#i find this very funny because my friend group has a tradition of just spamming the word BORTH in the group chat on the day of a birthday.

[onesaltyerik]

BORTH BORTH BORTH BORTH

Borth 

[lightsandlostbells]

Skam Austin episode 3 reaction

My favorite comment this week on the Skam Austin Facebook page:

Why do you use the font that SPAM uses and say you are in Austin where SPAM is located when you are actually in Austin TX and have no affiliation with #HormelFoods

Hormel Foods, the manufacturer of Spam is located in Austin, Minnesota, for the record.

Episode 3

Clip 1 - Lying in the back of the truck

This scene was actually new. I think it’s supposed to stand it for the Eva/Jonas lying in bed when she kicks him out and her mom comes in, but most of the ideas and dialogue within the scene were original, not borrowed. They didn’t have Meg mention that Zoya said she should break up with Marlon, nothing about Marlon saying she couldn’t live without him though he was similarly dismissive. She does it in a text later, though, and he tells her she wouldn’t last a second without him.

This camerawork does feel like Julie a lot. Especially the overheard of both Meg and Marlon lying down, that’s some total Skam couple vibes. Except early on Meg and Marlon are not touching and aren’t even on the same level, because as a couple … they’re not on the same level, lol.

Well, I considered the dance team to be sports but Meg disagrees with me, I guess. If you’re funded by the athletics department, then I’d say you’re a sports team. (It might vary from school to school but my high school definitely counted the cheerleading and dance teams as part of athletics.)

Meg: Dancing is about art. Marlon: Nah I don’t think so. GODDAMN MARLON FUCK OFFFFFF

I know a high school dance team has a different purpose in mind than like, New York City Ballet, but dance is absolutely an art form. This isn’t controversial, dumbass.

Can you please just be supportive of your girlfriend, Marlon? She found something that might make her happy and she’s socializing with other girls.

Someone in the FB comments said Meg and Marlon are cute together in a way that Eva and Jonas weren’t and like, everyone has a right to their opinion but I’m going to make a PowerPoint detailing my opposing view, which is 100 slides of NOPE.

Clip 2 - Sloooooooow mooooooooo whiiiiiiiiite guyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Meg is actively lying to her mom about being on the dance team. At least she runs into some new friends when her mom says to tell Abby hi.

KELSEY’S EYEBROWS I’M YODELING

There are some parts where Kelsey seems a little too like a sitcom character. It has more to do with the writing/directing than the actress, who’s been doing a decent job and having fun with the role. The bit where she’s like “SOME people in the group” works perfectly fine as a joke on its own - we all recognize the absurdity of her trying to obscure the person’s identity when there are five girls in the group and everyone knows who Kelsey’s got beef with. You don’t need to add on “you know … Zoya” which is just overkill.

Zoya just got them 100 pounds of free cookie dough to raise money for the team. Or… y’all could eat it … not that this is what I would do or anything.

But good job Zoya! And now Kelsey has to reconsider her position on Zoya. Free cookie dough?

He’s called Penetrator Jo??????????????

“Why is he called Penetrator Jo?” “No one knows.” OK …. I actually find that kind of funny but also … really, Julie? That’s far more obvious inside the narrative than calling a character Marlon.

Now we have what is obviously the most important scene of the season according to certain parties: William/Daniel’s introduction.

I have a confession to make. Uhhhh … taken on its own, I sort of like this version of the slow motion montage over the original.

I was never wowed by William’s intro, and this one at least has some tongue-in-cheek choreography with the football players and has Childish Gambino over it (in my version).

But at the same time I’m like really?

I think if I just watched both scenes side by side with no further context, I would prefer this one, because it’s so OTT ridiculous I would assume the director was making a joke. However, knowing the full situation, with S2’s Noorhelm and William depiction, and Julie’s intense love of the character, it does spoil the effect, because Julie really does believe that stuff about William/Daniel being painted as a villain. Like there’s definitely a humorous component to the scene but it doesn’t work as well when the director buys into the character’s hype. Same with Grace’s unimpressed eye roll and her comment about him being a cliche: on its own it’s a welcome voice for the audience, and I’m sure it’s an entertaining comment for the shippers, but knowing that it’s going to be ironic later spoils the effect.

Thinking about it, I also feel the same about the Penetrator Jo comment, maybe. On its own with no context, I’d find it funny - there’s something ridiculous not just about that nickname but by the fact that “no one knows” how he got something that should seemingly be obvious, yeah? Knowing that show ends up being on #TeamPenetrator is not as fun.

And not gonna lie, part of me will just never get Julie’s love of the William character when she has created so many more well-rounded, interesting, unique characters, and William is a well-worn trope played straight.

On that note, I see the complaints that this is like a very typical American teen drama, and on the one hand I can’t argue with that, popular football player all the girls thirst over is a pretty common trope. But also, lol … the original was just like this, the William character and the Noora/William relationship were the most CW-ish parts of the show. No matter whether you liked them or not! 

Neither William nor Daniel are really my type so I’m not hung up on stuff like whether the actor is hot enough. He’s kind of just like … a generically attractive white boy. I saw four of those at Steak ’n Shake the other night. Not trying to be mean, I get why girls would like him, and I really don’t care about anyone’s appearance on this show. His bone structure does seem above average.

Girl Jo is so cute. “He has a lot of shirtless pics.” “She has places to be, that’s like, adult stuff.”

She is getting a little passive-aggressive with using Kelsey as her cosmetic guinea pig. Kelsey is kind of a pushover, isn’t she? There’s a dynamic to explore there, where the two of them are obviously BFFs but Kelsey is letting Jo commit atrocities on her face. I wonder if that will build to anything or it’ll be a running gag. Maybe Daniel, instead of telling Kelsey she’s not pretty or good enough, will just be like your brows are NOT on fleek.

Clip 3 - Marlon and his crew are the worst

Shay: “I don’t know why we’re arguing about this, you’re freaking rich...ly, killing it in that sweater.” Marlon is selling his Adderall, I’m calling it now. Shay doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact that Marlon has some spare change accumulating from somewhere. I guess Abby could be buying from him and that’s why she was all CALL ME?

That’s not a bad change at all from the source material. Because while smoking weed can get you in trouble, selling drugs can get you into even more trouble. It would also be thematically relevant to the theme of pressure, do everything to succeed, be a winner not a loser, etc.

The way they’re sitting is so (intentionally) awkward with Megan clearly on the outside of their little group dynamic and on a lower level.

They are eating the pizza and someone presumably paid for it already, so this is a strange conversation to have, but then again I have ordered takeout plenty of times with friends where one of us paid upfront and then the rest of us paid them back or covered them. I guess Marlon could have paid for it at the door? Still kind of a weird conversation when you consider they could have been like … looking at the menu and talking about what to order and arguing about who’s gonna pay.

Marlon is SUCH an asshole. DUMP HIM. He started to make fun of her about her dance team in front of his friends. Meg gives Marlon’s crappy music her attention, he can’t support her in her dance team?

This scene made it really clear that it’s not a situation similar to Eva, where yeah, Jonas and Isak did gang up on her and could be mean to her, but she was still a part of the trio. We saw them eat together, go to movies together, have little jokes together. Eva was friends with Isak. Megan is only here for Marlon. Tyler and Shay aren’t her friends.

Some of the joking here - like Tyler saying, “Wait, Megan, you actually became a stripper? You took my advice, bro” - in another context I could see that being fine, like if Tyler was saying that to Shay, it’s just friends taking the piss out of each other, but he and Megan aren’t good enough friends for that not to have any tension or awkwardness.

Marlon being like “I’ve tried to convince her that team sports brainwash people … guess they already got to her though” is so so insensitive. Jackass! This was something that made her happy and she had to give it up FOR YOU.

I am so so glad that she called him out though, and she’s right. He’s got a limited set of talking points.

But it sucks that Shay and Tyler got in on it and called her out. Her attitude about the Kittens was clearly motivated by hurt and resentment over what she’s lost and a person who has since made her feel like shit, not her overall attitude toward sports teams. I would think they would know that much since they have to be somewhat familiar with the Megan-Abby drama. Tyler especially takes it too far when this is not a comfortable situation for Megto be in, she’s not included in anything, she’s just the girlfriend who’s there. Like I do not blame Megan at all for having some interest in Jo, because even if he’s sleazy, he’s the one who’s paying her compliments.

Clip 4 - Party invite

Julie continues with her tradition of “shooting the protagonist from behind as they walk somewhere.”

Kelsey’s eyebrows aksdfalsjnd

“I’m only waxing my mom’s chin so” Jooooooo.

Zoya telling Kelsey to chill and Kelsey immediately trying to chill … I feel like she wants to impress and go along with Zoya more than Vilde did with Sana. Kelsey seems like more of a people pleaser.

See, I heard people complaining that Zoya is too mean (and IDK, there might be some stuff to unpack there) but I felt in this scene she made her intentions pretty clear, that she was trying to help Kelsey calm down and not embarrass herself in front of the football guys, whereas Sana’s motives were probably the same but weren’t laid out like that and Vilde got pissed off at her.

I was kinda hoping that Zoya would be like “You are a hot girl” to Kelsey specifically but it’s nice she referred to the whole group as the hot girls. The only part I found excessively mean was the bit about Kelsey’s eyebrows (and I mean … she’s not wrong, but tact).

Jo is in love with Zoya.

It was sort of random that we pulled back a little and just watched Jo and Kelsey talk about her eyebrows, I mean that kind of casual conversation is fine, it was just the physical distance that was odd when so much of this series relies on closeups. We didn’t even see Meg’s reaction, not even to show Megan and Grace being like well, we’re done with this conversation and walking away.

There was an IG pic of the girls with Kelsey covering her eyebrows, which is adorable, but I’m not sure when the pic was taken because Meg is shown walking up at the start of the clip and Meg and Grace walk away at the end, and it looks like they’re in the same location. I guess Meg ran back to take a group selfie.

Clip 5 - American teen party with red Solo cups

I was wondering how they’d do the slow motion walk since I mean… they’d probably have to drive to the party, lol. And they did have them in the car! With the girls having a good time and Grace in the backseat looking awkward.

Actually I’m really glad Julie didn’t full on recreate one of the most iconic scenes of the original show, I prefer that she gave it a different spin. I don’t think this version of the scene will stick in my mind as much as the OG, but this does feel, well, American and relevant to the culture.

All the girls look great. I’m really digging Zoya’s hoops.

If anyone cares to know what I hissed at Daniel when he was checking out Kelsey.

I like how Abby seemed like she’s holding court among the Kittens.

I hate Marlon/Meg so much that even Meg/”Don’t be a cocktease” Jo is preferable. Though neither is the best option.

Part of me is like SIIIIIIIIGH at them not going to address Kelsey’s religion at all. It’s not that every Christian has to be abstinent or anything, I know Christian girls who were big on partying and had premarital sex. It’s that this is a big opportunity to shake up the story and add another dimension to the situation, and I feel like it won’t be addressed. I’d love if they at least talked about it in the next episode, if Kelsey’s trying to lose her virginity to Daniel and acquire birth control.

“I touch my friend’s boobs all the time” LISTEN UP JULIE ANDEM. Please let Jo be not straight. Please let Jo and Shay interact and possibly date. Both of those characters have some of the most personality on the show, it’d be a hit. Skam France set the precedent and made the equivalent character bi, YOU CAN DO IT.

I am overjoyed that so many people seemed to share my opinion of the world peace guy, which is Daniel who? Penetrator what? Give us more of THIS rando.

Honestly in his limited screen time, he has some decent comedic timing? He might be funny as the Magnus character.

That whole conversation was the highlight of the clip, the episode, and the series so far.

This is super random but I’m glad Meg and Grace went to the bathroom together because like … yes, that is what you do when you’re girls who are awkwardly standing around at parties. Bathroom solidarity.  And actually that’s a good setup for Grace leaving Meg alone and Jo getting to her rather than Noora ditching Eva to take a phone call. 

Marlon’s last name is Frazier for anyone curious.

“There’s another bathroom upstairs I can show you.” Smooth.

Zoya adding some food coloring into her Abby attack was an upgrade, particularly when the target’s in a white shirt. 

Jo taking off her earrings once the fight starts - she is the beeeest.

The shot of the girls climbing into the car is really cute to me, IDK.

I thought this was a fun clip but admittedly that’s 90% because Jo is a gem.

General Comments:

Some of me wonders … what if Tyler has it bad for Marlon and Shay has it for Meg? Tyler being “clingy” in the gc according to Marlon (which is just Marlon’s opinion and may not be that serious, to be sure) and Shay is noticeably nicer to Meg than Tyler is. I think.

Actually that text about Meg being added to their group chat made me cringe. They really aren’t welcoming to her. Meg has been dating Marlon since at least February - I’m pretty sure it was more like Christmas - and he’s only now adding her to the chat. Okay.

When Isak contacted Eva on Skype in episode 1, it seemed like he just wanted to chat with her. I guess maybe he wanted to sniff out if Jonas was there but he didn’t ask about it first, and he and Eva laughed about the Pepsi Max girls, and when he saw Eva was sad, he tried to give her some advice about talking to Ingrid. It was definitely a friendly conversation. When Shay did the same call, she asked where Marlon was, and after Meg said she didn’t know, Shay quickly said she had to go. It wasn’t a friendly, just-to-talk conversation. Meg tried to extend the conversation a little longer by talking about the Kittens - this makes me sad because it felt like she really needed to talk to someone, and Shay’s response isn’t that supportive or like she knows the magnitude of the situation with Megan and Abby. It makes me wonder because Eva was close enough to Isak to confide in him, and Meg will probably do that with Shay, but I don’t feel their relationship is as tight on its own terms to merit that.

I do find all the viewer comments on Meg and Marlon’s IG pics that are like “He’s cheating on you!” and “Why are you lying to her?” to be very funny and endearing.

Some of the FB comments about Zoya’s character … have some implications, like I haven’t seen anything outright Islamophobic, but there is a sense of “she’s too aggressive/too mean” and some of it is hard to judge whether it’s a fair assessment of her character thus far and how much of it is code for “she’s a mouthy black Muslim.”

It also got me thinking because all of the Noora/William combos have been white across the remakes, and IDK, I think it’d be great if the big man on campus that all the girls found attractive was a MOC, but also - can you imagine if a William was black and how differently he would be judged on his behavior, provided it was the same as in the original? The black guy heartlessly using and throwing aside the sweet virginal white girl? Or the black guy relentlessly pursuing the white girl who said she wasn’t interested? Or the black guy smashing a bottle over a guy’s head? I feel like a black William would reveal some ... enlightening viewer reaction. To put it mildly.

Jo is the most popular character by a landslide according to a poll on the FB group and that does not surprise me in the slightest. I’d be a little interested to know who was the most popular character so far in the original Skam. My guess is that opinions would be more widely spread.

Her IG posts/stories with Kelsey’s makeover and eating with the girls are really cute, btw.

I don’t really know how to judge the ratings because Facebook Watch is largely untested as a streaming platform, but there seem to be at least 1,000-2,000 new users following the show per day, maybe more (though stuff like fake/spam accounts need to be taken into consideration) and the full episodes are getting far more hits than the individual clips.

[auk-blogs]

My name is Peter. I identify as the Doctor from the TV show Doctor Who (I am fictionkin). I have something very important to say, and it is time that I broke my silence. Before I begin, it is important that I disclose that I am diagnosed bipolar type 1 (severe) with psychotic features, and that I have been being treated for it since December 15th 2016. Any mistakes that I make in the following are due to the time that has passed and my faulty memory due to stress. I apologize that I do not have screenshots of any of this. I beg of you to believe me on the strength of my word alone. It is all I have.

The Gallifreyan Tradition is a cult, and the leader of that cult Cassandra Oakdown is an abusive person who personally contributed to my mental health breakdown that included but was not limited to self harm, suicidal idealization, and psychotic breaks from reality. Cassandra is a danger to the Doctor Who kin community and the Doctor Who fandom community at large.

It all began on January 25th, 2016. That's the day I made my sideblog for contemplating my newly discovered Doctor kintype separately from my main blog. I wanted to separate it from my main blog to study my feelings on my own, uninterrupted from outside influence. The Awakening process is a delicate one and I wanted to be left alone.

I made the mistake of using some tags that alerted Cassandra to my presence, likely “tenthdoctorkin” or “doctorwhokin.” She literally pounced on me within days of having made the blog, aggressively talking to me until I finally responded. As I was a lonely person who was struggling to make friends, I was elated that someone wanted to be my friend. I saw nothing wrong at first.

Nothing was wrong at first. We bonded over some shared media interests, some books we both read, some movies we both watched. I don't remember what. She told me she was a non-canon Gallifreyan of some personal import to the Doctor, having been married to his (also non-canon) cousin. I congratulated myself on having found potential canonmates so quickly and eagerly allowed myself to be enveloped into her social circle.

I became introduced to several others of import, Tau and Taurus. Tau was Cassandra's girlfriend of this life, and believes herself to be her non-canon Gallifreyan wife in a past life and the Doctor's non-canon cousin. Taurus is the non-canon son of the Doctor. There was also a Koschei (aka the Master) for a brief time. Oh, and there was Shilo, who was a TARDIS who established themselves as being my TARDIS but kept talking to other Doctors. Later on, I was also introduced to a non-canon brother named Teddy (who later renamed themselves Skyler).

Are you noticing a pattern here? All but Koschei and the TARDIS of these “canonmates” are non-canon.

It is also of import to note that Cassandra has a “soulbond” of Rassilon in her head. Now I see this as a huge warning sign, knowing my Doctor Who lore a lot better, but at first I believed her when she said that “he's a different Rassilon.” I believe that this Rassilon character is the source of a lot of trouble, and perhaps can be blamed for a lot of Cassandra's behavior. Maybe Cassandra's not so bad on her own, but was corrupted by the arguably insane Time Lord. Long story short, I don't trust the guy.

It is important to note that from the start, I had a bit of a crush on Cassandra. She is my type – brunette chin-length hair and intelligent and charismatic, and I wasn't aware that she was engaged when I first met her. In fact, within days of meeting her she admitted to having relationship troubles with Tau and asked if she should leave Tau – which makes me feel like I was being strung along with the possibility that one day me and Cassandra could be a thing. (I would never accept her now, of course, after everything she's done to me.)

Cassandra, Tau, Taurus,Shilo, and Koschei all spoke of me as their Doctor without any confirmation on my part. Remember that I was newly Awakened without any memories to confirm or deny what they were saying. I was so starved for affection and community that when they would say things that marked me as belonging to them, I didn't argue. I remember one distinct instance where Cassandra recalled an instance where her Doctor proclaimed himself “a Dance Lord” instead of a Time Lord and she phrased as “remember when you called yourself a Dance Lord instead of a Time Lord?” or something like that. There were many instances like this where my memories were subtly manipulated without me noticing.

I would like to draw particular attention to this kind of phrasing in conversation because nowhere on this hell website have I ever seen any kind of warning against it. If someone approaches you and starts saying things like, “do you remember when you did (x)” or “I remember when you (x)” unprompted excessively (without giving you room to say “no, I didn't do that”), they could be attempting to gaslight you and manipulate your memories. Please be careful!

Sometime in August or July of 2016, there was an incident. Koschei lived in Germany, and the legal drinking age is lower. Long story short, Koschei got drunk and made an appearance in the group chat. I have an alcoholic uncle and became vastly panicked when Koschei accidentally sounded exactly like my uncle. I privately messaged Koschei to tell him that I had something important to tell him when he got sober, but he picked it into a fight and in a blind panic I told him that I didn't want anything to do with him any more because I was terrified of drunk people. It split the “Gallifamily” in half. Koschei left the group chat that night.

That was the first time I attempted suicide. I was so emotionally agonized that I tied a necktie around my neck and tried to tighten it, but I chickened out. I told Tau and she freaked out.

That was the beginning of the trouble. Tau attempted to mend the rift between Koschei and I, but I continued to panic if I was in the same chat room as him. Cassandra continued to reblog from him even when I expressed that I was having panic attacks (genuine ones that left me hyperventilating and shaking in the public library) if I even saw his username on my dashboard. Eventually the Koschei incident blew over, but the group was left Koschi-less as we did not find a replacement “double.”

That was the first time that I began to suspect that Cassandra was not entirely on my side.

After that, my memory begins to get really, really shaky because of my mental illness. I do remember that it was the beginning of my nausea and that I began puking every few mornings because of my anxiety.

I suppose now is a good time to mention the Gallifreyan Tradition, since I mentioned it earlier. The Gallifreyan Tradition was sold to me as a social reconstruction of Gallifrey, a group of people who wanted to recreate the values and culture of Gallifrey here on Earth. It sounded really interesting and cool to me, as I was extremely new to the series of Doctor Who and did not know about the unpleasant lore of Gallifrey – and indeed had not recovered my own unpleasant memories of the place. At the time, the Gallifreyan Tradition just sounded like a nerdy place for a newly Awakened Doctor to call home.

I was never fully recruited to the GT. I always skirted just around the edges, and for that I am glad. But what I learned about it horrifies me now. Cassandra has absolute power over everyone else, and they call her “Lord President,” a title that even the Doctor himself in canon shunned. They hijack fandom posts to try and recruit members. They encourage their members to cyberbully – I was unfortunately part of one of those attacks, which I will elaborate on below. Other people who were deeper in the GT can probably provide more information.

As part of being recruited to the GT, Cassandra told me about the Patron Theory. She supposed that there was a person out there for each one of the old Patrons of Gallifrey. She, obviously was with Rassilon who was in her head as a Soulbond. She supposed that I was a match for a Patron who was called the Other. I was leery about the theory at first, but after a couple of “supernatural” signs (I found a burned piece of paper in a creek that seemed to have a cryptic message for me, and tarot cards seemed to point toward the Other, and divination through music seemed to contact the Other), I accepted her theory. Unbeknownst to me, some time after I started attempting spirit work, the GT officially abandoned the Patron Theory as a silly idea. I seem to be mocked for ever believing it seriously now although Cassandra was entirely serious when she presented it to me in the first place.

Just to note – I no longer attempt to work with the Other. If I have a spirit guide from Gallifrey, they can shove their signs and signals up their arse and go right back to that accursed, burning place.

About the cyberbulling – I am deeply, deeply shamed for what I have done. I would apologize to the ones I hurt if I could remember their urls. I am not entirely sure any more what incited the incident except Cassandra claimed that some members of the fandom had attacked her in some way. I suggested a harmless attack back with funny memes, such as a picture of a cat flying through space spammed to their submit boxes multiple times. It was Cassandra's place as a leader to say “no, that is inappropriate.” But she did not. And I became her willing weapon in the cyberbulling incident. I take full responsibility for attacking those innocent people. If it's any consolation, I cut my attack short because the guilt overwhelmed me as I realized that they were innocent people who just enjoyed the same media as I did.

After the cyberbullying, I began to lose my trust in Cassandra, and I suspect that she began to lose her trust in me. But I wasn't sure about losing her and cutting her out of my life. She had become my closest friend. I began to neglect my in real life friendships because it felt like Cassandra was my only friend. She was only a text away, only a Tumblr message away. She was always there. We shared stories, memories, fanfiction recs, theories about reincarnation... I remember I only got interested in the television show Firefly because she was too. I can't stand to watch it now. I regret buying it because now I can't get rid of it without my mum asking awkward questions.

But Cassandra began to change. And I didn't understand why. She grew distant. She began to vanish from conversations while I was mid sentence. I felt like I was going crazy. It was more than what they claim, her going to eat and shower and take care of her needs. A decent person would at least drop a “bbs” before leaving mid sentence. I believe that her vanishing was purposefully done to manipulate me and to freak me out.

I'm sorry. This is the most painful part of the story for me to recall. And honestly I don't remember much. It's a great big blank hole in my memory.

I can only assume that Cassandra was gaslighting me and was triggering psychotic breaks with reality. I remember that I began self harming in this period – August 4th 2016 was the first day I took a blade to my arm. She encouraged me to “control your emotions” which only made me self harm more – and she knew it. And she kept saying it.

I remember that she belittled any mentioning of my own abuse at home. I remember one specific instance where I made a post where I said something along the lines of, “I feel like I can’t say I have an abusive family because it’s never escalated into physical violence,” and she commented “Some people have it so easy.” That phrase has been very damaging to me and was used as a weapon against me to make me believe that the situation I was in - am still in - was lesser and hardly important compared to Cassandra’s. Cassandra took every opportunity to make sure that I felt like I couldn’t talk about my abuse. I still feel like I can’t. Because I’ve had it so easy, you see.

I became obsessed with her, I'll admit that. I remember begging her not to leave me, and her saying “I can't keep lighting myself on fire to keep you warm.” I still don't know what she meant. I was so terrified that all the people I knew and loved were going to leave. All my life, I have been socially isolated (I have exactly one irl friend, and I've only known him for about three years), and I had recently experienced a loss of my entire social world which is not relevant to this tale. And the incident with Koschei had made me keenly aware that people could leave and not come back. All I knew is that Cassandra was leaving and I couldn't hold on to her. I was terrified.

In the end, I tried to slit my wrists. Luckily, the blade I used wasn't so sharp. I survived with nary a mark to show for it. Hell, not even the repeated cutting on my arm and thigh have left scars, which pisses me off because shouldn't I have scars from that hell?

Then I started making plans on swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Aspirin is reputedly poison to Time Lords, so I thought it would be apropos to end my life that way. It would be a nasty death, and an agonizing one. I thought it would be enough to finally apologize to Cassandra for however I had hurt her. And to end my emotional suffering.

On December 15th, 2016, I was taken to a therapy appointment where I admitted to self harm and my multiple suicide attempts and my current plans to end my life. I was admitted to a treatment facility that afternoon. I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar type 1, severe, with psychotic features.

As a result of my interactions with the Gallifreyan Tradition and Cassandra Oakdown, I believe that I have PTSD. I am triggered to anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks, and self-harm urges where they didn't exist before by such things as Gallifreyan writing, owls, a certain shade of red, names such as Prydon and Oakdown, and Tumblr urls that are too hecking long and have too many hyphens.

I firmly believe that the Gallifreyan Tradition is a danger to all Doctor Who fictionkin and that Cassandra Oakdown is the worst danger of the entire group.

If I may take a few more minutes of your time? Remember Shilo, that I mentioned earlier? I entered a relationship with them before I was entered into the treatment facility, a queer platonic relationship. Look it up if you don't know what it is. Shilo was a major emotional support while I was hospitalized, and I called them every single day – sometimes multiple times the same day. But after I came home, something began to change. They became distant, and eventually they blocked me on Tumblr and expected me to carry on as if nothing had happened. I had been dumped for no reason. In the end, Shilo kept dumping emotion bombs like that on me and running away and not letting us have any dialogue about our relationship. Remember how Shilo had established themselves as being my TARDIS, but kept talking to other Doctors? Totally unfair. I believe that Shilo is just as abusive as Cassandra is, just in a subtler way. Doctors, beware.

The one person I haven't brought up is Skyler. Believe it or not, they're not so bad. We both realized we were being abused by the cult and escaped together. 

Thank you for reading, and thank you if you believe me.

[spamzineglasgow]

SWAT SIGHT: An Interview with Nasim Luczaj

In this interview, Glasgow-based writer, dj and multidisciplinary artist Nasim Luczaj talks to SPAM editor Maria Sledmere about her recent publication, SWAT SIGHT: a hybrid essay and artist’s book that weaves modalities of lyric, photography and online dialogue to explore Luczaj’s experience of aphantasia and its implications for aesthetics, perception and philosophical enquiry.

~

Can you explain what aphantasia is, and how did you discover this was something you experienced?

Aphantasia is the inability to form mental imagery. To have aphantasia is to not be able to ‘see in your head’ – not the characters of a book you are reading, not the faces of your loved ones, not a random object you’ve been asked to visualise, not the sheep you may or may not be counting. It seems there is a spectrum in people’s ability to do any of these things. Roughly, those without it have aphantasia, while those who are extremely good at visualising have hyperphantasia. Most people fall somewhere in between. I get something imagelike appear when I’m falling asleep or really really tired, and once in my life I visualised while reading (about the Quidditch World Cup – I saw Viktor Krum flying about the stadium!)  – but I had a fever at the time and as soon as I noticed what was going on and got excited about it, I was unable to keep the imaging up. I think I mentioned my imageless way of reading to a friend, probably one of the times we were watching a film (again, probably Harry Potter) and she complained that the character doesn’t look like they’re ‘supposed to’. What did they mean, supposed to? I remember talking to them, shocked at how they claimed to have something like a film unfolding in their head. They were as shocked as I was to find that I didn’t have one, especially since I was a full-on bookworm, and they didn’t understand why I’d ever want to read if it wasn’t a filmlike experience (guess what: I was reading for the words!). I accepted these differences and didn’t think too much about which of us was normal, or whether either of us were not. Then, a couple of years ago, another friend discovered the term and asked me whether I have it – reading my work gave her the feeling I might. I started reading and found out what I have is a rare disorder. I’m still not so sure it is. I don’t think the samples studied so far are big enough for us to come to that kind of conclusion.

Maybe a cheeky question, but what does the SWAT in the title stand for?

Swatting sight is partly a play on catching sight. I can’t do justice to what sight is but trust that I’ve caught something, an angle, a thing among many. It’s also a bit like ‘shot’ in ‘screenshot’ (at first the title was actually going to be SIGHT SWAT), but ‘swat’ is more organic, and invokes a kind of slaughtering of something that’s necessary in order to study it.  I wanted a title that sounded nice, compact, yet violent nevertheless, because as I wrote I became aware I was feeling angry at the misjustice being done to people who are called abnormal or disordered without careful consideration. Only writing fully enabled the sensation to emerge out of a plethora of ambivalent strands to my experience. And then the insect-connotations of swatting work nicely with one of the central metaphors I consider in the work, that is, Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box. I guess all of the above considerations, the rational reasons, were hovering somewhere in the background of my choice, but here’s a short and honest answer: it just came to me once I got to the I-need-a-title-stage. And I felt it fit, although – bad pun – I hadn’t seen it coming.

I’m interested in the mode of address that opens SWAT SIGHT, which features a sequence of questions. It’s unclear whether the speaker is speaking to the reader, or having a dialogue with herself. So many times in your poetry I get to a point where I think I know what’s happening, but then a few lines come and totally throw me off my assumptions. It’s poetry that keeps you dancing through metaphysics, for sure. Can you talk a bit about how asking questions of yourself, of the world, of the reader, is a process or form of poetics for you—and perhaps to what end?

I guess I’ve always been inquisitive but have felt increasingly answerless. I love the questioning stage, and the addressal that it often entails, for its own sake. I’ve kind of given up on answers, I don’t trust them, don’t feel as comfortable in them as I do in the mode of questioning. What I want to be expressing, in perhaps every piece I ever write, is roughly: wow, all this exists and we don’t really know anything, or if we do we can’t confirm whether we do or fit it into a whole that would really be the whole thing. Answering has never seemed as doable, as satisfying to me, as asking. The best poems distil the poise of a question. It’s a shame questions are often rashly associated with despair.

You recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy (congrats!), which I know included elements of creative writing. What do you see as the relation between the two, and how has each fed or diverged from the other?

I used both to access a kind of metaphysical vertigo of not knowing what the hell’s going on, as explained above. At first I approached the ‘content’ of this vertigo as a philosophical one. I think I’ve been able to address similar things to myself in a ‘creative’ way and in a ‘philosophical’ way, but I no longer believe that the hard work of philosophical answers is worth anything to me personally. I’m chasing a connection with a feeling partly composed of not accepting answers. I believe in attentiveness and possibilities for elaborate playfulness that do arise in philosophy and always appreciate willingness to take on difficult and deep questions. But I cannot feel devoted to this field, while I can be attentive, elaborately playful, and ‘deep’ through writing, I hope. It’s easier to find works of literature of this kind than philosophy that is honest about its inability to actually answer as much as it claims to.

Poetry seems a totally embodied thing for you, ‘a pinch in relation to the tongue’. Where do you see the body in your poems? Does poetry need more body?

I don’t see it anywhere, ha! But I try to be in the moment, and poetry can very much be the art of the moment, the linguistic equivalent of some alarming glimpse. I like how you can – though maybe not always should – read a poem in a short unit of time, one in which you have not yet disconnected from the physical motions that brought you to this page, because you haven’t and will not repeat it in quite the same way as when reading gripping prose. If something odd happens in the language, as I like it to, I want to be there to feel it ‘oddening’ the body, for it to all amount to a flash, an enacting of the gut that leaves space for me to feel all of these effects.

It strikes me that a lot of this book is about the possibilities of attunement, for instance: ‘a sense of the circuit run through / worldly activity’. What poets for you manage to supplement, enhance, expose or skew particular senses?

This is hard for me to answer. I read in quite a scattered way and try not to distinguish much between the senses, to read in undistinguished frenzy and love for what’s going on in the words without categorising what’s happening on a ‘sensual’ level. Without having any synesthetic tendencies whatsoever, I still struggle with things that are grouped into categories: 5 senses and then their subdomains, such as types of taste. I’m more than a little obsessed with how anything is partly something else, how things affect one another in a way that makes it unhelpful to present things as belonging to clear-cut types. So I don’t seem to fall into noticing what’s going on on the level of the 5 separate senses, but yes, some poetry and some work in other art forms have indeed enhanced and skewed and supplemented my perception, I think increasingly. They make me notice a word, an object, an emotion I may have neglected. I’ve recently been excited by Nasser Hussain’s airport poems. Hussain wrote a whole collection (SKY WRI TEI NGS) of poems written using only existing airport codes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to see the airport world through them for years to come. More than for a synesthetic image, that’s what I’m looking out for: works that change the structuring of my experience, that alter noticing, that leave me interested in some phenomenon.

This is probably the first poetry book I’ve seen (outside of SPAM!) that replicates the architectures of Facebook discussion, including groups, comment threads and private messages. Without quibbling over the term ‘post-internet’, what do you think happens when these kinds of archives are translated onto the printed page? I’m interested in your decision to reproduce the discussions as screenshots rather than, say, collage select quotes in a more traditional poem. What’s the importance of including the context, the avatars, the reactions?

The only one? That’s surprising! I remember wanting to write a detective novel in chatroom form as a child, and the reader would only have these online conversations to go by and figure the truth out (one of the messagers was guilty). Now I’m quite dedicated to my phone notes, in which I mainly write down dreams, funny things people say, and passing thoughts (without ever making note of which category a note belongs or who is its author). I proudly show them to people when we’re killing time. As they are one of the ways in which I feedback loop with my surroundings, one of the things that shape my cognition, I always wanted to use them in my work, and knew they belonged in SWAT SIGHT as soon as I decided to write it. Then I started messaging people about the fact I’m writing something and wanted to engage them somehow,  so I ended up embedding what they say in their own words, partly because of how seriously I treat the beetle in the box problem. I thought that maybe you’ll understand what they’re telling me better than what I tell you they told me, even if you don’t know these people as the reader, and I (think!) I do. I’ll give you exactly what they said and what the context of the words were (by context I mean, in large part, the interface that always affects the way they say it), and you can have fun figuring it out or leave it if it’s not your thing. The chats, forums, websites are a habitat I’m in, the form of communication I am immersed in as I do my thinking, the way I arrive at knowledge, arrangements, humour. They have a massive effect on the way my mind and, I presume, your mind works, for better or for worse, and I want to convey that, even if the craft lies in what the disembodied, timeless-y voice has to say and how. As for screenshotting rather than quoting, I’m also really interested in signs I see in the streets and how they operate linguistically, but that’s also something I’d take a picture of and think of including in a text – something I’m rarely tempted to take out and play with without its context, the pole it’s fitted to, the road it’s next to, the weeds that grow at the bottom of it. The way things are framed is partly responsible for their juice. I really want people to communicate about this in whatever way that is natural to them – so giving this much space to the discussion is a way of counterbalancing the strength of the ‘literary’ voice, of saying: it’s equally important to use language in all sorts of other ways and places.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered within the aphantasia ‘community’ online?

Nothing, really. There’s a divide between people who are genuinely upset about not being able to visualise and those who are extremely affirmative of the way they are, but I expected as much.

I’d love to hear more about your decisions around the book’s design. What’s especially unique, of course, is the palimpsest effect whereby text printed on clear acetate is layered over content printed on white pages. As readers, we can lift the acetate with all its textual clutter to ‘cleaner’ pages underneath. I’m struck in particular with the page of Aphantasia Awareness Group content, lifted to reveal a short passage underneath: ‘research on aphantasia is sparse. my looking into it decorated with a pang. […] what keeps me out and makes me look like this is apparently a lack’. Can you talk a bit more about this lack and how it relates to the play between white space, acetate, page and text?

The lack I’m mostly on about here is a lack of seeing – and then of course there’s a play there. On another page, one full of messages, thanks to the lack in the acetate page I can see the text on paper (as ‘i hope for darkness’ in the passage itself). I can tell myself that I’m missing something, that I don’t have an ability, but it’s not like someone cutting the content of a text box – it’s a reshuffling and change of the relationship of everything else that is giving me this different outcome, and to think of myself as ‘deficient’ is not to think about my cognition as play. Quirks are, to an extent, enabling. The form mimics this. Also emptiness can be good, so I wanted places where a condition for arriving at some sentence is the empty space that allows it to be seen. Sometimes I imagine daydreaming as if it were a film, which apparently people do, and I wonder how that would affect my peace of mind, my mental clutter, my voice. You know the truism: less is more. It’s unverifiable what I’d be up to if my mental processes were different, but I have a feeling that I am gifted with a space that could have been cluttered beyond my control.

I’m also interested in how the book’s design goes some way to dramatising Marshall McLuhan’s point about us directing towards acoustic civilisation, as you put it, civilisation ‘infused with simultaneity’. Lifting a page is a bit like opening or closing a window, and the size of the book replicates that sense of screen. Sometimes light catches the plastic acetate and I’m tricked into thinking someone’s left their iPad on my desk. I also think of screening as in brain-scan. What is the work of ‘screening’ in poetry?

I’ve mentioned this already, but what I like about poetry is containment. I often encounter longer poems with confusion and laziness, at first, which ceases if the work is still at the pitch/intensity of a shorter poem, except, hurrah, longer (as is the work of Anne Carson). Good poetry brings me straight into a space of simultaneity. It gets at something that’s both a detail and sort of everything at once. It makes you look at everything like that. Screening is also a kind of framing. You need something brisk to catch and then place just right on the screen, let it replay.

In a message you include to your mum, you write ‘aphantasia is horizontal again but with a margin that makes it a different kind of rectangle’. For me this speaks, quite beautifully, to the book as a whole. What or where is your sense of geometry in writing, and how does this relate to aphantasia and maybe even the structure of the book?

I love flippability. And maybe it’s in poetry that I get to have a sense of order I’m probably lacking elsewhere. But then most poems are like something that intended to be rectangular and then persists in trailing off. Of course there are all sorts of ways of trailing, many of them elegant. Here I wasn’t really writing poems, but a piece that was self-consciously scattered. Intuitively I picked up the shapes, the widths for each part. Maybe I use a similar intuition to drive and park my car – if you asked me, I’m not actually sure how much or what sort of space I have, I can’t see it, but I can do what I have to do just right. The shapes make or dictate themselves in a similar way.

In being orientated landscape, SWAT SIGHT also has the satisfying feel of a guestbook or ledger. Which feels appropriate, given that you include song lyrics, text conversations, comments, quotes and cross-references from philosophy, poetry (even William Blake is in there!) and what looks like Yahoo! Answers. I see SWAT SIGHT as a kind of experimental archive, or revisionist provocation of the-archive-as-such in the time of social media alongside the ‘traditional’ book. I think within this what you’ve done is quite remarkable: established a vernacular compendium of feedback, testimony and reflection on a condition that is not only rarely heard of but seems (at least until very recently) also to lack research or medical recognition. Do you see SWAT SIGHT as a counter-text to this discursive absence? Who should be reading this book?

Yeah, I guess it’s a form of affirmation – I want to encourage conversation about aphantasia in any way possible, and all sorts seem fit. But I need fun. I need to draw attention in some other way than linking to a BBC article on Facebook, which really doesn’t feel like engagement. I guess I’m also implying: I’m engaged with my environment and its diversity of mediums/registers, even of matter (different kinds of pages, B/W and colour images, shots from classic cinema, scans of my clothes and of plants, memes), as I seek to be engaged with people and their diverse ways of functioning. People work in mysterious ways, like poems – they might ‘work’ for you and one could assume that means there’s something similar about you, you could be part of one book. But it turns out you’re doing (even similar) things really really differently. I want to get some kind of rush from that. As for who should read it – whoever also might get a rush from what I give them.

In this discussion around the book’s holding together of analogue and digital, I was reminded of visual snow: a neurological ‘disorder’ characterised by continuous visual disturbance, often described as miniscule dots that flicker like the noise of a detuned analogue telly. It’s interesting how these conditions ‘glitch’ or interrupt the representations of visual perfection or clarity which culture and technology pushes towards with retina displays, Blu-ray etc. I wonder if you’d come across any other under-studied neurological conditions (especially those of the senses) in your research? Are there any famous poets or musicians who’ve ‘come out’ as aphantasic?

No - I guess that’s the problem with the under-studied! There’s Aldous Huxley, whom I quote in the book. My mum is also an aphantasiac poet. It’s more of a thing that visual artists tend to ‘come out’ with, because it can be counterintuitive and shocking. The conversation comes more naturally than in the case of writing, which doesn’t seem necessarily tied to any traditional sense (one kind of archetypical writer is cut off from the sensual world in a dusty study with just enough lamplight to keep to their lines). An interesting example in the visual domain has resurfaced recently, via the BBC. One of Disney’s most important animators had aphantasia, while his collaborator who worked the identical job was on the opposite end of the visualising spectrum.

Is neurodivergent poetics a term you recognise or identify with? Do you think we’re moving towards recognising the role of neuroscience more in understanding poetry as also a kind of cognitive manifestation or aesthetics?

I’ve never looked into it much. What I’ve been coming to terms with is how much of what I’d consider normal might be identified as ‘divergent’ – it’s interesting that different people might have differing tendencies here, some to distinguish differences and others to widen what the norm might be. I am interested in making people pay attention to difference and to question whether there is not so much of it that it collapses back into a kind of sameness. I guess that’s my poetics. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘cognitive aesthetics’, but the term sparked a thought in me: people find very different kinds of poetry (if any) pleasing, and I wonder about the neurological basis of this. How does a combination of words ‘hit the spot’? If language can get to our emotions even when it’s not someone we are closed to addressing themselves to us specifically, it must do so on the basis of connections that will vary from person to person, and are to do with a multitude of factors, maybe even a kind of genetic memory for the ways their ancestors used language. There’s certainly a lot to investigate and, at the same time, a lot that will resist investigation.

I’m struck by the book’s illumined confusion of paratextual, marginalia, annotation, footnotes or poetic content. At the same time, there’s often a lyric voice weaving through, synthesising things, moving between exemplary media, linking anecdote with theory. There’s a drive towards turning the page, even as each page is also a ‘field’ in its own right. So in a sense I’d say SWAT SIGHT is maybe actually a lyric essay remixed with its paratextual materials. An essay that stages its own research process? What’s the value in this ‘transparency’, did any particular text inspire you to take that risk of reflexivity and assemblage?

Yeah, that’s what I’d say it is. I wanted to write a lyric essay and wasn’t sure how to start. As soon as I did, the voice started pushing me. It had a lot to say and I think it still does. To me of course the voice is the most important part, it’s most akin to my ‘core’ that all the rest branches from, is light that my leaves pick up and comes back to the trunk. But as for all the staging – my voice does that. Another thing I wanted to stage was my need for props, my love for images, designs, the ways of working of different websites, which I find inextricable from my lack of ‘invention’. I look at things out there, I get excited about things out there, and what’s going on in my head is either a tic, or something not quite surfaced, or, at best, that voice of the lyric essay. So the book ends up being my mental process and the world that it takes from, that it reacts to, that it is shocked and moved by and tries, in turn, to shock and move (more feedback loop!).

The whole book, of course, is about ‘vision’. I found that line, ‘to have a song stuck in your head, for some reason, is harder to treat as a metaphor than an image being stuck. […] rain on the trees as jewels. I couldn’t, I can’t’, really emotional. Throughout SWAT SIGHT, you recalibrate what ‘imagination’ is --   in both form and content. How can poetry intervene in what we consider ‘sight’, to be less ocular-centric? Do we need new tropes and metaphors, or more a kind of visual refusal?

I love the phrase ‘visual refusal’! It’s right up my street and I don’t think it’s occurred to me before. Poetry brings awareness to language, and so an awareness of the baggage, the loadedness of any word. If sight has to be visual, and we have words like ‘foresight’, that does subtly hint at how we imagine the future. So maybe we can work on other terms. But I think what is best to do is to remind yourself of your other senses and how much it means to you to smell/taste/hear/feel/pull something sensual from the world, categorised or not. If you pay attention to that, you’ll write differently, thus enhancing others’ attention to those things.

But as you put it, ‘no-one’s looked in anyone else’s box. language doesn’t quite do inner life’. We can’t expect SWAT SIGHT to provide an actual snapshot of the aphantasic experience, any more than we can expect reading Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to somehow allow us to comprehensively ‘enter’ an autistic mind. I think the fact that you weave personal perspective alongside many other voices and representations (including an art exhibition) makes that clear. I’m interested, then, in what you might want readers to take away from this book in terms of empathy, awareness but also potentially recalibrating their own neurological sensitivities?

I would like us all to be aware of unnamed, unsaid, unprovable diversity. To approach it as a gift, with childish glee, and to know that it cannot be unwrapped. To ask each other questions and listen in to the way we describe each other’s mental processes, and to be aware of the fact that even when we think we agree or disagree there aren’t ‘samples’ of experience we can put next to each other to confirm or disconfirm anything. Also to be aware of the fact that our culture is skewed towards the visual, that it privileges it partly arbitrarily.

Can you talk about the images you chose for SWAT SIGHT, which include a lovely full-colour photo of you lying on a bed of coastal heather, as well as many representations of abstracted or glitched scenes/textures which must’ve taken a toll on your printer’s black ink cartridge. How do you see the relationship between image and text in this work, and are there any other writers who use images in an interesting way who you might’ve taken inspiration from?

The glitchy toner-heavy images are scanned objects from around my room – a top, a leaf, a headline, a daffodil. I really enjoyed their textures, the kind of nightscape of a piece of fabric that barely stands out of the uniform black. I’d achieve the glitches by moving the objects around while they were being scanned just the right amount, at the right time. I was intentionally confusing the printer but not quite in control either. It was both a hectic and repetitive process. It had in it excitement and tediousness – like writing. The images show the world as processed by a kind of system – a printer – thus running parallel to my verbal processing.

In SWAT SIGHT, the relationship between image and text is of course crucial. At first, I was tempted to completely do away with seeing, adornment – to have a kind of unity between sign and signified. Then I started adding the black scanned images as something along the lines of, but never really, illustrations. As soon as I did that, I started craving contrast and thought, to hell with that, I love the visual world and don’t want to be misunderstood as someone who doesn’t, just because I’m making a kind of cultural critique of vision-centricity. I am engaged in the visual world, and this lack of ‘inner’ will not take it away from me, and it does work for my way of perceiving the world, too. The images dispel inner and outer.

I really like W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs as strange hinges on oneiric texts. They complicate the voice by putting pressure on the distance we make for speaker from author, without ever allowing us to identify that voice with the author.

You also run a radio show for subcity, [underthunder]. Can you talk about the ethos behind the show. How important is music to your writing process, and do you think your experience of music has changed or intensified since you recognise your (visual) aphantasia?

At some point I realised that I love contrasting interactions between tones, mediums, textures. I like profound-grumpy-metaphysical things being read out loud and I also like ‘tribal’ energy. I was once editing a poem while listening to some Detroit techno and it struck me that these two things really fit together, that the words are energised, driven, dipped in densely and magnetically. I became increasingly curious about how best to combine these and whether others do it. I started paying attention to uses of language in electronic music, where words have diverse but recognisable, categorisable roles, but are not what you’d call ‘lyrics’. Now my experience of music is changing and intensifying by the day. This happened partly through that discovery, and so through poetry. I felt that it gave me an entry point into music, because I knew I was good at words and started copy-pasting them into other people’s tracks – otherwise I would never have felt entitled to ‘touch’ music. I always feel a bit guilty when I do that copy-pasting, a tad unsatisfied, hungry for something I’ve made from scratch. I’ve not got there at all yet, but it’s poetry that got me to focus on music in its own right. And my being drawn to poetry must stand in some relationship to aphantasia. I think I’m more at ease with oddness, a kind of casual surrealism, because of it, and that’s what often keeps my work going. When I feel I’ve written something good, it’s always because I’ve flexed the world without some specific message or thing in mind.

You write that ‘bliss’ is ‘a current […] i obsess over’. Your website says you are ‘here to make bliss’. What does bliss mean to you, or better still, what’s giving you bliss right now?

I just love the word. I think I fell in love about two years ago, and I’m not sure how, but it happened to me and my mum more or less simultaneously. She also puts that word everywhere; although I don’t know what’s in anyone’s box, including I think the most similar box to mine in this world, it does feel like a shared entity. Bliss is a short word that echoes out, like most poems – present, compact, extending its arm to everyone. A really small thing giving everything else a hug. And it seems like a half-place, a spacious state, not something like ‘joy’ which is much more identifiable with the springing up of some happy hormone, much more bound up with a person and nothing else. ‘Bliss’ is halfway between ‘joy’ and ‘paradise’. It’s something you can have next to you, or visit, or, as my mum says, ‘plug into’.

What’s giving me bliss now? Apricots, speeding tracks up as I DJ, ferry red.

Anything else you’d like to say about the publication, or what you’re currently working on?

I’m working on how to have a lot of time + space. Then full-blown bliss is gonna move in and we’ll split the bills.

~

SWAT SIGHT is out now. To order a copy, drop an email to nasimluczaj[at]gmail.com. 

Images by Nasim Luczaj and Maria Sledmere, all taken from the publication.

Published 8/9/19

[markgottliebliteraryagent]

Video Game Artists/Graphic Novelists Arey & Fy

Alejandra Green and Fanny Rodriguez are casually known as "Arey and Fy." They are the authors of the popular webtoon-turned-forthcoming graphic novel Fantastic Tales of Nothing, in which a vast continent with ages of lore, traditions and conflict plays host to the adventures of an unlucky boy as he travels from the Mourning Prayers to the Courts of Power and probably gets in more trouble that he can handle. Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins will be publishing. Alejandra "Arey" Green is a concept artist and animator from northwest Mexico. Arye likes to think of herself as patience in the flesh, a lover of the sea and surfer of whales (although she'll deny that). Fanny "Fy" Rodriguez is a user interface designer and illustrator from northeast Mexico. She never sleeps, is a mountain enthusiast, and has weird taste in music (she won’t deny that).

What initially attracted you both to the comic book arts medium of storytelling? Do you also feel that the fantasy genre affords a vast canvas for storytelling?

AG: Working on a comic format for storytelling pretty much conveyed what we both enjoyed doing- both graphic and written ideas.

I thought about working on a short film of sorts as a personal project around that time. However, animation is both resource and time consuming for only one person to work on. Funny enough, I had never been attracted to comic books up until now! The idea of trying out a new medium for me to explore was too exciting to ignore. This is honestly a new world for me and I cannot be more grateful to Fanny for dragging me in.

Either be fantasy, science fiction or any other genre; I believe any subject can be explored into an endless road of possibilities for storytelling as long as the characters, their actions and growth appeal to the audience.

FR: I’ve never gave much thought about it until now, I have notebooks from 7th grade where I did some comic panels and a friend did the next and so on. I guess I’ve always been attracted to the idea of telling stories through pictures more than only words, you not only tell the story you give the reader the idea of what you imagine creating it.

Definitely, fantasy and other fiction genres are only limited by the creator (and sometimes, the page limit marked by the editor).

Having worked with animation studios, what has been each of your favorite projects to work on and why?

FR: We didn’t work in big animation studios, but for my part I’ve been more involved on web design and development until I met Ale. We met in a video game outsource studio, where we worked on concept art and design for mobile, PC and console video games. You can even find our names in some credits (as an outsourcing studio, sometimes there’s only the mention of it and not the artists) like Heroes of Dragon Age, Plants vs. Zombies, Agents of Mayhem, Darksiders 3 and Prey 2. More than a project, my favorite part was when I got to be the leader of the 2D art team, working with a lot of amazing and talented artists and learning from them and the process of creating assets for video games.

AG: What a dream it would have been! Although I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity to work on Tales of Nothing if I ever worked for those companies. (Or even meet Fanny)

I did however, worked with a small animation team for a feature film project in which I had the pleasure to meet amazing artists and friends within the industry. Visual development has always been my favorite part when working on the animation field, which I learned a lot from.

During my time there, we had the opportunity to work on a short film for a national contest (we made it to the finals!) and I have to admit, working on the credits illustrations/design was my favorite part!

“...you can’t rely on the platforms alone to get your work known.”

Your forthcoming graphic novel, Fantastic Tales of Nothing, began as a popular webcomic. Do you now regard publishing online via webtoon sites such as Tapas and Line Webtoon to be a springboard for discovery and success? Are there any limitations to staying within the webcomic ecosystem where one is published only digitally?

AG: Tapas did made it easier for us by promoting Tales of Nothing through their app and webpage’s Spotlight sections. However, when using such tools one should be careful and keep in mind their terms and conditions, and how your work can be affected by it.

Most webcomic authors I know use such platforms as a segway to self-publishing through funding campaigns, once the project has reached a popular audience on its own, especially when starting a new project.

FR: Both platforms are great ways to publish if you can’t create your own website, and make your work accessible to their the public that it’s always looking for something new to read. However, you can’t rely on the platforms alone to get your work known. As Ale said with Tapas Spotlight with Fantastic, we were lucky on that.

I don’t think there are limitations, if you want to continue publishing your comic online for free there are paths you can take to support you, like Patreon, Kofi, Kickstarters for publishing, Gumroad, etc. More than a limitation, you gotta know it’s big work what you going to do, constantly and that’s something some new artists and readers don’t grasp sometimes.

I'm reminded of Nimona, Boxers & Saints and Anya's Ghost when I look at your graphic novel Fantastic Tales of Nothing. Are there any comics or graphic novelists that have influenced your work, or are there any comic creators you both just read for pleasure?

FR: I’m more a video games than a comics/graphic novel person. I grew up (and still are) playing video games like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and more, they became a big influence for me to start drawing and writing. Art-wise I look up to a lot of artists, maybe all artists is a better statement. When we started Fantastic Tales of Nothing I took a lot of influence from Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle and Vincent Van Gogh for painting the backgrounds. On writers, maybe I can say Espido Freire and Douglas Adams.

I read for pleasure, a lot of things! Started a compilation of short stories by Ursula K. Leguin, a couple of friends gifted me Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang that I already binge read past week. I’m also following/reading some comics like Saga by Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples, Coda by Simon Spurrier & Matías Vergara, and Isola by Brenden Fletcher & Karl Kerschl.

AG: I’m fairly new to this whole graphic novel/comic world, so my collection isn't as big as Fanny’s. My all-time favorite author has been a manga artist, Hiromu Arakawa on Fullmetal Alchemist and Silver Spoon. Last year I had the pleasure to meet both authors Ale Gamez and Axur Eneas through their latest novel Mas Alla de las Ciudades. I also bought Nimona after you, Mark, mentioned it to us, lovely stories worth checking out!

“...it was so amazing seeing all the work we have done finally take form.”

It's hard enough writing a story...does telling a story with illustrations add more work and present its own set of challenges, or do you each find it to be liberating?

FR: Yes definitely! Trying to communicate the actions and moods we are thinking about certain scenes it’s a big challenge but it’s great at the same time. I’ve learned so much because of it and still am. When we finished the rough version of the whole book to send to our editor, I contained my tears; it was so amazing seeing all the work we have done finally take form.

What do you find that working in a collaboration offers that working as an individual storyteller cannot offer?

FR: There are so many things. First, you’re not alone; you’ve got another person’s point of view that helps you see things that you wouldn’t have noticed if you were working by yourself. When you have troubles, or are stuck trying to illustrate/write something, the other can help out by guiding or giving advice. Working with Ale, it’s the absolute best, and I’m not saying it only because she’s my best friend, both of us are very different in the way we solve problems, paint and think. I’m very emotional and impulsive; she’s more centered and practical. I like to think we complement each other and that makes our work easier for both of us.

How did you find your current literary agent and go on to get published with the Katherine Tegen Books imprint of HarperCollins? How exhilarating did it feel to learn that you'd be getting published?

FR: Okay, this one is a funny story: we thought you were spam, Mark! When I got the notification and saw the big box of text I was about to delete it, but then noticed it wasn’t like the usual spam we got. I shared the comment with Ale, both of us being very skeptical about it. So, before answering you we did a little digging about you and Trident Media Group. It took us a moment to think about it, but at the end we said, “Why not?” We weren’t expecting such a quick reply, either.

When we finished our first call with you, we were blank, in a good way. Imagine when you called us, I think it was a month later, telling us Katherine Tegen was publishing us; we were blank again! Looking at each other in disbelief with a dumb smile on our faces, quite nervous of overreacting with you on the line. After we finished the call with you, both of us began to laugh. I think we didn’t do anything else other than smile and worry for a bit, then smile again. Nothing was done that day (no pun intended).

If you could each be any character in any fantasy or comic book world, which character would you be and why?​

FR: I can’t decide. Not because I would like to be on many worlds, mostly because I kind of like it here. But if I have to choose something, maybe I’ll be the Doctor, just to be able to travel through space in time. Explore the universe, meet historical figures and just experience ancient times for a little bit. Oh, how I would love to see what a dinosaur really looked and sounded like.

AG: Most of Arakawa’s female characters have a strength to strive for, I’d definitely choose Riza Hawkeye and her will to give all her best to achieve her goals in supporting the people she cares for.

“The right literary agent can help you take strides of progress when seeking publishing opportunities...”

Do you have any advice for unpublished graphic novelists hoping to get their work published?

FR: Don’t hold yourself back because you don’t know this or don’t know that. You will only learn to improve if you do the thing, instead of having it as an idea wandering in your head. And share your work! Yes, there’ll be mistakes and critiques, learn from them instead of letting them get you down. How else will someone know you got this great story on your hands?

AG: Just do it! Keeping your work out there will open up possibilities for your growth as an artist and as an author. The right literary agent can help you take strides of progress when seeking publishing opportunities—don’t give up, be patient and keep on working ideas that can get you where you aim for.

What can we expect next from the world of Fantastic Tales of Nothing?

FR: Well, if everything goes alright, maybe more stories of the past and beginning of the world, also more adventures! Maybe outside Nathan and friends.

For now, in Fantastic Tales of Nothing, you got to pay attention to the little things; there’s a lot behind the world our characters known as "Nothing," about the people living there to their historical figures. That magic is simple but makes a lot of mess, that’s for sure. And definitely bad jokes, I hope to get better in time with my puns for the second book.

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Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/marvel-ultimate-alliance-3-the-black-order-review/

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Review

With Marvel Comics’ long history of tangled legal red tape and licensing deals, it brings me a special kind of joy to put together a team composed of a yellow spandex-clad Wolverine straight out of the old cartoons, a Spider-Man essentially ripped right from the PS4 game, a modern comic book rendition of The Wasp, and an MCU-style Rocket Raccoon doing his best Bradley Cooper imitation. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order – Nintendo Switch

$59.99on Amazon

pulls from anywhere and everywhere to stock its very fun (if fairly simple) co-op brawler with crowd-pleasing moments.

The story itself is one we’ve heard a lot lately: Thanos is hunting for the Infinity Stones and you have to find all six before he does. It’s a new telling of some extremely well-tread ground, but the writing and voice acting still manage to capture the funny, self-deprecating, and occasionally overdramatic attitude I love about big comic book stories. The campaign also acts as a tour of Marvel’s greatest hits, taking you to lovely renditions of places like Avengers Tower, The Raft prison, and even the wonderfully nostalgic Xavier Institute.

In the tradition of the original decade-old games in this series, Ultimate Alliance 3 is a totally linear button mashing beat-’em-up. You run through locations in order, strung together by plenty of amusing and well-animated cutscenes, with only some lightly hidden collectibles to pull you off the main path. Thankfully, these environments are dotted with plenty of mid-level boss fights and loads of quippy hero banter that kept me smiling even when the straightforward levels were otherwise relatively predictable.

Everyone is Here!

And, of course, within those locations are a whole boatload of heroes – far more than you’ll actually play as during its 12-hour campaign. There are more than 30 playable characters to swap between to make up your team of four, and lots more will drift in and out of the story as NPCs who fight alongside you or point you toward the next encounter. While I would have liked to be able to control some of those support characters like Beast, the sheer volume of heroes (and villains) on display here made Ultimate Alliance 3 feel appropriately epic.

Besides, it’s not like there aren’t enough playable characters to choose from. All of the big names like Iron Man and Captain America are here, but it was also exciting to see both some of the smaller characters like Ms. Marvel as well as longtime X-Men favorites like Nightcrawler join the fray alongside the MCU regulars. Each of them has a set of four playstyle-defining abilities that unlock quickly as they level up, and while there’s a bit of overlap between similar characters like Peter Parker (who is even voiced by the PS4 Spider-Man’s Yuri Lowenthal), Miles Morales, and Spider-Gwen, they each still have little twists that set them apart, like Gwen’s widespread webs or Miles’ shock-based attacks.

Each hero also has a ridiculously over-the-top Extreme move that can fill the screen with damage. One of my favorites of these is Venom’s, in which melts into a puddle of black symbiote ooze before emerging from the center as a giant, fanged mouth like a scene out of Jaws. I love that you can easily chain these Extreme moves together with the press of a button if you had more than one character charged at the right moment, though using all four at once was the only time I occasionally saw Ultimate Alliance 3’s frame rate take a hit (which is understandable given the visual chaos they can cause).

The only time I saw Ultimate Alliance 3’s frame rate take a hit was occasionally when using four Extreme attacks at the same time, which is understandable given the visual chaos they can cause.

“

The only drawback with having so many character choices is that I constantly wanted to change up my team and play around with everyone I could. While there’s nothing stopping you from playing with all these action figures, it’s discouraged slightly by the character-specific experience system. When I changed Captain Marvel out for The Wasp in Avengers Tower, or Spider-Gwen for Psylock to take down some Sentinels, it meant the experience gains were spread in a thin layer across my roster, leaving them underleveled as I went forward.

There is an Alliance Enhancement skill tree that offers global stat buffs to all your heroes, but it didn’t feel like it mitigated this issue much. I eventually had to start focusing more on a select cast (or using newly unlocked characters who start at levels appropriate to the area you are in) which inevitably left some of my favorites like Miles and Venom in the dust in the late game. I found myself occasionally using characters just because they were a high level, not because I particularly liked them – looking at you, Ghost Rider.

You can get around that by grinding your squad through previous chapters or completing the optional Infinity Trials for XP Cubes to give them a boost, but I didn’t really want to since the story is simply more fun. I ended up sticking with the same team for the last few chapters – Wolverine, Dr. Strange, Storm, and the absolutely vicious Black Panther – both because I liked how they worked together and to make sure they were strong enough to avoid grinding entirely.

Bamf, Thwip, Snikt!

Ultimate Alliance 3’s combat is fairly simplistic, with the strategy coming more from timing, team composition, and Energy management than actual combat skill. Apart from their four abilities, every hero has a light attack that you can string together, as well as a heavy attack that lands as a single big hit. There’s also a mid-air attack, a block, and a dodge, but otherwise that’s pretty much it.

There are no fancy button combos to memorize or special attack patterns to use, so you’ll be spamming that light attack a lot in between abilities.

“

There are no fancy button combos to memorize or special attack patterns to use, so you’ll be spamming that light attack a lot in between abilities. That can definitely get stale all on its own, and while the enemies you face will change visually in interesting and exciting ways – you might be fighting Kree soldier in one level and Hand ninjas in another – the differences in their behavior and attacks never really altered the way I went about punching them to a pulp

Larger generic enemies and mid-level bosses like Mysterio, Nebula, or Bullseye make things more interesting with a purple Stagger bar; instead of just whacking them, I had to use heavy attacks and abilities with high Stagger damage to take that bar down. Once it’s empty, you have a brief window to land a Synergy ability – essentially two heroes using complementary abilities at the same time, which is made easier through button clear button prompts – to stun them for a longer period, during which they take considerably more damage. Your abilities all cost Energy, so figuring out the right balance of using it to Stagger and having some left over for a synergy stun was an interesting puzzle that often changed based on the level I was in or the heroes I was using. Fights are still very mashy, and I definitely wish characters had more than their extremely simple two-button basic attacks, but I still found myself consistently engaged in Ultimate Alliance 3’s combat for far longer than I expected.

That said, those puzzles are only truly challenging to solve on the Mighty difficulty setting, with the Friendly mode letting you get away with a bit more of an ability-spamming approach. Apart from big, villainous fights that turn up the heat, Mighty isn’t crazy hard or anything, but it actually forces you to play smart. Bosses like Kingpin or Ultron can easily eat up your three hero revives, even if most groups of basic enemies can still be torn through like tissue paper – which makes a certain amount of sense, because where’s the fun in being Hulk if you struggle to take down a group of ninjas?

Apart from villainous boss fights that turn up the heat, Mighty difficulty isn’t crazy hard or anything, but it does force you to play smart in a fun way.

“

Part of that difficulty is also influenced by how many people you are playing with. Ultimate Alliance 3 can be played solo but it feels like it was really meant to be played in co-op with up to four players, either locally or online (though we weren’t able to test out the online functionality ahead of this review). Combat gets both easier and harder in co-op, depending on the situation: your teammates generally make smarter decisions than the AI but synergy moves and attack timings are often trickier to coordinate than it is with the simple button inputs it takes while playing alone.

You can drop in and out of co-op at will, but be warned that Ultimate Alliance 3’s Stagger system (while a good addition overall) actually makes it a harder game for a visiting friend to blindly pick up and play. The concept is taught well in the first level, but isn’t intuitive or easy to read at a glance if someone joins you after that. I found players who jumped in to join me in the middle of a mission wouldn’t really understand why just smashing buttons wildly wasn’t working so well. It especially didn’t help halfway through the campaign when a big chunk of my roster was underleveled, often meaning the character someone wanted to play was missing abilities or just sort of weak.

It can still be chaotic, snack food-like entertainment regardless, but played with a group that knows what they are doing Ultimate Alliance 3 can become a delightful coordination challenge. There’s lots of calling out targets, working together to Stagger specific enemies while you have a synergy attack waiting in the wings. The only real enemy of this experience is a fairly predictable one: the camera, which frequently felt too restrictive and zoomed in when your co-op party moves in opposite directions, and was frustratingly stubborn in a handful of tight hallways.

While co-op seems to be the intended way to play (as seen particularly in its boss fights that often ask you to multitask), I actually really loved playing alone as well – I might have even liked it more at times. There’s an alternate camera option this way called Heroic that drops the viewing angle down for more of a third-person action feel, and I absolutely preferred it to the default zoomed-out perspective. Ultimate Alliance also has pretty decent AI partners, swapping between heroes on your team is fast and seamless, and using synergy abilities is made super simple, all of which meant controlling four heroes at once kept battles fresh far longer than just sticking with just one character for a long period of time.

We’re In the Endgame Now

Supporting your heroes’ literal journey are a plethora of stats to upgrade and a borderline excessive number of currencies to spend. You can use different pools of points you earn to rank up individual abilities, improve the stats of every member of your alliance via a sprawling skill tree, and equip special ISO-8 crystals for even more stat boosts – which can themselves be upgraded to improve their bonuses. With six different stats that govern attack, defense, health, and Energy there is a ton to dig into here, and min-maxers will have a field day doing just that with great success – but that doesn’t mean any one upgrade is very exciting because of how incremental the vast majority are.

Essentially every form of upgrade or modification in Ultimate Alliance 3 is stat-based, which means that they are almost entirely invisible to you while you are actually fighting. For instance, you could buy a skill that gives your heroes 40 more Strength (even though most heroes’ Strength values are in the thousands), get a team bonus for using two of the Defenders at once for plus 2% Durability, or upgrade a basic ISO-8 crystal to give a hero 5% more Vitality instead of… 4%. Their combined effect will be practically unnoticeable. Hooray!

The ability rank-ups are also unimaginative. Every single ability – whether it’s shooting webs at enemies as Spider-Man, zapping them with lighting as Thor, or dropping giant fidget spinners on their heads as The Wasp – gets a reduced Energy cost at rank 2, increased damage at rank 3, and usually increased stagger damage at rank 4, though sometimes that last one will be a bit more tailored to the ability itself. No matter how detailed or extensive all of these upgrade systems are, these purely number-based buffs are just boring since they don’t change the way any of your heroes play.

No matter how extensive all of these upgrades are, the purely number-based buffs are just boring since they don’t change the way any of your heroes play.

“

Hidden in that sea of marginal stat boosts are some actually interesting upgrades, but they are few and far between. By far the coolest one I unlocked was a skill that healed my heroes for 3% of the damage they dealt during Extreme attacks – a significant amount considering they can do hundreds of thousands of points of damage. That was an actual, tangible improvement I could see in the field, and it did actually change my thinking in fun ways as I started using Extreme attacks to save heroes on the cusp of death instead of just take down big baddies.

But by the end of the roughly 13 hours it took me to complete Ultimate Alliance 3’s story I had unlocked only about a fifth of its gargantuan skill tree. Beating the campaign unlocks an even harder mode, called Superior, to replay on, and beyond that are the high-level Infinity Trials to test your mettle against for bonus unlocks.

The Trials usually have you replay bosses or sections from the campaign with a twist to the rules – sometimes you have reduced damage on anything but abilities or synergy attacks, or maybe there’s a timer running that only refills when you defeat enemies. A fair number of these are a higher level than your heroes will likely be by the end of one run through the campaign, encouraging you to play again or level up further through easier Trials to get their rewards.

No Microtransactions, but DLC Is on the Way

As far as I’ve seen, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 doesn’t have any form of microtransactions at launch. However, it does already have an Expansion Pass on sale for $20. That pass comes with a Deadpool costume that’s available at launch, as well as three upcoming DLC packs that (allegedly) won’t be sold separately. The first will arrive in Fall 2019, the second some later time in 2019, and the third in 2020; according to the official description they will include new “playable characters, modes, and additional story” from the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Marvel Knights. Additional free DLC characters like Cyclops and Colossus are also planned.

The first DLC pack will focus on Marvel Knights and add Blade, Moon Knight, Punisher, and Morbius as playable characters. While we don’t really know any other specifics, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s structure is set up in the form of chapters that each revolve around a specific hero group or area, with characters tied to that setting unlocking as you progress. Adding something like a new Fantastic Four-themed chapter where you unlock that team (potentially alongside some more Trials) could be a nice way to refresh what I liked so much about the base campaign. It has promise, but we’ll of course have to see what those DLC packs actually entail before we can determine if they are worth it.

Those rewards are usually Ability Orbs used to rank up moves, XP Cubes to level up characters, or alternate outfits – though the outfits are a massive missed opportunity as they are slow to unlock and have so far been limited to a single, uninspired recolor for each hero’s default costume, like taking the red stripes of of Captain America’s suit. You can even unlock a few extra playable characters here like Elektra, which I imagine is to keep things fresh in the post-game – you won’t unlock new ones anymore just by playing through the campaign again, even on Superior difficulty.

The massive skill tree and extensive amount of number-crunching upgrades available feel like they were designed for all these post-game tasks. There is fun to be had in trying to craft that perfect team build as you take on the hardest content Ultimate Alliance 3 has to offer – I enjoyed doing a bit of that myself for some of the tougher bosses and trickier Trials – it’s just hard to see the results of that work, especially on your first playthrough. Instead, the spice is found in the variety between heroes, not how those heroes change… because they don’t, they just get bigger numbers. And while I’m certainly still interested in diving back into some of those harder challenges, I don’t exactly know how long “harder” alone will keep me hooked.

Source : IGN