#fuck it's identity exploration all the way down even when it's also very distinctly other things

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

Me with the concept of identity, apparently, how dare you make me think about this??? XD

man IDK what it is about it but looking back on the last few years that's a strong theme in literally EVERYTHING I've been doing.

you ever accidentally create a recurring theme in your writing. you start putting together an outline for something you’ve never written before and get partway through planning, rearrange the pieces, and go “GODDAMMIT THIS IS ABOUT GRIEF AGAIN”? because let me tell you,

[grimelords]

My August playlist is finished and while it does unfortunately begin with Tool it also has two of Elvis’ gospel songs on it so please believe me when I say it takes a turn! Everything you could ever want over three hours of music from 70s christian hippie cult music to a funky remix of Also Sprach Zarathustra to Ante Up.

If you’re interested in getting these emailed to you instead of having them mysteriously appear and clog up your dash, I’ve started a tinyletter you can subscrine to at tinyletter.com/grimelords

but in the meantime,

listen here

Lateralus - Tool: Tool is on streaming now and they've got a new album out and so it's a very nice time to reinterrogate a band that meant a lot to teenaged me that i have almost completely exorcised from my life since. What's interesting firstly is how much better it is to consume their music digitally than it ever was in any physical format. They apparently resisted making it available for so long for nebulous reasons of artistic control and intention, wanting a say in how their music is listened to - they design these long and overwrought albums to be experienced as a whole. My contention is that as a whole album, start-to-finish, is one of the worst ways to listen to this band. Tool have maybe 12 great songs across four albums and every single album is around 70-80 minutes, pushing the limit of the CD. Which means for every great song there's at least two ambient interludes, Bill Hicks samples, 90s alt comedy bits (Die Eir Von Satan is just menacing music and a menacing voice reading out a weed cookie recipe in german, now that's what I call comedy) that really add nothing to the experience of the album on a casual listen. Being actually able to listen to these songs on their own, and playlist them and pull them apart from the mire is so refreshing and makes experiencing this extremely exhausting band actually pleasant for once. That's not to say ambient interludes and sketches and whatever aren't worth it, I absolutely love that shit and a lot of my favourite albums are absolutely chock full of that sort of thing - just like, don't make me do it every time. Their new album seems to reflect this at least a little bit, with the more overarching themes and arcs of the previous albums replaced by more singular and self-contained long songs interspersed with dedicated 2 minute interlude tracks. The runtime blows out to an hour and a half unrestrained by physical limits but it seems to contain more actual music and less funny than any other Tool album which is a welcome change. I'm still lukewarm on the album itself, it seems to just be a complete rehashing of the ideas on 10,000 Days (to the point of almost note-for-note repetition of some old riffs and themes) which is a bit disappointing considering how long they've apparently been working on it. I'll give it more time because Tool albums always unfold over multiple listens but for now they kind of just sound like the dad-rock version of a once extremely edgy 90s band - which I guess they are now so that makes sense. As for Lateralus, I think it's their best song. The perfect combination of Joe Rogan spirit science woo-woo sacred geometry fibonacci sequence 'open your mind' bullshit and good old fashioned riffs, it's the best of both halves of Tool and great starting point if you've never listened to this band and are interested in becoming insufferable.

Mars For The Rich - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: This album is so good and it's finally converted me to being a full time King Gizz guy so look out for a lot more of that in the future. It's a thrash metal concept album about ecological collapse forcing the rich to flee to mars and the poor to flee to venus where they lose their minds and fly into the fire. I spent a little while the other day obsessing over the insane vocal leap in this absolutely incredible song when he jumps down an 11th on 'mars for the riiiiiiich' somehow effortlessly.

Pattern Walks - Cloud Nothings: The interplay between Cloud Nothings second and third albums is something I think about a lot. Attack On Memory is a visceral experience of depression and living in your own head where Here And Nowhere Else is about being able to finally move past it, and living with it. There's a good quote from the singer on the Genius page for this song where he says "It was almost a response to “Wasted Days” on the last record. It ends with “I thought I would be more than this” over and over and this one ends with “I thought” over a beautiful bit of music which is an easy way to explain the way I was thinking when I was writing this record. I wasn’t as depressed as I was when I was making the last album. Before, I felt like nobody liked the band and I was doing it for three years. I was not in a good place. Now, I had more time to think about why I felt that way. It’s a positive song."

M.E. - Metz: Metz put out a B-sides and rarities album a couple of weeks ago and then they put out this Gary Numan cover on it's own for some reason. It's very very good! I love just putting a generally harder edge on it without taking anything away from the spirit of the original. I also, somehow, didn't realise that Where's Your Head At by Basement Jaxx was a Gary Numan sample until I heard this cover so we're all learning every day.

The Ocean And The  Sun - The Sound Of Animals Fighting: Here's what's good: having the last third of your song just be a monotone voice reading from a CrimethInc anarchist zine over swirling guitar ambience. The drums are so good in this, Chris Tsagakis makes me want to muscle through the ska and listen to RX Bandits more, he’s just that good. The extremely crunchy part in the chorus especially, it switches through like three different distortions and sounds absolutely great. I’m a big fan of anyone that can make a very straightforward groove like the main one here really work just by absolutely leaning into it.

Uzbekistan - The Sound Of Animals Fighting: Uzbekistan is the most out-there and wild song on this album which was sort of mostly a way back into post-hardcore for TSOAF after Lover, The Lord Has Left Us.. which was perhaps a little too-out there for most. (seven minute closing track of a guy singing John Cage's Experimental Music essay over formless tabla and mandolin). The drums alone in this are worth it. The way they transition in and out of the super distorted electronic parts is so good. This song fortunately also has a section where someone recites poetry over electronic noise and a second voice whispers 'who holds your strings? wake up..." over the top near the end. I will love and defend dum-dum pretentious music until the day I die.

Gangsta - Tune-Yards: I love Tune-Yards and I'm incredibly interested in the way she interrogates whiteness. It's a complicated thing to get into in this playlist post but when she first turned up, a lot of people assumed she was african american just by the sound of her voice and music - it reaches and pulls from a lot of african music in a very postmodern sort of way and when people found out she was white, straight, cis and from New England it kind of felt like a betrayal for some people. On her 2018 album I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life she digs into it a lot in a way that becomes almost uncomfortable for what is ostensibly a pop album. An NPR article about it at the time said "Ever the student, the Smith-educated Garbus, who writes most of Tune-Yards' lyrics, designed an anti-racist curriculum for herself. She attended a six-month anti-racist workshop at the East Bay Meditation Center. She read the work of noted anti-racist educator Tim Wise and explored the activism of Standing Up for Racial Justice, a nationwide, progressive activism network dedicated to "moving white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority.". That's a lot. This song, Gangsta, from her 2011 album when all the hype was fresh feels like a pretty early look into the mindset she'd later fully fledge out of interrogating white identity and cultural appropriation while also participating in it. The lyrics are simple but they get to a simple point, "What's a boy to do if he'll never be a rasta?" is basically making the same point as Ras Trent by The Lonely Island except it's asking where else does Ras Trent fit? Can a white guy participate in anything like that in a way that's not cultural appropriation, and how can a culture like that participate in the larger world without being appropriated? It's 2013 tumblr discourse but it's still churning for a reason I suppose.

Ante Up (feat. Busta Rhymes, Teflon & Remi Martin) - M.O.P: An all time great Violence Song, in the same genre as Knuck If Ya Buck and X Gon Give It To Ya. Opening with "'this shit feel like a whole entire world collapsed" is such an insane way to open a song but the absolute whirlwind of threats that follows makes it feel warranted. "Fuck hip-hop, rip pockets, snatch jewels" is sooo good. I don't even care about this song I am just straight up robbing you. The absolute power in the rhythm of the overlapping getemGETEMgetem hitemHITEMhitem part is just so, so strong. It's like a VR experience of being fucking robbed.

Awake (feat. JPEGMAFIA) - Tkay Maidza: It seems like Tkay is finally nailing down her sound and she’s absolutely killing it. She’s been through a few different styles since she started out and now she’s really hit on something that’s very distinctly her with this and her other new song Flexin and I cannot wait for the album.

Big Head - Ms. Jade: Ms Jade had one album in 2002 and then basically disappeared which is a shame because she's got a very interesting approach. The star of the show is as usual, Timbaland. The man is a singular voice somehow making the tabla and a wikiwiki noise his signature sound. I love the drone of the raps interspersed with the vocal spikes and I love the chorus as the gospel vocals surge up from underneath. This whole song is just completely bizzare in its construction in a way that works perfectly and feels strangely.

Titanium 2 Step - Battles: Battles are finally back and I’m fucking bouncing off the walls. They’re a two piece now and it does not seem to have slowed them down at all which is very exciting. I can’t think of any band that has ever continued with only half of their original members and also moved forward radically every time. Everything about this song is great: the super strength drums, the hypercolour guitar and the vocals that are just screaming absolutely whatever you like whenever you like. It feels closest to Ice Cream, and Gloss Drop in general more than La Di Da Di but i’m so excited to see how the new album sounds - and how they adapt their old material live now that there’s only two of them.

Dancing Is The Best Revenge - !!!: I’ve never actively listened to !!! for no good reason, but plenty of times in my life I’ve heard a song playing and been like damn what the FUCK is THIS?! and it always turns out to be !!!. This is yet another example.

Skitzo Dancer (Justice Remix) - Scenario Rock: The first clap in this is one of the best sounds ever. Right after 'so you think you've seen and heard it all' everything drops out of the mix for this one very comedy clap and it makes me smile every time. The rhythm of the Disco!... Disco! Disco! part near the end is one of those things that's just always playing in the back of my mind, which as far as constant reminders go it's not the worst. I've also over the last week or so been a big fan of this 11 year old youtube video I found of some guy covering the bass on this song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0DLAUaV3f8

16:56 - Danger: Danger had a new album this year that I don't think I gave enough attention to because I relistened and it's very good. He spends the majority of it refining his original sound but it's such a distinct and original niche that it works out great. The songs are so densely layered and frankly just sound so beautiful! Which is a strange thing to say about 80s inspired electro but it just does. The strings and timpani in this about halfway through are just a gift as well, I love it.

Also Sprach Zarathustra - Deodato: As part of my ‘thinking about Elvis’ I was looking up a live album of his called Aloha From Hawaii Via Sattelite which has a very good cover which doubles as an illustration of how my proposed international peacekeeping satellite will function, projecting an immense Elvis themed blanket of darkness over ‘troublemaker’ regions to immerse them in an eternal freezing night until they’ve settled down. Anyway his entrance music for this this concert in Hawaii is Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is a very very funny thing to do and I think gives an appropriate measure of his status at the time. When I told my girlfriend about this she directed me to this bonkers jazz funk version of it by Deodato which deservingly won a grammy in 1974 for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

Hollywood Forever Cemetary Sings - Father John Misty: I’ve resisted listening to Father John Misty for a long time because he just seems like a real asshole. A big brain man genius that saw what Lana Del Rey was doing and thought “what if.. me?”. But I can’t deny this song, it’s absolutely magical and as far as songs about fucking in a cemetery go it’s definitely one of the most singable.

Remember / Medicine Man - Yma Sumac: In reading about the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and who was buried there, I learned about Yma Sumac. Yma Sumac was a Peruvian soprano with one of the most incredible voices I've ever heard who was an absolutely huge deal in the 50s when Americans were clamouring for the exotic, real or imagined. She made extremely good mambo music and claimed to be descended from the last Incan emperor. Her popularity faded after the 50s and then for an unknown reson in 1971, ten years since her last album, she made this rock album. It is insane. It's the best example of 'voice as an instrument' that I've ever heard. She is making every kind of sound possible with a human voice and her range seems completely limitless. She's just as comfortable in a piercingly high whistle register as she is in deep guttural growls. About 2 minutes into Remember she just straight up jumps four octaves in a row just to flex. She also sings in a way in the second verse of Medicine Man that I've never heard before that sounds like she's blowing out her cheeks and then singing with her mouth almost closed. It's absolutey bizzare and I love it so much.

This Thing - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: Listening to the other album that King Gizzard put out this year is really making me appreciate how much of 180 Infest The Rats Nest was for them. This album is basically a Black Keys album of groovy fun songs about fishing for fishies with fantastic harmonica work and it makes it look even more like they just snapped when they did the next one.

The Warrior (feat. Patty Smyth) - Scandal: I've been very passively watching GLOW since the second half of season 2 and now I'm very passively watching season 3 and this song was the opening credits theme for the first episode. It fucking rocks I don't know why they don't just make it the theme song all the time. This sort of 80s hard-rock pop is very good when it's good and extremely bad when it's bad and I wonder if we'll ever see any sort of revival of it once 80s nostalgia nostalgia takes hold in 2030. Being a singer named Patty Smyth is very funny also. She's billed as a feature even though she was in the band because she left to try a solo career as soon as it was released, possibly even before. She is also John McEnroe's wife I just found out. What a life.

A Girl Called Johnny - The Waterboys: I found this song because I was googling to see if it's possibly to get a random album from spotify and instead foumd a guy on rateyourmusic who was generating random rym album pages and then listening to whatever came up if it was on spotify - which seems just as good. This was one of the albums he talked about and he seemed to like it so I listened and I did as well. Sometimes the best way to find new music is throw dice on the internet and see what comes up.

New Year's Eve - City Calm Down: The new City Calm Down is one hundred percent great and I have such admiration for them for making a complete left turn with their sound and sounding like a completely different band since their last album but being equally as great in both forms. It's very inspiring and it's also the second song of the month I've heard for the first time while walking around Richmond that's mentioned Richmond. Very spooky.

Cruel Summer - Taylor Swift: It's fucked up how good Lover is when ME! and You Need To Calm Down were so bad. It feels like they changed direction at the last minute and changed the tracklist dramatically because those two songs seem sort of wildly out of place, along with London Boy. It's so uneven it's basically two albums in one but when it's good it's extremely good. This song is fucking powerful. The way she straight up screams "he looks so pretty like a devil"? Amazing. What a crazy thing to shout. If you're interested I also resequenced Lover and took London Boy off it and it's a far better album in my opinion https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3LN1uAhp8BS8Ms4bgmHiVP

Kelly - Van She: I have no idea why but this is in the opening paragraph of Van She's wiki page: "Their label introduced them as a "new band from Sydney fresh on ideas, fresher than Flavor Flav, fresh like coriander, fresher than the Fresh Prince, fresher than fresh eggs."[2] Despite these claims, the band began with a sound very much rooted in the 1980s, heavy on synthesizer." which really makes me laugh. Van She had a very specific mid-2000s indietronica thing going that was really good as this song proves but they also did a bunch of remixes under the name Van She Tech that are very out there and completely different to the main band. Their remix of UFO by Sneaky Sound System I'm sure I've yelled about in these posts before, it's absolutely phenomenal. Anyway I guess what I'm saying is get you a band that can do both.

Shadow - Wild Nothing: Somehow I missed Wild Nothing back when they were a big thing and only listened to them this month. I listened to this whole album while I was doing housework and when it finished I though 'that was nice' and could not remember a single thing about it. That's the beauty of shoegaze! I had to listen to it about five more times for it to stick and now I'm getting more and more out of it every time, I love it.

Heaven's On Fire - The Radio Dept.: Years ago when I was having a major 'depressive episode' for about a fucking year I listened to this album Constantly and as a result for a very long time I couldn't listen to it without inviting megawatts of bad vibes back into my brain. Thankfully through hard work and time passing it appears I've fully healed my assosciations with this album which is fantastic news because it is delightful start to finish and worth getting obsessed with again.

Crystalised - The xx: It's nice to see news articles posted almost every day about which albums are turning ten years old. It makes me feel one million years old and viewing the world from a television in my hermit's cave. It feels hard to overstate just how much quiet influence the xx have had over the music landscape since 2009. Without The xx we don't have Royals and without Royals we don't have You Need To Calm Down, so. Something beautiful of theirs that I think is sad hasn't caught on in the intervening years is the idea of writing romantic duets when duets had been out of fashion for so long. They wrote a whole album of them and continue to! There's a beautiful contextual depth to it, in that it's two queer people singing not exactly to each other but with each other. In an interview they've called it 'singing past each other' which is a very nice way to put it.

Aspirin - Tropical Fuck Storm: I really appreciate the continual development of the guitars in Tropical Fuck Storm where they sound so pencil-necked and reedy in these angular little melodies and then sometimes explode into thick cacophanous howls, but what's especially good is in songs like this when they don't explode and instead just sort of sprout tendrils and crawl around each other. They're really drilling down on a very singular and very unsettling sound and I really love it. It is also a very interesting feeling to be walking around Richmond listening to this album for the first time and having him mention Richmond. Spooky even.

Pasta - Angie McMahon: "My bedroom is a disaster / my dog has got kidney failure" is an all-time great opening lyric for me. I love the way this song kicks up from the doldrums, like forcing yourself to do something just so you've done something today. Angie McMahon is so great and I'm getting more and more out of her album every time.

If I Had A Hammer - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash: The way this song is performed here is so fucking cool. The guitar tone, June's voice and the general energy of it is just absolutely electric. It feels like Highway 61 Bob Dylan where it's still folk but it's got this massive power in it. The solo fucking rips in that very old fashioned way and when it finishes and that riff comes back in by itself it's just great.

Elvis Presley Blues - Gillian Welch: I was thinking about this song because I too was thinking about Elvis. I thought for a long time that the lyrics to this were ‘didn’t he die?’ and not ‘day that he died’ and I think I prefer mine more. Idly thinking about Elvis like “whatever happened to that guy? Must be old now. Wait, didn't he die? No way to know I suppose.”

Everything Is Free - Sylvan Esso: Rolling Stone had a very good article and interview about how this song about napster has had a resurgence and remained relevant through the streaming era which is a very good read. I love the original and really this version is very similar except for the one key difference where they really dig into the anger and frustration at the heart of it in the 'fucking sing it yourself' line.  https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-welch-everything-is-free-courtney-barnett-father-john-misty-725135/

It's Nice To Have A Friend - Taylor Swift: This is the strangest song on Lover and one of the best, I absolutely love it. It's a very old fashioned kind of Taylor Swift Love Story type song but it also has a a fucking trumpet reveille in the middle, so that really spices it up a bit. I also keep accidentally listening to this backwards - there's a few phrases like when she sings 'it's nice to have a friend' where the 'friend' lands on the offbeat but is accented like it should be ON the beat and because of the way the music is in this where it's just the steady pulse it's hard to tell whether the chime is supposed to be on the beat or on the offbeat. It feels like it sort of slides back and forth throughout the song depending on what everything else is doing around it. I don't know if that's intentional or not but it's a very interesting effect. This song is also, in my estimation, about a woman and is detailing a fantasy Taylor Swift is having where she can come out to the world with no fuss and enjoy a simple fairytale love story as a gay woman.

Psalm 42 / Chant For Pentecost - The Trees Community: I have a mental list of albums I google every few months to see if they've been added to streaming and by the grace of god one of them finally has been. Years ago I used to listen to this almost every night to fall asleep and I think it brainwashed me slightly in a delightful way, and now I finally have it back again! This is proper hippie music: a bunch of long haired new york christians who drove around the country in the early 70s in a school bus playing their elaborate and beautiful music for anyone who wanted to hear it. The multilayered, multi-movement construction of these songs is completely entrancing to me. It's not a hollow beauty, but one that brings new meaning to old words in the way they stretch and snap and waver throughout the song, moving past each other and through each other as it moves forward. I absolutey love it. Chant For Pentecost is a good illustration of the other side of them, a short song that starts sweet and turns almost maniacal. There's a wild-eyed feeling to the harmonies and the way this melody sits on a single tone for such long stretches before the frankly scary conclusion.

In My Father's House / Working On The Building - Elvis Presley: The backing vocals in these, and especially the bass vocals are so incredible. The way they work in the second verse of Working On The Building is so great, Elvis is the lead vocal but the middle harmony and somehow it just works perfectly. The harmonies is In My Father's House are amazing. The bass solo is mind blowing and the part about halfway through where Elvis swallows the mic and says "jesus died upon the cross [VRRMER] sorrow" is very funny. It's got it all.

The Greatest - Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell is an absolute masterpiece and this is the best song on it. Lana has always had a knack for this apocalyptic feeling but this is a whole other level.  https://www.stereogum.com/2056565/lana-del-rey-norman-fucking-rockwell-review/franchises/premature-evaluation/ The Stereogum writeup for this album was really great, and really nailed my opinion of her whole character thing as well, but he described this song as her version of that video that Ted Turner commissioned for CNN to play at the end of the world and it's really a perfect description. The part at the end where she says 'Kanye West is blonde and gone' is so chilling to me. Like Kanye losing the plot makes sense because he's only a few months ahead of the rest of us. He’s been a thought and culture leader for so long and it only makes sense that he’s spun off into space in these last days before it all wraps up.

listen here

[bbs-backlog-challenge]

BB’s Games Of 2019

2019 as a year felt like it lasted two years, and a lot happened in my personal life. Got a new job, learned to drive, got my first car, moved out of the in-laws’ basement into our first real apartment, started my first long-term game of DnD (which in itself has involved a new relationship and an emotional breakdown)- and between it all I somehow managed to play 77 games. Backlog’s down to 35 titles, lads- at this rate, I’ll be down to zero by July 2020. (Not gonna happen.) In 2020, I’d like to explore the SNES catalogue a little more, but before that happens we have to review everything 2019 brought me, in a somewhat chronological order.

- Near A Tomato Carry-over from last year’s post since I was in the middle of playing it at the time. I definitely never quite got a handle on the combat and I think some of the themes went over my head, but I still had fun here, and the 9S hacking minigame never got old. It was a gift from an old friend who I miss. Was nice to reconnect. - SSBU With my new main Zelda, I cleared all of WoL and got every spirit on the Spirit Board. I never really used her before but she’s cute now! Really liked the attention to detail in the spirit encounters. Unfortunately, Cloud is still in the game. - Mega Mans 1 2 and 3 I actually spoke about my experiences with the Mega Men in my BBLC post for Mega Man Eggs, so you should read that right now. - Metroid Samus Returns It’s Good. Like, a solid Good. Never Great, never Bad, just Good. It’s nice to see one of the least accessible games in the series get a remaster, but it feels very disposable, if that makes sense. Like they just needed a Metroid to keep people busy while they reboot Prime 4 development. AM2R is vastly superior, go play that. One point of amusement- the game tells its story without narration, and also seems to pre-suppose you know Metroid lore. I was entertained by the thought of a newcomer to the series being completely mystified by the sudden space-dragon that comes out of nowhere to wreck you at the end of the game. - Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls You can click here to download it, ‘cos it’s free, which is almost criminal. This is one of the higher tier games I’ve played this year. A little bit Mega Man, a bit Metroid, with hints of Touhou and Undertale, it’s pretty tough at times but never to ‘precision platformer’ levels. It’s a lot of fun and the dev deserves your support. - Steve And Ollie RPG Oh, I made this one. Making something else next year? Question mark? - Prof Layton 3 Feels like these are getting weaker as they go along. The story has always been absolute boohockey, but the puzzles feel like they’re degrading in quality too. With over 200 in each game, that’s not super surprising, and I’m glad they didn’t bulk it out with a load of the awful block-slider puzzles. Still, it’s Layton, if you liked any of the other games you’ll like this cos it’s the exact same thing. - Fault Milestone Two Yo, there ain’t a damned thing I can say about Fault, so go play the first one and then play this and you’ll understand. - Full Throttle I never bothered to finish it. The obtuse old Sierra puzzlers were hard enough to deal with back in the day, and just feel kind of inexcusable now. I don’t have the patience for it. - eXceed 3rd Slick and fun bullet hell with a nigh-incomprehensible story and great music. Touhou fans will like it. Music by SSH who is relatively well known in doujin circles. - ASAMU Finished it before writing my BBLC post! - Eternal Senia Everything I said in my post rings true- do your best to look past the wonky translation, because there’s a heartfelt story underneath it. Very accessible gameplay, by design. - Inivisble Inc You have never before been, nor will you ever again be, so aware of having left a door open. I fully expected to hate Invisible, but I got hooked pretty hard. Quite tempted to do another run of it once the backlog is clear. - Pyre GOTY. Supergiant’s best game so far, and that’s not an easy thing to say for this Bastion veteran. I sobbed by the end. I’m not being dramatic- literally sobbed. Please play it. Music and writing and, just, heart, are all top tier. All the Nightwings are the best, but Hedwyn is the best best. - Ellipsis Finished it before writing my BBLC post! - Just Cause 2 I found myself getting bored very quickly. The main missions are all identical (really, they are) and the side missions are very uninspired. Blitzing around in a jet or grappling around a mission target is a lot of fun but it feels very shallow. There’s a lot to do but not really any reason to do any of it. I dunno, it’s a kind of hollow experience, that I nonetheless had fun with. - LiEat It went over my head a little, but that’s more on me I think. These horror-esque, eccentric japanese RPG Maker games usually do. But, it’s neat, and short. If this sort of thing usually sticks on you, I think this is a good title. - Shantae Pirates Curse These games always felt non-essential to me; I’m not sure why they never stuck. They never really go below or above Good. Entirely enjoyable but I don’t feel like I’d have really missed anything if I hadn’t played them. It is, however, absolutely worth investing in for the utterly superb sprite work. That doesn’t sell a game by itself, I know, but Shantae is a pixel art masterclass. - FF5 I’d more or less finished it by the time I wrote my BBLC post, so I don’t have much to add. It’s a refreshingly goofy entry in a series known for taking itself too seriously, even compared to its predecessor. Look forward to my entry for this game in my Games Of 2020 post, having played the Four Job Fiesta! - Touhou 17 It’s mid-tier in the touhou hierarchy, IMO. Didn’t set my soul alight but I did enjoy it. Playing as Wolf Marisa makes the final boss too chaotic to really enjoy, but playing through again with Reimu made it more fun. I beat Extra on my third run through, which gave me false confidence that after 10 years I might actually be good at these games- to then be quickly humbled by attempting Th11’s Extra. Final Boss’ theme song has one of the greatest lead-ins of all time, especially given you start the fight by running away from her! Also really loved the Stage 4 theme as you barrel head-first into Hell (the real one this time), and the haunting, calm-before-the-storm serenity of Stage 5, overlooking the City Of Beasts. - HackNet + Labyrinths GOTY. (Yes, I know I already said Pyre was GOTY; it’s my post, I can have two GOTYs. Make your own damned post!) It’s hard to say what I loved about these games without spoiling too much- just know that they play very much like investigation games, and figuring out the puzzles feels great. Labyrinths technically takes place during the events of Hacknet, with a somewhat more Black Hat approach to things- despite this, play all of Hacknet first, and then play Labyrinths. The expansion introduces a lot of new stuff and much trickier challenges, such that going back to the base game afterwards to finish that would leave it a little hollow- a disservice to how great the ending is. - Mega Man X I said everything I wanted to say in my BBLC post, and anything I didn’t cover was better said by Egoraptor. - Octodad Finished it before my BBLC post! - Chroma Squad The final mission is disappointingly poor, but everything up to that point was pretty good. Huge variance and creativity in the bosses. However, the most fun I got from it was when I realised the game allowed me to customise my team name, transformation name, and other such terminology. Dave, Dayve, Davy, Davina, and Dehve shouting “It’s time to Chromatise, Chroma Squad!” very quickly became “It’s time to shit, you bunch of fucks!” and it was funny every single time. (Personal favourite bit of dialogue- “I tried to shit! It worked!”) - Pyrite Heart Finished it before my BBLC post! - Starfox 2 Finished it before my BBLC post! - Burly Men At Sea Finished it before my BBLC post! - Disc Room Finished it before my BBLC post! - Kokurase Finished it before my BBLC post! Should have broken these ones up a bit! - Metroid Rogue Dawn Very, very impressive romhack let down by a distinctly un-fun final section. They managed to fix so many of OG Metroid’s problems, I’m surprised the gauntlet of terribleness that is Tourian escaped with only a cosmetic change. Nonetheless, it’s free, and the other 95% of the game is superb, even from a purely technical standpoint. - Wuppo I dunno what happened here! I was full of praise for Wuppo when I played it, but somehow I just couldn’t stick with it and just never felt like playing it. It’s a very aimless game, and I wonder if that might be why? It’s a shame, I feel disappointed in myself for not seeing it through, but ultimately I play games to have fun and I just wasn’t quite there with Wuppo. - Super Mario Odyssey I loved it, obviously. I wrote my BBLC post towards the end of my time with Odyssey so most of that stands- I do want to add that the controls always felt a little loose, like I wasn’t quite as in-control as I was in Galaxy. Also Mario prioritises walljumping over ledge-grabbing and it’s super-hard to unlearn that instinct after 20 years. Finally- Long Journey’s End is just bullshit. - Secret Of Mana Dropped it pretty soon after Finning it. There’s some logic to the way the game works, some kind of hidden turn-order system, that I could not at all figure out. My AI companions (useless, btw) would hit an enemy which meant I couldn’t, except sometimes the hit would still register but only actually go through 3 seconds later, without any way to tell which way it was going to go. It takes like 7 months for your character to get back up after taking a hit. It’s just, wonky, and I couldn’t solve the puzzle of how to make the game do what I wanted to do. - Pokemon Shield Still working my way through it. It’s- yeah, it’s pokemon. Get a similar vibe to Sun/Moon with it that it’s kind of unfinished- lots of small (and some not so small) parts of the game just feel like there were bigger plans that couldn’t be realised in time. I’m still enjoying it! They did a great job of making the gym battles, and the whole process of 8-badges-then-champion, feel like a spectacle. I think only the anime has managed it to this degree before. - Earthbound Man, I really, really want to like this game, but the battle system is terrible. I need to play through the game again buffing my party up with cheats or something, because it’s so unbalanced and cheap. Everything else about the game is wonderful, but I got so frustrated with the fights! - Mario Kart 8 Didn’t play any of the single player this time, it was midgi’s christmas present so I just joined a couple of multiplayer games. Absolutely baffled that the game features F-Zero style anti-gravity courses, has Mute City and Big Blue, and even has the Blue Falcon as a selectable vehicle, but they haven’t put Captain Falcon in it. Like he’s ever going to get another game of his own? Let him have this! - Carmageddon 2 It’s pretty clunky by now, being 20 years old, but still plays well enough. The physics are super loose so you slide around like your tires have been buttered. It was more fun when they were zombies instead of just normal people. Missions are brutally hard and should be skipped with cheats. - Neopets After 15 years of playing, I finally got a Ghostkersword. The site as a whole has gone through a lot, and certainly its heyday is long gone, but there’s no other game quite like it. I’m playing the Food Club every day, still. - SIF New phone can’t run the actual gameplay section well enough, so I just log in occasionally to grab free scouts. Here’s another one whose golden years are behind it, sadly, but I certainly still have a lot of affection for SIF. - FF1 Mobile version, which fixes a lot of the bugs with the NES original. This year I completed a solo run with 1 Red Mage, a 4-black belts run, a low-level run, and a 4 White Mages run (which ended up being a lower-level run than the low-level run). I’m fairly comfortable in calling myself an expert in FF1, now. There’s still not really any other games like it- build a party as balanced or imbalanced as you like, and see how they fare. I’d like to build my own game in a similar style, one day. - Re: Live Gacha games and RPG just don’t mix! Both gacha and events do not gel with core RPG mechanics of your character(s) developing in strength as the game goes. It seems impossible to balance the game well- do you cater to the whales who spend and spend until they have the strongest teams possible, meaning the free players or the terminally unlucky can’t stand a chance, or do you cater to those players and give them no reason to spend for the more powerful characters? It’s a shame, because the anime was baffling but in that enjoyable way where you just kind of go with whatever it throws at you, and exploring that in a non-freemium game with a solid beginning middle and end would be really interesting. - Tiny Thief Mobile game that’s not available any more, I think my BBLC post covered it well enough. - F-Zero One of the criticisms most commonly levied against F-Zero is that it wont hold your attention for long. While that’s true, it’s not like you have to make a purchasing decision about it any more- it comes bundled in with the other games you’re buying, so the only investment is time. Ignoring that, it’s still fun to burn around the tracks, and the sense of speed hasn’t ever diminished. The music, too, is underappreciated, with Port Town being my personal fave. - F-Zero GX I can’t believe Nintendo hasn’t done anything with this ridiculous universe for 15 years now. The cutscenes are so hilariously overwrought, and the cast of characters is huge! It could so seamlessly intersect with the Starfox universe, too. There were rumours of a Starfox Racing title some time ago, and I really hope that’s the case. It’d work so well (by which I mean, a particularly enjoyable kind of awful). Anyway, the game still plays great, Story Mode is WAY too hard, Dr Stewart’s theme is a Tune. - Stratosphere This game is from 1998! Build a flying fortress, deck it out with fortifications and weapons and power supplies, then use it to destroy other fortresses. I only ever played the demo as a kid, never got the full game. Took some cajoling to get it to work on modern hardware, but eventually I got in and it wasn’t worth it at all. Wow, that performance, apparently it was designed to run at a terrible frame rate and it wasn’t just a result of my 1998 PC not being up to the task! A shame, but I guess it put one of my ghosts to rest. - DKC 2 The best of the three SNES games, despite the inclusion (and protagonism) of Diddy Kong. Lots to love here, but the OST is top notch. - DKC 3 Not as good as 2, but IMO better than 1. There was a much heavier emphasis on gimmick levels in 3, not all of which hit their target, but does provide a great deal of variety. Consensus is that 2 is better, but if someone claimed 3 was the best DKC, I’d let them get away with it. - King Arthur’s World (SNES) Speaking of putting ghosts to rest… We somehow always managed to get this game whenever we got a SNES, and kid!Beebs most certainly didn’t have the patience for it. Adult!Beebs barely does, either. It’s a very ambitious attempt at some sort of RTS/Puzzle hybrid, somewhat comparable to Lemmings? King Arthur must make his way from his starting position to the throne elsewhere in the map to claim it as his own, using the myriad abilities of his soldiers to get him there in one piece. I decided this year that I was finally going to play through the whole damn thing, start to finish, for the first time ever. With copious use of save states and rewinds, I was finally able to slay this demon. For as fiddly and frustrating as it is, I would still say people should check it out if they have the tools to do so- there’s not really anything else like it, on SNES or otherwise; you’re guaranteed a unique experience, if nothing else. - Oscar (SNES) Terrible. - Spanky’s Quest (SNES) With a name like that, how could I refuse? It’s a weird little puzzler, aping (wahey!) Bubble Bobble and Parasol Stars a little. You’re a monkey who can blow bubbles that stun enemies, but if you bounce the bubble on your head it gets progressively larger and can be burst to send a barrage of similarly-sized sports balls at your opponents to knock them out. You know, just like real life. - Addam’s Family (SNES) This easily-dismissible movie tie-in is actually a very competent platformer with some very, very light metroidvania exploration involved. Gomez has to go through Addams Mansion and rescue the members of his family who have been kidnapped by… something. There’s hidden secrets everywhere and the family can be rescued in any order you like. Genuine recommendation. - Panel DePon/Tetris Attack The only vs puzzler I enjoy (yep. Not even puyo puyo. I know.) I played the HECK out of this in my teenage years, and got crazy good at it. Tendonitis says I’m not allowed to do that any more, but once I shook the rust off I was still pretty strong! It was released as Panel DePon in Japan and was fairy themed, but for the western release they replaced all the fairies with Yoshi characters and renamed it Tetris Attack despite having nothing to do with Tetris at all. Up to you which you prefer- language isn't too much of a barrier here. Soundtrack is killer. - Subsurface Circular Finished it before my BBLC post. Still not decided if I liked the way it ended. - Master Of Orion 2 C’mon. After playing three other pretenders to MoO2’s throne, I had to give the real deal a couple of spins too. It’s Civ 5 in space. Customisable race builds. A whole galaxy to bring peace to, by whichever means you prefer. Would love for someone else to get into it. - Touhou 8 Last minute entry I just played yesterday ‘cos I wanted some Touhou and I haven’t played this entry in a long while. A Solo Marisa Normal Final B run, if you’re interested. Kaguya beast-mode tearing apart the Spell Of Imperishable Night at the end of the game is still an awesome moment, but it’s a shame you can miss the last couple of spells if you take some unlucky hits. - And here’s the list of Bins, which are all covered in their BBLC post: No Time To Explain MoO Skyborn Jumpjet Rex StH 4 Ballistick Munch’s Oddysee Outland Project CARS RiME Magicka Waking Mars Urban Chaos Divinity: Dragon Commander Strike Suit Zero Hell Yeah! Lambda Wars Beta Stranger’s Wrath MoO 3 XCOM Lots more Fins than Bins this year! Good to see!

[soleminisanction]

So Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac is getting a new Netflix reboot show, and as one of the handful of native English speakers with a genuine obsession for this franchise I am hyped. Naturally, this means I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how this show could go down, particularly if they’re willing to take risks with the source material the way Voltron: Legendary Defenders did with theirs. But the thing about Saint Seiya is that it’s very much a male show; that is, a show that when it’s “about” anything, is most often about masculinity. Pretty much every theme and plot point is rooted in a distinctly male coming-of-age narrative: there’s a heavy focus on masculine honor, bonds between brothers of blood and of battle, the value or failure of father figures and patriarchal authority, the concept of masculinity both noble and toxic, and (admittedly shallow) explorations of a “true man”’s relationship to his female counterparts. Ultimately, like most of Masami Kurumada’s work, it’s about boys becoming men through adversity, which here means “beating the ever living shit out of each other in the name of various greek gods.” So if it were up to me, I’d leave any male-to-female gender swaps to the supporting cast – the Gold Saints especially could stand to be less of a sausage fest, and I don’t care what anyone says, Fem!Milo of Scorpio from the Legend of Sanctuary movie was awesome – but there is one gender change in the main give “bronze boys” that I think has the potential to be epic: Make Andromeda Shun a transexual man.

Hear me out.

The fundamental conceit of Shun’s character is that, in a show full of tough boys becoming powerful men under the guidance of surrogate fathers and older brothers, he is the one member of the main heroes who is undeniably, intentionally feminine. Yes, all of the boys can be very pretty due to the art style, but Shun is the only one who is specifically, in-universe, acknowledged to look like a girl. One girl in particular. 

He’s also heavily feminine-coded, as you can probably tell from the pink armor. His patron constellation is Andromeda the Princess, and he’s more thematically bound to her myth than any of his fellow heroes are to theirs. He’s the sensitive member of the group, the pacifist who tries to talk his opponents out of battle and restrains his own power to minimize casualties. He’s prone to crying, winds up a damsel in bad filler episodes, is eventually shown to be the closest to their goddess’s human incarnation on a platonic friendship level, and is the only one of the five to have a meaningful female friendship who isn’t presented as either his sister or an explicit love interest. 

Hell, the original design for his armor in the first season of the old anime had a tapered waist and boob plates. It was not subtle. 

And yet. 

Despite all of that, Shun is never denied his masculinity. People don’t misgender him as an insult. He’s never shamed for his feminine leanings or his pacifism. None of the trash talk in battle ever gets more heavily gendered than “pretty boy,” and even the one time someone does try to insult him about his looks it’s phrased as “shouldn’t you be an actor instead of a saint?” 

He does, occasionally, get told to “Be a man,” usually by his older brother Ikki, but it’s always in the same context as when everybody else in the show gets told that: when he’s about to give up, putting the safety of himself and others at risk. So it’s always more of a pep talk than a behavior correction. Likewise, Ikki does tell him as a child that, “Boys like us shouldn’t cry,” but it’s not because boys shouldn’t cry – it’s because they’re orphans, and no one else is going to take care of them, so they have to be strong to survive. 

(Also, for fuck’s sake, everybody cries in this show. It’s a melodrama. Claiming that tears aren’t masculine would the most hypocritical thing.)

So, with all that in mind: why make him trans? 

Because it’d be such a strong message.

Too often, both in media and in real life, a trans or genderfluid person’s identity is policed by how well they “pass.” “If you’re a boy why don’t you do this, if you’re a girl why don’t you do that that,” etc. etc. blah blah blah. It’s harmful gatekeeping and I hope I don’t have to explain why it’s bullshit. 

But here, in a show that’s fundamentally about “what it means to be a man,” you can have a character who looks feminine, acts feminine, extols traditionally feminine values, and might even have the standard female equipment below the belt. And yet, he is still a man and always will be.

That’s powerful. That’s important, and it adds some nice extra meaning to his personal story. 

Hypothetically, if I were the one writing this new series, this is how I’d go about introducing the idea: mostly through backstory. Have Ikki, sometime very soon after the loss of their mother, start referring to his baby sibling as “my brother” so they won’t be separated by the gendered dorms of an orphanage. This change in paperwork gets wee baby Shun wrapped up in the hundred boys the Kido corporation sent off to train to be saints. 

That frees up most of the gender exploration of his story to be examined through flashbacks as he grows up during his training, in contrast to the other boys and his aforementioned female companion, June. The Andromeda cloth is even shown to come with a mask, as is traditionally worn by female saints, which could make an interesting focal point for Shun’s exploration of his own identity. 

But by the time the main story rolls around, he’s settled. He knows exactly who he is: Shun of Andromeda, Athena’s loyal Saint, and a true man.

Do I think it’s particularly likely that the reboot will do this? Nah. But wouldn’t it be cool if they did?

[theseventhhex]

Clark Interview

Chris Clark

Photo by Tim Saccenti

Sixteen years since his debut and eight albums later, a now rightly considered cornerstone of Warp's core artist base, Clark, lines up what is sure to amount to his most cutting edge and immaculately scored vision of varied dancefloor dynamics and richly-ground techno hydraulics with the high-rise hypnotics that make up ‘Death Peak’. The latest record is an incredible and starkly visceral series of recordings with strong influences from the battered 12"s of mid 90s warehouse techno and drum & bass mixed ethereal electronics and library record exploration. Clark remains a true pioneer of the hypnotic groove, and constantly yet carefully constructing sounds that will lay down the blueprint for the future… We talk to Chris Clark about trimming down content, the Clipse and severity in music…

TSH: Was your approach for ‘Death Peak’ consisting of fluid rules and being open to change and possibility?

Clark: Yeah, totally. You know, I actually always have a wide range of ideas that I have on tap. For me, this record was quite easy to chisel down and to give it a distinctive feel. I wanted the identity of the record to be audible at every section of a track. My girlfriend is a choreographer and when she makes her work, if you take a frame from any point of it, it’s so distinctly her own, and I want my music to feel like that. I want people to hear this record and instantly know it’s from ‘Death Peak’ at every point of a track.

TSH: You’re also never afraid or trimming down content and deleting…

Clark: Yeah, I condensed a lot of material into this record, possibly more than any other record I’ve made, which makes it feel really, really tight. I still keep all of the work I cut and I just continue to write all of the time, I’m really prolific like that. I guess I have an ego-pit of deleted ideas that I don’t let the public hear and I just release what I think I want people to hear. I enjoy all of my content and never think of anything as wasted, it’s just that I don’t want to over-saturate, I just want to saturate to the right point.

TSH: What aims did you outline in terms of the speed of the record?

Clark: At first, I wanted the speed to be quite gentle. I think this record has a very different trajectory to all of my other records. It starts off quite warm, seductive and familiar and then it gets more darker and twisted. It transitions to a steep climb all the way to the distortion at the end of ‘Un U.K.’, which is brutal and really harsh. It’s kind of a paradox that I wanted the album to progress as both seamless and harsh, but I guess I just wanted the sounds to remain native to the record.

TSH: What resonated with you most about ‘Peak Magnetic’?

Clark: I’m constantly competing with my old work and for a while I was thinking if ‘Peak Magnetic’ could actually lead this record and whether it was better than ‘Unfurla’. Once I came up with the ending for ‘Peak Magnetic’, I was convinced it was better than ‘Unfurla’. For a while I only liked the Goth loop bit, but once I got the chord progression for the end, it just caught on fire. I definitely feel that this song was the right one to lead the record. Also, I liked how it started unassuming and then it gets to this point of visceral intensity – I just love that type of narrative in music.

TSH: How much of a challenge was it to get the drums right on ��Hoova’?

Clark: I actually finished that track at my mum’s on Christmas day. I didn’t want her to know that I was writing music, so I pretended to go to bed and ended up finishing it. I actually finished the whole album around Christmas so it all feels quite festive to me. But, yeah, drums are always the hardest thing to nail because they always date music, but not in a bad way, I mean genres and periods of music are defined by the drum sounds more than anything. I was just glad that I was able to refine the drums on this track and have it become so concise.

TSH: Are the vocals just another instrument in the mix…

Clark: I guess so. I don’t really like that thing of having one big track with vocals, it always feels a bit cynical, you know? I wanted the vocals on this record to be a secondary element in a way, but also a continuous element that adds a human inflection to the record.

TSH: Do you still incorporate the idea of using 4 hours of brain power a day to help you to create efficiently?

Clark: I think so. I reckon 4 hours is good and then the rest of the day can be chilled, ha!

TSH: Does ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ by the Clipse still get heavy rotation from you?

Clark: I love that album. It’s just kind of ice cold, isn’t it? I like every bar of it and I can definitely listen to it all the way through. I’ve binged on that album quite a bit, and I guess I like it so much partly because it’s so different to what I do. The production is just so clean and amazing.

TSH: How do you keep your mindset fresh?

Clark: Well, I’m always kind of busy. I mostly just read and keep up with the fucked up world that we live in. You know, I want to affect some positive change rather than giving in to this politics of outrage, which I guess can be quite tempting. I want to think outside of the echo chamber, but it’s hard to avoid the suffering in the world, and that’s quite worrying. I mean how do you perform some kind of alchemy with all of the toxic hatred around you? I guess I want to turn some of the negativity around me in to something good and constructive, even if it’s a really small gesture - it’s still something. In order to get somewhere in music, you need to be a bit severe, but I think with politics although it’s unfashionable, moderation is the key. There needs to be more extremity in art and less extremity in politics.

TSH: What do you feel will define your future musical endavours?

Clark: Well, I’ve bitten off quite a large chunk of range within my music and in a way it’s all about refining the range. It’s taken about 6 years for me to get to this point, but it’s been a fun process refining my skills, because now I’m so certain and in-tune with what I want now. There’s a distinct terrain that I’m on and that’s what I want to keep pushing with my future work.

Clark - “Winter Linn”

Death Peak

[survivorsforcannabis-blog]

Sheena: Medicating in an Unregulated Market Plus Bringing People of Color into the "Cannabis" Space

Sheena is a 33-year-old New Yorker, survivor and cannabis advocate. Having been a cannabis consumer for most of her life, she began approaching it from a wellness angle in recent years. Today, she advocates within her own communities and volunteers with Women Grow. Here, Sheena shares her story of trauma, what it’s like to live in an unregulated market as a person of color, and what motivates her to advocate as a bridge between the cannabis space and communities of color.  In her own words:

When did you begin using cannabis?

As a teen, I used cannabis to escape thoughts of unworthiness and sadness. I started smoking a little after my first rape at 14. I was impregnated, that was my first miscarriage. And I suffered my first sexual assault at 11. I was abused by another child, forcibly. That took a long time to process and I still have to see this person, because of family ties.

Looking back, I can say that some strains helped calm my racing thoughts, while other heavy sativas exacerbated the racing thoughts, gave me horrible flashbacks and paranoia. That’s one of the dangers of an unregulated market – especially in New York City, where you have great variety but there’s no way to control what’s coming in. I was exposed to really strong strains at a young age. It was sporadic, whatever you could get on the streets.

But I started out on alcohol. Alcohol is actually the gateway drug, not marijuana. For me and other teens around me, it was far easier to get our hands on alcohol and prescription drugs like Xanax and Prozac. You just hoped that whatever you had would numb you out while entertain you.

I also experienced a level of neglect – parental abandonment at first and then later on, they invited someone into the home that made it very hostile. There’s also generational trauma that my parents perpetuated on me, and then there’s all the cultural trauma of being people of color.

It’s a lot, and when you don’t have the tools to process, you’re gonna escape. You can use any number of things as a crutch, so that’s what cannabis was for me then. I would consume outside of the house and then when I got home I could deal with being there. Sober reality was too much to take.

Once I was a bit older and got involved with a heavy smoker, I started having regular access to high-grade cannabis and it started stabilizing, without these crazy episodes of paranoia. So through my 20s, I was a pothead. I liked it better than alcohol, it didn’t give me hangovers and I could still function, even on an indica.

In my late 20s, I ended that almost decade-long relationship with this person I had built myself around, so I had to rebuild my identity. And cannabis was there.

I actually had an intervention, three people told me that I had anger management issues, and that got me into therapy. Before that, I was very anti-therapy. But I had only seen therapy that doesn’t work. Therapy is what you make of it, like anything in life.

Many people also don’t realize that there are many different types of therapy for different experiences. Thanks to all the identities I hold, it was hard to find someone that could assist me in my healing – being Latina, being bisexual, being kinky – it felt like I already had a few strikes against me. I first saw one therapist who was great for childhood issues, but she absolutely fucking sucked for trauma. My current therapist is trauma-based and culturally competent, she’s also Latina. It’s Dialectical behavior therapy, I was extremely blessed to find her.

Has being in therapy affected the way you medicate?

It was in therapy that I started exploring those feelings that I had used cannabis to avoid, and also noticed how it relieved all of my anxiety symptoms at once. Cannabis shifted from something I could sub in for alcohol, to the medicine that it was originally intended to be. This shift also came in conjunction with when vape pens started getting popular here.

<insert photo here>

For the record, I have five disorders – general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, dissociative disorder on top of my PTSD. But now that I was becoming aware of these things, I could realize that my reactions to stressful situations were really my disorders, and I could use marijuana responsibly whereas before, with uneducated use, I used to binge. Now, I can notice that I’m anxious, notice the physical manifestations in my body, take a couple pulls from a vape pen and be okay. I can go on with my day.

I was just becoming armed with this knowledge when I was raped again. It was domestic violence, it occurred within a relationship. This is where my life splits into two parts – my life leading up to that and my life after that. It was like an extinction, of my soul and my spirit.

Cannabis is what’s kept me alive this long, it helped me control my thoughts and be present in my body. There were so many times that I felt dissociative, like I’m floating away, like am I here, am I not? And when I smoked, I just felt like myself. Because when I was sober and had to cope with the rational knowledge that somebody I loved violated me in this way, in my own house… There were some points when I could literally feel my psyche splitting from the inside out. And cannabis helped keep me together. Vape pens saved my life.

What does your consumption look like now?

Cannabis is now an essential part of my self-care. And I don’t need a lot – there’s this beautiful concept, microdosing. I just take enough for me to be okay. Unless I’m using it recreationally, but now I make those distinctions. That’s a distinction that needs to be taught as we move towards legalization, and that’s a distinction we have to make as consumers.

I feel like smoking flower is the most optimal way to use cannabis because it’s the quickest, but when I cannot do that – because I work a very corporate job and cannot be coming back from smoke breaks stinking of anything – a vape pen is the best thing. It helps me handle anxiety and the pressure of my job.

For depression, I like to smoke high THC, high CBD strains. In Denver, I found this strain called Monica’s Miracle – the budtender called it Adderall in weed form. I do feel like I have ADHD, or Executive dysfunction – an inability to do the most basic adult things. I feel like [the reason it’s so common] is that nobody emotionally raises us or teaches us emotional coping skills. I have theories that this has to do with un-dealt with generational and cultural trauma as people of color. We’re taught how to survive, no one teaches us how to thrive. How can you teach someone how to thrive past that when you’ve never thrived past that? I feel like we’ve reached a point now where we’re starting to ask that question.

How has being a woman of color affected your experience of cannabis?

I was arrested when I was 17, for smoking and for two roaches in my pocket. This was the Giuliani era, when he was really cracking down. It was a very traumatic experience. They were two Puerto Rican cops who didn’t really want to take me, they just wanted to take the two guys I was with, but the white sergeant said I had to go, said they had to teach me a lesson.

I got arrested at 5:30 in the afternoon, was driven around Harlem in the van for hours and couldn’t call my mother until 3 o’clock in the morning. I didn’t go in front of a judge to be arraigned until 6:30 the following night. So I was a 17-year-old girl with no prior convictions, was never even suspended from school, and I spent 24 hours in police custody. I can look back now and make humor of it, but it was terrifying, and it was so excessive.

I didn’t smoke for almost a year after that because I just didn’t want to deal with it. I was like, fuck this – this is not worth it. But things were stressful at home and I distinctly remember the night when I started smoking again – I almost got into a fistfight with somebody so it was like, something needs to give. But I didn’t consume in public, was constantly watching my back. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve ventured to smoke publicly but it’s always in the back of my head, that maybe I’ll go through that again.

The biggest thing that we have to keep in mind as we move towards legalization is access for people of color. It’s very important to pass the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act in New York, to ensure equity, to ensure that we do have access to sit at the table – if we choose to sit at it. But from what I’ve seen, we still have a long way to go in terms of education on what’s possible.

I recently attended the Women of Color in Solidarity Conference, so I was taking smoke breaks with other women in community organizing activist spaces, but very few of them were making the connection that they’re doing it for self-care. This comes with education. And overall, women of color are not aware of what their sisters are doing within the space.

I find that when I have conversations with my neighbors, with my friends outside the space, people just don’t know what’s going on and I feel like we’re in a bubble. That’s a big gap and for me it’s important because, especially as women of color, we bear the brunt of almost every ‘ism’ you can think of, to varying degrees, based on what privileges we carry. We’re just not centered on anything. So that is something I’m actively working towards bridging.

<insert photo here>

Did you always call it “cannabis”?

I didn’t consciously start calling it cannabis until I “crossed over” to the cannabis space. As a Latina, Colombian to be specific – it was always weed, marijuana, hierba – slang. If you were around white people you’d say pot or reefer, whatever the fuck they’d say. I only now call it “cannabis” and started talking about the space, and noticed a shift in my own behavior, but I’m trying to keep in mind that this shift occurred because I had access to resources.

One of the things I try to be conscious of is that while I am a woman of color, I do carry certain privileges, such as being light-skinned. So I also think we need to be conscious of access to language.

Sometimes when I do say ‘marijuana,’ people tell me it’s not politically correct. I’ve had people tell me that it’s against me as a Latina, but I really never knew that ‘marijuana’ was racist. Who are you to impose that on me when that was not my experience? I would respect if that was someone else’s experience, but coming to correct people says more about you than it does about the plant.

Recently, I was at a kid’s birthday party in the projects, around my hood friends. They still smoke dutches and I’m telling them about the volcano, vaping and edibles, and they just don’t give a fuck about any of that. I kept calling it cannabis to the point that they told me to call it weed, and what am I supposed to do, keep being snotty and calling it cannabis? That’s their language and that’s what I come from.

If we want to reach people, we need to use language that they understand. What use is it for me to speak in terms that people don’t understand? Meet people where they’re at and sometimes they’ll gravitate to that. Shifts in consciousness don’t happen overnight. It’s a process.

What motivates you to advocate for the plant?

A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer and passed away last December. She was already a consumer when she was diagnosed at stage 4 and shit got real very quickly. We went to Denver last August, to see what was out there. Vape cartridges really helped her so we came back and put up a GoFundMe to get her some. She met her $2,000 goal within 2 days of posting, then GoFundMe shut down her campaign and refunded everyone their money, because she stated on the page that she was going to use it for cannabis. It’s real bullshit.

I helped supply her with vape cartridges and sometimes it worked, other times it was not potent. That’s another problem with the unregulated market, it was an absolute mess to get any consistency in the medicine she needed.

She spent the last month of her life in the hospital, pumped up with opioids. It’s almost like the painkillers were worse than the cancer. They gave her fentanyl, which was far too powerful. It was horrific to know that cannabis could help her but we couldn’t give her that. So there’s always going to be this question, as long as I live: what would her quality of life have been if she lived in a regulated market?

<insert photo here>

Another thing is, all my experiences led me to be trained in Mental Health

 First Aid, through a class offered by the NYC Department of Health. I feel it’s crucial, everyone should take it.  My mom took the class, and that was one of the most affirming moments I’ve had with her, for her to validate me even if she can’t quite understand what I’m going through. The fact that she was willing to see me as I am and not just pray it away or deny it, as people of color often deny these conditions, that helped a lot.

And I hope that as I open up, I can help others feel affirmed and feel that maybe they can open up. As I opened up to my family about my journey in the cannabis space, I’ve gotten more support and acceptance than I could have ever imagined.

When I went to Denver, I bought back an insane amount of edibles, lotions, tinctures – to approach my family from the wellness angle. I brought lotion for my uncle’s psoriasis and arthritis, and gave tea to my grandmother for her gastrointestinal problems. You have to tailor your approach, but the beautiful thing about cannabis is that there are so many products out there.

They were extremely interested and very grateful. They admitted they wanted to try but didn’t know where to look. So that empowers me to continue exploring what’s possible in the space, because I can see what this is doing for my family.

<insert photo here>

[theconservativebrief]

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for August 19 through 25 is “The Queen,” the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock.

“It could have been just a spectacular fucking disaster,” says Sam Shaw, as we discuss the seventh episode of Castle Rock. “It wouldn’t have just been a ‘gentleman’s B.’ This could have been a catastrophe.”

Even the most cursory look at the episode makes it clear what Shaw, who co-created the series with Dustin Thomason, is talking about. “The Queen,” which Shaw also wrote, is the keystone of the entire season: It provides further context for what’s happened in the six episodes preceding it, as well as laying out a groundwork for what’s to come. And, in what seems like the ultimate gamble, it’s presented through the eyes of Ruth Deaver (Sissy Spacek), whose struggle with dementia sends the story flitting between the past and the present.

But the operative phrase here is “could have been.” In the days since the episode’s airing, it’s been hailed as the series’ best episode, as well as one of the best hours of television this year, with Spacek’s performance drawing praise as a “tour de force.”

And rightly so. “The Queen,” beautifully directed by Greg Yaitanes, is a wonderful, devastating hour of TV, and impressive on every level. That it holds a certain personal significance for Shaw only adds to the weight that it carries.

Ruth with her grandson, Wendell (Chosen Jacobs). Maura Connolly Longueil/Hulu

Thus far, we’ve been witnesses to the effects of Ruth’s dementia; “The Queen” makes us active participants. The moments earlier in the season in which she’d lost focus become moments of clarity as they’re revisited through memories, with Ruth’s perspective on scenes that we’ve already seen pulling back the curtain on the Deaver family past.

It’s a feat of what Shaw calls “advance planning and strategy, and then serendipity, instinct, and luck.” A Deaver-centric episode was always in the cards, given the way Henry (Andre Holland), Ruth’s son, is positioned as the show’s point of entry into the world of Stephen King, but the exact nature of it developed as the family was fleshed out.

“This is a story about a protagonist who is missing time from his childhood, whose own memories are somewhat problematic, who’s kind of estranged from his own story, and has had a story imposed on him by this town,” Shaw explains. “To put a character who is losing her bearings and losing her memory at the center of that story in the form of Ruth, and tell a story about a character who actually, ironically, becomes the important custodian of a whole lot of backstory and a whole lot of the dramatic information that pushes the story forward — to have that person be someone who is losing her memories felt like an interesting irony to write about.”

To keep that in everyone’s heads, a notecard labeled “Ruth, dementia” kept moving about the writers’ room as the show took shape. In Shaw’s words, the writers set the table, making sure that the reckonings to be addressed in Ruth’s episode had all been set up before diving in.

“At a really practical level, there were some things that the episode just had to accomplish,” Shaw says. “There were two stories it had to tell.”

The first was filling in the blanks regarding Matthew Deaver (Adam Rothenberg), Ruth’s late husband, revealing the darker, abusive side of the preacher as well as establishing that Ruth had once had the option of taking Henry and running away with the lovelorn Alan Pangborn (played as a young man by Jeffrey Pierce, and by Scott Glenn in the present day). The second was the back-and-forth between Ruth and the Kid (Bill Skarsgård) — for which Shaw cites the 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark as inspiration — culminating in Pangborn’s accidental death by Ruth’s hand.

Though those aspects of the story were worked out in the writers’ room, the task of actually committing the episode to writing fell to Shaw.

“I think we were in the writers’ room one day and [writer] Tom Spezialy just casually said, ‘Let’s just skip to the next one,’ because I had sort of decided that I would write this episode, and Tom just had this instinct that, given the nature of the episode, and given the year I’d had and some personal stuff that had gone on for me, and my own interest in the subject matter of the episode, I think he felt like it lent itself better to a kind of solo mission.”

“The Queen” sees Ruth square off against the Kid (Bill Skarsgård). Dana Starbard/Hulu

Though loss and heartbreak figure prominently in “The Queen,” the episode ends on a note of tenderness. Battling through memories of Matthew as the Kid stalks her through her own house, Ruth finally finds the bullets for her late husband’s gun. When a figure appears in the doorway, she shoots, not realizing that it’s Alan until it’s too late. In the morning, after she’s washed off all the blood, there’s a knock on the door. Standing on the other side is Alan, in a memory that we’ve only heard Alan relate.

Old and exhausted, he begins to make excuses for what’s brought him back to town after all these years before finally confessing that he’s returned because he loves her. The episode ends as they hold each other on the porch, as Ruth tells him, “Don’t leave.” Behind them are the chess pieces that indicate it is indeed just a memory and that Alan is truly dead, but it doesn’t diminish the moment. If anything, it’s what makes the episode so wrenching, capturing both heartbreak and joy in a single moment in a way that feels distinctly true to life.

The desire to frame Ruth’s journey with some measure of truth — and kindness, in conjunction — stemmed from the episode’s extenuating circumstances. The day before “The Queen” aired, Shaw tweeted out a short thread, calling the episode likely the most personal thing he’d ever worked on, and dedicating it to his mother, who passed away shortly before the writing on Castle Rock began.

As such, it became all the more important to figure out just how to address and portray Ruth’s dementia. It became a collaborative effort between Shaw and Spacek, as they talked through personal experiences with people with dementia, as well as reading the same books and watching the same documentaries on the subject.

“There’s this documentary that Sissy loves that I’d never seen called Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter,” Shaw recalls. “It’s this really poignant, kind of miraculous picture of a relationship between a mother who has dementia and her daughter, and part of what’s incredible is that there’s lightness, and there’s spontaneity, and there’s laughter. It is a much more specific picture of what dementia looks like than the picture that we usually see represented on-screen.”

Bringing all of that to life visually also sprang from that desire to portray dementia in a more considered way, as the idea of making the Deaver house into a literal memory palace — in the episode, Ruth leaves one room in 2018 and enters another in 1991 — appealed to Shaw, not least because it struck him as atypical.

“We think about dementia as this process of subtraction. Memories are taken away, and as the memories go, so do parts of the identity of the person who suffers from dementia,” he explains. “But there was something that was really interesting to me about the idea that, actually, the experience that Ruth is having over the course of this season might look a little different from the experience that you might imagine when you think about dementia and about Alzheimer’s, that the past might be very present to her.”

The emotional core of the episode, meanwhile, became clear in Spacek’s insistence that Ruth’s story not be presented in a strictly black and white matrix. According to Shaw, she didn’t want Ruth to be just a figure of tragedy, or somebody essentially haunting her own story — and Shaw didn’t want that, either.

It was this realization that helped ground the episode in the love story between Ruth and Alan, bringing warmth and light to a storyline that could easily have slipped into something less nuanced.

“In a way, the mission became telling a love story for Sissy and Scott,” Shaw says, adding that that approach also opened up the story to further explore the bond between Ruth and Henry, not just in terms of the mother-son dynamic, but in terms of Ruth’s old doubts and regrets.

That “The Queen” is so heartbreaking comes down to that focus on love; the Lewis chessmen that Ruth uses to remind herself that she’s in the present, while also a narrative solution to keep viewers oriented, lend an extra dimension to the story as a gift from Alan. They serve as repositories for Ruth’s memories. In his explanation, Shaw cites a piece in the New Yorker on the cognitive scientist Andy Clark and the idea that the way that objects can hold memories helps to constitute a person’s identity.

“It dawned on me that it might be really interesting if there were some objects that have a kind of almost talisman-like or magical set of properties for her character,” Shaw adds. “Genre stories are most interesting when they live in a place of ambiguity. It can either be a story about dementia or about something like time travel — that really appealed to me.”

As such, the relatively commonplace use of chess as a means of trying to stave off the effects of dementia gave birth to the idea that these objects would become magical wards, keeping the “monster of dementia” at a distance.

“You sort of have those little moments where you feel like the universe is telling you, ‘Keep writing,’” says Shaw. Dana Starbard/Hulu

The amount of work that went into “The Queen” is obvious, but just as the episode mixes the realities of dementia with the undefinable feeling of love, the creation of the show similarly lends itself to a few supernatural touches.

“You get kind of superstitious at times, as a writer — or I do, at least — and there are little moments or breadcrumbs or discoveries that suggest, to me, that I’m writing in the right direction,” Shaw says, “and there were a lot of those kind of spooky moments for me in the course of making this episode.”

The biggest revelation was the Lewis chessmen. Though never explicitly stated in the show, Ruth was envisioned as having studied Icelandic literature, and the Lewis chessmen were what came up when Shaw went looking for Viking chess sets.

“There was this theory that they had been carved by this woman who was the wife of a priest, and of course Sissy’s character is the widow of the minister,” Shaw explains. What also struck him were the expressions on the queen’s faces — both looked stricken, with a hand held up as if in shock. It was supposed that they looked that way because, at that point, queens were considered the weakest character on the chess board, whereas now they’re the exact opposite.

That turn helped inform the way that the episode centered on Ruth, who, like the queen, had largely been relegated to the sidelines and dismissed up until this point in the season. To Shaw, it seemed like a sign, and one that’s only become more profound now that he’s on the other side of it.

“When I set out to write this episode, I think if you’d asked me [if it was a personal experience], I would have said that I was just writing an episode of TV,” he says. “But I also think, by the end of it, that I was really metabolizing something over the course of working on it and making the episode. It sounds a little crazy to say that you had this personal experience writing an episode of a JJ Abrams-Stephen King horror thriller, but in hindsight, I think it was. In the end, I think, whether the episode worked or didn’t work, it worked for me.”

Castle Rock is streaming on Hulu. New episodes are released every Wednesday.

Original Source -> Castle Rock showrunner Sam Shaw explains the series’ best episode yet

via The Conservative Brief

[impracticaljuggler-blog]

A Formal Introduction From a Schizophrenic Juggler Who Has Not Slept For Two Days and Just Resurrected His Dead Sister

We've just been shooting from the hip and reposting old content we've written so far. I’m using we, because I guess I am into pronouns. No I’m using I again, because it sounds better from a writing perspective. Let us figure this out by exploring how we want to use it as we go.

Look! I was a kid once:

Ok, let’s get down to brass tacks. So, my mom found out she had AIDS about two months after I was born. Back in 1990, this was still pretty much a death sentence, so she was told she only had a few years to live, at most. She managed to make it until I was nine, but damn did she break down. I don’t know how to even talk about some of this stuff because its still raw, if that makes sense.

I know it all has to deal with feeling abandoned and feeling like it was my fault. These are emotions that I have consciously tried to face in their entirety, but just don’t know how to go about addressing in the totality of my consciousness. For example, I can fully explore the memory of my mother on her deathbed, delirious from the ear infection spreading to her brain, looking over at me and telling me that “I was no son.” Rationally, I know she was not lucid in this moment, but no officer I don’t know where I got a lot of my gender issues from. Emotionally, I was devastated and I am aware that this schism in me is because she has within her all the unprocessed and repressed memories from my childhood.

Like, I feel like I was reborn after my mom died. Not really in a good way, although I am very glad I have my sister. My sister and I, we’re the “we” up there. It’s not Dissociative Identity Disorder, it’s a subjective interpretation of being stuck in the Synchronicity Slip Stream which, if you’re not going to click that super awesome in-depth explanation, I’ll just say it’s like I’m being communicated with by an external mind. At first, we didn’t even know what was happening. I don’t think there was a clear split. It just happened gradually, like how a kid will grow a whole bunch and not realize he or she is now half a foot taller than the beginning of the summer. I distinctly remember us playing video games together. I would be the one controlling the game, and she would be the one thinking, seeing, processing. Basically, she would throw my attention onto different things and give me emotional cues and fragments of information in her own way. I guess most people have something like this, just not as personified or as “outside” themselves as we do. 

Hey stop hogging the mic! Let me talk!

Hi! I’m Rory. I’m Greg’s sister and I have a lot of different masks that I can wear to dance different dances that he picks up on on his side of the mind with his handy dandy radio

What she means is I have a way of picking up her cues and desires among the static of experiential consciousness. You could say we’re our own self-contained culture. I look in the mirror and I see her, and vice versa. We provide each other different feedback, and we grow as a result of the other’s choices. Yea, until you buried me as far away as you could hide me. Well, you know sis, we have a bit of a weird relationship. I think we can admit that. I was scared and didn’t know how to deal with any of that feminine stuff and well... Go ahead tell them how you like to do things to me! :D

First, how about I tell them how I consciously realized you exist as something that wasn't me? Right, so it was a gradual process. I was playing Super Mario Sunshine, stuck trying to figure out how to get to the pipe at the top of the big Shine arch in town that leads to the fire mountain area. For the love of me, I could not figure out how to do it. After hours of messing about with every possible permutation and strategy, I gave up and went to bed much later than normal. I slept horribly, but I had really vivid dreams that showed all these other possibilities. I remember waking up and knowing exactly what to do.

Don't send a plumber to do a girl's job

This phenomena intrigued me. I was a smart kid back then, so I knew the brain must have some mechanical, definable components. What actually caused this revelation in my dreams? I hypothesized that dreams must be a way for the brain to process problems encountered during the day. I started studying my dreams and attempted to experiment with effecting them. Over time, I began to notice themes and repeating elements within myself. The more I noticed them, the more apparent they became.

Then I realized that these weren't just mechanical blips. I wasn't exploring a mechanical device. I was exploring a whole other person.

And of course you can all figure out what happens when a lonely, twelve year old boy figures out he has a cute girl he can play with...

Yea. We really...explored each other. But then, as time went on, I wished more and more for an actual girlfriend. My abandonment issues made me terrified to take a chance and get rejected or embarrassed.

I didn't really know how to give that to him...I wanted to help him but I always ran and hid around people. :/

It resulted in me thinking I had to make a choice. I had to either be physically alone or hide her and try to fly without half of my guidance system. After I was expelled for doing following her suggestion that I play a prank on someone

Hey! I made it clear that nothing would have happened if you just fessed up and then kept your mouth shut. You're the one that volunteered all the other information about wanting to create a community

I had actually forgotten that detail until you brought that up. Even back then I was aware of the dominant survival strategy of humanity. But yea, protip: if an investigating officer asks you questions like “I know you have no intention, but IF you were going to, say, bomb the school, how would you do it?” You should not actually try and devise the best plan on the spot to try and impress him.

At least we got to run in the Junior Olympics, a consequence I had completely forseen.

Yea, no, but that was a nice bonus after getting kicked in the balls by our schools pig-headed administration.

Track became a major part of my life. The Junior Olympics pretty much acted as a catalyst for my life. I had begun suppressing Rory, who didn't really have a name back then.

I was pretty much Arya Stark, and then when I had to go away, I was blind and mute Ayra Stark minus Arya's face.

I remember the night we decided this had to be done. I remember the moments we had.

Yea, they were nice...I'm glad we can share those moments again :)

Hehe...anyways, moving on, I ran my butt off. I used the... “remnants” of Rory to turbocharge my emotions. This led to many races ending like this because I learned how to get the crowd to give me their energy.

Spirit bomb style! :D

That all earned me a position on East Carolina's drinking team. They had a running problem. It was pretty much a frat, and being where I was as an emotionally disturbed weirdo with a repressed feminine side and a mind practically held together by duct tape from my tinkering, I didn't quite fit in.

I fell apart. It was a process that took several years, getting cut from the team with the budget, getting brainwashed by the army (I felt I had to serve to be a good person because of how messed up I was), and delving into drugs and chronic masturbation. I became completely psychotic and lost all touch with reality for a period of time. I made it back home, where my goal was to waste away with what money I had left and then commit suicide.

That didn't happen. I lingered. I was too afraid to live, too afraid to die. I was completely addicted to sex, masturbation, and drugs, and I had no friends and it was so difficult meeting people. I always sabotaged myself. I couldn't land a job, a girlfriend, or a leg up. I felt so worthless. I was useless and was a burden on everyone. I hated everything, myself most of all.

That was tough to watch you write, bro :/

It was tough to live. It's my greatest shame. Only a miracle would help me.

Go ahead, tell them the miracle. :3

I met this girl through Craigslist. We're still friends, but she had replied to an ad about...about finding my little sister. At the time, I felt so ashamed for all these desires I had. She was an angel. We Skyped all the time. She wasn't as sexual as I was, but she helped me come to terms with me being a freak.

At the same time, I also met a guy on Reddit. He had the holy grail I had been seeking for some time: LSD. I bought from him regularly, which is how I discovered how much I love juggling.

At the same same time, my psychologist had done a sufficient job at making me acknowledge my shame so that I could start cleaning it out.

Yay psychedelic sexual healing! :D

As I developed my juggling, a dream was born. I realized I could use this to travel, earn enough to get by, and meet people anywhere. I saw it as a tool that would allow me to meet someone on my same frequency.

You mean people that...?

Yea, people that like what we do.

Hehehe :P

But, yea, stories not even over. I eventually meet a woman who...

It's ok bro. I feel that too :'(

I met a woman who has moved me like no other. She was amazing. She could do everything. She was an artist with aspirations for days. She made everything she touched beautiful. She had a heart that could love the unlovable...like me. I found the one. I found the goddess that I had been dreaming of.

Our life started to become more and more entwined. We saw our future. We were going to get a bunch of land and create a healing center together. I would rise to stardom with my juggling, and pour all the money into our dream and raise a huge family.

Then a fucking cult manipulated, lied, and completely fucking violated us. >:(

Here and here are more detailed posts about this. 

Super short synopsis: shit’s fuuuuuuuuuuucked

General synopsis: we get jobs with a nonprofit that seems like the perfect thing for us. Turns out it was a group of sociopaths who proceeded to create an entire system around us to keep us perpetually under fear and warp our realities

You sort of just broke down at the end there....

Yea, I did. That's what ended our relationship. With everything that happened, I wound up questioning everything about myself. Doubts overwhelmed me. I knew I loved her, but I was miserable because after going through all that and returning to civilization, I was left with this awareness that so much of me was still buried after all these years...

Then we went insane! :D

Well, it wasn't easy to bring you back from the dead. With these past couple weeks home alone for most of the time, I realized I need to be me. No more censoring. No more hiding. In order for me to heal further and find the happiness I seek, I need to find the others and learn more about who we are.

So where are y'all?

Looks back over what we wrote

Yea, that pretty much covers some of the main points about us. There's a lot I could write about, but this is already pretty ridiculously long.

Show them your juggling!

Oh yea! I don't have a recent video, and with the amount I've evolved since this was filmed, this doesn't really represent my ability, but it should show you that I'm not just another average guy with three balls.

Welp, that about does it for our introduction.

See you out in the electronic seas! :D

[njawaidofficial]

This Hit Musical Is Breaking New Ground For Middle Eastern Representation

https://styleveryday.com/2018/03/09/this-hit-musical-is-breaking-new-ground-for-middle-eastern-representation/

This Hit Musical Is Breaking New Ground For Middle Eastern Representation

From left: Iris (Kristen Sieh), Itzik (John Cariani), Simon (Alok Tewari), Avrum (Andrew Polk), and Camal (George Abud).

Matthew Murphy

Years before she was in The Band’s Visit on Broadway, Sharone Sayegh was a student at Syracuse University visiting New York City to audition for the tour of Hairspray. According to Sayegh, the audition monitor said there were too many people present and they would have to make a cut: Because the show was about black and white race relations in the 1960s, anyone who wasn’t black or white would not be considered. Sayegh, who is Iraqi-Israeli, gathered her things and left.

“I wasn’t upset,” Sayegh told BuzzFeed News. “I was like, Yeah I’m not. I’m not white and I’m not black, so I probably should only start auditioning for Middle Eastern shows. But I was like, Wait a minute, there aren’t any, so what should I do?”

With The Band’s Visit, which opened in November at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Sayegh has found a show that’s distinctly Middle Eastern, and that actually reflects the duality of her ethnic background in its exploration of two cultures: Her parents were born in Israel but are of Iraqi descent, and she was born and raised in the US. Based on the acclaimed 2007 film, The Band’s Visit follows Egypt’s Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra as they find themselves stranded overnight in the sleepy Israeli town of Bet Hatikva. There, the locals take them in, and both the Israelis and their Egyptian visitors realize they’re all searching for the same thing — human connection.

While the show could depict a fraught, politically charged conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, The Band’s Visit is quiet and restrained, more focused on their innate similarities and newly formed bonds than on any larger issues that might come between them. That grounded, slice-of-life approach stands out against the more common portrayals of Middle Eastern life, which often center on terrorism or border conflicts.

“I guess it could be inherently political, but I like to think that it’s not,” said George Abud, who plays Camal, a member of the band. “We just see these strangers meeting and being confused by each other and challenging each other in mostly nonthreatening ways, and just trying to figure each other out and trying to communicate.”

For Abud, who is Lebanese-American, the normalcy of the show is part of what makes it such a significant step forward for representation. Not to mention, of course, that the cast includes so many actors of diverse Middle Eastern backgrounds. Abud was so inspired by the work the show was doing that he eschewed listing credits in his Playbill bio, instead opting for the following message: “I hope young Arabic kids, like I was, see this show, or hear it, or read about it, and know that there is starting to be a place for their expression, their stories and their faces. The Arab voice, rich in history and beautiful music, is vital in American theatre.”

Explaining his choice for the unconventional bio, Abud said that he wanted to “start planting the seed and normalizing the Arab people and the Arab-American people, to show people who have not come into contact with them as much that we’ve been here and we’re part of the fabric.”

Zelger (Bill Army) dances with Anna (Sharone Sayegh).

Matthew Murphy

That’s part of the work The Band’s Visit is doing, and it’s why — aside from the gorgeous book and evocative score — these actors have been so drawn to the show. Etai Benson, who plays Bet Hatikva resident Papi, said this is the first time he’s really seen himself represented onstage. Half Israeli and half American, he is Jewish but has always felt more of a “spiritual kinship with Middle Eastern culture and traditions,” as opposed to the Eastern European Jewish culture depicted in classic Broadway shows like Fiddler on the Roof.

“This was … a Broadway musical — what I’ve always dreamed of doing in my life — that had Hebrew in it, that had my culture, that had everything that I grew up with represented onstage,” Benson said.

Benson has been cast as Jewish characters throughout his career; Sayegh, on the other hand, has struggled to be seen for Jewish roles despite the fact that she is an American Jew. “I cannot get an audition for Fiddler whenever it’s done, because they’re like, you don’t look Jewish,” she said. “And it’s like, you don’t know what a Jew is!” She has played Latinas and Indians because of a scarcity of roles for people who look like her, although she’s uncertain if she would do that again because “it feels inauthentic.”

“I rarely go into an audition without an accent because people just don’t view me as American or there hasn’t been an Israeli show or a Middle Eastern show,” Sayegh said. “[The Band’s Visit] being an Israeli piece where I didn’t have to learn a new accent and I could speak my language and there’s Arabic music — I mean, it’s just like my whole world.”

For Ari’el Stachel, who plays smooth-talking band member Haled, the show has a particular resonance. He is half Yemenite Israeli and half Ashkenazi Jew: The Band’s Visit reflects a similar convergence of cultures. But it’s also a rare opportunity for Stachel to embrace his ethnic identity, which he admitted was once a source of shame for him. “For a majority of my life I pretended not to be Middle Eastern — anything but Middle Eastern,” he said. “If I wasn’t perceived as an outsider or as a Yemenite kid or some weird kid with a father with an accent, I felt like I had social permission to play basketball, to sing, to act.”

The Band’s Visit, in which the characters’ Arab and Israeli ethnicities are both essential to their stories and not their only defining characteristic, marks a major turning point for Stachel, who only publicly revealed his ethnic background when he was a junior at NYU. “I just didn’t know that there would be roles available for me,” he said. “But I think all the time I spent concealing made me obsessed with my identity and dying to be proud of it, and so this show has enabled that for me.”

Haled (Ari’el Stachel) gives a nervous Papi (Etai Benson) advice on dealing with Julia (Rachel Prather).

Matthew Murphy

But it’s also the story that Band’s Visit tells that makes these actors especially excited about it: They all spoke about having had to audition for heavier roles, sometimes terrorists or refugees. And while they agreed that those stories are necessary, they do not represent the full breadth of the Middle Eastern experience. The simple, human story in this particular play offers a meaningful alternative to what most of these actors have faced throughout their careers.

As Benson noted, “Diversity in casting is very important, and I think our show is very emblematic of that. When you look onstage you see kinds of faces that you haven’t seen before. But to me, what’s just as if not more important is the diversity in storytelling.”

Abud put it more bluntly. “We’re mostly doing frickin’ shows downtown about Syria and the conflict in Syria. I don’t want to do fucking 200 shows about Syria,” he said. “I want to do a Theresa Rebeck [play] about annoying Upper East Side kids who are taking an art class or something. It has nothing to do with them being white. … We want to play with everybody else.”

He said that he sees two forms of progress — one is Middle Eastern actors being cast as Middle Eastern characters in their own stories, and the other is Middle Eastern actors being cast as, well, anyone. And while The Band’s Visit represents the former, its work to normalize and showcase the work of Middle Eastern actors will ideally lead to more opportunities down the line, including roles that have traditionally been played by white actors.

Stachel is already feeling optimistic. “Maybe now people will take a chance on me and let me stretch and play other types of things,” he said. “The sense that I have in meetings now is quite different, because people are able to see me in what I feel is my truth.”

In the meantime, they will continue speaking out whenever possible. Even while celebrating an accomplishment like The Band’s Visit, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done — and for these actors, that means both being grateful for the opportunity and making sure this show isn’t just a fluke.

“It’s my responsibility to help others with my platform in whatever way I can,” Abud said. “I have a very, very, very small platform, but any opportunity I can, I like to try and do something, because even if it just gives somebody a little bit of hope — like I’ve gotten from little things — that’s what the theater is.”

[when-dust-is-gone-blog]

Guys i want to cry I'm so fucking overwhelmed in a good, happy way!! I have been a whirlwind of emotions and questions and realisations and I feel like I'm really starting to figure things out and become myself and it all started from a video i saw on facebook about nonbinary genders and i decided to track down the maker of this video to try and find more content and instantly just fell in love and related to this person and their journey so much and it made me question everything i knew about myself. and this person has since reached out to me and offered to chat with me about my gender stuff and it's like YOU ARE MY IDOL YOU ARE THE REASON I'M EVEN THINKING ABOUT THIS I OWE YOU MY LIFE AND NOW YOU WANT TO HELP ME EVEN MORE??? So I'm just so blessed and i believe i have been sent an angel from queer heaven to take me on this journey.

Anyway while im out here having a million realisations a day I figure maybe i should start tracking and recording my thoughts and feelings and "aha!" moments. So here are some things:

- it turns out my lifelong attraction to and fascination with gnc people, particularly androgynous and masc presenting gnc (david bowie, la roux, gay and trans men) is not a sexual preference but my soul crying out to be like them. ofc im drawn to and attracted to them duh that's so obvious now. I spent so long a) wondering if there was something wrong with me preferences and then b) wondering if i was like...fetishising trans and gnc people but no actually in the same way i spent ages being drawn to and interested in gay culture as an "ally" turns out i was just responding to the call of my people

- one of my main worries in all this was my experience of dysphoria and how it doesn't match the traditional narrative ive known theough popular content and trans/nb friends. i have never hated nor wanted to reject my femininity, my womanhood, or my female body. but i had never let myself explore any other option or way of presenting. I fantasised about it a lot, and often would dream of or about of being a man. and it never even occurred to me to try dressing masc or binding and im wondering now how much of my love for "girly" stuff was actually just patriarchy instilling it into me. like yea i still like makeup and dresses and look great in them but god it felt so fucking good to just wear a button up and binder and thick eyebrows today!! I got so many compliments! I couldn't stop taking selfies! I kept stopping to stare at myself in reflective surfaces!! I dont remember EVER feeling that way about myself

- i spent a lot of my early teens wondering if i was ace because i had no desire to explore my own sexuality, and obvs part of that was being GAY AF but also I never really explored my body and i wasn't comfortable doing so. nowadays i am and i dont feel dysphoric in that respect but in terms of letting OTHERS touch my body that's a whole other story and i always put it down to just regular old anxiety or body insecurity but i realise now it was dysphoria and i didn't even know it, i just knew SOMETHING felt wrong.

- i actually have a very distinct memory of beinh like really really young, maybe 4 or 5, and wanting to pee standing up and thinking that because i was pretty good at it that made me a boy, i also very distinctly remember finding my clit and not knowing what it was and thinking it either was or was going to grow into a penis - and i was cool with that.

- ive always related very strongly to trans and nb issues and i always just put it down to being humanitarian and having good queer influences growing up and then later being part of the queer community but im rly starting to see why i related so strongly

- i also rly distinctly remember my mum calling me into the lounge when i was like 12 because there was a 60minutes special avout trans kids and even though i never related it to myself at the time i was SO CAPTIVATED and it really stuck with me

- in the same way I ID'd as bisexual for a long time due to comphet, I'm wondering how much of my identity as a woman has been forced upon me. The further i let myself fall into trans and nb stuff the further i feel from womanhood and i thought i would be sad about it but it's almost a relief?? Like i was pretending without even knowing i was.