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downtonabbeyrevisited · 3 years

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Season Two Episode Two

Following a typically chaotic opener, Episode Two of Season Two strikes a far more sombre tone. The arrival of Henry Lang as Robert’s valet brings the first of this episode’s three plot points that address the impact of WW1 on the mental health of its soldiers. There is nothing funny to say about either shell-shock or suicidal ideation both of which are vast, complex issues that, for my money, Downton Abbey isn’t the vehicle explore in (because they require more time and depth than the pace of the plot in Season Two affords) and it certainly isn’t my place to make light of them in this rather irreverent corner of the internet. So I’m going to have a go at treading a fine line here. Forgive me if I stumble.

Lang is clearly in the grips of something awful and yet in an attempt to avoid the indignity of having maids in the dining room, he is bumped up to footman duty. He struggles throughout, culminating in him depositing his cargo on Edith’s dress. Mrs O’Brein has firmly taken Lang under her wing, recognising that he is struggling and offers him assurance and comfort that she has never gifted to Thomas.

Across the Village, Lieutenant Edward Courtenay is in the hospital having been blinded by gas. The use of gas (both chlorine and mustard) had a devastating impact on soldiers in WW1 but was also the root of the development of Zyklon B. Frtiz Haber, a German Jewish chemist, enabled chlorine gas to be used a weapon in WW1 and his research was later developed into the Zyklon process which was used by the Nazis to murder millions, including his own family. This is only one of a dizzying number of appalling ironies to be found in the World Wars but as I said last episode, I’m not a military historian so I’m going to leave it there. Edward had plans to return to the country after his graduation from Oxford to pursue the simple life (although one gets the feeling that his idea of the pursuit of a simple life will still be one that is very well upholstered). Thomas has taken it upon himself to read Edward’s letters to him and together with Sybil is helping him to adjust to living life with a different set of parameters. But growing pressure on the hospital’s limited capacity means that he is to be transferred elsewhere. All three voice their dissent at varying volumes to Major Clarkson who falls back on the very real backlog of wounded men. After Edward has died, Major Clarkson, Isobel and Sybil talk about a renewed need for the Abbey to become a convalescent home, an idea that has been bubbling under the surface for a while now. Meanwhile, Thomas has been left on his own to process both Edward’s death and the implications of witnessing a lack of support given by his own physician to those with depression.

The usually reliably jovial Mrs Patmore also has a more somber episode with her pursuit for the truth about the death of her nephew Archie. Robert finds that he has been shot for cowardice. Not only does this mean that her family is in mourning but they will now have to navigate the stigma and undue shame that came with having a relative die in this way. So entrenched in British life was the derision levelled at those who were shot for cowardice or desertion that it was only in 2006 that pardons were offered by Britain for 309 of those that were executed by firing squad during WW1. I know I said I’d leave it there with the military history, but that felt like an important bit of context.

We are now in 1917 and Matthew is still in the same trench that he was in 1916 (a detail I hadn’t actually noticed until I got the screen cap for this) so it looks like his strategy of downing tools mid-fight and continuously popping back to Blighty for important plot developments isn’t really paying dividends. Perhaps the addition of William to the ranks will help him? William certainly seems to think so and if the speed at which he moves through the various stages of his ‘relationship’ with Daisy is any indication of his tactical prowess, the British Front will not only be well within Germany’s borders but will be breathing down Russia’s neck in a fortnight. In any other episode, this would certainly get the award for oddest relationship dynamic but Sir Richard Carlisle exists.

Sir Richard makes his debut at Downton, having been introduced in name only in the previous episode. He and Mary met at Cliveden which is a regular haunt of mine, giving me hope that one day I too will from a strategic alliance with a newspaper magnate. He may know how to talk his way around a boardroom but he is lacking in the sartorial department. Whilst Sir Richard manages to avoid catching fire in his tweed, Lavinia is not free from the heat as he threatens her with his connection to her uncle. He may not know much about navigating the niceties of Downton, but at least he has cottoned on to the fact that any major disagreement should occur under a specific tree. Whilst Mary’s signature move is weeping into her gloves, Sir Richard’s is grabbing women by the forearm. A female friend of mine told me that one of her favourite things about the pandemic and the compulsion to keep 2m away from anyone (and not just emotionally) is that she has not been ’steered’ by a male hand on her lower back since 2019. It turns out that she can enter and exit rooms just fine on her own and I get the impression that Lavinia could get the gist of Sir Richard’s rage without the vice like grip of a man probably about twice her age.

Twinned with the ’tree of emotional conflict’, the ‘platform of romantic uncertainty’ provides the backdrop for Sir Richard’s proposal of marriage to Mary which is a declaration that really feels like it should come with a series of well-formatted charts. Mary’s heart, however, is still very much with Cousin Matthew. After being counselled by Carson in a type of conversation I cannot imagine her ever having with her father, she is on the verge of coming clean with Matthew. But in the second round of Lavinia vs. Mary, Lavinia declares that she ‘could not go on living’ without Matthew and Mary winds her neck in.

Also having a romantic entanglement this episode is Edith. Drake, previously of dropsy fame, has lost his farm hands and Edith turns up to offer her help in a wildly unsuitable trouser and heeled boot combo. But she soon gets down to it by pulling up a tree stump and flirting in a barn whilst a rather lovely border collie looks on (I’m currently trying to talk myself out of getting a border collie and this incident has done nothing to help things). After showing Drake that she can drink from a bottle like literally every single other human on the planet, the two share a kiss and some highly awkward dialogue that only slightly resembles ‘Carry on Downton’.

Whilst Edith is more than happy to crack on in a barn, Mr Molesley is much more backwards about coming forwards. Apparently having predicted the creation of ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, he figures that a book is the perfect kindling for romance when you exist in a glossy depiction of the past. Sadly neither Elizabeth nor her German garden can lure Anna from Bates who is fast shaping up to be schrodinger’s boyfriend. Anna proceeds to make some odd analogy where she compares Mr Bates to her moon-based child, revealing a rather unhealthy amount of codependency in that particular relationship.

Romantic declaration of the moment

Again, it feels like anyone but Sybil and Branson should get this but I am an agent of chaos and here we are. Branson defends Sybil’s will to work and has ample opportunity to see her shine in her chosen field. The admission that she will not be returning to her old life is a little chink of light that Branson basks in.

Expressive eyebrow of the week

I nominate Carson’s entire face when he realises that he has taken on too much and goes an impressive shade of red. As Carson frets about spoons, sauce, and something I can’t quite fathom, he starts to resemble a man who is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Carson’s battle to get a cork out of a bottle and knocking into chairs is a warm up to his rather dramatic collapse which is accompanied by a pretty disturbing groan. Sybil springs to action and he is soon efficiently ensconced in his own quarters.

Wait, what?

“I got a lot done on the train” Clearly Richard was on a train that was unencumbered with the wifi issues that plague the Pendolino.

“It takes a good deal more than that to shock me.” Mary’s shock-o-meter is a pretty odd instrument. It is unresponsive to corpses of diplomats but goes into absolute meltdown at the notion that she might have to live in a cottage.

“Let's hope my reputation will survive it.” I’ve not checked (and I categorically never will) but I would put money on the fact that someone has created a rarepair out of this.

“How can Matthew have chosen that little blonde piece?” Is Lavinia blonde? Women’s hair is not really my forte but I would have thought she was more akin to Tim Minchin than 1998 Justin Timberlake.

“I believe in this war. I believe in what we are fighting for.” William seems to have a better grip on what all of this is about than I ever did in high school history. The ‘A’ that eluded me is heading his way.

“I thought he might've died for love of you.” How I love snipey Thomas. It’s good to have him back. To borrow a quote from Bottas (another man who is currently living a life in which his destiny is his own demise) ‘traditions’.

“Fold it in, don’t slap it” The more season two goes on, the more I think that Moira is just an amalgamation of some choice elements of Julian’s kingdom.

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the-light-finds-its-way · 3 years

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Velliks Lightkin

Guardians name: Velliks Lightkin, formerly Harn Amrok

Age: Unknown

Race: Eliksni, formerly Awoken

Call signs/alias: The Waking Eliksni, Ahamkara-born, Wishborn

Pronouns: He/him

Class: Warlock

Preferred subclass(es): Ark, Stasis

Ghost’s name: Teka

Their Vanguard: Zavala, Ikora, Cayde-6

Fireteam name: Harbingers of Destiny

Fireteam teammates: Magnus, Dominus Ghaul, Anthem-99, Velliks, Gadrax, Kahun

Favorite legendary weapon: Steelfeather Repeater

Favorite exotic weapon: Thorn

Favorite exotic armor: Claws of Ahamkara

Favorite ornament armor set: Lightkin set

Favorite weapon ornament: Book of the Dead

What stats do they focus on: Recovery, Mobility

Are they offense, defence, or support: Support

Do they prefer being close, mid, or long range: Mid-range

Do they lean more “Element of Surprise” or “Upfront and Aggressive”: Upfront and aggressive

Strikes, Gambit, or Crucible: Strike

Who was their mentor(if they had one. If it is a character you created, tell us about them!): Mithrax

Who are they mentoring(if they are. If it is a character you created, tell us about them!): Nobody at the moment. Velliks is a young Lightbearer, and thus, is too inexperienced to train anybody.

What ship do they have: Kabr’s Glass Aegis

What is their Sparrow: Micro Mini

Favorite Ghost shell: Orbweaver shell

Favorite shader: Byzantium Lotus

Favorite color: Purple and green (they’re tied)

Favorite food: Ether

Favorite piece of Pre-Collapse tech(if they’ve seen any): None. Velliks wasn’t born before the Great Collapse.

Favorite Pre-Collapse music(if they’ve heard any): N/A

Favorite place in The Last City(if it’s a place you created, give a little description!): The Eliksni Quarter

Favorite NPC(s): Mithrax, Zavala, Ikora, Cayde, Osiris, Eris Morn, Elsie Bray

Favorite patrol location: Anywhere in the EDZ

5 things your Guardian likes(can be anything): Ether, Eliksni, snuggling, being Eliksni, fighting the good fight

Least favorite food: Salmon

Least favorite shader: Nessus Mirage

Least favorite patrol location: Anywhere on Europa, as the whole planet almost caused the downfall of his entire species.

Least favorite Pre-Collapse tech(if they’ve seen any): N/A

Least favorite NPC(s): Eramis

Least favorite weapon ornament: Coup de Main

Least favorite ornament armor set: Moonfang X-7

Least favorite legendary weapon: Calus Mini Tool

Least favorite exotic weapon: Bastion

Least favorite exotic armor: Verity’s Brow

5 things your Guardian dislikes(this can be anything): Eliksni haters, cowards, the House of Salvation, anyone or anything malicious, broken trust

Your Guardian has to rest. What is their living space like: A small house, with a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a room for the servitor and materials for it to convert into Ether. The overall place is beautiful, modern, and neatly-kept.

Does your Guardian have any casual wear?(Y'all remember Polyvore? The website URSTYLE works very similar if that helps!): Velliks is actually the only Guardian I have without a casual style. He insists on wearing his House Light clothes as his everyday clothes.

What hobbies and/or skills does you Guardian have: Gadrax hasn’t discovered any hobbies yet, but he’s skilled in healing the wounded, more so than many other Warlocks.

What would your Guardian’s lore book be called: Wishborn

Where was your Guardian reborn?(If you created the location, give us a little description!): Somewhere in an abandoned part of The Tangled Shore, a place without name or purpose to anyone.

What were they wearing when they were reborn: Tattered Awoken Corsair clothes.

What was their reaction to being reborn: Confusion

What was their reaction to their first rez: Amazement and laughter. Velliks felt invincible entirely.

After being reborn, did they meet friendlies first or hostiles: Friendlies. The first people he met were the House of Light, and specifically, Mithrax.

Who was the first other Guardian they met?(Same thing! If you made them, give a little description!): Osiris

Did your Guardian get reborn with, or find, any indication of their past life? If so what do they have/found: Velliks’s only indication of his past life was the Corsair clothes. Beyond that, he knew and still knows nothing about who he was, other than that he was clearly Reefborn.

How did your Guardian get their name(if they didn’t rez with past life momentos): After spending months helping House Light, the Eliksni saw the Warlock felt alone without a name. One day, an Eliksni called him “kir-Velliks”, or “strong Velliks”, as he was seen as a strong commander of the House. Thus, he took on the name Velliks, and became a commander within his House.

Going back to your Guardian’s lore book, what would be some some quotes or passages from their book: “A Wish, a Wish for my sake, but at the cost of how many others’?” “Worry not about what will happen to those who wish to help you. They’ve taken the desire you hold, and shared it. Let them rejoice as you shall in your success. Let them help.”

Does your Guardian have a significant other: Nope

Did your Guardian go explore first before going to The Last City? If so, where to: Velliks explored wherever the House of Light went before they finally arrived in The Last City.

What was their reaction to first seeing The Last City: Awe and wonder. It was everything he was told it’d be. Velliks assumed he was on his way to discover it when he’d escaped the Reef, and finally seeing The Last City with his own eyes gave the Eliksni a sense of accomplishment and wholeness.

Is your Guardian a part of a clan: Mithrax’s House of Light

Does your Guardian’s clan have a back story? If so, what is it?(if you want to or able to share): N/A

If your Guardian would have a quote as a flavor text for a weapon and/or piece of armor, what would they be: “A Wish, o Eliksni mine.” “What lovely gloves you’ll make, o Granter mine.”

If your Guardian has had any interactions with any civilians (The Last City/The Farm), Eliksni, Cabal, Vex, Hive, Taken, Scorn, Rouge Lightbearers, or Iron Lords/War Lords(if your Guardian is an Old Light) tell us about it!: Velliks was found upon first revival by the Eliksni of House Light. From there, Velliks began to take on Eliksni habits, lifestyle, personality, everything, and tried to be as much like them as he could, even going so far as mimicking chittering sounds and whatnot. He insisted on speaking Eliksni more than English, and being as much like an Eliksni as he could be.

Does your Guardian have any unconventional allies or connections(By Vanguard standards): Nope, not as of yet

How does your Guardian feel about themselves or others using Stasis: Velliks trusts Stasis entirely, as it was the only way he could stop Eramis from destroying his kind. He knows for a fact that Stasis can be wielded without corrupting the user. Himself and Elsie are proof of this.

Did they run The Last Wish raid? How did they react to seeing a live Ahamkara a.k.a Riven: N/A

Did they run The Deep Stone Crypt raid? How did they react to the Crypt and seeing Exo Eliskni: N/A

Is your Guardian from D1? How did they react to seeing Taniks alive once again: N/A

Where did they go and what did they do during The Red War: Velliks wasn’t revived before the Red War, so he doesn’t remember what he was doing during that time. He assumes, based on how he was revived, he’d been attempting to flee the Reef, however.

Here are some characters that are either polarizing or have created a strong enough mass emotion within the community. What opinion does your Guardian hold on each of them(These are only a handful of characters!)>>>

Osiris, First Warlock Vanguard, originally exiled: Trustworthy, a great teacher, and his ally.

Eris Morn, Bane of the Swarm: He feels bad for Eris, but also admires her DEEPLY! Velliks aspires to be as persistent and driven as Eris, though he’s unaware of just how driven she can be, and how that has proven dangerous.

Cayde-6, Sixth Hunter Vanguard: An interesting guy. Velliks didn’t meet him until after the events of Forsaken and when the Traveler brought him back in my canon, so Velliks is unaware of what the Vanguard has gone through.

Ikora Rey, Second Warlock Vanguard: A deeply dear friend, and his greatest teacher. Velliks has learned everything about being a Warlock from Ikora, and appreciates her, aspires to be as skilled in wielding the Light as she is, and hopes to live up to her name as her student.

Commander Zavala, Second Titan Vanguard: A hesitant ally, but an ally nonetheless. Velliks places his trust wholeheartedly in the man, but the question arises of whether or not Zavala returns it. That remains to be seen, and hoped for.

Saint-14, legendary Titan, First Titan Vanguard: Velliks doesn’t trust him. He wants to, he hopes to, but Saint has been pinned up as an enemy and slaughterer of his kind, and thus, he hesitates to go anywhere near Saint.

Lord Saladin, Iron Banner handler, One of the last remaining Iron Lords: Velliks doesn’t see anything bad about the man, other than his sternness. He’s unaware of what the man has done.

Lord Shaxx, Crucible handler, Hero of Twilight Gap, living megaphone: Noisy, eardrum-shattering man, but kind and loving and supportive. He likes Velliks, and Velliks likes him in turn! They get along amazingly!

The Crow, New Light, Ex-Enforcer to The Spider: A brother, a friend, someone to trust entirely. He’s a part of the House of Light, and must be treated as such.

The Spider, The Shore’s Only Law, founder of “House” Spider: Don’t trust him at any costs. Velliks hasn’t met Spider, but he also hopes he never does.

Uldren Sov, Prince of the Reef, Master of Crows: Velliks never met Uldren, so he has no opinion on him.

Mara Sov, Queen of the Reef, Queen of the Awoken, Ex-Kell of Wolves: A misguided woman who let the Darkness take her and control her.

Variks, the Loyal, founder of House Judgement: An ally and someone who must be protected. Variks is trustworthy and, although mistaken, everyone makes mistakes, and thus, Velliks forgives him.

Mithrax, the Forsaken, Kell of Light, founder of House Light: A father to Velliks, his hero and savior. Mithrax treats Velliks like a son in return.

The Exo Stranger/Elizabeth “Elsie” Bray, Granddaughter of Clovis I and Sister to Ana Bray: A great ally, and teacher in using Stasis. She can and must be trusted, and if he can help ease the burden of teaching other Guardians to use Stasis all alone by doing the same and spreading knowledge of its benefits, he will do that for her sake.

Eramis, of House Salvation, Kell of Darkness: Killer, evil witch, someone who Velliks was glad to eliminate personally. He can’t stand to look at or think about Eramis. She threatened all his kind, and that’s unforgivable.

Empress Caiatl of the Cabal Imperial Empire: Although she’s Cabal, Velliks trusts her. He believes in unconventional alliances, considering he’s Eliksni and a Guardian. Velliks seeks to speak with Caiatl and become a good friend of hers at some point.

Taniks the Scarred, the Perfected, the Abomination, the Shadow Thief: N/A

The Darkness is fast approaching. How is your Guardian handling it: Velliks is scared, but he’s ready to fight. He will give his life fighting the Darkness’s evil if he must do so. And he’s ready for that day, whenever it may come.

And finally, does your Guardian have any advice for any New Lights: “Follow your heart. Only there does the Light guide you. Nowhere else inside.”

#my guardians #long post

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javisjeanjacket · 4 years

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Exile - (poe dameron x fem!reader)

Folklore Series Part 1 /4

A/N: who doesn’t love a bit of yearning in the evening?? this one is inspired by Taylor Swift’s new song, ‘Exile’. If I used your gif or photo in my collage, let me know and I will add your tag! :)

Warnings: cursing, yearning, alcohol reference, poe dameron is in it so there should be a thirst warning as well

Word count: 2K

"Excellent work, the First Order's work on light speed tracking will be extremely valuable if we can crack their hextacryption. Go ahead and return to base." Leia's voice crackled over the holodisplay.

"General, I thought I was assigned to Coruscant permanently." You said, your eyebrows pursed in concern.

Leia chuckled. "I wish we had the money to keep you there permanently. Come back to base and the team will decide where your next deployment will be. May the Force be with you." The gray-haired woman bowed her head and the holodisplay vanished.

You stuffed the holoprojector in your back pocket as your chest tightened. You blinked several times, trying to force your emotions to sort themselves out.

Speeders, cargo ships, and public transports zoomed outside your tiny hotel room viewport. For a moment, it struck you how every one of those creatures in every one of those vehicles had a life as rich and flawed as your own.

Your mind wandered to Poe Dameron; lost somewhere in the stars so very far away from you. Your fingers absentmindedly grazed over the top of your wrist and for a fleeting moment, you were able to convince yourself it was Poe's hand on your skin.

The communicator on the nightstand beeped, pulling you from your delusion, and resounded, "Transport arriving at 21:04."

Taking a steadying breath, you looked once more over the hotel room that had become your home during your work on the city planet. Your mind filled with memories of nights not too long past; how your body had curled into the thin sheets and how violently your fingers had clenched the pillow tucked to your chest. Flashes of nightmares zipped through your mind as did the many nights spent with your heart drowning in tears and alcohol.

A deep loneliness washed over you, pushing your heart to jump and yelp against your rib cage.

Your eyes felt heavy and hot tears pricked at the sides of them as you began to gather your clothes from the small closet in the corner of the room. Haphazardly stuffing them in your rucksack, your mind did not have to work hard to envelop you completely.

Ripped from some hiding spot deep within, the memory of Poe's hand on your back sending shivers across your skin, now spun on display in the front of your thoughts. His smile beaming in the sunlight. How soft his lips were on your cheek every morning, the sweet must of your bodies intertwined. The wave of his hair curling away from his face. The fire in his eyes and in his footsteps.

The feelings still living inside of you for Poe Dameron; so long harbored and so long neglected, moved with a fury to invigorate your feeble heart. Beating against your chest, the muscle threatened to shatter all over again.

Reality reminded you of the last time you had seen the pilot; the red rings around his deep brown eyes and his hand tracing his lips, frustrated. How hot the fire inside your chest had burned, how utterly defeated you had felt. How the feeling of your words, heavy as stones in your mouth, still filled you with regret.

The way his face had twisted in pain, how taken aback he was. Poe, for as much as you loved him, could never seem to hear you out. In his mind, he felt that he could make things the way he wanted them to be, just by his sheer will and determination. To him, Poe Dameron was the end all, be all of his own destiny. And, to an extent, he was right, but when it came to other people he struggled with the notion that to have them in his life, it meant he actually had to have them in his life.

You dropped your head to your chest and wiped a warbling tear from your eye.

One of your favorite shirts wrapped around your hand; absentmindedly you had strangled it.

You stuffed the shirt into your bulging bag and zipped it closed.

Taking a deep breath, you flicked your eyes to the clock on your bedside table.

'21:03' It displayed. Swallowing against a dry throat, you picked your rucksack up from the floor and left your hotel room, the lock clicking firmly behind you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You didn't know what you expected to feel, coming back to Base after months away, but it wasn't this.

You sat upright in the pilot's chair of your ship, your back straight against the cushion behind you and your knees pushed tightly together. Nausea rose in the back of your throat and you had to force it back down.

The Resistance Base came into view and your heart leapt from your chest and into your hands. Your fingertips seemed to glow, drunk on a cocktail of adrenaline and anxiety. Your own words echoed around your mind, 'I think that it's best if you just leave me alone.' 'When I'm with you, I can't stop myself from trying to pretend that I don't feel the way I do.'

'Do I still feel that way?' You interrupted yourself.

Mindlessly, your fingers began to prep the landing sequence.

'I'll have to see him. I can be civil. I'm sure I was just being dramatic.' Your eyes settled over the Resistance flight techs moseying in your direction, half hoping to recognize a face on one of them.

Taking a deep breath and hurrying through the ship to gather your things, you met the landing dock as it lowered to the ground beneath you. You nodded a greeting and smiled softly to the techs hurrying towards your ship, asking if you needed fuel or repairs.

A familiar astromech droid's beeping pulled your attention to your shin.

You smiled broadly at the little orange and white ball droid, squealing as you bent down to rub his sides. "BB-8!" You exclaimed. "Oh, I missed you buddy!"

The droid moved back and forth excitedly and beeped rapidly, firing off a story just too important not to tell you.

You nodded, fully unaware of what he was saying, but happy to see him so happy nonetheless. The droid finished his spewing and began to whir back to the compound, towards the one person you did not want to see, you assumed.

"BB-8!" You called, not wanting to hurt the little droid's feelings by abandoning him. "I'm going to find Leia."

The droid's visual receptor widened and then narrowed. His system was processing why you didn’t choose the most logical thing to do after being away from Poe for so many months.

You smiled gently at the droid and headed towards the bustling Base entrance. Resistance members hurried past you, chatting to each other, pointing harshly with eyebrows furrowed, and others laughing heartily.

The path through the D'Qar Base was easy and memorized, your boots clacking on the metallic floor below steadily. You shouldered your rucksack closer to you and squeezed through the frantic hallway. Nerves wrapped their hands around your stomach, flipping it over and over again. Your eyes scanned the hordes of people, unconsciously searching for the face of the Resistance's most valuable pilot. You made your way into the war room where you spotted Leia's heather gray hair hovering over a holodisplay table. Close by though, a familiar black mop of unruly curls moved from one side of the room to the other. His voice carried through the din and his finger pointed to something on the holodisplay.

Suddenly, your legs were planted where you stood. You could feel them tremble and your breathing hitch on it's way out. Half of you screamed, 'Run! Run!' and the other half felt as if it would never move again.

'Well, I can't very well run away now, people have seen me.'

Taking several short breaths in, you moved your gaze from Poe to Leia. Setting your shoulders back and sticking your chin out defiantly, you moved through the clusters of Resistance intel officers to General Organa.

She and Poe both had their backs to you, Poe still explaining his thoughts.

"General Organa." You said, your chest out proudly.

Leia turned to face you and her features softened.

At the sound of your voice, Poe whipped around from the star chart in front of him and his mouth gaped slightly.

You could feel how hot his gaze burned on your face, but you dared not to meet his eyes and satisfy him.

Leia greeted you and ran her hands up your forearms. "I'm so glad you're back safely. The intel you brought us was invaluable."

You smiled at her as your thoughts began to pound against your skull, 'Look at him, look at him, look at him.'

"Thank you, Leia." You answered.

"Poe," Leia began and turned to your ex-boyfriend.

Anxiety rose up in your chest and your eyes moved back and forth between the two of them frantically.

"Will you make sure your friend here makes it to her quarters alright? I can finish up here without you." She looked between the two of you with a knowing look on her face.

"Oh, General, that's not-" You began.

Leia held up a jewel-clad hand. "I'm sure you two have a lot to talk about."

Your eyes finally met Poe's and you could almost feel yourself tripping into them again.

Poe's face was set, his curiosity now turned to steeliness. He pulled his eyes from yours and looked down at his boots. His hands rested on his hips underneath his flightsuit, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to snap it's fangs at you. He looked up at you again, his chest beating shallowly, and then turned to walk down the corridor you had entered through. His frustration trailed after him, bouncing and wailing like a child pouting.

You clutched the strap of your bag and kept your head down, your eyes following the up and down of Poe's scuffed boots through the hallway.

He turned and lead you down a darkened corridor, and as well as you could remember, it was no longer used because of the unsafe door panel wiring.

Your eyebrows scrunched and you could feel a shudder in your chest as you realized why he had brought you this way. The best pilot in the Resistance wanted closure.

Poe's lean body turned around to face you. His bottom lip tucked into his mouth and his eyes scanned the hallway behind you, his senses heightened by the surprise of seeing you.

"Look," He began, his arms crossed over his chest. His voice was just as you remembered it. Just as you had heard it so many times before.

A burning desire to hear your name in his mouth again, to hear him shape you with his tongue, rose in your chest.

"We gotta talk about what happened. If you're gonna be here, I need to know how to be around you." His dark eyes had an unrelenting hold on yours. In the dim light of the hallway, shadows played across his face, painting him in darkness almost overwhelming.

"I don't know what you want me to say." You choked out. A muscle behind your eye twitched.

"Do you want me to not talk to you and avoid you in the halls or what? What do you want?" Poe's voice was laced with frustration. You could sense a deep melancholy in him and the anger guarding it carefully.

"No, Poe, I-" You sighed and tucked your shaking hands into your back pockets. "You don't have to do that."

"Then, what?" He spat. His arms flung outwards to emphasize the end of his question. He was trying to keep his voice quiet but his passion kept pushing him upwards.

"Why don't you tell me what you want." You said, his frustration frustrating you.

Poe chuckled indignantly. "What I want? What do I want?" He took a step back and turned from you. "Do you even remember what we were like?"

You gritted your teeth as you blinked hot tears away from your eyes. Of course, you remembered. The secret dates off-planet, the way he would run to wherever you were to give you a goodbye kiss before leaving on mission, no matter how quickly he needed to take off. How could you forget?

"I remember everything." You whispered.

Poe's face scanned over yours, searching for what you meant to say. His jaw set and his chest heaved shallowly. His head tilted to the side, looking at you. The skin around his eyes softened.

"Then...what happened?" He asked tenderly.

"I ...I loved you every day we were together." You admitted. The words nestled for so many months in your heart now taking off and flying on their own.

"It was real for me, whatever we were. But..." You shook your head, your eyes keeping Poe's hostage. "I don't think it was for you."

Poe reached a shaking hand out to touch your face. His skin kissed your cheek and your eyes shut involuntarily, a relief you didn't know you needed. "I never could read your mind, could I?" He chuckled lightly.

One side of your face turned upwards and your throat burned at the tears yanking at your eyes.

His thumb wandered to graze down your chin and then to rest around your jaw. "I missed you every day we were apart. I pretended like I didn't but...you never gave me a warning sign. I never understood what happened." His eyes fell to your lips and his body seemed to freeze in place there.

You shook your head and pulled yourself out of his ensnaring grasp. "Poe, I gave you every sign that I could. I told you every day, a million little times, that I was going to leave. You just didn't want to hear me."

The pilot sighed heavily and his eyes watered. "Can we just...try again? Do you," He sighed again and looked back up to your eyes. "Do you still feel the same way about me?"

You pulled your top lip into your mouth and drug it across your teeth, the pain a welcome release of the mounting pressure inside you. "We've both seen this Holofilm before, and neither of us liked the ending. It's time to let go." The harshness of your own words ripped your throat to shreds, but you kept your lips firmly shut.

"And what if I can't let go?" Poe asked, his tone clipping at the end of his unspoken deceleration. His body moved closer to yours and his wide palm reached to hold the small of your back.

Looking up into Poe’s hazel eyes and feeling his muscles tensing around your body again sent a wave of light-headedness through your mind.

"I think I can find my quarters on my own, Commander. Thank you for your help." Your voice broke as you pushed yourself out of Poe's grasp and headed towards the women's sleeping quarters. You kept your eyes trained on the ground below as you tainted it with hot tears, plopping and splashing against the cool metal of the Resistance base floor.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What did you think? I really hope you enjoyed reading my work. Just your liking / re-blogging it means a lot. If you have a moment, I would love to hear your thoughts! Tell me what you think via my ask box or a comment always warms my heart!! Thank you again for reading!

Need more reading material? You can visit my Masterlist for more Poe Dameron content, as well as my other works.

Want to be kept in the loop? Let me know so I can put your handle in my taglist form. Right now, I’m writing for Poe Dameron, Din Djarin, and Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia, but I have plans to expand my SW character list, and eventually add in my favorites from the MCU as well.

Thanks again for reading! Sending love! -hai

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davey-dammit · 5 years

Quote

Fashion often changes in broad, pendulum-like swings, and this is a good example of the phenomenon. But while the question is deceptively simple, the answer is complex, because it involves explaining several social and historical convergences. Bear with me, if you will, and I hope all will become clear: In the early 70's, there came about, pretty abruptly, a strong visual backlash against the electric, high-chroma,"psychedelic" colour palette that was such an iconic feature of the late 60's hippie culture; in short, the style got old very fast. The reasons were multiple: America was now deep in a quagmire of war; thousands were being drafted and returning home in coffins, mere weeks after their induction; protesters were being beaten and jailed; every day, the newspapers (!) revealed our leaders to be ever more egregiously stupid crooks, liars and fools. Madness and anarchy seemed to lie around every corner. Somehow all that celebratory, fun, acid-saturated colour now seemed ... silly and self-indulgent. It became as inappropriate as wearing a "Smile" t-shirt to a schoolbus rollover. And all the gentle social upheaval and genial questioning of institutional values that those bright colours once cheekily promised? Well, they no longer carried much appeal. In fact, they seemed frightening - just more uncertainty and conflict, in already uncertain and conflicted times. People were suddenly in the visual mood for something more muted, contemplative and restrained. The faintly mournful "autumn" colour palette - dark orange, oxblood, copper, brown, harvest gold, avocado green - filled that need so well that, as you point out, it literally became symbolic of the decade. Perhaps simply because it reminded folks of a less complex time, when subtle, visually digestible, vegetable-based dyes coloured our surroundings, rather than incomprehensible, knock-your-eyes-out chemical pigments (whose colours were actually meant to approximate the livelier visual effects of a hallucinogenic experience!). Concurrently with the shift in colour preferences, smaller, meticulously repeated patterns once again began to appear on fabrics and wallpapers, as sharp stylistic counterpoint to the free-form, Yellow Submarine-esque, "supergraphic rainbow" visuals that had overwhelmed every available wall surface during the previous decade. Those autumn colours also thematically supported, and were cross-fertilized by, the decade's nascent "natural" movement. Still inspired by the lofty ideals of their older siblings' recently failed hippie paradigm, and boosted by the first vague stirrings of the modern ecology movement, '70s boomers forsook (at least temporarily) their parents' blatant consumerim, and instead embraced the generationally dormant, homespun handicrafts of their grandparents: macramé, crochet, bargello, weaving, leatherworking, cutting down old beer bottles into drinking glasses. The handicrafts they created and proudly decorated their homes with were mostly made from organic materials, so they just looked better when surrounded with earth-tone colours. Chromatic colour was out, because it detracted from the workmanship - which was, after all, what differentiated handmade-and-unique from factory-extruded and common. This attitudinal shift towards muted, "homemade" colour and texture, and away from slick, obviously industrial colours and finishes was, at least in part, probably a subconscious side-effect of the 70's generation's fast-growing resentment of both the politician-buying industrial complex, and its ongoing material support for a war they despised. (Yes, the war ended in '75, but resentments lingered.) It was, if you will, a form of protest, or boycott: a generation's tentative, somewhat pathetic attempt to re-exert control over their own visual destiny, and to wrest whatever tiny part of their environment they still could, away from the overbearing and apparently malignant industrial and commercial forces that were threatening to overwhelm them socially, financially and politically. At the same time as these colour and design changes took hold in home decor, people began gradually shifting their wardrobes back to natural wools and cottons. After a decade and a half of collecting increasingly slinky, shiny, uncomfortable, odiferous and obviously synthetic garments - which were themselves a pendulum-swing away from the ossified white-cotton-shirt, gray-flannel-suit ethos of the two decades following WWII, the fabric-choice pendulum was again swinging back. And in clothing, as in interior design, autumnal, natural colours were generally seen to be more complementary to natural materials than chromatic colours. That all being said (whew!), the prevalence of the autumnal palette wasn't really as all-encompasing as retro media like That 70's Show would have us believe. (Btw, what was up with the anachronistic, so-90's, industrial loft-tech, cheese-grater kitchen lights? Obvious clanger.) Designers frequently go kind of over-the-top when they try to recreate a period look, a generation or more later. Frankly, even Mad Men, though certainly very well researched, is visually a little overbearing in its representation of the period; after all, not everything in the Sixties was of the Sixties; some of it hailed from the Fifties and Forties, even the Thirties. Just as we still occasionally see an 80's wood panelled Buick land-shark station wagon in the Walmart parking lot, or a suitcase-sized VCR parked under a friend's tube TV, I long to see a cheap postwar suit on some poor agency schlub who supervises the steno pool. Instead, everybody wears Brooks Brothers. All the time. It is also instructive to realize that within any fashion era "look" you'd care to examine, competing visual ideas constantly jousted with one another for dominance. Visual style is a roiling river, not a still pond. Remember that the "natural, homespun" 70's were also the era that gave birth to platform boots for men, polyester lounge suits, "designer" jeans, disco, the New York Dolls, foil wallpaper, smoked glass coffee tables, naugahyde sofas, spherical stereo speakers, shag carpet, gold-veined mirror tiles, chrome overhead lamps, and pink Christmas trees; and may God forgive my generation for those particular stylistic trespasses. For further proof, take another look at Goodfellas, with an eye to the set decoration and costumes; it is a veritable omnibus of questionable 70's design. (And a showcase for some very clever designers!) Next instalment: why the theme colours of the late '50s and early '60s were red, pastel green, chrome yellow and teal, and why commercial printers suddenly stopped putting type into straight lines. Source: Lived through it all. Also, history of design in theatre school.

theartfulcodger (reddit post from 2014)

A really well thought out and interesting answer to the question “Does anyone really know why brown and orange were so popular in the 70s?”

#70s fashion #70s #70s style #retro 70s #observational insight #sociological take on 70s fashion

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firstpuffin · 5 years

Text

Where is Frozen 2 going to go, and will it meet the standard of the first?

It’s probably worth pointing out early on that I don’t watch trailers to the things that I’m interested in; I’ve had too many experience ruining spoilers, which also happens to be an article in the works. I avoid as much as I can about the movie, series or game, which means that everything I have to say about the upcoming Frozen 2 is based solely on posters, the products we get in at work and experience.

So, sequels are a difficult thing to pull off, like wet clothes or a duct-tape gag. A good, satisfying movie should stand on its own without needing a follow up movie, television series or other separate source (looking at you Marvel Cinematic Universe). But of course this complete story can mean that it’s hard to follow up on. That’s why the first Kingdom Hearts game appears to close off the story (mostly) while letting you know that the main cast haven’t stopped adventuring; it’s both finished and open to expansion.

I wanted to throw in a bad example but I think it’s telling of the internet age that I don’t remember any; I only ever seem to watch or play things that have been recommended for quality (or I watch specifically because they are bad) so I haven’t experienced many bad sequels in recent years. I’ve suddenly lost confidence in this article… Still, it’s nice to only remember the good examples because depressed people typically better remember bad memories than good, so maybe I’m managing my own better? Silver linings.

The second Harry Potter book could have been a travesty. They’d apparently killed off for good the big bad antagonist with He-who-must-not-be-named’s revival being foiled, only to be followed up by another attempt set into motion before he died originally. You could accuse this of being a forced method of continuing the story for a number of reasons, but that’s how writing goes. The diary horcrux doesn’t contradict anything from the first book and isn’t a deus-ex-machina at the end of a story, so where’s the problem?

Star Wars did this well too: the first movie was actually very simple. Leia asks for help, this leads to finding the Luke which leads to saving the Leia, which leads to defeating the bad guys. It’s a super-simple three acts that closes the story while also leaving things open (although what with Lucas changing everything I don’t know about the original versions…). Then the second movie expands on the simple story and background set up by the first movie, of the empire, Vader etc.

Another way to do a sequel is just to have a series of movies that follow the adventures of the heroes without any mention of destiny or anything particularly grand. Look at any action movie series: sure, they may be saving the world but nothing really changes after each movie. Iron Man is just Iron Man making up for mistakes. Ethan Hunt is just trying to- save the girl? Am I misremembering this or is Ethan usually trying to protect a woman? Sure, he saves the world too, but that’s secondary.

Anyway, these movies are pretty simple and don’t try to take things too far. Look at the tagline for Frozen 2: “Destiny Awaits”. I mean, ignoring how dull it is to bring destiny into a story it’s apparently the only way for the writers to keep to the scale of the first film, which was a Game of Thrones (GoT) attempt at taking over a fucking kingdom (a word that has lost a lot of impact through Disney films so just take a moment to think about how huge it really is), while a freezing apocalypse (huh, it is GOT) ravages it.

So thinking back to what I said about Star Wars, what did the first Frozen movie set up that is still available for use? Hans is gone, Anna and Elsa made up, that one angry Duke may return but I can’t see him as a valid villain. The only thing left is the mystery of Elsa’s Wintersmith powers which, given the destiny angle, is probably where this is going. And it’s boring. As a society we need a break from destiny, it’s everywhere. Chosen ones in particular are annoying.

But it seems we are going to have another one. Elsa’s powers make her a chosen one and something is going to happen to require her to defeat some great scourge in a far-off land- Why am I talking about adventure though? Well, the merch has a lot of pictures of Elsa, Anna and Kristoff with horses and one particular poster, the one that inspired this article in the first place, has them cheerfully walking along a snowy riverbank.

I’ve been nanny-negative so far (does nanny-negative work? I don’t know why I said it) so let’s look at what does have me interested. That poster that changed the course of this article? Not only was it a super pretty piece of art (but too big to put in my room), but while it seemed to be set during the day and the snow was pure white as it tends to be in the day, the river water was an ominous red.

I didn’t even notice it at first, but when I did it immediately set a scene. Sure, the scene is exactly what I bemoaned earlier, but the poster set it up so well that I don’t mind. Absolutely, I think that having our heroes go on an adventure is the easy option for a prequel and while I can’t think of any examples (it’s bad, I know, but at least I’m being honest) I’m sure it’s done frequently.

Frozen set one hell of a standard for any potential sequels to try and meet and if it isn’t met then people

will

get upset because people: well that’s what they do. It may have been better left as a stand-alone film, but we’ll see.

#first puffin #I'mgettingfedupoftags #frozen #frozen2 #writing #borednow #thosetagswilldofornow

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calleo-bricriu · 5 years

Text

Haven’t done one of these in awhile so...

full name: Calleo Bricriu. @braxfordthebeater knows his middle name and their agreement is that Calleo will never use Braxford's first name and Braxford will never use Calleo's middle name.

pronunciation: There are technically around three correct ways to pronounce it, so he's not exactly picky. That’s not even a joke, there are several ways to say it.

nicknames: @kerrotko 's Severus is allowed to call him Leo. @absintheabsence has probably 15 or so various pet names for him. @pocketsfullofspiders often just calls him babe. Goblins are contractually allowed to call him Hunðeow, which means lapdog.

height. 5'8"

age. Verse dependent, but most often in his 30s (Golden Trio era) or mid to late 40s (Fantastic Beasts verse).

zodiac. Leo. If you want his full birth chart, my dumb ass put that together and it's here.

languages. Fluently spoken: English Spoken well enough that he could probably get by without completely embarrassing himself, though it'd still be obvious it's on shaky ground: German & Danish. Written/Reading: Latin, Middle English, Old English, German, as those are most commonly what he sees at work.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair colour. Kinda orange. If you wanted to be nice, red. If you wanted to be annoying, ginger.

eye colour. Brown. Depending on the colour and amount of eye makeup worn that can appear anything from almost yellow to black but, on their own, without heavy makeup, they're a pretty run of the mill brown.

skin tone. Pretty pale in that way gingers tend to be. It doesn't help that he works in a department below ground with no windows, it's often dark when he gets in and dark when he leaves. He doesn't avoid daylight on purpose, it just works out that way.

body type. If you asked him, he could stand to drop a few pounds. Nobody with eyes would use words like 'lithe' or 'slim' to describe him. He just looks kind of soft.

accent. Two options:

Option 1: At work and/or if he wants to make sure you can understand what he's saying, he puts on a WWN broadcaster accent. So, the sort of generic accent people not in the UK think of when they think of a "British accent". Kinda boring.

Option 2: A hellscape that mixes the accent from the area he grew up in, which is far Northern, rural Scotland and a mix of vowels sounding a bit off as his mother is from Northern Denmark and has a fairly thick accent with a tiny sprinkling of Northern Scottish.

To start.

Once he moved closer to London, more bits and pieces of surrounding (and varied) accents started creeping in, and when he moved back to a rural Scottish town again (though this time, near the English border and about 30 minutes West of Newcastle) it got muddled even further.

At this point, if he speaks at his normal speed and you haven't know him for years, it probably sounds like he's either not speaking English or is just babbling nonsense. If he speeds it up and mumbles, good fucking luck figuring out what he’s saying. While that occasionally happens if he's excited about something, he most often drops the "broadcaster" accent and speech patterns for it if he wants someone to go away and stop talking to him.

He thinks in that accent as well as he found it to be a reasonably decent built in Occlumancy defence.

dominant hand. Either or for most things, with a slight preference given to the right.

posture. He either looks intensely interested in/friendly toward something he's interested in with posture and body language that conveys that very clearly or completely detached to the point that others sometimes wonder if he's listening at all for day to day work interactions.

The feigned disinterest is often used in business transactions with certain types of people who are likely to get offended and try even harder to get his attention because how dare someone not be interested in their magnificence?

He does tend to slouch or sit however he finds most comfortable, which may or may not be correctly or on a piece of furniture designed for sitting.

scars. He's got a good collection, usually from experimental magic backfiring, sometimes from duels, occasionally from fights. A few are intentional and inflicted by other people.

tattoos. Nope.

most noticeable features. He thinks it's his mess of hair. Other people tend to say it's more the bright clothing.

CHILDHOOD.

place of birth. Braemar, Scotland.

hometown. Also Braemar.

birth weight / height. He's never thought to ask but assumes it was within normal ranges.

manner of birth. Oh, you know, the usual way.

first words. "What's that?" mashed into one word.

siblings. Exactly zero.

parents. Thrasius & Beathas (Kjeldgaard) Bricriu

parental involvement. He was and still is very close to both of his parents and they are involved in his adult life as well. They both work at the Ministry and have a tendency to visit him at least once per day if he’s there.

ADULT LIFE

occupation. Senior Archivist in the Department of Mysteries’ Research Wing.

close friends. Verse/RP dependent for canon characters. In my main verse, in the canon basket of close friends there’s: @absintheabsence @aconxtum @kerrotko ‘s Severus, @severus-snape-of-spinners-end, @theotherdumbledore (when they’re around!), @ambiidexter (Sorry Remus :) ).

In terms of canon characters he’s on friendly (or at least not hostile) terms with, in my main verse: @lamentedhope , @thegreatestminister , @slytherin-bled (Bellatrix), @tmvoldemort , @0lliivanders, @leeriverofwordsjordan

For OC characters he’s on friendly terms with: @lyraxlestrange

For friends' OCs, those close friends span any verse, so @misfit-herbologist @pracownik-ministerstwa @braxfordthebeater @pocketsfullofspiders @legilimens-corvus-frugilegus (who also plays Gan) and @directoryandle are always around in some form or another.

relationship status. In several open relationships at any given time. In most, the only overlapping feature is Calleo, all of his partners are aware of the others and have no issues with it because good communication and established rules about how everything works is a thing, and a thing that everyone is willing to abide by.

financial status. His public finances show him pretty standard middle class.

driver’s license. Nope.

criminal record. Roughly 9 alleged Statute of Secrecy violations (all dismissed), one Excessive Use of Force (also dismissed, it's difficult to charges to stick to someone who works in the Department of Mysteries), and one assault and battery of law enforcement during the First War that was ruled self defence.

SEX & ROMANCE.

sexual orientation. Whatever, as long as you're at least 50% human and look generally human. romantic orientation. Also whatever.

preferred emotional role. submissive | dominant | switch | Depends on the partner and what the general mood is each particular time. There are definitely more than three options here.

preferred sexual role. submissive | dominant | switch | Depends on the partner and what the general mood is each particular time. There are definitely more than three options here.

turn ons. Treating him as an equal and educated member of his professional field (as opposed to some kid playing with dangerous magic), generally not being a complete arse, focusing more on his intellectual and magical strengths and accomplishments over, "You're pretty". Being interested in the type of work he does.

turn offs. Treating him like a child, like he's beneath you, arrogance that can't be backed up with skill, explaining to him why you think his occupation and hobbies are "immoral", reading his own research back to him and doing it in a way that shows you didn't actually understand what you wrote, giving him orders of any sort if that wasn't an agreed upon game, being casually horrible about things like, "Aurors keep society safe", "Anyone using the Dark Arts belongs in Azkaban," "Werewolves aren't people," things of that nature. Telling him he "could do better" after meeting one or more of his long term partners.

love language. Talking to you without being under work orders to talk to you, letters at all hours of the night for no reason other than to say something that happened to pop into his head, gifts that cannot be mistaken for anything other it meaning he knows you very, very well, physical touch (platonic or otherwise), voluntarily spending time with you without having to schedule it. In general, if he's voluntarily giving you his time, you matter to him on some level.

relationship tendencies. Pretty things that will indulge his habits and research projects. The bonus here is that if you're willing to and skilled enough to do the latter, he's going to find you very pretty indeed. Ugly is more a state of mind anyway.

MISCELLANEOUS.

character’s theme song. Doom or Destiny - Blondie & Joan Jett

hobbies to pass the time. Work, only he calls it a hobby at that point. Spell modification/creation, discussing magical theory, laying around while doing those first three things, watching other people work if what they're doing requires fine manual dexterity, playing bait in traps he works with to set up, needling various departments at the Ministry about how they're doing their jobs poorly, performing 'magic tricks' (card tricks with marked decks, distraction based illusions, sleight of hand, etc...) around Muggles just to see if the Department of Magical Law Enforcement will get their hackles raised and try to arrest him again, a lot of completely unmentionable things because it's not Sunday.

left or right brained. The type of work he's involved in relies on fairly even communication between the two.

fears. Slipping and losing himself to addiction again. In that vein, losing the ability to keep a stranglelhold on that addiction and turning into something--unstable and violent.

self confidence level. He keeps it in line with his abilities and is exceptionally careful not to let his reach exceed his grasp; when it comes to working with the Dark Arts and the other sorts of people who also work with the Dark Arts, letting your ego get the better of you is often a very good way to end up dead.

It’s not arrogance if you can back it up, after all.

vulnerabilities. Those are on a need to know basis; those who need to know already do. The most obvious one anyone else would see comes out when he talks about addiction as it's clear, either by how specific it is, or because he verbatim says so, that he's primarily talking about his experience with it.

tagged by: stolen from @mia-castellan because I haven't done one of these in awhile. tagging: whoever wants to. I bunch of you all got tagged further up so that also works.

#ooc #about #character info

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iffltd · 6 years

Video

vimeo

Sigur Rós - Excerpt from Mankind’s Destiny : A Tribute to Space Sci-Fi Movie from Richard Vezina on Vimeo.

FULL VERSION OF MANKIND'S DESTINY : vimeo.com/193994400 ----------------- Mankind’s Destiny is a mash-up/homage to space exploration and science-fiction films set in space. The combination of historical space conquest events with sci-fi cinema may seem unusual due to the differences between fiction and reality. However, an increasing number of sci-fi movies opt for technical realism close to actual current and future space conquest accomplishments. The selection was made based on the movies' visuals and impact. Space opera-style films (such as Star Wars) were partly or completely skipped; however, some scenes were taken from movies like Star Trek, simply because of their beauty. However, many interesting movies on this subject were not selected, because their visuals did not match the project.

- Why are 1950s and 1960s science-fiction classics missing? Aside from Forbidden Planet, no footage from any other movies from that era was used. The special effects' quality in such films simply does not fit in with the effects found in more recent movies.

- Why is there so few Soviet archive footage? The amount of footage available from the Soviet space programme is very low compared to the American programme. Also, most of the available footage is in low resolution. Since this is not a documentary, but rather an art piece, it was impossible to include more of them.

- About the Nedelin catastrophe The Nedelin catastrophe isn't directly linked to the Soviet space programme. In fact, it was closely related to the launch of ICBM missiles. However, the technologies that were tested were to be integrated to the space programme. In Russia, October 24 is a day dedicated to the memory of the people who gave their life to space conquest, and no rocket launch can be held on that date. This is why this event can somewhat be linked to the Soviet space programme.

- Earthrise The Apollo 10 Earthrise shown in the first part wasn't the first one ever witnessed by human beings. The first occurrence dates back to the Apollo 8 mission and was immortalized on a classic photo by William Anders.

- Image modification Some image manipulation was required to better integrate the selected footage to the project (inversion, rescaling, colour correction, etc.)

- Lisa Gerrard – Abwoon (Our Father) The selection of this song was made strictly for its music. There is no relation between this project and the lyrics' meaning.

- Distribution This project started in the fall of 2015. A public screening of the first version was held in Montreal in the summer of 2016, during Fantasia Festival. Editing was done entirely with Premiere Pro CC.

- Who am I? I live in Montreal and work in a field outside of video editing. I create such projects during my free time, as a mere film lover. --------------------------------------- Music: John Murphy, Sigur Rós, Lisa Gerrard, James Horner, Johann Strauss II Films: 2001, 2010, Alien, Apollo 13, Armageddon, Avatar, Blade Runner, Cargo, Close Encounters, of the Third Kind, Contact, Elysium, Ender's Game, Europa Report, Event Horizon, First Orbit (audio), Forbidden Planet, Gagarin first in space, Gravity, Interstellar, Love, Mission to Mars, Moon, Moonwalk One (audio), Outland, Prometheus, Red Planet, Silent Running, Solaris (Tarkovsky), Solaris (Soderbergh), Space Cowboys, Sphere, Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek The Motion Picture, Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars The Force Awakens, Stargate Atlantis, Sunshine, The Core, The Day the Earth Stood Still (Derrickson), The Fountain, The Martian, The Right Stuff, Transformers Dark of the Moon, Earth from space, For all mankind, How russia won the space race, IMAX - Blue planet, IMAX - Mission to mir, IMAX - The Dream is alive, In the shadow of the moon, Last flight of the space shuttle, NASA Archives, Race to the moon, Roscosmos Archives, Columbia Space shuttle disaster, The space shuttle last flight, The space shuttle a horizon guide, To the moon (audio), When we left earth --------------------------------------- This is a non-profit video made for entertainment purposes only. All rights to any material used remain the property of their respective owners.

Mankind’s Destiny on Youtube : youtu.be/CrNC4V6XfLE

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betweensceneswriter · 6 years

Text

Island Hopper (Jimjeran Book 2)- Chapter 14 : Ache

Claire continues to work on the Field Ship and finds herself getting to know John better and missing Jamie...

Previously on Island Hopper

To the Table of Contents

At breakfast the next morning, I found myself at the same table as Dr. Saul. We smiled at each other across the table as we attempted to fuel ourselves for the day with a breakfast of rice, fish, and breadfruit. I found myself longing for a bowl of Jamie’s steel cut oatmeal—what he called ‘porridge’—chewy and satisfying especially when topped with brown sugar and powdered milk. Thinking of him made me feel even emptier than I already did.

“It’s a shame that there’s not time for follow-ups,” the kindly doctor remarked, his brown eyes a contrast to his stark white hair. “Some of the teeth I had to pull yesterday could actually have been saved if I had time to do a crown. But with such a short time to visit, if a cavity goes deep enough and can’t be fixed with an amalgam filling the tooth has to go.”

“I feel the same way,” I replied, pushing the dry roasted breadfruit around my plate. As much as I tried to tell myself it was just a starch like potatoes and that despite its name it wasn’t supposed to taste like either bread or fruit, I couldn’t bring myself to eat it if it wasn’t drenched in oil and salt. “I guess Arno is lucky to have a nurse practitioner there, though we don’t have a dentist… speaking of which, Dr. Saul, do you think I might be able to observe an extraction? A toothache is one of the things that makes people miserable, and I’d like to be able to at least help them if they’ve got a horribly abscessed tooth. I don’t want to make it worse for them by cracking a tooth off in their jaws.”

Dr. Saul smiled. “You’ve got to become a jack of all trades out on these islands, don’t you?” He looked at me curiously. “My wife was a nurse before we retired. I’ve tended to come on these adventures without her, but I keep on wishing she would be willing, for a short time if not several months, to serve out on one of these islands.” He smiled. “Then I’d finally have time to do dental work the way I’d like to, and she could be my assistant if she wasn’t otherwise occupied.”

All too soon it was time for us to take our dishes to the galley, call out “kommool tata” to the cook, and head to our respective stations.

We had docked on Jabor, the islet with the largest population on Jaluit. I was surprised to see how westernized the little town was, like a miniature Majuro. Instead of palm trees radiating out from the dock, there were some paved roads and some coral gravel roads, houses, a couple of small stores, and a school. It seemed like every spare inch of space was covered with either a building or road.

The ship still had a large delivery of boxes to offload and copra to pick up, but it was obvious that the residents had less need of the medical services we provided. Dr. Saul, however was quite busy, so during my patient breaks he was able to coach me through several extractions. He showed me how to grip the tooth and rock it back and forth in its socket to loosen the bone and detach the ligament before removing the tooth. Preparation, he said, was extremely important and would prevent the tooth splintering on removal.

He also demonstrated what to do if a tooth cracked on its way out—how to flush the cavity and make sure to extract the other pieces, to close the opening with a few stitches, as well as giving the patient instructions to rinse their mouths with salt water until fully healed.

John had a bit of a weak stomach, so he was quite grateful to relinquish the assistant spot to me, and instead manned the fort in the clinic to come get me if I had a patient and handed out toothbrushes and toothpaste to curious children peering into the dental operatory.

Because Jabor was so well-supplied and urbanized, the ship only spent half the day there. At our lunch break, the boat left the dock and pressed north to another island in the atoll a 45-minute journey away.

After we’d filled our plates, John and I found a shady spot on the upper deck to eat, as far away as possible from the bags of copra piled high on the main deck so that the rancid odor no longer overpowered us. It was getting worse as the trip progressed and the supply of smoked coconut increased, though if we ever got a breeze at night, it seemed to blow the smell away. However, in the past few days the ocean had been remarkably still and currently the only disturbance on the water was the white “v” of our wake.

“Where are we going now?” I asked John.

“Imiej,” he replied. “It was where the Japanese were based during World War II here.” John pointed ahead to the far end of the long green island parallel to our course. “There are ruins of barracks and an old Shinto shrine there, as well as wrecks of boats and airplanes that divers come to see.”

“I knew that Guam was held by the Japanese during World War II,” I nodded. “I hadn’t realized that the Marshall Islands were, too.”

“It’s taken a while for us to travel toward independence,” John smiled. “In the 1880s during the imperialism rush, Germany claimed the Marshall Islands. They put in a trading post here on Jaluit. After World War I, Germany lost the territory and we were given to Japan.”

“As if your nation was something that could belong to anyone other than her people?”

John inspected his fish and selected the perfect bite to pair with his rice. John was handsome, refined, and distinguished, and yet he looked just as at home eating coconut rice and barbecued fish with his fingers as if he was using utensils in a fine dining establishment.

“Well, Claire,” he said, smiling patiently, “Though a small nation does not have much control of her destiny, what can be accomplished viewing history with bitterness? Our histories make us who we are. During that time, we gained Japanese immigrants, and although many were repatriated to Japan after the war, if they’d intermarried, they were allowed to stay here.”

“I was thinking Ogawa sounded very Asian,” I responded. “Our general store out on Arno is owned by an Ogawa. And a few of Jamie’s students have a blend of Marshall and Japanese features.”

John nodded.

“A lot of late World War II was fought in the Pacific, as I recall,” I said. “The US liberated Guam from the Japanese before the war ended.”

“The Japanese base here on Jaluit was bombed during World War II. The US took the Marshalls in early 1944, and the war didn’t end until a year and a half later. After the war we became part of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” I said. “But are the Marshall Islands still a territory of the US? Guam is.”

“No, we gained our independence in 1986,” John said with a smile. “Thirty-two years ago. We might still be considered a protectorate of the US—they provide defense for us, and the US postal system delivers mail here as if we were a territory or state. Considering that we only have 55,000 people in the entire nation, we aren’t any sort of superpower.”

I set down my plate and leaned forward toward John. “I’m missing my husband,” I said. “Tell me how you met.”

John’s face brightened. “I think it was my first day of College Writing,” he said. “I like to do well in school, so I was one of the few people sitting toward the front of the classroom. The next thing I know a very large ri-palle with bright red hair sat down by me. Sorry,” he said, “Ri-pālle means…”

“No need to translate,” I said. “That’s Jamie’s name for me half the time.”

John looked amused. “He calls you Ri-pālle?”

“Aet,” I nodded. “As in ‘itōk Ri-pālle.’”

He shook his head in amusement. “That Jamie… always kakūtōtōik—teasing. Sometimes,” John said, “the teasing hides a deep hurt… He has mentioned his family, of course.”

I nodded.

“The loss of his father in particular,” said John. He started to ask me a question, then stopped himself. “Has he mentioned me?”

I shook my head slowly. “But John,” I explained, “I have only known him a little over two months.”

John stared at the wake of the boat. “Jamie was just the opposite of everything I’d seen every day since I was a kid. Red hair instead of black; curly instead of straight. Tall instead of short. Big instead of petite. You can see I’m bigger than the average Marshallese because I’m half white. And having never met my father, I was drawn to Jamie. It was like I was seeing the other half of myself, the other half of my identity.” He paused. “And I was coming to grips with another part of my identity as well, deciding whether it was safe, whether I was ready to come out of the closet.”

“It’s a big decision,” I responded. “My best friend Joe is gay. Coming out to his mom was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Of course, she gave him a big ol’ hug and said, ‘Honey, I’ve known forever. I just wondered when you were going to figure it out.’” I remembered the glassy look of tears in Joe’s eyes when he’d told me that story, when he’d shared how freeing it was to be able to be real with his momma.

“Sometimes it’s hard to stay home and make that change,” I said. “Joe moved across the country for college, and he’s settled in Colorado.”

John looked straight at me. “At times I feel certain that moving away is what I need to do to really be able to be myself. But I’m tied to this place. I just haven’t been able to leave.”

The peaceful camaraderie of our boat journey quickly came to an end when we docked at Imiej and soon the staff of all the offices were back to work. By the end of our second work day, I had reached a level of efficiency that reminded me of my days in the ER, funneling patients through as quickly as possible, assessing their needs and providing care in a prompt manner. I missed the relaxed, communal nature of my practice on Arno but it was also stimulating to rush again. There was a part of me that recognized that sensation of stress and responded by shutting down the social part of my brain and triggering the professional part.

But after dinner, when the field ship was heading across the still sea toward our next destination, the atoll of Ailinglaplap; the part of my heart that longed for connection couldn’t help but ache. I crept up to the top deck again and sat by the railing, gazing out toward the east, opposite the final rays of the setting sun. Somewhere over those black, still waters lay the island of Majuro. And beyond that was Arno and Jamie. I hugged my knees to my chest and closed my eyes.

I’d been homesick at camp before. I’d had that baby ache when I longed to be a mother. And I’d missed Frank when I first came out to Arno. But missing Jamie hurt all over. I pictured him coming home to me, his face beaming at the sight of me, imagined him after a morning jog, entering our apartment with a smile on his face, sweaty and hungry for breakfast and me, and the look on his face as he determined which to have first. I thought of him getting dressed in the morning standing by the closet in boxer briefs—how just the sight of him: damp curls around his ears and neck, the lines of his back and visible tone of his muscles could draw me to him as if nothing else existed, unsatisfied until I had seduced him, until I had tasted him fresh with the scent of soap, until I had made him moan and say my name, gasp and blink his eyes in awe and then chuckle, speechless on our bed.

I thought of being held—in that bed, on the couch, in the hammock, standing in the kitchen doing the dishes with him hugging me from behind, his breath in my hair, his body a solid wall of security behind me. I thought of talking in our bed in the darkness of night, the pleasure of telling stories of our childhoods and discussing things that mattered to us. There was continued joy in the discovery of who Jamie was, and with each new revelation of his thoughtful character, I thanked providence for bringing us together.

Someone cleared his throat behind me, and I startled at the sound, at first concerned but then grateful to realize it was Dougal MacKenzie and not one of the deck hands who I occasionally found leering at me.

“Well, young lady,” he said, coming over by me and sitting down on a box. “Here you are, outside at night alone again.” He chuckled, so I began to think I wasn’t in trouble with him. “We havena had many opportunities to get acquainted, but I thought I might take a moment to check with you and see how you are doing.”

I was grateful I hadn’t succumbed to the impulse I was feeling right before he arrived which was to start crying. It was probably good to be distracted.

“I’m definitely keeping busy, Mr. MacKenzie,” I said. “I’ve seen so many skin ailments and infections galore and given out at least a third of the boil prevention kits I brought along with me.”

“Indeed? That’s good….” We sat in silence for a moment before he began again. “So you and Jamie have been married a month now?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I responded. “It was our anniversary when you radioed us.”

I could barely see his face with the sunset fading behind him, but I had a sense that he was smiling.

“Miss Beauchamp,” he started. “I mean, Mrs. Fraser. There are moments when I regret not speaking out against your marriage. It was a sudden decision, and I have wondered whether by not forbidding it, I allowed the two of you to move forward with a life choice that will prove painful to both of you. I hope it wasn’t a mistake.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t a mistake, Mr. MacKenzie,” I insisted. “As much as it seemed sudden, Jamie and I had a connection from our first meeting.”

“Truly?” Mr. MacKenzie asked.

“I love him, sir,” I said. “I was just sitting here thinking of him. It may have been being reprimanded for my behavior and realizing what it would mean to lose him that was the catalyst, but I believe that we would have ended up dating and marrying if life had continued as it was. I was falling in love with him, and he said he wanted me from the beginning.”

“So I don’t need to second guess my decision to let you be married? I often consider my sister Ellen when I think of the lad. When she died and then Brian left, I knew I needed to provide for him. He needed a man, an example, to get him back on the right path. And though I think I’ve been firm with him and demanded much, I hope it has not worked for ill in his life.”

“Jamie is a very hard worker, sir,” I said. “And yet gentle and kind too.”

“Well, I canna take any credit for the gentle and kind part,” Dougal laughed. “Nor do I think that it was all Ellen’s doing, as sweet as she could sometimes be. I think it was his father, Brian. Though I don’t know what sort of tenderhearted person would leave his son and daughter when they were still grieving their mother and brother.” He faded into silence.

“Jamie was lucky to have you, sir,” I responded quietly. “And I’m grateful to you, too.”

He pushed himself up from the box. “I promised Jamie I would keep you safe. So you’d better come down with me and get settled in your stateroom for the night. And in the future, if you wish to have time alone after dark, perhaps you could knock on my door and mention it to me. I can stand guard at the stairs.”

Before the man could move away, I hugged him. “You’re family now, Mr. MacKenzie,” I explained. “Thanks for trying to take care of me.”

He patted me awkwardly on the back, and I followed him downstairs, smiling as I entered my room. The hug hadn’t been from Jamie, but it would do.

On to Chapter 15: Hugs and Kisses The days drag on and on, but the ship is heading back toward Jamie…

#jimjeran #island hopper #jamie x claire #outlander fanfic #alternate universe #canon divergent #book 2 #kinda boring #but sweet

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reylo-week-2019 · 6 years

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Hello~! I was trying to click the top link for 'themes and prompts' and it says that it's an unsafe link on both Internet explorer and Chrome. I don't know if its the link itself and what not but is there anyway you can put a written section of the themes???? Or is there a tag I should follow to get the full list? (that way I can work ahead of the clock instead of at.... 4:34 am xD ) If not I totally understand~ Thank you for reading!

Hi there! Sorry about the link, not sure what’s going on there but I’ll try and sort that out. Until then, here are all the themes and prompts together. :D

Day 1 Theme: Colors

Mini Prompts:

Red

Blue

Purple

Yellow

Grey

Longer Prompts:

Rey fights with Ben’s saber.

Ben fights with Rey’s saber.

Rey constructs a saberstaff with Ben’s help. The blade is purple.

Rey and Ben go to visit Rey’s old home on Jakku. The desert appears golden in the light of the setting sun.

Ben and Rey create a new Jedi Order, this time embracing both the Light and the Dark side of the Force.

Day 2 Theme: Dark

Mini Prompts:

Possession

Obsession

Destruction

War

Betrayal

Longer Prompts:

Supreme leader Kylo Ren finally captures the last Jedi Rey, who has been on the run from him ever since rejecting his proposal.

Rey was raised a Sith and is tasked with destroying the Jedi Ben Solo. Alternatively, Rey was Snoke’s apprentice, not Ben.

Kylo seduces Rey to the dark side and she accepts his offer to rule the galaxy together.

Rey was Ben’s fellow student at Luke’s Jedi Academy. After Luke’s betrayal, Ben destroys his uncle’s Academy and Rey is among the students he takes with him to Snoke. Rey grows up as a knight of Ren, perhaps happily or bitter that she was taken from the Light.

Rey is a senator who holds The First Order in disdain, much to her displeasure, she attracts the attention of Kylo Ren, it’s leading knight.

Day 3 Theme: Touch

Mini Prompts:

Hands

Thigh

Minds

Wrists

Face

Longer Prompts:

Rey and Ben have destroyed the First Order. The battle is over, and as they watch the Resistance celebrate, they hold hands.

The Force Bond continues, and Rey and Ben succumb to their lust and love for one another despite being on opposite sides.

Ben discovers that Rey has left her mind unguarded during a Resistance meeting. Instead of looking into the Resistance’s plans or location, he searches her mind to find out how she feels for him.

During training, Rey pins Ben by his wrists. He’s into it.

Rey touches the scar she gave Ben.

Day 4 Theme: Mythology

Mini Prompts:

Enchantment

Power

Belief

Deities

Creatures

Longer Prompts:

A retelling of the story of Hades and Persephone through Kylo and Rey.

A tale inspired by King Arthur, The Knights of Camelot, Guinevere, Lancelot, Mordred, the lady in the lake ect. It could be based on the actual legend or even just using some of the characters to create a new story through Kylo and Rey. i.e Rey as The Lady of The Lake and Kylo as Mordred.

Robin Hood AU.

Your favourite myth/legend told through a star wars canon retelling.

Creature AU! Could be mermaids, dragons, vampires, deities, selkies, kelpies, force ghosts, werewolves, wizards and witches or whatever you can think of.

Day 5 Theme: Wounds

Mini Prompts:

Split to the bone

Torn apart

So lonely

In my head

Scar

Longer Prompts:

Rey/Ben suffers from a mortal wound while the other watches helplessly through the Force Bond.

As their bond grows in strength, Ben and Rey begin feeling physical pain from their separation.

Rey’s lonely past overwhelms her in the night, and Ben comforts her.

The psychological scars left from Snoke constantly being in his mind torment Ben. Rey is shocked, she never knew how bad it was.

Rey and Ben look at each other’s scars.

Day 6 Theme: Soulmates

Mini Prompts:

Devotion

Trapped

Identifying marks

Cursed

Reincarnation

Longer Prompts:

When someone is injured it is not they who suffer the physical injury or bleed, it’s their soul mate. Before going into battle one must ask themselves, how much pain are they willing to let their soulmate endure? Worse still, what if your soulmate was your mortal enemy, how could they use that against you?

Everyone has a mark somewhere on their skin that allows them to find their soulmate.

Only soulmates can share a force bond.

Soulmates are reincarnated lovers.

Rey was told a prophecy when she was a little girl about who her soulmate was. Terrified that she is destined to end up with a monster, she runs away from Jakku to find a way to change who her soulmate is and ends up straight into the arms of the one she was trying to escape from.

Day 7 Theme: Destiny

Mini Prompt:

Its always been there

Intertwined

One day

It is you

Paths

Longer Prompt:

After hearing Ben tell her “I’ll come back for you, sweetheart.”, Rey realizes that the voice she’s heard all her life was a premonition of Ben.

No matter the universe, Ben and Rey will always find each other. Show them meeting in one or more alternate realities.

Ben makes a promise to Rey, and one day fulfils it.

Ben realizes that the woman in his dreams is Rey.

Rey/Ben makes a different decision at a turning point in their life. (Ben goes with Han, Rey takes his hand, etc,)

#ask #anon #reylo week 2018 #reylo week themes and prompts #long post

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victoriavmw82 · 3 years

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Da Funk

Since I have been staying at my friend's pad, one of her dogs took a liking to me. It was her sons dog, Sir aka: Rookie Wookie. That dog just loved me to pieces, why I have no clue, he would sit by the door and wait for me, sit infront of the bedroom and lay in the hallway.....hoping I would cave in and let him lay with me. I was tempted to take him out and do a photo shoot and me dress up almost as if I stepped right out of an episode of Star Wars.....the vintage story more like around the time frame of Dryden Vos. I imagining I was the love interest or one of his captives/ assistant. Rookie Wookie even made sounds like Chewbacca which was hilarious. The first time he did it to me it caught me off guard because he had gotten out and typically when dogs get out of they run wild and your forever trying to catch them......this morning it was different he and LG had gotten out. Now LG is a pit mixed,Sir/ Rookie Wookie is a red heeler mix. I believe he is red heeler and spaniel mixed.....but my friend will swear up and down he was a German Shepherd mixed🙄 So Rookie Wookie he did what I call a victory run and then he went to pee. LG followed suit. I walked over to them, LG continued to use the restroom and looked at me as if to say, "Do you mind?!" Rookie Wookie sniffed the grass and as soon as he saw me he ran over making the sound 🤣😂I didn't realize it but if Harrison Ford had been standing there everything that I said and did afterwards, well sounded like I was talking to Chewbacca 😂🤣I was even trying to whisper cuz it was morning🤣😂The dogs listened😮 Surprisingly! I told Wookie it was time to go in and he followed me sniffing everything along the way, LG ran over to me. LG got in the door we had to wait before it was Rookie Wookie's turn he heard the camotion and began to howl looking at me between breaths of howling much like Chewy would😂🤣I realized this in the second round of howling and played the part, laugh out loud. Rookie Wookie knew when I was upset, knew when I was happy and knew when I needed a laugh or was sad. My first night at my friend's I even woke up to him literally sleeping in my lap, almost like he knew I needed a hug, the next night he slept at my foot which is the biggest compliment ever. I find it interesting that it was him that took up with me because I happen to be a HUGE Tom Hiddleston fan, like huge. Tom Hiddleston, apparently has a fur pet, named Buddy I'm not sure if Buddy is a Cocker Spaniel or Red Heeler or a mix of the two but needless to say Sir/ Rookie Wookie looked very similar. This season has been a very weird one since January mainly since March, there are times for me as fan getting ready for the release of Loki and then me as a fan going through all in one season the fandom of Loki;catching up,cuz I spent most of those years in a shelter.......ALL the MCU movies I watched while in the shelter. The whole reason we began was to pull me out of my funk, imagine that, going through something and a friend suggested we start watching the movies and ya know it worked. We for a short while, at least while the Avengers and Thor was doing their thing....we became family, doing what the Avengers would do, pausing to eat together.....me being the Loki at times.....a lot of times actually 🤣😂looking back on it and then turning around and being genius in the kitchen dispite what I was going through and like Dr. Strange rocking it out, being taken out of the kitchen and feeling much like Dr. Strange did afterwards and me like Dr. Strange forced to find higher purpose to heal myself and well getting a result much like Dr.Strange.

I've spent most of this season honestly trying to figure out if I'm to risk everything and try, try to break through at age 38 now 39 with the purpose of trying to see Lady Deadpool come to life on Cinematic screen or if I'm supposed to at age 39 go for it and try to make it as a make-up artist and or hairstylist. I considered risking everything and trying to go for a chance of a lifetime for a series that actually wanted to train those wanting to learn.......the only thing that stopped me was it was in a different country and it's one thing to be homeless close to home but homeless going for your dreams in a foreign place I actually was like.....Ummm if I fail,it's gonna be an epic fail and Well ya!" Although Scotland sounded like a dream hashtag goals and well, I do know a lot of biblical info enough to have the average person left going😲😮Like you stored that away in your brain....what the heck! Why aren't you a scholar or something 😂🤣 So I found out that my buddy that found me parelled his, I just keep wondering if this was a sign. I was not the dogs owner, and yet it listened to me as if I was, almost like he choose me. So I'm still up in the air what I should do honestly, I've been inspired by so much this season it's hard to put it all down and honestly some strange things that have happened that almost make me think I should try. I've been debating on if I should move to New York. Why New York, I haven't got a clue it just keeps coming up. There was a job opening recently that was in New York, I felt it was a job I should have applied for because I could have rocked it out, I let fear get in the way from applying, again being homeless in New York, is not ideal or starting over again.....it's literally sink or swim. Cold winter.....being homeless in the winter sucks ass, just saying. Imagine being up North......No!!!!!! So that was the factor that stopped me that and Pandemic issues in regards to the Delta Varient. However, it does keep coming up, should I try starting over again in another state, would I be more successful? Who knows, in my opinion I think it would be the same, just different people and scenery so to speak but hey I could be wrong. I keep thinking that my life is gonna some how change drastically for the good by moving to New York, like almost as if it was destiny type thing. I don't believe much in destiny but it keeps coming up, the whole New York thing. The shelter systems in a way are even better, the programs and the success rate and resources are better. However I'm not sure if those statistics are based off of women with children if this also includes women without children and women in my age bracket, that also plays a factor believe it or not. Not living there I can already without digging probably guess that shelters are gonna probably be in or near Brooklyn, so to me then there is the factor of how do I get to interviews, jobs, if I do pursue my dreams schooling or classes. Restaurants are probably gonna be on the other side of the bridge then there's the factor of the bridge, during the winter is that something I need to be doing. How long are these programs for time line wise am I looking at a couple of weeks to get a job,save and find something or is it 90 or 180 days or something between those two numbers. What are the other variables. I can tell you all about Texas, TABC, Food handlers, etc but in another state what's it like? Health care, would my situation medically be able to be fixed there through indegent programs or are my chances better here in Texas??? Cuz that has to be taken care of at some point.

My goal if I do this would be to move there, get in a shelter cuz I have nothing, first get my medical issue taken care of then work on what I'm calling physical therapy (losing weight)training down to the size I'm normally at which is an athletic size 12 or 14, while I'm doing that since medical issue is taken care of working and saving, finding a place then from there either going back to school or doing the crazy and attempting to start an acting career or technical backstage career either as makeup artist and hairstylist or just makeup artist and possibly my other strength in tech; props and set building, believe it or not. I already asked my high school drama teacher when I thought I was gonna apply for the Good Omens job opportunity if she'd be willing to write me a letter of recommendation and she hands down was all for it.....soooo I'm not sure. I mean it would be a big risk. I keep having reoccurring dreams were I'm in New York, I'm not sure if it's a sign or if there's something else that is being said to me in my dreams and I'm just focusing too much on the literal. Either way I've been doing a lot of thinking since February 😬.

Back to Rookie Wookie, he passed today. It came as a shock to me. Like I said for whatever reason he was brought into my life even if it was, just for a short while to help me along to the next part of my journey but I must say, my jaw like to have hit the floor that again on the fact that a four legged friend mine was similar to someone I admires fur baby. What is so weird about this is,in my dreams, Sir/Rookie Wookie was there with me in New York, I had asked my friend if he could go with me and she had said yes. We walked a trail together in a park, if that even exist and we would go have coffee together and I'd feed him pieces of apple or frozen green beans🤣😂sounds weird, I know and I even got him certified so he was my service dog, I imagined him a Wookie and me dressed space age😂🤣even the collar. I know I had waaaaay too much dream thought into this and then he'd sit with me head in my lap while I read to him whatever book I was reading or with me enjoying whatever music I was listening to. In my dream we even jogged together. I firmly believe that some animals have a spirit about them, almost as if they are like sent from God to be with you or that they have a human type personality Rookie Wookie was that type of animal and he will be missed greatly.

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henryofgreatbritain · 4 years

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Up close and personal with Prince William: an intimate portrait of the future king

As the world devours the Harry and Meghan interview, what’s going on with the brother who was left behind? He’s embracing his destiny, William’s close friends tell the Sunday Times royal correspondent, Roya Nikkhah

Next month Prince William will celebrate his tenth wedding anniversary — the day he became a duke and embarked on the most formative decade of his life. Back then, the tentative 28-year-old newlywed was not ready to devote himself entirely to royal duties. A decade on, he is in a very different position.

The job of being the heir to the heir to the throne, of finding a balance between life and duty, is difficult at the best of times. These are not the best of times. In their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey this month the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royal family and the institution around it of racism and callous disregard for a suicidal newcomer, among many other damning charges. Harry the spare also declared that William was trapped within “the system … My brother can’t leave that system, but I have.”

In the immediate aftermath of the interview William was “reeling”, a source close to the duke says. “His head is all over the place on it.” Four days after the Sussexes had their say, he hit back during an engagement with the Duchess of Cambridge at a school in east London. Asked about accusations of racism, William retorted with restrained fury: “We’re very much not a racist family.” He also confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to Harry yet, “but will do”. By the weekend it emerged they had “been in contact”.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s explosive interview with Oprah WinfreyAVALON

William is thought to have been less than thrilled a few days later when that conversation made global headlines after the American presenter Gayle King, a close friend of the Sussexes, revealed live on air that it had not been an easy chat: “I did actually call them to see how they were feeling,” she told viewers. “Harry has talked to his brother and he had talked to his father too. The word I was given was that those conversations were not productive.” The intervention prompted a senior royal source to say that “none of the households will be giving a running commentary on private conversations”.

A close friend of both brothers says Harry’s “trapped” comment was “way off the mark”, insisting that William does not see it that way. “He has a path set for him and he’s completely accepting of his role. He is very much his grandmother’s grandson in that respect of duty and service.”

When the Queen turned 90 nearly five years ago William admitted “the challenge” that “occupies a lot of thinking space” is how to “modernise and develop” the royal family, and make it “relevant in the next 20 years’ time”. Twenty years now seems like a very long time. In the hours and days after the Oprah broadcast, William was at the heart of all discussions with the Queen and the Prince of Wales about how to respond to the Sussexes. He was keen that the issue of race should be acknowledged in the Queen’s statement as an area of particular concern that “will be addressed”.

William has always railed against being a “ribbon-cutter royal” and the issues he champions — mental health, battling racism in football, homelessness and his ramped-up eco-warrior role — are a window into where the future King William V will take the House of Windsor. A friend says: “He’s a small-c conservative. He values tradition and the need to go around the country, but he realises he can make a difference beyond traditional royal duties.”

Today royal popularity is, to put it mildly, in a state of flux, but William’s strategy has been working. Post-Oprah, he ranks just below the Queen at the top of a YouGov poll of royals. Not so long ago such a position looked like a long shot, when the “workshy Wills” and “reluctant royal” tags plagued him and he was clocking up fewer days of royal work than his nonagenarian grandparents. Pictures of him hitting the ski slopes and clubs of Swiss resort Verbier in March 2017, missing a Commonwealth service that even the Duke of York flew back for, didn’t help.

Prince William on an official visit to Coventry War Memorial Park in 2014GETTY IMAGES

After the lasting PR gold dust of the Cambridges’ 2011 wedding and the births of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, it was the first public nosedive for William, who was still working as an air ambulance pilot. “That pissed him off,” a friend says. “He was leaving home at 5.30am, getting home after dark and saving lives in between, but people were still being critical of his commitment to his [other] job.” William was based at Cambridge airport with East Anglian Air Ambulance for two years, where he was on call for “some very sad, dark moments”, often working “on very traumatic jobs involving children”. He later acknowledged that “after I had my own children … the relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge, and I started feeling things that I have never felt before”. But it was a job he loved, because of “working in a team … that’s something that my other job doesn’t necessarily do. You are more out there on your own.”

A former royal aide says: “Immediately after their wedding he had a very clear idea of the pace at which he wanted to take things.” William was adamant he wouldn’t curtail his day jobs, first as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey and then with the air ambulance. “If you’re not careful, duty can weigh you down an awful lot at an early age,” he said, insisting he didn’t “lie awake waiting or hoping” to be king. He delayed full-time royal duties until the autumn of 2017, when, acknowledging the Cambridges’ future required more time at “monarchy HQ”, they moved from Norfolk to London and George started school.

He’d had to fight his corner for the air ambulance role. A source close to William reveals “there were lots of raised eyebrows in the Palace when he wanted to do that. While the Queen and his father backed him, some senior courtiers questioned whether it was becoming of a future king to be doing a middle-class role, hanging out with ordinary people. They thought he wouldn’t stick it out, he’d find it boring, or was doing it out of stubbornness to put off royal duties. He was pretty bloody-minded about it, and determined that other people’s expectations in the media or the system shouldn’t get in the way of his own values.” In the wake of Harry and Meghan’s interview much has been speculated about the extent to which royal life is dictated by Palace officials, but it is clear that William has managed to forge his own path. Who knows how high those senior courtiers’ eyebrows rose in 2019, when William spent three weeks shadowing the spooks of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to learn how they combat terrorism. He insisted on being called “Will” and lunching in the canteen every day.

Those closest to the duke say his resistance to the idea of full-time royal duties stemmed not only from a desire to achieve something for himself but also from a fear of the impact on his family life. Miguel Head worked alongside the prince for ten years until 2018, as William, Kate and Harry’s communications secretary and later as William’s private secretary. “In his role everyone’s going to tell you you’re marvellous,” Head says. “The RAF and air ambulance jobs were about knowing what his abilities were, what he was good at in his own right. Without that he’d still be hankering for something that was his own.” After children came along he says William developed a “visceral determination to give them a life of consistency and privacy that were missing for large parts of his own childhood”.

Pomp and splendour at his wedding to Kate Middleton, April 2011ARTHUR EDWARDS / THE SUN

Another close aide says the plan enabling the Cambridges to have a few years of “normal” married life, away from the full-time glare of the royal spotlight, paid dividends: “For years, the battles around privacy and paparazzi intrusion were all-consuming. He wanted to know, could we build them a credible plan allowing them a family life while slowly increasing the profile of official life? It took years to get there, but the success of that plan allowed him to be confident and content in his role. He’s not worried about his kids’ privacy any more and he has been able to be the kind of dad he wants to be.”

“Marriage maketh the man,” a friend says. “Catherine’s groundedness has been the critical anchor. And where his relationship with the media was once all fury and frustration, he now understands using the power of modern media, so the public feel they’re getting enough access.”

The children’s birthdays are marked with photographs — often taken by the Duchess of Cambridge — and there has been a noticeable increase in their public appearances of late. While not “officially” staged, William was happy to let George and Charlotte be photographed at their first Aston Villa match with Mum and Dad in 2019. Pandemic set pieces have shown the family clapping for the NHS on the steps of Anmer Hall, their Norfolk home, and, before Christmas, their first red-carpet appearance together for an evening at the panto with key workers and their children.

Prince George celebrates a goal by Aston Villa at his first football match, October 2019JASON DAWSON

As they celebrate their anniversary on April 29, friends who joined the Cambridges on their wedding day tell me the partnership’s equal footing is key to its success. “They’ve got a solid relationship and she gives him confidence,” one says. “There is no jealousy, no friction, they are happy for each other’s successes.” In private William talks as passionately about Kate’s work as his own campaigns, and takes pride in her growing confidence on the public stage.

William plays with Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis in their Norfolk garden during lockdown, June 2020PA / THE DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE

William has said his grandmother’s approach to being head of state is to take “more of a passive role. She’s above politics and is very much away from it.” He doesn’t plan to meddle in party politics, but he was not happy about the unenviable position the government put the Queen in with the 2019 proroguing of parliament, which was later ruled to be unlawful and forced an apology from Boris Johnson to the monarch. Constitutionally the Queen had no alternative other than to act on the advice of her government, but in William’s reign there will be “more private, robust challenging of advice”. His last three private secretaries — Christian Jones, Simon Case, now the cabinet secretary, and Head — had all worked in government departments, helping William to keep his finger on the political pulse. The new incumbent, the Whitehall heavyweight Jean-Christophe Gray, who served as David Cameron’s spokesman, continues in that vein.

The former Conservative leader Lord Hague of Richmond was last year appointed as chairman of the Royal Foundation to develop William’s work on mental health, the environment and a raft of new support programmes for key workers. “People internationally and nationally respect his credibility and knowledge on these issues,” Hague says. “He’s very persuasive. You only see that behind the scenes. He knows what he wants and he goes out to get it.”

Charlie Mayhew, chief executive of the conservation charity Tusk, has known William since he was 20. In 2005 Tusk and Centrepoint, the homelessness charity championed by Princess Diana, were the first patronages William took on. “In those early years I kept having to pinch myself to remember how young he was,” Mayhew says. “He was much more mature than his age and very aware of his destiny coming down the track. He had a sincerity, but never without wicked humour. His teasing is merciless.”

William knows some people see his passion for conservation as a posh man’s part-time hobby, but Mayhew says the duke’s “genuine and huge knowledge” undermines that view. “He’ll call and WhatsApp to flag up something that I haven’t even seen in the conservation space. He can be impatient to get things done.” Last year William launched the Earthshot prize, a £50 million Nobel-style environmental award to galvanise solutions to global problems over the next decade. He believes “conservation and the environment … shouldn’t be a luxury, it’s a necessity”, Mayhew says. “That’s the drum he wants to beat. He’s got a megaphone and wants to use it in the most constructive way. He speaks for that next generation and I think they can relate to it.”

William greets President Xi on his state visit, 2015PA

A turning point for William was his 2015 official visit to China, one of the world’s largest consumers of ivory, where he met President Xi and condemned the illegal wildlife trade as a “vicious form of criminality”. Unlike his father, who has refused to visit the People’s Republic over its human rights record and treatment of Tibet, William’s view was that despite the UK’s fractious relationship with China, “we’ve got to engage”.

“It was very political, raising the illegal wildlife trade in China. I’m sure the diplomats were having all sort of nightmares in advance,” says Mayhew, who joined the duke in China. “But he was gathering greater confidence that he had the ability to be a mouthpiece for the issue.” Mayhew reveals that while William was visiting Japan before China, he still hadn’t secured a meeting with Xi. “But when the Chinese saw all the high-level meetings he was having in Japan, they changed their minds and Xi made time for him.” Later that year, as Xi began a UK state visit, William appeared on Chinese television condemning the ivory trade. Two years later China banned the trade.

In 2018 he spent months prepping for his most high-stakes overseas visit yet, to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that summer. Navigating the diplomatic tightrope walk between Jerusalem and the West Bank, he visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. As he travelled back to Jerusalem, he changed his speech for a reception with young Israelis and Palestinians to strengthen his solidarity with the latter: “My message tonight is that you have not been forgotten … The United Kingdom stands with you.” It was a bold move, but both sides hailed his visit a success and the officials breathed a sigh of relief. To the delight of the travelling press pack, William’s engagements on the final day were brought forward, allowing the diplomat duke and president of the Football Association to land back in the UK in time to watch England’s World Cup tie.

William at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, 2018PA

Ask him if he’s a peacemaker and William will laugh, saying Kate is the mediator. But according to a source close to William and Harry, his bridge-building skills were deployed in the lead-up to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018, when tensions in the Kensington Palace household, then still shared by the brothers, were running high: “Every time there was a drama, or a member of staff on the verge of quitting, William would personally try and sort it out.”

As the brothers clashed more over the substance and style of their work, and the family hierarchy that William is a stickler for but Harry is less keen on, a split was inevitable. When they finally divided their households in March 2019, it had been a long time coming. But he never thought that a year later his brother would up sticks for America.

The pair went for a long walk to clear the air after the “Sandringham summit” when the Megxit deal was hammered out, but did not part shores as friends. What upset William the most was Harry and Meghan’s surprise launch of their “Sussex Royal” website before the summit, which featured their blueprint wish list of a part-time, commercial royal future. Later, when the Queen decreed they could no longer use “royal” in their future ventures, their website hit back with this bold statement: “While there is not any jurisdiction by The Monarchy … over the use of the word ‘Royal’ overseas, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex do not intend to use ‘Sussex Royal’ … or … ‘Royal’ …” Both “the content and that it’s still online is staggering”, a senior royal source says. “That was it for William, he felt they’d blindsided the Queen in such an insulting and disrespectful way,” says a source close to him, who reveals it was still at the forefront of William’s mind at the Commonwealth Day service one year ago. It was the Sussexes’ final engagement as working royals, and the froideur between them and the rest of the family was unmistakable.

An awkward Commonwealth Day service for the Cambridges and Sussexes at Westminster Abbey, March 2020GETTY IMAGES

It is a year since the Sussexes left for California and William misses Harry. “Once he got over the anger of how things happened, he was left with the absence of his brother,” an aide says. “They shared everything about their lives, an office, a foundation, meetings together most days and there was a lot of fun along the way. He’ll miss it for ever.” A close friend says William “definitely feels the pressure now it’s all on him — his future looks different because of his brother’s choices, it’s not easy.” Another friend says: “It’s still raw. He’s very upset by what’s happened, though absolutely intent that he and Harry’s relationship will heal in time.”

After lobbing bombs in his Oprah interview, Harry said: “I love William to bits … We’ve been through hell together … we have a shared experience … The relationship is space at the moment, and time heals all things, hopefully.” Harry would be wise not to set his stopwatch.

The first test will come this summer, when the brothers could be reunited for a series of family engagements including the Duke of Edinburgh’s 100th birthday and the Queen’s birthday parade in June. In July they are scheduled to unveil a statue of their mother at Kensington Palace, marking what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, an emotionally charged occasion with the world watching.

While a chasm has opened up between the brothers, William has grown closer to the Queen and Prince Charles. He has helped them to navigate their way through Megxit, Prince Andrew’s removal from public life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and, now, the Oprah controversy. “That has changed the way the Queen sees him and values his input,” a courtier says. William also feels his relationship with his grandmother has “massively improved” in recent years and their views are “more aligned than ever”.

Friends say there has also been a “renaissance” in William and Charles’s relationship. “As the years passed there were strains imposed by the system — money, work, competition, Diana,” one says. “Part of William’s evolution is that as he has become closer to his father, he sees their similarities. At William’s wedding there was a gag in one of the speeches that he was more like his father than he’d ever admit, which made a lot of us laugh. As their respective destinies get closer, it weighs more heavily on them and strengthens the bond. The rift with Harry has also brought them closer.”

The British line of succession — the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George, December 2019AP

William is said to hate “flummery”, though the role of future king comes with plenty of bowing and scraping. But in 2017, for the first time publicly, he didn’t get his way. As a new parent worried about rising teenage suicide rates, he had spent a year convening a Cyberbullying Taskforce with big cheeses from tech and social media giants including Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Google and Twitter. He wanted them to adopt industry-wide guidelines creating safer online spaces for children. According to William the meetings at Kensington Palace got “fruity” and the tech giants didn’t come close to the change he wanted. He was furious.

Tessy Ojo, chief executive of the Diana Award youth charity, sat on the taskforce. “He was deeply disappointed,” she says. “He didn’t come into it as ‘the duke’, he gave emotional pleas as a father.” William has since publicly condemned social media giants for their “false choice of profits over values” and privately offered support to the family of Molly Russell, who took her life at 14 after viewing images of self-harm online. Ojo believes it is William’s “lived experience of the fragility of life that guides the work he does”.

It also shapes the way he and Kate are raising their family. William has said he is determined that the grandchildren Diana never knew should “know who she was and that she existed”. He “constantly” talks to his children “about Granny Diana” at bedtime, so that they know “there are two grandmothers in their lives”. Earlier this month on Mother’s Day, Kensington Palace’s social media feeds published George, Charlotte and Louis’s cards paying tribute to “Granny Diana”, revealing it is an annual ritual for the Cambridge children. After a difficult few weeks for William, a line in Charlotte’s card provided poignant insight into how he is feeling: “Papa is missing you.”

He is on course to be a more modern monarch than any before him, but William is still a creature of habit at heart. He has the same tight circle of friends from his schooldays, one of whom says that, with William, “it’s all about trust and loyalty”. He plays five-a-side football in his Villa socks when he can, goes to the Chelsea Harbour Club gym he went to as a child with his mother and has a “smart casual” public uniform of chinos, jacket, blue shirt and no tie.

“William’s not trying to be down with the kids,” a friend says. “He never wants to be painted as irrelevant or dull, though he’s allergic to being compared to celebrities. The public doesn’t always get to see his funny side, but otherwise he’s the same in private as in public. He once said, ‘I’ll be in the public eye all my life. I can’t hide who I am because I’ll be found out.’ ”

In 2019, during a visit to a youth homelessness charity supporting LGBT people, William was asked how he would feel if one of his children was gay. “Absolutely fine,” he replied. “I fully support whatever decision they make, but it does worry me from a parent’s point of view how many barriers, hateful words, persecution and discrimination might come.” Such a personal exchange was a radical departure from royal engagement small talk. But William, the first in his family to be photographed for the cover of a gay magazine, had personally put the issue on the agenda.

As president of Bafta he gave the academy a diplomatic dressing down in his speech at last year’s ceremony, expressing his “frustration” over the lack of diversity: “In 2020, and not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process — that simply cannot be right in this day and age.” The 2021 nominees announced this month suggest his words hit home.

William “thinks the public look to him to keep royal work looking modern”, a confidante says. “The Queen and Prince of Wales are providing continuity and stability. He’s carving out his own relationship with diverse communities. He sees it all as a way of doing things now that will help a smooth transition when the time comes.”

First-day nerves as Prince William joins the East Anglian Air Ambulance, 2015GETTY IMAGES

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as a former frontline worker himself, William has led the royal charge supporting key workers. “Now, more than ever, he knows what his role in public life is, and he sees the value in it,” a close aide says. Chatting to NHS workers in January, William said: “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance … is that when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world … as a … darker, blacker place.” Soon after the first lockdown was announced, the Cambridges’ Royal Foundation launched Our Frontline, a round-the-clock mental health and bereavement service for key workers.

Miguel Head says the future King William will continue to campaign on his big issues: “I can’t see him backing away from causes he’s passionate about. And while he’s not someone who loves ceremony, he knows the importance of it. When he gets the top job he won’t do away with it all. He’s mindful the monarchy represents something timeless that’s above all of us, and many people like the magic and theatre of it.”

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quasithinking · 4 years

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Gravity’s Rainbow: Part XV

We're introduced to Katje in this section. Katje is Blicero's Gretel, Slothrop's temptation, Pointsman's octopus's conditioned stimulus, Pudding's feces factory, and Pirate's—I don't know—salvation, maybe? Why does she get around so much? Whoever she is, she's important enough to be rescued by the Allies—by Pirate, to be explicit—via a message sent from Europe to London in a rocket. Was she, as Blicero suspected, always an operative for the Allies? Or was that just Blicero's paranoia, which grew so strong that he eventually sent the message to rescue her from himself via rocket? I don't know because I'm not a tenured academic who can devote the kind of time needed to understand Gravity's Rainbow! Also, I've only read the book once so far. I'll probably have it all figured out after my current, second reading! By the way, Katje means kitten in Dutch. Just in case that's important. Which it totally is because cats are fucking the best. Right up there with raccoons and goats. You might now have a slightly better understanding of me, now that you know my favorite animals are the most chaotic of our domesticated friends or, at least, in the case of the raccoon, urban dwellers. Side note: when I was around ten years old (I'm 49 now! Yeesh!), I saw my first Red Panda at the zoo and instantly declared the Red Panda as my favorite animal. I always forget how much I like them until they pop up on the Internet. Ten year old me would be severely disappointed in 49 year old me. Red Pandas didn't even make my list of favorite animals after I remembered them and had a chance to edit the previous paragraph! They only made this side note!

Speaking of loving chaotic things, I love Bob Mortimer so much that I accidentally became him.

This section begins with Katje being secretly filmed in Pirate's apartment while Osbie Feels prepares psychedelic mushrooms for smoking. I have never smoked mushrooms before. Is that better than eating them? Or do you still wind up just as paranoid as Slothrop when he's, um, well, when he's just being Slothrop? I once went to a strip club with a couple friends of mine while I was on mushrooms. The DJ at the club knew one of my friends and kept making references to him during the night. This caused everybody in the club to look back at our table. Strangers constantly looking up at a person on mushrooms feels aggressive and terrifying. After this happened a number of times, I turned to my friend and said, "I have to go outside." He responded, "Why? Are you going to cut somebody's head off?!" Anyway, the film will later be used to condition an octopus into attacking Katje for part of the Tyrone Slothrop experiment. But we'll get to that outrageousness later! Katje walks into the kitchen where Osbie is cooking the mushrooms down to powder just as Osbie opens the oven door which sends her into a sort of fugue state where she relives her time playing Gretel with Blicero as witch and Gottfried as Hansel. Although it's an extremely adult version of Hansel and Gretel with bits like "'the Rome-Berlin Axis' he called it the night the Italian came and they were all on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried's upended asshole and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth" and "Katje kneeling before Blicero in highest drag, black velvet and Cuban heels, his penis squashed invisible under a flesh-colored leather jockstrap, over which he wears a false cunt. . . ." There's plenty more to that last example but I don't want to put in too many spoilers and/or visuals that might upset the squeamish. If it's true that Stephen King based his entire novel It on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," is it possible to read Gravity's Rainbow with the conceit that the entirety of it is based on "Hansel and Gretel"? The 000000 rocket is the oven Blicero shoves Hansel inside. Except there's no Gretel to save him in this version, her having run off to the Allies. Much of the characterization in the novel is based on the methods each character is using to control what they can in the face of the War's unending random violence and death. For Blicero, Gottfried, and Katje, their method is the fairy tale of "Hansel and Gretel." It is a predetermined act in which they control their roles and their environment. Or, at least, Blicero controls them. But Katje, at least, feels it is a rational decision. I don't know, exactly, how Gottfried feels about it. It's possible we eventually get a section from his perspective (I mean prior to his perspective from within the 000000 rocket) but I don't remember it. But I will remember it soon because it's in this section! Part of Blicero's suspicion of Katje, that she might be a British spy, is a result of the "Hansel and Gretel" game itself. Isn't it Gretel who pushes the witch in the Oven in the end? Is she fated, simply by the rules of the game Blicero has chosen, to bring about his end? The game itself, used to control a world one desperately knows they have no actual way of controlling, fuels a new kind of paranoia for Blicero. She is his slave, his obedient servant, his pawn to move as he wishes. And yet, she is also his demise, his bringer of death. Just as the rockets which often misfire and fall back upon the Germans firing them, Katje presents a danger to her master, Blicero. Here, Blicero's description of Katje's commitment to Nazism, to the game: "But not Katje: no mothlike plunge. He must conclude that secretly she fears the Change, choosing instead only trivially to revise what matters least, ornament and clothing, going no further than politic transvestism, not only in Gottfried's clothing, but even in traditional masochist uniform, the French-maid outfit so inappropriate to her tall, longlegged stride, her blondeness, her questing shoulders like wings—she plays at this only . . . plays at playing." Blicero (for now the story has dipped into his perspective. As so often happens in Gravity's Rainbow, a remembrance of a character by one character often turns into the narrating perspective of that character who might remember another character which will change the perspective to that third character's point of view) contemplates an earlier point in his life when he began the trajectory (parabolic, perhaps?) of the life he currently leads. It's similar to Pointsman contemplating the minotaur and the maze and Ariadne and how the lure of Pavlovian conditioning led him to The White Visitation and planning his experiments on Slothrop. This comes after his quoting a line from Rilke: "And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny...." He thinks about a friend from youth who was so athletic that his Destiny as a soldier to die on the Eastern Front was practically set, simply by muscle memory, by reflex. He thinks about these Germans, these youths, all used for their ability and their belief in the lie of Deutschland Uber Alles, manipulated by others, to be sent to their deaths. But more so, he thinks about those who will survive the war, those less committed than he, those limber enough, like Katje, to change. Blicero himself has grown tired and now just looks forward to the end of his story. "He only wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven's warmth, darkness, steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging shut, forever. The rest is foreplay." I feel like I'm just doing a lot of summarizing but it's my only method for getting a handle on the plot and the characters which will solidify these ideas in my head which in turn should allow me to recall previous passages when I get to sections that rely on the information within these passages to fully understand and grasp the meaning of the future scenes. Blicero admits to worrying about his children, Katje and Gottfried, when he's gone. This worry makes me think it was indeed Blicero who sent the message via rocket that brings Pirate to rescue Katje (it isn't. I don't know who it was though. Katje? Piet? Wim? The Drummer? The Indian?!). As for Gottfried, well, Blicero's freedom for him is, um, somewhat different. Blicero also remembers his time in the Südwest and how he met the Herero boy, Enzian, whom he took under his wing. "Took under his wing" is an awfully innocent way of saying "sexually molested and kidnapped him back to Germany." Enzian, we will find out later, has become the leader of the Schwarzkommando. From the first time I read the book, I remembered this scene where the young boy uses the name of his God as a stand-in for fucking which drives Blicero crazy with guilt and blasphemy and lust. But I didn't realize, once Enzian was introduced, that this was who that was. This is definitely something I need to keep in mind in that it colors the relationship between Blicero and Enzian. Sidekick and apprentice were the words I thought of to describe Enzian's relationship to Blicero previously; now I must also remember to add the words molestation, kidnap, and victim. And then after Blicero ponders Katje's withdrawal from the game (I think only mentally at the moment although that would set up Blicero's decision to free her completely via extraction by Pirate), the point of view shifts to Gottfried. Before I get to that, I want to clarify something I said in a previous section. I pointed at how dumb I thought my Children's Lit professor was being when she suggested we write long essays on single sentences of text. My point wasn't that critical analysis shouldn't somehow be longer than the text being analyzed; obviously that's going to happen an awful lot. Some lines and paragraphs need pages of explication! My issue was that she didn't want us straying away from that single sentence. She didn't want us bringing in other examples of the text and exploring greater themes inherent in the work while using the sentence as a basis for a longer discussion. She simply wanted us to focus exclusively on that sentence. So while I'm obviously all for dissecting the shit out of a text (although to really go in-depth on Gravity's Rainbow would take more time than I'm willing to spend so my sectional blurbs are far, far shorter than a truly explicatory dive should probably be), I'm simply not for the completely out-of-context vibe she was creating by pulling a single sentence out of the whole and concentrating exclusively on that piece. Because what does it matter if you can't refer back to the entirety of the piece of art it was pulled from? Or as Roger Mexico said: "'I don't want to get into a religious argument with you,' absence of sleep has Mexico more cranky today than usual, 'but I wonder if you people aren't a bit too—well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?'" The "you" is in italics in the previous quote because Mexico is referring back to Pointsman's previous argument that ends with "but what has one said?" Anyway, back to Gottfried, I guess! Gottfried is young enough that death is unreal to him. It is something that happens to others. The war for him is an adventure, and the game he plays with Blicero nothing more than routine, a routine that, though outrageously different, is nothing more than the routine his fellow soldiers live through. He understands that his freedom will come with the end of the War. Until then, he plays the game, he longs for Katje, and he fucks Blicero. But he is nothing more than an observer and he watches when Katje finally quits and Blicero, subsequently, throws a huge tantrum. Blicero's reaction suggests he didn't send the message to rescue Katje. Perhaps she sent it, or one of the Allies she's been secretly passing information to for the last year. According to rumors Gottfried has heard, Katje has fallen in love with a Stuka pilot in Scheveningen. This Stuka pilot exists and his name is Wim. And on her last meeting with him, she is rescued and taken back to London by Pirate after Wim and the others (Piet, the Drummer, the Indian. Who? I don't know! Maybe a reference to a movie about British spies in WWII?!) abandon her. They abandon her because they were seeking the location of Blicero and his rocket site, the one piece of information she couldn't bring herself to betray. But once she left Blicero for good, he knew she had betrayed him and he immediately had the rocket launch site moved. Now with the context of the rest of the novel, I can see where Katje came from. She was feeding information to the Allies just as Blicero suspected. But she just couldn't feed them enough. And even though her cover as a loyal Nazi party member came at the cost of sending three Jewish families to camps, she still feels she gave them more than enough information. Nobody seems to agree because she didn't give them Blicero. But Pirate takes pity on her and sends her over to The White Visitation. Here's a lengthy transcription of Pynchon's description of the commerce of the war: "She's worth nothing to them now. They were after Schußstelle 3. She gave them everything else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain's rocket site, and there is too much doubt by now as to how good the reasons were. True, the site was often moved about. But she could've been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own expressionless servant's face that leaned in over their schnapps and cigars, the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables, the cream papers stamped purple as bruised flesh. Wim and the others have invested time and lives—three Jewish families sent east—though wait now, she's more than balanced it, hasn't she, in the months out at Scheveningen? They were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved to talk, and she's fed back who knows how many reams' worth of Most Secret flimsies across the North Sea, hasn't she, squadron numbers, fueling stops, spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings, radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns—hasn't she? What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals." Once Pirate mentions that The White Visitation is where Katje can escape to, the scene shifts to her arrival there, and Osbie and Pirate having a conversation about going mad. I must, once again, transcribe a bit of text because it has a recurrence of "magenta and green" in an account of Dumbo (which will also have a recurrent mention later where Dumbo's magic feather becomes soldier corpses (or some such thing!)): "'Of course, of course,' sez Osbie, with a fluid passage of fingers and wrist based on the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of doped wine to some fool of a juvenile lead in White Zombie, the first movie Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his All-Time List along with Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to Rio, and perhaps Dumbo, which he went to see in Oxford Street last night but mid-way through noticed, instead of a magic feather, the humorless green and magenta face of Mr. Ernest Bevin wrapped in the chubby trunk of the longlashed baby elephant, and decided it would be prudent to excuse himself."

Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour during the War.

We learn that "[w]e are never told why" Katje quits the game with Blicero. But Pynchon adds some speculation that mostly amounts to simply saying, "Fuck it." In his analysis of why he brought back Katje, Pirate teaches me the word "crotchet." I shall immediately add it to my vocabulary, much as I added hobbyhorse after reading Tristram Shandy. And then, as Katje denies being Pirate's responsibility, knowing only that she owes him a debt, Pynchon gives us the story of her ancestor Frans Van der Groov and the story of the Dodoes. And I need to take a break because this section made me weep terribly last time I read it and I must prepare. The Dodo story reads like an early draft of Mason & Dixon. It easily, aside from the linguistic style, could fit into that book (which I'll probably re-read soon). And while I thoroughly loved this section the first time I read it, I gave it no real mind to the overall novel. I do that now upon my second reading and it makes me sick to my stomach. If not an analogy of the Holocaust or of Colonial Genocides, it is certainly a portrayal of the thing within humans that allow, or perhaps demand, grisly and horrendous crimes such as those. After the story of Frans Van der Groov and his dodoes (Dodoes that found salvation, or Preterite Dodoes?), Pirate and Osbie have a short conversation about what will happen with Katje. It begins like this: "'He's haunting you,' Osbie puffing on an Amanita cigarette. 'Yes,' Pirate ranging the edges of the roof-garden, irritable in the sunset, 'but it's the last thing I want to believe. The other's been bad enough. . . .'" I don't know who the "he" and "the other" are referring to! Frans, possibly, since Pirate makes reference to having been told the story later in the novel. Pointsman, maybe? Slothrop?! I guess some things will need to remain a mystery. The section ends on a scene at The White Visitation where the film of Katje that was being recorded at the beginning of this section winds up being played for Grigori the Octopus. He's being given a stimulus to respond to in the next Chapter.

#Gravity's Rainbow #Thomas Pynchon

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brothermouzongaming · 7 years

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Games I’m excited about for 2018

Spider-man (PS4 exclusive): This list is in no way ranked. That being said this is my most anticipated game of 2018. I have been waiting for a Spider-man game to grab me since Spider-man 2. When I was at E3 the gameplay looked really promising and showed that the developers knew what made the good games good. From what I can see they even were able to pull some of the things that made the bad games good a la “Web of Shadows”. I’m not going to say much else for fear of this whole post turning into a Spider-man rant. Don’t let me down Insomniac. Do not.

Dragon Ball FighterZ: This game looks SHIT HOT and I’m excited to have a fighter I really want to get into from this generation. Smooth seamless combat at breakneck speeds and so much source material it was probably daunting. DBZ is special to me and many people like me, the guys at Arc Systems have their work cut out for them and I’m excited. My fighting games thus far have been Soul Calibur 3, MvC 2, and the little I dabbled in Injustice 2 ....yeah as you can see fighting games aren’t my thing. This, however, this is gonna be something I commit to. Come January 28th these hands will be on sale, come and get it

Days Gone (PS4 exclusive): 28 Days Later-esque pandemic centered in a rich yet frightening wilderness with survival mechanics? Single Player based?Yes please and thank you I will be having all of it. The gameplay looks great and just as importantly, the story seems engaging. Yes, it’s the same Last of Us scenario we’ve encountered time and time again in both games and movies. This time I think that may have been taken into account. There’s a somber yet rooted tone that though again has been done before, really seems to hold up even in the brief cutscenes available online. Am I worried that the developers have really only accomplished the Syphon Filter series (dating myself here which is a scary thought), two PS Vita Uncharted games, one unremarkable Resistance game, and Bubsy 3D in ‘96.... NOPE fuck it cause it’s almost promised to be free of micro-transactions and actually be an enjoyable and enthralling experience.

Monster Hunter World: The beta was fun, combat felt a little empty at times but once it gets going there is no stopping this game. Something about hunting a Slug Fish creature in a swamp, turning a corner only to see some unholy being vaguely reminiscent of a T Rex fused with an Armadillo. At that point I realized that we may be the monster hunters but holy shitfuck we better come correct. Really really really deep equipment and tools settings. Your main weapon is just the beginning with perks, buffs both passive and active, as well as a few other key tools also being at your disposal. I got a buddy to join me and the two of us dragged each other through that ordeal but it was hard because it was new, I was still having a good time. I’m excited to see what Capcom brings to their first console rendition in 11 years for a franchise that is as highly acclaimed as this one.

Far Cry 5: This is a series that has always done an amazing job at the whole “Hunter v Hunted” aesthetic. I always feel so powerful and dangerous when I play Far Cry and 3 was a huge step in the right direction. 4 had a lot of things that I enjoyed, the gunplay, vehicles, and characters were really good. It did, however, fall a little short story-wise as well as some worn game mechanics with this being the fourth in the series. I did not get to play FC5 at E3 because that line was absurd. That being said, from the gameplay available on Youtube and various interviews it does seem that Ubisoft is aware of the potential stale twinge Far Cry has developed over the years. I’m looking forward to cutting down zealot cultists in the open Montana landscapes. March 27.

Anthem: This game is important, after the fuck-shit-stack that was Battlefront 2 and the cacophony of backlash that came with it; EA have to get this right. This loot box based online shooter, the “Destiny-killer” it’s being called. How does one kill what is already dead? Fuck if I know but I am interested IF they can do it right. That being said, my hopes aren’t high, but this game will be a barometer. This will show whether EA is willing to bend at all on their plans for monetization. They know a BF2 scenario is totally on the table now, and if they misstep, there will be more backlash. Either way, we win, either we get a good game or EA get put on another stake to burn.

Vampyr: From the developer that brought us Life is Strange and Remember Me comes a new game set in London 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. We will play a vampire (sigh prime journalism over here folks) in town with a set number of NPCs and each death will have consequences for both you and the city. Semi-open world with an RPG and combat focus, I’m so down and I really hope this game can do new things. Q2 (Jan., Feb., Mar.) 2018

Soul Calibur 6: My fighting game is back and this is going to be a weird year for me with not one but two fighting games that will find my focus this year. Mitsurugi, Sophitia, and around 20+ are back to beat the everloving snot out of each other. I’m excited because this is supposedly a “reboot” of the franchise which means a lot of the original characters will be back (Nightmare, Maxi, Ivy, Taki, Kilik, etc). Things like armor breaking are both interesting and worrisome. I suspect Taki, Ivy, and the other unreasonably busty women of the series will be left awfully vulnerable sans armor by the mid/end of a battle. Regardless, this revamp maybe what the fighting franchise needs to enter the ring against the big boys of this generation.

Death Stranding: DEATH MOTHER FUCKING STRANDVXIRJORWTMDNGHF Let me tell you something, Kojima is going to save us all. I’m serious he is going to take all our hands and walk us into the sunlight of gaming where there are no microtransactions, the singleplayer is an epic odyssey, the multiplayer is fun but unnecessary, and the gaming experience is not only unique but has a lasting impression on every gamer brave enough to hold a controller. This game is going to test us, change us, and maybe most importantly: make people rethink the way games are made/designed. The third person sci-fi nightmare adventure will be here before we know it and great Scott am I ready to dive in.

Red Dead Redemption 2: Had you asked me about RDD2 and it’s hypothetical production about 3 years ago; I would’ve said something along the lines of “Fuck yes yippie kai yay mfs where mah horse at”. After Take-Two (parent company of 2k and Rockstar) came out and essentially supported EA’s usage of loot boxes. The CEO stated that “Recurrent consumer spending was the way of the future,” which is concerning to say the very least. I’m worried my West World sim is gonna turn into well...something more like West World. “Oh what’s that want a new hat? 5 bucks. New horse? 10 doll hairs plz. New gun? 15 smackers and the skin off your respective genitalia. Thank you come again.” My once resounding and honestly strange response is definitely more tepid and cautious. GTAV is lending itself quite nicely to the ways of the microtransaction and I can just see little buckets of gold nuggets or some dumb shit like that hinging in front of me or at the local shop. If so may there be backlash, and lots of it.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Greedfall: Developed by Spiders, a team with an... interesting track record in gaming (Sherlock Holmes v Jack the Ripper, Bound by Flame, and Technomancer [yikes]). On paper, this game sounds like it might be worth a damn and this is the most publicity any of their games have gotten so that does peak my interest. That and the publisher is Focus Home Interactive, makers of games like Divinity 2 and The Surge as well as my highly anticipated Call of Cthulhu and Vampyr. Who knows, this team up might just work. An open world RPG with online mechanics sounds fun.

God of War: I have never played a God of War game all the way through. With this being my first PlayStation that does make sense. That being said, I’m very excited to sit down and try my hand at this rebooted series. Given the reputation and clear influence a game like GoW has had, it does lead my expectations up rather than down. Santa Monica is developing, Ready at Dawn for some reason isn’t but it’s good to see the original team getting another crack at the Spartan. This time Greco-Roman gods are put aside for a more Nordic feel. The chain blades replaced with a hefty ax as well as a few other tools from what I’ve read/heard. Another interesting single player experience for those turned off by multiplayer and microtransactions. Not to say it won't have them just look at Shadow of War. It does, however, make it considerably less likely.

BioMutant: Traverse an open and changing world as an also everchanging bio-genetic mutant. Supposedly going to have big rpg mechanics involving the fact that your character’s schtick is evolving and changing. Brought to you by THQ Nordic the people that brought us the highs of the Darksiders series, Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, and Red Faction (2001). As well as some lows like the recently imploded Elex, Alan Wake, and the classic Spynx and the Cursed Mummy. I really don’t know what to make of this resume let alone what to expect. I am however excited for something new in the third person adventure genre.

#dbz #dragon ball fighterz #spider-man #days gone #monster hunter world #far cry 5 #anthem #vampyr #soul calibur 6 #death stranging #greedfall #god of war #biomutant #ps4 #xbox #red dead redemption 2

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wtf-skittens · 7 years

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Skits, how did you get into warhammer40k?

TL:DR version: Via my university librarian and the A Thousand Sons novel, mostly. XD

Long version: I was at uni studying games animation, and one day sometime in 2009 I noticed my uni librarian, a bloke nicknamed Dingo, painting some miniatures during his lunch break. I was all ‘hey that looks cool’ and he was like ‘yeah wanna try it?’ He dug up some random lil tyranid for me to test paint, and it turned out I was pretty good at it! (twenty-odd years of prior art experience probably helped XD). I also quite enjoyed it, and it was a good way to kill time and rest my brain between classes. (It also led to Dingo having to often remind me to breathe, because I would legitimately forget to do so regularly while painting. ¬_¬ I am not a clever man)

So I ended up painting one of his several armies for him, a Tzeentch-focused Chaos Marine army he called the Heralds of Change. One of the squads in said army was a squad of Rubricae, and because I really liked the blue and gold of the box art, he let me paint them that instead of the purple and silver of the rest of the force. This army kinda became ‘mine’ while I was at uni, since I’d painted all of it. ;)

There were other people at uni who also played 40k, and a lot of them kept their armies in the same side-room of the library that Dingo kept all his (plus terrain) in. So it wasn’t uncommon to find people playing 40k between classes and such, and ofc I ended up joining in as well, using ‘my’ Heralds of Change army. Through them I also started playing the Dawn of War computer games, and eventually started reading the Horus Heresy novels. By this point I’d been enjoying the 40k hobby for like a year without paying a single cent of my own money. XD Good times.

And then I read A Thousand Sons, and absolutely fell in love with the XV Legion. Damnit. So that’s about the point where I went “hey I’d like to make my own Thousand Sons army!”, and Dingo gave me that original squad of Rubric Marines and their accompanying Rhino that I’d painted to help form the core of my fledgling army. They were soon joined by a second Rubric squad + Rhino, a Defiler, a Vindicator, a Land Raider, the metal Ahriman model, a big ol’ winged daemon prince, and a Forgeworld Thousand Sons dreadnought. That dread was my first real foray into sculpting anything with greenstuff, and again, I found out I wasn’t terrible at it. XD Then I got myself a squad of chaos terminators, but I decided I wanted to make them look more like the 30k TSons artwork in the Collected Visions Horus Heresy artbook. So that squad was my first attempt at major conversion, and despite all the things I’d do differently with them now, I’m still quite proud of them.

Now, during all the games I’d played, the sorcerer model of my second Rubricae squad developed something of a reputation of sucking hardcore. The dice seemed to specifically hate his face. He’d fail to hit or wound anything; he’d be the first in the squad or army to get killed by the enemy, or he’d fail a psychic test and die horribly, or he’d explode into giant chicken-daemon which would also fail to do anything useful before getting killed messily, etc. etc. So we nicknamed that one particular model Kenny. “You killed Kenny! AGAIN! You bastards!”

At some point after reading A Thousand Sons, I decided one day to look up Egyptian names - I don’t even remember why. Just for the hell of it, I flipped to the “K” section - and found Khentimenti, mystical god of the dead’s destiny.

Kenny immediately became Khenti, and I think that was about the time I first started actually thinking of background fluff and characterisation for my lil plastic/metal mandollies. XD And THEN I decided that my lil band of TSons were actually still loyalists, so I had to come up with a backstory for that, and reasons WHY they were blue instead of red, and why they’d still have a daemon prince and a Defiler (because I still wanted to use those models, damn it), so on and so forth. My fluff also tied in to the fluff of some of my mates, and we all developed our own lil collaborative area of 40k space where all our armies hang out and interact, etc. So that led to a story I wrote based on one of the games I’d had with some of them, and I’ve been developing the fluff for my army (alongside theirs) ever since. XD It also led to me starting a second TSons army - this one more 30k-styled, in the red and white instead of blue and gold.

One of the other things that’s kept me in the hobby is the various RP games that Fantasy Flight released - Deathwatch, Dark Heresy, Only War, & Black Crusade. My lil group of mates have been playing those various games for the past four or five years, even moreso than the tabletop miniatures game. Since all our games are set in the same general area, stuff that happens in one game can affect (or completely derail ¬_¬) what goes on in another. My various characters have lost enough body parts collectively to almost build an entire new person. XD Good times!

anyway uh wall-of-text crits for over nine thousaaaaaaand~ I hope you enjoyed this ramble! XD

#wh40k #thousand sons #shadowed suns #I love Khentimentiu he tries SO HARD #and I have SO MANY STORIES from all those rp games #so many #valueyourwahls

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