#its one of those strange things that really did fully change the trajectory of this little leg of my life

[wraithsoutlaws]

you know i had a fun little vp idea i wanted to do for the cyberpunk anniversary but i haven't had the energy to even touch it recently so i'll just settle with saying that this game impacted me in ways i never thought it would when i first picked it up 3 years ago. i knew i would enjoy it, i had been looking forward to it for a long time, and despite a ~controversial~ launch, i had a fucking blast from day 1 (on ps4 no less). regardless of bugs and memes and public dunking, the story grabbed me like nothing else could at the time, and it reignited so much of my passion and motivation for art that i had lost in the clutches of mental illness and i'll always be grateful for that. it introduced me to so many wonderful people (some whom i carry very close to my heart), and maybe most personally surprising, it gave me an outlet to understand parts of myself that i had been too afraid to acknowledge for a long time, the courage to accept and embrace myself as non-binary, and allow myself to just BE without trying to convince myself i'm crazy. that's not what i expected from the get-go but it's been a really fun journey to be on ngl

[according2thelore]

📝pssst Lizzy I saw that you listed the AOS in some of your favorite movies! I loved them too but it seems like that fandom was kind of a flash in the pan. I miss it!

I have a deep abiding love for Kirk/McCoy from the reboot but only in the reboot! I agree Kirk/Spock is the choice for the original series. Something about Pine and Urban’s chemistry. They were so good together!

No worries if you’ve never really hopped into fandom for this and just enjoy the movies but if you do, do you have a ship there?

hello!! <3

the AOS fandom in it's heyday was FANTASTIC!!! i discuss this lower down, lol!

for those unfamiliar with star trek, the original 60s TV show ("the original series"/TOS) and the movies with chris pine ("the alternate original series"/AOS) are based on the same characters, while other "generations"/shows/iterations (like "the next generation" with picard, etc.) have different crews and ships (literal physical spaceships).

the whole movie series (AOS) wasn't "oh let's make TOS again," it was "what would TOS look like if one detail was changed," and this detail was the premature death of kirk's father (played by a pre-fame chris hemsworth, which is pretty fun!). by changing this, the whole thing shifts, and the trajectory of the lives of all of the characters changes pretty dramatically. it's quite literally an AU fanfic!!!! which is SUCH a fun concept i wish more reboots did!!!

i LOVE the AOS for so many reasons, but i think i kind of fall into the "love what it almost was/could've been" rather than strictly "what is on screen/what it is"

one of the main reasons i love AOS so much (particularly "into darkness") is its thematic shift from the TOS.

it makes sense why kirk would be on tarsus iv after the death of his father, it makes sense that spock has a bit of an identity crisis after the death of his mother, it makes sense that bones is so jaded after his divorce moved his daughter away, it's just delicious!

while one of the main incredible things about TOS was its earnestness and ownership of its hamminess (or shall i say, camp), i think some of it was to the disservice of its characters.

finding out about tarsus and the tarsus nine during a full-out shakespeare production? and it never really being mentioned again? strange. like...they fully had to eat people to survive (or if not, they had to do other impossible frightening tasks)...and kirk was a CHILD fighting to protect other CHILDREN. also SAM DIES? and kirk never really talks about him again after that.

so the AOS engaging more with the characters being scarred/traumatized was fun as an angst, H/C, and whump lover, lol!

i (unfortunately or fortunately, depends on who you are) am a spock/kirk diehard truther. any version of these characters are deeply in love/intwined in my head!

i particularly enjoyed pine's/quinto's chemistry (not to mention the fact they always talk like they're trying to smell what mouthwash the other used that morning)

while i tend to shy away from enemies/lovers (just not my particular cup of tea, usually), i think it's really fun that they explicitly placed them as adversaries that have to earn each other's respect and trust.

i think the closest we get to canon spock & kirk & bones dynamic is ST:ID, which is why it's my favourite. kirk is like "yes <3 i will break the rules <3" and spock says "...i'm calling the police" and bones says "i am breaking his phone in half bc we HAVE to break the rules here, jackass"

and i personally think it's so fun that they changed the death of spock to the death of kirk in ST:ID, and then proceeded to have spock try to beat a man to death with his bare hands--an act of grief and self-harm and revenge, given what we know about vulcan hands.

(also, while kirk is dying, "you had to know why i went back for you" and the ta'al kiss through the glass???? launch me into the SUN!!!!!!!!)

(small note, but i also think it's so interesting the default emotion for TOS spock is anguish (when it's forced upon him), but the default emotion for AOS spock is fury...like yes...tell me more, thematically...)

it's SO true that karl urban just has INSANE chemistry with all of his castmates. the spock & bones corporate bonding retreat in ST: Beyond was delightful start to finish.

urban's mccoy is one for the HISTORY books, truly! grumpy and loveable and dickish. i want to kiss him on the mouth; who said that?? that was weird. anyway,

the entire cast was just FANTASTIC. i especially adore zoe saldana as nyota uhura. john cho and anton yelchin were incredible choices for sulu and chekov, and simon pegg as scott was INSPIRED. even relatively background characters like winona rider as amanda greyson, indeed!! yes!! thank you!!

are there issues with the AOS? OH YES. YES INDEED. but the potential was there and fun and campy and angsty and i shovel it with a spoon into my greedy little writer hands. this movie series was like if they caught lightning in a bottle and then got scared that they did something so awesome and gently placed it on the ground (wow i guess i have a media type...spn is just...that as well...). it was still incredible, but i wanted more!

i deeply adore bones & kirk as best friends, and think their dynamic in the AOS is so inherently relatable and tender. i can definitely understand and respect your shipping of them! like...oh my god...they were roommates...(and also will do anything for each other, and have a deep, abiding respect and care for each other that is not akin to any other relationship they have)

i mentioned this once briefly a bit ago, but i have another account where i write all of my non-spn fanfic, and have a pretty well-loved AOS spirk fic over there. (some of the people in my real life follow that account and it'll change my life for the worse if they find our wincest blog, unfortunately.) i've been occasionally opening another spirk fic i've been working on laboriously for a year to lovingly look at the screen before being hit with another psychic blast of These Brothers That Want To Kiss and end up writing a hanahaki fic instead, lol!

some of the best fanfiction i have ever read--period!--comes from the AOS and the incredible writers there. these fics are spirk, so if that's not your particular cup of tea, i totally get it! but i thought i'd recommend some anyway for stray spock/kirk fans wandering through here!

shine like the sun --> imo THEEE AOS spirk fanfic; spock gets amnesia and the last thing he remembers is turning kirk in for the kobayashi maru

anything --> morally dubious spock tries to find comfort after kirk dies!!! yes!!!!

the bond --> A CLASSIC!!!! spock gets amnesia and assumes he and kirk are together...kirk doesn't correct him

please don't touch the vulcans --> christmas! and tarsus! yummy!

the Proposal AU one!!!

(if you want more of these PLEASE ask i have SO many recommendations, lol!)

i am so sorry!! this was so long!!!! THANK you for asking!! this was so long and i have no idea if i actually answered your question! i hope this was fun to read! (i spent like an hour responding and then editing my answers bc this was originally An Essay, haha!)

asking a girl about one of her hyperfixations will get her yapping (i once explained the entire series to charlotte on our kitchen floor at like 3 AM).

i am now going to go rewatch ST:ID, lol! <3

-lizzy

[gascon-en-exil]

A Game of Thrones 10th Anniversary Season Ranking: Part 2

Link to Part 1

Time for the bottom half of the list. The four seasons here will surprise no one, but the order might.

#5 Season 6

You can tell what I most what to talk about here...but there's an order to these things.

S6 actually has a bunch of great ideas, but they drown beneath the most slapdash plotting and character work the show has seen yet in order to set the stage for the narrower conflicts of the last two seasons. It's notorious for bringing back characters who haven't been seen in a season or longer only to kill them off (Balon Greyjoy, Osha, Hodor, the Blackfish, Rickon, Walder Frey) or awkwardly graft them back into the main plot (Sandor Clegane, Bran). There are plot threads that ought to be compelling but are too rushed in execution, like the siege of Riverrun, Littlefinger's hand in the Battle of the Bastards, or Daenerys's time back among the Dothraki and then finally getting the hell out of Meereen. Arya hits on the only interesting part of her two-season sojourn in Braavos - a stage play, of all things - only for it to stumble at the end with a disappointing offscreen death and some incomprehensible philosophy ahead of the start of her murder tour of Westeros. There's also so much cutting off the branches, enough to be conspicuous; the final shot of Daenerys leading an armada of about half the remaining cast she assembled partially offscreen says that better than anything else. Well, not anything....

Highlight: Without exaggeration, the opening of S6E10 is easily my favorite sequence in all of GoT. The staging, the music, the mounting suspense even as it becomes increasingly obvious what's about to happen, the twisted religious references particularly in Cersei's mock confession to Unella, Tommen throwing himself out a window because he can't deal with the reality of how terrible his mother is, how Cersei gives absolutely no fucks whatsoever about murdering hundreds of people at once in a calculated act of vengeance largely prompted by her own poorly thought out actions - I love it all. It's the single most masterfully-executed act of villainy in the whole show - Daenerys torching King's Landing probably has a higher body count, but the presentation there is all muddled - and if I had any doubts about Cersei being my favorite multi-season major character they were silenced in this moment. The explosion of the Sept doesn't sit perfectly with me, because I liked the Tyrells and because of what I said about deaths like theirs and Renly's in the previous post under S2, but I think that unease only cements the strength of this sequence. It's an overused phrase in fandom these days, but GoT at its best is all about moral greyness that gives its audience room for multilayered reactions. Cersei nuking the Sept and making herself the sole power in King's Landing, which in a sense is just a more overt example of the kind of character/plot consolidation elsewhere represented by Daenerys's armada, is one of those events that's impossible to approach from a single angle if you care about any of the characters involved. And hey, it's not in the books (yet, presumably), so unlike Ned's death or the Red Wedding the GoT showrunners can take the credit for realizing this one.

Favorite death: Even leaving aside the Sept and related deaths there's a lot of good ones to choose from in S6. Ramsey is cathartic but too gory for me, Osha's was a clever callback but a little delayed, it's hard to pin down specific deaths when Daenerys incinerates the khals, and Arya only gets half credit for Walder Frey and his sons when she saves the rest of the house for the opening of S7. I'm thinking Hodor, not so much because I enjoy his character or the manner of his death but because it's a clever bit of playing with language (that must have been hell to render in other languages for dubbing) wrapped up in some entertainingly murky consent issues and some closed time loop weirdness. It's all very...extra? Is that the word for it?

Least favorite death: Offscreen deaths continue to be mostly letdowns, in this case Blackfish and the Waif. Way to botch the ending of Arya's already near-pointless Braavos arc, guys. Speaking of Arya, this spot goes to Lady Crane, whom the Waif somehow kills with a stool or something. It's a dumb way to send off an entertaining minor character.

#6 Season 8

I swear that I'm not putting S8 this high solely because of Jonmund kind of sort of happening. I've never been very interested in either of them and the sex would be far too bear-on-otter to suit my pornographic preferences, but even so the choice to close out the series with them is hilarious.

I really don't need to elaborate on why S8 is down here; everyone who's ever watched the show has done as much in the nearly two years since it wrapped up. I do however need to explain why I've ranked not one but two seasons below it. My biggest argument here is that I don't believe it's fair to critique S8 for problems it inherited from earlier seasons. A non-comprehensive list:

Mad Queen Daenerys: unevenly built up beginning from S1 and continuing in some form through every following season

The questionable racial optics of Dany's army: also seeded as early as S1 and solidified by S3 with the Slaver's Bay arc

Cersei only succeeding because she makes stupid decisions and then lucks out until she doesn't: apparent from S1, directly lampshaded by Tywin in S3, fully on display with the Faith Militant arc of S5-6

Jaime not getting a redemption arc or falling in love with Brienne: evident with his repeated returns to Cersei throughout the show as one of the most consistent elements of his character, particularly in S4 and during the siege of Riverrun in S6

Tyrion grabbing the idiot ball/becoming a flat audience surrogate mouthpiece: started in S5 around the time the showrunners ran out of book material for him and wanted to make him more of a PoV character and his arc less of a downward spiral, although I've seen arguments that changes from the books involving his Tysha story and Shae set him on this trajectory even earlier

The hardening of Sansa's character: began in earnest in S4 and never let up from there

The strange ordering of antagonists: set down by S7's equally strange plot structure - the Night King had to come first with that setup

CleganeBowl and the dumber twists: from what I've heard the whole thing of writing around fans on the internet guessing plot twists started pretty much when the book content ended, so S5-6 maybe?

Yes, there's plenty to criticize about S8 on its own merits...but just as much that was merely the writers doing what they could at that point with deeply flawed material.

Highlight: This may sound cheesy, but the better parts of S8 are almost all the cinematic ones, whether that's E2 being a bottle episode with tons of poignant character send-offs before the big battle, a handful of deaths with actual satisfying weight like Jorah's and Theon's, and an epilogue that incorporates both closure for individuals and the broader uncertainty of messy socio-political systems that GoT has always been known for before working its way back to the Starks at the very end for some tidy bookending. Even imperfect moments like the Lannister twins' death and the resolution of Sansa's character felt weighty and appropriate based on what had come before.

Favorite death: Forget about the audio commentary attempting to flatten Cersei's character; Cersei and Jaime Lannister have an excellent end. Cersei especially, as the scenes of her stumbling her way down into the catacombs as the Red Keep crashes down around her really show off how her world is abruptly falling apart and how she retreats into her own self-interest at the end in spite of her demise being at least partially of her own doing. There's some stupid moments associated with these scenes, like Jaime dueling Euron to the death and CleganeBowl, but I can excuse those when the twins end up dying exactly where you'd expect them to: in each other's arms, in a ruined monument to their family's grand ambitions that, like Casterly Rock itself, was taken from another family.

Least favorite death: Quite a few dumb ones in S8 have become forever infamous. Missandei sticks out, and for me Varys too just as much because of how the writing pushes him to do the dumbest thing he could possibly do purely for the sake of killing him off ten minutes into the penultimate episode. But no one belongs here more than Daenerys Targaryen, killed at the height of a rushed and uncertain villain reveal by a man who takes advantage of their romantic history (who is also her family, because Targaryens) to stab her in a moment of vulnerability - pretty much only because another man tells him that Daenerys is the final boss. Narratively speaking that might be the case, but even so this is the end result of multiple seasons of middling-to-bad buildup. Not even Drogon burning the symbolism can salvage that. Also Fire Emblem: Three Houses did this scene and did it better.

#7 Season 5

...Yeah, we're going to have to go there.

Sansa's rape is not a plot point that personally touches me much. It's terribly framed in the moment and the followup in later seasons is inconsistent at best, but it's not a kind of trauma I can relate to. On the other hand, in the very same episode Loras is tried and imprisoned for homosexuality, and Margery faces the same punishment for lying for her brother. That hits much closer to home, not just for the homophobia but also for the culture war undertones of the not!French Tyrells persecuted by a not!Anglo fanatic who later reveals himself to be the in-universe equivalent of a Protestant. The trial is just one part of Cersei's shortsighted scheming, just as Sansa being married off to Ramsey is part of Littlefinger's, and both of them get their comeuppance in the end...but it's unsettling all the same. I especially hate what the Faith Militant arc does to King's Landing in S5, swiftly converting it from my favorite setting in GoT to a tense theocratic nightmare that only remains interesting to me because Cersei is consistently awesome. What's more, pretty much everything about S5 that isn't viscerally uncomfortable is dragged out and dull instead: the Dorne arc, Daenerys's second season in Meereen, Arya in Braavos, Stannis and co. at Castle Black. The most any of these storylines can hope for is some kind of bombastic finale, and while several of them deliver it's not enough to make up for what comes before, or how disappointing everything here builds from S4. S4 has Oberyn, S5 has the Sand Snakes - I think that sums up the contrast well.

Highlight: S5 does get stronger near the end. As much as his character annoys me I did like the High Sparrow revealing his pseudo-Protestant bent to Cersei just before he imprisons her, and there's a cathartic rawness to Cersei's walk of atonement where you can both feel her pain and humiliation and understand that she's getting exactly what she deserves (and this is what leads into the climax of S6, so it deserves points just for that). The swiftness of Stannis's fall renders his death and that of his family a bit hollow, but it's brutal and final and fittingly ignominious for a character with such grand ambitions but so little relevance to the larger story. The fighting pits of Meereen sequence is cinematic if nothing else, and even the resolution to the Dorne arc salvages the whole thing a tiny bit by playing into the retributive cycles of vengeance idea (and Myrcella knows about the twincest and doesn't care, aww - no idea why that stuck with me, but it's cute all the same). Oh, and Hardhome...it's alright. Not great, not crap, but alright.

Favorite death: I don't know why, but Theon tossing Myranda to her death is always funny to me. Maybe because it's so unexpected?

Least favorite death: Arya's execution of Meryn Trant is meant to be another one of the season's big finale moments, but the scene is graphic and goes on forever and I can't help but be grossed out. This is different from, say, Shireen's death, which is supposed to be painful to witness.

#8 Season 7

I can't tell if S7's low ranking is as self-explanatory as S8's or not. At least one recent retrospective on GoT's ruined legacy I've come across outright asserts that S7 is judged less harshly in light of how bad S8 was. If it were not immediately obvious by where I've placed each of them, I don't share that opinion.

Because S7 is just a mess, and the drop-off in quality is so much more painful here than it is anywhere else in the series except maybe from S4 to S5 (and that's more about S4 being as good as it is). The pacing ramps up to uncomfortable levels to match the shortened seasons, the structure pivots awkwardly halfway through from Daenerys vs. Cersei to Jon/Dany caring about ice zombies, said pivot relies largely on characters (mostly Tyrion) making a series of catastrophically stupid tactical decisions, and very few of the smaller set pieces land with any real impact as the show's focus narrows to its endgame conflict. As with S6 there are still some good ideas, but they're botched in execution. The conflict between Sansa and Arya matches their characters, but the leadup to that conflict ending with Littlefinger's execution is missing some key steps. Daenerys's diverse armada pitted against Cersei weaponizing the xenophobia of the people of King's Landing could have been interesting, but there's little room to explore that when Cersei keeps winning only because Tyrion has such a firm grip on the idiot ball and when Euron gets so much screentime he barely warrants. Speaking of Tyrion's idiot ball, does anyone like the heist film-esque ice zombie retrieval plotline? Its stupidity is matched only by its utter futility, because Cersei isn't trustworthy and nobody seems to ever get that.

And how could I forget Sam's shit montage? Sums up S7 perfectly, really. To think that that is part of the only extended length of time the show ever spends in the Reach....

Highlight: A handful of character moments save this season from being irredeemable garbage. As you can guess from my screencap choice, Olenna's final scene is one of them, even if Highgarden itself is given insultingly short shrift. S7 also manages what I thought was previously impossible in that it makes me care somewhat about Ellaria Sand, courtesy of the awful death Cersei plans for her and her remaining daughter. The other Sand Snakes are killed with their own weapons, which shows off Euron's demented creativity if nothing else. I like the entertainingly twisted choice to cut the Jon/Dany sex scene with the reveal that they're related. And, uh...the Jonmund ship tease kind of makes the zombie retrieval team bearable? I'm really grasping at straws here.

Favorite death: It's more about her final dialogue with Jaime than her actual death, but again I'm going to have to highlight Olenna Tyrell here for lack of better options. She drops the bombshell about Joffrey that the audience figured out almost as soon as it happened but still, makes it plain what I've been saying about how Jaime's arc has never really been about redemption, and is just about the only person to ever call Cersei out for that whole mass murder thing. There's a reason "I want her to know it was me" became a meme format.

Least favorite death: There aren't any glaringly bad deaths in S7, just mediocre or unremarkable ones. I still think the decision to have Arya finish off House Frey in the season's opening rather than along with their father at the end of S6 was a strange one that doesn't add much of dramatic value.

[evien-stark]

✧I Need You✧ Chapter 93

Trying to resume business as usual was tough over the next few days. The thought kept running in your mind. Thor had returned to earth. Thor had taken Jane and then gone back to Asgard. All within a couple of minutes at best. And right before then there was some anomaly Tony and Bruce had been tracking. This all seemed weird. And complicated. And… probably dangerous. 

You remembered that night at the charity ball, when Jane had barged up into your penthouse and demanded answers about Thor. As she had every right to, and nowhere else to turn. Thor had disappeared after the Battle of New York- had not called or spoken to her, even though he could have. A sentiment you understood and sympathized with. But then what sense would it make that he should appear so suddenly, grab her, and then leave? And right in the middle of a skirmish with the police? 

It was all strange. And absolutely spoke of something dangerous on the horizon. The Avengers needed a better way to get in contact with Thor, if he was going to be gone so far away all the time. This Asgard… his home. You really knew nothing about it. Which unnerved you all the more. And you just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Now more than ever. Thor’s sibling rivalry with his brother Loki was what had turned earth upside down. Had threatened its safety, its people. 

They were aliens too. Just like the ones Loki had brought. Something serious had happened to or with or even because of Jane. Something that had mildly spooked Tony and Bruce. While Bruce, of the two, was certainly more spookable… the fact that Tony had been basically on lock down in the lab since coming back from lunch that day- and very clearly didn’t want to talk about whatever findings he was finding… it didn’t bode well. Things like this never boded well. And you weren’t sure, so soon after the bruise that was still aching in your heart, in your mind, over everything you’d been through similar to this… you weren’t sure you could handle something like that again so soon. 

Sleep, as always in moments like these, eluded you. And Tony- really, did he even know the meaning or point of sleep? You were starting to guess he may have been less human than you thought, and only really lied down when you asked him to. Otherwise he’d be up, buzzing on cups of quadruple shots of espresso, thinking and learning and doing late into the night into the next morning into the next day… Endless. You worried about him. He sunk so deep into these things. Because he was worried. 

Same as you.

When you went down to the lab nearing four AM that morning, he was writing all sorts of equations over a long expansive holoboard that was taking up half of the back room. Several screens were on stands beside him. He had those blue tinted glasses on. Bruce- ...Bruce’s head was down atop his folded arms. More human than the rest of you. You gave him a little pat-pat on his shoulders and a small gentle ease of your hand over his back. He didn’t startle, only mumbling briefly, looking up at you with blurry eyes. You gave him a gentle smile and a little nudge. Didn’t take much to get him out of the lab and into bed where he belonged. 

But Tony…? Once the room was clear save for the two of you, you stepped closer, not surprised when he gave you a glance out of the corner of his eye in the middle of writing something else on the board. Well aware that you were there. Reaching up you rubbed your palm between his shoulder blades. “You gonna tell me what’s really going on yet?” You didn’t consider this lying quite yet, the massive amount of information concealing he was doing. 

...but it was toeing a line. “If I knew, I’d tell you, honey.” But this… this you believed. The only thing that drove Tony crazy like this was having massive amounts of data and not being able to put it all together. The only thing that stressed him like this was knowing of something yet not knowing what to do about it. Not having a solution. 

“Well… what is it you’re working on?” If he babbled science and numbers at you, there was probably little chance you’d be able to understand it. Maybe for that reason it would be a waste of his time to even try. 

He took a breath, stopping his scribbles, standing back from all his work. “Something’s going on over in the UK. Science is starting to not look like science anymore. Which- fine- kinda used to nonsense going on over there- but-” You felt a little better when he started rambling. “That abandoned factory where they found Foster- where Thor went- that gravitational anomaly had been there for longer than we had a hint of it. And when her team went to go check it out, it was kind of like… poking a bear. Whatever she did- she made it worse. And Thor showing up throws a whole other bag of peanuts into this.” 

Thor was probably the key to all of this, really. You couldn’t help a sigh, holding a hand to the side of your face. “I’d really like to give him a communicator or something…” 

At this Tony let go of a breathy chuckle. “If I knew how far Asgard was, I’d know how far I have to throw a satellite into space.” Something seemed to register properly, he turned quickly to one of the work stations nearest, and lifted a very familiar friend. “Here, by the way.” He settled a newly finished Heart Reactor into your palm. In the middle of all this mad supposed science, he’d been working on getting an upgrade for you. Along with… “And these- upgraded voice commands- plugged right into the suit. Better wide spread radius on the audio. Fully programmable. Upgraded tech pack. Higher heat resistance…” 

Like the first time he had presented you with them, he held out a little black box and opened it for you. The earring cuffs that you’d basically exploded into dust had been changed to a slimmer cuff with a tapering, almost vine-like soft rounded line that trailed down the part that would rest over the shell of your ears. Like the last, it was easy to tell he’d crafted these with thought and care and love. 

You took them from the box and clipped on one, then the other, feeling a little light buzz as they lit to life and melded comfortably to the shape of your ears. His genius for tech would forever be beyond you. But the fact that he could just make things like this- what were they… nanotech if you remembered correctly. Millions?- of ...computers? Robots? Both? All working together simultaneously to protect you. Guard you. 

Already you felt safer with them back on. Maybe if you’d had them that night… you could have called for help… You wondered if Tony had been thinking the same thing, too. And reworked all of this in his guilt. ...wondered might have been a mild word, considering you knew in your heart that was true. “Thank you.” Smiling up at him. 

He returned the sentiment by pulling you close, wrapping his arms around your shoulders. Drawing you in tight to him. There, you rested your head against his chest, eyes closing, lulled by the steady beat of his heart. And then the rumble of his words as he spoke. “I love you. When I crack this thing, I need to-” 

JARVIS cut him off. “Sir, the gravitational field is weakening in the same spot- the anomaly is expanding once again.” 

“Any gamma bursts?” 

“Not at this time.” 

Annoyance flickered hard then between the two of you- solely belonging to Tony. He stepped away from you, going back to the board to scribble an angry mess over some of the contents. “That doesn’t track.” You stood back from him, hands nervously clasped together, as he started writing angrily. “JARVIS-” 

“My mistake, sir- something is rapidly approaching earth- trajectory marked on screen- gamma flux levels rising.” 

You thought you heard a shriek. A high pitched ring was whining in your ears. “Approaching earth? What does that mean? How could you know that?” 

Tony was pulling the screen up and closer. “Yeah, well… throwing satellites into space has many uses… not just a floating cell tower...” 

“Tony-” Reaching out to take a hard hold of his bicep, both miffed that he’d done something on that scale and terrified, because this sounded a lot like- 

“I said I didn’t know how far to put it out, not that I didn’t-” It trickled in to him in that moment. What he’d been pointedly ignoring. Because now was absolutely not a good time for him to dissolve. Much in the way that you were. He turned, taking in your sudden trembling, laying a strong hand to your shoulder. “Honey. Look at me. We don’t know what this is yet. It could be anything- JARVIS could be getting a little overzealous. Might not even come close to us yet. It’s pretty far out-” 

JARVIS stopped him again. “While I sincerely appreciate your undermining me, sir, Darcy Lewis is on the phone. She says it is urgent.” 

You quickly answered, “Put her through, please!” 

Her voice came not a second later. “Uh- hello? Is this the Avengers? Because I think I got one of yours over here- Thor and Jane just kinda came back-” 

You and Tony talked over each other. While you requested, “Put Thor on please!” He demanded, “Hand Jane the phone.” 

Which left Darcy confused. “Uhm… which one? I could put it on speaker…” 

The two of you shared a mutually confused look. You started. “Thor will know what’s going on.” 

Tony crossed his arms. “Thor will know what’s coming. Jane’s a scientist. She’ll know what’s happening.” Which- for him- meant filling in the blank spots that had been perplexing him. And figuring out how to fix whatever was going on. He held a hand up. “Never mind. Don’t worry. You talk to Thor.” Then taking his phone out of his pocket, “JARVIS, get me Dr. Foster.” Then paced away. 

So… while he was getting information from one of them, you supposed… “Darcy, can I talk to Thor, please? And LUNA, can you transfer it to my cell-” Taking your own phone out, holding it up to your ear. Less noise to distract Tony. There was a lot happening all at once, you recognized the sound of another phone going off- Jane’s presumably- and then when Darcy said here and you recognized the switch, you couldn’t help not only your excitement but your anxiety as well. “Thor!!” 

“Ah- hello- is that you, Lady? It’s good to hear your voice.” 

“Thor, what’s going on?” Tony, in the other corner of the lab, had started talking rapidly, so you put a hand over your opposite ear and turned away. “Something’s got Tony all worked up- something bad I think, and you guys are at the center of it all-”

“Lady please take heed- something Jane has called the convergence is upon us. One of Asgard’s enemies means to utilize it and unleash a weapon called the Aether. We don’t have much time.” 

Though it made you feel awfully guilty, you couldn’t help but let your mind stray there. “...is it Loki?” 

A short silence cut between the two of you until his solemn tone stepped in. “Though Loki was driven by madness and malice and it hurt your people- he helped Jane and I. And it cost him his life.” 

“Thor- I’m… sorry-” Really. For the most part. Loki was responsible for a lot of the hurt, the pain, the destruction- the loss of life that still haunted both you and Tony, but… you were still trying to figure out just how much of him was responsible. Like… who loaned him that army? And had that scepter been controlling him, too? You remembered that yellow static… 

Questions for another day. 

“Now is not the time for grieving, though I appreciate your sentiment. Jane and I have to go- Malekith will be here soon.” 

“Tony and I can come help- we can assemble the other Avengers-” Feeling a sudden sense of dread. Whatever was heading towards earth- that was this Malekith. And from the sounds of it, he had some sort of weapon of mass destruction. 

New York all over again… how could you let Thor face that alone? His team needed to be there! 

“Stay where you are, Lady. I assure you Jane and I have this handled. If you and Stark come, you’ll only be putting yourselves in danger. ...aside that… this has become very personal. I will end Malekith’s aggressions. For all of Asgard.” 

“Thor-!” Was he crazy?? What was the point of all of you- and- besides that- he was bringing his shit to earth. AGAIN. This man needed a severe talking to. Fury hadn’t been 100% correct with the way he’d wanted to handle things but god damn it. This was getting truly upsetting. 

“This is Asgardian business, I will finish it myself!” Something was upsetting Thor, though. He’d never spoken to you like that before, even if you’d only known each other a short time. He’d always been very kind and sweet to you. The loss of Loki-... was it driving him that far? “...when I am finished, I will find you. That is a promise. I know we have a lot we have to speak on.” 

“Thor!” It was evident the call was over. He didn’t answer, and the slice of the other line ending abruptly was all too evident. Yet still, “Thor!” Heat filled your veins. This was stupid. Foolhardy. And worst of all… 

“Honey?” 

You threw your phone to the table and then pressed the Heart Reactor to your chest, double tapping afterwards. The suit up felt slicker, somehow. Perhaps he’d heightened the sequence. The way it shaped against you felt better somehow, too. You turned to look at him, not yet activating the helmet. “Asgardian business my ass. He’s bringing aliens to earth. Again. And I’m not gonna sit here and wait around for his say so to protect our own people.” 

“Now, honey… to be fair…” Tony stepped closer, putting his hands on your arms. “He’s an alien. Remember. So technically he’s already brought at least one.” He was trying to lighten your mood. It wasn’t really working. When he gathered as much, as you continued to gaze at him, he rubbed his hands up and down your arms, giving a deep nod. “Yep. ...yep. We gotta go. If what Jane said is right, we’re not even gonna make it on time. But I always liked being fashionably late.” 

Good. Tony was on board. It eased a brief flash of a smile over your lips. “Should we get the team?” 

“No time. You and me. Let’s go.” 

It was your turn to nod. “You and me.” 

                                                    ---------

The sun wasn’t even up yet as the two of you took off from the balcony. A little after four thirty in the morning. Great time for a fly. You had LUNA route a course, locked to Tony, and wherever these gravitational anomalies were finally meeting at a head. Apparently Greenwich University in London. Seemed like a small place to start an invasion- if this was that- but then again, you only had the grandness of the Battle of New York to compare it with. Really… a smaller location was ideal. Because maybe that meant this wouldn’t be this bad.

You hoped to god that was right, because you hadn’t woken the other Avengers. Before you’d had a whole team ready to go. Relatively speaking. Now you were just going to beat some sense into Thor, for the most part. If this was a grave situation, surely he’d have allowed your help- Asgardian business or not, right? Before had technically been his business. It had been his brother. And yet he’d still allowed and even cheered on a team effort. But not here. So… not as bad, right? 

That was really all you had to hold on to. Your only hope. Because if this was another big battle ahead of you… you weren’t sure you were ready yet. You were so tired. You were always so tired. There was just never any time between one incident and the next. 

“Anniversary’s coming up, you know.” Tony’s voice shook you from your dizzying thoughts, and your eyes focused in on the image of him on the left side box on your display. 

“Thinking about that at a time like this?” Despite the rather odd timing, you couldn’t help a smile. 

“Four years. Edible Arrangements has been trying to sponsor our anniversary for a couple of months. Should I give in?” 

“Edible- ...what?” 

“It’s the basket full of food- usually fruit nobody likes and-”

“I know what it is. I’m asking why.” 

“Fruit and flowers are the traditional gift for the fourth one. And you can’t imagine how many florists are trying to get free press. Basically every shop in the city.” 

JARVIS blared an alert on the exact opposite side of your display, alerting you to the fact that an alien ship had entered the atmosphere. And would be touching down in approximately five minutes. You were nowhere near close. “Little early to be making plans. Considering. But… let’s go away.” 

“Anywhere you want. Pending current survival status. Which, to be fair, I’m calculating as pretty high.” 

Your smile was a touch more bittersweet as you looked at the picture of him on your screen. “I trust your math.” 

“You should. It’s always right.”

                                                   ---------

Fashionably late was a term stretched a little too far by the time the two of you made it to the epicenter of all the goings-on. There had been flux after flux, reading after reading- things you didn’t understand. So much so that you had to silence some of the data on your display. It was really only for Tony, he was tracking that stuff, making sense of it. Knew what to do with it. He’d only shared it with you because he didn’t want you to be out of the loop. But to be honest… looking at it made you more confused. Better off without it. 

Your heart was pounding in your ears, as even miles out, you could see the impossibly large, big black T shaped ship looming. It had wedged itself at some nexus point in Greenwich, that much you’d been told and understood. The rest of it…? This Malekith was like the rest of them. After some sort of power and blood. Why couldn’t life just… not be full of people like that? 

But just as the two of you broke the airspace around the campus, it seemed too little too late. The ship was going down- and as you both made a sharp bend around a building, you saw it was going down right on top of Jane- who was covering a very unconscious Thor. 

“I’m up top, you get the base!” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

Splitting up to span the length of the ship, both of you curbing its trajectory of fall with your hands out. It was incredibly heavy. So much so that even with the power and help of the suit, the boost of all your jets, you were struggling intensely. “We’ve got no good place to put it!” Even if the thought was to bring it to the ground, there were buildings and people everywhere. No good spot to just place it without putting it on top of a bunch of property. 

“You wanna put it back in space??” There was a plan. You could take off and hope you had enough force and fuel to just push it back where it came from. 

“Any other options?” 

“Excuse me!!!!!” There was a voice beneath you. One you were acquainted with, but not familiarly so. Amidst your dual struggles to keep the ship from collapsing to earth, you and Tony both looked towards the ground. LUNA centered in on the man yelling on you, zooming in enough for you to see. Dr. Selvig. You remembered him from his SHIELD files. The man Loki had captured some months ago. “TEAM IRON! Let the ship go!!!” 

“Are you crazy?!” Your nerves were perhaps a little too frayed for this. You needed sleep. 

He raised some sort of device over his head, shaking it at you. “I’m going to put her back where she belongs!!” 

Something must have clicked, just as the ship pressed down on the both of you a little harder, Tony suddenly looked very panicked. He abandoned his post, sending you further down as your suit started warning you about the physical constraints- and you felt just about all of your muscles about to snap. “Honey- let go!” 

Before you could even think about doing so, he swooped up underneath you, only about fifty feet from the ground- from getting crushed, grabbing you in his arms and flying away. You were helpless in that moment, clinging to him. “What’s going on!? Tony, what about them?!” 

The answer happened right in front of you. The ship came to a quick crash. But not on top of Thor and Jane. Safely out of the net of danger, Tony stopped to a hover, still holding you in his arms. The both of you watched the ship get swallowed up by- ...well. Nothingness. It fell into some sort of hole right atop Thor and Jane and disappeared completely. Almost like it had just blipped from existence. 

“What- what was that??” Finding yourself slightly breathless. Because the implication here was… 

“Well. If my math is right-” And it always was-”...we almost just got pushed onto another planet.” 

It was really just all too much. Too much to even think about putting into words. So instead… “Maybe Thor really did have a handle on this.” Looking down, zooming in on the picture of him now sitting up, and Jane hugging him tightly. 

But as a military jet flew overhead, and the both of you looked up, Tony rolled his eyes. “We’re basically paper pushers at this point.” 

“Janitorial staff, more like it.” 

Because England’s military was here. There were police coming on to the scene. That meant there was clean up to do. And, as Tony brought the both of you back to earth, meeting a growing crowd of armed forces, he raised a hand, his helmet sliding back. “Hey. Avengers business. Don’t mind us.” 

So you zipped your line of sight up across your screen, setting the command to deactivate your helmet, next. “As the head of the Department of Damage Control, Stark Industries is now declaring this a clean up site. Please stand back.” 

A strong hand clapped over your shoulder and you half turned to see Thor standing behind you. A little beaten up, but smiling. “Lady, Stark. Good to see you. I told you I had this handled.” 

Tony made a face at him. “Oh great. You wanna handle the authorities? Because I was kind of in the middle of something back in New York.” 

At this, Thor’s smile dropped and he gave Tony a couple of slow pats on the back. “I think I shall… leave these matters to you.” 

You weren’t exactly smiling at Thor, but not quite a frown either. “It’s good to see you too, Thor. And when you get a minute, we need you back at the Tower. We’ll handle this for you- only if you promise you’re not about to disappear.” 

Jane scoffed. “Hey, he has to promise me that first.” 

Thor’s lips were pulled thin in a grimace. “About that…” 

You let the two of them go. And while you and Tony were busy with the authorities and foreign governments, Thor did disappear again. Asgardian business you supposed...

[burning-clutch]

Crashing Like A Tidal Wave With Cardiac Arrest: Part 1

Read on Ao3: here (Chapter 1 of 2) Pairings: Jack/Maddie Trigger Warnings: Blood and gore, Major character death Author: @burning-clutch (Team Ghost) Total words: 4711 prompt by:  Anthropwashere / Anthrop  AO3 and FFN: Anthrop

-.-.-.- **Important** There is a bit of excessive gore in here I wanted to try my hand at writing but I marked it between xXxX lines. it's not a lot just an over detailed depiction of the scene, but if you need to skip it, it will not change how the story is perceived, and you can continue on with out worry. -.-.-.-.-

The day was routine, or at least it started out that way…

Danny had woken up late for school having spent the night prior fighting endless rounds of Ectopuss, giant rats, a pack of wolves, a bear ghost, the Box Ghost, Skulker, some weird rabbit gorilla cross…. All in all nothing too terrible… Just relentlessly endless and annoying, eating into his sleep and making him generally miserable the next day.

Danny had gotten to the school in record time, not that it mattered really, he was already late and the added five minutes it took didn’t make any difference in Lancer’s eyes. He was sorely tempted to skip his first period altogether but didn’t really want to risk the phone call home to his parents.

He was a big enough disappointment to them as it was right now, and the last thing he needed or wanted to be the hollow sight from his parents as they looked on to him hopelessly.

“I really wish you would take this more seriously hun,” his mother would say

“I know these are your best years son, but the school’s important! Fenton’s are smart and you got a legacy to uphold!” his father would continue.

It was the same thing almost every time he screwed up, followed by his sensitive ears picking up his parents' hushed conversations mainly consisting of. “I don’t know what we’re going to do for him… nothing helps…”

He sighed as he landed in the janitor’s closet and transformed back to human. He shouldn’t worry about this now. Jazz and him were making preparations to be able to tell his parents the truth, and hopefully, that will allow him to smooth over most of the issues with his parents. He was concerned that he may have some loss of freedom though.

Or at least Jazz had warned him that may be the case. At the very least he could expect enforced ghost fighting curfews with a ghost shield around the house that a halfa can’t get out of.

He shook his head to clear the thoughts and moved to exit the closet swiftly making his way to class. “Ah, how nice of you to join us, Mr. Fenton,” Lancer said, hardly even sparing the teen a glance as he continued to write on the board.

Danny offered the teacher a sheepish smile that seemed to go unnoticed by the middle aged man, and hurried to his seat, throwing himself into his chair as silently as he could. It only occurred to him once he was in his seat that Lancer hadn’t bothered to issue him a detention.

Strangely that thought twisted in his gut painfully. Was he so bad off that even Lancer deemed him a lost cause now? He sighed deeply and just tried to push those self depreciative thoughts out of his mind, and decided instead that he should count his blessings that he could head home directly after school for a change.

Regardless he still opted to tune out the rest of the lecture as the day dragged on, Mr. Lancer did not make The Grapes of Wrath sound interesting at all and his opinion.

His friends beside him took in his tired visage and offered him a pitying look. The bags under his eyes made it clear that he was in need of sleep.

“What kept you up last night dude?” Tucker asked him with a quiet whisper.

“Box ghost and a whole bunch of animal ghosts all teaming up to make my night an endless hell…” Danny responded equally as quiet with an exasperated sigh.

“You should have called us man we would have been able to help you” Tucker whispered back eyeing his friend with a critical glance.

“You know we're always ready and willing to share the burden, you don't have to do this all yourself, as much as you think it's your ‘duty’ to,” Sam added from his other side.

“I know but it's not right for me to drag you guys into this. What if you guys get hurt? I'd never forgive myself!” Danny whispered back, with a slight huff, though a slight glow overtook his eyes. betraying his truest feelings.

Sam and Tucker exchanged a glance around him knowingly, it was pointless to try and argue with him when he gets like this. Even Jazz with all of her endless patience for psychoanalyzing him eventually gave up trying to understand the motivations behind his weird compulsions and all the faults and quirks that came along with having a Ghostly obsession to boot.

Danny lets out a long yawn. Man, was he tired. Maybe he could just rest his head on the desk for a moment, Lancer probably wouldn't notice right? No sooner was his head down were his eyes sliding closed from his exhaustion, unconsciousness taking him quickly.

From Danny’s perspective, he blinked and then was suddenly being poked by Tucker. Danny raised his head and took in his friend’s deep frown. “Bell rang, dude.”

Right good… “Yeah,” he yawned widely. Earning a sympathetic look from his friends and a flat exasperated sigh from the teacher.

Danny did his best to ignore the look as he stood and gathered his things to leave. He was just passing the classroom’s threshold when his ghost scene went off, fogging up around his vision and dissipating off into the air. He groaned.

“If it’s Boxy, I’m just going to lock him in the thermos and keep him there until the Christmas truce,” Danny growled.

“You want one of us to take care of him then?” Sam asked as Danny handed off his backpack to her.

“No, I should do it... “ He sighed. “I’m the one that everyone expects to be late anyway.”

“Still dude, you don’t-” Tucker started only to snap his jaws shut when Danny waved a flippant hand at him.

“No, it’s fine just tell the teacher I had a bowel problem or something. I’ll be back.” Danny said, already turning to leave and head for a closet or the bathroom to transform in. This was so second nature for him now, he had to wonder what he would ever be able to actually accomplish in school if he had the time to dedicate to actually sitting still for more than an hour and actually having time to learn things.

One flash of light later and Phantom was in the air following his ghost sense to the roof of the school. No sooner did he fully emerge above the building did he get blasted from behind. Danny rounded on the enemy expecting Skulker again but was surprised when he saw one of Vlad’s vultures panting from the exertion of its attack.

Instantly on high alert now, and looking for the elder half ghost himself, Danny fired an icy blast at the annoying bird's wings taking advantage of it’s needed recovery time.

The attack struck true and the bird fell to the ground with a squawk. Vulnerable now, he unhooked his thermos and sucked up the ghost easily. Capping it, and reattaching it to his belt, Danny flew around the school, trying to find the other two vultures or Vlad.

Using his ghost sense to guide him, he makes his way off the school property and into the woods that were just behind, Danny soon found the second vulture. It was odd though the bird was flying quickly away from the school instead of trying to attack him it kept on its trajectory.

It didn’t take Danny long to put two and two together and realize that the vulture was luring him somewhere. So he threw up a shield in front of the bird, which it flew into with a wet sounding thump before that minion too was sucked away.

“Ha, even dead birds fly into stuff” Danny quipped.

He flew upwards to get his bearings and realized he was halfway to Elmerton almost now. He cursed under his breath before doubling back towards the school, ignoring his ghost sense that was trying to draw him further away.

If Vlad was involved in this… whatever it was, he at least wanted to try and make it hard for him to execute whatever plan that frootloop had set up. Heading back towards the school he caught sight of a flash of green of a pair of Ectopuss in the football field.

“How did I miss you?” He muttered as he flew down towards them.

He hardly entered the school grounds when a pink blast shot towards him whizzing right by his ear. Only the sound of the static as it fizzed through the air alerted him to the attack, giving him barely enough time to dodge.

“Ah Daniel, I must admit I was anticipating you being gone for a little longer.” Vlad mused seemingly unimpressed by the teenager’s appearance.

“Did you really expect me to go that far once I realized your cronies leading me off?” Danny spat hands aglow with green sparking energy.

“Well of course I did. Your infernal hero complex is all too predictable after all.” Vlad chuckled dryly. “By the way little badger, how did you sleep last night? I had an unfortunate ghostly animal jailbreak.”

“Of course that was you.” Danny snarled before launching an attack at the man.

Vlad simply floated out of the way casually, smirking in that overly pompous manner of his. “As I said, predictable.” he chuckled darkly before a clone came up from behind and kicked Danny down to the ground.

The teen yelled and tried to slow his fall, but he still managed to leave a decently sized crater in the ground when all was said and done. Danny pulled himself free in launch skyward invisibly hoping to catch Vlad off guard.

Again, the elder half ghost dodged, before rounding on the teen and trapping him with a bear hug

"Now, now, Daniel. I can't have you messing up my plans my dear boy. Today is the day I Triumph and finally end that fool Jack Fenton and take Maddie for my wife," he purred

Danny's eyes go wide at the man's words. “What did you do,” He growled out. “Where are my parents Vlad! I swear-”

“Oh don’t worry it’s nothing dear Maddoline can’t handle. Tell me did you happen to get all three of my minions or did you simply come back here to confront me?” The man smiled in an overly sickeningly way that made Danny want to vomit.

“Wait, you - UGH!” Danny sees red, or rather green, as his eyes shine bright the need to protect overwhelming him as he stretches his body out and escapes the man’s hold. Snapping himself back to proper shape he lets loose a powerful mix of ecto plasma and ice.

It launched out of his palms so large and wide that Vlad had no choice but to try to shield, unable to dodge. The pink shield strained and shook, cracking with spiderwebs lacing the ecto construct.

Danny’s fury helped fuel his power and the added power backing him enabled him to break through the shield, hitting Vlad square in the chest... and destroying the clone in a hiss of melting pink sludge.

The teen whirled about in the air looking for the next attack, any possible sign of his enemy. How dare he! This was his town, his lair and he would protect the people in it. In a way, they were his too. It only fueled his rage knowing it was his father who was at risk.

Danny snarled in rage before shaking himself into a more coherent state. He fumbled about on his person managing to find whatever weird interstate his phone had gone into, and pulled it free to check it over.

He pushed it open and brought up the ‘Fenton Finder’ app that showed where the GAV was at any given moment, something that the citizens of the city enjoyed so they could avoid the areas whenever possible, usually meaning that there was a ghost attack wherever the Fenton’s were heading.

For Danny, it helped him avoid, or find his parents quickly. Finding his parent’s location was easy and after sticking his phone from what area it had come from, he’d shot off like a rocket. Thankfully they weren’t far, practically down the street from the school near the mall actually, which made sense otherwise Vlad wouldn’t have been able to maintain his clone.

Danny arrived on the scene just in time to see Vlad telekinetically tossing things towards the GAV. He had managed to split up the elder Fentons and lifted a few cars getting ready to toss them at Jack with a howl.

Danny slammed into Vlad tackling him to the ground, hands burning as bright as his eyes as he blasted the ghost.

The damage was already done though. As soon as Danny had tackled Vlad, the cars had become encased in pink energy causing it to still follow the trajectory that Vlad had wanted.

Both halfas slammed into the ground but were still high enough, the crater created not too deep in the pavement, to see what was happening.

Vlad smirked and took Danny’s distraction as a chance to escape phasing into the ground leaving a bewildered teen halfa unable to move, only stare at the scene before him.

The car sailed towards Jack who tried to bound out of the way. The large man was not as fast as he liked to believe and of course, was a large target, to hit. The car slammed into his leg knocking the tall man over and causing him to roll back from the force of the strike.

“Fu-e- Ouch! That’s broken…” Jack hissed out changing his swear last minute. The orange clad man struggled to get to his feet, his right leg bending awkwardly below the knee, but putting all his weight on his left allowed him to clamber to his feet… er, foot.

Danny heaved a sigh of relief seeing his father still standing, a little worse for wear granted but overall alive…. Or at least he was until he saw the man he always knew to be cheerful and boisterous, went quiet and pale, letting out a barely audible “N-No...”

Danny realizing Vlad had taken off, stood and followed his father’s gaze, heart and core both pounding anxiously, before burning away into a mix of sorrow and furry. There, just a little bit away, he could just barely make it out to what it should look like… but it was indeed a leg... in a very familiar, painfully familiar, teal colour, sticking out from under a car.

Danny gulped wishing silently that the red that was splashed about the concrete was just paint… A grunt and a crunch pulled Danny’s attention back to his father, who was trying desperately to meet his wife.

Carefully he flew to the large man before landing silently beside him, only to look away a second later ashamed. “I…. I couldn’t stop him in time…” He managed out, voice as broken as he currently was and glow dimming to an almost nonexistent state. “H-Here…”

Jack wrenched his eyes away from the blood and gore before him to stare listlessly at Phantom. Normally his scientific mind would be undoubtedly fascinated by the things currently being exhibited by Phantom, but right now…

Jack hardly said anything, not even so much as a protest as Danny looped his arm around the large man’s back allowing him to use the ghost as a crutch. That normally would have worried Danny but his everything was just stricken. He just…

He forced himself to move forward, urged on more by Jack’s listless hobbling rather than his own will to do so. He heard sirens, and couldn’t care less whether they were police, ambulance, fire or even the GIW coming for him… he just…

He had to know that the stillness of that form ahead really was due to...

He shook his head chastising himself for thinking such a thing before he had any proof. Though the closer he got, the colder the air around him felt.

Even Jack was shivering but his mind was numb to the biting temperature that Phantom was giving off… Nothing mattered just… “Madds… Oh, Maddie…” Jack whimpered, as they rounded the car.

Phantom turned green and fell away from Jack’s eyes widened. His stomach turned at the bloody scene before him. His mother… she was… “She’s... She’s dead!” Phantom cried out large luminescent tears falling from his eyes as he quivered in sorrow and grief.  

It was a grizzly sight

XxXxXxX

   Maddie was not in one whole piece for starters, her lower half had been cleaved off by the car leaving her legs to lay underneath while her upper body had rolled on, landing sideways against the curb, Her eyes, still opened, were glassy like that of a dead fish, and were quickly clouding.  

   Her skin now looked a sickly grey as opposed to the healthy pink and peach Danny had come to associate with his mother. Her face had been scraped deeply from when she had slid across the pavement, reminding the teen sickeningly of ground beef with how bad the scrapes were.  

   Entrails hung out from below her ribcage spilling their foul greenish yellow bile across the pavement, while chunks of… something Danny didn’t even want to identify was strewn about in various shades of whiteish, grey, pink, bright red and reddish black…  

   Bones... That was bones… or rather bits of bone that had been crushed and scattered from the impact…. Danny had seen bones before of course, there were skeleton ghosts after all but never like this… not something like this...  

   And all the red! Red was everywhere. No matter where he looked there was red. Large globbing splatters all the way down to the tiniest of pinpricks, it was there, and it was her. His mother… her essence...The iron scent was so strong now he could taste it.    

XxXxXxX

It quickly became too much for the teen, and he had to turn away from the scene onto the nearest boulevard to vomit. A thick green sludge that awfully enough reminded him of a slightly glowing lime Jell-o tumbled out from his stomach, burning his throat and nose.

After having emptied his stomach of whatever was in there and turning away from the mess he’d made, he carefully returned to his father who was weeping openly having fallen to his knees as he did so. The broken man was unable to turn away.

Danny swallowed thickly doing his best to keep his eyes on the ground, thankfully his own tears made everything blurry so he didn’t have to focus in on the mess that his mother had become…

“D- Jack? ...Come on… There are paramedics…” The teen managed out weakly. Jack looked up at him as if finally realizing just who was here beside him. Danny forced himself not to look away from the lost broken look on his father’s face. When he tried to say more it was as if his mouth was suddenly filled with cotton, and he opened it and closed it a few times unsure what to say.

“What do you want, Phantom?” The man asked after a moment of silence passed, both openly letting their tears fall, but neither mentioning it. The accusation was there but it was so much weaker than he had ever heard before… “If you’ve come to gloat I-”

“What!? No! Never! I… I actually wanted to say I’m sorry… I wasn’t fast enough I… This is my fault…” He sniffed out.

“What?! You’re sorry? You’re sorry!?” Jack boomed anger getting the better of him. Danny had heard enough of Jazz’s lectures to know what this was. He was so distraught and hurt, that he was going to take out his anger on anything he could…

Danny couldn’t blame him for turning on him though… everything is his fault.

“Sorry is not going to bring her back! Sorry isn’t going to fix this! Sorry isn’t going to- '' The man's voice cracked, breaking as he screamed becoming silent a second before he broke down again. “She’s gone… Sh-She’s gone!”

“I’m so sorry... This is my fault! If I was faster! I-I should have figured out Plasmius’s plan sooner I-I’m such an idiot I… oh Mom…” Danny hiccupped and tugged at his hair, nails digging into his scalp. “Mom! It’s all my fault! I should have saved you!”

“Wh- What did you?” Jack sniffed head snapping up in an instant watching as Phantom seemed to be having a mental breakdown. “Mom…” he managed out between sobs. Jack stole a glance at his broken wife, before staring back at Phantom.

The ghost looked young. Maybe somewhere in his mid teens at most, and with his glow now as weak as it was, he could clearly see the ghost that was usually hidden within the usual ethereal fog. He was a boy really, he looked so small, not at all like the muscled form they usually see. His glow was pretty much gone, leaving his usually brilliant white hair a dull steel grey. His white gloves and even the sharp crisp black… all of it just looked so dull…

Even the usual bright radioactive ectoplasmic green of his eyes had faded to a more human looking colour. If one were to take away the slight green tint in his skin he could easily pass for a kid who just dyed his hair, so long as someone wasn’t looking too hard at him... It was so surreal and uncanny in how the ghost moved, like an old movie that was missing an occasional frame.

And he was clearly having some sort of… episode… Perhaps he had died in a car crash with his mother? Was that why this was affecting him so strongly? The soft sobs of the usually strong and cocky ghost, and watching the boy cry about his mother… It felt so wrong.

“What kind of hero am I if I can’t even save my own mother? I can’t help anyone!” he sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve leaving an iridescent slime trail along his sleeve.

“Phantom…” Jack tried softly. Instantly the ghost’s head popped up to look at him, though it didn't last long as a moment later he squeezed his eyes shut tightly.

“Just… Just get it over with… hurry up and tear me apart… just… It’ll make us both feel better right?” the ghost pleaded brokenly to Jack's dull green eyes staring blankly ahead. “At least then I… I can be useful… not a disappointment… I’m just a screwup… I- “

“Phantom…” Jack said softly.

“I- I’m sorry” He sniffed.

Jack blinked slowly. “I need you to help me get to the paramedics.”  

“I’m- You want me to help?” He sniffled again. He really was a broken child at this moment and not just a ghost… besides, Jack didn’t have the fight in him right now to even bother trying to attack the ghost. “Really?” Phantom asked again, hope filling his green eyes.

“Yeah… I mean since I can’t walk,” came the simple response. “I…I need your help Phantom.”  

The ghostly teen nodded and moved forward to help the large man. Storm clouds barely being contained behind his eyes, while Jack on the other hand, just felt numb.

As Phantom helped Jack over to the emergency responders neither one noticed the other ghost that was on a nearby roof, staring down at the scene in silent horror.

Vlad masters or Plasmius in his current form had undoubtedly, unequivocally, and unquestionably screwed up… big time. Not only had his plan failed in the most spectacular way possible, but he had also killed the love of his life. By his own power, his own hand, she had stopped breathing, her heart stopped beating… her life drained.

In trying to end Jack, the man who ruined his life, he had unintentionally ended another's. The one most precious to him… Second only to the kinship that he had felt with Danny…

That feeling had been the most notable change here…

As it stood now, Vlad was unsure if he still felt the same about the younger half ghost. It was Daniel’s fault his plan had gone awry… If it wasn’t for him that would be Jack’s corpse smeared across the pavement from the car. The hunks of metal crushing the fat oaf of a man, not his dear sweet innocent Madeline.

But at the same time… they still shared a curse. A curse that bound them together whether they liked it or not. It was something that bound them to walk a tightrope of life and death and experience a sensation of isolation like no other.

Though as Vlad watched Jack interacting with Phantom, how the ghost tenderly had started embracing the man, and Jack in turn squeezed and held the boy so tight it looked like he would pop, the man couldn’t stop the bit of jealous rage that fermented in his core.

And yet, the more human side of his brain was breaking. Maddie was gone and he had destroyed Daniel’s family in all the wrong ways… It was his fault here as much as it was Daniel’s, and now... Now he just needed some time to himself to reflect…

Danny wasn’t sure how long he’d hugged his father for, and in ghost form no less, but they both needed this and it seemed like it didn’t matter who was there to offer the much needed comfort. “I-I…” He swallowed thickly again when he looked up into the deep blue eyes of his father globs of tears rimming his lashes and streaking freely down his face.

“It… It’s okay… I… You just… you look so much like my son like this” Jack admits. “I… I couldn’t... I…Oh, Danny....”

“Dad… I wanted to tell you sooner, and … and Mom too but…” He sniffed, trying to clear his nose and opened his mouth to continue only to hiccup, his voice betraying him. As the paramedics, cops and of course the GIW start to encircle them Danny whispered simply. “We-We’ll talk at home I…”

“Ecto-entity Phantom, by the order of CR-2003-02 you are under arrest!” The agent called out earning several glares from the emergency responders that had shown up.

“Like hell he is!” Jack boomed, surprising everyone there, but none more than the ghost himself. “You leave right now or I swear...” The large man said in a rather flattened tone. Jack loud was one thing, that was normal… Jack talking calmly or quiet well… that meant hell was about to break loose.

The agents looked about the area awkwardly, before one brave one with dark skin piped up. “But the law states-”

“And the law can get you a warrant to take him,” Jack said simply eyes hardened. He was not about to deal with them after… after… he shakes his head to clear his thoughts before putting an arm around Phantom… Danny… Danny Phantom, and pulling him to himself. “Ghost’s mine and I’m a licenced hunter so I have possession. Now leave.” he barked

Danny watched his father in awe. He’d seen his father upset before of course, and even protective of him and Jazz before too, but never like this…

The agents shared a glance before backing off with glares all the way back to their van.

The paramedics were next to approach while the Cops started roping off the area. Everything was a blur after that. And Danny hardly remembers anything once the paramedics took Jack.

He knows at some point he flew home, not bothering to head back to school, as he sort of ‘blinked back into reality’ to realize he was staring at his ceiling. He really didn’t care about school right now…

He wasn’t sure what time it was when Jazz came home. Her eyes were red and she sighed in relief upon seeing him, before practically collapsing on top of him crushing him in a hug their father would be proud of. It only took a second before they both began to sob again… -.-.-.-.-.-.-.- Incomplete Total words: 4711

[thisstableground]

therapy rambling under the cut

i didn’t say very much on it earlier because honestly it just knocked me for a six. i don’t fully buy into the questionnaires for mental health stuff because i feel like i struggle with doing them accurately but with a certain margin of error they’re still a pretty quantifiable “you’re doing less/more bad than before” and i wasn’t expecting something quite so definitive as i got.

so i went into the session and we talked a bit about christmas and my weird housing situation general stuff, i told her a few things about how i’ve been doing and then she was like “okay, so what shall we do next for your therapy” and i was obviously like “well what are the things i’m supposed to do next”

she said, “ive got this worksheet, if you’d like to work on that” and i said sure, so she asked me what i’d been doing on the stuff we’d worked on before the break. i go “well, i ended up retyping up the notes we made, and changing things around a bit and putting in a few extra bits” etc etc and she says, “...well, that was actually exactly what this worksheet was supposed to get you doing. and the one after it.”

i’m all, “oh, sick, am i ahead of curriculum?” and she just gave me this very thoughtful, kind of amused look and said, “change of plans, do you want to do the impact of event scale again?”

and i was expecting to have maybe like a 35-40. you know, a big step, very close to recovery. and then i got a 13 and spent the next forty minutes just not knowing how to react. in a good way, but a confused way. i’m still kind of confused in a good way about it. nine goddamn years avoiding it. its been there my entire adult life and its so recently that i actually acknowledge it and got a name for it, and now i’m just Better, Apparently? i genuinely worried that maybe i’d lied about my responses, but i don’t think i did. when we looked at all the weekly scores together she said they follow the usual pattern of recovery – something high enough to count as diagnosable, at the start, then actually getting higher around week 4 when things get serious and all the worst stuff happens, and then getting lower.

i said, “that’s great but also i have no idea how to respond to this because i wasn’t really expecting it.”

she said, “to be honest, me neither. this doesn’t usually happen by session 8.”  

and that made me feel strange too. not in a bad way at all, but there was definitely an element of “am i lying to myself about how well i’’m doing?” because i know the point of therapy isn’t just to get through it as fast as possible and how quickly it’s done isn’t the measure of whether you did well.

weirdly i feel a little like i’m bragging here – just reminding myself of my asshole teenage self who’d be like “oh yeah i got an A in that class and i didn’t even study” - but that’s not what i’m saying. it feels like it happened too fast because i only just started therapy but really i did like what, six or seven years of constant and really difficult work on so many things before now and i mostly needed therapy just to help me put together all these pieces i’d already put so much work into.

this is probably what i’d call the fourth Big Recovery of my life: psychosis, depression, eating disorder, here. and a lot of what was so hard about the other ones is how long it takes to develop the attitudes and the understanding of the recovery trajectory: learning how to even engage with the possibility of getting better, knowing that a temporary feeling bad again doesn’t have to be a relapse, being able to accept the way that improvement kind of rollercoasters up and down, patience and being kind to yourself and asking for help and taking a break and all those million little things that are intensely hard to learn for the first time, the second time, become easier by the third, and the fourth. mental health is all about practice. i have had so much practice. so even when it sucked at the time, for this one i could believe myself when i said “this is just a ‘getting worse so it can get better’ thing” because i’ve already seen so much proof that this is part of it, and it isn’t forever. some of the things i had to face were much harder this time, but it was also so much easier to not lose sight of what could be on the other side of it.

and next week is our last session. there’s also a part of me that’s worried that i’ll be like “yay, i recovered from this one!” and then ANOTHER repressed emotional problem that i haven’t had space to deal with might pop up, but at the moment i can’t feel one there. (plus there’s like a three month window where if i need a follow up i can book back in with the same person and skip the waiting list so that’s a nice safety net).

anyway. that was probably all incoherent rambling because it’s 3am. i still haven’t quite processed it all yet. i’d planned to spend all day doing transcription and work tomorrow because it’s about time i started making money but i think maybe i need just one more day of time off. to just like, wander around town as a person who doesn’t have active PTSD and think about what the hell that means. its weird. it’s good. it’s incredibly weird.

[heavenslastcrush]

About Sunsets

Sunsets never cease to amaze me. The expansive sky, lit up in all of its glory, bursting with beams of light and spectacular color that is magnificent to behold: nature's own fireworks display. The magic lasts just a short while, blessing those lucky individuals that took the time to notice it, and then fades into the night as the world falls into a slumber.

I've been immensely fortunate to see some pretty incredible sunsets in my lifetime. My current apartment, situated on the 42nd floor, faces south west and allows me to view this majestic phenomenon every evening that I'm home in time from work. But, apart from this, I've witnessed sunsets all over the world from Easter Island, to the Serengeti, to the Phi Phi Islands. Each sunset so breathtakingly beautiful, each so unique. Whether the weather, the backdrop, the company I'm with, or the colors that Mother Nature decides to grace us with: from delicate pastels, to fiery reds; sunsets are glorious. 

The most amazing sunset I've ever experienced was at the end of last year, just a couple of days before New Years, on board a National Geographic expedition in Antarctica. The upper deck of the ship, which was serving as home to about 110 guests during our voyage, had a hot tub that was accessible to everyone, provided that seas weren't too rough. So, after dinner one evening, two of the ship's staff members joined me in the hot tub as we sailed through the Lemaire Channel on the calmest waters one could ever imagine. 

One of the staff members, Karen, was a avian specialist. She had a deep rooted love for nature and animals, particularly birds, that compelled her to travel around the world and study them. The other staff member, Max, was a National Geographic photographer who had explored the far reaches of our little blue planet and had the opportunity to photograph it in all of its wonder. Sitting there and listening to their journeys and experiences was alone enough to make this an unforgettable evening. 

As we continued to navigate down the Lemaire, our small vessel carefully pushed small pieces of ice, referred to as growlers, aside as we propelled forward with radiant ice bergs and snow-capped rocky mountains surrounding us. The three of us were in deep conversation about where we spent last New Year, when Karen abruptly stopped and pointed out the stunning atmosphere around us. "Look", she nodded toward the landscape in front of her.

The sky began to transform into the most magical display of light and color that I had ever seen. Tremendous, radiant shades of chartreuse, pinks, purples, and blues that gracefully faded into one another as though it were composing a symphony; each color its own instrument. 

We all sat in silence for a moment, listening to the crackling of the ice in the Arctic Ocean, breathing in the crisp, cold air, staring in wonder at the colors as they danced around the mountains, sipping our wine while we remained warm and cozy immersed in the hot water, and genuinely enjoying each others company. 

It was Max who finally broke the silence saying, "I'd bet this is the most beautiful sunset in the history of sunsets; that no one in history has ever experienced a sunset quite this beautiful". I literally couldn't do anything but nod in agreement and continue to sit there and soak in that moment with every fiber of my being, letting it completely fill me up so that I could remember it forever. It was a perfect moment, and it was a perfect sunset. 

Max did hop out of the tub for a few minutes on a couple of separate occasions to try to visually capture the vista. The funny thing about sunsets though, is even with the best camera money can by (which I'm positive he had), you can never really do it justice. The colors, even if one were to spend years tweaking them in Lightroom or Photoshop, would never be quite the same. As for me? Of course, this was the one time during the entire trip I did not have any of my 3 cameras with me, so all I have is this vivid memory of an experience that I could never capture, or recreate, and no one in history will ever be able to. It was the epitome of bittersweet.

I've thought about this memory and this particular sunset so many times. It's one of those go-to memories for me whenever I'm feeling down, or exceptionally happy, or taking a photograph, or when I've had a little too much wine. Max's words that evening constantly echo through my mind: "No one in history has ever experienced a sunset quite this beautiful." 

First off, I can't reiterate enough how powerful that sentence was coming from Max. Here is this person, who has seen more of this world than literally billions of people ever have, or ever will. More beauty. More tragedy. More compassion. More greed. More hope. More despair. More sunsets. More... everything. If he thought this was the most beautiful sunset ever, then I am perhaps one of the luckiest three people that ever lived to have been there to witness it. 

Secondly, there are about 17 different ways I've thought about writing this article, because with this one story, this one little experience, this one little dot on the canvas that is my life, there are so many lessons that I could draw from it. I could have written about living in the moment, and putting away technology so that you can fully immerse yourself in experiences. I could have written about being mindful and continuously showing gratitude for things in your life. I could have written about the importance of human connection, and creating authentic, meaningful relationships. I could have written about the transformative experience that is travel, and why I believe everyone should do it. I could have written about how singular moments can change one's entire outlook and trajectory of life. I could have written about the importance of nature conservation, so that future generations can experience similar wonder that I was able to that evening. 

All of these topics are important lessons that I hope each one of you consider. But, of the seemingly infinite range of topics and lessons I could have written about, I'm going to write about You. 

Yes, you.

Because you, dear reader, are a sunset. 

Amazing. Specatcular. Magnificent. Magical. Incredible. Majestic. Breathtaking. Beautiful. Unique. Glorious. Tremendous. Radiant. Stunning. Perfect. You. 

Like any sunset, there is only one you, and there will only ever be one you. Yes, others may also be amazing, but you are unique and perfect in the way that you touch people that you encounter along your journey. And, while your time here on planet Earth may be temporary, making way for the next amazing thing, you have the opportunity to show the world how stunning and amazing you are. 

Whether you realize it or not, you are impacting the people that encounter you each day. You hold the paintbrush to the canvas that is your life, and you get to decide the colors to use as you paint your sunset and show it to those around you.

It's strange that we humans are so easily amazed by external things, like sunsets, or can easily acknowledge how incredible someone else is, but often fail to recognize, or even realize how amazing we are. And you literally don't need anything to be amazing, you already are. Everything you need it already inside you. (Sure, if you want to get some academic or life experiences under your belt, or have a cup of coffee before you fully unleash all of your amazing, you can. But, it's not required.)

So, next time you're feeling a bit down because you see a colleague or classmate do something awesome while you feel like you're just continuing to ho-hum along; or you're not feeling particularly special, deserving, or worthy, please just stop; because every sunset is radiant, and special, and captivating. 

Take a moment. Take a breath. And, take the time to marvel at your own splendor. To give yourself credit for all that you've done. To be optimistic about all that you have yet to accomplish. Then go out there, and show the world the best fucking sunset they've ever seen. 

xoxo, H

[paulisweeabootrash]

Book Review: Princess Holy Aura

An earlier version of this post was published on Facebook on April 30, 2018.

PAUL IS WEEABOO TRASH; or, Paul Reviews... A Book?!

Q: A book?  So, like, you're reviewing based on the first volume of a manga series or something?

A: No, a novel.

Q: A novel.

A: Yeah.

Q: Why not manga?  You have a problem with it?  Are you being snobby about what kinds of books are better than others?

A: No, not at all.  Manga is just another kind of literature.  I just felt like doing this novel because it's relevant to--

Q: How?  Oh!  Is it a novel that an anime is based on?  One of those outrageously-long light novel serieses?

A: No.

Q: A visual novel?  That seems like something you'd review.

A: No, it's a Western print novel, and there's no anime based on it.  But I swear it's relevant.

Q: Relevant...?  Hm.

A: Because it's--

Q: Is it something mentioned in an anime or something else you'd review?  Oh!  Is it "Hyperion"?

A: No.

Q: ..."Portrait of Markov"?

A: That's not a real book.

Q: Well what then?

A: It's a novel about a magical girl.

Q: Oh.  Huh.  Weird.  Proceed. -----

EPISODE 8: Princess Holy Aura (2017)

Princess Holy Aura by Ryk E. Spoor is a magical girl story for people who are familiar with the genre and find its absurdities at least as endearing as they are frustrating.  It's a sort of affectionate parody.  We follow the normal progression of certain famous magical girl anime — the mascot (a magic rat named Silvertail) giving our heroine her powers, the escalating danger of fights with an otherworldly enemy (an assortment of creatures derived from Japanese and American pop culture and folklore), meeting and bonding with a whole team of magical girls (the Apocalypse Maidens) — with some added twists and an awareness of the rules of the genre that allows the main character to succeed because of his ability to deconstruct what's going on.

The deconstruction is justified--

Q: Wait, did you say "his"?

A: Yes.  I'm getting to that.  And the pronouns are going to get confusing.

See, the reason Holy Aura is genre-savvy is that her secret identity is Stephen Russ, an impoverished thirtysomething otaku and Air Force veteran.  Chosen for his intense willingness to help others and his experience with the stresses of adult life, his knowledge of magical girl shows also turns out to gives him the preparation he needs to understand and anticipate his enemies.  Why?  Because, as I was going to say before, the deconstruction is justified by magic-users' beliefs about magic affecting how magic works — so it's susceptible to the magic-related memes of whatever culture(s) the current crop of Apocalypse Maidens are from.  This means Holy Aura and the other Apocalypse Maidens apply knowledge of various media conventions to figure out, and sometimes anticipate, their enemies.

The other four magical girls, for magical plot contrivance reasons, are actual teenage girls, so Stephen must go undercover as "Holly Owen", Holy Aura's eyeroll-inducing normal human girl form, to find and recruit them.  Stephen/Holly deals with the strangeness of abandoning his old life and adjusting to his role — not just physically, but because of how his status as small, young and female now drastically change how others interact with him.  This leads to one of my favorite things about the story: how it describes Stephen/Holly's adjustment.  Each Apocalypse Maiden is partially herself, but also a cumulative reincarnation of every previous version of the Maiden they are.  So Holly not only has Stephen's memories, but those of every previous person to become Princess Holy Aura, all of whom up to this point have apparently been actual teenage girls.  As Stephen adjusts to the radically different physical form of Holly, and the differences in treatment that come with it, he also finds himself feeling more and more "right", as if Holly is the "original" and Stephen the assumed persona.  This is true not only of acting like a high school girl but also true of her physical body.  Stephen's crisis of identity as he realizes he is becoming Holly to the point that his own male body becomes just plain disorienting to walk around in feels genuine and understandable.

The gradual shift from Stephen to Holly eventually leads to (sigh) an inevitable romantic subplot between Holly and another student, because the genre demands it.  But I actually like how uncomfortable this is for both Stephen and the reader.  At this point in the story, Stephen is in a truly alien and frightening situation.  Since Holly is not just a persona adopted by Stephen but has traces of the personalities and feelings of all people who have ever been Princess Holy Aura in the past, Stephen is more and more a passenger in Holly's body rather than the "driver".  Stephen is becoming subsumed into Holly, a brand new person born out of the combined experiences of many.  So of course Holly has feelings Stephen feels alarmed by and does things Stephen doesn't fully control, and the reader should be creeped out by contemplating what that would be like.

As the book goes on, however, its flaws also become more apparent.  Expository conversations (both between heroes and between villains) are an expected part of this genre, and given that there have been many iterations of the Apocalypse Maidens vs. Lovecraftian Aliens battle in the past to learn from there is at least an in-universe justification for them, but there are so. many. of. them.  Silvertail's advice in particular gets increasingly tiresome, sometimes feeling as if we're reading "Silvertail's Walkthrough Guide to Magical Girl-ing" instead of a novel, and he has far too many conveniently-helpful magical abilities despite his alleged weakness.  The premise also leaves itself vulnerable to an obvious in-universe problem, which it tries to address, but not convincingly.  For reasons to do with how magic works, the Apocalypse Maidens reveal themselves to their parents, and this includes them learning that Holly was previously Stephen.  As you might expect, this does not go over well.  Stephen is genuinely a nice guy, not a "Nice Guy", and attempts to get that message across, but the most convincing argument he can muster is basically "your daughters are safe around me because they could kill me easily if I tried to molest them even if I was in full Holy Aura mode", and worse, parents accepting the situation is explained mainly as a mixture of that reassurance and magic itself keeping the Maidens together.  There is, apparently, nothing Stephen can possibly say or do to reassure them he's not a sexual predator.  Maybe that's the point of those scenes?  It's unclear.

That takes us most of the way (and slightly out of order) through a broad overview of the plot, and I don't want to give any spoilers for the resolution (go read it yourself!).  Suffice it to say that it continues along a pretty much "first season of Sailor Moon" trajectory.  And of course, the whole book ends in a way that leaves it open to a second season-- er, I mean, sequel, but still definitely ends this particular story arc.  Exactly as you'd expect.  Exactly as it must, according to the memes controlling magic.

-----

[Classic] W/A/S Scores: 4(+extra) / 1 / 4

Weeb: This is very much a book by a geek for fellow geeks.  Although I previously said the Magical Girl genre does not have a high a barrier to entry in terms of general cultural knowledge, and although Princess Holy Aura also incorporates tropes and characters from, and makes references to, a great deal of American media, knowledge of both Japanese and American horror and fantasy tropes is really helpful to "get" what anyone is talking about.  Not only is it taken for granted that characters recognize the source material for what's going on, they also sometimes make leaps of logic that I have trouble following, and I don't know if that's a problem with the story or with my own background knowledge so that if I'd seen the right show(s) I would've caught on immediately.  Plenty of things are explicitly spelled out, especially in early conversations between Stephen and Silvertail, but familiarity with several magical girl shows or manga would probably be helpful if only to know more specifically what Stephen is talking about.  I'd rate this a 4 on the Weeb scale, but also at least a 4 on a scale of American Geek Media — knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft and recent internet lore, and to a lesser extent general knowledge of RPGs and major works of sci-fi and fantasy, are probably essential to not staring blankly going "what is this?"  Like certain interminable live-action shows I could name, it mashes together monsters from a variety of source materials with mixed results.

Ass: As if directly responding to common complaints about men writing women in inappropriately-sexualized and deeply-implausible ways, descriptions are actually descriptive rather than gratuitous, and Stephen-as-Holly really only talks about his/her own body in the context of getting used to it, and does so in less-sexualized terms than I've heard women I'm friends with use in moderately-polite company.  In fact, although Holly is understandably portrayed as having sexual feelings, Spoor rather aggressively avoids sexualizing her to the audience, which is an important distinction.

Shit: The whole "trust me, I'm not a pervert" interactions with the parents, some way-too-convenient things about the way magic works, and OH DEAR GOD THE EXPOSITION just end up making me go "is that really the best way you could think of to resolve that?".  Also, the Cthulhu mythos seems shoehorned and incongruous.  It's not great, but it is entertaining and coherent, unlike some things I've reviewed so far, so I'll give it a middling score.  I still recommend it if you're in the target audience of "gigantic fucking geek", which, face it, you probably are if you read my reviews.

-----

Stray observations:

- The action scenes are described well enough that I can pretty much imagine how they'd go shot-by-shot in an anime.  Or maybe I've just seen enough anime to know what common shots Spoor is talking about.

- SLENDER MAN IS NYARLATHOTEP.  (This is barely a spoiler.  It takes about one page for the characters to make the connection.)

- If "Silvertail's Walkthrough Guide to Magical Girl-ing" were a real book, I would totally read it.  It would go on my shelf right next to Hate You Forever: How to Channel Your Rage Into Effective Supervillainy, which is also not that good but quite entertaining if you're the right flavor of geek (which, again, you probably are if you read my reviews).

[firefield]

David Bowie - Glastonbury 2000

Focusing very specifically on the positive, opens oneself up to accusations of sycophancy, certainly on dedicated Bowie forums where deeply held opinions from an individual’s discerning ear are woven inextricably into any given personality. It’s something that feels unique to the art of music and sound; moreso than say painting or photography, and I think it speaks to the power of music’s ability to shape the very memories of our own lives and how we chose to live them.

This criticism of this particular show is fueled by DB’s insistence that it be truncated, the reason being a dissatisfaction with the vocal performance due to the singer recovering from an earlier laryngitis diagnosis. Other suggestions from people involved with that decision claim otherwise - that the quality of DB’s performance was never in doubt, and that it was a purely fiscal argument with the BBC having plans that differed significantly from the Bowie camp’s expectations.

Regardless, where others seem to hear a disaffectation from the material, or a boredom even, I hear humility. No doubt, DB’s connection to that place, and to the man he was in 1971 when he first took that stage, must be profound. I think that humility is immediately evident with not only the choice of opening such a huge show with Wild Is The Wind, but in the performance itself. It feels to me like he chose a song he himself did not write, a song that is the very castle-on-the-hill of the artistic expression of intimacy, and he makes an extremely public and passionate attempt to scale up that mountain, accepting the bumps and bruises and scrapes right there in the open. The heat of the spotlights juxtaposed with the visible exhalation of breath into the cold. One man, one huge crowd of fans and non-fans alike. A word on a wing.

Another criticism is the “let’s play the hits!” aspect which is obviously valid, and something DB himself wasn’t thrilled about, described by his writings in the 2020 Glastonbury CD/DVD/LP set liner notes. He recognized that many that purchase tickets for a festival like that, do so with no knowledge of who all the acts are and all their material, and he felt an obligation to do his best to try to be inclusive of all. So with a few exceptions (like the wonderful arrangement of Let’s Dance) these arrangements are what you’d expect from this particular band at this time, and the songs are recognizable and certainly sing-along-with-able.

I’m not going to track-by-track this 2 hour show extensively. I’m nauseatingly long-winded as it is, so I’ll just point out a few things that struck me about the show and the recording. Earl Slick and Mark Plati really sound great together. For as short a time as they had to put this together, it’s impressive how complimentary their dueling guitars are - especially when you consider that the lines between who plays rhythm and who plays lead are not clearly defined. They both handle those roles at different times and they sound great together.

Changes was a given here with its inclusion in the ‘71 set. Great guitar stuff happening here.

THAT rendition of Life On Mars after a laryngitis diagnosis? Come on now. Extraordinary.

Did you catch how DB casually mentions Absolute Beginners is his “favorite song of the 80’s?” and that he hopes some of them know it? Very cool inclusion. Some of the Kate Bushian background vocals are a bit weird here. They work technically, but I could do without them in the verses.

You can feel the band really settling in here on Ashes To Ashes. Gail’s bass arrangement is fantastic, and Sterling’s drumming is killer. I’ve always been perplexed as to what the steam-hissing sound is during the chorus. Still don’t know the what or why of that. Is Garson triggering a sample? It plays through the coda too.

I like this version of Rebel Rebel, and you can see DB totally feel the crowds reaction to it. Everybody is rocking out, Sterling is pounding the snare like a time-stretched jackhammer on resilient concrete, the backing vox are solid and Earl plays that riff like he’s landing his Cessna on an airstrip on his personal island villa.

Bowie breathless on Little Wonder after slaying Rebel Rebel. Hang in there Dave!

So yeah, I get the criticism of Golden Years. If you take DB at his word, that they hadn’t played it in forever and only worked a week - it shows. Firstly without very specific notes to the live sound guy about how to treat all these vocal trade-offs in the arrangements, it’s gonna be that dudes nightmare. Clearly some parts aren’t totally thought out… the harmonica sound is “there” but just…. there. Gail’s parts are poorly mixed. The sound guy is playing constant catch up. The guitars aren’t as complimentary as you’d want for a song whose groove is paramount.

And Fame wipes that all away in an instant. When I first saw Gail switch to a 5-string bass and drop into that groove… hot damn. DB sounds fantastic here. And Sterling’s stutter-step drumming is just badass. Solid as a rock. The band is having so much fun and you feel it from literally everyone on stage.

All The Young Dudes cranks up the ROCK feel of the show significantly at this point; a trajectory that apexes with a totally slamming version of Ziggy Stardust that I’ll get to later. Holly and Em’s backing vox here are great.

Slightly shaky start to TMWSTW but they pull it together fast. Plati’s acoustic is a nice addition to the shows timbre. Some nice interplay between Earl and Mike. Sterling Campbell again with some stellar drumming. I love that snare sound.

Mike Garson is strangely absent on Station To Station and there are balance problems with parts of the vocals, but overall serviceable. I tend to focus on Earl Slick’s growling guitar leaning into the left channel. He has such a snake-like delivery when he’s playing under the vocals. As I’ve mentioned, I love Sterling’s drumming, but I miss Dennis Davis on tracks like this. Cold grooves like this was in his blood.

“I feel love in this room. I do!”

Ahhh. I hear a lot of joy in this version of Starman. Mike’s rolling piano is beautiful. What a great song choice for this venue, and the crowd loved it.

“I’m hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, and I’m too vain to take it off.”

Wow. You can immediately tell that this band is more familiar with and has toured Hallo Spaceboy. Nice to see this toss to fans of his newer stuff. A potent slice of menace to balance out the childlike charm of Starman. DB’s voice showing some fatigue.

Under Pressure was a certainty for this show of course and Gail nails her difficult synchronous parts with grace as always. I think DB is aware his voice could go, and is making melodic, timbre and amplitude choices carefully to pace himself.

“…and goodnight…”

Well, I love this encore opener of Ziggy Stardust. Sterling sets the tempo smacking his sticks together and it’s a dirty, sloggy, whore in the alley tempo and Earl just feels it right up. Again, Sterling’s snare sound is a shotgun slug. Earl and Mark fully unified, and DB pushing his voice and laying it all out there. So great. For those of you that avoid this show as lackluster, decontextualize this track from the show itself and crank it up. It slams.

WhooBoy, yeah. DB is tired here. Heroes probably would have worked better as a show centerpiece, and with a fresher vocal, but I’m not in love with this pedestrian guitar arrangement. This song needs abandon. It needs desperation. This arrangement sounds a bit like they just want to get through it. Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s easy to find better live versions. Like straight from 1977, Bowie lets his vocal fatigue/strain work in the songs favor.

So the first time I ever heard this show was on a cassette a friend made for me, a boot of the whole show, and I just assumed as I was listening that Heroes would close the show. And then… uhhh… Spanish guitar from Earl? eBow-like guitar swells from Mark? What am I hearing here? Ahh. Let’s Dance. Sweet! Love this arrangement. They’d done it this way before, but back then, I think it was the first time I’d heard it. Man. DB’s voice is hanging on for dear life.

Again, assuming LD would close the show. And…. I’m Afraid Of Americans! Great rendition. Excellent keyboard touches all through this thing and gives DB a chance to growl through it without any intense melodic acrobatics.

Well, there you have it. Your mileage may vary as they say. Unavailable in its complete form officially until only recently, it’s a fun huge-festival type listen. Are there “better” shows? Certainly. But I enjoyed the hell out of this DVD/CD edition as well as the Bureau Supply edition on vinyl. Next up: Heathen.

EDIT: That slaphappy bass part on Ashes To Ashes is played by Mark Plati - Gail switches to rhythm guitar. That’s what I get for writing instead of WATCHING.

[this-shit-needs-documenting]

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

It’s not R.

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI  SEP 30, 2020

Updated at 1:17 p.m. ET on October 1, 2020

There’s something strange about this coronavirus pandemic. Even after months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open.

Why, for instance, was there such an enormous death toll in northern Italy, but not the rest of the country? Just three contiguous regions in northern Italy have 25,000 of the country’s nearly 36,000 total deaths; just one region, Lombardy, has about 17,000 deaths. Almost all of these were concentrated in the first few months of the outbreak. What happened in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April, when so many died so quickly that bodies were abandoned in the sidewalks and streets?* Why, in the spring of 2020, did so few cities account for a substantial portion of global deaths, while many others with similar density, weather, age distribution, and travel patterns were spared? What can we really learn from Sweden, hailed as a great success by some because of its low case counts and deaths as the rest of Europe experiences a second wave, and as a big failure by others because it did not lock down and suffered excessive death rates earlier in the pandemic? Why did widespread predictions of catastrophe in Japan not bear out? The baffling examples go on.

I’ve heard many explanations for these widely differing trajectories over the past nine months—weather, elderly populations, vitamin D, prior immunity, herd immunity—but none of them explains the timing or the scale of these drastic variations. But there is a potential, overlooked way of understanding this pandemic that would help answer these questions, reshuffle many of the current heated arguments, and, crucially, help us get the spread of COVID-19 under control.

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices.

The now-famed R0 (pronounced as “r-naught”) is an average measure of a pathogen’s contagiousness, or the mean number of susceptible people expected to become infected after being exposed to a person with the disease. If one ill person infects three others on average, the R0 is three. This parameter has been widely touted as a key factor in understanding how the pandemic operates. News media have produced multiple explainers and visualizations for it. Movies praised for their scientific accuracy on pandemics are lauded for having characters explain the “all-important” R0. Dashboards track its real-time evolution, often referred to as R or Rt, in response to our interventions. (If people are masking and isolating or immunity is rising, a disease can’t spread the same way anymore, hence the difference between R0 and R.)

Unfortunately, averages aren’t always useful for understanding the distribution of a phenomenon, especially if it has widely varying behavior. If Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, walks into a bar with 100 regular people in it, the average wealth in that bar suddenly exceeds $1 billion. If I also walk into that bar, not much will change. Clearly, the average is not that useful a number to understand the distribution of wealth in that bar, or how to change it. Sometimes, the mean is not the message. Meanwhile, if the bar has a person infected with COVID-19, and if it is also poorly ventilated and loud, causing people to speak loudly at close range, almost everyone in the room could potentially be infected—a pattern that’s been observed many times since the pandemic begin, and that is similarly not captured by R. That’s where the dispersion comes in.

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. Scientists looked globally at known early-introduction events, in which an infected person comes into a country, and found that in some places, such imported cases led to no deaths or known infections, while in others, they sparked sizable outbreaks. Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case. A recent review shows that this may even be true in congregate living spaces, such as nursing homes, and that multiple introductions may be necessary before an outbreak takes off. Meanwhile, in Daegu, South Korea, just one woman, dubbed Patient 31, generated more than 5,000 known cases in a megachurch cluster.

Unsurprisingly, SARS-CoV, the previous incarnation of SARS-CoV-2 that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, was also overdispersed in this way: The majority of infected people did not transmit it, but a few super-spreading events caused most of the outbreaks. MERS, another coronavirus cousin of SARS, also appears overdispersed, but luckily, it does not—yet—transmit well among humans.

This kind of behavior, alternating between being super infectious and fairly noninfectious, is exactly what k captures, and what focusing solely on R hides. Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor of epidemiology and complex systems at Northeastern, told me that this has been a huge challenge, especially for health authorities in Western societies, where the pandemic playbook was geared toward the flu—and not without reason, because pandemic flu is a genuine threat. However, influenza does not have the same level of clustering behavior.

We can think of disease patterns as leaning deterministic or stochastic: In the former, an outbreak’s distribution is more linear and predictable; in the latter, randomness plays a much larger role and predictions are hard, if not impossible, to make. In deterministic trajectories, we expect what happened yesterday to give us a good sense of what to expect tomorrow. Stochastic phenomena, however, don’t operate like that—the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs, and things can tip over quickly from one state to the other. As Scarpino told me, “Diseases like the flu are pretty nearly deterministic and R0 (while flawed) paints about the right picture (nearly impossible to stop until there’s a vaccine).” That’s not necessarily the case with super-spreading diseases.

Nature and society are replete with such imbalanced phenomena, some of which are said to work according to the Pareto principle, named after the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto’s insight is sometimes called the 80/20 principle—80 percent of outcomes of interest are caused by 20 percent of inputs—though the numbers don’t have to be that strict. Rather, the Pareto principle means that a small number of events or people are responsible for the majority of consequences. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in the service sector, for example, where a small group of problem customers can create almost all the extra work. In cases like those, booting just those customers from the business or giving them a hefty discount may solve the problem, but if the complaints are evenly distributed, different strategies will be necessary. Similarly, focusing on the R alone, or using a flu-pandemic playbook, won’t necessarily work well for an overdispersed pandemic.

Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of the National COVID-19 Cluster Taskforce at Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and a professor at Tohoku University who told me that Japan focused on the overdispersion impact from early on, likens his country’s approach to looking at a forest and trying to find the clusters, not the trees. Meanwhile, he believes, the Western world was getting distracted by the trees, and got lost among them. To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policy makers need to figure out why super-spreading happens, and they need to understand how it affects everything, including our contact-tracing methods and our testing regimes.

There may be many different reasons a pathogen super-spreads. Yellow fever spreads mainly via the mosquito Aedes aegypti, but until the insect’s role was discovered, its transmission pattern bedeviled many scientists. Tuberculosis was thought to be spread by close-range droplets until an ingenious set of experiments proved that it was airborne. Much is still unknown about the super-spreading of SARS-CoV-2. It might be that some people are super-emitters of the virus, in that they spread it a lot more than other people. Like other diseases, contact patterns surely play a part: A politician on the campaign trail or a student in a college dorm is very different in how many people they could potentially expose compared with, say, an elderly person living in a small household. However, looking at nine months of epidemiological data, we have important clues to some of the factors.

In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments where many people congregate over time—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks. For super-spreading events to occur, multiple things have to be happening at the same time, and the risk is not equal in every setting and activity, Muge Cevik, a clinical lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-author of a recent extensive review of transmission conditions for COVID-19, told me.

Cevik identifies “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, [a] highly infectious person, [and] crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor. Given that some people infect others before they show symptoms, or when they have very mild or even no symptoms, it’s not always possible to know if we are highly infectious ourselves. We don’t even know if there are more factors yet to be discovered that influence super-spreading. But we don’t need to know all the sufficient factors that go into a super-spreading event to avoid what seems to be a necessary condition most of the time: many people, especially in a poorly ventilated indoor setting, and especially not wearing masks. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, given the huge numbers associated with these clusters, targeting them would be very effective in getting our transmission numbers down.

Overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of overdispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.

Because of overdispersion, most people will have been infected by someone who also infected other people, because only a small percentage of people infect many at a time, whereas most infect zero or maybe one person. As Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of the book The Rules of Contagion, explained to me, if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own.

The reason for backward tracing’s importance is similar to what the sociologist Scott L. Feld called the friendship paradox: Your friends are, on average, going to have more friends than you. (Sorry!) It’s straightforward once you take the network-level view. Friendships are not distributed equally; some people have a lot of friends, and your friend circle is more likely to include those social butterflies, because how could it not? They friended you and others. And those social butterflies will drive up the average number of friends that your friends have compared with you, a regular person. (Of course, this will not hold for the social butterflies themselves, but overdispersion means that there are much fewer of them.) Similarly, the infectious person who is transmitting the disease is like the pandemic social butterfly: The average number of people they infect will be much higher than most of the population, who will transmit the disease much less frequently. Indeed, as Kucharski and his co-authors show mathematically, overdispersion means that “forward tracing alone can, on average, identify at most the mean number of secondary infections (i.e. R)”; in contrast, “backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of 2-3, as index cases are more likely to come from clusters than a case is to generate a cluster.”

Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.

Another significant consequence of overdispersion is that it highlights the importance of certain kinds of rapid, cheap tests. Consider the current dominant model of test and trace. In many places, health authorities try to trace and find forward contacts of an infected person: everyone they were in touch with since getting infected. They then try to test all of them with expensive, slow, but highly accurate PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests. But that’s not necessarily the best way when clusters are so important in spreading the disease.

PCR tests identify RNA segments of the coronavirus in samples from nasal swabs—like looking for its signature. Such diagnostic tests are measured on two different dimensions: Are they good at identifying people who are not infected (specificity), and are they good at identifying people who are infected (sensitivity)? PCR tests are highly accurate for both dimensions. However, PCR tests are also slow and expensive, and they require a long, uncomfortable swab up the nose at a medical facility. The slow processing times means that people don’t get timely information when they need it. Worse, PCR tests are so responsive that they can find tiny remnants of coronavirus signatures long after someone has stopped being contagious, which can cause unnecessary quarantines.

Meanwhile, researchers have shown that rapid tests that are very accurate for identifying people who do not have the disease, but not as good at identifying infected individuals, can help us contain this pandemic. As Dylan Morris, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, told me, cheap, low-sensitivity tests can help mitigate a pandemic even if it is not overdispersed, but they are particularly valuable for cluster identification during an overdispersed one. This is especially helpful because some of these tests can be administered via saliva and other less-invasive methods, and be distributed outside medical facilities.

In an overdispersed regime, identifying transmission events (someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying infected individuals. Consider an infected person and their 20 forward contacts—people they met since they got infected. Let’s say we test 10 of them with a cheap, rapid test and get our results back in an hour or two. This isn’t a great way to determine exactly who is sick out of that 10, because our test will miss some positives, but that’s fine for our purposes. If everyone is negative, we can act as if nobody is infected, because the test is pretty good at finding negatives. However, the moment we find a few transmissions, we know we may have a super-spreader event, and we can tell all 20 people to assume they are positive and to self-isolate—if there are one or two transmissions, there are likely more, exactly because of the clustering behavior. Depending on age and other factors, we can test those people individually using PCR tests, which can pinpoint who is infected, or ask them all to wait it out.

Scarpino told me that overdispersion also enhances the utility of other aggregate methods, such as wastewater testing, especially in congregate settings like dorms or nursing homes, allowing us to detect clusters without testing everyone. Wastewater testing also has low sensitivity; it may miss positives if too few people are infected, but that’s fine for population-screening purposes. If the wastewater testing is signaling that there are likely no infections, we do not need to test everyone to find every last potential case. However, the moment we see signs of a cluster, we can rapidly isolate everyone, again while awaiting further individualized testing via PCR tests, depending on the situation.

Unfortunately, until recently, many such cheap tests had been held up by regulatory agencies in the United States, partly because they were concerned with their relative lack of accuracy in identifying positive cases compared with PCR tests—a worry that missed their population-level usefulness for this particular overdispersed pathogen.

To return to the mysteries of this pandemic, what did happen early on to cause such drastically different trajectories in otherwise similar places? Why haven’t our usual analytic tools—case studies, multi-country comparisons—given us better answers? It’s not intellectually satisfying, but because of the overdispersion and its stochasticity, there may not be an explanation beyond that the worst-hit regions, at least initially, simply had a few unlucky early super-spreading events. It wasn’t just pure luck: Dense populations, older citizens, and congregate living, for example, made cities around the world more susceptible to outbreaks compared with rural, less dense places and those with younger populations, less mass transit, or healthier citizenry. But why Daegu in February and not Seoul, despite the two cities being in the same country, under the same government, people, weather, and more? As frustrating at it may be, sometimes, the answer is merely where Patient 31 and the megachurch she attended happened to be.

Overdispersion makes it harder for us to absorb lessons from the world, because it interferes with how we ordinarily think about cause and effect. For example, it means that events that result in spreading and non-spreading of the virus are asymmetric in their ability to inform us. Take the highly publicized case in Springfield, Missouri, in which two infected hairstylists, both of whom wore masks, continued to work with clients while symptomatic. It turns out that no apparent infections were found among the 139 exposed clients (67 were directly tested; the rest did not report getting sick). While there is a lot of evidence that masks are crucial in dampening transmission, that event alone wouldn’t tell us if masks work. In contrast, studying transmission, the rarer event, can be quite informative. Had those two hairstylists transmitted the virus to large numbers of people despite everyone wearing masks, it would be important evidence that, perhaps, masks aren’t useful in preventing super-spreading.

Comparisons, too, give us less information compared with phenomena for which input and output are more tightly coupled. When that’s the case, we can check for the presence of a factor (say, sunshine or Vitamin D) and see if it correlates with a consequence (infection rate). But that’s much harder when the consequence can vary widely depending on a few strokes of luck, the way that the wrong person was in the wrong place sometime in mid-February in South Korea. That’s one reason multi-country comparisons have struggled to identify dynamics that sufficiently explain the trajectories of different places.

Once we recognize super-spreading as a key lever, countries that look as if they were too relaxed in some aspects appear very different, and our usual polarized debates about the pandemic are scrambled, too. Take Sweden, an alleged example of the great success or the terrible failure of herd immunity without lockdowns, depending on whom you ask. In reality, although Sweden joins many other countries in failing to protect elderly populations in congregate-living facilities, its measures that target super-spreading have been stricter than many other European countries. Although it did not have a complete lockdown, as Kucharski pointed out to me, Sweden imposed a 50-person limit on indoor gatherings in March, and did not remove the cap even as many other European countries eased such restrictions after beating back the first wave. (Many are once again restricting gathering sizes after seeing a resurgence.) Plus, the country has a small household size and fewer multigenerational households compared with most of Europe, which further limits transmission and cluster possibilities. It kept schools fully open without distancing or masks, but only for children under 16, who are unlikely to be super-spreaders of this disease. Both transmission and illness risks go up with age, and Sweden went all online for higher-risk high-school and university students—the opposite of what we did in the United States. It also encouraged social-distancing, and closed down indoor places that failed to observe the rules. From an overdispersion and super-spreading point of view, Sweden would not necessarily be classified as among the most lax countries, but nor is it the most strict. It simply doesn’t deserve this oversize place in our debates assessing different strategies.

Although overdispersion makes some usual methods of studying causal connections harder, we can study failures to understand which conditions turn bad luck into catastrophes. We can also study sustained success, because bad luck will eventually hit everyone, and the response matters.

The most informative case studies may well be those who had terrible luck initially, like South Korea, and yet managed to bring about significant suppression. In contrast, Europe was widely praised for its opening early on, but that was premature; many countries there are now experiencing widespread rises in cases and look similar to the United States in some measures. In fact, Europe’s achieving a measure of success this summer and relaxing, including opening up indoor events with larger numbers, is instructive in another important aspect of managing an overdispersed pathogen: Compared with a steadier regime, success in a stochastic scenario can be more fragile than it looks.

Once a country has too many outbreaks, it’s almost as if the pandemic switches into “flu mode,” as Scarpino put it, meaning high, sustained levels of community spread even though a majority of infected people may not be transmitting onward. Scarpino explained that barring truly drastic measures, once in that widespread and elevated mode, COVID-19 can keep spreading because of the sheer number of chains already out there. Plus, the overwhelming numbers may eventually spark more clusters, further worsening the situation.

As Kucharski put it, a relatively quiet period can hide how quickly things can tip over into large outbreaks and how a few chained amplification events can rapidly turn a seemingly under-control situation into a disaster. We’re often told that if Rt, the real-time measure of the average spread, is above one, the pandemic is growing, and that below one, it’s dying out. That may be true for an epidemic that is not overdispersed, and while an Rt below one is certainly good, it’s misleading to take too much comfort from a low Rt when just a few events can reignite massive numbers. No country should forget South Korea’s Patient 31.

That said, overdispersion is also a cause for hope, as South Korea’s aggressive and successful response to that outbreak—with a massive testing, tracing, and isolating regime—shows. Since then, South Korea has also been practicing sustained vigilance, and has demonstrated the importance of backward tracing. When a series of clusters linked to nightclubs broke out in Seoul recently, health authorities aggressively traced and tested tens of thousands of people linked to the venues, regardless of their interactions with the index case, six feet apart or not—a sensible response, given that we know the pathogen is airborne.

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases has been Japan, a country with middling luck that got hit early on and followed what appeared to be an unconventional model, not deploying mass testing and never fully shutting down. By the end of March, influential economists were publishing reports with dire warnings, predicting overloads in the hospital system and huge spikes in deaths. The predicted catastrophe never came to be, however, and although the country faced some future waves, there was never a large spike in deaths despite its aging population, uninterrupted use of mass transportation, dense cities, and lack of a formal lockdown.

It’s not that Japan was better situated than the United States in the beginning. Similar to the U.S. and Europe, Oshitani told me, Japan did not initially have the PCR capacity to do widespread testing. Nor could it impose a full lockdown or strict stay-at-home orders; even if that had been desirable, it would not have been legally possible in Japan.

Oshitani told me that in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another. Oshitani said he believes that “the chain of transmission cannot be sustained without a chain of clusters or a megacluster.” Japan thus carried out a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters. Japan also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing—bringing together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission, as well as presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.

Oshitani contrasts the Japanese strategy, nailing almost every important feature of the pandemic early on, with the Western response, trying to eliminate the disease “one by one” when that’s not necessarily the main way it spreads. Indeed, Japan got its cases down, but kept up its vigilance: When the government started noticing an uptick in community cases, it initiated a state of emergency in April and tried hard to incentivize the kinds of businesses that could lead to super-spreading events, such as theaters, music venues, and sports stadiums, to close down temporarily. Now schools are back in session in person, and even stadiums are open—but without chanting.

It’s not always the restrictiveness of the rules, but whether they target the right dangers. As Morris put it, “Japan’s commitment to ‘cluster-busting’ allowed it to achieve impressive mitigation with judiciously chosen restrictions. Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”

Could we get back to a much more normal life by focusing on limiting the conditions for super-spreading events, aggressively engaging in cluster-busting, and deploying cheap, rapid mass tests—that is, once we get our case numbers down to low enough numbers to carry out such a strategy? (Many places with low community transmission could start immediately.) Once we look for and see the forest, it becomes easier to find our way out.

* This article originally stated that, in April, coronavirus deaths spiked in Quito, Ecuador. In fact, they spiked in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

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ZEYNEP TUFEKCI is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society.

[destiny-smasher]

Life is Strange: Before the Storm (Episode 1)

I’ve spent so much time discussing this prequel over the past few months, it’s a bit tricky to try and sum up things into something readable. As lengthy as this post is, there’s plenty of details I have to let go of. I’d like to lay out my biggest pros, cons, and a bit of commentary on how I feel about its very conception and potential intent, along with some casual predictions.

I was very critical of this project from the moment it was leaked, but I quickly grew to support Deck Nine, the studio developing the game, because it was easy to see how passionate and thoughtful they were being. Makes sense, right? The sort of dev team who would want to take on a Life is Strange story would probably be the sort to be mindful of just how delicate such an undertaking is. Square-Enix, however, gradually frustrated me more and more, and their choices and actions with this entire project kept me on my guard all summer. With the first episode released, I can confirm my feelings about both companies’ involvement haven’t changed -- I’m still very supportive of Deck Nine, and I’m still rather frustrated and confused with Square-Enix. This first episode helped prove to me to that the developer definitely does have their heart in the right place, and has the ability to realize the same kind of potential one might expect from a follow up to such a special game. I have my concerns, but to be honest, most of them have arisen from Square-Enix's questionable setup to this project and the premise of the game itself bothering me on a core level.

With most video game releases, the way a game is marketed or how it's conceived is rarely important to me. However, Life is Strange was a special indie game that doesn’t come along often. Before I discuss the actual game itself, I feel compelled to bring up the reveal and marketing of this project. We of course don't know the full story, but what we do know has unfortunately colored the whole project with a weird shade. Setting aside the interpersonal experiences I've run into with fellow fansm I will say that at the heart of my concerns is the unshakable feeling that DontNod did not want this game to get made. The feeling that DontNod, who created these characters and this world, wanted those characters to be left alone. That's just speculation at this time, but everything I've seen and heard seems to point in this direction, and while that's not the developer's problem, it is the publisher's. When an indie team creates such an earnest indie game with a strong emphasis on narrative and themes about regret and not being able to fix the past, goes on to say the story is done and they're going to leave it alone, it's pretty damn odd to me to proceed with producing a prequel about the past, ditching the protagonist of the original story, and focusing on two women who we know meet unfortunate fates. Oh, and the actual creators of the characters aren't involved. Oh, and neither are the actors. AND it's not gonna connect its story to the original game because it's “stand-alone” (why make a prequel, then?). AND it's going to cost more but have fewer episodes. AND the fourth episode is conveyed as a thinly veiled cash grab to get fans of the first game to ante up for the Deluxe Edition right away. When a pre-existing narrative has been around for years, and its creators have had ample time to consider how they might expand upon their own story and are ready to let it go, then I'm much more understanding of giving the reigns to someone new who might have that interest. It must've been barely a year since Life is Strange was finished, however, before Square set this prequel into motion. That's way too soon to hand those keys off to someone else entirely, especially if those who created the keys weren't happy about it. The fact that it has taken all summer for DontNod to even acknowledge the game's existence is suspicious, and at this point, even a positively spun statement would come across as legally obligatory pleasantries. I have confidence that both dev teams have mutual respect for one another, but the seeming lack of communication between them with regards to such a delicate story is unfortunate, and I just hope that whatever Deck Nine is doing, the core concept of it was approved by DontNod as a team – or that they at least end up happy with it. Now, let me take a step back from this and point out that Square has made steps to try and correct and reassure concerns folks have had, and that's good. But a lot of it has come across as damage control for fires that shouldn't have even started. All right. There's my frustration with Square-Enix out of the way. Let's move on to the actual episode that has been released. I went into this game feeling very wary, worried, and concerned. I walked away from it feeling...pretty OK, and even pleasantly surprised by parts of it. I will be discussing the game freely, so if you have not experienced the story and don't want to know about any details beforehand, you should stop reading this now and come back when you're ready.

Partway through this I stop referring to Deck Nine in the third person and begin addressing them directly, partly because I'm honestly writing this as a personal expression to them, specifically, because I really do think they have a lot of skills being put to work, and I want to provide useful criticism, support, and feedback, which they've personally expressed an interest in. So, Madeleine, Felice, and anyone else at Deck Nine who might be reading this, I just want to express that it really means a lot to see your team interacting with us fans so directly and openly. I can say that I feel like Deck Nine “gets it” when it comes to what made Life is Strange special, how it connected to people, and what kind of overall aesthetic and tone it has. It's a shame that the concept of the story itself places things in such a bizarre, trapped kind of position, though. I've had so many conversations about this game in the past few months, I'm not even really sure what I would like for it to do as a game or as a prequel. Most angles I've approached it with just end up leaving me feeling worried and dissatisfied. Some things are better left alone. I honestly still feel like this story was one of those things – but, to be fair, that story still hasn't been fully told yet. And this first episode has certainly illustrated that there is intent at work here. This doesn't feel like a cash grab or something purely being made for fanservice. And yet, I still can't see where it could go within the bounds that they've laid out and still coalesce with its source material in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful. I've been vocal in the past that for as much as I love Life is Strange, I found its climax to be unfulfilling, illogical, and self-defeating. If Before the Storm can manage to somehow lead things into the original game's story in a way that can make sense of things (ex. the titular 'Storm'), my feelings about the nature of the overarcing story itself could change drastically. From where I'm standing right now, though, this story still feels pointless and unnecessary. And I really hope that by the end, that changes. When it comes to Chloe, Rachel, and essentially everything relating to them, we don't really learn anything new in this episode. Nothing mind-blowing or revelatory is given to us. On the upside, it means that things basically line up with pre-existing canon, makes fine sense, and even reaffirms things that were implied in Life is Strange. On the downside, the narrative feels like it's spinning its tires here in terms of plot, shoving these two characters together in a way that feels rushed and forced while simultaneously not going anywhere with them. If you look at the actual plot of this episode, and compare it to Max's, the stakes are so much lower, the trajectory of the protagonists so much more unclear, and the character development itself much more shallow. This is not a knock on Deck Nine's abilities so much as the choice of content. Chloe Price was already in such a bad place at age 19. Go back three years and...she doesn't exactly have much room to grow, and even if she does, what's the point when we already know where she ends up? When we already know where Rachel ends up? (and if this all some alternate universe thing, given that AU's are already established as a canonical aspect of this lore, it's gonna be super tricky to make that concept not feel hamfisted if it's gonna be a big plot reveal later) There's clearly more compelling stuff going on with Rachel if only because we don't truly know Rachel, and I do like that this episode sets up some dramatic things for her, but I'm still left feeling like I don't really get a sense of what her arc is supposed to be here. When you're telling a story with only three episodes, it can go a long way to make clear – by showing, not telling – what is at stake for the characters, and what their goals are. I get that  this is a story about teenage drama, but even Max, who was such an uncertain character, had an opening act that established very clearly what her goals were, and what internal and external obstacles she was going to have to confront.  With this story, that clear sense of direction is missing. To be fair, that very well could be intentional, given the emphasis on mystery, trickery, and such. And part of the problem is that there's sort of a 'ceiling' for where this narrative can feasibly go, and thus how these characters could be developed. Again – the very premise itself is, in a lot of ways, holding the story back, and that's a shame. It's a shame because on a technical level, there is a lot of good stuff going on here. The overall aesthetic, the themes, the writing, it all does feel in-line with the source material. While the painterly vibes of the original game are replaced with a bit more flat of a visual design, seeing the character's faces actually emote in a noticeably more detailed way is a technical improvement over the original, and was actually something I was very excited to see. In a way the first game couldn't really achieve, there are even moments here that let the visual expressions alone tell story beats. The music is good, but I actually felt like a lot of the episode was too quiet on this front. While this does heighten the impact of the music later on, the actual story beats didn't quite match the intensity of the music for me. Even the montage at the end felt a little off, like it was trying to replicate the ending of the first episode of Life is Strange but rushed through things too quickly. The subtle addition of more detailed sound effects was great, though. Like the expressions on the faces, those additional sound details put another layer of depth to the setting. The camera angles in particular were another noticeably upgrade from the presentation of the original game. On the downside, some scenes felt very awkward – controlling Chloe through the world in general felt particularly clunkier and harder to do than moving Max around; certain moments that expect you to control the camera in order to pick options, like the clothing bit, were also weird and unclear at first, in a way that didn't occur in the first game, maybe because they usually kept the camera behind Max's back? On the upside, there were a lot of cinematic choices I really liked that fleshed out the presentation, from Chloe grabbing her phone in the bathroom to the neat stuff during the 'Smash' scene in the junkyard to the angles during the tabletop game...just a lot of more dynamic and intriguing camera angles. I honestly wish there were even more “reflection” moments, like Max would often have. The moment with Chloe smoking was a great parallel between the characters while capturing that same reflective vibe. The writing isn't exactly going to turn heads, and there's still a fair amount of corny dialogue (mostly when characters are trying too hard to be 'edgy' or 'sassy'), but the original game had this, too, and usually, it just ends up feeling like that same kind of honest cheesiness you might expect. Some moments, however, the writing gets distractably bad – mainly, the Backtalk sequences, and a couple of clunky dialogue sequences like Chloe's chat with Joyce (which can feel unbalanced and off). The Backtalk is a fine idea on paper, but in practice it's just...taking something away, rather than adding to things. The timer puts unneeded pressure on the player, and lends these segments to be more about random guessing or shallow word play than any kind of legitimate, thoughtful intimidation. I do like the idea of Chloe being an asshole to intimidate people, but it, erh, does kind of feel odd to be encouraged to be an unnecessary dickhead to people who usually don't really deserve it because they're just trying to do their jobs. This is Chloe's character, though, and she is the opposite of Max, especially at this point in their lives, so I get the intent. But the dialogue here is at its weakest, its mechanically unclear and ultimately feels kind of pointless. My recommendation for making it more engaging would be to make it more like what it feels inspired by: the sword fighting in Monkey Island. Let the player use info they've previously obtained to give them more options during an 'encounter' without making it obvious when those options are useful (like finding those bits of things to bring up to Joyce at the house). Give them time to consider their choices, and in turn make the actual dialogue that ensues feel less like hamfisted schoolyard playground disses and more like actual intimidation. I think there's some potential to this mechanic but it needs work. Hopefully, by episode 3, we'll be in for some legitimately intense Backtalk sequences in circumstances that actually warrant threats and intimidation. Noteworthy moment – the wine-theft scene was...just...yeesh. Given the tone of most of this episode, that scene in particular just felt weird, like we were transported from an indie teen drama and into a Nickelodeon cartoon. I've seen the argument made that this scene was intentionally goofy in order to lower the player's guard so the junkyard scene hit us with more 'oomph,' but...yea, I'd recommend tackling the humor in the more organic way you were able to with most of this episode, like the D&D scene. Speaking of which – wow, what a pleasant surprise that was! That scene in particular, I think, really showed what you guys are capable of. Even the Backtalk mechanic's finickiness was less noticeable here because of the less serious context. Getting to meet new characters who were adorable and realisticwas such a treat – much more interesting and engaging to me than the somewhat predictable interaction with Victoria, which felt kind of tacked on for fanservice. The D&D scene felt organic, original, and charming. I especially loved the detail where if Chloe has read Joyce's self-help book earlier, she whips out the phrase she read if the player chooses to encourage Mikey. This was my favorite scene in the episode, and it had nothing to do with Chloe Price being present, or even being tied to Life is Strange in any way. I admit in my own interpretation of the characters for All Wounds, I've written Chloe making D&D references due to a history of playing it with Max – so there's some personal bias that helps elevate this scene for me, but still, I think this was a great scene. Likewise, the 'two truths and a lie' scene was also a game played via dialogue choices, and it, too, felt organic and fresh, using the players' element of choice to more readily establish a connection to the world and what its characters were doing (as opposed to just grilling someone for information or to just move the plot along). In terms of the overall tone and emotion of this episode, the dream sequences were an intriguing callback to Max's Nightmare. There were many interesting details there which made it feel genuinely connected to future events in this forboding way, so I hope there's something intentional there. On that note, I found the imagery of Max hanging to death on a tree branch to be...a bit too much. This is coming from someone who relishes that darker kind of imagery, but usually that's when the character being attacked is actually present within the narrative. The frequency and intensity of Max-bashing going on in this episode made me uncomfortable and that 'hangman' imagery even felt kind of disrespectful to Max's character. I'm not going to do what  others have done and jump to conclusions about 'ohhh they're portraying Max as an asshole' or what-not. In truth, I felt what you've expressed with those letters was so intense and angry that it has an intent. After all, the original game had a strength in showing one side of a character to set up a broad expectation, only to subvert it later to remind us that real life human beings are three-dimensional. The implication I pick up from all of this Max-hating is that it's there to show us just how special Max was to Chloe, just how painful it is for her to face their disconnection, and thus just how meaningful it is for Chloe, three years later, when Max finally reappears (which, I mean, simultaneously has me questioning exactly what your plan is with Rachel, given the layers of context here). I really hope the story you're telling will somehow end up somewhere that subverts all of this Max-hating toward what the original game ultimately does with Max and Chloe. From where I'm standing right now, just one episode in, it feels over the top and unnecessary, but again, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that there's a purpose there. The fact that Max is even dressed how she is three years in the future, and the fact that her text states she's see Chloe when she dies – which is, literally, how things play out – combined with the overt 'All Seeing Eye,' and how Chloe's dream even foretold how Rachel would start the fire, all of this feels thought out and intentional, rather than mere coincidence. I certainly hope that's the case, as a story precursing one about time travel could certainly incorporate supernatural foresight in interesting ways. This brings me into the aspect of the supernatural. I was a little offput by how interviews and PR stuff tried to tell us there'd be no supernatural elements at play when it seems apparent that there will be. When a story lies to its audience, that's fine, but when the physical, real-life people are lying about it, that's dodgy. I'm honestly more intrigued by the supernatural stuff here than I ever thought I'd be, and I think it's because between the foresight element of the dreams, the spirit animal implications, and the unnatural wind projected onto Rachel's fire, it tickles my imagination with the possibility of “Oh shit, could this story actually end up implying an explanation behind Life is Strange's biggest plot hole?” The title, 'Before the Storm,' the name of the Platinum trophy, 'Bring on the Storm,' and the premise of the fourth episode focusing on Max and Chloe all further adds to this gut feeling for me that you might actually be trying to fill in some blanks with the origin of the tornado. Because, frankly, the tornado in Max's story is my saltiest issue with everything in those five episodes, so the idea of some kind of explanation tying it together with Rachel and Chloe's past is actually very intriguing to me.

Here's the thing, though: no matter what your team has planned, no matter what big plot twist you might have in store, someone out here in the fandom has already predicted it, and for others it might not even feel too surprising by the time we get there. Either way, surprise and shock value are an exciting but fleeting emotion. I genuinely hope that whatever climax this story is leading up to, you focus more on the execution and establishing a rational resolution rather than just trying to grab “the feels.” I can already tell from this first episode that you've thought ahead with this stuff. From way back when your game was unfortunately leaked, a single question on a marker board has kept me intrigued by what this story will hopefully explore: “Is Rachel good?” I think that question has already been implicitly brought up in this episode, and while the technical plot hasn't moved much of anywhere yet, the prospect of this question, the different themes it could entail, and how it could ultimately flesh out Chloe's background and this world, are all things that have me more interested than I expected. While I think the core relationship of this prequel has been pushed too quickly and illogically, it's true that teens can make decisions irrationally and have sudden bursts of intense emotion – Rachel's angry fits were an example of this I didn't actually expect from her, but now feel almost like I should have, and I also feel a sense of intent with that. Part of me feels like I should talk more about Rachel and Chloe's relationship here, but honestly, I'm just having a hard time feeling invested. I don't think it's because anything is “wrong,” I mean...it makes enough sense for them, given all we learned about them in the original game. I guess it's just that knowing how things turn out – and Rachel's evident role in that – is disconcerting to just how quickly Chloe is diving into this, and how too eagerly Rachel is to pull her in. It makes me feel just as wary about Rachel as would've expected to, and maybe that's the point. Of special note are the very interesting parallels you've drawn between characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest and Rachel, Chloe, and Nathan. Very fascinating implications, I adore the intertextuality here, and the literal 'storm' imagery makes it such a great fit to be drawing from. I'm expecting to see some kind of meaningful payoff here, as well. You might notice that a lot of what I'm saying at this point is basically me seeing seeds you've planted, and expecting those to germinate and grow by the end here. Three episodes is a very short storytelling space, though. I'm worried about just how fulfilling these threads can be resolved, and I admit that how this story ultimately concludes will probably play a huge part in how I ultimately feel about it. But, at the very least, I hope this helps you get a grasp on what kinds of thoughts your story has put into the head of someone who is very invested in this world. I'll confess that I'm maybe not as hyped to see more as I was with the original game. And so much of this prequel makes me feel...just, weird, in a bad way. But, I will just as readily confess that most of what I am worried about or am taking issue with doesn't really have to do with your efforts as a creative team, but rather, the very nature of what this story is in relation to the source material, and the creators of these characters not really being present. I think that for a first software release for a new dev team, this is some great stuff, and to be blunt, I am actually more excited for whatever your team will be working on a year from now – hopefully something entirely your own? – than for this prequel. I'm certainly curious to see what Before the Storm does, and how you continue to build off of this start, but I just want your team to know that I'm already more excited to see what you come up with down the road when you've established yourselves and don't have these unnecessary weights to be contending with. I think this episode's strongest moments don't actually rely on its connections to Life is Strange at all, they just happen to inhabit Arcadia Bay – which you have been able to recapture well, at the same time. There are some discrepancies, a couple questionable details that don't seem to line up, and the incessant Max-bashing feels super weird, but as someone else who's written fan-made content with this world, I can understand the delicate nature of trying to set up dominoes someone else made and trying to line them up in a way where they’ll topple in an elegant fashion. With everyone shouting in your ears that can’t make it easier, but I see such attention to detail in your work that I have much more faith than I did a month ago that as long as the story culminates into something meaningful and satisfying, I think a lot of those 'weird' things some fans are feeling right now will be easier to let go of. And even if things go south with this project, I think you’ve already established the potential your team has. Good luck with the next three episodes. I went into this feeling so much anxiety, fear, and doubt, and while not all of that has been resolved, I'm at least relieved that the team working on this seems to be capable, passionate, and up to the task.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Erica Review - Grab The Popcorn

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/erica-review-grab-the-popcorn/

Erica Review - Grab The Popcorn

Erica never lets you feel at ease for long. In one scene, a character teaches Erica how to play a song on the piano–you’re encouraged to memorize the cute little melody and try to perform the correct timing. But just when you start playing along, somebody suddenly starts coughing up blood everywhere, it’s messy and gross, everyone starts screaming, and the vibe is killed. In Erica you have to treasure those sweet breaks before they’re swiftly swiped from your hands and replaced with a solid helping of worry, stress, and a side of confusion.

A fully filmed playable thriller in which the titular character is on a mission to help solve a murder case that she has strange family ties to, Erica utilizes some subtle yet effective film-inspired techniques–like match on action and screen wipes triggered by touchpad interactions–to tell its enigmatic tale. To progress each scene, you choose dialogue options and make various adventure game-like actions. The game bounces back and forth in time between Erica’s childhood with her father to the mess that is modern-day life, in which she has to move to a strange hospital her late parents helped create for her own safety.

Erica, played by real-life actor Holly Earl, is a relatable, if malleable, protagonist. Earl regularly looks like she’s bewildered or uncomfortable, exactly how you feel as a viewer in most of the situations. She seems thoughtful and patient, but other than that there isn’t too much of a set personality for her. You decide through your in-game choices if she’s more passive or aggressive or unhelpful during the case, and because of the high stakes murder circumstances, switching her attitude and approach never feels abrupt nor out of character. Even if you spend most of the game being rude, you can be friendly to someone and it doesn’t feel weird. Your reactions, and in turn Erica’s, are likely to change frequently during a playthrough every time new information pops up, objectives change, and new, incredibly peculiar characters enter the picture.

Somehow, every new character you meet is more suspicious than the last. Everyone talks to you like they just poisoned the food you’re eating. There’s a sequence in the courtyard where you can choose a girl to hang out with and get to know better, and right after you pick a possible pal to spend the afternoon with, the head of the hospital says, “Just remember that some of the girls here… Uh… They can be quite manipulative,” and just walks away. The guy is nowhere to be found after that, and you’re left sitting there wondering why would he say that–and before you know it, you’re overthinking every interaction because you don’t know which person he was insinuating was going to manipulate you. All of the secrets, ulterior motives, and Erica’s own faulty memory cause for some very intriguing “Trust nobody, not even yourself” gameplay.

Perpetual disorientation is the central feeling of Erica, and it’s what keeps you searching for the truth no matter how many crooked obstacles stand in your way. The plot is ever-changing and chaotic; you’re attempting to solve a crime by talking to a plethora of weirdos in an unfamiliar, creepy place while having stifling flashbacks of your messed-up childhood. There’s so many forces clashing and intense situations going on that you find yourself yearning to make sense of even the smallest mystery just to feel grounded. There was a time where Erica was being gaslit by a character and I ended up shaking my fist and yelling “She’s not crazy, you’re just lying!” at my TV–but even though that character annoyed me I kept listening to them in case they accidentally dropped a small hint to steer me in the right direction, and they did. Erica is a striking example of a whodunit that’s heightened by its enthralling characters, shady occult science, and recollections of previous trauma.

From the overall murder case to smaller questions like what kind of hospital you’re staying at, there are a number of mysteries weaving together concurrently throughout Erica. It’s easy to miss context that’s vital to understanding the full picture. You might get an answer to a question that’s been burning in your mind for the last half hour, but that answer could be a truth that presents new pathways to choose from or a lie that leads you astray. That mystery management is exciting and makes every experience with the game its own curious, isolated thriller molded by whatever answers and stories you care about at the time.

You can use either a DualShock 4 controller or a companion phone app to play Erica; the latter is smooth and seamless for the most part, while the former is bogged down by a clunky implementation of touchpad controls and is the far less preferable option. As you move through the narrative, you alternate between selecting which areas to explore, choosing dialogue options like “contempt” or “desperation,” and performing no-stakes everyday actions like cleaning the fog from a mirror or turning on the sink. Potential actions are shown as silhouettes on-screen, and there’s also a mock trajectory of where to swipe your hand on your phone if you’re using the app. The inputs are all done by small, comfortable hand swipes, not extending to the full horizontal or vertical reach of the screen.

Most actions are intuitive, and you feel like you know where to swipe and what you can do before the game even tells you. There’s a moment where you and a detective walk up to an empty reception desk that has a bell sitting on it, for example. I lit up when I saw it and I started tapping on the screen a bunch–Erica didn’t hesitate to mimic my actions in her world and ding away, so much so that the detective swatted her hand off of it because he got annoyed. The straightforward motions make navigating trouble-free, and being able to quickly deduce what moves you can make adds a connection to the moment-to-moment gameplay. It keeps your focus on the important things, like figuring out what the heck is going on in the story.

Choices and quick-time events happen every 30 seconds or so, which may sound overwhelming, but it isn’t so in practice. Most of the time, they aren’t high pressure actions; they’re a chain of a few choices, and those chunks are separated by longer cutscenes every so often. They do eventually get mundane and feel unnecessary, especially if you choose to use the DualShock 4, though. The game is controlled entirely with touch, and while the swipes are supposed to be a convenience for your hands, it’s difficult to perform them on the small DualShock touchpad without your fingers slipping off or hitting the joysticks. There were also a few occasions where the companion app was slightly unresponsive, which is something that can have game-changing consequences if it happens at a critical moment. It takes a second to get back into the game’s rhythm after there’s a blip in the controls. They’re small things, but those shortcomings pull you out of what is otherwise a really engrossing experience.

In general, the filmic elements are integrated so carefully that it’s a genuine and mostly calculated mix of two mediums. Erica is in the middle of game and movie, and a lot of small mechanics add up to show that. For example, the character Erica is an artist, and there’s a scene fairly early on where you can flip through the pages of her artbook. Looking through a character’s personal items is a common feature in interactive adventure games, but the detail that went into shooting the natural angles of each flip makes it an even more intimate way of gaining insight into who the character is. Outside of the footage itself, all of the trophy pop-ups are paused until you complete the game, which goes a long way to keep you from getting distracted. It’s a small, fitting touch for a game that values story so much.

Perpetual disorientation is the central feeling of Erica, and it’s what keeps you searching for the truth no matter how many crooked obstacles stand in your way.

There are also some sneaking situations that are made better by the film aspect. There are always conversations happening behind closed doors, and because you have so many questions that you need answered, sometimes you have to be a weirdo and eavesdrop on people. If you peek out for too long or open the door too fast, they’ll see you, stop their conversation, and share an awkward glance with you. Because it’s footage of actual peoples’ facial expressions, it makes you cringe a little more–and that is one of the most high-tension fail states I can imagine.

The whole time, the game marinates you in a constant anxious energy that fuels a curiosity for the dodgy, mysterious world that you’re influencing. Some scenes you’re just holding a book or a photo and staring at it for details, but since it’s paired with an insidious sting it transforms what would be a normal occasion into bitter dread. There are flashbacks, dreams, and abnormal things happening frequently; oftentimes you’re forced to decide on the one secret you want to uncover the most and drop the others. Should you pick up the phone that’s been ringing in the lobby or check out that weird ghost thing in the hallway? There are some decisions that are straight-up difficult–high-stakes ones where, in the bottom of your heart, you don’t know what the right thing to do is, but you know you have to do something. Those times will have you wishing that this game was just a movie, but Erica is more than that.

Erica has a strong, fleshed-out narrative full of twists and turns that each bring their own unique piece to the story. Its cryptic tone is carried through the audio, visuals, and writing; it never lets you relax. Sometimes weird controls jolt you out, but there is an abundance of enticing threads to follow, and it’s a treat to be able to mold your own adventure out of it. Using a combination of crisp cinematography and FMV-specific game mechanics, Erica never fails to hook you into its haunting, mysterious world.

Source : Gamesport

[mrdanielblack]

The agent and the Robot

The panel discussion at Inman Connect that featured Sarah Bell was about how AI is changing real estate for consumers. It centered on whether robots will replace real estate agents. Sarah has the view that the real estate agent will remain central and very important in the transaction.  She explains today as she talks to Sherrie Storor.

Topic – Will agents become redundant?

Mentor – Sarah Bell

Transcript:

Sherrie:   This time in the show we’re talking to Sarah Bell, and Sarah Bell is the co-founder and the chief operating officer, and CMO of Air. She’s most well known for a beautiful product called RITA, so Sarah thank you so much for joining us today.

Sarah:   Thanks for having me.

Sherrie:   You have just been on the stage at Inman and been invited to speak, which is a massive, massive coup. So congratulations.

Sarah:   Thank you.

Sherrie:   But tell us a little bit about what you shared on stage today? There were some massive takeaways that I know the audience loved.

Sarah:   So the panel was about how AI is changing real estate for consumers. It kind of begged this debate about whether robots will replace real estate agents, especially when we’re talking about the customer interface. I kind of have the view that the real estate agent will remain central and very important in the transaction. I think one of the points that we talked about yesterday was this thinking that a job has to be done by either a robot or a human. It’s kind of flawed thinking about this technology, because as human beings we already work in teams. We work in teams with creative people, with people who are great at financial intelligence, or business intelligence. Machine intelligence I think will become just an essential member of the team. It’s not always a question of whether or not it’s a robot or an agent, I think that a much better question is how can we connect human beings to computers so that collectively they can be more intelligent together.

Sherrie:   Yeah, well I must admit I heard something yesterday saying that personalization is AI plus human, which I thought was really cool, which is I know exactly what you’re all about. I think on that point most people really know you as RITA’s mum, right? But you actually had a background before you became RITA’s mum. So tell us a little bit about your journey and what your background is?

Sarah:   Yeah, so I had a strange kind of trajectory in and out of real estate. My first job at uni was doing quantitative statistics and research for my professors at uni. So some of the stuff that RITA does I actually used to do with a pencil and a bit of very, very basic software. But the worlds moved on and so did I. After uni I was recruited into the Commonwealth Ombudsman as I worked as an investigator for a while. Then I met this tall bloke who happened to be in real estate, and pretty quickly after we met we made a decision to purchase his family real estate agency, and I spent the next sort of decade in the business. Made a point of learning every job, and went on to study business and really kind of take apart real estate and use those analytical skills to find ways to put it back together in a machine that would work better.

Sherrie:   Well I think this is really important actually, because the fact that you actually have been so heavily involved in real estate is what actually really gives you the power behind it, and why I think RITA is so special. Tell us a little bit about RITA and what she’s really all about. Her personality, and what makes her think and tick?

Sarah:   Yeah sure, well RITA, it’s an acronym, and I’ll clear that up right now. RITA stands for real estate intelligent transaction assistant.

Sherrie:   RITA’s way more fun.

Sarah:   RITA’s faster. She’s not designed to replace the agent, she’s not designed to kind of be disruptive, she’s designed to be supportive technology. I think that we’re at a place in real estate where agents really demand that of technology. So what RITA does is the identity problem that we’ve found is that real estate agents have all of this data that they don’t know what to do with. You take data that’s sitting in the CRM and it’s kind of all of this latent opportunity, the CRM is really a warehouse of opportunity.

Sherrie:   Well it’s all collection and no engagement.

Sarah:   That’s right, and you know a lot of the analysis that we’ve done, a lot of the research that we’ve done shows that agents just aren’t making that human to human engagement. So what RITA’s really famous for is taking all of that latent opportunity and then mashing it against some other data, so data from the marketplace and giving those contacts and those relationships some context, and some purpose. Then suggesting to agents who would be the best people to contact each and every day in order to convert data into opportunity.

Sherrie:   So does it work? Like you must have some great case studies.

Sarah:   Yeah we do, and we’ve been really grateful and lucky that clients that came onboard early have allowed us to really partner with them and refine what we’re doing. Part of RITA being born and growing up has been her learning, and we do that through feedback. So RITA’s essentially getting smarter and better all the time, but some of the algorithm or some of the math has outputs that put conversion from data to appraisal, anywhere from 20 to 35%.

Sherrie:   Yeah, well I think what’s really interesting is that most agents have been hearing about AI for a little while now, and to I think most of the industry it’s super scary, because it’s just like this amazing thing which is gonna kind of take over and they don’t really know how to implement it. So can you kind of just run us through like I guess how RITA comes in as AI and how it essentially helps the business, how it’s kind of different to a lot of other bots?

Sarah:   Yeah sure, well there’s kind of two ways of looking at AI. So you can look at it like a tool, and I think when you have things like chat bots that you use, or you react with, or you ask questions of and they return answers it feels like software that you use. Then there’s also this other camp, which RITA kind of sits in, where she’s not so much a tool but a colleague. So unlike a chat bot where your kind of gonna dial in and ask for answers, RITA’s more of a proactive suggestion engine. So we’ve created her and engineered her to feel like the dream assistant.

Sherrie:   The dream assistant.

Sarah:   The dream assistant, and it’s funny-

Sherrie:   There is such a thing?

Sarah:   There is such a thing, it comes in technology form because you don’t have to manage her, there’s no burden to actually having that staff. There’s no emotional overhead, there’s no … Certainly the cost overhead is much lower, and she’s infinitely scalable. If you get really busy you don’t need two RITA’s, she can just expand and amplify what she does. But in terms of how you work with RITA, you don’t have to train her. Out of the box she analyses the CRM and understands, she reads every single note in the CRM, so understands the context of every single relationship in your business-

Sherrie:   That’s pretty sexy notion really isn’t it?

Sarah:   Right, so straight out of the box you’re gonna have this fully cognized and fully trained employee that you don’t really have to spend any time getting up to speed. Then the next thing that’s really cool about that, the way I explain this to people is, remember back in the day, and I don’t want to give away my age too much, but back in the day-

Sherrie:   You’re super young babe.

Sarah:   … when the CRM was a list of cards in a Rolodex. That system in its simplicity kind of worked because you just pulled out the first 20 cards, made 20 phone calls, put them at the back. As that cycled through you’d sort of talk to everyone, but then what happened with software is that we took that visibility away, and we had to then manually search, and create call lists, and do that data search-

Sherrie:   We had more.

Sarah:   Yeah, and we had much more, so we did that data search and planning ourselves. But I try and explain RITA in her most simple way is this magical assistant that comes in every night, reads every single card in the Rolodex, looks through everything that’s happened in your marketplace and picks the best people for you to call. Then leaves them for you to call in exactly the best order. So she might suggest 20 opportunities for you to connect with, and if you’ve only got four, if you call the first four they’re going to be the best four. If you’ve only got time to call four. So the whole things prioritised-

Sherrie:   So that’s great, yeah.

Sarah:   … and optimised, and understanding that agents have this resourcing challenge where they need to meet fluctuating demand in the marketplace. It’s very difficult for a human being when you’re the supply, when you’re the product. So she’s really capable of adapting and understanding how agents work, and she’s supportive, she’s not demanding. She doesn’t kind of punish agents for being human.

Sherrie:   I guess that’s where the heart to heart connection sort of comes in, the fact that you still pick up the phone but you’re actually just really making sure that you’ve got this super hyper kind of time efficient, kind of what would you say? Ability to be able to contact the best leads.

Sarah:   Absolutely, and I think it’s also about identifying a purpose for a phone call. So if you take like a traditional trail, if you like through the CMA, there’s no natural anthropological conversation that happens on day 18. Right? And again on day 24, that’s awkward to call someone and say, well its day 18 and my computer says I should call you-

Sherrie:   Call you, yeah it’s very artificial.

Sarah:   Yeah, so RITA’s also as well as suggesting who you should call with, she’s suggesting reasons that you might connect with them. So an example of that is she might notice that 15 Smith Streets come on the market, and if as an agent you know the property owners of number 8 and number 12. She’s gonna suggest that you get in contact with your property owners to let them know about the new event that’s happening in their street, it’s a brand messaging about being a market expert. It’s a very current position for a real estate agent to take. The context of the conversation that you have with property owners should change, and should be hyper relevant based on what’s happening in their direct location. So she’s really trying to support the agent to be that local expert without them having to constantly monitor, and constantly do all that mental labour to be in that position and defend it.

Sherrie:   Yeah, well I absolutely love that you explained that, ’cause I think for a lot of people its kind of, we all know that AI is absolutely spectacular, and it’s all gonna change our lives, but we don’t know how. So thank you so much for going through that. Look we don’t have a lot of time but I just wanted to run through some quick rapid fire questions. So tell me Sarah, structure or chaos?

Sarah:   You got to have both. If you’ve got too much structure things are rigid and you can’t innovate. But if you have too much chaos no one knows what’s happening and there’s no normal.

Sherrie:   Your favourite time wasting app?

Sarah:   I would say Facebook, but I would debate whether or not that’s time facing.

Sherrie:   pple or Windows?

Sarah:   Apple.

Sherrie:   Apple, love it. Tech gadget that totally changed your world?

Sarah:   The iPhone, we’re heading in a direction where the smart phones gonna have more computing power than the human race, it’s not gonna change.

Sherrie:   What was the tech gadget that did it?

Sarah:   i Watch.

Sherrie:   i Watch, yeah okay it’s very cool. .

Sherrie:   Well look Sarah thank you so much for joining us today, congratulations, we loved listening to you on stage, it was really wonderful to see an Aussie. To you, we really appreciate you being part of our show today.

from Real Estate Uncut https://ift.tt/2T0wazD

[realizempathy]

the cost of withholding gratitude

One of the most clear patterns I see when coaching CEOs is this.

They all had one or more people who have significantly and positively changed the trajectory of their lives.

When I hear them talk about these people, I see their eyes light up with admiration and exuberance. It’s clear to me how much of an impact these people have had on their lives.

What’s interesting is that alongside these expressions of admiration and exuberance, I sometimes hear their expressions of shame or regret as well.

For example, one CEO told me that his mentor went through a major bankruptcy and has since become impossible to locate. He regrets that he never had the chance to fully pay him back for the help he has received. Another CEO told me that he is making steady progress toward paying his mentor back. At the same time, he feels ashamed to admit that he’s yet to achieve enough success to do so.

These are painfully familiar feelings for me.

In college, I studied under a professor named Dr. Randy Pasuch. You may have heard of his famous talk titled “The Last Lecture.”

Dr. Pausch was a computer science professor and a virtual reality researcher. He once gave an inspiring and uplifting talk titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” The talk was remarkable not only for its positive message, but also for being delivered while he was suffering from pancreatic cancer with 3 to 6 months left to live. The talk went on to become a viral sensation on Youtube.

In college, Dr. Pausch significantly and positively changed the trajectory of my life by giving me a reason to study computer science. Some may find it strange to think that one needs a reason to study. But to be completely honest, without a clear reason, or a sense of purpose, retaining interest in computer science was a struggle. All that kept me going was a sense of pride and duty. The school I was attending was best known for its computer science program and I had promised my parents I would be studying computer science.

That was, until I took Dr. Pausch’s class.

What I learned from Dr. Pausch’s was that I didn’t have to be interested in computers to learn computer science. According to him, all I had to be interested in was connecting with other people through shared experiences. Experiences that may include such feelings as joy, sorrow, surprise, or even fear. For him, the computer was nothing more than a means to that end. It was a medium to facilitate the realization of our empathy.

And that resonated with me. Profoundly.

And just like that, I had finally found a reason to study computer science.

…

But then I lost touch with Dr. Pausch.

For 8 years.

As a matter of fact, a month before “The Last Lecture,” I sent him the following e-mail:

I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Slim from your BVW class from way back in 1999. I worked on the Van Gogh project. I’ve been working at MAYA design for the past eight years!

I now serve as the assistant director of engineering here, and we’re looking to hire some hardcore thinkers who are also genius makers.

I thought ETC would be full of such people! Are you the right person to talk to if I want to figure out how to lure that talent over? Are there protocols for doing such a thing? (i.e., hold an informal info session at ETC)

Any advice would be awesome.

Thanks!

Slim

To which he responded:

Slim, Good to hear from you, and *of course* I remember you — things like the Van Gogh world leave long memories!

I’m sure the ETC would love to have MAYA come and recruit — and there are definitely venues for that. Unfortunately, I’m no longer involved in the day-to-day of the ETC, so I’ve CC’d Drew Davidson, who can help you out with things.

Best wishes,

Randy

I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I had no idea he was ill. In fact, the subtext of my e-mail was me showing off to him that I had made significant advancements in my career since graduation.

Why was I showing off to Dr. Pausch? Because I wanted him to be proud of me.

I’ve come to learn that this is one of those silly things we do to those whom we love and admire.

Instead of just telling them that we love them or that they mean a great deal to us, we try to gain their recognition by bragging to them about something that is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things like status, fame, or fortune. And because we get so blinded by our desires to be recognized by the other person, we fail to tell them what it is that we really mean to tell them, which is that we are grateful.

A couple weeks after “The Last Lecture,” I found out that he was terminally ill.

Guess how I found out?

By watching “The Last Lecture” on Youtube.

On Youtube.

A talk held just a few miles from where I worked.

How could have I been so poor at keeping in touch with someone I considered my hero? I tried blaming it on my shyness. I tried blaming it on my busy life. I tried all sorts of excuses before giving up, and quickly writing him a long e-mail pouring my heart out.

But upon hitting the “send” button, I realized that his inbox was probably overflowing with e-mails in response to “The Last Lecture.” It was unlikely that he would ever read my e-mail. He may never know how he changed my life.

Staring into the computer screen, I couldn’t help but ask “Why?” Why couldn’t I have told him sooner? How stupid does one have to be, to wait so long to say something so simple?

If your life was significantly and positively changed by someone, the question need not start with “How can I pay them back?” The question can start with something much simpler. “How can I communicate my gratitude?” You do not have to wait until you achieve “success” to do this. Let them know what it is they did or said that you appreciated. Let them know how that made you feel. Let them know why this was significant to you.

Thank you Randy. I cannot say enough how much I appreciated your honesty. When I heard you say that your interest in computer lies not in the computer itself, but in its ability to facilitate empathy among people, I felt a profound sense of resonance. You made me realize that I’m not the only person who feels that way. You gave me the permission to be who I am. To realize that it is ok to feel the way I felt. Once I felt comfortable being who I am, it completely reframed my relationship to my subject matter of study. To this day, my interest in computer science is strong. All because it helps me facilitate empathy among people.

Do it for them. You have no idea how much this could mean to them.

Do it for yourself. There is no reason to set yourself up to feel regret or to bask in shame.

Do it now.

May your days be filled with gratitude.

[jimivaey]

Rest In Peace, My Dear Friend Onukaba- Dele Momodu

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Fellow Nigerians, as for me and my house, no news could be bigger and sadder than the gory death of my dear friend and brother, Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo. This has been a week of major events but none touched me as mightily as that of Onukaba, one of Nigeria’s finest journalists. Where and how do I begin to tell you about Onukaba?

I first encountered him on the pages of one of Nigeria’s greatest newspapers of all time, The Guardian. His name then was Shuaibu Ojo but he later changed to Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo. At the time, I read everything he wrote except those that escaped my attention. I was his devotee, to put it mildly. He was a pen god and many like me worshipped his writing prowess. He wrote with so much authority and maturity that made me assume he was an old man until I met him. There were many distinguished writers and reporters at The Guardian – Stanley Macebuh, Patrick Dele-Cole, Chinweizu, Olatunji Dare, Odia Ofeimun, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Sonala Olumhense, Greg Obong-Oshotse, Edwin Madunagu, Tunji Lardner Jnr, Seyi Olu Awofeso, Andy Akporugo, Amma Ogan, Tunde Thompson, Nduka Irabor, Eluem Emeka Izeze, Ben Tomoloju, Mitchell Obi, and others – but Onukaba stood out in his own right as a reporter and writer. The Guardian was home for literary giants and Onukaba was clearly one of them even though he was relatively younger than most. Any self-respecting writer therefore wanted to appear on The Guardian’s effervescent pages. I was one of such dreamers but didn’t know how to go about it.

Onukaba was God-sent. Our paths crossed by pure chance. I was managing Motel Royal Limited, a holiday resort in Ile-Ife owned by The Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse II. Onukaba loved culture and came on several occasions to do stories on the Ife palace and its festivals. Olojo was the biggest cultural event in the traditional calendar of a town reputed to be the cradle of civilisation and famous for its 401 deities. Onukaba was lodged as a guest of His Majesty at the hotel during one of such festivals at the time when I was managing the hotel. I recognised his famous name as soon as his registration was forwarded to my office. I sent word out that I would love to meet him as soon as he arrived.

Ours was a case of love at first sight. I found Onukaba to be my age mate. This was the first surprise. I was shocked to see that he was smaller if not shorter than his gangling pen. He must have wondered why I stared endlessly at him. He wouldn’t know or even imagine how much I respected his brains. As a budding writer, I craved his talents. We got talking and we realised we shared common interests, especially our love for the African Writers’ series. It was fashionable in those days to impress people with authors and books you’d read, not like these days when your bank statement is the easiest way to show off. Onukaba was stunned about my robust knowledge of African culture. I regaled him with tales of Ife idols. He was fascinated by my Bachelor’s degree in Yoruba from the then University of Ife as well as my plan to be the first graduate of Yoruba Studies ever to attempt a Master’s degree in Literature-in-English.

Onukaba encouraged me to write a piece on the popular Olojo Festival for the African Guardian magazine which was edited by Nduka Irabor. I co-authored the essay with Kwesi Sampson and Onukaba was our courier to Lagos. A few weeks later, the article was published by the magazine. It was the biggest thing to happen to me personally and I was on top of the world. I bought copies and showed to anyone who cared to listen to me. Being published in any of The Guardian titles was a big deal to everyone at the time, and I was no exception. Onukaba encouraged me to write more. Through him and the inspiration of Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, I started contributing as regularly as possible to the op-ed page. Dr Ogunbiyi was a lecturer from the Dramatic Arts Department at the University of Ife but later served his sabbatical at The Guardian and rose to become a Director at Rutam House, Lagos. Like Dr Ogunbiyi, Onukaba would later serve as Managing Director of the Nation’s foremost newspaper of those days, the Daily Times. I was paid N25 per article and always waited to publish four essays before travelling from Ife where I was now a post-graduate student to Lagos to receive the princely sum of N100. Trust me, it was a lot of money to an indigent student like me and it came in handy on several occasions. The Naira had great value in those days.

I remember my first article in The Guardian titled, ‘The Politics of Language’. It was a defence of Ngugi wa Thiong’o when he decided to stop writing in English language and chose his Kikuyu language and Odia Ofeimun was miffed about the decision. Of course, Ofeimun fired back thunderously at me to attack what he called my jejune thesis. This was how I got initiated into that exalted company of writers in Lagos. I kept writing for The Guardian and was also appearing in the Sunday Tribune at the introduction of my best friend Adedamola Aderemi, the Prince of Ile-Ife because of his conjugal ties to the Awolowo family. The Sunday Tribune had a fantastic Editor in Mr Folu Olamiti who did everything to encourage me. Onukaba followed my trajectory with keen interest. He rhapsodised about how beautifully I wrote.

Despite being able to establish myself as a writer, my real love was teaching. My ambition was to be a teacher, marry a teacher and live happily ever thereafter. But man proposes and God disposes. I searched and scratched everywhere for a teaching job but there was none anywhere. In frustration, I became exasperated. All my friends had jobs except me. And I was dying in silence, almost going off my rockers. I met Onukaba in Lagos and he said he could introduce me to a few Editors but could not really promise anything. He asked if I was ready to migrate to Lagos and my response was an instant yes.

Onukaba invited me to his office at Rutam House one afternoon and he took me round the powerful offices. He suggested that it might be easier to get a job from the African Guardian and he physically walked me to the office of Nduka Irabor, the Editor. My heart palpitated as we walked in. Onukaba was a confident speaker and his voice boomed as he introduced me to the big man. I was in awe of Nduka who had become larger than life since his sojourn in Buhari’s prison alongside his co-conspirator, Mr Tunde Thompson. Both men had been detained and jailed under a draconian decree in those dark days of dictatorship in Nigeria.

Onukaba left me to discuss with Nduka, my would-be boss, but the deal fell through and my destiny led me elsewhere. My test was to write a report on night life in Lagos, a topic I felt was too difficult for a JJC (Johnny Just Come) village boy just coming from Ile-Ife, and I simply absconded. I returned to Onukaba and told him I could not oblige with Nduka’s test and offered to go back to Ife. But Onukaba, in his usual indomitable spirit, said I couldn’t go yet, that we must try one more Editor. He personally led me to The African Concord magazine, owned by Chief Moshood Abiola. He told me he was friends with the Editor, Lewis Obi, and he was sure Lewis must have encountered my writings somehow because I had gained some recognition and popularity.

In all honesty, The Concord Press was not my idea of an ideal media organisation. My heart and soul had been substantially poisoned against its proprietor and Chairman, Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola. The barrage of attacks against Abiola by his opponents was enough to stultify anybody’s enthusiasm in the man and his business. Onukaba taught me to keep an open mind and this would become very useful throughout my entire career. He believed a good journalist should give everyone his right to fair hearing. Onukaba’s level of maturity was uncommon. At any rate, I needed a job so badly. And according to an old adage “a one-legged man cannot say the man carrying him stinks…”

I followed Onukaba to The African Concord office near the Murtala Muhammed International Airport. Unknown to me that’s where my Destiny waited patiently. We did not meet Lewis Obi but met his deputy, Bayo Onanuga and his right-hand man, Babafemi Ojudu. They told us Lewis was out but I could wait for him. To my greatest surprise, when Lewis came in, he invited me into his office. I told him Onukaba brought me to see him. He was obviously fond of that great name and he gave me a listening ear. I did not mince words. A man cannot hide his body from the undertaker who would bury him, my dear mum had told me repeatedly. I told Lewis I needed a job, pronto.

Lewis looked up and scanned my face as if searching for a specific expression. I tried to keep a straight poker face. When he finally responded, I couldn’t believe my luck. “How much salary would you like to earn…”, he asked, almost rhetorically. I didn’t know what to say. How can you ask a poor needy boy such a question? Besides, I didn’t know what salaries journalists commanded and for me simply to join the ranks of the employed was the most important thing! I remained tongue-tied and speechless! Lagos, with its unusual ways, was as strange as London to me. To cut a long story short, Lewis employed me on the spot and I remained eternally grateful to Onukaba.

Onukaba would later travel to the US for studies and jobs. He earned himself a handsome PhD and we started calling him Doctor. We were proud of our friend. He later worked at the United Nations and I visited him and Sonala Olumhense once in New York. When Ovation International was berthing in the city of London in 1996, I invited both of them as Contributing Editors and they graciously accepted to support the ambitious project without hesitation. They generously made impeccable and intellectual contributions to the journal. It is impossible to repay their kindness fully but their names are indelibly etched in our common history.

Onukaba returned home to Nigeria and we met every now and then, particularly when I myself returned from self-exile. He was a great disciple of General Olusegun Obasanjo and was an authority on the life history of one of Africa’s living legends. Onukaba left everything to launch a global campaign for the release of Obasanjo when he was incarcerated by General Sani Abacha. Onukaba was forever loyal and dependable. He joined Obasanjo’s government naturally and was posted to the office of the Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, where he formed another permanent bond as usual. He authored authoritative biographies of both these Nigerian leaders, amongst other books that he wrote or co-authored. I could go on and on and on about Onukaba and his many parts but space would not permit me. In summary, he was a journalist, playwright, dramatist, author, envoy, administrator, politician and lecturer. Above all he was an admirable friend and great family man. Everything he undertook, he did with great passion, consummate ease, excellently, gracefully and effectively.

Onukaba died under very bizarre circumstances last Saturday as he returned from the celebration of Obasanjo’s 80thbirthday. It would have been unfathomable for Onukaba not to have attended any of the ceremonies lined up for a living legend he admired so much. His deep loyalty to people and causes would not have allowed such escape. Onukaba played the role that was expected of him but died on his way home.

This bitch of a life!

May his soul Rest in Peace…

Dele Momodu

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