#my fatal flaw is once i find a world i like i must eat every single detail about that world. and then i want more of it

[57sfinest]

17!

17. there should be more of this type of fic/art

okay for art umm i want to see more . women. i need an iv of lilienne & ruby & soona straight into my blood. thanks

for fic i wanna see character analysis type stuff, specifically i wanna see FUCKED UP fics exploring dysfunction between characters more because i eat that shit up. my recent jeanharry fic was my attempt at feeding that niche. umm and also if we can all go super autism mode on worldbuilding/lore i love that shit also i wrote 2 fics in a week about the pale alone and i want MORE

[dailyaudiobible]

05/13/2020 DAB Transcript

1 Samuel 14:1-52, John 7:31-53, Psalms 109:1-31, Proverbs 15:5-74

Today is May 13th welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is wonderful to be here with you today as we move through the center of another week and pretty much through the center of another month. But no matter what time it is, no matter what day it is we’re here together around the Global Campfire and that is a joy and an honor. So, let's…let's take that next step forward together. We’re reading from the New International Version this week and we’re in the book of first Samuel learning about Samuel, learning about the first king of Israel, Saul. And Saul…Saul is showing us a lot about ourselves. Today, first Samuel chapter 14.

Commentary:

Okay. So, in the book of first Samuel, as we learn about Saul, we have already been able to observe his fear of man, right? Like, what people think about him very, very much influences the way that he behaves and the way that he makes decisions because of what they're going to look like. In today's reading we also see that Saul is rash, like he has enormous power, he is the king but he makes decisions without like seeking wisdom, without knowing like, this is a crossroads I need to slow down for a second,  think this through, be wise about this next move. Instead he’s like trying to appear to be this strong leader and that works. Like, they've fought lots of battles but he’s also trying to make these decisions that have implications on down the line. And that happens today. So, Jonathan doesn't tell his dad, doesn't tell anybody that he's gonna go over and check out the Philistine camp, which is probably an error on Jonathan's part, but they do go over they’re like, you know, “if they say wait there we’ll come to you” then they’ll know one thing and if they say, “come up here we’ll…we’ll show you some things” then they'll know that they should climb up and fight with them. And they do and that starts battle and Jonathan's victorious in that battle, but it kind of sets off a chain reaction where the Philistine army is confused. And, so, they start fighting each other and there’s a lot of confusion and Saul sees all this going on and he’s like, “let's go get them. No one can eat a thing until we have avenged our enemies.” Okay. Like, I am not the exercise guru of the Daily Audio Bible by any stretch but I know that if you do begin to do some kind of strenuous exercise, something that you're gonna have to get the heart rate up and you’re gonna be running and you’re gonna be stopping and you're gonna be swinging and you're gonna be flicking and you’re gonna be jousting, all these kinds of things and you're going to be doing it kind of indefinitely, but at least a day and you're gonna have nothing to re-energize yourself, then that is ultimately going to exhaust you and slow you down. And yet, this is what the king ordered so this is what everybody's obeying, which actually hampers the victory. Of course, Jonathan he started…instigated the whole thing but he doesn't know anything about this vow. So, he eats some honey and it's full of carbohydrates and he's like re-energized, he’s got some energy back, but in the end, you know, everybody's kind of assembling back together, people are going crazy and just eating whatever they can find and they’re butchering animals and just eating the animals. Saul wants to keep going and he calls for the Ark of the covenant and the priest is like, “we should probably ask God about this.” And God has nothing to say. And, so, Saul is determined like, “something's wrong here.” And we do the lots and it turns out, Jonathan's the one. And, so, Saul has already said like, “even if it's my own son Jonathan he will die.” A rash thing to say. And Jonathan is basically like, “I didn't know about this.” And, you know, like “God has been working through the battling against our enemies and I have to die?”  And the King, King Saul is like basically, “you do have to die right here right now.” So, it's the soldiers like who step forward and are like, “not at all can we kill Jonathan. The whole victory today was instigated by Jonathan. Can we not see that God was working in this? Like, we’re not killing Jonathan today.” And, so, Jonathan is saved but we’re gonna see there is a kind of tenuous relationship between the two of them, son and father as we go forward, as you could imagine. So, Saul is trying to be the part to look like this strong, dynamic, commanding, instantaneous, smart, wise leader, but his fatal flaw is that he cares more about what people think about him than anything. And in today's reading we see that he’s boxed himself in where his own son is going to die. And it's the people that Saul wants to look strong in front of that step forward and are like, “we’re not doing this. It would be wrong to execute him.” So, the thing that Saul's trying to preserve and to portray isn't working. By the time we get done with today's reading, Saul doesn't look like this masterful king. He looks weak. His own army, his own military leaders had to step forward and say, “this would be wrong.” So, once again we get a reminder of where the fear of man and paying attention to what everybody else might think or say as a way of gauging our lives, how that leads us into kind of a false identity. Now Saul has to appear to be kingly and this is in his head. He's got to live up to something that he thinks he's got to live up to when he doesn't and this leads him into these kinds of situations and we like watch it day after day and we’re not done because Saul is gonna continue to walk this path are and we’re going to continue to watch where it goes.

Prayer:

Father, once again, we invite You into this because it really does boil down to a sense of identity. It boils down to who it is we’re trying to please and how much we’re willing to change who we really are in order to do that. And the truth is, we can't really change ourselves. We can pretend. We can pretend but only You are capable of changing us from within. And, so, it is our identity in You that we must care about. All of the other things are by far distant secondary things. You give us identity and the identity that You have given us is…is that of a child, that we are Your children. May we walk in quiet confidence of that fact today we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

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I remind you the book, The God of Your Story, which is…which is our latest, is a 365-day journey through the entire Bible like we take here every year only in written form, which brings out completely different kinds of nuances. And is a fantastic…well it…it is a fantastic companion for this journey because that's exactly what it was created to be. And, so, I pray everyone…everyone in this community has that…has a hard copy as that's available no matter what the Internet's doing, no matter what the world is doing, like a hard copy for the journey through the Scriptures is that resource, The God of Your Story. So, check that out.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage. Thank you profoundly and humbly for your partnership we wouldn't be here, we literally wouldn't be here if we were not in this together. And, so, I'm glad that we are. So, there’s a link on the homepage. If you are using the Daily Audio Bible app you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address, if you prefer, is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi Daily Audio Bible friends and family this is Hannah in Illinois and I just wanted to pray for a young lady who…whose message played at the end of May 7th. And I just want to also encourage you. So, you…you sound how I sounded a few days ago actually when…we’re…we’re struggling to have a child and when I found out again that we were not having a child this time around it felt like I was dying. And I want to share that it…it wasn’t…it wasn’t…it��s not because it’s a bad desire to want a child or to want to be with someone who you love but when we raise it higher than…than our Christ it…it tears us apart. And, so, whoever you put in the place of God, that that person cannot handle the weight of that or the responsibility of that. And, so, I’m praying for both you and I right now. Dear heavenly Father, thank You for my sister and I just pray that You heal her heart God and that You strip away anything that raises itself above You God in her mind, in her heart, in her life and in mine as well God. Help us to focus on You and receive Your love in Jesus name. Amen.

Hi, everyone it’s Karen in St. Louis. Hey, I’m going to ask you all please pray for my former pastor’s wife and his family. He was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound the day before yesterday and they have been through so much in the last five years. God has used this man to impact thousands and thousands of people throughout the world and he wasn’t perfect. There’s no one perfect on this side of heaven, only Jesus. But he was a good man, he was a genuine guy and I want to tell you he preached grace and truth. And, so, I’m asking for prayers for his family, for the extended church family. I also want to pray to the comments that were on his Facebook page were…there were so many that were just appalling, satanic comments. And I fear and as I’m seeing I’m seeing darkness continue to rise up that we would be strong in the Lord, that we would pray for these people, that the God who rules and reigns over everything would apprehend their hearts. And I’m praying for protection for those who are trying to speak to them in love. And it’s vicious, it’s horrible. Thank you everyone. God bless you all. Bye-bye.

Hey, I’m wondering if…if you wouldn’t mind praying for me. I’m super struggling at the moment and have been going through a pretty hard time for about 13 months. One of the things I’m really struggling with is self-hatred and I don’t know why. And I’m also struggling with shame. I know that my sins have been forgiven so I don’t quite know what the shame is all about. And yeah, really feeling physical and lots of emotional pain and…and fatigue and grief and just don’t quite know how to move forward and manage. Anyway, I…thank for your prayers. Five.

Hello, you lovely people from the DAB this is Allison and I bring you greetings from England. I thought today I better call in with a really big praise report but this one goes back a very long way. Some of you, not many, but some will remember that over nine years ago, almost 10 in fact, my son was in a very serious accident and had a very serious brain injury. And they thought he wasn’t going to live. Oh, I’m Allison and he’s Christopher. The people from this community prayed for him and he has steadily made progress. It was quite rapid to begin with but then after a while it settled down and we weren’t sure if he was going to make more progress. And then he went into lockdown in his care home and I was really scared. But this seems to have been the making of him and Christopher who can walk a little bit with the frame decided to do a sponsored walk for charity to support where he lives and other homes like it. And he’s raised over 2000 pounds but much more than that, it’s brought meaning and hope into his life. So, for all of you who have ever prayed for Chris or if you’ve prayed for others like him with brain injuries, I offer my deep heartfelt thanks and I thank you all for sustaining me to the last 10 years. May you all be blessed and may you know God’s love working abundantly through you and in you. Amen.

Hi this is Ellie from California I’ve been a listener now since the beginning of this year, full time listener, and I just want to reach out with some prayer requests. I’ve been in the hospital for a week now and I went in for some pretty routine stuff and I had a lot of complications and I’ve had several procedures since coming in here and one procedure they made a couple mistakes and they’re doing their best to rectify them but I feel really, really scared and rotten and just kind of in need of...of global prayer. So, if anybody can please pray for me. I can’t get any food or water down. I’m so weakened to that. Thank you very much for listening and God bless all of you.

He was a hero overseas but a terrorist at home a real pillar of the community but he also liked to roam he has a license to have a gun but he molested his own son he fought for all life but he abuses his own wife how many are there like him it’s not important that we know but the problem is symptomatic and it continues to grow he’s got God on the outside but he’s got demons within so how can you separate the man from the sin it is only through Christ the only true vine that a man can be delivered from the torments of his mind because it starts in the heart that’s what the demons control and only God’s Holy Spirit can release that man’s soul for its trapped in a torment that permits him no peace and its only through Jesus that he can find a release and the blood that Jesus shed gives him the right to be ruler of all life because he truly is the light darkness must flee when we invite him to come in but he will not impose because he’s the consummate friend men must be told and shown by our works that peace and great joy are just part of the perks a hero in war should be a hero at home who’ll speak of God’s goodness wherever he’ll roam and all that he knows to his offspring he shows with respect for all life especially his wife a brand-new creation coming out of every nation the numbers might be few but God is making men new

blindtony1016@gmail.com. Like to give a shout out to Sherlock Washington and Kim, know your loved very much and prayed for every day and once again Brian and Hardin family thank you for this podcast for God’s holy spirit to flow, keep it flowin’ y’all. All right. Bye-bye.

Hello Daily Audio Bible this is Duane from Wisconsin all praise and glory to our wonderful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Today is Mother’s Day so happy Mother’s Day to all those mothers around the world. I’m calling in for Cindy the flute player. She called in and told us she has lost her job and she is struggling to find employment. Unemployment hasn’t been there and now she has to move out of her home. Cindy, The Daily Audio Bible is praying for you. We pray the Lord will give you direction, that He will provide for you spiritually, financially, and physically. We want to lift you up in this time. We want you to know the Lord is walking with you and we as DABbers are also walking with you. We are here to encourage you and to let you know we are praying for you. We will continue to lift you up until you are able to find the financial resources you need and we ask that you lean the Lord, pray and in fasting you’re doing many good things. And in this time the Daily Audio Bible DABbers would like to lift you up. God bless you Cindy.

[sokalenko]

What I Wish My Father Had Taught Me About Fishing

Forty-odd years ago, while aboard a fishing boat with my father on Long Island Sound, I felt a pull on my line like none I’d ever felt before. And then another. And another still. The wild world had hit my line with all its abundance. I reeled hard and with a crazy swing I swept my multi-hooked rig loaded with five big mackerel in a wide arc over the rail until the whole bloody mess landed with a chaotic thud. I had no care about what I would do with all these fish that I had killed in one haul. Whether I would eat them or bury them in the garden or feed them to my mother’s cat. What mattered was that I had caught them and they were all mine. Except for one, which had gone missing.

“Wait,” I said kneeling down and searching the deck. “Where’s the fifth mackerel?”

“It’s right here,” my father replied from a crouching position he’d assumed in vain to avoid the bombardier-mackerel in my wild swing. “It’s here in my back.”

I followed my line to its end and saw that the fifth mackerel, along with a large silver lure, was indeed impaled in my father’s shoulder. He’d ducked, but I’d nailed him all the same.

“Sorry, Dad.”

“Just tell the mate to come over and take the hook out.”

This Father’s Day I find myself thinking of this scene because it pretty much sums up the haphazard way dads taught their kids to fish back when the natural world seemed rich, no matter how poor it was fast becoming. In my case it was my parents’ divorce that started the process. My father was a hard-working doctor of the late Mad Men era who logged long hours away from home. Many of the details of how to keep children productively occupied were alien to him. When he suddenly found himself with court-allotted divorced dad weekends on his hands and hours of child time to fill, he fell upon fishing like a thirsty man on an oasis. And in his little red Dodge Omni we would range the coast of Long Island, his one-piece surfcasting pole lashed to the luggage rack like a knight errant’s lance.

During these times I learned from him the basics: how to cast that mighty fishing rod of his, tie a lure to a line, jam a hook down the gullet of a sandworm. But learning to fish is not so much about one person teaching another a set of skills. Rather, it is the directing of a child to observe the ways in which nature works.

After each divorced dad weekend, when I returned to my more permanent home with my single mom in her little Connecticut rental cottage, I would seek out fish-filled water at every opportunity. Like some kind of latter-day Huck Finn, I’d hop fences to trespass on various backwoods estates and to follow rivers as they braided and splayed out on their way to the sea. I came to understand how trout take cover in the slack water behind boulders, saving their energy for the critical moment of the hunt. At the seaside, I learned that the first blooming of forsythia in springtime signaled the right temperature for winter flounder to rouse themselves from the mud. Standing chest deep in summer surf, I figured out that a brighter Moon hid the fish-spooking effects of the luminescent plankton bouncing against my line. And in the fall, I mimicked nature; tempting striped bass with the eels they naturally encountered on their migration from saltwater to fresh. Eventually, I acquired my own boat and began feeling my way around Long Island Sound’s shores alone, coming to understand the bottom topography and the flow of species in and out of that great embayment.

This was how I came to learn the scientific method. I formulated a hypothesis about a fish and its hunting behavior. I tested out my hypothesis with an experiment—a choice of anchorage, a retrieve speed for my lure, the calculation of a given depth. I then published my results in the form of fillets for the freezer. No small wonder that E. O. Wilson, Carl Safina, and many of the world’s greatest naturalists have told me of similar experiences. Through fishing, a child learns the way the world works, fish-by-fish. A more serious study of biology and ecology are natural next steps. And I can thank my father from the bottom of my heart for setting me on a course that led to a global study of fish and fisheries that is now the center of my career.

There was, however, one serious flaw in my fishing methods, something I could have discussed with my father, a psychiatrist by profession, had I thought to ask. It is, in a word, denial: the pernicious tendency of men and women (and boys and girls) to downplay or dismiss the effect “sport fishing” might have upon the greater world.

For in the modern era, when boys and girls go fishing they are not Huck Finn on a raft dipping a knotty string and a rusty hook into the water in hopes of a random bite. Today, even the smallest child can fish with technology the likes of which Huck Finn could only dream: fluorocarbon fishing lines made of polymers that render the line invisible to even the keenest of fish eyes, graphite rods capable of whipping a lure farther than rods of previous generations, sonar that plumbs every cranny of the seafloor for fishy habitat.

That I did real damage with all this newly emergent angling technology is undeniable. I can remember an evening in Martha’s Vineyard when my father dropped me off at a beach where the weakfish were so thick I could hear them rumbling, making croaking noises with their swim bladders. By the end of the night I had beached six fish—lilac and yellow on capture, dull and gray upon death. We ate, maybe, one. The rest I sold to a fishmonger for five bucks. This spectacular run of weakfish occurred for three years. Then it stopped. The same fishmonger who’d paid me a pittance for my catch later told me that weakfish had been spotted off western Africa and that clearly they had migrated to the other side of the Atlantic. No such thing had occurred. Weakfish don’t cross oceans—my fellow fishermen and I had brought about a local extirpation.

This would also happen to the mackerel in Long Island Sound. Catching one at a time rarely happens in those waters now, let alone five. And when the forsythia bloom in April, very few flounder come out of the mud. They’re so scarce in Long Island waters that scientists at Stony Brook University have found evidence of inbreeding—flounders are clinging to existence by breeding with their cousins. And lest the sport fishermen blame fish declines on rampages of the commercial sector, they need only look at the numbers. Today, the sport take of striped bass, arguably the most popular recreational fishing quarry in the United States, is more than double the commercial take, a situation that seriously imperils the fish’s future survival.

This weighs heavily on me as Father’s Day comes around and I debate whether or not to teach my own son how to fish. What I learned about nature from killing fish was profound and immeasurable. But there is not enough slack left in the world for such behavior. No room for figuring things out at the expense of other lives. And so anyone contemplating bringing another angler into the world must, by definition, consider the state of the world beyond the tip of the child’s pole.

The child you teach to fish must come to the pastime knowing the consequences of killing. The unknowing child may want to kill, for example, a really big fish, a so-called “trophy.” But trophy fish are the most reproductively important fish and, in spite of every instinct screaming to the contrary, more often than not, the big ones need to get away. Indeed, some progressive states have responded to this very sound scientific principle and established “slot limits” for fish that are big enough to have bred once, but not so big that they are critical to the endurance of the species.

Once again, letting a big fish go is a practice that must be taught and not simply learned. And it goes strongly against instinct. Yet, even if adopted, catch and release itself can cause problems. Holding a fish up for a trophy photo before it is released could have consequences we’re unaware of, but we do know something as simple as touching a fish’s skin while letting it go abrades its disease-resisting mucous making it prone to infection. These and other factors contribute to the truly shocking fact that, depending on the species and fishing gear employed, as many as one-third of all fish caught and released on traditional fishing tackle may die and not live to “fight another day” as many fishermen implausibly claimed in my youth. Yes, there are new technologies that mitigate death. There are now barbless hooks as well as “circle hooks” that lodge in a fish’s jaw rather than its gut. Both greatly improve a fish’s chances of survival. And there are “descending devices” that help return deep water fish to the correct depth thus reversing potentially fatal barotrauma that distends a fish’s organs when it is hauled up from great depth.

But even with proper release techniques, slot limits, circle hooks, and descending devices, we will still need to change our behavior by limiting what the commercial fishing sector calls “fishing effort.” In fishing, like in life, there are good days and there are bad days. And because of the increasing number of bad days in the present era, fishermen tend to keep on fishing if they happen upon a run of good luck. Even those who practice catch-and-release angling are guilty of this habit. “If I’m not killing anything,” they reason, “why should I stop?” But as the marine conservationist Carl Safina wrote me recently, “Fish are not made to have hooks in their mouths. So if we hurt these animals, we need to have a better reason than ‘just because.’” To catch something from the wild and use it for our food is, to my mind, justifiable. To torture it for amusement is not.

So perhaps it’s time to rethink fishing. No one says that a fishing trip need only be about fishing; there are other things to learn while bobbing in a boat with your kids. We can teach our children to learn the lexicon of seabirds that still plunge into the ocean’s depths, or wonder at the whales and dolphins and seals that are much more common off American shores now than when I was a child—thanks to laws that prevent their destruction. Quiet observation is a good skill to learn. And, if all else fails to amuse them, a fishing trip could wrap up after the evening’s meal has been procured. In the end, it might be better to kill and go home rather than endlessly catch and release.

[rousingloki]

The Flame in the Flood-Muddy Waters

Another Survival game with Hunger, Thirst, Tiredness, Stamina, and Crafting. Truly a memorable and unique experience.

The prospect of a survival game is endearing. I thoroughly enjoy the idea of having to maintain human needs while attempting to accomplish an over arching goal. Unfortunately, most of these games have either been done to death, or they don’t change up the formula whatsoever to keep the idea fresh, or just stick to such a rigorously established formula that even if you haven’t played the game, you’ve already played it. This game follows all of these problems, and then some.

The most interesting thing this game has going for it, is the premise. The world, through unexplained means, has plunged into an indefinite flood, destroying entire cities, drowning counties, and leaving only elevated bits of land as islands. The player Scout’s end goal is to discover the radio source a dog (Aesop or Daisy, depending on your choice) has brought to you via a backpack. That’s about it in terms of story.

There really isn’t room to grow on the story, because the game spends its entire time pestering you with constantly draining meters. The gameplay consists of moving between islands gathering resources to keep your hunger, thirst, temperature and tiredness in check... and it’s one of the worst things about this game.

This game basically makes you into a “Meter Maid” constantly annoying you how your player is hungry, so you eat, and now you need to drink water, but now that you’re full and quenched, you need to sleep. Now that you’ve slept, you’re parched and hungry once more. It’s a vicious and annoying cycle that NEVER STOPS. From the beginning of the game to the end, it’s nothing but making sure you have all those meters up, and only that.

You also have a temperature gauge that, if too low, can make you sick if you catch a cold, which could lead to pneumonia and eventual death if you don’t have adequate enough clothing. The only other way to stave this off is to get by a fire, or find a cabin to sleep in for the night, but that’s only a temporary solution to a problem that isn’t as annoying as the others, as you’re able to insulate your clothing and stave off the problem entirely, but it’s a rather difficult feat to pull off.

Other issues included is disease. Like said before, you can get a cold which could lead to pneumonia and eventual death. Other issues include things like “scoots,” or poison ivy, to parasitic infections and snake bites. These do nothing more than make sure you have to use up more inventory holding healing items, and another thing to make your meters go down faster, which too leads to death.

That’s another issue with this game: Inventory. You have extremely limited inventory, and when I say extreme, I mean extreme. You only have so much room to hold food, water, traps, weapons, medicine, parts, etc. The dog can hold a sparse amount of items, and you can also store items in your raft. But I swear no matter how hard I try, inventory management is always terrible. It doesn’t help that menu navigation is annoying, but it’s just the constant amount of things you NEED that will take up your space in no time. Stacks can’t be built very high, and some items, like jars and water, don’t stack at all. So storing anything long term is a very unrewarding feeling.

Let’s talk about the raft for a little bit. The raft is your mode of transportation in this game. Since the flood has taken away roads, or really any way for an automobile to get around, the only way around is by boat. Scout must use this raft to get between islands, keeping it maintained, and even upgrading it as she travels along the river. These upgrades are one of the better parts of the game. They’re honestly one of the better driving forces, as they really do help in the long run. Things like durability, control, inventory slots, they’re all very useful. 

Unfortunately, the actual steering and moving of the raft is not fun.

It’s an absolute dump truck to control. when on the current, moving left or right feels extremely unresponsive, and hitting anything feels extremely aggravating, especially when it feels like control was wrestled from you, instead of being an honest mistake. Shockingly, control is better when you’re on rapids, and you only have to worry about moving left or right, as slowing down or quick moving is out of the question. There is a “dodge” mechanic but it’s got several problems as well. First, it drains an abysmal stamina meter. One that’s got about 3 uses before needing refilling, and most of the time the effect is so negligible, that it hardly ever feels worth it. Even with the rudder upgrade, I still felt like I had just as much control without it. Simply put, the raft sucks.

Being in the water means you have to think about what type of island you’re going to land at. There are several different islands, all with different resources, with advantages and disadvantages. The camping islands always have fire, and copious amounts of flint. Liquor stores have alcohol, and clinics have medicine. There are plenty more, and once you’ve played through you’ll definitely learn which islands have which, and which ones might have resources that you’re hemorrhaging for.

Then there are the enemies. While there isn’t a huge variety of enemies, all of them are brazen idiots. The most threatening off the bat are wolves and bears. Bears are monstrous enemies that require far too much effort to kill, with the only reasons to kill being their hides used to insulate your mittens. Wolves aren’t as threatening, as even in packs you can just wave your staff and keep them away long enough to get away. Then there are the boars. Boars are shockingly the most annoying, and brutal enemy in this game. They charge at high speeds, cause a staggering amount of damage, and never leave you alone. There’s also snakes but you can just walk around those. They are difficult to see, but they don’t pester you like the other enemies.

The only point in killing enemies is for their hides. Because temperature needs to be kept in check, you have to keep upgrading your clothes as you move down the river. You can start with things like rabbit hide and cat-tails, but soon you need to get warmer clothes or else you die. This is quite literally the only reason you NEED to face these enemies. If not for that, it’s rather easy to get around them as you could theoretically just leave the island and move on to the next one, unless you’re in absolute desperate need of resources. 

Rabbits are honestly the only thing worth killing, as they’re stupid, will walk into a snare trap with no bait, and supply a copious amount of food that is easily turned into jerky. They’re also on a huge amount of islands so you never really need to worry about getting huge amounts of it.

I’ve talked about this game very negatively so far, because I do want to address what is bad, but to be completely honest, none of it is inherently bad. Everything from survival, crafting, and exploration are all done rather competently. My only complaint to add to that would be the lack of a rotating camera. Everything The Flame in the Flood does is done decent enough to function, but that’s about it. But it does have its moments.

The biggest moment for me was easily the music. About half-way through the game, I was wandering around a town like island, no threats, just lots of cars and buildings for me to loot. Out of nowhere the music that had been playing as only an instrumental a few regions back, added lyrics. This moment may have been small, but it was a very cathartic one. With no enemies to bother me, and all the gasoline and salt I could carry, I felt extremely optimistic and confident. It was as if I knew I was gonna be OK, and that everything was gonna be smooth sailing from here on out.

Then I left and that feeling immediately sunk to the bottom of the river I was traveling on.

The Music and Art style are both wonderful to say the least though. The Picasso style art is captivating, and the music is an interesting blend of grass roots, folk, and country. While the art is a bit more distressing to look at, the music is uplifting and upbeat. It blends two very different elements to create something more distinct, and in a way beautiful. It’s a shame I’ll have forgotten all about it in a week or so.

That’s where this game’s true fatal flaw is: It’s boring. This game is aggressively boring. While it doesn’t do anything truly bad, it doesn’t do anything truly new. There are so many of these video games that I’ve lost track. It’s so generic that it couldn’t even be a full release, it had to go through steam’s early access. Just like every other survival game released.

It’s so boring I started scrolling back and forth on the menu screen of my Switch when I took it out in public.

I have no problem with monotony in a video game. Games like Stardew Valley or Space Engineers are a couple of the many monotonous games I’ve played, but this game takes it to the extreme. From the beginning of the game to the very end, you are doing the EXACT same thing. Making sure you’re fed, quenched, warm, rested, and disease free. From beginning to end it’s nothing but being a meter watcher until you reach an end that does not feel rewarding for the time spent getting there.

In what seemed like a desperate bid to be completely different, this game ended up being just like every other survival game on the market. I would say that there was a flame in this flood, but someone didn’t even bother to light the fire in the first place

5/10 Mediocre

[writemoment]

The Cold Reality [Epilogue/Bonus]

Writer: Ellie-Mae (Pen Name)

Part: Bonus

Summary: Loki’s P.O.V. on being brainwashed and the fluffy epilogue they deserve.

Pairing: Marvel Loki x Reader

Warnings/Rated: Angst, sadness and fluff.

Word Count: 3,039

( Loki ) P.O.V.

“I’ll be right back.” I tell Y/n, sensing a bad feeling come over me. Panic sets into Y/n’s features as she looks at me wide eyed.

“Are you just going to leave me here?”

The dread and fear laced within her words brings an unrecognizable pain to me, but I can’t let that put her in harms way. I know that I need to keep her safe and that’s my priority. Glancing at her one last time, I take off through the door and follow my instinct to find the trouble.

All around me, the corridors are vacant and I work swiftly through the facility as I look for the others. It starts out as a pinprick at the back of my mind. Slowly, it’s intrusive nails scrape the surface of my brain until I feel my thoughts being rummaged through.

No. Not Now.

Memories surface of laying in bed with Y/n. How her slightly chapped lips would quiver as she revealed her worst fears and secrets to me. So vulnerable. Next, the night I had promised I would never leave her and how I was growing to care for her. All these memories, the ones I held dearest to me, surfaced in a matter of seconds.

Someone else is messing with my thoughts.

“Brother!” I hear faintly in the muffled background but I’m too busy struggling to get a grip and ignore my brother’s voice. “Brother?” He calls once more, making me turn to look at him. At my spin-around, I catch sight of Y/n clutching Thor’s wrist as he holds her back from me. Fear and confusion clinging the face that I’ve come to care for deeply.

“Pet...” With my defenses down, I feel the intrusive hands dig their claws into my system and I know, in this moment, that that one mistake will cost me. Thor tries to catch Y/n as she makes her way to me and deep inside, I try warning her to run away and keep herself from harm. 

Fighting with what I can, I feel my body clench it’s hands and my face twitching from the inner struggle to free myself of this mental leash I have been hooked upon. That’s when I feel her fragile touch on the surface of my smooth armor. 

No!

My body reacts with vicious ferocity as it grips her body and slides her across the floor. The loud screeching mixed with her groan confirms that the smooth ground has burned the surface of her skin. By instinct, I try to move forward and help her but my body does not react. 

“Loki! What is happening brother?!” Thor calls, rushing forward to Y/n’s aid but my body’s quicker. Grabbing the blonde god, I hurl him into the wall, breaking the material in the collision. “I don’t understand why you’d do this! To me, fine- but never to Y/n!”

Never to Y/n. I’d never do this to Y/n!!

She whimpers as she pushes herself from where she had landed and my mouth moves on it’s own accord. “Shut up, you mewling mortal!!” 

Her body flinches slightly at my harsh tone and she looks at me with an open mouth. I feel my lips turn up into a smile when that’s the last thing I’d ever do with her looking at me with such an expression. 

“L-loki, love. Please.” Y/n chokes on her words and all I can do is watch her as I become everything I swore never to be to her. The tears in her eyes as she holds her raw arm, fear flooding her pupils.

“Did you really think I cared for you?” Hearing my own voice say such things makes my stomach fall, feeling the acid rising in my throat. Thor’s attempt at speaking is overpowered by my own mocking voice, laughing. “That’s right, I lied. But am I really the one to blame? This is what you get from trusting me.”

Y/n’s tears are a sight that drives me insane. Not being able to stop those tears and knowing that I’m causing such a painful feeling to overflow inside of her. “I thought I could trust you...Why did you do it? Tell me!” Her yelling is interrupted by broken sobs and I fight back against my own mouth.

My body fights back against me, contracting against my pushing and closing me down into my own dark thoughts as harmful words flow from my lips. I try yelling but it seems as if I am disconnected with my own being, occupying a cell in my mind with bars made up of what I lack.

“Ah, are you too daft to recognize your fatal mistake? Falling for the God of Mischief was the most intelligent process to choose.” No, no. No! Her head falls forward, tears falling to the floor. Whoever is in my mind is obviously using her fears to their advantage, but they’re also using mine against me. Losing Y/n when I haven’t been able to tell her the truth about my affections. The intimate conversations I’ve shared with no other soul but hers - all of it being used as a weapon.

“But- but you promised. And now you’re hurting me... Why can’t you love me back?” 

I’m in love with you, Y/n. Please, this isn’t me. These aren’t my actions, pet. As much as I push those words to rip from my throat, I can’t do anything but feel myself smile at her pain. It feels so out of place, this ruthless smile. “I should’ve known. Please, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that this is all a nightmare and wake me up!”

The sound of her breaking weakens me to the bone and I can’t stand to see her shattered into so many pieces. “Ah, Y/n. It is a nightmare, but it’s the cold reality.”

Her bottom lip trembles and I long to encase them with my own. To pour my heart and every fiber of my being into her, to protect her from the world. But it’s impossible for me to protect her from myself.

“You’re leaving me?” Never have I seen so much hurt on Y/n. The feeling is eating me up inside. Watching her like this, it makes me want to break all those painful memories from her past. It makes me want to break her free from my vicious tongue.

The next words that leave my mouth sound like me, which makes me feel so much worse. “You always said ‘you can never trust anyone to stay’.” And here I am, breaking whatever bond I had so fiercely built with her. All of it breaking without my own actions.

My mischief from the past has always caused some kind of tear but seeing what pain this has caused brings forth an amount of guilt I’ve never acquired in the past. “Yeah? Well, I thought- I thought you’d be the exception.” Although I can’t show it, I feel the burn of tears behind my eyes. Y/n’s put her trust, her faith in me and now she’s spilling her heart to me as I burn it to the ground. “You don’t see me...”

Y/n...I do see you! Oh, pet. She always saw me as I did see her. Even when I revealed myself as being a frost giant, she had the audacity to call me beautiful. To love me when I couldn’t even find acceptance in my own blood.

Every bridge we’ve built turns to ash as my legs move to leave. “Pay attention to me!” Freeze. Stiffly, I return my gaze to her and see the sad anger swirling inside. “I still believe there’s a good person in you, Loki.” She stops my intruder from interrupting and continues, “Don’t. I don’t need to hear your pathetic excuses anymore. Just- Don’t let me go.”

Screaming. In my mind, I hear myself calling to her and telling her that I’m in here. That I’d never do her harm. All those memories of holding her shaking body during the night. The feelings that blossomed inside me as I memorized every beautiful curve, every wonderful flaw in her appearance- all of them being tainted by this moment. “I thought I’ve already told you-”

“Lie to me then.”

I feel my feet move to her and I’m terrified for her life. The life I could easily end and would have no control over. But what happens causes so much more pain than any physical wound could possibly have. “I already have.” As I walk away from her form, sagged on the ground, I hear her weeping echoing through the halls.

My feet keep walking aimlessly and I continue to fight against these bars I’m held behind. Slowly, I feel the claws detach from my body and I come to an abrupt stop. My whole body aches and is weighed with an unnatural exhaustion. Feeling heavily drugged, I stumble through the halls and catch the back of Peter’s head as he carries a body, draped across his shoulders.

As fast as I can carry myself, I peek in to see Y/n convulsing on the metal table and several arms holding her down as they sedate her. I clench my teeth at the sight of her in pain and freely let my anger take over. I must find the being who has ripped my love from me. I will find them. I will kill them.

****

Y/n angrily tells me I no longer have any rights to call her nicknames, nor do I have any more chances to turn in. “Do you regret me?” Even if I can’t repair this broken heart, I want to look after her and I want to be there for her. 

Her face is colored in an array of emotions that I can’t follow. My chest feels as if it has been bashed in by the Hulk a dozen times over, but even that couldn’t hurt this much. The thought of Y/n, my pet, regretting the moments we’ve made and shared- it makes my throat tighten and my breathing shallow.

Ever so quietly, she asks me to leave and I sadly oblige to her wishes. 

Sitting back in my bed, returned in my own quarters, I relive the memories I’ve come to cherish with Y/n. Never did I think a mere mortal would take one glance at my Jotun form and call me beautiful. Never did it faze Y/n. In fact, she lovingly accepted me for who I was despite the facts.

When Thor recounted his affections for Jane, I would not have imagined I would fall under similar circumstances. If Odin could see me now, he would make a fool out of such a love. If given the opportunity, I know that Y/n would be able to change such a twisted mind.

How I long to feel her soft fingers tracing my features, memorizing them like her favorite pictures. Waking up to her peaceful slumber was something I knew I’d never get used to or get tired of. The desire to hold her and call her mine is painful. All I ever wanted was to protect her.

Now all of that is ruined. 

The only being powerful enough to even get close to overcoming my natural defenses is a child of Thanos and I am petrified of his presumed target on Y/n. Keeping her safe is my priority. To keep her alive. Y/n deserves to live the life she chooses. I am not one to get in the way of that. As long as I can keep her safe, I can accept her moving on without me by her side. My love for her will never falter and I will always be there for her, even when no one can see.

****

EPILOGUE

( Reader ) P.O.V.

It has been a year since everything first happened in New York. That first meeting between Loki and me that changed everything I thought I had set in stone. 

For a while, it was hard for me to relax around Loki after our encounter with Ebony Maw. Despite the betrayal being from an unstoppable influence, it was hard to not doubt my trust. Thankfully, Loki was very kind and understanding. He worked with me, loved me and proved his loyalty to our relationship. In the midst of breaking down our walls, we built up our trust we one another.

Shuri was right in warning me about the scar I’ve earned from the energy core. The raised, slightly pink scar is still the cause of insecurities and even lingering nightmares, but my Avengers family is always quick to comfort me.

I find Loki absentmindedly tracing over the scar when we lay to sleep. It’s comforting and has assured me that he doesn’t shy away from the sight. He says it’s proof that I am strong and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

He’s always quick to love the parts I can’t love about myself.

Jogging to my shared room, I push my way through the door to find Loki waiting for me and showing peter some of his magic. “Hey guys.” I greet when they lay eyes upon me. Even being with Loki for this amount of time, I still get flustered at those loving, ice-blue orbs of his. Peter grins widely at me, his eyebrows raising in excitement at my arrival.

Both of them welcome me into their conversation but soon, Peter decides to split off and give us some time alone. Which I’m very thankful for, as always. “Hello, love.” Loki coos softy. Sighing in content, I smile at him as I intertwine my hand in his. 

“I have a surprise for you, Pet.”

Curiously, I watch him as he searches my expression. “For me?” I ask, not sure what to expect. He nods, his lips tilting up at the corners. “What is it?” Both excitement and anxiety plague me as I watch his expression shift to one of wonder. His lips pull back over his teeth as he awkwardly chuckles before speaking.

“A while ago, you told me of your desire to see where I grew up and to meet Frigga. To gaze upon Asgard.” He recounts and I nod, following his words. “Well... Wish granted. You will be accompanying us as we travel back, Thor and I.” 

My heart beats furiously in my chest and I gasp at the idea of it all. Leaning forward, I press my lips against his and wrap my arms around his neck. “Oh my- Thank you so much, Loki! I’m so excited, I can’t even begin to explain.” I tell him when I break away.

I can feel him smile in my hair and I inhale his comforting scent as I rest my head underneath his jaw. “We’ll be leaving by bifrost in the morning. You don’t need to pack much, I’m sure we can find you proper attire with Frigga.” Loki’s fingertips press into the flesh of my hips, holding me close against his body.

“I love you.”

“I love you, Y/n.”

****

Traveling through bifrost was disorienting to say the least. My insides feel as if they’ve been tossed in a bowl and shoved back inside my body. “Whoa- Slow down there, pet.” Loki’s arm anchors itself around my waist as he pulls me to stand upright and still. Thor chuckles lightly at me.

“Shut it or I will vomit on you, Thor.” I threaten but this just makes him laugh louder. Once I pull myself together, I slap his shoulder playfully and we both smile at each other. Thor introduces me to Heimdall as Loki keeps his grip on me. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Departing from the gatekeeper, we walk together down the rainbow bridge and into the kingdom. My mouth is open and my eyes are wide as I embrace the view of Asgard, the lovely planet in which my favorite gods grew. Loki goes into stories as we pass through the village and I smile as him and Thor bicker over the details.

“You made me believe you were a snake and then stabbed me!” Thor cries.

I giggle at that mental image as Loki retorts back. “It was hilarious, brother.” 

Although I don’t get involved in the matter, it does indeed sound hysterical. Reaching the palace, Thor leaves us to announce our arrival to Odin and Frigga as Loki takes me up to change into Asgardian attire.

The material is silky and smooth against my skin and I feel oddly comfortable in such formal clothing. “You look dashing, darling.” Loki compliments, hugging me from behind as my breath is taken away by the view from the balcony. 

Looking out, I watch as the people of Asgard live their lives and it’s much different than the living I used to examine back on Earth. “It’s all so beautiful, Loki. So elegant compared to Midgard.” He nods in agreement, resting his chin on the crown of my head.

“Yes but each have beauty in their own way. Each have ugly as well.” I inhale the cool breeze that sweeps through the balcony and goosebumps wonderfully adorn my skin. I ask Loki if he misses it here, where his childhood is placed. 

“Not as much as before. You see, Asgard is the people. Not the place.” We turn to look at each other, his touch unfaltering. “The same for home. These walls and buildings are just a place, Pet. Frigga and Thor, those are the people.”

Nodding, I bite my lip as I ponder his words. “You are my home, Y/n. As long as I’m with you, I feel comfort and complete.” His words cause me in inhale sharply and we both stare at each other, feeling the heat of our love radiating from one another.

“I feel the same way about you.”

Before anything else can happen, a guard appears. “You have been summoned by the king and queen. They wish to welcome you back.” He says, turning for us to follow. Taking a deep breath, I move to catch up. Just before I can make it too far, Loki pulls me back to the stone balcony overlooking the kingdom.

“Welcome home, my love.”

Masterlist Here

A/N: Here you go, lovelies! xoxo. - Ellie-Mae

Permanent Tags: @britishfangirl @jcalpha1

Loki Tags: @artbysteph87 @velyssaraptor @jclements919 @immoralquandary @kany-eet @anaswolves @mysticalstarfishpolice @m4shtyx @yetitty @accentsintooblivion @lokigreyvatore @elydrendy @laeticafe03

[scrollsofeternity]

I will follow you into the dark || trial 6.9 (nice) || alphonse, r.e. hisato, shouri, ami, chiharu

(The man who once was could remember moments where he hadn't been alone. Light pouring in, the brush of a hand over his… the quiet sound of someone telling him "I love you". A request for hair to be undone, to roll over his shoulders and provide a curtain of sensation for some two-toned man to experience the feeling of hair tickling his face as they tested out a variety of ways to kiss.

...He could remember a hand cupping his cheek, the thumb brushing along freckled paths, pushing tears away as they made their burning path down his chin.

■■■■■■■■ knew what it meant to be loved, then. Seen. Held and beheld for an audience of one, company kept and company kept so tightly, close, burning closer to his chest that it could burn. He swallowed stars, glass, burning coals- things to eat him away, tear it apart and leave nothing behind.

He begged for it to leave nothing behind.

■■■■■■■■ died on that floor. Whoever it was that was tied to a tree, he can never be sure. He was scared, and loved— so very, very loved.

But his fatal flaw was not believing it until death had him gripped by the throat.

...but Sebastian knows none of this. He remains blissfully unaware, his own memories occupying his mind.)

And we return. 

Alphonse sits on the armrest of the throne, oblivious to the world around him. He's told that he's loved, he sees the woman he had cowered behind burst into a rage, he sees…

He sees so little. His focus remains ever locked on Hisato, pacing before the throne. He recites poetry, something that burns his chest. It only seemed to grow stronger the longer he stayed there, burning holes in him as the fire seemed resistant to dimming. 

Alphonse holds his breath. It aches, for a moment, before the feeling quiets just long enough for him to say,

"Hisato."

He gains enough will to get up to his feet, hand going to gently, so gently take Hisato's arm.

"...I think… I would like to die one more time. One more. Would that be selfish…? I would not impede your beheading. ...I understand, I must let you go to have this be undergone. But…"

Has he ever felt so at ease with his existence?

[CW: Suicide attempts, ideation]

(Hospital visits were growing more frequent. ■■■■■■■■ could hear his grandmother berating the physician for keeping him alive this time, when it simply wasn't worth it. If he wanted so badly to die, then why not let him? One less thing for her to deal with!

...And how Sebastian escaped the tower… Had it really been falling? An accident? ...No. Every instance like this in his life, it led to… this.

A lifetime- no, two- two lifetimes of pain, of suffering, of crying til there was nothing left, of picking things away until there was only blood, of wasting away in the dark, yearning for the light—

He knew there had to be something better. So he waited. The monster waited. And waited. And now, he has the chance to do this over one… one more time.)

"I know how it sounds. But… I think I would like us to meet… again, properly, with no weight on our shoulders. No pain. Just… meeting, truly, and seeing where it takes us. Would that be a bad thing…? I think it could be… perfect."

He brushes the hair away from his eye, aiming to see Hisato properly. He had been too nervous to do it before, even when they were alone, but, now…

[CW: Eye is Burned]

"Where you go, I am going. I am determined in this. I feel like I have been waiting for you my entire life, so… Don't suffer alone. Let me follow you in this. In going toward a new beginning."

He reaches up to punctuate this, brushing Hisato's bangs aside. He quietly, softly adds,

"The length is perfectly suited for you. ...Absolutely beautiful."

But the question is, now, he supposes, what to do about being addressed. They had tried to instill some manners into this horrible creature, but he was still...

(I reached my hand into the night sky to pluck a star from your view, to hold it in my hands as something so fragile, so perfectly raw that it could consume me. 

I begged for it to consume me. 

I held the star to my chest and felt it burn my flesh away and sear itself into my body and I felt nothing of the act. Desperation led me here to this fool's game. I wanted. I needed. I craved. Now who would take me out of it?)

The question came in who really wore the shining armor, here. A cardboard knight, or the person with her hair coiled into such a fascinating bun, who had pointed at him and said so many things that made his brain hurt that it was obscene.

"...Chiharu…?"

He breaks back into a smile, one the living man should have been able to break into.

"Chiharu!! I… You are right, you are, I have no idea what any of that means… But…"

"But thank you… for fighting for me!! Sir Ami as well, and… and even though you were kind of mean… Masuda, thank you, thank you for the feeling I get in my chest from all of you… "

"The man I was… must have… really been loved, huh…?"

He takes a steadying breath.

"...But until I can leave here… until I can fulfill the desires you all have for me, I must stay here regardless. ...And I will find some happiness of my own, until you get your… medical degrees, right?"

Why is he…

He doesn't know why he can't…

stop…

Crying. When had he ever cried? What had been the point? The pendulum was swung, though, and now he couldn't stop, looking down at the ground as he struggles to find his internal footing.

"...I'm… I'm desperately excited for what may come. Whether it's here, or… or some far off land, I'm excited. I don't think I… I have ever… felt like this before."

(The man who once was might remember a similar excitement. Giddy with prospects. Giddy, standing in line, waiting for his plane to arrive to take him to his new life. Giddy. 21, and desperately excited. 

His hair was so long he had to tie it back with a bun, and even then, most of it wouldn't fit. He could see people staring at this bizarre creature, rocking on his heels, gripping his one and only bag that held everything he needed to go to the future. 

Of course, Sebastian doesn't recall this..

But he was giddy. Delighted. Over the moon. Even arriving in Japan, sleep deprived, he was excited. There were things to see, school officials to meet, a dorm to move into— his life was unfolding just how he wanted it to.

...But he had never known the feeling the man who once was had experienced, surrounded by people who loved him- who desperately loved him- telling him exactly what he had… needed his entire life.

Sebastian might never experience that properly. 

But Alphonse could, again.)

[angeltriestoblog]

I watched a couple of movies! (Part 2)

Back again with the second bunch of my latest quarantine companions! My last post wasn't that long ago, but I’ve already gone through an additional 21 and thanks to the extension of the lockdown and the abrupt cancellation of the rest of my sophomore year in college, I predict that this number will only increase exponentially. I obviously have to start looking for a sustainable way of reviewing the media I consume (probably will try dumping mini-reviews on Letterboxd instead), but until then, here is today’s little catalog: divided into four neat categories so there’s a little bit of everything for everyone.

Dead Poets Society (1989, dir. Peter Weir) ★★★★½

John Keating is the teacher we secretly deserved yet never had, which is probably what's behind the fervent loyalty audiences have had for this movie since its release around three decades ago. His methods of teaching are admittedly unorthodox, but they effectively instill in fictional students and real-life audiences the core message: to seize the day and be extraordinary. I definitely would have appreciated more of Williams, though: I noticed later on that he was used mostly as a plot device, as the focus started to shift to the impact his words had on the group of young boys under his tutelage. But, thankfully they are endearing and lovable in their own little ways (special mention goes to ambitious Neil, played by Robert Sean Leonard; and Ethan Hawke as timid Todd), which is why the last half-hour remains one of the heaviest in recent memory.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993, dir. Chris Columbus) ★★★★

When Daniel Hillard’s (Robin Williams) wife splits up with him and takes their kids, he disguises himself as an English nanny called Mrs. Doubtfire and applies as their housekeeper to be with them. Not exactly the most realistic and practical approach to an issue as serious as divorce, but it succeeds by banking on heartfelt humor to strike a chord in products of broken families. When you take his several antics, punchlines, and vocal impersonations aside, he is simply a father willing to do anything for his children. Williams was destined to be the lead for this: his comedic timing, sheer versatility, and natural ability to bring joy remain unparalleled. Such a shame I didn't get to grow up with this guy, but maybe this saved me a lot of heartbreak.

Catch Me If You Can (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg) ★★★★★

A con man successfully cashes in millions of dollars worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and lawyer, whilst evading the FBI agent who’s hot on his heels. And this is all before he turns 19 years old--what a total underachiever. The best part? It’s a true story. I find it hard to believe that this clever cat-and-mouse story lasted more than two hours: it's easy to lose track of time thanks to its dynamic and snappy screenplay, coupled with the chemistry of its brilliant lead actors (no less than Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks). But beneath the complex and technical aspects of his scams that have high entertainment and educational value lie touching moments that may be admittedly easy to miss. At the end of the day, these escapades were nothing but some twisted coping mechanism of Frank Abagnale, Jr.’s to deal with the divorce of his parents. *blows nose into handkerchief* Wow, I seriously didn't think something could be so fast and fun, yet so depressing either!

Good Will Hunting (1997, dir. Gus Van Sant) ★★★★★

Academy Award-winning writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck may look like they share a solitary brain cell in total (a prime example would be this footage of their acceptance speech), but it was the power that radiated from that which brought us this instant favorite of mine. This engrossing story revolves around a janitor at MIT, with a genius-level IQ but a troubled and traumatic past. A scuffle with a police officer leads him to Sean, his therapist (and platonic soulmate) who breaks down his dangerous defense mechanisms and self-destructive patterns, helps him tackle his inner demons, and ultimately transforms his life. There is a lot to adore about this film that’s equal parts wit and heart, but my favorite has to be the razor-sharp and realistic dialogue between Damon and Williams. Smoothly transitioning from topic to topic—genuine friendship, abusive relationships, and everything in between—it gives us the opportunity to monitor Will’s growth while carefully examining these aspects of our own lives. With every word said, the audience is reminded once again of any person's innate capacity to change for the better as long as someone else believes in them.

Lost in Translation (2003, dir. Sofia Coppola) ★★★

Film Twitter and the Letterboxd community both made this out to be an outstanding piece of modern cinema, so I went in with very high expectations only to be sorely disappointed and unable to understand the hype behind it. This revolves around two lonely people who find solace in each other and the unfamiliar and unpredictable territory they're in, a storyline brimming with potential that just fell flat to me. I normally appreciate the beauty in silent and ambient scenes, but the ones that made up a huge bulk of this feature didn’t have substance—it was similar to watching mashed-up clips from some random travel vlog. I did find the choice of location fitting though, I am now a hundred percent convinced I should travel to Japan once this pandemic is over. And Scarlett Johansson is incredibly talented for her age: her ability to channel and characterize emotions that a 17-year-old may not even be able to comprehend is above par, which is the main reason why this gets a passing rating from me.

Forrest Gump (1994, dir. Robert Zemeckis) ★★★★★

What I would give to run into a chocolate-eating, Nike Cortez-wearing Forrest Gump at a bus stop, and hear him tell me these fantastic stories himself! This heartwarming tale shows the manner in which he weaved himself into significant historical narratives (literally and figuratively, thanks to the power of deepfake) and injects timeless lessons along the way. Tom Hanks is undoubtedly brilliant as the titular role, and as we see the world according to this feeble-minded and well-meaning man, we come to admire his values, appreciate his efforts, and forgive his occasional shortcomings. In this fast-paced and overly complicated world that we struggle to navigate, this can serve as a necessary breather, a reminder of the simple joys that the world has to offer.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012, dir. Lee Toland Krieger) ★★★★

I think this is the first time I’ve witnessed a breakup end rather amicably on the big screen: there's no screamfest that concludes with a cold slap to the face and a dramatic walkout, or a courtroom confrontation that unearths past transgressions, et cetera. Instead, the leads are forced to confront the fact that the friendship they have forged years before that eventually blossomed into something more will never be the same again. Even if they want to so, so bad. I guess that’s why this is so heartbreaking, and thus the perfect companion for any person in the process of finding themselves after the demise of a long-term relationship. Celeste (Rashida Jones) meanders through the process with an extreme lack of finesse—which is the most realistic way to do so—that heavily accentuates her several fatal flaws. But, she manages to finish strong, emerging as a self-reflective and action-driven version of who she was in the beginning. I definitely wanted additional exposure for Jesse (Andy Samberg), though, who was not only surprisingly tender and sensitive in contrast to the Jake Peralta we know and love (and want to pick on), but also an unexpected perfect onscreen match for Jones.

A Star is Born (2018, dir. Bradley Cooper) ★★★★

The third remake of the 1937 movie starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, this edition of A Star is Born strays far from the paths traversed by its predecessors (and this I am aware of, from that film analysis video binge I did recently). It’s the first to give Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), the has-been with a raging alcohol and drug problem, extensive back story that draws audiences closer to him. But, this character arc comes at the expense of Ally's, the talented singer that he propels to fame, played by Lady Gaga. It was a shame she wasn’t fleshed out as much as she should have been, given that Gaga was a natural, her vulnerability a far cry from her outrageous onstage persona. But, then again, expectations must be kept realistic: it would’ve been impossible to cram that into the specified duration. Nevertheless, I thoroughly appreciated it: though rehashed several times, a romance done this way keeps its key components while catering to the preferences of this generation. The soundtrack is outstanding, and the climax—though somewhat expected—finds new ways to reduce us to a puddle of tears, particularly as the last song number start to roll.

Fall in Love At First Kiss (2019, dir. Frankie Chen) ★★½

Our Times has been a favorite of mine for years, so I couldn't believe that I missed this work from the same director which starred the same male lead during its initial release. Turns out it didn’t make much of a difference whether I watched it or not. The storyline was silly, but forgivably so: in a school where students are segregated based on intelligence, a stupid girl is smitten by the smartest boy in school and gets rejected as soon as she confesses. Consequently, hell breaks loose after they are forced to live together for reasons you have to see to believe. I remember enjoying the first half, squirming in my seat because of Jiang Zhishu (Darren Wang) every chance I'd get. I can’t pinpoint where exactly it started going wrong, but I remember realizing that it is possible for something to drag along, yet also move so fast: to bore me with excessive detail in a single scene, then cut to the next so fast it loses a sense of continuity. In addition to that, the female lead (Jelly Lin) was so unbearable in terms of her acting style and character development (or lack thereof). She seemed to think that constantly complaining in her shrill voice and thrashing her limbs was a fitting substitute for dialogue, thus making it difficult to want her to get her happily ever after. Also, I’ve had pretty intense crushes in the past few years but what she has for Zhishu is bordering more on an unhealthy obsession—I have trouble believing he reacted so calmly to the shrine that she built for him (which included life-size pillows with his face on it).

The Object of My Affection (1998, dir. Nicolas Hytner) ★★½

I was very confused as to why I had never heard of a chick flick that starred two of my favorite actors from the 90s, but now I understand why it didn't take off. (Phoebe would probably share my sentiments. What's her best friend doing with her husband anyway? And why is he attracted to men?) Nina (Jennifer Aniston) is hopelessly in love with her gay best friend George (Paul Rudd), so much so that she decides she wants to raise her unborn child with him instead of with her overbearing and borderline manipulative boyfriend (John Pankow). Though it wasn't a complete disaster given that she didn't successfully convert him, Nina was far too demanding, constantly overstepping her boundaries, and feeding her delusions. Maybe it could afford a modern retelling since I know our generation could tackle the concepts of platonic soulmates and LGBTQ+ relationships in a way that is simultaneously vibrant and sensitive.

How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003, dir. Donald Petrie) ★★★★★

Once I had tried my luck in a number of different genres, I decided to reward myself with a return to the cheesy, corny, and conventional chick flicks I am familiar with—and I’m glad that I picked this one! Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) is a magazine columnist with her biggest scoop yet: an article on how to lose a guy in 10 days. To test this idea out, she tries it out on Ben Barry (Matthew McConaughey), who’s on a mission to make a girl fall for him within that duration as well. Their conflicting agendas lead to disastrously hilarious results as they realize that they’re both *gasp* catching feelings for each other! I enjoyed this very much despite the predictability, although I’m honestly unable to judge it based on any criteria other than what I felt which was pure and utter, slamming-the-table, throwing-my-stuffed-toy-across-the-room “kilig”.

Just My Luck (2006, dir. Donald Petrie) ★½

I didn’t expect this to be on the forgettable side of the romcom spectrum, when it had Chris Pine as the leading man and Brit-pop band McFly lending their music to most of the scenes (the sole redeeming factor I found). But, I guess it’s Lindsay Lohan’s character and her surprising lack of chemistry with the equally attractive and talented person opposite her that killed it for me. Here, she plays Ashley, the luckiest girl in the world who gets everything her way and is thus as snobbish and stuck-up as you’d expect her to be. A chance encounter brings her to Jake, who is the human equivalent of a black cat standing in front of a broken mirror, and swaps their fate. She is then left to deal with poorly contrived misfortunes with effects that are bordering on slapstick comedy: she gets doused in mud, mildly electrocuted, and soaked in bubbles shortly after blowing up a washing machine and I get that they’re probably supposed to be funny, but all I’m seeing is a live-action version of the Looney Tunes show.

Eighth Grade (2018, dir. Bo Burnham) ★★★★★

Entering our awkward preteen years has always come with a certain and specific kind of mortification, but I reckon it’s become increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet. It’s become easier to find fault in oneself for the pettiest of reasons: why isn’t my crush accepting my friend request? Why do I look like a monster in my #wokeuplikethis selfies? Why is no one viewing my YouTube videos even if I work hard on them? Eighth Grade encapsulates this difficult period in the lives of Gen Z kids with the use of experiences and references which are so specific to this generation: I may have gotten whiplash more times than I would care to admit. Elsie Fisher shines in her painfully relatable performance as Kayla: you can sense her desperation for social acceptance. She just wants to be worth noticing and remembering, is that so bad! Although his role is often overshadowed, I also felt for her dad (Josh Hamilton), who tries to hide the struggle of looking out for a daughter who's growing in ways he simply can't understand.

Boyhood (2014, dir. Richard Linklater) ★★★

This ambitious effort by the director of my favorite film trilogy observes the growth and development of a typical American boy named Mason. No fancy plot devices or major conflicts are in sight, but by using the keeping the cast members fixed during the 12 years it took to put this project together instead of swapping them out for older counterparts, audiences are expected to form an emotional connection with them because they were given an intimate and prolonged look into their lives. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for me. Yes, I did watch him grow up before my eyes, but I barely know who he is. These mundane snippets of his life haphazardly stitched together, without any indication of how much time has elapsed since the previous scene, made it hard to keep up with the pace and look at the viewing experience as anything but a chore. I honestly am puzzled as to why I endured 165 minutes (I’m kidding, it was for Ethan Hawke) worth of footage, and sadly it wasn’t even worth it.

Brooklyn (2015, dir. John Crowley) ★★★★

This drama about the migration of an Irish girl to New York to seek better opportunities delves into the concept of what home truly is, as Eilis is left to choose between two men from two different countries. Divided into three segments revolving around pivotal events in the protagonist’s life, it sensitively tackles the experiences and issues familiar to any immigrant, remains true to the period it is set in, and engaging to audience members of all ages. Most in the historical genre are incapable of doing all three, so that's definitely no mean feat! And I’m not biased because Saoirse Ronan plays the starring role, although her compelling performance renders it impossible for anyone who claims to have a beating heart to finish this without puffy eyes and a heavy chest.

Happy Old Year (2019, dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit) ★★★★

I thought Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying couldn’t top her role in Bad Genius, but she just had to come along and star in this personal take on new beginnings. Here, she plays Jean, a girl in the process of decluttering her house so she can transform it into an office space. While sifting through her possessions, she finds certain things belonging to people from her past, that remind her of broken relationships and question her philosophies on forgiveness and letting go. Her performance may be understated compared to the cunning and reckless Lynn she has become popular for, but I see this mastery of restraint as indication of her growth as an actress. The film is relatively simple in its execution, staying true to its central theme of minimalism. By stripping the structure down to the bare essentials of actor and dialogue, the audience can focus on the poignancy ingrained in the most mundane part of our everyday routines.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016, dir. Kelly Fremon Craig) ★★★★

It's actually true that a coming-of-age movie has been written based on every definitive moment a teenage girl experiences, they weren’t lying. The Edge of Seventeen could serve as part of Eighth Grade's cinematic universe, but instead we’re dealing with another reflection of who we were (or maybe still are). Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) is a teen constantly teetering between arrogant self-assurance and sheer hopelessness. When she loses her best friend to her worst nemesis, she suddenly has to learn to navigate the ups and downs of adolescence and deal with her mental illness on her own. Besides focusing on the several firsts that we often encounter during this stage in our lives, the film accurately portrays our angsty and self-deprecating nature without resorting to mockery, therefore calling us out on this reflex we have of beating ourselves up and giving those around us permission to do so during such a critical part of our lives. I swore I was actually going to try not to cry here, but I guess Nadine's tearful monologue left me with no choice. (I'll leave it below so you can suffer with me.)

You know, ever since we were little, I would get this feeling like, like I’m floating outside of my body, looking down at myself… and I hate what I see: how I’m acting, the way I sound, and I don’t know how to change it. And I’m so scared that the feeling is never gonna go away.

The Kingmaker (2019, dir. Lauren Greenfield) ★★★★

This documentary is a fitting introduction for anyone who isn't familiar with the ill-gotten wealth and abuses the Marcoses have lying underneath their glossy veneer of opulence as well as the consequences of their actions that we suffer from to this day. Greenfield’s juxtaposition of this family’s fabricated stories and the testimonies of victims and first-hand witnesses was a smart move, as we observe the lengths they often go to, to revise the course of history. By spotting the parallels in their narrative and that of Rodrigo Duterte, the next strongman the voting population would unfortunately elect as their leader, we are also given a glimpse into the selective amnesia of the Filipino people that keeps these people in power. The danger lies in the fact that being an outsider herself, Greenfield leaves plenty of room for interpretation: there is no clear-cut statement of what was right and wrong among the several interweaving statements we heard. I was able to determine which was which is due to the fact that I already had prior knowledge, but where does that leave those who don't?

By the way, if you’re wondering why this has been grouped under this category, it’s because I remembered from Grade 6 science class that anger is one way to trigger adrenaline in the body.

Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan) ★★★★★

Perfect always felt like a lazy way to describe what is supposed to be of superior quality. If you want to sing praises about anything that good, you're gonna have to do a better job than that to convince anyone that it's worth their time: was it inventive and bold or cerebral or emotional? Well, I'm afraid I have to bend this rule for Inception for the sake of brevity, because if I leave myself to ramble on about everything this did right, I would surely run out of adjectives. This sci-fi-heist-psychological thriller is in a league of its own, with its intricate plot and layered method of storytelling further amplified by stellar cast performances, masterful editing and special effects, and a thundering musical score that keeps audiences on edge for the entirety of its run. These elements come together to create a production that resonates and lingers with viewers long after the credits have rolled, partly thanks to that highly disputed final scene. (If my opinion is worth anything here, I believed that it stopped. Iykyk.)

The Lobster (2015, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) ★★★★½

In this dystopian society, single people are required to check into a hotel in the hopes of finding a suitable partner within 45 days. If they fail to do so, they are sentenced to live the rest of their lives as an animal of their choice. It’s an absurd plot, far removed from reality, executed in a bleak and dry fashion. Yet, it manages to mirror and even satirize the world of modern relationships rather profoundly, particularly the societal pressure to couple up and find our ideal match instantly, or face harsh judgment. I doubt I've watched anything this dark in my life, but I found the unpredictable twists and turns, the deadpan humor, the sheer strangeness of it all very amusing and recommend it to anybody who wants to learn a thing or two about how blind love can be.

Ocean’s Eleven (2001, dir. Steven Soderbergh) ★★★★

I admit I was as pissed as Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) following his discovery that the reason why Danny Ocean (George Clooney) was keen on carrying out an elaborate heist of the three biggest casinos in Las Vegas was to win his wife (Julia Roberts) back. But, along the way, I was reeled in by the airtight pacing of the multiple scams that were a part of the scheme and the natural banter that takes place among the members of the ensemble. Also, it’s quite impossible to be annoyed at something that starred so many big names during the peak of their careers. (I have a soft spot for Matt Damon, thanks a lot Good Will Hunting.) Although I already knew what was going to happen, it was a joyride to see everything unfold. Based on the ending (and the copies of Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen that my dad owned as a kid), I can tell that it’s far from over and I’m surely looking forward to what happens next.

So, that’s it for today’s round-up! Hope something caught your interest: I’d be happy to send 123m*vies links for any of those that aren’t available on Netflix. Feel free to hit me up too: I'm honestly up for thought-provoking discussions and straight-up keyboard smashing. Wishing you love and light always, and don’t forget to wash your hands, check your privilege and pray for our frontliners!

[hopelesschromantic]

apollo, hera, hephaestus, narcissus, icarus

apollo: what are your favorite pieces of poetry? Idk I have a terrible memory for poetry so have this John Betjeman poem, Diary of a Church Mouse

Here among long-discarded cassocks,Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,Here where the Vicar never looksI nibble through old service books.Lean and alone I spend my daysBehind this Church of England baize.I share my dark forgotten roomWith two oil-lamps and half a broom.The cleaner never bothers me,So here I eat my frugal tea.My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;My jam is polish for the floor.Christmas and Easter may be feasts For congregations and for priests,And so may Whitsun. All the same,They do not fill my meagre frame.For me the only feast at allIs Autumn's Harvest Festival,When I can satisfy my wantWith ears of corn around the font.I climb the eagle's brazen headTo burrow through a loaf of bread.I scramble up the pulpit stairAnd gnaw the marrows hanging there.It is enjoyable to tasteThese items ere they go to waste,But how annoying when one findsThat other mice with pagan mindsCome into church my food to shareWho have no proper business there.Two field mice who have no desireTo be baptized, invade the choir.A large and most unfriendly ratComes in to see what we are at.He says he thinks there is no GodAnd yet he comes...it's rather odd.This year he stole a sheaf of wheat(It screened our special preacher's seat),And prosperous mice from fields awayCome in to hear the organ play,And under cover of its notesAte through the altar's sheaf of oats.A Low Church mouse, who thinks that IAm too papistical, and High,Yet somehow doesn't think it wrongTo munch through Harvest Evensong,While I, who starve the whole year through,Must share my food with rodents whoExcept at this time of the yearNot once inside the church appear.Within the human world I knowSuch goings-on could not be so,For human beings only doWhat their religion tells them to.They read the Bible every dayAnd always, night and morning, pray,And just like me, the good church mouse,Worship each week in God's own house,But all the same it's strange to meHow very full the church can beWith people I don't see at allExcept at Harvest Festival. 

hera: who makes up your tumblr family? @softkitten, @ironbearicade @tankgirlongirl @wittingaccomplice @leninscoolbeard @eldritchpopkitsch @paronomaniac @sonoroustempest @theviolentflame and @judasbooth though he’s shy of tumblr.hephaestus: what do you enjoy making? Lists, plans, maps, stories, gamesnarcissus: what's your best trait? That I’m an optimistic humanisticarus: what's your fatal flaw? Indecision to beat the band.

[one-more-miracle-gatsby]

I just finished Impyrium by Henry H Neff and I’m gonna talk about it because I have a lot of feelings so spoiler warning

-I completely forgot the demon’s conditions for the Red Winter Treaty so I saw the Prusian Sea on the map and I was like ���huh I wonder what the crafty bastard did to get an ocean named after him” and then I got to the line about underwater demon kingdoms and I was like THAT’S RIGHT THEY BANISHED HIM TO THE SEA and of course he still managed to go make himself a successful kingdom like ffs Prusias just enjoy retirement.

-Sigga Fenn is my new favorite character. What a bro. I mean yeah she played Hob like a panther stalking a rabbit and absolutely would have killed him in an instant and we don’t still know what her exact orders are but there are times when she does seem to be as sincere and friendly as she can professionally be and like honestly it’s nice to have such a chill agent. Disguising herself as the old lady was hilarious like that was so unnecessary Sigga you didn’t have to steal her dessert

-I love the dynamics between the triplets. Isabel is great.

-homunculus breeding is fascinating oh my god

-”Hazel saw that Harkün had also drawn a dagger with a wavy black blade” TFW you’re such a die-hard Cooper fan you can recognize his weapon 3000 years later

-speaking of the devil, I hope that Mystic with mismatched eyes was a descendant of who I think she was because please imagine Hazel Cooper’s reaction to finding her greatx3k granddaughter gambling with a domovoi

-Like. I know Prime is not going to turn out to be Cooper but there’s a tiny part of my sappy fangirl heart going, “if anyone were to volunteer themselves to be turned into a statue for all eternity to protect Rowan it would probably be him”

-Hob’s sass is beautiful can he give me lessons

-THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SHROPES COOKING AT ROWAN

-I love the quotes at the start of the chapters, not only did they bring more meaning to the chapters but they also provided some context and backstory, like how old David lived to be.

-Honestly Hazel’s mentality was so unapologetically realistic like she was so innocent and oblivious but then she started learning things and I love her revelations that she can take control of her own life. But like she was still allowed to be delicate and cry and sleep with a stuffed giraffe and it wasn’t depicted as weakness.

-I will be forever be impressed at the all the political webs Henry weaves

-Montague’s character development

-I wonder what Ember really did with Mina like did he really eat her or is she chillin in his mouth under the sea

-The two perspectives were so great and it was awesome because you can’t trust the Fellowship and you can’t trust the royals, you can only trust that the main characters themselves will see the faults of their respective sides and make the right decisions. I love how they opened each other’s eyes to new things.

-It’s so cool because The Tapestry was so heavily based in Irish mythology and now Impyrium is based in Tapestry mythology like the original series became the mythology of the new series, which means that our world is part of that mythology. I remember Henry saying something about how The Tapestry was partially a story about human perseverance and that really spoke to me in some parts of this book too. That ancient, scratched-up, barely-working Disney film was so unsettling but so wonderful. Burke’s line about “would you believe we lowly little humans once walked on the moon?” The part where the Fellowship is explaining about how humans once built flying ships and split matter to its smallest components without any magic, just with the sheer power of their minds. It’s inspiring. And it was interesting seeing that different perspective of the destruction of the Book of Thoth, like we were just starting to explore the heavens themselves and then that technology was taken away from us. But like it said, at least we’re still walking on the Earth. It’s surreal reading this and realizing that in this book we are the ancient civilizations. Much of our history is either not known at all or considered a nonsensical fairy tale. But Disney films and the Brothers Grimm tales still exist. Stories persevere, no matter how rare or expensive or illegal they may become. Getting even more meta, it’s just like the stories of the original series becoming the mythology of this one. Stories stick around, no matter how much they may change, and apparently the same applies to humanity.

-I would love to talk to someone who read Impyrium without reading The Tapestry first and find out what that realization was like, when it suddenly dawned on them that this had once been our world.

-It’s also really interesting and kind of funny seeing the empress and the princesses have the whole week-long pilgrimage and put themselves through such physical and mental duress to go worship this mysterious scary god-king from another world when those of us who have read The Tapestry know that this all-powerful warrior is the same guy who got repeatedly bossed around by a talking goose and once used magic to leap 20 feet in the air because he got startled by a robot centipede. The Hound of Rowan, everybody. One thing I always admired about Max’s character was that no matter how much he grew and changed the core of his personality, his kindness and his humor, stayed the same (and even when he went full supernova god in the Workshop he was still able to keep from destroying everybody because of the love he felt for his friends). And I’m glad that even just from that little glimpse we got of him we can see that he still holds that same personality, that he was so eager to help this teenage girl that he forgot about the FATAL WOUND that would literally kill him if he went through the gate like Max never change

-I was not expecting this story to give me so many Max feels like I thought I was over the end of The Red Winter but apparently not. I actually laughed when they brought out the lyrmrills as offerings because it was so beautifully nostalgic and sentimental but also like, what else would it be? The man loves his lymrills.

-Speaking of Max getting bossed around by Hannah I seem to remember her saying she was immortal at the end of The Red Winter so are she and her goslings still wandering around the Direwoods oh god

-Again it must be such a different experience reading this without the context of the first series because that whole Direwoods field trip was kind of a punch in the gut. I remember in The Hound of Rowan reading about the abandoned charges wandering the Sanctuary and forgetting that humans ever cared for them and I thought that was so sad and now the entire Sanctuary is like that. The Sanctuary was such a beacon of hope and peace and now it’s just a creepy haunted forest where little rich kids are afraid to get their feet dirty. Who knows how long selkies live, that could have been Frigga or Helga in the lagoon being so glad to have some humans to play with again. And the ruins of the Warming Lodge and the dvergar brother’s forge. Dude that one classroom had Nile Croakers and domovoi and stuff in cages and the selkies were described as “water beasts” like that was so sad it feels so wrong and it’s such a good representation of how the culture has changed

-Like honestly it’s just such a message about the nature of history. It reminds me of Church’s monologue from the end of season 13 of Red vs Blue, where he talked about the hero never getting to know if his sacrifice was worth it. Max didn’t know what became of his friends or the world he left behind presumably until David’s death (and don’t think I don’t have a fanfic idea about that), and then Max and David and everyone presumably don’t really know what became of their world 3000 years later, like they know the gate and the dragon exist and they know about the Faeregines coming on pilgrimage every few years, but I guess they probably don’t know much beyond that. They never get to see the long-lasting effects of their efforts, and they don’t get to know the perspectives with which people view them and the legends they’ve become. They didn’t want Rowan to become a place for snobby elites, and they didn’t want nonmagical people to be discriminated against, but they can’t do anything about it. Because we can act to change our history, but in the long run we never know how our stories will end up being told. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take action to better our world for the present and the foreseeable future.

-I love all the subtle parallels, intentional or not, between this story and The Tapestry. Kids sneaking out at night for a sleepover on a ship, kids sneaking out for a duel. A man losing his face. Workshop specimens getting stolen. Being betrayed by a friend (honestly, I didn’t suspect Viktor at all until he suggested that they collect firewood and then my mind immediately went to Rolf and Connor for some reason even though there was no real connection). The illustration of Hob outside Hazel’s tent with the House Blade next to the fire reminded me so much of Cooper sneaking into Max’s tent with the poisoned Atropos blade, and it was Scathach the shadow who saved Max and Sigga the shadow who saved Hazel and Hob. History repeats itself. No matter how much some things change, some things still repeat.

-Olly was such a great character, like he had flaws but he acknowledged and apologized for them and he was so great. Sniff.

-Seriously Sigga is that teacher who’s like “I know you’re going though a lot so I’m going to conveniently forget to close the submission box until a while after the due date so I won’t know if you turned the homework in late but if I do catch you turning it in late I gotta fail you sorry”

-Also can we talk about the fact that Ember apparently fell in love with Astaroth’s hell dragon that he conjured from dead people like oh my god Ember plz you guys almost killed each other

-I feel like remember Henry saying something about us eventually getting to hear more about the grymholch from Prusias’s arena and the world it was from and I hope that happens

[topmixtrends]

THE FINAL PASSAGE of Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here contains one of the finest analogies I’ve ever read. The eponymous protagonist, whose stepfather has just died, is working one of her last shifts in his diner before she heads off to college:

People say it’s so awful that I only had a real father for less than two years and then had to lose him. I wish like anything he was still here, but it’s like getting an extraordinary meal after you’ve been eating junk food for a long time. The taste just sweeps through your sensibilities, bringing all-out contentment, and the sheer goodness of it makes up for every bad meal you’ve ever had.

Hope Was Here was published in 2000, and since then I’ve searched, mostly in vain, for novels that washed away the taste of poorly written contemporary fiction that did nothing for my mind, even less for my soul. Not one, but two new exemplary short story collections have renewed my faith in American fiction. Sweet and Low by Nick White and Fight No More by Lydia Millet employ a seldom-used conceit: the stories revolve around a cast of characters, and each collection is devoted to a specific geographic locale. White’s incisive exploration of the South — you can practically hear the scrape of a wooden chair across a dusty floor, the rustles of swampy groves, the flies buzzing over a dead dog’s carcass — is beautifully tempered with sincerity and irony, while Millet, choosing present-day Los Angeles for her tightly woven trove of adults and teenagers slowly losing and finding their minds, breathes more life and texture into life into sun-baked Southern California than anything since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

A central shtick that alters the expectations of short stories can be a clever method for soliciting a reader’s respect; for example, the minimalism of Lydia Davis’s short stories netted her adulation and a Man Booker Prize. Melded narratives and characters is a tricky feint, but when done well it allows characters to blossom and expand the ways in which they relate to one another and the reader. In fairness to White’s and Millet’s work, neither collection demands that the reader sit down and trace the presence of each story’s DNA in the tale that follows. Both authors are aware, however, of the richness embodied by each of their characters, and if you do grab a pen, as I did, and map out how and where the people in their stories overlap, you’ll be rewarded.

While the first four stories in Sweet and Low do not partake in the central universe conceit, they do share one important, and fatal, story arc: knowledge is power, and more than a little knowledge has the power to unmake you. (“Bird-Headed Monster,” a taut and mordant tale in Fight No More, follows a similar path: a young woman is touring a house in Los Angeles when she learns that her wealthy boyfriend is buying it not for them, but for himself and his fiancée.) Rosemary is the widow of Dr. Arnie Greenlee, and in “The Lovers” she runs into a young man named Hank in an airport. He promptly faints due to low blood sugar — a result of his diabetes, which was first diagnosed by the late doctor, who had also begun an affair with Hank, and took the latter’s grandfather’s watch to be repaired. But Arnie died before the watch could be restored to its owner. Only the reader and Hank know about the affair; Rosemary only knows that her indifference in the bedroom following their only child’s birth helped her grant Arnie permission to have affairs. She does not, however, know about her husband’s fondness for male sexual partners. A meandering terror wraps itself up in White’s prose:

She drives on, thinking.

At the airport, he mumbled something about a watch. Her brain makes some connections. A month or so after Arnie’s death, she was in the bathroom cleaning out his cabinet. […] If she remembers correctly, initials had been carved into the back of it, but she couldn’t make them out, which frustrated her.

[…]

Home from following Hank, she retrieves the watch and holds it in the palm of her hand. It ticks. There are things in this world, she decides, you keep for no particular reason, the things you haven’t yet found a language for.

Arnie’s secret bisexuality isn’t nearly as much of a shock to the reader as the terse, oblique hypothesis about Rosemary’s dual nature, the same nature that happily permitted Arnie to have affairs without her needing to disclose that:

Say, just for conversation, there once lived a girl who was one person — one complete person, not a person for the world and a person for herself. They were one and the same. Then, let’s say, it’s her first week at college, and a boy she trusted, a boy from her hometown even, pushed his way inside her bottom-floor dorm room while her roommate was out. Say he did things to her that split her in two. Right down the middle. Years later, this same girl met a boy who was sweet and unassuming and never curious about the other girl behind the girl, the one she hid so fiercely.

Hank and Rosemary are two very different people bonded by a loss, but there’s just enough precarity in their incipient acquaintance that they lose sight of one another, and ultimately, must seek closure on their own. White has a profound talent, one writers decades senior to him frequently lack, for imbuing his prose with bombs of shock that land with ferocity and precision, leaving a devastation far greater than might be successful in longer stories and many novels. The reader may feel no pity for Pete in “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin” — he’d “run off his faggot of a son” many years ago — and that he’s trapped under his lawn mower after a fall, “one leg crushed under the back end” of the machine feels like karma for a bigot. There are, however, horrors in Pete’s own childhood that caused me to stop reading and draw a deep breath before I could continue. After Pete’s mother died, Pete’s father would take him snake hunting:

He was lucky being a boy — his sisters, after their mother died, had to deal with things much worse […] This usually happened late on summer weekends when his father was high on corn whiskey. His sisters slept in the room next to his, and on those nights, he could hear the terrible grunting coming through the walls.

That a snake slowly slithers into the crevasse in which Pete is pinned feels like the literal manifestation of his failure to defend his sisters and accept his son. He tries, in vain, to aim handfuls of soil at the snake, but it remains unmoved, “refusing to be anything but predator.” Dying is easy. Staring down near-certain death is much harder.

The title story — which also opens the latter two-thirds of the book, a section titled “The Exaggerations” that focuses mostly on the Culpepper family, emigrants from Illinois to and residents of an unnamed town in Mississippi — posits a simple but ambitious theme: our families influence, and often dictate, everything about us. Forney Culpepper’s father Reuben died of a heart attack — weak hearts run in the family — so his widow Felicia decides to give stardom a shot with her beautiful voice. When she prepares to audition for a talent scout in Memphis, a 10-year-old Forney finds himself at the helm of a quest for self-awareness:           

The two of them — mother and son — gaze at the reflection of themselves wearing their new getups. Like different people, Forney thinks. Happier people. But is he happy? Or on the way to happiness? This singing stuff makes her happy, and he guesses he’s happy that she’s happy. But is he?

In the six stories that constitute most of Sweet and Low, the perils of being a writer are given attentive, and often hilarious, consideration. Buck Dickerson, Felicia’s music teacher and a sugar-addicted radio host, reveals to Forney that his son, a member of the Peace Corps, harbors literary ambitions: “My son says he wants to be a poet. Can you believe that? I didn’t know people decided to be poets. […] Thought it just happened to them, or something, like a car wreck.”

White unfolds the tales of Forney’s Aunt Mavis and Uncle Lucas with such care that reading about them is one of the purest abject pleasures in the book. Told in the first person, the story picks up once Forney lives full-time with his aunt and uncle, after his mother leaves for Nashville to pursue stardom full-time: “We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together […] we saw plays and ballets in Jackson […] took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans.”

But for all their cultural excursions, the Culpepper family has its share of disappointments too:

In her younger days […] [Mavis] fancied herself something of a poet. She […] had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind to “see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

Nina the real estate agent is single too; she is our foyer into Fight No More. In “Libertines,” she is showing a house to a group of three men, one of whom, she thinks she was told by a colleague, is an African dictator. Millet has a knack for two specific, brilliant devices. First, infusing her prose with the part-confident, part-bored, part-ironic intonation of upper middle-class conversation in Los Angeles:

Had the person who lived in the house died?

Well yes, in fact, she’d wanted to say, because that’s the only way anyone ever leaves a house this stunning.

Second, trading from the beginning on the necessary maintenance of fact as fiction. Business cannot be conducted if apparent flaws are pointed out with loudspeakers and fluorescent flags:

This house always seemed to be waiting for the mudslide that would drag it down the cliff, snagging those giant, spiky plants as it fell. Chunks of frame and plaster would be dangling off plant stalks as beds and espresso makers tumbled down the hillside. Till that day came: 2.8 million, if you don’t mind.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might be one of the best short stories I’ve read in the last 10 years. Millet dances between first and second person in the story, an interesting effort given the speaker is Jeremy, approximately age 16, who has decided to cut school and openly masturbate in his bedroom, knowing the real estate agent will be bringing a family on a tour through his house. For all his boorish antics, Jeremy’s internal musings are peppered with Latin, and he is concerned about his mother, who is reeling in the aftermath of the boy’s father leaving to start a family with a younger woman. Still, he celebrates when Marnie and the prospective buyers walk in on him during his orgasm, then rush out: “Murmurs outside the door. He felt a grin spreading. Reached for the Kleenex. There you go. Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar shit.”

Later, Jeremy starts to roam the empty house. At his mother’s vanity, he does something he tends to avoid: he lets himself reach for a memory. Millet’s prose here is charmingly graceful, a turn from the obscenity-laced monologue from moments before:

He used to watch her put up her hair. Like in the movies: rich kids watched their mothers get ready. Good feeling. Dinner parties and evening wear. She’d been so deft with bobby pins it looked like sleight of hand. Magic, he called it then. He flashed to one time when her long hair, in the space of a few seconds, was transformed into a great shining round atop her head.

That shit looked elegant. Audrey Hepburn. “Magic mama.” She picked him up and twirled him. He’d been so small. Hard to believe.

Jeremy’s actions and their consequences create a breathtaking paradigm for Fight No More. One of the buyers, who sees right through his bullshit and tells him so, causes him to look back on his childhood, which in turn exposes a brief glimpse of his truth: there’s a difference between anger and hatred, and what he felt was anger at the “paterfamilias […] sowing his seed in younger soil.” The sardonic humor of the teen boy masturbating as a stunt is not forgotten, because Jeremy, in order to do something nice but not melodramatic for his mother, decides to use her credit card to fill the house with flowers. When his new stepmother — pregnant with his soon-to-be half-sibling — invites him to dinner, he is forced to examine the reality of his new existence. Being a teenager, Jeremy masks exploration of a new family dynamic as “a movie [that] could really crack you up,” but each step he takes as a new stepson, the child of a newly divorced couple, the grandson of a woman exhibiting signs of dementia, he reconsiders. Millet isn’t out to provide redemption, but she is interested in how people change when they finally come to terms with change. Jeremy remembers a cousin’s baptism he’d attended:

In the church she was dressed in a snow-white robe and smiled without end. She beamed. His whole life, he could swear, he’d never seen anyone look that happy.

Do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?

I do.

“I renounce him,” he muttered under his breath […]

And all his works?

I do.

Jeremy wasn’t alone in his bedroom when Nina and her clients walked in. He was getting off to a cam girl named Lexie, living in Carpinteria, almost certainly underage. The small degree of respect he affords her — “She wasn’t dumb” — is important because, in “Stockholm,” the reader receives a visceral look inside Lexie’s mind. Her stepbrothers are meth dealers, her mother a drunk, and her stepfather has been raping her since she was 16. There is something astonishing, even electrifying, about Jeremy’s offer for her to come to Los Angeles and be au pair to his new stepsister; it energizes the book. Lexie’s other duty will be to keep an eye on Aleska, Jeremy’s paternal grandmother, a retired professor of the art and propaganda of fascism, who is selling her home to live in the guest house on her son’s property. “Jem” gives the new babysitter a quick rundown about Professor Korczak:

[D]on’t be fake Christian, she’s Jewish, well, kind of, but she was raised by some kind of missionaries so she’ll see through it. Tell her about your trashy family. I mean, don’t mention the Internet sex biz […] just try to be a straight-shooter. She won’t mind the white-trash part, as long as you’re smart and not rude. She likes an edge but she really doesn’t like rudeness. Treat her with respect, she’s had a hard life. Her whole family died in the Holocaust when she was six.

Aleska has experienced other losses too, namely her husband to suicide. It’s unclear when this happened — later in the book it’s hinted that Paul was still a child — but his widow does not dwell on what cannot be changed. In many ways, “Gram” is the hero of Fight No More. Her wry, self-possessed manner, her request for stiff cocktails in the evening, her general determination to keep track of her marbles before biology takes over and slowly sends them spinning off, one by one, into the darkness of senility, is nothing short of fearless. Some of the book’s best dollops of humor come from a woman whose framed posters of swastikas unnerve her new daughter-in-law.

Members of Lexie’s family, residents of Carpinteria, turn up in Los Angeles too. A content warning should be issued for “I Can’t Go On.” I don’t fault Millet or the publisher for not providing it, but anyone who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative/family friend should proceed with caution.

Both White and Millet are keen observers of the interpersonal expectations between people who are sure of themselves and people who aren’t. The chasm that separates fully functioning adulthood and reality is often invisible to characters in both books. “The Men” in Fight No More is a dizzyingly paranoid but mildly comic tale about a group of male midgets who are performing repairs on a house. Its resident, a production executive who “otherwise leads a normal life” but whose husband has left her, becomes unnerved “when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight.” Nina, the agent selling the house, wonders if she’s become “a magnet for eccentrics” in the aftermath of a lover’s death. The unnamed narrator of “Break” in Sweet and Low is befriended in college by a girl named Regan and her boyfriend, Forney Culpepper. The latter is by now an aspiring poet, but hasn’t written any poems yet. “Instead, he spent his mornings retyping the work of other poets — Ginsberg, Stevens — on a sky-blue IBM Correcting Selectric II […] When I asked him about it, he said, ‘I’ve not found the right words for me yet, so I’m using other people’s until then.’”

Very rarely in modern American literature is the reader afforded an opportunity to so fully absorb a character that it feels like he’s sitting right next to you. Forney Culpepper is such a creation. I understood his confusion when he glimpses Uncle Lucas kissing his best friend Buddy Cooper’s neck. I respected his reluctance to hear Aunt Mavis untangle the truth from the exaggerations, but appreciated his need for facts. I teared up for him during “The Curator,” White’s tour de force and the penultimate story in Sweet and Low. If you’re from a certain part of the South and you’re immersed in literature, at some point you have to contend with William Faulkner. His name doesn’t appear in White’s book, but we can safely guess that “the Author,” referred to only by that title and capital A, as the force manipulating lives in an unnamed Mississippi town where Forney lives as an adult, is a stand-in for Faulkner’s towering presence as the literary legend associated with the South.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and I was partly raised in the South, so I appreciated the lack of myopia in both White and Millet’s prose. Both areas function as characters because everyone in “The Exaggerations” is stagnating, paralyzed by circumstance and expectations lowered over time. Aunt Mavis never went to graduate school; Uncle Lucas moved out, took a trip to Canada, died of a heart attack. Homosexuality — repressed, concealed, unidentified — is as common in the South as ostensibly cool and collected facades are in Los Angeles. The sun hangs heavy over both sets of stories, only the one in the Delta is intimidating, and bossy, and the one in Southern California is part of the glossy psychological veneer of the region. And both books end with the yearnings of elderly women.

Sweet and Low and Fight No More share a brutal lesson about human frailty: we are flawed because we want so much more than what we have. This want, this hunger — financial, sexual, physiological, emotional — turns into a blind spot, and often our Achilles’ heel. Attempting to meet that want can take a lifetime, and even then that feeling, the comforting realization that overtakes you as gently as a cotton sheet over your body on a summer night, that we’re sated and at peace, may never come. The only reassurances we’ll ever get are momentary. Fleeting precious seconds of calm and security. By the time we learn this, it’s too late.

¤

Nandini Balial is a writer and copy editor whose work has appeared in the AV Club, the New Republic, Vice, The Week, among others. She lives and works in Texas.

The post Resurrection of the American Short Story: Nick White’s “Sweet and Low” and Lydia Millet’s “Fight No More” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2nd4zsU

[thirteenthanda]

3 Mistakes NOT To Make In Your Morning Routine

Mary is a private coaching client of mine. She’s an ambitious, single mom who recently left her corporate job to launch a small business. She’s definitely in “startup mode.”

You can probably relate to Mary’s hopes and dreams of becoming financially free and living life on her terms, while building a business that helps people and supports her goal of traveling the world.

If you can, that means you probably also share one of her fatal flaws. Mary is a Type-A personality and she takes on too many commitments and responsibilities. She says “yes” to every opportunity that comes her way because she’s worried she might miss out on a connection, a breakthrough, or a deal.

Mary even takes this approach with her morning routine. She’s heard how important it is to do meditation, to take time for gratitude journaling, to exercise, to do yoga, to do free-form journaling (writing down all of her thoughts), and to watch a motivational video first thing in the morning.

As you can imagine, this morning routine takes a lot of time. Frustrated with this busy-ness, Mary recently emailed me.

“Craig,” she said, “I get up at 5 a.m. to get things done, and I still feel like I’m running behind by 7 a.m. when my daughter gets up. Once I get her breakfast and off to school, it’s nearly 9 a.m. and I don’t get through my email until nearly 10 a.m. By then I’m ready to go back to bed.”

Mary wasn’t making any progress on her routine, so I proposed a drastic solution.

“It’s time to put some of your morning routine on the chopping block,” I said.

Bruce Lee said, “It’s not about the daily increase but the daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

If you want to do GREAT things, you need to do FEWER things.

“Mary,” I said in my follow-up email to her, “Stop trying to do so much first thing in the morning. You can’t do meditation, gratitude journaling, a long workout, personal development reading, motivational video-watching, Instagramming, and yoga (or yoga while Instagramming!) all before breakfast. You need to cut some of these activities and focus on what matters, saving you time and stress.”

For example, I offered, here’s what I do in the morning to ensure that I move toward my big goals and dreams each day:

I wake up. I go to the bathroom. I splash water on my face, walk down the stairs, pet the dog for 30 seconds, and then sit down in front of my computer. I turn it on, put on my writing music (Chopin’s “Complete Nocturnes”), and open up a Word document with my most important daily writing task.

Then I sit there and do the work. Or as Brian Tracy says in his book of the same name, “I eat that frog.”

This is what Mary should do. This is what YOU should do.

If you are struggling to complete the most important tasks in your day—whether it’s writing a chapter for your book, doing your taxes, or preparing that PowerPoint presentation for the marketing team—you should wake up and get to work as soon as possible.

Some professionals, like authors Steven Pressfield and Stephen King, go through a non-work morning ritual before they sit down to work at 9 a.m. sharp. Pressfield, in his book, “The War of Art,” talks about going for a morning hike before returning to his house, putting on his writing uniform (his favorite sweatshirt), and sitting down at his computer to write. King also begins writing at 9 a.m. and sits there as long as it takes to complete his daily word allotment (2,000 words).

I don’t share the same routines as King and Pressfield (aside from writing in my favorite sweatshirt), but I do engage in morning rituals. As the owner of a coaching business—with many employees and clients to manage and connect with each day—my morning gets busy with phone calls and emails by 10 a.m. That’s why I must write before the sun—and civilization—rises.

If you want to do GREAT things, you need to do FEWER things.

Right now it’s nearly 5 a.m. and I’ve nearly eaten my frog. It wasn’t tasty—not at all. It was tough. My mind wandered, and my fingers wanted to dance over to the mousepad and open up the browser to check sports scores—a bad habit I picked up as a bored child on the farm.

Knowing my weaknesses, I designed a system to ensure my Perfect Mornings. When you control your morning, you own your day. When you own your day, you take big leaps toward success and creating your legacy, and that’s what “The Perfect Day Formula” is all about. (Click here to get a FREE copy of this life-changing book.)

But if you clutter your morning with the unessential—if your routine becomes about the daily increase rather than the daily decrease—you find frustration, struggles, and stagnation in your business, your career, and nearly every area of life.

This brings us back to Mary.

“Mary, you’re doing too much,” I said to her. “Just imagine what you could you do with an extra 15-20 minutes in the morning when you could focus on real work. We need to cut down on your morning self-care rituals. You just don’t have time for everything.”

So, I suggested these three things Mary could cut to ensure maximum productivity in her mornings (and they work for everyone):

First, don’t do redundant “New Age” activities.

Meditation, gratitude exercises, and journaling are all wonderful, helpful activities—in theory. But if they are taking up more than 20 minutes of your morning and you’re struggling to get other things done, then they are having the opposite of their intended effect.

My friend, business partner, and coaching client, Bedros Keuilian, recognized this. He tried to do meditation and gratitude journaling in the morning, and it just left him stressed. Neither felt natural to him. He decided that instead of forcing these activities into his schedule that he would simply get up, take his dog Cookie outside, and do a quick little gratitude exercise (one that he made up) while playing fetch with Cookie.

After 10 minutes, Bedros goes back inside, has a protein shake, and sits down to work on his biggest priority for the day. He usually has this completed before his kids wake up. Then his family has breakfast together and he sees them off before heading to the gym. He’s happy, productive, and grateful—not overextended like Mary.

Second, cut back on your morning exercise.

I made a career out of showing people they could get the same physical and mental benefits from short bursts of exercise as they can with long bouts of exercise. You don’t need a full hour in the gym. You can dramatically cut the length of your exercise routine, save time, and give those minutes to what matters in your business. I encourage you to start today. Instead of spending 60 minutes in the gym, cut back to 40 minutes. [Here are some helpful videos to get you started.]

Third, don’t do anything else until you’ve given 15 minutes of focused work to the number-one priority in your business.

For Mary, that means preparing for her daily sales calls. After taking my advice, she has been able to modify her sales scripts and practice her “close” out loud. This has quickly led to an increase in the number of converted prospects—without mad scrambles or jumbled sales calls.

Making these three changes eased the stress in Mary’s mind. She still felt inner peace and enjoyed good health from her self-care routine in the morning, but no longer felt rushed.

Hacking away at the unessential, and thus doing fewer things, allowed her to do GREAT things. Her business started growing faster. She was able to be present with her daughter during a leisurely breakfast rather than rushing her to get ready. Mary’s sales calls went smoother and her clients noticed a calmer demeanor in their interactions.

My challenge to you today is this: What is one activity that you could cut or stop in your morning routine that would save you 10-20 extra minutes and make a BIG difference in your life?

Put that on the chopping block.

Hack away so you can do greater things today.

by Craig 

[quieteating]

New Post has been published on Quieteating

New Post has been published on https://www.quieteating.com/frenchie/

Frenchie

The clean eating revolution.  Something I have learned to dread, as it engulfs the world around me.  Green is good.  Oils are bad.  Flowery is great.  Dull is worse.  Artistic is excellent.  Common is sub par.  Some might say that this is a case of form over substance.

On this basis of analysis, Frenchie serves up an elegant feast.

We decided to dine at the bar.  All the better to watch the bartender at action and being the nosy person I am, to also see what the other patrons were imbibing.  Through our careful observation, we did get a hint of what our food would be like.  Flowery.  I watched with piqued interest as the bartender pulled out a container of decorative flowers and proceeded to artistically arrange these in the various drinks. Uncouth drinker that I am (not drinking at all), I did wonder idly if this made the drink seem more sweet.  Yet, I hope that you do not come to this blog for my clever frivolities about alcoholic beverages.  So putting such distractions aside, best start with the bread.

Sourdough from the famed Hedone with whey butter.  Bread lover that I am, we had to order the bread.  Although I did note in annoyance that you must pay a pretty penny (almost GBP1 for each slice) for this.  It was good but perhaps suffered from being a bit too heavy, perhaps on account of the cost.  When you are paying a not insubstantial sum for lunch, I have been accustomed to having some items thrown in. Weightier than I would have liked.

Corn porridge, pickled chili, oregano and corn shoots.  I was very wary when I saw this on the menu.  I need not have worried so much.  The corn in many different forms with a delicate hint of spice was smooth and satisfying.  The taste lived up to the presentation, outstanding.

Sea bream carpaccio, olive crumble, hazelnuts, tomato and watermelon.  Painting a very pretty picture, the collection of artfully arranged discordant notes led to a surprisingly light taste.  Perhaps on account of the razor thin slices of fish.  Yet pretty as it was, I think I prefer to have my seafood with more bite.

Cornish whiting, bean ragout and raspberries.  The ragout was creamy and delicious, the whiting ok if a bit bland, the foliage not really to my taste and the raspberries a juxtaposition.  Overall a weird, not great, not bad but so so dish.

Smoked pork belly, aubergine, hazelnut and pickled mustard.  This was to be the surprise of the meal.  I am accustomed to pork belly being juicy, moist and decadent on account of its placement near juicy (read fatty) parts of the pig.  Try as I might, I could not find any plumpness on the pork belly.  Which was not a fatal flaw for me.  Instead, the straw that broke the camel’s back was that the pork belly was dry.  Of all piggie cuts, I expected this to not suffer from this particular malady.  Although on a positive element, I guess it tasted healthy.

Banoffee, nutmeg and caramelized pecan.  A feast for the eyes, this cream ball hid banana and delightful pecan inside.  An interesting light take on one of my favorite stodgy desserts.  Something to recommend to come back to.

Yellow peaches, almond crumble and Verbena ice cream.  The peaches were bright and healthy looking.  They tasted like that too.  The crumble was as tasty as flour and sugar could be.  The aforementioned parts were not really to my liking but the ice cream was good.

A clean lunch it was.  With pretty flowers, careful presentation and neat impersonal service.  I noticed that every dish was served by a different waiter.  A bit more friendliness might have been in order as I would have liked it if I was asked at least once how my meal had gone. Although, maybe in hindsight it was better that I did not give them a piece of my mind, unlike in Elliots.  Yet, I guess perhaps it was for the better that I had something so healthy for lunch as I got to live a different type of life for a change.  Although my fatty self did complain that he was left out in the cold.  Perhaps he might feel better with a flower from one of the drinks in his hair.  But then again, perhaps not.

  A quiet eating 6.5/10.

Lunch (3 courses) was GBP32 excluding drinks and service.

  Frenchie

16 Henrietta St, London WC2E 8QH

[letterstopoldark-blog]

Pilot (Part I)

Dear Poldark,

Hi. I’m here. Why? Well, I love historical fiction. I love the 18th century. I needed something to fill my Droughtlander. Supposedly, you’re going to fill this void in all of your tri-cornered hat glory. I am promised love, scandal, 18th century England, and objectification of the male physique. I mean, okay. I’ll try anything at least once. 

Enter a you, tall, dark and handsome (or should I say, pol, dark and handsome? heh... sorry,) scoundrel wearing a red coat. Despite the fact I am American and literally every piece of American propaganda since I was born has told me to find red coats and tri-corner hats distasteful, I somehow don’t hate you in the first few scenes in which I see you. You seem apathetic to the war around you, gambling a few coins away and laughing like you’re in some 18th century frat and not, oh, the American Revolution. You actually seem a bit spoiled, tbh. Joking about breaking the law and going to war to escape the gallows. LOL, good times. 

I am very close to being not that into you when I see a flash of honor on your part, questioning your Commander and whether they were defending liberty or tyranny in the backwoods of New England. Ah, so Ross Poldark is a philosopher, eh? 

We never did get to hear the Commander’s answer, because, well, war.

Suddenly, we think you might be dead except we know you’re not because why would they name a show after a dead guy? Okay, I guess they did that with Cukoo, but I’m watching the “real" BBC-in-collab-with-PBS, not BBC 3-in-collab-with-Netflix. I expect the best here. 

Cue mysterious flashback of a pretty, giggly woman on some bucolic coast somewhere, and then there’s that sweet, rustic violin music and some vast, pretty skies and a rugged English shoreline, nearly as rugged as your 5 o’clock shadow and okay, I’m in. Because I am always in when a show has good intro music.

Come to find out, two years later, you, Mr. Pol, Dark and Handsome are returning home to a dead father and gossiping neighbors and … at least you might still have that girl we saw in the flashback, right? Because, I mean...

Wait, sorry, forgot what I was saying. I became too distracted by your cape. I do love a man in a cape.

How pleasant that you arrive home and promptly crash a family dinner party! What a joyous homecoming. Perhaps you can all play a rousing game of Monopoly afterwards while wearing matching sweaters. Side note, I love the woman in the frilly cap. She has only said one or two lines but I will already tell you that she is what I aspire to be when I grow up. Also, doesn’t she look familiar? Anyways, fun fact, I once bought a colonial-style hat that looked exactly like the one she’s wearing in a gift shop situated in a former, 18th century French fort in Northern Michigan. It matched my Felicity doll. 

#nerd. 

I was not the popular girl in school. 

Anyways, this dinner that you crashed seems to have brought you back into the arms (almost!) your dear flashback!girlfriend, Elizabeth, who is all a-fluster at your reappearance into your life. (Which, side note, it would be adorable that she is all flushing and girlish to once again be blessed by your presence, but this is 2017 and I think women, even if it’s anachronistic, are... not supposed to be all girly like that? I mean, is it not a little... silly? Are we for once actually not going to be anachronistic in a television series and actually show how shitty and un-politically correct the world once was? I’m conflicted about how this is all playing out.) At any rate, something is clearly amiss here because it all seems too good to be true and we’re only 10 minutes into the show.

Oh, goody, and your cousin is there, too, welcoming you home heartily. What a lovely time!

Wait... what’s that? And he’s getting married! Yay, wedding. Maybe you’ll get to dance with flashback!girlfriend at the wedding, Pol.

Um, stop. Who is he getting married to? 

No.

Aw.

Awww.

Poldark. Sweetie. I mean, ugh. Tough break. You go off for several years overseas to fight some spoiled, uncivilized American brats and you return home just in time for flashback!girlfriend to marry your cousin.

Awkward.

I really love your cape, by the way.

I guess you aren’t staying in your cousin/soon to be flashback!girlfriend aka. Elizabeth’s mansion tonight, eh? Time to go home. 

Your dad wasn’t much of a housekeeper, was he?

Drunk servants. Rats. How pleasant. Wait, why do I obsess over this century so much? It could use a vat of antibacterial wipes and I would need an arsenal of antibiotics to go back there.

Anyways, Poldark, I know you’ve had a rough day, but do you really need to snap at the servants and be such a bastard? Prickly. 

So, let’s recap, my dear. Your house is a rotting piece of trash. Your flashback!girlfriend is gone, to your cousin/friend no less, daddy is six feet under, and… well, at least the scenery is pretty. I mean, you do have a million dollar view there.

So back to the local mansion: is it Trenwith or Chenwith? My uncultured American ears cannot tell the difference. (Side note: it’s Trenwith.)

I like that you have a group of guys in town to be all bromancey with. At least something is going right in your life.

I can see now that, despite your moody sensibilities, in the next few scenes we have definitely established that, while you may be fairly poor right now, you have your heart in the right place. Are you going to be some sort of Robin Hood type figure? Or perhaps an 18th century, more rugged version of Harry Potter, whose reckless bravery leads him to fight for noble causes? You do have the facial scar. 

Speaking of Harry Potter, now that we have fully established you as being in Gryffindor, let’s cut to a scene where clearly the VILLAIN of the series is being introduced.

“Ross Poldark is alive” we hear a man with curly hair and frilly clothes say. He is counting his money. He has a wingman with an evil voice. I’m 99% sure the curly-haired blonde with frilly clothes is Draco Malfoy’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather. The guy with the evil voice is Crabbe and Goyle’s ancestor. 

Speaking of villains, Elizabeth’s mother is a Disney villain, no? I’m getting some wicked stepmother vibes here. “Marry the dude you don’t like as much,” she advises her daughter. Yes, because that always goes well, lady.

Meanwhile, this episode clearly can’t show too much of you being nice, because we are frequently reminded of how your servants are useless but as much as they’re useless, you’re even more of a bastard to them. Also, did you just call them fat? Wow, Pol, my friend. A+ servant owner of the year award. What’s next, “Let them eat cake”?

This episode is getting a little tedious, but all of the sudden we are introduced to your cousin Verity. I love Verity already. She’s sweet. A breath of fresh air. She’s also been a character in literally every British television or movie I’ve ever seen, and I like her. She has a good attitude despite the mopey family she was clearly born into.

I’m getting the sense that you and flashback!girlfriend are made for each other, because your favorite hobby is brooding. Still, better broody than insecure, which your cousin Francis is. He must be insecure about not being as broody. Instead, he goes for pouty. It’s not quite as sexy.

Luckily, flashback!girlfriend’s mother seems to be influential, because Francis is hanging on to her.

#thatawkwardmoment when you are invited to your flashback!Girlfriend’s wedding with your former BFF.

Okay, so here’s the thing, Poldark. Right around here you make a fatal flaw. No pun intended. Were you literally about to let your cousin die in front of you? Um, I don’t know what to say to you other than, asshole. 

“Is Poldark a bastard? Moment #2: Almost lets cousin/BFF drown. 

10 points from Gryffindor.

Let’s check in on Malfoy, who is now currently vying for a spot as your best frenemy. Good luck shaking that guy off.

I take it back about you and Elizabeth being made for each other. Your broodiness would eventually destroy each other, as you try to out brood yourselves and ultimately would brood each other to death.

Oh, and by the way, at this point in the episode, I have decided you are indeed a bastard.

Pol, dark and broody.

Quick question, Are there going to be pirates in this series?

And then there’s a good ol’ fashioned family Tarot reading, which is appropriately Mysterious for the halfway point of this episode. Thank goodness for the crazy old aunt in her Colonial cap reading the Tarot to her mopey family. This kind is how I like my 18th century dramas.

To be continued...

Sincerely,

A.

{{still photo credits}}