#we used to see bats sometimes when i lived on the west coast

[spacefinch]

MSB rambles: locations

As anyone who’s watched the Magic School Bus series knows, the show is mostly set in Walkerville, a made-up town. However, they never specify where it is, except for “in the USA.” They don’t specify what state, or even what region of the country it’s in. But here are my observations.

In “Gets Eaten,” Ms. Frizzle drives the class to the beach, while the bus is in normal bus mode. The beach looks like a California beach to me (based on my experience going to beaches there), and a sea otter makes a brief appearance. In the US, sea otters are only found along the west coast.

In a few episodes (Getting Energized, Rocks and Rolls, etc…), it’s shown that there are mountains/foothills just outside Walkerville, and that there’s snow on top for at least part of the year.

We know it snows during the winter in town as well. (Source: MSB Holiday Special)

There is a swamp with alligators and blue jays within driving distance of town, as shown in “Butterfly and the Bog Beast.” The whole vibe of the swamp feels very southern to me. (Note: “driving distance” might not necessarily mean said swamp is near town. Could just be that anywhere is driving distance on the Magic School Bus.)

In “Gets Swamped” we see that there is a more marshy swamp in town. The main vegetation is reeds and small shrubs, and the animal life consists of species such as snapping turtles, muskrats, wood ducks, harriers (marsh hawks), bullfrogs, red-winged blackbirds, and dragonflies. This suggests a more northern location for Walkerville.

In “Goes to Mussel Beach,” the mussels are described as “Mytilus californianus” aka the California Mussel, a species only found along the west coast. Again, we have no idea how far away the beach is from town, but it’s a different beach than the one in “Gets Eaten.”

In “Kicks Up a Storm” the outside temperature gets to a high of 99 degrees Fahrenheit— which, judging by the kids’ reactions, is too hot for them. As a Californian, I can sympathize with this.

In “All Dried Up,” the bus (in plane mode) must fly over a mountain range to get to what looks like the Sonoran Desert. Which mountain range they fly over is not specified.

In the book “The Truth About Bats,” it is stated that in order to see bats in Yosemite National Park, the class must fly to California— thus implying that Walkerville is not located in my home state.

In “Goes to Seed,” there is a Ruby-throated hummingbird (at least that’s what I think it is) in the garden at Phoebe’s old school. The Ruby-throated hummingbird lives mainly in the eastern half of the US.

In “In a Beehive,” Tim mentions a “big frost” approaching. Again, this suggests Walkerville is somewhere Up North. (We don’t get a “big frost” where I live— just a few smaller frosts.)

In “In the City,” we see that some of Walkerville’s urban wildlife includes peregrine falcons, red foxes, opossums, raccoons, and nighthawks. It is also implied that bears live in the woods outside of town.

In the book “The Wild Whale Watch,” the New England coast is a short drive from school, which directly contradicts my observations about coastal locations in the show.

The woodpecker in “Meets the Rot Squad” is a red-bellied woodpecker, a species found in the eastern US.

In the book “Rocky Road Trip,” Carlos says that he collected some of the rocks in his collection near “the Saddle River.” I looked it up, and in the real world, Saddle River runs through New York and New Jersey. (But for all we know, the Saddle River in the book could be made up just like Walkerville.)

In “Ups and Downs,” we see that Walkerville is located near a good-sized lake— large and deep enough for a submarine to dive in, and with plenty of underwater vegetation.

In terms of continuity, there is no continuity when it comes to where the heck Walkerville is. This sometimes frustrates my overanalytical brain. So, I leave it to you, fellow Magic School Bus fans, to answer the question:

Map for reference!

[peachypizzicato]

SPOOKY SEASON!!!!

BATS!!!!!!

BABIEEEESSSSS

[ragingbookdragon]

DC Character Insert Guide!

So, I got my second Covid shot yesterday and while I didn’t feel much of the effects then, I’m feeling them today, and I don’t want to write any fics because it’s too much effort and everything in my body hurts.

Instead, I decided to compile a list of all the character inserts I do, just so everyone can have a bit of a better background to them. Let’s start with the Batfamily, then we’ll move to the Superfamily, then Flashfamily, and finally the Lanternfamily.

-Thorne

So, within the Batfamily inserts there are four insert characters: Batmom (Bruce’s wife and mother of the Batfamily), Bat-Aunt (Bruce’s sister), Batsis (Bruce’s daughter, and Batbrother (Bruce’s son).

1. Batmom (Bruce’s wife and mother of the Batfamily) is a model by day and support at night. She stopped being a vigilante after Dick and Bruce’s falling out, preferring to stay at home and focus on raising Jason whilst caring for the family. She was born in Blüdhaven but grew up in Gotham City, eventually getting a job at WE where she quickly worked her way to the position of Bruce’s secretary where she became a valued member of his personal circle.

2. Bat-Aunt (Bruce’s sister) is a billionaire, playgirl, philanthropist by day and depending on which pairing I’m using, she’s either a vigilante by night or support for the Batfamily (non-vigilante). She’s Bruce’s younger sister and no one’s really sure if they’re related by blood but apparently one night, the two siblings sat down to test DNA, received the answers, and never spoke of them again. They’ve been together since they were in diapers—they’re siblings through and through. She is close with Ghost-Maker and Barry Allen.

3. Batsis (Bruce’s daughter) is a writer by day and a spy-network running vigilante by night. She is the oldest sibling of the Batsiblings and takes it upon herself to keep everyone in check when they need it. Because she’s older than most of the sidekicks every major superhero has, she’s not friends like Dick is with his group, so she tends to help out with the JL more. She was born and raised in Gotham City, showing up at Bruce’s doorstep at six years old. She is close with Wally West and Kyle Rayner.

4. Batbrother (Bruce’s son) is a black ops squad leader, designation SPECTRES, who runs missions all over the world that take out terrorist organizations, human trafficking rings, etc. He is the eldest sibling of the Batsiblings, and is typically compared to being a second Bruce, but a much laxer Bruce. He was born in Gotham, but his mother passed during birth, and he was raised in the mountains of Virginia by his maternal grandfather until he was thirteen. During the time, he was taught how to live off the land—which is important because it helps him during the Super Soldier Program. He traveled to Gotham City to Wayne Manor and told Bruce he was his son. After DNA testing, it was proven true. When he’s not on a mission, he’s usually at Wayne Manor bugging the crap out of his family. He is a sexual assault survivor during his time in the military and he advocates for other survivors and also runs personal missions (without his team) to bring justice to those who didn’t receive any. He is close with Kyle Rayner and his younger brother Jason Todd.

Within the Superfamily there are two reader inserts and those are Super-Aunt (Clark’s sister) and Supersis (Clark’s daughter).

1. Super-Aunt (Clark’s sister) is the world’s Superwoman. She lives in Gotham City working for Bruce, so she is technically apart of the Batfamily. She was not raised by the Kents with Clark, as their pods hit one another in the atmosphere and shot off to different locations, hers in Jacksonville, Florida. She and Clark met during a Daily Planet trip to Wayne Enterprises. She is close with Bruce Wayne and Ted Kord—and Booster Gold because you can’t have Blue Beetle without Booster Gold.

2. Supersis (Clark’s daughter) is the world’s Superwoman. She is not Lois Lane’s daughter but considers the woman her mother. She fights with the Young Justice team and when she’s not fighting with them, she’s either at her family home or at Gotham University taking classes. She is close with Tim Drake, Bart Allen, and Jason Todd.

In the Flashfamily there are two reader inserts, and they are Flash-Aunt (Barry’s sister) and Flash-daughter (Barry’s daughter).

1. Flash-Aunt (Barry’s sister) is a Flash like Barry and serves in the Central City Police Department with her brother, but while Barry is a forensic scientist, she is a detective, working their cases so that the two siblings are always on them together—they’re currently gunning for the most solved cases award. She is not the child of Nora Allen, but instead of Henry Allen during the time that he and Nora were getting divorced. When she was born, the mother gave her to Darryl Frye and she and Barry were raised together. She is close with Hal Jordan and Bruce Wayne.

2. Flash-Daughter (Barry’s daughter) was recently introduced with the fic “If We Were Fast Enough”. She is the daughter of Barry Allen in a world where the old Justice League has retired, and their successors have taken up the mantles. Unfortunately, global devastation occurred which was a result of nuclear warfare between countries. During the all-out war on the ruined landscape, she watched every JL member fall along with every Flash. She witnessed the deaths and took their speed (she did not kill them, but merely took their speed to keep it out of the hands of the enemy), making her faster than every speedster. Within the final moments of her world, she harnessed Barry Allen’s speed before he died, making her the fastest speedster alive, even faster than Wally West (just by an inch), and escaped the imploding of her world by traveling to another timeline. After a year, she broke down and told Barry the truth, but he accepted her as his daughter regardless. She works in CCPD as a forensic scientist and is the Lightning Flash when she isn’t working. She is older than most of the sidekicks, around her late twenties, but is close with Jason Todd and Kyle Rayner.

Last but not least, there are two inserts in the Lanternfamily, and they are Lanternsis (Hal’s sister) and Lantern-Daughter (Hal’s daughter).

1. Lanternsis (Hal’s sister) is the daughter of Jessica Jordan but not Martin Jordan. She was born a few years after Martin died, her father isn’t known, and was raised in the family. Because Hal was so determined to join the Air Force and fly, he wasn’t around much as she was growing up, but seeing that no one in the family wanted to talk to Hal, especially her mother and oldest brother, she took it upon herself to have a relationship with him, calling him whenever she could, seeing him when she could. They became very close when she expressed that she herself wanted to join the Navy and become a pilot. Hal taught her everything he knew about flying and she excelled in the Naval flight programs, even at the expense of her relationship with Jessica. When her mother died, she chose an honorable discharge from the military and started working at Ferris Aircraft with Hal. Sometime during Hal’s breakdown as Green Lantern and the destruction of Coast City, the Blue Lantern Power Ring found her, and she became the Blue Lantern of Earth for her undying hope that she and the ones she loved most would be okay. She is close with Barry Allen and the Four Corpsmen.

2. Lantern-Daughter (Hal’s daughter) was introduced with the fic “When The Music’s Not Forgotten”. She is Hal’s daughter, mother is unknown, and currently lives with him in Coast City. She works at a Wayne Enterprises branch in Coast where she met with Jason Todd and started training unbeknownst to her father. During a fight when the truth was revealed, she and Hal had a falling out where she returned home and was met by Sinestro who invited her to join the Sinestro Corps. She agreed and became a Yellow Lantern. All is not lost though; she eventually becomes another Lantern type. She is close with Jason Todd, Wally West, and the Four Corpsmen.

[imaginepirates]

The Lady Washington

This weekend, I went for a sail on the Lady Washington, aka the Interceptor from Pirates of the Caribbean. I had a great time, learned a lot, and made many observations of my own. Below are my learnings, observations, and pictures from the sail.

1. The Sails

The first thing I noticed as we approached the ship were her sails. She flew 4, but I only remember what 3 of them are. As the state tall ship of Washington State (west coast of America), she flew both the American and Washington state flags. More interesting, though, was her pride flag. I was surprised, given that it's past pride month, and many people/businesses take down their flags after the end of the month because they're really just used for advertising and fake inclusion. Not so with this ship. (Mrs. Norrington, if you ever read this, your husband's ship openly supports gay rights.)

2. The Crew

The first thing both my mother and I noticed upon boarding was the crew. Most of them were women. (I don't have pictures because it seems intrusive). This came as a bit of a surprise to both of us; these were young women, too, in their early to mid 20s. The captain, first mate, and events coordinator were all female or female presenting, along with the majority of the volunteer crew. Many of them had nautical themed tattoos, though my favorites were the Lord of the Rings tats one sailor sported (we geeked out over them together, it was cute). They were also mostly noticeably queer. That explained the pride flag better. Apparently, it's quite common that on these older models of ships, the crew is mostly, if not entirely, female.

3. Interactive!

That's me! I know I have little on here about myself, but now you know how I look. I was wearing a Jack Sparrow shirt, too, because I went prepared.

I went on what they call an "Adventure Sail" where they let you handle some of the ropes. There are two pictures of me here where I'm hoisting the fore staysail. It's actually not as hard as you think, though I did have to put my bodyweight into it. I wasn't allowed to climb the rigging, but I noticed that the crew had safety harnesses and clips for when they were out on the masts. The ropes really hurt your hands, though, and now I understand why sailors got blisters so easily. That rope burn sucks. In any case, I was so enthusiastic, they offered me a two week volunteering position! I'm looking into it for next summer, because if you think I'm not going to work on the honest-to-god Interceptor, you're wrong. Which brings me to:

4. Volunteering.

They have 2 week volunteering positions for a season of, right now, six months. This runs from spring until autumn, as they do ship repairs in winter. It sounds like they sail the full coast of Washington over the six month span. You live on the ship, sleeping in a room that can house up to 10 people, though I don't think it ever gets that full. There's also a cook, so you don't have to worry about food. Volunteers are allowed to work all parts of the ship, including climbing the rigging, though they don't have to if they don't want.

5. The History

The Lady Washington is a re-build of her original. The original ship (brig) served in the American revolutionary war, and was used as a shipping vessel afterwards. She was the first American ship to go around the tip of Cape Horn, and also the first American ship to land on the west coast. She opened the trans Atlantic trade as the first American ship in Japan, Honolulu, and Hong Kong. Also, according to the site: "Lady Washington opened the black pearl and sandalwood trade between Hawaii and Asia". Interesting that she began the black pearl trade, isn't it? She was eventually lost in the Philippines.

The replica was made in 1989 and launched as part of the Washington State Centennial celebration. Her current model is almost an exact replica of the original, save for the more modern fittings in her hull to make living on ship easier (they have a generator). She also has an engine to make her easier to maneuver in and out of harbor. Currently, she's a teaching vessel meant to educate people on the lives of sailors and trade. She has been in multiple films and TV shows, including our dear PoTC, Star Trek: Generations, and Once Upon A Time.

6. Little Observations

I made lots of little observations about the sailors and the sail in general. One thing was made very obvious: every time you were given an order, you were to repeat it back aloud. This both fixes any confusion about orders, and lets the rest of the crew know what was going on. There were many instances where the captain gave orders only one person could hear, though the order was meant for "all hands available".

Another thing was how they got lines taut. They did this maneuver where they had two people on major ropes when trying to secure them. This is hard to explain without a visual, but I'll try. Basically, they would have the rope wrapped under the bottom of a belaying pin, and one person would lean into the rope before quickly pulling back into a squat and letting their bodyweight pull the line taut. The other person would then secure the rope to the belaying pin.

Speaking of belaying pins, they're just that: pins. I didn't realize that you can really just....pull one out of the little hole it goes in. They're fairly loose until a rope is secured around them. The ropes, depending on size and what they were supporting, were sometimes wrapped around multiple pins. Many ropes were wrapped in a sort of figure-eight pattern. For those of us who write, it's absolutely possible for a character to use a belaying pin as a weapon. That being said, they're a little smaller than you think, and it would take a bit more force to knock someone over the head with than you would imagine. They aren't a bat, they don't have that range. Otherwise, solid weapon if you put some strength behind it. (You can see them for size in the pictures of me above. Keep in mind I’m about 5′9″.)

Ropes on a ship are a major tripping hazard. There are six miles of rigging on the Lady Washington, so the air above your head is a frickin maze. Every rope that touches the ground gets coiled. Every one. It doesn't matter if there's only three feet of it touching the deck: it gets coiled. There are all sorts of coiling methods, though I didn't quite pick up on names, except for the Flemish coil pictured below. It really isn't practical, except when you have completely loose ropes or huge strands of rope touching the ground.

[gothamdetected-a]

an idiot’s guide to the wayne family.

now complete with new diagrams! i wish i wash kidding, ive really made a diagram to help illustrate this.

[ follow the link here for actual visible quality. thanks tumblr.]

some points to make quickly -

• this is not complete. there were probably more siblings and wives and children, but i just focused on the main lineage i could piece together from DC knowledge

• apologies for the lack of knowledge on the women in the family past the last century. this is unfortunately common in real life too, as women were not landowners etc, and without a marriage certificate they basically don’t show up on records. dc happily talk about the male line but not about the wives and daughters so :/

• the dates are fairly made up, and especially at the bottom are just me twisting things to fit my own personal canon

• and finally, i just wanted to say that while this is pieced together from what DC have told us, there are a lot of holes that i have filled with headcanons. not all of this is canon. sometimes i just want to give a person a cool life that dc are too cowardly to do.

so, although this varies by “earth”, i have tried to combine the various histories given for pre- and post-52 waynes into a full comprehensible timeline. i’ve probably failed, but this is what i’m sticking with.   

to start with we’re supposed to believe that there was a norse guy calling himself the Bat-Man, running around in the 10th century killing frost giants. is it plausible? yes. is it exaggerated? most definitely. am i wiping it from existence because it was one issue in a faintly terrible run that has technically been retconned anyway? absolutely. ignoring that makes the earliest recorded ancestor of the wayne family a man called gawayne de weyne, a french crusader in the 14th century. on some earths he’s called lancelot wayne (too on the nose) or harold wayne (thanks i hate it), so im personally going to retcon that and just say gawayne is it. also because i love the etymological aspect of the name beginning as de weyne in old high french and it slowly changing through out the centuries. gawayne, also sometimes written as gevain, was one of the knights sent to retrieve the holy grail, but, as knights tended to do, he died. sorry gawayne. the weirdest part about all of this is that he asked for his heart to be embalmed, and there’s a plot line revolving around this (batman: scottish connection). now i’m not saying that madness runs in the family, but the waynes absolutely do not get a good head start in history. 

gawayne must have had at least one surviving heir who goes on to have babies etc etc, and eventually we get to the 16th century, and the next instance of the waynes. specifically, contarf wayne. which, i have to say, super dumb name. if i ever have a kid, im calling it contarf. so it’s now the 1500s and the waynes have somehow become scottish, probably from getting given land after crusading and that. apparently gawayne was aknight of the scottish court, despite being french, which actually happened a lot back then. literally the only notable thing contarf does with his life is build castle wayne, and i swear these people are all born with both madness and a flair for the dramatic. yes at some point bruce does go to this gloomy scottish castle where it’s always rainy and stormy and fits right on in, so that’s terrifying.

around a hundred years later nathaniel wayne tries to emigrate across to the “new world”. nathaniel likes witchhunting, and has come over to what will one day be the US following a witch fleeing from england - annie. annie who he may have dated. annie who may be pregnant with his child. good on you nathaniel, that’s a healthy relationship you’ve got right there. after the baby is delivered, he finds her and. you know, people were not kind of witches back then, so she dies. and with her dying breath, curses nathaniel and all his descendants. which includes her OWN BABY (super punk move), and one day bruce wayne. this curse manifests in very few of the extant waynes surviving beyond 40, often going mad, and absolutely tuning on each other. nathaniel’s particular grisly end comes when his is the fateful colony that ends up in what-will-one-day-be-gotham (see my idiots guide to gotham for more juicy details), releasing the deacon blackfire from his little cave and ending up missing, presumed dead. (definitely dead). this is the start of the “waynes probably should avoid gotham” saga. spoiler alert - they don’t. 

somewhere in the interluding 100 years, a branch of the waynes do actually successfully make it over into the americas. 2 brothers, caleb and thomas simon wayne, reach the east coast from britain, and go their separate ways. caleb joins a convoy heading out west, leading a wagon train, and, as so many pioneers do, he also dies, while trying to make this trip. but caleb really isnt the interesting brother here (sorry man), because what thomas gets up to is far more exciting. he settles in, lo and behold, the newly formed town of gotham, and for some strange reason (probably because all the waynes are fairly nuts, as we’ve established at this point) decides to give devil-worshipping a go. maybe its fucking curse. maybe its something in the water. maybe its maybelline. but whatever it is, thomas wayne tries to summon and ensnare the demon barbatos by killing some innocents, in a wild, but understandable, attempt to gain immortality. he doesn’t succeed. or does he. it half works - instead of summoning the bat-demon (yes the same bat-demon that the founding fathers later summon and also trap beneath gotham) he gets one of darkseid’s hyper-dimensional bounty hunters, and some how, through some space age magic, the energy of this event corrupts him into agelessness/slowed ageing, we’re not totally sure. later dear old tom pops back up as the villainous dr simon hurt, and literally fights his own descendant. DC give no fucks. 

after the whole corrupting not-magic thing, but before he disappears, thomas/simon impregnates one of his cult’s disciples. a lot. (is this why the waynes can look 30 at 50? more on this at 10) and between 1747 and 1771 (because immortal people also have immortal sperm apparently), she bears him 3 sons. probably some daughters too but again, who cares about that. not DC, that’s for damn sure. these sons are all absolutely fucking insane, just like daddy dearest. the eldest, who is LITERALLY known as “mad” anthony wayne, is said to be the spitting image of bruce, which is confirmed through some time travelling bs that we’re not going to think about. anthony and horatio wayne, the middle brother, both sign up to fight in the revolutionary war. unfortunately THE CURSE STRIKES AGAIN and horatio perishes while burning british ships. anthony goes on to becomes a brigadier general, serving directly under george washington and pulls some crazy good strategies that help to kick the british out of new jersey, earning his nickname of “mad” anthony, because only someone fucking nuts could come up with these plans, and pull them off. the youngest brother darius wayne is only 4 when the war breaks out, and is therefore too Babey to fight, but does later become notable for being the man to start construction on wayne manor. in 1795, using the money inherited from his brother horatio on his death, he hires an architect nathan van derm, to begin planning and building. sadly darius will never see it completed, with funds dwindling and his older brother’s death, eventually darius takes his own life. 

not to worry, he leaves behind 2 sons - herkimer and charles wayne. literally herkimer’s only notable feature is that he fights in the war of 1812. sorry my guy, DC hate you. charles, on the other hand, is a businessman, who manages the failing company his father had left behind and starts to grow the wayne fortune. charles buys more land surrounding the manor, as well as a lot of general gotham real estate, and is the man accrediting for starting wayne enterprises as a series of several small business, ranging from merchant trading to land ownership to mining, in 1845. however charlie contracts tuberculosis at the ripe old age of 62 and shuffles off the mortal coil. 

the oldest of his sons, charles lincoln wayne, also known as charles junior, does 2 things - begins construction on the wayne manor again in 1855 after purchasing it back from jerome k. van derm, the destitute son of the original architect, who had been living in the bones of the construcion, and uses a considerable portion of his inheritance to build the gotham botanical gardens in 1870. the next son, winslow wayne, is another enigma - the only thing mentioned about him in the comics is that he fought alongside teddy roosevelt, which i’m guessing is in the spanish-american war. but the youngest two brothers, joshua thomas and solomon zebadiah wayne are the real spicy pair. not only do they tackle the bat infestation on the manor grounds, but the pair work to change the federal system of america - joshua, when he’s not managing the wayne companies, is an abolitionist who engages in secret missions to free slaves by getting them across the border into canada, and solomon, the vaguely more sensible of the two, becomes a judge, attempting to be as fair and incorruptible as possible. sadly joshua is killed due to his slave smuggling antics (THE CURRSSEE), and this sends solomon slightly nuts, and causes him to contract the architect cyrus pinkney, who is even more nuts, to basically. build gotham. these two men are the reason 97% of buildings have gargoyles on them. 

solomon has only 1 child before he dies, who fortunately, grows up to be a very shrewd businessman capable of growing wayne ent even through with the advent of shipping and rail sectors. this man, alan wayne, constructs the original wayne tower in 1888, and it completely swamps the gotham skyline. he also marries catherine van derm, the great granddaughter of the original architect of wayne manor, and finally manage to complete and move in to the building in 1895, exactly 100 years after the project was started. for a while they are very happy, and catherine falls pregnant. but this darn curse just won’t leave these wayne boys alone, and in 1897, catherine dies giving birth to their son, kenneth wayne. a year later, lost and traumatised and going insane thinking about his wife’s death alan wayne mysteriously disappears (read as: fell down a well and was maybe or maybe not tortured and killed by the court of owls). 

kenneth wayne, raised as virtually an orphan, turns out to have his papa’s business management skills, and, foreseeing america's impending industrialisation in the 20s and 30s, makes some risky moves that pay off, including the advent of wayne chemicals, and wayne ent expands yet again. kenneth, like the recurring pattern that you can see here, dies fairly early due to WW2 however, leaving his wife laura to care for their 4 sons AND the company, which she does like a boss ass bitch. seriously, women barely had the vote and she was already a titan of industry and raising 4 teenage boys like. massive props to you babe. these boys are

ishmael wayne, a whaler who is an incredible parody of captain ahab and also dies trying to catch a white whale, elwood wayne, who goes and reclaims what is now called waynemoor castle in scotland, living there until his death, silas wayne, who may or may not be a thief posing as a wayne because the real silas died, AND at long last, patrick wayne - bruce’s granpappy, who founded the wayne tech arm of the company at 20 years old, aiding the war effort, and where this stupidly long post ends, because there is 0 point in me recounting the lives of thomas, bruce, or any of his children. everyone knows them. could i write more about thomas’ siblings and the kanes and how they tie in? yes. but this post is like 2100 words long and i want to sleep at some point today so this will have to do askjdbjsdhgf

[dearmrsbitch]

March 5, 2020 - And the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table...

 Q. Can’t support a pagan friend: I’m a thirtysomething who lives in a midsize West Coast city with very liberal sensibilities that I share. There’s a reason I moved here! I am also a Christian who goes to a mainstream Protestant church. I’ve never seen much disconnect between the two and I have many friends of other faiths, primarily Muslim and Jewish, whose religious functions I sometimes attend, like a wedding or a child’s entry into life or their religion. I value getting to experience these things with my friends and learning more about them, their religions, and the world. I grew up poor in the South but was lucky that we were always clean, well-fed, and warm. A good friend who lived in my neighborhood could not say the same and her unfortunate start in life has affected her ability to thrive as an adult. She is divorced from an abusive husband, in recovery for alcoholism, and trying to support two children with little help from her ex and often active hindrance from her dysfunctional family. Health issues make it hard for her to work, and poverty gets in the way of her work as well, as she sometimes can’t afford a uniform she needs or fix her car to get to work, and has been fired from one position because of her bad teeth that are a result of years of not having money to care for them. I have a lot of sympathy for her and her children.

 She has written a few children’s books about her faith and has set up a small independent internet business to offer services connected with her belief system. I would love to support her, but she is pagan/Wiccan. This isn’t exactly a problem, as I don’t think it’s immoral. I just don’t want a children’s book on spells or to spend money on a tarot reading. My old friend spends a lot of time online talking about things like her “marriage” to a Norse deity that just make me roll my eyes in a way I know I should be ashamed about. I could probably get over my aversion to this and at least donate to her nonreligious crowdsourcing page that is just asking for money for utilities and food for her kids, but she also spends a lot of time online talking about how awful Christians are. Just Christians. While I know I’m not fully supportive of her faith, at least I know it’s bad of me to judge her on hers. I would never publicly demean her or her religion, much less do it several times a week. I feel so bad for her and would like to help, but every time I get close to donating, I just think about how much she hates people of my faith. Should I donate anyway?

Dear Christian type person,

Well, I think you’re all being deluded, but that aside....

Look, I’m a hardcore atheist, but when I get invited to a religious event, like a baptism, Bat Mitzvah, etc., I bring a gift, I spend money, I sit through nasty religious wedding services that declare marriage only between a man and a woman and bite my tongue because I don’t want to interrupt my friend’s vows with the priest their mom told them to get or she wouldn’t pay, etc.

If you’re comfy buying a gift for a Bris, you can buy a book from her.  Donate it to a library or the Spiral Scouts, or something pagan friendly.  It’s all the same.  If you’re spending money on a Muslim themed gift for your friend, you can spend money on a Pagan book.  Because from the outside, it looks like you’re okay with conferring with other “People of the Book,” but like, fuck them pagans.

Most of your rituals come from the Pagans by the way, your religion at this point, besides the Monotheism (with a trinity?) has more in common with modern day Wicca than you think, except, you all hate gays and women, where most Pagans are cool with that. 

Light your Christmas tree, worship your chocolate bunnies.. burn your incense in temple.

Now, let me surprise you. I’m not anymore a fan of Paganism than of any other religion, they just sit a bit higher because they aren’t as much of assholes as the rest of the faiths usually.  They drink more, fuck more, dance more, etc. Less hateful usually.  But I laugh as much as being married to a Norse god as you do - however, how are those nuns doing that are married to Christ?   Cause either you see the hypocrisy there, or you’re just prejudiced because one is you, and one is them.  Pagan religions invented the idea of being a “bride of a god,” long before the big three were a blip on the map. 

Her ideas pre-date yours, and even if they’re not mentally healthy, you have to remember that they don’t seem normal because you live in a heavily Christian society.  A society that she has to contend with on a daily basis.  One that mocks her, one that discredits her views.  ONE WHERE DAMN NEAR EVERY POLITICIAN LEGISLATES IN ACCORDANCE TO CHRISTIANITY WITH NO RESPECT FOR OTHERS. 

People are allowed to be upset about the dominant view of a society if they are a minority group that is essentially - doing nothing wrong.  She’s existing as a pagan, and maybe her religious beliefs are that churches should pay their taxes, child genital mutilation should be outlawed, etc etc., and she has no chance to see her religion respected in the same way that yours is.  You may be liberal, but, little one, you are still adhering to a system that is overall, highly conservative, demeans women, donates to vicious shock therapy programs that cause teens to kill themselves when they can’t “pray the gay away,” and HIDES THE SYSTEMATIC RAPE AND ABUSE OF CHILDREN.  (Protestants too, Catholics just like to rape boys more.  Get the sexism there?  Our society cares less about the little girls raped in Protestant churches than the little boys in Catholic ones.)

God damn.  Fuck.  How do you not see this?  I have a friend whose husband is a super hippy Christian dude.  He had to vet every charity he gave to.  You know why?  Because even the most progressive looking Christian charities can have their money funneled to gay conversion therapy, or to the Salvation army that turns away gay people and transgender individuals who need a place to sleep.  He didn’t find one really good religious charity that he felt he could trust beyond a shadow of a doubt to trust with his parishioners donations.  No matter how liberal you are - you still sucking on Chick-Fil-A and acting like bigot chicken ain’t a big deal.

She has a right to criticize the religion as a whole.  If she lived in Israel, she’d be upset about Jewish law, in a Muslim country, Sharia law.  Because the big three aren’t fair and just in their application of law.  Sure she’s got a chip on her shoulder and maybe her whole life is her fault, but she still gets to complain that the dominant religion of the country, one that professes “Love your neighbor,” does not have national healthcare, and churches are basically tax shelters for money that could do so much for all of us, and that evangelicals cheer on the caging of children just because they are brown.  If you love Jesus so much, then FUCKING ACT LIKE HIM.  Christians in this country, by and large, would be hated by Jesus, loathed even for the sheer hypocrisy.  Watch “Jesus Camp,” those are the fucks she’s railing against.  

And you, you my dear liberal Christian.  What would he say about you?  He picked up several people maligned by society and took them in, and fed them, and helped them.  He commanded you to do unto others, and do good in his name.  And she is asking for donations to help with utilities and food for her kids, and you’re upset because you don’t like her Facebook quotes. 

People like you are why I left religion finally, entirely.  I realized there was no amount of religion than can make a good person do more good, but religion will make a good person do bad things, in its name.

Mrs. Bitch

[thelittleredheadedmusician]

To Roast or Not to Roast

It’s been a hot sec since I wrote a DC fic but I got an idea about the batkids being asked to participate in a schwanky roast of Bruce and it turned into this! Some light internal angst with a happy ending.  Gen Rating: PG Words: 1856 AO3

Dick frowned down at the invitation. The thick envelope made of paper that cost more than most kids in Gotham paid for their notebooks had fallen out of the pile of bills and magazines and postcards when he’d grabbed his mail. It was heavier than anything else in the stack with the cardstock it contained and slipped right out when he’d grabbed everything. He had carried it as though it were likely to explode at any moment or contained deadly poison or was a carrier of smallpox and living in Blüdhaven and having a return address of Gotham those weren’t wholly out of the realm of possibility.

When he’d finally reached his kitchen Dick dumped the rest on the counter and just held the cream envelope in his hands, studying it with narrowed eyed suspicion that only increased as he read and reread “Gotham City Chamber of Commerce” in the upper left corner.

Finally, Dick opened a drawer, pulling a steak knife from within it and tore through the top of the paper. He slipped the invitation out and carefully read the script.

You are cordially invited to a night honoring Gotham’s great businessman and philanthropist Bruce Wayne

The night will feature a four-course meal and conclude with a roast of our guest of honor.

Please RSVP with the card enclosed.

Dick felt his eyebrows raise as he read the invitation again. A roast. Bruce was getting a roast. Bruce agreed to a roast. Bruce agreed to a roast after Alfred pressuring him into it and making the Chamber of Commerce agree to donate a rather large sum of money was more likely. And running his own investigation to make sure he wouldn’t wind up literally on a spit Dick was sure.

He chuckled and shifted the cards to find the RSVP and hope they hadn’t skimped on return postage when he noticed something odd. There was another piece of paper, nicer still than anything he had in his printer but not the same thick cardstock of the invitation. He unfolded it curiously and frowned as he read.

Dear Mr. Grayson,

We hope that you are well and hope to see you in attendance. We are writing to ask if you might consider being one of our special guest speakers for the night. As Mr. Wayne’s eldest son we thought that you might bring a unique and entertaining perspective to the stage. We have also reached out to Mr. Drake-Wayne and Miss Cain-Wayne and greatly hope the three of you would consider speaking.

We await your reply on the matter.

The Gotham City Chamber of Commerce Lucy Plumber Events Chair

As he finished reading Dick let the paper fall onto the counter. He went to collapse on his couch, fishing his phone out of his pocket. They wanted him to speak at Bruce’s roast. They wanted him to roast Bruce. Not that he couldn’t, he did all the time it was quiet easy after all these years and well brooding in a dark cave while dressed as a bat kind of made you an easy target. The question was did he want to roast Bruce in front of these people?

It was one thing to tease Bruce and make fun of him when they were in their masks because that wasn’t Bruce, that was Batman. Batman deserved it more often than not and had bigger things to worry about than Nightwing making fun of him in front of a gang of would be arsonists. Batman was used to having his protegee complain about him with various members of the Justice League and Titans, most of them had just about as much right to complain.

It was another thing to tease Bruce to his friends and family. They got it. They either grew up with the guy too or had been sidekicks themselves. There was a something that came from growing up in the shadow of heroes and really only people who had done that understood it. So yeah, him and Babs or Tim or Cass ragging on Bruce in the cave was allowed. They’d earned that right. Bitching about him with Wally or Roy or even Jason and Steph – when they were on speaking terms – was allowed too.

Standing up in front of a room full of Gotham’s elite and making fun of the man that, to them, saved Dick? Yeah, no. Ok, yeah he did save Dick that was true but he didn’t need a bunch of rich snobs thinking he was some ungrateful circus brat, he’d dealt with enough of that those first couple years after high school thanks. Besides, they didn’t deserve to hear Dick’s jokes. Not the ones about Bruce. They wouldn’t understand. He didn’t want them to understand. Those were personal.

Besides, what was he going to say? “You know how you grow up and people tell you you’re ‘one of a kind!’ and all? Yeah, Bruce never said that and for proof please let me point to the three others who are apparently just like me and even with changes to the costume some still think we’re a singular person!” Or, “People always tell me ‘you’re so well adjusted!’ and yeah I am for a kid who watched their parents die. For a kid who was raised and trained to fight crime by a man in a Kevlar furry suit? Well the verdict’s still out.”

Dick could just say no, he wouldn’t do it. Hell, Dick should just say no. It just… He didn’t know. It bothered him. Everything about being asked bothered him.

He kept playing with his phone, spinning it around in his hand, as he thought when he finally remembered why he’d gotten it out in the first place. He checked the time as he unlocked it and yup, Tim should definitely be awake by now. He hit the call button, lifted it to his ear, and waited.

“Nnngh. Whu?” Tim’s voice was muffled when he picked up and maybe Dick underestimated how late the kid could sleep in on a weekend.

“Good afternoon Timbers,” he couldn’t keep the tease out of his voice, not that Dick tried.

“’M on the west coast. ‘S still mornin’,” he protested. Dick winced a bit, he hadn’t realized it was a Titans weekend so yeah maybe Tim got some slack.

“Sorry.”

“’S fine. What’s up?”

“Well I was going to ask you about something interesting I got in the mail-”

“If Steph sent you a live bat it you should blame Jason,” Tim interrupted quickly and Dick paused.

“Um. No. What?”

The younger boy sighed and Dick could just see him scrubbing his hand down his face before pushing it back up to push his long hair back. It was a movement he did often and one that often prompted a remark about haircuts from Alfred. “I dunno. Harper got her and Cass really into Les Mis and then she and Jason ran into each other on patrol the other night and he caught her belting out One Day More or something? I really don’t know. She was talking really fast, you know how Steph gets. Anyways, they started talking and Jason told her something about how Victor Hugo sent his fiancée a live bat in the mail and she thought it was hilarious and well we all remember what happened when she found those websites were you could send people glitter and gummy dicks and poop.”

Dick had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. He did remember that, vividly. Tim and Cass both had a fine coating of glitter over their apartments for weeks after that, though with all the pranks and Cass being Cass there was normally glitter coating their apartments. Dick had gotten the gummy dicks sent to him and work and truth be told they’d been pretty good. Bruce had received the elephant poop. At the office. And Tim had seen and told Kon who’d told Clark and then there was an article in The Daily Planet and Bruce had been forced to give an interview to a very amused Viki Vale about the whole thing when she made a very compelling argument about the failings of a Gotham paper not being able to report on Gotham news and the importance of the press and well there’s a reason she and Lois go toe-to-toe on scoops.

“There was no live animals, though that would have been preferable,” Dick admitted once he was sure he wouldn’t burst out laughing if he opened his mouth.

“What did you get then? A dead bat?”

Dick snorted. “No. At least not today. I got an invitation to a roast for Bruce. And to roast Bruce.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Apparently, you did too.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Neither do I,” Dick admitted. “I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t know what I’d want to say.”

“You could say no,” Tim said levelly. “I haven’t even seen it yet but I’m probably going to. Too bad they can’t ask Jason since he’s legally dead and all, he’d love this. Or Barbara. Let her roast him, she’s good at that.”

Dick smiled and shook his head, imagining those two tag-teaming. It wasn’t hard, they did it on the comms some nights and it was some of the most vicious and scathing remarks he’d ever heard. Thankfully, it was rare they were levelled at him. There had been times though and those had been rough.

“I don’t think any of what they’d say is fit for the general public,” he said dryly.

Tim gave a noncommittal hum. “Steph and Harper. They’d just rip into him for being a rich white guy.”

Dick sat up straight. “That’s not a bad idea Tim.”

“What? Have Harper and Steph do it? Um, I still haven’t seen this thing but I’m fairly certain they asked us cause we’re his kids but not like an actual child like Damian.”

“No, I know exactly who it should be. Thanks. Have fun with your friends this weekend, I’ll come to the Manor for dinner sometime this week.”

“Um ok? Bye?”

“Bye!” Dick hung up with a smile.

He pushed himself up over the back of the couch and grabbed the letter off the counter. There was an office number under the signature and while there was a chance she wasn’t in today Dick figured that being Events Chair meant you worked weekends. Besides, it’s not like he couldn’t just leave a message.

She picked up on the second ring and Dick’s smile grew. “Hi Lucy,” he pushed as much charm as he could muster into his voice, “this is Dick Grayson. I just got your invitation to Bruce’s roast and while I’m honored that you invited me to speak I just don’t think I’m the right person for the job. However, I do think I could put you in contact with someone who is. Have you reached out to Bruce’s cousin? Kate Kane? She’s a delight and if her barbs at holidays are anything to go by I think she would be perfect.”

[onegirllis]

Have you really gone through episode 2 of LIS2? I really wonder what you think about it. Better, of course, the full answer.

I finished it indeed. The episode is about 3-4h long, depending on how much you want to explore and how much time it would take for you to find a way out. I was battling with the idea of sharing my thoughts because it’s very hard to judge just a slice of the story, instead of the whole season, but why the hell not. Maybe I will read it when episode 5 comes out and see how wrong I was. 

So, without further ado, here’s my review of episode 2, but please be aware it includes a lot of spoilers. It’s also as honest as possible, although it’s my personal opinion only. And yes, it may be harsh, not sugarcoated, but sincere. 

MY REVIEW OF EPISODE 2 OF LIFE IS STRANGE 2

Call me naive, but I really had hopes. I really did. I didn’t like ep1, it was way too slow for my taste, with some dramatic moments that felt off, but overall I assumed that it might be just an exposition, an introduction to the world, the characters and their problems, and that the game would elaborate on everything else later. Sometimes the beginnings feel off and it gets better later, so that’s why I had some hopes (not super high) that ep2 of LIS2 will remind me of why this game even belongs to LIS franchise and why I should play the whole season. 

Well, it didn’t work out. 

Characters

Again, It’s my opinion only but I don’t feel that there are any character developments whatsoever. Daniel and Sean didn’t learn anything freezing their asses off in the mountains. They didn’t change their ways, not learning patience nor being careful. There is no tension between them or any quarrel about the events. The acceptance of their fate is understandable, but not helping with the lack of overall tension. The moments of calm, that usually gave the player the opportunity to know more about the main character’s inner thoughts, instead serve the purpose of a summary of the few previous scenes and nothing more. It almost feels like the writers don’t like the PC and don’t want to tell us more about Sean, because there is absolutely nothing worth telling. Remember the girl Sean was in love with in ep1? Never mentioned again. Remember his friends, his boss, his job, school, or sports he was interested in? He doesn’t mention them either. There is nothing in the journal or in the dialogues that would show us anything we don’t already know or wouldn’t assume by ourselves, and Sean’s insights seem more like repetitive whinings than anything impactful. In episode 1 I could wave off the fact that they decided to walk to Mexico being shocked, traumatized and lost. In episode 2, when they notoriously risk their lives or reject any other solution not learning from experience just to run away, you start questioning their sanity. I know the reason behind it - “oh plot” but “oh plot” is not good enough. 

The boys miss their dad, but don’t feel much upset or don’t present any sign of emotional trauma. There are no breakdowns and the brothers are more or less in good spirits staying optimistic, not asking themselves a single question about the future. Comparing to Chloe who was repeating “I wish Rachel was here” over and over and was living in this trauma the whole time, they don’t seem very much impacted by the events, but on the other hand, they place the dad’s photo on the table, so his death can be conveniently mentioned. The dog died (yes, it’s true, Mushroom is killed off in the first 20 minutes), and even if Daniel is supposedly devastated, it takes him only 5 minutes to shake it off and never mentions this dog again (oh ok, maybe once). If the characters don’t freaking care about this animal, why should I? 

It also seems that the characters keep forgetting what the objective is here. Maybe it’s on purpose, but they recall certain friends only when it’s convenient for the plot. “I’m gonna call Lyla” says Sean towards the end of the episode, even if he hadn’t mentioned her for 2 hours of gameplay. And even when getting devastating news about her, he is not really concerned, shrugs and sighs deeply. Yeah, we sigh with him.

When it comes to Sean himself, I really don’t mind the PC being a guy, really. If I had a problem with it, I wouldn’t be able to play 90% of video games. The thing I do have a problem with though, is Sean being an utter asshole. Yeah, he takes care of his brother and all, but he is freaking mean to his grandparents, showing lack of empathy and acceptance of a different point of view. Calling the grandma, a woman who opened her house to them “an old bat” is just a bit too much, especially after a month spent in an abandoned house without food or heating. There is no reason for him to judge those people so much and if there is a reason, we don’t know the details. How can I emotionally invest in a character that is not opening up to me, the player? Or maybe there is nothing more about Sean, and that’s even worse. 

There is a big mystery regarding why their mother left her sons but if you expect any answer while the boys are visiting their grandparents and can snoop around in Karen’s old room, you’d be mistaken. The devs are building the mystery in the typical David Cage style, that one of the characters is about to tell you something “Oh, I will tell you what your mother did..~” and then something happens and we’re left in the dark again. At this point, I expect some explosive explanation of why their mother left the family, but it’s ether drugs, a religious cult or some relationship stuff.

Tragedy Porn

Dear devs, the fact that a lot of people in the fandom are familiar with this term and use it regularly, doesn’t mean you should take it literally. I know that the LIS franchise is about hard choices or difficult situations, but killing kids and small animals left and right is just cheap and really unnecessary. It quickly gets old, just like “the boy who cried wolf” (pun intended) that as some point I don’t even blink when witnessing another digital death. I can’t be devastated by Mushroom’s death, because the dog had less screen time than Sean’s skateboard. I can’t feel sorry for every character (human or not) that you didn’t even give me a chance to feel connected to. I know that you want me to “feel something” but at this point the “feel” changes into “yawn”. Chris AKA Captain Spirit being dead (or almost dead) AGAIN - so I helped the boy just to see him die 1 hour later (I know it’s optional but still)? Lyla in the hospital, the family from the abandoned house being wiped out of the face of the earth because of cancer (at least not a car accident this time), Chris’s mom dead, the boys’ father dead, grandpa almost dying because of the accident… It’s too much. It feels cheap and not impactful. At this point, I will be surprised if you won’t just kill everybody. Who needs people on the West Coast anyway, huh?

I don’t even know if I want to learn more about the boys’ mother since you probably will kill her too.

Politics and Religion

In this episode, politics have been toned down, still visible though and there are a few moments when I literally rolled my eyes. This time the devs decided to say something more about religion since it’s a significant part of life if you live in a small town in America. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the power of prayer is being mocked rather than actually shown as somebody’s way of life. Acceptance and tolerance go both ways though. 

The boys surprisingly identify themselves as Mexicans, even though they are half Irish and have never been to their father’s homeland. There are a few moments when you are wondering whether they had ever really liked to live in the US, questioning everything around them. Sean, who spent a decent amount of time with his dad on “the road trips” as stated in ep1, seems genuinely surprised that in his country people keep the Bible by their beds, as if he had never been in any motel whatsoever where the Bible is always present, placed on the nightstand or in a drawer. If being religious bothers him, boy, oh boy, you will be hella surprised in Mexico. They also don’t know how to pray, which I find extremely hard to believe. It almost feels like a scene from “Anne of Green Gables” but damn, the girl had a valid reason not to know. They don’t, especially if they identify themselves as Mexicans. We could assume that they were also part of Mexican-American communities and I cannot believe that in THIS WORLD the immigrants from this particular part of the world don’t know how to pray. Although if you expect some deep conversation about God or religion in general, forget it. It’s just there to be there and that’s it.

I don’t want to discuss the articles in the newspaper about “the gentle police officer” that was killed by immigrants because it makes my blood boil. 

Against the logic, the brothers are still planning to escape to Mexico and no grown-up is really trying to talk them out of this idea. There are no alternatives provided or discussed except a pat on the back and an offer for a quick stop if even. Even the grandparents are a bit concerned but no one really gives them any real advice, which I find unlikely. The problem is that if anybody would actually give them a piece of real advice, we wouldn’t have a game.

And that’s a problem, isn’t it?

Gameplay

We have a few mini-games and fetch quests like finding bottles in the abandoned house (why always freaking bottles?), the pirate version of dice poker (never brought back again) and drawing. None of those serve any purpose except a filler that you might enjoy but it doesn’t matter if you succeed in them or not, unless the game forces you to succeed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that this particular genre doesn’t usually provide a set of complex challenges in its gameplay, but it seriously looks like LIS2 is throwing us a bone, remembering from time to time that uh, it’s a game, not a movie. Those mini games are not really engaging, not really connected to the plot, but just for… whatever reason, as part of the daily chores. 

But it’s a game about choices, you say! Yes, it is, but only some of them really matter and I’m not sure for how long. If you give me a choice to do something or NOT to do it, please consider that I might pick the latter and don’t force me into your favorite path. It happens from time to time and it’s utterly annoying. If you want me to do something, just don’t give me the illusion that I can refuse. 

It almost seems that LIS2 turned into a dark alley where you are rewarded for picking the “good, canonical path” and punished for playing it differently than the devs indented. I loved LIS1 for ambiguous choices that I might pick, depending on my personal preferences, not to mention that those choices are made during an emotional moment. I don’t feel I have that opportunity here, just as if somebody who constructed it forgot why LIS was so great and is so loved.

When it comes to dialogue, it is way better than LIS1, regarding how people actually speak. On the other hand, the lines are just there to be there and I can’t recall a single line that would be worth quoting. 

And one more thing. Cutscenes. So many cutscenes. The moment when I actually could do something with my controller was a celebration. I don’t mind cutscenes in general, but it almost feels like a movie.  A long, boring, super slow movie.

Superpower


The superpower is mentioned, mostly in rules that Sean is lecturing Daniel about, but it’s non-existent in the gameplay almost at all. It’s drastically different comparing to LIS1, when Max was using her power almost all the time or was a challenge not to use it. Here we know that Daniel can do things but most of the time he conveniently forgets about it or uses it in the wrong moment. I know the game is about education but the superpower itself seems like a plot device, an additional reason to run to Mexico than anything else. They talk more about it than use it. It sounds like a good idea in general and it probably looked great on paper, but at some point I didn’t care about the superpower at all, forgetting that this secret even exists.

Season 1

When it comes to references to season 1, Arcadia Bay, or any character that we know from LIS1, there is almost nothing. Yes, you can find a drawing of ”door to another world” instead of hole to another universe, or graffiti on the wall that Sean and Daniel were here, similar to the famous junkyard thing, but it won’t give you any insight about what had happened to the favorite characters or any glimpse of their fate. There was more about Arcadia Bay in Captain Spirit than the whole LIS2 so far. The devs were damn serious, showing us Arcadia Bay in episode 1, destroyed or not, saying that this is the past. It seems that they don’t want to even refer to this past much and it’s fine, but if you’re hoping for anything, just anything related to LIS1, forget it.

Technical problems

Oh, boy. I’m aware that creating games is not an easy job and a team sport. I know that it’s almost a miracle that some of the titles even got shipped, but episode 2 of LIS2 is probably the MOST BUGGED EPISODE in the history of this franchise. Glitches, problems with sound, teleportation of objects, animations that didn’t work or songs being cut off… I’m not talking about a few mistakes here and there, but it happens all the time. It’s so common it’s an epidemic and you face some technical challenge almost in every scene as if Bethesda was putting this episode together. This episode looks like advanced beta, not a finished product that had been delayed for months. It seems ironic when recalling the posts from the Life is Strange blog about QA teams, one in France and one in Canada, carefully checking every detail and describing how quality was important. Especially in that context, this is really a disaster, however, I didn’t face any technical problem that would make this episode impossible to finish.

What worked

So what’s great about this episode? Does everything suck? Well, of course not. On the upside, the locations are absolutely stunning. You want to explore the town, the houses, play in the snow, dive into the world, even if you don’t expect anything groundbreaking to happen. The level design, in my opinion, is better than in LIS1, more consistent and intriguing. I know a lot of people might disagree with me but somebody put their heart and soul building this environment, creating something really beautiful. Except for the locations, I liked some songs and the music, way more than in ep1, but it’s not as good as in LIS1 or BTS. Better, but not great.

Cassidy

Oh, somebody was reading “Preacher”, weren’t ya? Or is ia reference to “On the road”? A lot of people seem excited about her finally showing up. I have mixed feelings about this character since I’m not sure if I want to discover the world from her perspective. A stoned, hippie-rasta girl, who takes pride in being free and “not owned by any corporation” (except Square Enix hehehe), is maybe a realistic character and I’m not saying that people like her don’t exist here, but I’m on the fence, to be honest. It seems that the devs are trying to establish the next canon ship or something with her being interested in Sean and him actually “liking her” after exchanging 3 sentences, but that really feels off. She seems more like Chloe 2.0 than anything else, but we shall see (in the next 6 months or whenever they will fucking publish the next ep). Plus for fuck’s sake, Sean was into Jenn (I don’t remember her name exactly), and there was Lyla, and then this girl. Dude!

Summary

It was boring. It was extremely freaking boring to the point that I lost my patience to check every single detail or examine every object. I don’t feel any need to replay it, even if the consequences of my choices weren’t great. I’m not curious about different outcomes nor do I want to check if I missed anything. There is not a single scene I want to see or experience again. In my game, Chris died and I don’t really feel the need to replay it and change the outcome since I will never meet him again or even deal with the consequences of his death. The whole road trip setting is intriguing but drastically different to what I loved about Life is Strange - learning more about each character, dwelling deeper into the situation, uncovering a hidden mystery. We won’t learn more about most of those characters (or it doesn’t seem possible) since we just pass them and move on, exchanging a dialogue or two like with a pedestrian on the street. There is a charm to the road trip idea, but then I would have to be extremely interested in the main characters, including the PC, to actually follow their journey closely. In LIS1 I didn’t have to like Max to play the whole thing, curious about Chloe or Rachels’ disappearance. In a road trip setting the two brothers are the core of the story and if you’re not fond of them, it won’t work.

So far it’s not working for me.

[junkyardlynx]

i feel like oversharing right now

it was always just me and my dad since i was very young. my mom was never in the picture, she passed when i was very young due to narcotic abuse, so he took care of me himself. his family shunned him for the most part and by extension, me.

we moved from the west coast to the midwest and settled down. at this time my father was already struggling with a few medical issues (a drop foot from an incident back in ‘89, a left hand near-permanently stuck in a claw shape due to an infection after a drywalling accident, a thumb that was torn off and re-attached on his right hand, chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis) but he was capable of work. he worked at a die shop. on saturdays i’d end up at his work, napping on a forklift or playing a game on my gameboy. 

after that die shop closed, he got a job at a steamer / griddle manufacturer and moved up slowly. he eventually headed the shipping department and got a job that mostly consisted of being at desk and managing other people. since he needed the money, they gave him some extra to come in saturday and take care of a bunch of cleaning and odd jobs around the cubicle farm. i’d end up there, and played a metric fuckton of Diablo II on his computer. sometimes i’d help out, but he never made me. if i did, he’d throw me a few bucks for some cards and we’d go get lunch. 

i was happy. he did everything in his power for me. he raised me right, he taught me love and respect, he’s honestly the reason i get people i deliver to saying shit to me like “I just wanna look out for you because you remind me of my son.” he taught me compassion and kindness. also taught me some snark and gave me a love for sci fi. i still fondly remember him telling me i’d probably have the day off from school, so i could hang out in his room with ice cream and watch x-files all night.

of course, happiness doesn’t last in stories like mine. when i was 12, going on 13, my father was involved in an accident at work. he’d been taking care of things at a warehouse and a steamer fell and crushed his hip. it caused part of his hipbone to break off. being the stubborn man he was, he refused to go to the hospital until he couldn’t walk. turns out he was suffering from spinal cord compression and ended up accruing permanent nerve damage. 

my 13th birthday was spent with my dad in an understaffed, underfunded nursing home. i brought my ps2 up there so we could watch movies on DVD. a coworker of his picked me up late at night and asked if i wanted to get food. i declined. she took me home and said she’d be staying the night. i told her it was fine and she didn’t have to. i just wanted to be alone. she relented on the terms that if anything happened, i called the police immediately and then her. 

my dad was my man. he was my hero. still is, honestly. it just shook me. i’m not trying to brag or anything, but i was a pretty smart kid - blind as a bat by the time i was in third grade so i got sucked into reading and other shit that involved being close up so my idiot eyes could see. i knew things would never be the same. in the last three months i’d seen my father cry out of fear and pray to god. god never answered. 

eventually, he came home. he used a walker from that point on. before, due to his drop foot, he always wore a sort of leg-boot-brace that supported his foot and ankle, but he could still play catch and everything with me. ah, he fucking hated that walker. my dad was only 60 when he died, so from the time he was about 48 until he was 60, he used a walker or a wheelchair. the image of my father swearing and burning with embarrassment on the few times he tried to go to the store with me is burned into my mind. it makes me so sad i feel like i want to puke. my dad was a handsome man and had a budding romance with the woman who’d taken me home. it didn’t go anywhere after his accident. 

as i turned 14, i ended up driving around town for all of the errands and groceries, only letting dad drive for his doctor’s appointments so they wouldn’t ask questions. i matured relatively quickly, i had facial and chest hair in my freshman year. thankfully i was never pulled over or anything. 

my dad and i felt guilt towards each other and it showed. we were overly cautious of each other’s space as i turned 16. for me, i basically blamed my dad’s poor health on my entire existence, reasoning that if i had never been born, he would still be out on the sunny west coast, living life to the fullest, probably happy and in love. for him, he confessed years later that he felt like he’d failed me because i never ended up going out much in high school, always being at home to make sure he was okay. i just wanted him to be okay. comfortable. happy, if possible.

we continued like this until i got out of high school. i had very poor credit when i was 18 due to bills being put in my name and then subsequently being unpaid due to my father losing his disability benefits several times over, and even then, i felt like i couldn’t really devote myself to my studies because his health was always getting worse. he was constantly plagued with MRSA and cellulitis in his legs among other things, leading to weeping sores on his frightfully small-but-swollen legs that never went away. i never ended up going to college. 

i got a job, and i’m still at that job. i’ve managed to grandfather myself into a somewhat ridiculous hourly rate while still working delivery, so other prospects are incredibly noncompetitive. i started paying the rent for him and trying to do what i could to help, but we could never get ahead. copays and equipment costs piled up, culminating in him requiring a nurse to come by every week and check on him. 

i remember coming home to our apartment one day to find a box of my dad’s medical supplies unceremoniously ripped open and scattered along the stairway outside of the apartment proper. all that was in the box was gauze, medical tape and a bunch of xeroform patches (commonly used to treat burned flesh, but used for my dad’s sores). the upstairs neighbors apparently thought he’d had some drugs delivered right to his door or something. i think that was the most murderous rage i’d ever felt in my life. i did nothing about it, other than stuffing the contents into the box and telling my dad that i’d accidentally ripped it open, laughing it off. 

things continued like this until i was 23, with my father sliding further and further down the scale of healthiness. i tried to live my own life. i fell in love. it was good. i had a bout of almost dying of sepsis at this time and even in the hospital, my main concern was my dad. i made sure that nurse showed up once a day to check on him instead of once a week. it took my entire tax return but it gave me peace of mind.

a few months after i got out of the hospital, my father went back in. he’d been passing out for periods of time and his lungs were heavily degraded along with the rest of his body. they shuffled him around to a few nursing homes, but eventually, there was no chance of recovery and they sent him to hospice.

i still remember the call. i was playing destiny and eating dinner alone in my new apartment that i’d been forced to relocate to (it’s where I live now) after they refused to sign the apartment lease over to my name where i was. i was doing good. i didn’t know they were about to give up on my dad. 

he called me. went a little like this.

“hey buddy”

“hey pops, how ya doin’?”

“i’m alright, are you playin that one game? still having trouble with that deathmatch stuff?” 

“nah, i finished that. what’s up? did you need me to run something down? you want some more peanut butter m&ms? i picked some up at walgreens on the cheap.”

“nah buddy. you don’t have to worry about that anymore. they’re gonna put me in hospice.”

his voice broke; i lost mine. it was a solid minute before i could speak. my fingers kept moving out of sheer rote muscle memory.

“hospice? but i thought you said you were doing okay.”

“i am buddy. i don’t wanna live in pain anymore, and i had a good life. i’m really proud of you, and i love you. i gotta get off the phone now, but you’ll be okay. they’ll call you in the morning to tell you where i’m being moved. i love you so much, spencer.”

that was the last time i ever really got to talk to my dad while he was lucid. we had a few rambling conversations while he was drowning in pain medicine, and i ended up leaving just a few short hours before he passed one morning. i still regret it.

i miss him so fucking much. my girlfriend broke up with me the week my dad died, telling me i was “too sad about it” and that “she couldn’t help me deal with that.” turns out she was cheating. 

i lost everything i ever loved two years ago. i nearly died the year before that. i’m not okay, really. i’m still not. i’ve been pulling the broken pieces back together but all i am is a collection of scars and bruises. i can’t find the places that don’t ache anymore. 

it was just my dad and i, and i still feel like i ruined his glorious, brilliant, shining life by being born. i know it’s not what he believed at all. it just hurts. it hurts so bad and it’s hurt so, so long. 

i wish you guys could have met him.

he was so fucking funny. he said the craziest things and always had a witty reply. he liked to mess with me and others. 

he was tender. the face he made when he met Kitty Pryde (my cat that i drove an hour to pick up) was the first real spark of joy i’d seen on his face in years. they were joined at the hip. she basically just settled for me after we left - if she had a choice, it’d always be snoozing on dad’s lap. when i’d leave for work and they’d be asleep on the couch, curled up together, i felt like things were gonna be okay. 

he was kind. even to those who treated him poorly, like the doctors that ignored his pain and refused to treat him like a human being. 

he taught me how to cook. he’s the reason i’ve been able to function like an actual person since i was young - he believed in self sufficiency but not pointless pride. 

he never once berated my interests. my dad grew up in the 60′s and 70′s and his spheres of interests were pretty far from mine until later in his life - man, i got to burn my dad a CD of my favorite music. and he loved it. and made me put all my favorite tracks on his phone. he watched anime stuff on netflix. he wishes he could have played games with me more, but his hands were so bad.

my dad was the best person i’ve ever met. if i turn out half as kind and giving as him then maybe i won’t waste the life he’s given me. 

i just. miss him. i had a good dad. he was the only family i really had, but he was all i needed.

and now he’s gone. 

and i’m alone, struggling to make ends meet, struggling with my creative outlets, struggling to make sense of everything in the calm waters of absence and loss.

[weaselle]

I put them both in one post.

I have a brother 10 years older than me and a younger brother and sister 5 and 7 years younger than me respectively. I call the older by his name, and also “dude” a lot. You know those twisty metal puzzles you have to figure out how to take apart or put back together, like puzzle rings and shit? He can do those in seconds without even thinking about it, like, idly while talking to you. He’s a daredevil bombs and blades tinkerer, and a practical joker. Once he told me he was getting out of the lake because it was noon and that’s when the sun shone straight down to the bottom and woke IT up, and then got out and snuck halfway around the lake to climb back in and swim up from underneath me to wrap a hand around my ankle and suddenly yank me down about ten feet at an angle toward the center of the lake. He went to jail for building a bomb, it’s a good thing they never found his other homemade weapons, like arrows with exploding tips, or the underslung potato gun mounted to the frame of his car. And I SAY potato gun but I saw him use his tester model to launch a wad of duct tape through a truck camper shell at the junk yard in the R&D phase, and he use to load it with a wad of something for batting topped by a snapple cap and a handfull of roofing nails and disintegrate mail boxes with it. He is a good wood sculptor and has a surprisingly delicate yet raw style when drawing with charcoal or graphite. He can take apart and put together almost anything. I could just write a whole book about his antics.

With my younger brother it’s mostly his name and “dude” quite often. Every once in a while, I will call him bro, or brother, but usually when I am low-key reinforcing our age difference. Like if he thought mom would react one way to something, but I had seen her reaction to that same thing before he was born or whatever, like, brother, I’ve known her longer. He is one of two people I know personally who may be legit geniuses. He used to play video games in the early 90′s by hacking their code and modding them - I’d walk in and he’d be 12 years old like “Instead of cannon balls, I made the cannon shoot cows that bounce around randomly a few times and explode, and I’m trying to make it so that each time a cow bounces, it spawns another bouncing cow bomb”. He has a… I want to say a Masters in Physics. His math teacher in high school tried to hold his interest by having him teach the first 15 minutes of each class. Once when the rest of us siblings were all standing around talking about sneaking out of the house, we asked if he ever did and he was like “why would I sneak out in the middle of the night… that’s when I sleep.” Now he’s a very mellow polyamorous hacker who brews his own beer and “isn’t allowed to tell you where I work, it’s so silly”

Our youngest I call by her name, and dude a fair amount, and a combination of the word sister and her name (like if her name was Brittany I would call her Sisttany) I do call her sister more than I use brother for my fraternals, but she calls us all brother quite a bit.  I think there are some complex reasons for that, but it boils down to her having been teased terribly and given a very hard time growing up by us, her brothers, who had a certain alliance against her. Of course by now we’re forced to admit that she is awesome and special and maybe the best of all of us. Certainly the coolest. Like, my younger brother is hella cool on paper, but when you’re in a room with him, he’s a little.. the only way he pulls it off is by truly not giving a fuck if people think he’s cool, which, as we all know, instantly awards coolness to whatever you’ve got going. On the other hand, when my sister is in a room, people laugh when she decides something is funny. Someone else is often making the decisions, but everyone only agrees to go along with them if sheagrees with them. She’s not wearing those clothes because they are cool, those clothes are cool because she’s wearing them, Once she worked at the same hotel I did for a while, and I asked her what she thought of it, and she said “I only ever want to work in a hotel again if I OWN it”. She was 19. She once knocked out her (now ex) boyfriend for forcefully taking his car keys away from her too roughly when he’d been drinking. He realized what he’d done too late to save him and she pulled him down from the fence he was climbing to get away from her so she could lay him out. She ran her own business for a while doing marketing stuff for publications and wineries and things, but she felt she was working too hard for the return she was seeing, and now she works for some firm overseeing the people who manage their social media or something.

And then there’s me, the Bard of the group, basically. I travel around on lots of adventures (I was arrested by the US airforce in Germany, I got stuck in England for a summer when they took my passport away from me at Heathrow - I stayed at a circus school with a few of the circus students who had no real home to go back to for the summer, and I put together a circus busking group with some of them and that’s how I made enough money to eat every day.) I used to write and produce full length comedies for the stage. I was SO sure I was going to be a con-artist, so I studied slight of hand and magic ( I ran a crooked poker game at recess) but as a young adult, when I picked my first pocket, I found I had no taste for stealing from real people (I’ll fuck up Coke any day, where’s Amazon’s pocket? Side note: I tapped the guy on his shoulder and handed his wallet back to him and said “I think you dropped this” and never picked a pocket again, but I can still do some pretty interesting stuff with cards and coins and things, Juggle knives and torches. that sort of stuff). Anyway, I adventure, and I write songs and stories, and my siblings mostly call me by my name, and very occasionally, dude. Also, my origins are steeped in mystery and my siblings are actually my cousins by blood, but that’s another story. Okay, here is that story.

My Grandmother was left-handed and the reason I love cooking and definitely some kind of Being. Her title was The Grandma. She had 4 great grandchildren by the time she died, and so her daughters became Grandma, but she was THE Grandma. She had this way about her, like she was incredibly present, but also paying attention to everything in the whole world. And then sometimes (notably when you fucked up) it was like she pulled her attention off all those things and put the whole thing on you; it was very unsettling. And she had the Voice, which she almost never used.

The last time Grandma traveled on an airplane with us, we were going though security and she couldn’t go through the metal detectors because by then she couldn’t get out of the wheelchair for longer than twenty seconds at a time. The TSA agent said she was going to search her or pat her down instead, and reached for my Grandmother. And Grandmother said, in the Voice

“Don’t touch The Grandma”

The TSA agent blinked and looked at grandma’s eldest daughter (a celtic witch if ever there was one) who merely shrugged and said “…don’t touch the grandma”.

TSAgent hesitated as if about to reach forward and insist, thought better of it, called TSA Supervisor over. TSA Supervisor explained everything to The Grandma - it’s just a quick pat-down, everybody who can’t go through the detectors has it done, they won’t even ask her to stand - and then reached forward to pat down my grandmother

“Don’t. Touch. The Grandma”

TSA Supervisor’s hands stopped as if hitting glass. She looked confusedly back and forth between the TSA agent and my grandmother for a second, and then the confusion left her face and she stepped aside, looked at the TSA agent and said “Don’t touch the Grandma” and waived us through security. They didn’t even scan the rest of us

It’s a shame she couldn’t fly anymore after that, she loved to fly; when her first husband died, she married P, a WW2 B52 crewman who taught her to pilot small planes, and they would fly up and down the coast to any cities they wanted to visit - she knew the West Coast in a way few people do.

One morning in the deserts of Nevada a year after P’s death she woke me up and said “get dressed, were going to into town to the casino; P visited me in a dream last night and told me I’d win a video poker jackpot with a royal flush today” and we drove into town so she could spend fifteen minutes playing video poker. I say fifteen minutes, because after fifteen minutes she hit her jackpot with a royal flush in hearts, and we went back home.

She used to sit in her chair in her living room with her back to the kitchen wall, and I’d go to leave the kitchen and I’d hear her from the other room “don’t you leave my kitchen mat like that” and I’d look over my shoulder at the mat in front of the sink, and sure enough, it would be all rumpled up; sorry grandma.

Grandma and I shared a birthmark, a red stain I won’t describe fully. And my grandmother and I were both adopted. Let me explain.

My Grandmother was adopted by a nice family.

And then that family all died, and she was adopted AGAIN.

She grew up and married a man whose Irish father I am named after: K, who came here from Ireland to work the Alaskan gold rush. She and her husband lived with his father K for a while, and this is a story about that:

Every Sunday. great grandpa K would go off on his own for a couple hours to “walk in the woods”. Grandma followed him one day. K walked into the woods, packed a pipe, sat down with his back to a tree, and took a small handful of nuts and seeds and fruits and leaves out of his shirt pocket. He scattered them around. Soon, as if expecting him, several animals came and helped themselves. The squirrels climbed all over him, on his head even. The raccoons sat in his lap. The birds sat on his knees and shoulders and in his beard and peered into his face. The deer checked his jacket for more snacks. After they hung out for about an hour, they all went on their way. Then K smoked his pipe and went home.

Grandma and K’s son had 5 kids.

One died as a child.

The eldest became an ER nurse and a savant witch. She would never admit she is a witch, but there’s a horseshoe over her door (not the front door, mind you, but the door she actually uses) and she’s the one who taught me to always leave a single spider in your house when you clean. She has a natural way with plants and animals -  the deer eat everything but her herb garden, which isn’t even fenced. This year one of them stayed in her backyard for nearly two months raising twins to be big enough to take back to the herd. She recognizes the individual squirrels and birds in her yard and knows their personalities and habits and things about their families. And of course as an ER and ICU nurse, she’s a hell of a healer.

The youngest was a witch, but sadly neglected, remained immature. Still, she had talents. She could fool people and make them laugh as easy as breathing, like some kind of glamour. Every long line of strangers she ever waited in became a party among friends. Could literally smell if you were lying to her. As in, she’d lean close and take a couple deep sniffs and then be like “Nope. Tell me, where did you really go after school?”

The only brother became a wandering holy man of sorts. Used to hitch-hike around the country in robes and junk, with a small, like, cult; then he quit them to just grow his own holy experience. He died in his 30s.

And the middle sister was my mother. She was double jointed and very dyslexic, and everyone says she was incredibly gifted in many ways. She did intricate artwork in ink, fractal gardens and faux woodgrain that was made of salvador dali faces, stuff like that. She was self taught on the piano, used to just walk up to a piano and play songs she made up on the spot that sounded how she was feeling and little crowds would gather. Made her own exercise equipment. Could pick up an accent within minutes and become semi-conversational in days. She had me with a half Japanese guy in the Air Force (he didn’t stick around). Then when I was about three, she sent me to live with her eldest sister, because her life got too, ah, interesting. Like, her partner had a hit put out on them. It wasn’t safe for me. By the time I was six it all caught up with her, and she died in an accident when she jumped out of the passenger side of a car and tried to run away as it stopped at a red light.

That’s when her eldest sister adopted me. The paperwork was messed up and my name is different on my birth certificate, my SS card, and my ID. Then, the person who filled out the “messed up” paperwork was fired, but I’m still a mystery to the bureaucratic world.  

So here I am, same birthmark as my psychic grandmother, orphaned son of a savant creative criminal and a Japanese-American soldier, named after my Irish, gold hoarding, bearded, pipe-smoking beastmaster great-grandsire; raised by a celtic witch, hidden away from the official world. Sometimes I feel like all those hero origin stories are trying to call me out of hiding. More about my adventures soon.

[dustindahusky-blog]

Would Americans buy a Chinese car?

From my view, yes. Here’s why a Chinese car might stick around long enough to catch on with American buyers.

 Cars are pillars of status, privilege, and pride in the USA. The car has truly made its home in our country and to many we often see them as members of the family or a faithful friend. Some like to show off with luxury or sport models or brands to denote their position in their company, neighborhood, or for the thrill of driving something fun or special. Most of us own what I would refer to as a daily driver, a car that gets you to A and B without fuss with creature comforts that make the everyday drive possible and while adding buckets of practically for any adventure. Some own minivans or CUVs/SUVs for hauling stuff around easier or to move large families around with oodles of space. Trucks are great for even bigger hauling and towing things around like boats or trailers of beer or stolen copper wire. However there is a price to pay with all this, depending on brand or model, new or used. Buying a vehicle is quite the important purchase for many. And they aren’t cheap depending on entirely what you’re looking for.  And this is where the Chinese auto manufacturers might have a leg on nearly all brands currently selling in the US. This even includes the value leaders of Kia and Hyundai, who have been known to sell cars at more reasonable prices than their competitors and offer more for what you’re buying.

 Installing a brand into a new market isn’t easy, however we have seen a template in which new guests into the US auto arena have done very well to get anchored in and to weather to storm ahead. At first European brands immediately after WWII have established themselves and have secured a foothold in the US, so did the Japanese in the mid 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Koreans in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and even late newcomers back on American soil like Tesla in the 2010’s have found their way to be taken seriously on the big stage. That successful template is offer something special or affordable in value, or do both. The original Volkswagen Beetle offered affordability, simplicity, and economy that was hard to pass up in the car starved post war era of the late 40’s. So was the Toyota Corona and Corolla of the late 60’s. The Koreans offered the Hyundai Excel that also provided much the same qualities. At the time when they were new, they were “the” disposable car of their time. They did a job well and adequately without many frills, and they were good value for the money for their respected time periods. Even the little Yugo from Socialist Yugoslavia offered the cheapest car in the US that only did the job to get you around town that didn’t get you wet when it rained.  They offered both young people and adults who didn’t have a lot of money to spend or who wanted to buy a new car at second hand car prices, cheap affordable wheels they can take home with.

 Now it’s 2018, and the brands that introduced themselves humbly during their times are now well established with the American buying public. No longer do we look at brands like Toyota, Honda, or Nissan with skeptical views of cheapness or being unpatriotic of not buying domestic, even today the scrutiny of buying Kia and Hyundai products is nearly nonexistent in our day and age because they have continued to up their quality and value game. Much like the many imports before them, we see them no differently than how we see GM, FoCoMo, and Chrysler-Fiat products. Just another quality brand. However now, there is a catch that we now see today, the import brands that came into our country that once touted affordability have now slowly over the passage of time become a tad out of reach for younger buyers. Yes cars are expensive, but most cars you see on dealer lots tend to be more expensive mid and upper trim option levels for most models, and you have to do some digging around to find a new car that is cheap enough to fit within budget needs. And here’s why this affordability is important with the feasibility of seeing Chinese cars in the US market. The average age of a car in the US is 11 years old, which honestly doesn’t sound that bad, though that feels kinda low. I’d feel it’s more like 15 years old, there are still a ton of older cars still rolling about the hills and the back roads. But whatever it is, people are holding on to them for many reasons. Can’t afford a newer car, maybe with plenty of work done a car could be driven for a lot longer, or maybe life priorities don’t call for the purchase of a newer car.

 Now let’s take a look at the Chinese auto industry. The Chinese economy is very much a living example of the Yugoslavian hybrid model of “market socialism”, centralized planning with capitalist competitiveness coexisting well together that promotes more frequent updates or advancements with the goal to sell to the consumer without having industrial or economic waste. Other socialist states didn’t work like this, and how they had vehicle development, marketing, and production was a much more different animal than what is seen in China today. And because of this, China’s automotive industry is has blossomed into many companies producing many models of vehicles for its vast “captive” and export markets. Some companies have properly obtained licensing agreements and their technical packages to produce vehicles, while some others have reverse engineered vehicles to blatantly copy. Their quality ranges from comparable to Western cars we come to expect to just low quality junk that we haven’t seen in cars since the 80’s or 90’s.

 If China makes most of our consumer products, cameras, phones, selfie sticks, appliances, industrial equipment and car parts, why not whole cars. Well China did try to extend into our auto market by selling us the Coda electric sedan on the West coast for only a model year from 2012 to 2013, and selling a dismal 117 units. Quality wasn’t where it should have been for the cost of $40k, and initially scheduled to be launched back in 2010 was held back two years due to lack of developmental time for durability. For the first US market launch of a Chinese made car that designed in 2004 on an older Mitsubishi platform, and an electric car right off the bat, no bite and little positive impression.

 Now for real, let’s say China markets a car brand for the US that passes Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) and fuel economy/emissions standards, they should start with basic affordable cars that people want to buy. It’s a no brainer that the US market for car sales is a huge market on its own, and even other European companies are envisioning a return back to grab a small slice of the market pie. For one, Americans might draw some skepticism to a Chinese car but the idea of buying a compact or even midsized sedan with loads of options for less than $15-20k is a tantalizing prospect and would buy them up like they did the Yugo. The Yugo did alright for staying in the market from 1985 to 1992, selling 142k units. If you can sell ten thousand cars like how Scion began in 2003, you’ll make a good enough foothold in the market, unless you’re Daihatsu. Sorry Daihatsu, maybe a subject for another day.

 What are you going to expect with your Chinese car when you get it. I would expect body panels that don’t align well as they should have, “orange peel” paint finish, interior plastics that look like they won’t last long, sheet metal that might go rusty in a couple years, seat fabric that might rip in not much time, fit and finish overall is generally an afterthought. Again, you’re paying to get pissed off like buying a $3990 Yugo sold new in 1986 (if you could ever find one that sold for that low back then), but remember that you’re buying a set of wheels that’ll get you by for the time being. Much like how people expected Hyundai Excels to be just garbage piles, still preformed the duty of a basic if not agricultural car.  But that would be a worst expectation of what a Chinese car could be. Who knows, maybe if the Chinese are that serious about the US market, they’ll build a separate assembly line like the Zastava factory who built the Yugo for the USDM. Here’s a scary thought, we all know how much of a mixed bag the Yugo was in the US, and to think the ones that made it here were built better on another assembly line meant for our market, I can’t imagine what the Yugoslavian market Yugos were like.

 Much like every cheap and affordable car that introduces itself to our market, expect it to have little to no resale value to speak of, however you’re not really expecting to sell this car if you were looking at buying one. In your situation, you’re buying your first car for the first time or needing a second car, something to get you rolling for the time being. Whether if you’re in college or in highschool, or down on your luck with an older car that kept falling apart. The idea that you could buy a Chinese car for peanuts is something that’ll get the job done, and not care much about what you’re driving. You’re not expecting mind bending performance or luxury, you know what you’re getting into if you do, and the more you accept this the better. I mean no Toyota Corolla was ever sporty in the 70’s, it was the car you bought after the Ford Falcon finally rusted away and you needed to buy something fast so you can still go to night class. And if there were Chinese cars in the market here to buy, I’d buy one to drive it into the ground to either save up for a better car or just to buy another if one wasn’t enough. In the world of millennials sometimes having no credit or shit credit could transpire into a hairy situation of sticking with a rusty 90’s Nissan Sentra affectionately named “Liam Nissan” that eats too much oil or asking your aunt to buy her equally rusty Plymouth Breeze with empty cigarette packs scattered around. You’d rather buy a Chevy Cruze however you’re afraid that one for $10k and 83K miles might end up needing routine maintenance that you couldn’t afford to pull off on the spot and any new Kia Rio found on a dealer lot is still thousands over the mythical minimum sticker price. Hell, if a Chinese car was too expensive brand new, wait a year and you could even get one for sub $6-8k prices, maybe even less.

 Honestly I’m really surprised that the Chinese haven’t entered our market yet, they have entered the European zone and been a huge mainstay in Russia (I guess Ladas aren’t cheap enough for them) for years now. They can range from cheap to really adequate modes of transportation, even something to own for more than you really require of it. The Chinese have been making Audi’s, BMW’s, and Buick’s with huge demands because they have been grand sellers in terms of luxury, and they tend to be of quality similar to their genuine originals. Whatever the Chinese do throw out us someday, we’ll gladly be in open arms for cheaper alternatives to newer, or really used cars. Plus, we Americans love to rip on unknown shitboxes, then in 15 years’ time we are buying them by the thousands. Who would guess in 1966 that Toyota would be producing quality luxury sporty cars under the Lexus brand. In 1995 when Kia would one day be producing a car like the Stinger that is chasing around other RWD sport sedans. In 1992 the Yugo going on to better things….oh wait we ran out of Yugoslavia by then. Mhmmmm we never really did get the Tata Nano here in the states (who remembered when that came out, $3000 car that had a fire problem), even though that there was an interest for a short while. In 1970 Americans wouldn’t expect Datsuns to be called “Datsun by Nissan” in 1984 and just Nissan by 1985. Import brands change and morph in the fluid of time, and many are still here. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Chinese brand turns out to be a good seller in 5-10 years time much like how the other imports started out.

 And apparently on a quick google search, it seems that the Chinese auto company GAC has an interest in joining the US market in late 2019. Under the local Chinese brand name….Trumpchi. They are serious, and honestly their vehicles don’t look that bad either. In fact they would fit right in with this country. They are figuring out a newer name to use in North America. No one is certain how reliable a new Chinese car will be in the states, but if it’s cheap don’t expect it to last forever.

 If you made it this far, hurray! If you like my rambling, you’d like what I’d have in store in the future. If you don’t, well, I’m still going to write it down anyways. :D

 Keep zooming!

[minimotives]

First and foremost:

I am absolutely sorry for the last blog post that you may or may not have seen if you subscribe to this blog (It’s gone now).  I was not hacked but apparently James was.  Also, apparently he was set as a contributor to this blog.  So someone hacked into his account and published some sub-par English (like I have any room to complain!) post about something or another… I am sorry to be a cruddy email in your inbox though and thank you so much for those of you who let me know so I could handle it!  It has been fixed and I’ll do my very best to not let it happen again!

Quick Recap!

So, 13 months, to the day, is how long we were on the road.  And 39,998 miles (I’d like to just round that up bat I can’t do it).  In that time we were able to hit 45 national parks (all of them in the lower 48 excluding 4 island parks accessible only by boat or plane).  We can all, including Denver, say we’ve been to 48 of the 50 states.

I did technically take a computer but it was not easy to hook it up to the internet (I attached via phone).  Then, every time I did my computer wanted to update.  So any time I wanted to write a blog post I had to basically wait 2-4 hours and hope I remembered enough to scribble it down.  As you can see, I think I wrote about 6 blog posts the whole time we were out and that was from my phone (its not easy to blog via touch pad!).  I’m sorry for that but it was a lot more fun exploring the country!!  Hopefully, if you wanted you were able to find us on Instagram where I still updated.

We left in the middle of some hot and heavy tiny house discussions and it’s pretty much been tabled the whole time we were away.  We are very happy to be back thought to finish working through the nuances and hopefully make it easier to live tiny in Idaho at least!

Before That Happens Though:

We have to find a home base.  The thought of mooching off any family while we figure it out is not appealing.  We have great tenants in our ‘real’ house and have no ambition to kick them out just so we could live there a little while.  We can’t occupy the tiny house. Short term (or long term) rentals are astronomical in Boise right now. (Click here for a special link to Yahoo about our hometown)

This left us with one logical answer.  When James moved in to the tiny he never fully downsized.  He just kind of put his things in boxes and then built a basic, detached garage for his ‘real house’, then stored all of his stuff in there.  So we’re converting that garage into some temporary housing for our family of four!

Our Anniversary

We didn’t just end our trip 13 months to the day after take off, we also ended it one our anniversary.  Every year we take a family photo in front of our home as a snapshot of the year.  I am glad to get another picture with ‘Lil Beastie! (our camper).  Here are our anniversary photos to date, I wonder what next year’s will look like! ha!

We lead a pretty cool life, I am so glad I, on a whim, started taking these pictures!

Year six, can you believe we were on the same vacation as the picture taken one year earlier! 🙂

Year Five, new home on wheels for a while

Year four, no new family members!, yea!

Year three, Miles is just about done cooking!

Year two, surprise baby Hazel!

Year one, the day Denver came to live with us!

First date – who even gets this picture??

Now The Downsizing Begins Again!

James has been hardcore into the real downsizing efforts.  A year on the road has been pretty eye opening for both of us on what we really need (spoiler: less than what we currently own!).  Honestly, I have cleared the tiny house of several truck loads of stuff!  Our kids have grown up in a year and they really don’t need all the baby stuff we had.  James has gone through box upon box.  We’ve taken two truck loads to the dump, were planning a yard sale for anything else.  Whatever doesn’t sell will be donated to start a new life elsewhere.  Hazel and Miles have been going through all their stuff, they are excited to earn money from their toys AND plan on hosting a lemonade stand for cool refreshments.  I absolutely cannot believe the amount of STUFF we have accumulated in our tiny little places!

Building Anew!

After this weekend we really get going!  We will be adding a kitchen, a custom playhouse/fort for the kids, and doing all those little projects that take a garage to a home for a family of four and their dog!  I will try to do updates because its totally relevant to ‘tiny homes’ and living in small spaces.  Sometimes Instagram is just easier for me because it’s quicker (and can be done from my phone).  I will definitely update on the legalities once that conversation gets going too.  I am happy to be back and ready to rock this world again!  In the mean time here are some of my favorite pictures of our adventures!

Also, this is not the end of our travels, we absolutely plan to make it to those four parks we skipped and are already planning our trip to Alaska (my last state) for next summer followed by celebrating James’s 40th birthday next fall in Hawaii!  We should be able to see all these amazing National Parks before too long!

Oh, P.S.

Our cat is mad we are back.  Did you know we had a cat? It’s probably because I am a dog person ;-).

He misses his bachelors pad and all the fancy parties he used to throw! While we were away we had an RFID cat door programmed to his microchip so that he could enter and exit the house at will (but nothing else could).  We set up a camera pointed at his food so we could make sure he was alive and eating.  Any time the food got low we would order another bag from Amazon and have James’s sister or mom run over and fill his dish.  Pretty sure he enjoyed that set up a whole lot more than he enjoys our company!

The Pictures

Tetons NP

Washingtons Peninsula

Cascade NP

Mt. Rainier NP

The Oregon Coast

Crater Lake NP

Redwoods NP

Patricks Point, CA

Everglades NP

Bug watching, She is the best at finding lizards, frogs and catipilars

Bryce Canyon NP

Death Valley NP

Suguaro NP

Florida dog beach

Grand Canyon NP

Yosemite NP

California Free Camping

Zion NP

Zion Hike

Utah Farm

Mesa Verde NP

Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP

The dop of the highest sand dune in North America, Great Sand dune NP

Petrified Forest/Painted Dessert NP

Painted Desert NP

Spring in Death Valley NP

Death Valley

Death Valley Dunes

Joshua Tree NP

Saguaro NP

White Sands NM

White Sands NM

Big Bend NP

One of MANY awesome aquariums (this one is in Mississippi)

Mardi Gras Parade in New Orleans!

Cocoa Beach with Poppy

Furthest South Point in the US

Disney’s Animal Kingdom

Disneys Magic Kingdom

Florida

North Carolina

Playgrounds across America!

Mammoth Cave NP

Smokey Mountain NP

Random Virginia picture (such a pretty state!!)

Shanendoah NP

Shanandoah NP

West Virginia

Washington DC

Wild ponies!!

Birthday Boy in Maine

Furthest east point in the US

Denver could not contain himself around that much water!

thousand Island area in New York

Hot springs

Sibling bonding

Denver got a lot of this!

He learned to fake his first smile and I caught it on camera!

Sand dunes in Michigan

Teddy Roosevelt NP

National Grasslands

Idaho is kinda pretty too 🙂

Learning new tricks

Glacier NP

Teton NP

Mt. Rushmore

Badlands NP

Rocky Mountain NP

Happy Campers!

Colorado bonding

Great Salt Lake

Spiral Jetty, UT

Great Salt Lake

AND… We’re Back! First and foremost: I am absolutely sorry for the last blog post that you may or may not have seen if you subscribe to this blog (It's gone now). 

[sargenthouse]

Dylan Carlson Photos + Interview // RCRD Magazine

DYLAN CARLSON

Interview and photos by Dominic Goodman via RCRD Magazine

I understand you moved around a lot growing up. Were you influenced musically by the places you visited or even just in a more general cultural way?

Yeah I mean my Dad worked for the department of defence, so I guess sort of an army brat in a weird way. Not in the military, I guess a child of the military industrial complex. As soon as we were born we left Seattle for Philadelphia and then from Philadelphia to New Mexico, then New Mexico to Germany and then we moved three times within Germany and then back to the States where we lived in Texas and then New Jersey and then back to Washington. My grandmother was Scottish. She came over to the States right after the war. We still had relatives living in Scotland so when we lived over in Germany we used to visit our relatives in Scotland quite a bit. My Dad worked for the military but wasn’t in the military, except for one year, so we didn’t live on bases, we lived out and about. We did go to U.S. schools but apart from that my parents definitely took advantage of the fact that we lived overseas and travelled a lot. Unlike, I remember there was a Sergeant that worked for my dad and he was proud of the fact that in his five years of being stationed overseas he had never left the base, never eaten outside the NCO club, didn’t know any German, you know, complete isolationist just waiting to get shipped back home basically. It was really strange, that kind of mentality of being somewhere that had so much to offer and just basically ignoring it.

Did you feel like you picked up on those cultures as you were moving around?

Yeah, definitely, we travelled a lot during school breaks and stuff like that. My dad had friends who were, you know… there was this one couple that were my parents friends. He was French but in the US Air Force and had a German wife Then our friend Peter, he had a German wife so they lived outside the base, they didn’t live in the enclaves. I guess nowadays you couldn’t get away with that.

Were you interested in music at that stage?

Music was sort of ever present in the house just because of my parents being of the generation they were. I guess you could say I grew up listening to a lot of my parent’s music. When we were like five as part of our Easter egg hunt we got the first Allman Brother record as a prize. I grew up listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and The Band, I guess what they would call ‘Classic Rock’ now. My Mum’s best friend’s husband was a big Zeppelin fan and Blue Oyster Cult fan, so sort of like through osmosis I picked up a lot of music. Once we moved back to the States when I was in Junior High, at about 11, I could start buying music myself or at least wanted to buy music myself. That’s when I guess I gravitated towards… my first record was an AC/DC record, that’s when I started getting into hard rock and heavy metal I guess. What they called heavy metal back then, now of course it would be called something entirely different because of the micro-genres.

What kind of age did you begin to play or start to want to play?

It’s funny, I guess the first time was the moment I heard AC/DC, that was when I wanted to start playing. I didn’t quite figure out that you could play until a few years later, so I guess it was about 4 or 5 years of wanting to play before realising ‘oh I actually could play’.

Would that have been with friends? Did you form bands with friends at that time?

Not right off the bat, I mean right off the bat I just wanted a guitar and got a guitar and started learning to play and learning to write songs. It was weird because later, as I met people who played guitar, most of them spent most of their time learning to play other people’s stuff and I never really went that route. I just started trying to write songs from the get go, which, sometimes I regret not learning how to play other people’s stuff at the same time. For some reason it seemed like instead of learning to play Stairway to Heaven I should just learn how to write a song.

Obviously around that period of time, around Seattle, so much great music was being created. Do you think that there was something happening or a cultural aspect that enabled that, or just chance and a knock on effect from one band to another?

I think it’s a combination of things. Ultimately I think it’s the fact that you have an area where there’s not a lot going on. I can still remember the very first article on Seattle that was in NME and the description of Seattle was: “An obscure West Coast seaport”. I think the fact that Seattle wasn’t LA, or New York or one of those kind of places where people looked for things to happen it kind of created this blank slate for things to happen. Once people saw that there’s people doing things and it’s like getting noticed then more people wanted to start doing stuff. It kind of builds from there. I don’t think anyone set out to be like “Seattle is going to be the cultural nexus of rock music for the 90s”.

Was it exciting to be a part of that scene or was it frustrating that it very quickly had so much attention focused on it?

It’s weird, I mean at the time, you don’t really notice that’s going on so much. It’s just sort of like, stuff is happening and you see other bands doing stuff and they’re getting noticed and other bands aren’t. At least from my perspective it’s not a very conscious thing, it just kind of happens and some people are able to take advantage of it and other people aren’t.

I’m interested in the sound that you and Earth have It seemed to sort of be there from the outset and yet you’ve managed to integrate that into different styles while still keeping this very idiosyncratic sound. Was that sound for you something that was very instinctual or was it something that developed through a number of years as you were beginning to play music?

I guess it would have to be sort of an instinctual sound, choosing to do it in a specific way….

Your guitar sound has certainly influenced lots of people. It’s instantly recognizable in the context of Earth but you have also been able to integrate it into a lot of different styles sometimes not always expected.

It’s funny I look back on the old days and where I was very equipment specific and “oh I need this” or “oh I need that” and now it’s like, I’ve sort of realized that I don’t really need any of those to do it.

Because it’s coming more from you than the equipment?

It’s not the gear, I mean, there is certain gear that makes it easier but ultimately, regardless of what I’m given, it’s going to be me that it comes out of. It’s not based on what I’m using.

Going back to the early days, specifically Earth 2 feels like a very daring record in it’s simplicity. Did it feel like that at the time it first came out? What was the reaction to it at that time?

Well, yeah. Earth 2 definitely was the most conceptual album. At the time it was like, what’s the maximum amount of time we have for a CD? which was like 73 minutes, so it was like, let’s fill up all 73 minutes. Again we ran into another problem which was that at the time you could only get a half an hour reel on a recording tape hence it had to be broken up into three parts. Conceptually that was intended to be the extreme of what technology could handle so that is what we wanted to use.

How did people react to that when it came out?

It’s funny now that it’s gotten this patent of ‘oh it’s such an amazing record, blah, blah, blah”. Obviously there were a few people who liked it but ultimately when it was first pressed there were 2,000 copies pressed and it took 3 years to sell those 2,000 copies. It was certainly not a popular record [laughs].

You talking about Earth 2 being the most conceptual, it seems in a way that all your records feel quite conceptual. Is that something you think about before you even start writing or do you begin writing a record and it just develops in that way?

I think nowadays, they’re much less that way. Originally I used to have notebooks of song titles. I’d write music and eventually I’d go through and be like “Oh this song title works for this piece” whereas nowadays the music comes a lot faster than any kind of song title.

Regarding Earth, do you put in time where you say “we’re going to write” or is it just an ongoing collaborative process?

I’m always writing stuff. Some of it will be an Earth song, some will be something else, so yeah it’s not compartmentalised. It’s not like “now I’m writing an Earth record” or “now I’m writing this record”. I’m just writing and I think this might be good for an Earth song or this one might be good for something else.

You’ve obviously got a very strong understanding within the band when you’re playing. Are the tracks very structured before you play live or is there a lot of improvisation going on?

I’d say there’s a lot of improvisation. There’s like certain riffs and those riffs can vary the number of times they’re repeated.

So there’s a general structure and you just work around that? Is that the same with when you’re recording?

It depends upon the song, recording wise some of the songs are more structured than others.

You mentioned about you having ancestry from the British isles. Is knowing that something that drew you back here or do you think it was something in your genes that you connected with?

I think it’s definitely something I was aware of.

You visited Scotland growing up?

Yeah we visited Scotland and England quite a bit when I was younger.

And (your interest) in the folk aspect?

I guess that came later.

The origins of the background to some of those songs? Did you do some research on that side of things?

Yeah luckily, you know, there’s Cecil Sharpe House and Child Ballads those are quite a bit of information available on the history of that, which was quite helpful.

I’m interested in The Bug collaboration and how that came around. On paper I couldn’t really of envisaged it but in reality it works so seamlessly.

That happened kind of like out of pure serendipity. Simon Fowler, who’s illustrated a number of Earth album covers has also done a number of Bug album covers, so I guess was the catalyst.

In terms of you guys meeting each other?

Yeah, Kevin [Martin] was aware of my work from back when he was a rock journalist. He’d been given an Earth2 record to review back in the day. I guess he must have kept tabs on what I was up to…

So he approached you with a concept for a project?

Yeah, originally he was doing this ‘Angels & Devils’ record and he wanted me to play guitar on a couple of the tracks and then for whatever reason it ended up becoming separate tracks. We ended up doing two 12” and keeping it separate from the record. We’d done a few shows together at the behest of Ninja Tune, and he was like ‘Oh why don’t we do a full record instead of just a 12”’ so we did that and the response has been really overwhelmingly positive.

Were you familiar with The Bug before?

It’s weird, I wasn’t as familiar with his music as he was with mine. I went through a period of time in the late 90s, during my – what do you call it – ‘silent era’? where I got quite into Jungle and stuff. I mean I’ve always been a big dub reggae fan so I guess it grew out of that. That’s where the interest came from.

So you were listening to more contemporary electronic music?.

Yeah, I mean, there’s music that I love and listen to a lot but there’s also music that….I mean, I think there is good music within every realm, I don’t think anyone has an exclusive hold on what’s good music and what’s bad music. There’s certain genre’s where it’s harder to find good music but.. [laughter]

Do you feel like you’ve gone through periods of time where you’ve listened to different genres in that sense?

Yeah, I mean I try not to. To me genres are kind of marketing tools, marketing gimmicks.

You mentioned that hiatus period when you weren’t putting any records out and then you came back. Was Hex the first record after you came back?

It was the first I guess that was [a proper album]. We’d done a live record: “Living in the Gleam of an Unsheathed Sword” and some other recordings but they were all live.

Was there a catalyst at that point where you thought it’s time to get back to creating?

Weirdly enough that time I started playing guitar again just because I wanted to play again, I didn’t set out to either restart Earth or restart guitar to be noticed.

You were just drawn back to it without any particular reason?

There was no plan to redo Earth or even necessarily to perform as Earth again.

Now, moving forward is your plan to continue with another Bug album, or work on your own stuff? Are there other plans for more?

I recorded a solo record in May of last year that’ll be out soon. We’re going to do another Earth record there’s no date yet for it or anything, but we’ve been writing it and we’ll see what’s up with it…

Dylan Carlson’s new album Conquistador is available now – HERE

[truthofherdreams]

Of baseball bats and psychic powers (3)

Steve rents a little flat above the electronics shop, despite his parents’ protests. His mother had wanted him to stay at home for a little while longer and then his father had offered to help with the deposit on a house, which was so fucking ridiculous Steve refused immediately. He likes his bachelor pad, like Nancy calls it, and the fact that he can spend his days off in nothing but his boxers without anybody to see or judge. It’s just enough independence for him who still doesn’t entirely have his shit together.

Kali follows him inside, failing to look bored as her eyes roam every inch of the main room. His cereal bowl is still on the coffee table and he can’t remember the last time he did the dishes, which wasn’t a problem before a hot, deadly girl showed up. Playing host isn’t that good an idea, all of a sudden.

“Pizza okay with you?” He makes his way to the fridge, grabs two cold beers and offers one to her.

She opens it and takes a long gulp, a sigh escaping her mouth when she licks the beer off her upper lip. Steve does a pitiful job of not staring.

“Vegetarian for me,” she answer. Then, when she notices his raised eyebrows, she points to herself. “Hindu.”

Steve stares at her, perplexed. “Isn’t alcohol forbidden?”

Her eye roll is so impressive he’s afraid her eyes will be stuck at the back of her head for a moment, but then she’s back to glaring at him. “That’s Islam, you idiot.”

“Fine, fine.” Can’t really blame him for not knowing those things. Hawkins is mostly white with, like, two black families and a Jewish one. That’s about it.

She’s still glaring by the time he reaches the phone and punches in the pizza parlour’s number. Better not linger on why he knows the number by heart, or how he doesn’t have to give his address. He just asks for two pizzas, one pepperoni, one cheese, and leaves it at that. The phone rings again the moment he hangs up, and he blinks at it before picking it again.

“Hullo?”

“Hey, Steve.” Sometimes, he wonders if his heart will stop doing that weird flip-flop thing every time he hears Nancy’s voice. He’s pretty sure some small part of him will always be in love with her, even if he’s over her now, moved on and everything. It’s kinda hard, completely forgetting your first love. He’s been doing an okay job, but some feelings linger.

“Hey, Nance.” He spares a glance for Kali, who’s now looking at the pictures of the dipshits and him stuck to his fridge, before he takes the phone off its hook on the wall and moves to his bedroom, closing the door behind him. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to check in. Mom says she hasn’t seen Mike today and nobody’s answer at Joyce’s so…” So I’m wondering if the end of the world is near. Steve knows the feeling.

“He’s fine. We’re fine. Everybody gathered at Hopper’s and…” He sighs, loud, as he sits down on his bed, one hand in his hair. “Turns out Dustin and I are the only sibling-less in the gang.”

Only silence answers for a few seconds, before, “What do you mean -- is Joyce -- wait. What?”

Steve lets out a low chuckle, before he fills Nancy in. She’s back on the West Coast with Jonathan, settling in San Francisco a couple of weeks before uni starts again. Steve tries not to feel too jealous of them, because he loves his life and everything, but. Sometimes, he wishes he’d gotten out of Hawkins, too.

Nancy, bless her heart, gasps at all the right places, never interrupting him until he’s done with his tale. Even when he’s done, she stays silent for a little while longer, and he pictures her nibbling on her bottom lip or playing with her hair or something very Nancy-like to do.

When she speaks again, it’s with the kind of mirth in her voice that has Steve wish she didn’t speak at all. “So, she’s hot right?”

He lets himself fall backward in bed, one arm above his eyes, with a loud groan. “Is that all you’re focusing on?”

She laughs. “You’re telling me King Steve would let a girl come to his bachelor pad if he didn’t have the hots for her?”

“Hey! Be nice! I let you come to my place, and El, and Red and…”

“Joyce?” He hears the smirk in her voice, and he hates her for it. Just a little. “I mean, girls you’re actually planning to sleep with, not your almost-sisters and everyone’s mom.”

“And you.”

“And me.”

Steve is the one to let the silence linger this time. He’s so very glad he managed to stay friends with Nancy, after everything. Their friendship was rocky at best, at first, when she told him what happened with Jonathan and he nursed his broken heart but. He has no idea what he would do without her as his best friend, even now that she lives so far away. She understands him in a way nobody else ever did.

“Yeah, she’s pretty.”

“‘Pretty’?” she asks with a laugh. “Wow, even worse than I thought.”

“Okay I’m going to hang up on you now.”

She laughs again. “Come on, Steve!”

“Bye, Nancy!”

She’s still talking to him and laughing when he actually hangs up the phone, a smile on his lips. He needed that, someone who doesn’t hero-worship him like the kids do, or glare at him like Hopper, and now Kali, do, or anything. Nancy doesn’t believe his bullshit, and forces him to face the truth. Not that he was particularly denying having the hots for Kali. He has eyes, after all.

When he goes back to the living room and puts the phone where it belongs, it’s to find Kali lounging in his couch. She’s stripped off a few layers of clothes and is now down to a simple black tank top and her jeans, boots and jackets on the floor. There’s a hole in one sock and another one on her knee, and she’s showing way more skin than Steve was ready for. Also, she has her nose in a book, and doesn’t look up even when she says, “Girlfriend?”

“Ex, actually. Now best friend.”

She raises an eyebrow but still won’t look at him, and Steve wonders when exactly he lost his charms with women. If he ever had them in the first place. Or if Kali is a special case, in more than one way.

He’s stopped in his musings, and in Nancy’s words coming back to haunt him, by a knock on the door. It’s his usual delivery guy, some boy he vaguely remembers from high school, and Steve tips him as he grabs both pizza boxes then slams the door shut with his foot. Kali is still reading when he puts the pizzas on the coffee table and sits in the armchair, but she perks up a little at the greasy smell.

“What are you reading?” he asks, because maybe awkward conversation is better than awkward silence.

She doesn’t look up, and deadpans, “Pride and Prejudice,” even if he can clearly see she’s holding a Margaret Atwood book. It’s going to be a long night.

“What’s this about?”

She sighs, and for a moment he believes she’s not going to answer. But then, “It’s a dystopia where fertile women are the slaves of rich families who want children.”

That’s. Okay. Wow. “I too read to escape the shitty world we live in,” he finds himself replying, like a moron.

She snorts a laugh, looking up at him above the top of her book, before she closes it and puts it aside. She grabs a slice of pizza next, smirking at him with her mouth full of food, head tilt to the side. Steve wonders what she sees, what she’s looking for. He’s but a suburban kid with bad jokes and a history of getting himself into trouble and she -- is so much more than that. Much more trouble, too.

“Where do you fit in all of this?” she asks after a while, around another mouthful of pizza. “Jane never mentioned you.”

“Probably because we only met after she came back from her little Chicago adventure,” he replies. Only in passing, and then he’d been at the hospital for two days because of the concussion Billy gave him, and El had been passed out for a full week, and it was another week before they were formally introduced by Dustin. He still remembers the bags under her too big eyes and the smile at the mention of him saving all of their annoying asses in the tunnels. “Told you, I was the babysitter.”

Kali purses her lips, before she points to the corner of the room. “That to play with the kids?”

He doesn’t have to look to know she noticed the baseball bat in the corner. He used to keep it in the trunk of his car, until Hopper saw it and lectured him about safety issues. Now it stays here, ready to be grabbed if something happens. It hasn’t moved in months, thank god. “Yeah, Mike’s into baseball,” he replies, with a smirk of his own.

“You’re weird.”

In her mouth, it sounds like a compliment.

…

He has to fight her over offering his bed to her, because he’s too chivalrous for his own good and she’s too stubborn and this entire scenario is too fucking stupid. Yeah, his couch is not the least comfortable and she’s small enough that she would fit nicely, but. His mother raised him better, okay? When you have a guest over, the guest gets the bed. That’s, like, the most basic rule of all.

Kali rolls her eyes, but she gives up at some point, and throws one pillow at his face before he grabs a spare blanket. She locks herself in the bathroom too, while she’s at it, and Steve fails not to stare when she comes out with a clean face. It makes her look -- soft. Small. Almost vulnerable. She still has the tattoos, and the crazy hair, but now she doesn’t look so tough anymore.

Looks can be deceiving.

“Good night, then.” She’s standing in the doorframe, one foot on top of the other, like she doesn’t know what to do with her body. Her arms swing a little by her sides, and an awkward smile curls up her lips. Like she doesn’t quite know how to deal with kindness and hospitality, which reminds Steve of Hopper’s stories about Eleven. Makes sense.

Steve decides to put her out of her misery with a smile of his own. “Yeah. ‘Night.”

She lingers for a second longer, before she nods to herself and turns around. The door closes, and then silence settles in. Steve sighs, and rubs his face, before he lies on the couch. It’s too small of him, and he struggles to find a comfortable position for long minutes, tossing and turning until he manages to have all his limbs under the blanket and his back not screaming in agony too much.

It’s going to be a long night. Especially since he pictures her every time he closes his eyes, all soft skin and long hair and mysterious eyes, and he hates himself for how predictable he is. Throw a new girl his way, not some Hawkins chick he’s known his whole life, and he’s a pathetic fool. In his mind, Nancy is laughing loudly and Jonathan is shaking his head. They both have a point.

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: The Eternal Knight, Celebrating Over 80 Years of Batman on Batman Day

This article written by Nate Ming was originally published on March 30, 2019, the original article was written to celebrate Batman's 80th anniversary

  The Batman is everywhere. He is in every shadow in every alley, crouched on every rooftop. He's in your video games, your breakfast cereal, even in your anime. Batman is everywhere, and everybody loves him, because if you could become a superhero, you'd probably be Batman--a force of will and skill, human and vulnerable on the inside with a fearsome visage outside.

  And he's been at it for eighty years now.

  But WHO IS THE BAT-MAN? regardless of adaptation, here are the definite points:

  THE MAN: Orphaned by an act of senseless violence, Bruce Wayne dedicated himself to a single ideal: making sure no one ever suffered the same tragedy he did. Traveling the globe, Bruce learned all manner of skills: combat, infiltration, detection, forensics, and more. Bruce was reborn as The Batman, a terrifying avenger who stalked the night, fighting evil with its own greatest weapon: fear.

      THE CITY: Batman's territory is Gotham City, a sprawling gothic nightmare on the Jersey coast recovering from decades of political corruption. Batman's adventures span the globe, but Gotham City is the place he calls home.

    THE FAMILY: Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred is probably the most important member of Batman's "family"--a group of allies who help him the Bat when they're not having adventures of their own. Depending on the telling, you'll also see various incarnations of sidekicks like Robin and Batgirl, supporting crew like Oracle, or police commissioner Jim Gordon himself.

    80 years of comics mean 80 years of changes--multiple reboots have not only modernized the main Batman story, but have shown a plethora of reimaginings of the character, where we see Batman as a viking, a samurai, a vampire, and much more thanks to DC's Elseworlds imprint. The most recent were 2011's New 52 and DC Rebirth relaunches, completely revamping DC's entire lineup of comics for new readers.

    Batman has been on-screen almost as long as he's been in comics--it's been 76 years since 1943's 15-part Batman theatrical serial starring Lewis Wilson. Batman has been a steady presence in live-action film and animation since then, appearing in another serial, showing up as a major character in fifteen theatrical films (Lego Batman is the best one and I will not hear another word about it), forty-three direct-to-video animated works, and this isn't even covering Batman on TV!

    It feels like there's a Batman TV show for everybody--you want something lighthearted and campy and fun? We've got the Adam West Batman show from the '60s! Want something dark, moody, and visually gorgeous? Batman: The Animated Series, widely considered the definitive Batman adaptation, has you covered, but don't skip Justice League or Justice League Unlimited! The list goes on--for animated adaptations, we have The Batman, Batman: Brave and the Bold (this one deserved more love), Beware the Batman, Justice League Action, a handful of appearances across Teen Titans, Teen Titans GO, and Young Justice, and the upcoming Harley Quinn animated series! Finally, we have Gotham, a live-action drama with a young Bruce Wayne growing up in a city that's descending into madness.

    Oh wait, right, that's not it--I haven't even covered Batman's anime or manga yet! It all started with a Batman manga that ran from 1966-67 in Shonen King, capitalizing on the popularity of the Adam West TV show. In 2000, Kia Asamiya (Martian Successor Nadesico) wrote and drew Batman: Child of Dreams, a slick black-and-white adventure that brought Batman to Tokyo hunting down the creator of a lethal drug.

    On the anime side, Batman: Gotham Knight was an anthology from a variety of creators showing the many sides of the Dark Knight, and Batman Ninja was absolutely bananas and super fun, throwing Batman, his friends, and enemies back into feudal Japan where they have a mech-fight against Joker's transforming castle that somehow still ends in a swordfight between Joker and Batman. It is unapologetically the coolest thing ever.

    ONE MORE THING: the video games. From 1986's Batman on the ZX Spectrum all the way up to last year's Lego DC Super-Villains, Batman is always there to punch out countless nameless thugs (and sometimes his friends) in the name of justice. Whether you're looking for intense, competitive fighting action (like the Injustice series) or a sprawling city of your own to protect (like the Arkham series), it's not hard to find a good Batman game these days.

  Still… 80 years is a long time, and sometimes it feels like we've seen every possible adventure the Dark Knight could have. Thankfully, creators and fans will always keep the fire alive, finding new ways to thrill longtime fans while still drawing in countless new ones. It's been 80 years, but here's to 80 more--happy birthday, Batman!

  What are your favorite Bat-memories? What are your favorite Batman comic stories, movies, games, and animation? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

  Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. Check out his comic, Shaw City Strikers!

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[mst3kproject]

1102: Cry Wilderness

Cry Wilderness is, in my humble, unprofessional opinion, the worst movie of Season 11.  Every other film on the list had some kind of redeeming quality.  Avalanche had nice scenery.  The Christmas that Almost Wasn't took a look at the weird relationship between generosity and greed during the holiday season.  At the Earth's Core had Peter Cushing filling the caverns of Pellucidar with the fucks he did not give.  The Beast of Hollow Mountain proved that dinosaurs really do make everything better, even boring cowboy movies.  The only serious competition comes from Carnival Magic, but I'm giving the Garbage Crown to Cry Wilderness on the grounds that Carnival Magic was a bit less racist.

Last summer a boy named Paul met Bigfoot, and they became best friends – or at least, Paul became Bigfoot's coke dealer.  In the autumn when Paul has returned to boarding school, he wakes up in the middle of the night to see Bigfoot standing outside his window, telling him to go find his father immediately.  You don't just ignore a message like that, so Paul hitchhikes across the country to the national park where his dad works.  There he learns that the park rangers have been ordered to hunt down a mysterious predator that's decimated the local wildlife.  Could that be Bigfoot?  Paul certainly seems to think so, and he does everything in his power to thwart the hunters' quest.

This movie's Bigfoot looks really, really stupid.  Remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer got covered in mud and moss and mistaken for Bigfoot?  If you've ever wondered what that would look like in real life, this is the movie for you.

It's tempting to compare Cry Wilderness to Pod People. Both are set in the woods, have weirdly irrelevant titles, and are about a lonely child's sugar-based friendship with a furry humanoid that doesn't talk.  I find, however, that Cry Wilderness reminds me more of Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, in that it's just uncomfortable to watch.  The movie feels forced, as if the actors are doing all that awkward laughing at gunpoint.  The best metaphor I can think of to describe this is to draw your attention to the skin tones the makeup people used for Red Hawk and Jim – these don't look so much 'Native American' as they do 'nasty sunburn'.  The whole movie is like that. Everything it aims for, it misses its marks in ways that are gross and kind of painful-looking.

Yet for all Cry Wilderness is tremendously, tooth-grindingly terrible in every possible respect, I have to say that it actually does one thing pretty well.  It is better than Boggy Creek 2 at making us wonder about Bigfoot's status within the animal kingdom.

If you'll recall, in Boggy Creek 2 Lockhart spent a lot of time wondering if Bigfoot were man or beast, while events completely failed to back him up.  The Bigfoot of that film stole food, defended its territory and its young, investigated new objects, and feared fire.  The audience got the impression that Bigfoot was probably about as intelligent as a bear, which really isn't bad – any zookeeper will tell you bears are bright, curious animals that learn quickly.  What Boggy Creek's Bigfoot was not was especially human-like, not even in the ridiculous way sometimes presented in killer animal movies, like when the creatures of Bats somehow know that attacking power lines will leave humans unable to see in the dark (more on this when I get around to Phase IV).

Cry Wilderness, on the other hand, sets Bigfoot up as an ambiguous figure right from the opening scene.  When Paul describes his friendship with Bigfoot, he mentions two things the creature really likes: Coca-Cola and a radio.  A lot of animals, from insects on up to great apes, like soft drinks, and for exactly the same reason humans do – namely, soda pop is full of delicious diabetes and since sugars are the easiest source of calories the brain is programmed to seek them out.  One can imagine a monkey or raccoon learning to open a pop-tab can to get at the contents.  That doesn't really require a lot of higher cognitive ability, just dextrous fingers.  The radio, however, tells us that Bigfoot likes music.  A lot of science has been done about how animals react to music, but we still tend to think of it as characteristically human and that is how it is used in Cry Wilderness.  The suggestion is that a Bigfoot who enjoys listening to the chart-topping hits of 1987 can't be all beast.

Having thus established Bigfoot in this netherworld of 'neither man nor beast', the movie then goes to some trouble to keep him there. As the hunters close in, Bigfoot tries to evade them but leaves tracks and traces they can follow and makes no attempt to outsmart them, suggesting that he possesses no more than an animal's cunning. At the climax, however, he turns back to save Paul's father in an act of human-like altruism.  If this movie had Lockhart narrating at us about The Creature being More Man Than Animal, it would... well, Lockhart himself would still be an insufferable jackass, but he would at least seem to have a point.

But you guys have all seen the movie, so you're just waiting for me to get to the part where Bigfoot fucking talks.

There are two scenes in which Cry Wilderness presents Bigfoot as more of a supernatural entity than the mere undiscovered primate that the History Channel has sought so long and so fruitlessly.  The first is early in the movie, when Bigfoot appears outside Paul's window in the middle of the night to deliver his message in spoken, colloquial English.  This is very uncomfortable, as it makes Bigfoot just a little too human.  If he can talk, it becomes incredibly creepy that he's tracked a little boy down to where he sleeps.  The school principal argues that this sequence was nothing but a dream and I want to agree with him.  I feel better about it that way.

The second scene is at the end of the movie, when the formerly strict and skeptical principal gets a complete personality transplant and Bigfoot reappears, surrounded by deer and raccoons, to the delight of all.  I want to say this is a dream, too.  It seems like a piece of wish-fulfillment for Paul – he gets to prove that he's right, and the principal turns out to be not so bad after all. Unlike the previous dream sequence, however, it doesn't begin and end with Paul in bed.  It is presented as something that happened in the movie's real world, as if Bigfoot appears like Bloody Mary when you say his name.

If this is so, we seem to have a third possible identity for Bigfoot, which would make him neither man nor beast, but some kind of forest spirit.  This is actually not at all unprecedented as an interpretation.  Folklore is full of creatures that look like furry humans and act as guardians of the woods – there's the European woodwose, the Russian leszi, and the Chinese yeren, and of course the tales told by many Salish-speaking peoples of the American west coast, which are generally treated as Bigfoot stories.  Even the gorillai of Hanno the Navigator may be a version of this archetype, rather than a reference to what we now call gorillas. Such creatures are often described as tricksters or shapeshifters, and sometimes said to abduct or even eat misbehaving children.

Bigfoot as a sort of tutelary forest spirit, however, would seem to be very much at odds with Cry Wilderness' opening scene.  Here we see a Bigfoot-like humanoid in a museum, labeled as a species of primitive man.  This seems to offer a Bigfoot much more like the type cryptozoologists hunt for, a flesh-and-blood creature that could have its hair analyzed and its genome mapped and be placed firmly on a branch of the primate family tree.  Then again, maybe this, too, is intentionally ambiguous.  Maybe Cry Wilderness is telling us that we are simply not meant to know whether Bigfoot is man or beast, spirit or flesh, legend or reality, or that it can indeed be all of them at the same time.  The fact that we can't tell if Paul's school encounters are dreams or not may tie into this theme.

And that is one hundred percent of what's interesting about Cry Wilderness.  The rest of the movie is a lot of pointless bullshit, animal abuse, forced laughter, and boring Noble Savage stereotypes that will have your eyes rolling so hard you'll be staring yourself in the frontal lobe.  Looking around tumblr, it seems that a number of MSTies with Native American ancestry were very uncomfortable with its inclusion in the new series.  I kind of understand why.  Some things just don't deserve a wider audience, even if that audience is going to make fun of them.  A movie in which a child tells a man he's “just a dumb old Indian” and is never even reprimanded for it is arguably one of those things.

In closing, I would like to say that as a resident of the Rocky Mountain foothills, I do not believe in Bigfoot and I've never met anybody who does.  I've found evidence of bears, bobcats, cougars, and porcupines in my back yard, but nary a sign of Sasquatch.  Besides which, we live in an age when almost everybody has a camera on them constantly, and a near-unlimited capacity for sharing the photographs they take – if Bigfoot existed, we'd be slapping puppy ears on him in snapchat. You know we would.