#then I realised their designs are like inverses of each other | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

deadboyfriendd · 10 months ago

Note

hello, i hope you are well and that the holidays are treating you gently! in response to an ask i sent in earlier and you talked about cochise and your inspo being blood meridian:

firstly apologies for the length of this reply! OMG!!! wow thank you so much for this incredibly thoughtful answer and yes ofc i would love to talk to you about writing or anything else anytime!! i haven't read blood meridian but i've heard lots of good things about it, i just tend to get squeemish at graphic violence but i'm willing to give it a go to see how the original work, as well as your derivative (i mean that as a compliment) work handle violence and keep it from being simple shock value and mean something in your respective stories. i also haven't read cochise but something tells me i should do my homework. in any case, excited to analyse violence! you mentioned that stone gothic helped you establish the kind of narratives you're interested in and i'm excited to see how you develop and build on the tones and structures you excelled in in that fic!

it's also interesting that you're designing a reader character who sounds quite different from ones you wrote before, naive and cloudy doesn't sound the same as one who realises they just have to keep going on, and that's honestly really brave of you! stone gothic reader sounds similar but hallmark and the 50 first dates girl sound more in line with another sort of fmc. lots of writers tend to write a specific sort of character and it's not necessarily a bad thing, why fix something that ain't broke/write what you know, etc etc, but i am excited to see how you face that challenge on!

I also like the idea that both of them bring some sort of change out to each other. i really really love the line you brought up, "i will not know gentleness in the way i love you". it's very beautiful, i went and re read the letters until i found it and it touched me in a new way. firstly, thank you for talking about your inspirations, that's always great to hear from any artist and it's amazing how much art inspires other art and takes themes and ideas and reshapes them for new stories and purposes! that line is so good and i deeply love the concept of love as softening, of melting, of turning someone who has seen a lot and reminds them of the gentleness that still exists in the world. but the inverse of that that you're planning, of a reader who becomes stronger, more practical, a little more aware of what's going around her, is also a new and exciting thing to think about love! a lot of people, me included, think about love the first way! one of the first qualities i'd want any partner of mine to have is gentle, kind, soft, but the idea that love can also be expressed in making you "harder", stronger, more smarter, worldly, just, i guess more capable? is interesting! its especially interesting because i think it relates somewhat to how a lot of first generation immigrants i think conceptualise love, including my parents, which funnily enough, in certain aspects i show you can explain the western frontier (it's not a one to one match. but. certain aspects, especially since many cowboys were people of colour.). for my mom, for eg, loving my dad was largely an endeavor of mutual success in a new country. their love was made of shoveling snow and breaking ice and living with people they didn't really understand and a lot of that meant becoming smarter and quicker on their feet, and sure they're gentle and nice, but there's also a lot of bonding that happens when you're both working and moving together in a world that's out to get you, and that's an interesting way to make the romance actively part of her character growth, and imbues it with a sense of theme instead of another plot point for the sake of it.

as for the garrison mentality, lmaoooo i do sort of love when nature is seen as a great terrifying unknowable thing and omg!! doc hollidays' last words being "well, i'll be damned" as he went onto the gentle goodnight when he he was sure he'd die a violent death is both ironic and i think, idk if you mean to make it as one, but a very juicy character trait to deal with in a romance. someone who is very sure that they will perish to the forces of destiny and feel a sense of inevitable destiny about it bc of the things they've seen, and instead be actively surprised by the gentleness of their end or the overall tenderness that still exists in the world, is all very delicious, and a complex i absolutely adore. the world can be cruel and evil and chaotic but it can be just as tender and good and soft if we really look for it, especially if we see it in the faces of the people we love! i am also very curious to see if there will be some pedestal-putting of reader at the hands of steve as you mentioned that she is running away from something that steve hasn't really considered a dark past of her own....wondering how he might react when he finds out this person he saw no violence in may have some blood in their path at all and the kind of toll that it could take....all in all incredibly excited to see whatever you're cooking with and it's obvious that there's some real heat in your kitchen!

my apologies for the essay in your askbox, i just found your answer to my original director's cut question so interesting and it's always fun connecting with people and asking them to discuss their art! also, i talked a bit about things in your answer that interested me and how i thought they'd play out, i hope it goes without saying that whatever you decide to do in your story is the right thing to do, especially on a free platform, and any speculation on my part is just excitement and curiosity of a project that sounds interesting and has a very clear passion behind it, which is always something to admire! death of the author and all that is fine, but i believe toni morrison more when she says reading is an act done by writers and readers together! again, hope you're doing good, and excited for bisbee, friend! much love <3 :) !!!

Hi! Sorry I'm just now getting back!

I will say Blood Meridian is VERY graphic and very sudden with the violent onslaught of violent events. If you are squeamish I would avoid reading it to be completely honest, for the sake of readability, historical accuracy, and the general appeal to audience that my readers are, I'm not going to write in several events even remotely adjacent to Blood Meridian in Bisbee. The violence that I do write in is going to be more easily palatable and necessary for character development. Stone Gothic really helped me develop that melodramatic tone and how I can write in a love story with debilitating hurdles. I ended up falling in love with this form of writing and have written it in several different fics: SITG, The bisbee and Cochise Universes, and a lot of my WIPs. I think Bisbee's reader's downfall is ultimately naive, yet is using that personal to ultimately mask the fact that she is painfully self aware. It has been really helpful to me so far to pull pieces from my other characters- who ultimately contain pieces of me- and stitch them together to create a different worldview.

I think a really big part of it so far is that writing has, like a lot of other people on this platform, held some sort of catharsis for me. It is a way for me to write out and process things and understand that, even though I'm hard to love, I'm not impossible to love. The Stains in the Granite reader really helped me through that. The house had such a big part in the actual fic because the street was based off of my childhood home and the house I grew up in! I actually lived down the street from a Dr. Cullen who was a dentist and had yellow show-quality labs! The SITG reader helped me find that part of myself that I knew was mean and helped me process that, even though I am not an internet personality with a shining smile like Disney on ice, that I am a real person that is worthy of being loved. My Nellie reader was how I was learning to process major grief as an adult and trying to navigate those feelings for the first time in my life. It helped me metabolize and marinate in those feelings of losing a loved one, losing a past version of yourself, or losing grip on who you thought you were. Nellie is gritty and forward like I am. She is learning how to heal alongside Eddie. The same is going to go for this Elsie character, my reader from Bisbee. She is loud and obnoxious, she pushes steve a little too far, she is naive, and she is ballsy. She is also carrying the baggage of a past life and a past lover.

I am a firm believer that you are a culmination of everyone you have ever met, and the boys in my fics are merely catalysts for change within my readers. I still listen to Valentines Sux by the frights every valentines day because my ex-best-friend and I did it once and drove around town in heart shaped sunglasses and ate shitty chinese food because we thought we were unloveable but at least we had each other. I wear turqoise and paint cactus landscapes because my grammy fell in love with the desert and let us love it, too. I got into the habit of documenting and photographing even the most mundane things in my life to accomodate my best friend who lives across the country. My readers are shining examples of the way we carry pieces on everyone we have ever met like stones in a suitcase.

I can also relate to conceptualizing love through stories of immigration. My grandfather was a Finnish immigrant who joined the US air force, got stationed at the Clark military base in the Philippines, and then met my grandmother! I didn't know my grandfather very well as he died when I was so young, but seeing how that love manifested itself into met needs is so much different than the way Mr. Flea and I love each other or the way my mom and dad love each other. My grandmother is a very cold person, however, she shows love by means of met necessities. She will make sure you are clothed and fed, make sure you are still in school, make sure you are disciplined and poised and polite- but she will not tell you she loves you. My mother was raised coldly this way, and my dad was a child of divorce, born to teen parents in the 70s. My parents conceptualization of love was also not outward, and oftentimes expressed as frustration or overbearing guardianship, yet we were fed and we were clothed and we figured out how to not kill each other together. However, Mr. Flea was also a child of divorce born to teen parents, though his mom his very outwardly affectionate and he is, too. It's really interesting to me to see how our environments really affected the way we love each other and how we had to learn to heal and navigate each other in the six years we've been together, and the four we've lived together. I was 16 when I met him, after all! One of my favorite examples of this is my grammy, on my paternal side. She was one of many children, her father died of complications of Polio later in his life- when she was 13. She doesn't remember him much, but she did know that he was a talented and published author. He wrote westerns! We were able to get our hands on a collection of recounting he had from the family. My grammy and I read through every page and laughed and cried together 1.) because our diction and humor has been so overtly passed down through generations like stamps and 2.) you could tell that he loved his family by the way he wrote, not by the way he showed it.

#flea speaks #flea answers #flea's friends

3 notes · View notes

nightcall99 · 7 months ago

Text

Notes from 22.4.24

The video didn't do much for me, which I expected. It's a good sign. I'd be disappointed if it did because I don't want to connect to information from months ago. That would mean I haven't integrated it yet. We're past it. We're past everything. It did help me confirm that the dog is a literal NPC dog because I recognise that I have no feelings toward it anymore. I used to worry and stuff but it no longer crosses my mind.

Uneventful day but I felt light and happy. My head was empty and I was just completely in the moment. This roller coaster ride has become less upsetting because it's set in that I know how it's going to go now. Not the specifics, I mean the energy of it. Even when I'm deeply irritated or depressed, I know how it's going to go. How many times do we have go through this? I can't play dumb anymore. I mean, those people in the chat play dumb and it's for their own purposes I suppose, but even that, I feel, will come to an end soon. We feel bad, we always feel bad and then we don't. We go back down and then we come back up. It's always the same. Should we keep playing?

You know what's fucking funny, I am Clea. I am her. She is me. Maybe today's video did help me more than I realise, because I remember that this is a fact I always knew. Like the sun rises and sets and my heart beats and I intake breath. I never once fought against the knowledge that she and I having the same HS. I just knew. And I dunno bro, you and me, talking each day like this, I'm sorry but how much deeper can you get? Your essence is deep in this shit. It's hanging around with my essence. I hope I'm not coming across as trying to influence but I think we do that to each other anyway and we can't help it. It's by design. And you and I aren't just hanging around, we're pioneering this shit. I'd bet all the money in the world that we were among the ones who coordinated everything. Yes, we're all one, so everyone did. Blah blah. But like, I'm talking about the fractalized, individualised level. The level of the game where we pretend we are separate essences. You and I. We did this. We must have.

It feels to me like we're on the cusp of something. It feels close. It does. I know, I say this a lot. Nothing I say means anything but it's like I've reached the point where I can just say stuff and it doesn't really matter anymore. The burden is gone, the anxiety. I don't care. The takedown is in a few weeks, the recall is any day now. People are here, people aren't here. Mort was on the side of the dark and he switched sides in this life, and that's why we feel the major ick. Is any of this true? I dunno. Whether it pans out or not, oh well. Live here till a 100? Ok. I want a Hello Kitty walking cane. And then the inverse of all that, is something extraordinary. The possibility that this all could be true, well my god. How can words express such joy? Maybe this is how it goes. Oh I know this is how it goes, because I planned it. In letting go, in giving in, in the absence of struggle (all figures of speech), beyond the appearance of drowning, we are deep diving toward the truth. We are safe. Diving suits, oxygen tanks. Goggles. We are good, fine. More than fine. And I think... I think I see something in the distance. And what if I do? See something. And I perceive it as getting closer? Well I'd smile a bit wouldn't I.

1 note · View note

neopoliitan · 4 years ago

Text

Theory: RWBY’s Oz allusions are played in reverse.

So by now we’re all familiar with the fact that RWBY has multiple characters based on or inspired by characters from L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels - specifically those seeming to have close ties to Ozpin and the old guard. There’s always been a sort of general idea of how each character ties into their allusion, but I’m going to attempt to convince the reader that RWBY’s Oz characters are specifically designed as an inverse or reverse of their Oz counterpart.

Let’s start with someone simple.

Professor Ozpin & The Wizard of Oz

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” is what they say about the Wizard in the Oz books. In the source material, the main cast spend their adventure assuming that the Wizard is a grand magician who can solve all of their problems. As it turns out, he’s little more than a con man who can put on a decent show.

Contrast with Professor Ozpin; while the main four cast members assume he’s just another huntsman, it’s revealed he is an extremely powerful Wizard who has reincarnated potentially thousands of times. He takes the Wizard’s concept and reverses the steps.

Leonardo Lionheart & The Cowardly Lion

Leonardo is one you have to read between the lines for. Despite his role on-screen being portrayed as a one-note coward, he remarks that he’s ‘not the fighter he used to be’, Ozpin speaks somewhat fondly of him in Volume 6 and he was trusted with the protection of a vault.

The Cowardly Lion is, well, cowardly, and at the end of his story ‘gains’ his courage by finding out he had it all along. In contrast, Leonardo seems to be a man who had courage, but lost it at the end of his story.

James Ironwood & The Tin Woodman

Ironwood is a very clear cut case. Characters like Watts remark that his heart has cost him his mind. He’s open, welcoming and apologetic at the start of volume 7. In volumes 2 and 3 he praises Ruby for going after Cinder alone at the dance and tells the students no one will fault them if they leave during the Fall of Beacon. All symptoms of a man who tries his best to care.

But after the fall of Beacon, James’ fixation on finding a solution sees pieces fall apart around him. He’s constantly backed into a corner by Salem and paranoia, and both figuratively and literally cuts himself off to find some small amount of victory, be able to assure himself that he definitely saved someone.

The Tin Man has no heart and ‘gains’ one. James Ironwood had a big heart, but he’s losing it.

Qrow Branwen & The Scarecrow

Qrow Branwen is initially presented as Ozpin’s most trusted lieutenant, to the point he has been granted a small amount of magic with which he can perform scouting missions. But as it turns out, Qrow was kept in the dark to a lot of Ozpin’s history, and the fact he had no plan to defeat Salem, and is shattered by the realisation.

The scarecrow, meanwhile, hopes the Wizard can give him a brain. If we assume the brain is reflective of knowledge, well - the Scarecrow gains it, while Qrow founds out that he knew nothing.

Of course, it’s also worth considering that Qrow’s mental state as of late volume 7 and volume 8 may be reflective of the Scarecrow losing his mind.

Oscar Pine & Tip AKA Ozma

With Oscar, you’re going to have to take my word for how he ties into the Oz lore, as even though he’s been around for five volumes Word of God still hasn’t come out and given us an allusion for him.

In my mind, he’s reflective of Tip, a young boy who lives alone on a farm with a witch-like woman named Mombi. As it turns out, Tip is actually Princess Ozma - kidnapped by Mombi and turned into a lowly farmboy so she could not ascend to the throne of Oz.

So Tip’s true form is Ozma, and Tip was merely a deception.

Meanwhile, Oscar Pine is a young boy who lives alone with his aunt on a farm, but the responsibility of becoming Ozma’s next incarnation is thrust upon him and he resists.

In Oz, the identity of Tip is thrust upon Ozma. In RWBY, the identity of Ozma is thrust upon Oscar. In Oz, Ozma was always the true form of the character; in RWBY, the farmboy is his real self.

And if we’re going backwards... Ozma was forced to become Tip, then became Ozma again. Might Oscar be forced to become Ozma, then regain himself later? We can only hope.

Salem & the Wicked Witch of the West

I can sum this one up extremely simply;

Water is what killed the Wicked Witch of the West at the end of the story. Water is what cursed Salem to never die at the beginning of the story. What this means for her is hard to say, but how the Wicked Witch began may give us a clue on how Salem might end (but who knows).

Professor Theodore & Dorothy

So here’s the skippy - we don’t know nearly enough about Theodore other than his garish wardrobe being an extremely heavy handed reference to Dorothy, but we can still do a bit of exploring for funsies.

So Dorothy’s character arc in Oz is that she wants to get home to Kansas. “There’s no place like home” and all that. If Theodore’s arc is played backwards, it’s possible he may want to leave Vacuo - that might add reasoning to him constantly challenging people to beat him in a fight and take his role as headmaster - he wants to get out of there.

There’s a little more about Theodore that I might write about, specifically regarding that despite it all he may not actually allude to Dorothy and the similarities are a complete misdirect - but that will have to wait till another post.

For now, take what this post has told you into consideration (and also give me the benefit of the doubt because there’s probably a lot of confirmation bias), and go forth into the end of Volume 8 wondering if that Tin Man is going to lose even more of his heart.

While you’re here - maybe check out my RWBY fancomic, Team RAIN, too!

#rwby #rwby theory #rwby discussion #theory #rwby8 #rwby volume 8 #rwby vol8 #rwby volume8 #salem #james ironwood #ozpin #leonardo lionheart #oscar pine #qrow branwen #professor theodore

302 notes · View notes

ouyangzizhensdad · 4 years ago

Text

Romantic subtext vs romantic text (reception of CQL vs MDZS)

Coming across a lot of arguments in favour of CQL’s portrayal of Wangxian’s “romance” or essays by people explaining how they would rewrite the romantic resolution of MDZS, it made me realise how much subtext can be a crowd-pleaser by its very nature.

What is romantic subtext but a romantic tension that never needs to be resolved? And it seems that for many people, subtext might appeal to them more due to the very fact that it is unrealised: people are not likely to find issues with how the creatives actually decided to make the romance blossom if it remains in the bud. With romantic subtext, the narrative does not need to answer questions like: how did they realise their feelings for one another? How did they process them? How do they communicate these feelings? When? In what context? Do they become physically intimate? How? What changes (or none) happen to their relationship dynamic once they are aware of each other’s feelings? How does being in a romantic relationship shape their interactions with the rest of the characters and the world around them? What compromises and difficult decisions are they forced to make as a result of entering this romance? etc.

With subtext, the audience can project into the romantic tension between characters the resolution they want, the one that suits their personal preferences and politics (or just ignore it if they don’t like the idea of the characters being together!). It’s easier not to be disappointed, unless the audience member is solely invested in seeing the romantic tension resolved, regardless of what that resolution would be. And with shows where people are told it’s “super gay” but that they “cannot show the romantic resolution because of censorship,” it’s unlikely that the audience has expectations of seeing any textual exploration of the romance.

In a way, it resembles the logic of the perfectionist who keeps working on something but never finishing it because they know that once the work is finalised, it will be open to judgement, by oneself and others. And it also, in an unrelated note to CQL, makes me wonder how many creatives lean into subtext because they are scared of how they could ever realise the romance in a way that would please any portion of their audience.

When you resolve the romance, people might find a number of issues in the way it unfolds. Maybe the storytelling ends up being weak or inconsistent with the rest of the text. But it might also just be because the audience finds issues with the romance itself. Maybe they believe the declaration of love is underwhelming or, inversely, overdramatic. Maybe people will argue love does not look like that, or that one of the character is being creepy and possessive, or that they don’t actually end up acting like two people in love. Often, you’ll get to see how they are portrayed as a couple, and what their dynamic is. And because there is so much subjectivity in terms of what people prefer in terms of romance, without even mentioning the influence of how a growing number of people believe fiction should only depict (their version of) healthy relationships, or any other political/morality aspects that comes into the equation: it might feel like you’re set up to fail, in a way.

Of course, not all subtext is made equal. Some can be very intentional and “tight” in terms of themes and narrative, which makes it less likely to be interpreted a thousand different ways, but in practice most subtext is in the eyes of the beholder: if you don’t want to see it, you won’t, and if you want to see it (in the long gazes, in the chemistry between the actors, in the loyalty and friendship, etc.), you’ll see it the way you want it to be, as if the subtext were a Rorschach test.

So it makes sense to me that people have more complaints about the book’s romance than CQL’s because, in the novel, there is an actual resolution to criticise: a build-up to a declaration, clearly-explored-within-the-text misunderstandings and internal struggles regarding each other’s romantic feelings, sex scenes, a married life, compromises and a new life together, etc. People can find issues, regardless of how well-founded these criticisms are, with any aspects of the romantic resolution in text. They can be confronted in how the creative had a different vision for the resolution to the text than the one they might have created in their head. But with CQL, they can simply project the resolution they prefer and insist it is the true intention of the spaces in between the text.

I’ve read CQL fics in the past and still come across summaries of post-CQL “Wangxian getting together” fics, and I have to say that 95% of them were (to me) absolutely bland, generic (aka it could be the romantic resolution for any two characters, not specific in the slightest to Wangxian and their dynamic and journey), out of character and/or completely devoid of any interesting thematic explorations. If I had watched CQL with any of these romantic resolutions actually happening in the text, I would have critiqued this resolution to hell and back. But, once again, there is in fact in CQL no resolution, no bringing the romantic subtext forward into the text: and thus, nothing to criticise in terms of how that is resolved. The subtext romance is all potential, all possibility while the realised romance is all there for us to pick apart.

And so, when people say they prefer CQL’s romance, I do have to wonder whether they are actually praising what CQL put forward or instead whatever version of resolved romance they create out of long gazes and declarations of life-long bosom friendship that is, by design, perfectly suited to their own tastes and politics.

#mdzs meta #cql vs mdzs #fandom discussions

346 notes · View notes

welcometowcwmondaynitro · 3 years ago

Text

WCW Monday Nitro 09/09/1996

Shit be exploding, so you know what time it is.

Yes sir.

Once again we are not given a location this week, which generally means the town is too small-time for the big shots at WCW to even consider giving a shout out to. My research tells me this broadcast comes from the Columbus Civic Centre in Columbus, Georgia.

As always we are introduced to our first hour announce team, Schiavone and Zbyszko.

Tony is looking quite smart this evening. Larry as expected has a horrific multcoloured abomination on underneath his jacket. It’s basically his gimmick a this point so whatever.

They talk about how the balance of power has shifted to the nWo and Larry says Giant is “the biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold”, nice ancient reference there, Larry. We get a recap of last week’s awesome show-ending brawl.

Once they’re done wrapping this up, Goldberg’s music plays. What? I check my file - yes, definitely 9th September 1996. Has Goldberg time travelled back to 1996 and changed history by debuting early?

Well, either that is one hell of a disguise or no, actually Goldberg’s theme music was first used by this Japanese guy called Pat Tanaka. It’s really weird seeing this random fella walk out to Goldberg’s music. The crowd boo mildly - I guess just because he’s Japanese? I don’t remember there being any storyline reason to boo him, anyway.

Pat’s opponent is... this.

Looks like a mascot from a early/mid-90s video game brought to life. If this is Super Calo then I am curious as to what regular Calo is like. I am unsure as to what makes this version ‘Super’, but maybe we’ll find out in the upcoming match. Mike Tenay joins the announce crew because it is Calo’s debut and Tenay is the only one likely to know anything about him.

Pat Tanaka vs Super Calo

I was kind of hoping Tanaka would start the match with a spear and then jackhammer Calo into oblivion, but no such luck.

As one would anticipate from a man dressed like a stereotypical kung-fu master in an 80s movie, Tanaka starts the match off with some kicks.

Calo jumps around pointlessly and then gets kicked in the face. Bants.

Tenay tells us Calo’s name and look comes from the “top rap group” in Mexico. He does not name this group. Confusingly wikipedia claims Calo is named after a Mexican rock group with the same name, but his image is meant to convey a rapper. So, just... what? Also what rapper has ever looked like Super Calo? In Mexico is that how rappers dress?

Well anyway this odd fellow somersaults over the ropes onto Tanaka outside of the ring.

The screen then cuts to this.

Then we’re back to the match. OK then.

Tanaka hits Calo with a powerbomb, which leads to Tony talking about him being “so schooled in the martial arts”. Yes, because we all know that classic martial arts move the powerbomb. Often followed by a leg drop and a scorpion deathlock.

The ending to this match is beyond ridiculous.

First, Tanaka puts Calo onto the top turnbuckle.

Neither man seems to know what is meant to happen next, so they awkwardly wrap their arms around each other.

Tanaka then lifts Calo up like he’s going for an inverse piledriver and falls backwards.

Apparently he knocks himself out, gets pinned, and loses.

What an idiot.

Super Calo defeats Pat Tanaka via Pinfall.

Nothing too super about our friend Calo in this one I’m afraid. His victory came largely because Tanaka is a super dunce.

We got some lads in the front row who are big fans of the classic moustache.

They seem quite pleased that Calo emerged victorious.

Just under seven minutes in and we throw back to Mean Gene in the locker room with Rick Steiner. This should be good.

Shirts hanging out of the lockers behind them, as you do.

Gene asks Rick Steiner about Nick Patrick’s questionable officiating - referring to the incident last week where Luger was disqualified in seconds for basically nothing. Rick says that he had Luger, and Gene saw it. Total bullshit as the match had barely started, and Gene does point that out.

Luger walks into the frame as we see last week’s replay. Rick is continually going on about how he was going to win, sounding like a mentally challenged three year old. On the other hand this is a guy who also genuinely thinks he’s a dog, so... I should probably be impressed that he is able to form words and put them into a somewhat coherent structure.

Gene says that Steiner is “a little confused” in the understatement of the century,

Luger tells Rick that he’s “a great tag team wrestler” but he feels like he has the edge in a singles environment. Rick continues to fail to understand basic english and keeps repeating “I can beat you, ask Sting” and then starts calling for Sting.

Gene then ushers Rick away like an unruly child as Luger walks off as well. Gene says that Luger was alluding that Rick “doesn’t have it upstairs”, pointing to his head. Wow, what a dick. Luger didn’t say anything like that. All he implied was that he was a better singles wrestler than Rick. Not sure where Gene has gotten his interpretation from, but my guess is he just wants to stir the pot as usual.

Next it’s nWo announcement time.

Just the usual t-shirt ad with Nash saying “all proceeds go towards the Ric Flair retirement fund”. Joke’s on him, that fund must have accrued some serious cash before it was finally paid out.

We’re back and...

Somebody buy these poor kids some real nWo t-shirts.

Where did these people come from? Did they decide to stop by Nitro after a corporate dinner or something?

Are these pilots in the audience as well? Wtf? Why are all these people coming to the show dressed in their work clothes? Is this a common thing in the States?

Oh, hey, guess what - Glacier debuted. I would say “remember all that hype” but if you’ve been reading this sad collection of nostalgic drivel then you will indeed remember the many Glacier adverts that have been on every Nitro broadcast since May or so. We’re now in September and Glacier finally had his first match... on WCW Pro.

Seriously.

WCW Pro is like... Sunday Night Heat or Velocity in WWE terms. It’s below WCW Saturday Night for fuck’s sake. Tony calls it “one of the most eagerly anticipated debuts ever” - which is why he made his first appearance on WCW FUCKING PRO. Oh WCW, what are you like?

Larry says Glacier will be “a force to be reckoned with”, which, spoiler alert. turns out to be the opposite.

Oh good, these two walking charisma vacuums.

And these two lumbering idiots. WCW, the best wrestling on the planet. How could WWF in 1996 find no way to entice people away from Pat Tanaka vs Super Calo and The AFC vs the Nasty Boys? Seriously. It isn’t that difficult.

The AFC do their usual schtick of singing the Canadian national anthem badly and the crowd get angry because ‘Murica fuck yeah and whatever. The Nasty Boys say “fuck this” and attack the AFC after about 10 seconds of this bullshit, getting the match started.

The Amazing French Canadians Vs The Nasty Boys

You don’t care about this match. I don’t care about this match. Let’s just skip to the end.

Knobbs whacks the eyepatch guy with the flag the AFC brought out. Saggs pins for the win.

The Nasty Boys defeat The Amazing French Canadians via Pinfall.

Mean Gene comes scurrying out to interview the Nastys, for some reason.

Saggs says everybody has been pointing the finger at the Nasty Boys, accusing them of being with the nWo (can’t imagine anybody really cares but OK, sure). Saggs says the Nasty’s are only worried about the tag titles which are in WCW, ergo they aren’t interested in joining the nWo. Does he not realise that faction affiliation is irrelevent as far as challenging for belts is concerned? I mean, Hogan is literally WCW Heavyweight champion at this point in time.

Knobbs says that the Nasty’s don’t care about the nWo, they’re in WCW and they’re coming for Harlem Heat to take the tag team titles. Short and to the point, which is fine by me, even if the Nasty’s appear to be under the mistaken impression- that joining the nWo would invalidate them from challenging for the tag titles.

We’re back from a commercial break to find Scott Norton and Sgt Craig Pittman in the ring.

Sgt Craig Pittman Vs Scott Norton

The commentators bill this as a “hold versus hold” match and I’m not sure what this means, as I was under the impression every match is hold versus hold. But whatever.

After some back and forth Pittman decides that it’s time to ram his head into Norton’s sternum.

It looks pretty painful and not especially effective, but Pittman enjoys it so much he does it again.

They head to the outside of the ring. Norton gets whipped against the guardrail, the entirety of which moves upon impact, but then Norton regains control by slamming Pittman’s shoulder into the ring post.

Norton locks in the armbar but the Sarge will not give up. Long gets onto the ring apron to beg Pittman to give in, but he won’t. WCW, for reasons beyond my understanding, is very careful about protecting Sgt. Craig Pittman. He never gets pushed, as far as I remember, but this man WILL NOT QUIT.

Then...

Ice Train wanders out wearing this abomination. Seriously - what the fuck? It’s like a demin vest with a backpack built in. It’s something you would expect to see an eight-year old girl in the mid-90s wearing over the top of a t-shirt or something. What clothing brand figured that this design was suitable for huge, beefy dudes? I don’t know, but they clearly have a customer in Ice Train.

Train throws in the towel for Pittman.

Scott Norton defeats Sgt. Craig Pittman via Forfeit.

He enters the ring and stares down at Norton, who is looking at Train’s vest top and moobs like “dafuq?”

The two former amigos have a staredown which doesn’t lead anywhere.

Pepboys Power Pin of the Week is a submission. Go figure.

We head to the locker room where Gene-o is with Ric Flair, Arn Anderson and Lex Luger.

Three of these men are dressed appropriately. The other is Lex Luger.

Apparently Sting is supposed to be a part of this interview as well but is nowhere to be found. Luger assures Flair & Arn that Sting is in the building, but the Horsemen are having none of it and are concerned that Sting doesn’t have his head in the game. Flair starts going crazy and practically flings himself into an alternate dimension with his erratic movements.

Like a jet propeller is being put directly in front of his face.

Anyway eventually these two sad sacks come lumbering in...

Mongo looks like he’s about to explode, whilst Benoit as usual appears barely awake. Mongo yells about not being able to count on Luger and Sting. Luger reiterates that Sting is in the building somewhere, he’s just not around for the interview. The Horsemen do seem overly paranoid here - how hard would it be to track Sting down and talk to him if they are this pissed off?

Arn says he’s called ahead to Winston, Salem (where Fall Brawl/War Games is being held) to pre-book himself a hospital room as he assumes he’s going to need one. Seems like a somewhat pessimistic thing to do, but is it even possible to pre-book hospital room? Arn is talking like he’s booked a hotel room for the night. Strange lad. He also suggests Hogan uses battery acid to burn out his eyes which... I mean, don’t give the guy ideas, Arn.

Interview ends with everybody talking over each other and Flair wooing a lot - so, the same as most Horsemen interviews.

People in the crowd are holding these signs which say “nWo - you haven’t seen bad... but it’s coming!” - indeed, Hogan Vs Piper is coming.

We get a recap of this thrilling DDP/Eddie/Chavo storyline which nobody cares about, but why this is recapped is beyond me as the next match has nothing to do with any of those three.

Instead, out comes “the desparado” himself, Joe Gomez.

Somebody throws a wad of paper at him as he enters. Obviously not a fan.

His opponent is Juventud Guerrera, who Tony repeatedly refers to as Juventud Guerrero.

As Juvi enters he runs past these ladies, who appear both baffled and unimpressed with him.

Cold.

Joe Gomez Vs Juventud Guerrera

The match starts off okay, but descends into disaster fairly quickly as Juvi starts trying various lucha things which poor Joe is clearly not comfortable with. First Juvi stands on the apron, jumps onto the ropes as Gomez slowly walks towards him and does this...

It’s clear from this angle alone that there is no way in hell Juvi is going to reach Gomez. In fairness to WCW they switch camera angle just in time to make it look slightly less terrible, although I imagine it was more down to luck than skill. Nonetheless Gomez at least tries to sell the move, falling backwards theatrically.

Weeee! Points for effort if not execution.

This happens next, and thanks to Uproxx “Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro” series (check it out, it’s great) I have a GIF to put into pictures what I would struggle to put into words.

Speaks for itself.

After this Juvi seems to want to go for a hurricanrana from the top turnbuckle but I‘m not sure if they botch this as well or it was the plan, but Juvi ends up backflipping away from the turnbuckle and then catching Gomez with a weak looking dropkick as he jumps towards Juvi.

Juvi just about manages to hit the finishing move...

But even that looks a little bit dodgy. At least Joe just had to lay there for this one. Ref counts to three and mercifully this one is over. Not sure if Gomez or Juvi are to blame for this shitshow, but either way I advise never putting them together again.

Juventud Guerrera defeats Joe Gomez via Pinfall.

For some reason Mean Gene is on the ramp to interview Nick Patrick. Oh good, more of this storyline.

Before they start the interview though, as Juventud walks past Gene and Patrick, Gene says “very good match there on the part of Juventud Guerrera”, then gives Juvi a disdainful look and mutters “guy just kind of... wanders around here”. LOL. Why is Gene throwing shade at poor Juvi? “Guy just wanders around here”, like he’s a lost child or something. I guess Gene is still salty about the interview with Juvi that went wrong a couple of weeks ago, but come on, that was hardly Juvi’s fault. Obvious Gene is still holding a grudge though.

I don’t think anybody really wants to hear from these two ballbags but here we are anyway.

Gene is accusing Patrick of making too many controversial calls for it to just be coincidence, whilst Patrick is accusing Gene of being a shit-stirring cock cheese who needs to get a life. Neither are lying but nobody really cares either. What is funny is that Okerlund is very haughty and dismissive of Patrick - until Patrick threatens to take Gene to court - at which point Gene stutters “well I-I hope that doesn’t happen” before saying “thank you very much Nick Patrick, sir, thank you” to Patrick as he walks off. Pathetic.

Meanwhile Hogan, Hall, Nash and the Giant are outside in the pouring rain putting those nWo flyers with the “you haven’t seen bad... but it’s coming” slogan on random cars. This seems like a total waste of time as by the time the car owners get back to their vehicles the rain would probably have destroyed those flyers anyway. Do these guys really have nothing better to do? Tony tells us the nWo are “literally” in the parking lot - as opposed to what, being there in spirit?

Ted DiBiase is the smartest of the lot as he 1) has an umbrella and 2) isn’t wasting his time putting up useless flyers in the pouring rain. He’s talking to somebody in the car, and the announcers are shitting themselves as to who it might be, as they tend to do. For all they know DiBiase might just be talking to the driver.

“HERE’S A STORY OF TWO BROTHERS, RICK AND SCOTT!”

Just Rick tonight. He comes out doing that sad half-bark he does whenever something is troubling him.

His opponent, of course, is Flexy Lexy.

Rick Steiner Vs Lex Luger

These two are not exactly known as ‘ring generals’ so I am not expecting a classic here. Let’s see, though. Perhaps we will all be pleasantly surprised.

After various arm drags, headlocks, shoulder blocks, and so on, this happens.

Uh...

Yeah. Rick is basically molesting Luger in the ring and keeps this up for a disturbing amount of time. I guess it’s meant to show his amateur wrestling background but it basically just looks like sexual assault. Rick’s hands are going to places they really should not.

Hour two begins with the usual fireworks. Bischoff, Heenan and Tenay come in on commentary for the rest of the show.

Rick hits Luger with a nice powerslam, and Randy Anderson cannot bear to watch the impact. The crowd bark their approval which, personally, I don’t think is helpful. Rick’s clinical lycanthropy is only going to get worse if people bark at him when he does something good. Or bark at him in general, really.

More cuddling. Back away, Rick. Even Randy Anderson is telling him to cut it out at this point.

Luger takes control with a powerslam and signals for the rack. However, before he can attempt his finishing move...

This dicksplash comes running out waving his arms around. Looks like he’s doing the sieg heil there but fairly sure it’s just the timing of the screenshot.

Anyhow, Patrick tells Luger to follow him out the back, yelling something about the nWo beating up Sting.

Considering Patrick’s recent behaviour, Lex, it might not be wise to...

OK. Never mind. Of course Luger goes running after Patrick, abandoning the match entirely and getting himself counted out.

Everyone looking towards the entrance way like “where’s he going?”

Rick Steiner defeats Lex Luger via Countout.

We get a shot of DiBiase talking to the mystery man in the limo. Sting’s voice is heard but it is blatantly piped in from some other promo. He says he’s “tired of the DTA stuff, don’t trust anybody”, so I guess he’s not a fan of Stone Cold Steve Austin. DiBiase pretends to talk to the pre-taped Sting voice until Lex shows up.

A guy who is clearly not Sting gets out of the limo and starts beating up Luger whilst Bischoff screams “NO! NO!”

I have the advantage of hindsight and my monitor is probably bigger than most people’s TVs back in 1996... but still, it’s really obviously not Sting. Were people genuinely fooled by this?

The nWo along with “Sting” beat Luger down and leave him laying in a broken heap in the rain...

It has not been a good night for Luger. First he got yelled at by the Horsemen, then he spent ten minutes getting inappropriately touched by Rick Steiner during their match, then he gets smacked around by the nWo and left on the ground in the pouring rain. Bad times for sure. Although if you’re stupid enough to follow Nick Patrick anywhere...

Luger does manage to get back up but ends up just kind of wandering around in the rain looking confused whilst the nWo flee, leaving the limos parked outside the building.

These bois are not impressed by what they have just seen. Tenay looks like a dad who is about to grab his belt and put a whippin’ on somebody. Bischoff is indignant. Heenan wears the expression of a man who was just forced to sit through every Raw from 2015. Pure torture.

Bischoff says he has an update which is literally “we don’t know where [the nWo] are. I’m sorry. I don’t know”. Well thanks for that. Very helpful.

We get a long recap of last week’s angle including more footage of the amazing all-out brawl that ended the show. Then we get another nWo advert for their t-shirt.

A bunch of random jobbers are outside with Luger and Rick Steiner milling around the limo yelling out “DIBIASE!” - as if he’ll just pop up and be like “sup bois?” - pointless endeavour. Rick Steiner is the only one smart enough to bring an umbrella outside. Let that one sink in. Luger chucks a bunch of stuff out of one of the limos onto the floor which seems unnecessary.

Out comes pre-Flock Billy Kidman. The commentators could not care less, just droning on about Sting’s supposed “defection”.

The other combatant in this contest is Cruiserweight champion Rey Mysterio Jr.

Rey Mysterio Jr Vs Billy Kidman

The announcers spend the entire match in ‘sad voice’, like their dogs have all collectively died. It’s really annoying.

The match spills to the outside very quickly. Rey gets the advantage and rolls Kidman back in. He attempts to jump off the ropes from the apron, but Kidman knows what’s coming and meets Rey with a dropkick to the chest.

Kidman slams Rey in the centre of the ring, runs over to the turnbuckle and leaps off.

Just a two count though. Rey wins the match soon after this by flipping off the ropes onto Kidman.

It looks weak but whatever. This wasn’t anything special.

Rey Mysterio defeats Billy Kidman via Pinfall.

We come back from a commercial and the Dungeon’s of Doom’s “music” is playing, and I put that in inverted commas because it isn’t really music, just a pseudo-creepy OTT villainous laugh accompanied by some kind of chant. Whatever. Normally any sign of the Dungeon is enough to make me want to hang my head in despair, however!

If Meng is involved, it might be somewhat entertaining. Just to note those aren’t two random arms sprouting out of Meng’s shoulders – the Barbarian is behind him.

The announcers are still going on about how tragic Sting’s supposed betrayal is – and Bischoff apologises for “not giving Rey Mysterio the attention he deserves in his match”. I mean, kind of tough to take that apology seriously considering how often this has happened and will continue to happen until Nitro goes out of existence. It is the only time I can recall any commentator in WCW actually apologising for the routine ignoring of the cruiserweights in favour of talking about/complaining about the nWo, though.

These two are the opponents. Yeah, Public Enemy, they definitely deserve that pyro. Sure. Look at them waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

By the way, the commentators are still going on about Sting. I wonder if we’ll get another apology for ignoring this match as well? Not that I’d necessarily blame them here.

Some diehard wrestling fans here. I think we saw them previously – seemingly someone in production has taken a liking to these ladies. They look like they got lost on their way to a PTA meeting, but fuck it, might as well enjoy themselves now. Watch out for the dude behind you though, ladies. That smile worries me a little.

The Faces of Fear Vs Public Enemy

We go to a commercial break, and as soon as we come back Bischoff says “I hate to keep repeating this, but apparently Sting has joined forces with the nWo”. Bullshit, if you hated it that much you’d have shut up about it by now. I mean, jeez, we get it.

This contest is just a brawl, as you’d expect. Not exactly a match for the ages, but all of a sudden, randomly…

This dude on the left appears and begins running/skipping around the ring.

The fuck? It’s like Rockstar Spud’s demented uncle or something.

He briefly chases Jimmy Hart, then just… vanishes? Oh, and by the way, the commentators make no mention of this. They do not acknowledge this at all. Why? Because they’re talking about everything except the match itself. Literally, I’m not kidding, it’s like this match is not happening. It’s like listening to a radio show or a podcast spliced together with unrelated WCW footage.

Wait, what? What’s happening now? The match is ongoing and they just cut to the back. Judging from the faces of these lads you’d think someone died. It’s a sombre scene to say the least – but seriously, why even have the match in the ring? What’s the point? The commentators are acting like it isn’t happening and we cut to an interview as the match is happening. Bischoff doesn’t even note that we’ve cut away from a match in progress, he just says “take it away Gene”, like this is totally normal. Whatever, I guess. It’s not like I’m desperate to see the Faces of Fear versus Public Enemy, but what a bizarre way to structure… everything.

Gene asks Arn to explain what happened in the parking lot earlier. Seemed quite self-explanatory to me and the commentators have not stopped talking about it since it happened, so the viewers really don’t need any extra information.

Arn says he doesn’t give a shit about Luger losing a friend, or that he’s lost a team mate, he’s just shocked. He brings up Sting’s loyalty to WCW.

They actually move to a split-screen here – I guess someone in the production truck remembered there is actually a match going on. It wouldn’t be fair to deprive the dozens of Faces of Fear/Public Enemy fans the chance to see their favourite grapplers go at it.

Anyway, Arn says he has a sick feeling in his stomach, he’s shocked, and he’s out of words. He’s said quite a few already, though, so not really.

Flair stands there with his arms folded, eyeing the audience like a disappointed father.

Luger says he doesn’t have any answers, and that his “best friend in the whole world” stabbed him in the back. He then says he knows where Sting lives and where he works out, and he’s going to go and find him “right now”. Sounds like Lex is planning to murk Sting. However, he should keep in mind this is a guy who only last week tried to murder somebody by chucking a rock through the window of a limo, then stole a police car. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why Sting isn’t in jail. Regardless, I wouldn’t be chasing after him without a good plan.

Flair screams that he’s “sick of it” and just generally yells about how they’re going to beat up the nWo at War Games (including Sting). Arn says “it’s a fight to the death – yours, not ours”. I suppose that was worth emphasising? Also Arn has a tendency to see these matches as ending in death, even though it never comes close to that.

We return to the Faces of Fear/Public Enemy match. By “we” I mean the audience – the commentators are still talking about War Games. I genuinely don’t think they have said anything about the match – oh, wait a minute, Bischoff does mention the match, finally. Although he says the teams are “literally fighting for their lives” which is not exactly accurate. What is up with these people thinking matches are going to end so tragically?

Anyway, the brawling continues for a while and eventually, somehow, Rocco Rock ends up lying on a table. Barbarian heads for the top turnbuckle.

Guys, I don’t foresee this ending well. Seriously, what is the absolute best result of this? Rocco (who can clearly see Barbarian on the turnbuckle) for some reason lays there and lets Barbarian jump on him. It’ll be brutal for both. Or, Rocco moves and Barbarian crashes through the table. Either way Barbarian doesn’t win in this scenario.

Uh oh. Jimmy Hart is absolutely useless at holding Rocco down, kicked away like an insect as Rocco sits up.

That is a fucking sick bump. It’s funny because Barbarian barely takes any serious bumps at all, on Nitro at least, then he decides to say fuck it and leaps to the concrete through a table because YOLO I guess?

Well anyway he dead. Rocco brings a second table into the ring.

Looks pretty old. Nick Patrick wags his finger in disapproval, but incredibly that isn’t enough to persuade Public Enemy to stop. They lay Meng on the table, then Rocco goes to the top turnbuckle for a moonsault…

He almost misses the table entirely, only catching Meng with his legs. The table is weak enough that it breaks despite the soft contact.

You’d think that would be the spot that ends the match, but no. Meng gets up like nothing happened and starts brawling with Rocco again. Barbarian is also somehow revived and back in the ring fighting with Grunge. This is weird because the outside table spot with Barbarian getting wiped out, and then Meng getting put through the table by Rocco’s moonsault, felt like the end sequence of the match. Now it’s like we’re back at the start again. Keep in mind the match has been going for about 10 minutes now. That’s at least 7 minutes longer than is ideal for these teams, really.

Whilst Rocco and Barbarian are hugging it out in the corner, Meng puts the Tongan Death Grip on Grunge and now this one is over.

No explanation as to what the fuck was going on with that random ginger guy running around the ring earlier by the way. Oh well. During the replay Heenan accidentally calls Meng “Haku” and then goes silent immediately. Oops.

The Faces of Fear defeat Public Enemy via Pinfall.

Suddenly Okerlund appears at ringside, accompanied by the Dungeon of Doom.

Maxx, Jimmy Hart, Big Bubba, Gene, Kevin Sullivan, Hugh Morrus and Konnan. To quote Rufus from Final Fantasy 7 – “what a crew”.

Sullivan is no longer painting his face with those stupid markings, but for some reason is now wearing a white headband. Does he think he’s the Karate Kid now?

He also starts making this derp face - and this isn’t just a screen grab catching an awkward expression momentarily, he’s making this face on purpose.

For some reason we go to Jimmy Hart first, who tells the Giant “it’s the beginning of the end for you, you just don’t know it yet”. I’m sure he’s quaking in his boots.

Big Bubba then rants about Glacier, talking about him saying he’s coming for “6 or 7 months” and asking if he’s not debuting because he’s afraid. Slight exaggeration on the 6 or 7 months from Bubba, but to be fair it does feel like those vignettes have been running for at least that long. Bubba actually doesn’t seem to be aware that Glacier debuted on WCW Pro, but it’s WCW Pro, so... understandable. Bubba calls the Dungeon of Doom “the masters of intimidation”…

What he means is that Meng is the master of intimidation. The others aren’t exactly adding much to the equation. Maxx is standing off to the side looking distinctly unimpressed by the entire thing.

With that said, bored does seem to be his default expression regardless of what is happening. I imagine he’d have the same expression even if Bubba was in the process of sprouting three heads whilst doing a kossack dance.

After calling Gene “homes”, Konnan calls Sullivan a “hardened veterano”. He then says Sullivan has seen and led gang wars from coast to coast.

Yes, Kevin Sullivan wearing that silly white headband is exactly what I think of when I think of leaders of gang wars. Sullivan’s ‘wut?’ expression here says it all. I’m not sure you can call the Dungeon of Doom/Alliance to End Hulkamania Versus Hogan and Macho Man a “gang war”. I’m not sure two people can even constitute a gang. Also Sullivan may be worried Konnan is unintentionally (?) implicating him in genuine gang wars… which probably isn’t in the Taskmaster’s best interests.

Konnan challenges the nWo to come out and confront the Dungeon, who he calls “the toughest set”. Yeah, sure. The challenge is not accepted, because the nWo are for sure terrified of a “gang” featuring the likes of Maxx, Kevin Sullivan, Big Bubba and Hugh Morrus.

Sullivan says that Savage thinks he’ll owe the Dungeon “a debt” for carrying him out from the ring last week. I doubt it in all honesty – maybe if they’d actually done something to help him before he’d been beaten down and spraypainted. Carrying him out after the fact didn’t really help much.

Anyhow, Sullivan says Savage can repay this fictional debt by first beating John Tenta, because why not I guess, and then by getting rid of the Giant. That doesn’t really seem like a balanced deal. We carry you backstage after you’ve been beaten up, you make it even by beating John Tenta and the Giant. Hmmm.

Time for some nWo propaganda.

Hogan tells us that they “aren’t here for a stinkin’ reason” – directly contradicting Nash and Hall, who had previously made it clear they’d come in specifically to take over WCW. He then randomly says “we’ve got our boss with us” and points to Ted DiBiase, who’s sitting in a chair behind them.

Homely. DiBiase looks like he’s being held prisoner, but whatever. Hogan says DiBiase makes Ted Turner look like a “pauper”. Honestly I could try to recap this whole thing but it’s really just a bunch of random sound bytes ripping on WCW for the most part. They talk about wanting “their own tag team tournament” for some reason. They also want a segment (on Nitro, presumably) where they can “highlight” their talent. What they actually mean is a segment highlighting Hogan, as we’ll discover going forward. Scott Hall says “nWo 4 life” with the hand sign (might be the first instance of this?) and they all end the segment laughing like it was an amazing joke.

I was a satellite dish owner back then – or rather, my parents were - but no WCW PPVs in the UK, sadly. We only got a butchered hour-long version of Nitro on TNT UK during 1996 & 1997. I didn’t find out that I’d been watching an edited version of the show until many years later. At least now I can sit back and relive the glory of the Faces of Fear Vs Public…. eh, maybe TNT UK were doing us a favour after all.

Back with your bois at the announce desk. Tenay once again has that “stern dad” look, whilst Heenan seems to be whimsically remembering something from years gone by. Take a guess as to what Bischoff is talking about?

A) The upcoming main event

B) Meltzer being wrong about everything

C) Blue Chew

D) Sting’s betrayal

If you’ve been following along thus far, you’ll know the answer. The lad does genuinely hate big Dave though, and loves that Blue Chew. Come to think of it, what is the main event? I can’t even remember. Sting’s supposed betrayal has been hammered into my brain so many fucking times at this point I can barely conceive of any other event occurring at any wrestling show.

Chris Jericho’s music plays, but…

It’s John Tenta? Still got that stupid haircut by the way. Seriously, fish man, you’ve made your point. Get that shaved.

But yeah, I’m confused here. I thought Jericho was coming out. But hold on, that’s Jericho’s second theme, “One Crazed Anarchist”, aka the Pearl Jam ripoff, not the one he’s using at this point in WCW, which I believe is the Journey ripoff. So John Tenta is in fact the OG “One Crazed Anarchist”. For the record, the theme suits Jericho far more than it suits the former Shark.

As he comes out Tenta says “Savage, you’re not putting me down”. You think so, John?

What exactly has that guy in the hat been up to? That is not the look of an innocent person.

Ohhh yeahhh, it’s the Macho Man. The commentators are pretending that the result of the match is in any doubt, which I suppose they have to do.

John “anti-fish” Tenta Vs “Macho Man” Randy Savage

Savage storms to the ring, but that turns out to be a bad idea as Tenta stomps on the Macho Man’s back as he slides in and then clobbers him with a forearm to the back.

Bad strategy, Macho. Tenta’s moobs though… whoa.

That’s an interesting choice of attire for a wrestling event, madam.

Tenta works over Savage in the corner for a bit. Savage then begins to make a comeback, before for some reason attempting to slam Tenta…

Goes about as well as you’d expect. Macho really needs to work on his strategy.

Bischoff actually specifically says here that Heenan accidentally referred to Meng as “Haku” earlier and wants to make it clear Meng now works for WCW and not the WWF. I guess they were really taking this kind of thing seriously due to the lawsuits flying around at this point in history. Funny though, as you hear these kinds of slip-ups all the time. I mean, if TNA or AEW were sued for every time a commentator accidentally used a competitor’s ex-WWE name there would need to be a legal department created specifically just to deal with the fucking volume. At least Heenan didn’t call it “WWF Nitro”.

Tenta hits Macho with a decent looking drop kick – quite impressive considering his weight. Outside of the ring Savage hits Tenta with a steel chair…

He isn’t disqualified because…? He whacks Tenta twice more with a chair. This is not a no-DQ match, but it is WCW, so fuck the rules unless we need them for storyline purposes, right?

Flying elbow drop!

Macho goes up for a second, but then Teddy Long comes to ringside yelling “Macho!” – what could the so-called “godfather” want with Savage? Also where’s my man Ice Train at? Come to think of it, I just remembered what he was wearing earlier… best for him to stay backstage.

Savage still hits the second elbow drop. Long is gesticulating wildly at Savage and yelling something about the nWo. Savage leaps over the top rope with nice agility.

But before we go any further…

Son, I am disappoint. I can’t even say “A for effort” because that is the lowest tier of effort.

Anyway, Savage follows Teddy to the outside of the arena where Teddy announces “YOU GONNA GO ONE-ON-ONE WITH THE UNDERTAKER PLAYA!”

Actually, they run towards a limo.

The limo drives off as soon as Savage approaches it. What was the point of that?

Flair and Mongo randomly appear as the limo drives away.

There’s another limo there, but only a box of spraypaint inside it. There are a ton of WCW guys out there now – the Horsemen, the Dungeon, Public Enemy, Juvi, Super Calo, Savage… basically everyone who was on TV tonight. They start spraypainting “WCW” on the limo windows… or rather, they try to. Due to the fact it’s been raining and everywhere is wet it ends up just looking like a green smudge. As an aside, if that is in fact not an nWo limo, somebody is going to be in for a surprise.

For some reason the commentators are all standing up. Tenay is looking more evil every time he’s on camera. It’s like he wants to reach through the camera and strangle each and every viewer.

Seriously though, he is repeatedly making a “pissed-off dad” face.

“Dad, I borrowed your car…”

“Um… and… I got a speeding ticket…”

“And there’s a dent on the front as I kinda sorta knocked over the mailbox…”

Grounded forever.

Anyway, once they all sit back down Heenan goes on a rant about the nWo which concludes with “if we don’t stop them now then they can’t be stopped”. If only you could glimpse into the future and nWo 2000, Bobby.

Oh, by the way, I guess John Tenta won the match against Savage by count out? It wasn’t announced or shown, but Savage jumped out of the ring and never returned, so…

John Tenta defeats “Macho Man” Randy Savage via Countout.

I guess Tenta was right, Savage didn’t put him down after all. Score one for the fish hating weirdo.

Double A suddenly appears on set. Heenan gives Arn his headset. Can’t help but think it’d be better for Anderson to be in the ring with a mic, as the fans in the arena can’t hear any of this… but whatever.

Arn says that the world is “in shock” and “outraged”. The world is probably a bit of a stretch, but OK. Flair turns up as Arn is talking, as do Benoit and Mongo. Arn says that this all began ten years ago with the original Horsemen, and that they paved the way and showed the nWo how to do it. Technically true. Arn says the nWo want to be the Horsemen “when they grow up”.

Tenay continuing to give that evil stare, even at Arn. Bischoff looks kind of sad.

As an aside, I may have mentioned it before, but I really like this shirt design:

Bischoff begins talking about making mistakes, but Flair interrupts him. Flair screams so loudly that the headset seems to take some damage as the volume decreases slightly. Flair explains War Games – although if you don’t know what it is by this point then what have you been doing with your life? – and says Hogan won’t leave War Games alive. Spoiler alert: he does.

Bischoff then talks about how maybe bringing Hogan in to WCW was “a mistake” and that the Horsemen “haven’t been given their just due”. The same exact sentence could have been said in 2000 and been even more relevant.

WCW then ends the show with a replay of Luger getting beaten up by “Sting” and the nWo. I’m sure he appreciates that. A good thing they reminded us, as I think a whole ten seconds passed at the end there without mention of Sting’s betrayal and my memory had started to go hazy.

#wcw #wcwnitro #nwo #nwo4life #Sting #luger #flair #horsemen #outsiders #wtfwcw #lolwcw #stinger #mondaynightwars #moobs

14 notes · View notes

noddytheornithopod · 4 years ago

Text

Holy shit my thoughts on Mind over Mutant got surprisingly complicated so uh here’s a massive discussion under the cut, lol.

Out of all the main post Naughty Dog games... this might be my favourite after all? It’s far from perfect, but I think I had the most satisfying experience overall.

To start, visually everything looks pretty good. Granted I’m using the PS2 version which has a few visual bugs because it was designed for Wii and X360 graphics more, but generally I like how it holds up? Shame 360 emulators aren’t a thing as of now, and I’m not buying some old console just for one game, lol. Speaking of PS2, there’s no Coco option because apparently her moves were too complex for the system, RIP.

To start... yes, fuck the backtracking. It’s perfectly reasonably why this pisses people off. For me, it’s mainly the transition between Wumpa Island and the Ratcicle Kingdom since you have to go through AND back twice, with little variation. Other paths at least have you only needing to retread once for the story or there’s a new extra path in it that unlocks. At least some of the enemies change up I guess? But honestly, I think what bugs me more is that it’s not exactly consistent in its implementation. Because for a while, yeah you’re going back and forth retreading old ground, but then you get the key for the Junkyard on Wumpa Island and you’re just teleported to the Junkyard gate. Same thing happens when you get the Uka Uka bones. And of course, there’s the teleporters to find said bones, which is kind of striking a middle ground. Basically... it’s kinda inconsistent. Tedious when it is, but when you suddenly start to get used to it, you’re given massive leaps lol.

There’s stuff from Titans that was changed that I don’t really understand why? For example, the block with Crash no longer has a dodge, and dodging is now purely responding to mutant attacks. I like the addition to help even out things between Crash and mutants, but why no dodge normally? There’s no board sliding anymore, nothing calls for it obviously so it may have been pointless but it is kinda funny. Also Crash’s glide is replaced with the spin drill, which of course has its uses, but I miss having that glide too (you could have both, maybe the drill is by holding square or even pressing triangle, IDK).

On the topic of Crash, I kinda feel like Crash’s gameplay is oddly sidelined? I think it’s because of the mutant storing. Even if there’s less combat, much of the platforming now uses the mutants, and because there’s only some sections where you have to be Crash, it means you end up being Crash rather sparingly unless you really want to stick to him. Like, mutant storing is a good idea and works with the kind of game, but compare to Titans where even if it was more combat focused, the fact you had to use Crash in more parts meant you end up playing as him more than this game, and thus it feels like he has more of a presence with his own move set.

The combat felt off at first, but I ended up realising it’s because I became used to the Titans system... to start, it’s less intense and slower paced. You’re rarely gonna be swarmed so you actually have a chance against enemies. There’s also the mutant mojo upgrades, which means your mutant actually grows stronger with each upgrade, making combat different each time.

I like how they use mojo... for the most part. I like that the mutants can now be upgraded, and Crash of course grows stronger. My one reservation is that the upgrades don’t feel that diverse? In Crash’s case it’s probably because he keeps most of his moves from Titans, but still, only strength and spin upgrades isn’t the most exciting. Same with the mutants, getting stronger and the occasional special attack boost is cool, but it’s not the most exciting. I guess I need to view it like a Ratchet and Clank situation, because that’s what this is more like... including the multiplier. Including a multiplier with your combo level to make mojo worth more helps a lot with upgrading.

Because mutant gameplay is now more diverse instead of just a few classes that do their job, it also comes across as more inconsistent? I like that there’s improvements like them being able to jump now and more attack variations eg from when you block or jump and hit attack, but I also find some of it a bit awkward. Like, many of these attack variations are cool, but the tutorials give fuck all clues to them, so it’s hard to figure everything out.

For example... seriously, it took me ages to figure out how to use the TK in combat. TK is a pretty fun mutant, but until you figure out how to shoot and combine attacks with their telekinesis, you’re gonna be stuck to slow heavy attacks and awkwardly throwing enemies around.

I also find the Rhinoroller awkward. Because of the new moveset compared to Titans, it’s on one hand less slow, but on the other, it can get pretty annoying to control.

Ratcicle feels kind of overdeveloped. They can freeze stuff AND surf on shallow water. I mean, it’s great, but it kinda makes the other mutants look less exciting, lol. But yeah, one of the best mutants in this game because they definitely thought of much.

There’s a few mutants that are fun to play as like Spike, Sludge, and Battler, but unless you go outside the main story, they don’t really feel like they have much of a presence. The introduction pacing feels off, basically.

Snipe and Stench are back as ranged mutants. Snipe suddenly gets an upgrade and is pretty fun to play. Stench I’m not so crazy about, like now their special attack isn’t ranged anymore so that kinda messes up the gameplay with them, and while the fire rate is improved from Titans, every now and then they do a reload animation which I assume was meant to add detail, but all it does is slow the gameplay down and make the rhythm of firing off.

Magmadon is around, and while they aren’t underused, I do think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity with this game’s increased platforming focus that it doesn’t have any fire/lava abilities. There’s only one place that’s too hot for other characters and thus making them necessary too. Like, imagine if you could use it to melt through ice or even metal, eg a door that must be melted down to progress. Sludge’s shrinking ability is only used like two or three times (and I think only one is mandatory), so I think there’s missed opportunities there too. The shapeshifting and extendable arms stuff could’ve made for some cool mechanics. Adding more platforming abilities for mutants might overcomplicate the game of course, but... still. Especially with Sludge, give them some more use, even for secrets and such. Speaking of secrets... Spike needing to use the special attack on that one spiky part on the way to Mt Grimly is pretty random, huh?

Scorporilla and Yuktopus serve their role as the massive powerhouses (and Scorporilla even gets a beefed up melee combo), though I must admit it’s odd Yuktopus is now demoted to a regular enemy/sub-boss class (seeing two in the minigames was surreal when I was young lol). And I mean, random changes in design and stuff is something I find odd in general. I mean, the returning mutants mostly have improved designs, but for others I’m not as sure on, eg Rhinoroller looking less rhino-y, and Sludge suddenly being a boar instead of an frog or chameleon or whatever it was in Titans. Guess some is NV mutations but whatever, lol.

On the topic of enemy design, one thing I miss from Titans is the colour and outfit variations. Maybe they had less time to do it and at least the single models they get look good, but still, it’s a shame. We do get the hero mutants, but the PS2 version fucks up their looks for some reason, lol (and for some reason their mojo upgrades separately from the standard of their species, which is weird, especially since it’s not counted in the game’s completion).

Grimlys are cool, probably my favourite mutant in the game. Kinda funny how they don’t have a block and instead a lock on function, but it makes sense given they’re meant to be used faster than other close range mutants. But yeah, time slowing is so cool it’s even back in Crash 4 with one of the new Quantum Masks. Really helps you rake up that combo count to get all that mojo too.

The minions are... interesting. They mostly do their job, but then suddenly you have Doom Monkeys and Znu that have these massive stun attacks that can get annoying if there’s a lot of them. Slap-Es can block but as long as you’re not Crash they’re as quick as any others. The Doom Monkeys are less annoying in speech too, thankfully.

I get a few audio bugs. Most annoying of which is being unable to hear enemy conversations. But sometimes I just got sound effects cut out for no reason. On the inverse... some of the mutants are very noisy and need to shut up. Aku Aku also sometimes adds commentary when unnecessary, making him feel a bit handholdy. Yes, I’m going to the damn roller village, be patient, dude.

Probably the thing to impress me most revisiting the game is actually the continuity and worldbuilding. I mean, to start, you have all the mutants becoming free and forming their own societies, only for the NVs to turn them into evil warriors again. Said societies are pretty interesting as well.

Wumpa Island is mostly the same (sans all the stranded Ratinicians gone wild lol), but then you have the Ratcicle Kingdom. A Kingdom formed mostly out of ice, and also near Cortex’s evil public school. Nothing like this was in Titans, so was there always a cold part of Wumpa Island, or did the concentration of Ratcicles allow them to make enough ice to form a cold climate and society despite this being tropical nearby? All the designers and stuff are cool, and some of the characters are quite peculiar (I love that one masochist Ratcicle lol).

Then there’s the Ice Prison and Evil School. IDK how the Ice Prison was made, but it seems like it’s Cortex’s doing since the Brat Girls run it AND Evil School (while also being students?). As one of those lore junkies that headcanons Wumpa Island is the second island from the original Crash games, this fits oddly well, because in Twinsanity Cortex suddenly has a massive floating Iceberg lab. Maybe Cortex also made the school and prison nearby, and the Ratcicles took their Wumpa Island residence and connected Cortex’s base. Yeah, I’m getting crazy with my speculation, but the game letting you fuel this is fun. Also cool how the Brat Girls leave Nina after she loses in Titans and end up as Cortex’s grunts, ironically.

The Wasteland seems new, and I assume it’s the evolution of the Lumberyard from Titans. We also have rhinoroller elders even if it’s only two years of existing lol.

The Junkyard is apparently born out of the remains of N Gin’s weapons factory (I heard somewhere the Weapons factory was apparently on N Sanity Island but IDK if that was ever confirmed, it makes more sense it was on Wumpa Island TBH but if it was imagine all that junk moved there lol, TBH Cortex Island could work for the weapons factory too, it would make things less cluttered and it’s possible there’s still unpolluted beaches but whatever). It’s a pretty cool setting, and the Doom Monkeys being in the remains of their old location but under new leadership (and somehow with rockets removed from their heads... maybe they were merely aesthetic? lol) is nice continuity. Judging from the concept art it also seems to be around that volcanic area in Titans, which makes sense given that had more machinery.

Mt Grimly is completely new. Surprisingly it’s not an evolution of the Uka tree (though there is one creepy tree place with the hero Grimly on Wumpa Island), and as a result it’s much harder to work into my 2nd island headcanon (I mean, at least that island always had a giant tree lol). Cool location, but unfortunately we don’t really learn much about its normal state compared to the other worlds, unless it’s permanently inhabited by evil dudes, lol. Also I still wonder what the heck the Znu and Grimlys are. Are the Znu supposed to be the same thing as Grimlies? Are the Grimlys NV transoformed Znu??? Who knows.

Even the changing enemies in revisiting locations relates to the story. For example, the sludges in the Junkyard will say how Slap-Es and Stenches have appeared from “the sky”. Besides random occasional appearances from different mutants in various locations, you also have the Znu and Doom Monkeys moving out of their home levels to the previous ones after you make it through said levels the first time. I’m very perplexed by the sudden increase of Battlers when you revisit evil school and the ice prison paths though... either they’re also favourites of Cortex, or the Brat Girls disappointed Cortex after he saw Crash break into school and Nina helped him and he... used NVs on them to make new Battlers. Other stuff like Snipes in the Wasteland because of the Snipe hero are clear enough, but this one is... interesting.

There are some inconsistencies that bug me though. For one, it feels like nobody acknowledges Cortex’s blog video. Aku Aku acts surprised that N Brio is back and working with Cortex, and later wonders how Brio gets dark mojo even though Cortex explicitly says he’s using Uka for that. IDK, I guess Aku Aku doesn’t like watching internet videos and expected Crash and Coco to do everything, lol (I mean, he doesn’t really acknowledge it after watching anyway). Also a bit confused on how evil school works... it’s implied the Brat Girls are the main students, especially when one NPC says it’s all girls, but the intro video includes all genders and shows non-Brat Girls so... something’s up (maybe the NPC misheard or the ad was lying and only had girls because EVIL). Also apparently there’s another evil school somewhere besides Madame Amberly’s (is it also public? how is it public, is there a government funding these evil schools? did Cortex declare some regime?).

The humour and cutscenes are mostly pretty fun and there’s many funny moments. There are a few jokes that are... questionable at best (Uka I know you’re evil, but you don’t need to be ableist), and some of it probably seems outdated, but I actually appreciate most of it. The 2D cutscenes in different styles simulating changing channels like you have an NV is cool and has some pretty fun jokes with them, though it does suck you don’t see some character models well if at all as a result. The whole satire of consumerism and the latest tech fads was a nice addition (between this and the different mutant powers and stuff, it’s almost a classic Ratchet and Clank type game), not to mention wild stuff like evil recycling (and I mean, green movements ARE co-opted soooo) and many edgy but still mostly jokes I doubt would pass today.

Bosses are fine. Cortex was fun, but Coco was too easy (plus she’s freed from NV control a bit too soon, they could’ve saved her for the Ice Prison or even Evil School or something to raise the stakes, I mean if you’re not gonna fully commit to playable Coco then you may as well go the N Tranced route). Crunch wasn’t as hard as I remember, in fact he was kinda underwhelming. If anything the Scorporilla and Yuktopus acting as sorta sub-bosses in-story were better fights than saving the bandicoots (also one of the sludges says Crunch is Crash’s brother... confirmed?). Also small nitpick but why doesn’t Coco have her evil model in the enemy profiles, even as she has her boss lines?

Music is legit one of my favourite soundtracks in the series, Marc Baril doesn’t get enough credit. He manages to have such a range and it all works so well even as it has a distinct and fitting style.

Voodoo doll collecting is more involved which is cool, and there’s also golden wumpa now serving as health upgrades because we don’t have lives anymore. Yeah, Titans and MoM did gold wumpa first, not CTR:NF and Crash 4. At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up even earlier. Minigames are optional too which means less stress for 100% completion, though there’s also the arena minigames (oh hey, more Ratchet and Clank similarities), and they unlock enemy skins... unfortunately unlike Titans which had skins for every enemy, there’s only a few skins here (one for each world’s games), which is disappointing.

Anyway... yeah. Mind over Mutant isn’t as polished as Titans and is a bit messy and inconsistent in some places (most likely because this game has less time than Titans), and some of the backtracking is tedious, but in general I had a pretty good time with it, and was actually pleasantly surprised by some things.

#crash bandicoot #crash: mind over mutant #mind over mutant

7 notes · View notes

nwfmp2021 · 4 years ago

Text

Rhonan McGarry Analysis

Rhonan McGarry is a graphic designer from Scotland who takes his inspiration from comics, sci-fi, and the pop art and surrealism art movements.

I like this kidmograph because of how everything has been positioned in terms of perspective and how the snail is much larger in comparison to the people in front of the building, I find this a bit ironic as obviously in the real world us humans are much larger than snails and here McGarry has basically inversed the sizes of them to possibly make us realise the size difference between us. I also like how upon closer examination you can see that there is a trail coming from the snail which I find is a nice touch because of how it makes this appear more realistic in addition to adding a bit of texture, I also like the textures in which are on the snails shell and on the snail itself and the building and I have been inspired by his use of texture in this kidmograph as it appears more detailed and gives a bit of dimension to it.

This kidmograph is quite different in comparison to the ones in which I have on this post because of how there are 4 different somewhat “dimensions” and how each of them are different yet similar in terms of the green and red one appearing to have a similar appearance along with the other two, I also like the shapes and textures used because it adds some shape and makes sections appear 3D especially the yellow mountain appearing element and this has inspired me because of how it just enhances the appearance of the kidmograph.

I’m not sure whether I like this kidmograph or not because of how it has been showcased in terms of there being a somewhat illusion effect in terms of there not being a platform where the people are standing as well as the fact that everything just has the appearance of that they are floating, but I do like the fact that it’s very simplistic and is quite subtle in terms of there not being any bright colours or any abstract shapes used and I also like how the coloured rectangles are also going in different directions at the top of the image to compose a ceiling of some sort.

I like this kidmograph because of how the perspective is simple in terms of it being straight forward as the grid is going both across the floor then up as a wall in a continuous effect but are just different colours which are yellow and blue which both go well together as they are complementary colours, I also like how the shadows have been showcased and how they are quite dark and not faint which I like as it makes them stand out a bit more. In addition to that I also like the elements in which have been used such as the person standing next to a canon or gun of some sort which has fired at what appears to be a shard, I can tell this because of how there is smoke coming out of the end of the weapon and how there is also an explosion effect taking place on the shard which I find is a nice touch.

#research

1 note · View note

chainofbeing · 4 years ago

Link

Adam is forced to re-evaluate his intentions Epicurosa: Laura Rodgers Harpy: Maxwell James Ginn ([email protected]) Surveyor: Lance Chapman, Nerys Howell, Mary-anne Stanek and Jesus r Carbo Ovig Nadal: Glyn Pritchard Score: Bethany Porter Lewis Sound design, Writing, and Adam Delta 5: Cai Gwilym Pritchard An Extra Special thanks to our patrons Theresa Shiban Anthony Hyde Zachary Fortais-Gomm email us at [email protected] follow the podcast on twitter @chainofbeing Subscribe to the patreon for exclusive content and rewards! 170119_hydrophone_river_3.wav by Leonsptvx

We stand on a great and sweeping mountain, a strange fog covers the landscape and movements of large obscured creatures and just about be made out. The wind shrieks in my ears, as if ordering me to leave this place, no oxygen, no protection from the harsh radiation of the sun, If I weren’t in the shadow of the tall eight armed god, Epicruosa, I imagine I would be having a much harder time standing here. Epicurosa puts on the onyx skull of a crow of some kind, decorated in banded white silver. They place a large hand on my back and push me toward the large circular chasm that lays open in front of us. It drops down, I lean over and see no bottom. They gesture toward it. “You want me to jump in?” I ask

[with each new mask epicurosas voice changes, the crow has a similar but more exaggerated quality to adams, and there is a hypnotic tone underneath that winds and and down as she speaks]

“What’s the issue? You’ll survive,”

“Yea but will I be intact?”

“I did not funnel myself into a physical form and bring you all the way out here just to watch you splatter at the bottom of a vast abyss. If I wished to do that I would have just thrown you from the top of that mesa where I rescued you from that... infected woman,”

“Oh fuck, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I shuffle toward the edge and turn before jumping off “What’s down there?” I’ve never seen Epicurosa’s face without a mask, I see her gray textured skin, glowing yellow eyes and black teeth. Completely unobscured I imagine the sight of her bare face would destroy some part of me. Despite the skull mask I can see her frustration. “Think of the universe as a body, mortals live their entire life on the skin, maybe they’ll cut through the epidermis every so often but that,” she gestures to the open maw of the mountain “Is a place where the skin has been pierced and reaches the flesh and bone,”

“Oh,” I turn back to the chasm “And why do you want me to-”

Epicurosa sighs angrily and shoves me over the edge and I get the sense that something watches me fall, the stone sides of the huge hole that start as rough, natural looking stone soon gives way an impossibly smooth and flawless texture, too smooth even to seem mortal made, something approaches and I hit a layer of water, I sink through for a second, carried by my momentum, before I pass and continue falling, strangely though, it seems as if I am falling up, a circle or orange light approaches and I sail up into the air and back down again, landing on my feet on a wide square, white stone platform. The space is incredibly vast, there is a roof and sides to it, made of the same white stone of the pyramid, the sides go straight up for miles and then begin to slope inwards until they reach the wide flat ceiling which so far away that I can only just make it out through the atmosphere that sits, trapped in this impossible place. Huge pillars are carved into the walls that stretch high above me. Multiple balconies protrude out from the sides on which stand colossal figures, obscured by robe and fire, they look down upon me, vigilant guards holding flaming golden spears. The roof leads to an open octagonal hole through which a warm light shines through, thin trails of sand cascade down and land in a large garden whose borders are entirely defined by where the light falls. Four huge walls stretch the whole height of this space evenly around the octagon, partially barring my full vision of the garden, and even the whole space as the walls prevent me from seeing the side directly opposite. This place I’m stood in is so incredibly huge that the minimal light just barely illuminates the vast cavern. The floor at the bottom of the pyramid is covered in a variety of landscapes: rocky heaths, tors, promontories, and various other rock formations that jut into the air, forming long bridges, platforms and canyons, far off in the distance I see pools of some molten substance of various sizes dotted sporadically here and there, with long thin rivulets trailing around the landscape. At the bottom of the long staircase that trails along the side of the pyramid I see that the rock is actually something akin to glass, unrefined and opaque but still clearly glass. I look up at the angels in their flaming shrouds, their gaze still fixed on me. From Behind a pillar of glass a creature of some kind swiftly rushes up into the air, rising into the air far, far above me. I watch it sail out of sight toward the ceiling, and begin to walk, heading for the garden at the center. I take a step and hear something rushing toward me from above, I look up and see the creature headed straight for me, I draw my sword and ready myself, it moves so quickly that I can just barely discern its form. It descends in a blur of glistening black feather, and pale skeletal claw. It deftly avoids my blade and tears a gash in my arm. The thing lands on the sloping wall of the inverse pyramid behind my and skitters around. A thick oily substance drips from its feathers which stand in a show of active hostility, it turns it’s head toward me and I get a look at it’s face. For that is what it possesses. I can call it nothing but human in nature. A genderless and sickly face the black sludge oozes from it’s pale eyes and seeps from its snarling teeth. It’s features are sharp and cruel.

[the harpy’s voice is harsh and gravelly]

“This is a place of knowledge and discovery, you sully the ground on which you walk, what say you, intruder?”

“Epicurosa, she sent me here,” The beast shivers as I say their name, as it speaks globules of the black liquid splatter and drip from its thin sickly lips

“If you were indeed placed here, and you didn’t intrude where you should not, as you are known to do, then you have been placed here to die!” the creature pushes away from the pyramid wall and spins as it goes for another attack. I hold my sword up in a defensive stance, it grabs the sword with its bone-like claws and shatters the metal. I go to grab it but the oil that soaks it’s feathers causes it to slip from my grasp. “All you know is to destroy! Even in your non-violent pursuits, you hurt those around you,”

“You think I don't know?” I say, gesturing toward the bird which hovers in the air with my shattered sword “do you not think the thought crosses my mind everyday?”

“And what have you done to atone? Promises to ‘be better’? The damage has been done, the collapse of Eden is your burden, the death of the others is on you, your plan to simply not repeat your crimes is meaningless,” I gesture around me, my clothes soaked in black sludge and my arm bleeding freely “what do you think this is? My immortality, letting myself get dragged around by gods and bureaucrats and fucking fascists. Being thrown into bottomless pits, pursuing incomprehensible extra universal entities. Why do you think I do this?”

“You pursue Ovig Nadal in the hopes that you will understand the information that was forced into your mind, do not posture about duty and morals, your pursuits were as selfish as they ever were. Understanding what it is you have in your mind will not bring Eve back, it will not uncorrupt your realm in Eden,”

“Do not presume to know me, why can it not be both? Why can I not stop Ovig Nadal for the benefit of the universe and its inhabitants and for my own ‘selfish’ justification? Why must I ignore my own needs? I am all I have in this world, I am the only one who is there to help me,” I ready my firearm and raise it to the creature, whose face is almost entirely covered in the black oily sheen

“And that is why you shall fail” it says as it explodes in a fountain of black oil. I look down at my now shattered sword, the shards lay scattered around me, some submerged in the black sludge, “What the fuck?” The sludge reeks of spent electrics and leaking batteries. I check the clip in my Sub-machine gun. 18 rounds. Thank the stars for high capacity magazines. I affix it to my hip and start to navigate the maze of glass pillars and strange formations. My arm starts to sting, I didn’t have enough time to restock on bandages, my last two got used up patching the wound created by the Rolder. I go through a small thin trench constantly adjusting my way to try and head in the direction of the garden at the centre of this strange vast place. I look at my reflection in the sheen of the dark glass wall, covered in blood and filth, “something has turned it’s benevolent gaze upon you,” I usually don’t think too hard into what the gods say, their words often hold more meaning than I could ever hope to know. That, combined with the fact that language and communication are based on experience, and the experience of a god is so infinitely different to any non-divine that they have to, essentially, dumb it down and feed it through the filter of what they know to be the non-divine experience means I tend let the general malaise of meaning and intent wash over me, but those words stuck out, they feel so out of place coming from the mouth of a god, usually so impassive and calculating. The trench begins to widen and the ground beneath my feet gradually changes from hard opaque glass to a coarse grey sand which stretches ahead of me shifting to a deep rich brown earth. The trench widens out further and I realise I have reached the centre. I turn and look behind me, the landscape now entirely different. The trench has been replaced with a short sloping escarpment, the pyramid on which I arrived now absent, however the resplendent golden glow of the ever observant angels, now mere spots illuminating the balconies on which they stand, remains consistent. I have no doubt that they watch me now through their shrouds aflame, I begin to march over the rough sand, headed towards the illuminated garden, before I hear a muffled voice. “Hey!” I stop in my tracks and my hand goes to my gun, “Woah” the voice responds to my initial act of hostility “Do you always pull a gun to calls for help?”

“Sorry,” I say to the general area, unsure of who I am addressing, “Recently everything I’ve come across has tried to kill me, or absorb me,”

“Yeah but every star emits light, you don’t see planets orbiting a lightbulb do you?”

“Huh?”

“A sun emits light, a lightbulb also emits light, but a lightbulb is not a star. In the same way, there are things here that will try to kill you, I am a thing that is here, but I do not want to kill you. You gotta take each interaction case by case man. I get it, you’re human, you like to see patterns, it’s in your nature,”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“Aw man, this is gonna take forever,” a second voice chimes in

“Bah, ça fait aussi une éternité qu'on attend, hein” a third voice says in an old human tongue

“No we haven’t! we’ve only been here a few weeks,”

“the clock says 9567 years 3 months and 5 days,”

a fourth voice points out

“Oh yeah because time totally acts like normal down here doesn’t it?”

“Hey!” I say, “at least let me know what direction to look in when I’m talking to you,”

“Turn left, bit more, bit more. Right, now forward a bit, look down,”

I look down and see what I had subconsciously registered as a rock buried in the sand surrounded by many others, the worn metal holds a remarkably similar colour to the glass rocks that peek out of the coarse sand,

“You might need to do a bit of digging to get to us,” I begin to scrape and dig around and reveal a glowing blue eye of some kind

“Oh mon dieu, il a une sale tronche!”

“Tell me about it- what's up with the horns?”

I sigh, “It’s a long story,”

“Looks kinda like the landscape of this place,”

“It’s not lost on me,” I say as I excavate the side of what becomes increasingly clear to be a space probe of human design. And an old one. After a few minutes I finally manage to get a good portion of the body of this thing exposed. I lean against the side of the small crater I’ve dug out, foot resting against the probe itself.

“Better?” I ask

“Much, so what brings you to this angel infested hellhole?,”

“I was going to ask you the same thing actually, I was brought here by a god, got pushed down a big hole in a mountain and then I ended up here. She said this was a place where she could ‘find out some things about me’,”

“How deliciously vague,”

“My name is Adam, by the way. As in, like the Adam. The first human. Just feel like I should let you know,”

The eye stares at me in what I assume to be disbelieving silence

“I mean is it as crazy as anything else you’ve seen here? You obviously have accepted the existence of the angels,”

“You make a good point, how much have we missed?”

“Aw man, I’m guessing you were sent from earth?”

“Yeah,”

“Right so, that’s gone,”

“Was it what I think it was?,”

“I don’t know what you think it was but probably, they put up a good fight if it’s any consolation, launched a bunch of conservation stations, made some good preparations. Wasn’t quite enough in the end but you know, at least they tried,”

[an awkward silence]

“so uh… what’s your deal?”

“We are Surveyor 14,”

“How did you get here?” I ask

“On faisait partie d'une mission pour découvrir à quoi ressemble/ressemblait l'intérieur d'un trou noir. On est équipés d'une technologie très puissante qui nous permet d'échapper à l'attraction gravitationnelle, avec les données toujours intactes, et rentrer au bercail, (bah...)dans un chassis détruit, c'est vrai, mais bon. Bon, le fait est qu'on a été envoyés en mission, puis qu'on a été absorbés et qu'on s'est retrouvés... ici. Pour une raison qui m'échappe, on s'est divisés en quatre personnalités différentes... et voilà où on en est,”

[adam pauses] “ah… I see”

“We’ve had a lot of time to think here, or maybe we haven’t, it’s kind of hard to tell,”

“Hey, I’m not really sure what I’m doing here so if you need someone to bounce ideas off of,”

The AI turns it’s one glowing eye toward me and focuses. “Are we alone in the universe adam?”

“You mean are there aliens? I probably should have mentioned this, so there’s this council-”

“Not aliens, we mean, do you stand alone? An Island surrounded by multitudes of other Islands, or are we all intrinsically one collective? A continent that lessens with each death and grows with each birth,”

“I don’t know,”

“In the hundreds of thousands of years you’ve had to be alive, you’re telling me you haven’t thought of it once?”

“I feel empathy, if that’s what you’re asking, I feel the need to help others. If that drive comes from a place of real altruism (if such a thing truly exists) or some kind of need to atone for all the wrong I’ve done I cannot say,”

“(Bah) ça, c'est pas ce qu'on a demandé”

“My actions have an effect, as much as I wish they didn’t, I still am a part of the collective, I still am a cog in the great cosmic machine. At the most minute level I displace the air around me, my feet shake the ground ever so slightly with each step. Butterfly wings and typhoons. At the same time, it’s hard for me to feel a part of a population whose experience is so totally different to mine,"

“You think you’ve got a monopoly on isolation? On guilt?”

“Hé! Redescends un peu!”

“You’re not the only one who feels guilt for what they’ve done, it’s an age-old feeling, and yes, there are certain circumstances of your life that are specific to you, but your experience is not as unique as you may think. You yourself admit you are part of the ‘comic machine’ as you put it. You are not the mouse to the man, You are the elder that tries to relate to their grandchild, the child speaks as a child, the elder speaks as an elder, and yet there is no sense of lost community within the tribe. So why not you? Even if you cannot find common experience in your past life, can you not find commonality in being in a harsh and uncaring universe? Are you so detached, that you relate more to gods than mortals? There are threats beyond even divine comprehension at play, and yet you still manage to separate yourself from the rest,”

“Wait, how do you know about-”

“Deep down I believe you truly care for others, but until you believe that you are a part of the continent, you cannot truly enact a beneficial change in any meaningful way.”

I lean back against the side of the crater and look up the ceiling obscured by distance and darkness,

“So, uh, you know how to get out of here?”

“I was hoping you’d know actually, you’ve been here longer than me, have you seen anyone or anything else enter and leave this place?”

“Occasionally the angels will blink out and then return, but other than that it’s been pretty quiet here,”

“I’m thinking we should at least head into the light, now I don’t think I’ll be able to carry you, is there a data core or something I could remove?”

“Data core?”

“Wouh, regardez s'il est chic celui-là avec ses data cores!,”

“We’ve got a hard drive, just pop open the chassis and then have a root around,”

I pry open a door on the outside of the probe and start searching for a harddrive amongst the instruments and circuits, I feel something with a handle on it

“Is this it?” I ask

“How the fuck am I supposed to know? If I squeezed your liver would you be able to tell me if I’d got the right organ?”

“It’s not quite the same but I see your point,” I grab a hold of the handle “See you on the other side,” I unlock the hard drive and pull it out from the machine. The glowing eye goes dim and I hold up the hard drive to the light coming from the octagonal opening in the ceiling to this place. I scramble out of the hole and dust myself off with one hand, the hard drive is heavy but I still manage to carry it in one hand toward the edge of the light, the gap between the two huge walls on either side of me is wide and sits perfectly at the barrier between the golden light and the dark. I stand at the edge and peer into the garden, twisting old trees bearing fruit, both alien and yet painfully familiar, thin leafed bushes and pale grass, the sand that tumbles down doesn’t seem to drown the garden and instead pushes outwards to the rest of this place. At this distance I’m finally able to clearly see what's on the inside of the walls. All along an intricate diagram is embossed in gold, strange shapes and symbols stretch the entire length of each wall. No words, not in any language a non-divine could comprehend, each wall is different. Perhaps they display, perhaps they praise. Maybe a bit of both. They display a scale of some kind, from what I can discern it represents a gradation, all flowing from a single source, each wall represents a different aspect or group of aspects and how they relate to said source. I pass the barrier between the dim cold of the glass fields and enter the warm garden. The light soaks through my skin. Ragged and bleeding I stand for a moment in the resplendent light.

[he simply breathes for a few seconds]

“Alright let’s get the fuck of here,” The garden rises ever so slightly, a shrine sits atop this small hill, smooth white stone, it encircles a hexagonal basin, golden light plays off of the surfaces like sunlight off of water. It’s perfectly geometric, angles and simple shapes fused with each other in 3 dimensional symmetry, spiralling and tumbling down, too complex to be aesthetically pleasing but it’s not there for me. I approach the wide basin, at least my height in width, I kneel at it’s edge and peer into the golden liquid, it’s thin and only carries a slight luster and it’s deep, the edges on the outside curve inward down maybe half a metre, but looking into the deep liquid it seems to go outwards and much further down, some bright light dances around down there.

“Now what?” I say to the silent hard drive that leans against the side of the basin. I stand and brush myself off.

Suddenly, as if they had been stood there this entire time behind some curtain which now, upon my being here is dropped to reveal their presence, I see several angels, one hovers above the shrine it’s wings of golden shards extended outward, I take a step back, with the hard drive of surveyor-14 still in hand, it floats to the ground It has in its hand a long spear of gold, at the tip of the blade a small fire blazes white hot. It lowers the spear to my chest, and slowly pushes it into my heart, not with any malice or intent to damage, but with a conviction akin to a sculptor using a chisel or a carpenter using a plane. The world, or at least my perception of it, begins to wobble and convulse as if seen through weeping eyes. This effect recedes and I see the world through the eyes of something else, through a veil of golden fire and white robe I watch a battle between two forces, one I recognise, the form of Ovig Nadal, who causes such an entropic effect on the universe and one I do not, the common form of a god, for sure, but not one that has deigned to make its presence known to me. Beyond this physical interpretation I get the sense something much grander takes place between vast formless things and that this display is simply the tip of the iceberg poking out from the great depths of the cosmic ocean, my perception of these events begins to wobble again as Ovig Nadal grabs the angel whose vision I borrow and brings it close to his face. He peers into its eyes, his multitudes of teeth thick with the molten glass that fills the angels and his pale eyeless head bleeding that polychrome matter, damaged and cut all over. I can only assume this is a form he manifested or grew from some pre-existing entity he possessed. He holds the angel close to him and says “You watch one step toward a better universe Adam, a step forward in the progression of this universe to a state in which it never will have been as it is now,” and as his opponent readies another attack, Ovig Nadal crushes the angel and the vision finally begins to falter too much for me to see anything clearly.

I arise and pull back from the golden spear that intersects with my heart, I look up to see it now being wielded by Epicurosa wearing a wolf skull on her hooded head.

“We have deemed you ready, I will send you to the aftermath of that battle and-,”

“I still don’t understand, why me? Not why me. Why not you? You are the most powerful thing I have ever seen, you formed humanity and the Veatorians from nothing. You Shift cosmic forces with no effort or exertion. Why are you, or any of your peers unable to do this? I want to, I really do, it used to be that I wanted to understand what it is I learned, to make what I did worth it, but I have realised that it is not about making it worth it but is instead atoning, the intent has changed but my action remains the same. But I must know, why?”

She exchanges her wolf skull for that of some kind of large fish, not an animal I have ever seen.

“I could force your understanding, I could initiate a vision. It would torment you, as it does Might-Upon-Serenity, unable to convey or sufficiently re-create in your memory. Instead I will try to explain, in language. Gods are not physical beings, I believe a Veatorian philosopher once referred to us as “concepts with will” and while ‘concept’ carries certain connotations she had the right idea. Ovig Nadal is unlike anything this universe has ever seen, I do not know his origins, I simply know he is other and that we cannot affect him, you saw through that angel's eyes, there was nothing that Aratheau could do to destroy him. Our common forms can cause harm to each other: matter touches matter, but celestially, we cannot influence him, but he can us. I believe that you will be able to do affect him in a significant way, and the fact that there is something beyond even divinity that surrounds you and guides us to help you, proves that I am right,”

[with relief]

“Thank you,”

“I am going to send you to that place within the vision, follow him. And whatever he intends to do, stop him,”

“I know his intentions, Might upon serenity, in a moment of clarity as we shared a vision corrupted by Ovig Nadal, she told me he seeks Eden,”

Epicurosas whole demeanour shifts, if I were to assign emotions to a divine being of pure though I would have called it… fear

“If that is indeed the case, then our situation is far more dire than previously anticipated. Let us hope you will be able to stop him before this happens”

A portal manifests behind me. “Could I ask something of you?”

“You may ask,” I hold up the hard drive

“Would you construct a body for them? Make them whole please, they’ve helped me on my journey, I think they deserve it,”

“That I can do,” she takes it from me and I walk through the portal, leaving behind the divine setting of glass landscapes and perfect stone, I step through into my new setting, a collapsed city aflame...

#audio drama #audiodrama #podcast #transcript #podcast transcript #scifi #sci-fi

3 notes · View notes

superchartisland · 5 years ago

Text

Super Mario All Stars (Nintendo, SNES, 1993)

Any overall roadmap for this project (and my brother’s related predecessor) is very lightly sketched, but this is a useful point to reflect on it. We grew up playing Dizzy games; part of what we’re doing is trying to reclaim video game history as we and many other Brits lived it, to demonstrate how the American-led received wisdom is a rewriting of the record. All of my research suggests that we were in the majority there -- in the UK the NES didn’t get a look in, and we’re not going to properly encounter the Game Boy until it’s a decade old.

Even this first Nintendo direct encounter is somewhat of a guess. Super Mario All Stars was a documented best-seller for the SNES, but in an absence of evidence I don’t know for sure that it was big enough to be an overall UK #1. I remember hearing about it a lot at the time, and by then the SNES had had a chance to build an audience, but remember that this blog covers games which were a #1 but not necessarily always the #1. Yet at the same time as I refute the story that Nintendo swept in to replace a dying industry -- neither happened like that in the UK -- we’re pretty keen on many things Nintendo. I have a NES Classic Mini, SNES Classic Mini and a Famicom Classic Mini sitting under my TV: loving recreations of consoles which I never owned.

In the internet era, this kind of adoption of history is probably more common. When I wrote the first version of this post I had recently watched the period piece music video for Satellite Young’s “Don’t Graduate, Senpai!” and was overwhelmed with contented nostalgic feelings, left with the power of a glimpse into a familiar and loved past. All that despite the fact I’ve hardly ever listened to the Japanese genre that it takes after, City Pop, or watched shoujo anime, and never when I was growing up. The person who it is precision targeting isn’t me. But it needn't be. There can be a feeling that is just as real, but second hand, a gravity exerted on adjacent culture that was invisible until something made me look over and notice its force.

youtube

There are lots of ways that the influences on the song and video reached me. My partner did grow up with a lot of Japanese pop culture in Hong Kong, and talking with her about that and having watched a couple of episodes of Creamy Mami means having a feel for her fond memories. I have years of happily browsing tumblr gifsets of Sailor Moon, absorbing love for it and its place in culture. I can still get good use from a “but you didn’t do anything!” meme even if I’ve never actually watched the show. I’ve listened to 80s referencing music elsewhere, and modern Japanese music taking cues from City Pop, and that has added up to giving the sounds of the song a similar personal gravity.

And all of that has been made easier by the world getting smaller, by the internet giving providing an easy route to interests you share with people elsewhere in the world and from there to interests they share that you don’t. Look at it negatively, and it means a winning narrative can travel faster and become more comprehensive than ever, reaching into places where it doesn’t belong. But at the same time, it gives us a Japanese band and some Swedish animators uniting in their shared nostalgia, and it reaching out to me through next door culture which I’ve taken in via friends from all round the world, and me having feelings shared with those friends. That’s an amazing thing.

In common with most people I knew, we didn’t have the internet when Super Mario All Stars came out, and the world was still huge. Nintendo had other tools to work with, though. Their games were successful enough to reach out and have an outsized cultural impact beyond the limits of people actually playing them.

When I started primary school, before football stickers, there was a craze for Nintendo sticker books, and friends and I collected images of all of their games. People tried to negotiate enhanced swaps for stickers of Game Boy screenshots by maintaining that they were gold stickers, even more valuable than the special silver ones. I knew more about the characters and background for Mario through Saturday morning cartoons, and I remember watching American TV programmes where people competed through playing Super Mario Bros. levels. I assume it made it to the UK’s own Gamesmaster at some point too. And of course, many of the European games we were playing took their own influence from Nintendo. I may have been unaware of Metroid until years later, but hours spent playing Turrican still gave my first impressions of it that nostalgic gravity.

Mario was Nintendo’s most successful reach out to the wider culture, and that wider culture drove people back to Mario’s original form. That could work better for Nintendo if Mario games were easier to access, and so we get Super Mario All Stars. What to do when moving on from the NES to the SNES? Reissue, repackage, re-evaluate the games! Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3, now brought together in one place. With an extra track, no less, in the form of Japan’s very different Super Mario Bros. 2, new to the rest of the world and hence called The Lost Levels. From 2019 the very idea of levels being lost feels faintly absurd – someone will dig it out in a mod, or you can just log onto your alternate Japanese online console account, surely? I guess a handful of British people probably did own imported Famicoms even in 1993, but everyone else got their cross-fertilisation of culture mediated by Nintendo’s eccentric international release schedule.

Super Mario All Stars presents each game in its entirety, complete with newly upgraded graphics. Yet, in some way, the games seem to shrink in the transition. The act of selecting a game to play from a menu, turning them into pinned specimens labelled by year, emphasises the overall history and starts you off with a reminder that each world is only a part of a newly defined whole. Maybe that's why there is no Super Mario All Stars on the SNES Classic Mini, an assessment that the bird-inside-a-bird effect of featuring a retro collection on a retro collection would be that bit too spookily recursive.

And that idea of recursion is where the realisation struck me as I played Super Mario All Stars. It wasn't the first version of Mario I played, (it was the first Super Mario Bros. 3 that I ever played, though, the briefest of enchanting glimpses). But it feels absolutely right as my version of these games, even for Super Mario Bros. 2 where I'm pretty sure I'd never played this version before. The very sense of diminished scale, the way that All Stars exists as a Mario game aware that not only each individual game, but the games as a whole, are but a small part of the Mario out there in the world, feels totally fitting. The feeling runs through everything. The upscaled renditions of the music which expand on it but nonetheless can't escape how iconic the basic originals were. The decision to put Super Mario Bros.’ underwater waltz on the title screen with the new confidence that duh, it rules. The little portraits of what to expect that have been added to the start of each level, not spoilers but cute reminders. This is a Mario for the late to the party, an artefact of the games' immense second hand cultural gravity, reflected back into the games themselves. It's a sign of so much to come.

In reflection of it being the first time these games have come up on my route through history, here are miniature entries for each of the four games on Super Mario All Stars, pinned to one place:

Super Mario Bros.

It’s all about the movement. Specifically, the jump, the balletic means of progression which sits at the tempting boundary of predictability and control. It is not the only game jump, it was not the first game jump, but it is somehow still the Jump. When you press the jump button the moment stretches in time, a repeated joy that resounds slightly differently from Jump to Jump. Sometimes the Jump is relaxed, sometimes the Jump is tense, sometimes the Jump is a celebration of achievement. Gravity and momentum make their claim on you, and you must not reject them or bow to them, but turn towards them, take their hands, and dance. Only when you are the lead in the dance can it proceed in its full majesty. All of the subtle design, killer music and cleverly revealed secrets play their part too, of course. The richness of the world, day and night, water and dungeon, clouds and green groundclouds, isn’t to be underestimated. The dance wouldn’t be as kaleidoscopically beautiful without all of that. Fireworks might not always be necessary, but they are still fireworks. And yet it is the dance of the Jump that gives meaning to it all.

The Lost Levels

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“The Lost Levels”) introduces one such shadow as almost its first move with the poison mushroom, power-up turned to power-down. It takes that to a whole new level with the negative warp zones: welcome to warp zone, now a trick on you. The whole game, in fact, is a cruel mirror held up to Super Mario Bros., a reflection that looks right but doesn’t wave back. Much of its cruelty comes from luring players into familiar actions and then turning them back against them. This game is a dance too, but it’s one where the floor is trying to throw you off, where the steps and flow that you have learned are not only impossible to use but will quicken your downfall. But for some people who already know the dance back to front, perhaps trying to freestyle your way through some spiky math-rock is an enjoyable next step.

Super Mario Bros. 2

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“Super Mario Bros. USA”) is the Waluigi of early Mario games, a mirror of a mirror. It doesn’t focus on the shadows of objects and characters, though, but whole shadow worlds. Pick up a magical potion and you can open a door anywhere, take a subtle knife to the fabric of the universe, walk through the doorway and find yourself literally in shadow. Even outside of that mechanic, there are doors everywhere, and each one could go anywhere. This is the world of the subconsciousness, where possibilities extend to such things as a playable princess and gliding across the world on a gravity-resistant egg. Super Mario Bros. 2 is barely even a Mario game, and handles more awkwardly than one. Yet among all of its doors, it opens one to one of the series’s futures, platforming which is first and foremost a series of puzzles and doors to unlock.

Super Mario Bros. 3

This is the game where Mario learns to fly, tail flapping, on unseen wires in front of platforms casting shadows on a sky painted on sheets. The game is a show, and it’s some production. It has a cast of thousands and is the introduction point for almost as many iconic series images as the original. Its brilliance as sequel and as theatre is in taking the solid and dependable gameplay and mechanics of the original and using those as building blocks, the platforms of its stageset, then rearranging them. Each world rejigs and relights them and makes them interact with new props and characters for a set of dramatically different scenes. Water levels go from brief distractions to an entire world; the desert and an idyllic grassland emerge; World 7 turns off all of the lights to interact with the bare mechanics of pipes. The transitions between levels feel like curtains down and a chance to move things round. And then occasionally it breaks all the underlying rules and throws you into giant world or climbs up through the clouds, and there is nothing to do but laugh in delight. This is the game where Mario learns to fly.

SNES chart, Edge 004, January 1994

#every number one #retrogaming #SNES #Super Mario Bros.#Super Mario All Stars

5 notes · View notes

marginalgloss · 6 years ago

Text

r&R

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh has had fine reviews everywhere I’ve looked. I found it hard to fault. It’s funny, bleak, and strangely elusive. It is in some ways an uncomplicated realist novel, but in its dedication to cold, calculated bouts of absurdity, it slips away from straightforward analysis. It has the feeling of an extended joke — like a very long episode of a sitcom based around a very dark idea, which only briefly permits the reader to glimpse into the depth in between bouts of audience laughter.

At the start of the story it is 2000, and our narrator is about to settle down for a year of heavy rest. She is quite clear about her intentions. She wants to spend the best part of her days asleep (often for about fifteen or sixteen hours) because that is where she is most comfortable. This is not a suicide attempt: initially it seems more like a gentle parody of current rhetoric around the rituals of ‘self-care’.

She will still eat, sleep, and perform the usual human ablutions; the rest of her waking hours will be dedicated to watching movies on her VCR. In this, she will be aided by her eccentric therapist, who is only too happy to provide her with a vast array of antidepressants in between bouts of quackery. Money is not a problem either — the book is keen to explain that the narrator lives in a central New York apartment without a concern for rent, and her parents have left her a substantial inheritance to pay the bills. (Her parents are, incidentally, both dead.)

It was, I suppose, the right time for me to be reading this kind of thing. I don’t find this time of year especially easy for a variety of reasons; a few weeks ago I came down with a minor eye complaint, and the treatment for that has my vision partly blurred by dilating steroid drops. Not being often ill, this has left me feeling out of sorts, like a perpetual convalescent stuck between getting better and getting worse. There is a strange tension between wanting to be an idle person and knowing I am not really capable of it. When my alarm goes off in the mornings for work I propel myself out of bed whether I want to go or not. The motivator is less dedication than it is anxiety; fear of lateness, failure, and various kinds of redundancy. And when I’m not at work, my chosen pastimes are ideal for the kind of person who wants to pretend they are switching off when in fact they are simply shifting their brain into a different gearing for a different kind of work. All this is to say that the idea of a year of R&R, aided by a serious arsenal of chemical downers, starts to seem pretty appealing at this time of year.

For many pages, it’s unclear why the narrator is actually doing this. A reader might associate staying in bed all day and stunning oneself with a vast array of drugs with words like: depression, failure, anxiety, grief — at one end illness, at the other end melancholy. But the narrator is very careful and deliberate in the way she expresses herself. ‘Depression’ doesn’t really come into it: there is nothing so banal, so obvious, as a declaration of feeling bad. Perhaps the feeling of badness has ceased to be overwhelming and it is now only whelming. It is the thing in which she is submerged, and it is so very much all around her that she has ceased to think of it as worth talking about. Instead she would rather go to sleep.

Things, however, don’t go entirely to plan. Despite her best efforts she is rarely alone: her best friend Reva has a habit of appearing at unexpected moments, with a considerable amount of emotional baggage in tow. And the cocktail of drugs she is taking leaves her with gaps in her memory. Sometimes she finds evidence of having gone out and come home while believing herself to be ‘asleep’; she stumbles on IM chat logs on her computer that she doesn’t recall having; she finds bags of expensive clothing piled up in her apartment, all bought while she was unconscious. A different book might have used this as the prompt for a mystery story about what the narrator’s other self gets up to when her real self is asleep, but here, much of this is allowed to be inconsequential.

Again, this feels like a very deliberate contradiction to similar stories about a ‘shut-in’ personality. While reading this I thought often of Money by Martin Amis, which was another novel chiefly concerned with scenes of shocking excess; that book used the same conceit of missing memories, which became the trigger for a descent into Hitchcock-esque paranoia. There’s also The Enormous Space, a short story by J. G. Ballard where the main character chooses to lock himself inside his suburban home as a sort of life experiment; boredom and desperation drive his thoughts relentlessly inward until the dimensions of his surroundings appear to change out of all rational proportion, and a kind of madness takes hold.

Moshfegh’s novel does none of this: the narrator’s drug-induced nocturnal excursions are simply permitted to occur. They are not permitted to be mysterious. This is a book which is not at all surprised by the idea that many of us (perhaps all of us) have lives which exist in the dark side of our waking lives; it would not be right to call them unconscious thoughts, since they become all too real in the execution; they happen, and ought to be seen as another side to ourselves, and not like the sinister shadow to our ego.

A few words about the setting. It is the early 00s; the internet is there, but is of peripheral importance. DVDs are starting to become a thing, but the fact that the narrator actively spurns them in favour of VHS tapes seems important. There’s something about the act of going and getting the tapes that is a thing for her: it is one of the few active motivations she has for leaving her apartment. But those tapes also dealt with time in a different way to DVDs. Each one was like a complete wedge of duration unto itself; you could fast-forward and rewind, but it was clumsy and difficult; they were designed to be consumed from start to finish, in one sitting. DVDs contained multitudes of scenes, angles, options; tapes were somehow so much more one thing.

There’s something worth saying about the kinds of movies the narrator spends her hours watching. These are very much ‘movies’, not ‘films’. Their names must be familiar even if you’ve never seen them. They come from a certain stable of middlebrow, middle-of-the-road, late 80s and early 90s repertoire; today you might see them today in the early afternoon or late at night, on a TV channel in a foreign hotel. They’re chosen not because they are great, but because they are fine. They have a passable quality. Broadly, they’re anaesthetic, and antiseptic: they only allow as much feeling is as required, and for their duration they suppress unhappiness as long as the attention is held. Whoopi Goldberg is the particular object of the narrator’s affections, for complicated reasons which seem to have something to do with her inimitable charisma. Whoopi is so utterly unmistakeable, never less than absolutely herself; always involved in the world around her, always a pleasure to be around. She is the complete opposite to the narrator.

The book’s treatment of movies made me think of the film Brigsby Bear, which the main character is imprisoned by his family in a bunker entirely isolated from the rest of society, with his only experience of popular culture being a TV show filmed, directed and voiced by his father. In the same way, this novel paints a picture of a person who is the prisoner in part of a certain kind of entertainment. But that film ended with the protagonist making the entertainment his own, and in doing so finding his place in a larger community. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers nothing so consoling. The narrator of Moshfegh’s novel actually does something similar — she offers herself up to an artist, and allows him to enter her apartment while she sleeps to make herself into a kind of art project. It’s a bizarrely specific kind of gesture: a conscious surrendering of one’s own unconscious. It’s uncomfortable: consensual, but with limited understanding of the outcome. Does anything come of it? It’s unclear. It feels more like an inversion of the idea that creativity can be a route out of depression: what if, instead, I had someone do the creating for me, while I slept? What would that feel like?

The expectation with a book like this is for the whole thing to move towards a conclusion where the narrator comes to understand the error of her ways. She will dump the drugs, lose the crackpot shrink, and perhaps come to achieve a degree of what some people call ‘closure’. None of this is what happens here. The most we can say is that over time she realises some things about her relationship with her parents, and she comes to regard the people around her with a little less active contempt (especially Reva). Is she a better, more capable human being? Possibly not. But it would be hard to argue that there wasn’t some benefit in all that time spent out of mind.

#books #ottessa moshfegh #my year of rest and relaxation

6 notes · View notes

deantemjitunit19 · 6 years ago

Text

Task 1 - Mini Teach

For task 1, we are asked to design a lesson that uses Art & Design in some way to teach the class skill or some knowledge. Moreover, the lesson session should last for about 10 minutes - not longer and not less. Furthermore, we also had the options whether we are going to stand up in front of the class or create a lesson in a creative way.

To start the project off, I started searching online of what I could teach and these are my mind maps below. However, they seem to be a really boring subject to listen to for about 10 minutes so I decided to scrap that idea.

I came to a conclusion to go with teaching the class hexadecimal colours after searching for something to teach that relates to art & design. However, I knew that teaching how hexadecimal colour works alone would not be enough for people to understand; if most people don’t understand the basic of colour theory first. I have decided to talk briefly about the colour theory and how it links to the hex colour codes at the beginning part of the video lesson.

After I have made my mind up that I’d go with hexadecimal colour code idea, I then begin researching from various websites as to how hex code works and how you will be able to guess colours that way. Of course, this was my first time learning about hex colour codes as well so when the deadline comes - I should be really knowledgeable about this subject.

After that, I have also researched briefly about colour theory. However, I am not going to be mentioning terms that are complicated or scientific which we do not need to know about. Just the basic knowledge of colour theory and how colour works.

Once the research is completed, it is now time for me to decide whether to stand in front of the class with a powerpoint slideshow or make a video presentation and to be honest, video presentation sounds good to me. This is because nobody would really like to listen to a boring powerpoint slideshow for a whole 10 minutes. A better way to educate people is through the uses of images, moving images, and animation. This should be enough to grab their attention for the whole 10 minutes and I do plan on doing a voice over instead of just captions as that could overwhelm the audience.

Before I begin, I’d need to write a script as to what I am going to be teaching in the video, and I also need to make sure to pace myself really well as not to go over the mark of 10 minutes. However, the time I limit myself on the video was actually 7 to 8 minutes as I wanted to leave a few minutes for the class to have a go at a mini quiz of guessing the hex colour code.

I recorded my voice using a microphone and I recorded it to only one sentence each as reading the whole script in one go would mean that there is a high chance that I’d mess it up and have to start over again, which is why I decided to record one sentence at a time and put it together in Adobe Premiere Pro. Furthermore, since English is not my first language, I tried to pronounce words as best as I can so that the audience can understand me easily.

After I have recorded the script, I then put all the voice recorded in Premiere Pro where I put them all together, and it came to almost about 8 minutes which is quite good in my opinion. The next step I did was exported the audio file and imported it into Adobe Audition where I equalize and change the volume to a standard volume. The reason why I have to equalize the sound was that the original record was really bad, and I mean some parts were really quiet and some parts are really loud. By equalizing the sound, it will give off a steady and consistence sound which is good for the viewers to listen to.

Once the scripted audio was equalized, it is time for me to export it into an MP4 file and imported the file into Adobe After Effect. I have made some of the assets in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop which I then imported it to After Effect; however, most of them were made in After Effect itself.

I then started to animate some of the elements that match the script to make some of the areas easy to understand, rather than having the viewers only listen to myself - I thought it would be a good idea to have them see what was going on and how it work as well. Most importantly, I have also used quite a few stock footages that I have found on the internet that are free to use. Not to mention, photos that are being used in the video are from a website called ‘Unsplash’, which is a website that you can use images for free at a high resolution too.

In addition to explaining the basic colour theory and how hex colour code works, I have also made a section where I test out my ideas and using what I have learnt to try to guess the colour using the hex code. I have included that in the video to show that it was possible to guess the colour - although not accurate, as these codes are meant for the computer to process, but it is just a fun way of figuring out the colours.

I did much research into the best way into guessing the hex colour code, but none that I found were as useful or was quite difficult to comprehend and would take some time. This would be a 10 minutes lesson to the class so I want them to learn it in just the amount of 8 minutes, which they would try to take the test on themselves and see whether they have learned anything from the lesson. I realised that this was going to be difficult but I tried as best as I can to use images and animation to make it easy for them to understand.

I came up with an idea to create a number chart which displays 16 numbers from number 0 to 15. Obviously, I have already converted the letter symbol from A - F to 10 - 15 which makes it easier for the viewers to understand. The way it works is rather simple, I did mention in the video that to break the hex colour code in the simplest way, the viewers only need to focus on the first symbol of each red, green and blue colours - which then use the chart to see how much intensity the colour is.

I did also mention that RGB colours started out with darkness or black, which means that the lower the intensity is, for example, number 0 - 4, would actually be a dark colour. The lower the number is, it does not mean that you will get a darker shade of that colour, but would rather get a black colour or nothing the lower the number is. It is a complicated subject to understand but once the viewers understand this point - the rest is easy.

Script:

Hey, welcome to a video presentation of the basic colour theory and hex colours explained. It is a good idea to understand how hex colours works as a lot of the time, you’d be working with them in Adobe software and I know it can be a little bit confusing as you’ll see letters, numbers, and pound or number sign but I’ll do my best to explain it as much as I can.

So what is hexadecimal code?

Well, if you’ve ever worked with colours on your computer, then chances are you’ve seen the hexadecimal codes before. It started off with a pound or number sign which follows by random numbers and letters that make up a colour.

However, before I begin explaining what hex colours is, let’s touch briefly on the basic colour theory and understand the differences between additive and subtractive colours.

Light or white light is a combination of all colours, and to get a better answer to this. Let’s take a look at this apple. It creates colours by subtracting or absorbing certain wavelengths of colour while reflecting other wavelengths back to the viewers. This is called subtractive colours.

If an object reflects all the white light back to the viewers, it will appear white. However, if the object adsorbs or subtracts all light illuminating it, no light is reflected back to the viewers and it will appear black. It is the subtractive process that allows everyday objects around us to show colours. Now, subtractive or CMY colours requires to be illuminated by white light to be visible and seen in original colour.

As for the additive or RGB colours, it starts with darkness or black and gradually add light to get different results of colours, and this is the perfect inversion of the subtractive primaries we have just talked about and this is because, for subtractive, we are taking away light whereas additive, we are adding light into it.

A computer screen blends varying intensities of red, green, and blue light each of its tiny pixels. These pixels are so small and tightly packed that our human eyes are fooled into the perception that there are many different colours when there are only three.

Before we get into the hexadecimal codes, let’s test my ideas of breaking down hex codes and making an inform guesses on the colours.

What we have here is a hex colour code test and what you do is make a well-informed guess base on the hex code given above to figure out the colour.

[Test]

From what I can see from the hex code, I can see that there is no red, a lot of green and a little bit of blue. Now I know for a fact that it isn’t going to be a bright green because it’s not at its highest intensity so my answer would be this colour here. That’s correct.

As for this one, I can see that there is a bit of red, a lot of green and very little blue. Now, can it be a very bright green or a lime green colour? From what I can see from the hex code, I know that there are quite a bit of red in there and red mix with green gives a yellow colour. However, since the red colour is kind of at the medium point of intensity, my guess would be for this lime green colour. And that’s correct.

And for the final one, I can see a medium amount of red, no green, and medium amount of blue. And I know that if you mix red with blue, you’d get magenta. However, because the intensity for both of the colours is at their medium point, my guess for the colour would be a darker shade of magenta. And that’s correct.

That was a quick demonstration of me trying out the test, and by the end of the video, you’d be able to make a well-informed guess as to which colour it is. So how does this work?

It’s simple to understand the RGB colour system because it’s done in the decimal system, meaning numbers are just like what you’ve learned your entire life. Zero is the lowest and 255 is the highest.

To get the colour of red, the set value needs to be at 255, 0, 0. This value will equal to a bright red colour. If the value is set to 0, 255, 0 – you’d get a bright green colour. And lastly, 0, 0, 255 will get you a bright blue colour.

The standard numeral system uses ten symbols from 0 – 9 and that’s what you’re familiar with. All of the numbers in our system are composed of 0 – 9 and any number we have are going to include these 10 numbers, including the number 0.

However, in the hex numbering system, it uses the numbers from 0 – 9 and an additional 6 letters symbols from A – F which represent the number 10 – 15

Now, why do we use letters instead of numbers? Well, when they get to 10, they want to be able to keep the single digits and there are no single digits after 9 so they would have to use letters as a representation for the number 10 – 15.

So now that we know a bit about how hex codes work, let’s break it down even more. Hex numbers start with a pound sign or hashtag and are followed by six letters or numbers. The first two digits will mean red and tell the computer how much red to add, the next two digits will mean green and how much it should add, and finally, the last two digits will mean blue and how much it should add into creating one complete colour.

In hexadecimal, you’ll define how much red, green, and blue in values between 00 to FF instead of 255 like in RGB. But to be honest, they work exactly the same way. In RGB colour, the value 0 is the lowest and the value 255 is the highest – and this means how much intensity the colour is. The same thing can be said for hexadecimal colours. The lowest intensity equal to 00 while the highest intensity equal to FF.

There is a way to convert hexadecimal numbers to an RGB value. For example, let’s take 7D in hexadecimal number and convert it to an RGB value. To do this, you’d need to take number 7 and times it by 16. And we know that the letter D equals to 13. Take the number 13 and times it by 1. Basically, you just take that number and do nothing to it. Once multiplied, add the number up to get the RGB values.

So, before we end this video and onto the quiz, I just wanted to show my thought process and explain a little bit of how you can guess the colour using hex code. Let’s start basic. So we know that the first 2 digits are red, the next 2 digits are green and the final 2 digits are blue. Now you can do the math and convert the hex code into RGB values and guess it that way if you think that’s easier. However, I think that is just way too long. Let’s keep it simple and only focus on the first digits for the red, green and blue. C equals 12 so we know that it is way past the medium intensity. 3 is a very small number for the green so let’s not worry about that and around medium intensity for blue colour.

Now we know that if you mix red and blue together, you’d get magenta and there are two shades of magenta here. It can get complicated, but just think simple. We have a high intensity for both red and blue so the obvious choice would be a vivid magenta as there is no green colour in there.

Now it isn’t necessary for us to read hex code as they are meant for a computer to process the code to generate the correct colour. However, it is great to be able to understand how it works and that there is a way of breaking down the code and make well-informed guesses.

Mini quiz:

After the video is finished, I then presented them with a mini quiz of five questions to see how much they learn from this lesson. I obviously didn’t want people in the class to feel intimidated by this broad subject, so I started the quiz with 3 simple questions that were mentioned in the video. For example question number one, the question to guess the colour is #0000FF. I did mention that 00 is the lowest intensity while FF is the highest intensity, and the viewers also know that there are six symbols in hex colour code that is divided into a group of 2 to make 6 - with each group representing red, green and blue. FF is the highest intensity and we know that the final 2 digits represent blue colour so the obvious answer would be a blue colour. It is pretty straightforward and this is just to get them started and not feel intimidated by the question.

However, question four is a little bit harder as there are more options and the question wouldn’t be as obvious as the other three. However, it is still pretty simple. Now before I explain the answer, I do feel for the class if they couldn’t get these last two questions as I have printed out a mini quiz for the class, and the colours that they are supposed to be guessing is RGB colours. However, because I have to print these out, I’d need to select the CMYK colours, plus my home printer was being annoying so the colours came out a little faded. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got the answer wrong as the colours are not even correct in the first place. I initially wanted them to try it on the computer screen, but I didn’t know where else they could to take this quiz except for Kahoot. However, I personally don’t like Kahoot and would rather avoid it as it’s annoying so I decided to print it out instead. To compensate for the incorrect colours on the sheet, I tried to make the answer obvious by having colours completely opposite one another to make the choices seem obvious to the viewers.

For question number four, the question is #C1280E and the answer is actually pretty obvious. If the class can remember what I have mentioned that the first 2 digits are red, the middle is green and the last 2 is blue - they should be able to understand this question easily. For example, C equal to number 12 for red. 2 is a very small number for green and there is no blue so the obvious answer would be the red colour.

As for the final question, the question is #B349DD and this is a hard question to test if people have learned anything from this lesson. B equal to number 11 for the red colour, 4 for the green, and D equal 13 for the blue colour. Obviously, the colour red and blue are very high in intensity and if you mix these two colours together - you’d get the colour of magenta which would be the correct answer.

Reflection:

I believe I achieved what I had set out to do at the beginning and managed to make a good quality video presentation. I successfully created the mini quiz as well and I really wanted people to have a go at it - whether they get it right or wrong doesn’t matter as these codes were meant for the computer to process it anyway, but it is a nice way of learning how the code works.

The mini quiz I gave to the class was also well received with 3 to 4 people who actually got all 5 questions correct, while all managed to get at least 3 questions correct. I totally understand it as this type of subject takes time to understand and practice with, but for a 7 minutes lesson - I believe they did extremely well learning it.

As for my presentation, I went a little over 11 minutes but overall, it was a good result. The video I’ve prepared is 8 minutes long and I was planning to have the class do the quiz for about 2 minutes. However, some people took longer than the other but it is no problem as I still think that it was successful.

Final video presentation:

youtube

1 note · View note

yogaadvise · 4 years ago

Text

YogaHub Teacher Spotlight: Julie B

www.JulieBYoga.com

My Yoga story

I reluctantly stepped onto a yoga exercise mat for the very first time one decade back. At the time I really did not actually recognize much regarding yoga. From what I did recognize, I had a feeling it would not be for me. I don't commonly admit it, but this is one time I am really happy to say-I was really wrong.

From that initially yoga class I understood yoga exercise was something that would be a massive component of my life. Wherever my course took me. I didn't know the level of the benefits I would certainly obtain from practicing, and currently educating yoga. 10 years on and I'm now educating complete time. I remain to be shocked and touched by what yoga provides to me each day both on and also off the mat.

From that initially class I rapidly established a routine practice incorporating vinyasa circulation and astanga. I was extremely stunned to find fringe benefits far from the physical method, like a calmer mind. I was (as well as still am) that person who is frequently on the go-always thinking ahead and planning. I found it really tough to turn off. It took me virtually 2 years to actually turn off at the end of course and, when I did, it was absolutely fantastic. I keep in mind floating out of the studio that evening with a clear realisation. Yoga exercise had come to be greater than simply obtaining my normal physical fitness. Yoga exercise was a vital component of my life on and off the mat.

My teaching trip began 7 years ago-I finished my 200hr educator training with Yoga exercise London. I am additionally learnt maternity, mum and baby yoga exercise and also children yoga. My history remains in dancing and acrobatics. I such as to incorporate the freedom of motion and innovative sequences into my classes.

I've experienced very first hand the benefits of yoga as a praise to other sports as well as training. Whilst training for a marathon 6 years ago, yoga maintained me injury free as well as boosted my recuperation considerably. From this I started exploring the benefits yoga can offer professional athletes of any kind of degree as well as studied sophisticated makeup being experts in injury recovery and also prevention. This swiftly became my focus and for the past couple of years I have collaborated with professional athletes throughout numerous sports including specialist rugby gamers, Olympic weight lifters, specialist MMA fighters, triathletes and also marathon runners.

Julie B Yoga Classes

With many various yoga exercise classes readily available in Dublin it is confusing for any kind of yogi to recognize where to begin or what is right for you. Whether it is your very first time on the floor covering or if you have actually been exercising for many years it can seem like a little bit of a yoga exercise maze out there. It seems weekly there is a new design of yoga to try yet likewise one style can imply different points in various studios and every instructor will have their own style. With a lot of options and also yoga exercise words flying around it can be daunting-Deep Breath, we have actually all been there.

I educate all levels of courses and also a range of workshops but all are designed with the same foundations and result in mind. You discover your side and also discover exactly how to listen to your body to get the most out of it in your yoga technique. My courses are testing but fun. I like to be creative in my sequences and blend the various designs I have actually researched and learnt. No two courses will certainly be the very same with me-It maintains it fresh for both myself and also the yogis in course.

What I love to teach

Whilst living in London I specialised in sports yoga as well as dealt with numerous athletes as well as sports teams. I am really enthusiastic regarding this area-when I instruct sporting activities sessions I like to concentrate on the significance of getting the posture right by understanding the positioning and what areas of your body you are functioning in every pose. I likewise have a background in dancing as well as gymnastics and I like to incorporate this with various yoga styles so my courses are fairly creative as well as filled with testing series however always with a component of fun.

I additionally love to teach arm balances and handstands. After a bad loss in course doing pincha years ago I was identified to overcome my fear of falling and also now use this to show pupils exactly how to do the very same in any kind of inversion or balance.

Personal Practice

I technique daily- this can be difficult trying to fit it in between teaching classes. Relying on my routine I will certainly attempt to fit a technique around it. I do a mix of self technique and also go to classes. I assume as an instructor it's actually essential to maintain going to classes to challenge on your own as well as also get brand-new concepts for teaching. Some days I do fairly a slow-moving steady series and also others its a whole lot faster and also high energy. It depends upon my state of mind on the day but one point I have learned to do is to fail to remember expectations. I never understand when I jump on the floor covering for a self method how much time it will certainly last- I simply pay attention to my body and go with it.

New points I'm learning this year

I'm mosting likely to Bali in June for a month to do my Yin Yoga exercise teacher training as well as I'm so ecstatic concerning it. I just discovered yin in 2015 and am simply impressed by exactly how this design of yoga has actually transformed my very own technique and also my teaching. I'm like a little publication worm at the minute checking out all points yin!

What am I grateful for

As corny or predictable as it appears I am so grateful that I have the ability to do what I enjoy every day and also instruct yoga. It never falls short to astonish me the beautiful and also authentic people I get to meet with my task. I really battle with calling it a work, I never wake up and also really feel like I'm going to function. I feel extremely fortunate to share my love and also interest for yoga exercise and learn from my pupils and also other instructors each day. I am additionally widely happy for my outstanding pals, household and also boyfriend that frequently motivate and also sustain me in what I do. I am additionally extremely happy for the real pals I have actually fulfilled through yoga and the chances that have actually come my means through my little yoga journey.

One of my much-loved aspects of being me

I have actually made some huge choices in the last couple of years - some would say extremely risky options. I shared a few of their uncertainties as well as worries yet I have constantly had a very favorable perspective in life. So I took the dangers as well as followed my heart, remained real to what I knew I desired in life both on and off the mat. It really feels weird to state, it however I truly like exactly how I do that-if I think something I won't let anyone quit me or alter my mind. I usually ask myself 'what's the most awful that can take place?' if I'm okay with the response I opt for it- if it does not exercise how I prepared or desired I try to see it as a discovering as opposed to a failure therefore far it seems to be exercising well!

#baby yoga #Hatha Yoga #kundalini yoga #vinyasa yoga #yin yoga #yoga #yoga classes #yoga styles

0 notes

garywonghc · 7 years ago

Photo

Accepting the Unacceptable

by Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Over the last century or so, death has been becoming increasingly institutionalised and removed from immediate experience. It is no longer a common experience in concrete terms. Where people used to die at home in the past, this is no longer the case, and the usual gathering of relatives and family no longer takes place spontaneously. It is no longer a communal affair, but on the contrary, it is hidden from public view, resulting in less actual contact with death and dying. Perversely, the literature on death and dying has been growing considerably, and people are actually talking about it more and more, while handling the practical fact less and less. The irony of this situation is described by Ray Anderson, a Christian theologian, in his book Theology, Death, and Dying:

There is then a fundamental ambivalence about death for the contemporary person. Death has been pushed out of sight and out of the context of daily life. No longer is death itself a meaningful ritual of family or social life. Yet, there is the emergence of a quite specific awareness of death as an existential concern quite apart from the event of death itself.

Strangely enough, awareness of death in the form of the psychological effects of death as a condition of life has grown in inverse proportion to the silence concerning death itself. Where death was once the unspoken word that accompanied communion with and commitment to the dead as a ritual of public and community life, there was virtually no literature on death and dying.

In contemporary Western society, it is quite the opposite now, with one author stating that he has reviewed over 800 books on death and dying and has more than 2,000 articles on the subject in his files. Overall, there is much more talk about death and dying and far less immediate experience of it, in terms of actually handling those who are dying, or having to witness death. We see a lot of simulated death on television and so on, but as a rule, we have very little immediate contact with it compared with people living in developing countries, or in the past.

For all these reasons — the ever-present fear of death and our lack of contact with it — it is all the more important to have a proper encounter with the facts of death and to deal with the fear of death, because, from the Buddhist point of view, coming to terms with death is part of making our life worthwhile and meaningful. Death and life are not seen as completely separate and opposed, but as giving rise to each other. They coexist in a complementary fashion. For Buddhists, the aim is not to conquer death but to come to accept it and familiarise ourselves with our own sense of mortality and impermanence.

According to Buddhism, we die because we are a product of causes and conditions (pratityasamutpada in Sanksrit). Whatever is caused is impermanent, is subject to decay, to death. Human beings are not exempt, as it is a natural process. Life without death is impossible, and vice versa, and therefore the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice incorporates an acceptance of death and a cultivation of an attitude that does not reject it as something ugly and menacing that steals our life away, and thus something to be pushed aside and ignored. Nor does a Buddhist think of living forever. The Buddhist view is that everything is transient and impermanent, and so death and life are inseparably bound up with each other, at all times in fact, even while we live, as the aging process itself is viewed as a part of the dying process.

There is the famous story of the Buddha’s being approached by a mother carrying her dead baby in her arms. She pleads with the Buddha: “You are an enlightened being; you must have all these extraordinary powers, so I want you to bring my child back to life.” The Buddha says, “All right, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do one thing for me first.” “I’ll do anything,” she replied. He responds, “I want you to go around and knock on all the doors of this town and ask each person who comes to the door whether he or she had anyone die in his or her family, and if he or she says no, then ask him or her to give you a sesame seed.” The woman knocks on every door she can, and returns empty-handed, saying to the Buddha, “I don’t want you to bring back my child now. I understand what you are trying to teach me.” The lesson here is that death is all-pervasive and not something that happens, sometimes, to particular people, but it happens to every one of us. Knowing this can lessen the sting of the fear of death. It is analogous to people sharing some kind of psychological or personal problem. Eventually everyone starts to open up and talk to others with similar problems, realising essentially that we are all experiencing the same thing. In this way, the problem becomes diffused. The Buddha’s point to the grieving mother, that everybody dies, is compassionate because to think “my child, my child, he has died, I want him back” is to narrow our focus in such a way as to generate an enormous personal problem. It is better to think of all the mothers that have lost children and experienced the same grief, whereby it becomes more encompassing. The problem moves beyond the personal into something much wider.

In terms of karma, it is an interesting question from a Buddhist point of view to ask if our death is in a way predetermined. In some ways, it is feasible to say that there is a preordained time to die, as our karma determines it. When the time to die arrives, we then die. This would be a result of our karma. On the other hand, our death is also dependent on a lot of causes and conditions, so it is not preordained in that sense. So it is predetermined in one sense and not so in another. Following form this, it is quite expected that Buddhists, if unwell, would seek medical attention and remedies, or go to the hospital if necessary. They would not simply acquiesce and say, “Well it must be my karma to die now,” and do nothing about the situation, for the time may very well not have come yet, so to speak: and if they are not careful, because of the causes and conditions set in motion, they might die before they need to. Even so, at times, no matter what we do in order to live, it will become impossible to do so.

People do not fear just eternal pain and suffering in hell, but extinction, not being around, not existing. This thought is very much disturbing in itself for many people, and so the removal of the idea of hell will not alleviate the fear of death itself. We have a fear of death, as do other creatures, but from a Buddhist view, ours is intimately linked to our notion of a self. While meditation or contemplation on death can be very confronting initially, we will be far better off for doing it than not, precisely because the fear of death is always there, underlying everything. The fundamental sense of anxiety is always there, so it is better to bring it to the fore and deal with it than suspend consideration, because it will continue to influence our life, often in a negative way, if ignored. We must remember, too, that this type of practice is done in the context of other Buddhist practices, which are all designed to incorporate and process the full range of negativities in the mind.

It is sometimes thought Tibetans have a different approach to death, having been raised among it perhaps, but the very fact of there being specific spiritual instructions especially designed for the matter indicates that Tibetans are no different. They fear, as we do in the West, not just for themselves, but they also fear leaving their children and loved ones behind, and they too wish not to grow old and die, or to die young, for that matter. Fear of death is all-pervasive and acultural. Everybody experiences it, but an important difference in the Buddhist tradition is the emphasis on working with that fear. Therefore Tibetans, if they choose to, have access to traditions and practices of this nature. Monks for instance, would go to charnel grounds, or graveyards, to practice and contemplate impermanence, which might seem a bit excessive to us. In Tibet the charnel grounds use to be in the wilderness, so they were a very eerie place to practice, especially on one’s own, and it was guaranteed to throw up all kinds of fears. Thighbone trumpets and other implements used on these occasions have horrified some Westerners, who have described these rituals as shamanistic, incorporating elements of black magic and so on. However, for Tibetans, living in primitive physical conditions, these bones had no magical qualities, but were merely reminders of impermanence, of transience. It would help them deal with their fear of death, and the fear of the dead as well.

There are Buddhist traditions, of course, like Zen, that do not have such elaborate rituals as are found in Tibetan Buddhism that involve mantras, visualisations, and so forth, and focus more on being immediately present with what is happening now, avoiding all mental constructions of what might take place, as the best form of preparation for the future, including the eventuality of death. The end result is the same. Both methods lead to greater acceptance of the event, and the ultimate aim is the same, which is to increase awareness and develop insight. In addition, of course, the Buddhist view is that life and death are inextricably bound to each other, moment to moment. The death of the past is happening right now, and we can never really see what is going to happen in the future. When one moment passes, that is death, and when another arises, that is life, or rebirth, we might say. Therefore, living in the present with awareness, links in a fundamental way with appreciating impermanence.

It does not matter how elaborate certain teachings or meditation techniques are, the fundamental aim is still to deal with immediate experience, here and now. It has nothing much to do with what might or might not happen in the future, or attaining some wonderful mystical experience in the future, because, as the masters have continuously emphasised, as important as the attainment of enlightenment is, it has to be arrived at through being in the here and now, dealing with present circumstances, not through indulging in speculation about what enlightenment might be. None of this is to say that we have to be practicing Buddhists to die in a peaceful manner. Ultimately one cannot tell, judging by people’s personalities, who will die peacefully. Some Christians die very peacefully, whereas others struggle; some Buddhists die peacefully, and some kicking and screaming, as they say, and some atheists die peacefully, and so on. A very mild-mannered person can become quite aggressive and obnoxious at the time of death, refusing to accept it, and others, normally obnoxious characters, turn out to be very accepting and amiable. We can never really say with certainty how anyone will react to death, but we can say that certain meditations, including those on death, will definitely help a person come to accept it more readily, although we can never be absolutely sure, and the moment may produce panic even in a dedicated practitioner. But if we know what’s going on, it is likely to be far less confrontational.

This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have.

Knowing in an abstract sense that everybody dies or that everything is impermanent is different from experiencing impermanence, coming face to face with in everyday life. If we have felt impermanence, then tragedies are easier to deal with because we fully grasp that all is impermanent and transient and nothing lasts forever. As the Buddha said, we come in contact with people and things that we wish not to come in contact with, and we get separated from people and things that we wish to stay among, and that is how things are, in reality. Similarly, when death occurs, it may still be a very fearful experience, but we may be able to maintain that sense of awareness. Fear may still be present, but maintaining a sense of equilibrium is very important. Buddhist meditators may get separated from their partner and experience great stress and grief, but they may not yield to that grief so completely that it overwhelms them, and this applies with respect to their own death as well.

34 notes · View notes