#just chock full of downers

[moonstruckme]

hello! I hope you are well and Christmas is treating you nicely so far! I was wondering if I could potentially request something based around reader not knowing how to swim with perhaps poly!marauders or any other character of your liking? Obviously do not feel any inclination to do so if this is unappealing! thank you!

Thanks sweetheart, hope the holiday season is treating you nicely as well!

cw: reader has a mild fear of water/drowning

Steve Harrington x fem!reader ♡ 1.1k words

Steve’s hands rove your calves, cajoling. “C’mon, you know I won’t let anything happen to you.” 

“I don’t understand why you care so much.” 

“And I don’t understand why you would wear a swimsuit,” he laughs, “if you’re not going to swim.”

You look down at the smallest bikini you own, then raise a brow at him. “Well, it wasn’t for me.”

Steve’s grin turns smug but he doesn’t let up, wrapping his fingers around your ankle and giving a little tug. Not enough to drag you into the pool by a long shot, but enough that you brace your hands on the wet concrete by your butt. 

You give him a warning look. “Steve, quit.” 

He does, going back to soothing his palms up and down your calves. You’ve got your feet in the water, and that’s as far as you’re willing to go. You can watch Steve swim from right here.

“Look, I’m not saying you don’t look great up there. I mean, you do, you really—” he gives you a meaningful look that makes your already sun-warmed skin heat a touch further, seemingly mindless of the swarms of people around you “—really do, but I’m just thinking you’d look even better if you were in here with me, you know?” 

You tap your fingers on the edge of the pool, casting a look towards the shallow end. It’s chock-full of screaming kids and toddlers bobbing around with arm floaties, but it looks infinitely more inviting than where Steve is in front of you, barely touching the ground. 

“Can we go over there?” you ask, jutting your chin in that direction.

He turns to look at that side of the pool reproachfully. “Babe, the shallow end is like two-thirds piss. Just hop in right here. I won’t let you drown, okay?” 

You chew your lip. “That’s a low bar.” 

Steve grins, sensing victory. “I will make sure you flourish, honey, alright? Just trust me.” 

You take in a breath and hold it, nodding hesitantly. “Okay,” you say. 

Steve’s smile widens. His wet hands slide up your legs and grip you under your thighs. You think he’s going to support you as you ease in, but in the next second he’s lifted you off the concrete, spilling you into the water with him. 

You gasp in surprise at the action and the cold and skitter up him, wrapping your legs around his torso and clutching at his shoulders. 

“Steve!” you squeak, heart in your throat. The absence of any surface beneath your feet, the sheer jeopardy of it, makes your blood icy with terror. 

“You’re okay, you’re—jeez, you really are freaked, huh? Think you could retract your claws?” Steve keeps one hand on your back while the other pries at your fingers on his shoulders. After a second, you loosen your grip slightly. Just slightly. “Thanks, babe. No need to cut into me, I wasn’t going to drop you.” 

“I wasn’t expecting it!” you say, voice still pitched high. “You scared me.” 

Steve softens. His hand splays out on your back, keeping you more securely in place. “Sorry. I’m sorry, I just thought it’d be better to get it over with. But you’re okay, see? It’s all good.” 

You shiver a bit from the cold, hugging him tighter. Your boyfriend’s skin is warm despite the frigid water, his shoulders under your hands dry and freckling from the sun. And you can admit, it’s not the hugest downer in the world to be pressed so close to his shirtless abdomen. 

He senses your train of thought, that smarmy grin spreading across his face again. “Glad you could join me in here, honey.” He slides a hand up to your jaw, angling your face for a kiss. You feel a bit better.

“I don’t know what’s so great about in here,” you say. “We could’ve done this just as easily on solid ground.” 

“Mmm, but it’s so much cooler in here. Anyway, we’re teaching you to swim.” 

You raise your eyebrows, a spidery dread starting up in your gut. “We are?” 

“We are,” he confirms happily, palm moving up your spine and back down again once. “It’s an essential life skill, babe. But don’t worry, you’ve got the best teacher on this side of the Mississippi.” 

“Ah, well.” You roll your eyes. “So long as I have him.” 

“Yeah, you’re lucky,” Steve ignores your sarcasm completely, adjusting his grip so he’s got a hand on either side of your waist and holding you out slightly in front of him. Your eyes go wide, and you start to dig your nails into his shoulders again, but he goes on casually, “Okay, just kick your feet.” 

You do, tentatively, feeling silly. Your legs feel awkward underneath you, disorganized and somewhat frantic compared to the other swimmers around you with their placid movements. But Steve smiles at you, proud, and you keep going. 

“Good, not bad, babe. Just keep doing that. Feel how I’m not having to hold you up as much anymore?” 

 “Mhm.” You give him a wary look. “You still can’t let go, though.” 

“I won’t,” he promises easily. “Okay, now try to move your arms around a little.”

“How?” 

“Like, uh…” Steve looks around, nodding to a girl treading water a few feet from you. “Like her.” 

You try, moving your arms from side to side with your palms facing down. 

Steve’s smile widens. It’s contagious, and you grin too, feeling like an idiot. “There you go, you’ve got it! The whole point is to just keep pushing the water down, you know?”

“Yeah.” You’re a bit mystified, struck by the odd feeling of the water moving around you. How surprisingly easy it is to control. You look down at your legs, kicking in weighty nothingness. “I think I get what you mean.” 

“Good, good. Okay, I’m gonna let you do it by yourself for a second.” 

“What?” Your head snaps up. “Steve, please.” 

“You’ve got it,” he reassures you, and slips his hands from around your waist. 

You start kicking double-time. Your hands move faster until they’re just splashing, useless. Suddenly, you can’t remember the motions they’re supposed to be making at all. Your chin touches the water, and you lunge for Steve, wrapping your arms around his neck. 

“That wasn’t bad,” he says, sounding far cheerier than you feel. Your heart pitters against your rib cage. “You did good, honey. You’re learning quick.”

“Can we take a break?” you ask, tightening your grip on him. “I think I like it here better.” 

Steve’s arm bands securely around your back and he presses his lips firmly to your forehead. “Sure,” he promises. His voice is heavy with a quiet contentedness. “Yeah, we can stay here for a while.”

[smokeybrandreviews]

Majesty

I got this whole piece about how disappointing the current season of anime is but i had to shelve that because Frieren is till a thing. That debbie-downer of a piece is still definitely coming out, i have grievances, but, after finishing episode twenty-one of Autistic Elf Mage, i needed to take a minute and just gush about this entire franchise. Look, I'm a sucker for a solid fantasy tale. I love all of that sh*t. I've been enamored with Arthurian legend since i was young. I've read Dune a handful of times in my life. I've read all of the Tolkien Rings books and even read the first Game of Thrones novel, but they're not for me. My favorite genre of anime and manga, after cyberpunk, is fantasy. My favorite game franchise is, you guessed, Final Fantasy. I love this sh*t so you can imagine how hard it would be to win my affection. Sousou no Frieren did that chapter one of the manga.

I absolutely adore the manga. I highly recommend checking it out but, considering the popularity of the anime, i think a ton of people already have. This sh*t has become a full-on phenomenon and rightfully so. I am a staunch believer that great visual media (TV, games, film), has to have a strong start on the page. The sh*t you're adapting, needs to be well written before you even begin to visualize how to capture anything for the eye. Sousou no Frieren is a textbook example of this sh*t. I cannot stress how well written that book is. From the characters, to the world, to the magic system; All of it is brilliantly executed with a whimsical, deadpan, levity you rarely see in modern anything. Yamada Kanehito has crafted a masterwork and Abe Tsukasa's art compliments those whimsical words, with some of the most gorgeous art being published in tonkobans today. Sousou no Frieren is every bit as excellent, in almost the exact same ways as Dungeon Meshi, and if you know me, you know that's high praise. I wrote an entire essay, straight up fanboying about Delicious in Dungeon so you know, when i say Frieren is just as brilliant, i mean it. That said, Frieren does one thing better than Meshi and that's it's anime.

The Sousou no Frieren, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End as it's being called, has no right to be as exceptional as it is. Seriously, the manga, as well executed as it is, is just a slice of life. Now, I'm not bashing that at all. I love those types of stories. Indeed, one of my other favorites, Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers, is about to get an anime adaption and that thing is basically the same concept, but Frieren's is much more about the journey, rather than the conflict. It's a very weird and contradictory thing when you actually think about it, but nothing really happens in the Frieren plot but, at the same time, SO much happens! It's chock full of content but the way that narrative is approached, makes you think otherwise. It's quite an interesting read so to see that same energy perfectly captured in the anime? I am more than impressed. And, to push my reverence even further, this show looks amazing! Easily the best animated of the season, and it's a holdover from a previous one. Seriously, Madhouse is undefeated when it comes to their craft. I still think the pinnacle of their library was that first season of Onepunch, but this is arguably a close second or third.

Sousou no Frieren is f*cking spectacular, man. In all forms. Read the manga, it's one of the best in print. Watch the anime, it's the best of the season. There's a reason why this thing has become such a cultural phenomenon. It's one of those rare franchises which actually live up to the hype. As a manga reader, i know there is a ton of sh*t just over the horizon that is going to be a f*cking spectacle when it gets animated but what we have now? Even just this bit before the real action set pieces start up, is more than enough to take in these twenty-three scheduled episodes. I mean, that "battle" with Aura was incredible and Frieren just basically stood there. How do you make a scrap that compelling, when one of the combatants doesn't even move? I don't know, but this show did just that. F*cking exquisite. Seriously, watch this show. Read the manga. Episode twenty-one just came out, there's two to go. I had planned on writing this essay after the last episode aired, but i couldn't wait. It's just that good. Sousou no Frieren is as close to a perfect anime adaption as you can get. The hype is real. Watch that sh*t right now!

[smokeybrand]

Majesty

I got this whole piece about how disappointing the current season of anime is but i had to shelve that because Frieren is till a thing. That debbie-downer of a piece is still definitely coming out, i have grievances, but, after finishing episode twenty-one of Autistic Elf Mage, i needed to take a minute and just gush about this entire franchise. Look, I'm a sucker for a solid fantasy tale. I love all of that sh*t. I've been enamored with Arthurian legend since i was young. I've read Dune a handful of times in my life. I've read all of the Tolkien Rings books and even read the first Game of Thrones novel, but they're not for me. My favorite genre of anime and manga, after cyberpunk, is fantasy. My favorite game franchise is, you guessed, Final Fantasy. I love this sh*t so you can imagine how hard it would be to win my affection. Sousou no Frieren did that chapter one of the manga.

I absolutely adore the manga. I highly recommend checking it out but, considering the popularity of the anime, i think a ton of people already have. This sh*t has become a full-on phenomenon and rightfully so. I am a staunch believer that great visual media (TV, games, film), has to have a strong start on the page. The sh*t you're adapting, needs to be well written before you even begin to visualize how to capture anything for the eye. Sousou no Frieren is a textbook example of this sh*t. I cannot stress how well written that book is. From the characters, to the world, to the magic system; All of it is brilliantly executed with a whimsical, deadpan, levity you rarely see in modern anything. Yamada Kanehito has crafted a masterwork and Abe Tsukasa's art compliments those whimsical words, with some of the most gorgeous art being published in tonkobans today. Sousou no Frieren is every bit as excellent, in almost the exact same ways as Dungeon Meshi, and if you know me, you know that's high praise. I wrote an entire essay, straight up fanboying about Delicious in Dungeon so you know, when i say Frieren is just as brilliant, i mean it. That said, Frieren does one thing better than Meshi and that's it's anime.

The Sousou no Frieren, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End as it's being called, has no right to be as exceptional as it is. Seriously, the manga, as well executed as it is, is just a slice of life. Now, I'm not bashing that at all. I love those types of stories. Indeed, one of my other favorites, Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers, is about to get an anime adaption and that thing is basically the same concept, but Frieren's is much more about the journey, rather than the conflict. It's a very weird and contradictory thing when you actually think about it, but nothing really happens in the Frieren plot but, at the same time, SO much happens! It's chock full of content but the way that narrative is approached, makes you think otherwise. It's quite an interesting read so to see that same energy perfectly captured in the anime? I am more than impressed. And, to push my reverence even further, this show looks amazing! Easily the best animated of the season, and it's a holdover from a previous one. Seriously, Madhouse is undefeated when it comes to their craft. I still think the pinnacle of their library was that first season of Onepunch, but this is arguably a close second or third.

Sousou no Frieren is f*cking spectacular, man. In all forms. Read the manga, it's one of the best in print. Watch the anime, it's the best of the season. There's a reason why this thing has become such a cultural phenomenon. It's one of those rare franchises which actually live up to the hype. As a manga reader, i know there is a ton of sh*t just over the horizon that is going to be a f*cking spectacle when it gets animated but what we have now? Even just this bit before the real action set pieces start up, is more than enough to take in these twenty-three scheduled episodes. I mean, that "battle" with Aura was incredible and Frieren just basically stood there. How do you make a scrap that compelling, when one of the combatants doesn't even move? I don't know, but this show did just that. F*cking exquisite. Seriously, watch this show. Read the manga. Episode twenty-one just came out, there's two to go. I had planned on writing this essay after the last episode aired, but i couldn't wait. It's just that good. Sousou no Frieren is as close to a perfect anime adaption as you can get. The hype is real. Watch that sh*t right now!

[theveryworstthing]

I Live.

Gonna give y’all a little life update copy-pasted from patreon since I’ve been gone for a thousand years. I don't really want to get deep into everything because sharing too many private details about my life/family on the internet feels a little icky even when people are nice but a quick rundown is:

1. My mom was helping my aunt through the legal proceedings of a messy divorce from her abusive ex husband and had to fly to her place like every 2 weeks. During her stays there she sensed something was wrong and after a few doctor's visits we found out that my aunt has early onset dementia. She's being taken care of by family and her shitty ex will never see her again if we have any say so but it's been Rough. She doesn't deserve this shit.

2. Surgery Bonanza! Mom has to get a giant mysterious fatty mass schlorped out of her back and my Grandma Lou' s thyroid gland went insaneo style and blew up into two huge masses that had to be cut out of her throat before they completely cut off her breathing. Then she had a bonus surgery to help with her failing eyesight. On the bright side, there was no cancer found in the weird lumps harvested from my kin.

3. My cat developed a weird lump full of cancer. I spotted a small lump on his right back leg over a month ago and after begging his former vet for an appointment sooner than 2 weeks away we finally got him in. Within seconds she said that it was probably cancer and that if it is he probably won't survive the treatment for it because he's 15 so do I really want to know? Because if I know then maybe I'll want to treat this expensive thing  but if I wanted to let it ride it might be easier I guess? Because letting my weird little son die without trying to save him or give him proper end of life care is cool as long as it's cheaper and I don't have to think about it as much???? This was before any sort of intensive check on him or the tumor was done btw. The little dude was pretty much either a dead man walking or he had some mysterious swelling that time would take care of as far as she was concerned. Either way there was the vibe that she kind of wrote him off.

I ordered tests for him anyway, waited 2 weeks to get inconclusive answers, ordered an x-ray (which should have been done with the other test but whatever), waited a week and a half to learn that yeah, he probably does have cancer maybe and thank god it's not spreading too fast because uh oh! It's been almost a month and that bad boy has been growing this whole time!!!! Also it took weeks for them to bother scheduling any kind of re-check. At this point they say that there's nothing they can do and offer to get me in contact with what seems to be the only animal cancer specialist around. Who's like 2 and a half hours away. And has a crazy wait list. Did I mention that Coup hates being stuck in his carrier and will stress out and cry constantly every time he's forced to travel anywhere? So after reaching out to friends and family I found another much closer vet who could give me a second opinion first and thank god I found that place because not only did they actually judge him by his actual level of health instead of just his age when it comes to treatment (besides the cancer Coup is healthy as an ox, stellar scores in bloodwork and overall cat-ness, vet said that judging from his behavior/usage of the leg that we're probably more concerned about the situation than he is) but they also had a treatment plan rolled out and ready by the end of the visit. The boy is almost done with his chemo injections now and even though the shrinking is slow he's still in great health so we're daring to dream.

Fuck The Haters.

Other things happened but I don't want to talk about those things. The bottom line is that I'm not juggling a hell schedule or crying every day now so I want to get back in the drawing saddle. Thanks again to everyone on patreon who stuck around and basically threw their money in this mysterious pit, Y'all helped pay my bills when I was literally too mentally wrecked to work. And thanks to everyone else who sent me random good vibes, hoped I was okay, said nice things about my art, and were generally pretty cool even though I fled social media. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #477

Top Ten Alternate Titles for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

So did you see the finale? It was good, wasn’t it? A bit like the entire series in microcosm, it was sort of all over the place; a bit too long, with scenes and speeches that needed editing, and a plot that was maybe a little bit too full of holes (let’s be charitable and blame pandemic-enforced rewriting). At the same time, however, it was chock-full of awesome action, some excellent superhero moments (when he comes in through the window! When he lifts the truck!), some intriguing and thought-provoking racial and political commentary, and lots and lots of seeding future stories. I am fully in the tank for the MCU, so I’m always going to be more generous than your casual observer, but really just spending time with Sam and Bucky is enough for me right now (oh god, the bit where Bucky was lifting up all the kids!). Anyway, I thought it was – overall – a great finale and I’m really excited for, in particular, Secret Invasion and Armor Wars, which I think will be the two shows that really follow up on plot threads from this series. And – hey! – Captain America 4, everybody! With Sam! How cool is that?!

Anyway, because I was enjoying it so much, I’ve decided to be really hedonistic this week and dispense with a carefully curated list of reasoning and explanation and just go for ten terrible jokes. Because, you see, every time I’ve talked about the show to my family I’ve hilariously changed the title to make some kind of gag based on the character or power of Falcy and Wintry. So what you see here is a list of ten terrible titles for the Sky King and his Mardy Mate. And that’s it! No messing or fussing. Not convoluted explanations. Please feel free to find it funny, or not.

Normal long-winded service will be resumed next week.

Wingspan and Pouts

Flyguy and Arm-y Man

The Grin and the Grump

Birdy and the Bionic Arm

The Flier and the Faller

Upper and Downer

The Aeronaut and the Assassin

Cloud Atlas and Snowpiercer

Air Bud and K-9000

Apollo and Midnighter

Also I just want to add how delighted I am that I was able to find this gif of my single favourite moment in the entire series. Thanks, makkarisersi, whoever you are.

[hoodedsuns]

Aftertaste of Cherry | Ten

Genre: Street Racer!AU, Fluff & a hint of Angst

Summary: Ten wasn’t one to go on late night adventures. He wasn’t really a risk taker and would much rather prefer being curled up in bed watching a movie. And yet he still somehow manages to end up at a very illegal street race, where he met you.   

Word Count: 2.1K

“Tell me again why you dragged me all the way here in the middle of the night?” Ten couldn’t help but huff out as he glared grumpily at a way too cheery Johnny, eyebrows raised as he silently questioned whether or not his precious free time was worth being sacrificed for whatever spontaneous adventure his roomate had once again decided to drag him into. Ten had been lounging on the couch in his faded black hoodie, mindlessly scrolling through instagram while waiting for his cup noodle to finish cooking so that he could officially start his netflix binge, when Johnny suddenly busted in through the front door with a smile that Ten had learned to associate with less than pleasant ideas.   

“Don’t be such a downer, you need some excitement in your life once in awhile!” Ten sneered at the implications behind Johnny’s words, hands wrapping themselves around Johnny’s neck as he faked strangling him, trying hard to suppress his amused grin when the older boy dramatically chocked before “passing out” by crumbling to the floor. Admittedly, he does spend most of his time in the dance room, but it wasn’t as though he was purposely cooping himself up in there. He just couldn’t help but accidently lose track of time and all sense of reality. “No but seriously, what are we here for?” The once miniscule bubble of anxiety that resided in Ten’s heart couldn’t help but expand and burst as the words “street racing” left Johnny’s mischievously quirked lips. 

Ten’s eyes darted around his surroundings, only now noticing the crowds of rather sketchy looking people who were dressed in all black, each of them easily blending into the darkness of the barely lit industrial road, the only real indicator of a human’s presence being the bitter smoke that would occasionally escape someone’s parted lips. He unconsciously wrinkled his nose in disdain at the thought of breathing in all that second-hand smoke that filled the air before he turned back to Johnny, hands gesturing around panickedly. “Isn’t this illegal?” It was a rhetorical question that Ten already knew the answer to but he still couldn’t help but ask, holding onto the futile hope that maybe whoever was in-charge of this race really did have the permission to legally use this scrappy looking place that they were currently standing in. In the event that the cops choose to visit on this very night, Ten knew that there was no way that he would be swift enough to escape the jaws of the law considering that this was their first time here which meant that they weren’t really familiar with this place, and Ten really wasn’t keen on having to explain to his parents why he was here in the dead of the night instead of being back in his dorm studying. Granted, he wouldn’t be studying right now even if he was back in bed but he’s confident they’d agree that it was a significantly better option than whatever was going on here.

“Don’t worry too much about it, what are the odds that the police will come,” Johnny attempted giving Ten a comforting smile but judging from how the latter was fiddling with the drawstrings of his hoodie anxiously, it was safe to say that he didn’t feel very comforted. “Look, I’m only here because my friend knows one of the racers and I just couldn’t turn down his invitation so since we’re already here just try to relax and have some fun tonight alright?”

Questions about this mysterious friend and his potentially dangerous racer friend immediately replaced Ten’s thoughts of murdering Johnny for being so nonchalant about this whole situation but before he could get any of them out, the sudden cheers and whistles of the people around him had caused him to lose his train of thought as he instinctively turned his head to where everyone else was facing. And that’s when he saw you in all your skin tight leather glory, a wild sort of beauty that he hadn’t ever experienced before. You stepped out of an expensive looking midnight blue car along with a purple haired male, rolling the stick of a pink coloured lollipop between your fingers before popping it into your mouth. You both sized up the crowd for a moment before the male’s eyes locked onto the tall giant that he was looking for, completely destroying any assumptions that Ten had about his personality as he bounded over to Johnny like an excited puppy with you trailing not far behind.

“You really came!” Johnny couldn’t help but chuckle as Yuta grinned at him, arms curling around Johnny’s figure in a hug as he gave him a firm pat on his back. “Oh, who is this next to you?” Ten’s brain had registered the fact that Yuta was referring to him and although he was already mentally reciting his introduction, the physical him didn’t respond, nor did he make any attempts to face him. He was staring at you unabashedly, eyes unable to leave your figure. It was as though you had caught him in a trance.

“This is Ten, hope you don’t mind that I brought him along, he really needed a change of scenery.” Ten finally snapped out of his stupor when Johnny placed a hand on his shoulder while simultaneously pushing him closer to Yuta. Ten stuck his hands out to initiate a handshake but to his surprise, Yuta stuck his fist out instead in order to fistbump him. Everything happened so quickly yet also in slow motion. With Ten still being slightly out of it, he didn’t have enough time to process the situation which led to him just awkwardly patting Yuta’s fist, causing you to burst out laughing in amusement. 

“Ah I haven’t introduced her yet, she’s one of the racers,” you took a step closer to the group wiggling your fingers in a cheeky wave. “You can just call her The Lion since that’s what everyone here-” with a rather loud slap to his back, you smiled in satisfaction as Yuta finally got the hint to stop talking about your embarrassing title in front of his really attractive friends before you do something worse. “Ignore that last part, its just some dumb nickname that the regulars here came up with and they refuse to stop calling me that no matter how many times I’ve told them not to,” you groaned while removing your lollipop from your mouth with a small pop. 

Despite that nickname sounding like something that would circulate around an elementary school full of toddlers instead of an illegal street race full of adults, Ten couldn’t help but agree with how well that nickname fitted you as you had an undeniably feral aura about you. Maybe it was the confident way you carried yourself, or the way your unruly hair framed your face, or maybe it was the way you observed everyone with the sharp eyes of a carnivore. When you had first made eye contact with him after stepping out of your car, he couldn’t help but feel a shiver run down his spine as he felt your eyes rake up and down his body with a lazy smirk. He felt like a vulnerable prey cowering under the gaze of an unpredictable predator.  

“You don’t look too happy to be here, what’s up?” You shifted yourself to stand next to Ten, the both of you having been abandoned by your friends right after your introductions as the pair immediately ran off to who knows where, lead by a hyper Yuta who probably just couldn’t wait to show Johnny some secret hideout he found. “Not much, just a little mad that Johnny kidnapped me here only to leave me for his friend without hesitation.” Chuckling at his usage of words, you hummed in thought to yourself as you silently looked him over properly. He was really cute.

“What did your friend mean by you needing a change of scenery, you having an argument with your girlfriend or something?” Ten shook his head with a small smile, arms rubbing away the goosebumps that had risen on his skin from a particularly chilly breeze and from the way your piercing eyes seemed to be analysing his every move. “The only thing I’m in a committed relationship with is dance.” Ten could’ve sworn that he saw your smirk grow into a smile at his reply but chalked it up to his habit of overthinking things. “Maybe I would have a girlfriend if I wasn’t so boring.” Widening his eyes at his own stupidity, Ten chuckled uneasily, not having meant to let his self deprecating thoughts be exposed to a stranger he had just met.

Sure, people complimented him on his dancing all the time, some even going as far as to call him a genius at it. But outside of dance, Ten wasn’t exactly the most interesting person. He didn’t go to parties, didn’t flirt with anyone, didn’t get up to any mildly illegal antics (until now) that young adults should be experiencing before they are fully shackled down by society. If you had asked the rather tiny group of people who knew of his existence for one word to describe him, chances were that most of the answers would be words like ‘dull, average, normal’, or any other synonyms for the word ‘uninteresting’ that they could think of.

“I think it’s pretty cool that you do what you want to do, even if it might be considered boring in someone else’s eyes.” Now that was a first. People usually told him that he needed to change into someone more exciting and that he needed to get out more. “You live your life for yourself so I don’t see any problems with doing what you enjoy doing. Afterall, if you enjoyed your time, it means that it was time well spent.”  

“Thank you…that means more to me than you can imagine.” You nodded your head at him with a genuine smile plastered on your lips and for a second, Ten swore that you looked like an angel. Honestly, it was a breath of fresh air to have someone tell him that being boring was okay, that he didn’t need to feel guilty for it.

“Hey what flavour is your lollipop?” You crunched on the hard candy with your teeth, breaking it off the white plastic stick that it was once stuck on, rolling the sweet shards around your mouth with your tongue.

“Why don’t you taste it for yourself.” Was the last thing that Ten’s brain processed before he felt your lips moving against his, slowly prying his lips open with your tongue and pushing bits of the broken lollipop into his mouth, the sugary taste of artificial cherry invading his sense of taste. Although his thoughts were having a hard time catching up to what was happening, his body had no problems with moving as he wrapped his arms around your waist, pulling you closer to him. He felt his heart speed up as the familiar feeling of butterflies that always went wild in his stomach before a performance chose to visit him once again but instead of feeling like vomiting out whatever he had for the day, it was an empowering sort of feeling, it felt like he was on the top of the world.

“The race is starting soon, stop sucking on your boy’s face and get your ass over here!” You groaned in disappointment as you pulled away from Ten, turning around to face the brazen-faced announcer who was smirking knowingly at the two of you. 

Ten felt his heart slowly sink as you started heading towards your car without a single goodbye or mention of your previous actions. Not to mention that he was starting to feel really self conscious under the scrutinizing gaze of the people around him who were curious as to who you had been with. Mentally cursing himself for getting his hopes up and for thinking that someone like you would be interested in someone like him, Ten looked around the parking lot for Johnny, desperately wanting to go home so that he could wallow in his disappointment in the privacy of his dorm room. That was until, you shouted to him from across the parking lot. 

“Hey! If I win this race it means you owe me a date alright?” Ten already knew that if Johnny was watching the exchange from some hidden spot, he was going to tease him for how quickly he transitioned from looking like a kicked puppy to a child in a candy store, but Ten couldn’t stop himself from nodding enthusiastically at you. He was confident that you were going to win, and you did, and he was once again left with the sweet aftertaste of cherry.  

[vedj-f-bekuesu]

You know what? I know I only did Hunted yesterday, but March of the Oni is only four episodes long so heck yeah I blitzed that too. 

A little background before I actually cover my thoughts; March of the Oni feels just as much like old Ninjago before my entrance into the fandom as the other seasons. The truth is that it isn’t; I got into LEGO again because of watching TLM2 about mid-late February. I then went nosing around other LEGO branches a month later in March, which covered things like Friends, Clutch Powers, LCU, Nexo Knights and Ninjago. By the time I reached that, it was around the time March of the Oni was airing, so I got to see the reactions to the season in real time. Of course, I couldn’t really join in because I didn’t watch it with them.

But now I have, and it’s honestly rather fun, if not a bit weird. There is one obvious issue, but I think we can predict what that is. But enough of a history chat, I’ll get into my season note write-up!

-The characters are pretty on point even with the lighter tone. At its heart this is a focus on Lloyd to wrap up his plot, and Lloyd is just fine here. He obviously spends a lot of time in a downer mood here too (because circumstances), but he’s got more of his spunk back, the conflict between him and Garmadon in the Oni land is some nice banter. The FSM scene was kind of out of nowhere though. -The other ninja characters have their own small stories (bar Zane. Even the plot tries to excuse that when it doesn’t make sense) and they are all pretty enjoyable. Shout outs to Cole and Kai this time, they’re finally stepping up to take the entertainment mantle from Jay (well, when they’re not depressed in this special. I’ll get to that). Also, Pixal gets more time to show off here than in Hunted, which was a full season. What? -I didn’t even mention Garmadon in Hunted despite being a big player because there he was basically just a destruction machine. For some reason (which I know) he has a lot of sass this time. It means he’s a lot more fun, but after the last two seasons this feels like a very different direction. -Nobody else was worth mentioning aside from Garmadon’s epiphany being from talking to...a random cameraman? What? Even Dareth, Faith, Wu and Misako were basically just cameos.  -Omega and the Oni were actually kind of interesting. I mean, to start with, they’re supposed to be hell-bent on destruction by nature, so them being one-note is a lot more forgivable than more human characters being the same. For another, the plot used Omega to highlight something Hunted never really did anything with. When we saw the resurrection ceremony in Sons of Garmadon, the ninja appeared to interfere with it while it was still going on. The aftermath of SoG and the entirety of Hunted basically went along with the idea that this ended up a flawless resurrection anyway, and that the ninja interfering did nothing. Omega basically offers a counterargument that it was in fact botched, calling out this supposedly totally evil Garmadon as still wanting to connect to his human side. That’s why I’m actually fine with how it ended; Omega’s words have him conflicted, and he feels he can’t judge how to react to Lloyd in this state, so he ends up backing off to see he can find some answers for himself. Leaves the Omega’s words room to resonate and have payoff.  Plus he seemed so done with the family feud shit down below.  -Speaking of, I have seen people question why Cole was needed to fall anyway when he survived just fine and came back in the span of one episode. It seemed to be two-fold to me; to be the straw that broke the camel’s back between Lloyd and Garmadon (thus driving Garmadon’s possible road to redemption, since him and Lloyd are the focus of this season) and being the impetus that eventually leads to the idea of forging the Golden Weapons, and thusly the Tornado of Creation. Plus Kai was depressed pretty much the entire time until Cole came back (I’ll get into this one later).  -The whole premise of this special has a weird foundation; it was supposed to finish off the brand spanking new Oni trilogy, but was made to promote Legacy sets. That being said, it was nice to see the callbacks. From the aforementioned Tornado of Creation, to the Golden Master armour (NOT the Dragon Armour), to Possessions’ Sword of Sanctuary, and even Kai’s profession from the pilot play a pivotal part.  -As one may expect, the big thing about the season that holds it back is the pacing. With only four episodes to cover story as opposed to ten, a lot of beats end up going by very quickly without having time to really mull properly. Biggest offender is probably after Cole’s death, everyone is down, but as soon as Kai forges those golden weapons Jay and Zane are just stoked like “YEAH” and “COOL”. Like, come on. 

Okay, for this one I’m getting on a soap box about Cole and Kai again. I did it for Possession, but I need to do it here even harder. When I started this watching of the older Ninjago material, I thought, based on how everyone else talked about it, Cole and Kai stopped having meaningful interactions early on, only to come up again much, much later. It seemed that way when I started, being way down for season 2 compared to season 1 and the pilots. But no, season 3 picked it up again, and it persisted. It persisted so long, only season 6 could be argued to have dropped it again (and that has the excuse of them only appearing for half the season in Kai’s case). It was there, but it was on the low, left to simmer. March of the Oni feels like someone got drunk at the wheel and messed up the ratios of character interaction, because this season was just chock full of it. Like, it even comes to a point where Garmadon is looking at past photos of Cole after being admonished for his inhumanity about his “death”, and the shot just could not cut Kai out of the closeup of Cole. Between this season, and what the DHX seasons have done, it’s no wonder Lava seems to be snowballing.

Also can I just point out that this is some weird bizarro universe where Jay is being pushed by his girlfriend’s brother and his former romantic rival to propose when Jay’s the one not ready to do so? And that it gets even weirder for said girlfriend? 

Overall, I actually quite enjoyed March of the Oni, in spite of its reputation. It’s certainly very bizarre when taken as the follow-up to Sons of Garmadon and hunted, but I think it achieves what it set out to do, and in a satisfactory way. The deaths may have been a bit too cheesy, but everything has a narrative purpose, so none of it feels like fluff. Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. 

Well, it’s nice that the series has picked up again after Hunted. But next time, we get to see if it can...oh, wait, that’s it. I saw Secrets of the Forbidden Spinjutsu when it came out, and I really enjoyed that one. And Prime Empire is my favourite season of Ninjago altogether. 

So I guess for overall, I’d say this; Ninjago as a show isn’t without its issues. It especially seemed to have teething issues for the first four seasons, but aside for some clunky bits (decisions made in S6, S9) and some shaky characterisation that wasn’t quite ironed out, it’s been an enjoyable ride. I’d say I’d watch eight of the twelve seasons willingly again, and that is definitely not a bad ratio for such a long lasting show. 

This isn’t the end of my thoughts on old Ninjago though. Next time I get to do something more off the cuff and digging into my more nuanced thoughts; unpopular opinions!

[tratserenoyreve]

i’m still thinkin about how, in comparison, kingdom hearts ii’s finale is just so good, which is what makes kh3 such a personal downer for me. thematically, visually, the gameplay, it just all came together for a brilliant over-the-top end for a game that admittedly spent a lot of its time dragging its feet, which is why it hits so hard when they stop moseying along and suddenly jump kick you in the goddamn face with all this cool sh!t.

like, okay, in kh2 you have a ton of options in fights. the way the magic, drive, and ability systems all tied together is just pure videogame poetry which others have broken down and explained way more eloquently than i ever will. the summary of which being that those systems tie together to begin with and do it really well. sure this makes standard difficulty feel like a walk in the park, but it keeps up a strong pace, fights are full of movement and quick options, and as you ramp up the difficulty the game pushes you harder to think faster and understand how you’re moving and managing the combat around you.

this then starts being amped up in the final world, the world that never was, which is also just a visual treat. abyssal neon, gorgeous music, the aesthetic is off the charts with the color choice, a floating castle above a void with a giant moon shaped like a heart looking down upon you. this level is fast to start throwing multiple unique bosses against you, the first of which being a character who has a moveset on par with your own!

the fight against xigbar, against luxord, saix, all of them were just such good treats of being thrown into unique fights with unique mechanics. on harder difficulties, your reflexes are actually really challenged! how well you understand how to parry, reflect, what their moves are, when to switch into drives, it’s just so fun to play.

and the story! the kingdom hearts games’ story heavily relies on character attachment, which comes to fruition here at the end of kh2. you spend the whole game looking for sora’s friend riku, and then kairi, and you get them both back! in such a badass way! kairi starts bashing heartless down, riku rejoins his friends, and the icing on the cake is the fact that riku becomes a party member! he actually joins you!

the climb up the castle then culminates in multiple fights against xemnas, which are also chock full of great visuals and gameplay. the point of no return is you entering the goddamn heart moon in the sky that has had a hole blasted into it and you’re using a door summoned by the hearts of all the worlds you’ve been to up until now to access it. and when you enter, there’s more of that gorgeous abyssal neon, with extra void thrown in, and you enter a gauntlet of amazingly showy boss fights.

and! the boss fights refer to some of the story’s emotional strengths repeatedly! the bit where sora and riku are fighting xemnas and he is in the middle of having his electro dragon blast lasers at you and he starts asking if sora can truly trust riku, to which the response is to chuck skyscrapers at his dragon thru the power of teamwork. the way the very last fight has a moment where xemnas traps sora and you play as riku and have to save him!! the choreography of the fight at the very end where sora pummels xemnas???!?!

its all such a feast of rewarding visuals and gameplay that actually intertwine!!!

meanwhile, there’s such a... comparable disconnect in kh3 at the end that it feels so... lifeless? the keyblade graveyard is neat but visually little is done to it even with the ‘maze’ that gets thrown in. seeing the others fight is cool, but you never actually get to fight alongside everyone, and rather than the bosses being a challenging gauntlet with unique mechanics, they’re more like mob fights, each taking place in a similar arena and not forcing the player to really adapt to anything. you fight them 3 at a time, then pick them off, with little fanfare or resistance.

the fact that you never have kairi or riku as teammates in kh3 also caused for me this big disconnect. what happened to rewarding the players and driving home the fact that they’re friends? that they care about eachother? what happened to the kairi who insisted she’d fight alongside everyone, and why the hell has riku become so passive when his friends are endangered?

the very final boss fights for sure are much more impressive visually. but the blandness of the other organization fights is only made more obvious for it. there were definitely high moments, mostly helped with the music, but goddamn a boss fight shouldn’t be able to play itself within two minutes (i’m not joking, roxas and xion can take down saix all on their own, the player doesn’t have to do anything like... wtf)

tldr: kh2 is superior and i’m sad about that

[horoscopesbygil]

Horoscopes by Gil Hizon - February 4 - March 3, 2018

Cage-free and gluten-free, yet chock-full of shadery.

AQUEERIUS (January 20 – February 18)

When these hos around you are filled with desperation OR are just being super extra, you’re the only one they can turn to for stabilizing support. Your default aloof demeanor inspires others to not let their emotions get the better of them. Your expansive brain enables you to dole out the best advice with minimum effort. You’re the glue that holds the rest of us busted bitches together, you keep us sane, and you make that shit look good. Thank you! =====

PI-SHEESH (February 19 – March 20)

There is something to be said about declaring your dreams, goals and aspirations to the universe. Here’s the thing, queen. There are allies all around you that have your back, and a lot of them don’t even know it yet. These hos are willing to help you out, because you have been such a giving, generous queen to them in the past. All you gots to do is let them know your deepest desires, and you’ll be surprised how many bitches will go the extra mile for yo ass. =====

ARIES IS BURNING (March 21 – April 19)

This month, you can stand to participate in any group think activity you can squeeze yourself into (orgies optional). Your energy is ripe to absorb so much useful information right now, that if you don’t take advantage of this shit, you might end up feeling like you’re not doing anything meaningful with your fucking life. No time like the present to allow other queens to “yes and” your perspective. =====

TAURY SPELLING (April 20 – May 20)

This month is all about the idea of opportunity and the many ways it can enter yo life. I know that sometimes, you can be a stubborn bitch who would only recognize opportunities that look traditional to you, but queen, it don’t take that much effort in opening your mind a bit and being a little more trustful of those who wanna help you get the most bang out of your buck. If you can put some energy into broadening your mind of minds, it will only benefit yo ass. =====

GEM IS EXCITEMENT (May 21 – June 21)

This month’s Jekyll and Hyde act is brought to you by Excedrin. Quite honestly, as a veteran of mood swings, yours don’t surprise nobody noh moh! The rest of us have learned to predict this behavior of yours that we can automatically brace ourselves from your cray of the day. So honey, give it your best shot. We ready. And we got back up. =====

KUH-KUH-KUH-CANCER (June 22 – July 22)

Gurl, you have a lot on your plate right now, and the worst thing you can do to yourself is add more shit to that pile by saying yes to pretty much everything. It’s nice to be so in demand and to have ERRbody dependent on yo ass, but spreading yourself too thin will not do you nor nobody else any favors. The more you’re persnickety about what to say yes to, the more you’ll retain your sanity and the more you’ll be in tip-top shape to help other hos. =====

LEO MCQUEEN (July 23 – August 22)

Your biggest challenge this month is to find a balance between spreading yourself too thin by going out too much, and exhibiting hermit realness in your house. Your energy just doesn’t have the capacity when it comes to finding a middle ground right now. Or so you think. With enough focus, yo ass should be able to discern which activities will further enrich your life, and which ones are just meaningless fluff. =====

VIRGO/BEYONCÉ (August 23 – September 22)

This month’s hustle is brought to you by Muscle Milk. No one hustles more than you and you’ll find that, as your status in life evolves, so does the hustle. You are being forced to up your game and normally you’re excited to take on the challenge, but switching gears at the drop of a hat is not something you’re good at. Rising to the top of your game is also a growing pain; the more you look ahead, the more you’ll be able to handle the swerves and curves of life. =====

LIBBY JUJU (September 23 – October 22)

There’s a time in someone’s life when one has got to drop the nicer-than-thou facade and be a ball-busting badass superbitch. And this month is that time, LIBBY. Trust the rest of us when we say that we need a leader right now, and your facilitating antics to make us all happy ain’t not gonna cut it. The end game is approaching. There’s no time for niceties anymore. You can do that shit after we cross the muthafucking finish line. =====

SCORPIES (October 23 – November 21)

You’re so used to distrusting ERRbody with such intensity, that when you flip that coin and turn your suspicions into full on trust, it’s fucking magic, baby. Recognizing that not everyone is out to get you makes you a better participant in this play we call life, and no matter what hardships you may face, know that your intensity is something you’ll always have within you. If you use that shit for good, ERRbody wins. =====

SAGITTICARIUS (November 22 – December 21)

You’re looking good and feeling GAW-JUS these days. You’re just full of optimism in being successful, that it will make even the PISCIEST of PISCES look at you and say, “who deez betch thinkin she’s Mary Fucking Poppins?” Look, queen, we think it’s great to have such a positive outlook when you’re setting out to fulfill your dreams. But when you contain and control that positivity, it will only help you zero in on a plan to achieve your goals. =====

CAPRICORN-ON-THE-COB (December 22 – January 19)

It’s never fun to be the Debbie Downer in any group, but someone’s gotta do the job. And unfortch, that someone this month is you, gurl. If you don’t want such a backlash in your Debbie Downer behaviors, it wouldn’t hurt to shave off some of the sharpness in your reads. And honey, if you keep that tough love funny, it’ll be easier to absorb. Kewl? =====

(DISCLAIMER for all entries: This is all a shitshow!)

For more Horoscopes By Gil Hizon, click here, gurl!

[ilovereadingandilovebreathing]

Play It Again, Virgil

So, as promised, here is the companion piece to “Play It Again, Patton” (aka the other bout of angst Coldplay caused me.)

As I said on my other post, this one is a different situation from the other; they’re just companions in the Coldplay inspiration and Virgil/Patton angst department. This one took a different less painful course than I expected, but I think this one is my favorite of the pair. 

The placement of this one is immediately after the filming of “Accepting Anxiety” because that whole ordeal would be chocked full of emotions for Virgil.

Summary: Today’s been a big day for Virgil. The other Sides AND Thomas were in his room, he revealed his name, and the others were all so kind to him. It’s sparked something in him that he never wants to lose, so where else to go to hold on to an emotion than their resident powerhouse of emotions?

Word Count: 1,172

Characters: Virgil and Patton (platonic/paternal), some Logan, and a smidge of Roman

Genre: (Kind of?) Hurt/Comfort, (I guess?) Angst, and (some) Fluff

Warnings: None, again, unless “Fix You” and/or “Yellow” by Coldplay are/is a no-go for you (which is completely fair because wow). 

Tags: @irish-newzealand-idian-dutch @ssides

“Honestly, thank you for all of the good stuff that you do provide. You can be a good guy.”

Virgil sinks out of Thomas’s sight and materializes into his corner of the Mind Space, that small grin still playing with his lips as he sprawls across his bed. This…there’s this sensation, and it feels good. Like, really good. It’s warm and also kind of fuzzy, like static or a fleece blanket, and the feeling is burrowed in the pit of his stomach and the middle of his chest. It’s strange, and the force and unfamiliarity of it almost make him feel a little queasy, but…he likes it. 

And he doesn’t understand it. So, seeing as he and Logan are still on civil terms after a video (for a change), Virgil ambles toward the Logical Side’s room.

“Hey Logan?” Virgil asks, peeking his head around the door frame.

“Yes, Anx-Virgil.” Logan corrects himself, smiling apologetically. “Is something the matter?”

“No, no not at all. Things are great, actually, but I was wondering….I have this weird warm, fuzzy feeling in my stomach. Am I sick? Did being away for an extended period of time screw something up?”

“In your stomach, you say…” Logan reiterates thoughtfully. “Warm…fuzzy…is this only in your stomach?”

“Well, my chest, too, but that’s it.”

“I believe it could be a few different things, but considering the breakthroughs being had recently, I’d say it’s….a sense of belonging and acceptance, a physical manifestation of your sense of feeling at home here.”

“Wow,” Virgil is wide-eyed. 

A sense of belonging…of home…so this is what that feels like.

“That’s…I like it. A lot.” He wants this feeling to remain for as long as possible, and he knows just where, or who, to go to make that sensation stay. “Thanks, Logan.” Virgil waves as he turns and pads down the hall toward Patton’s room.

-

“Hey, Pat?” Virgil asks, knocking on Patton’s door a few minutes later. “Can I come in?”

“Of course, kiddo!” Patton chirps, briefly looking up from his adult coloring book to flash him a smile and beckon him in. “What’s up?”

“I…just wanted to hang out with you.” He knows if he mentions the home and belonging thing, Patton will flip out and hug all over him. With all of the stimulation today, he isn’t sure if he can handle that just yet.

“That’s just fine!” Patton beckons to the empty side of his bed, moving a few colored pencils out of the way so Virgil can stretch out. “How’s a little music?” Patton grabs a palm-sized remote and aims it toward the docking station on his bedside table.

“Anything is fine. Whatever you want, Pat.” Virgil sighs as he leans against Patton’s boundless abundance of pillows, allowing the beat of Capital Cities’s “Safe and Sound”  to fill the air around him.

They let time pass like this, Virgil staring at Patton’s ceiling, reveling in this new feeling, and Patton happily adding color to intricate mandalas. Eventually, the much slower pace and sadder instrumentals of “Fix You” are filling the room, and it isn’t until the chorus that Patton’s ears register the difference.

“Whoopsie daisy!” Patton grabs the remote and moves to change the song. “Don’t know how that Debbie Downer snuck into my playlist. Must’ve accidentally added it with “Something Like This-”

Patton suddenly realizes that his bed is shaking, and he looks up, shocked to find Virgil huddled into himself, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Virge, kiddo, what’s the matter?“ Patton asks, moving to sit in front of the other side. “Do I need to change the song?”

Wordlessly, Virgil leans over and rests his head on Patton’s thigh, still curled into himself as he continues to cry; he shakes his head when Patton once again asks about switching to another track.  

“I-I-it’s h-happy a-a-and s-ad c-crying, P-P-Pat.” Virgil barely manages to choke out as the emotions continue to pour out of him. It’s a cathartic kind of crying, as Virgil envisions, and even realizes the possible reality of, a life where the other Sides and Thomas really do care about him and want to help him, to “fix” him. The verses remind him of his past, present, and still likely future struggles with himself, but the chorus brings him the hope of this new life of support and companionship. After the emotional video he barely got through today, the timing of this song is too much to contain.

Leaving the song to play on, Patton considers the lyrics, suddenly realizing what their significance could be to Virgil in the aftermath of “Accepting Anxiety.” Patton runs his fingers through Virgil’s hair, occasionally straying to rub his back as his charge lets his feelings wash out of him.

Eventually, “Fix You” fades out, and Patton switches off the music dock, taking in a deep, but shaky, breath before softly singing, “Your skin, your skin and bones, turn in to something…beautiful…You know….you know, I love you so.” Patton sniffles as a few tears sneak from the corners of his eyes. “I do, kiddo.” Patton whispers, a small smile on his lips as Virgil looks up at him from beneath his bangs, the eye-shadow and actual bruises melting together through Virgil’s tears. “You’ve grown so much since we first became aware of you, and….I’m so proud of you, kiddo. I really…really am.” This time, Patton is actually crying, and now he’s drawing his dark, strange son into his embrace as he whispers, “I love you so much, Virgil” into the other Side’s shoulder. “So, so much.”

Virgil takes in a deep, steadying breath and murmurs, “I love you, too, Pat.” Squeezing the other side before letting go, that small, shy smile back on his lips, he shakily chuckles, “I wouldn’t have worked so hard on my eye shadow for the video if I’d known I’d just cry it off afterward.”

“It’s okay, kiddo.” Patton grabs a tissue from the box on his desk. “It looks kinda cool, Halloween-y.” He smiles as Virgil gently rubs the black eye shadow from beneath his eyes, trying not to stare at the actual purple-black bruises already underneath the dark make up.  His heart clenches in pain for his beloved companion, but there’s also a twinge of hope that maybe things will change for Virgil, now. Maybe he can feel more at ease and sleep more, letting those dark patches of skin fade. Only time would tell, but that wouldn’t keep Patton from hoping now.

Squeezing Virgil’s hand, Patton looks back to his coloring book and hits play on his speakers, skipping to the next track which happens to be “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Getting an idea, Patton suddenly leaps off of the bed, doing a horrible interpretive dance and horrendously inaccurate air guitar solos that leave a still emotionally charged Virgil in hysterical tears. The noise draws Logan and Roman into the room, as well, and before long, all four are laughing and singing together, that warm and fuzzy feeling alive and well within all of them.

Play It Again, Patton

All of my Sanders Sides fanfics

[scrabbleknight]

Let's take the most obvious one out: Kemono Friends.

Yeah, you fucking heard me.

An anime about cute anthropomorphic animal girls in an abandoned park called Japari Park. Here we follow a vaguely human character Kaban as the protagonist, and the cute cat girl Serval. Kaban has lost her memory and is searching for her identity.

Kemono Friends doesn't shy away from the whole "post-apocalypse" theme. Yes, it's cute and cute girls do cute things but there are some seriously disturbing stuff in the background, some of which just blatantly spelled out to you. But because of the characters, they don't care about humanity's extinction. They're not human, after all; they're Friends. To them, we might as well be dinosaurs in the dirt.

Then, there's Houseki no Kuni, also known by its English name: Land of the Lustrous.

Land of the Lustrous is not a "cute girls doing cute things" anime. In fact, they're not even girls. They are known as Lustrous, beings made of gemstones that occasionally pop out from a beach. They are ranked by hardness and quality, and we follow the lowest of the Lustrous, Phosphophyllite, who hard a hardness of 4.

However, the story has a lot of cute moments. It's chock full of fluff and cuteness, mostly at the expense of Phos and their naivety. But underneath that layer is the story's core themes, focusing on the philosophical debates regarding life, death and rebirth. And every time Phos gets closer to understanding these, the more they lose themselves, literally.

Oh and it takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth that was ravaged by meteors, creating 3 moons and causing humanity's extinction kinda. To ensure humanity's survival, they basically split themselves into 3 parts - flesh, bone and spirit.

Finally, the last one I can think of, and possibly the reason I wrote this post, is Girls Last Tour.

I... haven't watched much of this one. But I've seen the ending (it was a downer) and saw a few episodes/chapters. Basically, you have these two girls who are living in a world destroyed by war and they're just spending time with one another, trying to reach the top of the tower they've lived their whole lives in. Unlike the other two series, Girls Last Tour takes place quite recently in the post-apocalypse.

The story is a "cute girls doing cute things" anime but it also deals with a lot of heavy themes. More precisely, it's about hopelessness in a dying world and what you do with it. It's not about trying to survive; no, it's about trying to make the best out of your life. And the ending really kicked me in the balls.

Girls Last Tour is sad but cute, depressing but uplifting. It's a story of finding joys in one's fleeting life and how existing isn't all there is. It's a cute story with lovable protagonists doing lovable things, albeit in the worst setting they could be in. They are fully aware of their demise and yet, still continues to do what they want.

Sometimes i'm reminded that Japan has a lot of video games/anime/manga where everything is all cute and cuddly and everyone is happy and joking around in this slice-of-life universe, only for the story to slowly reveal in the background that it all takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth and humans are extinct or something.

Like, you can have this group of cute girls do cute things, only for them to stumble into a decrepit nuclear bunker and be like "Wow, look at this funny-looking mask! It's got a trunk!" and play around the skeletal corpses of dead children.

[superfamigos]

Sam’s GDC Recap: Day 2

All right, here we are to review Day 2 of GDC, Tuesday February 28. Today was another day chock full of talks. I was on a Summits, Tutorials, and Bootcamps pass, which primarily take place Monday-Tuesday, so I was trying to make the most of the talks I could get to. I still did have a little discretionary time, and met a few nice people. Let’s get into it.

(And check it out! It me! Photo courtesy of Tim Rogers’ Twitter.)

Failure Workshop

Speakers: Michael Molinari, Adriaan de Jongh, Tim Rogers

Overview:

Michael Molinari talked about his interactive Twitch game CityStream

A city building game that combines elements of idle games, Twitch Plays, and realtime DMing

Reasons the game didn't do well included:

Paid content was permanent, so no reason to keep buying

Had to work double shifts to run the game live (more on this in Details)

Got too confusing as more and more things were added

Adriaan de Jongh talked about closing down his game studio Game Oven

Discussed background of the studio and costs of keeping it open

Various struggles for the team:

They had different deep motivations (for the kinds of games they wanted to make, and how to run the studio)

Media articles often gave credit solely to Adriaan, not the rest of the team 

Their roles were undefined, which caused tension

Tim Rogers talked about the failure of his digital sporting good VIDEOBALL

In some sense, Videoball was not a failure, because Tim designed his own favorite game

Videoball was already super hype in 2013

Took too long to get the game out, and had a weak message (I thought the trailers were awesome though - Ed.)

Various problems that contributed to the game's failure:

Inherited the burden of a publisher's expectations (to make the game bigger and better)

Divided their work into "have-to's" and "want-to's" (which led to moving the “want-to’s” into overtime work)

Original publisher went out of business during production

The first-time game experience for new players was too difficult, and often in the wrong environment (they intentionally prioritized a player's 1000th experience over the 1st, which led to the game's appeal not being apparent at first, especially in 1v1 like many streamers and Let's Players did)

Too much stuff in the game (online play split matchmaking into ranked and unranked 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3, plus arcade mode etc.)

The menus were not perfect (e.g. confusing at some parts)

Spent much less than $1 mil promoting the game

Lessons learned from the game:

The game was great: we can make great games

Game conventions are loud and stupid: we should have shown at universities, etc.

You can't make eSports, it just happens (shouldn't have diluted matchmaking with so many modes and just had ranked 2v2, which is what the game was designed around)

We could have made a dumber game (with more identifiable characters, etc)

Gave ideas on how we can save Videoball (essentially a stripped down, ad-supported free version)

Interesting details:

CityStream was only playable in one place: the CityStream Twitch channel. Now that the game has ended, there's no way for anyone to play it.

CityStream's character BEEP, a robot who narrated the action, was actually played in real-time by the team. They watched the game every day with the players and wrote live responses, because they weren't able to come up with a good automated solution. This led to double shifts where the team worked on the game during the day, and then played the game on stream at night.

CityStream ended with a really cute event where players flew to the moon while riding atop the city they built

The business model of Game Oven was to run a company on the "long tail" of sales from many games.

It cost approximately 6500 euros per month to run Game Oven, which went to 3-4 full-time employees, contractors, and other costs.

In the end, long tail sales wasn't enough to run the company, but other sources helped them make it. In other words, Game Oven wasn't closed because they ran out of money.

Communicating your vision and your frustrations is hard, but important

Despite all the problems, Adriaan is still friends with Bojan, and he's proud of what the team accomplished together

"Videoball launched, and my life has been a garage sale ever since." - Tim Rogers

With VIDEOBALL, Tim wanted to create the Burberry scarf of video games (iconic, high-quality, premium)

When working 16-hour days at some point during development, Tim worked out that they were probably making 4.60 per hour

People have said VIDEOBALL's design style is "preschool industrial," and called the game itself "Pong for millenials" and "2D Rocket League"

Tim showed an awesome illustration by Dan Dussault of what VIDEOBALL could look like if the look was un-abstracted into armored future soldier sports

Thoughts:

Failure Workshop sounds like a pretty depressing talk, but it actually wasn't too much of a downer. I mean, I don't want to downplay it: it's hard to see the struggles people went through, and you wish they could have succeeded. And it's also scary to realize that your chances for failure as an indie dev are also very high.

Fortunately though, the speakers generally had a positive outlook. It was good to see that they could pull lessons out of their experience, and they were still at it, trying to make games. CityStream and a lot of the games from Game Oven were very unique and creative, so it was cool to see a lot of new ideas, even if all of them didn't work out. And Tim Rogers' talk in particular was one of the funniest I went to at GDC. Definitely some of the best crowd response I saw.

Links:

Failure Workshop (Video) on GDC Vault: The full talk is available for free on the GDC Vault!

Failure Workshop (Michael Molinari Slides) on GDC Vault

Failure Workshop (Adriaan de Jongh Slides) on GDC Vault

Tech Toolbox

Speakers: Michael Cook, Holden Link, Brian Williams, Cukia "Sugar" Kimani, Chris Martens, Innes McKendrick

Summary:

Michael Cook of Falmouth University showed a procedural assistance tool called Danesh

A tool designed to help you tune your procedural generation

Allows you to not only adjust parameters and see examples, but also calculate metrics

Autotuning lets you set desired output metrics rather than mess with inputs to try to get those outputs

Danesh can search your code for other potential parameters to include

Available at danesh.procjam.com

Holden Link of Turbo Button showed off Tbutt, a wrapper for VR SDKs in Unity

Makes it really easy to compile builds for different VR platforms

Helpful for testing a project for a specific platform on whatever VR rig you have handy

For example, rather than compiling a build to load onto mobile for Google Daydream or Cardboard, the Turbo Button team can just flip a switch to test what they're working on with the Vive on their desk

Available at github.com/turbobutton/tbutt-vr-framework

Brian Williams of Spry Fox demoed Dark Config, a tool that allows real-time changes while the game is running by hotloading config files

You can define level attributes in config files and change those files on the fly, and the game will update instantly while running

This allows much faster iteration and proofing out new ideas using new combinations of existing assets

Uses YAML for the config files

Works with Unity or any other C# project

Available at github.com/spryfox/DarkConfig

Cukia "Sugar" Kimani talked about using Bezier curves to animate rectangles

From Johannesburg, South Africa, working in a studio called Nyamakop on Semblance

Talked about animating the main character, a little blobby dude, by deforming a rectangle using Bezier curves

(Wasn't able to get down many details, but it looked pretty neat)

Is winning the email game with an address that starts with "holla@yourboy" haha

Chris Martens showed Ceptre, or TinkerTool for rulesets

It's a small prototyping language for rulesets and logic stuff in board and video games

Could be helpful for testing resource economies (like Minecraft crafting), procedural generation (like Spelunky) or interactive fiction

Available at github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp

Innes McKendrick from Hello Games talked about the texture generation in No Man's Sky

Their goals were to create variety, allow for runtime generation, and amplify the work of a small art team

They mix and match different layers and elements (base color, stripes/spots, hair, etc.) of individual textures created by an artist

Wrote a photoshop script to export color maps and metadata

For better color control, don't work in RGB (they use HSV)

The game loads in artist data, then combines and recolors in the shader, and finally generates a mipmap

They also wrote tools that let artists see lots of examples generated from their work, so they can make tweaks

Thoughts:

There were some very interesting tools in here. I was particularly into TButt, as it seems like it would be very useful for friends of mine that work on VR games in Unity. Danesh and Dark Config also seemed very useful, and using Bezier curves as an animation tool was interesting too.

Links:

Tech Toolbox (Video) on GDC Vault: Available for free!

Tech Toolbox (DarkConfig Slides) on GDC Vault

Tech Toolbox (Rectangles Slides) on GDC Vault

(The links to each tool are included in the summary notes, if provided.)

Lunch break!

After the Tech Toolbox talk, I got to talking with the guy next to me, Austin. He's a really friendly grad student from University of Michigan who co-teaches the only game development-related class at the school. He invited me to grab lunch with him and some friends, which included his game dev co-teacher Kurt, some grad students from Carnegie Mellon, and Rodrigo, an audio engineer and developer from WayForward. We went to Mel's Diner for lunch (where I got a old-school syrupy strawberry lemonade and a few very juicy, red-to-the-point-of-being-disconcerting sliders), and had a pretty fun time talking about Undertale, Splatoon, the Switch, etc. While Rodrigo and I were talking, I was excited to be able to tell him about Thumper, which he hadn’t heard of yet. If you're out there Rodrigo, hope you checked it out! Let me know what you think!

Unfortunately, lunch went a bit longer than I expected and I missed a talk by Matt Thorson (creator of Towerfall) about the level design for Celeste. Instead, I wandered around a bit in Moscone West until the next talks started, and ended up talking to Josh and Marcos, two Aggies who are currently working as generalists in the games industry (at Flying Car Games, I think?).

Finding ‘Duskers’: Innovation through Better Design Pillars

Speaker: Tim Keenan

Main points:

Rather than designing Duskers up front, the design of the game emerged during the course of development as Tim tried to listen to what the game needed

He gradually discovered several design pillars that guided development, but these pillars were less like mechanics or principles and more like emotions or feelings he wanted to evoke

These pillars included: realism, isolation, and careful planning

Tim felt that staying true to these pillars in all of his decision-making is what led to the effective communication of these feelings in the final game

Interesting details:

Duskers was very much inspired by Capsule, a similar terminal-based game set in space. (In fact, I was a bit confused when I first heard about Duskers, because I had heard of Capsule and wasn't sure if it was the same game.)

He was tempted to flesh out the look of the game world by showing a view of the area around the player's computer terminal before the game began. In the end, he decided to only show the on-screen display, in support of the realism pillar. The idea is that the player isn't controlling a drone operator character, they are the drone operator. This 1:1 simulation of the terminal helped players to feel like they were really there when they turned out all the lights and played.

Similarly, he tested two ways of showing what each drone "sees": a CCTV-like camera feed, and a less-readable view based on edge detection, which is closer to methods used in real computer vision for robots. Players liked the CCTV version more, but he chose the edge detection view, again to support the pillar of realism.

He also cut music entirely from the game to make it feel more real, which was a particularly scary decision.

Tim encouraged anthropomorphizing of the drones, which he hoped would make players feel like a lonely, slightly crazy freighter pilot. He gave each drone a name, and opted to let the drones obey orders blindly, rather than give them some level of AI autonomy. This made the drones feel more like pets or children than peers. He hoped that players would grieve the death of a drone, then realize how crazy they were being for attaching feelings to unfeeling robots, just as a drone operator in the game's world would.

He also increased the feeling of isolation by using logs to flesh out the game's world instead of direct dialogue with other characters.

Thoughts:

As someone who's really interested in imbuing games with emotion and feelings, Tim's success in achieving this with Duskers was really encouraging, and he had some good ideas on how others could do the same. The talk itself was engaging too. I recommend checking it out, especially if you're a fan of the game.

Links:

Finding ‘Duskers’ (Video) on GDC Vault

RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 on Vimeo: Speaking of 1:1 interface simulations, I was reminded of this great music video, which is designed to be watched on your smartphone (ideally an iPhone). If you’re on your desktop, go ahead and open it up on your phone. I’ll wait ;)

Fantastic Arcade 2016: Misfits Attic’s Sci-Fi Drone Sim DUSKERS - YouTube : Tim’s talk at Fantastic Arcade, which looks to cover some of the same content, and more!

How the dev behind Duskers let his game be what it wanted to be on Gamasutra : a Gamasutra Twitch interview with Tim that also looks like it touches on the same themes of the talk.

Shaders 201: Creating Art with Math

Speaker: Ben Cloward

Main Points:

Demoed methods for creating several shader effects, including:

A simple cloth shader

Animated rain ripples

A volumetric effect for something like ice with dirt and imperfections inside

Thoughts:

I thought this talk was fairly good, but it covered ground that I was already somewhat familiar with. The methods he described were fairly simple, and I’ve learned similar things about shaders in school already. The descriptions are a bit technical though, and I don’t remember most of it, so I won’t spend a ton of time on this talk. However, I will share some of the resources he mentioned in the links below.

Links:

Unfortunately this talk is members only on the Vault.

Uncharted 2: Character Lighting and Shading (Slides) : Ben cited this SIGGRAPH 2010 talk as the basis for the cloth shader he demoed.

Water drop 1 – Observe rainy world | Sébastien Lagarde : A series of blog posts that was the basis for the animated rain ripple shader demo.

Efficient Shader Tricks (Slides) : This GDC 2006 talk was the reference for the volumetric shader.

Another break

After this, I nearly went to the talk “Bringing Fantasy to Life in ‘Final Fantasy XV’”. Actually, to tell the truth, I actually got in the room for the talk, heard the speaker say that there would be spoilers, and then left (after a discrete pause so people wouldn’t think I was leaving for spoilers :P haha). In other circumstances I might have just stayed, but I’ve actually bought Final Fantasy XV and plan to play it soon, so I decided to abstain.

Instead, I went by the Shut Up and Sit Down board game lounge. I saw a few interesting games there, like the beautiful-looking Mouse Guard RPG. I think the comic series is really neat, and I’ve been seeing great reviews of the RPG as well. I was also intrigued by Beyond Baker Street, which was described as a Sherlock Holmes-themed Hanabi where you play a group of inept detectives trying to beat Mr. Holmes to the punch. I do love me some Sherlock. 

While there, I ran into my friend Jon, co-designer of the board game Skulldug! and host of the podcast Pretentious Game Ideas. We both worked at Microsoft Studios a few years back, but both moved on to different things. It was nice to catch up. He also told me about Bargain Quest, a game he had been watching a playthrough of. Apparently you play as competing shopowners in a fantasy adventuring town, which sounded pretty neat. 

After that, I headed downstairs and chilled with my travel buddy Brian until the last talk of the day, the Indie Soapbox.

Indie Soapbox

Speakers: Brandon Sheffield, Tanya X Short, Jarryd Huntley, Sadia Bashir, Marben Exposito, Gemma Thomson, Jerry Belich, Brie Code, Colm Larkin, Jane Ng

Brandon Sheffield: Taste in Games

Brandon encouraged the crowd to make more games that are different by showing their tastes and passions

Doing this can be risky, but can yield greater artist rewards

Cultivate your taste by:

Thinking about your favorite things

Asking others about their favorite things, and why

Going out in the world and doing something new

Going to the thrift store and finding 3 interesting things

Unleash your taste by making something that means something to you, not something bland and flavorless

(Kudos for the Guy Fieri cameo)

Tanya X. Short: How to Self-Care AND Meet Hard Deadlines

Your goals are:

Don’t burn out (making a great game is NOT your #1 priority)

Keep making games better each time (so you have to survive!)

Make a great game

It’s hard to take care of yourself, but believe you can do it

Moon Hunters, Mini Metro, Canabalt, Don’t Starve and more were made without burnout

Stop working all the time (and set specific work hours, it will actually increase productivity)

Prioritize and reprioritize, try to cut out the stuff that’s urgent but not important

Estimate how long it will take you to do tasks, then evaluate the actual time after

Cut the scope of your game before you bleed out

3 weeks of 60+ hours is proven to be less productive than 3 weeks of 40 hours

You’re not an exception

In a study of people who think they need less than 7 hours of sleep, only 5 out of 100 were correct

Don’t give up, forgive yourself for mistakes in self-care and move on

Lack of exercise should be one of the biggest worries, put your health first

Protect your love and joy and energy and don’t use it up by trying to feel more productive

Jarryd Huntley: Indie Rock - The Indie Cousins You Didn’t Know You Had

There are things indie game devs can learn from the indie rock scene

Like rock musicians, you don’t get started until you actually pick up the instrument. Just do it.

Try to take inspiration from wide life experience, not just “game X + game Y”

Work together and hire indie musicians for your game

Try making a local art manifesto with other independent artists in your area, maybe go on tour with a band

Try to learn from other fields that have similarities to indie game development, and support those people too

Sadia Bashir: 3 Things That Can Save Indies from a Pitfall

We think that our great idea is what makes our game successful, but what is really tied to success?

Conceptualize and plan at an early stage

Freeze requirements and scope throughout to avoid feature creep

Quality of a product is related to quality of development process

A hybrid process might be more successful than Agile

Marben Exposito: Subverting Expectations in Shower with Your Dad Simulator 2015

Develops a lot of short, silly games based on dumb Twitter suggestions

Finds it effective to mix the weird and mundane

Also effective was to subvert expectations

Added surprise secret game section, which people really liked

Gemma Thomson: Owning Your Place

The public perception of indies can be harmful

Often we see it as white men crunching on games in a bedroom

Sometimes we end up glamorizing bad working conditions

But life isn’t really Indie Game: The Movie, not everyone can afford to work like this

In our public and private conversation, we should a promote more realistic idea of game development

Jerry Belich: Venn Harder

Currently, the overlap between academia and industry is not too large

Contribute your passion to students

Help students learn more about design than just learning the tools

Opportunities include adjunct teaching positions, short-term teaching residencies, or collaborating with faculty

Brie Code: Public Speaking

Brie shared some tips for preparing to speak publicly

Remember “Why do I care?” and who the audience is

Create an outline (why I care, what I’m saying, why I’m saying it)

Use tips from “Can Charisma Be Taught?” study

Only one idea per slide

Pictures, not text

Practice a lot (and remember to breathe)

Realize you might always be anxious because it’s normal, redirect energy into the talk

Colm Larkin: Share Your Games

Colm developed in the open from day 1 on TIGSource, sharing early progress

Got good feedback, helped him get confident

A few related tips:

Your idea is not that special: execution is more important than the idea

No one is going to steal your idea (and if you do, you’ve been sharing the whole time)

Share work embarrassingly early, before you’re ready

It’s hard, but it helps

Get feedback before you get too far in

Get feedback on foundational stuff, not just polish stuff

Jane Ng: “Product” and Why That Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Jar-Jar tongue candy: a terrible product

Often we don’t like talking about our art as a product, but it’s important to success

We don’t usually give feedback on “would you pay money for this?”

Consider experience not just for the player, but for the potential player

See making a good product as a design problem

Think about what makes a great entertainment product

Make sure the whole package is attractive to a potential player

And make sure your game isn’t a Jar-Jar Binks candy tongue

Thoughts:

I had a great time at this talk. Really rapid fire talks, and everyone had an interesting point to make. A few good laughs too. I highly recommend checking this one out on the Vault.

Links:

Indie Soapbox (Video) on GDC Vault: Available for free!

Talks I missed

Building Game Mechanics to Elevate Narrative in Oxenfree - Would like to check this one out after I play Oxenfree. Check it out on the free Vault!

Friendship, Curiosity & Challenge: Focusing Your Career as an Indie Dev - Also seems interesting, and also free to all.

Board Game Design Day: The State & Future of Board Game Design - I don’t follow the board game industry as closely as the video game industry, though I like playing board games. I’m interested to hear what was said here.

Board Game Design Day: The Making of 'Pandemic Legacy' - Also very interested in this, since Pandemic Legacy has been getting tons of praise. I’m scared of spoilers until I have a chance to play though.

Post-con activity

After the Indie Soapbox, Brian, his teammate Colton, and I went out to eat at Tropisueno, a fairly decent Mexican place very close to the Moscone Center. I got to hear a bit from Colton about his background and how his studio, The Stork Burnt Down, got founded, which was interesting.

After dinner, Brian and Colton went to the Oculus party across the street, which was invite-only. I had been considering going to a chiptune show at the DNA Lounge, but was again feeling pretty exhausted. So I headed back to the room to chill and play some Ace Attorney 5. A very full day.

[smokeybrandreviews]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Tetris

After taking in Earthrise with straight gusto, I've finally found my way back to the backlog of 2020! The first flick on deck is Soul from Pixar. I’ve been hearing great things bout this movie from a lot of the people close to me. It seems that it���s a legit hit with black folks across the beard, whether the media wants you to believe that or not. A a black dude myself, I'm super interested to see if this thing lives up to all of the hype. Pixar, for me, has lost a little luster as a studio since being re-acquired by the Mouse House. Sh*t like Cars, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. have all been exploited for those franchise dollars, tarnishing their excellent first entries. Not so much Cars. That sh*t is the worst but it makes the most money through merchandising so of course it’s a franchise now. What I'm saying is that current Pixar doesn’t make Up or Wall-E anymore. They’re a bit soulless so let’s see if Soul can actually put a little soul back into the once spirited company.

The Great

This film is f*cking gorgeous, man. Seriously, it’s the most beautiful movie I've seen all year so far. From what I've seen of Wolfwalkers, that one might give this one a run for it’s money but, so far, f*ck is Soul isn’t beautiful. Like, I'm not even talking about the animation, which is absolutely excellent, but more the entire art direction and aesthetic of the world. It’s absolutely breathtaking. Also, the animation is f*cking pristine. I need to actually say that, to put that energy out there. Soul is a masterclass of US animation.

This music is incredible. So much about the black experience hinges on music. We use it to weather strife, to lighten suffering, to celebrate happiness, and to just vibe out. It’s ingrained within from the very moment we are born. Cats talk about black people having rhythm but that’s literally because we all carry a song in our heart. Music is such an integral part of our people and this film emulates that with a respect and reverence that belies the cartoonish content on display.

This movie is so f*cking black, i cannot believe it. Like, it exudes black excellence, capturing the passion and and objective love we have for the arts. The look of this film, the way the characters move, the nuance of the cast’s delivery, and the music! Oh. My. God. The music! This sh*t feels like black people. It feels like when you put on Anita Baker and clean your house on Saturday morning. It feels like vibing with your grandma to the records she listened to as a kid. Soul feels authentically black and that’s mad rare. I thoroughly appreciate Soul for that.

The Good

The subtle social commentary delivered by this film with such delicious snark is absolutely chef kiss levels. That line about life being soul crushing got a real chuckle out of me and that bit about being a librarian made me laugh uncomfortably. That sh*t with he Knicks was absolutely hilarious. Look, this stuff is worth the price of entry, alone. Seriously, this movie is clever as f*ck and makes for a great watch experience.

I think a lot of the chuckle worthiness of this flick stems from the absolutely excellent writing on display. This sh*t is some of the best I've seen in a Pixar flick and that’s saying a lot because they are often excellent in that regard. I mean, even f*cking Cars had a decent script and it’s hot garbage water a a whole ass film. Credit to Pete Docter, who also directed and, apparently, runs all of Pixar, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers.

This cast is absolutely loaded and they all deliver excellent performances. Obviously Jaime Foxx and Tina Fey carry this film as the leads Joe Garderner and 22 but everyone else is just as great. Alice Braga, Questlove, Angela Bassett, Donnell Rawlins, Graham Norton, Phylicia Rashad, and Rachel House all bring an energy to match the lead performances. Personally, i think this is one of the strongest casts in a Pixar flick, in a long time.

The pacing in this thing is exquisite. It gets you from scene to scene with some of the best transitions I've seen in these types of films. The music goes a lot toward making that happen but the chemistry between Foxx and Fey really ramp that transition up. Soul is a brisk hour and forty minutes. It never feels plodding or overstays it’s welcome. I was engaged the entire time, a rarity among movies sometimes.

The Okay

The overall message is one worth experiencing, for sure, but it’s kind of a downer when you think about it from an artist’s standpoint. It smacks of that sh*t we hear all the time. I can’t say that it’s wrong, that the message, itself, doesn’t have merit because, if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that sh*t is not given, but goddamn is it sobering. I do enjoy the way Soul packages it though. It was the sugary syrup that makes it easier to down that bitter pill.

The ending felt a little abrupt. I was hoping to see more of Jo coming to terms with his life as a teacher, as a mentor, after he got his second life. I wanted to see him find that balance between his passion and living his life. I wanted to see him a few years down the line, teaching band, and reuniting with a now living 22. We didn't get any of that and, while it's a little bit of a bummer, I am okay with the overall finale.

The Verdict

I loved my time with Soul. It’s one of Pixar’s best and feels like a return to the old, soulful, Pixar of my youth. this movies feels like there is a purpose to it’s narrative, that it was made because of passion and not commerce. I’m sure Disney is going to submit this thing for an Academy award, as they should, but Soul doesn’t feel like it was produced strictly for that. Someone, somewhere, wanted to tell this story and thy told it exceptionally ell. Soul is chock full of beauty, outstanding performances, and real, honest-to-goodness, heart. I loved this movie so much and that’s saying a lot because i don’t particular like a lot of sh*t. Seriously, if you have the opportunity to check this out, definitely do that. Soul is easily one of the best films I've seen all year and it deserves all of the shine it has gotten thus far.

[smokeybrand]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Tetris

After taking in Earthrise with straight gusto, I've finally found my way back to the backlog of 2020! The first flick on deck is Soul from Pixar. I’ve been hearing great things bout this movie from a lot of the people close to me. It seems that it’s a legit hit with black folks across the beard, whether the media wants you to believe that or not. A a black dude myself, I'm super interested to see if this thing lives up to all of the hype. Pixar, for me, has lost a little luster as a studio since being re-acquired by the Mouse House. Sh*t like Cars, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. have all been exploited for those franchise dollars, tarnishing their excellent first entries. Not so much Cars. That sh*t is the worst but it makes the most money through merchandising so of course it’s a franchise now. What I'm saying is that current Pixar doesn’t make Up or Wall-E anymore. They’re a bit soulless so let’s see if Soul can actually put a little soul back into the once spirited company.

The Great

This film is f*cking gorgeous, man. Seriously, it’s the most beautiful movie I've seen all year so far. From what I've seen of Wolfwalkers, that one might give this one a run for it’s money but, so far, f*ck is Soul isn’t beautiful. Like, I'm not even talking about the animation, which is absolutely excellent, but more the entire art direction and aesthetic of the world. It’s absolutely breathtaking. Also, the animation is f*cking pristine. I need to actually say that, to put that energy out there. Soul is a masterclass of US animation.

This music is incredible. So much about the black experience hinges on music. We use it to weather strife, to lighten suffering, to celebrate happiness, and to just vibe out. It’s ingrained within from the very moment we are born. Cats talk about black people having rhythm but that’s literally because we all carry a song in our heart. Music is such an integral part of our people and this film emulates that with a respect and reverence that belies the cartoonish content on display.

This movie is so f*cking black, i cannot believe it. Like, it exudes black excellence, capturing the passion and and objective love we have for the arts. The look of this film, the way the characters move, the nuance of the cast’s delivery, and the music! Oh. My. God. The music! This sh*t feels like black people. It feels like when you put on Anita Baker and clean your house on Saturday morning. It feels like vibing with your grandma to the records she listened to as a kid. Soul feels authentically black and that’s mad rare. I thoroughly appreciate Soul for that.

The Good

The subtle social commentary delivered by this film with such delicious snark is absolutely chef kiss levels. That line about life being soul crushing got a real chuckle out of me and that bit about being a librarian made me laugh uncomfortably. That sh*t with he Knicks was absolutely hilarious. Look, this stuff is worth the price of entry, alone. Seriously, this movie is clever as f*ck and makes for a great watch experience.

I think a lot of the chuckle worthiness of this flick stems from the absolutely excellent writing on display. This sh*t is some of the best I've seen in a Pixar flick and that’s saying a lot because they are often excellent in that regard. I mean, even f*cking Cars had a decent script and it’s hot garbage water a a whole ass film. Credit to Pete Docter, who also directed and, apparently, runs all of Pixar, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers.

This cast is absolutely loaded and they all deliver excellent performances. Obviously Jaime Foxx and Tina Fey carry this film as the leads Joe Garderner and 22 but everyone else is just as great. Alice Braga, Questlove, Angela Bassett, Donnell Rawlins, Graham Norton, Phylicia Rashad, and Rachel House all bring an energy to match the lead performances. Personally, i think this is one of the strongest casts in a Pixar flick, in a long time.

The pacing in this thing is exquisite. It gets you from scene to scene with some of the best transitions I've seen in these types of films. The music goes a lot toward making that happen but the chemistry between Foxx and Fey really ramp that transition up. Soul is a brisk hour and forty minutes. It never feels plodding or overstays it’s welcome. I was engaged the entire time, a rarity among movies sometimes.

The Okay

The overall message is one worth experiencing, for sure, but it’s kind of a downer when you think about it from an artist’s standpoint. It smacks of that sh*t we hear all the time. I can’t say that it’s wrong, that the message, itself, doesn’t have merit because, if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that sh*t is not given, but goddamn is it sobering. I do enjoy the way Soul packages it though. It was the sugary syrup that makes it easier to down that bitter pill.

The ending felt a little abrupt. I was hoping to see more of Jo coming to terms with his life as a teacher, as a mentor, after he got his second life. I wanted to see him find that balance between his passion and living his life. I wanted to see him a few years down the line, teaching band, and reuniting with a now living 22. We didn't get any of that and, while it's a little bit of a bummer, I am okay with the overall finale.

The Verdict

I loved my time with Soul. It’s one of Pixar’s best and feels like a return to the old, soulful, Pixar of my youth. this movies feels like there is a purpose to it’s narrative, that it was made because of passion and not commerce. I’m sure Disney is going to submit this thing for an Academy award, as they should, but Soul doesn’t feel like it was produced strictly for that. Someone, somewhere, wanted to tell this story and thy told it exceptionally ell. Soul is chock full of beauty, outstanding performances, and real, honest-to-goodness, heart. I loved this movie so much and that’s saying a lot because i don’t particular like a lot of sh*t. Seriously, if you have the opportunity to check this out, definitely do that. Soul is easily one of the best films I've seen all year and it deserves all of the shine it has gotten thus far.

[thisdaynews]

Why Is Andrew Yang Still in This Race?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/why-is-andrew-yang-still-in-this-race/

Why Is Andrew Yang Still in This Race?

BEAUFORT, S.C.—Andrew Yang was sitting here in a rented silver Suburban outside a black chamber of commerce surrounded by five members of his rapidly growing campaign staff when he saw a new Fox News poll in which he was tied for fifth in the sprawling Democratic presidential primary.

He stared at the screen of his phone and scrolled.

Story Continued Below

“Three percent!” Yang said, in his characteristically dry, droll way. “This team. Is the team. That’s going to go … all. The. Way. To the White House!”

Yang breezily walked into the chamber building and got onto a packed elevator. To the county party chair squeezed into a corner, Yang excitedly passed along the results of the poll, listing in order the only people who were ahead of him—a former vice president (Joe Biden) and three high-profile senators (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris).

“And thenme!” he exclaimed, flashing a goofy, exaggerated smile.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter. Just the other day, he made his Sunday news show debut.

It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full of small-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer.

His most foolproof laugh line—“the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math”—suggests that his candidacy is premised on distinguishing himself from the president the same way as his fellow challengers. But it’s not quite that simple. He’s attracting support from an unorthodox jumble of citizens, from a host of top technologists, but from penitent Trump voters, too. He’s one of only two Democrats (along with Sanders) who ticks 10 percent or higher when Trump voters are asked which of the Democrats they might go for—a factoid Yang uses as evidence that he’ll win “easy” if he’s the nominee come November of next year. Trump, of course, is the president, and Yang (let’s not get carried away) remains a very long long shot to succeed him.

But to spend any time with Yang is to grapple with this unexpected Trump-Yang Venn diagram. While Yang talks in different, far less overtly divisive ways, identifies different scapegoats (robots, not immigrants) and offers different solutions (cash, not walls), he’s zeroed in on the same elemental problem Trump did en route to his shock of a win in ’16: A large portion of the populace is being left behind, and it’s not remotely OK. Similarly, Yang’s campaign packs an anti-Washington, convention-bucking, on-the-fly, filter-free vibe. There are four-letter hats—not MAGA, but MATH (Make America Think Harder). And his Trump train? It’s the Yang Gang. Yang is not thenot Trumpof the 2020 trail. “Yang is thenewTrump,” a traveling Trump-voter-turned-Yang-Gang-YouTuber told me.

There are plenty of differences, too, of course. To wit: In the chamber building, after the elevator disgorged a floor up, a lobby was filled with the bouncy beats of line dancing emanating from a different room. One of his staffers joked that Yang should join in. And then … he did. Apparently unafraid of looking silly, or potentially creating an embarrassing, indelible, campaign-altering moment with the presence not just of me but also a state-based reporter from The Associated Press, Yang proceeded to team up with a handful of senior citizens for what most onlookers ultimately agreed was a quite credible, rhythm-keeping rendition of the catchy “Cupid Shuffle.”

“Down, down, do your dance, do your dance,” went the lyrics—and Yang did.

“Get it, Andrew!” the group leader called into her microphone. “Lookin’ good!”

When it was over, Yang jogged around the room to hearty cheers, grinning and giving everybody high fives.

“Thanks for letting me crash your class,” he said to the head of Family Slide Dancers.

“Thank you all!” he said to the members of her class.

By the time we got back to the Suburban, my phone was buzzing nonstop in my pocket. A tweet of the video I shot was starting to zoom around the internet.

***

“We are basically fucked,”Yang said, sitting in the Suburban, earlier in the day, not too long after we met, “unless we un-fuck ourselves, systematically and collectively.”

This blunt declaration didn’t surprise me. That’s because I’d read his most recent book. It’s one heck of a downer.

InThe War on Normal People, which came out last year, Yang sketched a stark picture of “broken people” and “jobless zones” and “derelict buildings” and “widespread despair” and “hundreds of thousands of families and communities being pushed into oblivion” and “a society torn apart by ever-rising deprivation and disability” and a “best-case scenario” of “a hyper-stratified society like something out ofThe Hunger Games.”

“It’s possible that we may already be too defeated and opiated by the market to mount a revolution. We might just settle for making hateful comments online and watching endless YouTube videos with only the occasional flare-up of violence amid many quiet suicides,” he wrote.

“The group I worry about most is poor whites,” he added. “There will be more random mass shootings in the months ahead as middle-aged white men self-destruct and feel that life has no meaning.”

My copy of his book is littered with my disconsolate scribbles.

“Yikes.”

“… bleak …”

“… hellscape.”

Know what else, though, I penned into the margins?

“Ha!”

“When I was 13,” Yang wrote, for instance, “I had to have four teeth pulled in preparation for wearing braces. I was actually kind of excited about it because I saw my dad’s teeth and was like, ‘whatever it takes, let’s not have those.’” He said the answer for out-of-place workers was not a career as a home health care aide because “former truck drivers will not be excited to bathe grandma.”

And as we traveled around, a busy, six-stop day in this sweaty, marshy terrain—from Bluffton to Okatie to Beaufort, from town halls to meet-and-greets with local Democratic clubs to a quiet, private stop at a shelter for abused women and children—the laughter never stopped for long.

Nibbling on a belVita vanilla oat biscuit, he praised the company for marketing the product as a healthy option. “It’s, like, you’re clearly good for me,” he said, “and then it’s a fucking cookie for breakfast!”

He referred repeatedly to his $24 average donation. “My fans are cheaper than Bernie’s!”

Entering a Mexican restaurant for a town hall, he said, “The best thing about running for president is I walk into a room and people clap!” The crowd roared.

He wasn’t always this way. His parents came to America from Taiwan. His mother was a computer services administrator before becoming a pastel artist. His father grew up poor on a peanut farm and got a Ph.D. in physics at the University of California at Berkeley and worked for General Electric and IBM in New York. Yang described him as a “workaholic” and “a brusque lab geek.” Growing up in the suburbs of Westchester County, Yang as a kid was “angsty,” “brooding” and “sad,” he said. He read science fiction and fantasy and Herman Hesse and listened to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Sarah McLachlan and played piano and decent tennis and lots of Dungeons and Dragons. He was, for a time, a tad goth. He suffered racist slurs. At prep school at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, and then at college at Brown, where he majored in economics and political science, he began to come out of his shell. He started to lift weights, mostly to try to get dates, and was proud to be able to bench press 225 pounds eight to 10 times in a row.

Now, here in the Suburban, as we crossed the Broad River, I brought up “Rex and Lex.” That’s what Yang named his pecs, “Rex” for the right, “Lex” for the left, when he was lifting all those weights. I knew about this because he wrote about in his other, earlier book,Smart People Should Build Things. He “could jostle them on command,” he had written, “to make them ‘talk.’” Obviously, I wanted to hear more.

Yang obliged. Having shed his blue sport coat, he looked down at his chest, and he … channeled “Rex.”

“He’s, like, almost mute,” he said, “but he’s still like”—and here the candidate for president made his dad-bod-dormantpectoralisundulate under his checked, collared shirt and assumed a diminutive, sing-song cadence—“‘Andrew, I still have a little bit of voice left. You haven’t fed me in a long time. You used to looooove meeeeeee.’”

Zach Graumann, Yang’s 31-year-old campaign manager, looked some combination of mesmerized and mortified. “You’re such a tool,” he said.

Yang was undeterred. He was on a roll. He turned his attention to “Lex.”

“Oh man,” he lamented, “Lex is wimpier than Rex!”

Everybody inside the Suburban laughed and laughed.

***

At the town hall in Hilton Head—a standing-room-only crowd of mainly older folks wearing boat shoes and flip-flops—it was hard to miss the young guys in the pink hats.

They listened intently as Yang introduced himself. “Hello, everyone! I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for president! … I’m going to be honest. I’m the last person anyone thought was going to run for president, in terms of my high school, my upbringing. My parents were not like, ‘You’re gonna be president someday.’” This assertion drew laughs. After Brown and law school at Columbia and five unhappy months as a corporate attorney, he started a company (Stargiving.com) that failed, he said. He was the CEO of a company that succeeded. He launched a non-profit that did a little bit of both. Then Yang gave his political pitch, about truckers, and soon-to-be self-driving trucks, and so many other kinds of workers, and automation, and artificial intelligence, and the real reason he thinks Trump won—millions of jobs automated away in the most important Midwest swing states—and the coming “buzz saw” and “the race to the bottom” and “suicides, drug overdoses, anxiety, depression,” and how the average American life expectancy has declined for three straight years for the first time in a century, and how “D.C. is not up to it at all,” and about $1,000 a month for every adult.

“How am I doing so well?” he said. “It’s because Americans recognize the truth when they hear it.”

The guys in the pink hats were impressed.

“He nailed it,” Mike Gallagher, 29, told me after Yang finished.

“Awesome,” said Wayne Boyce, 28.

They had driven the hour or so up from Savannah, Georgia, and both of them said they had voted for Trump but would not be doing it again.

Ditto for their other friend. “He’s an asshole,” Jordan Snipes said of the president. “And he hasn’t done anything he said he was going to do.”

They were members, they all said, of the Yang Gang now.

I asked if there were others like them where they’re from.

“Most of our friends,” Snipes reported.

A few hours later, at the Mexican restaurant, I met the Yang Gang YouTuber. Russell Peterson, 43,from Union County, North Carolina, was with his wife, Elasa, who was wearing a MATH shirt, and their toddler son, Zephaniah—“country folks,” Peterson said, and “former Trump supporters.” He had a lot to say.

“We all saw a problem, and that’s why we elected Donald Trump,” he told me. “Because he was saying he was going to go in and he was going to drain the swamp. He was a larger-than-life figure, you know? We all knew that there was a problem. We just didn’t know what that problem was. But then, when you listen to Andrew Yang, you realize: Oh, yeah, it is automation—it’s not immigrants. It’s automation. We’re all losing our jobs. We’re all being phased out. I’m an ex-landscaper. I just saw yesterday they’ve got a mower that just goes and mows your yard, just like a Roomba, you know, does your house.”

And what’s he do for work now?

“This is what we do,” he said. “We follow Andrew Yang full-time.”

He doesn’t work for the campaign, but …

“This has become my passion. There is nothing more important than getting this man elected,” he said, breaking down his video equipment.

“I’m tired of politicians. I don’t want a politician. I want somebody who’s going to tell me the fuckin’ truth, tell me what’s going on, and thenprovidesomething that’s actually going to impact my life! Since I’ve been an adult, there’s not beenonepolitician that has directly impacted my life, but I promise you that freedom dividend and putting $2,000 a month into my household would directly impact my life. I mean,game over.”

He wasn’t finished.

“People are so disillusioned,” he said. “Donald Trump? He was the WWE superstar guy. You know, he was going to take his metal chair into Washington, and he was just going to use it on everybody. We were finally going to be working like we were supposed to be working—and I’ve only seen the country get more and more divided. And then when you have Trump acting like he’s acting, I can’t support that, bro’. And then there’s a lot of people in the center who are like me who are moving over to Andrew Yang because we don’t like what we see. Wedon’tlike what Trump has done to the country. He’s only divided us more and more. So now we actually have some solutions and a guy who’stalkingabout solutions—so, like, let’s get this guy in, because he makes too much damn sense!”

All day long, everywhere we went, Yang was asked about Trump. How was he going to handle him? How was he going to debate him? How was he going to beat him?

He said he “would make him seem ridiculous.” He said he “would just diminish him by dismissing his arguments and making him seem like the buffoon and joke that he is.” He said Trump was “fire”—and he said he was “ice.” He told people he was on the debate team in high school that went to the world championships in London. He said he would “use humor.”

And at the last stop of the day, here at the Grand Army of the Republic Hall, outside of which I spotted parked a red Ford F250 pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read TRUMP, the throng of a couple hundred that had gathered couldn’t fit inside. They spilled out onto the lawn off to the side. “Let’s do it!” Yang hollered. He had no microphone. “Let’s project!”

And at this last event the last question was about Trump.

“When you become the nominee,” a woman asked, “how will you stand up to that nastiness in the White House?”

“Voters around the country have said to me they cannot wait to see me debate Donald Trump,” Yang said. He was all about “logic and reason and problem-solving” while Trump was “all bluster, and Americans can tell the difference very quickly,” he said, snapping his fingers. “There’s a reason he hasn’t touched me,” Yang continued. “Because he knows I’m the wrong person to touch. His supporters are all coming my way. … I’m peeling off Trump supporters right and left.” And one more thing: “I’m better at the internet than he is!”

More laughter.

“On that note …”

A snaking line of people waited for pictures. The sun set. Through the buggy, muggy haze, a single orange orb of a streetlight glowed past clumps of spectral Spanish moss. Yang autographed MATH hats. Flashes from phones pulsed in the dark.

Read More

[karinaibond]

How Victoria’s Secret Generates An Insane $8 Billion Dollars In Sales Per Year (With 10 Key Takeaways)

On a crisp autumn morning in the mid-1970s.... A 30-year-old man named Roy Raymond walked into a department store to buy his wife lingerie... What he found in the store were, tacky designs and unappealing nightdresses that stuck out like a sore thumb under the fluorescent lighting... Add to this the piercing stare of the saleslady who made him feel like a filthy pervert just for being there… The experience was truly appalling and was the catalyst to him starting Victoria Secret. And after a few short years, his business was booming and he expanded into three more stores in San Francisco and was quickly turning over $4 million in revenue… Fast forward to today, and the company's revenue has soared to nearly $8 billion per year! We’ve broken down every part of their digital marketing strategy.... Every nuance… Their website, sales funnel, SEO, Paid Search, Link Building, Social Media….EVERYTHING! We’ve wrapped up all of these valuable findings into a detailed case study for you… It’s chocked full of screen-shots, cliff notes, write-me-downers and actionable tactics for you to model for your own business. Enjoy!

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246812 http://growthhackers.com/articles/how-victoria-s-secret-generates-an-insane-8-billion-dollars-in-sales-per-year-with-10-key-takeaways