#its all in the size of the eyeballs relative to the head

[kissingarthurclaus]

As you know, I've been lowkey aardman-pilled, just consuming every movie and short I can get my hands on lately! Well, I've been talking about a self insert oc idea with my partner and today I finally had the energy to sketch some stuff! (divider cred @/saradika-graphics)

After the events of A Matter of Loaf and Death, we don't really see Fluffles again unfortunately so I thought, what if she decided to go up for adoption again? Obviously she was very traumatized by Piella, and I think after some encouragement she'd be able to open herself up to being owned again eventually! I guess you could say she's a rescue, and through patience and love she eventually begins to heal!

I'm thinking the catch is that she's adopted by someone who lives far away, so Gromit has to let her go in order for her to heal. They still keep in touch through letters, though! And one day he gets a letter saying that Fluffles and her human are gonna be moving in on Wallaby street soon! She's a gentle artist, she moved to England from America to paint landscapes and such and she's a very kind and kinda goofy older lady. Definitely a great dog mom to Fluffles!

and idk maybe wallace starts crushin' who knows

Taglist♡: @me-myself-and-my-fos @tiny-cloud-of-flowers @sunstar-of-the-north @dearly-beeloved @adoredbyalatus @changeling-selfship @crushes-georg

@cherry-bomb-ships @rosieaurora @rejaytionships @tropgothships @little-miss-selfships

@starlos-soulmate @limey-self-inserts @candyheartedchy @space-sweetheart @halsinkisser @clancykisser @squips-ship @berryshipbasket @soulnottainted @homevideorentals @shakessoulmate @emceescha

[bethanythebogwitch]

Wet Beast Wednesday: whale shark

So I may have committed a cardinal sin last week because I didn't realize it was shark week and instead of a shark, I covered hagfish. This was clearly a terrible oversight and to make up for it, I'm going to talk about the biggest shark of all: the mighty whale shark.

(Image: a whale shark seen from the side. It is a very large shark with a flattened head and three ridges running down its side. The skin in grey and covered in white spots. Smaller sharks and remoras are swimming alongside it. End ID)

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are carpet sharks, meaning they are members of the order Orectolobiformes. The carpet sharks most people are familiar with are the wobbegongs, who are ventrally flattened sharks they typically stick near the seafloor, but Orectolobiformes is a pretty diverse clade containing a large variety of sharks with diverse body plans. Whale sharks are the only living member of the family Rhinocodontidae, making them effectively cousins of the wobbegongs. While there is only one living species of whale shark, we know of another few in the fossil record and there were likely more extinct species and relatives that we don't know about. Because shark skeletons are made of cartilage, they rarely fossilize, leaving only their teeth as fossils. Whale sharks have very tiny teeth and smaller things are less likely to fossilize than large things. Add in that fossilization is very rare and it's very possible there were whale sharks and other similar things in the past we will never know about because they never fossilized.

(Image: a whale shark seen from the front. Its mouth is open, very wide, and apparently toothless. End ID)

Whale sharks are the largest living sharks and the largest living animals that aren't whales. Whale sharks can reach an average adult size of 14.5 meters (48 ft) and 18,600 kg (41,000 lbs), with males being larger. The largest whale shark on record was measured to be 18.8 m (62 ft). Whale sharks have broad, flattened heads and unlike most sharks, their mouths are on the front of the head instead of beneath the snout. The mouth can be over 2 meters across in an adult and is lined with approximately 300 rows of tiny teeth. These teeth are vestigial and do not play a role in feeding. Instead, the shark uses a structure at the back of the mouth composed of 20 fleshy pads that are coated with a thin mesh and held in place with connective tissue. More on feeding below. Whale sharks are grey in color, with white bellies and white spots covering the body. Each whale shark has a unique pattern of spots that scientists can use for identification. The spots will reappear in areas where damaged skin has healed instead of being scarred over. Whale sharks also have some regenerative ability, being able to recover from major wounds and possibly regrow sections of lost fin. Each side of the body has three long ridges that may help with streamlining.

(Image: a whale shark seen form the front with its mouth closed. There are remoras attached to its underbelly and a group of small yellow fish with black stripes swimming near the mouth, possibly acting as cleaner fish. End ID)

Whale shark skin can be up to 15 cm thick and is covered with tiny, tooth-like scales called dermal denticles. Having tiny teeth where bony fish have scales is normal for sharks. What is not normal is having them on your eyes, but the whale shark does anyway. Let me repeat: whale sharks have teeth on their eyeballs. I like body horror and I'm creeped out by that. The eyes can be retracted into the head and these two adaptations are believed to protect the eyes from predators and parasites. Another adaptations the eyes (which, again, HAVE TEETH ON THEM) have is a mutated version of rhodopsin, the pigment the rod sells of the yes use to see. this mutation makes the eyes good at seeing blue light, but the rhodopsin becomes unstable in warm temperatures. In humans, this mutation leads to a degenerative eye condition that can result in blindness. Whale sharks have a solution, though. When in warm, shallow water, the pigment can be turned off to keep the eyes from degenerating. When the shark dives to deep water, the pigment is reactivated, granting the shark better vision as blue light is the most common in the deep sea.

(Image: a close-up of a whale shark eye. It is a small, black, lidless eyeball surrounded by gray skin. End ID)

While whale sharks are huge, they aren't hunters. They are one of three living species of filter-feeding shark, the others being the basking shark (which I covered previously) and the awesomely-named megamouth shark. The majority of a whale shark's diet consists of plankton: primarily copepods, krill, eggs and larvae, and small fish, squid, and jellyfish. The shark can feed either by ram feeding (swimming forward with the mouth open) or creating suction to draw water into the mouth. The mouth is shaped like a funnel and forces water through the filtration pads. The pads, which likely evolved from gill rakers, capture food particles, which are then swallowed as the water is forced out through the gills. The filtration pads are extremely efficient and resistant to being clogged up with debris, though whale sharks have been observed performing a coughing-like behavior that is speculated to help clean the pads. Whale sharks spend up to 8 hours a day near the surface of the ocean, feeding on an estimated 2.7 kg (6 lbs) of plankton per hour.

(Image: an artistic diagram of the feeding pads and gills of a whale shark and how water flows through the mouth and out the gills. Source: EmilyDamstra.com. End ID)

Whale sharks live in temperate and tropical oceans worldwide and can be found in both the open ocean and coastal regions. They are gentle giants who swim slowly and bask at the surface of the ocean, not threatening anything bigger than a sardine. While they spend a lot of time at the surface, whale sharks periodically dive in search of food. Most of these dives are less than 200 meters (660 ft) deep, but they will occasionally dive over 500 m (1,600 ft) deep. The deepest recorded dive reached 1,928 m (6,325 ft), the deepest recorded dive of any fish. Whale sharks are known to practice different feeding behavior based on available food in their region. There are two subpopulations of whale shark based on location: the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific populations. 75% of the whale shark population lives in the Indo-Pacific. Whale sharks seasonally migrate following warm waters and food and may also migrate to mate. Multiple places around the world host seasonal gatherings of whale shark, making them to best place to reliably see them.

(Image: a whale shark from the side, swimming with its mouth open. Other fish can be seen in the background. End ID)

Not much is known about Whale shark mating. It has only been seen a few times in Saint Helena Island in the Atlantic and off the coast of Australia. Mating likely occurs during the seasonal aggregations. Female whale sharks are believed to travel to regional pupping grounds to give birth, but where exactly these are is an open question as juvenile whale sharks are rarely seen. The youngest whale shark ever observed was discovered having been captured and tied to a stake on a beach in Pilar, the Philippines. It was measured at 38 cm (15 in) and was released after being measured. This discovery likely means there is a pupping ground in the area. Whale sharks are ovoviviparous, meaning their eggs hatch internally and the young are born live. Whale shark females are believed to be able to reserve sperm and impregnate themselves repeatedly between matings, rather than bearing all their young at once. It is not clear how long it takes whale sharks to mature or how long they can live, though some estimates put them at sexually mature at around 25 years old and with a maximum lifespan between 50 and 150 years. It is estimated that only 10% of whale sharks live long enough to reach sexual maturity. Adult whale sharks have no natural predators.

(Image: a baby whale shark that was rescued from a gill net in India. It looks like a smaller version of the adult, but with a proportionately larger head. A human (out of frame) is holding it just above the water. ENd ID)

Whale sharks are classified as endangered by the IUCN. They are threatened by fishing, poaching, bycatch, and boat strikes. Whale sharks are hunted for their skin, liver oil, and meat, though countries worldwide are increasingly regulating or banning whale shark hunting. Whale sharks also ingest large quantities of microplastics. The health effects of this are not understood currently. Whale sharks are kept in captivity in less than 20 aquariums worldwide. They need very large tanks and have special feeding requirements that makes it difficult to keep them healthy. Wild whale sharks pose no threat to humans though there have been reports of them ramming sport fishing boats after being provoked. In places where whale sharks seasonally aggregate, snorkeling or SCUBA diving alongside them has become a major ecotourism industry. Touching the sharks can hurt them and is illegal in most places. Some tourism agencies have been known to lure in young whale sharks by feeding them shrimp, something which is discouraged by naturalists as it can foster dependence on humans and potentially introduce dangerous chemicals to the sharks' diets.

(Image: a person in a pink swimsuit wearing goggles and a snorkel swimming next to a whale shark just beneath the surface of the water. Two other whale sharks are in the background. End ID)

[ollieofthebeholder]

And If Thou Wilt, Forget: a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 12: And never give a thought to night

The shop reminded Tim of the Night Market, except that everything seemed to be exactly what it was. Granted, “exactly what it was” constituted a wide variety of oddities, curios, and esoteric objects, ranging from a signed poster of Harry Houdini to a Victorian testicle massager to a whole shelf full of eyeballs in glycerin, but it was at least honest in terms of labeling. And the two women who ran the shop were happy to tell them about anything they asked about, which was both a refreshing change and suggested a relative degree of normalcy.

Gertrude’s warnings about Elias made him a little leery of the eyeballs, though.

“Yes,” he said in response to the teasing smile he was getting from the first of the two proprietors. “I am very sure you can’t interest me in a haunted clown doll. It’s not a work-related expense. Artifact Storage is a completely different department than the Archives.”

“Oh, it’s not actually haunted,” the woman, who had said her name was Janet, assured him. “Or at least we don’t have any kind of provenance saying it is. It just looked so creepy we started calling it the Haunted Clown.”

Tim hummed as he eyed the doll. It looked way too similar to Joseph Grimaldi, save that it had black diamonds around its eyes instead of the red tears Grimaldi had been famed for, and he hated it very much. It could have been innocent…or it could have been the best lead they’d gotten on this whole damn trip, which was saying something, since it was the middle of March. He definitely wasn’t going to purchase it, though. “Where did you get it?”

“One of our regular sources offered it to us as a bonus when we bought that off of him.” Jojo, the other proprietor, pointed to a framed poster. “He said it gave him the heebie-jeebies and that if we didn’t take it, he was going to mail it to one of his relatives that he didn’t like. His partner said that would be a pretty long list.”

Tim looked—and felt a chill run down his spine as he recognized a full-size version of the same flyer he had found himself holding in front of the Royal Opera House less than two years ago. It was in color rather than black and white, and it didn’t have the Cyrillic writing all over it—he’d always thought that was more in the way of being notes than anything—but other than that, it was identical, down to the clown’s face peering up at him from just above the frame. His hand curled into a fist automatically. Punching it would probably not do anything other than cost him a lot of money, but God help him, he wanted to. Badly.

Gerry came up behind him and placed a hand on the flat of his back, gently supportive, but didn’t say anything, just let Tim take the lead. Tim leaned back into his partner’s hand and took a breath before turning back to Jojo. “Where did he get it, do you know? I’d, uh—this circus is kind of a specialty of mine.”

Janet and Jojo looked at one another, then seemed to come to some kind of decision. Janet was the one who spoke. “You would have to ask him. If he didn’t get it directly from the original owner, or from someone who would add to the value because they’d owned it, he doesn’t always include that in the details.”

“Do you think he’d talk to us?” Gerry’s voice was soft, but hopeful; even Tim couldn’t tell if that was put on or not. “Not like we’re cops or anything.”

Jojo tilted her head at him skeptically. Tim was about to cave and offer to call Gertrude to verify their story when she said, “Well, if you are, just go to Central and ask to speak to Detective Montoya first. But yes, I’m sure he’ll talk to you.” She reached behind the counter, pulled out a business card from a rack there, and handed it to Gerry.

Gerry studied the card, then tilted it towards Tim. The logo was simple, a black bird with a gleam in its eye, clutching a banner that read POTTER’S FIELD above an address and phone number. At the very bottom was small text that read Rook Stevens, proprietor.

“Rook Stevens?” Tim repeated, his mood lightening slightly. It couldn’t be that common of a name. “I think I know him.”

Gerry gave an indulgent sigh, and Tim could feel him roll his eyes. “Of course you do.” To Janet and Jojo, he added, “Tim knows everybody.”

“Then I’m definitely sure he’ll talk to you, Skippy.” Janet laughed. Tim, who knew that joke, laughed too. “Tell him we said hello. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him.”

“We will. Thank you so much, ma’am.” Tim shook both women’s hands, and the two of them left the shop.

Their rental car waited on the curb; Tim, who was more comfortable driving on the wrong side of the road than Gerry was, slid behind the wheel. “Want to navigate?”

“Yeah, sounds good.” Gerry fished the paper map of Los Angeles out of the side pocket and unfolded it. They tried to leave as little of a digital footprint as they could, so usually avoided GPS whenever possible. “What’s the address?”

The late afternoon was warmer than Tim was used to for the beginning of March, but not so hot that they needed the air conditioner. In fact, it was a perfect day to ride around in a convertible with the top down, so after confirming that Gerry would be able to hold onto the map if he did, Tim folded back the roof and donned a pair of sunglasses before stepping on the gas and pulling away from the curb.

“So when was the last time you were in Los Angeles?” Gerry asked as they hit a stretch of road that would take them straight for a while before he had to navigate further.

“Never.” Tim shot Gerry a grin at his disbelieving scoff. “No, really. I’ve been to the San Joaquin Valley, but that’s about six hours north of here. And, well, we flew into San Francisco, so we went to Fisherman’s Wharf while we were there. It’s like the Navy Pier, it’s one of those things you just have to do.”

“What were you in San Joaquin for, then?”

“Nonno owned a quarter share in a vineyard that grew Emerald Riesling. He’d heard reports that the glassy-winged sharpshooter was spreading to California and he got anxious, and his English was rocky, so he asked if we’d come along and help translate.”

Gerry hummed. “Good trip?”

Tim bit his lip, wondering how to answer that. Finally, he said, “Well, to start with, fully two thirds of the crop was lost. Nonno got into an argument, through Mum of course, with his partner about whether to sell it or try and rebuild. And in the middle of it, Danny saw a traveling carnival that was set up a couple farms over—guy was letting the fields lie fallow that year—and took it into his head to run away and join the circus.”

“Oh.” Gerry reached over and squeezed Tim’s thigh lightly. “You got him back, though.”

“Uh…actually, he convinced me to go with him,” Tim admitted. He couldn’t help but smile when Gerry laughed. His memories of Danny were still a bit of a minefield, but okay, this one was funny. “I was twelve, old enough to know better, but Danny was nine, and I knew that short of tying him up in the hotel room he was going to join that carnival one way or another, so I told him we would go together. He got bored less than a day later, which I’d figured he would—things didn’t hold his interest as long back then—but I pulled the big brother card and told him he had to give it a week before he gave it up.”

Gerry laughed harder. “How much trouble were you in?”

“Dad threatened to sell us both as midway prizes if we tried it again, but that was the worst of it. Probably would have been more if Mama and Zi’ Vincenzo hadn’t done the same thing when they were our age.”

“She talked him down?”

“No, Nonno did. To hear him talk, we were only gone a week, and we actually came back on our own instead of them having to chase us halfway across the country. Rook almost came with us, but, well, his mum came back right when we were getting ready to go and he didn’t want to leave her.”

“This would be the Rook Stevens we’re going to see? Take the next left,” Gerry added, finger tracing the length of their road as a sign flashed past.

Tim hit the blinker. “Yeah, that’s him. His mum was…I’m actually not sure what she did in the carnival, but she wasn’t there then. She’d gone off to get some cigarettes and hadn’t come back for a while. It was fine, the other carnies were looking after Rook, but I think he was kind of desperate for attention from kids his own age. Latched onto us.”

“How old was he?”

“Six or seven. He wasn’t sure. Tried to say he was ten, but I called him on that bullshit pretty quick. Knew his birthday was the first of April, though.”

Gerry shook his head, looking worried. “Little kids like that are probably at the most risk from the Fourteen. The Lonely especially, but any of them can get at them. You think he’s okay?”

Tim sighed. “I think he’s survived this long. I’m not taking bets on whether he’s come up on any of the Fears.”

A few more turns, and Tim spotted their destination—a shop in the middle of a street with a sign matching the banner on the business card. He found a place to park, put the top up, and made sure there was no one coming before climbing out of the car. He slid his sunglasses to the top of his head and looped his arm through Gerry’s. “Let’s go find out what kind of a place this is.”

The answer was obvious before they’d even walked through the door. Floor to ceiling windows displayed flashy toys, movie posters, cheap props, and a full-size soft-bodied sculpture that looked vaguely familiar. Gerry raised his eyebrow at it. “What the hell is that?”

“Not sure, but I think it’s from some sci-fi show or other.”

“If it comes to life, I’m setting it on fire.”

“Agreed. Let’s try to talk to Rook first, though.” Tim pushed the door open.

The bell jingled overhead. A round-faced man with thick, wavy silver hair and clothing that looked like it had been purchased from the same shop as Tim’s winter hat was going over something on a clipboard with the youngish-looking person standing behind the counter, and both looked up when Tim and Gerry entered. The older man smiled brightly. “Welcome to Potter’s Field. Let us know if there’s anything we can help you with.”

Tim matched the man’s smile—he hoped. “Hi! I really hope you can. I’m actually looking for Rook Stevens?”

Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when the man’s smile slipped, just a little. “Do you have an appointment with him?”

“No, just an old friend in town for a few days.” Tim stuck a hand in his pocket and hoped he looked sufficiently nonthreatening.

“Jojo and Janet sent us,” Gerry said, helpfully waving the business card they’d been given. “We’re actually looking into something, but then Tim said he knew Rook. Maybe. Can’t be that common of a name, right?”

The two workers exchanged glances, and the older man continued to press. Tim got the impression he’d taken something of a fatherly interest in Rook Stevens. “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Visited the San Joaquin area once, a while back.” Tim recalled something that might help. “Uh, if it helps, tell him it’s the Fuzzy Duckling guy.”

The man raised an eyebrow, but disappeared through a door that looked like the TARDIS. Gerry turned to Tim, looking like he was struggling not to laugh. “The Fuzzy Duckling guy?”

Tim had a feeling he was blushing. “It was Danny’s favorite book as a baby. I read it to him so many times that I had it memorized. Rook got his foot caught in the recoil from one of the midway games and I was trying to keep him still while they untangled him so he didn’t hurt himself. Must’ve recited that story six times, end to end, before he was free.”

A few moments later, the door opened, and the older man came through. Behind him was a long-limbed, lanky figure in an outfit not dissimilar to Gerry’s. Rook Stevens had been a cherubic urchin—or at least cherubic-looking—and had grown into an undeniably pretty man, with a roguish grin that reminded Tim painfully of Danny’s. His eyes were the same as he remembered, one green and the other hazel.

“Jesus, you got tall,” Tim blurted without thinking.

“Tall? Me?” Rook looked down at himself, then back up at Tim with a raised eyebrow. “How long’s it been since you saw me?”

Tim counted back. “About twenty years.”

“I was like seven years old. Did you think I was going to shrink?”

Gerry snorted. Tim grinned. “Same old Rook. I don’t know how well you remember me—”

“Well enough to remember the Fuzzy Duckling thing, but I don’t remember your name,” Rook interrupted. “Wait—Stoker. I remember that because I knew Dracula even back then and thought it was cool. Danny, right?”

“Tim. Danny was my younger brother.” Tim swallowed the lump in his throat. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Good to see you, too.” Rook smiled like he meant it. “Manny also said you were looking into something? That JoJa sent you?”

Tim nodded. “They had a poster and a ‘haunted’ clown doll?”

“Oh, yeah, fuck that thing. Creeped me right out. Dante swore it wanted to eat his face.” Rook grimaced. “That’s the only one I had, though, so if you’re looking to buy it—”

“No,” Tim and Gerry said in unison. The kid behind the counter dropped his pen.

Gerry squeezed Tim’s hand lightly and explained to Rook, “We mostly just need to know where you got it. And if you know where it’s from. It might be trying to kill us.”

Under any other circumstances, that would have been an extremely inadvisable thing to say. Tim had to admit, though, that it was probably the right thing here. Rook gave a tuneless whistle. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Not even recently. Okay, I think I have that upstairs. Tell you what, why don’t you two come up? I’ll get the papers out and call for takeout, and we can catch up while we’re at it. That okay with you, Manny?”

“I keep telling you I have this, mijo.” The older man, presumably Manny, gave Rook a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Go on. Nice to meet you boys.”

“Nice to meet you, too, sir.” Tim shook Manny’s hand before following Rook through the blue build-out.

The other side of the door led to a short hallway leading to the outside alongside a flight of stairs. As Rook started up them, he tossed casually over his shoulder, “By the way, you didn’t introduce your guy here.”

“Oh, sorry. Rook Stevens, Gerard Delano.” In the months they’d been traveling, Gerry had more and more taken to using his father’s surname when he introduced himself. He’d confessed to Tim, staring into a mirror in a hotel bathroom in North Augusta, South Carolina, that the reason he’d chosen not to start dyeing his hair again—yet, anyway—was that it was the same color he remembered his dad’s being, and he was more and more starting to feel like Eric Delano’s son instead of Mary Keay’s. Tim was ready to support him no matter what he chose. He was just glad to see him happy and healthy. “We met at work. Kind of. Gerry doesn’t get paid for it.”

“What can I say, I’m a nosy bastard,” Gerry deadpanned. Rook laughed.

The apartment above the shop proved to be an open, airy loft, with enormous double doors. As Rook tugged them open, he explained, “This used to be a dance studio. No fucking clue why these doors are so thick, but it pays off sometimes. And it’s an easy commute to the shop, so what the hell. Come on in, get comfortable. I’ll put in an order. You like Thai?”

Half an hour later they were seated around a black lacquered kitchen table, papers spread out across them. Rook looked a bit sheepish as he discarded another stack. “I swear it’s all here. It’s just that I sold the whole lot, so I didn’t think I’d need it until tax time rolled around, and then it doesn’t have to be in any special order. I just give it all to my accountant, he gives me a number, and I pay it.”

“It’s fine,” Tim said for at least the third time. “It’s like a scavenger hunt, you know? Trust me, we do this sort of thing all the time. It’s fine.”

“What, sift through five years of receipts and shipping orders looking for random circus memorabilia?”

“Sometimes it’s antique medical equipment,” Gerry said, turning over one of the pages. “Seriously, though. Archival assistant. Tim spends half his life telling papers to make sense.”

Rook snorted. “What do you do the other half of the time?”

“Gallivant around the world charming people out of information they don’t know they have.” Tim took a swig of coffee.

The door to the loft swung open almost, but not quite, silently. “I know you’re a bottomless pit, cuervo, but did you mean to order this much food?”

Tim looked up to see a handsome man who would probably not look dissimilar to Manny when he got older, shrugging out of a brown jacket and clutching an outsize takeaway bag. He checked briefly at the sight of Tim and Gerry, but Rook was already greeting him with a bright smile. “Hey, babe. Good shift?”

“As good as they get.” The man resumed taking off his jacket and hung it on a hook, then bent to pick up the jacket Rook had casually tossed aside and hung it up as well. “You didn’t mention company when you asked me to pick up the Thai on my way home.”

“Yeah, forgot, sorry.” Rook shrugged, but Tim guessed he was completely unapologetic. “Tim’s an old friend of mine.”

“Old friend, huh?” The man’s attitude was casual, his smile never wavered. Still, under any other circumstances, Tim would have thought he was being measured up as a rival, a past lover come back to snatch Rook up again. But the holster and badge weren’t hard to miss, even as the man locked them up, and Rook bore all the hallmarks of a reformed thief, which meant that instead he was being judged by a cop as a former associate.

“Hutchinson’s Carnival,” he said, getting to his feet politely as the man came closer. “My brother and I ran away to join it and hung around with Rook for the week we were there. I’m Tim Stoker.”

The man relaxed infinitesimally—just enough for Tim to know that, yes, that was what he’d worried about. “Dante Montoya. It’s good to meet you.”

Gerry stood politely and introduced himself as well, and Dante shook hands with both of them. “What’s all this?” he asked, looking down at the papers spread across the kitchen table.

“You remember that box of circus stuff I got last fall?” Rook tilted his head back for a kiss. Dante hummed in evident affirmation. “These guys are looking for where I got it. It might be trying to kill them.”

Dante lifted an eyebrow at them. “The circus memorabilia, or the doll specifically?”

“No, the circus itself.” Tim thought about giving them everything, then decided that would be too much and dialed it back a little. “I work for the Magnus Institute in London. We investigate the paranormal and the supernatural and that kind of thing. My boss has me working a really big project involving the Circus of the Other—there are all kinds of spooky rumors about it—and honestly, that poster you sold to JoJa is the best lead we’ve had yet. I’m hoping that if we can trace where you got it from, we can get more information. Probably belonged to an expert, maybe even a former worker.”

Dante slid into the seat next to Rook and began helping them sift through the papers. “Let me help you get through this so we can eat.”

It was probably another twenty minutes before Dante triumphantly held up a receipt for six circus posters, a lion tamer’s whip, three riding girl costumes, a ringmaster’s top hat, two elephants (wooden), one tiger (cloth), and one Pierrot (cloth and porcelain, antique). Rook frowned at that last notation. “I don’t remember a parrot.”

“Pierrot. That’s your creepy clown doll,” Tim told him. “It’s an old tradition from the Commedia dell’Arte. The Pierrot was the straight man to the Harlequin, kind of stern and trying to temper Harlequin’s more lighthearted antics.”

“So like Abbott and Costello, then?” Rook handed Tim the papers that had been clipped to the receipt.

“No, they’re more the modern take on them. The Pierrot was sort of the precurser to the whiteface clown—Joseph Grimaldi developed that in the 1800s and introduced the Clown, who was a little harsher and meaner than Pierrot, as a foil to Harlequin. And since Pierrot and Harlequin were more stage characters and had spoken dialogue, when you went over to the circus and were pantomiming for a crowd rather than doing verbal jokes, you got the whiteface and the auguste, or the red clown. Bud Abbott would’ve been the whiteface and Lou Costello would’ve been the auguste.”

Rook raised an eyebrow. “How do you know all that? I was a carnie and I didn’t know all that.”

“I’ve…done a lot of research into clowns.” Tim glanced at Gerry, wondering how much to say. Finally, he admitted, “I know this is going to sound stupid, but a clown killed my brother.”

Something flickered through Dante’s eyes, just for a moment. Rook winced. “Dude, I’m sorry. Did they catch the one who did it?”

“He’s dead,” Tim said, which was true. Probably. Mostly. He really didn’t feel like getting into all that. Instead, he picked up the sheaf of paper with the detailed descriptions of the objects that had been in the lot.

Three of the posters had been from Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, and were—surprisingly—valued less than the others; Tim guessed because they were more common; the other three were from the Russian Circus, a turn of the century Italian circus he didn’t recognize the name of, and of course the Circus of the Other. The whip and the cloth tiger had also come from the Circus of the Other, which made him a bit nervous, especially since Rook had mentioned he’d already sold everything in the lot. The remaining items were all Italian, and the Pierrot dated back to the eighteenth century.

“Seems like this guy was more interested in Italian circuses than Russian ones,” Gerry said, picking up one of the pages Tim had set aside.

Tim turned to the last page and shook his head. “The Italian ones were just easier for him to get to. Look.” He pointed at the address printed next to the seller’s name. “That’s in Sicily.”

“Shit, yeah, I forgot.” Rook snapped his fingers. “He was just visiting for a couple of weeks—with his friend, he said—and I remember the other guy didn’t speak much English, so he did all the talking. He asked if I ever bought circus stuff, and when I said yeah, he offered me the whole lot blind. Got a good deal on it, honestly. He shipped it to me about a month later.”

“A dead end, I suppose,” Dante said softly. “Going to be hard to talk to him, even if you can get to Italy.”

“I speak Italian.” Tim spoke absently as he reached into his pocket for his notebook and pen. Carefully, he copied out the name, address, and telephone number, then clipped the papers back together and handed them to Rook. “Thanks. That’s a big help, actually. From his notes, he definitely knows something about the circus we’re looking into, so it’s still the best lead we’ve had yet.”

Dante looked surprised. “You’re actually going to Italy?”

“It’s not that much more expensive than flying back to London would be,” Gerry pointed out. “And honestly, once we’re there, it’ll be cheaper getting back to London. Besides, it’s work-related.”

Rook changed the subject as they cleared off the table, and they spent a couple of hours catching up on the past twenty years over Thai and beers. Eventually they parted with a promise to meet for coffee and breakfast at a nearby diner the next morning before Dante went on shift, and Tim and Gerry headed for their car and the hotel they were staying in. Fortunately it wasn’t too far away, relatively speaking, but it still took almost a half hour in the traffic that permeated Los Angeles even well after dark.

Gerry waited until they were pulling up to their parking spot before he said, “So, I take it we’re off to Italy after breakfast.”

Tim turned off the car. “Maybe. I want to call Gertrude first.”

“Call her? She’ll think we’ve stumbled into the Unknowing itself and you’re asking for her help in stopping me from becoming part of it.”

“I know, but…” Tim struggled with how to explain it. “She trusts us. Everything up to this point has been me telling her where we’re going next and just…going. But Italy…fuck, even if the Venetian Carnival is over, that’s still going to be a tricky one. And you were telling me about that woman you met who’d been Marked by the Lonely in Genua a few years back. Besides, technically this has all been based in the United States. If we’re going to be traveling around Europe for any length of time, I’d rather clear it with her first.”

“Good point,” Gerry admitted. “That might put us off another day, though.”

Tim shook his head as he opened the door of the car. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Wait, you’re calling her now? Tim!” Gerry cursed under his breath as he struggled out of his seatbelt and got out of the car, but he didn’t continue the argument until they had reached their room. “It’s the middle of the night. I know she keeps odd hours, but if you wake her up at midnight she will think it’s an emergency, and she’ll skin you alive.”

“It’s six in the morning, London time,” Tim pointed out. “She gets up by five. And we’re going to need to check out in the morning before breakfast if we’re leaving tomorrow. I just…don’t want to wait on this one. It feels important. It honestly feels like the best lead we’ve had so far.”

“Good point,” Gerry admitted. “Okay, go ahead.”

Tim sat down at the tiny table, pulled out his cell phone, and added the additional steps to call an international number. He waited while the call connected, twisting his ring idly around his finger. He wasn’t surprised when Gertrude answered on the second ring, sounding as alert and aware as ever. “Tim. What is it?”

“Think we’ve got a lead, boss,” Tim said seriously. “Best one we’ve had yet. We found a guy who knew a guy who bought a lot of circus stuff from a guy in Italy. We were going to go out there and have a look around, but…I wanted to clear it with you first.”

Gertrude was silent for a long moment. “Tell me what you have.”

Tim did. He trusted that Gertrude wouldn’t ask him for that information if she thought there was a risk of being overheard, or it getting out dangerously, so he laid everything out for her—the poster, the memorabilia, the address in Sicily—even though he didn’t feel the slight prickle of static he was accustomed to on the rare occasions when she attempted to compel someone. He could hear the faint clicking of keyboard keys in the background, but otherwise, she was quiet as he explained.

“How familiar are you with the area of the address?” she asked when he was finished.

“Pretty familiar. The family vineyard is only about twenty or thirty miles away, and I spent a good few summers there. And I know circuses used to come through there at least occasionally, since my mum and her brother ran away with one once.” Tim drummed his fingers lightly on the tabletop. “It’s not anywhere near Venice, so even if there were lingering issues from the Carnival, we should be well away from them.”

“If you do need to go to Venice, take precautions. And do keep an eye out for any other of the Fourteen you notice stirring. Remember that a higher concentration of encounters in a short period of time is likely to be indicative of a gathering power, which is why you’ve also seen more Dark statements.”

“You think they’re going to go first?”

“It’s possible. No more than that. If I hear anything, I will reach out to you, as previously promised. For now…I’m keeping an eye on a few things. I need you to stay on the trail of the Dance.”

“That reminds me—should we be looking into ballet companies, too? I figure that when you say ‘dance’ you’re not talking about ballroom.”

There was another pause from Gertrude. Tim flexed his hand slowly to alleviate the swelling he’d begun feeling sometimes after periods of inactivity—it must be something he’d had trouble with for years, but the only reason he noticed it was the way his ring sometimes felt randomly too tight—as he waited for her to answer. At last, she spoke in a careful sort of voice. “I’m not sure how much information you think I have about something literally called the ‘Unknowing’, Tim.”

“I thought that was about making the world unknown, but I take your point,” Tim allowed. “Anyway, if you’re fine with us going to Italy—which I assume you are, even though you haven’t said so outright—depending on how much time we have before our flight out tomorrow, maybe we’ll stop by the ballet company in town and see if there’s been anything odd going on around there.”

“Your flight leaves at five-thirty P.M. Pacific standard time tomorrow, and I’ve booked you into a bed and breakfast in Messina for the day after,” Gertrude replied. “The details should be in your email shortly. If I am the one asking for reimbursement on this one, it will seem less like you’re using Institute funds to visit your grandfather.”

Tim grinned. The old bat thought of everything. “Thanks. I’ll send you a follow-up written report here in a few minutes as usual.”

“Please do. And Tim—do take care of yourselves.” Gertrude’s voice, unaccustomedly, softened slightly. “I should hate for anything to happen to you.”

“We will,” Tim said seriously. He recognized what a big deal it was that she even brought that up. “You, too, okay? We don’t want anything to happen to you either.”

“You have my word. I’m old enough that I’ve developed the habit of living, and I’m too set in my ways to give it up now,” Gertrude said with dry humor. “I’ll be looking for your report. Let me know when you’ve arrived in Messina.”

She hung up without further pleasantries.

Tim set down his phone and reached for his laptop, smiling over at Gerry. “We’re good to go. She’s already made all the arrangements for us. We leave tomorrow night.”

Gerry nodded. “What was that about dancing?”

“The Unknowing. Another name for it is the Dance. She didn’t tell you that?”

“Never came up, I guess. So yeah, I guess we’re stopping by the Los Angeles Ballet tomorrow?”

“And the opera, I think, if we can get both in. I just want to see.” Tim pulled up his email to see the tickets waiting for them. “Meanwhile, let me get this report to her, and then we can get some sleep. I think we’re going to need it.”

[jonnysinsectcatalogue]

Long-Tailed Giant Ichneumonid Wasp - Megarhyssa macrurus

After finding this specie just yesterday, uploading Tuesday's post now feels like the appetizer before today's main course: one of the largest Ichneumon Wasps you'll find in North America! This insect is so iconic and recognizable that it actually has a common name! That name perfectly encapsulates this insect's features: its giant size (easily dwarfing that of other Ichneumonids) and its long tail, represented by a long, flexible abdomen tipped with an elongated ovipositor. Have a glance at Picture 5 and behold the length; the ovipositor is easily twice the length of the insect's body. Despite the formidable appearance of a potential angry Wasp wielding what appears to be sword for a stinger, she is 100% harmless to humans. She has no bite and her ovipositor is not designed for defense. Even if the latter was, it's fair too unwieldly to use in an instant. She would have to telegraph her sting by contorting into the posture in Pictures 1, 2, 4 and 7. The worst she can do is charge at you in an attempt to frighten you away should you step too close to her tree (as I found out during my observation).

When observing Giant Ichneumonids such as this one, pay close attention to their wings, abdomens and their faces. All those features are necessary for an accurate identification. For one example, male Wasps within Megarhyssa tend to be smaller, have less complex abdomens and lack an ovipositor, but are relatively large compared to other Ichneumonids. Secondly, of the 4 Giant Ichneumon species that call North America home, the female of this specie - M. macrurus - has the potential to be mistaken for Greene's Giant Ichneumonid Wasp (M. greenei), especially since the latter's subspecies have tremendous variability depending on their latitude. To distinguish between the two, the Long-Tailed Giant has more regions in its wings with pigmentation (as opposed to simply one large area), its head has distinct vertical stripes (Picture 9 provides a good look at what to expect), and the ovipositor is a very long one (M. greenei's ovipositor is supposedly 1.5 times the body length). For the latter, you'll need to eyeball it unless you intend to capture and measure the specimen yourself. Of course, I prefer to observe and photograph. Speaking of which, what is today's specimen doing on this tree? What is she looking for?

As I documented her, this Wasp monitored this tree for nearly 2 hours in search of the perfect spots to drill into the tree's trunk. Her searching activity on this tree implies that portions of the wood are afflicted with disease or have begun to decay. Those holes in the bark may indicate some trouble, but those holes were not made by her actions, nor the insects she's looking for. She's searching for the developing larvae of the Pigeon Horntail, (ironically) another harmless giant Hymenopteran that drills into old, decaying wood with its own ovipositor. Just like other Ichneumon Wasps, the giant's offspring are parasitic, feeding off of creatures that have been paralyzed by the mother's sting. When coiled up in the upright position, the Wasp unsheathes her great ovipositor and positions it and herself to drill downward through the wood to find larvae that she can place her eggs on. I believe her to be successful a few times here as I noticed the underside of her abdominal tip was pulsing rhythmically while the ovipositor remained steady. What's astounding is the process by which larvae are located. You see, the Pigeon Horntail merely needs to place eggs inside the tree and then go to the next tree. The Giant Ichneumon needs to seek out a Horntail larvae and place its eggs on it without even seeing it! The mother Wasp goes purely based on scent cues from her antennae and then feeling her way through the wood using her ovipositor.

Pictures were taken on August 24, 2023 with a Google Pixel 4.

[honeytae]

Hi!! Idk if you’re taking requests or not, but I was hoping I could request something along the lines of where you’re in love with your best friend, taehyung, but he doesn’t know and he’s getting married soon. you don’t tell him how you feel until the night of his wedding when you’re a bit tipsy from drinking your feelings away. you can decide the ending! thank you in advance if you end up writing this! hope you’re doing well and staying safe. Xx

hi darling! i’m so sorry this took so long for me to write. i couldn’t get it to a point where i was satisfied with it for a really long time, i still don’t feel that good about it honestly but hopefully it’s okay for you!!! i tried to make it angsty (yikes) so hopefully it’s not horrible lmao

tags: @ahgasearmyfan, @hoseokayy, @the1921-monsters

genre: angst

word count: 1.6k

warnings: um so much heartbreak, oc is a little (very) in denial about the situation and comes off a little toxic tbh, requited love but nothing they can do about it now, mentions of tae going into a panic attack

You couldn’t handle it.

You couldn’t handle the ‘congratulations to the happy couple,’ nor the Mr. and Mrs. Kim sign practically floating over their heads. You couldn’t handle the copious bouquets and all the preparations that went into this.

And you felt like a complete asshole about it.

Which is precisely why you decided to prematurely exit the event, doing yourself and everyone else a favor by leaving for the night to go sulk in your hotel by your lonesome.

The elevator ride up to your floor was miserable, your own battles within your mind coupled with the fact that your floor was the top one, making the ride excruciatingly long on top of everything else.

Rustling with the hotel key in your bag seemed to take forever as well, finally barging into your half unpacked space with a sigh. You quickly shut the door behind you, hoping you’d been able to sneak away from the hotel lobby without any guests noticing.

Shuffling further into the room, you sat on the edge of the king bed in the center of the room, placing your head in your hands at the mere prospect of this weekend.

Taehyung was getting married. Kim Taehyung, your best friend, the one person you’d been pining for since middle school, would be legally bound to someone else in less than twenty four hours.

Maybe you just shouldn’t have come. Despite sending red flags to Tae, you couldn’t think of a better solution than fleeing at this exact moment. Why did you think you could handle this?

Two knocks against the locked door had your head raising from its resting place, cursing under your breath at someone coming after you.

You didn’t feel well. That would be your excuse.

“Hey, you okay?” Immediately upon opening the door, Taehyung spoke the question out into the air, dark eyebrows knit in concern and kind eyes imploring yours for an answer.

“Hi. I’m fine, just a little tired, Tae.” You pressed your lips together in a hopefully believable smile, the man frowning before nodding at you.

“Me too. Can I come in?” He asked, the question completely innocent however making your heart rate a bit faster at the what if. What if things had gone differently? What if it was still a possibility for things to escalate between you two?

Cut it out. He’s about to be a married man.

You raised your eyebrows at him for a moment, then stepped back to allow him in, putting all your concentration on shutting the wood for a moment as you took a steadying breath.

“What about your party?” You wondered aloud, the man humming as he took a seat on your fully made bed.

“I’m tired of the parties. They’re exhausting.” He chuckled, covering his face with his hands as he reclined back on your bed.

Your heart skipped another beat at the vision, his tight pants leaving little to the imagination and buttons from his dress shirt stretched to new limits with his strained position. Diverting your eyes, you walked over to the desk chair in the corner of your room, reaching for a water bottle out of your mini fridge. Get a fucking grip.

Tossing one over to the bed beside Taehyung, you sat down in the plush seat, grateful that the man didn’t seem to notice your distance from him as you glanced out the window.

Until….

“Are you really okay? I feel like you’ve been avoiding me lately.”

At his sudden words, you froze, gripping your water a bit tighter as you brought your eyes back to his face. He was closer now than before, having scooted to the edge of your bed to lean toward you, eyes showing concern for you as you shuffled in your seat.

Taehyung was never one to beat around the bush, and at times like this, you really wish he would just brush some things under the rug as easy as you could.

“I’m good, Tae. Just have a lot going on, I guess. I’m sorry I made you feel like that.” You said, hoping to clear the air and dismiss the topic as soon as you possibly could. The man’s stare wasn’t helping your state any.

“No apologies. Just wanted to check in on you.” He sighed, seemingly disappointed with your lack of response before a hideous painting across the room caught his eye.

“What the fuck is that?” He griped, making you chuckle as he sat up to lean toward the art piece, squinting with his lip curled in amusement.

“It’s not so bad.” You shrugged, smirking when he turned back to you in bewilderment. Realizing you were teasing him, his eyes went back to normal size, a smile meeting his own lips at the return of your familiar banter.

“How can you sleep in a room with that shit? I feel like asking for a refund.” He shook his head, making you laugh before taking a swig from your water.

“Somehow I manage.” You replied, twisting the cap back on the bottle with a sigh.

It’s times like these that you feel as though nothing is wrong. Times like these that transport you back to periods of your life when Taehyung was just a call away, and you thought maybe, just maybe, you two had a chance. But that was over now. Those days were no more.

Because Taehyung informing you about a blind date then turned into him in a full blown relationship, a serious one at that, and soon enough they were taking big steps such as meeting the parents, moving in together, and yes, getting engaged.

Your friends had been just as shocked as you were, pitying you with deep sympathetic looks over Taehyungs shoulder as you hugged him in confused congratulations. It had all happened so fast...how did you manage to lose him forever?

Waking up the next day, you felt a particular heaviness on your chest. It was the day before the wedding, the rehearsal dinner turned into an entire day of partying for their guests. A celebratory day, if anything.

But waking up and getting all dolled up for this occasion was the absolute last thing you wanted to do, today or ever. You had always thought that you’d have much more of a starring role in Kim Taehyung’s life. Shaking your head to dismiss those kinds of thoughts, you cursed as you left your hotel room, wondering how the hell you’d be getting through this day.

Four martinis. Four martinis was how you’d be getting through today. The bartender had become one of your closest acquaintances over the past few hours, eyeballing you silently as he poured you yet another cocktail, your demands obvious that you were not drinking out of celebration.

Sitting at the bar, you contemplated everything. From the time you’d met Tae, you had been so sure that you two completed each other. Were you that naive? And fuck, why are you still thinking about this now? It’s over. You and Tae will never be.

Nearly jumping off your stool at a hand suddenly clapping your back, you shifted your gaze over to the arm belonging to Jungkook, one of Taehyung’s youngest yet wisest friends.

“You’re sulking.” He said plainly, dark eyes tracing over your faded features, briefly examining the drink in your hand before shooting the bartender a knowing look.

“You shouldn’t be out here.” You sighed, nearly breaking into a sob when his hand laid over yours, fingers fitting between your own in a comforting gesture. With one glance at the man, you gained all the information you didn’t want.

He knew.

You wondered how long he’d known. Jungkook, being the quiet and relatively introverted person he was, was an observer. He knew everything about everyone it seemed, by not speaking to them at all. He noticed everything.

You just hoped he didn’t notice the way your eyes started blinking rapidly, and that he’d instead just go back into the party without another word.

“Neither should you.” He replied to you, his tone holding nothing but concern as he tried to catch your eyes.

You just couldn’t hold it in.

“Well maybe if I wasn’t in love with him I’d be having a better time.” You mumbled, leaning your head down on your hands, elbows pressed to the tops of your thighs, sad and tired as Jungkook froze beside you.

Unbeknownst to you, a concerned Taehyung had also come to find you, stumbling upon that very scene as Jungkook tried to console you.

Meeting eyes with his older friend, Jungkook’s mouth gaped open for a moment, opening and closing like a fish out of water as you cluelessly rambled under your breath about how stupid you were to ever let yourself come here.

With a shaky exhale, Taehyung silently began to put it all together. The way you’d been working constantly lately, picking up every shift you could to decline his repeated attempts at getting together with you, the way you’d ran off last night and brushed it off as you being too tired. It was all adding up.

You were struggling with this as much as he was. Maybe more.

But what Taehyung could do about this years ago was no longer an option, his hands shaking at his sides as he spun on his heel and walked out of the lobby. He could briefly hear Jungkook call for him but ignored it, breathing heavily as he rounded one of the hallways leading to the restrooms.

Unshed tears misted over his eyes as he hugged a corner of the wall, feeling rather unsteady as he leaned his forehead against the cool surface. The burning pain in his chest had him sinking down to the floor in an instant, sobs wracking his shoulders with heightening emotions rising in his throat.

You’d finally given him the green light. And it was too fucking late.

[hartigays]

rafe seeing barry’s scars for the first time🥺

warning: mature themes ahead kiddos! (descriptions of violence, mild threats of violence, sexual themes, ur usual rafebarry bullshit)

barry always keeps his shirt on during sex.

rafe really doesn’t get it - he can feel the hard lines of barry’s body through his clothes every time they touch. he knows that what’s underneath is something… something like a feast just waiting to be devoured.

he doesn’t understand why it’s being hid beneath an endless supply of fabric, because rafe is pretty sure whatever barry has going on under there is going to make rafe’s mouth water either way.

tonight, when barry rolls off of him with a grunt, rafe eyes the way barry’s sweat-soaked shirt clings to the toned muscles of his chest, to the soft yet sculpted lines of his stomach. rafe is pretty sure he can see the vague outline of barry’s happy trail, and his fingers itch to just hike the fabric up to barry’s neck so he can see and touch and taste.

rafe doesn’t like things being kept from him. it bothers him.

“you’re really good at that,” rafe starts, slowly. through the darkness of the room, he sees barry glance at him out of the corner of his eye. “you know what would make it better? if you’d take this goddamn thing off.”

rafe plucks at the fabric of barry’s shirt, wrinkling his nose, and barry swats his hand away immediately, almost as if on instinct.

“quit that shit, will you?”

“i just started,” rafe points out, moving his hand back to trace his fingers across the hem of barry’s shirt. “i don’t get why- ”

“don’t bother askin’, country club. you ain’t gonna get what you want,” barry cuts rafe off, then slides out of bed and leaves the room.

rafe can hear the bathroom door open and shut a moment later.

okay, so maybe his approach to getting barry’s shirt off was a little… well, rafe thought it was okay enough. but apparently barry disagrees.

the shirt seems to be staying on. for now.

when barry returns from the bathroom, his face is freshly washed and he has a different shirt on. it’s rattier, but still smells like barry. rafe catches the scent of it as barry crawls back into bed, resisting the urge to just reach out a take what he wants.

which is barry’s shirt, off. rafe would much rather drape the fabric over himself, smother himself in barry, and have the freedom to explore all the exposed skin that has been kept from him.

“you’re keeping things from me,” rafe says into the quiet of the room, his voice careful - steady and controlled. “i don’t like things being kept from me, barry. i don’t like lies.”

rafe can practically feel barry roll his eyes. “the fuck am i lyin’ to you about, baby boy? you ain’t seen my tits so now i’m a liar?”

“i haven’t seen your anything because you’re hiding it from me. and you won’t tell me why,” rafe replies, finally reaching out a hand and taking a fistful of barry’s shirt.

he doesn’t do anything with it besides hold it, but it’s obvious what he wants to do. “i just want to see. just once, at least.”

rafe is pretty sure just once will never in a million years be enough for him, but he doesn’t say that part out loud. it’s like barry hears it anyway, with the way he’s eyeballing him right now, gaze flickering between the fistful of his shirt in rafe’s hand and rafe’s eyes.

“‘m pretty sure you don’t wanna see any of this shit, country club. it ain’t pretty.”

there’s definitely insecurity laced through barry’s words, and rafe wants to shake it right out of him. all of it.

“why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” rafe huffs, wanting to smack barry for being so goddamn stubborn.

it takes another moment, but barry finally concedes. it surprises rafe - he hadn’t thought it’d be so easy to get barry to cave.

but that seems to happen more and more these days, and barry always has this look in his eye when it happens. something that looks a lot like trust. it always sends these delighted little shivers racing down rafe’s spine.

barry lays down on his back, reclining slowly, tucking his hands behind his head. he lets rafe scoot his shirt up, inch by inch, exposing marks and scars as far as the eye can see.

they’re clearly the source of barry’s insecurity, based on the way barry is avoiding rafe’s eyes now, and rafe wants to map out each and every one with his fingers, etching them into his memory like a brand.

rafe stretches out on his side, propping himself up on his elbow, smoothing his hand over the happy trail he knew barry was hiding. when he scratches his nails through the wiry hair, barry shivers.

he feels like he’s conquering undiscovered territory. rafe wonders, fleetingly, if there’s ever been anyone else. any other person who’s been permitted to see the full masterpiece that is barry the fucking coke dealer.

a flare of possessiveness sparks in rafe’s belly, and his physical response is to squeeze one of barry’s pecs in his hands, happily noting the way barry’s eyes flutter shut and his abdominal muscles jump.

“all of it,” rafe says suddenly, tracing an uneven scar that nearly runs the entire length of barry’s sternum. “show me all of it.”

barry’s eyes lock with rafe’s, and he’s never looked more uncertain. rafe just gives barry a challenging look, arching his brows.

finally, barry sits up with a sigh, his back to rafe, and rafe scoots his own body up the bed to prop himself against the pillows. barry tugs his shirt fully over his head, and rafe finally gets what he wants.

barry’s back holds the worst of it, flesh marred and littered with jagged scars, all varying in size.

“‘s always when your damn back is turned,” barry comments, turning his head to look back at rafe, noticing the way rafe is staring at him. “that’s when they get you.”

“they?” rafe asks, his eyes still fixed on barry’s back, the tips of his fingers reaching out and ghosting over a long, rope-like scar twisting its way down barry’s left flank.

“the enemy.”

rafe swallows as he thinks about it, about the violence and the pain and the blood and guts and gore that war brings, a curl of desire settling in the marrow of his bones.

for a moment, he wishes he could’ve traded places with barry during that point in his life. maybe so he could take away some of this insecurity that’s all tangled up inside of barry and make it his own - or maybe just so he could feel the thrill of a fresh kill, all the while adding scars of his own to his collection. little reminders - the forever kind.

most people wouldn’t feel jealous of barry’s experiences. but, rafe cameron isn’t most people.

“tell me about them,” rafe demands, though his voice is gentle. almost soothing, in a way. “what’s this one from?”

rafe scoots closer, tracing a short, thick scar that’s evenly lined up with barry’s shoulder blade.

“ka-bar,” barry says without even turning to look, able to tell just from rafe’s touch alone which scar he’s talking about. “little bastard got me durin’ a raid. never heard him coming til’ he was right fuckin’ behind me.”

rafe’s thumb smooths over the mark, his eyes fixed on it, entranced. he imagines the knife digging into muscle, blood pooling and spilling down barry’s back. his stomach twists, and he can’t decide if it’s a good twist, or bad.

maybe some sort of fucked up combination of both.

“and this one?” rafe asks, running his hand over the long scar winding its way down barry’s flank.

“bootcamp,” barry tells him, his voice a little breathless. “got tangled up in one of them damn climbing walls, y’know, with the ropes ‘n shit? rope burn’s a bitch.”

“that’s an understatement,” rafe mutters, tracing the scar with mild fascination. “rope burn did all this?”

barry shrugs, and rafe can feel the motion of his muscles shifting and resettling beneath his palm. “maybe dug in enough to cut. can’t remember too much about it, some dickhead kicked my damn head so hard i blacked out.”

you don’t have murderous tendencies, you don’t have murderous tendencies, rafe thinks to himself, breathing steadily through his nose to suppress the urge to ask barry what the stupid fuck’s name was so he can look him up, go to his house, and slit his throat in his sleep.

instead, rafe traces his fingers along a round, almost neat scar that sits close to barry’s spine.

“what about this little guy?”

barry snorts. “that little guy? gsw, baby boy. any closer to my spine and i’d be in a chair right ‘bout now. think you’da still fucked me if i came back on wheels, country club?”

rafe knows he would have. he’ll fall together with barry no matter what. they’re bound to it, rafe has decided. something as simple as a wheelchair wouldn’t be enough to block fate. or destiny.

whatever, it doesn’t matter. rafe just sits up, shuffling around until he’s straddling barry’s lap, facing him head-on. he pushes barry’s shoulders until he flops back against the pillows, looking up at rafe almost in earnest. like his whole world hinges on rafe’s response to his question.

instead of giving him one, rafe shifts down barry’s body, angling himself so he’s hovering over barry’s stomach. he kisses his way up barry’s happy trail, cataloguing every soft sigh and whimper so he can replay them all later, like a little symphony in his mind.

“and here? what happened?” rafe asks quietly, his lips ghosting over a jagged, star-shaped scar on barry’s hipbone.

“soviet slug, no rifling. bye-bye bikinis,” barry says in a strange voice, cracking a small smile that rafe can just barely see through the darkness of the room when he looks up.

rafe just stares. “what the fuck are you talking about?”

“you- rafe, c’mon, don’t tell me you never seen the winter soldier,” barry groans, and rafe just blinks at him, unimpressed. “shit, you really ain’t seen a damn thing except fight club, huh?”

leave it to barry to ruin the fucking moment. rafe pulls his lips away from the scar, finding a smooth patch of skin nearby to sink his teeth into instead.

barry’s whole body jerks in surprise, but then his fingers tangle in rafe’s hair, holding him in place a little desperately.

rafe releases the skin from between his teeth, sucking at it until it’s nothing but a pretty pattern of teeth marks and bruised skin.

he has the sudden urge to bruise every inch of unmarked skin, his own personal way of claiming his prize. rafe slithers up barry’s body like a snake, coming to a stop at his chest so he can suck pretty little marks anywhere he sees fit. which is everywhere, including a mottled scar that rests just below one of barry’s pecs.

that one has barry keening in surprise, but he doesn’t shove rafe away. instead, he grabs rafe’s chin and lifts his head, forcing their eyes to meet. barry’s pupils are blown wide, and he’s looking at rafe with something that’s akin to fascination.

“you really ain’t got a problem with- with this shit?” barry asks, his voice tight with emotion.

rafe wants to mock him, just for a second, but he won’t risk losing this masterpiece. not now, not after he’s finally laid his claim. knowing barry is his to keep, well. it’s enough to deter him, and fill him with something that feels a lot like want.

“it’s- you’re perfect,” rafe says, his voice just shy of breathless. “like someone threw paint on the mona lisa and finally fucking made it better.”

barry, for a long moment, just stares at rafe, his chest rising and falling rapidly. then he tightens his grip on rafe’s jaw and pulls, causing rafe to lose his balance and topple down on top of barry, their faces nearly colliding.

and then they’re kissing, which is nothing new but it feels new. because so much of barry is new to rafe right now, and he’s starting to lose himself in it.

barry kisses rafe like he’s starving for it, like he’s a desert flower in desperate need of a light rain. rafe can’t breathe and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t need air - he’ll just steal barry’s.

just when he thinks he’s going to pass out, barry pulls back, his thumb stroking along the line of rafe’s cheekbone as he looks up at him.

he gives rafe a look that’s almost adoring, and says, “call me the fuckin’ mona lisa one more time and imma give you some scars of your own, princess.”

rafe just gives barry a wolfish grin, dipping down to nip at his bottom lip, then asks barry one simple, blessedly short question.

“promise?”

[simtanico]

Hi! I don't know if this is an annoying/difficult question, sorry if it is, but do you have any advice at all for modelling sims based off real people? Your sims are SO crazy good. When I try to make them they end up looking... eh... Vaguely like the person? But there's a huge gap between that and some kind of 'spark' some simmers seem to manage to capture.

Hello! Definitely not annoying. Difficult, as in how difficult it is to answer? Maybe. I'm gonna go off on a couple of tangents. But I'm gonna try my best to explain the process. Which isn't really much of one sorry.

There's a handful of tutorials and tips out there regarding reference photos and like... proportions and all that so I won't cover that.

I use that as a general guide of course, but mostly I just save some photos of the person at various angles and focus on one feature or two at a time. Literally going back and forth between reference photo and my game. I think if you try to get everything at the same time, it really makes it easy to get frustrated with whatever your sim looks like at the moment. Making sims in general is a combination of a LOT of things depending on your style.

I can point out ALL the flaws with my sims based on real people. In my experience, it’s about getting the defining features of a person close enough to the real thing so that it resembles them. I don't think you need a complete copy to get the point across, however i do think some people and features are harder to emulate than others. I've been working on some sims for YEARS, and they still don't work out lol

and take a look at this progression on my sim based on Z4ne H0ltz starting back in 2015!

that first screenshot:

Personally, I get a little lost if I work on a sim too much all at once. I find some time away makes me less tired and frustrated. Just pace yourself :)

Also if you need any help, shoot me a message here or on discord. I promise I don't judge or anything.. it's sims who cares lol

TO START...

I suggest starting with the head and its shape. Starting off with a game-generated sim, the first slider I get to is head width. It's usually too dang wide for my tastes. And then adjusting the general position of the the features. You can always change things later, so you don't have to know exactly what you're going to do, but as I've mentioned before, sculpting sims up in CAS is just practice with sliders! Also in the long run, you may want to use Pu+Chi House's Smooth Face Normals slider! I attempt to explain and show what it does here. I've uploaded the slider here: https://simfileshare.net/download/984204/

This is gonna be a doozy sorry in advance if the read more doesn't work

SLIDERS SLIDERS SLIDERS

Big sliders like Pu+Chi House’s face shape sliders dramatically change the face shape, and it could save you a lot of time! I highly suggest using these to get rid of the weird large jaw sims can get.

Play with different sliders and how they interact with one another! Example: jaw width and Cheek Fullness affect the same area. if you need a wide jaw and don’t want cheek distortion, you can use cheek fullness, lower the jaw width slider and then edit the cheekbones from there

 Knowing what sliders move what and how it can work to your advantage is key! I cover this in my reply post about noses.

For visual reference:

I start out with my nose but I want the nostrils to sit further on the outside

so i go in and use the nose width slider and raise it to widen the lower nose:

Then lower the nostril scale slider

Comparison:

as you can see, i kind of achieved what I wanted, but also widened the nose tip too! Welp, that takes another slider I have, Tip Width. And I'll adjust that accordingly! It's really just a matter of what you're going for and what you're going to have to compensate for as a result!

That said, our community has made some awesome sliders that open up so many possibilities and even eliminate the need to do that multi-slider tango. I wouldn't even know where to begin (wish I wanted to make videos because I could talk for an hour about sliders)

For example @pitheinfinite made sliders that can make sims look better and more realistic, I'm jealous at what they've achieved!

They have their Inner Corner to Nose slider that moves an area of the sim's face hat make eyebags and the shadows and lines appear farther out from the inner eye. It saves you from having to use cheek sliders to mimic the effect and thus ruining the face shape you have going

It's truly an INDISPENSABLE slider. One of many!

Since I make sliders, I usually just make some to specifically fix whatever issue I'm having. Granted they're made with general function in mind, which makes my cheater-y way of making things happen more useful in the future. I have about 50 experimental unfinished sliders in my game and can tell you that all my current sims use them for some reason or other. So I'm not working with nothing, I guess?

EYE SPY 👁

The best way to really get nice accurate looking sims is the eyes.

Pay attention to the slant of the eye, the shape and position of the upper and lower eyelids. you can use the game’s Eyelid Height slider, and AWT’s Eyelid width and height sliders (and many more)

and especially where the iris (green) sits relative to the eyelid. getting that shape and eyeball positioned correctly really makes a HUGE difference

I do suggest Bloom’s Eye slider (left and right) that rotate the eyes left and right. That along with their Lazy eye sliders can give your sims a less symmetric face and position the eyes to be FAR more accurate and realistic than the default.

I also recommend their vertical sliders (Eye lift or drop) to help with eye positioning.

I can't stress the importance of the right contacts or eyes for your sims. Of course it all depends on how you make your sims's eyes and all that. Take the last sim i posted about. It took forever and a half to find the right contacts that didn't need severe or intense editing to capture the same vibe the person he's based on. The problem is pretty persistent for me, and I am just speaking for myself when I say this is necessary. Iris size, shading, recolorability, detail, catch lights, and pupil position are things to consider for your play style and preferences.

In addition to seeing what eyes will do the trick, I do edit the catch lights in the screenshots to give the eyes a different emotion or look. (I use defaults that get rid of the game-generated catch lights, and supernatural eye glow.) It's nice when that's all it is and I don't have to go in and photoshop things in and out to make them look human lmao

Perfect, schmerfect

And just know that as long as you have the same vibe or look going on it doesn't need to be perfect! Things will evolve over time, and you can change and perfect things as you go along, but close is better than trying to achieve an exact replica. We are working with the limitations of sliders and the optimized meshes they work on! So yeah there might be jagged bits or the profile might not exactly match and some things might not be accurate, but that's okay! Considering what sims look like at their default, you should be proud! I use the same mf eyebrows on all my sims basically and I tell myself they're just placeholders (yeah, right), but I manage to make them work with what I have!

Sliders, Makeup, and Skins, oh my!

a good base skin is critical, but not the end of the world if you pick the wrong one. They determine kind of definition and types of features highlighted on a sim 100000% and you might lose a feature you like or dislike when you change them! Feel free to switch up between skins you have to find the best fit.

Makeup can be a game-changer though!!! Any details you can add and help make your sim look the most like the person you're basing them off can go MILES.

In some cases, I've actually gotten really interesting results trying to get my sculpt as close as possible to real life references so the makeup makes a difference but don't define the features by themselves. Still, though, I utilize makeup up a LOT. [remember that if you use Nraas, you can layer makeup. Right-clicking makeup will also remove it if it's applied :)]

Here's the last sim i posted about when removing makeup:

no nosemasks really replicates the face-claim's nose (too shiny at the lower part) but it'll do 🤷‍♀️

Freckles, eyebags, highlighters, face shadows, pores, nosemasks, etc are all great!!

The way you move your sliders WILL effect how these look, so don't rely on makeup that adds super-specific detail or goes over an area you know is a jumbled mess because of sliders!

I do have a mess of recommendations and wcifs for skins and makeup. replies tag | wcif tag

[also I love compiling wcif cc lists for my sims it's great]

Finally, I appreciate your comment about my sims, mainly because I know they're not ever really exact copies or as close as I want to be to their real life counterparts, so thanks!! I've seen fellow simmers get really good results without messing as much as I do and I love when people can make really good maxis match likenesses because it's just so damn cool! It's truly a talent. I'm not one of those lucky few, but I like to try my way at it anyway. After what feels like some good progress I'll post a pic here. Even after doing this forever I don't feel like I'm an expert or can get good results in a shorter amount of time, but it's just fun to see the progression (or regression) of how my sims look.

[fourphoenixfeathers]

Okay, its late and I've been working on a sculpture for hours, so hear me out here.

What if... Papyrus is Gaster AU... but when he got shattered, only his right eye was left in the underground?

Prunsel is Gaster?

Okay, wait wait wait, don't go. Think about it. Mystery Man has a funky right eye. Paps can have eyeballs whenever he feels like it if you take his sprites literally. What if the shock of falling into the core caused him to manifest his eyeballs, and he lost one, leaving it behind in the underground while the rest of him was dumped in the void or whatever. The eyeball, still being connected to him, developped a sort of sentience and grew to (relatively) normal monster size because of it's new status as an independent being.

Prunsel can't talk normally because he's not whole.

Sans can't remember Gaster, but he can still feel a deep connection with this piece of him, so Sans takes in Prunsel as his brother and is the only one who can understand him.

How does Prunsel do normal everyday things? MAGIC HANDS. When no one is looking, save for Sans and Frisk, he will summon the Gaster hands to just do stuff. Set up puzzles. Make Spaghetti. Maybe even converse with Frisk through ASL?

The only question that remains is what Pretzel/Gaster/Papyrus would look like if he got rescued from the void and reunited with his missing piece. Would he be Gaster but with an eyeball in his droopy eyesocket? Skeleton body but eyeball head? Eyeball in a trench coat sort of like the Observants from Danny Phantom?? Maybe he wouldn't be able to reform at all and Prunsel and Gaster would just both be incomplete forever???

Oh no I'm attached... I already have an ask blog, abort aBORT ABORT--

[ao3bronte]

when chaos reigns [the sirens come to play]

A Merman AU. (Rated T with some suggestive language.) Now on AO3! READ PROLOGUE - PART 2 HERE!

[Part 3]

Covid-19 forced a lot of people to stay stuck in their homes until they inevitably went mad and uploaded cringe videos of themselves dancing to Blinding Lights on TikTok. But Adrien Agreste, having been unable to leave his underwater ivory tower since the mysterious disappearance of his mother, really doesn’t know any different. 

“Final question. Who was the fifth king of the Sea of Okhotsk?”

Slumped against his seagrass cushion, Adrien sighs into his palm. “The Sea of Okhotsk doesn’t have a king. They have clans and elders.”

“Excellent,” Nathalie Sancoeur responds, wordlessly motioning for him to stop slouching. “I think that concludes political history for this evening. Onto diplomacy—”

“Can you give me a minute?” Adrien tries not to give away his intentions as he glances through a porthole. “I think Father is home and I’d like to greet him.”

Nathalie raises a brow. “He won’t change his mind, you know.”

“Didn't we just talk about erosion?” With a firm flick of his tail, Adrien makes his way towards his usually barred bedroom door. “It works on rocks, so why can’t it work on him?”

“Your father is not a rock, Adrien.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Adrien murmurs under his breath, leaving anyway. He snakes his way through the narrow halls of his palatial home towards Father’s atelier and hopes he doesn’t miss him; he rarely sees Father at all these days...sometimes it feels like Adrien hardly knows him at all.

Especially when he’d announced that Adrien was going to mate with his betrothed, whether he liked it or not!

“Good afternoon, Father.” Adrien straightens and bows his head in greeting, swallowing painfully as his father peers down at him from his pedestal. “I’m thankful that you made it back home safely.”

His father sighs. “If you’re here to argue with me once again—”

“But Father!”

“You are NOT getting out of this arrangement! I already told you!”

“Please, Father. Hear me out—”

“I have no intention of letting you leave this kingdom,” his father rages, slashing his hand through the water with enough force to shake the entire structure around them. “Everything you need is right here where I can keep an eye on you. I will not have you outside in this dangerous world.”

“It's not dangerous, Father. I'm always stuck in here by myself. Why can't I leave our home? Why can’t I explore the Ligurian Kingdom and make friends just like everyone else?”

“Because you’re not like everyone else! You are my son! You are the heir to my—” his father stops himself and pauses to gather his composure, his eyes ablaze with discontent. “Adrien, the kingdom of the Tyrrhenian Sea is relying on me to unite our families. You don’t want to disappoint an entire kingdom, do you?”

Adrien’s shoulders cave. “No.”

“Then don’t continue to disappoint me. Return to your studies immediately and do not trouble me with this matter again.” His father turns and ushers him away with a shoo of his webbed fingers. “Nathalie, where is the sentimonster you promised for the administrator? M. Damoclès has wronged me for the last time.”

“It will be finished this evening,” Nathalie responds, her fingers gently toying with the enamel brooch hanging from her neck. 

“When I hired you as my assistant, you assured me that you could complete tasks on time.”

“I did.” Nathalie flicks her crimson tail in irritation. “And I will continue to serve your interests in a timely fashion. Is there anything else I can do for you at this time, sir?”

The imposing interim leader of the Ligurian Kingdom simply pinches the bridge of his nose. “That is all. Ensure Adrien’s bedroom is secured immediately. And get on land as soon as possible to finish your spellcasting; I didn’t hire a sea witch for her to rest on her laurels.”

“Of course, your Regency.”

~

“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”

Nathalie tries not to smirk as her sheepish charge continues to wriggle his way through the barred porthole in his bedroom. “That depends entirely on what you plan on doing with your freedom, providing you can get your dorsal fin uncaught.”

“I’m—” Adrien grunts, desperately trying to shimmy his backside through the stone barricade. “—I want to go back to where you took me before!”

Nathalie quirks an eyebrow as he finally manages to free his dorsal fins and slither outside his bedroom relatively unscathed. “Humans are not to be trifled with.” 

“Says the sea witch who can transform into one!”

“My Miraculous doesn’t exactly work underwater.” Nathalie explains, raising a sculpted brow. “I don’t suppose you plan on visiting the grotto?”

Adrien nods in earnest. “The flowers are out and I wanted to see them again! And there aren’t any humans there, so I’ll be fine!”

Flower pollen, of course, is like catnip to merpeople. One whiff of the stuff and it’s Boogie Nights for anyone with a tail and a propensity for caterwauling sea shanties. 

“Be back by nightfall.” Nathalie tells him, having orchestrated this escape since the very beginning. She watches him swim away as fast as his tail will take him none the wiser, and grazes her nails down the curved edges of her Peacock Miraculous, the likes of which holds the immeasurable magic of a mermaid on a mission that will surely bring the Mediterranean to its knees.

[Part 4]

For all of Marinette’s near compulsive need to prepare for things ahead of time, it can be assumed that she is most definitely not prepared to find a merman scooching his body up on shore like a sea lion and shoving his face into an oleander bush. 

And her screams of shock and horror most certainly confirm it.

“Aaaaaauuugh!!!!!” Marinette, having just crawled through a small cavern to a grotto to investigate the golden gleam, falls flat on her face yet again. “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

The merman, equally as frightened, shrieks and rolls backwards as ungainly as one can when you’ve just been caught shoving your face into an oleander bush. She catches a brief glimpse of his face — speckled and smeared with golden pollen — before he promptly flings himself back into the sea.

Marinette is horrified. Astounded. Dumbfounded! Merpeople are impossible to find and even more impossible to survive! And she just—it was right in front of her! Green and gold and—she saw it! With her very own eyeballs! It was there! Huffing flowers! 

For the second time in almost as many minutes, Marinette sits down and stares dumbly at the waves.

Merpeople kill humans for fun...and she just survived! Holy crap!

Marinette keeps one eye on the watery mouth of the grotto and the other on her surroundings. She never would have spotted the grotto had she not performed the act of becoming a human pancake back out on the main beach; the entrance to this cave is so small and so hidden that Marinette wonders if anyone has ever discovered it before. It’s about the size of a lorry and covered in moss and spindly vines that meander up towards the small window of sunlight at the top. The limestone walls are strangely warm here, radiating heat and spurring the growth of the plants that are blooming as if it were summertime. Even the sand is different here; startlingly white with speckles of black and grey, the tiny shoreline creeps down into a cerulean underground cavern alight with bioluminescence.

It’s magnificent, but she’s not safe here. “Are you still there?”

Marinette nearly enters cardiac arrest when a mop of golden hair suddenly pops up from the vibrant depths. He heard her? Can he understand her?

The merman blinks. “Uhhh… I…”

“Are you waiting for me to leave? Because I can leave,” Marinette says, pointing towards the tiny crevice she’d just crawled through, “But then I’d have to take my eyes off of you and then you could drag me into the ocean and drown me and then my grandmother would be looking all over for me and then the police would have to come here and try to find my dead body and my parents, they’re stuck in Paris because of the coronavirus and—”

“—No, no! I was just trying to—” The merman disappears under the water for a moment, only to emerge at the edge of the beach. “—I didn’t mean to scare you! You scared me!”

Marinette screeches and scurries backwards to create some more distance between them. “How do you know how to speak French?!”

“How do you know how to speak Nereid?”

“I asked you first!”

“Well, I don’t speak French. I speak Nereid!”

“What’s that, merman language?”

“Yeah.” The merman cocks his head. “What’s French? Human language?”

“Well, for some humans, yes.” Marinette crosses her arms across her chest and narrows her eyes. “Wait a minute...are you making fun of me?”

The merman flashes his gleaming set of triangular teeth just long enough for Marinette to notice that he has not just one row of razor-sharp teeth in his mouth, but two. “I wouldn’t dream of causing a commocean.”

Marinette’s nose wrinkles at the pun. “Now you really are making fun of me.”

“I mean, maybe.” The merman winks. “It’s kind of fun seeing you turn pink. Is that a human thing too?”

“I’m not turning pink.” Marinette harrumphs, turning her shoulder away from him. “And humans turn pink because...because they’re warm. I’m just warm, that’s all.”

“It’s probably because of your...” The merman gestures to her raincoat and jeans. “Do you need help getting out of them?”

With all of the poise of a particularly erratic squirrel, Marinette simply splutters. “What?!” 

“Well, you must be trapped in them or you would have taken them off already. We get stuck in your human garbage all the time, it’s awful.” The merman opens his mouth and taps against one of his larger teeth with his fingernail. “Here, I can cut them off for you if you want—”

“You’re not coming anywhere near me with those things!” Marinette recoils, scooching towards the oleander bushes on her bottom. “You could rip me apart!”

“I’m not going to kill you!” The merman exclaims with a huff. “Besides, if I was hungry, I’d have eaten you already!”

Marinette’s eyes nearly bulge out of her skull. “You eat people?!”

“Sometimes.” The merman shrugs as if it’s no big deal, “Haven’t you ever had human fingers before? Crunchy, yet satisfying.”

“No! That’s disgusting!”

The merman’s straight face dissolves into laughter at Marinette’s expression of utter horror. “Now, I’m actually making fun of you!”

“Well, it’s not funny!” Marinette grabs a handful of sand and hurls it at him, dusting his face and hair. He continues to giggle at her expense and Marinette has had just about enough of him. “Stop it!”

“Sorry!” The merman grapples to get himself together. “I just wanted to show you that I’m funny, I swear! I've never really been out on my own before and I've never had friends. It's all sort of new to me.”

“Joking about eating people is not how you make friends,” Marinette grumbles, still keeping a wary eye on the merman before her until the implications of his words catch up with her ears. “Wait, you don’t have any friends? How come?”

“Father doesn’t let me out of my home...ever.” The merman rubs the back of his head nervously. “I kind of escaped to come see the flowers, which is how I met you!”

“Is...is that normal for merpeople?” 

“To come see the flowers? Yeah, we love flowers!”

Marinette shakes her head. “No, I meant the ‘being stuck in your house’ thing. Why don’t you...you know, swim around and, uh...talk to people?”

“It doesn’t matter.” The merman waves her off, looking a little uncomfortable before turning his attention back to her. “What does matter is that we can be friends! Would you like to be friends?” The merman shimmies forwards with excitement and thrusts his hand right under her nose. “I’m Adrien! Pleased to make your aquantance.”

Marinette looks at his outstretched hand and hesitates. “You’re not going to pull me into the water and drown me, are you?”

“I’m not a dolphin, you know, I have manners.” Adrien huffs, hoisting himself further up onto the sand bank. “See? Only my tail fins are in the water now, I couldn’t pull you in even if I tried.”

Marinette carefully reaches out and gently clasps his hand, revelling in the strange texture of his skin. He cups his other hand over hers and she mimics the gesture, smiling a little as he squeezes his fingers and then shakes once before letting go. “There. Now we’re friends!”

“I don’t know about that,” Marinette says, still keeping a wary eye on the merman in front of her. He settles back down on his elbows and Marinette’s eyes are drawn to his chest as he brushes the granules of ivory sand from his sides, his muscles clenching at the movement. “You’re a merman and I’m a human. We aren’t supposed to be friends.”

[NEXT PART]

[mickibloo]

Human Rights and Veganism

I speak frequently about my passion for human rights and how this is often dismissed by nonvegans on the basis of me being vegan, and seeing how many other vegans have related to my struggles, I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the human rights issues animal agriculture is responsible for and/or perpetuates. This will not be a list that 100% encapsulates the extent to which human rights are violated by these industries, but I think it is still a really great introduction, if nothing else, to how ubiquitous the oppressive nature of animal agriculture is. This post will be mostly guided by links to sources and some key quotes and phrases from those sources. 

1. Slaughterhouse Workers

Slaughterhouse workers are one of, if not the most, abused, mistreated, and neglected groups of workers to exist within western countries. The traumatization they face as a result of their job is often ignored by almost everyone who is not vegan or who does not research the topic. 

“A Call to Action: Psychological Harm in Slaughterhouse Workers“

“These workers perform a job that, by its very nature, puts them at risk of psychological disorder and pathological sadism. This risk emerges from a combination of many factors of slaughterhouse work, one of which is the stressful environment that slaughtering creates. A large portion of this stress comes from the exceptionally high rates of injury among the workers.

“However, slaughterhouse work is unique among major industries due to its innate violence...one of the most prominent studies investigated the impact of having a slaughterhouse in a community on crime rates within that community, using this as a metric for psychological health... Though the industries they used for comparison were nearly identical in other predictors of changes in crime (namely worker demographics, potential to create social disorganization, and effect on unemployment in the surrounding areas), slaughterhouses outstripped all others in the effect they had on crime. They led not only to a larger increase in overall crime, but, disturbingly, disproportionate increases in violent crime and sexual crime.

“Creating and sustaining oneself with “good” moral character and having another self that can mechanically end lives for hours each day not only serves as another source of psychological stress for workers, but exposes workers to the risk that their pathologically un-empathetic work selves will slip into their community lives. This is another explanation for the “spillover” that affects slaughterhouse workers’ minds and communities.

“Living with the knowledge of their actions causes symptoms similar to those of individuals who are recipients of trauma: substance abuse, anxiety issues, depression, and dissociation from reality.

(Testimonies from slaughterhouse workers): “And then it gets to a point where you’re at a daydream stage. Where you can think about everything else and still do your job. You become emotionally dead.”

“So a lot of guys at Morrell [a major slaughterhouse] just drink and drug their problems away. Some of them end up abusing their spouses because they can’t get rid of the feelings. They leave work with this attitude and they go down to the bar to forget.”

Confessions of a slaughterhouse worker

There are things, though, that have the power to shatter the numbness. For me, it was the heads.

At the end of the slaughter line there was a huge skip, and it was filled with hundreds of cows' heads. Each one of them had been flayed, with all of the saleable flesh removed. But one thing was still attached - their eyeballs.

Whenever I walked past that skip, I couldn't help but feel like I had hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me. Some of them were accusing, knowing that I'd participated in their deaths. Others seemed to be pleading, as if there were some way I could go back in time and save them. It was disgusting, terrifying and heart-breaking, all at the same time. It made me feel guilty."

I know things like this bothered the other workers, too. I'll never forget the day, after I'd been at the abattoir for a few months, when one of the lads cut into a freshly killed cow to gut her - and out fell the foetus of a calf. She was pregnant. He immediately started shouting and throwing his arms about.

I took him into a meeting room to calm him down - and all he could say was, "It's just not right, it's not right," over and over again. These were hard men, and they rarely showed any emotion. But I could see tears prickling his eyes." I remember one day in particular, when I'd been there for about a year or so, when we had to slaughter five calves at the same time.

We tried to keep them within the rails of the pens, but they were so small and bony that they could easily skip out and trot around, slightly wobbly on their newly born legs. They sniffed us, like puppies, because they were young and curious. Some of the boys and I stroked them, and they suckled our fingers.

When the time came to kill them, it was tough, both emotionally and physically. Slaughterhouses are designed for slaughtering really large animals, so the stun boxes are normally just about the right size to hold a cow that weighs about a tonne. When we put the first calf in, it only came about a quarter of a way up the box, if that. We put all five calves in at once. Then we killed them.

America’s Slaughterhouses Aren’t Just Killing Animals

“I’ve seen bleeders, and they’re gushing because they got hit [by a knife] right in the vein, and I mean, they’re almost passing out,” she said, “and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops.”

In Texas, where private employers are not required to carry workers’-compensation insurance, Tyson has opted out of the state system completely. When a worker gets injured at the Tyson beef slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, in order to get medical care from the company, that person must first sign a document saying:

I hereby voluntarily release, waive, and forever give up all my rights, claims, and causes of action, whether now existing or arising in the future, that I may have against the company, Tyson Foods, Inc., and their parent, subsidiary and affiliated companies and all of their officers, directors, owners, employees, and agents that arise out of or are in any way related to injuries (including a subsequent or resulting death) sustained in the course of my employment with the company.

The pressure to sign was enormous. When a worker named Duane Mullin had both of his hands crushed in a hammer mill at the Amarillo slaughterhouse now owned by Tyson, a manager employed by its previous owner persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his teeth.

'We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war

The company is now measuring workers’ temperatures as they report for work, and began supplying surgical facemasks, but, according to Fields and workers interviewed by the Guardian, Tyson continues to suppress information on employees who have tested positive for Covid-19.”

One worker, a central American migrant who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her job, told the Guardian that the company was not enforcing social distancing. 'We are all given bathroom breaks at the same time and there are hundreds of us waiting to use them. There are only seven bathrooms,' she said. 'They [Tyson] don’t care about the worker. They don’t care if we get sick.' A spokesman for Tyson said the company was taking 'several measures' to allow social distancing but did not address the bathroom break allegations."

One African American worker at a Koch facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. 'They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,' the worker said. 'I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.'

The sociologist Lourdes Gouveia has studied the meatpacking industry for three decades and said the Covid-19 outbreak is simply highlighting again the dangerous conditions in processing plants. Gouveia said the industry has perfected a formula which allows it to maximize profit while producing relatively safe meat by resisting regulations and utilizing low cost, mostly immigrant, labor in unsafe conditions. 'All of these elements are of a highly perfected formula or maximizing profits that is unlikely to change fundamentally,' Gouveia said."

2. Environmental Racism and Classism

Animal agriculture, and factory farms specifically, tend to locate their facilities near poor communities (often black or Hispanic) who do not have the financial means to take them to court over the ways in which these farms affect their health and wellbeing. 

How Swine in North Carolina Affects real People | René Miller Excerpt

“When you go back and you look at where these hog facilities are located, there’s a disproportionate number of them that are located near communities of color, low income communities. It is definitely a human rights issue.”

“Now see, if you lived here, and saw the way they do, you wouldn’t eat no pork. I don’t eat bacon, because I know where it comes from. When they die, they go into a box, and they decompose because they swell in the heat. A truck come and pick them up, take them to the processing plant in Roseo, ground them up into feed, and feed them back to the hogs.

“It hits you right in the face. Smell like something that you had never smell before. Smell worse than a dead body.”

“When we go to the funeral, he used the spray. If we wanna have a cookout on Sunday, he’ll spray. He always sprays Sunday.

“Do you think it’s also a civil rights issue?”

“Yes, I do.”

When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting

Like many other hazardous and exhausting low-wage industries in the United States, this work depends on the labor of America’s most marginalized communities. Most workers in the industry are people of color, many are women, and nearly one-third are immigrants.

In 1983, wages for workers in the meat and poultry industry fell, for the first time, below the national average for manufacturing work; in 1985, they were 15 percent lower; in 2002, they were 24 percent lower; today, they are 44 percent lower. Workers earn, on average, less than $15 an hour.

Jobs in the meat and poultry industry have long been a starting point for many groups of new immigrants to the United States as many positions require little formal education, experience, or English-language skills. In 2015, nearly 30 percent of meat and poultry workers were foreign-born non-citizens—about three times more than the percentage of manufacturing workers nationally.

Even immigrants with work authorization can remain vulnerable to coercion from employers, as many are not aware of their workplace rights, may not be familiar with technical terms in English, or are otherwise hesitant to navigate the complex, and potentially costly, procedures to vindicate their rights. The result is a significant part of the low-wage workforce who are less likely to report workplace abuses or even injuries, and are therefore more easily exploitable than US citizens, for fear of their employers’ power to fundamentally disrupt their lives and the lives of their families. “Us workers are afraid to lose our job,” said Rebecca G., an immigrant worker at a poultry plant in Arkansas. “[P]eople don't speak up or say what's wrong about the chemicals, or the speed of the line, or the discrimination.”

3. The displacement and murder of indigenous peoples

The Companies Behind the Burning of the Amazon

The burning of the Amazon and the darkening of skies from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, have captured the world’s conscience. Much of the blame for the fires has rightly fallen on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for directly encouraging the burning of forests and the seizure of Indigenous Peoples’ lands.

But the incentive for the destruction comes from large-scale international meat and soy animal feed companies like JBS and Cargill, and the global brands like Stop & Shop, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart/Asda, and Sysco that buy from them and sell to the public. It is these companies that are creating the international demand that finances the fires and deforestation.

The transnational nature of their impact can be seen in the current crisis. Their destruction is not confined to Brazil. Just over the border, in the Bolivian Amazon, 2.5 million acres have burned, largely to clear land for new cattle and soy animal feed plantations, in just a few weeks. Paraguay is experiencing similar devastation.

After years of remarkably successful conservation initiatives that cut Brazil’s deforestation rate by two-thirds, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has reopened the doors to rampant destruction as a favor to the agribusiness lobby that backs him. That industry is accountable for the atmosphere of lawlessness, deforestation, fires, and the murder of Indigenous peoples that followed. According to data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon in July 2019 increased 278 percent over the previous July. Bolsonaro responded to this news by firing the head of the INPE. 

I would like to close this post by saying that I understand this may leave nonvegans with some questions; What can consumers do about this? Should consumers be expected to do anything, or would that simply be misplacing the blame for these things? Aren’t all industries awful in similar ways since there is no ethical consumption under capitalism? If you have these questions, I am more than happy to engage in a good-faith conversation about them. The purpose of this post, however, is not to answer such inquiries. I made this purely to raise awareness about these issues because the only people I ever see discuss them are vegans, and these are extremely important topics that I think deserve far more attention than they receive. 

[motleymoose]

Homecoming: Astray, Ch. 2

Chapter 2

Laserfights in the Dust

Fandom: The Mandalorian Characters: The Mandalorian (Din Djarin), Gender-neutral Reader, Unidentified Stormtroopers Words: 1.6k+ Warnings: Laser fights!, Angst???

Summary:

The bounty hunter may have caught me.

That's it. I'm caught and screwed and nothing could make this worse.

...Unless Stormtroopers are thrown into the mix.

Notes:

Heyo! Just an update:

I've several chapters in the works of being tweaked and edited. On that note, I just want to warn you that I'll be editing the first chapter of this part because holy moley I did NOT do the editing I thought I did before I posted it.

Hope you enjoy this installment of Homecoming. Check back this weekend for the last chapter of part 1!

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read my words. I really really appreciate it!!!

Homecoming Masterlist

The Mandalorian’s ship was of an older gunner class, bulbous and clunky in all the wrong places. I immediately took a shine to it.

“Mother of Moons,” I breathed, drinking in the sight of the Razor Crest. The ship was ancient compared to its neighbors moored in the docking field, her dark gray hull splattered with pocks and burns from laser fire, and carbon residue dulled the once-bright metal. Amazed that she could still fly, I considered the costs and labor associated with keeping something like her up in the air. The bounty hunter must’ve employed a fragging good blackthumb, or at the very least had a mech droid to keep up with all the repairs the ship constantly would need. My fingers itched to caress the control panels and explore the access hubs. Engineering alone would’ve been something to behold.

I was a mechanic through-and-through.

My captor’s gait changed the closer we got to his ship. Weaving in and out of the stacks of crates and barrels awaiting transport into the village, I noted the speeders parked in the path we were taking, not too far away from the Crest. Before I could have a closer look, gloved fingers dug into the tender meat at my shoulder.

“Yours?” he snapped, blaster humming to life and jammed into my kidney.

I shook my head. “I don’t have anyone willing to risk their neck to rescue me. Whoever that is,” I discreetly waggled my eyebrows in the direction of the speedbikes, “probably wants me dead more than you do.”

The pistol’s barrel eased from my back, and I released the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. He accepted the answer I’d given, which was a first in my dealings with bounty hunters. I doubted greatly that he trusted me, but maybe a mutual respect was building in the hour we’d known each other.

With his hand between my shoulder blades, the bounty hunter urged me forward out of the relative safety of the unloaded cargo. I assumed we’d wait out whoever was waiting for us, but apparently the Mandalorian liked to act before he thought.

Shoving hard, the bounty hunter knocked me to my stomach, bound hands barely breaking my fall. Wheezing, I rolled onto my hip to snarl at him just as he raised his blaster and fired over my fragging head.

“Frag!” I screamed unheroically. I automatically flattened in the dust, cuffed hands over my head. Laser beams sliced through the air above me, some coming low enough to singe my hair. Letting instincts take over, I crawled on elbows and knees until I made it under the belly of the Crest. White armored legs dashed by my hiding spot, and I shrunk farther under the ship’s hefty bulk. Even with the Empire collapsed, there were still loyal factions spanning the known galaxy. I wasn’t too surprised at their arrival, only that the Imps still had enough credits to outfit their armies.

I tore my eyes away from the gunfight to look for an escape. Near the landing gear, a square hatch barely large enough to warrant much thought caught my racing mind. Pulling myself into a crouch, I shuffled over to it, using my little dagger to persuade it to open. A few frantic, scrabbling moments later, and I pulled myself up into the crawl space and snapped the panel shut behind me.

Inside the crawl space - no, access shaft, I shimmied on my belly towards the only source of light.

“Please be an access panel, please be an access panel…”

It was not an access panel.

The light was streaming weakly through a rectangular vent in the floor of what must have been the hold, the streaky dark and bright causing my eyes to swim. Turning onto my back, I took a moment to blink, forcing my eyes to adjust to the dim light. When I looked back through the vent grate, I saw a face peering back down at me.

“Oh frag!” I shrieked, dodging clumsily out of the light.

No sound or shouts of alarm followed, and I sucked in my breath and scootched back to the vent.

“Oh. You’re not what I expected.”

Above me lay a slab of carbonite. Inside the carbonite was a face twisted in pain and horror, hands bound in much the same way as mine. Every detail of the being frozen in time was on display, if I wanted to hang around and eyeball her some more. Was the Mandalorian going to do that to me?

Gulping nervously, I turned back to my belly and continued my slow crawl through the carbon dust and wires that lined the access tunnel in equal parts. I strained my eyes as best as I could, feeling them water and sting from the dust my movements stirred up. I couldn’t make out much of anything in the unlit space, but I didn’t want to light a flame in the off-chance the bounty hunter was carrying more than just frozen carbonite. I was going to have to use my other senses to find the crawl hatch into the hold. From there, freedom.

A rustle near my boots startled me out of the vague plan I was beginning to form about escaping. Looking over my shoulder, I could see nothing beyond the little square of light falling from the vent.

“Bugs. Probably just bugs,” I murmured to myself, not at all reassured by the waver in my tone. Exhaling softly, I continued forward.

I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d entered the ship, but from the sounds happening, or worse yet, not happening outside, it was safe to assume the fight was over and to the victors went the spoils.

But who the victors were was still up for debate.

Urgently, I pushed through a particularly nasty tangle of wiring. Thick and winding and of all colors and sizes, some of the wires looked brand new while others were completely fried. A faint wisp of electrical smoke drifted lazily from a deep, melted gash severing a bundle that looked to be -

“The energy cycler wiring. Shit.” Quickly, I assessed the damage. The cut didn’t seem to go too deep, only about a quarter of the way through the wiring. I didn’t have the tools needed to make a decent repair job, but if I did nothing, the Razor Crest would strand anyone aboard her once the energy cycler ran dry. Which could be anytime as the damage looked like an older wound and I had no way of telling how much power was left in the containment systems.

Rolling onto my side, I awkwardly began to dig out what I had in my jumpsuit pockets that might help. Most of a roll of electotape; collapsible screwdriver base and tip case; handful of assorted plastic ties; hose clamps in various states of rust; thin, carefully folded sheets of aluminum foil; and my prized possession: customized multitool.

Feeling surprisingly lighter after emptying my pockets, I ordered my tools into a neat pile and got to work on the smoking wiring. I made sure to match every split wire with its original end. Using the foil, I connected the loose wires before taping over them with the stretchy black eletotape. Whenever the plastic coating proved to be in the way, I used the sharp cutter edge of my multitool to scrape it away and expose the damaged wiring, thus making it easier to reconnect. The plastic ties and hose clamps, the latter of the hardware being tightened with my collapsible screwdriver, were used to sort and organize the larger bundle into smaller, neater groups.

As I worked, sounds of rustling and rifling interspersed with tiny squeaks and sneezes floated through the air not that far from the soles of my boots. I forced myself to ignore it, hoping that whatever it was would stay well away from me until I was done repairing the wiring harness. I didn’t want to waste time fighting pests when my services could be better used fixing mechanical things.

Another sneeze, a delighted trill, and then the patter of small feet scurrying away alerted me that I was now, hopefully, alone. Tightening one last plastic strap with my teeth, I swiped my forehead with the back of a sooty hand and gazed proudly at my handiwork. Dang, I was good at cobbling together repairs.

A whirring clank shook the metal underneath me, and I jolted straight up, clunking my head painfully against the subflooring. Rubbing at the throbbing lump forming on the top of my head, I cursed myself silently and held my breath, listening.

Heavy boots thudded hollowly above me. Another clanking whir covered up most of the stream of Mando’a being growled above me, and I knew that the bounty hunter had won.

Frag.

Quietly as I could, I untangled myself from the wiring and inched away from the sounds of mumbling and stomping. I’d stowed away before, a long time ago, on a colonizing ship stopping on my backwater planet for refuelling and supplies.

But those had been farmers seeking a better life for themselves, not a warrior from a people more legend than truth, hunting me down for a bounty. I was in deeper kung than I wanted to admit.

The sounds of cursing and stomping disappeared, possibly to another deck, and I let out a heavy, relieved sigh. I didn’t have much time to plan before he ultimately found me, so I needed to come up with something that wasn’t going to get me killed, or worse - frozen in carbonite.

[lacquerware]

Sekiro has one big similarity to Bionic Commando, and it's not what you think

Spoiler Warning: Sekiro, Bionic Commando (NES)

Progress in Sekiro is meted out through challenging boss fights and punctuated with scenic, relatively safe traversal sequences that enhance the sense that you’re on a textured journey that’s headed somewhere. Fairly early in the game, after you’ve found your initial footing and conquered a few lifebars bearing fancy names, the game pulls a fast one on you: As you’re scaling some cliffs to get to the next part of the game, a snake roughly the size of Godzilla glides into view—filling your view—and looks at you like you’re the last donut hole in Boston. What was supposed to be a rejuvenating slice of downtime is suddenly the most stressful situation Sekiro has placed you in so far. A harrowing stealth sequence ensues, where you must divide your time between hiding and madly dashing for the next hiding spot.

Eventually you escape into a cave and get on with your life without confronting the beast, but a new seed of anxiety has started to sprout; eventually you’ll have to confront this thing. It’s Sekiro’s way of shaking the confidence you’ve spent the first chunk of the game building. “You think you’re all that because you beat an eight-foot ogre who started the fight in shackles? Sit back down, insect.”

From then on, the Great Serpent becomes a sort of sinister mile marker, dividing your journey broadly into acts with recurring reminders that your successes don’t mean you’re not still a tiny worm on a giant fucking cosmic hook. At one point it ambushes you on a rope bridge, leaving you floating helplessly in the water below. Another time, you find its shed skin adorning the scenery.  

In my many hours and playthroughs with Sekiro, I’ve come to learn that there is some variation to the order in which the game’s key events may unfold, but on my first playthrough, I’d done just about everything possible before finally emerging from that Sunken Valley cavern to find the Great Serpent nestled asleep on a cliffside a few hundred feet below. I’d acquired the Mortal Blade as well as all the ingredients for the Fountainhead Incense. The dreaded Guardian Ape was dead, then undead, then dead-dead. It was clear I was about to enter a new, late phase of the game, but then there she was, once again laying watch over my only path forward.

I edged forward on the overlooking wooden beam, scanning for grapple points or other escape options. There were none, but I was startled to find I could lock onto the slumbering Serpent’s head. Ah, I thought. This is the fight I’ve been dreading all along. Nothing left but to walk the plank and wake the dragon. I gulped, wiped the sweat off my palms, and dove . . . .

As I plunged, I was again startled to see the familiar red smudge of a Deathblow opportunity appear on the Serpent’s head. I spewed some fragments of syllables as my finger scrambled for the R1 button. It registered and Sekiro readied his sword in midair. Unexpected as this was, it occurred to me that many boss fights had begun this way, with a Deathblow opportunity that knocked off one of the boss’s multiple life bars. There was no special reason to think this would preclude a grueling fight, until, that is, Sekiro tore his sword through the Serpent’s uncaring reptile brain, drenching the entire landscape in a downpour of strawberry rhubarb jam and leaving the Serpent a dangling dead decoration. The fight was over before it had begun.

I’ve already commended Sekiro for being FromSoft’s first game in the “Souls” template not to be centered around discouragement, but this dramatic display of leniency was downright motivational. It was like your drill sergeant surprising you with a pizza party instead of the expected twenty-mile march.

“It’s fucking dead?!” I said out loud to my wife in the other room.

“What’s dead?”

“A snake in a video game.”

“Oh.”

But to me it was astounding. This colossal demon, whose prime function up to now had been to keep my confidence in check, had now fallen to my little blade in one of the most spectacular shows of player triumph I’d seen in my more than thirty years of gaming. What I’d thought was the game’s way of saying “You’ve haven’t accomplished as much as you think you have” was ultimately the game’s way of saying I’d accomplished more. Even this impossibly large beast, this divine manifestation of terror itself, which had made every other adversary look puny and insignificant, was now dead. What a shot in the arm! There was no stopping me now.

After finishing Sekiro, I realized this moment had been instrumental in creating the lasting impression that, unlike Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Sekiro never seeks to discourage or punish. It also contributed heavily to the dynamic contour of the whole experience, which is a major thing I think Sekiro has over my beloved Nioh. It aspires and succeeds at being more than a game with a predictable loop—it’s an odyssey of diverse sights and experiences, and the Great Serpent kill feels like the centerpiece. My favorite moment of Sekiro.

Some time later, I had a shower thought: Bionic Commando on the NES, one of my all-time favorite games, had done something very similar more than thirty years prior. The Japanese version of the game includes Hitler’s Resurrection (ヒットラーの復活) right in the title, but in America it’s not until the climactic showdown that you even know it’s a game about defeating Hitler. Until then, your ostensible adversary is Generalissimo Killt, an imposing, sneering, decorated man with all the trimmings of a fictional fascist. He taunts you face-to-face early on in one of the game’s RPG town-esque neutral zones, where you have no recourse even though your bionic arm could surely crush his skull like a grape in a condor beak.

When you finally meet again, Killt stands regal before a towering stasis chamber with a human figure floating within. He says something menacing about “Master-D” and a “revival device,” makes a threat on your life, and then the encounter is cut short by an apparent electrical malfunction. With a powerful jolt, the device unceremoniously kills Killt before he can even try to make good on his threat. 

The floating figure within the chamber slowly emerges and speaks. Despite his censored name, the pixelated portrait that accompanies his dialogue box is unmistakable—an eerily lifelike rendering of Adolph Hitler. I was six or seven when I first witnessed this moment, but thanks to Mom’s yearly Yom Kippur tradition of breaking out the Holocaust picture book, Hitler’s stony visage was already imprinted upon my brain. He was my boogeyman, the subject of recurring nightmares, and now somehow he’d invaded my video game. This real-life association made him formidable in a way no other video game villain could touch (no, not even Mike Tyson). It was personal and terrifying in a way no game had been. In an instant, the stakes of this adventure soared sky-high. Hitler was the Great Serpent, a terrible titan sent to ambush your confidence.

After his grand entrance, Hitler unleashes upon you the “Albatros” [sic], a hulking, amorphous war machine outftitted with rhythmically spewing flame vents and a pulsating organ. A tense fight ensues, putting your swinging and shooting skills to the ultimate test. Finally, the Albatross explodes in a screen-filling spectacle of pyrotechnics, and you emerge on an elevated precipice just in time to hear the dying words of a wounded comrade, Hal: Hitler is getting away in a chopper, and it’s up to you to stop him. Even the ultimate test had fallen far short of stopping this monolithic evil.

Hal hands over a bazooka and instructs you to aim for the chopper’s cockpit as you leap from the precipice. You edge forward, scanning for grapple points. You gulp, wipe the sweat off your palms, and swing . . . .

As you plunge, you fire off a single shot. It strikes the glass. You land.

“Your number’s up! Monster!”

Now bear in mind that up to this point, only the weakest enemies in the game had died in one hit. And this wasn’t just any adversary; this was the biggest possible bad. As with the Great Serpent, there was no special reason to think this one shot would preclude a grueling fight, until, that is, Hitler’s cranium exploded in a starburst of strawberry rhubarb jam, the gory detail intricately rendered in four disgusting frames of diverging skin, teeth, and eyeballs. 

The fight was over before it had begun. What appeared at first to be a demoralizing escalation of the game’s peak, was in fact a spectacular way to pat you on the back for making it this far. It's like they shoehorned Hitler into the game at the last minute just to let you blow his head up. For a little Jewish kid, that was just about the tastiest proposition a video game could offer. 

The more I ponder these two moments, the more they feel like twins. The dissonance of the antagonists’ grandeur with the world they inhabit. The ease with which you reveal both to be false gods. The extreme use of gore to convey the weight of your achievement. They even both hinge on a do-or-die attack performed in free fall. Considering Sekiro also stars a grunt with a bionic arm, I have to wonder if there weren’t some Bionic Commando fans involved in its conception.

[ill-skillsgard]

Blue and Yellow - Part 1 - Axel Cluney

Title: Blue and Yellow

Characters: Axel Cluney x female OC

Warning: 18+ sex/mature themes/medical themes/mentions of blood+injuries/hospitals/violence/drug and alcohol use

Description: A new nurse finds herself entangled in the complicated life of an underground boxer with a slew of problems she cannot fix.

Note: I've wanted to write Axel as a boxer for a while now and finally came up with a storyline I could put him into. I hope you enjoy it and please consider leaving a comment and/or reblogging! Patreon subscribers got to read this last week as part of the early access benefit.

+

A nurse stood outside room 2817, reading over the tattooed man’s chart. He had come in—unconscious—and woke up in a bloody daze. She remembered seeing his swollen head and thinking there wasn’t a chance he hadn’t sustained a brain injury, but the man was alert and became responsive not long after. That was several hours ago when she began her third shift ever at Featherfall General.

The man with the black and blue face was awake and sitting up in his hospital bed. At the request of others, they pulled over the curtains to shield eyes from prodding at the swollen knot of an eyeball enclosed beneath a grotesque protrusion. His bottom lip had swelled to twice the size, and he couldn’t move any facial muscles without pain shooting up his nostrils. His nose stopped bleeding an hour ago and hadn’t sustained any injury beyond an unsightly bruise.

When she shifted the curtain aside, one squinting eye looked her over while the other remained concealed in a mountain of raw skin and broken blood vessels. She hadn’t seen anyone come in with a face like that yet. It made her stomach flip.

He couldn’t smile, but he wanted to. The nurse stood at the foot of his bed, her large brown eyes landing on every object in the room before taking a skittish scan of his face. The navy blue bubble of his closed eye ballooned to his temple and bled down to his cheekbone like an oil spill. It made the contusions on his shoulders and arms look like faded pinches. The bridge of his nose raised an inch off his face, puffy and tender. 

“You turning me loose, Saberrah?” He rasped, angling a look at the badge on a clip hanging out of her scrubs pocket.

“We will keep you a few more hours, on account of your concussion. The doctor will come to go over your CT scan. Would you like another ice pack?”

“Yes, ma’am, ‘ppreciate it.”

“All right, Mr. Cluney. You hang tight and try not to move around. Lie back and rest.”

“Can’t lie down,” he muttered. “Can’t sit up either.”

“That’d be your cracked rib,” she informed him. “Looks like you took a bad beating.”

He squirmed, wincing from the pain shooting through his lung. “Is it a good time to say ‘you should’ve seen the other guy’?”

She took his humour with a small smile. “I don’t want to know what kind of trouble you found for yourself. I just hope it doesn’t happen again. A concussion is a serious thing, Mr. Cluney.”

“Axel, please. You make me feel old,” he said.

“Says here you’re twenty-nine. Not old yet. But dirty thirty is coming up. You might not heal up as quick as you used to when you were a younger trouble-maker.”

Axel grimaced through a weak chuckle. “Dirty thirty. I like that.”

“Hopefully, you live to see them.”

“And what makes you say I’m the trouble-maker? Maybe I was minding my own business.”

She acknowledged him with a nod and a muted smirk. “I’m sure you were, Mr. Cluney.”

“Axel,” he corrected her again.

The voice slipping out of swollen lips was warm, but to look at his face still made her heart twinge. By anyone’s assumption, the man with the beaten face, a broken rib and tattoos was a sucker in a deal gone wrong. Featherfall was no cottage town with walking bridges and newly paved streets. Despite the pleasant melody of its name, it was no more a city than it was a village, but something in-between. It was big enough to get lost in, yet everyone seemed to know each other. It had its fair share of drug problems, and Axel Cluney was the fourth guy she saw that raised more than an eyebrow or two.

Her trained eyes fell to his arms, seeking any inflamed injection sights along his arms or puffy purple fingers. She found nothing out of the ordinary but scraped knuckles and tattoos to make a mother mourn.

“Hello, Sabi,” a voice greeted her from behind.

She turned to a man in standard indigo scrubs. It was the doctor charged with the late evening rounds, a man named Rufus Farber. Sabi relinquished the clipboard to the young doctor and stepped back.

“We meet again, Axel,” Dr. Farber spoke through a tight smile. The shadow in his eyes told of little sleep and too many occupied beds for a Wednesday morning. Though he was fresh out of med school, he had the tired look about him of a man twice his age. 

“Good to see you. Well... What I can of you,” the patient’s words flubbed out of fat lips.

Sabi left to find a cold pack and came back to them laughing like old pals. Dr. Farber was wrapping up and taking inch steps away while scribbling on a prescription pad.

“Your rib should heal up fine if you can keep still for a while. I suggest telling Eugene to take you off the night shift for a couple of weeks,” the doctor said with a wink.

“I reckon I’ll take some of that advice,” Axel replied. “I could use a little vacation.”

The injured man swung a slow gaze at Sabi, then saw the cold pack in her hand. She handed it to him, and he nodded a silent thanks.

The doctor signed the bottom of the note with a flourish of his pen. “Get yourself some painkillers, my man. Check-in at the pharmacy across the street.”

“Thanks, Doc. And thank you, Sabi.”

Sabi flinched at the sound of the patient using her nickname, but not so much that he noticed her reaction. “You take care of yourself, Mr. Cluney. We’ll come to get you in a couple more hours. Do you have somebody who can give you a ride home?”

“Sure do,” Axel replied.

“All right. You take care now.”

~*~

Featherfall General wasn’t the most state-of-the-art facility Sabi had ever worked. The rooms—often packed with patients — overflowed into the corridors. There were entire wings lined with beds, and everyone ran around like headless chickens in a crowded coop. It cut her work out for her, and a dull moment never sat right. There was always somebody screaming, children crying, women giving birth, blood to be mopped, and disruptions in the waiting rooms. 

Outside of the hospital—on the sidewalk and no closer—was where Sabi found a minute of rest. She could smoke a cigarette and forget that a patient had vomited blood on her. Sabi wasn’t alone on the sidewalk—far from it. Patients permitted leaving their rooms lined the walkway, smoking as many cigarettes they could fit into a ten-minute window. Some still hooked to their IV stands. One man with cracked red skin and starch white hospital sheets plastered to his arms and legs took puffs from a rancid gold-band cigarette that his companion held up to his chattering lips.

Sabi looked across the street at the pharmacy and the adjoining pediatrician’s offices. The building was a squat, rectangular structure next to a multi-level parking lot, of which she always heard the family members of patients complaining. The most frequent complaint was the seven-dollar parking fee. People who had dying relatives shouldn’t be expected to pay such a steep price to avoid getting a ticket.

New as she was, Sabi didn’t want to get on wrong sides by taking long breaks, and she chose the perfect moment to return as an ambulance flew into the emergency bay. Strapped to a stretcher, they hauled a tiny woman out of the back and rushed her into the hospital, followed by a tall man in blue jeans and a black tank top. Sabi only saw his side profile before he was halfway down the hall, following the EMTs and the female doctor who had intercepted them.

“It’s another overdose.”

“Fourth one tonight.”

“Third time for her. Can you hear me, Mrs. Cluney?”

They disappeared around a corner and left Sabi blinking in the corridor while others tried to catch glimpses. Most of the folks waiting in the lobby had nothing better to do than gawk at the people with real problems; broken legs, failing hearts, deep gashes, bright yellow skin, and when somebody came in with a worse ailment than them, a chorus of scoffs warbled in the room. They drowned out the only television tuned to the local news and grimaced at each other.

“‘Scuse me? When can we see a doctor? My kid’s sick!”

The triage nurse glared through the glass window. 

“I’ve been here for three hours!”

“Do we have to hack our limbs off to get some attention in this place?”

Sabi ducked out of the waiting room and went to where she was needed most, but she couldn’t be in half a dozen places at once. She tried her best.

It was a long, hectic night, and the sickness she saw didn’t end until the early morning. She dragged her feet and tired eyes into the hospital cafeteria and made for the coffee machine for a cup that might get her home. If she had to get into her car and drive, she would need the caffeine to keep her eyelids drawn; otherwise, she’d be another person getting rushed through the doors and into intensive care.

An old couple sat in a corner, and the same tall man that came in at the end of her first cigarette break occupied a table in the centre. She squinted at him and realized that she knew his face from somewhere. He turned, and a faded crescent moon of bruising arced from his brow to his cheekbone. It was the man with the black and blue face, more yellow and green now that the swelling disappeared. Two large hands dwarfed a paper cup of coffee as he stared off into outer space. 

Before he snapped out of his deep thoughts, Sabi made her way to the table and gave her best comforting smile. Without the swollen balloon of a head, she could make out his facial features. He had sharp cheekbones and two eyes that reminded her of the foggy marshes on her grandparents’ land. He looked up at her and his placid face glimmered with a hint of welcome.

“Oh, hi,” he said, lifting the paper cup to his lips.

“Hello again, Axel. How’s the head? And the rib?” She asked.

He knocked on his temple, tossing out an amused laugh. “All’s well.”

“I saw you come in earlier. I hope everything is okay.”

Axel sighed, a hopeless air leaving his broad shoulders deflated. It was odd to see him dressed in civilian clothes with nothing but a faded bruise on his face. His knuckles still bore scrapes, and dark bags of exhaustion hung beneath his marshy eyes, but he looked healthy. Sabi’s eyes coasted up and down his tattooed arms, habitually looking for signs of drug use and found nothing but vulgar symbols.

“It’s my ma. She’s in a coma, I guess.”

“Oh, jeez. That’s terrible. I’m sorry. I hope she comes out of it soon.”

He shrugged and sipped his coffee again. “Might be the best thing for her. She did it to herself.”

“Oh?”

“I guess that’s what happens when you mix Percs and alcohol for three days straight.”

Sabi gave an understanding nod. It no longer surprised her to learn the extent of drug abuse inside the walls of Featherfall General. Axel looked off into the unknown again, absently drinking his coffee until the cup was empty.

“Are you doing okay?” Sabi asked, unsure if the stranger would take offence to her questions.

“I’ll be all right. My hopes are that she’s okay.”

“I hope so, too.”

Axel raised his empty cup, slid his chair out, and stood up. Sabi’s eyes followed his, and soon she was looking up. He seemed much taller than when he had been a crumpled thing lying in a hospital bed. 

“Well, I should head out. I’m done for the night. Or morning, I guess. Sorry to hear about your mom, and I hope I won’t be seeing you in here again soon.”

“I know, I’m a sight for sore eyes.” Axel pointed at the cloudy bruising around his eye.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Sabi, shaking her head with a smile. “I mean... I hope you don’t find another reason to come back here.”

“If I don’t, how will I ever see you again, Saberrah?”

[a-point-in-tumblspace]

Bayes Trubs, part 1

Tldr: there are circumstances (which might only occur with infinitesimal probability, which would be a relief) under which a perfect Bayesian reasoner with an accurate model and reasonable priors -- that is to say, somebody doing everything right -- will become more and more convinced of a very wrong conclusion, approaching certainty as they gather more data.

Summary

Some old post by Bayes-skeptic extraordinaire @nostalgebraist​ caused @arriving-at-new-equilibrium​ and me to dig up and dig into this statistics paper (Freedman 1963). I don't really know what the whole paper is about, per se, because it took two hours to fully comprehend a single paragraph ("..since M is a homeomorphism of [1/8, 7/8] into Λ, its range is an arc containing ... as interior points (i.e., in the relative topology)" yeah, no thanks), but it was a really interesting paragraph that I'd like to relate. It describes a scenario where Bayes can lead you astray, which I didn't think was possible.

In broad strokes: we're going to craft a kinda funky distribution, with one parameter θ, which we're going to try to estimate with Bayes(TM). As we draw more and more data, our Bayesian posterior is guaranteed to "home in" on θ, our pdf spiking higher there than anywhere else, just like we would expect... but under certain not-technically-impossible circumstances, that needle-thin spike in our pdf will narrow even faster than it rises, so that as we gather more data, most of our probability-mass actually moves away from the true θ.

As a big Bayes fan, I find this very worrying.

Concrete example

Okay. What does this pathological situation look like?

Suppose we have a truncated geometric distribution over the natural numbers: a normal geometric distribution, except it assigns 0 to all numbers above some threshold.

(interactive graph) (If concrete models help you: we have a box containing a biased coin; press a button, the box flips the coin until it gets Heads, and returns [how many Tails it got] modulo [the truncation threshold].)

And, normally a truncated geometric distribution would have 2 parameters (bias θ and threshold t), but in this case, suppose we know that the threshold is computed directly from the bias, using a function that looks like this:

So, for most biases, the threshold is a normal-sized number, but in two arbitrary places (say, 0.25 and 0.75), it spikes to infinity. And, crucially, one of the spikes is way, way thinner than the other one.

Consider what this means: suppose we press the button on this box and observe a 3. We immediately know with certainty that the truncation threshold is at least 4 (otherwise observing a 3 would be impossible). Eyeballing our two-spike graph, this means that the bias θ is between either [0.24999 and 0.25001] or [0.69 and 0.81]. Unless we had a ridiculously strong prior for θ~0.25, we become almost certain that θ~0.75... even if the true value of  is indeed 0.25.

Now, sure, sampling a 3 means that the coin came up TTTH, which is 9 times more likely with a 0.25-H coin than a 0.75-H coin, so our posterior for θ=0.25 (correct) has increased nine-fold relative to our posterior for θ=0.75 (incorrect). But that just means that our posterior looks (roughly) like this:

A needle-thin spire at 0.25, and a low but wide plateau around 0.75 with hundreds of times more total probability-mass.

As we gather more data, this problem gets worse. Most of the time, when we sample another data point, it won't be especially large. The plateau around 0.75 will sink a bit, as it should, and the spire around 0.25 will stretch up, as it should, Bayes guiding us to truth as expected. But once in a while, we'll see a new largest sample; which means the threshold must be larger than we thought; and only the edges of the plateau will get shaved off (because the truncation-function has a very slowly narrowing peak around θ=0.75), while everything but the merest core of the spire will slough off into impossibility (because the truncation-function has a very quickly narrowing peak around θ=0.25), moving almost all of our probability-mass to the plateau.

It's not obvious that the occasional narrowing cataclysm can outweigh the slow-but-steady progress towards the truth of θ=0.25 that most of our samples give us. But we can make the truncation-function's θ=0.25-spike get narrow arbitrarily fast (oh, log(log(1/Δx)) isn't narrow enough? How about ten logs? A hundred? How about getting an inverse Ackermann function in here?), so I'm willing to take it on faith that with a brutal enough narrowing, we can achieve this perverse result.

Conclusion: ????????

We've seen a situation where a proper Bayesian, with an accurate model, and nothing funky happening with their priors, will become arbitrarily convinced of a falsehood as they gather arbitrarily much data. What the heck?

Now, I did sneakily assume that θ=0.25. If it's even a tiny bit off, then there is some finite truncation threshold, which means that eventually the narrowing effect will stop; and after that point, the slow-but-steady updates will siphon ~all the probability-mass from the plateau to the spire.

So the perversity, in this scenario I described, hinges on having exactly θ=0.25. That is to say, for us practically-minded folk, exactly never.

But... just because this effect can't mislead you literally forever doesn't mean it can't mislead you for a very long time.

I will admit my faith is shaken. On the other hand, I don’t see what strategy would lead you to a happier outcome. I hope to make time for followup investigation in the next month.

[moviesandmania]

IT: Chapter Two will be released by Warner Bros. in the USA on Digital on November 19th 2019 and on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital combo (the one to get!), Blu-ray + DVD + Digital combo and Special Edition DVD on December 10th. Content options vary in other regions but they should be released around the same time.

Special features:

Audio commentary with director Andy Muschietti

Pennywise Lives Again!

This Meeting of the Losers Club Has Officially Begun

Finding the Deadlights

The Summers of IT: Chapter One, You’ll Float Too

The Summers of IT: Chapter Two, IT Ends

Here’s our previous coverage of the movie with stacks of reviews:

IT: Chapter Two is a 2019 American supernatural horror feature film directed by Andy Muschietti (Mama) from a screenplay Gary Dauberman (The Nun; Annabelle; Within; Wolves at the Door; et al), based on the novel by Stephen King. Seth Grahame-Smith and Barbara Muschietti produced.

Bill Skarsgård returns as Pennywise the clown, with Jessica Chastain (Crimson Peak; Mama) as adult Beverly, Bill Hader (The Skeleton Twins) as Richie, James McAvoy as Bill, James Ransone (Sinister; Sinister 2) as Eddie, Isaiah Mustafa (Shadowrunner: The Mortal Instruments) as Mike Hanlon, Andy Bean (Allegiant) as Stanley, Jay Ryan (Mary Kills People) as the adult Ben Hanscom.

Plot:

Twenty-seven years later, the members of the Loser’s Club have grown up and moved away, until a devastating phone call brings them back…

Reviews:

“The group dynamics of the (very good) cast propel the film as each Losers Club member faces down his or her personal demons. (Chastain especially gives the material a lift.) Taking each storyline at a time, all accompanied by flashbacks, gives each character some depth, even as the crowded film — at nearly three-hours long — verges on turning into a clown car.” Jake Coyle, Associated Press

“The whole film is going damn near overboard, for better and worse. It’s easy to admire Muschietti’s film for its excess and imagination. It’s easy to watch and enjoy it as a fright flick. It’s just harder to connect with the adult versions of these characters than it should be, and it’s harder to take this story seriously than it was before.” William Bibbiani, Bloody Disgusting

” …each scene begins relatively innocently before exploding into a waking nightmare that preys on the worst fears and repressed memories of each of the Losers. All good stuff, but more often than not, director Muschietti and the first-rate special effects team deliver gross-out visuals in favor of truly chilling and tense psychological terror. I mean, the Losers have to deal with a lot of arachnid-inspired imagery.” Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

“The devotion that Dauberman and Muschietti exhibit towards the Losers is palpable from start to finish, and despite some pitfalls in the film’s pacing, overall what they’ve managed to achieve with their collaborative efforts on IT Chapter Two is nothing short of monumental, and I think they’ve crafted something very special with these two films.” Heather Wixson, Daily Dead

“A psychologically merciless sequel, everything here is as it should be: deeper, scarier, funnier. Muschietti, in particular, has stepped up, skilfully guiding us through a rollicking funhouse. It is obscenely entertaining.” Alex Godfrey, Empire

” …even if Chapter One was example enough, there are no diminishing returns when it comes to shock value. Any time Pennywise feeds on life there is genuine sadness over the loss (the naivety and insecurities of his child victims contrasted with Bill Skarsgård’s master manipulator tendencies ensure it so), whether it’s a character we are attached to or someone newly introduced. ” Richard Kodjer, Flickering Myth

“The terror of Pennywise is best glimpsed fleetingly. See the clown too many times, and he becomes a familiar joke. But also letting the air out of things is Muschietti’s penchant for CGI scares, where practical effects would be far more effective. The movie’s many monstrosities – a crawling eyeball! a giant spider! an insect with the head of a human infant! – don’t inspire fear.” Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail

” …Chapter Two seems to consist of an indefinite number of big, scary set pieces, featuring interchangeable snaggle-toothed creatures, or occasionally gigantic, fairground-sized monsters lurching grotesquely up out of nowhere. The scenes deliver reasonably efficient scares, but with the tension level repeatedly and disconcertingly reset afterwards to zero…” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Muschietti’s faithful adaptation, with all its creative and creepy set pieces, can’t justify that ass-numbing run time; especially not when the characters are just doing a lot of the same things they did in the first movie. They run into cobwebbed houses, stare down nightmarish visions and get tangled up with a clown that can morph into all kinds of silly, gigantic creatures. It’s all so easily forgettable.” Radheyan Simonpillai, Now Toronto

“Chapter Two is darker than the first, Bill’s attempt to deal with the guilt of losing his little brother by saving another ending in a brutal bit of bloodshed. Yet there are really only a couple of scary jolts, too many scary CGI puppets repeating themselves, too many effects beholden to Carpenter’s The Thing. McAvoy feels miscast here, perhaps a first for the actor.  Chastain, Ransone and Hader do a great job updating their childhood counterparts…” Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

“Maybe it’s just that an evil clown terrorizing kids is intrinsically scarier than one going after adults. Or maybe it’s that the filmmakers, apparently believing this themselves, put the majority of their focus on a series of digitally created monstrosities. Whatever the case, It: Chapter Two, though ultimately satisfying, doesn’t get at the deep-seated creeps its predecessor did.” Michael Gingold, Rue Morgue

“IT: Chapter Two never really depicts the way dewy sentimentality can curdle into pain and regret or considers whether the other side of middle age offers a way of letting go of the past. Its monster only occasionally embodies the otherworldly fearfulness that leads the characters to speak of it in hushed tones. But at least Muschietti is trying for something epic and intimidating…” Keith Phipps, The Verge

” …when the filmmakers don’t force the story to fit into strict parameters and just let the story flow with these characters that we love, IT Chapter Two can be just as effective and emotional as the first film. For fans of the novel, you shouldn’t miss this because much of what we love about the book makes its way to the screen, even if it can’t completely hit every high point. IT Chapter Two is clunky, too long, and not as scary as it could have been, but when it hits, it really hits.” Alan Cerny, Vital Thrills

“Real trauma is given the same consideration as a literal funhouse of horrors, which cheapens what the characters and audience are put through.” Alan Silberman, Washington Post

“What stands out in It Chapter Two is not the clearly labored-over insect effects but that moment with Mrs Kersh and the scene of Pennywise as Beverly’s father — both reliant on actors rather than technical wizardry. The human eye can tell that there is not much in effects but effects themselves with a story like this about evil. But an actor like Gregson or Skarsgård can channel evil for us because they are human…” Dan Callahan, The Wrap

NB. Scroll further down past the trailers for YouTube reviews

The New Line Cinema production is obviously the sequel to the smash-hit horror movie IT (2017) which took a whopping $700,381,748 at the box office worldwide against a reported budget of $35 million.

Controversy:

As reported by 9news, some parents in Australia say that giant billboards of Pennywise’s face have been giving their young children nightmares.

“It just totally freaks them out,” Brisbane mother Kellie told the Australian news outlet, speaking about her kids’ reaction to the billboards. Her daughter Piper added: “I get really scared because it’s hard to go to bed when you have a scary picture in your mind. Before I go to bed, I have to check the whole room. And when I finally go to bed I will wake up after a nightmare.”

Another mother also told 9news that her child is terrified by the imagery. “Some people do enjoy going to horror movies and that’s fine and that’s their choice, and I understand that but we’re not choosing to see this poster,” said Jane, who issued a complaint with Ad Standards. The latter body has confirmed that the ads don’t break any of their rules. [Source: Bloody Disgusting]

Production:

Filming on IT: Chapter 2 officially began on June 20 in Toronto with a release date of September 6, 2019.

Background:

IT: Chapter Two clocks in at a whopping 169 minutes.

“A movie is very different when you’re writing the script and you’re building a story compared to what the final product is,” director Andy Muschietti told Digital Spy and other press.

“At the beginning, when you’re writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it’s 4 hours long, you realise that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.

“You cannot deliver a 4-hour movie because people will start to feel uncomfortable – no matter what they see – but we ended up having a movie that is 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the pacing is very good. “Nobody who’s seen the movie has had any complaint.”

Cast and characters:

Jack Dylan Grazer … Young Eddie

James McAvoy … Bill Denbrough

Jessica Chastain … Beverly Marsh

Bill Skarsgård … Pennywise

Sophia Lillis … Young Beverly

Finn Wolfhard … Young Richie

Bill Hader … Richie Tozier

Jaeden Martell … Young Bill

Jay Ryan … Ben Hanscom

Kate Corbett … Dean’s Mom

Javier Botet

Xavier Dolan … Adrian Mellon

James Ransone … Eddie Kaspbrak

Owen Teague … Patrick Hockstetter

Jess Weixler … Audra Phillips

Jake Weary … John ‘Webby’ Garton

Nicholas Hamilton … Young Henry

Wyatt Oleff … Young Stanley

Isaiah Mustafa … Mike Hanlon

Jeremy Ray Taylor … Young Ben

Jackson Robert Scott … Georgie Denborough (rumored)

Teach Grant … Henry Bowers

Andy Bean … Stanley Uris

Chosen Jacobs … Young Mike

Stephen Bogaert … Mr. Marsh

Logan Thompson … Victor Criss

Taylor Frey … Don Hagarty

Ryan Kiera Armstrong … Victoria

Janet Porter … Richie’s Mother

Jake Sim … Belch Huggins

Amanda Zhou … Waitress

Kelly Van der Burg … Victoria’s Mom

Angela Thompson … Comedy Show Patron

Will Beinbrink … Tom Rogan

Ari Cohen … Rabbi Uris

Lyla Elliott … Dead Young Girl

Angelica Alejandro … Asian Waitress

Rob Ramsay … Meaner Nurse

Divan Meyer … Audience Member

Erik Junnola … Bully

Anthony Ulc … Joe The Butcher

Martavius Gayles … Paramedic

Connor Smith … Carny

Shannon Widdis … Cheerleader #1

John Connon … John Koontz

Elena Khan … Derry townsperson

Chris Jiggins … Paramedic

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Image credits: Brooke Palmer / Warner Bros. Entertainment

Jump forward four minutes for review:

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IT: Chapter Two released on 4K Ultra-HD, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital soon – invite Pennywise into your home! IT: Chapter Two will be released by Warner Bros. in the USA on Digital on November 19th 2019 and on…

[ertrunkenerwassergeist]

Dreams of Our Past - Chapter 1 (Part 2)

7.28.755 ME

Insomnia, Lowest Districts

Kingdom of Lucis

 How no one in the upper parts of Insomnia had been able to find the Shadow Market yet, Noctis would never know. Hell, even most people from the lower districts didn’t know of this place. 

It was early in the morning. Very, very early. Even if one were to stand up on the city wall, the sun wouldn’t be more than a notion in the dawn. Noctis dearly wanted to sleep, do nothing more than burrow beneath the thin summer blankets and cuddle his wife, but he had people to look after, duties to see to.

It had nothing to do with Hiemi, his fiery and wonderful wife, kicking him out of bed. It certainly hadn’t.

Darkness reigned nearly undisputed in this part of Insomnia. There was no electricity to power street lanterns that weren’t there. The only lights were weak things glimpsing out of near blind windows in houses that, by all rights, should have collapsed in on themselves a long time ago.

He could hear the market before he could see it, the loud buzzing of people, of activity, was jarring in the previous sleeping silence. Light spilled around the corner, nearly blinding him. He could barely make out the burly man casually leaning against a crumbling wall, tipping at his red bandana in greeting. It was barely keeping the black mess that was his filthy hair together.

Noctis nodded back. Better not to say anything, lest he decided he could get away with demanding a fee for passing without using the hoist. That had happened often enough already. Noctis made his way to the ladder, the rusty metal creaking audibly under his weight. 

The Shadow Market was an impossibility stacked upon old bridges, which seemingly led nowhere, up until twenty meters into the air. Booths, built by the vendors manning them, sat next to and sometimes even on top of each other like a huge jigsaw puzzle, only leaving enough space in the middle to let the people pass by. It was lively and cramped and stank of waste, sweating bodies, rusty metal, oil and food. 

“Look at what the sewer rats dragged in. Still haven’t grown another centimeter I see,” said a smirking voice to his right.

“At least I don’t have to crawl through nests of metalcrabbers every Gods damned day,” answered Noctis, his own smirk tugging at his lips.

He turned and saw Aes, slightly leaning out of her booth built out of artfully welded metal. Her black dreadlocks were bound out of her face by a piece of braided wire and small burn scars dotted the dark skin of her naked arms.

“You still want me to check on your water cleaning station, right?” Her teeth flashed in a shark-like grin, a sharp humor dancing in her eyes. 

“How’s it going?” asked Noctis, ignoring her question. 

That Gods damned water station was always broken and Aes always came by to fix it, even if it wasn’t within her area of expertise at all. 

“Oh, you know, a bit of this, a bit of that. It should rain at the heaps again soon. You better prepare for the rookies to show up.”

Noctis groaned. “Don’t they know to wear their protective gear by now?”

“I’m not their mother, you know. Stupidity is sadly not curable,” shrugged Aes. She shot him a meaningful look.

“You know it doesn’t work like that, right?” he couldn’t help but point out dryly.

She snorted. Her deadpan stare was answer enough. Something fell on the roof of her booth, the loud metallic clang drawing the attention of the people in the vicinity. Someone yelled an apology from above. Faster than he could blink Aes was leaning so far out over the counter, that Noctis feared she would fall over.

“Watch what you’re doing you asshole! If you damaged my gods damned roof, you’re sure as hell gonna repair it!”

Noctis snorted. “I’m going to leave you to it. If you’re coming by today, it’s fish for dinner.”

“Sure. Greetings to Hiemi and the brats.”

He waved carelessly and walked through the morning crowd farther up the bridge to get to the nearest ladder leading up. The giant of a man with the filthy red beret and the baton at his hip eyeballed him mistrustfully as he grabbed the metal bar of the ladder until he recognized him. The guy nodded in a way that may have been supposed to be friendly and let him pass without a word. He tried not to care as the guy stepped into the way of the person behind him, the half panicked protests slowly drowning out behind him.

 Gammers mobile oven stood in a crammed niche on a bridge nestled so close to the rock wall that one could touch it without problems, if one was dumb enough to lean so far over the balustrade. Only one lantern pushed back the shadowy darkness next to the flickering oven fire. The scent of freshly baked bread made his mouth water.

An old woman stepped out behind the oven. Her bend over form was covered in fine dustings of flour and dirt gathered deep in the wrinkles of her face. As she saw him her wrinkles parted into a toothy smile full of holes.

“Right on time, laddy. They are as good as done.”

Noctis smiled, long accustomed to Gammers antics, while the old woman took a pole in hand, whose end was flat and wide, and fished a tray full of buns out of the oven. Noctis’ stomach grumbled loudly. Without paying attention to the heat Gammer put the buns into a crumbled paperbag.

“Good morning to you, too, Gammer. How are you today?”

She cackled loudly and grinned. “Good, good, my dear. Excellent, really. If I get my payment, that is. It’s been so long since someone bothered to pay fairly for my labours.“

Bony fingers held the paperbag close to his face. Noctis rolled his eyes good naturedly and pulled a small metal container out of one of the deep pockets of his old military coat. It was as wide as the palm of his hand and as high as two of his fingers. Hastily Gammer plucked it out of his grip and deposited the paperbag without further ado into his arms. Even through his coat the heat was uncomfortable. Swiftly she pulled the container open and smelled at the mint green salve within.

“Good, good,” she murmured. Her voice ground like millstones. “Good, good. Your wife is getting better and better with these recipes.”

“Thank you. I will relay it as soon as I see her.”

“Yes, yes. You do that,” she said as if it was all the same to her and began to knead a new batch of dough in a chipped bowl as she talked without pause. “You should take care of louse tongues among your followers, Healer, if you don’t want to be found. Especially the canal rats do not know when to stop.”

Noctis made a face and pushed the fear and frustration that threatened to well up aside. This wasn’t happening.

“I don’t have followers”, he growled out between clenched teeth, the words nearly getting stuck.

Gammer crowed gravelly. “It is as unavoidable as the burning fire and the flowing water, laddy. The Six cloak themselves in silence.”

“But not all.”

“No, not all. But also no one is listening. Or maybe no one wants to. Who knows what people would do if they actually listened.” She laughed as if she just told a joke only she understood. The fire in her oven cracked as if to approve. Her hands, full of flour and chunks of dough under the nails, grabbed his wrist like a vice.

“Watch after yourself and your charges Healer-of-the-People. The fires are restless and the embers cast deep shadows. Something is coming, thirsting for blood. The Deep City will not let you leave its protective embrace willingly.”

Gammer let his wrist go and the man calling himself Healer among the people of Deep City stumbled back as if he had been struck.

“I… I - what are you saying?” he sputtered and shook his head so hard his black hair became a dark shroud around his head.  

Her light brown eyes were old and full of pity. “You do not get remembered as you were, but as what the people say you were, laddy. Especially you should know that.”

She started to form the dough into fist sized balls. For a moment he just stood there and didn’t know what to do with this conversation. When he woke up this morning he hadn’t expected for his day to go to shit this early. For so many years he had lived in relative anonymity. Now he could practically feel it dissipating while he desperately tried to cling on, like a child holding on to their blanket to shield themselves from the horrors of the night.

“What are you still doing here? Chop-chop, before your wife arrives with the fury of the Infernian on her heels.”

Noctis winced at the thought. Keeping her and the children waiting was a bad idea. He nodded to Gammer and turned around. The foreboding feeling in his gut stayed until his clinic came in sight. It had been his home for the last few years and he wasn’t sure if it would and should stay that way.