#its including the notes so the total will be different from the posted version

[sluglore]

Explaining The Iterator's Purpose (And Why They Weren't Made to Circumvent The Echoes)

Alright, I know there's already been a few posts like this out there, like this older one from @halvedforest, and this recent one from @noizepushr, which are both good posts, but I've been meaning to touch up and cross-post my own older misconceptions post from reddit for a while now, and provide a deeper, more expanded analysis as to why this misconception exists and explain what's actually going on, so here it finally is haha I'll also be using the term 'Benefactor' instead of 'Ancient', if people are confused about that, I intend to make a post about it eventually ^^

( If you're confused on who out there even believes this, this idea originated from Rain World YouTube lore videos, long before Downpour was ever a thing! It is unfortunately still quite prominent on there... but it's definitely getting better :3 )

This misconception stems from misreading the singular pearl to ever mention the echoes, being the Bright Red farm arrays pearl, so let me begin by attaching the specific section below:

“There were some horror stories though... That if your ego was big enough, not even the Void Fluid could entirely cross you out, and a faint echo of your pompousness would grandiosely haunt the premises forever. So even when the Void Fluid baths became cheaper, some would still starve and drink the bitter tea.” (Bright red Farm Arrays pearl dialogue)

Note the specific usage of “some” here. Echoes weren't presented as an issue significant to re-center Benefactor society around, (let alone build the iterators for) but as some horror stories which only "some" people (likely on the fringes of society) would believe in. Nowhere are we given anything that alludes to the existence of Echoes being regarded as a societal problem to address, much less have anything to do with the Iterators.

Additionally, although we know for a fact that echoes do exist, its fairly possible that most of Benefactor society didn't, as LTTM doesn't even know what they are either, regarding them as nothing more than superstition. On the very next line, LTTM confirms that the void baths continued all the same, while again mentioning that "some" would still choose to abstain from them, and drink the bitter tea.

Then what’s the purpose of the iterators if they weren't created to circumvent the echoes? What is The Big Problem that they are even trying to solve in the first place? Well, both FP, LTTM, and the Exterior colored pearl dialogue spell the answer out for you. In fact, it's the first thing FP even tells you!

“The good news first. In a way, I am what you are searching for. Me and my kind have as our purpose to solve that very oscillating claustrophobia in the chests of you and countless others. A strange charity - you the unknowing recipient, I the reluctant gift. The noble benefactors? Gone.” (Five Pebbles dialogue to Survivor) (Monk's version also hits similar notes)

Five pebbles introduces himself as a “reluctant gift," with his purpose being "to solve that very oscillating claustrophobia in the chests of you and countless others," meaning to solve the cycles for everyone and everything else.

If you bring Looks to the Moon a neuron, she has the chance to repeat the same exact explanation to you.

"We were supposed to help everyone, you know. Everything. That was our purpose: a great gift to the lesser beings of the world. When facing our inability to do so, we all reacted differently. Many with madness.”

FP, LTTM, and the rest of their kind were created to serve the rest of the world in finding a method of total mass ascension, of ending the cycle entirely for everyone.... and everything. Not only including the fauna of the world, like the slugcat, but the bedrock, microbes and even gases, as explicitly stated in this snippet from the Exterior pearl dialogue below:

“The Moral Argument: Five Pebbles is our Creation, and we have Parental Obligations towards him. As an Iterator, he is also a Gift of Charity from Us to The World (unable to reach Enlightenment by itself - being composed mostly of Rock, Gas, dull witted Bugs and Microbes - and towards which We thus have Obligations)” (Pale Green Exterior pearl dialogue)

Here we have the Benefactors define it very clearly, that as an iterator, Five Pebbles is a "Gift of Charity from Us to The World." It's important to note that many misinterpret the next section in parentheses as being about FP himself, but if it were, it would be the only time FP is ever referred to as “it”. What's really being described is the world, “unable to reach enlightenment by itself, being composed mostly of rock, gas, dull witted bugs and microbes” The world is unable to reach Enlightenment on it's own and therefore, that's why the iterators were created. (Also- when you think about it, the description of "being composed of rock, gas, and dull witted microbes" doesn't even really fit FP's description lol)

Quick but necessary tangent, the concept of non-living things being apart of the cycle is a little confusing, and tricky to quickly answer without going deep into cycle lore discussion, (I have an entire post in drafts dedicated to clearing this up) but it's actually incredibly important for understanding what The Great Problem is! To shed some light, it's not that non-living matter are able to somehow comprehend the cycles, but that the entire physical world itself is actually an intrinsic part of the cycles.

If you leave a stone on the ground, and come back some time later, it's covered in dust. This happens everywhere, and over several lifetimes of creatures such as you, the ground slowly builds upwards. So why doesn't the ground collide with the sky? Because far down, under the very very old layers of the earth, the rock is being dissolved or removed. The entity which does this is known as the Void Sea. If you drill far enough into the earth you begin encountering a substance called Void Fluid. The deeper you go, the less rock and more Void Fluid. It's believed that there is a point where the rock completely gives way - below that would be the Void Sea. When that stone you placed on the ground has finally done its time in the sediments, it meets the Void Fluid and is dissolved, leaving the physical world. (Teal Subterranean pearl dialogue)

There's a reason that 'Cycles' is always plural in Rain World, because there's multiple of them! Organic life is in cycles, the physical bedrock of the world is in cycles, even the very concept of civilization is in cycles. In order to ascend everything, that means ascending not only all living things, but the entire physical universe itself! That's what the Great Problem really is :D (Also technicallyyy it's only ever referred to as "the big problem" and not "the great problem", the latter term stems entirely from the community but it's whatever i just wanted to quickly mention that. great problem definitely sounds cooler LOL)

In conclusion, Iterators are described as "Gifts to the World" not once, not twice, but three entire times throughout base game Rain World's dialogue, one from FP, one from LTTM, and one from the Benefactors. Rain World lore holds many unanswered, purposefully ambiguous questions, but the Iterator's purpose is not one of them!

If you're confused/interested in analysis of the Benefactor's motivations and perspectives on Ascension, I made a post a little while back containing my thoughts right here :)

[st-hedge]

this is the total word count for calamity au/little souls fic first draft document. from end to end

[dotthings]

Post 1 of Ben Edlund commentary from SPN Then and Now podcast, 4/15/2024

Edited for clarity.

On The End as a sign on the road to the haunted house:

"In the case of The End, I believe it came from a node that I was fumbling around with and that was because it was early in a season that was heading for an apocalypse and heading for this incredible stuff and I had this — the desire to put a sign up in front of the road that goes down to the haunted house that had a skull on it that said “It’s really scary down there, you don’t know how scary it can get” — just some kind of drumbeat base note of how heavy we were intending to go. So without giving away anything that was gonig to be part of the key mechanics of the end of the season. So that was a bit of a balancing act."

On Dean as a PH test of horror levels:

"In a sense Dean was the PH test or the strip reading to level of pain, horror, and change we were threatening. Jensen…he’s talked to me about that briefly, how much…how difficult that was. He did such an amazing job, he really was two people with the same shape, two totally different guys with the same five o’clock shadow."

Future Dean, scar tissue, and Zachariah’s propaganda tools:

"It was about the amount of experience that Dean had and he had been to the war, sorry, future Dean, had an amount of experience with this thing that present Dean was fearing and that was a distance or a difference in character that was depicted in scar tissue, basically, and regret, a tremendous amount of regret, because the sort of fulcrum of the universe had shifted and he couldn’t call out to angels anymore so he was…at least whatever this version of Dean was felt tremendous humility. Well, and when you look at it, it’s almost sort of charitable of us all, including me, I see it as its own universe that has its own reality but it’s also a perfectly tuned propaganda tool from Zachariah to have Dean do what he wants. It’s almost on the nose, like, come on."

[epitomereally]

Celestial Navigation by @sabrecmc

18 year old Omega!Tony finds himself Bonded to Captain Steve Rogers. He isn't happy about it until he is.

An absolutely gorgeous story of learning to love yourself, even when you feel like you don't fit in & that you grew up wrong. I'm so happy to have gotten to bind this mammoth work for Sabre & as a gift exchange for @mourningmountainsbindery (who bound me this beautiful copy of Astolat's Let the River Run—JUST LOOK AT THAT COVER!).

Also to anyone who has @ed me lately (looking at u, em @powerful-owl & tacky @tackytigerfic particularly) & I've been derelict in responding, here is WHY.

This has been the longest binding project I've undertaken, both in page count and in time. My original message to Sabre was on March 16th—can't decide if I want to use the laughing or crying emoji here—and the colophon says I made the book in April 2023 (which was when I started typesetting, maybe). I had been randomly perusing dying videos on Youtube in bed on a Saturday morning, as one does, and came across a video showing how to spiral tie-dye. I IMMEDIATELY had a design premonition of the full design for this fic as a two-volume set, planted into my brain wholesale by the binding gods. I learned many new techniques throughout the process (edge painting, edge trimming/sanding, tie-dying/dyepainting, embroidery, typesetting meta from tumblr which copy-pastes with the worst goddamn formatting in the world, kill me now). Overall, alternately extremely painful & wonderful, and I'm extremely proud of this set.

Design-wise, I went whole-hog with the scifi stars theme. Endpapers are recolored versions of the star charts from the Apollo 11 mission:

Title page & chapter titles are both rips in the galaxy:

Epigraphs both star-themed:

Some more glamor shots because I'm so proud 💕

8.6 lbs // 3.8 kgs worth of books (~3000 total pages) 🥰

Celestial Navigation is also INCREDIBLY popular, and Sabre has been incredibly generous answering asks on her tumblr + writing additional one-shots in the universe. There is also a veritable volume of fanart. I was so inspired by seeing @robins-egg-bindery copy of ********, with its appendix of fanart & meta, that I promptly copied them.

fanart redacted because lots of the artists are no longer active on tumblr but just know i am ECSTATIC about the amount of art in these books

Lastly, I love how @clovenhoofbindery includes their 'Illustrator mess' with their bind posts, as a behind-the-scenes look into the wild process of designing these books. I don't actually have an Illustrator mess for this book (the chapter titles & title page pretty much came in one take), but I do have a DYING MESS. It took me sososo many tries to figure out how to get the dye to look how I imagined in my head. I ended up 'dye painting' instead of tie-dying in the end, but my inbox is always open to chat hand-dying/tie-dying/dyepainting (or what I did differently between any of these attempts). Numbers are the dying attempt.

Last process shot: I hand-dyed variegated linen thread to match the colors of the bind, which ends up being incredibly difficult to see on the finished bind, but was super fun while I was sewing!

Materials:

Body font: Kepler

Title font: Compaq 1982

Chapter number font: aliens & cows

Endpapers: recolored versions of the star chart used by Michael Collins during the Apollo 11 mission (archived at The Smithsonian)

Bookcloth: dyed using Dharma Trading Procion Fiber-Reactive Dyes

Title page and chapter headers: designed in Photoshop using the Ultimate Space brush pack by jeffrettalyn on DeviantArt

Metallic embroidery thread: Cosmo Nishikiito thread

I would dye for this embroidery thread. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the classic metallic embroidery thread from DMC: much easier to work with & much more sparkly. Literally so eye-catching; it truly doesn't translate to photos.

Paint for edges: Daniel Smith watercolor tubes in Iridescent Sunstone and Prussian Blue

Note: these are GORGEOUS watercolors. The color is so saturated and strong and beautiful BUT I don't think I'd recommend watercolors for edge painting. They went on very differently depending on the grit of the sandpaper I used for the edges + they sometimes bled into the pages + they had to be set with fixative, which then stuck the pages together.

[emotionallychargedtowel]

Desert Hearts rewatch notes

Desert Hearts (1985) is one of my favorite movies, but as with most of my favorites, I've gone quite a while without seeing it at times. I put it on the other day for the first time in years and took some screenshots in the hope that I might get some folks on here to give it a try that haven't, or at least bring back some memories for those who’ve seen it before. Then, when I sat down to post the images, I found I had more to say than I realized.

This was my first time watching this movie since I got into the whole BL/QL genre and I was curious to see if it would seem any different to me after a period of being more immersed in queer stories than usual. Mostly it swept me up into its own world, something this film is really good at. But I did find myself thinking at times about how aspects of it mapped onto QL tropes and more general romance tropes. I also couldn't help but see some parallels to the actual lived experiences of myself and people I know.

Queer romance tropes in Desert Hearts

Three tropes stood out at me that I've run into in the QL world, some of which I've seen in hetero romance settings as well.

Fish out of water - Vivian goes from her life as an academic in New York City to staying at a ranch outside Reno in pursuit of a "quick" divorce. (Having to spend six weeks in a strange place in order to get a divorce was "quick" by 1959 standards.) Helen Shaver, who played Vivian, points out in a featurette included with the Criterion version of the movie that Vivian has been living a very cerebral life, living inside her own head while cutting herself off from her body from the neck down. This radical change of scenery is exactly what she needs to be able to open up to something different.

There’s a similar dynamic at play in hetero fish-out-of-water romances. But I find this trope a lot more interesting in a queer context. Queer identities have a more complex relationship to difference. Among other things, characters who seem to be at home in the environment of the story often turn out to be alienated from it due to others’ perceptions of their sexuality.

Age gap (with the younger person pursuing) - Cay, who is ten years Vivian's junior, is definitely the pursuer here. This isn't a specifically queer trope per se, but it can manifest in some specific ways in queer love stories.

LGBTQ+ identity can put people on unusual timelines in their lives. (This is an idea I first ran into in a book by Jack Halberstam in undergrad.) Sometimes this means being in a more "youthful" mode later in life than cishet people. Other times it means being a particular kind of late bloomer. And so on. So with life stages not conforming to typical expectations, what does it mean to love someone you have a significant age difference with?

In the case of Vivian and Cay, Vivian may be older, but Cay is poised to initiate her into practices and feelings that are pretty familiar for Cay and totally, mind-blowingly new to Vivian. This creates a kind of role reversal. At the same time, Cay has never felt this way about a partner before, so in many ways, their relationship is causing her to have some new and intense experiences as well.

The thing where a character figures out their sexuality for the first time because their feelings toward a love interest act as a catalyst - This is certainly a trope that comes up in stories about queer romance, but it's more debatable whether it's a queer trope in the sense of a trope that is used by and resonates with queer people. I guess I'd say the theme comes up in different ways when a story is very geared toward the "straight gaze" and when it's more authentically queer. With the "straight gaze" version you get things like "gay for you." With more authentic versions, well, I don't think I've noticed many commonalities there. But I will always defend the use of this trope when it's done well in a way that centers queer experience, if only because falling for a specific person is exactly what forced me to come to terms with my own sexuality.

Side note: Speaking of coming to terms with my sexuality, it really is an indication of how deeply in denial I was about my bisexuality in college that seeing this movie for a class didn't help me figure it out. I was deeply affected by it and fixated on it for weeks after seeing it, but it didn't get through the thick shell of obliviousness I had built up around myself.

A connection to personal experience

There are quite a few ways that Desert Hearts resonates with my own experience but one really stood out to me this time around. [Spoilers ahead.] When Cay goes to see Vivian at the hotel where she’s staying after she leaves the ranch, she goes for a last-ditch, Hail Mary move—she takes off her clothes and climbs into Vivian’s bed. At first Vivian tells her to leave, but then she softens a bit, clearly interested but conflicted. Then this moment happens.

I related to this so much. When I fell in love with a someone who was (at that time) presenting as a woman and it started to look like I might actually have a chance, I had so much anxiety about whether and how I could be intimate with my crush and whether I’d be able to “perform” decently. It turns out, as we learned when we compared notes sometime later, we had each had the same worry and we’d both bought an instructional book about lesbian sex (I think it may even have been the exact same book!).

I think part of my anxiety back then stemmed from the prospect of starting from scratch with a new set of practices and skills after being acclimated to sex with men. It made me feel like I was off balance. But when I actually did get close to my crush, another, much more pleasant side to my inexperience came up. It turned out that not having a familiar script for what to do made me much more present and gave me a sense of freedom. I remember thinking that it was like going from traveling down the same old route to exploring a new place that we had to write our own maps for. And that was pretty exhilarating.

Soon after that relationship happened, I read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. There was a passage where Lorde described something very similar from her own life. In this passage, she’s reflecting after her first sexual encounter with a woman after having a similar set of anxieties.

So this was what I had been so afraid of not doing properly. How ridiculous and far away those fears seemed now, as if loving were some task outside of myself, rather than simply reaching out and letting my own desire guide me. It was all so simple.

She’s so amazing at evoking these feelings, isn’t she?

I can’t think of any other places I’ve seen this type of experience discussed besides these two. (I’m pretty sure others exist, but the fact that I haven’t come across them suggests there aren’t very many.) There are plenty of stories out there about hetero sex performance anxiety and its eventual resolution, but I think the queer version of this kind of learning has some big inherent differences that go way beyond the genders of partners being different. So it’s really nice to see it come up here, and be handled in such a sweet way.

In case you’re wondering, once Vivian is able to “let her own desire guide her,” in Lorde’s words, she also finds that her fears were misplaced. The resulting love scene is beautifully executed even by current standards. It’s even more remarkable to see it in a film that was released in 1985. It’s equally remarkable that this sex scene was shown in rather explicit detail.

about, by, and/or for?

I'm also thinking about this movie in terms of the for/by/about queers typology that @wen-kexing-apologist came up with a while back. In my estimation, Desert Hearts belongs right in the center of WKA's Venn diagram. It's about queers, of course. I'd also place it in the "by queers" category. The director, Donna Deitch, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is an out lesbian. It's not clear whether the other co-screenwriter was queer. Her personal life was mysterious enough that it seems like a definite possibility. And the movie is based (somewhat loosely) on a novel by Jane Rule, who was also an out lesbian and whose work as a writer was very focused on lesbian characters.

I'd also consider this movie to be "for queers." It was marketed to a wider audience, of course. But as I watched some of the bonus material and looked at writing about the movie, I saw a lot of evidence that Deitch made the film for her community and they embraced it.

Shaver had a really lovely story in the featurette I watched about this. I forget the exact nature of it, but she described how she attended some kind of event with Deitch and Charbonneau where the audience was full of queer women who gave them an incredibly long standing ovation that she found very moving and helped her see how impactful the film had been.

I’m also sure Deitch had queer viewers in mind (at least in part) when she set out to fill a glaring gap in Sapphic representation. In an interview with AfterEllen, Deitch said, “My goal was to make a lesbian love story that did not end in a bisexual love triangle or a suicide. Because that’s all that had been made at the time I set out to make Desert Hearts.” (Note: I’m not linking due to transphobia concerns regarding that site but folks should be able to find it easily if they look.)

In summary…

If you haven’t seen Desert Hearts yet I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

(And yes, that’s Denise Crosby from Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting beside Jeffrey Tambor.)

[randomvarious]

Chicago House Playlist

Alright, folks, here's something that's been a long time coming: a playlist of house tunes that came from the city that gave birth to the global phenomenon in the first place, and also kickstarted the whole evolution of electronic dance music as we currently know it. When house music began, most dancefloors had moved on from disco to a mishmash of post-disco, boogie, hi-NRG, dance-pop, synthy funk, electro, freestyle, and a whole lot of other stuff, but there was something different that started to brew itself into a movement during the mid-1980s among a predominantly black, gay crowd in the city where disco had first been symbolically murdered in 1979.

And eventually, it became known as house music, named after both The Warehouse, the place that the genre's godfather, Frankie Knuckles, would have residency, and the posters that would be hung up to advertise the venue's events, which referred to 'house parties' and 'house music.' The Warehouse would open up in the late 70s and close in the early 80s, but in 1983, Frankie would open up his own club, The Power House, which would then change its name to the Power Plant, and then change its name again to The Music Box, after another legendary house DJ, Ron Hardy, would take up residency there.

So, a lot of this playlist channels the greatness of some of those halcyon Chicago house days. And so much of it is just pure, primordial dance music bliss; lighthearted, unserious, super fun, revolutionary grooves. There was an amateurishness to a lot of it back then that gave it a significant level of goofy charm, and that's something that seems to have gotten mostly left behind as the music continued to grow into the 90s. Songs like "Move Your Body," by Marshall Jefferson, which opened with this rich and clanging, jauntily unpolished piano rag of sorts, was so infectious, and his plainly bad, but passionate singing voice that would follow that iconic intro couldn't help but be adored too. And the song on this playlist that currently comes after that one, "Love Can't Turn Around," by Farley "Jackmaster" Funk & Jesse Saunders, is in much the same vein, as featured vocalist Darryl Pandy goes over-the-top berserk to start his second verse, making for another song that you really just can't resist 🥰.

Another total favorite of mine on here is one that was produced by Frankie Knuckles himself: "Let the Music Use You," by the Night Writers, which is a near-eight minute masterpiece that has a divine, string-pad-and-bell-laden beat that immediately shows you why Frankie was revered as such a master of his own craft. And that beat gets paired beautifully with Ricky Dillard's soft and tender, heartfelt vocals too.

And then there's Kevin Irving's "Children of the Night," which features his excellent, soulful voice on a beat that combines string pads with prickly electro stabs, and was made by Larry Sherman, the founder of the most important label in the history of Chicago house itself, Trax Records, which has also caught a lot of flak over the years for its shady business practices.

A couple more notes: first, be forewarned that the track that starts this playlist is another tremendous classic, "Mind Games," by Quest— which features the voice of Liz Torres and some great and dreamy freestyle-type synth work—but even though it's on Spotify, it is, unfortunately, pretty damn scratchy. Luckily, I was able to include a much cleaner version on the YouTube version of this playlist, though 😊. And second, I like to keep these playlists as chronologically ordered as possible, but I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out when Screamin' Rachael's "Bip Bop" was actually made. It has an aggressive male rap vocal on it that's reminiscent of Turbo B's on Snap!'s "The Power," so it could be from that early 90s period, but I really don't know. So I just put it at the end, where it will stay until I one day possibly figure out when it was actually created.

This playlist is ordered as chronologically as possible and links are provided below to songs that have been posted about previously in order to give them more context:

Quest - "Mind Games" Marshall Jefferson - "Move Your Body" Farley "Jackmaster" Funk & Jesse Saunders - "Love Can't Turn Around" On the House - "Pleasure Control" Housemaster Boyz - "House Nation" Ralphi Rosario - "You Used to Hold Me" Night Writers - "Let the Music Use You" Dalis - "Rock Steady" Kevin Irving - "Children of the Night" Bam Bam - "Where's Your Child?" Paul Johnson - "3rd Dimension (Remixed by Armando)" Screamin' Rachael - "Bip Bop"

And while there are some incredible moments in that Spotify playlist, I still have way more Chicago house music to show you in the YouTube version. Some tracks that stand out in this bonus crop are the first one, the silly and campy "Undercover," by Doctor Derelict, which has about 3,500 plays on YouTube across a couple uploads; another one from Frankie Knuckles, which is a rare remix of his very popular "Baby Wants to Ride" that has ~31.6K plays, and features some political opining from vocalist Jamie Principle, and even a detouring interpolation of "America the Beautiful" in its second half (😆); and then one from a later era of Chicago—'99, to be exact—called "Testing & Balancing," by Jimminy Cricket, aka James Curd, that has around 170 plays and liberally samples from Al Green's soul classic, "Love & Happiness."

Doctor Derelict - "Undercover" Jungle Wonz - "The Jungle" Steve "Silk" Hurley - "House Beat Box" On the House - "Ride the Rhythm"Libra Libra - "I Like It" Paris Grey - "Don't Make Me Jack" Liz Torres - "Can't Get Enough" Frankie Knuckles - "Baby Wants to Ride" On the House - "Let's Get Busy" Mister Lee - "Come to House" Jimminy Cricket - "Testing & Balancing"

And this playlist is also on YouTube Music.

So, with the Spotify version of this playlist, we currently have 12 songs that total an hour and 16 minutes, and with YouTube, we're at 23 songs that total 2 hours and 24 minutes. Clearly, there are a whole lot more goodies in that YouTube one.

And if you want a Chicago house playlist that's a bit shorter, I have one that's made of stuff that's solely from the 80s too.

1980s Chicago House: Spotify / YouTube / YouTube Music

Enjoy!

More to come, eventually. Stay tuned!

Like what you hear? Follow me on Spotify and YouTube for more cool playlists and uploads!

[sterlingarcher23]

Happy memories=Season 5: Addendum & Will foreshadowing

I already altered my previous post (link down below) a bit - I overlooked something: Lucas.

Time jump (correction)

Lucas telling Max that he's there, right in front of her, and she's kind of ignoring him is foreshadowing the scene they shot with Sadie and Caleb: Max in coma, "ignoring" Lucas who tells her that he's there. "I don't want a letter. I'm right here."

It's either that or the scene in S4 in which he reads the book. And the sequence includes Season 4.

The "I'm right here" scene in the memory corresponds with Lucas sitting at Max's bedside (but she is looking just like Sleeping Beauty because she's not in cast and Ross saying that she's in a coma - which means in this scene),and her "ignoring" him. It's possible that this is this scene. It's also possible that it refers to S4. - His watch shows Thursday 11 2 (!), so November 2nd and that's 1989.

Next is Max swallowing the red Skittle (You were wearing that yellow Benny's Burgers t-shirt and it was so big it almost swallowed you whole - like a Pac-Man swallowing the red ghost in the scene, red jacket Max enters the Arcade.), then El and Max link and we hit the time barrier...

Note how in the memory scene they cut the original moment before the linking and after the linking - that's a time jump in itself:

Season 3 mall scene = time jump in Back to the Future. (JC Penney - they used the brands without getting money for it, it's not because they want to make commercials but used them for specific reasons like KitKat, Skittles, M&Ms) The linking/vanishing and reappearing part isn't in it.

The original version is cut in three segments (not sure about the exact terminology here, so I better leave that out, in German which differ from English terminology its probably: halbnah, Totale, nah). If you see the original footage as a single sequence, the edited memory version is visually a temporal jump.

Here again the comparison between this scene (without the final shot) and Back to the Future:

So this is the time jump - it's the third element in the memory sequence (and those are completely out of chronological order) and my guess is, that there are like two jumps potentially. - There's also some contradicting Infos about the time jump, like some say "immediate" time jump but other sources say from Episode 1 to 2. It's still possible that there are multiple time jumps and the hand holding scene IS right before waking up.

(Caleb is wearing a jacket in the bts shot and we don't see what he's wearing under it but in the hand shot he's definitely in role.)

The Back to the Future time jump reference in the memory is happening right after the "I'm right here/Lucas at Max's bedside" scene - however these moments are probably much closer than I initially thought.

And these segments of Lucas touching Max, the red Skittle are connected and the BttF time jump sequence may show us the result of this.

My guess is that there's at least one scene, maybe more, before the actual jump, involving Max (that has not been filmed yet - it would need summer weather) and we get to see already a partial resolve of the jump with Lucas holding Max's hand. Still comatose but a coma is only important if and how someone wakes up.

The coma is a "time jump"

"I'm right here" is either Season 4 ending or the scene from S5. Thinking about it, both would make sense. The first one even a bit more if we think of the coma as the actual starting point for the memory sequence to foreshadow everything the follows after.

Falling in coma, swallowing the red Skittle, time jump sequence and the rest is the boys who meet the killer, the ghost trap scene, ElMax foto session, fotos (in media metaphorically) freeze people in time like:

(There are some Whovians out there that say, that some Doctor Who is also in Stranger Things. And those stasis cubes are visualized as paintings. - An endless summer skateboarding sounds very much like a stasis cube or a pocket dimension. )

.. the movie date (storytelling technique called promise gets it's payoff) ElMax hugging...ElMax & Lumax Endgames.

And they could only use existing scenes but those are very deliberately chosen (there's a scene not in this sequence that has it's own rhyme and I only just discovered it but it demands another moment like it, it involves ElMax, certain posters but most importantly: a sea shell lamp).

And it's been foreshadowed how we would react to the time jump that the JC Penney reference alludes to - I didn't make it up, the Duffers made this connection in the show by showing us the exact moment including Doc saying "The temporal displacement occurred at 1:20 am"

Yepp...these two idiots. That's us.

Conclusion?

The coma is a time jump. "I didn't disintegrate anything. The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact. I sent him into the future.", Doc Brown.

In the memory scene, except the "coma" segment as a starting point and the Endgame (It's you and me won't be unhappy), the answer to EVERY memory sequence is ElMax, shown as inseparable after linking. That's neither queerbaiting nor is it just a "regular" relationship. This is not even slightly one of these stories.

Nonetheless is gives us some basic elements of the plot.

And it's ElMax making Lumax Endgame possible: High five. 1st place. Winners....whatever you want to call it.

Soo... The sequence foreshadows some basic elements of Season 5 in regards to the character relationships. - And ElMax appears like inseparable in these moments, either linked, very close by, hugging ...

It doesn't get more obvious. They tell it straight into our faces.

And I would say that it's obvious that they make a huge deal out of Max's coma. Just her having powers? That's it? How is this such a huge deal? The Vecna has absorbed her and stuff can easily be debunked too.

Will

And I have Will proving that they do this shit with the window and foreshadowing ...just differently. This is almost not so surprising, is it? That they show us that he has a "crowbar" in his head. - Oh, yes, people.

And while the class scene in Season 2 is about him. It's also about Max, she however has light reflections like "God rays" pointing to her head when the focus changes with Mr Clarke's words on top. Seriously, people. This is a subtle as fireworks in the middle of the towns square.

ElMax Endgame

ElMax will turn out to be a dissociative identity/multiple personality disorder system of two individual minds residing inside the same body. Max's body. They'll be together. Literally.

This way Max is healed by the cure/medicine: El. - This way ElMax and Lumax can happen and it's in line with the themes of the show. And it fits in regards to the inspo for Eleven taken from Elfen Lied - kids having supernatural powers do do some lab science MK Ultra style etc etc, why not Fringe? Because Elfen Lied has a main character that has DID.

"One skull, two tenants"

Previous post:

[jacensolodjo]

Total disclosure: Because of the book Babi Yar being republished in English on 4/18/2023, while also seeing certain posts on my dash, I was inspired to make this post.

If the USSR was a free and open utopia why were books like "Babi Yar" sent through so much censorship it would have probably been better it was never published at all?

Babi Yar aka Babyn Yar, you know, the massacre of (predominantly) Jews that was the largest singular event massacre of the Holocaust?

If the USSR cared about Jews why did they cover up and refuse to even so much as put a plaque of remembrance up for DECADES after? Oh sure 25 years after Babyn Yar they put up a placeholder plaque promising a new one. BUT they would clear away all the flowers and such from the PLACEHOLDER PLAQUE whenever foreign dignitaries finished their tour of the area. How, exactly, is that okay? How could they put effort into all of that and not even give a proper plaque of remembrance? (The answer, by the way, is this was the Soviet Union's standard MO. Western writer is visiting? Quick, hire a bunch of actors to live in this totally fake Ukrainian village to PROVE there is NO FAMINE.)

At some point you have to admit someone is in the wrong and it will always be the USSR.

(Note the book Babi Yar isn't just about the massacre but also tells the story of a young man up through the 1960s, including the Kreshchatik and 1961 disaster.)

The author himself regretted he published it with so much redacted from it due entirely to USSR censorship.

I suggest everyone take a look at the new publication of the book from this year. (Translated into English new publication I should say.) ((And yes I DO think it is well timed given the attack on the Babyn Yar memorial site last year.)) I should note, that the complete unredacted version is unvarnished truth, and thus some parts are hard to read. It is told from notes written by a boy barely into his teens and this should be kept in mind if you do read the book.

Note from the author of Babi Yar:

"Those who are interested will be able to have some idea of the conditions in which books are published in the Soviet Union, because—as I must stress again—my case was not an exception; on the contrary, it was quite ordinary and typical. Again, the version of Babi Yar distorted and deformed by the censorship was printed in millions of copies and appeared in translation in many languages. People who have read it already but who would like to know the full text need only read in this book the new sections, published here for the first time; especially since they contain the main sense of the book and are the reason why it was written."

(Please note that even though the author, Kuznetsov, was Ukrainian geographically and half Ukrainian from his mother, that he was a Russian speaker and thus used the Russian spelling of Babi Yar in addition to other words. He was well within his rights to use whichever toponym he desired. There is a HUGE difference in him using the Babi Yar form and a Western English speaker using it after knowing the preferred by actual marginalized Ukrainians form. Out of respect for Mr. Kuznetsov I use the form he used in his writing when talking about the book itself. As well as any other words from the book using the Russian spelling.)

Anatoly himself was not Jewish but he grew up right by Babyn Yar. Before and after the massacre there. The massacre also, it should be noted, did not just include Jews but ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Rromani, the disabled (mentally or otherwise), etc., and Anatoly took great pains to make sure of this fact to anyone who read the book in its full form.

One more note from Anatoly about the book's current form: "In the summer of 1969 I escaped from the USSR with photographic films, including films containing the unabridged text of Babi Yar. I am publishing it as my first book free of all political censorship, and I am asking you to consider this edition of Babi Yar as the only authentic text. It contains the text published originally, everything that was expurgated by the censors, and what I wrote after the publication, including the final stylistic polish. Finally, this is what I wrote." (and I want to note he says PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM of the book which turned out to be a 478 page paperback so this meant he RETYPED ALL ~478 PAGES and had the presence of mind to actually PHOTOGRAPH IT knowing damn well what could happen to his manuscript otherwise. He sewed all of it into his jacket as he fled for asylum.)

(I want to say, foolishly giving people the benefit of the doubt, that when a writer is called a 'Soviet writer' that they think it is somehow all of them actually being allowed to write. When in fact 'Soviet' in front of writer only refers to the time frame they were writing. Many 'Soviet' authors often only had their work published either during the 80s -- the time of glasnost-- or after the Fall but they still get the moniker of Soviet. Or, commonly, like with Anatoly their work is so butchered by censorship as to be practically a different work altogether. It takes a certain amount of courage to publish anyway though, so Anatoly's efforts along with any other author that mirrors his experience should be held in high regard.)

A regime or system of government (since people have tried to 'well actually' about the word regime) that does not allow their people to poke fun or satirize or even tell an unflattering truth with no veiling is not really a regime/system of government one should be defending and yet. When you defend the Soviet Union, you defend their total disregard for Jews, Ukrainians, etc., while at the same time pretending to care about them (The Soviet Union was a Jewish utopia, honest! So long as you ignore all the pogroms and things like the Doctors' Plot that happened post-Holocaust because gosh darnit there were still too many damn Jews in the Soviet Union! Mother Russia, FIX! While also preventing them from going to Israel where they can actually, you know, live. Instead you just whisper about thinking of going to Israel and you got fired and became a 'leech' and yada yada some people waited a decade or more to be allowed to emigrate but hey whatever. Jewish Utopia.)

I leave with one more note from the author of Babi Yar:

"Time and again I set about the task of writing an ordinary documentary novel on the basis of my notes, but without the slightest hope that it would ever be published. Apart from that, something rather strange happened to me. I had been trying to write a straightforward novel in accordance with the rules of ‘socialist realism’—the only guide to writing which I knew and which I had been taught ever since my schooldays. But the truth of real life, which cried out from every line written in my child’s notebook, immediately lost all its vividness and became trite, flat, false and finally dishonest when it was turned into ‘artistic truth’."

And an example of something that was excised by Soviet censors, denoted by brackets paired with what made it into the first editions of the book:

"[I, Anatoli Vasilevich Kuznetsov, author of this book, was born on August 18th, 1929, in the city of Kiev. My mother was Ukrainian, my father Russian. On my identity card my nationality was given as Russian.] I grew up on the outskirts of Kiev, in the Kurenyovka district, not far from a large ravine the name of which—Babi Yar—was known then only to the local people. Like the other parts of the Kurenyovka it was our playground, the place where I spent my childhood."

(I wonder, what was so repugnant about stating he was half Ukr to cause it to be removed from the book entirely?)

[centrally-unplanned]

Comic Box 1997 End of Evangelion Issue - Archive Scan

Comic Box was a magazine in Japan launched in, from what I can gather, 1982. It was a bit of an ‘alt” magazine - it has an imprint, Comic Box Jr, which focused on doujinshi for example - and would cover anything anime-adjacent, including western films. The October 1997 release of the magazine was dedicated to the release of the End of Evangelion film, and to answering the question “what was the phenomenon called Evangelion?”. Towards that end it features fan submissions, art, comics, essays, all talking about what Eva meant to them. Some are serious, some are fully comedic, way way more than I expected are erotic, and overall it is a time capsule of how the anime community was thinking about Evangelion when EoE came out. The magazine dissolved in 1998 from what I can tell, so this was one of its last releases - you can still see its absolutely vintage website here! Complete with dashing chibi cat gif.

I discovered this magazine through japanese anime/manga archivist-in-residence ehoba on twitter, who provided photos and rough summaries of some of the pages. They are just camera photos of an open magazine though, not scans, and not at all complete. I hunted around for a while to find a scanned version, messaged ehoba and a few others, posted on forums like Evageeks, and drew total blanks. I couldn’t find any listings of it online, so I set the quest aside...until I was placing another order for some artbooks for import and decide to check Yahoo Auctions Japan and lo and behold, there is was! It arrived this week.

So that image above is not one pulled from the internet - I have scanned the entire Evangelion segment of Comic Box - October 1997 issue. I am a neophyte scanner & image editor, these aren’t gonna be amazing or anything, but while I hope to make a more polished version I wanted to share the drafts now. I really aspire to translate it, but of course I don’t speak Japanese, so I am going to see how far working with some people I know and brute-forcing with AI would go. If you are interested or know someone who would be, definitely reach out! 100% would crowdsource this. If someone already scanned and translated this, also let me know, I would groan heavily and curse my google skills but i’d rather it be available and know, and not waste time.

Below will be some reduced-down PNG’s of the magazine to fit Tumblr image limits with Ehoba’s notes and a few of my own attached to them. A link to the full images as a singular PDF is on the Internet Archive [Here]

A reflection of a very known thing in this magazine is that, from my perspective, End of Evangelion is definitely Asuka’s moment to shine, but it didn’t matter because the 90′s Eva fandom *loved* Rei. She was the most popular by far, and I think dethroned Sailor Mercury on the ‘best girl’ polls in magazines of the era. Nowadays if you poll audiences - as the NHK did recently - Asuka is the most popular girl, but it was a different, proto-moe-boom time.

"Evangelion was fake. A fake made by one director, or by the staff. However, it was a very real fake. God, it was so good."

Watermelon Kaji absolute goat here; so cool indeed

How much Asuka is suffering in all these images vs god-salvation Rei is, again, saying alot about the waifu wars.

"I don't think episode 25 and 26 were professional work. I understand that the ADR script and previews with layout sheets are supposed to be avant-garde, but something is wrong with it." "TV show is not an individual's job, so I wanted them to deal with the schedule limitation."

90% sure this Asuka ‘escaped’ and I saw it on the internet in the early 2000′s - maybe the author published it elsewhere in a doujin, I assume a lot of this art would have been repurposed for other mediums.

Honestly the art is incredible for this magazine sometimes, the splash pages they have are filled with Evangelion’s anime-spiritual energy.

"Unit 02 has a mouth, which means it can give a blow job." "The biggest surprise is Rei in cowgirl position. The official content does that, so hentai authors have nothing to do."

(Gainax putting hard-working hentai doujin authors out of a job, what assholes!)

"My heated up feeling toward Evangelion was quick-freezed by episode 25 and 26. EoE defrosted it, but now I feel distant from Evangelion."

How much Episode 25-26 come up here is great evidence for how divisive they were - End of Eva is absolutely seen as commentary on, and opposition to, the TV ending. I think in the west the initial reception of the original ending is overall more positive? Certainly nowadays, would be curious how it is seen in Japan today.

OCR’ing this image will literally murder me, pls I can’t

"Bullshit plot, surficial information, shallow dialogues, inconsistent direction, story with tons of plot holes, the director's masturbation, the otaku's useless attempt to enlighten other otaku..." "BUT I LOVE IT."

10/10 take

"'Sincerity' of someone I don't like just confirms that I still don't like them. Anno apparently thought that honest depiction of himself can be depiction of otaku, but that's not wrong. Anno is exceptionally creepy."

God-tier Anno portrait here. I love how many of this art showcases “settings” from End of Eva and which ones hit the audience - re-using the movie theatre seats for Shinji, that is really cool!

Evangelion - Slayers edition! The artist names are in the black box panel on the page lining, I absolutely hope to track down a few of them and see what kind of works they made.

"I think each material of Evangelion was nothing new. In the early half, however, I was moved by their techniques of arranging and remixing those materials." "Creators' strong desire for expression supported this story, but I'm not sure."

"Adam and Eve in the Eden East" "I hope they will live happily after the ending."

"The theater was like a funeral after the screening. No, I should say it was a literal funeral. Evangelion ended, it died. In terms of entertainment, Evangelion was completely and brilliantly killed."

Kaworu’s insta-inclusion into the ranks of the kid cast is always amusing to me; he is in one episode of the show after all, barely in Eva! But he is all over the art immediately. The power of design - and also being one of the first gay characters on television (as opposed to OVA’s) in Japan.

Hopefully if I can make progress on translation I can have actual thoughts to add to the scan, certainly I will post results if I get them.

I value, way too deeply to be honest, the preservation of the other side of the ‘media mix’ - how people responded to the media in question and what it meant to them. It is way more likely to be lost than the media itself or documents from the production side. May this contribution to preserving a bit of that experience be of value to those out there who would be interested in the history of Evangelion, and anime more generally.

If you think you know anyone or your followers overall would be interested in translation help, I would appreciate the broadcasting!

[aetherspoon]

Hi total stranger here sorry to jump into your inbox but I saw you mentioned a drive that allowed you to bypass the truly awful 4K uhd settings that I've literally only just heard about?

Oooo, my first ask!

So, I'll post the short version here and the long version under a cut.

The short version is simple - I have a USB UHD (4k) BluRay drive from LG. At the time I bought it, it had firmware that could be upgraded to some unofficial firmware that can avoid that garbage. That drive isn't recommended anymore, which is why I'm not bothering to give you the model number, but if you look at this site:

It will give you the list of drives that ARE recommended for this type of thing. You can even buy some pre-flashed drives from people if you don't want to mess with that.

My drive has worked fine for me, but admittedly I've only used a few UHD discs on it (and a whole lot of normal blu-rays and DVDs).

Now, the longer version is under the cut, including one of my patented totally normal (blatant sarcasm tag here) analogies that still somehow work.

-----

I'm going to use an analogy here, because that's how I explain tech.

Let's pretend your Blu-Ray (regardless of whether it is UHD/4k or not - see my notes at the end for a fun fact) is a VIP performing at your exclusive club called Blu-Ray Drive. You'd think that, because you own the club, you can watch the VIP perform, right?

Wrong.

You see, the club has a bouncer by the name of AACS. Every VIP insists on one of their bouncers being at the club, deciding who to let in and what they get to do. The bouncer doesn't actually work for you, they work for the VIP, and no VIP will come to your club if you don't have one of their bouncers.

Also, just for more paranoia, every VIP will have its own list of who and what to allow, along with where they're allowed to stand. Each time you have a new VIP come to your club, they give their own list; if the bouncer sees the list is newer, they throw away all of the old lists and only keep the newest one. On top of that, AACS is a nationalist asshole that decided to only allow people from their own country in, because the VIPs want to charge people differently based on their nationality.

The VIPs even require some fancier clubs to have a courier continually delivering them new lists (this is where that UHD/4k Internet connection thing comes from).

All of the stuff you want is inside of that club, but the bouncer won't let you in because you're not on the list (and might not even from the right country). And you can't just sack the bouncer because then no VIP will play at your club.

You heard of another problem at a similar club (Club DVD), where their more local VIPs required them to hire a bouncer named CSS. However, CSS wasn't paid very well, was near sighted, and never bothered to update the list; all of your friends just called themselves "Maria Wang" and CSS let them in. Your VIPs know about that though, so they insist on the updating list thing and giving their bouncers eye exams. So what do you do?

Simple. You call a buddy and they kool-aid man through the back wall of your club shouting OH YEAH!, of course.

This is a completely logical analogy, I know. I should really commission an artist to draw this.

This buddy is called LibreDrive. Your VIPs still have their bouncer - anyone who doesn't know about the secret entrance still goes through the bouncer. The people who do know - including you and your friends - just go through the secret entrance instead. The VIP company is none the wiser.

-----

Now that my completely logical analogy is over, what does this actually mean tech-wise?

The way DVDs work is by using an encryption technology called CSS. However, in late 1999, someone figured out how to break the encryption, mostly because they did a really lazy job in making it to begin with. This is DeCSS. There were huge lawsuits, poetry made using source code, a whole lot of weird things. Today, we don't even need DeCSS; the encryption on DVDs are so bad that a modern computer can brute force decrypt it in seconds.

Fundamentally, both DVDs and blu-rays work the same way. There is a portion of the disc (DVD or blu-rays) that no drive is allowed to directly read. This contains the encryption information for the rest of the data on the disc. That encryption information is used by the player as to what is and isn't allowed to read the disc and what parts they ARE allowed to read. This is also where region locking comes in, where it checks what region your drive is set to and allows/denies discs to play based on that region; this is called CSS. If you are old enough to remember the bad old days of WinDVD and PowerDVD, those applications had encryption keys allowed by the DVD drive to play back the video content on the drive.

Anyone remember those cheap knock-off "region free" DVD players that used to be really common in the 2000s? They just ignored CSS entirely; the drives themselves can still read all of the data on the disc, it was just CSS telling the drive what it could or couldn't read.

Anyway, the movie studios, seeing their "beautiful creation" get ripped apart like that, wanted to make sure that it didn't happen the same way with their next technology.

Where blu-ray differs from DVDs is how it isn't using CSS at all, but something called AACS instead. It makes this list into a continually updating list; every time your drive (whether it is in a computer or a standalone player!) sees a new disc, it checks that hidden encryption information for a list of what is and isn't allowed to access the drive. If the list on the disc is of a newer version than what the drive currently has in its firmware, the disc will actually flash the firmware of your blu-ray drive with the new allow/deny list. Then it checks again - does the firmware match what the disc has? If so, it continues. If not, it refuses to play no matter what. From there, the rest of the process is basically the same, checking any player for a list of keys allowed to play it. If it sees a key not allowed (say, your ripping software), it says no and stops everything from reading it.

Unlike DVDs with CSS, these keys are actually pretty darn secure... and even if they weren't, studios would just release an updated allow/deny list and suddenly your computer can't rip discs anymore because the latest version of Frozen came out.

UHD (4k) blu-ray players take this one step further and just continually update that allow/deny list across the Internet rather than waiting for new discs to update that allow/deny list. This is why a standalone UHD blu-ray player needs WiFi, by the way. It isn't used for anything else.

So... how to avoid it? You could use a leaked key and basically hope that it isn't updated. This is how most blu-ray ripping software works, which is also why they need continual updating while movie studios play cat and mouse. And with UHD content, that's a really tiny window of time that you can do unauthorized things with the drive.

Remember our surprise tool - the drive itself still has to be able to read everything, it is just AACS stopping us. If we can somehow just get a drive to not care about AACS, we'd have access to everything we care about.

LibreDrive is a custom firmware that basically lets all of the above still happen, but any program aware of LibreDrive can just use it to access the full disc. It acts as an intermediary between the physical drive itself and software on your computer, similar to AACS itself. Like the analogy said, you're kool-aid manning a security hole into the drive's encryption. AACS is still happy because it can still update its firmware allow/deny list, you just bypass AACS entirely. Every byte of data on the blu-ray is accessible to whatever programs know about this security hole, which includes programs like MakeMKV and anything using the open source (and illegalish - see below) LibDriveIo library. Fun fact, you can just copy that library in to VLC and it'll use it.

Unfortunately, you can't just flash LibreDrive onto any drive. Basically, someone needs to be able to read the existing firmware on a drive in order to know what to modify to open up that security hole. This means you need specific drives on specific versions of firmware to flash LibreDrive.

The industry, however, caught on to this. They started requiring drive manufacturers to encrypt their firmware, so some newer revisions of drives that used to work now don't - this is the case with my drive.

And that's... the rest of the story.

Now, my notes:

You know how I said UHD/4k and regular blu-rays work the same? Yeah, it isn't just that they work the same - sometimes they're actually the exact same drive. Some regular blu-ray drives can actually read UHD discs, they're just not allowed to by AACS because "fuck you that's why". LibreDrive can work around that, too.

Illegalish? Well, circumventing copy protection isn't allowed under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), outside of specific scenarios. And the US's copyright laws tend to get copied over to a lot of other countries as a result of the trade deals they make with each other, hence "illegalish". You make your own moral call, my morality says that personal use to rip your own media should have always been legal and I should be able to play a Brazilian version of the Phantom Menace if I want to.

Some additional source reading material: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856 for "What is LibreDrive", which explains the same thing I did but without my fun analogy and using more technical terms. It also includes the full list of drive firmware that works with LibreDrive.

[whimsicaltwine]

psppspps i heard you have the maps,,,,, hand em over

The pictures I had in the initial post are actually all the layers I have finished right now. I'm currently in the process of tweaking the most important rivers to look better when zoomed in very close, which takes a while because it has to be done at a really small scale. I can, however, tell you more about my process so far under the cut because it got long.

Scale

Here's the map, both with and without the base pictures I'm working from, with a grid overlay. Each square is 100 km by 100 km.

I've decided to go with metric, at least for distance, because it's what's used in-game. I considered using chunks as my unit of measurement, but in the end, it would have made my life way, way harder, so metric it is. This is not a 1:1 version of the map! If I did that, each empire would be just its capitol city and the whole area in total would be tiny, so I'm working at a scale of 1 block : 10 km. When I go in and add individual buildings, that will be on the standard 1 block : 1 meter scale.

For those, like myself, who aren't used to metric, the width of the whole map is roughly the same as the width of the United States, not including Alaska and Hawaii. I'd also suggest looking at the driving distance between places you're familiar with in kilometers to get a sense of scale.

(Note: to match the map to the grid, I had to eyeball it based on the coordinates given on the Chunkbase map, which unfortunately were not very neat numbers. I tried to get it as accurate as possible, but that 1 block : 10 kilometer ratio probably isn't perfect. For the purposes of the project, I'm just treating it like it is. You can chalk any inaccuracies in that aspect up to the in-universe projection having some distortion.)

Coastlines

You might notice my coastlines are different from the official map Pixlriffs made. That's because he used Chunkbase, which generates a map of Minecraft seeds based on biome. Because of this, its coastlines aren't very accurate. I matched the Chunkbase map to my grid, then matched this map from the wiki, which was made using the in-game mapping feature, to the Chunkbase one. This allowed me to make more accurate coastlines, include terraforming, and pinpoint specific builds. It only covers most of the area I'm working with, though, so I used the Chunkbase map to fill out the edges.

The Cod Empire coast does not quite match the actual places in which there are water. This is because I'm interpreting those waterlogged areas as swampy, brackish lowlands. Once I've got a better understanding of the ecosystem, I'll go put a ton of rivers and lakes in that area.

Mountains

I more or less placed mountains randomly in the areas of the map that have mountain biomes, placing them more densely where there is snow. I knew roughly where I wanted my tectonic plates to go and put the mountains down accordingly. Because of some problems I had scaling the icon up and down, I have two different mountain layers, one more detailed than the other; when you look at a map on a large scale, there appear to be fewer mountains than there are when you zoom in. Most mountains aren’t named and don’t have any data; I plan to eventually estimate elevation for the Anthill, the mountains between the Grimlands and the Crystal Cliffs, and one in central Rivendell.

I have enough to say about rivers that they warrant their own post, I'm afraid, so be on the lookout for that. Also, feel free to ask more questions or throw suggestions at me! I'd especially love any name ideas for rivers, mountains, and towns. Special thanks to @talonwings, who has been patiently listening to me rant about this project and helping with some of the decisions.

[the-far-bright-center]

a gentle reminder: on this blog, TCW =/= Disney Star Wars

While I understand that some of my fellow Anidala fans may dislike The Clone Wars, please keep in mind that I am not a TCW hater. In fact, I have a great deal of nostalgia and fondness for the first five seasons of the show (2008-2013) which were created during the Lucas era. While I have criticisms of certain aspects of the series and don't consider it to be 'canon' on the same level as the films, I certainly don't hate it and would prefer not to see constant negative remarks about it on my otherwise unrelated posts. (If anyone wishes to know my thoughts on TCW in more detail, check out my 'tcw discourse' tag.)

Likewise, for my fellow anti-Disney followers, please note that when I write my anti-Disney posts, I'm not including the original seasons of TCW in that. If I tag something 'anti-disney', I'm referring to what has been released since TFA, because it was the Disney sequels that tried to negate and destroy everything I love about Star Wars. My issues with Disney canon do not stem from TCW, they originate entirely from the supposed premise of TFA/the sequels. The whole reason I don't watch Disney SW anymore is because I completely disagree with the cynical, destructive, out-of-character, and decidedly anti-Skywalker version of events in Disney's post-RotJ storyline. This has nothing to do with the original seasons of TCW, which were created solely with the PT x OT saga in mind. So even though I am vehemently anti-Disney, and despite the fact that Disney has absorbed the TCW storyline and characters into its so-called canon, I consider all of the Lucas-era Clone Wars material (TCW 2008, Clone Wars 2003, EU comics and novels, etc), to be its own separate thing. So please, I would ask people not to conflate my anti-disney posts with whatever issues they may have with TCW—in my personal view, these are two separate entities and the criticisms I have of each are coming from totally different places.

[celticbotanart]

*Squid Squidward wide awake meme* ALRIGHT, hear me out - I've been saying for a while how much Witcher 3 reminds me of the Brazilian countriside (more specific Minas Gerais). And ever since I had this madlad dream of a Brazilian Witcher except we called them Bruxeiros (the X here is pronounced like "SH" not like the American "X" - its kind of a meme here, kind of a "literal" PT-BR translation, it's complicated), and they fight Brazilian folklore badass stuff like Boitatá (fucking giant fire snake), Iaras (river mermaids) and un-curse women that became Mula Sem Cabeça (literally headless mules running around with fire coming out their necks). These are all some of our most well-known folklore for real, lol (HIGHLY recommend season 1 of Brazilian Netflix show Invisible City if you wanna see more! It's REALLY good!)

ANYWAY. I was in my kitchen making toast at midnight, when it occured to me. I had A VisionTM. Brazilian Witcher battle music would be like. Floral Fury.

For those unfamiliar, this specific Cuphead theme is 200% oldschool Brazilian samba - yeah the "weird straw-against-plastic-lid" sound is an actual instrument, it's called cuíca lol "Nah, but this is too happy and cheerful", you say. Alright, you are correct, maybe it doesn't fit to be a battle theme for the Bruxeiros. HOW ABOUT SEPULTURA, THEN

SEPULTURA, THE BRAZILIAN METAL BAND, who performed this song as soundtrack for the BR movie "Lisbela e o Prisioneiro" (one of my fucking faves btw), and it the theme song for Frederico Evandro, a character who's ruthless hitman ("Matador").

BRO. IMAGINE. The peaceful and colorfully bucolic countryside of Minas Gerais and you are there fighting a Brazilian Werewolf (cause they are different from the European werewolf, we have several types btw), with THAT playing as battle theme.

Another good contender is Break of Reality's rendition of "As Bachianas n5" by Villa-Lobos (guy was a badass proeminend classical music composer who loved to mix in Brazilian folk elements with the classical music sttuff, pissing off a lot of purists in the process lol, good for him)

"As Bachianas n5" is probably Villas' most famous piece, it's originally a GORGEOUS aria, classically sung in Brazilian Portuguese.

SEVERAL people covered this song, including Sandy from sibling duo Sandy & Junior (they were EXTREMELY POPULAR with kids and teens back in the 90s/early 2000s); also people from all around the world covered it. You get it, it's pretty legit and famous AF.

THEN came Break of Reality a few years ago

with THIS badass cover:

LOOK.

THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE VERSIONS OF THIS SONG. I STAN THIS COVER SO HIGH. I LOVE how it is sweet and emotional, but it brings a totally different, new, raw aspect to it that is so strangely fitting to this song (I can't explain, it just is). I can easily imagine this in the Bruxeiro!AU as battle music, even more cause a lot of the og Witcher 3 OST is full of slavic folk music that doesn't even reflect the Battling of Monsters thing - "...Steel For Humans" is like, a song sung by girls on wedding/harvest festivals, lol.

ON THAT NOTE, I think we could end this crazy ass post by including some of the folk / afro-Brazilian culture as well, which is only fair, and add this one, which I LOVE, "Caxangá / Escravos de Jó" by Milton Nascimento (my beloved <3) and folk singer Clementina de Jesus:

Milton is known to sing in high, ethereal vocalizations and extremely emotional lyrics. Guy is just A Fucking Legend fr. If there's a bard in my Bruxeiro!AU it's def Milton, I love his work so so so much! He's also known for mixing up influences from afro-brazilian culture, as you can see in here!

Stay tuned for more posts like this that can happen again at any moment or never again, lol

[jayextee]

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

(including Dragon's Curse/Adventure Island)

So, apart from the Brazilian release Turma da Mônica em: O Resgate, I believe I've played through every version of this game now. Spoilers, they're all 5/5 bangers.

In essence, one of the OG MetroidVania games before the genre was codified, in its year of release 1989 this was absolutely amazing and truly made me have no regrets growing up as a SEGA kid. I believe I've waxed lyrical in my review of the 2017 remake, so I won't gush too much. Heh. So instead, some notes about the three main versions before that.

The original Master System version needs no introduction. It's a solid romp, probably the best game for the system. Looks great, sounds great (with PSG or FM sound!), and is a nice 2-3 hour distraction when I need it. No notes.

The PC Engine version, known either as Dragon's Curse or Adventure Island (confusingly, given the series' spaghetti-ball of a lineage) is a fair enough game. Because it's the Master System version. Kinda. Apart from some changes to Lizard and Piranha Man, plus Lion Man being replaced with Tiger Man, you'd be hard-pressed to see any difference between the two outside maybe one or two recoloured skies. But I assure you, there's more shading on almost every visual element here.

This may sound like a diss, but despite it not really 'feeling' like PC Engine fare it's still good. It does run at a full 60fps though; double the other two versions here.

My initial impressions of the Game Gear version were basically to the tune of 'oh dear, oh dear me'. I wasn't impressed. Rather than redraw a whole game's worth of assets to compensate for the smaller screen real-estate, the game is instead crunched to a tiny space with simplified layouts in places. Combat is tougher as a result of the reduced visibility, but it's nothing that can't be adapted to. Oh, but I'd have killed for a camera that looks ahead in the player's facing direction. Alas.

However, as I played further, stubbornly due to my want to play all the versions of this childhood favourite, I started to notice changes that really improved things on a fundamental level.

For starters, the 'charm point' system is gone (buy what you want, when you want! As long as you've got the rubies, uh, coins), as with the 2017 remake. Unlike that version, however, the charm stones have been replaced with teleportation gems that serve to return the player to the main village on use. And there's plenty of them; perhaps a quality-of-life measure with the Game Gear's poor battery life in mind? Either way, it's welcome -- even if the lack of 'home' doors post-boss was initially sorta confusing.

But. Also. Due to the game essentially having a small-scale redesign to accommodate the crunched screen, certain areas have a particular new 'flavour' to them. It's now impossible to accidentally stumble into the lava canyon area before you've access to Piranha Man's swimming now, for example. There are a few interesting screens in the final dungeon as well, and the pyramid's key is now in the sphinx at its far side. Et cetera, and so on, and so forth.

Actually that made this version totally worth playing through, and I think it remiss to not have paid homage to some of the changes in the 2017 version. Ah well. Had it a look-ahead camera I'd actually call this tiny handheld version the definitive one of the pre-remake versions. But it's not to be.

Either way, I told ya. Three absolute banger versions of a great game.

5/5

[dollarbin]

Shakey Sundays #25:

CSN&Y's American Dream

Every now and then I just want scrambled eggs. I don't want any cheese mixed in; no chives!

It's the same thing with my wardrobe: occasionally I roll another number for home, eager to bust out my tattered college sweatshirt. 30 years after its purchase the thing is pockmarked, flabby and perfect: it's comfortably mediocre, like wearing scrambled eggs. In a good way!

I don't want anyone else around in such moments; no students, no cell phone and get away from me please, cat. I just want to be comfortable and unchallenged. Generic vodka on lots of ice is an acceptable garnish.

Neil Young can relate. Once or twice a decade he scrambles a bunch of eggs, dons his 4 Way Street sweatshirt and summons Crabby, Silly and Nasty to the ranch: it's time, he decides, to take a break from being Neil Young and do something totally mediocre instead: it's time to make a CSN&Y record.

Shakey didn't have to make American Dream in 1987. He had steaks and asparagus ready for the grill and fancy new wardrobe pieces assembled. After all, he'd just recorded Summer Songs, an eclectic and enticing EP of solo demos.

Like Neil sweet and edgy, singing his own backups? Summer Songs opens with American Dream and, believe it or not, the song, which would soon get utterly destroyed by CSN&Y, sounds downright lovely. Prefer Neil stark and slightly terrifying? Wrecking Ball, appearing here with almost entirely different lyrics, checks that box. Or maybe what you really want is another tinkling ballad in the Man Needs a Maid vein filled with the expectation of seeing God's face during interstellar space travel and regrettable praise for Christopher Columbus. Well then Summer Songs' very early version of Someday is gonna make your day, especially as it includes the line, "wake up all you sleeping beauties." Or are Old Ways 2-ready Farm Aid political polemics mixed with weirdo shamaltz your thing? Last of His Kind has you covered. I could go on all day: Neil even manages to mangle every possible note on One of These Days. Summer Songs has it all.

I can't share any of that greatness with you here: the EP went unissued in the 80s and was only released for a sweet digital second a few years back. (My famous brother points out that if you subscribe to Neil's website you can still go listen to it all right now but this is the Dollar Bin, not the bigwig subscriber zone.) Anyway, Neil has otherwise wrangled the whole shebang off the rest of the free-to-me internet. I'm guessing you'll hear it, not soon enough, on Archives III.

When the EP first emerged Young said he had no memory whatsoever of recording it. And that makes sense: he must have done the whole thing during a one night Hitchhiker-style bender and woke up the next day without a clue. And so he called up Crappy, Sorry and Nerd Club.

"Hey Crosby!" Neil shouted into the whispermaphone, unclear on how his newest piece of technology worked exactly. "I hear you're in the slammer! Sounds rough, dude. Listen: tell the warden to let you out on furlough or whatever so we can make some mediocre music! Don't bring a guitar; I won't let you play one anyway. But do bring what's his name and the other guy; you know, the ones you make all those terrible records with... Yeah, them. We'll plug in a bunch of keyboards, eat velveta on white bread and see if Joe Freakin Lala's available. What's that? You're still mad about my song Hippie Dream? Come on, Crosby! Don't you read The Dollar Bin? No? Come on, dude: what else is there to do in the slammer? Well go check it out and you'll see I already apologized to you for that. Here's the post. That Dollar Bin guy is some kinda genius...

"Listen: our new record is gonna be awesome. I'll hide all my good new songs from you guys and help make your new ones suck less. Then, at the last moment, I'll bust out a single great new song of mine that will make everything else on the record look not just pedestrian but criminal by comparison... Yeah, it'll be just as good as Helpless and I'll do the same thing ten years from now on Looking Forward...

"Quit whining Crosby: of course there will be hummus in the lunch spread... And yes, there'll be those McNuggets you like so much too. Once we're done the warden can lock your ass back up or you can reform the Byrds yet again and make a CS&N record covered in wieners without me. Or whatever. It'll be sweet! Oh, and Crosby! One more thing: don't bring your guns!"

And that, friends, is exactly what happened...

Let's start with the good stuff. Feel Your Love is, for me, a top 25 all time Neil Young track. Listen to the pacing; note the shimmering buzz here and there outside the center and the deft percussion (played here by Young himself while Lala and Stills compared one another's bellybuttons: mine's bigger! no mine is! wait, where did mine go?). Anticipate the song's tender melody, then let it descend. The backing vocals here represent just about the only good thing Crock, Spam and Nutjob can truly bring to a Neil Young track.

This melodic and spiritual cousin to Zuma's Through My Sails often hovers just outside my consciousness, like a guardian angel I sense but have no proof for. I'll find myself humming and wonder what song I'm chasing after. I.... Wanna Feel.... Your Love.

Dullness knows no bounds on the rest of the record. Young breaks out jazz hands for the whole band on the title track, records every note himself while foreclosing on Nash's Our House in This Old House but still makes it all sound lousy and gets cringy during Name of Love. Crosby merges Masters of War with hamster droppings on Nighttime for the Generals and appeals for, but does not earn, our sympathy on Compass. Nash provides filler music that my wife is currently vacuuming over in fitting fashion.

And Stephen Stills? Yeah, he thoroughly sucks. Just check out his finger snaps and gun twirl in this pure Shakeyvision music video:

They're all washed up.

But Neil got through this phase. He ate all his eggs and had a mediocre moment in his sweatshirt. Then he dismissed Crotchety, Skunk and Needless, assembled the Blue Notes instead, took Old Black and a sweet Homegrown era outtake out of deep storage, and got back to being Neil Young.

[musical-shenanigans]

Show #43

Title: Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire

Show Release Date: April 12, 2023

Hello everyone, and this will be the first time a blog is posted at the same time as a show.  So, it may require editing, updates, or just some good old fashioned fixing at a later date.

The good news, is that the editing is still fresh in my mind as I have just completed it and made my notes to what I want to say here.  There are more references and uses of songs that need to be addressed, and a lot has changed since the third show that I last posted about on this site.  But, follow us on Twitter and you will find out when I post about the older shows.

So, this is possibly the 43rd show we have recorded, and that includes any of our holiday specials or any other odd thing we did.  By the time I update the shows betwixt the third and this one, I should have the counts straight, so we will say 43 just to get through this post.

Unlike previous posts, I am going to drop references as they come up, so this may look a little different.  Much like the show, this site needs some tweaking on format and will absolutely change around as we go.

First, you might be wondering about the title of the show, even after you've heard the show, you may still be wondering about it.  Well, it is a lyric from the song "The Plains in Spain" from "My Fair Lady".  There is another hidden meaning, but I will come back to that at the end of this season, as all the titles have a running theme - which you may or may not have guessed.  The main reason for this lyric is that Scott makes a rather astute parallel of Amy Winehouse to Eliza Doolittle.  Absolutely fantastic.  So, I really wanted to use that bit.

Our first round matchup is between Carole King and Lauryn Hill (Tapestry #25, and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill #10).  We start with Carole an the many songs she has written for other artists in the Brill Building.  The Brill Building was discussed in Show #10: Frank Sinatra: The Tenth Wonder of the World  when we discussed Laura Nyro. And take a look at the Wikipedia page showing all of the songs that Carole King has written and the artists that made them popular - she was even sampled by the friend to the podcast, Kanye. 

In our discussion, we referenced the Rocky Horror Picture Show and its executive producer Lou Adler.  Lou is responsible for bringing the stage version to Los Angeles, giving us the cult classic film, and unfortunately he also gave its sequel that should have never been made.  But in case you are curious, the entire movie can be seen here on YouTube.  You were warned, so send your complaints elsewhere.

There follows a short spot for the podcast Fancy Bread Miami - go check them out.  They are really great guys and their show is well done.

Next up is Lauryn Hill.  Dave brings up the lawsuit with musicians that played on the album that were not given and credit.  This article came out in August of 2018 discussing the lawsuit that took place.  We also make fun of how I totally mispronounced the OutKast's album title "Aquemini" in episode #16 (or possibly 17): Podcasting in the Name of. 

There is a joke about how many songs Michael McDonald is featured on, and my estimate is way off.  Check out this page to see all of his contributions.  Also take a look at James Taylor and Joe Walsh.

The middle quiz game will get its own blog page.  Please watch this space for it.

The second round begins with Amy Winehouse and the brilliant reference to Eliza Doolitle - watch this clip from the movie and it will all make sense.  And you have not heard Amy Winehouse speak, watch this.

There is a documentary film about Amy Winehouse, and I highly, highly recommend it.  It is tragic, but it is done very well.  It is called "Amy". 

We move onto Aretha and I mention the movie that goes along with this album is fantastic.  I could not find a clip of everything her father, but if you see the movie, you will hear his phenomenal, oratory voice and the love he has for his daughter.  Also, "The Old Landmark" was in the Blues Brothers film and the song is led by James Brown, and you can watch it here - I promise you, the best six minutes of your day!

Note: for our next show, I say that we are going to cover Eric Church.  And, he was voted off the island before the next show was recorded, and we failed to address it.

Thanks for coming out!

Songs used:

Title: Entitled "Comedy Theme" by user Hagfilms at freesound.org

Carole King - "It's Too Late"

Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop That Thing"

Amy Winehouse - "Me & Mr. Jones"

Aretha Franklin - "The Old Landmark"

Outro - "Touch Me There" - a silly piano bit I made