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marginalgloss · 4 years ago

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the red telephone

The thing about Control is that I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve felt such a vast difference between a game’s artistic and technical quality and its total lack of thematic and narrative depth.

There is a good case for saying that this oughtn’t to be a problem. It’s long been the case that if a video game is entertaining enough, any further ‘depth’ (by the standards established by other media) is unnecessary. This is why we don’t much care if the story isn’t good in Doom. The sense of being there and doing the thing is enough. But Doom isn’t drawing on influences bigger than itself. Clearly it’s been influenced by a variety of things — from Dungeons and Dragons to heavy metal album covers and Evil Dead and everything in between — but Doom is not referential, and it’s not reverential. Doom is complete unto itself. Control is not complete.

Horror films and ghost stories and weird fiction are best when they are about things. Think about The Turn of the Screw and The Thing and Twin Peaks and Candyman, to pick a few examples off the top of my head. They work not just because what we see and hear and read is mysterious. They are compelling because they have intriguing characters and thematic resonance. The Babadook is not just a story about a monster from a book for children. Night of the Living Dead isn’t just about, you know, the living dead. By comparison I find it hard to say that Control is about anything, but it presents itself as adjacent to this kind of work. It is a magnificent exercise in style which trades in empty symbols. It wraps itself in tropes from weird fiction in the hope of absorbing meaning by osmosis.

It feels like a wasted opportunity, because the setup is not without interest. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman supposedly beginning her first day on the job at the Federal Bureau of Control, a mysterious government organisation that deals in high-level paranormal affairs. The FBC is a feast of architectural and environmental detail: a vast Brutalist office complex with an interior that seems to be stranded in time somewhere around the mid-1980s. Everything is concrete and glass and reel-to-reel machines and terminal workstations. It’s frequently stunning.

Unfortunately most of the staff are missing because Jesse’s visit to their headquarters coincides with a massive invasion by the Hiss, a paranormal force which has taken over the building. The Hiss is a sort of ambient infection that turns people into mindless spirit-drones, chanting in an endless Babel. (Conveniently, most of those drones are present as angry men with guns. There are also zombies, and flying zombies, for variety.)

There is, obviously, more to Jesse than meets the eye. She spends a lot of time talking to someone nobody else can see. But there isn’t that much more to her. Like every other character in the game she is a monotone. There is no reason to believe she has any existence outside the plot devised for her here. Similarly, the other characters you meet exist only as the lines they speak to you. It works only when the effect is entirely, deliberately flat: the most compelling person in the game is Ahti, the janitor with a sing-song voice and a near-indecipherable Finnish accent. He is nothing but what he is — he has no past, no future. He has all the answers, if only you knew what questions to ask.

Control is undeniably stylish. The interiors are striking, vast, spacious. Even on the smallest scale the game has a great eye for little comic interactions via systemised physics. You can shoot individual holes in a boardroom table and watch the thing splinter apart into individual fragments. You can shoot a rolodex and watch all the little cards whirl around in a spiral. If a projector is showing a film you can pick the whole thing up and the film will reveal itself as an actual dynamic projection by spiralling and spinning madly across the nearest walls. (Speaking of film, the video sequences with live actors are great fun, and this being a Remedy game, there’s a fantastic show-within-a-show to be found on hidden monitors around the FBC.) And all of this before I mention the sound design — the music, which is full of concrète mechanical shrieks and groans — and the endless sinister chanting which fills the lofty corridors and hallways of this place, The Oldest House.

All of this is very, very good. And most of the time it’s quite fun to play. I mean, you can pick up a photocopier and fling it at enemies. It’s never not fun when almost anything can be used as a projectile. And then you get the ability to fly! At its best the combat in Control feels messy and chaotic — in a good way — but in a way that has little to do with typical video game gunplay. Staying behind cover doesn’t work because the only way to regain health is to pick up little nuggets dropped by fallen enemies, so most of the time you have to use your powers to be incredibly aggressive. The result is that often you feel like the end-of-level boss — a kind of monster — throwing yourself into conflict with a team of moderately stupid players who think they’re supposed to be playing a cover shooter circa 2005.

That you are given a gun at all seems odd. The gun feels like a compromise. The gimmick of a single modular pistol that can shape-change into a handful of other weapons is neat, but those weapons are just uninteresting variations on the same old themes: handgun, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, rocket launcher. The powers are more interesting and powerful. But of course the gun has to be there; can you imagine them having to go out and sell this game without a gun in it? What would Jesse be holding on the front cover?

A gun is an equaliser. It evens the odds between the weak and the strong. But if you’re already strong it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You’re clearly so much more powerful than everyone else you meet in Control that after a while you begin to wonder why the game is also frequently quite hard. The omission of any difficulty settings is notable in a game of this type; it suggests that the developers were committed to their vision in the way that might recall Dark Souls. In fact the hub-like structure of the game is pretty clearly influenced by From Software’s games, and though it’s nowhere near as challenging, it seems to be reaching towards the same kind of thing.

It’s a game which demands you take it seriously as a crafted object. But then it has all these other elements cribbed from elsewhere — the generic level-based enemies with numbers that fly off them when shot, and the light peppering of timed/semi-randomised side activities, both of which made me think of Destiny. So there’s games-as-service stuff wedged in here too, and it doesn’t sit at all comfortably with this supposedly mysterious, compelling world that you’re supposed to want to explore.

This isn’t a horror game. There are one or two enemies with the potential to induce jump scares, but given that you can always respond with overwhelming force, it’s never really unsettling. But it’s clearly been inspired by horror. A source often mentioned as an inspiration for Control is the internet horror stories associated with the SCP Foundation wiki. From there the game borrows the idea that unlikely everyday objects can become sources of immense cosmic power — hence we see items like a rubber duck, a refrigerator, a pink flamingo, a coffee thermos imprisoned behind glass as if they were Hannibal Lecter. A pull-cord light switch becomes an inter-dimensional portal to an otherworldly motel. The great part about this is that these little stories can be told effectively in isolation; it’s always interesting to come across another object in the game and to discover what it does. (The fridge is especially unpleasant.)

But experiencing this kind of thing in the context of an action game is entirely different to stumbling it on it online. SCP Foundation is pretty well established now, but still, there’s a certain thrill in stumbling across something written there in plain text, titled with only a number. When those stories are good, they can be really good. Given the relative lack of context, and the absence of any graphical set-dressing, there’s room for your imagination to do the heavy lifting.

In Control these fine little stories are competing for attention with all the other crazy colourful stuff going on in the background. You read a note and you move on to the next thing. You crash through a pack of enemies and the numbers fly off them. There’s never a sense of the little story fitting into an overall pattern. That lack of a pattern can be forgiven in the context of a wiki. In Control, these stories start to feel irrelevant when you never come across an enemy you can’t shoot in the face. In a different format, or a different type of game, this kind of rootless narrative might be more compelling.

But what is this game about? There’s a sister and brother. A sinister government agency. Memories, nostalgia. A slide projector. It’s all so difficult to summarise. When I think about the game all these words seem to float around in my head, loosely linked, but not in a way that suggests any kind of coherence. The game always seems to be reaching towards some kind of meaning but it only ever feels hollow. It feels flat. Yet all the elements that are good about Control must be made to refer back to these hollow, flat signifiers. Sometimes the flatness works for the game, but mostly it doesn’t.

Today, it’s hard to see that anyone could see the point in establishing a website like SCP Foundation if it didn’t already exist. Viral media is not what it was in the first decade of the 2000s. Written posts that circulate on social media have a shorter half-life than ever. It’s almost impossible for any piece of writing over a few hundreds words to go viral in ways that go beyond labels like ‘shocking’, ‘controversial’, ‘important’, etc. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ don’t quite cut it. This kind of thing doesn’t edge into public spaces in the way it used to via email inboxes, or message boards, or blogs.

Perhaps the weird stuff is still out there. Perhaps we only got better at blocking it out. With the arrival of any new viral content, today’s audience is mostly consumed by questions of authenticity, moral quality, and accuracy. If you think this creepy story might be ‘real’, you’re a mug. If you promote it you might be a dangerous kind of idiot. And that’s fair: there are a lot of dangerous idiots out there. Yet there’s something to be said for an attitude of persistent acceptance when it comes to the consumption of weird stuff on the internet. I know I become gluttonous when I come upon such things. I want to say: yes, it’s all true, every word. I’ve always known it’s all true.

#gaming #control

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verdigrisprowl · 5 years ago

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So we all know Prowl's favorite architectural style is brutalism, but do the Constructicons have any styles they think is the coolest (or ones they think are the worst(tm), like, 'if they could personally delete the architectural movement from Cybertronian history for being stupid, they would')? If so, are there differing individual preferences, or would it be a thing they collectively reached group consensus on?

For any architectural styles referenced below, assume I'm actually referring to whatever hypothetical Cybertronian style is spiritually and/or structurally most similar; because I don't feel like inventing a bunch of Cybertronian schools of architecture, but Constructicons definitely don't give a crap about human architecture.

Their tastes definitely blend into each other. For example, Long Haul was the first of them drawn to brutalism, in a sense—although more in the sense of "utilitarianist military concrete bunkers" than actual architectural works—and because of him the rest are sorta like "concrete. simple. sturdy. good." When Prowl joined the group, in the miasma of blended group sleep thoughts he picked up a couple drops of Long Haul's preferences and a bit of general knowledge of what works more properly regarded as "brutalist" are like, and that snapped together with his own natural preference for Sturdy, Simple, Solid, Reassuring, Geometric structures and suddenly he's all into brutalism. And now, because of Prowl, they all have a collective greater appreciation for brutalism than they did originally.

But, they also have individual tastes.

Along with his semi-interest in brutal-ish architecture, Long Haul also has an interest in all kinds of military architecture. Like, they're all competent and knowledgeable about constructing forts and such, but Long Haul is into it. Alarmingly so. His aesthetic architectural tastes trend toward post-First Civil War through early-Golden Age and are oriented toward martial culture; like, if he were a human, his idea of the greatest architectural structure in history would be the Colosseum, for having both that "ancient culture" aesthetic and that "lots of people die here" aesthetic. If lots of people died to MAKE it, even better, which he probably picked up from Bonecrusher; although in his head he spins it toward "it has value because of all that was sacrificed for it" rather than "murderous nihilism is hot, baby." He's naturally averse to "prissy" styles (read as: has things sticking out that he can break off with one hand), unless it was Scrapper's idea, because Scrapper's a genius; and he thinks anything made pre-First Civil War is outdated and anything more recent looking like it's trying to be pre-First Civil War is pretentious and stupid. Since most of the Constructicons' works have been military and utilitarian, Long Haul's preferences peek out a bit more strongly than the others', as he has the strongest opinions on what military structures SHOULD look like; but whenever there's a chance for ornamentation or ~style~ you can start to see the others' tastes come out.

Scrapper's tastes ran the direct opposite of Prowl's. Most of the dream buildings he fantasized about making some day Once We've Won The War were very art nouveau—not in the sense that he'd be working within whatever pre-existing architectural school is closest to art nouveau, but that he himself would have been the originator of a new style which can be best described as art nouveau-ish. Naturally, Cybertronian "art nouveau" would look very different from human art nouveau, since their idea of "natural" subject matter is very different—a lot less plants, for one thing. (At a cursory glance, "Cybertronian art nouveau" might look superficially most similar to human art deco.) More stars, clouds, circuitry, vehicular motifs. Hook's hatred of Curved Architecture would over time steer Scrapper away from too many rounded and beveled shapes in the architecture itself, although not in the ornamentation. Scrapper's style would've run counter to a lot of Decepticon aesthetic ideals, which tend to eschew ornamentation and emphasize function over fashion, as a direct rejection of the excesses of the pre-war upper class and Senate. (But he had a few supporters; I'd imagine Ratbat and Tarn would be all for the look.) His tastes in existing architecture trended toward "monumental, designed to impress/enlighten"—although they stretch across a variety of styles, things like mosques, cathedrals, the Pantheon would fit that bill. Definitely into Gothic shit.

Hook was more or less Scrapper's acolyte; whatever he said was good, Hook thought was good. But outside of that, he's got the most diverse tastes; he can like any style, as long as it's done well. Any architectural style that's new is automatically suspect because he doesn't know what its internal standards for "done well" are yet. Once the style has been established for a while and has switched from "these are the traditional rules that we're breaking to show off how new and different we are" to "these are this style's internal rules that everyone has to follow," he makes peace with the style and starts judging new works based on how they fit those rules. (Usually, that switch will be made in Hook's head once Bonecrusher has decided the style is codified and his knowledge of what its rules are backwashes into Hook's mind.) If he can see what an architect is going for and think they pulled it off, then he can respect that regardless of the style. He'll respect Classical architecture and he'll respect Modern architecture; but if you put big fat columns in front of a wall of glass and they're not even holding up a pediment, then Primus have mercy on your spark because Hook sure won't. The exception is if a space has poor functionality, even if that's "the point," or "a statement," he considers that unacceptable—a natural inclination bolstered by Mixmaster's insistence that ALL spaces should be suitable for safe lab work. He's also got a pet peeve against round architecture. It's only gotten worse since he's been sharing headspace with Prowl.

Bonecrusher's never met an architectural style he's not willing to rip to shreds. It's either so old-fashioned it's completely out of fashion or it's trying too hard to be new and different; it's either underwhelmingly small and cramped or it's a massive waste of space; it's either cluttered with gaudy decorations or it's painfully bland; it's either completely generic in its rigid adherence to a style's rules or it's weird as hell because it's got no understanding of or appreciation for the most basic fundamentals of architectural aesthetics. It doesn't matter what it is. He'll diss it. If Hook doesn't like a building, he'll find Bonecrusher, drop a couple hints about what he doesn't like about it to make sure Bonecrusher's on the right track, and then they'll lambast it together. If a building is something his team has made, he'll criticize the hell out of it during the planning stages—that's constructive criticism—but once it's been made, not a word against it; this is partially to be nice, but mostly because he's intimately aware of whatever thought processes his teammates went through during the design stages and so he gives their intent or vision weight and offers up the benefit of the doubt to them the way he wouldn't to anyone whose head he hadn't been inside. And he'll also reluctantly concede the virtues of any particular building any of his teammates like. Anything built or dreamed up by Scrapper is, of course, sacrosanct. (He would have happily been a Gustav Klimt for Scrapper's Victor Horta—probably, idk if they even knew each other—but any chances of Bonecrusher being any kind of normal artist pretty much died with Scrapper.) If he was FORCED to choose what style he likes, he'd admit grudging admiration for anyone who deliberately bucks against conventional architectural trends. Most recently, that'd probably be deconstructivism, but even that's getting passé in his book. He'll also admire any building, regardless of style, that's got a good story behind HOW it was made; if you show him a misshapen shack he'll criticize how they chose to divide the space inside but if you tell him how many shuttles they had to kill to get enough heat-resistant armor to build the walls he'll automatically like it. He also has a tendency to internally rank buildings—particularly skyscrapers—based on how satisfyingly they'd come crashing down.

Scavenger's forgotten more about architecture than most bots will ever know; but the emphasis here really should be on "forgotten," because he honestly knows jack shit about architecture. Although Scavenger still vastly outstrips Prowl in terms of basic construction knowledge, Prowl's just about passed him in knowledge of architectural schools and design theory, and Prowl ain't been doing this long. Scavenger likes anything his team likes and dislikes anything they don't like. His personal preferences trend toward colorful, busy, and highly ornamented—he loves Scrapper's private style, and not just because it was Scrapper's—but also art deco, anything with mosaics or bas reliefs or stained glass windows... He lives and breathes maximalism. He's probably fatally allergic to minimalism; he only grudgingly tolerates brutalism for the sake of his teammates that are into it, and most Modern architecture is on thin fragging ice. He'd be very into whatever the hell Saint Basil's Cathedral is up to. He and Prowl could probably bond over an appreciation for Girih. He's also enchanted by anything Googie, which is probably the only formally-recognized architectural school that it can be safely said he'd enjoy the majority of. Does he know what Googie is? Probably not. But he likes it when he sees it.

Mixmaster is more interested in the functionality of a space—like, he's really into air flow. When he walks into a new space his first two thoughts are "if someone set up a chemistry lab in here would they suffocate on the fumes?" and "in the event of a fire how easy would it be to get outside without being stampeded by other people looking for the exit?" He's content to inherit his architectural tastes from his teammates; he leans into Long Haul and Prowl's appreciation for blocky, utilitarian structures—easy to adapt to lab work!—and will disparage anything Bonecrusher and Hook consider below the Constructicons' lofty tastes. Despite having little architectural taste of his own, after Long Haul's dominance in military structures Mixmaster had the most overt influence on everyone else's work—namely, in how they arrange spaces for basic utilitarian purposes. Architecture may not be his passion but he'll be damned if the wiring and ventilation ducts aren't laid out nice and simple, and because of him, none of the others will stand for it either. His focus on these mundane details dovetails well with Hook's perfectionism.

And of course, Prowl is into brutalism. Like. Just brutalism. That's it.

Devastator's idea of the perfect building is a blocky art deco structure with painted or mosaic decorations in big simple blocks of color, stuffed to the brim with enough art nouveau-ish Scrapper-esque decorative flourishes to fill five buildings. Hard and sturdy on the outside, satisfyingly crumbly and crunchy on the inside. Like breaking open a piñata.

#anonymous #ask #constructicons #headcanons

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bitterfucked · 3 years ago

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blandness is a bit of a weird ranking system but as someone who has toured all over canada and played music in every major city (plus lived in a handful of them, including toronto), Toronto isn’t that bland. the parts that are, it’s gentrification. i’d probably rank canadian cities least bland to blandest like:

1. Montreal - It’s just the easy choice for #1. When you imagine a city with bright lights and glamour and midnight but also with alleyways and grime and danger, you’re very nearly imagining Montreal. You probably didn’t imagine the Québécois living in your ideal image of a city but they do, for better or for worse.

Montreal is never going to stop being the #1 Canadian city because it’s the only major city here with rent control.

2. St. John’s - Look, it’s Canada, it’s called a city. It’s the only major population centre for 1000s of km, anyways. #2 because Newfies have culture, while Canadians (or at least the white people who say Canada instead of Ireland or Germany or wherever when asked where they’re from) don’t. St. John’s isn’t less bland just cos of that special Newfie friendliness - it’s got great music, drinking, history, drinking, architecture, drinking, squatters, drinking, and interesting local cuisine. And drinking. Highest concentration of bars in North America outside Bourbon St.

3. Winnipeg - Gritty, like a city should be. A very cool native art scene. Lots of outsider art too. Significant Canadian labour history - many Canadian working class rights have their roots here.

4. Vancouver - Vancouver would be rated higher if we were talking pre-2010. It’s got impressive native art scenes, a significant punk history, and the culinary excellence that comes with a major immigrant population. Unfortunately, it’s also got extremely aggressive gentrifiers and the 2010 Olympics massively accelerated their efforts. Gentrification is the death of culture.

5. Toronto - I was tempted to rate TO lower just to be a dick, but you really don’t get to be a city this size without getting some interesting stuff going on. Has the same issue as Vancouver - there’s a very active effort by assholes with money to make this city completely unliveable to anyone who doesn’t have money. Also similar to Vancouver in that it very much has a neighborhood culture - most people here pretty much only live in their neighborhood. Incredible food. One of Canada’s two real gaybourhoods (the other is in Mtl). Lotta queer history, speaking of. Lots of immigrant culture - there’s two Chinatowns! Most green space out of any municipality in Canada - besides the major parks, there’s parkettes everywhere.

If you don’t have an image of Toronto, that’s probably because the parts of it that people live in don’t have a lot of pizazz. It’s mostly 2-3 storey brick buildings with lots of trees and little corner stores and little restaurants. I think a lot of money got put in in the 70s or 80s because a lot of “newer” houses follow North American architectural trends of those decades. Torontonians would probably want me to add that there’s streetcars and their buses have red highlights. Very pleasant looking but not memorable, which is probably why it gets called bland. For how old it is (relative to other Canadian cities), not much historical architecture and definitely the historical architecture isn’t a point of pride - your average Torontonian probably cares more about Honest Ed’s being gone than they do about any historical property.

6. Ottawa - Hull or Gatineau, whichever you call it, is doing some heavy lifting here. Between Ottawa/Gatineau, it’s a very architecturally interesting place, from the brutalistic government buildings to the Parliament to the ramshackle renos of Hull. Has some neat gardens.

7. Halifax - Like St. John’s, barely a city. However, very historical (but mostly in the sense that the military built a lot of sturdy stuff there) and, with the 10000 universities and colleges in its city limits, has a thriving youth culture. Lots of oceanography if that interests you. Has donairs. Major micro-brewery scene for some reason. Visit if you like hops.

8. Quebec City - I see this left off a lot of this sort of list because unlike Montreal, it’s actually French. It’s got good bookshops and some great museums.

Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon - I’ve played a couple shows in each of these places but haven’t stuck around at all. They pay well but I don’t know enough to rank them. I’d guess ranked blander than QC, with maybe Calgary pulling ahead to the #8 slot.

Victoria, Nanaimo, Kelowna, Kamloops, etc. - All the the BC towns that are the biggest thing around and get called cities for that reason. All pretty bland. Probably rank lower than the Alberta/Saskatchewan cities.

South Ontario - Despite my personal fondness for Hamilton (great example of South Ontario architecture and there’s so many waterfalls around), all the South Ontario “cities” are bland as shit.

The other Maritime “cities” - While they would absolutely be ranked less bland than the BC and South Ontario “cities”, these are towns. Halifax and St. John’s get the nominal title of city because they lack anything close to a contender, not because they’re big enough to be one.

I think that people from the rest of Canada resent Toronto because it has all of the smugness and condescension of an imperial Metropole with almost nothing to back it up. Like, if you visit New York, or London, or Paris, you’ll immediately be bowled over by the local culture and intellectual life and every little thing that you see will immediately remind you of something from some famous story or other that you grew up reading. And then there Toronto, which is basically a bigger version of Winnipeg only with douchier people and a worse ballet company. And then they’re like “Oh yeah? Well we have Raptors basketball! And Drake! And Margaret Atwood (though I strain to think of any of her novels that are actually set in Toronto)!” And you just have to kind of nod your head and politely pretend that you actually care about any of these things until they go away.

#canadian cities #i could get way more in depth about some of these paces #but this thing is already a lot of words

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utopiainspiration · 7 years ago

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Worldbuilding june 2017 day 5; Architecture

Architecture, as I understand it, reflects a lot about a societys ideals and what they think is important.

As is, Konlateus City stands in very stark contrast with its strict utilarian, almost brutalist, architecture to the Utopian style where ”spaces are for people” is the rule.

The Old Colony have many elements of this where public areas are built to make space for people, incorporating locally produced art and aesthetics into the architecture, supported by organic shapes and patterns. Incorporating plantlife is common, ranging from raised flowerbeds on promenades, to self-watering greenery shelves on rising architecture, and planted trees and alleyways. These arrangements are also often used to support local subsistence farming where citizens can grow and produce crops for their own use.

Another important facet of Utopian architecture is Acessability. Stairways are usually avoided in favour of ramps, doorways are high and wide to allow anyone from creatan to skulk easy passage. Along the same fashion you tend to find bannisters at various heights to support the needs of the diverse lenghts of Utopian citizens. The Old Colony mostly got its energy from wind and solar, usually incorporated into the architecture with transparent solar panels in larger windows, and ”windmills” on rooftops.

But as people have moved out of Old Colony and into Konlateus City, whole districts have fallen to neglect and abandonment. Overgrown plantations, dead husks of alien trees which died without the care o f its planters, and windmills broken from the increasing winds. The remaining colonists living here do their best to make use of the planting grounds for the increasingly important subsistence farming, while doing their best to repair and maintain the power options they have available.

Konlateus City is built for utility and efficiency. Many people live in the same building as they work, and those that don’t find themselves using rail-lines and gravlifts to get where they need to be in the day. A lot of the city is built with this transportation in mind both in means of it to be easy to get around and in the way billboards are placed to maximise exposure-opporturnities.

The enormous skyscrapers of the city are a uniue feature and even something that draws in tourists in itself. These marvels of engineering are made possible not in small part thanks to the hedylydian grav-supports scattered thorough the buildings, the same machines that have been used around Hedylydia for centuries to support the Hedyloids amazing precipicial architecture. These heavily protected machines change gravity itself and allow the buildings to bypass some of the strain their own mass puts on them, thus allowing them to rise to the dizzying heights they do. These machines require regular maintenance and calibration and are staffed by teams of well paid hedylydian experts.

The gravatic architecture also end sup altering the gravitational effects experienced on certain floors. On the floors surrounding the device one experiences almost microgravity, which requires some special adaptions to make life on these floors easier. But it also allows for floors which aren’t designed with a clear ”down” in mind, which have become very popular among those with the creds to pay for it. Along with these are floors where gravity is altered in other ways, such as ultra light or superheavy, for those so inclined.

For those less fortunate to live the upside-down lifestyle, the city also offers plenty of options ranging from coffin-motels, where anyone can hire a bed, a lockbox, and modicum of privacy with shared utility and cooking spaces, to full fledged appartments with room for a small family. These buildings are usually built in a strict functional fashion with brutalist sensibilities, adhering to the idea that anything not directly functional is a waste of time and resources. Besides, there are holo, VR, and SIM-Sense for those who wants to augument their housing experience, available at affordable prices from local dealers and retailers.

The gravatic technologies are also what is planned to power the rising dome around Konlateus City. While it is far from the first city in recorded history to live under a dome it is definatly one of the largest, and the first to be domed after its innitial construction.

What greenery you can find in the city is usually private penthouse gardens, or the rare balcony where someone found the time to grow some peas and tomatoes in a pot. Certain corporations pride themselves on keeping large lawns of grass outside their entrances, which are usually carefully groomed and tended to. Disturbing the grass is even seen as an offense in some districts, and are punishable by fine or corporal punishment.

A city as big as Konlateus City of course needs a lot of waste management. While a lot of it is burnt for fuel to produce electricity, supplementing the solar and wind power, a lot of it is also wasted into the bay below the city. Much to the ire of the local fishing industries which grew up before the UCBX moved in.

A lot of the citys sewage is turned into manure for the farming.

#wbj #wbj 2017 #world building june #day 5 architecture #own writing #legends from konlateus

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post-futurism · 7 years ago

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full moon, night light, ponder, midnight, nightmare, slumber :)

Full moon: what type of person do you hope to be?I want to be someone who loves, and who is loved. I hope to be modest, - not boastful, and appreciative of and celebrate the creative wonders that my friends and family create and are involved in. I hope to have strong friendships and be someone who is fun to be around, but also my company can enjoy a relaxed, easy time while i spend time with them. I hope to be generous, where capable, and repair my flaw of not thinking about the bigger picture. I hope to be a person who asks ‘why?’ more. i hope to not so frequently be a door mat! but i hope that in times where i am, others are gentle and forgiving. i hope to also be able to support myself financially, without hindering my personal life and ability to create. i hope i can find that balance…

Night light: who/what makes you feel safe?My partner.

Ponder: What do you want to do with your life?I’d like to finish my degree, work for a good company or for the government doing work which will benefit future generations. i’d like to some day live and work in another country. I want to get to a point where i can feasibly live a sustainable life, live in an environmentally friendly and recycled home. i want to do a world tour of all brutalist buildings! i want my partner with me, doing things he enjoys and finding a place in the world too. i want to keep making art and stories and contribute to the creative world, regardless if i get ~famous or not. someone out there will enjoy what i create, or what work i have done, and that’s fine with me.

Midnight: are you a different person late at night than early in the morning?Yeah totally. I get weird at night haha. Life is more hilarious the longer i’m awake. I find i’m more creative when i’m sleep deprived too. in the morning i can be quite changeable. catch me being normal between 10am-3pm.

Nightmare: What are you most afraid of?I’m really afraid of drowning haha… as a kid i was super afraid of natural disasters. tsunamis, great fires, and even tornadoes even though the possibility is so damn low. there was a massive drought in australia for like, 20 years? and i would often have nightmares about my neighbourhood catching on fire. my childhood home was depressed from the street, so that the top level (of the 2 storey house) was actually street surface level, which is where my mum and i lived. and i’d have nightmares of fire burning down the houses around us and coming down the stairs and into our garden and we wouldn’t be able to escape. Now that i’m older, i’m mostly afraid of not being able to write. or not creating artistically. not meeting personal deadlines, not being consistent etc. i’m afraid that when i do finish my degree, i’ll have to work full time hours and be stressed all the time like i was before, and not have the energy to create let alone catch up with friends and family. i’m afraid of a repeat of the last 5 years, in fact lasting the rest of my adult life. fuck capitalism bro! i just wanna create free art in my free time!

Slumber: What’s the one thing that helps you fall asleep when it feels impossible? Gosh, it used to be reading fanfiction HA but that doesn’t work anymore. Sometimes i try thinking about my stories and try and think about what should happen next, but then i get worried that i’ll forget it and have to rouse myself to write my ideas down on my phone. so that’s normally a 50/50 thing. sometimes i plan outfits in my head for the week. what works most often is listening to a sleep playlist. the songs can’t have any drums though. i used to have a good playlist but i broke it when i was moving music files around on my phone. so this is a good reminder to build it up again!

thanks for the ask rosie. some of these questions were so deep and difficult to answer haha

#about me #replies

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webbygraphic001 · 7 years ago

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18 Twitter Accounts Every Web Designer Should Follow in 2018

When you think about social media marketing for your web design business, you may be inclined to focus on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Dribbble. After all, visuals play a major part in the conversations that take place there and you are in the business of creating engaging visual content.

That said, I would argue that Twitter is the best social media marketing platform for a web designer. This is especially so if you’re looking to do more than just show off samples of your work (which really isn’t a recommended practice anyway):

Follow web design experts and thought leaders;

Find inspiration for your own web design work;

Stay attuned to what’s happening in web design and web development so you can become the go-to-expert for your clients;

Have engaging conversations with other web designers;

Have engaging conversations with potential clients and fans of web design, in general.

Twitter isn’t a one-trick pony like some other social media platforms you might find yourself on. While you should still take time to be active on those, Twitter definitely is deserving of your time and energy. Mostly because of how many kickass web designers are there.

To make the most of Twitter, I would suggest you follow the right people from the very start. Not only will this help you build a base of high-authority web design experts around you, but it will also give you a wealth of information to tap into it whenever you want it (or perhaps even when you least expect it).

The following are some of the best web designer accounts you’ll find on Twitter. As you’ll see, they don’t spend time talking about irrelevant matters or sharing content without any thoughtful insights alongside them. These guys and gals know their stuff!

1. Abduzeedo/Fabio Sasso

Google designer and founder of the Abduzeedo design inspiration website, Fabio Sasso’s ABDZ account is a must-follow. His direct tweets demonstrate a real dedication to sharing the work of other designers while his retweets never fail to provide followers with relevant and insightful tips from other design experts.

2. Andy Sowards

Although Andy Sowards is a web designer (as well as programmer, gamer, and all-around geek), I’m not going to promote his Twitter account for that reason. Instead, I’m giving it a shout-out because this is exactly the kind of content freelance designers (or any freelancers managing their own businesses) should be seeing on a daily basis.

3. Brad Frost

Brad Frost is a Pittsburgh-based web designer, writer, speaker, and consultant. Clearly, he knows his stuff.

So, if you’re looking for someone who knows what they’re talking about when it comes to web design, and, more specifically, about has some really great practical advice on things like UI design and design systems, follow him.

4. Catherine Dionne

Catherine Dionne, UX Director of the Kryzalid web agency, has an interesting Twitter feed. It may not be for everyone, but it’s definitely worth following along if you’re interested in the future of user experience; specifically, in technologies like AI and blockchain that are expected to come even more into play in the coming years.

5. Chris Coyier

If you’re a fan of the CSS-Tricks website or you spend a lot of time on CodePen looking for CSS and JavaScript snippets to streamline and enhance your designs, you’re going to really enjoy Chris Coyier’s Twitter (he’s had a hand in creating both). His feed has a good mix of original tweets and retweets around CSS and web design.

6. David Teodorescu

David Teodorescu is a UX designer with an awesome Twitter stream to follow along with. Even if UX design isn’t your thing and you opt not to follow him, please do at least take the time to glance through some of his posts this year. He shares a lot of process-driven insights as well as tips on how to work smarter as a designer. There’s a lot to learn here.

7. Ethan Marcotte

So, uh, you know that whole responsive web design thing? Yeah, well, Ethan Marcotte is the one who coined the term back in 2010. It’s almost a decade later and it appears that he continues to be a web designer and thought leader worth listening to.

8. Heath Howard

Heath Howard has been designing websites since the early 2000s, which makes any insights or advice he has to give on the matter quite valuable.

There is a good mix of content here, from launching a new business to learning how to code websites with HTML5 and CSS. He also shares the occasional web designer/developer meme, so it’s also a worthy follow if you appreciate a good distraction every now and again.

9. Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman has been a designer since 1995, but most of you probably know him as the man behind the “Apart” brands (A List Apart, A Book Apart, An Event Apart). There is a good hodgepodge of posts, not all of which actually have to do with web design (like a post about tattoo design from April). I’d say that if you find something like this post entertaining, Zeldman is a good one to follow:

Nobody is at your website or app to gaze lovingly at your navigation. ‘I didn’t like the Grand Canyon itself, but I did enjoy the fonts they used on their signposts,’ said nobody, ever (except maybe a graphic designer).

10. Jen Simmons

Jen Simmons, Designer Advocate at Mozilla, has a pretty clear narrative that runs throughout her Twitter: CSS Grid is essential if you want to design well for the web.

Whether you already have an interest in using CSS to improve your skills as a web designer or you want to learn more about how grids can streamline and improve design results, this is a Twitter account you must follow.

11. Jonathan Torke

One of my favorite things about this account is how often Jonathan Torke posts to it. It’s obvious he has a lot to say about the state of web design, so I greatly appreciate this steady stream of insights. And they cover so much: UI, UX, JavaScript library suggestions, upcoming design trends, design technologies, and so on. It’s just a really great collection of design information from around the web that’s sure to both educate and inspire anyone who follows him.

12. Jon Phillips

Jon Phillips is a UI and UX designer whose Twitter feed is much like what you’d expect. He promotes content that not only gets other designers thinking about UI and UX in smarter ways, but it heavily promotes the research and planning parts of the design process. I’d say that if you find your own research and setup of web design projects to be lacking or you just want to get a better handle on it, check him out.

13. Justin Mifsud

If you want to get better about designing for the user experience, Justin Mifsud’s Twitter account is a great one to start with. He is the founder of UsabilityGeek and, yet, with all the posts you’ll encounter in his feed, you probably wouldn’t know it because of how much high-quality content he shares from other awesome usability sources.

The best part is that he usually isn’t in the habit of throwing up a link and copying just the title into the message. He lends real personal insights to his posts, so you know he’s taken time to read the article and extract something valuable from it as well.

14. Katrin Suess

UX designer Katrin Suess has what I like to call a very vibrant Twitter feed. Yes, she shares content about user experience design. But there’s something very well-rounded about what she offers here. You’ll find content that has to do with SEO and marketing, for instance, which is great because it acknowledges that there’s more to web design than just the heavy-duty UX work that gets a lot of airplay.

15. Kostas Hatzis

Kostas Hatzis’s feed is a really well-rounded aggregation of web design, graphic design, and UX design articles from around the web. I would say this is a must-have regardless of what your particular specialty or areas of interest are. And you have topics ranging from fun and controversial (like “5 Times Nudity Shook the Graphic Design World”) to practical applications (like “Lesser known CSS quirks & advanced tips”).

16. Luke Wroblewski

Luke Wroblewski has worked for a number of high-tech, forwarding-thinking companies like Yahoo and eBay, which is a solid testament to his prowess as it pertains to the web. While he has done a lot in the way of designing products, I would say that his insights into UI design (especially for mobile interfaces) would be incredibly helpful for the modern web designer.

17. Val Head

What’s really great about Val Head’s Twitter account is that she shares content that is truly click-worthy. And it’s not just because it has to do with the subject of user interface design and animations (which isn’t always the case, though it’s the majority of it). No, it’s because she shares thoughts like this that really provoke followers to read more:

Why does brutalist web design even exist? Maybe it’s the bad influence we all need.

18. Webdesigner Depot

How could we possibly conclude a list of inspirational Twitter accounts without appending our own. Webdesigner Depot’s Twitter account is the best account to follow if you’re looking for community and inspiration, design news, tools, resources, and more.

Wrapping Up

Whatever it is you seek—more valuable social media connections, inspiration for your web design work, or a chance to engage more with your community—these web designer Twitter accounts are a great place to start.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

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dulwichdiverter · 7 years ago

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Delectable designs

As furniture fans look forward to the next Midcentury Modern event in Dulwich, we meet the duo behind the design destination

Words by Katie Allen; Photo of Petra and Lucy by Lima Charlie

Design fans will have cause to rejoice this month as the much-acclaimed Midcentury Modern show is returning to Dulwich College on November 19.

This is no ordinary vintage fair. Beautifully curated by Petra Curtis and Lucy Ryder Richardson, it brings together mid-century European and American furniture and household finds – with a strong bent for Scandi design – with contemporary pieces by top British talent.

Items for sale vary from furniture, wallpaper and ceramics to cushions, lighting and other household ephemera, as well as gifts. With prices ranging from £10 to thousands, it’s the ideal location to start a collection or find that perfect investment piece.

Modern Shows began in 2003 when Petra and Lucy ran a one-off open house event – Showhome – at Lucy’s 1960s home in Dulwich, selling a collection of midcentury furniture and homeware pieces.

From Eley Kishimoto homeware to 1960s Scandinavian sideboards and chairs, they sold out of everything they had in stock. The event’s success inspired them to go into business together.

Petra recalls: “Both of us lived in 1960s houses and it was disappointing that we had to travel to north London to find midcentury furniture. There were a couple of shops in Herne Hill and another in Camberwell but that was pretty much it.

“As there are so many 1960s houses in the area we thought that there must be more people like ourselves who wanted to add 60s furniture to their homes, hence Showhome was created.

“The success of that led to organising an event to bring dealers from all over the UK to south London. We couldn’t believe our luck when we visited the Christison Hall at Dulwich College as a potential venue. As a 1960s Brutalist building it was absolutely perfect. We haven’t stopped since.”

Since then the business has flourished: there are the Midcentury Modern shows, the sister show Midcentury East in east London, and Midcentury and Midcentury Modern pop-ups around the country, attracting fans of vintage and contemporary collectable design.

They also run the Modern Marketplace on their website, which offers a directory of midcentury and modern pieces, as well as blogs which showcase their passion for, and knowledge of, design.

Lucy explains: “We are very organic in our approach and have a gut instinct as to what will work and what won’t. We’ve learned to sow seeds of ideas and then, rather than over-control them and force them to grow, we ignore them, hoping the right person will come along.”

Their first show in the north of England, at Yorkshire’s Brutalist gallery Hepworth Wakefield, took place after the gallery approached them.

“Hepworth Wakefield came about a year after we decided it would be good to do smaller satellite shows around the country,” says Lucy. “The offers we get are invariably better than we could have imagined when we first came up with the idea.”

They have also expanded into styling, with specialists The Modern House estate agency asking them to dress some of their properties.

The friends first met through Petra’s husband and Lucy’s ex-partner, who were at school together and now run the architectural practice Landolt and Brown.

Lucy studied fashion design at Middlesex University and then did a fashion journalism MA at Central St Martins. She was a fashion journalist for seven years, writing for publications including the Guardian, Vogue, i-D and the Evening Standard.

She has “no idea really”, where her love for design comes from, remembering: “I just always loved doing my bedroom up. My granny was an artist and my dad has vintage cars.”

Petra studied at Canterbury College of Art and worked in the design and advertising industry in London and then out in Hong Kong. “I came back to the UK in the [late] 90s with one child and the second on its way,” she says.

“I didn’t want to be a working mum in design as the hours were so unpredictable. I did a stint of teaching design and then with Lucy set up Showhome, which later became Modern Shows.”

What is it about midcentury design that they love so much? “The patina of the wood, the fact there is so much heart in it and the stories of all the design greats,” says Lucy, who has recently written a book – 100 Midcentury Chairs and Their Stories – on the subject.

“I interviewed some lovely family members of so many of the design greats for it,” she says. “It was a special year in my life and some of the letters I got back from family members after they read the book made me a bit teary.”

She says that architects and designers love design from this era too. “It lasts and it’s still not very expensive for an antique,” she says. “It also appreciates in value faster than most other eras.”

Petra says: “The furniture is so beautifully constructed and the quality of wood is fantastic. I love the notion that we are just part of the furniture’s story and that most pieces will stand the test of time for the next generation to enjoy.”

Both Lucy and Petra now live in the Dulwich area. Petra says: “I’ve lived in Greater London pretty much all my life, but mostly north. I didn’t ever see myself living south but now I would never go back. South is so much better – there’s less congestion, it’s greener and there’s more space.”

Lucy adds: “I used to be a north Londoner but saw Petra’s house and was swayed to cross the river. The prices were so much better, the air is clean and Dulwich is beautifully green. I live in a wood 15 minutes from the centre of town on my train. How amazing is that for a Londoner to be able to say?”

They point out that the area is full of midcentury gems which would delight any enthusiast. Lucy says: “Look for Wates buildings. There is a walk during Open House London around all the 1960s estates the Dulwich Estate built. Petra and I live in them. Mine has a double-height hallway and they both have incredible landscaping that makes you feel like you are in a treehouse sometimes.

“We met the architect at one of the shows and he said coincidentally that he had also built Christison Hall, the building with its concrete buttresses and acoustic tiling that we show Dulwich Midcentury Modern in.

“There are also the Segal developments up towards Honor Oak. One of the photographers for The Modern House will be selling his book about Walter Segal and his incredible prefab houses at the show.”

Not everyone can live in a 1960s house – so how can they introduce a little midcentury style into their homes? Lucy recommends the moulded plywood Cherner chair designed by Norman Cherner in 1958.

“A Cherner chair looks great mixed with any antique, it’s a piece of sculpture in its own,” she says. “The black metal and brightly coloured enamel Danish Krenit bowls by Herbert Krenchel work anywhere too.”

She has a top tip for buyers: “If it hits you in the gut, buy it – don’t hesitate. The minute you turn around someone else will snap it up!” She adds: “Always ask for the story and to have details written down on the invoice. Keep it tucked away under the legs or in a drawer.”

At the November fair, there will be 85 dealers and designers – “something for everyone”, Petra says. Highlights will include three new dealers who have not shown at Dulwich before: Skinflint Design, which specialises in reclaimed industrial lighting; Everything But The Dog – an east London-based dealer selling Danish furniture and homeware; and Charliefourlegs, which only sells Charles and Ray Eames original chairs.

There will also be Beldi Rugs, specialising in original vintage Berber rugs from Morocco, Orson & Welles selling original film posters and Circus Brixton’s eclectic mix of ceramics and glassware.

Contemporary treats to look out for will include Haidée Drew’s graphic mirrors, London Terrariums, cushions and throws from Mourne Textiles and Anna-Lisa Smith and midcentury-inspired jewellery from Barbara Spence and Kate Hodgson. There will also be a prosecco van on hand to keep visitors refreshed while they peruse the wares.

Lucy and Petra have big plans for Modern Shows in the future. Lucy says she wants to “expand more around the country and show in partnership with more museums and galleries as well as focus on the interiors side”.

Petra adds: “I totally agree – plus the future is so exciting with the introduction of new materials and new designs. I’m looking forward to seeing what pieces from our current collections will be the midcentury moderns of tomorrow.”

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sending-the-message · 7 years ago

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In The City Of Meatbot-Powered Killers (part 4) by molotok_c_518

Table of Contents.

Part 3.

I hit the dark web for a few minutes, burned a couple of Bitcoin for a block of stolen credit card numbers, and searched for what the hell just happened downtown.

While I took a couple of the platinum card accounts to activate some of my burner phones (their fraud support will save them some charges, and I'll still have some prepaid phones to work with), I digested what the Army and Air National Guard just did.

(*26 hours ago, in RQZ HQ...)

Col. {Jones}, HQ "Six" (HQ6): This is Six, go ahead, sir.

Adjutant General, New York National Guard (AGNY): This operation is strictly need-to-know now, Six. It has been designated "Top Secret: Compartmentalized" at the highest levels, and the code name attached is "Glass Chipmunk."

HQ6: What the... who comes up with this shit... uh, sir?

AGNY: Some spook at the NSA. More time on their hands than sense.

HQ6: Yes, sir.

(Side note: The reason top secret stuff gets odd code-names is because they are words you would not accidentally say in a normal conversation. Try to work "Glass Chipmunk" into a sentence without sounding like you're crazy. It *might** work with someone with a curio collection... sort of like Alpine Shepherd Boy... but otherwise, you will stand out.*)

AGNY: How is the perimeter?

HQ6: Solid, sir. Nothing is getting out of there. We've had a few... anomalies, but no breaches.

AGNY: "Anomalies?"

HQ6: Well... it appears that the mad scientists' little toys don't hole up well in non-humans. We've had some animals come to the wire and just melt. The larger ones, we need to put down... have you ever tried shooting a cat and her kittens? They melted, too.

AGNY: I'll arrange to get some more men rotated in. Things like that obliterate morale.

HQ6: Thank you, sir... but we need a longer-term solution to this. We've gotten lucky, so far, in that only a few infected have tried to hit us. Tracers work well, so we've taken to loading all of our SAWs with nothing else. If they hit us in anything larger than 3 or 4 at a time, we're gonna get overrun in a heartbeat and a half, and you'll have a lot more than a city's worth of these things to worry about.

AGNY: Roger that, Six. I gotta tell ya, Tom... I've never thought, not even once, that we'd be talking about bombing American citizens.

HQ6: Roger that, Six. Voting demographic will definitely shift.

AGNY: Are you suggesting...

HQ6: No, sir. Just a bit of gallows' humor. Whistling in the graveyard, as it were.

AGNY: How about our reluctant big-brain?

HQ6: Still no sign of him. We lost him during his move towards the campus. We think he's in the Advanced Research Labs facility on campus, but we're not sure enough to risk an extraction team in a hostile-heavy area of the city.

AGNY: We have a good set-up on the plaza. Give the green light for the Reaper to launch. You are covered.

HQ6: That's an order?

AGNY: Direct order, Tom. Take solace in the fact that it's an act of mercy for the poor bastards.

HQ6: Yes, sir.

(23 hours ago.)

Reaper drone pilot, designated RD-3: On station, awaiting instructions.

HQ6: What's your load, RD-3:

RD-3: I have 4 Hellfires, sir. I see the target, awaiting order.

HQ6: You've been briefed as to the situation?

RD-3: Yes, sir. Glass Chipmunk. (almost inaudible chuckle)

HQ6: Right. When you have the target locked, you are cleared to engage.

RD-3: Order received. Lightin' em up.

Video footage from RD-3

It's daytime, timestamp on the video is 1106. Wide shot of a square plaza surrounded by concrete and glass buildings, in a Brutalist architectural style.

In the plaza is a large, pulsating mass of bodies, covered in dirt, rags, dried "blood" (in reality, it's mostly meatbots at this point), sweat, and strips of dried flesh.

A fountain in the center has kept these people hydrated since the outbreak. It has allowed this... gathering... to continue unabated.

"Gathering" is too weak a word. It's like a Roman orgy crossed with Cannibal Holocaust or Green Inferno.

The weakest have either stayed at the fringes and devoured what scraps they can, knowing that they have no chance at survival in the main body, or threw themselves in early, were torn to shreds and eaten whole, in order to kill the all-consuming hunger driving them.

The strongest have formed a horrific symbiosis, tearing chunks off of each other, letting chunks get torn from them, then healing enough to repeat the process. The looks of pain when injured are almost indistinguishable from the looks of rapture when they devour a neighbor.

There is no "sex," per se. Hunger has replaced sexual desire. If anything, the erogenous zones seem to be the most targeted areas for consumption... and since they grow back, they get targeted a lot.

I don't want to look. I want to make a bad joke about oral sex and fix myself a bottle of rum. Better still, a keg.

I look anyway.

At 1113, a missile tears into a fuel truck abandoned at the east end of the plaza. The angle is perfect: flaming kerosene or diesel splashes over the crowd, and thick clouds of boiling black smoke quickly fill the space.

Some of the (un)lucky few who escaped the initial blast run away.

Most, either sensing a well-cooked meal or realizing this will end the agonizing hunger, dive into the center of the holocaust.

In one strike, the National Guard have eliminated about 3/4 of the population of [REDACTED].

I've been working frantically for the past day, trying to find a way to protect myself from possible infection. I can't think "if" anymore: those idiots out there will see me at some point and launch an extraction. I've seen enough horror movies to know how catastrophically it will fail, and how likely I will be to have highly-trained, inhibition-impaired, hungry, rapid-healing killers at my door.

Yes, I'm a pessimist.

I know now how we got to this point, and I have the entire sequence ciphered out. My meatbots were part of a power struggle within the group, and were weaponized purely by circumstance.

First, Dr. A. He got in to the GATACA compiler and dropped his little brain bomb in the code. Hidden in the "comments" in the DNA (we had plenty of space to put messages in the DNA, and did so frequently to explain why Sequence 8c, for example, was written to repair a long muscle in a certain manner, rather than another) was his excuse:

Dr. A: By the time you read this, you will no longer head this project. If I can strike quickly and "prove" that you bungled the neuro programming, I can capitalize and run this program as I see fit. Some people aren't worth saving. Others should be reprogrammed for the greater good.

Dr. B followed this up by checking out the endocrine codes and cranking hunger to 1000. His excuse:

Dr. B: Need more. We can fund this by selling the old versions on the black market, and keep the excess for ourselves.

Profiteering, meet societal re-engineering.

It might have gone almost unnoticed, except for player 3.

Late in the project, I had an assistant basically forced on me. Dr. C was also a computer scientist, come to us from government service. He said the right things, asked the right questions, and made himself indispensable.

What I didn't know until last night was, he was a military contractor on the side, and was looking for combat applications for the 'bots.

He knew what the other fuckwits had done, and instead of fixing it...

It was he who showed Bobby the "Jesus room" (he used a different name for each guard, knowing they would be impressed with what was within). He managed to get a copy of Steve's key card to the most pliable guards, then waited for the inevitable.

He got very lucky (or unlucky) that we had just begun to prep for primate trials when Bobby's wife died. He had the "perfect" weaponized version of my project, and its spread was the perfect test.

I know this because the dumb fucker emailed his superiors on a civilian email account.

The NSA grabbed him up rapidly after that. He's sitting in Guantanamo Bay, if there's any justice.

What I've learned in the past 48 hours is sickening.

When I was a kid, I read Frankenstein several times. Mary Shelley shares my birthday, so it's like we're soul mates separated by 200 years.

I always told myself, "Don't let hubris be your downfall. You're doing this for mankind. You're not playing God... you're doing God's work, if we really are created in His/Her image."

This has never been about doing it because we could. It's doing it because we need this... to save lives cut too short by disease or accident.

Do this now, decide later how it should be used. That was always the mission.

Now... now, I'm using my knowledge of chemistry to destroy my life's work. I know what to mix for the best explosives I can make given what I have on hand. The labs we've been working will be utterly annihilated.

There's no way this project gets out. They aren't ready.

They aren't worthy.

Before I do that, though, I am going to call several people and let them know what happened. I am going to tell the press why my malignant miracle is being denied to the world.

NOW I'm playing God.

I've already made several vials of my counter-bots and hid them on my person. They're untested, but better than the alternative.

I may have a way to sneak off-campus, and from there I have a possible way to get out of town. It's going to involve laying low after the powers-that-be order a full sweep and cleanup of the bot-ridden, which I fully expect in a week or so.

I did some very rough calculations. Fatty tissues have probably all been digested by now. Protein can be burned for energy, and some of it will be consumed by each repair and replication cycle. I figure that, in 3 or 4 more days, there won't be enough metabolic energy to drive a flea left in anyone with meatbots in their blood.

Before I do anything else, though... time for a smoke.

I head up to the roof, and take a deep breath... then step to the wall and puke as the foul reek of thousands of roasting bodies pours into my sinuses.

I won't be eating barbecue any time soon.

By some dark miracle, I puke right on a bot-ridden at the base of the building. He looks up, then begins licking the vomit off of himself.

Didn't need to see that.

I move away from the wall. I fumble a smoke from the pack, and light up with very shaky hands.

I also crack the seal on the cheap водка I found in a lab assistant's office and take a deep swig. I dislike the cheap stuff... it has this nasty chemical aftertaste.

All of this is distracting me from the little fucker I puked on, who is free-climbing the wall.

I catch the barest hint of movement out of the corner of my eye as he crests the retaining wall and leaps 20 feet across the roof to tackle me.

I drop the водка and spin quickly to meet him. I'm unarmed, because "Of course they can't get to me. I'm behind two locked doors!" and this is going to kill me...

...and it gets close enough for me to see that "he" is a "she," and she's emaciated and nothing but bone, skin and wiry muscle and hunger and fuck I'm going to have to punch a girl to save my life as I loop a right cross straight into her oncoming jaw, and she drops to the roof...

...and I grab my водка and run for the door as she scrambles to her feet and makes the sprint after me with frightening speed, and I stop and duck as she comes at my back and misses her grab and I stand up straight into her jaw and she staggers backwards...

...and I spin around and plant a solid left into her gut and she doubles over but she has a grip on my back and can't bite through my shirt but I stand up straight and she flips over my back to the ground at my heels...

...and I spin again and kick her in the head and she grabs her head and it gives me just enough time to get to the door and open it...

...but she's on her feet and after me and through the door just as I pull it shut and now I'm in the stairwell to the second floor with a crazed bot-ridden woman who lunges for me...

...so I throw her over the railing and she hangs on barely and I'm running down the stairs and to the second floor entryway and through the door...

...and she drops from the railing and down all the way to the first floor and I hear the CRACK-CRACK of both of her legs snapping on impact and she screams in agony but she's up on both broken legs and trying to limp up the stairs...

...and the door to the second floor closes on the stairwell.

I'm now trapped in the building with a for-now injured bot-ridden.

Oh... and my knuckles are bleeding.

I may be infested as well.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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junker-town · 8 years ago

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The Georgia Dome got the farewell it deserved

Monster Jam was the last memorable event in a stadium that begged to be forgotten.

Monster Jam fills up enough of the Georgia Dome — most of the bottom bowl, and a good chunk of the mezzanines and upper deck. There is competition in town — but there also probably isn’t a lot of Sunday night overlap between the monster truck crowd and the people across town at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium watching Atlanta United lose its first game ever to New York Red Bulls.

There are mostly dads, myself included, towing kids there with the promise of monster trucks and multiple concession stand runs.

One of these runs: for a $20 Monster Jam official Grave Digger sno-cone with commemorative Grave Digger cup with molded grinning skeleton face and flashing lights triggered via a button in its plastic forehead. I bought it; one $15 commemorative non-truck-specific Monster Jam sno-cone; a $15 pair of headphones/ear protectors, with rubber tires mounted around the ear cups for one child; a $20 pair of less-elaborate ear protection for the other kid, who could not be persuaded to get the cheaper ones because, “I need different daddy”; at least $30 worth of bribes in the form of food and drink to keep them in the stands for half the show; $0 in alcohol, somehow, because two children at a monster truck show keep you so busy and running that you cannot find the time to get drunk enough to deal with the children.

While waiting, a towheaded 3-year-old behind us pointed to the beer man selling $12 oil cans of Busch Light.

“Daddy, you could get a beer.”

“You know Daddy only drinks crown.”

The Omni

The first thing I can remember about going to a live sports event involves DeBarge, and the memory is wrong. Wrong may not be the right word, actually. Better put, I misremembered because I was probably 6 years old, and 6-year-olds can’t be counted on to provide accurate testimony in a court of law or in a recollection involving the Atlanta Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers.

My dad took me to a Hawks game at the Omni. The Omni was the least-lovable building ever constructed, a black cube with tented pyramids of black sheet metal jutting from the roof, weird angular corner windows, and the street presence of a giant, menacing blast furnace. I thought it looked cool because it reminded me of the doomed spaceship in Disney’s The Black Hole. Kids have bad memories and deplorable taste in architecture.

The Omni was built to rust, to be an uncherished memory before it ever happened.

The first claim there is literal. By rusting, the steel elements of the building would become even more fused to each other. In its later years, it started to look like an overturned running shoe or waffle iron left outside to the elements. The designers reportedly did not factor in Atlanta’s subtropical climate, and the Omni kept rusting and rusting until the entire building had an incurable form of architectural arthritis. Holes appeared in the building’s frame, holes big enough for people to pass through without tickets or permission. Rather than fix the gaping holes in the building designed to rust in one of the United States’ most humid places, management instead put up chain-link fences along them.

The second claim, that the Omni was designed to be an uncherished memory, is a guess. The Hawks played there either way. My dad drove me down into the city with the radio on — never the rock station, but always the R&B station with Switch, Brick, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Gap Band, Roger and Zapp, or Kool and the Gang on. I knew the Hawks had a player named “Tree Rollins.” This was enough all by itself, but I would also get to go to Burger King for a kids meal, which, for a kid who was avowedly not into sports, was a low, low bribe bar to clear.

Tree Rollins totally looked like someone named Tree. I remember the Omni very much looking like the inside of a doomed spaceship, and that everyone was very excited that someone called Dr. J was there, even though he was evidently some off-brand version of Dr. J not equal to a previous version. There were men there with giant Jheri curls and Magnum, P.I. sunglasses and mustaches indicating that they were serious, wealthy, and just dangerous enough to wear a mustache. I remember the hair across all races and genders being massive and more carefully constructed than the arena they were standing in; I remember being one of the few kids in the building, and thinking that maybe, sometimes, my dad might just be taking me to stuff he liked in order to get out of the house and have a few too many beers by himself.

Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

On the way home, I remember passing the few super-distinct pieces of the Atlanta skyline: the Peachtree Westin that Dar Robinson jumped out of for a Burt Reynolds stunt, the UFO-shaped alien cake of Fulton County Stadium where the Braves played and where my dad would later take us to sit in empty seats and pick up fiendish sunburns, the Georgia Capital that always seemed completely out of place in all that retro-futurism and brutalist forestry around it. That’s the kind of place Atlanta was and still is — a place where the past is what seems unnecessary, not the future.

The music had changed. My dad drove in silence and smoked Vantage cigarettes with the window cracked even though it was winter, I think, and cold enough to have the heat cranking. It was Quiet Storm time on the radio, and that meant Jeffrey Osborne, Marvin Gaye, Rita Coolidge, and Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Teddy Pendergrass. DeBarge’s “All This Love” came on and the nylon string guitar solo played and I looked up and thought how the streetlights were on but still looked so dark against the streets and the houses of what I now know was a decimated Techwood.

I’m pretty sure since that song came out in 1982 that we’d already moved to Tennessee by then, but at a certain point emotional memories are immune to fact-checking. The fadeout and ride in the song is endless over the background singers going say you really love me baby/ say you really love me darling/for I really love you baby/sure enough love you darlin’

youtube

At the Georgia Dome, there is some of exactly what you think should be at a Monster Jam show in the South.

There was, for example, a terrifying man in the sleeveless Confederate flag shirt eight rows below our seats. I asked him if he knew where I could get ear protection before the race. He looked at me for about five seconds before responding because he:

comes from someplace where there is a daily quota on words for interpersonal communication

thought I was a godless bearded urbanite hitting on him

or was very drunk and hearing me talking on a built-in beer-induced tape delay.

I hope he was drunk, and also that he thought I was hitting on him.

The trucks have names ranging from the super-uninspiring and corporate — the FS1 Cleatus Truck! the Team Hot Wheels Firestorm! — to the classic and menacing (Bounty Hunter and El Toro Loco). There is a truck called Obsession and its unimaginatively named partner, Obsessed. One is called Ice Cream Man, easily the least-intimidating monster truck of all time because it comes out to tinkly ice cream van chimes, or the most unsettling because it plays a song synonymous with the sketchiest non-related regular cast member of most people’s childhoods — the neighborhood ice cream man who might have lived in the van he worked in.

There is a Monster Energy truck with green neon lights built into the undercarriage. I am here to report against my will that it looks absolutely and positively sick. It is called “the Monster Energy Truck” because there are two good monster truck names in the universe, and both are taken. (Grave Digger and Bigfoot, to be specific.)

The anthem is sung while a bald eagle flaps in slow motion on the end-zone video boards.

The Georgia Dome was built in 1992, and it will be imploded in the summer of 2017. It will never see its 30th birthday, and it will not be missed because it, too, was built to be forgotten. The last event in the dome will be Monster Jam. If you are from outside of the state, you will think it is appropriate because LOL REDNECKS; if you are from here, you will probably also think it is appropriate because LOL REDNECKS, but will get mad when anyone else says it.

For the record, the Dome didn’t even try to be interesting on the level of the Omni or Fulton County Stadium. It was fine but unmemorable as something you drove past, sat in, or saw in shots of the city skyline. Take a hotel bathtub, preferably one of the cheap ones, too shallow to do anything in but sit unhappily for five minutes before giving up and draining the water. Cover it with a large golf umbrella blown inside out by the wind. Solder the two together. Paint it first teal and maroon, because someone in 1991 thought putting the bedroom color scheme from a Florida vacation rental on the outside of a stadium in Atlanta was a good idea.

When you remember the Atlanta Falcons play football there, paint it in a new scheme with red and black in it to remind everyone of their existence. Don’t do this until 16 years after you open the stadium, and only nine years before its eventual demolition.

Photo by Doug Benc/Getty Images

Monster Jam is the last event here. Other things happened before that. The Atlanta Falcons played mostly forgettable football here, unless you take out the Vick years, which you might want to given how they ended. If there were some way to keep the part where all the mostly African-American fans in the upper deck went bonkers the minute they started playing “Bring ’Em Out” for those teams, you should do that. That may be the most excited single concentration of minutes you could salvage from the team’s history at the Georgia Dome: Before the team played, but after they remembered they were going to watch the fastest player in the NFL touch the ball on every play. This is a happy memory. There aren’t a lot of those there.

It hosted a lot of college football, including the annual SEC Championship game. Tim Tebow cried on the sideline there after Alabama clipped Florida’s undefeated streak short in 2009; Les Miles in 2007 used his backup quarterback to win an SEC title there, and then a national title LSU somehow got with two losses later in New Orleans. Before that game he hustled every reporter in reach to a press conference where he denied Kirk Herbstreit’s report that he was going to take the Michigan job, and then with his chest at full inflation demanded that the room “have a great day.” I was there for that and, yes, it was just as confusing in person as it was on television.

Photo by A. Messerschmidt/Getty Images

LSU coach Les Miles after defeating the University of Miami, 40-3, in the 2005 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.

There was Wrestlemania in 2011, when the Rock returned and I nearly flipped my laptop off a table when the glass broke and Stone Cold Steve Austin ripped down the entry ramp on an ATV like the Pope of All Shitkicking Rednecks. In 1994, Deion Sanders and Andre Rison punched each other while wearing helmets in fight during a football game, an event that easily clears the hurdle to being one of the top 25 most memorable moments in Atlanta history, and was also incredibly dumb. Those two circles overlap a lot here.

There were two Super Bowls in the Dome. The first was a forgettable one in 1994 where the Cowboys beat the Bills. This beating was different from the seven other Bills/Cowboys Super Bowls in the 1990s because the pregame show featured Kriss Kross, Charlie Daniels, the Georgia Satellites, and the Morehouse Marching Band doing a tribute to “Georgia Music Makers.” Charlie Daniels is from North Carolina but did a song about an unenforceable contract between the Devil and a mentally ill violin player, so by any standard he counted.

The second is best remembered for an unseasonably brutal ice storm and Ray Lewis picking up two murder charges from the Fulton County District Attorney after a very bad night out on the town with his friends. The Tennessee Titans came up a yard short in Atlanta, but most Nashville things measured in Atlanta terms fail by much, much more than that. Feel better thinking about it in those terms, Nashville.

There was also the time the tornado struck the Georgia Dome while I was inside it during the 2008 SEC basketball tournament, rippling the ceiling like water and throwing the scoreboard around like a weight on a fishing lure. That happened, too.

Other than all that, there’s not much else. Monster Jam will close out the building’s life, if you like to anthropomorphize a stadium no one ever thought to give a personality or memory. The seats will be auctioned off or sold to high schools for repurposing. The innards will be sold in stages, right down to a yard sale of whatever’s left in the building getting gutted and gaveled out right on the sidewalk outside the Dome on Northside Drive.

Sometime during the summer it will be imploded and become a parking lot for the new stadium. It’s a corporate-sponsored metallic oculus someone will probably remember as looking like a very old future. The Falcons and Atlanta United will call it home, and the Georgia Dome will be gone and not mourned. That’s fine, and I don’t want you to think for a second it isn’t. Some things are built to be forgotten, and the Georgia Dome is one of them.

Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images

The trucks spend the first half of the show racing by pairs in heats. They can sort of drift a corner — sort of, as much as a 10,000-pound truck can slide on dirt. The drivers don’t hammer the gas so much as they get up to speed, and then feather the throttle to keep the trucks moving with careful blasts of the engine. It’s like watching extremely short rallycross races run by farting whales in track shoes.

Finishing fast is interesting. Finishing sideways doing something reckless and badass is better, but finishing first and flying sideways across the finish line is best. This is particularly true if you can roll the truck over, hit the throttle, catch one enormous tire in the dirt on the end of the roll, and flip the entire vehicle back onto all four tires for a save, a round of WOOOOS and applause, and a pass to the next round of racing.

This happens twice in the racing segment of the show, which is two more times than anyone should be able to pull that off in the aforementioned 10,000-pound trucks. Grave Digger sacrificed itself for the crowd’s pleasure early — it hit a massive jump while trying to speed across the finish line, bouncing sideways, blowing out one enormous tire and a mess of important-looking metal stuff in the chassis on impact, and then rolling to stop on its ceiling while soaking up the applause. Grave Digger left the arena with three good wheels, one completely destroyed tire, and the limp of a champion who’d given their all. If I had been drinking, I might have teared up a little.

The second half is the freestyle, the more entertaining part where Monster Jam ditches the entire concept of racing, and just lets drivers try to tear apart their cars for the crowd. The drivers have two minutes to run through their routine. The most popular runs don’t even make it that long, though. They end abruptly and satisfactorily when the driver rolls their truck onto its roof off an ill-advised but spectacular jump, breaks an axle or blows out a tire, or cripples the thing trying to land a backflip.

The Monster Energy truck — the one with the absolutely sick neon — whipped itself around during the freestyle event with such force that its flimsy body panels sheared off in every direction. One truck just did donuts for the last 20 seconds of their routine. If a monster truck rips donuts on dirt, there is an involuntary response from the body. “WOOOOOOOO” leaps from the diaphragm. You can’t fight it, and wouldn’t want to if you could.

The MCs yell out this or something like it repeatedly.

“DOIN’ IT ONE LAST TIME FOR THE GEORGIA DOME.”

It doesn’t have much effect, not even when a local DJ yells it out during a bike race between three audience members racing on children’s bikes. But then, the Georgia Dome is used to quiet echoing off its cavernous walls, or having fan noise piped in to ricochet between its empty seats. There is nothing more to give from this afternoon’s audience, for one: Being at Monster Jam is getting blasted in the face for three hours with engine noise, and then coated with a gentle drizzle of dirt floating down between runs. Maximum audience participation is clapping and yelling just loudly enough to be heard over engines that burn a gallon of fuel a minute. There is no 11, or giving it up any harder than one is already giving it up.

Very few people seemed to realize this was the end, or at least attached any significance to it, or cared whether anyone would begin gutting the building the instant the last earth-mover carried out the dirt.

We had to leave three trucks into the freestyle when both of their attention spans wore out, and were unrecoverable. We left before the Georgia Dome paid one last tribute to itself: A grease fire broke out in a concession stand, which was quickly put out only after filling a concourse with smoke and scaring the hell out of a few patrons. Remember that on the way out: that the building tried to save everyone the trouble of demolition by burning itself down.

Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images

A tear in the ceiling of the Georgia Dome is visible after severe weather passed over the building during the SEC Men's Basketball Tournament on March 14, 2008.

Walking out with my kids, they were about the same age I was when I left the Omni with my dad at the Omni in 1982, or 1983, or whenever it was in fuzzy kid-time. They saw the new stadium next door and thought it looked pretty much like a spaceship, or like someplace where Skylanders would live.

That is exactly what the Omni and Fulton County Stadium looked like to me as a kid —so much so that later, when my dad and another dad would awkwardly hang out for the benefit of their sons’ juvenile need to socialize with other dudes, my friend Jim and I would sit in the backseat as they drove and point out the buildings we would own in the future. He’d take the Westin, and keep all his Legos there. I’d take Fulton County Stadium, and reserve it exclusively for my collection of helicopters. A city was a place to be had, a thing to be purchased for your convenience.

Kids, weirdly enough, understand that a city is just something to be bought and sold.

Later, weirder, less-tenable ideas creep into your head: That it could be home, that the buildings you can name mean something beyond the names, that there might be some kind of resonant harmony between you and this random system of properties and spaces. Sometime someone might superimpose a sports team into that imaginary relationship, making this city not just a place, but a place for you, and people like you, and that all of you can thrive here. It is special. You are special, and the team, its players, and all the spaces they pass through and live in are special and remarkable and unlike anything else in the world.

There is a magic you can believe about a place as an adult that children do not even begin to believe or accept. A 7-year-old would laugh you out of the room, probably while telling you that the new place was much better, both because it looked like a place where Skylanders would live, and also because it was new. New things are better, and you should always take the new thing.

Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

That shouldn’t be hard to accept. Take the new thing, even if the nagging, haunting feeling of living somewhere boils down to a problem with you, with that thing where you’re looking for something in tangible space to consider a landmark, a guidepost. To consider something significant, if only so that you, in relation to it, can have a bit of that significance. The city I live in makes that hard to do, though there’s an honesty in that constant self-digestion and auto-demolition. Do not get attached. It, and everything in it, will eventually move, just like the teams and the people who call it home.

That’s the rational, reasonable thing to think, yet even with an intentionally blank, mostly unmemorable empty space like the Georgia Dome I want something to be there, to definitively have happened there. There should be a definite something there, thinks some deeply schizophrenic part of my brain that doesn’t want so much as a garden shed to collapse around me without some memory attached to it. Otherwise it’s just a thing — and by extension, so is the city, and the very personally important me I’ve attached to it.

I have a definite thing to attach myself to here. After all, I thought for a few seconds on March 14, 2008 that I was going to die on the floor of the Georgia Dome on press row at the SEC men’s basketball tournament.

I thought Kentucky fans were stomping their feet in unison on the bleachers at first, but the noise swelled, and swelled more, and grew so loud and limitless all at once. It felt limitless in the sense of being infinitely powerful with no range or end to the noise, so loud and yet so obviously just getting started on the way to a theoretical full volume. What do you think a tornado at pace is? It’s actually just clearing its throat and warming up, volume-wise. It’s whispering, holding back. You just hear it as a roar.

There wasn’t even a shudder from impact. There was just the sensation that the entire building was next to an immense floor buffer, spinning and vibrating at thousands of RPM. When that vibration turned into waves the roof flapped like a subwoofer, the air vents started spitting out pieces of insulating foam, and for one second I weighed the options of dying standing up and being crushed by the falling roof and lighting, or taking my chances ducking under a table, only to be crushed by all that plus one flimsy plywood table. The lights swayed 10 to 15 feet in either direction. The waves got stronger, and the entire overturned bathtub of the stadium was now being thumped by a very pissed off janitor pushing that giant floor buffer into the side of the Georgia Dome.

I was sitting next to Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery. That would have been memorable for me, at least, getting crushed next to a legendary announcer, in the few seconds I had to have a last memory. If I’d heard Verne say “oh my” as it collapsed, it would have been my last tweet, and the RTs and favs would be infinite.

Instead of bearing down at full speed and colliding with the Dome, though, the tornado drunkenly staggered into the Georgia Congress Center next door, then down Marietta Street and into Cabbagetown before dissipating into the night. Not knowing what else to do, I walked out and took pictures of holes in the walls of the Congress Center, and thought about how great I felt about not dying in the Georgia Dome that night.

Leaving the last event at a building that was designed to be forgotten, I didn’t even really think about the one thing I should remember and attach to the spot.

Instead I thought about the only song I think about when I think about the irrational need for a place to give me something only a human can — especially this place, the first place I did so many things, like leaning my head against the window listening to DeBarge after a Hawks game. That need will never make sense, no matter how many games you watch there, or how many moments you spend there. It won’t make sense, not even after years of silently asking a place to just talk back to you once after you spend years monologuing to it. To look at a place that eats its own every day, and buries its stadiums and buildings and places under like daisies beneath a plow, and ask it, as if you were some exception to the rule, to sing the outro to you:

say you really love me baby

say you really love me darling

for I really love you baby

sure enough love you darlin’

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