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fascinating-yarn · 3 months ago

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So You Want To Know About Chess The Musical

So you want to know about Chess. The first piece of advice I have to give you is:

Step 0: Are you sure?

Because trust me, it's a whole lot weirder than you think, even if you know that the story is, in fact, only very little about chess (the board game). But if you are sure, because you have a friend who, like me, can't stop talking about it, then, you're ready to begin with step one.

Step 1: Listen to the concept album

Yes, there are plenty of recordings of the full show that are easily accessible on YouTube. Do not be fooled. With very minor exceptions, they will not elucidate anything at all. Trust me, even if your favorite actor is in one of them, start here. You will have time to get back to them later, trust me. It helps to read the synopsis of the album while listening; this has been kindly transcribed here by @alovebizarre.

Already hooked? Yeah, probably. Now you understand why all of us got stuck down here in our circle of complaining about this show. We, too, all thought it was going to be good based on the concept album.

Step 1.5: Watch the 1989 concert

This is mostly the songs of the concept album and retains the two male leads, but has Judy Kuhn playing Florence, the female lead. It's a strong concert and only cuts one song, and adds another ("Someone Else's Story", the show's only breakout hit not on the album). There is plot narration in Swedish, but one of the versions on YouTube has been subtitled in English

Step 2: Acquaint yourself with The Big Four

Now you know the music but the plot may still not be totally clear. The next step is to get to know the major variations. These are, generally:

The 1986 London version (and derivatives)

The 1988 Broadway version (and derivatives)

The 1990 Sydney version (there aren't really derivatives for this one but the material shows up Everywhere)

The 2002 Swedish version aka Chess på svenska (and derivatives)

Now, you can watch the original productions of all of these, but the issue is that the first two are both... not great. So here are some alternatives.

Step 2a: London Alternatives

The London version is mostly an expansion of the plot of the concept album, with changes - most of the structural changes were initiated by director Michael Bennett, who left the production before rehearsals due to his illness, while most of the more distinct changes of themes are from later director Trevor Nunn.

There are videos of the original production, but they're generally poorly filmed and suffer from major generation loss. There was no cast album, but the score has been recorded twice: in 2002 with the cast of a Danish touring production (released as "Chess: Complete Cast Album," but recalled soon after and not on streaming) and in 2008 at the Royal Albert Hall (this is on streaming as "Chess in Concert" - one of two albums of that name).

Any one will give you an idea of the script, but the original London production is generally the most musically cohesive. The Royal Albert Hall version has some minor script changes, most of which make no real difference, but makes some bizarre choices in terms of transition music and is generally a poorly produced album. The Danish album is likewise not very strong.

The Royal Albert Hall concert was professionally filmed but the audio is poorly mixed and the show's cast varies from a few great performances to some that are... not so much. It's also got a track record of making people either latch on immediately or be totally turned away from the show, so watch at your own risk. For a possibly better experience, watch the original London production.

Step 2b: Broadway Alternatives

The original Broadway production still has a bit of a bad reputation in the fandom, but people have generally warmed up to it. The new book, by American playwright Richard Nelson, is generally strong (if a bit overlong) until about halfway through Act Two --- at which point it suddenly isn't anymore. The original production itself doesn't help, and though there are some good moments, it was not very well directed and some of Nelson's best scenes suffer.

Firstly, you should listen to the Broadway cast album. The cast is the best part of the show and does some incredible things. The new music isn't quite as good as the original material, but is still strong and worth knowing.

In terms of the actual book, your best chance at a good experience experience is probably the 1990 Long Beach production directed by David H. Bell and starring Jodi Benson, which has a watchable video online. There are some script changes, which serve to adjust the script to be less cynical, more palatable, and better paced. After this, do go back and watch the original cast, as it generally has a stronger overall cast and some scenes are genuinely great with them.

Step 2c: Sydney and Svenska

The Sydney production closed early due to the economic recession in Australia, and the script has never been revived, but parts of it appear all over the place, especially in the London derivatives of the early 1990s. It takes bits of the plots of both London and Broadway, and becomes its own thing. It is worth knowing, and there is a mostly bearable bootleg on YouTube.

If Sydney is its own thing for being a combination of London and Broadway, Svenska is its own thing because it resembles neither. The plot is streamlined to the essentials and takes place over a much shorter period of time, plus it has two new songs. There is a proshot that has been uploaded to YouTube with subtitles, and a very good cast album. There have been some productions since based on the script, but the original is still going to be your best starting point.

Step 3: Into The Abyss

There are so many other productions and they're all a little different from each other. Most are based on London or Broadway, but some are an odd combination resulting from people who wanted to produce the London version in the US being forced to retrofit the Broadway version (unavailable for US licensing until 2008). A non-exhaustive list is:

1992 Off-Broadway: Preserved only in an incomplete, poor-quality audio bootleg, plus a slightly more complete script from a lost recording, this script is Tim Rice's first (but not last) attempt at making something definitive post-Broadway. It is one of the most bizarre scripts out there and should really be experienced late to be fully appreciated.

1990 US Tour: An early attempt to jump off the Broadway script into something new, this production stars 42.9% of the original Broadway cast of Falsettos and has some wild stuff. Don't watch till you know Broadway, since it has been known to sour people's opinions on the show.

2003 Actors' Fund Benefit Concert: This one-night only concert is preserved on a leaked (but poor quality) archival video and a higher quality rehearsal performance. The script is an attempted hybrid of the London and Broadway scripts, but leans mostly on the London script with a few Broadway changes that serve really only to stay within the legal requirements of production still in place at the time (and doubly important due to Nelson's personal support of the concert).

2018 Kennedy Center Concert Series/2022 Entertainment Workers' Fund Benefit Concert: This script was eyeing Broadway for about five years but is no longer in the works as the rights were pulled. With a new book by Danny Strong, based on the London plot but with the details changed significantly, this production takes a more overtly political spin on the show and grounds it in actual political events. Start with the 2018 version, as it's generally agreed to be better than the later concert version.

2018 London Revival: To call this production a revival is generous, being staged by the English National Opera for a limited run and generally not being considered very important. It became well known mostly for being associated with the Kennedy Center production and the general knowledge that Rice was looking to bring the show back to Broadway. Despite that, this script is entirely unrelated to the Kennedy Center version and is mostly an onstage expansion of the concept album with the show being influenced heavily by Benny and Bjorn.

With all of these I have but one piece of final advice and that is:

Step 4: Be wary of The Discourse

This is not meant to scare you away from the fandom at all. I promise we're all very friendly and most of the discussions are quite civil. But every fan has very strong opinions about this show. I have tried to present this post as neutrally as possible but my bias has absolutely creeped in and you've already been influenced by my opinions on it. Some productions (notably the Kennedy Center script) are very divisive and I encourage you to consume them yourself and forming your own opinions.

And that is how to get into Chess. If you want to. It may not be the wisest decision, but hey, we all made the same mistake.

#chess the musical #if anyone asks where they should start send them this

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oceanpulls · 9 months ago

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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. ��But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

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The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

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Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

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The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

-----------------------

Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

#my ninposting #my transcription #trent reznor #atticus ross #nin #nine inch nails #trent #reznor #gq

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doueverwonder · 2 months ago

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a whole bunch of notes on Illithiya and her and Utah's kids under the cut;

Born in 1963

25 in 1988

26 in 1989

29 in 1992

33 in 1996

43 in 2006

55 in 2018

61 in 2024

okay, this is actually where we're at with her age, and if you look below here's where I am with the kids.

Ogden UT. ‘Zach’ (he/him): Est. 1846, born 1988. Currently 19 physically.

Salt Lake City UT. ‘Jaxson’ (he/him): Est. 1847, born 1989. Currently 18 physically.

Provo UT. ‘Kayleigh’ (she/her): Est. 1849, born 1992. Currently 16 physically. [twin]

West Jordan UT. ‘Kinsley’ (she/her): Est. 1849, born 1992. Currently 16 physically. [twin]

Sandy UT. ‘Jayden’ (he/him): Est. 1871, born 1996. Currently 14 physically.

Orem UT. ‘Kayden’ (he/him): Est. 1919, born 2006. Currently 8 physically.

West Valley City UT. ‘Brayden’ (he/him): Est. 1980, born 2018. Currently 3 physically.

Ahmed. (he/him): Born 2003, adopted in 2007 at age 4. Currently 21.

General notes: yes she was 55 when she had Brayden deciding rn if I'm going to mess with the math more (mostly just make the age gaps with the last two smaller) or if I'll just leave it this way and use the miracle baby excuse.

personifications age 1 year for every 2 that pass until they're 'adults' (usually around 25 physically), this is why Ahmed is older despite being younger than the majority of his siblings. They could be angsty about it but instead he just uses it to tease his older siblings :p

I think they stopped trying for more after Jayden, and were in the process of adopting Ahmed when they found out Illithiya was pregnant with Kayden and after 'much prayer and meditation' (<- freaking the fuck out for 20 business days) decided to adopt Ahmed anyway bc to heck with it.

Nah but like Kayden was a 'oh weren't expecting that but we're always happy to make our family bigger :)'; Brayden caused the panicking and tears, and "we can't have another baby, I shouldn't be able to have another baby!" bc it had been 12 years since Kayden was born, and 11 since they adopted Ahmed and suddenly here's another kid??? they love him so much but holy fuck bud u came out of nowhere.

I do actually have an essay typed up on Illithiya, Ahmed and Zach specifically pertaining to how Illithiya and Ahmed will grow old and die and the rest of the family wont. It's bullet points is

Illithiya considers herself privileged and chosen in someway to be Utah's wife and the mother of cities. she thinks that God somehow hand picked her for the job, and she doesn't like that her husband and children aren't 'normal' all the time, but this is what gets her through it. Then God gave her Ahmed so she would be able to watch one of her children grow and have a normal life.

Ahmed always thinking he was just different because he was adopted, then in his mid-teens processing fully that that's not the entire reason. Dude randomly remembered that time he got it explained to him that his dad and siblings are semi-immortal beings the represent pieces of land, their governments, and their people 🤯

uhh angst about Zach leaving the church, there were a lot of reasons he left but the straw on the camels back was absolutely in relation to the fact that Illithiya and Ahmed would die long before he would and he'd have to live without them. The snapping point was an argument he got into with Illithiya where he asked her "if you're actually chosen, like you say you are, why is God letting you die?" and when Illithiya didn't have an answer (and even if she had he had already made up his mind on the matter) he decided he was done.

but i'm not posting the essay unless someone wants it bc it is LONG and pretty angsty lmao

#wttt #welcome to the table #wttt illithiya #wttt utah #tw: religion

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tarynisbunhead · 6 months ago

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Man, CGI has really ruined Hollywood.

I've said how much I hate CGI in the past. How at this point I can't see the movie but just CGI blobs, or how about the fact that CGI takes away jobs like Make-up artists and costume design? "Hey if the computer can do it, why bother to wear the costume at all?" This is why corporations now turned to AI, and it's backfiring.

So why even bring this up? This summer I decided to watch Young Indiana Jones Chronicles again. I watched the first half of volume one, so far the first four adventures follow 10 year old Indiana Jones as he travels the world with his parents and tutor. Eventually the series tackles what happened to Indy's mother and the bitter relationship between father and son but as for right now Professor Jones is traveling and lecturing. This series was released in 1992 and as a kid when this series was released I didn't miss an episode, it was one of my favorite shows - why the fucking hell is Hollywood stupid now? This isn't some crummy nostalgia trip because I have the set and watch it on occasion, in the last 20 years Hollywood has given us reboots and self inserts, I'm not entertained watching someone's fan fiction play out.

This show starts off with a monologue explaining how Indy got to be an adventurous kid, and how he ended up with his dog. It then slides into how the family started their trip around the world - their house is a Victorian style house so you know the rest of this will be shot on location. Even as a kid I loved the location shots and costumes, I wanted to go back in time and wear Mrs. Jones clothes, I thought she was so pretty.

Okay now first of all, Professor Jones. George Lucas had to know after releasing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, and having Sean Connery as Indy's father, that wasn't going to be easy. The actor, Lloyd Owen, not only has the look but his acting style follows Mr. Connery. Right down to saying "Junior!" almost exact.

Shoot on location or green screen? I understand budget, but if you were given the money to show off the beauty of a country, why destroy it with computer generation?

I mean even the silent film Phantom of the Opera, that music hall set was designed using sketches. People thought that scene was filmed in an actual music hall. Lucas filmed on location in several episodes, using props that fit the time period, with 10 year old Indy the journey began in 1909.

Props and costumes really make a difference in transporting the audience back in time.

But even at that, through the series Indy meets several historical figures. Some show up several times like T. E. Lawrence and Howard Carter, so of course they had to look like the person they were portraying but what about Sigmund Freud? Tolstoy? Even a young Norman Rockwell?

This is the first episode, Carter and T. E. Lawrence are at a digsite. The crafty thing about Lucas is the characters mention King Tut so yeah you're gonna see these guys again

Here's a young Norman Rockwell

Here's Puccini, the opera composer who gave us Madame Butterfly. I watched the episode last night and didn't realize just how much it showed the actual Puccini - in the episode he went after Indy's mom, the real Puccini was a womanizer so there was no holding back

You can say I'm nostalgic and defend 2024 Hollywood but look at Who Framed Roger Rabbit that was released in 1988

Or how about Dick Tracy, released in 1990

Then there's Rocketeer in 1991

And then the same year that Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was released to TV, there was Newsies - 1992

Can we go back to movies and TV shows that look like the time period they were set in?

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stopthatfool · 1 year ago

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stop-that-fool's ICEMAV timeline for Your jeep. Your Teeth. The coffee that you bought me.

AKA where my icemav's story sticks to canon and where it diverges/changes-- all while trying to make it align with real military/historical events.

Also, thank you @sliderkerner for indulging me and saying that you wanted my timeline posted here!

DISCLAIMER! I am in no way an expert of the US Military. This whole 'timeline' should not be taken as fact or canon regarding TOP GUN. I am making this for my own understanding of my icemav story and to help myself and anyone reading keep track of the timeline. This is just for fun and mostly for me.

Quick note about the time off US Military members get. According to this website, people accumulate leave-- 2.5 days per month of work. I don't think that either Mav or Ice are eager to take time off. I can only see them wanting to take time off to visit Carole and Bradley (as Val Kilmer stated, I also believe that Ice does not have the ideal family). That's why a lot of their work seems back-to-back/never ending.

1986-

-The movie stays the same (Goose dies, intense amounts of sexual tension between Ice and Mav, "You can be my wingman anytime" etc., etc.)

-The FIRST change in canon is when Mav states that he's going to try teaching at TOP GUN. In TGM, Mav said he barely lasted one class. Within my story, Mav lasts until 1988.

Between '87 and '88-

-Ice comes to teach at TOP GUN (entirely for the purpose of his career/'resume' for working his way up for promotions etc., etc.)

-While Ice is there (for around 2 TOP GUN classes) that is when Ice and Mav start getting involved romantically.

-But Ice hates teaching. He leaves mid '88 and joins the Iran-Iraq War aboard USS Enterprise.

Late 1988-

-Mav completes one last TOP GUN class after Ice leaves and follows Ice to the USS Enterprise (a happy accident that they were stationed on the same ship). This then allows them to continue their 'involvement' and allow them to fly together again ("Bullshit, you can be mine" blah blah blah).

1990-

-The Gulf War. According to Fandom Wiki both Mav and Ice have the Kuwait Liberation Medal-- meaning they both fought in the Gulf War around this time. (Btw they are no longer on the USS Enterprise as she was no longer involved in the Gulf War past 1989 (I think))

-In my TOP GUN universe, Mav gets another 'kill' during the Gulf War (I have no idea if any naval aviators did this in 1990 (Mav didn't do this canonically) but it happens within the stop-that-fool fanfic universe). Merlin is also Mav's RIO throughout the the Gulf War.

1991-

-BUT Ice has the Kuwait Liberation Medal (Saudi Arabia) while Mav does not. Mav has the Southwest Asia Service Medal. So, for my story this time in between 1991-92 is when Mav pisses someone off and is moved squadrons/carriers to somewhere in Southwest Asia.

-Both of them, according to these medals, participated in Operation Desert Storm. (Mav also could have participated in Operation Desert Shield due to his Southwest Asia Service Medal.)

-Throughout 1991 they are able to see each other a couple times, but the fact that Mav keeps pissing people off makes it difficult. This is also because Navy deployments on average last between 6-7 months (according to a quick Google search) and for the sake of the story, their deployments and time off in between rarely overlap.

1992-

-This difficulty continues into 1992 where it all comes to a head on Dec. 31st 1992 (Ice's birthday! (Ice does not have a 'canon' birthday, but Dec. 31st is Val Kilmer's and I thought that bday also made sense for Ice)). Que the car scene in ch.4 and the aftermath the next morning.

-Throughout '92, Mav was in Iraq participating in the Iraqi no-fly zones. (I think. I find this UN mandate difficult to understand, especially whether or not the US Navy was involved or not.)

1993-

-Mav and Ice do not see each other in person at all in '93. But as said in ch.4 they-- "...talk about nothing on the phone. Ice never picks him up from the airport again."

-The US Navy also provided air cover for cargo planes that were bringing relief supplies during the Bosnian War. This is where Mav was placed in '93 (pissed off some captain or higher up or something).

-Ice and Mav don't see each other (in person) until '94.

The UNITED NATIONS MEDAL- In the TOP GUN fandom wiki page, both Ice and Mav are listed to have a United Nations Medal. What it does not state, and what I cannot find anywhere online, is what conflict they were a part specifically of for them to receive this medal. There are multiple options throughout the 1990's and 2000's that could have led to this award. BUT for the sake of my story, I will only be considering/applying conflicts that took place between 1994-98.

Between 1994 and '96-

-I think Ice received the UNPROFOR United Nations Medal for his service during the Yugoslav Wars. This is where he was between 1994-95. As I stated in ch.3 he was stationed somewhere in Europe after he and Mav 'break up' (I can't figure out what United Nations Medal Mav could have received-- it's difficult to figure out US Navy specific peacekeeping missions he could been involved in besides UNPROFOR.))

1997-

-It's around this year that Mav uses some of his accumulated vacation days to spend a longer period with Carole and Bradley. Ice is still stationed in Europe (workaholic).

1998-

-After Mav's time off, he's deployed again to Iraq.

As I mentioned in a previous post, not a lot of things happen in early to mid 1998 in regards to military conflicts, BUT Operation Desert Fox happens in December of 1998. I think the military would need to have people around before the operation before completing something of that scale. AKA that's why Mav is there in June.

-Then on an undisclosed date in early June, Mav crashes as stated in ch.1 (“You dodged some crazy bastards up there, then hit a bird. The plane crashed into the ground, and you ejected and landed on some rocks...").

-Mav is transferred to a hospital in California as he needs special surgery for his shattered knee cap.

-Ice has been in California for a couple days when Mav gets there because his paternal grandfather is dying (another happy accident that his grandfather is in the same hospital as Mav (god i love plot armour)). Ice had previously been permanently stationed somewhere in Europe (to get away from his family, Mav, and to work up to a promotion).

-Carole dies a couple days after Mav is released from the hospital. Bradley is now under Mav's legal guardianship. They move into military provided family housing on the Lemoore Naval Air Station with Mav teaching at the SFWSPAC (Strike Fighter Weapons School Pacific) once his injuries heal.

-Ice then reveals that he has requested to be stationed in California with Mav (the request was approved, Ice is now near both his family AND Mav... he's so silly).

-On June 21st 1998, Mav, Ice and Bradley drive out to West California to the beach cottage Mav rented (courtesy of Viper) with the plans of celebrating Bradley's birthday on June 27th (finally someone with a canon bday thank u Bradley).

Anyway, that's all we got so far! I would just like to say again that I am in no way claiming that this is accurate or canon. I also can't guarantee that I understand all of the wars, conflicts, operations, and details of the US military that I stated previously. So if I got something wrong; any of the language I used, details of the wars and conflicts stated, I apologize! Very deeply. From the depths of my soul.

#this is proof that i am a productive member of society #I AM NOT AN EXPERT #this is just for fun #all my info is basically from Wikipedia plz do not trust me #i tried to hyperlink everything that i referenced.. which is mostly Wikipedia #sorry about that.. but i don't care THAT much to find 'reliable' sources #like this is a military propaganda movie after all.. therefore i'm not like... dying to make this as accurate as possible #who am i kidding here #this is literally for a fanfiction #do u think tom cruise would combust on the spot if he saw this... all this for a gay fanfiction....#again this is mostly for me to reference-- my scattered notes and floating thoughts in my brain were not working anymore #so i made this for myself and then i thought i would post it #because sharing is caring #i got the fanfic name right #finally #the military propaganda got to me. IT GOT ME.#icemav #icemav fanfic #top gun 1986 #top gun #maverick #iceman #pete maverick mitchell #tom iceman kazansky #top gun fanfiction #thank u ily bye #ao3 #stopthatfool writes

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baconpncakes · 2 years ago

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oh. my. gosh. your house episode is so intriguing i really want it right now actually LMAOO

i want to know how you came up with everything actually im so so enthralled

Omg I'm so glad you asked ✨

Putting this under the cut bc it's long-winded lol

My sister (who has never seen an entire episode of House but I send her stuff from it and about it all the time) said that there should be an episode where House is taking care of a drunk Wilson and it's all very amusing until Wilson kisses him. House kisses back, but then he actually processes Oh Shit Wilson Just Kissed Me. The next morning House probes Wilson and it turns out he doesn't remember the kiss. House goes to Thirteen to talk about it and see what she makes of it. Here's where the quote came from lol. Then we said that Wilson would talk to Cuddy about how House was being weird and she'd say "Go talk to him. I have work to do." Eventually they'd get to the point where House asks "Why did you kiss me?" over and over and Wilson just keeps responding with "I was drunk!" and "I don't know!" and "Just drop it, House." until one or both of them finally snaps.

So I sent my sister a fake episode summary, with the elements that she presented and a case, which I made up: a drunk and 'irresponsible' patient to parallel drunk and irresponsible Wilson!

To do the summary I'd come up with a title (I looked at a couple songs but none of them felt quite right, then I realized I could use a Teardrop lyric and it was too perfect) and I needed my sister to know how clever I was for the it, so I wrote a little explanation, like they have on the wiki.

Then I thought, if I'm doing that I might as well also do the "major events" section of the wiki!

So I determined that I HAD to make it into actual fake wiki screenshots, which meant filling out some gaps.

For the timeline, I thought: House and Wilson have been drunk together tons of times. Why is this different? And figured that it would probably be different if saaay Wilson had just proposed to House after he pretended the two were a couple. Certainly enough to bring kissing House to the forefront of his mind. And THEN I looked at the episode scheduling and there was a week off between the original airing of The Down Low and the following episode Remorse, so it fit right in the middle!

For the diagnosis I actually went to Web MD, typed in the symptoms I thought the patient should have and went through the results until I found some that might work, then I picked the one that seemed like it'd be the best for the show. It also happened to be a condition that might come with personality changes, which plays further into the whole Wilson Was Drunk He Didn't Actually Mean It angle.

I went through a bunch of s6 directors and writers to see what episodes they worked on and who I thought would fit best.

And then I needed guest stars! The episode would have aired in 2010, and I wanted someone who would have been about 21, so I looked up "actresses born in 1989" and decided on Brie Larson. Then she needed a friend, so I looked up "actors born in 1988" and went with Nicholas Braun. Then Brie Larson needed a mom so I chose another birth year and went with Calista Flockhart (who's in one of my favorite movies). All of the actors I chose were people who felt could have been in House. Like if I watched an episode and a young Brie Larson or Nicholas Braun was there, I wouldn't be surprised. I also needed to name them, so I picked random names and then searched the wiki to make sure they weren't already taken lol. And Andre Braugher is there bc it's season 6 so House would talk to his therapist about what happened with Wilson and then ignore the advice to Just Talk To Him.

That just left trivia, which I was very excited about. Some of them are just details and callbacks to other episodes. The Minuteman thing is bc I chose Nicholas Braun and I knew my sister would get a kick out of it. I knew I needed a gay movie reference and But I'm a Cheerleader really felt like a movie that House would casually reference and make everyone, characters and audience, think that House is definitely queer (and we must never forget that House was actually canonically a cheerleader). And finally, since it was immediately following The Down Low and House MD loves musical theatre gay jokes, I wanted another A Chorus Line reference. I'm honestly appalled nobody had done that one before. Her nickname is literally Thirteen!

This is probably more long-winded than you expected but I spent way too long and put way too much thought into that thing lol

#thank you again i am so glad you enjoyed it!#let's talk about that #ask of cakes

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neil-gaiman · 2 years ago

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Ahoy, sir.

I know full well it's not going to sound great, but it's a question and you might have the answer, so here we go. It's about Johanna Constantine in Sandman.

I saw a tweet you wrote about Johanna being her own character - it was, i believe, in response to her being cleaner than John. You said she can be cleaner for the simple fact that she isn't John, or at least she isn't a gender-swapped John.

I have a question about that. If she's a different character, why is there so much that she takes from John ? Why giving her a Newcastle (even if it's not quite the same), why not modernize or reinject a version of her story with Pandora's box ? I think it's awesome to see a modern version of Lady Johanna, but I wonder what were your ideas behind keeping so much of John's in her episode, and why she wasn't push more into what makes her character different - money, sure, but also henchmen, guns and magic instead of tricks, to name a few.

I know how it sounds like - I met a few fans ever so annoying about the casting. I'm not trying to complain or bash the work you and so many talented people put behind the Sandman. I like this serie, I want more, I like Jenna Coleman as well as I'm thrilled by a Johanna Constantine in modern setting. I'm just curious about how she was thought about.

I also know you must get a whole lot of asks of the type, and i suppose it ends up souding like I'm asking for some justification. I'm not, I'm just curious - and if it seems to mean anything else, note that I'm sorry and that it's not what I meant.

Thanks, anyway, for all you do and have done, and for your attention ~

Because when you move the life essence of a character from universe to universe you keep some things and you change others. I grew up with DC Comics having Earth 1 and Earth 2, and a Batman and a Superman and a Flash on each. Both Batmans were Bruce Wayne, both Supermans were Clark Kent and Kal-El, but one Flash was Jay Garrick and one was Barry Allen. And these were ways of solving problems of time, of dealing with three decades of continuity. The John Constantine in Vertigo who was in his mid-thirties in 1989 is now a pensioner. And the Morpheus of that world escaped in September 1988.

In those terms, the TV version of Sandman exists on Earth-Sandman, a world that starts three decades on. It's not beholden to 1988 comics continuity, but it uses it when it wants to. The person holding the Constantine life essence in this world is Joanna. She didn't sing in a punk band in the 1970s. Her Astra Logue went to Hell, but it wasn't Joanna's fault in the way it was John's in 1979 in Hellblazer 12. She didn't spend the time in Ravenscar Secure Facility from 1979-1982.

She's smart, not grubby, a lot more like the original dandyish John Constantine who showed up in Swamp Thing in 1984 than the unshaven wreck of a man he became.

And we will get to see a lot more of Lady Johanna in Sandman, if we get future seasons.

Does that help?

#constantines #john constantine #joanna constantine #sandman

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hauntedwitch04 · 2 years ago

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Kiss this dead girl walking

Childhood friend!Steve Harrington x Childhood friend!Reader

Heathers AU

Words: About 1.5k words

Warnings: mentions of sex, with some scene smutty?, Steve Harrington (and yes he is a warning), under age use of alcol (?)

Author’s note: Hi everybody! After what it feels a life I come back into writing. During this period I watch all Stranger Things and I littleraly fell il love with Steve Harrington, so here I am with a one shot about him. I decided to realize this in an AU of the Heather, the film of 1988, that I love deeply and I probably love the musical even more. I took inspiration from the song Dead girl walking, that I'll put at the end of the story. Hope you like this idea. I’m sorry for any eventual grammatical error, I just finished to write it!

Requests are open I Ask

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The words of Tears for Fears fill your ears to the beat of "Everybody wants to rule the world," a song released just this year in 1989. You're running away from the one and only worst party ever. Heather, the one you consider for some strange reason a "friend," has dragged you to the party of Kurt Kelly, the captain of the rugby team. Of course, she was gone right away, doing god knows what with god knows who, while you were left drinking, crammed into a dimly lit hallway among couples making out, people drinking but who were already too drunk by then, and people smoking, so much so that it created a huge cloud of smoke that obscured everything. You have recently managed to become part of the school's most popular girl group, after years of suffering and being bullied by them, but immediately you are beginning to regret it, seeing their behavior, and slowly realizing that their world, is a place where you don't belong.

The evening, however, is interrupted when, as yet another jerk hits on you, and you in response vomit your soul onto his shoes. The only thing you remember before you get into the car is Heather's contrite face at your gesture, to which you in response, thanks in part to some of the liquid courage you had drank, tell her to go to hell, and that you don't want to be friends with her anymore.

Those words were the signature for your death sentence; you are now nothing more than a dead girl walking.

You wake up from these thoughts that have numbed your mind so far, and you realize that you are standing in front of Steve Harrington's house. When you were kids you were close friends, then you sought the path to popularity, while he was happy in remaining labeled only as the odd boy, which was no longer enough for you. You don't know why but something is telling you to stop. You know he will definitely be alone at home, since his parents are always away on business. You park in the driveway, next to his car. You stop to think about what you are doing only when you are standing at the door, but at that moment you realize that you have nothing left to lose now and so you knock. It takes a few seconds before you hear someone on the other side, but eventually the door opens to reveal a glimpse of a sleepy Steve Harrington, who trots his eyes with a unique tenderness. He widens his eyes upon seeing you.

The first to break that silence is you.

"Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't have to break you just..." You say suddenly unsure, but he immediately stops you, as if he has finally woken up and understands what is going on.

"No, no quiet meanwhile I was awake. Ehy but are you okay? You don't look so good." He asks, visibly concerned. You don't know why, but that gesture of his, that tone of his makes you burst into tears. He stands dumbfounded for a moment looking at you, then hugs you, and it's as if in a second you are again the little girl who falls down the Harringtons' driveway after getting tripped up, being hugged by that sweet little boy who is convinced that all it takes is a little affection and everything heals.

He pulls away a little from the hug to look at your face and you look up.

"Would you like to have a drink together? I know we haven't talked in years, and that this is all my fault because I've been a bitch, but I need to talk to someone and you're the first person who came to mind." You ask unsure, while tears are still drying on your cheeks. He nods and leads you into the kitchen. While he gets two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, you sit on the counter of the table. Once you send down a few sips of the ice-cold drink you begin to talk about everything inside, how much you suffered for Heathers, how much it hurt you to not be able to talk to him anymore, being afraid that he hated you, and what happened this very night a short time ago. Many times you apologized for your behavior, and every time he told you it was nothing.

You talk for hours, the beer bottles meanwhile multiplying until now you're lying on the couch in hysterical laughter at reminding yourself of the ridiculous harpy device that would kill your public image at school on Monday, until Steve gets improvidently serious.

"You know, I've always thought you were a fool in changing yourself and your appearance to join that group of snobs who think their biggest problem is the crease that came badly before school." The boy stops for a moment before continuing, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. "You were always perfect the way you were. Without this unattainable girl aura. To me you were already perfect as the girl who loved to read books, and wore those cute prescription glasses that made her big, curious eyes even bigger." You continue to remain silent, too overwhelmed by the alcohol in your system and the closeness of the boy. His scent is worse than dorga, and all you want to do is draw him to you and stick your nose into the crook of his neck as you run your hands through that perfect hair of his.

You see him licking his lips as his eyes are on yours before you say.

"I have a distraction in mind, if you'd like, to forget about all these bitches, this shitty life, my practically nonexistent family, everything. What do you say, are you ready to take a chance, Cherry?" You smile at that nickname, which reminds you of afternoons spent with a Cherry Sluchie in your hand, your favorite, in front of his pool, while he enjoyed swimming, and showing you when he was good at diving.

Your smile turns into a gigno as you bring your hands to his shoulders. He instinctively comes closer and you feel him vibrating with excitement, as you whisper, with surprising courage for the second time that night.

"And what would you have in mind Harrington?" He doesn't answer, on the contrary he shows you, rubbing his nose on your neck. After teasing you enough, he moves on to leave delicate, light kisses on your neck, which over time become more and more passionate and important, so much so that you are sure you will be left with the mark of those kisses, and this only increases your desire to rip him off that had been on for too long now. You feel his hands wander over your body, until he finally decides to unzip the zipper of the dress you're wearing, and before you know it you're both unclothed, invested with passion, with the desire to escape, taking refuge in each other's arms. Your moans, filling the room like the smell of sweat and alcohol, as you make love on the couch.

It seems like it has happened a billion times before, and maybe it has in the minds of both of you, so much so that it seems like a dance whose steps everyone knows, and at the same time of a song that only you know. Your lips are like glued together, and they cannot stay away from each other.

At one point, however, he pulls away and immediately you moan, pulling him back to you, wanting nothing more than his sweet kisses that taste of beer, tobacco and licorice.

"Kiss this dead girl walking, you don't want her to die not remembering what your kisses taste like." You say as your lips lightly trace her jaw. He stiffens from the pleasure caused by that gesture, before responding.

"I wouldn't want to kill this dead girl who walks with my kisses in my arms, while I make love to her on the couch in my house."

"I see no better way to die." You retort before continuing your journey down the jaw.

You spend most of the rest of the night this way. In the morning you wake up very late, still on that couch, with him lying beside you, still bare-chested and one of his arms around your waist, still traveling in the world of Morpheus, and all of a sudden Heather doesn't scare you anymore, because you finally understand where you really belong.

#steve harrington #steve harrington x reader smut #steve harrington x reader #stranger things x reader #becky's writing #Spotify

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dutchforstrangers · 3 years ago

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Digimon Astrology Journey - 'Head first' buddies: Koushiro & Taichi

So I’m back with some headcanon Digimon Astrology and I’m diving into it head first! Something fierce leader Taichi would do, however he needs his loyal ‘brains’ there with him and that will be Koushiro. Where Koushiro is a thinker, analytical in every way due to his pragmatic Sun and Rising, Taichi is one of action due to his Moon and Rising (and Mars!). However don’t underestimate them, they have some serious airy energy going on, making them vocal, diplomatic and charming in their own individual ways.

These boys are so different, yet work together very well. They just have a hard time… talking to others or each other about… the complicated, personal specific stuff feelings. Must be the stars, right?

It’s been a while, but you can read back all things Astrology (basics, background, etc.) in previous posts Part 1 | Part 2. Furthermore, exploring Taichi and Koushiro’s birth charts is part 2 of this series, you can read the exploration of Sora and Mimi’s birth charts here.

The important stuff

Koushiro Izumi, August 26th 1989 (around 05.30AM)

Sun: Virgo (earth-mutable)

Moon: Gemini (air-mutable)

Rising: Virgo (earth-mutable)

Taichi Yagami, October 15th 1988 (around 5PM)

Sun: Libra (air-cardinal)

Moon: Sagittarius (fire-mutable)

Rising: Aries (fire-cardinal)

Warning: IT’S VERY LONG! I’m sorry in advance…

A little disclaimer before I start rambling: These are headcanons! Their given birthdays are not canon at all, but just me having fun combining my love for Digimon and my love for Astrology. It can be highly self-indulging, but maybe you can find some truth in it as well! If you want to know how I calculated their birthdays, read my previous posts as stated above. I use these birthdays in my own fanfiction, but feel free to use them as well. Some credit in the form of a reblog, like or mention of these posts and/or my Tumblr would be highly appreciated! See something you want to discuss? I love to learn and talk! As said these are my headcanons, but I’m not afraid to change my mind or to defend what I have if necessary.

Everything charts and the why under read more!

Koushiro Izumi - August 26th 1989

Assigning the Virgo Sun to this boy was the first thing I did, because I myself am convinced Koushiro Izumi is the embodiment of a true Virgo. I could be wrong, as I did not study Astrology and am a simple hobbyist, but everything I read about Virgos always lead me back to this particular maroon headed anime dork for years now. Hence why I gave him the same Sun and Rising sign, because Koushiro is who he is. Anyway, let me try to convince you.

For starters, here are a few (or actually all the) things about Virgos in general, for both Sun and Rising. Virgos are bright, practical, pragmatic, orderly, respectful, critical, perfectionists, security driven, communicative, tidy, nervous, detail-oriented… Can I stop already? Okay, now pick one of the above and tell me it’s not fitting for Koushiro.

…

Hm, I know. It’s hard, isn’t it?

Maybe his tidiness is questionable depending on the situation… But the guy is orderly and the chaos only exists in times when his perfectionism takes over. The nervous part from the Virgo can be seen in shyness or even being obedient. All of that makes Koushiro a dedicated friend who would do anything in his power to make everything work for you. Danger is that he will efface himself, thinking he’s not worth as much as the others. This is what happens in Adventure episode 28 right after he solved the card riddle. On the top left corner either the Agumon or the Gomamon is right, but he doesn’t know which one and he apologizes, which is not necessary at all, with: “I’m sorry I couldn’t live up to your expectations,” which is such a Virgo Sun/Rising thing to say..! The Virgo dynamic is alive and kicking.

It’s even more alive and kicking in his other strong Virgo placements: Mercury and Mars. With Mercury in Virgo, Mercury is in it’s sign of its rulership, making it a strong placement. And precisely that planet is the planet of thoughts and knowledge! The combination of his Sun, Rising, Mercury and Mars in Virgo makes him be, engage, think and act like a true Virgo. Detail-oriented, thoughtful, respectful, orderly, practical and curious!

The hardest part for his birthday calculation was his Moon placement. The Moon is all about emotions, needs, wants, behavior, responds, et cetera. I first gave him a Capricorn Moon, but my boyfriend is such a Cap Moon and it didn’t fit the bill for Koushiro in my opinion. So I read and searched and eventually came to the conclusion it had to be an Air sign Moon, simply for the fact that our boy Koushiro is the bearer of the crest of Knowledge and Air signs can be seen as the intellectual ones of the Zodiac! Eventually I went for the Gemini Moon and I’m going to explain why exactly.

One could say Gemini is the bearer of Knowledge just as much as Koushiro is. Gemini LOVE to know things! They are naturally curious and are great communicators, when it comes to knowledge (pun warning if you’ve seen the reboot: they love to bring joy to their knowledge). Gemini tend to be a bit superficial when it comes to having and sharing knowledge and of course we know that’s not the case with our Koushiro here, due to his many Virgo placements, making him more observant and inward. What the Gemini Moon DOES to him is making this boy very talkative! He likes to spill what’s on his mind, he likes to share what he thinks, he likes to ramble and rant. It’s something we see him doing in Tri a lot, especially that one scene in Reunion part 3 (episode 3) where he keeps on rambling about all the strange events and he misses the first part of the conversation between the other DigiDestineds (about the news and Jyou’s ‘girlfriend’ poor guy no one believes him). Koushiro misses the conversation because a) his Gemini Moon likes to ramble and keep rambling, and b) because his Virgo placements can make him a bit unaware of his surroundings quite the time…

That’s not a bad thing per se, Koushiro is just very much focused on his work and d e t a i l s, which is a VERY Virgo-ish trait. But lets not forget that his priority is to help others with that knowledge and that the combination of his Virgo placements with his Gemini Moon makes him a great mentor. Brings me to his role throughout the entirety of Adventure 02: The Mentor. You’re welcome.

Another Gemini Moon thingy is rudeness. Now we know Koushiro is the most polite person out of ALL DD’s, always using honorifics, even saying Hikari-san instead of Hikari-chan, because Koushiro IS respect. But Koushiro is not afraid to tell you what’s at stake in times of ‘danger’, he’s not afraid to tell the truth. There are a few examples for that in Adventure, Adventure 02 and in Tri, but I’d like to refer to one of my favorite moments in whole Digimon Adventure history. Because Koushiro x rudeness brings me back to Diaboromon strikes back when he’s obviously so done with everyone, then Mimi enters the scene and he doesn’t even care. In the English dub she literally says “How rude”. Ooooohhh Koushiro, you little rude demon… It’s not the biggest proof it’s a simple one and my personal favorite.

All of the talkativeness and rudeness is something we mostly see Koushiro doing when he’s most comfortable. So we won’t see him being all talkative all the time -sharing more than just plain, superficial knowledge and instead more personal helpful knowledge- with everyone, but we do see him being talkative and speaking up to certain characters he’s most comfortable with. Now name one boy he’s very talkative to compared with literally all the other characters… You know what? Scroll down.

Last thing and then I’ll stop rambling about this beautiful and lovely nerd. His Venus, planet of values (and love…) is in Libra. What does that mean? Well, I’ve seen quite some fans type Koushiro as a bi-sexual, or something in that direction. Or even better a ‘disaster bi-sexual’. I already agreed on that, but when I saw this birth chart… IT’S (HEAD)CANON! Seriously, Libra is the zodiac sign of doubt, decision making (or actually no decision making, but I’ll get there with the next boy) and relationships and if you have your Venus placed in Libra you’re doomed to be a disaster when it comes to making decisions in your love life both romantically and platonically! Venus in Libra creates the desire for a good and loving relationships, but Koushiro’s Virgo Sun/Rising makes him more shy, his Virgo Mars makes him hold back. Once again, the Virgo Sun/Rising-Libra Venus dynamic lets him efface himself in relationships, thinking they have nothing to offer, but they have!! And so Koushiro gets left behind with his unresolved feelings… the boy has a hard time in love, let’s give him all a hug!

Taichi Yagami - October 15th 1988

The protagonist. Okay, let me compare this goggle headed protagonist to another goggle headed protagonist outside the Digimon franchise: Naruto. This is probably more interesting to people who have watched and know Naruto, so you can skip the part. To me Naruto is the classical protagonist type; bold, adventurous, playful, (a little) obnoxious at some times, hot headed… These are traits we easily assign to fire signs in the zodiac, especially Aries. So I would immediately give Naruto the Aries Sun placement. However, when we see Naruto grow up, his behavior and the way he speaks and leads grows up with him as well. That’s only natural. And based on those changes I wouldn’t necessarily give Naruto the Aries Sun placements, although the Aries placement or another fire placement is very likely to be present in his chart.

Now I could go even further, explain the development from child to adult through Jung’s theory about cognitive functions, but that’s incredibly complicated and a looooong stretch I won’t be making here today. In short, Jung’s development theory is interesting, because it shows how we first see the obvious traits in a child which are the traits the child engages (Rising sign) the world with before it develops the other functions showing the person’s true identity (Sun sign). So we could say we first see someone’s Rising sign more clearly before the Sun comes shining through. Like with Naruto. And the same could be for Taichi in the case of this headcanon.

To tackle his birth chart and big three, I’ll be starting with explaining his Rising Sign before his Sun sign. And the Rising sign I assigned him is Aries Rising.

Like I said above, Aries is bold, adventurous, playful and above all: courageous. Especially the Aries Rising placement which is more courageous than its Aries Sun counterpart. Aries are born leaders, can be extremely competitive, are somewhat restless and desperately need to move. In Taichi’s case with the above birth chart, that urge to move is magnified by his Aries Mars placement. The dynamic of his Aries Rising and Aries Mars makes Taichi a mover, an adventurer, and incredibly determined. This could be both positively, always wanting the best (especially for yourself, as Aries is a pretty selfish sign), and a tad negatively, always going and going and going. In the Adventure series this could be the reason why he makes Greymon dark-evolve, because he wants things too bad and too fast. Aries are hot headed and can grow impatient if things don’t go the way they want. And the Aries Rising and Mars dynamic makes Taichi a very physical guy. Mix that with the impatience and he is not afraid to pick fights and use his fists.

All of this can make Taichi a very stormy and reckless boy (boundaries? What’s that?), but also a fearless leader. The exuberance, the impatience and restlessness comes back in his Sagittarius Moon placement as well. This Sag Moon in combination with his strong Aries placements in Rising and Mars makes Taichi a sportive, physical, optimistic and forward leader that is incredibly courageous and adventurous, which could make him a bit ‘superficial’ as a protagonist. But the Sag Moon also deepens and strengthens his leader skills.

Sagittarius is a sign pictured by a centaur with an arrow and bow. The centaur’s horse legs make the Sag want to move and be free, but the arrow aims in a clear direction and aiming takes knowledge and focus. Sagittarius thus is an adventurous fella, but also a philosopher. Taichi’s Sag Moon placement makes him a pro in seeing the bigger picture and connecting dots next to his never ending energy. He will make sure we’re going in the right direction by overlooking the whole situation. So we absolutely shouldn’t forget Taichi is a true strategist! He sees, understands what’s at stake in a situation, connects the dots, comes with a strategy and like a true leader knows his team and can place everyone in his right spot to get through the toughest of situations (once again referring to Taichi asking Koushiro to pick the cards in Adventure episode 28). Speaking about a great leader, gosh, Taichi, you’re truly amazing! <3

However, it’s his Aries Rising and Mars that often make him act before he thinks, preferably alone (Taichi is a teamplayer, but the selfish and reckless Aries in him makes him act alone. And the sum of teamplayer + acting alone = self-sacrifice mode… which happens ALL THE DAMN TIME). Or actually makes him act while thinking without doing a short reflection beforehand. Seriously, I’m convinced that this reflection in advance could have saved him a lot of trouble throughout Digimon Adventure. Let’s blame it on (t)his (headcanon) birth chart…

Also, all of the above vouches for Taichi having an amazing intellect, but the guys needs to be challenged… Hence why he’s always staring out of the window during classes in Tri, daydreaming away to where the adventure is. He feels trapped, needs to be outside and should use his intelligence for things he finds important (like saving the digital world, soccer and saving friends and the world). The daydreaming could also be his Libra Mercury who can make Taichi lose his focus and could make him lazy. Luckily Taichi has a very active Aries Mars in opposite aspect from his Libra Mercury that neutralizes that lazy and dreamy Libra Mercury.

Okay, back to topic. Now you maybe think: But if Taichi is good in knowing where to go, being the fearless leader, also an intellect who has the knowledge to aim straight and shoot… then WHY is he so lost, down and in doubt in Tri and so unknowing of his future in Kizuna…??!! I have an answer to that. And that answer is his Libra Sun.

I know I know, this is a very VERY unpopular Sun sign to give this goggle leader, but please hear me out. For starters, Libra is the sign of diplomacy and if we believe the 02’s epilogue what’s Taichi’s job? Right, a diplomat. We also know he studies something like political sciences in Kizuna (which I think is AMAZING and vouches even more for Taichi’s intellect! Politics is a tough study…) and to make it in the political field you really do need diplomacy and charms.

Taichi is an absolute charmer, in my eyes at least. I mean, look at his 02 self! He’s such a smooth charmer in every way… The way he sends off Sora to Yamato while acting all cool and collected, phew, that requires some serious smoothness. And still we often see Taichi depicted as a down and broody boy besides his energetic and bold (sometimes indifferent…) character, especially after Tri. That too could be due to a Libra Sun placement.

Like Sagittarius is depicted by a centaur, Libra is depicted by scales and those scales are all about harmony, balance and justice. Libra is the opposite of Aries in the zodiac, but also about weighing opposites in the sigh itself. When we look at the Aries/Libra opposite placement: where Aries can be quite selfish, Libra as an opposite is the people’s pleaser. Where Aries is reckless and impatient, Libra is thoughtful and patient and one could say that an Aries acts where a Libra waits. Where Aries makes the impulsive decisions, Libra keeps deliberating leading into constant doubt and confusion. And how do we see Taichi in Tri? Ah yes, in doubt and confused.

A Libra Sun desperately wants to bring peace and harmony, driven by justice, in a diplomatic way. Libra Suns are deep thinkers which can make them very doubtful, making them spiraling down into a hole of overthinking and doubts. The Libra Sun-Sag Moon dynamic makes this all even more deep and almost philosophical in a way there will always be more and more questions, but never answers because Libra simply can’t make choices. All while being solution-oriented!

As Taichi grows up from a middle schooler to a high schooler, it’s that doubt coming from the Libra Sun that kicks Taichi hard. It conflicts with his carefree and bold Aries Rising nature and as that Libra Sun comes shining through, we see Taichi becoming more cautious and reserved compared to his younger self. The guy has a strong inner dialogue always looking for the best solutions to please everyone and bring harmony (I wanted to say ‘balance to the world’, yes to all the avatar the last airbender cameos) to the people and world(s in case of the digital world) around him he so desperately wants to protect. This is what we see happening in Tri, where he can’t choose what’s the right thing… Most of the time that inner dialogue is hidden behind his Aries Rising (and Aries Mars and Sag Moon).

So under that tough and courageous Aries Rising demeanor (remember that a Rising sign is all about engaging and how you come across to others) is a very soft, sweet, friendly and overall smart Libra Sun boy who has troubles expressing himself because the boy is in conflict with himself (which we see in the Dark Master’s arc in Adventure where he expresses his concerns towards his sister to Koushiro… it’s so hard for Taichi to let it all out, even when he needs it badly). It’s so sad, he’s such a complicated character, but that’s also one of the most beautiful things about Taichi. He’s layered af. He could be the best listener (Koushiro’s feels this, that’s why Koushiro can talk so open and freely to Taichi, because Taichi lets him thank you Libra Sun) if it weren’t for his strong fire placements opposite from his airy Sun sign. But give the boy time and space and he can show you his charms in a way no one else owns those charms.

So Taichi’s Libra Sun is hidden away most of the time due to his strong Aries placements. Usually his Rising and Sun sign being in opposite aspect from each other, should neutralize the placements, but Taichi’s Aries Mars placement makes the Aries Rising overrule the Libra Sun. Still, we shouldn’t forget Taichi is a softy with a big heart. He just needs the right people around him to get his charm on and Taichi definitely has some great people collected in his life who can help him think and make decisions.

A few things I want to point out before I stop rambling, because this analysis is already WAY too long.

Taichi’s midheaven in Capricorn in combination with his Libra Sun and Aries Rising makes him very ambitious on the intellectual side! Directly aiming for the UN and quickly climbing up the promotion ladder (and being successful like a true Cap, let’s not forget that).

His Mars was in transition from Pisces to Aries during his birth. Which means his Aries Mars is highly influenced by Pisces which could also explain why he spirals down as Pisces Mars has a lot of stormy energy on the emotional side (whereas Aries Mars has stormy energy on the physical side). When this emotional energy comes out negative, it can lead to mental health problems (!!! TRI DEPRESSED!TAICHI), especially when close friends and family (can you feel it coming? The whole Hikari-trauma is a thing) are involved.

His Libra Sun makes him in need of a group of friends and he loves being surrounded by them! Though he doesn’t like to admit that due to his Aries Rising. Taichi is such a conflicted boy…

An end note on these two boys: A heart to heart/hard friendship with a lot of mutual understanding and support <3

#DFS Digimon Astrology Journey #head-first buddies #Koushiro Izumi #Taichi Yagami #Digimon #Koushiro #Taichi #Izzy Izumi #Tai Kamiya #Izzy #Tai #Astrology #Reference post #Digimon adventure #Digimon tri #Digimon kizuna #Digimon adventure: 2020 #LONG POST.#Digimon headcanons

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randomrainman · 3 years ago

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why the american campaign in afghanistan was destined for failure, and other strange stuff.

Our campaign in Afghanistan which began on October 7, 2001, dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom” for some peculiar and uniquely American reason, was doomed from the very beginning, and most of the blame for the failure is ours.

Pictured: A group of Afghans rest near Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. (Photo: me)

So why did this happen in the first place?

Detailing the entirety of Afghanistan’s tumultuous 19th- and 20th-century history here would an arduous (and, ultimately, pointless) task, but, put succinctly, the USA and Afghanistan’s eastern neighbour, Pakistan, were instrumental in the initial development of the Taliban as a viable militant organisation and major player in Afghanistan.

Pictured: a Soviet soldier takes cover near Herat, Afghanistan. (Photo: AP/Jacques Langevin)

The Soviet Union embroiled itself in a bitter conflict in Afghanistan from 24 December 1979 until 15 February 1989. Through Pakistani intelligence services, the CIA, in its anti-commie fervour, armed and funded anti-Soviet resistance groups, collectively known as mujahideen (which is Swedish for “turboprop plane”, or maybe just Arabic for “those engaged in jihad”). Spirited resistance and brilliant guerrilla-style tactics by the mujahideen, which included future prominent Taliban figures such as Haibatullah Akhundzada and Mohammad Omar, led to the eventual departure of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in what has been termed (perhaps ironically, considering our current situation) “Russia’s Vietnam”. At least 562,000 Afghans perished in the Soviet-Afghan War, and millions more either fled the country or were internally displaced. This conflict also likely directly contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Pictured: Former Representative Charlie Wilson (D-TX) with a group of mujahideen. Wilson championed a veritable Cyclone of bullshit. (Photo: Wikipedia/unknown author)

As a civil war further ravaged Afghanistan, the Taliban, founded in 1994 by Islamic cleric (mullah) Mohammad Omar, emerged as the preeminent force amongst the mujahideen. Backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the Deobandi Islamist group quickly made territorial gains and captured Kabul in 1996, brutally murdering former President Najibullah to punctuate their conquest.

Under the newly established Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime went right to work in establishing stringent shari’a law over the territories they subdued, barring women from education and work, suppressing ethnic and religious minorities, and outlawing music and TV (which, with the exception of the last thing, should sound familiar to anyone familiar with our own history).

A certain Usama bin Laden (UBL), who founded the terrorist organisation al-Qa’ida (literally “the base”) in 1988 during the Soviet-Afghan War, funnelled resources, to include arms and foreign fighters, into the mujahideen resistance effort in Afghanistan through his Maktab al-Khidamat. Though the organisation provided little in terms of overall impact on the war, it boasted a backing of both Pakistan’s ISI and Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency, and was later absorbed into al-Qa’ida.

Having had his Saudi citizenship stripped and amid mounting pressure from Saudi Arabia, the US, and Sudan, bin Laden opted to return to Afghanistan in 1996, where he would forge an alliance with Mullah Omar. Omar’s Taliban regime provided a suitable, ahem, base of operations for bin Laden’s burgeoning global terrorism aspirations, and Pakistan provided continued funding and manpower for the Taliban and its al-Qa’ida allies up until 2001.

Pictured: Ahmad Shah Massoud and a group of mujahideen in the Panjshir Valley, 1984. (Photo: Jean-Luc Bremont/AP)

Ahmad Shah Massoud, a guerrilla commander who famously repelled Soviet occupying forces from the Panjshir Valley, became a leading figure in anti-Taliban efforts. Massoud, along with Abdul Rashid Dostum, a polarising yet powerful ethnic Uzbek warlord, formed the United Front (commonly referred to as the Northern Alliance). Instead of the Pashtun-centric approach utilised by the Taliban, Massoud sought to incorporate Afghanistan’s numerous ethnicities under the United Front’s umbrella.

Despite the Northern Alliance’s clear opposition to the Taliban and ostensibly having prior knowledge that radical elements were at play, the United States provided zero backing to the resistance efforts. Massoud himself addressed the European Parliament and warned of an imminent attack, and also expressed the need for US aid in combatting Taliban belligerents.

Two days prior to the September 11 attacks, the highly revered Massoud prepared to give an interview to a pair of Arab TV journalists, and it would be the last thing he did, as the “journalists” detonated a suicide bomb fashioned out of a TV camera, which was apparently stolen in France. The "Lion of Panjshir” was buried in his home village of Bazarak, Panjshir Valley, with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.

Pictured: The World Trade Center’s Twin Towers erupt in flames after airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda operatives crash into the buildings. According to conspiracy nutjobs, these planes and their passengers never existed, and instead flew into a wormhole and into a parallel universe. (Photo: Silva/Reuters)

Following 9/11, then-President George W. Bush threatened the Taliban regime and demanded that they deliver al-Qa’ida leaders in Afghanistan to American authorities, an undertaking they promptly decided to never do. Naturally, Bush came to shove, and a joint resolution that somehow declared war on the very concept of terror was issued.

The United States also finally decided to team up with the Northern Alliance at the onset of OEF in October 2001. Fortunately, it paid off; the Taliban regime rapidly disintegrated after being bombed into the Bronze Age. Despite having effectively vanquished the Taliban, the US failure to capture or kill UBL at Tora Bora likely protracted the conflict into the behemoth bumblefuck we currently recognise.

We did manage to finally kill UBL on May 2, 2011, but stayed in Afghanistan for another 10 years, because stuff. In 2018, then-President Trump ordered a drawdown of approximately 7,000 troops, and in February 2020, US envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban vice emir Abdul Ghani Baradar signed a peace agreement. In July of this year, we abandoned Bagram Airfield, our biggest base, virtually overnight, and did not bother informing the Afghans, which I’m sure made them extremely happy.

Pictured: The mountains near Bagram, Parwan province, Afghanistan. (Photo: me)

The Taliban resurgence into power was equally swift and met surprisingly little resistance: on August 15, 2021, the Taliban took Kabul and cemented its authority. This version of the militant group the NATO coalition and pro-Western Afghan forces soundly defeated in 2001 made promises to uphold women’s rights and to maintain an inclusive government, though the killing of at least three at a protest in Jalalabad, amongst other things, probably does little to reassure critics that their takeover is a positive turn of events. That said, far-right and neo-Nazi elements are, in fact, celebrating the Taliban’s seizure of power for some depraved Nazi-exclusive reason. It must also be noted that, on multiple levels, the evangelical brand of Christianity possesses significant overlap with the Deobandi Islamist stylings of the Taliban credo.

Pictured: President Joseph Biden discusses Afghanistan at the White House, Aug. 16, 2021 (Photo: AP/Vucci)

As of late, we have frequently underestimated the capabilities of enemy combatants, and the conclusion of our campaign in Afghanistan is no different: President Biden hugely miscalculated the Taliban’s competence in retaking the nation, citing the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) strength in numbers and superiority in armaments and materiel. Following the takeover, he even went on to blame the ANDSF’s lack of resolve as a reason for the US-backed regime’s collapse. While technically true, it also fails to take into account Afghanistan’s nature itself. In reality, Afghanistan, in contrast to a central federal government such as that of the United States, is very splintered, factional, corruption-ridden, and largely fiercely independent and self-governing, especially amongst Pashtun tribes. It’s as if Piru and Crip sets spread out over an entire country ... and over several centuries.

Pictured: “NAYBAHOOOOD!” ... now take away the colours, replace every clothing article with shalwar kameez, and turn it up to a cosmic scale, and you have Afghanistan. (Photo: unitedgangs.com)

An additional blunder was approaching the campaign as one would a conventional conflict, something which clearly does not apply to a place as plagued by lawlessness as Afghanistan. There are largely no clear enemies (or friends, for that matter), and trying to distinguish friend from foe is akin to stabbing a warbling mass of sentient Silly Putty or the weird black goo from Prometheus. The United States will almost always win in terms of sheer might and overall warfighting acumen, as we are skilled in both conventional and asymmetric warfare, but what can you do when you have no idea who the enemy is? When the enemy is willing to “wait it out” indefinitely? Sure, we could literally blow everyone up, but, last I heard, wholesale genocide is a generally frowned-upon activity.

Calling Afghanistan even a Pyrrhic victory seems like an overstatement when you examine the initial mission, our successes, and the final result. Sure, we got UBL, which was supposedly the entire point of the invasion, but if so, why did we choose to remain for another ten years, wasting a metric asston of resources in the process? To build a nation? To soothe our collective ego?

Pictured: Workers construct a road in Afghanistan (Photo: AP/Rahmat Gul)

If one is to build a nation, it requires a decent understanding of and a rapport with the people groups with whom you are dealing. It is not enough to simply install people who share your particular leanings and instruct them to do what you would do. It is certainly inadequate to provide arms, training, and funding to people and expect them to do your bidding when shit hits the fan. This sort of thinking also indirectly implies that we possess some kind of moral authority over the nations we invade. ��While our post-war influence has proved positive in some places (Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.), it does not mean that we should be building nations in every place in which we set foot, especially in a place so volatile and tribalistic as Afghanistan.

I have communicated with a few individuals who insist that President Biden’s withdrawal was too hasty, or that we should just remain in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. As much as I am typically revolted by former President Trump and his frequently incoherent word salads, he was right about this particular matter: “The only way they last is if we’re there. What are we going to say? We’ll stay for another 21 years, then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous." Yes ... yes, it is ridiculous to prop up an institution that will collapse instantaneously in our absence.

I am no fan of former Senator Ron Paul, and especially Alex Jones and InfoWars, but Paul is almost completely correct in making this statement. Ultimately, a militaristic approach to dominance does not pave the way for longevity. While it is virtually impossible (and infeasible) to return to a 1930s-era isolationist policy, repeated and extended global conflicts only serve to deplete American resources, even if war profiteers have much to gain from it.

Pictured: barbed wire fencing at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. (Photo: me)

Ultimately, rather than rushing pell-mell into unknown and dangerous situations, it is important, especially in this time period, to examine why things went wrong to avoid embroiling ourselves in additional catastrophic and unwinnable debacles such as our Afghanistan conflict. This is a time for self-reflection, rather than outrage.

|the kid|

#Afghanistan #afghan crisis #afghan peace talks #Taliban #US military #USA #crisis #humanitarian crises #Pakistan #international relations #foreign relations #war #Middle East #Pashtun #world affairs #creative writing #Clayton Jones Images #intelligence #CIA

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recentanimenews · 4 years ago

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FEATURE: Why Kamen Rider Black Remains Well-Loved After Nearly 35 Years

Image via Toei

For decades now, fans of Japanese tokusatsu (live-action with heavy special effects) have been getting to know each other with one simple question: “Which Kamen Rider do you like best?” With nearly 130 characters to choose from, each one sporting a distinct theme, setting, and ability, picking your favorite vaguely-grasshopper-themed, armored superpowered character is almost like a personality test that reveals who you are as a person.

Maybe your favorite Rider is Wataru Kurenai, a hardworking oddball loner who transforms into the Halloween-themed Kamen Rider Kiva. Or maybe your favorite is Gentaro Kisaragi, an optimistic and badass idiot whose dream is to be friends with everyone and who fights evil as the rocket-themed Kamen Rider Fourze. Or how about Oren Pierre Alfonzo, a queer ex-member of the French Foreign Legion, a world-famous pastry chef, and owner of one of the most badass Kamen Rider armors in the entire franchise: Durian Arms?

Image via Toei

In a group so diverse, it feels almost impossible to stand out, yet Kamen Rider Black (1987-1988) seems to have done just that with all the sequels, remakes, and reboots that it spawned. Kamen Rider Black RX was the first direct follow-up to a Kamen Rider show in the history of the franchise and became the basis for Masked Rider, which was Saban’s attempt to bring Kamen Rider to the US like it did with Super Sentai/Power Rangers. In spring of 2022, we will even get a more adult-themed reboot of the original called Kamen Rider Black Sun, directed by Kazuya Shiraishi who’s very much NOT a tokusatsu director. He’s actually more known for gritty dramas that explore the darker side of the human psyche like the excellent but sadly underappreciated Birds Without Names. This might actually be our first clue as to the enduring popularity of Kamen Rider Black.

A More Serious Tone

Image via Toei

Making a “darker” version of Kamen Rider Black will actually be quite easy seeing as the original series was pretty dark to begin with. The show dealt with two foster brothers, Kotaro Minami and Nobuhiko Akizuki, being kidnapped and cybernetically enhanced by the evil cult called Gorgom who want them to become their next leader, the nightmarish Creation King. Most previous Riders also gained their powers against their wills at the hands of one evil organization or another, but what sets Kamen Rider Black apart from them is just how much focus is given to everything the main character lost because of it.

Through flashbacks and present-day interactions with his friends and family, the show takes its time to let us know the person underneath the (now iconic) Kamen Rider Black armor. Once you start seeing him less as a superhero and more as a human in an unbelievably tragic situation, the show throws more tragedy at you as it lets you know the story is building up to Kotaro and Nobuhiko having to fight each other to the death. Although it’s not terribly complex, the story has an almost Shakespearean quality to it. But that’s not the only place where it excels.

Creative Fight Scenes and Knowing Its Limitations

Image via Toei

The special effects in Kamen Rider Black ... sometimes take you out of the story. But the show tries to make up for it with creative practical effects, especially when it comes to the fights.

Every Kamen Rider iteration lives or dies through its fights, and among the first eight shows, Kamen Rider Black probably has the best combat scenes. Every punch or kick feels like it really hurts — and there are a lot of them in every episode. The action is lightning fast and incredibly inventive, taking advantage of each set up in its own, original way. For example, in the very first episode, Kamen Rider Black battles spider monsters, with the show taking full advantage of the enemy’s web-shooting ability. There’s swinging, there is binding, and there is a lot of focus on the monsters themselves, which are pure nightmare fuel.

Now compare it to the second episode where Kotaro battles a leopard mutant. Here, the action is totally different because he’s fighting a monster that uses speed as a weapon. The battle is full of scenes of confusion and speed blurs which not only set the fight apart from what we’ve seen in the earlier episode, it also helps conceal the leopard mutant costume, which was as far from the best as you can get. But it shows that the series is aware of its shortcomings and tries to find creative ways around them, and you have to respect it for that.

Nailing the Fundamentals

mage via Toei

Kamen Rider Black doesn’t feature the most tragic backstory ever, nor does it have the best fight scenes in the franchise. Those all came later, primarily from the Heisei era (1989–2019). But Black was the first to truly get that ball rolling with its relatable, human character, fights that were more than just acrobatic punches and kicks, and a story that followed a simple Monster of the Week format but also had something much bigger hanging above it.

You could tune in to the show at any time and enjoy the creative and often actually scary-looking monsters that Kotaro fought in inventive ways, but all of it was slowly building to the ultimate, tragic confrontation with his brother. It all just made you feel like you were watching something epic in a franchise that, up until now, had more than its share of campy moments. Basically, Kamen Rider Black and Kamen Rider Black RX are remembered today because they did so much with very simple ingredients, taking them as far as they could go. This left the following shows no other choice but to grow and try out new things, ultimately leading to 50 years of Kamen Rider. A lot of people remember what Kamen Rider Black and Kamen Rider Black RX did for the franchise as a whole, and many fans will undoubtedly check out Kamen Rider Black Sun to see if it will have as much dedication and love for the iconic main character as the original did.

Are you a fan of Kamen Rider Black? What do you love about it? Are you planning to watch the reboot series? Let us know in the comment section!

Cezary writes words on the internet. You should follow him on Twitter.

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

By: Cezary Strusiewicz

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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hopelikethemoon · 5 years ago

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Past Connections (Javier x Reader) {MTMF}

Title: Past Connections Rating: PG-13 Length: 2100 Warnings: Mild Angst Notes: You can find everything about Maybe Today, Maybe Forever here. Set in March 1998. Summary: The second article hits the newstands.

@grapemama @seawhisperer @huliabitch @pedropascalito @rogrsnbarnes @thewallpapergoesorido @twomoonstwosuns @gooddaykate @livasaurasrex @ham4arrow @plexflexico @readsalot73 @hdlynn @lokiaddicted @randomness501 @fioccodineveautunnale @roxypeanut @snivellusim @lukesrighthand @historynerd04 @mrsparknuts @synystersilenceinblacknwhite @behindmyeyes-insidemyhead @exrebelshocktrooper @awesomefandomsunited @ah-callie @swhiskeys @lady-tano @beskar-droids @space-floozy @cable-kenobi @cool-ultra-nerd @himbopoes @findhimfives @pedrosdoll @frietiemeloen @arrowswithwifi @random066 @uncomicalhumour @heather-lynn @domino-oh-damn @cyarikaaa @ahopelessromanticwritersworld @im-still-a-pieceofgarbage @ksgeekgirl @yabby-girl @xqueenofthecraziesx @punkass-potato @coredrive @pascalesque @theduchessofkirkcaldy @queenquazar @sabinemorans @buckstaposition @holkaskrosnou @yespolkadotkitty @fleetwoodmactshirt @seeking-a-great–perhaps

PAST CONNECTIONS SPEAK OUT IN DEA SCANDAL

Following the bombshell report The Post released in the March 2nd issue, the DEA came forward with allegedly incriminating documentation purporting a pattern of unsanctioned expenditures, where Javier Peña had filed expense forms on evenings spent with Colombian hookers.

During our investigative reporting, The Post was able to connect with three of the women who had been paid by Peña, using DEA funds, during his time with the DEA in Colombia.

Elena Ramierz, who was willing to go on record using her own name, was forthcoming with information concerning her time with Peña.

“I would not be where I am today, had I not crossed paths with Javi. He was willing to sponsor my immigration request — without asking for anything in return. Javier Peña is one of the only men I worked with who was a genuinely good man. He cared about all of the girls at the brothels and would look out for us. I cannot, however, say the same about other men who abused the systems the DEA willingly put into place.”

When pressed further, Ramirez went into detail painting a picture of the systemic abuses that were encouraged by the DEA, including but not limited to brutalizing sex workers, non-consensual contact, and intentional situations that led to physical and mental harm. These claims were largely substantiated by the other two women who were willing to speak with The Post.

“He hated what he had to do to get information for the DEA. You could see the weight on his shoulders. Despite the brutal situation he was in, he was always kind and gentle with me and the other girls. Whatever picture the DEA is trying to paint him out to be, it’s to hide their own misdeeds.”

At the request of the DEA, The Post also made contact with Lorraine Jackson (neé Davis) who was the former ex-fiancé of Peña. Jackson, who hails from Laredo, Texas, provided details about the nature of her relationship with Peña nearly thirty years ago. Despite the DEA’s insistence that Jackson’s testimony would be detrimental to Peña and Morley’s case against DEA, her statement was to the contrary.

“Look,” Mrs. Jackson stated, “Javier left me at the altar when we were kids. I was angry for a long time. A long time. Even after I got married and started a family with a truly wonderful man. I was still wounded by what Javier did, but it all worked out for the best. I can’t even imagine what life would’ve been like if he’d shown up. Have you met his daughters? They adore him. He’s a good man, despite what happened between us.”

Mrs. Jackson continued, “When the DEA approached me about our relationship, I let my hurt feelings get the best of me. He made a lot of mistakes when he was younger — but didn’t we all? He left, went to college and came back to work for the Sheriff’s Office. He’d closed himself off and frankly, he was an ass. I don’t pretend to know what happened in Colombia, I wasn’t part of his life then, but I could see he had changed when he came home. The DEA wants to paint him out to be a villain in all of this and that’s just not the case.”

The DEA issued a revelatory statement, rebuffing the claims previously printed in The Post.

There is no doubt that Ms. Morley contributed admirable efforts in the war against Pablo Escobar. As the American people have now seen, her records contain multiple instances where she assisted in the apprehension of multiple associates of Escobar’s.

Despite her efforts, during her tenure with the DEA in Colombia and Ms. Morley failed to uphold the standards expected of a DEA field agent. One year after her transfer, she entered into a relationship with a CIA liaison who was an active member of a joint task force formed by the two agencies. It became clearly, early on, that she was not capable of maintaining a professional work environment.

In 1992, when Ms. Morley revealed that she was pregnant, she was immediately placed on desk duty. During a meeting with her direct chain of command, Ms. Morley intentionally concealed the identity of her child’s father. When questioned about Mr. Peña, she blatantly denied that she had any sexual contact with her partner. The following year, when Ms. Morley and Mr. Peña provided the DEA with the truth, we were forced to terminate her employment for her misconduct.

While The Post may attempt to twist this situation into a gender-based discrimination case, it is abundantly clear that both Ms. Morley and Mr. Peña engaged in unethical practices unbefitting of federal agents.

The Post reached out to CIA Agent, Lance Collier, who Ms. Morley was in a relationship from June 1988 to June 1989, clarified that their relationship had been approved by his director prior to its beginning.

Collier was willing to go on record with a statement of his own, “Annie was one of the hardest working agents I’ve ever worked with. During meetings, I repeatedly witnessed her being ignored and silenced by her superiors. They would ultimately use her knowledge under the guise of their own, intentionally undermining her abilities. On numerous occasions, I was also present for meetings where Javier Peña and Steve Murphy would go to bat for their partner. Annie was well aware of the risk and complications related to being a woman in a male dominated field, and despite that she persisted. I have seen men who acted as bad agents against our government still be venerated, so why are they still punishing her for becoming a mother?”

The Post is dedicated to the continued investigation of this scandal.

————

“You’re brooding.” You told Javier as you shut off the stove and grabbed a trivet to sit the pot of wild rice off the burner.

Javier huffed, folding his arms across his chest as he leaned against the kitchen counter across from you. “I’m not brooding.” He rubbed at the back of his neck before he pushed away from the counter and moved to grab two plates out of the cabinet. “The timing was just less than ideal.”

“I know.” You grabbed an oven mitt and pulled out the pan of chicken patties, sitting it on the stovetop. “I wish Vickers had told us how thorough Valerie was going to be in her statement to the paper.”

“It was fucking mortifying, baby. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it through exams next week. Think it’s too late to make it a paper?” He questioned, grabbing the buns and mayonnaise out of the fridge.

“Unfortunately,” You made a face as you shut off the oven and moved to grab a paper plate to cut the tomato on. “It’ll blow over.”

“Not nearly soon enough,” He shook his head. “You know how much I hate looking back on that shit and now everyone knows my business.”

“It was a risk we were both willing to take,” You reminded him. “Say the word and we pull the plug.”

“I’m not pulling the fucking plug, baby. I’m just saying — did my class really need to know about my exploits with hookers in Colombia? I get that it’s tantalizing, but she pushed it too far.”

“Even Elena didn’t realize how far it would go,” You sat the knife down and wiped off your hands on a dishtowel, turning to approach him. “I’m sure the DEA thought they could put a wedge between us — like I didn't know what you got up to.”

“You talked to Elena today?”

You nodded, “I called to thank her. Her word would’ve been enough I think, but having two ‘Jane Smiths’ reaffirm what she was saying? There’s so much bullshit going on, in the pursuit of stopping drugs that has to end. We both know how they abuse those women.” You reached up and brushed your fingers over his cheek, leaning up on your toes to kiss him.

He snaked his arm around your waist, pulling you towards him. “Think they’ll try to track down Matias next?”

You let out an incredulous laugh at that, “God, I don’t even know what happened to him.” You admitted, “I doubt they’d be able to track him down.” He had been a sweet young man you’d spent a handful of evenings with in the pursuit of intel nearly a decade ago. “It’s not like you don’t know.”

Javier dragged his teeth over his bottom lip and nodded slowly, “It’s just fucking bullshit. Even if it exonerated us.” He sighed heavily, “I should’ve cancelled class. Standing up there trying to keep on topic — knowing they’ve just read an article with three women who I’ve fucked.”

“Technically five.” You pointed, clarifying when he arched a brow. “Elena, Valerie, and Mia, Lorraine, and myself.”

He made a face, feigning disgust before he released you. “I hadn’t realized the DEA would be so determined to punch below the belt.”

“Because bribing Monica to say you’d fucked her was above the belt?” You pointed out as you moved to grab two buns out of the bag, throwing them on the plates and using a spatula to pick up the chicken patties and place them on each bun.

“Alright, alright. You’re making valid points.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “One day the girls are going to see these articles.”

“Then we’ll explain to them that sex workers deserve more praise and credit than they’re currently afforded.” You stated simply, “And that there’s nothing wrong about being sexually active — like we were, before we got together.” You shrugged.

“You wanna have that conversation with them?”

You shrugged, licking your thumb clean after you got mayonnaise on it, “Sure. It doesn’t bother me.”

Javier pinched at the bridge of his nose for a moment before he started plating up his chicken sandwich, “You got cheese?”

“Hang on,” You headed for the fridge, pulling the door open and rummaging around in the deli drawer. “Swiss or cheddar?”

“Do we have any of the pepperjack left?”

You hummed as you pulled open a drawer below, grabbing the bag of pepperjack cheese. “You’re in luck. I hid it the last time Nadia was here.” You tossed it onto the counter beside him, “That girl loves cheese.”

“Monica wasn’t in class today,” Javier stated, throwing two pieces of cheese onto his chicken patty before topping it off with the bun, “Did you hear from her today? I meant to call but got pulled into meetings.”

“I called her this morning at work,” You told him as you stowed the mayo back in the fridge. “She’s still pretty skittish after everything that happened.” You explained, smiling when you returned to your plate and Javier had scooped up a spoonful of wild rice for you. “Thanks, babe.”

He pressed a kiss to your cheek, “Anytime.” Javier gave your ass a playful swat before he headed for the kitchen table. “She’s got office hours with me tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t make a big deal about it,” You cautioned him as you sat down across from him at the table. “Honestly, she seemed fine. She just wanted to skip today.” You took a bite of your sandwich, before washing it down with a swig of beer. “I can’t wait for all of this to be over with.”

“You and me both, baby.” Javier retorted, covering his mouth with his fist as he spoke with his mouth full. “I want them to fucking pay for their bullshit and let us get on with our lives.”

You nodded your head slowly, “Everyone at the P.D. has been so supportive. They’re far from perfect, but they at least recognize what the DEA’s been doing is morally and ethically wrong.”

Javier rocked his jaw slowly as he stared at you across the table, “You still thinking about quitting?”

“All the time,” You admitted with a shrug. “I just want to get through this first. The DEA’s been such a dark shadow for so many years.”

“Once this is over, I feel like we’ll be able to really live.”

“Right?” You agreed with a grin, “Connie thinks we should go on vacation.”

“As soon as this semester’s over.”

You leaned across the table and took his hand into yours, giving it three short squeezes. “There’s a part of me that is stupidly excited about my name finally being attached to yours in the record books. And Steve’s, of course. It’s bizarre to see our lives laid out in the newspaper, but at the same time — I love it.”

“Me too, baby.” Javier grinned at you, “It means no more hiding.”

#javier pena #javier pena x reader #pedro pascal x reader

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optimistic-dinosaur-nacho · 4 years ago

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𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕊𝕡𝕠𝕠𝕜𝕪 𝔽𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕤

It’s your monstrous dinosaur here. Unexpected right? Don’t worry. As you all know a certain month is coming its way to haunt us. You’re wondering why I’m giving you a long speech and you want to know why I’ve come here to give it to you so unexpected.

It’s Spooky Season, ladies & gentlemen. Grab your brooms, daggers, stakes, rope and a candle for the dark. I cannot talk for long, once this hour strucks 3am, I am no longer safe. And so are you.

I have made a challenge. A Spooky Challenge.

Let’s hope you know your movies.

They’re about to come to life for your imagination.

Rules are simple. There is a list of Classic Spooky Films put back from the 1970s and 2000s. Films like Alien, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, A Quiet Place, Halloweentown, Hocus Pocus, and more! Your chosen Actor/Character shall play any character you desire in your Spooky Story. Will this character survive or will this character take another life? That’s your choice.

And choose wisely. Like I said.

You’re no longer safe.

Rules Below

You can choose any classic Halloween film.

But choose wisely. First come first serve and you might not be able to turn back.

Do you have to follow Dino to participate?

No. You do not have to, this is for everyone. But I’d appreciate it.

Limit of two films per writer.

Limit of two stories per character

Once 2-3 people choose the same film, that film is gone. So hurry!

No Smut! Implied is allowed just have very little and a warning

Dark themes are allowed! Make sure you have warnings.

These can be reader insert or OC stories.

Ethnic, Interracial, LGBTQ+ and polyamorous stories are welcome and encouraged.

Minimum 500 words. No max.

It must be an original work and not part of an existing series.

No sexual situations with minors, no bodily functions and no snuff.

Can be scary if chosen to be. The characters can watch the film of your choosing or put them in the movie to make it even spookier. Whatever you desire!

Doesn’t have to be based on the film! Can be put in a different way but gives the same scenes for that film.

If your story contains anything that every horror film has (Blood, gore, Ouija Boards, Etc.) that should be in your warnings for others. Thank you

Deadline?

October 31, 2020

How do you participate?

Choose a film below then send in an ask along with your chosen film and character. If you’re doing more than one character add them, too. (There is no limited character choosing, just films)

When you have your Scary Story written, tag me in that fic, and use the tag #DinoScaryStories2020

Spooky Classic Films

First come, first serve

Horror Thriller Films

Jaws (1975) @just-one-ordinary-fangirl

Carrie (1976) @ssebstann @nekoannie-chan

Halloween (1978)

Alien (1979)

The Amityville Horror (1979) @sweater-daddiesdumbdork

Friday the 13th (1980)

The Shining (1980) @nekoannie-chan

Poltergeist (1982)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)/(2010)

Silver Bullet (1985)

Aliens (1986)

Little Shop of Horrors (1986) @hettie-drysdale

Predator (1987)

Pet Sematary (1989)/(2019)

The Babysitter (1995)

Scream (1996) @queenofspades20

America Psycho (2000)

The Ring (2002)

Saw (2004)

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Orphan (2008)

The Conjuring (2013)

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) @hettie-drysdale

The Purge (2013)

World War Z (2013)

Annabelle (2014)

Ouija (2014)

Split (2016) @nbarnes

Don’t Breath (2016)

It (2017) @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad

Get Out (2017)

Happy Death Day (2017)

Truth or Dare? (2018)

Bird Box (2018)

The First Purge (2018) @writerwrites

A Quiet Place (2018)

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019)

Us (2019) @just-one-ordinary-fangirl

Ready Or Not (2019) @waywardodysseys

Family Friendly Films

1984 - 2015

Ghostbuster (1984) @nbarnes

Gremlins (1984)

Beetlejuice (1988)

Little Monsters (1989)

Witches (1990)

The Adam’s Family (1991) @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad

Hocus Pocus (1993) @hevans-angel

Casper (1995)

Halloweentown (1998)

Corpse’s Bride (2005)

Coraline (2009)

Goosebumps (2015)

Be creative with your stories, no need to write the exact film. If I were to do Hansel and Gretel, maybe the reader falls into Steve’s trap and he holds her captive. Be creative! I’d love to see the 2018 films in your stories.

I will also participate in these but I will not take places of the films, those are your places to take!

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betweenthetimeandsound · 3 years ago

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Three Minutes to Eternity: My ESC 250 (240-231)

#240: Joci Pápai - Az én apám (Hungary 2019)

"Hallom őt, az ő szívét a húrokon Látom őt, múló idővel az arcomon Az ő hitét büszkeség vallanom Ezeregy dalból ezt az egyet dúdolom, dúdolom"

"I can hear him, his heart on the strings I can see him, bearing the passing time on my face I’m proud to confess his faith Of a thousand and one songs this is the one that I hum"

If there's anything I love at Eurovision, is when someone sings a song from their soul. And in both of Joci's entries, he does just that.

Az en apam is a bit more sedate than his first entry (which will come soon enough), but it's calming and serene with substance. The lyrics, talking about his relationship with his father, is a touching and poetic tribute, one that people should really speak to their loved ones that care about them.

It's just a shame this song was the one to break Hungary's impressive qualifying streak; I thought they were on a path to win soon (though not with this one...). And they left the contest too; hopefully they will steer the ship back to more open waters and come back.

Personal ranking: 5th/41 Actual ranking: DNQ (did not qualify)--12th in the first semi-final in Tel Aviv

#239: Anna Vissi -- Mono i Agapi (Cyprus 1982)

"Η ζωή μας περνά, κι ότι φεύγει πονά Πίσω δε γυρνά, κι όμως κάτι μας κρατά"

"Our life passes by, and whatever leaves, we’re in pain It doesn’t come back, but something holds us together"

In most cases, the first entry somebody has sent in the contest is their best, with a number of exceptions here and there. Anna is one of them; I never liked her first entry, but her other two are fantastic.

Mono i agapi is quite lyrically simplistic--it talks about how love remains between two people, as the world changes around them. But the melody has a very loungy sound--I've heard it being compared to a James Bond theme. While I don't hear why it would be the case (other than the alluring mystery of this piece), it does give a calming vibe, and stands out in the rather mediocre field in 1982.

Personal ranking: 3rd/18 Actual ranking: 5th/18 in Harrogate

#238: Yardena Arazi -- Ben Adam (Israel 1988)

בן אדם הוא רק בשר ודם,” אבק פורח במדבר, בן אדם, בדרך העולם, כצל עובר, כחרס הנשבר "

“A human being is only flesh and blood, Dust flying in the desert A human being, in the way of the world Like a passing shadow, like broken pottery"

Yardena's time at Eurovision 1988 is best known for the anecdote where she goes to a fortune teller who said that song #9 would win that contest. When the draw occurred, Israel was slotted into that place, but was shafted up to #8 when Cyprus withdrew from having an already-released song. #9 would go to Ne Partez Pas Sans moi, which would end up winning and make history thanks to its singer.

This ends up taking away from the song itself; Ben Adam is reminiscent of older folk songs, but it takes off with its own character and flair. I also love the lyrics, which recognizes humans as flawed, without berating them as such. (We need a little bit more of that in the internet world, haha)

The flurry towards the end of the song was well-executed too, and the instrumentation is just fantastic. It feels like one was in a festival!

Personal ranking: 2nd/21 Actual ranking: 7th/21 in Dublin

#237: Amandine Bourgeois -- L'enfer et moi (France 2013)

“Tu m’as fait pleurer à vif Mon cou porte encore ta griffe J’aimais échanger de peau”

“You made me cry a lot You can still see your mark on my neck I used to like exchanging skin”

I love the dark sensuality of this song—with its blues influences, it tells a story of a relationship gone awry, but does so with sophistication. It starts out with a slick guitar line, which later devolves into a full on outrage against the lover at question.

The harshness of this song probably clashed with its opening spot, which is why it’s so underrated. Or it was because of Amandine’s styling...

Either way, it has grown on me since I watched the 2013 contest, and it gets the right vibes going...except with the lyrical story...

Personal ranking: 5th/39 Actual ranking: 23rd/26 GF in Malmo

#236: Ambasadori -- Ne mogu skriti svoju bol (Yugoslavia 1976)

"Ne molim da se vratiš Al’ molim te da pamtiš Voljela tebe samo sam ja”

“I’m not begging you to come back But please remember I only loved you”

Ambasadori was one of Yugoslavia's biggest groups, and they have a long list of who's who in the Bosnia music scene. I'm not familiar with their other music, but Ne mogu skriti svoju bol definitely highlights their artistry, along with the dark-pop take Yugoslavia had in 1970s Eurovision.

This song was initally my fifth place of 1976, but it has steadily grown until it became my fourth (knocking out Portugal in the process) The instrumentation conveys a dark mood, despite the upbeat strings and the poppy sound. There’s a grooviness in it to contrast the sullen lyrics, mourning for a lost love. It definitely stands out in the crowd; along with Ismeta's lack of makeup.

It got rewarded with a second-to-last place, which is way too low for this. And Yugoslavia withdrew for five years, and came back with a new sound...

Personal ranking: 4th/18 Actual ranking: 17th/18 in Den Haag

#235: Zibbz -- Stones (Switzerland 2018)

"Sins of the father make us fall And I can’t do anything about it"

2018 had a number of staging errors which cost several countries qualification. In Stones' cases, this wasn't the case.

Corrine has incredible stage presence, with a sense of strength and attiude as she struts on the stage. She definitely adds substance to this powerful pop-rock song, fighting against bullying in all corners of society.

To further that, she lights a flare at the bridge, which definitely hits the tone of the song home. Plus, it was an awesome moment to behold.

Basically, Zibbz did everything right--great song, thoughtful message, simple but impactful staging, and it still didn't qualify...While it has outgrown me a bit, it's still a total jam.

Personal ranking: 9th/43 Actual ranking: DNQ -- 13th in the first semi-final in Lisbon

#234: Kalomira -- Secret Combination (Greece 2008)

“An open book An open book, well, I'm sorry, I am not Sometimes I'm acting like a lady Sometimes woman, sometimes baby.”

"You maybe an open book Spongebob, but I'm a bit more complicated than that"

One third of the female-bop grouping in the 2008 contest, Secret Combination takes Greek instrumentation and American production to produce quite the gem. I could imagine Britney Spears singing this, but I also thought of the Cheetah Girls when I was listening to it. With a bit of sweetness and a touch of sexiness, Kalomira plays the different roles well--and has a cute moment when the book actually opens, revealing her in a really nice silvery dress!

Personal ranking: 7th/43 Actual ranking: 3rd/25 GF in Belgrade

#233: Avi Toledano -- Hora (Israel 1982)

"וגם ההורה, ההיא עם הה”א קולה עוד עולה, קולה לא נדם"

"And also the Hora, the one with the Hey Its voice still rises, its voice has not been silenced"

Israel had a particular style with songs from the 1980s--they are usually really energetic, with fun choreography in which everyone joins along. It makes for good results and good energy, especially when it's done well!

Hora seems to embody it in many ways, from the celebratory lyrics to the fun dancing across the really tiny stage in Harrogate. It combines Israeli folk music with a sense of joie-de-vivre, celebrating the nation (which as you will see later, may not work today...)

Avi earns himself a strong second place, but he would write something even better the following year (again, will come later)!

Personal and actual ranking: 2nd/18 at Harrogate

#232: Raphael Gualazzi -- Madness of Love (Italy 2011)

"Ma vedrai un altro me in un sogno fragile Riderai come se non ti avessi amato mai Cercherai un altro me oltre all’ombra di un caffè"

"But you’ll see another me in a fragile dream You’ll laugh as if I had never loved you You’ll look for another me beyond the shadow of a coffee"

Between 1994 and 2010, Italy withdrew from Eurovision, with only one participation in 1997. Nobody knows why, with reasons ranging from the rise of a televote to Italian disinterest in the contest, but they were certainly missed. Thanks to the late Rafaella Carra and a bunch of other circumstances, Italy came back in 2011, and they did so in style.

"Madness of Love" is frequently overlooked amongst Italy's post-comeback entries, as some of us aren't into jazz. I don't listen to the genre often, but I like this song particularly. It's flirty and sweet, under a very sophisticated soundscape which reminds me of a 1920s speakeasy. And while people are put off by Raphael's vocals, the way he lets himself go at the end of the chorus is definitely a highlight.

Basically, it's one of those runners-up that should've won against the winner of its year. But it was nicely made up for ten years later.

Personal ranking: 2nd/43 Actual ranking: 2nd/25 GF in Dusseldorf

#231: Anneli Saaristo -- La dolce vita (Finland 1989)

“Minä sammutin elämän janoa vaan Minä osasin onnea anoa vaan Jälkeen kaiken nyt saatan sen sanoa vaan La dolce vita”

“I was just quenching life’s thirst I knew how to plead for happiness After everything all I can say is: The good life”

La Dolce Vita sounds more stereotypically ”Spanish” than “Finnish”, because of its flamenco influences versus the dark pop or metal we expect from the country. Apparently, a lot of Finns travel south for vacations, which makes a bit more sense here.

Either way, it springs a bit of life and joy into a dark heart. It embraces life in its tropical vibe and Anneli’s deep vocals, and conveys a comfortable mood. Apparently, it was also known for Anneli's slight choreography, but I only noticed her standing during the instrumental.

It would be Finland’s last top ten result for many years, but the 7th place it got in Lausanne was deserved (and they should've done better, actually!). A fitting send-off for their long-time conductor Ossi Runne (RIP).

Personal ranking: 3rd/22 Actual ranking: 7th/22 in Lausanne

#esc 250 #eurovision song contest #esc top 250 #esc hungary #esc cyprus #esc israel #esc france #esc yugoslavia #esc switzerland #esc greece #esc italy #esc finland #three minutes to eternity #vintage eurovision

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