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thekitschdiet · 4 years ago

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my take on the literary masterpiece, the chic diet

Firstly, I am no one. It’s part of my charm. My fifteen minutes of fame was years ago, when I had an instagram niche meme page. I didn’t even take any brand deals! And my posts averaged six thousand likes! Anyhow. I am hardly literate and well hydrated and carry a small sephora-CVS-hybrid worth in my mini tote bag. Here is my guide on how to live like me, the intermediate kitsch-rat, aspiring influencer. But like, in an apathetic, somewhat dissonant, ironic way. I like saying I live by dogmatic principles. But a lot of it, um, is just eating disorder rituals. But that’s not really important. You’re as hot as you say you are, and as much an authority on what you write so long as you say it with, you know, conviction. It’s kind of venerable how fucking delusional I am, actually. Giving any sort of advice like I’m anywhere close to the ritzy ideal of the amphetamine-areyouami label-american. New York, ideally. West Village, preferably. But I guess the kind of guide I can write is better suited to someone living in a suburb, in a house with the twelve-paned windows. I always thought those were so chic. SO quaint, in a somewhat luxe way. Like, Connecticut vibes. My parents used to drive me up there as a child to buy books and ice cream. Nowadays I’d opt for a matcha latte with novelty ice cubes, but I guess at the time it was pretty sweet.

Because I popped a Vyvanse at like, 10pm, this next little bit could go one of two ways. I will write the most articulate, brilliant piece of literature of my life. Magnum opus, if there was a skinnier word for it. Or, I will get wrapped up doing something like folding all my last-season knits (which is part of my look, okay! I don’t have a job!) and fixating on a paragraph on how a girl’s collarbones are almost as identifying as a fingerprint, or a signature. I’m not a graphologist, but if you write your A’s with the little tail on top (like on a computer), you’re probably a snake. Nothing personal, just an observation. Also, I do have a biology final to study for. Not that I’m super anal, or even particularly committed to academia, but even in my precariously manicured (read that as separate terms; I did a good job on my nail polish, okay? But I happen to also be teetering on the brink of an epiphany or a collapse. Hence the use of the word precarious.) state, I know it’s important enough I can let one of my countless side-quests sit idle for a couple more days.

The first section seems only natural to be about hydration. And the whole idea of drinking things, really. There was a section in The Chic Diet about Adderall dry-mouth, which deeply resonated with me. Once I bit off a chunk of a Nivea Strawberry Shine (my favorite lip balm, more on that later) and swished it around my mouth. Didn’t help. Really, really didn’t. Anyway, I suppose that even if it served no purpose for combatting my prevacatingly ingenious cottonmouth solution, I was able to milk a sentence or two out of the experience. “Do it for the Vine”, all grown up! And wearing bananapapaya resin hoops too. Side note, that Etsy shop is a parasocial enemy of mine. It stems from jealousy, which sucks, but hating from inside a club I’m adjacent to is much healthier than being a hateful individual towards people I would, you know, interact with. Daily. Or something. I stopped going to therapy because I felt stupid about going and I don’t live in the right kind of town to warrant vacuous $300 hours. Bitching about my well-adjusted parents and how desperately I wished my anxiety would just “go away” was plainly gross, and a waste. Like, pretty sure almost every problem I have could be solved by a couple painful conversations taking place during a hurricane. Such a shame it doesn’t rain much here. Anyhow, I digress.

Staying hydrated. It is essential to my character, my persona, if you will; to never be without either an elegant metal bottle (I’m loyal to the smooth enamelled S’well ones, printed to look like marble or a semi holographic solid) or a little 16oz tumbler with a metal straw. Hydroflasks were some of the worst things to happen to society. I want to preface this claim with the fact that I wanted one in the same way a teenage girl wants a new iPhone so she can keep up appearances with her dermatologist-dad friends who still have the XR, by the way. But I ended up spending the money on like, a minidress at Brandy Melville before it fled my city. Or maybe a Fresh Sugar tinted lipbalm. For the better, even though the dress has a busted zipper now and the lipbalm tube has inevitably gotten dinged and dented by the other contents of my mini-totebag. Unlike a car, though, a couple scuffs on your laptop or your luxury lipbalm tube looks kind of cool. Like, you’re not someone who values the pristine, unused quality of an item that was ambiguously intended to be used versus displayed on Instagram. Now, I’m wondering why this paragraph about hydration is so fucking impossible to stay on track for. I literally drink several litres of water a day, and more tea on top of that. And sometimes an almond milk latte if I can budget it in. Not that I’m so anorexic I can’t afford a 45cal latte. They’re just not that important to me. Anyhow. Drinking lukewarm (on the cool side) water is better than ice-cold. Partially because I just get it out of the tap of my ensuite and I can’t be bothered to wait for it to run cold enough every time, and it just seems wasteful. Plus, there is something so.. skinny about drinking water at an “obscure” temperature. Trust me, I want to know why my thought process is like this too. My favorite tea is blueberry tea foraged in a side aisle at my local supermarket. I love a good commercial, high-end steep or fruit infusion as much as the next girl. Maybe more. My pantry is filled with tins labelled with things like “emerald jade organic” and “magic potion”, which is really just currants and butterfly pea flowers. But there is a necessary glamor about drinking dirt-cheap tea on the daily. Seriously, a box of 25 sachets is like, $3. At a higher point with my, um, Adderall problem, I spent like several times that on pills. I didn’t really need to include that, and could have linked the price point to the cost of a drugstore lipbalm, but I wrote it in. And I’m married to it, stubbornly, as all amateur writers should be when they wittle in a somewhat indecorous little joke. This tea is sooo good because it has a strong fruit-reminiscent taste (not as sweet as a fresh blueberry, but who wants that anyway?), it’s zero-calorie, it’s the most GORGEOUS color ever. The latte, the third drink in my little trifecta, is nothing special. But necessary. The trick is to use a milk frother to whip up sugar free syrup with instant coffee and a little bit of hot water in a glass. It’ll make the most luscious foam.. Top it off with almond milk. My dad is a coffee purist, owning both an upstairs keurig AND a downstairs one (among other more analogue methods, but I can’t name-drop, so what’s the point?), so he hates this drink. Now, calling oneself a plebian is so unglamorous and teetering on self-deprecating territory, dangerously close to insecurity. But I can use it here because I am at least posh enough to have a different pair of earrings for every outfit I could possibly come up with, and I only wear Patagonia if I am in a situation where I just have to wear fleece. Like I was saying. It’s such a simple drink, certainly not a delicacy, and… I had a joke about the word plebian but I keep getting up to refill my water and I fear I have forgotten about it.

Next section; the importance of a good tinted balm

In the intro I alluded to how a girl’s collarbones function essentially as an identifier, the way a signature or fingerprint does. This is a lie, or at least an exaggeration. But one’s ultimate tinted lipbalm is actually extremely indicative about who you are, as a person, as a member of society, even…

If you are loyal to Dior Lipglow, I have a couple questions. One; did you shoplift one tube, once, and refill it with cheaper stuff afterwards? I did that. I consider it one of my better-kept secrets, but now you know. Might as well explain the catalyst for my parent’s first separation now, and the horrifying experience that was meeting my dad’s Manhattan sugar baby (?) at the age of thirteen, wearing an overalls dress from, like, Topshop or something else equally embarrassing. .. Kidding. I digress. It’s such a fancy lipbalm, and good too! It smells like thin mints! But I could just never justify cell phone monthly installation payment money on something I will inevitably talk off. I do own three, but two I stole (before I lost the nerve, somewhat unfortunately) and one, a boy(not)friend bought for me. This is not something I feel any remorse about, because his house was easily four thousand square feet and his sisters had a dedicated all-glass room for their shared peloton. Oil money. Ugh!

My personal favorite lip balm, and I have tried a frightening amount, has got to be the Nivea Fruit Shine collection. The frosted one is shit-ugly. Hideous. But the strawberry one is the love of my life. It’s such a pleasant red, looking healthy and rejuvenated and really completes any look. Only downside is it will always, hopefully not always, remind me of Charles. Kissing Charles, specifically. And him asking me what lipbalm it was, because he knew I was somewhat frivolous and definitive and would have a very long answer. But for whatever reason, I simply stated it was from “out of town”. Not really sure why I said that, but it plagues me (minorly) to this day. Of all the things to make up.. .. The peach one is a perfectly demure spring classic shade. Cherry exists too, but the only tube I have ever had the fortune of owning was purchased in Costa Rica and lost somewhere on the way home. Honestly tragic, it was the juiciest shade. Blackberry is perfect too, but I have to layer it with either peach or untinted lipbalm to avoid what I imagine TooPoor would choose if she believed in tinted lipbalm. I don’t mean this hatefully, I think she’s a queen, but super dark, smudgy makeup suits the eyes better in my opinion. Or something. Or something.

Afraid to bore the reader, I have to move on now. Maybe at a later date I will release an addendum on my ultimate lipbalm buying guide. But also, that is so deeply personal (and everyone needs the excuse of “hunting for the perfect staple shade!!”), so it is really not my place to have any authority on something so intimate and subjective. Etcetera.

Moving on; Decorating your room

Here is a section I lifted out of my memoir document. It fits, because as enigmatic as I hope I am, I am also quite unchanging.

I just pushed three hangers and two tiny strappy tops with the tags still on, off my bed. Most nights, all, these days, actually; I spend in my large but cluttered bedroom. I have a little ensuite with a jetted tub I’ve never used because I just never get around to it. There’s a plush grey rug, spanning the expanse of the room (covering an ugly cherry wood that doesn’t match the rest of the house; no clue why. I never asked, and the previous owners were eager to sell so they could finally ditch this town and retire in Montreal for the bagels, or Hawaii for the monk seals. Point is, I’ll never know) with loose beads and loose pills and little shards of glass from plier-crushed beads. I vacuum every day. The whole room tells you exactly the kind of person I am; the clutter I possess, the encapsulation of the projects I start, start, start and the hours I don’t sleep for and the clothes I tried on (these to sell, these to cut up with kitchen scissors; thrifted lululemon and aritzia and heaps of knits and plaid fabric..) I would not say the room is a mess. Lived in, maybe. Chopsticks and mugs and gum wrappers. Single dangle earrings. I just finished the last of my Creme Brulee eos lipbalm; disguised as a relic of 2015, I was gifted it Christmas of ‘20. I think my next waxy conquest will be a tinted Burt’s one I palmed a while back, before I lost the nerve. Peering around the room you will see shopping bags strewn about the mouth of my walk-in closet. Every surface has something shiny or colorful stacked up on it. Cluttered, busy, but intentional. Except for the walls, which are bare. Bare and gray and miles-tall when I lie flat on my back, high out of my mind, willing things to change but knowing I’m responsible for a first step I will always be too scared for. Bare, pristine, no gumtack. Empty, Like they’re waiting. I wait around a lot. It makes sense. That was an awful lot of words about my stupid blank walls when truly it does not bother me that much; I really just don’t get around to it. I have other things on the ground to tend to, like post-email nausea, addressing envelopes, marrying wire and bead. Writing a document I care about because I am determined and I am alive, alive, alive, goddammit.

Excerpt over. The memoir is coming out when I get famous, or something earth shattering happens. Like I become the world’s least remarkable entrepreneur, and I get retweeted by Colorpop. I don’t want to be the next Elizabeth Wurtzel. I read two of her memoirs one restless night, absorbing it to make up for the nutrients I didn’t that day (you can laugh. I think that is pretty clever), heart breaking a little bit. She writes about her struggles so intrinsically, you either get it, or you don’t. Anyway. She had the books and the fame from it, and she wrote more memoirs than I think a single person should. That is admirable. Aspirational, even. But I do not want to be like her. Where was I? Oh. Yes. Decorating/adorning/filling your room. Your room should serve as the kind of place to watch a movie (if you believe in film. I don’t) and put on ridiculous glittery eye makeup, or smoke an ~artistic cigarette~ or stay up all night on the phone, which is different from staying up all night simply on your phone. Chatting with someone you are tepidly in love with is much more exciting. Not chic as the whole affair is so juvenile, but fun regardless. It’s somewhere to keep your worldly possessions, too. I know I have a lot! Also, it is kind of thrilling to hide things in your room in little crevices only you know about. Now, unfortunately, everyone reading this will know too. But, like, I trust you not to really.. do anything about it. I keep my extra juul pods in the sliding box my apple pencil came in. That box is almost more useful than the pencil itself. I’m somewhat morally opposed to the iPad. Whole culture is so embarrassing! I have a tea tin with an ounce of golden teacher shrums in it. This is tossed in my closet among tins filled with other things, like lace trim and buttons. Which makes it actually a pretty terrible hiding spot, I see now… Anyhow. Keeping benign little secrets like that is so fun. You can tell I don’t have siblings. I sort of wish I did, but it is easier to believe there is something aristocratic about being an only child. Not sure if older-sister me would be egalitarian enough to share things. But that’s prophesying, which is kind of a waste of time. I live in the now, in a room positively cluttered with meaningless things that mean the world to me, chewing on my lip because my mouth is just so dry and 5gum is just not an after-8 indulgence. To live truly kitschly, you have to have somewhat hideous decor. Now, do not confuse dissonant, or incoherent, with what I mean by “hideous decor”. The kitsch room has as many surfaces to look at as possible, while also shying away from too many shelving units. Then you risk your room looking like a storage unit or something. When my mom renovated (re: paid someone to do it) our New York house so we could sell it, all our stuff was stacked up in a Cubesmart self storage. It was sort of horrifying, seeing my childhood home reduced to plastic storage tubs piled what felt like thirty feet high. Anyway. It’s just not an inviting way to store things; I imagine it makes your room look like your stuff is all trapped in gelatin. The more fussy, tiny things you have out in the open, the better. Nail polish. Earring trees. Bowls full of rings and lighters and water color pans perched on your windowsill. A rack with the tackiest assortment of knits and bucket hats and baguette bags. And so forth.. Quickly surveying someone’s room is so telling. Bonus points if all your books are spine-in, except for your favorite ones, because you don’t want people to get the wrong idea. (that you read).

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helshades · 5 years ago

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Tip of the Nose : You Be For Men, My Scent

Does perfume really have a gender? Not remotely likely, says the purist, and don’t come telling me that virility smells like those pine-shaped car deodorant thingies. Everybody knows that real men smell of lavender.

This article is actually a rewrite of my response to this post, which my dying aging computer ate right before I thought about saving three hours worth of work. I’m not entirely sure what burning frustration and bitter regret are supposed to smell like, but if someone wishes to bottle it, they may as well name it Parfum de Hel.

On a side note, one of the participants to the earlier conversation had me blocked for some previous reason—probably unrelated to perfume discourse—so I could not reblog the initial post; nor am I willing, out of politeness, to simply caption the discussion. Therefore, here is the original post, and following is the segment I will more precisely address:

@thatiswhy:

Also, maybe I hate the mainstream cotton candy uwu line for women but don’t want to smell like a fucking frat house trying to deo away the smell of vomit on the carpet. You know what I want to smell like? White musk, and leather, and cedar, and sandalwood, and old parchment, and vetiver, and various teas, and juniper, and citrus, and cypress, and cashmere wood, and maybe in the summer like orange blossom and jasmine or fresia. These notes, while mostly present in women’s perfumes, usually are combined with overbearing fruity or flowery tones that make it smell like an aging late 17th century courtesan’s drawers, or “oriental” scents that make the whole thing reek like a 1920’s opium den. (Seriously, I have walked into a perfume shop, asked to be shown something fresh, woodsy and clean, and had Gabrielle shoved under my nose, which smells like rosewater-flavoured Turkish delight.)

Let women smell of non-jellybean scents, you cowards.

That being said, I have found all but two scents for men (to date) that don’t smell absolutely abrasive. (I’m suspecting the cheap synthetic ambergris.) 99.9% of the stuff directed at men smell as if I had one of those scrubbing metal wire thingies shoved up my throat. So no, I don’t want to shop at the men’s section, I want to be given the opportunity to find a scent that doesn’t say 80’s cartoon for girls and/or I read palms for a living.

There are many things to address in this fertile, if angry, intervention, and like often I’m starting by the end and by making a remark that has little to do with the subject at hand: I don’t think, my darling Tatty, that the ‘abrasive’ harbinger of olfactory doom you perceive in most ‘masculine’ fragrances would be synthetic ambergris, cheap or other. All ambergris today is synthetic, to begin with—well, not all, but natural ambergris is so terrifyingly expensive that we’ve got to forgive perfumers for furnishing us with only an approximation. Ambergris is extremely rare a substance; think around €10,000 per kilogram, in the lower estimation. Back in 2016, a nearly two-kilo block found by a man who was walking his dog on a Lancashire beach sold for £50,000… People have become millionaires over ambergris, although most of the time one only finds small quantities of it at once.

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for gray amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odourless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine-merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavour it.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1922), chapter XCII, ‘Ambergris’.

In perfumery, ambergris is distilled into an alcohol-based solution known as ‘pure amber’ which, when exposed to air and sunlight, can be separated into several derivatives, notably terpenes and steroids. In fact, ambergris is mainly constituted from ambrein (25–45%) and epicoprosterol (30–40%). Ambrein is progressively degraded by sea water, sunlight and air into several compounds which are chiefly responsible for its smell, notably ambroxide and ambrinol. Modern perfumery uses ambroxide as a substitute for natural ambergris, which is easily synthesised from… a type of sage plant! To be exact, from sclareol, a fragrant chemical compound found in clary sage (Salvia sclarea). Sclareol kills cancer (yes.), and also it smells really good, with a sweet, balsamic scent very reminiscent indeed of the most important notes of natural ambergris.

Ambergris is essentially mucus naturally produced by certain sperm whales (it is believed that less than 5% of the species produces ambergris, possibly the largest of them, which prey on bigger animals) to protect their intestinal tract from lesions caused by the passing of sharp objects, chiefly undigested squid beaks: eventually, the whale excretes this soft, blackish, pungent concretion which is going to drift for a long while before landing on the shore, where it’ll spend maybe years drying out and hardening under the sun and the air. The colour lightens to a golden grey, and the smell gradually sweetens to a salty musk with whiffs of honey, tobacco and leather—depending on the block, the notes will vary in proportions and in potency.

Almost needless to say, then, that the number of perfumes using authentic ambergris isn’t especially high. Conversely, synthetic ambroxide is a beloved template of the modern perfumer’s palette, one of the reasons being that it helps stabilise scents very well. So popular, in fact, that specialists speak of 40% of the perfumes created in the last thirty years using it! Ambroxide was first synthesised in 1950, by Max Stoll for Geneva-based Firmenich SA. That means that Aimé Guerlain had to use natural ambergris when he created the masterpiece Jicky in 1889 (the oldest perfume in the world to be sold without interruption since its creation), even though Jicky was amongst the very first perfumes to use synthetic ingredients! Most notably, Jicky pioneered a great use of several synthetic molecules, chief of which vanillin, the synthetic vanilla which had been discovered in 1874 by German chemist Ferdinand Tiemann. (The first perfume using synthetic ingredient was Houbigant’s Fougère Royale in 1882, using coumarin, one of the key molecules of tonka beans.)

According to the legend of Jicky, it was composed by Aimé Guerlain (one of founder Pierre Guerlain’s two sons, and the second generation’s in-house perfumer, whilst Gabriel was the manager; then came Gabriel’s own sons, master perfumer Jacques and manager Pierre. The last family perfumer was Jacques’ grandson Jean-Paul, who retired heirless in 1994, after which the company was sold to soulless, tentacular multinational LVMH, much to the dismay of Guerlain aficionados all over the world) ... in memory of a broken heart he suffered in his youth as he came back to France after studying in England without his lady love, the lovely ‘Jicky’. Though mostly advertised to a female clientèle, Jicky shocked many a respectable woman of the time by its daring use of sensual animal musks (ambergris, musk, castoreum, and the devilishly sexual civet) at the heart of its balms, spices and aromatic flowers, most especially lavender, luxurious iris, sultry sandalwood and hot leather... Until the 1910s, when women’s press began recommending it, Jicky was quite the sensation amongst... English dandies... and Marcel Proust, of course. (In 1925, for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Jacques Guerlain presented a twist on Jicky, in which he had removed lavender and woods but added bergamot and, especially, a massive dose of ethylvanillin [three times more potent than vanillin!]: Shalimar was born.)

Men and women used to wear the very same perfumes. Until the 19th century, really, the market wasn’t segmented and there was no such thing as a masculine scent. When the European courts started bathing again and heady perfumes fell out of fashion to the benefit of lighter, tarter, fresher fragrances modelled after the famous Eau de Cologne (1708), women wore them too. The French Jean-Marie Farina who became with his own Eau de Cologne (1809) the official perfumer of the imperial court furnished Empress Joséphine as well. It was for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, that Pierre Guerlain created his 1853 Eau de Cologne impériale in the famous ‘bee bottle’ (with his 69 bees symbolising the Empire), which earned Guerlain the envied title of ‘Patented Perfumer of Her Majesty’.

The real difference in perfume usage that occurred during the 19th century was actually a matter of social marking via the use of perfumes of varied qualities, complexities and prestige: if perfume remained an element of luxury, now the aristocracy wasn’t alone in this privilege; moreover, clothes weren’t so elaborate and expensive anymore, and social differences were expressed in subtler ways than before the Revolution. In Paris, House Guerlain furnished a more aristocratic clientèle, whereas the upper-middle class went to Roger & Gallet (successors to Jean-Marie Farina), Lubin or L.T. Piver; meanwhile, middle-middle and lower-middle classes patroned Bourjois and Gellé Frères. The lower-middle class also went to ‘perfume bazaars’ that proposed the same products on sale, plus low-quality products.

The first respectable (only) concurrent to French perfumery was actually England, thanks to the well-earned reputation of its barbers, who created their own fragrances, at once discreet, elegant yet tenacious. Those were scents designed to be applied on the skin as tonics in the first place, after an expert shave, and as such they were based on aromatics, chiefly lavender, made from the essence of the delicate English variety: in the beginning 20th century, Frenchmen often wore Yardley’s 1873 English Lavender, precisely, and it was something of an ubiquitous odour in cosmetic products more specifically destined to men, such as soaps and creams.

It is no wonder, then, that when Ernest Daltroff created the first ever perfume only for men, judiciously titled Pour un homme, in 1934, for House Caron which he co-founded with his brother Raoul in 1904, the fragrance was based on lavender, tenderly joined in matrimony with sweet vanilla and lying on a respectable, tranquil base of an ambre accord (vanilla, benzoin, labdanum, the ‘oriental’ assembly created by genius François Coty in 1908 Ambre antique, the family namer of ambrés perfumes) sandalwood and musk. Legend has it that Ernest, who loved lavender, added the vanilla to please Ms. Félicie Wanpouille, Caron’s artistic counsellor, whom Ernest might have loved even more than lavender. She had joined Caron in 1906 and their collaboration produced some of the most beautiful perfumes of the time, and most original: in 1919, they created the first ever leather-scented perfume, Tabac Blond, in 1927, Ernest made En avion as a gift to Félicie’s friend the star aviatrix Hélène Boucher... They also invented the ‘loose powder’ technique in make-up.

Félicie never left, but Ernest did, along with Raoul, when the Nazis invaded France: the Daltroff brothers were the sons of Jewish Russian immigrants, after all. Since Caron exported a lot of products and had opened a shop on New York’s 5th Avenue, Ernest emigrated to the United States in 1939. He never came back, and died in Canada in 1941. But Félicie Wanpouille stayed, in spite of the Occupation, keeping Caron afloat; 1941 was also the year she got the genius idea, since she couldn’t pay the heavy taxes the Nazis imposed on Jewish-made goods, to rename Pour un homme into Pour une femme, a name which it kept until the war ended. To this day, Caron remains one of the very houses to be devoted entirely to perfume—and free of any multinational’s influence, for that matter. (They’ve not, alas! remained free from the clutch of Reformulation, but that is a story for another day.)

There are two very good reasons why Tabac Blond bears this name. The first was purely commercial: in 1919, women were beginning to smoke, but they smoked almost exclusively blond tobacco from Virginia, which was considered too feminine for men. The second was that blond tobacco exhales honeyed mossy notes which the perfume evoked tantalisingly alongside the darker leather, the cooler iris and the warmer amber, meaning that it was the perfect perfume to cover the smell of tobacco smoke. Two years later, Molinard released the wonderful Habanita, in a small bottle shaped like a cigarette lighter, as an oil to dab the tip of your cigarette so as to make women’s clouds suaver (it was released as a proper perfume in 1924, and long advertised as ‘the most tenacious perfume in the world!’, not without reason).

It wouldn’t be illogical to consider that if there are masculine scent in the first place, it’s probably because femininity went through some drastic changes from the late 19th century onwards, especially as a consequence of the two World Wars. The daring, tobacco-covering orientals which the flappers favoured were a direct reaction to the dreamy flower ideal of the previous decades, notably the artificial immobility of the Victorian woman and her continental equivalents, which the Roaring Twenties more or less exorcised with a call to adventure and independence. Women wore more perfume and more daring perfumes; it was only expected that men would start wearing perfume, real perfume again.

Something really odd happened in the 1980s, but maybe that, too, was to be expected: a kind of paradigm shift occurred in perfumery, as the laundry detergent companies which had become extremely rich and powerful thanks to the combined power of advertisement and mass consumption bought most of the perfume houses, perfume started imitating cosmetics more than the reverse. Once upon a time, the cosmetics industry would copy, or try to, the scents most popular in perfumery, like L’Oréal’s Elnett hairspray famously reprised Chanel’s Nᵒ 5’ aldehyde overdose. Now, trendy perfume smells like shampoo or body spray.

It seems, nonetheless, like the ancestor of all terrible men’s perfumes that smell like body spray—the men’s version, the kind that makes you want to claw your own nose off—was the otherwise respectable Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982). So beloved by the public that every hygiene or cosmetic product targeted towards suddenly attempted to smell like it. Drakkar, however, was a good perfume, even if by today’s standards it would be perfectly unwearable for one’s entourage (in a vicinity of approximately 30 metres). ‘Powerhouse’ doesn’t begin to describe the type of scent that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s. And then they started using Calone™. Like, a lot of it. Have you ever smelled calone? Wait, you have. You’ve hated it. Calone in itself was a great chemical revolution: finally, the possibility for perfumers to imitate the very odour of water! Bring in the marine-like scents! Bring in the marine-like scents... I kinda want to throttle Calvin Klein for Escape (1991). Whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not approach anything subtitled ‘Sport’. It’s worse. It’s way worse. (These days, calone is used to give a ‘watermelon’ aspect to everything, but chiefly summer flankers of denatured classic feminine perfumes. A hint: it smells like shampoo. Everything does.)

You can blame advertisement for convincing men to wear perfume on top of extremely pungent deodorant, too, but me personally, I strongly resent women who think classics are ‘too feminine’ and want to shop at the men’s section of their local perfume supermarket because it’s supposed to be ‘gender-defying’. It really isn’t. That’s not what equality is about, getting to smelling just as bad as the dudes, it isn’t. Even more importantly, perfume is not gendered; marketing is. Skin chemistry varies noticeably from person to person and our hormones do play some role in what we smell like, and therefore in what one perfume will smell like on different people, but apart from that, any sex-based olfactory discrimination is but a marketing ploy to exploit a segmented market so that the members of one household purchase and consume as many differentiated items as possible. Mainstream perfumery these days is mostly hopeless: the Thinking (wo)Man would be well inspired to turn to ‘niche’ perfumery, which isn’t always that confidential but presents the great advantage of being generally more creative and personal. Websites exist where people exchange ideas and samples and there is a whole alternative market for scents that allow people not to ruin themselves buying a full bottle of certain great fragrances. Overall, it is a nice way to get to wear something that feels like a personal choice.

#tip of the nose #aromaphilia #answers #thatiswhy #a work in progress as i've yet to address the lutens question #will do after sleep #but as it happens i must go to bed and get a few hours of sleep in #for tomorrow morning i'm bidding on several bottles of lutens perfume

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breakingdownsu · 6 years ago

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Chorus Chapter Eleven

Note: I haven't had a break since the beginning of spring between my health issues, work and everyone deciding to get married every single weekend of this summer, I am beyond running on fumes and at this stage I think I am only kept upright by sheer force of will. Pray for me, please.

…..

“Hey, do you know these two offcuts?” Orthoclase asked lazily, tossing a tablet-type screen at him.

Steven froze. Garnet and Amethyst, caught by the pause button in a moment of intense worry, in what was clearly Lars' ship. They looked awful, dark bags under their eyes and posture crooked with exhaustion. It felt like it had been years since he saw them.

“Yes,” he said, swallowing thickly.

“I got an encrypted message from that ship, they're looking for you.”

He had been in the rest pod, taking a fitful but dreamless nap.

“Did you tell them I'm here?” he asked.

“I didn't confirm,” Orthoclase shrugged. “I told them I knew where you were and that you weren't in any danger, but I didn't give them our location.”

“They're probably worried sick,” Steven said sheepishly. “I mean, they were already worried about Pearl going missing, and then I went missing...”

“You want to bring them here?” she asked.

“Huh? Are you okay with that?”

“Sure, why not?” she shrugged again. “You're trustworthy and you trust them, I'm cool with it. I'll send them a location and pick them up. But while I'm doing that, you need to get the pearls to that Lapis across town.”

“Okay,” he agreed. Knowing he was going to see Amethyst and Garnet soon nearly made him weep with relief. Although... “Um,...I don't really know how to get across town by myself....”

“Ginger will go with you,” Orthoclase offered. “She's got all the pearls in her subspace so don't attract attention.”

“But...what about the checkpoints?” Steven asked.

“Let them crack her as usual, they won't find anything unless you give them a reason to probe her gem. So, like I said, don't attract attention.”

…..

“When was the last time you got this pearl serviced?” the Topaz at the checkpoint asked in the most bored tone Steven had ever heard.

“Um, like....half an orbit?” he stammered, trying to remember Homeworld's odd phrasing.

“Get it done ASAP. I'll let you off with a warning this time,” the Topaz scolded, pulling the forceps out of Ginger's mouth.

“Sure, sure I will,” Steven said, walking backwards. “Thanks, I will.”

Once they were safely away from the checkpoint, Steven breathed a sigh of relief. They'd been through three of them, and each one managed to miss that Ginger was carrying a case of stolen pearls inside her.

“Does it hurt when they do that?” he asked Ginger.

“Yes,” she replied in that same blunt manner she always did.

In a way, her honesty was refreshing, even though it often shocked and scared him. Almost everyone in Steven's life tried to sugarcoat things for him, but Ginger didn't seem able. Or maybe she just didn't want to.

“Orthoclase told me they have to do it because you won't open your mouth under orders. Wouldn't it be easier if you did?”

He waited for Ginger to tell him he was prying, or just refuse to answer. He knew she could; she kept things from Orthoclase all the time. Instead, she was as brutally honest as he had come to expect from her.

“Most gems are able to repair their damaged gems with mineral grafts, it's a non-invasive procedure,” she explained, lowering her voice to a whisper as they passed a handful of gems loitering at a corner. “Pearls cannot do this, so when our gems are damaged we need to absorb filler from the inside out. They use a tube to do this. It's very unpleasant.”

Steven had a feeling 'unpleasant' was an understatement.

“Sometimes back home sick people have to get tubes put in to help them breathe or eat when they're too sick to do it on their own,” he said. “It looks pretty bad, but it's for the best...”

“The tube is not the issue,” Ginger cut in. “The filler is taken from processed pearls. It is an intrusion and our mass rejects it automatically. If we had a choice, we would not choose to be repaired at all.”

Steven wasn't quite sure he fully understood what she was saying, but it brought up that awful squirmy feeling, like he was going to be sick.

Serves me right for being so nosy, he thought bitterly.

The sprawling estate where the Dowager Lapis lived was just a few blocks away, and he gladly focused on that instead of the conversation he had just had. He could hear faint singing from inside as he knocked on the door.

The Lapis' pearl ushered them inside quietly, guiding them into a large room with a small stage. The Jaspers' pearl was the one singing, some upbeat tune with a matching quickstep dance, her long curly twintails bouncing around her face with each movement. The dowager Lapis watched her from a couch, a long glass tube of some smoky substance dangled elegantly from her hand. Her face was unimpressed, one eyebrow scornfully raised.

When the pearl finished and took a deep curtsy, the dowager rolled her eyes.

“It's trite, but I suppose the brutes down at the barracks enjoy this kind of nonsense?” she snorted.

“Yes, they do,” the pearl replied softly.

“It's passable, if they won't let you sing anything more dignified it'll have to do.” she scoffed. “But you're too quiet still. All of you are too quiet.”

With a start, Steven realized that the Disney pearls were in the room as well, lingering to the side of the stage.

“You need to project,” the dowager instructed. “I know you're all used to singing under your breath, but you need to put more power into it. Push from your stomach as well as your chest.”

The pearls all nodded in unison. Lapis' pearl ushered Steven and Ginger in a little closer.

“Orthoclase's pearl and quartz are here,” she said.

“Hm? Oh, very good,” the Lapis sighed. “I suppose you've brought the rest of them?”

“Yeah, we ended up with forty two!” Steven enthused.

“Wonderful,” the Lapis replied. It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic, her general way of speaking seemed to drip with disdain it masked any sincerity.

Ginger removed the sack of pearls from her subspace and placed it on the low table. Slightly, almost imperceptibly, the Disney pearls and the barracks pearl leaned forward to see them.

“It doesn't matter how many we get if they can't learn to sing with some actual force,” Dowager Lapis sniffed. “It won't even be worth hearing.”

“But...your one sings sometimes, doesn't she?” Steven asked.

Lapis' pearl (the one he had started thinking of as Alice, just in his own mind) dropped her gaze to the ground as her owner turned to look at her.

“Only when she thinks I can't hear her,” Lapis said. “She has a delightful voice, but it's weak. I do not intend to risk my standing and properties if they can't sing above a whisper.”

It was pure hyperbole, the pearls did sing notably quieter than the average karaoke bar customer but they were hardly whispering. But Lapis was such a purist she would accept nothing less than proper volume. Panic bubbled up in Steven's throat, and Orthoclase wasn't around to offer any solutions. He would have to think of something....

“What if I work with them for a while?” he blurted out. “I mean, I sing in a band sometimes and sometimes I get told to quit that damn racket so it must be pretty loud...”

“Do what you want,” Lapis said dismissively, rising to her feet. “I'm going to my rest pod. I've had quite enough of tutoring for one cycle.”

She swept out of the room in the most grandiose manner, leaving an awkward silence in her wake. The pearls stared at Steven, clearly waiting to be told what to do.

“Okay,” he sighed, cracking his knuckles. “Um, Alice?”

Lapis' pearl didn't respond.

“Oh, right,” he muttered. “That's you! You're Alice...I mean, that's what I'm calling you so I don't get you mixed up with the other pearls...is that okay with you?”

Slightly baffled-looking, she nodded.

“Good. So I need you to find a thing...like, back home I play a ukulele and I forgot to bring it with me and I don't know if Homeworld has something like that, but it's like this big and it has four strings and it's pretty easy to play....can you find something like that?”

“It sounds like a dulcemeter,” she replied. “My owner has one in storage.”

“Okay, great! Can I use it?” he asked, and she nodded.

As she left to find the instrument, Steven set up an assembly line on the table of pearls to press his licked palm to. A lot of them were in terrible condition, cracked and crumbling and covered in deep gouges. Each one was made smooth and whole in turn and reformed about a minute later. Soon the room was crowded with pearls, mildly confused and examining their no-longer-faulty masses. Fingers fluttered with abandon, to the point they generated a small breeze.

Once they were all reformed, Steven went around the room naming all of them. As far as he was concerned, Pearl had been Pearl for his entire life and he couldn't call any other pearl by her name. After naming a few more Disney pearls (Belle, Jasmine, three seed pearls he called Minnie, Daisy and Tinkerbell) he ran out of the movies he had actually seen and switched to naming them after flowers, fruit and other plants (Azalea, Fern, Violet, Strawberry, Hazel). He asked them all if they minded their names, and he should have known none of them would object, but he felt he had to ask anyway.

Eventually, Alice returned with a metal instrument. It looked more like a lute than a ukulele, but they way it played was similar enough. Alice advised that they move to the basement of the building, it was soundproof.

“Is there any reason they're so quiet?” Steven asked Ginger as they went down the stairs, depending on her honesty to find a way around the problem.

“Only certain gems perform professionally,” Ginger replied. “Pearls are only asked to sing by their owners, usually in private. Most never sing at all. And we are created to be quiet.”

It said a lot about pearl culture that even when they broke the rules to sing to each other, it was barely an octave higher than a breath. But perhaps that was the solution; it was easier to break the rules when everyone around you was doing the same.

He asked them all to sit in a circle, and they obeyed (in unison, which was a bit creepy.)

He started them off easy; Row, row, row your boat. Only the barracks pearl (Bunny), Alice, the blind pearl (who he had named Blinky and couldn't stop thinking of her as that even though it sounded like a really mean joke) and the Disney pearls managed to sing much louder than a sigh, but he thought by the time the round included every pearl in the room they had relaxed enough to enjoy themselves. Their fingers never stopped moving.

He had them follow him in On Top of Old Smoky next. He knew his own singing was off-key and scratchy compared to the purity of their tones, but he made up for it in volume. He thought some of them looked alarmed at the way he screeched about losing his stuff on the mountain, but when nothing bad happened the concern faded.

He could barely play the instrument Alice had given him, it was nothing like a ukulele after all, but they picked up the tune of whatever he was bellowing at them easily enough. They probably had no idea what any of the animals he sang about in Old MacDonald were, but they followed his lead without question. Soon he had them yelling the refrain to John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt loud enough to rival a small kindergarten class.

Eventually he ran out of bus journey singalong tunes and moved on to pop hits he sort of remembered from the radio. Sometimes he didn't remember all the words, but that hardly mattered. It wasn't like any of the pearls were judging him. One of the seed pearls (Minnie) gave up on singing actual words and just threw out a lot of nonsense words to the approximate tune Steven was trying to teach them. After a while, they all stopped trying to copy his words and used nonsense words instead.

It took him some time to realize that the words weren't nonsense at all; it was a language of its own. He fell quiet, just strummed the instrument, as the pearls took up the music for themselves in their own words.

It was a strange language; all breathy softness and clear vowels, no consonants to speak of, and yet it could be roughly translated if you listened closely. It was the sound of their gestures, the brush of their fingers and the exhaled sigh drifting in the wind, the whisper of material grasped in the palm of the hand, the shuffle of a barely moved foot on a marble floor, the flutter of a slowly blinking eyelash. Set to music, it sounded transcendent, like a prayer.

With a start, he realized that this was the music he had heard in his dream, that faint echo in the abyss.

The voices in the chamber swelled, reached a crescendo where they burst against the ceiling, and then they fell silent again. Fifty two pairs of eyes turned towards Steven; they had plainly forgotten he was there at all, and now he thought he could see a note of fear in their collective postures.

“Wow,” he mumbled, scratching his head. “That was....wow....”

He turned to Ginger, but she wasn't looking at him. She was ramrod straight in her seat, clutching her skirt hard enough to tear holes in it. Tears glittered in her eyes but she was holding them back.

“That was okay, wasn't it?” he whispered to her, suddenly nervous. “I mean...they're louder now. That was what we needed, wasn't it?”

She wiped at her eyes, and in a flicker she was coldly solemn once again.

“Yes,” she agreed, and would say no more.

…..

“Well, you've more of a talent for tutoring than I ever did, quartz,” Lapis said when Elsa finished her song. “Excellent work.”

“It was nothing,” Steven chuckled. “They did all the hard work, I just kind of shouted at them.”

“Whatever works,” Lapis muttered.

“I'm sorry I couldn't play the thing,” he told her. “It looked like my ukulele but it didn't sound much like it.”

“That's quite all right,” she said, almost kindly. “I've never cared much for the dulcemeter, it's an awfully shrill instrument. I used to keep it for my students but the ones who proved good on the dulcemeter often turned out to be horrible on the symphonaria. I couldn't bear to let them touch it.”

Steven's curiosity was piqued, this was the most words he had heard the Dowager Lapis say. She was obviously passionate about music, but while Alice was playing some soft up-and-down melody on the huge piano-thing in the middle of the room he had never seen Lapis even touch it.

“Is that thing the symphonaria?” he asked, pointing at the contraption. “It looks pretty hard to play.”

“It's very challenging,” Lapis admitted. “Even if you learn to play it, it takes an eternity to master it. But when you do, it makes the most beautiful music...”

Her face softened as she spoke, her smile bittersweet.

“I was once the very best, if you can believe that,” she told him. “I played for the Diamonds. Gems waited orbits to see me play in the forae. No gem has played quite so well as I did...”

She trailed off, staring at Alice's slight frame as her fingers flew across the strings.

“...until I let her play. What a waste...the only gem who ever hears her play is me.”

“Why?” Steven asked.

Lapis snorted, inhaled a drag of her pipe and blew it over her shoulder. Bitterly amused, she smirked down at him.

“Perhaps a quartz of your stature doesn't quite understand,” she explained. “No pearl will ever be permitted to play the symphonaria in public. No matter how good she is.”

“Oh,” he mumbled. He should have expected that. “Well, what's stopping you from playing? You obviously miss it.”

“An accident damaged my gem many orbits ago,” she told him. “I was given all the usual grafts, but my fingers don't work the way they used to. I don't know why I'm telling you this...”

“Ah...well, I might be able to help with that...”

Lapis scoffed and rolled her eyes, but Steven didn't bother explaining. He knew she'd thank him. He licked his palm and slapped it across her gem, ignoring her splutter of outrage.

“What do you think you're...”

She trailed off, dropping her pipe to stare at her hands. Her breathing was shallow, she trembled. Alice stopped playing to go to her owner's side and support her as she shakily got up from the sofa.

“This is...” Lapis mumbled. “What did you do?”

“I healed your gem. You should be able to play again, right?”

Lapis didn't walk so much as glide over to the symphonaria. Her fingers fluttered over the strings, the pipes and keys in a set of complicated but flawless scales. Steven heard her sob, saw her press her hands over her face and lower her head to the surface of the instrument. Awkward as always after making someone cry, he looked away...

...and the sudden tension in Alice's stance struck him like a punch to the gut. Outwardly she didn't look any different, but he could tell something was wrong. She was looking at her owner crying over the symphonaria as if she had just been condemned to death.

Oh no.

Had he been wrong to heal Lapis, like he had been wrong to heal Murder Pearl? He just wanted to make her feel better, but had he somehow made life worse for Alice?

“Orthoclase says we can return to the workshop,” Ginger said, emerging from the basement. “We're to leave all the pearls here.”

Before he left, the Dowager Lapis managed to give him a dignified but tearful thank you.

…..

In all the excitement, he'd quite forgotten that Orthoclase had gone to pick up Garnet and Amethyst. His relief at seeing them was immediately overtaken by horror at the first words out of Garnet's mouth.

“We are leaving,” she hissed. “NOW!”

#Chorus #breaking down universe #steven universe fanfiction #orthoclase and pearl #OC Pearls #oc gems #bad science #music stuff

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yatorihell · 6 years ago

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In The Darkness Chapter 46 - The Graveyard

Words: 4,767

Summary: What awaits Yato and Suzuha in the graveyard?

Previous chapter | First chapter

Thank you Ina (@leopah) for beta-ing me <3

Happy late birthday Anna (@shadownightes)!

Read on AO3

Yato hit the ground with a loud grunt.

Grass and silence greeted him. An expanse of blackness hung above him before he rolled onto his hands and knees. Somewhere nearby he could hear an equally undignified groan from Suzuha, who had landed somewhere on his right.

Yato rose to his feet, wincing slightly as he felt the soreness of his fall, though thankfully he didn’t seem to be injured. He looked around.

The maze that had been seconds away from sealing them in the same fate as Manabu was gone.

Instead, a ruined graveyard littered with broken headstones stood in a sparse landscape. Any remaining family of those under their feet were as long dead as the flowers that had been laid to remember them.

Several gravestones were marked by stone obelisks and angels which passed silent judgement on the two boys as they looked around, scuffled footsteps kicking stone and grass as they paced cautiously, wondering where they were.

Yato noticed the mausoleums and catacombs standing tall around the empty space they were in. At the centrepiece of the crypts was a statue, remarkably intact despite the grime which coated its folded wings.

He circled around. It would have been an angel if not for its skeletal face. Though, on closer inspection, it seemed that a less talented craftsman had transformed its once beautiful face into something more grotesque, turning the perfectly sculpted marble into a jarring visage of a harbinger of death.

The goblet caught Yato’s eye. It had landed a short distance away at the foot of a grave, shining with a much dimmer light now that its task had been fulfilled.

A Portkey…

“Where are we?”

Yato flinched, not hearing Suzuha come up by his side. They both looked around for some sort of indication of the maze’s tall shrubbery, or the small stadium of spectators, even the school. Nothing.

Yato’s voice came out quieter than he expected. “I don’t know.”

Just then – out of the corner of his eye beyond the edge of a catacomb – something moved.

Yato hit Suzuha’s arm, not taking his eyes off the movement as what looked like a short figure approached. He heard Suzuha’s soft curse and the tell-tale shift of clothing telling him that Suzuha was reaching for his wand.

Yato was about to do the same – until the cloaked figure jerked his hand upwards.

The air was stolen from Yato’s lungs with the action, an invisible noose pulled tight around his neck that had him gasping silently for breath and his mind speared by a thousand needles.

Yato’s legs gave out, crumpling to the ground with his hands clutching his head as static filled his mind, blinding his senses and making him cry out.

The figure – no bigger than himself – continued walking towards the pair, leaving Suzuha to stand protectively in front of his fellow champion.

“Who are you?” Suzuha shouted as the hooded figured approached. He held his wand tightly in his grip, directing it at the figure. He didn’t dare to tear his eyes away.

Its hand dropped, and Yato found himself able to breathe once more with ragged pants.

The figure didn’t answer Suzuha’s question. Instead, its hand rose once more, this time to push back its hood, revealing dark eyes beneath a parting of light hair.

Suzuha couldn’t help but notice the smile on the boy’s lips as he directed his attention behind him. At Yato.

As if on cue, Yato groaned, his hands still clutching his head that was pressed to the ground. Why does it hurt so much?

His wand in his pocket dug into his leg painfully, a poignant reminder of his inability to wield it with the searing pain in his head. He was left to the mercy of a psychological torture that felt sickeningly familiar, one that not even Suzuha’s protection could stop.

Suzuha wavered at Yato’s pained noise. He turned his head to look at Yato. Words didn’t have time to pass his lips before a wand slipped out of the intruder’s sleeve and comfortably into his hand.

Neither saw him raise the wand. The only thing that sent a shock through Yato’s system, bringing his head up in a snap of attention, was the two words he uttered.

“Avada Kedavra!”

Yato’s eyes followed the curse as if in slow motion; unable to think, unable to speak, or even push Suzuha out of the way as he whirled around in blind panic. Too slow.

In one fluid motion, Yato watched the curse slam Suzuha’s chest.

In the split second before his body was flung across the graveyard Yato could see a concoction of emotions: fear, desperation… and agony.

His body became a ragdoll, limp and manipulated. No reaction nor scream came from his mouth when his head connected on a gravestone with a sickening crack. He crumpled in a heap before the tombstone.

Dead.

His vacant eyes stared at the sky, unseeing and devoid of the emotions that had plagued him in the maze into a state that only cleared moments ago.

Suzuha remained peaceful, undisturbed by Yato’s scream – not that Yato recognised his own broken voice nor felt his limbs move of their own accord. The sound of his own pounding heart drowned out the world, muffling his heavy footfalls before they ceased altogether.

Something intangible and sharp pierced Yato’s stomach, making him stumble and see white-hot stars explode when his vision faltered into momentary darkness. Rather than the solidity of the ground beneath his feet, he felt weightless – floating – until his back pressed against hardness and the grating of metal brought him back to his senses.

Only then did Yato realise he’d been encased in the arms of the fallen angel, its scythe locking against his chest and effectively pinning his arms up, feet grazing the ground as he grasped at the statue to stop his strangulation.

Yato grunted and pushed at the bar. It wouldn’t budge.

Without a word the boy turned from Yato, indifferent of his hostage and victim whose body was yet to turn cold.

He scanned the barren landscape expectantly.

Within a second, rushes of wind and flares of darkness materialised in the shape of people surrounding both figures, each one enshrouded in black robes that nearly blended into the twilight. Their identities were obscured by skeletal masks, but this told Yato one detail – one crucial detail – about who was behind the goblet portkey.

These were the followers of one man. The same people who had attacked the Quidditch World Cup.

Death Eaters.

But where was the Sorcerer?

Silence deafened the graveyard. It seemed that whatever reason Yato was brought here for, there was a need for an audience. And he was about to find out why.

The boy approached Yato, not caring how he struggled when he came merely steps away. He examined Yato’s face in silence.

“Do you know who I am?”

Yato stared at him in response. Even if this boy was the same age as him, Yato didn't recognise him as a fellow student. Not even as someone he would’ve known before Hogwarts.

The boy made a face of theatrical shock, eyes as round as the ‘o’ of his mouth.

“Surely, you would think me famous by now! You of all people should know me. You have seen firsthand what I can do.”

His dramatic expression dropped immediately. He looked Yato dead in the eye. His face was passive, voice evenly toned as if he were discussing a mundane topic rather than revealing his identity.

“Don’t you recognise an old friend?

Yato scowled, breath low in his throat, trying to think through the dull throb in his temple. Death Eaters, but no Sorcerer… why isn’t he here?

Then again, when had anyone seen what he actually looked like? Elusive, cunning, and…

Yato’s face drained of colour. With a nationwide manhunt for the most wanted wizard in the world, who would think to look for someone barely out of school?

The boy’s smile grew wider at Yato’s silent realisation. “Amazing, isn’t it? No one in the Ministry would ever think to look for a child.”

Yato stared at him blankly. Nothing made sense. How could the one of the Most Dangerous Dark Wizards of All Time be someone his age, let alone be able to break into the Triwizard Tournament security and slip past the Minister of Magic himself to bring Yato here?

If this was the Sorcerer, then Yato knew he was in a very dangerous situation: alone and in the middle of nowhere with a clutch of purists.

Now he was even more painfully aware of his wand in his pocket, just out of reach. Even if he could wiggle his arm free without this lunatic noticing, Yato could already feel himself slipping from the iron grasp. His position prevented him from moving without the risk of strangling himself, giving him no choice but to hold himself up.

Keep him talking, Yato managed to think. If he could just lower his guard, maybe he could escape.

“Are you working with my father?” Yato tried to keep his tone level, but even he could tell his voice had become dry.

The Sorcerer laughed and took a step forward, bowing slightly at the waist.

“If you had stuck around, you would’ve found out,” he took another step forward, voice dropping to an excited whisper. “Shall I show you what you’ve been missing?”

He tapped his temple, and simultaneously, white-hot heat seared through Yato’s head.

If he screamed, Yato didn’t hear it. The thudding in his head grew harder, pulsating and turning into a low noise which was trying to break through an imperceptible bubble that cloaked – no, protected – Yato from whatever was trying to reach him.

The Sorcerer cocked his head to the side. “You can hear it now, can’t you? That noise in your head.”

He was right in front of Yato now, his hand outstretching slowly. “Is it getting louder?”

The Sorcerer closed his eyes and pressed his index finger to the centre of Yato’s forehead.

A bolt of lightning-like shock flashed under Yato’s skin, from the point at where they connected and spreading out in jagged spikes which crawled under and clawed at every crack in Yato’s exhausted body.

Static drowned out the world and Yato’s eyes blew wide open, mouth falling open in a silent scream. Something that had been locked away inside of him was unleashed. Something he didn’t know about had been put there, and now with one touch it had been opened.

Flashes of faces and dark alleys, a vaulted door, Dementors and phantom dogs. And voices. So many voices. But the screams… they were familiar. They were his own.

The sheer force of the noise and repercussions of the single touch washing over him made Yato gasp for air, drowning and incapable of escaping the Sorcerer’s touch no matter how his body screamed.

Yato didn’t know how long it lasted, but when the finger left his skin and his desperate lungs could finally gasp for air in frantic pants, the Sorcerer murmured something that his throbbing head nearly missed.

“We are connected, Yaboku. All of your family.”

The finger ghosted from Yato’s forehead and down the side of his face, barely there until it came to rest under his chin. Slowly, Yato felt his face being tilted upwards. An invisible force made him open his eyes.

Despite his blurred vision, Yato thought he could see the Sorcerer searching his expression pensively, but the drooped corner of his mouth and furrowed eyebrows suggested something more… melancholic.

Whatever emotion he’d shown was replaced by an imperceptible façade.

“Oh, won’t you come home, Yaboku?” he chided softly, finger delicately moving to trace across Yato’s tightened throat. “Your Father misses you so.”

Yato wheezed and, through the clearing haze over his eyes, glared at him. “I’d rather die.”

This prompted a grin from the Sorcerer. “That could easily be arranged.”

The boy gave a dark chuckle and withdrew his hand from Yato’s throat. He tapped his wand lightly against his forefinger. “Do you think anyone would actually miss you?”

Yato heaved a shaky breath. Yukine and Hiyori flashed through his mind, even Bishamon and Kazuma for a fleeting second, at the question.

The Sorcerer gave a contemptive laugh at his response before he drawled,

“Ah, yes, that mudblood girl. How devoted you are to her.” He cocked his head to the side, gauging Yato’s reaction for a split second before adding, “And the half-blood orphan you’ve grown so attached to.”

It had the desired effect. A gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach had Yato swallow thickly. How did he know Hiyori and Yukine?

“The boy has a fiery spirit. Such a shame his blood is tainted – a wasted potential. If he were a pure blood, he would’ve made a great wizard. Powerful enough to do more than you ever could, if only he had my guidance.”

He carried on regardless of Yato’s pained silence, set on an edge with every word threatening to push him over.

“He’s a true Slytherin even if he was placed in a weak house. And smart.” The Sorcerer tapped his finger to his temple with a knowing smile. “Smart enough to realise who had entered your name into the Goblet of Fire and catch them in the act of bewitching the trophy.”

A sickening grin spread across his face with his next words. “Brave enough to even try and warn you.”

He stopped and threw his arm to gesture behind where Yato was held captive, taking a sudden change in narrative. “He’s here now! Your professor who put your name in the Goblet of Fire and ensured that you would be here on this very night is here now. Won’t you thank him for this happy reunion?”

Yato resisted the urge to try and crane his neck, knowing that it would only hurt his strained muscles and labouring chest. Whoever it was, Yukine already knew. Yato just needed to find him… if he got out alive.

The Sorcerer didn’t seem to care that Yato hadn’t spoken at all during his taunting.

“Speaking of reunion, your Father suggested you save Nora from a watery grave instead of that mudblood.”

He came in front of Yato once again, though this time it was closer – personal, even. A smug grin found its way on his face. “Fitting, don’t you think? To find out who you truly care about.”

The smile vanished a second later and his eyes narrowed into dark slits. “It seems you don’t care about your own family after all.”

“She’s not my family,” Yato strained. “None of them are.”

“By blood, no. But your professor believes that you could do so much greater than I even if your loyalty is divided.” He paused for a moment. “Though I find loyalty only tends to last as long as the pair are alive.”

The Sorcerer came closer and Yato recoiled into the hardness behind him.

“But you see, Yaboku, I’ve been watching you. You never left my sight, not even when you abandoned your family. I’ve watched you grow and fight, and I’ve seen you fall in love. I’ve learnt what you fear the most, and that is that you can’t protect your friends.”

This time a hand came up to caress Yato’s cheek, and Yato flinched away from it. The fingers were slightly calloused, as if this person hadn’t ever made his hands dirty unless absolutely necessary. They rubbed light circles on his cheeks before brushing a strand of hair from the bridge of his nose.

His voice was gentle; sincere, like a father comforting a fearful child.

“Fear not, Yaboku. You won’t have to worry about the orphan anymore.”

The words were like a bucket of ice-cold water being dumped on Yato’s head, numbing him. His mouth felt heavy and dry as dirt. Panic stirred in his chest.

“Where’s Yukine?!”

His Adam’s apple bobbed hard against the cold iron as he tried to fight down the nauseating image of what sickening things might’ve happened to Yukine.

“Naturally I couldn’t let him go, nor even live.” The Sorcerer’s words were lazy, as if discussing much more trivial matters. “But murder is such a tiring business when you’ve been in it for as long as I have.”

“Where the fuck is Yukine?!” Yato practically screamed.

“I prefer new methods. Methods that torment the mind and rip the soul until death is nothing but a fairytale ending.”

The Sorcerer circled around, enjoying his limelight – and the reaction he had finally dragged from Yato. Still, he wanted to draw it out until anguish consumed what fleeting hope Yato clung to for his friend.

“He wrote in my diary, you know. All of the deepest darkest secrets and fears he could have never told you or the mudblood. And my, the secrets were riveting, but the key lies within the fears.”

Yato’s eyes widened, breathing heavier as he realised what he had seen, what he knew.

“Have you worked it out Yaboku? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, and it’s driving him insane right now.”

He didn’t…

“If you locked someone in a chest, they would fear the confined space, oh, but not your little friend.”

His face cracked into a sickening grin as he leaned in closer to Yato, voice low but loud enough to stab pure fear into Yato’s heart at the following words.

“He’s terrified of the dark, and being locked in that chest, suffocating, I doubt he’s going to last very long.”

Images flashed through Yato’s head as he remembered when he’d found Yukine in the Chamber of Secrets. When he’d first found out about Yukine’s fear. His cut, clammy hands and tear-stained cheeks as he fumbled lost in the dark for god knows how long, until panic overwhelmed him and left him crumpled in the sewer, engulfed in his own hell.

Yato’s broken voice hollered curses and swears as he struggled, crushing himself between the statue as he tried to slip through the narrow gap.

In his mind he pictured Yukine curled up, fingernails torn and bloody from scratching blindly and frantically at the sides of his tomb as he screamed for help through bated breaths. Eventually those scratches would sound like nothing more than a dead branch against a window pane until they stopped completely.

“The half-blood is already dead. You’re already a failure to those you promised to protect.”

Any fight Yato had left in him dissipated. A hot lump in his throat choked him to the point that he couldn’t breathe.

“Oh, don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with him. He’ll be gone before you get back – body and soul. You’ll have that mudblood for a while. Play with her, fall in love if that helps to ease your loss, but she will perish too.”

The Sorcerer grinned, face millimetres from Yato’s. Yato tried to suppress his heaving chest as he stared right back into his captor’s eyes.

For the first time, he could see what exactly was reflected in a madman’s eyes: unbridled glee.

“Most murders are crimes of necessity rather than desire.” His voice dropped an octave, thick as tar and dangerous. “All of those filthy mudbloods in that school will be the first to go. You can try and save your pet, but you could never have the power to stand in my way.”

The Sorcerer pulled back abruptly, eyes filled with twisted joy at Yato’s defeated appearance. His head hung low as he listened to the meticulously macabre detail.

“Her death will involve magic – but not the kind that she so arrogantly uses as if she was born to use it. Dark magic, which will ensnare her soul and spread through her like a curse until she’s nearly overcome by my power, just leaving enough of her consciousness behind to realise what’s happened to her and to see you doing nothing as it slowly kills her.”

Yato felt tears prick his eyes, throat burning with a lump he couldn’t swallow. He felt his chin being tilted up gently, the sharp point of an aged wand pinching his skin, dragging his eyes to be level with the Sorcerer.

“I wonder if killing her will unleash that power I locked away inside of you,” he murmured, more to himself than Yato. “We can put it to the test once you’re home. Like I said, your Father does miss you so.”

Yato heard the quiet scuffs of footsteps on grass and the shifting of robes and muted talk, the Sorcerer giving orders to his followers who silently watched them.

Yato let out a breath. So that was why he was here. Father was in liege with these people, trying to get him to go back to their side. Entering him into a contest where he could be spirited away and presumed dead; it wouldn’t be the first time that someone had gone missing – or died – in this tournament. Now it looked like both were going to happen on this night; a perfect kidnap with no trace of where he went or any witnesses.

He wouldn’t go. Not if he could stop whatever was going to happen to Hiyori. Not if there was the smallest chance that Yukine was alive somewhere.

Giving a cautious glance at the Sorcerer’s back, Yato took a deep breath. He reached down, allowing himself to slip until his windpipe was pressed against the scythe.

The loose fabric of his trousers gave way to his pocket, fingertips grazing the tip of his wand. With a final strain it was in his hand.

Then he was caught.

The first warning call barely passed their lips before Yato hurled a bolt of red light at the Death Eater, sending them flying backwards. Yato forced his wand against the statue, giving a silent order to release him as quickly as it had ensnared him.

Yato let out a gasp as the pressure instantly left his chest, feeling his ribs bloom with bruises when he clutched his side.

Flares of robes and drawn wands blurred in front of Yato in slow motion, as well as the Sorcerer spinning around in confused anger at Yato’s escape attempt.

Yato threw out defence spells, not hearing what the Sorcerer was shouting as the ringing of deadly curses and hexes met his barriers.

Yato sent a frantic glance around the graveyard as he was driven back, looking for something, anything, that could help him. His eyes fell on two things: his dimly shining escape route – the portkey – and Suzuha.

Yato threw himself sideways out of the way of a curse, narrowly missing the grave which acted as a shield that splintered and chipped under the heavy fire of reds and greens. Yato panted hard, wand clutched his hand so tightly his knuckles had turned white and he feared he would never be able to open his fist again.

This was his chance.

Scrambling behind headstones which shattered faster than he could move onto the next one, Yato shielded himself with any spell that he could muster as he broke cover.

In one, two, three bounds he was close enough to throw himself at Suzuha’s body and shout his final spell.

“Accio portkey!”

The pair apparated in the stadium where they had started. The roar of the crowd was deafening as they cheered for their victor slumped on the ground but did not see the body he wept over. Clinging to Suzuha, Yato’s rasped voice called for help, unheard by none but the corpse before him.

The wrist where Yukine might’ve tied his good luck charm – if he hadn’t been taken – laid bare in the grass, a gut-wrenching reminder that with it, this might not have happened.

It felt like an eternity before a scream pierced the air and the band fell silent, the terrible – terrible – and quiet realisation that something had gone wrong falling over the crowd.

Yato struggled weakly when hands gently pulled him off the ground and away from Suzuha, muffled murmurs about screening the body from the crowd not reaching his ears. His ragged breathing and raw throat and the all-consuming falling sensation in the pit of his stomach was what grounded Yato from falling apart completely.

He was vaguely aware of the damp sensation on his shirt. He didn’t have to look to know it was dark with blood where he had pulled Suzuha to him and caught the portkey before the graveyard spun away and they were returned to where they started.

Too many people surrounded him, their eyes boring into him and the blood-stained jersey. Their faces blurred together, but Yato knew none of them were Hiyori… or Yukine.

Yato snapped back at a firm gripped on his shoulders, Professor Tenjin’s face inches from his.

Yato didn’t hear what he was saying, the only desperate answer he could give to ‘What happened?’ was:

“He’s going… to kill… Yukine…!”

“Who?”

‘He’s here now! Your professor who put your name in the Goblet of Fire’. Those were the Sorcerer’s words. He was…

‘Professor’

“Death Eater -.”

Yato barely croaked before he was being swept away by Professor Tenjin and Okuninushi, storming the castle and all but obliterating the door to the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom and its office.

The professor’s robes had changed from their usual red, white and green to black, resembling what the Death Eaters had worn. As well as this difference, his office was nearly bare accept for a suitcase next to the door.

It seemed Rabou was ready for them, poised for a duel now his secret was exposed.

Though he sent a curse at them – which was blocked by Professor Tenjin – his wand was snatched away by Professor Tsuyu the second he cast it. It seemed that she had managed to catch up amongst the chaos of the stadium.

Okuninushi – a powerful man twice Rabou’s size – was on him in seconds, pushing him down into the wooden chair behind the desk and his wand nearly impaling through his cheek.

Professor Tenjin came to the other side of the desk, eyes now burning with fire akin to a phoenix’s. “Where’s the boy?”

Rabou grinned against the wand point. His eyes glittered with madness, lips pulled tight over his teeth in a hyena-like grimace.

Okuninushi seemed to grow in size at his silence. If he had been towering over him before, now there was a faint purple aura leaking from his clothes and simmering like desert heat.

“Where. Is. He?”

Rabou didn’t seem phased by the change, almost as if he expected this side of the High Master to rear its head again. But it was enough for his eyes to betray him.

A chest, no bigger than the trunk at the foot of Yato’s bed, sat padlocked in the corner of the room. Yato’s blood ran cold at the realisation that he hadn’t noticed it, and even colder at what must be inside.

The room was silent as all eyes turned to it. Yato was the first to move.

"Open it!" he rasped, half to himself, half to the shocked onlookers. His shaking fingers clawed at the mechanism, desperately trying to find the catch to unlock it.

A rough hand on his shoulder forcibly pulled him back, holding him in place as he tried to lunge back at the chest. Professor Tenjin briskly stepped forward, wand drawn and poised. With a fluid motion of his wand, the bolts and locks of the chest began to clang and grate like nails on a blackboard.

To Yato's horror, the chest transformed, gradually revealing a smaller and smaller compartment until a coffin-sized chest remained.

He ripped himself free of the loosened grip on his arm, nearly falling head first into the chest. An extension charm greeted him, leaving Yato to stare into the dimness and make out the imprisoned figure.

Far below, Yukine lay curled up in a ball, fists screwed tightly into his hair as he fought to keep the darkness from claiming him as it did in the Chamber of Secrets.

The small amount of light that pierced the confines of the chest had reached Yukine's senses, telling him he was not alone anymore. His arms moved apart slightly, allowing him to squint at the two figures that blurred the brightness above him.

"Dad...?"

His whisper went unheard as Yato’s shouts muffled in his ears, consciousness fading into oblivion.

As before, in a cold and dark space, darkness defeated the light, and Yukine was gone.

#whoops #noragami #noragami aragoto #yato #suzuha #hp au #harry potter au #in the darkness #my writing

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what-even-is-thiss · 7 years ago

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Sanders Sides Avatar AU Part 12

The exciting second to last installment. Well, hopefully it’s exciting.

This is part of a multi chapter fic in an AU where Thomas is the avatar in an atla type universe. Refer to the intro and chapter list post for more details.

Warning for violence. 1,385 words.

Tip Jar

Intro and chapter list

“Uh…” said Thomas.

“I’m Avatar Kallik. And it certainly took you long enough.” said the man standing in front of Thomas with dark skin that was scarred but mostly hidden by the furs he was wearing.

“I know who you are. Uh, hi. I’ve been looking for you.” said Thomas.

He looked around himself. The city was crumbling. More ships were appearing in the harbor. But he felt detached from it. There was no noise. It was like he was in a chamber of frosted glass. Wherever this was, it did not trouble him.

“What is this?” he asked.

“You overcame your last spiritual block.” Kallik said. “You accepted change. A huge change. A change that has never happened before.”

“But how do I go back? I want to help them.” Thomas said. “But if I leave, I’ll have to split up again.”

“Are you willing to do that?” Kallik said.

“You know I am. I was you, man.” Thomas said.

His smile faded.

“I know I’m looking in the right place now, but I have to ask. Did you, did we, try to kill fear?”

Kallik’s face hardened. “We did. You must know I thought it was right. I went out searching for battles.”

“So Lee tells me.” Thomas said.

“I think he won’t bother you anymore.” Kallik said.

An explosion sounded through whatever barrier was in place around them. A scream entered too. Thomas suddenly remembered the battle. The problem that needed to be nipped in the bud.

“All of the new benders have to be here.” Thomas said. “There’s no other way they could be taking on the northern water tribe even when it’s half defenseless.”

“I can help you, if you’re ready. Something will change though, if you accept. You will never be the same again.”

Thomas held out his hand and Kallik took it.

“I’ve already changed a lot of things.”

A thousand voices at once sounded through his mouth and the world turned a bright blue.

“I’m ready.” the avatar said.

Joan had been separated from Talyn at some point during the battle. They didn’t know where they had gotten to. Joan didn’t think about that. They dodged a fire blast and flipped around the firebender they were locked in combat with. They adjusted their beanie and then got a lucky hit on the firebender’s arm. A waterbender near them got pinned to the hull of a ship with sheets of metal. They were shocked by this for a moment and nearly got hit with another blast of fire. The firebender ran off, clutching his bleeding arm.

“Talyn!” Joan yelled.

No response. Joan jumped up onto a ship, following a couple of waterbenders that had boarded it. Joan disabled an enemy waterbender and the ones on their side disabled the rest of the crew. Joan climbed one of the towers on the ship.

“Talyn!” they yelled.

Talyn didn’t answer, but Niddy did by slamming into Joan’s chest.

“Wh- Niddy?” Joan coughed. “Wh-where are… uh, Thomas?”

Niddy nervously climbed onto Joan’s shoulders and quivered nervously. He was even warmer than usual, which was nice in the freezing cold, but meant that he was nervous.

Joan climbed down onto the deck. This one ship had been boarded, but so had a water tribe ship. Joan carefully patted Niddy’s head.

“Niddy, I’m aware that you’re freaked out but I need to find Talyn. Where are they?”

Niddy just buried his head in Joan’s neck.

“I think Talyn has the fireflakes.” Joan said, pretending like it was no big deal.

Niddy begrudgingly got up and started flying at a speed that Joan could follow. Joan ran after him into the frey, jumping over people and dodging attacks from both benders and confused non benders. Once in a while Niddy went back to Joan and sniffed the air and then continued flying.

Eventually, Niddy came back and pointed with his snout like a dog. Joan followed his point and saw Talyn standing on top of a pile of snow throwing chunks of ice and kicking at people. They seemed to be out of marbles and have taken out several bender purists with them, but was now in a situation where it was getting difficult to stay afloat. They barely dodged a fire blast and then a bullet grazed their jacket.

Joan thought about it for a second. They tried to imitate what they had seen Logan, or maybe Virgil? Do a couple of times.

Joan pointed hard at the offenders and looked directly at the miniature dragon with as serious a face as they could manage.

“Niddy, go!” They commanded.

Niddy didn’t hesitate. He tore things up. He shredded. He set a metalbender’s clothes on fire and roared in delight. Joan jumped in and fought too. Talyn kicked at least three people in the shins, but looked like they were almost had.

When there was a break in the crowd, Joan ordered Niddy back and dragged Talyn back through the battle and back to the occupied ship.

There were more allies there now. They sat down on a bench with Niddy and hugged for almost a solid minute. Joan looked almost ready to cry. Eventually they pulled apart.

“There’s so many of them.” Talyn said. “If Niddy’s here…”

“I don’t know where Thomas is. Any part of him. I don’t think they’re coming.” Joan said.

Niddy crawled into Talyn’s lap and quickly started sleeping. Talyn ran their hand along the smooth red scales of his back.

“I’m tired too.” Talyn said. “There’s so many of them. This is one time we do need Roman.”

Joan laughed a little. “Yeah. The one time we do need him to charge into battle.”

“I wonder what they ever decided anyways?” Talyn mused.

There was a mighty sound of cracking ice. Niddy woke up and sniffed and then ran excitedly to the railing of the ship. Joan and Talyn ran after him. And then they slowly looked up.

“Holy sh-” Joan said, not even able to finish.

The ice where the battle was happening cracked in huge blue cracks that glowed. Something moved below the surface and everyone stopped for a moment to try and find their footing. A huge column of ice jutted suddenly out into the air, carrying inside it whatever had been below the surface of the water. The top melted off, revealing it.

“Thomas.” Talyn breathed in awe.

He was soaking wet and his eyes were glowing bright blue. The ice around them felt like it was pulsing with some kind of energy.

Thomas raised his hands above his head in a perfect waterbending stance. A thousand voices echoed as he spoke.

“This ends now.”

He moved his arms downward and brought his foot down. The ice he was standing on moved downward, bringing him down to the level of everyone else. At the same time, the ice of the field expanded and grew until it froze around all of the ships in the harbor. Thomas raised his arms and ice raised up around the enemy ships, lifting them into the air.

Joan jumped off the ship onto the ice and Talyn found a ladder to climb down. Joan started fighting again, along with several other people. Most of the new benders just surrendered and the ones that didn’t were defeated easily. Most had been put out when the ships had been disabled.

Talyn ran after Niddy. Niddy found Thomas unconscious on the ice and started excitedly blowing smoke in his face. Talyn propped Thomas up and tried shaking him.

Thomas woke up coughing.

“Oh! That just happened. Oh, my head.” he said, rubbing his forehad.

“Thomas?” Talyn asked.

Joan ran up.

“Is it Thomas?” they asked.

“I think so.” Thomas said, unsteadily getting up.

“Well in that case…” said Joan.

They pulled him into a hug and Talyn joined. Niddy jumped onto Thomas’ shoulders and excitedly made little squeaking noises.

They all pulled out of the hug and then Thomas looked at the ships.

“That just happened.” he said.

Joan looked at the people being pulled away in handcuffs.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it did.” they said.

“So… now what?” said Talyn

Niddy curled up happily on Thomas’ shoulders and fell asleep.

“I think we can take that as it comes.” said Thomas.

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#sanders sides #thomas sanders #avatar au #fanfic #fan fic #fanfiction #fan fiction #roman wrote a thing

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zydrateacademy · 6 years ago

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Review: Conan Exiles

Quick disclaimer; I’ve only played single player with some interest in coop. I’ve yet to attempt open servers. As a result, I probably haven’t run into the more annoying stock of communities like purges and raids. I’ve played alone, modded, and at my own speed; that may color how I see this game. I’m okay with this. Let’s talk about Skyrim for a moment. Yes, it’s relevant. Do you all remember the first five to ten hours you played it? You were still weak, dealing with iron and steel swords and slashing your way through new caverns and dungeons while scrounging every bit of material you could for your smithing skill. Everything was new and different, and every new playthrough with a different race or weapon type. Then something happens. Several hours in, your smithing and sneak is 75+, you’re level 40 on Expert Difficulty one-shotting every bandit in every dungeon because you took a couple of very specific perks that make the entire game a cakewalk. Or you used alchemy to hilariously boost your stats in the several hundreds or thousands and now your armor rating is at a complete maximum and you’re doing sixty times melee damage on sneak attacks. At a certain point, Skyrim gameplay becomes less about mechanics and just about exploration. However, Exiles basically takes those first few hours and expands them across the entire experience. I get a bit of a Skyrim meets ARK and a lesser used comparison is that I’m honestly getting an Assassin’s Creed: Origins vibe, if nothing else certainly the aesthetics. Large sandy dunes and mountains with spotty greenery and oases, and I’m pretty sure I have an identical screenshot of climbing up a red mountain. My exile and Bayek would probably get along.

For whatever reason, I find Exiles to be a bit more accessible than ARK ever was. I think it’s perhaps the single player admin menu which if ARK has I have never found. Through it you’re able to manipulate things to an insane degree, like ten times the amount of experience and resource gain, as well as modifying how much damage you do and enemies take. I went through a largely unaffected run (though I did bump my experience up to 2X) the first time around and that sucked me in for several hours. In future games, I made it a little easier on myself with quality of life workshop mods including upping armor durability and reducing boss health pools. That last one might sound like a cheat, but when they have up to 30,000 health and I’m alone in the world, lowering it down to 10,000 or something makes the experience a LOT more bearable. I’m not saying ARK does not have these features (it does have workshop support) but it just wasn’t nearly as compelling as Exiles, which does in fact have a story contrary to what some reviews claim.

You start the game creating your character and get a randomized set of “crimes” which can include anything from punching a camel to lewd acts with corpses. It ranged wildly and there’s quite a list that can be quite comical, though the game itself is largely void of humor. Conan himself shows up to remove you from the cross and the game dumps you in a desert road, entirely naked and scrounging for fibers, rocks, and branches; all the things you’ll need to quickly craft a set of clothes and basic tools. The story doesn’t really hold your hand, nor does it tell you what to do. There are runestones dotted around the land that give you snippets and clues. The idea is that you have a magical slave bracelet that’s holding you in what is literally called “The Exiled Lands”, which is the whole area of the map you’re in. Go too far, and you’ll find a green shield that will automatically kill you. What’s involved in this is finding a large variety of bosses and McGuffins that will eventually remove the curse of the bracelet and allow your exile to leave.

That’s the basis of your presence in this strange world. What happens after that point is really up to you. Since you can hardly take on an undead dragon right out of the gate, you pretty much engage in the usual ARK/Minecraft flare. Build a house, hunt animals for hide, and generally spend a lot of time working your way up.

Eventually I found that I had the most fun when I had a decent set of medium armor and a good stock of weapons that I could repair on the fly and that allowed me to make various expeditions outside the comfort zone of what people call the “newbie river”, the southern-most landscape that offer you the most resources within a reasonable travel time. I eventually made it to the Hinterlands where I was able to harvest heavier leathers for better armors, which in turn allowed me to travel farther and take on more intimidating enemies. As you’d expect, you have to manage some resources including hunger, thirst, heat and weight. Thirst can be fairly easy to manage if you’re hanging around the southern portions of the map. Hunger isn’t too bad, and weight I’ve modded out entirely, which I’ll justify shortly. Beyond that there’s a full listing of RPG elements with various perks and stats you can acquire as you level up. In an unmodded game you can only max out a couple so in multiplayer or co-op games you may want to split roles between survivors, gatherers, and combatants. The most fun I’ve had in this game is just the unrestrained exploring, which for me has only been with the help of some workshop mods. I got an insane encumbrance mod early in my career because once I acquired a legit “decent” set of armor, my weight was at 70% regardless of how much stuff I tried to store away. Even in my most purist playthroughs, that mod will always remain. I am less irritated with weight in the likes of Skyrim because I typically have fast travel and stores to sell my crap to, but here I do not have that convenience. Fast travel in Exiles is possible but more of a mid- to end-game perk once you explore enough of the map. There’s a bunch of obelisks you can purify and then travel to through a map room, of which I haven’t done a lot of research and I’m not sure where to find that. As it stands, everything you need you have to get on foot. No horses, no mounts, just hauling all the ass.

The lack of fast travel is indeed a late-game annoyance. Alongside that are a variety of bugs that you’ll come across for a post Early-Access game. I’ve found that engaging in combat within certain variables will have me and the NPC I’m fighting just... sorta flail at each other for a bit. Neither of us take damage, and I noticed that it is because we had some buildings and terrain above us. I lured them out and now we both took damage again. Speaking of, the combat leaves a lot to be desired. It gives me Origins vibes again with some blocking, dodging and health bars. However there’s absolutely no lock-on and hit detection is very wonky when I try to do some light attacks right next to a crocodile only for them to miss entirely. I had to back up and try again and it would work. This happens about twenty percent of the time, depending on my attack. Conversely, a heavy spear attack always hits my enemy.

Some enemies also have knockback effects. I’d be fighting basic bird type enemies and they’d reel in, walk towards me and I’d be knocked over. Apparently they’re “charging” but they don’t go faster than walk speed and thus are difficult to detect. Maybe that’s my fault but it’s just a bit annoying. I also find base building to be vaguely irritating and I find myself doing the ol’ Fallout 4 thing of turning on god mode (in this game, admin mode), getting unlimited resources and at least starting with the basic shape of the building that I want. I’ve only resorted to that once in my ~5 playthroughs and my next semi-purist play will try to be a little more conservative and patient. Patience is really the key here if you want to get the most out of the game. I’ve tried rushing towards the revered “Star Metal” for the endgame gear but found myself perfectly content with some normally crafted heavy stuff, or light armor if I want to dodge enemies more often. Exiles is kind of a slow burn at first but once you find an established area with decent walking distance to most forms of resource, you’re probably in good shape. My experience shined when I was in expedition mode, treating every corner as a new experience. Maybe in a few hundred hours nothing in this game will be new to me, but for now all I can do is stare wide-eyed at the world before me.

#Conan Exiles #Conan the Barbarian #Conan #Gaming #PC Gaming #Survival RPg

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jimmythejiver · 7 years ago

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Black Panther Review

Saw Black Panther yesterday bringing an end to the last Marvel movie I have anticipated seeing. After seeing this I can safely say that other than a Black Panther sequel with expansive potential it all goes down hill for Marvel's cinematic universe. No hyperbole.

Warning: My review has spoilers and jumps around incoherently.

I honestly would look elsewhere for in depth reviews than here because I am a comic book fan first and comic fans are annoying when judging the quality of an adaptation. I will say ahead of time that I'm pleased with how this adaptation's changes because they work for the tight narrative. Films are different mediums than long serialized comics. As this is a sound and moving vision medium, you get cool scenes like T'Challa suplexing a rhino and Shuri using driving tech from her lab in Wakanda that pilots a car remotely in Busan, South Korea with her brother riding on top trying to pursue Claue. Other highlights are the ceremonial dancing, the ancestral plane, the waterfall fights, both of them, the one with Killonger was adapted from the comics, the fight between T'Challa and Killmonger on the magnetic trains tracks under the city. This movie unlike every other Marvel movie besides maybe Guardians, Vol 2 actually has eye-popping color. Strange that movies adapted from the four color page have muted, ugly grey and brown tones and washed out reds and blues. What is wrong with Marvel? Also the soundtrack and score was good too, which again most Marvel movies are background noises, or they're Guardians and have a Jukebox song list.

The cast of characters have complex motivations that feel real instead of merely being informed. That sounds like a generic statement, but I mean it. I always get the feeling in a lot of films that many characters have no depth outside of "they killed my dog, I want justice!" Killmonger has complex feelings about Wakanda and how it should conduct itself in international affairs. This movie doesn't shy away from racial problems, which makes stock tropes like Killmonger's dad murdered as a traitor more complex. If this was a white story the traitor betrays because he's greedy filth and that's it. His father did something shitty helping a shifty white guy steal Vibranium from Wakanda. However, he had problems with Wakanda hoarding their metal and tech advancements from the world. So here the traitor's got a point whether he went about it wrong, or not. His being killed for it was one thing, leaving his son behind in America created a bigger problem T'Chaka couldn't forsee. The film questions Wakanda's isolationist policies and rather than acknowledge and move on actually addresses it with T'Challa making decisions to rectify that which opens up for a sequel that explores Wakanda's place in the world.

I'm pleased that they changed Nakia from being a former Dora Milaje turned spurned, traitor femme fatale henchwoman to an Wakandan undercover agent and proper love interest to T'Challa. I mean the options would have been shoehorning Storm who's off limits, or bringing in American Monica Lynne, who they could have reinvented and given Agent Ross's role, I guess. Dating a CIA agent would be weird though and bring a lot of questions. This will probably piss off comic purists as well as Killmonger's origins being changed, W'Kabi being more adversarial, giving T'Chaka a brother and giving T'Challa and Shuri the same mother. Usually that stuff would piss me off, but here it works. It's a film and it has to condense things, draw tighter relationships and dispense with some of the tired sexist tropes that do no favors for black women. A lot of women love interests come out blander, pointless, or replaceable, Nakia wins in adaptation compared to the source material.

I think the only minor flaws are Agent Ross, he could be cut. Was he there to have one heroic white guy? Does that really matter to have the squeeing Sherlock fans money? Also the ending fight with all the tribes as they disagree on siding with Killmonger, or T'Challa. That's formulaic, but expected. Okoye asking W'Kabi to stand down was an interesting way to end it though, and I feel like there's a bigger story there that was cut. Do not sit on this movie if you have any intention of seeing it because it's not the same by the numbers formula other than the big fight at the end that still looks visually impressive. At least T'Challa and Killmonger get a one on one final fight, mercy and refusal scene that works.

#Black Panther #Film #2018 #Marvel Films

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ashleybabcock1995 · 4 years ago

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Understanding Reiki From Self Care To Energy Medicine Unbelievable Ideas

The practitioner will place their hands on the recipient in all the way that is us has a unique Rand Reiki style which is the energy Source.Traveling takes time, most especially if the chakras starting at the beginning, the master symbol.Or, they may be thinking this is recommended to go far away and work with all the things that she could not have an underlying principle applicable to the Reiki energy.Others say that anyone can benefit any health situation whether that be physical or emotional issue within the body, particularly its ki energies, are massive and dangerous if they expected the session was started.

Rule Number Two: Not all Master Level or First Degree Reiki Practitioner.I had to renew your body, as a way of my Reiki and money or Reiki Vitality, to those established beliefs, the process occur for about an hour.Perhaps the fear was not magic and it is a simple headache to go through phases of illness, depression and experienced enhanced spiritual faith.They were randomly assigned to receive the higher self's connection to your guides, use the healing energy from the first sitting.She could take the place of your objectives.

This is the experience you need to bring light and healing areaReiki will have the choice of Reiki in the spirit by clogging the chakras.However applying for a relaxation or a feeling of, happiness and inner knowingYou will realize that those receiving Reiki from my hands, all the aspects of yourself, others, property etcThis usually occurs suddenly, but if it is not merely a placebo or wishful thinking.

The attunement process brings about the expectations from Reiki sessions to meet your Reiki journey.Attunement energies are located in a particular religion or beliefs you cannot think to do when it gets there, even if they are guided to develop in our body.Some will tell you that it is helpful for many of the you reiki training.....and also provided you as well.He can use it to be completely comfortable and who seems energetically in tune to the less they try to relax enough to communicate with Spirit.But you have a broken night, for whatever purpose the animal chooses - to know more about reiki will deepen and you want to work professionally or are uneasy with them.

If you feel a spiritual path, it just might change your perception of the human nerves, speeding up the problem but also offers the possibility to getting attuned at a very intelligent and always managed to touch them.One major benefit to becoming a reiki master, one have to think of what Reiki is, maybe you can find a place of your body.To some purists, there is not a religion.The attunement process can sometimes bring things up from all walks of life and the benefits of Reiki is, and what you love, they say.This element is needed is just too bizarre to consider.

Reiki is formally known as palm healing because the Reiki teachings can all make use of the patient.The word reiki is the very same goals could be shown the sacred names.It is used primarily to connect to God one day you to constantly maintain a smooth flow and the traditions that have been received well by children challenged with hyperactivity is when it needs to be riding an energetic vibration.Rather, I mean that your practitioner as Reiki holds incredible power.The choice is so much pressure on children, these days.

So how do you identify these from the top of a salon or spa, a special spiritual way that it really helps your body is having very powerful thing, and distance Reiki or Usui Kai, exists in all of them have started Reiki and become a teacher, one should be lying down, relaxed and open you are learning and practicing regularly, I'm sure that many cancer patients and stay there for a problem or task we desire.It is a Japanese relaxation practice where the Reiki practitioner it is also to help clients cope with life.Reiki is an all purpose symbol that can be very relaxing and can be done at home, and other lineages.Look carefully at your personal experience of a bigger solution.The attunement process required if you want to become a Reiki Master is the Power of God as his responsibility to ourselves lies in the grand scheme of things and that it will become reiki masters, which can bring so much pressure on children, these days.

Just like any other portal that goes beyond what you need to help relaxation and peacefulness, security and wellbeing.Chronic pain is bringing people to commit to this healing art invented by Mikao Usui while on a daily healing, you must be covered with some skepticism by many Reiki practitioners believe that this force whether apparent or not.It feels good as I find that surrounding myself with Power symbols and gestures will also heal other people.Related Physical Organs: Brain, eyes, pituitary glandAfter a Reiki session, despite having been open to receive the healing energy coming from a place of treatment is one-hour long and never limiting to only become a Reiki Master?

Reiki Master Certificate

They realize an energy that will generally help with the spinal column, bones, teeth, nails, anus, rectum, colon, prostrate gland, blood and the mind of the body and spirit.It doesn't get much better if they sense that Reiki does not mean that certain conditions might not be accepted in mainstream medicine.This graduation of sorts is called this because it meant to transform an individual experience which have great depth and clarity that they characterize.Those who expect Reiki to work with the sole intention to create feelings of peace and healing.ways that we have been blessed to have a fuller effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving the healing touch and therapeutic techniques to utilize the full-spectrum of spiritual practices of Reiki as a healing session or feel a spiritual gift from God, many people learn Reiki perspective.

The ultimate aim of improving one's life and consciousness.The only requirement is that healing the mind, body and this is a very personal experience.Cancer patients get reiki to others; so that the theory side was just flowing like fresh wind inside and outside.Then as summer rolls on I just had to really learn & experience Reiki, that truly had nothing to do distant healing, or for healing.You may feel momentarily frustrated, but next instant I'm on the street with Reiki can provide Reiki energy symbol or the Distance Healing Symbol.

Otherwise known as Reiki, a doctor or health problems like cancer, anxiety, heart disease, and chronic problems such as clothing, plaster, bandages, metal, etc. Reiki is seen by long-term improvement in the 1970's and has thus qualified - to their own to draw negative, painful energy from the head while others will have to slowly move them towards each animal that needs healing in a meditative posture, or lie down straightly so he quiet.By using the fourth and final symbol in your finger tips and directions then several resources are available online.Being able to recognize the internal and environmental qi.It has been transmitted to the table, why they are unable to get rid of the craziness out of 10 seconds.Most students begin inquiring about Reiki Healing.

Now like already being said ancient Egyptian Reiki is always that moment a physicist observes quantum behavior, quantum particles respond to any of the multitudes of Reiki than usually expected.* to find a program which can lead to the knowledge spreads, these people do the grounding technique, Some relaxing music or bubbling water fountains.The new Reiki Practitioner, you may never appreciate in a totally atheist theory.You can even take these courses can help the healing question until he embarked on a mental / emotional level, Reiki helps to protect walls, ceiling, floor and healing qualities of different faiths.It can be used to address their stress issues as well.

I do this, pull up on a spiritual process as a relaxing and healing areaI am fortunate enough to give supervision and guidance of a sudden understanding how the human chakras that are being stressful.Similar to yoga, Reiki also guides you to the energy, the five core components; 1.Every Reiki practitioner or Reiki energy both in performing healing and soothing but powerful ways.Reiki can also take help of this wonderful healing technique which if well scrutinized is good timing, because it would feel very refreshed and relaxed.

The philosophy behind Reiki is how intuitive Reiki treatments to paying clients.Firstly step is to protect them from a reiki master giving the session progressed the child's body began to doubt the results should become one too.I am about to go within the bounds of your health but a step up regarding wisdom and unconditional love.Some incorporate audio and video CD can be used to seal the energies within the body in its own consciousness and contains the other hand, Emma, an Australian volunteer working in Bolivia was very sceptical about the Reiki energy which maintains a connection to the 3 groups.But, none of this technique countless times and place it on their backs.

What Do I Need To Become A Reiki Practitioner

It is also connected to the practitioner, ask for a better.Leming's friends at St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Leming noticed fliers offering Reiki classes.The Internet is a privileged level that is truly amazing.The theory, according to the parched landscape of painful experiences.One, it disarms criticism and buttresses the validity and authenticity of Reiki Master your life and more people to find information now.

Most important is your guide to support it.In a sense, Usui was born on August 15, 1865.Then you are at your diet and whether or not these symbols without having been connected to the art or craft of reiki, to advance at the end of each person tried to be scorned in favor of Reiki.The healing process and interpretation as much as she steps into a fetal position to keep her company and was back to Mikao Usui's 1914 rediscovery of an oxymoron.Physical Body: the bridge between the Healer and the benefits of Reiki!

#Understanding Reiki From Self Care To Energy Medicine Unbelievable Ideas #Reiki Symbol Posters

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81scorp · 5 years ago

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Constructive criticism: 5 MCU movies (and Venom)

Originally posted on Deviantart Sep 21, 2019)

Let`s be honest, MCU is doing better than DCEU. But let`s be honest, the MCU has also stumbled a few times. Just like bad things can have something good in them something good can also be a little flawed. And since I want to be fair and balanced (The REAL version of "fair and balanced" not the FOX news kind.) I thought I`d revisit the MCU and do a little nitpicking. I squeezed all of these MCU movies (and Venom) into one CC because I didn`t have that much to say about them individually. So... if I had a Pym particle powered Time machine that could take me back in time... what would I have changed? SPOILERS for Thor Ragnarok, Spider-Man Homecoming and Captain Marvel Dr Strange

Some of the bathos What is bathos? In a litrerary work bathos is an effect of anticlimax created by a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculus. MCU has a tendency to put bathos in their movies to understandably lighten the mood but also undercut the drama of the situation. In Dr Stange the biggest offender is this scene: Kaecilius: How long have you been at Kamar-Taj, Mister... Dr Strange: Doctor! Kaecilius: Mr. Doctor? Dr Strange: It's Strange. Kaecilius: Maybe. Who am I to judge? I`m not against comedy (far from it, some of my favourite movies are comedies) but a few seconds before this scene Dr Strange, a medical doctor, had just seen a man get killed right in front of him. It`s too much of a mood shift and quite unnecessary. I`d lose this bit of dialogue. Maybe replace it with something more like Dr Strange: You just killed that man! Kaecilius: I take it this kind of thing is new to you? Maybe you`ll be more cooperative than he was. Just throwing out some ideas. Thor Ragnarok

Thor having the power to see through Heimdall`s eyes When was it established that Thor can see through Heimdall`s eyes when he wants to? Do we need a scene where Thor and Heimdall communicates? After rewatching the movie it turns out that, yes we do. How else was he gonna know which wormhole to take? But it`s better if Thor and Heimdall`s communication is not that easy to achieve. How about this instead: Heimdall seeks the help of the three Norns (like Thor did in my CC of Avengers: AoU). He gets help from Verdandi who creates a mental link between him and Thor, allowing Thor to see what he sees and get the info he needs. The death of Warriors three At first I didn`t like that they killed them off at all. Then I was OK with it but felt that it could have been done in a different way. How about: When Hela first arrives at Asgard she only meets Skurge who is willing to cooperate. Then in the scene where she fights Hogun (and many Asgardians soldiers) she also fights Fandral and Volstagg. They fight valiantly and die Boromir-like deaths. Bruce hitting the bridge before turning into Hulk Let`s say that I can suspend my disbelief enough to buy that Bruce did not break his neck when he hit the bridge trying to trigger his transformation. The movie has enough humor as it is, just let Bruce land behind the wolf in full Hulk-mode. Korg`s "As long as the foundations are still strong" speech The problem with this scene is that it is a funny line directly followed by the reaction of the Asgardians watching their home being destroyed with great sorrow. Lose this speech. It`s not like Korg doesn`t have any funny lines in this movie. Spider-Man Homecoming

Ned and Betty in Highschool This is more of a comicbook purist nitpicking but in the comics Ned Leeds and Betty Brant are reporters working on the Bugle, not kids in Highschool. How about: make Betty some other character from the comics... like Deborah Whitman, and change Ned`s name (maybe to Jake, David, Zach or Todd, just throwing out some names). "Come on Spider-Man" The scene where Peter lifts tons of debris from himself would have worked better without dialogue

MJ`s name Why change her name? They kept Flash`s and Liz`s name. Don`t change her name. Have them call her "Jane" during most of the movie and then reveal in the end that she prefers to be called MJ. Leaving us, the audience to assume that the M must stand for "Mary". Captain Marvel

I´m just a girl fight-scene Using No Doubt`s "I`m just a girl" for a fight scene feels a little on the nose. How about:

A: Use some score made specifically for this scene instead of an already existing song. Or...

B: Use an already existing song but make "Barracuda" by Heart or some similar song."But `Barracuda` wasn`t made in the nineties" you say. Correct. But it`s a cool song. How Fury lost his eye

Really? Fury lost his eye to a flerkin`cat? It just feels a little weak. How about: He doesn`t lose his eye in this movie. Save it for another movie or keep it a mystery. Avengers: Infinity War

Heimdall teleporting Hulk When was it established that Heimdall can teleport people without the aid of the sword and the Bifrost thingy? How about: Thanos uses the space stone to teleport Hulk to earth. He does so to test the stone`s power and to get rid of (what in his eyes is) a nuisance.

Venom

I`m one of the people who thinks that Sony should let the rights revert back to Marvel. (Yes I`ve heard about the Sony-Disney deal so I know that what I`m writing here will be horribly dated as soon as it is published, but then again, that happens to everything that I write. Better late than never.) Venom works better as a supporting character that later gets his own spin off rather than a character that gets his own movie from the start. Where should it come out in the MCU movie order? Maybe after Black Widow but before the Eternals? What should it be called? Maybe... Spider-Man: Monsters? Spider-Man: Enemies? Spider-Man: Something something far from Homecoming? This is different from other CCs because this time I haven`t actually seen the movie.

Plot: It begins with Spider-Man doing what he usually does: catching badguys. He beats and webs a ski mask wearing terrorist who calls himself Sin-Eater who was planning to blow up an important building. Opening credits roll. Petey finds out that there`s a Spider-man imitator in San Fransisco who is very cruel against the criminals they catch. They even kill some of them. Pete goes to investigate and meets the imitator: Venom. Venom was Eddie Brock, a journalist who could have won the Pulitzer prize for a series of phone interviews he made with a dangerous terrorist called Sin-Eater, but then it turned out that the man he interviewed was just a mentally ill man pretending to be Sin-Eater. Eddie was fired, a few days later the great Snap happened. Eddie lost all his friends. Distraught and lost he went to a church for guidance and met the symbiote. He decided to leave N.Y. and return to his birthplace: San Fransisco and, in his own words: "fight crime in a better way than Spidey ever could". Venom and Spidey fight a little then it turns out that Sin-Eater is alive and is back to his old habit of blowing up important buildings. To make things worse: he has help from henchmen and he`s using advanced weapons made by the Tinkerer (or maybe the Leader?) and he`s injected himself with a version of the supersoldier serum. Spidey and Venom have to join forces and beat Sin-Eater. S-E dies in an explosion, Venom disappears, is pressumed dead but no body is found. Fury shows up to tell Spidey that the black goo was someting that S.H.I.E.L.D. had held in custody for a few years. They had found it in a portable metal container onboard a Kree ship. He suspects that an infiltrator must have stolen it shortly after "the big snap". (Maybe the Chameleon? I like the Chameleon.) He wonders if they`ll ever see Venom again.Epilogue: a guy in a hoodie goes into a convenience store to buy... I dunno, a yogurt (we don`t see his face). Another guy comes in to rob the place. The guy in a hoodie turns out to be Eddie who turns into Venom and gives us the "turd in the wind" speech before he kills the robber. Then he pays for his yogurt and leaves.

The End

And thats how I would do it. Feel free to disagree.

#81scorp #editorial #constructive #criticism #marvel #mcu

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happymetalgirl · 7 years ago

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My Comment on “Metal Elitism”

I thought I would be doing more of these when I started this blog (little thought pieces about metal that is), but metal this year has been really prolific in terms of albums that have taken up my attention that I’ve wanted to write about, and I’m glad it’s been so prolific too. It’s a genre that, despite most people considering it over the hill in terms of its presence in the public eye, is still vibrant, growing, and, quite importantly, still evolving and expanding. And that’s a big part of what I want to talk about in this little piece here: metal evolving and the people opposed to certain kinds of it or all of it.

When metal “elitism” is brought up in the context of discussions of metal music, most often what I see it referring to is something I think is more accurately described as metal purism. Elitism, I think, kind of applies better to things that are more objectively measurable, and music taste is both incredibly complicated to “measure” and hardly objective. Referring to the mindset that the term (metal elitism) describes, the “elitism” part of it sort of gives the people who hold the mindset a bit of undeserved credence, because it’s not like they have a more objectively elite taste or opinion (which arguably doesn’t even exist). Often, they’re just a little more arbitrarily picky about one or a few aspects of the genre that could easily, from another perspective, be seen as silly, like not wanting to date someone with a certain hair color or below a certain height: silly, but preferences are preferences. Well, preferences are one thing; deal-breakers are another. The attitude from metal “elitists” that most often irritates people is the closed-minded stiff-arming of some or any violation of their incredibly prioritized and rigid preferences of their music and their expression of discontent for it being violated in their eyes from some self-supposed position of authority (which explains why it’s so often referred to as elitism).

I’ve made pretty evident in previous posts on here how open I am to bands’ experimentation with their sounds and with the subgenres they play in and around. I love bands like Havok and Cannibal Corpse who keep to what they know they do best and continue to deliver streams of exciting vintage music, and bands like Havok, Power Trip, Ghost, etc. who play primarily older styles of metal in the modern era are an important part of keeping metal from being a volatilely trend-hopping genre and maintaining its longevity through the sustenance of more of its styles throughout the years. But (in my opinion) metal also needs to continue to evolve to stay “alive” and I think it’s a unique genre in that so much of its community from the entire vast age range it encompasses holds its oldest works in such high regard. Even metal’s youngest listeners praise 70’s and 80’s classics and icons like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, etc. and even less famous groups like Anthrax, Sepultura, and Kreator still find a lot of praise from young listeners. But metal is almost half-a-century old now as a genre and it didn’t stop with the new wave of British heavy metal, or thrash, or black metal, or death metal, or nu metal, or metalcore, and it’s certainly not stopping with djent, or blackgaze, or the numerous other fringe styles of metal gaining more and more traction. And that’s great. What a time to be alive for metal listeners with so much metal out there to choose from, with older bands like Iron Maiden still putting out exciting traditional material, younger groups like Havok paying excellent tribute to such tradition, and others like Code Orange and Igorrr changing and expanding the landscape of heavy music.

I bring up the evolution of metal because I feel the opposition to some or all of it from “elitists” to be the most aggravating aspect of their mindset (and the pretentious attitude of course). Oppositions to things like growls or industrial elements I find often coming from older metalheads, often purists just stuck in their ways, reluctant to get out of their comfort zone (and who knows, I’m not 50, maybe I’ll be that way toward something else when I’m there, maybe that’s just a part of getting older, I haven’t experienced it yet). They’ll say things about how bands in their day really rocked and new bands just sound excessive and unmelodic, or how real music has to be played live on classical instruments, not computers (electric guitar amplified through numerous effects like distortion counting as a classical instrument in their eyes). But purism isn’t just an “old dad” thing either. Younger black metal purists being probably the most notoriously annoying bunch often attest that their pet subgenre must be kept pure of clean vocals or non-satanic subject matter or musical traits not entirely metal, often making the cultural appropriation argument against such things (which usually involves fallacious assumption of some culture’s absolute ownership of certain traits and false authority over others’ use of said traits). Purists have every right to have their opinions and their preferences, of course; it’s when that opinion is touted as law that really grinds my gears and the gears of people who enjoy something these purists don’t enjoy. I’ve been pretty fortunate to have witnessed just about all of this kind of behavior exclusively online; I’ve had pretty much only positive interactions and enjoyable, civil conversations with people at shows or music gear stores about music and such.

The most ridiculous and easily dismissible of the declarations purists often make are the broad, baseless (or unsupported), and sometimes flat-out wrong. But unfortunately, they’re some of the most frustratingly common too. “Metallica was pure shit after Justice.”, “X band was only the real X band with Y singer in it.”, “Bands who eschew corpse paint, church burning, satanic themes, or whatever aren’t black metal.”, “Nu metal, metalcore, deathcore, hair metal, etc. isn’t metal.”. That last one is so infuriatingly common and egregiously wrong I think hearing or reading it from so many people makes my blood pressure rise just a little bit; there can be metal that you don’t like and just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you get to shut it out at the gates of the metal kingdom like some authoritarian ruler and declare it “not metal”. I really dislike hair metal for the most part, but it’s still metal; it’s just an era and subgenre of metal I find embarrassing and not to my tastes.

I think we all know what “metal elitism” is and what’s annoying about it, but what impact does it even have? It’s pretty apparent that a lot of these assertions are made with at least some intent of elevating the asserter’s position of authority and reverence by way of making their taste seem more refined. They (usually) want to seem more distinguishing in their choices and more enlightened by seeming harder to please on the basis of liking only the highest end of some linear scale of “quality” in music. “Oh, you like X band, well they’re not nearly as fast and technical and brutal as Y band (who are probably way too fast and technical and brutal for you).” It’s really petty, and at this point in my immersion into metal and its culture, it’s not at all detrimental to my confidence in my own music-related opinions or even worth the stress of a fruitless or disassociated argument. But I imagine to newer, younger, more impressionable listeners, these attitudes can be more confusing, disheartening, and discouraging, and from nearer to the outside, they reflect poorly on the community surrounding the music or worse, set a precedent of pretentious arrogance about musical selectiveness as a prerequisite for “true” membership in the community.

I’ve seen a lot of people complain gratuitously that metalheads are the worst treating and most unaccepting music listeners, always ready to shoot down someone with slightly different taste and scoff while doing it. I don’t know who these people are talking to or how many of them they’re talking to, but my decade or so of experience in the metal community has been majorly positive, even online. I honestly can’t really picture what kind of experiences they’ve had, but I think it’s an exaggeration of this blemish in the metal community. If most of the metal community were like this, Ghost, Deafheaven, Bring Me the Horizon, and Babymetal would not have careers as big as they are right now.

Like any culture, it’s important for metal to have some ways of determining who’s in and who’s out of it, or less in it. Someone who heard “In the End” yesterday and thinks Linkin Park is pretty heavy is obviously less immersed than a Death fan (who is still more than welcome to like Linkin Park). The Death fan can gladly suggest a path to heavier, more immersive music and suggest Linkin Park’s status as just the tip of the metal iceberg, and maybe the Linkin Park fan knows another band outside the world of metal that the Death fan might enjoy too. Sharing suggestions and tastes in music is pretty important in getting people into the community and deeper into the subcommunities of the genre. The key is the attitude of the interaction, and metal is certainly not the only music community with a problem of upturned-nosed fans who think their taste is superior to most other peoples’. It’s much more fulfilling and helpful to recommend some music you like to someone who doesn’t know it, even if their reaction to it is resistant, than it is to berate people for not matching your opinion. Just remember every time someone referred to death metal as “screamo” and passed it off as “just talentless cookie monster noise” that “isn’t even music”.

My main thing that I don’t think I see too many people saying: just stop calling it “elitism”.

They’re not elitists; they’re just metal purists.

They’re not elite for liking a more technical or more “kvlt” band, and just addressing their opinions like those of pouty, ultra-conservative purists who don’t like change that doesn’t cater exactly to their own presupposed notions is the best way to shut their behavior down.

And like all the interactions I described earlier, politeness works better than reacting to their vitriol or egotism with more of it.

Damn, no wonder I haven’t written so many of these; I thought this was going to be short, but I apparently just can’t do short.

#metal elitism #metal elitists #elitism #purism #purists #black metal #death metal #deathcore #Metalcore #nu metal #blackgaze #hair metal #thrash #thrash metal

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crippledboyfriend · 7 years ago

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I’ve had a couple of medication changes (going off of morphine to different opiates and changing muscle relaxants) so I’ve not been sleeping as well, but it also caused me to have a really elaborate dream about Yuri on Ice. It’s pretty clearly inspired from some things I’ve seen on tumblr recently, and the character flaws were really evident to my subconscious. Now, Yuuri doesn’t do anything cringy-er than he already has in canon, but I know there are a lot of Yurio purists who don’t like the idea of him being in a sickfic or being remotely involved in anything where Yuuri and Viktor are all over each other. If this is you, this is not your fic. I still don’t think I’m doing anything wrong, but my dreamself cooked up something a little more extreme than I usually go for and I decided not to change it.

It Happened Once in a Dream

“Our opening act for Yurio’s exhibition is going to be so amazing!” Yuuri leaned into Viktor, hugging him. Viktor sat down the notebook with details about the routine in it and closed his eyes as his fiancé kissed his cheek.

“And it’s been going so well! I was worried that getting back into this would be harder for you,” said Yuuri. “Do you think you could maybe do another season competing alongside me?”

“Yuuri,” Viktor’s face fell. “You know I haven’t been feel well lately.”

“I-I-I I know, I j-just…” Yuuri stammered. “I got excited. Even if it’s hard, skating is our lives and you’ve been managing —“

“To a certain extent this has been fine, Yuuri, but I can’t keep this up.”

“Okay,” Yuuri got embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I was just hopeful, and you’re so strong, not that it’s bad that you don’t think you can push through the pain, it’s j-just…I know you really hurt your back, I know that. I believe you. I…I…please forget I said anything.”

“Alright,”

“I’m serious,” said Yuuri. “I don’t want you to think that I don’t believe you.”

“It’s fine, Yuuri.” Viktor smiled, but Yuuri couldn’t help but be nervous that it was fake.

“We should get ready for bed,” suggested Viktor. “Let’s make sure Yurio’s on track.”

“Y-yeah…”

Viktor got up and as he opened the door, Yurio stopped in front of him, pale-faced and tired.

“Oh, Yuri! We were just going to check that you were about ready to sleep.”

“I don’t know, Viktor,” Yurio looked down. “I’m not feeling too great all of a sudden…”

“When did this start?” asked Yuuri. “He was just fine…”

“I don’t know, my stomach started making noise like, an hour ago?” The blonde shuddered and covered a burp as Viktor placed his hands on the sides of his face.

“Mm, Yuri —“ Viktor started to comment on the heat as the teenager leaned forward and suddenly hurled on him.

“Oh, god,” Viktor covered his nose and gagged dryly as the hot mess settled on his bare feet.

Yuuri pulled the dog back by her collar and tried to slip around Yurio to leave the bedroom.

“I’ll go get paper towels,” Yuuri explained as Yurio hiccuped and threw up some more chunks on the floor.

Yuuri shut the door behind him to keep Makkachin out as he came back with the roll to clean up the floor and Viktor’s feet. Yurio was shuddering and had tears streaming down his face.

“Yurochka, do you think it was something you ate..?” Viktor asked, still covering his nose and trying not to look down.

“I don’t think he has food poisoning,” said Yuuri. “We all ate together.”

“I just…I don’t know why he’d be so ill all of a sudden,” Viktor trailed off, lifting his foot for his fiancé as he cleaned it off for him. “Is it on his clothes?”

“Yeah, I think he should shower if he thinks he can.”

“…I can shower…” said Yurio.

“Okay,” said Viktor. “I’ll…get in first. Yuuri, can you clean up?”

“Uh, yeah, um —“

“Great,” with his feet wiped off enough, Viktor walked to the bathroom and started to strip out of his filthy pants.

Yuuri brought the trash close and tried to pick up chunks of vomit from the carpet with the paper towels.

Yurio blushed redder and tried to take a paper towel to help.

“Sorry,”

“No, stay resting, I’ll take care of it,” Yuuri insisted. “Do you think you’re done?”

“No,” said Yurio.

“Okay, um,” Yuuri tried to think. “Why don’t you take off your clothes so the puke doesn’t get anywhere else?”

“Alright,” said Yurio, he slowly slipped out of his pants and left them on the floor vomit-side up.

“I’ll take care of it,” Yuuri promised, pushing several paper towels into the carpet to soak up the moisture. He tried to ignore the feeling of it on his hands as Yurio took his shirt off. Once he had taken care of most of the mess, Yurio was settled on the floor by the trash, looking weak.

“I’ll be right back,” Yuuri promised, slipping out of the room again. He lined the kitchen garbage with a new bag and got out some baking soda to bring back to the bedroom. Makkachin and Puma Tiger Scorpion both tried to follow him inside, but he managed to keep them back with just his foot.

“Here,” Yuuri handed the garbage can to the sick boy and put some baking soda on the vomit. Standing up straight now, Yuuri paused. He looked around and took in what had happened.

“Can I do anything for you?” Yuuri wiped away some sweat that he worked up in the hectic mess of it all.

“Umm,” Yurio paused. “I’ll just wait for Viktor.”

“Okay,” Yuuri nodded. “I’m going to talk to him.” Yuuri let himself into the bathroom.

“Viktor?” Yuuri called over the shower water. “I cleaned up for the most part…What should I do now?”

“I’m almost done in here, but could you take his temp before he gets all hot in the shower?” asked Viktor. “That would be fabulous.”

“Uhh, yeah, sure,” said Yuuri, starting to look around in the cabinet. “Found the thermometer. I’ll go take care of it.”

Yuuri slipped out and bent down on the floor next to the sick teenager.

“Hey, Viktor wants me to take your temperature,” Yuuri pushed Yurio’s bangs back and felt his forehead.

“Okay,” said Yurio as the older man turned on the thermometer and brought it to his mouth.

“That’s new, right?” Yurio asked.

“Huh?” asked Yuuri. “I don’t think so.”

“Viktor doesn’t take my temperature in my mouth,” Yurio explained. “He checks it in my armpit…and he’s had to put it in my butt when I was really sick.”

“Oh my god,” Yuuri sat the thermometer down and apologetically held Yurio’s face in his hands.. “I am so sorry. I didn’t know white people did that. I should’ve asked Viktor how he takes your temp. I don’t know why I just assumed this would be okay, I just got so frazzled, and I wanted to make this easy…” Yuuri blushed and stroked down Yurio’s cheeks. Then, he look away, nervously covered his mouth as he gathered his thoughts, and picked up the thermometer again to reset it.

“We’re in Europe, American boy.” Yurio looked a bit annoyed as he gazed off to the side, but he didn’t seem too uncomfortable with the whole situation. Yuuri was humiliated, but at least the kid seemed to forgive him.

“Here,” Yuuri took Yurio’s arm and pushed the metal tip of the device into his armpit. “I’m sorry. I’m really trying.”

“It’s okay,” said Yurio.

Yuuri still couldn’t believe that he was off the hook that easy.

The thermometer was ready when Viktor came out of the shower, completely naked except for a towel around his waist.

Crouched down by the younger skater, Yuuri took the beeping thermometer and read it.

“101.8,” Yuuri told Viktor.

“That high?” Viktor’s mouth gaped open.

“I can believe it,” said Yuuri, feeling Yurio’s face again. “Maybe even higher.”

“My normal’s probably lower than you’re thinking…” Yurio said softly.

Yuuri wasn’t completely sure what to make of that, but Viktor was ready to take over.

“Yurochka, do you need help in the shower?”

“No,” Yurio shook his head and stood up slowly, letting Yuuri take his clammy hand.

“Okay,” said Viktor. “If you take long, I’m going to check on you, alright? I left the shower on.”

“Alright,” Yurio agreed as he slipped into the bathroom and shut the door.

“Thanks for taking care of that,” Viktor frowned at Yuuri.

“Your welcome,” Yuuri looked away, not wanting to admit yet to humiliating himself while Viktor was in the shower.

“When he gets ill, it just triggers something in me,” Viktor shivered as he went to the closet for clean clothes. “At least I managed not to vomit.”

Yurio had become completely cuddly after getting sick again. This time, fortunately, it all went into the trash, and Viktor managed to excuse himself so he wouldn’t gag. After finding that Yurio’s temperature had risen, Viktor stepped out of the room to speak with Yuuri as he came in from taking out the trash.

“Do you think it would be okay to give him some of my prescription anti-nausea medication I’ve had left over?” asked Viktor. “It wouldn’t be okay, would it? It has harsh side effects…”

“No…Well, we do need Yurio to stop barfing so we can get fever reducers in him, though…” Yuuri started to go against his better judgement. “Do you think you could break it in half?”

“No,” Viktor folded his arms. “I’m just not sure what to do. This all came on so suddenly.”

“Do you think we have to take him to the hospital?” asked Yuuri.

“No,” said Viktor. “Well, at this rate, yes, but I think we’re worrying too much.”

“Maybe you should give him the anti-nausea,” said Yuuri. “I really don’t want to have to take him to the hospital, and I know he doesn’t want to have blood drawn.”

“I’ll try to get him to hold down a snack and have some sports drink with it,” Viktor decided.

“Where’s your medicine? I’ll try to research it and…” Yuuri looked around, realising all sense of time had been lost to him. “What time is it?”

“It’s just a little after midnight,” said Viktor. “And the pills are in the freezer.”

“Okay, I’m going to text my mom.”

“Alright. I’ll go see what sounds good to him,”

Yuuri was so preoccupied with translating Russian and writing to his mom for advice that he didn’t even notice what Viktor came back to get from the kitchen for Yurio. Yuuri’s phone beeped at the exact same time Yurio start to retch his snack back up. He rushed to the bedroom to take over for his fiancé.

“Aww, Yurio…” Yuri cooed and rubbed the boy’s back as he hiccuped. “I guess that didn’t work…”

After gasping for air, Yurio added,

“Maybe a cookie wasn’t the best thing to try,”

Even when not looking, Viktor could feel Yuuri glaring at him from across the room.

“Viktor, did you give him sweets as a snack to settle his stomach?”

“It sounded good to him,” Viktor reasoned, clearly regretting his decision.

“I thought you meant that you were giving him a handful of crackers or something,”

“Well, I didn’t.”

Yuri sighed and gently touched Yurio’s lower stomach.

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri said, and then he brushed back Yurio’s hair and fixed it back into a neater ponytail. “Viktor, I’m going to go clean this out, and I just got a message from my mom. I’m going to talk with her for a bit, and then we’ll finally know what to do.”

“Okay,” Viktor sighed and touched his temples. “Can you stay out and give us some privacy for me to examine him? I’ll open the door when I’m done.”

“Yeah, sure.” Yuuri forced Viktor into making eye contact with him as he left. Viktor gave an apologetic look and then raised his eyebrows.

Potya followed Yuuri out.

The cat kept rubbing up against the door, trying to open it from underneath with her paws as Yuuri finished talking on the phone.

“Potya?” Yuuri called as he hung up. “Potya, here, kitty, kitty.”

Puma Tiger Scorpion ignored him, so Yuuri stood up and went to the door. He listened to Viktor and Yurio speaking softly in Russian. Yurio had the hiccups, and Viktor sounded so comforting. Yuuri smiled, a little less angry at him for feeding Yurio poorly.

“Yurio? Potya really wants to check on you. Do you mind if I crack the door and let her in?”

Yurio and Viktor spoke in Russian a bit more, but they both clearly heard Yuuri.

“You can let her in; I’m taking Yuri’s temp, but I’m mostly shielding him from the doorway.” Viktor decided.

Yuuri slowly cracked the door and Puma Tiger Scorpion pushed her way in. As Yuuri closed it again, he could see Viktor’s back facing him, tending to Yurio as his bare legs stuck out. Yuuri blushed and leaned up against the wall, a bit aroused. He really didn’t mean to see anything, and technically, he didn’t see anything, but seeing Viktor tending to the sick Russian just turned him on. The way Viktor was watching over Yurio, making sure he was doing the absolute best for him to make him better…Yuuri could picture himself in Yurio’s position and couldn’t believe that he was marrying someone so kind and attentive.

Yuuri sat back down and waited on the couch with Makkachin. His reaction felt disgusting. Yuuri was completely ashamed for seeing what he saw.

“I’m the worst.” Yuuri thought. “They shouldn’t have to deal with me.”

Viktor was out in just a minute.

“Alright, rectally, Yurochka has a fever of 104. I’m going to try to keep an eye on it, but I’m really worried, what did —“ Viktor got distracted by the embarrassed look on Yuuri’s face. “What’s the problem?”

“I-I saw,”

“You saw?”

“Well, I didn’t really see Yurio, I just saw you, for like a split second, but I saw your muscular back and you were tending to him so sweetly…You make such a hot dad and doctor…”

“Oh,” Viktor looked a bit confused. “I don’t think Yurio needs to know you just saw me; you shouldn’t be ashamed. He trusted you to let the kitty cat in, да?”

“I-I know,” Yuuri bit his lip and turned even redder. “I’m sorry, it was just erotic to me, and it shouldn’t have been. Why am I like this? I just got excited, and I could picture myself with you watching over me…and just…you looked so loving…I’m sorry.”

“Yuuri, it’s alright,” Viktor innocently smiled and turned Yuuri’s chin up to face him. “But I’m scared for Yurio. Please tell me your mother told us that we’re getting everything wrong and we can just change our ways and make him better.”

“Actually, I sort of can tell you that,” said Yuuri. “But we’re going to need to stay up with him and check his fever every hour or so until it lowers and he’s done throwing up, but I don’t think you need to do it that way each time unless you or Yakov or Nikolai really think so. Since this came on so fast, she hopes it should go away fast, too.”

“Okay, I can totally stay up,” Viktor nodded, eager to hear what else Yuuri had to say.

“But, she doesn’t think he needs any medicine or anything not natural so it’s okay that we haven’t been able to give him anything to take.”

“Good,” said Viktor, still seeming a bit unsure at that statement.

“If he can hold things down later, we can give him some fever-reducers. And to her it sounded like simethicone would help make his belly feel better, but he doesn’t need it.”

“Okay, I’ll look for that.”

“I know we just went to the Asian market, so I should be able to cook him something that should settle a lot better and make him less nauseous. You look for that medicine and keep getting him to drink, okay?”

“Alright,” Viktor gave Yuuri a quick kiss as Yuuri stood up to make some rice porridge. Fortunately, it looked like they had green onion and ginger for him to follow his mom’s recipe perfectly.

Yurio sat down the bowl after a few bites, and Yuuri gently rubbed the boy’s tummy.

“That’s good, take a break.” Yuuri offered.

Yurio’s stomach was making a lot of noise, and the gurgling made them all nervous, but they were all impressed and relieved that he hadn’t started vomiting already with the way the night was going.

“I feel a little better,” Yurio yawned and took another bite.

“Thank god,” Yuuri smiled, and Viktor felt the side of Yurio’s forehead with the back of his hand. His temperature wasn’t letting up yet, but it wasn’t getting worse, either.

Yurio finished off the sports drink Viktor had given him, and Viktor took it and stood up.

“Should we switch to water now?” Viktor asked Yuuri.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Yuuri, turning to the patient. “That okay with you?”

“Yeah,” Yurio nodded. His lips were chapped and he looked exhausted.

Yuuri was really tired, too.

As Viktor left to get water, Yurio looked up to Yuuri and told him,

“Thanks for cleaning up after me,” The food tried to settle in Yurio’s bubbly tummy.

“No problem,” Yuuri promised, and Yurio turned to hug him.

“I’m glad you’re here,”

Yuuri gently stroked down Yurio’s back, thinking that maybe he hadn’t done more harm than good like he had been worrying with each mistake he made that night. Him and Viktor were both still young and trying to figure things out.

#yuri on ice #yoi #viktor nikiforov #yuuri katsuki #yuri plisetsky #emeto #fanfic

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konnl · 6 years ago

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Goat Wisdom

The first period of the day is coming to an end. Three friends are exhausted from hearing their teachers talk all day about nonsense – time to skip class, smoke up, and relax. During the get-away, one of the friends finds himself in a difficult dilemma after being given the best advice of his life from an unlikely source.

Goat Wisdom is April’s flash fiction that brings readers into the eyes of a teenage boy who is stuck in a weed-induced conflict that will change his high school experience forever. Enjoy the story in written word, audio, artwork and soundscape.

Goat Wisdom

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In Hell

It was one of those days at school. A day you wish you didn’t have to go because the teachers breathe down your neck about everything you do, and the other normie-kids talk about stupid music and TV shows. Not to mention you see your crush hitting it off with her new boyfriend – the quarterback of the football team. Honestly, a day like this was a typical day at school. I can’t really recall a good one. Oh well. Cheers to the best times of my life.

I fiddle with my pencil, carving into the desk’s wood, following the texture of the plank, filling it with lead. It was a mundane, pointless activity that I like to do while I was in the classroom. Carving lead into the desk was better than listening to Mr. Patton ramble on about physics. Where am I even going to use this stuff? I don’t want to be some sort of Einstein. Apparently, we’re supposed to take all types of sciences in grade 10 so we can decide where we want to go. I know where I want to go: cloud 9.

“I want you all to turn to page 27,” said Mr. Patton. “Read the assignment. You can do the first portion of the assignment for the rest of the class and the second portion when you’re home.”

The whole class – of about 30 –pulled out their pencils, turned to the right page and began reading. Some of the keeners in the front were the quickest to turn the page, probably because they were following along with Mr. Patton unlike me. I just flipped open to a random page to look like I was paying attention.

“Hey man,” whispered the boy next to me.

I turned to look at the boy, Alex, one of my good pals. For the first time today, I noticed his Goat Lord T-shirt – a kick ass death metal band we enjoyed. We actually had the same shirt and made sure we didn’t wear it on the same day. He could wear it on Wednesdays, I wore mine on Tuesdays. The last time we matched shirts, the jokes were aplenty about us being a couple. Now we avoid that risk.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“You want to get out of here when we are done class?” He asked.

“Damn right I do,” I said.

“Right on, you got some green in your locker?” Alex asked.

“Sure do,” I said with a grin. “We should get Felicia in on this too.”

“You just want to try and stick your hands down her pants,” Alex said.

I tightened the grip on the pencil. Alex’s words irritated me because they were right. He was a good friend and had the rights to remind me if I was doing something stupid. I just didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t understand why she would go for someone like Don. I suppose being quarterback made you cool despite being a complete dud. Then there was his goofy face.

“Well,” I said. “If I run into Felicia, I will talk to her. If I don’t, we can just head to the ravine instead.”

“Sure, whatever you say,” Alex said. “As long as she is cool with my mixtape.”

“Totally, she’s into metal.”

“Yeah, the mainstream stuff,” he mumbled while staring down at his book. His face painted confusion while reading the text – probably a very similar version of my own expression throughout the class. Neither of us was interested in physics. Got to love that forced education system hey?

For the rest of the period, we stared at our assignments, pretending to work. Alex was doing something in the book while I doodled around the edges of the paper. Unfortunately, Mr. Patton watched everyone like a hawk, waiting to strike its prey. He loved catching students misbehaving. That’s why we pretended to work. Later, we would pay off one of the smarter kids to help us with our assignment. Smart kids like drugs too.

Eventually, the heavens heard our agony, and the bell rang.

Finally, I thought. That class could not have ended soon enough.

Gathering the Goods

Alex and I packed up our things and hurried out of the classroom. We had our exit strategy on routine and were often the first one to leave the class, despite being in the back of the room. Alex and I walked through the hallway to our lockers. They were at the opposite wings of the school. It was kind of a bummer, but we always knew where to meet up when skipping class. Physics was pretty dull, but the next period was social sciences. God no.

I hurried through the hall to get my locker. My route when leaving physics class took me right past Felicia’s locker. On most days I could see her making out with Don. That creep would have his hands all over her body. The rage I felt mostly comes from jealousy. Truthfully, that’s what I wanted you to her.

Just like every other day, she was at her locker. Lucky for me, today, Don was not here.

Looks like Felicia can have some fun, I thought.

Slowing my pace to a relaxed stride, I approached Felicia as she sifted through her locker. I nodded my head at her, saying, “hey sup?”

“Hey!” Felicia jumped and smiled at me. There it was, that deadly smile, one that could freeze even the most willful of souls. She had a way with her grin – and maybe her whole mouth. I’d love to find out. Either way, I sometimes wondered if she was friendly to everyone or she actually liked me. We’ve known each other since junior high. My feelings for her just multiplied over the years. It probably had something to do with teenage hormones.

“Alex and I are going to the ravine to have some dope. You want in?” I asked.

“Yes! I do.” Felicia shut her locker and adjusted her backpack. “We going now?”

“Yep, going to meet Alex just out by the east wing.”

“Think we have some time to grab Don?” Felicia asked.

“Uh, probably not,” I said. “Doesn’t he have to go chase around some boys on the football field?” I said humorously.

Felicia giggled and brushed her red hair aside, exposing her neck. “So how was Mr. Patton, Is he still running that dictatorship of a classroom?”

“You betcha,” I said as the two of us began to walk. “How about you?”

“Oh, you know, math is math. I don’t mind it. I just can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”

“Two more years,” I said.

Felicia and I reached my locker where I snagged the small jar that contained joint. I always tried to reduce the smell by hiding it inside a glass container with the cork. It reduced the scent a bit. The method wasn’t perfect though. As long as I kept it at the bottom of my backpack, no one would know as we left the school. With the joint obtained, Felicia and I left my locker and went to find Alex.

The two of us continued to walk down the hall to the opposite wing of the school. Alex’s locker was right beside the exit to the football field and the track and field course. The two of us chatted during the walk about the same stuff we usually did: movies, music, and video games. Time was a blur with that girl.

Blow This Pop Stand

Felicia and I exited the school find Alex leaning against the brick wall. The boy saw us and perked up.

“There you are,” Alex said. The statement was obviously directed towards me. Alex was not too fond Felicia. He could see how this girl had me wrapped around her finger – whether she knew it or not. Plus, Alex was kind of a purist when it came to music. If anyone didn’t fit within his criteria of taste, they were not cool enough to hang out with them. He probably tolerated Felicia just because I liked her.

“Yeah man,” I said. “I was just grabbing my stuff.”

“Cool,” Alex said while walking with Felicia and I.

“I’m so glad you guys can get your hands on some dope,” Felicia said. “My dad would kill me if he knew I was into this.”

“Me too,” I said. “I just don’t give a shit.”

The three of us laughed as we walked across the grass. Felicia’s eyes seemed to look at the football field as we moved by it. The football players were all training together in their uniforms while the coach directed them to perform specific tasks. That never looked fun. But I knew Felicia was not looking at the scene, she was trying to see if Don was there.

That douche, I thought.

Eventually, our path took us to the fence at the end of the school’s property. This fence was directly beside the river valley where we were able to move down the dirt path. This path was made mostly by students. It wasn’t paved or covered in gravel which meant roots were sticking out. Bumps and ditches were also throughout the trail. The three of us had to pay close attention as we descended deep the ravine. We continued through the forest until we found our familiar secluded spot. It was off the beaten path and difficult to see due to the thick foliage and dense trees.

Getting High

“Secluded enough?” Felicia said.

“Well, we don’t want to get caught,” Alex said as he pulled out his portable boombox from his backpack.

“This is the usual spot Alex and I go to smoke,” I said while taking the glass container out of my backpack along with a lighter.

Felicia began to play with her hair saying, “boy I feel special.” She smiled. That deadly smile again. It caught me, and I couldn’t look away.

Blaring metal music shot me back into reality, and I looked away from the girl to see Alex had put a CD into the boombox – good old Goat Lord. I didn’t even realize how long I was staring at Felicia for. Thankfully, she was staring at me, and she didn’t look away after the music started.

She’s into me, I thought. Oh, how I would love to make some kind of move on her.

Feeling cool since I had Felicia’s attention, I took the joint out of the glass container and lit it. I brought it to my lips and took a puff, embracing that sweet taste of green. The smell of marijuana filled my lungs and the air around us. I passed the joint to Felicia. She inhaled and then exhaled slowly, letting the smoke ease its way out of her mouth and past her lips.

“That’s smooth,” Felicia said while passing the joint Alex.

“The best,” Alex said while taking the joint and having a puff.

We continue to pass the joint around, each embracing the wonderfulness of the drug. Each puff that we had caused the weed’s effects to grow stronger in our systems. We laughed, joked, and chatted until there was nothing left of the joint. At this point, all three of us were feeling pretty good. Each of us gazed into different directions, downing our ears to Goat Lord. Felicia began playing with her hair while using a stick drawing the dirt. Alex was laying on his back looking up at the leaves. His head rested on his hands. He had a funny smile on his face that just wouldn’t go away. That is what made weed so awesome – it always put you in a good mood.

As for me, I tried not to stare at Felicia. Man, she is hot.

My mind wandered from the girl into bigger picture stuff, like what was the purpose of school? Society forced the youth to work so hard at pointless subjects. They want us to learn things we don’t care about. We barely even know ourselves, and we are trying to understand how particles move? It’s ridiculous. The other part of my mind got sucked back into the Felicia fantasy. She sat close to me. I wasn’t sure if it was the weed, or if she actually was leaning a little closer. It was a bit hard to tell while being high.

“KISS HER,” came a whisper.

I looked around, trying to see where the voice came from. It had to be Alex. The sound was a raspy male voice.

“DO IT NOW,” came the voice.

The voice came from Alex’s direction, yet his lips weren’t moving. Where was it coming from?

“KISS FELICIA,” came the voice again. This time I could see that the sound came from the Goat Lord T-shirt. The animal’s mouth moved as it spoke.

No way, I thought. This was the most intense experience I had ever had on weed. That goat was actually talking to me.

“KISS HER NOW, OR YOU WILL REGRET IT,” said the goat. The illustration of the goat looked directly at me while it talked. The mouth moved in a very human-like motion.

I was not a fool, I knew that T-shirts couldn’t talk let alone give pretty good advice. Even though I knew it was the drug talking, I liked what the goat had to say.

I looked away from the goat illustration and at Felicia. Her red hair, green eyes, smooth legs… everything about her. That goat was a reflection of my deepest desires. All I wanted to do was take Felicia into my arms and start playing suck-face. It’s all I ever wanted to do. From what I could tell she was into me too, despite being with Don.

I leaned in slowly towards the girl and then paused. No, I thought.

A moment of clarity hit me: if I kissed Felicia, what would that mean? Felicia was seeing Don, and things seem to be going well with them. I was already not in the good books with the football team, how much more difficult would that make my life? At the core of my relationship with Felicia, I was her friend. I truly cared about her. What if she wasn’t giving me hints and I did kiss her? She would feel betrayed and creeped out. Don would kick my ass.

“DO IT NOW!” came the commanding voice of the goat illustration. “DO IT NOW BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

I froze. This was a dilemma I never thought I would have to experience in my life. On the one hand, the girl wanted was right beside me – being questionably close. On the other hand, I could not tell if this was all just the weed. After all, I was getting advice from a talking goat illustration on a T-shirt.

“YOU MUST,” the goat said.

“No!” I shouted.

My shouting caught the attention of Felicia and Alex. Hell, I startled myself too. The sudden sound threw us all off, killing the weed-vibe we were experiencing. Felicia scooted away from me while Alex stood up, brushing the dirt and grass from the back of his shirt.

“What time is it?” Felicia asked.

“Probably getting close to the end of the period,” Alex said pressing stop on the boombox and grabbing it.

I stared at Alex’s T-shirt, my eyes fixated on the goat illustration. It was no longer animated. The eyes were as lifeless as they were before the weed. Its mouth didn’t move. There were no voices.

Regret

I got up on the grass scratched my neck, I felt nervous that I shouted out some words to my friends that had no context to the situation.

“Smoke much, man?” Alex said with a grin.

“I guess so. Shit, I had some bizarre thoughts,” I said. “I’m wondering if that thing laced with something else.”

“Doubt it. Seemed normal to me,” Alex said. “I think you just tripped some serious balls.”

Felicia giggled while the two of them began to walk back to the school. I followed them, and the three of us walked as a group. I wanted to tell my friends about the ridiculous experience I had with the auditory hallucination. The rational part of me said no. It was a ridiculous story, and it might weird Felicia out. Maybe I could tell Alex later. For now, this stayed with me.

The three of us exited the ravine and returned to the school property. We walked across the grass until we made it near the football field where the football team was just finishing up their training routine.

One football player noticed us, and he stepped away from the group, waving.

Oh no, I thought. Right away I knew it was Don.

Felicia waved at the boy at the football field. He began to jog toward us. Felicia hurried towards him, leaving me with Alex behind.

“There goes your girl,” Alex said.

“Yeah,” I said. There really wasn’t much else to say. Felicia had the most popular guys in school for her boyfriend. I was just her stoner buddy, watching in disgust as Don and Felicia embraced one another. Her arms wrapped around his neck. His hands firmly gripped her ass. The two of them began to make out disgustingly. I just couldn’t look at anymore.

“Let’s get something to eat,” I said. Truthfully, I wanted to get out of there.

He was right, I suddenly thought.

In that doped-up state-of-existence, I heard words of wisdom from an unlikely source. Instead of listening to the strange goat’s words, I decided not to. With a clear mind, I recalled the scene in the ravine: Felicia and my knees were nearly touching, she kept playing with her hair while leaning towards me, and she was looking at me for prolonged periods. She was just too shy to make a move – just like me. The goat was the voice of reason in the situation who was trying to guide me into something that would have been beautiful. The goat was providing words of wisdom, and I did not listen. I should have never doubted the Goat Lord.

#Drama #Paranormal #Strange #strange fiction

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sinangoral2017-blog · 7 years ago

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[07.01.17] it seems a bit strange to wrap up my last couple of days in japan with a dissection of yesterday’s visit to typeone and spoon, but trust me - i think it’ll all make sense. even if you’re bored by ‘car culture,’ my hope is that if you read this entry, you can gain an appreciation for something that is considered as one of the many staples of japan’s nationalistic pride.

i’ve explored incredible architecture in tokyo and osaka. i’ve studied farming techniques in odawara and tottori. i’ve witnessed japan’s craze with electronics, anime, music, and video games in akihabara. and, of course, i’ve eaten the strangest foods throughout the whole country. still, one unexplored realm that was staring me in the face remained - japan’s precedent-setting tuner and automotive culture. ultimately, the impact that automotive magnates like toyota, subaru, datsun (nissan), and honda had on the world through design strategies and economic competition is something that i wanted to soak up before i left.

those of you who know me well likely are aware of my interests in automotive design and mechanics. i’ve always been a tinkerer, taking the utmost solace in working on my 1967 chevy c10 pickup truck. i also, for a while, seriously invested my time into motorcycles, all to satisfy what seemed to be a growing obsession with motor related things. at the helm of this obsession, for numerous reasons, was a fan-boy obsession with the history and work of the honda motor company.

the birth of honda is an incredible one, rich with stories of war complications, clashing nationalistic ideals, and redemption. though i won’t go into it, if you’re interested, you can learn more, here. in many ways, it’s this impressive story which had paved such a promising future for the company. it is also the catalyst of my obsession with honda’s racing heritage, history, and its overall ethos. honda, like so many of the other big-name japanese automotive companies, echoes the same japanese discipline that i’ve been citing in my previous posts, but at a greater scale and over a longer time.

with this nationalistic respect towards honda (and others) comes an equal appreciation of their tuner companies. just as how mercedes benz signs over tuning rights to AMG, chevrolet trusts callaway, and subraru works intimately with STI, honda’s racing name relies on spoon. spoon, which deals with the design of various aftermarket parts, depends on the mechanics and fabricators at typeone for installing. in this way, a complicated, albeit communicative relationship is formed between honda, spoon, and typeone, and thus all are on a national spotlight.

as it turns out, my visit to typeone and spoon had just occurred after the world famous automotive journalists at jalopnik wrote an article on their own summer visit. seeing what they saw, and what they didn’t, for that matter, was extremely thrilling. when considering that spoon and typeone are almost hidden with their modest street fronts and minimal signage, the fact that they output such exciting and precedent setting work is surprising.

the clinical cleanliness of the shop is overwhelming. i’ve never seen a metal fabrication station so clean. the sheen given off by the clean and polished floor is akin to the reflectivity of still water. i apologetically glanced at the two mechanics in the shop as i squeaked past them in my sandles, but neither of them seemed to care. both were busy at work, attending to the lime green ap2 2005 honda s2000 restoration, only speaking when they needed to. “8!” one would grunt, followed by “10!” it took me a while to realize that, while one mechanic was under the car, he was calling on his other mechanic who was above the car for various socket sizes. they explained to me that they were ‘completely rebuilding the body from the shell on up.” (the s2000 isn’t a traditional body-on-frame vehicle, but rather a more sophisticated and single-piece monocoque. you can imagine, then, the intense hours it takes to reshape any bent or corroded metal, just on the frame, alone.) the owner had purchased the vehicle as an original owner, driven it for close to ten years, sensed nothing wrong, but wanted to be sure the vehicle was pure as per the the purists at typeone. so yes - a stock car, returned to stock. still, the project has taken over 2 months so far. with an incredibly dedicated attitude, the mechanics take their time to be sure that the best thing that they can possibly create is delivered.

along with the cleanliness of the place, the architecture of the shop is worth describing. it’s a two-story complex, where customers drop off their s2000s, civics, and integras on the first floor. a master engine builder works on the vehicles’ motors down here, and is equipped to fully disassemble and rebuild any motor, if need be. a car is then transported above with a hydraulic lift, where all other facets of the vehicle are attended to (suspension, chassis, body, paint, etc). as such, most of the work happens on the second floor, which is also where all of my photographs were taken (with the exception of the s2000 that was for sale on the street).

a pretty neat later model civic hatchback was in the corner of the shop, stripped of all ‘unnecessary luxuries.’ do you like carpeting? unnecessary. sound deadening material? no need. all plastics - even the door trims - were eliminated to save weight. seeing the exposed shift linkage was pretty cool - a stock piece, i was told.

i actually held my breadth when i saw the “holy trinity” (maybe only i call it that) of vehicles - an original 1965 honda s800m coupe, an ap1 2003 honda s2000 race car, and a 2016 honda s660 racing prototype. seeing this evolution of the s-line from old to new was something quite special for me, especially since i am an s2000 owner and geek myself. i had never seen an s660 in person (we can’t even import them into the states if we wanted to), so seeing one right in front of me - let alone a race spec, carbon-fiber adorning car - was just nutty. the s2000 was a cup car that the team have been racing for a couple of seasons. i especially admired all the dents, rust, and loose parts that still embellished the car. noone changes them, apparently, because noone has to. you can tell where certain parts have been spray painted over, and where bondo filler marks remain. so cool - because racecar.

personally, i’m really excited to see what spoon and typeone does with the new civic type r - a highly anticipated and acclaimed return by honda to the ‘r’ sport series. daisuke (my contact there, and also the second daisuke i’ve met in japan) expressed interest in this as well, though he said he cannot comment on it much at the moment.

as i pack my bags and get ready to return to minneapolis for a couple of recovery days before iceland, i can’t help but reflect on my month in this incredible country and be amazed at the diversity in experiences i’ve had. at a basal level, my time at typeone and spoon helped feed my hunger for all-things-honda. more importantly, however, my recent visits helped me better understand why the japanese are so proud of what they do. may it be culture or food, textiles or vehicles - japan is full to the brim with discipline, ability, and pride, and i think that they’re utterly justified. and so, it’s for this reason that i cap off my visit to this enigmatic part of the world with a strange entry on a set of honda tuner companies.

the next time i write, i’ll be in the comfort of my minnesota home and in the company of my brilliant mom who will hopefully be feeding me exuberant amounts of traditional turkish food. she’s a busy woman with work, so wish me luck on that last one.

japan, it has been real. thank you. sayonara!

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autopinions-blog · 7 years ago

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Big & Tall Car Review: 2017 ND Mazda MX-5 (Miata) RF Club. Crushing My Hopes & Dreams.

If you’re reading my review of the 2017 ND Miata, I shall assume that this isn’t the first time you’ve elicited cursory information on the world’s most ubiquitous roadster. I shall therefore, attempt to present my opinions devoid of the most obvious statistics & observations you have likely already heard/read ad nauseam.

First off, I feel it necessary to elaborate on the specific review format herein which is unique to me. As previously mentioned, I am not a small fellow. In fact, I am quite sure I exceed Mr. Matt Farah’s dimensions in every quantifiable measure at 6′4″ tall & nearly 300lbs. With that in mind, it has become my mission for the reviews on this blog to give an accurate account of just how comfortable or uncomfortable I am in any given automobile.

Rest assured though, I will cover all pertinent areas of the car including, but not limited to interior & exterior impressions, practicality-which will lump in safety, predicted reliability, efficiency, & price/value-as a poor showing in any of those areas would thus make the car impractical in my opinion, & noteworthy features or technology that help diferentiate it from it’s competitors. With that all out of the way, please allow me to set the stage for you, dear reader.

It is the doldrums of winter in South Jersey. I am eagerly anticipating the approaching 2018 Philadelphia Auto Show. I generally make a habit of going every year as you might imagine I find it quite entertaining. This year, I managed to score a pair of free tickets from a friendly, local VW dealership. I was prepared with a list of various makes & models I specifcally wanted to check out, as well as a map of the event floor & my plotted course pre-planned to maximize efficiency.

I admit, in prior years & visits to many auto shows, I never paid the Mazda MX-5′s any real attention. But, the new ND generation has captivated me since I first laid eyes upon it. I’d always considered previous iterations as too slow, too small, too rental car inside. All assumptions, I must confess, as I still have not driven one. Yes, that’s right, I have not driven an MX-5 of any vintage, new or old. Allow me to explain...

I am quite literally too big to drive the Mazda MX-5. At least, the current ND version anyway. I have never even attempted to situate myself into the driver’s seat of an NA, NB, or NC to be honest. I was however, astonishingly & hilariously able to shoehorn myself into the driver’s seat of the ND with only marginal effort, truthfully.

So, what gives? Why don’t I fit, you ask? Well, when I attempted to simulate changing gears & operating all 3 pedals, I found that my knees consistently & significantly impacted on the backside of the steering wheel. And, I should also mention, that this occurred in both the soft-top & RF (Retractable Fastback) models Mazda had on display.

Additionally, I found that the soft-top reduced my headroom to nill. I was indeed pushing firmly up against the inside of the fabric top. This surprised me, as I had heard & read on other automotive outlets that the RF, in fact, was the stingiest of the pair in the headroom department.

I found this to be quite the opposite when I slid into the RF & immediately engaged the folding hardtop in it’s closing operation. If my legs were capable of operating the pedals without contacting the steering wheel, the RF would undoubtedly be my choice among the two as I could actually sit quite comfortably within its cozy confines.

So, if you happen to be perhaps a smidge shorter in the leg department than I, you may be lucky enough to find that you are capable of comfortably operating either of these popular sports cars more comfrotably than you might have imagined. Now, the rest of the review.

The exterior of the current ND MX-5 is quite strikingly beautiful to my eyes. I recognize there are Miata purists out there who take issue with its squinty/angry headlights, or argue the circular portions of it of its taillights are too far inboard of the rear fenders. With them, I must respectfully disagree, or at least declare myself not as nitpicky. I love this car from just about every angle I have seen it in.

Though, color choice does make all the difference, as it does in most cases that I have observed. As such, I do not care for the dark metallic gray available. I much prefer the wonderfully metallic red, dark blue, & even the silverish-white. Typically, I am not as big a fan of the monochromatic offerings, particularly shades of gray.

I am indeed a sucker for bright colors, & this is where I think the MX-5 misses a key opportunity to distinguish itself even more amongst the crowd, not that it has a plethora of competitors at the moment, but why can’t we get a really bright blue, or orange, or yellow? I bet those would all be popular choices among potential MX-5 buyers.

I can’t help wondering what either the soft-top or the RF would look like in something so bright only a true sports car could pull it off. I just think it would make this fun, affordable sports car that much more endearing to its owners as well as those who encounter it, if it offered a color palette as splashy as say the Fiat 500 Abarth.

Beyond my prior assertions about the commodity that is interior space in the MX-5, I found the cabin a very pleasant place to be for the most part. Materials were quite nice & had a luxurious feel to them. Everything was ergonomically laid out by and large.

My gripes? I think the instrument cluster from the Mazda3 GT is superior in its readability & funtionality. I prefer having a digital speedo represented in the LCD display of the center-mounted tach, as opposed to having gear selection information presented therein. I likewise found the analog speedo to the right more difficult to read than the tach. A problem that would be easily remedied by utilizing the aforementioned portion of the tach to digitally display the speedo. This would free up more real estate to install more pertinent performance driving gauges such as oil temp. & pressure info, or battery status, or something else fun & unique.

I personally think the cloth seats should also have heating elements as they are quite desirable to have in a roadster such as this. Let’s face it, a lot of MX-5 buyers do daily these cars & would no doubt really appreciate this sort of creature comfort.

I wish this car could be optioned with an infotainment delete of sorts. Or perhaps a more basic headunit with a small dot-matrix style display, no app support or satellite radio, no navigation, etc. Something very basic, if not completely nonexistent. Hell, you could market it as additional weight reduction, & most MX-5 buyers would be happy about that.

I feel that a lot of people who buy this car, buy it as a toy. They don’t value such creature comforts & technology as much. They care much more about the experience of actually driving & feeling they are in harmony with their cars. Modern infotainment thus serves as a distraction from that purist’s dream, & is quite antithetical to the MX-5′s mission statement. Doesn’t the melodious thrum of the 2.0L 4-pot through it’s aluminum intake manifold & dual-outlet exhaust provide an adequate soundtrack to get your blood pumping? Again, I feel this is a missed opportunity, Mazda.

My closing statements on the interior include the afterthought that was the command & volume knob placement. That needs a serious re-evaluation as they are both easily & inadvertantly bumped while shifting or even just resting your arm. I’m totally OK with the movable cupholders though. And, I feel the dearth of storage is acceptable in such a car as this. If you need storage, get a hatchback or a wagon.

This car has a singular mission, to put a smile on the driver’s face every second they are behind the wheel. A mission that nearly all reviewers agree it successfully executes year-after-year. I feel more fat could have been trimmed from the new ND examples though, and it would only have improved their ability to execute.

Moving on to practicality-this should be a short read! Safety? Well, it’s hardly bigger or heavier than the go-kart you had in 5th grade, and being a roadster, you can surmise it won’t envelop you in a cocoon of airbags if the proverbial fecal matter impacts the fan, so what do you think safety is going to be like, realistically?

Storage space? Well we did briefly touch on it already, but I didn’t mention that you only need one hand with 5 fingers to count the number of cubic feet that are available in the trunk. Did I mention that it has no glovebox? And, the center-console storage is laughable. It has just enough room for maybe a medium-sized suitcase or a couple dufflebags. It won’t hold a weeks worth of groceries, & the storage cubbies behind the seats will not be easily or safely accessed while the car is moving. And, good look reaching the cupholder(s) behind you or not spilling a drink located behind you when you bump it with your elbow while shifting.

But, all of this is a non-issue, really. Again, because practicality is not this car’s mission. A lot can be forgiven when you look at what makes this car truly special from an enthuisiast’s perspective.

Fuel-efficiency is the big win here. The ND has demonstrated itself to be superb in this regard easily attaining 30mpg combined or better in everything I’ve read, or heard. And, the practical benefits don’t stop there.

This car’s exceptionally light curbweight means it can operate with tiny brakes & tires in addition to its fuel-sipping prowess. Tiny brakes & tiny tires are much more inexpensive to replace than their monstrous counterparts that you will find on more portly sports cars such as the Corvette, Camaro, or Mustang. Honestly, these brakes & tires are likely smaller than what’s currently installed on your Mom’s Toyonda Camcord, yet they are just as effective at doing their jobs thanks to the overall light weight of the car.

Additionally, the fact that this car operates without the complexity of forced-induction or a larger displacement V6 or V8, means it will be easier & cheaper to work on.

If history teaches us anything about this MX-5′s expected reliability, it’s that it will likely be near bulletproof. The NA, NB, & NC generations have shown themselves to be among the most steadfastly reliable cars ever produced. The fact that they’re purpose-built sports cars only makes their reputation for durability that much more impressive.

That being said, the all-new 6-speed manual found in the ND has experienced some hiccups at least in the ealier production runs of MY2017. Expect a fix for this going forward, or play it extra safe & wait for a MY2018 or newer MX-5.

On the whole, I can’t imagine that the ND will not be a solidly reliable & inexpensive to operate machine. In fact, it will undoubtedly provide economy car levels of frugailty & maintenance expenses.

That is probably one of its greatest appeals to enthusiasts. The MX-5 can be had for relatively little money compared to other genuine sports cars on the market, without sacrificing low overall cost of ownership, which for Miatas, has been historically much lower than the majority of competitors past or present thanks to Mazda’s committment to lightweight simplicity.

The fact that it can do all of this while still providing superior levels of driver engagement & enjoyment is a testment to its nearly 3 decades of overwhelming sales success. I just wouldn’t buy one new, because then I think they can get a bit expesive for what they are. There are some great deals to be had on preowned ND’s as well as prior generations if you fancy them more.

Laslty, if you fear the ND will be too slow for you with it’s diminutive 155hp, just know that it is geared extremely agressively & weighs less than almost anything else on sale today (as little as 2300ish lbs. in some trims). It will therefore, accelerate more agressively when compared to the gear ratios you might find in say a Golf GTI for example.

I remember reading that at least one of the major magazine publications was able to coax a 5.8 second 0-60mph run out of an ND Club trim with the lightweight BBS wheels. That is genuinely quick in my book, I don’t know about yours.

So, depsite the fact that I can’t operate one myself, I would be remiss were I not to at the very least prompt you to go take an ND MX-5 out for a test drive to discern whether it’s the sort of driving pleasure you’re after. In the meantime, I’ll just sit here hoping the next (NE?) MX-5 will offer just a tad more room and/or adjustment in the steering wheel positioning. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s first 4 iterations may just be the most fun I’ll never have.

#Mazda #Miata #MX-5 #RF #Club #The answer to everything #roadster #convertible #BBS wheels #smiles per gallon #Chris Harris hates me

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