#war-zard

[smbhax]

War-Zard (aka Red Earth) art from the Gallery section of Capcom Fighting Collection (PC/Steam)

Illustration by Daigo Ikeno

[haydensmub]

tessa

[cere-mon-ials]

2024 in what made me happy: a misc list

the broadcast schedules of cdrama. this year, for the first time, i finished a cdrama because i saw one gif set of wu jinyang telling wang xingyue that he was handsome in the pouring rain. after the double, i watched and loved love like the galaxy, watched and loved amidst a snowstorm of love. then, i began watching and loving blossom as it aired new episodes every single day. i love what this has done to my drama-watching routines because it's not as fickle as a binge drop and it's not as sedate as weekly drops.

no, but weekly drops too. especially, only murders in the building and running to reddit to see what all the hot new theories are. and, culinary class wars — that was a good month.

i refused to listen to podcasts, and it made some small room to listen to other, more useful, voices. i didn’t finish books i cared little for. i closed tabs and deleted bookmarks more often. i didn't attend any weddings, in an attempt to recover from the weddings i did attend in 2023 and the 2025 invitations currently dinging on my whatsapp.

got a job, hated it, found some courage to turn back on the excellent pay, and left it. got another job soon enough, one that now keeps me on my toes but isn't painful on my heels.

my mother's saree collection, and to the first year of my life when i got to wear them on the reg.

learning chinese and refining my urdu. i can now recall maybe 15 chinese characters without fumbling and read a faiz poem slowly, with a pencil and in a quiet room. it's great because it's so difficult.

saife hassan, whose direction of zard patton ka bunn has (a) seized me back into pakistani drama (b) given me meenu and nofil's tender, sweet romance (c) brought back feelings that i thought dead and wouldn't want to articulate in this space.

the ambition in as byatt's possession, which crept into my dreams to remind me that i am slacking and in cixin liu's three-body problem, which crept into my nightmares to remind me that the grand architecture held in the entirety of my imagination is a speck in the universe. i can't tell you if i loved or even enjoyed either book but i don't think it matters. i have reserved the remaining two books of liu's trilogy for 2025.

steaming white rice with a spoonful of ghee and a smattering of salt, the most delicious appetizer to any meal.

last year, after avoiding them because they were always priced higher, i began buying poetry books. this growing bedside stack has been my solace and i love reaching for a random page to find something i needed to read in that moment. i began this year with my dearest heaney and i intend to end it with cavafy.

the discipline of a simple skincare routine, which i am not always good at keeping up with and my skin isn't all that better either but i am trying.

syd & carmy & richie & tina & marcus & chef terry & everyone else in the bear.

the soundtrack of lovely runner kept me company on some of the longest commutes and shut out loud arguments in the ladies compartment. the soundtrack of love like the galaxy felt like the soundtrack of my life for about three months this year. the soundtrack of the last samurai came out of nowhere to aid me during difficult work sessions. i am always in search of appropriate times to blast the soundtrack of gully boy, the weeknd's my dear melancholy, and frou frou's details. there's no lack of appropriate times to blast a rahman album.

driving, i guess. i resisted for as long as i could because i am a public transportation person but i do not live in a city that is conducive for it. i do feel a strange sense of accomplishment at learning this skill.

the classics that i missed when they were being defined as such: i loved moonstruck's ridiculous commitment to being perfect because of its loudness and not despite it. sandra and keanu really did something special with speed (i know!!!) and i was beyond thrilled to experience that kind of textured action filmmaking. michael clayton and the pelican brief were wonderful watches as smaller, quieter, revelatory films where stars get to be actors. lee mi-sook in an affair changed me at a molecular level.

i fell in love all over again with short films and documentaries: loved sean wang's silly and heartfelt nǎi nai & wài pó, loved maryam takafory's touching irani bag. i rewatched amit dutta's nainsukh a full decade after i first watched it in college and i am yet to figure out how he did it.

monsoons, which i didn't get to experience this year but about which i read a miscellaneous ton in search of a doctoral thesis topic for whenever i choose the take the plunge. i am never not thinking about those winds and those rains from my childhood and the limited future i can imagine for myself.

my k-pop listening has suffered because my favourites are serving in the military but i held on thanks to the loving embrace of enhypen. i watched their online concerts with utmost pleasure. best performances: enhypen. best album: ateez's golden hour, part 2. best music video: stray kids' chk chk boom.

hozier singing i think i'll take my whiskey neat / my coffee black and my bed at three / you're too sweet for me.

so much hozier, london grammar, rahman, the hindi cinema by the decade playlists on spotify, and terrible tiktok music that unfortunately sound fab in the car music system.

my loved ones and all of you, who are better than me in every way that counts.

[kunosoura]

as a person who spends a good chunk of their leisure time reading fantasy novels and watching fantasy shows and playing fantasy videogames. I think there is something pathetic about the genre sometimes. In the way some universes want to draw you in and keep you there forever rather than telling a story that connects perhaps thematically to our world but also draws a clean line and says story over, move on w/ ya life. Learn a lesson and start a new chapter. ask that girl out. maybe ask for that promotion that's up for grabs, champ. nah instead these want you thinking about them forever.

the obvious example would be the endless oversaturated franchise drek of e.g. star wars and marvel. but this can happen in completed stories or even one off stories. things that end but don't conclude. encouraging the worst habits of the fantasy audience by enticing them to keep a little part of them living forever in that world. endless fanfiction for a universe whose author has moved on or died.

I think Tolkien set the standard for this. He wrote The Hobbit and LotR and spent the rest of his life with his world revolving around that universe and he encouraged that sort of engagement with it by constantly answering letters and working on the silmarillion et al. I think that bled into his influence over the rest of the fantasy genre. SFF authors don't create stories, they create worlds and they want a small part of you to live in them like they did when writing it. And some of them struggle to draw the line.

some of them don't even want to. new star wars shows/seasons every year. visit the w*zarding world at universal studios today. https://www.brandonsanderson.com/tag/store/. we want your attention until you're cold in the ground.

and like even that I can forgive when they do something cool with it and encourage some sort of deeper understanding but too often it's just like. welp! imagine your own cool elfblooded ranger doing cool sword duels :). find out what knight radiant order you are today! take the quiz.

no thesis no conclusion sorry I'm just a hater up too late.

[just-mushroom-thoughts]

For the ask game: musty wail.

The war in particular being the skeleton war of course.

¡ ¡n†erac† w¡th skele†on war s†¡ll! ¡ jus† haven'† had many foes la†ely, I †h¡nk †he w¡zards and skele†ons abandoned †he war!

[turqoisetortoise]

Gigi from Warzard / Red Earth

[xbuster]

Capcom Fighting Collection trading cards on Steam

[videogamequeens]

LAVIA AKA LUAN (JAPANESE VERSION)

Lavia is a harpy with the tail of a peacock. A harpy in Greek mythology is a half-human and half-bird personification of storm winds.

Their name means "snatchers" or "swift robbers" and they are known for stealing food from their victims while they are eating. Whenever a person suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it was said that he had been carried off by the harpies.

[capcomallstars]

Mai-Ling fanart by gogo80000v.

[fallenparty]

Red Earth

[smbhax]

War-Zard (aka Red Earth) art from the Gallery section of Capcom Fighting Collection (PC/Steam)

[the2dvgstages]

"Ruins" [Day to night animation] - Red Earth

[draidachiart]

ADIVINA QUIEN HIZO WAFFLES

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[howlandgrim]

The Unparalleled Emperor.

[lgbt-tiktoks]

Caption:

[You heard of Sappho of Lesbos, now get ready for what one historian called the Sappho of Spain. Umayyad princess and poetry battle champion, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. A woman who lived her life by absolutely no one's rules other than her own. Born around the turn of the second millennium CE in the Caliphate of Córdoba, her adolescence was full mostly of war and strife which resulted in her eventually inheriting large amounts of money and political influence.

She used this to establish a huge palace and literary salon where she regularly invited women of all classes, from noble to enslaved to be taught poetry and let's just say the romantic arts. She became the prototype for courtly refinement, or al-zard, in Andalusian women. And that included winning poetry competitions usually reserved just for men but she would walk right on the floor, often with her hair uncovered, and wipe the floor with them.

She famously had two of her own verses embroidered in gold along the lapel of one of her coats. The first one read "by God I am fit for greatness and will stride along with great pride". And the other read "I allow my lover to reach my cheek and allow a kiss to him who craves it". She was notorious not just for leaving her hair uncovered but for dressing very evocatively, more in the style of Baghdad compared to the more conservative Córdoban fashion at the time.

She had a lot of detractors for this but one of her big defenders was Imam Ibn Hazam al-Andalusi. Which means if you don't like her lifestyle you have to go through him first. Wallada had three primary lovers, one woman and two men. She is most notoriously remembered for her tempestuous love affair with one of the great poets of this era, Ibn Zaydun. When Ibn Zaydun saw Wallada owning her opponents with sick metered rhymes, he fell instantly in love.

The two soon started exchanging love poetry but unfortunately their affair was never meant to be, for they were from rival clans. Their falling out is the stuff of many a romanticization. Suffice to say, it was a combination of political machination and the fact that she was jealous of that he kept on sleeping with other men.

Wallada never married but she eventually moved in with Ibn Zaydun's greatest rival, Ibn Abdús, who then proceeded to confiscate all of Ibn Zaydun's wealth and properties and exile him. Leaving the poet to rite nothing but homesick, lovesick poetry for the rest of his days. And Wallada even outlived Ibn Abdús, who stayed by her side for the rest of his days, despite them never being married. She died March 26, 1091 the same day the Almoravids invaded Córdoba.

Epilogue, a surreal thing happened while I was making this post. A lot of the research came from Professor Sahar Amer, who I was planning on shouting out and then I saw her last name. And the cover of one of her books and it looked familiar. It turns out I was planning on highlighting the literal sister of Ghada Amer, the Arab artist I highlighted at the end of the previous post in this series. What did they feed these women growing up, super wheaties? Follow for more women in SWANA heritage month.]

[astroboy84]

Hauzer Wallpaper

Hauzer, the legendary Divine Dragon from Greedia. It's one of the boss characters from the Capcom fighting game Red Earth (War-Zard in Japan). Hauzer is also in Capcom Fighting Evolution as a playable character. Just had to make a wallpaper of this cool dragon-dinosaur monster. It has a very cool design. Even playing as Hauzer in Capcom Fighting Evolution, even though that game was very unbalanced, was fun.