#someone with wider encyclopedic knowledge than I

[silanb]

Alright I need the very niche few of you who have these overlapping interests to aide me here.

I want, very badly, to make Disco Elysium Kim and Harry doll customs. Of course I’m running into a huge problem with this which is: their tragically unique face shapes and stylized proportions. Both face and body.

Typically when I do male doll repaints I use BTS dolls (bc I like their slightly larger than Barbie proportions) or the new Disney ILY dolls, and on occasion make minor sculpting edits to feminine face sculpts to suit my needs. This works for most of what I’ve done (ocs, the mandalorian, stuff like that) but I’m in a corner here. I have several options but none are great.

- I could use one of the two that I usually do and make some large alterations and pray for the best. If I choose to do that I’m going to have to find decent base dolls which I don’t doubt I can do. Pros are it’s within my comfort level, cons are it’s very limited.

- Monster/Ever after high. They have very stylized sculpts but their proportions are just a bit *too* much in terms of my preference. So I could shrink some monster high high heads and go from there. Pros are it’s also familiar and closer to the stylization I need, cons are shrunken heads are more difficult to work with and risk breaking to achieve the size I want.

- Third option is to sculpt and print/cast unique face molds, which is not a prospect I’m excited about but is something I am feasibly capable of. Pros is I can guarantee the most accuracy with the least need to make alterations, cons are I have very minimal experience with this so I have to fucking LEARN shit while also asking for a favor to print/mold/cast/whatever the final results.

-secret fourth option where someone smarter than me knows a doll that would make the perfect base

TL:DR I want to make Kim and Harry dolls but I need ideas on what base to use. If anyone knows some specific doll brands or characters that work well for the characters or have any advice/input on the matter pls hmu! I am unfortunately dedicated to this project.

[positivexcellence]

Is there garlic on this pizza? An oral history of Supernatural's 'Monster Movie' episode

THE BEGINNING

What started as a simple enough idea — a black-and-white episode — was then put into the hands of writer Ben Edlund, who’d already crafted some of the show’s more creative hours, including “Hollywood Babylon,” which marked one of the series’ first meta episodes, and “Ghostfacers,” which was shot like a cheesy ghost-hunting reality show using handheld cameras. Alongside Edlund was director Robert Singer, an executive producer on the series and a massive movie fan himself.

ERIC KRIPKE (Creator): I was an obsessive fan of The X-Files and in their prime, they got really bold and adventurous with their format, and they had a black-and-white episode. I was always hoping that we could start taking those same kinds of swings. I remember saying, “I want to do a black-and-white episode where Sam and Dean are up against the classic movie monsters.” But I think Ben came up with the shapeshifter. We were trying to figure out: How do you get a mummy and a werewolf and a Frankenstein and a Dracula in the same episode? That makes no f---ing sense. So this idea of a shapeshifter who loved those movies and was ultimately just a fanboy was the secret to cracking that one open. 

ROBERT SINGER (Director): I think that script was Ben at his best. I was really happy that I was in line to direct because I really loved those old movies, so it was fortuitous that I got to do it. 

JENSEN ACKLES (Dean Winchester): It’s all just paying homage to the old-school ways of doing things, which having Bob at the helm, he’s seen all those movies time and time again, so he was the perfect guy to direct this episode. 

KRIPKE: Bob has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, especially older films. He’s a classicist and his directing style is a lot of that kind of beautiful, elegant Hollywood style, and I think he just really relished it.

SINGER: I shot generally with wider lenses than I would normally do with Supernatural to try to give it some of that old-time feel. I really took pains to make it look as old fashioned as I possibly could. I’m a big fan of James Whale, who had done Frankenstein, and there are a lot of great crane shots in those movies, so I did a lot of crane work in this. We did a lot of shadow play. 

JARED PADALECKI (Sam Winchester): You put Ben Edlund on writing and Bob Singer on directing and magic is bound to happen.

But there was another piece of the puzzle that needed to come together for the magic to truly work: Who would play the shapeshifter (and therefore spend the episode doing their best Dracula)? The answer was Todd Stashwick.

TODD STASHWICK (Dracula): They wanted a full-on replication of Bela Lugosi’s performance. I had the DVD of the 1930’s Dracula, so I was watching that just to get the mannerisms and vocal intonation down so that I wasn’t doing a Xerox carbon copy but rather actually trying to get that Hungarian dialect that he has. I went in [to the audition] and just swung for the rafters.

SINGER: We had him do one of the Dracula scenes and then do the speech where he’s telling her how he became the way he became and Todd just killed it. That was an easy call to cast him.

STASHWICK: They wanted to know that you were going to be able to bring both sides to it, the full-on studied Dracula performance and then to let that mask drop and see the wounded man that is the monster. 

KRIPKE: We needed someone who could stick the landing on the Dracula part and that’s really hard. It’s hard to do it and have it not come off like a bit. Todd is a remarkable mimic of Bela Lugosi and brings humanity and soulfulness and depth to it. There’s something in his eyes that made it deeper and sadder than had you cast someone who was just going for an impersonation.

PADALECKI: That episode belongs to Todd Stashwick. He’s so damn good. 

Alongside Stashwick was Melinda Sward, whose character Jamie, a local waitress, caught Dean's eye and marked a first for the show. 

KRIPKE: At the time, there was a young female fan named Jamie. She and her mother would write us letters and they were super fans, and we were still early enough that we’re like, “I can’t believe there’s fans.” Jamie had medical issues, so when the season was coming up, I wrote her a response and said, “If you concentrate on getting better, we’ll name a character after you.” And she responded and said, “That’s amazing, but can you just do me a favor? Can you make sure it’s a character that doesn’t die?” So the female lead in this one we named Jamie. That was one of the only times we ever named a character after a real person and a fan. The happy ending is she was thrilled and she grew up healthy and now tours around with a replica of the Impala. 

ACKLES: Jamie was one of my favorite Dean Girls. Melinda was so good and so fun.

From the instant the episode began, fans knew they were in for something special as the old black-and-white WB logo kicked off a very old-school credits sequence.

SINGER: Right from the opening of the Warner Brothers shield, you know where you’re going. It set the tone perfectly.

KRIPKE: That and “Changing Channels” are the only two episodes where I’ll sit down and just watch the credit sequence. The font, the way you list every crew member, and it just goes on forever. And [composer Christopher] Lennertz wrote real orchestral music for it. I just love the opening of that episode and the way we did that title sequence. But changing subjects, what that reminds me of is the singular genius of Ben Edlund to set this episode during Oktoberfest. Suddenly everyone looks like European villagers and everything becomes a real monster movie.

SINGER: And that location was a party site, but it worked perfect for us. 

PADALECKI: It was like an amusement park in the outskirts of Vancouver that we rented out. It ended up unfortunately getting torn down and turned into condos or something.

THE MIDDLE

With the setting and the cast locked, the brothers set out on their hunt, arriving at Oktoberfest to help solve a murder. And when the investigation made Dean late to his first date with Jamie, he found himself face-to-face with Dracula. So naturally, Dean punched the shapeshifter in the face. A fight ensued, one that ended with Dean holding an ear and Dracula ... riding a vespa?

ACKLES: I believe one of the many reasons this show lasted as long as it did is because it can be scary but then at the same time, you throw something like the scooter in and it layers in comedy with horror, with drama, with romance. It touches it all. Bob said it early on and it became a mantra of ours: “No joke is too cheap.” 

STASHWICK: That’s the infamous assault scene. I’m in full crazy mode and I’m supposed to clock Jensen in his beautiful face with my elbow, and for whatever reason in that moment — I perhaps leaned in, he perhaps leaned in — we closed that gap and I clocked him. So what you see on the DVD extras is me being all Dracula and then me being mortified that I just hit their billion dollar baby in the face.

ACKLES: He caught me with an elbow but he probably thought he hit me harder than he did. It was a mix between a good shot and a graze, but he immediately broke character. He was like, “Are you good?” And I was like, “Yeah, that one woke me up.” [Laughs]

Dean made it through that fight, but the shapeshifter had already planned its next move: While Sam checked out an eccentric local that they thought was the killer, Dean and Jamie shared a drink back at the bar where she worked. Her friend Lucy (Holly Elissa) then showed up just in time to spike their drinks. By the time Dean woke up, he was wearing Lederhosen while strapped to a table in a dungeon.

SINGER: Jensen was like, “Oh god do I have to wear this?” So to make him feel better, I put on the Lederhosen top. I didn’t go with the full shorts but I did direct that day in the Lederhosen top to take the edge off it a little bit for him.

ACKLES: I remember that! He directed in that shirt. [Laughs] Those were authentic leather Lederhosen from Bavaria. Only the best for Dean.

PADALECKI: When Jensen’s first getting strapped to the table, cause he’s a big guy, I remember them talking about how for the visual's sake, they wanted it to be like he’s a quote-unquote damsel in distress, so if they used a normal-sized platform, it would’ve looked comical, but not in a good way. So they had to make it a little bigger cause he’s kind of big.

Dean wasn’t in the dungeon long before Dracula left him to go answer the doorbell. It seemed the shapeshifter ordered a pizza … and he had a coupon.

KRIPKE: I just love how there’s the monster lab in the basement but then you go upstairs and it’s this mid-century ranch house. That’s almost a direct ripoff of the Steve Martin movie The Man with Two Brains.

SINGER: [Set designer] Jerry [Wanek] did a great job in building the dungeon set, and then when the doorbell rings, you realize it’s in the bottom of a suburban house with a pizza guy showing up at the door. 

KRIPKE: When Ben wrote the script, we talked about that scene more than any other scene in the episode. We were so specific about how we wanted the Dracula shapeshifter to react to the pizza guy and the way he’s scared when he says, “Is there garlic on the pizza?” And then the way the pizza guy’s so bored and over it: “Did you order garlic?” And then he says, “No!” It’s the way that he’s so bored of this Dracula at the door.

PADALECKI: I think Jensen and I must’ve watched this episode together in 2008 because I remember us looking at each other and going like, ”Oh my god, [the pizza guy] is way better than he needs to be!”

ACKLES: That line, because of the way that Todd delivered it, we used that line on set many, many times. Whenever somebody asked a question that had an obvious “no” to it, it’d be like, “Hey, did you want the big light on in the distance?” And Bob would be like, “Is there garlic on it?” So that became a little ism on set.

STASHWICK: I’m a Second City guy, so “yes, and” is drilled into my head and yet the two memes I’m most known for, I’m saying the word “no,” and that is Supernatural and Star Trek. I have the no's that are heard around the world. 

In the end, the brothers came out victorious and another monster was dead, but not before this one made you feel a little something (and gave one heck of a final monologue quoting King Kong). 

KRIPKE: Ben gets all the credit, and rightfully so, for writing the crazy episodes, but where I don’t think he gets enough credit is what a disciplined screenwriter he is in terms of character consistency and rule consistency and just the emotion and pathos he brings to every single story he does. No matter how crazy, he always has such a talent for capturing humanity. I wasn’t counting on the shapeshifter to have pathos but when he gives that speech at the end, it’s so sad. I give him all the credit in the world for that.

SINGER: Eric used to say, “Every villain is a hero of his own story,” so we always tried, as best we could, to give the villains something to do and learn more about them and give them full characters. So even with all this fun, we managed to give him something a little more to do. 

PADALECKI: He becomes an almost sympathetic character — I stress almost because he did kill a couple people — but what a great character arc all inside of one episode.

STASHWICK: Because this character wasn’t just a cartoon Dracula and he had that human moment, I think it made him stick in people’s minds more. This monster just really loved the movies. He was the ultimate cosplayer. It might be the thing I’m most known for outside of Star Trek, that one episode of TV.

THE END...?

Although Dracula didn’t make it out alive, the episode seemed to breathe new life into the series, marking perhaps its biggest risk yet, though not the biggest risk the show would ever take. 

SINGER: It kind of laid a template for other big swings that we took that were out of the ordinary, whether it was “Changing Channels” or “The French Mistake.” This was the first of our big swings of being totally different than what the show was generally week to week.

KRIPKE: I remember it getting a positive reception. I think people appreciated the swings we were starting to take. I just love that this small little supernatural show that’s arguably a Buffy ripoff on The CW got so experimental. I am really proud that we were doing legit avant-garde stuff, really experimental filmmaking, of which this was one, and then we just kept pushing it. 

PADALECKI: It’s such a great episode of television and I think we have a few in our 15 years that could stand alone as something fun to watch and out of the box, and it's certainly easy to argue "Monster Movie" is at the top.

ACKLES: This was really when we were hitting our stride. We were in the pocket with these characters, with the storytelling, with the writing. The first year was really finding our feet, the second was like, "Okay we somehow survived a network merge, let’s not mess this up." And then third season we started playing a little bit. So by the fourth season, we’re like, "Now we know where we need to be." This was the perfect time to do one of these outside-the-box episodes. This is definitely one of my top 10.

SINGER: I directed 48 episodes and if somebody asked me which is my favorite, I would probably say this one. I just had the best time doing it. 

Entertainment Weekly

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

One of the strangest takes I've seen is that Ingo and Emmet would somehow not know anything about pokemon from regions outside of Unova, even pre-pla amnesia. Like they're battle facility heads, they must get a huge variety showing up all the time, from tourists if nothing else. But even outside of that they just don't seem like the type of guys who would be so... insular, with their knowledge. Just because they only have Unovan pokemon on their bw/bw2 teams doesn't mean they aren't familiar with others. Like I said, weird take that I've somehow seen a number of times lately from different sources and I'm not entirely sure why

you see an ask open with "one of the strangest takes i've seen" and you know it's gonna be a wild ride. anyways EH??

i mean... the one angle i kind of understand it from is maybe, not wanting to make them OP? ingo in particular, i do kind of see the impulse to nerf his encyclopedic pokemon knowledge bc it does make him very uh. idk how to term it exactly. nobody else in hisui can do that and it gives him a wild advantage over everyone else in battle. which is how it should be! but i think this stems from a wider issue of fandom being unwilling to make their characters like... too skilled at anything? maybe this is a thing i am imagining, but i do feel like it's a recurring thing that people shy away from just having their favs BE impressive and respect-worthy in their fields. like they're overcorrecting from having people complain about mary sue-ness or something.

regardless tho this is a dumbass take!! like, are they probably more familiar with the intricacies and mannerisms and needs of the pokemon they handle regularly, like their teams or their depot agents' teams? yeah. they probably couldn't tell you the specific dietary and social needs of a tinkatink off the top of their heads. but like. there are people In The Real World who have an encyclopedic knowledge of every pokemon's types and at least a general expectation of their stats and dex entries. it's not even a difficult thing to acquire you've just gotta be a nerd about it for long enough. and these guys Live in pokemon land and yeah, WOULD have actual practical experience from battling tourists and anyone who had pokemon from elsewhere in the world.

besides, this is not just a job but a PASSION to them. they run the battle subway! they adore pokemon and battling! you think in at least some of their off time they're not, like, watching gym match recordings? reading up on the current move meta & new developments? fucking, swapping stories with the facility heads of other regions?? fuckouttahere. you underestimate the power of a special interest.

but yeah tho, the thing i said before, that would be my observer's take on it. fandom just has this weird aversion towards making their characters too powerful/skilled/etc at anything. it's dumb. there is, and i say this as a deeply ace person, nothing sexier than watching someone be really really good at the thing they are good at. COMPETENCY PLEASE.

[samingtonwilson]

Marriage Material - Part 10 - Jim Kirk

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9

Summary: in this chapter, the lollipop flavor debacle is settled.

Warnings: language

A/N: happy 1 day late star trek day, friends :))

You were staring at each other. Lying on your sides, face one another, your eyes just focusing on the irises of the other. He was smiling, just a little in that small, sweet way that always made you feel heard, made you feel cared for. You hoped the smile you wore wasn’t too much, wasn’t too revealing of the hammering in your chest and the utter disarray in your head.

He lifted his hand, his fingers centimeters from your jaw before he paused. When you glanced up, he closed the distance and let his fingertips trace your jaw, the curve of your ear, the rise of your cheekbone, the slope of your nose. He sighed as he stared at you, letting his fingers tangle through your hair. “I hate orange lollipops.”

You turned your face to laugh into the pillow. “What?”

“Yeah,” he continued, smiling wider when you turned your head only enough to let one eye meet his. “Partial to green apple, sometimes lime. Anything green.”

“Except vegetables.”

“Except vegetables,” he agreed with a single nod, sighing out when he saw both of your eyes.

“Why did you keep taking the orange ones?” you asked, pushing at his shoulder and ignoring the feeling in your stomach the moment his fingers wrapped around your wrist and pulled you closer. “It’s not like you had to. It was a bribe for your benefit.”

“I didn’t need a bribe.”

“Len said—”

“I’m a difficult patient, I know that,” he interjected, struggling against a frown when you took your hand from his. “I hate hypos, and physicals, and getting my blood drawn. Bedside manner doesn’t come naturally to Bones, he needs the aid of unnecessarily sugary things. He had run through every flavor by the time you transferred on board, except orange. Had a full set of jars of orange.”

“You couldn’t have said something?”

He shook his head. “Like I said, I didn’t need a bribe— you’ve got good bedside manner. And I’d take any flavor of lollipop if it was you giving it to me.”

You snorted, pushing at his bare chest before turning onto your back. “Stop flirting with me, I already had sex with you.”

“Four times,” he added, smirking.

“Four times,” you sighed out, your eyes shutting for a second as if you could relive the toe-curling, hair-raising, moan-inducing blissful feeling.

When you opened your eyes again, he was staring at you in amusement. You cleared your throat. “If you brag about this to anyone, I swear, —”

“Brag about what, starlight? That, four times tonight, I’ve made you co—”

“Yes, that,” you said, shaking your head. “Is that, like, a record for you, Jim?”

He followed the slope of your nose with his eyes this time, following it to the swell of your lips. His gaze lingered there for too long— on the swelling, the darkening. “Yeah, actually.”

You narrowed your eyes, turning your face to look at him while still laying on your back. “Keep your ego in check when I say this, but I find that very hard to believe.”

“Am I that good?” the smugness in his voice irritated you, the smile over his lips even worse.

You reluctantly nodded, wishing you could wipe the smile from his face just for a second. “You’re also just that sexually active.”

“And you thought this would inflate my ego?”

You laughed, shaking your head. You lifted your arm and set your palm against your forehead, holding your hair back. “I thought the first part would, I can’t vouch for the second. Although, there is nothing wrong with being sexually active— I mean, so long as it’s safe, and consensual, and so, so good.”

“Yeah, that,” he pointed at you, referring to the soft moan in your voice, “that’s inflating my ego.”

You rolled your eyes. “You know, you could say something nice about me, too. That wasn’t all you, there was another person involved.”

He nodded, looking at you as if he had tunnel vision and everything around him was dark and quiet and invisible. There was a lot he wanted to say to you— a lot of nice things, a lot of loving things. But he’d been keeping those things to himself since the moment he’d kissed you hours before.

It was better than he thought it would be— the feeling of being buried in you, the feeling of being wrapped in you, the feeling of finally pressing his lips to you. He thought it was funny that everything Leonard told him was true— that sex was better when you were in love, that it was more powerful, more intoxicating than he’d ever felt sex be, than he ever thought it could be.

He actually wanted to laugh at himself for it. He hated that he sounded like some cheesy romance novel or some poem written by a mediocre lovesick Renaissance sonnet aficionado that had just defied the village traditions to have sex with the only person that had survived the previous month’s common cold. He thought it was hilarious, and corny, and totally unexpected.

But he hated more that you weren’t with him on it, that you’d decided this was a just-sex thing and every gesture of yours was empty and not meant to be thought of as something deeper— words he never thought were ugly until you said them. But you had an act to keep up and you didn’t want him to think the act was a reflection of your actual feelings, feelings you said you had no interest in augmenting for reasons your throat had grown sore of repeating.

Despite the anger and self-loathing it all caused, it was easy for him to agree. As self-destructive as it was, he agreed without a second thought. If he could see you unravel under him— or on top of him, for that matter— every night, if he could be the reason you moaned out and sighed out his name, if he could make your eyes shut in bliss, he wanted to do that. It didn’t matter what it made him feel, all that mattered to him was you— the person he married while drunk off his mind, the person he’d stay married to for the rest of time if he had any say in it.

“You’re okay, I guess.”

A scoff and a slap of offense against his chest, you sat up and took the sheet with you, holding it under your upper arms so you were comfortably covered. Your back sat against the headboard and you set your foot flat against the mattress so your knee formed a small peak before your chest. “I’m better than okay. I have references that can corroborate my claim.”

“Have I ever met any of these references?” he asked, climbing out of the bed and not caring that his entire naked body was brightly on display— you knew if you were in his shoes you would’ve done the same, you would’ve never put clothes on if you were in his shoes. “Come to think of it, I’ve never heard anything about you and anyone on board.”

You shook your head, looking away when he caught you gawking with your bottom lip between your teeth— he smirked in reaction. “I keep it in my pants until leave— usually meet someone on the starbases. I’ve never dated anyone on board, never slept with anyone on board either. ”

“Until now.”

You hummed, catching the t-shirt he tossed you. “I’m breaking a lot of rules for you, zuji.”

“That was—”

“Arabic.”

He frowned in consideration, nodding a moment later. “And you know all of these languages, how?”

“Have you met me?” you asked once the shirt was on and you slipped out of the bed to stand on still unstable legs. “Encyclopedic knowledge is, like, my thing. Everything I am is basically a qualification to get transferred onto this damn ship— weirdly intelligent, emotionally messed up, oddly good-looking.”

He nodded. “The superficial qualifications are the ones we put the most weight on.”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true.” You caught the pair of leggings you motioned for him to toss to you, pulling them on and rolling your sleeves up to your elbows. “Are you hungry? We never ate dinner.”

He hummed. “I’ll do that. What do you want to—”

There was a knock at the door that cut him off. It was a double knock— two very quick, very forceful knocks with barely any pause in between.

You tilted your head and looked at Jim. “You expecting someone?”

He frowned and shook his head. “It’s, like, two AM—”

Two more knocks cut him off.

You inhaled deeply and brushed past him, purposely bumping your shoulder against his with an added exaggerated sigh of mock effort.

He smiled, catching your arm before you could walk away entirely. “Let’s go again. One more time.”

Another knock had you taking your arm back and clicking your tongue as you patted his cheek. “Patience, sunshine.”

He watched as you fussed with your hair and strolled to the door, hitting your hand against the control panel and standing back with your arms crossed over your chest.

Your eyes widened when the door opened entirely, suddenly wishing your eyeliner hadn’t smudged off and your lips didn’t look so freshly bitten. You cleared your throat and frowned at her. “Yes?”

Her eyes were wide as well, the brown, almond shaped eyes that were so flawlessly lined trailing over your body. Her hair was loose, long, dark strands falling before her face to soften her sharp bone structure. She wasn’t wearing her red uniform dress, now in a comfortable outfit you knew she would usually sleep in. “Can we— I want us to talk.”

“Are you going to yell at me more?” you asked, peering at Jim, who watched you with a single eyebrow raised. You were thankful he’d put a shirt on— mostly so you could stay focused.

She shook her head, her eyes glassy. “No, I just want to talk.”

You uncrossed your arms and stepped back, your frown softening and your eyebrows returning to a neutral position. “Yeah, Ny, come in.”

She nodded and walked inside, glancing at Jim and waving a little. “Captain.”

He nodded back, pointing at the door that you had yet to move from. “I’m gonna— I’ll go find Bones, give you guys your privacy.”

He decided to forgo shoes once again, nearing the door but pausing to press his lips to your forehead. “Good luck, starlight,” he whispered so only you could hear, stepping out into the corridor with the door shutting behind him.

You looked at the door for a few seconds, shaking your head and turning back to Uhura.

She was watching you, her head slightly tilted. “This is different.”

You nodded, motioning to the sofa. “Sit. I have a feeling this’ll take some time.”

She complied easily, taking a seat and pulling her legs onto the couch as well. She kept her knees at her chest, her fingers set on top.

It was strange seeing her like this. Usually exuding confidence, she sat before you in a nervous, unsure manner that confused you and made you want to hug her and never let go.

“So what’d you want to—”

“You got married,” she said, her eyes narrowing as she stared at her hands. When she met your gaze, her eyes narrowed further. “You got married to Kirk and you didn’t think to tell me.”

“It was a spur of the moment thing, Ny. I didn’t plan on marrying him.”

“I didn’t even know you were dating,” she continued, setting her feet on the ground and crossing her legs at the knee instead. “You didn’t think to tell me that either.”

“I just—” you shook your head and wished you’d taken those improv classes offered a mile from your childhood home that your father tried to force you into. “It wasn’t supposed to be serious. It was just hooking up, but he’s so— God, he’s so great and, I don’t know, I guess I— I guess I fell in love with him.”

You knew you weren’t lying. You just wished you were.

“He asked me to marry him and, ten minutes later, we got married,” you told her, sighing and slouching in your spot on the couch. “I couldn’t tell you then— I didn’t have my communicator on me and I didn’t think to make the walk back to Chekov’s.”

“What about after?” she asked, seemingly following every bit of your features with her eyes. “I found out from Spock, (Y/N). He’s not even in touch with gossip, he thinks it’s too futile and that Vulcans are above it.”

“He saw the forms,” you shrugged.

“I should’ve known before Starfleet officials did.” She sighed and shook her head, sniffling. “I love you and I love Kirk— I want the two of you to be blindingly happy. Did you think I would judge you? Or that I’d be jealous or unhappy?”

You shook your head. “Of course not. I just thought you’d— Actually, I don’t know. I didn’t think, I was so caught up in all of it. It was so much. I married Jim Kirk. I stood up,” you assumed, you could have been sitting for all you knew, “in front of random strangers and married Jim Kirk. The part of me that started lusting after him the minute I met him was having a field day but every other part was so scared,” you assumed again. “I mean, marriage isn’t— I’m not marriage material.”

“Jim thinks you are,” she argued softly, smiling at you a little when you met her gaze. “I wanted to be there for you. If I was there, maybe I could have made it all a little less overwhelming for you, maybe I could have helped. But you didn’t give me that chance, even the day after.”

You nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I know I do stupid things like this— keep important things to myself, talk about random things when I should talk about the significant things. I’m sorry, Nyota. I’m really sorry.”

She nodded back. “Why didn’t you say that sooner? It’s been a month.”

“Life after marriage to Jim Kirk is,” you clicked your tongue and shook your head, “it’s something else. He’s— He’s something else.”

“He’s been acting like something else recently. Always happy, always smiling. It’s like serving under the sun,” she laughed with a single shake of her head.

“I missed you. I missed you a lot.”

Her smile was close-lipped but not small by any means. “I missed you.”

“We’re okay, right? You and I? I have you in my corner again?”

She shook her head again. “You’ve always had me in your corner.” She then wrinkled her nose. “Fuck, that was corny.”

“It was,” you laughed. “But it was sweet.”

She leant towards you, nodding her head pointedly toward the mess that was the bed— sheets tangled, a few pillows on the floor, comforter piled on top of it. “He really as good as they all say he is?”

You laughed through your nose, nodding. “Even better, actually.”

She nodded, sitting back once more. “I thought that would be the case. With the way he looks at you, I’m surprised you’re not stuck in here with him all day.” She tilted her head. “Come to think of it, he’s always looked at you like that. S’a wonder I didn’t catch onto your little charade sooner.”

You tried to laugh again, smiling at her. “Yeah, weird.”

PART 11

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[giggle-me-this]

i want the k! (xi)

7. Romantic Kiss

((Muggle London, sometime in the significant-but-not-all-that-distant future, plausibly but not definitively canon so for now we’ll say AU))

“So, what can I get you?”

It was a question that Nate asked a lot, these days—and by a lot he meant an absolute metric fuckton. It tumbled out of Nate’s mouth without him even having to think about it, just like the other dozens of times he said it every night, with his sleeves rolled up and his elbows on the bar, in a tone that was inviting and confident but still a bit enigmatic, enough to entice the customer into buying top shelf liquor in the hopes of impressing Nate but not enough that they would hang around all night and proposition him when he got off.

Which—yeah, it did still happen, and he couldn’t really complain about it. He’d been told it was just something that happened to all bartenders—which is what Nate was now, and his pride only suffered a little to say it, at this point. It took a long and begrudging amount of time to get here, but Nate couldn’t deny that he kind of liked working at a bar. A No-Maj bar, no less, seeing as Nate was blacklisted from every establishment in the wider wizarding world that had ever even thought the words Giggle Water—which, it turned out, was everywhere.

And it wasn’t just that Nate was good at it, because he was. Life experience had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of all types of liquor and exactly how every sort of drink was prepared. Though he would never, ever admit it, Nate even knew an impressive amount about how ingredients would taste and react when they were mixed together—thank you, Tyler Envest—which earned Nate the absolutely laughably absurd monicker of mixologist around the bar; what a fucking joke. His hands when he worked moved with intuitive, easy confidence, and so beguiling that no one ever noticed when he moved his long fingers just so and a little touch of magic sparked out that made a drink just a little prettier, or just a little sweeter, or just that little extra something that ended up getting Nate more tips.

And Nate got a lot of tips; another perk of the job that he somewhat enjoyed, he had to admit. It’s not like Nate didn’t know he was very attractive—maybe that was pure Pinnock arrogance, or whatever, but Nate didn’t really have much left of that old life except his good looks, so fuck if he wasn’t going to own it. And it’s not like he looked the same as he did back then, either. His hair was a bit longer; dark and curly and pretty now that he didn’t fuss with it so much. And he seemed to have somewhat grown into his height, finally, with all his features shifting from lanky and boyish to slim and refined; not that Nate had even tried to make it that way, which was possibly even more annoying.

So it wasn’t as if he didn’t notice and even take some smug pleasure in the way that people would sit at the bar and watch him, automatically, like their eyes couldn’t be drawn to anything else; watch his hands move and his mouth move. Which was the thing that Nate really enjoyed about this job. In some parts of town, even now, even after all these months of letting the dust of scandal settle, he was still Nathaniel Pinnock, disgraced former billionaire and pretentious asshole that rubbed everyone the wrong way.

Whereas here, in a nothing bar in nowhere No-Maj London, Nate could be anybody. And often, he was. People would sit at the bar and they would ask Nate about himself, and Nate would do what he really did best, what had always come most naturally to him. He’d put that silver tongue to work, spinning stories out of nothing, fairy tales and adventures and thrillers and tragedies, whatever struck his fancy. Nate would talk and talk and talk and by the time he was done he’d have a captivated audience, on the edge of their barstool, eyes wide and enthralled and filled with desire and need, and that’s when Nate would be coy and casual and shrug off the attention like the person he was a year ago never would have, and that’s when stupid people spent a lot of money.

It wasn’t just about the money, though the money was good; Nate did like the attention—how could he not? And sometimes, even, on late nights when Nate, despite his best efforts, drifted down into that dark and lonely and horribly needy place that he had mostly trained himself to suppress, he would give in. Some nameless stranger that didn’t know Nate at all would brush up against him with intent, having stuck around until Nate got off, and Nate would give in. He would let himself be weak and fill that selfish cavernous hole inside himself for just a little while and he would feel; but never so much that he couldn’t just as easily forget, after.

Because the truth was there was someone who did know Nate, more truly and deeply than he could have ever expected anyone to want to know him, let alone actually achieve. More than Isaac, though not for as long. More even than Harriet, which was an anomaly in his life that Nate had only just begun to wrap his head around.

They’d been through hell and back to get here, but Nate wouldn’t trade anything for the cherished closeness he shared with Xiomara, here and now.

And Nate wasn’t saving himself for her, or anything fucking idiotic like that. It’s just that Nate had spent his whole life acting in a way he thought he should—sometimes for other people, mostly for himself—and with Xiomara he just didn’t have to think so much. He didn’t have to think at all, really. He could go out into the world and be whoever he had to be, and when he came back to Xi he could just be entirely, fundamentally himself, always.

It was a friendship more than it was anything else—perhaps the most real and uncomplicated actual friendship that Nate had ever had. Which didn’t mean that his traitorous thoughts didn’t try to complicate things for him, often. He’d thought about kissing Xi a hundred times; not in an actual expectations-of-reality way, but—had he thought about it? Of course he had, how could he not?

Xiomara didn’t look the same either. Not to him, anyway. Nate had spent so much fucking time with her, noticing so many frankly ridiculously attractive things about her—which, yeah, was maybe kinda weird from an objective point of view, and Nate would be mortified to find out that she noticed him doing it, but how could he help it, really? He noticed the elegant curve of her wrists when she held her wand or poured coffee from the french press or typed on her typewriter. He noticed how round her bottom lip was but how she would never deign to actually pout—Merlin forbid—and how the upside-down arch of her lip would pucker in at the edges of her mouth and twitch when she was trying very hard not to smile.

So yes, he’d thought about it, but there were just as many reasons why Nate wouldn’t kiss her; Nate had fucked up a lot of things in the past but he was determined not to fuck up this one, not when they’d worked so hard—together and in parallel—to pull themselves back up from absolute zero and slowly, painstakingly, build something real and solid with their lives that was cemented with trust in each other. There was absolutely a time when Nate would have blown up something pure and good that he had for something ludicrous like lust, but he’d changed enough that he wasn’t dumb enough to wreck the one solid thing he had. He wouldn’t.

And even despite the fact that him and Xi had developed a kind of casual intimacy that came along with being very comfortable and living together for a while. Like that night, when Nate had his feet propped up on the coffee table and Xiomara was laying in such a way that her legs draped over his lap. It didn’t mean anything, really; sometimes it was just nice to be close to someone without it meaning anything, and that was fine. Just like it was fine that there were many times that Xi did not want to be touched, still; these moods were impossible to predict but Nate could read her body language enough to know when they were happening and keep his distance without being a moody little baby about it. Though it still filled him with real hurt for Xi every time he would make an idle gesture, nowhere near her, and Xi would get that flash of panic in her eyes. It was something he couldn’t heal for her, and didn’t try to; all Nate could do was try his best to be comforting in the way that she needed at any given moment.

That night it was Xi’s turn to pick a movie, after Nate had ‘subjected her’ (her words) to Gangs of New York the previous movie-night. For some reason Xiomara had been on a bit of an old movie kick—which, yeah, kinda snore—but classics were classics for a reason and at least she was getting a solid education on the History of American Cinema.

Tonight she had picked Gone with the Wind—which again, ugh, but Nate had learned quickly enough that if they were going to avoid a fight (though truth be told, they never went all that long without some stupid bickering argument, anyway…) then it was best to keep his mouth shut and his many cinematic opinions to himself when it was Xiomara’s night to choose.

About halfway through the movie, when Scarlett was back in her deserted hometown of Tara and was truly starting to feel the hardships of her destitution, Xiomara, after going a long while watching quietly except for the crunch of popcorn, suddenly said, “Bit relatable, wouldn’t you say?”

Nate made an oh really kind of scoffing sound and replied, “You fancy yourself a Scarlett O’Hara, do you?”

To which Xi looked over at him without missing a beat and said, “No bitch, you’d be Scarlett.”

Nate laughed and only faked being affronted for a minute or so before he said, “Okay, yeah, that tracks.”

Xiomara smirked, and her eyes glittered in that mirthful, self-satisfied way that they did when she knew very well that she’d said something clever, thank you very much. Her eyes were a strikingly similar hazel color to Nate’s, he’d also noticed, except that hers had these radiant specks of gold in them that caught the light when Xi was amused, in a way that could knock the air out of a person—but only if she herself allowed you to see it. Nate looked away, back at the television screen, smiling and trying not to think about crazy stupid things like the color of Xiomara’s eyes.

And he did a pretty good job of it, too, except that every time the music in the movie had a big dramatic swell and Scarlett O’Hara would have some cheesy, screen-worthy romantic kiss, Nate noticed in his peripheral vision that Xiomara would rest her delicate fingers in that puckered indention at the corner of her lips. And her eyes would flicker for a half-second in Nate’s direction, in a way that suggested she absolutely did not know he noticed what she was doing—or perhaps, on the other hand, suggested that she knew more about his hidden looks than she let on.

It was a silly, thoughtless gesture that likely meant nothing.

But maybe—just maybe—she’d thought about kissing him, too.

And Nate didn’t let himself cling onto too much hope, anymore, for things he would probably never have and would be perfectly okay with not having.

But maybe? With Xiomara, maybe was enough.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Archival Slides from the Metropolitan Museum Find New Life as Artworks

Martina Mrongovius, “drawing room” (2017) in ‘Institutional Memory: 35mm Slides from the Met’s Collection Reimagined’ (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

A few years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art digitized its massive library of 35-millimeter slides, which capture thousands of objects in its collections as well as views of the museum’s galleries over the last few decades. But once preserved in pixel form, theoretically for eternity, the original pictures were just eating up precious storage space. They could have ended up in the trash, but instead they found new life at the Department of Cultural Affairs’s reuse center, Material for the Arts (MFTA), where five artists have transformed the little squares into contemporary artworks, from sculptures to a multimedia installation.

Michael Kelly Williams, “The Curatorial Staff” (2017)

These are now on view in the exhibition Institutional Memory: 35mm Slides from the Met’s Collection Reimagined, curated by Omar Olivera and Hallie Bahn, in MFTA’s on-site gallery. The small, dark space sits above MFTA’s 25,000-square-foot warehouse for once-discarded objects, which is an astounding repository of potential.

Members of affiliated organizations are invited to shop, free of charge, in its seemingly endless aisles, which contain everything from damaged musical instruments to toys. Thanks to MFTA’s dedication to sustainability, trash has often turned into treasure for use in projects for public schools, arts organizations, and beyond.

“No other organization in the city can accommodate such an amount of material,” Bahn told Hyperallergic. “We are the landing ground for materials that are no longer needed for their original purposes.”

Materials for the Arts’ warehouse in Long Island City

In the case of the Met’s slides, they arrived as a donation arranged by artist Marco Castro Cosio, the Met media lab’s former manager. MFTA then commissioned artists for the exhibition, inviting them to sift through the trove and have their pick to haul back to their studios. One of them, Jean Shin, took a different approach and created a workshop with Teens Take the Met. Collaborating with students, most of whom had never before seen a slide projection, she created a light box filled with strung-together slides, like a reliquary for their imagined narratives.

Through careful handiwork, artist Martina Mrongovius also formed new connections from these artifacts by creating nine collages of slides, each backlit by light boxes and set under microscopes. Some simply layer copies of the same image, but are shifted slightly, so galleries appear as unfocused spaces or artworks appear mirrored. Other slides are brought together to form wider views of the Met’s architecture, only they’re fragmented, hovering between reality and fiction. Mrongovius’s installation, which forces you to closely scrutinize the slides, like specimens, highlights their objectness. The tiny image requires a type of viewing we don’t often employ today, as a picture that’s static, unzoomable, and unswipeable.

Martina Mrongovius, “archways echo between philosophers and Pharaohs” (2017)

Embracing our ways of digital consumption is Andrea Wolf, who has created a slideshow of slides that plays on eight monitors, rather than on a manual carousel. Viewers control its speed by pressing a button, which pulls up a random slide from Wolf’s chosen 74. Each also features a quote she’s scribbled over a portion of the picture, drawn from texts of critical theory such as Hal Foster’s Bad New Days or Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Also inspired by her own memories of the Met, Wolf’s image bank suggests new narratives, contemplating how an institution interprets its archives and consequently produces knowledge through its methods of documentation and organization.

Other artists, like Dustin Yellin and Michael Kelly Williams, paid more attention to the vintage, metallic casings of the slides. Yellin’s “Attn Viewer: Please bury for 2000 years” recalls his Ant Farms series, filling a metal frame with over 500 slides, arranged as if held up at its base by an invisible mound. Placed to form many layers, the images of the slides are nearly impossible to make out; they form an incredibly dense mass of metal and celluloid, representing the obsolete contents of our era trapped in a hardy time capsule.

Nearby, in Williams’s sculpture, slides are shown as lightweight ornaments dangling from a wooden staff he carved and playfully titled “Curatorial Staff.” Resembling the powerful rod of some fictitious chief, the piece alludes, somewhat simplistically, to the power curators yield over the spaces recorded in these slides. Even if they serve mostly as decoration here, I found myself attempting to view their colored windows and make out scenes in the shadows. Useless as they may be in the 21st century, there’s something undeniably wondrous about these tiny records, many of which are annotated. Each, in the end, represents someone’s efforts to manually document the encyclopedic art museum. To display them is to honor those past, quiet labors.

Detail of Michael Kelly Williams’s “The Curatorial Staff” (2017)

Dustin Yellin, “Attn Viewer: Please bury for 2000 years” (2017)

Martina Mrongovius, “the crusade for a mirror” (2017)

Martina Mrongovius, “round and round the archways” (2017)

Materials for the Arts’s warehouse in Long Island City

From Andrea Wolf’s “an-archive” (2017)

From Andrea Wolf’s “an-archive” (2017)

Installation view of Andrea Wolf’s “an-archive” (2017)

Installation view of ‘Institutional Memory’ with works by Martina Mrongovius

Institutional Memory: 35mm Slides from the Met’s Collection Reimagined continues at the Material for the Arts (33-00 Northern Blvd, Long Island City, Queens) through June 2.

The post Archival Slides from the Metropolitan Museum Find New Life as Artworks appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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