#since I got his alt recently you actually get to play through the entire event again as his sync pair story

[fluffs-n-stuffs]

I HADN’T REALIZED THE DESTINY BOND COMIC LINKS BROKE SINCE I UPDATED MY BLOG NAME AKDJSNDNSJDS

I shall update them by later today 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♀️🚶‍♀️

[trashcatsnark]

NGL I love how much you have embraced the silverv stuff here - its so nice to read. I submit for consideration, Rogue notices the tattoo while on the disaster date and both Johnny and V play it off as a joke and holy shit poor rogue stuck in a room with two morons.

Also - V getting dressed for that date and realizing they just MIGHT be a little jealous with a side of some thoughts of "Oh God Johnny Would NEVER Feel That Way About Me Gotta Bury This Deep So He Doesn't Know"

Johnny notices the anxiety but is very dense about the cause.

Oh hell yeah, I have fully embraced it and this ship; I was writing SilverV porn before the game came out, like I knew what my ship for this game was gonna be from the second I saw gifs of

“You’re a dick, Johnny” 

“And you’re a cunt, so maybe we’ll fit together after all.” 

That banter sealed my fate and I’m fairly sure I had named and created my V then wrote porn of her with Johnny literally a week later. The devil works hard, but my brainrot works harder and faster. 

Spoilers! 

Okay, so I’ve thought a lot about that date in both a silverv context (and largely how it fits with my V, Aidan and her fic) I’ll try to stay general though. 

Firstly, I whole heartedly believe Rogue sees through their bullshit. Not only is she just good at that, but Johnny even states she has MRE’s (?) and can see through people, like her eyes can pick up on signs of lying. And usually, thats not an issue for when V talks to her, but when she asks about Johnny and their relationship with him. Its a mess. And when Rogue asks Johnny about it, its a mess. 

And when Rogue notices the tattoo it’s like Oh... I get it . And Johnny is of course like, “hahaha, yeah I thought that’d be so funny, the kid hates it.” But Rogue isn’t stupid, she knows a lovey dovey heart with their names, something that looks like someone doodled it on their third grade notebook about their crush, is not really typical of Johnny’s “joking” She knows that if Johnny is not really the kind of guy to hahahaha its so funny to make it look like we love each other; he’d be more likely to get a dick tattooed on V’s arm if it was just to mess with them. For gods sake, look how many people didn’t pick “the other one” because they were convinced it was gonna be a dick. That’s a Johnny just trying to fuck with someone move. So, she doesn’t buy it, but doesn’t push it...with him. 

She asks V about and of course they play it off as “Yeah, Johnny thought it’d be funny, what a fucking asshole, its so fucking dumb, I totally fuckin hate it.” 

“So, why not get it removed?” 

“Uhhhhhhhhhhh, well you see what had happened was, um, I, just uhhhh, never been enough time, I guess yeahhhhhh.” 

Cause lets face it, in cyberpunk universe, getting a tattoo removed should be easy. If you can get blades in your arms and can have a completely newly reconstructed body in like an afternoon; you can get a tattoo removed in like twenty minutes. So, V still keeping it, says volumes about how they really feel.

Now, V’s jealousy and the date. 

I do absolutely agree that any anxiety or ill feeling V might have up until the date; Johnny is gonna feel, but not realize where it’s coming from. I think if anything, he’s gonna chalk it up to V being anxious about giving him control again and he’s gonna be like worried that maybe V doesn’t trust him as much as they let on. 

And I do think a V who has feelings for Johnny, would not be able to help feeling some jealousy regarding Rogue and Johnny. Just because jealousy is natural thing to feel and while you can debate if they were ever a good or healthy couple, you can’t debate they shared very real feelings for one another. And I think a lot of V’s jealousy would come from just how much Johnny seems to first think of/go to Rogue. When he needed to save Alt, first person he turned to, Rogue. When he wanted to bomb Arasaka tower (going by his memory of it and ignoring that the event was probably actually planned by Morgan Blackhand), who’d he go to? Rogue. When he becomes determined to get Smasher, who is he determined to get him with, Rogue. When he first decides to atone for his past mistakes, who’s the first person he wants to make up with, Rogue. When at the rooftop, who does he want to go grab to help him save V, Rogue. 

If you got feelings for someone, that’d hurt, I think it’s impossible for that not to spark some jealousy. And V if anything is also mad at themselves for having those feelings, because they like Rogue, she’s a badass, a legend, they respect the hell out of her. And of course they have feelings for Johnny and they wanna help him make shit right and they wanna give him a chance to enjoy himself. But this stupid reptilian part of their brain is screaming but i want to be the first person he goes to, the first person he thinks about, which they know is also stupid cause for fucks sake the man literally lives in their brain, they’re as close as two people can be and literally when Johnny has the power to go to someone for something, he can’t go to V because they’re reduced to sleeping essentially until Johnny hands back the reigns. Yet, feelings aren’t aren’t always, rational, sadly. 

And to Johnny’s credit, he probably doesn’t even give it that much thought. Rogue is a badass, someone he cares for, someone he can depend on and someone he hurt really badly. The two people he can and always has been able to depend on the most (other than Alt prior to her death) have been Kerry and Rogue. And, bless his heart, the fuck is Kerry gonna do? Kerry ain’t a merc, Kerry isn’t gonna bust into Arasaka Tower or plant a bomb. Kerry doesn’t have the connection to Smasher. So, of course, Rogue is gonna be his go to. And in terms of making things up to people...he literally cannot really do much to make things up to V, not the way he can for Rogue or Kerry. Cause, when him and V are both conscious, he can’t do much beyond touch and talk to them. Hell, even with Rogue and Kerry, he relies mostly on V to help him do anything. Even with people he can interact with and do something for; V is doing all the nitty gritty work for him. V drives Rogue to the theater, V breaks into the theater, V gets the projector going. V breaks into Kerry’s house, V disables the security. V gets in contact with Nancy. V gets Nancy out of Totentanz in one piece. 

Which probably if V actually thought about it critically, does mean he’s going to them and relying on them more than Rogue, but they’d probably dismiss it out of it being for necessity and not because he cares about them and feels he an depend on them. 

Anyhow, Johnny would probably love to do some nice gesture to make up for his bender to V, hell they probably were the first person he wanted to make things up since they are his catalyst for changing. But what feasibly can he do for them? Anything he’d want to do with/for them, would just be asking V go do this thing and i’ll also be here. Anything that would put them in public interacting is out, unless they want MaxTac called on V for looking cyberpsychotic. He can’t even do an at home date, because he can’t cook (engram or not) and he can’t buy them anything nice he has no money and also doesn’t technically exist. He could try to do so sneakily while he’s in control...but he’d be using V’s money so they might as well just buy it for themselves. he can play music for them,,. but that doesn’t seem too special and more than a little egotistical to think it’ll make V feel better about what he did... So... all he can really do, is prove he’s worth trusting by being on his best behavior and more importantly do what he can to save V’s life. 

Then there’s the date. And as usual, I have some opinions and feelings about a thing.  Like, okay, I’ve seen some people (aka Gamer Bros on Twitter) being like, Rogue is Johnny’s girl. Wanting to date either of them is wrong because they like each other. (then you also get the BUT ALT crowd, but rants for another day.) And I can’t help but ask, did we play the same date? Their entire date is about how they’re both desperately clinging to the past. Rogue is trying to reclaim 2013-2023 Rogue and Johnny just wanting for a night to feel like the world and his place in it haven’t been completely rearranged. And it ends with Rogue telling him, she is not that girl anymore, she can’t pretend to be, and frankly she doesn’t want to anymore. She wishes she could be, wishes she was still that tall haired street punk who’d never dream of working with corps or being a fixer, but she’s not. Her and Johnny are no longer the same people who met back in to 2010’s. Doesn’t mean they don’t care about one another and doesn’t mean what feelings they had weren’t real or important; but they’re just not those people anymore. Rogue more so than Johnny since he’s freshly on the course of change.   

Something else in regards to the date, that I think is important to talk about and how it relates to silverv and its something I personally have very conflicting feelings about. The fact that Johnny can initiate some physical intimacy with Rogue. See, I have never chosen the option to kiss Rogue during the date and actually did not learn until relatively recently, that if that choice is made it goes a biiit further than a kiss. I have watched the scene now.

And god I have mixed feelingssss. Like, I get it, but I’m not sure I like it. And I know full well, my silverv bias impacts my feelings on the matter, it’s be disingenuous to say otherwise. But I don’t think the ship is purely my reason for having these feelings. But at the end of the day, its all opinions. So, I get from a character perspective that Johnny and Rogue are trying so hard to reclaim their past and what they use to have that they get caught up in trying do what they would do if this was the 2010’s. And Johnny’s relationships as we’ve seen are very physical, sexual chemistry and attraction are major factors in his relationships because he kept things very superficial most of the time. He even says part of the issue with his relationship with Rogue is at the time he didn’t realize he could let her see the true him and still hid behind walls, kept things at a distance. So, the idea that’d they fall back into the old habit of trying to just be physical and ignore their feelings, isn’t out of character. 

However, and Johnny even seems to acknowledge this issue when Rogue interrupts it, they’re doing this with V’s body. V...who did not consent to sexual contact. They consented to a date and while one could logic that this would mean everything a date could entail up to and including physical intimacy; I would argue that that is something that would need further conversation to have clear consent. And like again, this might come down to boundaries and personal feelings. Because I go back to the bender and what’s been interesting to me is too see different opinions on it; some people weren’t actually bothered at all by Johnny’s bender in V’s body, some people were bothered by the drugs and alcohol specifically cause their V is straight edge. Me, personally, it was the sexual content and the endangering of V’s life. Like, it was mostly funny and oh yeah, I expected that it’s bad but eh I’ll move on, to me, until he started getting sexual with people in V’s body. Like that to me is not just crossing the line, it’s catapulting over it. 

And like I said, Johnny even responds to Rogue’s “this isn’t fair” with “what, you mean it’s not fair to V?” which she says she meant it isn’t fair to Johnny. (Which viscerally upset because you nearly used V’s body for sexual gratification without their consent and you’re worried about Johnny, which tbf Rogue has no way of knowing what V has and hasn’t consented to, so its not on her but that was my knee jerk thought). So, he has some awareness that maybe that was a bad move. 

And yeah, it definitely to me and my V would be a very bad move (unless he explicitly talked to them beforehand and got consent). And in general, it made me feel like, dude, you just promised you’d be better and not break V’s trust but again not a day later you’re nearly using them to have sex. It felt like a backslide, which isn’t necessarily unrealistic, cause change and growth is not always linear, people can commit to changing themselves and still fuck up and not get it right; in fact it’s rare for them not to have any sort of backsliding or repeating of mistakes. 

Again, I will also give credit that he could have been assuming that given V consented to the date, they assumed or were cool with their being physical intimacy between him and Rogue. He also generally, might not have really planned for it to happen, because I don’t think Johnny plans a lot of anything. It very well might have just sort of happened. Also, V doesn’t clearly communicate if the sexual component was an issue in the bender. All V really seems to have an issue with in game is the very general thing of; he misled them and used them. So, he might have assumed that wasn’t ever an issue. And hell, if you wanna go full meta, the player is technically the one who makes that choice and V is largely an avatar for the player, so that alone could be seen as whether or not V would/does consent. 

But, from a story perspective, removing the player choice element. I think how that’s handled would have a huge impact on silverv and where it goes from there. 

Because if V and Johnny did talk about consent prior and V did consent while having feelings for Johnny, god I’d have to imagine they’d still feel pretty hurt, but feel it’s irrational to feel that way and have put their own feelings aside because clearly Johnny cares about and wants Rogue and they should ruin what could be his one chance to make things right. 

If there like in game was no talk of consent and Johnny ends up kissing and touching on Rogue and V finds out or has memories of it surface,that could be devastating for them. Not only from their own feelings for Johnny, but this since of betrayal and hurt. Was the oil field conversation just a lie? A manipulation? V might feel like they were used; that Johnny never gave a shit about them or how they feel. And Johnny would have to deal with the realization that intentionally or not; he earned back V’s trust just to destroy it again. He fucked up again, he ruined everything again, he got his second chance and destroyed it…. And he doesn’t know how, if he can, or if he should bother trying to ask for a third. In general, I do think, V would come out of the date assuming (naturally so) that Johnny really only has romantic feelings towards Rogue, that they’re just a friend at best, a host to be used at worse. I even in my own universe with my V have them after everything is better, everyones got a body, expects Johnny to start pursing Rogue and trying to swallow their own feelings and be a supportive friend, try to encourage and push him to do it and Johnny’s just like please stop, Rogue is this close to murdering us both.

I was gonna add more funny stuff to this and include a shitposty interaction he has with my V over them dressing up for the date and shit, BUT HOLY FUCK THIS GOT LONG AND SAD????? I’M SO SORRY.

[bookshelfpassageway]

Hello yes I would like the full rundown on It's A Wonderful Life a la Eugene Riverworth (I once helped my DM spec out alignment-reversed versions of our entire party, alt universe characters are near and dear to my heart)

ALRIGHT SO IT'S CATASTROPHIC AMOUNTS OF CONTEXT TIME

Sorry I took so long, I've just spent most of my week trying not to turn into a puddle of goo. I accidentally listened to Mr Blue Sky today, however, and the last verse sucker-punched me into finishing this.

...At some point, I'm going to take my google doc of garbage notes with no filter and turn them into a coherent campaign recap to hand out to people. But for now, here's this definitely-more-than-a-snippet-snippet.

Alright so, to start with, we have an NPC friend named Rothwin. He's a goth wood-elf wizard with a deep, deep set guilt complex about how many people he's known that have died. His mother, due to a dragon attack, and he recently discovered, his little sister, due to the mafia said dragon runs. His twin brother was recently thralled by Mind Flayers, and we've been trying to track him down. He also had a particular bond (I don't have all the details, but he gave him an enchanted knife and a letter) with our halfling assassin, Tasher, who was disintegrated back at lv 8 by a possessed Eugene. He let the possession happen on purpose, to try to get the upper hand in a fight with our warlock's patron, but the thing he gave himself over to was not at all inclined to give Eugene's body back. This chain of events also led to the kidnapping of Rothwin's brother. There's a reason we call him the "trashwizard".

Anyway, Rothwin. Rothwin is the hero child that wants to fix everything. Guilt complex from here to the moon. He's also a slightly higher level wizard than us, a lv 14 party, and he's recently spent a LOT of time scribing studiously in his spellbook. Because Eugene is a nosy little man, he actually got a glimpse at the spell he was working on: Wish.

So, the night after Rothwin's brother is captured, we hang around and try to comfort him. He seems oddly alright, and tells us that he thinks things will be looking up, soon.

When we awake, the world is different, none of us know any of the others, we remember nothing of the world before, and Rothwin has erased the dragon that tore his family apart, over 200 years ago. In the process, the circumstances did not arise where Tasher died.

The original Eugene left home at 17 to seek his fortune, and, finding that to be a very hard task, gradually lowered his standards over the course of a decade until he became the glitzy mountebank in the pointy hat we all know and love.

This new Eugene never had that chance to be a con man. If he did swindle, it would have only been a brief stint of the minor, hunger-induced infractions of the very beginning of his career. He had a pretty similar childhood and departure. Instead, he was recruited by this universe's much more prosperous version of the Mage's Guild (run by Rothwin's mother), an agent of whom saw some element of talent in him. So for the past ten years, he's made his name as an Illusionist of mild note, a full wizard rather than a rogue multiclass, and slowly moving up the Guild's ranks. He'd just been promoted, even. He's Neutral-Good-aligned, as opposed to the original True Neutral, and though his base traits remain the same (including: sociable, vain, ambitious, indulgent, a bit foolish), they're dialed up to different degrees. This Eugene is a genuinely sweet person, in a slightly fussy and oblivious kind of way, and actually allows himself to get attached to people. Which happens easily, and strongly. He hasn't had any need to shut that part of himself down. He has a Simulacrum named Snowy, and understands what birds are (running joke in the campaign, his familiar is exactly one pint of screech owl and summoning medium-sized birds has never been successful).

Eugene's youngest sister, in the original timeline, was a warlock of the Raven Queen. She quickly began having visions of the way fate was originally supposed to play out, and together they were able to research what might have happened and start to contact the old partymembers. Everyone arrived, and started getting flashbacks of the events of the campaign. We fought some old enemies who were defeated in the original world, including the devil that set off so much catastrophe, and a mad wizard who here had managed to imprison the guy who can fix this.

We managed to short out this wizard's magical abilities with a Counterspell, triggering the source of his stolen power to take over his body to see what the hell was going on. The Whispered One, known more commonly (though not in this campaign. His name is a pricey secret after all) as Vecna. We met him once in the original timeline too, he's how Rothwin found out his sister was dead, and was responsible for the warlockifying of an artificer. (it was almost the original Eugene, but the depressed cat got in there first, also, selfishly, a warlock multiclass would have screwed over his spell slot situation too much)

Between people starting to get flashbacks (flashsidewayses?), logical deductions, and a free trial of information from the Whispered One, we realize IC what's happened and what we'd be going back to, and how to set things back to exactly square one.

Everyone gets... Maybe a little too into the RP at this point. There's a lot of philosophy and metaphysics. There's also a lot of upset when we realize who doesn't survive the original course of fate. We try to figure out if it's possible to put it back the same but just a little different, and realize that someone is here with the power to do so, but the Whispered One is not going to budge unless we give him a secret as payment. Changing fate to save a life (possibly more), would likely require a more costly secret than average. Also, we as players aren't just going to shortchange VECNA. We like being alive (Sure we will piss off the Raven Queen, but that's fine, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it). Also dramatic gestures are more narratively satisfying. Eugene's mental state is a fascinating concoction of self-loathing, existential dread, cunning bastard, hero wannabe, "hey I've known this party longer than anyone except my family and former business partner" + "I will admit I care about people". Some solutions are proposed, the Dragonborn Paladin has a book from her backstory, the Assassin has god secrets...

And Eugene, filled with guilt and distaste for tragedy and fondness for Tasher and a complicated infatuation towards Rothwin and all the trappings of a moral person, realizing for absolute certainty that all that he's become, worked for, and hoped for in this life, MUST be overwritten by someone he can't stand, and knows won't be able to stand him... Suggests that what is more secret than a life that could have been, and never could have been, lived? His own existence could not only amount to something, but actually be preserved in some capacity in the Whispered One's library.

This is immediately, though with some surprise, accepted by the Whispered One. "In all my years and years, I've never had a whole person a secret before..." A portal into a dark room with pinpoints of green light inside opens, and all he has to do is step through, and Rothwin will be given the power to re-cast Wish to bend the world back to the way it was-... While having fixed that which can be fixed. There's a bit of devolving back into Philosophy here, people trying to stop him or suggest simpler secrets, but knowing this might lead anywhere except causing more stress and the risk of him chickening out, Eugene steps through the portal.

Cassie, who had been watching him intently since the deal was proposed, gives the world's smallest "...wait" at the exact moment it's too late. Rothwin is given a green glowing rune, and casts Wish again.

The party wakes up right where they left off before all this happened, with no memory of what transpired. Eugene seems no worse for wear, and has gone back to accidentally persecuting the local introverts. Tasher washes up on the beach where we scattered his ashes, remembering only the other world and feeling a compulsion to seek out the place where we might be going next, and the devil we fought... Is present on the material plane again, somewhere.

So yeah. The man can’t go one timeline without yeeting himself headfirst into shady eldritch nonsense in a bid to find a Third Option. But this time having fixed the problems he created by all the previous times he’s done it. RIP good!Eugene, you were too pure to exist without the universe breaking. This is absolutely going to come back to bite me in the ass and I have no idea how my DM will have it do so.

[life-love-geekculture]

SPN 14x20: a few (i.e. many) thoughts

Writers lie.

But, they lie in order to tell a greater truth.

At least, that’s how the proverbial wisdom goes anyway. After this episode, however, I’m not entirely sure I know what Chuck’s truth is supposed to be.

“Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible.”

That’s my all time favorite quote from the series. Along with the addendum endings are a raging pain in the ass. Ever since his introduction, I’ve always felt an affinity for Chuck’s character. He’s a writer. So am I. He vocalized a not insignificant part of that experience. Reconciling the pain characters you create and love have to go through to get them from point A to point B. The difficulty in wrapping up a story. Hell, critics. It’s one of the reasons Metatron always drove me a bit nuts during his play at godhood. All of the technique, but none of the artistry.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is Chuck’s turn to villiany hurts a little. It’s brilliant beyond all belief, don’t get me wrong! What better way to get across the theme of free will on a meta-narrative level? But within the SPN universe it just feels anti-thetical to the story he’s been “telling”. An honest to god betrayal of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I can buy the avoided apocalypse (the first one at least) was Chuck’s intent all along. He wanted Sam and Dean to choose family. He created free will so it could be used. It plays seemlessly into the parental metaphor they’ve also attached to him. The kids have got to grow up sometime. And part of growing up means cleaning up your messes on your own. Which the Winchesters do...a lot.

This sudden shift in attitude,though, just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s less writing an ending as crumpling the document and throwing it away. If the multi-verse is supposed to represent drafts, then Chuck is the kind of writer who keeps ahold of them because some element in one could make another better (and now bringing all the alt-hunters back make sense on a meta level and my head hurts). The point is, if SPN is his final draft or his favorite why destroy it?The characters’ didn’t do what you wanted ? That’s half the fun of being a writer! The unexpected twists of creation! Inspiration turned to life! It makes no sense.

And so I tried to look at it from the God-angle perspective and it still doesn’t make sense. Chuck doesn’t change. Like he told Lucifer he’s pretty much the same as he’s always been. Yes, there’s the Old Testament’s wrathful side. The fire and brimstone and punishment, but even in the Bible that’s balanced with compassion and forgiveness. There’s the Chuck whose solution has always been: build a bigger box. The one who fought for creation to be born. Not made, born. The one who could be reasoned out of apparent wrath because the point was the lesson (the truth) he was trying to get across. And then I remembered his exchange with Castiel...

Chuck: See this is why people need to lie. It’s good. Keeps the peace, you know?

Castiel: Seems like an odd stance for...you.

Chuck: Is it? I’m a writer. Lying is kinda what we do

Chuck is God’s lie.

That is, it’s the mask he wears to keep the peace. It’s his way of walking away and letting the kids learn (and in many ways blossom) for themselves while still supervising. It’s something Metatron calls him out on when they meet in season 11 to discuss Chuck’s autobiography. Specifically, Metatron notes the emphasis on time spent in the Chuck persona was being used to hide the truth. And, it’s a truth Chuck readily confesses to Sam in the Bunker.

Jack told the universe to stop lying. Chuck comes back immediately in full father-mode. The father who demands obedience over the growth of the children (hello, season 1 & 2 parallels). These are not coincidental. Now, sure Chuck could fix creation, but could he do the same for himself? Evidence suggests...not so much. And, based on the look Billie gives Jack in the Empty, the kid done fucked up something. That was not a happy look.

So where does this leave us?

Well, with a zombie apocalypse in the immediate future and lots of ghosts to deal with next. More importantly, though, it looks like the boys may be on a mission to stop or save God himself. It’s...it’s a hell of a way to go out. The writer in me is very proud.

Before I wrap this up, though, a few thoughts on TFW 2.0:

First, I called it with Dean. Again, not a surprise. As I said, he needs to get to the edge before he can back off from it. That said, this episode wasn’t without some painful moments for him. As some of you may know, I’ve started rewatching and reviewing old episodes of SPN in preparation for the series finale. A bit serendipitous given recent events, but as part of that I rewatched episode 1x03 recently. Dean’s speech about Mary being his hero is so similar in tone to the speech he gives Lucas (the kid with the psychic link to the lake ghost) about his belief in Mary wanting him to be brave. It physically hurt to watch. The facade hiding the pain of Mary’s second death publicly cracking in a way similar to the facade hiding the pain of her first. But it also made me really excited to complete this review series and pull out those hidden parallels. Also, don’t think for a second I won’t point out how much of a nerd Dean really is. I have said it for years and now I feel vindicated!

On a more serious note, I don’t know what to say about Jack. Seeing him dead hurt (the only tears I shed in the finale to be honest). But this season left off with so many unanswered questions. Just how powerful is this kid? What are the Shadow and Billie planning? What is with Halucifer 2.0? How the fuck do souls actually work? And I’m still trying to get my head around his self-prophecy to Cas. A perfect world has always seemed, again, anti-thetical to the point of the story. The power of choice means things can’t be perfect and the only way to bring about perfection is to rob creation of choice. It’s a constant battle the Winchesters have had to fight. I’m cautiously intrigued to see how this storyline is going to be fulfilled.

So let’s talk about Sam. I knew the kid was in a bad place going in to this episode, but...DAMN!

I’m pretty solidly in the camp he wasn’t intending to kill Chuck with that wave of multi-dimensional hoo-haa. Sam’s only ever been that bad of a shot during the trials when he was sick. Still the fact he even tried it...This might be the one thing I can’t forgive Dean for this season. Even when the boys have been at their worst, Dean still allowed Sam to talk.To get his grief out. There’s been no relief since Mary’s death and Sam’s journey has inevitably played into a point I made reviewing Absence(14x18). The boys are used to dealing with death as a matter of consequence, not an accident. Which is why Sam is currently blaming himself for what happened. While it’s true Jack’s storyline for the season contributed towards Mary’s death, it’s something that could have happened regardless of if he had a soul or not. There’s no cosmic choice involved. But add it to the list of things that have gone wrong this season, and it makes sense for Sam to shift the blame to Chuck when he realized he’s been watching and apparently not doing anything (something we’ve known about Chuck for practically forever).

It’s something people do when bad things happen all the time in the real world. Chuck could have been less of an ass explaining why he couldn’t help, but he’s sorta not...wrong. Assuming he didn’t interfere with Jack to kick this mess off (and I hope to God that is not the case), it all goes back to free will. Sometimes bad things just happen. Sometimes Someone makes a stupid mistake in the heat of moment, and you just have to live with the aftermath. That said, I just kind of want to wrap the moose in a bunch of blankets and keep him protected in the Bunker forever and...

And so finally, we come to Cas. My sweet, awesome fucking angel/best dad in the whole universe. Cas wins the whole season! Give him all of the awards! The poor angel has been putting out fire after fire and I love him for it as much as I’m still terrified for him. It does crack me up a little that everyone got so pissed at the boys last episode for the Ma’lak box, and yet Cas is literally thinking of putting Jack in the Cage this episode. Like father, like son I guess. Yet, it’s clear his intention is to save him. Cas isn’t blind to the danger Jack poses, but his aim is to just contain him till a cure can be found. Not a great solution but the only one we have at the moment. And can we talk about that scene in the graveyard! Perfect imagery of a father being strict but compassionate towards his son who screwed up. All of the awards! All of them!

[abundantchewtoys]

HS Epilogues, Meat p26 reaction

Well, we unexpectedly went on a little hiatus there, in our liveblogging. It's just one of those things you got to find time for doing, you know?

So, last time in Homestuck Epilogues, Dirk was present for Rose's ascension into omniscience. Although he did state he still had a manner of control over her, and was going to do something to anchor her to her living body. So, you know, they're not on equal footing just yet, in part because Dirk hasn't relinquished control of the narration to her.

I hope the POV switches to John again, but since we just had a page from his perspective, it might be going back to Kanaya? Or Roxy, but Dirk might not want to spent more time around her "unfathomable" mind than is necessary for the plot to advance. It's not something you'd relish, as a supposedly omniscient narrator.

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"Jade kicks her shoeless feet behind her slowly, as if she’s swimming with the current of the gravitational waves pulling her ever closer to their source." Oh! I didn't think we'd see her again, at least in the Furthest Ring. Thought the Black Hole had already swallowed her up. Though maybe as a Space player, and one with a connection to a seven-year-more-experienced version of herself located outside of canon and thus with more guaranteed conditional immortality than normal, she might be able to... resist getting thorn to pieces, as she crosses the event horizon? Unlike, presumably, every other being sucked into this thing.

"the ruby slippers are gone. She kicked them off hours ago, as if to jettison all hope of returning anywhere resembling a place she used to call home. The fond remembrance of such a place no longer has any pull on her.

Now, something else entirely is pulling her." Welp, guess the Black Hole is kind of hypnotic, ain't it? Or maybe it's Alt Calliope's strong personality.

"Believe me, I’m sympathetic to the temptation. It’s always just there, isn’t it?" To jump into the void? I don't think it's ALWAYS there for everyone Dirk, but thanks for the unique perspective into how your mind functions.

"There’s something about being alone for so long, it makes time feel like it doesn’t exist. She knows this almost better than I do." ... Yes, well, Lonely Jade did, and it seems as if she might have taken over, or melded with, Reload Jade? So yeah, her three years of isolation would indeed have given her some inkling of the feeling of loneliness that Dirk and the cherubs must have experienced, being physically alone all their life. ... Right, of course her childhood on Hellmurder Island would have also done that regardless.

"Jade also knows well enough by now that time doesn’t actually exist in a literal sense, the way we generally understand it. It’s just one aspect of many, and the complement of her own, Space. It therefore can be neutralized by the introduction of her essence. Reduced to white noise or soft light. The continuum of time is therefore demonstrably an illusion. The field of sequential moments and physical conditions that stretch on and on, resulting in the mirage of loneliness, is pure projection from disproportionate attention given to a single side of one cosmic, polar pair of ideas: time." Ah yes, aspect exposition time! To quote the swamp bender: "Time is an illusion", huh? We're going that route? Well, sure, but for most people a rather convincing one, no matter what your Aspect is. Though it would be interesting to see what "disproportionate attention" given to Space would result in... Despite a ravenous Black Hole consuming an entire realm, I guess.

"It’s my way of saying, and thereby alerting her mind to what she already knows, that this feeling of all-consuming solitude and despair haunting her since childhood��it’s in her head." Like, I can only root for Dirk in trying to save Jade from whatever Calliope has cooked up, but he's still manipulating her for his own purposes.

"The ticking of time is a little contrivance in her mind as a byproduct of imbalance, of the vast disparity between her limited self and her Ultimate Self." So, what, his past is as real to Dirk right now as his present and future?

"It lives rent free there the way Dave once did, and for this version of Jade, probably still does." Funny how that points to this still being Reload Jade more than post-canon Jade.

"Maybe Dave broke her heart a little, and he keeps doing it too, no matter how many different timelines they try out." Okay, see? This applies to post-canon Jade! It seems to swing around from moment to moment, the direction the narration points into. Though, I guess post-canon Jade might really benefit from absorbing her pre-retcon selves memories regarding her relationship with Davesprite, to assess how to go about handling Dave on Earth C.

"She slips closer to the event horizon, still making no effort to impede her descent. My persuasion skills are admittedly a little rusty. Bear with me here." So very rusty, so very unused recently. :P But yeah, she's different from Rose AND John, so he'll need a different approach.

"In my experience, there’s something about being alone that can take a person’s limited meat-engine and make it imagine that it can see beyond the confines of its own electrical processes. Make it believe that it is ascending to a place where it can see the four dimensions spread out beneath it like a set of windows." Is he... paraphrasing Jade's current mindset? Or his own, isolated on B2 Earth? Sounds also as if he's describing a medidative monk, kind of.

"Like sheet music. Like a garden, where Jade used to spend so much of her time with her hands in the earth and her head in the clouds, dreaming about flowers that bloomed in six colors and grew when she played them a song. Was that real? It’s hard to tell. But it made her happy, didn’t it?

Isn’t that what she needs now?" Ooh, so he's trying to persuade her to turn around by getting inside her head and trying to figure out what made her most happy. Being omniscient, he might just have a hard time distinguishing the important bits from the trash? He seemed to describe it in such a way, as if Jade might sometimes have been daydreaming in a way it overlapped with dreaming on Prospit! And so, she might have created a space for her dreamself that didn't stick to the confines of the dreamroom.

"Isn’t it reasonable to presume that’s the only thing capable of persuading her to slow her descent—to being invited to imagine, fake or otherwise, that which once made her happy? That which could still make her happy, if only she’d slow down, think about it, and do whatever is necessary to place herself in those surroundings again?" So, he's trying to shake her out of it by thinking happy thoughts. :P

"It’s possible that manning the other end of a suicide hotline, transmitted through pure thought in a metatextual format, may not actually be my true calling." (He actually kind of sucks at this.)

"I’m doing my goddamned best here. She just isn’t slowing down, for some incomprehensible reason." So, uh, what's stopping you from pulling a John and just, like forcefully move her thoughts to where you want them?

"Perhaps my touch is too soft. It wouldn’t be the first time." Said no one ever that ever knew you. :P

"Perhaps the limits of persuasion itself are being tested by the most powerful gravitational force to ever exist?" Now that'd be something! That a pure manifestation of an Aspect could overcome narrators of omniscient inclination.

"Or perhaps it’s true that insistence is just the more effective half of persuasion.

So I’m insisting now." Took him long enough.

"Jade Harley will not go into that hole. She does NOT want us to all to see what happens when she unsettles the spirit residing there." So Dirk also seems to be convinced she's survive? Or maybe he thinks that, adding her to the matter inside the Black Hole, would upset some kind of balance.

Basically, he's like: "No, Alice, don't go into the rabbit hole!" and "No, Dorothy, don't look behind the green curtain at the wizard residing there!"

"she does, though." OOOOOOoooooohhhhhh!!!! Battle of the narrators!

Guess Alt Calliope's eon-long isolation, coupled with her Spacey thing, gave her the same powers as Dirk's. So that answers the question whether ghosts can grow into an Ultimate Self! It has interesting implications regarding Aranea and (Vriska), for one!

"Fucking yikes.

Jade throws on the brakes. I say she does. But by now, the gravity is overwhelming. Is she even trying to resist, or is it just that it’s useless to try? I’m not... I’m not sure I can tell?" Wow, yeah, so here we see what happens when Dirk encounters another narrative force of equal or greater power. He loses the ability to discern everything. But Alt Calliope remains eerily silent, only 2 comments from her so far.

"Jade realizes, preferably before it’s too late, that this is fucking serious. She needs to turn this around. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to die.

she wants to return to me." ...? Eh? Does Alt Calliope see herself as THE Self now, devouring all other beings into some sort of hivemind gestalt? Or does she refer to the time Jade (either version) spent with Calliope (either version)? Seems a bit stupid if she'd mean that. On the other hand, it might be a childish response, a desire for affection so deeply rooted into the main Calliope, that Alt Calliope during her ascension absorbed it.

"All right, I’m done messing around.

YOUR name is Jade Harley. YOU decide, right now, that you do not want to die. You resist the pull of the black hole with all your might. What would killing yourself accomplish? Sure, most of your friends are dead. But John is still looking for you. Do you want to let him down? Do you want to crush his soul? Do you have any appreciation for what he’s going through, Jade? He can take you home. To your new home, Earth C. The home I made for you, Jade. Your friends are all there, alive and well. Rose, Dave, Karkat, slutty adult Jade, Jane, Jake, Roxy, me. You wouldn’t want to disappoint them. You wouldn’t want to disappoint me, would you, Jade?" Well then!! Pffff, I didn't think a Strider could ever evocate "Stern Fatherly Disapproval" like Dad Egbert/Crocker can, but here we are. Let's just skim the implications of taking a teen Jade back to Earth C to live with adult versions of her friends, as well as Dirk's less than gentle tone here, and agree that her survival is definitely desirable, just cuz IT'S ABOUT HER, SURVIVING.

Still, you have to wonder what Dirk's ultimate plans for her are. I'm starting to doubt he'll be successful, though.

"You’re close now, to the ceiling of the cancerous deformity. Too close. Just skimming the edge of this thing’s vicious horizon." It's like he's describing the event horizon as a quantum vacuum decay, which for all we know in science, it just might be.

"You dip your toes through the place where the singularity is snapping everything apart at the seams. It’s so loud that it’s completely silent. You can already feel yourself stretched thin, distorted, pulled out with your descent elongated for all eternity." I suppose there's no one suited for pulling her out at the last second, is there? No chance for Davepeta to make a last-moment re-entry into the epilogues.

Blaperile points out something significant to me: Dirk has attributed Jade the "you"-ness factor! It would be cool to have Jade come on par with John in the epilogues, but I doubt it'll last past this page.

"When you look down, the stripes of your witchy tights go on and on for miles. Please, Jade. Don’t ever say I didn’t try to stop this.

she closes her eyes and lets go." Is... Alt Calliope going to take over the narration for a bit here, on the next page?

We have three potential candidates for taking up narration at this point - and no sight of Andrew Hussie, the author avatar, who could have been a fourth.

Welp. Now Jade's really gone. I have to wonder what this means for post-canon Jade, who fell unconscious with the sight of the Black Hole seared into her eyes. It can't have been a pleasant thing that happened to her, there. I just hope Alt Calliope hasn't taken over her body like a true puppeteer, giving Dirk a run for his money.

[murasaki-murasame]

More Dragalia Lost liveblogging under the cut where I talk about my Halloween summons, the upcoming version update, and my thoughts on high dragon trials now that the HDT weapons are a thing to work toward.

First off, I can’t remember exactly how many summons I’ve done on the Halloween banner, but I got all of the Halloween units except for Elly and Maritimus, and as much as I want to get H-Maritimus, I think I’m gonna wait until they announce the next banner to see where I want to put my resources. I have a feeling we’re going to get a water banner next that might give us our first 5-star water blade, which might be really tempting. So I’m gonna wait it out for now.

I also got Lin You as a random pity break along the way, which was really nice, since I was considering dream summoning her in the future. Now my wind roster is pretty much fully rounded out, except that I don’t have Wedding Elly yet. And funnily enough, regular Aeleen is still the only 4-star in the summoning pool that I don’t have yet.

And on the topic of dream summons, I decided to go ahead and get Xander from the current one. Which really took me by surprise since I figured we weren’t getting one anytime soon, since they didn’t announce it during the anniversary, but here we are. I felt a bit awkward about how just a few hours later we found out that the new Halloween banner was gonna have a new stun-res water sword on it, but I don’t regret getting Xander. My water team really needed him.

At this point there’s only a handful of units in the regular pool that I’d be interested in dream summoning eventually. It’s basically just Delphi, Ramona, and Lucretia at this point. Mainly Delphi at this point. I’m still salty about how I got a dupe Wedding Aoi in the last banner instead of him. And to make things worse I also got a dupe Ezelith during my Halloween summons, lol.

I was really surprised by the new Halloween units being a mix of flame and water ones, but they all serve nice roles, even if they’re awkwardly useless for the Halloween event itself. I also ended up being completely wrong about which characters would get alts for this in the first place. Mostly since I wasn’t expecting them to branch so far outside of the launch unit pool. I vaguely thought we might get a Mym alt, but I figured that it’d go to a different party member instead. But I’m actually happy that H-Mym is a thing, because I didn’t have a flame axe built up before I got her [which is why Ramona’s still high on my priority list for dream summons], and axes are one of my favourite weapon types to use. Sadly it sounds like G-Mym is better than her, but I’ll probably still just use H-Mym since I like her more as a unit.

Most of all I love and adore H-Lowen. He’s the best thing ever and he’s never leaving my flame team, lmao. On the one hand I still dislike it when units get alts where the only real difference is their element type, but I’ve been specifically hoping for us to get a good sleep-res flame healer for ages, so I can’t complain. He’s also just a really great healer all around, aside from not having the right resistance for HMS. He at least seems equally as good if not better than Verica. His kit is less specifically focused on healing potency than hers, but he has some really valuable support utility, especially since he has skill prep. I actually ended up using him last night in my very first HDT clear, against standard HMS. He doesn’t have the right resistance, but he can easily pass the HP check, and with his skill prep he can get off his defense buff and his HP buff, which is really nice. It doesn’t seem super essential for standard HMS, but for expert and master it might be a lot more important, like why Choco Thaniel is so important to HBH. And honestly even though H-Lowen’s sleep res, I found that it was pretty easy to avoid getting hit in the first place after the opening blast.

I still have my Xania set up as a DPS-focused alternative to use in HMS, but I really like using H-Lowen, and I’ve kinda resigned myself to the fact that Xania probably won’t be very good for anything above standard HMS. I have units like Mikoto, Sarisse, and both Myms who I can use in the fight instead if I need to, but I like Xania so I want to use her wherever I can.

Even though I’ve been playing this game for like six months, I’m only just starting to get into HDTs, lol. Part of it’s just that there really hasn’t been that much of a need to do them in the first place before they introduced HDT weapons recently, but mostly I’ve just been going through the typical motions of performance anxiety that you get with online co-op stuff like this.

I’m still really happy that I got my first clear, but I was kinda surprised by how relatively . . . simple standard HMS ended up being, in spite of knowing in advance that it had been heavily powercrept as the game’s gone on. I don’t really know what I expected, though, especially after knowing that the void dragon fights were specifically designed to prepare people for the HDTs. I really shouldn’t have been surprised that in the end, the HDTs would just feel like harder versions of the void dragon fights I’ve already done, lol. I actually feel like Void Zephyr almost feels harder than standard HMS right now, from what little experience I have with the latter, since Void Zephyr has way more unavoidable damage, and the tornadoes and stuff are a lot more frequent and get in the way a lot.

I might just stick to HMS for a while, but I have units I can use for the other ones. For HMC I have all the meta units except for W-Elly, but I’d lean more towards using Noelle or Lowen since I prefer playing as ranged units for these sorts of fights. For HBH I have a Choco Thaniel set up, but I don’t have a great dragon for him [which is why I’d like to get H-Maritimus but I can live without him], though I also have Lily, Summer Celliera (and I’ve promoted Elly and Orsem]. For HJP I have Gala Cleo, who I’ll probably stick to since I prefer ranged units, but I also have Curran, Heinwald, and Natalie. And then for HZD I have Gala Euden, and then Fleur and Yachiyo who I haven’t promoted. I’m kinda hoping we get better 5-star units I can use instead, so I’m not interested in investing a lot of resources into those two, so I’ll probably stick to Gala Euden. Sadly ranged units don’t seem to be very in favour for HZD, but I have S-Cleo in back-up.

I’m way too early to be thinking about the whole expert HDT thing just yet, but thankfully I have Noelle and a 2UB Freyja who I can use to get my foot in the door with expert HMC when the time comes.

I have mixed feelings overall about the entire concept and implementation of expert/master HDTs [and the time attack rankings are their own whole mess], but I can’t really say much about them since I’m so inexperienced with this whole part of the game in general. I do get the feeling that they gave us too much too fast, though.

Mostly I just hope that they don’t start balancing new endgame content around the assumption that everyone has HDT weapons, since that’s just not going to be the case for the most part, and it’d just be boring if new content becomes effectively locked to anyone outside of the top 1% or whatever of players. In the short term, I’m worried about how the new wave of humanoid endgame bosses they’ve teased at will go. They’re said to be ‘harder than high dragons’, but it’d really suck if they’re basically gated behind expert HDTs. Getting a whole new wave of permanent endgame content that I can’t even begin to access for who knows how long would just be kinda . . . demoralizing. I really hope that, even if they’re presumably harder than standard HDTs at least, they instead exist parallel to those fights, and you can basically get into one or the other first, instead of one being gated behind the other. That way it wouldn’t take as much grinding for people to be able to even start challenging the new bosses.

I also have a feeling that, like how you can grind the HDT fights to get the high dragons from the trade store, you might be able to grind the new endgame bosses in order to obtain them as playable adventurers. Which on paper I like the sound of since they at least seem to have really neat designs, but I can’t help but worry that it’d be like the HDT weapons where they basically create their own meta in the community, while suffering from a sort of ‘key in a locked box’ scenario where you’re expected to have those units/weapons/etc in order to even start doing the content you need to grind to obtain them. Which definitely seems to be a problem with HDT weapons, with how there seems to be barely any wiggle room for entering the expert HDT grind cycle if you don’t have a HDT weapon.

I’m at least assuming that the new bosses will be basically the same as HDTs in terms of being co-op content with four players using one unit each against a single boss. In which case it’d be pretty easy for similar issues with the meta and whatnot to arise with it. I kinda hope they shake it up a bit, though. It’d be pretty nice if it was actually solo content that plays out more like facility event bosses. We really need more solo endgame content in general. But I think it’ll probably still be co-op focused.

And then there’s the new version update coming out in a week or so. Which mostly just seems to be quality of life improvements and stuff, but I’m really happy about the improvements to the regular log-in bonuses. Getting five times more wyrmite from it is pretty neat. Which reminds me of how they’ve recently started implementing tenfold vouchers as rewards for clearing raid/facility bosses for the first time. So overall we’ve been getting a lot more regular access to summoning resources, which is nice.

I’m also happy that we’re getting the ability to put facilities into storage while keeping their effects. I recently maxed out my elemental altars and slime facilities, so it’d be nice to put them all in storage to free up space in my halidom.

We’ll see what happens at the start of November when the Halloween event ends and we get our next This Month In Dragalia Lost post, but I hope we get a Celliera event rerun next, both so we can get a good new water banner, and so I can finally get OG Celliera since she’s one of the few event units I don’t have yet.

[grimelords]

My November playlist is finished and I've done something slightly different by actually ordering the songs into a cohesive playlist rather than leaving them in the order I added them. Listen in for everyone's favourite genre, acoustic guitar instrumentals, followed by old fashioned cowboy country, comedy and ridiculous songs, 80s and modern dance, out-there piano instrumentals, rocks and rolls, oddball rap, christian rock buried where nobody will find it, noise rock of all flavours and Mirror Reaper in full. I guarantee there'll be at least something in four hours of music that you'll like. listen here!

Deixa - Toquinho: I love how much happens in this song even before it even kicks off at about a minute in. It cycles through so many different feelings before it really powers up and the drums come on. The rhythm from then on is just mesmerizing, it's just so busy and never dwells on any section for too long, the interplay between the melody, bassline and chord rhythm is amazing. And then at about 2:20 it powers up again! Bossa Nova Strong. Also I'm feeling very disrespected because I just did some research on this song only to find out it was sampled by Nujabes on one of his bad anime youtube hip hop songs.

Just A Closer Walk With Thee - Marisa Anderson: Traditional And Public Domain Songs is Marisa Anderson's weakest album, which is a shame because I love Traditional and Public Domain songs. Her playing is on point as always, but the tremolo and distortion she's using overwhelms the recording more often than not. This song is the best on the album purely because she's playing so quietly that it only shows up when she gets loud so it works perfectly near the end as it crescendos.

The Three Deaths Of Red Spectre - Gwenifer Raymond: Gwenifer Raymond has a new 'non-holiday specific single for a cold climate' in her words and I absolutely love it. The sheer velocity of the middle section is flooring, before it breaks apart totally and reforms into a sort of shanty before metamorphosing again into a heightening mania. I love the constantly shifting structure of this, it barely stops to give you room to breathe all the way through before the very end where it almost feels like it's going to collapse entirely.

Mister Sandman - Chet Atkins: Happy to report that I've had Mr Sandman stuck in my head for three weeks now and still don't really know the words because of tumblr posts. It alternates between 'mr email / e me a mail / make the attachment a pic of a snail' and 'mr sandman / sand me a man / make him the cutest man car door hook hand'.

Do I Ever Cross Your Mind - Chet Atkins & Dolly Parton: I've never gone much on Chet Atkins but my girlfriend showed my this song and it has completely reversed my opinion and it's mostly due to Dolly Parton. She is just so lovely on this it makes me tear up - the song itself is so nice and the playing is perfect but her personality just shines through so brightly it's an absolute delight.

There's A Man Going Around Taking Names - Lead Belly: I've been doing research to try to find out what this song is referring to, or its origin but I cannot find anything concrete. A few people are saying it inspired Johnny Cash for The Man Comes Around, which is plausible and adds a mystic bent to it. It seems incomplete, like it's missing the turn at the end that reveals who exactly he is or what's happening so the whole song just ends up feeling very mysterious and ominous.

When Mussolini Laid His Pistol Down - Merle Travis: This song is from 1943, which is sort of amazing because that means it's not a song about history particularly but rather current events. A great paragraph from wikipedia: "On 24 June Mussolini gave his last important speech as prime minister. It went down in history as the "boot topping" speech, with the Duce promising that the only part of Italy that the Anglo-Americans would be able to occupy (but forever and horizontally, i.e. as corpses) was the shore-line (for which he used a wrong word to define it). For many Italians, that confused and incoherent speech was the final proof that something was wrong with Mussolini." Mussolini, truly history's greatest moron.

The Master's Call - Marty Robbins: As a result of Red Dead 2 and my own natural instincts, I've been having a bigger than usual moment with cowboy music this month which of course includes Marty Robbins' Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs. In my mind this song is both the true ending and end credits music of Red Dead 2. Arthur sees the face of Christ in a lightning bolt and abandons his life of crime and sin, pleading with the lord to forgive him and then God kills a hundred cows with another lightning bolt just to make damn sure Arthur knows He's serious.

Saga Of The Ponderosa - Lorne Green: I was hanging out with my old housemate a few weeks ago and it turns out we were both having concurrent Marty Robbins cowboy music phases which was great news because then he turned me onto this album by Lorne Green who was on Bonanza and apparently took it upon himself to expand the Bonanaza Cinematic Universe in the 60s with a few albums. This song is apparently an origin story of Bonanza which I have never seen. It's extremely good, very powerful music. Great story of this godlike man striding across the country and overriding his wife's decision by naming his son HOSS.

Hard Sun - Eddie Vedder: I think it's interesting in A Star Is Born that Jackson Maine doesn't seem to be a real life equivalent of any actual musician. He's not obviously an archetype of any real person and so it's hard to place how exactly famous he is in the world of the movie. He's washed up enough to be playing pharmaceutical conferences but still has enough industry respect to be playing a tribute at the Grammys. The closest I could think of was Eddie Vedder oddly enough, and this song from the Into The Wild soundtrack really does sound like a Jackson Maine original.

For Chan - Tim Heideker: I'm having a real thing with comedy music recently and I can't tell if it means I've got a brain parasite or comedy music is good to me now. I think what I like about this song is the bluntness. There's no two ways about these people, and after years of hearing about the alt right as mysterious political genius computer brains it's a nice break to just hear them called greasy fat basement guys like we used to.

That's Right I'm Five - Don't Stop Or We'll Die: More good comedy music! They played this song on Comedy Bang Bang without announcing what it was called first, so the chorus really surprised me and made me laugh a lot. "They're selling the stocks so buy them, launch the torpedoes, tell my wife I love her, and send my son to college, bury me in the desert in my osh kosh b'gosh - that's right I'm five!" might be my favourite lyric of the year.

Future Brain - Den Harrow: Den Harrow is very good. He's like a beautiful moron American man that some italian scientists built in a lab in order to conquer America from the inside. Here are some good highlights from his wiki article: "The name Den Harrow was conceived by producers Roberto Turatti and Miki Chieregato, who based it on the Italian word denaro(money)." "After years of fame and popularity, it was revealed by frontman Stefano Zandri and his producers that Zandri did not actually sing the Den Harrow songs; he was essentially a character who lip-synched to vocals recorded by a number of other singers. Furthermore, since they did not consider Zandri's name and origin to be "trendy" enough, the producers R. Turatti and M. Chieregato concealed Zandri's Italian origin, marketing him as having been born Manuel Stefano Carry in Boston. This was done so Polydor Records could market him more easily in the English-speaking world, where Italian-produced music was, at the time, viewed with skepticism"

Love A Girl Right - Little Mix: Check out this rewrite of the Thong Song they did for the new Little Mix album. It's beyond belief. My girlfriend loves Little Mix and she's right to because they're the only girl/boy band that actually takes advantage of the form and does harmonies instead of just having them all sing in turn or all at once. They've got good vocal arrangements but they have the worst fucking songwriters working for them. Songwriters that pitch 'what if the Thong Song had a crunchy nu-metal guitar in it'.

This City Made Us - The Protomen: It's interesting to hear a band change styles - most other Protomen songs are a sort of Springsteen pastiche but this one from their newer single is more like Iron Maiden or Thin Lizzy. Approaching the 80s from a different angle. It's impressive to switch so radically and still have enough of a unifying sound that it feels like the same band. 80s throwback rock is a generally pallid genre populated by freaks who can't move on but Protomen put so much heart into it it's hard to write them off.

Teardrops - Womack & Womack: I love this song because it has two choruses. The drums stay the same throughout, the chords stay the same through the verse and chorus and only change for the second chorus/bridge part ("the music don't feel like it did when I felt it with you"), which just gives the whole song this feeling of beautiful endlessness. It goes and goes and goes and you're always already living in the best part of the song.

Boys Will Be Boys - The Duncan Sisters: Very very good piece of disco with a very nice piece of country picking guitar near the start for some reason. I quit like that the chorus of 'boys, oh boys, will be boys - they can really hurt you!' goes from a lighthearted thing about relationships until the bridge near the end where it sounds more like a dire warning. She's staring straight into your eyes and saying 'they can hurt you. boys can hurt you. they can really hurt you.' while motioning toward the exit with her eyes. 

Ayaya - Bicep: I've been trying to train my ear a bit better so I got a piano app on my phone and I just try to pick out the melodies of songs now when I'm bored. It turns out this is a very satisfying song to play. The melody is very simple, but the constant build and the couple of other melodies that come in around it make you feel like a super genius for just playing the same thing over and over.

The Call - David Mayer: I completely forget how I came across this song but I'm in love with the vocals on it. The effect reminds me of the one on Problem With The Sun by Nicolas Jaar, sort of pitched down and layered over itself. Outside of the vocals it's a pretty straightforward euro house chunk but damn sometimes a song just has a really good sound in it that you can't deny.

Problem With The Sun - Nicolas Jaar: My girlfriend's brother was telling me he was riding his bike the other day and had some kind of mental break where he was riding north in the afternoon but the sun was on his right, in the east - and for some reason his first instinct wasn't that he was wrong or disoriented, it was that there was a problem with the sun and it was in the wrong place. That boy ain't right but this song is good. I love that Nicolas Jaar uses this weird down pitched voice on a few songs and I really wish he'd bring it back, it sounds great and also funny to me.

Ensaslayi - Cecil Taylor: I don't have the brain power to comprehend any of Cecil Taylor's ensemble work that I've heard, free jazz in a band setting is simply too much for me it turns out -but I've really been getting a lot out of this solo album of his called Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!. This song in particular is one of the longer ones on the album, where another is only 53 seconds long and a few last around ten minutes. This is a nice midpoint, where he gives himself so much room to get lost in different directions without losing the thread entirely. I said it last time I was talking about him but I've really never heard anyone play piano like this and I absolutely love it. A lot of reviewers describe it as him playing the piano like it's a drumkit, which I think is accurate to a degree - but I think looking back from here this music makes a lot more sense within the context of black midi and things like that. The extreme edges of what a piano can theoretically do, but with a decisive and beautiful human edge and human brain that's responsible for and making sense of the chaos.

The Homeless Wanderer - Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: I found out about this album cause Benjamin Booker was posting about her on his instagram story and it's just incredible. The TL;DR of her story is she's an Ethiopian nun that studied music in Switzerland and Cairo and wrote this beautiful piano music based on traditional Ethiopian pentatonic music. I love the rhythm of it, every note in the right hand get swirled around and around before it's settled on while the left hand moves so smoothly and delicately. Unfortunately-ish she's obviously in that genre of Searching For Sugarman secret blog music evidenced by her spotify similar artists being Karen Dalton, Alice Coltrane and Connie Converse. That's not a bad thing exactly, at least people are hearing about her, but her music is unique and amazing enough on its own without needing much mythologizing.

Carnival Of The Animals: No 12 - Fossils - Camille Saint-Saëns: My girlfriend was showing me Saint-Saëns' The Swan and then we were going through the whole rest of the Carnival Of The Animals and I'm happy to report that he not only did he do one for fossils but also centered it around the idea of a bone xylophone. I'm going to write an article for Vulture tracing the origin of the cartoon bone xylophone and my thesis is it starts here.

Perth - Bon Iver: Just thinking about how good Bon Iver is. I love how massive this song can feel, the drums combined with the big brass. It's small and soft on the grand scale, but on an album that gets as quiet and soft as songs like Holocene this song blows up like an atom bomb.

Yet Again - Grizzly Bear: This really is one of the best songs of all time I've decided. It feels like I get into a thing of listening to it on repeat almost every month now. I don't know what it is exactly - I guess it's every part of it. The lyrics are impenetrable (check) the riff is simple and powerful (check) the drums are doing a lot and keeping it simple at the same time. The the way the harmony vocals all intertwine in the prechorus part is amazing. The way the whole song blows up into a big radio static solo at the end. Every part of this song is great, I just love it.

Fuckin N' Rollin - Phantastic Ferniture: I found out that Julia Jacklin has a side project with a very shit name and they make very good music. I love when people have a whole other band for another side of their self. This is just Julia Jacklin if the lyrics were just first draft whatevers instead of incredibly poignant and beautiful and the music was just rockin and rollin with your friends. It's great!

Soft - Kings Of Leon: Number one best song ever about havin a bad dick!! I'd love to hang out lady but my dick! I'm passed out in your garden, I'm in I can't get off I'm so soft! I'd pop myself in you body, I'd come into your party but I'm soft!

Soft Serve - Soul Coughing: I played this while I was driving with my girlfriend and she said 'what the fuck is this' and she's right, as usual. It's Soul Coughing baby! The 90s 'slacker jazz' band! They sound dated as fuck, a real product of their time but I think they've still got a lot to offer. I had the chorus of this stuck in my head for a couple days which made me listen to this album more than usual when I mostly prefer their first one Ruby Vroom. Irresistible Bliss might have the worst album cover of all time though, so it's got that going for it. Google it.

Ya Mama - Wuf Ticket: There wiki article for this band says they had two songs in 1982 and that was it. Then it has a section titled Greaseman and then the article ends. Here's the Greaseman section in its entirety: "Wuf Ticket's “Ya Mama” achieved its greatest notoriety, and airplay, as a music bed for bits by shock jock The Greaseman on WWDC-FM in Washington, D.C. and later his nationally syndicated radio show where Greaseman would argue with a surly service industry worker." Anyway this is more of that very good early hip hop shit where everyone assumed songs should go for 8 minutes. It's just extremely weak sauce Ya Mama jokes for a very long time before they change tack completely and start talking about how Every Woman Is An Angel And Without Mothers We Would Never Have Been Born So Think About That Next Time.

Gon Be Okay - Lil B: I had the part of this song where he sings 'things are never gonna be the same again' along with the piano in my head the other day and spent fully an hour googling to try to find what song it was from before giving up. I woke up the next morning and suddenly remembered it was this song but was very shocked to find out that he actually never sings that line along with the piano melody, he says it once at the start and that's it. What's going on with my brain. Anyway in my searching I found out that the piano is sampled from the Spirited Away soundtrack so once more in my life I've been led to ruin by anime.

2 Minute Drills - Allblack & Kenny Beats: This whole EP is great. More sports themed rap please. Allblack is ferocious and Kenny's production throughout is great, the perfect mix of simple straighforward beats that still have a lot of space and energy in them, plus 'Woah Kenny!' has my award for Best New Producer Watermark.

Don't Gas Me - Dizzee Rascal: I don't know how he keeps doing it but somehow Dizzee Rascal continues to make extremely fun bangers without ever slowing down. The best line in this is when he says "no I don't drink Appletiser" (the sparkling apple juice) which is an extremely weird flex if there ever was one.

Acid King - Malibu Ken: It feels insane that a Tobacco and Aesop Rock collab sounds as good as this. I love that there's no drums the entire time he's rapping and I completely love the Mort Garson vibes in the instrumental which turns out to be a perfect soundtrack to the Ricky Kasso satan worship LSD murder story that Aesop's telling. Also in reading about Kasso I just discovered the very good stoner doom band also named Acid King, so expect to see them in next month's list.

Pirate Blues - As Cities Burn: As Cities Burn have reformed and put out a new single so I've been thinking about them a bit. On paper they don't sound good, over three albums they morphed from a christian metalcore band to a christian alt-rock band, and while they never reinvented the wheel I think they're a remarkable band who took a lot of risks in their own way and made a lot of rock solid music. They've got a lot of great songs but I think this is my favourite from their third album when it finally felt like they'd settled into a steady alt rock sound informed by their much heavier past.

This Is It, This Is It - As Cities Burn: The thing I like about As Cities Burn is that as much as they're a christian band (yuck) they're more of a band of guys who are christians (slightly less yuck) and the difference is huge. Rather than evangelising or preaching, their songs are about their own personal struggles with their faith (still slightly yuck). I like this song especially because the lyric feels close to gospel, 'we're all singing for our sins, unless grace be the wind' but with the added twist of being furious that you're trapped by the sin of your physical body.

Timothy - As Cities Burn: I think this song is just incredible. The lyrics are so strong and direct and heartbreaking, the vocal performance especially is amazing and it may be the only time in history that a 6 minute guitar solo has seemed good and necessary.

Face Tat - Zach Hill: There's an incredible video of the recording of this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGi9SOFX5rc that really looks exactly how it sounds and has a very similar energy to that video of 80 guys singing the halo theme in the boys bathroom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRG9KwvbVhk . This is what it sounds like when the boys are left alone. The biggest draw to Zach Hill's drumming is the intense primordial immediacy of it. He is just pounding away like a possessed animal and it's really on show here, especially combined with the occasional punctuating shout. Carson McWhirter's guitar is incredible too, the tone he's got where it sounds like three at once playing these incredible twisting riffs that turn on a dime. I think what I like most about this song is just how in sync they are - for such a chaotic, noisy song it sounds so rehearsed, somehow every single note is perfectly in time in the storm.

Betty's Worry Or The Slab - Hunters And Collectors: This is maybe the sweatiest song I've ever heard. It's a disgusting song about being incredibly sweaty and horny and I love the weird squeaky noise he makes after he says 'say it! say it!'. The bass sound in this is so fantastically meaty too, and combined with the brass at the end it's just great.

Worms Of The Senses / Faculties Of The Skull (live) - Refused: I cannot believe just how absolutely ferocious live Refused is. Insanely powerful without ever missing a beat in a song like this that requires incredible timing throughout. For some reason I've always thought Refused were an only ok live band after watching Refused Are Fucking Dead because all I remember of it is a clip where the guitarist accidentally hits the singer in the face with his headstock and they have to stop the show.

Mirror Reaper - Bell Witch: I got to see Bell Witch live a couple of weeks ago and it's one of the best shows I've ever seen. I can't really describe it other than it feels like the closest thing to a legitimate summoning ritual that I've ever seen. An invocation and an expelling of raw power and emotion between two people, it was really something. Also the best part was about two minutes in when they were really setting the scene with the sort of ambient beginning of Mirror Reaper and the whole crowd was dead silent and entranced as they built this mystic atmosphere and set the vibe a guy behind me said loudly to his friend 'hm pretty good so far!'

What's You Gonna Do When The World's On Fire - Lead Belly & Anne Graham: This is in my opinion the best genre of gospel song where they they just roast you for not being saved yet.​ 

listen here

[shadowphoenixrider]

OC Creation: 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19 - Draggka, Dranka ^_^

Allllrighty then!

2. Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind? 

Draggka wasn’t; she was just created from ‘I like this’ in the character creator, though her scarring and other aesthetics bits (like raven feathers in her braids) came much, much later.

Dranka, however, was designed from the beginning as Draggka’s brother, so he does share hair colour. Or was supposed to; his mohawk is actually blue ingame because you can’t have red hair and purple facepaint, and the not having purple facepaint would have annoyed me more.

4. In developing their backstory, what elements of the world they live in played the most influential parts? 

Both of them were pretty badly affected by Zalazane’s take-over of the Echo Isles. Dranka had to go into hiding with the other druids there, and Draggka lost her brother and father in one fell swoop, which made her mother go out into Durotar to raise her alone.

Then Garrosh’s nonsense didn’t exactly help, especially on Draggka’s end. So I guess most of the Horde storyline has affected them the greatest. Though arguably the entire Warlords of Draenor storyline, because, you know, reasons.

9. Are they based off of you, in some way? 

Yes; they do take my personality traits. Draggka in particular, much in the way she behaves, her take on ‘honour’, and her ‘won’t fight unless provoked’. She’s basically my WoW proxy, honestly, since I experience WoW primarily through her eyes, but it forges her into what I hope is an interesting character.

Dranka is hardly to say, but I’m pretty sure his mischievous streak is also mine, and the fact he’s a bit mystic when he wants to be. I might be a woman of science, but I’m weak for a little bit of magical nonsense and prophecy every now and again.

11. Did you know what the OC’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation? 

Nope! These two were created when I was still firmly rooted in my very hetero world, so they started off very straight. As I came back to WoW with my bisexuality discovered, Dranka changed first and became gay. Literally a ‘why not’ decision whilst writing The Hunter’s Call (then I promptly realized I’d committed the ‘bury your gays’ error with his romantic life and conjured up a boyfriend for him).

Draggka shifted to bisexuality naturally, but a bit slower than Dranka. She had a crush on alt-Draka like I did, so I figured again, ‘why not’.

12. What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

Draggka...I think is alright, though sometimes I struggle to find appropriate dialogue for her that doesn’t lead me into writing myself into a corner I can’t get out of (the third chapter of Shadows of Karazhan was the worst offender).

Dranka hasn’t been written enough to have any difficulties, which probably means he needs to show up more. Probably I need to balance his ‘I’m in Dreeeeam’ nonsense with being his own character, and not leaning on the mystic stuff too much. So far, I think I’m doing ok. But I haven’t written him enough to be sure.

14. If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be?

Oh bugger, that’s a tough one. For Draggka, it would be that Spike is a thing always and they will not be parted very easily if at all, and that she is distrustful of the Alliance, but not innately hostile. She’d rather avoid them than fight them, and she’s happy to work with them for a common goal.

For Dranka...that he doesn’t work like Draggka. They behave similarly, but Dranka is much more rooted to the Horde than she is, and it effects their decision making and reactions to certain events. Also, that Dranka is a druid, and sensitive to nature. Though he’s mainly a Feral druid, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t like plants and he can definitely heal.

17. Is there some element you regret adding to your OC or their story?

For Draggka? I think tying her story to run parallel with @galleywinter‘s Camdyn has definitely made telling Draggka’s story more difficult, and there are times I want to step outside of it, but I made a promise and already laid foundations. And, well, you don’t get better if you don’t challenge yourself!

For Dranka, the fridging of his first love. Unfortunately, it’s important for him to tell Khadgar to buck his fucking ideas up in The Hunter’s Call, but it’s part of the aforementioned ‘bury your gays’ trope, and that doesn’t sit well with me. I do eventually have a demon hunter boyfriend lined up for him (who ISN’T going to die), but I still feel a little ashamed.

18. What is the most recent thing you’ve discovered about your OC?

For Dranka, it’s that he really likes unicorns. I got the Wild Dreamrunner out of the Dreamweaver Paragon chest, and Dranka immediately fell in love with it. He mostly goes places in Cheetah form, canonically, but in dungeons and raids he likes to go by unicorn now.

Draggka. I’ve discovered that she’s very okay with being polyamorous with Khadgar and Medivh. This is not canon for her story, but she settled in OT3 AU very happily. She doesn’t love Medivh as intensely as Khadgar, but she’s certainly getting fond of the cranky old raven mage.

19. What is your favorite fact about your OC? 

Oh, you can’t ask me this! For Dranka, it’s that he, like Spike, have tried to get Draggka and Khadgar together. And he teases them about their relationship. All the time. “Hey sister I made you a leash for your boyfriend’s collar!” “You fucking what?!”

Draggka...ah, that’s difficult. If I had to pick one...It would have to be that she loves gryphons, and would love to have one. When she discovered the gryphons in Trueshot Lodge, she took time with their dwarven keeper to learn all their foibles and how to care for them.

That and the mechanical raven-

[hellsbovnd-archive]

I did a lot of screencaps today so I tossed them into queue! And by ‘a lot’ I mean like... 10... They’ll post throughout the day tomorrow. I only managed to get through Percival, Wren, and one Leon screencap before I got pulled to do other things, but I wanna get some of Jan and Rose too at some point! (Rose needs non-armor glamz tho and I know I do want to do a shoot of Jan in ‘uniform’ at some point)

And some 3am thoughts below the cut because why not. (Also I’m hungry again.)

I have been thinking a lot about Leon lately.

I’ve played the same character, more or less, for what will be three years this July, though Leon’s been a concept I bounced around in my head for about a year before that when my main was still on Malboro. (Malboro friends may vaguely remember a beta!Leon who was actually an arcanist with the guild, who was meek and shy and who was easily intimidated into giving information; this arcanist concept would eventually be merged into a journalist-with-the-echo character concept I also had at the time, and would then go on to pick up crime shit later when I started Ebonguard to spite everyone who said it couldn’t be done.)

And in those three years, he hasn’t changed a whole lot? He got nabbed into a relationship early which has provided me endless hours and innumerable sessions of entertainment (you want angst? We got angst. You want fluff? They do that too. Sit down for six hours and Just Go; what happens next may blow your fucking mind) and he wound up in positions of leadership as a result of my OOC circumstances. But that’s kind of it. 

I tried running a character arc for him once upon a time, but it didn’t do super well and I ended up cancelling it (it’s now existing in a weird space both within and outside of canon events; I can’t decide what I want to do with it since it was never completed and I don’t RP with/Don’t Fucking Like any of the participants save like 2?? anymore).

In the time between then and now I’ve done a lot of DMing but that kinda forced me to sideline Leon or make him into more of a “taskmaster” character, who while IC present for the events that unfold around the party, never really acts to affect them, because as a DM I personally feel like it’s bad form to make a scene all about my character, or to take away player agency in any way and make it so that only I have the power to actually push the plot forward. I know that on the exceedingly rare occasion that I get to be a player, that kind of stuff makes me tune out.....really fucking quickly.

So as a result I haven’t really spent most of that time actually playing my character, and as it just so happens the overwhelming majority of the people I have DMed for have pretty much just used me for my DMing skills.... Cuz they didn’t wanna do it, but they also didn’t actually give a goddamn about me as a person, lmao. Which, yeah, I can tell a story--it’s pretty much my only marketable skill on this hell of an earth, and I like telling stories, but going through all that effort, creating a narrative, making NPCs, writing “lore” on magical artifacts, scheduling and running events, logging them, tying them together and keeping track of the party’s progress neglecting the character I actually play in order to tell these stories for other people, only to have them spit in my face the instant they feel I’ve outlived my usefulness, y’know, fucking sucks.

And there’s still more to do. There’s never nothing to do. I need to organize two plots for Ebonguard, one of which requires outside collaborators--I need to slide coords/officers some incentive to help me solicit for Modus I think, but there’s also another pretty big plot that we have in the oven that I’m kicking off... Oh shit, today. I have no plans. The plan will reveal itself as I do it, I guess. I wanna organize some RP for INK too, we’re all kind of in pre-expac lull mode and we all have like seventy billion alts now including a small gaggle of disaster Garleans. I have been kind of neglecting INK lately. I pitched the idea of running Leon’s character arc as an INK plot to positive responses but then I got ahead of myself and kicked off Jan’s character arc like an idiot. I love playing Jan and I’m very excited for his story, but he’s hot out of the oven and Leon needs it more. But I hate FC leads who make shit about their character on principle, so I don’t wanna do more than one character arc at a time.

I have basically no motivation or reason to actually play Leon. I love his concept and I will always love his concept, and he’s going to stay my main because uh, I’m poor and I’m also not levelling everything again if I don’t have to. It’s not a problem with his core concept so much as, I guess, the fact that nothing has happened to really challenge him since I started playing him. Modus Operandi will change that obviously but I’m probably going to end up the primary DM there anyway if I don’t get lucky with collaborators, but without characters around him that give a damn that doesn’t really even mean anything anyway? He has basically zero meaningful RP connections, he’s overshadowed by pretty much the entirety of my cast of myriad alts at this point, and when I play him I don’t really get to play him anyway. And when I DM there’s like a 50/50 shot that people will just spit in my face 6mo down the line and tell me they’re doing me a favor. His first best friend rerolled and his second one turned out to be a massive PoS OOC so yeet.

idk. I love DMing and story-telling, I love INK, I love Ebonguard which has treated me incredibly well for the past 2 3/4 years, I love Ed and the scant few RP partners I do have on Leon, and I’m really excited for Big Plans, but running all of them once, and all of them for the most part entirely solo until very very recently when Ebonguard got coordinators and INK got officers (kiiind of?), and even now like 50% solo, and at times running them in parallel with each other, has really put a damper on my ability to enjoy writing Leon. I love Leon, but I look back at 3ish years of RP and see I have absolutely nothing to show for it. None of the plot threads I wanted to explore were ever explored, and there were times I had RP partners who actively tried to get rid of the threads by solving them with some handwave that Leon never earned. His character, apart from some bits and bobs that he picked up along the way, is exactly the same as it was on July 3rd, 2016.

I’m semi-considering a soft reset; major beats of his story staying the same (relationship with Edda, role as Crow, leader of Alizarine) while erasing everything else which, granted, because roughly half of all the RP partners I have ever had have turned out to be absolute shitstains (terfs, etc) is not actually a whole lot to erase, because a lot was already retconned anyway. But I dunno if that would actually fix anything.

tl;dr 

[alamante]

On June 15, when he packed his AR-15 and drove an armored vehicle onto the bridge near Hoover Dam, Matthew Wright had a mission. He’d gleaned it from a berserk conspiracy theory that circulates mainly online, and now here he was, offline, near a very real dam, with a not-at-all-virtual rifle.

As he blocked traffic, he held up a sign. “Release the OIG report,” it read. He wanted the same thing that so many others that subscribe to the all-encompassing QAnon conspiracy theory want: some sort of proof of a “deep state” conspiracy, run by the liberal elite and Hollywood, to commit and then cover up an array of atrocities, from child sex trafficking to false-flag shootings. And they thought they would find at least some damning evidence in the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

The report he was looking for had actually been released the day before, and it didn’t have any of the information he and the rest of the QAnon followers sought. Of course, the theory’s adherents believe there’s another inspector general’s report they haven’t seen, one with all the “true” information, and they’ll fight to get it.

On the day he was arrested in Arizona on a variety of federal charges, Wright was acting as a soldier for “Q.” That’s the handle of an anonymous poster on equally anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan and on Reddit since late last year. In letters Wright wrote from jail, intended for President Donald Trump and various government offices, he signed off with the QAnon motto: “For where we go one, we go all.” He also referred to a “Great Awakening,” another likely allusion to QAnon.

Nobody was harmed in the bridge standoff. But Wright’s crusade, along with a handful of other recent incidents, gives us an idea of what QAnon looks like when it emerges from its online cave, blinking in the sun. And it’s a little terrifying.

It Seemed Harmless For A Minute There 

As conspiracies go, QAnon isn’t even faintly plausible. It’s every conspiracy, all at once, an orchestra tune-up of theories. It involves Hollywood, former presidents and the Democratic Party joining up to commit various heinous crimes. And on the other side is an anonymous hero named Q, who claims to have high-level government clearance.

A surface-level glance at QAnon threads on Reddit, 4chan and 8chan will make you cringe well before it’ll scare you. In one post, commenters wondered whether Q was winking at them by making the lights flicker during President Trump’s White House speech last week. The post reads in earnest: “What if the lights going out during the press conference was… the cue(Q)?” 

In another, a Redditor used one of Q’s posts to surmise that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s entire family fabricated the Parkland, Florida, school massacre to “advance the anti-2nd agenda.” Commenters agreed and expressed their anger with all the maturity and expertise of a high school film studies class.

“It’s just like watching V for Vendetta in how the people would trade away their freedom for security,” one commenter wrote.

“The more I’m reading about the Q posts, the more it brings me back to that movie,” said another. “False flags, under-age exploitation, and a top level conspiracy even among a major religion.”

There are hundreds of these posts. Choose any conspiracy you like ― false-flag shootings, underground child sex dungeons run by elite predators, unreleased Justice Department reports that, if made public, would put Hillary Clinton in jail ― and you’ll find them being discussed on QAnon forums.

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer wrote a great primer on the theory. It essentially goes like this: “Q” started posting weird messages on 4chan last November, leaving “breadcrumbs” for the online masses to find evidence that several top Democrats are about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, special counsel Robert Mueller is actually investigating Hillary Clinton, etc. Nobody knows who “Q” actually is, and there’s no evidence that the person (or persons) posting under that handle has (or have) any high-level security clearance.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the QAnon conspiracy theory, in much the same way it was easy to dismiss Pizzagaters as a bunch of lunatics — right up until the moment one of them, Edgar Welch, showed up in Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, demanded to know where the child sex dungeon was and fired an assault rifle.  

This Seems Familiar

Thus ended Pizzagate, the real-world violence shattering the suspension of disbelief that had sustained the theory online. Even after Wright’s arrest in Arizona, QAnon has continued apace, undeterred by the fact that the “OIG report” he demanded had already been released, to the great disappointment of Q’s followers.

QAnon adherents are on a collective scavenger hunt of sorts ― the goal varies from unearthing conspiracies between politicians and Hollywood brass to finding a group of elite pedophiles in the desert. In Tucson, a group called Veterans on Patrol, with the backing of QAnon online, is hunting for pedophiles after it stumbled on a homeless shelter in May and decided it was a secret site for child sex trafficking. As Motherboard reports, it is not ― police found no evidence of such trafficking ― but the group is patrolling Interstate 19 in Arizona and demands that police declare a state of emergency. It also posted the QAnon 8chan thread to its Facebook page, asking for the internet’s help in finding the elusive, and nonexistent, pedophiles. A QAnon Reddit post says it is “prepping for battle.”

Of course, another real-life QAnon mission brings another arrest. The founder of Veterans on Patrol, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, was collared on Sunday after sheriff’s deputies saw a YouTube video in which he was rifling through private property in his hunt for nonexistent pedophiles. He was arrested on suspicion of trespassing, along with a charge of failure to appear in court on July 17 for an unrelated assault charge. 

Meyer is the perfect QAnon soldier ― committed enough to put his boots on and go LARPing (live-action role-playing) through the desert, unhinged enough to believe that a homeless camp he finds is a child sex-trafficking dungeon and savvy enough to disseminate his findings online to likeminded people. He is too extreme even for some extremists. Meyer and his group were kicked out of the occupation party at a federal building in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 after militants accused him of walking in and assaulting a disabled Vietnam veteran.

“I do believe Lewis [Meyer] is a Paid Provocateur by the Fed’s to divide and destroy,” militant group member Blaine Cooper wrote in a Facebook post at the time. Writer J.J. MacNab points out that Meyer was also tossed off of Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada during the standoff over defaulted grazing fees there.

As the Arizona Daily Star reports, Meyer has accused any number of businesses of child sex-trafficking ― various farms and ranches, a building materials company, a mining company, etc. ― their only crime being that they’re in relative proximity to Agua Blanca Ranch, where he uncovered what he thought was a den of illicit activity involving kids.

“What jumped out at me was their ignorance of what things really were. The cooling towers that they were calling watchtowers. Maps being on the wall, which they called a command center. Children’s rooms — that it was something we had created to hold children in. It just seemed ridiculous,” David Cathcart, caretaker of the ranch, told the Daily Star. “They’ve got a hell of a lot better imagination than I do.”

For QAnon, wild imaginations drive the bus. And some of those imaginations are the loudest people on the internet.

Reliable loons Roseanne Barr, former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and Minecraft creator (and Pizzagate supporter) Markus “Notch” Persson have all signed on. Barr and Persson, for instance, tweeted out abbreviations of the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” to millions of followers. And, of course, Infowars’ resident nut Alex Jones is involved ― he said in January that the White House called on him and his team of dinguses to investigate QAnon.

There are so many conspiracy theories under the QAnon umbrella now that anything and everything can feel like a dog whistle to its followers. Recently, followers latched on to Hollywood director James Gunn. Gunn was fired by Disney last week after alt-right troll Mike Cernovich helped surface old tweets in which he joked about pedophilia and rape. Underlying the fake-outrage campaign was the QAnon-friendly notion that Hollywood is lousy with pedophiles. Even Sen. Ted Cruz got in on the fun. 

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[xsrock-blog]

Geoff Tate seems to be sort of an enigmatic person for a lot of people. Always a bit mysterious and probably often misunderstood. Prior to meeting Geoff for the first time, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. I have been a longtime fan of his work, first in Queensryche and now on his own. Geoff has just finished his latest album under the Operation: Mindcrime moniker, The New Reality, which is set for release on December 1st through Frontiers Music. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Geoff is a very friendly, intelligent and articulate guy that has a tremendous amount of respect for his fans, the press and other performers. During our interview, I found him to be humble, honest and quite interesting to speak with. I hope you will enjoy reading the interview as much as I enjoyed doing it.

Bobby Caughron Senior Editor XS ROCK

XS ROCK: So, I really like the latest and final chapter in the Operation: Mindcrime trilogy, The New Reality. To me, it seems much closer to the classic Queensryche sound that you helped create. Was that by design? It almost seems like, in many ways that on the first two albums, you were almost trying to distant yourself from sounding too much like your former band.

Geoff: Umm, I don’t know if I was really trying…..I’ve written the majority of the material over the years for Queensryche and now my own. There’s a similarity  that you have as a writer that you can’t get away from you. It kind of follows you. Even though I’ve collaborated with a lot of different people on this project, there’s still a lot of things that are similar in the musical passages, the melodies, and the lyrics. It has a familiarity to people, I guess.

XS ROCK: So you just kind of did what you wanted to do and that’s just the way it came out in your work, correct?

Geoff: Yeah. I kind of always follow that plan. I don’t know any other way to go about it, you know?

  XS ROCK: So, now that Operation: Mindcrime has come to an end, what’s next for Geoff Tate?

Geoff: Well, really touring. I’ve got quite an extensive tour itinerary coming up. I’m going to be starting my tour in Ireland and then kind of spreading out across Europe.  After that, I’ll be jotting back to North America sometime in the Spring and South America after that and then probably Asia after that. So it’s going to be a pretty full year of touring for me.

XS ROCK: Musically, as far as recording, do you have anything beyond Operation: Mindcrime planned? More solo work or a possible new band?

Geoff: I don’t. I really don’t have a set musical plan. I’m constantly writing, jotting down ideas and creating demos and things like that, so I have a lot of, as yet, unreleased material that I suppose I could make something out of, you know? I haven’t really decided on what I want to do or how I want to go about it as of yet. I’m really kind of just getting finished with the Operation: Mindcrime projects. It was really, really intense. It was a long project. A three year project and I kind of want to take just a little bit of a musical breather. Recharge my batteries a bit and see where the touring leads me.

  XS ROCK: Which do you prefer? Writing new songs and recording or playing for a live audience?

Geoff: I like both for different reasons. I love being in the studio. My wife actually has a hard time trying to get me out of the studio, actually. It’s kind of my office, my think tank. It’s where I go to organize my thoughts and write down new ideas. I love being there. But, I also love traveling.  I love going around the world to different places and visiting friends and there’s so many countries that I like to visit and while I’m there, I may as well play a show, you know? (laughs). I try to gather different groups of people together to play my music with me and that’s always fun. That’s kind of what we’re doing over the next month, rehearsing for this upcoming tour. I’m going to put together a real interesting set list for the people. I think it will really please a lot of people who may have seen me perform over the years. I’ll be doing some really deep cuts off of some albums that often times don’t get a lot of attention. I’m looking forward to playing some of that material.

  XS ROCK: Starting with The Warning album, Queensryche seemed to have a really solidified sound and direction (a thinking man’s heavy metal, if you will) that was quite different from most metal bands at the time. Was this  pre-planned or was it just the results of the chemistry of the band members together?

Geoff: I think that’s collectively where our heads were at. We were dealing with a lot of doomsday type stuff. That was 1984. A lot of our albums had to do with the times. That was a very radical time in my life. I was really at that point, exposed to international politics and the first time that the band had gone overseas. It was really an eye opening experience, seeing the world in an entirely different perspective from what I had.  I think that really is reflected in the music.

XS ROCK: I usually don’t ask questions about politics, but a lot of your material seems political in nature at times. What do you think of the current U.S. President, Donald Trump?

Geoff: I haven’t been a fan so far. I think the worst president in my lifetime has been George W. Bush. Just a horrible presidency.  and I think President Trump will probably beat that record and be the worst president in history (laughs) . I wrote an interesting piece on this recently. We are stepping into a period of growth. As Americans, we are facing a full frontal discussion on who we are. We are able now, with our advancements in communications to communicate everywhere in the world all at once now.  So we are witness to situations that are occurring everywhere and we’re commenting on them testing our own perspectives and our belief system. We’re questioning it and drawing new lines. I think it’s a healthy thing, but it’s very frustrating because we don’t really have an American identity. We came from all over the world from different countries and nationalities and we came to this country to worship the god of our choice and make lots of money. Those two situations don’t really align themselves to fulfill one’s identity.  But here we are…trying to figure out who we are., what we believe and what’s right and what’s wrong. We’re now redrawing the lines for sexism in the workplace and those lines needed to be redrawn for a long time. In my lifetime, black people were persecuted, segregated and couldn’t vote. And in my grandmother’s lifetime, people were still slaves. At that time it was okay to own somebody.  Now, we look at that and say well that’s ridiculous. How could that be? How could that have happened? How could people believe that? Go back even further to England an France and millions of people used to think that the King or Queen were holy. They believed that god, a god, some god, spoke to these people and told them that they were holy and that they needed to lead those people. And they somehow convinced millions of people that it was true. Now we look at it with 21st century eyes and say what a bunch of idiots. How could they believe that stuff? Well, we’re in that same place now. We’re questioning our actions and belief systems and it’s testy. A lot of people say freedom is a right. It’s not a right. It’s a choice that we make.

XS ROCK: A lot of your lyrical content is quite intellectual in nature, what influences you creatively when writing new lyrics?

Geoff: Well, all kinds of things really. I guess it kind of depends on what I’m writing for. The trilogy project was a story. I was creating the lyrical direction out of the outline of the story. Other times it’s events that are happening around me. World events. It’s a fantastic time to be alive right now. There’s so much information out there and so many inspirational situations, every day. Also, I’m at a point in my life now, where I’m pushing 60 and I have a real opportunity to look at things in retrospect. People that I’ve known for a long period of time are going through changes in life and that’s an interesting bunch of topics that I can pull from.  I have my ears open and my eyes open right now. I’m in what I call the sponge mode, where I sort of pick up a lot of different things, feelings and observations and kind of catalog them in my memory banks, before I make something new.

  XS ROCK: So, the record industry has changed dramatically since the 80’s, what do you think the key to survival as a recording artist is today?

Geoff: Is there an industry? I think that depends on who you’re talking to. For myself, I’m a pretty established artist, I’ve been doing it for a long time, so I have an audience.  I can plop down in most cities, at least in the 65 countries that I tour in, I can go there and put on a show. A lot of new bands starting out don’t have that audience yet. And I don’t even know how a young band even gets an audience anymore because it used to be that we heard about new bands and artists from the radio and we don’t have that anymore. So I guess for a time, it was YouTube, but if the FCC has their way and they stop net neutrality, then wow!, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s going to be a bloodbath for a lot of businesses, small businesses and a band or young artist is really a small business.  It’s really difficult times.

  XS ROCK: Over the years you’ve toured with a lot of different bands. Which band treated you the best and who was the worst?

Geoff Tate in the Queensryche times.

Geoff: I toured with Trans-Siberian Orchestra and they treated me like gold. It was fantastic! It was champagne nights and caviar dreams. I was just in Sao Paulo Brazil, and I did a show with Angra, which is the biggest metal band in Brazil, and I did a special guest thing with them and I sang some of their songs with them and they sang some of my songs with me. It was really, really beautiful. A really great audience. I’ve been in a lot of situations where bands have treated me really, really well. The majority of them were really helpful. Especially in the early days. Iron Maiden was really great. Judas Priest were fantastic. AC/DC was just over the top cool and nice and welcoming. Ronnie Dio was exceptional. He was actually my first experience with touring. He kind of set the bar. He treated Queensryche really well as the opening act. He gave us sound checks, lighting and all of the sound we wanted. You could go anywhere on stage and had freedom backstage to move around and I thought that was just the norm. Later, when we toured with some other bands, you couldn’t even look at the guys in the band (laughs) without getting kicked off the tour. I won’t say who that was. That will be in my book someday.

  XS ROCK: Do you have any outrageous tour stories from the road?

Geoff: Hmmm. Well, I’m not really sure what’s considered outrageous, because my level of outrageous is set pretty high (laughs). Around 2004 or 2005, when I was in Queensryche, we were opening for Iron Maiden, we had a day off somewhere in Texas and a bunch of us all went out golfing. That lead to a lot of drinking and that lead to us all getting kicked out of the country club where we were staying…for different reasons, public drunkenness, nudity, profanity, things like that (laughs).

  XS ROCK: What’s the strangest request that you’ve ever received from one of your fans?

Geoff: Wow! Strangest request? Well, I’m really interactive with my fans. I actually really like talking to them and listening to what they think and how they interpret lyrics and so forth. It’s interesting to hear their perspective. You know, I’ve done things like visiting people in the hospital, blood drives, I’ve done several lectures at schools in regards to music. I’m active in a charity called Save The Music which helps put musical instruments in kids hands at an early age and gives them musical instruction. It’s a really wonderful organization and they do great things. I was always glad that I grew up in a school system that supported the arts. I was in school band all of my school life. I try to give back to that whenever I can.

  XS ROCK: What do you consider your greatest accomplishment both musically and personally so far?

Geoff: Oh gosh, you’re making me to dig deep here.  I think being around and making music for the length of time that I have is pretty amazing.  This new album is my 18th album. I think that’s like 216 songs that I’ve written.  A lot of content. I’m pretty proud of that. I think that I’ve been married to my wife Susan, for 23 or 24 years now, we both forget exactly how long it is. I think that’s pretty impressive. I’m very happy in my personal life with my family and my life. We have five beautiful daughters and now grandchildren. I feel very blessed. Every day, I open my eyes and I’m thankful that I’m still alive.

  XS ROCK: If you weren’t performing in a band what kind of career do you think you would have?

Geoff: I never had a backup plan. I’ve always been a musician. When I was nine I started listening to music and starting shaping myself a s a musician even then.  I figured out what I wanted and systematically went in that direction.

              Geoff back in the day

XS ROCK: In the age of fake news, similar to Axl Rose, there is a lot of negative comments about you posted in various places on the web. I wonder if you’d address that by giving me your take on things. Do you personally think that you’re a difficult or arrogant person as many people have posted?

Geoff: (laughs) I think those things that are written about me on the internet are written by people who don’t know me, honestly. The whole Queensryche break up was a pretty nasty thing and I think it’s pretty well known, that in a lawsuit situation, there’s a lot of negativity that’s spread around.

XS ROCK: Do you think that’s what drives most of it? Like kids of divorced parents choosing sides with one parent over another?

Geoff: Oh, I absolutely do. I’ve worked with way too many people and have way to many contacts with people for a personality like some people try to paint for me. So, there you go. Also, if you’re an artist that sort of breaks the rules, like myself, I tend to draw myself outside of the box. I challenge my listeners musically quite a bit. And I think that’s upsetting to some people who want me to conform to some sort of standard that they’ve invented. That becomes frustrating to some people.

    XS ROCK: What do you think of the current music scene? Any new bands out there that you really like?

Geoff: Yeah. I’ve been  listening to all kinds of new music lately. There’s a band that I’ve been listening to called Vancouver Sleep Clinic. I really like their music. It’s very unique and beautiful. Kind of sadly beautiful. It’s fitting for today. It’s rainy and dark. Very introspective.

  XS ROCK: For anyone that doesn’t know you, what would they be surprised to know about you?

Geoff: I have no idea.

XS ROCK: I guess it would be a surprise to you as well?

Geoff: Yeah. (laughs) I guess it would.

  XS ROCK: Is there anything that you’d like to promote or say to your fans out there?

Geoff: I’ve got really wonderful fans and I’m very thankful that people will come out and spend their evenings listening to me and what I have to say.  They continue to come out and they bring their kids and their friends and it’s really become a unique thing that and I’m really grateful for this life that people have allowed me to live. So, I guess I would say thank you. Thank you so much for that.

  XS ROCK: Thanks again Geoff for taking the time to talk with us at XS Rock, I know you have quite a busy itinerary at the moment with tour planning and all!

Geoff: Thank you Bobby! Thanks for the interview. Good questions. I appreciate that too.

The Operation: Mindcrime Trilogy

The Key

Resurrection

The New Reality

You can buy them on Amazon by clicking here.

http://geofftate.com/

https://www.facebook.com/GeoffTateOfficial/

  XS ROCK Interview With Geoff Tate Geoff Tate seems to be sort of an enigmatic person for a lot of people. Always a bit mysterious and probably often misunderstood.

[rockrevoltmagazine]

Grace Potter's Grand Point North 2017 Preview - Artist Interview - Mondo Cozmo

Mondo Cozmo Performing at Boston Calling 2017

Unless you’ve been lying under gigantic rock formations in the desert this summer or somehow one of those pesky hurricanes managed to sweep you out into the North Atlantic, you’ve probably come across Mondo Cozmo’s hit single, “Shine,” even if you didn’t realize it.

Whether you heard it on the radio on your ride to work, on Spotify while you were attempting to sweat out the previous evening’s liquid debauchery or perhaps you just overheard two birds chirping it to one another, it’s been next to impossible not to come across Mondo Cozmo’s music lately.

In any event the steamroller that’s Mondo Cozmo has been invading the airwaves, as well as countless venues and festival grounds these past three months, to the delight of tens of thousands of adoring new fans. 

Who exactly is Mondo Cozmo though?  Is he an angel keeping watch over America at night as violence and darkness take over our streets?  Is he the muse this world needs right now to restore balance and peace to the masses in these oh so chaotic times?  

Or is Mondo Cozmo perhaps just this one of kind sublime talent whose unique brand of music has been penetrating the hearts and minds of the lucky souls who’ve had the fortune of crossing paths with the enigma and his band recently?

Bonus points if your answer was one of the first two aforementioned options, however, option number three was the correct choice, as Mondo Cozmo is actually Philadelphia born, now Los Angeles based musician, Josh Ostrander. 

Ostrander, who previously fronted the early 2000’s alt-rock outfits, LaGuardia and Eastern Conference Champions, began recording under the moniker Mondo Cozmo back in in 2016.

Since then his single, “Shine”  reached number one on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Chart, he and his band have played north of a hundred shows throughout the course of 2017 alone and just this past month he released his debut album Plastic Soul to primarily critical acclaim.  

The record has something to offer just about any listener as it cuts across pop, rock, folk and indie genres, while also seemingly being influenced by a myriad of artists such as Dylan, The Pixies, The National, Springsteen, Mumford and Sons, Beck and U2 to name just a few.

  Earlier this summer I stumbled upon Mondo Cozmo at this year’s Boston Calling music festival.  

As I entered the festival’s grounds I found myself immediately faced with a music based conundrum.  Should I hit up one of the main stages to check out Massachusetts based rock based outfit The Hotelier or instead make my way over to one of the smaller side stages to take in Mondo Cozmo’s set?

Being a fan of The Hotelier, while also not having any clue as to what or who a Mondo Cozmo was, the choice at first, seemed to be an easy one.  That was of course until I dialed up the ole inter-webs to take a listen to the band’s single, “Shine.”

Instantly sold on the tune’s uplifting nature and catchy hooks I immediately took a course that would take mere feet from the entity known as Mondo Cozmo.  

Like myself, I’m guessing not many in the audience knew Mondo Cozmo all that well, however, by the conclusion of their truncated set the band had everyone within ear shot of the stage they were performing on beyond entranced and begging for more.

It’s also worth mentioning the sheer joy Ostrander and his bandmates had with one another on stage.  The lead singer is talented, charismatic and easy on eyes.   Thus Ostrander could have easily put together a group of anonymous musicians to serve as his interim backing band whose role would have been to primarily remain in the shadows.  

Fortunately the front man had enough clarity and experience, as well as the desire to surround himself with like minded and equally talented musicians, to choose a different path. 

  The result in a live setting is impossible to ignore as the band, comprised of Ostrander, Drew Beck (guitar), James Gordon (synth/keys), Andrew Tolland (drums) and Chris Null (bass) posses this fiery chemistry, that without question, elevates their performance to greater heights.

Following the band’s set at Boston Calling I immediately reached into my pile of music contacts to find Mondo Cozmo’s publicist so that I could attempt to take in one of his headlining shows and hopefully sit down with the man, the myth and the soon to be legend himself for a short chat.

As luck would have it the band was playing the Higher Ground up in Burlington, Vermont the following night where I would be presented with the opportunity to speak with Mondo Cozmo himself and bare witness to the band’s headlining performance later that evening.

Rock Revolt: Josh can you talk to me about how after recording and touring with bands for the vast majority of your career how different or liberating it’s been for you to write and perform for yourself?

Mondo Cozmo: Well for one I didn’t have to go through four people anymore. Now I’m just going with my gut and letting the songs do all the work. To be honest, it’s been amazing. 

The biggest thing I’ve taken away from all of this is to not put any parameters or rules on it. As soon as you do that you’re putting yourself in a box.  It’s been liberating and there’s been this sense of my being fearless, which frankly took me a very long time to get around to.

Rock Revolt:  Following the demise of both of your previous bands LaGuardia and Eastern Conference Champions I read that you had gone through a bit of dark period and even questioned whether you would or even should continue with music?

Mondo Cozmo:  It was a really fucking tough time as I was working two jobs to just keep food on the table. In my spare time I’d record songs up in my guest bedroom. 

A lot of the songs that came out during that time like “Shine” “Plastic Soul” and “Higher,” those were songs I was writing because I was bumming and coming to terms with never being able to tour or put records out again.  You know I was just sitting around thinking about how my band is done and I don’t even know what I’m doing any more. 

It was kind of terrible but the coolest thing about it was the songs I was writing during that dark time, I was only writing for myself and now I’ve been getting all these messages from fans about songs like “Shine.”

People seem to be having these complete opposite reactions to where I was writing those songs from and they’re getting something positive and great out of them. 

So it’s cool to think that whatever I had to go through might be helping someone get through his wife leaving him or a relative dying. That’s really the power of music right there.  I’m very humbled by it.

Rock Revolt: The songs that appear on your debut record Plastic Soul were mostly written during that period of unrest. Can you talk about where you’re getting your inspiration from these days, as with your new found success I’m guessing your outlook on life and the music industry has become a bit more upbeat and positive.

Mondo Cozmo:  It’s tough when you get to the point where tons of people are listening to your music as it changes things.  So when “Shine” hit number one I started the full length album and it gave me a completely different perspective regarding what people actually wanted to hear and what they would respond to. 

Honestly my super power is being able to write songs super quick.  I have a way of delivering songs that I think is unique and it’s been amazing that so many people are starting to take notice.

There’s this great line in Keith Richards book where he talks about when he heard his first song in America.  The Rolling Stones were in a van touring the States but he didn’t know the song was coming out yet and he thought they were going to be able to go into the studio and work on it a bit more.  

Keith had this great line where he said, you just have to let it go. I was like, fuck yeah, that’s so fucking great. It got me thinking we both were probably in the studio slaving over the fucking toms trying to make them sound good and nobody even gives a shit. 

If “Let It Be” sounded even a little bit different no one would care because it would still sound great.   So I guess I’ve kind of learned to just let the songs do the work and to try not to over think things too much.

Rock Revolt:  One of the most significant takeaways I walked away from at Boston Calling this year was your set and in particular your performance of The Verve classic, “Bittersweet Symphony.’ Can you touch on that song in particular and or how you feel about tackling other artists’ music in general?

Mondo Cozmo:  Well the first thing I thought about in terms of covering “Bittersweet Symphony” was, I better do a fucking good job.  I consider “Bittersweet Symphony” to probably be my favorite song of all time because it’s just so damn perfect.  

I’ve never been in a situation before musically where I could turn to the band I’m playing with and just say let’s do this cover and we’re able to put it together very quickly.   I love playing covers especially when we’re playing in front of bunch of kids who have no idea who we are, such as when we opened for Bastille not too long ago.

It also gives anyone a gauge to judge our music against something they’re already familiar with.  Personally I think playing covers has been really a smart thing for us to do. 

Rock Revolt:  Although you wrote Plastic Soul solo you’re touring with an entirely new group of musicians.  Can you comment on how you came across the other musicians in your band now and what it’s been like to tour with them this past year?

Mondo Cozmo:  The scariest part for me was I had to change my approach to music and actually do auditions; which was terrifying because I thought one, these guys aren’t going to like me and two, these guys aren’t going to even let me know they don’t like me because they may want the gig.  

I went through all of these auditions and it all kind of just came together organically.  As it turned out the one thing that I was most worried about ended up becoming the most exciting part of the whole experience.

We haven’t played a lot of shows with one another so you’re watching a band come together every time we play on stage right now.  We’re trying to remember lyrics and chords and we’re still in dressing rooms trying to learn all this new shit together.  We’ve all been doing this a long time, we’ve all been in a ton of bands and this one man, this one feels special.

Rock Revolt:  Finally can you touch on how you feel about what some of the uninformed would consider your rather quick ascent to fame as well as what you and the band are hoping to accomplish for the remainder of 2017?

Mondo Cozmo: I’m not going to hide behind my age or how long I’ve been doing this.  I wish I could have had this kind of success when I was seventeen but for whatever reason I had to go through what I endured so that I could write better songs.  Where I’m right now feels so good and because I worked so hard for it, no one can take it away from me. 

As for the band and the remainder of this year I want to get to the point where we aren’t opening up for anyone but if U2 called and asked us to open for them maybe we’ll take the call.  

At the end of the day I’ve been opening up for other bands for seventeen years, I’m ready to headline.  I don’t care about the size of the venue, just so long as it’s packed and we’re the last band on stage.

This Friday September 15th Mondo Cozmo plays the Paradise in Boston, Massachusetts before heading back up to Burlington, Vermont this weekend to take part in Grace Potter’s annual Grand Point North music festival.  

Tickets to Mondo Cozmo at the Paradise on September 15, 2017:

http://events.crossroadspresents.com/events/2017/9/15/mondo-cozmo

Tickets to Grace Potter’s Grand Point North Music Festival September 16th-17th:

http://grandpointnorth.com/tickets/

Connect with Mondo Cozmo (click icons):

All Writing and Photography: Robert Forte

Instagram:  40_photography  http://www.instagram.com/40_photography/

Facebook:    4zerophotography http://www.facebook.com/4zerophotography/

Grace Potter’s Grand Point North 2017 Preview – Artist Interview – Mondo Cozmo was originally published on RockRevolt Mag

[paintmeyourbluesky]

They call themselves, “The Red Devils”. Yep, shoutout to all the Manchester United team fans out there who either have or have not yet visited this dashing city, and of course, the Old Trafford stadium himself. Typical as it is, I’ve come to just learned that apparently most of the UK’s notorious football teams possess their very own stadiums that is very open to the public during off-game-seasonal days, showing off fans from all over the world all the pride they gathered through the years being preserves inside these very stadiums.

Having the opportunity of stepping into this stadium myself (literally) gave me the chills. And it’s not because of the weather or anything, psh

Okay, so there was a sarcastic tone on that note. Big deal.

The weather was terribly cold, and apparently the wind went too far blowing itself on preeeetty much anyone who chose to stroll around the stadium that day.

But ANYWAYS I got a huge chance of joining the exclusive tour to the grandeur pride of MU led by a formally introduced official himself. His name is Bill. Say hi, Bill!

His overall feature (and his voice + the accent) very much reminded me of the creepy black cab murderer in the first episode of Sherlock (A Study In Pink), only without the cap and specs, of course. And the slightly sinister attempt on acknowledging every passenger he acquired to eat his suicidal pills. Just to throw this in out there.

Moving along, Bill showed us around the house and stated some really interesting insights of the big whoop with that accent, and you’d bet it was radical, especially if you consider yourself to be a Red Devil yourselves. He showed us around the cafeteria, where it was originally closed and only opens during game season, where they sell all those variables of grub you see on television like hot dogs, coke, peanuts, etc to them spectators who wish to enjoy themselves as company to witness their favorite players on field. Too bad I forgot to take pictures of it, though. My mistake.

He also brought us in to the extra exclusive changing room used by the actual players themselves, which was, as expected, blown up entirely by the iconic red jerseys hung throughout the entire walls that surrounded the room.

I literally had no clue who these players were to be quite honest. But it was worth the shot anyways.

He then showed us to the visitor’s changing room, where all the world-famous football teams were to change before they really rise themselves up to the field to face against MU or any other particular teams as well.

The time finally arrived as we scout along towards the last, but more importantly, the best deal the tour itself could possibly offer: stepping on the all-round bloody hell stadium itself.

Bill was giddy enough to inform that the state of the art stadium was sponsored by multiple billionaire companies, and that the green grass field that covers up pretty much the entire field had recently been trimmed, and taken care of by the hands of the very best expertise on set, so yes. No touchy-touchy, nor is there to be any stepping on it while we admire its enormous authenticity.

Now here’s the interesting part: before we were to enter the stadium, there is this very unique, must tradition to all football players who are to appear during a game where they are supposed to be properly introduced by the sports commentator along with a very champion-esque music flowing along as they go through it, just to strengthen the versus tournament vibes and light up the hint of motivation to the players.

Here’s what Bill did: he asked our group to create two separate lines, and then as the recording of the commentator cues on with the music playing, we screamed our lungs out to some kind of motto or word (I couldn’t remember the exact words we said, sorry!), running towards the field with our game faces on, and was then greeted by the sight of the dashing red-filled hot seats throughout the entire stadium.

Holy guacomole was the stadium big, alright. Old Trafford was one bloody red of a stadium, with a capacity of over 80,000 seats, the cheapest to cost around 200 pounds, at least, (correct me if I’m wrong on that one) that could get you only one of the seats located at the very top far back row around the stadium, depending on how popular the teams that were playing are in that specific time being.

Unbelievable.

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After really sucking in all the red we could during our very last brief moments inside the stadium, we were to exit and was recommended to check out the official MU museum, where it contained pretty much anything there is to know about this legendary team, or visit the store where they sell all kinds of official merchandises any Red Devil could ever want to own in the palm of their hands. It was the end of the tour, and we were sadly off to part ways with Bill and his knack for amateur football playing and his passion towards the team themselves (fairly enough, I did get to ask him a question or two once I got the chance of doing so). Cheerio then, Bill!

Clearly, you wouldn’t expect my adventures to be over just yet, now do you? Well, we had to take our chances on visiting the museum on the second floor, of course! But before we went into all that great stuff, resting our tired legs in the iconic Red Cafe that lies right next to the museum was what we really needed at first. We eventually sat, and ordered ourselves a mug of hot chocolate along with an aesthetically pleasing, yet also one of the best mouth-watering chocolate muffins you could ever come across into having in your mere entire lives. For real, though. The overall texture of it tasted magnificent that we even considered on getting another one! But didn’t, unfortunately. For it was almost lunch time.

The museum was overall a fantastic finale to complete the piece of our day in Old Trafford. It had all the awards, including big, huge trophies, countless medals and certificates, also detailed information which regards all the past and present players of the team, written historic events that occurred from the very beginning, and far too many for me to mention. I’d say you’d be ever so lucky if you were to enter, spending hours there gawking at all that’s in it. That is, if you are a true badass, dedicated Red Devil, of course.

Moving on to a funny story, you guys: my brother was the first person to examine the official personalized MU ball and finding out that it was literally made in Indonesia! The tag clearly said so, and we were super intrigued on how funny it would be if we were to ever purchase them not realizing that it was made inside our very own nation. Indonesia sure had really outdone themselves on this one. #ProudCitizen

So to wrap it up in a nutshell, I do think that this was an entirely new experience for me, visiting Old Trafford. I, for one, personally do not have a thing for football. Let’s just say I did not have the friendliest gesture of a first impression when I first tried playing it back when I was 6. You do not wanna know. Never tried playing nor showing specific interest to it since then. It might come off as a huge milestone for some people who are indeed fans of the nature of football themselves, but yeah. I’ve had the greatest pleasure of visiting this stadium regardless of not being the football maniac myself, to say the least. It was cool.

On another account, Manchester was the very first city I stepped upon on my first day of the trip, and this stadium was also the very first site I’ve ever come to visit back then. It’s a shame that I couldn’t really stay there for too long, and was only able to experience Manchester at a glimpse through Arndale and Manchester Cathedral, (pictures shown down below) which were all-in-all amazing and incredibly authentic as well.  BUT that being said, I’d love to come back for an extended visit, for I know this city would offer a lot more than I could have consumed on my plate for me to devour upon once I get back to it someday.

  Have you guys ever visited the Old Trafford Stadium? Or are you planning, no, dreaming of visiting it on your own sometime in the future? Make sure to leave a comment down below, because I’d love to hear all about it! Hope you enjoyed devouring this chunk of a post, because I can assure you that there will certainly be plenty more where that came from. SOON. (;

Cheerio, then!

  A Milestone in Manchester They call themselves, "The Red Devils". Yep, shoutout to all the Manchester United team fans out there who either have or have not yet visited this dashing city, and of course, the Old Trafford stadium himself.

[murasaki-murasame]

I was planning to make a whole post anyway about my hopes and predictions for Gala Leif if he ends up happening next month, but there’s also a whole lotta other stuff to talk about now with the FEH rerun, the Ciella fight teaser, and our first gala dragon, so I guess I’ll take the chance to just talk about everything all at once, lol.

I feel like I went through every possible human emotion in the span of like ten seconds when I saw the gala banner announcement a day or two ago and then saw what it was actually about. That sure was a roller-coaster.

I honestly don’t really care about Mars that much [mainly because I’m always just more interested in adventurers than dragons], but I’m really curious about the precedent this is setting, with this being our first gala dragon, and this also happening only one month after the last gala banner.

They’ll probably talk about it in the next This Month post in a week or so, but I’m gonna just assume for now that we’re gonna get gala banners on a monthly basis from now on, rather than every two months. Which is a little bit scary to think about since it gives us less time between each gala to save up for each one, but we’ll just see how it goes.

Everyone’s predicting that we’re gonna alternate between gala dragons and gala adventurers, but I’m not sure it’ll be strictly scheduled out like that. I feel like we’re just switching to a monthly schedule and we just happened to get a gala dragon as the start of the schedule shift. I think it’s more likely that we’re going to start seeing reruns of old gala units between entirely new gala characters. I mean, it’s pretty obvious how much revenue it’d get them if they ever decided to rerun Gala Cleo or Gala Alex, lol.

Mostly I just can’t even think of that many options for what they could release in terms of gala dragon alts. We might get some of the other dragons that the royal siblings have pacts with, but we only know of like two other ones.

Mars’ introduction is bringing up the whole hot button issue of powercreep in the fandom, but honestly I don’t think Mars being really powerful is that big of a deal. He’s not exactly essential for any content, and tbh at the end of the day I just think it’d be weird if our first gala dragon WASN’T notably powerful. People already complain about dragon banners as it is because they have such low value. I can only imagine how many complaints there’d be if we got our first gala dragon and it only ended up being a sidegrade to the existing options. From what I’ve seen of how Mars changes up things on the DPS sim, I think they struck a good balance of making him powerful without him being super gamebreaking. I honestly think that Marth’s mana spiral is a much more blatant example of powercreep, and has had more of an impact on the flame meta than Mars alone.

Anyway, on the note of Marth and co, the FEH rerun has finally begun, and I kinda have to agree with everyone that the defense gamemode just doesn’t really feel good to play at all when it’s locked to solo, lol. It’s so obviously designed for co-op instead. It’s not really that big of a deal, but it does feel like more of a slog than it should, especially since you have to do it like 45 times for the event endeavors, and since there’s so many valor rewards. I’m curious to see how it pans out when this becomes a regular gamemode for future events, though. Hopefully they get better at balancing it and making it fun to play.

Even though I still don’t have any interest in pulling on any of the FEH banners since I just want to save for Gala Leif, I did decide to 70MC Alfonse, because haha bad decision machine go brr :) But I honestly do like him a lot, and I’m excited to get Sharena from the upcoming event. I hope she’s a light lance since I don’t have H-Elly or H-Vanessa, but we’ll see how it goes.

We also got some more teasers of the new FEH event and how it’ll play out. It looks like it’ll be a wave-based arena mode of sorts where you fight lots of enemies, which apparently include boss versions of different gacha characters. I think they mentioned a while ago that they’ll be introducing a new event type to the event rotation along with defense battles, and I assume this’ll be the first example of it. If they do, I hope they keep the part with you fighting boss versions of gacha characters, since that’s a neat idea that makes them feel different from the other events we get and the bosses we fight.

They haven’t really said anything about what the new FEH units will be like aside from Sharena, and I can’t really make any guesses since I’m not a Fire Emblem fan to begin with, but I’m already bracing myself for the inevitability of us getting a two-part banner for the new units, lol.

We’re also getting Ciella’s fight at around the start of next week, and they posted a preview video of the standard difficulty version of it. It seems like she inflicts a unique debuff called Vulnerability, so I’m really curious to see if I end up being correct with my previous theory about certain wind units getting debuff cleanse mechanics added via mana spiral upgrades. I think there’s at least one part in the video where Lowen heals the team and it doesn’t cleanse Vulnerability like it does with Plague, and it’d be a bit weird if you’re just meant to deal with having the debuff until it eventually wears off, so it’d be neat if they do introduce a new debuff cleanse mechanic.

Though tbh I can’t actually tell exactly what Vulnerability is meant to even do, since I don’t think it seemed to have a big impact on how much damage characters took, even though it definitely sounds like it’s meant to be a defense debuff or something. Either way, it’s probably going to be the central mechanic of Ciella’s fight, so hopefully we get tools to deal with it.

They only showed off the standard version of her fight so things will probably get more complex in expert, but it looks like her fight’s going to be built around making you move around a lot to dodge attacks. She seems to have various purple attacks, as well as homing attacks, and one move that seems to fire projectiles that bounce around the map. I don’t know how much this will really impact things, but it at least seems different to how relatively little you have to move around in Kai Yan.

It also looks like she might have unavoidable freeze-inflicting attacks, which might be interesting. They probably want you to use at least one freeze-res character. Which might not really diversify the meta much from where it is now, since Hawk has freeze res, but we’ll see how it goes.

We haven’t heard anything about us getting more wind mana spirals, but I’d be kinda surprised if we don’t get any more for this. In general wind is in a bit of an awkward spot, and if we don’t get more mana spirals for it soon, I feel like the Ciella meta is just going to be Tobias + Hawk [and maybe Lin You] again, if only just due to a lack of good options.

I’m also still really interested to see what the wind Agito weapon buffs end up being, and how much they might benefit certain characters. I think that a crit rate buff might be pretty nice, at least for characters like Ku Hai, but that sort of a buff probably wouldn’t help people like Lin You or DY-Xainfried much since they have crit rate buffs in their kits already. A crit damage buff could be interesting, but unless you’re playing as Lin You or have a DY-Xainfried on the team, it might not be as good as a crit rate buff.

Either way, I’m slowly getting a 0UB wind CT2 of each type just so I have all my options available to me, but I feel like the first wind Agito weapon I get will probably be a blade or wand, since I’ll probably end up using either Tobias, Noelle, or DY-Xainfried against Ciella most of the time. I do have a 70MC Lin You, though, so I might get an axe too.

We’ll see how it goes when the fight comes out, but I’m gonna assume that Ciella will probably be about as difficult as Kai Yan. Though since she doesn’t seem to have the same ‘you deal twice as much damage to the boss as you normally would for some reason’ mechanic as Kai Yan, and since wind is way less broken as an element than shadow as a whole, it’ll probably take a bit longer to clear. Though tbh I’m still like 100% expecting people to be able to clear it notably faster with full shadow teams than wind teams, so there’s that to consider, lol.

Anyway the main thing I’ve been thinking about recently is Gala Leif, who I’m still hoping against hope will come out at the end of next month.

It’s not like we know for sure he’s gonna ever be released at all, but with chapter 13 he’s officially joined Euden full-time, and he got a whole new redesign and 3D model to commemorate it, which really seems like blatant set-up for him getting a gala alt. Like how Sarisse has her NPC design, and a 3D model based on it for Melsa’s event, but then she got a new outfit and 3D model for her gala alt. Even Mym technically got her design tweaked a bit for her gala alt compared to her regular NPC artwork.

I wasn’t even sure at first if Leif got a new outfit for chapter 13 or if it was just a different pose, but it’s definitely a different outfit. Or, more accurately, it’s basically his old outfit but tweaked and redesigned to be more ornate and fancy and detailed, which is pretty telling. And I’m pretty sure his 3D model from the Void Poseidon fight was a new one based on his new outfit, which is also just even more additional design work to put into someone who’s currently just an NPC.

I heard that in chapter 9 he was basically given the same sort of internal coding as Albert [like how NPC Zethia in chapter 1 was apparently based on Hildegarde’s data], but I don’t really think he’s going to be a light unit, at least if he does end up as a gala unit. We already have Gala Euden as a gala light sword adventurer, and I don’t think they want to double up on that. I also feel like one way or another Leif is going to be fairly support-based, which would make him overlap with Gala Euden even more if he were a light sword. So I’m just hoping that doesn’t happen.

In the long run I think that his role in combat will be more relevant to the question of which units he’d overlap with, rather than his element/weapon combo. I mean, we could have a purely offensive gala light sword and they wouldn’t actually conflict too much with Gala Euden because they’d do different things. The various changes we’ve gotten to how co-abilities work, and the introduction of unique co-abilities, means it’s not really a big deal to have two units with the same weapon type in a team together so long as they do different things.

Which is also why I don’t want him to be a wind or water element sword unit, either. Gala Ranzal is [kind of] defense-oriented already, and also he just doesn’t deserve to get directly overshadowed by a hypothetical new gala wind sword, lol. And even though Gala Elly is a different weapon type, Leif would definitely conflict with her in practice if he was a support-oriented water unit.

Funnily enough I think him being a shadow element gala sword built around team buffs could work fine, and he wouldn’t really overlap with anyone aside from maybe Patia, but realistically I doubt we’ll get another gala shadow sword so soon after Gala Alex, no matter how different they might be in practice, lol.

So basically due to process of elimination I think I’d want him to be a gala flame sword. On the one hand the idea of a gala flame sword doesn’t really interest me at all, but honestly I think he could be surprisingly interesting and really shake things up if he’s support-oriented. Nearly all of the flame swords we have are pretty much entirely offensive, and nobody uses Karl even though he can technically be used as a support-based flame sword with the right set-up. So I honestly think that Leif could have his own relatively unique niche in the flame meta even if he ends up with such a common element/weapon combo.

There’s also the fact that Volk seems like it’s going to end up being the hardest Agito fight by a substantial degree, so I think it’d make sense to start introducing more flame units designed to let people break into that fight. And from what I know of the Volk meta [from having never actually played eVolk myself, lol], it seems pretty obvious that the big hole in the flame meta at the moment is how H-Lowen is basically the only accepted support unit, and he’s an entirely support-focused unit who does next to nothing to contribute to the team’s DPS. If eVolk and HMS didn’t have unavoidable damage and high difficulty in general, he’d probably lose his place in the meta, which I feel like is kinda already happening as a result of Hawk and Marth’s mana spirals. So I feel like what flame really needs right now, rather than more good DPS units or more good healers, is a support unit who can also contribute to team DPS.

So basically what I want is for Gala Leif to be like a mix of Tobias, Gala Elly, and T-Hope. If he wants to be an alternative/replacement to H-Lowen, he’s going to need at least SOME healing, on top of offensive/defensive buffs. I wouldn’t actually want him to have enough healing to straight up replace H-Lowen as a healer, but if he wants to be an alternative to him then he at least needs enough to deal with stuff like cleansing plague.

In general my basic idea of how I think his kit could work in order to fulfill that role is that he could have an S1 that has a big strength boost and a smaller defense boost [so like a reverse of Patia’s S1], and an ability/chain co-ability that gives Team Healing Doublebuff. Preferably on the level of 5% HP per tick instead of 1% HP per tick like with T-Hope. I think that’d basically be all that he needs to be able to work as a team support unit who can contribute to team DPS while also providing enough healing to deal with plague and recover people from unavoidable damage, even though he wouldn’t be as good of a generalist healer as H-Lowen.

For both Volk and HMS there’s also the issue of interfering with melee baiters, and needing to do ranged baiting for certain moves, so in spite of him being a sword unit, maybe they could give Gala Leif an S2 that gives him a ranged attack stance like Tobias, so he can let the melee units do their thing.

This is all just more or less baseless speculation, but this is just what I’m thinking they could do to address the fact that Volk is the hardest Agito fight, that the support role is the most exclusive and difficult role in that fight, that H-Lowen is basically dead weight DPS-wise who seems to slowly be losing his relevance in the face of 4DPS team comps, and that Emma has basically never been meta for Volk and has become way less important for HMS with how co-abilities work now. So introducing a new gala unit who provides fairly substantial team DPS buffs along with adequate healing seems like it’s exactly what the flame element needs right now. And considering that Gala Alex has poison and buff dispel it’s not exactly impossible that we could get a gala unit designed to work against Volk. It might make more sense for us to get a wind gala unit next to go against Ciella, but I still think that Ciella won’t be as hard as Volk, and wind also already has more in the way of viable support units than flame does at the moment.

The fact that our first gala dragon is also a flame one designed for DPS units, along with Marth getting a super powerful mana spiral, also just makes me think that they’re still trying to address the Volk meta and give people more options for it, so I think it’s reasonable to assume our next gala unit might be designed to address the support/defense part of the flame meta.

It’s worth noting, though, that I’m pretty sure Leif had some sort of team defense buff when he showed up in chapter 9, which is basically the main reason why I’m assuming he’d be a support/defense-based unit rather than an offensive one. Patia also ended up being a team support unit so it’d just make sense if he ended up being kinda similar, lol.

Anyway this was way too many words to just say that I want my boi to finally come home :v

[paintmeyourbluesky]

They call themselves, “The Red Devils”. Yep, shoutout to all the Manchester United team fans out there who either have or have not yet visited this dashing city, and of course, the Old Trafford stadium himself. Typical as it is, I’ve come to just learned that apparently most of the UK’s notorious football teams possess their very own stadiums that is very open to the public during off-game-seasonal days, showing off fans from all over the world all the pride they gathered through the years being preserves inside these very stadiums.

Having the opportunity of stepping into this stadium myself (literally) gave me the chills. And it’s not because of the weather or anything, psh

Okay, so there was a sarcastic tone on that note. Big deal.

The weather was terribly cold, and apparently the wind went too far blowing itself on preeeetty much anyone who chose to stroll around the stadium that day.

But ANYWAYS I got a huge chance of joining the exclusive tour to the grandeur pride of MU led by a formally introduced official himself. His name is Bill. Say hi, Bill!

His overall feature (and his voice + the accent) very much reminded me of the creepy black cab murderer in the first episode of Sherlock (A Study In Pink), only without the cap and specs, of course. And the slightly sinister attempt on acknowledging every passenger he acquired to eat his suicidal pills. Just to throw this in out there.

Moving along, Bill showed us around the house and stated some really interesting insights of the big whoop with that accent, and you’d bet it was radical, especially if you consider yourself to be a Red Devil yourselves. He showed us around the cafeteria, where it was originally closed and only opens during game season, where they sell all those variables of grub you see on television like hot dogs, coke, peanuts, etc to them spectators who wish to enjoy themselves as company to witness their favorite players on field. Too bad I forgot to take pictures of it, though. My mistake.

He also brought us in to the extra exclusive changing room used by the actual players themselves, which was, as expected, blown up entirely by the iconic red jerseys hung throughout the entire walls that surrounded the room.

I literally had no clue who these players were to be quite honest. But it was worth the shot anyways.

He then showed us to the visitor’s changing room, where all the world-famous football teams were to change before they really rise themselves up to the field to face against MU or any other particular teams as well.

The time finally arrived as we scout along towards the last, but more importantly, the best deal the tour itself could possibly offer: stepping on the all-round bloody hell stadium itself.

Bill was giddy enough to inform that the state of the art stadium was sponsored by multiple billionaire companies, and that the green grass field that covers up pretty much the entire field had recently been trimmed, and taken care of by the hands of the very best expertise on set, so yes. No touchy-touchy, nor is there to be any stepping on it while we admire its enormous authenticity.

Now here’s the interesting part: before we were to enter the stadium, there is this very unique, must tradition to all football players who are to appear during a game where they are supposed to be properly introduced by the sports commentator along with a very champion-esque music flowing along as they go through it, just to strengthen the versus tournament vibes and light up the hint of motivation to the players.

Here’s what Bill did: he asked our group to create two separate lines, and then as the recording of the commentator cues on with the music playing, we screamed our lungs out to some kind of motto or word (I couldn’t remember the exact words we said, sorry!), running towards the field with our game faces on, and was then greeted by the sight of the dashing red-filled hot seats throughout the entire stadium.

Holy guacomole was the stadium big, alright. Old Trafford was one bloody red of a stadium, with a capacity of over 80,000 seats, the cheapest to cost around 200 pounds, at least, (correct me if I’m wrong on that one) that could get you only one of the seats located at the very top far back row around the stadium, depending on how popular the teams that were playing are in that specific time being.

Unbelievable.

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After really sucking in all the red we could during our very last brief moments inside the stadium, we were to exit and was recommended to check out the official MU museum, where it contained pretty much anything there is to know about this legendary team, or visit the store where they sell all kinds of official merchandises any Red Devil could ever want to own in the palm of their hands. It was the end of the tour, and we were sadly off to part ways with Bill and his knack for amateur football playing and his passion towards the team themselves (fairly enough, I did get to ask him a question or two once I got the chance of doing so). Cheerio then, Bill!

Clearly, you wouldn’t expect my adventures to be over just yet, now do you? Well, we had to take our chances on visiting the museum on the second floor, of course! But before we went into all that great stuff, resting our tired legs in the iconic Red Cafe that lies right next to the museum was what we really needed at first. We eventually sat, and ordered ourselves a mug of hot chocolate along with an aesthetically pleasing, yet also one of the best mouth-watering chocolate muffins you could ever come across into having in your mere entire lives. For real, though. The overall texture of it tasted magnificent that we even considered on getting another one! But didn’t, unfortunately. For it was almost lunch time.

The museum was overall a fantastic finale to complete the piece of our day in Old Trafford. It had all the awards, including big, huge trophies, countless medals and certificates, also detailed information which regards all the past and present players of the team, written historic events that occurred from the very beginning, and far too many for me to mention. I’d say you’d be ever so lucky if you were to enter, spending hours there gawking at all that’s in it. That is, if you are a true badass, dedicated Red Devil, of course.

Moving on to a funny story, you guys: my brother was the first person to examine the official personalized MU ball and finding out that it was literally made in Indonesia! The tag clearly said so, and we were super intrigued on how funny it would be if we were to ever purchase them not realizing that it was made inside our very own nation. Indonesia sure had really outdone themselves on this one. #ProudCitizen

So to wrap it up in a nutshell, I do think that this was an entirely new experience for me, visiting Old Trafford. I, for one, personally do not have a thing for football. Let’s just say I did not have the friendliest gesture of a first impression when I first tried playing it back when I was 6. You do not wanna know. Never tried playing nor showing specific interest to it since then. It might come off as a huge milestone for some people who are indeed fans of the nature of football themselves, but yeah. I’ve had the greatest pleasure of visiting this stadium regardless of not being the football maniac myself, to say the least. It was cool.

On another account, Manchester was the very first city I stepped upon on my first day of the trip, and this stadium was also the very first site I’ve ever come to visit back then. It’s a shame that I couldn’t really stay there for too long, and was only able to experience Manchester at a glimpse through Arndale and Manchester Cathedral, (pictures shown down below) which were all-in-all amazing and incredibly authentic as well.  BUT that being said, I’d love to come back for an extended visit, for I know this city would offer a lot more than I could have consumed on my plate for me to devour upon once I get back to it someday.

  Have you guys ever visited the Old Trafford Stadium? Or are you planning, no, dreaming of visiting it on your own sometime in the future? Make sure to leave a comment down below, because I’d love to hear all about it! Hope you enjoyed devouring this chunk of a post, because I can assure you that there will certainly be plenty more where that came from. SOON. (;

Cheerio, then!

  A Milestone in Manchester They call themselves, "The Red Devils". Yep, shoutout to all the Manchester United team fans out there who either have or have not yet visited this dashing city, and of course, the Old Trafford stadium himself.