#in the original post the person talked about being so corny they were born on the [corn] cob

[potter-inthe-tardis]

..... what does it mean you were literally born on the cob

Oh I was just trying to make a joke!

[charmwasjess]

Okay, I finally finished The Living Force, and as promised, I have thoughts. These are just my musings as a fan and a reader - if you enjoyed the book more than I did, I'm really glad! If you hated it, good for you too! Let people like things, let people not like things. <3 My feelings with this book were somewhat down the middle. I'm interested in reading it again in a couple months and seeing how I feel.

Overall: a fun, engaging read, genuinely hard to put down once the action starts going. The book isn’t afraid to be funny. SO MUCH GOOD JEDI CONTENT! Miller takes on a huge task trying to write perspectives for all twelve Council member characters and does a pretty good job bringing them to life. Mace and Depa steal the show. I had a hard time with some of the meta plot and overriding messages about the Jedi Order.

Andddddd the long version:

The entire conceit of the book comes about when Qui-Gon goes head to head with the Council, who are bogged down in committee red tape Senate paperwork disconnection, and challenges them to “help one person.” So inspired, the Jedi Council in its entirety goes to the planet Kwenn to help close down a hundreds-year-old Jedi Outpost. 

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan serve as the book’s inciting incident, our quest giver NPCs, who hang around close enough to the action to keep the readers who bought the book only for them engaged. It reminds me a little bit of a spin-off TV show where the fan favorite character from the original series shows up to boost ratings, saying their classic catch phrase while the live studio audience goes crazy. Look, Qui-Gon is Being Kind to Pathetic Lifeforms! Obi-Wan drops a “hello there” in the first scene! Oh, them!

Lest you think I’m being shitty, let me say that it was actually great to see Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on the eve of TPM working together well and having a blast. Both in Padawan and Master & Apprentice, they are still very much figuring out their relationship, and now it’s clearly evolved to its final magnificent form. They’re utterly corny together - I love that for them. This is the same pair that gave us “the negotiations were short” and the baffling “there’s always a bigger fish!”

I’ll talk a little bit about Sifo-Dyas because of course I will. He appears only in mentions, but so many of them, he's a huge part of the subtext of the book as he's recently left (been fired) from the Council and been killed - he's apparently on everyone's mind. I’ve posted about this before - I love the Seeker Sifo addition, and further, letting him be a rightful problem, a true pain in the Council’s ass and who ultimately got himself fired for not following the rules. Of course I have sympathy for him: this is a person who is beyond desperate to save his world and willing to try anything at this point in his life. And I think it’s worth mentioning that this is well within Cavan Scott’s characterization of him as a natural born troublemaker. I mean, he’s on screen for about two pages in Dooku: Jedi Lost before he just fucking literally steps on Yoda. Apparently, he never stopped. 

The book is oddly complimentary of him in weird places. Canon is inconsistent about Sifo-Dyas and how much his visions were impacting his judgment or even his simple ability to function. The last we heard of him in the Yoda comics, Sifo-Dyas was so routinely incapacitated by them that he was traveling with Lene full time. So it was cool to see that he had apparently gotten in control of them enough to be a super crucial member of the Council. Mace complains about Sifo’s absence and how that has directly impacted their entire ability to perceive the future, an acknowledged blind spot that comes up quite a lot in the prequel films and Clone Wars. Yoda goes on and on about how what a powerful Jedi he was.

...I don’t think the scene where the ENTIRE FUCKING Council round robin style takes potshots at Sifo-Dyas for *checks notes* rescuing some orphans was particularly successful. Of course, accuse me of bias, he’s a favorite character of mine, and it’s rough to see his colleagues - who are also his only friends and family - sitting around talking shit about him (to a bad guy no less!) for a page and a half, when he literally just got violently killed. (And they know he’s dead, at least, if not the circumstances. Killed on Felucia was the official story reported to the Council per wookiepedia.) Just tonally weird.

But really, I think what actually bothers me about that scene is the treatment of the baddie, Zalestra’s motivation as in any way legitimate, credible, or worth an apology by the narrative. Wow, the villain had a good point! To be clear, her issue with Sifo-Dyas taking her friends away to be Jedi is not that it changed her situation in any meaningful way in terms of care provided. It was a crime of omission. And these friends were so dear to her that she goes around indiscriminately killing Jedi of their exact generation? I suspect Miller liked his cool Nautolan Pirate Joker OC and wanted to give her a sympathetic excuse for why she was going around torturing and murdering Jedi (and just random people, including children) for fun, and “I got separated from my friends as a kid because of a Jedi” was the best he could do. Of course, it sets up Depa for a really beautiful line about not using other people as a canvas to paint grief on. 

The question of Attachment is a strong theme. Depa seems to be Going Through It - about attachment in particular, but also generally in the book. She’s shown relying a little too firmly on the no attachment cause in the wake of grief for a lost student. For example, she is quick to volunteer that Zalestra’s friends who were brought into the Temple together would be immediately separated so as to not form attachments - without pointing out the rest of that, that this separation would be specifically into Creche clans so they could bond with other Jedi kids and grow up in a community. Mace’s reaction to Depa’s attitudes make me suspect this is a Depa character growth thing, not something we’re supposed to take as a face value fact about the Jedi Order. Indeed, she ultimately overcomes her fears about this and decides to take a Padawan. And the final lines of the book include Qui-Gon defining for us that it isn’t attachment that’s a problem for Jedi – it’s indifference. 

Mace and Depa are the clear stars of the book. The Shatterpoint lineage vibes are immaculate. I’d read that the Living Force is supposed to set up an upcoming novel about Mace, and I am legitimately thrilled for it after reading this. Anyway, their dynamic is fantastic. Mace treats her 100% like a respected colleague, no cute Padawan infantilization tropes, even when he is put in situations like rescuing her after weeks of prolonged torture. Instead, he gives her his lightsaber to use, since hers has been taken. A really powerful and beautiful moment of support, while still recognizing her strength and agency. 

That said, if you’re looking for a deep dive into more obscure members of the Council or an EU/Legends junkie looking to see your favorite backstory pulled from the fire, this book might not be it.  With his five wives and seven daughters in old EU, Ki-Adi-Mundi might be the least likely Council Member to be the comedic butt of a bit revolving around awkwardness around women, but Miller goes for it, and there’s no mention of his family situation. 

Another odd reference, this time to current canon: the civilians the Council are working to help are mentioned as being the relocated survivors of the Protobranch disaster. It’s an ironic choice to frame the narrative of “the Jedi have been too focused on the big picture/the future at the expense of their duty to ordinary people” and then set the story in a community of people that the Jedi literally saved after getting a vision of the future disaster. The fact that it was our problem child Sifo-Dyas’s vision, and the rescue only happened after he and Lene outright defied the Council to get the gears moving is never mentioned or addressed, despite its seeming supreme relevance to the other themes in the story. 

For a time, I thought the narrative tension there between those two truths - that the Jedi should be concerned about ordinary people and living in the moment, but that this doom future is truly about to be a huge problem for the Jedi Order and the galaxy - was intentional. Having now finished the book, it doesn't seem to have actually been. Maybe someone else has a different perspective.

In truth, I didn’t understand what I kept reacting negatively to about with some of the meta themes of the book until the literal last page, John Jackson Miller’s author’s note where he says it outright. He talked about the other Star Wars books he has written over the last decade - how they all have depicted (Jedi) characters who are off on their own, away from the Order, “loners like Luke Skywalker,” and how his depiction of the Jedi Order from that perspective has been very critical. With this book, he decided that ALL Jedi couldn’t be bad, and that “Qui-Gon Jinn was the greatest symbol (of diversity of thought in the Order)” so he wanted to explore that. 

I closed the book and gently placed it in the trash can.

No, I’m kidding. Kind of. You know that I love Qui-Gon Jinn, he is my first favorite character, but this take exhausts me. That he is the magical exception to all of Jedi’s problems leading up to the prequels, and that if he were somehow not a direct product of that same Jedi Order, which encouraged him in his particular way of thinking almost to a fault, starting with Dooku.

In the final scene, with a magical twinkle in his eyes, Qui-Gon explains his own “defiance”of the Council: “I’m not insubordinate. I’m unorthodox. The insubordinate are ignored. The unorthodox are heard - grudgingly.” So the book finally resolves for us the narrative confusion in the difference between Sifo-Dyas’s bad future-fixated rulebreaking, which is shown to create villains and piss off his colleagues alike, and Qui-Gon’s good Living Force-serving unorthodoxy, which creates friends for the Order and moments of spiritual understanding for the Council. 

...Smashcut to six months later when Qui-Gon himself is outright defying the Council’s decision on Anakin and sidelining Obi-Wan because he’s convinced the Chosen One prophecy is just that important. 

Star Wars: The Living Force by John Jackson Miller, 6.5/10 stars, would have been 7 if I hadn’t read that asinine author’s note and gotten all mad again. 

[lungfishpoem]

Last oc superultramegapost regarding these three. This one is about Evan. Finally. Him.

TW: abuse, csa (not done by Evan but on Evan), incest (NOT seen as a good thing!!), a bit of gore and body horror.

Reminder that these three ocs are like. stupid. and badly polished or researched. and corny. you get the idea. overly edgy at times. you know. sometimes you gotta have fun.

Okay so... Evan. Previously called Ivan but I changed it because although it was the original intention, it was TOO close to Ian (and Iago, but Iago is from another story), and I was starting to mess up when talking about them. So now it's Evan.

His whole thing is about how he is, uh, an abuser, and obsessed with surpassing God with his bizarre artistic creations. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in the past two long posts about my ocs.

I'll start with his backstory because it's easier this way. Oh yeah and I changed some numbers so if an age I mentioned previously doesn't match up it's because it's been changed.

Evan was born and raised as the most precious, special, innocent and perfect child ever. He is older than his brother, Pierre, who was raised being compared to his older brother and seen as inferior than him. Evan was raised to be a meticulously clean, polite and organized person, and so he is to this day, he was born like an angel. One day, though, someone from his family tried to rape him, something Evan was never taught about and that basically changed his brain chemistry forever, even if it was unsuccessful and someone managed to stop the person. When he asked about what had happened, people gave him answers that were too vague or no answer at all, which led him to simply interpret it all as "I have no control over my body", which led into him becoming a control freak. Not only did he believe he had no control over his body, but also that he, as someone clearly superior, needed to show somehow that he had control not only over his own body, but over other people's, other people's bodies and entire lives. After all, he was like an angel, he deserved to aim higher and become someone close to being a second God (he is a bit religious, but not very, as he is constantly saying blasphemies). It's a bit of a shit explanation, sorry. But it's the best I can offer for now, it's still an idea in progress.

Evan is obsessed with appearances, everything he owned as a child was very organized and clean, and to this very day his things are like that.

Anyways, around that time where his obsessions begin, he begins to bother his brother. And by bother I mean straight up hurt him and manage to put the blame on him. Isolate him from other people, bully him, have absolute control over his life. Pierre was a practice doll for him. He felt as if he owned him.

Nothing more happens around childhood, but things get a bit crazier when he's a teenager. When he starts properly discovering what sex is, he also ends up realizing he was gay (which he never revealed to his family, since he still wanted the angel reputation). With his already sadistic tendencies from around childhood, he began to try and seduce some guys in his school who he saw that had some sort of hidden (or not) insecurity regarding their sexuality. When it didn't work or he messed up, he just threw them in the trash and left them alone (or ruined their lives, depends on the conditions). He was able to get a lot of things from these semi relationships he developed, but what mattered the most to him was how much he could simply control whoever he was talking to, and how easily he could change them and such.

Remember Pierre? Well this is the most uncomfortable bit. Evan develops once again an obsession with him, and ends up on a secret relationship-ish with his brother. He never straight up rapes Pierre but trust me Pierre's consent is dubious at best, as he is incredibly scared of Evan and a very very mentally ill person who is constantly used as a punching bag to his brother. Ever wondered why Pierre HATES Evan so much? It's mostly due to this.

Regardless, when Evan was already older and Pierre was at the end of his adolescence, Pierre gets sent to a mental hospital which he never really gets out of because of his family (MOSTLY EVAN'S SADISM) insistence in his need to stay there for as long as possible, and he was too out of it for too long to ever say anything about it (he starts getting better at around 24, but that belongs to Pierre's post). (idk how mental hospitals work by the way. in case it wasn't obvious. but pretend I do for a moment). Ah also Evan decided to not let Pierre contact his own mother outside of letters because their mother developed dementia and Evan was like "ah she'll get worse if you show up like... that". Once again just Evan toying with him.

Evan goes to college and takes biology, finishes it at 22 years old, works for a while at a hospital and while still working there he begins to study psychology (at around 24 years old, the story happens when he's 26).

When he was around 22, though, he began to have some sort of epiphany. He wants to make art. And he wants to truly prove himself better than God. He is bored of simply manipulating and trying to emotionally mold people into what he wants, he begins to want to change the BODY. Because it was always about the body. So he begins to try and make art out of roadkills and animals overall. Stitching them together, letting them rot at different speeds, make entirely different creatures. Something not even God had thought about. He also starts stealing human bodies at some point, but does so rarely because he doesn't want to get caught.

His entire apartment is clean to the point where it's disturbing, everything about him is so perfect it is disturbing.

Anyways at this point this post is too long and I already gave as much detail as I could. Basically what happens in the two stories is: he meets Ian and is fascinated by him. Just, absolutely fascinated. Like he found the other side of his own coin. He falls in love with him. He originally started talking to Ian because he reminded him of Pierre. And then he just began to fall in love with him. But he only realizes that AFTER he manipulates Ian into stealing corpses and Ian gets caught and stopped (again.) (Also more details on Ian's post). Ian is the first person besides Pierre to see Evan's work.

That's his pov for the first story he appears in. The third story of the book is a solo Evan story narrated by his victim. Basically after Ian's arrest he gets careless. And then he ends up getting drunk and showing the narrator his work. The narrator freaks out and Evan is unable to do anything about it as he is caught and arrested 👍

Sorry for rushing the rest of the post btw!! Maybe one day I'll go into more detail on Evan's roles in the stories but I thought his past and shit were more important since I had already talked about the second book story in Ian's post and the third story is very... simple, to be honest.

Also they don't get exactly arrested but I forgor the term that you use when someone is sent to a mental hospital or something. They are both deemed insane 👍 and end up in the same place as Pierre. Woah.

That's it. Sorry again. Thanks for reading!!!

[lockefanfic]

The Girl with the Purple Hair

A/N: No smut here, guys, sorry to disappoint you - just some fluff. I wrote this fic literally four (!) years ago - one of my first k-pop fics and my first non-smut fic. I never reposted it here for some reason, but an ask I received recently got me to re-read it and I remembered how proud I was of it when I wrote it, so here it is. Please don’t judge me :P

---

Purple.

 It’s the first word that comes to mind when you see her. And how could it not be, given the color of her hair? It’s not like purple hair is a common thing - not like there are other people in the noisy, crowded bar that have purple hair. In fact, this is probably the first time you’ve seen someone in person with purple hair. Normal people had normal colored hair, like black or brown or blonde. Her hair isn’t some lazy dye job, either, with shades and highlights and a gradient to the violet strands.

 You don’t want to be caught staring, and so you steal glances at her every now and then, and every time you look her way, the first thing you notice is the wavy strands of purple as they play about her shoulders, falling lazily down like a waterfall on an alien world, where the water happens to be purple.

 Beautiful.

 It’s the next word that comes to mind, because were anyone to look just a little past the eye-dazzling color of her hair, they’d find a beautiful face, made with delicate, small features. She is traditionally beautiful in the sense that any man or woman  would agree with you if you said “here is an attractive human being.” There is a timelessness, a universality to her beauty. She could have been born a hundred years ago and still be considered pleasing to the eye - purple hair aside, she could be a painting of a woman from a time gone by, dressed up in the fashion of a model from the magazines of today.

 There is a playfulness about her features at the moment, as she indulges in conversation with the three other girls at her table. Her three friends are nothing to sneeze at, but she makes them all pale in comparison - part of it is the ridiculous, daring color of her hair, but there is something more than that. She possesses a magnetism, an allure that makes her stand out amongst three girls that, were they anywhere else, would easily be the most attractive girls in the room.

 You’re not alone either, sitting as you are with a few of your friends at your own table on the other side of the small bar. It is Friday evening, and as is custom with your co-workers, you all headed to the bar to celebrate another week gone by. But they are currently immersed in a conversation about some work-related topic, some absent co-worker or client (you weren’t really sure anymore) that was frustrating them. Uninterested in the topic, you found your attention drifting, naturally, to the girl with the purple hair.

 You notice that she has a certain aloofness about her, a certain detached nature from the conversation her three friends are having, and for a moment you wonder if perhaps she is in the same boat as you - stuck at a bar with friends who are babbling about co-workers or video games or guys or shopping or cars or clothes or those girls in the random k-pop video playing on one of the big screen TVs, when clearly you’d rather be anywhere but there.

 The other three girls seem like average girls, typical of the type you’d see at a downtown bar on a Friday night, out to have a good time with friends whilst under the influence of perhaps one too many alcoholic beverages. They are the type that would head to a club after they are sufficiently liquored up at this bar, spend the night dancing, post a group picture on Instagram when the night is at its peak, and then make a post on Facebook about how awesome it was the day after.

 But the girl with the purple hair seems different from the other three.

 She lets her gaze wander, and for a split second you are afraid again that perhaps she would catch you staring, but thankfully her eyes drift in a direction opposite from you. She lets a small, almost imperceptible sigh escape her lips, and you wonder if perhaps she would rather be somewhere else, perhaps at home on the couch binge watching some random show on Netflix, or playing Overwatch, or indulging in some random artistic pursuit that you didn’t even know existed.

 She seems like the type that would play Overwatch. She seems like the type that paints, or makes her own earrings that she sells on Etsy, or likes to watch movies in foreign languages. Maybe she watches them with the subtitles off sometimes, just to see if she can understand what they’re talking about simply from the universality of gestures made by foreign hands and the tones of foreign voices coming from foreign mouths.

 The sudden realization that you are framing this random girl in your mind rattles you a bit, and you smile to yourself as you shake your head, as if to rid those stupid, childish thoughts. You didn’t know this girl, not even in the slightest, and it was wrong of you to impose a character, a personality, on someone you knew nothing about.

 You play idly with the small glass of whiskey in your hand, watching as the amber brown liquid swirls about. You take a sip and appreciate the warm taste of it in your mouth and down your throat, appreciating the soft burn, the soft warmth it leaves behind.

 You take a moment to try to tune back into the conversation your friends are having, but they are knee-deep in a conversation about a Super Nintendo game. You loved vintage games - there was something about the original plastic in your hands, and the classic, blocky pixels on your screen, that made it feel more authentic in the way an emulator on a modern console could never be.

 You are about to join in on the conversation, about to tell your friends about some random game you picked up online, when a movement on the other side of the bar catches your attention - the girl in the purple hair is raising a glass. One of her friends is speaking earnestly, it appears, and after finishing her little speech the brunette girl next to her gives her a hug - perhaps it was a toast? Perhaps it is the brunette’s birthday? It probably was. Either way, the girls clink their glasses together, and down their shots in one gulp.

 The girl in the purple hair scrunches her face as she forces the strong liquor down her throat. Immediately you think that perhaps it the cutest thing you’d ever witnessed, and you find that a small smile has appeared, unconsciously, on your lips.

 The four girls share that wonderful post-shot reaction with each other, complaining about how awesome that small bit of alcohol they just had was. Together three of them tease the orange-haired, thin girl who is struggling with the alcohol and having a coughing fit. They laugh and one of them grabs her phone to take a picture of the poor girl, who, to her credit, is laughing along with them, probably out of embarrassment.

 The girl with the purple hair joins in on the fun, saying something that must have been hilarious, for all three of her companions burst out in laughter - including the thin girl struggling with the shot. The girl smiles, and her eyes narrow to thin half-arcs. In that moment she is the picture of happiness and joy.

 She says something else to her group - you assume it is her declaring that the next round is on her. She stands, and the girls make way for her to leave their table.

 For the first time you get a glimpse of her from head to toe. She is wearing a short, black dress, and what appears to be a grey patterned collared shirt beneath it. The dress is plain and relatively short but not overly so, showing off her long, slender legs without being improper or overly suggestive. It’s an interesting outfit; classy enough to be worn to work, whilst casual enough for a night out with the girls.

 Here again she differs from her compatriots, who appear to be dressed in typical club girl outfits, with short tops and skirts, heels and small, glamorous purses and accessories. If ever there was a club girl starter kit, they were perfect models.

 But the girl with the purple hair, as you’ve come to see, is a little different from her friends.  

 You watch as she approaches the bar. There is an elegance in the way she walks, which is admirable considering the alcohol you presume she’s consumed thus far this evening.

 Later on, you’ll wonder where your sudden burst of confidence came from. But at that moment, when the girl with the purple hair reaches the bar and tries, unsuccessfully, to flag down the overly busy bartender, you see an opportunity.

 Hastily, you mumble something to your friends about grabbing the next round, and step away from the table. Out of the corner of your ear, you hear one of your friends wonder where you’re going, and another say that you still have an almost full pitcher at your table - but they are irrelevant now. Nothing else exists aside from the thirty feet between you and the spot at the bar next to the girl with the purple hair.

 Where did this come from, this sudden burst of confidence, this sudden need to get up and go over to this girl to talk to her? Was it the liquor, the liquid confidence coursing through your veins? No. It was the desire, nay, the need to speak to this girl, the need to see if she really was everything you’d built up in your mind. You needed to speak to her, to ask her her name, maybe find out a little about her. Even if she shot you down before you could get a sentence out, well, at least you had tried. You couldn’t bear the thought of wondering what might have been had you not done something.

 Ten feet away. You take a deep breath, and ready what you are about to say in your mind. Some comment about her hair? A stupid, corny joke, just to break the ice?

 Five feet away. Maybe some witty comment about bad bartenders?

 Two feet - and suddenly your thoughts disappear, and your mind goes blank as the girl with the purple hair turns her head and makes eye contact with you. Later you would realize that moment seemed to go on forever. You were hardly the mushy, sentimental type, but you finally understood why the movies slow that moment down, why the soft music plays in the background during those scenes. You wonder if this is what it feels like when someone who will be important in your life looks at you for the first time.

 You are relieved, beyond words, to see a smile appear on her lips.

 You smile back, although you wonder if perhaps the nervousness coursing throughout every fibre of your being is having an effect on your smile, and if you are actually grimacing oddly at her instead of smiling. But your mouth and lips miraculously follow the orders sent to them by your dazzled mind, because her smile widens a little bit in the way that smiles do when they are returned.

 It is just a second, maybe two, of the many billions of seconds in your life, but it felt like an eternity.

 You reach the bar, your legs - your wonderful, reliable, stable legs - by some miracle not failing you and delivering you safely to the bar without collapsing due to sheer nervousness. You remember who you are, what you came here to do, and you try to act as casual as your nerves could allow you to. You make a show of trying to flag down the bartender, but he is busy on the other end of the bar catering to some especially loud patrons.

 Your mind is racing, trying and failing to remember what it was you were going to say to the girl with the purple hair, your nerves suddenly afire at the mere proximity of the young woman you’d been stealing glances at all night. You were far from inexperienced with the opposite sex, far from being some timid fool when it came to approaching them. But this one was different. This one was special.

 Maybe you should just say hi. Start simple, y’know? But dammit, that never works. You needed something witty, something memorable, something that would make her laugh and giggle and think ‘clearly this man’s shirt is made of boyfriend material and I should throw myself into his arms posthaste.’ You don’t get that with hi!. No one gets that with hi. Girls want someone cocky and confident and sure of himself. No one ever just says hi! You know who approaches girls and says hi? Single guys, that’s who! Don’t just say hi!

 Dammit! What were you going to say? Your mind races, tries to think back to other times you’d approached girls, tries to remember what you said to them when you were successful. Gah! Your mind fails you, returns only a simple blank slate, as though your mind had put on its hat and jacket, hung up a sign that said “you’re on your own, kid,” and then started to walk home.

You tap your fingers nervously on the bar surface, trying, and perhaps failing, to appear as casual as possible as you stare, blankly, in the general direction of the too-busy bartender as he struggles to pour the correct kinds of alcohol in the correct kinds of glasses in the correct proportions.

 Clearly you needed to make some witty comment to break the ice. A small joke, perhaps? A corny one, or a genuinely funny one? What was a good joke… dammit! Damn you, mind, and your vacation time! Perhaps mention something… about… sports! Yes, it was a bar, and there were sports playing on the TVs. Maybe she was a hockey fan? Or soccer? What if she liked one, but not the other? Which sport had the highest proportion of purple haired fans? What if she thought sports were stupid, a male-dominated dick measuring contest that wasn’t worth her time or attention, and she thought less of you for liking them? Dammit!

 Maybe you should comment on her hair? Maybe something along the lines of… perhaps… using her hair to get the bartender’s attention? Then segue into how it got your attention. That’s it. Hahahaha, you laugh nervously in your mind’s eye. Then she would say how she was hoping you’d come over to talk to her, and you’d say she was awesome and you’d go on a date the next day and get married a month after that and later you’d have kids and live happily ever-

 There is a soft tap on your forearm. You turn, nervously, to the girl with the purple hair, and the sight of her face, her eyes locked on yours, that bright smile once again on her lips, causes your heart to skip a beat like it was a crack on the sidewalk.

 The next day, when you’d recovered from the whirlwind of the night’s events, you’d realize that her first words to you, the first sounds you’d hear from her voice, would sound like music. And it was crazy, considering it was just a single syllable, a single word, but someone could have told you that the entirety of Beethoven’s works were held within that syllable, and you’d have believed it.

 The girl with the purple hair’s mouth opens, her lips part, a she leans towards you with a soft smile and says:

 “...Hi.”

[cactus-joke]

the thing i will never wrap my head around is introducing sylvie as a frankenloki & then giving her absolutely no depth despite her being the key protagonist of season 1... like mike must hate women for the fact that

1) all the tva women of color are sidelined immediately (at least the two w the most prominent & interesting roles/backgrounds) for a white ladies development

2) you can count all the tva lady agents we see onscreen w one hand

3) frankenloki aka sylvie has a bunch of gaps for a character like where’d she get blonde hair dye. if ure hellbent on revenge why are u making stops at wallmart 2 get a box of hair bleach. where’d she get asgardian leather but SPECIFICALLY for her top (she’s wearing baggy pants & combat boots w that ensemble??? which as i say it also sounds like those corny wattpad “put my hair in a messy bun, wore my combat boots” fanfic outfits 😭), why and how did she get the AoA loki horns, she didn’t have them when she was taken. if she hates the loki association why’s she wearing the horns & the color green which is... the biggest target to be perceived as loki

4) if she’s an important part of the self love metaphor romance why does she always make this face “😐🤨🤢😐🤨😐” when loki talks (berating him & betraying him in the end aside ofc!)

5) why do we not know her nexus event? why do we not know why she chose the name sylvie? why does she have no prominent character traits outside of having a vagina? why is she cis? why did she get taken at the tender age of an elementary schooler but not when she was born if her crime was being born a girl?

6) has mike waldron ever met, spoken to, or seen a woman? has he engaged in critical, intelligent conversation with anyone, really?

7) can i be emotionally compensated by disney for simultaneously the most BORING (how do you make.. the god of mischief & tricks... boring is beyond me) and convoluted overstuffed show for wasting my time?

I don't know that Mike hates women, but I do think, based on his interviews and the resulting product he made, that:

1) It was certainly a choice to make the two prominent black female characters slaves to a fascist organization and one essentially a leader of it. A choice I don't think anyone involved in creating this show spent a second to think about.

I don't think they were necessarily sidelined on purpose, however. I just think it's an inevitable by-product of the show's terrible pacing and even worse writing. That scene one between B-15 and Renslayer, a scene I think was ultimately a waste of time, made me think that they probably did want to highlight at least those two characters on their own merit. They failed, of course, in the end, and with the set-up I think the intention or lack of intention doesn't really matter since we get what we get, you know?

It's not really a shinning example of giving your characters of color time and care, either, but I do have to highlight B-15's moment of doubt, a scene I think Wunmi Mosaku absolutely killed (seriously, everyone needs to check out her other work, she is effort and talent personified.).

Besides that, if you ask me, no character in this show has any real development anyway, including Sylvie. It is an uneven display of screen-time because obviously she's a main over everyone else but, like, can it even be said that Sylvie particularly benefited from it? I don't really think so. As you said, she has no depth, she is just an empty girlboss fantasy, and the diversity in general in this show feels empty to me.

2) I didn't really even want more TVA foot soldiers to be women. It wouldn't be a diversity win so much as just more empty pandering and Marvel's typical (military) propaganda fuel.

Anyway, I'd like to highlight some youtube creators of color who make great in-depth videos on this issue:

Khadija Mbowe: Color-blind vs. Identity-conscious casting and examining Hamilton and Malcom & Marie

Town of Tawiah: Performative Diversity and Colorism in Film | Dear White People Review, My Wife & Kids,HTGAWM & More

Cheyenne Lin: GOOD Representation Matters | Colorism and Casting

There's obviously way more, but these videos are a good starting point to expand on this topic from people who know what they're talking about. I put a link to their videos while the link on their names will lead you to their respective channels.

3) Sylvie's whole appearance is bullshit from the get-go. They deliberately used comic book references on her to confuse us and make their dumbshit twist of: oh, see, she actually is a Loki variant!

I remember seeing a post essentially saying whoever thinks Sylvie is a Loki variant with 100% certainty is media illiterate lmao, so I guess it worked on some people.

So, you know, IMO, it doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense for her to wear Loki's signature colors and the iconic AoA head-wear, she just does because fuck you.

Also, "if ure hellbent on revenge why are u making stops at wallmart 2 get a box of hair bleach." lmaooo - she just wanted to be her own person, you know, visually, but only with her hair and nothing else :)

4) Sylvie so very clearly doesn't even like Loki all that much, certainly not as much as he likes her (she is a girlboss after all, "she's got shit to do!"). It would be funny if it wasn't tragic. I do feel bad for Larry from accounting :(

5) I'm guessing we don't know her nexus event because they kinda never bothered to define what it was and they don't care. Maybe Renslayer saying she doesn't remember her nexus event was supposed to be this moment of like cold truth, or an attempt to hurt Sylvie because she knows but won't tell her, or, you know... actually, who cares.

6) I think Mike has spoken to women and I think he's had plenty of intelligent and critical conversations at his level. Which is a relative zero to a generous one. Perhaps two on a good day.

Idk though, jokes aside, his writing on this series is childish and lazy, his view of Loki is boring and reductive, his original script he used for this show is absolute shit, and that's all I can really say for sure.

7) I wish. The show really is boring when it isn't actively infuriating. It still boggles my mind how this mess even happened. Like, I knew the show would be bad, but this bad? Man oh man.

[littlemisssquiggles]

Pinehead Headcanons: Oscar's Dreamscape: The Garden of Two Lovers

@miki-13 asked "Okay I know we didn't get a lot of Oscar backstory, but I really do think that after the V8 finale, there's a new avenue to explore with Oscar. Why? Because as far as he knows, his friends, partner and love interest are dead. The people he's grown to care for over the course of V5-8 are suddenly gone. There's no way that's not gonna hurt him, even if Ozpin assures him that they're not dead. Because either way, he's been forcibly separated from them.

Heck, this could actually open up an avenue for him to talk about his own family life and why he lives with his aunt. Not to mention one of his allusions is to The Little Prince and he just arrived in a desert after leaving his Rose behind, and the whole story deals with death in general.

Actually, maybe that's how Oscar gets his semblance/ branches out with his magic! He wants to find the people he loves so badly and refuses to give up on them, that he finds a way to get the void/ communicate with them and possibly find a way to lay the groundwork for bringing them back!

Squiggles Answers:

Hey there Miki-chan. Pardon the late reply but I wanted to reserve my response to this as a new Pinehead headcanon post considering that, ironically, you and I share the same thoughts and theories about Oscar reaching out.

The idea I had is that Oscar would be able to connect to Ruby in the Other World in his dreams. Once again, I return to my old Oscar’s Dreamscape Pinehead headcanon from donkey years ago. Essentially, through his unyielding love for his rose and his deep desires to reunite with her again in some shape or form, Oscar unintentionally creates the Dreamscape.

And what the Dreamscape is is that it is this magical place that transcends reality and only exists through the shared bond between Oscar and Ruby. Picture a shallow stagnant sea that mirrors an endless sunset sky. A perfect blend of the warm embrace of the sun and the tranquil beauty of the moon that paves the path towards a small garden that sits in the middle of this mysterious magical place.

And it is in this garden where Oscar meets Ruby in his dreams and vice versa.

Remember how it was said that the Little Prince fairy-tale ended ambiguously with the reader never knowing the truth of the prince’s fate after he was poisoned by the snake and “went to sleep”.

Some iteration believed the prince to have died and gone back to his home planet in spirit to be with his rose while another interpretation described the Prince returning home only to discover that his rose had died in his absence without him present to take care of her.

Either way, the allusion is that the prince does indeed reunite with his rose but in a manner that is still tragic when you look at it. Going off of that, this is why I love the concept of Oscar connecting to Ruby in sleep with the two meeting and communicating with each other in their dreams through unknown power originated from Oscar. Only it’s NOT exactly a semblance. Nor is it exactly magic either.

One of my favourite quotes from the Lost Fable episode back in V6 is when Jinn described a power much greater than magic that caused Salem and Ozma to recognize one another in their new lives.

“…Call it magic or call it something stronger, but in that moment, the two knew exactly who stood before them…”

In the Lost Fable, Jinn made it seem as if loveis an element more powerful than even the likes of magic; as cheesy as that might sound. So if love is able to transcend life and death to cause two kindred souls to recognize each other in another life in another time time, what’s stopping it from transcending worlds to bring together another pair of kindred souls?

So as corny as this is going to sound, the hopeless romantic in me cannot help but swoon over the thought of love being what creates the Dreamscape and/or brings Ruby and Oscar together in such a place that only they can traverse.

It is a power that was born from Ruby and Oscar’s shared love for one another and desire to reunite with each other and thus it’s a power that only they share together. The Rosegarden in the Dreamscape is theirs.

In the beginning, on the first night the two reunite in their dreams, the Dreamscape was believed to be solely of Oscar’s doing but in reality, it was a special new world that belonged to both the little prince and his true rose alone.

Okay, hear me out with this one. The reason why I’m thinking the Dreamscape was believed to be Oscar’s power alone in the beginning was because when it all started, the Dreamscape mainly reacted to Oscar. On his end, let’s say…Oscar wished so desperately to see Ruby again that unbeknownst to him; the Dreamscape was forged just so Oscar could accomplish his heart’s wish---to see his rose.

Thus, Oscar is able to see Ruby in their dreams and she in turn is able to see and talk to him between worlds but only in sleep. However, that is extent of the Dreamscape through Oscar’s influence. The two can communicate but they can’t physically touch or feel one another.

Because I have this idea of Ruby and Oscar growing closer to each other than they’ve ever been before since they’re able to meet in Dreamscape. However it’s also this painful thing where despite being together in their dreams, they’re still not together when they are constantly reminded that they can’t touch each other.

Like imagine a moment where the two rosebuds are bonding in the Dreamscape, trying to come up with way to reunite together, swapping backstories and secrets about themselves with each other that they’ve never told anyone else only for one of them---mainly Oscar--- to get lost in the euphoria of the moment and attempt to reach out and touch the other person only to be painfully reminded, that they’re not truly there. They’re still separated despite how close the Dreamscape has brought them.

The only time when the Dreamscape is actually able is to make Ruby and Oscar interact physically is when that becomes Ruby’s wish.

Okay, hear me out again.

I have this scenario in my head where Oscar suffers a mental breakdown as a result of being poisoned during an encounter with Tyrian Callows. Remember how Tyrian’s venom caused Qrow to suffer and hallucinate back in V4?

Well picture something similar with Oscar where he falls into a sort of light coma as a result of being poisoned. Let’s say…as a result of the venom, Oscar is transported to the Dreamscape where ALL of his inner demons---the true feeling and fears he’s been suppressing for a long time---suddenly manifest inside this world to torment him and berate him.

And let’s say…on the other end, in the Other World, Ruby becomes worried for Oscar’s well-being when he doesn’t make contact with her in the Dreamscape for some time. And let’s say…due to her connection with Oscar, which became stronger as a result of them bonding in the dream world, Ruby is able to sense when something is wrong with Oscar due to her having a weird feeling in her chest. Almost as if her heart was beckoning her somewhere else. To take her to the person she wanted to see who needed her help. Or something like that.

In a nutshell, Ruby is able to enter the Dreamscape on her own through her connection with Oscar. At first, Ruby mostly relied on Oscar to bring her to the Dreamscape but when Oscar was in trouble, Ruby used their link to take her there as an alternative means.

To make a long theory short, Ruby arrives in the Dreamscape to find the once magical dream world in dark chaos ---basically imagine being on the outside of a tornado.

The Dreamscape had turned into a rampant storm to reflect Oscar’s darkest inner emotions which were spiralling out of control before Ruby’s very eyes.

Remember how in Steven Universe, in the episode that debuted the “Here Comes A Thought” song, remember how Steven’s true feelings about Jasper, Bismuth and his mother started to manifest before him and Connie while they were fused as Stevonnie during training?

Picture a moment like that with Oscar in the Dreamscape where Oscar’s fears take form---at first taking on the appearance of Oscar’s old self dressed in his old farm boy attire belittling Oscar for leaving home to be among people who he didn’t fully believe trusted or even actually cared him---unearthing Oscar’s thoughts and repressed emotions from the events of V6.

Then the Dreamscape manifests Ironwood to belittle Oscar for his repressed emotions from the events of V7. Then it transforms into Salem to taunt and humiliate Oscar over his repressed trauma as a result of being her prisoner during the events of V8 and being tortured.

You get what I’m saying, right? Whatever Oscar has been repressing for so long, the Dreamscape manifests it as a being of spite to through it all back in Oscar’s face when he was most vulnerable. Finally, as Ruby enters the fray, the Dreamscape takes on a new form.

Here’s another concept to toss onto the Fake Rose table. Imagine if…the Fake Rose isn’t another silver eyed warrior or rose-themed person who takes an interest in Oscar.

What if…the Fake Rose is actually a replica of Ruby manifested by the Dreamscape to reveal Oscar’s true feelings and fears in respect to Ruby?

Assuming that you’re an ole-school Potterhead like yours truly Miki-chan, remember the last book/movie?

Remember that one scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows involving the locket? Remember how the locket made an apparition of Harry and Hermione appear before Ron to voice his jealousy and inferiority when compared to Harry especially in the eyes of Hermione who he believed loved Harry over him.

Picture something like that with a Fake Ruby Rose---Mocking Oscar over his “childish” love for his rose, as if he actually stood a chance of being with her given the Merge and any other insecurities that Oscar secretly harboured that he’d supressed for so long.

Picture that. Imagine…something like that happening so that it could ultimately lead into Ruby denouncing ever fear of Oscar’s voiced by her fake copy as this rose---the one true rose did her best to comfort her prince.

It’s a moment where Ruby words unfortunately don’t reach Oscar. Thus, Ruby tries to one way she’s always reached out to him. Through a gentle comforting touch. In that moment, Ruby wishes for Oscar to feelher there beside him.

To feel her arms wrapped around him and the warmth of the hug she dared to give him since she wanted more than anything to be able to comfort him through the storm. And for a second time, through the power of love (mixed in with just a smidge of their share magic inherited from the God of Light possibly), the Dreamscape grants Ruby’s wish and Oscar is able to feel her for the first time since they met in the dream world. To feel her arms around him as she embraced him tightly with all the love and care for him she could channel in that moment.

And just like that, all becomes calm as the storm disappeared; softening to a gentle breeze against a beautifully sunlit sky; revealing two hearts embraced; once seperated but now together at long last in the world of their own created from their shared love.

Basically picture the Dreamscape as this magical world brought to life by the love and heart’s desires of two star-crossed lovers separated by fate and lost to two realities. Thus the Dreamscape mirrors the feelings and grants the desires of these two lovers since they are the rulersof said world as its creators. Thus it is a world that is only attainable by them. A world of their own. A world of dreams to grant the wishes of two lost souls in love.

I’d love to go more in depth into this revised Dreamscapeidea of mine for the Rosegarden pair. However for the time being, this is concept that I have in mind and is all that I have to share for now. What do you think?

~ LittleMissSquiggles (2021)

[rpgmgames]

May’s Featured Game: Cadeau

DEVELOPER(S): HALFWORLDstudios ENGINE: RPG Maker VX Ace GENRE: Horror, Fantasy, Puzzle WARNINGS: Blood, Mild Gore, Suicide Mentions, Death SUMMARY: Cadeau is an RPG Horror game about a lonely, yet stubborn, young woman named Charlotte-- who finds herself in a world unknown to man, wearing clothes that do not belong to her. Wonderful and tragic events are to follow suit, as all of her greatest wishes come true. However, as these things often go, her happiness does not come without consequence...

Play the beta here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Macdev: Greetings and salutations. I'm Mac, writer, artist, and programmer for Cadeau, as well as the founder of Halfworld. I've loved Rpg games since I was about 10, and have been creating them since! Bruno: My name is Bruno and I'm the music composer. I got into game music approx 2 years ago and I've currently made music for a couple of games and other projects, and Cadeau was the first one of them. Aidan: I'm Aidan/kanteramcneil on Tumblr! I'm one of the voice actors, and I'm super excited to be able to follow Cadeau's progress! I've been in the RpgMaker community for a few years now and I adore being able to watch all the devs progress and grow Rindre: Hi I'm Rin! Currently, I'm on an indefinite hiatus, but Big Mac managed to catch me, chain me up to a chair, and make me say stuff about myself against my will. So... I make games, I guess. - Note from macdev: Erm, not true? These accusations are SLANDER and I will not stand for it. WariA: Hello! I’m WaraiA, one of the voice actors of Cadeau — A pleasure to meet you! I will be voicing the oh so mysterious ‘Your Admirer’, so please look forward to listening to my antics ☆〜（ゝ。∂） I am a Japanese/Chinese Australian born citizen, with a tendency to speak in an American accent. Any pronouns are fine for me My most notable role so far has been Harpae from Pocket Mirror, so some of you may be familiar with my voice already! Nothing much has changed — I enjoy cosplaying, role playing, drawing every once in a blue moon, Final Fantasy XIV, and most importantly, catboys (Nael, I’m coming for you, boy) As ‘Your Admirer’ is a rather elusive character, I cannot disclose much. But I do suggest always keeping one eye open throughout your journey

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Macdev: Cadeau is a game about a troubled young woman named Charlotte Émile-- who is a "tomboyish" and bold individual who has been unfortunately presented loneliness by a series of disastrous events. After giving up on companionship, she miraculously receives an affectionate letter from a mysterious person aliased as her "Admirer". This "Admirer" character beckons poor Charlotte to visit them at a mysterious well in the woods, and to come armed with nothing but a strange golden coin. From there, madness ensues. Our protagonist must learn of her past and the events that lead to her misfortune, all while becoming entangled in a family drama rooted in witchcraft, raging years before her unexpected arrival. It is a story about self-love, friendship, acceptance, magic, and all that corny-ness. Sounds fun, right? My initial inspiration was The Witches House. The game was originally meant to be simple, and maybe an hour or 45 minutes long. A simple story, and a straightforward 2-ending path.... How have we managed to get here from that?

How long did you work on your project? *Macdev: Two years, I believe! Its anniversary is April 8th. In the beginning, it was very off and on-- because I was having a difficult time with school and-- as I mention-- organization. So not a whole lot of progress was made then. I'm proud to say I've been chugging quite a bit faster than my previous pace!

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Macdev: My inspiration would probably lie in Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts, and Alice returns to madness. As for RPG games? The Witch's House, Havenfell, and Pocket Mirror. As well as many other beautiful artists and creators in the video game community. Overall, my biggest inspiration for this game has got to be the stop-motion movie: Coraline. I even reference the movie once or twice in Cadeau. The tone of Coraline, and the whimsical yet eerie people and creatures within it give me inspiration for this game. It was very much a favorite of mine when I was younger, and that still applies today!

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Macdev: The biggest problem I've run into has been a lack of structure. In the beginning, I hadn't even written out the story halfway. I was just pulling ideas from thin air, going back and forth, and deleting entire concepts-- only to bring them back and re-arrange them as I went. Characters weren't fully dished out; the game didn't even have an ending. This state of creating is fine, but not when you have other people expecting things from you. Thankfully, things are sailing much MUCH smoother than before.

Did any aspects of your project change over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Macdev: It's absolutely taken a turn from what it was originally! As I say, it was meant to be an extremely short game in the beginning, and now obviously that’s not the case. The goal for Cadeau now is: around 2-3 hours long in playtime, and full of many diverse character types! As well as a storyline that extends far more than face value. Which is in high contrast to the basic, short, immemorable experience that it was going to be.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Macdev: I do have a wonderful, beautiful, talented team working with me on Cadeau. - A composer! (Bruno Buglisi), - As well as voice actors! (WariA as Allete, Aiden/kanteramcneil as The Botanist, and Rindre (who I have definitely not kidnapped...) as The Maiden) I met everyone in the team through volunteer posts-- and I had never done that before-- but it worked very surprisingly well! We worked very quickly together, and we had a very mutual understanding of what each other wanted. It feels good to know I have such talented people helping this game come to fruition. I owe a whole lot to them for helping the game become what it is now.

What was the best part of developing the game? Macdev: Being able to make the world in your head interactable, for sure. Since I was 8, maybe even younger, I have loved writing stories and making art. Webcomics were my main thing as a kid, so story-telling is something I’ve always loved. So, the fact that I can turn my ideas into something someone can experience and interact with is a wonderful feeling. There's nothing more fulfilling, honestly!

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Macdev: Very often, actually! I try not to ride too close to the material I see in other games, but I do gain lots of inspiration from my fellow creators! One thing I am laser-focused on, though, is making Cadeau quite unique content-wise. I want it to have very interesting, uncommon puzzles and mechanics that you may not expect from this type of game-- or one of this engine. So far, I think I've achieved this-- so look out for that!

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Macdev: My favorite character has got to be The Botanist. At the beginning of the game he has no dialogue, yet still presents such a strong personality. They are kind, thoughtful, and absolutely adorable. Look at that foofy hair! I'm a sucker for it. Their character arc is something I'm excited for. It's been a blast writing it so far-- and I won’t spoil anything-- but you guys will love him. I'm sure of it. Now if we're talking character design, Naël has got to be my favorite. He recently received a “tune-up,” as I would like to call it, and I think everything works together very cohesively in his design now. It's probably one of my favorites out of all of them, at this point.

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Macdev: Thankfully, things worked out perfectly-- and the universe blessed me with a wonderful team in the end-- but it was very stressful once I realized I had asked for help way too early. I essentially made a single map, and a little character sheet-- then asked for a whole team to help me out. As I said, it luckily worked out in the end. Now we have so many amazing people helping us-- but we also lost a few in the madness-- and that's a mistake on my part, 100%. If you don't know what you want, it's hard to ask for help. It will lead to confusion, lots of back and forth, frustration, etc... Just wait until your way further in development. Trust me. I know it’s easy to jump the gun and shoot for the stars, but sometimes it won’t work out as well as it has for the Cadeau team!

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Macdev: I won't say as of now! The idea of a sequel/prequel has floated around, but if it does come to fruition, it won't be until way after the release of Cadeau. We'll just have to see. (This isn’t to say I’m not hopeful!)

With your current project, what do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Macdev: I have so many amazing project ideas lined up for after the release of Cadeau. I won’t spill too much, so they'll be more of a surprise-- but they range from classic, adventure-themed true RPG's-- to 3D teenage-thrillers. I'm honestly stoked, there's so much in store for Halfworld.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Macdev: I think my biggest fear is letting people down. Also, I worry about losing interest or having people form the idea that the game is never going to be completed. It’s just going to take some time, is all, and that’s okay!

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Macdev: I already mentioned above not to jump the gun and ask for help too early, so some more advice I'll give: is to keep all your material, all your ideas, and all your concepts in one concise place. I would say do it digitally from the get-go, but if you would prefer to write it down physically that's fine! Just make sure it's only one or 2 notebooks, and not 13. The information for Cadeau is spread throughout my hideous mound of notebooks, as I get up during ungodly hours of the night to scrawl a sudden idea down. So, I'm currently in the process of moving them to one digital spot-- and while it's generally easy-- I would have been able to avoid it if I had just put everything in one spot in the beginning. Oh, and back up your progress regularly! I have separate backups of Cadeau from months in 2 different years, and in 4 different places. So, I take backups very seriously—and so should you!

Question from last month's featured dev @atlasatrium: What's your favorite RPG Maker game and why? *Aidan: I love End roll, Ib, OFF, Prom Dreams, From Next Door, and Aria's Story! Bruno: Mm, definitely Long Gone Days (though it’s not being made on rpgmaker now) Midnight Train, Heartbeat and Glitched! WariA: I don't really have any :0 the devs I've worked with so far have all been really sweet (´꒳`);; Macdev: This is a tough question! I have a lot of favorites. Probably Stray Cat Crossing overall, but I also love Home and Starboy. Starboy brings a lot of memories, and Stray Cat Crossing was what inspired me to start making games! Oh, and Home is just very cute.

We mods would like to thank HALFWORLDstudios for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Cadeau if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[koolkvat-blog]

       hello  loves  ,   what’s  up  !   i’m  super  excited  to  be  here  &  to  finally  play  my  precious girl  ,   jade aka kool kat   .   i’m  LOLA  ,   use  she / her prounouns  ,   i am NINETEEN  ,   &   i  am  currently  in  the  gmt + 1 timezone  which  means  yes  ,  my  ass should’ve  been  awake  for  intro  posting  but  i  don’t  know  what  time  management  is  and  ended  up  swamped  w/  work  ,  so  !   everything   you  need  to  know  about  about  miss  kat  is  under  the  cut  ,   &  i’m  rlly  thrilled  to  be  apart  of  such  a  wonderful  rp  with  such  gorgeous  muses  .  corniness over  ––   if  you’re  looking  to  plot  sumn  out  ,   just  hit  that   ♥︎    &   i’ll  make  my  way  on  over  to  ur  dms  ,  or  feel  free  to  add  me  up   on  discord  which  i’ll  give  in im’s  if  anybody’s  interested  !   ♡♡♡         tw  :   family issues  ,  body image issues  &  drug mention  ( not  explicit ) . 

001 . SYNOPSIS  . FULL     NAME  .      jade        kikuchi . NICKNAMES  .      kool kat    . AGE  .      twenty - one . DATE     OF     BIRTH  .      twenty  -  seventh     of     september   ,     1993      /     libra . PLACE     OF     BIRTH  .      harajuku ,   tokyo ,     japan .         GENDER  .       cisgender     female . SEXUALITY  .     (  closeted  )  pansexual  . NATIONALITY  .      japanese  ,  now  american  too  after  successfully  gaining  citizenship  . ETHNICITY  .      asian  . OCCUPATION  .       fashion designer at katz designz      ,     former  fashion  design  and  journalist  student  back  in  her  original  timeline  . PLAYLIST  .      here  !  (  +  )     charismatic , enthusiastic , warm , energetic , adventurous , compassionate , animated . (  -  )     deceptive ,  independent ,  emotional , territorial , ambitious , impulsive , temperamental , insecure , sarcastic .  

002 . AESTHETIC  .      wheatgrass  smoothies , 90′s  anime  with  subtitles  , chanel  no. 5, speeding  on  a  desert  road  with  the  windows  down ,  painting  your  toenails  on  the  dashboard ,  neon  prints ,  cat  lazing  on  a  balcony  in  the  sun , black  lace ,  japanese  horror  films  ,  sour  cocktails  with  sugar  around  the  rim , half - smoked  cigarettes ,  stacks  of  fashion  magazines , long  hair  hastily  dyed  different  colours in  a  motel  bathroom ,  thrift  stores   .

003. INFORMATION  .

tl;dr : a flighty, inattentive adventurer: a follower of whims; personable and sociable but lacks the skills to maintain relationships because she’s entirely (and perhaps too) career focused, checks her horoscope daily and entirely relies on the stars when concerning relationships, epitome of a britney spears / gwen stefani stan back in the 2000′s, still owns a (bedazzled) flip phone, collector of vintage fashion (chanel, elle, juicy couture etc.) a subscriber to the Leonardo Da Vinci sleeping method; catch her at 2 am making soufflés or buying plane tickets to shiwei so she can really experience the culture: will tell you she loves you ten minutes after first introduction because she’s high: kind of unintentionally insensitive to those she doesn’t know and closed off but in like a cool, lovable way. 

•    heads up im running on like 5 hrs sleep so sry when this inevitably derails ! ok sweet let’s get into this . 

•    so as aforementioned this is jade kukichi, aka, kool kat. she was dubbed that by her friends due to her unique fashion style and sense of dress, and it’s stuck. lbr nobody other than her friends can use that term so if you do, she’s just going to stare at u for a quick sec before saying ‘it’s jade’. 

•    born in harajuku, tokyo to a cardiothoracic surgeon of a father and a politician of a mother, jade grew up traveling the world and becoming flighty af, never thinking she was going to make long - term friends and kinda being okay with that. 

•    her family has never stayed in one place for very long, though her aging parents eventually settled into a permanent residence in the us around the time she turned sixteen, not soon enough for jade to break the habit of wandering, but thankfully quick enough for her to meet the bratz girls who were just as adventurous and fun - loving as she. she's spent much of her teen life jumping from place to place wherever her interests are that moment, collecting people along the way, but to find friends was the only thing she was missing. jade has a brilliant mind, but she lacks patience and follow through. she needs guidance or she'll jump from idea to idea, job to job, whim to whim.

•    ngl, jade pretty much hated her home life. her parents were an overbearing presence in her life, her mother wanting jade to be a proper lady who also went into a profession like theirs (entirely serious and stifling when it came to creativity, doctor, politician, lawyer etc.) while jade herself wanted to check out the latest trends and go to the mall w her friends – so she turned all of her focus and energy into getting good grades in everything she wanted to do in the hopes that she could be the most successful fashion designer, then leaving town forever. 

•    like she spent 7 yrs in high school graduating w honours but she barely knew what was happening in 9/10 of her classes and sometimes she just slept through classes and then wing her exams which she miraculously did well at. it was just not a good idea to send jade to a public school at 11 after being in boarding school for the rest of her life and then never really enforce any rules :~\ she has trouble with that kind of thing.. as in making logical choices instead of saying "YEAH lets go watch american psycho and smoke weed!" skipping chemistry to do just that 

•    she loves fun and values doing what makes her happy over most things. it's hard to pin her down and she spends most of her life chasing after ideas that don't really follow any sort of conscious order, bc she’s really got that ‘i’ve got dreams and i’m gonna do everything in my power to achieve them’ personality. 

•    according to bratz canon she’s worked as literally everything ? she’s one of those insufferable people who r just. good everything ig and that’s just how it is on this bitch of an earth. jade’s been a photographer, a song - writer and bass player in a rock band (shout out to bratz rock angelz the best movie w the best soundtrack ever), a student studying fashion design, a fashion columnist, a quickly fired nanny, and many other things in between. 

•    so when she appears in toonsville she’s kind of out of it that she’s not doing something w her skills and sets up her own business which she loves ? being her own boss suits her fine (for now) because she’s got a Real Job and she's actually trying rly hard so she can fulfill her dreams !! like suck it mom nd dad haha !!!

•    jade has a lot of weird feelings TM about her body and her looks and struggles a lot with her self confidence :~( she had a shit time at school with boys saying she was too thin and she compensated by acting like she didn't like anyone at all for a while and now she thinks she isn't good enough for anyone when rly she is a cinnamon bun too good for this world too pure 

•    best friend ever she is so good at being a friend if u text her at 3am to go out or cry on her shoulder shes ready to go at 3:15 even if she was sleeping w lots of snacks and treats and love!!! she is sooo extroverted around those she’s comfortable w, she gains so much energy from being around people and she loves being nice and being around ppl she likes 

•    she becomes the mom of groups pretty easily (hence why she’s the leader of the bratz) bc she bottles up most of her own problems to help ppl with theirs!! which is toxic yea but she puts people first always so !! plz help her poor repressed soul!! rip kool kat.. 

•    still super into the stuff of her time so like.. she loves the x files and bad reality tv shows (i want to be a hilton) and reads gossip magazines on the reg because she enjoys that stuff! also very into girl groups.. ginger spice / posh spice is an eternal mood.  

•    anyway yes sweet adult-child of 21 (she is in denial about that tho like she doesn't want to be childish) who is v nice v kind v loyal v baked a lot of time, v passionate v silly. idk what i'm doin hope u like it < 3

004. WANTED CONNECTIONS . 

friends / best friends / ride or dies . jade genuinely loves people, loves talking to strangers and getting into intense conversations with people she’s only just met, learning other people’s way of life and bettering herself for getting. she is, however, incredibly blunt and has never once minced words to keep from hurting someone’s feelings or to ease them into a situation. she’d much rather have a one-time conversation with a stranger than make long lasting relationships. she has three very close friends –  to the point of co - dependence –  and honestly, she’d rather spend all of her time doing things she loves such as her hobbies, sticking her nose into the latest vogue, or searching for cute collars and treats for her cat mica w them instead of making new friends. she's also FUN and she'd be happy to go on crazy road trips or buy out a movie theater for a day or anything that she thinks will her buds happy. she's traveled all over, so she’s v well read and cultured. she loves people but she hates complication and won't deal with any sort of emotional labor. she wants to live in the moment and expects everyone in her life to do so as well. just be chill, y'all. 

frenemies / enemies /  rivals  . please be her enemy, she needs people to antagonize shdhshd. she grew up pretty much affluent so she’s pretty spoiled even if she doesn’t want to admit it, and that rebellious side of her hasn’t died down yet. despite the fact that she is wealthy and in good community standing, she has a hard time letting go of childish grudges. in general she’s got a lot of suppressed feelings and ready to fight everyone who hurts her friends – like an irritated cat – so, honestly, come at her ? she is sometimes a little fickle and flighty and a unintentionally stuck up when it comes to art / fashion and she has definitely said the wrong thing at the wrong time and pissed the wrong people off, she can’t stand anyone underestimating her or thinking she’s dumb bc she’s interested in fashion. like gtfo !

ex’s , fwb’s , possible love interests .  jade is fairly fluid romantically and is the type of person who hates labels but also just wants to be cherished and called cute pet names lowkey. she loves a lot and gives a lot to her relationships, but typically doesn't want to commit to anything important. she’s gone from one disastrous relationship to another, ending up with a boyfriend who constantly ridiculed her image that was essentially the catalyst for her cutting off romantic ties, quite a recent wound before she found herself on the island actually. worst thing is tht she’s convinced herself that she’s been the problem in these relationships –  that she turns good people bad or that she is too much for people to deal with, she’s not sure what the issue is and she doesn’t really want to know. so…. fuck everything amirite ? anyway, she’s a strong independent woman who don’t need no (wo)man. 

etc . pls give me people jade can give a makeover to, people she shares an apartment w on the island, people who think fashion is girly and vapid.. creatives who love what she’s doing, anything tbh << 3

[gods-rising]

May Post - Mothers’ Day

How would the cast of Gods’ Rising celebrate their mothers - or just their family in general - on Mothers’ Day? Mothers’ Day has happened already in England however that month was dedicated to Birthdays. Sorry for how late this is, life got busy at the wrong time.

Main protagonists first, then minor protagonists, then main antagonists, then minor antagonists. Background characters not included.

Jakob Sullivan - Jakob doesn’t remember his mother or if he even actually had one. But if he did have a mother, he’d buy pretty flowers, a nice card (and write a personal message, maybe thanking her for specific details, maybe nodding toward an inside joke) and cook her a nice breakfast in bed. Even if it turns out he didn’t, or doesn’t, have a good relationship with his mother, he’d try his best to make her feel loved that day.

Zlatko Jones - Zlatko celebrates Mothers’ Day by bringing his mother breakfast in bed and treating her and his little brother to a three person feast with a homemade dessert and ice cream. He’d get his brother a present and card to give to their mother, and get a smaller present and card for himself as well as a big card from the both of them. It’s her day, he reminds himself, and it’s up to him to make her feel special, everyday.

Charlie Parker - Charlie is sans a mother figure, so she takes it as another day to celebrate her father, whom she loves dearly. She’ll throw him a present, probably a corny mug, and give him a Mothers’ Day card and write a joke in it. She likes hearing his laughter; even if the joke is terrible, he’ll chuckle over a hot mug of coffee, which she’ll make (and maybe deliberately fuck up), and she’ll know that she made his day a bit better.

Alex Wilson - Alex, before everything fell apart, would rarely help his siblings get gifts for their mother, having to be urged by either his father, uncles or grandparents to just wish her a good day. Sometimes he’d give her the presents that had been bought by someone else and wouldn’t resist too much to be in the pictures they took each year with her. Looking back in time, he realises, he wishes he’d been persuaded more often.

Kenna Collier -  Kenna wants to stay as far from her mother as she can after the divorce - her mum’s... bizarre nature often ruins her daughter’s plans and mood, and there’s certainly a disconnect between the pair. The moment the opportunity arises to avoid spending Mother’s Day with, well, her mother, she’ll take it without hesitation. She’s disinterested in spending time with her mother. Her mother knows nothing about her.

Klara Lullay - Klara never really celebrated Mother’s Day. Without a mother and a father and grandfather she didn’t see worth celebrating, there was never any need. She’d celebrate herself, because she was the only one who was worth it, in her perspective. When not being hassled or tutored by her grandfather, she’d make herself a cup of tea (despite not being fond of it, she saw it as a celebratory drink) and make some food.

Eban Jones - Eban really wants to make his mother feel special but his anxiety gets in the way of him buying things (it’s hard to buy things when you can barely talk to the cashier). So he finds himself still having to get Zlatko to buy stuff for him. He does help his brother in the kitchen though when making the Mother’s Day meal - but whether that’s for better or for worse, no one is really sure. It’s a hit or miss most years.

Grace Smith - Grace was the closest with her mother and would often draw things for her, get her father to make a breakfast for her to bring to her mother in bed and would go outside and pick flowers from the neighbour’s garden for her. But now, her mother is gone, so she takes the time to appreciate her father and, since she can’t ask him to cook for her, she either gets Kai to help or just goes down to the nearest shop to buy a meal deal.

Kai Smith - Kai was never really too close with his mother, and she seemed to feel the same way, but would still try to participate in Grace’s celebrations of her. This usually met carrying anything Grace couldn’t or wouldn’t. Even before his mother was gone, Kai would prefer to spend time with his father, helping him wash up from Grace’s endeavours, watching television with him and playing video games. Now they have a Player Three.

Maddie Eyighes - Maddie barely celebrates her foster mother, only joining in just enough to get by without hassle, whether that means carrying the breakfast or just being in the background while her foster siblings surprise their mother or opening doors for her foster mum. The moment her necessary deed is done, she’s off, outside and running. Not like she can do anything inside, it’ll be taken up by her foster mother, and outside she’s free.

Nastasia Lavisco - Nastasia, for Mother’s Day, decides to get into more paid fights, win more supplies, trade some of the rest for more profitable supplies to sell, put some of the original supplies up as winnings for two people to fight over, hide some of the profitable but criminal supplies in too, sell the rest, use the money to buy better weapons and repeat the cycle. It’s what she does everyday, and why should a holiday about a mother change that?

Aidan Lavisco - Aidan is very lucky to have help from the people of the palace, as Mother’s Day is almost a necessity rather than a celebration. It’s the one time Aidan is allowed to run a dance, because the mother in question can’t be involved. He decides the scheme, the theme, the dress code, the predominant dance and the menu of it all, but it’s barely a choice. He’s been trained exactly what to say, by a mother who pulls the strings.

Valeriya Jones - Valeriya, as a mother herself, loves Mother’s Day. She always has, as she was especially close to her mother. They would cook together, Valeriya always learning a new recipe, a new trick, a new skill each time, and she treasured that time with her mother. Being a mother of two boys has been a challenge, but she can’t help but be cheerful when her sons show her their appreciation, especially through recipes she taught them.

Kyle Smith - Kyle had been eager to bring his mother gifts and flowers when he was younger, but stopped as the teen years got closer and his fights with his parents became more prominent. Then, when he had kids with his wife, he helped the two celebrate her, or spent time with his son if he wasn’t helping his sister at all. But those days, with his mother and wife, are behind him, and now he’s the one celebrated on Mother’s Day.

Tyler Brae - Tyler, being the immortal Demon King, is obviously without a mother but he finds the day endearing. For him, Mother’s Day is another opportunity to show how much his ragtag family means to him. He’ll choose some corny but interesting film, buy some snack food while his family is preoccupied during the day and get them all in the living room to watch it. They’ll pretend to hate it and complain but he knows that there’s nowhere they’d rather be.

Shadow - Shadow never celebrated Mother’s Day before and would happily continue to not... too bad he lives with Tyler. Finding himself wrapped up in the demon’s shenanigans continues on this day as he helps Tyler set everything up for the rest of the family. If Tyler wants to cook something, Shadow is there to help him and stop the inevitable house fire. Tyler might ask him one day if he’d prefer to stay out of it, but Shadow won’t let him do it alone.

Mehmun Salton - Mehmun doesn’t remember many Mother’s Days - not with his mother, not with his aunt, not with the mother of his daughter. He prefers not to, because who knows what other memories will arise? All he knows is that he had too few Mother’s Day with his actual mother and not enough with his wife. So he has no idea what he used to do - but he finds he enjoys watching shitty films with a group of other traumatised misfits.

Preston Sin - Preston’s mother is long gone, thanks to his immortality. When she was alive, Mother’s Day was special for her and gifts were expected. If she received one less gift, there was hell to pay, even though all of them knew the gifts would maybe last a day or two at best before finding themselves in the bin. But now, she’s gone, and he’s still around and kicking, with a new family who would never throw away presents.

Maggie Snare - Maggie didn’t celebrate her stepmother for Mother’s Day after her actual mother divorced and left her father, which may have started the rivalry and contempt but who knows? Most Mother’s Days, she’d go out with her friends or spend the day studying and being as far away from her stepmum as she could humanely be. If there were plans, she’d reluctantly abide by them. Now she has more freedom and people worth celebrating.

Luke Fortunato - Luke was too young to be able to get things for his mother before he and his brother were sent into care, plus there wasn’t much she cared for. The people running at the carehome weren’t motherly (or fatherly for that matter) so they never expected gifts, almost never received them and they seldom deserved them. He’s glad he didn’t bother because if he had, maybe Ezekiel would have been more bothered. 

Ezekiel Fortunato - Ezekiel’s only gift was to fuck shit up for them - pour the carers’ secret stash of booze or weed into the gutters, piss in their food, blocking the drains up, anything really to make the carers’ lives just as miserable as their clients’. It was a daily gift, because he didn’t know Mothers’ Day was a holiday for a long time, barely escaping his teen years without knowing it existed. He regrets not knowing - coulda done more.

Kiyoshi Kornai - Kiyoshi didn’t have a mother figure, even though she was a Born Hell Demon, and demons don’t celebrate human-made holidays regardless. It took a while for her to be introduced to the concept of the holiday and she’s still uncertain on how she feels about it - cute and something she celebrates with her family now but, at the same tine, how many times was she suffering on Mother’s Day?

Amber Miller - Amber used to love her mother and was often buying her flowers and chocolates. She’d buy her all sorts of flowers, like roses, and try to pick out all the best chocolates for her, wrap them up and bring them to her in her bed. Now she regrets bothering. She could have saved up that money for something, maybe for when she ran away after her parents refused to accept her as trans. But she didn’t. She wasted it on her mother.

Johnny Miller - Johnny would chip in with their sister’s presents to their mother, giving maybe a pound or two extra to really buy something nice. However, they weren’t as close with their mother, or their father really, Amber being the parent-adoring child. Johnny preferred his own company. But that didn’t make it any harder for Johnny to run away with Amber. Not that they’d ever choose them over their twin. They’ll never be far from her side.

Damien Roth - Damien was an Original Demon, created by the hands of the gods personally, meaning he has no family. He would celebrate the gods, before the war, and give the divine gifts - loyalty, worship, love. That changed when his eyes opened to the injustices demons faced in a world catered toward mortals. Now, with the gods dead and a King who needs to die, the only thing he’ll celebrate will be the promise of them never returning.

Ayla - Ayla is usually in charge of all the Light World balls - not the Mother’s Day one, however. She’s not involved, and leaves it to her son. However, she makes sure he knows what she wants, and that there’s hell to pay if demands aren’t met. Though the Mother’s Day ball is often praised as her son’s, it’s a product of her incessant control and manipulation. That’s the best Mother’s Day gift she can get - relentless power.

Loki Lullay - Loki grew up within the Lullay family and the supposed Lullay curse took his mother from him at a young age. Mother’s Days were the days he’d visit her grave with his brother and father, to lay the most gorgeous flowers for her. He hasn’t seen her grave for eighteen years while his traitor brother keeps up the tradition, or at least he assumes he does. Maybe that’s what drives him to madness. Twenty years away from her.

Malcolm Gull - Malcolm bought flowers for his own mother and his best friend’s mother, before she died at least. After that, he’d buy his best friend flowers on that day, even chocolates, and they’d have a picnic as well. Those were some of the best days for the pair of them, playing Frisbee and football. Then his best friend died. Because of the sorcerers. Because of a sorcerer. He’ll avenge them. He’ll avenge them both. He’ll avenge him.

Nico Angel - Nico never got into Mother’s Day. He’d buy stuff, or at least his father would, for her, maybe bring her a half-hearted breakfast in bed, but no real effort or time put into it. That changed when he became a father, as he’d help his child treat his wife on that day, making food, buying flowers, showering gifts. Too bad it didn’t stay that way - he didn’t stick around for long with them. He just hopes his sons treat their mother well.

Davey Sullivan - Davey grew up with no mother, a dead brother and hatred for his cousin. His father made sure he knew it was his cousin’s fault his mother and brother were dead and made sure that he knew it was his fault that his cousin got away unpunished for his guilt. But for Mother’s Day itself, he’d go to his mother and brother’s graves, lay flowers down and promise them he’d get his cousin punished. Once and for all.

Aerron Yelad - Aerron’s mother loved him much more before he got diagnosed with autism. Despite being ‘vaccine injured’ and ‘proof vaccines do more harm than good’ and ‘the reason I’m not vaccinating the rest of my kids’, he still loves her a lot. He understands that she does love him, he’s just harder to deal with, and she’s giving all the attention she can. But he still feels alone. Alone enough to make bad choices. He’s so desperate.

[beinglibertarian]

Onward, Collectivist Soldiers

As I contemplate where I fit in my current relation to the State and its politically-correct and uptight sycophants, I realize not much has changed since Catholic school. If I benefited at all from the tutelage of nuns, it’s in being able to identify when I’m being indoctrinated or hoodwinked.

The first few years of my scholastic career were spent at a Catholic school in New Jersey. It was there that I, along with other kids with last names like O’Dowd, Vigliotti, Rispoli, and Gomez, were first introduced to the doctrine of original sin.

Sister Nazarene told us a sin was whenever a person did something wrong. God would not like it if we sinned, and if we sinned, he would damn well know all about it. You couldn’t hide from God. Apparently, a really long time ago this guy Adam and this broad Eve did something so bad that we, the first grade class of St. Francis Albert of Hoboken School, were guilty of it too.

As unreasonable as this seemed at the time, we were taught to understand that God was really pissed off. And touchy. 

You see, before the beginning of time, God spent a whole summer making this place called the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve. Eden was this groovy resort where people could just relax forever and ever, just as long as they behaved. By and by, good ol’ human imperfection had its way, and Adam and Eve goofed up. God was so hurt and insulted that he decided from that moment on that every Vigliotti, O’Dowd and Ferrara, as well as the Changs, Goldbergs and Patels, would be culpable for what those two Biblical miscreants did. Forever and fucking anon. He was God, after all. 

Do you know what the transgression was? What Adam and Eve did that was so damned bad? They ate an apple. Not just any apple, but a super apple that had magic powers. Some wiseguy who looked like a snake called Satan told them to do it. He beguiled them. Sister Nazarene said that to beguile someone was like tricking them. As I recall, many us felt at that moment that we were being beguiled too. But God help ya if you asked any questions, or wanted clarification. You’d get a smack on the knuckles with a ruler faster than you can say Galileo Galilei. 

Anyway, after they ate it — the apple, that is — Adam and Eve became smart. Turns out, God didn’t like smart people. Folks like that might want to find a meaning for things. They might find joy and fulfillment in intellectual pursuits, or in the labor of their discoveries. They might want to build stuff, make tools and what not, and shape the world according to their needs, according to their vision.  

“Bullshit,” said God. “That’s my department. Who in the Hell do you bipedal monkeys think you are, muscling in on my action? From now on, your lives will be hard and mean and your kids will have it hard too. Now get out of here and don’t come back!”

This was called the expulsion from paradise. God did not like competition. When we would grow up, we would find out that most people don’t like competition either.

As we matriculated — that is to say once we got to the second, and then third grade — some of us Catholic kids started to think that all this original sin jazz was nothing but a bunch of malarkey. We looked for a Garden of Eden on the globe in our classroom and found none. We read up on snakes. They can’t talk, let alone beguile. Apples, while having some nutritional value, can’t make you any smarter than a rap on the head with a ball peen hammer. 

Then, somewhere along the way, we were taught that this other guy, Jesus, died for all of our sins, lock, stock and fucking barrel. 

“What gives?” we wondered. “How can there be original sin and Jesus too?” 

We had a lot of trouble wrangling with this paradox. Mrs. Alverone, our third grade teacher, said a paradox was when something didn’t really make sense. And how!

Eventually, due to either boredom or mental exhaustion, all of us kids gave up our pursuit for the truth in favor of more lofty pastimes like dodge ball, smear the queer, and pouring salt on slugs. Halcyon days! 

Still, it bothered me: being guilty of, and then having to atone for, things I didn’t do, couldn’t do, wouldn’t do, and had nothing to do with. A few months later I broached the subject again with my pals.  

“Maybe original sin is just a way to remind us all that people are imperfect beings,” Crazy Dominick said while burning some ants with a magnifying glass.  

“Well, shit,” I said. “You don’t need Biblical scripture to teach you that. Just look at how Fat Arnie swings a whiffle ball bat: just like a girl. And what about Jackie Smith dropping that pass in the end zone during the Super Bowl? And just look at how corny M*A*S*H has gotten since Alan Alda took over.”

Indeed it was a world fraught with imperfection. All we kids could do was observe, contemplate, and avoid the wrath of the nuns by never getting caught doing anything fun.

More and more it began to dawn on me that teaching us that we were all born guilty was just another way for the church to keep folks in line. 

Think about it: if you’re constantly apologizing, you’ll never have time to do much of anything else, especially disobey, think critically, or pursue your life’s ambitions. I guess I was a late bloomer, but by the time I was ten years old I came to the grim realization that people like holding dominion over one another, especially with vague concepts, opaque language, and moral absurdities. And if those methods won’t work, brute force and violence will do the trick just fine. “Miracle, Mystery and Authority,” as Dostoyevsky once put it. 

It goes without saying that aside from those obligatory funerals and weddings that pop up from time to time, I haven’t willingly stepped into a church since Jimmy Carter cured cancer. The way I saw it, you should stay away from people who want you to feel bad. Little did I know, assholes abound.

Now listen: if you think that living in a world that has begun to cast aside archaic concepts from the early Mesozoic era will free you and me from the efforts of dimwits to encroach on your sovereignty through didactic chicanery, think again, tough guy. Plunderers of the spirit will always seek new and improved ways to turn their contempt for joy into a moral crusade. Why? Because people like fucking with other people, and the best way to fuck with someone is to defame them from up on high in the lofty strata reserved for those with a knack for judgment and a lack of self-awareness.

Nowadays, when I observe the world and the myriad discussions, arguments, diatribes, and commentaries that our fancy-pants, interconnected culture is heir to, I see new versions of the old skullduggery popping up all the time. And so do you.

Aren’t terms like “privilege”, “cis-gendered”, “patriarchy”, “carbon footprint”, “intolerance”, “unfairly disadvantaged”, “triggering” and the like, bandied about by people claiming a moral authority steeped in victimhood, just as sanctimonious and illegitimate as that of the church and its so-called divine morality? I’m not saying that all of those terms are inherently bad in and of themselves; a just and fair world is a thing to aspire to, just like a world free of sin and talking snakes is. If annoying, PC bromides help the cause, so be it. They won’t, but hey, don’t progressives need something to do too? 

Where the trouble starts is when an elite class of people, the heads of civic organizations, the clergy, media dolts, or politicians throw condemnatory terms about in an arbitrary and self-serving manner to stifle anyone who disagrees with or challenges them, all in the name of righteousness.  They think that by forcing dissenters into a posture of constant apology and atonement for intangible transgressions they can either alienate or eliminate them without the trouble of firing squads, cattle cars, inquisitions and re-education camps. Meet the new douchebags, same as the old douchebags. They’re just less blood-thirsty and well, kinda, wimpy.

In the world of the collectivist headcase, the collective is the Garden of Eden, and being met with the collective’s disapproval for things he may or may not have done, or advantages that he may or may not have, is akin to the expulsion from Paradise. But who told them we wanted to be part of their world anyway? 

It wasn’t okay when the church thrust upon us their ecclesiastic version of a full nelson and it’s equally offensive when modern-day demagogues do the same with their new-fangled concepts of original sin. But I don’t blame stupid people for using shortcuts to thinking; that’s what dummies do. And I don’t blame connivers for selling snake oil. What pisses me off is when people who know better allow themselves to be pushed around by these turds and their lexicon of defeatism. 

The bottom line: don’t let anybody make you feel guilty for your own life. Especially if the shame being thrust upon you is the last ditch tactic of an inferior mind that wishes to hold sway over you because their own existence is so damn uncompelling to them. That there is some bullshit.   

As writing this article has now become a tedious affair, and in order to avoid being redundant, I have provided below a post-modern to Biblical translator. Those of you with even a modicum of parochial education will find it helpful… but if your parents were jerk-offs and you went to a Montessori school, then not so much. As it is incomplete, feel free to add your own variables and expressions. I hope this helps out. Extrapolate and deduce as you will, big shots.

Privilege = Original Sin

Reduce your carbon footprint = The Ten Commandments

Cis-gendered = Lust

Patriarchy = Sloth

Intolerance = Pride

Non-Vegan = Gluttony

Trigger = Wrath

Global Warming = The Flood

Climate Change = The Rapture

Bruce Jenner = Jesus

Oprah = God

Michael Moore = John the Baptist

Jordon Peterson = Satan

Individualist/Libertarian = Heretic 

Bill Maher = Doubting Thomas

Ron Paul = Nebuchadnezzar

California = The Promised Land

Corey Booker = Moses

Taxes = Acts of Contrition 

This article represents the views of the author, and not those of Being Libertarian LLC.

The post Onward, Collectivist Soldiers appeared first on Being Libertarian.

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2CSlFVB via IFTTT

[dweemeister]

2018 Movie Odyssey Awards

And that’s it folks. That’s all the posts they wrote on the 2018 Movie Odyssey. All the films featured here were films that I saw for the first time in their entirety over the last calendar year (the entire list of which you can see here). Except for the Worst Picture category at the bottom, this entire post is a roll call of cinematic excellence. You can’t go wrong with the winners and nominees in these many categories. Submitted for your consumption and reflection...

Best Pictures (I name ten, and never distinguish one above the other nine)

The Blue Angel (1930, Germany)

Charade (1963)

8½ (1963, Italy)

The Heiress (1949)

A Man Escaped (1956, France)

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Pyaasa (1957, India)

Roma (2018, Mexico)

Shoplifters (2018, Japan)

Stalker (1979, Soviet Union)

This is the first Movie Odyssey Best Picture lineup without an entry from either the 1990s or 2000s. It is the first Best Picture lineup since 2015 without a silent film being among the top ten. But what is not here should detract from the excellence of what is here. There are no 9/10s here... The Blue Angel, Charade, and Pyaasa received 9.5/10s; everything else received a 10/10. From the romantic antics in Charade (as part-spy thriller) and The Philadelphia Story; lust masquerading for love in The Blue Angel and 8½; standing resolutely on one’s own self-worth in The Heiress and Pyaasa; the desperation of A Man Escaped and Stalker; and the modern instant classics of Roma and Shoplifters, this is the best Best Picture slate in the last three years.

Best Comedy

Blondie (1938)

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Incredibles 2 (2018)

My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999, Japan)

Overboard (1987)

The Philadelphia Story

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Stowaway (1936)

The Whole Town’s Talking (1935)

Wonder Man (1945)

It didn’t make me laugh the hardest (that goes to Incredibles 2 and Spider-Verse), but The Philadelphia Story managed to reaffirm what is most important in loving someone and seeing in others what isn’t necessarily the most visible thing. Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Ruth Hussey are an amazing ensemble. Close behind are those two aforementioned animated movies and another animated peer, My Neighbors the Yamadas. The Whole Town’s Talking also was in the mix.

Best Musical

Girl Crazy (1943)

Grease (1978)

Moon Over Miami (1941)

The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968)

Pete’s Dragon (1977)

Pyaasa

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

South Pacific (1958)

A Star Is Born (2018)

Stowaway

This category favors musicals that are original, not adaptations. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers would never be made today, because no one would get the satire for its gendered misbehavior. But with its incredible musical score, outstanding choreography, and appealing performances despite a brow-raising plot, it is by far the best musical I saw this year for the first time. Girl Crazy, Family Band, and Pyaasa would have been next up.

Best Animated Feature

The Cat Returns (2002, Japan)

Incredibles 2

Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017, Japan)

Mirai (2018, Japan)

My Neighbors the Yamadas

Perfect Blue (1997, Japan)

Pom Poko (1994, Japan)

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

The Wacky World of Mother Goose (1967)

There was a lot of separation from the top films and the bottom films in this category. The excellent family comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas sends the late Isao Takahata a winner (its comedy entirely based on Takahata’s strengths in observing human behavior), in what was also the last Ghibli film I needed to see to complete the studio’s filmography. Close behind were Perfect Blue and the best animated feature of 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Best Documentary

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (2016)

Don’t Look Back (1967)

Free Solo (2018)

Pick of the Litter (2018)

RBG (2018)

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

It was the cinéma vérité of Don’t Look Back versus the emotional power of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in the end. And at the end, what appealed to me most was the latter. Mr. Rogers was a part of my childhood, and I’m only learning more about him and the lessons he imparted to all his neighbors in my mid-twenties. I never imagined I would be revisiting him now, but here we are! The harrowing (at least, in the final half-hour) Free Solo - dont watch if you’re afraid of heights - was solidly in third in this category.

Best Non-English Language Film

The Blue Angel, Germany

8½, Italy

Floating Weeds (1959), Japan

Gojira (1954), Japan

A Man Escaped, France

My Neighbors the Yamadas, Japan

Pyaasa, India

Roma, Mexico

Shoplifters, Japan

Stalker, Soviet Union

With four entries, this was Japan’s to lose. In what was essentially a toss-up between Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky, it was the former’s film that will this category for me. I first saw a part of 8½ almost ten years ago now, deleting the recording after realizing there was something about the film that I, as a teenager, could not get. There is only one movie you need to watch, probably, about artist’s block, and that’s 8½. Considered just after that and Stalker are Roma, Pyaasa, and Shoplifters. Gojira - best known to all as Godzilla - was not expected to be here because I once saw the American cut/dub of the film (which cuts a lot of the tragic and allegorical elements). There is no better monster movie than the original Godzilla.

Best Silent Film

Camille (1921)

Caught in a Cabaret (1914 short)

It (1927)

Mabel’s Blunder (1914 short)

Mare Nostrum (1926)

Piccadilly (1929)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927)

West Point (1927)

I honestly did not see enough silent films last year. But that doesn’t take away from how good West Point is - as a drama, a comedy, a romance, and a sports film. Edward Sedgwick’s film juggles a lot of hats, and by sheer charm of its performances, manages to find the right balance. Trailing West Point were Piccadilly and a strong adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Personal Favorite Film

Charade

Christopher Robin (2018)

A Corny Concerto (1943 short)

Gojira

Incredibles 2

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)

My Neighbors the Yamadas

The Philadelphia Story

The Whole Town’s Talking

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

1) The Philadelphia Story; 2) Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; 3) The Journey of Natty Gann; 4) Charade; 5) Incredibles 2; 6) My Neighbors the Yamadas; 7) Gojira; 8) The Whole Town’s Talking; 9) Christopher Robin; 10) A Corny Concerto

You folks have no idea how many times my top three switched places while considering this. So much to love about them all. Since I haven’t mentioned Natty Gann yet in my comments, let me do so here. Sometimes, I’m in the mood for a simple, but beautifully shot Disney film out in the wilderness. Meredith Salenger as the title character must make her way from Chicago to Washington state after an unfortunate accident where she is separated from her father. I just adore the nature shots, Natty’s wolfdog companion, and James Horner’s ridiculously beautiful score.

Best Director

Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped

Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

George Cukor, The Philadelphia Story

Stanley Donen, Charade

Guru Dutt, Pyaasa

Federico Fellini, 8½

Hirokazu Koreeda, Shoplifters

Michael Powell, 49th Parallel (1941)

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker

William Wyler, The Heiress

A bit of an upset here, but my goodness it takes incredible skill to pull off such social commentary with the amount of artistry Pyaasa does. Ambitious in structure, aesthetic, and thematic approach, it is Guru Dutt who will take this home. Next up would have been Tarkovsky and Fellini.

Best Acting Ensemble

All This, and Heaven Too (1940)

Crossfire (1947)

Cry, the Beloved Country (1951)

The Heiress

Imitation of Life (1934)

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

The Philadelphia Story

The Post (2017)

Shoplifters

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

An excellent set of nominees for Acting Ensemble, with few weak links among them all. They might not be the biggest ensemble, but pretty much everyone is pitch perfect in Imitation of Life - essentially bolstered by its supporting actresses in Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington. The Philadelphia Story in a close second.

Best Actor

Cary Grant, Charade

Emil Jannings, The Blue Angel

Burt Lancaster, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

Canada Lee, Cry, the Beloved Country

James B. Lowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Marcello Mastroianni, 8½

Ganjirô Nakamura, Floating Weeds

Sidney Poitier, A Warm December (1973)

Paul Scofield, A Man for All Seasons

Jack Webb, The D.I. (1957)

Paul Scofield, as Sir Thomas More, is a man on a mission - a mission to stop Henry VIII to stop screwing things up even more. Reprising his role from the stage, to me Scofield is clearly the winner as he imbues More with incredible authority yet knowing vulnerability. An astounding, career performance from Scofield is trailed only by Cary Grant and Marcello Mastroianni.

Best Actress

Yalitza Aparicio, Roma

Bette Davis, All This, and Heaven Too

Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel

Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade (2018)

Olivia de Havilland, The Heiress

Audrey Hepburn, Charade

Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story

Waheeda Rehman, Pyaasa

Anna May Wong, Piccadilly

Natalie Wood, Splendor in the Grass

Olivia de Havilland’s growth throughout The Heiress is downright incredible to watch. How she asserts herself in the final minutes is the culmination of all that has happened up until that point - a film about a woman who finds the strength within herself to state her clearest intentions as pointedly as possible without breaking societal expectations. Just trailing are Yalitza Aparicio (please nominate her for this year’s Academy Awards) and the Hepburns.

Best Supporting Actor

Montgomery Clift, The Heiress

Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born

Rodney A. Grant, Dances with Wolves (1990)

Graham Greene, Dances with Wolves

Bob Odenkirk, The Post

Sidney Poitier, Cry, the Beloved Country

Anthony Quinn, Warlock (1959)

Mickey Rooney, The Black Stallion (1979)

Robert Ryan, Crossfire

Takashi Shimura, Gojira

I don’t know folks, this category seems to like villains. And Robert Ryan’s psychopathic, anti-Semitic murderer is as frightening as a film noir villain can get. Considering what I had seen from Ryan up to this point, there was no preparing me for that. Runners-up include Graham Greene (of Oneida descent), Sidney Poitier, Mickey Rooney, and Takashi Shimura.

Best Supporting Actress

Louise Beavers, Imitation of Life

Stockard Channing, Grease

Wendy Hiller, A Man for All Seasons

Ruth Hussey, The Philadelphia Story

Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread (2017)

Sandra Milo, 8½

Anne Revere, National Velvet (1944)

Millicent Simmonds, A Quiet Place (2018)

Fredi Washington, Imitation of Life

Michelle Yeoh, Crazy Rich Asians

No one could really touch Paul Scofield in Best Actor. Likewise, no one could touch Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life. Yes, Beavers’ role in the film is that of a stereotypical “mammy” at first glance. But looking deeper - and with a major assist from an extremely thoughtful screenplay - Beavers is allowed to give this role so much more than many of her fellow black actresses were ever permitted to have. In a film on racial identity and belonging, she is what makes Imitation of Life tick. The distant challengers were co-star Fredi Washington, Lesley Manville, and Sandra Milo.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Robert Alan Arthur, Warlock

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

Ruth and Augustus Goetz, The Heiress

Sadayuki Murai, Perfect Blue

Alan Paton and John Howard Lawson, Cry, the Beloved Country

Casey Robinson, All This, and Heaven Too

Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt, The Philadelphia Story

Arkadi Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Stalker

Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin, The Whole Town’s Talking

Isao Takahata, My Neighbors the Yamadas

Best Original Screenplay

Rodney Ackland and Emeric Pressburger, 49th Parallel

Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread

Ari Aster, Hereditary (2018)

Robert Bresson, A Man Escaped

Robert Buckner, Dodge City (1939)

Bo Burnham, Eighth Grade

Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi, 8½

William Inge, Splendor in the Grass

Hirokazu Koreeda, Shoplifters

Best Cinematography

Eduard Tisse, Alexander Nevsky (1938, Soviet Union)

Caleb Deschanel, The Black Stallion

William H. Clothier, Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

Dean Semler, Dances with Wolves

Gianni Di Venanzo, 8½

V.K. Murthy, Pyaasa

Philippe Rousselot, A River Runs Through It (1992)

Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Alexander Knyazhinsky, Stalker

Nicholas Musuraca, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Best Film Editing

 Paul Crowder, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years

Robert Dalva, The Black Stallion

Jim Clark, Charade

Leo Catozzo, 8½

Tom Cross, First Man (2018)

Eddie Hamilton, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Robert Kern, National Velvet

Harutoshi Ogata, Perfect Blue

Ralph E. Winters, Quo Vadis (1951)

Barbara McLean, The Rains Came (1939)

Best Adaptation or Musical Score

S. D. Burman and Sahir Ludhiyanvi, Pyaasa

Adolph Deutsch and Saul Chaplin, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Al Kasha, Joel Hirschhorn, and Irwin Kostal, Pete’s Dragon

Alfred Newman, Moon Over Miami

Alfred Newman and Ken Darby, South Pacific

Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, The Greatest Showman (2017)

Walter Scharf, Hans Christian Andersen (1952)

Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band

Louis Silvers, Stowaway

George Stoll, Girl Crazy

It is one of the few wholly original musicals here. And though its score is not perfect, its highs are some of the best 1950s MGM has to offer.

Best Original Score (eleven nominees because this year’s slate was way too hard to decide on... even the ones I cut)

John Barry, Dances with Wolves

Aaron Copland, The Heiress

James Horner, The Journey of Natty Gann

Akira Ifukube, Gojira

Henry Mancini, Charade

Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky

Nino Rota, 8½

Miklós Rózsa, Quo Vadis

Max Steiner, All This, and Heaven Too

Dimitri Tiomkin, The Alamo (1960)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, 49th Parallel

This was the most difficult category to call this year. This was the strongest collection of Best Original Score nominees in a few years, with arguments that could easily be made for John Barry, Akira Ifukube, Nino Rota, Max Steiner, and Dimitri Tiomkin. In the end, it was between the three composers not known for film scores, but their classical music: Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Prokofiev took third place as I found that the placement of music in Alexander Nevsky paled a bit compared to The Heiress and 49th Parallel. In the end, I went with the Englishman because his distinct sound has never really been replicated for movies, and Vaughan Williams’ works are less available in North America. There are other Copland scores - and some that I feel more strongly about. So in this titanic battle of film score composers, congratulations to Ralph Vaughan Williams!

Best Original Song

“Bless Your Beautiful Hide”, music by Gene de Paul, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

“Candle on the Water”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, Pete's Dragon

“Chaar Kadam”, music by Shantanu Moitra, lyrics by Swanand Kirkire, PK (2014, India)

“Charade”, music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Charade (1963)

“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, lyrics by Ned Washington, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

“Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”, music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

“Mystery of Love”, music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens, Call Me by Your Name (2017)

“Rain”, music by Shin'ichi Nakajima, Saori Fujisaki, and Satoshi Fukase, lyrics by Saori Fujisaki and Satoshi Fukase, Mary and the Witch’s Flower

“Shallow”, music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt, A Star Is Born

“You're the One That I Want”, music and lyrics by John Farrar, Grease

Thanks to all those who participated in the preliminary and final rounds! And even those who didn’t participate but gave me the support power through this. Details are here!

Best Costume Design (TIE)

Konstantin Eliseev, Alexander Nevsky

Orry-Kelly, All This, and Heaven Too

Ruth E. Carter, Black Panther (2018)

Mary E. Vogt, Crazy Rich Asians

Sandy Powell, The Favourite (2018)

Edith Head and Gile Steele, The Heiress

Albert Wolsky, The Journey of Natty Gann

Elizabeth Haffenden and Joan Bridge, A Man for All Seasons

Mark Bridges, Phantom Thread

Herschel McCoy and Joan Joseff, Quo Vadis

You couldn’t make me choose, folks!

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Peter Frampton, Paul Pattison, and Lois Burwell, Braveheart (1995)

Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski, and Lucy Sibbick, Darkest Hour (2017)

Samantha Denyer, The Favourite

Colin Arthur, The NeverEnding Story (1984)

Uncredited, Piccadilly

Charles E. Parker, Sydney Guilaroff, and Joan Johnstone, Quo Vadis

Uncredited, Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953)

Amanda Knight and Francesca Crowder, Solo (2018)

Geoffrey Rodway and Biddy Chrystal, The Sword and the Rose (1953)

Perc Westmore, Jean Burt Reilly, and Ed Voight, The Woman in White (1948)

Best Production Design

Iosif Shpinel and Nikolai Solovyov, Alexander Nevsky

Peter Ellenshaw, John B. Mansbridge, Robert McCall, Al Roelofs, Frank R. McKelvy, and Roger M. Shook, The Black Hole (1979)

Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart, Black Panther

Otto Hunte, The Blue Angel

Max Rée, Cimarron

Ted Smith, Dodge City

Piero Gherardi, 8½

Edward Carrere and William L. Kuehl, The Fountainhead (1949)

John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri, The Heiress

William A. Horning, Cedric Gibbons, Edward C. Carfagno, and Hugh Hunt, Quo Vadis

Achievement in Visual Effects

The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

The Black Hole

First Man

Flight of the Navigator (1986)

GoldenEye (1995)

Licence to Kill (1989)

Mare Nostrum

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

The Rains Came

Ready Player One

Solo

The Sword and the Rose

Tron (1982)

Wonder Man

All films in this category are declared winners. It would be unfair to compare a silent film to the newest Mission: Impossible film, so this is based on visual effects achievement in their respective time.

Worst Picture

Cimarron (1931)

The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964)

Die Another Day (2002)

It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963)

Kiss & Spell (2017, Vietnam)

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Red Barry (1938 serial)

Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue

Tron

The Wacky World of Mother Goose

Holy mother of hell. Rankin and Bass, what did you DO?

Honorary Awards:

Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, for stewarding the James Bond series and decades of entertainment

Peter Ellenshaw, for his esteemed career as a matte artist and visual effects wizard

Bill Gold (posthumously), for his artistry in movie poster design

Salt of the Earth (1954), for its courage to speak truth to power, persevering through the judgment of time despite being the only American film ever blacklisted

Vitaphone, for innovative achievements in sound recording

FILMS WITH MULTIPLE NOMINATIONS (excluding Worst Picture... 61) Ten: 8½

Nine: The Heiress

Eight: Charade; The Philadelphia Story

Seven: Pyaasa

Five: All This, and Heaven Too; The Blue Angel; A Man for All Seasons; My Neighbors the Yamadas; Quo Vadis; Roma; Shoplifters; Stalker

Four: Alexander Nevsky; Cry, the Beloved Country; Dances with Wolves; Gojira; A Man Escaped

Three: The Black Stallion; Crazy Rich Asians; 49th Parallel; Grease; Imitation of Life; Incredibles 2; The Journey of Natty Gann; Perfect Blue; Pete’s Dragon; Phantom Thread; Piccadilly; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Splendor in the Grass; A Star Is Born; Stowaway; The Whole Town’s Talking

Two: The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years; The Black Hole; Black Panther; Crossfire; Dodge City; Eighth Grade; The Favourite; First Man; Floating Weeds; Girl Crazy; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral; Mare Nostrum; Mary and the Witch’s Flower; Mission: Impossible – Fallout; Moon Over Miami; National Velvet; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band; The Post; The Rains Came; Solo; South Pacific; The Sword and the Rose; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Warlock; Wonder Man; Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

WINNERS (excluding honorary awards and Worst Picture; 41) 3 wins: The Philadelphia Story

2 wins: 8½; The Heiress; Imitation of Life; Mission: Impossible – Fallout; Pyaasa; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Shoplifters

1 win: The Absent-Minded Professor; Alexander Nevsky; All This, and Heaven Too; The Black Hole; Black Panther; The Black Stallion; The Blue Angel; Charade; Crossfire; The Favourite; First Man; Flight of the Navigator; 49th Parallel; GoldenEye; Licence to Kill; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; A Man Escaped; A Man for All Seasons; Mare Nostrum; My Neighbors the Yamadas; Quo Vadis; The Rains Came; Ready Player One; Roma; Solo; Stalker; The Sword and the Rose; Tron; West Point; Wonder Man; Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

102 films were nominated in 26 categories.

[ayearofpike]

The Midnight Club

Pocket Books, 1994 211 pages, 9 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87263-X LOC: PZ7.P626 Mi 1994 OCLC: 28710742 Released February 1, 1994 (per B&N)

Orphaned, riddled with tumors, and unresponsive to treatment, Ilonka Pawluk has no place to go but a hospice run by a wealthy philanthropist. She refuses to give up hope, though, and in that vein she, along with a few others, found a late-night storytelling society. It helps (or maybe it just hurts more) that she is attracted to one of the other members, by a sensation that she has known him before and for longer than either could think possible. And he feels it too. WIth him, even as they race toward death, Ilonka gains new appreciation and understanding for life.

That sounded so corny, I know. But this one is not like anything else Pike has ever written. Well, there’s the connection to Eastern mysticism through a wise elder and the concept of reincarnation. But: no monsters, no villains, no aliens, no time traveling, and no murderers (unless you count cancer or suppressed immune systems). In fact, there’s not a lot of plot going on at all. It’s just a slice-of-life narrative, even as it comes at the end of one.

I have to wonder whether Pike wrote this out of obligation to somebody he knew or met. He’s mentioned being inspired by a Pike book club in a terminal ward, but I feel like it goes deeper than that. After all, the book is dedicated to “Ilonka,” and the story kind of goes out of its way to make sure we know she’s Polish by birth, even though Ilonka moved to the US as a baby and is wholly Americanized. Unless I’m misremembering, this is only the second character Pike has written who isn’t born in America or England, and he hasn’t even gone outside the country for a new person since 1988. Why all of a sudden does origin matter so much, if he’s not making a direct nod to someone he knew? Since Pike started answering questions on Facebook, he’s talked a lot about his process, but whenever this book comes up he says it’s a longer story that needs its own post. Which I have not yet seen. So I just have to speculate.

There’s nothing really wrong with the book itself. It maybe doesn’t devote enough time to thinking about mortality, but it’s also kind of more about exploring reincarnation and what lies beyond where we are and what we know. Still, if you jumped into this expecting space vampires or murderous vengeance, you might be disappointed. It certainly isn’t anything we’ve come to expect from this dude. Basically, five characters with terminal illnesses sit around a table and tell stories until nobody is left. In order of disappearance, we’ve got:

Anya Zimmerman, who battles bone cancer and has already lost a leg to it. She tells one story here, about a girl who makes a deal with the devil to split her into two bodies so that one can drink and party and bone and be irresponsible while the other stays in school. Of course, it doesn’t work out the way she hoped — in fact, both halves spiral down and out of control — and the only way out is to kill her selves.

Sandra Cross, who has Hodgkin’s disease but otherwise doesn’t belong. Ilonka says that the others were already friends, and they let Sandra “come along for the ride” (28) when they started meeting separately. It’s revealed that she has never told a story at The Midnight Club, and she still doesn’t until one night they get drunk and her entire story is about boning a dude she just met in a park.

Kevin, the object of Ilonka’s affection, dying of leukemia. Hey, I forgot to put his last name in there — but that’s because Pike never mentions it. Another shameless self-insert? Certainly another reason for me to suspect that he’s writing a more personal story. Kevin’s ongoing story is about an angel muse who is confined to the Louvre, but leaves it and gives up his immortality when he falls in love with a human woman. Of course they don’t know how to be with each other, and they fall apart, but fate brings them back together at the end of her life, where they remember the love that they shared.

Spencer Haywood, who tells everyone he has a brain tumor. Spence’s stories are a lot more rage-against-the-machiney, with one about a disfigured war vet who snipes civilians off the Eiffel Tower and one about a young magician manipulated into murdering his school by locking the gym during a big basketball game and setting it on fire.

And finally, Ilonka, whose cancer is never specified but it’s somewhere in her abdomen. She doesn’t make up stories, she says; instead, she tells tales of her past lives. One is about a woman in Egypt whose best friend’s daughter is murdered and how they comfort each other, and the other is a girl in caste-heavy India who insists upon marrying below her grade and endures ostracism for true love. Both times, she has a strong feeling that Kevin represents the partner of her personage, but she doesn’t tell him that.

Ilonka’s story at the first session includes a bit about one character packing the dead girl’s overnight bag, which gives the other hope that her spirit came back for her things. This gets them thinking about whether there is anything after death. They make a pact that the first one who goes will try to send the others a sign, though they’re not going to specify what just in case someone pulls a trick. Ilonka actually feels a little guilty, because she’s feeling better. She’s avoiding medication and focusing on natural remedies and thinks that she’s healing, enough that she asks the hospice director to schedule an MRI. It’s kind of against the hospice rules to seek treatment beyond just pain management, but he plays along. 

Her conviction that she’s not dying isn’t enough to try to get Kevin’s girlfriend to leave him alone. She basically scares the girl off with talk of his death, and then confides in Anya that she’s worried about her motives. Anya, in turn, tells Ilonka about the only time she was in love, and the stupid mistake she made in cheating on the dude, upon which he broke a statue she was sculpting for him and walked out forever. Anya still has the statue, and she shows it to Ilonka. Spookily, the only thing that he broke was the girl’s leg — the one Anya is now missing.

The story session that night is the one with the wine, and Ilonka doesn’t enjoy drinking at all. In fact, she barely makes it back to her room before blacking out, and when she wakes Anya is dead in her bed. There are a lot of signs that she planned to die, but no way that she or the hospice director can determine she might have done it. So Ilonka goes to pack up Anya’s bathroom stuff — but it’s already gone, just like the girl in Ilonka’s story.

Ilonka doesn’t have a lot of time to worry about this, because all of a sudden this rumor starts flying around that someone was misdiagnosed and is not terminal. Since she’s the only one who’s seen a doctor recently, she knows who the lucky person has to be. She goes to tell Kevin, and then Sandra — only Sandra is packing a suitcase and singing. I told you she didn’t belong here. In fact, Ilonka’s tumors have gotten bigger and spread to other organs. So she freaks out and has to be sedated, and wakes up in her room around midnight.

And Kevin is there. He finishes telling her his story, and she confesses her love to him. And I guess part of him knows, as he’s always felt at home and relatable when Ilonka tells her stories, like it’s stirring some deep-seated memory. He says he loves her back and that they should make love right there and then. Of course neither one of them is in actual physical shape to do the dirty deed, but there’s lots of kissing and holding and sleeping (mostly implied) and then they wake up in each other’s arms and then Kevin dies.

Nothing to do now but get worse. So she does, and Spence does, and he wants to see her one more time. Which is where he confesses that he’s gay and is actually dying of AIDS and not a tumor. He talks about his lover, who has already died of the disease, which ... how old is Spence? I’m running into Pike’s timeline inconsistencies again. If he and Carl met when Spence was 15, but Carl is already dead and Spence needs a fake ID to buy wine, then this shit progressed quickly. Given the sequence of events, I’m not sure Spence should blame himself for Carl’s death, but he does — and it’s that blood on his hands that allowed him to smother Anya when she asked him to. He flat-out denies taking Anya’s stuff, though, and figures it must have been Kevin, because he’s pretty sure that Kevin saw the parallels in Ilonka’s stories before she said anything. So, not a sign, just a dude doing what he thought was right because of a literary allegory.

But then Anya’s ex shows up. Ilonka directs him to the packed box of her things, and the first thing he pulls out is the statue. Which is suddenly and mysteriously whole, like it was never broken in the first place. That’s got to be the sign, only Ilonka’s the only one alive and conscious to think so. (Spence has fallen into a coma and dies within a day.) In fact, she’s the only one Anya ever told about this guy and her regrets. Would anyone actually believe her anyway? We never find out, because Ilonka shortly follows her friends into that world beyond life.

Our epilogue shows a young space traveler named Eisokna and her new husband Karlen, off to colonize a planet in the Sirius system. She confides in him that though she loves Earth, she feels that everything is good with her and the planet and she is ready to leave. Does she know about the past lives? Who gives a shit?

I’m not sure how deeply or fully The Midnight Club really gets into the end of life actually being a rebirth. It feels like there wants to be a little bit more, only there was no way the publisher was going to let sexy-lizard-teens guy stretch out on existential metaphysics. If this really was a personal story, I can only imagine how hard Pike must have pushed to get it out, considering how different it is from everything else. Maybe he’ll actually talk more specifically about it in the not-too-distant future, like he’s been promising for six years.

[aion-rsa]

Please Don’t Skip the Therapy Scenes on The Sopranos

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains some spoilers for the six-season run of The Sopranos.

Classic HBO series The Sopranos is now old enough to find new fans who weren’t even alive when it originally aired. Zoomers, or kids born in the late 1990s and early 2000s are increasingly intrigued with the iconic drama for many of the same reasons folks were wrapped up in it back when it premiered in 1999. The show depicts violence in a very raw and realistic manner and shows a faction of organized crime that feels like a time capsule of a period that is now well in the past, while also touching upon a general sense of nihilism that modern viewers can appreciate.

Not coincidentally, The Sopranos also was one of the first programs to dig into human psychology via therapy on a level that wasn’t corny or cartoonish (nobody is lying on a couch in an office with a doctor taking notes in a pamphlet during the session here). The subjects of mental health and the mafia don’t exactly go hand-in-hand, and the shorter attention spans of the modern TV viewer have led to a lack of appreciation for the former topic. 

Caught up in the excitement of the dark, violent New Jersey underbelly, some newer fans report getting bored by Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) psychotherapy appointments with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). Reddit threads are littered with discussions on the odd habit of completely skipping over these scenes throughout the series:

I’m watching for the first time and am on season 2 atm. I just find the scenes with Jennifer Melfi the psychiatrist totally irrelevant and annoying, to the point where I have skipped every scene with her in it. The scenes just feel like a recap, where she explains obvious things that just happened, as if the audience is so dumb we cannot keep up with what is going on in the show.

Other viewers completely understood what the objective of the sessions was, but found it redundant after the first few seasons:

For the first 2 or 3 seasons, I enjoyed the psychiatrist scenes. But after a while I feel they are more of a nuisance and not worth watching. I know it’s a way for the audience to peek into what Tony is thinking, but I don’t find it being worth it.

This is where the show runs the risk of losing an audience that is used to watching media that moves at lightning speed. TikToks, YouTube videos, and cliffhanger culture has zapped the brains of the younger generation to the point that it can be hard to revel in the minutiae of a character’s psychology. They know Tony Soprano is interesting, but they don’t want to figure out why they find him as such. 

The Sopranos proved that it was viable to put a murderous criminal in the protagonist role, show him execute his victims, and then go home to his wife and kids like any other American man of the 2000s would. Tony Soprano added obsessive infidelity, mommy issues, sexism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity to his list of deplorable traits, yet the audience still sympathized with him and wanted to understand where he was coming from. 

A lot of the audience’s sympathy for Tony can be attributed to his therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi. As has been famously discussed for the last two decades, the show was one of the first to depict a patriarchal man in a position vulnerable enough to seek out professional mental health advice. And those who skip these scenes are skipping one of TV’s best ever storytelling devices.

Tony starts visiting Dr. Melfi in the pilot after experiencing a panic attack while watching a family of ducks flying away from his backyard pool. He continues to visit Dr. Melfi throughout the series as the panic attacks recur and he looks for answers to all of the other predicaments and depressions that overwhelm his inner psyche. He also spills his guts on many matters that painted him in a bad light, but occasionally we get to see his explanations for those inadequacies.

One of the show’s big goals is to demystify and demythologize these mobsters, specifically Tony, depicting them as real people who have personality quirks, idiosyncrasies, and who endure emotional hardships. The whole thing can get very dense because there are multiple layers and subtexts exposed to the audience within a short period of time. Seeing Tony talk about what it all means to him makes it so much easier to contemplate what it means to us. 

There is a larger literary debate that extends out much further than just this show: if an author puts something in a text with a specific intent, but the reader gleans something in juxtaposition to that original conversation, is our understanding of the work valid? Is there room for analysis that contrasts with what the artist put out into the world? Without Dr. Melfi, creator David Chase’s work is rife with confusion and laden with concepts that can go awry if absorbed by the less thoughtful TV viewer. She is our Tony Soprano for Dummies handbook; she is the mediator between us and the complex anti-hero on the screen. Tony is relatively the same person at the beginning and end of his therapy, but the treatment is required viewing for us to understand why he performs the actions he does outside of the doctor’s office. 

Jennifer Melfi is her own fully formed character herself though, with thoughts, emotions, and opinions on the psychoanalytical treatment she is giving; this is a huge reason why we are able to live vicariously through her. She seeks guidance from her own therapist, Elliot (Peter Bogdanovich) about this criminal client, and in a way is asking the follow-up questions that we still want to know after listening to Tony. 

Through it all Melfi is capable of maintaining her own moral compass, passing up the opportunity to use Tony’s violent proclivities to her advantage when she is sexually assaulted in the third season and avoiding the temptation of sexual advances from him in the fifth season. Because she is so grounded, she serves as an effective conduit between us and Tony. If she were compromised in any way, she would run the risk of influencing or enabling Tony’s despicable behaviors more. 

If you skip over the therapy scenes, you are missing out on what Tony claims he feels about a lot of the issues that happen in his personal and professional life (his emotions can often cloud the reality of his situation, though.) He wears his emotions on his sleeve a lot more when in the chair than he does in the Bada Bing or sitting with Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. at the dinner table. The main reason for this is because those three people shape his outlook on life a tremendous amount, along with his mother, Livia, and Uncle Junior. His relationship with those five delves into a deeper discussion on how traditional masculinity connects with his Italian heritage and Catholic values. 

Melfi helps Tony realize that his mother’s cold child-rearing methods led to confidence issues and doubt over what it means to “be a man” (this is one of the only signs of progress he ever makes in the show). This epiphany becomes a crutch that Tony leans on heavily when compartmentalizing the differences between how his life turned out and the heavy contrast to his own son’s future. 

His narcissism creates a void for A.J., who struggles with suicidal thoughts and severe depression when he can’t live up to the depiction of masculinity that Tony exudes. Tony tells Melfi that A.J. is weak and shameful, an admittance that would never come from his mouth when around his family. With Dr. Melfi, we get these fascinating diatribes on the outdated tropes that shape Tony’s own view of himself as a Gary Cooper-esque man in American society. Fast-forwarding is literally skipping past Tony’s characterization. 

Additionally, a social issue comes into relevance in the first half of season 6 when one of Tony’s main capos is outed as gay. The majority of the mafia is made up of toxic men with incredibly fragile makeups of masculinity and they immediately want him whacked, or at least eliminated from the group in some way. Tony reveals to Melfi that he doesn’t share all of his associates’ homophobic tendencies, instead putting credence into what a valuable earner his capo is for the DiMeo family. While he’s still not capable of harboring evolved social values outside of the context of the business, he’s revealed as someone who has put thought into what is right and wrong. He’s a bad person, but he’s three-dimensional. Not every layer is evil. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

That is why you are truly missing out on who Tony Soprano is if you skip his sessions in therapy. You will only get to see the violence, the hateful rhetoric, the devolved sexism, and the illegal day-to-day activities that make up a typical mobster. With psychiatry, you get to engage in the vibrant cesspool of personalities that create Tony Soprano, the legendary anti-hero archetype of TV lore.

The post Please Don’t Skip the Therapy Scenes on The Sopranos appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3Avi4aV

[captaindoubled]

Long ass post but I’m in mobile so forgive me: Hella Black Panther spoilers below

It’s been long enough I think so Black Panther Hot Take (tm) that i haven’t seen yet (direct me to someone’s posts/article if they are on the same track) :

It was about terrorism. Or, more the making of terrorists. Sure they had criminals and thieves with Klaue (or however Becky Sue white way they spelled it) but Erik was basically Wakanda’s first terrorist.

The language they used to describe his father was very much in line with they way folks describe terrorists, being “radicalized”. It’s always used in news to mean “when they they turned crazy” when it’s always been “when the straw finally broke and they demand change by any means, even violent ones”

Black Panther didn’t treat terrorist as faceless bad guys to pop off like in other movies and something they “””tried””” to do a bit in the other marvel movies to an extent but failed. Erik was a terrorist with a face. Erik was family. He was rightfully part of that community, Wakandan royalty really (the only way he could be closer to new King T’Challa was to be his brother but that woulda been corny) and through isolation and loss funneled his hurt into anger into violence. Sure he hated Wakanda for what it did (or didn’t do) to help black people around the world but he deep down hated what it did to him. He was left an orphan without guidance. Many terrorist learn what they do from “””legitimate””” state militaries, and so did Erik. Old Tolkien White even seemed slightly proud when he announced that Erik was “one of there” as far as a military person and the skills they trained into him. Being in the military only radicalized him more, like many other terrorist.

People were hot brink mad over “Killmonger was right” because Nakia was right and they felt it ignored her and i get that buuuut, I’ll throw in that Nakia would have never been listened to, even with T’Challa head over foot for her, without Erik. He was Wakanda’s mistake. Their near fatal flaw. It took one person, first his dad, then him, to break Wakanda down to the ground. Poor oppressed people around the world are sad to look at sure, but by Wakanda isolationist principles, they are not their problem and so they only have to worry about their own country (America first anyone??) They were fine with the rest of the world thinking it was a dirty dust bowl because it kept them safe. But all it took was for one person to know about Wakanda, it’s wealth and it’s ability to help the rest of the black people they just let, suffer by hands of the rest of the world and people within Africa.

Nakia was radicalized in her own way because she just did not live in Wakanda the same way people just give their shit away and live on nothing and devote their entire life, body and soul to helping. They are helping people but Nakia was putting herself in unbelievable danger to fight the entire world alone and that’s not good for her. But because she lived in Wakanda, her actions were on aid because she had the means.

Erik had nothin, was shooting hoops in a milk crate and the higher he climbed, the harder it was for anyone bring him back down.

All it took for T’Chaka to decide that Erik wasn’t worthy was for him to be born outside of Wakanda. Isolation is a major contributor to people becoming terrorist. And yes, even white boy terrorist as awful as their are, people pray on their isolation. First generation, second gen, American born immigrants deal with the isolation of their family original homes as well as isolation and oppression from their communities and turn to people that promise that the people that hurt them will pay.

I saw a post a day or so back criticizing the idea that Erik was a product of toxic masculinity and I’d have to agree and disagree with them. When you see just looking at Erik as a dude, sure, that’s not all enough to say the reason he’s the way he is was just toxic masculinity, but when you look at him as a terrorist then yes! He’s absolutely the product of toxic masculinity.

Just breaking it down in girl/boy binary, girls tend to talk through their problems (which can leads to rumination [[which is probably the word lots of folks are looking for when they critique “”tumblr’s”” anti recovery culture]] which is bad and prevents recovery but gives them a chance to vent out some stress) or they internalize which leads them to just hurt themselves (Nakia putting her self in straight danger on the regular to help people [[The fact that T’Challa made her the head of the Wakanda outreach center basically in my opinion will save her life because she’d end up dead at a young age in the way she was going]])

While dudes external, which everyone knows, but also they internalize as well, which starts the whole thing in the first place. Toxic masculinity says don’t reach out for help, or talk to anyone and internet conversations that are basically anonymous give them a place to vent without feeling judged and that’s where a lot of radicalization happens now a days. Erik didn’t talk to nor really trust anyone with his plans and even at the end, he was still in so much pain that and anger and fear to do better or that it could be better, he decided to die instead.

But my biggest biggest support for the idea that it was about terrorism was M’Kabi. He was, as the movie progressed, being radicalized into being a terrorist. All he needed was for someone, anyone, to give him some justice for what was done to him (again framed around the criminal Klawfoot and what he did to Wakanda but really, what he did to my family). M’Kabi wasn’t so far gone because he had people that loved him, and he still loved Wakanda and so he was able to stand down, and even with the people not liking his character I found him just as sympathetic as Erik or another other character because he was hurting, and redirected his energy into someone he thought would change things. (Why we have trump tbh. So many Bernie voters when he lost the primary switched to Trump because they wanted changed, stupid but I understand).

Hell, even if Civil War hadn’t intended it, they got half right the plot line that set up for Black Panther with him and the dude that set in motion the movie ( like I said earlier with MCU tried but failed). He understood WHY he did it, they framed his conversation in a weird way, but I think that showed before he was going to be able to understand Erik in Black Panther because that’s old dude was another terrorist, Erik this time was just very close to home and family.

Before the NSA or FBI come knocking st my door, I’m writing this last part as a analysis of Black Panther in comparison to the US, leave me be please:

The US and other “first world counties” are just going to have more terrorist, either home grown ones are from abroad because they have the means to fix the root cause of problems, but choose not to. And that’s way creates terrorist. Like, even if they brought Erik to Wakanda, what if Nakia never came back to Wakanda and had a child outside of the country, what would happen to her child? What about another Wakandan? The problem was Wakanda’s isolation, not who the person was. The problem was the have the means as ability to help all of Africa for one, but chose not to for their own protection. People that either need help in the way of resources, mental health care, or just respect and assurance that they have the right to exist and not have these ideal capitalist life styles shoved in their face and are failures when they can’t change it. (America creates a shit ton of white cishet male terrorist, they know it, they just redirect their anger to brown and black and lgbt folk and disabled folk and Jewish or Muslim folk in hopes their guns won’t turn back in them. They tell white cishet men that they see infallibly right and all they have to do is achieve this goal post in life to also be the masters of the universe but even they are subjected to goal post moving or literally no ball to get into the goal and they are told as men that it’s because they are failures and not a strategic plan to make more white terrorist to terrorize “other” into submission and do their dirty work of policing “others” for them without legal consequences. Basically how white people got doped as sharecroppers to not side with free blacks against the people who were oppressing them both! That’s why white terrorist groups don’t go anyway, and even with gun violence they should 2nd amendment, because they are a low key state sponsored milita)

Like, again, I get why people were pissed at “Killmonger was right” 1) because Nakia existed and 2) they just probably weren’t in on the joke lol 3) it feels weird to sympathize with a terrorist. But that was the point. And B Jordan acted his ass off to make Erik an unironiclly sympathetic villain. His last line when he died still brings me to tears because that’s such a unique African Slave Trade Dysphoria pain that other people don’t understand. (Which I will rant on that at the bottom because Im pissed at someone’s comment on it)

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

MLk, Jr quote on riots that in sure most folk know but I wanted it here in relation to Erik. He did what he knew and you cans abhor the violence but also you have to condemn the conditions that made him Killmonger.

Cause, like I understood Erik’s reasons, his actions were wrong and innocent people suffered. So he’s wrong in that way. But just like in movies and real life, you can sympathize and understand what brought people to those actions. It doesn’t make you wrong or weak or a bad person to want to change what caused a criminal to be a criminal. If anything, the vilifying and pathologizing of criminals prevents real reforms in society that could have prevented their crime. And we are all guilty as fuck of that. (And no, I’m not saying you have to be nice and forgiving and never be angry at criminals because they still did the crime [[most of the time, bias in the law make this hard to deal with sometimes]] but immediately distancing them from “normal people” makes it so the reason they are they way they are never get fixed. We all are the attack dogs against state reform and prision reform because we throw away criminals instead of fixing the world that made them because “I loved a hard life and I turned out fine, what’s their excuse”, different biology for one and modeling of how to deal with stress from family or peers but another rant for another day). But thats why I brought up white Boy terrorist, probably too much for anyone’s liking; there is an underlying reason to their actions and it isn’t just, toxic masculinity or them being entitled or mental illness or whatever other buzz word, but a country that mass produced them and trains them like dogs and sends them off on anyone they think is in their way of their goal. Republicans are always trying to do that by building a divide between Black Americans and Latinx (American or Immigrants) as a way to sick Black people on Latinx if that’s easy to swallow. They do the same with Asian Americans against Black and Latinx people. Give a crumb and say that person is why you don’t have a full cake, the cake they are fucking eating!

That’s how we get respectably politics because it keeps black people from uniting against the folks that are the ones disrespecting them and making black fight fight for scraps of respect. Or African shitting in AfAms or other way around or throw in some Afro Carribaians into the mix and you’ve got three groups pointing fingers at each other while someone robs them all blind

Like Erik may not be dealing with some of those intra group politics going on since his beef was with Wakanda and not the US but he learned how to hate like that, and learned how to external and divide and conquer from the best in the business at that, living in the US. So it’s still relevant on the creation of terrorist.

At the end, T’Challa made a speech that all nations should make, to commit to helping, really helping, because for him, one Killmonger was enough. He would have loved to welcome him into the family as a cousin and not an enemy.

So Dee’s Hot Fresh Take (Tm): Black Panther was about terrorism and what creates terrorist and I think that umbrella covers shit like toxic masculinity and isolationism and Trans Atlantic dysphoira and racial injustice and the like. Don’t gotta agree, all my sources are in my head because I’m on an adderall fuled typing fest on my phone but it’s solid enough. I like this interpretation anyway lol.

———————————

Side rant in Erik’s words, a Household name activist took offense to it (won’t say who they are because I’m not that messy) but suffice it to say, they said something along the lines of celebrating the slaves that made it snd made change and their resilience. Which, you know, dope, but it doesn’t work for Erik nor his story. And I think it takes away a big part of the strength of slaves who ended their lives or the lives of their children rather than suffer they way they did. There is a reason that many black people cant swim, we all know that! It’s because slave owners beat the fear of water into them and the tradition just kept up, more switching to prevent black peoples from enjoying the bounties of nature (and as more research on nature and mental health, a way of preventing black folk healing) but it was to stop slaves from trying to escape AND dying as a form of resistance. When hoteps say the Bible was used to oppression black people and it being the white man’s religion they are only like, part right, like 3% on the mark, because using the Bible, suicide was something punishable in the after life as well and so that prevented a lot of suicides. Abortions fucking crippled plantations sometimes because when the trading stopped, they needed more slaves but women were just not having children as a form of resistance. Death and life has always been a part of resistance and it’s so disengenous to ignore all the slaves that died for the freedom of others, or their faith said that the water would take them back home Igbo Landing Story). People in extreme conditions like they have to always be prepared to die because there lives are always on the line either way. If there Death is meaningful or a mother has to abort every child they have, consentual or not, it’s part of the resistance. And the trauma of it all. We still feel echos of the past in the present but we are so far removed from that very specific pain sometimes that it’s easy to focus on the ones that lived, the heroes, because it gives us hope that it will get better, or we can mobilize for folks that had their life stolen from them because they had more life to live but we sweep the ones that took their own life as if it was the cowards way when we never walked in their shows. And for the writers of black Panther to acknowledge them in the creation of a character like Erik makes me cry. I know when I was younger u tried to separate myself from slavery because it was painful and I heard the Igbo Landing in elementary school and it hurt me so badly I was the only person in my class just uncontrollably balling but I’m older and I respect those people, myth or real, so much. Tbh! In reference to what Erik said, and why slaves drowned themselves to go home, Erik wanted to be burred at sea to return home, to the dead land area, with his dad in their little apartment because Wakanda was nice but he’d never see it as home.

[element-effect-blog]

"Generating Leads With Podcasting Feat. George B Thomas" The Inbound Success Podcast Ep. 10 [Show Notes]

Looking for a way to generate leads, establish thought leadership and get massive return on investment from your marketing? Look no further than podcasting.

Listen to the episode here, or read the transcript (below), to learn how George raised his profile as a thought leader, got invited to speak at INBOUND and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in business leads...all from a podcast.

Transcript

Here’s what George and I discussed on this week’s show:

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is George B. Thomas of the Sales Lion. Welcome George.

George B Thomas (guest): Kathleen, thanks for having me.

Kathleen: I am so excited to have you here. I specifically waited to have you as my guest for a few weeks after starting the podcast, because even though you and I have known each other for a while, I wanted to have some kind of a track record before I invited you in because you are a pro at this.

George: Well ... I've done a few podcasts, let's just put it that way. But, I love being on podcasts. It is a great medium to educate, to inform, all that good stuff. And I'm glad to be here. Finally, I'll say, you know, tonight I'll sleep. At home tonight, I'll sleep cause I've been on the podcast.

Kathleen: You crossed one off your bucket list right?

Kathleen: Well I'm really appreciative of it and before we jump in, I've known you for a while but maybe not everybody who's listening does know you, so tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what you do these days.

George: Yeah definitely. So my name is George B. Thomas. Like Kathleen said, I do work at The Sales Lion. I started out as an employee, and I'm now a co-owner, which is always interesting. I started with inbound marketing in 2012, listening to Gary Vaynerchuck, and decided I wanted to become a thought leader in something that I knew absolutely nothing about, so I started educating myself, started growing myself, kind of changing my mentality of "never arrive but always succeed." And now I go out and I give workshops, I speak professionally and I train clients over the internet from the comfort of my home office, which is awesome.

Kathleen: I wish that people listening could actually see what I'm seeing, because we're on video as we record this and George does have a really cool home office. 

George:Let's just say super heroes people, super heroes.

Kathleen: It's pretty cool. Well, I think one of the reasons I was excited to have you on is that you've kind of made a career out of educating other people, and what I love is you just said, you started this journey in 2012, which funny enough is kind of when I started focusing on inbound marketing. Your career has been fascinating to watch. As an outside observer, I give you so much credit because you, more than anyone else I think I've ever met actually, are so committed to teaching yourself and going out and learning and not waiting for the information to come to you.

You're so proactive and I really see that as something that everybody can learn from in this space.

George:Yeah, Kathleen, I appreciate that. I'm humbled because I'm just trying to be me and I'd like to say that there's a sexy answer for that but there's really not. I tie the way that I am with education to the fact that when I was 17 years old, I had somebody tell me that I would never amount to anything, and for the rest of my days I will be able to wake up in the morning and say to myself, no, I will be something and they're wrong.

And so there's this innate desire to know as much as possible about anything that I dive into. I'm hoping somebody will get something out of this. I think they will because we're talking human level, which we'll get into podcasting in a minute, but there's something that is really awesome about being able to be a sponge. This is what people will usually say about me is, hey I'm gonna head George in this direction, and then just absorb the information.

This is what I did with Hub Spot in 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16 right? It's what I do now. But 18 months ago, 24 months ago, Marcus, knowing that I'm this type of person, Marcus Sheridan by the way other owner of the Sales Lion, pointed me in the direction of video and said, "go do what you do, but with video versus Hub Spot." And now we teach video workshops as well as go out and teach at workshops and stuff like that. But we'll talk about that more.

Kathleen: Well, whoever that person is that said you would never amount to anything, has spent many, many years eating their words.

George:Well yeah, and it's funny because, and again I'm just trying to speak to somebody out there, for a lot of years Kathleen, I was like I really hated that person, it was a place of anger. But, now I'd actually love to go back and see my math teacher and thank him. Because, it is that spark that fueled this forever educating mentality in my brain.

Kathleen: Yeah, and you were saying there's not really a sexy answer, and again as somebody who kind of is an outside observer, what I have observed is it's "roll up your sleeves and do the work." We happen to be Facebook friends, and George will post at like eight o'clock in the morning, that he's starting the day with a bang and he woke up early and he got a new Hub Spot certification. Or it'll be a weekend and in between taking his kids to the movies, he's getting another one. It's really amazing. And this is gonna sound really corny, but you totally do inspire me.

George:I appreciate that.

Kathleen: You're an amazing role model.

George:I'm humbled, I'm humbled.

I'm trying to do the best I can, and if people can come along for the ride, if I can change my corner of the universe, which really ties back to The HubCast and the podcast, if I can put a little dent in my side of the universe, when I get to the end of the road ... I should start singing Boys to Men right now, but I won't. When I get to the end of the road, I want to be able to look back and be like, yeah that's a good dent right there.

Kathleen: That's so funny cause that's what I say when I send my son ... I have a fifth grader ... when I send him off to school every day. I always say, "make the world a better place." I think he thinks I'm nuts, but no, someday you're gonna remember that I said that to you.

George:Absolutely, absolutely.

Kathleen: Well, speaking of little corners of the world and wanting to make a difference, I started this podcast because I really felt like there's a lot of companies and people out there that are doing inbound marketing and it's been around for a little while now. I do feel like if you sort of follow the plain vanilla play book, it's getting harder and harder to see results. One of the things I wanted to do with this, is shine the light on people who are getting creative and following the play book, but adding to it with their own spin and testing out and doing new things and getting awesome results. And really pick apart what they're doing so that the average inbound marketer - the person who is in the weeds, in the trenches, boots on the ground, doing the work every day - can extract some lessons from that, apply it to the work they're doing, and also improve the results they're getting.

We could probly have you on five different episodes. You talked about video, and I feel like that's another one but, for this one, I specifically really wanted to talk about the work you've done with podcasting because we haven't talked about podcasting on this podcast before. It's very meta! When I spoke to you and to Marcus about some of the things you've done with podcasting and what that has meant to your organization from a lead generation standpoint, I was really fascinated and it seemed to me to be a best practice.

I'd just love to turn it over to you and have you tell us a little bit about the podcast and how it came to be and what the original purpose and objectives were.

George:Yeah, and it's funny that we talked about video a little bit. Before we get into podcasting, my biggest fear that video is so hot right now, and 99 percent of the people who haven't even touched on podcasting for their business. You're like, well blogs aren't working anymore and everybody is saying "well video is the wave of the future", which is true, don't get me wrong, again probably a different episode. But podcasting is so, so magical.

Let me kinda just paint a picture for you. It was 2014, Marcus Sheridan sent me an email and said hey, I think we should create a podcast. I'm like, "uh I don't know." Cause, side note, I hate my voice.

Kathleen: You actually have such a great DJ voice.

George:I hated my voice for years. And I'm like, "okay dude, if you think this is a good idea." And he's like, "I want you to put together what you think would be a great show for HubSpot users." And I don't want to gloss over that. I want everybody to realize that immediately we were focused on a niche audience. We were not creating a podcast, and we were not about to create a podcast for marketing automation, or inbound marketing, or marketing. This was going to be a podcast specific for HubSpot users. 

And so I put pen to paper and I started thinking, "What are the goals? What are we trying to do with this? And how powerful could it be?" First of all, we had to figure out a name. We came up with The HubCast because at that point, if you tried to use "HubSpot" in your podcast name, HubSpot probably would've crapped a brick and there probably would be some legal things happening. So we're like "Hub" for HubSpot and "cast" for podcast. We just mashed it together.

Kathleen: It's a great name.

The HubCast was born. And with the outline, what I realized I wanted to do, I wanted to have something that I could spin up quickly. So the show notes would be repeatable, meaning there were going to be sections that each week I would just be able to copy a template, paste it and then fill in the slots. And so, from that, I knew that I wanted to be able to do this quickly. From that I knew I wanted to be a resource. It had to be educational. So we put in a strategy section, we put in a question of the week, and then I knew that it needed to be focused on somehow building a community. Cause I knew, people aren't just waiting around for a HubSpot podcast to come out and if they do, it's gonna be slow growing. So how can we implement this to be a little bit faster.

So we put in tweets of the week. The whole strategy behind tweets of the week, was to actually find people who were using #hubspotting, #Inboundmarketing, whatever, #INBOUND16, etc, and actually find things that they were saying that we thought were creative so that we could then mention them on the show and then mention that we mentioned them on the show so that then they would share out that they were on the show and other people, friends, family, dogs, cats, would actually start listening to the podcast, which worked really, really well.

We also did another section in there, which was agency spotlight where we'd start to talk about what agencies were doing well. Again, it was all about mentioning people so we could grow the community.

Kathleen: If I could just interject on that...That's something that I've always thought you guys did particularly well. Because The Sales Lion is an agency and not everybody realizes that at first because you are so much about education and about helping, but you do have clients. And it seems counter intuitive as an agency to promote other agencies. But back from the very beginning it starts with Marcus and River Pools and the famous story of how he would write blog posts about the top pool companies that were not his own on his website and what that did for his business. And I think you've taken that "aha moment" that came about through that initial experiment and really ran with it very successfully.

George:Well, I'll tell you a couple things. One, we bleed the fact - the truth - of there is no secret sauce. In podcasting you gotta talk about it. In the written words you gotta write about it. In video, you just gotta show it. There is no secret sauce. And the other thing is some of these posts that we do have become the most magical moments of our content marketing.

For instance, we have a Top 12 Hub Spot Partners post. It's a huge post. We don't mention ourselves. We mention all these other people. But I can tell you, the amount of traffic that we get, because we mention these people in a post. And also agencies who have said, how do I become the first person on this list. And then us adjusting overtime where we actually put people on the list. It's just, you have to be transparent, honest, authentic (which, by the way, those words I just said are key to the success of The HubCast podcast as well). That's the way that you have to communicate in today's space.

Kathleen: So you, had an objective, which was to create a podcast for HubSpot users. You determined that, and that audience was specific. Did you go out and look at other podcasts to try and get an idea of what the best practices might be for your format? Are there other podcasts that you look at as really good examples or get inspired from?

George:Yeah, I'd love to say that I was that smart at the beginning, but there has been a lot of learning along the way. However, I was a podcast junkie before this. And so I had listened to and paid attention to what other folks were doing at a very light level on educating myself. But there was really no "I want to be this type of podcast". It was more of like, "hey this is something new and I have no clue what it's going to look like, this is how we're gonna initially mold it and see what happens."

And one of the major things that we talked about was there's not gonna be any sponsors at first. No sponsors. And I think we made it to episode, Kathleen I think it was episode 54 before we ever actually talked about a sponsor. Now, one of the things that we weren't worried about in the beginning was how are we gonna generate revenue from this podcast. However, it has become one of the larger revenue generating sides of the business for us, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit.

Kathleen: I think we understand the general concept of the podcast, and you talked about building community, obviously a campaign involving a podcast starts with making the podcast. You record it, you produce it, you publish it on your website, on some kind of hosting platform, but then how specifically have you promoted that podcast and gotten it in front of more eyeballs, more listeners? You have your show notes, which you do a very nice job with the show notes and we want to talk about that at some point too. But I'm curious, what are your lessons learned for how you promote a podcast and really start to get a bigger audience?

George:Yeah, I'm still learning. As a matter of fact, when you emailed me over before this podcast, and you used the word "campaign" attached to a podcast, I was like, all of a sudden like sparks started coming out of my brain and I'm like, "oh my gosh, this is the longest campaign that we've ever run and there are pieces of a typical campaign that are missing from what we're doing right now." It repositioned the way that I looked at the content that we are creating. So, that was amazing.

I'm always learning. As far as promoting the podcast, it was really just an organic thing at first where we would just create it, we would mention people, they would mention it. And because it was so authentic, transparent, useful stuff that was just important to them as a HubSpot user, it started to get noticed. Then we started doing other things where we would do social publishing. One of the smartest things I ever did probably - well, I mean I've done a couple smart things - but, one of the smartest things with The HubCast was that back in the day, when you could actually use the HubSpot share tool and share to LinkedIn groups. What I did was I went and I actually, not for a spammy crappy way, but just to be a helpful utility unto the HubSpot world, I went and I signed up for every possible HubSpot user group that I could on LinkedIn and then when we would produce a new episode of The HubCast, I would send it that way.

Here's the amazing thing, not once ever did anybody who was in charge of a LinkedIn group say, "oh you gotta stop sending us content." They were like, "yeah, bring it, this is good quality stuff." It's providing great content to a niche audience of HubSpot users, in a HubSpot user group, which if you think back is exactly why the podcast was created, so it was a perfect match.

Now that's a little bit more difficult and time consuming because you can't do it with one click, one button.

Kathleen: You gotta go in to LinkedIn to do it. Yeah, my heart shattered a little bit when they made that announcement.

George:Yeah, I think I cried for at least 30 seconds. Then I was like "I got work to do so let's just do this."

Kathleen: Time to move on.

George:The thing is, so we started to do that and it really helped.

The other thing that is really helped us is we've leveraged hashtags. As INBOUND has done a lot of work, to go from 2,500 to 5,000 to 15,000 to 21,000 attendees, they've given us a large amount of people that we can hashtag. Like if you look, there's a lot of titles that have #INBOUND15, 16, and 17 in them so that people are like, "oh I'm getting ready to go on a flight. Let me see what this podcast is about because I can listen to it while I'm 50 bazillion miles in the air."

Kathleen: So, that's a good thing. So you put the hashtag not just in your tweets, but in the titles of your podcast?

George:Because then, when anybody shares it, what's there? The hashtag. And so it spreads like wildfire. And so that is definitely another kind of social strategy that we have done.

Now I'll tell you what's in the horizon. We've actually talked about, because we've realized the power of, if we can get people to listen to The HubCast, if they see the value that we can add, there is revenue on the other side of it. So, it's working, now let's add gasoline to the fire and really fuel it up. So we've been talking about starting a Facebook lead ads campaign where we're just using some type of video content to get them on a page where they can subscribe to The HubCast and they can just realize "wow, this is super awesome, super valuable and I need to listen every week."

I want to rewind for a second and pick apart what you do for the podcast. You have the show notes published on The Sales Lion website. In sort of a blog format, correct?

Kathleen: Do you host your podcast on a platform like LibSyn, or where is it hosted?

George:Let me just give you the kind of run through. Anybody who's trying to do this, cause I wish everybody would do this. First of all, let's just talk about gear and how simple we've kept it.

We use Skype, we use Skype Call Recorder and we use ATR 2100 microphones. That's it. That's how we record it. Boom. The way that I edit it, is I split the track with a piece of software that comes with Skype call recorder, I put it in Adobe Audition, I add an intro, I add an outro, I sometimes add a commercial for the HIT workshops or the video workshops that we do, I export it out to an MP3, I upload it to LibSyn, I throw all of the metadata that I need in there for iTunes, Stitcher and all those good places, and then we put it on our website. Then when we publish as a blog article to this specific category called The HubCast, then it shoots out to iTunes, Stitcher, blah blah blah.

Behind the scenes of that, before the recording, we use Dropbox Paper to create the outline for the show notes and where I can, again, take that template, paste it, fill in the blanks, and then share it with Marcus. He shows up, we look over the show notes, we record it, I do the whole editing part, then I take that outline, and I put it on our website as a blog, add images, tweak the links, make it look pretty, add a call to action, hit publish and then people can either listen on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever or on our actual webpage.

But we're never really trying to always drive them back to the webpage. I don't care where they listen. I just want them to listen. And that's pretty much the whole process other than like, on some episodes we'll have a special guest and there's another layer of complexity to that. That's pretty much it.

Kathleen: Do you have any sense of which platforms people are mostly listening on?

George:Yeah, for sure. It's a lot of IOS. So iPhones, iPads, whatever. Website might come next. Stitcher is probably after that. But you know what, while we can look at some of that granularity, I don't look at it very often. Really there's ... this is sad. I mean it's not sad. Well, it's sorta sad. There's really two metrics that ... well there's more than two metrics. There's some hard core metrics and there's some soft core metrics that I look at when it comes to the podcast.

When I think of hard core metrics, I think of things like, we started with 53 listeners. So, that's 53 downloads. Now we get well over 5000 downloads a month. And we've even had ...

Kathleen: And you're measuring that through LibSyn?

George:Yes we're measuring that through LibSyn. And we even had, Kathleen, this one time, I may have like pooped myself just a little bit. We had one episode that got 2185 downloads by itself. And we're like, "we're big time now people."No, I'm just kidding. We didn't say that at all. We're like "wow, what happened?"

So we went from 53 listeners to 5000 listeners and so every month I'm looking at, "are we up and to the right?" Are we always gaining more listeners? Did something fall off? Are we not talking about the right topics? What are the hot topics? And then there's the intangibles, the soft metrics like the hand shakes, the high fives. And being able to tie back, if we didn't start The HubCast in 2014, I probably would've not spoke at INBOUND in 2016. I would've not spoke at INBOUND in 2017 because there was a power, a brand, a growth that was shown, and a massive amount of people who were like, "hey we wanna see George B speak at Inbound," this was 2016. So, that doesn't happen.

Because that doesn't happen then you can't say, well the deals that we closed because of INBOUND and speaking in front of an audience or retainers or whatever, that doesn't happen. You have to look at the audience growth year over year. So like, 2016, I think I spoke in front of 500 people, and then an overflow and this year it was a room of 1200 people with an encore and an overflow to the encore.

There's those metrics that aren't somewhere on a chart but you can visually see them. And then we can track back for 2016, over six figures of income that came from our services that we sell on just The HubCast. That's the only place we were promoting them. And this year of course it's still calculating. I don't know what it will be this year but last year was well over six figures.

Kathleen: Now, how are you tracking that?

George:If you have a podcast, and the only place that you promote a HubSpot Intensive Workshop or a video workshop or a workshop on workshops, all of those things, if that's the only place you're promoting them, and you can then sit back and go, "well we went out and did this many workshops for this much money," it's tracked. That's it. It's simple.

Kathleen: Do you have other, for example you do provide agency services, do you have a way of knowing if somebody comes in through your website and it's not something that was solely promoted on the podcast, do you have a way of being able to attribute that to the podcast, like a question and a form?

George:No. Other than, we'll hear people when we start to train them, they'll say things and you'll be like, "you listen to the podcast don't you?" And they'll be like "yeah, come on." But we never ... although Kathleen this would be a really good idea. On our onboarding of new clients we never say to them "are you a HubCast listener, or have you been a HubCast listener." So that's interesting, which might need to happen in the future.

Kathleen: It would be interesting to almost incorporate that into lead scoring and try to figure out, is somebody who is a HubCast listener more likely to become a client because they're already bought in to you, on a personal level, which is really a game changer for most of the leads that agencies get? Because, I don't know, I've owned an agency, I've worked for an agency and I do find that when somebody comes in cold, it always starts with an element of adversarialness to it. "Prove to me that you're as good as you say you are."

Kathleen: "Have you really gotten the results you talk about?" And so, part of the challenge in the sales discussion is overcoming that adversarialness and developing a different relationship.

George:We've never had that.

Kathleen: Because people listen to you online and they know who you are.

George:I say this humbly cause it's funny you're mentioning that and I'm remembering back in the old school days when I worked in an agency where we did have to claw and bite for the business. We're thought leaders. At The Sales Lion, we honestly do not have that issue because, after 154 episodes of The HubCast and over 400 HubSpot tutorials that I've done on YouTube, they've seen my face, they've heard my voice, they've tied it back to Marcus Sheridan and the larger strategy of "They ask, you answer," the Big Five, and as a client you sit back and you go, "well holy crap." We've got strategy and the most tactical tactition that is going to educate us on what we should be doing. And so usually its just like, "where do I sign?"

Kathleen: Yeah, and that's something that I want to pause and just emphasize. The concept of thought leadership. I talk to so many companies that are either doing inbound marketing and want to be able to do it better, or just starting to do it. Almost, I would say 90 percent of them at least, come to me and say, "we want to establish ourselves as thought leaders." What I find is that in today's world, it can be harder to do that in a blog because there are so many of them. Especially if you don't already have an audience that you can start to get really great content in front of.

But podcasting, there's a little bit more of an opportunity. It's a little bit more of the wild west still. There are a lot of podcasts. But not necessarily in every industry.

George:But specific. Specific.

I will tell you right now, one of the trainings I did last week was to a foam installation company to start a podcast. That's the thing, if you go very niche, into your industry or the services that you provide, there is still a lot of gold that can be mined. And that's why I said at the beginning, I get nervous that video is so popular because podcasting is still an area where you could be crushing it. I know you're gonna ask me some questions later, and what you'll notice is there's some names in there and they are podcasters, but they're also thought leaders. And when you talk about thought leaders, what I really want to say to those folks who say, "man I really want to be a thought leader," then I'm gonna say two things. Educate the crap out of yourself and work your butt off.

George:Cause if you don't do those two things, it doesn't happen. And so there's this thing I talked about at INBOUND17 where people want to educate, educate, educate, educate; that does not equal a thought leader. That also does not equal inbound success, but if you educate and execute, educate and execute, then you'll be an Inbound hero and you'll be a thought leader and then your world changes. Trust me. Your world changes.

I look at me, my family in 2012 and me, my family now in 2017 and whew, my goodness.

Kathleen: But you're also the master of if you put your vision for your future out into the universe, it will come true because having been a loyal HubCast listener from day one, I know that you've gone on that show and said, "this is what I want to accomplish next year and it's gonna happen." And every case when I've heard you say it, it has. There's something to that.

George:I live and die by goals. I'm always focused on what the next thing because I never want to feel like I've arrived. Not that I don't want to feel like I've succeeded, I just never want to feel like I've arrived. I think there's two differences there in the way that you look at the world. And even as we speak Kathleen, there's a board over to my left that has three year goals, things that I want to reach by the year 2020.

Kathleen: I want to know what's on that board.

George:I'll share with everybody.

George:I'm gonna get some people paying attention. I'm gonna talk specifically, talk about specifics. This is video, just for the use of talking to people about what I'm going to do, the micro moments to get to that larger goal. I'm sharing how I'm growing my community, how I'm working out, trying to lose weight, how I'm educating myself. So you're gonna see the nuts and bolts of, if I make it, how I made it through this video thing.

Kathleen: I love it, I love it.

George:Take the summer off ... by the way, not all of this is business related, which is something to think about listeners. Take the summer off to travel with family. 2020 will be my oldest daughter's senior year, and I want to take three months off, and I just want us to go travel around america and do whatever we can do and see whatever we can see.

By 2020 I want to write a book. And I even have the title, I have the idea. I've been through enough stuff that I think it would be really interesting to put out this manual if you will to the world. I've had, and I say this humbly Kathleen, I've had people come, several, multiple, many actually, people come up to me and say, either in email or in person, how do I find a George B Thomas for my agency? I think this book helps them find that person or build that person.

I want to ... this is the big hairy one where, when I wrote it I laughed, and I know people will laugh. By 2020 I want to make 250,000 dollars a year. Which is a lot of scratch right? That's a lot of money. What's a guy gonna do with that? Well a guy's gonna make a bigger dent in his universe.

Kathleen: Guy's gonna put his kid through college.

George:Yeah yeah. Guys gonna make a bigger dent in the universe.

Kathleen: Speaking as somebody who has four kids, two of whom are in college at the same time right now.

George:Exactly. I already put one through college, I got three more to go. Statistically, one probly won't go to college, which is shameful. But then last but not least, I want to sit on a board of a non profit organization. Again tying back to the deeper reason of why I'm actually here on the planet, versus just being an inbound thought leader.

Kathleen: I love that. And I'm gonna do an ask, and it may or may not be possible, I don't know what's on that board. But would you be willing to snap a photo of the board and share it with us so I can put it in the show notes?

Kathleen: I love it, that's awesome.

Kathleen: It's funny that you said you have personal goals on there because a couple years ago I read, I think it's like Mastering the Rockefeller Habits or something along those lines. And he talks in the book about how your goals have to be personal and professional because you're really not a complete person unless you can balance those two and be equally fulfilled in both realms so I totally agree with that.

George:I live my life, and I know this has gotten a little bit off of podcasting but, I live my life Kathleen, in a way that there is no work life balance, there's just life.

Kathleen: Love it. Alright so, back to podcasting for a minute.

Kathleen: I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier. So we've talked a couple times in this podcast about video. And you mentioned that you talk about video a lot. And you also mentioned that when you were making The HubCast you made a lot of videos and put them on YouTube. I think a lot of people, when they think about podcasting, it's very binary. It's like we're gonna put out this audio file, there might be some written show notes and boom we're done, but you managed to combine video as a really important part of that podcast. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

George:Yeah. This ties into the show notes. One of the things that I realized is, and this is because of weakness, I'm not a great writer. Okay, I just can't write. My spelling sucks, my grammar sucks, it probly has something to do, tying back to the math teacher who told me I would never amount to anything and at the age of 17 dropping out of high school. Not having the education I needed for that part of my life. When Marcus said, "hey let's do The HubCast," which by the way people, that was being vulnerable.

When he said "lets do this podcast," I was like, I'm gonna make the most incredible show notes, where it has nothing to do with if I can write great but I can be creative and I can put images and words and videos and whatever on this page where people are like, "man these show notes are awesome." Cause that was my side of the written word right? And people, our content manager or Marcus, would go through and just make sure that the parts that I did write, were like, yeah you're good and the rest is awesome.

But, going more specific into why video in the show notes, was, one of the sections, because one of our goals was to educate and its very hard to show people how to do things in HubSpot in audio form. I'll tell you, Chris Handy with Hub Spot To Go did a great job. I'm sad that that podcast isn't continuing to go more and more and more. But it's just very difficult. By the way, Chris Handy is one of my heroes. I just love him in the space and hey, I mentioned him alright, cool. Check.

So I wanted to be able to show people how to do things in HubSpot and that became a section that was HubSpot Tips and Tricks. It grew and it had its own thing where, all of a sudden Marcus one episode called me "Georgie Claus" and there's this whole "ding, ding, ding" thing that happened around every time that I would have the tutorial in one of the episodes. And what we found was super interesting as people would come to the show notes and then go to our YouTube channel and watch these videos. And so it was something that was working.  It stuck, and we could educate them while they are walking up the mountain or while they are driving down the road and when they got to their office, they could then get these micro moments of video content specific to, tips and tricks in the tool of HubSpot or HubSpot CRM.

Kathleen: That's great. It just goes to show that you don't need to be such a purest in your format. Somebody actually told me that the other day about podcasting. In fact, it was somebody fairly high up at HubSpot. I was asking what he saw as some future opportunities in marketing and he said, I would look at different formats of podcasting. There's a Hamilton podcast, which is a musical podcast. And they're doing great and they're different experiments. You don't have to follow the traditional playbook. I think that's a great example of how you built on what were your strengths and found a great solution.

George:Yeah, you just have to find ... it is, it's about your strengths and how you can tell the story. And how you can kind of lead the way through that story.

Kathleen: You have gotten fantastic results for the company through podcasting, you've built this large community, you've got a big following on the podcast. What I've loved hearing about this story is that you did come about the format and the whole campaign, which we're now gonna call it, organically.

Kathleen: You came about it organically in a way that really good marketers should, which is what's our objective? Who's our audience? And what's really gonna work for them? I would love to know, as somebody who is so committed to learning, where do you turn for information? When you go look for websites for ideas and the latest thinking and cutting edge tactics and strategies, who are you looking towards? I feel like a lot of people look towards you.

George: First of all there's a butt ton of podcasts that I listen to as I'm flying or traveling. But if I have to give you the default answer to this, I would of course say, it's HubSpot Academy. I mean come on. I've got 14 certifications out of the 15 so that's definitely a huge part of it.

Kathleen: Probably the only reason you don't have the 15th is they keep releasing new ones, darn them!

George:No, to be honest with you it's because it's Growth-Driven Design and you need a snack and a backpack to get that one done.

Kathleen: Nice, put it on the board.

George:Yeah, put it on the board.

There's other pieces like Moz for SEO and Lynda.com for other things. But here's the not so, again not so sexy answer is more times than not, I learn stuff about inbound marketing when I'm working through things with my own clients. There are several systems in place that are not taught anywhere. Like anywhere else. The fact that I got up and at INBOUND this year, one of my sessions for a Highly Effective HubSpotter was triple qualify your leads. And I was talking about informationally qualified, engagement qualified, and persona qualified. And there were HubSpot users and agency owners that came up to me and said, "Holy crap, gold! Where did you learn that?" And I'm like "no, no, no, I built that."

That's something that has happened more and more and more. And Kathleen the reason I think this has happened is because, I'm able to take the things that I have learned through 14 certifications, and because there's not one two or three certifications, but there's 14 certifications and I'm literally looking at the landscape from marketing, sales, design, development. Because I used to be a nerdy designer and developer, I'm able to piece ... and add in the fact that I understand humans from being a recovering youth pastor, I'm able to see all of this and kind of like, ooh if this part of the brain attaches to this piece over here and we add two of these and a little dash of this, pppffff, inbound goodness right. That's part of the answer as well.

Kathleen: Awesome. My next question, which I always ask everyone who comes on this podcast is, who - company or individual - do you think is doing inbound marketing really well? So if the listener wanted to go out and see an example of somebody who's just killin' it, who should they look at?

George:Well I should say you. Cause you're doing a podcast.

Kathleen: You can't say ... cause that's you know ... well aside from us.

George:Again, IMPACT is killin' it, you guys are killin' it.

Kathleen: It's not about us.

George:I know, it's not. But I did prepare. If you wanna see people that are out there that are killin' it inbound and just general good people, I would say people like Stephanie Casstevens, Moby Siddique, Francess Bowman, Dan Moyle. Those are like the core group of people that I'm watching and excited about their growth in life and where they're going.

Of course, then you layer on the people who are doing podcasts like, HubShots with Craig and Ian. Zon and Adam from The Kingdom who are doing HubnSpoke. Any of those people who are doing what we're talking about today. Creating content through a podcast or have just generally been killing it with very interesting out of the box things or ideas. That's where I'm at.

Now, that's people. And in the question, people or companies. Companies, and I don't wanna turn this into a TSL client show, cause it's not what it should be. But I will tell you, we have one client that I'm super excited with in particular. I've been watching them. And it's Slick Woody's. They sell Corn Hole boards, Corn Hole bags, Corn Hole lights and other stuff like apparel and adirondack chairs. They have been killing it. When we say write these things, or do these tactics or use HubSpot in this way, and what's really neat about it, is they've been leveraging HubSpot and Shopify and The Sales Lion training for a year, just signed on for another six month contract of, I think it was like, we just love you so much we wanna keep you around to be honest with you. But just signed on for another half a year contract with us. But have, just astronomically blown out their yearly "this is what we'd like to make" number. And their customers are super happy with the way that they are actually doing it.

That to me is a "win, win" scenario. And then I think of a couple UK clients that we have. OSV and Triaster, they historically have been killing it with their inbound marketing.

Kathleen: That's great. I definitely will put a link to Slick Woody's

Kathleen: ... in the show notes. Everyone go check that out. I think it's nice to see examples from different industries too, cause everybody always comes in and thinks, "oh I can't do that in my industry," there's another one - corn hole boards - that who knew, was a great candidate for inbound marketing.

Well thank you for sharing all this George. It's been so fun and so interesting and I love that you shared a lot of the personal stuff in addition to the podcasting stuff. You're always so good about walking the walk with being honest and transparent and authentic.

George:Yeah, sometimes I'm ... I'm waiting for it to get me in trouble. But so far, it's been a good thing.

Kathleen: Well, it's great. And if our listeners have questions, obviously they should definitely listen to The HubCast. I recommend it.  When I had my own agency and I would hire new people, one of the things I would assign them - I don't think I ever told you this - as a new employee, was that they should listen to every episode of The HubCast. For everybody listening, that's definitely a great place to start if you want to be a better inbound marketer. But if people specifically want to reach out to you with questions, where can they reach you?

George:So I'll give you a couple different places. First of all, that is kinda cool that like, "hey you're hired but you have to listen to these 150 episodes of a podcast." I love it.

If people want to reach out to me, by the way, if you have questions about podcasting or whatever, you can email me, george@thesaleslion.com I did just give you my email.

But if you just want to have a conversation on the socials, then you can reach out to me on Twitter @georgebthomas and on Facebook, which is really the place that I love to jam the most, @mr.georgebthomas, which now that I said that I feel like maybe I'm saying I'm old, cause I like Facebook. But anyway. Doesn't matter.

Kathleen: I love it. Well thank you for sharing all those different ways for people to get in touch with you. And for sharing all this awesome feedback on podcasting, I definitely am gonna hound you about getting that picture of your board cause I think that's so cool and I might just start my own board as a result of this.

Kathleen: I have all kinds of thoughts in my head right now about what my goals are gonna be. But anyway, thank you so much. And for people listening, if you liked this episode, please review us on iTunes or Stitcher. It means a lot and helps us get in front of other people. And if you know somebody who's really kicking it with their inbound marketing results, let us know. Because we're listening for and looking for new people to interview every week. And if you are somebody who's killing it, we'd love to talk to you. So that's it for this week and, join us next week for our next interview with an inbound marketing rockstar.

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!  

This content was originally published here.

[callsignbaphomet]

Yo buddy! 19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)

I am so so sorry for the length of this post. I got carried away :S

Man, I actually spent like 30 minutes thinking about this answer and right off the bat I wanna say that all of my OCs are super important. Yeah, a pretty standard dad answer but I’ve put a lot of dedication and time into them all. I wanna make them as equally important and valid whether they are op or just fraguile. Not to mention that with LC I really wanna be as extremely inclusive with my OCs as humanly possible. It’s fun, challenging and incredibly scary (my number 1 fear is fucking up and doing something offensive).

However, I’m gonna go with Jelani. Yes, I talk a lot about him, Angelus, Loke and Ginger but they’re my most developed OCs and the easiest to just talk about for hours. And honestly I have a soft spot for all four of them. There aren’t any “main character(s)” in LC but these four are as close as you can get.But anyway…Jelani. Why? I’m gonna go outright and say that all LC characters have been around since I was 14 years old when I first took up writing. I cannot for the life of me remember what his original name was and the character he used to be back then was a hell of a lot different than what he is today. As embarrassing as it is to admit to he was the “token black character” with barely any development and barely any roles and just thinking about that makes me wanna slap the shit out of 14 year old me. He was a massive idiot and didn’t know shit about character development.

So the character was in a box for years. Then 2005 came along, with a massive dose of depression and a shit ton of other things which caused me to stop writing LC and I just got rid of it and got rid of every character except for Angelus for VERY personal reasons. Lo and behold in 2006 I met my boyfriend and as corny as it sounds he helped me wave off that bad time in my life and I started doing the things I used to enjoy again. One of which was picking up LC and starting from scratch. This time the character development was slightly better but not by much. From the very start “important” characters were loosely based on important people in my life so I continued that trend but made it far less obvious. I redesigned Jelani and loosely based him off my boyfriend. Over time and the more I’ve developed Jelani the similarities have dwindled and pretty much the only things they have in common now is that they’re both metalheads and are male lol

Around that time he did have blue eyes and was lighter skinned and wasn’t powerful. But I wanted to keep working on him and wanted to make him something unique and different since I had an overload of werewolf and vampire characters. I also changed his skin color to a much darker tone. Correct me if I’m wrong but you seldom see dark skinned characters that are powerful and are not evil. I’m not saying Jelani is a saint, he’s made a lot of wrong choices but he’s not evil. So I turned to one of my favorite subjects: mythology (in this case some sort of based around Christian mythology since it’s the only one I sort of know a little bit about). Pretty much ended with a super powerful character that borderlined on useless. With the snap of his fingers any and all problems could be solved and that was boring and as my boyfriend pointed out, “It’s fun to have very powerful characters but if you wanna use him you kinda need to balance him out.” Been working on that ever since. And I’m currently satisfied.

As he is now Jelani is still my most powerful OC especially after his story arc but there are a ton of restrictions on him. He is what in LC are known as Makers or “Gods to the Gods”. Long story short he and a few other deities were involved in some really bad mess which caused a massive war and the deaths of millions of “celestial beings” and the Maker that ascended Jelani (back then he was named Caine) properly punished him and those involved.

So now a second war broke out and it nearly destroyed the Earth. Sick and tired of trying to kill off his 8 compatriots-turned-enemies he destroyed his physical self and sent off his soul/energy/whatever you wanna call it into the cosmos to then later come back and kill off the remaining enemy deity. Ironic since he is the god of reinvention and reincarnation. Thing is this plan backfired. Horribly. While suspended he sort of fell into a coma and didn’t awaken until eons and eons later and was then “reincarnated” to the version you currently know. In his absence the enemy deity, who is a massive dickhead, that started the mess took over Jelani’s realm (Engh'Nia) and role and completely threw everything off balance. I’ll probably explain later if anyone wants to know.

That enemy deity sat comfortably on the throne thinking Jelani was dead but only a Maker can kill another Maker so…yeah.

Now in 870 C.E. he is born to Earth realm beings known as Berserkers and is named Jelani and has no recollection of his previous life and what he really is. However he always sort of felt outta place. No, I didn’t want him to feel out of place because of what he and his mother (at the time the only two black characters living in that village) look like. He and Sanaa (Jelani and Loke’s mom) are very loved, accepted and treated as well as the rest of the family. Sanaa dedicated as much time to teaching him, and Loke as well, of her side of the family. Ingvarr (Jelani and Loke’s dad) and the other side of the family also learned with the boys.

What I meant by out of place is that he should’ve been born a Berserker since Sanaa and Ingvarr are both Berserkers but he wasn’t. They thought he was but turns out he wasn’t. He always had weird dreams that made absolutely no sense at all yet always left him mentally and emotionally exhausted, he had certain abilities that neither side of the family had ever seen before. He could conjure a weapon but unlike Berserkers he could only summon one and couldn’t conjure any armor. He has the ability to whisper into anyone’s ear and force them against their will to do whatever he commanded. Thing is that no one knew what language it was that he whispered, wasn’t Old Norse and it wasn’t Swahili either. He also recovers from any and all kinds of injuries quickly. One day of rest is enough to heal small injuries while bigger injuries take 3 to 5 days without leaving any scars. The complete opposite of Berserkers. His eyes also changed to a bright red. When conjuring weapons and armors Berserker’s eyes glow in their natural eye color, they don’t change colors. Everybody just thought it was a product of Jelani being mixed.

His grandfather, Håkon, didn’t think it was because Jelani was mixed, he thought that maybe he was something more and encouraged him to explore those differences and develop them. Ever since then he’s been trying to figure out what the hell he actually is. He eventually finds out the truth.That enemy deity that was left had found out Jelani was alive and didn’t remember anything so he tried to have him killed without exposing himself to him in case it would jump start his memory. Even if he’d stand in fro t of him he wouldn’t remember. Before destroying his physical self he’d made certain fail saves. Jelani had about 3% of his original power tucked away but it could only be activated if he was in immense danger or in some cases if his panic level reached extreme levels which happened twice, once when Loke was in grave danger and the other when Loke died. That first time, he was about 8 years old, he had managed to change into his “real” form to get Loke to safety but he had no control over his actions and after it was over he didn’t remember what happened but Loke saw everything. Didn’t scare him and he didn’t treat him differently after that.

The second time was when Loke died and he just lost it. He sort of changed physically but he wasn’t in control either. The result was that he destroyed an entire area, basically killed everything within a 5 mile radius in his panic in a fission bomb style. He then tapped into more reserves of his abilities and restored everything as well as ressurecting Loke. This time more people saw what he could do. Another fail safe his old self did was trap one of his enemies with the rest of the 97% of his abilities into an old tree he himself had created. If the deity wanted to be set free they just needed to give him back what he told them to hold on to. Like I said, in the arc he recovers everything but he didn’t want to go to the realm since he had another life on Earth that he preferred. The Maker that ascended Jelani took charge of the realm AFTER Jelani fixed it, which took almost a year. If he ever wants to go back he’d be free to do so. He still carries the weight and authority of a Maker and is recognized as so by celestial beings and those few mortals that know. Same for those who allied themselves with Jelani. However, his abilities are down to 3% to keep things balanced and tbh an op character that could just snap their fingers and solve everything doesn’t feel like a good challenge or even fun.

Thing about Jelani is that as I developed him I also developed a lot of OCs and made a lot of world building decisions that made LC a lot more complex and fun to work with. Loke was supposed to have permanently died just to fuck with Jelani, cause him more pain and grief, make the antagonist even more of a dickhead and make Jelani question and doubt himself even more but I scrapped leaving Loke dead permanently since I kept developing him as well and wanted them to have a very friendly, loving and healthy sibling relationship. Honestly I am so sick of the “brother against brother” trope. You have no idea! I’m still trying to work in some things with him and am even still trying to come up with a design of his “true” form that I really like.

Not to mention that this character has also positively influenced other characters as well. In short I just freaking love Jelani so freaking much and I could talk more about him but this post is already really long and I’m so sorry about that lol