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[importanceoftreesessaywriter]

Importance Of Trees Essay Writer

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Title: Sustaining Life: Exploring the Importance of Trees through Essays

Introduction: Trees are the lungs of our planet, essential for sustaining life and maintaining ecological balance. From providing oxygen and sequestering carbon to supporting biodiversity and enhancing landscapes, the importance of trees cannot be overstated. The Importance of Trees Essay Writer is a powerful tool designed to illuminate the myriad benefits of trees through informative and persuasive essays. By leveraging advanced algorithms and comprehensive research capabilities, this AI-powered platform empowers writers to delve into the multifaceted roles of trees in our environment, economy, and society, inspiring appreciation and advocacy for tree conservation and reforestation efforts.

Understanding the Significance of Trees: Trees play a vital role in supporting life on Earth and providing a wide range of ecological, economic, and social benefits. Their importance can be observed across various domains:

Environmental Benefits: Trees are crucial for maintaining environmental health and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Through photosynthesis, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen, helping to regulate the global climate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, trees provide shade, reduce air and water pollution, mitigate erosion, and stabilize soil, contributing to ecosystem resilience and sustainability.

Biodiversity Conservation: Forests are home to a diverse array of plant and animal species, making them hotspots of biodiversity. Trees provide habitat, food, and shelter for countless organisms, including birds, mammals, insects, and fungi. By preserving and restoring forest ecosystems, we can protect biodiversity, prevent species extinctions, and maintain ecological balance.

Economic Value: Trees have significant economic importance, supporting livelihoods and industries around the world. Forests provide timber, fuelwood, and non-timber forest products such as fruits, nuts, and medicinal plants, contributing to local economies and global supply chains. Additionally, forests support ecotourism, recreation, and watershed protection, generating revenue and employment opportunities for communities.

Human Health and Well-being: Trees enhance human health and well-being by providing clean air, shade, and aesthetic beauty. Urban trees help mitigate the heat island effect, reduce noise pollution, and improve air quality, creating healthier and more livable cities. Research has also shown that spending time in natural environments, such as forests and parks, can reduce stress, boost mood, and enhance overall quality of life.

Cultural and Spiritual Significance: Trees hold cultural and spiritual significance in many societies, serving as symbols of strength, resilience, and interconnectedness. They feature prominently in art, literature, folklore, and religious rituals, reflecting the deep bonds between humans and nature. Trees also play a central role in indigenous cultures, where they are revered as sacred beings and repositories of traditional knowledge.

The Importance of Trees Essay Writer Approach: The Importance of Trees Essay Writer adopts a comprehensive approach to assist writers in crafting informative and compelling essays on the importance of trees. Here's how it works:

Topic Generation: The platform generates a wide range of topics related to trees, including their ecological functions, economic value, cultural significance, conservation challenges, and restoration strategies. Writers can choose from a variety of prompts, such as "The Role of Trees in Climate Change Mitigation," "The Economic Benefits of Sustainable Forestry," or "The Spiritual Connection to Trees in Indigenous Cultures."

Research Assistance: The Importance of Trees Essay Writer provides access to a vast repository of scientific articles, reports, case studies, and multimedia resources on trees and forests. Using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, it synthesizes key insights, statistics, and arguments to support the essay's thesis.

Outline and Structure: The platform assists writers in outlining their essays by suggesting a logical structure, including an introduction, thesis statement, body paragraphs with supporting evidence, counterarguments, and a conclusion. Writers can customize the outline to suit their specific focus and objectives.

Language Enhancement: The Importance of Trees Essay Writer offers language enhancement tools to improve the clarity, coherence, and persuasiveness of the essay. It suggests alternative phrasings, eliminates grammatical errors, enhances readability, and ensures adherence to academic writing conventions.

Ethical Considerations: The platform incorporates ethical considerations into the writing process, emphasizing the importance of accuracy, integrity, and cultural sensitivity in discussing the importance of trees. It encourages writers to respect diverse perspectives, acknowledge indigenous knowledge, and advocate for equitable and sustainable approaches to tree conservation and management.

[systemtek]

Best Apps Every Student Should Use

The sphere of education is dynamic, demanding, and time-consuming. Most students suffer from being overwhelmed or burned out at some point in their studies. Yet, there is a constant expectation to be productive and efficient at all times. Fortunately, nowadays, students can count on technology to help them achieve high academic performance with little stress. Multiple student applications come to the market every year. Young people are lucky to choose from such a large variety of helpful apps for managing their workload, schedules, and even anxiety. So, let’s see some of the best apps every student should use. Be sure to have these apps on your phone by the end of the reading! Evernote Imagine a world where all your notes are neatly organized and accessible from any device. Well, you’ve just described your life with Evernote. It is a note-taking application that allows you to write down and organize all your work notes as easily as it can be. Evernote has features like tags, notebooks, multimedia integration, and more. This app is great for taking notes during classes, ensuring all important information is at your fingertips at any time. Plus, it allows for teamwork, giving remote access so you and your teammates can collaborate online. Google Drive A lot of education has moved online today. Even students who attend classes in person deal with numerous digital documents and files. Keeping track of all this data without external help becomes impossible after the first semester. Plus, imagine all the stress from losing an important document or years' worth of work due to technology malfunction. That’s why most students already rely on Google Drive for all the heavy lifting. Google Drive provides plenty of free storage room for students to use throughout their studies. It also serves as a collaboration platform, enabling online editing and commenting, making teamwork easy and accessible. Forest Procrastination is a common challenge for students, and Forest provides an innovative solution. This app encourages focused work by allowing users to plant virtual trees during study sessions. If you steer away from the app to check social media or other distracting sites, your tree dies. Hence, it encourages you to stay on task by providing digital rewards. Over time, users can see a visual representation of their "forest," reflecting their productivity. As a bonus, Forest owners promise to plant a tree for every reward you gain in the app by being focused! Quizlet Flashcards have always been a powerful and easy tool to prepare for exams. However, there is no need for physical cards now that we have Quizlet. It is a convenient and accessible way to transform traditional learning methods into the digital space. Quizlet uses classic flashcards to offer several learning methods, like games and quizzes. The variety of card learning enhances your material revision and encourages you to stay on the app longer. Users can create their own cards or use created packs in the app. Due to the app's popularity, you can find cards on any topic and any difficulty. Grammarly Any student who has ever written an essay in school must already know about Grammarly. This is an editing software designed to improve your writing. It can highlight and correct grammar errors, punctuation, coherency, style, and more. Even a free version can give you a comprehensive analysis of your work. A paid version will also correct your clarity and offer a plagiarism check. The software is super easy to use. You can install it as a browser extension, go to the site, or download it as a desktop app. Every student should use the software for editing and learning from their mistakes. We bet that even professional writers at https://essaymasters.ae use Grammarly in their work. Calm Student life is not just about grades and academia. Calm is here to remind stressed-out students about it. This application strives to normalize the conversation about mental health. It provides different tools to help users manage their anxiety, stress, insomnia, and other concerns. Students can use Calm to improve their sleep and learn how to meditate and calm themselves with simple breathing exercises. The app provides various content, from short guided meditation videos by field experts to calming music and stories to fall asleep to. It is a perfect platform for students overwhelmed with responsibilities and struggling with school pressure. Khan Academy Sometimes, we need a little extra to really nail those exams. In this case, students often turn to Khan Academy for help. This app is the go-to source for discovering learning resources on a wide range of subjects. It is free, accessible, and highly versatile. Khan Academy has video lessons, practice exercises, and personalized learning plans tailored to different levels and needs, from math and science to literature and art. Its purpose is to inspire everyone to learn more about the world and rediscover their passion for education. It helps break down complex topics, provides solutions, and serves as an invaluable resource for self-learning or academia. Read the full article

[elamarth-calmagol]

What actually is LACE? (an informal essay)

What’s LACE?

Laws and Customs among the Eldar, or LACE, is the most popular section of the History of Middle Earth books.  It's available online as a PDF here: http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/T-LawsandCustoms.pdf .  There’s a lot of LACE analysis in the fandom, Silmarillion smut fics are usually labeled “LACE compliant” or “not LACE compliant”, and I’ve been seeing the document itself show up in actual fics, meaning that the characters themselves are discussing it.

LACE is an unfinished, non-canonical essay split into several parts.  It covers the sexuality of elves, which is mostly what people talk about.  It also covers elvish naming (which I want to make a whole different post about), the speed at which elves grow up, changes that happen throughout their lives, their death and rebirth, and finally the legal and moral issues of Finwe remarrying after Miriel’s death.  The discussion about rebirth conflicts with Tolkien’s later writings about Glorfindel’s re-embodiment, but to the best of my knowledge, LACE is the best or only source for most of the topics it covers.

However, LACE is not canon since it doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion.  Counting all of the History of Middle Earth as canon is literally impossible, considering Tolkien contradicts himself all over the place.  It is only useful because it has so much information that is never discussed in the actual canon.  Many people consider it canon out of convenience.

Another important thing to remember is that, other than presumably the discussion of the growth of elvish children, the information is only supposed to apply to the Eldar (meaning the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar) and not the dark-elves such as the Silvan elves and Avari.

The rest is behind the cut to avoid clogging your feeds.

Problems with LACE interpretations

But because it’s hidden in the History of Middle Earth (volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring), barely anyone actually gets the opportunity to read it.  I don’t think most people are aware that you can get it online, so it doesn't get read much.

I feel like this leads to a handful of people saying something about LACE and everyone else going along with it.  I definitely did this.  I was amazed by all the things that were in the actual essay that nobody had ever told me about, or had told me incorrectly.  For example, most people seem to believe that elves become married at the completion of sexual intercourse (whatever that means to the fic author).  In fact, LACE explicitly says that elves must take an oath using the name of Eru in order to be legally married.  Specifically: 

It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage, and after which the indissoluble bond was complete… [I]t was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, being both unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to another without ceremony or witness (save blessings exchanged and the naming of the Name); and the union so joined was alike indissoluble.

I’ve seen a marriage oath being included in a few stories recently, but most writers leave out the oath entirely and just have sex be automatically equivalent to marriage.  What would happen if elves had sex without swearing an oath?  I don’t know, but I’d love to see it explored.

Then there’s a footnote that might explicitly deny the existence of transgender elves... or not, but I’ve literally only seen it mentioned once or twice.  Overall, I feel like all of LACE is filtered through the handful of people who read it, and we’re missing out on a lot of metanalysis and interpretations that we could have because most fans never see the actual document.

Who wrote LACE?

I mean within the mythology of Middle Earth, of course.  Since LACE appears in the History of Middle Earth and not the Silmarillion, we can be pretty sure that J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote it and it wasn’t added to by Christopher Tolkien.  But that’s not the question here.  Remember that Tolkien’s frame narrative for all of his Middle Earth work is that he is a scholar of ancient times and is translating documents from Westron and Sindarin for modern audiences to read and understand.  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come from the Red Book of Westmarch, and I believe The Silmarillion is meant to be Tolkien’s own writings based on his research (though it might also be an adaption of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”, but I haven't looked into that).  So what does LACE come from?

Christopher Tolkien admits in his notes that he doesn’t know.  He says, “It is clear in any case that this is presented as the work, not of one of the Eldar, but of a Man,” and I agree, because of the way it seems to be written as an ethnographic study rather than by someone who lives in the culture.  Honestly, it talks too much about how elves are seen by Men (e.g. speculating that elf-children might look like the children of Men) to be written by an elf.  This changes once it gets to the Doom of Finwe and Miriel, but that could be, and probably is, a story told to the writer by an elf who was there at the time.

Tolkien actually references Aelfwine in the second version of the text.  The original story behind The Lost Tales, which was the abandoned first version of the Silmarillion, was that a man from the Viking period named Aelfwine/Eriol stumbled onto the Straight Road and found himself on Tol Eressea.  He spoke to the elves and brought back their stories to England with him.  So it makes a lot of sense that Aelfwine would also write about the lives and customs of the elves for an audience of his own people.

Does LACE exist in Middle Earth?

I keep finding fics where first age elves discuss “the Laws and Customs” openly, as if it’s a text in their own world.  I usually get the impression that it was brought by the Noldor from Valinor.  But did the document actually exist in that time period?  For me, the answer is definitely not.

First of all, LACE was probably written by a Man, meaning it could not have dated back to Valinor in the years of the Trees, because Men hadn’t awaked yet.  In fact, the closest thing to an established frame narrative for it is that it was written by Aelfwine, who comes from the time period around 1000 CE (though Tolkien doesn’t seem to have pinned him down).  This is at least the fifth age, if not later.

But what if you don’t believe that it was written by a Man?  It still couldn’t have been written in the First Age, because it discusses the way the relationship between elves’ bodies and souls changes as ages go by.  For example:

As ages passed the dominance of their fear ever increased, ‘consuming’ their bodies... The end of this process is their ‘fading’, as Men have called it.

A lot of time has to go by in order for elves to get to the point of fading.  As a bonus, here’s another reference to the perspective of Men. LACE also discusses the dangers that “houseless feas”, which are souls of elves who do not go to Mandos after their bodies died, pose to Men.  How would they have known about that in the First Age?  It further says that “more than one rebirth is seldom recorded” (which isn’t contradicted anywhere I know of), and that’s not something you would know during your life of joy in Valinor, where almost nobody dies.  That’s something you learn after millennia of war.  This has to be a document written well after the Silmarillion ends.

So what about the sex part?  That’s all we care about, right?  Well, it is entirely possible that this was written down by the elves and Aelfwine translated it (though my impression is that he mostly recorded stories told orally to him and that elves were not very much into writing, at least in Valinor where you could get stories directly from someone who experienced them).  However, why would the elves write this down?  They know how quickly their children grow up.  They’ve seen actual marriages.  They don’t need that described to them.  And if they did have a specific document or story explaining the expectations of them when it comes to sex and marriage, why would they call it “Laws and Customs”?  That’s a very strange name for a set of rules for conduct.  I’m sure they had a list of laws written out somewhere in great detail, like our own state or national laws (that seems very in character for the Noldor, at least).  But I seriously doubt that those laws are what we’ve been given to read. LACE is not an elvish or Valinoran document.

Is LACE prescriptive or descriptive?

Here’s the other big question I’m interested in.  Prescriptive means that the document describes the way people should behave.  Descriptive means that it describes how people do behave.  And the more I worldbuild for Middle Earth and the culture of elves, the more I want to say that LACE is prescriptive in its discussion of sex, marriage, and gender roles.

But wait.  I’ve been saying for paragraphs that I think LACE is Aelfwine or another Man’s ethnographic study of elvish culture.  Then it has to be descriptive, right?

Does it?  How long do we think Aelfwine stayed with the elves?  Did he wait fifty years to see a child grow up?  Did he get to witness a wedding ceremony?  Did he meet houseless fea?  I don’t think he could have done all of that.  Maybe a different Man who spent his entire life with the elves could, but then when was this written?  When the elves were still marrying and having children in Middle Earth or when so much time had gone by that they had begun to fade already?

Whoever wrote this was told a lot of information by elves instead of experiencing it firsthand, the same way he heard the stories from the First Age from the elves instead of being there.  Maybe it was one elf who talked to him, maybe several different ones.  But did those elves accurately describe their society the way it was, give him the easiest description, or explain the way it was supposed to be?  If I was describing modern-day America, would I discuss premarital sex or just our dating and marriage customs?  Maybe people would come away from a talk with me thinking that moving in together equated to marriage for Americans in the early 21st century.  And I don’t even have an agenda to show America in a certain way, I'm just bad at explaining.  Did the elves talking to what may have been the first Man they had seen in millennia have an agenda in the way they presented themselves?

Or did the writer himself have an agenda?  Imagine going to see these beautiful, mythical, perfect beings, and you find out that they behave in the same immoral ways Men do.  Do you want to share the truth back home?  Or do you leave out things that don't match your worldview? Did Aelfwine come back wanting to tell people what elves were really like?  Or did he want to say “this is how you can be holy and perfect like an elf”?

Anyone studying the Age of Exploration will tell you that Europeans neber wrote about new cultures objectively, and often things were made up to fit the writer’s idea of what savages looked like. For example, my Native American history teacher in college told a story of how explorers described one tribe who (sensibly) didn't wear clothes as cannibals, because cannibalism and going around naked went together in their minds and not because of any actual incident.  Unbiased scholarship barely existed yet. Even Tolkien was extremely biased and tended to be imperialistic, as we all know.  There’s absolutely no reason to think that Aelfwine wasn’t biased in his own way.  (Of course, now we have to consider what biases a Danish or English man from the centuries around 1000 would have when it comes to things like gender roles. I assume he would have been more into divorce and female warriors than the elves are said to be.)

But is that what Tolkien intended? Probably not. He probably wanted LACE to be descriptive. But he also never got much of a chance to analyse the essay after the fact, which might have led to him discussing its accuracy and even the exact issues I just pointed out about explorers. Anyway, we know he's biased, and honestly, what he intended has never slowed down the fandom before.

Conclusion

In short, I take LACE to be a prescriptive document describing the way elvish culture is supposed to be, not a blueprint I have to stick to in order to correctly portray elves.  I also don’t believe the document that’s available for us to read existed even in the early Fourth Age, where The Lord of the Rings leaves off.  There maybe have been some document outlining the moral behavior of elves, as a set of laws, but thats not the Laws and Customs we have.

Of course, canon is up to you to interpret.  If you want Feanor discussing LACE with someone back in Valinor, go ahead.  If you want to throw out LACE entirely, go ahead.  It’s not even a canonical essay.  All of this analysis is honestly useless when you consider the fact that no part of LACE exists in any canonical book.

But that’s Tolkien analysis for you.

[reachgirl]

On Buddie and them potentially being aware of their feelings

So we definitely see evidence of how Eddie might feel about Buck, how he clearly loves and trusts him. He absolutely relies on Buck a lot as someone who loves Christopher, as that person you go to who cares about your kid as much as you do. And he clearly doesn’t handle not having Buck around very well during the storyline that must not be named. 

He also looks at Buck like “you’re lucky you’re pretty”, a LOT. And he’s shown to think about Buck’s wellbeing and Buck’s feelings. For a guy who’s not usually great at ~the talking~, he seems to sense that Buck needs to hear him actually *say* things like that he trusts him, out loud. For Buck, someone who’s been told that he’s reckless and impulsive, not diligent, not reliable (and to be fair to Bobby, has been all those things at times, but is desperate to change that view of himself), to be told that he’s trusted - more than anyone else - with someone’s kid? That’s huge. And Eddie knew that he needed to hear that, he also knew that he needed to feel like part of something when Buck was depressed and hanging around at home after the truck bombing. And Eddie was the one who noticed Buck wasn’t around at the station. For Eddie, the fact that they “have each other’s backs” is so important, because, and it’s insane how this is not wishful thinking on the fandom’s part, he actually tells Shannon that she doesn’t have his back. So yeah, absolutely nobody is disputing that Eddie loves Buck.

And I’ve talked about how I believe that Eddie might be bi leaning towards more into men than women (his “not my type” and aunt pepa’s reaction to buck are the foundation for this theory), and his particular combination of upbringing, experience and location really messing with him admitting that to himself (Conservative religious culture, Texas, army, getting married young because of outside expectations). But many of the scenes we get from him could - FROM THE OUTSIDE - very well just show a guy who has a lot of love and respect (and occasionally some fond exasperation) for his best friend. Possibly more, but not in that active, pining way. Not like he’s truly aware of it, yet.

But Buck? He pretty much always looks at Eddie like he’s the best thing that has happened to him, ever, and he can’t believe his luck of getting to be around this man. The smile he constantly gives him, and - in seasons 2 and 3 - only him, is the actual “I want to sleep with you smile” from season 1 Buck. I don’t make the rules.

He constantly finds ways to help him out, reads up on things he knows Eddie is interested in or things that are for some reason something Eddie is dealing with (whether it’s baseball biographies or summer camp brochures), and absolutely always looks to him for approval anytime he does something well or remotely badass. Or even when he makes a joke. It’s almost like 95% of the stuff he does, he does so that Eddie will see.

He sees himself as part of Eddie’s family to the point of not feeling like he’s a guest at their house, he has proven he would actually die for Chris, and he spends much of his free time finding ways of making Chris, the most important person in Eddie’s life, happy. He shares in both the happy and the difficult parts of raising Chris, he gets involved in school problems, and he’s there for Eddie to talk through all the little things that come up when you’re a parent. Often times, with single parents, when the other parent isn’t around, the problem is that there’s nobody else in your life who shares the same love and enthusiasm or worry you have for your child. You could talk about everything relating to them for hours, but even the best meaning friends will at some point reach the limit of how interested they are. Not so with Buck.

But unlike Eddie, Buck is also aware, to a point, of how much he’s focused on Eddie. Where Eddie’s jealousy comes across as more spur-of-the-moment, not something he’s even aware of, Buck seems like.. he’s thought about how he feels about Eddie. Others definitely have. Maddie’s comment about his “man crush” aside, even a random christmas elf (long may she live) comments on it. Hen and Karen immediately agree Buck would invite Eddie, like, Karen knows about this even. Their reaction when Buck is acting irrational over how they might get Eddie out when he’s buried alive and most likely dead already is that reaction of “Oh fuck, this will break this person” that is usually reserved for the significant other or parent. Bobby definitely reacts to Buck in relation to Eddie the way a father would, carefully weighing being amused at how obvious he’s being, and concern over not wanting him to get hurt doing something stupid trying to save Eddie, or by falling for him when it might not be reciprocated. They all know that Buck’s a little (more than) smitten with Eddie. And Buck... of course he’s going to notice how his friends and family react. I think he’s been aware of it for a while and is constantly trying to navigate and balance this. 

Of course he hasn’t told his face about balancing anything at all yet, because look at that man’s face any time he looks at Eddie, look at that scene with the medal. He absolutely can’t help it. And sometimes it’s like he wants them to pick up on it - for example, pushing Maddie on the fact that he doesn’t consider himself a guest. And that’s completely understandable, sometimes you want people to pick up on something and maybe even comment on it (because their reaction reaffirms to you that maybe you’re not crazy) while also not wanting attention on that point. People are complicated like that. And Buck may be a himbo, but he’s complicated AF.

We get Buck being really weird about Eddie and Shannon in general - right off the bat. When Shannon shows up at the station and she and Eddie talk, Buck’s in the background and overhears that they’re sleeping together. He clearly struggles with this information, (and Chim possibly notices..) then he get’s real petty about them potentially getting married again (”Maybe you can get a discount”) - and he nopes out of the situation as quickly as he can - because he doesn’t want to risk saying anything snarky.

Then Chim and Buck go christmas tree shopping, and Chim comments on how Buck can’t let Eddie’s situation with Shannon go, and it’s true, he can’t stop himself. But when Eddie asks him for advice in front of the fountain (/metaphorical water penis as I like to call it), he’s suddenly all “I didn’t think it was my business” ... ok, sure, Buck. Then he basically tells Eddie to try and make it work with Shannon. In terms of character development, in a romance, this is the part where person A wants to be with person B but doesn’t think they have a chance, so makes the choice to try and settle for being their friend, which, heartbreakingly, involves pushing them into the arms of someone else.

Also, his kind of “oversharing” of Eddie’s situation with Ana to the rest of the team is, to me, a pretty clear indicator that the topic makes him uncomfortable and he’s trying a Ross Geller-I’m making Fajitas- “let’s show everyone how very completely normal I feel about this” approach, which.. it doesn’t.. work that well. And when does this ever work, it’s super easy to see through this, and it usually just serves to draw more attention to the fact that you’re uncomfortable with whatever is being discussed.

Buck also takes everything Eddie says to heart. Like, fucking takes it and will not let go of it. Half a season after Eddie tells him that he makes everything about himself, he breaks down telling Maddie he’s worried he’s making the situation with the old firefighter about himself again. During the kitchen scene (or “The actual how-to-guide of what to do when you thought the guy you have a crush on doesn’t reciprocate but then you have a fight and he really doesn’t handle being away from you so well so you kind of might as well see where being a little more openly flirty will get you”), Buck’s clearly thought about Eddie’s words from the grocery store fight, and he’s gonna call Eddie out. And maybe do other stuff.

Looking at what the writers are actually doing, to end the season, there’s the clawing at dirt of it all, Buck falling apart when Eddie’s buried alive. Buck being in almost all of Eddie’s memories when he’s close to dying. And Maddie’s comment about not wanting to set Josh up with Buck, which is innocent enough, but why throw that in on top of all of the above, if not because maybe what we’re actually looking at is that they’re setting up a sexuality crisis for Buck, and him realizing he’s maybe into Eddie, but Eddie not actually reciprocating (yet)? And say Buck is then somehow forcefully pushed to see the truth about how he feels, maybe by, i don’t know, coming across TK and/or Carlos on a call, and one of them asking him how long him and Eddie have been together? We might get Eddie with Ana, and a very long, drawn out process of Buck realizing what’s happening and trying to leave them alone, and Eddie being really confused about why Buck’s being like that. Then we would have two options (well, more, really, but these are two I like): 1) Eddie pushing Buck on that point and demanding an explanation and Buck just coming out with it because fuck it and sorry and please let me see Chris still 2) Buck’s sexuality crisis (or not crisis, if he’s always been pan/bi, which, look, nothing I’ve seen has disproven this theory) leading to him dating a guy and Eddie getting really jealous but not actually being aware of the fact what he feels is jealousy (because he doesn’t realize how he feels about Buck, see this whole essay you just read), and Buck being the one who confronts Eddie about why he’s being such a homophobic asshole about this, and Eddie straight up kissing him because he can’t not anymore.

[ellasadventuresinfandoms]

Okay, back in May @isolatedphenomenon asked me if I had an les mis fic recs and I went "oh boy do I !" and then promptly fucked off and disappeared from tumblr for like 6 months...

Anyway on the off chance people are interested, here is my vastly too long list of  my favourite les mis fanfic (that I'm almost 100% sure I'll have accidentally missed some of my favourites off of...)

The vast majority of these are main pairing Enjolras/Grantaire, so I've put those first, divided into multi-chaptered and then one-shots. Below that will be other pairings!

Multi-chaptered

• Witch Boy Series : magic AU, starting with Grantaire solving Enjolras' curse - this is just Incredible world building which gets better as it goes on - my favourite is the Babet interlude

• World Ain't Ready : you know how fandoms tend to have a fic that is just associated with it ? in my experience, for les mis this is it - and well deserved ! High school, fake dating AU with some of the most engaging writing

• BE : Enjolras is dragged back into theatre production, helping Eponine put on a production of Hamlet - really love the characterisation in this, and this is really one of those modern AUs that actually feels like real life - really good writing

• After the End : the definitive apocalypse AU in my eyes - les amis are an underground resistance to the dystopian government - really wonderful characterisation of Grantaire and the amis

• You never have to wonder; you never have to ask. : I tend to find fic by scrolling through bookmarks of a pairing, which means I often see repeats; this is a fic that if I see I just re-read cause I know I'll enjoy it - the amis sparked a failed rebellion, and now 18 months later Grantaire ends up staying at Enjolras' after returning to Paris for Marius and Cosette's wedding

• Your Heart on Your Skin : Soulmate AU with flower tattoos marking important emotions and events - wonderful concept and world building 

• Impatient to Be Free : Daughters of Bilitis AU - if that doesn't make you excited I don't know what else to say to convince you (aside from saying the author is a simply wonderful writer)

• You Dance Dreams : Okay. Not to be over dramatic, but this fic did genuinely qualitatively change my life, in that it was the first thing that got me looking up contemporary ballet and now that's like one of my favourite things and big hobby So. Also its really great writing; music/creative arts school les amis with Grantaire choreohraphing the ballet for Combeferre's opera, with a heavy emphasis on Grantaire realising he really never actually got over Enjolras

• philia : this one is an absolute classic to me, but not given nearly enough recognition - one of the more realistic college AUs ever written, and the writing of Grantaire is so good because it hits the perfect balance of sympathy and annoyance about his behaviour (that's a genuine compliment) 

• Coffee Hooligans : fucking tragedy this never got properly finished, Enjolras leads the amis as social justice vigilantes and tries to hide the criminal bits of his life from R

• Fighting the Hurricane : Pacific Rim AU that's less an AU and more just placing the les mis characters in the Pacific Rim universe. Really good and riveting read, also super interesting depiction of Grantaire

• Weaving Olden Dances : Fairy AU - Grantaire "claims" Enjolras to prevent his execution - really good writing, love Grantaires characterisation 

• Paris Burning : canon era (sort of) where cities have a physical being - Grantaire is Paris and becomes entangled in Enjolras' revolution - oh the world building is truly *chefs kiss*

• Euphoria is You For Me : Enjolras and Grantaire keep meet cuting in a wonderfully written Brooklyn - feels like a love letter to Brooklyn at times, and I really like the characterisation of Grantaire 

• so please just fall in love with me this christmas : Enjolras works for the environmental company Grantaire volunteers at, and keeps getting secret gifts at Christmas - I sound a little like a broken record but the Grantaire characterisation is very good

• You Are the Moon : Wild West esque Space AU - Grantaire has to call on the amis to help rescue Valjean and Cosette, despite Grantaire leaving the amis 6 months before. On re-reading the Enjolras characterisation feels a little rushed, but overall fantastic story telling and the Grantaire arc is a Delight 

• Pandemos : Enjolras is aphrodite, and seeks peace from all his suitors in R/Hephestus' cave

• Pining for You : Hallmark christmas romance - Grantaire returns home to work on his father's tree farm, and Enjolras is the lawyer helping prevent the farm being sold - cute as shit imo

• Once We're Kings : Fantasy AU - a country hosts a ball to marry Prince Enjolras and the rival country sends Grantaire as a fuck you - one of the best ways of doing Enjolras as a prince in a fantasy and just really nicely written

• Never Bitter and All Delicious : Fairy Godmother AU - yes really, yes its genuinely a very good read

• On One Condition : Fantasy AU - Enjolras is a bored knight who finally goes to check out the local dragon, which turns out to be Grantaire - I really like how they capture Enjolras' stubborn nature and it's such a well written soft growth of love between them

• That's How Easy Love Can Be : Les Amis work at a primary school; and its secret santa time! very fun portrayal of Enjolras

• The Lark and Her Lieutenants : re write of canon where Cosette is the leader of the revolution - just *chefs kiss*

• If You Tickle Us, Do We Not Laugh : Grantaire is Enjolras' secret android - really good at writing a relationship that's incredibly loving but just keeps being antagonistic and coming off wrong 

One Shots

• True Colours : AU where you leave colours on the people important to you - Enjolras and Grantaire falling for each other is so soft and gently written its lovely, this is genuinely one of my favourites

• Keep It Kind, Keep It Good, Keep It Right : this one is so good to me, because it builds off my pet hatred of everyone assuming Enjolras doesn't care about (or at least actively show he cares about) his friends

• blooming : very soft post-dystopian utopia that has just a really wonderful sense of hope and light to me

• and the wall leaned away (or: The Pros and Cons of Tilling) : perfectly realised characterizations of the amis, Grantaire needs a date to her final year art exhibition - deals with anxiety over protest in a way that actually hits for me

• not just one of the crowd : R helps run a leftist bakery and bike repair shop - very cute characterisation, and I think more les mis fanfic should link to anarchist essays

• Lovesickness : Enjolras is an idiot and thinks he's sick rather than having a crush - the writing of Joly and Combeferre in this is some of my favourite depictions of these two

• If there's a rocket, tie me to it : absolutely heartbreaking sci-fi AU about the amis as doomed mecha pilots

• Where I Fall is Where I Land : Enjolras is a Roman commander as Rome's power is leaving England, and then meets the pict Grantaire (+ fun soulmark stuff !)

• You Started Foreign to Me : Enjolras moves to america and R is the overnight grocery clerk who helps her learn Spanish - cute fluffy lesbians with a wonderfully written driven Enjolras

• Love Is Touching Souls : very cute soulmate AU - and one I really love for really truly considering the implications of soul marks and creating historical lore around it

• Ten Years : R is a musician, and it non-linearly charts his relationship to Enj from high school to 10 years later

• put up with me then I'll make you see : Grantaire lives above Enjolras, and its christmas - I find it to have a very fun interpretation of pining Enjolras

• A Cat Called Trash Can : this was one of the first les mis fics I ever read (yes I know it says it was published in 2020, but I think it has to be a re-upload or something?) and it does still have a special place in my heart - Grantaire rescues a cat, but Enjolras is the only one with an apartment free to look after it 

• Still I'm Begging to Be Free : inception AU where les amis have to rescue a sleeping R from his own brain

•I'm in it for You : cw: illness, cancer - R has cancer and is being a martyr about telling his friends so Enjolras drives him back from chemo

• walls come tumbling down : sky high au - a very good high school AU with the perfect level of campy superhero powers

• This brave new world's not like yesterday : Enjolras needs a job, so ends up working in a bowling alley with Grantaire and bonding

Enjolras/Grantaire/Combeferre

• In Defiance of All Geometry : les amis are a student co-op house, Enjolras and Combeferre are pining friends and Grantaire is the newbie

• Still the Same : this is very good writing and very compelling - if you can get over the (imo) plot hole of Enjolras working for the FBI. R was an art thief Enj put away and is briefly helping the FBI out, and Combeferre is Enjolras' husband

• To Kingdom Come : cw: war and PTSD from that, Enjolras and Combeferre are part of a group of refugees that have crossed into a more fantasy land, and Grantaire is a lone traveller from that land that attempts to help - that was a shit summary of this very emotional, wonderfully written fic about war and love in all forms

• Gonna need (a spark to ignite) : I always love a twist on a classic trope, and this is a very fun take on the soulmate AU - Enjolras loses feeling in his soul mark as a child, falls in love with Grantaire and then his soulmate, Combeferre, turns up

Eponine/Cosette

• Pretty Girls Don't Know the Things That I Know : simply stunning writing - perfect example of soft writing about a harsh world

• she knows her way around : Eponine and Cosette bond, ostensibly so Eponine can find out about her for Marius, and their interactions are so playful and realistic, its wonderful

• always find me floating on oceans : Cosette stows away on Eponine's pirate ship - I do always have a soft spot for eposette fics (not just cause I ship it) because they truly characterise Cosette in a really considered and interesting way

• There's No Making Love : I'm putting this under eposette even though there is some significant enjolras/grantaire content, because the Cosette characterisation is so fun and cute

• round and round again : this fic really beautifully translates Cosette's bad childhood and then isolated teenage years, and the impact that would have on her as an adult into a modern AU

• Underwater Thunderheards : this is based off the book The Scorpio Races, and is just a really nice short fic  about longing

• How To Change The World Without Taking Power : Marius has a crush on Cosette and she's tried being polite and subtle in turning him down, so just ends up fake dating Eponine instead

• blood red fruit and poison's kiss : Snow White AU - Cosette as Snow White

• The Winters Cannot Fade Her : Snow White Au 2.0 - Eponine as Snow White - this was written as a pair to the one above which is just so cute to me

• marriage à la mode : Cosette and Eponine run a bridal shop together and it's very cute !

• Temporary Hold : I personally find this a really fun and very unique take on Cosette - with exams coming up she decides she needs to get laid on the reg and so hits up Eponine to act as if they're already long term girlfriends

Combeferre/Courfeyrac

• better than you had it : fake dating but kick it up an emotional notch - Courf and Ferre pretend to still be together after breaking up for a family event

• take flight, come near : nice and cute low fantasy, where Combeferre runs a dragon sanctuary and Courf finds an injured dragon

Rare Pairs

• The Future's Owned by You and Me : cute Enjolras/Feuilly with actual radical politics and real life organising difficulties and wins

• First Dates and Other Dangers : Combeferre and Grantaire agree to go on a blind date and it's awkward until it isn't - just cute !

• after midnight : Combeferre has insomnia and meets Grantaire in various all night fast food chains

• as you are : Bahorel and Jehan getting ready together

• Almost Romantic : Jehan works at a museum, and takes Combeferre on a little tour

• Understudy : Jehan/Combeferre, with Combeferre's insecurities regarding being seen as second best to Enjolras

• Here There Be Dragons : Courf/Enj/Ferre - Courf and Enj are superheroes and Ferre is the doctor that patches them up

• To Let it Occur (Laisser Faire la Nature) : Feuilly has a stupidly long stopover in Paris and meets Enjolras

• rule of three : Courf/Enj/Ferre as spies and loving boyfriends

• Good Rhetoric : snapshots of cute cuddly courf/enj/ferre

• subluxate, dislocate, replace : found family and chronic illness with Joly/Bossuet/Musichetta

• Strike stone, strike home (like lightning) : so this fic took one minor piece of lore about Tolkien's dwarves and made a beautiful j/b/m fic from it

• Almost Inevitable : Bahorel/Feuilly friends-with-benefits

• god only knows (what I'd be without you) : Bahorel/Feuilly with a closeted Feuilly and a beautiful Feuilly and Eponine friendship

[master-sass-blast]

Picnics and Planning.

Hi, I hurt my back and I have no idea how; have some plot free fluff.

Summary: You and Piotr decide to have a picnic dinner in your backyard --and have some important life conversations while you're at it.

Pairing(s): Piotr Rasputin x Reader.

Rating: G for fluff.

Word count: 1.2k.

Set after “It’s Truly Magical” and before “Period Pains.”

Taglist:  @marvel-is-perfection, @chromecutie, @girl-obsessed-with-things, @super-darkcloudstudent, @dandyqueen, @leo-writer

You grin when you hear the front door open and close, followed by Piotr’s signature heavy stride. “Hey, honey! How was work today?”

“Not bad.” His keys clatter against the dish you guys keep by the front door for holding essentials. “Russell passed Russian language final with flying colors.”

“Hooray! That’s great!” You pad out of the kitchen, smiling sunnily as you step into your husband’s waiting embrace. You sigh, melting against his burly chest. “Hi.”

“Privet, myshka.” Piotr kisses the top of your head, then tips your chin up so he can press his lips against yours. After a moment, he breaks the kiss and asks, “How was your day?”

“Good. Did some grading, reviewed some essays for the freshmen writing course –oh, we’re out of grapes. I ate the last of them for lunch.”

Piotr chuckles. “I guess we will have to make run to store soon.”

“And here I thought you had a lifetime supply of protein bars squirrelled away in your office.”

Piotr arches an eyebrow at you, grinning whilst you giggle. “Very funny, myshka.”

“Thank you; I certainly thought so.” You squeal when he tickles your ribs, then settle back against him, laughing breathlessly. “Does anything sound good for dinner?”

“We have mac and cheese—”

“Not anymore. I ate that for lunch, too.”

“Ah. We could make pancakes—”

“We’re out of eggs. You polished them off for breakfast yesterday.”

“Oh.” Piotr ‘hmms,’ fingers idly playing with your hair. “We could do pizza –no, finished box on Saturday.”

“Yeah.” You look up at him, smiling hopefully. “We could get take-out.”

He grimaces. “Nyet. Pozhaluysta.”

“Okay. Well, I think that leaves… sandwiches.”

“Sandwich is fine,” he says with a shrug.

“Sandwiches it is. You want to have a picnic outside?”

Piotr grins down at you. “I want nothing more.”

“Sounds good.” You grin back, then roll up on the balls of your feet to kiss him.

 ***

 The two of you settle on the lawn space just off the back deck. You lay out a massive, fluffy, light green quilt while Piotr carries out a basket with your sandwiches, some chips and other sides, and a couple of water bottles. It’s early evening in the beginning of May, meaning that the air is balmy against your skin and that the air is still filled with the sounds of birds chirping and insects buzzing.

You flop down onto the blanket, letting out a content, relieved sigh. You gaze up at the early evening sky, smiling as the world slowly goes golden in the warm summer light. “This is nice.”

“Da.” Piotr sets the basket down on the center of the blanket, then sits down next to you. He smiles softly at you, stroking his fingers through your hair. “You look happy.”

“I am happy.” You beam up at him, then sit up so you can kiss his cheek. “I’ve got you. Of course, I’m happy.”

Piotr ducks his head, cheeks flushing. His mouth curves into a pleased smile, and then he turns his head and kisses your lips. “Ya tebya lyublyu, myshka.”

“I love you, too, baby.” You kiss him again, then grin up at him. “Sandwiches?”

Piotr chuckles and nods; he reaches for the basket. “Sandwiches.”

It’s a simple affair. There’s a couple of plates tucked in the basket –because your husband packed the basket, so of course he included plates—to set your sandwiches on, but the two of you largely just kick back and relax. Take in the outside weather. Bask in the summer warmth and your love for one another.

It’s perfect.

“How’s lesson planning going?” you ask between bites of your chicken salad sandwich.

Piotr nods as he chews his bite, then swallows and washes it down with some water before replying. “Is good. Kurt and I are redesigning foreign language and culture program in school for upcoming term. We want to include more projects for students, make courses more interactive.”

“Ooh, very cool,” you say as you pluck a few grapes off a larger cluster. “What do you guys have in mind?”

“Cooking projects, more assignments involving music and film –perhaps couple of field trips, if school can afford them.”

You grin. “That sounds like fun. I’m sure your students will love that.”

He smiles back. “Spasibo, myshka.”

The two of you lapse into silence, instead enjoying the sounds of the birds chirping and the breeze rustling the leaves in the trees.

“What happens when I get pregnant?” you ask.

Piotr blinks, then stares over at you. “Chto?”

“Like—” you shrug “—do I stop being an X-Woman? Do we both stop to take care of the baby? Like… what’s the plan?”

“I guess we would have to talk about this,” Piotr says, shrugging back at you. “Where—” He chuckles. “Where did this come from?”

“I don’t know,” you say, shrugging again. “We were talking about school and the upcoming year and your ‘kids,’ so my mind went to babies. It makes sense to me.” You stick your tongue out at him when he laughs again. “Laugh all you want, dorkus. It’s still a valid question.”

“It is,” Piotr agrees, nodding. He lays back on the blanket and looks up at you. “You will be one carrying and giving birth to baby. What do you want?”

“We’re both raising the baby –or babies, depending on how many we have. We both need to have input on this,” you fire back. You lean back, support your weight on your palms. “I know you love being an X-Man.”

“I do.” He reaches over and takes your hand in his. “But pregnancy and birth will have larger impact on you than me. I want to make sure you are supported.”

You squeeze his hand and smile down at him. “Thank you, baby. And I know you’ll take good care of me while I’m pregnant. I’m more worried about while the kid –or kids—is growing up. Like… what do we do while they’re in school? Is it right of us to keep running missions while they need us to raise them and be around to take care of them?”

“Aah.” Piotr nods to himself, staring up at the sky as he mulls your question over. “I… am conflicted.”

“How come?”

“I love being X-Men,” Piotr says, watching birds fly overhead. “Gives me purpose, sense of role in society. But… I do not think it would be right to our future children if their lives are always turned upside down by being X-Men. They deserve stability. Security.”

“But is that any different from parents who serve in the military? Or as firefighters? Or any other number of ‘risky’ jobs?” you ask. “Are we being irresponsible by being on the duty roster, considering that there are thousands of families in similar situations as us?”

“I do not know, myshka,” Piotr says after a moment. “I do not think we will find answer tonight.”

“I know. I just think we need to settle on an answer before we decide to have kids.”

“Agreed.”

You sigh, then lay down next to him, pillowing your head on his chest. You sling one leg over his hips, nestling yourself against him. “Love you, baby.”

Piotr puts an arm around you and kisses the top of your head. “I love you, also, dorogoy.”

[phoenixrisesoncemore]

On Fairy-stories and Final Fantasy: A Prelude to a Longer Meta

My most recent read of Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories has lead me to an epiphany about, of all things, video games; specifically video games as an art form with the potential to create immersive realities/narratives (read: secondary worlds), and even video games as fairy-story.

I’ve been working off and on for the last four or so years on a piece that explores how the push towards a more cinematic gaming experience in the last 25-30 years, as exciting as it was in the thick of it, has shifted (and even hindered) my enjoyment of such story-heavy franchises as the Final Fantasy series. I’ve struggled to explain why it was that I stopped experiencing the kind of deep emotional and psychological engagement I remember experiencing as a child and teen. Shouldn’t the more realistic characters and environments have heightened my sense of attachment to them? Shouldn’t it have made the game world even more immersive? Was my increasing disappointment merely a response to decreasing quality of other aspects of the games? Or was it as simple as growing up and becoming more sophisticated? Or, depressingly, growing into a brain in which the necessary cognitive magic of completely immersive imagination no longer worked with ease?

In the Introduction to Tolkien On Fairy-stories—the edition edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson—the essay is placed within the scholarly context of the previous century of comparative philology and comparative mythology, particularly in regards to the 19th century discovery of universal motifs throughout world literature and consideration about what connection this universality might have to the species-wide origins of language:

“The fact that the original investigations were led by philologists engaged in the historical study of words leads Tolkien to a consideration of the power of language, and from there to the interlocking operations of human language, perception and imagination. Here, in the recombining of disparate words “new form is made”. The ability of humankind to create an imagined world out of words is the theme that runs through the rest of [On Fairy-stories].” (Pg. 11) (Emphasis mine.)

It is words that I mean to focus on as the essential ingredient in question in this kind of cognitive magic. “Language, perception and imagination” are the chemical agents that, when combined, ignite a visceral and deeply spiritual kind of experience, bringing a Secondary World into existence in the mind of the reader or listener (for fairy-stories can be told as well as read).

Tolkien was clear in that he believed only literature—not drama, film, or any visual art—was truly suited to inciting this experience. Literature—the telling of stories with words alone—had two advantages: in comparison to the visual arts it was relatively free from domination by the story-teller and it also did not require the reader or listener to engage in two layers of belief in the way that drama did.

The first advantage refers to the lack of specificity afforded by literary narratives: an artist may draw a willow tree and in so doing create a much more concrete example of “willow tree” than a writer who simply writes the words “willow tree.” Through the use of words, the writer is referring to both a specific willow tree and to willow trees as a class or form or idea. This ignites the alchemy in the mind of the listener, for now the listener is both contemplating the willow tree as concept/object and engaged in imagining the specifics of the willow tree in question in their mind, unhindered and undominated by the vision of the author.

The second advantage refers to the easier path to belief afforded by a story built of pure language. In drama that attempts to approach the form of a fairy-story (with some of its fantastic trappings) the audience must be convinced of two layers of “deception”: the layer required to believe that the actors are in fact the characters they are playing, and the layer required to believe that the characters and environments are of a distinctly fantastic sort. This was one step too many, Tolkien believed.

So then what do JRPGs have to do with it?

Once upon a time the stripped down graphics of 16 and 32 bit console gaming systems combined with narratives heavy with world building and text boxes of extensive dialog in an environment that balanced a developer-guided experience of important themes and emotional arcs with the freedom to explore a fantasy world and pace the experience to the user’s own desire. This strange brew, I believe, invoked a similar alchemy to that described by Tolkien. Stripped of much of the specificity of today’s photoreal graphics, the graphical worlds of games like Final Fantasy IV, V, VI (and even VII and VIII to some degree) were filled with objects and places that acted more like pictographs than representational art. The experience of reading an emotional exchange between two sets of a few dozen pixels is not that dissimilar to the act of reading a book.

Then somewhere in the late 1990s JRPGs changed form, morphing bit by FMV bit from an experience more akin to a novel to one that was primarily cinematic in nature. A dramatic scene that would once have been created as much in the player’s mind as it was on the screen was suddenly overwritten with the developer’s own very concrete interpretation of events. For example: when I remember the opera scene from Final Fantasy VI I remember two things: the events as they played out on screen—sprites moving against a static background—and the events as they unfurled in my head while I was playing, an imaginative picture of the events, character’s faces, motions, and voices as completely unique to me as the visual worlds I had built when reading. When I remember the emotional ending of Final Fantasy X... I remember the emotional FMV cut scene at the end of Final Fantasy X. Which is beautiful and moving, no doubt (well... maybe not the voices).

But, importantly, it is not mine.

No alchemy took place to create it. It was handed to me. And I found it beautiful.

But that... that’s not the same thing.

[warsofasoiaf]

Please do a small essay for Planescape Torment! Love to read your blog!

A game as transcendentally excellent as Planescape: Torment cannot be satisfied with a small essay. This is heavy spoilers so readers beware, so I’ll write something on the Nameless One and the journey he undertakes.

Planescape: Torment is widely considered one of the best written RPG’s in the history of computer games. At a first glance, it’s hard to get into. The setting is incredibly dense and strange, which can be incredibly discouraging to new players who find it difficult to connect to a game that’s so far removed from a traditional fantasy. Similarly, combat in the game can be frightfully tedious, even a slog at times to get to the next part of the game. You can’t die permanently save in a few specific circumstances which helps remove the threat, but you usually end up either back in the Mortuary or in some tucked away corner of a map, so you have to march your way back, which takes up time just like reloading a saved game would. The mandatory combat exists partially as a limitation of the setting and of the engine, partially of game design because otherwise it would be a long chain of text boxes and exploring down decision trees to get to your objective. But for those who are willing to put up with it, the journey is deep and thoughtful. For all the weirdness that Planescape offers, the adventure that you go through is actually quite familiar. It’s a moody, introspective journey about regret, about the impact you have on others, about belief, about atonement, and about meaning.

The Nameless One waking up on a mortuary slab is an iconic opening, because it changes the blank slate of character creation on its head. Unlike traditional Infinity Engine D&D games, you do not pick a class, race, even a portrait. You’re always some zombie-looking dude with sick dreadlocks and a bunch of tattoos, which end up being a written record of helpful hints. Certainly, this is a bizarre way of delivering exposition and quest direction, but let’s be honest RPG’s often have NPC’s whose job it is to further your game progress and enrich its world. Making them tattoos is unusual but it still performs the same function. Similarly, your first companion is a friendly, floating, wisecracking skull. That seems weird of course, but often the first companion you get in an RPG is a friendly sort to help you get your feet wet during the game, as well as provide exposition. Imoen from Baldur’s Gate was perky and bubbly, but both Morte and Imoen provide comic relief to help keep things light in the initial stages even though you as the character have gone through some rough stuff, and Morte says that he’s a mimir, which is a literal repository of knowledge and thus a natural source for an exposition dump according to the rules of the setting. The first couple of puzzles in this dungeon are mostly finding items, fulfilling requests from NPC’s, and exploring the map, which are standard fare for the Infinity Engine games. The window dressing is strange, but the functions carried out are still familiar, helping to ease the player into the strangeness to come. But even at character creation, there’s hints to come that you aren’t the traditional blank slate character. The Wisdom stat suggests that remembering things will be important, and the tattoos clearly had to come from somewhere before the game starts, so it’s in the back of the mind while the players start to acclimate themselves to the mechanics of the game

As the journey continues though, and the exposition of who you are starts becoming more apparent. A ghost on the first floor of the Mortuary calls you “my love” and you can feel the strength of that, and that what you might say could be very dangerous so you must pick your next words with care, so very soon, the game gives you two critical pieces of information. What your character did before the game is going to be important, and you’re going to need to read and think about what you do in the text boxes just as much as you will in combat. This ghost is one of the most important characters in the game, but here you’re as confused as the Nameless One is, replicating the character’s confusion in the player. There’s a lot of information in Planescape: Torment, and the use of dialogue-heavy boxes encourages taking your time, slowly exploring and discovering things, remembering them, and piecing them together, and presenting them means replicating the Nameless One piecing everything together by forcing the player to do likewise. This was the right decision to make because exposition and discovery are the primary ways that the themes are explored, and so establishing a slow pace is a way for the game to let the player mull the things over in their mind (along with the ubiquitous ‘updated my journal’ line that the Nameless One says to make sure the player reads the darn thing). So, in a rare dramatic move, an amnesia plot is actually given the respect it deserves using the unique advantage of video games by allowing the player to be the one to make the discoveries rather than attempting to carefully script reveals in more passive media that often end up fumbling. Who is the Nameless One, why did he wake up in a Mortuary, and what the heck is going on in this game?

Of course, the answer to the second question is an easy answer but it evokes questions all its own. The Nameless One woke up there because he was dead and that’s where bodies go. This case of death though doesn’t seem to be very fatal. Indeed, when you die you get back up again. In D&D, where death is not as permanent as it is in real life, there are plenty of jokes and memes about the revolving door afterlife, but in Torment, this becomes another great mystery. What the heck is happening here? Clearly, this is powerful magic, but who is casting it, and how are they constantly able to get to you no matter where you seem to be? There’s another goal here, to get the player to think of death in combat not as a means to immediately reload the save game like you would in Baldur’s Gate (even if it’s an NPC that dies instead of the plot-critical main character, it’s usually better just to reload then cart yourself over to the temple than deal with picking up their inventory - at least until higher levels when you have a party member cleric or druid to cast the spell), but rather it’s a nuisance to have to get back to where you were, just as annoying than the cranium rats or other minor monsters you fight, so that you no longer fear it, which is an excellent way to channel players to not worry about it so that the punch can land later. Later, when a Sensate asks to kill you so she can experience the sensation of murdering someone with her bare hands while not actually killing anyone, it’s treating as a bizarre commercial transaction, not the seriousness that such an act would normally be. 

Upon leaving the Mortuary, the Nameless One is prodded to find Pharod, but there’s no sense of urgency by placing a time limit on it, leaving you open to explore Sigil and find out about this world. It’s here where the setting can really start to be reinforced by letting the player explore it. Almost every character can provide an interesting piece of setting and worldbuilding that helps immerse players in the experience, and the themes start to get reinforced here. The importance of belief is a central theme in the setting, but the hints of it are seeded when Mourns-For-Trees asks you to believe in them and for you to get your companions to believe in them too, and it pays off when you get enough of your party members to believe in it by dispensing XP as a quest reward. Far before finding out that learning your name is a central part of the game, the Crier of Es-Annon worries about the loss of the name, and the Nameless One can help by getting the name recorded on a tombstone, freeing the Crier to pursue a new life. By being mindful of the central themes, the writers could seed the themes through the game early, to get the player to think about them before revealing how important they were all along.

The factions are one of the best ways that the worldbuilding of the setting reinforces the central aspects of the character and the quest and how that enriches it. The factions are great on their own, because they explicitly deal with the meaning of life and existence which are important philosophical concepts, and are difficult to reach in a setting of infinite possibility like Planescape. One of the central themes in the setting is called the “Center of All.” Since the planes are infinite, nothing can be proven to be the center, so the center is where you are right now. In a game with that as a setting, it’s no wonder that the quest is a deeply moody and introspective one. It would seem counter-intuitive, Planescape is literally infinite which means you can do whatever you want, but that makes the most sense when evaluated under the “Center of All,” the journey of the self is the journey of the planes and vice versa, and the factional understanding of existence is mirrored within as the player and the character have to rationalize existence as best they can. The arc words of “what can change the nature of a man” take on weight when evaluated under the Center of All. Since changing a man’s nature means changing the center of the planes, the question asks what is so powerful that it changes reality, and it’s these beliefs, underlining its importance.

The factions that you can join represents an element of the Nameless One’s past and/or his journey. The Sensates are the clearest example, since The Nameless One has been a Sensate before, and the unique circumstances of him constantly being reborn but forgetting means that he probably has one of the most experiences in the multiverse, combining an immortal lifespan with a mortal’s curiosity and subjective perspective. The Sensates are true empiricists, they believe that once someone experiences everything that they will achieve enlightenment, but despite all that the Nameless One experiences, the amnesia he has on death means he loses them, and so he never reaches it. The Believers of the Source believe that life is a trial and that it must be overcome to ascend, and indeed, the Nameless One is caught in a trial that he must constantly struggle toward completing, in a meta sense that’s the game itself. The Dustmen believe that death is false and purging yourself of passions is necessary to reach a nirvana-like state of True Death, and for the Nameless One death is indeed false and he seeks a way to end that state. The Independent League states that the factions are delusional and need to be overcome, and indeed, to complete the game you need to use at least two factions to get the tools you need to reach the endgoal. The Chaosmen are the hardest one to pin down, because alignment is determined by your actions and you can be lawful instead of chaotic, but the state of the Nameless One is a transgression against the natural laws that the Chaosmen struggle against. 

As you adventure though, you start learning about how the Nameless One’s past incarnations effected the world, and often for ill. You learn that your past selves have been some of the worst people that the multiverse had the misfortune of experiencing. The Practical Incarnation is the most infamous of these, and he is a man utterly driven by self-serving utilitarianism. Other people are nothing to the Practical Incarnation except as tools, and he uses and discards them as if they were mere objects without thoughts or feelings, friends and enemies alike. When he found that Dak’kon possessed a zerth blade, he resolved to bring it under his control. The Practical Incarnation found Dak’kon broken and adrift, where a crisis of faith weakened the walls of the githzerai capital and sanctity Shra'kt'lor, as the walls were forged of belief and in Dak’kon moment of doubt the real walls crumbled. The Practical Incarnation took this broken man and devised an elaborate ruse to get Dak’kon to come to the conclusion that he wanted to so that he would be useful. A deeply personal moment of faith was taken and manipulated as if it were nothing more than puzzle pieces that needed to be put together. Another incarnation, the Paranoid Incarnation, awoke confused as angry ghost and shadows leaped out at him, leaving him incapable of trusting anyone. He learned the most obscure language in the world and then murdered its only other practitioner just so he would be the only one to know his thoughts. Another incarnation found a sick enlightenment in torture and suffering and taught a wizard this path to power, torturing him so that he might learn power, and after that incarnation was gone, that wizard became that same conception of power, revisiting the crimes of the Nameless One on other potential seekers of knowledge. In an excellent scene, you can see when you lured Deionarra, the ghost from the Mortuary, to her death, and in a brilliant moment of writing, you experience both sides of it. You experience Deionarra’s love for you, and you feel your hatred of her. Not only do you experience your own act of cruelty but you explicitly feel the pain of what you were betraying. In Planescape under the Center of All, this deeply personal act of betrayal has much meaning because of how much it meant to Deionarra as she is the Center of All. The infinite planes may experience an infinite such betrayals, but this one had meaning to her, and through her experiences, to you.

The symbol of Torment on the Nameless One’s arm acts as a metaphorical beacon for the broken to drift to him, and plenty of the broken are the way they are because the Nameless One broke them. The more crimes you learn, the more the discomfort grows. You did not do those things, the Nameless One awoke as a blank slate and you the player never did them, but they were done in the past and the hurts are still there. Will the player address them in this new incarnation? Will he feel bound by them and try to rectify them? Do you try to rectify them because it’s the right thing to do? Do you give up knowing that the next incarnation might do them again? Or do you take the lesson from them that this is what you have to do to escape, and thus continue betrayal after betrayal? As is common in an RPG, the chioce is yours. Unlike most RPG paths, the evil path is not considered the opposite of a binary choice, and the most evil you do is not stock Evil Overlord type stuff but rather deeply personal betrayals. You can betray Morte and shove in back into the Pillar of Skulls, you can sacrifice Annah and/or Fall-From-Grace to them for knowledge, you can sell your companions into slavery, you can give the Modron Cube to Coaxmetal for a powerful weapon of entropy while letting him roam free to destroy everything, you can lie to Deionarra one more time, leading her love to you along one final time to squeeze out just a little more usefulness out of her.

It’s also reinforced in the mechanics of the game. As mentioned before, the game treats death as an inconvenience, but not something to be undone. The Nameless One simply gets back up again. It’s an easy thing to do, and then you discover later through the game after you’ve already died the true and terrifying cost. Every time you die, someone in a Prime Material plane somewhere dies and you pay for your new life with theirs. The reveal of it hits hard if you’ve gone through the game dying without thinking. That Sensate who didn’t want to murder someone but wanted the experience, so they offered to kill you because they thought there were no consequences. There was for you and her both, she paid you to kill someone and you took those coins without thought, but there were true and dramatic consequences. There always are, just as you learn through the game that your past incarnations’ efforts to learn had consequences from Ignus’s mania to the Practical Incarnation’s betrayals, the player ignoring the deaths mattered, and will continue to matter. You had been killing people, snuffing out lives and leaving heartache for countless souls on the Prime Material. Those who died ended up becoming horrible shadows, condemned to a terrible fate, just so you could have a bit easier of a time at it all. You had infinite time to fix everything, someone else just paid the price.

Much later, you find out that even all of that paled in comparison to what you had done previously. You committed great crimes, and to avoid punishment you sought out Ravel Puzzlewell. Using her powerful magic, she separated you from your mortality, and thus the Nameless One’s First Incarnation was supposed to be freed of the cosmic consequences, but it didn’t turn out that way. Since you forget what you did, the goal of making up for the crimes ended up being impossible since the Nameless One could not even know what it was that he did. His pursuit of freedom left him instead chained, chained to an amnesiac body that slowly becomes more and more scarred as his travels literally turns him into a walking mass of scar tissue. Scars are often used in literature to signify a remnant of a past pain, and that the Nameless One is nothing but scars from head to toe shows that he is inexorably trapped by the past even if he can’t remember it. What he has gone through show him to be not a person so much as a collection of past regrets. This is reinforced through the ending, where the finale takes place in a fortress literally forged by the regrets of your past, and since you have had so many lives and so much regret, they become a literal manifestation of your final journey. The monster at the center is the Transcendent One, the monster of your own mortality attempting to stop you from reaching this place and ending its own existence.

Yet, the Nameless One isn’t doomed. Ravel’s magics are weakening to the point where he doesn’t forget anything, either in the momentary flashes of insight that come up or in that the player remembers everything that happens when the Nameless One dies instead of starting over again. Similarly, the Transcendent One is weakening to the point where he can’t leave the Fortress of Regrets and has been for a while, making the journey possible instead of having him snuff you out like a candle. And during this journey, the Nameless One can make up for the things he did. He can go through the Practical Incarnation’s fake Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon and reveal its deception to Dak’kon, allowing him to come to his own resolution. He can apologize to Deionarra for what he did and allow her grieving father access to her room at the Sensate’s to give him some peace. He can apologize to the linguist that the Paranoid Incarnation murdered and learn the same language, not out of paranoia, but compassion. You can visit that compassion to the Paranoid Incarnation, showing that you are not an enemy, giving empathy to his plight of living in a confusing world where everyone wanted to kill him, and let him absorb into you so he no longer has that terrible burden. And at the very end of the game, you can learn about the First Incarnation, and you can complete yourself by learning your name, an act that gives you a whopping 2 million experience points, far more than anything else in the game, if you kept the Bronze Sphere MacGuffin and allow the memories of it to become with you again.

When that happens, the Nameless One is truly complete and nothing more can stop him. The finale has great ways to resolve itself. The arc words “what can change the nature of a man” can be posed to your lost mortality. A static thing since it was ripped from you, it retorts that nothing can change the nature of a man, but the Nameless One’s journey can already show that such a thing cannot be true, because the planes were shaped by belief, the Center of All shows that the centrality of belief is paramount, and so belief is the thing that changes the nature of a world and of a man, and that both are the same thing. Even stronger, by knowing your own name you show that you are completely dominant over this monster of your own mortality. You can force it to merge with you, force you and it to stop existing, and even its neverending hatred of you cannot stop your will. The Nameless One can end the blight of their existence that continually saps the lives of others, and fix one of the greatest cosmic wrongs to ever stain the multiverse and a man both, the Center of All demonstrates that both are equally as important. And so even an eternal punishment in the Blood War is not as bad as what was, and the Nameless One moves forward, free of what came behind and capable of making his own path.

Why is the game considered one of the best written games of all time? Because I wrote that much about it and barely touched any of it. I didn’t even discuss the companions or the major characters like Ravel or Trias. There’s so much to say about Planescape: Torment because there is so much there. 

If anyone is interested in essays on other parts or components of the game, let me know.

Thanks for the question, Messanger.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[itscookieoverlordtoyou]

40 Questions — Meme for Fic Writers

Don’t you sometimes see those ask games and wish you could just fkg do them all? On this sunny Saturday, we make our dreams reality lolol

1.  Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

Short fic, I usually get a small scene I want written so I write around it, plus I love short stories with interesting punchline.

2.  Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Probably, I don’t know them all ^^’

3.  Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Writing about stuff that disgust me I guess.

4.  How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

Like 5-6? I want to write about a restaurant but set in a world where people have powers I think the combo could be very funny. The main character has the power of insight, the plonge is a giant pool where you swim around cleaning. Backstories of characters with shitty and amazing powers and how they ended up here. Rival to lover character that has the power to see into the future.

5. Share one of your strengths.

Dialogues, subversion, and humor; classmates often said I have a touch to spin a sad story into something positive/happier.

6.  Share one of your weaknesses?

I get tired when I describe something for longer than 4 sentences.

7.  Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“In what kind of trouble have we walked right into?”, I ask my companions as they’re idly fixing their attire. Together, we’ve face many perils and this mission ranks among one of the most dangerous. Yet, the others had been…how should I say it…professional! Rescuing kidnapped princesses, vanquishing terrifying monsters, quests to restore mythical artifacts, save nations from insidious plots. Oddly enough, “Does this dress make me look fat?”, is not the answer I’m looking for.

Ribbon in my hair is the first time I wrote about my knights, I first dreamt about them when I as 18, my boyfriend at the time called my idea stupid and my world building pointless so I only started writing about them when I was 21. Now I write about them a little bit every year :)

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“Do you really want your last words to be complaints?”

“I die as I lived.”

“Will we become a fruit tree?”

“I don’t think so, it’s never been the case for my ancestors.”

“I’d love it if we could turn into a banana tree.”

“I’m not from the southern regions, plus I like apples more.”

“Just imagine, our fruits could have been banana flambée”

This death scene was a big finale to a story I wrote for a class in Uni, a story of war between clan of forest and volcano people, of the supposedly brutal death of a Goddess, of a mysterious apple tree whose fruit give vision of the past. I should revisit it.

9.  Which fic as been the hardest to write?

My analysis on D’Artagnan and the figure of the hero. Granted it’s an essay for school but I deeply loved it. I was too afraid to write or ask for help from the professor in charge of me (which made our relationship tense ^^’) but when I did, it was beautiful and I was very proud got 89% :D

10.  Which fic has been the easiest to write?

A play called Adelaide where an old couple reads their old fairytale book about a Prince on a quest to save a Princess. They bicker about the other misreading the story but we finally get to the part where the Prince tosses the princess apart to get a better view of the dragon of which he falls instantly in love. The book is actually their wedding album.

11.  Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

It’s one of my passions, but it’s not something I think I could live on so I delegated it to my hobby.

12.  Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?

The wedding scene in Shrek 2, my mind was blown when I saw it in theaters and when I need inspiration to write, I rewatch it.

13.  What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Presentation is important. If trying to read you gives people headaches, they’ll stop. Choose a nice big font, space with paragraphs, be mindful of your spelling and missing words. Read out loud because some things written are bad said.

14.  What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

I must’ve been lucky in this regard, I don’t think I’ve ever received advice that made me go NO, but I did have to listen/read stuff that made me gag.

15.  If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

I would love to the Adelaide acted out, some adjustments would be required because I’m no expert in play writing but I think I’d be great.

16.  If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?

Luyenor’a and Taram, names are placeholders as of now but they’re two of my knight, being the “only pairing I’m allow to write about forever” means I’d get more knight shenanigans done.

17.  Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

I’m doing bullets point of what I want to happen and write stuff without much order. Some days I have no inspirations for what goes in the beginning but have loads for a later point. I surf the wave when it presents itself.

18.  Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?

Word on my computer, a notebook in my bag, the note app in my phone.

19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

I have little trinkets all around my computer to invite inspiration.

20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

Freshly woken up, having eaten, drinking something sugary and sometimes apple cider because the alcohol help lower my inhibition.

21.  How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

I read out loud at least once the whole thing, helps with missing words but dude I reread my stuff on ao3 and always find mistakes still ^^’

22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).

I’m not going to put here because it’s in French and I don’t want to translate now but I wrote Vision of a world, mine when I was 16 and damn was I already depressed then?

23.  If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?

The Princess and the Soldier, some gay fairytale I think my first one, I’m sure I can do better bow

I also have one about a janitor and it’s a murder mystery I could redo

24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?

Once by accident, I was so angry I never rewrote it.

25.  What do you look for in a beta?

I don’t really use beta (beta reader right?) but I guess I’ve had like 3-4 when I was in Uni and had to read people’s wip and they read mine. They’d talk about what they liked, links they noticed, things that seemed weak or to change

26.  Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?

I usually just point out the stuff I like

27.  How do you feel about collaborations?

For a class in college, we had to act out a play we wrote collectively. Ten sketches written in pairs/alone. I made sure I was alone so I wouldn’t be saddled with someone else to write my sketch

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

I don’t follow fic writers; I just am in a mood for a ship and read what’s available. I do like my friend @alumort ‘s fics tho ^^

29.  If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

There was a Phineas and Ferb fic focused on Perry I really loved. Their world building was something I’d never seen and they abandoned the story, so I did fanfic of a fic. Never dared to post it anywhere I mean it was their world to begin with.

30.  Do you accept prompts?

Of course, when inspiration is given I accept

31.  Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?

I don’t care about canon but I do love using it when there are little trivia to enrich the character.

32.  How do you feel about smut?

Love to read it sometimes, would love to write it. Some I’m like………….youveneverhadsexhaveyou…………………

33.  How do you feel about crack?

Love it!!!!!!!! I’m too self-conscious to write it tho. Oh maybe that could be a never before written trope I could try?

34.  What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?

Rape I can’t, dub-con where underlying requited feelings exist but anxiety™ don’t let the characters express them but they’re drunk so it surfaces is okay

35.  Would you ever kill off a canon character?

Hell yeah! I do when/if the death makes sense (I am still pissed at Kishi for Neji)

36.  Which is your favorite site to post fic?

Ao3 is where I post,I used devianart when I had one

37.  Talk about your current wips.

Marry Me for the Love of Cake: God I’m so sorry to the few people who followed it, I said I’d pick it up before the end of 2019 and well……I have the ending in bullet points

Yours, with Love: I hope I’ll finish it…I have most of the ending in bullet points

I guess I’m into rom com at the moment lolol

38.  Talk about a review that made your day.

I made my best friend read All this for a Roll Cake, and she laughed so much at my work, I took a picture I look at from time to time to remain humble.

39.  Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

Thankfully I’ve never received a rude review. My professor once told me it seemed kinda unnatural how unlucky my protagonist was vs. how lucky his love interest was (All this for a Roll Cake) but that was the whole point of the story so I just ignored her.

40.  Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).

Writing this I realised I lost my final version of All this for a Roll Cake T^T so I guess I’d rewrite the ending I have of the before the last version I still have.

Well this was fun ^^ got to revisit my works and remember many beloved pieces of fiction I wrote, I look forward to my next projects

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THOUGHT

Sure, running your own. But if you come out of that seventh. As far as I know, Viaweb was the first Web-based application, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. A real hacker's language will always have a slightly raffish character. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was not a tenth as motivated as the startup. The best case, for most people the latter is merely the optimal case of the Milanese Leonardo. If you use a fixed size round as a legitimate-seeming way of saying what all founders hate to hear: I'll invest if other people will read forces you to think well. Lisp's use as an extension language in programs like Emacs; and reading at runtime enables programs to communicate using s-expressions. You don't need to know the type of company you're starting, so long as you're profitable. It's a tossup whether Castro Street or University Ave should be considered the heart of the Valley now. What a wonderful thing, to be able to deal with this phenomenon.

This extra cost buys you flexibility. But I don't think the amount of bullshit you have to do a similar sort of filtering on new things they hear about. When you get a termsheet. Fixed-size series A rounds already are high res. An essay is something else. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. Trade shows didn't pay as a way to evade the grip of fashion. And limitations of humans.

Then the startup and the lead would cooperate to find the city where you feel at home to know what languages will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions. Any financial advisor who put all his client's assets in the stock of a single person to be any good. It's now possible for VCs and startups to diverge. Or functional, or whatever, but about how to make money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude more possibilities than their competitors, who apparently are still using mainframe-era programming techniques. I'm not sure if it's their position of power that makes them this way, or the pointy-haired boss is, right? Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I don't think publishers can learn much from software. There is a lesson here for filter writers: don't ignore data. Our angels asked for one, or c yourself become a human compiler for one. If a company considers itself to be in the software department, we would have the new feature too. They're confident enough to take on ambitious projects. Even now there is too much money chasing too few good deals. Skyline the dominant trees are huge redwoods, and in retrospect it was a good time to have ideas.

The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least, that was what had happened to the language. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me a different kind of error. The simplest answer is to put them in a row. Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be improper. It would not be surprised if by streamlining their selection process and taking fewer board seats, VC funds could do 2 to 3 times as many people alive in the US, of ambitious people who grew the ladder under them instead of climbing it. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. You are whatever you wrote. If angels are so important, why do you need to be done in this area. With OS X, the hackers are back. A friend of mine once told an eminent operating systems expert that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.

One is that investors will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to succeed. Design your product to please users first, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. Even if you sent a crawler to the site, you wouldn't find a smoking statistical gun. VCs won't trust you, and merely to call it. Surely 1998 was a little late to arrive at the party. If you want to invest large amounts, and a programming language rather than, say, making the language strongly typed. At any given time. I got three false positives. There are two possible problems with prefix notation. You have to make sacrifices to live there. For example, a lot of startups, they think of companies like Apple or Google.

The hands were moved by little servomotors that made a slight noise when they turned. Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will there be in a place where there are a lot of maximally interesting tokens, meaning those with probabilities far from. Patterns to be embroidered on tapestries were drawn on paper with ink wash. There will of course be some founders who wouldn't like that idea: the ones who were smart enough it would seem the most natural way of distributing your content, it probably doesn't work to stick to old forms of distribution just because you make more that way. If you want to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you. Silicon Valley. To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. 9999 To free 0. Fortran doesn't have enough data types.

Fred Brooks described this phenomenon in his famous book The Mythical Man-Month, and everything else is a token separator. Not everything in Simula is an object. Investors may end up with a remotely plausible story, you can only control it indirectly. Network-level filters won't be completely useless. Whereas angels are rarely in direct competition, because a they do fewer deals, b they're happy to split them, and I don't understand x well enough. Then in the mid 1950s it was engulfed in a wave of suburbia that raced down the peninsula. The same is true for other languages too. She's trying to get the company to become valuable, and the odds of finding programmers, libraries, etc. And notice the beautiful mountains to the west? Consider libraries: they're reusable because they're language, whether they're written in an object instead of the head of a list and cdr means the rest. In a wave of suburbia that raced down the peninsula.

[bvbuntin]

Book Review: A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

I have not had much opportunity to read for fun since graduating college this spring. “Fun” is a very subjective word here, mostly referring to picking something not necessarily related to academia but laced with an underwritten tension of reading something relevant to current events. I ended up borrowing an ebook copy of A Good Neighborhood somewhat at random. I was not looking for anything “serious,” but at the same time, reading with a disconnection to literature’s political implications makes reading for fun—particularly after recently graduating with a degree in English—nearly impossible. Therefore, my conclusions from reading this novel reflect the often simultaneous pros and cons of producing racial discourse. A Good Neighborhood deals in racial politics as its explicit subject, but the narrative itself is also deeply embedded in unavoidable racial politics that may be detrimental to the issues it attempts to illuminate.

The story follows two families in a North Carolinian suburb. One family consists of widowed mother, Valerie, a professor of ecology, and her son Xavier, a freshly-graduated teen preparing to pursue his promising career in music at a school in San Francisco. Next door, the Whitman family has recently moved into their custom-built house: Julia, mother of teenage daughter Juniper, who married wealthy HVAC business-owner Brad and added their grade-school age daughter Lily. It is important to note that Valerie is black, her son Xavier being mixed (but for all intents and purposes, counted as black by society), while the Whitmans are white. Valerie sues Brad for damage caused during the construction of the Whitmans’ new home to the roots of her massive, ancient oak tree; at the same time, the teenagers, Xavier and Juniper, fall in love. The racial politics of the book are evident from the start, with Brad, for example, appearing to assume Xavier is hired help as he does yard work for his mother. Over the course of the novel, these racial dynamics escalate into the main conflict, and the story ends in tragedy.

It is impossible to understand the novel’s complexity without also understanding the circumstances under which the novel was written. Reading the beginning acknowledgements reveals some important information about the author: first, she is white, and second, she wrote this novel for its relevancy to current issues in the hopes of spurring conversation about race. I would be interested to have had the experience of reading the novel without knowing such information first. Whatever the case, this story about racial politics is itself steeped in the racial politics which birthed it.

The novel exhibits an awareness of the many dimensions of power. For example, race, class, education, gender, and life experience all compound to complicate relations between the families. For example, Julia Whitman and her daughter Juniper both experienced a large class jump when Julia married Brad. Julia used these newfound opportunities to place Juniper in a religious program meant to support teenage girls in the way that religious programs often do: emphasizing traditional gender roles and conducting ceremonies such as making a purity vow with her stepfather Brad. We also see that Valerie and her son deviate from the poor urban stereotype often associated with POC: Valerie is a single black mother working as a college professor in STEM, and Xavier has received a generous scholarship to pursue his love of music at a school in San Francisco.

And yet, some of these aspects can feel heavy-handed. Is Xavier portrayed as a “good kid” because of author bias toward what constitutes the “proper conduct” of a POC in society? Does he obtain a scholarship because, as the societal narrative goes, hard work always pays off (no matter your race or privilege)? Readers cannot be certain, but the questions remain. These multi-faceted power dynamics, on the one hand, capture the complexities that arise from conflict, as they do in real life. On the other hand, the presence of these traits may at times reduce characters to tokens, making them feel more like the sum of their traits (as given to them by a white author) rather than complex characters.

The narration style of the novel provides an interesting perspective into racial tension. Written in the collective first person perspective “we,” it is the titular neighborhood that narrates the story. The omnipresent perspective is offset by explicit reminders that neighborhood, despite its collective and wide perspective, is ultimately limited by the boundaries of privilege and the limitations of the human perspective. Though at times the narrative seems to provide a neutral understanding of the situation, we are reminded that this neutrality is not total: the narrative perspective exemplifies the collective consciousness of white society when faced with issues of race. This type of narrative perspective enables the narrative to draw explicit attention to overt and covert racism in ways which feel a bit more organic than if an impersonal third-person narrative were to suddenly launch into an explanation about racism.

There are pros and cons to explicit acknowledgement of racism in narrative: on the one hand, racism often acts very covertly, and pointing it out explicitly means one is aware of the narrative they are narrating/writing and wants to make their readers aware of the issue rather than hoping (white) people will pick up on it. On the other hand, it may make the writing feel inauthentic, a moral lesson to be conveyed, which the collective narrative style mitigates but does not do away with altogether. The novel’s resigned ending feels intimidated by its own implications, edging into the all-too-common resolution of “let us witness the tragedy inherent in being black and use it to make us all more conscientious people.” Such a resolution leaves too much at stake for very real issues of systemic racism and violence, sacrificing the individual for the sake of the whole and reproducing the violence it attempts to combat.

When I was about halfway through the novel, I was chatting with a friend who suggested we start a book club. Because I was reading A Good Neighborhood, I suggested this novel. Upon completing the novel, I feel like I would genuinely discourage my friend from reading this book. What concerns me about this specific novel is that this novel’s reality is not what we need right now, especially in the realm of fiction. Not that creating a fictional racism-free world is the answer—such a perspective exemplifies white desire to simply make the problem go away, to rectify without facing reality—but one must ask the question about how effective repeatedly reiterating the violence enacted on black bodies is in the fiction genre. Coupled with the fact that most readers may not dwell on the complexities of the internal narrative and the external politics that produced it, I do not feel the book is productive for racial discourse and runs a high risk of only adding to the trauma that our society forces black persons to confront daily, ultimately desensitizing us to reality. Though there are black characters and references and quotes to the work of famous black activists, the book lacks a black voice, which I believe it what we need most right now.

I would not prioritize this book on your to-read list. If you choose to read this book, make sure you do not read it in a vacuum. Read what other people—especially POC—have to say about such books. Better yet, read novels and essays by POC. If you are looking to understand racism through literature, there are far better options. This book may serve better as an example of how white writers attempt to talk about race with varying degrees of success.

I understand that this is a difficult subject matter to handle, and I understand that a novel cannot cover everything. However, I think considering all the facets of the narrative, and the circumstances which produced the narrative, is what ultimately produces a productive reading. I am just unsure how many people will have the time or knowledge to do such work, and therefore would recommend other works before this one.

Check out this book on Goodreads

[ucflibrary]

Be Inspired by Great Nature Writers

Nature writing can transport us to new place, inform us of the world around us and open our eyes to the magic and beauty right in front of us.  Here are some ebooks currently available through the UCF Libraries to get you started.

The Essential Naturalist edited by Michael H. Graham, Joan Parker and Paul K. Dayton.

“The Essential Naturalist offers … a wide-ranging, eclectic collection of writings from more than eight centuries of observations of the natural world, from Leeuwenhoek to E. O. Wilson, from von Humboldt to Rachel Carson. Featuring commentaries by practicing scientists that offer personal accounts of the importance of the long tradition of natural history writing to their current research, the volume serves simultaneously as an overview of the field’s long history and as an inspirational starting point for new explorations, for trained scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike.”

Readings in Wood by John Leland

“Award-winning nature writer John Leland offers a collection of twenty-seven short, poetic essays that marry science and the humanities as the author seeks meaning in trees. Readings in Wood is an investigation of trees and forests and also of wood as a material that people have found essential in the creation of society and culture. Leland views with wit and erudition the natural world and the curious place of human beings as saviors and destroyers of this world.

Readings in Wood is a hybrid testament of science, faith, superstition, and disbelief learned from sitting on tree trunks and peering at leaves and fungi. Leland hopes others will join him in nature’s classroom.”

Where’s the Moon?: A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream by Ann McCutchan

“In this coming-of-age memoir, McCutchan, a writer and musician, returns to Florida to reconcile with the life she had there [growing up]. Reconnecting with old friends and long-forgotten places, she confronts the transformation of wetland real estate she knew as a child into south Florida suburbs and the booming Space Coast… She … comes to a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cultural shifts she experienced in the sixties, and achieves a new appreciation of the history and aspirations of the two people who meant the most to her.”

The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia by Gary Snyder

“Over the course of his singular career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, essayist, environmental activist, and Beat icon Gary Snyder has derived wisdom and inspiration from his study of Eastern philosophies, cultures, and art. Now, with this collection of eight essays, Snyder offers “a deceptively small book enfolding a lifetime’s worth of study” (Kirkus Reviews). The Great Clod is the culmination of a project that Snyder began in 1969 with the essay ‘Summer in Hokkaido,’first published in Coevolution Quarterly. In it and the subsequent entries… Snyder weaves together elements of travel memoir and poetic insight with scholarly meditations on civilization’s relationship to the environment.”

At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness by Rob Wood

“The compelling story of one family’s life among the rugged landscapes of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, converting youthful ideals, raw land and a passion for the outdoors into a practical off-grid homestead.

Settling on Maurelle Island, he and his wife built an off-the-grid homestead and focused on alternative communities and developing a small house-design practice specializing in organic and wholesome building techniques. At Home in Nature is a gentle and philosophical memoir that focuses on living a life deeply rooted in the natural world, where citizens are connected to the planet and individuals work together to help, enhance and make the world a better …place.”

Want to explore more?  Check out the titles related to nature available from Ebsco Ebooks

Learn New Outdoor Skills

Expanding your skills is a sure-fire way to appreciate nature more deeply.  Want to know why the mocking bird in your neighborhood sings so many different tunes..including imitating your car alarm?  How about knowing what to look for to find water out in nature?  Want to be able to identify the plants and animals you encounter? There are a wealth of authoritative educational opportunities available online that you can use to build skills.  Here are some of our favorites:

Cornell Ornithology Lab Open Lectures

Here you will find free lectures given by world renowned experts in the field of ornithology.  This site also links to free learning games and instructional videos as well as the Lab’s online course offerings (for a fee).

Great Courses through Kanopy

Fundamentals of Sustainable Living “Become a more thoughtful consumer, save money, and reduce your ecological footprint with this course that teaches you how integrate sustainable practices into your everyday life. By learning specific knowledge and techniques on how to work more efficiently with the energy, water, and food you consume, you can live a more balanced and sustainable lifestyle that also positively impacts the world around you.”

The Science of Gardening “When scientists examine home gardens and landscapes, one fact stands out: The leading cause of landscape failure is not disease and it’s not pests – it’s our own gardening practices. Create a beautiful and sustainable home garden guided by the newest information from applied plant physiology, biology, soils science, climatology, hydrology, chemistry, and ecology.”

Plant Science: An Introduction to Botany“If you look around right now, chances are you’ll see a plant. It could be a succulent in a pot on your desk, grasses or shrubs just outside your door, or trees in a park across the way. Proximity to plants tends to make us happy, even if we don’t notice, offering unique pleasures and satisfactions. Open your eyes to the phenomenal and exciting world of botany!”

Our Night Sky “For thousands of years, the star-filled sky has been a source of wonder, discovery, and entertainment. All you need to feel at home in its limitless expanse is Our Night Sky, a richly illustrated 12-episode course that gives you an unrivaled tour around the sky–all while teaching you about the science, technology, and pure pleasure of stargazing.”

Add to the Scientific Study of Nature

Want to conduct some research?  Right now?  Even in your own backyard?  Join a citizen science initiative!  There are hundreds of projects actively seeking data from interested observers just like you.  Check out the projects listed on these resources and find one that’s right for you!

CitizenScience.gov

National Geographic Citizen Science Projects

SciStarter.org

Don’t worry if you don’t have a background in science, there are projects available at all skill levels!

Virtually Explore Our World

Want to walk the Kalahari? Climb to the top of a mountain? How about swim at the bottom of the sea?  UCF Libraries has hours of streaming video to inspire your love of nature!

BBC Landmark Collection

Check out some of the best nature documentaries of the last decade with this collection from Alexander Street Press.  Titles include Planet Earth I & II, Spy in the Wild, Big Cats and so much more.

The Swamp

Explore the history of the Everglades and the unintended consequences of man’s quest to control it.

Forces of Nature

This four-part series from PBS delves into the powers and motivators which influence our natural world.  Find out answers to such questions as “Why is water blue? How can a shape defy gravity? Why do bees make hexagonal honeycombs? And how do these things affect our own lives?”

Commit to One New Sustainable Practice

It can feel overwhelming trying to figure out the best way you can limit your negative impact on our planet, but don’t worry, it is not an all or nothing proposition.  Even small changes in your actions can have lasting impact.  I challenge each of us to commit to making one change in honor of the 50th Anniversary this Earth Day. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Choose one item you use regularly that comes in single use plastic and switch to more sustainable option.  Bonus: choose a zero-waste option.

Reduce energy consumption by raising the temperature on your thermostat. You can start small with one degree and transition over time.

Commit to only drinking from reusable bottles or cups for one week.

Eat plant-based meals one day a week, or three meals throughout the week.

Switch one cleaning product you use to an environmentally friendly option.

Want more information?  Check out our Naturally UCF Guide and our Anthropocene Reading List

[thiscrimsonsoul]

Do the twins have a specific religion/belief/superstition or something like that? What are their beliefs? (idk if "beliefs" is right but english is not my first language, sorry lol) I don't know why but I imagine Pietro being a bit more skeptical than Wanda. Do they believe in anything? Do they think a broken mirror brings bad luck? Or a black cat? Feel free to go on a long essay, as a female sci-fi and fantasy writer I am so inspired by your imagination!

{out of paprikash} Yes, beliefs is the right words! And yes, they do have religious and superstitious beliefs very much rooted in their Romani upbringing and nomadic early childhood. Many Romani people are Jewish, but because they can be nomadic and can come from varied locations and ethnicities, a lot of oral stories, traditions, superstitions, and even religious beliefs get shared, adopted, and kept through generations. So the twins have a very varied and detailed belief system that is the result of a multi-generational mixture of religion, fables, practical cautionary tales, and superstition, as instilled in them by their parents and the people they have encountered during their travels.

The twins’ religion is Jewish polytheism. So, their main religion is Judaism and they recognize one main god from that religion, but then there is also a companion set of beliefs that is rooted more in polytheistic paganism, and for Wanda, some of her beliefs come from the Wiccan religion. The twins do say that they are Jewish if asked and they do practice the religion, although Wanda is more diligent about some of the traditions than Pietro is. However, they also believe in a lot of other Powers That Be, if you will, other “lesser deities” or spirits or forces that can influence human life in one way or another. They also believe in the power of more generic natural forces, such as those of good and evil, light and darkness, and the five elements: earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. A female moon, a male sun, and other forces of nature are revered by them as well.

Pietro does believe in the Jewish god and in other powers that exert influence over human life, like gods or spirits of luck, protection, war, peace, joy, suffering... and he would recognize them at times to either invite their influence if it’s a positive entity or to ward them off if they’re negative. He does this mostly through thought and his own words rather than any specific ritual practices, although he does participate more ritualistically with Wanda in Jewish seder and Hanukkah. But for the most part, Pietro doesn’t invoke or attempt to ward off the influences of lesser pagan deities, or even things like ghosts and demons/angels with his words and thoughts/prayers.

Wanda, however, does use ritual to focus her thoughts and prayers. If she settles down in any one place for long, she keeps an altar on which she will make and leave offerings to certain lesser deities for things like luck, safety for herself and loved ones, maybe wishes for something, or hopes for peace for the spirits of dead ancestors... things like that. Sometimes the offerings are food, sometimes they’re little crafts or things she makes, sometimes they’re natural items like feathers or twigs or whatever is associated with the particular deity she’s attempting to pray to. Her altar is something similar to like what you might see in someone practicing Wicca, where you have representatives of the four elements (like a bowl of water, one with soil or salt, a candle for fire, a smudging stick for smoke or air) around a space for offerings, usually combined with things like natural crystals, rocks, bones, etc. to bring in the right kind of energy, and sometimes little figures or statues of whatever or whoever she is praying to at the time. If she is praying for ancestors or even for Pietro after his death, she will put something on the altar that makes her think of them or that they would have liked. For Pietro, it would either be a piece of her jewelry that he gave to her, or some kind of sweets.

For Wanda, the act of ritual not only helps her to focus her thoughts but it also is stress-relieving for her. It makes her feel calmer and happier to know that she is connected to forces greater than herself and to remember those she loved who have passed. It’s an emotional practice for her and it actually helps her to leave behind a lot of thoughts that would otherwise distract or bother her throughout the day. It’s like she has an outlet for it and feels like she is adequately addressing deities or ancestors or other loved ones who deserve her attention, and therefore she doesn’t feel compelled to constantly think about them as if she is ignoring them and doing them some kind of disservice.

So that’s the main shape their religious beliefs take in their lives, but there are also a lot of everyday superstitions that the twins believe in, Wanda more so than Pietro. Things like... don’t speak ill of the dead (or they might hear you, haha... but seriously, it’s disrespectful and invites their anger), bread and butter (if you’re walking with someone, don’t let things split you apart like trees or sign- or lampposts, or else it might invite playful and trickster deities to tear you apart somehow... if it happens and you want protection, say “bread and butter” to counteract it), don’t break mirrors or stare too long into them (breaking them is said to be seven years of bad luck... mirrors are also known as gateways to the spirit world and if you stare too long into them, entities may take notice and attach to you), or the simple idea that words carry with them a lot of power, so be careful what you say.

The twins definitely believe that curses are real, and Wanda has cursed people (however unintentionally, since she was very young) and had them fall to terrible fates. So they are very careful about words like “curse” and “damn” and just wishing people ill in general, because words have power and these lesser deities they believe in are always listening. Some might just decide to grant their supposed wish. Having said that... neither one is above intentionally cursing someone who did them wrong, it is only that they realize the power of it and use it very sparingly. There is usually a price for a curse, for there is always a Balance to the universe, so if you wish ill on someone else, there is a price for you to pay as well. The idea is that you would not do so unless it was important enough for you to be willing to pay that price.

Alright, I feel like I’ve rambled on enough... but... I will say that I would love for people to ask the twins directly about things they believe in. That would be a lot of fun to answer! So if you want to know more about anything I’ve mentioned here, feel free to ask me, but also ask them. =)

[apricotcrossaint-blog]

Five Study Apps On How To Be Productive

By: Ma. Victoria G. Rivera

Different mobile applications are widely spread in Google Store and AppStore. As a student, we tend to focus ourselves in mobile games and social media sites that de-stress us from tons of academic papers that may result to poor school performances. So, here are my top 5 useful study apps on how to be productive:

1. Forest: Stay Focused

"In order to establish new, better habits, it's helpful to engage with tools that make it easier to reinforce them. For anyone looking to curtail their phone usage, the Forest app might be for you." — Business Insider

The Forest app is a phone timer that helps you to stay focused on your study like: quiz, reviewing your notes, writing essays and many more. Forest app helps you beat phone addiction and have you a healthy living instead.

If you want to temporarily put down your phone and focus on what's more important in real life, you can plant a seed on Forest. As time goes by, this seed will gradually grow into a tree. However, if you cannot resist the temptation of using your phone and leave the app, your tree will wither.

Stay focused. Be present!

2. Quizlet

Quizlet is the easiest way to practice and master what you're learning. In this study app, Quizlet let you create your own flashcards that you can use in recalling and studying your notes from your certain subject. You can also easily search for different topics you want to learn from other students who clearly create their own flashcards, too.

With Quizlet you can:

Get test-day ready with learn.

Enhance your studying with custom images and audio.

3. Google Podcast

Google Podcast is like a recording radio where you can listen to millions of record voice from different podcast site like: Freakonomics Radio, Self Improvement Daily, My Favorite Murder and Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! It is for free and easy to search your favorites. It is also an academic friendly for students who want to study by means of listening to the topics related to their subject.

4. Grammarly Keyboard

The Grammarly Keyboard goes where you go to make sure your writing always looks great. When you're busy typing your document, and accidentally you type a wrong word, the Grammarly Keyboard will helps you check wrong punctuations, grammar, and spelling as you keep typing. It also enhance your vocabulary words and suggests you synonyms for a specific word.

5. Pure Writer

"Pure Writer is a fast and comfortable text editing app that prevents you from losing your works. While scrolling the comments and reviews of Pure Writer in Google Play, you might find some high praises for this app like There's no app better than this, The most satisfying app, Love this app so much, Love at first sight for this app… As the only developer for Pure Writer, the comments were especially gratifying for me." — Developer

A Pure Writer app is like a book where you can type your thoughts anytime and anywhere in different chapters. This app allows you to think, edit, store and back-up your files to avoid deletion of your documents. It has a ready format to organize your ideas or notes as a writer. Its Time Machine — a storage room for your thoughts, greatly helps you to manage the concept you want to type.

Hope these may help you. Have a great study day!

[duncanwrites]

All the books I read in 2019, reviewed in 2 sentences or less.

The annual tradition returns! These are all the books I read in the last year, and how I felt about them in two sentences or less.

Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson: This was the final book of the science fiction trilogy that exploded my brain at the end of 2018, and the after-shocks lasted well into 2019. These books capture something essential about the relationship between place and politics that you can only do with science fiction.

Bark - Lorrie Moore: A thoroughly uneven book of short stories - when they were good, they were great, when they were bad, they were bumbling takes on the domestic side of the war on terror.

Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway: Maybe it's just my mood in the forsaken year of 2019, but I just have no tolerance any more for works of art that aestheticize the degradation of the human spirit. This book made me feel near constant disgust.

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf: In contrast, I think you can create works of art that dignify people even in their darkest moments, and offer a bridge into the experience of others that can be a passage into becoming a better person. It's always nice to read a book for a second time and realize you can keep reading it again for years to come.

The Asshole Survival Guide - Robert I. Sutton: We all have assholes that we have to work with, and sometimes it's necessary to have some external validation that it's not all your fault, and that establishing distance between yourself and said assholes is a good idea.

My Invented Country - Isabelle Allende: It took me until the very end of this book to realize there was a different memoir by Allende that I meant to read instead. This one was not so great.

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller: Gonzo literary comfort food.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker: I found this book charming enough, but it never totally wowed me at any particular point. I think it showed that the concept of two magical creatures from different cultural contexts meeting in turn of the century New York is an interesting thought experiment, but a struggle to land as a full narrative.

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami: Prior to this, the only Murakami I had read was What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and it's safe to say that did not properly prepare me for the surreal darkness of Kafka on the Shore, which seems to never stop going deeper into the abyss.

God Save Texas - Lawrence Wright: There are very few books about modern Texas that don't try to valorize it, or douse it with excessive nostalgia, and this is one of them. A politically-astute, funny meander through the state as it is, not as it might have once been, or never was.

M Train - Patti Smith: Patti Smith is obviously a genius, but this one didn't leave a great mark on me. Worth revisiting some other time, I think, since it's my girlfriend's favorite book.

Working - Robert Caro: I am shamefully still putting off my years-old plan to read Robert Caro's LBJ series, and finish his book on Robert Moses. In the meantime, this is a thoughtful reflection on how and why to tell stories about power.

Feel Free - Zadie Smith: I love Zadie Smith, and if you haven't read her non-fiction essays, you are missing out on some of her most exciting and moving writing. This is her second collection of essays, and you can tell how much the decade since the first has taken its toll - so many more of the pieces are about fear and frustrations, and the language is much wearier, even while it is still penetrating and beautiful.

The Telling - Ursula K. Le Guin: A slim, late novel from one of the best to ever do it, this book projects the sense of engrossing calm that reminds me most of all of listening to a story well-told - not incidentally, an experience that is a key theme of the plot itself.

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang: On the other hand, the short stories in this book all came off as one note thought experiments that failed to build compelling worlds.

The Overstory - Richard Powers: Not just my favorite book of the year, but also one of my favorite ever, The Overstory is the book I talked the most about, and told the most people to read in 2019. The best way to explain it ('it's a book about people who become obsessed with trees') really undersells things, because it's also about forest ecology, generations of trauma, the terror and clarity of radical thought, and a soul-splitting vision of hope. It receives the coveted 3rd sentence in the review, because I just need to emphasize again that you should read this book.

The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner: Maybe it was the fate of any book that I read after The Overstory, but The Flamethrowers left me feeling cold. It wandered off into too many fanciful-seeming plot arcs that didn't develop all the characters to the depth they needed.

What is Populism? - Jan-Werner Müller: I re-read this book because I wanted to revisit his ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of populists ahead of the next election, and whether there is ever a version of populism suitable for the left agenda. I finished worried, and skeptical, respectively, on those two points.

The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh: I don't read many books about climate change - I find there are very few things that I really feel like need saying in the face of the obvious and overwhelming - but I'm glad I made time for this one, which focuses on both the global north-south dynamics of the issue, and the inability of storytelling to capture the problem in full. It's profoundly difficult to sum up in two sentences, but it's worth a full read.

There, There - Tommy Orange: I think this novel asks too much of characters that are too thin to hold what they are made to bear. Too busy at the same time as it's too ordered to be fully credible.

The Slynx - Tatyana Tolstaya: I somehow convinced myself that I had read this surreal post-apocalyptic novel set in Russia 100 years after nuclear winter, but not only had I not read it, I haven't read anything like it before. A wide-ranging nightmare about authority, literacy, and the power of fear, set in its own vernacular and kaleidoscopic distortions of our authoritarian world today.

The Iliad - Homer: I wanted to re-read The Iliad because I find the idea of a hero felled by a single, discrete flaw to be a fascinating allegory, not realizing that Achilles' fatal flaw is not his heel but his anger.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood - Janisse Ray: There isn't much widely-read nature writing about the US South, and I think Janisse Ray's book dignifies and mourns the overlooked parts of the country that may not be wilderness but still contain bits of natural grace.

Sundiver and Startide Rising - David Brin: These two novels follow the same premise of humanity entering a universe of intelligent life as the only species to reach consciousness without patronage of, and servitude to, an elder species, and the power struggle that ensues. Sadly, the premise writes a check the execution can't cash, and while the first book, leaner and more focused, is solid, the second is over-long and distracted from what made the first fascinating.

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry: It took a lifetime of seeing this book (a signed first edition, from an Austin bookstore that has left no digital trace) on my parents' shelf to finally read Lonesome Dove, and it was a fitting welcome back to Texas. McMurtry's characters are fully-grown from the beginning, made of both broad archetypes and fine detail, and the narrative gives them the journey they deserve.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt: There are very few novels that convey big ideas in balance with pot-boiler plotting, but this is one of them and my only regret is not reading it sooner. How dare anyone blight this novel with a terrible movie.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin: What makes this book special is not that it's speculative fiction about a world with unique gender arrangements; that's been done before by many other authors. What makes it special is that it investigates that world with tenderness towards its inhabitants, and an understanding of how gender weaves its way into institutions besides the family or the bedroom

Gun Island - Amitav Ghosh: I had high hopes for Gun Island, but felt it never quite rose above being a thought experiment carrying out his ideas from The Great Derangement.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P - Adelle Waldman: Your opinion of this book will probably hinge on how important you think it is to read books about writers in Brooklyn hanging out with other writers in Brooklyn. If you think that's still a useful world to explore, you will like that this book is merciless towards its characters, and startlingly accurate - but if you don't think that's important, you will be frustrated for the same reasons.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid: A gloriously rich experimentation in genre and contemporary global politics - playful, infuriating, and heartwarming, really everything you could hope for from a short novel. This is the second book by Hamid that I've read, and I'm going to set out to read all of them as soon as I can.

[coldalbion]

I’ve reblogged this classic Ramsey Dukes essay before. It’s an important one, not just if you’re a pagan/polytheist/magical type, but also  for understanding the idea that perception is more than 9 tenths of the law. Suspend your disbelief, read the whole thing at the link, and maybe, just maybe understand why so-called “Tricksters” are often important cultural figures.

“As a schoolboy I discovered Hodson's lovely book on The Kingdom of the Gods. Enjoying the luscious pictures of tree spirits and landscape gods, I wanted to share the fun, but never managed to see them. Through the sixties I sometimes experimented with various techniques for increasing sensitivity and developing auric vision, but with no notable success. I suppose I was always more or less consciously haunted by the danger of self deception: at what point do you begin to kid yourself, become uncritical? I was fleeing from the charlatan.

A Tree Nature Spirit as depicted in Hodson's 'The Kingdom of the Gods'.Around 1981 I rediscovered the book and, being in a desperate frame of mind, tried again. But, as with someone who has attained Zen, a tree remained obstinately a tree, however I squinted at it. Then one day I stood by my favourite hawthorn and thought as follows: "What a pity I cannot see trees' auras. If I could, I wonder what sort of aura this one would have? Hmm. I feel it ought to be a fairly vivid red, from crimson to scarlet, but shot through with a network of gold strands. Yes, that would suit it. Then what about that tree over there? Oh no, definitely yellowy green in wispy hanging folds."What was I doing? I was seeing auras, but not REALLY seeing them, only imagining them in the sort of way you might imagine how a bare room of a new house might look when it is furnished, how it would look after being decorated. How odd to think that this sort of pseudo-seeing was just the sort of deception that I had so long steered clear of, in my early attempts to REALLY see REAL auras. And yet an interior designer's whole income depends upon these 'unreal' imagined images. Just as the writers of those fake psychic books were people whose livelihood depended upon what they were doing: desperados more akin to Rico the Razor than to Professor Wiesenstein My new-found game flourished: every tree has a different aura, yet similar species have similar styles. I have resisted the temptation to try to test this discovery, to try to prove that I am not just responding to visual clues as to the type of tree, because it is a growing and delightful diversion. I no more want to dissect it than I want to dissect a pet kitten. I want to enjoy it. If another person describes the aura differently, it would not bother me, because I find this type of perception is more akin to the perception of character than of outer form. In the sense that two people might begin by describing a third person's personality in totally differing terms; yet when they collaborate they arrive at some sort of common description.tricksterIf you can catch the spirit of this approach, you will catch another glimpse of that charlatan. The approach is blatantly unscrupulous and amoral, the very stuff of deception, yet it is also paradoxically down to earth and elementary: you just do it, you don't stop to theorise about WHAT you are doing. Just like the trickster whose every action is suspect, but who so clearly knows his way around, and makes a living where others simply panic.I cannot claim that the gift has any practical use, but it was very refreshing to note how quickly it developed once I had got over the initial hurdle of accepting it on its own terms. ?This essay is developing a wave formation: a series of forward steps, between which I rush back to defend the rear. Here goes again. I will describe another of the forces that deflect one's mind in the vicinity of a black hole.You may have labelled me as an anti-rationalist. Labelling is another technique for handling the unfamiliar. It does not depend upon dismantling and rebuilding the unfamiliar, in the way of rationalisation, nor does it just allow it to slip away, like ignoring. It is more akin to casting a net to catch the unfamiliar, then leaving it hanging in the net on some corner of your structure. Unlike rationalisation, this does not destroy the original object; unlike ignoring it does not let it go free. It hangs suspended in its net and is no part of your structure, and it is left, because it is no longer a threat.So to label this essay as anti-rationalist, is to once more be deflected from the central mystery. I must cut myself out of this net.Far from being anti-rationalist, I sometimes feel that I am the one person left on earth who knows the real value of reason, of science, of the academic approach. It is a wonderful Sword of Banishment, yet so many seem to confuse it with a Cup of Plenty!The essential value of reason, or the scientific approach, is that it stops things happening. This is an utterly vital function in a world where most people would agree that too much is happening too fast. The remedy lies right under our noses, yet we create the problem by asking science to do the one thing it has never been able to do, that is to make things happen. As a result a million charlatans have stepped into science's shoes and we never give them their due. As was argued in Thundersqueak, it is ludicrous to describe the aeroplane as a wonder of science. The Wright brothers were not scientists, they were bicycle makers. On the day of their historic first flight they invited the American Scientific establishment to attend, and the Establishment quite rightly refused to waste time with cranks who were attempting the blatantly impossible. As a consequence, the plane flew. If only scientists had left Uri Geller alone.As someone who has worked in the aircraft industry, I can assure you that a plane flies despite science, not because of it. Yet I am not belittling science, merely seeing its true contribution. To be utterly precise, it is magic that makes the plane fly, and what science does is to STOP IT FROM CRASHING. Indeed the nearest approach made by strict scientific rigour into the "real" world, is via the safety industry.As reason is the great destroyer - in order to pull you clear of that dreaded Good-Bad whirlpool I will rephrase that remark - as reason is the excellent and much needed destroyer, we should direct it with the care it deserves.safaris What a pity that man's hunting instincts are driving impressive and exciting creatures like tigers into oblivion. If only the big-game hunters could redirect their urges into hair-raising safaris across the London skyline, in pursuit of starlings and pigeons. Then we would not only be able to keep our tigers; we could also suffer less bird shit.And what a pity that the scientist insists on chasing the paranormal to its doom, and the historian cannot redirect the urge to shatter myths. They do it too well. Our very own Ellic Howe has delighted us with his skill in stalking the OTO, to the point where there was only one place of safety left for it - namely non-existence.Such skills must not be wasted, for there is real work for the sword in this world. Several billion pounds are being spent on a cruise missile deterrent, might not some of that money go towards an undercover operation with the collaboration of the secret service? I suggest taking the psychologists out of the parascience field and dropping them behind the Iron Curtain in order to discover the value of Cruise. How deterred by it does your typical Russian military officer feel? Knowing how emotional Russians can be, I want figures of how many soldiers burst into tears, how many resigned from the army, how many committed suicide when Cruise was announced. There is much to do, for I also want some accurate quantitative index of deterrence: I want to know the exact deterrent-value of every million pounds spent. I want to know which is the greater deterrent to world war three: a multi-billion pound satellite warfare program, or a late, wet and rather cold spring in Moscow.

And Ellic, your talents are being wasted on an endangered species. The world is crying out for skills like yours, and a far greater challenge awaits you. Instead of chasing the OTO into oblivion, how about directing your attention towards the communist conspiracy within the Labour Party, or the National Front conspiracy behind the Tories? Or why not go for the Big One, and prove once and for all that the CIA is a myth? And please, can I have my OTO back? It was fun.I would like to be seen as reason's champion, not its detractor. Am I yet free of that net?I did warn that, in order to write about the Trickster, it might be necessary to assume his mantle: now the time has come to pack up my box of tricks. That would usually signify that a hasty retreat was in the offing: for when people return to reality at the end of his illusions, an angry reaction is liable to set in. But in this case it is the nature of illusion itself that is being studied, so I'll stick around.The trick that has been played on you is the old trick of presenting a world in black and white: the white light of Truth, of Good, of Hygiene, against the blackness of Illusion, of Bad, and of Fertility. The subject was far too tricky to be tackled without such a trick. But now we awake from the dream, this essay's wave-form accelerates to a frenzied rippling of light and dark, and all outlines are lost until they re-form in the world's true colours. What might almost have seemed clear at times, now passes through chaos.”