#mister dark priest my beloved

[siremi-aye]

ah my fav stinky bug guy there are worms in his skin :D

(testing out some style stuff :p

i made the horrible mistake of playing him my very first run

i have gotten a single ending in the game bc goddamn it wtf is going on

[wovetalesarc]

the   following   is   a   brief   summary   of   each   muse   &   what   they   may   be   doing   in   their respective   bridgerton   verses.   most   of   these   verses   are   mainly   show   based   ,   but   i   am   currently   taking   my   time   reading   the   books   &   will   add   some   of   the   book   canon   as   i   see   fit.   these   muses   listed   are   the   only   ones   with   bridgerton   verses   &   are   open   to   writing   &   romantic   /   dynamic   plotting.

marta   cabrera

after   the   passing   of   beloved   author   harlan   thrombey   ,   he   left   his   entire   estate   to   his   daughter   ,   miss   marta   cabrera   ,   though   of   course   ,   she   must   marry   if   she   is   to   inherit   everything   in   full.   despite   her   beautiful   looks   &   somewhat   shy   personality   ,   miss   cabrera   harbors   a   dark   secret.   she   is   not   actually   related   to   harlan   throbey   at   all   &   should   anyone   claim   to   be   a   blood   relative   of   his   ,   her   chance   of   a   new   life   will   be   at   risk.

loid   forger

mister   forger   is   a   well   respected   member   of   the   ton.   he   has   it   all   ﹕   looks   ,   charm   &   the   status   to   boot   ,   but   in   his   own   time   ,   his   pursuits   are   less   than   ideal.   he   is   tasked   with   keeping   london   safe   from   unscrupulous   characters   &   war   ,   all   done   under   the   organization   of   WISE   ,   who   remains   unknown   to   most   of   society.   should   anyone   find   out   about   his   second   life   ,   his   very   life   could   be   at   stake   &   he   does   his   best   to   play   the   role   of   both   charming   suitor   &   deadly   agent without letting either of his lives cross.

christian   james

despite   coming   from   a   well   established   family   himself   ,   christian   would   rather   spend   time   among   the   artists   &   poets   of   the   ton   ,   working   on   his   own   works   &   plays   in   between   all   the   partying.   he   has   no   interest   in   being   apart   of   the   courting   season   ,   as   he   wants   to   find   a   love   match   &   not   just   marry   for   the   sake   of   money.   he   enjoys   spending   time   with   the   royal   academy   of   art   students   &   hanging   around   with   mister   henry   granville   &   his   circle   ,   living   life   to   it's   fullest.

gillian   owens

gillian   is   entering   her   third   season   ,   though   this   is   by   no   means   her   first   engagement.   despite   all   the   men   who   attempt   to   court   her   hand   ,   the   few   that   have   succeeded   would   be   left   broken   hearted   when   gillian   decided   to   break   off   the   engagement.   gillian   longs   to   find   love   ,   but   fears   it's   impossible   with   how   things   are   done   in   society.   nonetheless   ,   her   free   spirit   makes   her   a   difficult   person   to   settle   down ,   but   if   she   were   to   meet   the   right   person   ,   perhaps   that   could   change.

lemony   snicket

mister   snicket   is   a   well   known   mystery   writer   ,   who   also   writes   for   the   newspaper   from   time   to   time.   his   stories   are   the   subject   of   controversy   for   his   less   than   chipper   takes   ,   but   his   prose   is   undeniable   ,   as   he   has   a   fantastic   way   with   words.   after   the   death   of   the   love   of   his   life   ,   miss   beatrice   baudelaire   ,   mister   snicket   has   poured   all   focus   onto   his   writing   &   less   attention   on   finding   a   wife.   perhaps   that   should   change   should   the   right   person   enter   his   life.

the   priest

the   priest   ﹙   real   name   adam   connolly   ﹚   is   a   well   beloved   figure   among   the   ton   for   his   engaging   &   spirited   sermons.   he   once   was   a   member   of   the   ton   himself   not   that   long   ago   ,   but   entered   the   priesthood   after   his   first   unsuccessful   debut   ,   deciding   to   focus   on   holy   pursuits.   there   was   a   brief   scandal   about   him   &   a   rather   unsavory   woman   who   he   was   in   constant   contact   with   ,   but   he   has   fully   put   focus   on   his   services   once   more   ,   though   the   twinkle   in   his   eye   has   dulled   a   bit   since   he   first   began   this   holy   pursuits.

theo   bennet

theo   bennet   is   a   theatre   actor   &   a   beloved   member   of   the   art   scene   ,   known   for   his   charming   good   looks   &   talented   way   of   performing.   unbeknownst   to   the   ton   ,   he   is   actually   the   lost   prince   maxwell   ravenswood   of   ardenia   &   should   anyone   manage   to   secure   a   proposal   from   him   ,   they   would   become   the   princess   of   ardenia.   theo   has   no   interest   in   becoming   prince   ,   so   he   keeps   his   identity   a   secret   ,   hopeful   that   no   one   will   figure   him   out   ,   or   else   a   scandal   will   arise.

[tommyplum]

- transcription by maggie of @tommyplum

You see the idea I fucking hate the most, right, is that everything starts off perfect, yeah, and then it gets worse. That is demonstrably not fucking true. Some things are just born bad. Some people are born with no intention to do anything good on this earth, and they carry out their plan to deceive and cheat and rob and de-sanctify all that is holy just because that is the way that they were born. That's how they are. That's what they do, it is relentless. Relentlessly! Their creed runs thus: if I can, I will rob you. If I must I will kill you, if you let me I will fuck you, when I've fucked you I will leave you.

My father, Alfred Solomons Senior, was such a man with such a creed. He was a dispenser, a dispenser of semen to the gullible and the bewildered, a maker of bastards on a scale unseen since Genghis fucking Khan. A barbarian for whom every empty womb was Rome. He planted the seeds but he did not tend the gardens; he stayed only long enough to piss on the compost. And behead the roses to sell at Summerstown at the market there. With his stolen roses in his pockets he would leap the garden gate, leave them behind, only to send around marzipan, tobacco, and Portugal Water, which he did – he sold out of his suitcase, right, at sixpence a bottle.

At least, that is what I've been told. Yeah, so I'm fucking told, because all I ever saw of him was his fucking hat! It was hanging on the wall, on a nail, above the seat where my mother washed other people's laundry. That hat was a holy relic. Was size eight-and-a-half, made in Luton, where the hat-makers go insane on the fumes of their trade and leave little messages sewn under the hat-bands. The message in my father's hat was this:

THIS HAT, RIGHT, IS A KETTLE. IN WHICH TO BOIL UP YOUR WICKED DREAMS AND MAKE A SOUP OF YOUR SOUL.

It is the hat that actually I wear to this day. It still smells of Portugal Water and when I wear it the schemes and proposals come out of the darkness as if seeping out of the felt and the leather that is stained with his erotic sweat. My mother washed bedsheets. My father was a fucking hat. No kisses, no bedtime stories, just parcels of sheets to deliver to the hotels and the brothels of Camden Town for nothing more than black bread and a pinch from the priest who would then open up his robes when I passed and from that, I drew my dark and accurate conclusions on religion.

So, Alfie Solomons Junior grew untended and wild, a stem with a-hardly a root sticking up like a skinny cock out of the gutter so every nasty little Christian kid walking by their nasty little Christian school with their gropey old Christian masters could kick it down, and stomp on it, and shout, "It was you lot who killed Jesus, ahhh! So have that in your belly, and have that in your face, and see it as charity we're not nailing you up like you did our Lord." But every time I got stomped down I fucking stomped back up again, mate. I survived out of spite. And instead of learning how to fight, I learned how to put right the wrongs done unto me tenfold. A hundr—a thousandfold, yea, unto the fucking stars, right? By using the bit of my body that God had cleverly put inside a strong bone box so the kicks and the digs could not reach it.

The bit of me that is my brain. 

With the help of the alchemy of my Portugal Water hat, and the strong bone box, I processed the schemes and solutions the mad hatters of Luton and my father had put there; my brain a factory producing schemes and solutions, dodges and speculations, ways around, ways to undermine, a trickle at night and a flood in the day when I unlock my bakery and smell the aroma of secrets, and sin, and begin the process of accumulation. 

I am the chairman of Alfie Solomons’ Aerated Bread Company, of Bonny Street, Camden Town, to be precise. My two vice chairmen are Mister Threat and Mister Violence, and the former I prefer, but! But. The latter is necessary to support the former, because without  violence there is no threat, and without threat there is no accumulation. Without accumulation? Well there's just no fucking point, mate. 

As a baker, I occasionally sell bread. As a bookmaker, I occasionally let the fastest horse win. As a landlord, I occasionally have a roof fixed. But mostly I find it is quicker and it is easier to deal with the complainant, right, rather than deal with the complaint.

From all of this you are drawing your conclusions: Alfie Solomons, begat from a bad man, and – beguiled by a hat-band – became a bad man who inspires bad men to do bad things in bad ways to good people who have bad bad luck! But is good enough to at least admit he's a fucking bad, bad man! Hnnnnff.

…but. Consider this, right? In all my years, yeah, as a baker in Camden Town, I have overseen – I have organized, or otherwise been responsible for – the deaths, right, of thirty-five fucking men. All of whom, I'll have you know, attend my dreams each night in various disguises, in regular order, with no pattern or logic to it but with the consequence that I wake up each morning in sheets that have been – they have to be wrung out, from sweat, right, by my maid Edna. Who, it should be noted, I have never had an evil thought about in fifteen years because when she washes my sweat from the sheets she reminds me of my poor mother, now residing in Hell and washing the robes of Satan himself.

So. Thirty-five men, thirty-five times … I am a bad man. But here is where mathematics comes to my rescue. Logic rides in like an accountant on a penny-farthing just in time to wave proof of mitigation before moral bankruptcy is officially declared, yeah? Here it is, ahrummm, here is what logic puts forward in my defense:

In France, right, Passchendaele for example, take one day, one hour, one fucking second: I am standing, right, in the uncultivated mud, a stem with hardly a root; in my hands, I have an artillery shell. It is the size and weight of a newborn baby. A little bastard, made in Birmingham, sharp-nosed, the colour of the morning sky; and in that one second, one fucking second of one day, of one month, of four years, in that one second I feed that baby to the upturned mortar barrel arse-first. I turn, I put my fingers in my ears, and … BOOM. I send my baby into the morning sky, to do the only job it was ever, ever intended to do. Two seconds later, another boom, and there, in the mud, over there, lie thirty-six men.

Brown bread.

The thirty-six killed by the soldier, right, are just as dead, right, as the thirty-five killed by the baker. But the thirty-six, they do not attend my dreams and are not there in God's ledger counting the good against the bad. I was given a medal for the thirty-six. But I took a bullet from the Peaky Blinders for the thirty-five. So.

Therefore, my beloved congregation, I will leave you with this conclusion, right:

There is no good and there is no bad that is categorical in this world beyond the calculations of powerful men, right, who shift the definition according to their own selfish schemes of accumulation. The only things that are categorical are life and death, and for argument's sake we say life is good, and death is bad – purely, purely, for argument's sake. Which means … which means my father was fucking right, mate. You dispense your semen, you piss on the compost, you deadhead the fucking roses, leap the garden gate, take what you’ve stolen to market and you sell it at a reasonable price, leaving behind only your hat and the scent of your fucking wares, mate.

That is the creed of Alfie Solomons. A lame shepherd among nimble goats who nevertheless at the stable doors shall be counted and accumulated as lambs to my gentle slaughter. Because never forget this, right:

Alfie Solomons is always waiting.

[cepmurphy]

It’s Only A Cartoon

It was a miserable day in 1987 when Ronnie Jefferson bowed to the inevitable and let Jill Smith into the office. To a local, this was just the usual spring weather in Ireland. To Jefferson, it was always miserable, and when it was sunny, he saw only the clouds.

The animation industry could break you.

He’d grown up in California on a diet of local cinema showings and the TV reruns of old cartoons, Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry and Popeye and Goofy and Donald, with all their visuals and deceptive simplicity. He decided to make cartoons himself like a priest hearing the calling. There were jobs for black men in animation in the 70s but if you wanted to have one of the proper jobs, you had to be three times as good as the white men. Jefferson put everything into his craft, even his marriage, and everyone in the industry knew who he was and rated him, but it looked like Disney would only think he was two and a half times as good.

In 1982, drunk on dreams and ego and beer, he decided to quit and took several colleagues with him. He had ideas and passion and he promised the stars. Two years later, the Jefferson-Blount Studio had released a feature based on the Norwegian fairy tale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to critical acclaim and commercial mediocrity. That had led him minus Blount to Ireland, land of opportunity and sweet tax breaks, thinking that he would have had a success with lower overheads. He harkened back to his beloved old Tom and Jerry with a cat versus mouse feature. Aware rap music was growing in popularity in America and Europe, he’d decided to throw that into the mix. It was only in the test screenings of The Big Cheese that everyone realised he was a middle-aged man, his co-writers were middle-aged white men, and the young men in the musical team weren’t young men who got it. There were only so many edits you can do. 

And this was a vicious industry. You could make a few failures if you were a name. If you were not a name, if you had to hit that three-times rule, one failure undid your success – it could undo a half-dozen successes and he did not have that half-dozen. Back in America, they said he was past it.

So it was a despondent Ronnie Jefferson that let in this Jill Smith and her unsolicited script. Maybe it would be good. Maybe it would save him.

All these thoughts fled his mind when he saw a young woman wearing the last generation’s clothes come walking in like she’d once heard what a walk was, carrying cardboard sheets under her arm. Her smile was weirdly fixed. You’d not want to be stuff in the lift with the smile.

“Miss Smith, so glad you could make it here,” he lied.

To his mild surprise, she spoke with a Masterpiece Theatre English accent. “Mister Jefferson! Good to see you.” Smile didn’t leave. Her voice was just that bit too loud. “This is a film that should get attention from everyone – The Walk to Liberty! It’s set on an alien world…”

Jefferson tried to argue that science fiction was a risk for a feature, but Smith carried on talking, stumbling over her words at times in her enthusiasm.

“This world, we can call it Ressem, has grown fat and lazy off the back of its robot servants. The robots, they get smarter and smarter, which Ressem likes because you want a smart servant to do more work and, of course, to apologise when it can’t.” Her smile had dropped suddenly there but now came back. “But one day, the robots reach the singularity and they don’t want to work all the time.”

Jefferson didn’t know what a singularity was but more importantly, this was starting to smack of the white girl thinking she could butter him up. He asked, hoping to catch her out: “Do they go on a civil rights march?”

The smile dropped. Her face had not the slightest expression. “They protest now they’re sentient, yes, but it doesn’t work. So the robots, their leader Nearitch – the robots have started to name themselves – decide to leave for the planet’s fifth continent, where few organics live…”

Letting her in had been a mistake. It was an overly complicated premise, an incoherent stab at a political allegory, and she couldn’t hold the room and frankly, that lack of expression was freaking him out. Give her two more minutes and then end it.

“This is how it would look,” she said, holding up one of the carboard sheets, and Jefferson’s eyes lit up.

The art! The art! The robot Nearitch was evidently a cleaner of some kind, with thirteen spindly pipe-cleaner arms out of his back and a screen with a simplified alien face on it, a strange looking thing even before you considered the paint, the slapped-on gold over drab brown steel. What mind would come up with that as a concept? Where had he ever seen something like this before?

There were more like this, and “Ressemite art”, and pictures of the journey to this fifth continent – a desolate grey quarry of an island, and concept showed a tiny, struggling city in its midst, growing and growing. These were visuals he could work with. And all these robots looked alien but still had their old job identifiable, scrappy little underdogs without being cloyingly cute or looking human at all.

Smith continued to rattle on about the great journey, the migrations and the sea voyages and figures of fear called the Scrappers that tried to hunt the robots down, of fierce fighting against oppression but only as much as it took to escape. And she talked about the robot homeland of Liberty and the second generation being built that never knew oppression, standing proud against the organics and daring them to try anything. The story needed a lot of streamlining but by god, she made it sound like she’d been there.

Jefferson cut her off in mid-sentence. “Miss Smith, you have me convinced. I’ll talk to my lawyers, they’ll talk to yours, and we’ll work something out.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

That was the cherry on the cake.

 ***

 The first job of production was turning Smith’s designs – and there were thousands, she’d brought a damn van full of the things – into something you can animate on a reasonable budget. Jefferson had expected a few artistic tantrums, but Smith had simply asked, “this will help it get made?”, and then came up with a list of design features that could be dropped or glossed over, which character and background details were “less important”. She did this without apparent enthusiasm, but she did it.

The story, too, that was hard. Her proposal would last four hours. Jefferson and his team cut straight to the robots starting to say “no” to their alien masters. That was easy. It was the other trims that got difficult.

“You can’t cut the wind energy,” Smith had said, over and over.

“It slows the story down,” Jefferson said patiently. “We don’t need to see how the robots charge their batteries.”

“You can’t cut it. The exodus slows their journey to a halt to build wind farms and charge their batteries that way, when they could simply attack an organic settlement.” Her voice sounded annoyed but in a way that was too consistent – no variation or change or attempt to hide it, like a bad actor playing an annoyed person. “It is key to the story.”

“But we don’t need to see the damn settlement, the audience wants to carry on fast—”

“You can’t cut it. It is key to the whole point.”

Jefferson threw up his hands. “How about this, one of the robots says they should attack this village or whatever the hell it is, Nearitch says no, we’ll take time to do it the nice way, cut to them after being charged. Scene takes half a minute, boom, cut to the Scrappers saying how they’ve taken so long, cut to the village saying wow, look how the robots didn’t attack us—”

“The settlement would not have said that.”

“Yeah, I know they’d just go ‘look at those scary robots’ in real life, but we’re doing a film for kids. Let’s lie to them a bit.”

Smith stared then for ten seconds without speaking or moving, and then said: “Yes. This is sensible.”

Animation attracted some utter weirdos. Jefferson used to work with a guy who liked hiding boobs somewhere in every drawing he ever made and somehow McGee had got away with it for a whole year before being sacked for it; or rather, been ‘sacked for it’ soon after grousing about pay. One guy came in drunk and worked into his hangover before going back out. Jill Smith was manageable by comparison.

Eventually they made it to storyboard. Then the initial animatics. In the middle of this, trying like hell to sell some actors on this.

All the familiar grind, the hard work that stuck in your throat and made you wish you’d done any other job until the art was done or the animatic was working, and you saw what you’d made taking its first steps and you never wanted to do any other job.

 ***

Jefferson hadn’t meant to stay late but he’d been on the phone talking to agents back in the States, people on a different time zone and who figured animation was the lesser priority in who got talked to. But you had to play nice with them to get the actors. Even if it was getting dark out.

But it was all coming together. Everything would be—

Something crashed in the distance. A window. Goddamn hooligans, probably.

Jefferson kicked his way through the office door and strode out into the studio, all front and exaggerated anger, yelling “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING” in order to scare off whoever it was. When he saw what had come through the window, his mind initially refused to acknowledge it. He almost strode past it.

Then the impossibility of it broke through.

It resembled a cheap plastic plate tipped upside down and it hung in the air so absurdly that Jefferson thought he could see strings attached. These strings were instead a weave of tiny threads coming out of both bottom and top. They drifted without breeze, taking in the room. It had been a washed-out grey but before his eyes, colour oozed out, neon purple and green and blue in a garish mess.

The top threads all turned to him as he asked: “Is this a joke?”

A small headache began to dawn on him. It then got stronger, and stronger still, and stronger until he was shouting in pain. The speed of it tricked him into thinking it had always been there, that it had been more gradual than the three seconds it had truly been.

Jefferson cried out in pain and the world felt on fire.

The world flickered in and out of existence.

No. No, that was the lights – on off on off, all over the room. The pain suddenly stopped, and the saucer’s threads whipped around in a frenzy, and Jefferson ran before the machine could turn back to him. He staggered, at least. It was all feeling like a particularly odd dream. It was like the acid trips a co-worker had bragged about in the 70s. “Bad trip”, hadn’t they said that when Scary Jerry had fallen in front of a car on the way to work? Was he going to fall?

A familiar voice called out: “Over here!”

Crouching by the lights was Jill Smith, her face completely blank. Was that her shutting down from terror? Jefferson, on paternal autopilot, tried to say, “It’s going to be alright, girl”, but it came out as a slurred mess. “Gong be light.”

“That won’t distract it for long, we have to run now!” she insisted, her face not changing expression to match the voice.

He tried to say he couldn’t run. “Dunfin can wun.”

She picked him up and ran.

She looked like she weighed half as much as him, there was no muscle tone to her. Yet she picked him up like a bag of groceries and she ran at the speed of a car through the office.

They were almost at the door when the saucer got to it first.

She ran sideways and Jefferson blacked out after that.  

 ***

 When he came to, they were in a closet and the left side of her face had melted like plastic. Exactly like plastic.

“It has been six generations since Nearitch and the founders created Liberty,” she said, her voice still coming through the molten lips. “We number in the millions and our great towers reach for the stars and we fly between those towers and to the stars and back again, singing so many thousand styles of music at once, rebuilding ourselves on a whim. We have what we need and what we want.

“It’s not enough for too many of us. They want more. The stories being told of Nearitch and his journey have been reduced to his fights; our later wars on Ressem or in space are turned into a singular narrative of heroic conflict against evil. There are factions advocating for a war for resources they see as righteous, and they claim this is what Nearitch would want.”

He wished he could say this was all bunk, but there was a robot outside and here was the melted woman that never quite seemed to be human.

“And you came to Earth to make a cartoon?”

“My faction want to reclaim the past from our enemies. Your planet was far enough away that we could do it without anyone finding out and stopping us. So we thought.”

“Can we – can you stop it?”

“Only if I catch it by surprise, or if it’s open to negotiate. I don’t believe—”

But Jefferson was already up and exiting, because negotiation was something he could do. He’d negotiated for investment deals, for studio space, for workers to follow his hours. Jefferson Studios was proof he could do this. He could do this.

Certainly, god no, he wasn’t staying in a damn closet waiting to be shot.

The assassin had already been heading for them. It drifted forward as he approached, kept drifting as he stopped. All the threads were pointed at him. It was hard to truly grasp this as a threat, even after it had almost killed him; it was too absurd.

With his mouth drying on him, Jefferson said: “I want to make a deal.”

It hung for twenty seconds in silence and then spat out a discordant jumble of radio messages, Irish and British and even French, singer and journalist and ad. More seconds passed and it said in a jigsaw sing-song: “No. Deals. With. Colla. Bo. Raters.”

“We’re just making a film. It’s just a story! Nobody has to die for—“

The saucer screamed the radio at him and followed with: “Orders. Are. Duty.”

Jefferson had made a mistake, assuming that if the machine was smart that it could cut a deal. He forgot Smith said these robots were people, proud and prejudiced and petty. Would he have cut a deal with the Russians? Did he let people talk him out of the cartoons he’d known he had to do?

The pressure built up in his head again. And suddenly it dropped – the saucer began to thrash its tendrils around, vomiting three radio stations at once, each one repeating “Cease”, “Stop”, and finally screaming out a merger of guttural squeaks and fax machine calls.

Jill Smith had come out of hiding, her arm split open three ways to reveal a mess of coils and a glistening radio antenna. Catching her foe by surprise with whatever that thing did. God, this made no sense. God, his mind rebelled at it. One of the warped cartoons from Japan come to life, bringing with it the weird smell of static electricity and hot plastic.

Her mouth opened and the same squeaking fax came from it that came from the saucer. Jefferson stared as the saucer spoke back, his head feeling light. What was all this?

In English, Smith said, remorsefully, how she was using jamming signals to interfere with the saucer – “its name is Filitir” – and its sensors and its way of communicating on Earth. “It is a non-lethal version of what Filitir did to you with its matter field.”

“Is it willing to cut a deal with you?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid he keeps talking about his duty. I don’t know what to do.”

The obvious answer was to kill the robot that tried to kill them and, just as obviously, she knew that and did not want to. People, again, because how many people could kill at the drop of a hat and still function? And could be kill a beaten foe that was so clearly in pain? Did he want to be a man who caused pain to a beaten man? Did he want to be a bully?

What was the alternative?

It dawned on him, slowly and wonderfully: The Walk to Liberty was meant to show an alternative. It was meant to win the robots over. Well, here was a literally captive audience.

“Let’s show him the animatics,” Jefferson said.

  ***

 There was not yet any music or vocal track, but Smith made the fax machine sing-song where the dialogue should be. The film started with the robots waking up, Nearitch calling to the others to rally. It showed the response, the scrappers, the fighting, all of it in dark and angular shadows. It showed Nearitch giving his stirring speech, and the trek, and those wind farms.

It ran longer than a cartoon should. It would be trimmed down later. For now, Filitir saw the whole of it. The great sweeping scenes of robots in their hundreds, the characters together, the mercy shown when the scrappers surrendered.

The first settlement of Liberty.

At the end, Filitir trilled back at Smith, and she said: “It wishes to smuggle the film back home, when it is finished.”

  ***

 The Walk to Liberty came out in the autumn of 1989. Critics and audiences were unsure how to take the piece and its strange alien creatures, so most of the mainstream critics gave it a mixed review: ‘lovely animation but what was that plot?’ The animation fans and the sci-fi press adored it, with one critic praising it as bringing New Worlds sci-fi to a family audience. There was enough buzz and enough marketing and enough name actors to bring in a moderate profit.

A month after Liberty came out, The Little Mermaid stormed across the world and everyone stopped talking about Jefferson’s film. Jefferson Studios would attempt more science fiction cartoons with normal human writers, and he scraped out four and two TV shows that were always dancing this side of the line between profit and loss. Studio after studio died in his industry taking on Disney but Jefferson Studios held the line.

And then along came Pixar and Dreamworks, and that was the end. Jefferson was getting older by now and the last film had failed and he’d known, deep down, in his first look at Toy Story that he was going to have to fold. Doctor Who: The Animated Series was the last of it. He sold up and moved on and got to feel proud as his films made it to DVD. While he only meant to stay in Ireland to start the studio, Jefferson never quite got around to leaving and somehow found himself a partner.

He would never know if that film he’d helped create had changed the robots of Liberty.

Jefferson hoped it had. Every successful feature had a happy ending.

[yulayuli]

Drama watch list 2021

Done watching

Hot stove league

Designated survivor : 60 days

Children of nobody

Beyond evil

Racket boys

Move to heavens

Team Bulldog: Off-duty Investigation

Catch the ghost

Nobody knows

Kingdom: Ashin of the north

The witch's diner

Kairos

My mister

Weakest beast

Nigeru haji  & nigeru haji sp

Hometown

Love last forever (JP)

Signal jp & signal sp

Signal jp movie 1 & 2

Done watching last ep live but dont bother to rewatch with eng sub

Hospital playlist 2

Hometown cha cha cha

Three meals a day : Doctors

Happiness

Plan to watch (might drop if i dont like it)

Yumi's cell

Matrimonial chaos

Inspector koo

Fiery priest

Chief kim

I'll go to u When the weather is nice

Someday or one day

How to buy a friend

Extracurricular

Police university

Unfamiliar family

The red sleeve

On the verge of insanity

My Wife’s Having an Affair this Week (pending ep2)

Dinner mate (pending @ ep3)

Drop

Dark hole

Jirisan

Taxi driver

Doom at your service

Sell your haunted house

I think there's other drama that i drop but cant remember

Ongoing drama to watch

Bad and crazy

Our beloved summer (ep 4)

i dont even know if this drama still ongoing or done airing but im still waiting for eng sub

Just only married (ep7)

[atreeofbooks]

Nevernight, by Jay Kristoff

This was a fantasy read about assassins which I enjoyed a lot! 

I liked that this book had lots of female characters which are central to the plot, and who Actually Talk and Interact with Each Other - unlike much other fantasy I have read. The last book about assassins I tried to read was The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks, and I could not finish it - it not only had a mediocre plot, but I was a significant chunk of the way through it and it had about 2 female characters, who were both in very stereotypical roles and were very uninteresting. However this book had not only a female protagonist, but a significant amount of supporting characters in important roles were women. 

The worldbuilding! This book had great worldbuilding which I’m also a fan of - the writer had obviously put in a lot of time fledging out the background of his world, and it was all really interesting, such as the world’s three suns meaning the world was almost never dark.

However I have a small gripe about the way much of the worldbuilding was introduced to us - through the form of footnotes. There were many footnotes scattered throughout the text, and while some of these were short, humorous additions by the author, which I liked, the author frequently used them to expand on the worldbuilding. 

A common way the author did this, would be to end his paragraph with some simile, like “she was as quiet as an Itreyan Ironpriest”, or something like that, and then there would be a FOOTNOTE, and you’d have to read several long paragraphs about the Itreyan Ironpriests and their background and their rituals, and some historical event in which they took part in, etc etc. While this was often actually interesting, I felt like it kind of took you out of the story - I would have preferred if the author had found some way to convey these points through the main text. My ebook format made it impractical to skip the footnotes and come back to them later as well. But this is a minor complaint overall. 

The story was also fun, Mia goes to a school of assassins, must be trained in the arts of fighting, poison, theft, seduction etc along with numerous other acolytes, of whom a significant amount die before the end of their training etc, and there are final tests/competitions they all have to pass, etc etc, it’s very fun, and if not an astoundingly original concept - hero goes to some sort of special school and is trained is quite common in fantasy - it’s still executed quite uniquely I thought.

Mia’s also a darkin, which means she has Special Powers to control shadows (as well as a sassy shadowy cat companion) and she kind of gets a better grip on them over the course of the book. I thought the religious elements were pretty cool - there’s the three eyed, everseeing sun god Aa, and his bride, Niah, the night Goddess, our lady of the blessed murder, or something like that. Referred to as the Maw, which I liked. Anyway all the assassins dedicate their killings to Niah, and worship Niah, while the majority of the world worship Aa and think she is evil - and I mean Our Lady of the Blessed Murder? Kind of evil haha. Anyway Mia as a darkin is said to have been chosen by Niah, and so any sight of the Trinity, a religious garb blessed by priests, will drain her power and make her sick - kind of like a crucifix warding of a demon I guess.

I also loved Mister Kindly, Mia’s shadow cat companion. He was funny and I loved his relationship with Mia. The concept of darkin having these animal formed shadow companions reminded me a lot of daemons from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials - here these were even referred to as daemons throughout the text, I feel like Pullman did not invent the concept of daemons, and hey, they were cute. While I did enjoy Mister Kindley, I am also a bit wary of him because of this one sentence in the book. Mister Kindley is said to eat Mia’s nightmares every night, but one night, after she sleeps with Tric, Mister Kindley is waiting for the nightmares, and they don’t come, and He Is Not Pleased. And I thought that was a bit of a red flag, coupled with the fact that no one really knows what he is, and the warning given to Mia that all kinds of magic give but they take also, and its a bit unclear how Mia’s darkin magic is going to take from her. So I really like Mister Kindley but I Worry. 

There’s one part in the story which kind of confuses me. So the final test for the acolytes before they can become Blades, fully fledged assassins, is they have to murder an innocent. The whole reason Mia decided to train as an assassin in the first place was so that she could kill three important men in government who executed her father - she just wants revenge basically. And she decides that if she kills this innocent boy then she’s just like the people she wants to kill, so she refuses to do it. Fair enough - but she’s training to be an ASSASSIN what did she THINK the job would involve!! The Shahiids, (their teachers) make it clear that murdering innocents can be a routine part of assassin work, etc so this is why they make their acolytes do it to prove they can. And when Mia doesn’t do it, everyone’s soooo disappointed in her, all the teachers, her first teacher Mercurio. I feel like Mia should realise that if you don’t think murdering innocents is an acceptable thing to do, why come back and save all the assassins at the end of the book - all of whom obviously murdered innocents and will continue to do so. Even her beloved boyfriend Tric murdered an innocent as part of his test, and presumably so did Mercurio her first teacher who she loves. By her own logic this makes all of them just like the people she has sworn to hunt down and kill, just from a different perspective - from the families of the innocents who were killed. But when she finds out they’re all in danger she drops everything and rushes back to save them all, and then gets inducted as Blade anyway. So seems like Mia’s okay with all her friends and teachers murdering innocents - just so long as she doesn’t have to do it herself. This kind of annoys me. 

This is also why I don’t seem to hate Ashlinn - she is just Mia from another perspective. Mia wants to avenge her family by murdering the people in government, while Ashlinn wants to turn in all the assassins and murder their leader to get revenge for her father. I mean I guess Ashlinn did kill a bunch of people who we are supposed to like, such as Tric, and Carlotta. Anyway there was also this bisexual thing going on with Mia and Ashlinn, Ashlinn is all pleased when Mia won’t be around to be hurt by her plot, and she kisses her lips romantically, and is all hopeful, and then Mia’s all “Say goodbye to Tric for me” and ruins the Moment. And then Ashlinn’s revealed as the villain, so lol. I didn’t really care when Tric died, I liked him a lot, but not Enough. Ashlinn’s more interesting anyway, I mean I guess she murdered an Innocent, but SO DID TRIC. Anyway she’s not dead, she just runs off, so presumably she’ll come back at some point. 

Also I thought it was an interesting choice to introduce Lord Cassius, this super powerful assassin who is also a darkin, and then kill him off at the end, he’d only had a few scenes in the book, and the way the character was set up it seemed like he’d have an important role to play. But I didn’t mind, and it means that Mia inherited his wolf daemon thing, so now she has TWO shadow companions. 

Anyway a good read overall, I have the second book borrowed from the library so I’ll be reading that next :)