#its so big i never even got to experience all the new nifty stuff

[davidmann95]

How'd you like the new Death Metal special (and, more broadly, this week's comics)?

pretenderoftheeast said: Comics this week (12/9/2020)?

Batman: Black and White #1: The first of a platter of anthologies today:

* The Tynion/Moore story is predictably fire.

* JHIII is JHIII. Also he does a really nice surprising story about how Batman’s relating to this moment of the time, but let’s be real, you’re here because JHIII, and be assured he is JHIII as helllll here and it’s great.

* Dini/Kubert plays as the former building a story around accommodating requests by the latter, but that’s not a bad thing, and glad to see Kubert’s kept up the pace since his DK3/Up In The Sky creative rejuvenation.

* Ok I’m a philistine who has no idea what that Emma Rios thing was about but it was certainly pretty.

* Wilson doing Batman is surprisingly disappointing, but Smallwood doing Batman definitely isn’t.

DC’s Very Merry Multiverse: Not a very merry time! I hate to say it given this should be so geared to my interests, but this is the weakest overall effort we’ve gotten from one of DC’s quarterly anthologies in a good long while, at least among those I’ve picked up. Not to say it’s a dud, there are several nifty little stories in here including the much-hyped first appearance of Kid Quick (destined to become the Flash of Future State) and really almost everything here reaches ‘pretty okay’. But for $10, and a creative space that should reach so much more than ‘pretty okay’, I don’t know that this is a justifiable recommendation unless you’re understandably desperate for all the President Superman content you can get your hands on.

Tales of the Dark Multiverse: Flashpoint: I’m surprised I got it too, but the preview grabbed me and in practice it was a fun, mean little high-concept adventure of Reverse Flash being a total cock.

Wonder Woman #768: Credit where it is due, this has been getting a bit better in its closing stretch.

Dark Nights: Death Metal: The Last Stories of the DC Universe: This ruled. Obviously there was the one story folks are most interested in, but almost all of the tales in here lived up to being a ‘final’ story of sorts for their leads.

* The Titans bookenders were pretty nice even if it’s hilarious that their big rallying cry basically amounts to “by god, our book may be shit, but we’re valuable IP so we’ll never be cancelled!”

* Green Lantern is basically an epilogue to Johns’ run sans the baggage of bringing back Johns (that we get in two weeks with Secret Origin and god forgive me I’m so looking forward to that), and definitely one of my favorite efforts from Lemire.

* Wonder Woman’s the stinker in what’s nominally her own event. I can parse the roots of most bad Superman stories one way or another, but I just can’t understand what’s behind most bad Wonder Woman stories beyond that the people handling it simply don’t give a shit.

* Astonishingly, the Green Arrow and Black Canary chapter in here might be my favorite of the bunch? Simone at her best, a really sweet slice of playful, sincere romance about two characters I’m not by default invested in but ended up quite caring for here.

* This Aquaman story is everything I generally hate in Aquaman stuff, a big long maudlin speech about the weight of the world as he swims through a black featureless ocean, except here between the real heart Sebela brings to the script and the mood artist Christopher Mooneyham manages to evoke, it all clicks together.

* The Batman Family story feels like it can’t quite make its pacing work, but it’s still a heartfelt little ode to the theoretical power of the concept.

* Hey, that Mark Waid guy? Turns out he can write him some Superman. It’s not perhaps the total barnburner you might have expected - I imagine he’s saving his biggest hits for later - but it’s a very solid execution of a gangbusters concept, and Manapul steals the show with absolutely sensational, gorgeous scenic Superman imagery. I’mma say 60/40 in favor of them doing a Superman project together on either a main book or Black Label (I know Manapul was supposed to be locked into a creator-owned thing with Scott Snyder but that was ages ago), because this is a paring that’s yielded some immediate results and I imagine everyone knows it. And given my upbringing, nice to see a big, iconic, beautiful Superman story with him rocking the mullet.

Anonymous said: Haha holy shit Crossover is literally Cates taking that page where Spawn meets all the corporate heroes locked up and spinning it out into a series

Anonymous said: Does Crossover #2 hold the crown for the funniest, dumbest, most baffling opening page ever?

Crossover #2: Readers I’m not too big to admit I laughed my ass off at the first page, and at least a little bit for the actual reasons intended. The sense of homaging that Spawn scene in the context of a book about “Gosh, isn’t IP the best folks?”, or Cates’ dialogue...(shall we say) proving why he likes the concept of ellipses enough to name a character after them aside though? That it’s already crossed the line with its central metaphor from “indefensibly insensitive in its ridiculous self-centeredness” to “out-and-out cartoonishly offensive” somehow actually makes it more rather than less palatable; there’s no longer the secondhand embarrassment of waiting to see how bad Cates is going to handle this, it simply is the worst it could possibly be and readers have to accept and perhaps revel in the sight of him stepping on rake after rake. I cannot wait for him to finally give an interview on this book where he explains what the hell he thinks this looks like, and I hope my dad keeps somehow enjoying it forever because I totally wanna see what pit this descends to next.

Penultiman #3: This is absolutely agonizing and probably the most relatable take on a ‘superman’ ever.

Home Sick Pilots #1: A new creator-owned book from Dan Watters (whose big two credits include the stupendous “Afraid of America” with John Paul Leon in the last Batman Secret Files, and the upcoming Future State: Superman/Wonder Woman) and Peter Cannon’s Caspar Wijngaard, this new book set against the backdrop of a Californian high school’s punk scene in 1994 describes itself as “Power Rangers meets The Shining (yes, really)”. The former influence isn’t much in play yet, but thus far this is a book that merges building tension and freewheeling dopey teen bullshit to an extent that’s subtly impressive as hell, and seems likely to proudly take a place among the current horror comic renaissance.

Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar #3: Ok again I don’t have any experience with this franchise but you’d better believe that cultural osmosis was enough that I popped for BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!

King in Black: Namor #1: Kurt Busiek’s return to Marvel...sucks? Such is the power of Knull I guess even if he doesn’t manifest within the actual story here, this is a complete nothing of a comic and I’m not tuning in for issue #2.

Avengers #39: Eh, I’m not liking Aaron Avengers when it gets remotely serious nearly as much as when he’s doing stuff like having them finally help Blade with all those vampires or Captain America assisting with the delivery of an exploding space-baby in the back of a muscle car.

Anonymous said: That new Guardians of the Galaxy was something else. What do you think the odds are that Comic Books, with a decade or two of hindsight, recognizes Ewing as one of the best to ever do it?

Guardians of the Galaxy #9: I lack much context here beyond recalling from an interview that this is Ewing’s way of grappling with the ideas from Steve Englehart’s original unrealized vision of Star-Lord’s character arc, but wherever it stems from this is a hell of a comic.

S.W.O.R.D. #1: This is everything I’ve wanted from the non-Hickman X-books since the moment HoXPoX ended, and so much more, and also it is basically hilarious that Ewing is all but explicitly using his clout to force Marvel to let him to Ultimates3 under a currently cancellation-proof banner. Most importantly of all, Ewing has already mastered the subtle art of writing not merely Magneto, but the infinitely superior Jonathan Hickman Magneto. And good lord Schiti and Gracia, I already knew they were top-tier but these pages’d make a grown man cry.

[daggerzine]

The Simon Provencher interview (by Tom Murphy)

Simon Provencher is perhaps best known for his frenetic and creative guitar work for the post-punk band VICTIME out of Québec. But on March 26, 2021 the musician released his debut EP Mesures via Michel Records. It is six tracks of free jazz collages that bear favorable comparison to the avant-garde compositions of Anthony Braxton as Provencher makes creative and playful use of clarinet, electric guitar, percussion and processing to convey a strong sense of mood and place while making one very aware of aspects of the environment around us we often tune out. In pairing aspects of exploratory jazz and musique concrète, Provencher has given us an album that is both soothing and keeps us grounded in the present. The composer and musician recently answered some questions we presented to him via email about the nature of his music, its inspirations and methods of crafting its elegantly evocative passages.

 Dagger Zine (Tom Murphy): Mesures will probably hit some people's ears as akin to a free jazz or spontaneous composition type of record. How did you approach putting together these songs and experimenting with sound compared with maybe how you do with VICTIME?

Simon Provencher: People wouldn’t be wrong in these assumptions at all. Mesures is a record that was written very quickly. I decided to trust my first instincts for much of the record. With VICTIME, our approach has always been more iterative. By that I mean that we’ll loop “embryonic” parts over and over again, slowly changing elements, morphing the composition until we found ourselves happy with how everything sounded together. I’m still very much into this way of writing, but Mesures was a much more immediate affair.

For me, inspiration almost always comes from timbre, usually through loads of guitar pedals. In this case though, I wanted to see what sounds and textures I could get out of the electric guitar without using any external effects or even amplification. Timbre was still my main concern, but in a more subtle way I guess. I slightly detuned the strings and experimented with resonances, chord shapes, finger placement, fingernails, etc. I also “prepared” the guitar: I jammed objects between the strings and tied sewing thread to the strings (if you pinch the thread with slightly wet fingers and slide them around, you get eerie, reverse-like effects).

Enough about me though, another big change was that this record was made remotely with two new collaborators, Elyze Venne-Deshaies (clarinet) and Olivier Fairfield (percussion). Both of them had “carte blanche” (pardon my french) to do whatever they wanted. I can’t speak much to their personal approach to improvisation, but both of them are seasoned veterans and delivered absolutely amazing performances.

 D: Some people might think of any kind of music declared experimental is a barrier to its acceptance but your album seems to me very accessible as a form of pure expression. Do you have a sense of why your songs seem so open and, as one reviewer put it, welcoming?

 S: I don’t quite know actually. I do agree that the songs have a certain softness to them that was certainly somewhat intentional. When I did the initial guitar parts, I did set out to make something conventionally “beautiful”, or at least “not harsh”. I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe what happened there, but the resonances, repetitions and patterns definitely implied a soft mood from the get go.

I guess this foundation inspired Elyze and Olivier to also play with softer tones, to approach the music with warmth and subtlety in mind. They really “got” the vibe of the music without me ever telling them anything about my intentions. A “shift” of some kind happened when the clarinet parts were added to the drums and guitars. I felt like the mood of the pieces almost completely changed (in a positive way, of course). I think there’s something to the linearity of Elyze and Olivier’s playing, in contrast with the repetitive, hypnotic guitars that gives the music a sense of wandering aimlessness which I really love.

On the audio engineering side, I did intentionally mix the songs with a certain softness in mind. We added some warm tape saturation to some of the sounds and carved out a lot of higher frequencies. On the songs with feedback and noise, Simon Labelle, who mastered the record, made it so that when the clarinets get louder, the high-frequency content ducks out of the way a little bit. This nifty little trick does help out a lot with making the noisy songs more warm and inviting too.

 D: Listening through the album I found it resonated with the albums of Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman. The former of which never considered his music part of jazz though he is often associated with that form of music and the latter who expanded the range, dynamics and tonal choices of jazz. Were you inspired by in any way by those forms of abstract yet emotionally expressive music? How might you describe its impact on what you've done?

S: I totally was! I discovered Anthony Braxton through Québec jazz guitar great René Lussier. I’ve been a fan of Le Trésor de la Langue for a while and I got into his back catalog last year: his collaborations with Fred Frith, EAI stuff and more, some of which was released on “Les Disques Victo”. “Victo” stands for Victoriaville, a small city between Quebec and Montreal, where there’s a great contemporary music festival named FIMAV. Shamefully, I haven’t actually been to FIMAV yet, but I’ve loved finding recordings of some amazing concerts, a favourite being Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey’s 1987 Moment Précieux. I was amazed to find out about this rich local history of musical experimentation and improvisation. This record was very much inspired by the whole FIMAV sound.

Coleman is another great point of reference. His records and those of his collaborators, Don Cherry being another big one, all are major inspirations. As a guitar player, I especially got into James “Blood” Ulmer’s career. I really admire his approach to guitar and the immediacy and expressiveness of his music.

 I’m probably paraphrasing it all wrong, but Don Cherry said of Ornette Coleman’s “harmolodic” approach that instead of improvising from chords, like in bebop, you’d start with melodies and improvise to create new forms, harmonies, rhythms to try and reach a certain “brilliance” as he calls it. You’d try to make the music transcend. In harmolodic theory, melody, rhythm and harmony are treated as equals, no solos, no lead and accompaniment dichotomy, no strict timing, scale or tonality.

This is both quite simple but also quite hard to actually grasp in a musical setting, and I’m far from mastering any of it, nor is it necessarily something I strive for, but it is an inspiring way to conceive improvised music for sure.

 D: The first half of the album you make great use of what sounds like atonal melodies yet they perfectly convey the mood and lend a sense of texture. What informed employing those sounds in the songwriting?

S: I’ve always written music without much regard for tonality, key, etc. My musical background is still very much anchored in No Wave and noise music, where skronky chords and weird, unstable melodies are the norm rather than the exception. When playing, I really don’t think much about it, I follow what sounds good to me in the moment.

Looking back on the recorded music though, I feel like there is a lot of nuance to be found in atonality and imperfection. Detuned chords ringing out have such complex and interesting decaying resonances, you can almost hear the frequencies battling each other. These interactions between notes and lines that fall just short of resolving are part of the magic and intrigue of abstract music. In the case of Mesures, I think there’s something special with how some of the atonal, out of tune textures and weird synths clash beautifully with the in-tune clarinet parts, making either one “pop out” depending on where you focus your attention.

 D: The second half or at least the second three songs on the album use processed drones and what some might call noise underneath or in the background, although very much a presence in the mix, of the clarinets? What do you feel this almost contrast in sounds conveyed that say a more conventional arrangement might not?

The second half of the record is basically a rearrangement of the first three songs. There’s four clarinet parts in there! On the first side, they fade in and out of focus, but on side B, everything is there all at once.

This is basically the result of me simply “soloing” the clarinet takes in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, the software used to arrange and mix the music). When I heard the four clarinets at once, I really fell in love with the sound.

 So I knew I wanted this to be the focal point of the rearrangement, and I knew I wanted to add something. I just happened to be working with feedback that week, so it kind of fell in place. Feedback manipulation was a technical interest first, I had gotten a new guitar pedal called a Feedback Looper, which sends some of your output signal back into the input of a series of pedals. This creates self-oscillating and rich, detailed noises that are somewhat interactive and malleable. By turning some knobs and flicking some switches on ordinary guitar pedals, you end up with an infinite amount of possible glitches and shrieking high frequency tones.

I don’t know if my ears got accustomed to it or what, but I’ve come to really enjoy the sound of this process. I also really love the tactile aspect of it, it feels kind of like an unpredictable modular synthesizer. When I had recorded the feedback improvisation, which I did in one single take, I thought this sparse, harsh rearrangement was a nice contrast with the more warm, conventional first three songs. At that point, the record felt complete.

 D: The final three songs also remind me of Philip Glass in his soundtrack work wherein he mixes the playful and flowing with the dissonant. How would you say these sounds complement each other in your own music?

S: Especially on this release, while there are a lot of sounds that are contrasting with each other, I also feel like there is a sense of shared directionality. The song Et quart is a good example of this. The high feedback notes start out in almost complete opposition to the meandering low clarinet lines, but, as the song progresses, the sounds somehow seem to merge with each other and they end up flowing in the same direction for the song’s climax.

 D: What are some other artists operating now that you find interesting and/or inspirational and resonant with what you're doing?

There’s way too many to name them all, but I’ll try! I think there’s a very interesting local-ish scene around me. I admire the work of N NAO, either her solo releases or her collaborations with Joni Void. Sarah Pagé does mind-bending music with harp and effects; I’ve had the pleasure of catching her live in Ottawa just before the pandemic started last year. Kara-Lys Coverdale is also a major inspiration, so is Kee Avil, whose live show and guitar playing blew me away.

I also need to shout out my friend (and bandmate) Mathieu A. Seulement, whose end-year list allowed me to catch up on a lot of fantastic new music, including, but not limited to Ana Roxane’s Because of a Flower, Jasmine Guffond’s Microphone Permission, Caterina Barbieri’s Ecstatic Computation and, last but not least, Holly Herndon’s magnificent Proto.

  **the three Simon photos were taken by Charlotte Savoie

www.simonprovencher.bandcamp.com 

[pixelgrotto]

Remixing a tomb plus a highway to hell

Last month I finished DMing Tomb of Annihilation for one of my D&D groups. It’s a campaign that sees heroes adventuring to the land of Chult to stop big bad lich Acererak, who’s made a device known as the Soulmonger that’s emanating a Death Curse and screwing up the world’s resurrection magic. It’s also a spiritual successor to Tomb of Horrors, one of the classic deathtrap dungeons of tabletop RPG history that came about because D&D creator Gary Gygax wanted to screw his players over for opening doors wrong. In short, it’s certainly one of the more memorable adventures for D&D 5e, but the version of Tomb of Annihilation that I ran for my players was actually extremely remixed and hacked apart, as is the case with every official Wizards of the Coast module that I run. 

There were a few reasons for this - my players were coming into this campaign fresh out of Curse of Strahd, and everyone was level 8. One of the players had died early on in Curse of Strahd - in the very first session we played, hilariously enough - and was temporarily sustained by the mists of the Shadowfell only to collapse upon returning to the material plane. With this in mind, I felt that it would be a great twist to have the party venture on a quest of resurrection only to learn that resurrection magic throughout the world had stopped working due to Acererak’s nefarious plans.

Additionally, I wanted to give my players the chance to try out alternate characters if they so desired. In the name of grand ambition, I decided to have my players create two sets of characters, and wove a homebrew story, dubbed “Fiends in Waterdeep,” that would run analogous to and eventually intertwine with Tomb of Annihilation. The first set of characters - consisting of some of the veterans who had survived Curse of Strahd - would investigate the streets of Waterdeep, which was suffering from an invasion of devils and demons that seemed unconnected to Acererark’s dark doings. The second set, consisting of new level 8s, would venture to Chult, the vaguely African-inspired landmass in the south of the Forgotten Realms, to track down the source of the Death Curse. After progressing through seemingly unconnected storylines, at the end of the campaign the disparate plot threads would mesh. The Waterdeep explorers would travel to the Nine Hells only to learn that the fiend invasion was caused by the abduction of the Queen of Hell’s newly born infant - a soul-devouring mass of flesh that could open portals into other worlds with its burps and farts - while the Chult expedition would delve into the jungle to find Acererark, smash the Soulmonger and free the aforementioned child. 

In short, I basically made a complicated D&D adventure even more complicated by layering my own story on top of it and running two campaigns at once. I think I was looking for a challenge, and oh boy, I got one. I probably won’t be undertaking something like this ever again, because it required a lot of planning hurdles on my part. For instance, my players and I usually gamed for about 5-6 hours at most, which meant devoting 2 and a half or 3 hours to both sets of characters. If one battle lasted too long or a social interaction went south, I’d have to adjust this timeframe accordingly, and every DM knows that players will always defy your expectations in one way or another, so there was a lot of improv on the fly to make sure that our sessions stayed well-paced. 

In the name of pacing, I also stripped much of the fat out of Tomb of Annihilation, which is largely composed of a really long hexcrawl. D&D 5e’s hexcrawl exploration and survival rules have never been particularly good, in my opinion, and the rules in the book expect you to roll LOTS of random encounters and deal with stuff like inclement weather, mosquito attacks, hunting, getting lost, etc. I incorporated some of this stuff (the hunting, since we had two rangers in the party), but I pre-rolled all of the random encounters and potential locations the party could go ahead of time, getting rid of some of the ones I didn’t like, and largely handwaved stuff like getting hopelessly lost. Reddit explorations have revealed that by far and large, everyone running this campaign does the same thing - particularly for higher level players trying to get through the jungle without feeling like they’re wasting time. (And from my firsthand experience with Out of the Abyss, there’s nothing worse than going through multiple D&D sessions and feeling like you haven’t accomplished much.)

My approach to streamlining Acererak’s deathtrap lair at the end of the campaign was similar. I skimmed through the entire dungeon with all of its bajillion floors (which could take an average group months to get through) in favor of using the 10 rooms that I liked the most, which was more than enough. Tomb of Annihilation, while probably fairer than Gary Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors, is still in my opinion full of wacky stuff in the final dungeon that just isn’t my cup of tea for D&D, including one trap that can get characters stuck in real-world Victorian London. (Okay, that’s cool on paper, but to actually run it as a DM, especially when your players are in the final hours of their adventure? I’ll pass.)

Additionally, I made Ras Nsi - the warlord-turned-yuan-ti - into more of a developed NPC who was actually willing to help the players slay Acererak. In the book, he’s very much a Darth Maul-type bad guy who looks cool but has a minimum of characterization. This is because Tomb of Annihilation leans into the stereotype that Ras Nsi and the rest of the yuan-ti are all merciless bastards with inscrutable plans, and while this may be fine if you’re familiar with the Conan the Barbarian serpentfolk tropes that inspired the yuan-ti, it’s not great if you’re trying to build a believable world with compelling characters. Much has been written about how Chult stumbles at portraying a fantasy Africa - largely by depicting the characters as foreign saviors and the Chultans as relatively helpless - and while some of this was alleviated in my game by the fact that one player’s character actually was Chultan, I still felt it was necessary to give some of the indigenous races a chance to help undo the curse that, after all, was first and foremost affecting their land.

Switching gears, when it came to the accompanying Fiends in Waterdeep homebrew story, I recycled some material from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, which I’d previously run for two different groups, and also took inspiration from the Wizards of the Coast module Descent into Avernus. At the time of planning, Descent Into Avernus was the most recent D&D hardcover, and all the reviews I’d read painted it as cool in concept but a major pain in the butt to run in reality. So, I decided to use only the nifty bits - a journey into the first layer of the Nine Hells via Mad Max-style tanks powered by souls - and mixed it with my own tale that was influenced by a profile of Fury, the dragon queen of hell, that I’d read in the third-party 5e supplement Legendary Dragons. It turned into a mildly amusing story about Fury warring against her ex-husband Asmodeus, and the players ended up serving as therapists in what amounted to an interplanar lover’s spat. I’d recently started therapy when I came up with the campaign concept, so this is probably one of those unique instances where real life truly influenced art. And hey, the unpredictable whims of all-powerful, world-shaping deities make for great adventure hooks, and judging by how Greek mythology seems to have re-entered the modern zeitgeist these days (I’m thinking about Hades, one of the most popular indie rougelikes out there, as well as that Netflix series Blood of Zeus) it seems like I was on the nose!

In the end, this two-tiered campaign lasted roughly 70 hours and climaxed with all sets of characters reaching level 10. Acererark’s Soulmonger was smashed, the feud between Fury and Asmodeus smoothed over, and after enduring the eerie mists of the Shadowfell, the hot temperatures of Chult and the flames of Avernus, the story of these motley players - who’d started questing with me back in 2018, and endured a move to online games in the era of COVID - came to a gentle end. I’m a believer in the reality that campaigns don’t necessarily need to last forever, and with real life throwing some of my players (and myself) a few recent curveballs, this seemed like a solid finale point. A consistent campaign running over two years is in many ways a dream for a lot of D&D players and DMs, and I’m glad I got the chance to make it happen.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #433

Top Ten Things I Want from Xbox Series X

June is Games Month here at David’s Top Tens! That’s right, all month long we’re exploring the majesty of what we all used to call “computer games” before we became too cool. That’s because it’s the time of year when huge multinationals tantalise us with pre-rendered cinematics showcasing gaming experiences utterly divorced from what we’ll get to play. Even in this Time of Crisis (as opposed to a Time Crisis), games companies are still Touting Their Wares, and as such, I am brimming with fanboy fervour, tantalised at the prospect of Gaming Yet to Come. This week alone has seen sexy new videos from the likes of EA, Pokémon, and Sony – whose PlayStation 5 reveal gave us the best glimpse yet at exactly what the next generation could look like. I was impressed; although there wasn’t too much in the way of radically new concepts or whatever, games looked good, with plenty of sexy, shiny new bells and whistles, and it looked like environments will be bigger, more fluid, and more reactive than ever before. Plus seeing the ray-tracing in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart gave me serious “Quake II running on a 3D accelerator card” vibes. Suddenly I was sixteen again, getting all sticky-knickered over texture filtering and coloured lightning.

It was great.

However, I’m pretty much an Xbox-first gamer; mostly, I suppose, due to inertia, having gotten used now to how an Xbox works, to the point where a PlayStation always feels a little alien (still wanna play The Last of Us Part II, though). I’m more of a fan of the Xbox game franchises – the main reason I bought an original Xbox in the first place (way back in 2001) was to play Halo: Combat Evolved, and because of the promise of Fable. This love of Xbox games has only grown with the acquisition of Rare (despite the slight misstep of Perfect Dark Zero) and the release of games like Crackdown, Gears, and Forza Horizon. So as much as I try to be open-minded – and certainly I try to avoid any kind of partisan mud-slinging – I guess I’m pretty much in the tank for Xbox. As such, I’m phenomenally excited for Xbox Series X. I got an Xbox One at launch, and despite all of the hullaballoo and criticism, I’ve always really liked it. I think it’s kind of struggled compared to its predecessors (cult favourite OG Xbox and revolutionary Xbox 360), and hasn’t quite had the era-defining games that both of those enjoyed. All that being said, though, I’ve had loads of fun with it, and so have my wife and kids. But I’ve stuck with the same machine all these years, never upgrading to the more streamlined Xbox One S or the super-duper-sexy Xbox One X. So when I do upgrade, I think the jump will be far more noticeable than someone who’s been enjoying Red Dead Redemption 2 or Gears 5 on a 4K display; it should really feel like a new generation. And that’s before we get to all of the traced rays and other lovely gubbins.  

Anyway, when it’s this time of year, I tend to do a semi-comical “E3 predictions” list, followed by a “Stuff I liked at E3” list. Obviously E3 isn’t really happening, but these other online game reveals are, and given my aforementioned excitement over Series X – and Microsoft’s upcoming and much-anticipated reveal of first-party titles – I thought I’d divert my thoughts to what I want to see on the new console. However, unlike the traditional E3 predictions of yore, I’m going to look at what I’d like from the console rather than what games I’d like to see. Partly that’s because these announcement videos are getting spread so far and wide that it’s hard to keep track of what’s been revealed or when we’re likely to see something; partly it’s because we already know quite a few Xbox games that are coming out; and partly because the list would just degenerate into older franchises I want to see come back round again. Plus, with Crackdown 3 having already happened, a new Fable more-or-less an open secret, and a new Perfect Dark being very heavily rumoured, my go-to “wants” are getting thin on the ground. Perhaps Tim Schafer can bring his old LucasArts classics to the Xbox next year…? Whatever, this time around, I’m looking at that big black box and thinking about what features and design elements I’d like to see. What could be improved from how the Xbox One works? How would I like Microsoft to leverage their assets – from the faster SSD to the power of Project xCloud? Basically, what do I want Xbox Series X to be like, outside from glittering reflections on Master Chief’s shiny armour?

Streamlined, faster dashboard: now they’ve already said that the Xbox Series X dash will be effectively identical to the Xbox One dash, which is a trifle disappointing, but I hope that doesn’t mean that both systems can’t get an improved dashboard before Christmas. At the moment things are a bit fiddly, and I’d like to use the improved SSD to mean seamless transitions from page to page. Make it super-easy to get to your game library. Allow more customisation of the landing page. How about allowing us to resize icons, like on Windows 10? Don’t have quite so many obscure categories clogging up the front page. Use the shoulder buttons to hop between sections. Make it more about the games I can play rather than connectivity, shopping, or chatting. Stuff like that.

Integrated streaming: with Project xCloud on the (official) horizon, hopefully we can integrate that service into how the Xbox works. How’s about letting us stream demos straight from the store? Or stream games while they install/download? Or the option to stream any game we own rather than play it from the console? Or cast games from console to phone, or tablet, or PC, so we can enjoy the benefits of Series X hardware in the palm of our hands?

Discless play: teased then withdrawn from the Xbox One launch as it require the internet to check, I hope this can make a belated return. I like physical media, but I also like not having to get off the couch to change discs. I’d be very willing to accept an always-on connection as the price for playing a game without the disc in. If they could find some way to implement this and keep everyone happy, I’d be delighted.

Improved Guide menu: the best thing about the Xbox 360 interface was the Guide menu, which – certainly by the end of the generation – basically offered you full console functionality from one simple pause-button menu. The One Guide has been refined but could go further. Offer instant access to all our games, and all the system settings. Let us seamlessly jump from one thing to another and back again. Let us view all our captures quickly and easily. And let us go through game-by-game and see all our achievements, cycling through their related imagery. Basically, make it more like the 360, please.

Standardised settings: another amazing thing the 360 did that was totally walked back for the One is the idea of having a standardised range of settings that were applied across your entire profile. So if you want to invert your Y-axis, you tick one box, then all games are inverted. This was fantastic, and Microsoft were daft for undoing it. Make it good again! You have the power!

Refined subscription services: I think Game Pass is the future of Xbox, and I think xCloud is the future of Game Pass. This seems fairly obvious to me. I don’t know how much money Microsoft makes from Game Pass, but the way they’re leveraging their entire gaming strategy around it suggests that it’s a much stronger money-spinner for them than the traditional console market. I just hope that eventually the myriad Xbox subscriptions can be refined. Perhaps “Gold” as we understand it could be retired, replaced with a simple three-tier monthly sub, similar to Netflix; Game Pass Bronze (limited multiplayer, limited ability to download games from the library); Silver (Gold and Game Pass as we understand it, plus limited streaming), and Gold (all the games plus full streaming of everything)? This would, hopefully, mean we could get some of the benefits at a reduced cost (say, a fiver a month), and the “free” games in Game Pass would offset the loss of Games With Gold, perhaps.

Switch app: simply put, this would be cool: the ability to stream Xbox games on a Switch. Nothing more to it than that, really; the Switch form factor and controls would lend themselves to the Xbox experience effortlessly, and it’d mean I could continue my Halo campaign whilst my wife hogs the Xbox with Stardew Valley again.

Tangible differences between generations: on the one hand, I really applaud Microsoft’s blended approach to console generations. Smart Delivery, Backwards Compatibility, and Play Anywhere combine to form a very consumer-friendly approach; if you a buy a game now, you’re more-or-less guaranteed the best possible version come the Series X launch in November (or whenever). The downside to this, however, is a slight nagging feeling that we’re not going to see the best that the console can do; it’s fair enough that the Xbox One and Series X versions of Halo Infinite are, to all intents and purposes, on the same disc, and your progress and achievements carry over; but does this not mean that, aside from improvements in graphics and loading times, the Series X version is functionally identical? Is it just like upgrading a graphics card? Ratchet and Clank boasted some nifty dimension-hopping technology that presumably is a core part of the gameplay and looked like something that maybe wasn’t possible this gen; will Xbox owners miss out on features like that? If Series X could, say, give us a new Fable that presented as one continuous open world with no “hubs” or separated areas or loading, with some kind of magical traversal that allowed us to rocket across the landscape on a broomstick or whatever, would that not be handicapped by having to carry save game data over from the inevitable Xbox One version? Basically, I’m fascinated by how it’s going to work, but I hope we’re not going to end up slightly short-changed from a featureset point of view.

New hardware: not just the Series X itself, obviously; and not even the strongly-rumoured “Series S” either. I mean other bits and bobs. As they’ve already shown us the controller, I can’t realistically wish for one that had a microphone in it, but a tiny mic attachment maybe? Alongside the obvious headset. I wanna talk to the machine, basically; it was the one genuine benefit of Kinect. Also: a new, improved, media remote. A wireless mouse and keyboard, or some kind of lap-based hybrid. A new camera, not as invasive or scary as Kinect, just so we can use the Xbox to Skype people. And y’know what? VR support. Doesn’t have to be unique, bespoke headsets; just let us use PC ones, and let developers support VR in Xbox games. I don’t have the money or space to upgrade my laptop to be VR-ready, but if I had a PlayStation you can be damn sure I’d have PSVR. Half-Life: Alyx might be a pipe dream, but can I play Star Wars Squadrons at least?

Don’t bankrupt me: yeah, this. I’m cautiously optimistic that Microsoft will at least attempt to make this manageable; the recent rumour that it’d sell for $399 was much appreciated even if I think it’s supremely unlikely, especially if Lockheart/Series S is a thing. With Sony giving out noises that the PS5 will be a “good value” proposition rather than cheap, I think MS will strongly attempt to undercut them, but also not feel the need to go stupidly low. So please, Microsoft: $450, top end. Please don’t give us a $499 box. I’m already gonna be forking out for a new TV so I’d appreciate if I could keep the whole cost. For what it’s worth, I think the prices of all the new consoles will be: PS5 $499; XSX $449; PS5 DE $399; XSS $299. There you go: I managed to slip in an E3 prediction right at the very end. Prove me wrong, guys!

Phew, that was another epic one. But it was fun. I guess it’s weird to try to talk about the feel of a console without having used it. There are things I’d like improving with the look and feel of Xbox, but it’s hard to quantify it; stuff that’s clunky on a daily basis. And I’m probably an edge case anyway: someone with a huge interest in games and gaming, but who’s not very interested in multiplayer, and who – because of time and money but mostly time – rarely plays new releases, and takes ages to complete a game. But anyway. I’m dead excited about the Xbox Series X, and I can’t wait to hear more.

[iakes-on-amasakas-archive]

💋, 👾, 🎨, 🌍, ⌛️,🍺 ((PlayKinshara/Rose))

From here || Keep ’em coming!SEND AN EMOJI TO LEARN HOW GOOD/BAD MY MUSE IS AT THAT PARTICULAR SKILL!

💋 — kissing

Haaaaaa, well - good and bad are such subjective words. The truth is, Shinji’s kissing style is loads of fun for some people, and is utter torture for others. He likes to play. He’s a bit of a tease. He likes sweet, little pecks interspersed with sucking on lips and tongues, and he sometimes likes to talk in between kisses. And never forget that he’s got that nifty tongue ring - some partners think it’s fun and sexy, and others think it’s gross and kind of extra. Shinji can adapt to his partners’ preferences within reason, of course, but ultimately, a partner who likes a little spontaneity and some lighthearted fun is going to have a better time than one who’s looking for die-hard romance. (That said - I haven’t written Shinji in any romantic and/or sexual situations yet. With the right partner, I could see him being pretty sweet. He’s cringing at that idea right now, but eh. Give him time.)

Putting the rest under the cut, cuz this got long~

👾— video games

He’s great at video games. He likes them, too. They come naturally to him, the same way fighting does. He doesn’t have to think - he just goes, following the impulses of his body, and flowing naturally with the world onscreen, just like he does with the world around him when he’s engaged in combat. He’s one of those guys who just gets physical stuff, and video games are an extension of that. He prefers combat-based games with tricky combination moves to, say, RPGs. He’ll kick your ass at Smash and Mortal Kombat, but he gets bored by Skyrim and Fallout after an hour or two. Unsurprisingly, he’s also dope at Portal.

Hiyori beats him at Mario Kart every time, though. He’s still not sure why he keeps agreeing to play.

🎨 — art

Ha! Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. We’re talking visual art here? Oh, my gosh. He’s so bad at this, y’all. So bad. 

His handwriting is really messy, and any attempts he’s ever made at visual art aren’t much better. He doesn’t attempt very often, because he just doesn’t care that much, and he knows how to stay in his lane - but it’s almost comical how awful his “work” is, on the rare occasions when he feels compelled to try. 

Shinji is one of those guys who either picks things up really quickly and excels at them, or doesn’t pick things up quickly and then gets annoyed when he’s bad at them. Fortunately, he’s good at just about everything he tries, so he doesn’t encounter the latter too often - but that just makes his few ineptitudes even more frustrating. 

Basically, Shinji’s art looks like if a big, dumb bear on crack grabbed a paintbrush in its mouth and whacked a canvas with it repeatedly. It’s plenty colorful, so that’s something - but that’s just about its only redeeming quality. Shinji would probably tell you that it would sell for millions if it were marketed as a modern abstract, and frankly, he might be right. But at the end of the day, that’s bullshit, and the art itself is still pretty trash. 

If Shinji were ever seized by the compulsion to pursue art, he could probably get somewhere. His inevitable self-portrait would probably be brightly bold and pretty slapdash - nothing realistic. It would be one of those pieces that involves a lot of thick paint with hard, scrape-y lines drawn through them with spackling tools. Probably lots of primary colors. His eyes would look totally crazed, and his hair would be these really unsettling straight lines jutting out of his improperly-shaped head. It would be kinda freaky. But then again - Shinji is a bit of a freak, in his own way, and he’s not afraid of it. So, I dunno. Maybe it would be pretty spot-on, when all is said and done.&nbsp

Huh. Thanks for this one in particular, @playkinshara​. I’ve never considered any of this before.

🌍 — knowledge of the world

Shinji’s knowledge of the world he’s experienced firsthand is stellar. He understands things quickly, and though he doesn’t always understand why various cultural practices are worth anyone’s time, he appreciates the history and the context, and adheres by them for the sake of propriety and politeness. He’s kinda over some of it, internally, and he’ll only do the bare minimum if he thinks a particular practice is stupid, but he’ll never voice that. He knows how to be respectful, and he understands that not everyone’s morals and values align with his own. 

He has some knowledge of the world beyond his own experience. In Soul Society, he was always fascinated by the cultural movements of the World of the Living - particularly music, fashion, and other cultural trends adjacent to those things (like dance and film, for example). His interests aren’t at all limited by geography. As I mentioned in another answer, he reads a lot, and he absorbs knowledge quickly. There’s plenty that he doesn’t know, but if the stakes are low, he doesn’t have any trouble admitting his ignorance and asking questions. He can intuit plenty, and what he can’t intuit, he finds out for himself. He’s a curious guy, and he knows it’s in his best interest to know more, rather than less.

⌛️ — time management

Shinji is… pretty average at this, at best. He’s never grossly late for official business, but occasionally, he’ll roll up a minute or two behind schedule because he got caught up in listening to a record (skipping out when a track is only halfway over is blasphemy in his book) or getting himself ready (if he’s not wearing his uniform, he’s gotta look snappy, after all). He works efficiently, and spends just enough time on things like paperwork to be thorough, but not so much that he often feels bogged down. He makes sure to budget appropriate amounts of time for both work and leisure, and he’s good at staying focused throughout those allotted time periods. He never needs to be nagged to get his ass in gear and get his work done, but he also won’t be thrilled if you interrupt his personal time for a matter of business.

🍺 — alcohol tolerance

Haaaaaaa. Y’all. Have you seen Shinji. The man is a stick. 

That said, his alcohol tolerance is marginally better than people often expect it to be. Plus, he’s not an idiot. If he knows he has a night of drinking ahead of him, he’ll pound half a pizza beforehand. He’s also mastered the art of making it look like he’s keeping pace with the group, when really, he’s been sipping on the same beer for about two hours. On that note - he’ll do shots if someone really insists, but he prefers beer to everything else. It lasts longer, and it’s nice and cold, and he likes the taste best.  (Though, once he discovered weed in the human world, he rapidly developed a new preference. One of his favorite things ever is to come back at the end of a long day, light up a joint, put on a record, and leave all his cares behind, if only for a few hours.)

[aion-rsa]

Bruce Campbell and 40 Years of Building The Evil Dead Myth

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This article is presented by:

When The Evil Dead returns to theaters nationwide on Oct. 7 as an exclusive one-night only Fathom event, complete with a Bruce Campbell introduction, it will be almost 40 years to the day since the film premiered at Detroit’s Redford Theatre, an ancient movie palace that even now maintains a classic theater organ in the back. During that 1981 debut, the movie was still titled “The Book of the Dead,” and Sam Raimi was renting ambulances to place outside the cinema in order to set a mood. There was a line out the door. Few might’ve guessed from such inauspicious beginnings that they’d be launching a horror classic. But four decades later, it’s still here.

The Evil Dead’s persistence at creating new fans year after year, and generation after generation, is a testament to its eagerness to be the “ultimate experience in grueling terror.” Because for a moment there, even years, this quintessential cabin in the woods movie appeared to be an outlier—a truly independent affair in which a handful of school chums stumbled around in the Tennessee wilderness and then struggled to get the movie seen by audiences. One of its financiers was allegedly horrified by its tone during that Michigan premiere; several British courts found it obscene, leading to a prolonged legal battle over censorship in the UK; and the film even only received major distribution at all because Stephen King wrote a glowing review in 1982 after seeing it at Cannes.

There’s enough mythology around how The Evil Dead was made and released to fill the pages of the Necronomicon. Twice. But year by year, story by story, that self-perpetuating legend has grown until it developed one of the greatest legacies in horror—until it became a genuine classic. Perhaps that’s why when we sit down to chat with Campbell ahead of the film’s Fathom re-release, he can’t help but laugh at some of the more embellished stories about its genesis. After all, Raimi, producer Rob Tapert, and Campbell, by his own admission, have had an intentional hand in nurturing many of the tall tales surrounding the movie.

“Sam and I encouraged a lie for years about the last shot in the movie,” Campbell says with a chuckle over the phone. He’s referring to the famous shot near the end of the picture where the unseen evil entity in the woods—or “the Force” as Raimi used to call it back then—smashes through the doors of the cabin and comes riding headlong into Campbell’s ample chin.

Says Campbell, “We had a whole story about Sam riding a motorcycle in order to smash through the doors. We said we did it last because I was probably going to get hurt, because in order to get the camera close enough, the motorcycle pretty much had to make contact [with me]. So we sort of perpetuated that lie, very successfully, for decades.”

It’s an impressive overstatement, even if the actual truth of the shot is pretty nifty on its own: Raimi came running through the doors, which were pulled away by ropes off-screen, while the director held above his head an Arriflex camera with a wide-angle lens bolted to a board. The low-fi elements of it are refreshingly cool, even more so now. Still, a motorcycle, it ain’t.

“The great comedian W.C. Fields wrote all his own press releases, and he lied in all of ‘em,” Campbell muses. “So we enjoyed doing that sort of stuff and adding to the myth.”

It’s this type of showmanship that comes naturally to Campbell, as well as Raimi and Tapert—all of whom were executive producers on The Evil Dead. They demonstrated it early when they were able to actually get the financing to make the film back in the late ‘70s after dropping out of college, and they did it again when they succeeded at making a horror spectacle so extreme, and so genuinely innovative, that we’re still talking about it. Campbell even fondly recalls how they all bought suits from thrift stores and then went around Detroit trying to pitch the movie for investors to local businessmen and dentists.

“We bought briefcases,” says Campbell. “Rob and Sam had a slimmer briefcase, and I had a thicker one because I carried a lot of the paperwork and checkbooks, and stuff like that. But we did carry briefcases because we thought that’s what investors would want to see. And we wore suits and ties, because Detroit businessmen in the ‘70s wore suits and ties.”

It was all to add an air of legitimacy to fresh faced twentysomethings who were asking for money to make a debut film in a genre that many investors couldn’t even stomach watching. According to Campbell, one man even had his associates view Raimi’s proof of concept short film, “Within the Woods,” while he stood outside. It’s worth remembering this was at a time when, as Campbell puts it, “horror was one rung above porno.”

Still, looking back at this early bid for youthful professionalism, Campbell can point to plenty of hardships that never needed any hyperbole.

During our conversation, the actor recites with a matter of fact exhaustion all the basic amenities that should be on any film set, yet were totally absent during the making of The Evil Dead. It’s as if even their memory is wearying. For one thing, there were no bathrooms at the real-life cabin; not to mention the actual nightmare that came from having no heat during the middle of an Appalachian winter; they instead relied on a portable kerosene heater for the whole production. There was also no running water and thus no way  to bathe; safety precautions were non-existent, and then there was that one time a bull came running across a field at Raimi and all the production could do was watch. Even the “craft services’” would deliver doughy cake and tell Campbell it was pizza. He didn’t buy that either.

“Almost every crew member or actor got hurt in some way,” Campbell estimates. His own injury came after a tough shoot one night in the cemetery. After running down the hill and jumping, Campbell broke his ankle. As he recalls now, “We had to keep shooting the rest of the night, with Sam and Rob Tapert cornering me in a room, poking my ankle with sticks because they thought it was funny.” He later adds, “I’ll always favor that ankle lovingly, because I know it came from Sam.”

Be that as it may, Campbell looks back on the whole experience with as much nostalgia as shudders.

“It’s both, because I don’t really remember how horrible it was,” Campbell says. “My memory doesn’t really work that way. My memory tends to gloss over stuff. So yeah, no question it was uncomfortable, but we had nothing to compare it to. So it wasn’t until later that we figured out how bad it was, and by that point, it’s over. So what’s the difference?”

How ever he considers that time in the woods now, it certainly paid off. With its extreme use of gore, grandiose camera movements, and filmmaking flair, The Evil Dead remains a singular experience—one might even say grueling. It paved the way for sequels like Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, plus the much later television series Ash vs Evil Dead. And for Campbell there’s something particularly provocative and enduring about that first effort.

“Sam’s a good filmmaker, and he’s got sequences in there that are very visually impressive,” Campbell says. “So he sort of drew them in, stylistically. But it’s also sort of docu-horror, the way we actually shot it in a real cabin in the middle of nowhere. You can kind of tell, so it seeps into the movie.”

When looking at how The Evil Dead was made versus Campbell’s Starz TV series, the actor points out what a difference professional expertise makes, as well as how it can change the visceral grime and dirt under the fingernails that audiences can intuitively feel while watching such a movie.

“In the first Evil Dead, Ash hears a noise by a window, he sees a shadow, he turns with the shotgun, and he blows the window out,” says Campbell. “Well, in 1979 in rural Tennessee, you just take a shotgun and you blow the window out. There’s no stunt guy. There’s no nothing…. And then by the time you get to Ash vs Evil Dead, I’d raise the shotgun and a guy on set would go, ‘Ready and bang!’ When he says, ‘Bang,’ I’d jerk the gun, and a guy on set hits me with an interactive light for the flash. And they put a digital flash in that’s any length you want, any color we want, and a big smoke plume and a Howitzer cannon sound effect.”

Campbell admits it’s safer, but it loses that handcrafted quality which makes The Evil Dead still both so creepy and, depending on the audience, amusing. When asked if he misses those old ways, Campbell concedes, “I only miss it a little bit, because there was a lot of dumb stuff done on movie sets back in the day that should not have been done. We skirted around safety stuff, and film sets are much safer now. So I’ll take now for the sake of safety, but the funny thing is we just didn’t know any other way.”

It’s safe to say that they wouldn’t make The Evil Dead today like they did back then, but then that’s the original’s charm, and the root of the stories we tell about it. Even when compared to the sequels and spinoffs where Raimi’s camera rigs got more elaborate, and Campbell’s acting got better with each sharpened wisecrack, there is nothing as chilling as seeing actors genuinely freezing on a winter night.

By the time of Army of Darkness and Ash vs Evil Dead, Campbell was able to really develop the character of Ashley Williams, and his own acting talents, turning the protagonist into what Campbell estimates is the archetypal “ugly American.” One might wonder then if the performer has more satisfaction from the later projects—he does tell us the Starz TV show was his chance to be like George Lucas and go back and “fix all those shitty effects.” If so, Campbell keeps such thoughts to himself while speaking with pride on what the first Evil Dead did for his career and the horror genre.

“You don’t always want to be known for the [character you played] when you had the least experience,” Campbell considers. “So you’re always going to have the echo of Ash wherever I go, which is fine. But I’m glad that people are still finding it relevant all these years later. You can’t ever look down on it, because it got me into the film business. So mostly, I’m just grateful.”

Fathom Events will present The Evil Dead 40th Anniversary with Bruce Campbell at theaters across the U.S. on Thursday, Oct. 7. Get your tickets now at www.FathomEvents.com

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[47pictures]

“Dandelion” [PT. I]

Link to original r/nosleep story here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/libraryofshadows/comments/o7tj7w/dandelion_part_1/

I’d never participated in a group study of any kind before, so for it being my first, I felt like I was actually contributing something useful to the world of science. Some students around campus said there may even be some money involved, mainly just mentioned as an incentive to join in the first place, of course. I volunteered specifically for this one due to the subject matter that its research was geared towards, one that I found a bit fascinating.

Dreams… or, so they advertised. More so the study of how the subconscious works in correlation to our deep-rooted memories.

Dr. Ramirez, young and beautiful, and probably in her mid to late-twenties, explained it all just perfectly, and perhaps in the easiest way it could be.

In the room just ahead of the lab, she gave me a quick rundown of how exactly the machine was going to work. On a dry-erase board, she drew one big near-perfect circle, and inside of it drew another smaller circle. She then pointed at the smaller circle with her marker.

“Let’s say this is the Earth,” she started. I nodded, following along. “And this,” she went on, as she motioned around the bigger circle, “is space and beyond. Everything outside of here is full of endless possibilities, right? You’ve got your other planets, asteroids, comets, satellites, stars, and so on.”

I nodded again, a bit amused with her analogy, wherever it was pointing to.

She continued. “Now, can you imagine where I might be going with this?” she asked with a skittish smile.

I know she didn’t expect me to give her an even remotely correct answer.

“You’re gonna send me to space?” I dryly remarked.

She laughed. “Not quite, but I like your sense of humor.” At least she had one, I thought to myself.

Dr. Ramirez went on to further explain as she drew words over the top rim of each circle, labeling them. She started with the smaller circle.

“This is you, essentially,” she explained while simultaneously writing the word “conscious” over the top rim. She then moved over to the bigger circle. “And this is also you, but the vaster and more mysterious ‘you’, if that makes sense.”

She proceeded to write the word “Subconscious” on top of the larger one.

Thankfully she was a visual demonstrator and I was a visual learner. I remembered a decent bit of this when I took AP Psych back in high school, but then again, I barely passed AP Psych. Had a great teacher, though.

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘as above, so below’?” she asked me.

I suggestively tilted my head. “Here or there, maybe once or twice,” I answered.

“Well, the reason I ask is because I like to compare that exact same expression to how the subconscious and conscious works,” the doctor went on as she pointed at both words with her marker appropriately. “They are both one and the same, however, they like to work in different ways. As you may already know or at least have some sort of grasp on the topic, your subconscious stores most of your long-term data, you know, those memories that can go further back, or even some as recent as yesterday that your brain just decided to lock away in the back. These things don’t require your ‘conscious awareness’ or immediate focus, right?”

From what I noticed about her so far, Dr. Ramirez liked to talk with her hands, but I must say, she made it work for her. It was rather intriguing.

“Whether it’s driving a car, riding a bike, or playing the piano,” she continued. “Or heck, even learning a new language. At some point, you had to learn these things for the first time, and they required a great deal of conscious effort, yes?” I nodded. “So, thankfully, our brains have been blessed with the ability to ‘learn’.” She let out a short laugh. “And so, these memories are stored in our subconscious, where it basically becomes second nature to do these sorts of tasks. You with me so far?”

I nodded again to reassure her. My sandpaper-dry personality probably wasn’t helping, but she really did have my full attention whether she realized it or not. I hope she knew that I wouldn’t have volunteered otherwise.

“Now,” she started again, but this time drew another medium-sized circle just around the “Conscious”-labeled one, “Our understanding of dreams has always been sort of a mystery to science. Many say they’re just random jumbles that our brain picks from our subconscious, whereas some say they’re a state of mind that acts independently on its own. Well now, we’ve learned that both of those answers are… well, sort of correct.” She then labeled the circle that surrounded “Consciousness” under the name of “Dream State”. The entire diagram was starting to look like a big target, with “Consciousness” in the center, “Dream State” being the inner rim, and “Subconscious” as the outer rim.

“Think of our dreams as the Earth’s atmosphere,” she said. “Any sort of debris that enters the atmosphere at high speed, such as a meteor or fallen satellite, gets broken up into little pieces before it can cause some serious damage to all of us down below, right? I’m assuming you were awake for science class in middle school?”

“Eh,” I joked. She took it with a laugh, but if only she knew I used to have an issue falling asleep in school as a kid. “So, our dreams protect us from our subconscious, is that what I’m hearing?”

“Ooh, I like the way you think,” the doctor remarked. “I’d like to think of it more like, in a less catastrophic example, that our dreams ‘filter’ what our subconscious throws at us. Now, there’s still debate on whether or not our subconscious actively tries to communicate with us or our dreams are the ones pulling from our subconscious, but that’s beside the point. What we’ve come to learn, in the midst of all the chaos in our dream state, from being able to fly, seeing the sky turn a different color, seeing giant chickens cross the road, and whatever other crazy things people have mustered from their imagination is that dreams are no longer the barrier that stands between understanding our subconscious. We’ve now developed a way to essentially enter our subconscious state, unfiltered and uninterrupted.”

And that was where she threw me for a loop. I stammered to try and find the words to even begin questioning something so bizarre, but with no luck. I could tell she was amused by my bewilderment from the smile on her face. We'd come so far in technology and scientific advances - was this it? Is this what the future held all this time?

“So, Mr. Thompson,” Dr. Ramirez spoke. “Are you ready to explore space?”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

She led me to the lab room where we would be doing our first session of the experiment. I was expecting something more intricate or complex. In reality, the setup was quite minimal. An operating stool sat in the center as expected, and next to it stood a monitor that I assumed was for checking my pulse. Along the wall was the real sight to behold. Large screens displaying all sorts of numbers and diagrams in which I couldn’t even comprehend their meaning. Though, from what I could probably guess, it looked like some sort of EEG setup. I’d seen it in movies and documentaries (and back in AP Psych class), but never in person.

“Now before we start, I have to ask if you’ve eaten in the past 8 hours?” Dr. Ramirez asked. “It’s a precaution we take for all of our test subjects due to the side effect of leaving the hub.”

“Uh, just a protein bar,” I said. “Did you say ‘hub’?”

“Oh, yes, that’s sort of the nickname we came up with for what’s basically the ‘subconscious state’.”

“Oh…”

“So that’s good that you’ve had some form of sugar and carbs at least today. Sometimes people report feeling a bit lightheaded or lethargic after the session, and the first thing they’ll usually want is a coffee or a soda. We have a vending machine for soda, snacks, or coffee - whichever you prefer - across the hall if you need them afterwards.”

All this time we had discussed going from point A to B, but not how. Looking around the room, seeing all the tech being used, I couldn’t imagine the funding that must’ve been poured into this project.

“I’m sure you’ll get to it soon enough, but how exactly does this work?” I finally asked, doing my best not to sound impatient. Dr. Ramirez, however, seemed more than happy to explain.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she replied. “Well let me just give you a basic rundown of what this all does and how it’s going to affect you.”

She picked up a small lightweight device from the table that clearly looked like some sort of headset, much akin to a VR one. However, it had a sort of synthetic material cap attached to it, with multiple white dot-like pieces carefully placed. It certainly looked like an EEG device for scanning the brain, as I'd guessed earlier.

“This is why we’re here today,” said Ramirez, pointing at the device with her free hand. “This little guy here is called the Cadacus.”

I cocked a brow.

“Supposedly it’s derivative of Hermes’ staff, you know, in mythology, the symbol used for ambulances and medical-related stuff?”

“Mmm,” I understandingly nodded.

“I tried to tell them that one, it’s spelled wrong, and two, it’s not even pronounced correctly,” she said, rather annoyed. “It’s supposed to be ‘Ca-doo-she-us’, but, then again, I’m not the one who invented it, so Dr. Lockhardt gets the final say on that.”

She then handed me the set for me to get a feel for it and analyze it for myself. Nifty, needless to say. As she had explained, the device was capable of not (and she greatly stressed) recording your dreams, per se, but instead taking you into your ‘subconscious’ world. Dreams are merely the barrier blocking us from seeing our subconscious thoughts and memories uninterrupted. In dreams, situations and objects might change sporadically at any given time without warning. One of the greatest struggles, she explained, when testing the Cadacus was trying to find the breakthrough in how exactly to bypass the REM cycle, which is when most of our dreaming occurs. But she explained that as well…

“In the world of science and medicine, or rather human innovation as a whole, we’ve learned how to basically pick certain parts of our brain and utilize them how we see fit, and not the other way around,” she preached. “Not have them decide for us. Essentially, Cadacus allows us to hack certain parts of the brain that are responsible for letting us take a peek inside our deepest embedded memories. I like to tell people the closest thing we have to a time machine is our own brain. In it lies a whole world of events and moments that you may have forgotten, or choose to have forgotten.”

“So what’s to stop it from peeking into memories that are… I don’t know, better left forgotten?” I proposed. Of course, she had an answer for that as well.

“Great question. So the beauty of Cadacus is that just like I mentioned, you now have the utmost control over what you decide to see… or, at least we’re testing to make sure things stay that way.”

And there it was. That was the catch. After all, nothing was ever perfect.

“I’m sorry, I just have to ask, how many people have you tested this thing on?” I boldly inquired. Ramirez seemed unbothered by the question, though. In fact, nothing seemed to bother her with everything I asked. To me, it conveyed confidence in the things she spoke on, which I hoped also equated to her being sincere.

She chuckled. “Honest answer? About twenty-four so far. Now I’m sure the real reason you’re asking is because you want to know how many of those tests turned out successful or not, yeah?”

I answered with a guilty smirk. Absolutely that’s why I asked.

“Well you have nothing to worry about, Mr. Thompson,” she reassured. “All of the people who’ve participated so far haven’t reported any negative side effects, other than the low energy blunder right after the exiting the hub. So you're not gonna have to worry about spazzing out or going 'mental' in any sort of fashion. And keep in mind, these tests were done over the course of weeks, and some even months, depending on whether or not we came across more interesting findings during the sessions.”

She really didn't back down from a fight. Ramirez stuck to her facts, despite how truthful or not they were, unbeknownst to me. I took in a short tense breath, then exhaled.

“All right, but you have to promise me one thing,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Call me Travis. If I’m supposed to trust you with handling my brain, we oughta start getting to know each other a little better, don’t you agree?”

She smiled and nodded. “Fair enough,” she replied. “In that case, you may call me Jennifer.”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Cadacus was now all set, and we were ready to start. The headset over my eyes, electrodes covering my scalp, and the HRM hooked to my wrist and chest were all properly configured. Jennifer also had everything she needed set up on her giant monitor, where she could now see my full brain, able to pinpoint any changes in activity. From my perspective, the Cadacus headset made everything in the room look like I was peering through a fish-eye lens scope. It was all blurred and a bit disorienting, but it wouldn’t be for long once I entered the hub, Jennifer informed me.

“You ready?” she asked, sounding more excited than I was.

“Sure,” I answered, lying through my teeth.

“Oh yeah? ‘Cause from the looks of it, you seem pretty nervous.”

I knew she had to be looking at my heartbeat to know that.

“It’s okay, everyone experiences the same thing,” she added before I could say anything. “Just try to relax. Remember, it’s not like a dream where you have no sort of control over what happens to you. You’ll have control over the things you experience just like you would in the comfort of your own home, based on the words that I give you. You don’t have to see something scary if you won’t want to. Remember that, okay?”

I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I complied.

“Good.” She gave me a pat on the shoulder and walked back over to her desk by her computer and giant monitor. “Alright, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have you count down to 'one', starting from 'five' when I say so. Sound good?”

“Ready when you are,” I answered.

“Alright…”

I couldn’t see her really from the corner of my goggles, but I could hear her hit a few keys on her computer, along with two clicks of her mouse.

“Okay...” she started.

And with one final click of her mouse, a high-pitched whirring sound began to emit from the Cadacus and straight into both of my ears. It reminded me of the times I had to get a hearing test done, and all those high-frequency noises sounding from left to right.

“Go ahead and countdown for me,” she said.

“Five,” I began. “Four. Three. Two-”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I’m not sure how quickly it all happened, but the next thing I knew, I was suddenly standing alone in the center of some vast blackness of space, as I opened my eyes. The only light came from above in the form of what looked to be a stage spotlight, which shined down on me. I didn’t have the sensation that I was dreaming, though. I felt fully present and aware of the fact that I didn’t even finish my countdown. Just moments ago, I thought, the last number I was on was ‘two’. And now this is where I was. Not laying in the chair of the lab room, no headset or goggles covering my face...

Then a faint, echoey voice sounded from no particular direction. It seemed to come from everywhere.

“Travis, can you hear me?” it spoke. “This is Jennifer. If you can hear me, just go ahead and say something.”

Amazing. She wasn’t kidding. It’s as if she were God herself.

“Yeah…” I answered unsurely. “Can you hear me?”

“Perfect, I hear you just fine,” Jennifer spoke back from the ‘beyond’.

This was a bit too trippy for me. I really didn’t know what to expect, but this exceeded anything I could’ve possibly rehearsed prior in my head.

“You never did count to one,” she joked.

“Oh yeah, um… one,” I remarked. I could even hear her laugh just the same as if she were right next to me. Her voice began to sound more and more clear as she kept talking.

“There we go. Now tell me, right now, what is it that you see?”

Not a damn thing, I wanted to say. But I gave her what I could.

“Well…” I began, looking all around me, still under the spotlight, “I’m standing in… what I think is a stage, and there’s like…” I looked directly up, “... a spotlight right over me.”

“Interesting,” I heard Jennifer say. “That’s a new one for me.”

“Where am I?” I asked.

“So, you’re actually in ‘the hub’ as we speak. This is just your interpretation of it.”

“My interpretation?”

“Uh-huh. So what happens is that basically, our own subconscious mind presents itself to us through its own unique layout, or environment, if you will. For instance, every time I went through it, I was always standing in a giant ocean of shallow water, and a bright blue sky with no sun in sight. Others see a never-ending field of grass, a barren desert, or maybe even an empty warehouse, in some cases.”

“Huh…” I quietly mumbled.

“So for you, your subconscious presents itself in the form of an unlit stage, probably waiting to be filled.”

I expected to be more afraid, given that there was basically a never-ending plain of darkness beyond the spotlight, but to my own surprise, I found it a bit peaceful. It also helped that Jennifer was still with me.

“Your vitals appear to be in great shape, which is good. Means your body is responding well to the Cadacus so far. And on that note, I’m gonna begin going down our list of ‘sensory triggers’.

I wish she had picked a less threatening word than ‘triggers’, especially when I’m in a place so foreign to me (ironic, given that it is me).

“How this is going to work is that I’m going to give you a word, and with that word, I want you to close your eyes and concentrate as much as you can on connecting that word to a specific thought or memory, okay? It sounds odd, I know, but trust me, you’ll see pretty soon. Don't overthink it.”

“Well, I trusted you this far, haven’t I?” I remarked.

“Yes, indeed you have, and I’m thankful for that. Okay, so the first word I’m going to give you is… golf.”

“Okay,” I spoke under my breath, as I began to close my eyes.

I visualized everything that I possibly could relating to golf, all the way from a golf ball, to Tiger Woods, to a golf club, then to a field of low-cut grass, to a golf cart, and so on…

I did this for about five seconds before opening my eyes again. When I opened them, I was met with what I could only describe as the piece of a house set design. It truly was like I was on the stage for a film studio or theater. The set design only showed an open door and small portions of the perimeters of the walls of the structure. It was as if someone cut a portion of the house like a slice of cake, particularly the front door, and placed it in front of me.

“Do you see anything?” Jennifer’s voice asked.

I saw something, alright. The problem was, I didn’t exactly know what. Obviously, it was a house, but an incomplete one.

“Uh, I see… a part of a house,” I said. “Like, it sorts of looks like those half-built set houses that you see on film sets, you know, like for shows or movies?”

“Oh, I see. Interesting… Your subconscious mind must be very, hmm… imaginative? Or strongly connected to the cinematic or theatrical.”

“Hmmm... it's a theory.”

“Hey, no one knows you better than yourself, right?"

I shrugged. "I guess."

"I'm not trying to intrude or anything, this is just me taking notes to see if there’s perhaps a correlation between your own personal awareness and how your subconscious views itself, does that make sense?”

“Yep.” Sort of, anyway.

“Okay, so go ahead and do me a favor and try to describe the house to me. Or what you can of it, at least.”

“Well, the door is open,” I started.

“What’s the door look like?”

I shrugged. “I mean… it’s just a regular door. Brown, wooden, has a peephole and everything. Nothing too unordinary.”

“Okay… what else?”

From the brief pauses in between her sentences, I could tell she was taking notes.

“Um, from the portion of the house that I can see,” I continued, “it’s made out of wood instead of brick. Light-blue wood, to be exact. I can see a small little porch light perched in the corner, like just before the wall cut off.”

There was a brief awkward silence in between, which I assumed was my cue to keep talking while Jennifer kept taking notes.

“And…” I started again, this time trying to peer into the house through the open door. Oddly, I could see that there was an abundant amount of space between the open ‘stage’ and the inside of the set design house. From where I was standing just several feet away, there appeared to be stairs leading up to a second floor, and a bit to the right was a living room with a couch and perhaps other furniture hidden from view, and beyond, a small hallway leading to what looked to be a kitchen, and maybe even a backyard door and other rooms.

Physically, it didn’t actually make sense. There was no way for there to be all that space in between here and there. It was like looking through a portal, essentially, where the space in which I stood didn’t proportionally match the one in which I was viewing. I liked to call it the ‘small house, big space’ phenomenon. But this was something else entirely...

“It looks like I can go inside the house,” I finished.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Jennifer replied. “Do you want to?”

I didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go, so it seemed to be my only real option. I went ahead and walked towards the open door, my view of the inside space growing more and more visible. Once I made it inside, an overwhelming sensation that I couldn’t quite put my finger on began to overtake me. It wasn’t fear, it wasn’t joy, it wasn’t sadness… yet, in a strange way, it was almost all three of those things at once.

The house was well-lit in all spaces and corners, quite impossibly, given that there wasn’t enough light on the ceilings to emit such radiance. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a real source for light at all, as the one on the ceiling wasn’t even on. The house just emitted a sort of white luminescence, the kind I’d normally see from white plasma beam lights in bathrooms at gas station stops, and I could practically hear that low endless buzzing noise that filled the space.

But this time, I didn’t hear a noise at all. Silence filled the house instead. Pure silence. That was the only unnerving thing. Even odder, I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat or breathing. Only the sound of my footsteps emerged here and there whenever I made a move across the wooden floor, leaving behind a faint echo, but that was it.

Taking in the overall atmosphere and setup of the house, for some reason, I felt as though I could guess, or even most certainly knew the time period in which the interior currently reflected. Perhaps late nineties to early 2000s. Maybe even pre-9/11. I wasn’t exactly sure on the year, but I just had that strange certitude of that particular era. Beige walls, carpeted flooring, and brown wooden kitchen cabinets all in a very particular layout that just seemed 'dated'.

“See anything interesting?” Jennifer asked.

“Well, if that’s the word you wanna use to describe this,” I muttered.

“Just say the first thing that’s on your mind.”

I looked around, trying to find the first thing I could to catch my eye. But something was extremely off about the house apart from its age. It’s as if I knew this place, but yet I couldn’t understand how. The smell even brought about a strange sense of familiarity. A faint scent of-

“Lavender,” I said. “It smells like lavender.”

There was a brief pause. Then Jennifer finally spoke. “Tell me, does the lavender scent mean anything to you? Maybe, bring you back to a certain time or place?”

“I… I think so. I’m not sure how, though.”

“What else can you tell me about the house?”

I glanced about again.

“There’s a corded phone sitting on a stand, next to a lamp and a recliner,” I said.

“Corded, huh?”

“Yeah, corded.”

“Does the house seem a bit… outdated? Or from a different time than present-day?”

Now it was as if she could read my mind.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” I concurred. “You know how some houses just look old? Like houses they just don't make anymore?”

I heard Jennifer let out a small chortle. “I know exactly what you mean.”

I shook my head confusingly. “But it’s like I know this place somehow,” I added.

“Well Travis, even though you nor myself know exactly where it is you are, I can tell you this. What you’re standing in right now is likely an old memory you’ve long forgotten, stored into the far reaches of your subconscious. You have been to this place before. This is your subconscious’s best replication and rendering - if you will - of the memory in a way that makes sense to you.” And yet, it didn’t make sense at the same time. “Can you see any pictures posted along the walls or perhaps over a fireplace anywhere?”

There actually was a fireplace in the living room, and plenty of picture frames. But there were no pictures. Not a single one in any of the big, small, and portrait-sized frames set throughout the house. Yet, they were all carefully positioned as though there were supposed to be photos within the frames for people to see.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” I answered, puzzled.

“I see,” Jennifer responded. “So as odd as that may seem, it’s actually a common thing people who’ve used the Cadacus report about seeing in ‘the hub’, or I guess I should say ‘not see’, in this case. Faces and actual people are a bit more difficult to render and replicate from stored memory banks. Over time, you forget exactly how someone’s face actually looks. You have an idea of how they appear, but you can’t actually remember all the fine details, such as exact facial structure, moles, size between the eyes, you name it. That’s why dreams tend to do a better job at showing you people you’ve seen more recently in your everyday life.”

It was a bit uncanny, if I’m being honest. The least my imagination could do was make up some pictures, I would think, at least just to fill the void. This was just flat out strange…

“Why can’t my subconscious substitute something, like how my dreams do?” I asked.

“Great question. This is where I have to break it to most people. Your imagination is practically meaningless in the hub. Scientists, psychologists and other researchers all over have started to come to the understanding that dreams and the imagination have more in common with each other than our subconscious and the imagination. The subconscious is more concrete and based on what actually happened, whereas dreams and the imagination focus on what could be, and possibly what can happen. So if the subconscious can’t actually remember something, it won’t be able to render it in the hub. That’s often why most subjects just see places and certain structures rather than actual people. Those things are easier for the mind to pick up on and remember to the best of detail.”

The longer I stood in this place, the more it gradually began feeling as though I were standing in a vacuum of space, with no real sense of time or reality. Where was I? How did this all come to be just from the word ‘golf’?

“Try exploring the house a bit more,” Jennifer suggested. “See if that does anything.”

I headed upstairs. Plastered along the walls leading up the stairs and beyond was a fully encompassing floral-design wallpaper. It was a very particular floral design, enough to bring back that sensation I felt earlier when I first stepped in the house...

“I’ve seen this wallpaper before,” I whispered, as I dragged my palm across the walls going up the stairs.

When I got to the top, I saw that the upstairs room was set up to be used for a gameroom. Oddly, the contrast in this room stood out from the downstairs. Small and ever-so-dim corners and shadows placed about the room reminded me of old photos that people used to take on those polaroid cameras from the 80s and 90s. It had a grainy look to it, as well as an uneven exposure. This time, though, it seemed as if I were in one of those pictures.

The space was almost entirely bare, except for a small entertainment system which stood against the wall (this one not being covered in floral design), accompanied by a bulky 30 to 35-inch CRT TV, and a Nintendo 64, with a game cartridge sticking up from inside that I couldn’t distinguish from this far. My mouth dropped open, astonished, and that excited feeling of electricity, the kind you get when you experience an ‘ah-ha’ moment, now replaced any other notion of uncertainty that I may have had before.

“Oh my god,” I spoke under my breath.

“Travis?” Jennifer’s voice sounded.

I let out a short, scoff-like chuckle as I clasped my hands over my head.

“This is my aunt’s old house,” I exclaimed. “My Aunt Deborah - this is her old house.”

"Now we're getting somewhere," Jennifer spoke in a proud tone.

I let out another laugh. “This is insane,” I commented. “I remember we visited here one time. A long time ago. And…”

I stepped towards the entertainment center, and bent over to get a closer peak at the N64. I now clearly saw what cartridge was inserted into the console, and a smile drew over my face.

“Good ol’ country club golf,” I finished. “Wow…”

“Country club golf?” Jennifer asked.

“One of the games we used to play on the ‘64 was Waialae Country Club. ‘True Classics’, to be exact.”

“Ah…”

“That’s insane...” I whispered under my breath.

“I told you you’d see where I was going with this, huh?” Jennifer teased.

I stammered, shaking my head, trying to contemplate what I was experiencing. This was something beyond any other thing I’ve done before. This was bigger than VR or AR. This was something else entirely. It knew my deepest memories and had made a place inside my own brain.

Jennifer continued. “You see, these words that I’m giving you is just a small example of what your subconscious can act with, based on just a single word that can trace back to countless other thoughts stored in your memory bank. We now are starting to understand why we dream something related to a conversation we might’ve had earlier that same day, and why our brains decided to cling onto that specific conversation or even a single word that was said. Cadacus allows us to do that exact same thing but on our own terms.”

Jennifer allowed me to explore the house a bit more. I tried checking out the other rooms, but each time I was met with nearly empty spaces. I’m not sure how my subconscious mind was trying to interpret the house, but it was the equivalent to a bad buffer, or loading bar that never quite finished. Some rooms had little furniture, and for the furniture that did exist, they were weirdly vague.

In different parts of the rooms, it was like a Picasso drawing come to life, just a little neater and more organized. At least I could tell it was furniture and decor for different sections of the house, yet, I couldn’t exactly describe what I was looking at. Some things looked like a chair, others like a lamp, maybe even some jewelry lying about, and other sorts of bathroom accessories like a towel or soap made sense here and there, but overall, when you looked at them altogether, the house was a huge enigma.

“Jennifer, why is everything so…” I began, trying to find the word.

“Disorganized? Jumbled?” she finished for me.

“Exactly.”

“So, remember what I told you, just like with the pictures, the hub can only render and replicate what it knows, or the best idea of what it ‘thinks’ it knows. What is it in your dream - I’m sorry, subconscious state - that looks disorienting to you?”

I let out a short burst laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly know how to describe it, you know? It’s so confusing to me.”

“Do things sort of look like, for example, like they’re pieces of furniture or specific objects, yet, they somehow don’t at the same time?”

Bingo. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like. I don’t understand it, though.”

“Well, that’s what these studies are for, right? What you’re doing right now is a huge help to getting us to better understand how our subconscious minds continue to work in mysterious ways. It seems a common testimony in all the people who’ve participated report the same thing of not being able to completely interpret specific objects. It’s a known fact that over time, our brains will remember things much differently than how they actually occurred, and certain memories will slowly fade over the years.”

“So I can still remember the basic layout of the house, but not what was in it specifically?” I said.

“Mm-hmm. You got it. So… would you like to continue on to a different word?” I obliged. “Very well then. Just like before, when I say the word, you’re gonna close your eyes and just focus on every single thing you can related to that word alone. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Okay… ‘summer’.”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I opened my eyes and was no longer inside. I was outdoors, the sky was clear blue, and it was bright and warm out. Looking down at my feet, I saw that I was standing on grass, and when I looked back up around me, in the distance there were fields of trees that led to deep woods. Not too far to my left lied a small timber bridge just over a tiny creek with a bed full of rocks. It had to be in some sort of park. A summer camp, maybe? Or just perhaps a regular community park I may have visited some time ago.

I walked around to try and see what other things might pop up to spark something inside. As I turned a corner around a field of tall bushes, the scene beyond abruptly changed to that of what looked to be the grounds of a fare or some sort of carnival. A carousel, stuffed prizes, empty concessions, and other sorts of festivities lined up. I remembered a place like this once, I thought.

I told Jennifer all of this, and we both began trying to dig for clues as to what this particular memory was about. However, this one was a lot easier than my Aunt Deborah’s house, since I actually can recall this day. Or, at least the fact that we showed up. The only other moments I can maybe remember having on this day were playing tag with some friends, strangers, or even cousins, and us throwing this small toy shovel at a couple of wasp nests just under the timber bridge I’d seen earlier, then running like hell later to escape their fury. Funny how that thought decided to resurface the longer I stayed here, just goes to show how big of assholes kids could be, and I was no exception. I could never imagine doing something so cruel nowadays.

“Hmm, looks like your mood changed a bit,” Jennifer pointed out, more than likely reading my vitals again from where she was. “You seem relaxed. And the parts of your brain that are lighting up more seem to indicate a sense of joy and happiness. Sounds about right?”

“I miss my childhood,” I replied. “Sometimes it’d be great to just relive a time where I didn’t have to be an adult, you know?”

“Oh, I hear you. Why don’t you say it louder for the people in the back.”

I chuckled. But then I stopped as a thought occurred to me.

“Speaking of which, is it normal to not see anybody at all?” I questioned. “In the hub, I mean?”

“Yes, it’s very normal. In very few cases, we’ve had some people report seeing long-lost family members or even some friends of theirs. When we talked about it after, all of them said that the people they saw in the hub had a strong relationship with them, which tells us that the stronger the bond we share with people in our lives, the longer we hold onto those memories, allowing us to paint a better picture of how they looked through the Cadacus.”

“I guess I don’t love anyone as much as I thought,” I dryly remarked.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Jennifer said, knowing good and well that I was joking. “It’s gonna be different for everyone else. The words that another host or myself gives to you or others won’t come up with the same results, obviously because you all have different life experiences and memories unique to you.”

It was time to move on to a different ‘trigger word’, as Jennifer called them. Still wish she would’ve picked a different name for it, but I digress.

“Alright, you ready?” she started as usual.

“Ready when you are,” I replied.

“Good. Okay… ‘dandelion’.”

As before, I closed, then opened my eyes.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I found myself standing in a vast lobby of some sort. There was some light, but very little to illuminate the entire space. The floor was a red-colored carpet, the same one you’d see in some movie theaters still. As I looked around at the barely visible walls, an artificial tree standing in a pot in the corner, and another obscure, jumbled rendering of an object that looked gold, I was beginning to think that I actually was in a theater.

I walked forward to explore, and found myself feeling, for the first time since I initially started, rather uneasy. But I didn’t know why…

The area was spacious, and from my perspective, the theater felt as if it could fit hundreds of people. I couldn’t tell if I had shrunk a little or if the design of the place was just that large, but everything felt so gigantic. Unnecessarily gigantic, I should add.

As I kept walking, in the distance I saw a faint shimmer of light grow more and more visible. With each step, I began to realize that it was an overlight, or a sort of spotlight, rather. Underneath the light was a random dinner table, perfectly arranged and set up for guests. But why here? It was so strange and out of place. Yet, I began to notice something else even stranger that I didn’t acknowledge until now. I didn’t hear Jennifer’s voice this time.

“Jennifer?” I called out.

No response. There was no hiding it now. I was nervous. Not just nervous that the Cadacus might have malfunctioned, but nervous because I was alone…

“Jennifer?” I called again.

Still nothing. That uncomfortable silence that filled the hub was louder than anything. I could hear my own heartbeat frantically pounding between my ears.

“Yes?” Jennifer’s voice called back to me. “Travis, can you hear me?”

It was an out-of-body experience to feel much-needed relief after nearly losing it, like being thrown in an icy pool of water just to be pulled back out and doused in warm water. Whether it was a simple mishap in the machine or not, it was fucked up.

“You had me worried there for a sec, Jennifer,” I spoke as I let out a breathy chuckle of relief.

“Yeah, that was kinda strange. Nothing seemed to show interference on my end… I’m not sure what happened. I was calling to you but I couldn’t hear anything back.”

And let’s add that to the list of ‘mistakes’ this test run was supposed to catch while we’re at it.

“Do you see anything interesting - well, I guess I should ask what do you see*?”*

I told her about the theater, at least it was what I thought to be a theater, as well as the obscurity of the dinner table. She of course tried to tie this back with the ‘theatrical’ theme I had going on in my subconscious mind, which I still thought might be a bit of a stretch. For now, she insisted that I kept exploring to see what else I could find that may explain things.

Near the end of the hallway, a door remained a jar, and a bit of a light projected from the room in a wedge shape. I’d have to keep walking further to see what was inside, but I couldn’t help but feel slightly more uneased. Something didn’t feel right about this place. None of the other ones gave me this same sensation.

I carefully stepped into the room with the open door, and was confused by what I saw. The scene had changed yet again, this time to what looked to be a party room of some sort. Long tables were aligned with chairs pushed in and spaced apart from each other. Plastic colored cups, paper plates, napkins, and birthday party hats were neatly stacked and perfectly organized along each row. The floor also had a retro-patterned carpet design like the ones I’d see in other theaters or arcades, making me feel like I was going to space.

The lighting in here was different as well. It was a dimly-lit blue ambiance, almost like a night light. I found it rather calming compared to the outside in the theater lobby.

Then from behind me, the deafening sound of the door slamming shut filled the room, and filled me with dread as I jumped.

“Travis, are you okay?” Jennifer’s voice sounded. “Your heartbeat’s escalating really fast. Is everything all right?”

I almost forgot how to breathe.

“I-I don’t know what just happened,” I stammered. “The door shut.”

“The door? What door?”

“The one to the party room. I’m inside the party room and the door just slammed. Am I alone? I-Is someone here with me?” I was panicking.

“Travis, remember what we discussed. You do not have to see anything scary if you don’t want to. You hear me? You do not have to be afraid. Just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and count to three, okay?”

That was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to yell at her to get me out of the damn thing. I was now getting the feeling that I maybe wasn’t alone after all in the hub. I hadn’t seen a single figure yet, and the first signs of anyone else being here with me began to seem more alarming than I once thought.

I closed my eyes and did what she said. I counted.

“1… 2… 3.”

I opened my eyes again, and this time, I was still in the party room, but the calming blue luminescence was now replaced with an unsettling crimson color instead. The place had turned into a red room. I didn’t tell Jennifer, but I hated the color red. It was a lot of people’s favorite color, but I never liked it. It made me feel sick, and now I was drowned by it.

I looked around and noticed other horrifying features of the room. Streaks of what I could only assume was blood were randomly plastered across different parts of the room. What kind of memory was this?

Anxiety returned. I found it hard to breathe yet again. I needed to get out of here.

“Jennifer, get me out!” I yelled. “You hear me? Jennifer, please get me out!”

This time, she didn’t respond. Fuck. It was malfunctioning again. This was not a good time to start fucking up now.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit, shit, shit…”

Panicked, I stood huddled in a corner of the room, not sure where to go, but definitely not wanting to leave myself exposed to whatever may be out there. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be stuck here, maybe forever for all I knew. But right now wasn’t the time to think of any of that. I had to get the fuck away from this place. Whatever positive mental tricks Jennifer tried to preach clearly wasn’t working. I had to be brave, I told myself. It was just my own subconscious. I tried to tell myself that to give me some sort of comfort.

I crept over to the door with nothing to defend myself with. Jennifer wasn’t here to accompany me now. I was alone.

When I got to the door, I hesitated to place my hand on the knob. But I slowly raised and positioned it over, and was just about to grasp the knob until I realized something. There was now a window framed onto this door, unlike the first time…

I looked up, and right before my eyes, a child, a small boy, slammed his hands onto the window from the other side, screaming at the top of his lungs. To this day, I have yet to witness something as bone-chilling and hair-raising, and something so fear-inducing as to make me feel as if my own soul left my body.

I jumped back, so frightened that I fell to the floor. I kept my eyes fixed on the child, though, and he continued beating on the window, screaming for help. He was the first person I’d seen in the hub, and he was so real. So vivid. The fear in his eyes, the franticness… I wanted to help him.

But before I could do anything, something, or someone snatched him away and disappeared from the other side of the door.

“No!” I gasped.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Before I knew it, I was back in the lab room with Jennifer right next to me, frantically removing the Cadacus from off of me. The sterile whiteness of the room blinded me as she removed the headset from my eyes.

[birdscreeches]

Kids These Days || Aisha R.

The Marian Auditorium of Miriam CoIIege could seat one thousand fifty people, apparently, and on that day, it was a full house. Not necessarily by choice, of course. Every student there, aged twelve to probably fourteen at the oldest, had congregated into the air conditioned structure and settled into the smooth, wooden seats of the auditorium because this was a required thing, this talk on sexuality.

And if that isn’t a big, scary word. Sexuality. In a place like an all girls Catholic high school, saying the word “sexuality” was like opening a bag of chips in a dead quiet room. You will be met with winces or sneers or snickers. You might even get in trouble. The metaphor isn’t really foolproof, because on one hand, you’ve got a snack, and on the other, you’ve got an integral aspect of the human experience with endless variations. It’s a lot less “palatable”, for one. Not as tasty. Sexuality was funny. It was dirty. It was something to be whispered about and not spoken of, especially if you were twelve or thirteen or fourteen. Hell, even if you were older, it could still be something taboo. Growing up, or the failure of thereof, was a little peculiar like that.

But here they were for an entire two hour long talk all about sexuality. October of 2016, roughly one thousand fifty students were chucked into an auditorium where they tittered in a classic mixture of teenage curiosity, anticipation, and habitual boredom. On stage, the speaker, a family psychologist, walks out. The voices of the one thousand fifty students hush from a buzz to a hum to silence.

And the thus the talk began.

To say that the talk was a trainwreck would be a fantastic, monumental understatement. It seemed like every high school freshman I spoke to had something to say about the talk.

“Oh,” said A, a bookish girl with glasses who looked quiet and shy right up until I brought up The Talk. She pushed her glasses up in a way one knew meant she was livid. “It was awful.”

B, a student I had spoken to via email correspondence had written “It was terrible. Obscure. Immature.”

“I wanted to cry,” said R, looking like she was about to cry. “That talk made me want to cry.”

In a nutshell, the so-called sexuality talk was a verbal cavalcade of sexist stereotypes only thinly disguised as something educational. The speaker had talked about how men and women were different, how men’s brains were like waffles (boxed and organized) and women’s brains were like spaghetti (“Noodling around,” A told me. “I’m not shitting you. The speaker said, ‘women think like spaghetti, we’re always noodling around.’ What the hell does that mean?”) By the halfway point of the talk, students had resigned themselves to the fact that this was another one of those inane things the school did that they’ll have to forcibly erase from their memory. The talk went on about boys and girls and flirting and relationships and stuff everybody already knew about before always peddling back to “Studies first!” Educational stuff right here.

But the real kicker was this: one brave girl, just one out of roughly one thousand fifty, stood up, walked to the microphone set up in the aisle, and asked a question. She asked the question that was thrumming through the heads of a lot of students in the auditorium. She asked, “What do you think of LGBT?”

In front of one thousand fifty students, the speaker had smiled sweetly—sweet in the way that probably made you feel sick—and said “All the feelings you have for women, project them onto men instead.”

-

See, non-heterosexual people exist. Non-heterosexual teenagers exist. It just so happens some of them will end up in an all girls Catholic high school.

“It sucks,” R told me. R is a high school freshman. She had short hair and glasses and good grades and she was Not Straight. We spoke just a little bit after class ended at a lunch table in the school’s cafeteria. To her left was A, one of her friends who also was Not Straight, eyes downcast, as if she already knows the rest of what R was going to say. R said, “But, I don’t know. You get used to it.”

Which begs the question what exactly it is kids these days are forced to get used to.

The horror stories spanning from different schools are myriad. Sometimes it’s subtle. Miriam CoIIege High School had certain days where students could come in civilian attire, but “crossdressing” was not allowed. Students must dress like ladies.  St. PauI College Pasig has a rule against short hair. A bobcut is pushing it, and if you had a cut that was no longer in the realm of “female hair” you’d get talked to. L, a student from St. Paul, rocked something of a pixie cut during her stay at the school. She was called to the principal’s office for it every year and was even threatened with expulsion. Gender norms and non-heterosexual presentation are closely linked, and rules like these are tiny ways to make sure nothing happens even at a surface level. Rules like these are pretty nifty because it’s rather easy to shake one’s head and say this has nothing to do lesbians. It was about image.

Sometimes it’s more blatant. A had told me about a school—she couldn’t remember which one, just one from the expansive catalog of all girls Catholic schools—that had written in their handbook something along the lines of “girl on girl relations are strictly prohibited.”

Miriam College High School, the school where participants were taken from, has, in the curriculum for Christian Life, an entire section on Sexuality and Marriage. As expected, it all boiled down to teaching pissed off teenagers that if you weren’t straight, you were going to hell. Sure, it was sugar coated, but fancy plating doesn’t change the truth. If you took a shot for every time an earnest CL teacher said “God hates the sin, and not the sinner,” whilst making awkward eye contact with every visible lesbian in the classroom, we’d be getting to hell much earlier due to alcohol poisoning.

A controversial example of the curriculum at work would be the third term CL final exam given to the graduating batch of 2016. Questions upon questions of situations and matching values were put into a test that decided a student’s grade. Insert name here is a gay man in a relationship and dot dot dot. Insert name here thinks she is bisexual and dot dot dot. As a Christian, what is your response?

Many students refused to answer these questions at all. That was their response.

The act of existing in an all girls Catholic high school is one that’s implicit with resignation concerning this kind of treatment. Catholicism is obvious in its restrictions. It’s Adam and Eve, etcetera, but beyond religion, the structure of high schools and how they’re run creates an environment where not much can be done about it. The students are gay and the teachings are against you. If you’re really unlucky, a few teachers will be too. There can be teachers who are supportive, but they can’t really do much against the entirety of the administration. A joke I heard from a student was something along the lines of “There’s a reason why the CL department is so far away from the English department.” Right. Gotta keep the liberals away from the conservatives. An accepting teacher is a treat, but ultimately a bandaid in a world of gashes.

But, as R said, you get used to it. Or maybe you already were.

“And that’s messed up,” A told me. A was another freshman from a different class, and she really looked like a sweet girl. Anger didn’t suit her, but it graced her features anyway. It was mostly in her eyes; a hardened, steeled gaze. She is thirteen years old.

-

The thing about the infamous sexuality talk is that it’s the paragon of reinforcement. Smaller strains of it exist in things like religion class, disapproving teachers, guidance counselors who tilt their heads when you mention a girlfriend, and the list goes on.

It’s tempting to be confused as to why these things continue when they obviously don’t “work.” Work in the sense that these people and their attitudes don’t magically craft an army of straight girls. This much is evident by the persisting population of non heterosexuals existing in all girls Catholic schools. Talk after class after session, one after the other, and they’re still there and still as gay as ever.

These things continue because it’s a new coat of paint on the Straight Is Good sign. To students, this is something they’ll get to see on a regular basis. Those who disagree will continue to disagree, but there will be those who believe it. Of the non heterosexuals, this is just a small jab in the midst of many. They’ll get used to it, but some of them won’t. There will be those who believe it.

Of those who get used to it, the thought now is the fact that in an ideal world, they shouldn’t have to be.

“We’re used to being treated like this. There are worst things, but there are better ones too.” A said, “I wanna be used to better things.”

-

“I mean, I guess we’re lucky.” R told me a little later. We had taken a short break to buy food. R and A were now munching on gummy candies shaped like pizzas. There was something about this contrast that struck me; soft gummies and hard issues and teenagers who have both. “At least the students are really accepting. Just a week ago there was this, this romantic thing?”

“Yeah!” A piped in. “This girl had this sign like ‘I love you’ for another girl and they did this thing with flowers and stuff. It was really sweet. Right in the middle of the covered court, lunchtime. All the students were cheering.”

“And I figure, any teachers in the vicinity would just pretend not to notice,” I joked, but A just fixed her eyes on me again.

“What else can they do?” She said. And really, what else was there?

Ignorance, it seemed, was the easiest out. It certainly was the kinder evil. Averted eyes and skillful segues, and you never have to talk about gay students because well, they don’t really exist, anyway. “I’d take that over ‘gay is a sin’ any day,” A told me. “At least they stay away. They leave us alone.”

How lonely, I thought, but I didn’t tell her this. Instead, I just nodded and accepted that sometimes you have to settle. Whether it was a tragedy or not didn’t matter as much as the circumstances that pushed kids to have to set their standards low in the first place for something as simple as wanting to be accepted.

It seems if you’re a non-heterosexual student in a Catholic high school, it’s either you exist and you’re punished for it, or you’re ignored and you take what you can get. So flip a coin for it. I tell them this, and they laugh.

“I kind of don’t want to, though,” R said, squishing a gummy between her fingers. “It’s 2017. I kind of want more. Is that too much to ask?”

Not at all, I thought. Not at all.

-

In an auditorium filled with roughly one thousand fifty students, everybody hushed down, gritted their teeth, and listened. But if there’s something I’m getting from the kids I’ve seen and spoken to, it’s that they’re getting a little bit tired of that routine.

Perhaps, slowly, the silence will pick up. The murmurs will start. The words. The discussions. The voices will up in volume and confidence, a cadence of identity. Once upon a time, these kids were told to project their feelings elsewhere, and, in a sense, they are.

They’re projecting their feelings outward and beyond, loud and clear, absolutely demanding to be heard.

[jeremystrele]

A Tiny Handmade Home Built By A Father-Daughter Duo!

A Tiny Handmade Home Built By A Father-Daughter Duo!

Tiny Homes

Sasha Gattermayr

Camilla Walker built the tiny home at the bottom of her parents’ garden in Coburg with her dad, Patrick. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Camilla at home! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The view from one end of the home to the other. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The kitchen, dining and living area are all tucked neatly into the main space, while the loft houses a separate mezzanine bed and Camilla’s bathroom is behind the sliding door! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

A plumber and electrician were the only outside help Patrick and Camilla received in constructing the home. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Although Camilla admits she probably could have been a bit more nifty with storage space, the small dwelling has forced her to only own object she truly loves and needs. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Camilla’s bedroom. Her only two requirements were that the house had plenty of natural light and her bedroom was on the ground-floor. Here, she has both! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Patrick + Camilla Walker outside the finished tiny home, which took 8 months to complete. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The entrance to the tiny home, where Camilla looks out onto her parents’ lush garden. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

    The construction phase in progress!

The completed dwelling, entirely handcrafted by Camilla and Patrick. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

  Poppies in the garden outside Camilla’s tiny home. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

Having a bountiful garden to plonk your tiny home is definitely an added bonus! Camilla spends lots of time outside in hers. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

The lush garden Camilla shares with her parents. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files. Styling – Annie Portelli.

It’s no secret that increasingly, home ownership in the traditional sense is not a reality for many young Australians, and even more so for those without someone to join forces with. When Camilla Walker‘s parents first floated the idea of building a tiny home for her, she thought it was a bit bonkers. But after some consideration, she began to see the perks.

There are many reasons to build a tiny home. Generally, they have a low environmental impact, discourage overconsumption, and are economical to build and maintain. And for Camilla, there was the added bonus of being even closer to her beloved parents!

Located at the bottom of their garden in Coburg, Camilla and her dad Patrick built this tiny home by hand between September 2019 and April of this year. Over those eight months, the Walkers did everything themselves – drilling, jig-sawing, hammering, and painting – until the tiny, cosy cabin came to life. Despite her early reservations, Camilla has never been happier.

We quizzed her about every angle of this impressive project!

Hey Camilla! First of all, how did the idea of building a tiny home arrive as an option for you?

My parents went to a talk on tiny homes and suggested it to me as something to consider as a housing option. I thought it was a horrible idea at first! But I mulled it over for quite a while and eventually saw the plus side – no mortgage, living more sustainably with a lot less, being near my family, and building a house with my Dad. A lot of my friends were buying their first homes, which wasn’t financially viable for me back then when I was a single gal, so I built one instead with the budget I had!

Did you have any reservations about living ‘with your parents’?

Yes. I’ve been very independent for thirteen years, moving out of home and interstate when I was just 18, living in various sharehouses and overseas in London for a bit. I cringed at the idea of being anything but self sufficient. But as my friends have always told me, I have ‘cool parents’, and we foster a relationship that isn’t ‘parent + child’ so much as it is ‘adult family members who get along really well’.

We share meals, split bills, have each other over for coffee, help each other out, and particularly during Covid times I’ve felt the warmth and love of family that so many have probably been pining for. I love my parents with all of my heart, and never want to look back on life and wish I’d had more time with them.

Talk us through the construction phase!

My Dad and I built my house. Dad was a carpenter when we were kids so has unlimited skills and experience when it comes to building. He’s also endlessly creative and everything he touches turns into an eccentric masterpiece.

We had many discussions about the tiny house and how to build it. We looked at Pinterest a lot to make a mood board, watched tiny house videos and got a great feel for how to approach it. Essentially though, a tiny house is one room so you’re governed by the four walls. We sketched up the floor plan very loosely and then just went for it.

There were a few things I was adamant about – my room had to be on the ground floor (not in the loft as I didn’t want to have to crouch to get dressed) and I needed lots of windows for light and airflow. We had a plumber and electrician come in to do their thing, but the rest was all Dad and I.

How do you approach everyday life in your tiny home?

Life in my tiny home is simple – I wake up and have a coffee, and go out my front or back door to different parts of the garden. It is literally one room but I don’t ever wish I had more space. It has a kitchen and bathroom (with a composting toilet which isn’t as bad as it seems), and a shower which is plenty big enough. The only thing it doesn’t have is a laundry so I pop to the big house to do my washing. I also need to look into some serious cooling during summer because it can get pretty sweaty on a hot day!

We designed the house so that if I ever relocate it pretty much everything can be removed. For example, I don’t have an inbuilt stove, but rather an electric stove top and oven that I store under the bench. To be honest, I was a bit light on with storage (i.e. we weren’t clever to build storage into every nook and cranny) so I have to be ruthless with what stays in the house. For example, my wardrobe can only fit one season’s clothes so I swap them over every few months and put what I’m not wearing in a suitcase under the house.

What kind of life does your tiny home represent to you more broadly?

I’m a minimalist at heart and as I get older, I want only beautiful or practical things in my home. I hate having stuff for the sake of it. My tiny house represents doing life a bit differently – no mortgage, living alone (but quite communally) and feeling free. It’s on wheels so I can cruise away at any time too!

How long do you envision yourself living here?

It’s hard to say how long I will live here. I love it for now, it suits my lifestyle and I foresee growing more fond of it as time passes. But I also love change, so when the time comes for me to fly the coop again (lol), I don’t feel tied to owning a house in a traditional sense. I will either leave it in the yard or sell it, or relocate it to somewhere new!

What has been the most rewarding part of this project?

The feeling of living in a house we built from scratch! Sometimes I just stand in the kitchen and look up and I’m in awe of how beautiful the space is. I know where every last material came from, how heavy every piece of timber is, how strong its foundations are, how much insulation went into the walls, how I wondered what the hell I had done when the trailer was first delivered, and how much I dreamt about what this home would be like when I was living in it. And now I know that it’s the life for me.

[angstymarshmallow]

Three Days For Us  - Zig x MC

#ChoicesCreates Round 21

Book: The Freshman/The Sophomore Pairing: Zig x MC Prompt: “What if…?” Rating: T  Hosted by @catsrtheboss this week!

[A little note: The first ship I thought of was initially something else but I decided to take a small break to work on some other stuff. This is supposed to take place after Hartfeld University; except Zig and MC has never met formally until now].

[Summary: Another end of the year, means another round of Christmas parties and exchanging of holiday gifts. In a world filled with family and couples, MC despises this season until a twist of fate means she might not have to spend it alone this year.]

The mall was overflowing, cluttered with people three nights before Christmas Eve. Little children scurried with their parents trailing not far behind and couples walked hand in hand, laughing and joking with one another as if they were sharing some sort of private joke. They might as well had been.

Dia was distracted by her own sullen thoughts, when her eyes had swiftly snapped at attention. Three children were incoming fast and she narrowly avoided slamming into them in her distraught fumble of angling out of their way. She clutched her own shopping bags tightly, startled as they raced by her.

Seconds later, their parents had followed. They spared a glance in her direction, uttering a hasty admission of guilt as they swept by her.

She bristled at the sight of pity in their eyes and found herself wanting to say something. The urge to convince them as she had often tried to convince herself nearly overwhelmed her. She didn’t mind being alone. 

Everyone had someone during the holiday season, everyone except her. Her messy entanglements never lasted till Christmas, and she had never wanted them to. But as she mumbled miserably at the misgivings of seeing everyone else quite happy, watching and wedging herself between crowds of people on a night such as this; she had never been so painfully aware of just how alone she was. 

People continued scrambling by her. They cast apprehensive stares as they flitted by, wandering in every store. These were the types of people she longed to avoid - as if they were the black plague themselves during the holiday season. Usually, she was simply better than this; better than being caught by the last rush of Christmas gift buyers before the weekend.

She wasn’t big on the holidays. She preferred the quiet company of herself and her dingy apartment, over spending it with her friends, and family - nor was she the type of person to cross people off her list so close to the deadline. Her finitely short list never even took her long to shop for.

Unfortunately this month had been stressful, hard. She spent more nights working than she did sleeping. She had an influx of clients since the start of the month and was surprised by the amount of people wanting contemporary tattoos going into the new year. 

It was only three days before that business had finally slowed long enough for her to make the trip into one of Northbridge’s biggest mall. Yet with the extra hours she had under her belt, she was beginning to regret leaving the safety of her home at nearly every turn, as people inevitably ran into her.

Another shoulder shoved pass her and her own had stiffened in response by the sheer force of the blow. The person hadn’t impede their movement long enough to apologize and she had been left muttering under her breath about how much she hated the holidays. 

She hadn’t been paying much attention, before slipping into the safety of the next store she spotted. She rarely made trips here and yet she could not deny the familiarity she that clung to the store once she found her bearings again. 

The store was filled with little trinkets and nifty gadgets; things she saw potential in crossing off the last two people on her list. 

Abbie and Kaitlyn had both required something with equal parts artistic and equal parts of careful deliberation. She hadn’t been able to find anything that spoke out to her when it came to them, and had been here all morning searching aimlessly for something to engross her.

Zack had been the first friend she crossed off her list. A gorillapod - a portable tripod for the next time his agent called for a sporadic audition tape. Chris had mentioned his desire for a new set of tools to fuel his sudden hobby at fixing cars at their last brunch together and Tyler would be over the moon when he spotted her gift; a freshly new copy of the latest installment in the crown and the flame video game series. 

Her eyes widened in bewilderment when she took note of the sheer amount of people flooding inside the store the longer she waited. It was nearly packed to the brim with customers invading one another’s personal space. They barely strung together gruff apologizes to each other and her stomach churned at the thought of delving inside.

However, something stopped her from leaving its entrance. An indescribable feeling, telling her she was meant to be here, at this exact moment in time.

Dia believed in very little, least of all fate. She knew better from years of experience that following her gut never led to good decisions. Yet, her feet refused to move and her eyes darted across the store.

She had to make a decision. 

She ignored the funny feeling inside her stomach, bubbling with nerves the longer she shifted on her feet. Swallowing her nerves, she marched inside and her eyes skimmed the store quickly. She maneuvered between people, bristling with every abrupt brush of contact until her eyes spotted it. 

A pair of gloves, carefully handcrafted from the looks of it with an embellished design. It was pretty, and stood out from the rest left on the highest shelf. It didn’t hurt that it happened to be in Abbie’s favorite colour, another sign that she probably shouldn’t ignore. 

Abbie had a deep appreciation for handcrafted goods. 

She was still deliberating when her feet begun moving of their own accord. Twisting and rushing to close the distance. When her hands finally touched the first glove, she uttered a cry of alarm at seeing another pair of hands reaching at the same moment to grab the other.

A hand darker than her own, and much fairer in complexion tried to yank it from in between her fingers.

A feral noise of possessiveness escaped her throat before she held onto the glove tighter. She hadn’t suffered all of this holiday misgivings for someone else to steal away this prized and rare jewel. 

Her eyes swung to meet the intruder’s gaze hauntingly, and a declaration of expletives waited for quiet liberation until she saw him.

His eyes were dark, and somber. They stared unflinchingly at her in aggravation, until their eyes met for the first time. 

They blinked in surprise at her. 

Her complaints died rather quickly on her lips.

Her eyes moved in quick flurry to finish her inspection of him. They gave an appreciative once over until they traveled back to his almost symmetrical features.  He was good looking, extremely good looking.

When she glanced up again, he was smirking at her. As if the gloves had been momentarily forgotten, he met her stare head on. Then, slowly they drifted lower, taking their time to inspect her. His eyes roamed across every part of her.

Her skin tingled as if he had reached out and touched her. She swallowed back the sudden dryness inside her throat. 

The air seemed to fizzle, hissing as if whispering their sudden silent attraction; a mixture of desire and frustration all tangled into one with neither one of them flinching away.

Eventually, Dia does first. She ignored the sight of his triumphant smile from the corner of her eyes and listened to her own heartbeat, deciding it was probably better for her health and her heart to relent. 

When she could finally breathe again, her eyes swept back to his. She shot him the most frigid stare she could muster and tugged on the glove inside her own hand. “I was here first.” 

He didn’t drop his hand nor did he seem fazed by her chilling expression. Instead, he scowled at her. “We got here at the exact same time, you know that.” When she didn’t argue, he jerked his chin at her. “I deserve this as much as you do, probably even more after the week I’ve had.”

She scowled back. “Listen,” she tried to draw on her full height; a measly five feet and six inches compared to his towering six feet. “I didn’t spend all morning burying myself in stores and insufferable people just for some jock to come and take away my last chance at finding the perfect gift.” She said adamantly, watching as his brows shot up in surprise. 

“Jock?” He scoffed, shaking his head. “My students would probably disagree.” He corrected, drawing a puzzled frown from her. 

She was skeptical. He looked like the type; broad shoulders and tight muscles - dressed in a leather jacket and jeans; as if he had stepped fresh out of a scene from Grease. Things she would have probably appreciated under different circumstances. 

The man’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened in irritation. “And I’m sure if I hadn’t spent the whole day looking for the perfect gift for one of my sister’s I would actually care enough to surrender the last pair.” He replied shortly, tugging harder.

She felt her own hackles rise as she pulled back in her direction. “Yeah well, tough luck seems to be my motto today and I’ll tell you what I told that kid when I swiped the last copy of the crown and the flame. I. Don’t. Care.”

Another yank.

“I don’t care either!” His teeth visibly clenched.

Another yank.

Their tug of war continued with neither of them breaking eye contact. She gritted her teeth at him, fuming inwardly at the interruption. 

His nostrils flared and  his expression didn’t waver.

In seconds, their attention had  shifted from the gloves to each other. They became preoccupied with eyeing at one another again, except the stinging attraction between them had been replaced with the intensity of their harsh stares. 

They were trying to make the other flinch, and Dia had no intention of losing.

Neither one of them realized the gloves stuck in between their vice-like grips were beginning to thin, and stretch. 

Dia heard the sound of the material tearing far sooner than she had dragged her eyes away. The look of horror in her eyes palpable as was the man in front of her as his lips twisted into a snarl,  seconds before the gloves had flown out of their hands and fell by their feet.

Her eyes grew wide. She glanced from him to the floor and then finally back at him. “Well, shit.”

Her eyes dropped to his lips and she watched them twitch before turning into another smirk. It was infectious, causing her own lips to quiver until they curved into a smile. 

Seconds passed like this, before they both started laughing. She shifted a little closer and clutched her sides, laughing harder with every breath until tears threatened to swarm her eyes. “Did we really just -”

His features turned practically comical. “-Ruin a good pair of gloves?” He finished for her, shaking his head ruefully.

“I think we really did.” She mused. “Damn, that sucks.” 

He snorted in agreement. “Must be inevitable when two stubborn people meet.”

A corner of her mouth lifted. “Oh? You can tell that already?”

“I’m pretty good at reading people.” He replied winking. He smiled then, a full out grin that nearly stole her breath.  

She thought he was good looking before but now when he was grinning at her; from ear-to-ear, she was taken aback. 

He was damn near irresistible. The way he was smiling at her should be criminal. 

Without thinking, she found herself opening up a little, tucking a stray hair behind her ear as she introduced herself. “I’m Dia by the way.” 

“Zigmund,” At the sight of her eyebrows quirking in response, he chuckled and added. “Yeah, I get that a lot. Just call me Zig.”

“Alright, Zig it is.”  Although she couldn’t place his name - his face seemed vaguely familiar. The more she stared up at him, the more certain she was that she had seen him before.

His eyebrows quirked in question. “What?”

She couldn’t place it, but whatever caused her mind to linger refused to be ignored.  “Did you uh - go to Hartfeld by any chance?” She blurted out, frowning absently. 

“No.” He replied, shaking his head. “But I did work close by. A lot of students came by the cafe I used to work at.”

“The one near the end of the street?” At his nod, she smiled thinly. “Maybe that’s where I recognized you from.”

His eyebrows were low, nearly forming a v from the center of his face before she rambled on quickly. “My um, friends and I used to spend a lot of time in there. I’m surprised we’ve never met before.” She finished lamely. 

“A lot of students tend to spend time in cafes,” though his lips quirked to soften his sarcasm. “But I think I would’ve remembered meeting someone like you.”

Despite the simple compliment, she felt her cheeks grow hot. She heard better lines, compliments that could make a woman swoon  - but it wasn’t the compliment that warmed her, not truly. 

It was the way in which he said it; earnestly as if it weren’t a line he rehearsed. It felt different. It felt like it mattered. 

She had forgotten where they were as they spoke, with heads slightly bent towards each other, and eyes rooted to every small gesture the other made. The spell had been broken as briskly as it begun though, when someone had passed close enough to knock her into him.

She uttered a grunt of irritation as she rocked forward, barely catching herself in time before the man in front of had instinctively steadied her. 

His touch was nothing like his eyes had been. They were worse. They shot up her spine and frayed her nerves. Her next intake of breath happened quickly, too quickly, visibly making him grin as his touch seemed to burn brightly inside her veins. 

He didn’t move his hand right away and when he released her, they lingered long after.

“Sorry,” she mumbled under her breath. 

“No worries, it’s just really overcrowded in here.” He sighed dejectedly before reaching to grab the pair of gloves.

She moved too, leaning forward to grab the other and their hands innocently brushed again. The reaction was nearly instantaneous and she quickly retrieved her hand when they stood. 

“My sister would’ve really liked these.” He mused, glancing at the half-torn gloves inside their hands.

She sighed too, “my friend would’ve loved them.” 

She spent a minute longer mulling over them, wondering if there was anyway to fix them fast enough before the Christmas party tomorrow. 

Then she felt it. Rather him, watching from the corner of her eyes. She instructed herself strictly to avoid him, to mutter some half-apology before darting away. But the idea of leaving didn’t appeal to her as much anymore, when all she had to come home to was an empty house. 

Her eyes inadvertently lifted to meet his.

She could get lost in eyes like these. It was dangerous to but they had a magnetic pull - bottomless, as if she were falling inside a well with no hope of ever reaching the end. “Are you free later?” She blurted out suddenly, and watched the surprise flicker inside them.

His lips distracted her. They lifted into that smirk again. “You mean if I ever get out of this crazy mall?”

“If we ever get out of this crazy mall,” she corrected him, dragging a hand through her pale hair. “I figure the least you could do is take me out after ruining those pair of gloves.”

“Bold.” He commented, grinning. “I like bold.”

“Then you’ll like me.” She dropped her gaze to the gloves still in between them then glanced at the line awaiting at the check out station in dismay. She counted over fifteen people. “But I suppose we’ll have to wait till we’re finished with these, huh?” 

“I have a better idea.” He took the single glove from her before she could protest. “Trust me,” he muttered, stuffing hers’ inside her jacket pocket while stuffing the other in his.

“I just met you, I don’t even know the important stuff. Like if you’re some sort of closeted serial killer.”

His lips tugged a smile. “Do I seem like I’m capable of such things? I mean just look at me?” He gestured at himself for emphasis.

“Believe me, I am looking.”

He smirked, “If your instincts haven’t scared you off from me yet - I guess you’re just gonna have to trust them.”

Her instincts had gotten her into this mess in the first place. “What’re you doing -”

“How fast can you run?” A mischievous glint had appeared, alighting his expression with almost boyish charm. It made them shine when he turned those pair of smoldering eyes to her.

Adrenaline and excitement intertwined, igniting her veins once she understood his meaning and acknowledged his plan. Luckily she had the good sense to wear her combat boots today. “Just try and keep up.” She replied, grinning before taking his hand.

Together they raced towards the door, shoving people out of their way in order to hastily retreat before any of the staff could spot them. The alarms rung inside their ears as they sprinted down the giant mall’s hall. Their joined hands made it easy to stay together and dart around larger groups. They could hear the curse of people behind them, followed by the rush of hurried footsteps except they had a clean head-start.

Zig chuckled beside her, tightening his hold on her hand. 

Their hair and gift bags flew wildly between them. Their legs kept the same hurried pace.

Dia’s own chest had seized with a mixture of panic and eagerness, almost palpable as they skirted into another corner, neatly by one of the exits in the mall.

Security guards had jumped in their way, yelling at them to stop. They ducked and maneuvered barely within arms reach, at nearly every turn. They picked up momentum once they realized they had more than two following them.

Their eyes scanned together for any safe haven, anything that could hide them long enough for the danger to pass.

Eventually, they had. 

A quiet yelp left Dia’s throat as Zig yanked her into him, shoving them flat against a small path in between two nearly adjoining walls. Their breaths hand mingled together and her chin had rested on his chest as they waited for the sound of footsteps to fade and ultimately, disappear. 

Once they could no longer hear them; she became aware of their heartbeats syncing together once she placed a hand on his chest.

His eyes flashed with excitement, excitement she felt pouring and flooding nearly every part of her. The adrenaline rush had made her dizzy, and the way his eyes darkened with desire made her knees grow weak. When she tried to step back, his hand had held her wrist. 

For a moment neither of them spoke.

She held his gaze as she flexed her toes, tipping them forward just enough for their lips to almost touch. 

He didn’t wait for her to close the distance, simply captured hers after swearing under his breath. His kiss wasn’t gentle, it was rough and thrilling as his hands dived into her hair. She strained against him while her eyes had fluttered close. Her arms slipped around his neck, yanking him closer until she sunk her teeth into his bottom lip, nipping gently when she heard him groan.

There were only three days until Christmas Eve. 

Three days she had spent consumed by him. 

Three days she had spent learning why people fell and fell hard. 

Three days she had spent allowing her imagination to wonder what if - what would three hundred and sixty-five days of him feel like? Look like?

Three days where she hadn’t spent a single moment alone.

[parrotbeak]

I wrote that Steven Universe-The Simpsons comparison with the decision to not mention the colonial angle. But it’s become difficult to read posts, some critical, some not, relating to any of the Earth-made gems and spot the same indifference that’s interwoven with my life as Indo. Hopefully this post educates a little on what it means (or can mean; I only speak for myself) to be caught in-between. I normally couldn’t care less, but in this one case, don’t interact if anti-crit or non-crit.

The don’t-think-this-is-all short of the Indo experience is that the Dutch way back figured it’d be nifty if the Dutch East Indies had a supply of loyal people with a reason to stay right where they are. Marriages between Dutch men and Indonesian women were motivated in order to produce a new identity of people that’d be invested in serving the DEI because that, the colony holding both roots, was their home. The duality of being Indo plays a role to this day, past the violence of 1940-1949, the unwelcome by the Netherlands to which the arrival of Indos (and Moluccans) was inconvenient as well as never supposed to happen, and the undealt-with trauma that followed when quietly adapting was all there was to do. I’m not going into detail, but for me, having been born decades after the end of the DEI, I miss the place. Rationally and morally that’s ridiculous, but emotionally it promises so many answers I’ll never get. A lot of my life perspectives are based on considerations of what being in-between means. And though I love the Netherlands dearly (culturally), being part Asian also makes me different and alerts me of just how much my country still hasn’t given its DEI history a place.

So, for me the theme of home in colonial and war context is big and SU lines that stand out to me include “I never asked for it to be this way. I never asked to be made!”, “I don't have memories of it, just feelings. I know I can never go back to Homeworld, but it's hard not to have some feelings for where you came from.”, “I've been fighting from the second I broke free of the Earth's crust, because of what YOU did to my colony! Because of what YOU did to my planet!”, “Who knows what they would do to me back home after what I did to Jasper? I can't go back to Homeworld and I can't stay here.” I’m going to go ahead requesting that if the urge comes to throw a “you’re projecting”, don’t, because odds are I know better just how much SU fails at all of this. These quotes are just a selection reminding what the show could've been and that the writers do have an understanding of what they’re pretending to dig into before disingenuously scrambling back to the Status Quo of everybody getting along because nothing has meaning. I could’ve done without them shoving that nonsense out to a worldwide audience.

With “On the Run”, I don’t see a tale of “just” abuse as I get the impression generally is interpreted. What I see is a child stolen from her destroyed heritage who is given nothing to cope with that and forge herself a new identity. The happy resolution of what Pearl in particular has done to her isn’t giving her better access to the story she belongs to, but eradicating her psychological ties to it. Like, I know what it’s like to have to think about this stuff and I can’t imagine external judgement and disassociation would’ve helped me figure things out. And that would've come from my own parent, not an ugly outsider like Pearl, let alone an outsider responsible for the loss. That’s the bizarre part of “On the Run”. It knows there’s an inherent attachment difference between Amethyst and Pearl, but it lies around it because otherwise Pearl can’t be easily forgiven. The rebellion was right, of course, but sometimes in doing the right thing you can’t avoid causing harm and your moral compass is still on display in how you deal with the aftermath of your actions. Although it is insult to injury to me that RPG are conditional freedom fighters. Each one of them was ultimately motivated by own gain. Ruby and Sapphire wanted each other, Pearl wanted Rose, and Rose wanted human men. This isn’t something I fault them for, but it’d be nice if the show was honest about it and acknowledged the current passivity. The only original CG who is pure and operates by ideology and who could’ve pulled off shutting out Amethyst’s ordeal while still not being insensitive is Bismuth. Instead, she gave Amethyst a kind of support Amethyst usually only gives, never receives. She even shared a non-judgy detail what amethysts are like, which we’ve never seen RPG do! How come Bismuth is the one whom we’re supposed to believe is bad?

Where Amethyst has meaning to me in direct likeness, Jasper is a bit more complex, falling into my sympathy through my grandfather and the (violence-induced) personality traits that have been passed on, being mine and also not. Notwithstanding what I judge, I cannot disapprove of Jasper on the whole. I’ve grown up knowing of a man who was overly dedicated to his role as soldier, who couldn’t keep his home, whose successes were of lesser meaning than his non-whiteness, and who in response only became more dedicated. Pride’s funny like that. I’m not against NPD and child soldier interpretations for Jasper, though I don’t share them, but I experience frustration that the nature of her existence in relation to her uncomfortable place in society is not picked up on as a possibility too. I wondered for a while why Lapis’s lack of (consistent) characterization does not stop peeps from acknowledging the potential she has (had) while Jasper gets more of a “either/or” treatment, until I realized that with Lapis too the home angle barely gets talked about. Ditto for Peridot; my main problem with her redemption is that it wasn’t completed. We only got to see how she came to love Earth, not how she disconnected from Homeworld. I’ve only twice seen a post bring that up. Same disregard is reason #~4 I’m not dealing with HBA fans anymore.

I dislike posts that suggest Amethyst owes RPG anything. I dislike posts that pose that Amethyst feels impure for not being a CG by choice. I dislike posts that place Amethyst and Jasper on incompatible ends as if they’re not different expressions of the same duality conflict. I do not tell what to ship or not, but from the above it should be clear that I hold a negative opinion of ships involving any member of the Famethyst with anyone who has proven not to understand (do the people who ship understand?). A particular thing that’s been on my mind with Jasper and Lapis ever since “a lapis terraforms” is the theory -- a miniscule possibility that makes my hair stand on end -- that Lapis was involved with the creation of Beta. Roughly the only reason I want her arc to continue is to have confirmation that that theory is wrong. It needs to be wrong. And on a final matter, trying to put this as delicately as I can: I hope all who have compared Homeworld to Nazi Germany come from a place where they own those words. Because there’s a distinct lack of other (and at times more fitting) comparisons. Like, I’ve only ever seen one person compare Homeworld’s deal to the invasion of the Americas and nothing on any other. Just in general, I’m not comfortable with understanding evil only as an externalized condition. 

If possible, I’d like to see some more consideration whenever an Earth-made gem is the topic. A loss like theirs is a bad one, and even if you’d argue SU deals with it horribly in a way that can be ignored, both Amethyst and Jasper have made references to their troubles as a result of the loss. I may as well add, to any (future) writers, a piece of advice. When your worldbuilding requires you to create societal details, keep in mind that life’s stranger than fiction and nothing you can come up with doesn’t have a real-life parallel, sometimes with memory still fresh (there’s nothing colonial in SU that’s new to me) or even ongoing. It’s pointless to tell you to educate yourself because you can’t always do that if you don’t know what to look for (and as I can attest, even with a lead it can be difficult), but you can always be a decent person about what you try to do. If you decide on certain themes, carry them full and sincere instead of suddenly hiding behind claims of intentional naivity. It’s not difficult to think of how a certain event ought to affect each character and either reject the event if it gets in the way of the goal or plan for the outcome.

To end on a constructive note, these are specific things I would’ve liked SU to do instead:

Be clear about the place of imperfect gems in society, including the occurence of beta productions. We’ve got, like, five random sources right now and they’re contradicting and vague at best.

Be clear whether Rose (and any others of the pink court) is from Earth or not. It matters.

It creeps me out how the show refuses to decide whether Amethyst is an adult or a child and pretty much lets it depend on whether it wants Steven alone or not. Especially creepy given that Amethyst is stolen while Steven is the grand heir.

Be thorough on gem names. I never thought that moment where Peridot calls herself “Peridot” instead of her code was a moment for her, because in order to be “Peridot”, no other peridots may be around. No other peridots may share in what she has. That’s not “d’awww!”, that’s horrible. It bugs me with the Ruby Squad that we know them only by names Steven’s given them and I don’t get why we haven’t got a gem yet who chose their own name as a way to reject Homeworld’s identity rules. Only Amethyst’s scene of discovering her code made sense. (Needless to say, this non-commitment to name significance is why the DeMayo/Universe and Steven/Nora deals are laughable at best.)

Any plot necessity for Steven and Amethyst not to ask questions is dealt with by focussing on why they don’t ask questions. Fear of what emotions they might unleash? Fear of conflict between the teller and the not-teller? Fear of losing certainties? Fear of being unable to handle the answer? Fear of having to ask more questions? Or maybe they know the answers they need but not the questions to get at them. Stuff like this is like a sudoku; you have some answers and you know there’s more, but you can’t formulate a means to get those answers without finding the starter points first.

Garnet would’ve never said “For Amethyst to be herself“ in “Bubbled”, because, holy heckles, that’s rich coming from Ms. “We kept Amethyst”.

Going back to “Stronger Than You” after “Earthlings” leaves me with distaste. Jasper vaguely seems to respond to “And I won’t let you hurt my planet!”, a line that ought to hurt and infuriate her from what we know now, but it’s barely noticeable and gets contextually hidden by a closeup slasher smile. Either [my planet] should not be there or Jasper’s response should get focus. Yes, it’s Garnet’s song, but you can’t play over this like that. (I despise how the crewniverse hid an ethnicity context behind a sexuality one.) 

Malachite would’ve gotten Sugilite’s deal (and Sugilite something much better). Lapis would’ve fused with the aim to trap the fusion and give the CGs a clean shot, having nothing better to hope for than that Steven would save her from whatever fate would be Jasper’s. But the unexpected happens when the two fuse, Lapis’s knowledge that this one act locks her from her home for good and Jasper’s resurfaced trauma of the loss of her home mixing into a singlemindedness neither could’ve foreseen or can control. Malachite would’ve escaped and periodically resurfaced as a break from the Cluster plotline and something fresh in the gem recovery narrative.

The moment Peridot brings up the plans for the Earth colony in "It Could've Been Great", Amethyst would not respond identical to Garnet and Pearl, but rather with a hint of wonder. She was made for it and it was supposed to be made for her; shameful but her story nonetheless. Peridot becomes the person she tries to get more information from what happened and what things could’ve been like after all this time of RPG proving untrustworthy. That ableist nonsense of “Beta” does not occur.

Amethyst and Jasper “bond” after one or the other figures out the other’s identity, if only by playing into Jasper’s anger. Amethyst later defects (though never betrays), resulting in her own time of learning on HW and later visiting/being sent to the pink station, where her story can overlap with whatever is the equivalent of the abduction arc. Consequences of Amethyst leaving are progress in Garnet’s growth into leadership, major self-reflection by Pearl, probs something like Peridot boosting the ranks (Lapis and Bismuth deserve time to themselves), and, since I want Amethyst and Lars to be BFFs over Purple Puma, for this to be a hit on Lars that later helps Amethyst understand RPG’s choices and for which she’d apologize/make up in the equivalent of “Wanted” or thereafter. It could probably also be incorporated in Lars reflecting on his lost friendship with Ronaldo and the choices he made there.

I’m not sure what I want for Jasper. Her getting corrupted is fine by me, especially if she’d be crucial in developing a healing process, but I really wish SU had handled corruption better. Finding peace with her peers would be nice. I’d also like her being able to empathize with HBA (while not tolerating her actions) in a “I’m not where I’m supposed to be and neither are you” sense.

SU avoids talking about it, but it stands to reason some of HW’s planets were populated. You don’t have an army if you don’t have wars. It’s been my interpretation for a long time that Yellowtail is fully alien, Vidalia possibly part alien, and Onion at least half alien, all survivors or descendents thereof from another colonized planet. And after that odd scene between Topaz and Onion, I like to think Topaz is from that colony and that her encounter on Earth makes her think and spread the anti-colonialism beyond Earth.

[lindsaydoeslanguages]

FluentU Review 2019: Learning Korean with Videos

Back in 2015, I first discovered FluentU and used it to support my early Japanese studies. Another language FluentU supports is Korean, and when they reached out again recently and invited me to test the app and all its updates in the past few years on a free trial, I thought this was a great chance to update my review and learn Korean with videos. So, here’s my updated FluentU Review.

What is FluentU?

I made a quick 3 Minute Review to explain what it’s all about. Click play on the video below to watch that, or read on if you can’t watch video right now.

FluentU uses genuine video content from the internet to create their video based learning. There’s a website and an app available on Apple and Android.

Typically for each video there’s optional subtitles added below and a quiz for the new vocab you learn in that video. These words and phrases are then saved as flashcards on an SRS system (spaced repetition.)

There’s a good range of languages too – Spanish, Chinese, French, English, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, Russian.

So what’s it all about?

Here’s how it works. You browse the videos available for the language you’re learning by level, once you’ve spotted one that takes your fancy, pick it and watch. The subtitles appear below in both languages. You can also tap any word throughout for a direct translation.

What I noticed and really liked is that the videos are ordered in a logical order too for your ability.

I’ve been working through some really fun Hangeul songs that I would have never found otherwise.

When the video is done, you have the choice to play with a quiz to start learning the words featured in the video. This is done by multiple sample sentences, some from the video and others not, ensuring that you can identify and understand your new vocabulary in different contexts. Smart idea, huh?

This is what’s normally missing for me when I learn vocab. I learn a word and then I remember it (or not) but I have no context. So for me, having different sentence examples is a big advantage.

In a nutshell then, FluentU is a fun and natural way to learn languages without feeling like you’re studying too hard. Pretty nifty.

How much is it?

FluentU isn’t free. But stuff this good rarely is. However, the pricing is nice and simple.

You can join for 14 days for free to try it out. After that, you have just one simple payment option. Either you join and pay the monthly subscription or you can also save if you join via an Annual Plan. In fact, that gets you 4 months free, which is a really good deal. So if you’re looking for something new to use regularly, then it’s a worthwhile investment.

Click here to visit their site and sign up to the free trial to have a little look around before buying. (That’s my affiliate link, which means FluentU give commission to me when you join via my link, so it’s also a great way to support Lindsay Does Languages!)

How to Make the Most of FluentU

Ok, so now you know more about what FluentU is about and the basics of how it works, let’s take a look at how you can make the most of FluentU. Because when you’re paying for a subscription, that’s exactly what you want to do.

1. Download for Offline Use

FluentU naturally works better on a tablet or a computer. That’s not to say that it doesn’t work on a phone – it does. But it’s much nicer to use with a bigger screen.

And the great thing in particular about using FluentU on a tablet is that you can download for offline use. So wherever you are, you can be using FluentU to help you learn languages on the go.

To do this, simply click the cloud with a little down arrow next to a video from the main feed. To access your downloads, click the top three lines in the top left corner of the app to open the menu bar, click ‘My Content’, which will open up a drop down menu. Now click ‘Downloaded’.

2. Make Playlists

Much like when you log onto YouTube, when you open FluentU, you’re presented with an array of videos.

These are adjusted to the level that you’ve listed for that language, but to really make the most of FluentU, create playlists of videos you want to watch.

You could group these playlists around particular topics, specific grammar points, or something else.

To do this, simply click a video from the main feed and click the very top ‘+’ that appears in a circle. You’ll then see a page asking you which playlist you want to add this video to. You can select an existing playlist or click ‘New Playlist +’ to create a new playlist.

To view your playlists, simply click the top three lines in the top left corner of the app to open the menu bar, click ‘My Content’, which will open up a drop down menu. Now click ‘My Playlists’.

3. Review Your Flashcards

Whatever you learn from the videos and the quizzes is saved in your flashcards. These work on an SRS (Spaced Repetition System) basis, which means you can trusts FluentU will only show you something when you need to practise so you won’t be wasting your time.

The flashcards work like the quizzes after the videos, so you get to see most words in various contexts too, sometimes with additional video clips instead of images to help you remember.

If you click ‘Flashcards’ on the main Browse bar (All, Video, Audio, Flashcards), you’ll see a range of flashcard decks available for download. But, to view your own, you’ll need to access it from somewhere else.

To do this, simply click the top three lines in the top left corner of the app to open the menu bar, click ‘My Content’, which will open up a drop down menu. Now click ‘My Flashcards’. Here you’ll see ‘My Vocab’ and ‘Already Known’ at the top.

4. Filter content

The content you see in your main feed when you log on will be adjusted to your level already depending on what you said your level was for that language when you first signed up.

If you feel like a challenge however, you can adjust this to filter content to show only specific levels. Perhaps this would be a good chance to create a playlist or two of interesting videos you want to catch up on in the future.

Alternatively, you could also filter content by the topic. For example, if you’re really interested in art, you’ll have much more success using content that’s interesting to you.

Finally, you also have the option to filter via format. Are you looking for clips, music videos, commercials, movie trailers, news or something else? The format of the video you watch might vary the style of language used so this can be a useful feature to help make the most of FluentU so you’re only seeing the best content for your level.

To do this, simply click ‘Filter’ in the top right on the main page when you open the app. Then select your filter options – you can select multiple options here – and click ‘Done’ to see your updated video feed.

5. Set a Daily Goal

Goals work. You probably know already if you’ve read anything on the blog before that I love me some good solid language goals!

FluentU allows you to set a daily goal right within the app. It’s even possible to set a daily notification reminder for your device so you’ll always remember to study.

To do this, simply click the top three lines in the top left corner of the app to open the menu bar, click the Settings cog at the bottom, and scroll to click ‘Daily Goal’. And if you want to set a Notification, tap that too to pick when you want your daily goal reminder. You’ll also need to allow notifications for the FluentU app in the main settings on your device for this bit to work.

6. Multiple Languages

What’s great about FluentU is that for the subscription price, you get access to all the languages they offer. Currently that includes Chinese, Spanish, English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Russian and Korean.

Already got years of experience learning French back in school but feel like gentle practise and a refresher alongside your new language? You can do that. And you totally should seeing as it’s included in the same subscription.

To do this, simply click the top three lines in the top left corner of the app to open the menu bar, click the Settings cog at the bottom, and scroll to click ‘Language’.

Join FluentU

Ready to join FluentU?

Click here to sign up now and enjoy your free 14 day trial to see if it’s right for you.

Your Free Ultimate List of Language Learning Resources!

Looking for more language learning resources? I’ve put together an ever-growing Google Sheets file with language resources for over 30 different languages. It’s totally free and you can get a copy when you join my email list by clicking the image below.

Have you tried FluentU? What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post FluentU Review 2019: Learning Korean with Videos appeared first on Lindsay Does Languages.

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[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, interlude three

I just finished watching all of the Resident Evil movies I could get my hands on. When I told people I was doing this as the last part of my great year-long playthrough, they all let out groans and said something along the lines of, “Ugh, don’t you wanna end on a good note?” Undaunted by these words and fueled by my ability to tolerate crappy cinema, I moved forward, courageously making it through nine of these suckers...which, to be fair, ranged from surprisingly enjoyable to just as terrible as everyone warned me about. 

Before I begin, it’s important to note that we’re dealing with two separate film series here. There’s director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil Hollywood films, which are the ones that most people know about. Then there are three Japanese-made CG movies that are canon and co-exist alongside the stories of the games. The Anderson movies are...mostly ass. The Japanese ones are okay. 

Let us start with the ass first. 

Resident Evil - The first RE film came out in 2002, which means that what little CG it has is laughably dated and it’s refreshingly small-scale when compared to its sequels. The movie’s a fan fiction remix of some themes from Resident Evil 1, except with none of the characters from the games present. Instead, we have Paul W.S. Anderson’s wife Milla Jovovich taking center stage as Alice, the former head of Umbrella security in a secret base called the Hive that goes to hell when some dude tries to steal viruses. The entirety of the action takes place in the Hive, and we get a surprisingly tiny number of monsters, with just your garden variety zombies, a few Cerberus and a single Licker showing up. Even though she does run up a wall and kick a Cerberus in the face, Alice is at her most realistic here (she turns into a dual wielding mutant with the ability to make the camera go into slow-motion whenever she wants in all the other films), there’s a nifty laser grid scene that all the sequels keep referencing when they want you to feel nostalgic, and the Hive’s sentient AI, the Red Queen, is compelling enough that Capcom eventually stuck her in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Aside from this movie being full of British actors who do REALLY awful American accents, sounding like they all have mouths full of sausages, Paul W.S. Anderson’s first take on Resident Evil is probably the most watchable one he made. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - Okay, this one is watchable too, but in more of a popcorn-munching “lol, this shit is dumb” way. It steals the general plot of Resident Evils 2 and 3, with Raccoon City getting infected, but ups the cheese by a hundred. Alice is now a thirteen-year-old boy’s version of a BADAZZ woman, with lots of guns and a bare midriff, and she teams up with Jill Valentine, who resembles her game self in looks but not exactly in personality. Together, they’ve gotta escape Raccoon City along with Carlos Oliveira, who is possibly the only character from the games who is done a great service in these Anderson movies, which make him much more likable even if they couldn’t find an actual Hispanic actor to portray him and had to settle for an Israeli instead. Oh, and Nemesis shows up, because one of the dudes from the first movie who accompanied Alice into the Hive gets experimented on and turned into what honestly looks like someone’s Halloween costume. The writers commit a cardinal sin at the end of the flick by humanizing him, having him suddenly remember his TRUE SELF and help the good guys, but aside from that screw-up I admit that I had a goofy grin on my face throughout several parts of this movie. After Nemesis blows up the Raccoon City station and murmurs his one line of dialogue- “STARRRRRSSSS” - I even kinda felt like clapping. So yeah, Apocalpyse is idiotic fun.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Here’s where the movies stop being mildly entertaining and become varying degrees of either “meh” or just plain bad. Extinction’s biggest problem is that it makes the weird decision of having the entire PLANET be wiped nearly completely clean by Umbrella’s virus, giving the franchise the most generic setting imaginable for a zombie flick - a post-apocalyptic world. And even though this film features Claire Redfield and actually has Alice fight a Tyrant that looks the part, I feel that by turning the environment into Mad Max the filmmakers missed the entire point of the franchise. Resident Evil isn’t really about a “what if” scenario with mankind dying and zombies taking over the world. Instead, it’s about how humanity manages to cope in a time where zombies are used by corporations for terrorism purposes - hence the franchise’s “bio-organic weapon” catch-phrase for its creatures. It’s about how brave people live on in an era that just happens to feature biopunk monsters as a deadly fact of life. It’s about the evil that resides within a world that is pretty shitty, but hasn’t completely gone to shit. By turning the whole planet into the same ol’ zombie playground that we see in most popular fiction starring these workman-like horror tropes, Extinction - which probably thought it was upping the stakes - instead just feels sorta dull, and anyone who views the film today is probably going to see it as a weaker version of The Walking Dead. Oh, and it ends with Alice discovering clones of herself, which will only serve to screw with the loose continuity of these movies as they go on. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife - This one starts with Alice’s clones raiding the Umbrella facility in Tokyo, and the whole sequence - which feels like it should be the finale - is reduced to a few minutes of special effects in the beginning. (This is foreshadowing for the next two films, which both end with hints of giant, climatic battles that mostly happen off-screen, if at all.) The first thing that I noticed when watching this was how slow-mo kicked in every five minutes and how the camera seemed to linger on bullets, and I eventually remembered that this film was released during Hollywood’s obsession with 3D during the early 2010s. This explains Afterlife’s IN-YOUR-FACE-IN-THREE-DIMENSIONS action scenes, which are initially pretty in a music video sort of way but become overdone and tiresome as the movie goes on, kinda like a Zack Snyder film. (I place Paul W.S. Anderson in the same “style over substance” category of director as both Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, by the way.) Anyway, Afterlife deals with Alice teaming up with more survivors to try to find a secret ship haven free of zombies. Along the way she runs into Chris Redfield, who looks more like a janitor than the jacked BSAA agent that he is in the games, and Chris and Claire Redfield have a quick sibling reunion and fight Wesker in a scene with choreography shamelessly stolen from Resident Evil 5. It’s pandering fan service and sort of diverting, but ultimately none of it matters. Chris disappears after this movie and is never seen again, and Afterlife is more interesting as a specimen of 2010 3D excess than it is as an actual narrative.

Resident Evil: Retribution - Retribution amps the pandering fan service that Afterlife dabbled in to new levels. Ada Wong is here, played by Li Bingbing but dubbed by her original voice actress, Sally Cahill, probably because Li’s English isn’t that great. Leon Kennedy and Barry frickin’ Burton show up, both looking pretty much like their in-game counterparts. Even Michelle Rodriguez and a few other faces from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first Resident Evil flick make an appearance, thanks to the fact that this movie has clones up the wazoo and uses them to handwave away any series inconsistencies you could think of. So you’re got fan service for the people who like the games and fan service for the folks who liked the first movie, and on top of it all the film has the extreme 3D that its predecessor possessed and a buttload of battles because it all takes place in a giant Umbrella simulation facility full of stuff that can easily be wrecked. By now the plot to these things has gotten more scrambled than my eggs in the morning, but I will say that thanks to its inclusion of classic characters, Retribution is more or less tolerable. There’s even a bit of characterization this time around, thanks to a little hearing-impaired clone girl who Alice takes under her wing and begins to care for, and the movie ends on an okay cliffhanger in a Washington DC under siege, promising epic things to come in the next movie. Unfortunately... Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - I really did not enjoy The Final Chapter for a myriad of reasons. First of all, the Washington battle promised at the end of Retribution never happens. Instead, we fast forward to several months later, when Alice is (big surprise) the only survivor, and EVERYONE she was with in the last flick - Ada, Leon, the little deaf girl - is gone and never mentioned ever again. Wesker, who Alice was working with in Retribution, is back to being a bad guy for poorly explained reasons. Another bad scientist dude that Alice killed in Extinction also returns for even worse reasons, because supposedly Alice only offed his clone three movies ago. But wait, this “real” bad scientist dude is also revealed to be a clone as the TRUE bad scientist dude shows up in the movie’s last act! AND THE ULTIMATE TWIST (look away now if you actually care about spoilers) is that Alice is HERSELF a clone of the original daughter of the Umbrella corporation’s founder who died of a degenerative disease and served as the basis for the Red Queen AI. The idiotic thing is that this daughter was said to be the progeny of Dr. Charles Ashford in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but this movie retcons her to be the spawn of Dr. James Marcus. The Final Chapter, in fact, screws with continuity to a degree I have rarely seen before in a long-running film franchise. Yeah, the framework tying this series together got weird as soon as clones were introduced, but previously it seemed that Paul W.S. Anderson at least cared about his own messy fan fiction. Here? It’s like he forgot what he’d spent the last 15 years building up to and ended on one sloppy fart. If this weren’t bad enough, The Final Chapter is edited in that god awful “shaky cam, lots of fast cuts” way that I hate. In fact, I counted something like twenty cuts in a scene of a few seconds when Alice is attacked by a creature, which means that this film won’t just baffle you with its disregard for continuity - it’ll give you a headache too. 

Resident Evil: Degeneration - After watching an array of live-action flicks that took random Resident Evil threads and mashed them together with the elegance of a splattered turd, it did feel good to switch things up and move to the CG movies that were actually put out by Capcom. This 2008 offering takes place in between Resident Evils 4 and 5, stars Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, and deals with a virus breakout in an airport and some of the pharmaceutical company backstabbing that occurred in the aftermath of Umbrella’s destruction. It’s all stuff that feels like it could have come from a lesser gaiden game - perhaps in the same vein as the first Revelations title - and it kinda gives off that “so-so anime movie” vibe, especially because the dubbing always sounds a tad off. Nevertheless, Degeneration’s still a breath of fresh air compared to the Anderson series, and there’s a nice gag where Claire’s searching for a weapon in the airport, someone hands her a physical umbrella, and she looks at it and is like, “Hm, didn’t see this coming.” (Lollerskates.) The main issue I have with Degeneration is how “plasticky” everyone looks - it’s hard to realize how far computer animation has advanced in the last decade until you look at Degeneration’s stiff visuals and compare them to the other CG films. Also, Leon’s characterization is terrible. He’s meant to be a super serious badass, I guess, but he mostly just looks like someone rammed a Samurai Edge up his sphincter. I prefer my Leon Kennedy to be the “Don’t worry Ashley, I’m comin’ for ya!” version from Resident Evil 4, or at least a dude with a little sass to him. The guy in Degeneration is about as interesting as a board.  Resident Evil: Damnation - Damnation is a noticeable step above Degeneration, both in computer animation, which really got better from 2008 to 2012, and in all-around presentation. The dubbing’s still somewhat wonky with that same anime movie vibe, but the characterization is on point, and Leon, who’s taking center stage once more, is just like his RE6 self. Speaking of RE6, this movie channels that game’s themes of international terrorism with a plot that involves rebels in a made-up Eastern European country using Lickers and Las Plagas in an effort to fight for their freedom, only to learn that lo and behold, the nefarious female president who’s seized control of their nation has her own B.O.W.s - in the form of Tyrants - at her disposal. Leon’s caught in the middle of this mess and ends up befriending some of the rebels, and Ada Wong’s also infiltrated the country to manipulate the president. Ada and Leon’s interactions are as insubstantial as they’ve been in pretty much every game that isn’t the recent RE2make, but we do get a cool fight between Ada and the president, who for some reason knows substantial knife fu. There’s an even better battle between Tyrants and Lickers in a city hall square, and Leon gets throw against pillars, regularly takes hits that would kill a normal person and pilots a tank alongside one of the rebels who looks a lot like Chris Redfield but isn’t Chris Redfield. This dude serves as the film’s sympathetic character - a guy torn from his peaceful existence thanks to political wrangling and is tricked into using B.O.W.s to try to achieve a brighter future. It ends with the fella severely injured but learning how to live and move forward in a world infected with nefarious bioweapons, which is the very theme that the Anderson flicks ditched around movie number three. So good work for side-stepping previous failures and recognizing what Resident Evil is all about, Damnation. 

Resident Evil: Vendetta - If Degeneration’s a so-so anime movie, and Damnation a good anime movie, then Vendetta is just a good movie in general, with no “anime” distinction needed. The dubbing’s finally pretty decent, for one, and the story takes place in between RE6 and RE7, teaming Leon and Chris Redfield up with - HOLY CRAP - Rebecca Chambers, who’s been AWOL since Resident Evil Zero. They’ve gotta stop an arms dealer from bio-nuking New York and doing nasty things to Rebecca, who resembles his dead wife, and along the way Leon pilots a motorcycle on the freeway with his feet while shooting at Cerebrus with his hands. Nearly all of the movie’s considerable action segments are punctuated with rapid fire John Wick-style gunplay, and it works. It’s like the folks who made this film realized that the coolest part of Resident Evil 6 was the point where Leon and Chris point their guns at each other for a few seconds before deciding that they need to put their differences aside and cooperate, and even though you could conceivably fault Vendetta for leaning heavily towards the “action” side of Resident Evil rather than the “horror” side, it’s a well-paced film that finally gives us a substantial interaction between two series mainstays beyond the one minute they shared with each other in RE6. Also, people are still posting GIFs from Vendetta’s action sequences all across Tumblr and forums whenever arguments break out over whether Chris or Leon is TEH COoLER Resident Evil protagonist, so Capcom obviously did something right. If we get another computer animated film, I imagine it’ll lean more heavily towards horror since that’s where the series has gone recently...but hopefully the path of improvement that we’ve seen from Degeneration to Damnation to Vendetta won’t be broken. 

And with that, whew, I’m done with RE movies, at least until the rumored Hollywood reboot that’s supposedly drawing inspiration from Resident Evil 7 comes out. (It can’t be worse than The Final Chapter, I suppose.) I can’t say that my friends were wrong when they warned me that half of these would be shite, but I also can’t say that I ended on a bad note, because Vendetta was pretty good.

After all this, my grand playthrough and consumption of all Resident Evil media is about to finish Next post I make will be a last look at the franchise as a whole...and what a year’s worth of zombie headshots taught me.  All screencaps taken by me. 

[oajpw5f3-blog]

Help buying first car!?

Help buying first car!?

I have just finished my army training and so now I have about 8000 to spend on a new car, I have looked at the new clio, and corsas, does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks all

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare free quotes :bestinsureonline.xyz

SOURCES:

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[digitalmark18-blog]

The Low Hanging Fruit of Web Performance

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/the-low-hanging-fruit-of-web-performance/

The Low Hanging Fruit of Web Performance

There is so much to know about making websites fast. It’s rather incredible. Things like understanding servers and networks, how browsers parse things and make decisions, efficient coding choices, and file format nuances make being a performance expert a full-time career in itself.

But you don’t have to be an expert to care about web performance nor be an expert to start making changes to your websites to make them faster. Even total beginners to the web industry have the power to make significant performance increases to the sites they work on.

Perhaps you’ve heard this one?

If you save the length of an array first rather than calculating on each iteration of a for loop, it’s faster:

// this is faster var l = arr.length; for (var x = 0; x < l; x++) dosmth = arr[x]; // than this for (var x = 0; x < arr.length; x++) dosmth = arr[x];

That’s exactly what I’m not talking about. Haha. Sorry.

I want to talk about low hanging fruit. Easy changes that have big impact on web performance.

I have some of my own ideas. As a front-end developer and someone who thinks the web is a pretty darn great thing, I’m into any idea that makes it better. A few years back I did a whole talk on 10 things you can do to make your site faster, all of which are pretty low-hanging fruit.

But more recently, I asked on Twitter, and lots of people had some ideas of their own.

What are the LOWEST hanging fruit of web performance? Nothing fancy, anyone can do, big impact. Gzip. Optimize stuff. Reduce requests… What are other big ones? — Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) August 17, 2018

Lemme squish it all together and make a list! Remember this isn’t a comprehensive list of performance-increasing tactics. The requisites to be on this list are that they are fairly easy to do and that have big performance returns.

1) Reduce Requests

This one is my favorite. Anytime I can rip something off of a page and not really sacrifice anything, it feels great. Are there some CSS files you can combine? Tracking scripts you can remove? Sharing buttons that could be just simple links?

Dave Rupert recommends keeping an inventory of all the stuff on your pages so you know why it’s there and what it’s purpose is.

ImageAlpha + ImageOptim (Mac) / RIOT (Win) before upload SVGOMG before upload Keep an inventory of wtf is being added and why

— Dave Rupert (@davatron5000) August 17, 2018

You should also consider the concept of a performance budget. A performance budget might say: you have X requests for Y total file size and Z seconds of load time and nobody can do anything to exceed them. Make it part of the culture around your site!

2) Optimize Assets

Your images can probably be a lot smaller in file size than they already are, without losing any or much quality. Download an app like ImageOptim and drop images onto it before you use them on the web.

The same concept applies to all sorts of other file types. Rather than linking up the “raw” JavaScript that you write by hand, it should be run through a minifier to reduce its file size. This does stuff like remove whitespace and even fancy stuff like rewrite function names and calls to shorter versions. Same with CSS, it should be minified. There are loads of ways to do this that any build process can handle. For one example, here’s me using CodeKit and making sure the output of my SCSS is compressed:

For SVG files, check out SVGOMG!

Google performance expert Das Surma says compressing/optimizing images is the lowest hanging fruit of all for web performance. For images and video specifically, I’d also recommend checking out services like Cloudinary or Imgix which specialize in optimizing and serving images in super performant ways.

3) Make sure you’re gzipping

As a test, open your Network tab in DevTools and pick a CSS file. Look under the Response Headers and see if the content-encoding is gzip.

If it’s not, there are massive savings you could be having by just making sure gzip encoding is turned on on your server. Your host should have information about this for you. Here on MediaTemple, on an Apache server, here’s some info for that. It’s about making sure mod_deflate is on, which does the gzipping.

You might even investigate Brotli, which can be ever better than Gzip, and I notice is supported here on MediaTemple through the Securi firewall.

4) Make sure you’re browser caching

See that second arrow in the screenshot above? That points to an expires date for that CSS file. Notice it expires in the year 2037. That means the browser will hang onto that file essentially forever and not need to re-download it when needed again. That’s a massive performance booster. Need to change the file? Change its name! style.css?v=16.4

Speaking of caching… the general concept of caching is a massive part of web performance low hanging fruit. Your web host can probably make recommendations here. For example, perhaps they can flip on nginx reverse caching for you. Or if you’re running something like a WordPress site, perhaps you can toss on a plugin like W3 Total Cache and reap the rewards from that.

5) Use a CDN

Like Tim Murtaugh says… set up a CDN.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are for serving your flat files (like images, CSS, and JavaScript) from super fast servers that are specifically tuned for that job (for example, they are “cookieless” which saves some network data overhead). Plus they serve those files from servers that are geographically as close as possible to the user requesting that file. Big gains!

This is low hanging fruit as it’s generally a one-time setup and it’ll benefit you forever. Look into setting up Cloudflare for your site, or something like Stack Path or KeyCDN.

Media Temple offers a nifty a CDN and Web Application Firewall, all-in-one.

6) Lazy Load and Defer Loading of Things

The idea of lazing loading is that you don’t request the asset (like an image or video) until it’s needed. Imagine you visit a blog post that has 6 images on it, but 5 of them are down the page pretty far, and you never bother to scroll down. Why request the other 5?

There are lots of techniques for lazing loading, so allow me to just link you to Jeremy Wagner’s article on Google Fundamentals which covers the concept.

The idea of deferring the loading of JavaScript is simple. There are fancy ways of doing this like code splitting, but perhaps the lowest hanging fruit is deferring the loading of a script by putting it at the bottom of the page, or literally using the defer attribute.

Just add `defer` to any script element. Takes 0.7s to implement, makes your page a gazillion times faster. Pretty good ROI if you ask me.

— Benjamin De Cock (@bdc) August 17, 2018

7) Use responsive images (or at least use reasonable sizes)

Zak Nicola says he’s hit “home runs” for local business clients by simply resizing images on their sites to reasonable sizes. They had massive 4k images being put into a 120x60px spot. Yikes. It’s more common that you’d like.

Using reasonably sized images is a quick win. Check out Dave Rupert’s 1.5x images thinking. That might be a good default for everything.

Doing a bit more, look at using responsive images, which is special HTML for your images that has the focused purpose of serving the best possible image for the situation.

<img src="small.jpg" srcset="medium.jpg 1000w, large.jpg 2000w" alt="yah">

<picture> <source srcset="examples/images/extralarge.jpg" media="(min-width: 1000px)"> <source srcset="examples/images/art-large.jpg" media="(min-width: 800px)"> <img srcset="examples/images/art-medium.jpg" alt="…"> </picture>

Also, consider stuff like using muted autoplaying videos instead of GIFs.

Animated GIFS to videos (Autoplay, muted, loop). Remove the audio track too.

— Doug Sillars (@dougsillars) August 17, 2018

8) Mind Your Fonts

Using custom web fonts can be just as much of a performance burden as the usual suspects: images and JavaScript.

Do you need them at all? If you can get away with not using any custom web fonts at all, or removing some/all of the ones you have, you’ll certainly see performance gains. Perhaps check out using a system font stack.

If you need to use them (I don’t blame you, typography is fun and gives a site a lot of life), then you’ve still got options for improving the performance of them. The lowest hanging fruit is to try out using CSS in your @font-face declarations for those custom fonts, in the form of font-display: optional; /* or swap */. With that, the custom fonts will never hold up the loading of the page, so you might experience FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text) but never FOIT (Flash of Invisible Text). The “invisible” situation is the one that impacts web performance the most. Pages with no text are pretty useless.

As Brian P. Hogan says, that’s perceived performance as much as it is actual performance.

I’d say understanding what blocks the page from loading and what doesn’t. So, not just “actual” performance but “perceived” performance.

— Brian P. Hogan (@bphogan) August 17, 2018

If you wanna get hot and heavy with the performance of loading fonts, dig into Zach Leatherman’s Guide to Font Loading Strategies.

9) Good Hosting / HTTP2 / PHP7

There is some performance low hanging fruit in your web hosting itself. If your site has slowness issues in the form of response time being slow, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to something more powerful than shared hosting. Throwing money at a speed problem doesn’t always work and isn’t always an option, but sometimes it’s the perfect solution. And it’s definitely low hanging fruit as the effort is minimal.

Speaking of hosting, your web host can probably help you upgrade or configure your hosting to take advantage of the best technologies available.

Turn on http2 and make sure PHP is upgraded to PHP 7 (if applicable)

— Megan Zlock (@meganzlock) August 17, 2018

Ask your host about the possibility of taking advantage of HTTP/2, and if you’re running a classic CMS like WordPress or CraftCMS, getting on the very latest versions of PHP and MySQL which have had massive performance improvements in recent years.

10) Turbolinks

This Turbolinks stuff is a bit of a wild card in this list, but I like it because if it can possibly work for you, you get some increase performance with little work (again, low hanging fruit).

Have you heard of SPAs (Single Page Apps)? The whole idea there is that once the site loads, even as you click around, interact, and go to other pages of the site, the site never reloads. For example, you’re building a React site with React Router. URLs still change and all that, but the laborious process of a full page reload never happens. It’s all Ajax requests and re-rendering. Done right, very cool.

Turbolinks brings that kind of behavior to a site that wasn’t originally built that way. Rather than refresh the page, when you click a link it goes and fetches that page and re-renders what is needs to on the current page.

Resources

Source: http://mediatemple.net/blog/tips/low-hanging-fruit-web-performance/