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gamersguide · 11 months ago

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Baldur’s Gate 3: A Gamer’s Pilgrimage To The Forgotten Realms

Hello fellow gamer! Today I am going to share my experience and review of one of my favorite games of 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3. If I praise the game a lot, ignore it because I only write about games I love. Now, you all gather ’round the virtual campfire, for I’m about to weave a tale of my journey through Baldur’s Gate 3, the latest chapter in this legendary RPG saga. Buckle up, ’cause we’re diving deep into dungeons, deciphering lore, and maybe even flirting with a tiefling or two.

Release Rampage:

Remember the early access days? Those were like storming Candlekeep with a rusty spoon instead of Minsc’s trusty Flametongue. Bugs swarmed, features flickered, and crashes were more frequent than bards at a tavern brawl. Larian Studios was weaving a tapestry of D&D gold, a true successor to Baldur’s Gate. Fast forward to August 2023, and the full release hit like a meteor shower raining loot. Polished, packed with content, and oozing that familiar forgotten Realms charm, Baldur’s Gate 3 was here, and it was awesome(for me atleast). It wasn’t just a game; it was a homecoming, a reunion with old friends and the promise of epic adventures yet to come.

Resuming the legacy:

Now, I’ve slain my fair share of goblins and romanced my share of mages in Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. So, how does this new kid on the block stack up? Well, imagine walking into Candlekeep library after years away. The old tomes are still there, whispering familiar lore, but the shelves are bursting with new stories, unexpected twists, and characters that leap off the page. The Forgotten Realms are still here, vast and perilous, but Larian’s injected their own brand of magic. The story’s a labyrinth of intrigue, with betrayals sharper than Drizzt’s scimitars and secrets deeper than the Underdark. And the companions? Forget stereotypical party fodder. These are living, breathing characters with their own baggage, dreams, and moments of vulnerability that make you question who you can trust, who you can love, and who you might accidentally set on fire with a miscast fireball.

Subtle Sorcery:

But Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just about epic battles and witty banter. It’s the subtle details that make your heart skip a beat. The way moonlight filters through leaves in a moonlit forest, casting dancing shadows that whisper of lurking dangers. The nervous twitch of a goblin’s ear before it lunges, betraying its bravado with a flicker of primal fear. The way a character’s eyes soften when you make a kind choice, or turn steely when you choose the path of shadows. Larian’s poured their heart and soul into these details, and it shows. Every corner of the world feels handcrafted, a living tapestry woven with secrets, beauty, and danger. It’s the kind of world that begs to be explored, every step a potential discovery, every interaction a chance to rewrite your legend.

Gameplay:

Forget rusty spoons, adventurer, in Baldur’s Gate 3, you wield an entire orchestra of tactical options. It’s not just about clicking on enemies and hoping for critical hits (though let’s be honest, those never get old). This is a ballet of dice rolls and environment manipulation, where every spell slot and shove action is a note in your own personalized battle ballad.

The Divinity Dance: Larian’s Divinity 4.0 engine is your conductor, orchestrating a symphony of possibilities. Imagine setting the stage with an oil slick, then throwing out a bard’s thunderwave to ignite the flammable floor. Boom! Goblin barbecue. Or picture teleporting an enemy archer onto a precarious ledge, then nudging them off with a well-timed shove. Splat! Environmental takedown. This engine encourages creativity, letting you turn the battlefield into your instrument, each encounter a unique composition of tactical genius makes it lit!

Originally published at GamersGuide

#baldur's gate 3 #gaming #game of the year #game guide

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quickdeaths · 6 months ago

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Although it felt strange to walk without Sonia without taking her hand, Shinobu could at least be grateful for the reprieve from heat upon her cheeks. "For what it's worth, Miss Nevermind, I'd question the judgment of anyone who didn't think especially highly of you - title or no." After all, she was a rather unique, special person, and what reason could anyone have for denying that? "You're rather exceptional." Surely everyone could see that, even upon the briefest of conversations with her.

Of course, Shinobu has to wonder, too, why she seemed so set on saying so. After all, Anzu was her closest friend, and she praised or complimented her quite rarely. Perhaps it was just the matter that Sonia was a newer friend, and so the generalized appreciation wasn't as easily taken as a given? Or perhaps it was that Sonia, for all her skills and talents, seemed a bit more prone to doubt and introspection than Anzu, who had surrounded herself in so much ego and vanity as to be impenetrable to that sort of thing. Mm, they decided, that must have been it.

As the pair took their seats, Shinobu couldn't help but notice a small murmur rippling through the crowd near them. Among the student body, here to see their friends and classmates, they imagined it didn't matter, but to the high society types, those who might have flown in from elsewhere in the country, or even abroad, Sonia's presence did not go unnoticed. The archer had to stay within herself the protective urge to reach for Sonia's hand. The visibility was likely expected, but that didn't mean that it was welcome. Might things have been better for Sonia had Shinobu encouraged her to go with that gentleman instead, to a private box where she wouldn't have been reduce to some thing at which to marvel?

The curtains at the stage opened to reveal the orchestra, already seated, all dressed in uniform black clothes, either buttoned shirts and slacks, or blouses and long skirts. Shortly after, the conductor stepped onstage - a slender, middle-aged man with horn-rimmed glasses and wispy, thinning hair slicked back, dressed in a tailcoat with a white bowtie. A polite, restrained clapping filled the auditorium as he took his place, and the orchestra stood and gave light bows to acknowledge both the applause and the conductor himself. By the time they'd sat down, the applause had died down, though the various conversations - quiet, but not as quiet as those having them might have hoped - continued.

To Shinobu, at least, nothing had changed - it was impossible to take one's eyes off of Ji-yeon when she made her appearance. She was always a cool, fashionable person, but she had the same kind of overflowing stage charisma as Anzu. Her floor-length dress nearly masked the fact that she was wearing combat boots - or, at least, it would have, had she not announced herself with strutting, kicked-out strides that made sure to adequately display the laced, leather shoes running halfway up her shin. Meanwhile, a distressed jean jacket was draped over her shoulders, adorned with patches and messages of allegiance to various activist causes and left-wing political movements. Her ponytail - dark brown with faded, grown-out blue at the ends - bounced with each confident step, and she seemed, to Shinobu, completely bulletproof. So this was how she'd made her piece with being coerced into it, they thought. In fact, were Anzu there, Shinobu had no doubt that she'd describe it as 'rockstar energy' or something similar.

Another round of gentle applause accompanied Ji-yeon's walk across the stage, leading to her removing her jacket and setting it on the back of her chair, before sitting at a gorgeous cello already prepared for her at a special seat just in front of the conductor, and to the side, so that she was always in perfect visibility of the crowd. In anticipation, the conductor raised his hands, causing the clapping to cease, and then began the opening piece. The undercurrent of whispers and mumbled words continued regardless, and with Shinobu's excellent hearing, she could make out some of it. A handful of stuffier types seemed rather put off by Ji-yeon's appearance, but the majority of the conversation seemed to be about Sonia - her clothes, her prior meeting with Okuma, her future plans, and, occasionally, Shinobu's accompaniment of her.

These conversations didn't seem like they'd be stopping soon, causing Shinobu to frown. Sonia was simply here to enjoy the show as anyone else, wasn't she? To talk about her like that was unnecessary and invasive. Yet, the opening minutes of Brahms' "Tragic Overture" were interrupted by a sudden stamping of boot on wood as Ji-yeon rose to her feet. "To everyone talking over the performance," she started in a loud, commanding voice as the music abruptly stopped, "please take it outside, or shut up. I don't care if you like me, but I won't sit by and allow you to disrespect the hardworking members of this orchestra, or the other audience members, who care about the music." She said something to the conductor before taking her seat again, and the piece started over, with far less talking to interrupt it.

At the intermission, Shinobu stood up, having to pull her hand back from the instinctive gesture of offering to help Sonia up. "Well, that was something, wasn't it," she asked. Particularly the cello concerto, in her eyes. Ji-yeon was an excellent musician in any capacity, but when given a spotlight, her virtuosity wasn't matched by much. Shinobu hardly considered themselves any kind of expert, but they felt like she had a masterful command of technique, while still keeping an undeniable sense of style and personality in her playing that warded off any would-be accusations of sacrificing emotion in favor of sterile technical excellence.

"Miss Ji-yeon is really quite remarkable," she mused. "It's been a while since I've seen her perform, given how she'd stepped away from performance after her graduation - I'd nearly forgotten what it's like to watch her." Complicated factors of their relationship or not, Shinobu could never deny her talent, hard work, and unyielding dedication to pursuing things her own way. "Ah, but what did you think, Miss Nevermind? And, would you like to take the intermission to stretch your legs, or would you prefer that we just stay here until the symphony?"

Sonia shrugged: in the grand scheme of all of her social outings, Hasagawa had been rude but far from the worst she'd experienced. She'd told him she did not wish to accompany him to such gatherings ever again upon their parting, and it seemed to have stuck. So why did Shinobu look so angry? There was sympathy for friends of course, but she hadn't been wronged by him. "I do not like to say that I should have expected as much, I prefer to give everyone a chance," She replied, sighing. "But my dates so often turn out like this that it is difficult to remain optimistic. I am better off disengaging from it, until I must."

That was the problem at its core: she could never fully disengage by choice. There were two guarantees in life, or so her father had impressed upon her: death, and marrying a respectable man and birthing the next heir so Prince Arthur would be effectively shut out of any chance of taking the throne. For all the good he did for Novoselic aside, the most important one, her father told her in strict confidence, was ensuring his daughter would one day sit on the throne, and her children after her, to keep a selfish, close-minded relative as far away from the crown as he could.

"What I deserve and what will happen are not the same thing," Sonia reminded her. It had taken Shinobu holding, if not gripping, both of her hands to draw Sonia out of her head. She'd come to Japan to leave centuries of royal obligations behind her, just for a little while, and what she'd begun to find was that even thousands of kilometers and an island weren't enough to fully disengage. Everywhere she went, including Hope's Peak Academy, she was a princess. "And I wonder if you may think too much of me. As much as I would like to believe others would still find me appealing without my title and family, my past experiences leave me uncertain. I am not that special: I am just a person born into extraordinary circumstances who just wants to make the world a better place when I leave it and- Yaguchi-san?"

If Shinobu worried about running her mouth, it was nothing to the way Sonia now babbled on. Hands clasped in hers, Sonia had forgotten entirely that they stood in the middle of a mostly-deserted university hallway, with only her guards for company (and they tried their best to ignore the display of emotion that unraveled before them). Instead, she found herself confined, watched, if not scrutinized, by Shinobu. Despite how warm and tense it had become, the other girl refused to look away, and it would have been rude for her to do so when Shinobu had given her her full attention. Unwarranted, Sonia thought: it dawned on her that they were here to support one of Shinobu's friends, not have Shinobu be supporting her.

She needed to be stronger, she thought: complaining of bad dates didn't suit her, not if she was supposed to be a princess, the Princess. Regardless of the fact Shinobu cared or not, everyone else did. At least her own gestures of care came from a genuine place and not a desire for good press, as some members of the royal family exhibited.

"You are so very red," Sonia continued, eyebrows furrowed into a worried look. "Do you have a hand towel or handkerchief of your own? It is quite warm in here, perhaps the air system is not working." She shook her head, both at Shinobu's words and her own: a quiet, even hum from the air conditioning a few meters away proved Sonia wrong, and yet her cheeks had, by the feel of it and if she had to guess, flushed a deep shade of pink themselves.

"I do not blame myself, only my poor judgment for accepting the date at all," She continued. How was it getting so warm in the hallway with the air running? And why did she feel so short of breath, her chest tight? "But I suppose the identity of the person behind the cake will remain a mystery. They have their reasons, revealing themselves would likely be a complication. One they do not want: I can hardly blame them, after how the media was working to expose Gun-, that is, Tanaka-san's family history to the public."

It was a miracle they'd remained friends after it all happened, but it was a strength of both their characters, she supposed, that allowed it. Sonia breathed deeply once Shinobu had let go of her hands: maybe it was simply too warm for it. Spring had arrived, and the temperatures would only rise. "I am glad you enjoyed the chocolates, though. But I cannot imagine not being very taken with chocolate!" She laughed, the pink shade fading from her cheeks. The tension had dissipated in favor of amusement. "That seems rather unpatriotic to me, where I am from. I am quite glad you enjoyed Novosonian chocolate, and I would be pleased to share more in the future with you. But for now, yes, let us find our seats."

#c; the sun-slaying arrow #morethanaprincess #longer than intended for something with so little dialogue oops #but I figured it warranted presenting the atmosphere #ji-yeon does not know that most of the chatter was about sonia and when she finds out...

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detectivejigsawpines · 5 years ago

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A Pinesmas Carol-part 7 (Decking in the halls)

*If you want, you can imagine the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of "Carol of the Bells" playing during parts of this. It feels kind of appropriate.

Clink.

It was a tiny sound, barely audible in the stillness of the night; just a small, muffled noise that was barely recognizable as glass breaking.

But it had Stan opening his eyes almost immediately... and sliding the brass knuckles he’d kept under his pillow onto one hand, while opening his knife with the other.

Slowly he slid out from under the covers, straining his ears as he got to his feet. Was there a creak of hinges that came after, or was he just imagining it because of how wound up he was?

Sounds like that came from the back door. Do I go there to investigate, or stay here and make sure nobody ambushes my family while they’re sleeping?

If it had been just him, then it would have been easier, he wouldn’t have needed to worry about having to protect-

Wait a minute. Where’s Ford?!

The makeshift bed contained a distinct absence of long-limbed nerd (unless you counted Shermie, but he didn’t fit the description well enough as far as Stan was concerned).

Horrifying possibilities flitted into his head: Archer or one of his goons could’ve already broken in and seen Ford first, and thought he was Stan so they grabbed him and somehow took him without waking anyone else up; he could have gotten up to investigate on his own and got captured, and maybe even now they were-

Chill out! You literally cannot afford to panic right now if you want your family to get out of this alive.

Then, to his relief, Shermie was awake, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“What is it?” he whispered, looking up at Stan.

“I think I heard something,” Stan whispered back. Then, decision made, he handed him the switchblade. “Just in case anyone tries comin’ through the front.”

And before Shermie could answer he crept into the hallway.

****

Stan moved into the kitchen, glad that the windows were letting in a few squares of light so he could see that...the room was empty.

On the one hand, if there were intruders, they hadn’t come in here: good.

On the other hand, there was still a significant absence of Ford: bad.

Maybe he’s upstairs.

Was it worth checking? Shermie was awake and armed now, and if they’d decided to go upstairs and found his twin-not that Ford couldn’t handle himself if push came to shove, but old instincts died hard-

A dark form was suddenly looming in the kitchen doorway, and lunging towards him; something long and metallic-looking flashed in its hand.

Stan didn’t think twice before snatching one of the chairs away from the table and bringing it down on the figure’s head.

So much for tryna be stealthy.

...Oh crap, I really hope that wasn’t Ford.

But to his relief, when he pulled the now prone figure into one of the pools of light, he saw that it was a totally different man: bulkier than Ford or Shermie, wearing a thick black turtleneck. With a large wrench in his hand, just the right size for smashing onto someone’s head.

Stan glared, and snatched it up.

Finders keepers, loser.

And then, just as he was straightening up again, he felt something cold and metal press into the side of his skull.

****

It was only made worse by the fact that this new guy-another of Archer’s thugs, Stan was guessing-didn’t start monologuing like any self-respecting comic book villain would have done when they had someone at gunpoint, or even say something along the lines of “Archer’s been looking for you for a long time, Pinowski.” He just stood there quietly and waited for Stan to straighten and turn to face him.

Once that was done he moved his hand, gesturing towards the hallway.

Of course. Archer doesn’t want me dead just yet. He’s probably either gonna try ta take me somewhere else now and finish the job like he tried to last time...or he wants ta threaten my family first, make me beg for their lives before he kills them anyway.

...Screw that.

Stan, in a move that would have had police officers (and his mother) tearing their hair out and lecturing him for a good half-hour on his recklessness, suddenly jerked to the side and grabbed the goon’s wrist, pushing it down and twisting the gun. Something in the other man’s trigger finger cracked, and he screamed as Stan yanked the gun out of his hand, before landing a blow to his jaw that collapsed him right next to his buddy.

Once he was sure he was out for the count, Stan stepped out into the hallway, his new gun drawn-

And there was Archer.

He had a few new scars along his nose and forehead, and his hair had grown out a little; other than that he hadn’t changed much.

There was yet another generic thug standing behind him, also with a gun in hand.

Sheesh, you’d think I was the first guy ever ta stop him from selling kids. Unless he gives this kinda treatment ta everyone who p_sses him off.

For a moment they just stood there, staring at each other...before Stan smiled crookedly and waved with his free hand.

“How’s it hangin’?”

Archer’s own smile was pretty thin and mirthless. “I was sure you were here.”

Stan aimed at the jerk’s chest. “Well, you found me. And now you’re gonna leave.”

Archer raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t think so.”

The generic thug lifted his gun, pointing it...over Stan’s shoulder.

He glanced behind him (even though he knew how dangerous it was to take his eyes off his target), and let out a small curse of frustration. Because there was Shermie, standing behind him in plain sight like an idiot when he should have been hiding in the living room where he’d be safe with his family for a little longer, why had he thought this was a good idea-

He was probably coming to see if you needed help, a voice in Stan’s head whispered, and he groaned, lowering the gun in defeat and then dropping it to the ground.

Archer nodded his approval. “Good boy. Now come here.”

Stan only had time to take one step forward-before a voice sounded from the top of the stairs.

“Don’t touch him.”

****

As you might have guessed, it was Ford. Standing there, with a lit candle (where did he even get that?) placed on the banister next to him, a small bell in one hand, and his journal open in the other.

“What the [ CENSORED ]-” Archer began to say.

Ford just talked over him. Or, more specifically, he began to chant, while ringing the bell.

“Mutare, mutare,

Lusus naturae,

Facti quod tu es,

FACTI QUOD TU ES!”

Then he slammed the journal shut, and some incredibly crazy crap happened.

****

Specifically, Archer and the thug, and, judging by the flash in the kitchen, the two other jerks, were all suddenly surrounded by an angry-looking red light. It enveloped them entirely, and then...they began to disappear.

Or maybe shrink, since their clothes were still in place, and they just seemed to be disappearing into them, kind of like the Wicked Witch of the West.

There was some screaming, but it didn’t last very long. Until finally, all that was left were two lumpy piles of clothes.

Ford slowly descended the stairs, carrying the candle now, and looked over at Stan.

“You all right?”

Stan nodded slowly, eyes feeling a little wide. “Um, Poindexter...what did you just do?”

“Let’s see.”

And on that cryptic note he went over to the pile of clothes that used to be Archer, and began digging through it-until at last he lifted out...a baby.

A somewhat chubby, disoriented-looking baby, not exactly newborn but probably not more than a few weeks old, who on being exposed to the air began to kick and scream.

“...You turned them into babies?” Stan asked over the noise, staring in disbelief at what he was realizing had to be Archer regressed into an infant or whatever the term was.

“Not precisely. The spell was to turn them into whatever they are at their basic essence. I suppose this can be interpreted as saying that at heart, Archer-” Ford’s lip curled at the name- “was a spoiled child used to getting whatever he wanted, perhaps.” He finally registered that he was holding a naked infant in his arms, and set him down in the pile of clothes, blushing.

Curious, Stan went to the other pile of clothes-which had begun moving on its own, and shaking, until a dark-furred puppy stuck its head out. It looked up at him and whined.

Stan gave Ford a disbelieving stare; he looked equally nonplussed, but finally said, “A loyal dog, I guess?”

Stan snorted...but decided not to argue the point. He guessed it made a kind of sense, at least to magic.

“Wonder what the other two mooks were.” Stan gestured to the kitchen.

Ford peered in-and a second later pulled his head back out in a disgusted grimace.

“...They turned into a weasel and a rat, respectively.”

“That makes sense.” Stan was disconcerted to realize that the puppy had wandered over to him and was now attempting to climb into his lap. He made a few futile attempts to shove it off, until he admitted defeat and started petting it, deciding not to think too much about the fact that a few minutes ago this had been a person who was attempting to shoot his brother.

“And weasels are known to be occasional predators of rats.”

“Oh, eugh.” Stan made a face similar to his twin’s as he realized what he was saying. “How bad’s the mess?”

“The weasel’s about halfway finished with his meal.” There was a chewing, tearing sound from inside. Stan decided he was happier not seeing it.

Then he half-turned, still with the puppy in his lap...and saw the expressions on the faces of Shermie and Rebecca and Xander, who were all standing in the living room doorway and gaping at them.

Stan gulped.

“...Um...I guess we should probably explain.”

********

...Okay, technically most of the decking took place in the kitchen. But it was close enough, okay?

This explanation should be fun for everyone.

#flipside au #stan pines #ford pines #shermie pines #pines brothers fighting #not with each other this time #ford is awesome #stan is awesome #saving the day

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anarchistemma · 5 years ago

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Jerry Lewis. No comedian since Charles Chaplin has been so loved and so reviled. He is America’s Dark Prince of Comedy--brilliant, bitter, passionate and deeply conflicted. A man of many demons, his cockiness conceals a labyrinth of doubts and self-destructive impulses. An American original whom Americans have never quite come to terms with, he also happens to be one of the greatest filmmakers of the latter half of the 20th century. And for this he deserves an Academy Award.

It’s not surprising that he’s never even been nominated for one. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a tradition of snubbing comedians. The list of those whose movies failed to win a single Oscar is appallingly long and distinguished: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Mabel Normand, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, to name a few. The academy finally gave Keaton an honorary Oscar in 1960, and one to Stan Laurel in 1961 (after Lewis lobbied passionately on his behalf), and even one to Charlie Chaplin in 1972, bringing the once-demonized “un-American” director back to Hollywood after 20 years of exile in Europe.

Now it’s time to honor Jerry Lewis.

Lewis was a superstar in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the I Like Ike era of “The Organization Man,” when a Wonder Bread corporate monoculture force-fed an entire generation a bland diet of conformity. In a time of crew cuts and bouffant hairdos, of TV dinners, suburban tract houses, gleaming new supermarkets and the homogenized nuclear family paradigm set forth by “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” Lewis’ archetypal character, “the Kid,” served as an escape valve--a personification of the American id, cavorting across TV and movie screens, acting on the anarchistic impulses his audiences felt obliged to repress.

“We used to hang out on street corners, and guys would do Jerry Lewis imitations,” says Philip Kaufman, director of “The Right Stuff” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” who came of age in the 1950s. “The way that Jerry Lewis walked, that staggering, uncoordinated adolescent walk--you could feel the American youth culture being born. . . . Lewis and Elvis had this primordial American energy.”

Lewis gradually filled his comic archetype with nuances and complexities, so that it continued to resonate on deeper and yet deeper levels. He did this by becoming what he calls “a total filmmaker,” as Chaplin and Keaton had been. When Lewis began appearing in movies in 1949, he set about learning the technical intricacies of every aspect of production. “After about a year and a half I was able to load a BNC [35mm Mitchell] camera and do anything on the set that any technician did--maybe not with the quality of a man who’s done it for 25 years, but if he got sick, I could do it,” Lewis told me in an interview in December 2003. “I know depth of field like you know your wife’s first name. . . . I therefore proceeded to own every union card in the picture business.” Along the way, he also managed to invent the video assist, which allowed him to instantly replay scenes he’d just shot--now standard equipment on most Hollywood sets.

Once he’d mastered the filmmaking process, Lewis dared to declare his independence from the studio system. He wrote, directed and starred in a series of features that he also co-financed with his own money. “I mortgaged my house a couple of times, sold two cars, I remember that!” Lewis told me. In exchange for putting up half or sometimes the entire budgets of the films he directed, he got 50% or more of the profits and a level of creative autonomy that no screen comedian had commanded since Chaplin. “I had final cut on everything,” he said.

“I would love to have achieved the level of independence that he had,” Kaufman says. “The opposite is Orson Welles. He’s a half a generation before Jerry Lewis, but he gets destroyed because he can’t control the films.”

The movies Lewis directed--including “The Bellboy” (1960), “The Ladies Man” (1961), “The Errand Boy” (1961), “The Nutty Professor” (1963) and “The Patsy” (1964)--were bizarre stream-of-consciousness concoctions packed with brilliant pantomime set pieces and surreal comic nightmare sequences, moving Rorschach inkblots that reflected Lewis’ deeply conflicted psyche. “They were not regular Hollywood films,” says director Martin Scorsese. “There were no stories. No plots. They were very dreamlike, going from one free association to the next, almost like the later Luis Bunuel pictures, like ‘The Phantom of Liberty,’ which was a dream within a dream within a dream. You know you’re in the hands of a master; you just let him take you along. His films were almost avant-garde.”

Like Buster Keaton, Scorsese says, Lewis had an uncanny ability to pour his subconscious onto a movie screen, creating phantasmagoric visions permeated with disturbing psychological undertones. Unlike Keaton, Lewis often worked in color. He urged his cinematographer, W. Wallace Kelley, to pump huge amounts of light onto his sets until the comic book hues popped off the screen. “Lewis’ use of color has influenced many filmmakers, [such as] the way David Lynch uses color, and Pedro Almodovar,” Scorsese says.

In the mid-'60s, European critics--the French, most famously, or infamously, depending on your point of view--embraced Lewis as a genius, an heir to Chaplin and Keaton. Chagrined American critics sputtered outrage. They saw Lewis as a vulgarian, a pretentious, sentimental egomaniac who was a tad less subtle than the Three Stooges, and a lot less funny. And those were the good reviews. “Mr. Lewis is a frenetic performer,” wrote Eugene Archer of the New York Times, “but he lacks a point . . . a rubber-limbed robot making faces in a void.” Harriet Van Horne of the World Telegram wrote of a Lewis performance, “you flinch from the soulless vulgarity of his spastic twitches and low-class leers.” In his 1968 book “The American Cinema,” Andrew Sarris demeaned not only Lewis, but also his fans. “Lewis appeals to unsophisticated audiences in the sticks and to ungenteel audiences in the urban slums,” Sarris wrote. “He is bigger on 42nd Street, for example, than anyplace else in the city.”

Lewis seemed to scuttle any chance that American intellectuals would change their minds by taking the fight to the enemy. He wrote nasty letters to reviewers and denounced them on television and radio. He said they were “caustic, rude, unkind and sinister. . . . They’re burying the business they’re paid by.” And in his most infamous salvo, blasted in a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview, he called them “whores.”

But beneath his belligerence one sensed the man had been deeply wounded. In a telling passage in his landmark 1971 book about moviemaking, “The Total Film-maker,” Lewis confessed: “I cannot sit at certain tables at the Directors Guild because I make what some people consider is a ‘hokey’ product. John Frankenheimer waves and hopes that no one else sees his hand, simply because I film pratfalls and spritz water and throw pies.”

In countless magazine profiles and biographies, Lewis has been vividly portrayed as a tantrum-throwing egomaniac. But there is another side. I’ve talked with many people who worked with Lewis over the years--including his longtime collaborators, writer Bill Richmond and comedienne Kathleen Freeman--who told me stories of his private acts of extraordinary kindness and generosity. Peter Bogdanovich tells of how Lewis befriended him when he was a poor, young aspiring filmmaker--lending him a car, allowing him to screen movies at Paramount and charge the cost to Lewis’ production company. “He’s been a good friend to me for more than 40 years,” Bogdanovich says. When I first interviewed Lewis a year ago, I found him to be a perceptive, articulate but deeply divided man who oscillated during the course of our one-hour conversation from laughter to anger to tears. His ability to infuse his movies with these seething emotions gave them their strange emotional charge, and helped make them audacious and poetic works of art.

In “The Bellboy” and “The Errand Boy,” Lewis’ Kid finds himself wandering through sprawling corporate complexes: the ultramodern curvilinear interiors of Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau hotel, and the cavernous soundstages and maze-like streets and corridors of a movie studio. He desperately tries to mesh with the gears of the industrial combine, but his inability to function with the automaton efficiency of his co-workers inevitably causes catastrophe. “There’s a sense in which he’s a modern man, a universal figure confronted with modernity, with bosses and difficult jobs, and especially with a fast pace that’s difficult to keep up with,” says Henry Sheehan, critic for KPCC-FM and KCET.

There are haunting moments that evoke the lonely yearnings of the alienated in America’s increasingly institutionalized society, such as the brilliant pantomimes in which the Kid conducts an imaginary orchestra or imagines himself to be a movie mogul holding forth in a deserted boardroom. Or the scene where the Kid is assigned the Sisyphean task of setting up more than 1,000 chairs in an auditorium the size of a football field. Lewis films from one wide angle, holding the shot as the Kid recedes farther and farther into the great hollow hall. “When he started directing his own pictures there was a powerful visual sense,” Scorsese says. “It was almost as if the films were drawn by hand--animated. Something was very arresting about the way Lewis designed his scenes and shot them, the way he focused the eye of the audience.”

In the middle of “The Bellboy,” the Kid is ordered to help with the luggage of an arriving celebrity: Jerry Lewis, the movie star. Lewis the star arrives in a limousine with a huge retinue of yes-men and sycophants. “That kind of thing was refreshing and brilliant,” Scorsese says. “It opened the audience’s mind. What is the reality? We know we’re watching a film. We know it’s directed by him. We know he’s in control. Then he shows up as a film star within the movie! It plays with your sense of what reality is and what cinema is--and also what celebrity is.” In a culture obsessed with celebrity, Lewis shows us that a star is as objectified as a Playboy centerfold, and his existence at the top of the ladder every bit as lonely as that of the Kid at the bottom. The entourage of Jerry Lewis the movie star laughs at his every remark. When he tearfully reveals that a beloved aunt just died, the crowd howls with unhinged hilarity. “Nothing like a laugh!” someone screams.

In “The Ladies Man,” the Kid serves as a gofer in a boarding house full of young women. Lewis built the entire mansion--four stories tall, including a stairway and working elevator--on two soundstages at Paramount, with the fourth wall of every room cut away, like a giant dollhouse, so the camera could swoop on a crane from room to room, each of which was pre-lighted and wired for sound. It was another groundbreaking technical innovation, and a fantastic dreamscape through which Lewis’ imagination ran wild. In one spectacular crane shot, Lewis pulls back to show the entire dollhouse. “That shot is so striking,” Scorsese says. “In a funny way, it had something to do with the way I did a shot in ‘Gangs of New York’ in the beginning of the film, showing the [multileveled] hell of the old brewery

Scorsese found more inspiration in Lewis’ masterpiece, “The Nutty Professor,” in the famous sequence that occurs after Professor Kelp has transformed himself into the incandescent lounge lizard Buddy Love. At first we do not see Love. Instead we see the world through his eyes. In an intricately choreographed tracking shot, Love walks through the street toward the Purple Pit nightclub and various passersby react with astonishment to his high-voltage charisma. “I use that as an example of the kind of point-of-view shots that I use,” Scorsese says. In “Gangs of New York,” he told his assistant director, Joseph Reidy, that he wanted to choreograph a similar point-of-view shot in the scene where Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) places a rabbit pelt on a Five Points fence as a declaration of war. “I am constantly referring back to Lewis’ work,” Scorsese says.

Lewis explored the polarities of his personality--the lonely kid he had been in his youth and still felt himself to be, and the polished persona he presented on television and in live performances--not only in “The Bellboy,” but also in “Cinderfella” (directed by Frank Tashlin and produced by Lewis) and “The Errand Boy.” This theme reached its full and most complex expression in “The Nutty Professor.” The movie is an extended investigation of Lewis the public performer, and his insecure inner self. But more than a movie star’s exercise in self-absorption, it is a meditation on the American model of masculinity. Lewis acknowledges its pathology even as he admits that he cannot free himself of his aspiration to embody it. In the climax of the movie, Buddy Love transforms back into Professor Kelp before a stunned crowd of college students. Kelp makes a heartfelt speech about the fallacy of trying to create a false personality to please others and the need for self-acceptance, and there’s not a dry eye in the house. But in the film’s denouement, as Kelp leaves for his wedding with heartthrob Stella (Stella Stevens), the director reveals that she has stuffed two bottles of Kelp’s magic tonic in the pockets of her jeans--an admission that there’s a dark, erotic power to Love’s aggressive posturing that Americans find irresistible, despite whatever lip service they may pay to the values of sensitivity and brains.

“Lewis’ sense of burlesque is a strange type of comedy because it’s full of anxiety,” says director Barbet Schroeder (“Barfly,” “Single White Female”). “It’s a tragic vision that makes you laugh. . . . And all that is completely personal and completely extraordinary. He took burlesque comedy one step further, like any great artist, to a very freaky, disturbing modern tone.”

In 1977, someone at an American Film Institute seminar asked Lewis why his films hadn’t been rediscovered, as those of other great comics had been. “They wait until you die,” he snapped. Until recently, it looked as if Lewis might be right. During the last decade, a series of serious health problems--bouts of meningitis and pulmonary fibrosis--forced him to cancel live engagements and spend long stretches in the hospital. But last year, Lewis bounced back. He returned home from the hospital, and in the fall he released sparkling wide-screen DVD transfers of 10 movies from his golden period, complete with outtakes and commentary tracks.

And the damnedest thing happened. They got good reviews. The New York Times published not one but two rave notices. In the second one, Dave Kehr wrote: “Is it finally time to stop with the French-love-him jokes and acknowledge that Jerry Lewis is one of the great American filmmakers?” Kehr noted that the DVDs “reveal both the fierce creativity of his comic performances and the extreme formal sophistication of his direction. The centerpiece is the 1963 ‘The Nutty Professor’ . . . a study in split personality that both anticipates Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 ‘Persona’ and surpasses it in psychological acuity. It’s also a lot funnier.”

In December 2004, the Library of Congress concluded that “The Nutty Professor” is a movie of lasting cultural significance, worthy of preservation, and added it to the National Film Registry. Then in January, Lewis received a career achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. The explanation for this turnaround is simple: As older critics retired, a new generation replaced them. They had come of age in the 1950s and ‘60s and had spent the better part of their youth in the dark, watching Jerry Lewis and laughing till they just about wet their pants. “For me, personally, the impact of watching ‘The Nutty Professor’ as a boy in a drive-in in the Valley was huge,” says Robert Koehler, who writes for Variety. “It was the first time I had felt a weird sense of terror, horror and comedy all in one fell swoop. I’d never felt that before in a movie. There was something going on here besides just another Hollywood comedy. There was a sense of wild theatrics. I was only 7 years old at the time; I couldn’t even put my finger on it, but it so absolutely impressed my young mind.”

As they grew older, like Morty S. Tashman in “The Errand Boy,” these young fans made their way to Hollywood to become part of show business. Their film school professors and older critics had told them Lewis was vulgar and tasteless, but they went back and watched the movies and didn’t believe it. “I always thought he was funny, from the first time I came to him, at 9 years old,” says Henry Sheehan, president of the L.A. critics association. “Once I grew older and learned something about composition and the mechanics of gags, I was full of admiration for him. I think my experience is pretty common for people my age.”

For years a growing number of Lewis supporters had been urging the association to give the comedian the career achievement award. This year the membership suddenly agreed. “It was pretty widely supported,” Koehler says. “In the past there have been complaints. The first year I was in the group, his name was brought up and some people were openly contemptuous. I heard none of that this time. I don’t know why. I think it’s the test of time.”

As the night of the awards ceremony approached, a question loomed: How would Lewis react? Would he be able to drop the contentious attitude he’d held against his old adversaries for more than half a century? When I talked with him shortly after the award had been announced, he seemed to be struggling for his equilibrium. “I don’t really know how I’m going to deal with it,” he admitted, then murmured something about handling it with grace. But when he talked with other journalists, some of the old fighting verbiage crept into his remarks. He told Larry King the award was “the best revenge I’ve ever had.” And to a reporter from the Los Angeles Daily News, he said, “Jesus Christ, is that retribution or not?”

Finally, the moment came. Peter Bogdanovich presented the plaque. Lewis stepped to the podium. His eyes passed over the crowd. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be the recipient of this award. . . . What took so goddamned long?” The room exploded with laughter. Lewis segued smoothly into his Vegas act and did about 10 minutes that had the critics, filmmakers and stars doubled over and gasping for air.

Then he stopped, his voice growing serious. “I would feel somewhat remiss if I didn’t show you something that I believe brought me here tonight,” he said. Film rolled, and on the screen behind him appeared a 35-year-old Jerry Lewis doing the famous Chairman of the Board pantomime from “The Errand Boy,” his gesticulations and mugging timed to the tempo of Count Basie’s “Blues in Hoss’ Flat.” It was much more than funny. It was at once melancholy, poetic and exhilarating. When it was over, the room rose in a howling, hooting standing ovation. The only one of the night.

Now it’s the academy’s turn to step up. A few months ago, Bogdanovich wrote a letter to its president, Frank Pierson, suggesting that Lewis be given an Oscar. I hope the Academy doesn’t take too long. The hour is late. Another great clown and groundbreaking filmmaker, too long ignored, deserves to be honored by his peers.

JL’s yahrzeit

The once and future King of Comedy 👑

#rip #jerry lewis #the once and future king of comedy #yahrzeit #LA Times #david weddle #jerry lewis deserves an oscar #king of comedy #quote

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moonlightheretic · 5 years ago

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The Heretic Chapter 5-Crywolf

A chapter from my Solavellan fic. The full series is on AO3.

Sand and water flew up like dusty spirits uncoiling behind us. The wind gnawed at my dry lips. The horse underneath me strained to keep the speed I demanded. Running and disappearing had become the main part of my life. City to city, town to town, I never stopped. I felt like a coward. Life next to the lake proceeded joyfully. Winter made little distinction here. The ground remained unfrozen and untouched by snow. The birds still sang gleefully as if it was summer. An orchestra of crickets, entangled in the long weeds, announced our entrance. The peace of the moment absorbed me and I briefly dropped my guard. If it wasn’t for the sudden jolt of the mare leaping over a fallen log I would have dozed off. As we neared a resting point I slowed into a trot. The skin underneath my fingernails tingled. A reminder of what I carried with me. A virus. I dismounted and walked into a clearing. I was tired. The mare was trained to ground tie. Something felt off, the crickets stopped cheering and the birds fell quiet. I was being followed.

Obviously. Yet there had been no attack since the standoff on the ice-covered lake. It put me on constant edge and fully alert. Another night vigilant and another, nodding off? Not acceptable. They were tiring me out, waiting until I was incapable of fending off an ambush. I could not completely lose them. They would eventually catch up and follow me, no matter how well I covered my tracks. Actually seeing them rather than just knowing they were tracking me, hurt more than I imagined. The worst of it was, these men were familiar. They weren't just any agents, but the Inquisition's finest. Sister Nightingale's handy work. Another knife in the gut, but the remorse for her betrayal would come later when alone and such thoughts consume me. No, I would not be afforded the luxury of masked men. She wanted me to stare into their faces as I slaughtered them, most likely to win my hesitation and use it to her advantage in this fight. Out of all of them, one stood out. He held his weapons slightly higher than the others and his eyes glistened with tears. His eyebrows appeared as though they were mere smudges above his eyes. Vinreal, Leliana's top agent, only second to Charter. I understood the choice she made between them. "What about your mother?" I asked in a small voice. "She, nor I can let your betrayal stand without being challenged." I shook my head. "She will never see you again." "It doesn't matter, she will know I died honorably, fighting for what's right!" Hooded men surrounded me. The Inquisition insignia proudly glimmered from their armor. My eyes gave a wide sweep, I counted eleven. "Eleven?" I scoffed. "If any of you make it out of this, tell Leliana she should have sent the army!" No, they wouldn't survive. It was either I or them. If one got away it would mean I was dead or captured. "She did," One spat. "Is this how you should conduct yourselves in the presence of your Inquisitor? How shameful!" I taunted. The 11 men gave no response. I glared into their emotionless faces. So resolute in their rage, so confident in my betrayal it burned in their eyes. I slowly pulled the noir glove off of my throbbing hand, I had been down this road before and I would need both hands fully functional. "I will give you one chance," I lifted the blades from my back, "Leave me or I will kill all of you." The men rushed me all at once and I started to swing, propelling a fatal rhythm and gaining momentum. Every nerve alive and screaming to move, reflexes charged to the maximum. The lighting runes in the blades sizzling as they sliced through flesh and bone. These men had families. I knew their names, favorite meal, their hometown and their undeniable loyalty to the Inquisition. Yet, I cut through them like they meant nothing. Just another enemy to knockdown. Just another body slumped over, another lying dead in my shadow, another bleeding from the throat, and another drowning in their own blood. The distinct sound of leather ripping pierced the air and I felt the cold sting of metal slashing into my skin. My shoulder now bled like a river, it would have to be ignored. I twisted to avoid another puncture only to come face to face with another attacker. I kicked him, using him as leverage for my back flip. I released a flurry of poisoned knives and watched four men go down. I parried an incoming blow. Vinreal and I remained deadlocked neither of us willing to relinquish the pressure. Blades screeching against one another, runes cackling and sputtering sparks as they mixed into the enemy's, creating a violet and blue smoke that warped the air around us. We grunted as both of us tried to throw our weight into the other, trying to gain an advantage by unbalancing the other. Sweat streamed down our faces, mixed with blood, not of our own. Vinreal was strong, and at least a head taller than me, I could feel him pushing my body backward with my heels skidding in the soil. It was the betrayal in his own blade that saved me from fatality. A sudden movement caught my attention-, in the grooved reflection revealed two men; disappearing into a cloud of stealth in a matter of seconds. They're flanking me. I swiveled on my right foot, releasing my hold on his weapons and the young man fell forward from his own force. Before he could reach the dirt I kicked him in the stomach sending him airborne. The two men appeared on either side, entrapping me and thrust their knives into my absence as I hit the ground and rolled away. I used this chance to deploy poison to the knives and the steel hissed in reaction. "Final chance!" My hoarse voice rang out. Of course, they didn't listen. We circled each other and I counted to keep track of them, trying to control the battlefield as much as possible. 'Two....three...' One was missing--- black spots dangled in my eyes and a searing pain in the back of my head nearly incapacitated me. Chest heaving, my body twirled and stabbed the attacker through the neck, both knives crossed in his jugular. Blood spattered into my eyes and I tasted iron. The other men closed in and lashed out, I dodged but took damage to my left arm. I was starting to tire, my mind dulling to the situation around me. They saw their advantage and took it. Ignoring the pain, my legs moved on their own and I impaled their hearts with poison. Slashing and slicing, I cut them all down until I was the last one standing. Vinreal hadn't even protested in pain. I cried out in anger, seeing the Inquisition's soldiers lying lifeless before me. These were my men and I had slain them. What would their families think of me now? Knees shaking, I withheld my urge to vomit. I felt sick. Leliana had trained them well. I bent down and picked up my glove, and fitted my hand inside, too ready to be done with my actions and move on. But, I should have known better than to drop my guard because plan B greeted me. They rose, emerging from lying flat in the tall weeds, bows ready with arrows, all aimed at me. They barely made a noise, not even a rustle, like ghosts. Archers, their silhouettes inked black against the sun, they had been concealed the entire time. I was completely surrounded. There were too many to count. Flashes of blue struck the men circled around me. The archers were turned into, what looked like, life-size chess pieces. All ill-willed intentions now chronicled in stone. I tasted blood on the tip of my tongue. The grip on the bloody daggers only strengthened. There was to be no relief. Footsteps, just light enough to be noticed for someone with a trained ear. I turned around cautiously, weapons still poised for combat. He emerged from behind the men in stone, strolling past as if they were no more than mere garden ornaments to be admired. "Inquisitor." A smile pulled at his lips. He briefly dipped his head down in respect for my position or rather what was left of it. "You were difficult to find." I would rather have had more assassins. "Dread wolf." I spit out. His smile faltered like a small flame in the wind. "Isn't that how I should address you? Or would you prefer that we continue with this lie, Solas?" I drew out the last few syllables of his name. "I am Solas, and was always so, but I am also much more, Inquisitor." He answered humbly. "You killed my men." "They would've killed you." I twirled the metal in my hands. "Leave me before I end you." Each word squeezed through gritted teeth. He sauntered closer, free of any concern for the weapons and intentions I may act out. He approached in measured steps and in a demeanor that read as relaxed. Oddly enough, his gaze was centered on my gloved hand. "You won't. We both know you won't because you cannot," he stopped a few paces before me, "I am not here to hurt you, Vhenan. Discard your knives. Please." He gestured to the bent grass under my feet. The wind buzzed in my ears as I hurled towards him, my arms spinning in lethal ringlets. A glint of blue and I collided with the ground. I lay there shivering as if I had been shocked. Adrenaline still trying to compel movement from my limbs. My wounds screamed and the ache in my head intensified. "Your effort is futile, your knives will bring you no benefit. I am not your enemy do not try again." Solas spoke sternly. His shadow enveloped my still figure as he loomed over. "So you say, but you have blurred the lines." "I see that I have a double agent. I was going to tell you of my true identity." The blue flash came again followed by my body's freedom. I weakly pushed myself up and sat back on my heels. Solas crouched down to my eye level. Movement on the horizon caught my eye. The silhouettes suggested a caravan of merchants, assisted by guards. If I could possibly get their attention...I wasn't strong enough to fight him alone. Solas sensed the idea forming in my head. He had seen the caravan too. He motioned his head in their vicinity, "You want to drag innocents into this? That is unlike you Lavellan," Solas maintained eye contact, "Go ahead,-" he nodded, "-Cry wolf, Inquisitor and I'll turn those people into statues," The elf challenged with a frightening tone. "I no longer know you," I responded, mortified. “You are a monster.” The muscle in his long neck twitched in response. "The Solas I loved...was gentle, valued the lives of others and he wouldn't kill anyone without justification." It was an attempt to reach him. Perhaps, if there was even a tiny thread left of his old self, I could tug it into the light. "I am still here," he whispered, "but I am called to a purpose that will reshape the world. Even if I must tear this world apart in the process. Sacrifices may be necessary." His shoulders slumped. "I must right the wrongs I've committed." "I held the sky together with my bare hands Solas...I can't let you destroy the world I worked so hard to save. Two wrongs cannot make a right." Solas looked over me, his mind ticking. "You are pale. Inquisitor, you are losing too much blood." I winced when he put his hands on my injuries. His pupils flashed and I felt the flesh knit back together. "Thank you," I muttered lowly. The power he had was unnerving. It was still unknown to me of what he was capable of. I was not bold enough to move any further and let him reach for my gloved fingers. His stoic expression exchanged for one of concern. The rough leather was gently pulled from my palm and the air tingled at my fingertips. The anchor's glow bloomed around us, tinting everything with its hue. It rejoiced in its newfound freedom from the smothering glove. He tossed the glove behind him in subtle disgust, I noted, I needed that. The involuntary flinch from his proximity did not go unnoticed. His hand covered mine barely reducing the light emanating from its source. Solas's long fingers caressed the burning skin. It had been years since I had felt his touch. My heart leaped and old memories threatened to resurface. "Had I not followed Leliana's spies, perhaps I would still be searching. Or you would be..." He trailed off grimly. "You've been looking for me?" He stared into my hand as if looking through it, at something else entirely. "You were never meant to bear the anchor. I'm sorry...I am so sorry it has caused you so much turmoil." There was no shred of anything to suggest his words were insincere and regret knotted his eyebrows. "I know that you do not trust me. It's understandable and well deserved. Let me relieve you of this burden, Inquisitor." I backed away, shaking in rage and pain. To my surprise he let me go. "Please, I can save you. Take my hand." He reached out gently and I recoiled as if I had been slapped. "No. No! I won't give it to you!" I snarled. "Then it will overpower you and you ... will not survive." He clasped his hands behind his back and watched me with profound worry. "I can handle it. This pain is nothing compared to the consequences of giving it to you!" "You have limitations, Inquisitor. Learn to accept them." He stated a matter of fact. "You cannot sustain it. The anchor was not intended for you!" I glanced at my fallen daggers and then met his unyielding eyes. "If that is what it takes to save this world! I will gladly take this anchor to the grave before I ever let you have it! Traitor!" "Your noble integrity has always amazed me but, you are being foolish. You think the pain unbearable now? It will grow worse and it is…a slow death." He paced back and forth, "You resist change...you will always resist. As mankind has done for centuries. You would prefer to toil and struggle, even when-" Solas shook his head in frustration. "You sound like Corypheus." Fury was a barely adequate word to describe it. Eyes flashing, teeth barred, "We are nothing alike! He was a corrupted magister with a paper crown on his head and a nefarious mind filled with filthy aspirations! I stand before you as Solas, my mind is clear and my goal is salvation for us all.”

"He aimed to restore Tevinter to its former sovereignty. You want to restore the elven times of old and in the process rip this world to pieces. I see no difference." It struck me fast; the wind knocked out of my lungs. Knees buckling under me and as the green light intensified, I couldn't stop the guttural scream that left my lips. The anchor felt like it could explode, the blood in the veins actually boiling. I could only hold on to it in some pathetic attempt to keep it together. "Please!" Solas gasped desperately. He came forward and grabbed my hand from my own clutches. Using all my strength I pushed him away and attempted to stand only to end back up on the ground rather ungracefully. Eyes wide, Solas watched helplessly as I resisted my body's compulsions. "Ma Vhenan," He whispered, "it's already progressed into this state." I rolled on to my back hugging the hand to my chest as I struggled to regain composure, but they were just fractured attempts to keep my head above the waters of insanity. The pain subsided moments later, though it felt much longer. "You don't need to suffer so much, Vhenan I want to help you because I..." I scoffed, "Childbirth was worse." A smirk replaced my face's aching contortion and I wiped the tears from my cheeks. "This is nothing." "Moon'Hwa-" "Don't!" "When I left-", "When you left? You didn't leave. You left your spies to run rampant in my fortress. You were just too cowardly to remain yourself!" "She wasn't supposed to happen...none of this was supposed to happen!" He gestured around him. "I don't want to hear your bullshit excuses, Solas!" "I didn't know!" His hands closed around my face. "I only found out recently, I promise you!" "You abandoned the Inquisition! You abandoned...me...us." my voice wavered. Panic was etched into his features. His eyes searched my face as I held my breath, trying not to drown in the sea of emotions that threatened to overcome me. The episode from the anchor still fresh and affecting my mind. "I know and you are correct. I couldn't let you distract me from my purpose. I wanted to stay so badly...but I could not." "Her eyes belong to you Solas. I see you every time I look at her and it hurts so much." For a moment the future of Thedas and the Dread Wolf dispersed from my thoughts and I could only focus on the ache and longing in my heart. There was sorrow in his voice. "You have hidden her from me Moon'Hwa." He rested his head against my forehead and his thumbs stroking my temples. "Do I have the right to ask why?" My eyes closed to shut out his caring ones. "When I found out who you were...I was afraid of what you would do about her. I thought there was a possibility of you...of you," my voice shook, I could not even say the words. "I would never hurt her! I wouldn't dream of it!" He spoke firmly and his fingers pressed into my face. "She is the most wonderful little being I have ever seen." My eyes opened at this. "She wanders the fade when she dreams, Vhenan." He smiled, "I met her there. She does not know who I am." I was speechless. "You are raising her alone, I am so sorry.”

"Solas..."

"Spirits watch over her. They tell me her stories." "Your friends?" "Yes." Solas rested his hands on my shoulders. "That's why you need to stay alive...even for a little while. Our daughter needs her mother." "She has yet lived life. You want to end the world she will grow in. Solas, you have already cut her wings." "I do not make this choice easily, Moon'Hwa, but I have confidence that she will thrive in the world that I will build for her." I leaned my head into his armored chest. "I've thought about it so much; if I ever saw you again, what should I do? Say?" His palm flattened in between my shoulder blades. "I wanted to scream at you, hit you.... sometimes I just wanted to kiss you." My voice broke, "I wondered if you ever thought about me...or what you left behind." His voice was at my ear and he held me close, "do not be mistaken Vhenan, my feelings for you were always true. I never discarded you from my heart." I wrapped my arms around his neck and embraced him tightly. I could feel his face nuzzle into my neck just like old times, his larger frame sinking into my embrace. My left arm reached into the air. "I am sorry Solas." "Wh-" The fade rift ruptured into the clear air above us. It's force rippling in the sky like a pebble thrown in a pond. Undulating in air. I untangled myself from him as the rift disabled any movement or magic from him. Glove and Weapons found and sheathed, I didn't look back.

#solavellan #the dread wolf #fen'harel #solas romance #solas x lavellan #solas dragon age #trespasser #daifanfic #dragonageinquisition

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forgediinfire · 7 years ago

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tagged by: @goldenacolyte and @queencfevil <3

1st rule: tag 9 muns you would like to know better: @followthedrums13 @masterfulxrhythm (you’re gonna get a lot of these, I imagine lol) @koschei-no-more @kili-the-archer @fixedxpoint @fobwatchedcenturion and anyone who would like to.

2nd rule: bold the statements that are true.

APPEARANCE:

I am 5'7" or taller I wear glasses/ contacts I have at least one tattoo i have at least one piercing i have blonde hair I have brown eyes I have short hair My abs are at least somewhat defined I have or have had braces

PERSONALITY:

I love meeting new people people tell me that i’m funny helping others with their problems is a big priority for me I enjoy physical challenges i enjoy mental challenges i’m playfully rude with people i know well i started saying something ironically and now i can’t stop saying it There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY:

I can sing well I can play an instrument I can do over 30 pushups without stopping I’m a fast runner I can draw well i have a good memory I’m good at doing math in my head I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute i have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling i know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch i know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES:

I enjoy playing sports i’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else i have learned a new song in the past week i work out at least once a week I’ve gone for runs at least once a week in the warmer months i have drawn something in the past month i enjoy writing fandoms are my #1 passion I do or have done martial arts

EXPERIENCES:

i have had my first kiss i have had alcohol I have scored the winning goal in a sports game i have watched an entire season of a tv show in one sitting i have been at an overnight event i have been in a taxi I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year i have beaten a video game in one day i have visited another country i have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

RELATIONSHIPS:

i’m in a relationship i have a crush on a celebrity i have a crush on someone i know i have been in at least 3 relationships I have never been in a relationship i have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them i get crushes easily i have had a crush on someone for over a year i have been in a relationship for at least a year i have had feelings for a friend

MY LIFE:

i have at least one person i consider a “best friend” i live close to my school my parents are still together i have at least one sibling I live in the United States there is snow right now where I live i have hung out with a friend in the past month i have a smartphone i have at least 15 cds I share my room with someone

RANDOM SHIT:

i have breakdanced i know a person named jamie i have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce i have dyed my hair I’m listening to one song on repeat right now I have punched someone in the past week i know someone who has gone to jail I have broken a bone I have eaten a waffle today i know what i want to do with my life I speak at least 2 languages i have made a new friend in the past year

#about the mun #ooc

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littlesnowarrow · 7 years ago

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Ask Meme!

Yay! The best teacher in the world @slothquisitor tagged me in this :D Thanks sweetie <3

1) Name/nickname: Irene, Little thing, Snow

2) Gender: Female

3) Star sign: Libra

4) Height: 1,70m (5′5″)

5) Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff

6) Favourite animal: Wolvies :3

7) Hours of sleep: Around 6 hours during week days, but as soon as it’s the weekend or I have a free morning, I reach 11

8) Dogs or cats: ALL THE DOGS

9) Number of blankets: Just the duvet, but after being in Scotland, if I were to live somewhere as cold as there, I’ll need at least three. Holy fuck

10) Dream trip: Scandinavia and New Zealand. Vikings, outdoors, infinite wilderness (not so much in NZ I guess ^^')... And of course, Scotland again!

11) Dream job: Veterinarian. It’s a dream I’m not giving up

12) Time: 7:40 pm GMT+1

13) Birthday: October 18

14) Favorite Bands: Aside from every single (videogame) orchestra in the world? Imagine Dragons!

15) Favorite Solo Artists: Ed Sheeran stole my heart a long time ago *heart eyes*

16) Song Stuck In My Head: Attention by Charlie Puth. This song does things to me

17) Last Movie I Watched: Monsters Inc

18) Last Show I Watched: The Blacklist

19) When Did I Create My Blog: (I had to go back to my very first post... and it’s about Alistair, to no one’s surprise) It appears it was in August ‘16! A year ago already!

20) What Do I Post/Reblog: Dragon Age, Horizon Zero Dawn, animals and landscapes... and sometimes the very occasional shit post. I can’t help it ^^'

21) Last Thing I Googled: To be honest, a length converter

22) Other Blogs: None!

23) Do I Get Asks: Very few. I prefer to send them ;)

24) Why I Choose My URL: Because I’m tiny, I love the snow, and pretty much all my OC are archers (how very original huh?), and there you go!

25) Following: 214

26) Followers: 59

27) Lucky Number: 21

28) Favorite Instrument: Violins! But I also have a soft spot for pianos

29) What Am I Wearing: Strawberry linen t-shirt with an open back, skinny jeans, trashed sneakers (I really should retire these)

30) Favorite Food: COOKIEEES

31) Nationality: Spanish

32) Favorite Song: Really?! I don’t have one! But *coughs* I’ll go with Aloy’s Theme, by Joris de Man feat. Julie Elven

33) Last Book Read: Phewww I have no idea which was the last book I read. All I’m reading nowadays is fanfic... I still have to finish Songs from @lechatrouge673 and Carja Wedding from @pikapeppa

34) Top Three Fictional Universes I’d Like To Join: I’d be down joining the Harry Potter Universe, I would like magic please. Or to just know someone who has it. Do I have to stay there forever? Because if I could just jump in and hang for a while that’s different. I’d go to Fitzgerald’s New York or literally wherever Wonder Woman happens to be.

This time I’ll tag @novamm66, @missragdoll84, @pikapeppa and @swiggle-muffin! And whoever wants to play as well ;)

#games games!#get to know Snow #edit: I'm sorry Chat!

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scifigeneration · 7 years ago

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I asked artists to create films using real sounds from space – this is what they came up with

by Martin Archer

Art and science are often seen as complete opposites: art is subjective, while science aims to discover objective facts about nature.

But more and more, we are realizing that there are commonalities between the two. While technical skills are often attributed to scientific endeavours, there is clearly technical skill required in creating artworks. And while art is all about imagination and creativity, so too is devising an experiment or new analysis technique to test some hypothesis. You might not realize how much time I, as a scientist, have to spend trying to make my figures as clear and aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Given these overlaps, art-science collaborations have become more common. In the world of physics, these have often involved artists discussing scientific ideas with current researchers which then lead to artworks, be they paintings, sculptures, interpretive dances, or whatever. In fact, various research institutions, such as the CERN and the European Space Agency, and even some university physics departments, have artists in residence. Such collaboration should be encouraged and can benefit both parties: the scientist may gain new insights or be reminded of the bigger picture by talking with artists, and artists can broaden the range of their work by expressing different ideas based in science.

But if a piece of art is inspired by science, it isn’t always apparent to audiences. It’s not always easy to see the original scientific concepts in the artworks themselves. Sometimes these concepts get lost in translation: naturally the onus isn’t on communicating science but in creating something entertaining, thought provoking or of beauty.

However, with the wealth of data being created nowadays, such as from long-running space missions, city traffic cameras, and places like Google and Facebook, new ways of collaborating with scientists are emerging. And art which explicitly incorporates real data has the potential to create more transparency in such collaborations.

Sound, space and film

My own research concerns sound in space. This sound isn’t audible to the human ear: it’s incredibly weak and much lower in pitch than our ears can detect.

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Normally, therefore, we just study the data by looking at these oscillations (or figures from some analysis of them). But just like an orchestra consists of many different instruments which can be played in a variety of styles, there are many different types of sounds present in the space around the Earth which often occur simultaneously.

Separating these out using a computer can be very difficult, but the human auditory system excels at such tasks. That’s why I made some of these measurements audible, releasing them online and asking the public what they thought space “sounds like”. The idea being that this could help re-contextualize the data for researchers, potentially bringing new insights, but also identifying events for future study in the research. The responses were incredibly varied, ranging from things whizzing by, to whistling, static, and even insects fighting.

As I’d created this audible version of the data I use in research, I thought that there must be something else that could be done with it. And so I decided to run a film competition, challenging filmmakers to be inspired by these sounds and incorporate them into shorts in some way. I decided to keep the brief really open with no limit on genre or topic, only that the films had to use some of the space sounds (which they were free to modify in any way) somewhere in them. I had no idea how this community would take to such a challenge or what on Earth (or more technically, off it) the results would be.

I was really impressed with the number of film submissions we actually got. They were all so different and the quality was so high, which made the judging process very difficult indeed. My team of judges and I have managed to whittle the entries down to seven short films for cinematic screening at a special film festival in London.

One young filmmaker from Manchester, Aaron Howell, decided that the whooshing sounds present in the data evoked movement and was able to mould these around a fast-paced contemporary dance performance. Another team of London filmmakers took the concept of “space sound effects” quite literally and came up with a scenario that would fit well with the space sounds – a man tending to his garden.

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Others manipulated the sounds more. For example, Jesseca Simmons, a young filmmaker from Chicago, was able to bring out a sense of being underwater and convey the experience of a fish by playing with the space sounds, something I would never have thought of.

The sounds took on an incredibly creepy vibe in a Brazilian short film, in which filmmaker Victor Galvão coupled his unnerving audio composition with 35mm slides found in a medical archive to make something really unique. These are just a few examples of films selected from the competition.

It’s weird to think that all those diverse and disparate ideas clearly link back to audible data recorded in space. One filmmaker got back to me with an interesting perspective on the project as a whole:

Taking raw data out of context and using it as a key creative element in the creation of art is a way of providing a fresh look at a scientific inquiry. Art can be a mirror whose reflection can reset context and provide the listener with a different perspective than might otherwise be encountered. My hope is that the result of this competition will be a number of submissions that stimulate a wider audience to think about how science is more than just the collection of raw data, and that understanding can come from looking at results from a new vantage.

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Whether the project will actually do that remains to be seen, but hopefully, this will also inspire other scientists to open up their data in useful ways for artists, musicians, and filmmakers. The potential results, as I myself have witnessed, are quite simply unimaginable.

Martin Archer is a Space Plasma Physicist at the Queen Mary University of London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

#art #film #sound #space #short film #movies

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the-wardens-torch · 6 years ago

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TL:DR - Fal will unironically take up Dancer, eventually. Also my neck hurts.

Long version;

I took some muscle relaxers and pain meds for my neck about a half hour ago (attending a full session of physical therapy before diving into a 9 hour workday was a terrible idea on my part,) so forgive me if this gets incoherent.

When HW dropped, I wasn't terribly interested in any of the new classes it offered. It was probably over a year before I started leveling AST, MCH and DRK - the latter two of which I don't even have at 70. Even though I’ve grown to really love AST, it doesn’t fit Fal at all and will never be even remotely canonical for him.

As for SB, I still haven't leveled RDM or SAM. At all.

As for ShB... I'm actually kind of excited for Dancer. Its the first class in a long time I can actually imagine Fal getting into, whether or not I include it in his personal canon.

Fal loves music, but he’s usually the one playing it, not dancing to it. How would he feel if the roles were a bit reversed? He’s known quite a few dancers and has envied their skill at least once in his life. He spent a few years working in the orchestra pit at a burlesque house, and his first steady significant other was one of the ubiquitous Ul’dah dancing girls. Plus, it wouldn’t surprise me if his home islands in the South Seas had a tradition of powerful, masculine dances like some Polynesian cultures do in our world.

Canonically, Fal has a BRD soulstone, but he doesn’t really use it. He was in denial about his magical abilities for long enough to get really good at the musical element of the BRD class, but he never made much of an archer, primarily because he wasn’t very good at the mind-over-matter zen concentration part of things. He’s capable of being quite patient, but he has a lot of nervous energy and is an impulsive and in-the-moment creature at heart. He’s fairly agile, but he’s not particularly strong, and aiming when under duress is not something he does well. He also doesn’t really enjoy archery that much, and currently only practices it to maintain some connection to his mother.

Lazy asshole that I am, I haven’t worked out the exact canon of Fal becoming a SMN, and I‘m not sure if I ever will because I can‘t write good plots sfaFasfAdf. I started his story intending him to be a BRD and only a BRD, and I hate retconning, so… I reverse engineered SMN into his backstory. However it all happened, his magic is rather strong, but he does everything inside out or backwards. He uses his voice and (to a lesser extent) his movements as a sort of arcane focus when he casts spells, and he’s gotten used to manipulating and channeling aether in his own body. He doesn’t think his magic so much as feel it. And he enjoys it more than archery because it feels uniquely “his.”

I might be misinterpreting, but I think it looks like Dancer is more magical than martial. Even if it is a physical DPS class, the way its weapons seem to unerringly reach their targets and its rumored support abilities just make me think a lot of aether manipulation is at work. And Fal‘s good at that. He’d also be quite happy to have his secondary abilities strengthen his allies rather than weaken his enemies. I feel almost like the class could combine his musical abilities and his magical abilities quite well.

And no, there’s not supposed to be a hint of sarcasm or “lol look at that fruity dude doin a girl job” about any of these thought processes. His love of skirts and minimalist shirts aside, he’d take it as a serious art form.

…All that said, I’d probably wait at least a couple of months after ShB dropped to play around with the class because my whiny teen hipster sensibilities make me hate doing what the popular kids are doing.

I should probably go lay down.

#waste of space post

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riffmusicpony · 7 years ago

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Here’s 10 facts you didn’t know about my latest Metal album, Badlands. 1. There are two tracks that pay rightful homage to Brendon Small: Balthazar for the groovy Metal vibe and the reversed tubular bell which is common in the Metalocalypse series. The guitar played on these tracks was the Epiphone Les Paul, which is down tuned to C standard. When Autumn Sleeps didn’t like when I would down tune to C standard. 2. The album took 5 years to develop. In 2012, the final track Surfing on the edge of the universe aimed to be the most technically difficult shred track I’ve ever written. And it still is. This track started the idea for another album, leading to the development of Badlands. Technology was very limited back in 2012 so that’s why the sound quality is very different. It still needed to be included because that’s the track that started the whole thing. 3. I have no idea how to play the drums. But I do have an idea of how to program drums. The VST of choice had to be 8Dio’s Zeus drum kit. A massive 20 GB drum VST with over 38,000 samples, the first use of Zeus was programmed on the track, Fly with me (Soarin). However, some drum tracks were performed by two guest artists, Arnaud Krakowka & Tore Fagerheim, who were more than helpful in the process. 4. On a super super rare demo cassette (you read that right), there is a super super rare cover of Steve Vai’s “Building the church” I made. And on that cover came a section that landed on Hay in the needle stack at around 2:08. The rare demo was no longer found on any of my hard drives. 5. Jeepers Creeper was inspired by a manger and store owner who’s names I won’t mention. 6. Balthazar was a concept character that inspired the lore of Badlands. Balthazar is a woodlands based archer with an owl mask. The commissioned artwork of Balthazar was created by Tyler “Metadragonart” Florence. The Balthazar portrait is available on all purchased copies on Bandcamp. Thanks again Tyler!

7. Revolution is a very subtle nod to Tremblay Brothers Studios’ revival of the Swat Kats series known as Swat Kats: Revolution. The second half features a re-imagined version of the second season Swat Kats theme song. 8. I’m very well aware that The Boat Man has two recognizable melodies in it. If you caught them you probably heard Ghost Riders and the Doctor Who theme in there. 9. Don’t be a backseat driver is the least Metal track in the album. Clearly. But the orchestra was composed by me. So I say it belongs. Also sweep picking skills are displayed on this track. 10. The next Metal album looks as to be picked up right where Badlands left off, concept wise. But don’t quote me on that, it’s subject to change, but I love when albums do cool stuff like that.

#RiffMusicPony #Badlands

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silenceandpatiencepining · 5 years ago

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memories with TS songs

Today I’m thinking about how many memories I have with Taylor songs and imaging how there are even more coming just waiting to happen.

I was in sixth grade when Taylor’s first album came out and I used to steal my older sister’s hot pink iPod nano so I could listen to Taylor on the bus drives to and from school. It’d be me sitting alone, slouched on the seat with my knees propped up, staring out the window daydreaming while listening to Our Song. Or thinking about Teardrops On My Guitar and changing the lyrics to “teardrops on my violin” bc I was an orchestra kid with massive crushes on people who always looked past me.

Every time I had a falling out with someone or a friend that was going through a breakup, Picture to Burn was there with me. On more than one occasion my sister or I brought the small kitchen pot and a lighter to our bathroom and turned on the blower so we could literally burn pictures or notes or letters without starting a fire.

I’m Only Me When I’m With You has been the longtime anthem of me falling in love with my best friends over and over, and them not feeling the same way.

The summer after Fearless came out, I was absolutely obsessed with the album. I was away from home for a month or so and I would listen to it on repeat. Sometimes I’d g-chat (bc it was the newest feature on my new gmail account) with my cousin and we’d watch the You Belong With Me music video at the same time and gush about it.

Fearless was really That Album—so many iconic bops. Hey Stephen was my first favorite on that album. The Best Day made me want to cry and hug my parents and I still think that if I ever get married, that’s gonna have to be my father daughter dance song. I still scream sing the bridge of Tell Me Why every time it comes on. Fearless is the song that got me and still gets me gassed up to shoot my shot (archer pun not intended). Fifteen. White Horse. You’re Not Sorry. BREATHE. Forever & Always became my sign-off salutation and it’s still one I use. The Way I Loved You! I didn’t have the deluxe version of the album (bc I didn’t know there was one) but damn. I still stan fearless.

Speak Now was definitely the album my sister loved the most. It’s a lyrical masterpiece. I don’t know if I’m remembering this right but when Mine dropped with the music video there was this story circulating that it dropped early because Taylor and her team found out that it had leaked while they were on a flight or something crazy so they released as soon as they landed, ahead of the original date. And I remember watching that video and being so in love with all the pictures hanging on strings in the forest. I have so many memories of me playing Speak Now from my CD player and jumping around singing and dancing to my favorites songs or lying on the carpet like a dramatic bitch for the slow ones, especially Dear John. I’m pretty sure the only way I listened to Dear John was lying on the floor in the puddle of tears (imagined and real).

Red came out when I was in high school and everyone was so shook when it dropped bc we were like yooooo is Taylor experimenting with dubstep (back when dubstep had its little hay day). 2012 was such a weird year. It gave us Kony 2012 and apocalypse theories. But mostly, Red is the album that was the soundtrack to my last years of high school. It was sitting in the passenger seat with the music up and windows down, on long drive to the country or to get milkshakes and slushees. It was me falling in love with my best guy friend again, him choosing to date my best girl friend, and then him breaking both of our hearts. It was forbidden moments with him knowing he was dating my best friend. It was me singing “don’t look at me you got a girl at home and everybody knows that” and then being a fucking hypocrit bc all our friends would be over hanging out and we’d be snuggled up, never holding hands or kissing but always being a little too close.

Red was the first concert I got to see Taylor. A relative got me tickets for my birthday. I wore my cowboy boots and favorite hi-low dress and curled my hair. And every drive I took that year, after every pool party, after every movie date with the boy, every last adventure before my friends went off to college, every late night at a friends house was awash in Red.

1989 is the soundtrack of my first years of college. It was me feeling left behind and awkward, and turning that into a fresh start in a new city and trying to shake off negativity. I remember when the Shake It Off video came out and I literally screamed and laughed and cried tears of happiness bc I felt so seen. Loving to dance even though I wasn’t the best at it. I remember late nights walking around campus in the dark in the winter listening to Welcome to New York and letting that feeling of endless possibilities and new beginnings wash over me. I remember countless times I zoned out standing in the shower thinking about Clean. I remember feeling like 1989 sounded like such a mixtape (in the best way—it captured such a specific set of feelings).

Reputation. Where do I even start. I think up until Rep, my love for Taylor Swift and her music was such an internal part of me, but EVERYONE was talking once the singles started coming out and it was when I finally found myself getting defensive over Taylor. I remember literally screaming the first time I watched the LWYMMD music video. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. When the lyric video for CIWYW came out, my best friend and I were staying at this hotel while she was visiting me and I cried and all I could say was that I was just so happy that Taylor found someone to love her whole. reputation was quite literally the only thing I really listened to for MONTHS. I was obsessed with the album. I would have died for that album.

I initially didn’t think I would get a chance to see her on tour because the tickets were soooo expensive but I ended up getting a surprisingly cheap floor seat just 3 days before I saw her in Foxborough night 1. That entire performance blew my mind. I was 5 rows back from the B stage which ended up being the perfect place cause Tay was soooo close while performing Shake It Off (one of my all time faves) and the surprise acoustic song was 22, which made me literally melt because I had just turned 22. I actually danced so hard during SIO that I twisted my ankle and fell back onto my seat during the concert—almost everybody that was seated around me had moved up by that point to get closer while Tay was on the B stage, but my ✌️social anxiety ✌️ was not about that life. I think I lost my voice from singing. And definitely was shooketh to the core when Hayley Kiyoko came on stage. Truly unforgettable.

This era has been such a whirlwind and I cannot wait for the memories it will bring and the lyrics that will destroy me. If Taylor talks at all more explicitly about dealing with family illness or sexuality/identity or the monumental effort it takes to really love yourself, just know that it will probably end me.

ANYWAY I love you @taylorswift

Your music has been the soundtrack to so many parts of my life. I know there are countless fans out there with stories like mine, or even more powerful ones and I just want to share how much your craft and dedication to your fans means to every single one of us whether or not we meet you. In these last couple weeks before the album is released, I hope you see and hear SO MUCH positivity and no more of the drama.

Lol if anyone, if a single one of you actually reads this 1) wow thanks 2) please reblog with some of your #TS song memories or times when #Taylor Swift was there with me AND USE THE TAGS so we can share these awesome memories with each other

#TS song memories #taylor swift was there with me

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vinylbay777 · 7 years ago

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New Albums Coming Out in November 2017

Happy November! Now that the fall release season is in full swing, it’s time to take a look at some of the new albums coming out throughout the month.

There are a lot of big albums coming out in November. Sam Smith, Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 will all be releasing their highly anticipated new albums this month. Evanescence will be making their official return to the rock scene as well. November will also see new albums from the likes of Morrissey, Bjork, Noel Gallagher and more.

Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island’s music outlet, loves new music. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of some of the most anticipated albums of November. From pop to country to rock and punk, here are 11 albums to watch out for.

1. Maroon 5, ‘Red Pill Blues’: Following their 2014 album, ‘V,’ and two successful stand-alone singles, Maroon 5 return with their new album, ‘Red Pill Blues.’ Featuring collaborations with the likes of SZA, Julia Michaels, LunchMoney Lewis and A$AP Rocky, the album continues the band’s stride further into pop music. (11/3)

2. Sam Smith, ‘The Thrill of It All’: It has been three years since Sam Smith crooned his way onto the pop scene. Now he’s back with his highly anticipated sophomore album, ‘The Thrill of It All.’ The lead single “Too Good at Goodbyes” has already been blowing up on Adult Contemporary and Top 40 radio. Combined with the way people seem to faun over him, this album could possibly top the Album chart next week too. (11/3)

3. Evanescence, ‘Synthesis’: Evanescence are finally back with a new album after nearly six years. ‘Synthesis’ re-imagines some of the band’s biggest hits with a full orchestra. There are also two new songs on the album, including single “Imperfection.” Evanescence’s music is already dark, haunting and beautiful and such arrangements feel like they would be a natural compliment to their sound. (11/10)

4. Taylor Swift, ‘Reputation’: Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated new album comes out this month. The sound is a change of pace for the singer, showing off a “harder edge” to the once country crossover superstar. (11/10)

5. Quicksand, ‘Interiors’: Punk/metal band Quicksand broke up in 1995 after the release of their album ‘Manic Compression.’ The band tried to reunite for a new album in 1999, but the attempt failed as the band couldn’t see eye-to-eye. This makes the release of ‘Interiors’ even more exciting, as it would make it their first new album in 22 years. (11/10)

6. Faith Hill & Tim McGraw, ‘The Rest of Our Life’: It’s surprising that country power couple Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have not released a duet album together in the 21 years that they have been married. That changes this month when they release ‘The Rest of Our Life.’ Both artists have had huge success individually and putting the two together has the potential to be even more amazing. (11/17)

7. Morrissey, ‘Low in High School’: Smiths frontman Morrissey is back with his 11th solo album, ‘Low in High School.’ The album’s first single, “Spent the Day in Bed,” has a uniquely mesmerizing new wave tune and an interesting take on the politics and culture of the time. Hopefully the rest of the album will have a similar feel. (11/17)

8. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, ‘Soul Of A Woman’: It’s been almost a year since Sharon Jones passed away from pancreatic cancer. Now the world will get to hear her final recordings when ‘Soul Of A Woman’ is released this month. According to an interview with Daptone Records co-founder Gabriel Roth in Rolling Stone, Jones never recorded anything unless she was really feeling it, so chances are this album will be just as amazing and soulful as her previous ones. (11/17)

9. Fieldy, ‘Bassically’: The Korn bassist hasn’t released a solo album since his rap project Fieldy’s Dreams put out ‘Rock’n Roll Gangster’ in 2002. ‘Bassically’ will be more funk and jazz inspired than that, focusing more on the basses he’s playing and where he’s playing them. (11/17)

10. Bjork, ‘Utopia’: Avant-garde songstress Bjork is releasing her ninth solo album, ‘Utopia,’ this month. The album is supposed to be a bit more upbeat than her last, 2015’s ‘Vulnicura.’ That is already apparent with the album’s first single, “The Gate,” a calculated and minimalistic song with ethereal and enveloping-ly orchestral qualities to it. (11/24)

11. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, ‘Who Built the Moon?’: First Liam Gallagher released his album, now it’s brother Noel’s turn. His band the High Flying Birds is back with their third album, ‘Who Built the Moon?’ The album finds Noel reuniting with his former Oasis bandmates Chris Sharrock and Gem Archer, who are taking over on drums and guitar, respectively. (11/24)

November is gearing up to be one of the biggest months of the year for new albums, as some of the biggest artists in the world have new music coming out. These are some of the albums we think might be worth checking out. Keep an eye out for these and let us know what album’s you’re excited for this month.

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Find music new and old at Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island’s top new independent record shop. We have thousands of titles to choose from in a variety of genres. Browse our wide selection of new and used vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, music DVDs and memorabilia in store at our Plainview location or shop online at vinylbay777.com. Whether you’re looking for something new or to rediscover the classics, we have you covered. And with more titles being added to our selection all the time, you never know what you might find at Vinyl Bay 777.

#new music #albums #november

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