#me not do sketchy stuff level impossible

[avirxy]

my dearest sillies

[eerna]

can you explain your art techniques a little bit further? I just saw your post about arcane helping you drop line art and stuff, and I wanted to understand better (as someone trying to get into digital art)

Sureee, ty for asking! :)

For the first 7 years of my digital art journey I imitated the comicbook-style art tutorials and techniques artists I liked used. This means that I would start out with a sketch, draw the lineart on another layer on top of the sketch, hide the sketch, use solid blocks of color on separate layers for the coloring, and add lighting effects on top of it all. I was never really happy with how it turned out, and I often felt like I shouldn't have gone past the colored sketch phase because the full render would lose so much life. I used pretty much the same brushes I use now, aside from some textured ones, but not to their full potential because they were painting brushes being used for flat shading. Here's a few examples of fully rendered stuff from 2020-2021:

Then, I realized I do NOT have to do things I don't wanna do, and I can totally remove any steps from the process that I wish! I experimented for a while until I settled on a new thing that worked for me. And so my current process is: draw a sketch, color it all on one layer (base colors), add light effects if needed, add another layer on top of everything, and paint until satisfied with the level of rendering. Then I add optional effects, such as fires or patterns. This means I leave the sketch layer visible, so I have to clean it and base colors with erasers as I work, but it enables me to preserve the sketchy energy. The "all rendering on one layer" approach frees my hand and I don't feel pressure to render everything separately and perfectly, which in turn, ironically, makes my art look more detailed because the eye compensates for unfinished bits. In addition, the line between a colored sketch and a fully rendered piece is much thinner, which means I don't have to commit to completing anything, and that is a big deal for an insecure person prone to artblocks. If I lose interest halfway through the lineart-and-blocks-of-color process, I am left with an unusable piece. If I do it halfway through the painting process, I get a charming, messy piece a la my recent Chappell Roan art (I left the armor unfinished, and yet it doesn't clash with the rest of the art). Here's a recreation I did to show what a big difference the different approach makes:

So why didn't I stop doing lineart sooner? I did try, but my attempts tried to replicate what I did when painting traditionally, instead of adjusting to my digital abilities, so it usually looked whack. I remember showing my friends the Rito Village piece back in 2019, which was painted based on a screenshot from the game, and one of them telling me "Don't go back to lineart!" I was like "YEAH I am NOT going back to lineart!!! I will keep painting!!!" Only to realize that painting landscapes with already stylized references and painting portraits were completely different. Here's a painting portrait from one of those trial and error attempts. Later I realized the mistake was working on TOP of the sketch, as I would have done for traditional work, instead of both below AND on top of it - after all, my intention was to preserve the life of the sketch, which was impossible when I couldn't even see it. I also didn't understand color values (or honestly, any color aspects) very well, resulting in some low-contrast, unappealing blobs.

So yeah, my advice to any beginner digital artist is: experiment and figure out what works for you. Think about what makes you happy when creating, and build your process around it. Also, keep researching art theory and applying it to your work. Good luck to you and all other digital artists~

[schismusic]

Æon Flux and the end of all things

I don't remember the first time I heard of Æon Flux but I sure as hell remember the first time I watched it, and it wasn't too long ago which would technically not warrant the level of obsession I have for that shit, but here we are anyway.

I was knocked the fuck out on painkillers, two of my wisdom teeth freshly removed, not even remotely worried about the exam that I had coming up in like two days from then. So I was barely moving away from my swivel chair and sleeping on a whole ass armored pillow to prevent from tossing and turning and shit felt so surreal to me. It was like the eating chair from the last Cronenberg movie. So I delved into Æon Flux essentially blind and bingewatched the shit out of it. Twice. Ended up downloading the whole thing from some sketchy ass 1080p remastered torrent, rewatched it again, and spread it around personally in a more cauterized Google Drive folder (so if you guys got a nasty ass virtual STD from it, my bad I guess), not even a month after watching the series. Shit was fucked, in short, and every rewatch just fueled this obsession even further.

(image taken from Episode 1, Season 1)

One thing about me: when I obsess over stuff I want to draw something at the very least inspired by it. Happens to me a lot with Autechre, who are actually one of maybe three bands I would not hesitate to call my favourite based on an absolutely objective principle which is absolutely not up for discussion and which might be the object of a future post at this point. But the point is fucking Æon Flux is essentially impossible to replicate because Peter Chung's character designs are so recognizable that you start seeing them in literally every other movie that came out in the late '90s/early 2000s - and for reference, Æon Flux was brought to an end in 1995. Consequently, all attempts at drawing Æon Flux-inspired stuff end up either feeling very derivative or looking like fucking trash. Artistry is a weird thing because sometimes it inspires other people, other times it just inspires man-slaughtering rage.

Somewhat many of my friends are or have at one point tried to be accomplished visual artists. Some have made it to professional/teaching level, some others have an art school diploma or degree - and I'll be using this space to shout out @coto-letta aka V., who has recently rejoined Tumblr after years of absence. We met on here, when her handle was much different, and I mistook her for an ex of mine (whom, surprisingly, we are still on relatively good - if quiet - terms with) so I slid into her DMs as you do, and she was like "yeah actually I have no clue who the fuck you are I just think your blog is neat and dropped a follow" which was quite a fundamental moment in understanding that while my life was written like a dodgy soap-opera, that didn't mean I was the centre of the entire world. Anyway, the reason I'm shouting her out is because sometimes something deeper and older than you remember has a way of finding you again when you least expect it and that's what happened when in January 2023 (after V. had left Tumblr for at that point about two years and we had exchanged Instagram accounts) I somehow ended up on her Insta and found out she had been tagged in a picture taken somewhere that looked suspiciously like my university's conference hall and I could not fucking believe she was in my city. I slid into her DMs again, as you do, and found out that no, that wasn't my uni's aula magna, but yes, she was in fact relocating in my city for her master's. So we met up after maybe seven years of on-and-off Internet friendship. It's a neat story, sure, but how the fuck do we tie it into Æon Flux?

(image taken from Episode 3, Season 2: Leisure)

Not trying to be overly dramatic here, but Æon Flux to me is just about a condensation of everything that "art" can mean. Not just visual flare or style, not just deep meaning or interesting ways of putting across one or more questions and never a definitive answer to any of them (more often than not, it's sets of possible answers - usually two, neither of which ends up covering the whole array of possibilities, both of which actually leave a lot to be desired in a number of different ways), not just this insane fucking music that toys with everything you expect from animation courtesy of Drew Neumann who may just rank as one of the best soundtrack artists ever in virtue of this single work. It's the whole package. You would think it'd work taken in pieces, and it does, no objection to that: but it works even better as a whole package. If the moral questioning (and the philosophical musings of season 3, which is unjustly underrated because "it's too normal" by hipster wannabe critic dilettantes who like to think that they could do better than that. Everybody else on the other hand is generally able to stop pull their head out their own ass and recognize, at the very least, the excellent craftsmanship and talent that went into the ten long episodes) wasn't accompanied by the weird fetishistic sex it'd be somewhat less impactful, almost like a cauterized Tenshi no tamago made into a series for mainstream late-night TV audiences. The twist was that MTV's executives, at the time, "didn't understand [the double entendres], they didn't even notice them. So, we were okay", in producer Japhet Asher's own words in the short documentary Investigation: The History of Æon Flux. The network was, in fact, trying to break into the mainstream - they simply couldn't keep their creatives at bay. No wonder they turned to Jersey Shore as they went along.

(image taken from Episode 5, Season 3: The Demiurge)

Even just the main characters' purported edginess, clearly something "of its time", is never played entirely straight. Both leads are way too complex, and very clearly presented as such, to be just summed up by "Æon Flux is an anarchist/Trevor Goodchild is a dictator". Both of which are true, by the way, they're just one part of a full picture. Even within the context of its necessary linearity - this is still an animated short and as such moves only in one direction, even though a number of episodes (specifically Mirror and Chronophasia) deliberately fuck with the viewer's perception of times on varying degrees of diegesis and extradiegesis - the series could be perceived as, indeed, a sandbox: consequently, the viewer could set sail and explore it. This is further encouraged by the series's active weirdness to whoever would want to try and make sense of the world's story. There is no history, there is just the story at hand: an eternal present which you can't understand ("un eterno presente che capire non sai": Ferretti knew his shit, regardless of how it went after CCCP) and which Æon and Trevor are not interested in even trying to contextualize. Not a surprise then that they'd be into each other: their closeness in body and heart doesn't exist at the mind's level, and the whole thing falls apart miserably every time it looks like they could be finally let their weapons down. But as Æon completely understands, and as Trevor seems to actively try to ignore, the fight is already the whole point: star-cross'd as they may be, the entire act of playfully hunting each other for sport both in the bedroom and on the battlefield is what Trevor Goodchild and Æon Flux thrive on. Trevor wants stability but an Æon who doesn't fight back is simply not Æon; Æon does not want the stability, but she definitely likes Trevor to an extent and finds more in common with him that she would probably be willing to admit (I would like to thank Tumblr user @brw on thons very good analysis of the episode A Last Time for Everything, which heavily inspired this section of the post!). In short: if Trevor seems to embody Pier Paolo Pasolini's idea that "there is nothing more anarchistic than power" ("non c'è nulla di più anarchico del potere") then Æon flips the statement on its head: "there is nothing more powerful than anarchism". That is, of course, until we once again confront my signature ad-hoc elephant in the room that this statement just summoned.

(Image taken from Episode 1, Season 1)

No spoilers intended, but if you so much as google the name of the series you will easily find out that Æon Flux dies a whole lot throughout the series*. Season 1 and all the shorts from season 2 end with her dying ungrateful deaths and a couple of the long episodes leave much to be desired in the way of positive closure, with Ether Drift Theory representing a peak in bleakness for season 3. Most of the shorts where Æon dies imply that either absolutely nothing changes in the world around when she's lost or that Trevor Goodchild literally just succeeds in all of his goals (see Season 1's finale), and one could make a case that even if she did carry her missions through there would be absolutely nothing to show for it: somebody goes up the chain of power, everything is restored, there is one more tyrant to murder. Not to be that one guy who quotes Nietzsche about everything, but the eternal recurrence of the same is the first thing that comes to mind when watching Æon Flux, especially exemplified and even literalized by the episode War, possibly the best of the short ones: it's the same fucking story four times over a five-minute run time and nothing ever gets better for anyone. The body count in the episode is unquantifiably large - every one of the fallen a potential new Æon Flux or Trevor Goodchild. But this, in a way, implies that Æon keeps being reborn, and one could argue that the act of capturing a fly with her venus-fly-trap eye could simply be her coming back to life, as it were; stopping the most evident sign of decay, turning her eyes outward yet again, to face the eternal return of the same again and again and again…

(Image taken from Episode 8, Season 3: Ether Drift Theory)

You can find Æon Flux for free on the Internet Archive.

*as I was discussing the final draft of this post with my friend @oldshittydog we had a pretty interesting discussion which I thought should be added here for an even clearer, fuller picture:

[unluckyknight-21]

i've decided that the Good Place is real.

I finally know the answer to the question that has been asked since the dawn of man or at least since Greek philosophers have been making people think about stuff. ("Plato", f**king nerd).

The question in question is: "What happens when we die?".

The answer is: It's on Netflix in the form of a series called: "The Good Place".

For those who don't know, 'The Good Place' is a hit American comedy-fantasy series created by Michael Schur, It aired between 2018 to 2020 on NBC.

(⚠️SPOILER WARING⚠️: For those who haven't watched 'The Good Place')

The show revolves around 4 humans who've died and went onto the "Good Place" or so they think, they soon find out that they're actually in the "Bad Place" and they've actually been partnered together by a demon in a perfectly designed experimental 'hell' so that they can torture and make each other miserable for eternity.

But to the surprise of everyone in the Bad Place, the 4 humans actually helped each other be better than they ever were on earth, the demon in charge of them would try to wipe their memories and restart the experiment but the 4 humans would always find each other, become better by helping each other and outsmart the demons.

It became such an inconvenience that the main demon eventually gives up and teams up with the humans to try and get them into the real Good Place but then we find out that there is something wrong with the system of how people are judged when they die.

THAT'S where my religious girlfriend (God bless her or whoever is up there) got kind of sketchy about the show because her religious worldview couldn't accept that "Heaven" was flawed.

And I can understand that because most religious people, no matter what religion, would find it hard to believe that there is something wrong with the afterlife, the very thing that they've been told their entire lives they will go to after they die.

First of, the afterlife is the most mysterious thing that humans believe in because no one knows where or what it is, even Shakespeare made a whole speech thing about it because being a white guy during the 1500's he had the privilege of thinking about death while others were too busy being either poor or slaves and I have a feeling that they didn't enjoy it.

And secondly, Being humans, we couldn't handle not understanding something, so we created different versions of the afterlife using religions, but every religion had the same rules: Follow a certain way of life and be good so that when you die, you will be granted eternal happiness.

And that was the flaw in 'The Good Place', the protagonists in the show discovered that the rules to get into heaven were too broad, life on earth became too complicated because when you try to do good, you are setting off a chain of events that causes misery for others without even knowing it and that makes it impossible to earn enough "afterlife good points".

And so what do our protagonists do? They fix the afterlife, they make it so that no matter how you live your life on earth, when you die, you will get into a specifically designed hell that will test you until you become the best version of you and, only then, will you get into the 'Good Place'.

And it doesn't stop there, after you've had your eternity of fun, pleasurable bliss and you finally feel at peace, you actually have the choice to leave paradise and become one with the universe.

That to me is the definition of a perfect afterlife and is the reason why I've decided that the Good Place's version of the afterlife is what will actually happen when I die.

Now you might be thinking: "Wow, that is denial on a whole new level, I can't believe this guy is not just handsome but is he is also so scared of not knowing what happens when we die that he chooses to believe that the made up heaven of some tv show is the real heaven AND he's also handsome".

Well, I say to you, thank you, I am handsome but also, just like what my college professor told the dean why he has liking all the bikini pictures of my female classmate on Instagram: "Let me explain".

You have to remember one thing: All versions of heaven are made up.

That's the point I've been trying to make since the start, humans couldn't handle not knowing what happens when we die so we created religions, created rules into getting to heaven.

AND to a horrible extent, some of us created cults so that people will give them money to tell them that they're getting into heaven and that is simply despicable.

I'm not pointing fingers at any religion, although, when I mentioned money-grabbing cults what was the first one you thought of? And why was it 'Scientology'?

And if you're filipino, just like me, you know which one I am thinking of.

That is my problem with religion, they instill fear and guilt to their followers to keep them subservient and they wage war to anyone who thinks otherwise, but enough about christianity.

Meanwhile, in the "rules" of the Good Place, you simply need to do one thing to get into heaven: Be Good.

Be good to yourself, be good to others and put out good into the world. No subscription or body count needed.

I'm not saying that other religions scriptures/bibles/teachings tell their followers otherwise, I truly believe that they are no bad religions, just bad people. True good people, use their religion to impart good onto others and I believe that even without they're religion they will still be good. Good people are just that.

And then comes along this little comedy show, tells me that I need only to be good to get into heaven? Umm...yes please!

But if you think: "Then that means you're just being good because you want to get into heaven!", then what do you think religious people are doing? They're told to be good to get into heaven and if they don't? Eternal damnation. I don't know about you but that will definitely motivate me to be good.

But keep in mind that I don't really believe that the heaven in 'The Good Place' is real. Of course it isn't! it's just some comedy show that a white guy made, another Shakespeare situation if I ever saw one.

But I CHOOSE to believe it, just like any other religious person chose to believe their religion, because we're all scared of not knowing what will happen when we die so we cling to a belief that makes us feel safe.

Religion can be beautiful, I love seeing people become passionate about being good, I love when they dance and sing in choirs about how you should love others and spread happiness. God knows, I want to join in with Whoopi Goldberg and the other nuns in Sister Act when they were singing their hearts out, THAT is what heaven is all about.

But religion is flawed due to human error, divinity was defined by a humans a few thousand years ago and we've been suffering from it ever since. You want to tell me that God is perfect? Homer wrote in the Odyssey that Zeus turns into a swan to have sex with women. That's not perfect, that's means Homer had a furry kink.

The Good Place, isn't perfect either, especially in season 4 when some episodes definitely felt like they were just trying to run out the clock but it's message is, to not focus on what happens when we die.

My personal view on the afterlife is to not think about it too much. We spend so much of our lives trying to mold our life and our choices to align with the views of our designated religion or belief so that we get to be rewarded in the next life, when what we need to do is focus on the here and now.

To live your life on earth, the way you want it BUT also remember not to hurt others and even to put out some good out there in the world. Sounds unfair? It is.

But no matter how evil the world is, it's up to us to make it a little bit better for others and hope, just HOPE, that others will do the same thing.

And you might be saying: "Well, that's not how the world works" and the sad thing is you're right (Wow, bummer much?).

People will be bad, they will be selfish and they will choose to feel pleasure rather than suffer so that others would be happy, some greater than others, but yes, everyone will do that.

...I genuinely don't know what to write next.

I can't tell you things will be better when you do good because all of human history is against me, we try to do good, we wage wars, people die, the one's in charge learn a lesson, impose that others should be good, everyone forgets and then the cycle repeats.

"But what about technology, no more slaves and Captain Marvel movies?"

No, there's still slavery, human trafficking, sexual harassment, global warming and bad marvel movies. There will always be evil.

But there will also be good.

The cycle repeats not because people are always bad people but because there are always good people. And what 'The Good Place' also teaches us is that YOU can always be one of the good ones, as long as you try.

So why don't you get your phone (that was made by a child in some Chinese sweatshop), subscribe to Netflix (a streaming service owned by a billionaire) and watch the Good Place (a pretty forking good show) now.

[hasufin]

Teh Algorithm

I’m noticing an interesting change in Tiktok lately.

(Yes, I have a TikTok account. I post videos I took while hiking, and follow a couple of food and wilderness channels.)

Now, TikTok is kinda notorious for having a completely nonsensical suggestion algorithm and also being nigh-impossible to curate besides going to the specific channel you want. The content it was trying to serve up to me was just all over the map.

The last few days, though, it’s pushing what I would describe as “Shouty liberal being outraged.”. Basically what it says on the tin: some liberal talking briefly about some awful thing that conservatives in America are doing. There’s not a lot of data, but it elevates awareness of terrible thigns we probably should stop.

Now, this is interesting on a meta level.

For one, liberals tend to lose to conservatives in large part because conservatives have a large and well-funded propaganda effort with a massive astroturf component: basically if the Koch brothers want us to be talking about how the one shooter was trans, they will make damned sure there are lots of Youtube shorts about it and all kinds of posts. So it’s good to see some actual grassroots stuff.

Second, though, I’m not convinced this approach will have much effect. I could be wrong, but I feel like pretty much everyone is already entirely inured to the shouty liberal. I don’t know of anything better, but I don’t think it’s going to win anyone over.

Third... this really demonstrates that TikTok totally can control the algorithm. I think they’re currently trying really hard to make it NOT look like they’re yet another rightwing radicalization rabbithole, and they’re doing this by elevating liberal content.

Now, as a final note, about TikTok. they’re notorious for collecting ridiculous amounts of user data. It’s true that everything they collect, some other platform collects too... but whereas Google might grab your address book, and Instagram lays claim to all your pictures, and so on... Tiktok does all of it. Anything that any other social media platform collects, Tiktok also collects - and their app in particular is bad about it. Plus their approach to laws, in particular laws where their users are located, is pretty sketchy. I don’t think they should be particularly singled out, but rather this should be used to craft policies regarding user privacy and personal information on social media, and create a framework for determining what laws these companies need to follow. It won’t, but it would be nice.

[ghostflowerhotpotch]

I know this is in agreement with my post, but honestly seen this made me think on the other stuff I posted earlier that isn't mentioned.

Because yes, Miguel having control on those three things is indeed a problem; but I feel this wouldn't be that big of an issue if the circumstances were different. This organization could work, even with Miguel being the one with the watches, if it wasn't run in such a sketchy way that is.

But it never dawned on me to summarize everything wrong with the society in a way that would be easier for other people to read, so thank you for bringing that up.

In summary:

There are levels of information; how much a spider person knows (the canon events, which canon events, so for) appears to be kept a secret until you are prove trustworthy or circumstances force you tell this information. Not telling you the terms of contract before signing is part of cultish behaviour (though on its own is just sketchy.)

Asking people in vulnerable positions to join the force; knowing very well that this person now has to obey your commands or risk homeless/insecurity/etc. This also includes the possibility of people relying on the Spider Society for food, mental health resources, perhaps medical care- as long as you obey and do what Miguel says.

Having a central dogma that is the focus of the operation, to the point keeping said dogma takes more focus over looking for real solutions.

Said dogma also enables a cycle of suffering, ensuring that the tragedies that happen before continue happening to others as a way to justify the existence of said hardships.

Obvious, but still important: the Dogma also comes at the cost of the mental health and well-being of the members; needing to do things that would surely impact their mental health (like letting people die,) getting in dangerous situation where the focus is more protect said dogma, etc.

Unable to question authority, to the point that may be grounds for expulsion. This also means a lack of free will in other areas.

The existence of inner circles, with people who may not face consequences or less of a reprimand by being buddy-buddy with someone or directly the higher up.

EXTREME levels of surveillance, which they may or may not know about. (Because I wouldn't discard that people aren't aware the boss may just watch when they are off duty.)

The organization prioritizes the Spider-man persona over the individual; rationalize this duty should be more important than any other responsibilities you may have. This has the added effect of isolating people to anyone who isn't a spider-person, and since is difficult if not impossible to met other spider-people (unless they are in your universe) otherwise, this creates a us vs them mentality. Because the people in your world don't get you, you can't even tell your secret, but you are safe with us, the people who understand and know what you are living.

A leader with anger issues, prone to over react, and seems that the angrier he gets the less he listens; which is already a problem with someone who is quick to anger.

I believe I caught everything? A few things I feel can be part of previous points and this was suppose to be a SUMMARY.

Part 1 or 2 should involve all of those points with the longer, in-depth explanation, but for anyone who wants a recap, this is it.

Spiderman Society and Manipulation Part 2

Horrible Copy Mechanism and the Responsibilities you put in your own shoulders

Part 1

Oh boy this is going to be interesting for sure.

While I was writing the first part I originally wasn't thinking of writing this section at the beginning, I thought considering the situation it was better to focus in how the lower rankings and people in need are put between a rock and a hard place, and in the cultish characteristics it has.

But then I realized is not just that is a horrible copy mechanism that they are more or less using as a crutch, it also involves why Miguel is convinced over this, and also the responsibility that still comes with it.

WARNING: The following chat will have talks about trauma, recovery, and accountability. It will also include mentions of real religious manipulation and cultish behaviours.

If you think any of this could be triggering, please consider skipping this one.

But before we address the sad reality that is enforcing canon by the eldest/higher up members of this society, let me address something that I didn't mention last time.

Part of the reason all of this is bad is because Canon is fake, this theory falls apart by the seams, and this makes the society more like a cult exactly for this reason!

Here is the long version of why I say this so firmly.

But because I don't want to sent people to do homework, here is the cliff notes version:

Canon Event ASM-90 cannot be happening at this moment, because Spot IS an anomaly. Also, Miguel said himself that canon event ASM-90 is when a captain dies in a battle between the spider-person and a nemesis, but Spot isn't Pavitr's nemesis, and Miguel himself said that Spot shouldn't had happened and is another anomaly like Miles, so why Captain Singh should had died at that moment?

The black matter that supposedly is happening because Miles broke canon? Was happening BEFORE we saw the captain. The alchemax building is breaking down, and has a dark matter absorbing it, which gets bigger and bigger as we see our heroes descend, and then in the same spot the building felt, now there is a black hole! Coincidence? Doubtful.

Miles's universe didn't fell because he became a spider-man, even if by being an "anomaly" you should expect to cause some sort of reaction, right? Further more, he blames Miles and Co for the hole in the multi-verse, but this is ignoring the fact the spot not only was the one to transport the spider, he has MULTIPLE of them. But Miles's universe has no reaction to any of this somehow? And the only issues it had was because of the collider messing up?

Look dear reader, I feel the fact that Pavitr's example doesn't fit the bill by Miguel's own words, and Miles's case in ITSV has jackshit to do with being anomaly; is safe to say this isn't about canon. Is about what is happening.

Because Miguel, Peter, Jess and the rest are so blinded by this idea of canon on Spider-man, they can't notice an incongruity as they are explaining it to you.

You guys know what this means? This means that instead of learning what is actually going on with Pavitr's universe (probably more related to physics than spider-man in itself.) They are wasting time and resources in preserving a mythos that so far feels more like trying to fit a pattern and mix destiny with physics somehow.

So the question is...how come is that they don't see it? Why they believe in this well?

WELL-

Here is the interesting part about the "Canon is part of every spider-man story,." While is a horrible thing to say to people just starting that need to deal with the fact that they will lose love ones and suffer great hardships because of their work, for those who are over? Oh this is great news.

(I swear while looking at this I had a flashback of "G-d's time is perfect" and "Everything happens for a reason," after having a personal hardship. Goddammit this really falls in the steps to a cult way too much.)

Okay but seriously, I saw a lot of people over the past few months complain about how the other spiders could let this happen, and this is so horrible how come Miles is being the only real spider-man here-

Is trauma, is all back to trauma.

Because okay, we don't know until which point the canon theory goes; I would say most spider-people are bit when they are teens or young adults (tho there are universes where Aunt May or Uncle Ben got bitten- yes as senior adults.) So I wouldn't be surprised if the "canon" events Miguel has mapped out has already happened to Peter, Jess and him, considering that at least Peter? Has been doing this for almost a quarter of a century; the others can't be too far apart for what I gather.

So while for someone like Gwen, Miles or Pavitr means "oh this is the list of horrible things you are going to suffer, sorry kid." For people like Peter, Miguel and Jess? Is probably more of a "oh those tragedies that you faced? They were part of the universe making sure it stays intact, is okay."

The sad reality, one of the most twisted things about this situation, is that the system uses the trauma of the eldest members to ensure they continue the cycle.

A funny thing about cults and many religions quite honestly, is that they have specific believes in place to ensure that people are not just indoctrinated, but are also incentivized to perpetuated the doctrine and make others do the same. Almost like evolution, the ideology behind became this way in order to ensure it is believed and doesn't die out like other beliefs.

I know I already put warnings previously, but now I want to bring a real life case because I think I need to hammer home how these beliefs can be so hard to shake off.

WARNING: Talks about Missionary Work, Murder, and passing mentions about colonialism.

The following discussion will involve the case around John Chau's missionary work and end, if you want to skip it, the discussing will begin and finish with the gif below.

So, in case you guys aren't familiar with this guy.

John Chau was a young man, he liked to go on adventures and was a passionate evangelical christian, who also liked to do Missionary Work. He went to a few different places, but the one were he died was in North Sentinel Island. He was killed by the native people there.

North Sentinel Island is among the last few places that has a group of people that are disconnected from the rest of the world. Every time someone tries to establish contact they killed, or at best, barely make it alive for what I recall. We don't know exactly know why since no one has been able to establish communications with them.

Now, I can't have this chat and not mention that is better to leave those people alone. They clearly prefer to continue with their traditional ways, and if you had seen some history you can probably tell even if they were interested, chances are this would end more poorly for them than anyone else.

Considering their reputation, that it is ILLEGAL to try to contact them for that exact reason (John Bribed two fisherman to leave him in the island, there is no way to get there without breaking the law.) You may be wondering, why he choose to go there?

Well, as mentioned before, missionary work; because he firmly believed this was "Satan's last stronghold" since no one was able to preach Christianity to them yet.

Okay, I know I am messing with the tiger here, and I don't want to insult anyone's faith; but I also have to be honest. I am Jewish, but I am a convert, my family is christian (I prefer not to say which branch but is probably obvious,) and while I will try to remain neutral let's say is hard when you are still processing stuff that happened to you.

I will say this, for all the people who called this man a "deluded idiot" when I remember this case, I feel two things, one of them is pity, and the other one is rage.

For starters, trying to force a religion into others is wrong in my eyes, (In Judaism is forbidden to proselytize, the traditional thing is actually deny converts until they ask for a third time.) It also forces an erasure of culture and colonialism, a lot of times trying to absorb past beliefs just to make the new believers happy, which muddies some stuff later on.

So, why I still feel bad for him?

Because he thought he was doing the right thing.

As someone who doesn't believe, in my eyes this is horrifying; but for him? He believes if he doesn't go to preach to this people, they may suffer in eternity for never hearing about Jesus. In his eyes, if he goes to them and convinces this group of worship his lord, he has now given eternal happiness and peace to this people; or the possibility to do so.

I feel bad, because this man was convinced to do something dangerous and bad, by thinking he was saving the lives of these people.

Sorry for the heavy topic, but I feel this was a good way to understand why the society does what it does. Because by bringing real life situations, I think is all the easier to understand how easy you can end up in these places.

Miguel theory doesn't just provide an explanation as to why the dimensions work the way they work, they also provide a nice explanation as to why they all had lived similar struggles, while they had suffered this much.

Is a balm to all those old wounds, because I am pretty sure Peter, nor the rest of the other adults that are "done" or mostly done with the canon events, or heck just suffered a few of them- still had their nightmares and hard times remembering all of the people they lost.

But if they learn about this after? Now they know it wasn't their fault, this was suppose to happen.

Remember what I said earlier? "G-d time is perfect"? That's something I heard growing up, from people who needed to hear that this has to have a purpose, serve a deeper meaning.

Otherwise, is just suffering.

However, can you see the parallels now? A belief that uses the pain and trauma of their members to make them believe, gives a "justifiable" and "noble" reason to continue pushing this narrative too (aka if we don't do it the universe collapses.) And just as well, is also fake, yet they are too blinded to notice, and they are now making people suffer for most probably not good reason while neglecting to learn what is actually going down.

Yeah, this really hammers more than anything the most cultish aspects of the Society. Because it is at is core.

Miguel's Biases

Now, I am convinced Miguel's canon theory is wrong, I know we can't know for sure what's going on until BTVS, but at this point I am rolling with that idea because too many things are adding up for me.

Yet despite how it becomes obvious in a way I consider embarrassing that Miguel doesn't notice- He is blinded by his own theory.

We all have our own biases, is not odd that we are inclined to believe things when they are said for people we respect, admire or look up. Similarly, we are also inclined to believe things more quickly when they align we pre-established world views, or favours a narrative you are more inclined to believe in.

(Yes I admitted how that means this work and others fall into this category, the reason they are as long as they are is because I try to at least to be able to justify my position in some way, and lay all what I think in case someone wants to debate me on it.)

My point with all of this, is that the reason why Miguel cannot see the holes in his own theory as he explains it, is because he is biased by the narrative he has done in his head.

I said this a million times already and I will say it again: No one believes in this more than Miguel, while I think Jess and Peter believe some things and are doubtful with others, Miguel believes all the way.

And just like some missionary people going too far, he can justify all the things he is doing because of this. Because is for the "greater good," and as long as it is for that reason, slamming teens into the train while screaming "you are a mistake!" Is all to save the multiverse.

But we aren't seeing a guy convinced to do things the hard way because sometimes tough situations demand desperate measures. We are seen a man try to cope with his guilt so poorly he created an entire unit dedicated to preserve this idea.

This is horrifying.

And now everything he has done colours different, because let me tell you, if you think too hard about his behaviour now looks a lot more authoritative and insane.

Projection is NOT a great Look Miguel

You know? I firmly believe a lot of people in Miguel's side are biased by his angsty demeanour, by his looks, by the power he has. This isn't to say I am not biased, is just that is not in that direction.

Not gonna lie I can't see this guy throwing stuff and don't remember a couple of temper tantrums my dad has done.

Regardless of my biases, I believe is for this reason I can say that honestly? I find embarrassing that Miguel throws things like that.

Again, I feel these scenes changed a lot the context once you put together that canon isn't part of saving the universe, and that Miguel is getting so worked up about something that until I see the contrary, is a theory he came up by himself with no other backing.

Which means he is throwing stuff at people for no good reason, getting worked up to intense levels that are not appropriate; all while being the boss that doesn't like to be questioned.

Honestly this part isn't exactly necessary on cult leaders, but I would say it happens.

(Again, I don't want to call this necessarily a cult; regardless of how much I think it fits the bill. There are multiple criteria, and I can't evaluate everything.)

One way or another, Miguel's reactions aren't anything good. Think about it, if your boss threw things around when he was angry, would you consider that safe?

Because you know what I consider the most telling part of all of this? Neither when Miguel throws the trashcan, nor when he throws the console, has anyone being surprised about this behaviour.

Let me repeat this; even if this wasn't about Miles, Miguel apparently is known for this enough that no one is phased.

Forget that they are super heroes, I don't think is a great look when the leader of your organization gets so angry he can't think straight, to the point he reaches the wildest conclusions.

This is another reason why I think the mental health in this institution has to be shit, 1) You can't have a harmful belief that enforces suffering and have good mental health, is not feasible. 2) I don't care if Miguel is the boss, or is probably his decision not getting help; is downright embarrassing he is let to do these things and no one questions if he is out of line.

Remember, this shouldn't be a dictatorship, regardless if this was Miguel's idea and operation, if you can't question the leader even if he is wrong; that's tyranny, and all just needs the boss to be wrong once for things to go south.

Now imagine when the entire system is flawed.

Now, the following part feels like I may be repeating myself, but the previous part was about how these actions are bad; and the second one is about why having mental health issues isn't a defence,

I imagine by this point, perhaps someone may want to come out of the woodwork's and say "But you are being completely unfair! Miguel is clearly hurting about this, he is not thinking clearly! That's why he screams to Miles that he is a mistake, he is projecting!"

(Sigh.) You know? I don't think there is a lot of people who would seriously try to say that about someone making a theory like this is still justified to do what he does, because he is clearly trying to substitute reality with his own, but because I had gotten WAY TOO MANY TIMES the "oh poor Miguel/Peter they are traumatized!" I am going to do the thing that is the real reason this post will be controversial.

Because disregarding your mental health to the point is hurting you and affecting others IS BAD TOO.

HEAR ME OUT!

In real life, there are complications like not having money, not having resources you can go to, maybe you are living with an abusive person who will not let you get any help- Things are very complicated, and there are many reasons you are stuck.

This isn't Miguel's case, for starters.

The guy clearly has money, he even has a spider-man psych which means the guy knows how the secret identity goes and has a psychological degree, so you can say he has an available, viable help just right around the corner. He is also a middle-aged man, meaning he should know better.

Because here is the thing, for all the dumb shit Gwen has done, she is a traumatized teen with not the best support, not adults she can rely on, and has a dad which copy mechanism is "I have a job to do," which is the same thing she does. I can believe she doesn't know any better, and will not take the best decisions either. I did my own fair of mistakes at that age so I can't talk.

What is Miguel's excuse? I am sorry, but I feel when you are at that age, when you have a responsibility this big, (that let's not forget everybody, HE CHOSE THIS, no one forced it onto him.) You need to be able to look in yourself and know when you can lead or not, when you can be trusted with big decisions or not. By this point in your life, you shouldn't rely on other people to tell you need help. If you are so much in your own head you are not seeing what's in front of you, that's a problem you need to fix.

You could try to argue that at that point he obviously will not see it, but 1) Honestly people let him get away with it, as we can see. 2) Do we know he would listen, considering this situation?

That doesn't mean letting him go rampant, that means "we took the executive decision you aren't fit as a leader." I am not joking here, Elon Musk was kicked out of paypal for less dumb shit and that's saying something.

I had heard so many excuses over the years about angry men that refuse to address their attitude issues because, "he had a rough childhood," "his father was absent," "he is stressed about work." All while being told that you need to grit your tear and bear it.

I can't take seriously a guy who has the money and the means to recover, yet refuses to confront reality because is more comfortable to fabricate something in your mind.

ESPECIALLY NOT when he is involving more people into his twisted system, that perpetuates people having MORE TRAUMA, all to justify his own.

All, while putting the multi-verse in danger, because he decided to take this task upon himself yet using his own flawed narrative.

And you know why I think Miguel being wrong in multiple things, (his theory, behaviour, literally throwing Gwen for questioning him and "letting him go" and not for disobeying- seriously why throw a way the justifiable reason if it isn't meant to be something?) Is not bad writing in my opinion, is because-

THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT~!

Notice the funny thing about all of these scenes? All of them have Miguel showing being in the wrong.

Miles is telling Miguel it was the Spot, because it literally was; the black matter started way before and he saw it.

Miles IS Spider-man because he has earned that title, and not by doing a checklist of pre-approved events to see if he fits or not the bill.

Miguel is wrong because he is literally mad at Gwen for questioning him, and is insisting Gwen let Miles go; which is funny because PETER was the one in close quarters with Miles, and had a much better chance of capturing him.

But he isn't given any a reprimand for his behaviour, he gets scotch free while Gwen is being blamed for that blunder; and hey isn't something very traditional of corrupt systems of power favour those close to the inner circle while the "problematic members" are blamed for the mistakes of others?

And you can see all the other mistakes I had laid down already.

Because Miguel is the antagonist.

He is a man so blinded by guilt he has created a whole system made to keep it intact, is absolutely absurd to realize how crazy everything sounds once you put all of these pieces together.

Yet the point of this story is how even while having the most noble of reasons, if you are so focused on the past you are forced to make it your future, you may miss the opportunities out there to make it better.

Just like someone living in an unjust society, convinced it needs to perpetuate the status quo because anything else would mean the end of the world as we know it.

It really shows how sad and twisted this can be.

Oof, that got a little heavy huh? Sorry about that, is hard not to get intense.

Still feel a little crazy seeing the parallels about cults because I don't think the team realized how much this is hammering home with that; or maybe they do and I am underestimating them.

Thank you for anyone who came along in this ready! As always if you have the chance please support my ko-fi, and if you can't, please share this post around!

[luxurybrownbarbie]

"Hmm. I believe in balance. For example, if you steal 200,000 dollars from my mother, I steal your house and land. It’s about balance. 💛" This is a whole other level of petty. I'm proud of you.

*adds to bucket list of things to do because I too have bones to pick with some of my family members*

Since revenge is the theme of this Aries season (when is it not) I decided to let my natural vengeful side come through.

Sentimental Barbie coming up here, ew. 😭

I read each and every one of the replies and messages on my other post, and I had to tap out of replying at one point because it was all a bit much; but I knew I’d disappoint myself if I didn’t do anything, especially because I knew you all would expect me to. I love this band of pragmatically vengeful women. (And others! I know that’s a huge assumption, and I don’t want to leave anyone out!) 💛

Anyway, sentimental stuff aside now.

I knew that if this had happened to me, my mother would be scorching the earth. Even if I asked her not to, which she did to me, she would still find some way, because it would destroy her to her core, like this did for me. So, I decided to do for her what she’d do for me.

I realized I couldn’t file a lawsuit that would be meaningful, so I thought, they have houses they don’t own and they don’t own their land. And I had watched my mother go through the land purchasing process in Nigeria, and I’d heard plenty about it growing up, so I decided, I’m going to take it from them.

It was definitely sketchy, and very exhausting because I had to do it and not call attention to what I was doing. But I had M and a friend helping me with some parts around legality and all that nonsense.

And it was so cathartic.

When you live your life with a hand wrapped around your neck and the other outstretched, demanding more from you, you don’t know of a life without those limitations. You think about it, and you hope for it, but it feels impossible.

✨Showing people there are consequences for their bad behavior is healing, actually. ✨😌

I’m not going to pretend this undoes decades of abuse and damage, but man. A group of people who hate me and my mother, who never expected her to ever fight back, got the shock of their lives yesterday. I know she’ll still support them, because she is a really good person. But they got the message that I won’t. And I’ll make their lives hell. Her birthday was ten days ago. We got her gifts and celebrated her, but we were all reminded that what she had wanted most was to have broken ground and been in the process of building that hospital. Her birthday was her deadline. She may not have the hospital yet, but she does have freedom. And it feels so good.

[rah10corez]

Monetize Your Soul Pt. 1

Hi my name is Rah and building a core community. Taking a break from main page, I had it on prelaunch but then moved hosts again. Going to make sure I'm happy with a few pages and just launch as is then work away privately on others (rah10corez.io it's just a landing page for now). It's going to be a one stop faucets, learn, earn, task, loyalty, rewards kind of deal like you may have heard of and I will introduce some in this blog, I will have unique ideas on there that will set aside from the other ones :) They are trusted apps/sites either I can provide payouts or they have sites with them listed already. I just got tired of clicking games or some ad that harvest info my info and get me to watch ads just so I can hit payout, get an error, asked to do more then still don't get paid.. or flat out banned for some reason I've never heard of. Many of these sites are still running with high Trust Pilot scores or whatever review system they use. I'm a "trusted reviewer" and have millions of hits on the web for things I've done for Google and others. Still doesn't mean my word is gold, but best believe I'm mostly posting 1 star reviews. The internet evolved into a nasty pit full of garbage I can SEO a page of turds on top of the page that actually represents a product, sad really and I'm just a person. If you've come across these and don't know what to do aside review. You can contact me and I will provide alternatives, some you can request whatever you invested back if they're still online and traceable. I'll save for a different topic but I've tested many, been screw by many and have a huge list to go so this blog could turn into an eBook depending on how I do it.

Back to making near everything you do worth value. Whether it's walking, letting your heart beat or things you do regularly like watching TV/streams, browsing, gaming etc.. or you could be a dev, advertiser or content creator of some sort, there are many more ways to make money than just monetizing your page. The ones I've been testing the most are play to earn sites or apps. Some of these come on adwalls with dang near impossible goals. Like hit level 100 in 2 weeks, which I've tried some and do not have the time in the day or even if I did still you'd need in game purchases for some; defeats the purpose of P2E. Also, many of the new NFT or block chain ones either are sold out during an airdrop phase, an early launch phase so by the time you hear about it.. no more land for free it's people buying to get in. Still called P2E I think it should be something like pay to play to earn. I

'll start with something easy and becoming more widely know. What do usually start out doing when you click the internet (not if bookmarked)? I'd expect some to say or think browse.. usually what I do first unless bookmarked of course. Look up what I want and go there. Google Chrome is popular, Opera I think still has the highest security if memory serve right.. but none pay you to browse aside Brave browser.You can click the pic and it will lead to the download page. You can have 4 different devices using it for maximum payout. There are many things you can customize. If you're entering a sketchy site, turn up your shield, turn off scripts and many other things. Some of those things will restrict what you can see, may need to reset or just remember what you did where. Blocks trackers from all over even the sites popping up stuff that you see when you open Google "recommended shoes for you" or whatever. They have a built in crypto wallet which I'll review another time, it's convenient but depending on how much you know, may not want to start with DeFi. They allow you to auto send accumlated BAT coins to Gemini and Uphold. I've hardly touched Uphold but Gemini I would reccomend especially if you like earning interest. I believe the earn APY is 1% on bat, but it goes in auto and is like a bang, 1-2 earn payouts weekly.. then adds balance/compounds. Some other coins offer 8+ percent, some other sites offer 1000+ percent (usually fixed or promotional not perpetual). I'll get into earn account on a different blog or YouTube video or BOTH. Didn't have as much energy as I thought. I'd definitely get Brave and don't know much about Uphold, but Gemini is a solid exchange in my year or two experience with them. Can even stake Doge or some other random ones I'm sitting at a huge loss on.. but gaining more for the bull run.

[mc-doppomine]

30 Days of Hypmic Challenge

Day 18: A Character You Thought You Wouldn’t Like

Jinguji Jakurai! My first thought seeing him, ‘man he’s pretty.’ Second thought ‘I probably should not trust him!’ Y’all I’m not kidding when I thought there was some super sketch stuff going on. I thought not only was Jakurai the cause of the Dirty Dawg breaking up but that he probably kills people! I mean...both of those are not exactly wrong but I was not right in the way it went. It did not help me when I heard him the first time. I thought ‘oh god, that’s deeper than I thought’ and then ‘are we SURE he’s not like some antagonist to this?’ 

So yeah imagine my surprise he’s just some guy that’s out to help people by being a doctor and being the responsible one in his team. It was such a ride to even get to know Jakurai at all...Because I was totally thinking he’s one of those sketchy ‘doctors’ that like mafia use because they don’t want to go to actual hospital. Nope, he totally works at one. Far too often.

I will admit I don’t completely know where I stand with Jakurai. I know I don’t dislike him but I wouldn’t put him as like my favorite despite how much I love the team overall. And that may be because I simply don’t ‘get’ Jakurai. Like I know he is a truly humble man that’s trying the impossible (like all these other crazy bastards in this series) and that he has a rep of being like a saint to all others. But I don’t really get how he ticks. Which is odd because Jakurai often has asides in drama tracks or voices things directly. Maybe because I don’t get his negativity quite so clearly. Even when he’s point blank about it to Ramuda. I really can’t tell if it’s genuine annoyance...which feels hard to think about considering his patience or if he’s still stricken by grief and frustration with Ramuda’s presence. I do not know. 

Which is a bit strange since as a writer, I like writing characters of such a distinct or powerful image and just...breaking that here and there. While I would like to see that happen...I’m almost afraid of what will crawl out if you managed to break that saintly image of Jakurai to others. Because he’s so contained in everything...it’s difficult to guess what comes next. Super interesting but at the same time he’s......not as fun? I mean he has a distinct personality but I wouldn’t say it’s strong, especially compared to the rest of Maternou whose over the top personalities can end up drowning his. Him being succinct and not as talkative does not help. 

I think I’m more interested in his background because it is quite interesting in the tidbits that we have heard. And I am of the opinion it does make sense but I am more of the question as to in what way does it make sense. Like with his background, did Jakurai used to be a certain way and then something happened (I usually imagine it having to do with Yotsutsuji) that made him think...’am I a bad person?’ And he went about changing his ways. Or was it more of a he was always very good at heart but either by circumstance (such his family) or some other reason (such as being in the military or him being dogged about something he’s chasing) make him go onto this path and either when getting what he wanted or realizing his path would bring about more destruction did he stop? Both seem possible with Jakurai but there’s no indication of which or exactly how. 

Although one thing I do think is that Jakurai doesn’t know how to interact with people normally because he’s put up on a pedestal for so long. It’s not an ego that gets him, it’s the isolation. Because of his image, not many think of him as just some guy that deals with things like grief nor insecurity. That he’s on some level that they can’t or aren’t and Jakurai obviously doesn’t believe that. But he also doesn’t feel he can sway people from it either...which leads him to feel he HAS to be a certain way or that he simply has to take it with thin-lipped smile. 

[runawaymarbles]

3, 7, 10, 13, 23

3)     TFW: Sam, Dean, or Cas stan? I wanna hear your dissertation :)

Cas. Because you know who you are, right? You have a mission, you have a purpose, but the people who gave you that purpose turn out to suck. But you can still do it! Because it was right all along even if most authority is sketchy at some level. Only nobody ever tells you shit, and human interaction is fucking weird and complicated and you always do it wrong even when you try to do it right, and you try not to care that everyone is secretly or not so secretly laughing at you. Because you are clearly better than them and stronger than them and more badass than them-- and you know what you’re trying to do and it actually is really fucking important but nobody is fucking listening so yeah, maybe you have to do some shady shit but at least it’s better than the literal end of the world and why won’t anyone fucking realize that? but you go overboard so then you spend the next several years trying to make up for it and continuing to make things worse because people won’t stop fucking with you and still won’t tell you what’s going on, and meanwhile you’re just trying to carry out your original mission (Save Dean Winchester) but you don’t know what that looks like anymore and also, he’s an asshole, but you understand why he’s an asshole and it’s impossible to hate someone who knows you that well and so you keep fucking trying but you are consistently screwed over by the writers and not allowed to grow and you’re pretty sure that they’re still laughing at you and you try not to care. 

7)     What season should Supernatural have ended at? Or was s15 the right place to end? Again, dissertation required :) 

Here’s the thing. If they wanted to tell a good story, season five. If they wanted to tell a story I was willing to watch, season ten (but with the ending changed so it’s actually a season finale.) But because it went on as long as it did they got to do some weird bonkers stuff and if it ended any earlier we’d never have had our lives ruined by 15.18, so... yeah, sure, give us the fucking content.

That being said, the real answer to this question is “they should have given their slot to wayward sisters before they lost Claire’s actress to HBO.”

10)   Your favourite season and why. 

8, but mostly for sentimental reasons: it was the first season I watched live, and I had a friend on the other side of the country that was watching it with me, and the fandom was so full of hope at that point. And there was Benny, and Charlie, and Garth, and it was just a good time. There was so much good fic being written and good meta being written. 

13)   Arc: Your favourite arc. Get specific! 

Dean’s alcoholism. How it was getting steadily worse in the background during season seven when he was mourning Cas and then he had to detox in purgatory and you see him in season eight drinking coffee and whatnot. It was lovely and subtle and I really thought they were going somewhere with that, but it turned out they weren’t because. god forbid.

also, human!Cas. I wish that had lasted longer and they’d allowed him to actually, like, grow as a person and become competent at things instead of treating him like he was a baby until he became an angel again. 

23)   If you could forget all of spn, would you watch it again? Why/why not? 

No. I’d probably just watch a few clips and read fanfic, like I do for Merlin. The show is fifteen seasons long, a lot of those seasons are infuriating, and I simply do not have that kind of time.

Yes I am furloughed from my job Yes I have been home for nine months No I do not have time to watch TV Yes it has taken me like six??? months to watch RWBY but I’m working on it it is complicated

SPN ASK MEME

[marginalgloss]

A little while ago I wrote about Swimming to Cambodia, a copy of which I discovered in a charity shop. I read it and I liked it a lot. And then for a while I forgot about Spalding Gray until one day my wife pointed him out to me in the film Beaches. I think he played a doctor of some kind — I wasn’t really paying attention — but it was enough to get me thinking about his stuff again.

I started trawling YouTube for what I could find. Most of his stuff is out of print, but there at least you can find a few of the monologues — Terrors of Pleasure, Gray’s Anatomy and It’s a Slippery Slope are all delightful. The most interesting primer is Steven Soderbergh’s documentary And Everything is Going Fine, which is assembled entirely from excerpts from Gray’s monologues and interviews. It’s a deft, skilful, and beautifully elegiac piece of work which feels more like one great final performance than it does a conventional biography. Appropriate, perhaps, given that so much of what Gray did was rendering up his life through storytelling. 

I also bought a couple of books: Impossible Vacation, which is the only novel Gray published, and the posthumous collection of extracts from his journals. Apparently he laboured for years over the text of Impossible Vacation, with the original draft running to over a thousand pages — the monologue Monster in a Box was actually performed with the manuscript sitting in a scruffy cardboard box at his elbow. The final published form of Impossible Vacation is a relatively svelte few hundred pages in paperback, which is enough to make anyone wonder about the scale of the original. 

I was expecting Impossible Vacation to be a bit more novel-like. I was expecting a modern American comic story along the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces, perhaps. But in fact, the novel is a lightly fictionalised version of Gray’s own life. And that’s about as ‘light’ as it gets: it’s funny, but it’s also just as self-involved as any of his monologues. Gray’s protagonist is renamed Brewster North, but not much detective work is required to map North to the author. Much of the novel is mirrored elsewhere in Gray’s stories from the stage: the trip to India, his brief stint as an actor in pornographic movies, the experimental theatre scene in New York; and above all the memory of his mother, and the lasting effects of her suicide. 

If you read (and watch) far enough into Gray’s work it feels a little like wandering into a hall of mirrors: we see the same selves and preoccupations reflected over and over again, sometimes in distorted or disturbing ways. Glimpsed in passing the effect is comic, but after a while the effect becomes haunting. There is a moment in Gray’s Anatomy where he describes watching a student in a storytelling workshop, and staring into her eyes, and watching her face somehow disintegrate until the flesh falls from her skull and her face becomes a sort of ball of white light. Sometimes that’s what reading his stories feels like: the contortions of history and storytelling are subject to a relentless focus that becomes so intense that the reader is lulled into a sort of hypnotic compliance. 

This feeling of falling into a sort of dissociative trance is not uncommon in his work; it seems emblematic of a sort of transcendental feeling that Gray was perpetually striving for. Hence the dream of the ‘perfect moment’ in Swimming to Cambodia, hence escapism via skiing in It’s a Slippery Slope. Set against that dream of escape is everything the real world has to offer: the anguish of the domestic; the problems caused by anxiety, depression, drinking; the sad, strange, tortuous complications of his love life. In these respects, it hasn’t aged well – I can imagine audiences today having a little less patience for Gray’s occasional sways into mysticism. And his attitude towards women might at times be generously described as ‘problematic’. In the 90s perhaps it was easier to dismiss his casual reports of philandering as the trappings of the tortured artist; today it only seems sad, and a little wearying.

So why is it that I find his stuff so appealing? I’m not in the habit of reading biography. I like podcasts, but while Gray seems like a model for all kinds of modern tendencies in vlogging, I’m not aware of anyone who is doing exactly what he did in the same way he did it. Current trends towards the confessional in stand-up comedy don’t quite fit, either. The form of the thing is so important. He was as much a performer as he was a storyteller. The closest equivalent that I know of is David Sedaris, and I find his stuff intolerable. There are a few reasons for this, but to me Sedaris always seems convinced that the problem is with other people. He is stuck in a mode of perpetual disdain. But with Gray, we are never really left in any doubt that this author is in fact the only author of his own troubles. And yet he also knows how to have fun, sometimes; and I find that endearing because it seems to me more honest, and less spiteful.

One point of comparison is Proust. I don’t mean to say Gray’s prose is exactly Proustian, but they have an endearing amount in common. There’s a perpetual anxiety about death and entropy that often manifests itself as hypochondria. There’s the obsession with the mother, the retiring nature, the preoccupation with irony. The pursuit of the perfect moment through which emotion can become recollected in tranquility. And though both took to entirely different forms of media, it seems like both were attempting something a level of formal innovation which, while initially seeming familiar, approached a new way of committing memory and experience into art.   

Impossible Vacation is often intense but it’s not always laugh-out-loud funny. More often it seems possessed by a restless, struggling, enquiring energy. Sometimes the writing is inspired, but it lacks form – the feeling of form that was so dominant in the monologues themselves. As it stands, you wouldn’t consider half of the things that go on in the book as the plot for a novel because (like life) they don’t entirely cohere. And the story ends before it ever really begins, though it does at least contrive a neat circular ending that recalls (lightly) Finnegans Wake. 

Still, it’s a shame that the novel is out of print because, much like his monologues, it’s certainly worthwhile; the published journals of Spalding Gray are an entirely different and more difficult thing. The journals are kind of a mess. An enormous amount of biographical heavy lifting is provided by the notes and annotations by the editor, Nell Casey, and without this context any reader would struggle to discern what was going on. But the notes are pretty comprehensive, and in the end this seems as close to a biography as we are ever likely to get. It does, however, take a long time to get going. The journal entries all through the 70s and early 80s are sketchy, and not especially interesting. A lot of the time they’re purely expressive, and we have to be told what it is exactly that they are referring to. It’s only once the monologues get going that his private style becomes elaborate and involved enough to be worth reading.  

The picture we get of Gray is less of a single-minded auteur and more of a man who sort of wandered-or-fell into fame as a monologuist. After the fame and exposure of Swimming to Cambodia there is a sense of freewheeling — of doing what he’s doing because it’s what he does, and it’s rarely entirely under his own steam. He is perpetually worried, questioning, uncomfortable. Eventually he would become concerned with the idea that he had used himself up, and that he had no private life worth living outside the performances. But some of this was ameliorated by the late in life arrival of children and a more settled family situation. For a while, he thought himself happier than he had ever been.

In 2001, Gray was involved in a terrible car crash while on holiday in Ireland. His injuries included a broken hip and a fractured skull that likely caused brain damage. The accident changed his life, and afterwards he was never the same. The journal entries from after this point are harrowing — there is no other word for it. I knew of his eventual suicide, but I had no idea until of the extent to which depression utterly consumed his life. I didn’t know about the frequent hospitalisations, the shock treatment, and the pain his failed suicide attempts caused on others. There aren’t many extracts from this time shown, but what we are given was enough at times to make me wonder if any of it should have been published at all. But perhaps there is a purpose in trying to give a picture of the anguish he was in. 

All through his life Gray had been preoccupied with the idea of his mother taking her own life. The story he told about this was that this was precipitated by his parents moving house, to a new place away from the ocean, which his mother could never feel at home in. After the accident he and his family also moved house, and he came to regret this decision intensely. The editor Nell Casey calls this ‘his obsession, a mythic rant’. Gray cannot seem to accept the idea that a house might be, as a psychologist puts it, ‘a pile of sticks’. Here is how Gray considers trying to explain it to his sons:

‘…And they said, I’m sure, that, you know, Mrs. Gray—my mom—has other problems about the house, it must be symbolic of something, that same old Freudian rap, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a house is just a house. She missed the house. It wasn’t symbolic of something, she really missed walking along the sea. I miss walking in the village, I miss the cemetery, I miss hundreds of things. But boys, listen: when you get to that point, where you have been driven so crazy by something, like for me, when I think about the house, it’s not me thinking about it, it’s thinking me…’

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Baby You Were My Picket Fence [Chapter 3: Light My Fire]

You are a first grade teacher in sunny Los Angeles, California. Ben Hardy is the father of your most challenging student. Things quickly get complicated in this unconventional love story.  

Song inspiration: Miss Missing You by Fall Out Boy.

Chapter warnings: Language.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing) HERE

Taglist: @blushingwueen @queen-turtle-boiii @everybodyplaythegame @onceuponadetectivedemigod @luvborhap @sincereleygmg @stormtrprinstilettos @loveandbeloved29 @ohtheseboysilove @jennyggggrrr @vanitysfairr @bramblesforbreakfast @radiob-l-a-hblah @xox-talia-xox @killer-queen-xo 

You open the front door and there he is: black button-up shirt, navy jeans, chic but not overdressed. His hair is neatly gelled back from his forehead. In his arms are a lug wrench, a car jack, and a brand new tire wrapped in an oversized, floppy red bow like a Christmas present.

“I think normal guys bring flowers,” you comment.

“I figured...since you’re automotively illiterate and all...you probably hadn’t gotten around to replacing the spare yet.” He shoots a glance at your Elantra, then announces victoriously: “I was right!”

“Mr. Hardy...Ben...I really can’t allow you to perform any more free labor.”

“Five minutes,” he calls over his shoulder as he trots to your car. He has trouble with one of the lug nuts, so it takes him six and a half.

“You can come inside,” you tell him once he’s finished. “I won’t be long, I just have to water my plants.”

Ben raises an eyebrow. It’s dark and rather undomesticated, yet endearing. “I feel like there must be better stalling tactics than that. If you’ve got cold feet, I can handle rejection.” But what he can’t do is disguise the way his shoulders slump, the way he bites the corner of his lower lip apprehensively.

“No, really, it’s totally stupid, but I’m really trying not to kill this batch and if I don’t water them now I’m going to be stressing about it until I get home, and I don’t want to be thinking about houseplants all night, I want to be thinking about...” You wave your hand towards Ben inarticulately. “You know. You.”

He smiles, showing his teeth, his eyes lit up like embers, flickering and radiant and warm. “Take your time, Martha Stewart.” 

“My parents give me so much hell for this,” you call back to him as you flutter around the living room, standing on your tiptoes and reaching around furniture to water your peace lilies and spider plants and devil’s ivy and one wilting ponytail palm. “They’re farmers. They’re professional life-givers. I’m lucky if I can keep the cactuses alive.”

You hear Ben rambling around the kitchen. “I hope your nurturing skills are at least marginally better with first graders.”

You laugh, nodding even though he can’t see you. “I’m alright with those. I’m just more of a rock person than a plant person. Gems and minerals and volcanic glass...fossils and bones and teeth...that’s where the magic is for me.”

“I can see that. Dinosaurs are well-represented in your extensive fridge magnet collection.” There are clicks and scrapes as he rearranges them: prehistoric animals and tiny planets, peace signs and alphabet letters and cross-sections of agate. “These are so cool!” he exclaims.  

You bustle back into the kitchen, place your watering can in the sink, and wipe your hands with a dishtowel patterned with cartoon brontosauruses. “Ready?” Your eyes flick to the refrigerator. He’s organized your magnets into a giant smiley face. It’s ridiculous, it’s juvenile; but you feel this liberatingly simple joy flooding through you like early autumn air. And the way Ben’s grinning at you—a little mischievous, a little proud—reminds you so much of Eli that your breath catches in your throat. You have no idea who Eli’s mother was, but her genetics were omnipotent; it’s almost impossible to find any of Ben in him at all. But every once in a while there’s an unconscious gesture, an off-kilter smile, and suddenly you can see the common threads that wove them into being like spiders’ webs.

“Ready,” Ben agrees.

You smooth your dress as you slip into the passenger’s seat of his Lexus, placing your purse between your feet, checking your hair and makeup in the sun visor mirror. Ben glances over at you as he shifts the car into reverse and roars out of your driveway. Your hands aren’t shaking, your heartbeat is hushed, there’s no hot rushing blood in your cheeks or ears; this shocks you. It’s eerie how inexplicably at ease you are.

“Find something good,” he says, pointing to the radio.

You seize the dial. “Uh oh. My first test?”

He smiles, his eyes on the road now. “Choose something lame and I abandon you at the nearest sketchy-looking gas station.”

You flip through stations until you find Somebody To Love. “I work hard, every day of my life, I work ‘til I ache in my bones...” “Okay, how I’d do?”

Ben steals a suspicious peek over at you. “Are you fucking with me?”

“What?” you ask, bewildered. “No, why?”

He shakes his head. “Never mind. You definitely pass. You’re a Queen person?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely, I adore Queen. Most classic rock, actually.”

“So have you, uh...” He touches his chin thoughtfully, what you’re quickly realizing is a little nervous tic. It’s cute as hell. Goddammit, daddy demon, stop being so fucking perfect. “Did you ever see Bohemian Rhapsody?” But something gives you the impression he already knows you haven’t.

“Not yet,” you confess.

“Not interested?”

“It’s not that, I just...” You hesitate, trying to put it into words. “I know it did well and all. But I guess I’m skeptical of anyone trying to play Freddie Mercury. He was a legend, he was one of a kind. So are the rest of them. Those are massive shoes to fill. It seems like setting the actors up to pale in comparison.”

“I’ve heard it was pretty good,” Ben presses, almost teases.

“Yeah, maybe...”

“And Rami won the Oscar. So his portrayal must have been satisfactory.”

“Okay, oh my god, I’ll see it, are you happy now? Were you on the marketing team or what?”

You’re only half-serious, but Ben chuckles evasively. “So you like old rocks and old music,” he pivots. “But not old not-boyfriends. Except Jeff Goldblum.”

“This is news to me. I sincerely thought you were sixty.”

He laughs, a full gutsy laugh this time, a laugh that says he’s caught-off guard and thrilled about it. “That’s okay. I’m into old stuff too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Old music, classic rock, just like you. But old books too.”

“Gatsby?”

His eyebrows leap up; you’re watching his face as streetlamps illuminate the car in reiterating flashes like a spinning pulsar. God, he’s beautiful. “How’d you guess that?”

“Eli’s middle name is Fitzgerald. That’s not a common one.”

“Ah,” Ben says, and his full lips turn up at the edges into a smile, proudly, fondly.

“I really like it.” That’s the truth; Eli’s a handful and that’s a titanic understatement—though he has been better the last few days, the only blip on the upward trend being his attempt to convince Brayden to eat a live cricket by paying him in Oreos—but his name is classic and elegant and a few literary references here and there never hurt anyone.

“Yeah, that was me,” Ben reveals. “His mother insisted on choosing his first name, I think she heard Eli somewhere and just liked the sound of it. But she let me pick the middle name. And The Great Gatsby was always my favorite book...and The Beautiful and the Damned, and This Side of Paradise?! Freaking incredible. In my humble opinion F. Scott Fitzgerald is a certifiable genius. So...Eli Fitzgerald.” There’s a color in his voice you can’t quite read: the golden yellow of reminiscence, the murky blue of loss, the grey nothingness of depression, the bloody maroon of deep pain or resentment. Who was she, Ben? How did she hurt you? And could I ever fill those hollow places you’re carrying around like pocket change?

He asks how Eli is doing in class, and you tell him; you ask about his favorite classic rock bands, and he answers: Boston and AC/DC and The Stones and Queen. His Lexus cruises by your go-to dinner spots—the affordable chains like Noodles and Co. and Panera and Chipotle—then past the mid-level raw vegan and farm-to-table joints, and finally into the neighborhood reserved for fine dining establishments with three-figure price tags and reservations booked up months in advance.

“Uh...” you begin. “I don’t think we’re going to get a spot at a place down here.”

“Think again.” He parallel parks with absurd ease in front of an Italian-Japanese fusion restaurant called Nejire. There’s a line of people in suits and evening gowns waiting at the door. You feel like a minnow in a shark tank.

“Ben...”

He comes around to your side of the car, opens the door, and holds out his hand. “You trust me?”

Do I? You take his hand in yours like a life raft. “Don’t let me down, Mr. Hardy.”

Unpredictably, fantastically, he brings your knuckles to his lips. “You got it.”

He spirits you inside, past the line of waiting customers, past the hostess and waitresses; they glimpse up and nod at Ben as he draws you through the main dining room and back to a VIP table in a dimly-lit, quiet corner of the restaurant. Oh, you realize with awe and trepidation. He’s an important guy.

You take your seat and open a menu as waitresses array full glasses of water and wine across the table. There’s nothing under fifty dollars. You flip to the salad page, searching desperately.

“What are you doing?” Ben asks gently.

“Um, nothing, just browsing...”

“You’re not paying for any of this,” he says point-blankly.  

“That’s not very feminist of you,” you quip, but on the inside you’re sinking. This is too much, this is way too much. I can’t let him do this for me.

“I’ll explain later. Trust me, we’re good. Order something expensive or I’ll do it for you.”

“I’m a teacher, Ben. My idea of luxury is Olive Garden.”

He grins at you boldly, almost roguishly. “Oh we are going to have so much fun together, Miss Y/L/N.”

Orders are placed, wine is sipped, appetizers are ferried to the table. As you nibble on ahi tuna tartare and caprese sushi, you find yourself lost in how Ben motions wildly with his hands as he tells stories, how his large emerald-or-jade-or-malachite eyes gleam when he’s animated, how his voice is so rich and deep and yet mild, how it suddenly feels like you’ve known him your entire life. Oh no. Oh no, I like this guy a LOT.

Ben abruptly stops eating and cracks his knuckles. “So there’s something I need to tell you. Since we’re...” Air quotes. “Not dating.”

Oh fuck. He’s married or something. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“It’s about my job.”

Whew. “Ah yes, your elusive profession. You can tell me the truth if you’re a dogwalker or a circus clown or something. It’s always nice to out-earn someone. Actually, dogwalkers in L.A. probably make more than me...”

“I’m an actor.”

“Oh,” you reply cautiously. “Like, for tv shows or independent films?”

“No,” he says, amused. “For major films.”

I knew he was too fucking gorgeous to be a normal person. What am I doing here? “Like what?”

“Well, recently, Bohemian Rhapsody.”

You choke on the white wine you’re drinking and cough and gasp into your cloth napkin.

“You okay?” Ben asks. “Don’t die. You can’t die yet. You haven’t tried their tempura crème brûlée.”

“You...” You cough once more. “You were in the movie that made $900 million dollars...?”

He grins toothily. “So you were keeping up with it!”

“It was hard to miss that tidbit. It was all over the news. BoRhap won the Golden Globe.” Your head is spinning. “You’re an actor,” you repeat.

“I played Roger Taylor.” The brilliant, obscenely good-looking drummer, the man who wrote Radio Ga Ga and These Are The Days Of Our Lives and A Kind Of Magic.

“Oh my god, Ben!”

“I mean, I’ve been in other things too—”

“Ben!”

“Look, relax, we’re cool. I’m not telling you this to freak you out, I’m just explaining that you don’t have to worry about dropping a few hundred bucks at dinner. You have a right to know who I am if we’re going to be...involved. And there’s something else.” He wrings his hands. “I have to be...discrete about my personal life. Try to stay under the radar.” But now that effortless comfort is strained somehow, weighted, ominous; Ben averts his eyes. There’s a presence in the room like a storm cloud, trapped pulsing lightening igniting the opacity from within.

“Sure,” you say, thinking that a life in the spotlight can’t always be easy. “Lowkey. I got it.”

“Awesome.” He’s relieved.

“I have to keep it on the down-low too. I’m a pretty important person myself. A bunch of six-year-olds would lose their minds if they knew about my extracurricular activities. They would color such scandalous pictures in art class. Premarital dinner dates, maybe even handholding. Yikes.”

That makes Ben chuckle; the shadow is nearly lifted. “Keep drinking, Miss Y/L/N. I’m loving this.”

And it should feel weird or frightening or wrong that he’s using the word love this soon, this casually; but it doesn’t at all. It feels anything but wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~

Your feet are on your kitchen floor, your palms empty. Ben’s fidgeting around, his hands in and out of his jean pockets; it seems like he’s trying to say goodbye, but maybe he’s not.

“So...” he ventures.

You wonder if he’ll touch you, if he’ll kiss you. You try to catch his eyes, but they’re everywhere except meeting yours. “Hold that thought.”

You dash down the hall to your bathroom to smooth your hair, touch up your makeup, swish some Listerine. On the way back to the kitchen, you stop in the living room to check on your plants. If it’s possible, they look a little perkier than they did when you left a few hours ago. You run your fingertips over the broad leaves of your peace lilies, smiling faintly to yourself. “Maybe we’re going to make it after all,” you whisper.

You hear the distinct clicking sound of iPhone texting. “Oh shit,” Ben mutters from the kitchen. “I’m sorry, I gotta go, Y/N, okay? I gotta run. But I’ll call you. I’ll see you soon.”

“Okay, just a sec...” But by the time you rush into the kitchen to say goodbye, Ben is gone, the screen door swinging forlornly. Puzzled, you lock the door behind him as headlights flare to life in the driveway and swiftly retreat into the night. Then you turn around.

Your fridge magnets are rearranged again, this time in the shape of a heart.

[saltpepperbeard]

Okay I’m officially back on my Joshifer bullshit thanks to you lmao. What are your thoughts on all the drama surrounding JH and CT? Do you think she’s the reason Joshifer never came out and admitted they were dating? Or was it because of JL and NH? I figure it’s been long enough that you can talk about it freely without starting the Discourse™️. Feel free to ignore this though if you think otherwise, I don’t want you to get any hate lol.

I feel like my blog should come with a disclaimer honestly. Like, CAUTION: CHANCE TO GET BACK ON YOUR JOSHIFER BULLSHIT UPON VISITING lol. But oooh goodness we’re spilling tea of THAT caliber, huh anon? I don’t mind talking about it at all these days though. Because yeah, I believe we’re definitely out of the shipping war/Discourse™️ days, and I’ve also reached the level of Fandom Veteran where I just…No longer Give A Care lmao. TOO TIRED TO CARE.

But BECAUSE I have a tendency to get ramble-y, let’s go beneath the cut~

Okay so first off, I’ll start out with my honest thoughts on Joshifer, and what I think they had and/or what happened between them. The thing I lean towards the most is that they messed around at Hawaii. I think it’s the most likely thing, given that they were both young, pretty newly single, and alone on that island together. And looking at all the BTS footage, plus every promo that followed? Come on now. And maybe it wasn’t sex necessarily. But at LEAST making out/heavy petting or SOMETHING, my dude. I WANT TO BELIEVE lol.

So, what I LIKE to think happened is that Jen and Josh messed around/had sex/attempted to get into a relationship during the filming of Catching Fire filming somewhere. But in the midst of that, Jen got a little too scared with the whole idea, and ended up breaking things off to eventually go back to Nick. Which, in turn, hurt Josh enough to attempt to mend his wounds by starting a new relationship with Claudia that following summer.

And then that’s where things get…ROCKY lol. Because back in the day, I definitely used to think that Joshifer’s story didn’t end there. I thought that, somewhere down the line, they had to start messing around again or dating in secret, because there were some pretty eyebrow-raising events that took place.

The two ones that instantly jump to my mind are of course, Cannes and the MJ1 Promo. And hell, even MJ2 promo honestly. Cannes because of Jen giving Josh a LAPDANCE and the two of them leaving the party BY THEMSELVES, TOGETHER, “INTO THE NIGHT.” Mockingjay Part One because of them both contracting strep throat, but no one else in the cast/crew seemed to get it. And Mockingjay Part Two because of all those random kisses/bouts of physical affection.

Bruh, I was just CONVINCED that they were going to come out as a couple following the wrap of Mockingjay Part 2. I really really was. But then…they never did. They both seemed to go quite separate ways for that matter. So that’s left my mind to kind of shift a bit and to start questioning things.

Because, almost all throughout the Mockingjay Promos, both Josh and Jen were linked to relationships. Jen with Nick for a bit, and then Chris Martin for a bit, and Josh with Claudia (See I’m to the point where I don’t mind dropping names lol FIGHT ME). So like…BACK IN THE DAY X2 lol, I thought that they were just “cover up” relationships. Or PR relationships, if you will. I kind of hopped aboard that bandwagon because of how CONVINCING Joshifer seemed.

That, and Josh’s relationship with Claudia and Jen’s relationship with Chris just seemed…weird lmao. They didn’t seem anything like what I was seeing during promo with Josh and Jen. So that made me even more convinced that I was on the right track.

But then Jen broke it off with Chris only to move on to Darren, and then to Cooke, and Josh remained with Claudia. The ship I was nearly certain was going to take off never did. So it left me reevaluating tbh.

It made me think that Josh and Claudia had to be an actual relationship. Because, come on lol, there’s no way. Why the hell would he stay with her for six years now, for anything other than…a relationship? Because Paradise Lost lmao; who is she? We don’t know her. It never even made waves in the states at all. And that was FOREVER ago. Josh was never even that big of an actor to really properly “stunt” in my opinion anyway. That seems to be reserved more for the actors who are really on the media’s current radar. The talk of the town lmao.

BUT, that doesn’t mean I’m 100% a fan of them. Because I’m not. Never have been lol. And nor do I really like how they’ve presented their relationship. I’ve definitely seen enough sketchy stuff to make me wrinkle my nose. Which is the drama you were referring to I imagine lol. Claudia using Josh for her career’s benefit, their friends using him for their benefit, yada yada. Idk, once I kind of realized Joshifer wasn’t going to be an immediate thing, and once I kind of stepped away from Josh (which is a whole DIFFERENT story in itself lol), I just…really never jumped into that drama/cared about it at all.

AND, despite talking to a few different people about it, I feel like I never really gathered enough information to really formulate proper opinions on it. AND X2, I kind of realized that hey, these are actual people and we really don’t know what’s going on behind the surface level stuff we’re seeing. We could be 100% right, but we COULD be 100% wrong. So I just kind of stayed out of it, sighed whenever Josh was in Spain or she in the States, and just kind of moved on.

Same thing goes for Jen and Nick. Saying his name makes me shudder, but I think that’s only a self-inflicted gunshot wound lmao; THANKS, TWAAL. I had a lot of issues with him, but I think they were mostly…fandom driven? Like, it was one of those “I don’t like you because you’re interfering with my OTP and because your fandom hates mine” kind of dealios. I really didn’t have any VALID reasons to dislike him at all lmao.

People will say otherwise. I know a lot of Veteran Joshifer Shippers think that relationship was ENTIRELY fake/PR driven too. I can’t say I entirely agree? But again, it’s practically the same thing as my thoughts with Josh and Claudia. I didn’t dive that deep into things regarding that relationship, so I really know nothing, and so I REALLY can’t form a proper opinion.

*Wheeze* SO lol. Where does that leave me now. Well, since things did not go the way I and probably a lot of other people anticipated, I’ve just been…confused? Like yeah, there were things that I DEFINITELY thought were indicative of a possible fling/relationship. But Josh and Jen were with other people…? It seemed so so SO real, but then they moved tf on?

So yeah, I really don’t know what happened at all. I can’t prove anything. Josh and Jen genuinely could have been just friends all throughout promo, hence why they have nothing to tell. Or, they could have genuinely fucked all through promo, and their relationships WERE just indeed PR cover ups at the time. It’s literally impossible to say for certain.

I think if anything did happen though, it’s probably way too soon to tell. Especially with Jen in a rather new and very serious relationship now, and Josh still in the relationship that he was in all throughout promo. I feel like if something did happen, they’d probably open up about it like, a decade or maybe even more down the line. Or who knows, maybe it’ll be their little secret, and our little speculation.

Like, the both of them definitely don’t need anything “cheating scandals” or anything like that running rampant with their current situations. So yeah, if there was something, we likely won’t hear of it for a while, if…ever.

Which Goddddd gets my GOAT lmao. Still bitter to this day. And still can’t fathom what happened between those two. Because I was rooting for them so very hard, anon. I think everyone was at a point. There was just so much RIDICULOUS shipping fuel between them.

And I think for that reason, I’m always going to be rooting for them in one way or another. They’re the equivalency of a “first love” for me lol. Like, I’ll always always remember what I saw between them/have a soft spot for them regardless. And I’ll definitely ALWAYS have fingers crossed for ANY tidbits.

[doshmanziari]

2019 Mega Drive Explorations [3]

A continuation of parts 1 and 2. Click the link below the first entry to read more.

Fist of the North Star: The New Legend of the Post-Apocalyptic Messiah (1989)

Absolute garbage. Since I couldn’t give less of a shit about Fist of the North Star’s plot, I played it in Japanese; the English localization of the game did not retain the Fist of the North Star license, and was renamed Last Battle. You guide Kenshiro, slowest man in the world, through a bunch of ruinous stages, fending off opponents including: men with jack-knives for arms who live underground, men with scythe-arms who form three-man-towers, men wielding shotguns who do not move at all, and harpoons. A bar runs along the bottom of the HUD, and each time one of its thresholds is passed Kenshiro will destroy his shirt and get strong. You have to face around ten bosses, and there is, barring the last point on the map, never any way to tell if the next stage is a boss or not. This is a problem when you can get destroyed in mere seconds (as far as I could tell, the best strategy for nearly every boss was to keep jump-kicking and hope the sketchy hit detection worked). If you go the wrong way on the map, you must backtrack, and it is never fun to return to any of these places. The worst are the warehouses, each acting like Sword of Sodan’s horrendous Craggamoor gauntlet, except that they are mazes with nothing to do but walk one way, see if it dead-ends, and proceed from there. The music may have, for all I know, been the work of Fatal Labyrinth’s composer, and that’s not a happy comparison. Through it all, New Legend has a kind of graphic appeal that’s tough to put to words besides shrugging and saying that maybe I just have a weak spot for coarse ugly-banal stuff that’s pumped full of shrieking colors (such colors aren’t so present here, but when they are you know it, as the second screenshot demonstrates). My final opinion is that I don’t think that Fist of the North Star deserves to have good videogames, so whatever.

Mega Turrican (1993)

This was my first Turrican game and I thought it was a lot of fun! Exciting stages, surprisingly reasonable bosses, responsive controls and neat subsidiary mechanics, and one of the system’s very best credits themes. Sometimes you can forget how many videogames had enemy placement that was “BOOM! Here’s this thing (or these things) just outta nowhere, get fucked, lmao,” and, well, every one of Mega Turrican’s stages has parts like that. This is mitigated by it being a minor trend, and the unexpected plentifulness of items that fully restore your lifebar. My main concern is one vertical room right near the end that’s structured like an extreme fan-hack for a Metroid game. Its assembly is interesting -- a sequence of platforms and recesses in either wall that come together for a series of precision-based grapple-hook challenges -- but having the likely consequence of one mistake be falling all the way back down is too much (this was also where I wished that you had a line of sight for your grapple-hook; the angle of your arm is not as reliable as it would appear). Anyway: another example of welcome mitigation was entering an enormous organic den with literal xenomorphs and facehuggers prowling about and having arrows indicating the way to the exit -- a blessing when I was expecting to contend with a maze made to make you time-out over and over again. As you can partly see, the game is visually astounding, a dense maximalist masterpiece evoking the look of an Amiga platformer, and the level design -- what’s interactive, what’s background, etc. -- remains remarkably legible, for the most part.

Golden Axe III (1993)

I was hoping to come away from Golden Axe 3 with a better impression than the one I had when cooperatively playing it years ago, but I think beat ‘em ups aren’t a genre I can get into past screenshots and soundtracks. For me, enemies have too much behavioral randomness (if they, e.g., suddenly decide to charge at you, it’s almost impossible to react in time), and the best strategies for someone who’s not mastered the mechanics often feel tedious -- cautious jump-attacks and protracted turf wars with opponents who’ve been knocked offscreen and are edging their way back. Golden Axe 3 offers the unusual opportunity to take alternative paths, which I’m guessing lead to other stages, and it does unquestionably have the series’ best avatar roster, but even the promise of new sights and sounds can’t compel me to be enthusiastic about seeing the game’s five or so endlessly palette swapped barbarians again. With these qualities and a final stage that belabored its point about being the final stage, Golden Axe 3 is another title I won’t be returning to.

X-Men 2: Clone Wars (1995)

Although it might be an unfair association, when I think of Mega Drive action-platformers I think of hellishly large layouts featuring repeating level designs and little to no grounding setpieces. Now, there are numerous western-developed games for the Super Nintendo which fit this description, but as I had little experience with those growing up, aside from the occasional Bubsy or Marvin Missions, and as that was almost exclusively what I found when playing on someone else’s Genesis, it became a stereotype. Clone Wars doesn’t escape that sort of level design -- there’s a lot of impossible-to-anticipate enemy placement, some stretches where the visual homogeneity of your surroundings gives rise to the boring sort of dislocation, a few places that could be trimmed -- but it’s also better than I was expecting. Prior to starting a stage, you can choose from, ultimately, a total of seven characters. Aside from the last few stages, where it seemed practically necessary to choose Beast for his sheer strength, I could keep switching to a different character and not feel like I was inconveniencing myself for variety's sake. Perhaps because it was a late Mega Drive release, but also certainly because of the combined talents of the background artists who included Steven A. Ross (an artist for Chakan: The Forever Man), Clone Wars is hardly ever dull to look at. It harnesses that almost over-detailed, modular aesthetic many superhero comics came to have during the 90s: characters with too many muscles, machines with too many tubes, all of those melodramatic grotesqueries that are an irresistible attractant when you’re an adolescent. And Kurt Harland’s forceful, metalized score is the best audio accompaniment that you could wish for, maybe occupying the pinnacle of EDM/IDM on the system, right next to Bare Knuckle 3. I’d love to see a ROM-hack of this that adjusted the level design, or lessened damage taken.

[paulisweeabootrash]

First Impression: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Get in your robots, audience, it's time for Paul is Weeaboo Trash!  And today, I'm finally watching a show it seems like everyone just... assumes I must've seen:

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Episodes watched: 8

Platform: Netflix

The idea of something being a "classic" may be in decline in the anime fandom, or at least be getting very specialized, since "anime" no longer implies a narrow interest in specific sci-fi and fantasy subgenres like it used to, but certain shows still manage to pervade the pop culture indirectly.  Neon Genesis Evangelion is one such show, enduring in the modern fandom and general internet culture because of its status as one of those old sci-fi anime classics.  It has contributed memes — not just as in image macros or running jokes, but as in units of culture in the form of iconic quotes or character designs or elements of the plot — to the point that you have certainly been in some way exposed to them without any knowledge of the source material.  But despite its reputation as a must-see cultural touchstone, it has been out of print in America for years.  Used copies of the DVDs sell for absurd prices, and I don't think I knew anyone who owned it when I was a young weeb in the mid-2000s.  I'm fairly sure my family did not have cable during the one specific season it was on Adult Swim, and there's no chance I would have been up at 12:30AM on Thursdays to watch it anyway.  I am not much of a fan of media piracy and wasn't even aware of that option when it was apparently everyone else's favorite pastime to ruin their computers with sketchy torrents.  So there was never a reasonable way for me to watch it, only for me to be dimly aware that this was An Important Show I Need To See.  Until now.  Because it's on Netflix.  As if I hadn't already been awaiting it, I was aggressively reminded of it, because social media and geeky news outlets were soon blowing up with retrospectives and Very Serious Analyses — and fans of the old ADV translation were offering hot takes on how Netflix's release compares.  So let me finally check this out for myself.

We start out in the distant future of... 2015, where UN forces are defending Tokyo-3 ("Old Tokyo" is mentioned and depicted later; no mention yet of Tokyo-2 unless I somehow already forgot it) against an attacking "angel", an immensely powerful alien with barely-comprehensible powers.  Meanwhile, an officer of a UN agency called NERV, Misato Katsuragi, brings our main character, 14-year-old Shinji Ikari, to an underground NERV base under Tokyo-3 on the instructions of Shinji's father Gendo, who runs a secret research project.  Shinji has been brought there to pilot an Evangelion, or Eva for short, a giant robot operated by some sort of neural interface.  In combat.  With no training.  He is, understandably, not happy about this.  After seeing how badly injured the other available pilot, Rei Ayanami, is, however, he agrees to do it — and it works far better than he or anyone else expected.  He apparently has an innately great ability to "sync" with however exactly the Eva's interface works.  But this only gets him as far as starting the thing up.  When he actually engages the angel, he has trouble just getting the Eva to walk, and he feels the pain of the Eva taking damage once attacked, a frankly horrifying feature of the interface.  We cut to him waking up in a hospital, but having surprisingly won because his Eva "went berserk", operating on its own.  A flashback later shows what happened when he lost control of the Eva: it fought the angel by itself, but also took heavy damage, and we see its visor? faceplate? sōmen? of the Eva's armor come off to reveal a fleshy-looking face and a very biological-looking eye.  At this point Shinji blacked out, which is really the only reasonable response to this situation.

Over the next several weeks (the time scale is vague, but since Rei apparently fully recovers from the injuries she had when we first saw her before the time she and Shinji are both deployed, it must be at least 3 weeks between eps. 1 and 5), more angels appear, to the surprise of civilians and UN forces alike.  The Evas continue to be excellent weapons against them (though Shinji himself is still, uh, not great at using them), but despite having now killed several angels, the Evas are considered a ridiculous boondoggle by personnel of other UN branches, and Gendo's sinister superiors seem to be losing patience with his project.  In the words of... uh... that UN navy guy in ep. 8, "Shit!  A bunch of kids are supposed to save the world?"  The alternatives are wildly ineffective conventional weapons and a remote-controlled nuclear-powered giant robot that almost had a literal Chernobyl-style meltdown, which was averted by Misato and Shinji.  Although repairs are expensive, injuries common, and pilots in short supply, Evas indeed seem to be the only effective weapon against the invading cosmic horror, the barely-comprehensible aliens that are impervious to ordinary human technology and also don't fit our concepts of life or... uh... possibly physics.  So, instead, in the words of Misato later in the same episode, "This plan may be insane, but I don't think it's impossible."

While this is going on, Shinji has been adjusting to this new life poorly and slowly.  Despite being a pilot, he is still after all a 14-year-old, so he is enrolled into the same class as Rei at a local school whose student body has dwindled as more people evacuate over the initial angel attack.  He also needs somewhere to live, so Misato arranges for him to move into her apartment.  Some of Shinji's classmates think he's incredibly lucky to live with her, and spend a good deal of their screen time drooling over her, but Shinji is highly uncomfortable around her not just because Captain Katsuragi is his commanding officer, but also because she has a tendency to not wear much clothing around the house and is, er, a bit of a drunk and a slob.  Oh, and she has an inexplicable, clawed, beer-drinking penguin.  You know, all stuff that would make a nervous, lonely, scared 14-year-old completely at home.

Neither NERV training nor school guarantee a community, though, and Shinji, isolated and confused, could sure use one right about now.  He seems quite likely traumatized from the first battle.  He keeps ending up in situations that make him wildly uncomfortable while other characters take them in stride.  He repeatedly attempts to quit NERV or at least defy orders before backing out (or... backing back in?) at the last moment.  It would frankly be bizarre that they accept him doing this, except that (1) nobody really seems to take Shinji that seriously anyway, (2) he's the boss's kid, and (3) most importantly, it seems that only a small number of pilots, all the same age as Shinji and Rei, are even capable of using Evas.  (Wife and I are starting to suspect reasons why this might be, especially given the whole cyborgs with neural interfaces thing, but... uh... let's not embarrass ourselves with public speculations about the plot of a ridiculously famous show almost as old as we are.)  He only slowly gains any support or comfort from his new classmates and colleagues.  They don't reach out to him, and he certainly doesn't reach out to them, because who is he supposed to talk to?  His roommate/commanding officer who is twice his age?  His classmates who treat him as a celebrity, not a person, once they find out he's an Eva pilot?  Even if his default state since the very first episode hadn't been basically imploding into despair with no idea how to communicate that anything's wrong, there's nobody that really makes sense for him to try to communicate it to.  Except one person: Rei.  He notices that she's also isolated at school, and especially after seeing her dark, miserable, unmaintained apartment, he attempts to be friendly towards her.  I thought this might be a hint of growth indicating that he understands she is possibly the only person more isolated than him and the only one who might be able to relate to him, but then the next time he threatens to quit NERV after that conversation, he explicitly claims she doesn't know what he's going though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he just has bad social skills.

Sigh.

Shinji does start to make friends with Aida and Suzuhara, two of his classmates, though.  And it's interesting because they contrast against him in their reactions to the conflict outside.  Aida roleplays being in the military and finds Shinji's role as an Eva pilot glorious and enviable.  Suzuhara is initially furious at Shinji because his sister was collateral damage — she was injured when Shinji fought the angel — and his mind is changed only after Shinji rescues him (and Aida) from an angel.  Shinji, though, having been thrust into a role he doesn't even understand and about which he is ambivalent and unstable, lacks Aida's optimistic admiration of his role and a full appreciation of either Suzuhara's resentment or gratitude.  He not only rejects their praise, he calls himself a coward during (sigh) one of his attempts to quit NERV.  It occurs to me that this could be seen as indicating different perspectives about the military (ask any American vet who's sick of being "thanked for their service"), or even different perspectives about adulthood itself — I'll bet any millennial who did not achieve their dreams can recognize Aida's "wow this is amazing I can't wait to be a grownup too" roleplaying vs. Shinji's "I am doomed and isolated by the responsibility that has been thrown at me" actual experience in NERV.

Also thanks to the school scenes, we start to learn some backstory, including the famous "Second Impact".  A catastrophic asteroid impact in 2000 melted Antarctica's glaciers, which led to unprecedentedly rapid sea level rise, leading to mass extinction, including that of half of humanity through not only direct climate change impacts like displaced populations and crop failures but also conflict stemming from it.  Or so the official story goes.  It is later revealed that the Second Impact actually involved somehow the previous arrival of angels on Earth, although this has yet to be explained in detail.  (Actually, I accidentally saw spoilers about more detail about this while revising this review, because I went to sanity-check myself about some other detail on one of the fan wikis, so I know part of where this is going, but only part.)

Over the first eight episodes, which must be several weeks at least after the start of the show given that Rei has recovered from her initial injuries (although the time scale is very vague), Shinji fights four angels total and gradually improves, but the biggest improvement comes not from him being an individual hero but from finally working well with others.  For example, the octahedral angel that drills into NERV's base has incredible abilities to detect and counter incoming attacks.  It kicks Shinji's ass on the first attempt, because duh.  But Misato devises a plan to test its abilities and concentrate the power of... uh... Japan's entire electrical grid(?!) at it from a safe distance, and the plan succeeds only because of Rei giving Shinji cover.  An angel attacks a UN ship convoy transporting the third pilot, Asuka Langley Soryu, and her Eva, and she and Shinji fight the angel together in a ludicrous fight that involves both cramming in to pilot the same Eva together (which, interestingly, requires them to give it the same, or maybe just compatible, instructions together in the same language for it to work... yay neural interfaces).  So maybe/hopefully the direction this is going is "the chosen one is a stupid idea and even talented people need both training and cooperation to not suck at things"?

Episode 8 leaves off with Asuka joining Shinji and Rei's school class, and with the dramatic and creepy reveal of an embryo encased in bakelite which is described by Gendo as "Adam, the first human"...  Well.  That comes off as the kind of thing that would drive the future plot, and hopefully all the Biblical imagery will finally start to converge into something coherent instead of just sort of serving to draw extra attention to the fact that the humans refer to the aliens as "angels".  I've been wondering about that since the beginning.  There's the title, of course, but also the sefirot in the opening and on Gendo's office ceiling, the first angel's attacks using what appears to be a directed energy weapon which invariably forms glowing crosses, and the fact that most of the angels themselves are wildly non-humanoid (a choice which echoes the rather... eldritch... classical depictions of angels — see also the seraph in the opening).  NERV's motto is even explicitly, well, monotheistic at least, if not sectarian: "God's in his heaven.  All's right with the world!", which is counterintuitive at best with the idea of calling the alien invaders "angels".

Well.  I'll find out, and I plan to write a followup like I did with Re:ZERO, going into the broad swaths of the rest of the plot and my overall impressions of how they handled things.  Especially given that this show has a famously-controversial ending.  I jumped into this determined to watch the whole series, so I'm not backing out.

I'll just threaten to quit repeatedly then almost immediately come back.

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W/A/S: 4 / 3 / I feel kinda bad about this but 4?

Weeb: I mean, anything with giant robots fighting giant monsters deserves a few points just for that, right?  I don't think this requires much by way of Japanese cultural references or assumptions to watch, though.

Ass: Nudity so far has been brief, partial, censored by convenient angles and object placement, and not remotely sexy.  Thanks to another contextless spoiler I happen to have picked up, I expect an infamous later scene that is clearly supposed to be sad and disturbing in context, which is, again, not the kind of thing this scale was originally designed to describe.

Shit (writing): Even though I tend to overall like their plots, I always sort of sigh and eyeroll at the "let's put children/teens in combat and/or experiment on and/or just plain torture them to force them to become powerful" storyline formula that’s been semi-popular for the last few decades, and Evangelion is definitely in that category.  Friends have said the story is confusing or poorly-paced, and I kind of agree but also think some of the confusion is warranted by the choice to enter the story in media res in order to reveal what's going on to the audience at about the same time it's revealed to Shinji.  As for the tendency to have some long shots where literally nothing happens, that does get annoying, and I suspect its primary motivation was to save money, but I think it also usually emphasizes how lonely the whole situation is, at least before Shinji starts to warm up to Misato and Rei to Shinji in the last couple of episodes I've watched so far (which have, appropriately, had much more action and interaction).  Mainly, my writing complaints are actually about translation, because there are some noticeable and consequential differences between translations for the sub and dub.  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of the love vs. like thing everyone on the internet is already upset about, but I haven't gotten to that episode yet.  I'm talking about things like Misato saying "it will work!" in the sub vs. just "okay!" in the dub when Shinji is first able to control his Eva, a choice which suggests very different things about both her level of knowledge of the project and why Shinji has been called on for it at all.  The new dub also feels... uh... too at home as a dub of a '90s anime, as it prioritizes matching lip flaps over flowing like believable speech.  Having not seen the old dub, of course, I can't make any kind of judgement about whether this is a step up, down, or sideways from how ADV did it.  And the sub has many on-screen captions in Japanese are left untranslated — not things like signs in the background, but actual captions the audience is meant to get information from.

Shit (other): Maybe we're spoiled in this age of computer-aided art, but i's surprising to see a show with such limited animation — speech conveyed only with lip flaps, obviously reused shots within the same episode, foreground objects gracelessly sliding against a background to indicate movement — and so I'm willing to give the show a pass on most of that, especially since the characters are distinctive and the setting and aliens and robots so interesting.  Much of the limited animation actually serves to show the vast scale of NERV's facilities and the Evas vs. the humans and/or to emphasize loneliness like the pacing.  But there really are some painful mistakes from time to time in the art: objects and faces that look utterly wrong, like the artists just did not successfully figure out how to draw that particular character or vehicle from that particular angle.  The legendary opening theme is certainly catchy — it’s been stuck in my head almost continuously for the past week — but I just don’t think I enjoy it as much as other people do.  Some of the immediate complaints that were apparently worthy of news media attention were about the replacement of Fly Me to the Moon with a piece from the show's soundtrack as the ending theme.  I understand why people would be upset by that kind of change, but I am willing to take the controversial stand that it's not a bad change.  The piece they chose as a replacement is haunting and tense, which fits in with the mood of most of the episodes so far, while Fly Me to the Moon feels to me like an inappropriate mood change from that.

Content: Actually among the least graphic of the various shows I've covered involving violent or horrifying elements.

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Stray observations:

- God it was weird to write this by constantly abbreviating “Evangelion” as “Eva”, considering that Wife's name is Eva.

- A lot of people seem to hate Shinji as a character, but I find him understandable in a way that probably implies uncomfortable things about my own sanity.  I just... I understand that sheer degree of doom and misery and indecision and inability to articulate any of those.  Man.  Ugh.

- I don't know if you've ever seen an undisguised angel, but trust me: they're horrifying.  (link NSFW)

[achillesmonochrome]

Oh boy where I start with this...like, I even try to think of a title even if is just a saltpost but fuck, this is just horrendous. 

When Jaune suggested the idea of steal Atlas airship, I was really, really hoping they will discard it and get into something. Why the fuck I try let my hopes up when I KNOW what would happen. 

I mean, we know the things between Argus and Atlas are tense, Atlas itself is a mess with the lockdown and people blaming them for Beacon; and you decide to steal an airship? That is your plan?

There is really not another way? Weiss got out without stealing Atlas military, just a regular airship that has some products right? Why they didn't do something like that? If it was like that some weeks ago, I doubt something had to change it; just find a regular airship and if you cannot pay the man, steal it; is at least more secure than do it to the military!

Also, Qrow really don’t have a way to communicate with Ironwood? Yeah they have issues, but Qrow was a vital part of the mission and also looking for Ozpin (he had the cane and Ozpin knew he has it, so they plan this before his death). Ozpin didn’t also have a plan of how to contact them and report he was reincarnated? I know they have lockdown and stuff, but I really doubt with Ironwood knowing how the things are (Salem, end of the world, etc) didn’t have a way to maintain communication, especially because the Beacon Fall was from Salem. 

I can also suggest Weiss contacting Winter, but I guess that is still impossible. 

Why Jaune sister and her wife are helping them? They don’t know what is at risk, or why they need to go to Atlas so desperately; they participate in a mission to steal from the military and get down part of the communications, that is highly illegal, this could easily make them to not only go to Jail, but spark a legal issue between Argus and Atlas (since she is from Argus, but the whole issue was with Atlas and stuff). And you are telling me they agree to this?

Not to mention that with Blake saying she had already do some illegal stuff against Atlas, I’m surprised if they don’t start believing that whatever they are doing is not an actual mission but highly illegal or criminal. 

Another minor detail could be Weiss being the one who took the call instead of Maria (it would still be sketchy, but would buy them some extra minutes at least). Or Idk, sending the man who can transform into a bird to the Communication Tower? Yeah he doesn’t have the experience of Blake, but he could just have somebody telling him on the scroll. Since he can become a bird, even if he got captured in footage for security cameras on stuff, nobody would be able to tell how he got there (since transforming into a bird is apparently impossible, even with the video somebody would say was manipulated or so) and not have somebody who was a criminal in a terrorist organization. 

Cordova taking the Mecha? Fucking stupid. In so many levels.

First, she is really going to take down their own airship? That thing is not exactly cheap, not to mention the fact that she could kill them and well, that would be problematic (even if they steal the airship, would be a mess about abuse of force). Second, AGAIN, the things between kingdoms are tense; and you take a fucking Mecha? How the people of Argus would react? Oh yeah! They were scared and confuse and yeah this doesn’t look good.

Oh, and the cherry on the top, somebody knows why we are going to Atlas in the first place? 

Ozpin never explained why, he just said they should do so. I don’t say just forget about the mission and that, but the man who told you so without explanation is one you don’t trust right now, so why? Yeah he could say the reason of camera, but the fact we just don’t mention it doesn’t sit well with me. 

We finishing this season, and how we are doing I can only say this was really uneventful and a mess; the only thing in this season that is good is Maria. Bless the angry latin woman.