#there's almost that intermeshment between them

[innovativestruggles]

Yuta & Rika - a speculative analysis

Like with basically any fandom out there, I'm about 3 years late with JJK 0 😩 Regardless, I finally watched it yesterday and subsequently really, really needed to discuss this topic before I forget.

As an anime only fan, I only heard of Yuta from bits and pieces in the anime and from the fandom. That would go for Rika too so I never really understood the extent of their relationship until I watched JJK 0. But oh man, when I watched it, these two took my entire heart and soul.

And whilst I do get why Yuta is shipped with Maki or Inumaki, Rika wins it for me. And before I jump into my explanation, I want to say it outright - Yuta and Rika gives me strong Obito and Rin vibes 😳

Anyways let's talk about Rika.

This sweet yet psycho girl is a super side character (much like Rin), but I did a bit more research into her and it explained so so much more about her character and why she is the way she is (both as human and cursed spirit). Rika lost her mother unexpectedly at the age of 5 and then her father during a hiking trip together at the age of 11. There are speculations (by paternal grandmother) that she is involved in the death of both her parents. I cannot say too much about whether a 5 year old would have too much influence over their mother, but I will shelve this for now. I want to focus on Rika and her father. There is an explanation that one of Rika's biggest dislikes is older men. Let me tell you this - an 11 year old child with an adverse dislike for a specific portion of the population (older men) points towards one thing - abuse. This is an educated guess on my end (and if I was given a case in real life about this, I would come to this hypothesis as well), but the trauma Rika endured shaped her personality and how she would end up attaching herself to Yuta. We don't know exactly what sort of trauma Rika went through, but my guess is some form of physical or sexual abuse. The development of a 'manipulative' personality towards adults is a form of a survival mechanism developed to keep herself safe. Rika's father most likely had a role in her abuse and hence the mystery of his disappearance (and how it alluded to the fact that Rika had something to do with it, together with the explanation of her manipulative personality).

Let's come back to Rika's mother. There are two theories/hypothesis to this.

A 5 year would have enough cognitive capacity to understand that they are in an unsafe situation. However, it is unclear whether Rika's mother had any involvement in Rika's abuse. But what I presume is that she did not have a close relationship with her mother. The reason? She gave her mother's wedding ring to Yuta. A child impacted by abuse by one parent and not the other means they would naturally be attached to the safe parent, so anything sentimental attached to the safe parent would give the child a sense of safety. To give something special away like her mother's ring means her mother meant very little to her, so Rika decided to re-symobilise the ring into something new - something for Yuta. And because an 11 year old most likely cannot afford a ring

The second theory would be that Rika had a close and safe relationship with her mother, and the giving away of the ring to Yuta symbolises the safety and security she finds in him. I.e. the element of safety and security she found in her mother has been transferred to Yuta (via the giving of the ring).

Regardless of what theory we go with, there is too little information regarding Rika's relationship with her mother. We don't know what happened to her mother, whether she died of natural causes or was murdered. But all we know is that Rika most likely endured severe abuse by her father (that may or may not involve other older men).

Looking into Rika's personality. Her proposal to Yuta is a dead giveaway of her need to locate a safe space. Yuta is Rika's safety net. They met at a time where both were quite vulnerable - Yuta being unwell and Rika having returned from a mountain climb where her father went missing. Rika's proposal is an indicator of her need for a new life, the idea of marriage is to be permanently attached to her safety net and to have Yuta take her away from whatever she experienced. Of course, 11 year old children do have a basic idea of what marriage is, but it seems like Rika has more of an underlying idea of what she would like to utilise the marriage concept for - that is, to escape and re-establish her safety within the one person she loves and trusts. This explains her personality as a cursed spirit - jealous, overprotective, intense, emotional and childish. Through trauma, Rika learnt ways to ensure she is kept safe emotionally, psychologically and physically. She is always having to survive day by day until she is finally able to manipulate her father out of her life (again this seems a likely scenario, given the very little info readers are provided). When the one person (Yuta) who comes into her life finally allows her to be a child - to play, to have fun and give her the life she should have been having, naturally Rika would be overprotective of Yuta. As I mentioned, Yuta is her safety net, and to have him taken away (by bullies, by another love interest etc), is the decimation of Rika's own safety.

We were given only very small snippets into Rika's life and what she was like as a human. But her personality carried over into her cursed spirit form, and the basic information provided in the character profile, are both more than enough to deduce that Rika's background is incredibly complex with multiple layers of trauma.

One really big thing I would like to point out is Rika's comment before she moved into the afterlife - she was happier accompanying Yuta as a cursed spirit than when she was alive. This is another important piece of information that showed Rika most likely experienced a significant amount of trauma as a human. What would force an 11 year old child to come to such conclusions? The only answer is abuse. As a cursed spirit, Rika is able to escape everything and be by Yuta's side (almost like the prospect of marriage - "take me away from all this and let me be by your side forever")

For Yuta, I can't speak too much about him because his background as a child is essentially a mystery. Not sure about his parents and how he grew up. But judging from his bond and connection with Rika, I presume he grew up quite lonely and friendless. Whether there was trauma, I don't know but it did mention he had to distant himself from his family when Rika became a cursed spirit. Regardless, Yuta's acceptance of her proposal and his happiness at the prospect of being together forever with her as they grow older indicates to me that Yuta may have some complexities in his childhood we don't know about. But it could just be that he genuinely had a normal childhood and Rika was the one and only person outside his family he connected with. However, we don't know whether his timid nature occurred before he met Rika or after she became a cursed spirit. There are too many unexplained parts with Yuta. Anyways, we know Yuta loved Rika immensely (as much as Rika loved him), and his refusing to accept her death is an indicator of his feelings towards her. Their love for each other is pure and innocent because they allowed each other to live in safety and to be children.

And even after releasing her spirit, Yuuta still held onto remnants of Rika. I do love the idea of Yuta being able to move on and give himself to someone else, but I feel Yuta has a lot more unprocessed emotions regarding intimacy - that though he freed Rika, he seems forever bounded by being with her and only her.

So here's my conclusion for this pairing - their background and their pure love is what really made me love them so much. Does all this sound very Obito x Rin to you? Whilst Yuta is able to bounce back from the grief with the help of a mentor and friends, Obito never did. But they both shared an immense amount of grief from the loss of their loved one at an early age.

And yes, I seem to love my tragic rare pairs...dear oh dear.

Anyways, these are all speculations based on canon materials. So if you have any interesting hypothesis, I'd love to hear it!

[kindlythevoid]

So this point might have been made but I would once again like to link the Death of the Clones and to the Fall of the Republic

We all knew that the downfall of the Republic went hand-in-hand with Order 66. In Clone Wars, Filoni, as we all knew, emphasized the clones’ death in the series finale as much as the Jedi’s in the movies. He places real emphasis on the effect it had on the clones, who we had grown to see as individuals, as people, while the Emperor saw them as a means to an end. 

However, not only does Filoni acutely break our hearts by showing us the other side of the coin, he makes an interesting association throughout the show. The end of the Jedi means the end of the Republic, it’s true, but, in most media types, Luke Skywalker rebuilds the Jedi Order in a new way and helps preserve their legacy. The Empire is done away with and the Republic restored. 

Or is it?

On one side, the New Republic and the Jedi show the resurrection of an old idea in new ways, a transformation in order to adapt to new ideals. 

But the Old Republic is dead. The time of the Jedi intermeshed with the Republic is gone and buried, another story to be passed down as more of a cautionary tale than the height of an ancient order. 

You know who else is dead? That never gets revived or reformed? The clones. 

Our brave boys in every color under the sun die, and they never return, not in any way that prolongs them. 

You see, they age on the double. During wartime, this was so they could get more troops on the field faster. Afterwards? It’s pretty convenient that they die twice as fast as the rest of the population. And even though surviving clones such as Rex and Wolffe and Gregor, the main ones we truly know about surviving later on at this point in the Star Wars Canon, made huge contributions to the Republic, it ultimately will not benefit them from a genetic or cultural standpoint. 

Culturally, they were dead the moment the Emperor gave the order. 

And, here’s the kicker, so was the Republic. 

The Republic spent its last years mired in politics and war rooms and, as Filoni likes to remind us, clones. 

I’m still going through my rewatch of the clone wars, but there are a few prominent scenes that come to mind that make Filoni’s point, intentioned or not, extremely clear. 

The first is this gif of Commander Thorn’s death. 

As Thorn falls back after his admittedly badass last stand, he lands in the center of what I would describe as a symbol of the Republic. The gear’s right there, formed by the droids. 

This, of course, is just one of several moments where the Republic symbol is made, but it is a popular scene and a good example for the point I’m trying to make. 

Thorn in this picture, takes the place of the Republic. And just as the clone dies, so, too, does the Republic.

Don’t believe me?

Fives very literally held the secret to the clones’s survival. And, as we all know, had the clones had full control, it is likely the Republic would not have fallen, or at least not as dramatically and without the multiple genocides on its way out. 

Fives, in the gif above, is surrounded by the Republic symbol once again, only this time by other clones. It’s poetic, in a way, that two clones struggling to save their people die in a Republic symbol. Almost as if the fate of the Republic hinges on the fate of the clones. 

And if that doesn’t cover it enough for you, if you truly don’t see the connection between the clones and the Republic, I’d like you to meet a dear clone whom we all love:

Jesse. 

The only clone I’ve seen with a big ass tattoo of the Republic symbol stamped right there on his damn face. 

Jesse, who truly believed in the Republic and had served long enough to be the only clone other than Rex to keep his helmet creatively apart after Ahsoka’s return. 

Jesse, whose death marks the start of the Empire. His destruction and death under Order 66 marks the turning point in Clone Wars. Before they got the call on that ship, the Republic was alive and basically done with the war. But as soon as that ship crashed, as soon as we see that Jesse is well and truly dead, buried and respects and everything, the next scene, the very next scene, features Darth Vader and the Empire. 

The clones were the canaries of the Republic. When they died, the Republic followed. 

[comfort-questing]

"It isn't your fault, you know."

He shivered in her arms, a loose half-conscious bundle of tattered robes and messy hair, the blood from his forehead staining her coat. The discarded mage staff lay on the floor beside them.

"I should - should have - "

She tightened her grasp, trying to ground and still him. "We weren't going to be able to hold the wards against them, no matter what. That was - that was too much for anyone." And even more for one who'd spent the morning on the walls, frantically spell-patching against catapult stones and magic missiles alike.

"Well, it's all over now." His voice into the hollow of her neck was more breath than sound. "It's all over. They're - they're coming."

"We don't know that yet." She willed a confidence she did not feel into her voice and picked up her water bottle, holding it to his trembling lips. How long it had been since she'd seen him eat or drink, she didn't know. She'd had her own work to do just like all of them in the city.

He drank, after a moment of staring empty-eyed at the bottle; she kept a hand on it to steady its slight weight. "Will you stay with me?" he said, a moment later. The look in his gray eyes was almost too much to meet. "When they - if they come. If you trust me. I'll - I'll try to keep you safe, anyway. I'll try."

There wasn't really a question there, and she didn't know what to say that wouldn't cheapen it. So she moved her hand up to cover his on the side of the water bottle and squeezed gently, so that their fingers intermeshed, and watched his smile blossom strained and tired for an instant across the slight space between them.

"Then you'll need to rest, anyway," she said, after a moment. "I'll keep watch."

It didn't take him long to fall asleep, in the end - there on the floor with his outstretched arm for a pillow - one hand looped around his mage staff, and the other cold hand warming into hers.

[indiavolowetrust]

THE LOCKED-ROOM MURDER OF MR. DIAVOLO: Choose Your Own Adventure

Guidelines

The story will be updated in approx 1000 word segments on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with two to three choices at the bottom in [this format.]

Depending on the feedback – comments, DMs, reblogs, etc. – I will write the next portion of the story based on the choice. You will have until 6 p.m. Central Daylight Time of the following days to make your choice: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Available here on AO3.

If the MC dies, the player (you) will be allowed to rewind back to the previous choice. Perhaps there are even secret choices.

Previous part here. Or start from the beginning.

Portrait of a Young Man: Part Four

[Of course! Rudeness would be out of place, and it is free of charge.]

It is a moment before you decide, your eyes flickering between her impenetrable gaze and her rather odd appearance -- and then you are reaching your own hand towards hers, hesitant. Perhaps a little too hesitant. The crimson-clad woman snaps up your hand with her own in the blink of an eye, catching you off guard, and you very nearly startle off your seat. Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to notice. The woman flashes you a quick, toothy smile before bringing your palm towards her face, somehow inspecting the skin through the smoked glass. Given the thickness of the spectacles -- you cannot even catch the shape or color of her eyes as she bends over -- it is a wonder that she can see through them at all.

“Marvelous decision, my child!” she says in a sing-song tone. For the first time, you notice that she is wearing gloves. They match the ostentatious crimson of her gown. “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous. I’ll make sure you won’t regret it.”

“Thank you, but is there any particular --”

A chilling sensation on the surface of your skin forces you to pause mid-sentence. It is as if an icicle has struck it. As if the skin there has suddenly felt the unpleasant sensation of frostbite. Your eyes flicker instinctively to what your body tells you is a wounded area, searching the woman’s hands for some hidden needle or whatnot -- but your search proves unfruitful. The hand that holds yours is gloved completely. The finger that traces it is not.

The woman hums. “Quite the bright little one, weren’t you?” she remarks, an icy finger trailing the inner flesh of your palm. You do your best not to shiver. “Astounding in all sorts of academic fields and everything you put -- oh! Perhaps that is not so, anymore. But that doesn’t matter much now, does it? Surely there are better ways for you to succeed in life.”

You clench your teeth at the sensation, which only seems to worsen by the moment. “Is there anything interesting in my near future, then? Anything I should be wary of?”

“Oh, come now, I’m a fortune teller, not a seer!” The woman laughs. It is brisk and shrill. “Reading palms only gives you a hint of the future, not the entirety of its tale. And wouldn’t it be so much less fun if you knew everything that was to happen?”

“No.”

“Ah, well, there’s nothing I can do about that negative attitude.” Her finger releases your flesh for a moment, granting it temporary relief, but in less than a moment it meets the surface of your palm again. It traces icy trails elsewhere, now following some line that must pass between your forefinger and thumb. “You’ve had a very great many things that have happened to you in life,” she continues. “Not all of them are good, but not all of them are bad, either. Suppose it’s just the way you look at it. Tell me, child, what was it you decided to travel for again? A family friend? Some business?”

“I’m currently on the way to --” she presses into the flesh, and you hiss, “-- the northern mountains for some business.”

“Business?” Her smoked spectacles slip down her nose. You catch the golden, slitted eyes beneath, nearly gasping at the sight. Her grip is tight on your hand. “Or is it revenge?”

You hold her gaze for a long moment. Her golden eyes -- they are wrong, wrong, wrong -- bore into yours. Her lips part once more to reveal an impressive set of needle-like teeth, each intermeshing with the other perfectly, and she smiles quite broadly at you. Her forked tongue slips out from between her teeth, tasting the air. Tasting you.

You should’ve known. You should’ve known all along. Beneath the lavender water, the smoked glass, the gloves -- this woman is a devil.

Her grip releases just slightly on your own hand, the muscles relaxing, and you take the opportunity to snatch your hand back. You cradle it in the other, attempting to massage feeling back into it. The crimson-clad devil before you only laughs in delight, apparently amused at the fear that has surely made itself apparent on your features. A moment, and the she-devil slips the glove back onto her hand. She reaches for the glass and taps the rim with her long claws, her grin only growing wider and wider.

“You look so lovely when you’re frightened, you know,” says the devil. “And that fear, that anger -- how wonderfully tempting you are. I’ve half a mind to devour you at this moment!”

You glare at her. “I’m not afraid.”

“Oh, of course you aren’t. They never are until the last moment.” The she-devil waves her hand in dismissal. “But you should know that it’s a sin to lie.”

“Those are lofty words, coming from you.”

The devil only hums in response. Another moment, and then she begins to stand, tucking away the spectacles of smoked glass into some breast pocket. Evidently there is little need to disguise herself at the moment. You watch as she makes her way towards the door of the cabin.

She turns to give you one last smile. “Consider it a lesson!” she sings. “A very important one, if you know what you’re getting into. The fire will consume you before the brimstone, my child. Remember that.”

And then she is gone. There is only the scent of sulfur in the air, the mask of lavender water and perfume quickly disappearing from the cramped space.

The same man who had served you lunch arrives not long after, prepared to take away your dishes. You look hastily in the direction of where the she-devil had left her wine glass after you hand him your own dishes, fully expecting to need to reach over the table. By the time you look, however, it is gone.

* * *

The rest of the trip passes rather uneventfully. It is a lengthy, boring journey by train that is seceded by an equally boring journey by automobile. It appears that Mr. Diavolo only hires the most tightlipped drivers.

You find yourself mulling over the she-devil during the course of the journey, your memories flickering to and fro. The smell of sulfur, just hidden by lavender water. The golden, slitted eyes, hidden skillfully by the smoked glass. The forked tongue. The needle-teeth. You were so sure that she had left her wine glass, that she had gripped your skin hard enough to bruise -- and yet there had been no trace of her. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air.

A feat that may very well be possible for a devil, for all you know. Perhaps you are not going mad. Perhaps you had not imagined her at all, and the she-devil had simply decided to play a nasty trick on you.

It is a very long journey in the automobile.

The driver rouses you after some time -- you are not exactly how long it has been, considering how night appears to have long fallen -- and you scramble out of the car as quickly as you can, nearly falling over your cane. The driver merely grunts when you ask him a question, hauling your suitcase from the back of the automobile. There is a rather harsh glance at your complexion. You fix him with a both determined and vexed stare when he finally places your bag by your feet, not bothering to take it up the stairs for you. He sighs.

“Be back in about six days,” the driver says gruffly. “Provided that the weather’s good and all, o’ course. You’re one of the first ones here, so don’t expect some grand greeting when you walk in.”

The door of the automobile slams shut with an air of finality before you can even ask anything else, and then the automobile goes tottering down the mountain road.

Before you is the private estate of Mr. Diavolo, its form looming before you like some great beast. Its tall spires are jagged teeth, its windows the eyes through which its occupants watch you from within. The eccentric, twisting shape can be attributed to no one else but a demon, for surely the architects of Hell must have odd tastes, and its stained glass shines with an almost unnaturally saturated hue. And then there is the great, crimson door before you, its knocker a polished bronze lion.

Unfortunately, there are several stairs before you. Given that the driver was nowhere near hospitable enough to carry them for you, you’ll have to manage them with both your cane and suitcase in hand. You begin to --

The great doors fly open. You nearly fall face first into the stone, but you turn just quickly enough to avoid smashing your chin completely against it. Still, your body meets the ground rather painfully.

“Look, another one’s here!” calls out a voice from the doorway. You squint to see the silhouette of a slender, rather short figure, its arm waving frantically. “Come quick, come quick!”

“It is nearly midnight, Asmodeus,” grumbles another. This one seems to originate from just out of sight, and it is only moments before I hear the sound of footsteps. “Surely this can wait until --”

“Absolutely not,” argues the first voice. “And look, this one’s a darling!”

“That darling is on the ground.”

“Oh. Oh my.”

It takes another second for your vision to clear. When it does you see two men: one a petite, nearly androgynous beauty, the other a regal and dark-haired. The petite one strides up to you with several quick bounds and sticks his hand out to you, offering you an amiable smile. You stare at him for a moment -- taking in the perfectly coiffed hair, the hint of foundation, the strange air of nobility about him -- and then you place your hand in his proffered one. He pulls you back to standing with ease.

“Are you alright?” asks the petite man. “You seem to have taken a nasty spill there.”

“I suppose I am now, Sir …” you trail off, not quite sure what to call him.

The petite man regards you with some confusion for a moment, waiting for you to finish, and then catches your meaning. “Oh, there’s no need to call me that,” says the man, breaking into that disarming smile once more. “I’m not a blueblood like that one over here. My friends call me Asmo.”

What a strange name, you think. Who in their right mind would name their child that?

“Oh,” you manage. “Well, thank you for --”

The dark-haired one finally stands within a respectable distance, stepping forward. He sighs. “Don’t you think it’s a little too early to be flirting?”

The petite man cocks a brow. “Flirting? Who said I was flirting?”

“I did.” The dark-haired man scowls at Asmo, his irritation having fully surfaced. A lack of sleep, perhaps, given the hour. He ignores you. “Now, could we please just get her through the door?”

“Oh, you’re only jealous that I was the one to --”

“No, I’m simply --”

“-- since you simply couldn’t be bothered to --”

You’ll be damned if you let these two fools bicker before you the entire night. Whatever regality or nobility that you had thought surrounded these two men has long gone, lost in the wind of their fickle argument.

“Georgine!” you say a bit too loudly, demanding the attention of the two before you. They regard you at the same time, Asmo’s hand poised in half of a gesture. “My name is Georgine,” you say with your most arresting tone, attempting to halt whatever argument may continue. “I appreciate the sentiment, but don’t you think it’s time we headed in?”

Asmo hand withers slightly. The dark-haired man simply stares. Your gaze flickers between the both of them. You realize the awkwardness of the situation.

Finally, the dark-haired man decides to clear his throat. “Right,” he says. He turns towards Asmo. “Since you’re the only gentleman around here, I don’t suppose you’d have any misgivings about helping her to her room?”

And so he does. It is only after a moment or so that Asmo realizes your lack of a limb, his eyes casting once towards where your leg should be, and fetches your cane for you. The dark-haired one looks at you -- not quite avoiding the missing appendage, yet not quite staring openly either -- and then walks back inside. Asmo takes your hand gladly in his and follows suit. You step past the threshold.

The nostalgia is almost overwhelming.

Aside from the occasional figure or statue, the appearance of the entrance hall may as well have been ripped from the fabric of your memories. It is the very image of decadence: a massive chandelier hangs from the ceiling, casting its light upon the brocade walls and a pair of open staircases. The walls boast an impressive collection of baroque paintings, each made with a different technique, and a rather sizable rug -- imported from the Orient, perhaps -- lies before you. The weight of your childhood comes crashing down onto you all at once, so shocking is the image. Your father had brought you here a fair amount of times during the golden years of his business empire to discuss matters of the soul trade.

Your eyes trace the carved banister. Asmo talks at length on one topic or another, bantering with the dark-haired man, but the sound is a distant, far off clamor. The world is muddled with the buzz of your thoughts, your conscience smothered by your memories. Your father had held you by the hand at the base of the stairs there. Some official or businessman had offered you a boiled sweet in exchange for running off and playing somewhere else. You had nearly crashed into the gilded statue in that corner. There used to be a chip in that archway here. Each reminiscence nearly devours you.

Then you catch the image of a sharp, dark pair of shoes. Your heart stops.

As does Asmo. It takes him only a moment to glance at the figure at the top of the railing. He waves. The dark-haired one offers a simple greeting.

“Georgine!” Mr. Diavolo stands at the balcony, all golden eyes and hellfire locks. He grins, his sharp, white teeth gleaming even in the dim light. “How wonderful of you to come! How was the journey?”

[Answer in kind. You are a guest here, after all. Despite your circumstances, you must follow social obligations.]

[Refuse to speak to him. How dare he speak to you in such a manner! This devil is no friend of yours.]

[Say something cutting in response. This demon deserves not your politeness.]

[secret-blacklight-domain777]

Drew McDowall speaks to Chloé Lula about new solo album Agalma and the reissue of Coil’s 1999 opus Musick To Play In The Dark

21 years after its initial release, Coil’s Musick To Play In The Dark is being remastered and reissued by US label Dais. The release coincides with ex-member Drew McDowall’s fourth solo album Agalma – which he describes as an extension of the ritualistic practices that were “woven into Coil’s DNA”. Like the industrial group’s later work Agalma drips with spectral textures, angelic backing vocals and glitchy cinematic sweeps formed from warped field recordings and modular processing. Here, he reflects on finding inspiration in solitude, the insidiousness of the patriarchy and the power of synchronicity in music and in life.

Chloé Lula: Musick To Play In The Dark has been hailed as the point at which Coil pivoted from “sun music” to “moon music”. According to Jhonn Balance, it was motivated by a desire to “let in things you had shut out before: the feminine. The tidal. The cyclical”.

Drew McDowall: Musick To Play In The Dark kind of put the stamp on a process that was happening for a couple of years with Coil. Balance and Sleazy’s music was considered kind of solar as it related to an album like Scatology with a queer, male energy. During the period that I was involved as an official member, from about ‘94 or ‘95, we began investigating lunar energies, like with Moon’s Milk or Under An Unquiet Skull, one of the Solstice/Equinox 7"s, I think the driver behind this shift was our distaste and distrust of the patriarchy, both from a cultural point of view and from an occult point of view. Musick was a conscious effort to tap into lunar, traditionally feminine energies. And in an occult sense, to move away from the ostensibly solar, patriarchal, hierarchical Crowleyian aspect of the occult into the more fluid, chaotic, unconscious practices of Austin Osman Spare.

Not a lot of people know this, but Balance and Sleazy would always say grace before a meal, and they would always give thanks to the Goddess. They did that almost as long as I knew them. I kind of liked that. So it was about those energies that only really come out in the dark, that are less blatant and present and in your face. It was a process, it wasn’t a sharp delineation. But Musick was when that crystallised, and in that sense it was an album that was completely moon music.

What were your specific contributions to the album?

It was really fragmented. I’d moved to New York after living in London for 15 years, and was dealing with a lot of chemical issues, drug issues, whatever. I went back to work on Musick, but my imbalance had gotten so extreme that I could only be awake during the nighttime hours and was asleep during the daytime. Their studio was in Weston-super-Mare, this decrepit seaside town. They’d gotten sick of London, and they wanted to get Balance away from all of the temptations that he was prey to. It was kind of an attempt to save his life, really. They had this huge Victorian mansion on a hillside overlooking this wonderful bay, the River Severn.

Balance, Sleazy, and Thighpaulsandra worked in the studio on the bones and the structure and the stratum of these tracks during the day, and I would stagger out of whatever comatose stupor I was in in the evening and just take what they’d done and process it and rework it. It was a way I wasn't used to working with Coil, but I think it added something – some kind of psychosis or strange pathology to the recordings. Back then – this was ‘99 – granular synthesis wasn’t really readily available. We’d gotten a hold of some prototype stuff that was really not very easy to use. They didn’t have the nice interface that you have now. But that was part of the fun. I was also taking things and running the material through different filters and synths that we had in the studio. I would leave the files on one of the computer desktops and go to bed. We’d cross each other’s paths in the morning, have breakfast and chat for a bit, and then I’d go to sleep while they worked for the rest of the day.

I’ve read that what you generated through granular synthesis was intended to sound like a fire. What was the idea behind that?

It was almost a kind of ritual aspect, like being around a ritual fire, or a primitive fire, and tapping into what we were and where we came from. If memory serves me right, those were some of the conversations that we had, fire being this idea of being in a glade or an opening in the forest around a fire, and having that sound, the smell and the sight of it. We could only really capture the sound of it, but hopefully we managed to create the effect of the whole experience.

You’ve mentioned to me that you like to go to upstate New York when you want to work on your solo material now. How do isolated settings, like the Catskills or Weston-super-Mare, impact your ability to tap into highly creative states?

We [Coil] loved to get out of the city and go to places like Avebury. We would take day trips or trips for a couple of days and visit stone circles. Back then, in the mid- to late-90s, they weren’t quite the Instagrammable tourist hellholes that they are now. So you could really get to these places that you weren’t allowed to be in, and you’d either cut through a fence or just walk into these places that weren’t even fenced off, for the most part. Getting out like that was a lot of our inspiration prior to doing any recording. Especially when we all lived in London, it was so vital to get out and get into the forests and connect with Pan. That was part of Coil’s methodology, and I kind of carried it over into the way that I work now. If I’m not recording upstate, I’m doing a lot of the pre-recording meditation there and getting myself ready, either psychedelically or mentally or physically or whatever. Or even doing some of the recording if not the whole album. The album that Nicky [Hiro Kone] and I did [The Ghost of George Bataille] was recorded entirely upstate in the Catskills.

You helped remaster both volumes of Musick. Is there anything notably different about these reissues?

We remade Musick into a double album and added a really beautiful etching on one side. All of the Dais reissues sound even better than the originals, thanks to Josh Bonati who remastered them. Corners were cut a little bit in some of the original packaging, and the print quality wasn't as good back then. So not only does Musick sound better, but it looks absolutely gorgeous because we got all of the original files for the artwork and gave them the kind of high-resolution, beautifully packaged reissue that it deserves.

What was it like to revisit the material? Are the guiding principles behind it still relevant 20 years later?

I think they might be even more relevant today, if anything. There’s this massive pushback into this really regressive patriarchal state worldwide. Obviously we see it here in the USA, but in Poland, Hungary – all of those places. It feels like patriarchy’s last death spasm. Unfortunately, as we all know with male rage and white rage, the death spasm can take everything down with it. And while it’s unquestionably a good thing that it feels like its death spasm, we should be aware that it will try to destroy the planet in its desire to not give up power. I think that’s in the nature of patriarchy. It would rather burn the planet to cinders than cede its position. Patriarchy and white supremacy both being intermeshed in the same thing. Things felt apocalyptic back then too, do you know what I mean? But now there is no hiding from as it really feels like everything’s spiraling and whiplashing into oblivion.

I really hadn’t listened to Musick very much, because the process of making it was often very traumatic. And dramatic. I didn’t hear it until about two years after it was released. So when we were listening to what we had during the process of having it remastered, it was kind of mind-blowing. There are moments of darkness, but there are moments of really delicate sweetness, like “Broccoli”, where Sleazy is singing in his soft and sort of adorable voice about vegetables.

I hear similarities between songs like “Are You Shivering?” on Musick and “Agalma II” on your new album. There’s so much going on in their sense of depth, space, and evolution, and their allusions to familiar instruments combined with granular glitch.

That wasn’t deliberate, but it’s kind of inevitable. I added to Coil’s DNA, but Coil added to my DNA as well. There’s something we tapped into that I want to keep exploring. That never changes – this feeling that the work is never done, the mission is never complete. You can always go deeper or explore more, or take it in different directions.

In past interviews, you’ve talked about how your music as part of Coil and as a solo artist has aimed to trace various dissociative states.

I disassociate very easily. And rather than fighting it, I try to use it as a wellspring – as fertile ground for the work that I do. That’s always been a process, and always been part of the work or part of the inspiration for the work. I took my inspiration from those states that we all experience, that we can’t really put a name to. There are moments that fall short of language, and when we try and pin these moments down, it feels like we’re trying to hold water in our hands and it’s slipping out, and we feel adrift. So the idea with Agalma was to try and capture those moments. I guess the closest that I could come to putting a word on it was trying to capture the feeling of the sublime. Not just beauty, but joy, terror, dread. It was partly that. And the working title of the album was Ritual Music. That’s another thing that’s kind of been woven into my DNA from being with Coil. All of the music that we did was ritual music, and everything I’ve done since then has been a form of ritual music.

Agalma feels improvisational in its sense of chaos, but controlled enough to indicate planning, arrangement, and methodology. How did you put it together?

I’m not a very rigorous conceptualist. For me, it’s really trial and error and serendipity. Some of the inspirations or methodology might be that I’ll take the particular architecture of a dream and translate that sonically. Or it might just be a process of iteration, which is really my main workflow: manipulating what I’m doing to the point that something else is revealed in it, something that was trying to get out – that I was consciously cajoling or persuading to speak to me – or else something that just pops up unexpectedly, and I’m like, “This is where this piece is trying to take me”. I might take something through the modular and put it through different processes on the computer, then send it back into the modular. A lot of what I find really rewarding is field recordings. There are a lot of field recordings in my work that don’t even sound like field recordings. I kind of like that, where it’s not immediately apparent what something is.

What were some of the field recordings you used on this album?

I was in Naples a couple of years ago staying in this incredible apartment building that was carved into the side of a hill. I spent hours just recording in the marbled hallways. I got a ton of really good field recordings that I then shaped using the modular. You can’t really listen to it and say, “Oh, that sounds like a voice”. It just sounds like traces and resonances of something. But it’s really hard to pinpoint what it is you’re listening to.

Eight out of nine tracks on Agalma feature contributions from other artists. How did you choose who to work with?

This album started to take shape in my head last year, before I started recording. I really wanted to work with people that inspired me. I wanted to work with people I had that sense of trust with. I didn’t give anyone any guidelines, but everything just gelled in a way that felt really magical and weird.

We’ve talked quite a bit about subverting the patriarchy and being an outsider. Are your collaborations motivated by a desire to mine that feeling of operating from the margins?

That’s interesting. All the collaborators on the record are friends. That was one of the important things. My personal connections with people are always predicated on the idea of this affinity of outsiderness. Alterity. When I meet someone I like, I get the sense that they’re also kind of an outsider. Even if it’s not, like, explicit, there’s always a strand. For this record, it just felt that those were the voices who I really felt a presence with.

One of the feelings that I was also trying to explore and skirt around the edges of, or have in some way in my brain, was the sense of the sacred, and to really reconnect with that idea. And not in any religious terms. That’s something that was very, very much part of Coil. Even though their focus changed for me, I still see it as going back to the albums that preceded my involvement. Coil always had a strong sense of the sacred, and it wasn’t in any Sky God sense. It was in the sense of a sacred materiality. Like “sacred” in the Bataille sense of the word. That’s always been part of my work, but with this I wanted to make it more up-front.

It’s powerful when the act of following a kind of altered, oneiric logic leads to moments of synchronicity.

Those moments have to be valued and not just dismissed as coincidence or something mundane. There are moments of just huge resonance that we’re often not aware of at the time – like the moment feels loaded in a way that we can’t immediately put our finger on. But sometimes months or even years later, we see them as points where our life changed and we started on a different path. We do ourselves a huge disservice to just write them off to chance or happenstance or accidents. What they are I don’t know, but I think they’re much more meaningful than just randomness.

Agalma is available via Dais now. Musick To Play In The Dark is released on 27 November

By Chloé Lula

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Ptilonorhynchus violaceus

By Joseph C. Boone, CC BY-SA 4.0

Etymology: Feather Bill

First Described By: Kuhl, 1820

Classification: Dinosauromorpha, Dinosauriformes, Dracohors, Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoromorpha, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostaylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Neoaves, Inopinaves, Telluraves, Australaves, Eufalconimorphae, Psittacopasserae, Passeriformes, Eupasseres, Passeri, Euoscines, Climacterides, Ptilonorhynchidae

Status: Extant, Least Concern

Time and Place: Within the last 10,000 years, in the Holocene of the Quaternary Period 

Ptilonorhynchus, the Satin Bowerbird, is primarily known from the Eastern coast of Australia 

Physical Description: The Satin Bowerbird is a large bird, reaching about 32.5 centimeters in length and up to 290 grams in weight - making it about the same size as the common Rock Pigeon. The Satin Bowerbird is a bulky passerine, with a medium-length, pointed bill and a fairly long body, and a long tail. This bird is sexually dimorphic, with the males having a very distinct appearance. The males are black in color, but the feathers have a distinct iridescent blue sheen over them, while the underbelly and thighs are less glossy than the rest of the body. Their eyes are vividly purple, while the legs and bill are more pale in color. The females, on the other hand, are much more dull in color - they are brown, with some olive-green tint to the underfeathers and back feathers, with longer tails and pale yellow underbellies that are striped across. 

By Streetsweeper, CC BY-SA 2.0

The juveniles are usually brownish olive, with browner black feathers. The males look like females for the first three years of life, though their wing feathers are more pointed; in the fourth year they become darker, as the feathers over the body slowly transition from green to darker black and shiny. By the sixth year the males have an odd patchwork of blue-black feathers and green ones; they reach full maturity at about eight years of age. The females, on the other hand, become mature within three years.

Diet: The Satin Bowerbird feeds mainly on fruit, but it will supplement its diet with flowers, leaves, nectar, seeds, and insects. The hatchlings almost entirely insects brought by the parents, especially scarab beetles and cicadas.

Behavior: Satin Bowerbirds feed at all levels of the tree canopy, plucking fruit from high up off of the ground and gleaning animals from lower levels. They usually don’t use fly over techniques to find animal-based food. They will forage alone, or with their families; though they do join mixed-species flocks. In the winter, they form flocks of up to 200 individuals, which fly together to find plants in pastures and gardens. They, in general, do not migrate; some that live in the woods will travel to more open habitats during the winter. The males often do leave their bower locations during the non-breeding season. 

By Summ, CC BY-SA 3.0

The most interesting thing about Satin Bowerbirds, of course, would be their mating behaviors. Male Bowerbirds create stick houses, called bowers, that they decorate to attract mates. The Satin Bowerbird is one of the best known of these dinosaurs, and their bower behavior has been well studied. Young male Satin Bowerbirds will use a variety of blue, yellow, and shiny objects to decorate their bowers, but they transition to more blue objects as they age. Oftentimes, the males will use the same bower sites for over 30 years - they are attached to their bower sites and will remain with them, though they aren’t territorial besides defending their particular bower site. The male makes the bower by placing sticks upright, making two separate towers of sticks that curve towards each other; he then will add grass straw to the ground of the bower as foundation. Then, the male will continue to add twigs until they meet and intermesh above the grass foundation. The grass straw on the ground does extend beyond the walls, though sometimes the bower will have a third wall, creating another path through the bower house. Sometimes, these structures can have more than 2000 sticks making up the walls.

These bowers are then decorated by the males - usually with what we would consider junk, but obviously, the Bowerbirds don’t feel the same! The items they grab can range from ballpoint pens, to straws, to caps, to flowers and berries, and even clothing - sometimes even skulls. Sometimes, the males will also paint the inside of the bower walls with charcoal, foliage, bark, and fruit. The objects are usually chosen by what catches the male’s eye, and over time he learns from experience what will attract a mate. The females will visit the bowers, and use the decor outside of the bower to determine their choice of mate. The males will also dance to woo the females, but they can be interpreted as threats rather than displays sometimes. First, the male buzzes while rapidly opening and closing its wings, picking up decorations and strutting directly in front of the female. Then, the male will mimic the female’s vocals, and raise and lower himself on his legs and comes towards the females with decorations in its bill. 

By Joseph C. Boone, CC BY-SA 4.0

The female decides whether or not to accept the male’s courtship in three steps. First, she visits bowers before nests are built, while males are absent, to judge the bowers without male interference. Then, the female visits the bowers before nests have been built while the males are present and displaying. Finally, the females will visit a limited number of bowers after nests have been born, and usually narrows down to a single male for copulation. Younger females make their decisions mostly based on the bowers; older females, on the mating displays. When that decision has been made, she will crouch and vibrate her wings, and raise her rump so that the male can mate with her.

The nests take about two weeks to build, by making a saucer of sticks and twigs and green leaves. Usually, these nests are built high up off of the ground, though sometimes closer to the ground. The height is mainly dependent on the density of vegetation. The clutch is usually 1 to 3 eggs, which is incubated for about three weeks by the female alone. The male, meanwhile, will solicit more females with his bower. The females will continue to take care of the young for three more weeks, usually by chasing away predators and competitors from within the species. They’ll even do a broken-wing distraction while mimicing predators in order to distract antagonistics. Both sexes live between 20 to thirty years in total.

Ecosystem: The Satin Bowerbird mainly lives in the rainforest, especially along the edges, and dry woodlands as well. The bower sites are usually dispersed evenly through woods and rainforests. The young are usually fed upon extensively, but the adults are not typically threatened quite as extensively.

Other: Subfossil Satin Bowerbirds are known, but they all exist within the Holocene - thus, they do not significantly extend the time range of this species.

~ By Meig Dickson

Sources under the cut 

Coleman, S. W., G. L. Patricelli, G. Borgia. 2004. Variable female preferences drive complex male displays. Nature 428 (6984): 742 - 745.

Frith, C. & Frith, D. 2019. Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus). In: del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., Sargatal, J., Christie, D.A. & de Juana, E. (eds.). Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

Higgins, P. J., J. M. Peter (eds.) Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds, Volume 6: Pardalotes to Shrike-Thrushes.

Jobling, J. A. 2010. The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. Christopher Helm Publishing, A&C Black Publishers Ltd, London.

[xenosgirlvents]

The Last Gardener

Have been on-off typing this for a little bit since listening to Last Guardian. This is, basically, my headcanon for what happened AFTER the ending of the Audio Drama, since no-one bothers to confirm that Dian’s Spiritstone is destroyed or anything. Its...weird since I just wrote it to vent out feelings and emotions, so it isn’t really about a plot or storyline just...stuff happening. :P

There is a garden, of sorts, beginning to take shape on the lip of Craftworld Kher-Ys. Tall structures jut out, resembling trees and flowers, their imitation leaves and petals static in the airless enviroment of the dead Craftworld.

They are, of course, not true flowers or plants, as even a cursory examination could reveal. Universally the colour of bone bleached to an exceptional white gleam, studded with dull gems of varying shapes and sizes, they are pieces of wraithbone, of homes and buildings, shaped to a new form.

There is a sense of progression, when one looks at the garden. Towards one end the wraithbone foilage seems to barely qualify as even an imitation of flowers; in place of gently sloping petals they have jagged spars of wraithbone jutting into the air, rather than seamlessly joining to the floor they appear as if they had been forced in, cracks running all along the ground around them. It was as if whatever shaped these flowers improved with time, their first efforts crude and driven by force and anger, yet growing more subtle, more exquisite, with every attempt.

Dian made these, made them, she continues to do so. Where the flowers seem to end the giant she has become lies propped up against the dome of the Craftworld, a pillar of wraithbone held in one hand, as a finger gently bent the top of it into a starburst pattern. To an observer the deft movements of such massive digits seem somewhat difficult to reconcile with the blank, featurless, shape of her sloped head, the shell of the wraithlord betraying neither ears nor eyes, nose and possessing no sensors either technological or organic. Yet this body, and she has come to think of it as ‘this’ body rather than as ‘her’ body, now shapes these flowers as if remembering the action from long ago, muscle memory somehow carrying on through into the actions of wraithbone. 

Even now Dian struggles to think of the Wraithlord shell she rests in as ‘her’ body, she feels as if there is always something between them, dividing them, her mind and body not a seamless intermeshing together, but more akin to some performer pulling the strings on a jerky, ungainly, marionette. She’d been told of what life in a wraith-shell was like, all children of the Asuryani had, but even then words failed to properly express it. She moved through a liquid world in which she felt at times like the only thing solid. Time and space seemed to flow around and through her, rather than simply thrusting her forward, and even when her hand pressed into dense wraithbone it did not feel as if she was bending some psychoplastic but, rather, as if the material world itself was clay, shifting beneath her fingers.

How long had she been like this now? Dian can’t recall, not for a lack of methods through which she could tell time, no, but through a simple inability to comprehend it anymore, the dreamlike haze of her existence made it difficult for her to appreciate time unless she focused every ounce of her thought on to it. There was a reason the Wraithlord was customarily donned only by those who could become one with their War mask, and the Khaine-given, single-minded, focus it brought. 

But Dian was a gardener and, in the dream-life she now lived it seemed, at times, that this fact was the one thing she could use to anchor herself.

The dream sometimes gave way to nightmares. From time to time the blackened stump of one leg, blown off by the melta charge of a Death Watch Veteran, would intrude on her awareness, as she heard the sound of it scraping behind her, markig her passage as she crawled along the lip of the Craftworld, forcing her to relive the moments of her clash with the mon-keigh’s killers.

The nightmare was a discordance of pain, fire and shouting, and she wished she had eyes so she could shut them whenever she remembered, but instead contented herself with remembering the bodies of every slain one of them; one who’s face had been melted into carbonised slag, another who’s head she’d sliced open, these images of her tormentors deaths helped somewhat keep at bay the final moments of her life as Dian, before she became what she was now.

Dian pauses, briefly, to look behind her. Though she cannot tell time anymore she has found her own substitute for marking her life; behind her she sees the acres of garden she has already erected, marking her crawl around Kher-Ys, as if slowly the Craftworld was being enveloped by a growing wood, a sprouting of new life, to fill the vacuum of the dead Craftworld. It will take, by any reckoning, an age and a half for her to fill this place, to crawl all around this moon-sized vessel, to complete her garden. It is, for her, a good way to mark her life and direct her, although a small voice always whispers; even this will end, and you will not. 

Then what?

Sometimes she pauses in her work, shifts her focus momentarily fromt he blossoms taking shape in her hands to the world around her. She hears, although in truth that word is incorrect in the context, sounds. Laughter, giggling, moaning and more. Sounds of revelry. Sounds of passion. 

There are no Aeldari left on Kher-Ys, and there are no more mon-keigh either. There is no-one left on Kher-Ys but her. Yet there are voices. Dian knows where these voices come from, and she will not deign to ever accord them the status of a ‘being’ for they were parasited, nightmares and reflections only. But they are there, deep within the Craftworld, spreading out, not hampered by the lack of atmosphere or freezing cold, moment after moment growing bolder, growing louder, coming further from the center and closer to the lip. One day they would reach her forest. 

Dian only stops momentarily though, never long. She has a garden to finish, after all, and some things are simply to important to be distracted from. 

Sometimes Dian wondered if the reason she didn’t stop was fear. Her memories had become hazy within the Wraithlord, bleeding into each other without restraint. There was a reason why, in standard circumstances, a wraith-shell was returned to dormancy, its Spiritstone removed, after battle. The Aeldari had never intended for the passage of ages trapped within one, never resting, never returning to the embrace of the Infinity Circuit, constantly active. 

Existence in a wraith-shell was to have one’s own soul exposed to the material, like a raw nerve, sensitive in ways a living, breathing, Aeldari couldn’t truly comprehend without experiencing themselves. 

But Dian had done it, had little choice but to do it. She was no Spiritseer, she could not safely remove her own Spiritstone, and even if she could there was no Infinity Circuit to join it to. Where Kher-Ys’ Infinity Circuit once sat was now only a baleful, leering, lecherous eye from beyond, gazing inwards at the cavorting of its own children. 

She could not rest, never rest, always in motion, always doing. Gardening was what she used to remind herself she was Dian, Dian the gardener, for that much she had convinced herself was true beyond a doubt. At times the brief doubt entered her mind that is she ever stopped gardening she would face the awful realization that whoever Dian had been she was no longer her...that was when she worked most fervently, when she proved those doubts wrong through her craft, and asserted through the planting of each new flower her identity. 

I am Dian, I am the last gardener of Kher-Ys.

The pier of Kher-Ys, one of the piers, stretched out for many miles from the Craftworld proper, a thin tongue of Wraithbone extended into the dark. Once, before, an Aeldari would have been able to walk naked upon it and feel no harm from the void around, powerful forcefields maintaining regular atmosphere and temperature inside of it, yet allowing entry for any vessels seeking to dock. 

But the lights had gone out in Kher-Ys long ago, and with them all systems had failed. Although she felt nothing in the Wraithbone shell, the cold did slowly begin to impede her movements, as Dian dragged herself to the edge of the pier with slow, deliberate, movements.

At the edge of the pier she looked over and saw space wheeling below, even if she knew that the very concept of below and above meant little in this situation. The darkness was omnipresent, of course, broken only by the countless motes of starlight, but...Dian did not mind the dark, she had never feared it. Dark was not evil, despite the beliefs of so many other species, it was simply another part of what was and she held no grudge against it. It was almost inviting, in truth, she felt as if the dark called her down off that pier, to embrace her in its incomprehensible vastness.

With a groaning sound she turned her shell over, and looked back behind her, looked back at Kher-Ys, home.

She did it. even if, from this vantage, she cannot see it all, she does not have to. She knows she has done it, Dian knows. Tall and thick, slender and firm, different shapes, different forms, each its own unique expression, a forest of wraithbone flowers, some small as an Aeldari, other’s taller than even a Wraithlord, surround and embrace Kher-Ys rim, a garden or, maybe, a forest which sits silently, static, in the airless, freezing, remains of Kher-Ys.

A Wraithlord cannot smile, but Dian managed it all the same. Her work was complete and the sound of shrieking in the distance reminded her that she deserved to rest.

The Wraithlord pushed itself from the edge of the pier and slowly drifted away from Kher-Ys, further and further.

A Wraithlord needed no food, no drink, no sleep or rest. She could survive untold millenia in space in this shell. She had known that, of course. 

As Kher-Ys grew above her, her awareness slowly encompassing more and more of it, she saw her home from below in all its beauty.

Dian? Dian? Dian?

The words, thoughts, pushed through, intruded on her, their sudden appearance making her recoil at first. Had she not already been so accustomed to a life as nought but a ghost bound to a wraith Dian, no doubt, would have panicked, would have lashed out, at this sudden, strange, bodiless existence.

W-who are?

Dian tried to raise a hand, or rather tried to mimic the thought of raising a hand...only to find there was no hand to raise. Indeed, though she tried to turn to her side and ‘see’ what had happened to her hand there was, in truth, no side to turn to. There was no direction, no sense of space, she floated in an indeterminable sea of...something.

You are safe, Dian of Kher-Ys, you are with your people.

The intrusion was subtle, masteful and elegant compared to Dian’s brutish, sluggish, thoughts. As they appeared images, impressions, formed in her mind. She didn’t so much see whoever it was communicating with her, as she saw flashes of their own self-image; a young woman, then elderly, a sea of stars beneath her, robes and runes and...and something...something Dian recognized.

Spirit...seer?

Yes, yes. I am Spiritseer Alatharil of Craftworld Alaitoc, you are safe, you are on our Craftworld.

It is hard to understand without experiencing it. Loneliness is a pain, an unimaginable pain, an unbearable pain. Dian had endured multiple lifetimes of of it, she had heard no voice, she had seen no Aeldari save for in dreams and nightmares. The presence of another was something Dian had thought certain she could no longer remember, and yet when she felt Alathrail’s thoughts brush her own there was a moment where her spirit roused to lucidity, and she felt as if, for an instance, she could recall every bond, every friend, every love, every instance of her life with all the clarity she had once possessed.

It was your garden Dian, your garden was how we found you. A vessel of the Anhrathe, they passed Kher-Ys, noted that the forest was growing, that something had to still be alive there. They returned, to watch, to see...that was how they found you, brought you to us-

The thoughts stilled for a moment, Dian tried to create a response, to encompass what she felt, but she had never trod the path of any Seer or Witch, and the upswelling of emotion and feeling within her was far to vibrant for her untrained mind to project as anything more than a wave of discordant feeling, buffeting against the Spiritseer’s mind, briefly silencing her.

It was, by some reckoning, several long moments before the last part of Alatharil’s message reached Dian’s soul.

Dian because of you...Kher-Ys will not die. 

A smile crossed the elderly Spiritseer’s features, as she gently pulled her hand from the luminous stone set in the wall before her. Around her the Infinity Circuit hummed, welcoming another into its embrace, as Kher-Ys lived through Dian to become part of her people forever.

“She was...remarkable. For a Gardener to survive so long in a Wraithlord? Is it not a waste, I fear to say, to simply put her away?” The one who spoke was younger, a male, dressed as a Spiritseer but one still learning the mysteries of the soul. Alatharil did not turn to have to speak to him, still smiling at Dian’s Spiritstone, the wash of positive energy rushing from it so great that, for now at least, the section of the Circuit she was embedded in began to hum, spectral images of flowers blossoming over it to crown Dian.

“No, it is not a waste at all,” she said, simply, as the illusory flowers, psychic creations of the Circuit, spread further, growing beneath her feet, till all around her and her student a garden of breathtaking beauty glimmered in half-reality.

Thank you very much.

[3standardstoppage]

Known and Strange Things Pass Andy Sewell @sewelland Published by @skinnerboox The photographs in the book are taken on either side of the Atlantic in places where the Internet is concentrated. Where the fibres come together, and almost everything we do online passes down a few impossibly narrow tubes, stretching along the seabed, connecting one continent to another. Looking at these vast unknowable entities – the ocean and the Internet – we sense their strangeness. We can understand each conceptually but can only ever see or bump into small bits of them. They challenge our everyday assumptions and show us that the boundaries we put between things are more permeable than we might like to think. That the objects surrounding us daily, appearing so reliable and mundane, are actually parts of much larger, more complex, bodies extended across space and time. The work is structured through the push and pull of intermeshing sequences. Things, in different spatial and temporal phases, intertwine and coexist. As we look closer, worlds we think of as separate bleed into each other – the near and the distant, the ocean and the internet, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological. Available online 3ssstudios.com #knownandstrangethingspass #andysewell #skinnerboox #3ssbookselect #3standardstoppage #3ssstudios (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRmpUs4FrfZ/?utm_medium=tumblr

[halcyondigger]

Legends Never Die -Security Breach-

Beneath the Golden Ward, a ferocious blizzard raging dozens of meters above on the surface, a frosted-but-undaunted Rock stood upon a large pipe, his eyes trained on the last wire. A thick covering of intermeshing plating clearly rated to endure  had been steadily blown away, bit-by-bit with four of the five Charge Shots he had at his disposal a day, but at last, it was in sight. The thick electrical cord that, once severed, would help bring this madness to an end. He could only hope that, in other sections of the island, others had managed to track down and sever those nearby them.

“I’m...” Rock put his hand to the ear of his helmet, “I’m almost done, Roll. I’ll be coming back up soon...but I’ll be tapped for the day once I deal with this.”

A bright, burning energy began to build at the barrel of the Mega Buster, expanding further and further still into a blazing sphere, before he took aim -- and, with a tremendous discharge, let the blast fly, his arm blown back from the sheer force. 

The condensed energy shredded through the cord, everything caught within its area almost-immediately vaporized, a resounding explosion heralding his task’s completion. As the dust cloud swept up settled, the frayed ends of the wiring flickered in defiance several times before, thankfully, dying down.

“I... I did it.” He fell onto his plated backside, heaving a breath of relief. “Roll, are you reading me? I think that might’ve been one of the last ones! Everything just cut out down here!”

He turned around, preparing to make back down the tunnel to the service ladder he’d come down on. 

“Are there any...changes...up...?”

Far away in the tunnel, something was staring back at him.  A single, crimson ruby eye shone amidst the blackness.

Rock’s face blanched. Unconsciously, he took a step back.

“...No...” 

“...It can’t be...!”

Another appeared. Then another. A third, and more emerging still.

A shrieking cacophony of clawing, scrambling metal engulfed the shadows as a wave of countless Reaverbots descended upon him from the darkness.

“AGH--!!”

A sudden cry of pain was cut short as a Wolfon and a pair of Horokko barreled into his torso, sending the young Digger caught frozen in shock sprawling back down the cavernous depths beneath the city. Rolling prone for some moments, he quickly scrabbled to his feet, flinging himself off to the side just in time to narrowly avoid being executed by a bombardment of fireballs by a squad of Golbesh.

Four tall humanoid figures sprung over the squat gunners, the spinning drill-like hands of the ever-violent Sharukurusu squealing with malicious intent. Rock raised his arms to defend himself, only to have one of the dangerous appendages jab him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, before another clubbed him in the back of the head, disorienting his senses as the two who had yet to strike began to bear down on him savagely. His body was thrown between the quartet, lungs burning from lack of breath, his body already aching in earnest from the beating of the long, metal limbs. The assault only came to a respite at one Sharukurusu reared back, slamming its foreleg into Rock’s side and leaving him sprawling back on the ground again. 

The Digger gulped as much breath as he could, his body burning from the lack of oxygen he’d suffered during the gang-up-- but there was no relief to be had as, to his horror, a swarm of doll-like faces descended from the ceiling; an entire squadron of Miitan. His entire body froze, believing he was about to be caught in a chain of powerful explosions, but surprisingly, they did no such thing.

They descended instead upon his limbs and held him down.  A loud slamming in the distance heralded the coming of exactly what they had done this for.

The final eye broke from the countless number, substantially larger than the rest. A terrifyingly huge club of an arm, easily the size of a tree, smashed down into the ground repeatedly in a steady rhythm-- again, and again, and again as it drew closer to him.

One of the colossal Hanmuru Dolls, one of the most powerful and dangerous Reaverbots you could find. And not just any. Oh no, Rock knew this one. It had only one arm...just the same as the Hanmuru Doll he’d bested in the ruins he’d scoured before landing at Kattlelox, all those years ago.

The way its eye blared a merciless blood-red told him it remembered him just as well.

The slamming grew closer, and closer. This was some of the most frightful behavior a Reaverbot could demonstrate, the propensity to deliberately torment their prey out of nothing more than a seemingly bottomless well of hate. 

He had ten seconds. Maybe. Then? Then he would die.

Rock furiously fought against the Miitan holding him down, but in his position, he couldn’t get any kind of leverage against them. No, no, it wasn’t ending like this! Roll was waiting for him up top! He promised her he wouldn’t leave her again, he promised!

His Charge Shots were spent though! All those stupid Stars had left him with were BBs!  ...Gah, fine! FINE! He’d get out of this with just that, then! He’d already overcome so much, come so far, he wasn’t going to get killed like this, down here, never seeing his loved ones again! 

“I’m...not...!”

His buster arm raised what inch or so it could off the ground against the Miitans’ hold.

“...GIVING UP!”

A chain of emission sounded out as, as if by miracle, a slew of energy bullets lit up the darkness. 

The Miitan holding down his barrel was busted apart almost immediately, causing the others to disperse in surprise-- allowing him to raise his arm to shoot the others holding that arm down, with a mighty push, forcing himself back, freeing his legs. Getting back up in a kneeling position, his bewildered face turned towards the Mega Buster,

“Wh....?” He stammered, lost. “It’s-- back?”

A shadow above his head suddenly called back his attention. The Hanmuru Doll was upon him, arm raised to kill.

“Gh--!”

On reflex, Rock drew his right arm back, not knowing what he thought he was accomplishing by it -- by throwing as hard a punch as he could at the descending arm.

Then, his right arm changed.

A sheen of light passed over it, the forearm down being replaced by a huge, heavy engine, topped off by a long, powerful length of coiling steel. The Drill Arm roared to life, crashing in collision against the lethal club mighty enough to crush through steel like so much tissue paper, punching clear through it. 

The now-armless Hanmuru Doll stumbled backwards on its many peglike feet, unable to process what had just transpired. Brandishing his Mega Buster on left arm again, Rock took aim at the monstrosity’s head, sights locked onto the obsessively shining eye. 

“Sorry for never settling things with you before.” The building energy shone at the barrel once more. “But you’re not going to hurt anyone ever again.”

The Charge Shot flew free. With no hope of retreat, the Hanmuru Doll’s entire upper body burst apart in a deafening explosion, the entire surrounding horde of Reaverbots drawing back. They all took a moment to grasp the situation at hand-- then, all at once, their eyes began to glow in the very same was as the other’s had. 

Surrounded by unmatched murderous intent, Rock stepped forward, undaunted.

“Listen to me. I’m not looking for a fight. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Not even you.” His right arm began to change again, the Drill Arm being replaced with something new. “But I’m going to protect them. Every single person I can. That’s the promise I made a long time ago. Because, I’m not just Rock Volnutt--”

He raised his new weapon, a sterling silver cannon accented by an emerald eye poised at the entire myriad of Reaverbots.

“--I’m Mega Man Trigger.”

Above ground, a rumbling would sound from somewhere deep below, building more and more, a point of light appearing in the depths of the service tunnel... And then a dazzling, iridescent pillar, the color spectrum dancing in slivers amidst a pure white, broke free from the depths of the earth, column piercing into the sky-- 

--as the light of the Shining Laser heralded the return of history’s final Mega Man.

[theblackshit]

Radical artistic creation is dangerous, at times life threatening. For like existential philosophical thinking, it is, firstly, inseparable from the general existence of the creator, i.e. the artist, and, secondly, the creator must dare to enter new terrain, without considering the risks which may be lying in wait there. At a certain degree of radicalness, artistic creation and existential thinking not only merge but moreover the immediate physical existence of the creator, the body, is effectively dragged into the process as an energising source and interface to the world. To create something really original, whether in images or thoughts, entails living out the radically new each and every time. To act fundamentally new becomes, as Foucault sees it, a “dangerous act”, it is an act of force, if not violence, one has to initially commit against oneself. Tim Plamper has time and again shrugged off the familiar and created new zones to experiment in, evident in a body of works spanning various dimensions: from small meticulous photorealistic drawings, drawings of double exposures in medium formats and large format drawings of the abstract through to sprawling drawings of somnambulistic multiple exposures, which, through the distance the viewer has to the respective sheet, explore the tension between the liberated shading and the photorealistic impression. In this experimentation his own body always plays an important role, and not only because drawing, as a practice, is mostly based directly on the subjective motoric of the artist, but also because the motifs of his works are largely drawn from an inner, erotically-charged pictorial world, one in which remembering, desiring and mysteriousness flow into one another. Since 2018, in his Shadows series, Plamper has once more – in his indomitable radical manner – been venturing into unknown terrain. The Shadows are a growing batch of diverse sets of similarly mannered ‘blind’ drawings and – thanks to the prescribed uniform mode of their technical realisation – they necessarily explore areas beyond the direct organic seeing of the artist and beyond the direct rendering of a physical surroundings. Following initiating key concepts, Plamper unfurls fine graphite lines across almost transparent paper, again and again and with his eyes closed. The artist is thus compelled to gaze inwardly, into the world of his thoughts, his memories, his desires and his elaborate, intuitive repertoire of forms – and simultaneously follow his ‘blinded’ perception when setting the line on the given surface. He is thus also compelled to completely leave behind his trusted working strategies and put his proven skill to the test by taking a completely different approach. During the repetitive procedures of Shadows, consciousness and action intermesh inseparably, so that here the drawing of the line is both a searching and a marking in the stream of consciousness at the same time. These markings condense into drawings on a surface where they become visible for all. The Shadows are embedded in a new, comprehensive complex of photographs, drawings and texts which revolve around Europe as an idea, a place of origin and a community, ‘seen’ through the perspective of the human body and yearning. Some sheets bear socially abstract concepts and signs like “postcapital”, “passage”, “O” and the stars of the European Union. Several other sheets show nudes of men and women, brought forth out of the artist’s interior, and with the figures rendered alone on the surface or in combinations where they merge and entwine. And there are other sheets where the body and abstract sign are held together, thus displaying the fundamental dialectic of the artistic undertaking in this complex. From the subject and mode, these lines of associations move onto – amongst others – the field of biopolitics that Michel Foucault had detected in the Will to Knowledge, the first volume of his final opus The History of Sexuality. In today’s control society, the power of capitalist authority inscribes itself directly in the vital bodies of the population. Plamper follows this trace in his unique way, taking his own body as the basis and Europe as the thematic frame of his agitation. As a collective, humanistic ideal and as a union of peoples, Europe is in acute danger, seeming to become weaker and weaker by the day, wilting away. Its surfaces appear worn out, cracked and chafed or unresponsively metallic, its body hollowed out and cloned. The “abstract machinery of national sovereignty” is once again on the march and is a toxic pacemaker for a humanistic and pan-European political project. It is precisely the younger generations, to which Plamper belongs, who grew up in the security of and in the attachment to this idea spanning from Antiquity to the Modern Age. But just like Orpheus, who loses the helpless Eurydice to Hades, Europe is slipping through the hands of those who care in the direction of a miserable shadowy existence and a lurking finale to become what was yesterday. And so once again the contest is: Eros versus Thanatos. With your love, your desire, your blossoming body, you have to go to where life and death intersect, venture into the realm of shades where Hypnos, the dream and the sleep, and his twin Thanatos, the peaceful death, and their sister Keres, the violent death, reign. Only there will you be able to change things fundamentally. But should your own body be an integrative part of the biopower that is corroding a humane Europe, then to what extent is the autonomy of a bodily subject to still be trusted? Or to put it more clearly: is “fuck the pain away” still an effective agent in today’s age when self-empowerment is at stake? Another intersection in this graphic examination crystallises around Hypnos, the guard and messenger of un- or subconscious. In this case it is only of secondary importance if Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of a “collective unconscious” or Maurice Halbwach’s theory of a “collective memory” is drawn on. There can be no doubt that the relationship between subjective consciousness and collective sub-consciousness plays a pivotal role in the Shadows. Via the path of instinctive drawing, the artist dazes himself inwardly; descending into the depths he has cast a few anchors and then personally fathoms hidden collective structures directly on the ground. What he finds there and makes visually graspable also affects us, for we not only share large zones of the sub-consciousness, but moreover our actions are driven by them. Creative work is a very elementary form of dealing with this recalcitrant world, or in the words of Gilles Deleuze: “One has to get to where folding the line is possible so as to create a liveable zone in which one can find shelter, can defy, can gain a foothold, can breathe – in short: can think. Fold the line to be able to live on it, to live with it: a matter of life and death.” This is perhaps exactly what Tim Plamper is doing.

[disparition]

When I was a kid I spent a lot of my summers at the Albert L. Shultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. I went to a number of summer camp programs, with various degrees of religious and political content, about which I still have very conflicted feelings. But this was also just the place where our family would come to go swimming or use the gym. The JCC itself was a set of low one story buildings connected by semi-open walkways with lots of open space in between - the same structure and layout you see in any Californian public school or community center.  It was next to a cemetery, a park, and a footpath and a small area of nature surrounding Adobe Creek. In general this was a very mellow place where I never really felt unsafe in a deep way.

This, maybe, in spite of the intentions of those who taught there. The summer camp programs were a constant reminder of the hatred that was out there; games that pitted kids against each other, re-enactments of exoduses ancient and modern, sessions with Holocaust survivors. All of this affected me deeply but a combination of the semi-idyllic setting and my instinctive resistance to the feeling of being indoctrinated in something made it seem somehow distant, or theoretical.

I was never particularly religious to begin with and as I grew up, while I remained personally spiritual on some level, I became skeptical, even suspicious of many aspects of the Jewish community. The more I looked around and read the more I saw a rising and ugly nationalism within the Jewish world. And when I looked back on the summers spent at the JCC as a kid, some of the memories remained warm but in many other cases I felt like some of my suspicions about indoctrination were confirmed. What I began to feel was that programs like those I attended, and much of the Jewish media I was exposed to, were in some ways exaggerating the threat against us in order to bolster support for Israel and a strong ethno-nationalist mentality in general. A mentality of being alone in the world, superior but surrounded by enemies - a position from which people can be easily manipulated, especially by nationalist forces. By the time I was just entering the adult world, which was right around the time of the Second Intifada, I had become almost completely detached and distrustful of institutional Judaism in general, especially anything that seemed to promote Israeli nationalism or the idea of a strong tribe or a religious state.

Many years later, well after having moved to NYC, I came back to the Bay Area to visit and noticed that the old JCC had been renamed and moved to a new location. A large and kind of strange looking, almost fortress like structure near 101. I was with a friend at the time, who had recently worked in Israel, and he told me that some of the features of the complex were defensive architecture adopted from Israeli practices. At the time, I remember this reinforcing my view of the paranoia coming from that community.

Two days ago, like dozens of other JCC’s and Jewish schools all over the United States, it was evacuated due to bomb threats. This following on the heels of massive vandalizations of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia.

It is tempting to respond to these events with the thought that those paranoid voices within the Jewish community was, all this time, correct. We are and always will be alone in a world populated by our enemies, we must be a strong tribe and support our strong state. This was, after all, the dominant response when the Nazis were defeated the first time around. I think it is a mistake.

As I grew in political and historical awareness over the past two decades, I saw increasing alignment between the Jewish community and the forces of political conservatism in the United States. And disturbingly, I noticed that many Jewish people my own age who had liberal or even progressive stances on most issues were suddenly more conservative, even hawkish when it came to Israel. Israel’s defensive (and offensive) needs meshed well with the geopolitical agenda of conservative and pro-corporate American politicians of both parties, and because of this a strange sort of alliance was formed between elements of the American right - who had for most of their history been anti-Semitic - and elements of the Jewish community. “Judeo-Christian” began to be thrown around by certain kinds of politicians almost as a dog whistle sort of term, and the manipulators of the religious right began to re-emphasize the spiritual importance of Israel in their own context.  

This alignment has resulted in massive amounts of taxpayer money spent supporting and arming Israel as well as on our own related military misadventures, and it has been a massive contributor towards the xenophobic attitudes against Muslims in the United States. And this has caused a related shift in our paranoia, with much of the media - mainstream, conservative, liberal, Jewish, or otherwise - portraying modern anti-Semitism as almost exclusively as a threat coming from the Muslim world, and often framed with an anti-immigrant context.

This kind of thinking has misled us, and as frightening as these recent events are, I hope we are waking up to that.

There is a very common pattern in history: a group of people, long oppressed, rises from their oppression by oppressing someone else using the exact same techniques and mentalities once used against them. This is a pattern we must resist.

We should not be wall builders, and we should not align ourselves with wall builders, in this country or in any other.

Patterns are everything to us. We repeat things until they become true and these become the building blocks of the human part to the world: nations, borders, genders, races, ideologies - all of these basic elements of the world around us that often seem inflexible, sometimes even concrete but which are, in the end, purely a manifestation of our collective minds - a layer of thought that sits on top of the natural world. It’s not possible to just abandon these patterns collectively, we need to work, together and as individuals, to evolve them into new ones.

This chaotic time, scary as it is, is an opportunity to create new patterns. That means looking at ideas like the nation state or national borders, looking at how our identities intermesh with those ideas, and reassessing the patterns, maybe even forming them into something new, defining and organizing ourselves in new ways.  I don’t claim to have some vast new plan for human organization, but I do know that we need to start moving away from modes of thinking that are dependent on defining the self against an excluded “other” and towards those that are inclusive of all the forms of love and creativity that make being human worthwhile.

[sakshitmr]

Twin Screw Pumps Market Clear Understanding of The Competitive Landscape and Key Product Segment

Screw pumps play an important role in various aspects of everyday life. From sewage and wastewater treatment to the extraction and processing of raw materials and manufacturing of finished products, the applications are almost endless. Twin screw pumps are self-priming, double ended positive displacement pumps with external timing gears and bearings. The twin-screw pump is made up of two inter-meshing screws that move the pumped fluid. The design of twin screw pumps are responsible for providing the axial balancing of the rotating elements and eradicating metal-to-metal contact inside the pump and make them suitable for dry running.

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These twin screw pumps consist of one set of shafts, one driving and other driven with two screws mounted and keyed onto each shaft. A twin screw pump has two intermeshing screws placed parallel to one another with small gaps in between so there is no direct contact between two screws, therefore allowing for better performance in pumping of non-lubricating, corrosive or contaminated fluids. The twin screw pump technology has been around for a long period, but only lately has it been used in sanitary pump applications. These pumps are specifically suited to very low inlet pressure applications.

Twin screw pumps have played a major role for many years within the group of displacement pumps for hygiene applications. These pumps are often used when pumping conditions contain high gas volume fractions and fluctuating inlet conditions, and were primarily used for the transportation of oil products. However, in the past few years, twin screw pumps have firmly established itself in the food and beverage industries as well as in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and fine chemicals. The innovative pumps fulfill very high quality standards and are made entirely of stainless steel.

[business2businessposts-blog]

Best Business2Business Website

A business to business (B2B) website needs to be clear, to the point and aesthetically pleasing. The navigation through the website must be easy and understandable. The website must be able to offer detailed information about your product or service.

Since the consumer needs and business needs are different, there is a huge difference between a B2C and a Business2Busniess website. The sales cycle and lead focus is different and the amount of features, user experience and design needs are all different on a B2B website.

The B2B industry has grown drastically in the last decade. B2B sites are websites that allows a business to make a commercial transaction with another. This is usually done when sourcing materials or even services in the present scenario.

China is the leader in the B2B market with the highest number of B2B marketing agencies in the world, followed by the USA, India and Hong Kong.

If you wish to be a part of the B2B industry, here is a list of the world’s top best B2B websites.

1. Alibaba

Alibaba is the biggest B2B online marketplace in the world. Launched in 1999 this website is way ahead many other leading websites like Amazon and eBay. It is the world’s best b2b website for global wholesale trade. It started in China and has support for many languages including Deutsch, Italiano, Polska, Japanese, etc. Alibaba group’s two portals managed to draw in 39.9 Billion US $ in 2018. It also hosts more than 35 million users currently. You can post 50 products on the website for free.

AliExpress, Alipay, and Alibaba international are some of the other brands under the umbrella. The only shortcoming of this top website is that some companies are simply trading companies and not the manufacturer.

2. IndiaMART

IndiaMart is an e-commerce company that provides Business2Busniess website, B2C and C2C marketing via its portal. The Economic Times has called IndiaMART as the largest online marketplace in India and is the world’s second largest B2B website after Alibaba. This website has its origin from Uttar Pradesh and it is beyond imagination how the website climbed over the ladder of success.

It has nearly 1.5 million suppliers registered on the portal and helping businesses to grow by generating business from over 10 million buyers.

This B2B giant was founded by Dinesh Agarwal along with InterMESH. It has over 2,215 different product categories and sub-categories.

3. eWorldTrade

eWorldTrade is a newly launched website in the B2B market. It has earned its name in the B2B market already. This venture provides digital media and technological services. It has its base in US and is a subsidiary of Reckon Media LLC.

It is the only B2B marketplace at present offering up to 10 leads free of cost after you sign up to it. This has been the USP of this website and this can be seen through its fast growth in only a few years. It has gained most of its business from its partnership with China but it also has manufacturers registered from USA, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan.

It has it main operational unit based in Pakistan and the platform has become a part of CPEC. This will be of great benefit due to in the future. Lowest wholesale rates and quick delivery are the key factors helping it to grow.

The website has especially boosted smaller to medium businesses that were unsuccessful in gaining recognition on previously known top b2b websites operating within Pakistan. 10 Free B2B lead generation is a major reason for the manufacturers to sign up here.

4. Made-in-China

Made in China is a popular Business2Busniess website website which is operated by Focus Technology Co., Ltd. It is the giant in the industry of electronic business and operates from China. All the products are either made in China or Taiwan.

However, in the past, Made-in-China have had a few issues. In 2007 the US, Canada, Australia and the European Union issued recalls on a wide range of Chinese-made consumer goods.

It remains to be one of the most successful websites in the world for business to business sales.

5. GlobalSources

Global Sources is a Hong Kong-based e-commerce which began in 1970 by Merle A. Hinrichs and C. Joseph Bendy as Trade Media Ltd. This company is also registered with NASDAQ and GSOL.

Global Sources has grown enormously and has more than 1 million international buyers currently housed under it. Global Sources has an outstanding B2B sales strategy and is the reason why it has made its mark in the game.

The selling point of this website is that it verifies the authenticity and quality of the manufacturer unlike all the other platforms provide. To take it a step ahead Global sources also organizes specialized shows around the world that bring buyers and suppliers together in a quality environment.

6. DHgate

DHgate is a leading wholesale website for good manufactured in China. It has a steady record of quality services and products and offers the most reasonable rates that cannot be found elsewhere. Though it is a Chinese company but it also supports the English language.

This model facilitates manufactured products from small and medium-sized business owners. It has a safe payment system gateway and a fast logistic service. It has a number of offices around the world in countries such as the USA, the UAE, Philippines, and India with its headquarters in Beijing, China.

The thing that I admire the most is that DHgate was founded by a woman, Diane Wang, who was also the co- founder of Joyo.com. She has also worked as Country Marketing Director of Cisco Systems.

7. TradeIndia

This is an India based website, operating globally to buy products made in India and trade worldwide. It has its head office in New Delhi. It has a wide variety of products ranging from Home décor, agriculture to machinery.

It is a portal specifically designed for small businesses in India. It was the vision of Bikky Khosla that led to the foundation of this website in 1996. Today it has grown with its branch offices in over 35 cities providing employment opportunities to thousand of professionals across the country.

It functions as an online directory service to the global export-import community.

It presently has over 12,000 product categories and subcategories. Along with being in the B2B industry, Trade India has been associated with Google as their leading SME partner.

8. iOffer

iOffer is an e commerce website just like Amazon and eBay. It stands true to its slogan “A Place to Buy, Sell & Trade,” you can buy and sell almost anything on this platform.

Offer was formed by Steven Nerayoff in 2002. This is a San Francisco based online trading company.

The website claims to have one million users including about 75,000 sellers. This has made it one of the most reputed Business2Busniess website across the globe. What attracts the users is that this website allows free citation of items for sale and charges them only after the products are sold or for premium listing services. The difference between iOffer and eBay is that it is more vulnerable to frauds and does not provide appropriate buyer and seller protection norms.

9. ECplaza

This №1 Trade Leader providing online and offline services was created Inkyu Park, in 1996. It is a South Korea based website. It caters to over 1,000,000 members and has gained popularity due to its B2B leads.

It is an all in one b2b website that is full of trade leads, product catalogs, and company directories. The portal offers languages like English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

It is a safe online wholesale mall for international trade.

10. ECVV

ECVV was founded in 2003 with the vision to facilitate global trade more efficiently. It is yet another b2b website that has dominated the world market. ECVV is an authentic platform to purchase from. It provides the global buyers with the complete analysis and information about the suppliers, products and packages.

It is a major international trade promoter and the first end-to-end procurement service platform in China. The annual trade volume on ECVV is estimated to be $5,000 million.

11. ExportersIndia

The website was created in 1997 and is owned by Weblink. In Pvt Ltd. It has its headquarters in New Delhi. The website supports only English Language. The App for the website is also available on Google Play.

It is the most searchable B2B websites for variety manufacturers, exporters, and importers, suppliers, etc. However, the reviews for the website have not been quite well lately.

[futuremarketinsightsreports]

Automotive Chain Sprockets Market to Witness a Healthy Growth during 2018 – 2028

Market Definition and Introduction

An automotive chain sprocket or an automotive sprocket-wheel is a specific wheel type with teeth or cogs, which intermesh with a chain, track or other perforated or indented material. Automotive chain sprockets are in fact a wheel type on which radial projections allow a chain to pass over them. Automotive chain sprockets are different from a gear in their design. Sprockets are never meshed together directly. They are also different from a pulley in terms of their design – sprockets have teeth whereas pulleys are smooth. Regarding vehicles with caterpillar tracks, the engine driven, toothed wheel transmitting motion to the caterpillar tracks is known as the drive chain sprocket. It is located at the front or back of the vehicle. There could also be a third, automotive chain sprocket which is elevated, and drives the track.

Automotive chain sprockets find important applications in automotive manufacturing across industry’s various business segments, such as in the manufacturing of cars, tracked vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and other automotive products. This is so because automotive chain sprockets play an important role in transferring rotary motion between two shafts in cases where gears are found to be inappropriate for transmitting linear motion to a track or tape. Automotive chain sprockets have been instrumental in facilitating the motion of primitive automobiles, which are mostly driven by the sprocket and chain mechanism. In bicycle manufacturing, automotive chain sprockets are carried by the pedal shaft and drive a chain, which in turn, drives a small sprocket on the axle of the rear wheel – an important action for the bicycle’s movement. Considering these important aspects of applications of automotive chain sprockets, the study of the automotive chain sprockets market becomes an important read.

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Market Segmentation

On the basis of product type, the automotive chain sprockets market is segmented as follows:

Double duty automotive chain sprockets

Hunting tooth automotive chain sprockets

Skip tooth automotive chain sprockets

Gap tooth automotive chain sprockets

Draw bench automotive chain sprockets

Segmental rim automotive chain sprockets

On the basis of application, the automotive chain sprockets market is segmented as follows:

Passenger cars

Light commercial vehicles

Heavy commercial vehicles

Two wheelers

Others

Key Trends and Drivers

Sprockets come in various designs. Manufacturers claim that almost every design ensures maximum efficiency. Sprockets typically do not have a flange. However, some sprockets used with timing belts have flanges to keep the timing belt centered. Sprockets and chains are also used for transmission of power from one shaft to another where slippage is not admissible. In such cases, sprocket chains are used instead of belts or ropes and sprocket-wheels instead of pulleys. They can be run at a high speed and some forms of chain are so constructed as to be noiseless even at high speeds.

Automotive chain sprocket manufacturers have been focusing on developing improved variety of designs. Designers of new automotive sprocket designs have been claiming high efficiencies for their respective designs, as part of their marketing strategy. Also, manufacturers have been keen on product development so as produce increasingly light weight automotive chain sprockets with an effort to improve fuel efficiency. Better transmission, low noise levels during functioning, almost zero slippage with regard to the automotive chain sprocket assembly and use of superior grade materials in automotive chain sprocket products have been the focus points of manufacturers. Steel sprockets have been gaining increasing importance as they display higher tensile strength vis-à-vis cast iron sprockets. This trend has also been emphasizing the importance of the material of construction used for automotive chain sprockets.

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Market Participants

Examples of the market participants in the automotive chain sprockets market are as follows:

S. Tsubaki Power Transmission, LLC

KMC Automobile Transmission

Rockman Industries Ltd.

Felix Enterprises

Madras Chain Corporation

KettenWulf Betriebs GmbH

HangZhou DongHua Chain Group Co., Ltd.

Schaeffler Technologies AG & Co. KG

Silcoms

MicroPoly

SKF

[keep-van-goghing]

Something So Beautiful

Nothing struck a cord in me so much as when we started the impressionism section in lecture. There was just something so beautiful and delicate about how these artists depicted simple life around us.

As the reading mentioned, it truly is an impression of life, which makes these works of art so much more than just a painting of still life. It’s what the artist sees when he looks at the world, which is so much more than perfect lines and exact depiction like a photograph. Life is constantly moving, and it is its own dynamic being.

A few weeks ago, I ventured to the MoMA at a time before we started the impressionist section. I had always heard about the famous lilies of Monet, so I figured it was the thing to do. So, below is a picture -- that does no justice -- of Monet’s “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond.”

(Cloud Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, 1914-1926)

When I first saw it, I will be quite honest, I did not think it was a big deal at all. In fact, I was very confused why these paintings were so famous. I, of course, thought it was beautiful, but it did not strike a cord like “Starry Night” did. However, looking at it now after our lecture discussions, I feel like everything has changed.

Monet used a beautiful palette of blue, greens, pinks, and whites to portray these reflections throughout different points of the year. There is not a reassuring feeling of preservation but an essence of constant change by the intermeshing of the different colors. There are no true lines in this painting, but the different elements are separated by when a blue radiates into a white or a green radiates into a blue. The painting almost seems alive. The dedication to represent an ever-changing life is truly evident in the size and contents of this painting. Not only that, but Monet does a fantastic job of inviting the viewer into the painting by its grand size and color scheme. I am now seeing the magnificence that I was not able to see just a few weeks between these two viewings.

The ability to capture the constant change and activity of life, I think, is a gift that I could not appreciate until we had those lecture discussions. Whereas before I was astounded by how Raphael and Michelangelo were able to depict life so perfectly and closely, now I find this even more impressive. This is because I think it depicts life even more perfectly than the actual perfect depiction ironically because life is not perfect. Whereas the works of the past of those who painted or sculpted these faultless lines and curves we see in our world, impressionism adds an extra layer of appreciation for life. As mentioned, the blurring of the colors in Monet’s piece do not perfectly divide the elements, but it creates more of a mesh of colors. In a way, our lives are meshes of colors. So much happens during one year, one day, one hour, one second that it is impossible to truly depict life unless you were to create a piece like this. Works of the past show one millisecond of what we go through -- they were the early photographs.

Impressionism has given me a bigger appreciation for life. Whereas worrying about those milliseconds, it’s nicer to step back and see the bigger picture -- to see how dynamic and beautiful life is. Impressionism shows us to not worry about those milliseconds -- to live in them, yes -- but things are constantly changing and meshing with each other. Sometimes it is okay to move on and keep going. It all blurs together beautifully anyway as Monet has shown.

I tried to sketch this painting, but it looks like a mess of lines and whirls. I’ll include it below, although it is quite terrible, just to exemplify the mastery Monet had in this painting. Furthermore, it shows how it would have taken him more than a few days to achieve this artwork. It is not something one can sketch in one sitting; it truly does need that element of time to depict the lilies and clouds as he did.

[mlonswayfilm-blog]

San Soleil

This week I decided to begin by watching the movie before venturing into the texts, which was not my brightest idea. I have never been one to watch a lot of documentaries as I enjoy fictional drama, but often times documentaries prove to have the most interesting concepts. They step past artificial romance and break into modern and past problems that most of us try to avoid thinking about. As soon as San Soleil started I was a bit lost as the image of three children went across the screen and letters were being read but I figured eventually some main obvious point would be made. 

Instead the entirety of the film followed the same structure of letters being read aloud in a nondiegetic fashion and quick cutaways from one image to another. It seemed to all be shot in a POV perspective as the narrator’s face was never shown, but several times she mentioned her awareness towards the subject she was filming avoiding looking at her or not. It was all as though someone had journeyed around Japan and Africa and the camera was directly shooting what they saw. It was a bunch of history and rituals crammed together with similar themes of time and memory that all lead back to the same image of the children. There was never any character that were shown throughout as the entire film was close ups and middle shots of people that quickly cycled on to the next person. To me, it felt rather impersonal not having a person to connect to. Even the person narrating did not give us much information besides the lessons she had learned in the letters and about a future idea for a movie. Of course there were little snippets throughout such as her favorite creatures being cats and owls (which is obvious as they continuously show up throughout the film) but besides that no character is really focused in on. There were no interviews, no storylines of a specific person, nothing but letters and a lot of people watching. As I come from a family of avid people watching, the film felt very real in the sense that I felt like I was where ever the camera was, observing the same habits and motions of people. It was all very candid, as small moments such as the girls laughing while standing by the robot of a president. So often in fictional movies little bursts of laughter are not seen by the extras, but by having no main subject matter and no acting cues people were able to be people. To an extent these small moments helped me feel more connected, but often I felt lost and wishing for guidance.

Guidance could have been brought to me if I had focused in initially on the readings instead of tackling them after. I began with the article by Daniel Fairfax which directly spoke of Marker’s films and how the quick cuts were a stylistic choice he tended to make in his films. He described this in a term coined by Walter Benjamin as “dialectical image” which in short was fast images coming together as a mix of past and present (Fairfax). Knowing just this term alone helped clarify why everything was seemingly all over the place to me, but to Marker it all made sense as it showed the connections he wanted to portray. To quote Marker he said “attach oneself to details, to the tiniest of things which historians and sociologists hold in disdain, and to arrive through their intermeshing at the portrait of an era” (Fairfax). Small moments that may seem irrelevant to some, were where he found his important clips for films. Compiling this clips brought about the meaning he was trying to get across that one clip may not have shown. For example, in San Soleil as people were sleeping on the train he flashed images of horror movies, which may have seemed unrelated but since he discussed earlier how it felt like the shows were watching the audience, it seems that by flashing horror over sleep it as tv had even intruded people’s dreams. It was a chaotic symbol that tied in well with previous narration. 

But then there is this concept of image and montage which as heavily brought up in Andre Bazin’s book What is Cinema? He begins with a chapter on image and how photography changed the whole world of art as people were able to capture realism like never before. He goes so far to say “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (Bazin 16). Now as someone into photography this all made sense to me as I enjoy the realism aspect of a photo. As soon as I try to paint or draw something it never depicts exactly what I would like for it to. By taking a photo it is clear to the intended audience what is being represented, rather than leaving room for interpretation. As mentioned by Bazin, they seem to freeze time for a moment as photos leave something in that state forever (Bazin 14). Photos do hold a lot of power in terms of memory as what we wanted to capture stands still perfectly the way it was in that split second. But this is where I find some disagreement with Bazin, as although there may have been a search for perfect painting realism, that now has been fixed by an digital image, which leads to losing some of our creative aspects. Anyone who has a camera phone and an Instagram automatically thinks they are a photographer but when it comes down to it the uniqueness of realism is gone. I am from Oregon, where it never snows, so when it does my Instagram feed is often 30 pictures in a row of front yards with snow. But when painting, a creative aspect of brush strokes, color, abstract aesthetic and much more comes involved that I feel gives the painter more creative power. Bazin finds this to be a negative as he describes “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity” but subjectivity is what brings inspiration and movements to the world that a photo of a sunset cannot (Bazin 12). Marker almost contrasts this idea of realism in his film as he uses that machine to change images into abstract colors that hide details. He used this effect over scenes of violence which helped mask what people try not to see. It added an avant-garde effect to something that was originally realism making the clips more unique. But at the same time, the effect took away the power that the clips originally has presented. Marker often spoke of censorship and its commonality but for him to censor such dramatic moments that would likely have stuck with people made the scenes less effective. On the first day of class we had discussed the images in media that stuck with people, and detailed violent images are what were often most memorable.

There is the other whole concept of montage brought up in both Bazin and Fairfax’s work. My previous idea of a montage was just a collage of clips all brought together. Bazin discussed how it all started from silent films where montages were shown to give the audience an idea of what was going on. He used the example of trains coming towards each other, showing shorter lengths to demonstrate their speed (Bazin 25). He also discussed the involvement of juxtaposition which reminded me of Mamet’s article on how images with simplistic juxtaposition spoke more loudly than words. Mamet seems to be supporting the world of silent films as Bazin describes them. Artavazd Pelechian in Fairfax’s article sums up montages as being all about the disconnection of scenes (Fairfax). This concept made sense in Marker’s film as his montages were all about putting dissimilar scenes next to each other to try to spark some meaning. Besides the narration and slightly futuristic sounds, a lot of the film reminded me of silent movies as it was just clips with no talking and occasional diegetic sound. Bazin often discusses how montages demonstrate some sort of meaning but his given examples were more obvious, while personally Marker’s montage was hard to understand for me. There was no flashes of trains getting close like in parallel montage but instead quick cuts between a Japanese celebration and other scenes such as a boat. A mystery was brought into Marker’s film by taking away anything obvious in theme but for me it was too vague as I was uncertain exactly what Marker was trying to get across to the audience most of the time.

Although the meaning was not the most clear to me, the overall aesthetic was very pleasing. There was a lot faded colors involved, fast cutaways and close ups that all did fit together. Even through the immense amount of people and concepts, there was still unity through his editing style. Bazin did discuss towards the end of his chapter that as technology improved so did editing as more depth and better angles became involved (Bazin 33). Stories flowed well together and a sense of real culture was articulated throughout by keeping clips to be POV observational. I went to Japan about five summers ago and it felt like I was back for many clips such as when discussing the dog statue as I can remember witnessing that and a similar crowd surronding it. It was little things such as the dog statue and other continuous themes that brought together the long montage. The narrator had a fascination with animals as could be seen as many were shown and discussed throughout. Again, often the meaning behind things such as the emu went over my head, but the continuity showed emphasis on the subject meaning in someway creatures were very important to the overall idea. Although I really do wish that I had a better understanding of what exactly Chris Marker was going for, the montage style of film was something I had never seen anything like and helped broaden my horizon on different cultures.