#making sculptures and just objects that are highly specific shapes in general | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yoonzinow · 4 years

Text

red moon - k.mg

➺ inspired by gose’s bad clue episode, mingyu tells his side of the story

• warnings and note: mentions of s*icide, death, angsty angst, the reader’s medical license should probably be taken away lol, over use of the word endearing, lots of difference from the episode, also, Jeonghan, I’m so sorry. There is a lil romantic epilogue in the end but it’s optional, I just had to because I’m too soft and I love happy endings. Sorry if it’s all of the sudden, but if I extended too much it would be too long and I’m not that creative. Again, forgive any typos and I really hope it doesn’t suck ♥

• wc: 9.9k

Your office was simple. Even if you wanted to make it feel more like home, there wasn’t much that could be done. The most you could manage to get was a tapestry hanging on the wall. Even though the inmates were cuffed during the sessions, it was still required to remove any potential harmful object, as well as strong colors or shapes that could be triggering. There weren’t any pictures, ornaments or sculptures of any kind. It was just the locker, a table and two similar chairs.

You were still standing up, waiting for him to come in. You would usually wait for the patient to choose where they sit, but this time, it wasn’t that. It was simply because you froze in place.

-Come in. – you tried not to sound as small as you felt.

After the second noise, the door opened slowly, revealing the most confusing thing you could imagine seeing.

If you’re told you’ll be meeting a criminal, a murderer, the child in your head makes this image of a monster, a creature you wouldn’t want to look in the eyes. But the moment you laid eyes on Mingyu, you saw everything. Pain, confusion, grief and something else you couldn’t yet pin point. All of that in a face sculpted by the angels themselves.

-You can have a seat. – you pointed to the table, but not a specific chair. He sat down on the one closest to him. The guards locked his handcuffs to the hook on the table and left to wait outside. You bowed lightly and waited for the door to close. Walking towards the table, you sat down. The first thought when he first looked at you was that somehow, he knew. You wondered if anything would give away, even though it was highly unlikely.

-So, first of all, how would you like me to call you?

-Mingyu is fine. And you? Doctor? Ms.? Mam? – although his words could come out as cocky, he had a boyish charm that gave him an endearing look. It was like he sat next to you in a park and was simply trying to start conversation. It was like he wasn’t in therapy to understand his crimes. You just had to decide whether it made your job harder or simply more of a challenge.

-Doctor. – you feared you sounded a bit harsh, but it was probably your mind telling you he knew.

-So tell me a little about yourself. – you put your notepad on the table and the pen on your lap, in a force of habit.

-Could you be a bit more specific, doctor? I mean, there’s a lot about me. My past, my present, my preferences, my fears. So, any particular topic I should start with? – again, he didn’t sound cocky. He was genuinely asking.

-Hum… Yeah, it’s a bit of a vague question. Let’s start differently. How are you feeling today?

Like any other patient, you didn’t immediately take notes. Most of them weren’t exactly happy for being arrested, so at first, you tried your best to avoid triggering even more anger, making them feel analyzed instead of heard. Regardless of the backstory you had, Mingyu wouldn’t be any different.

-I’m a very sensitive person. I felt different kinds of distinct emotions since I woke up. – he took a deep breath. –First, I looked around the boring cell and felt… Well, I’m not sure what the feeling was but I guess I had a quick flashback of the recent past. I was quickly interrupted by a short yet stout guard with weirdly thin eyebrows. His grumpy expression mixed with curiosity of what was waiting for me here just made me feel… - he looked around as if he was searching for the right word. –Anxious, to put it simply.

Simply. You wondered what he’d say if wording it the complex way.

-So, what did you think about this place? I mean, what did you expect it to be?

-Honestly? I had no idea, but at the same time, I guess I knew. – he showed a bit of a sad smile. – I guess… - again, he paused. He was constantly trying to find the right words. You couldn’t help but wonder if he was naturally articulated when speaking or if he simply was trying to make your job easy. –I knew it would be visually boring. Why bother decorating for this kind of people, right? – again, he smiled sadly. –But to be honest, I also wondered how I would feel like, spiritually, maybe.

Looking at him was a very interesting thing. His words were obviously heavy in meaning, but what really caught your attention was his body language. As he continued talking about his expectations, he kept smiling as if trying to convince himself that it wasn’t that bad. But he knew it was, and it wasn’t likely to get any better, at least not anytime soon. He was relaxed in his seat, at the same time, holding a firm, polite posture. Giving his medical record, it wasn’t his first time doing that, except this time, it wasn’t about how he felt, it was about what he’s done. He also showed something unknown. His expression had this sort of acceptance to it, as if he knew that his fate was already determined and there was no way back. However, that meant he had something inside that he wasn’t showing completely, and something told you that he wouldn’t. Ever.

Or maybe he did already. You just didn’t pick up.

5 weeks later

The things were going smoothly with Mingyu’s daily sessions. The problem is: you didn’t start talking about the crime itself. You decided to approach him slowly, making him feel somehow safe to open up. Even though he was talkative and cooperated most of the time, there was still something about him that wasn’t being shown. The first troubled feelings and fear that treating him would be wrong was being vanished a lot faster than you thought. Sure, sometimes it would hit you that the man in front of you killed someone you were fond of, but the professional part of you needed to go deeper. Mingyu was polite, kind, not to mention his ridiculously handsome looks. It intrigued you very, very much. How could this be the same man who murdered six people in one night?

But you knew you had to get into the part of his life that led him to this fate. It would be hard and scary, yet intriguing and fascinating.

He entered the room with a smile that was now genuine. It wasn’t that wide or cheerful, but simply out of well manners. The whole process of cuffing him to the table was finished and the guards left. It was quite soon, but you would, eventually, tell the security that the cuffs were no longer needed, as you did with every other patient whose behavior didn’t come as threatening.

-Good morning, doctor.

-Good morning. How are you today?

-The same as yesterday. – he shrugged slightly.

-Okay. – you nodded, ready to jump to the next question. – I have to ask you a question and you might think I’m a bit late for that but… how are you feeling in general, about being here? And by ‘general’ I mean both physically and mentally. How is it that you are settling in the facilities?

-Well, I understand why you took the time to ask that. Obviously the first couple of days can be terrible. But honestly? If we’re talking about the facilities and the overall routine, I can definitely say it’s not that bad. I have a lot more freedom than I thought, so do the other patients. At least the non-violent ones. I won’t say I’m happy, of course. But it could be much, much worse.

-I see. I’m glad you are settling in. Have you made any acquaintances yet?

-I did, actually. I usually have long talks with this older lady when we have the common room time. And I’m also very close with this kid called Hiro, you know him?

-No, not really. He’s not with me. In fact, I don’t really recall that name. Is he Japanese?

-Nope. – he emphasized the ‘p’, amused with the story. –I actually don’t know his name, but that’s what he wants to be called. He doesn’t really talk about his past that much but he wants to leave it behind. So he decided he will be the man he wished he was. He chose his own name and his story began here, so he doesn’t really feel like he’s been locked up, but simply lives here? Don’t know if you got it but yeah. He’s a lot of fun to be around.

You never heard of that patient but you heard similar stories from the other doctors, since it was a huge facility with a lot of professionals, there was no way one could know about every case.

-I’m glad. I hope you can keep up. I heard you were very cooperative last Friday on the game night. You helped a lot before and after cleaning up. Does it feel good to be helpful?

-Yes, it does. – his response came quickly with the most adorable smile you have ever seen, making him look like a proud child. It made your heart clench a little, because you knew the course of the conversation was to bring no reason to smile.

-So, tell me. How do you feel about talking about your past? – you tried to be as careful as possible, not wanting to crash down the amused aura he had previously.

-Honestly? Not great. But also, I was kind of prepared. It’s therapy for inmates, of course I’d have to talk eventually.

His words felt like lots of pounds taken from your back. Mingyu showed himself as more and more mature as time went by and you couldn’t be more satisfied. He knew what you were doing, and he was by no means confused or scared. Sure, talking about the amount of abuse he had to face wouldn’t be a pleasant thing to do, but he knew it was the right thing to do in order to let you do your job.

-That’s true. It’s a very good thing that you know it’s a vital step for us. So, is it okay if I ask you some questions now?

He only nodded.

-Do you understand why you’re here? Not in the office, in the Hospital. – he pouted slightly, but you continued. – You don’t have to explain or tell me in detail. Just tell me if you understand.

-Yes, I do. I mean, I know why. Not sure if I comprehend, but I understand.

You liked the way he worded it. In fact, every single one of his sentences was captivating in their own way.

-Alright. We’ll get back to it later. But I have another question. Where do you think you should be right now? – you were genuinely curious about his answer. You feared he would say something harmful, or go to a more generic path and try to make you feel bad about him, but once again, he took a different turn from which you would expect.

-I should be in a loving home, in the company of a family, or, at least, of people that care about me. Oddly enough, I think I deserve it.

-I don’t think it’s odd. Everybody deserves it. You can say it with confidence.

-Isn’t it, though? I mean, I had family. But look where we are now. Do I really deserve a family that loves me if I got rid of the one I had?

You were in loss of words. He was one step ahead of you, as if he knew already the whole process. Half of you wanted to say to the board: ‘’Okay, tell the judge this man has no need for therapy, because he is more aware of this own emotions than any person declared sane you ever seen.’’

But the other half… That one had this little voice saying it was a matter of time before you found something lurking, waiting to jump on you and make all of your work go to waste.

-Before everything that happened, did you feel for those who were your relatives any kind of emotion that resembles a family kind of notion?

He thought for a minute, surprisingly, not giving you a quick response.

-Well, you can say that. I felt some kind of safety, but not the emotional kind. It was like… If I got into an accident or something, someone would be there to pay the hospital bills and such. It’s not the warm kind of safety but I guess it counts.

So does my insurance company, you thought. -Did you feel loved?

-I guess I’ll never know. I don’t know what if feels like to be loved, so I don’t really have anything to compare with.

Your heart broke a little by hearing his words. Whether he was a great actor or he was simply lonely. Completely, utterly, devastatingly lonely.

-So, what did yo- before you could finish your question, a screeching sound came from the speakers, making you jump from your seat.

-What was that? – Mingyu covered his ears with a pained expression from the disturbing noise.

-An inmate escaped. All of the doors will be locked for a while. – you tried to sound calm but it was always stressing when the sirens went off.

-How the fuck did someone escape? Seriously, there are more guards than prisoners here.

-It’s fine, they can’t go too far. It’s all the same security system all over the facility. The electrical fences automatically increase in voltage.

You didn’t actually think Mingyu would try to escape, but you chose to remind him there was no use trying. Getting off of a cell wasn’t impossible, or escaping from kitchen duty, maybe. Escaping the Hospital was a whole different story. So, it was better to just enforce the information to him.

Soon, a second noise, a shorter one was heard, signaling the inmate was found. However, the session had to be stopped. Every patient must go back to their room once someone tries to escape, for head count.

-As the door opens, the guards will come get you and you’ll go back to your room. I’ll have to warn you, though, they might get a little rough. These attempts of escaping make them a bit angry, just so you prepare for some sort of aggression. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you, I wouldn’t let them anyway. But they do get a little…

-I get it. – he looked at you with an understanding complexion. –Thank you for warning me.

But were you really warning him? Or you were trying to prepare yourself to a potential scene of him being treated badly?

Mingyu didn’t have his sessions for the next two days after the attempt of escaping of a patient. All of them were put in some sort of lockdown, as an indirect warning. Later that day, he would be coming back, and you were strangely excited. You told yourself over and over again that it was only because you were still curious about the story he was about to tell you, but deep down, you knew there was something else. You could almost say you missed him, even though it was a terrible thing to even think about.

You just needed some time to cool down, so you chose a nice, calm walk through the garden. Everything was back to normal, so it wouldn’t be that boring to walk through the hospital.

The Sun was shining in its full glory, making everything around you seem brighter and more alive. You felt warm inside and out. A few older patients were sitting on a wooden bench, not really talking much, just admiring it all. Some younger ones were cleaning up and looking around.

At the back, there was this little area with a fairy garden kind of vibe. There were flower spirals and two swings, always busy with someone playing like a child. It made you giggle.

However, your smile faltered and you stopped in your tracks. There he was, sitting on the grass, admiring a humming bird kissing a flower.

As a patient called your name, his attention was brought to you. A girl with a shy smile and a flower in her hair came to you.

-Good morning doctor. It’s been a while! – she signaled you to come closer and used her hand to cover her mouth as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear. –To be honest, my current doctor has nothing on you.

You chuckled a little.

-Well, I hope you get along eventually. But for the record, I miss you. – you winked a little. –By the way, you look stunning. – you pointed at her hair.

-Oh. – she reached for the flower and put it on the back of your ear. –Now you look stunning too.

-Oh my, thank you so much! – you smiled widely, with warmth coming from your heart. –But what about you?

-I look pretty without it too. – she covered her mouth as she chuckled. –But if I want another flower, I know where to get it. She walked away, bouncing a little as she happily returned to the people she was playing with. As you brought your attention back to Mingyu, you saw him smiling, fond of the scene that he just saw. You wondered if you should go talk to him or just wave and leave. Apparently, your legs made that choice for you, seeing as you were already walking towards him.

-You look very good. – he said, admiring your features.

-You like my new gift? – you smiled, pointing at the flower you just got.

-I do, I do. – his look became a bit more serious. –But it’s not all. You look… I don’t know. You’re kind of glowing.

You gulped hard. In your sessions, you had your ways of being stern and diverting the situation, but there, just hanging out on the garden, you weren’t sure how to react. Luckily, he didn’t let you wonder too hard and just changed the topic.

-Your patients really admire you, huh? – he asked and motioned his head to his side, silently asking you to sit down.

You straightened your medical coat and sat next to him in the grass.

-It does make me really happy to think so.

He nodded in agreement.

-Me included, doctor. – his voice was small, barely audible.

-I’m sorry? – you asked in hopes he wouldn’t say something that could make you blush. The natural light would make it impossible to cover.

-I admire you. As a professional, of course. – it was endearing how he made sure his words weren’t misunderstood. You just hated the fact that you were expecting something else. –And trust me, -he continued- I have been to a lot of doctors. You listen to me, like really listen. To this person right here, not the boy they wrote I am on that medical record. I never felt the need of showing the real one to anyone because nobody would understand. That is until I met you. I feel safer being with you for this past weeks than I ever felt with doctors that treated me for months.

You completely froze. His words gave you a million sensations all at once, making all of what you thought about your job go to waste. You were a professional, you should be glad that you were doing your job properly. But this? This was affecting you in a completely personal level. It was the pride of achievement, except, not labor related. It was the good feeling of having a special place in the mind of someone you were growing fond of.

Maybe it started slowly, or maybe there was this one moment when one of his sweet words penetrated your soul and made you see something you haven’t before with a patient. It was this hunger for more, this need of understanding that man and even a bit of anxiety to find reasons to de criminalize him. Maybe you were growing the same affection you did in every case, only seeing it more intensely for some reason. Or, in the worst case scenario, you were happy you made him happy. Because you wanted him to be happy.

Not only cured, but happy.

You thought about a million words to use but none of those would hide your fear. You knew that a single word could make you look guilty, for something you were yet to find out.

-It’s almost lunch time. I have to go fill some papers but I’ll see you later, yeah? – you stood up quickly, shaking any piece of grass out of you. -Can’t wait. – he showed you his smile, as sweet as everything else about Kim Mingyu.

It was a nurse’s birthday, which explained the buzz and laughter coming from the staff’s kitchen.

-Oh, hey doctor.

You turned around to see whose voice was calling you. It was dr. Byeon, one of the older doctors. He was a nice old man, but didn’t talk much. Usually, the older doctors would have the that superiority complex, always saying they knew better. DR. Byeon, however, had faith in the next generations. He tried to teach the younger ones subtly, not wanting any credit.

-Dr. Byeon. – you bowed and smiled at the old man. –How are you doing today, sir?

He chuckled a little, probably not used to others going for small talk. That was a heavy energy place, but you tried to make the people around you feel more at ease. He liked that.

-I am doing just fine. In case you didn’t notice, I have a piece of cake I’m about to eat. – he giggled, happily looking at the chocolate cake in the plate he was holding. –There are fancier ones from big bakeries, but this one here was made by our beloved Nana. - He was referring to one of the most admired workers of the place, a sweet and kind old lady that worked at the kitchen since 30 years ago.

-Oh, don’t mind if I do. I’m with you on this one, sir. Nothing can beat our Nana’s baking, right?

Dr. Byeon smiled at your words, and then back to his cake.

-Well, I must go find some cake before it’s all gone. – you told him and he nodded.

-You should, sweetheart. There are a lot of delicious food there. Go eat it, I can see your bones! – he joked dramatically.

-Oh really? So you have X-Ray vision, sir? –you asked and both of you laughed.

-Alright, I’ll take something and leave because I have work soon.

-Yes, yes. – dr. Byeon nodded.

-It was very nice seeing you, doctor! –you walked away but after a couple of steps, he called your name once again. When you looked back, he started speaking again.

-There is something different about you lately. – he said.

You tilted your head to the side, trying to remember if you had a haircut or something visible. Maybe you were more tired than usual and your eye bags weren’t at all forgiving.

-Me? How so? I don’t think I have done anything unusual, my last haircut has a while ago.

-No, no. It’s not that. You are… glowing, one could say?

Your expression was clearly a confused one, so he snapped you out of any worries.

-Don’t worry, it’s a good thing! If anything, you look happy. – he waved a little and left you first. You stood there for a second, with nothing much to think.

It has to be a good thing, right?

Mingyu’s POV

As he heard the sound of the main door to the dorms open, he started to get out of his bed where he just took an afternoon nap, or at least tried. He knew his session would be happening soon, so sleep was out of question.

Mingyu knew that the sound meant the guard was coming to take him to you, which left a bittersweet sensation inside of him. Part of him was excited, like a kid about to open Christmas presents, because he knew that he would enter the room and you would be there, waiting for him. Sometimes, you were doodling on the last page of your notebook and closed it very quickly when they showed up. But your eyes would always find his first. You would greet the guards as well, but you would always look at him first. The other part of him, however, couldn’t stand still. He knew that you would start talking about his past and actions, but he also knew the answers were needed.

The thing is: Mingyu felt like such a fool. You wanted to see him happy because that was your job, but he wanted to see you happy because your smile was the most endearing thing he ever laid eyes on. Maybe it was all in his head and your eyes didn’t light up with his presence, but if in some universe it was true, he would be risking losing it. Of course, you knew how many people he killed, but hearing in details, knowing their names and stories might as well make you disgusted, and just the thought of losing the shine of your smile made him sick.

Or maybe… It’ll explain it all.

The corridor to your office was long, but there were a lot of entertaining things to see. There were other offices from other doctors and also different utility rooms, such as the game room, where the elders would play cards and board games, or the daycare, where the children of the employers would stay occasionally. It was a little weird to have that in a place with constant transit of handcuffed people, but he didn’t read too much into it.

When he finally arrived the thick metal door, there was that annoying screech he grew to enjoy, since it meant his session would start. Except that day, it almost made his heart jump out of his ribcage.

There you were, radiant as always. If not more.

This time, unlike others, when the guard approached to cuff him to the table, you stopped him.

-It’s okay, we won’t need it today. – you nodded politely to the guard, who only responded with a look that said something like ’suit yourself’’.

Mingyu’s heart once again beat alarmingly fast. You trusted he wouldn’t try anything, which he knew was true, but knowing that you believed it gave him a comforting warmth he hadn’t felt in a while.

He smiled in a silent ‘’thank you’’.

-I know we saw each other earlier today but I’d like to ask officially. How are you today? – you started as soon as the guards left.

-Honestly? I’m pretty nervous. – Mingyu knew there was no reason to deny it any further, so he chose to be straight forward.

-Hmm, and why is that? – you wrote something on the notebook, and it was one of the first times he was actually curious to know what it was.

-Last time our session was interrupted in a very crucial moment for me. And for you, I believe.

Mingyu was noticeably showing the relieve of being free of the cuffs, by making gestures and occasionally biting his nails.

-It was, it was… -you agreed and continued. –But are you okay to continue? Actually, to start?

With a dry throat and no idea of the right answer, he nodded.

-Where should I start? Will you ask me a specific question? – Mingyu asked and you perked an eyebrow.

-I could but… is there anything in particular you think I should know? – you leaned your elbows on the table and cradled your face in both hands, like a plead for a nugget. –If you only had a few seconds and sentences to explain what happened, what would you say?

Mingyu thought for a second. Sure, he wanted to see you happy, he wanted you to like him, but he didn’t really know what would be better. The truth, in his head, was crystal clear. But in yours, it could be read differently, or you simply wouldn’t believe. After pondering his options, he decided to tell you the truth. If anyone could understand it, it had to be you.

-I would say that I am not sick, troubled or crazy. I was faced with a situation that was basically a test to my patience. There was no mastermind planning to kill people for fun. It was only a moment of weakness that I regret very, very much. It was a risky move. The thing about being diagnosed ‘’crazy’’ is that no matter what you say next, will only make it worse, specially saying you’re okay. Maybe the majority of your patients would tell you they are not mentally ill, but there was this deep hope inside of him that you knew it was the truth. Something in your eyes made him believe that you saw the real boy sitting in front of you and that you would feel the truth to his words.

And every single bit of his sentence was true, specially the part about there not being mastermind behind the crimes. At least not for murder. That day, Mingyu told you his perspective of the story and could only pray you believed him, or else he might as well stop believing himself.

His childhood was no different from kids with rich families with secrets. He walked in angry phone calls and arguments when playing around the mansion he lived in as a kid, but since he was so young, nobody ever tried to distract him.

His relationship with his father wasn’t anything out of the usual. He was pretty busy and since his mother was no longer alive, Mingyu only had half of the parental attention, but this isn’t unusual.

At the age of five, Mingyu was too young to understand what happened to his father. The scene he walked in was devastating, but he only felt it in is instincts, that his father wasn’t okay. It took him some explanation, as well as you can explain to a child, but of course, with many excuses and holes he would only notice years later. By then, there were people making sure the story he would be telling later wouldn’t be validated.

Mingyu knew you were waiting for a story on how he planned the death of all those men. But the truth was: it wasn’t at all planned.

Even though Jeonghan knew he was the favorite son, it wasn’t enough for him. He never really liked the fact that he would always be the bastard and that would never change. Mingyu liked to have an uncle so close to his age. He and Jeonghan always played together as kids, but once Mingyu lost his father, they became closer, having more of a sibling relationship than anything. The boys had their discoveries and growth together, sharing everything. As they grew older, some stuff became a lot clearer. There were pieces of the story that wouldn’t fit, but they were now old enough to contest it.

The first thing Mingyu discovered was the abuse his father suffered from his grandfather. Even though he too was dead, Mingyu couldn’t help but feel betrayed, since he admired his grandfather with all his heart.

As time went by, Mingyu discovered more and more dirt on the family and their employers. They needed to find out which one of the sides was true, and if any of their doings and lies were justifiable. So they planned, not a murder, but a confrontation.

Mingyu and Jeonghan made sure all of the involved were invited to the gathering on the mansion, so they could force the truth out of them. That night, they would lock everyone in and start trying to solve the whole mess the family was involved in.

Mingyu and Jeonghan planned everything carefully. There would be a gathering at the mansion with all of the people involved somehow on the family scandal hidden up until then. So they made fancy invitations and made sure everything would go according to plan. The workers would be dismissed for the night and the guests would only be released once they confessed. It wasn’t anything out of the law technically. Unethical, maybe.

The day came and everything was ready to start. However, a few hours before the event, there was something that changed the entire course of the plan. Without telling Mingyu, Jeonghan hired a private investigator whose discoveries had been kept to himself until he found out the whole truth. But the detective chose to reveal it all in the night they would rip the truth from their mouth. Mingyu knew his family wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t think things would go that far.

The one Mingyu knew the most was his uncle Seokmin, who was relatively present in his life. Maybe it was the guilt for knowing how much Mingyu’s father suffered, since he was abused as well, both physically and mentally. That night, Mingyu realized the damage his grandfather caused: unlike his dad, Seokmin did not let himself lose the will to live. Instead, he turned the pain into something bad. The only thing he lost was his ability to care, and that is how he became the monster his father was. All the mess began with him, once he planned to murder his father to have his fortune. Also, deep down, to get his revenge. The only thing is: his father was killed before he could do it himself.

But his uncle wasn’t alone, and wasn’t the only one getting profit from the death of the president Kim Taesang.

At that point, Mingyu still thought the death of his grandfather had been an accident. Even though Seokmin wasn’t the one who killed him, he still intended to do so, except he lost his opportunity.

Kwon Soonyoung wouldn’t miss anything related to crimes, especially the ones involving corruption. A while back, the rumors that a coup was being set against the bSK board started to spread, and the reporter Kwon, of course, was there. There were a lot of suspects and too much money involved, which is why it was surprising that all of the sudden, Kwon Soonyoung stopped investigating. Back then, it wasn’t given that much attention, but giving the amount of effort Soonyoung would put in similar cases, it was extremely out of the ordinary.

Xu Minghao was the vice-president, and that made him one of the first suspects when the corruption scandal blew up. After a while, he managed to prove he wasn’t involved. That, however, was the only thing he was innocent from. The reasons why Minghao reached his position were far from noble, including a mountain of lies, blackmailing and other dirty doings. He wasn’t planning on steal the company per say, but he was guilty for throwing the dirt on the president, the dirt he planned himself. His relationship with Seokmin was good, better than the one he had with the president Kim. It would be a lot easier to take him down later so he had to make sure Seokmin took the spot. Minghao was too intelligent to simply plan a way to get rid of the president, so instead, he manipulated others to do his dirty work. He made sure Seokmin got the signs, being encouraged to dethrone his father. How would Seokmin get rid of the president? That didn’t matter to Minghao.

There were no innocent victims that night, but the person least deserving of his faith was the secretary Chwe. Chwe Hansol was a young man, who wasn’t too ambitious. He didn’t aim too high, yet, he didn’t want to lose what he already had.

Even though he started working for bSK at a very young age, he owned the trust and respect from president Kim. Eventually, Hansol was aware of what was happening and the abuse he used to cause his own sons. Hansol was also aware of the unethical ways bSK would profit, but kept silent about everything. So his destiny was set not by what he did, but what he didn’t do.

The plan was to find out what they had done to later decide what they would do about it. Except they now knew the story and, in a few hours, the men in question would be knocking on the door.

In the course of the next 43 minutes, hell broke loose between Kim Mingyu and Yoon Jeonghan. And that’s when it all started to go wrong.

Mingyu was telling the story looking at any flat surface, as if he was trying to visualize his memories in front of him. The words just spilled out of his mouth like they have been trapped for years. He was completely vulnerable as he shared the events of the worst night of his life. Most of the time, he kept his hands on his lap, circling his thumbs one around the other, again and again, sometimes, alternating the order. He sounded disappointed at himself, but somehow relieved. He considered the possibility of never telling the truth, because no one would believe him, and also, because of the guilt of saying it out loud and confirming to himself and to the world that he became a monster for a moment. And that moment would remain forever.

-What did you plan on doing when they got there? – you tried to sound calm and use the same tone you would in any situation and any ordinary topic. You needed him to feel like no matter what he said, you would not stop helping him.

-At first, when we first got the idea, we would corner them and try to force the truth out of them. Up until earlier that day, that was the plan. But Jeonghan’s news catch me by surprise. He was working with a private investigator called Lee Jihoon. This investigator found out all of the crimes committed by the company and their employers and sent it to Jeonghan. – you could see Mingyu getting more anxious, like he was circling the topic to finally reach the climax.

-Okay. What was the new plan? – you tried to hide the slight hesitation in your voice, showing confidence in your questionnaire.

-You know what it was. – the sentence itself was intimidating, but as Mingyu voiced it, it sounded nothing but embarrassing. And then he continued.

The night of the crime

-We have to call it off. Now that we know all of that, what are we supposed to say? All of that was planned so we could confront them, Jeonghan. What now? Shouldn’t we just leave it to the cops? – Mingyu was begging for his uncle who was sitting with his elbows on the arms of the chair, the tip of the big envelope touching his lips.

Jeonghan scoffed. –You are too naïve. Don’t you see? These people are bad, they have money and influence. What do you have? What do we have? The bastard and the crazy boy. What a great team.

-Crazy boy. That’s what you think of me? – Mingyu didn’t mean to sound as disappointed as he did.

-No, not at all. At least not me. Look, the little fucker I hired, Jihoon, - Jeonghan opened a smaller envelope that was on the top of the table. – he got his hands on your medical record. Wanna see it? – Mingyu wasn’t pleased with Jeonghan’s snobby tone but took the envelope from his hands.

The words written on it would stick to him forever. No matter what Mingyu said he saw, nobody would believe him. He was said to have multiple disorders and a person with no capacity to live without constant supervision. He was labeled as insane by the family doctor.

The moment Mingyu mentioned the name of Jeon Wonwoo, you curled your fingers inside the pocket of your coat. You bit the inside of your cheek, trying desperately not to show emotions that were any different from the other names of the involved. It was a confusing feeling. A part of you thought, at first, that you would be secretly angry at Mingyu. At that point, you had no idea anymore. You were no longer afraid of it or him, but you were, to be honest, of your own feelings. Somehow and at some point it shifted all the way around. You wanted the closure to why Wonwoo was killed, but that moment, what you wanted the most was for Mingyu to give you a reason why he didn’t deserve to be there. You wanted not to be angry with Mingyu, but deep down you knew and it scared the shit out of you: no matter what he said, there was no way you wouldn’t be able to forgive him if I asked you once.

-I never understood why my family insisted on such a young doctor. When that guy was finishing med school, my family offered to help him pay his loans in exchange for him to work for them full time. The only answer to why is how easy it would be to manipulate him. The amount of money they would pay? He would do and say anything. Including invalidating me for the rest of the world. One word from him and pft. There goes my sanity. I could swear he needed to go through residency first before being able to diagnose me officially, but apparently there is a whole lot of shit that can’t be explained but can be bought.

You gulped as you listened. Mingyu was tired, was defeated. But he kept his chin up, continuing his story.

-But he wanted more. That’s when he formed some sort of alliance with my uncle and his attorney, Hong Jisoo, or Joshua, as he was known. The three of them had a plan, to poison my grandfather by using his simple sleeping medication mixed with another drug, making it lethal and easily looking like an accident. It would be pretty much undetected by exams, making it the perfect crime. But luckily for them, someone was faster. My grandfather died before they could kill him.

-How did your grandfather die, if I may ask?

-He was murdered. The amount of people wanting to kill you shall tell you the kind of person you are. That’s Kim Taesang for you.

-The prescriptions weren’t used. The drugs weren’t taken from the pharmacy. In fact, it wasn’t the same used to kill grandfather. They didn’t kill him, then who did? – Mingyu was still in shock about all the information, dizzy and blood pumping furiously on his chest.

-That means nothing. They could have changed their plan, change their method. I don’t care. And even if they didn’t kill him, they wanted to.

Mingyu wanted to believe Jeonghan had a point and he had the right to be angry, he really did. But it was too much information and so little time. They tried to place more than Mingyu could handle inside of him and there was no way it could end up well.

-Mingyu, you, me and my mother are the only people that could be called family. Now that my mother is gone, we only have each other. –Jeonghan was now hovering over Mingyu, who was sitting on the floor with his head on his hands. He was hyperventilating, crying and confused. –They are evil. They will keep doing those things if we don’t put a stop to it.

Mingyu raised his head and looked at Jeonghan with sad, red eyes.

-How do we stop them?

-That was one of the most frustrating things I ever felt. My uncle, my best friend. He was sitting there, trying to convince me that killing them was the right thing to do. And I was weak and agreed with him. No one would believe us. So we needed to do it fast.

You had too many questions you couldn’t ask, so you just let him keep talking.

-We would give them the same poison uncle Seokmin, dr. Wonwoo and Joshua would use on my grandfather. Only we would also take it, but a smaller dose, enough to put us to sleep for a few hours until the workers came back. We would give one of them an intermediate dose, so maybe he would survive and make the thing less suspicious, or so he would die in the hospital. It would be the secretary Hansol, probably. All of the confrontation went out the window. Instead, we just needed to make them thirsty.

-Thirsty? – you voiced and raised your eyebrow.

-Well, we put the drug on the water, so we needed all of them to drink willingly, in case there were survivors for some reason. We turned down the humidifier to make it extra dry inside and served spicy food.

-Oh, I see. But something went wrong, I suppose? I mean, your uncle Jeonghan died as well. Did you choose to kill him too? – there was a chance all of that story was bullshit and Mingyu killed them all after planning alone, trying to blame Jeonghan instead. But why would he only tell you in confidence? To manipulate you?

You needed more answers, so you waited.

-It wasn’t planned at all. I was nervous and scared and almost giving up. But they came in and I couldn’t back up anymore. If I told them the truth that moment, I would be locked up for good. So, guess who was there?

You shook your head ‘no’, waiting for him to say it.

-Lee Jihoon. – Mingyu sounded disappointed with himself, rubbing the bridge of his nose. – That moment I realized Jeonghan already planned that before. He cornered me to agree with his plan because he needed help, and he gave me no time to tell anyone, that’s why he waited until only hours before the guests came. The investigator knew the whole story and he also knew Jeonghan was the one who hired him. When the news of their deaths showed up eventually, Jihoon would put two and two together. That was clear now. Jeonghan had planned that. – So I was ready to confront him when I overheard his conversation with Xu Minghao. He voiced clearly how much he despised my grandfather for lying about funding the payment for his mother medical treatment. He purposefully neglected her and it got her killed. The anger in his eyes got me thinking and I was almost sure Jeonghan was the one who killed my grandfather.

Mingyu took a deep breath and you knew he was about to tell you the crucial part of the story.

-I was a wreck, I had no idea how to fix that. If told everyone, I’m pretty sure Jeonghan would also make me look crazy. And then… then I saw it. Jeonghan was putting the mixture on my drink. Not the sleeping pills like he said he would. He couldn’t have any loose ends so he chose to kill me too. – a single tear slid down his cheek, followed by many others. His next sentence was messy and interrupted by hiccups as he started sobbing. –He was the only person I had, you know? And to see him trying to poison me, I mean… How could he do that? – he sniffed and rubbed his eyes like a child trying to stop crying. – At that moment I saw red. I completely blacked out from reality and I realized I had nothing left. So I changed our cups when he wasn’t looking and I watched him swallow his own venom.

You did the one thing you know you shouldn’t. Instead of handing him a tissue, you stood up and cradled him in your arms. He turned around instantly and wrapped his hands around you, burring his head on your chest. Why the fuck would I do that?

Seeing the state Mingyu was in opened a hole on the floor under your feet and you felt like your heart could burst at any second. To see the pain on that boy messed with your insides, making you throw your values out the barred window.

You kneeled on the floor next to him and dried a random tear falling from his eyes. You wanted to dry them all.

-I didn’t take my drink. – he said in a small voice.

You stood up and got back on your seat.

-I’m sorry?

-I didn’t do what Jeonghan planned. You know, to take a sleeping pill and pretend I was a survivor. – he looked deep inside your eyes. - Doctor, where would I go from there? I had no family. I had nothing and I knew nothing about life. I had no idea of what to do with my life and I knew I would never be able to forgive myself. I didn’t want the fortune, the presidency or whatever. I didn’t want to be alone and I lost the little I had. It was the wise choice to tell the truth. Well, most of it. So I hid some valuable objects in case I needed some money eventually and then I called the cops. It was awful. They treated me like an animal who didn’t understand human language. I didn’t bother telling anyone all of it and I expect you to keep it between us. No one will ever believe me, doctor, not even you I’m afraid. But I would never sleep properly again unless I trusted someone with this. So, thank you. I will lay me head on my pillow tonight and it will much, much lighter.

You heard him. You respected his secret and kept it with yourself. However, you didn’t promise him you would sit and wait. It was no longer about admiring him in a different way. Or maybe it was, maybe you were completely unprofessional and let yourself be manipulated, but either way, you made a decision not to stop until the world saw the Mingyu you saw.

It was a hard, a lot harder than you would ever think. It took three months for the board to keep track of Mingyu’s progress and your statements to finally get his case another trial. You had the help from an old time friend who was a lawyer, who walked you through the whole process. First, you stopped your sessions, putting Mingyu in a group therapy. You still talked on the garden where you would watch the humming birds. You tried not to tell him too much so he wouldn’t get his hopes up.

After four more months, his case was finally solved. Mingyu managed to open up to other doctors, realizing that yes, people might not believe you, but that shouldn’t keep you from telling the truth. He was being heard by other people, not only you, but that didn’t change the fact that it was you the one to wake that inside of him, the feeling that there was something for him out there, and that’s what he kept in mind as he walked away, finally free.

here comes the romantic ending, it’s completely optional though ♡

It was a lovely night, that one. It was only a few days after Mingyu’s discharge and you were over the moon. You knew you saved people from their own demons, but the feeling of bringing justice to Kim Mingyu was like nothing you ever felt before.

You could feel the night breeze coming from the windows and shaking the curtains, and watched as your cat played with a little plushy he was obsessed with. You were on your way to the bathroom to shower when someone knocked on your door.

Standing there, wearing a fluffy beige knit sweater was Mingyu. His smile was different, wider and more alive. Seeing him without the white uniform from the hospital was something else and you couldn’t keep your eyes off of him.

-You look amazing. – the words slipped out of your lips before you realized.

-Thank you. – he gave you a cheeky, boyish smile. –I feel amazing. Although, there is something bothering me. I never got to say thank you.

-You don’t have to. I wish the world could apologize to you, though.

-Yah, stop saying nonsense. You have done more for me than the world. Just a little bit over a month you saw me and you trusted me. You listened to me in a human way, not only as a doctor. I used to believe that every day, but I tried to keep it real to myself. You were doing your job but… a part of me had hopes that you were seeing me. Me, not your patient. I would never cross that line before but I have to ask you.

-Ask me what? – your words were shaky, like the rest of your body. You were getting dizzy in the best way. It was like a childish, innocent feeling.

-Did you see me, for a moment, as anything other than a patient?

His eyes were wide, like his life depended on your answer.

-No, not for a moment. – his eyes fell to the floor, but before he could get too embarrassed, you continued, not realizing how bad the timing for the pause was. –Not one moment, but all of them.

That night, you shared your first kiss. In the moment his lips touched yours, you believe heaven has sent that man to you. You would never know if it was worth the trouble it could get you, the issues you would face and the way the world would look at it, at him, at you. All you knew was that Kim Mingyu had been mistreated by the world. He made a mistake, a big one that would never go away. He would still pay for it for a long time, but at that moment, the only thing he knew was that right there, by your side, he was finally feeling his place on the world, like he might actually deserve a chance to be happy.

-Won’t you lose your job because of me? – he asked, later that night.

-No. I mean, I’m not sure but… let’s not think about it now, okay?

-Okay. – he blinked a couple of times before closing his eyes and dozing off.

You asked for your vacation. You had three weeks and decided to do something different. By then, no one really knew about you and Mingyu going out. Even though you were early in the relationship, getting to know each other better, you were bonding more and more. It all happened fast, but you were not afraid, not even one bit. You came to learn that Mingyu wasn’t just a lost boy. He was an intelligent man who struggled a lot with his feelings, mostly because he didn’t feel like he was entitled to have a say on stuff.

You decided to go to the countryside with him. So both of you packed and drove all the way to the lodge you had been told about by a friend. It was in a smaller town, but still had a fair amount of buildings and stores, making it a very pleasing place to go around. The place you would be staying was a hostel owned by a couple in their 60’s. There were a few wooden cabins, two floor each with a smaller space on the top floor. The insides were cozy and warm, like the whole atmosphere of the moment. The wooden chair near the balcony on the top floor had a beautiful view to the lake nearby, with a stunning sunset.

-I could live here forever. –you said as you were about to fall asleep, your head buried on the crook of his neck, both of you under a blanket.

-Tell me about it. I don’t think I’m a city boy. This, right here, is heaven.

You had been staying there for a week and a half and you were pretty sure you weren’t leaving. You didn’t really have anything other than your job keeping you in the city, and you never felt more at ease than you had been in that small city.

You woke up and Mingyu was no longer in bed. Confused, you got out of the bed and went to the balcony. You were welcomed with the sight of the owner of the place showing Mingyu how to ride a tractor. He was laughing, happy. It was a genuine image, so special it almost rid of your head completely the image of the lonely boy in a prison uniform. That guy was still there, but he was blooming and that made your heart skip a beat.

You repeated to yourself silently.

I could live here forever.

2 YEARS LATER

Mingyu was still visiting doctors, going to therapy and being supervised by the local social workers. When he was done, he rushed to the construction utilities store he worked part time and rushed home to start his shift at the hostel. Mr. Jung, the owner, was very fond of Mingyu. The moment you and him both showed interest in moving to the city, he offered to help, showing everything around and offering Mingyu a job as a handyman in exchange for a place on a small cabin used by the eventual keepers, which he no longer needed. You moved after you found a job at the local hospital working with children in early stages of mental illness, wanting to prevent more kids from having their childhood traumas haunt them in the future.

Eventually, he found out about your relationship with Jeon Wonwoo. It wasn’t easy, it took a few days for him to process it all. Some part of him felt like you would wake up one day and realize you could never forgive him, but you made sure to remind him every day that you loved him with all your heart and that would never change.

It was already getting dark, but you probably were home already. Mingyu came home from the store and walked towards the little house he was now living. There were no maids, no luxury, nothing fancy. But there you were, playing with your cat and the now grown puppy you found abandoned in the road almost a year ago, sitting on the floor, legs crossed and the small dog jumping, trying to catch a toy in your hand. The way you would always run to him when you saw him coming home was enough to make Mingyu tear up. He felt all of the love he never got in his life in a single look, a single kiss, a single smile. He was happy, completely, entirely happy.

He knew he had done something bad. Still, Mingyu couldn’t help but wonder what amazing thing he could have possibly done to deserve to feel all of that love. It was dark once, but the clouds eventually disappeared and the sky was finally clear again. The blood moon was gone, but unlike the celestial event, it wouldn’t come back anytime soon.

a/n: that’s it! It’s a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Well, I kind of went through a dr. harleen quinzel vibe of ‘’she thought she was curing him but she was falling in love’’ in this, except mingyu is a good boy. I am very, VERY nervous to post but what the heck, let’s do this :D

48 notes · View notes

tanoraqui · 5 years

Note

*chinhands* so tell me about guinevere being gay and doing crimes in space

There are three rules that an e-space* Navigator lives by:

Know who you are

Know where you’re going

Know where home is (just in case)

*“espace”, more often; hyphens don’t survive casual parlance; it’s short for “extra-space” because scientists aren’t always good at naming things. just thank god for the one physicist who raised an early objection to “subspace”, even though in early models of layered reality, what came to be known as “espace” was, indeed, below our space.)

The third is easiest, because it’s drilled into every recruit from the second they’re brought to the Lighthouse - which is usually at an age so young they’ll forget having lived anywhere else before. There might be an official name for the headquarters of the Navigators’ Guild on paperwork somewhere, but inside the space station’s halls and outside it, on every ship and planet and empty space between stars in the galaxy, it’s the Lighthouse. There’s a general understanding of why: it’s where navigators call home, where they can look to for aid and succor when the seas turn rough, in this space and the other.

Most people don’t understand, though. Because most people are not navigators: they have never stayed awake while every other mind in the ship was sent very carefully and very deeply into sleep, while the ship passed across a crackling boundary between this reality and another. They have never held themselves together in a world where up was not quite down because neither of those terms applied, where colors were tastes were neither, where time and space were both only suggestions, and the map is a matter of focus in your mind.

You are lost as the default, in espace. Or, “lost” isn’t a term that applies, because all reference points are only in your mind, and if you don’t have your destination absolutely clear, you will be lost in the metaphorical sense as well as not quite the literal. So the politer, more bureaucratic line is that navigators (orphans, usually) are taken in so that their training can begin as early as possible, the truest truth is that it is so that when they begin their training, they will have somewhere to come back to. (Their very secretive training; it’s not, allegedly, sink or swim, but the Guild protects the secret of how it trains its navigators more closely than it guards anything.) So that no matter what, if they lose track of their destination - too unfamiliar, or even unwanted - they can always remember the Lighthouse. The bunkbeds and warm corridors of the dormitories; the creatively placed asteroid ring, more for agility practice in dart-fliers than anything else; the iconic long body of the station itself, modeled half-seriously after a lighthouse of old (symbols can matter in espace), floating amidst darkness and a starry background, the nearest planet several standard-orbits away for the sake of autonomy…the navigator’s last and truest port in a storm.

The earlier a young navigator-to-be can fix that in their heart, so surely that they’ll know the exact moment its closest, to fire the engines to make the jump back, the more likely they are to, indeed, return home.

The second has been touched on! Navigation in espace is a matter of focus and knowledge, intuition, sense of the shape of a world without shape and essence of a world - or rather, a very specific part of a world - in which its rarely manifest. Many navigators dabble in art of some kind - painting, sculpture, crochet, poetry - because it helps them capture what cannot otherwise be captured. Or maybe so much time in espace means they can’t help but see this world differently as well, and need an outlet…opinions differ. Among navigators. Person to person, you know?

Anyway, because of this quirk of interstellar travel, most planets have, gloriously from a worldbuilding perspectively, entirely in-canon motivation to have highly specific unique traits. The easier a planet or station is to remember, itself and only itself, the less likely ships are to be lost on the way to it. So there’s a planet in Alpha Centauri renowned for its deserts, and its annual global competition, bringing thousands of would-be bakers, confectioners, and more each year. There’s a space station circling Rigel where every citizen proudly gets a new tattoo each year, and so does the station itself, vast stenciled artworks commissioned by the ruling council and drawn by artists in space suits. There’s old Red Mars itself, now more a tourist trap than anything but still just as proudly rust-colored, the closest any interstellar ship is allowed to the nature reserve of Earth.

So, know where you’re going, because going back to the Lighthouse gets you safe, but it doesn’t get you paid. The Guild cares for its navigators, it really truly does…on average. But there are bureaucrats and business managers in there, too, and they know they’re sitting on the galaxy’s most valuable monopoly.

And first: know who you are. Nothing in espace is real the way it is in standard space, including the self. Don’t worry about the crew or the passengers, or even the materiality of the ship itself - the ship AI will keep track of them, as well as of time as it should be passing. Nothing determinedly holds to numerical time like a digital mind. They’ll keep track of the navigator’s physicality as well - that’s what the biotagging chip is for. But most navigators do some sort of dance, martial art, or other exercise as well, to give themselves a better sense of, well, themselves - it’s always good to have a backup. Any passengers and crew are so unconscious that they may as well be inanimate, which is why an AI can keep track of them jus fine - the navigator, of course, is awake for the whole voyage.

So, the woman who in another life might be named Guinevere…

Her first name is Djinn, because a lot of navigator orphans are named after mythical creatures or heroes, from one culture or another, that can fly. A lot others are named after mythical heroes or creatures known for sight. The people in charge of children at the Lighthouse are a bunch of nerds, really, or they were once, and tradition stuck.

Her last name is probably Navigator, because being named after your profession is as old as civilization, and there are fewer things its easy to be proud of than being an official Guild-licensed navigator. You get to choose a surname when you get your license, and like many before her, Djinn chose that.

Once a navigator has their license, they’re more or less loosed unto the galaxy, if they want to be. You’re welcome to work as an independent contractor, so long as you still pay your percentage back to the guild of every navigating fee, and don’t undercharge the Guild minimum.

Djinn elected not to do that, actually. She wanted to travel, of course, to fly, to spend as much time as possible in hte giddy twistedness of espace. But she didn’t want to manage her own business, and she didn’t mind the Guild taking a little higher percentage to have jobs lined up for her. And she was good, oh, she was good, so it wasn’t long before she was flying precious cargos and even passenger ships - small ones, to start, and not particularly pricey (not used by the affluent, that is, who would pay more for a more experienced navigator, with more successful trips under their belt). But still, a very promising career, and she was comfortable.

She always has a sketchbook, luxurious paper so she can save or destroy the drawings as she wants, rather than wipe them clean from a laminate. Physical rather than digital, because she’s drawing this world, she says, so it has to have real mass - but she almost only ever uses pale colors. Bright things, she saves for paint, when she has time and space and money for an easel, and that art is twisting and bright and incomprehensible to everyone but a fellow navigator - and even then, most understand what she means, but now how she’s representing it. No one really experiences espace the same way.

She’s short of stature and of hair, skin probably #C26604-ish? and walks with a dreaminess in her eyes and the confidence of someone who knows she’s weird - as most navigators do. Also, definitely practices some science fiction equivalent of judo. Has slightly more energy than she needs at any given moment, and when she decides to move fast, will do so. Physically, emotionally, and in terms of decision-making - will put off decisions if they’re unpleasant, but will make them quickly if they’re not, and commit 100%. Stubborn or determined, however you want to phrase it; holds grudges…but if pushed to reconsider something, will do so, and will willingly change her mind. Often in the 100% opposite direction from before.

(It’s hazardous to go into espace unsure of what you want in life.)

Also, she’s not actually a licensed navigator anymore, by Guild rule. See, I said she was good, right? Really good? So, most navigators have a seat on the bridge - they don’t really need to be there, but it feels right - and that’s where they stay for the duration of the espace journey. Easier to focus if you don’t need to move, don’t need to think about anything but where to go and when (”when” maintained by the ship’s clocks) exactly to make the jump back to get there. There are probably IV tubes and catheters and everything, because it can be a several subjective hours sometimes, and better safe than sorry.

But Djinn was good, oh, she was really good, and she didn’t need that stuff. She didn’t want that stuff. Always a little more energy than necessary for the moment, remember? So her knee jiggled, and that was fine. She stood and stretched, and that was fine. She paced the bridge, alone save for the AI, and thought about the swirling patterns on the outer skin of that one station, or the best donut she’d ever tasted on that one planet (she always wanted to be more of a sweet tooth than she actually was.)

None of this was per regulation, but it was the sort of thing that got comfortably ignored by the Guild, if you admitted it - and you were encouraged to, for your own safety as a navigator and that of your ship, and in the interest of more data gained about espace travel. And then not reported on to whoever’d chartered the navigator, so long as the nav was back in their seat by the end and got the ship to its destination just fine, because what the layperson didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

But, well…

It doesn’t get much harder to hold yourself and everything under your care together as they are the longer you’re in espace - additionally, but not multiplicatively, much less exponentially. Time and space still function in a way, so trips between this planet and that are known to have a certain average amount of time, but it’s flexible. If a navigator can confidently know themselves through, and the ship AI has a confident grasp on everything else, there’s no reason she shouldn’t pause in her destination-seeking, or at least not focus quite so hard, and just…wander the ship for a while. See the sights (that aren’t quite, here.) Enjoy the upsideways-tasting sensations.

So, Djinn met an AI with whom she really got along, did a couple trips in a row on that ship specifically, and then talked them into covering for her while she stole stuff from the passengers. More for fun than anything, honestly. But she got…well, she got caught, mostly, more than she got anything particularly valuable (probably?). (She got away with it like a dozen times, first, though.) And stealing from passengers while traveling through espace, while nearly unprecedented, is illegal by the laws of every place of origin she flew from…which is what applies on-ship until the destination is reached, by interstellar law.

More importantly, it was against Guild rules. They claimed precedent, because the Navigators’ Guild looks after its own, so Djinn wasn’t imprisoned anywhere. But her license was revoked for 7 years.

We meet her sometime in year 4, maybe 5 of that probably, I think on the equivalent of Jackson’s Whole.

#uhhhh #my fic #original fic #science fiction #arthurian legend #astria et al #hermionehair goylebrain

23 notes · View notes

dragimalsdaydreams · 5 years

Photo

man, I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a legitimate ponysona... before this, I could never figure out what class of pony I wanted to be-- and even more frustratingly, if I even wanted to be a *pony* in the first place. I eventually just cut my losses and bound myself to specifically a ponysona or else I’d still be going around in circles still (changeling? deer? kirin??), and I finally figured out an interesting approach to my ‘sona’s class that I think rly fits me

anyways, her info under the cut

Name:

Willowsprout. most folks just call her Willow, though her parents call her Sprout/Sproutling

Class:

most folks assume Willow’s a full-blood unicorn due to her more obvious physical traits. legally she’s an earth pony, since newborn unicorns (in my lore) don’t grow a horn til a few weeks after birth, so her non-unicorn parents just assumed she was full-blood earth and registered her as such. in reality, she’s a bicorn (a concept I describe in more detail here), with most of her magical ability influenced by her earth pony side, and most of her physique influenced by her unicorn side.

Parents:

I usually don’t care to think up parentage for my personal ‘sonas b/c history/family doesn’t matter to me so much as their current/individual state, but this time I might?

see, I’ve always joked that my personality is basically the love-child of Fluttershy (talent with and compassion for all creatures, social anxiety) and Treehugger (hippie aesthetic, mellow vibes, talent with plants), so it makes sense that I’d make them my ‘sona’s parents. BUT a unicorn/earth pony bicorn is p unlikely to result from pegasus/earth pony parentage. not to mention Willow’s white/green palette compared to their respective yellow/pink and green/red...

even so, I still like the idea of them being Willow’s parents, so IF I were to go with them, I’d make Willow an unplanned pregnancy from a fling b/t the two. I like to imagine Discord/Fluttershy/Treehugger in a loose poly “angle”, where Discord/Fluttershy are a solid romantic pair, while Fluttershy/Treehugger sort of vacillate b/t close friends and partners. Discord, despite his tendency towards jealousy, has come to affectionately tolerate(?) Treehugger, and is happy that his wife is happy with the both of them. Willow, however, was born a bit before Discord/Fluttershy became an official couple, and it threw their relationship into a bit of a spiral until Fluttershy, Discord, and Treehugger all finally sat down and worked out their feelings and relationships. since then, Willow has been raised with all three acting as her parents

now if I were to instead just make up parents for Willow, then I’d make them both earth ponies. I like the idea of Willow being entrenched in earth pony culture w/ very little unicorn cultural influence. I especially like the idea of at least one parent (if not both of them) being a farmer of some sort

Special Talent:

while Willow can do magic-based dexterous tasks and pick up reasonably-sized objects with the grace and precision of any full-blood unicorn, she has 0% aptitude for any kind of active spell-casting. even the most simple of spells that a unicorn foal could produce are simply impossible for her. Willow’s true power lies in her earth pony side, with complex, intimate connections to the earth. despite the weakness of her spell-casting, Willow has found a unique way to combine the overt magical influence of unicorn magic with the more subtle influence of earth pony magic

with this combination, Willow can connect to and sense the physical/psychological states of individual organisms and broader ecosystems around her. this can be used identify and help heal ailments, soothe troubled minds, abstractly communicate with other organisms, and even navigate new environments. the Special Talent that Willow typically uses this broad-scope ability for is monitoring broad ecological systems and restoring these systems to balance

one interesting trick of Willow’s Talent allows her to meld seamlessly with the environment around her as a sort of “camouflage”. this doesn’t change anything about her physically, but rather slightly alters the perceptions of those around her so that she simply doesn’t register under any senses. this allows her to quietly observe the environment around her without actively disturbing it. of course if someone knows Willow should be somewhere near them, they can break this passive magic fairly easily, but most creatures aren’t expecting a quiet pony observer, so it’s still a great boon to an ecologist such as herself

despite the control she can exert with her talent, Willow never had much of a taste for the strict monitoring of pony-controlled ecosystems like those around Ponyville. she thinks it best to leave a system to its own devices unless absolutely necessary. thus, Willow’s taken to casually traveling the land, documenting flora and fauna, and stopping to help any systems that need to rebalance

these travels have brought her into contact with several other species, and given her a broader perspective on pony relations with the land and other creatures. she’d never been able to put a hoof on exactly what bothered her about pony-controlled systems, but she’s since learned what it means to live in and among systems, rather than ruling and subduing systems as ponies tend towards. she’s now an active supporter of non-pony sovereignty and land rights, and always works directly with locals whenever she finds an ecosystem in need

Cutie Mark:

Willow’s mark is a stylized aspen tree forest hanging down into the shape of an aspen leaf, representing the concurrently individual and collective nature of nature

(yes, I know her name is Willow, but willows are close relatives of aspens, and “willow’ flows better for her name..)

Personality:

Willow is generally laid back and accommodating, taking situations as they arise with the patience of a rolling wave. she used to be rather timid in her youth, but has mellowed out a bit in her adult years. her social anxiety is definitely still there, but it’s far more manageable now. while Willow is polite when confronted, she’s still not an especially sociable pony, even without the immediate threat of anxiety

Willow tends to shut down in crowded, loud, high-stress environments/situations (this issue is compounded in areas without much plant life, like cities). a thousand-yard stare and one-word responses are clear signs she probably needs a breather with fresh air and a potted plant or two

while Willow’s “camouflage” magic is certainly an active choice at crowded social events, she’s prone to unconsciously pulling the shroud around herself as she simply goes about her life. she prefers to quietly observe the world around her even when she’s not working, and the shroud helps her pass through the day undisturbed. this often leads to spooks when she unintentionally creeps up on a friend to say hello

despite not being very talkative with other creatures, Willow’s prone to idle chatter with plants, and even sings to them on occasion. this likely doesn’t help them grow, but she at least enjoys it

while Willow certainly has strong opinions on social issues-- especially those intersecting with her work with nature and other creatures-- she’s more likely to quietly observe and catalog the opinions of others and act accordingly, rather than state her opinion outright. she’s just not one for outright conflict

Hobbies:

beyond her work with all things natural, Willow loves visual art-- especially drawing and various crafts like sewing, knitting, and found-object sculpture. she loves to collect any interesting rocks, dried plants, and various animal bones she finds out in the field, which she sends back home to later arrange into elaborate displays. her drawing skills are highly refined, and she’s a well-known name among zoological/botanical illustrators. she often takes commissions from fellow researchers who need visual aids for their own work, completing them while trekking around the world

Willow’s interests slant towards the macabre in some respects, which sometimes shocks strangers who judge her to be too meek to enjoy such subjects. usually this interest is academic, such as dissecting a corpse for study/reference, or exploring abandoned areas for curiosities. though she won’t deny that she enjoys the fear-driven thrill of a good spooky tale~ Willow’s humor also tends towards the dark and self-deprecating, especially in the company of close friends

Willow loves a good book-- when she’s not out in the field, she’s most content to curl up in bed with a biology journal, fantasy book, or supernatural/horror novel. she dabbles in writing, but mostly in the form of field journals and poetry

Physicality:

Willow takes strongly after her unicorn side in this respect, with very little built-in strength or stamina to speak of. her work serves to fortify these physical aspects of course, but any time she takes an extended break, she’s right back to square one

Willow’s one physical reminder of her earth side is her small hoof-nails, whose color often blends into the color of the surrounding hoof anyways

Willow is rather short and slight compared to most ponies. while unicorns aren’t the tallest of classes, they usually aren’t the shortest either, so her size is a bit odd to see in a so-called unicorn lineup. her height may be influenced by her earth side since earth pony sizes can vary a lot, but it could just be a simple genetic fluke in this case

#mlp #My Little Pony #my little pony friendship is magic #MLP:FiM #ponysona #anyways anyone who knows me know this is just my dragonsona as a pony I'm sorry I'm so predictable asdfgh #willowsprout

12 notes · View notes

thevortexofourminds · 7 years

Text

And one more time...

Art, photography, journalism, and objectivity

Tiernan @tiernanogphoto / @tiernanogmuse kindly allowed me to “take his post (here) apart” ;) And that is what I will try to do. Because - with all due respect (I love you, T! I really do. And I hope you know that) - I don’t really see the point you were trying to make other than to (in parts) just disagree ;P

In his “rant” Tiernan raised the question of “when you shoot photos, are you trying to capture ‘reality’ as it is, or are you trying to make art?”, and mentioned that “photographers are divided”, and that “these approaches can lead to very different results.”

Agreed. Different results. The thing though is: You cannot capture reality. That is not possible. Not in photography. Not in movies. Not in books. Not at all. Even just trying to capture reality is absolutely pointless because you will inevitably fail. Simply because it is not possible. You will certainly create something else. And it might be wonderful. But what you will do is not to re-create reality. And I am not even talking about how subjective “reality” is. Reality happens in your head. And in mine. In every person’s. So there is no _one_ reality. There are as many realities as there are people on this planet. And that is not some philosophical “Hippie bogus”, that is science. The world is multi-dimensional. Photos are two dimensional. That alone makes it impossible to “capture reality”. And even if we use 3D techniques there is still the smell, the sounds, your mood that day… whatever… so many factors.. that are missing in the photo. Ansel Adams once said:

“You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

And the same is true when looking at a photo. What’s IN your head will not shape, no, it will CREATE reality - your reality. What you see in a photo is your reality. Not the one of the person who made it.

So, yes, please everyone who wants to, try to capture reality. Go ahead, I won’t stop you. And I am sure that you will create something amazing. But it’s not reality. Like… if you do photorealistic painting… Some people call it art. Others call it “just technique”. And sure, everyone can learn to paint photo-realistically. But “creating reality” is not the point of photorealism. This goes much deeper. Claiming that these people are not artists clearly shows that there is not the slightest bit of understanding for art. Just as if you claim that ONLY photorealistic painting is real art. Both claims are blatantly stupid.

The way we perceive the world - even if we “just” talk about perceiving the world with our eyes - is largely different to how a camera “sees”. The camera captures one specific timeframe - a “moment” if you will - which can be a fraction of a second or even many seconds. Maybe minutes, hours, or even days. But the result is one static picture. It might simulate motion, but in an abstract way. Our eyes and brain _continually_ perceive the world. There is not one moment. There is a constant flow. And if we close our eyes, what we saw is gone. Left is only a memory. And that memory changes over time. That is also science.

Tiernan wrote “Good artists, I feel, seek to enrich the quality of life.”

I disagree. Heavily. That is one way _some_ artists see their art or themselves. Whether these are good artists? That is certainly a question of the audience. I highly doubt that artists like van Gogh, Picasso, Magritte, Miró, etc. tried to enrich the quality of life. It might be that this was _one_ of their goals, and certainly, they fulfilled their own need to create and so … yes… it probably enriched their own quality of life, but no, I highly doubt that enriching the quality of life is what was they sought for.

Sure, if you only focus on art that is “mostly entertainment”… and focus on these artists… then yes, that might be their “mission”. But I know tons of artists (even personally), who don’t give a flying fuck whether they enrich the quality of life. Their “missions” are as numerous as their number. What they have in common is their _need_ to create and communicate their own “vision”.

Quite frankly, I am surprised, T! I am really surprised that you basically use the same argument my mom used to make: “This is not beautiful, so how is that (good) art?”

I also think that this is a VERY dangerous approach. Art was never - never ever - not political. Even during times when politics wasn’t even “invented” yet and it was called religion. There was always art. Paintings, sculptures, music. Art always had a function. This “L’art pour l’art” bogus is a very new thing in art history. Sure, the emphasis of the function of art shifted over the millenia, centuries, decades. And yes, at this time, there is a big emphasis on entertainment. But no, that is not what art - in general - is about.

Art is the first invention humans made. And it is one of the few things we are different from animals. Art and conscience (probably. Scientists are still divided on that subject). Art is the underlying tissue of humanity. Art is what everything else is built upon. NOTHING we have is not connected to at least one art form. Even if people have nothing else, what they have is the need to express themselves. In stories, songs, pictures, dance, … Art was there before anything else was. And the first artform was storytelling. Journalism is old, yes, but not as old as art. And journalism uses “art techniques”.

Tiernan wrote “Both [art and journalism] are important, but I think journalism more so; It can mean the difference between life and death, how often is that true of art?

Is literature art to you? There is one book that led to the deaths of millions and millions and millions of people. Granted, the deaths of these people was caused by the misunderstanding that this book is journalism and not art ;)

Sass aside: Why did and do books get banned or burned? Why did and do artists (of all sorts) have to flee their countries? Because it’s “just fiction”? Or because what they and their books, movies, pictures, whatever… caused was/is dangerous to certain regimes? Was/is that not a matter of life and death?

I agree with that art might not have this - as you call it - immediate impact on life and death of many people. Fact is: Without art, I wouldn’t be here today sitting and typing this. Because I would have certainly killed myself. But sure, I am not many people. ^^ But just because there is no _immediate_ impact of art, claiming that journalism is more important… I am sorry to say it so harshly, but that is completely bogus. Art always changed the world. Art was always used to change the world. In the good and the bad. Art always taught people how to survive. Granted, in an entertaining way. Often through stories. How do stories work? I’ll give you a comparison: Why does cough syrup come raspberry flavored? Because it is incredibly stupid to assume we’d drink it just because it’s good for us.

Saying that journalism is more important than art because journalism has a more immediate impact is like saying: “Chest compression is more important than having frequent meals”. You’re comparing apples to oranges. No… wait… apples to the moon. Both kinda round'ish, but that was it. Completely different things. If anything then art influenced journalism. How to write/present something effectively: Art techniques. Cough syrup.

Once more about objectivity:

Where should I start? First of all: You heavily contradict yourself. You wrote: “anyone who says there is no such thing as objectivity does not understand the concept”. And then you continue with: “Think of the buildup to the Iraq war. Instead of seeing investigative journalists, striving to be more objective (since complete objectivity is impossible), (…)”

So… what is it? Is there objectivity or not? You write that anyone who says there is no objectivity doesn’t understand the concept but then claim that objectivity is impossible.

I do fully agree that journalists need to strive for more objectivity. And they need to always have in mind that they automatically are biased and act accordingly. But that is it. There IS no objectivity. There CANNOT be complete objectivity. Complete objectivity would be presenting ALL the (necessary) facts without any kind of interpretation. And interpretation is ALWAYS subjective. Interpretation cannot be objective. Not possible. More objective? Sure. Completely objective? Nope. And even just the selection process of which facts to present is subjective. What does the person who selects deem to be necessary? And presenting the facts alone is not journalism. Facts are just facts. And without interpretation useless. A journalist’s job is it to collect and interpret facts. Journalism is informing people and shaping opinions. And that is never, that can never be completely objective.

Tiernan wrote “Yet while art rarely reaches that level of immediate importance, it can illuminate deeper truths, those only be covered at a surface level by even the best of journalists.”

Fully agreed. During my literary studies, I did some classes on fairy tales, on “Death in fiction” etc… Metaphysics par excellence. ^^ I certainly won’t go down this rabbit hole here, but there are some amazing books about the “inner workings” of myths, about the deeper truths, about how these works of art cover our human self, describe our human development, etc.

C.G. Jung took many of these ideas and created his own theories about the collective unconscious with its Archetypes etc. While there is certainly a lot of disagreement in the science world about Jung’s theories, it is nevertheless fascinating.

The same story patterns are everywhere. All around the world. In every culture. Music is everywhere, it influences us, whether we want it or not. Religion, politics, advertisement.. everything uses art. Subliminal or not. To influence us. The way we perceive the world is shaped to a large degree by our artistic environment. You think you had one original thought? Think again. Everything you said, everything you wrote came from somewhere. And went through the filters in your subconsciousness. And these filters? In many instances: art.

So… yeah… a big “no” about “Journalism is more important than art”. Journalism wouldn’t even be possible without art.

#art #journalism #objectivity #my writing #photography #was that too sassy? ;)

72 notes · View notes

mybestluxe · 3 years

Text

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT BRACELET FOR YOUR STYLE

Both men and women are crazy for bracelets these days. Now, the world’s top jewellers aren’t scared to try new things to make new types of bracelets. Bracelets are considered to be highly comfortable, lightweight, and functional as a result of ongoing innovation. Looking through modern jewelry catalogs, you can notice that young girls nowadays enjoy wearing multiple bracelets on one arm, made of gold, silver, and diamonds.

As a result, photographs of women’s bracelets demonstrate the importance of matching all of the bracelets in terms of style and colour. They can be hung with small intriguing pendants in the form of inscriptions, symbols, or other stones.

You can’t go wrong with pretty bracelets when it comes to jewelry. What’s so fun with bracelets is that you can enjoy them entirely differently from collars, after all, when you wear them! The bracelets have been used over the years by men and women, perfected for layering and stacking.

The word “bracelet,” which means “arm,” derives from the Greek word “brachile.” Early bracelets consisted of copper, bronze, grass, slender tree limbs, and shells. Evidence shows that people wore bracelets in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. After the Bronze Age, bracelets became more complex and decorative, when jewelry was a symbol of power and privileges. Precious metal bracelets and stones and shells decorated.

Charming armbands and hanging locks were unbelievably popular in the Victorian era. The bracelet chains were designed in the 19th century and connected camels and medallions with ivory and coral. In the 20th century, fashion gemstones became mass-produced and cheaper.

Bracelets today are made of a wide variety of products (e.g. metal, cloth, plastic, and leather) and are generally decorated with jewelry, crystals, metal, and pearls. They are intended for every lifestyle and sex. How do you find the right style for your personality and lifestyle with so many beautiful wristbands to choose from?

When you shop for the right bracelet, there are many things to consider, including the activities you will do, where you will go, and what you will wear. You have a large number of bracelet styles in your wardrobe for any occasion, so it’s a good idea.

How does a bracelet fit with other jewelry

There are a few guidelines to follow when combining many bracelets with other jewelry.

Watches and bracelets should be worn on different hands at first. These are two separate attachments that rarely work together.

Second, wearing both silver and gold bracelets is unusual. The best way to wear jewelry composed of these noble metals is to wear it separately. Wearing two gold bracelets at the same time is not a good idea. Because each of them is a flawless product, the beauty of one can be overwhelmed by the beauty of another.

You must visit a jewelry store to select the appropriate bracelet. Because there is such a huge selection of wristbands to choose from, you must first establish a goal for yourself as to why you want to buy a bracelet. If it’s a gift for a woman, imagine how she’ll look wearing a bracelet with an evening gown. If you’re buying it for yourself, think how you’ll look on an evening stroll or in everyday wear with it. However, a diamond bracelet as a present would always look stunning on you.

You must also select a bracelet for your clothing. This is crucial because not all bracelets will look good with your gown or outfit. As a result, bracelets made of precious stones in light tints will always add refinement and compassion to the cocktail look. With the right evening costume, it is traditional to wear valuable jewels of considerable size. Silver bracelets with stones, for example, can be worn with a formal suit. For a better look, guys can wear a gold bracelet with short shirts and no jacket.

Choose jewelry that matches the silver bracelet

Bracelets, like any other sort of jewelry, look excellent in general. You can use it as a feature piece, avoiding wearing other gems, or combine it with other bracelets and rings to make it look more magnificent, depending on the shape you want.

If you’re wearing a silver cuff, keep the rest of your jewelry basic and smooth. On the other hand, silver bracelets can (and typically should) be worn with a variety of different bracelets and jewels to create an interesting blend.

Design your silver bracelet

Make your bracelet glow by dressing appropriately. The bracelets should cover three-quarters or less of the sleeves.

In fact, a short-sleeved shirt with a bracelet is a fantastic approach to bridge this gap.

Silver looks best when paired with brighter or colder hues. Make a monochrome look with your silver bracelet and a blue shirt, or give some contrast to an all-black suit with your silver bracelet.

A silver bracelet might give some excitement to a trendy neon colour. A sculptural silver cuff that goes well with the modern minimalist appearance, while a stack of bracelets has a definite boho style that may be worn with long skirts and blouses, depends on how you create your bracelet.

Don’t be scared to mix and match, but keep an editorial eye on it and don’t go overboard.

Selectively add your Accessories

Silver bracelets look excellent on hats, scarves, and other accessories.

There are a few things to keep in mind, though. When wearing silver jewelry, avoid carrying a bag with gold embellishments — it won’t appear like it no matters what you do. If you’re wearing a silver glitzy bracelet, you might want to reconsider wearing the scarf. Charms will rip knit or loose garments, and if you’re not careful, you’ll even rip a hole in silk.

Types of Bracelets

Chain and link

Connecting links into a band creates a chain-and-link bracelet. These are usually constructed of precious metals like gold or silver. They are adaptable, ranging from delicate chains to hefty designs. Bracelets with chains and links come in a variety of precious metals and are ideal for layering.

Beaded

Beaded bracelets come in a single or multi-row style and are extensible and stretchable. They can also include a variety of coloured gemstones and look wonderful when piled on both arms.

Bangles

A bangle bracelet is inflexible and round in shape. Bangles are usually made of gold or another metal and have a basic or etched design. Bangle bracelets adorned with gemstones or diamonds can make a sophisticated statement. They’re fantastic on their own or piled with other bangles.

Bangle bracelets come in two styles: hinged and slip-on. A slip-on bangle is bigger and usually rounder than a hinged bangle, and it’s not as well-fitting. Hinged bangles are more oval in shape and fit the wrist better. Slip-on bangles are more informal in style and are typically composed of less expensive materials. In addition to the primary clasp, hinged bangles frequently contain a safety clasp.

Handmade

Bracelets produced by hand can range from hand-forged silver or gold to delicately crafted beads strung together in lovely combinations. Handmade bracelets are usually one-of-a-kind, one-of-a-kind objects that reflect creativity. A bespoke jeweller can work with you to design the perfect piece. Whether it’s a sentimental one (such as a bracelet made with a gem from a loved one’s engagement ring set in a unique rose-gold setting) or a strong fashion statement that looks just how you want it to.

Tips for wearing your favourite bracelets

Make sure the clasp is securely fastened. Bring the bracelet to your jeweller for a fast adjustment or repair if the clasp appears to be weak or opens by itself.

Have your jeweller replace the clasp with a magnetic one if you have trouble fastening clasps (as many of us do!). It will be more durable and simple to use, allowing you to keep wearing your favourite piece for years to come.

If you want to be fashionable this year, you should have several bracelets to layer. To avoid tangling or overwhelming a delicate bracelet, keep the scale similar when layering bracelets.

About Us –

Living a fulfilled life does not cost you a fortune. Elegance is a choice of lifestyle, it’s not luxury. You need not be making millions to live your life fully.

My Best Luxe is an online one-stop platform where we bring you all the information related to specific luxury lifestyle items. It’s a curated list of everything to do with living a fulfilled life.

Want to understand whats the latest trends in fashion, jewelry, accessories, or lifestyle in general? Stay tuned to our blog for all the updates.

We are a community of market experts who regularly research for trending updates of the market and bring it to our enthusiastic readers.

0 notes

avenoir-rp · 6 years

Photo

today we have yet another location preview for y’all! under the cut, you’ll find detailed descriptions of the aesthetics, politics, religion, magic, and technology of orlais. as a reminder, the site will open tomorrow, march 22nd-- we hope this will tide you over until we’re ready for you!

Culture in Orlais is defined by themes of extravagance, show, and religion. The nation’s borders begin with sprawling hills of the greenest grass and grow more tech-heavy and modern as you move inwards towards the major cities.

AESTHETICS

Gothic architecture as well as heavy Art Nouveau influences are prominent artistic styles used in shaping Orlesian aesthetics. While Tevinter prefers to showcase the talent of its ruling class, the Magisterum, in its high-tech rows of ever-stretching, eclectic skyscrapers, the buildings of Orlais are considered much more artful and flamboyant. The pride and joy of Orlais is its capital, Val Royeaux, which is headed by large, heavily-windowed, artistic buildings on every block made of pure white marble and gold. High ceilings and stain glass windows are also common staples of Orlesian architecture, even for commonplace buildings such as stores and art galleries. The streets are often cobblestone and lined with colorful displays of greenery, either in windows or on balconies.

Houses in the city are generally tall and narrow, usually stacked four or five stories high to make up for what they lack in width, whereas studios and apartments will only usually take up the top two floors and are usually reserved for students or children of nobles. Elaborate windows and balcony displays are cherished components of Orlesian housing complexes for this reason. Manors are also understandably quite popular within Orlesian circles, though the ones that take up the most space (and are reserved for the richest nobles) tend to sit just beyond the reach of city limits inside gated neighborhoods -- never too far a drive, of course.

Business and religion are ever-tied within the Orlesian Empire and the typical set-up of a city’s municipal district will tend to reflect this. In Val Royeaux, the municipal “district” sits just inside the golden sun and moon gates of the Andrastian Chantry, creating a sort of wall around the Grand Cathedral and the rest of the world. These buildings are decadently carved with precious stone, jewel, and metal sculptures of Andraste and her disciples, as well as famous Orlesian war victories over the years.

POLITICS

The Orlesian Empire is headed by two ruling powers: The White Divine of the ANDRASTIAN CHANTRY and the EMPEROR or Empress -- both are elected positions, but very rarely is a win into office as simple as collecting the largest number of votes. Politics in Orlais are notorious for how they operate on a very delicate balance of cunning and manipulation, and more often than not end in blood and mayhem, or worse.

To begin to understand Orlesian politics, most would start with an explanation of “the game”. The game is a series of often underhanded social gestures and betrayals amongst Orlesian nobles for their own personal gain. Assassinations and public humiliations are regular components of the game, as there are no rules or laws that govern it. Like the name suggests, the game is often treated like a sport, though very rarely does it ever bring anyone enjoyment for long. To suggest that any one Emperor or Empress (save for maybe the nation’s founder and first king, Kordillus Drakon I) was elected into power without the support of Orlesian nobles-- and by way of that, by the playing of the game-- would be incredibly foolish, Orlais’ current Emperor, Gaspard de Chalon, included.

Most know the story of the Inquisition’s meddling in the most reason election, though very rarely does the true story get told: Gaspard de Chalon murdered his cousin and former Empress, Celene Valmont, and was subsequently blackmailed by her former lover Briala into “counselling” for his time as Emperor. More often than not, Briala speaks through Gaspard like a puppet, and it is her rule that governs Orlais. Briala’s rulings are often controversial, given Orlais’ staunchly traditional stance on things like elven rights and mage equality. The most pressing issue to date is the removal of alienage walls within Orlais-- nobles from all different backgrounds have made their disgust public and clear, showing uncharacteristically honest disdain for the decision. Most days Orlais sits just on the brink of another civil war, held together very loosely as new laws are written and old ones broken.

Emperors and Empresses in Orlais often rule alongside the Chantry, wherein the Divine gives or withholds blessings which may sway public opinion.

The Chantry hierarchy operates with the Divine at the head, voted into power by a seat of Grand Clerics, all of which are the leading Andrastian priests of their own nations. It is customary for a Divine to name her successor before death, but this does not always guarantee immediate election. The current Divine Victoria (Leliana) was elected into power in 9:42 Dragon (with the Inquisitor’s blessing) and immediately made it her mission to bring change to Thedas. Under Leliana’s rule of the Chantry, elves and mages are slowly being treated more fairly, and men and women of all races may join the Chantry to serve. To almost no one’s surprise, Emperor Gaspard de Chalons has been one of Divine Leliana’s biggest supporters-- very likely due to Briala’s influence. Leliana has chosen Cassandra Pentaghast and LEFT HAND as her right and left hand while she serves.

RELIGION

Orlais is the home of the Andrastian Chantry and takes great pride in upholding that reputation. Andraste and her disciples are a regular theme in Orlesian art and pop culture, even for non-religious institutions. Nearly all buildings of worth are decorated with gold, a color that is regularly associated with the Chantry and the Andrastian religion. You’d be hard pressed to find any permanent resident of Orlais who doesn’t consider themselves at least somewhat religious, even if it’s only in practice and to maintain face among their peers, as being Andrastian is a source of social gain for most Orlesians, especially where the game is involved.

MAGIC & TECHNOLOGY

Nearly everything with a visual element in Orlais is designed with extravagance in mind, though TECHNOLOGY often plays a bigger factor than you’d imagine in regards to the nation’s efficiency. As much as the Chantry would like to wipe its hands of the reputations of tech-heavy societies like Tevinter and Orzammar, life in Orlais is built to sustain luxury, which requires some sacrifices. Phones and other smart devices (tablets, kindles, blackberrys) are as commonplace in Orlais as they would be for you and I, and, in fact, it might be more bizarre to assume someone doesn’t have one. Billboards, television screens, and even mirrors are often animated using holographic technology-- similar to that in Tevinter or Orzammar-- but, ironically, are much less flashy, preferring to showcase content vs the technology used to craft it, however advanced. Motor vehicles (cars, motorcycles) are common in the suburbs after Ferelden made them popular but very rarely are they utilized inside the city as often as rideshare services are to save space on the (often cramped) roads. Cars in Orlais are also incredibly compact-- you'll never see a pickup truck inside city borders. Traffic inside Val Royeaux is regularly monitored by government officials to keep life leisurely and easy for its residents. Bikes and scooters are available for rent curbside and are the primary mode of transportation inside highly-populated cities.

Warriors (including Templars) are often trained with guns as opposed to swords, as well as in hand to hand combat. Magic-users in Orlais (at least those that were housed in White Spire) are more often than not trained with a traditional staff, as opposed to Ferelden, where recent trends have introduced all kinds of objects as alternatives to staffs, or 'focuses'. WEAPON LAWS in orlais are loose, though not as loose as they are in Ferelden. As long as you are not using them in a malicious, illegal manner then you are allowed to own and carry weapons. Elves, on the other hand, were not previously allowed to own weapons of any kind until Gaspard's ruling (and Briala's, in secret) and now the Orlesian alienages are filled to the brim with weapons of all kind, causing even more panic among already-prejudiced nobles.

Due to the years of extreme prejudice in Orlesian societies, Leliana's rulings towards the fairer treatment of mages-- specifically, the removal of throughout Thedas-- has caused major uproar among Orlesian nobles and even common people. Many long-dedicated Templars have left the order after having their status demoted to that of a Cheveliar or common police guard, feeling it a personal slight. In more extreme cases outside of highly-populated Orlesian cities, the order to disband circles has been ignored completely or taken into the hands of local mages and templars. These mages and templars have formed makeshift circles where the former rule of cruelty and brutality is upheld and encouraged. The newly reformed Seekers of Truth, led by Cassandra Pentaghast, have been attempting to crack down on these templars and ex-templars, but the sheer amount of people involved (not only in Orlais, but all across Thedas) has made it difficult.

On the other hand, some mages have thrived under this ruling, joining up with the newly-reformed COLLEGE OF MAGI, a sort of university for both young and old mages to study their craft while living in harmony. The College in Orlais, under the formal protection of Divine Leliana, is called the Bright Hand and is made up of former Inquisition mage allies. Their main competition in the study of magic and tradition is a circle formed by former Inquisition member and high-end Orlesian society member, Vivienne de Fer. Vivienne's circle is one of the only circles currently governed as the White Spire was that acts in public without fear.

#avenoirs #previews

0 notes

arrangedstilllife · 7 years

Photo

Installation view of “Annette Kelm: Leaves,” 2017, at Kestner Gesellschaft.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Annette Kelm “Pizza”

In contrast to any type of image production that aims above all to achieve optimized effect in the digital media, Annette Kelm unleashes the potential inherent in photography to reproduce the world of objects and thereby uncover their cultural foundations and day-to-day aporias or impasses.

On the one hand, her photographs seem dedicated to a thoroughly sober presentation of things, quoting genres such as the still life and studio photography. On the other hand, however, her strictly formal pictorial language with its neutral light and objective view of arranged objects gives the latter a hyper-real presence, freeing them from the realm of the purely factual. Levelled down onto the plane surface and free of any narrative charge, the compositional factor comes to the fore, endowing the motifs in all their visual density and pithiness with an almost rebus-like significance. Thus the things are what they are, yet carry also an abstract significance that is merely ascribed to them. They are straightforward and yet at the same time intractable motifs that seem to fit neither the category of objective documentation nor that of figurative representation. They flatten objects pictorially into a plane or line them up in the lines and sequences of photographic experiments and lighting effects. Depicted frequently from the front and with great sharpness of detail, the minimal yet ornament-oriented world of things marks the translation into the two-dimensional space of photography. The latter’s perspective, narrowing into a single point of view, is part of the photographic apparatus, but also the expression of a subjective vision of the world.

Thus in the three-part series Monney (2015), arranged as a triptych, unused one- dollar bills can be seen against a background of packing paper. In the first picture, they form the wrongly spelt word ‘Monney’, while in the two other pictures this disintegrates into a heap of banknotes. The notes, whose photographic reproduction precludes any test of their genuineness, present themselves as printed paper, possessing here at best an abstract monetary value. Money and language alike present themselves rather as the result of a symbolically regulated, societally practiced consensus.

In the likewise three-part series Money Tree (2015), the dollar bills serve as the leaves of decorative plants and form an abstract tree of money. The individual titles, however, record the given arrangement in the style of a protocol: One Dollar Right Side / Money Tree One Leaf Right or One Dollar Left Side / Money Tree One Leaf Left. On some of the bills, Kelm has painted the corners of George Washington’s mouth turned upwards.

All the objects on view in these photographs are of little value. They are things bought in one-Euro thrift shops or things found on the street – pizza boxes or flowers against a coloured-paper background reminiscent of Mondrian. The way they are staged has no ennobling effect, but neither does it simply let the things drift away from reality into spheres of cultural meaning. Grounded in the principle of repetition and variation, the pictures centering on these objects tend rather to emphasize the photographic itself as the production of signs and images. Seriality reveals itself as a way out of a pictorial concept trapped in representation. Based on a complex serial strategy, Annette Kelm’s photography is hypostasized in endlessly differentiated repetitions. Balancing Wedge shows the identical, clearly personally constructed set of scales in a range of differing inclinations or tilts. The photograph of a pizza box on which an expressively shaped piece of bark is lying contrasts the standard, industrial product with the natural objet trouvé, but only in its differing versions does it become an enigmatic image of photography as a system of signs. The portrait of the artist Lucie Stahl, showing her standing behind a red blind, is as much formal composition as a study of propinquity and distance, image and simulacrum.

The jeans shirt on which a cup painted with a face has been positioned – all photographed against a gleaming yellow background – could be a self-portrait of the artist. The Jacquard loom with its punch-card system is a forerunner of the binary system in modern computers. As these images make clear, however, instrumentality is just one and probably not even the most important category in our dealings with things, which are always also place-holders for something else, something other.

Vanessa Joan Müller

. at KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin until 29 May 2016

Annette Kelm “Pizza” installation views at St. Agnes, Berlin, 2016

Courtesy: the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin.

Claudia Comte “Catch the Tail by the Tiger”

It should come as no surprise that artists are great exhibition designers, but when exhibition design becomes part and parcel of the exhibition itself, something not a little wonderful is liable to happen. Such is the case with the Berlin-based, Swiss artist Claudia Comte’s first exhibition at KÖNIG GALERIE.

Created specifically for the singular, re-purposed church, Comte’s ten inverted plinths are suspended at different heights from the cavernous ceiling for what looks like a hanging jungle. On view in their shelf-like interiors are a selection of Comte’s amorphous wooden sculptures as well as her target paintings. At first glance, the exhibition might overwhelm with its subtly spectacular design, but linger a moment, and the manifold nuances, contradictions and paradoxes that animate Comte’s brash and elegant practice begin to emerge. From the techniques to the materials, not to mention the highly mediated, self-aware relationship with art history, Comte’s work retains an almost miraculous structural integrity despite being pulled in several directions at once. Most salient is the strict logic that underpins and governs a good deal of her decision- making vis-à-vis the human propensity toward imperfection that characterizes the end result. This logic is evident in the fact that the spatial arrangement of the plinths is organized according to a virtual grid as well as the stripes that adorn their surfaces, which have been burned black with a blow torch, and incised precisely five centimeters apart, with a chainsaw wielded by the artist’s own hand.

The same hand fashioned the amorphous, fluidly shaped objects nested among the interiors out of wood (walnut, acacia, ebony, cherry, oak, and olive). However, unlike the plinths, these shapes are so finely worked and finished that their facture is all but undetectable in their surfaces; the objects are almost eerie in their ethereal hardness, ultimately looking all but machine-made. Her sculptural vocabulary, not so much hewn as carefully distilled from the curvilinear, amoeba-like stuff of modernism (Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi, and even Brancusi, to name a few), is rendered even more uncanny by the apparent impossibility of its production. This impression is fed by a variety of factors, from the seemingly exhausted codification of her references (reflected, again, in her target paintings), which is indivisible from the mediated nature of her production, to the apparent superfluity of her labor. This counterintuitive expenditure of energy extends to the fluidity of the forms themselves, which would seem more easily generated in plastic or foam than, say, wood. For all the supposed naturalism of Comte’s work, there is something very unnatural about the whole process, and even the final product. What contradiction could be more pointed, more relevant and contemporary?

Chris Sharp

at KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin until 29 May 2016

Claudia Comte “Catch the Tail by the Tiger” installation views at St. Agnes, Berlin, 2016

Courtesy: the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin.

4 notes · View notes

watchilove · 4 years

Text

Six years after the launch of the Starfleet Machine, the first clock co-created by MB&F and L’Epée 1839, a new expedition is underway. The space station returns in 2020, in a more compact size and enhanced with bright colours, accompanied by a fleet of three small spacecraft exploring the universe; it rightfully bears the name of Starfleet Explorer.

Designed by MB&F, the Starfleet Explorer is an intergalactic spaceship-cum-table clock crafted by L’Epée 1839, the last remaining Swiss manufacture specialised in high-end table clocks. Not only does it display the hours and minutes, it also features an animation in which three spacecraft perform a five-minute orbit of the station. The highly visible, superlatively finished in-house movement boasts an exceptional eight-day power reserve. The mechanism can be manually wound using a double-ended key serving to wind the movement as well as to set the time.

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Red

Hours and minutes are indicated by means of two discs, along with an aperture and a brightly-coloured hand. More specifically, the minutes on a revolving radar dish are read off when they appear through the centre of a fixed metal aperture, satin-brushed by hand and anodised, that follows the dome’s curved contours.

The hours disc placed just below remains motionless. An hour hand – likewise satin-brushed and anodised – indicates the hour by spinning in its place and performing a complete turn around the disc in 12 hours.

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Blue

Starfleet Explorer also features a significantly original new element in the form of three tiny spacecraft, lined up along the same axis at regular intervals and placed inside the actual Starfleet movement, the heart of the mechanism, around which they revolve at a rate of one full turn every five minutes: a space exploration guided by the mothership.

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Green

The Starfleet Explorer’s movement is placed horizontally, but its escapement is vertically positioned. The impeccably finished stainless stain or palladium-treated brass components (with the exception of the 11 jewels) are designed and manufactured in the L’Epee 1839 Swiss atelier. The gears and mainspring barrel are on full display thanks to the skeletonised mainplate and concentric C-shaped external structure. The Starfleet Explorer can rest on both ends of its vertical landing gear; a useful feature when turning it over to wind the mainspring and set the time. It can also be leant sideways so as to offer a different view of the intergalactic horological station.

Starfleet Explorer is launched as three limited editions of 99 pieces each in blue, green and red.

Table clocks – (extremely) large watches

The Starfleet Explorer is a table clock, featuring essentially the same mechanisms as a wristwatch, only larger: gear train, mainspring barrel, balance wheel, escape wheel and pallet-lever. L’Epée 1839’s regulator also features an Incabloc shock protection system, something generally only seen in wristwatches, which minimises the risk of damage when the clock is being transported.

One might be tempted to think that the more substantial size of the components simplifies work. Larger components, however, make finely finishing the movement much more difficult to handle than finishing a wristwatch, because of the bigger surface areas.

Arnaud Nicolas, CEO L’Epée 1839 explains: “It’s not just a case of double the size of the components, it’s double the time it takes to finish them. The complexity increases exponentially. For polishing you need to apply the same pressure as you would finishing a watch movement, but on a bigger surface, and that’s more challenging. It’s thanks to the experience and dexterity of our clockmakers that the Starfleet Explorer can feature such superlative fine-finishing.”

Form follows function

The details of the polished movement can be fully appreciated by the naked eye, thanks in large part to the Starfleet Explorer’s extremely open concentric C-shaped external structure, to which the mainplate is attached.

The outermost C-shape features three vertical arcs on which the clock rests. These graceful supports play a role in the design of the model, but also have a very practical application: to enable the Starfleet Explorer to be placed upside down for time-setting and rewinding using a special key.

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Technical Specifications

Starfleet Explorer is launched as three limited editions of 99 pieces each in blue, green and red.

Display

Minutes: indicated by a fixed curved aperture on the mobile upper dome, performing a complete rotation every 60 minutes.

Hours: indicated by a mobile hand, performing a complete rotation every 12 hours on a fixed disc.

The minutes aperture and the hour hand are satin-brushed and anodised, in blue, green or red.

The hour dome and the minutes disc are satin-brushed and feature MB&F’s signature numerals.

Main structure

Height: approx. 11cm

Diameter: approx. 16.5cm

Number of parts: 19

Materials: stainless steel for the main structure, hand-lacquered polymer for the three spacecraft

Movement

L’Epée 1839 in-house designed and manufactured movement

Balance frequency: 18,000 vph / 2.5Hz

One barrel, power reserve: eight days

Number of parts: 95

Jewels: 11

Incabloc shock protection system

Manual-winding: double-ended key to set time and wind the movement

Mechanism and mainplate in palladium-treated brass

L’EPEE 1839 – the premier clock manufacture in Switzerland

Dedicated to making high-end clocks, L’Epée has been a prominent Swiss Manufacture for over 180 years. Founded in 1839 by Auguste L’Epée in France’s Besançon region, the company originally focused on producing music boxes and watch components. The brand was synonymous at the time with entirely hand-made pieces.

From 1850 onwards, the Manufacture became a leading light in the production of ‘platform’ escapements, creating regulators especially for alarm and table clocks, as well as musical watches. It became a well-known specialist owning a large number of patents on exceptional escapements and the chief supplier of escapements to several celebrated watchmakers of the day. L’Epée has won a number of gold medal awards at international exhibitions.

During the 20th century, L’Epée owed much of its reputation to its superlative carriage clocks; for many, the clock of the influential and powerful, in addition to being the gift of choice of French government officials to elite guests. In 1976 when the Concorde supersonic aircraft entered commercial service, L’Epée wall clocks were chosen to furnish the cabins, providing passengers with visual feedback of the time. In 1994, L’Epée showed its thirst for a challenge when it built the world’s biggest clock with a compensated pendulum, the Giant Regulator, the making of which is celebrated in the Guinness Book of Records.

L’Epée 1839 is now based in Delémont in the Swiss Jura Mountains. Under the impetus of its CEO Arnaud Nicolas, it has developed an exceptional table clock collection, encompassing a full range of sophisticated clocks.

Starfleet Machine

The collection is based around three themes:

Creative Art – first and foremost artistic models often developed in partnership with external designers as joint creations. These clocks surprise, inspire and sometimes even shock the most seasoned collectors. They are intended for those consciously or unconsciously looking for exceptional, one of a kind objects.

Contemporary Timepieces – technical creations with a contemporary design (Le Duel, Duet, etc.) and minimalist, avant-garde models (La Tour), incorporating complications such as retrograde seconds, power-reserve indicators, moon phases, tourbillons, chiming mechanisms and perpetual calendars.

Carriage Clocks – carriage clocks, also known as “officer’s clocks”. These historical models stemming from the brand heritage also feature their fair share of complications: chiming mechanisms, minute repeaters, calendars, moon phases, tourbillons and more.

All models are designed and manufactured in-house. Their technical prowess, combination of form and function, very long power reserves and remarkable finishes have become signature features of the brand.

MB&F – Genesis of a Concept Laboratory

Founded in 2005, MB&F is the world’s first-ever horological concept laboratory. With almost 20 remarkable calibres forming the basis of the critically acclaimed Horological and Legacy Machines, MB&F is continuing to follow Founder and Creative Director Maximilian Büsser’s vision of creating 3-D kinetic art by deconstructing traditional watchmaking.

After 15 years managing prestigious watch brands, Maximilian Büsser resigned from his position as Managing Director at Harry Winston in 2005 to create MB&F – Maximilian Büsser & Friends. MB&F is an artistic and micro-engineering laboratory dedicated to designing and crafting small series of radical concept watches by bringing together talented horological professionals with whom Büsser both respects and enjoys working.

In 2007, MB&F unveiled its first Horological Machine, HM1. HM1’s sculptured, three- dimensional case and beautifully finished engine (movement) set the standard for the idiosyncratic Horological Machines that have followed – all Machines that tell the time, rather than Machines to tell the time. The Horological Machines have explored space (HM2, HM3, HM6), the sky (HM4, HM9), the road (HM5, HMX, HM8) and water (HM7).

In 2011, MB&F launched its round-cased Legacy Machine collection. These more classical pieces – classical for MB&F, that is – pay tribute to 19th-century watchmaking excellence by reinterpreting complications by the great horological innovators of yesteryear to create contemporary objets d’art. The LM1 and LM2 were followed by LM101, the first MB&F Machine to feature a movement developed entirely in-house. The LM Perpetual, LM Split Escapement and LM Thunderdome broadened the collection further. MB&F generally alternates between launching contemporary, resolutely unconventional Horological Machines and historically inspired Legacy Machines. Last year (2019) marked a turning point with the creation of the first MB&F Machine dedicated to women: the LM FlyingT.

As the F stands for Friends, it was only natural for MB&F to develop collaborations with artists, watchmakers, designers and manufacturers they admire. This brought about two new categories: Performance Art and Co-creations. While Performance Art pieces are MB&F machines revisited by external creative talent, Co-creations are not wristwatches but other types of machines, engineered and crafted by unique Swiss Manufactures from MB&F ideas and designs. Many of these Co-creations, such as the clocks created with L’Epée 1839, tell the time while collaborations with Reuge and Caran d’Ache have generated other forms of mechanical art.

To ensure an appropriate platform for all these machines, Büsser had the idea of placing them in an art gallery alongside various forms of mechanical art created by other artists, rather than in a traditional storefront. This brought about the creation of the first MB&F M.A.D.Gallery (M.A.D. stands for Mechanical Art Devices) in Geneva, which would later be followed by M.A.D.Galleries in Taipei, Dubai and Hong Kong.

There have been a number of distinguished accolades reminding us of the innovative nature of MB&F’s journey so far, including, to name but a few, no less than five Grand Prix awards from the famous Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève: in 2019, the prize for Best Ladies Complication went to the LM FlyingT, in 2016, the LM Perpetual won the Grand Prix for Best Calendar Watch; in 2012, the Legacy Machine No.1 was awarded both the Public Prize (voted for by horology fans) and the Best Men’s Watch Prize (voted for by the professional jury). In 2010, MB&F won Best Concept and Design Watch for the HM4 Thunderbolt; and, in 2015, a Red Dot: Best of the Best award – the top prize at the international Red Dot Awards – for the HM6 Space Pirate.

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Green

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Blue

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Red

MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer Six years after the launch of the Starfleet Machine, the first clock co-created by MB&F and…

#L’Epée 1839 #MB&#MB&F + L’EPEE 1839 Starfleet Explorer #news #Press release #Starfleet Explorer

0 notes

boldlyloudkoala-blog1 · 4 years

Text

Bikini Fitness: Women With Super Powers

Bikini Fitness ... These girls are a superior breed.

Women who practice Bikini Fitness are known for their high degree of sacrifice and the perseverance with which they face both training and the nutrition necessary to achieve their goals, being "accused" on many occasions of "obsessed" ... even if in some way The people who accuse them are right ... since this obsession with health and being in shape is real, that is, the obsession to take care of your body and take it to a much higher level of quality of life than that of the rest of the world. people ... and be the best version of yourself overcoming your own limits every day and destroy your limiting beliefs, improving day by day to get where the rest of the people only dream ... then BLESSED BE THE OBSESSION !! 😉

If more human beings were able to sacrifice so much for their dreams, we would all live in a better world… I leave you in this image some of the girls that I have prepared and who are super heroines 😉

The Bikini Fitness is an increasingly widespread practice among women who love fitness and physical exercise in general, since it provides the girls who practice it with a dazzling physical appearance that endows these women with a figure of extraordinary appearance, with a excellent muscle tone that provides them with proportional and sculptural incline bench chest press.

The aesthetic criteria of beauty have evolved so that flaccidity and lack of muscle tone are no longer in line with the criteria of standard feminine beauty in which more and more importance is given to muscle tone and definition, in this sense the bikini fitness is a highly recommended and attractive practice.

Bikini Fitness Rules

Bikini fitness is a sports discipline recognized by the IFBB executive council on November 7, 2010 in Baku (Azerbaijan), in this executive council the administrative and technical regulations governing this discipline were established.

There are two categories: category A which includes participants up to 163 cm and category B open to participants over 163 cm, the competitions are organized around elimination rounds.

Fitness bikini outfit

As its own name indicates the clothing used in this discipline is the bikini, the two pieces of which it is made up must meet a series of requirements established by regulations, these are:

The bikini will necessarily consist of two pieces.

The bikini may have any color

Despite the fact that the participants are given freedom in the choice of the model, it must meet criteria in line with good taste and the% body covered by them.

The use of ropes is prohibited both at the top and at the bottom.

The bottom of the bikini should cover at least one third of the buttock surface and the bottom of the central area.

The use of jewelry is allowed as long as it is not used in an overloaded manner and meets criteria of good taste.

Participants are expected to wear a good tan as long as it is healthy.

The jury will assess that the participant gives importance to the hairstyle, so going to the hairdresser before the event is highly recommended.

Shoes may not have a platform on the front of the foot greater than 1 cm.

To enforce compliance with these standards, an IFBB delegate will ensure compliance with all these standards, having the power at all times to determine whether the participants' attire meets the established criteria.

Bikini Fitness evaluation criteria

When evaluating and scoring the participants in a bikini fitness competition throughout the two rounds, the judges will establish said evaluation according to the following criteria:

The general physical appearance is assessed taking into account symmetry, muscle tone, skin condition, facial beauty and hair, and other more subjective values such as the athlete's ability to show and function gracefully before the jury.

Particular attention is paid to balance, which is why athletes who do not have a very high muscle volume or a slim appearance are valued more, the striae score negatively.

Great importance is given to the firmness of the skin, which is why the smoothness, softness and absence of cellulite are valued.

As a complement to the general assessment, the jury will give importance to hair care and makeup.

The evaluation of the jury, in addition to taking into account the general aspect of the participant, will positively value the presentation on stage from the moment it is incorporated until the moment it is removed from it.

Tips About Diet During Bikini Fitness Practice

Unlike the female bodybuilding discipline in which more importance is given to muscle volume, in bikini-fitness the participants put all the focus on muscle definition, to obtain good results in this sense it is very important to monitor the diet and follow a series of specific recommendations that must be followed, take good note:

Eat more often than usual

It is necessary that throughout the day you maintain a normalized blood glucose level, this will help you in your training since you will have enough energy to optimize results, to achieve this it is necessary that you do not feel hungry, doing so will contribute to the deterioration of your muscle tone and you will define with more difficulty what goes against the objectives that are pursued with the practice of this discipline, it is recommended to eat a minimum of 5 times a day.

Eat in moderation

This recommendation, although it seems to contradict the previous one, does not do it at all since one thing is to eat frequently and another thing is to eat in moderation, you can assess the amount of calories you need with your dietician or your Personal Trainer

Eat healthy

This recommendation is more than obvious, you should minimize the consumption of fats, eat plenty of fruits, vegetables and fish, and in general of healthy foods, and completely eliminate saturated fats , sugars and junk food.

Bikini Fitness Competition Training

A good workout for participation in a bikini Fitness competition should be focused on strengthening the muscle groups that the judges will take into account when evaluating the participants in the contest.

To do this, training planning must aim at toning and defining muscle without generating too much volume or losing female forms.

In any practical proposal aimed at the bikini Fitness, it is important to work with the quadriceps in which routes are carried out that involve other muscles such as the back, shoulders, glutes, femoral and rectum of the abdomen in such a way that it does not generate excessive volume in them.

The rest of the muscles can be worked in a moderate way since through the previously described muscular work they receive indirect training.

It should be noted that the chest is an area that should not be overworked since an excessive load may not give the desired appearance, likewise twins should not be overworked since an increase in their muscle mass is not positively valued by the judges.

The preparation consists of two phases, the first is aimed at increasing strength and muscle fibers, while the second focuses on definition and fat loss.

You must establish a rigorous training plan before the competition in which you must take into account the different phases of it and have advice and supervision.

Basic recommendations before the Bikini Fitness competition

This is a temporary plan of basic recommendations that you can follow before the competition, however it is important that you can count on the advice of a personal trainer who will monitor you at all times and adapt the plan to your morphology, metabolism and specific needs.

Twelve weeks before: You must start the intense training about twelve weeks before the competition, in addition to executing a series of exercises and designing a suitable diet, you should drink at least 3 liters of water a day.

8 weeks before: In addition to the previous recommendations, you can start practicing the poses that you will use during the competition, it is also the ideal time to start with your tanning sessions, two weekly sessions are recommended.

4 weeks before: It is time to start reducing food intake (amount not often) especially carbohydrates that you must replace with a good amount of fish and vegetables, you can take advantage of this period to start planning what hairstyle and makeup you will wear during the competition, I also recommend that you do photo sessions of your progress and progress, this will serve as motivation.

2 weeks before: Depending on your results you can make an additional shortening of your diet, the most advisable for this is to have the advice of a professional during the process, you can take the opportunity to give yourself a beauty session, whiten your teeth or any other procedure to improve your physical appearance.

6 days before: You can increase or decrease the sodium intake in your diet depending on the strategy of your coach, but surely you will decrease carbohydrates.

3 days before: Decrease water intake to 1.5 liters, it is the right time to get a full hair removal.

2 days before: Reduce water intake to 1 liter and rest.

Previous day: Drink half a liter of water, condition hair and apply spray tan, do not use deodorant.

Competition day : Do not use deodorant, just drink one sip of water if necessary, you can take a few small sips of wine or a shot of an alcoholic drink to improve your vascularity before going on stage ... you can also go up with less embarrassment 😉 but do not overdo drinking lest you turn the championship into an Ibiza party hehe.

General recommendation: As you advance in your training for the competition you will have to adapt your weight lifting regimen, repetitions and muscle group to work you must have the advice of your coach.

I hope this article has been useful to all women who love Bikini fitness who also feel a special predilection for the world of competition and beauty.

Through the practice of bikini-fitness you will not only achieve a body and an enviable figure you will also be able to experience in first person the benefits of healthy practices that this discipline requires, for this it is important that you have a personal trainer to guide you to achieve the personal and physical transformation that you must achieve to face the competition with guarantees of success.

0 notes

kristablogs · 5 years

Text

Soothing stories to take your mind off stressful things

Warning: Contains puppies. And nude Founding Fathers. (Pexel/)

2020 has been quite a year, and it’s only March. But while it’s important to pay attention to global events and follow evidence-based advice for, say, minimizing the spread of a dangerous new disease, it’s also important to find moments of peace and calm. If you’re having trouble disconnecting from the world’s stressors, take a leisurely digital stroll through these stories to amuse, relax, and distract your anxious brain.

Step one: Look at these puppies

We’re not pulling any punches here, folks. Our first story to clear away your mental cobwebs is an investigation into corgi mixes—specifically, why they look like corgis disguised as other dogs. Here are the genetics behind their incorgnito appearance (with plenty of adorable pictures, of course).

Explore the soothing science of ASMR

The internet-fueled phenomenon known as ASMR is a divisive topic. Some fanatics say the sounds (and sometimes even the sights) of ASMR send them into a trancelike state of inner peace, and many say ASMR videos give them shivers of pleasure. But others report an enraging response to the same stimuli.

Which camp do you fall into? The answer might well be... both. Find out more in our recent feature on ASMR and its dark cousin, misophonia. If you’d prefer an auditory exploration of the topic, check out our podcast episode below. And you can see and hear a chemistry-powered example for yourself right here.

Stop to think about how beautiful bugs can be

We typically think of insects as pests or pestilences, carrying disease or gnawing their way through our gardens before we can get a bite. But they’re also gorgeous creatures. Photographer Levon Biss shows them off in these highly-detailed images—each specimen required thousands of individual shots, which he stitched together over the course of several weeks. The results are nothing short of stunning.

Consider the evolutionary benefits of cuteness

Humans are literally hard-wired to find certain creatures and objects adorable and react accordingly. But why? Find out more here.

Raise a SCOBY to get a pet and a beverage all at once

Kombucha may be a trendy beverage right now, but brewing it is an ancient practice—and one you can easily do at home. PopSci’s Sandra Gutierrez recently adopted a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) of her own, and her adventures in raising the squishy creature provide a comforting introduction to making delicious tea in your own kitchen.

Try a new meditation app

Humans have been meditating for thousands of years, but we’ve only recently realized our stress-inducing smartphones have the potential to help us chill out. Find out how different apps can help you achieve mindfulness during trying times.

Read about a famous slice of pie

In the shadow of Alaska’s Kuskokwim Mountains, nestled in a valley along the banks of a winding river, there’s a town called Takotna with a population of a mere 49 hearty souls. Each March, this cozy hamlet doubles its numbers as mushers racing the Iditarod Trail come here for their mandatory 24-hour rest. On a course that traverses just under a thousand brutally cold and snowy miles from Anchorage to Nome, the racers and their dog teams have gone about a third of their journey when they reach Takotna. So what makes this place their stopover of choice? Pies. Find the recipe here.

Watch a humble slime mold predict the shape of the universe

Lowly slime molds are helping us map out the cosmos, which is weirdly calming to think about. They also have hundreds of sexes, so that’s great for them.

Make scientific illustration your chill new hobby

Spending a lot more time at home lately? That’s a great excuse to invest some time and patience into mastering (or at least reaching basic competency in) a new hobby. Scientific illustration is just the kind of multidisciplinary practice to challenge you mentally, physically, and creatively—and you might be surprised how many creatures there are to draw sitting right in your backyard (or on your fire escape). Here’s a guide to getting started.

Binge a new podcast (or four)

Now is the perfect time to catch up on nearly two years of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, a hit podcast from the editors of Popular Science. With episodes on everything from the surprisingly feminist history of butter sculptures to Benjamin Franklin’s love of hanging out in the nude, we guarantee you’ll be intrigued.

If you’re already a seasoned Weirdo, you can check out the other science and tech podcasts our team loves to listen to. We’ve got a list of sci-fi podcast recommendations, too. Reality is overrated.

Watch tiny tadpoles breathe by ‘bubble sucking’

Scientists recently discovered a Pokémon-esque power called bubble sucking with help from high-speed cameras:

View this post on Instagram

🐸 Tiny tadpoles breathe by "bubble-sucking." This high-speed camera footage reveals the Pokemon-like technique for the first time. 🐸 Blowing spit bubbles might seem silly or immature, but when you’re a tiny aquatic creature just trying to catch a breath, there’s a good reason for it. Researchers at @uconn have finally cracked the timeline of a tadpole's breathing process after evolutionary biologist Kurt Schwenk noticed a splashy new behavior while watching a baby tree frog shimmy near the surface of its tank: “When it swam away it left a bubble behind.” 🐸 Schwenk and his graduate student Jackson Phillips had planned to feed the tadpoles to salamanders for an experiment, but they quickly switched course. They thought the bubble could be a clue to how young amphibians flex their developing lungs without breaching the water’s surface. 🐸 To test their idea, Schwenk and Phillips set out for the New England swamps to collect tadpoles belonging to four different species, along with spotted salamanders, diving beetles, and pulmonate snails. They also mail-ordered African clawed frogs, which were bred to have see-through skin. They then filmed each subject with high-speed monochrome cameras (capturing 30 to 1,000 frames per second) backlit with LEDs to see what was happening below the surface of the water—and the creatures’ skin. 🐸 The videos, including the above footage of a wood frog tadpole (first clip) and green frog tadpoles (second clip), were published with a recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 🐸 To read more about Schwenk and Phillips' findings, bubble-suck your way to the #linkinbio 👉 @popsci 📹: K. Shwenck and @jack.outside

A post shared by Popular Science (@popsci) on Feb 25, 2020 at 12:42pm PST

See more of this amazing ability here.

Soak your stress away with a DIY bath bomb

If you’ve got a bathtub and the ability to order some basic supplies on Amazon, you have everything you need to make yourself a veritable hoard of bath bombs. Nothing is more relaxing than surrounding yourself in warm, fizzy, pleasant-smelling waters.

Think about aliens, but in a chill way

Given all the real estate in the cosmos, astronomers generally agree there’s got to be other beings out there. PopSci’s Rob Verger recently mused on why it’s so improbable for humans to be alone in the universe—and on how we’re working to find what alien life might be keeping us company.

Gaze upon some stunning photos for a spell

From lunar halos and opera-singing fish to flying pumas and red-hot lava tongues, PopSci has plenty of brilliant images to scroll through. For something a bit sillier, check out the winners of the latest Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. And if you’re craving extraterrestrial entertainment, get your head into the clouds with our staff’s favorite images of space.

0 notes

scootoaster · 5 years

Text

Soothing stories to take your mind off stressful things

Warning: Contains puppies. And nude Founding Fathers. (Pexel/)

Step one: Look at these puppies

Explore the soothing science of ASMR

Stop to think about how beautiful bugs can be

Consider the evolutionary benefits of cuteness

Humans are literally hard-wired to find certain creatures and objects adorable and react accordingly. But why? Find out more here.

Raise a SCOBY to get a pet and a beverage all at once

Try a new meditation app

Read about a famous slice of pie

Watch a humble slime mold predict the shape of the universe

Lowly slime molds are helping us map out the cosmos, which is weirdly calming to think about. They also have hundreds of sexes, so that’s great for them.

Make scientific illustration your chill new hobby

Binge a new podcast (or four)

Watch tiny tadpoles breathe by ‘bubble sucking’

Scientists recently discovered a Pokémon-esque power called bubble sucking with help from high-speed cameras:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Popular Science (@popsci) on Feb 25, 2020 at 12:42pm PST

See more of this amazing ability here.

Soak your stress away with a DIY bath bomb

Think about aliens, but in a chill way

Gaze upon some stunning photos for a spell

0 notes

elsbethvanparidon-blog · 7 years

Text

From left to right, top to bottom and maximalism to minimalism, the wheels of the fashion bus go round and round. Temper takes a closer look at the thought of simplicity in fashion, and all it entails, through the eyes of designer Eva Yiwei Xu and her brand All Comes From Nothing.

Liúbái (留白 ) or ‘blanking’ is a commonly used technique in traditional Chinese painting, leaving space for the imagination to run rife.

Despite hailing from three generations of doctors, Xu knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a fashion designer as their TV set somehow, and illegally so, received the Fashion TV cable signal back in 1996 when this network first launched. True story. Glued to the screen watching runway show upon runway show, the epiphany had struck. A myriad of internships later, starring Michael Kors and the likes, Xu launched her own brand: All Comes From Nothing. Temper grabs this up and comer – clad in her own light-grey Jackie dress design – by the lapels and talks blanking techniques, oriental poppies and hybrid music! With the Muse of minimalism guiding us through the process like a white thread.

Minimalism as we know it may very well be a western art movement launched in the 1960s, yet perhaps we might be able to shine a Chinese light on this “blank canvas” theme at hand:

Blanking is a commonly used technique in the creation of traditional Chinese works of art. The word “blank” actually refers to the art of painting and calligraphy in order to make come full circle the overall bigger picture. The rules in China’s traditional art of painting are more harmonious and intend to leave the space open for imagination and interpretation. Have a nice minimalist ring to it, if you ask me — a layman by all acounts, true.

As the creative requirements of Chinese painting do not demand strict adherence to reality or to a particular angle of view or source of light, the painter has complete freedom in terms of artistic conception, structural composition and method of expression. It’s all about composition and space. To give prominence to the main subject, it is permitted to omit the background entirely and simply leave it blank. At the same time, taking into account how the sizes and shapes of the spaces in the painting all differ from one another, the very absence of content can itself create rhythm and variety. Sometimes this variety and the balance created in this way is further enriched by the addition of inscriptions in the empty space. Well, as they say…

All Comes From Nothing!

About Moxy And Muses

All Comes From Nothing (ACFN) is womenswear created by artist and designer Eva Yiwei Xu based in both New York and Shanghai. Inspired by the Chinese philosophy of simplicity and Minimalism art, Xu’s designs combine the softness found in natural fabrics with geometric shapes, creating versatile and unique looks. Each ACFN piece yields to the essence of the individual, allowing their inner identity to shine and power through. Artistic, minimal and elegant, are the keywords when flipping through Xu’s lookbook.

The ACFN woman has reached a point in life where she just knows. With a rooted identity, she welcomes everything in life with open arms. Both the pleasant and challenging moments along the ride are savored equally given each plays a distinct part in the discovery of one’s lifepath. Dedicated to her creative work, Xu’s client dares to venture into ideas left unexplored by many who have come before her. As a strong individual, the ACFN woman is by no means a fashion victim; clothing does not define her identity. Au contraire, her overall essence of self defines her style. The ACFN woman creates for life. She is artistic, elegant, intuitive and adventurous. Girl got moxy. Fashion is her accomplice, not her calling card.

The main Muse calling card for Xu herself is art. Whether it be through color, shapes, patterns or the overall aesthetic feel, some inspirations find their way into Xu’s design in a more literal manner than others. Whether it be architecture or Sol LeWitt (the American artist linked to movements including Conceptual art and Minimalism); inspiration rages like red lit fire in Xu’s life. One such current example is that of her soon-to-follow SS18 collection fully based on Georgia o’Keeffe’s Oriental Poppies and Pearls; all very feminine – the flowers represent vaginas, methought. Mind you, and us, Contemporary Art, Modern Art or Minimalism are all still relatively new concepts in China, with a very limited percentage of people – typical in the initial stages of the development of the individual in a newly developed society — interested in exploring these new unbeaten sites. On a very positive note, their interest and eagerness to learn is most definitely on the rise. This, looking on the bright side, gives Xu an advantage since her collections have the power to transfer more Art Basel knowledge onto her growing Chinese client- and fan-base.

“If you got what it takes and you power through, people will see you. They will take note!” Eva Yiwei Xu

About Minimalist Simplicity And Mirroring Society

Because you need to know in order to grow, so bear with us!

In “Minimalism: Designing Simplicity”, Hartmut Obendorf teaches us the following:

“ Minimalism as a style in visual arts and music, uses pared-down design elements. The term originates from the artistic movement that appeared in 1960s New York, when a group of artists including Donald Judd, John McCracken and Agnes Martin rejected the traditional representations in painting and sculptures and chose to pursue the new mode that owed as little as possible to the physical existence of an object. Deriving from reductive aspects of Modernism, Judd described his work as ‘the simple expression of complex thought’, summing up the aesthetic as it exists within fashion, too.”

Nevertheless, minimalism in fashion stretches far beyond the use of single color or the denotation of a mere trend embracing simplicity. The minimalist aesthetic has long found itself closely allied with the wider range of social development, incessantly reinventing itself and adapting to befit the diverse chapters of our post-1950 society.

“Minimalism served as an indicator of economic cycles and technological development. Looking back, at the development of the 20th century, we can observe the minimalism underpinning almost every social development, even before the official start of the minimalist movement. From women entering the workforce to winning the voting rights, the story of the modern working woman also mirrors the rise and fall of minimalism.” Obendorf continues. The onset of society’s more multifaceted lifestyle was accompanied by a simplified, masculine and more practical wardrobe (see Coco Chanel’s playbook), whereas the backlashes against feminism — during the 1950s and 1980s – unleashed a return to the hyper-feminine look (for example Dior’s New look). (Countered once again by the avant-garde creators to follow, but who’s counting.)

“The relationship between popular music and fashion has been culturally significant since the 1950s, and this book explores the ways in which music and musicians play a key role in the shaping of identity, taste and consumption.” Janice Miller in “Fashion and Music”

About Modish Infusion

Circling back to Xu, then, minimalism represents a state of comfort. First confronted with the style when visiting the Dia:Beacon Museum (located at some two hours from New York City), she realized this was it. This was the art form she had been dreaming of. This was her jam. Never before, in all of her years studying art and fashion/textile design at Tsinghua University prior to that particular museum visit, had she come across a style that spoke to her in such a way. New Romantics, Pop Art, all those did not cater to her specific taste… Until she “met” and clicked with Eva Hudson. “You might even say this type of art is connected to Chinese culture, in terms of Zen,” Xu explains.

When we arrive at the crossroads between Xu’s creations and China, we mostly see her native country’s influence come out in her use of techniques. New embroidery techniques, visits to the manufacturing factories to get the latest in technology, Xu remains highly hands-on. When it comes to the art itself, she does at times refer to her experiences in traditional Chinese painting: Yep, that blanking technique. As opposed to the West, Chinese traditional art does not require the craftsman to fill up the entire frame, but one may leave the space open for the imagination to fill in. A rather minimalist thought, in Xu’s book. Being in New York only adds to that imagination. The city’s people, the streets, their straightforwardness, the electricity, all combined spark the creative mind on a daily basis. Surrounded by a close-knit circle of Chinese designer, musician, filmmaker and artist friends who have all come here to do their own thing, Xu finds herself in an nurturing and -stimulating setting 24/7. The city never sleeps. Nor does the imagination.

Not interested in merely hosting a fashion show where models line up and scoot down the runway, Xu aims to turn her seasonal presentations into hotblooded events. Entertainment, if you will. With a little help from her artistic friends: “The Either”. One hybrid, futuristic, humanistic, globalistic band integrating electric pipa, electric erhu and electric vocals, these guys have joined strings with Xu at her past three runway shows, dishing out some live performances as well as taking the lead in musical direction. Xu and The Either make for a perfectly harmonious match, both literally combining the concepts of futurism and blanking minimalism. Both parties share the same target and are boldly going where no one has gone before. Dressed up in All comes from nothing.

As both Xu and her musical counterparts at The Either have stated: The future – of fashion, art and humanity — is now. Tradition, wherever on the globe you may find yourself, is something you know, it’s something you’ve grown up with; it is innate. The task remains for us all to bounce down that unbeaten path and incorporate innovation as to kick off a new limitless, boundary-shattering cycle. And thus we come full circle. Zen.

Follow Xu and her brand All Comes From Nothing on

Facebook

Instagram

Shop ACFN online!

Images: All images belong to Elsbeth van Paridon for Temper Magazine

Close-Up: Minimalism! All Comes From Nothing. From left to right, top to bottom and maximalism to minimalism, the wheels of the fashion bus go round and round.

#art #china #design #fashion #featured #magazine #minimalism #modern art #new york #photography #shanghai #style #technology

0 notes

davidschnuckel · 7 years

Text

A New Vernacular:

Young Glass 2017 Speaks to the Trajectory of Contemporary Glass

The Fall issue of GASnews is hot off the digital press! Content in this issue is motivated by the theme of TECHNOLOGY and measures a wide variety of ways in which technology is influencing contemporary glass. With putting so much thought and effort in developing a paper presented at the 2015 Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium regarding the intersection of glass education and technology, I felt less inclined to pursue an article so directly relating to the theme. However, conversations regarding what happens when digital capabilities become integrated within a field so traditionally tactile and hands-on is definitely an interesting one. It's a conversation regarding transformation: how standard approaches to things can undergo a significant change when colliding with seemingly foreign or unrelated things. In turn, I wanted to examine that conversation within the context of a perfectly timed exhibition that has always stood as both metaphor and measuring stick of change within the international glass field. For this issue, I traveled to Denmark to write an an illustrative overview of the "Young Glass 2017" exhibition at the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft...one that only happens once every 10 years. Although knowing that the generation represented within the exhibition would be noticeably embracing various technologies in the development and showing of their work, the article also uses that same exhibition to paint a broader picture: a way to describe and speculate upon the evolution of the processes and techniques that have come to epitomize contemporary glass practice. Below is the draft I submitted to my Editor in its full, unedited version to serve as supplemental material to what is seen in the Summer 2017 issue of GASnews:

One of the most exciting barometers within contemporary glass provided a new measurement at which the field is expanding this past June. Young Glass 2017 is the fourth installment of a competitively juried exhibition established, organized, and hosted by Glasmuseet Ebeltoft housed in Ebeltoft, Denmark. The exhibition premise is unique in its vision on a couple of fronts. The first is in its intent to seek innovative approaches to thinking about and working with glass from practitioners specifically under the age of 35. The second is that this is a decennially occurring opportunity – that it only comes around every ten years. Due to these distinctive conditions, Young Glass functions in the short-term as an opportunity to highlight the diversity of approach and accomplishment at which a budding generation of artists and designers challenge and redefine conventional glass practice. In the long-term, the decades in between each Young Glass event noticeably documents the rate at which our field changes from decade to decade; not only from a technical standpoint in what is done with glass and how, but in the evolution of ideas and creative impulse its application is in service to. Following the opening of Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in 1986, founder Finn Lynggaard shared an interest with several colleagues to initiate a strategy to provide recognition and support for up-and-coming glass workers; one that would also suggest the future of the field as seen in the work of those who could potentially be paving the way. In turn, the first iteration of Young Glass was then launched in 1987, putting forth a call for applications to be reviewed by a jury of established, international glass artists. The precedent to have a rotating selection committee had then been set to follow in 1997 and again in 2007; ultimately broadening to host jurors who were not only artists, but museum directors, artistic directors, educators, and writers in the field. Jurors for Young Glass 2017 included Susan Warner, Artistic Director at the Museum of Glass (USA), Maja Heuer, Museum Director of The Glass Factory (Sweden), Jeffrey Sarmiento, Artist and Programme Leader of the University of Sunderland (United Kingdom), and Dan Mølgaard, Executive Director of Glasmuseet Ebeltoft (Denmark). Young Glass 2017 includes 57 artists from 326 applicants, a highly international show representing 18 countries. The work within the show is as equally diverse. No matter the approach in how each exhibition participant had engaged glass within the show, terms like craftsmanship and tradition are as honored as they are challenged. When it comes to object making, work within the show under this umbrella maintains a reverence – and a highly acute sensibility – towards excellence in glass working protocol. Whether oriented in a sculptural- or design-based pursuit, work that culminates in the object applies a much more refined handle on a wide variety of glass working processes than ever before; approaches to glassblowing, cold working, flame working, kiln forming, and imaging withhold a highly refined approach to things like surface and form (O’Neill), life-like representations of the natural world (Skyriver), cultural referencing and iconographic commentary (Peterson), and sculptural narrative (Deleurme). Even in the case where glass objects are being made, there are instances where glass is utilized as a supplementary material or a component instead of a primary focus within a time-based work (Weinberg). Glass is also being found or – in some particular cases – repurposed; in one example debris resurrected from pulverized uselessness along the bed of a lap wheel to highly purposeful in the formal structure of a work (Thebault). More often than not, when objects are at play, it’s work that isn’t taking on the shape of identifiable forms or engaging the laborious glory of skill for its own sake. Not because “it’s cheap” as famously noted by our Studio Movement forefather, but because the sophistication of the questions these young artists are asking by way of glass is collectively broader than ever before. Pursuits in “beauty” for the sake of beauty seem passé. “Symbolism” and intentional “meaning” seem dated. Work geared towards the “explicit” or “straightforward” nearly extinct. The legacies of the “easy read” and the “one liner” have evolved into a level of thinking and making that demand more time and consideration in one’s general viewing. One family of work within the show advances technical capability as equally as it advances the imaginative inquiry that perpetuates it. The other family of work maintains a similar thoughtfulness and complexity of intent, but puts reverence for material, process, skill, and “the object” in the backseat to chance, the experimental, and/or phenomenology. As the scale of artistic vision in Young Glass 2017 indicates new breakthroughs in what working with glass now means, it also showcases a broader vocabulary of ideas and resolve in using it. The rising popularity between glass and performance, projection, and video are accounted for; non-object works that speak to live action art experience between artist and audience (Roux), multi-media installations projecting the beautifully redundant labors of physical activity (Houghton), and the blatantly tasteless merging of glass disaster and cinephilia (Skrott) are wonderful examples of each respectively. Even beyond those genres of artmaking are interesting glimpses into the young glass practitioner’s consideration of the body. One approach is in wearable work thinking of glass as fabric, transparent garment as an opportunity to speak towards ideas of exposure and vulnerability (Gonjo). Works culminating in objects, performances, and documentation of the human body performing glass-related tasks (Feracci), engaging common day-to-day occurrences with glass-based extensions (Rikken), or visualizing the negative space of one’s body through blown glass impressions of face and torso (Kudel) also abound. In thinking about the body in relation to glass from a material engineering angle, it’s interesting to see work pursued that merges the poetic consideration of place, the raw ingredients within it, and how that culminates in fascinating work rooted in glass chemistry(Jahncke). Another work along the same spirit of merging art and science creates an opportunity to view chemical reactions come and go in an Arduino programmed, temperature-changing chamber hosting Sodium Acetate; a sophisticated glass display case of constant crystallization and thawing activity (Kubelková). Speaking of digital tools, new technology is more readily integrated within the work of Young Glass 2017. Aside from what equipment video and projection requires to exhibit work of that nature, manufacturing processes such as water-jet cutting glass (Dickson) and 3D scanning and printing processes (Arday) are a tool that has been added to the young practitioner’s arsenal within a traditionally “hands-on”, tactile field of making. Time-based sensors, motion-activated sensors, kinetics, sound, circuitry and lighting all also becoming standard accessories; not only a counter to the customarily static nature of exhibited glass, but an opportunity to heighten the sensory experience within a viewing of work to places beyond the visual. To think about what all in the past 10 years has potentially impacted or influenced the direction with which young practitioners are approaching glass in Young Glass 2017 is equally intriguing; educational changes, economic tragedy, industrial shifts, environmental reconsiderations, cultural movements, and influential tremors from contemporary art are just a few potential provocateurs – of regional and international impression. I’m sure there are many more… There’s so much more to assess and speculate. Not only about what the participants in this show are revealing about the trajectory of the glass field, but what further it could suggest when compared against what had defined the essence of what was deemed “new” and “fresh” in previous generations of Young Glass exhibitions. Regardless, it is my recommendation that anyone in the community who is curious where the puck of contemporary glass working is going should do what they can to purchase a catalog of the Young Glass 2017 exhibition. Whether young ourselves, seasoned, or somewhere in between, we all could find opportunity to reexamine our place within its progressive course. http://glasmuseet.dk/young-glass/?lang=en David Schnuckel is an artist and educator, currently serving as Lecturer within the Glass Program of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

0 notes

brogansimonsexam · 7 years

Text

SAMANTHA TAYLOR - JOHNSON (WOOD) ANALYSIS.

For my analysis, I have focused on Sam Taylor - Wood’s moving images, specifically the art ones instead of the commercial ones as the art ones link to my exam piece and were my main inspiration for my own moving images.

About the artist:

Samantha Taylor - Johnson (born Wood) is an English filmmaker, photographer and visual artist. Originally a sculpture, Taylor - Johnson began working with photography, film and video in the 1990′s which she has continued to this day. Taylor - Johnson splits her time between producing film and commercial pieces for companies, trailers for movies and producing her own art pieces; which she classes as moving images.

Form:

From the 1990′s onward Taylor - Wood’s choice of medium has been photography, film and video but she did create some sculptures before this. The particular piece I focused on for my project is a time lapse video on a 35mm film and displayed as a single screen projection. In Taylor - Wood’s film and commercial work, the colours used and the way the colour is organised is completely based on what the film is being produced for. In the moving images I focused on for my work, the colours are quite sombre and she uses a lot of natural and skin tone based colours (peaches, browns, beige, grey). ‘A Little Death’ contains many shapes and forms, the mains ones being; the form of the hare which is completely rigid due to rigor mortis and the roundness of the peach sat next to it. Although at the beginning of the video the hare is in perfect condition, we see the form of it change due to decomposition, however the shape of the peach stays the same the whole way through. One main technique used in Taylor - Wood’s moving images (Art) is the completely still environment with only one aspect, the subject matter, moving. When we look at ‘The Last Century, 2005′ for example, everything is completely still except for the smoke rising from a man’s cigarette. Taylor - Wood’s reasoning for this was ‘...A group photograph of people in a bar, classically set up, not unlike these Doisneau photographs of French lunchtime drinking or any of those Manet paintings...the group is frozen in time but the outside world keeps moving...’. I feel that this is a main aspect of Taylor - Wood’s moving images as there are multiple other films that are produced in the same way. Another technique Taylor - Wood uses is a stationary camera which stays in the same spot, filming from the same distance and from the same angle throughout the entire film. This is what gives her work the ‘photograph’ look and makes the films more dramatic as the actors are having to do all the work. Due to the work being a moving image which has then been presented as a projection, I believe that the surface would look smooth, especially as walls are generally smooth. However, if someone was to touch the wall the video is being projected on, they would be able to feel the little bumps and ridges of the wall, which I feel fits with the video as the video flickers and isn’t exactly ‘smooth’ either. There is quite a lot of texture within ‘A Little Death’. The cabinet the hare and peach are presented on is smooth and shiny which contrasts the the patchy, rough looking concrete all behind it. We can also clearly see the fur on the hare which to me looks quite matted and pretty coarse in some parts, which is most probably due to the fact that the hare is dead and will start decomposing soon. ‘A Little Death’ is a 35mm film displayed as a single screen projection.

Context:

‘A Little Death’ was made in 2002, by Sam Taylor - Wood; a year after Taylor - Wood produced ‘Still Life’ which is similar in the fact that both videos portray decomposition but one of an animal and one of fruit. As this piece of work isn’t part of her film and commercial based work and part of her moving images, I believe the work was made for her own portfolio and pleasure. A way to experiment further with what she had already created and a way to continue on from her ‘Still Life’ film from 2001. In Taylor - Johnson’s word: ‘It was interesting in one way to take the idea (of still life) one step further by bringing in an animal, and also, that animal specifically, the hare in history, is the symbol of life and virility as well’. Sam Taylor - Johnson makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our share social and psychological conditions. In the centre of Taylor - Johnson’s creative work is the examination of the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects - either singly or in groups - in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict. The main aim of Taylor - Johnson’s work is for the viewer to be following a natural progression, a natural course of events. By having the camera as a witness she is not tampering with anything and by not editing her work she doesn’t give the pieces a narrative, making decisions about how things should be. Taylor - Johnson has stated that her main influences are easy, saying; ‘When I first saw Warhol’s films I was totally over - excited by the concept that something be just how it was, how it was presented. The obvious influence is the fact that he used real time, so what you’re looking at is a film of something that naturally transpires. I go to the cinema a lot. I look to the kind of gritty realism of filmmakers like Cassavetes. They’re more of an influence than other photographers’. Throughout Taylor - Johnson’s career there has been numerous artists who specialise in producing moving images but the one artist who came to mind straight away was British artist Tacita Dean and her film ‘Disappearance at sea’. ‘Disappearance at sea’ is a 16mm colour film shot on location at the lighthouse of St Abb’s Head in northern England. Shown on a loop, the fourteen - minute film consists of seven lengthy shots captured by a static camera that alternate between close - ups of the rotating lighthouse bulbs and footage looking out to sea and as time goes on we see the colour of the sky shifting. This piece related to Taylor - Johnson’s piece as they have the same filming technique; a static camera which films a slow change to the subject matter, while also being quite grainy just like the quality of ‘A Little Death’. After doing some research into moving images, I found Bill Viola, who creates haunting, emotionally charged videos that consider universal themes of spirituality, life, death, love and hate through an intense focus on the human form. A piece of work I feel links to ‘A Little Death’ is ‘Three Women’ from Viola’s Transfiguration series. ‘Three Women’ captures a mother and her two daughters passing through an invisible boundary and then slowly returning. Combining grainy images recorded in analogue video with those shot in high - definition allows Viola to take the viewer on a journey between obscurity and clarity - as if from death to life. Again, Viola’s work links to Taylor - Johnson’s as they have the same filming technique (static camera) and grainy quality to them, but the concept behind ‘Three Women’ also links to ‘A Little Death’ due to ‘A Little Death’ depicting the stages of death through decomposition, which at the same time takes it through a process of coming alive again, while ‘Three Women’ also depicts death into life. Taylor - Johnson has also been compared to American photographer Tina Barney, most well known for her large - scale, colour portraits of her family and close friends, and Bruce Nauman who creates grainy and simplistic videos as well as photographs. Nauman’s piece ‘ Lip Sync, 1969′ is what I personally link directly to Taylor - Johnson’s work for that fact that it is more of a moving image due to the only movement coming from the mouth of the model. I am unable to find a direct link between ‘A Little Death ‘ and the social or political history of the time however one main link that can be made to the political history of 2002 is the theme of death; as 23 politicians from around the world died throughout that year. Taylor - Johnson herself said: ‘the deathly scenario (talking about going from ‘Still Life’ to ‘A Little Death’) came to life again, and then it evolved into a sort of slasher horror film version of ‘Still Life’. I personally agree with Taylor- Wood’s statement ‘a sort of slasher horror film’ as it reminds me of the cursed video from The Ring and the home movies from Sinister. I link ‘A Little Death’ to the cursed video due to the fact they both contain completely still slides in which one part of the image, usually the focal point, will move. I also link it to the home movies from Sinister because they have a similar quality to them; the home videos in Sinister are quite grainy and flicker a bit due to them being filmed on a vintage camera, very similar to the graininess featured in Taylor -Johnson’s moving images.

Content:

This particular piece is one of Samantha Taylor - Johnson’s moving images from her ‘art’ portfolio. The 3 minute 49 second film is a time - lapse produced as a single screen projection which focuses on the decomposition of a hare. For the first 30 seconds of the film everything is completely still, it looks like a picture or even a realistic painting but as time goes on we slowly see the hare starting to decompose, while a single peach sits next to it, perfectly preserved throughout the whole film. This piece explores mortality and the arguable finality of death. Both ‘A Little Death’ and its linked piece ‘Still Life’ make an interesting pair as ‘Still Life’ takes a perfectly, healthy looking bowl of fruit and seems to take it into a place of degradation and nothingness, while ‘A Little Death’ starts off with an object of death and takes it through a process of coming alive again through the decomposition process. Also, in ‘A Little Death’ there is a single peach placed alongside the decomposing hare which stays perfect throughout the entire film something which Taylor - Johnson found disturbing in itself and believed it could be the result of it being genetically modified. The title of this piece is ‘A Little Death’. The main reason for this title would be because we are seeing a dead hare going through the decomposition stage, after death. I believe the ‘A Little’ part is because there is not actually that much death involved in the film, the hare itself may be dead but through the hare’s death life is born and maggots and flies are able to feed and survive off of it. Also, the peach in the frame doesn’t rot at all, it stays fresh throughout the whole film which adds to the amount of life portrayed compared to death. I think the title does change the way we see the work. When I initially watched ‘A Little Death’, I was predominantly focusing on the decomposing hare due to the hare being the main aspect of the video and the word ‘death’ in the title. After actually contemplating the title and re watching the video, I noticed that the key word in the title is ‘little’ and not ‘death’ as there is more life than death throughout the film; shown through the peach staying fresh and the maggots and flies reproducing. I don’t believe any part of the film has been exaggerated purely for the fact that nothing within the frame has been made to stand out from the background / other objects. Both the peach and hare are dull in colour, which although we can clearly see them, neither of them particularly stand out. Even the maggots and flies haven’t been made to stand out, when the decomposition stage first begins, it is actually really hard to see what is actually happen, it just looks as if the camera is a bit fuzzy in one section. The only distortion taking place is time, specifically the time in which the whole decomposition takes. Decomposition would usually take months, even years to consume a living object completely, but due to Taylor - Wood creating a time - lapse video, we are able to view the whole process in a matter of minutes.

0 notes