, introspective, character focused fantasy. 

A Skinful of Shadows

I read this book because two of my friends are big fans of the author and I don’t like to be left out of things. I did enjoy it, though! The historical setting of the 1640s English Civil War is perfectly chosen and expressed, and is married so perfectly with the themes of the book that it doesn’t seem like it could take place at any other historical moment. The supernatural element of the plot is a perfect lens for discussing questions of power, control, belief, selfhood, and the afterlife. Do you believe in Puritan ideology? Do you believe in the power of the king? Or do you just believe in your own superiority? Read this if you like atmospheric, dark fantasy, ghosts, unlikeable characters, and bears. 

Convenience Store Woman

This was a different choice for me as I don’t usually stray very far out of the genre fiction world, but I’m trying to broaden my horizons. I’m also currently interested in reading translated works, so this was a good start! This book was short and sweet and absolutely dead on in its portrayal of the rigidity of society and the way that other people are hostile to people that don’t fit in to their preestablished narratives about what a person should be. Read this if you’re frustrated with the assumptions people make about you and your life based on absolutely nothing. 

Ancillary Justice (reread)

This was my fourth read of Ancillary Justice. It’s my favorite sci-fi trilogy and the urge to reread comes around about once a year in my mind. (It all goes around, the planet goes around the sun). This read I was fascinated by the way the book presents choice. We all believe that we would make the right choice in any given situation, and we judge others freely based on our assumption that we would have done better in their place. But it’s not that simple, and it’s not that simple to know in the moment when your choice will make a difference, and when it won’t. The main character Breq is tormented by her past- she initially believes that as an A.I. there were turning points in which she had no choice in her actions, but she begins to realize she may have been more complicit than she originally believed. She resolves to make things right- but is it possible to know when her actions will make a difference? Which gambles will lead her closer to her goal, and which ones could end her journey, and her life? Read this book (and reread it, and reread it) if you love character-focused sci fi with complex worldbuilding, stories about spaceships with feelings, and portrayals of evil empires from within the evil empire. 

Battle Royale

Continued my trend of translated fiction with this one! I watched the movie a few years ago and enjoyed it a lot, and since then have been courting this book every time I see it in the bookstore. Overall I’d say I had a lot of fun reading it, as a gory, fast-paced thriller. I did get a little tired of it by the end, and there was a lot of description of guns, baseball, and other sort of boring stuff that I hardcore skimmed. My biggest gripe with the book was the overall infantilizing treatment of female characters by the narration- how dare this game force a sweet, innocent girl to kill? How dare this game ruin a beautiful girl’s beautiful face! Mitsuko Souma’s backstory was also both out of left field in how over-the-top horrific it was and completely unnecessary. Of course, people who were abused become murderous sociopaths. Of course, a female character can’t just have one bad thing happen to her, it has to be violence on top of violence for the entirety of her miserable life until she dies. 

Re: The Hunger Games, after reading this book I don’t think THG was actually copping Battle Royale at all. THG is a dystopia that’s focused on the dystopia- the corruption of the rich, the element of the media in both keeping people happy and twisting their worldview, the ways in which people fall through the cracks. Battle Royale is focused more on the inner world of the characters- it wants to know what could actually drive a child to kill someone. What level of fear, what level of danger, when does someone actually snap? The author said he was inspired by Stephen King’s The Long Walk, which tracks- The Long Walk is about the limit of a human mind and body in a similar way. In what conditions could someone decide to push their body past the limit of horror? Read Battle Royale if you have a stomach for gore and like fast paced thrillers, video game plots, and seeing innocent children get mown down by a sociopath with a machine gun.

And that’s all! See you next month? And try not get kidnapped and put on an island where you are forced to kill your classmates. 

[ofpaperhearts]

▷  currently  playing  ——  THE FAÇADE  a playlist for Elliot King. n. a false appearance that makes someone or something seem more pleasant or better than they really are.

!! anxiety & depression tw throughout playlist !!

obnoxiously long tracklist & descriptions that may or may not make sense under the cut!

▷  currently  playing  ——  TWO  by  SLEEPING AT LAST.

it’s okay if you can’t catch your breath // you can take the oxygen straight out of my own chest // i know exactly how the rule goes: // put my mask on first // no, i don’t want to talk about myself // tell me where it hurts // i just want to build you up, build you up // ‘til you’re good as new // and maybe one day i’ll get around to fixing myself too

Okay, so there’s not a doubt in my mind that Elliot’s an enneagram type two, which is what this song is all about. The entire song really captures how he wants to take care of others and give his love to them, and then if there happens to be anything left, he’ll take care of himself, but it’s not a priority.

▷  currently  playing  ——  BEAUTIFUL LIGHT  by  UPPERMOST.

I don’t fully know how to describe it, but this song just makes me feel upbeat and hopeful and I feel like those are the types of vibes that Elliot tries to put out into the world. This is a song that works very well for him when simply looking at him on the surface level.

▷  currently  playing  ——  I JUST WANNA SHINE  by  THE FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS.

so don’t give me dark days, i already had those // i’m just trying to figure out how to be myself right now // i don’t wanna lay low, hiding in the shadows // so i wake up, i get out of bed // stay up, stay out of my head

This song is probably more how Elliot perceives himself. Like despite having his own stresses and hardships, he still strives to make the most of his life and keep up and optimistic view.

▷  currently  playing  ——  MESS IS MINE  by  VANCE JOY.

bring me to your house // tell me, “sorry for the mess”, hey i don’t mind // you’re talking in your sleep, out of time // well, you still make sense to me, your mess is mine

This song just goes back to how he wants to give an receive love by taking care of others.

▷  currently  playing  ——  PLEASER  by  WALLOWS.

indecisive feelings of enjoyment // hold the thought, i think i need a moment // i’m aware there’s somethin’ i should tell you // but my voice annoys me // bite my tongue off with a smile // i can’t feel it anymore // ‘cause recently the line is blurred // between depression and bliss

This whole song is basically about being a people pleaser (which Elliot is to an unhealthy degree) and struggling to figure out to please someone (which is something that would cause Elliot a great deal of distress to be perfectly honest).

▷  currently  playing  ——  OH KLAHOMA  by  JACK STAUBER.

tears falling down at the party // saddest little baby in the room // fears, tell me fears, don’t get me started // i get a little grey hair for every scare you share

Honestly, Elliot could be either person in this song. For the most part Elliot would see himself as the person in this song that’s trying to console the other (possibly at the expense of their own mental health), but he could just as easily be the other person if he actually asked for help/comfort whenever he’s going through something.

▷  currently  playing  ——  HARD TIMES  by  PARAMORE.

all that i want // is to wake up fine // tell me that i’m alright // that i ain’t gonna die

Upbeat songs with sad lyrics just have an Elliot vibe to them. I think songs like this reflect that happy/put together front he puts on for everyone, even when he isn’t doing so great.

▷  currently  playing  ——  FAKE HAPPY  by  PARAMORE.

hey, if i smile with my teeth // bet you believe me // if i smile with my teeth // i think i believe me // oh please, don’t ask me how i’ve been // don’t make me pretend

Same reason Hard Times is on here. The lyrics definitely hammer the part of putting up a front for others home more.

▷  currently  playing  ——  WAY LESS SAD  by  AJR.

i’m a-okay, i’m a-okay // you say it but you just don’t mean it

I think the mix of putting up a front and trying to remain optimistic even in life’s harder moments just fits Elliot.

▷  currently  playing  ——  WONDERFUL LIFE  by  SMITH & BURROWS.

you know it feels unfair // there’s magic everywhere // look at me standing // here on my own again // up straight in the sunshine // no need to run and hide // it’s a wonderful, wonderful life // no need to laugh and cry // it’s a wonderful, wonderful life

There’s something about the softness of this song that just gives me Elliot vibes. But I think beyond that, it’s the mix of optimistic and pained lyrics that make me think of Elliot whenever I hear this song.

▷  currently  playing  ——  BLUE KNUCKLE  by  NIGHT BEDS.

i’ve been working like a surgeon // on some courage // lift my burden // i’ve been hurting // have you heard it

I just feel like the bits of this song that I relate to him scream, all the self-sacrificing I constantly do doesn’t make me as happy as I thought it would, but I’m not entirely sure how to change that without some help.

▷  currently  playing  ——  FREAKIN’ OUT ON THE INTERSTATE  by  BRISTON MARONEY.

i’m sorry i haven’t been myself // and something’s got me down // what it is, i cannot tell

1. He’s so concerned with others that I don’t think he necessarily knows how to pinpoint why something would bother him. 2. High anxiety hours.

▷  currently  playing  ——  FALSE CONFIDENCE  by  NOAH KAHAN.

and i wonder why i tear myself down to be built back up again // oh, i hope somehow, i’ll wake up young again // all that’s left of myself, holes in my false confidence

Themes of being hypercritical of oneself and insecurity which is something Elliot struggles a lot with under his surface level happiness.

▷  currently  playing  ——  COLD LOVE  by  RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE.

and if i cry in your arms // just some other shit, just some other shit // just some other things that i’ve been dealing with // i’d die in your arms, bury me while playing this // bury me saying “you were all i ever needed” // and hold me like we’re dying from liquor that we drank // in hotel rooms, to feel warm in cold love

Originally, I only wanted to include this song for the first part of the lyrics I put here because it’s the same dismissive attitude Elliot has when it comes to taking care of himself. But the more I thought about it, I think Elliot is the type of person to find himself in doomed relationships because the give and take is never equal resulting in ‘dying/cold’ loves.

▷  currently  playing  ——  ALMOST HOME  by  MXMTOON.

i was just a kid // dreams were looking big and then i had to grow up // no one ever says // all the love you give might not be enough // broke my heart in two a couple times // before it hurt too much // i was such fool

I feel like Elliot was a relatively carefree child before becoming increasingly more and more concerned with how others saw him and feel like that’s kind of reflected in this song? Like growing is usually very different from how one imagines it when they’re a kid.

▷  currently  playing  ——  MELODY X  by  BONAPARTE.

you keep the light on // you keep the light on // you keep the night light on // hold your broken dream up high // oh, you know you try // oh, you know you try // it’s the worst case scenario lullaby // something’s gotta change (something’s gotta change)

Another song acknowledging how hecking hard life is and trying to remain hopeful in spite of it with a hint of being aware that something needs to change in Elliot’s life for him to really be happy.

▷  currently  playing  ——  NO ID  by  ANDREW APPLEPIE.

and suddenly you realize // that everything you’d ever told yourself were lies // and believe me i can sympathize // cause everything i ever thought i was made me cry

Overall, this song is about self-acceptance and growth, which is something Elliot is still working on. And it’s more so on here as Elliot being the person the singer is watching struggle with these things.

▷  currently  playing  ——  PRETENDER - ACOUSTIC  by  AJR.

i’m a good pretender // won’t you come see my show? // i got lots of problems // well, good thing nobody knows // oh, i’m insecure, i’m insecure // i think i like what i’m supposed to // like what i’m supposed to

Back on that putting up a front for everyone else because he thinks that’s for the better/expected of him bs!

▷  currently  playing  ——  BRAIN, BRAIN, GO AWAY  by  UNLIKE PLUTO.

through the night my mind is racing // my inner voice and i debating // on everything i should be changing // can’t decide so i keep maintaining // i gotta contain my overactive mind

This song is on here because big anxiety hours and how truly exhausting it is to deal with.

▷  currently  playing  ——  MIND IS A PRISON  by  ALEC BENJAMIN.

sometimes, i think too much, yeah, i get so caught up // i’m always stuck in my head // i wish i could escape, i tried to yesterday alone with my thoughts again // guess my mind is a prison and i’m never gonna get out

Same exact reason why Brain, Brain, Go Away is on his playlist.

▷  currently  playing  ——  NUMB  by  MARINA.

i can’t open up and cry //  ‘cause i’ve been silent all my life // i feel numb most of the time // lower i get, higher // i’ll climb, and i will wonder why // i got dark only to // shine, looking for the golden light // oh, it’s a reasonable sacrifice

One of the main reasons this song is included is because of a comment made on the lyric ‘oh, it’s a reasonable sacrifice’ and how in this song it seems to imply sacrificing one’s well-being to impress others is fine and if that’s not Elliot’s biggest mood than I don’t know what is. But in addition to that, a lot of the other lyrics touch on internal struggles he deals with and trying to overcome them.

▷  currently  playing  ——  NOBODY  by  MITSKI.

and i don’t want your pity // i just want somebody near me // guess i’m a coward // i just want to feel alright // and i know no one will save me

1. This is the type of song that sounds like “ooooo fun” but then you listen to the lyrics and it’s like “BOOM SADNESS” which is kind of Elliot’s song aesthetic if that makes sense? 2. Despite having people in his life that he’s close to, life can still feel very isolating when he’s not open about everything he has going on. 3. This song is an enneagram type two’s biggest fear so it just makes sense being here.

▷  currently  playing  ——  IT’S CALLED: FREEFALL  by  RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE.

called to the devil and the devil said, “hey! why you been calling so late? it’s like 2am and the bars all close at 10 in hell, that’s a rule i made” // anyway, you say you’re too busy saving everybody else to save yourself // and you don’t want no help, oh well

More on the idea that life can be very isolating when you struggle in silence and Elliot’s “gotta help everyone else over myself” mentality.

▷  currently  playing  ——  MINDLESS BLISS  by  UNLIKE PLUTO.

always staying up to the sunrise // i can barely close my eyes // all i’m looking for is a good night // just for one night, just for one night // but i am wide awake, surviving day to day // i’m half alive in my own way // and i’m struggling with all the carrying

More big themes of anxiety and struggling with it.

▷  currently  playing  ——  WAVES  by  DEAN LEWIS.

and it takes control of the person that i thought i was // the boy i used to know // but there is a light in the dark // and i feel it’s warmth // in my heart, in my hands // but why can’t i hold on?

Life’s always changing for better or worse and growing up you can think life is going to be one way just for it to be something completely different and I think Elliot can relate to that sentiment a lot.

▷  currently  playing  ——  KEEP  by  MOTHER MOTHER.

i write it down, but to read it doesn’t work // take it to town, but to be seen doesn’t work // smack it around, but that only make it worse // i make it worse // i meditate for a day, but it doesn’t help // get down and pray, i gotta say, what a living hell // i could escape but i know that all too well // it doesn’t help

Wanting to cope with things, but struggling to do so in a way that works which is a big Elliot mood.

▷  currently  playing  ——  DON’T WORRY, YOU WILL  by  LOVELYTHEBAND.

trying to stay positive // not an easy way to live // laugh right through the pain // she said i can’t find a thing i don’t like about you // and i’m like don’t worry, you will

More themes of being hypercritical of oneself, silently struggling, and putting up a charade to get others to like you or to please them.

▷  currently  playing  ——  GOODBYE  by  BO BURNHAM.

am i right back where i started fourteen years ago? // wanna guess the ending? if it ever does // i swear to god that all i’ve ever wanted was // a little bit of everything all of the time well, well, look who’s inside again // went out to look for a reason to hide again // well, well, buddy, you found it

Full disclosure, I only know this song from TikTok. But anyway! I just felt like the lyrics in the last bit of the song were super fitting: the fear of being back right back where he started before he got a little better at putting himself first, struggling to balance everything he wants/needs, dismissing his problems in favor or something lighthearted like a joke, looking for reasons to keep things to himself, etc.

[shanascarlett]

Songs from Transformers playlist

Autobots

AC/DC - Thunderstruck

Art of Dying - Die Trying

Extreme Music - Skin Em Up

Glitch Mob - Better Hide, better run

Glitch Mob - Animus Vox

Hollywood Undead - How We Roll

ill Factor - Champion Sound

Imagine Dragons - Radioactive

Imagine Dragons - Cha-Ching (Till We Grow Older)

Imagine Dragons - I’m So Sorry

Imagine Dragons - Warriors

Imagine Dragons - Battle Cry

Lemaitre - Day Two

Linkin Park - Final Masquerade

Linkin Park - A line in the sand

Linkin Park - Lost in the Echo

Linkin Park - Burn it Down

Linkin Park - Road Untraveled

Linkin Park - Leave Out All The Rest

Linkin Park - Shadow of the Day

Linkin Park - What I’ve Done

Linkin Park - The Little Things Give You Away

Linkin Park - Iridescent

Ryan Star - Brand New Day

Skillet - Feel Invincible

two door cinema club - Undercover Martyn

USS - Who's With Me

Fall Out Boy  The Last of the Real Ones

Linkin Park ft. Steve Aoki - A Light That Never Comes

One Republic - Counting Stars

USS - Work Shoes

Panic! At The Disco - Victorious

Worlds Collide - Extended Orchestra Mix (ft. Nicki Taylor)

Youngblood Hawke - Pressure

Optimus Prime

As Lions - World on Fire

Fired Earth Music - Aphelion

Hammock - Numinous

Hollywood Undead - Take Me Home

Immediate Music - Rising Empire

Immediate Music - WIth Great Power

Linkin Park - I’ll be gone

Linkin Park - Powerless

Linkin Park - Leave Out All The Rest

Poets of the Fall - No End, No Beginning

Red - House of Glass 

Tribal Society  – Kings

Bumblebee

Arcade Fire - Rococo

Avicii - Wake me Up

Imagine Dragons - It’s Time

Imagine Dragons - Cha-Ching (Till We Grow Older)

Linkin Park - Road Untraveled

Linkin Park - Robot Boy

Swedish House Mafia - Don’t you worry child

Panic! At The Disco - Vegas Lights

Sideburns VS Matisyahu - Let Go (Fight Like A Warrior)

TobyMac - Ignition

Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime

Fitz & The Tantrums - HandClap

Hollywood Undead - Live Fast Die Young

Linkin Park - Road Untraveled

Bassnectar - Into the Sun

Saint Mesa - Lion

Skillet - You Take My Rights Away

Thousand Foot Krutch - Untraveled Road

two door cinema club - Undercover Martyn

You Me At Six - Fast Foward

Panic! At The Disco - Vegas Lights

One Republic - Counting Stars

TobyMac - Ignition

Panic! At The Disco - Victorious

Vincent Steele, Michael Woodenbridge & Nine One One - Rise UP

Elita-One

Flume - Greatest View

Icon For Hire - Too Loud

Ironhide

Papa Roach - Maniac

Ill Factor - Champion Sound

Prowl

Linkin Park - Crawling

Linkin Park - Road Untraveled

Linkin Park - Blackout

Sidewalks And Skeletons - Morphine

Meg Myers - Make A Shadow

Dirty Palm - Oblivion

Vincent Steele, Michael Woodenbridge & Nine One One - Rise UP

Paramore - Ignorance (Animated ver)

Icon For Hire - Iodine

Icon For Hire - The Grey

Ratchet

Imagine Dragons - Gold

Woodkid feat. Max Richter - The golden age - embers

Arcee

Icon For Hire - Pulse

Icon For Hire - Demons

Icon For Hire - Make A Move

Drift

Linkin Park - Crawling

Linkin Park - Waiting For The End

Klangkarussell - Sternenkinder

Within Temptation - Running Up That Hill

Dirty Palm - Oblivion

Vincent Steele, Michael Woodenbridge & Nine One One - Rise UP

Sideswipe

TobyMac - Ignition

Suntreaker

Papa Roach - Maniac

TobyMac - Ignition

Vincent Steele, Michael Woodenbridge & Nine One One - Rise UP

Icon For Hire - Hope of Morning

Windblade

Dpen and Nick Varon - Grasshopper

Within Temptation - Running Up That Hill

Within Temptation - Mercy Mirror

Tommee Profitt - Enchantment (feat. HEAVYOCITY)

Tommee Profitt - This Ship Is Going Down (feat. Xeah)

Mistress of Flame

Within Temptation - Mercy Mirror

Blurr

Skillet - You Take My Rights Away

You Me At Six - Fast Foward

The Prodigy - Wild Frontier

TobyMac - Ignition

Skids

Linkin Park - Roads Untraveled

TobyMac - Ignition

Dirty Palm - Oblivion

Kup

Papa Roach - Maniac

Tailgate

Foster The People - Helena Beat

Foster The People - Houdini

Chromedome

Dirty Palm - Oblivion

Rewind

two door cinema club - Undercover Martyn

Grimlock

Foo FIghters - Rope

Alpha Trion

Ryan Star - Brand New Day

Decepticons

Deuce - I Came To Party

Hollywood Undead - Apologize

Hollywood Undead - Lights Out

Hollywood Undead - Tendencies

Hollywood Undead - Lump Your Head

Hollywood Undead - Le Deux

Hollywood Undead - War Child

Hollywood Undead - Comin In Hot

Hollywood Undead - Dead Bite

Hollywood Undead - We Are

Imagine Dragons - Who We Are

Julien-K - This Machine

Linkin Park - Plc.4 Mie Haed

Linkin Park - When They Come For Me

Powerman 5000 - How to be a human

Red - Outside

Within Temptation - Tell Me Why

Front Line Assembly - Sturm (Seekers Theme)

Clarx - H.E.Y. (Seekers Theme)

Within Temptation - Mad World

Powerman 5000 - Invade, Destroy, Repeat

Powerman 5000 - We Want It All

grandson - Blood Water

Megatron

Adelitas Way - Sick

Hollywood Undead - Dove and Grenade

Imagine Dragons - Monster

In This Moment - Adrenalize

Nine Ich Nails - Meet Your Master

Nostalghia - Homeostasis

Red - Damage

Warmer - in my head its like hell

Starscream

Franz Ferdinand - Evil Eye

Hollywood Undead - Levitate

Inner Party System - Don’t Stop

Missio - Twisted

Bring Me The Horizon - nihilist blues ft. Grimes

3OH!3 - Anything I Want

Machinae Supremacy - Gimme More

PhemieC – Ugly Story

USS - This Is The Best

Soundwave

Current Value - Dark Rain

Dead Fetus - Mind of God

King Plague - Ave Plague

Shockwave

ZAYDE WOLF - COLD-BLOODED

Knockout

Angelsplit - 100%

Family Force - Chainsaw

Franz Ferdinand - Evil Eye

Ken Ashcorp - Absolute

Prodigy - Destroy

Rabbit Junk - IDONTGIVEAFUCK

Breakdown

55 Escape - Addiction

Airachnid

Sayonara Maxwell - Decay Queen

Cyclonus

Imagine Dragons - Demons

Three Days Grace - I Am Machine

Three Days Grace - Just Like You

Action

Actual Phantom - 7 Nation of Army

Barns Courtney - Champion

Beastie Boys - Sabotage

Blue Stahli - You’ll get what’s coming

Bring Me The Horizon - Mantra

Celdweller - Own Little World

Celdweller - IRIA

Celdweller - Shapeshifter

DVBBS & Borgeous - Tsunami

Hollywood Undead - Pray

Imagine Dragons - Battle Cry

Inner Party System - Don’t Stop

Kings & Creatures (Wolfpack) - Hunted

Linkin Park - Wastelands

Linkin Park - With you

Linkin Park - Points of Authority

Linkin Park - Burn it Down

Linkin Park - Lies Greed Misery

Linkin Park - Pts. Of. Athrty

Linkin Park - P5hng Me A_wy

Linkin Park - Rnw@y

Linkin Park - By_Myslf

Linkin Park - Kyur4 Th Ich

Otep - Lie

Red - Falling Sky 

Red - Death of Me (Guillotine Remix)

The Used - Revolution

USS - Yin Yang

Within Temptation - Endless War

Fall Out Boy – Light Em Up

Hollywood Undead - Already Dead

Within Temptation - Holy Ground

Imagine Dragons - Believer

Within Temptation - In Vain

Within Temptation - Raise Your Banner

Within Temptation - Reckoning

Tommee Profitt - In The End

Julien-K - Technical Difficulties

Calm time

Arcade Fire - Suburbs

Arcade Fire - Rococo

Dirty South - Unknown

Ellie Goulding - Your Song

Everything Everything - Blast Doors

Florence And The Machine - Hurricane Drunk

IAMX - Alive in New Light

Imagine Dragons - Tokyo

Imagine Dragons - Working Man

Imagine Dragons - Radioactive (Synchronice Remix)

Imagine Dragons - Fall

The Kills - Sour Cherry

Lemaitre - Day Two

Ludovico Einaudi - Life

Raign - Empire of our own

Battle Tapes - Feel The Same

Ki:Theory - Kitty Hawk (Break Science Remix)

Leon Else - Tomorrow Land (All Fall Down)

Tom Day - Who We Want To Be

Fall Out Boy - Centuries (Gazzo Remix)

Fever Ray – If I Had A Heart

Glitch Mob - Fortune Days

Panic! At The Disco - Vegas Lights

Rabbit Junk - Bubble

Ruelle  - Take It All

Ruelle - Until We Go Down

USS - Work Shoes

Cybertron

As Lions - World on Fire

Bastille - Pompeii

Imagine Dragons - Nothing Left to Say

Linkin Park - P5hng Me A_wy

Linkin Park - Fallout

Perfume Genius - Longpig

Confidential Music – Albatross

Ruelle - Until We Go Down

Woodkid feat. Max Richter - The golden age - embers

Unicron

Dead Can Dance - Black Sun

Optimus x Elita

Avril Lavigne feat. Nickelback - Let Me Go

Linkin Park - Jornada Del Muerto

Adam Lambert - Evil In The Night Lyrics (Transformers Animated Ver)

Hot Rod x Arcee

Of Monsters And Men - Wolves without teeth

Goo Goo Dolls - Before It's Too Late

Starscream x Windblade

Twenty One Pilots - Doubt

Bring Me The Horizon - in the dark

[0poole]

Tangle Tower

I don’t usually want to play games for multiple hours on end. Even when I really like a game, most of the time after a bit I’m just like “I’ve had enough for now” and go on to do something else. I think the only times that’s happened before (in recent memory at least) were with Oxygen Not Included, Pokemon Sword (because it’s Pokemon) and the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2. I’m not the kind of gamer who won’t get up from their chair. Honestly though I have so many games just around and half-played I kind of wish I could turn into that to finish them all.

But I’m not here to post about that. I’m here to post about Tangle Tower, the best looking game I’ve ever played. And yes, I have played Cuphead. Don’t get me wrong, that games a godsend in every single way, I just prefer this style more. We don’t get 2D drawn-animation games often enough, and TT and Cuphead are both prime examples as to why that’s a damn ol shame. 

Since it doesn’t seem crazy popular, just watch the trailer and see: https://youtu.be/3JEliSJ859I

And looking at their previous game, featuring the same protagonist, looks like a serious step up. Might end up playing that one too, since it pretty much seems the same with less pretty art and animation. Or, you know, if any store app even worked on my phone...

Anyway, I’m sure the trailer did most of the work for me. I am in love with the character designs. I only wish I could make characters that inherently expressive. Ignoring what my pants have to say about it, I can’t get enough of Flora’s design. Even though she basically does nothing with her head or hands, the animation of her hair blowing in the wind just makes you stand up straight and think “Oh shit.” Plus, she’s the perfect degree of mysterious to be the subject of a painting painted by a murder victim. 

But come on, Sally though? There isn’t a better blend of coldness and wit out there. Her voice acting is also amazing. All voices are really, usually I just have to power through it and enjoy the rest of the game, but here they were all great voices. I was especially surprised at liking Grimoire’s voice, since he definitely seemed like the type to get annoying after a while, but his comedic side didn’t overstay its welcome, and was left behind when necessary, and played off Sally’s witty side pretty well too. I especially loved all of Felix’s weird little imperfections and chortles after his sentences and such. He definitely seemed like the type for that. If my own words aren’t enough, for once in my life I actually felt like going through each little clue when talking to each character just so I could hear their remarks. 

Since they were all so animated so well, I also just wanted to look at them move for a bit. Not just that, but if I weren’t so hard pressed on continuing through the story, I could seriously stare at them move in the overworld in each of their little rooms. It reminds me of those “lofi chill beats to study to” videos on Youtube, how their movements are so minute, but they seem to fit so flawlessly into the setting that it just is satisfying. Obviously Felix’s is kind of depressing, with him half asleep in the corner of his room, and Fitz’s being sort of creepy with him in the shadows of his greehouse, but even then it’s just fitting for the character. My favorite would probably be Hawkshaw, fiddling around with whatever’s on that weird portable desk of her’s. The setting is so nice anyway that pretty much any character could just lie there and look fantastic, but I still love overbearing character designs like Hawkshaw’s anyway.

Apart from the art, I was kind of glad how easy the puzzles were. Clearly, as you can tell, I’m mostly just here for the story and the art, so I wouldn’t want a puzzle to get in the way of that. That’s really the only reason why I haven’t wanted to play more Professor Layton games, because the puzzles make me feel like a proud idiot who doesn’t want to just look up the answers but is too stupid to get through them, and with some points requiring a certain amount of puzzles, I just don’t feel like going through the trouble. Here, not only were the puzzles directly relevant to whatever think the characters were supposed to get past, but they always felt super accessible to an idiot like me, and weren’t so accessible that I felt like it was a cop-out. I always felt like I knew what I was doing, but once and a while took just enough effort on my part that I still felt like I was doing something.

The plot wasn’t ground-breaking, but it sure as hell wasn’t bad. It is the type of thing that BEGS for a sequel, though. It doesn’t stray too far outside of the cooler bits that are relevant to the plot itself, so you’re kind of left wanting to just know everything there is about the little world they set up. I’d say it’s a good kind of that, though, like where it was a good balance that just teases the inner monster lover in you, but didn’t want to upset the non-monster lovers. Considering the monsters weren’t entirely relevant, them not being talked about as much isn’t an objective negative by any means. 

Basically: fork up your dough to look at some pretty art and animation for a while, while the story and puzzles keeps your active brain occupied. It’s seriously enjoyable.

[myupostsheadcanons]

Books “Read” in 2019

I am going to rank these by how much i enjoyed them vs. any actual literary quality. often well written books aren’t always the most entertaining books.

Note: i listen to many of these books at work, which is why i am able to go through so many of them in a year.

List from 2017 List from 2018

------- My Favs of the Year ----

Novels from The First Law:

Best Served Cold (#1), The Heroes(#3), Red Country(#4), Sharp Ends(#5).

A Little Hatred (#2) (Age of Madness, sequel to The First Law)

I read “The First Law Trilogy” about a year or two ago and finally got around to reading the rest of the books, just in time for a new series taking place in the same world to start up (Age of Madness) and now i am waiting like everybody else for the next two books to come out in 2020 and 2021. A Little Hatred shouldn’t be read as a stand alone, a lot of what goes on is dependent mainly on knowledge from the first trilogy and in The Heroes, then bits and pieces from Best Served Cold and Red Country. So much of your enjoyment of each book is based on what you’ve learned in other ones (character development or seemingly useless information being not so useless later).

Age of Legend (Book 4,  Legend of the First Empire)

This is more-or-less an “aftermath” book where the main characters are still reeling about what happened in the previous book and are trying to make plans for what they are going to do next. I still like the characters and the world/setting it takes place in.

House of Assassins (Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, Book 2)

I’ve been waiting for the next book in this series to come out the second i finished the first book in the series. It is one of those Science fiction in the disguise of Fantasy settings and I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see how that plot/revelation comes out (I am certain that the location the story takes place is Earth, more specifically around Asia/India, but in a post-invasion apocalypse setting where nobody remembers anything prior to the invasion). I also really like how much of a badass Ashok is... i have a thing for emotionally stunted badass characters, especially when their flaws are held up to a mirror and have real consequences.

R. R. Haywood’s Worldship Humility & Extinct (Extracted, Book 3)

I love the way Haywood writes characters and dialog. I was at-first iffy about WSH, but was won over after i warmed up to the new characters.

Shades of Magic Trilogy (A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows, A Conjuring of Shadows)

Solid multi-verse and magic system world. Well-written characters, some minor nitpicks on plot points, but can be easily ignored. LGBTQ rep, the gays don’t stay buried.

“Don’t you have enough [knives]?” “You can never have too many.” [me, every time: LOL]

One of the few times when a character deserves a redemption arc, doesn’t really get one, dies, and i am perfectly fine with it because it is done well.

Assassin’s Fate (Fitz and the Fool, Book 3)

I read this one in book-book form, but i already knew most of the emotionally painful parts of the book by spoiling it to myself when it first came out a couple years ago. The main appeal is the inner monologues of the two main characters, even if like 50% of this trilogy is basically spending weeks/months trying to go from Point A to Point B, when many other books would have glossed over the details of travel.. but you can really feel the stress as they dwell in their thoughts and struggles.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles & Circe

Re-Imagining of the Iliad and The Odyssey. Focusing not on the characters of Achilles or Odysseus, but on Petroclus (Achilles’ lover) and Circe the sea nymph witch that Odysseus had an affair and child with.

The Spear of the Stars (Cycle of Galand, Book 5)

Still love Dante and Bleys... This is where they really get into the meat of world building and solving the mysteries of the Arawn Cycle (the book/bible) and peel back the layers of their reality.

Dust (Silo Book 3)

A great ending to a good series, it answers whether or not humanity can or has survived what had caused them to be locked away in the silos.

Blackthorn and Grim (Dreamer’s Pool, Tower of Thorns, Den of Wolves)

I like the premise of the books, the two main characters first seeking out revenge, but end up wanting to become better people due to magic shenanigans.... One part Fantasy, One Part Mystery, One Part Lovestory.

The Dispatcher (Audible Free Book) 

I want a whole series based off this novella. It is John Scalzi so he can write a good story. I had previously read Android’s Dream by him, which it didn’t make it into my top-10 that year, but was still decent, even if the subject matter was a bit gross... The Dispatcher world is a Sci-Fi Noir, not quite Cyberpunk, where people don’t die by anything other than natural causes. The Dispatcher’s job is to kill people before something goes does wrong and the person “resets” to when they where safe and sound.

---- this is the “Above Average” Zone ----

All the Pretty Horses & Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

The master of bleak and depressing fiction. if regular Dark Fiction isn’t enough for you.... there is Cormac McCarthy books. Get use to the “purple prose” that fills up pages with no dialog.

The Golem and the Jinni

Supernatural world of the far past dealing with Edwardian New York and Immigration. It not only is a “fish out of water” story of the two main characters trying to fit in with society but they are among communities that are also new to America and trying to find their own place in the world. There are love subplots but most of those kind of fizzle out.

The Axe and the Throne: Bounds of Redemption Vol. 1.

“Discount First Law” book... it is lacking the dark humor that made TFL series far more entertaining.  This was also the book that was prefaced by warning people about how grim and dark the setting was... Hahahaha. I still found it entertaining none the less, and hope the rest would show up on audible soon.

Black Snow, White Crow (Audible Free Book) 

Another one of those short stories that should have a larger saga to its name. Fantasy Industrial Punk. It has the whole equality role reversal thing going on, it isn’t done quite as well as Left Hand of Darkness (but that book leaned onto the boring side of things).

Stephen King’s IT, Pet Semetary, and Carrie

It’s Stephen King. Classic King. Not much else to say.

Watership Down

Depressing Rabbit Book. Though I did like all the stories and mythology the rabbits had.

Bloody Acquisitions (Fred the Vampire Accountant, Book 3)

A series that is always fun to listen to. I wish the audio books were cheaper because they are rather short.

Lethal White (Cormoran Strike, Book 4)

shuddup, i don’t care if it is Rowling... i have a low-key crush on Cormoran.... he just hits that big-burly tragic-backstory man-shaped soft-spot of mine. These stories are also her “for adults” writings so...  expect more racism and garbage values.

The Eye of the World (Book 1, Wheel of Time)

Classic set up to a long running series, though i am reluctant to go further as the middling books in this series are said to drag out the story too much.... It’s not as self-centered as Wizard’s First Rule and the characters are more relatable and stick to their fantasy tropes. This is the “mold” that other modern fantasy try to subvert by going “darker and edgier.”

The Exorcist

If you like the movie, read the book. There is a lot of back story that the movie wasn’t able to adapt.

---- This is the “AVERAGE, but Still Good”  Zone ---

The Iliad and The Odyssey

Classics. I am still on the hunt for an unabridged version of Jason and the Argonauts story. I also have Virgil’s Aeneid in my wishlist to get too soon.

Phillipa Gregory’s Plantagonate Novels (The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, White Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter)

Sometimes it is like reading the same book 5x in a row. other times you end up not liking the previous protagonist in a book you just finished reading because of how the current protagonist sees them from their POV.

Return of the King (Lord of the Rings, Book 3)

Read the other books last year and didn’t get around to this one for a few months.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Fuck... I’m a janitor... why can’t i afford a house?   If you liked Stephen King’s “IT” go back and read this book.

Alien Franchise Dramatizations: Alien: Sea of Sorrows, Alien: The Cold Forge (Audible Free Book) Alien III (Audible Free Book)

I don’t mind that they all are done with a full cast. Though often I end up wanting to find the actual book and listen to them with just one narrator and descriptions.

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (Narnia, Book 1)

I would like to get the rest of the books in this series, but for books that are only 5-7 hours long they want 20$ a book for them. It needs to go into an omnibus.

Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets (Audible Free Book)

It’s Stephen Fry... he’s funny and a good narrator.

Wizard’s First Rule (Book 1, Sword of Truth)

I don’t like Richard. He started off alright, but even before he got tortured 2/3rds into the book, i was starting to dislike his personality.  Other than that, the side characters and world are solid, but it was like taking an R-rated movie and cutting it down for TV. There is somethings that are vaguely described when i am use to harder fiction like ASoIaF, The First Law, Dresden, and McCarthy books actually describing those things.

Halloween (2018, movie novel)

Like I said when i first read the book, it would’ve benefited by a second re-write before being published. But, i like the movie and so I liked the book.

Don Quixote

Another classic read. I did find it hilarious that the Author spent a good chunk of the second book complaining about Fanfiction of his own book... in the 1600′s.

The Princess Diarist

I listened this book instead of going to see TROS. worth it.

Smoke Gets in Your eyes: And other Lessons from the Crematorium

Non-Fiction, If you want to know the ins and outs of the funeral business and get told in an informative yet non-clinical way with lots of tidbits and history facts tossed in as well as a semi-autobiographical account of the Author’s life.

--- These Books are “Alright” ---

Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz books

I ligit got into an argument with a 70yo man in a comic book shop about how Canon the other Oz books were post Baum’s death. He was looking for Oz comic books and I brought up reading the first 14 books, and he’s like “There’s over 100 of them” and i was all “but all those are written by somebody else.” and he got all “they are still canon...” 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

If you want to know about the In//cel ideology in a classic literary form, this fits the bill. So much man pain.

A Christmas Carol (Tim Curry) (Audible Free Book)

Tim Curry, guys.....

The Poetic Edda (Norse God Mythology)

I listened this book twice. I bought two Edda books thinking I’d get some extra content, but no... same book just different production teams and readers. Returned the one with the worst translation.

Treasure Island (Audible Free Book, dramatization)

I need to read the actual book sometime, but i did like the cast and thought they did a good job.

Wally Roux, Quantum Mechanic (Audible Free Book)

A YA coming of age story about diversity and acceptance... with wacky science fiction. 

Carmilla (Audible Free Book, dramatization)

The vampire before Dracula. Victorian Lesbian love story.

Even Tree Nymphs get the Blues (Audible Free Book)

A novella from one of those “love on the Bayou” romance series with supernatural creatures. Could practically take place in the same world of either True Blood, Dresden, or Fred the Vampire Accountant.

Mystwick School of Musicraft (Audible Free Book)

Harry Potter lite. For 10yo girls.

A Grown-up’s Guide to Dinosaurs (Audible Free Book)

I like dinosaurs.

Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World (Audible Free Book, Dramatization)

Interesting way on telling us about the Fossil Wars and Puma vs. Adidas.

True-Crime from Audible: Body of Proof (Audible Free Book),   Midnight Son (Audible Free Book), The Demon Next Door (Audible Free Book), Killer By Nature (Audible Free Book)

Why is True-Crime or YA fiction the only halfway-decent things Audible is giving us? But yeah, these are basically the type of reporting that the two journalists from Halloween were trying to do. Where they go around and gather up information about semi-famous cases and present it in a Podcast-like format.

---- Meh... ---

Camp Red Moon (Audible Free Book)

Would’ve been better if they were actually written by R. L. Stein.

More Bedtime Stories for Cynics (Audible Free Book)

No... half of these aren’t written very well.

The Darkwater Bride (Audible Free Book, Dramatization)

The setting is nice, but it is far too .... Soap Opera Dramatic.

Junk (Audible Free Book)

A cross between Alien Invasion and Zombie outbreak, read by John Waters and written as if it was a bad version of a Philip K. Dick Novel.

Rip Off!! (Audible Free Book)

Most of them are duds and boring. I don’t even remember half of them without having to look them up. The two that stood out the most for me where the “Other Darren/Bewitched” and the “Dark and Stormy Night” stories, the rest were rather garbled.

--- Garbage... ---

Dodge and Twist (Audible Free Book, Dramatization)

No, you are not being edgy or kool.

Unread:

Siege Tactics (Spells, Swords, & Stealth. Book 4)

Triumphant (Genesis Fleet, Book 3)

Earthsea (Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea, i am going to re-listen to the first three before i get to these)

Into the Wilds (Warriors, Book 1)

Pout Neuf (Audible Free Book)

House of Teeth (Audible Free Book)

Viva Durant and the Secret of the Silver Buttons (Audible Free Book)

The Other Boleyn Girl (Phillipa Gregory)

[prettylittleliarsxxxx]

This is the shot: A slim, twentysomething white man, pale and dark-haired, waits in the center of the frame, head tilted fractionally to catch a glimpse of something (someone?) the viewer can’t see. He is wearing a dark jacket with a high collar, and a dark ball cap, even though he is inside, even though it is night. The collar is pulled up to obscure his too-romantic silhouette; the cap is pulled down to obscure his too-soulful eyes. This is the kind of man who literary heroines—or at least literary-minded ones—swoon over, but with so much of his face obscured, it is only his cheekbones, high and almost too pronounced, that signal such classic desirability.

Such a signal is important. Because everything else about this shot shouts that this man is a stalker: From the blurring of important details in the background, to the juuuust too-closeness of it, to the shadows cast from odder angles than seem natural, every aspect makes us want to scream at the heroine, RUN AWAY, LEAVE, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE WHO THIS PSYCHO IS???. And so we need something, some small thing, to remind us, when this man is not actually dressed to kill, when he’s not staring at the device he’s got tracking her every digital step, why she can’t see what we see. And that small thing is: He is attractive.

Duh.

This, of course, is why this man’s story works. The fight-or-flight reflex his behavior should provoke in the object of his obsessions is counteracted by his charming physical appeal—lust, at least initially, wins out over fear, and as it does, provides the tension necessary to drive the narrative we keep tuning in for.

The trick is, how the show wants to resolve that tension is a question of cultural time. As in, when the handsome stalker was Ezra Fitz (Ian Harding) in Freeform’s teen thriller, Pretty Little Liars, just four short (long) years ago, the romantic hero vs. predator tension was invoked only as a means of creating a temporary road block to eventual nuptial bliss between A Good Man and his (high-schooler) sweetheart. Now, when the handsome stalker is Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) in Lifetime’s adult thriller You, here in the year of Goddammit Are We Collectively Still Not Taking #MeToo Seriously (a.k.a. 2018), the tension is very clearly meant to resolve not only in Joe’s psychopathy being found out, but in his sweetheart’s (and our) delusions of obsession-as-romance shattering completely.

Understanding that this is You’s endgame is helped, of course, by the fact that (spoilers) Joe straight-up whacks a romantic rival in the skull with a book mallet in the series’ pilot, then kills him with peanut oil after holding him hostage for all of episode two. But even if he didn’t go that far, that early, series creators Greg Berlanti (of the Arrowverse) and Sera Gamble (of The Magicians) make no effort to suggest that we in the audience should be ambivalent about Joe’s character, who addresses the narration of nearly every sequence to an idealized fantasy of Beck (Elizabeth Lail), the “you”-object of his affections, whom he spies from the other side of the book shop he manages in the series’ opening scene and immediately starts scheming to own. In fact, if Berlanti and Gamble make any effort in any direction, it is to keep reminding us that Joe is bad: Take centuries of art romanticizing the unwavering fixation of a handsome man on a single woman and add to it the sea of mundanely callous dudes in the modern dating scene, and you get an audience that’s been trained out of any ability to keep an attentive, clever, present guy, who likes books and making jokes and who is, on top of it all, moppily handsome, at any kind of wait-and-see remove. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, but for the propagation of violent loopholes in rape culture—without intervention from the puppeteers behind Joe’s dark adventures, we might trip over those loopholes and fall to our Joe-shaped doom.

It’s tempting to think that they aren’t doing this, as so much of You is staged as the exact kind of dreamy romance Joe imagines himself to be facilitating and Beck believes herself to be living. Each episode opens on a series of slow, bird’s-eye pans of New York City in early autumn, set to some kind of unobtrusively sweet indie-ish acoustic background music. Scenes with Joe and Beck together are filmed with a warm, golden filter, the background details and even the edges of the foreground taking on a comfortable kind of soft-focus that seems to snuggle them together like a big, metaphorical duvet. If they are outside, the melody of bird song is prominent. If they’re inside, the shush of pages turning and life being lived together is turned high. But when juxtaposed with the brittle, hard-focus, doom-soundtracked reality of the scenes of Joe’s life outside of his and Beck’s “romance,” the delusionally fantastic nature of those softer scenes is made obvious: They are all in Joe’s head, and while Beck may be living in the same fantasy at the moment, Joe’s head is a bad, dangerous place.

“Yeah, but he loves her, but he’s sweet, but it’s a love story!” Badgley imagined eventual fans arguing when he and Lail sat down for an interview with E! News earlier this summer. “In what world?! I don’t believe that’s love. I don’t think that love equals this, so I think we have to question, what is love, and if we think this is love, where are we mistaken?”

Where is throughout all of hetero-romantic pop culture. More acutely, where, I would (and already started to) argue, is in Pretty Little Liars, which not only features Joe’s stalker ancestor in the form of Ezra “I’ll Be Watching You” Fitz, but is in actuality one of the two other shows about attractive young people swept up in cyberstalking that every elevator pitch of You invokes. (The other, of course, is Gossip Girl. ) I spent the better part of three years and many hundreds of thousands of words arguing exactly how many rape culture/toxic masculinity balls Pretty Little Liars and the creator-blessed endgame of #Ezria dropped, so I neither need nor want to retread rageful ground here. But I do need to point out that none of those elevator pitches invoking Pretty Little Liars are doing so for the fact that You is finally juggling all the poisonous balls PLL, and, in its earlier way, GG, let fall—they’re doing so because stalking is a superficial thread throughout all three, and because You’s stars include PLL’s Shay Mitchell and GG’s Badgley. That’s it.

The thing is, the fact that You is treating the subject of violent masculine entitlement and obsessive, possessive “love” with more deadly gravity than either of its teen predecessors isn’t subtle; watch the first five minutes of the pilot and you’ll get that. But that’s the point I’m trying to make: You have to watch the first five minutes of the pilot to see it. If you just look to the promo interviews and red carpet soundbites and fluffy entertainment news tweets and headlines, our collective inability to accept the violent potential of the bad men in our midst is laid bare: Joe’s psychopathic character is translated as him being a mere “creepazoid,” according to the photo caption in Vulture’s review, while You itself is cheerfully summed up as a “messy, murderous romp.” According to a teaser interview with Entertainment Tonight last fall, Mitchell declared the show to be “juicy… It still has all those elements that PLL had with it being sort of a mystery, there’s a romance part to it and it’s just exciting.” Back on E! News, while the article anchoring Badgley and Lail’s interview sports the title, “Penn Badgley Is ‘Really Troubled’ By Anyone Thinking You Is a Love Story,” it eventually can’t help but suggest that, “What Joe does is not really harassment from what Beck can see, but from the viewer’s perspective, it’s not quite not harassment and also not quite not [sic] love.”

!!!!!!!

It’s true, as Kathryn VanArendonk argues in that Vulture review above, that the tone of You isn’t steady, but I’d argue in response that this is less an indicator of the show not being serious enough to be more than a romp, and more a reminder that we are not, as a species, that great at metabolizing the idea that multiple, contradictory things can be true about a person or a situation at the same time. Especially if that person is a man, and especially if the contradictions involve a woman. I am filing this piece on the weekend before the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hear testimony in the alleged violent attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl by then-17-year-old Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and likely no one reading these words is unaware that “boys with be boys,” “that was just horseplay,” and “what is harassment anyway???” have resurfaced, in response, as an apparently reasonable foundation for the debate between men’s ability to gain fame and fortune and women’s basic humanity. “Two things can be true at the same time” has become a kind of clarion call across justice-minded social media, but that doesn’t mean it has been absorbed by everyone, on every level.

And so we get: Romp. Juicy. Romance. Not quite harassment. We get Ezra Fitz as pop culture’s most recently successful romantic stalker model. We get the urge to make excuses and carve a path for a bad man’s not-all-badness, even being inside Joe’s head in a way we could never be in Fitz’s, even knowing how he thinks, how he watches, how he transgresses Beck’s digital and physical privacy—even knowing how he murders people to get closer to her. We get that urge because we are also getting Joe swinging from murderously delusional to relatably jokey (his inner monologue as he disposes of his romantic rival’s body in episode three, and later as he picks up jogging to better follow Mitchell’s Peach, is particularly funny) to empathetically invested in making the daily life of his neglected kid neighbor just a bit richer and safer and less sad in a way that isn’t inconsistent so much as it is human, and in its humanity is challenging for us to accept.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most emphatically unequivocating take I’ve found on the non-romance of You comes from Badgley himself, whose every interview has centered his utter rejection of anything positive one might try to shake out of Joe, or Beck, or Joe and Beck’s “relationship.” One of the most illuminating is the one he did with Devon Ivie at Vulture. It is worth reading in its entirety, but his response to why he took on a stalker role now, in 2018, stands out:

“Now that we’ve made the first season and I’ve been gauging reactions with critics and friends and viewers, I can say there’s a certain accountability—an emotional and psychological responsibility—that we hold the viewers and Joe to. It’s not this wildly irresponsible, escapist fantasy at the perfectly wrong time. I think the show came out at the right time, because any other time, we wouldn’t have had the courage at a social level and have conversations about why we’re drawn to it, but also why we know we shouldn’t reward it. We don’t want to reward Joe more than how he’s already being rewarded.

And as to whether or not he thinks that “viewers will cheer on this depraved man for being a self-described ‘fool in love’,” Badgley responded, “To me, a conversation I hope it starts is, What is it about the show that’s compelling? Why am I watching it? Am I enjoying it? Am I agreeing with Joe? What about all of this do I enjoy most? […] The degrees of which you’re enticed and excited by a show, there’s a lot more scrutiny in terms of the stories we’re interested in telling and consuming—the things we’re still charmed by and attracted to. Because Joe shouldn’t be allowed to behave the way he does. But only the viewer can decide.”

Shortly before Pretty Little Liars was set to air the last half of its seventh and final season, I flew out to Los Angeles to join my co-recappers at the show’s final PaleyFest panel. There were still ten episodes to go before the finale, and we held out hope that the series that had, in its bravest moments, been the most subversively anti-rape culture on television, might be about to burn the whole of Rosewood’s toxic patriarchy to the ground. The viewers who congregated in our comments section every week had certainly decided that that was the only way Pretty Little Liarscould end with integrity. Ten episodes! Ezra could STILL be A! His stalking could be revealed as the toxic danger it always was! But then we got to PaleyFest, and the entire theater was filled with fans whose only interests were the romantic lives of the cast, both onscreen and off, with the #Ezria endgame front and center.

Reader: #Ezria was endgame. And after giving fans like me a single fever dream of the show’s best character beating the daylights out of a jailed Ezra before letting his high-school sweetheart forgive him, the show was so proud of its own cleverness.

It’s 2018 now. #MeToo is only growing stronger as it complexifies, and as more projects like You get made by people who, like Badgley, Berlanti and Gamble, are entirely disinterested in giving bad men a path to not-all-badness. Joe is an outlier, but our willingness to soften the evil of his—fictional, patently obvious, easily condemned—violent obsession is the water we’ve been swimming in for too long. We can decide, as viewers and as people, to start demanding cleaner pools.

You airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.

[blog4trendsetters]

TOP 10 MUST WATCH TV SHOWS EVERYONE MUST WATCH

TOP 10 MUST WATCH TV SHOWS EVERYONE MUST WATCH

1) CASTLEROCK

BASED ON THE STORIES OF STEPHEN KING, THE SERIES INTERTWINES CHARACTERS AND THEMES FROM THE FICTIONAL TOWN OF CASTLE ROCK.

2) MCMAFIA

 ALEX GODMAN HAS SPENT HIS LIFE TRYING TO ESCAPE THE SHADOW OF HIS FAMILY'S PAST. BUT WHEN A MURDER UNEARTHS THEIR PAST, ALEX IS DRAWN INTO THE CRIMINAL UNDERWORLD WHERE HE MUST CONFRONT HIS VALUES TO PROTECT THOSE HE LOVES.

3) MANHUNT UNABOM

IN 1995, FBI PROFILER JIM "FITZ" FITZGERALD JOINS THE UNABOM TASK FORCE. FITZ RECOMMENDS NEW METHODS OF PROFILING BUT FINDS NO ALLIES AMONG THE AGENTS IN CHARGE. IN 1997, FITZ IS TASKED WITH CONFRONTING TED KACZYNSKI, THE UNABOMBER.

4) STRIKE BACK

5) YELLOWSTONE

6) THE NIGHT MANAGER 

THE NIGHT MANAGER OF A CAIRO HOTEL IS RECRUITED TO INFILTRATE AN ARMS DEALER'S INNER CIRCLE.

7) WACO

THE FBI AND ATF SEIZE RELIGIOUS LEADER DAVID KORESH'S BRANCH DAVIDIAN COMPOUND NEAR WACO, TEXAS IN THE SPRING OF 1993.

8) TRUST

IN 1973 ROME, JOHN PAUL GETTY III, THE HEIR AND YOUNGER MEMBER OF AN OIL TYCOONS' CLAN, IS KIDNAPPED BY THE ITALIAN MAFIA IN ORDER TO GET A RANSOM.

9) HALT AND CATCH FIRE

FOLLOWS SOME PLAYERS IN THE 80S TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION THAT LEAD TO INFORMATION SOCIETY.

10) FRIENDS

FOLLOWS THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIVES OF SIX TWENTY TO THIRTY-SOMETHING-YEAR-OLD FRIENDS LIVING IN MANHATTAN.

[eddyjmu]

For the best little sister

@blckwatchjesse here you go kiddo =] I’ll be adding as I go along looking for that one song.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKIrRQ_txP_MGDoOA69BU-OKEelKJtJCI Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal Fleet Foxes - Blue Ridge Mountains Fleet Foxes - Mykonos Frou Frou - Let Go (Garden State Trailer) Travis - Love Will Come Through (Garden State Trailer) Frou Frou - Breathe In The Postal Service - Such Great Heights (Garden State Trailer) Thievery Corporation - Lebanese Blonde (Garden State Soundtrack) Mint Royale - Blue Song Mint Royale - Singing In The Rain (made famous by a VW commerical) Mint Royale - Little Words Frank Sinatra - This Town (Mint Royale Remix) B-Complex - Beautiful Lies B-Complex - Three Dots Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice (featuring the one and only Christopher Walken) Fatboy Slim - Right Here Right Now Chemical Brothers - The Test Chemical Brothers - Setting Sun (this was in a trailer for Serenity) Chemical Brothers - Do It Again Chemical Brothers - Salmon Dance Chemical Brothers - Escape Velocity Royksopp - Remind Me Royksopp - What Else Is There Royksopp - So Easy Royksopp - The Girl and the Robot Royksopp - Happy Up Here RJD2 - Ghostwriter Crystal Method - Name of the Game Bonobo - Sugar Rhyme Bonobo - Ketto El Michels Affair - Hung Up On My Baby El Michels Affair - El Pueblo Unido Blockhead - The Music Scene Blockhead - Insomniac Olympics Blockhead - The Art of Walking Blockhead - Carnivores Unite Blockhead - It’s Raining Clouds Jagwar Ma - Exercise The One AM Radio - Sunlight Flying Lotus - Zodiac Shit Gorillaz - All Alone Eagles of Death Metal - I Really Wanna Be In LA La Femme - Sur la planche Moby - Porcelain Muse - Undisclosed Desires Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition Nine Inch Nails - Survivalism S Strong - Whitestick (Think neo-Gatsby) Robin Schulz/Francesco Yates - Sugar Milky Chance - Stolen Dance Duck Sauce - Barbara Streisand Michael Mind - Baker Street Beastie Boys - Sure Shot Beastie Boys - Sabotage Saint Motel - My Type Saint Motel - Cold Cold Man Saint Motel - Benny Goodman Bloodhound Gang - Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal Kasabian - Underdog Blur - Song 2 Beck  - Loser Cake - Comfort Eagle Two Door Cinema Club - Undercover Martyn Peter Bjorn and John - Young Folks Passion Pit - Sleepyhead M83 - Midnight City Miike Snow - Animal Miike Snow - Genghis Khan Flume and Chet Faker - Drop The Game The Avalanches - Because I’m Me The Revivalists - Wish I Knew You The Submarines - 1940 (Amplive Remix) Nico Vega - Medicine Man Amon Tobin - Keep Your Distance Wax Tailer - Que Sera Thom Yorke - Analyze (Credits song for The Prestige) Supreme Beings of Leisure - Never The Same Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second The Wombats - Moving To New York The Strokes - Reptilia The Strokes - Last Nite Purity Ring - Lofticries Purity Ring - Bodyache The Dodos - The Season Friendly Fires - Lovesick Xploding Plastix - Joy Comes In The Morning Tricky - Excess Morcheeba - The Sea Caravan Palace - Lone Digger Stuck in the Sound - Let’s Go Santigold - Disparate Youth Fitz and the Tantrums - The Walker John Frusciante - Murderers The Prodigy - Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix) Paul van Dyk - Nothing But You A Perfect Circle - The Outsider A Perfect Circle - Passive (from Constantine with Keanu Reeves) Young Men Dead - Black Angels Monster Magnet - Space Lord Battles - Atlas (was in LittleBigPlanet) The Rasmus - In The Shadows Mutemath - Reset Moondog - Bird’s Lament Dave Brubeck - Take Five High Contrast - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Portugal The Man - Feel It Still Junkie XL, Elvis Presley - A Little Less Conversation (Elvis vs JXL) The Bravery - An Honest Mistake The Bravery - Believe Electrasy - Cosmic Castaway The Kooks - Naive Chinese Man - I’ve Got That Tune Jack Hylton - Breakaway (Shemian Remix) Lostprophets - Last Train Home Lostprophets - Shinobi vs Dragon Ninja Lostprophets - We Still Kill The Old Way Sixfingerz - Law of Nature Sixfingerz - Universal Law Deela - El Mechanico Michael Lener - Boombox Question - Osanha GooMar - I Forgot Why Neroche - And Then She Was Gone The Blue Square - Believe Demouche - Sweet Davila DJ Shadow - Six Days DJ Shadow - Mongrel Meets His Maker Gasoline - The Hardest Frenic - Alright Moderator - Words Remain Le Melodist - Sas Nas Esseks - Tom n Jerry Poldoore - I Do L’Orange - Her Sins Kognitif - Yeah Yeah Yeah Parov Stelar - Catgroove Quantic & Flowering Inferno - Cumbia Sobre el Mar Panama Cardoon - Moliendo Cafe Chinese Man feat Taiwan MC & Cyph4 - Miss Chang CloZee  - Koto CloZee - Secret Place CloZee - Inner Peace Ryder - Pretty Little Gangster Rone - Bye Bye Macadam C2C - Delta Funky Destination - Inside Man

[thedopesessions]

THE MICROPHONE MISFITZ: ESCAPE FROM BABYLON VOL 4- ALBUM REVIEW   

     It's funny that in Hip Hop today, especially if you are of a certain age, we end up talking about what real Hip Hop is. What we will and won't listen to. How we feel about these rappers or emcees who don't rep the culture. I say all that because as soon as we are introduced or know about artists or groups that do rep the culture, we tend to not listen to any of the music they've been supplying us for years. Now if you listen to my podcast or seen the album review i did for an album called "Escape from Babylon Vol 3" I was introduced to the group "The Microphone Misfitz" by the front man and leader  "D-Nick" I was very intrigued by him and the group. I was also intrigued by the music as well. I listened to Vol 3, I started listening to other singles and eventually got around to listening to Vol 2 and Vol 1 of their Escape from Babylon series. I got to read what accompanied the music, which is the series of comic books that we get to see with every album they release. In my review of Vol 3 I did say that I enjoyed the album, and that they reminded me of Hip Hop group "Jurassic 5" an although I dig the music and everything they have to offer, I wasn't much into "B-Boy" style of music. I said that but i also kept going back to the music, because there's a energy to it and it's not the usual or typical mainstream rap songs or albums.  That's why I keep going back to listen to more songs from them, now I get to tell you how I feel about "Escape from Babylon Vol 4"     I had many of conversations with D-Nick on the process of making this album. I remember him telling that, it was going to be very different from the way they usually do there albums. This album was co produced by Juan "Big Herc" Hernandez and features a familiar face with Femcee Filpsidee. Heavily featured songs with Emcee & Nerd core legend Mega Ran and a song that features legendary West Coast Lyricist & icon Ras Kass. So i guess the question would be, with everything they have on this album, is this album any good or do the features kill who they are? The answer to that question is that everything works on this album and then some. Sometimes when you listen to a Hip hop album and its heavily featured, you do wonder if the features would over shadow the group. Mega Ran who is featured on 5 of the 12 songs is a great piece to the songs and not some one who takes over. This is a Microphone Misfitz album, and I say that because when you have a Mega Ran on the album, you can be lost in the shuffle, but the Fitz are reppin.     If you don't believe the Fitz are superheroes then check out the first track on the album called "Super Hero Landing" because we all know that when the heroes land, it's the heroes landing that gets our attention. Those who know what I'm talking about, watch the movie "Deadpool" The thing i love the most is from The Microphone Misfitz is the wide range of topics they speak on every album. Yes, they are B-Boys and that they do rep that on songs like "Keep Watching" & "Take it From the Top" which B-Boy anthems as a call to action for the love of the B-Boy culture, and for them to get on the floor. Triggered is a song that's going to get a lot of people "Triggered" pun intended. Its a song that speaks of the now PC culture that we currently live in. It also made me reflect on how it is being a black man who has been called so many things in the book and never had the chance or the time to feel triggered and get in our feeling. the trend we see now, especially when it comes to interviews, music artist, and comedians. A song like "Space Invaders" in which could've been about an actual Invasion like the video game or a song based on the video game, but its a song about people invading you inner space. The Track "V.M.P.A." that features Femcee Flipsidee, who is a collaborator with the Fitz, fits so perfectly on this song. She gives a female perspective on the relationships and dating trends, and i love the line about how if this is how it is, then she would rather just stay home and watch Netflix. The songs "Family History" & "Power Pen" two songs that are very different but the same as far as just dope rhymes. Family history reminds me of the song from Common "I Used to Love H.E.R." talking about the the history of music and the love that D-Nick has for Hip Hop. Power Pen is just to me, a raw lyrical assault.     When i talked to D-Nick when they were making this album, there was moments where i felt that because it was other hands in the pot and he didn't know how it was going to come out. Truth is, the hands on this album is just incredible. I say that because it could've been an album where you just didn't know how it would form and come out but its to me, one of the best albums in the Microphone Misfitz catalog. The songs, beats, lyrics, everything fits perfectly. I also loved Ras Kass verse on the "Take it From The Top" I mean, of course it's Ras Kass. I've loved Ras Kass since the song he was featured in on the "Street Fighter" soundtrack and his solo album "Soul On Ice" The interludes on the album are amazing, and set up some of the songs on the album. This is a well crafted, well written, and produced album that I wish everyone would listen to. The Problem is... they won't, but will still complain about no real Hip Hop, and how the creativity is lost. Here is an album that you should listen to. Here's a group that should be on the festival circuit. They need to be celebrated. There needs to be stories about them and more coverage. The sad part is that in this particular industry we have right now i don't see it happening but i really hope not just the Nerd core and B-Boy audience will hear this album.

[sinkingsidewalks]

the ghosts beneath

An exploration of Fitz's (potential) thoughts through 4x17: Identity and Change

read on ao3

It starts with an itch, in the back of his mind, a stove that he can’t remember turning off, a phone call he hasn’t responded to but from whom he doesn’t know. The ghost of something. Shapeless, boundless, entirely undefinable, yet there nonetheless, only when he isn’t looking for it. 

It’s bothersome to say the least. He knows his own mind. He stays up far past Ophelia, checking and double checking the calculations on Project Looking Glass. Nothing’s out of place.

When she wakes the next morning, comes and finds him slumped over at his desk, he swears that he reads more into her expression than could possibly be there.

Then he sees her face, the subversive, the woman, and there’s nothing there. Except that, the emptiness of his gaze, is what feels unexpected, is what feels hollow. Like he’s forgotten his own reflection.

She’s beautiful, of course, even beneath the dirt and the grimace set across her expression, but to him she’s nothing more.

Did he leave the pan on the stovetop this morning? Maybe he didn’t switch off the coffee pot? Is he wearing pants beneath his trousers?

It feels like a string tied around his wrist, but what it’s to remind him of he’s got no idea. He rubs at the empty skin anyways and, instead of pondering his potential insanity, resolves to find the subversive and take her out. That will undoubtedly solve his uncertainty.

He ignores the thread of thought that tells him this feeling started long before Jemma Simmons.

Fitz watches the ocean from a port window in the lower level lab inside the jet. No one dares linger with him. He stares out across to where the horizon melts the edges of the sky and the water together, the ocean an endless, glittering blue beyond where their shadow encroaches.

They’ve just past Bermuda, there won’t be anything to mar the view until they arrive at the island. From his perspective, it looks desolate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just below the surface, beneath the barrier of waves, exists a whole world, an entire ecosystem that they, as humans, can barely touch, such are the dangers of environment, the threat of hypoxia.

He finds his fingers gracing over the delicate skin of his inner wrist without cause. If he were to press down, around the tendons, onto the radial artery, he’d be able to feel the pulse of his heart through the skin. He doesn’t. Instead, he shoves the fingers into the pocket of his trousers.

There’s no reason he should be feeling this off.

Clacking heeled footsteps approach the glass door to the lab and he pieces his attention back together in the presence of his lover.

The exiled scientist doesn’t faze him. He is just a desperate man, lost in his mind to the science, to love. The Doctor doesn’t stoop to such levels.

Fitz listens to him prattle, beg really, and ignores the sour taste in his mouth when Radcliffe says he crossed the universe for the subversive, ignores that it doesn’t sour the words being said, but rather his memories.

There’s no time to think of where he’s stolen Ophelia’s words from.

Instead of questioning, he shoots the woman.

Jemma Simmons screams his name.

Just for a moment, it feels like he has a grasp on what it was that he forgot. Then it slips, off his tongue, from between his fingers, like trying to catch a cloud, dry ice over his palms.

He can’t look away from her. He doesn’t know why.

It’s as if in a dream, where the features of someone’s face are not their own, are unrecognizable, belonging to a complete stranger, yet that doesn’t make them any less familiar.

Security drags him out before he can breathe again.

On the plane, in the air, Ophelia lays her hand across his forearm. Through the fabric of his jacket and shirt, onto his skin, something in the touch burns.

He shakes his head instead of shaking off her touch and tells her he has something in the labs to check on.

There, he finds himself no longer staring out into the sea. A phantom of pain somewhere in his chest, the feeling of uncertainty, that he wishes to carve out, with a blade, if only he could place it.

A breath shudders through his lungs as he tries to parse out why his skin no longer feels like his own. Like it’s been stretched over the frame of another skeleton, then handed back to him, ill-fitted and worn out.

He tries to explain away the stumble of his heart when he saw her, the inexplicable pull towards this relative stranger, the worry that sunk through his heart when the gunfire started, worry that was not for himself, was not for Ophelia.

He can’t.

There’s nothing he can work out himself, no one that he would dare broach the subject with. Except.

He has questions. Skye – Daisy – the traitor – has answers.

[jenksy]

2016 Albums of the Year

While most have rightly put 2016 in their rearview mirror, it's taken me even longer than last year to sort out the music I wanted to share with everyone. I decided to change the format from my usual Top 50 because there was not a lot of music that I got fully immersed in. To put it in terms of numbers: In 2015, I amassed a collection of 787 songs. In 2016? 545 songs. I found a handful of albums that I really liked, and I listened to them on repeat. There were really only two albums that I knew would be at the top of the list, and everything else fell into one of two categories- I liked it but didn't listen to it much, or I really liked it but found it hard to rank above or below anything else I really liked. As such, I have listed my Top 20, plus about 40 other albums and EPs that I enjoyed to verying degrees, in alphabetical order. I did a decent amount of inner reflecting about 2016 and didn't say much about it publicly, other than I was glad when it ended. I'm not going to say anything publicly about it now, either, other than I think that in 2016, most music critics tended to value albums that highlighted issues facing our society. Pop culture often serves as a reflection of the state of the world, and it's important to recognize art that gets people talking about current events. But for all the problems the world at large faced in 2016, I had my own problems to deal with, and my list this year is very reflective of how I dealt with those problems. I hope you enjoy my annual countdown, but since 2016 was so bad, why not start out with my biggest disappointment of the year?

Fitz & The Tantrums - Fitz & The Tantrums This album was an enormous letdown. After getting a bunch of enjoyment from their first two albums and seeing them live, I was anticipating something funky and creative for their third album. What I got was unimaginitive, canned pop music. "Hand Clap", which I found to be very fun, despite being infectiously catchy, was the only song on the album that really utilized any saxophone- something that I was expecting to be a major presence on the album, but was unfortunately switched out for synthesizers most of the time. The term "sell-out" is really the only thing appropriate here- They sound like they've been told what they need to play in order to sell records. Now, onto the good stuff Anderson .Paak - Malibu "Am I Wrong" ft. ScHoolboy Q Angel Olsen - My Woman "Shut Up Kiss Me" The Avalanches - Wildflower "Frankie Sinatra" Bloc Party - Hymns "The Good News" Bon Iver - 22, A Million "8 (circle)" Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Denial "Vincent" Childish Gambino - Awaken, My Love! "Redbone" CRX - New Skin "Ways to Fake It" Crystal Castles - Amnesty (I) "Kept" Deap Valley - Femejism "Smile More" Gregory Alan Isakov - Gregory Alan Isakov With The Colorado Symphony "Liars" Grouplove - Big Mess "Spinning" Justice - Woman "Stop" K.Flay - Crush Me EP "Blood in the Cut" Låpsley - Long Way Home "Hurt Me" The Last Shadow Puppets - Everything You've Come to Expect "Sweet Dreams, TN" Little Scream - Cult Following "Love As A Weapon" The Lumineers - Cleopatra "Angela" M83 - Junk "Laser Gun" ft. Mai Lan Margaret Glaspy - Emotions and Math "Pins and Needles" Michael Kiwanuka - Love & Hate "Rule the World" Miike Snow - iii "Back of the Car" Modern Baseball - Holy Ghost "Mass" Paper Bird - Paper Bird "I Don't Mind" Pixies - Head Carrier "Um Chagga Lagga" Poliça - United Crushers "Lose You" Ra Ra Riot - Need Your Light "Water" Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool "True Love Waits" The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome "Just Your Fool" Ry-Lo - Ry-Lo EP "New Friend" Sara Watkins - Young In All The Wrong Ways "Say So" Seasick Steve - Keepin' the Horse Between Me and the Ground "What A Thang" Solange - A Place At the Table "Mad" ft. Lil Wayne The Strokes - Future Present Past EP "OBLIVIUS" Sturgill Simpson - A Sailor's Guide to Earth "Brace for Impact (Live A Little)" A Tribe Called Quest - We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service "We The People...." Two Door Cinema Club - Gameshow "Bad Decisions" Warpaint - Heads Up "New Song" Weezer - White Album "Endless Bummer" Whitney - Light Upon the Lake "No Matter Where We Go" 20. SHEL - Just Crazy Enough "You Could Be My Baby" "Rooftop" 19. Lake Street Dive - Side Pony "Call Off Your Dogs" "Mistakes" 18. Jake Bugg - On My One "Love, Hope and Misery" "Put Out the Fire" 17. Red Hot Chili Peppers - The Getaway "Dark Necessities" "Go Robot" 16. Biffy Clyro - Ellipsis "Howl" "Re-arrange" 15. Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues "Pol Roger" "Through" 14. Wye Oak - Tween "If You Should See" "Watching the Waiting" 13. Parker Millsap - The Very Last Day "Pining" "Heaven Sent" 12. The Joy Formidable - Hitch "Liana" "The Last Thing On My Mind" 11. Honeyblood - Babes Never Die "Hey, Stellar" "Sea Hearts" 10. Glass Animals - How To Be A Human Being "The Other Side of Paradise" "Season 2 Episode 3" 9. Chairlift - Moth "Ch-Ching" "Moth to the Flame" 8. Phantogram - Three "You Don't Get Me High Anymore" "Run Run Blood" 7. St. Paul & The Broken Bones - Sea of Noise "Sanctify" "All I Ever Wonder" 6. Esmé Patterson - We Were Wild "We Were Wild" "Wantin' Ain't Gettin'" 5. Wolfmother - Victorious "Victorious" "Gypsy Caravan" 4. blink-182 - California "She's Out of Her Mind" "Left Alone" 3. Catfish & The Bottlemen - The Ride "7" "Anything" 2. School of Seven Bells - Sviib "On My Heart" "Open Your Eyes" 1. The Naked and Famous - Simple Forms "Last Forever" "Backslide" "The Runners"