#most of this is the “early installment weirdness” problem alas

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

See the late great Steven Attewell:

Being too honorable to take up Littlefinger’s offer [...] is not the reason Ned Stark fell from power. The reason Ned Stark falls from power is his inability to understand institutional power. Instead of understanding the fiscal powers of the state as an institution that exists outside of the man who occupies the office, he sees Littlefinger as “the man who pays” and thinks that he has to use Littlefinger. In reality, Ned is Hand of the King and Lord Protector of the Realm – he doesn’t need Littlefinger to take command of the City Guard.

Via his commentary on AGOT Eddard XIII, but reiterated in all of his Ned chapters commentaries, especially this one.

like people are always whacking george for this and yeah he can be a bit handwavey with like “margaery and her cousins” “this random girl we never hear from again was alysanne’s lady for many years” or whatever, like he doesn’t single out more than two or three girls usually, their families aren’t always as politically active as you’d expect them to be but they are THERE they do EXIST like there’s a FUCKTON of tyrells in that capital, ned himself comments on the sheer number of evil blondes hanging around, All Three Baratheon Brothers Are There For A Long Time, petyr is by himself but he has an ENTIRE SPY NETWORK meanwhile ned just rolls up with nothing but a glorified intern, a mean party nun, and his two young daughters and is like “i can fix the entire government actually politics is easy” NED WHERE ARE YOUR CRONIES. THE ENTIRE NORTH IS LINING UP TO BE YOUR INSANE HENCHMAN AND YOU LEFT THEM ON READ.

[seyaryminamoto]

I always think about this before sleeping at night: OZAI AND URSA COULD BE ATLA SUPREME CANON SHIP IF SHE DIDN'T CHEAT ON HIM I mean they are doing well (and treating zuko well) before he reads that damn letter

x’D well, before sleeping at night I always think about future scenes of my stories I look forward to writing, but to each their own (?)

Frankly, canon-wise I don’t know what to make of Urzai anymore. Gladiator!Urzai is based on my early understanding of their relationship as was presented in Zuko Alone, but then the comics took a whole different direction to explore their story and it went against pretty much everything I’d expected from these two. It’s probably the most unpleasant take on Urzai, despite it’s far from the most depressing, actually? Had they cared about each other to some degree, their story would have been soooo very complicated, and Ursa’s actions would feel much more like a sacrifice than they do, lending a much more tragic feeling to her tale. But alas, that’s not what we were given...

In any case, Ikem obviously poses an irksome problem in any positive canon!Urzai interpretations. His character is vital to The Search because he’s Ursa’s initial source of misery upon being stuck with marrying Ozai, but he hasn’t had a significant role at all in the comics beyond this. Whatever happens next, I highly doubt that he will be more important in future installments. Removing him from the story altogether could do away with Ozai’s completely exaggerated behavior over Ikem, and he’d probably look a little less unhinged and freakish than he does because most of his paranoia over Ursa seems to stem from the awareness that she once loved someone else. Granted, the letter she writes doesn’t help one bit, but he sends Vachir to kill Ikem after YEARS of doing nothing? Which implies he just... obsessed silently with the letter for that long and didn’t act on it until Zuko was older? 

There’s even inconsistencies in Ozai’s erratic, jealous man behavior that I don’t think I’ve pointed out before and I don’t know if anyone else did:  

Part 1:

Part 3:

Like... let’s try out all the interpretations of this particular situation: say the wedding wasn’t immediate, they had to prepare for a while: why would he need spies to track down her “every move” before marrying her if they took Ursa to  the Capital on the very day they went to Hira’a, and Ikem was left behind in the village? He wouldn’t need “spies” for it, he would merely need maids to inform him of her every move, like the one who intercepts the letters. I highly doubt that woman qualifies for the title of spy...? :’D

Then, the other possibility... is that Ozai found Ursa on his own, and kept her under surveilance BEFORE Azulon found her? Does THAT make any sense? O_o Or did Azulon find Ursa, tell Ozai, Ozai sent his spies to keep watch on her and only after a few months of being sure she hadn’t fucked Ikem did Ozai and Azulon travel to the village? :’D

... Yeah, weird plot contrivances, what else is new...

Anyways, I think it’s fair to say that Ikem was only thrown into the mix to give Ursa a dramatic reason to despise Ozai since day one. So... would they have been fine if she hadn’t “cheated”? Well, for starters I don’t think she cheated while she was living in the Palace, canon-wise, she only does after Ozai forces her to leave (and I won’t argue that it counts as cheating after she leaves, because they’re technically still married, despite they’re clearly 100% estranged and give zero shits about each other, according to the comics). But going by how this relationship was characterized, I’ve always thought the comics were insisting on presenting an absolutely miserable and unhappy Ursa, who only pretended otherwise for Zuko’s benefit. Yeah, the letter made things worse for their family, but even then, that your husband keeps tabs on everything you do, including the letters you’re sending back to the family you’re no longer allowed to meet, isn’t exactly a sign of healthy relationships. Again, it’s all done to show how bad and toxic Ozai is, and why Ursa has every right to get out of this relationship. Everything is unpleasant and straight-forward.

Obviously, in contrast, Zuko Alone presents a picture of Urzai that allows a thousand possible interpretations. I have no doubts there’s some people who actually think they were in love, then there’s others who think they hated each other’s guts. I’ve even seen fics based on the premise that Ursa was actually in love with Iroh all along and had an affair with him behind Ozai’s back :’DDDD therefore... it can go all sorts of ways. There’s no end to the possible interpretations of what Ursa and Ozai’s story could have been like, but sadly, the comics didn’t offer much that would allow a positive interpretation of canon!Urzai, as far as I can tell.

So, while Urzai definitely had potential to be the coolest possible ATLA version of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth? The very starting point of the comics, when retelling Ursa’s story, establishes pretty strongly that this isn’t the story of a Macbeth and his Lady Macbeth, but the story of a woman who was roped into marrying a toxic man against her will. Hence... it’s not merely because she cheated or because of the letter or because of Ursa’s actions, it’s because the whole backstory the comics created for them blatantly ruled out the possibility for Ursa and Ozai to be as twisted and interesting as some of us hoped they would be.

If you wish their canon relationship were any better, I’ll just say outright that the key factor to make a more palatable version of Urzai would entail removing Ikem from the picture, and that means The Search would have to be written completely differently... and at this point in time, I don’t think canon will backtrack on that at all. Soooo... I’d say go read as many Urzai fics as you can, because fortunately there’s quite a few. There are countless missed opportunities by canon, there’s no arguing with that... so I feel you, and I share your pain. But we can always find refuge in stories, because ultimately, ATLA is just a story too :’D so, look for stories with interpretations of Urzai you can agree with, and then you’ll be much happier in life, I hope!

(Or, you know, imagine such stories before sleeping at night :’DDD then you’ll be just like me x’D)

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

On the Outside Looking In: Growing Up in the Moonies

Flore Singer Aaslid, Ph.D. (2007)

Abstract The author recounts her experiences as a child and young adult in the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). She discusses the enduring sense of not fitting in, which arose from her many years of travelling and being taken care of by people other than her parents (who were usually busy with missionary work) and stigmatized for being an “unblessed” child (not born to Moonie parents). During this prolonged conflict situation she vacillated between trying to “buy it” and rebelling. Leaving the group proved to be difficult because she discovered that she did not fit in “outside” either. Ultimately, however, she left the group permanently and began to build a new life.

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There is a saying that if something doesn’t kill you it will only make you stronger. A spiritual perspective might interpret this statement as meaning that most challenges in life, however unpleasant or inconvenient, are like trials laid out by some Grand Master Plan for the sole purpose of adding some muscle to one’s otherwise weak disposition. Perceived from such a perspective, being raised in an environment such as that of the Moonies is really a blessing in disguise, with a vast array of potentials and possibilities to grow and expand in every conceivable manner. In my case, I can see how the whole experience has toughened me up in many respects. Nevertheless, for me, the most enduring and overwhelming side effect of growing up as a cult kid (having been set apart from society at large and carefully protected in a dogmatic cocoon for most of my formative years) is the relentless, almost haunting, yet mostly exasperating feeling of never quite fitting in—anywhere. I have yet to discover whether this is a blessing or a curse, but it’s probably a little of both.

Like that of many of my peers also raised in “the church,” as we called the whole ordeal, my childhood was somewhat turbulent. From the age of two, I never lived more than two years at a time in any one place. By the time I was eight, I had already lived in four different countries and learned three different languages (two of which, unfortunately, I forgot as I no longer used them). The number of “caretakers” I had during those years is beyond my recollection (probably more than 20 and fewer than 50), for both of my parents were missionaries, busying themselves with the very important task of saving the world. I was a sacrifice for the sake of a greater good, my mother used to tell me. I was put into God’s Hands, and with the help of a lot of faith and a seemingly endless number of dedicated prayers, He would protect me (sort of like paying holy instalments toward some kind of sacred life insurance). This might have worked, for all I know; I was an almost abnormally healthy child, and even today the most serious illness to fall upon me has been the flu and some nasty stomach problems in India.

Still, it is as if all this moving about, learning new languages, making new friends, adapting to different environments, only to be torn away from it all and repeat the process all over again (and again, and again, ad infinitum), somehow turned me into a weird little muddled misfit. I was doomed to feel like a perpetual stranger, forever the foreigner, like some bizarre product of shoddy enculturation, sloppy socialization, or whatever one wishes to call that process through which young children experience a sense of belonging, and identify with their nearest and dearest. I wasn’t, of course, consciously aware of my predicament at such a young age. I just felt exceedingly lonely, and of course being an only child didn’t help matters. Children, as a rule, don’t like to stand out, and lord knows I did my best to fit in. I made friends easily, was unusually outgoing, learned languages and dialects in record time, joined the Girl Scouts, the swim club, the ski club, and even a glee club (chorus). I wore the right clothes and probably liked the right things, but to no avail; that lonely feeling just never left me. And all this, by the way, relates purely to my experiences with the Outside World (that is how we Moonies referred to what other people might perceive as “normal society”). Children growing up in cults, or in any kind of fundamentalist movement for that matter, always get stuck between (at least) two worlds.

Things probably would have been slightly different, although not necessarily better, had I felt some sense of belonging in the Inside World (my own personal term for the Moonies, or “the family,” as we insiders referred to ourselves). This fate was not to be mine, however, for one big reason that I can explain only by examining the Moonie Belief System (B S). This “family” came complete with a set of True Parents (Sun Myung Moon, also founder and self-proclaimed messiah, and his wife) and True Children (their 14 children). All the other members lovingly referred to each other as True Brothers and Sisters to complete the Holy Metaphor, but also, I suspect, to linguistically prevent any kind of sexual activity from occurring between these “Brothers and Sisters.” Premarital sex was regarded as an almost unforgivable mortal sin. Sex was so terrible that any children born from this impure act were blemished forever with the stain of Original Sin, passed on through generations all the way back to when Adam and Eve had premarital sex. This is “the fall” according to the Moonie bible (otherwise known as “The Principle”)—which, incidentally, was Eve’s fault because she had sex with Satan first and then felt guilty because she remembered that it was Adam she was supposed to have sex with, whereby she seduced him, but, alas, too late or too early, or both, and so women became the inferior sex and suffer childbirth and menstruation and all sorts of womanly misfortunes as a consequence of this badly timed and somewhat bungled-up sex act.

To remedy this calamity, all lowly mortals (both men and women) must pay Indemnity. Any kind of personal misfortune could be seen as one form of paying Indemnity, but most members supplemented this payment with additional suffering, just to make sure that Indemnity was indeed being paid. There was fasting (often for [7] days with absolutely no food whatsoever); getting up very early and praying hysterically for days, weeks, or months on end; as well as fundraising (practically all the members fundraised at some point or another; many did nothing but fundraise) and witnessing (getting other unsuspecting outsiders to join the happy family). The only other activity that could remove the stain of Original Sin was The Blessing. Here, several hundred (sometimes several thousand) couples, whom True Father himself picked out from pictures or in a great big gathering called “The Matching,” would all get married at the same time by True Parents, in some very big place, like a football stadium, or Madison Square Garden. 

▲ Sun Myung Moon “matching” couples in the 1980s.

Not only the Blessed Couple, but all the future children born from this holy matrimony, would then be freed of Original Sin (which explains why it was so popular; I think the Moonies are even in the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest mass weddings in history). The offspring of these decontaminated couples were then subsequently called the Blessed Children since these lucky little cherubs were born into the world unblemished and completely free of Original Sin. In all metaphysical respects, as perfect as can be.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s point of view), I was no such child. Born to an unwed mother before she joined the church, I was doomed to carry the burden of Original Sin. I and others like me were continually reminded of this disgraceful state of affairs by simply being given the rather unflattering designation of Unblessed Children [“Jacob children”]. 

As an Unblessed Child, I was excluded in several different ways: Ritually during Sunday morning prayers (which always took place at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m.), for example, where I was consistently prohibited from saying the Pledge of the Families (not belonging to a Blessed Family myself). Socially, during big Moonie celebrations such as God’s Day, where special seats were always reserved for Blessed Children (I was allowed to sit there on many occasions, but hardly ever without first being solemnly informed that these seats were really for Blessed Children). Then there was the obligatory trip to Korea ( [usually for 40 days, but possibly] lasting several years), which was an absolute must for most Blessed Children, but not for me (although from what I’ve heard, I think I was blessed to have missed it). And of course, as opposed to most of the Blessed Children, I was in no way exempt from the fundraising and witnessing. After all, Indemnity must be paid, and I have many (not so very fond) memories of myself standing on street corners selling flowers with my mother, usually for some worthy “Christian” cause (we hardly ever said it was for the Moonies, unless we happened to be in the mood for some rather unpleasant “persecution,” as we called the stone throwing, name calling, and other mostly verbal abuse).

Understandably, after many years of this kind of treatment, one is always in danger of feeling vaguely inadequate and prone to a slight sense of inferiority with respect to those Holier Than Thou. So, to finally make my point, even in the Inside World, amidst my own True Brothers and Sisters, I felt like an outcast, a recluse, a misfit, and once again, the freak in the group.

Psychologically speaking, there are probably several ways to deal with this type of dilemma. I have ascertained two primary methods: Either you buy the crap (pardon my French), or you don’t. Choosing the first method would have been highly destructive to my fragile psyche. No complex psychological analysis needed here; I simply state what to me seems obvious: believing that one is fundamentally inferior to most of one’s peers, for whatever reason, can dangerously stagnate one’s own personal growth and development. (However, believing that their superiority is due to a somewhat more elaborate mating ritual between their parents than that of one’s own does make it all the more absurd, even though some 50-odd years back, the majority of our God-fearing citizens adopted this view regarding unwed mothers and their “bastard” children. But this just goes to show how cruel and easily duped we humans can be.) Therefore, probably to protect myself and spare myself serious damage in the long run, somewhere in the depths of my psyche (possibly even subconsciously), I decided at a relatively early age that I was surrounded by a group of gibbering morons.

This was, perhaps, not the most sophisticated strategy, but it was effective, and it worked wonders when it came to ignoring and shutting out most of the ranting and raving that appeared to compose the greater part of my conceptual reality tunnel (the Inside World), although, admittedly, many times the two worlds collided. The resulting clash was so straining that I did my best to convince myself that this plump little Korean guy jumping about on a stage, flailing his arms energetically and barking loudly in gibberish (Korean), really was the Messiah, here to save the world and populate the planet with little Blessed Children. Fortunately, this phase was usually fleeting, and then I was back to my familiar miserable, cynical self. Ironically, I strongly believe today that had I been a Blessed Child, this strategy (deciding that I was surrounded by a group of gibbering morons) would have been very difficult to adopt. This is because Blessed Children had, for the most part, been told all their lives how very special, important, and unique they were, sort of like Holy Super Kids. The whole world depended on them, and if there is still widespread misery and suffering today, it is because they haven’t taken their role and mission seriously enough (what a burden, poor kids). Basically, my guess is that it is much harder to disregard and block out positive affirmations that build self-esteem and make one feel like a Very Important Person than it is to ignore a Belief System that ultimately makes one feel like a little piece of poop. In other words, I think I was blessed to have been unblessed (life is funny that way).

Another factor worth mentioning here is that many of the Blessed Children, in addition to being conveniently Blessed to one another, later became very economically dependent on the church, which mediated and sponsored both jobs and higher education, making it hard for a recipient to break free on any level, even if one did start developing a mind of one’s own. Put slightly differently, where subtle and sophisticated mind-controlling techniques fail, hard economic facts still tend to win out in the end (I, of course, was never worth sponsoring and have had to make do with a combination of student loans and welfare, sigh). Finally, I do believe that all that moving about during my early years, and the fact that I never really managed to “bond” successfully with my mother, made it much easier for me to break out later on. Filial piety (playing the role of obedient and devoted daughter) just didn’t seem to be in my nature; and as for my father, he drifted out when I was 12 and later helped me do the same.

I have often wondered why it was so easy for me to turn my back on my True Family, and (almost) never look back. I left to live with my father in California when I was 14 (although mentally I was long gone way before then). About two years later, I decided to re-join, and become a missionary myself in France (the Outside World was too much for me at such a vulnerable age, and I had to escape before it gobbled me up—“from the frying pan into the fire,” as they say). Being a missionary in France was probably the most serious attempt I made at “buying it” my whole life. Growing up in the Moonies was due to unfortunate circumstances way beyond my control, but becoming a missionary at the age of 16 was a desperate and conscious choice. It was, in many ways, a matter of survival, at least existentially. The loneliness and emptiness I felt in the Outside World at the age of 14 was so intense that I’m really quite surprised I emerged from it all as relatively unscathed as I did (my mother was almost certainly paying holy instalments to my sacred life insurance more than ever at that point).

The best illustration I can think of to illustrate this feeling is that of a small animal, locked up in a cage most of its life, and then suddenly set free to manage as best as it can in the jungle. Or, as another cult kid I read about in a Norwegian newspaper described it, being raised in a sect is like growing up in a spaceship, protected and confined, and then one day leaping out into space. Compared to the chaos, the overwhelming freedom and the incredible loneliness I encountered out in the big cruel world, being an Unblessed Child in the Moonies seemed like peanuts. After all, here at least I was part of something, even if it was the lesser part of an otherwise perfect family. Orbiting the Outside World, having cut all ties linking me to the Mother Moonie Spaceship, I felt utterly and completely alone. Therefore, I quit high school and set off to become a missionary and sell flowers (more out of necessity than conviction). A stranger in yet another strange land, but, as fate would have it that was probably one of my wisest and most courageous decisions. Sunny California would have been the death of me, and even though I ended up staying in France only for a year (after which I fell in love with a young Norwegian and moved to Norway), I knew instinctively that I had to get away, no matter where, no matter how.

The Moonies (or whatever they call themselves today) are not the Ku Klux Klan, as one of my childhood friends has already pointed out in a previous article. They do have some positive values, and they do mean well (yes, I know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions). On the whole, my experiences have taught me a lot about society, human nature, and this very bizarre and sometimes unpleasant state called life. The feeling of being a misfit, a social freak, doomed to dwell forever on the outside looking in, still haunts me wherever I go. However, I do have a new “family,” I have my friends, and I have my son (and I can rest assured knowing that when it comes to child rearing, I certainly know what NOT to do). I also have my sense of humor to chase away any new devils (traumas and tragedies) that might happen to fly my way. I have noticed that fanaticism (in its many forms and guises) and humor are unhappy bedfellows; they just don’t mix very well. So for those of you who find this article somewhat offensive in any way, my sincere apologies; but when it comes down to a conflict between preserving other peoples’ Belief System and my own mental health, I tend to get a little selfish.

In many respects, I suppose that growing up the way I have has made me stronger and wiser. But I certainly didn’t choose the easy way out, and sometimes I can’t help but wonder if things might have been less problematic if I’d just stayed on the inside, content with looking out. But then, I seem to attract adversity; and besides, I was never really on the inside, just like I’ll never really be on the outside. You’ll find me floating in those fuzzy grey zones in between.

____________________________________________

This material was originally prepared for a presentation at the AFF [now known as ICSA] annual conference, June 14-15, 2002, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Orlando (FL) Airport.

It was published in Cultic Studies Review, 2(1), 2003, 1-8

http://www.icsahome.com/articles/on-the-outside-looking-in-growing-up-in-the-moonies

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Flore Singer Aaslid was born 12 October 1972 in Rosenheim, Germany. She was raised as a “non-blessed” child [a “Jacob child”] in the Unification Church and grew up in Germany, England, USA, France, and Norway, respectively.

She was about 8 when her mother was ‘blessed’ to her father at a Unification Church mass wedding at Madison Square Gardens in 1982.

Currently, she is a social anthropologist based in Trondheim, Norway, where she lives with her son.

____________________________________________

Wise Mind – A Case for the Integration of Subjective Experience with Objective Reality in the Age of Fragmentation written by Flore Singer Aaslid

Introducing ‘Ethnography and Self-Exploration’ — Sjaak van der Geest, Trudie Gerrits, Flore Singer Aaslid

Marginal groups, marginal minds Reflections on ethnographic drug research and other traumatic experiences by Flore Singer Aaslid

Flore Singer Aaslid Thesis: Facing the Dragon: Exploring a conscious phenomenology of intoxication

Flore Singer Aaslid Book: Facing the Dragon: Exploring a conscious phenomenology of intoxication  Paperback – 23 Feb 2010

Do you see it? Adam and Eve were husband and wife before the Fall, not brother and sister.

In the 1952 Divine Principle, Jesus was married.

Sun Myung Moon’s explanation of the Fall of Man is based on his Confucian ideas of lineage, and his belief in shaman sex rituals.

Hooked on the “true lineage” rhetoric

Sun Myung Moon’s theology used to control members

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe

Writings of former FFWPU members Many recount their experiences in the organization or their journeys out of it

Ashamed to be Korean

[spiderdreamer-blog]

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

Jim Henson’s 1982 puppet-starring fantasy epic The Dark Crystal is perhaps the best possible definition of a “cult film”, mostly because it combines the phrases “Jim Henson” and “puppet-starring fantasy epic”. Crystal was a massive passion project for the beloved puppeteer, creating an entire world from the heads of himself, British artist Brian Froud, and dozens of equally passionate artists. But the world didn’t quite know how to take the film; it made its money back respectably, but even the most positive reviews of the time could be guarded in their praise, marveling at the craftsmanship, muted in the reception of its story, which was fairly standard boilerplate fantasy of its time, and Jen and Kira failed to inspire much passion as the Gelfling protagonists, seeming blank and uninteresting compared to the monstrous villainy of the Skeksis. Still, the cult grew, many seeing those flaws as feature rather than bug, and plans for a follow-up of some sort bounced around for decades: at one point, master animator Genndy Tartakovsky would’ve made a sequel (though this eventually did survive as a comic). Now, 37 years later (fuck me, I’m old enough to remember seeing this on VHS in Blockbuster), a proper prequel exists in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, headed up by The Jim Henson Company, Netflix, and Incredible Hulk director Louis Letterier. Can lightning strike this time around?

Personally, I find myself often in agreement with most of the criticisms levied at the original Crystal installment. It’s a fascinating world to soak in, particularly in its ambition and the level of technical “how did they pull THAT off?” wizardry. Its mix of heady 70s-early 80s spiritualism, the Skeksis’ royal intrigue, and general weird Hensonian touches like the Podlings or Fizzgig make it an engaging sit, and some characters like the delightfully cranky Aughra or the sniveling Chamberlain manage to stand out. But the story, alas, is a lot of hogwash, and there is a lot of very, VERY slow wandering around from place to place without much of a clear tension until the climax, so the pacing is a bit of a slog. Resistance, to its credit, fixes most of this right out of the gate: there’s a much larger group of characters (although the opening narration by the ever soothing voice of Sigourney Weaver perhaps goes longer than it needs to in setting all of them up) to follow, and our Plucky Protagonists have a few more shades to them than Jen and Kira, in addition to having much improved puppetry (even Jim felt they hadn’t quite cracked the code in the original). It doesn’t quite fix the pacing problems (there is still a lot of Wanderin’, and I’m not sure the individual episodes needed to be 45-50 minutes on average) overall, but that’s less OF an issue.

And that aforementioned passion is on FULL display here, with every little detail a marvel in either the puppetry or the environments. Everyone is here to make a goddamn EPIC, a puppet-scale Lord of the Rings, and, it must be said, they come rather close to succeeding. Puppeteers like Neil Sterenberg, Kevin Clash, Louise Gold, Victor Yerrid, and many others are masters of their craft and prove it here through affecting, dramatic performances; the slightest furrow of a brow can convey a world of emotion even before a character begins speaking.  Letterier’s primary innovation (as explained in the excellent accompanying documentary, The Crystal Calls, which is arguably essential viewing) is to provide more of a roving camera rather than locking things down tight as in many puppet-based films, and it gives things a fantastic sense of lived-in immediacy. The only place where the approach falters notably is that some of the fight scenes get into trouble with close-ups and choppy editing, though they seem to have figured out the difficulty curve by the finale’s battle, which is quite rousing. CGI, pleasantly, is not disregarded in the slightest, but neither does it overwhelm. Henson was delighted by the possibilities of computer animation and compositing as far back as his early work on Sesame Street and carried that forward into projects until the end of his life. Here, it’s primarily used as an assist for backgrounds, pushing some of the expressiveness of the puppets at times, and giving them some extra kinds of movements (most notably some shots of SkekMal the Hunter bounding through the trees after his prey). I can’t speak for the departed Mr. Henson, but I think they’ve made his legacy proud in this regard at least.

The writing, as with the original, is still a little boilerplate (there’s not much here in a plot sense that will surprise you, exactly), but holds a great deal more interest due to the larger cast and machinations going on (I hate that Game of Thrones has become the go-to comparison for “fantasy series has political maneuvering”, but that was almost assuredly on their minds at SOME point here). Most fit into comfortable types, particularly our three leads (Rian is the fresh-faced tragic hero, Brea is the shut-in-but-passionate-princess, Deet is the cheery magic waif from the country), but hold a lot of interest regardless thanks to details in the writing and the performances (which I’ll get to shortly). Of particular interest in Seladon, sister to Brea and fellow daughter of the All-Maudra, queen of the united Gelfling tribes. Her arc takes her from blind obedience to outright collaboration with the enemy and then a real change after a truly horrific encounter. I found it rather moving, all told. Though, as before, the Skeksis prove to be the true stars of the show, compelling in their wretched decadence and hateful fear of death, even managing to be darkly funny a lot of the time in just being SO openly horrible. The Chamberlain remains the most interesting among them due to his Starscream-esque propensity for backstabbing, and he gets to air some of the most interesting, chilling points of view for the Skeksis side. One scene between him and Rian proves to be most compelling in its arguments when the usually composed Skeksis tries to justify himself by saying he’s just acting according to nature, then snarls at the possibility of having to truly confront dying. Aughra is back too, and her cranky mentor status provides some welcome levity to what can often be very dry proceedings (”Could’ve just said that! Clearly! Succinctly! Without all the WALKING!”), as does an encounter with a “good”, somewhat scatterbrained Skeksis known as the Heretic and his slow-talking Mystic counterpart UrGoh (which also gives us the best meta joke in the series).

The voice cast also helps paper over the boilerplate, given how fully stacked it is with ringers (many of whom are, amusingly, given my earlier comparison, Thrones alumni), though all manage to avoid the trap of coasting and put sterling effort into their work. It would be folly to try and list all of them, but I’ll offer at least a few bits of praise (that will inevitably turn into big-ass paragraphs). Rising star/Elton John spirit channeler Taron Egerton centers us as Rian, giving a lovely old-school heroic performance, while Anya Taylor Joy provides a nerdy strength to Brea, and Nathalie Emmanuel is the perfect ingenue as Deet. They form a strong vocal trio and chemistry as well, though some of the writing seems to line up weirdly in places (first Rian seems interested in Deet, then Brea, then Deet again, and I wondered if there was a missing script beat somewhere). Gugu Mbatha-Raw has one of the most difficult roles as Seladon, but she dives into it with Shakespearean aplomb (one key scene feels more than a little, well, Lady MacBeth), managing some of the most genuinely moving bits. Donna Kimball is one of the rare performers who gets to voice AND puppeteer her character as Aughra, and she does so with the proper cranky gusto, seeming by turns legitimately wise, ornery, and very funny. Like Kimball, Victor Yerrid steals all of his scenes, both puppeteer and voice, as Hup, a brave Podling that gets some big laughs in his annoyance at all the shenanigans that conspire against him. I was also amused in a meta sense by the brief appearance of Theo James as Rek’yr, a morbid-but-friendly Gelfling who worships death, given his somewhat similar role as Hector on Castlevania (though Hector ultimately has far more of a sense of self-preservation).

But of course, it’s the Skeksis who get to have the most fun, and all their casting is stunningly on-point (whoever had the thought of “Harvey Fierstein as a Skesis” deserves a medal), most of all Simon Pegg as the Chamberlain. What Pegg does here gobsmacked me; he uses the late Barry Dennen’s vocals from the original as an initial guide and impression (he hits the infamous “hmmmmmm!” notes perfectly), but ultimately makes the character truly his own in a way I’ve never heard from him in any previous project. It’s stunning work that he completely disappears into. Other highlights include Jason Isaacs as the nasty but strangely thoughtful Emperor (there’s a terrific scene where he muses to the General about how frightened he is at the possibility of being confronted by guilt and punishment in the afterlife), Andy Samberg as the aforementioned nice-but-out-of-it Heretic (he has great vocal chemistry with Bill Hader, reuniting from their SNL days, as UrGoh to the point where I wonder if they recorded together), Mark Hamill doing his delightful latter-day Hamill thing as the Scientist (he gets some of the best political scenes in the show with Pegg’s Chamberlain), and Ralph Ineson as the dangerously driven Hunter, who proves a frightening antagonist that will definitely scare the shit out of some kids.

All told, much like the original film, I feel a certain....distance that I wouldn’t say is entirely anyone’s fault. This was, in many ways, designed to be a beautiful, but alien and incomprehensible world, and I feel like that was never going to entirely go away, prequel or sequel. You want to be true to what makes Crystal special, after all, but it ultimately results in something I admire rather than truly love. Despite that reservation, what’s been achieved here is truly remarkable and worthy of being praised. There’s nothing else like it, and for that alone, it deserves consideration and respect.

[lacquerware]

Mega Man should stop presenting its flaws as indispensable features

When I was fifteen, I learned to play the song Malagueña on the piano. It was a laborious project; the culmination of nine years of piano lessons under the tutelage of Mrs. Diane Miller, and the main event for her upcoming student showcase.

This arrangement of the piece was a seven-pager, and somewhere around page four was a problem phrase I kept playing wrong, a rapid two-handed run up the keyboard with tricky fingering. I got to a point where I could play flawlessly up to that phrase, only to flub the phrase every time. Each time I flubbed it, my teacher would stop me and send me back to page 2. “You have to perfect that phrase,” she would say, “so try it again, but first play the preceding two pages, so it’s no longer fresh in your mind by the time you get to it again.” Alas, this would result in more flubs, and after three flubs in a row she would send me back to the beginning of the entire piece. “You’re still not getting it,” she’d say. “So I think we should run through the stuff you’ve already mastered one more time.” I would glance at her, trying to read her intent, and she would stare back at me, bug-eyed and malevolent.

The above story is false,because Mrs. Miller was a kind, intelligent, and non-insane person. Like all people of that description, she understood that you don’t work out a problem area by indiscriminately repeating ALL PRACTICE. When you get one problem wrong on a math quiz, you don’t review the entire textbook. You don’t work on your free throws by drilling layups and then also free throws. You can’t learn to poach an egg by toasting English fucking muffins all day. To suggest otherwise is an act of hostility.

Mega Manhas always carried this hostility. The game dishes out its challenges in neat little screen-sized units, but penalizes your failures with gratuitous setbacks, often requiring you to replay entire stages from the beginning. This makes learning inordinately tedious. You have to retread every yard for every yard gained.

I guess this is a relic of the arcade age, when games were designed with the express intent of punishing players—unless they paid up. Indeed, most of Mega Man’s NES contemporaries inherited this same feature in the form of finite lives and scarce checkpoints, but it never made much sense on home consoles. You could argue that it prolonged the lifespan of each game, but that only held true for the masochists who continued to tolerate this torturous system rather than reallocate all that wasted time to more fruitful pursuits like, I dunno, learning to play piano or poach an egg.

I’ve always liked Mega Man, but it was already starting to feel like a tired concept as early as Mega Man IV. I was about eight years old by then, and starting to catch on that they were running out of boss motifs. Pharaoh Man felt like a red flag.

Mega Man has since proliferated into a multi-faceted franchise spanning more than 120 titles and three decades (and for the record, I’ve played through almost all of them), but it’s never really dispensed with its ancient baggage. Mega Man X brought new visual flare while diversifying the core action; Mega Man Zero imbued the series canon with new consequence and cool factor; Mega Man ZX fused the classic gameplay with the Metroidvania template; but all of these spin-offs continued to punish, punish, punish, to gatekeep their content from the series’ own consumers to no certain end.

When Capcom revealed Mega Man 9, I was momentarily taken with the nostalgia of it, but quickly lost interest when I realized that Capcom had no intent of evolving the series’ concepts, even in basic quality-of-life ways. Lives and weapon energy were still pointlessly commodified, checkpoints sadistically scarce. They’d even removed what few innovations the series had seen to date, such as the slide and the charge shot. Nor did the roster of Robot Masters appear any more inspired than the cast of rejects that had turned me off five installments prior. Capcom had had seventeen years to think about it and all they’d come up with were lame analogs of pastbosses, like Tornado Man and Magma Man. It’s like they thought they hadto retread the same shit beat for beat or people would get confused. Even their ace, Splash Woman, was just another in a long line of water-themed bosses.

Mega Man 10 as a follow-up was downright depressing. Strike Man, Pump Man, and Chill Man are what you get when you realize yesterday was the deadline and all you’ve got is a pen and a cocktail napkin. I can’t fathom that a bunch of game designers sat around brainstorming ideas for Mega Man fucking 10 and someone was like, “Hmm, what about an ice-themed boss.”

Now we have Mega Man 11, the long-awaited, belligerently-demanded revival of the MM franchise after some eight years of dormancy. After playing the demo, I find myself wondering why. Why are we here? Why is Mega Man 11 Capcom’s answer after saying no to Mega Man for eight years? It’s the SAME.

Yes, it looks and sounds nicer and there’re a couple new mechanics—which are themselves comically uninspired takes on the ancient tropes of bullet time* and Devil Trigger—but I’m mystified at how unchanged the formula still is after eight years of seemingly adamant dismissal of the entire franchise, let alone the thirty-one years they could’ve been critically examining it. Do they realize that other developers have been building on this genre since the eighties?

*Weird side note: The tutorial for Mega Man’s new “Speed Gear” ability explains that the gear makes you “move so fast that everything else seems slow,” but in practice Mega Man moves just as slowly as everything else. So it’s not Mega Man who’s moving fast, it’s. . . the player?  

Punishment as “Difficulty”

In the Block Man (lol) stage of the demo, there’s a section where you have to jump and slide through elaborate platforms as they scroll toward you, an insta-kill grinding device nipping at your heels all the while. The third platform has very peculiar collision detection, such that your head bonks against the empty space you’re supposed to jump through, seemingly rendering the challenge impossible. This is several screens into the stage but still prior to the first checkpoint (on Normal mode), so every time this platform killed me, I had to start the entire stage over. After about fifteen tries, I discovered that the collision doesn’t trigger if you’re holding left as you make the jump—an illogical thing to do unless you’ve died so many times you’ve run out of other ideas. By the time I cracked this idiosyncrasy, I’d already spent close to an hour replaying the preceding screens over and over for no reason. Why is this still a thing? This is punishment, not difficulty. It contributes to the challenge only in that it makes the experience less fun, “challenging” your resolve to continue playing. Think of all the origami you could be learning. All the old ladies you could be helping cross streets.

The Mega Man games are quite clever in the way they parse out the platforming and shooting in little bite-sized units. Each screen is essentially an action puzzle for you to solve. It would be so logical for each screen break to be a checkpoint, because each screen break isa checkpoint—the start of the next challenge. Games like Super Meat Boy do this, meting (meating?) out their challenges in bite-sized, infinitely repeatable increments. Nobody accuses Super Meat Boy of being too easy because it doesn’t make you repeat the shit you’ve already completed when you fail at the current task. If you wantthat kind of punishment, no one’s stopping you from resetting the game.

Mega Man 11 adds a “Casual” mode which increases the number of checkpoints, but it’s still annoying to me that the more punishing model is treated as the norm while the more logical distribution of checkpoints is treated as a concession. Soulsplayers will tell me to “git gud,” but that’s why I led with the piano analogy. I got damn good at Malagueña, and I still had time left over to do my homework and play video games.

Special Weapons

Using your Special Weapons in Mega Man games is like spending the money you might need to pay rent on stuff you could be getting for free through your well-connected friend Dave. The trial-and-error pairing of the right weapon and the right boss is such an integral part of Mega Man’s progression that any other use of anyspecial weapon becomes a high-risk gamble—unless, of course, you just Google the answers.

I understand the need to impose limits on the more powerful weapons, but games have figured out countless better ways to do this in the thirty-one years since Mega Man 1. Cool-down times. Cool-down meters. Recovery proportional to damage inflicted. Recovery proportional to damage received. Recovery by way of skillful attack, à laMetal Gear Rising. Enemy fire absorption à la Alien Soldier and Radiant Silvergun. Ranger X on the Sega Genesis had solar-powered special weapons; why not steal that idea for this game’s allegedly solar-powered protagonist?

Instead, even in its eleventh installment in two-thousand-goddamn-eighteen, Mega Man still employs an RNG-based item drop system. Replenishing your meter is as simple and menial as finding an enemy spawn point and brainlessly standing and shooting until an enemy happens to drop the energy you need. Don’t forget to cycle over to the gun you want to replenish, or else the battery is wasted, as if Mega Man just eats it by mistake.*

*Later games in the series introduced the Energy Balancer, a purchasable item which automatically refills the weapon that needs refilling even if you don’t have it selected. Why is that a thing you have to buy? Why put a fundamental improvement to the game behind a paywall, virtual or otherwise?

Meanwhile, MM11still employs the same bizarre meter continuity between deaths as past installments. Each death means repeating sections of the stage without reacquiring any previously spent meter, effectively creating a difficulty vortex—the harder this game is, the harder it gets. There was a ruthlessly capitalistic logic to this in the arcade days,but the Mega Man series has never been coin-operated (with a few obscure exceptions). It hasnevermade sense that, often, the best strategy is to voluntarily leap to your death over and over to force a Game Over, just to restart with a full weapon meter as an alternative to the tedium of refilling it manually or facing the boss without it. What is the explanation for this meter continuity in the first place? Are we supposed to think Mega Man is repeatedly exploding and materializing but he can’t materialize a few extra shots from his bubble gun while he’s at it? There’s a multi-faceted idiocy to this whole system.

Rush

Capcom ought to take a long, hard look at Rush, Mega Man’s transforming robot dog companion. It’s hard to believe the same guy who invented a fully autonomous solar-powered robot boy couldn’t design a dog-shaped spring that runs on renewable energy. Special weapons are one thing, but why does Rush have an exhaustible meter? He’s a fucking spring. It makes no sense as a narrative detail nor as an element of game design. What exactly are the designers trying to limit? Your ability to spam high jumps? The logistics of the Rush Coil already do that; you have to set him up like a lawn ornament and he peaces out after a single bound. He’s unspammable, even with a full bar. To begin with, there are rarely that many useful opportunities to use the Rush Coil within a single stage, and energy power-ups are infinite as long as you’re willing to endure the chore of finding them, so it’s not as though the game is challenging you to budget your resources—it’s just discouraging you from searching for those meaningful jump opportunities in the first place. It’s driving you to Google.

Bosses

The Robot Masters have always received special star treatment in the Mega Man games but rarely been very interesting as boss fights. You know the deal: dodge the dizzying hail of projectiles in an empty square room while desperately scrambling to land enough hits with the weakness weapon before you die. Considering all the fanfare these bosses get (mug shot, intro screen, and now reveal trailers), most of them feel kind of interchangeable. Most of them have nearly identical silhouettes and shoot functionally redundant projectiles in superficially different shapes. Every gun is a Lucky Charms marshmallow.

The boss fights actually do seem a little more interesting in Mega Man 11—Block Man in particular stands out with his mid-fight transformation into a hulking colossus. I’d hoped to see more of this in future Mega Mans—fights that evolve and really set each Robot Master apart as a distinct embodiment of its corresponding motif—so maybe they’re onto something this time. Still, it’s a little ridiculous that this game has yet another fire boss, electricity boss, cold boss, and bomb boss. Why are we still here?

Before the mob comes for me, I want to stress that there’s always been lots to love about Mega Man, and I’m glad Capcom is investing in the IP again. I just hope this is the start of a long-term effort to reevaluate and improve the series, not another short-sighted extension of a tired status quo.

[urbanadventureleague]

I’ve owned my Schwinn Heavy Duti since October of 2014. At almost four years in my possession, it’s the second in longevity in my stable, behind the Raleigh Crested Butte. Unlike the Crested Butte, which has gone through numerous changes in the almost six years in my possession, the Heavy Duti remained pretty static. This was mostly due to it being a “fun” or bar bike. But then it became the bike I used the least, going through some pretty long stretches of disuse. Most of this was because of it lacking a front brake. I just didn’t feel safe riding a bike that had only a coaster brake.

I had made noises about adding a front brake for years, but didn’t do anything about it. This was mostly because it was such a daunting task no matter which way I sliced it: The front fork was a replica of a Schwinn blade fork, having no way to mount a sidepull brake, and too thin to put cantilever bosses.* I could put a drum brake wheel on there, ** but they were not easy to find, or cheap.*** The other solution would be to install a different fork, one that brakes can be mounted. The big problem here was the funky old American size stem (21.1) made the search difficult, especially if I wanted to have something with canti bosses.**** I would make some vague and vain attempts to search for either solution, get discouraged, and give up.

And of course, the deeper question was: Was it even worth it to go down the rabbit hole? Did I like this bike enough to go through the trouble? I only paid $80 for the bike and spent way less than $200 in the years since I got it on maintenance and parts. Cheap.

I started to ride the bike more over the past winter. And I decided that yes, I like this bike and it was worth it to plunk down some more money on it. But the question remained: How to go about it all?

Thankfully, somebody heard me whining about the bike over the years, and decided to do something about it! Spencer out in Upstate New York dug through his parts stash and found a fork off an 80’s mountain bike, one that had that funky 21.1 size.***** The steerer tube was longer than what I had on the Heavy Duti, but steerer tubes can be cut. So he shipped it out to me.

And thankfully, I had someone willing to work on such a silly project. I had been talking to Jeremiah about the Heavy Duti when he was working at Velo Cult last year. He moved over to River City, so I went there to get the work done.******

And at the end of May, I picked up Heavy Duti 2.0!

So, what are all the changes to make this an improved bike?

Well, there’s that front fork! An old mountain bike fork works well. The black goes good with overall color scheme of the bike.

Attached to those canti posts is a front brake! It’s a generic Shimano, with a scavenged Dia Compe lever.

Also attached to the canti post is a bottle dynamo! It’s a Nordlicht, a German model considered the “best of the best”******* when it comes to these. Alas, they stopped making Nordlichts a few years back for some reason, so the AXA HR (which is what I have on the Crested Butte) is now tops I guess…

And I have an old basic Busch und Muller LED headlamp connected to dynamo, mounted to front basket strut (a Wald, of course!)

For the rear: The old single speed coaster brake was fine, but I’d been thinking for a bit about putting more gears on this thing. I thought about finding a three speed wheel (pre-built 26 inch coaster brake versions are out there), but wanted to keep it simple and go different. So…how about a two speed kickback? I found a generic (KT) branded one built into a rear wheel on eBay over the winter for a good price. Now it’s on the bike!

My old “Back Roads” black rear rack with rat trap is now in use again on the bike.

And attached to the rack is a nice rear LED tail light. It’s a Spanninga version. No, it’s battery (using two AAs) since I didn’t feel like getting a dynamo version for now. I find that these German hard-mounted battery powered lights work quite well and last very long.

So…how does the bike feel?

Great! It’s a fun bike to ride around, and now much more practical (and safe). Having a good front brake is useful and puts my mind at ease. Dynamo lighting means (mostly) not having to worry about batteries and charging. A rear rack means more cargo capacity.

The thing that I’m still getting used to is the two speed kickback. Yes, you shift the gears by backpedaling (aka “kicking back”), in the same way you’d brake with the coaster brake. You start in low, then kick back to get to high. Most kickbacks work in such that you kick it back slightly to get to high, then full kickback to brake and then you are in low. This one seems to shift gear when you kickback. So if you are in low, then brake, you will be in high when you start pedaling. It’s a bit weird, but since I have a front brake, it’s not as big a deal as if I didn’t. The gearing on a two speed works as 100% (direct) in low, 133% in high, so it’s like a three speed hub with the top two gears. (On a Sturmey-Archer AW hub, the ratio is 75%-100%-133%) Good for around town and small hills, but not really for anything big!********

I’ve been riding it around a bunch. It’s a great summer fun bike. I can even throw a studded tire on the front and use it as a snow/ice commuter in winter.

Here’s to more bike fun!

*This blade fork was a bit of anomaly, since the bike is from the mid-90s. The Heavy Dutis made after this had a typical unicrown fork, where one could mount a brake.

**It would be fun to have a drum brake, if not just for the simple pleasure of having all the available braking systems possible on my bikes: Side/centerpull brakes (three speeds), V-brakes (Crested Butte), and disc (Bantam). Well, a coaster brake is a hub brake so there’s that…

***Or light. All of the pre-built drum brake wheels in 26″ I could find had steel rims. Going with an aluminum rim would mean paying even more money for a build.

****It’s true that I could have redone the headset to make it compatible with a common fork/stem, but the Bullmoose handlebars I was using was sized for the funky 21.1, and I wanted to keep those bars. Yes, I make things difficult.

*****The early era of MTB’s had funky things like this, since they borrowed heavily from old American balloon tire cruisers. By the later 80’s things got more standardized and moved away from all that.

******I don’t think I ever had any of my bikes worked on at River City, despite the shop being in town longer than I have!

*******There’s not a lot of competition in the bottle dynamo market, though.

********Hey Norm! You still out there?

Heavy Duti 2.0 I've owned my Schwinn Heavy Duti since October of 2014. At almost four years in my possession, it's the second in longevity in my stable, behind the Raleigh Crested Butte.

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Ultraman, Riddle of Steel, William Hope Hodgson

T.V. (RMWC Reviews): The plot is similar, but different from the original Ultraman. Instead of merging with a human host, this show’s Ultraman came to Earth from the Land of Light in Nebula M78 (an actual nebula and part of the Orion constellation) and rescued a guy, then took his form and calling himself “Dan Moroboshi” joined the Ultra Garrison, an organization dedicated to defending the planet from alien invaders as its sixth major member.

Cinema (Didact’s Reach): The latest episode of the Didactic Mind podcast is up, after a week off (rather regrettably) for various reasons. In this week’s episode I discuss the Riddle of Steel, an idea with its roots in the epic 1982 cinematic masterpiece Conan the Barbarian, and explore its relationship with powerlifting and iron sports in general.

Writing (Yakovmertin): In the latest instance of forces conspiring against right-wing creators, bestselling author Jon Del Arroz’s Kickstarter campaign for his Dynamite Thor comic has been shadowbanned on Kickstarter, and google. Searching for the campaign by its name, or by Jon’s name, on the site won’t bring it up. You need the direct link. It doesn’t appear in google searches either.

Robert E. Howard (John C. Wright): A Witch Shall Be Born was published first published in Weird Tales magazine in December of 1934, coming one month after the final installment of People of the Black Circle. It is the thirteenth published story in the Conan canon. It is also, alas, one of the weaker and more forgettable Conan stories to spring from the masterful pen of Robert E. Howard, but, ironically, it contains one of the strongest and most memorable Conan scenes.

Magazines (Cirsova): Our latest issue is now available for print pre-order on Amazon!  This is an all-star issue you won’t want to miss! Slave Girls for Sacrifice, by D.M. Ritzlin: A powerful sorceress with a bestial lover requires a blood sacrifice to complete her vile rites… Will Avok’s brawn and bag of tricks be enough to stop the witch?!

Adventure Fiction (Daily Mail): WHAT BOOK would Wilbur Smith take to a desert island? King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. I still consider it to be one of the greatest adventure stories of all time. King Solomon’s Mines is a quest filled with danger and great bravery, particularly in the face of the unknown, and it showed me heroes other than my father and grandfather.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): Bertram Mitford’s 1891 novel The Weird Of Deadly Hollow recounts a legend of one such blood curse. Mitford was a contemporary of H. Rider Haggard and worked a similar vein with adventure thrillers set in the frontier lands of southern Africa. The prolific author has lately been elevated from total obscurity to a level of mere relative obscurity, largely thanks to the critical works of Professor Gerald Monsman, who has written introductions for releases of Mitford’s stories and incorporated him into context in his book H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political and Literary Contexts of His African Romances.

Weird Fiction (Marzat): “The Stone Ship”, William Hope Hodgson, 1914. This, behind his “The Voice in the Night”, is probably Hodgson’s most famous weird nautical short story. Essentially, it’s a sea gothic with a haunted ship full of strange and monstrous beings. It begins a thousand miles off the west coast of Africa, in the tropics, on a clear, quite night in 1879. As is often the case in Hodgson’s weird tales, the oddity makes itself known first through sound.

Weird Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When a story is Lovecraftian but not Cthulhu Mythos, it can slip by your notice. “The Flabby Men” by Basil Copper is such a story. (From the collection, And Afterward the Dark) It is dark, brooding, ultimately depressing, and one that H. P. Lovecraft would have fully approved of. Now Basil has written actual Cthulhu Mythos stuff. “Shaft Number 247” comes to mind. His novel The Great White Space (1981) is more in the same vein as “The Flabby Men” with Lovecraftian elements but not a Derlethian pastiche.

Upcoming Release (DMR Books): n May we’ll release a collection by one of the greatest new authors in the pulp fantasy/sci fi scene: Schuyler Hernstrom! The Eye of Sounnu will contain all of Sky’s stories that appeared in Cirsova Magazine over the past few years, along with a few that have never seen print before. Running the gamut from sword-and-sorcery to sci-fi, these heroic adventure stories will satisfy fans of Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance. At over 90,000 words, it’ll be one of our heftiest releases! The cover will be painted by Brian LeBlanc (the same artist who did Renegade Swords), so you won’t want to miss it.

D&D (Skulls in the Stars): Bughunters (1993), by Lester Smith. We begin with a look at a non-D&D roleplaying game produced by TSR in the early 90s, whose core conceit is pretty much given away in the title! Bughunters was one of numerous worlds designed for use with the Amazing Engine gaming system, released by TSR in 1993. The basic idea: from a single core set of rules, multiple RPG settings could be supported.

Upcoming Release (Howard A. Jones): The unofficial cover copy has beenturned over for book three now, and it looks almost certainly like it’s going to be titled When the Goddess Wakes. I’m sure before the end that cover copy will be tweaked a bit, but it’s a milestone on the road to completion. At this point the first act of the book is pretty solid and act two is getting there. I know what’s going to happen in act three, for the most part, although I’m still undecided about a few points, which means I’m still eager to see what happens to some of the characters.

RPG (R’lyeh Reviews): Agents of Delta Green—whether of the Program or the Outlaws—get involved when ‘HOME DAGON HOME HOME YHANTHLEI SEA TO THE SEA.’ is found graffitied on the wall at a gruesome crime scene. A family of five in Mustang, Arizona, a remote town originally founded to support the long since shutdown nearby U.S. Navy base have been ritually butchered and whilst the local police force suggest that ‘Dagon’ might have occult links, given that it is mentioned in the Bible as the name of a god worshipped by the Philistines, its investigators have no clues as to the motives or perpetrators of this heinous act..

Science Fiction (Rich Horton): Robert Silverberg’s “Precedent” is set on a world of somewhat primitive aliens, who have been contacted by humans. Humans are the dominant force in this section of the galaxy, and indeed they have never encountered an alien race at a comparable level of development. Their policy is to engage the alien races as friends, trying to avoid “Cargo Cult” reactions. One arm of this policy is that humans on the planet are required to be subject to alien laws. Curiously, this has only been a problem once before, and the man who mistakenly violated a law was sentenced to trial by ordeal, which he survived.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): By the time 1967 rolled around, Donald Westlake had really found his groove with the novels he wrote under the name Richard Stark starring a hard-nosed, emotionless thief named Parker. The commercial success of the series had far outpaced the popularity of the comedic crime novels Westlake authored under his own name, and the quality of the Parker stories showed no indication of deteriorating. That was also the year that Parker’s 10th paperback adventure, “The Green Eagle Score,” hit spinner racks.

Sensor Sweep: Ultraman, Riddle of Steel, William Hope Hodgson published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[kayawagner]

Happy New Year–Plans for 2019 and A Look Back

After taking an extensive break over the holidays I am back at work. This is also a good opportunity to give you an update what I have been up to lately. Without further ado, let’s get started…

Forbidden Lands and Shipping Woes In December Fria Ligan’s latest roleplaying game called Forbidden Lands was finally ready for shipping. It’s a sandbox fantasy roleplaying game which I backed on Kickstarter in 2017. When the game finally was done it was already a bit delayed but that’s something you get used to when you regularly support projects on Kickstarter.

Sometimes things don’t work as planned. Unfortunately, the shipping of the Forbidden Lands boxed sets quickly turned into a total disaster. Backers started to get grumpy when it turned out that the books and boxed sets were already done, but the distributor had to delay shipping because of another Kickstarter fulfilment.

When finally shipping started everyone was excited and a few people quickly got their packages but then things went downhill pretty fast. A lot of backers didn’t get any shipping information even though the distributor claimed they shipped everything. When Fria Ligan support contacted the distributor they got told that the packages have been sent out without tracking – which is a terrible idea considering some people were waiting for stuff worth up to hundreds of Euros. Then the same people suddenly got shipping confirmation emails with conflicting information. Quickly accusations were thrown around and it seemed as if the distributor was lying to both Fria Ligan and the backers.

At this point I decided to write an email to Fria Ligan support, the distributor as well the CEO of Fria Ligan and voice my concerns and displeasure with the whole situation. I usually don’t use my status as an “influencer” but this time I thought it might be wise to throw my weight around. And lo and behold the management director of the distributor reached out to me and they even posted an update to the Kickstarter explaining what went wrong. And only a day or two later packages which have been stuck in some warehouse for ages started to move again.

The whole kerfuffle was caused by the initial shipping delay. Shipment of hundreds of boxed sets coincided with a lot of traffic caused by both the Black Friday sales and pre-holiday online shopping. The distributor’s logistics partner was extremely overwhelmed. Even though they had hired additional help, some shipments stuck for up to two weeks in sorting hubs all over Europe. Bad communication between the distributor, Fria Ligan, and the backers caused a lot of bad blood, but luckily things calmed down after people finally received what they’ve paid for. And oh boy, Forbidden Lands is a beautiful product. The long wait was definitely worth it. I’ll probably write more about it in the future.

Hacking, Alchemy, and animated GIFs As you probably know I am not only interested in roleplaying games, but I am also a great fan of video games. I also dabbled in software development (which is probably a too big a word for what I’ve been doing) since my teens. So it’s no surprise that I enjoy many of the games released by Zachtronics. Most of their games consist of puzzles which are solved by programming. During the Steam Winter Sale I added both Exapunks and Opus Magnum to my collection. In Exapunks  you play a hacker living in an alternative version of 1990s who has to work for a mysterious AI in order to pay for medicine they need to survive. To do your job you use EXAs (which are small software constructs) which you program with a programming language comparable to Assembly language.

The other game I picked up is Opus Magnum which is set into world where Alchemy works. Your job is to design transmutation engines to – for example – turn lead into gold. It reminded me a lot of Zachtronics’ older title SpaceChem, but is much more polished in every way.

You’re probably wondering why I mentioned animated GIFs earlier. This is easily explained. Most new Zachtronics games allow you to export your solutions to the puzzles in the form of animated GIFs! I’ve included one of my solutions to a Exapunks puzzle below.

Demons, Bomb Disposal, and Nausea Traditionally my wife and I spend New Year’s Eve with friends. Usually I run a roleplaying one-shot, but this time I just didn’t feel like it. So our hosts offered we play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes instead. It’s a party game developed for VR headsets in which one player has to disarm a bomb only they can see, while the other players have access to a manual with disarming instructions. It’s a fun game where precise communication is key. This has actually been the first time I experienced VR on a Playstation 4 and I was surprised how well it worked.

Last time I had the chance to try out a virtual reality headset was when a friend lent me his Oculus Rift Developers Kit 2. My PC at the time was barely VR-ready and most of the games weren’t really optimized yet. When it worked it was pretty impressive, but also extremely nausea-inducing. Surprisingly the PS4 VR headset didn’t cause any of these problems, even though movement in VR still felt a bit weird.

After playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes for a while I also had the opportunity to try out DOOM VFR which was totally awesome! If you ever have the chance to play this game, you definitely should do so. There’s also a video of me playing this game which doesn’t look as silly as I feared, which I might upload to YouTube eventually.

Retro PC Gaming and Thin Clients The older I get the more I enjoy playing old computer games from the MS DOS and early Windows era. Some of these games just have a certain charm that modern titles lack. Tools like DOSBOX and online shops like GOG have made it much easier to play old games on modern machines, but there are advantages to running games on actual hardware. While browsing YouTube I stumbled upon various videos in which retro gaming enthusiasts talked about using thin clients for retro gaming.

A thin client is basically a stripped down computer basically not much more than a terminal used to access a remote server. Most of these machines use outdated hardware and are available for just a few bucks on eBay. After doing some research I found out that a good choice for a retro-gaming machine was the HP T5720 thin client. The CPU is not too fast and can be further slowed down by reducing it’s speed multiplayer and disabling its cache. This can even be done by software while the computer is running. This is perfect if you intend to play old DOS games.

Quickly I found an HP T5720 on Amazon Marketplace for less than 20€. Unfortunately the seller supplied the wrong AC adapter. Luckily he immediately sent me the correct one, but alas the thin client still didn’t work. This time replacing the CMOS battery did the trick. While opening the machine I also found out that the seller sent me the HP T5730 by mistake. For a moment I considered returning it, but then decided to keep it for some other future project.

A few days later I found an offer for a HP T5720 on eBay. After the auction was done it turned out I was the highest bidder and for less than €20 including shipping it was mine! This time I got the correct machine including the original packaging, all documentation, a USB keyboard and a PS2 mouse. Yay!

It took me a while until I figured out how to install Windows 98 using an USB drive, but after a couple of hours my retro-gaming PC was working fine. The sound chip included on the mainboard is unfortunately not 100% DOS compatible, but works fine under Windows. I own a couple of games intended for Windows 95 and 98 which are almost impossible to play on modern machines, which should work fine on the thin client. If you’re interested in reading more about this project, please let me know.

Roleplaying game plans for 2019 Over the holidays I also had the opportunity to think about how my roleplaying activities went last year and what my plans for the future are. When it comes to Kickstarter projects 2018 was for me dominated by Fria Ligan projects – and not just on Kickstarter. I have probably played Mutant Year Zero, Genlab Alpha and Mechatron more often than any other roleplaying game this year. I also own Tales from the Loop and have backed their successor Things from the Flood which I am very excited about. I have considered running the games for a while now, I just couldn’t commit myself to preparing anything yet.

Other games I would love to run in 2019 are John Harper’s World of Dungeons Turbo: Breakers, which uses a very cool and extremely streamlined variant of the popular PbtA mechanics (it’s also free!), Everywhen, a multi-genre implementation of Barbarians of Lemuria, Advanced Fighting Fantasy or its scifi variant Stellar Adventures, and – last but not least – D&D using the Rules Cyclopedia.

My last few years as a DM have been dominated by failures and even though I feel the itch to run a roleplaying game from time to time, I haven’t been able to commit to anything yet. I also know that I’ll have to make some unpopular decisions in the future. The group I regularly play with is just too big, so I have to make up my mind who I want to invite to a new game. Regardless of who I pick, scheduling will probably an issue, and this had lead to some serious burn-out in the past. I don’t know why scheduling issues are such a huge problem for me, but it drives me totally bonkers.

I also would love to write more in general and definitely more regularly for the blog, but my lack of writing is directly tied to my lack of DMing. It’s much easier to come up with interesting topics to write about if you run a weekly game. I haven’t run anything in quite some time, and I am not sure if it’s wise to bore you with stories of my failed attempts to get a new campaign running. Heck, I am already boring myself just thinking about it…

So what have you folks been up to lately? What are your plans for 2019? Please share your comments below!

Related posts:

Kickstarter: Forbidden Lands

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year–Plans for 2019 and A Look Back published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

[dawnajaynes32]

Don’t Fear White Space: Oliver Jeffers on Work, Process and Building a Creative Career

  Oliver Jeffers is the author and illustrator of 15 (and counting!) picture books for children, including Lost and Found, The Heart and the Bottle, and Here We Are. He has topped the New York Times Bestsellers list with multiple works and has won numerous awards, including the Children’s Book Council Children’s Choice Award and the ALA Notable Book Award.

But Oliver Jeffers’ work spans far more than picture books. He is also an artist with breathtaking emotional nuance. In his latest book, a monograph published this autumn by Rizzoli, Jeffers includes never-before-seen pieces as well as reflections on his personal life and career. It’s a treasure chest of quirky curiosities and distinctive charm.

After reading his monograph, I remembered what Holden Caulfield said in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—that often, when you finish a really good book, you wish you could just call up its author to talk. Every book by Oliver Jeffers has made me feel that way, but none more so than his monograph. So, after roughly 14 years of following Jeffers’ work from the shelves of bookstores and libraries, I reached out with some questions. Jeffers generously shared his thoughts on his work, his creative process, and advice on building a creative career—and did so with his characteristic sense of humor.

On the Monograph

What did you learn or discover while putting your monograph together?

That there were a lot of holes in my archive. There were certain images I wanted to include, but couldn’t as we didn’t have a high enough resolution image. WA few pieces we were able to track down the original and rephotograph some of the pieces, but a lot of stuff has simply gotten away, as not enough due diligence was applied at the time of creation. before I had simply moved onto the next project.

One of your chapters in your monograph is called “Don’t fear white space.” Fear of the blank page cripples many aspiring artists. Did you ever fear blank canvases?

This was written as one of several things I’ve learned since leaving art college. It was more of a metaphor than fear of a literal white page, more about the slow rolling of the beginning of any project. I never really did fear blank canvases, simply because everything in my work is concept- driven, rather than craft- driven— – in that I don’t paint things just for the sake of painting them. and I never have bought or made a canvas not knowing what was going to go on it.

You’ve including a pie chart of an average day, and the second largest slice of the pie (after airport security) is feeling pleased with yourself! What helped you to gain confidence as an artist? How did you learn to handle the inner critic?

I think a big part of this came down to being asked, quite brutally in art college one day, who I was trying to please. When I dissected this, I realized that, when making work that was ultimately aiming to garner the approval of others, not only was my work less interesting, but it was disingenuous.

My dad once told me that looking at motivation, rather than action, was a truer path to understanding another person. It occurred to me that the same lesson could be applied to my art. There were double benefits in this. Firstly, I was making work that I wanted to make, and therefore enjoying myself more, and secondly, I cared less and less about what other people thought.

These things combined led to confidence, and I was fortunate that I got to that point in my practice relatively early. It strikes me how many people don’t believe in themselves. There is really only one alternative to that—which is NOT believing in yourself, and that just seems like such a burden to carry around. So f***uck it. Why NOT believe in yourself? You’ll get more done and have more fun!

Your pie chart also mentions lists. What are some of your lists about? Can you list some items off of one?

Mostly they are to-do lists and shopping lists. A recent shopping list included “‘Guinness,”’, “‘matches,”’ and “‘rubber gloves’.” Can’t remember what I was planning, but it sounds dangerous. Random things from a recent to-do list include “‘find old pencil drawings”’ and “‘charge bike battery’.” Sometimes I’ll add something to a list that I’ve already done, just so I can cross it off!

On the Creative Process

How do you decide that a story idea is one worth turning into a book?

There are lots of half- conceived, then discarded, book ideas littered throughout my sketchbook. It’s rare I know right away something will fully work as a book concept. In fact, it’s only happened twice. Once with The Incredible Book Eating Boy, which sort of just popped into my head fully formed, and the second one is the book I’m in the middle of completing. I woke up from a nap, on a solo car journey up the north coast of Antrim (in Northern Ireland), and the story was just there in my head. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I don’t know.

I’ll sketch all ideas down, and squeeze out any potential.

Sometimes I’ll start off fairly confident, and realize, after sitting with it a while, or coming back with fresh eyes, that it doesn’t hold itself up. For it to work as a full book, there needs to be a solid beginning, / middle, / and end. Often two of those come quickly, and the third takes some enticing. Sometimes the third aspect never comes at all, and the idea stays in my sketchbook. Though that is how I came up with Once Upon an Alphabet—a clatter of not quite big enough ideas to work as a solo book, but bundled together as a collection of short stories.

Do you ever get in a creative rut? When you get stuck (hopefully not in a tree with a whale), what do you do to get unstuck?

If I’m creatively stuck on a problem, I move on to another project — the answer normally comes when you’re not thinking about it. If I’m motivationally stuck, I remember I’ll be dead soon.

What happens to you if you go some time without drawing?

Not much, to be honest. I’m not one of those sorts who has to draw every day. I suppose because my output is so varied, even if I’m working full tilt, I rarely draw every day. Sometimes I’m painting, writing, building, fund raising, wall-breaking, planning, thinking, designing, reading, looking. Drawing actually takes up relatively little of my actual output.

You often mix handwritten words with typeset words. What’s your writing process like? How do you decide on this balance–choose which words to handwrite? When writing by hand, how do you decide which words to emphasize? And how do you decide on the balance of words with graphics?

For my handwriting process, it’s as simple as going with my gut. Intuition rather than a formalized and laborious design process. Does it look good? Then, that’ll do the job.

On Building a Creative Career

You have a distinctive illustration style. Is having a distinctive style important? What do you advise to someone trying to figure out their style? How did you find your style?

I think having style is important. But so much of this goes back to my earlier answer of authenticity of motivation. If you’;re imitating someone else’s work, then that’s not your style. Very early on you’ll go through the motions of imitating people whose work you admire, but the hope is that you then move on from this, once you’ve figured out what your hands and eyes can do.

So much of finding your style is about listening to yourself about what you enjoy making, and listening to the way your hands want to work. See the tweaks and quirks in your visual handwriting, then turn up the volume on it. So it’s not really you finding your style, as it is your style finding you.

Are you picky or particular about your tools? What’s indispensable or special? What’s something weird you’ve used? How do you choose your tools? Have they changed over the years?

I use a lot of different materials, for different end goals. Most mediums are regularly in circulation. With water colour and oil, so much of it is about the right brush for the right job- so keeping the brushes clean and in the right place is important. I work quickly, and fairly spontaneously, so something has to be where it’s supposed to be when I go to lay my hand on it. The right type of paint is important too. I have a few go-to colorscolour’s for specific things. I found all of my favorites throughHow I got there with all of it was experimentation—. Eexploring to see what worked for me and what didn’t, then sticking with what did.

I also use paper towels a lot with painting. Realizing that taking paint away was as valid as applying it was an interesting lesson.

These days, I’m a fan of attacking a delicately produced oil painting or collage with an oversized oil or pigment stick. There’s no going back with those things, so you only get one crack at it.

They say that success is the tip of an iceberg and under the surface is a lot of hard work, persistence, and struggle. Can you share a story about rejection or failure, and how you worked through that? Do you agree? How do you advise confronting rejection and failure?

This is absolutely true. For every success I’ve had, there have probably been three times as many rejections or failures. The important thing is to not sit or dwell on those moments and just move past them. Either try a different approach, or move on to a different project. So much so, that I can barely recall what any of the rejections actually were. Mostly they’re project ideas that can only come to fruition with the permission and funding from someone else. The important thing is to not sit or dwell on those moments and just move past them. Either try a different approach, or move on to a different project.

The last page of your monograph reads “And on we go…” What’s next for you? What are you looking forward to?

I’m currently working on two exhibitions; one in NYC and one in London, both of which will occur before spring., I’m also working on a large- scale installation concept (though at the time of writing, this may end up being chalked up to one of those frustrating rejection / failure moments), and there are two story books. I’m trying to complete (booth of which are well-started), and I’m aiming to get all of this done before next summer. Then I am looking forward to taking a year off and traveling around the world with my family.

Read more HOW Design illustration coverage now, ranging from icons and emojis to turning hand-drawn doodles into digital art. 

The post Don’t Fear White Space: Oliver Jeffers on Work, Process and Building a Creative Career appeared first on HOW Design.

Don’t Fear White Space: Oliver Jeffers on Work, Process and Building a Creative Career syndicated post

[cynicalclassicist]

Yeh, Ned was brought down more by inexperience over honour. He hasn't spent much time South. And there isn't anyone Northern to help him. He really should have had more allies. If Robert had a wider range in King's Landing then Ned would have had a chance.

like people are always whacking george for this and yeah he can be a bit handwavey with like “margaery and her cousins” “this random girl we never hear from again was alysanne’s lady for many years” or whatever, like he doesn’t single out more than two or three girls usually, their families aren’t always as politically active as you’d expect them to be but they are THERE they do EXIST like there’s a FUCKTON of tyrells in that capital, ned himself comments on the sheer number of evil blondes hanging around, All Three Baratheon Brothers Are There For A Long Time, petyr is by himself but he has an ENTIRE SPY NETWORK meanwhile ned just rolls up with nothing but a glorified intern, a mean party nun, and his two young daughters and is like “i can fix the entire government actually politics is easy” NED WHERE ARE YOUR CRONIES. THE ENTIRE NORTH IS LINING UP TO BE YOUR INSANE HENCHMAN AND YOU LEFT THEM ON READ.

[asinglewildflower]

#prev re bringing the greatjon and wyman - yeah maybe not greatjon specifically but bring the smalljon to take over the gold cloaks for sure#and wyman would've been *salivating* to replace littlefinger you know it

#most of this is the “early installment weirdness” problem alas#but watsonially it's unfortunately just ned not realizing the sheer power he had as hand of the king

#he didn't need to work with the small council. he could've fired them all. even varys. even pycelle! and especially littlefinger and janos#robert might've grumbled a bit if cersei bitched but he would've given in. with him it's far easier to get forgiveness than permission#ned could've come in like cregan and said i'm hand now you listen to me or you die. but instead he was like

#“oh everyone knows their jobs but me. guess i have to listen to what they say. wait for hugh to answer my polite summons. i'm just a guy”#god imagine wyman in king's landing. clever wynafryd and bold wylla as sansa and arya's ladies. sigh sigh sigh

#welp suppose that's what you get when you want your main character to die right away so the plot can move on to the actual main characters

(tags via nobodysuspectsthebutterfly)

like people are always whacking george for this and yeah he can be a bit handwavey with like “margaery and her cousins” “this random girl we never hear from again was alysanne’s lady for many years” or whatever, like he doesn’t single out more than two or three girls usually, their families aren’t always as politically active as you’d expect them to be but they are THERE they do EXIST like there’s a FUCKTON of tyrells in that capital, ned himself comments on the sheer number of evil blondes hanging around, All Three Baratheon Brothers Are There For A Long Time, petyr is by himself but he has an ENTIRE SPY NETWORK meanwhile ned just rolls up with nothing but a glorified intern, a mean party nun, and his two young daughters and is like “i can fix the entire government actually politics is easy” NED WHERE ARE YOUR CRONIES. THE ENTIRE NORTH IS LINING UP TO BE YOUR INSANE HENCHMAN AND YOU LEFT THEM ON READ.