#meteor rocket interaction

[spacial-symphonies]

"Gzeep!!!" - @blessed-stardust [METEOR ROCKET]

xe looked up, they recognized that voice! rocket!

“gzeep?”

they turned to look at the demon

[spacial-symphonies]

Astro ran over as fast as they could, today was special after all!

“shooting star! thought i’d come by to visit”

oh! looks like another alien came to visit!

“Meteor? you around?”

- @spacial-symphonies [FOR METEOR!!]

-> The sound of drills and all sorts of metal on metal could be heard from within the blue alien's bedroom. Although the sound stopped upon the space lotl hearing Astro's voice. "Bedroom!"

[monsterfuckerconfessions]

Hello, robot and machine enjoyers out there. I'm a big tech guy and a huge sucker for computer things, but some of the things are so incredibly hot for me and I'd like to share it with you. I hope that I'm not alone in this and someone else can understand what I mean.

1) Radio robots. If you ever tried to touch a radio antenna, you know that the signal will get stronger. It's because your body becomes a part of the antenna. Imagine fucking a robot with a radio signal, and when you touch its antenna, you can hear it more clearly, its feeling go through your whole body and interfere with it. Having the one whole signal with it. My god it's so hot.

2) Room-sized supercomputers. They are so complex, can count routs for space rockets and meteors, they have an incredible power. But at the same time they are so vulnerable. You can always see their inner parts, incredible amounts of wires and controls. Only a few people can be trusted to work with it. It's perfectly tweaked, no mistakes, the true perfection, but still so sensitive and big. You have to be so gentle and look for the perfect conditions for it to work. I want a supercomputer to trust me, I want it to try understanding human emotions and empathy.

3) Old tech in general. I'm fascinated by old computers in the 90s and 00s. Big computers with convex screens, old phones with full keyboards and weird shapes, very specific tech that nowadays no one uses. But I need them. I want it to work to its fullest, I want it to feel needed. They can do so much, a lot of lab equipment still runs on old computers. They're individuals, they have its own personality.

4) Transparent case. Do you remember old tech with colorful transparent designs? It was peak. I want it back on new tech and robots so bad. I want to see its innards, I want to know what it actually is. Seeing the work and processing in general, seeing something inserted like a usb cord or a memory card and how all the contacts are interacting with each other. Even more old analog stuff, with gears and cogs, seeing its perfect movement through the casing. Or a whole visible car engine?? Come on!!

.

[whirligig-girl]

Star Patrol rocket Piccard-5 encounters an artifact of the incredibly powerful White Marble Civilization. circa 2169, colorized & shipgirlified.

Commission for @foxgirlchorix, based on a render by Holly for @torchship-rpg

This is some of my best rendering work ever! These commissions do have a knack for putting me out of my comfort zone enough to continue developing my technical skills and style.

Image ID: Digital art of two ship girls in a black and blue nebula background. One girl is a very large solid white marble statue with a naked feminine form, pitted and cratered with meteoric impacts, drifting belly-down though space. Instead of a face, her head has a large hole which glows yellow-orange, with a white marble sphere held in space outside of it. A green tractor beam is being emitted towards the second girl, a Torchship named Piccard-5. She is a silver girl with her body resembling a star patrol jumpsuit. Warp drive rings circle her waist like a hula hoop. She is wearing a spherical ball helmet. She is wearing white rocket boots. She has glowing red-orange radiator panels as wings on her back. The white marble sphere's tractor beam is slowly disassembling her into individual hull sections, disconnecting her radiator wings, removing her boots to reveal the rocket propellant inside her legs, and taking her body apart. Piccard-5 is reacting with a worried or confused expression. End Image ID.

Artist's notes and concept sketches in the read more:

When this render was posted Levana immediately had the idea to make it one of a series she was planning on commissioning me for, of shipgirls based on Torchship's Star Patrol (and alien) rockets. So we quickly brainstormed how it would go down and what she could afford price-wise.

When I do big commissions with new characters where I'm creating the design without an existing OC reference, I charge extra for character design. That doesn't just go to waste! Here's the concept art page:

The White Marble shipgirl is inspired by the Eerie and Enigmatic Empty Vessels by @murmurlilies, which Levana really likes--if you look at her blog you might see one of those posts reblogged multiple times. I wanted to pay homage to the eerie and enigmatic empty vessels without directly ripping them off! The first sketch on the upper left is imagining the girl poses by breaking her arms into segments and moving them around, but that never looked quite right to me. The second is basically just a direct study of the empty vessels (with a ball head). The third is after a little more refinement--I liked the cute hair on the empty vessels so I wanted to keep the head mostly intact, and I found a way of keeping the silhouette of the jagged angular hips on the empty vessels but in a very different way! Meteoric impact damage, just like on the original Torchship render. I also used an edited version of one of the Empty Vessels drawings for the thumbnail sketch in the lower right out of laziness.

There's also a sketch of what Piccard-5 looks like when she's not being disassembled. Piccard-5 has a rounded main hull, so it looks much more like a regular space suit helmet than the frustum-shaped helmet on the Newton-2 shipgirl I sketched a while back. The Newton-2 shipgirl had heat radiators as wing shapes on her boots, but making them actual wings on her back makes the disassembly image all the more unsettling.

I changed the hairstyle on the white marble girl when I drew the main drawing because I wanted to evoke like, greco-roman marble statues, and so a curlier/braided look worked better than the cute pixie cut of the empty vessels. I'm really happy with how the final product looks. I knew I wasn't gonna be able to half-ass it with the rendering, you know, just a little shading along the edge; this required a lot of careful thought and it was a lot of fun to do! Especially where the craters interact with the terminator (line between light and dark), just like on the Moon, which I have a lot of experience sketching (see below--the following sketches were made while looking through telescopes at the Moon at night)

Here's a WIP of just the line-art:

and with the basic shading done on the marblegirl

I started with like, a cel-shaded look (?), and then went in and softened the edges, then went over it again to fix the craters. I also added the marble texture to the unshaded base layer.

For the Piccard-5 girl, I spent a lot of time trying to get the pose right. I wanted it to be a little stiff, she's in a suspension beam after all, but not too stiff? And I had to decide like, what pieces should be detached, and where should they be going. In the render, hull pieces are often displaced towards the side, but when doing that to a humanoid, it ruined the pose too much, so i avoided doing too much weird stuff to the torso and kept the disassembled pieces largely to one axis. The cross sections are hollow because they're ship decks. She's a spaceship, not a robot girl. The warp ring was suspiciously untouched by the dissassembly beam in the original render, but i had the marble girl pull a few pieces off of it in my drawing.

Probably the one thing that isn't based on something happening in the render is the belt. Like, rockets don't have belts, cosmonauts do! So that was a fun little touch.

[ckwhc]

Oc rambling... from MANY different groups.. just... absolute BABBLING.. with NO organization.

The me

Meteor🔥🔥🔥

They dont really have lore, but i do know that they live in a cave and get lose in the mines 24/7. Their horns are really inconsistent, as sometimes i draw them with these little nubs, sometimes with ram horns, and sometimes with horns that look a suspicious amount like rocket from phightings..

Pallad and Rhenny

Both of them are literally just the doodle world legendaries Exiled and Jestwirl but slightly different

Pallad is usually flamboyant and overconfident, showing off their own skills whenever they have the chance. They are kind, just wayyy too much for most people to handle. When they actually are calm, they can be really fun to be around.

Rhenny is usually way too awkward to interact with others. They are very funny and silly, just.. terrible social skills, just.. absolute abysmal.. (doesn't stop them from trying, and trying is usually enough)

Kiko is a strange critter, they study humans like bugs and find the entire concept of empathy and kindness strange. They don't quite get why people form bonds with eachother, much less with pets or smaller beings.

Pooka is their opposite, they find love as one of the most beautiful subjects to come from living, and often fawn over living beings. Despite being strange in their own way, they are much more positive, and find the light in every situation.

Kiko studies Pooka often, considering that the two have similar powers it confuses Kiko even more that Pooka has such a connection with living things.

Pooka thinks of Kiko as their best friend, and does as much as they can to try and help them understand emotional situations.

Much to her own dismay and confusion, Kiko actually does care about Pooka and her wellbeing, though she still doesn't understand exactly why.

This is Chiimi, i dont have much written for them,.,,.., but i love them..socmuxh

The Vaporeon is named bubbles and was the first of the trio i made, they try to stay positive but have a very short temper, often leading them to making sarcastic offhand remarks that may make them come off as rude (or funny, depending on how seriously you take their remarks)

The flareon is named blaze, he's made 3005 unstable experiments in an attempt to make overpowered firearms and enhancers for pokemons magic. At some point the dude made a drug that could nearly double how strong his fires were, but he got addicted and is now even more hyperactive in his experimentation and is not all there (some experiments on pokemon being entirely illegal, but he pays well so 🤷‍♂️)

The leafeon is named Belle, she's the only one of these siblings with common sense or any self-preservation, and often ends up panicked or having to save the other twos sorry asses from the mass chaos they cause. Other than that, she can be very goofy and affectionate,.,., The plants on her can change over time, while oak is the default she likes having bellflowers...

I need to rename this dude since their name was unreasonably close to another ocs. All i know is they're an absolute nerd loser who doesn't do much with their knowledge. They sell the konpeito that grows on them and floats around them, but its unknows what they actually spend all that money on.

Anywho, ran out of images so ill need another post to add more..

[lucyl626]

The Sims 4 - Johnny and Liberty - Part 1

Johnny wrote his first short comedy routine and practicing it with Liberty. He was about to go to bed when Liberty got home so that's why he only wears underwear.

Liberty and Johnny went to the re-opening of The Solar Flare. This will be Johnny's first big gig. He drinks a Ridgeport to ease his nervousness. (The Solar Flare Reno is by Lorien_Dark, you can find the building in the Gallery)

Johnny's first comedy routine. Let's see how it goes.

Only Liberty and another dude was watching Johnny's performance, but he earned 82$ (I'm not gonna look for the simoleon symbol)

I love that clumsy sims have wants to learn handiness. I've never thought that Liberty will be the type of sim who repairs and upgrades stuff but it actually fits her.

Johnny got a promotion!

Liberty noticed a meteor is heading her way. Time to ran inside and pray it's not gonna come through the roof.

Another promotion for Johnny

Finally Johnny can refine his comedy routines.

After a really stressful day, Liberty got promoted to Space Cadet.

Liberty is not good at cooking and she also hates it, Travis knows that since they were living together. But how can she mess up making tea?

Before I could give Iggy to the Pancakes, Eliza called Liberty to ask advice on having a baby. Liberty was excited to tell her to try for that baby! I'm curious how the game names the baby, so I let it to be randomized

Totally by accident they were jogging next to each other and it reminded me how much I want a 'jog together' interaction

Due to her clumsiness, she broke the tea brewer

He reached level 5 and chose the comedian branch.

The second big night at The Solar Flare. Johnny prepared with three short routines, all of them are perfected to excellence. He made 348$

Liberty is actively supporting Johnny

Geoffrey sit at Liberty's table while Johnny was on stage and introduced himself. He came to see Johnny in secret because Nancy would be furious to know.

Good morning kiss

Johnny's next promotion.

Johnny and Liberty are spending the weekend at the pools

Eliza came over to announce her pregnancy. Little Pancakes will be born soon.

Liberty is working out. She is really fit because being an astronaut requires it, but now it's time to also build some muscles because space is not a joke.

Johnny ran into Nancy at the gym. "Hey, Karen!" "Don't you dare...!" "Cluck cluck cluck!" "I'm gonna ruin you life!!" "Bye, Karen! Cluck cluck cluck"

We are going for a promotion today evening so Johnny nervously practiced his routines for hours.

I pushed Johnny too hard

Level 7 of the comedian career

Johnny, I hope you didn't write a whole comedy routine about Liberty. Next time he will deny the Sixam Landing...

This is the first time I'm playing the incognito costume party event.

After Liberty got promoted to Space Ranger, she needed to buy a rocket, so of course I tried to build a whole rocket launch pad. Not very realistic, and I ran out of money so I can't finish it now. Liberty started to build her rocket

[fantasy2reality-things-blog]

Waiting

They had been waiting.

For a long while humans wondered if they were alone in the universe, searching out even as their world fell to shreds. It was that desperation to see someone else that had garnered attention in the first place, and why they waited. But the world was far from ready for answers. So they waited.

They saw the way that the masses suffered. How creatures went extinct, ecosystems collapsing and being torn apart in the search of another dollar to line the pockets of the powerful. They had waited with baited breath, mourning the lost planet.

They watched those rockets that went out to another planet, red and barren, with so little for us and yet they watched the cheers and excitement and enthusiasm as we sent our little rovers to go and explore.

They watched as excitement would die off, as humanity became more and more acutely aware of the crumbling systems, the abuses of power and authority, the declining state of our own world. They waited to see what would become of our discontent.

They watched the riots and parades, the protests and the boycotts and the attempts at the powerful to pit the poor against one another. They watched as one by one the systems were dismantled, and for a time they mourned the planet, waiting for the day it may truly be lost.

But they watched. They watched as people came back together, began to heal wounds, and look for ways to undo the damage done, to look outside of ourselves and began to repair the world around us.

They stopped waiting when they saw us make an honest attempt to do better.

They came down, the Mantrix first. They came bearing gifts to help us revive a dying world, and repairing ecosystems little by little. After that were the Achtrax, who didn't ask so much as begin to rebuild our infrastructure in a way that they deemed much more proper than what we had been trying (which they claimed - while an admirable attempt- was wrong).

Some left, some stayed, and as children grew to adults and generations passed, it didn't take long to forget we hadn't always shared this place. We didn't question others when they came, no matter how strange they may have looked, nor how difficult some first interactions could be. We welcomed others to our small home, welcomed them to see what we had become, and to join us at the table. There were some who didn't want to join the thrill of modern times, who resisted change like a gnarled tree that clings to a crumbling mountain even after the stones it grew on have long torn free and fallen, but they became fewer and fewer as time moved on. The planet is habitable - as it has been since those first bacteria hit the surface on those water-bearing meteors, and we do not take that for granted. This is our home, our lives, and we are more than happy to share.

[maskstaroseburst]

Character Bio: Rookie Cortar (⭐️)

Note:⭐️=Shiny. Name: Rookie Cortar, Aged 13.

Appearence: Lavender Ponytail, Yellow Vest Bearing the Uva academy’s uniform, with a white shirt and white gloves. They occasionally wear glasses, but prefer contacts instead.

Bubbly and Friendly, but is often taken by surprise. While they can use formal language, they tend to Lean towards more casual language. An Ex-Member of Team Star, they are on not terrible, but not Buddy-Buddy terms with the group. They’re fascinated with the cosmos, hoping to encounter the Meteor Pokémon, Minior one day.

Only Relative Shared Online has been Ex-Rocket Member, The Masked Phantump as Their Uncle, but they seem to have a Father-Daughter Relationship. This has caused rookie to be the target of a revenge attempt by team rocket on masked. Current Pokémon Owned:

Mariachi (Crocolor)-Gift From Star Boss Mela. The Glue that holds the team together.

Vandal (Shroodle)-Starter Pokemon. Can be a trickster at times.

Cupcake (Maschiff)-Encountered in a raid den, protective of their comrades. Tera-Fairy.

Floss (Flaaffy ⭐️)-Encountered Outside Cortando, Said to be ‘Their Trainer As A Pokémon’ in terms of personality

Bubbles (Marill) - Encountered During Training Session. Timid, and Prefers to be Alone, Rather Then Interacting With The Others.

Chestnut (Chespin) -Gift From Masked. Energetic, And Always looking for a fight. Sadly Cannot Evolve, Due to lack of energy.

Auto (Cyclizar)-Gluttonous, But Powerful if given motivation.

The Team is not Finished, More Will be edited here.

Hey! [Writer Froakie]

Hi there! This is a Pokemedia blog ran by @a-casual-froakie-fan! It’ll have a roster of four characters, whose bios will be posted in the reblogs. Some Important Info:

This is a continuation of an account on a different social media site, so important storylines will be linked.

The Owner is a Minor.

Characters will either be marked by Tags or Emojis. Same with OOC stuff, 🐸 is the Emoji for OOC.

Thanks for visiting!

[monster-huntologist]

Monster Ecologies: Valstrax

Entry 45 - Valstrax

Name: Valstrax

Aliases: Silver Wing of the Stars, The Argent Comet, Despair on Mecuria Wings, Sky Comet Dragon

Classification: Reptile, Elder Dragon

Biology: Valstrax are slim Elder Dragons covered in black and silver scales. It’s back is lined with fins and the tail is pointed in a similar manner. Like many Elder Dragons, it is quadrupedal with a set of wings. What separates it from the rest of its kind however, is the trident-like structure of its wings. They are also very flexible with multiple joints and can be moved in a multitude of ways. Valstrax have an incredibly bizarre method of flight that has never been replicated by any other monsters. A cavity in its chest rapidly absorbs massive amounts of air, which is then pressurized inside its body. This air is then expelled from holes in its wings and ignited via Dragon Element, propelling the creature forward. At full speed, its body is completely coated in Dragon Element and causes it to resemble a red comet in the sky. This makes Valstrax one of the fastest monsters ever recorded, faster than the speed of sound and surpassed only by Kirin.

Behaviour: Valstrax are solitary monsters, spending the majority if their lives alone. While usually keeping a calm disposition, they will attack anything that invades its territory. It doesn’t go out of its way to kill things on a daily basis, but it is completely oblivious to anything that isn’t food or a mountain while in flight. This results in it flying into (or through) airships and other monsters. Despite this unfortunate situation, they do have a somewhat softer side. Some specimens have even been observed peacefully watching the sunrise from their nests before they take flight. They are rather proud of their appearance and often dedicate an extended period of time to preening themselves.

Habitat: Spending most of their time in flight, Valstrax can be considered nomadic and travel from area to area in search of food. They make their nests at the tallest peaks of mountains. The Ruined Pinnacle is where most specimens have been seen inhabiting, likely due to its high elevation.

Diet: Valstrax are carnivores, feeding on whatever they can find while soaring through the skies. They primarily eat aquatic species such as Ludroth, Epioth or Sharq, but have been known to prey on terrestrial herbivores like Aptonoth and Slagtoth along with the occasional Bird Wyvern like Velocidrome. They don’t feed on any monsters or airship remains they may destroy during flight, as they are often unaware of the kill in the first place.

Attack Method: During fights, Valstrax uses a large variety of attacks and switches between them depending on the position of its wings. While its wings are in their regular flight-mode, it will swipe at opponents with its front claws, try to bite them, and take a jab at them with the razor tips of its wins. It can also use boosts of Dragon Element to rocket towards opponents in a short charge. The other mode is when Valstrax positions its wings in the opposite direction so that the back of them is now facing their opponent. In this state, the wings are able to function like a massive claw and can have their strength boosted further by infusing the strikes with Dragon Element. The Dragon Element can also be condensed and fired as homing projectiles against opponents. The most powerful attack of a Valstrax is known as “Around the World”. After intaking large amounts of air, it will blast off into the horizon. Circling around its opponent, it will do a loop in the air before rocketing back down as a fiery meteor of draconic power. This attack is extremely deadly but also imprecise, allowing agile opponents to evade it in time.

Place in the Food Chain: As an Elder Dragon, Valstrax is separate from normal food chains other than an eventual predation from a Nergigante. It’s elusive nature, extreme speed and high-altitude habitat means that rarely interacts with other monsters intentionally, and is also the reason it has only truly been discovered recently. However, sightings of the “red comet” have been recorded for years, unaware of its true nature. Although few cases have ever been fully observed, further studies into Valstrax have revealed that many specimens often engage in airborne battles with Amatsu over areas of sky that each deem their territory.

This has been a report on the Valstrax. Thank you for reading!

(Requested by anonymous. I actually did this a couple years ago before Iceborne, so the reason this is so fast is because it’s essentially a re-upload with a few edits.)

[fieryfantasybooklover]

Lightning And Thunder - A Sanders Sides Fic

Ships: Anxciet, Royality, Intrulogical

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

“Virgil! Come on you’re gonna be late!”

“Well, Pat, have you considered my likely lateness is because I don’t want to come?”

Patton shot Virgil a disappointed look as he attempted to yank the anxious side out the door. “Oh come on Virge. Even you can’t deny that you need a break and a few laughs.”

“Well, why does this have to be the place where I get the fun?”

Patton, Logan, and Roman had been working together to plan a night of fun and games for all the sides. Logan had only agreed because he believed it would strengthen group bonds, Roman wanted to show off his musical skills, and Patton just wanted snacks and everyone to be happy. Janus protested but quickly gave in, and Remus maintained a “whatever” attitude. So, here they were, a few days later, gathering for a night of activities. Eventually, Patton managed to drag Virgil to the living room and shove several different snacks into his arms. Patton then proceeded to launch a sneak attack on Roman, seizing him in a bear hug and peppering his face with kisses as the creative side stammered and blushed, before turning back on Patton and also launching a kiss attack.

Virgil, smirking and gnawing on a shortbread cookie, dropped onto the couch next to Janus, pointedly facing the other direction even as his face warmed. The two fought nearly always, and it only intensified when Logan and Remus finally got together. The pair was currently murmuring quietly to each other while seemingly making the final preparations. They completed each other impossibly well, and neither had been happier then since they got together. Logan was always smiling and laughing, an occasion that was now commonplace. Even Remus had a happier air, and his pranks had downgraded from malicious chaos causing to harmless pranks. With Patton and Roman together and infinitely sweet, and Logan and Remus happy, the only ones left were Virgil and Janus. Both starkly refused the chances of getting together, pushing past and stubbornly ignoring the clearly romantic based fighting, the red faces, and the stammering.

“Virgil? Yes you I’m talking to you!” Virgil jolted and looked around for the source of the voice, mouth widening in shock when he realized it was Janus. “Yeah? What do you want.”

“There is no need to be that way. I just wanted to ask you how you are.” Janus’s smirk only intensified as Virgil’s face grew redder. “I’m fine! And I already know that you are gonna say something snarky or assholeish if I ask you how you are so I’m not going to bother!” Virgil whipped around, face burning, trying his best to avoid staring at Janus unconsciously any more than he already did. In fact, he turned so fast he missed the mild blushing on Janus’s own face.

“He’s a jerk. A mean, stuck-up, definitely not funny, hot-” Virgil was snapped out of his sudden stupor and inner rant by Patton’s loud, happy yell. “Alright kiddos, it’s time to get started! Take a seat and the games shall begin.” Thus began a night of fun and laughter. Roman and Patton tackled each other multiple times on the mobile games, laughing and shrieking all the way down, leaving Logan, Virgil, Janus, and Remus to be the witnesses. All shared a similar mindset watching this, something along the lines of “They’re adorable dorks. Adorable, but dorks. Oh well, gotta love them.” Logan and Remus had many hilarious interactions, leading to a constant source of amusement for everyone else. Even a few weeks ago, Logan would have stormed off and Remus wouldn’t have even been there. But now, both only joined in laughing and gave the other a kiss to spectacular applause.

As the night proceeded, the games got crazier, as did they. Everyone, even Logan and Virgil, had ingested unholy amounts of sugar. So, when Roman slyly suggested spin the bottle, there was no objection. Had Virgil’s mind been clearer, he would have spotted the clear attempt at a set up and avoided it. However, he didn’t. So, when they all stretched out on the floor, Remus with his arm around Logan and Patton cuddling against Roman, Virgil and Janus begrudgingly sat down next to each other.

The bottle was spun several times, leading to gentle platonic cheek kisses between Patton and Logan, Remus and Patton, and Janus and Remus. However, when the bottle, spun by Janus slowed to a stop pointing at Virgil, both choked on air and turned bright red. “Oh come on! He can get one respin right? Guys, come on!” Logan, barely hiding a smirk, nodded to Janus and he spun again. When the bottle once again stopped on Virgil, Roman spoke up. “Well, it seems like destiny is sending you a message Virgil! You must embrace it, or you shall perish!”

“Calm down, this is spin the bottle not a quest to save the world.”

“I’m with Roman on this one kiddo! It seems pointless to fight anyway. Just one kiss and it’s done!”

“Come on Virgil, just do it.” Remus rolled his eyes as he replied. “And truly, if this didn’t mean anything, you wouldn’t be fighting it so much. If it helps, we could leave.”

Virgil, clearly close to snarling but turning bright red at the same time, gave in and turned to Janus. “Just to be clear, this means nothing.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything else.” Janus replied, somehow still managing to smirk as the others filed out of the room and shut the door. Virgil and Janus stood and faced each other. Virgil, realizing he would have to start, ran his hands through his hair quickly, before quickly leaning over and kissing Janus.

--Janus POV--

Janus was unprepared for Virgil to kiss him all of a sudden. Of course, he really should have expected it. But, it was just so sudden. What he wasn’t prepared for even more so though, was the creatures that roared to life inside him at Virgil’s touch.

As the two kissed, the rest of the world fell away. To both, it seemed impossible that one single action could contain so much. In that one perfect, ethereal moment, lightning struck and thunder roared. Wind roared and howled, and meteors struck Earth as both Virgil and Janus rocketed to cloud 9. Hurricanes slammed into shore as euphoria roared through both of them at impossible levels. “Oh. So this is how it’s supposed to feel.” was the only musterable thought from either of them in that second. Surprised his bones hadn’t liquified already, Virgil raised his hands and ran them through Janus’s hair, the other’s hat long since discarded to the floor. Janus gripped Virgil’s face as gently as possible, before responding in full force. This would likely have continued for much longer, had Remus not hammered on the door and shouted “Don’t forget, you’re not alone, lovebirds!”

--Virgil POV (sort of)--

Virgil and Janus broke apart, both impossibly red in the face with hair all askew. Avoiding Janus’s gaze, Virgil strode to the door and flung it open, nearly hitting the others in the face. It could not have been clearer that they had been hovering near the door and waiting for them to emerge. “Remus, and I mean this is the kindest way, fuck off.” Virgil snapped as he practically ran to the kitchen, trying to hide his blush. Remus just roared with laughter as Patton admonished Virgil for language. Roman, shaking his head in exasperation, planted a tender kiss on Patton’s head before murmuring to him and heading down the hall towards the rooms.

Logan, who just tossed Virgil an all-knowing grin, gently turned Remus and led him down the hall, tossing one last “goodnight” to everyone there. Virgil was left alone with Patton. “I’m happy for you kiddo. I can already see it in your eyes. You’re glowing.” Virgil, unable to muster a response to that, just stood there as Patton also vanished down the hall. Finally, it was just him and Janus, who had just now emerged from the room, fingering his hat in his hands.

“Well-” Janus started, but was immediately cut off by Virgil. “Don’t mention it. I’ll see you tomorrow, my little bumblebee.” And now it was Virgil’s turn to smirk as Janus turned bright red and stuttered. Turning, Virgil threw a final “night” over his shoulder, chuckling and blushing at the “Night, my little thundercloud.” he received in return.

That night, both Virgil and Janus would lay awake, reliving that single moment. Reliving it and wondering how something could be so perfect, so wondrous, so world-shattering. That experience, that feeling, would be the last thing either thought before they drifted into the world of sleep. And even then, even in their dreams, a smile would hover on their faces and pink would linger on their face. The feeling and the remembrance was shocking and new each time it hit them again, sending more waves of unnatural happiness through them, coloring their dreams with vibrant rainbow shades. The cloud of highly concentrated joy would hover over the house for several more weeks, as Virgil and Janus allowed themselves to express all the love that had been pent up for so long. And as the others watched, hugged their love close, they smiled with quiet happiness and offered their silent, encouraging cheers.

[spacial-symphonies]

Astrobox quickly hugged on to the taller alien, smiling

“so happy to see you, stardust!”

[FOR METEOR ROCKET]

a familiar alien seems to be visiting!

“Meteorite! gzeep!”

-> @spacial-symphonies

"ASTRO!" -> The blue alien hurries over to his lover, making grabby hands excitedly. "Astro! Astro!"

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 353

THE CLASH IN THE HEAVENS: THE DISCOURSE OF THE STARS: Part 2

Indeed, everyone can always travel to the heavens through his mind, vision and imagination. So too, freed from or purified of the gross heaviness of their carnal and material being, the spirits of the Prophets and saints travel there by God’s leave, and the spirits of the ordinary people do so after their death. Since those who are lightened’ and have acquired ‘subtlety’ and spiritual refinement travel there, for sure, certain inhabitants of the earth and the air who are clothed in an ‘ideal’ body or energetic envelope or immaterial form, and are light and subtle like spirits, may go to the heavens. Since there is journeying between the earth and the heavens, and important necessities for the earth are sent from the heavens; and since pure spirits travel to the heavens, for sure, imitating the pure spirits, the evil spirits too will attempt to travel to the heavenly abode. For, physically, they are light and subtle. However, they will certainly be repulsed and repelled, for by nature they are evil and unclean. Again, as the silence and tranquillity, the order and serene regularity of the heavens, and their vastness and radiance, show, their inhabitants are not like those of the earth; they are all obedient to God and do whatever He commands them.There is nothing to cause quarrels or disputes among them because they are innocent, their realm is vast, their nature is pure, and their stations are fixed. So, when devils or evil spirit beings attempt to ascend the heavens, the pure inhabitants of the heavens are mobilized to repel them from the heavens.

Without doubt, there must be a sign or reflection in the visible, material world of this important interaction and contest. For the wisdom of the sovereignty of Divine Lordship requires that the Lord should put a sign, an indication, for conscious beings, particularly for man, whose most important duty is witnessing, supervising, and acting as a herald to, His significant disposals in the realm of the Unseen. This is just as He has made rain a sign for men to explain, in physical terms, His countless miracles in spring, and also made apparent (natural) causes the pointers to the wonders of His art, so that He may call the inhabitants of the visible, material world to witness them, indeed to attract the attentive gaze of all the inhabitants of the vast heavens and the earth to that amazing exhibition. That is, He displays the vast heavens as a castle or city arrayed with towers on which sentries are posted, so that those inhabitants of the heavens and earth may reflect on the majesty of His Lordship.

Since wisdom requires the announcement of this elevated contest, there will surely be a sign for it. However, other than some stars being used as ‘missiles’ against the devils, no event among those of the atmosphere and heavens seems to be appropriate to this announcement. For it is evident how suitable for the repulsion of the devils are these stellar events, which resemble missiles and signal rockets fired from the formidable bastions of high castles. Further, unlike other events taking place in the heavens, no other function is known for such stellar events. In addition, this function has been known widely since the time of Adam, and witnessed by those who know the reality of things and events.

Like angels and other creatures, stars also have many different varieties. Some are extremely small, and some are extremely large. Everything that shines in the sky can be called a star. One sort of stars the Majestic Creator, the Gracious Maker, has created as a sort of jewels on the face of the sky or like the shining fruits of a vast tree. He has also made them the places of excursion or mounts or dwelling-places for His angels. He has made one sort of small stars missiles to drive off devils and kill them. Thus, firing these shooting stars to repulse devils may have three meanings:

The first: It is a sign that the law of contest is in force also in the most vast sphere of existence.

The second: It indicates that in the heavens there are watchful guards and obedient inhabitants, Divine forces, who do not like the earthly evil-doers to mix with and eavesdrop on them.

The third: The spying satans, who are the representatives of the foulness and wickedness on the earth, attempt to soil the clean and pure realm of the heavens inhabited by pure beings, and spy on the talk of their inhabitants in the name of evil spirits [unbelieving jinn and their human companions trying to mislead people especially through sorcery, mediumship and soothsaying]. Shooting stars are fired to prevent them and repulse them from the doors of the heavens.

The Perseid meteor shower observed in almost every year suggests that those meteors are shot for certain, important purposes. For they surprise observers by showing great diversity. The observations made as recently as 1993, demonstrate that the structure of the shower is yet poorly known.

According to information given by the International Meteor Organization about the events of the 1993 shower (Astronomy, October 1993), the first results posted for the night of 11/12 August came from Japan. Up to 20:30 (all times UT), 11 August, the meteor rates were found to be normal. A zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of 40 meteors per hour (m/h) was tentatively assigned to the shower at this time.

Preliminary data from European observers indicated that the rates had gradually increased to ZHR of order 100 m/h between 20:00, 11 August and 01:00, 12 August. Observers in France reported a noticeable increase in rates after 00:30, 12 August, with the rate being about twice that of ‘normal’. The rates continued to climb between 01:00 and 03:00. A preliminary ZHR of 200 50 was ascribed to this period. The rates appeared to reach a maximum between 03:00 and 03:30. The ZHR at maximum was estimated to be of the order of 500. Observations from the Canary Islands indicated that the rates began to decline after 04:00.

Higher than normal rates were also reported from many observers in the United States and Japan. As commented by Martin Beech in Astronomy, p.11, the results clearly indicated that the shower did not behave as predicted. Speculation about a possible meteor storm proved incorrect. Another unexpected feature in 1993 was the high number of bright fireballs observed. Observers reported something like five times the normal level of Perseid fireballs on the night of 11/12 August The Perseid shower once again demonstrated how difficult it is to predict meteor shower activity.

A. Cressy Morrison (Man Does Not Stand Alone, New York, 1945, p.100) mentions, as a typical human characteristic, the reluctance to give up fixed ideas, the stubborn resistance to accepting unfamiliar truths. The early Greeks knew the earth was a sphere, but it took two thousand years to convince men that this fact is true. New ideas encounter opposition, ridicule and abuse, but truth survives and is verified. Neither scientific studies nor developments in science can offer any excuse not to accept God. What we observe in nature and what we obtain from it must encourage us to know Him more closely and see the strong bridge between science and religion, the world and the Hereafter, and between the reason and the spirit.

[mst3kproject]

Tobor the Great

This was a movie YouTube thought I ought to watch. It’s so bad even Leonard Maltin didn’t like it.

Two scientists, Dr. Harrison and Dr. Nordstrom, are concerned about the effects of space travel on the human body, and so they attempt to convince the Civil Interplanetary Flight Commission (think NASA, but with funding) to use an alternative form of test pilot.  No, sit down, dog- and monkey-lovers in the audience, I’m talking about a huge, unwieldy, unnecessarily humanoid robot!  Obviously, foreign agents want to steal this machine and turn it into a huge, unwieldy weapon instead of a huge, unwieldy astronaut, but Nordstrom’s grandson Brian saves the day using his special telepathic link with Tobor!

The movie does not believe we’re smart enough to figure out why the robot’s name is Tobor.  It spells it out for us, literally and on more than one occasion.

Tobor the Great is a children’s movie – the main character is eleven-year-old Brian, who is mostly addressed by his nickname, Gadget or Gadge.  He’s established as an engineering genius in his own right, who gets to hang around in his grandfather’s lab and make friends with this cool robot.  He’s what every white American boy in the 50’s was supposed to want to be.  All of which makes it sort of weird that we don’t meet him until nearly fifteen minutes into the movie.

Consider some better children’s movies.  In Coco, Miguel is the literal as well as the metaphorical narrator – we begin with his voice telling us the backstory.  Lilo and Stitch gives us one title character almost immediately, and then brings in the second as quickly as it can to get us to the point where they meet.  Of course, you don’t have to introduce the main character first in a movie, but if you’re going to put it off you have to do it skillfully.  Star Wars takes its time getting around to Luke Skywalker, but it’s already given us somebody to follow in the form of C-3P0 and R2-D2, who make good audience proxies because 3P0 doesn’t know what’s going on any more than we do.  Tobor the Great lets nearly a quarter of its running time go by before we finally meet Gadge, and even more before we get to Tobor himself, and that time is spent setting up what seems to be a rather different movie.

The opening does establish the need for Tobor, but it takes way too long about it.  We start with narration and stock footage about the American space program, which is as deathly boring as it always is in these movies. Maybe it seemed more exciting in the fifties, when space rockets were the coolest thing around.  Then we get into Dr. Harrison and his complaints about unsafe practices, which lead to his resignation and to him trying to dodge the press before meeting the likeminded Dr. Nordstrom.

These seem like strange things to put in a children’s movie. I feel that a lot more time is spent justifying the need for a robotic astronaut than is really necessary, and the early close focus on Dr. Harrison makes it seem like he’s going to be our main character – but he fades into the background once we get to Dr. Nordstrom’s lab and at the end he’s not much more than a completely unnecessary love interest for Gadge’s widowed mother.  In Star Wars the two droids stick around and participate in the plot for the whole movie – Dr. Harrison doesn’t.  The politicking within the CIFC is not something children are likely to be interested in, nor is the nagging newspaper man, and all of these scenes are just guys in suits talking.  Very little actually happens and none of it involves robots carrying off beautiful women like the poster shows us!

The annoying reporter is a particularly odd inclusion. His name is Mr. Gilligan, which Joel and the ‘bots would have found hilarious.  I went into Tobor the Great totally blind, having never heard of it when the thumbnail appeared in my YouTube recommendations, but if I’d read a plot summary or something beforehand, maybe I wouldn’t have expected Gilligan to play a major role in the plot.  As it was, I figured he was either a Soviet spy or would unintentionally pass information on to them – but he vanishes after the first press conference, and the question of whether he has the right to compromise national security in the name of selling newspapers is never dealt with.  Instead the spies are a bunch of guys we’ve never seen before.

Once all this is over with, though, we do finally get to see Tobor strut his stuff.  Nordstrom and Harrison work on programming him to do things like type reports to be sent back to Earth and dodge meteor showers (as all 50’s space rockets had to do), while Gadge sits and watches… and does very little else.  You’d think this part of the movie would continue the thread of Gadge being the equal of the adult scientists, maybe overlapping with him and Tobor bonding, but there’s almost none of either.  Why set up Gadge as a prodigy if you’re not going to make use of it?  At the climax we expect Gadge to save the day by figuring something out, as he showed he could do earlier.  Instead he just shuts his eyes and thinks really hard at Tobor, like Ichi trying to summon Gamera. It works, but it’s not as satisfying as it could have been.  At the end the movie has neatly avoided almost all of its potential and anything that might have been cool to watch, and failed to give us anything it seemed to promise.

To make things even worse, Gadge is played by one of those insanely cloying 50’s child actors who say things like “oh, gosh!” and “gee whillikers!”  I cannot imagine anybody actually talking like this.  Actor Billy Chaplin sure makes it sound fake as hell.  While Chaplin is a decent actor physically, everything he says sounds stilted and unnatural, like he’s reading it off notes while trying to project his voice to a full auditorium.  The adult actors are much better, which just makes Chaplin look all the worse by comparison.

Tobor, on the other hand, is wonderful, in the ‘stupid cardboard movie robot’ way that makes Torg from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and the delightfully awful robot of Devil Girl from Mars so much fun.  It’s got lots of blinky lights and moving parts, and stamps around with a pretty convincing sense of weight.  Unlike some movie robots it actually moves at a good clip when it wants to, perhaps helped by the fact that it has working knees.  The movie makes the point that Tobor is a large and dangerous piece of kit at the same time as it’s able to be gentle and dexterous, which reinforces the idea that it would be frightening as a weapon.

My favourite part is when Tobor drives a car.  I wonder if the guy in the costume could see anything. That must have been a hell of a day on set.

What you want me to get back to, though, is the bit where the robot is psychic.  Yes, that’s actually the premise of this movie, a telepathic robot!  I’m not sure how plausible that would have seemed in the 50’s, even in such an explicitly silly movie.  Dr. Nordstrom doesn’t expect the reporters to believe in it without a demonstration, and yet the same decade also produced films like The She-Creature that present such ideas with an entirely straight, albeit incompetent, face.  Psychic powers as hard-ish sci-fi seems to have gone out of style by the 90’s, and nowadays it sounds like something you’d see in the Weekly World News.

Man, I miss the hard copy Weekly World News.  It was so nice to have that little isle of humour in the sea of garbage that was (and still is) the supermarket tabloids.  Remember Hilary Clinton’s space-alien lover?  Classic.

The function of telepathy in this story is not just to give Gadge a way to summon the robot after the spies break Nordstrom’s control mechanism.  It is also a means whereby Tobor may acquire human traits and emotions.  How to make a robot feel things is a perennial problem in science fiction… a lot of the time the mechanism is simply glossed over, as an artificial intelligence becomes more human by interacting with humans. Emotions are just chemicals in our brains, though, and the more we learn about how they work, the harder it gets to justify a machine feeling them.  In Star Trek: the Next Generation Data and Lore have a special bit of hardware that must be installed to enable emotions, and really seem like they’re better off without it. In Saturn 3, Hector has a processor made of cloned brain cells that can produce their own chemistry, as well as a direct neural uplink to its programmer.

As such solutions go, I actually kind of like how Tobor the Great goes about it, even if the mechanism is silly.  Rather than having emotions of its own, Tobor senses and mirrors those of the humans around it.  When Gadge is panicking, worrying that Tobor is out of control, Tobor panics and goes around smashing things, thus making for a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Gadge thinks of Tobor as a hero, the robot comes to his rescue, carrying him to safety like a rescued princess, and responds to the anger and rage of the spies by turning these emotions back on them and beating them up.  This is quite different from many ‘emotional machine’ stories, in that it doesn’t actually require Tobor to be in any way self-aware.

Unfortunately the movie is not very consistent about this. There’s a scene in which Tobor gets frustrated and breaks stuff after being put through too challenging a simulation, which does imply that the robot has an intelligence and emotional capacity of its own.  This bit has a purpose, as it serves to make us worry that Tobor will be unable to tell the difference between friend and foe at the finale, but it just doesn’t fit with the way this machine is treated in the rest of the movie.

Like many others both from MST3K and from the Episodes that Never Were, Tobor the Great has a couple of good ideas at its core.  It even predicted how much easier and safer it is to send robots into space than people, although those robots don’t look much like the lumbering humanoids of 50’s sci-fi. Sadly, the film is uneven, rushed, and poorly-acted, and nothing particularly fun or exciting happens in it. Various people over the years have seen its potential and Tobor has starred in a couple of comic books and an unproduced TV pilot, but these never went anywhere either.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 2: The Racism of the Conductor’s Baton (Part 5)

TIER: Meanwhile, minutes in the future, a new character wanders about the desert wasteland. A PEREGRINE MENDICANT.

CHEL: This character resembles WV, except plain white in colour and noticeably taller, also wrapped in rags and pushing what appears to be a shopping trolley full of mailboxes.

WV heads for the passageway outside, the door to the bunker slamming shut behind him and glowing with a touchscreen; interacting with that causes the antechamber to spin around and a door to open into a new room, containing more computers. One of the two screens depicts Earth, while the other shows four spirographs orbiting around a fifth spirograph, with one set of two dots (one large, one small) next to the centre and another set of dots outside the orbit range. Looks familiar? A smaller screen below shows coordinates and times.

The room also contains a meter stick, which WV considers combining with his knife (really a strip of rusty metal) and a strip of rag to form a spear, but he hasn’t got his knife with him, and a bizarre contraption which looks like a ray gun pointing at a circular platform. When WV presses the big blue button on the console, the machine is proved to be an APPEARIFYER, which produces a pumpkin apparently out of thin air. Closer examination proves it to have taken the pumpkin from the coordinates entered on the console; there is a symbol carved on the pumpkin in the shape of what appears to be a pointy-eared animal’s face.

WV experiments a bit more with the machine, successfully summoning his knife back and using it to cut open the pumpkin (we are spared the apparently gruesome sight of him devouring the innards messily). The spirograph switch is immovable without a key. WV is also able to rescue the firefly from within the amber chunk, and this being a cartoon the firefly is miraculously alive and very happy about this! Awww.

TIER: The APPEARIFYER seems to be capable of grabbing thing from anywhere and anywhen, as long as doing so doesn't create a time paradox of all things. Attempting to do so causes the machine to activate a failsafe that turns whatever someone tried to get into a pile of paradox slime.

CHEL: With seconds to spare and dramatic music playing, WV appearifies the grate over the entrance to provide himself with an exit route, then scrambles around cramming all his cans and equipment into the hollow pumpkin, much to the consternation of the firefly, now named Serenity (of course). Frantically, he rushes up the ladder towards outside and safety… only to slip and fall back down at the last second, cans landing all over him, cutting to a scene reading “PSYCHE?” The next page states simply “UNPSYCHE”, the text beneath declaring a failure of the rare and highly dangerous 5X CLIFFHANGER COMBO, and we lead into another animation.

WV makes it to the top of the ladder just as the countdown finishes. Fortunately, the explosion doesn’t kill him; instead, it turns out to be the starting of rocket engines which propel the entire bunker into the air, setting it flying westward. Cut to John’s suburb, noted to be A CONTINENT WESTWARD AND YEARS IN THE PAST (BUT NOT MANY), where a meteor plummets to Earth, destroying all life and construction around it. Wind fills up the crater with soil again and a large white tree sprouts in its centre over a time period then revealed to be the years between its destruction and WV’s arrival.

Meanwhile, Peregrine Mendicant pushes their cart full of mailboxes along in the desert, oblivious to the bunker which is heading right overhead. WV observes, and the camera pans out to show PM’s outside another bunker with the same green house symbol on it. AN OCEAN WESTWARD AND YEARS IN THE PAST, but not “not many” this time, a spirograph opens up in space, shooting out a meteor, which crashes beside an active volcano. Millennia pass; the volcano dies, the crater fills up with greenery, and a tall building of green stone with a frog statue on the top is erected by unseen beings. As water levels rise, the building is covered almost completely and the volcano becomes an ocean island. Pterosaurs fly past, so we can presume the building was not made by humans.

Cut to Rose, cornered by the fire, frantically hitting and screaming at the generator until a flaming tree falls, shattering the generator and forcing Rose to leap to safety - or not safety, as the fire is still surrounding her. Mom Lalonde observes from the window of the house and presses a button on a keypad, opening up a secret passage in the mausoleum, leading downwards.

In a mysterious purple tower, Dad Egbert is handcuffed and hurried along by two imps, until he breaks free of the cuffs and attacks with cake and shaving cream. (If you pay close attention, you'll discover the cuffs were the trick ones from John's chest, according to another reader - I never did notice.) Atop another tower, this one Dave’s apartment building, Dave faces down Bro and Cal under a bright orange sky, and we finally see Bro Strider in non-silhouette. He bears a striking resemblance to the photo of the GameBro writer, right down to the popped collar. I don’t know if he’s actually supposed to be said writer, though.

Finally, WV’s flying bunker comes to a gentle stop in the middle of another desert, and he finds himself at the foot of a third tower, this one the remains of the frog-topped building, the ocean now long dry. The animation ends, and the curtains close on Act 2.

Now this is how to get across a lot of information fast! Much better. Very little text needed (in fact, what is there might not be strictly necessary, though it’s useful for immediately parsing what’s shown), no messing about. It’s a sharp improvement over sylladex shenanigans.

Okay, what do you guys think of Act 2? What does it do better than Act 1, or worse? Do you think it’s doing a good job of storytelling?

TIER: The pacing has improved.

CHEL: Technically speaking there are more instances of GET ON WITH IT (five to Act 1’s three), but this act is also longer and some of those instances were unnecessary single pages and not endless faffing about like in Act 1, so yes, that’s getting better. I think Hussie now knows better where his plot is going, and I don’t know if he originally did in the early stages of Act 1, so he’s better able to stick to a route to the goal.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting seeing Rose’s and Dave’s home situation in light of later developments. I don’t think Hussie intended any deep commentary on child abuse when he wrote those scenes. I think it was edgy humor.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Rose’s FAQ or Sassacre’s book and I am disappointed by the racism in the excerpts. Worse, I know Hussie reuses the ethnic wedding metaphor later.

But on a positive note, the walkabout game is a cool new use of the medium.

BRIGHT: There’s a lot more meat to this act. More things happen, we get introduced to some of the background characters and find out more about how the game is set up. We also have more characterisation, which is a definite plus.

CHEL: So, for our hypothetical rewrite, removing the racism is obvious. “Edgy” humour was in at the time of writing, but even with that excuse, this is icky. It doesn’t really have the self-awareness of the awfulness of, say, Something Positive, it’s just a guy saying offensive things and it’s not quite clear how aware he is that they’re offensive.

Also obvious is removing the redundancy. I’d also add in a better reaction for John learning that Earth is doomed. I considered possibly moving that part of the reveal to a later point when it could be explored a bit more, but it does work nicely as a wham line with little info given yet. Also, figure out what the fuck we should be going for with Rose’s and Dave’s parental figures and stick to it. I could certainly see it being possible to lull the reader into falsely thinking of awful situations as funny in context and slowly revealing ways it fucked the kids up as we go, but in HS it’s handled clumsily, and there’s far too much going on already for an idea like that to have space to do it justice, I think. Oh, also, if John’s dream sequence was necessary, I’d have had it with him being knocked out, not just randomly deciding to nap while still surrounded by monsters. That was just kind of weird, especially since his friend is still in danger at that point.

Anything else you all can think of, readers? I don’t think we have any huge holes in the plot yet or anything. It’s certainly still much better than most of the works sporked here, but we'd appreciate it if you point out anything we missed.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 6 CALL CPA PLEASE: 2 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 6 GET ON WITH IT!: 8 GORE GALORE: 0 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 13 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 3 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 0 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 0 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 1 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 6 TOTAL: 45

[cateringisalie]

Promise Week 2019/20 Day 6

A warning of sorts: while these are all about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship, none of the fics I have written for this week actually involve Cloud and Tifa interacting with each other. If this is a problem I’ll remove the tags from the posts.

Written for the prompt ‘Family’

Fictional families never seemed to bear much relevance to Marlene’s. The ones on TV were always so rigid, so defined. So small. Marlene’s family grew by the year. Mostly. A few painful times it contracted to leave her and others distress. This too was part of life as far as her father was concerned.

Avalanche was her earliest memory of a family. Father and Tifa and Jessie and Biggs and Wedge. If she was upset, if she wanted something, if she was scared she would rush to whoever nearest. Father would win out in the end if all things were equal naturally. The others would fall back and let him deal with her on his own when the moments came. The Seventh Heaven was her home and Avalanche-   So hard to put labels to them even now older and aware of how the world might view them. What was Tifa to her? A member of her family. Marlene had never given any more thought to her role or her place within the group than that. Jessie too was another family member. The outside world seemed to want labels placed on the people within the grouping; declare Tifa and Jessie a mother or an aunt or a sister. Biggs and Wedge were another matter entirely; always Uncles or distanced further as friends of the family. Never as brothers.   Only on reflection could Cloud’s introduction into the group have completed reconfigured everything. There was an argument to be said that he did anyway, though from her own perspective, it was clear that life would have been shorter or far worse had Cloud not arrived. Marlene still lost three members of her family, but due to Cloud gained three new ones in quick succession and a further seven after. A shame she lost another after.   There seemed to be little faith Cloud would be part of the family at first. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge swiftly reached assumptions about everything not said between Cloud and Tifa – assumptions that were kind of right ultimately, but for that point in time and space were not accurate. The elements of basic attraction between the couple were clear for many to see. But Cloud carried too many secrets and laboured under a false sense of self; Tifa was not sure of truth or her own memories. For the two of them to split off, to become - as Jessie suspected – a smaller family would have been disastrous and impossible for them.   But Cloud had no family of his own. The only person of note from his past was Tifa. And Tifa was part of Marlene’s family. Far better ultimately that Cloud join Marlene’s rather than him pulling away to start some smaller one – and deprive her of a member of hers. For a time the family felt perilous; Cloud’s presence drawing Tifa’s attention away to him alone. When Marlene first encountered Aeris it seemed for a moment that perhaps if Cloud was going to drive a wedge into her family it would be best if he found someone else to do so with. Aeris seemed a good replacement.   Only- To leave Cloud with Aeris and a start of their own family would mean that Marlene would lose Aeris from her family. Again, not someone who Marlene could label easily. Less a mother figure than Tifa. Aunt possibly fit her better. She was if nothing else personable and would not sugar-coat anything for Marlene in the brief window they spent together. That Cloud and Tifa and father would go to get her back after the loss of Jessie and Biggs and Wedge felt right. Her family needed to regrow. Elmyra was now part of it; older than any other member of her family.   And Aeris and Cloud and Tifa and father sort of span-off into another family. But father and Tifa were still her family, so the new family was still hers. The new members would take time for her to meet. Reeve was in two places at once; with Cloud and Tifa, but also able to appear at Elmyra’s door to tell them both their family was shrunk again. Cid stank of cigarettes and what turned out to be rocket fuel. Vincent smelt of death and roses. Yuffie was forever in trouble and Nanaki’s fur was irresistible. And these new family members brought more with them. For Cid there was Shera; for Nanaki a thousand denizens of Cosmo Canyon. Yuffie’s family ruled Wutai.   After Meteor left the sky, the notion of shrinking the family deliberately was muttered between some of the group. The notion that Cloud and Tifa would still become a smaller family, separate, smaller, the two of them for now. But Tifa said no. Avalanche were a family now; whatever happened between her and Cloud (and something significant had changed between the day they left to rescue Aeris and the day they arrived in Kalm once Meteor was gone), they would still be Marlene’s relatives. Official labels be damned.

[yesterdanereviews]

Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere (1951)

Film review #379

SYNOPSIS: The heroic Captain Video and his Video Rangers from across the globe help maintain peace on the planet Earth, but when Earth becomes subject to meteor bombardments from the planet Atoma, Captain Video must find a way to thwart the evil schemes of it’s leader Vultura before it is too late...

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere is a 1951 movie serial. The serial stars (as the title suggests) Captain Video, the leader of an organisation called the Video Rangers, who help protect the Earth. When the Earth becomes subject to meteor bombardments originating from the planet Atoma, Video must stop them before they can invade the Earth. The plot resembles the vast majority of sci-fi serials, which copy the highly successful Flash Gordon and caught the genre in a thinly-veiled repetition of its plot and characters for over twenty years. A lot of the story revolves around Captain Video trying to prove that the scientist Dr. Tobor (yes, that is ‘robot’ spelled backwards) is working with Atoma’s leader Vultura, as Video and Vultura try to outsmart and thwart the other’s plans. I think this format and plot structures were gotten away with for two reasons: one, there was no way to re-watch old serials once they had first aired at the theatre, so new ones could come out with the same story and similar characters; particularly since serials such as this would be aimed at kids, who would not have seen earlier serials. The second reason being that the second world war probably didn’t leave much room or money for the development of anything too original or ambitious, as resources would have been focused elsewhere. Nevertheless, by the time this serial was released in 1951, there probably should have been some effort to change the formula or offer something new.

Despite it’s lack of originality in the story department, there’s still a decent amount of variety going on. The early chapters see Video travelling to the planet Theros, where the peace-loving people are under attack by Vultura’s forces, and Video has to teach them to be guerrilla fighters and fight back. Again, this plot structure shows up in many previous serials. The next major chunk of the serial consists in the back-and-forth between Tobor and Video, as they try and outdo each other on Earth. Video and Vultura only meet in the final half of the last chapter, which feels like a waste. The serial however, does keep things interesting with a whole host of gadgets and inventions that would undoubtedly spark the imaginations of youngsters watching. The guns that the Rangers use that shoot out sparks are quite a nice effect of the time. However, the serial often falls into the trap of explaining what is going on and what all these inventions do rather than actually showing them, mostly due to budget constraints, but often the plot is explained before it happens, leaving little surprise or tension. The inventions too have bizarre technological names, and accompanied techno-babble that try to justify the implausible things they do.

Most of the characters are based off the ones on the TV series, with Captain Video being the typical white American male hero that is the star of all these serials. His younger sidekick is strangely only referred to as “the Ranger” and never given an actual name. This is in keeping with the TV series, but other rangers are shown to use their own names, so it’s odd that he doesn’t. Maybe it’s a way to get kids to imagine themselves in the role of the young teenage sidekick, as anyone could be “The Ranger”. There’s also Ranger Gallagher, who does all the technical stuff at Video headquarters, and Vultura clearly has some east Asian influences in his design, again echoing the “Ming the Merciless” type villain that originated in Flash Gordon. One final note about the characters is that while you will expect these serials to only feature a white cast, there is not a single woman anywhere featured in the serials fifteen chapters. Often there is usually a solitary token female character that sometimes serves as the protagonist’s love interest, but there is none at all here, not even in any of the backgrounds. I suppose the lack of a female character could be attributed to the fact this is geared towards a younger, male, audience, who would not be interested in a female character or a romance sub-plot, but having this cast of inter-changeable white men interact with each other really emphasises the monotony of the story at points.

The serial was directed by Spencer Bennet, a veteran of these kinds of serials, so he had plenty of experience in what to do. Some of the effects are fairly decent; as mentioned, the ray guns the Video Rangers use is pretty cool, and their super-fast car stands out with its unique look. There is also a ‘space platform’ which allows transportation between earth and Atoma, which apparently is millions of miles away. Captain Video also has a rocket ship he travels in, which again adds some variety. Some of the effects (such as the rocket ship in flight) are done through using hand-drawn animation, which allows a lot more freedom in terms of effects, although this is not the first time this was done, having been integrated into the Superman serial a few years earlier. Overall, I think I can place the Captain Video serial just above average in the miasma of similar sci-fi serials: it has a lot of the well-worn tropes and characters, but has some decent effects and various inventions that add a bit of extra spice. It’s obviously meant for a younger audience, but there’s enough content for those who haven’t seen such a serial before to enjoy.