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toomanysweaters-moved · 5 years ago

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June 3rd, 2019

Clip, clop, clip, clop... Noelle’s hoofed footfalls tapped up the sidewalk, followed by the sound of the little red wagon being dragged behind her; carrying the many, many spoils of her birthday celebration; video games, treats, flowers, a hand-woven doll, a whole cake... and a lot of wonderful new memories.

Even still, while her mood had skyrocketed ever since getting even just one gift... her smile started to fade as she approached the imposing black gates that oh so often barred entrance to her home, thanks to her mother’s... ‘forgetfulness’.

Green eyes stare up at the bars as she came to a stop in front of it, buckteeth softly digging into her bottom lip... wondering if she should just head back up to Kris’s house. Like she had yesterday, not even bothering to try to get inside before... but, no, that would be rude of her to do.

She could deal with getting locked out again. Just like any other day.

Fruitlessly as it might be, a hand reached out to give the gate a tug... her eyes going wide as it came open without an ounce of resistance; it was unlocked.

... she almost didn’t think to actually walk in for a moment, too surprised at the sudden change to what had become her routine. After a solid amount of silence, though, her brain starts working again and she quickly scampers herself & her presents inside... closing the gate behind her, for once.

And after the walk up to her actual front door, she found it unlocked, too. Part of her wondered if they’d been robbed, but as soon as the door was open she could see that wasn’t the case; the house was pristine as ever. Still no sight of her mother, though.

Not that she was... entirely opposed to that, sad as it is. Hence why she tried her best remain quiet as she brought her gifts inside; putting the cake in the fridge and setting up the new Nintend0 in the living room before grabbing an empty vase for her flowers and carrying the rest of her gifts up the stairs to her room. Thank Santa for carpeted steps...

Her gaze fell upon the closed door to her mother’s study as she rounded the top of the stairs, stopping to listen... sure enough, the usual sounds of her ‘going about her business’ could be heard; the distinct sounds of a wineglass clinking against her desk being the most prominent among them.

Eyes fell to the ground and, with a shake of her head, she skulked to her room, sliding it open and quickly slipping inside. Eager to put her gifts away.

A smile managed to grace her face once more as she set the flowers on her bedside table and the plushie made in her dark world likeness on her pillow, taking a moment to just sit there and enjoy the fond memories they brought.

Until the silence was broken by sudden “Good evening.” from behind her. The sound of which made her instantly spin around and straighten her posture.

“G-good evening to you too, mom!” She sputtered out, arms crossing behind her back instinctively as she faced her mother; stood in the doorway, wineglass in hand, and a red bathrobe wrapped snugly around her small frame.

“You didn’t come home yesterday. Are you trying to worry me into an early grave, young lady?” The white rabbit asked, seemingly in jest, as she waltzed in; looking her daughter up and down. “Where were you?”

“Oh, um... I’m sorry, mom! I didn’t mean for that...” Noelle said, quick to swallow any gripe she may have had at the thought she’d actually be ‘worried’ about her. “It’s just... K-Kris... they invited me over for my birthday!

I know, should’ve told you first, I’m-...” Her apology is swiftly interrupted by a audible ‘Oooh!’ from her mother as her wandering eyes caught sight of the doll sitting atop her pillow, red eyes going wide as she walked over to examine it.

“Little Kris didn’t make this for you, did they?” She said, absolutely enamored with the hand-stitched plush’s quality... and how adorable it’s outfit was!

“U... um, no, that was from someone else at... at school.” I mean, it wasn’t technically a lie, but it still sounded like one regardless. “Kris got me... well, got us a new Nintend0! It’s downstairs if you want to-!”

And once again, the poor girl gets interrupted- her oddly excited mother reaching over the bed gingerly snatching one of the flowers from the bouquet on her nightstand. “Now these are from Kris, I bet! I recognize his father’s flowers anywhere!” Her rabbit nose twitches as she gave the flower a sniff, an uncharacteristic smile on her face as she slid it back into the vase.

Noelle... was visibly confused at this point, and couldn’t do much more than nod as she sat down on the bed beside her, clasping her hands together in silence. This was, like... really weird. But, also kind of nice? Almost felt...

“... they asked you out, didn’t they?”

! ! ! ! !

“E... excuse me?” Her voice came out as a squeak, face flushing pink and her nose glowing bright at the sudden jump in the level of questioning. “On a date, sweetheart. Why else would they give pretty girl like you a bouquet?

Unless they inherited that habit from Asgore, which I doubt.”

Oh, they’re doing this. This is what they’re doing now. Sweet Santa Claus... “Well... n-no, they didn’t, they... they were just being nice...!” She’s stammering now, and her mother’s squinted gaze certainly isn’t helping.

“... hm. I suppose he did inherit it, then.” The white rabbit said, taking a sip of her whine... not sounding at all convinced of that fact, but she knew her daughter wasn’t lying so there was no point arguing with her. She’ll give it a month.

Finally. She’s finally given a moment to breath....

“Then who did ask you out, hm?”

“ WH... WHA... HOW DID YOU...?!”

An amused chortle from her mom broke the poor girl’s squealing, interrupting her for the third time in the span of a few minutes. “Well, I didn’t. Until now.”

... the fawn’s eye twitched. Once, then twice, then finally the poor deer collapsed onto her pillow in utter defeat, while her mother sat there sipping her wine smugly over her. All too proud of her successful interrogation.

“So, who was it~? A boy from your class? It better not be that Nerdly kid. I’ll kick his ass. You deserve better than that.”

... blink, blink. Her ears couldn’t help but perk up hearing such a familiar sentiment from a completely different source... had she been talking to dad lately? “... n... no, actually, it was... well...” Stars, this was gonna be weird to-

“So it was a girl, then? Interesting. Gotta be something really special if even the girls wanna ask you out, hon.” The... praise(?) was accompanied by a gentle little clap of her paws, apparently pleased with this realization... leaving her daughter utterly perplexed. “You... you don’t mind?”

And there’s that chirping laugh again.

“Mind? Sweetheart, if things had gone just a hair differently in college I’d have been the one married Toriel and Rudy’ be off growing flowers with Asgore.

How is she, by the way? Bet the dinner she served last night was delicious.”

... the only response she got was her daughter screaming into her pillow after the mental images she’d just put in the poor girl’s head. Not that she minded that, either; why else would she throw something like that at her?

She gives the fawn a moment to work it out, patting her shoulder as a comfort, even as the amused smile was still on her face. “So, really, who’s the lucky girl?”

... deep (pillow) breath. Noelle manages to pull herself up, snatching up the doll Ralsei had made her and hugging it tightly before, sheepishly, getting out an answer. “S... Susie. Her name is Susie...” And now she’s blushing again.

For once, the impish look on her mother’s face fades away; red eyes widening and her head tilting at the answer. “... Susie? Susie Touchdown?” Legitimate surprise oozed from her tone, making Noelle shrink... in fear that might be an actual problem. The fact her mom knew of her only made it worse.

So, she just nodded in silence.

... but, no lecturing to have a ‘better judge of character’ or anything of the type came. Instead...she just whistled. Like... in a cartoon.

“Really didn’t take you for the bad girl type, hon! Suppose that’s what runs in our family~!”

She just... winked. Was that in reference dad’s attraction to her or her attraction to Toriel? Who knows, certainly not Noelle, nor does she want to know. She’s... just confused and... sort of happy?

Having a pleasant talk with her mother was... something she missed. All she could do was just... laugh. She’s giggling, to be specific. And Carrolle is giggling with her.

“Oh hon, I’ve got the perfect outfit! She’ll love it; trust me!” The rabbit practically hops up from her seat, bouncing all the way to her room; gong off about how you ‘don’t wear dresses on the first date’ and how she ‘knows Susie’s type’... It was fun. Noelle was about to follow... when she noticed something.

A tiny, gift-wrapped present; right where her mother was sitting. Ears twitch, looking between the present and the door... before grabbing it.

Doesn’t take her Gyftmas-trained hands long at all to get through wrapping paper, or the little box within it... green eyes widening at sight inside.

It was... a key.

A spare key.

#Merry Everyday! // IC //#drabble #actlead #freshsave #deltagram #okay so this was something i'd intended to write on Noelle's actual b-day #but obviously life said no to that so flashback time #sort of a ''composite timeline'' of the day's events #since i wanted to mention everyone that got her a present #so complete canon-ness for ship verses will obviously vary #just know some variation of it happened regardless #needed something to write to get my creativity pumping so

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years ago

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HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-08-06

♪ HS2 HS2 is baaaaack ♪

♪ HS2bloggin here we gooooo ♪

♪ Structural changes on their team but I don’t caaaaare ♪

♪ Already resooolved myself that its NOOOT gonna beee as good ♪ with inattentiveness to details characters like Terezi forgetting-what-they-used-to-know and an obsession with dwelling on traaageeeDEEE without relief-or-considering how weee’d feeeeeeel~ ♪♪♪ --so just gonna enjoy-what-i-caaaaaan about iiit~ ♪♪♪

Okay time for bankruptcy

> CHAPTER 11. History's Most Notorious Haters

Let’s see how effectively my perky new lowered-expectations attitude lets me enjoy this comic *click*

wut

Oh. so is this Dave drawing comics about current events or Regular Calliope doing so for our very first lanky look at her presumably-grown-up-more cherub form

> Knight: Keep it real.

HOLY SHIT IT’S DAVEBOT AND ARADIA

so we just get to SEE them?! just like that??? no buildup or anything? :D

Okay I’m marking out a little that’s a good sign. Also what a nerdy cop-out to turn the roboteyes into glasses that’s barely passable which is perfect, the rest of his outfit looks pretty cool tho

DAVEBOT: and thats reason four hundred nineteen why despite my mans many accomplishments i will never acknowledge big skateboardings contrived message that tony hawk is the quintessential skater of our generation ARADIA: o_o DAVEBOT: not in these trying times

Good to see Ultimate Dave is being true to form with regards to the core of his personality

DAVEBOT: beep boop ARADIA: i have told you several times that i was a robot before and i know for a fact you dont have to say beep boop DAVEBOT: hm that sounds fake does not compute ARADIA: david DAVEBOT: mom

I was with this conversation until the last two lines what the fuck

(I’m reading into it aren’t I, Aradia was trying to be atypically proper -- even though she wouldn’t have the frame of reference to know without being specifically told that “Dave” was considered nickname shorthand for the human name David, and thus if she DID know there’s no reason she’d use it except to troll him -- and Dave’s just mocking her response. Without any shame about his continued weirdness of calling people Mom, and by without any shame I mean he made the choice EXPLICITLY to intentionally evoke the awkwardness. Wow I got a lot out of two lines.)

(Oh, also alt!Callie’s true Jade-body incarnation here probably prompted her to start using “David” by example. There, various mysteries solved via a pile of assumptions probably to be disproven in the next couple lines I read.)

The Knight and the Maid stare at each other briefly, having exchanged enough meaningful glances over their time together to know when to drop it.

Would Time players have an easier time gelling this way, like this particular smoothness? Dropping it just before it gets weird or excessively irritating?

(Overclasspecting)

ARADIA: i think we have exchanged enough meaningful glances over our time together to know when to drop this DAVEBOT: what i enjoy about our conversations is that you just say things like that

OKAY I SNRK’D AT THAT. That was funny.

Initially. And now I’m concerned whether Aradia is being controlled by the narrative-speak, or whether they’re both just humorously referencing the meta-text they can both see, or--

ARADIA: oh is that what you enjoy ARADIA: well we are both an infinite number of years old living countless lifetimes at once but thats no reason to waste any of our...

WHAT??!? She’s an Ultimate Self too?!?

Um, okay! Yeah! So they’re BOTH just riffing on the narrative then. But... why would Dave need a robot body to accommodate his Ultimate Psyche without getting sick but Rose not need it? I can understand Dirk not needing it because the merging of the full breadth of his multiversal individuality gels well with him being a God of the aspect governing the power of his multiversal individuality, but Aradia?

Were the robot bodies not necessary after all, and the sickness Rose suffered and Obama thought Dave would have suffered some sort of ruse? Are there shenanigans afoot? (Or are we going with the “troll biology is better” cop-out?)

She knows how this will play out, having undoubtedly tried this joke on her friend in some timeline or another. Their rapport reflects a unique combination of their matching aspects but greatly differing classes. One a passive but powerful servant to time, the other wielding the aspect like a honed blade.

WHAT????

PASSIVE SERVANT OF THE ASPECT?!? WHAT THE FUCK

Okay if that means anything like it sounds like I guess my class chart is finally blown up, sure, they only waited (*checks last edit date*) SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS TO BLOW THAT GUESS UP, SURE

Wow. Okay, I feel some obligation to jump to conclusions and say the whole class chart is wrong, but let me stay strapped in to see if “passive” is as literal as one would expect alt!Callie to mean, or it just means “an active class passive compared to other classes”. And, serving the aspect? Oh dammit, now people are gonna come at me advocating a Maid / Page dichotomy about actively serving the aspect versus allowing the aspect to be served... or Page / Maid even, jesus

I wish I had enough energy to have those chats anymore. I’d rather hold on and see the whole ridiculous chart scheme they have in mind... which is definitely (and hopefully) the one Andrew really drew up at the time and not made up by the staff, even if it throws away plenty of my old work... I’ll just stop thinking about it and keep reading.

...

--no, I don’t think I can just stop thinking about it yet. Dammit, brain.

So um. Maids serving their aspect. There was a whole “Maids serve” thing going on throughout the whole plot of Homestuck, but despite how prevalent it was, I wrote it off as the story riffing on the classical definition of Maid when the actual stuff Maids accomplished was something different and more specific, just like Knights constantly got riffed on for chivalry and the like. Furthermore, service seemed like a really shitty class definition, when class definitions are the verbs one uses to interact with reality through Aspects to change the way reality unfolds, and “serving” isn’t really an action that results in change, implying a distinct deficit of agency that I wouldn’t have viewed as fair. (Especially since you originally think “meant to serve others” and not “meant to serve the aspect”, implying even LESS agency.) Furthermore, MOST passive classes from their descriptions seem to have a propensity to act “as if by the will of the aspect”, so even with the nuance of “serving the aspect”, devoting an entire class verb to service would just step on the territory of other active/passive class pairs’ passive sides, right?

But... IF we were to take this for granted as what it SEEMS... then concentrating on that angle of “serving the aspect” implies a whole lot more agency than a service class might sound on its surface. The definition fits with the story better once you contextualize all the Maid-y references to service around Jane, for instance, with the additional idea of “serving Life” by baking prolifically and creating more of its symbols in food and--

--fuck. “Serving”, like serving to others. Serving the aspect as its attendant AND serving it out to others that need it. Maybe this still IS part of the Additive class pair! Whoa. :O

Okay okay so, what I/we thought before was:

Create/Add - Maid / Sylph

Destroy/Reduce - Prince / Bard

But “additive” really isn’t an elegant verb compared to the “Destroyer” classes, so... could it be the “Servants” and the “Destroyers”? Like Maids cleaning up and healing the broken wreckage strewn through the halls by a bratty Prince’s tantrum???

It’d certainly be weird... and it’d CERTAINLY be a wild twist where I was partially wrong in some fascinating ways but not entirely off base?

One a passive but powerful servant to time, the other wielding the aspect like a honed blade.

And yet, I can’t bet on this being the situation yet; not at all. First, it relies on the idea that alt!Callie’s explicit narrative here is slightly misleading, which would be a pretty extreme thing to commit to, even for a technical truth like “she was saying it was passive relative to other classes even though it’s technically “active””. Second... it would mean that Muses are even more wildly defined than the previous insinuation of hers, that the Sylph -- what we thought was the passive additive class -- was not enough like a Muse compared to a Witch. Muses not being that Additive? I could grudgingly understand that, but Muses not being anything like passive Servants?! That would be EXTREMELY weird!

So... there’s not a whole lot of chance that I’m not dramatically wrong somewhere about these classes! In a way that throws the entire chart into disarray!

I’m... oddly excited? Huh.

That’s a pretty nice surprise that I actually feel that way.

(Don’t hit me up all at once to discuss this Classpect development over Discord, I’ll still need a few days without talking about Homestuck to recharge as usual. Like... maybe wait and come at me as a group chat? So I’m not talking about the latest developments separately with everyone? No that wouldn’t work, how about... guh I dunno, look my outlook’s a little more positive right now but dealing with Homestuck still takes emotional energy okay?)

Okay the rest of this page...

ARADIA: ... DAVEBOT: time then make a weird face ARADIA: ........ DAVEBOT: waste time DAVEBOT: time ARADIA:............. DAVEBOT: i experience all points of time simultaneously please just say time and make a weird face

This is true.

ARADIA: .................. DAVEBOT: cmon megido youre killing me clocks ticking ARADIA: ... ARADIA: time o_o

The Maid casts a furtive glance around the empty crew quarters, as though to search for someone more sympathetic to her bit.

ARADIA: tough crowd

Dorks.

> ==>

(Lazy fruit-throwing sword-training I won’t bother to screenshot but looks fun)

(I mean, really lazy looking, these people really don’t have Andrew’s knack for action composition that would make the same amount of gif-creation effort feel like a microcosm of the event they’re depicting, unfortunately. Again, I don’t blame them; Andrew was just too good at it.)

DAVEBOT: ok heres one DAVEBOT: how old do you think you are ARADIA: emotionally? ARADIA: that is a pretty heavy topic DAVEBOT: you know damn well thats not what i meant ARADIA: you know I have been through a lot dave DAVEBOT: ok ARADIA: its just so kind of someone DAVEBOT: ok i get it ARADIA: to finally ask how i feel ARADIA: i am beside myself with emotions ARADIA: i want to open up DAVEBOT: jesus christ ARADIA: shall i open up about my past traumas to you ARADIA: would you enjoy that ARADIA: to think even a frog like me can work through their pain with a dear friend ARADIA: you have truly blessed me on this day dave strider

Is Aradia JUST trolling here or is her Ultimate Self grappling with a ton of real unresolved trauma too that she’s bullshitting around Dave-style?

DAVEBOT: times fun when youre having flies

Okay that’s a damned good frog pun.

Alright now Davebot’s rapping

DAVEBOT: lacking tact i stay stacked while i breach contract DAVEBOT: sacred vows disavowed got divorce fever DAVEBOT: i leave her DAVEBOT: dont look back dont perceive her ARADIA: do you want to talk about it :( DAVEBOT: about what ARADIA: would you say you are hung up on leaving your wife and friends behind

Goddamnit is DAVE’S ton of real unresolved trauma leaking into his raps unintentionally Dave-style?? I knew we had to address it when we cut to Davebot but how about LESS TRAGEDY IN THIS COMIC MAYBE

DAVEBOT: arent you even a little guilty about ditching your boyfriend ARADIA: what ARADIA: oh fuck

But she knew what she was doing when she did it she explicitly did it didn’t she? Epilogues quote:

DAVEBOT: what about your boy DAVEBOT: eyepatches ARADIA: oh sollux is in one of his moods ARADIA: this was all getting to be a bit much for him ARADIA: if i go ill probably just cut him loose DAVEBOT: good move

And then they stepped through the sky hole more or less. Did like, distracted Ultimate Aradia not realize exactly how long she was leaving Sollux for, ie forever? Or did she “ascend” to Ultimate status later and hadn’t thought back to the full consequences of her actions within this timeline? Or both? From the looks of the link we’ll probably find out on the next pa--

--Wait. Something else I just thought of, unrelated.

If Aradia is an Ultimate Self, that’s another coincidentally Ultimate version of someone hanging around that happens to be on the prospective list of Soul-Powered Jujus that might have their creation loops closed in the coming story. Could those two things play into each other somehow? Like instead of their souls getting stuffed into the items, their “Ultimateness” is? Or as if that’s a necessary component, or... no, I’m probably overthinking things.

> (Months in the past, but not many...)

Uh huh. Is that flashing because he’s “watching” Aradia leave? But I thought Aradia SAID she was leaving--

> (==>)

--and that black hole portal doesn’t look as cool as it sounded in the Epilogues. But why was Aradia acting surprised, she said “I’ll probably just cut him loose” mere MOMENTS before entering the portal, did she mean “cut him loose” as in “I’m going to talk to him before leaving” and then just IMMEDIATELY forget that she didn’t say anything to him because she cared so little???

Wait. Waaaait wait wait. I think. I think maybe I missed some subtext. Lemme do some fuller quotes here:

ARADIA: oh sollux is in one of his moods ARADIA: this was all getting to be a bit much for him ARADIA: if i go ill probably just cut him loose DAVEBOT: good move

His gaze remains fixed on her. She blinks and looks away, unsure what to say next. He’s standing perfectly still, presumably waiting for her to say something. She met him... what was it? Once, twice before? She can’t remember. But she knows this is a very different Dave. Aside from the metal skin, he seems implacably confident. But then, people go through changes. She’s been through more than her share. She cocks an eyebrow, recalling her own stint with a metal body.

DAVEBOT: hey earth to whats your face ARADIA: oh ARADIA: its aradia

[...]

DAVEBOT: youre coming DAVEBOT: better decide quick i doubt that dank fuckin hell funnel is staying open for much longer ARADIA: yes i suppose so ARADIA: thats where all the action is right? DAVEBOT: all the action that matters yeah ARADIA: off we go then :) DAVEBOT: word

He holds out his hand. She looks around, and assumes he means for her to take it, so she does. She didn’t know someone could fly this fast. He nearly yanks her arm out of its socket. She considers reminding him that maybe this isn’t necessary, since she can fly too. But she doesn’t want to risk saying more embarrassing stuff around this outrageously cool dude. Besides, they’re through the wormhole before she can even finish the thought. It vanishes the moment they’ve crossed.

...this was a SHIPPING thing wasn’t it. She’s impressed as hell with Striderbot, she SAID she’d cut things off with Sollux, and then she was so busy being swooped off her feet and into the portal that she forgot to actually say anything to him. Is that what happened????

Ultimate Self Davebot x Ultimate Self Aradia. Huh. Didn’t see that coming. (Though, again... they could make it SLIGHTLY clearer that this wasn’t just a blatant continuity error.)

Anyway, a rare-don’t-get-used-to-it [S] page...

> [S] (Gaze.)

...Okay that was kinda funny.

> (==>)

SOLLUX: h0w the fuck am i g0ing t0 get d0wn fr0m here.

HAH! Okay, he’s taking it pretty well. :) --and THAT’s what she realized she forgot, giving him a flight down from the tower before leaving.

GOOD. KEEP THINGS HUMOROUS EVEN WHEN LITERAL ABANDONMENT IS HAPPENING. THAT’S the Homestuck I was missing. :) :) :)

> Back to reality.

(Since the black hole is outside “canon” reality.)

Those are some cool poses-AHAH JESUS CHRIST ALT!JADE YOU LOOK ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING XD

COULD YOU MAYBE HAVE CLEANED UP THE DRIED BLOOD AT SOME POINT OR IS SOME OF THAT FRESH FROM EATING MORE RAW MEAT

(Lord English’s blood leaving permanent timeless bloodstains would be a cool new thing to squeeze into canon i admit, i wouldn’t blame them for taking the excuse even if you could find small canon counterexamples I’m not sure of but dimly think might exist)

((ALSO SHE’S GONNA BE TINY NEXT TO THEM I DUNNO IF THAT MAKES IT MORE TERRIFYING OR LESS, PROBABLY MORE))

DAVEBOT: so youre telling me you dont even feel a little bad that you ditched him to be a weird death acolyte ARADIA: no i think he found my wiles both charming and irresistible DAVEBOT: not even an ounce of guilt or self doubt huh DAVEBOT: just like that DAVEBOT: no conversations about the greater good DAVEBOT: no revelations about your feelings

Is Aradia a jerk or weird? Can’t decide.

ARADIA: do you often find your faith in yourself shaken like this or is it a new experience now that your mortal coil has been left behind DAVEBOT: what ARADIA: do you think now that all that is left of you is a literal ghost inside of a machine you are more or less likely to embrace finality DAVEBOT: oh dope more cult of one shit DAVEBOT: immortality changed you ARADIA: could it be that you are projecting your feelings onto my situation DAVEBOT: does not compute rose jr ARADIA: ... ARADIA: we dont have to talk about it DAVEBOT: thanks

Wow, I actually can’t follow this conversation at all. Let me stare at it for a sec...

...okay, the first part she’s talking about DAVE’s faith in HIMself being shaken, not her own. She’s not asking if he relates to HER experience, she’s contrasting it.

Then, asking if he’d be more likely to embrace death, or... Time? Death. Whether his self-worth has changed because he might view himself as “less real”, something Aradia doubtless struggled with when she was a robot who already had so many excuses to devalue herself at the time? And then Dave talks about “cult of one” shit what does that even mean-...

OH. Like she’s a death cult. Gooot it. Because Aradia’s of the position that death and ending should be celebrated, and Davebot understandably isn’t entirely bought in. This is as hard to parse down as one would EXPECT conversations between two Ultimate Selves to be hard to parse down, unlike Rose and Dirk where their insane missions and glaring flaws shine bright enough through it all that you can follow their conversation flow easily.

JADE: They sit in each other's presence, the silence between them as meaningful as any words they could exchange. DAVEBOT: its always really cool to hear how meaningful my silences are DAVEBOT: especially while DAVEBOT: CALCULATING DAVEBOT: CALCULATING DAVEBOT: especially while i am attempting to experience them

Alt!Callie pulling a narrative-text AFTER a talk-identifier like “JADE:” is really hilarious in my opinion.

JADE: i do not need your approval. the story will continue how it must. DAVEBOT: beep boop hater detected ARADIA: wow is that true JADE: i am not a hater. DAVEBOT: classic hater line DAVEBOT: i know this because i am pouring through genuine actual quadrabytes of information on historys most notorious haters JADE: no, you aren’t.

Pffffff. This is pretty fun.

DAVEBOT: you are the exact opposite of a hater ARADIA: a liker DAVEBOT: ok DAVEBOT: perfect example your tolerance for whatever is going on with DAVEBOT: all this ARADIA: i think she looks quite lovely covered in the viscera of the all-powerful enemy she consumed ARADIA: floating lifelessly in our periphery ARADIA: observing our every action and noting its relevance :) DAVEBOT: uh huh thats what i mean

I was gonna note “liker” as additive for pointless classpect purposes, but really more quoting it just because I really enjoy this conversation. I’m starting to get sold on the chemistry of these two a lot faster than I expected.

JADE: even though I understand that it must happen, i am growing frustrated with the direction of this conversation. DAVEBOT: do you want to talk about something else stinky JADE: what would you suggest?

How long has that dried fucking blood been on her

DAVEBOT: ok hear me out DAVEBOT: kanaya DAVEBOT: but like DAVEBOT: wearing huge jorts

That explains Homestuck’s twitter earlier

> Weeks in the future, relative to the original point of interest...

Wait wait which point of interest? This time we were just viewing? *click*

I love what must be this shitty imagination-ship they’re using to cross the substrate of reality

> ==>

Whoaaaa. So they DIDN’T stay in those outfits for long? It showed them in a bunk bed earlier, it showed CallieJade still going around blood-covered afterward-- dammit, I’m having a hard time gauging exactly how much time is supposed to have passed between their entry into the black portal, their earlier conversation, and this moment. And as likely as some are to call this poor scene composition, I can’t think it’s anything but intentional, given we’re dealing with a couple of Ultimate Time players bullshitting with each other.

Moments like these are not rare, and serve a valuable function to the story. They are able to show a passage of time with the bulk of the emotional labor of a lengthy bonding process happening off screen. How did we get here? What have they been through? These questions are often better left open to individual interpretation and can give the one interpreting a sense of ownership of the story.

See? We’re being trolled is why. (Even if the authors are pulling the trick Alt!Callie describes maybe a little too damn often, because a cut like this where we’re supposed to fill in the emotional gaps and intervening events ourselves as readers depends on readers’ faith that sensible events and decisions for these characters would OCCUPY the gaps, as if readers don’t have faith that what intervenes WOULD make sense to their understanding of the characters the way the authors are writing them... it just seems like an excuse to do whatever you want without adequately explaining yourself, when in reality if you’d spelled out the events that led to it we’d all cry foul at the mischaracterization.)

...okay, maybe I’m a BIT bitter. Sorry. Where were we?

JADE: As a point of curiosity- ARADIA: oh shit!!!!

The dead Cherub possessing the body of an equally deceased Goddess of Space pauses at the interruption.

She doesn’t talk much, then? Too busy doing whatever talking you’d do as your other possessed Jade body? Just how temporally related is you controlling THIS Jade compared to when you were controlling the other? When that Jade pegged you as enjoying contact with friends, are these two just not enough for you, or did you “experience” the trips entirely separately? I don’t THINK the alt!Callie possessing either Jade is a separate entity from the other, but...

Were she to voice her opinion, it would be that --actually-- it is not unusual for those whose primary concern is The Grander Scheme to have a passing curiosity about the insignificant. So when one really thinks about it, any annoyance with the attendant’s small mindedness is both understandable and warranted.

She pissed

...also, “the attendant”. Even if “serve” is really the verb here, that phrasing really irks me as if she’s talking down to her. Which, I mean, makes sense for alt!Callie’s character, but doesn’t make me feel better about this new definition being foisted on us.

ARADIA: :( JADE: as a point of order, you never answered dave’s question. ARADIA: which one he is very chatty JADE: you experience time in a way that is woefully unfamiliar to me and it has... piqued my curiosity enough to learn more. ARADIA: ?_? DAVEBOT: shes asking how old you are

Wait a minute, is Alt!Callie asking a question about a dropped topic from WEEKS ago?! And is Davebot so in touch with Time and the meta ordering of topics that he actually CAUGHT ON that fast to what she was actually wondering about?????

This is getting more disorienting by the minute.

ARADIA: in this form our bodies stop aging once we reach maturity i think ARADIA: the god tier keeps our physical form locked in a state of undying ARADIA: even in death the bodies do not decay ARADIA: only lay dormant

THAT LAST PART IS FUCKING IMPORTANT. It’s being brought up intentionally to tell us that JOHN’S DEAD BODY can still be in the wallet Terezi’s carrying around RIGHT NOW without having decayed over the past years. I remember remarking in SOME previous HS^2 liveblog post of mine that I was alarmed by the decay that would have happened there (can’t find my remark on short notice and don’t really care to), so this explicitly dismisses it so we won’t be surprised by the fact that she could keep it in just-dead condition.

DAVEBOT: like how long have you been alive JADE: yes, that one.

[...]

ARADIA: oh maybe a few hundred years or so DAVEBOT: what JADE: what? ARADIA: well if i had known you were going to be so judgy about it DAVEBOT: when did this happen ARADIA: oh i spent some time in other doomed realities and timelines and came back before anybody could tell i was gone

Hm!

We knew she spent a LONG time in the dream bubbles, enough to talk to “pretty much all of the Nepetas”, but she was actually able to access a universe or universes and hop between them? That’s not something any time traveller we’ve seen has been explicitly able to do intentionally before, quite like she’s describing.

DAVEBOT: oh just out for a bit of fun then DAVEBOT: just hopped on over to a different reality DAVEBOT: real casual like DAVEBOT: oh hello dont mind me just popping in to see if it really is as doomed as they say it is DAVEBOT: did not disappoint ARADIA: yes almost exactly like that :) DAVEBOT: who did you hang out with are they cooler than me ARADIA: it is complicated to explain DAVEBOT: oh ok nevermind then DAVEBOT: all clear

Yep, he’s kinda bewildered. Is this Pesterquest stuff she’s referring to? Did she stop by Pesterquest?

DAVEBOT: a whole alternate universe ripe with the coolest motherfuckers imaginable ARADIA: you were there too i threw your air conditioner into the sun DAVEBOT: wow thats fucked up DAVEBOT: thats not where that goes at all JADE: these events are not-canonical. ARADIA: rude

Ah! Yeah, almost certainly Pesterquest. (Still haven’t played that and have little inclination to now that I’m more sure we aren’t being gaslit with intentional continuity errors, just disappointed by actual continuity errors.) Oh! And that makes a bit more sense because I imagine that’s Black Hole territory, and that territory outside of Canon seems pretty rich and easy for time-travellers to hop between stories and timelines willy-nilly. As they’re apt to in fanfics, which is the most appropriate way for things to be in that realm!

DAVEBOT: is that the trope of being hundreds of years old but looking young forever patently sucks ass DAVEBOT: a plot device an asshole would write ARADIA: :( JADE: that is not what i am trying to say at all. DAVEBOT: hmm wow yeah thatd really be a sort of pot/kettle situation i guess DAVEBOT: i cant believe im the only woke one here DAVEBOT: its hard being such a visionary AND such a fine metallic specimen DAVEBOT: but im an altruist first and fucking foremost ARADIA: so selfless JADE: yes, the greater narrative is truly blessed by your beneficent presence. DAVEBOT: oh so you got jokes now huh JADE: i have always had the ‘jokes’ of which you speak, but i have heretofore exercised restraint in laying you low. JADE: i possess knowledge of many of your iterations, as the scope of my powers allows me to exist in several narrative structures at once. DAVEBOT: but can she see why kids love the sweet cinnamon taste of cinnamon toast crunch JADE: i do not know, or care, what that means. ARADIA: neither do i :)

I’m actually really enjoying this conversation

JADE: its cultural significance to you as an earthling is wasted on the two of us entirely, as we have not conflated the misguided notion of clinging to nostalgic cereal advertisement trivia with socially relevant conversation.

Pff she literally checked her meta notes just now to learn what the cereal ads were after admitting she didn’t know what it meant and pretending not to care

> ==>

Oh, closer look at Davebot. Are those actual SHAPED shades over his robotic eye bulges? Weird, I thought it was just a lazy line drawn between them with red sharpie at first, Sans style. That would’ve been funny.

> ==>

Ohh, I get it. I was gonna say that was an unwarranted reaction... but he just realized that the Time-wait puns will be coming from BOTH his shipmates from now on. That’s gotta be a downer. :)

> ==>

HOLY

FUCKING

SHIT

IS ALT-CALLIE LAUGHING!??!?!?!??

That’s REALLY, REALLY GOOD!!! SHE’S ALREADY LAUGHING OCCASIONALLY THAT MAKES ME SO HAPPY

“BEST NARRATOR” COFFEE CUP

SHE’S ADORABLE

> ==>

Ah, was that Jade kicking you out? Or just the multiverse punishing you for being briefly happy :(

--oh, end of the update. Guess that’s it for now!

...

Alright I know I’m A BIT BEHIND on covering the HS2 commentary,

But

I really would rather wait on that a bit longer if that’s alright. Real busy and stressful week or two. (Found out my hair is starting to thin noticeably at age 31! Quite suddenly, too. Blood test looks fine so it’s nothing serious... gonna see a doctor to check if anything can be safely done about that, it’s really hurting my self-esteem more than I thought it would. Didn’t think it would hit my emotions that hard when it eventually happened, knew it was likely but not so SOON... really messing with my anxiety every time I accidentally touch my hair, now. I’ll deal with it.)

If I sound really aimless in this post, I think it’s cause I am? My mental and emotional energy’s REALLY drained. I’m glad that June/July break in HS^2 happened when it did, and I’m definitely glad there’s apparently plenty in HS^2 I can really enjoy, if this update is anything to go by. Maybe this comic can help lift me up instead of knocking me down. :)

See y’all later! More Patreon commentary blogging catchup after some other upd8.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #Homestuck Theories #Homestuck Theory #spoiler #spoilers #Classes and Aspects #Space and Time #Aradia

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liskantope · 4 years ago

Text

Some briefer(?) reactions to major Disney films 1989-1998

I consider the Disney Renaissance (around the period I refer to in the above title) to have been the last official leg of my chronological journey through major Disney features through Disney+ (for this one I need to mention that I’m excluding CGI animated ones on this journey, except when I feel like watching them on the side). I logged some thoughts on the films I watched in the two earlier legs of the journey here and here, where honestly I intended my notes to be short and not turn into full-blown mini-essays for each movie. Those posts turned out to be major timesucks and I can’t afford that now, but I thought I’d jot down a hodgepodge of reactions and just be briefer and sloppier about it. I feel like I have overall less to say about this set of films anyway, since they’re pretty much all very high-quality and are talked about extensively in the cultural discourse much more than films from Disney’s earlier eras.

As I was still trying to stick to taking one day for each year in the Disney Studios timeline and major film production by Disney picked up pace a lot at the start of this era, I wound up doing a rather intense marathon of one full Disney movie each evening: over ten evenings (corresponding to the years 1989 through 1998), I watched the ten movies The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan. I would have watched Tarzan the following evening, but I had very recently sort of re-seen it when it came on Netflix -- I didn’t see it for the first time until an outdoor event near the end of grad school not that many years ago; I didn’t bother paying full attention on seeing it the second time a couple of months ago and couldn’t much get into it on the second viewing.

The thing about the ten major animated Disney movies on this list is that, while I can’t say I love all of them, the uptick in quality is dramatic right from the start and never wavers. Every single one of these films just seems objectively better than Pete’s Dragon, The Fox and the Hound, or Oliver and Company. This will help me be a little shorter-written when talking about them, as it’s easier to expand on specific criticisms than to wax on about how great something is.

[EDIT: Okay, these still turned out pretty long and more on the polished side. Guess I’m just not that capable of being brief and sloppy.]

The Little Mermaid, 1989

Although we didn’t have the video at my house growing up, I somehow knew The Little Mermaid quite well; I guess I watched it quite a few times. I went a gap of many years before seeing it again in college (I’m fairly certain that my college girlfriend and I watched it together, in fact). My reaction at the time was that although it was well enough done with good music, the story was terrible. This was right around the time I watched a performance of Once on This Island, a musical based on Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” on which, of course, the Disney movie was based. I thought the tragic tale told in Once on This Island was beautiful and scorned The Little Mermaid for cheapening it. In fact, my opinion was quite scathing in the way that my opinions more often were when I was younger. So I was a little wary on watching it again.

I’ve mellowed out since my college days and don’t hate the story quite as much now -- in particular, I can’t really blame Disney for Disnifying a mature tragedy into a more lighthearted tale with a happy ending -- but I still think it’s kind of bad. We’re back to Disney princesses (I think for the first time since my first round of Disney films?), this time with a Disney princess who had goals that didn’t involve meeting her prince, until she actually meets him and every other interest, including staying in the world she grew up with where to which all the people who ever loved her or knew her are confined, giving up her voice, and drastically changing her physical form. And this is all for a prince character of flatly generic personality who is superficial and dim-witted enough that he only knows his true love by her voice. (I don’t understand why this isn’t the Disney Renaissance-era film that routinely gets criticized for being anti-feminist rather than... a certain other one also on this list.) Also, while King Triton isn’t by any means a flat character, his sudden turnaround at the end and almost lightheartedness at saying goodbye to his daughter presumably forever doesn’t quite feel right.

I was very surprised at how much I’d completely forgotten among plot events and certain scenes in the movie. For instance, as the action neared the climax, I really had no memory of how Ursula would be defeated and watching it didn’t jog my memory.

This is the first of several films on this list where I noticed a sample of what I’m starting to think of a set of 90′s sitcom/romcom tropes, in this case the situation of the romantic leads courting very publicly with all the other characters watching and cheering it on and working behind the scenes to help it happen. This shows up again in Beauty and the Beast and (to a slight degree) Aladdin below.

Great music of course, even slightly better than what I remembered. Fun fact: you know that “Part of Your World” song, almost certainly the most widely popular in the film, the one that musical theater kids at my (and maybe your) middle school always used for auditions? Apparently it was almost cut from the film, mainly because it was shown to a test audience of little kids who all fidgeted and got visibly distracted.

The Rescuers Down Under, 1990

I don’t have too much to say about this one, the first Disney sequel ever. I had only ever seen the first Rescuers before and, as my previous set of reviews indicates, didn’t particularly like it, but came in to this one a little more optimistic since some consider it better than its predecessor. They aren’t wrong -- this movie was similar to The Rescuers but better, I think. Although the villain was just as forgettable, the setting was far more enticing (at least to someone like me who has never been to Australia and thinks of it as exotic), and the dynamic between the main mouse characters was more engaging. Here we have another subplot that somehow reminds me of a 90′s-ish sitcom/romcom, with the aborted marriage proposals and a love triangle -- not that love triangles hadn’t featured in movies for decades, but something about how this one was done felt distinctly more modern.

Beauty and the Beast, 1991

Ah, this is not only one of the Disney movies I saw the most as a kid but one which has only grown on me as I’ve gotten older -- I consider it one of the most groundbreakingly beautiful of the animated classics ever made, one of my very favorite Disney productions of all time. We got the video when I was only five or so; I remember distinctly that it came out on home video (right after coming out in theaters) right around the same time that 101 Dalmatians came out on home video and that my mom explained to me that she was choosing to buy Beauty and the Beast instead because of its superior music. She was right about this -- not that 101 Dalmatians has bad music, but it’s hard to measure up to Alan Mencken’s masterful compositions for Beauty and the Beast. For me it solidly ranks in the top three Disney movie soundtracks ever, one of the others being that of Mary Poppins and the third being from an easily-predictable film later on this list.

I’m pretty sure I remember watching portions of this movie every morning for weeks before leaving for kindergarten (this is what makes me think we got it when I was five), and I continued to enjoy it throughout childhood. I next watched it when I was much older, but I can’t remember exactly when. During college I got hold of the soundtrack of the musical, which since has been one of my favorite musical soundtracks to listen to. I never actually got to see the musical until last December when it was showing in my hometown, and I thought it was excellent. Interestingly, there were a number of scenes that I assumed had been added for the musical but I had actually forgotten were in the movie -- unlike with certain Disney musical films *ahemMaryPoppinsahem*, they didn’t take many liberties with the musical except to add a number of new (very good) songs.

Leaving aside the top-notch music and exquisite animation, the story in my opinion is one of the most beautiful and distinctively memorable stories Disney has ever told, not to mention entertaining without every being silly or over-the-top. It speaks of compassion, drawing out core goodness from an ugly exterior, and the fact that, to quote the enchantress from the start of the tale, “beauty comes from within”. Belle is also, to my mind, the most feminist Disney protagonist ever to be seen up to that time, which is why I get super super annoyed that so many people point to this movie loftily shouting “Stockholm Syndrome!” I feel it’s kind of inevitable that I quickly address that here, even though I’ve brought it up on this blog several times before. (Also, for an excellent takedown of the “Beauty and the Beast is a sexist story because Belle has Stockholm’s Syndrome” take, see this video essay of Lindsay Ellis.)

When watching the musical last winter I kept an eye out for justification for the Stockholm’s Syndrome take that I might not have remembered and couldn’t find any, but it pains me to admit that I did find a smidgen of justification, for someone determined to be a bit uncharitable, in a particular bit of dialog from the movie. I don’t recall it appearing with quite that wording in the musical, although it’s entirely possible that the musical has those exact same lines and I just wasn’t being observant. Here it is:

BELLE: What did you say?

BEAST: I release you. You’re no longer my prisoner.

BELLE: You mean... I’m free?

BEAST: Yes.

BELLE: Oh, thank you. Hold on, Papa. I’m on my way. [tries to hand mirror to BEAST]

BEAST: Take it with you. So you’ll always have a way to look back... and remember me.

BELLE: [in sweet, deeply moved tone] Thank you for understanding how much he needs me.

So okay, maybe Belle comes off as showing just a bit too much unqualified gratitude here, an oversight that the writers circa 1990 clearly should have avoided in case diagnosing female characters with Stockholm’s should ever become trendy twenty-something years later. But this could be remedied by a quick rewrite of the dialog in that one scene; it’s not as though the whole plot has to be changed away from its inherently misogynistic nature.

And that’s all I want to say on that one aspect of this absolute gem of a Disney production. Despite a few minor issues I noticed, such as Maurice being a little too innocent and helpless, and it lacking my very favorite line from the musical (“Belle don’t you recognize the beast within the man who’s now before you?” at the end), Beauty and the Beast comes about as close to perfection as it gets.

Aladdin, 1992

Although I didn’t see this major blockbuster hit when it first came out -- it was probably considered a bit too intense for me at kindergarten age -- this is the first time that I was aware on some level that a particular Disney movie was a new release. (One of my few sharp memories of kindergarten recess was a boy standing on a stump or low piece of playground equipment making proclamations to passersby for minutes at a time that alternated between, “You are a street rat!”, “You were born a street rat!”, and “You will die a street rat!”, and how this made me consciously contemplate the concept of present/past/future tenses for the first time.) When I saw it, I loved it -- it was clearly the most exciting animated movie out there. At some point in childhood I thought it was bested by its sequel, but a few years later as a teenager I decided that the tightly resonant plot of the original Aladdin made it the best Disney movie ever. I’ve definitely mellowed out my opinion on this, as Aladdin certainly has flaws and some other features are more deeply meaningful to me as an adult, but I still hold up Aladdin as one of the greats. I saw at least parts of it as an adult on TV and saw it very recently prior to getting Disney+ when it appeared briefly on Netflix, but I was perfectly happy to rewatch it yet again on Disney+ the evening after watching its predecessor as Aladdin is fun and entertaining every time.

In this animated production we have finally topped The Great Mouse Detective in terms of animated action. We have topped most movies that ever came out prior in terms of a manically funny yet also soulful character in Robin Williams’ role as the genie. The story is excellent, apart from having only one female character, and my being bothered just a little by the slough of magic tricks dominating the action towards the end -- I tend to prefer universes where magic requires scholarly study and careful training (e.g. The Black Cauldron) rather than “genie points his finger at you and now you have the ability to point your own finger and make anything happen that pops into your head”. The sultan continues the trend of old man characters who are portrayed as helpless and infantile -- in this case, even more intensely, since the sultan has none of Maurice’s brilliant smarts. But I’m mostly nitpicking here -- Aladdin is well deserving of its high status in the history of Disney.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993

I was very glad to finally get a chance to see this movie, because I clearly remember knowing about it from the time it was being advertised back in 1993, and I heard about it during my entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Although it seemed that most of my friends had seen it growing up, it didn’t look much like my conception at the time of a “normal movie” or even normal content, and so I don’t recall ever asking to watch it. But my recent-day self recognized that it’s quite a classic and was curious to see it.

I don’t regard The Nightmare Before Christmas as one of the really great Disney productions, but I strongly admire how original it was (particularly for its time) in every single aspect, including use of claymation, overall aesthetic, intriguing characters, and story. It was also fun to see what seems to be the only Disney musical that is done in the style of opera, that is, where the entire story is told in songs without any extended non-musical dialogs. And the songs are quite good in their own way, too. I don’t particularly want to see the film again, but I might not mind getting a soundtrack of it.

The Lion King, 1994

This is the first Disney movie -- and I believe the first movie of any kind, in fact -- that I went to see in the theater. I remember it as a powerful and sometimes overwhelming experience, but as a movie I overall liked even as young as I was. This is remarkable especially considering that much of the story feels more adult in nature than almost any other Disney animated feature.

What can I even say about this one? I think the general reaction to watching it is almost unanimously shared. My impression is that what its creators were going for, more than anything else, was epicness, and they succeeded in a way that had never been done through animation before. Apparently the entire (incredibly epic) opening number was shown as the trailer -- a questionable move, but understandably it got people very excited about The Lion King’s release.

One of many particular things that makes The Lion King stand out is the profound darkness of its main villain, perhaps the most chilling that has ever appeared in Disney. An argument can be made that not only murdering a major protagonist halfway through the movie but convincing the child that he’s to blame is the most evil act we’ve ever seen from a Disney villain. I’ve seen it pointed out that it’s vaguely ableist to give the villain an ugly scar and even make it his name. Some have suggested that they should have made the villain the handsome and strong one and given the scar to one of the heroes -- Simba or Mufasa -- instead. I’m definitely sympathetic to this point of view, and I totally agree that Scar shouldn’t actually have been someone’s name. However, without getting bogged down into something that could be a lengthy post all on its own, I strongly feel that in a way it adds to the depth of our villain’s depravity through the backstory that it implies. And by the way, his ending is probably my favorite out of the fates of all Disney villains.

The music also follows the film’s ethos of being as epic as possible (well, with the exception of a couple of the songs, but they were still fine songs). “The Circle of Life” and the instrumental music propel The Lion King’s soundtrack to possibly the very best in all of Disney.

To be sure, this movie does have more flaws than I remembered. As I said, Scar is a terrible name to give any of the characters, especially in a story where everyone else’s name comes from Swahili. Pumbaa is basically just one big fart joke. (Although, I give the writers major credit for managing to switch the tone to accommodate fart jokes within like five minutes of Scar confronting Simba over Mufasa’s death.) The video essayist Big Joel has pointed out interesting things about the story and made some rather troubling points about it, although to me that almost just makes the film deeper and more thought-provoking rather than actually worse (I see the Chronicles of Narnia this way). But overall, The Lion King has well earned its high rank on the list of highest grossing films of all time.

----------

At this point in Disney’s history and my childhood, apparently I decided that I didn’t care to see new Disney films coming out because I was content with watching my old favorites over and over, and anyway I was getting older and discovering that non-Disney movies could be quite entertaining as well. Therefore, I didn’t see any of these last four until adulthood, even though they all came out when I was still a kid.

Pocahontas, 1995

I was glad for the chance to finally see Pocahontas for the first time, unfortunately not before hearing countless references to it as being Problematic while I would have preferred to go into it completely uninfluenced by popular opinion. I had actually seen songs from it and Disney books of it as a child and it didn’t interest me at all. On finally watching the film, I found that I got what I expected on both counts: it wasn’t terribly interesting or gripping, and it doesn’t really pass the muster of today’s higher standards of responsible storytelling about colonialism.

All that really sticks out at me looking back (after some delay in writing this post, so that it was over a month ago that I watched this) is that the plot felt a bit atypical in two ways. One, a character, who is neither a protagonist really nor a villain, is killed off around halfway through -- a daring move that The Fox and the Hound chickened out of doing, but I shouldn’t have been all that surprised given that Pocahontas’ very predecessor did this with a protagonist in a much bigger way. And two, the story ends sort of anticlimactically: I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed when a big Disney animated feature doesn’t end with a lot of action, despite realizing that this more peaceful kind of ending being a reasonable alternative is basically the entire point the story wants to make.

The songs are sort of meh, at least by the high standards of Disney movies of this period. Nothing more really to say on this one.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996

Here is another movie that I had never gotten around to seeing before, despite having been somewhat more interested in it than I ever was in Pocahontas. And this turned out to be the main breakout attraction on this list, as I found it nothing short of spectacular (save, perhaps, the music, which was “only” quite solid, maybe not spectacular).

I would nominate this for the award of most mature movie among all the animated features included in this journey. I would almost say its ideal audience is adults, not children. It showcases an abusive relationship with enough intricate care to be worthy of analysis through abuse discourse on Tumblr. It displays lust and sexuality in a way that I don’t think I’ve never seen anywhere else in Disney animation. Its violence and political undertones are quite dark. It examines religion deeply (which is as far as I know unique in Disney), and the capacity of religion to bring out both the best and the worst impulses in humanity is exposed. Its main villain is one of the more multi-layered ones. It treats physical handicaps and deformities in quite an honest way and subverts expectations with its love plot.

Perhaps the only thing one might reasonably criticize this movie for is the characters of the gargoyles, which are clearly present to lighten the tone a bit so that the film isn’t entirely heavy and austere. But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised -- I think the gargoyle stuff could have been executed in such a way that may have made the whole film sag, but instead they were done just right: the gargoyles are depicted as being animated only in the mind of Quasimodo. This means in fact that in a way, they actually implicitly add some gravity to his situation. (Consider that in a more typical Disney film there would have been some sort of cheesy sentient animal friend instead whose existence would not have been confined to the protagonist’s imagination.) Here I’m going to choose to ignore the fact that the gargoyles do seem to interfere in the final battle with some explosives, a possible inconsistency which is minor enough to be glossed over.

Anyway, I think before I unsubscribe from Disney+, I might just give this one a second watching.

Hercules, 1997

Although I never saw this one growing up, I did get talked into watching it by my college girlfriend who had been fond of it growing up. I distinctly remember not caring much for it when I saw it with her. My reaction at this later stage of my life is basically the same. There’s something about the animation style that I find subtly grating and distracting. And there’s something about the story itself that feels like way too light and cartoony a take on ancient Greek mythology (although it’s not like the ancient Greeks had a particularly heavy or dark mythology, and what else could I expect from Disney, really?). I guess that stories that are so explicitly centered around a young man’s quest for hero-hood and being godlike just don’t speak to me that well, and I didn’t find any of the characters that appeared to be especially memorable or engaging.

I did like the muses and enjoyed their singing but can’t say I love any of the musical numbers. So, I respect the effort and earnestness and general respect for ancient Greek culture that went into Hercules, but my overall reaction is still meh.

Mulan, 1998

I had only seen this movie once before, during a trip with some grad school friends back some years ago. One of my best friends at the time, who was with us on the trip, highly recommended it as pretty much her favorite Disney movie as she especially liked father-daughter stories. At the time, the film didn’t make a particularly strong impression on me, although I could recognize its quality. Watching it again on Disney+ has given me a deeper respect for it as having quite a good story and characterization, fine animation, and pretty decent music. I like both Mulan and Mushu as characters, and I enjoyed their dynamic.

I guess it’s telling, though, that I don’t really have all that much more to say about it. Maybe I don’t relate closely enough, maybe the movie didn’t imprint itself on me at an early enough time in my life, maybe I don’t engage that well with any plot that involves organized warfare, I don’t know. But I think I can only really like this film on a more dispassionate, intellectual level, rather than feeling touched in any kind of resonant way by it.

I think it’s interesting to note that Mulan is actually pretty rare among Disney protagonists in having two parents who survive through the entire story. And that moreover, despite it being billed as a father-daughter story to me (and I’m not denying that it is somewhere at its core), Mulan never directly interacts with her father except at the beginning and the very end.

Anyway... since watching all of these, I’ve been watching the more recent major films sort of sporadically: The Return of Jafar (a favorite of mine at some point in childhood, but with maturity I can now see why it was direct-to-video), The Emperor’s New Groove (quite good, better than expected), the first half of Home on the Range (about as bad as I expected, hence my quitting halfway through), WALL-E (as good as I remembered from when it came out when I was in college), Enchanted (one of my favorites, not on Disney+ so I got it through... other means), The Princess and the Frog (a real treat, slathered with Louisiana flavor), Tangled (sweet but nothing outstanding), Frozen (one of my favorites from seeing it in the theater; however I had never seen the first ten minutes which makes a major difference!), and Frozen II (which I had been sorry to miss in theaters last winter, a bit of a weird story but not bad and absolutely the most stunning animation I’ve ever seen). And, of course, Belle’s Magical World, the infamous mid-quel to Beauty and the Beast; this was not a major film but I just had to see if it was as legendarily bad as people say and, yes, it was.

I’m very glad to have been able to get a break from Netflix by taking a tour through the main history of Disney -- including many childhood memories, would-be childhood experiences, and more modern things from my adulthood -- thanks to Disney+.

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duskdragon39 · 4 years ago

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dust can’t settle: Commentary

I thought you were done with credits and notes and commentaries, I hear you say. You had an entire chapter dedicated to credits and notes. Why do you have more notes?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, @stellarfoam and I wrote a thing for @pod-together, got a whole ton of talented people to help us read it, and created the first ao3 relationship for the tag “Original Fear Entity Avatar Characters & Original Fear Entity Avatar Characters (The Magnus Archives)” except the tag was too long so the “the” got dropped. You can find that here. If, however, you have already read/listened to/somehow otherwise experienced our oc/self-insert-heavy original statement fic, welcome! I assume you’re here because you wanted to listen to me ramble on for yet another thousand words. If you’re not looking for that, well, here it is.

Under the cut, anyways

The World of DCS:

This is, very technically, the Magnus Archives fanfic.

I say technically, because nowhere in this does canon appear. It appears in the inspiration and base worldbuilding, but other than that... yeah no.

So this started when Kai and I looked at the worldbuilding TMA has for the U.S. and went “yeah there’s got to be more than one institute.” Thus the San Francisco Institute for the Unusual and Paranormal was born, along with its satellite offices in Denver and Chicago. Those same satellite offices also serve The Usher Foundation in DC. The branch offices collect statement, both written and recorded, and other research on the paranormal. Every five years, SFIUP sends along a couple of archival assistants to go and transfer those files to long-term storage in San Francisco or DC. The relationship between the branch offices and SFIUP can be best summed up as follows:

Chicago & Denver: Bigger archives are always bossing us around :( San Fran & DC: Alright but can you like, actually store your statements Chicago & Denver: No.... San Fran & DC: Okay, so...? Chicago & Denver: DON’T TELL US WHAT TO DO

Also, we said screw you to Smirke’s 14. There’s every chance that by defining and putting boundaries on the 14 he actually helped shape them into those roles, and we figured that different places would have different mergers and interpretations of those 14. Most of our statements merge or ignore the defined fears- Something There is Dark/Hunt/Eye, Hung is Vast/Buried, Beauty is Eye/Vast, Shasta Lake is just a weirdly big fish, Dragon’s Cauldron might be Hunt? It’s more just a “alright but wouldn’t it be COOL if...”

We also have another giant document about how the fears might manifest in different parts of America.

Because there is never an end to the worldbuilding.

The Car:

Some random facts about the car for your enjoyment: - It woke up because something something knowledge = power and Lee and Dusk (LD) kept reading it statements - So now the equation knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass applies, which is to say that the trunk is a transdimensional space that LD primarily use for storage of random things. - Also a flesh monster. - It’s just back there. - It tried to kill them at one point while crossing through Minnesota. They shoved it in the trunk. It just sort of. Remains there. For awhile. - The car did not approve. - In case your wondering, the car is more or less a traveling archive, and LD are its archivists. - However LD did not sign up for this, and so their road trip culminates eventually with them killing the car. It is a long and terrible battle, and the two of them nearly die. - I have, somewhere on this computer, right now, a recording of the Car’s lovely voice actor Lynx doing a variety of absolutely terrible voices, including petulant teenager and valley girl.

Statements:

We have two pages worth of statement ideas still that we’ll get around to writing someday. If we stop adding to them. Here’s the stories behind some of the ones that made it into the fic, and some other general things I wanted to talk about.

Chapter 1: Archivist’s Note, San Francisco, Shasta Lake:

The recording classification system does not have much thought put into it, but follows the following format

[Media type];[Supernatural Classification].[Year].[Month]:[Employee(s) responsible for the case]

So in the case of [S;F15.2015.06-09:LD)], it’s: Statement(s);Multiple fears.2015.June-September:Lee & Dusk

Is this a perfect system? Hell no. Did this get as deep into archive classification systems as I wanted to go for a 15k fic? Yes.

The Shasta Lake statement pulled heavily from several sources, including the Shasta Lake fishing website, Wikipedia, and an actual news story about a couple of guys who saved a sturgeon from choking on a catfish. It’s kinda an amazing story, especially since the fish was actually about 8 feet long.

Things I don’t want to run into, thank you.

Chapter 4: Empty City, Gas

Empty city was, as mentioned in the fic, inspired by a statement @laurenbrightwing gave to us. And yes, LD absolutely have gone and explored graveyards and abandoned buildings for the Aesthetic of it.

Gas, however, came from The Car, an absolutely beautiful TAU fic by Feneris. Don’t ask what it runs on. You don’t want to know. Chapter 6: Greenway

Fic-Dusk used to work for the Denver Branch Office before going to San Fran. The branch office never forgave them for their treachery.

Chapter 7: Hung

Eastman Chemical Company is an actual company stationed in Tennessee, and this statement was very heavily modeled after Mag 124: Left Hanging, except with more buried vibes.

Needs more buried should be a motto.

Chapter 9: The Dragon’s Cauldron

Guess who went down a research hole? It me.

Research notes for this statement can be found here.

Sources: Debunking the Myth, Fear of Yellowstone (U.S. National Park Service) Native Americans and Yellowstone National Park: Hot Springs, Legends and Sacred Places Explore the Fort Yellowstone Historic District (U.S. National Park Service) Whittesly Yellowstone Myths.pdf Timeline of Human History in Yellowstone - Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service) Legend of the Sheepeater Indian Tribe in Yellowstone - My Yellowstone Park The History of our Local Tribe: The Sheep Eater Indians - Bitterroot Ranch Dragons in Yellowstone - Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

Chapter 10: Something There, Archivist’s Note 2

RIGHT. This is a fun chain of events that have taken about three years to mature into this story.

Something There started off with a nightmare about something stalking me through my house. I was thoroughly creeped out, and then promptly forgot about it for the next day until I went to walk through my house at night and thought I heard something moving behind me.

About a year later, my composition teacher told us to write a speech. I think the prompt was truth?

So I went off about the thing supposedly living in my house, how no one would believe me if I told them, and implying that I absolutely was lying about the entire thing. My teacher loved it, and I got the highest grade I’d gotten that year for that assignment. (“They lauded me for that, did you know?”)

If that sort of vaguely existential crisis sounds like something you’d have fun reading, the full speech can be found here.

A bit later, I read the same speech for an open mic. One of my friends there yelled out that she believed me- something that did make it into the final version. (“One of my friends told me she believed me, once. I… I just shrugged and told her that there wasn’t actually anything there.”)

It eventually made its way into this project via me trying to figure out what the hell to use for a more spooky statement and stumbling across the speech sitting in my google drive.

I managed to scare myself to the point of not being able to go upstairs in the dark for about a week with the updated version.

I wrote it.

This seems counterintuitive.

Does this make this a self insert story? No. Statement giver here does not in any way respond like I would have in this situation, and they’ve since drifted even farther into full OC territory.

The “they can’t hurt you if you’re watching/if you see them comes from the lovely tma time travel fic “Strangers in the Dark” by Mayarene Rose.

MouseK also gave us the closing line for the fic! It wraps it up so nicely, and I’ve already squeed about this in the fic itself, but they deserve more because the line’s amazing and I love it. Conclusion:

Thanks to everyone who gave us statements, inspired us, and helped us with the project. It’s been an excellent time, and there have already been discussions of either statements collected on this journey or short stories set in the same universe being written.

Thanks for reading!

- Dusk

#podtogether 2020 #the magnus archives #statement fic #twisting roads #duskwrites #too many thoughts head full

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shakespeareanqueer · 4 years ago

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Snafu

Summary: Tony Stark’s one-and-a-half-year-old baby, Natalie, accidentally pushes some buttons on the time travel machine.

Word count: 1,691 words 🔘Contents: Wild anachronisms, but that’s it

A/N: This is for Tony Stark Bingo S5: AU-Ancient Civilizations! I know nothing about history so please don’t hate me. I did some basic Wikipedia-ing and that’s it. Anywho, enjoy!

I saw advice not to put tags in original fic posts for searchability reasons, so I will reblog with a link to my masterlist, my taglist, and tagging TSB.

It’s been five years since Bruce’s snap brought everyone back. Five years since Tony lost his arm, but thankfully not his life. Five years since Steve used the time machine platform that Bruce and Tony had invented to return the Infinity Stones to their proper timelines.

That was the last time anyone used the time travel machine. It was deemed to dangerous to let it fall into anyone’s hands except their own, and so it had simply sat in Tony Stark’s garage for ages.

Until one day, Morgan’s one-and-a-half-year-old little sister, Natalie, toddled into the garage and managed to hit just the right buttons to get it powered up. Tony lunged after her just in time to get sucked in as well, and off they went on Iron Baby’s first adventure.

Tony clutched his baby in his arms and looked around, trying to figure out where (and when) they were. It could be anywhere; the toddler had merely smashed her fingers on the keyboard to produce a random assortment of digits and coordinates on the screen. Wherever and whenever they were, they had no supplies, no Pym particles, and no time travels suits.

Mercifully, Tony did have his omnipresent arc reactor permanently glued to his chest. It no longer served as a magnet drawing shrapnel away from his heart, but it did house trillions of nanoparticles that could form themselves into an iron suit to fit any body. Unfortunately, they could currently only combine into one suit. He would have to fix that. In the meantime, he didn’t even hesitate to cover his child instead of himself, letting the particles envelope the toddler in a bright red and gold protective shield. He himself remained exposed to the glaring sun reflecting off the glittering sand in his ribbed tank top and jeans; he had been working on one of his vintage cars when Natalie had wandered out of his sight and gotten the two of them into this trouble.

They were somewhere in the middle east, Tony postulated based on their surroundings. He took deep breaths to keep himself from going into a panic attack, even though the environment was so similar to one of the most traumatic events of his life.

In the distance, Tony could see some sort of civilization. He had gotten himself out of the desert using before nothing but limited physical resources supplemented by his abundant intelligence, and gosh darn it, he would do it again.

As he trudged through the sand, he tried to think about how they could get out of this mess. He had spent a little time in his lab examining the make-up of the infamous Pym Particles. They were essential to time travel as the Avengers had invented it, since they were necessary to shrink down to the quantum realm. Tony had invented time travel himself and therefore one might think he didn’t want for anything to recreate it, but in truth he had only developed the concept past that initial stage. He was still a little baffled how Pym successfully managed to create a particle that could shrink not just objects but people, all the way down to the quantum realm, without causing permanent damage. He had studied the composition of the particles, but still wasn’t totally confident he could recreate them from scratch. With a supercomputer and a centrifuge, though, then maybe…

It became very apparent the moment the civilization came into clearer view that Tony would not be obtaining a supercomputer or a centrifuge. Nor would he receive a regular computer and a blender, with which he could easily construct that more advanced equipment. And he wouldn’t have access to even a calculator, a test tube and a top, either, with which he might have been able to make do.

No, this civilization had clearly developed none of those things. Wherever and whenever they were, it was ancient.

Tony was so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed the crowd that had been slowly gathering since the first person caught sight of the pale-skinned man with the funny garments and the glittering idol in his arms. There was a gaggle of them now, all gawking at the incredible sight with jaws agape and chores forgotten. When Tony did notice them, his steps slowed and his nervousness grew. But as he drew closer, he couldn’t discern any fear or malice in their faces, only awe and fascination.

Finally he was on the edge of all the action, cautiously staying several yards from the crowd.

“Hello, friends. I don’t suppose this town has a payphone?” he asked with a nervous chuckle.

No one paid him any heed. That’s when he realized; they were enraptured by the glittering bundle in his arms. He took a more thorough look around at his surroundings and realized that there was more worked metal than he would have assumed would be present in such an ancient society. They must have been one of the first civilizations to work widely with iron, he surmised, and practically worshipped it. The closest item in their schemas to the impossibly shiny, multi-colored metal enveloping his child would be that iron, meaning they would inevitably make the same mistake as the first newspaper article ever written about Tony’s suits. And they would worship him as a god of iron, or at least the baby.

“None of you speak English, by any chance?” Tony asked.

People began to mumble in an ancient language he could never hope to even begin to understand. The general excitement and buzz woke Natalie, and she began to coo and mumble gibberish, as she was wont to do.

Then after a moment, much to Tony’s shock, the gibberish turned to comprehensible words.

“People! Noise! Happy!”

It was only a series of words, but it was undeniably English to Tony’s ears. It was more decipherable words than the child had ever spoken; she said a few things that could sort of be interpreted as English every once in a while, like Mama and Dada and Morgy, but nothing like this. It occurred to Tony that the suit had a universal translator built in, installed by Carol.

To everyone else, Natalie was undeniably speaking Nesili, the native language of the Hittites. This impossibly shiny idol of iron was speaking their language, proving indisputably that this was a deity, sent by the gods above just as the sacred ore had been.

The first brave soul to approach was so overwhelmed by emotion that she burst into tears, but she managed to touch the fringe of her shawl to the holy baby before dissolving into tears at its bearer’s strangely-clad feet. The slightly older woman she had been standing with followed suit, then drew them both back into the crowd, so as not to show disrespect to their divine visitors. One by one, each citizen stepped forth and touched the fringe of their shawl or their sleeve to Natalie’s super-suit. Some kissed the garment before or after, and all bowed low and reverent as they retreated. Tony just stood there awkwardly as this town worshipped his progeny and murmured to each other in a language he couldn’t hope to understand.

After everyone had gotten their turn, an old man in brightly colored robes ushered father and child towards the center of the village. Tony surmised that he was likely some sort of holy man or priest. He walked with him to a building at the heart of the town, simple stone and yet fancier in its carved decoration than its neighbors. Tony quickly came to the conclusion that it must be the sacred temple for the town.

The priest ushered them inside. Once within the stone walls, Tony could see that the temple was built around a meteor that had lodged itself into the ground. The crater was deep, but there was a rope ladder leading down into it. Someone was actively chipping away at the meteor with a tool, while a handful of holy men knelt prostrate around the perimeter of the crater praying to the space rock. It was clear to see that the meteor was made mostly of iron, with streaks of other elements throughout.

The priest that had led them there had a hushed conference with the men that had been worshipping the meteor, once they completed their prayers and rose to standing. They all turned to look at Tony—well, Natalie. After a few exchanged words and much fervent nodding, two of the priests hurried out of the temple, their eyes lingering on Natalie and her metal suit until the doors shut behind them. The rest helped Tony into a hard and very uncomfortable but elaborately carved stone chair at the head of the room, on the other side of the crater.

Over the next few days, Tony and Natalie were treated like royalty. They were presented with lavish and delicious meals, Tony was gifted colorful garments, and they sat on the stone throne most of the day with people prostrate at their feet mumbling prayers. Every once in a while, Natalie would murmur something like “Birdie!” or “Papa!” and the devotees would go wide-eyed with awe.

Tony was just beginning to resign himself that they might be stuck here for a while, but that might not be so bad, when he felt a crackling energy around Nat's iron suit. He recognized the phenomenon as what occurred when one was about to make a time jump. He held his baby tight to his chest and prayed.

Luckily, the jump enveloped them both, and they arrived safely on the landing pad, back in the Stark farm garage. Pepper, their oldest child Morgan, and a medium-sized Professor Hulk were staring at them strangely. It took Tony a moment to realize that it was probably because he was wearing yellow and purple robes, and the baby was clad in an Iron Man suit and speaking English.

Morgan clapped her hands and shouted, “Iron Baby!”

The nickname stuck. As did ‘god baby,’ once the story was all told.

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bonjourmoncher · 5 years ago

Photo

Learn How to Facebook

Facebook has changed a lot since Hamilton Lindley initially pursued a record in 2008. In those days, Facebook was still called "The Facebook", and my profile truly stated, "Look at my MySpace, it's waaaay superior to my Facebook."

Obviously, Facebook has advanced dangerously fast since my center school years, and it'll continue adjusting at a quick pace for whatever length of time that it exists.

Take the free Facebook Marketing Course on building up a start to finish Facebook advertising system.

On the off chance that you need an update on the best way to utilize Facebook today or you need to pursue a record, look at this inside and out clarification of how to utilize the most well known internet based life arrange on the planet.

Pursuing a Facebook Account

To pursue a Facebook account, pursue these three simple advances.

Visit Facebook's site.

On the landing page, round out your first name, last name, portable number or email, secret phrase, birthday, and sexual orientation.

Press "Join".

Setting Up Your Privacy Settings

After you've pursued a Facebook account, you can alter your security settings to control who can see your profile and data. Pursue these four basic strides to change your security settings.

Snap on the descending pointing bolt that is situated on the upper right corner of any Facebook page.

Snap "Settings".

In the left sidebar, press "Security".

Set who is permitted to see your past and future posts. You can likewise control how individuals can discover and get in touch with you.

Customizing Your Profile

Chances are, there's presumably somebody on Facebook who has a similar name as you. To separate yourself from these individuals and help your loved ones discover you on Facebook, customize your profile by including a profile picture, spread photograph, and some close to home data.

Picking a Profile Picture

Go to your profile and snap on your profile picture.

To pick your Hamilton Philip Lindley picture, pick a photograph that you're as of now labeled in on Facebook, one that you've transferred to Facebook, or a photograph from your PC. You can likewise add a casing to your profile picture.

Picking a Cover Photo

Snap the camera catch on your spread photograph, which is on your profile.

To pick your spread photograph, you can pick a photograph from your Facebook profile, a choice of Facebook's own spread work of art, make a composition, or transfer a photograph from your PC. You can likewise reposition or erase your present spread photograph.

Refreshing Your Profile

Snap the "About" area on your profile page.

In this area, you can fill in data about your work and instruction, the spots you've lived, contact and essential information, family and connections, insights regarding you, and life occasions.

Preferring and Following Public Pages

On Facebook, you can pursue and get refreshes from your preferred brands, superstars, sports groups, and productions. The most ideal approach to do this is via looking for them on Facebook and preferring or following their open page, which will have a blue confirmed check mark alongside their name. After you like or pursue their page, you'll begin to see their updates in your news channel.

Your Timeline

Your course of events is a computerized log of your Facebook movement in turn around sequential request. Your announcements, transferred photographs and recordings, and the photographs you're labeled in will show up on your course of events.

Including Friends Facebook

There are three different ways you can include companions Facebook. You can either look for them, discover them in the "Discover Friends" tab, or import a rundown of contacts from your email, iCloud, or telephone.

To discover companions on Facebook, go to your profile, press the "Companions" tab, and snap the "Discover Friends" catch. You'll see a rundown of companion demands from other individuals and a rundown of individuals you may realize that you can include as a companion Facebook.

On the off chance that you transfer a rundown of contacts onto Facebook, you can include your companions as you sort through every one of your contacts.

Posting on Facebook

The primary reason for Facebook is to support loved ones associate with one another. What's more, the most ideal approach to interface with your loved ones is by refreshing them about your existence with notices. To share a Facebook status, go to the content box at the highest point of your news source page or on your profile page.

With announcements, you can impart content to 15 distinctive hued foundations, photographs, recordings, GIFs, stickers, and connections..

You can likewise share different kinds of posts, as:

Feeling/Activity: share how you're at present feeling or what you're right now doing.

Check in: when you visit a city, area, or spot, check in and let your companions realize where you're at.

Label Friends: in case you're spending time with your companions, label them in your status and offer what you're doing.

Label Event: in case you're at an occasion, you can label it in your status and offer what occasion you're visiting.

Request Recommendations: on the off chance that you simply moved some place or you're going to visit an area, you can approach your Facebook companions for proposals on where to go.

Survey: ask your Facebook companions what their feeling is on a specific subject.

Bolster Nonprofit: pick a not-for-profit association of your decision and offer it through your status. Your Facebook Friends would then be able to press the give catch to help the picked association.

Answer a Question: pick a foreordained inquiry to reply or make your very own inquiry to reply and impart it to your Facebook companions.

Records: pick a foreordained subject to make a rundown for or make your own point and offer it with your Facebook companions.

Facebook Stories: all the substance that you can share through an announcement is shareable through your Facebook story. You can likewise transfer substance to your accounts by tapping the Add to Your Story catch on the correct sidebar. Furthermore, you can observe every one of your companions' Facebook Stories by tapping on their image in the Stories segment, which is likewise situated on the correct sidebar of your landing page.

Photographs and Videos

On Facebook, you can include photographs, recordings, collections, and live video communicates to your profile for every one of your companions to see.

Transferring photographs or recordings

To transfer photographs or recordings to your profile, pursue these four straightforward advances:

Go to your profile.

Press the "Photographs" tab.

Press "Include Photos/Video".

Transfer pictures or recordings from your PC.

Making photograph or video collections

To make a photograph or video collection, pursue these four basic advances:

Go to your profile.

Press the "Photographs" tab.

Press "Make Album".

Transfer pictures or recordings from your PC.

Facebook Live

To do a live communicate on your Hamilton P Lindley account, pursue these three straightforward advances.

In the container that says "What's at the forefront of your thoughts?", press "Live Video".

When you press "Live Video", you can compose a depiction about your communicate, label individuals in it, include an inclination or movement, register to an occasion, bolster a non-benefit, or include a survey. You can likewise title your live communicate or label a computer game in case you're live gushing somebody or yourself playing a computer game.

Press "Go Live" when you've wrapped up your live communicated.

Associating With Friends

On your news channel, you'll see refreshes from your companions, family, or open pages you pursue. To cooperate with them, you can like and respond to their posts, share content on their courses of events, and speak with them through content or video visit.

Like, Comment, Or Share

On the off chance that you like somebody's post, offer them a go-ahead, remark on their post, or offer it.

Different Reactions

On the off chance that your Facebook companion's post summons a more grounded response in you than a like, you can likewise express that you adore, giggled, are flabbergasted, miserable, or irate at their post by holding down the "Like" catch.

Sharing Content on Your Friends' Timelines

Anything you can post on your status, you can likewise post on your companion's timetable.

Facebook Messenger

To talk with your companions or open pages on Facebook, use Facebook Messenger. You can get to it by tapping the "Messages" catch at the upper right corner of any Facebook page or squeezing the "Messages" catch on the left sidebar of the landing page.

Next, press "New Message" and type in your companion or brand's name that you need to interface with. Facebook Messenger likewise gives you a chance to make gathering visits by tapping on "New Group". From that point forward, you should simply name your gathering and add the companions you need to incorporate into the gathering.

When you message your companions or gathering on Facebook Messenger, you can transfer pictures, recordings, and documents from your PC, just as stickers, GIFs, emoticons, and take pictures and recordings from your PC's or telephone's camera.

You can likewise see Messenger all alone page, where you can look for past discussions and deal with your settings. To see Messenger all alone page click the "Messages" catch in the upper right corner of any Facebook page and after that press the "See All in Messenger" catch. Or on the other hand, you can press the "Messages" catch on the left sidebar of the landing page.

To text your companions' who are signed onto Facebook simultaneously as you, press the "Visit" catch on the base of any Facebook page and hit up a discussion with your companions who are on the web.

Telephone and Video Calling

When you have Messenger open individually page, you can look for any of your companions or gatherings, click on their name, and press the telephone or video talk catch to call them.

News source

Your news channel is a curated channel of posts from your companions, family, and open pages you pursue that Facebook's calculation thinks you'll be keen on. You'll additionally observe advertisements from brands who think you'll appreciate devouring their substance or items.

To alter your news source, press the descending pointing bolt in the upper right corner of any Facebook page and snap on "News source Preference".

From that point, you can organize whose posts you'll see first, unfollow individuals and gatherings to shroud their posts, reconnect with individuals and gatherings you unfollowed, find open pages that match your interests, and conceal applications from your news feed.

#hamiltonlindley

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themisterdarcy · 5 years ago

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dear darcy,

what’s up? it’s currently thursday, april 30, 2020. we are in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, and north carolina is on lockdown. well, technically. we are actually the worst state in the entire country in pandemic support. there are 1.06 million confirmed cases in the entire country, with 9,948 in north carolina, and 1,567 in mecklenburg county alone. the stay-at-home order is still supposed to be lifted on may 8th, though. that’s next friday. i don’t know how on earth anybody thinks that is a good idea, but the governor has the power in this situation.

school is canceled for the rest of the year, meaning that i have to finish my junior year online. i’m disappointed that i have to miss prom and seeing my friends (especially kai), but i think it’s for the best. nobody expected covid-19 to be this big of a deal, or for the quarantine to last this long. the day before schools closed, my apush teacher, mr. church, told us that he thought the situation was “blown out of proportion” and i quote: “there’s no way that school is going to be canceled.” even when schools closed, we were originally supposed to be back in school by march 30! here we are, a month later, and there’s no end in sight for this crisis.

trump is being absolutely useless, and even detrimental to the effort to contain the virus. he his early information about the virus, and didn’t bother to take precautions, leaving the country unprepared. by the time of the first case, it was hopeless. this week (or last week... time is all running together right now), he actually suggested in a press conference that a way to prevent/cure coronavirus would be to inject bleach/disinfectant into the body, or to illuminate the body from the inside with a uv light to kill the virus. both of these options as said by trump (uv light actually does have some merit to it, but it is in an entirely different context than trump suggested, and still in developmental phases) would be fatal, and aren’t even a solution to the main issue at hand: containing and controlling the spread of the virus.

in my opinion, new zealand has it down. i only know about it because amanda palmer is quarantined there, but they’re getting close to the end of 5 weeks of near complete lockdown. people are not allowed to leave their houses or visit non-immediate family members at all, and parks and public spaces are closed. while it does seem a little like an overextension of governmental power, it’s working. new zealand only has 1,476 total cases. thanks to prime minister jacinda ardern, the entire country has fewer cases than mecklenburg county. yes, new zealand only has a population of about 5 million, while mecklenburg county has 1.1 million, it’s still impressive that a population five times the size has 100 fewer cases. i honestly wouldn’t mind temporarily giving up some of my civil liberties and democratic principles if it meant that covid-19 was knocked out and controlled.

the people who are protesting the lockdowns are quite frankly narcissistic idiots who cannot see past their own ego. yes, staying at home is difficult and boring, but it’s the only way that life has any sort of chance of returning to a form of normalcy. i don’t think things will be exactly the same, nor do i think they should, but i do want to be able to hang out with friends again. i do want to go to school and have my senior year. i do want to be able to move out and go to college when the time comes. the more people disregard reality and ignore social distancing, the longer life will be like this. the protesters are only making things worse for themselves, and the saddest part is that i don’t think they realize this.

i’m writing these letters to future me (that’s you, darcy!) so that i can have a document of my life from the pandemic. also, i want to be able to remember what being 17 was like when i’m older. i do keep a journal, but that’s more for songs, poetry, and breakdowns. screaming into the void of the internet just feels more Official to me. also, i can’t lose a blog. that’s the thing about the internet: it’s forever, for better or for worse.

i think that i will open each letter with a discussion of any updates about the pandemic, focusing mainly on concrete facts and statistics. these are important to document, and i wish i had been recording this from the beginning. maybe i will go back and create a timeline, but i’m not sure yet. that might just be a task for another sleepless night. after the corona rundown, though, i’ll go into my own experiences and thoughts about the events of my life. these will probably be in bullet-point form, since my mind has the tendency to jump around as if topics were trampolines. i don’t know how often i’ll write, but i will try to everyday. every letter won’t be as long as this one, that’s for sure, but i do tend to ramble on. i hope you’re not overwhelmed, darcy.

taking a much needed break from 2020, how’s your life at the moment? i don’t know how old you are, but i’m assuming that you’re in college at the very least. are you and kai still together? i hope so. i really do love them. have you come out to the family yet? have you changed your name legally yet? i need to do that before my college graduation, because i want my degrees to be in My Name. the thing is, i’ll need to come out to change my name, and that is an issue i don’t really care to think about at the moment. how did that go? was it as bad as i expect it will be? have you started t? besides transitioning, how is your academic and career life? i hope to go to the university of texas at austin and double major in physics and music theory and composition. did that happen? if it didn’t, where did you go to school, and did you stick with the course of study i mentioned? i can’t really imagine studying anything else, to be honest. physics and music theory are two of the most intimidating and difficult subjects there are, and they also happen to be my favorite subjects. i love being challenged mentally, and i also like being seen as intimidating. imagine: a punk, non-binary, queer physicist who also writes and performs music. is there anything more intimidating than that? i aspire to be the “scary kid in your physics class.” i want to be an exception.

i’ve written so much already, but i do have quite a bit to get off my chest. yesterday was a weird day, and i couldn’t sleep at all last night, so here we are. this is what being 17 is like:

it is 6:15 am, and i have stayed up all night.

i was planning on getting a lot of work done, but instead i wasted time listening to amanda palmer and browsing the internet.

my dad thinks i took my sleeping pill, so i need to stay quiet in my room until at least 10:00 tomorrow morning so he doesn’t get suspicious.

kai called me today, but only for 15 minutes. they are a month behind in school, and will only get their phone back once they are caught up. i don’t know when that will be, but i am preparing for the worst.

i identify as androgyne, meaning in between man and woman. recently, i stopped feeling like i was faking, though. instead of worrying that i was making it all up in my head, i’ve become confident that i am Androgyne. it makes sense. it always has made sense. when i was little, i asked my father if it was possible to be “half-girl, half-boy,” and i would tell people that about myself. just because i like glitter and riot grrrl doesn’t make me a girl. i am an enby.

this is the song of the night:

i realized today that i have not left the house (excepting switching between mother’s/father’s) in an entire month. at the beginning of this lockdown, i was struggling, but i feel like i’ve adjusted more or less. this feels normal, now. i don’t feel like i’m missing something from my daily life.

10 days clean :)

my sleep schedule is fucked up. dr. kissam has put me on a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and a sleep medicine as well as my anxiety meds because she’s concerned by my bipolar tendencies. my manic phases have gotten more intense and happen more often now, and my down phases have gotten worse than they have in a long time. i started hurting again, but i’m trying to stop. i think i have a handle on it now. i did give myself two stick and pokes on monday night, though... does that count? i don’t think so.

i have the deathly hallows on my ankle, and the androgyne symbol on my left middle finger. it looks more like an anchor or a dandelion though. :/ i like them anyways, because they are Mine. My body. My decisions. I Am My Own Person.

during the call today, i felt like kai was distancing themself from me. i don’t know if i’m overthinking a 15 minute chat, but they didn’t seem like their usual clingy, lovey self. i’m worried that they’re going to decide they don’t want to be with me anymore during this time that they are off their phone, but i know that it’s just anxiety. overthinking is my enemy. kai loves me. i love them. we are in a healthy, stable relationship (for the first time in my life!!). they aren’t going to decide to leave me out of the blue.

the song for the kai situation:

sometimes i wonder what life would be like if i could just focus on school like a normal person. i have good grades, but i am a Very Chaotic student. if i could just sit down and complete assignments at a normal pace and with consistent motivation, what would i be able to achieve? would i be in a bunch of service organizations? would i be on student council? who knows?! i am darcy, and i am tied for valedictorian while never doing my homework. i don’t know how i do it either.

i’ve decided that i don’t like my confirmation name (octavian) as my middle name. i want to take my dad’s middle name, lamont. darcy lamont wheeler. it’s a super cool name, and it has Significance. our family is directly descended from the lamont clan in scotland. it’s also my grandmother’s maiden name, which i feel like makes sense because my dead middle name was her middle name. poetic justice. symmetry. i have come full circle.

hi! my name is darcy lamont wheeler.

darcy means “dark one.” i really, really like that. i like thinking that i am connected to the somewhat dark and eccentric. like the dresden dolls, or disturbing short stories. darkness adds complexity. nuance. background.

my favorite short story is “i have no mouth & i must scream” by harlan ellison. it is so completely terrifying, so beautifully disgusting, so brilliantly bizarre, so disturbingly ominous, and i have never read anything else that has come close to comparing. i love science fiction, especially dystopian ideas about technology advancing past the point of no return. it’s crazy to me that what could be considered mankind’s greatest achievement is so close to being our downfall.

everybody is awake now, and i hear them in the kitchen. i wonder when i stopped wanting to be awake. matthew and brianna seem to wake up as early as they can and fight bedtime until the absolute limit, as if they want to maximize the hours that they have each day. each morning is a new chance for fun. they don’t seem to resent life yet. i would rather be asleep instead of conscious most of the time. days are uniformly boring and miserable, with the rare diversion. why would i want them to be longer than they have to be? is this depression or is this just growing up? i can’t even tell anymore.

i missed amanda palmer’s birthday livestream yesterday, so i’m going to watch it today. two hours of her and her quarantine buddies sounds like heaven. this woman’s music quite honestly saved my life, and she is the epitome of badass!! i love amanda palmer. i wish i could write songs like she can.

on the topic of the dresden dolls, i asked brian viglione, the drummer, to “prom” as a pretense to ask him about his experiences as a musician, and for advice about how to develop my music. against all the odds, he accepted, so now, on may 9th at 8:00 pm, i am going to facetime with Brian Viglione, drummer for the dresden dolls and the violent femmes, among many others. life? made. i still can barely believe that this is actually happening!!

i came out to my english class, including ms. blaylock on tuesday. everybody reacted really well, and in that class at least, i get to go by my name and use my pronouns. i honestly couldn’t believe that i had the balls to tell anybody besides kai’s family, but i did, and it actually went well! the fact that there are people calling me darcy makes me so happy that i can’t even put it into words. it’s validating. i am darcy. not just when i’m by myself, but in real life. i am darcy.

is it weird that i’m not crippled by kai’s absence? i used to be an unproductive tangle of anxiety whenever mary was out of touch, even for a few hours. i was constantly worried that she was going to hurt herself, or that she was going to leave me. the thing is, even though i am in love with kai and i only thought that i loved mary because she was the first girl i was with, i don’t miss them to the point that i can’t function. i don’t think about them 24/7. i do miss them at times, and i cannot wait until we can talk again, but it’s not an all-consuming thing. i can go through my entire day without talking to them, no problem. night time is a little harder, but that’s because night is always when i go down spirals and rabbitholes. maybe this means that our relationship is healthy? co-dependency is a bad thing, i know, but i don’t know what a healthy relationship feels like since the only other experiences i’ve had (jack, mary, saanchi, rachel) have all been toxic in their own way.

one thing i have learned with kai is the importance of boundaries in a relationship. just because i love everything about them doesn’t mean that it’s healthy for us to share everything. there was a time where we were both in dark places and hurting, and when they shared what they did, it would set me off. the same went for them, i was using them as a journal too often, and the emotional burden had started to affect them. we had a conversation about this though, and established clear lines that we will not cross. it felt good to figure that out. i felt mature, looking out for my own needs and respecting kai’s. isn’t that how a relationship should work?

i love kai.

i’ve written a SHIT-TON. i think this is enough for now, but i might write another letter today. this was cathartic, and i feel like i’ve processed some shit as well as made a record for the future. i hope you weren’t bored or overwhelmed by my novel, darcy. i’m just writing what i feel is important, and i hope it’s still important to you.

signing off,

darcy lamont wheeler

#Spotify

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laughingpinecone · 4 years ago

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Press Start letter

I am laughingpineapple on AO3

It’s a long list of character combos so the specific requests aren’t overly detailed, please draw at will from my general likes and general fandom likes in addition or as an alternative to any of those!

All requests are art or fic - for art, the stuff I like is the kind that depicts the characters doing something. I’ll always be happier with a very simple drawing of two characters walking together or sharing a cup of coffee than with an ambitious composition that looks like an Avengers poster. I also enjoy seeing them wear different clothes, getting a feel of what their fashion sense is like beyond their canon outfit(s).

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, canon-adjacent tropey plots, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploration of secondary bits of canon, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played straight, sensory details, sickfic, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships)

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay), canon retellings, consent issues

Dark Souls

I’m only familiar with the first game+DLC! It’s probably relevant to mention that I think that linking the fire is kind of a dumbass move and Gwyn is an ass, but on the other hand Kaathe has his own agenda and there’s no winning move in this world, or at least no obvious one. Feel free to deviate from anyone’s canon endings, to make things happen that’ll stave off their hollowing. I am interested in any of these people meeting and possibly striking up a friendship, and also in exploring Lordran’s temporal/dimensional fuckery, where it’s possible to meet people who have been gone for ages…

Group: Solaire of Astora & Siegmeyer of Catarina: so much fanart of Sun Bro & Onion Bro being bros, so little fic. And yet, the potential! How’d they bounce off each other, what about the fact that Siegmeyer is apparently a proper Catarina knight after all while Solaire just painted his self-made insignia and left, what would Sieg think of Solaire’s quest?

Group: Alvina the Cat & Sieglinde of Catarina: dunno, kitty. I love them both and I want everyone cool to go on adventure with each other. What’s left for Alvina now that Sif is gone, Artorias’ grave desecrated? For her part, did Sieglinde, you know, (mimics Ash Lake)?

Ghost Trick

I am very interested in various characters finding about the erased timeline, but not getting their memories back, and having to live with being told about what they did but never remembering it. Exploring the ghost lore is great. All what-ifs welcome (what if they managed an acceptable happy ending but didn’t reset the timeline, what if a different party went back to the past and kept their memories, what if Alma’s ghost stuck around…) Also open to AUs here, especially for generic fantasy or sci-fi settings or the Final Fantasy ones I prompted last Yuletide.

For the non-canon sides of Jowd/Alma/Cabanela, please no infidelity? I’d be good with either setting the fic during the game timeline or some what-if thereof when the other spouse is dead or unavailable, or simply keeping them offscreen and not mentioning them (eg Alma/Cabanela beach day, Jowd/Cabanela precinct shenanigans)

For Jowd in general, I do love my big boy and enjoy milking that size difference for all it’s worth. In gen contexts too, it’s neat. him big.

Group: Jowd & Yomiel: I’d love to read about the intimate understanding that comes from their shared memories and the horrors they’ve mutually forgiven (and a penchant for morbidity they’ve gained from such horrors probably). Cat dads things welcome.

Group: Alma/Jowd/Cabanela: maybe once Alma and Jowd have figured out he’s smitten and that they do in fact reciprocate... they tease him to death, slowly and deliberately? Is it even a Jowd romance if there’s not an exhausting amount of teasing involved, I ask?

Group: Alma/Jowd & Cabanela: Cabs’ life is wild; his best friends’ home is a safe haven...

Group: Emma & Pigeon Man: Emma’s unsuspected beta reader...

Group: Alma/Cabanela: (taps mic) legs. And fashion!

Group: Cabanela/Jowd: a recent tumblr post made a convincing argument for Cabs liking to be in charge (the argument is just pointing at Cabanela, honestly). Jowd is... agreeable, by his own admission. But is it that simple?

Kentucky Route Zero

I love the ending and I’d love to see its themes and setting explored. I’m all for exploration of any of the game’s themes and for including any staples from adjacent genres - wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I love AUs so that’s an option too. Or of course there’s Xanadu at the height of its glory, an infinite what-ifs generator. Were the requested characters part of it, what were their digital counterparts up to? A Xanadu narrative would be great! I’d also love to hear about any new spot along the Zero or the Echo river, or an expansion of some place that’s only mentioned by Will in HATATE or only gets a few paragraphs of text. Mostly, I just love all these characters so much and I’m going through the tagset’s options like a hyperactive cat. Any fragment of their lives will make me happy.

Group: Shannon Márquez & Conway & Conway's Dog: does Shannon get to see them after the ending? Even for a moment?

Group: Lula Chamberlain/Joseph Wheattree/Donald: so Lula went back to Mexico. Joseph is pensive. Did the events of the night shake up Donald, or what will it take?

Group: Junebug & Lula Chamberlain: artists! Outspoken... artists... with a complicated personality. Put them in the same room and...?

Group: Junebug & Johnny: where’s the strangest place they played in, and what did Johnny find there?

Group: Conway & Johnny & Junebug (Kentucky Route Zero): their story is about finding individuality, his is about succumbing and losing it. Would any of them pick up on this mid-Act IV? Or just... talking about limbs and stuff?

Group: Cate & Will & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): a few months later, Shannon finds herself on the Mucky Mammoth again...

Group: Carrington & Weaver Márquez & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): maybe the cousins were trying to bond or reminisce or whatever and Carrington dive-bombed into the conversation, but in the end it was an enriching experience... of sorts?

Group: Carrington & Lula Chamberlain (Kentucky Route Zero): I don’t usually look for college shenanigans but this may be the exception? Or Art Opinions?

Group: Carrington & Clara (Kentucky Route Zero): would she even... get a word in? Maybe with the right topic?

Group: Carrington & Cate & Will (Kentucky Route Zero): Mammoth life! ...what does theater have to say about mushrooms again?

Group: Shannon Marquez & Weaver Marquez (Kentucky Route Zero): at the end of it all, Weaver was waiting. After this end, they can stand side by side again...

Group: Emily & Ben & Bob (Kentucky Route Zero): so what does it mean, like, poetically, that they were temporally displaced and Act I is in their future from Act V? Is it possible they were not aware of it?

Mutazione

The island, the sense of community, newcomers joining the community, gardens and music... I love the mood of this little game. Got ideas for some part of the island we haven’t seen? What stories do they tell each other about Moon Dragon and the first days of the new life it brought? The plants encyclopaedia was great - do Yoké’s archives hide some other cool tome? Please, if Graubert is mentioned, I would much prefer a sympathetic portrayal - he’s got his issues but I felt that the game was much harder on him than anyone else.

Group: Yoké & Karoo: I love the friendship between Yoké and Nonno and filtering it through Karoo feels even cooler to me. When did the big spooky bird first visit, did Yoké know or perceive what was going on?

Group: Yoké & Claire: book club book club book club!

Group: Spike/Claire: they’re so cute! Dinner at Mori’s? Swimming together?

Group: Nonno & Spike: I love Nonno’s role in the community and Spike’s role in the community, and they’re the two people who landed there and decided to stay. Could they bond over this?

Group: Dennis & Nonno: Important Tree Health Business!

Group: Bopek & Jell-A: Jell-A is the absolute coolest and Bopek grew on me a lot. Their friendship is adorable! What could they do together? As a side note, Jell-A’s place has the tightest interior decor in the whole game. How’d that happen, and does Bopek get a flair for vintage shapes and volumes in his weaving?

Group: Mori & Nonno & Yoké: FRIENDS. Friends for a long time, through so much pain. An evening together while The Youths (tm) are at Spike’s bar?

Yoké: catch-all Yoké request because he’s my fave! Doing Yoké things, being a big nerd, caring for books and plants and stuff

Pyre

The burning found family feelings, the revolutionary passion, the tension between topside social constraints and the kind of freedom allowed by the Downside! Thoughts about finding oneself at the end of an age, as everything crumbles down to form something new. I love all the themes, the solemnity, the heart of this game. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure. Out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. My main interest usually lies in post-canon exploration when applicable, but I’m also into various adventures during canon. Pick a location or a place outside the map and see what happens? As for the ending variables, I’d ask for a peaceful revolution and Oralech alive, but no preferences for who’s up and who’s down, pick whatever works best for any given plot bunny.

Group: Tariq & Soliam: what were Tariq and Celeste like in their earliest days? Were they made or summoned from some sort of preexisting star consciousness? They’re wildly different scenarios! I’m good with either. Does Soliam then see Tariq as a child of sorts, someone he made, or something greater than himself? Did he mean to do that, to have these two immortals around? What does Tariq learn from the First Scribe?

Group: Tariq & Dalbert Oldheart: Any excuse for Tariq to hang out with the Fates for a little while, and treasure and be treasured by dear Dalbert...

Group: Oralech & Vagabond Girl: after all is said and done, Oralech’s view of the Scribes is probably... understandably... dire. So of course I want to see him talk it out with ae!

Group: Celeste & Ignarius: look, listen, if the various triumvirates just camped out near their respective Scribe’s place during the Nightwings’ years-long absence (not the only possible explanation for how you find them all neatly lined up before the first lib rite, but an explanation nonetheless, I think. just let me have my crack), that means Iggy was Celeste’s neighbor for a long time. Neighborly hijinks please?

Group: Bertrude/Pamitha: Pam returning from her travels, again and again, and finding a home in Bertrude’s lab, finding an understanding there... Bertrude’s attitude being thorny in a way that’s just what Pam needs to allow herself to open up... also: snake kisses.

Group: Volfred Sandalwood/Oralech: waking up and remembering that the mourning that’s set deep in your roots is for someone who never died, waking up and remembering that the bitterness that consumed you had made up a betrayal that never was, finding each other through these crumbling walls...

Molten Milithe: that’s the pov for a love letter to the Downside, right? And/or which Scribe did she bond with the most? Or the least for that matter?

Volfred Sandalwood: catch-all Volf’n’anyone request. I want to see our tree interact with any friend and foe you might fancy! Arguing for his beliefs, being a history professor through and through, finding himself in a tight spot and getting unexpected help, verbally tearing Brighton a new one if they ever cross each other’s path again...

group: Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: Volfred’s zodiac sign is Cancer and Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so there’s that. I love how they both hold the other in the highest esteem, especially on Tariq’s part since he’s the immortal Herald of the Scribes and Volfred is, all in all, a history teacher, but listen to him and you’d think the roles were inverted. I love my nonviolent canon but could anything happen to either of them that may require a rescue, and/or some good old-fashioned h/c? What’s something that could make Tariq of all people lose it? How’s life 100 years on?

Shenmue

This game cares for the little things. I’d love to see fanworks that try to out-slice-of-life canon...

Group: Qiu Hsu & Xianzi Bei: cormorant kung fu adventure! Do they hang out sometimes?

Group: Hazuki Ryo & Shenhua Ling: any moment, discussion, small adventure from their travels together! I love their bond! For all its waifufication of Shenhua, S3 really sold me on their friendship and a shared brand of dorkiness. Alternatively, sometimes I remember that they’d be 50ish in the present day - how and where do you picture them?

The Silver Case

I‘m all for the surrealism, big things being introduced and never picked up again, Rashomon’ing it up with six explanations for the same thing where no single one can be true, people dying and then popping up again like nbd... maybe the thing I like the most is characters transcending their humanity and looming over the dystopian world like ominous avatars. Correctness’ first ending had me swooning, that kind of mood is unparalleled. I have played TSC, FSR and 25W so far and have vague memories of K7. I’m aware of the “everything’s connected” readings but that’s not my main interest in these games. For FSR-focused requests, I see Lospass as a real island but also a metaphysical place of transformation first and foremost, where strange things happen that don’t make sense elsewhere.

Group: Toriko Kusabi & Remy Fawzil: What’s Toriko up to when she’s not chasing Chris? I think it could be fun to throw her at Remy and see the island from their point of view!

Group: Tokio Morishima & Edo Macalister: since Tokio stayed at the Flower Sun and Rain... I’m interested in peculiar happenings on Lospass that are not centered on Sumio...

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi/Sumio Kodai: Tetsu picked one hell of a crush, huh! What’s it like in the aftermath of the games, when Sumio is Like That? How does Tetsu grapple with Parade? Is Tetsu an anchor of sorts for Correctness Sumio, who seems (at best) to be existing on a slightly different plane of existence at any given time and could disappear if you blink too hard?

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi & Shinko Kuroyanagi: I’m joining the “let these two be foulmouthed friends” masses - who’d be more fed up with the other’s nonsense, and in which ways would they be an unstoppable team?

Group: Shinkai Tsuki & Tetsugorou Kusabi: Both of them end their stories in the shadows one way or another, and defending their protégé may have had a hand in their misfortune one way or another. What kind of understanding could they reach? What IS Tsuki up to anyway?

Group: Christina & Catherine: anthro Catherine, as per the Placebo bonus chapter Yami, was unexpectedly charming. What was Chris before reaching Lospass, and did he also have a chat with her on the plane or on the island?

#letter

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schaddenfreude · 6 years ago

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Welcome to Outpost 3 Part 3

It's been a bit since I posted any Venable so I thought I'd make a return to that story tonight.

Hope y'all like it!

Reminder that the timeline of events is altered from the show. Also yes, it does end on a cliffhanger!

@venablism

--------------------------------

In the days following your unfortunate fainting spell, Venable takes it upon herself to assist in your recovery. Usually that means sternly reminding you to eat. Ocassionally, the gesture comes in the form of an uncharacteristic kindness that she hides from everyone else. It's a side of Venable you're still getting used to; the gentle concern has become something like a warm blanket in the cold, dreary void that is your life now.

The two of you begin to spend the occasional evening lounging in her quarters during this period as well. She takes a keen interest in your musical hobby and you gladly show her the compositions you've completed.

The approving up tick at the corner of her mouth as she reads over the papers somehow seems like the best compliment. It then becomes your mission to see her smile--and not one of those little half smirks--a real, honest to god, grin. The two of you start writing music together soon after. And in this close proximity, you learn things about the enigma of a woman who runs outpost three.

Of course, most of the time its by observation. She's nothing if not guarded and volunteers little of herself to anyone.

And you are very observant.

You notice the way she bites her lip when she's feeling amused, the way she plays with the head of her cane when she's pondering something, and the way she sidesteps any sort of praise despite the appearance of an inflated ego.

The last two things are things you desperately want to learn more about. The cane, you notice, is almost like her security blanket. A symbol of disability which she's turned into a symbol of her power.

Alas, you've never been brave, and digging into Ms. Venable's past seems like a fool's errand. Regardless, you know that she's studying you too, and you can't help but wonder what it is she sees.

_________________

About a couple months after your health scare, the food situation has grown more desperate. Venable is forced to impose a further ration and reduce meals to once a day. You catch her nervous glance toward you as she's giving the news. It's fleeting, So quick you almost miss it, but it is immensely powerful. There are so many words in that gaze that she would never dare to speak aloud.

Suddenly you know your next move.

Later that evening after dinner, your feet carry you down the familiar labyrinth toward fate. You've wasted enough time and there's a burning question on your mind that demands to be answered.

When Venable opens the door you can tell you've caught her off guard. She's wearing an ornate purple dress, not unlike your own, and her eyes have grown to the size of dinner plates as she stands paralyzed with indecision. It's clear to you that you've walked in on something you shouldn't have, you just aren't sure what. Anyone else may well have been drug off to receive any of a number of twisted punishments for seeing what you have.

"O-oh, Y/N, I wasn't expecting you here this evening." Her voice shakes as she scrambles for any shred of composure like a falling man reaching for rope.

You had so many questions in your mind, you swear it, but seeing her in such a state of vulnerability chases them all away and leaves you feeling like you're in middle school trying to speak to your crush again. Except none of them could hold a candle to Wilhemina Venable.

"I um...There's a lot on my mind. I came to talk to you."

------------------

#wilhemina venable #ahs apocalypse #drabbles

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sandiegophotographer0-blog · 5 years ago

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How to choose a photographer - Tips and Advices

Photographer is among the things which you could book early sufficient so that you may be certain you will have the one you like essentially the most. Earlier than you begin researching photographers, first you may need to decide what sort of pictures model you like. That can help determine which kind of photographer you will want shooting your wedding. Photographs aren't things you'll be able to hear, smell, taste and even feel at first—you do not actually know what you are getting until you get your individual album, but than will be too late to react. Fastidiously evaluate potential photographers' web sites and blogs to take a look at pictures of other weddings they've shot, which offers you an thought of their style. The design of the website might also have clues concerning the photographer's personality and sensibility. Take a look at their Facebook and Instagram pages too, if doable. Is the feedback from clients positive? How does the photographer reply?

HOW TO DECIDE ON THE BEST ONE FOR YOU?

You have to meet your potential photographers in person, you can't determine solely by critiques and ideal internet web page. For those who like what you see on their site—and their charges are in your finances —call to see in the event that they're obtainable for your wedding ceremony date. If the photographer is already booked in your date, it's possible you'll want to see if they have an affiliate or can advocate another shooter with an identical type. Arrange in-individual conferences with three to 5 potential photographers who are available on your wedding date to look at more of their work.

1. SET UP INTERVIEWS

Don't base your decision on what you see in a photographer's highlights gallery or album. Photographers show clients a portfolio of their finest footage, all from completely different weddings, so you're seeing the very best of the most effective. Ask to see some full galleries from real weddings they've shot so you may get an idea how will your album look after the marriage. When reviewing a photographer's album, look for the best moments you need captured: Did they get images of both the bride and the groom when they locked eyes for the first time? Additionally search for considerate compositions (does a shot look good the best way it was framed, or is there an excessive amount of muddle in the frame?) and good lighting (watch out for washed-out footage the place small details are blurred—except that is the fashion you're after).

2. ASK FOR REAL MARRIAGE CEREMONY ALBUMS

Do not underestimate the significance of liking and bonding with your photographer. You've got seen theirs work, however make sure that you like their persona. They will be shadowing your each transfer, and the more comfortable each of you are with the photographer, the better the images will prove. To get the very best pictures, your photographer must be assertive enough to seek out nice moments, he have to be invisible to catch relaxed smiles and pure stances from visitors, and calm sufficient to be a optimistic force.

3. YOU NEED TO LIKE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER

When interviewing photographer, ask for a normal vary based on the photographer's normal "taking pictures price" and package deal, plus their commonplace rates for the kind of album you assume you will need and the quantity of coverage you are hoping to e-book them for. It is important to search out out what's included in the standard package deal, plus the basic vary for any extras it's your decision, like an engagement shoot or further protection, so you'll be able to compare rates. In particular, find out exactly what number of hours of coverage are included.

4. COMPARE PACKAGES

Ideally, you need your photographer to be there for your full wedding day—from whenever you begin getting ready till after you make your grand exit from the reception. While packages vary, most include about 6 to 12 hours to cowl every little thing from preceremony occasions (getting ready together with your bridesmaids or first-look pictures) to the end of the reception. It's usually better to pay for extra protection if there's a chance you'll run over and also you definitely want your photographer there till the tip (time beyond regulation is normally charged at a higher hourly rate). Take note of whether or not you will wish to do an engagement shoot or have your photographer shoot different events throughout your marriage ceremony weekend. Before selecting one of the best one you may must do some homework. Cautious research and selectiveness regarding professional abilities is demand earlier than final choice.Once your wedding has happened, you’re going to wish to get your arms in your photos asap. But it's going to take a while before you'll have them in your palms. After you select "the one" photographer for you, the most important thing is to have signal on the contract.

5. CONCENTRATE ON YOUR RIGHTS AND PERSIST WITH CONTRACT

The contract should include delivery timeline, will you get hi-res JPGs or will you must order prints through the photographer? What publication rights will your photographer have? If you need control of the place your pictures are printed, ask for that prematurely. Generally asking photographers to not publish your work means they cost you extra, since free promoting is what retains their costs down. Generally that’s worth it. And finally, find out for those who’ll get entry to your unprocessed photographs.

Photographer in San Diego

You can contact Photographer San Diego a premier photographer and videographer in San Diego. They do Family, Couples, and Maternity Photography, Engagement and Wedding Photography and Special Event Videography.

#Photographer San Diego

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isearchgoood · 5 years ago

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When indexing goes wrong: how Google Search recovered from indexing issues & lessons learned since.

Most of the time, our search engine runs properly. Our teams work hard to prevent technical issues that could affect our users who are searching the web, or webmasters whose sites we index and serve to users. Similarly, the underlying systems that we use to power the search engine also run as intended most of the time. When small disruptions happen, they are largely not visible to anyone except our teams who ensure that our products are up and running. However, like all complex systems, sometimes larger outages can occur, which may lead to disruptions for both users and website creators.

In the last few months, such a situation occurred with our indexing systems, which had a ripple effect on some other parts of our infrastructure. While we worked as quickly as possible to remedy the situation, we apologize for the disruption, as our goal is to continuously provide high-quality products to our users and to the web ecosystem.

Since then, we took a closer, careful look into the situation. In the process, we learned a few lessons that we'd like to share with you today. In this blog post, we will go into more details about what happened, clarify how we plan to communicate better if such things happen in the future, and remind website owners of the channels they can use to communicate with us.

So, what happened a few months ago?

In April, we had several issues related to our index. The Search index is the database that holds the hundreds of billions of web pages that we crawled on the web and that we think could answer some of our users’ queries. When a user enters a query in the Google search engine, our ranking algorithms sort through those pages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second. Here is more information on what happened.

1. The indexing issue

To start it off, we temporarily lost part of the Search index. Wait... What? What do you mean “lost part of the index?” Is that even possible?

Basically, when serving search results to users, to accelerate the speed of the service, the query of the user only “travels” as far as the closest of our data centers supporting the Google Search product, from which the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is generated. So when there are modifications to the composition of the index (some pages added and removed, documents are merged, or other types of data modification), those modifications need to be reflected in all of those data centers. The consequence is that users all over the world are consistently served pages from the most recent version of the index.

Google owns and operates data centers (like the one pictured above) around the world, to keep our products running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - source

Keeping the index unified across all those data centers is a non trivial task. For large user-facing services, we may deploy updates by starting in one data center and expand until all relevant data centers are updated. For sensitive pieces of infrastructure, we may extend a rollout over several days, interleaving them across instances in different geographic regions. source

So, as we pushed some planned changes to the Search index, on April 5th parts of the deployment system broke, on a Friday no-less! More specifically: as we were updating the index over some of our data centers, a small number of documents ended up being dropped from the index accidentally. Hence: “we lost part of the index.”

Luckily, our on-call engineers caught the issue pretty quickly, at the same time as we started picking up chatter on social media (thanks to everyone who notified us over that weekend!). As a result, we were able to start reverting the Search index to its previous stable state in all data centers only a few hours after the issue was uncovered (we keep back-ups of our indexes just in case such events happen).

We communicated on Sunday, April 7th that we were aware of the issue, and that things were starting to get back to normal. As data centers were progressively reverting back to a stable index, we continued updating on Twitter (on April 8th, on April 9th), until we were confident that all data centers were fully back to a complete version of the index on April 11th.

2. The Search Console issue

Search Console is the set of tools and reports any webmaster can use to access data about their website’s performance in Search. For example, it shows how many impressions and clicks a website gets in the organic search results every day, or information on what pages of a website are included and excluded from the Search index.

As a consequence of the Search index having the issues we described above, Search Console started to also show inconsistencies. This is because some of the data that surfaces in Search Console originates from the Search index itself:

the Index Coverage report depends on the Search index being consistent across data centers.

when we store a page in the Search index, we can annotate the entry with key signals about the page, like the fact that the page contains rich results markup for example. Therefore, an issue with the Search index can have an impact on the Rich Results reports in Search Console.

Basically, many Search Console individual reports read data from a dedicated database. That database is partially built by using information that comes from the Search index. As we had to revert back to a previous version of the Search index, we also had to pause the updating of the Search Console database. This resulted in plateau-ing data for some reports (and flakiness in others, like the URL inspection tool).

Index coverage report for indexed pages, which shows an example of the data freshness issues in Search Console in April 2019, with a longer time between 2 updates than what is usually observed.

Because the whole Search index issue took several days to roll back (see explanation above), we were delayed focusing on fixing the Search Console database until a few days later, only after the indexing issues were fixed. We communicated on April 15th - tweet - that the Search Console was having troubles and that we were working on fixing it, and we completed our fixes on April 28th (day on which the reports started gathering fresh data again, see graph above). We communicated on Twitter on April 30th that the issue was resolved- tweet.

3. Other issues unrelated to the main indexing bug

Google Search relies on a number of systems that work together. While some of those systems can be tightly linked to one another, in some cases different parts of the system experience unrelated problems around the same time.

In the present case for example, around the same time as the main indexing bug explained above, we also had brief problems gathering fresh Google News content. Additionally, while rendering pages, certain URLs started to redirect Googlebot to other unrelated pages. These issues were entirely unrelated to the indexing bug, and were quickly resolved (tweet 1 & tweet 2).

Our communication and how we intend on doing better

In addition to communicating on social media (as highlighted above) during those few weeks, we also gave webmasters more details in 2 other channels: Search Console, as well as the Search Console Help Center.

In the Search Console Help Center

We updated our “Data anomalies in Search Console” help page after the issue was fully identified. This page is used to communicate information about data disruptions to our Search Console service when the impact affects a large number of website owners.

In Search Console

Because we know that not all our users read social media or the external Help Center page, we also added annotations on Search Console reports, to notify users that the data might not be accurate (see image below). We added this information after the resolution of the bugs. Clicking on “see here for more details” sends users to the “Data Anomalies” page in the Help Center.

Index coverage report for indexed pages, which shows an example of the data annotations that we can include to notify users of specific issues.

Communications going forward

When things break at Google, we have a strong “postmortem” culture: creating a document to debrief on the breakage, and try to avoid it happening next time. The whole process is described in more detail at the Google Site Reliability Engineering website.

In the wake of the April indexing issues, we included in the postmortem how to better communicate with webmasters in case of large system failures. Our key decisions were:

Explore ways to more quickly share information within Search Console itself about widespread bugs, and have that information serve as the main point of reference for webmasters to check, in case they are suspecting outages.

More promptly post to the Search Console data anomalies page, when relevant (if the disturbance is going to be seen over the long term in Search Console data).

Continue tweeting as quickly as we can about such issues to quickly reassure webmasters we’re aware and that the issue is on our end.

Those commitments should make potential future similar situations more transparent for webmasters as a whole.

Putting our resolutions into action: the “new URLs not indexed” case study

On May 22nd, we tested our new communications strategy, as we experienced another issue. Here’s what happened: while processing certain URLs, our duplicate management system ran out of memory after a planned infrastructure upgrade, which caused all incoming URLs to stop processing.

Here is a timeline of how we thought about communications, following the 3 points highlighted just above:

We noticed the issue (around 5.30am California time, May 22nd) We tweeted about the ongoing issue (around 6.40am California time, May 22nd) We tweeted about the resolution (around 10pm California time, May 22nd)

We evaluated updating the “Data Anomalies” page in the Help Center, but decided against it since we did not expect any long-term impact for the majority of webmasters' Search Console data in the long run.

The confusion that this issue created for many confirmed our earlier conclusions that we need a way to signal more clearly in the Search Console itself that there might be a disruption to one of our systems which could impact webmasters. Such a solution might take longer to implement. We will communicate on this topic in the future, as we have more news.

Last week, we also had another indexing issue. As with May 22, we tweeted to let people know there was an issue, that we were working to fix it and when the issue was resolved.

How to debug and communicate with us

We hope that this post will bring more clarity to how our systems are complex and can sometimes break, and will also help you understand how we communicate about these matters. But while this post focuses on a widespread breakage of our systems, it’s important to keep in mind that most website indexing issues are caused by an individual website’s configuration, which can create difficulties for Google Search to index that website properly. For those cases, all webmasters can debug issues using Search Console and our Help center. After doing so, if you still think that an issue is not coming from your site or don’t know how to resolve it, come talk to us and our community, we always want to take feedback from our users. Here is how to signal an issue to us:

Check our Webmaster Community, sometimes other webmasters have highlighted an issue that also impacts your site.

In person! We love contact, come and talk to us at events. Calendar.

Within our products! The Search Console feedback tool is very useful to our teams.

Twitter and YouTube!

Posted by Vincent Courson, Google Search Outreach

from Google Webmaster Central Blog https://ift.tt/2OUXvSm If you like this post please don't forget to share it. Source Of this Content is https://ift.tt/1uWlqOh More Posts You Will Like. Search Engine Optimization Techniques Video Tutorial 2018 Seo Tutorial For Beginners Step By Step Video 2018 Seo Tutorial Video In Hindi 2018 Complete Seo Tutorial 2018 Seo Tutorial Youtube 2018 Seo Tutorial For Beginners Pdf 2018 Seo Tutorial For Beginners Youtube 2018 Seo Tutorial W3school 2018 Seo Tutorial Step By 2018 via Blogger https://ift.tt/2MfaRH0 #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

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oscopelabs · 6 years ago

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3D, Part 1: James Cameron and the Broken Promise of the Third Wave by Vadim Rizov

[Note: This essay is the first in a two-part series on 3D. Part 2, coming soon, will discuss the unexpected peak of 3D as an artistic form. —ed.]

It’s not fair to say that James Cameron ruined projection standards by pushing for a digital changeover—the industry impetus was already under way—but Avatar left less of an impression as a movie than as technological advocacy, resulting in unintended, still-lingering side effects. Cameron dreamed of 3D cinema arriving, finally, at what he viewed as its overdue narrative fruition; he couldn’t have imagined compromising projection standards or undermining film archiving in the process. This is a two-part essay: The first is a grim recap of the Third Wave of 3D, which has unfolded over the last decade. The second will advocate for a secret classic of 3D cinema at its inadvertently experimental peak.

****

The not-too-reductive standard narrative goes like this: 3D was popularized contemporaneously with widescreen in the ‘50s as half of a two-pronged initiative to lure audiences away from their TV screens by giving the theatrical experience something unavailable at home. By decade’s end, widescreen was normalized; ’60s and ‘70s one-offs excepted, 3D wasn’t. 1980’s Comin’ at Ya! kicked off its second wave, which had a similarly short lifespan. In both runs, 3D failed to transition from passing gimmick to standard filmmaking option, mostly due to the diminishing thrill of seeing things flying at you, but also due to technological flaws that made the results physically difficult to watch. This history’s a bit of an oversimplification: like sound, color, and widescreen (all of which were experimented with long before they became standard options), 3D had test-run incarnations well before its ‘50s boom. Still, this story is largely accurate. So what makes the third wave different?

Cameron’s ideal 3D would be to create totally immersive worlds, refusing to throw objects at viewers the way the first two 3D waves had done. These effects were presumably cheap grabs for attention, while Cameron was focused more on depth rather than breaking the proscenium. In a (troublesomely unattributed) quote from 2009, a collaborator summed up his approach: “There’s a scene early in [Avatar] where something jumps out of the screen. Jim said, `I just did that so that they would know I know how to do it. But then I stopped doing it because that’s not what 3D is; 3D is bringing the audience completely into the environment of the movie.’” Narrative disruption was not on the agenda; Cameron’s films have always followed conventional dramatic arcs, and Avatar has a particularly unchallenging (“archetypal”) story. This meant yoking 3D to digital projection, which would straighten out the format’s numerous problems once and for all by eliminating both the visual eyestrain and eyeline problems of watching 3D, either polarized (the default standard until digital) or in anaglyph (the infamous red-and-blue glasses format that became a stand-in image for the format, despite being relatively rare) and the double potential for error caused by an incompetent projectionist. Cameron had spent years preparing audiences—and, more importantly, the industry—for a digital conversion. In 2005, he, George Lucas, and Peter Jackson appeared at ShoWest, the trade theater convention to boost for 3D and, by association, digital projection. “I’m giving you guys plenty of warning,” Cameron said. “You’ve got two years to get ready.” His timeline was off, the larger idea was not: In 2009, 16,000 screens worldwide were digital-ready. The next year, that had shot up to 36,000.

It’s not clear digital projection is the optimal way to see Avatar; the late 3D advocate Ray Zone saw the film five times in multiple formats in its first run, concluding not only that film-based IMAX 3D (with two 70mm projectors running simultaneously) was the correct way to see the film, but that “One hint that IMAX 3-D 15/70mm was the native 3-D format for Avatar was that the new large platters would only hold two hours and forty minutes of 15/70mm film—the exact running time of the film.” Nonetheless, Avatar’s overwhelming success sped up a slow-moving push to digital conversion, which the industry had been inching towards for some time. George Lucas had some digital screenings of Phantom Menace, but locally, I remember digital first rearing its head at the arthouse—specifically Austin’s long-closed four-screen Dobie Theatre, an independent that had by then been bought by Landmark Theatres. The arthouse chain went in early for digital projectors, a bright future ushered in Windows Media Player 9. (From a press release at the time: “The film is a milestone in digital origination — a genuine work of art that takes full advantage of new technology. Windows Media 9 Series will show it in all its glory.”) “We can hear the techies in the crowd oohing and ahhing already,” The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov wrote. “It'll only be a matter of time before the entire industry goes digital and the notion of scratched and blotchy film and frazzled frame adjustments will seem very quaint indeed. Progress, baby. We live for it.” My first screening in that format was Russian Ark, Alexander Sokruov’s one-take Hermitage film that would have been impossible to realize on celluloid, with its inherent time limits on how long each reel can be. That projection (the Dobie was only one of four US theaters to play it that way in the film’s initial run) made sense: digital in, digital out.

Still, the stakes of first digital conversion were relatively small; Avatar’s success upped digital’s presence significantly while coupling it to 3D. This is the part that’s different: where previous pushes for 3D worked with (extensively) modified versions of existing film hardware, this time the medium’s perfection accelerated the wholesale rethinking of film production and exhibition. Striking and shipping 35mm prints was expensive, as was paying qualified projectionists, and said prints would get beat up; the longer you waited to see a film, odds were the worse it would look. And “qualified” projectionists certainly weren’t the baseline standard by any means: I remember going to see Talk to Her improperly projected in 2002, the frame misaligned so that the bottom of the frame showed as a sliver at the top from start to finish. (Here’s a much more dramatic projection fail story from back in the day; probably everyone has at least one.) As with any new tech rollout, unforeseen problems followed: smaller theaters crowdsourced funds for new projectors or risked going out of business, digital files proved anything but foolproof in practice, a push for digital archiving placed the history of film at risk as new storage formats proved highly unstable relative to well-preserved film. (This last sentence is a heavily compressed version of what David Bordwell tracked at length in his highly recommended “Pandora’s Digital Box” series.) More succinctly, this is the first time 3D introduced a specific ghost in the machine: every time you go to a multiplex to see a movie that looks way too dark, the odds are good someone left the 3D lens on, and no one’s around who can fix it or who would even care to. What started as an attempt to perfect 3D had the inadvertent effect of undoing 2D digital projection standards.

Again, none of this is directly James Cameron’s fault. He’s just the one who helped push through a change faster than it might have been implemented otherwise. Avatar’s blockbuster breakthrough was followed the next year by Alice in Wonderland, which harvested a billion-plus dollars worldwide, making the case that it didn’t matter whether 3D was native or, as in Tim Burton’s film, post-converted. Not a year later, Jeffrey Katzenberg—another 3D booster—was already worried “the bloom was off the rose” because cynical types “thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn't care, or wouldn't know the difference.” Five years later, Katzenberg was blunter, quoting (intentionally or not) Easy Rider to convey the extent of his disappointment: “we blew it.” 3D’s never had as big a year since 2010: its revenue has declined every year since, and production of 3D films has gone down. The technology stuck, but 3D’s potential as a normative storytelling tool remains once again questionable until further notice.

Setting aside the grim trajectory of 3D’s current wave, which has seen revenue (and audience demand) for the format decrease, it’s worth reflecting on Cameron’s original idea that 3D would add “depth” to the familiar, instead of a better brand of comin-at-ya effects. For years, whenever people would ask which 3D movies I liked, I’d say Yogi Bear. This is (not entirely) a smartass answer: obviously Goodbye to Language would be a better response, but Godard sought to dismantle all 3D’s rules one event shot at a time, and no one will (be able to) follow up on its visual inquiries. Pina made visual sense (the performers are dancing outside, depth is important), Hugo looked neat, and Tron: Legacy was a cool lightshow (though that had more to do with sheer color overload and Daft Punk’s super-loud score as rendered on the biggest speakers theatrically available, and a 3D expert friend swears it has some of the worst use of the medium he’s ever seen); otherwise, my 3D sampling has mostly been review assignments of bad-looking movies. The worst are the post-converted monstrosities. A real low here was the new Pete’s Dragon, which Disney screened in 3D: it looked extremely dark, which was predictable, but worse, a bunch of shots which were clearly shallow-focus, had all been rendered as three to four separate planes of depth, casting blurry background areas in semi-sharp relief, each shot an unintentional diorama. It was sort of possible to tell what the compositional intent was, but impossible to really envision it.

So Yogi Bear is peak 3D. Why not? At a cost of $80 million, Yogi Bear renders a depth-filled Jellystone Park entirely on par with Pandora, with all of the depth and none of the tacky colors. Both movies tell stories, both benefit from depth to spatially reconstruct a largely external environment: the differences are mostly details. In an interview Google will no longer let me find, but which I swear I remember, Cameron said only 19 shots (or thereabouts, let me hedge) in Avatar featured zero CG. These are, I presume, the shots of Jake Sully back on base; to me, they’re easily the most memorable parts of the movie, capturing the full depth of a set (and its metal walls) in a way that’s way more compelling than a fully rendered fake ecosystem . What if Cameron was wrong and 3D is, fundamentally, not just a way to enhance immersiveness but one which, when deployed in the non-CG constructed world, can recode the nuts and bolts of narrative filmmaking visual language itself? In Part II, I’ll look back at the much-derided second wave of ‘80s 3D to make the case that 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, a little-regarded Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off, is one of the format’s greatest, most progressive and inadvertently suggestive moments.

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cbdorigin-blog · 6 years ago

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The History of CBD: A Brief Overview

While decades of cannabis prohibition may lead some to assume that the therapeutic benefits of CBD are a recent discovery, that’s far from the truth.

The first documented use of cannabis-derived medicine dates back to 2737 BC when Chinese Emperor Sheng Neng used a cannabis-infused tea to aid with a variety of ailments including memory, malaria, rheumatism, and gout.

Queen Victoria is believed to have used CBD to alleviate menstrual cramps during her reign, which ended in 1901.

Throughout history, cannabis had served as a valuable therapeutic resource; however, during the rise of modern medicine, it was not recognized by most in the medical community due to a lack of scientific evidence.

It wasn’t until 1839, when Irish physician and medical researcher, William B. O’Shaughnessy, published a study which investigated the plant’s therapeutic effects, that researchers did begin to consider the medical applications of cannabis.

In his study, which was then quite controversial, O’Shaughnessy explored the rudimentary effects of cannabis and thoroughly described its potential medical applications, particularly as an anesthetic.

While the Irish researcher may have not realized it then, he had just opened the door towards the discovery of the compounds that would one day be referred to as cannabinoids.

The Discovery of Cannabinoids

Nearly a century after O’Shaughnessy published his study, advancements in research and technology revealed the presence of compounds within the cannabis plant.

The first discovery of an individual cannabinoid was made, when British chemist Robert S. Cahn reported the partial structure of Cannabinol (CBN), which he later identified as fully formed in 1940.

Two years later, American chemist, Roger Adams, made history when he successfully isolated the first cannabinoid, Cannabidiol (CBD). His research is also responsible for the discovery of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

Early Research of Cannabinoid Pharmacology

During the early stages of cannabis research, scientists had limited knowledge of cannabinoid structure and an only partial understanding of the biological composition contained within the plant.

Because of this, early researchers could not accurately determine which compound was causing which effect.

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam made the first breakthrough towards understanding the effects of individual cannabinoids in 1963 when he successfully identified the stereochemistry of CBD.

A year later, Mecholam’s discovered the stereochemistry of THC, which revealed the cannabinoids direct relationship to the euphoric effects associated with marijuana use and disassociated CBD as a mind-altering compound.

As research advanced, a landmark victory occurred, when New Mexico passed the 1978 Controlled Substances Therapeutic Research Act, a bill which legally recognized the medicinal value of cannabis.

The momentum continued during the 1980s as Dr. Mechoulam and his team conducted a study on the potential application of CBD for the treatment of epilepsy as a hypnotic.

In the study, Mechoulam and his team administered daily doses of 300mg of CBD to study a group of 8 subjects. After just four months of treatment, half of the subjects stopped having seizures and the others exhibited a decrease in the frequency of their seizures.

This was a huge breakthrough that had the potential to change the lives of more than 50 million epilepsy sufferers from around the world.

Unfortunately, the discovery was not as publicized any type of breakthrough, due to the stigmas towards cannabis during that time.

The work of Dr. Mechoulam and the other early cannabis pioneers would not go in vain though.

Less than a decade later, interest in the therapeutic applications of cannabinoids revealed the discovery of additional cannabinoids, further understanding of cannabinoid structure, and the amazing breakthrough of our body’s Endocannabinoid System, a network of receptors that interact with receptors found in cannabinoids.

As research progressed, it would eventually lead to an explosion of interest across the United States.

The Rise of CBD in the United States

In 1996, California passed Proposition 215, making it the first state to legalize medical marijuana

Within a few years, 7 other states followed suit, including:

Oregon, Alaska, Washington (1998)

Maine (1999)

Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado (2000)

With the legalization of medical marijuana, patients in those states now had legal access to cannabis, and researchers could expand their studies into cannabinoid medical uses.

This prompted research into the potential of CBD for the treatment of a variety of ailments such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and numerous neurodegenerative diseases.

While the stigma towards cannabis had begun to shift, it still fell under a very gray area of the law, and because of CBD’s close relationship to the controversial plant, it was judged under those same laws.

While the distinction between CBD and the other cannabinoids was more known throughout the scientific community, it was foreign knowledge amongst those who could actually impact these laws – the general public.

Based on surveys from 1998-2002, more than 2 out of 3 Americans opposed cannabis legalization. One of the major factors that contributed to America’s opposition at the time was the prevalence of stigmas like “marijuana is a gateway drug” and others of the sort. This led Americans to believe that cannabis is dangerous, addictive, and harmful.

Based on the country’s current position towards cannabis at that time, changing their beliefs, educating the masses, and enacting CBD-specific laws seemed impossible, with a timeline of 25-40 years being optimistic.

But in the 2000s, an interesting phenomenon began to happen.

People began to share their personal experiences with others.

From Rick Simpson, a man who found relief from a rare form of skin cancer to countless others––the unique and moving stories of CBD-users revealed how CBD could deliver relief from conditions like anxiety, depression, insomnia, arthritis, fibromyalgia and more.

The genuine, organic nature of the stories and the openness of those to share their personal and vulnerable experiences for the purpose of helping others fueled a surge of awareness across the country.

Then, in 2010, a powerful story about the health benefits of CBD emerged and ignited the movement that would change the world forever.

The Amazing Story of Charlotte Figi

Charlotte Figi, a young girl in Colorado, was born in 2006 with a very rare form of chronic epilepsy known as Dravet Syndrome.

Dravet Syndrome is a very rare and devastating form of epilepsy that affects approximately 1 in every 16,000 to 21,000 infants.

By the age of just four, Charlotte had lost much her ability to walk, talk, and eat, and experienced 300 seizures per week.

While her parents had tried every option modern medicine had to offer and some, they realized that traditional doctors could not help their daughter and hesitantly turned to cannabis when Charlotte was 5.

After consuming a small dose of CBD oil extracted from a high-CBD cannabis strain, Charlotte’s seizures ceased almost immediately.

After hours had passed and Charlotte didn’t have a seizure, Charlotte’s parents realized that CBD had worked.

Today, Charlotte experiences 2 to 3 seizures per month, which has literally restored her opportunity to live a normal life. In an interview with CNN, Charlotte’s parents confirm that their daughter is happy and thriving as any normal girl and believe everyone should know about what CBD did for their daughter.

As a symbol for hope, the inspiring story of Charlotte Figi, Rick Simpson, and the countless others who have shared their experience, has fueled a massive level of support, awareness, and passion, which continues to drive the CBD movement forward today.

CBD in the US Today

In the years since Charlotte’s story, the stigma towards CBD and cannabis in America has dramatically changed.

Those that once opposed cannabis, now turn to CBD for relief, and its therapeutic properties are helping to change the lives of people around the country.

We are still just on the brink of this great movement, which is continuing to thrive at exponential rates, surpassing everyone’s expectations and achieving the impossible.

Here are just a few of the landmark events that have occurred:

There has been a massive growth of awareness and surge in the retail sales of CBD, leading analyst to predict that the CBD market could reach a value of $22 billion by 2022

Research has revealed even more therapeutic applications of CBD

Hemp-derived CBD was federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill

The FDA approved of a CBD-based oral solution called Epidolex

CBD products are now being sold online in stores across the country, including major retailers like 711, Sephora, and Neiman Marcus.

The Future of CBD

While the perception towards CBD has progressed dramatically over the years, CBD still is not fully normalized across the country. There are still many who stand in opposition to CBD and other cannabis-derived compounds and many more who aren’t aware of their benefits.

In order for CBD to reach its full potential and change the lives of as many people as possible, there’s still more work that needs to be done. While there may be some challenges ahead, the strength of the CBD community has shown that nothing is going to stand in its way.

CBD is here to stay.

I hope that this brief article has helped to inform you about the rich history of this amazing cannabinoid and, more importantly, I hope that it has inspired you to learn more and become more involved with this amazing movement.

Cannabis compounds like CBD have the potential to impacts the lives of millions of people, and with continued effort from all of us, it can change the world!

Spread the word and keep a lookout for our next article!

Thanks for reading!

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