#two people standing next to each other (stylized)

[am3-26]

there's this girlie (gender-neutral) i keep checking goodreads' of because i can't stop looking at their "all-time favourites" shelf and thinking to myself "why dont you also put 50 shades of grey on there"

[tangledbea]

Okay for some reason this won't leave my mind, and if anyone could help me on this quest, it would be Bex!

If I am correct, Rapunzel is 5'1 and Eugene is 6'1, canonically. He's a whole foot taller, right? So with this knowledge, seeing them stand next to each other you can roughly gage what a foot height difference would look like between characters.

Now I want to turn the attention to gold ol' Lance. Anytime he is next to Eugene the difference in their height seems very similar, or perhaps JUST smaller, than Eugene and Rapunzel's. Does this mean this dude is around 7 foot 😭

I know it can be hard as there's not many shots where they are simply standing completely up right next to each other, (this goes for all the characters.) I also appreciate that it's animation, and for many reasons sometimes the height differences are going to look less, or more drastic than in other shots. (I guess it's similar to live action where sometimes it has to fluctuate in order to fit a certain shot etc? Like when smaller actors have to stand on ramps of boards!)

Just something that I found interesting! I'm guessing whatever his height is, it would be extremely similar to King Frederick's, now that I think about it 🤔 Oh, God, wait, the Stabbingtons!? Hang on, they must be even taller than Lance. Surely? Now I'm even more intrigued!

Okay, so I think you're working yourself into a tizzy here. XD

Firstly, yes, you're correct about Rapunzel and Eugene's canonical heights. However, the movie's height comparisons are visually more accurate than the series'. Remember that the series art style is stylized to be Rapunzel's journal, and she exaggerates things to a large extent. And even then, as you mentioned, they're both animated, and proportions are exaggerated. Also, there's framing. Height differences are often fudged in order to make a shot look better.

That being said, in the movie, Eugene and Frederic are about the same height, and we only get to see that for a moment.

Frederic is still a little taller, because his head is bowed here while Eugene is standing tall. But that would put him at, what, 6'3" at the tallest?

That's a huge difference to their comparative heights in the series.

Rapunzel tends to paint people's height based on more than just their literal height. She also puts how they make her feel into it. I mean...

Eugene looks so short compared to the other men because he's her biggest comfort. He's cozy. Her dad's imposing. He's the king! He makes the rules! He keeps her inside the kingdom! Lance has a huge personality and is just full of life! The Stabbingtons, Wreck Marauder, and The Baron are all large and intimidating in the worst way.

However, when you look at the movie, the camera is constantly switching between a low angle to look up at the Stabbingtons, and a high angle to look down at Eugene when they're all standing together.

In most shots, it looks like the top of Eugene's head hits about the bottom of their lower lip. However, in that last shot, we can see that the top of Eugene's head doesn't even reach their shoulders. It's that whole fudging thing. I think it's safe to say that the Stabbingtons are meant to be about 7' tall, give or take. Lance is probably about the same height as Frederic, and The Baron is probably about the same height as the Stabbingtons.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

[leaderpinhead]

Idia - Like A Shoujo Cliche

Prompt: Role Reversal Notes: I feel like this could be read as both a romantic and platonic interaction. Personally, I enjoy a more platonic Idia/Yuu pairing, like two siblings.

Idia fiddled with the headphones around his neck. The crowd passed in front of him like a sea of faceless NPCs. Idia clutched his tablet closer and took a small step back to avoid being trampled by a trio of giggling girls.

Why had he agreed to do this? Oh, yeah because Ortho bullied him into it. “This is a once in a lifetime chance, big brother!” Ortho had insisted. “It’s a limited-time offer, and it’s right here on Sage’s Island. Do you really wanna spend hundreds of thaumarks to buy the same Premo merch from a dirty scalper?”

Honestly, Idia hadn’t minded the thought at all. Sure, he hated people who bought fan merch for next to nothing and then sold it for ten times the amount, but it made his life a lot easier. Just click a few buttons and wait a few days for the package to arrive at the Mystery Shop. Easy, breezy.

And not panic inducing like standing here like a complete weirdo taking up space in front of a cutesy cafe.

“Idia!”

Idia jumped. He nearly lost his balance spinning to face the direction he had heard Yuu’s voice. She waved when they made eye contact. The sprint Idia did to reach her would have put his record times in PE to shame, and Vargas would have given him an immediate spot on the track team.

Idia grabbed Yuu’s wrist. “What took you so long? I thought we said ten sharp. You weren’t here at ten sharp!”

Yuu rolled her eyes. She shook her arm, but he refused to let go of her. “Stop acting like I completely ghosted you. I’m literally five minutes late.”

“You’re still late,” Idia insisted. He tucked his tablet into his pocket. He clung to Yuu’s arm with both hands. He cringed closer to her shoulder to avoid a group of normies taking up over half the sidewalk. “Do you have any idea how stressful all this is? I don’t come here on the regular. How am I supposed to blend in with all the normies?”

“The first step is to stop acting like you’re being tortured for just breathing,” Yuu said. She shook her arm again, but Idia clung to her out of sheer stubbornness now. She sighed. “Come on, Idia. We’re here to enjoy something you like. The least you can do is be a bit excited.”

Idia pouted. He was excited...once he got past all the anxiety of brushing shoulders with complete strangers. He enjoyed all the livestreams of Premo’s concerts; he watched all their interviews and was active in all the big fan groups. He collected memorabilia like it was no tomorrow. He just...had never experienced something actually live.

And it seemed a bit silly to be stepping into a cutesy, pastel cafe with him being all “doom-and-gloom" like.

“We’ll even get a few crepes,” Yuu insisted when he stayed quiet for too long. Instead of trying to pull herself free again, she gave one of his hands a friendly pat. “They don’t have energy drink flavor, but Cater said the hazelnut chocolate ones were pretty popular.”

The only response Idia could give was an embarrassing groan. How lame was this? He was giving off NEET vibes like a radioactive zombie in some post-apocalyptic world. No wonder all the girls who had passed him going into the cafe had giggled and whispered to each other while shooting him some major side-eye.

Idia clung to Yuu’s arm as they stepped through the cafe’s door. It was just like he had seen through the window: cheerful pastels and bubbly employees. He liked the little woodland creature mascots pictured on the walls and displayed on the tables, but he figured a noodle with flaming hair cooing over a cute rabbit would earn him more stares.

His eyes darted across the menu hanging on the far wall. A separate board had been placed to the side of it, and the darker colors immediately caught his eye. Premo’s band logo—a stylized eyeball with a golden thread circling it—was pictured beside a parfait with several blue and purple layers topped with a cloud of whipped cream and blueberries. Another treat—a crepe with blueberry whipped cream and a drizzle of golden caramel sauce topped with whole blueberries—was pictured alongside it.

The second treat made Idia tighten his grip on Yuu’s arm. “They’re advertising a crepe with the parfait! No one mentioned a crepe on the message board.”

Yuu chuckled and patted his forearm. “I’ll get that crepe then. Why don’t you go find a table for us? The line doesn’t look too long, and I should be able to get them myself.”

Idia nodded and made a quick beeline to the tiny table in the farthest corner. He tucked himself into the chair facing towards the rest of the cafe. The other tables were occupied with mostly girls, but he spotted a few guys here and there. Mainly with one girl, and the girl was giggling while the guy looked like he took every opportunity he could to put his arm on the back of her chair.

Idia’s nose wrinkled. Talk about a shoujo manga cliche. Idia bet they had some equally cliche interaction, like the girl getting whipped cream on her cheek and the guy wiping it away with his thumb and saying something swoon-worthy. Then they’d continue their date and later have a “will-they-won't-they" kissing moment before someone else interrupts. It was kinda lame to think about it.

Idia’s tablet buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out without hesitation and found a message from Ortho. He was asking if Idia and Yuu had made it to the cafe yet. He grinned and typed out a response before holding his tablet up to take a picture of the limited-time menu options. Ortho would get as hyped as him about the extra crepe option.

Yuu stood at the counter just below the menu. She pointed up at the board just as Idia took the picture. He giggled at the serendipitous moment and shot the pic off into cyberspace. Ortho immediately responded with a happy face.

The next time he looked up, he found Yuu flanked by two guys. She held a tray with the Premo desserts and squinted up at the guys. Her head bounced back and forth as if they were talking too quickly for her to even form a response.

Idia sat frozen in his chair. Was he supposed to jump up and help her? From what he knew, Yuu usually handled her own problems without any issue. She had definitely handled guys on the campus that were twice her size. Idia getting into the mix would just cause more problems. Yeah, he was better off just waiting right here...

One of the guys grabbed her elbow. Yuu immediately jerked to the side in an attempt to free herself. The motion nearly knocked the parfaits off the tray.

Idia had crossed the cafe before he even realized it. He huffed when he reached the trio. “Are you guys some kind of shoujo creeps who can’t take a hint? The girl’s not interested.”

The guys spun on him. From a distance, they had looked to be bigger than Yuu, but up close, Idia actually thought they looked shorter than her, which made them way shorter than him. They blinked up at him like they didn’t know how to respond. Yuu blinked at him in the same way.

Idia widely grinned with false bravado. “Not so tough when you’re up against someone bigger, huh?”

One of the guys stuttered and looked down at his shoes. The other guy, the one still holding Yuu, pointed an accusing finger at her. “She doesn’t even know the names of Precipice Moirai!”

Idia’s grin faltered, and it was his turn to be confused. “Huh?”

“She can’t even name a Premo song!” the guy insisted. He pulled on Yuu’s arm again, but she braced herself to keep him from shaking anything on the tray. She glared at the guy but didn’t say anything. “The limited-time parfait and crepe are for real Premo fans. Not some fake fan who doesn’t even realize how valuable the reusable parfait cup and limited-edition crepe button pin are!”

The turn of events, while still shocking, immediately made Idia cackle. He loomed over the guy still holding Yuu, his grin widening. “For real? You’re really that type of guy. What gives you the right to gatekeep, bruh? Over a buncha sweets too? Premo would legit disown you plebs. They’d be the first to say the threads of fate can guide anyone to them. You’re thinking of clipping that thread prematurely? Lame.” Idia took a deep breath and scowled at the speechless guy. “And FYI, Yuu’s tots a fan. She might not be able to hold a tune, but she’s def jammed to a Premo song or two while waiting to queue into a game lobby. I got the proof right here—.”

“Okay!” Yuu’s abrupt interjection made all three of them jump. The guy holding her jerked away like her arm was a hot iron skillet. She shrugged between the guys to stand next to Idia. “I think we get the point. And they’re not going to gatekeep anymore because they really shouldn’t judge a person without knowing them. Right?”

The two guys picked up Yuu’s scary authoritative vibes and snapped to attention. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” Yuu paused. She lightly gestured the tray at them. “Now, uh, go order your own parfaits and crepes.”

The guys nodded and practically tripped their way back to the counter. Idia snickered. Idia would be the first to admit he was an otaku, but it was hilarious to watch other weebs embarrass themselves.

Yuu nudged his side with her elbow, and Idia followed her back to the table where he’d left his tablet. It wasn’t until they were seated that he realized a good number of the other customers were staring in their direction. Mainly the girls, who immediately started whispering and giggling with each other when he looked in their direction.

His face warmed with his own embarrassment, and he ducked his head into his jacket. Yuu pushed one of the Premo parfaits and the crepe in front of him and took the other parfait for herself. She grabbed one of the Premo buttons, the cellophane bag crinkling between her fingers. “Can I open this or am I committing a Premo sin?”

Idia snickered and temporarily forgot about the girls giggling at him. “I don’t care. I’ll keep mine sealed just for the collector’s value of it.”

“Cool.” Yuu unwrapped the button and swung her canvas shoulder bag onto her lap. She pinned the button to the flap of the bag. The ink used to print Premo’s logo shimmered when she moved the flap. “I’ve never actually seen the band’s logo before, but I like it!”

Idia rolled his eyes and grabbed his tablet to take pictures of the parfait and crepe. “I can’t believe you just admitted that. After I just sacrificed what little dignity I had to defend you against those gatekeeping dweebs.”

“Your sacrifice was greatly appreciated.” Idia rolled his eyes again, but Ortho had already responded to the pictures. Idia quickly responded to his brother’s awe. “By the way, thanks for the save. They were saying things I’ve never even heard from you.”

“How about we just forget that big flub,” Idia said. He grabbed the tiny spoon for the parfait but paused. He squinted and decided to attack the crepe first. “I’m already gonna suffer remembering it later.”

“I don’t see why,” Yuu argued. She didn’t have an issue stabbing the fluffy whipped cream of the parfait. Idia stared in horror as she shoveled the edible cloud onto a napkin to reach the sour yogurt beneath. “I think you made half the girls in here swoon.”

Idia choked on the large bite of crepe and blueberry whipped cream he had just taken. He stared at Yuu with wide eyes. “You’re kidding, right? Girl’s swooning over me? More like they were grossed out.”

Yuu’s eyelids drooped. “I think you underestimate the first impression you give some people. It’s not until you open your mouth that they get second thoughts, though this time it actually worked in your favor.”

Idia scoffed and went in for another bite. He froze when he realized Yuu was leaning towards him. She casually—almost too casually—swiped her thumb across his cheek at the corner of his mouth. She pulled back with a dollop of blue cream on her thumb. “Sometimes I wonder how any of you boys survive with the messes you make.”

She popped her thumb into her mouth, and Idia thought he was going to melt into a puddle of embarrassed shoujo cliche.

[last-lorekeeper]

[A video is embedded. Zinnia is standing next to a smart board (remember those) in front of a classroom full of students. For some reason, some of the students are holding testudo shields.

Zinnia: Alrighty, kiddos! It's time to learn some history! My name is Zinnia or Lorekeeper Zinnia or Professor Zinnia. Whatever you wanna use.

She uses the smart pen to write her name on the board.

Zinnia: I'll be your guest instructor today and I'm here to learn you some Hoenn History! This is just one of several lectures you'll be able to attend to get out of whatever boring class you're supposed to be in. We'll be covering, myths, legends, the ancient past, and even some recent history. You know, to piss Raifort off a bit.

Zinnia clicks a clicker and the smartboard changes from a digital whiteboard to an image of the mural at Sky Tower. Or rather, a recreation of it. The actual mural is too big to make getting a photograph possible.

Zinnia: We'll start simple. If you were born in Hoenn or spent any amount of time researching Hoenn mythology, which you probably haven't given how terrible your world history course is. So much time spent on Hisui. It's a fascinating topic but other regions exist too.

Zinnia clears her throat.

Zinnia: So, who can tell me the names of the Legendary Trio known as the Super-Ancient Pokemon.

Several hands go up. Zinnia makes a big show of deciding who to call on before eventually settling on a student in the back.

Zinnia: You! You look real smart!

The student looks a bit unsure.

Student: Uh... Groudon... Kyarger... and Racaza?

Zinnia: You know what, I'll give it to ya. The names of the Super-Ancient Pokemon are Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza.

Zinnia points to each Pokemon on the mural as she says this.

Zinnia: A long, long, long, long time ago, Groudon created the land and Kyogre created the sea. However, the two Pokemon were at odds with each other. Groudon's sole purpose was to create more land and Kyogre's sole purpose was to create more sea. And neither of them could fulfill that purpose so long as the other existed. Overflowing with Primal Energy, the two clashed, bringing chaos and catastrophe down upon the world. The seas turned, fire rained from the sky. The people and Pokemon could do naught but flee.

Zinnia: It seemed like there was no end in sight for this titanic clash. But then, Rayquaza, Lord of the Skies, Guardian of the Earth, descended from the heavens. Lord Rayquaza's power was enough to overwhelm the two titanic Pokemon, ending the era of chaos and bringing peace to the land. But the story's not over yet. Oh no, we haven't even reached the best part.

Zinnia grins, flashing her fangs.

Zinnia: Thousands of years later, another great Meteor fell. This Meteor bored into the earth creating a massive crater that would later come to house the City of Sootopolis. The crater created by the Meteor overflowed with Primal Energy, enough to reawaken Primal Groudon and Primal Kyogre.

Zinnia clasps her hands together.

Zinnia: Once again Rayquaza descended from the heavens but the Primal Pokemon, overflowing with the energy from the crater, proved to be too strong. It seemed all hope was lost and all the people had left was one last desperate wish. The Meteor within the crater responded to the people's wishes and shined with a brilliant rainbow light, transforming Rayquaza into a new radiant form. With this new form it sapped the power from Groudon and Kyogre, resealing them yet again.

Zinnia changes the slide to a stylized graphic of various Mega Stones in an aesthetically pleasing pattern. At the center is a Keystone.

Zinnia: It believed by my people, the Draconids, that this was the first ever instance of Mega Evolution. Yes!

She points at a student who has their hand raised.

Student: Wasn't Mega Evolution created by the King of Kalos firing the Ultimate Weapon 3000 years ago?

Zinnia sits on the desk.

Zinnia: Well, that's certainly one version of the story.

Zinnia lays back on the desk.

Zinnia: In truth, nobody really knows where Mega Evolution came from. There are a lot of different stories but who knows which one is true.

She springs back upright.

Zinnia: Maybe none of them are true. Maybe all of them are. It's a mystery, and that's what makes it so fun. I certainly know which story I prefer but, hey, I'm a bit biased.

Zinnia clicks the clicker again and the slide switches to an image of Sky Pillar taken from the air.

Zinnia: Alongside the Sootopolins, my people built a massive tower to record this story and pass it on to future generations, known today as Sky Pillar. It also serves as an altar to Lord Rayquaza, so that if we're ever in need, we can summon it to protect us.

Zinnia turns the smartboard off and leaps to her feet.

Zinnia: And that's part one. Its basic but its important to know. My next lecture will focus on the various native tribes of Hoenn and their cultures. Oh, and if any of you want to see an example of Mega Evolution in action, meet me in the Courtyard later. Class dismissed. Unless you have Raifort next in which case feel free to hang around for a bit.

The video ends.]

@accessabilityanon Since you couldn't make it. Its all basic stuff but I needed to lay down the foundation for later and I think I made it pretty entertaining.

[chronicparagon]

The Unconquerable: Honkai Star Rail!AU

Note: This verse is currently a draft meant to provide basic information. This draft combines the basic profile format and the backstory giving insight into Harmony's background. This verse is subject to change with the support of interactions and further research into canon events.

Abilities may be adjusted after further research.

---

Summary and Notes

Name: Harmony Halcyon

Alias: H-101 Omega (Former name by ARES), Nita Isskunosi (Little Bear) (Former name from her home planet)

Age: 23

Gender: Female

Sexual Orientation: Pansexual

Path: Harmony

Rarity: ✦✦✦✦✦

Species: Cyborg (formerly human)

World of residence: Unknown (born in a distant planet)

Faction: Formerly to be a soldier before ARES captured her for their experiments.She was held by ARES until her escape and became a Trailblazer and guard.

Note: Alternative affiliation is available upon request, such as being a vigilante, personal bodyguard, etc.

Element: Physical

Path: Harmony

Abilities

Harmony is a cyborg armed with plasma rays converted from light energy she absorbs through the artificial lotus blossoms embedded in the shoulders and arm joints. Her arms store miniature factories with her palms being plasma guns. They appear as circular purple lights embedded in her palms.  Her arms also have the capability of releasing plasma energy as vines. The arms are adorned with metallic vines with thorns and purple blossoms over her shoulder blades and joints. The entirety of her upper back is metal, serving as a cover for her secondary life support system that increases Harmony’s endurance and strength.

Some of her organs, such as her heart and lungs have implants to improve combat performance.

Some of her bones, such as her spine and ribs are reinforced for combat as well.

Although she doesn’t remember her past, Harmony’s knowledge of the military, combat, and field medicine indicate that she may be a soldier or guard. Her fate as an experiment for military research also suggests what her history is.

Note: Stats involving attacks are subject to change. Technique will be added soon.

Basic attack:  Plasma Ray – Attacks a single opponent with a plasma gun built into the palm of her hands.  

Skill:  Violet Vines (bounce) – Releases vibrant, purple thorny vines composed of plasma from her left palm. These vines inflict physical damage to multiple enemies and immobilize them for two turns.

Ultimate: Unconquerable Spirit - Increases all allies’ attacks and increases their critical damage for two turns.

Talent: Breaking free – After using her basic attack, Harmony’s next action will move forward by 15-35%.

Other Abilities: Harmony received the ability to communicate with wubaboos after saving one from capture when she was held prisoner by ARES.

---

Appearance:

Art made by @s-talking

Text of appearance is from her profile page: Her long hair is dark brown, almost black with some dark red highlights. It casts a reddish shine in the light. Harmony stands about 5 foot 4 inches (162.5 cm) and is toned because of working out with a pear-shaped figure. Her weight fluctuates between 135-140 pounds (61.2- 63.5 kg) as a human, but as a cyborg, it increases to 185-190 pounds (83.9-86.2 kg). Her complexion is tan which is darker than most people in this verse. Her skin tone, hair color, and eye color are more typical among the people of her home planet. However, not much is known whether there are others like her anymore.

However, both arms and shoulders are mechanical with her entire back being metallic. These parts are dark gray with a large engraving of a stylized eagle. The engraving was made after she began to get on her feet after her escape, wanting a symbol of her new freedom. She also has a small tattoo on her left wrist, which says her former name: “H-101 Ω”

Harmony has three piercings. One on each earlobe and she has a piercing on her tongue.

Harmony’s body has various scars on her body, ranging from thin, clean incisions from live dissections, the nasty scars and burns from the “so-called” tests where she fought to the death against monsters, even forced to end the lives of prisoners corrupted by ARES' other experiments. She has mixed feelings about the scars. Harmony worries that she lost any beauty she had, but at the same time, they are signs that she is free. She fought against her captors and even against death itself.

 There is beauty in life and strength. Harmony used all her might for her right to protect and live, and despite all odds, she won.

---

Personality: Harmony is a shy girl who can get excited occasionally. This can be off-putting to other people, especially if she just met them. It makes her come off as socially awkward. Most of the time, she’s more reserved, often in the background but she will warm up to others who mean no ill will.

She can trust others pretty quickly, which is both a good and bad thing. However, once she trusts someone, Harmony is sweet, even affectionate. Her most noticeable traits are her kindness, being polite, and quiet nature. She also has a nurturing side, who takes on the role as a mother figure to others in needs including children and creatures. However, she can be fierce, even a little scary if she needs to be. This was apparent in her trials in ARES’s captivity and in the challenges that followed in her duty as a Trailblazer and guard.

She’s incredibly stubborn, and sometimes this can do more harm than good. But it is that determination that also saved lives including her own. Harmony means well, but even after living she is dedicated, sticking to her tasks to the end. The last thing she wants to do is let anyone down.

---

Backstory

(Note: I haven't yet completed the Jarilo-VI quest line in HSR. Some of the backstory may change once I learn more about the lore. ARES have been created for this AU and more information about them and specific characters as headcanons. ARES and notable characters associated with them will be available for plots.)

The stars shine bright in the eternal darkness that is the universe. They shimmer near and far from Harmony’s window with the colors of distant planets studding the heavens like jewels on sparkling velvet. Silver eyes watch the outside surroundings drift by outside her room. Metallic arms cross over her chest and red lips curve to a gentle smile.

I never get tired of this. I love seeing the stars whenever I get the chance. Harmony thought while looking on during this short time alone. It’s small pleasures like this that she never takes for granted. It’s far better than the bright red and rust splattered on the pit’s walls, a place where she thought of many battles for her life.  Where she is now is far better than the walls of her cold cell, or the blinding white lights over her.

She can never forget those memories. Strapped to the table with the light shielding the scientists’ features as they diligently got to work with sterling scalpels, drills, needles, and probes. Harmony never recalled ever being under any anesthesia during those experiments. The researchers at ARES never cared to offer their test subjects that.

Harmony’s smile fades as the past slowly and carefully creep up on her. Her head lowers to the floor before her.

“Ares.” She mutters under her breath. Not many people knew of them, but she would say they were lucky to never know.

ARES is an illusive organization dedicated to researching and developing weapons for military and warfare. They have vast connections to other organizations who seek their weaponry and technology. They worked alongside oppressive regimes across the universe. They also had dealings under the table with private military contractors who were willing to pay a high price for their weapons.

Hushed rumors stoked speculations that the IPC may have some involvement ARES's work or used their weapons designed for mass destruction.  Of course, there is no clear evidence of their relationship. Still, ARES are responsible for the devastation their weapons caused and they ignored ethics for the sake of progress.

One of their experiments is the creation of a super soldier, an ultimate killing machine. This led to their development of Project Ursa, which is the creation of a soldier of human and technology combined. A weapon that is as powerful as a grizzly bear hellbent on reaping lives of enemies.

That was where Harmony came in.

Harmony holds out her left arm and her left hand gingerly strokes over the small engraving on her metallic wrist. She can’t feel the depth of the engraving of the name ARES gave her.

H-101 Ω

She can’t feel the cold metal with her hands, or how smooth the metal is. It’s nothing but that strange sense of numbness from her shoulders down. Her back is no better with metal replacing flesh from the back of her neck to the center of her back.

 Funny…I…Can't remember ever feeling anything with my fingers...Come to think of it, I can't feel anything on my arms and back. But everywhere else is fine.

She vaguely recalls a time when she was not like this, but…It’s so blurry. All she knows is the ARES Space Station and the hell created within those walls.

“Shoot! Not again…” Harmony mutters under her breath with a shake of her head.

Eyes shut tight as she recalls her earliest memories being ones of fear, pain, and death.  But her life must have not been that way. She has her names, one being Harmony Halcyon, and the other is from an unknown language that she somehow knows. Though she remembers only some words, it was a sign that her life was not always shrouded in darkness.

She only has those few fragments from her past before ARES. She knows she’s Harmony Halcyon and there’s another name: Nita Isskunosi. It’s from a language she doesn’t recall the name of but knows some words. It exists somewhere!  Those names are what she held onto. They mean she’s a person, not H-101 Omega: The innovation of super soldiers.

The young woman opens her eyes, returning her attention to the heavens for one more moment. Just one more moment before duty calls.

 What I don’t get is how I got there to begin with. Harmony thought, I must have something to do with military or something like that. Was I a soldier before that? A peacekeeper?

A chiming sound draws her gaze to the phone resting on her nightstand. She turns away from the window for the nightstand, her mind wanders back to how she came here. That she remembers very well.

ARES gushed over their success in developing a living war machine but they wanted to do more. They had much more in store in her before her eventual deployment.

Be it on the table under the knife or on the battlefield, Harmony knew this could be fatal for her. Unfortunately for her, It didn’t matter to ARES since they lost many test subjects before.  As far as she knew, she was the remaining human subject who survived.

But Harmony had other plans for her fate. She wasn’t going to let them keep her here and use her for every twisted experiment. No. She refused to let those monsters rule her life! She can't let these people conquer her fate as they have done to her body, her mind, and her previous life.

She must take control of her life and it had to happen now!

It was that decision that changed her story and sparked chaos in the ARES Station.

Sirens went off, and red lights flashed in her sight as she ran down the corridor.  Sparks flew and armed med and women fell from the storm of plasma rays emitted from the gun embedded within her. Screams and cries of pain rang in her ears when other staff who came after her met the large, blue shield. She bulldozed obstacles while her plasma gun was charging, breaking into the station’s hanger.

Her target: The Crimson Falcon, was a space fighter jet developed by ARES. It was one of the ships in the organization’s prized fleet, which fell into the fugitive’s hands as she used credentials stolen from a fallen staff member on the way.

It worked! It was working, and she was free! She was so close to freedom at last!

Or so she thought.

ARES didn’t give up and pursued her. It took one missile to send the Crimson Falcon crashing. Her fears of recapture or death filled Harmony when she fell from the sky. The craft screeching with flames engulfing the ship. She didn’t have the chance to react before a crash reaches her ears. Darkness flooded her vision, surrounded by intense heat drilling into her as debris dug into her body. Those are all she knew until there was nothing.  

Harmony shudders and she shakes her head once more. It’s all she can do to rid herself of the past. Calm yourself, Harmony! Don’t get caught up in the past.  She needs to keep telling herself that. She reaches for her phone, turning on the screen to the notification. It's a reminder of the time, which is when she needs to be on patrol.

Yeah, I need to go. She thought, and the phone slid into her jacket's pocket as she made her way to her desk that stood across from her bed and nightstand. She picks up her Astral Express badge from the desk, pausing to look at it.

She can never express the entirety of her gratitude for the Astral Express. They didn't have to take her in, but she offered her services as security and assist in Trailblazing. Surely, her abilities can do good for others instead of destruction.

How she got here opened the door to a new journey in hopes of finding answers. That part of her story is still fresh on her mind with the many ups and downs leading to this.

Harmony came to learn about it during her recovery from her wounds at a clinic belonging to a doctor named Natasha in Jarilo-VI. Shat was where she crashed and it wasn't long until she was discovered and brought in. There she learned that she was safe and there was no one there to harm her.

That was the very first time in so long that she felt safe. That was the first time when the dam broke and emotions poured out. Maybe it is too much for the gentle doctor but she was patient, and understanding, never judging her patient who was through the wringer more than once.

That encounter was still embarrassing for Harmony who was used put on a brave face in the face of the people who put her through hell in the name of science.

Her time recovering in the clinic gave her time to put her thoughts together with questions buzzing in her mind. Though they followed her for so long, Harmony couldn't dwell on such questions when fighting for her life.

Nita Isskunosi, that means Little Bear. Why do I know that? Who was I?

My family? Who were they? Did I have one?

...Where is home?

How did I get to ARES?...What happened?

She had to know, but...How? Where should she start in finding answers to those questions.

She knew no one would have the answers, not even Natasha. But, Harmony was open with the kind woman about these questions and not knowing where to go from there. She had no one else to turn to other than the first friendly face.

That was where she learned about the Astral Express. It carried the Trailblazers, who saved Jarilo-VI from the effects of the Fragmentum. Perhaps they could help her find the answers to her past beyond her time with ARES. Though hesitant, Harmony knew that may be her first step.

She reached out to them, and the rest was history.

Her story starts from here and Harmony hopes that one day, she will learn about herself, where she came from, why she became an experiment, and hope to find people she will hold dear to her heart.

Right! I need to go! I need to for real.

Harmony attaches the badge to her jacket. Then, she makes her way to the door. She takes in a deep breath before finally leaving her room.

This is it. This is only the beginning.

[poststormjitters]

The Falls of the Divine Horizon Seeker-2

IMAGE ID:

Four panels, colored in blues and cool toned grays, show scenes of people in summer clothes gathering or focusing to watch the sky as it gets dark. In a typewriter font and an off white text bubble in each panel, the text reads “They flooded the roofs,” “Sought friends,” “Swarmed the local piers,” “And found purchase in the tallest trees they could climb” The first panel focuses on a girl with long hair set up on a roof gazing through a telescope and writing in a notebook balanced on her thigh. She has books, her telescope case, and the lens cap within reach next to her. Other people have gathered on an adjacent building—one straddles the roof, one lays back on its slant, and an adult and child peek and wave through an open upper floor window.

The second panel shows a person with dark curly hair lounging on a picnic blanket at the edge of a fenced, grassy area with nearby stepping stones. They are with a sleeping cat and two friends who sit beside them on the blanket and against a tree trunk, respectively.

The third panel shows a girl with her hair tied up standing on a dock pointing away and out to sea with her left hand. She supports herself with a cane in her other hand. Two people sit on the end of the dock next to her, one gazing in the same direction, the other facing away. There’s a rowboat in the water on the opposite side of her, its oars are laid on the dock.

The fourth panel overlooks a distant mountain range. There are several stylized trees in the foreground, one has a man with long hair perched on its branches. There’s a hot air balloon floating further away.

END ID.

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Omno

[ID: The title of the game, Omno, written in round, stylized letters sandwiched between two horizontal lines. It's over an image of the game, showing a landscape largely covered in white, fluffy clouds, gray, low poly mountains with pink trees rising high. The protagonist of the game, a low poly humanoid figure wearing a blue shirt and a red scarf, looks over the scene. End ID]

From the very first screenshot I saw, I fell in love with the artstyle - low-poly shapes, fantastic creatures, pastel colors and admittedly a bit much bloom lightning. The protagonist carries a staff, which is used for everything - surfing, flying, carrying light - and I really love the animations. The soundtrack is great as well, very calm.

[ID: A screenshot of the game, showing the protagonist stand in front of a wall, the tip of their staff glowing. The mural on the wall depicts five people, raising their joint hands. Lights sparkle around the scene. End ID]

The premise of the game is rather simple: You enter an area, unlock the map, and find at least 3 light orbs to open the path to the next area. To 100% complete an area, you need to find all the orbs, interact with all the creatures and find some hidden glyphs as well.

The game is divided into several biomes, and each biome unlocks another skill, for example surfing on your staff in the snowy areas. Later puzzles require combining the unlocked skills.

[ID: A screenshot of the game, showing the protagonist sitting on the ground in a cold looking area. Next to them is a very round, very green quadrupedal creature with a huge tail not resembling any real animal. It's lying flat on the ground with its eyes mostly closed. End ID]

The puzzles aren't hard, but they still took me forever, because I suck at platformers. Apparently I took twice the average completionist time. A few puzzles were on a timer; those were my least favorites. Save and respawn points are plenty, so you can just yeet yourself over the edge repeatedly trying to get that jump right.

This is in no way a difficult game.

Achievements are mostly straightforward, but missable: Complete each area 100%, and in some do a special task like interacting with the creatures in a special way.

The story was... I don't know. I really didn't play this for the story. You're on a pilgrimage, following the footsteps of those who went before you, reading the notes they left.

[ID: A screenshot of the game, showing the protagonist looking over a desert area with palm trees, broken stone pillars and structures and low bushels of grass. End ID]

It took me 8 hours to finish, half of which I probably spent running in circles and falling off cliffs. There's no real replay value, but I had a fun time.

Despite all my love for it, there's also some negative points:

No way to rebind controls (it's ok with controller, I wouldn't want to play it with keyboard)

Basically no settings at all, and while I love the bloom effect, I can imagine it's a bit much for others

No cloud saves

I had a few crashes, but I can't tell if that's because of the game or the steam deck

It does feel kinda like an early console game - straightforward, no options, no save slots, nothing. But we're not in the era of early consoles anymore, and I am glad I didn't pay full price for it. The general consensus about time to finish seems to be 3-5 hours, which is one more reason I'd only suggest picking it up in a sale.

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats | Prince of Darkness: Phil Prince Revisited

When I last visited the depraved, upsetting world of Phil Prince, I did it through a marathon of sorts, watching eight of his films over the course of about a week. Folks, don't do this. I realize that my viewing habits may periodically look to some like a cautionary tale, what happens when you keep consuming swill from the gutter, and this is definitely one of those cases. Not only will you not actually get desensitized, because these movies keep finding ways to surprise you with their repugnance, but you'll also develop a certain Stockholm Syndrome, gelling to their distinct aesthetics, even if they rarely approach what might be considered "good" filmmaking. But the fact is, the runtimes average at less than an hour, and like the roughie equivalent of Lays potato chips, you can't have just one, so naturally I ended up watching a bunch more in a short amount of time. Folks, don't do this.

Tales of the Bizarre is not a standout effort from Prince in any sense, but it is halfassed and pungent in a mixture that only he offers. Here, we meet four women who tell each other sexy stories, which would already be a pretty transparent porno premise, but in this case, the sexy stories they tell each other are about being raped. I do not mean to be insensitive about the topic of sexual assault, but my guess is that this movie does not capture the way it's discussed privately in real life. We start off with a scene where Cheri Champagne calls up a number in a Screw Magazine classified ad and gets a visit from our old friend George Payne, who does his classic scary shouty shtick with aplomb. By the standards of people whose brains haven't been fried by an earlier Phil Prince marathon, this would be a pretty intense and upsetting scene. But for those whose brains are nice and crispy, this will stand out for having been recycled in The Story of Prunella to pad the other movie's runtime, something which pissed off Prince's mob-affiliated boss and Avon theatre chain owner Murray Offen when he tried to release both movies as a double feature on home video.

So my memory of that anecdote kept me from being too repulsed, a reaction that was quickly corrected by the next scene, in which a woman watching news about murderers and rapists in New York is visited by a rapist, whose violent and scatological threats make Payne seem tender and compassionate by comparison. Now, I've enjoyed graphic descriptions of murder in the music of the Geto Boys, but in a scene that's being played for titillation, I admit I was genuinely bothered by the dialogue here. Thankfully, we get at least one moment of levity, when he offers the unusually eloquent threat to "jab [his] bulbous projection into [her] fat hole", and I think there's something interesting about the way this scene plays on anxieties about a crime-ridden world. We then get a still unpleasant but easier to watch scene in sepia tone, followed by one where Prince himself makes an appearance, alternating between shouting directions ("I want two dicks! Two dicks in her mouth!"), lending a helping hand and eating crackers while spectating, dissolving the line between director, performer and viewer in a formally daring (by his standards) move. Alas, the movie ends on a weak note, with all the men from the segments joining the women for an orgy, which like many such scenes, is overlong and unfocused and undoes much of the charge of the preceding film.

Kneel Before Me is unusual in Prince's filmography in that it offers a sophisticated (by his standards) visual style and has something resembling empathy for its protagonist. You see, George Payne just got married to Annie Sprinkle, but despite his desire for a normal love life, he keeps having visions that he's the Marquis de Sade (which everyone pronounces as "Markeese"), BDSM-ing his way through a number of scenes of varying consent with Sprinkle and a bunch of Prince regulars. You get some simple but effective stylization with the black background, red lighting and limited but pointed use of fetish props (namely the St. Andrew's Cross), Payne doing both likable and scary, and a dream structure that gives this a level of ambition not often present in Prince's work. The supposedly terrifying comeuppance for Payne's character (courtesy of a very scary beej by Sprinkle and another character) is easier to watch than a lot of what goes down in Prince's work, but the unexpectedly artful nevertheless wince-inducing closing images certainly have an impact.

Pain Mania is a supposedly documentarian look at live sex shows at a 42nd Street theatre. I say supposedly because the movie is rarely convincing in this sense, recycling scenes from Prince's other movies both for the sex shows and to represent the audience (Marlene Willoughby jacking off two dudes in the front row), and interview subjects and the host ("Nina Nookie", actually Murray Offen's daughter Melissa, who also worked as a set designer on a number of Prince's movies) repeatedly flubbing lines. As far as parodic Prince efforts go, I think Dr. Bizarro offers a better skewering of the white coater than this does for documentaries, although this is fairly pleasant by Prince's standards (assuming you're interested in this world). At the very least, this movie shows the importance of context, with the sex show framing device removing much of the depraved charge that these scenes had in the movies they were borrowed from. I've seen this scene of Annie Sprinkle inserted a marital aid larger than her arm into an actor playing her brother twice now, and I can confirm it's a lot less unpleasant to watch when flute-tinged lounge music plays on the soundtrack.

I understand that Forgive Me, I Have Sinned has been released in a nice restoration. For the sake of cinema, I should have bought a copy. Instead I opted for a shitty, discoloured VHS transfer because it was more readily available, which does a disservice to but doesn't completely hide the compelling lo-fi visual style, not unlike Kneel Before Me. Here we have George Payne listen to the confessions of a few victims of rape, rape one of them and then invite them and their rapists so that the victims can get their revenge through rape. To paraphrase Big Maybelle, there's a whole lotta rapin' goin' on, but the attention given to the visuals makes this a bit easier to watch, in the sense that this looks like an actual work of art produced by someone with clear aesthetic ideas (there are interesting choices in terms of lighting, the use of slow motion, and distorted sounds on the score), and not just some scumbag's home movies or a crude document of depravity. It also helps that Payne acts circles around everyone else, who are less than convincing as their characters, except Ron Jeremy as a character's sleazy boss, although in this case Jeremy's offscreen actions play a big part. And while this ends in an orgy, I think the one here hangs together better than most such scenes, as the sinful atmosphere gives this one a certain participatory charge.

Whatever interesting aesthetic qualities I could find in the last few Prince efforts I watched were totally absent in The Stimulators and The Temptress, two transparently constructed loop carriers without much interesting going on. In The Stimulators, a movie producer watch a bunch of pornographic footage while sexually harassing her assistant as she prepares to cast her next movie. Prince has actually disputed directing this one, and based on the results onscreen, it feels very little like his work, both aesthetically (lots of lounge music) and in terms of sexual content (entirely vanilla), although casting Ron Jeremy (credited as "Ron Geremy") as the victim of sexual misconduct makes this an uneasy watch. There is one amusing moment in one of the vignettes where a character demonstrates a napkin-folding trick, but otherwise this is pretty dull. In The Temptress, a woman meets a friend in a bar and tells him a bunch of sexy stories, none of which she was actually involved in, and then becomes so horny that she starts having sex with her friend and eventually the bartender. This is one Prince does not dispute having directed, although you'd be hard pressed to see much of his style here. There are some laughs from Dave Ruby hanging on to every word of the terribly interesting stories being recounted by the heroine ("That's very interesting. What happened next?"), and one of the vignettes has a somewhat striking sequence involving eye closeups and horny narration, but otherwise this is a pretty uninvolving experience, lacking the charge Den of Dominance imbued into its bar setting or the ability of Dr. Bizarro to find humour in its framing device. It's a little disappointing that my exploration of Prince's work (the ones I have yet to see appear to be lost) ended with something so anonymous, but it is what it is.

[yaldev]

High Office

Decadin squinted at the fine print. “My name?”

“Yeah, just means we can use your name and likeness for branding, maybe put it on our intellectual property.”

Decadin looked back up at the Chief Executive Officer. “I am not comfortable with that. My name isn’t your property.”

“I assure you, these are standard terms for national heroes.” The CEO kept his eyes on the toast he was adorning with honey. “It’s not that deep, we can even purge the part about your likeness. But I’m insistent about using your name for endeavours that’ll make history. You and I, we’re going to build each other’s legacies.”

The CEO punctuated his point with a bite. He imagined Decadin’s name on buildings, ships and advertisements, and all the investors drawn in by the endorsement of a celebrity scientist. Decadin saw his name on off-brand toothpaste and Spinning Flyers made for war.

“If my name goes on something unethical…”

“We’ll talk about it,” the CEO said through a mouthful of stickiness.

Decadin shook his head, signed this page of the contract, and flipped to the next.

- - -

In commemoration of the Acolyte’s death, Terminus founded Decadin Suppression Services Inc., a subsidiary holding a State-granted monopoly—and obligation—for suppression tower repairs. Terminus did some lying, the Church did some whining, and DSSI even acquired a leadership role in maintaining the Aether Suppressor, which technically made Decadin Inc. a sacred entity protected by religious law.

It’s not easy having a monopoly. DSSI had to move its headquarters to Pelbee, despite the outrageous rent costs, all for the Emperor’s satisfaction that the best personnel would be readily available to service the world-saving relic. But the company made the most of their forced relocation, drawing direct inspiration from the building design that its namesake once daydreamed about.

Terminus built new highway exits leading right into Decadin Tower, maximizing transport efficiency. The building’s outer surface is white, standing for the brightness of tomorrow, while green streetlights and a single purple stripe represent the adaptability they need in the present. Far above, floating vehicles let the most important people and products bypass a long elevator ride to the top. But Decadin Tower has no text. It doesn’t need any, for its sacred duty is evident in all languages from one look at its renowned logo: two orange circles left to interpretation.

---

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[somerunner]

[Image ID: The first of six images in an illustrated comic.

A map of the United States of America with most of the states in the middle three-quarters of the USA as well as Hawaii and Alaska colored in green and bordered in sketched pink lines. These states are labeled with their postal abbreviations. The rest of the states are in a darker blue and unlabeled. Off to the lower-right of the states, a Canadian goose is speaking. It says "Did you know all these states have native names!?" (The word "these" is written in the same color as the states.)

/End ID]

[Image ID: The second of six images in an illustrated comic.

Connecticut, Minnesota, and Utah are drawn in a stylized manner with two Canadian geese flying between them. A sentence is written for each state, beginning with the name of the state in all-caps.

"Connecticut is from the Mohegan word 'Quinnehtukqut' meaning 'beside the tidal river'"

"Minnesota is a Dakota word for 'sky-tinted water'"

"Utah is derived from the name of one of its tribes: the Ute people"

/End ID]

[Image ID: The third of six images in an illustrated comic.

The Canadian goose is on a hill with a couple pieces of litter, next to a pond with a floating plastic bottle. Out in the background is a pink sunset.

The goose says, "Interesting right? Us Americans haven't had the best education regarding this land's indigenous history nor its present! But it's never too late to educate yourself and those around you."

/End ID]

[Image ID: The fourth of six images in an illustrated comic.

The goose appears twice in front of a background with wavy blue lines and a shining yellow circle for the sun.

First, the goose says, "What? You thought I couldn't be American because I'm a Canada goose?"

In the second part, the words continue, "Canada, USA … pff. My people are older than these names. I was born in California, but I live in Ontario during the warm months. I heard some of your kind used to live freely like that too."

/End ID]

[Image ID: the fifth of six images in an illustrated comic.

The goose stands with a wing under its chin as though thinking, in front of a collage of photos including: an image of a group of Native people behind a chain-linked fence, and an image of one in ceremonial clothing holding water by a gathering of police during some kind of protest or demonstration in a dusty area. (As an aside comment, I think these are rather famous pictures, but I'm not well-versed enough in history to know where or why these pictures were taken.)

The goose says, "Huh… It's almost as if borders are just imaginary lines drawn by those in power for political gain instead of reflecting and respecting the history of the land itself and those that have always lived there!!"

/End ID]

[Image ID: the last of six images in an illustrated comic.

The goose flies off into a flock with other Canadian geese. The background is a grassy beach with the sun setting or rising.

The goose says, "Anyway, we're off to Toronto. Sure hope you guys sort this mess out soon! The fate of the planet kinda depends on it!"

Another paragraph is at the bottom of the image along with Tumblr handle and name of the author of the comic.

"Acknowledgement is the first step. Find out whose land you're on at native-land.ca and learn about the path to a more just future at landback.org or via #landback"

mariah-rose marie / @ biophonies

/End ID]

I'm sure I didn't ID the fifth image's collage correctly. Apologies for any mistakes; I tried to find the events for each of these but couldn't.

After that is another ID for a reblog.

[Image ID: two replies by Tumblr user skydalorian.

"Also I'm Native and don't appreciate that this seems to lump in the general public as some collective stupid and unwashed mass that needs to be shown the blessing of (flawed) education here. Yes this message needs to be said, but there's better ways of going about it that doesnt also muffle existing voices nor condescend. Like, why is a fucking message about the importance of Native claims to land also preaching about how claims to land don't matter idk idk"

"'It's never too late to educate yourself!! uwu' isn't quite as strong a message when you get some of the abbreviations for the indigenous states wrong."

"This is a solid message but was poorly executed and has a weird tone tbh for something that clearly shows its own error."

/End ID]

If anyone would rather reblog just the comic with ID, feel free to copy my transcription. I wasn't planning on doing two separate reblogs, mainly since it's a good message with poor execution (as said in the reply). It's far, far better than what I could do myself, but it isn't as good as it probably needed to be for the amount of traction it got.

[whileiamdying]

An Artist Flowering in Her Nineties

Isabella Ducrot, a painter in Rome, didn’t really pick up a brush until her fifties. Four decades later, galleries and museums throughout Europe are celebrating her work.

By Rebecca Mead July 22, 2024

Ducrot, in her apartment in Rome. This summer, she has her first international solo museum show, in Dijon, France.Photograph by Albrecht Fuchs

For more than two decades, Isabella Ducrot, an artist who was born in Naples in 1931, has lived in an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in the center of Rome. When I knocked on her door for the first time, this past spring, she greeted me with an emphatic pronouncement in English: “I must tell you immediately that I have never been so happy in my life!”

It was a Tuesday evening in April, and I’d landed in Rome just a few hours earlier. Originally, Ducrot and I had arranged to meet for lunch the next day, but when she learned of my schedule she invited me to come over sooner, for a drink and a light dinner, noting in an e-mail that she “would be enchanted” to see me immediately. She opened the door to the apartment—where she lived with Vittorio (Vicky) Ducrot, her husband of fifty-eight years, until his death, in 2022—and I entered a spacious hallway densely hung with dark, dramatic Baroque paintings. Light shone on them from French doors that led to an expansive terrace. A side table held a vase of roses that were hovering on the edge between bloom and decay. Ducrot, who is tall and upright, grasped my hand more firmly than I would have expected, saying, “Please believe what I tell you. I adored my husband, and I am half a person now that he is not with me. But I am happy—happy.”

Only in the past five years has Ducrot, who turned ninety-three in June, become internationally recognized for her art, which she didn’t even begin making until she was in her fifties. When creating her works, she stands and uses a brush sometimes attached to a stick, sweeping loose arcs of ink or paint onto paper or fabric. She often later incorporates scraps of other papers or textiles. Her painted collages usually depict ecstatic figures and stylized landscapes; arrays of ovals or checkered patterns are a recurring feature. Typically made in series, her works are light, energetic, and uninhibitedly beautiful.

Ducrot’s œuvre has been admired in Italy for three decades: in 1993, a tapestry was included in the Venice Biennale, and in 2008 and 2014 she had solo shows at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Rome. But it wasn’t until 2019 that she was championed in earnest outside the country, when Gisela Capitain, a gallerist in Cologne, Germany, mounted a solo show of Ducrot’s work which featured iterative images of flowers in vases, along with several pieces from a series, “Bella Terra,” each of them depicting a tree and a flowing river. It was as if Ducrot, in her ripe ebullience, had leapt directly into a late-Matisse phase—full of color and shorn of fuss.

This summer, the Consortium Museum, in Dijon, France, is hosting Ducrot’s first international solo museum show, heralding her, counterintuitively, as “a young artist with a young career.” The exhibition includes eleven paintings, on paper, from a series that Ducrot calls “Tendernesses”; they show two figures exuberantly entangled amid a patchwork of patterned blocks. Secured to the gallery walls with pins, the paintings—like the blissful people depicted within them—seem to float unsupported.

Since Ducrot’s husband died, she has shared her apartment with her housekeeper and two cats. Apart from a daily excursion to her studio, on the palazzo’s ground floor, she only occasionally leaves home—a sharp contrast to her earlier life, which was uncommonly adventurous. Vicky Ducrot was the prosperous founder of a luxury-travel company, Viaggi dell’Elefante, and the Ducrots journeyed extensively to India, China, Laos, Myanmar, and many other countries, taking with them paying groups of well-heeled and cultured visitors—most of whom already were, or eventually became, their friends—to see architectural sites and to shop in markets. On those trips, Isabella bargained for rare and fragile textiles from merchants in places such as Kashmir and Isfahan, amassing a singular collection. Her treasures range from seventeenth-century Tibetan prayer shawls to fragments of Egyptian cotton dating possibly to the ninth century. Vicky collected Indian miniature paintings, becoming a self-taught expert. On their travels in Yemen, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, the Ducrots gathered cuttings of wild roses���transporting damp stems in their suitcases before planting them at their country house, in Umbria, where they tended a garden exclusively dedicated to the genus. It still supplies flowers for Isabella’s apartment.

Despite her late start, and even later recognition, Ducrot’s artistic flowering has been immensely productive. Andrea Viliani, the director of the Museo delle Civiltà, in Rome, which will exhibit a selection of Ducrot’s works alongside examples of historical textiles from its own collection this summer, told me Ducrot is fortunate that her preferred technique and materials remain relatively easy for her to manage, compared with, say, sculpting metal or painting with oils on heavy canvases. “Her work is easy to hold, and easy to paint, and easy to store,” Viliani said. “It is very convenient that she chose something so soft.” Sadie Coles, a gallerist in London who presented a solo show of Ducrot’s work last year, and is currently hosting another, first encountered the paintings in a booth at Art Basel, in 2022. She bought one of Ducrot’s landscapes without knowing anything about the life of the artist. “My initial response was just how fresh it was,” Coles told me. “I would never have guessed it was made by a then ninety-one-year-old! There’s a sense of play, of texture, of discovery.” Ducrot’s works, Coles added, “feel so full of sex, intimacy, and erotic charge.”

In an introduction to a catalogue about the “Tendernesses” series, the Italian scholar Emanuele Dattilo writes that people are frequently amazed to discover that the creator of such explicitly sensual works is “a lady who is well over the age of eighty.” Of course, this reaction reveals as much about the limitations of the observer’s imagination as it does about the voluptuous reaches of Ducrot’s. We tend to assign to the elderly—and especially to elderly women—the vague, and often diminishing, attribute of wisdom, thereby suggesting that their own creative, intellectual, or erotic evolution has come to an end, and that their sole remaining role is to give advice to others. Ducrot’s work and life offer an alternative possibility: that an individual might remain wide-eyed and open to experience—in an enduring state of naïveté, and with a capacity to be joyfully surprised—until the very end.

The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, which was constructed over several centuries and occupies most of a block, remains the home of the aristocratic family for whom it is named. The clan’s most prominent member, Pope Innocent X, was immortalized by Velázquez in a celebrated portrait painted around 1650. This masterpiece is still on display at the palazzo, in one of several splendidly ornate rooms downstairs that show off the family’s art collection.

On our first evening together, Ducrot welcomed me into her apartment’s unfolding series of cozy, inviting rooms, which were filled with overstuffed sofas, Art Deco armchairs, and modernist tables by Alvar Aalto. Choice ceramics and glassware were arranged on mantels and tables. There was a yellow ceramic dish by Picasso; a white glazed Ecce Homo made by Ducrot’s son Giuseppe, a sculptor who specializes in religious iconography; and a medieval Islamic dish showing a rider on horseback, a gift from her other child, Enrico, who now runs the travel business. Art works by friends hung on the walls. There was a portrait of Ducrot, from about forty years ago, by Maro Gorky, the daughter of Arshile Gorky, and a 1977 pastel drawing of a lotus flower by Cy Twombly, who, along with his aristocratic wife, Tatiana Franchetti, often travelled with the Ducrots. (The Twombly is inscribed “For Isabela.”) There were also dozens more Baroque paintings, many dating to the seventeenth century and acquired in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when such works were unfashionable. A shadowy, thorn-crowned Christ being taunted by a muscled thug, attributed to Annibale Carracci, hung in Vicky Ducrot’s still intact bedroom. The prize of the collection—a pallid, recumbent, half-naked Cleopatra, by Artemisia Gentileschi—was on loan to a museum, leaving a ghostly rectangle of space on a wall near the kitchen, where a litter box was discreetly positioned.

Ducrot asked her housekeeper, Shanthi Wijesundara, to pour us glasses of champagne, and we settled side by side on a sofa. She wore an oversized olive-green sweater, wide-legged black satin pants, and chunky pale-pink sneakers; her hair was white and cut in a blunt, chin-length bob with a center part, and around her neck she wore a gold chain with a pendant of green glass. She was chic and easy in her manner, but life at her age is far from effortless, she said. Since Vicky’s death, Ducrot has been increasingly dependent upon Wijesundara, who has worked for her for forty years. “She washes me,” Ducrot told me at one point. “I am completely in her hands.” As we sipped our champagne, Ducrot explained that the happiness she felt was not unqualified. “I am terrified also, naturally, because friends of mine, old people, are dying,” she said. “But happiness is another thing. I think I am helped by the words that come to me—words are more generous with me now.”

Though Ducrot is best known for her paintings, she has also flourished, belatedly, as a writer of essays and short stories. In “The Checkered Cloth,” published in English translation in 2019, Ducrot analyzes a painting of the Annunciation by Simone Martini, the fourteenth-century Sienese artist. Ever a connoisseur of textiles, she focusses on the exposed lining of the angel Gabriel’s fluttering cloak, which has a checkered pattern—a design that, she argues, has long been associated with women, children, and the insane, rather than with heavenly visitation. In “Twenty-two Places of the Soul,” published in 2022, Ducrot dilates on the “triune” nature of fabric, describing the warp, the weft, and the empty space trapped between them as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity. Elsewhere, she compares weaving to the generative union of masculine and feminine. Every morning, between eight-thirty and ten-thirty, Ducrot writes before descending to her studio. “During the day, I am absolutely normal,” she said. “But in the morning I write very intelligent things.”

Dinner consisted of traditional Neapolitan food: lightly fried arancini with tomato sauce, followed by a savory pie. We ate around a coffee table instead of at her formal dining table, which is more frequently used for laying out her larger works of art. Ducrot keeps it covered with a canvas tablecloth that she has painted with red and white stripes; rather than cleaning it when it gets dirty, she simply adds another layer of paint.

The meal was the first of several that I shared with her that week. One visitor after another came by, creating an ever-evolving salon. I met her sons, both of whom live in Rome; her older brother, Paolo, who is ninety-six, and still walks to her apartment from his home near the Piazza Navona (their younger sister, Schatzy, who is ninety-one, lives in Naples); two of Ducrot’s four grandchildren; a tax-law adviser and friend of more than thirty years, who travelled with the Ducrots multiple times; and a new art-dealer friend whom Ducrot had warmly absorbed into her circle. All were greeted with porcelain cups of scented tea or chilled champagne in pretty colored glasses.

We also spent many hours alone, during which Ducrot was irreverent, confiding, and emotional, our conversation interrupted only by the occasional wailing of one of her cats, Evita—a diminutive, ancient creature who stiffly roamed the apartment as if lost. “She is the same age as me,” Ducrot said, in a low voice. The cat sometimes unleashed a penetrating yowl that reminded Ducrot of her husband’s final days. “He approached death furiously,” she said. Having witnessed that, she was bracing for similar anguish herself. “I will be more near to Vicky,” she said, explaining that she didn’t mean this in a supernatural way—although she was devoutly Catholic in her girlhood, she no longer believes in an afterlife. She meant that, after a long life with Vicky, she would feel a fitting sympathy with him at the end. “Love is productivo—love produces love,” she said.

It became clear that although Ducrot’s late-arriving fame has gratified her, it is also, in a way, meaningless. Adam Weinberg, a former director of the Whitney Museum, is planning a big exhibition of her work at the Madre, a museum of contemporary art in Naples, in collaboration with the Madre’s director, Eva Fabbris. This home-town retrospective—the honor of a lifetime for a younger artist—is scheduled for 2026, and is therefore not something that it makes sense for Ducrot to anticipate. “It is too far away,” she told me. Her words reminded me of the final paragraph in “Women’s Life,” a slim memoir that she published in 2021, which I had just reread on the flight to Rome:

At this stage of life, you can no longer lie. You cannot help but say things that are true. . . . Why the etiquette of silence, the prudence of propriety? You must howl if you seek propriety, consistency and accuracy. Let the truth be sobbed out. Gentle has my time been flowing, whispering to me without malice, “There is no tomorrow, there is no tomorrow.”

When I reminded her of this passage, she said, “It’s very true. Yesterday, I said, ‘I hope that Rebecca is coming before I die.’ This is very logical! I live in a kind of metaphysical way. I am already in another dimensione.”

Ducrot grew up in Montedidio, a graceful district of Naples that is the site of the city’s ancient Greek settlement, in an apartment on an upper floor of a palazzo whose hereditary owner, the Principe Gerace, was a client of Ducrot’s father, a lawyer named Nino Mosca. Her mother, Maria Luisa Giordano, was descended from a noble but much reduced family. (It is family lore that when Ducrot’s parents met, in Capri in the nineteen-twenties, her mother may have been working as a courtesan.) Her father’s legal practice didn’t make the family rich, but they nonetheless inhabited bourgeois circles in Naples. Ducrot told me that although the city maintained “medieval” social norms in her youth, with young women requiring a male escort merely to venture outside, “people were fascinated by my mother, because she dressed in a way that was very elegant and very free.” In an act as spontaneous as Ducrot’s own work with textiles, her mother would fashion dresses for Ducrot and her sister by pinning together curtains.

Naples was heavily bombed during the Second World War, and the family left for the relative safety of Sorrento, a seaside retreat along the Bay of Naples, where they occupied the servants’ quarters of a villa belonging to an exiled Russian princess. In the evenings, Ducrot and her mother would have tea with the princess on the terrace and gaze at the city across the bay. “I remember my mother saying, ‘I see a fire—perhaps it is near our house,’ ” Ducrot said. “And our house was bombed, and we lost it.” When they returned, after the war, only one corner of the Palazzo Gerace remained standing, its ornate doorways splintered and its windows blown out. “My father asked the Principe, ‘Can I live here with my family?,’ and he said yes,” Ducrot recalled. “Nobody would think to live that way.” The family inhabited the ruin “as if it were the Palazzo Doria”; her mother created a bathroom in what had once been the library.

Ducrot was expected to make a suitable marriage upon graduating from high school. Paolo, her brother, told me, “Everybody looked for her at the beginning of parties and dances—she was known as one of the great beauties of Naples.” But when Ducrot was around seventeen, and having an aperitif at the Excelsior hotel, she began coughing up blood. “My mouth was invaded by warm liquid,” she writes in “Twenty-two Places of the Soul.” “I was able to slip into the next-door bathroom, let that unstoppable hot, flowing matter flop into the sink.” It was tuberculosis—an unspeakable disease in Naples, which had been blighted by the plague in the seventeenth century. Ducrot, fearful of being considered tainted, concealed her condition. Every two weeks, she sneaked off for a treatment that involved injecting oxygen via a syringe into her rib cage. It took fifteen years before she was declared cured.

A work from the series “Bella Terra.” Ducrot, in her ripe ebullience, seems to have leapt directly into a late-Matisse phase—full of color and shorn of fuss.Art work © Isabella Ducrot / Courtesy the artist / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Photograph by Giorgio Benni

Ducrot was around thirty when she fled the confines of Naples for the freedom of Rome, where “nobody knew anything about me.” (She still relishes the capital’s relative anonymity: “In this palazzo, I know about ten people. I never run into them. For me, it’s fantastic.”) She worked as a receptionist at I.B.M., at an office on the exclusive Via Veneto, and fell in with a group of intellectuals that overlapped with the likes of the novelist Alberto Moravia and the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. “They were very chic, very elegant, and very leftist,” she said. “I was not on the right or the left—I was nothing. But I was happy with them.” It was the era of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” and the women of Rome, married or otherwise, were bolder than those Ducrot had known in Naples. At least at first, she told me, “I was not a free woman. I did not have lovers.” When she finally became involved with a man, a leftist editor, she asked him one day to drive her to church so that she could confess her sins. Ducrot didn’t have money to spare, and was of necessity resourceful. When she was invited to a dance at the Palazzo Farnese, one of Rome’s grandest palaces, she improvised a dress from a length of fabric, just as her mother had done with curtains.

Vicky, who was working for the airline KLM, not far from Isabella’s office, began courting her. Vicky was also from the south of Italy—Palermo, in his case—but he was wealthy: his family owned a furniture company that made fittings for top hotels and luxury transatlantic liners. One day, Isabella joined him, his sister, Sandra, and several of their friends for a walk in the countryside. A man who had brought along his toddler son was flummoxed when the child soiled his pants and began to cry. Isabella swept the boy into her arms, hitched up her skirt, and waded into a nearby pond, washing him clean until he began laughing. Sandra, now a ceramicist who lives in Paris, told me, “She looked like a goddess, and she did the right thing, and so naturally. Vicky was looking at her, too. And I said, ‘You ought to marry this woman.’ ”

A few months later, Vicky proposed. “I was not in love, but I needed to be protected,” Ducrot recalled, adding that he promised her, “You can cry in my arms.” She told me, “This was really what I wanted. He didn’t say, ‘You are the best, you are a queen.’ He said, ‘You are. And it’s my joy.’ ” Her life changed dramatically, in scope and in resources. Vicky’s mother gave the newlyweds an apartment in Trastevere, a bohemian neighborhood in Rome, as a wedding gift, and took Ducrot shopping for couture in Paris and for jewels at Bulgari. Sixteen months after the couple’s wedding, Enrico was born, with Giuseppe arriving eighteen months after that.

Soon after Ducrot married Vicky, she showed him some autobiographical short stories that she had written, and textile designs that she had drawn. He was kindly but dismissive, she told me, and Ducrot set such projects aside for decades. “I was not offended,” she told me. “He had the feeling that he was protecting me. It was his way to show love.” Instead, she devoted herself to creating a gracious home and to sparking enthusiasms in Vicky, a serial autodidact. She recalled, “Once, I was alone in Florence, and I saw a small Baroque painting, and I called and said, ‘Vicky, I saw a beautiful, interesting painting,’ and he said, ‘Don’t buy it, we don’t need a Baroque painting.’ ” She bought it anyway, and he went on to acquire more than forty others, and to verse himself deeply in that period of art. Vicky’s introduction to a published catalogue of the Ducrot collection begins with a bracing confession: “To collect, and this can be applied to all kinds of collecting, whether match boxes, playing cards, narwhal teeth or pipes, implies a desire to own and accumulate property, and ultimately is an expression of egotism and vanity.”

Vicky was conservative in his politics, but in other ways he was more permissive than many Italian husbands. “He loved me, and he let me do what I wanted,” Ducrot told me. When she wanted to ride a bicycle around Rome, he told her that it was unsafe, but he turned a blind eye when it became her preferred mode of transportation. Marriage gave Ducrot both security and freedom. “I remember that I thought, Now that I am married, I can fall in love with other people,” she said. “It was very practical.” Once Ducrot entered élite Roman society, she found herself surrounded by other men of intelligence and cultivation. Her marriage was long and successful, but she told me that when her friends wax sentimental about how much she and Vicky must have loved each other she cuts them off—they are missing the point. “I always say, ‘Vicky gave me, for sixty years, every day, something to eat.’ ”

Throughout the Ducrots’ marriage, they spent weeks at a stretch travelling. Isabella estimates that she has been to India sixty times, and also to numerous places now essentially off limits to tourists, including Syria. In Afghanistan, she visited the imperial hilltop retreat of Istalif—“Positano-on-Hindu-Kush,” Vicky once described it in a photo album—and the Buddhas of Bamiyan, whose sandstone robes looked to Isabella “like vortices of lines.” (The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas in 2001.) During these expeditions, it fell to Isabella to insure that tour-group members were satisfied with their hotel rooms, and to supply whiskey sours after a long day of sightseeing. In the course of her travels, she said, “I learned many things, and I developed my sensibility.”

Enrico and Giuseppe occasionally came on these trips, but more typically they were left behind with babysitters. Ducrot told me that she enjoyed her children, but also cherished her life apart from them. “The reality is that I preferred to be with my friends than with them,” she explained. “It was not my maximum amusement to be with them.” If someone wonders aloud to her if the embrace in a “Tendernesses” painting represents a mother and a child, she quickly disabuses them. She told me, “I always thought that Proust, when the mother went after giving him the good-night kiss, cried notbecause he was so sad that the mother left but because he understood that she was preparing to amuse herself with much more interesting people than himself.”

Among her close friends was Patrizia Cavalli, the poet, who died two years ago. Cavalli once composed a poem for Ducrot titled, in English, “To Weave Is Human,” in which the warp is personified as male and the weft as female. (“She meets him just to leave him, / and leaving him she meets him; / he suffers her, he’s blameless, / and stands firm in his place.”) Tatiana Franchetti, the wife of Cy Twombly and an artist herself, who died in 2010, was the first person to encourage Ducrot to resume a creative life. The very first painting Ducrot made, in the eighties—which, with a few strokes of ink on Chinese paper, depicts two reclining lovers—hangs in her living room. Another female friend who encouraged Ducrot’s nascent vocation was Cristina Bomba, a clothing designer and the owner of a boutique near the Piazza del Popolo. Bomba told me that she was visiting Ducrot’s home to peruse her textile collection when she saw a patchwork children’s blanket that Ducrot had crafted. “I couldn’t sleep that night because I was thinking about this blanket,” she recalled. “Every little piece of fabric was so beautiful, and I was saying to myself, ‘My God, she’s so good, she’s a genius.’ ” Bomba gave Ducrot one of her first artistic commissions: to fabricate a screen for her boutique. The object, for which Ducrot patched scraps of silk and rough linen into abstract geometries, remains in service. “She started to do exhibitions in Italy, but it was very difficult for years,” Bomba went on. “In Italy, you have to be poor and unhappy to be an artist. But she was beautiful, and she was one of the luckiest people in Rome, because she had everything she wanted—so people didn’t believe in her as an artist.”

A work from the “Tendernesses” series.Art work © Isabella Ducrot / Courtesy the artist / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Photograph by Giorgio Benni

Ducrot’s studio is a bright, high-ceilinged space behind a door that opens onto a colonnaded courtyard. All day long, visitors to the Doria Pamphilj gallery, which is open to the public, walk past it unaware. When I visited the studio, a half-completed “Tendernesses” painting, on Japanese gampi paper, lay on the studio’s floor. The breasts of a female figure were exposed; a male figure had a peacock-like crest. Her studio assistant of twenty years, Veronica Della Porta, had added a black-and-white checkered background. For the next stage, Ducrot was filling the outlines of the figures with brilliant color: pea green for the woman’s skirt and carmine for the man’s lanky legs, as though he were wearing the hose of a medieval jester. “Little by little, we go on,” Ducrot told me. “And the tenderness comes out.” On a worktable lay a smaller painting that looked closer to completion: on paper washed in rose-pink pigment, Ducrot had drawn a couple in a snatched embrace, one with yellow cascading hair, the other with turquoise fronds that radiated outward.

Elsewhere in the studio, cabinets were filled with textiles folded like stacks of laundry. In addition to using scraps from her collection, Ducrot sometimes affixes larger, garment-size pieces to a background, creating imposing shapes suggestive of kimonos or of a sultan’s robes. Nora Iosia, Ducrot’s studio manager, who has worked with her since 1996, unfolded one such work, which was taller than her. Two pieces of blue-and-white striped Japanese cotton had been placed in bold juxtaposition. Iosia told me that it had taken time for Ducrot to become comfortable with such experiments. “When I met Isabella, she was very fragile and insecure,” she said. At the time, Iosia herself had recently graduated from college, with a degree in literature and philosophy; her mother, a curator, was familiar with Ducrot and her work. “My mother told me, ‘Isabella is an incredible artist, but don’t ask her to speak, because she doesn’t know the language.’ She needed to find the words.” Until Gisela Capitain, the Cologne gallerist, visited the studio with her director, Regina Fiorito, more than three decades after Ducrot began painting, “nothing happened at all” for her outside of Italy, Iosia said. “Isabella was full of power, and full of desire, and yet nothing. It was a kind of waiting for something.”

Ducrot had been a reader since her late teens, when her illness made it impossible for her to do much more than rest at home with a book. In her sixties, she began to study philosophy in earnest, taking classes at the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome, and working privately with scholars. With Emanuele Dattilo, she spent long hours discussing Simone Martini, the Sienese artist who inspired her exploration of humble checkered cloth. “I appreciate Isabella’s study method first and foremost,” Dattilo told me. “It is the method of losing herself—exposing herself to a radical not understanding, and moving forward with courage. Her study of philosophy is of this kind—getting into it and then seeing what effect certain ideas or certain words have on her, above all emotionally.” Datillo went on, “What is hidden attracts her, but above all I think what attracts her is a kind of reversal of roles. . . . She continually wants to reverse high and low.”

Ducrot’s work shows a particular interest in ordinary woven materials—the kind, she has written, that are ���used to protect, wrap, wash and rub the bodies of new-born babies, of women giving birth, of the elderly, of the sick.” Her inclusion of such fabrics in her art rejects the low esteem in which they are typically held, revealing their inherent dignity. Similarly, in “Women’s Life,” she writes of finally considering “the endemic ignorance that had tormented me for so many years not as a source of shame but instead as an advantage.” That shame had made it difficult for Ducrot to take herself seriously, not just as an artist but as a person. For too long, she looked to others to tell her who she was. “I think life, for women, begins at sixty,” she told me. “Because then we begin to be free.”

The last day that I spent in Rome, I left Ducrot’s apartment after we shared a lunch of pink-skinned grilled rouget, sprinkled with herbs, and eggplant that had been reduced in the oven to a deliciously sticky tar. Afterward, she wanted to take a nap, as she does most afternoons; tucked into a corner of her study is a monastic single bed, alongside which hangs a Baciccio painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi—the arrangement resembling the bedchamber of a priest, or perhaps even a Pope. When I returned, a few hours later, Ducrot admitted that she had not slept after all, but instead had sifted through old letters. She had found one from a man she had been deeply in love with during her Naples youth. This man, named Antonello, had come up many times in our conversation, flashing into view like the checkered lining on a cloak worn by an annunciating angel. He had rejected her, she had told me, and it had been a torment.

Antonello had written the letter she was holding when he was in his early twenties and she was eighteen. “It says how desperate he was, because I wanted to leave him,” she explained. “I had forgotten completely! I remembered that I loved him—that’s all.” The letter, which ran to several typed pages, subverted the narrative that Ducrot had long told herself about having been spurned. “In that moment, he really loved me,” she said, with fresh wonderment. “And I have loved him for years and years. So I forgot that he could have loved me.” The fabric of her old story was coming apart in her hands.

The discovery felt transformative, Ducrot said. “You came at a moment of my life when there is not so much more to say, and not so much more to feel,” she noted. “So, every day from tomorrow, I cannot say another life begins—no, certainly not. But, in a way, perhaps another meaning of the life is beginning.” Earlier, she had wanted to assure me of how unpredictable a very long life might be; although I told her I’d been happily married for twenty years, she observed, “We don’t know what we are going to do in life. Perhaps you will become a dancer, or leave your family, or go off with a man from South Africa”—not exactly conventional wisdom from an elder. Now, she told me, she believed it was possible to fall in love even as one was dying. “I have always thought this—that you are dying in a kind of agony, and you fall in love,” she said. “I’m sure it has happened.”

The letter in her hand, written on the fragile paper of the past, was the material evidence not just of what she had experienced in her youth but of what was animating her at this moment—our intense, extended conversation. Being very old had heightened her sense of the present. “I am already in love with you!” she told me in greeting, on the first evening I visited. If Ducrot had wisdom to impart, it concerned the trembling imperative of living fully, even without a future. “I think a person of my age cannot not be interesting,” she said. “Because we are like prisoners in a jail, and we know that we are in the braccio della morte”—on death row. She went on, “This is true of everybody—good people, intelligent people, poor people, rich people. This is an experience, to be so old.”

Lately, Ducrot has developed a new practice in her work. She takes pages of writing by others, which have long been filed away in cupboards and drawers, and sews pieces of them onto the surface of paintings—not for their content, she told me, but because of the beauty of their now illegible calligraphy. In her hands, these texts were transformed from one thing into another, just like the textiles that she once gathered from far-off places. One of Ducrot’s newest works lay on the dining table during my visit, and one morning I snapped a photograph of the painting on my phone. Only later did I take it in more fully: on a large fabric background, she had painted leaf-covered trees and an array of pots containing brightly colored, heavy-headed flowers. Tacked in the middle of the work was a cutout from a piece of paper on which tiny cursive letters had been written; the cutout was encircled by the branching arm of a tree. The leaves were heart-shaped and an autumnal brown, barely still attached to a branch—or perhaps no longer attached at all, but suspended in an ultimate moment of lightness before their fall. ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 29, 2024, issue, with the headline “A Young Artist.”

[frontproofmedia]

Dolo Flicks: MaXXXine Review: Ti West highlights the price for obsession with fame

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

By Hector Franco

Follow @MrHector_Franco !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id))(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

Published: July 18, 2024

"Now, say it with me... I will not accept a life I do not deserve!"  -- Maxine

All the films in a series or franchise are rarely considered top-of-the-line or high-quality. Director and writer Ti West continues the trend of delivering top-notch horror with the third installment of his X series, MaXXXine. The film is a direct sequel to 2022's X and follows the pseudo-prequel Pearl. 

MaXXXine stars Mia Goth as the titular character, Maxine Miller. It follows her journey attempting a future as a famous actress in Hollywood in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the infamous Night Stalker serial killer murders of the time. Maxine receives an opportunity to work on an upcoming horror movie sequel, and the events of X come back to haunt her, putting her new career at risk as a mysterious leather-wearing killer watches her every step. MaXXXine also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon. 

In 2022, when West set on what could have been a disastrous goal of putting together a trilogy of horror films, each with its own distinct style, many were skeptical as to how they would turn out. Two years later, West has put out one of the most anticipated films of 2024 as the final film in his horror trilogy, MaXXXine.

MaXXXine, following the path of the previous entries, is a film that stands out in both style and design. X was a 70's slasher with elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Black Christmas. Pearl served as a slow-burn character study with a character descending further into madness. What X and Pearl have in common is their smaller cast, making for a more intimate experience. MaXXXine, however, strays from the formula, carving its own unique path as a crime-thriller slasher.

The opening sequence of MaXXXine displays how the film will separate itself from its predecessors. It starts with an audition, where Maxine confidently outshines her competition and then takes us on a ride through Tinseltown to her next destination. This approach is so well executed that it instantly pulls the audience into the lifestyle of the main character, the setting, and the film's visual style.

" You've made it to the belly of the beast. Congratulations, very few come this far. To stay here, you must make it your obsession. Eliminate all other distractions because if you take your eye off that prize for even a moment, the beast will spit you right back out where you came from. You may never get a taste for you again."  -- Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki)

One element of West's trilogy that will be remembered is how each entry utilized the look and style of the films it mirrored. MaXXXine is a stylized slasher in the vein of some of Brian De Palma's work, such as Body Double and Dressed to Kill and Italian Giallo films of the 1970s. The cinematographer for each installment is Elliot Rocket, and MaXXXine is arguably his best work. The well of nostalgia for the 1980s has nearly run dry, but Rocket and West's technique and usage of colors bring a level of polish to MaXXXine that stands out from its contemporaries. 

"I have to give Ti tons of credit because that is the kind of thing he's very focused on," Rocket told Indie Wire. "He'll push really hard to make sure that the aesthetic, the colors, the clothes people are wearing, what the hairstyles are, what the props are, what the color of the wall is painted.

“It's really just a matter of someone who's in charge, plus all of the other people who are working on it creatively having the vision in their mind to create a consistent and cohesive aesthetic in terms of all of these things that are going to be in front of the camera."

Goth has been the foundation for the trilogy's success, putting forth career-best performances. Yet, MaXXXine asks less of the famed actress than X and Pearl. In X, Goth played dual roles; in Pearl, her performance was the center of every aspect of the film. The cast allows for breathing room for the Maxine character, allowing others to shine. Kevin Bacon's Louisiana Private Eye, John Labat, is one of the film's highlights. Bacon brings a level of levity and fun to the film in-between moments of stylized violence. Along with Giancarlo Esposito's agent for the stars, Teddy Knight, MaXXXine's vibrant look bleeds over to many of its characters. 

For the bloodthirsty horror fan, MaXXXine has a plethora of memorable kills. The kills are where the Giallo influence truly comes to life. In one scene, Maxine is pursued by a Buster Keaton impersonator and has the tables turned on him. Maxine pulls a gun and forces the man to strip, only to viciously stomp his testicles. This scene, like many others in the film, is a perfect example of the stylish violence that permeates MaXXXine. The colors used, along with the overly sexualized violence, infuse for an almost humorous moment that leaves audiences covering their faces in shock. 

Time will only tell how West's trilogy will be viewed. However, its standing in recent horror history firmly places it as the best series of films of the decade. Each film is connected yet different enough for fans to pick any of the three as their favorite. MaXXXine, with its unique style and narrative, has left a significant mark on recent horror history. Despite a few narrative issues, specifically with how the film reaches its resolution, MaXXXine is one of the year's best horror films and certainly one of the most memorable and engaging.

4/5****

(Featured Image: A24)

[becker-st]

Assignment #1

Semiotic analysis of four Adbuster spoofs

Spoof ads aim to discourage people from using or buying the advertised product and typically offer some sort of commentary on the issue. They are usually parodies of the original advertisements and often pervert the themes and motifs used within them.

The first advertisement I have chosen to analyze is a spoof ad for Marlboro:

The goal of this advertisement is to show the bleak reality of smoking and it does so by parodying the quintessential cigarette brand, Marlboro. The Marlboro brand relies on its carefully constructed image to sell its product. The brand’s advertisements use rugged cowboys and demanding scenery to showcase what they call “Marlboro country” and suggest that the lifestyle of those who smoke Marlboros is that of freedom, adventure, and independence. This spoof advertisement parodies this concept to suggest what true Marlboro country looks like.

Straight away, the headline “Welcome to Malboro Country” tells you that this ad is playing off of the Marlboro brand. In addition to being in the same font and color red as the original Marlboro advertisements, the phrase “welcome to Marlboro country” was a common feature in older Marlboro advertisements. The cloud of smoke and the blue wall is also reminiscent of the blue skies commonly featured in Marlboro advertisements. Additionally, whether intentional or not, the missing “r” in “Malboro” speaks to its inauthenticity, suggesting that the advertisement is a spoof. The inclusion of the headline and other imagery similar to the original Marlboro advertisements uses metonymic and analogical code to cause the viewer to compare this advertisement to the original Marlboro ads. In doing this, the discrepancies between the two become much more apparent and ultimately enhance the message.

As the viewer makes their way down from the headline, the seemingly white and blue sky begins to fade into a grey (symbolic) that speaks to the dreary reality of the huddled group of people standing outside of the building. The cigarette in each of their hands (iconic) and the smoke trailing from them (indexical), indicate that they are smoking cigarettes and place them in the position of the Marlboro Man. The individuals’ proximity to each other as well as their attire, suggests that they are coworkers who work in an office setting and that they must be out on a smoke break. Additionally, their body language (indexical), in combination with the surgeon general’s warning that reads “smoking causes hypothermia,” indicates that not only is it cold, but that they are succumbing to the elements. All of these components form a condensed code that conveys the reality of smoking as bleak and unappealing. Through metonymic code, it is suggested that this bleak reality is in fact “Marlboro country.”

The next ad I have chosen to analyze is a Calvin Klein spoof:

The intention of this spoof ad is to make commentary on the fashion industry and its exploitation of women. The ad features a package of raw chicken that is stylized to resemble the brand Calvin Klein, with emphasis given to the brand’s “CK” lettermark (symbolic). Through displaced code, the pieces of chicken symbolize the women depicted in the brand’s advertisements, speaking to the idea of their body parts being separated from the whole and used as marketing tools. Once one is aware of the comparison being made, it becomes apparent that the descriptive phrases on the packaging are actually being applied to the women and the “grade A design” symbol suggests that those characteristics are the industry’s ideals. The application of common descriptions of premium meat to women highlights the ridiculous physical expectations for Calvin Klein models and calls attention to the dehumanizing nature of the brand’s advertisements. For those who have prior knowledge of Calvin Klein ads, the beauty standards of women, and the inhumanity of mass production, all of the elements present in the spoof ad create a condensed code that sends the message that fashion treats women’s bodies like commodities.

The third ad I have chosen to analyze is a spoof of an ad for Berluti, a  men’s luxury shoe and leather goods brand:

The ideology behind this spoof is that buying luxury brands perpetuates consumer capitalism. The leather shoe and the brand’s name serve to symbolize the luxury brands and goods in question. The image of luxury is reinforced by the pristine condition of the leather shoe, indicated by its shine (indexical), which suggests that the shoe is freshly polished. Additionally, the luxury brand name of Berluti, in what appears to be a slightly altered Garamond typeface, typical of luxury brands, speaks to the luxurious image as well. The “place tongue here” (symbolic) alludes to the idea of bootlicking, which symbolizes submission, servitude, and obedience. So, because the “place tongue here” is positioned at the tip of the luxury shoe, it creates a condensed code that suggests that consuming luxury items makes you a servant of capitalism.   

The final ad I have chosen to analyze is a spoof of a Tic Tac ad:

The intention of this spoof is to critique the nation’s increasing reliance on prescription drugs to enhance productivity and performance. The replacement of Tic Tacs with Adderall pills uses analogical code to equate our conception of stimulants to mints, suggesting the normalization and trivialization of prescription drug use. The ad’s slogan, “for when you need to freshen your mind,” further suggests that stimulants are used as quick fixes to a tired mind similar to the use of a tic tac for fresh breath. The use of a well-known brand in the spoof highlights the contrast between the expected and the reality, emphasizing the absurdity of the situation. Additionally, the sterile white and various green colors (symbolic), give the ad clinical or medical air. Together, all of these elements create a condensed code that conveys to the viewer a critical message regarding society’s attitude toward prescription stimulants–a message that is particularly salient given the current national Adderall shortage.

[theatricuddles]

[ID: Art of a comic drawn on lined notebook paper with black ink.

The first panel reads “wake up. Drink something, eat something. You have to love your apocalypse body to live with your apocalypse body.” The panel is purely black with a figure curled up small in the corner.

The next few panels show a lit cigarette and the flame divided into thirds, with text reading “search for things you lost in the fire”.

“(There will always be something to search for, because what was lost is infinite.)”

The next handful of panels shows each item with a caption: “a favorite quilt” (some fabric tearing at a seam), “a lucky pin” (the back of a pin), “a language” (a face cropped to only show the lower half), “a stuffed rabbit” (a pair of rabbit feet), “a necklace” (a solid necklace shining), “a tattoo” (a stylized band of ink), “A family name” (three figures with long hair standing behind each other, each smaller than the next).

“Some people are living on the cusp of desolation”, with two matching panels of flames. “Some pilot the wave”.

The next panel is a set of bare feet shown from the ankles, with text reading “But you have been surviving in the wake”.

In the next panel, an undefined black shape has something dripping from it, evocative of weeping.

The next panel is a figure holding a cigarette and weeping profusely, “this is life mucking in the worst of it.”

The next panel is a solid black obelisk sitting among a clearing with trees and houses in the distance, “You walk the ruins with feet cut and blistered, wounds never allowed to rest or breathe or heal”.

The next panel reads “these wounds run deep enough up your leg to hit your everything”. The following words are written within a thin curved shape, evocative of the body, and framed on either side by two sharp objects, one dripping black: “You imagine a childhood your mother never had, you think of words you hope your children will never know, you grieve existences violently robbed from you”. Below this text is several black lines as if text has been redacted, with the only text visible reads “I can’t find the words”.

The last panel is hands holding bowls pouring water into each other, with text reading “Wake up.

Drink something. Eat something.

You have to love your apocalypse body. (with the words “have to” underlined)

Take what you find and carry it on, carry it on.

Listen to your mother, your friends, and learn it on, learn it on.

Hug your children and teach it on, teach it on.”]

 i dont think ill ever be able to fully express this thought

[welcometogrouchland]

[image ID: two page digital comic of an an alternate version of the unknowing from the Magnus archives. First page is a full page drawing featuring Sasha, Tim, Jon, Basira and Daisy from the Magnus archives. The colours are bright and stylized. Sasha stands under a spotlight, posed like a mannequin with string sewn into her clothes and wrapped around her fingers. Her outfit has clownlike touches- a diamond pattern on her shirt a jester's collar. She has worm scars and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The remaining four characters look at her, silhouetted. Jon says "Tim..."

Page two shows a panel of Jon and Tim looking at each other. The background is red now, and the colours are more realistic. Jon says "Tim, does she...does she seem familiar?". Tim replies "I...I don't know. Maybe? I don't like this Jon". The next panel is daisy and Basira looking at us. Basira says "guys? Something you want to tell us?". Next panel shows breekon and hope entering, looking behind a terrified Jon. In sync, they trade lines of the following dialogue: breekon: "such a shame really". Hope: "tragic". Breekon: "after everything the poor lass has been through. Lost her life in the outside world". Hope: "lost her place in people's memories". Breekon: "bout to loose her skin in the dance". Final panel continues the dialogue while showing us tim and Jon, who have horrified expressions on their faces. Hope finally says "and you cant even recognize your dear old Sasha". End ID]

(Click for quality) OKAY one last thing for @red-string-retrospective-week that I did for the prompt "memory", based on the fact that I thought Sasha was gonna come back for an embarrassingly long amount of time (like. Up until s4). This is set at the unknowing!

[lunawoona11]

TMNT:Unity-Michelangelo

Mikey is next up! Credit for the Full body ref goes once again to the incredible @jadethest0ne​

Extra note:

 *Orange Is what a certain Foot recruit refers to him as

-He is biofluorescent                                                 -prosthetic was made by Donnie

—-Image ID below—– 

[Image ID: image 1 depicts a full body lineart ref for a fanmade design of Michelangelo from teenage mutant ninja turtles standing against a blank pastel orange background.He is an anthropomorphic turtle with banana yellow skin, a tail and an orange sweatband around his head, with one tail of the sweatband resting on his left shoulder and the other flowing to the right in the wind.He has a black below the elbow prosthetic right arm which has 3 segmented fingers and is held up in a V sign, just beneath the prosthetic is an orange residual limb covering.He has gray knee padding, A deep brown belt and an orange wristband on his left arm which is curled against his hip. One leg is lifted slightly above the ground in a walking motion. He has a burnt orange colour shell, a sandstone colour shell bridge and a sandy brown plastron segmented in a series of Y shapes. He has brown interconnected scale-like markings on his upper legs, circling the middle of his head around his eyes, the entirety of his left arm aside from the fingers, and from the bottom of his shoulder down to the residual limb covering of his right arm. He has a large grin showing off his sharp teeth, he is slightly hunched forward and he is winking. His left eye is open and is deep brown. At the bottom of the image is a stylized watermark reading “Jade” with small fox head next to the e

The text alongside the image reads as follows

Michelangelo 

Nicknames:Mikey, Mike, Micheal, Angelo,*Orange

Pronouns: He/him

Age: 14

Turtle species: Hawksbill sea turtle

Weapon(s): Twin tekko

-Confident in skill

-Good at repaying debts

-Has a prosthetic hand

-Easily startled 

-Finds it hard to hold a grudge

-Oversleeper

-Needs music to work

-Master procrastinator

-Outgoing and emotionally perceptive

Likes: Fish and chips,Meditation,bugs,Board games,Embroidery+Sewing+knitting

Dislikes: Blood,Apathy,dishonesty,Assuming the worst in people, picking sides in a messy issue

Image 2 shows an upside down teardrop shaped burnt orange turtle shell, with serrated scutes that overlap and slope downwards culminating in a jagged bottom edge. each scute has two small cream lines that have a semicircle bump facing east as well a muddy brown grass-like shape along the bottom edge of the scutes. Text underneath reads “^shell”.To the right of it is two Tekko with orange wrapping on the handles and bolt-like indents on the knuckle guards.Text underneath the tekkos reads “^Twin Tekko”

/.End ID]