#with significant lag between us

[cultivating-wildflowers]

one time a bunch of my online friends met up in discord to play a game and we got sick of waiting for the last girl to show up, so another girl called her and, when we got her voicemail, we all shouted into our microphones "come play with us, Kenzieeeee" which had to sound terrifying on the receiving end

and then the girl who'd made the call realized she had the wrong number in her phone and we had just left that voicemail for a complete stranger

[wordsandrobots]

You could potentially write an essay comparing and contrasting the designs of the Valkyrja frames?

Totally not asking so I have an easier source to reference than pulling up like five different wiki tabs when I eventually design Geirahöð

Of course not, why would I think that?

Hmm. Let's start at the beginning.

The Valkyrja frame

The Valkyrja is the machine that lost an arms race to the Gundams. Developed at the same time, during the latter days of the Calamity War, it did not see wide-scale deployment, specifically because the Gundams proved so successful at countering mobile armours. I like to think that in the midst of the genocidal conflict, some mobile suit designer got quite exceptionally angry at Agnika Kaieru over their work being made redundant.

Indeed, this detail suggests a degree of, if not competitiveness among those working to end the War, then at least a proliferation of efforts towards doing so. Why put all your eggs in one basket, when said eggs are the future existence of humanity itself? Whether that represents the input of different manufacturing companies is unclear. We know nothing concrete about the circumstances that gave rise to mobile frames and their predecessors, except that some Gundams feature a symbol also seen on mobile armours – a symbol not present on any other type of 'suit.

The Valkyrja frame mobile suits did see some combat, with Oltlinde notably acting as support to the indestructibly-armoured Gundam Gremory. Their role, however, was not significant and only nine machines of this type were manufactured (this is stated outright in Oltlinde's kit manual, having been suggested very strongly by other sources). Consequently, they fell into obscurity, with few people remaining aware they existed.

Their most important legacy is as a starting template for Gjallarhorn's mainline combat machines, a development lineage that would eventually culminate in the Graze and Reginlaze.

Where the Gundam frame was based around overwhelming enemies with the sheer power of two Ahab reactors, the Valkyrja uses a single reactor with maximum efficiency. This, its relative simplicity, lightweight structure, and ease of use formed the philosophy Gjallarhorn took forward as they refined the design into an easy-to-maintain, easy-to-mass-produce frame. This stripped a lot of the elegance from the machine. In contrast to the Valkyrja's gently tapering limbs and human-like hands, arms and legs, the Geirail and the Graze are composed of blockier, more mechanical shapes, while the Reginlaze – built with a greater focus on 'suit to 'suit combat – only restores a little of that lost aesthetic with the more refined jointing structure.

The Valkyrja was also designed to be adapted to different forms of weaponry, rather than requiring weaponry adapted to it. This means the different units are each suited for a different form of combat. There is therefore no 'standard' Valkyrja.

Nonetheless, there are commonalities across the line. Among these are weapons made from 'rare metals', same as Gundam Bael's famous swords. Difficult to find and process, these materials provide much higher strength than the 'rare alloys' used in standard frames, armour and weaponry. Given the original target of the project was the mobile armours, it is clear the Valkyrjas were outfitted to overcome their defences. Ironically, that means they are or have the potential to be equally effective against other mobile suits: should somebody wish for a 'Gundam killer', the Valkyrja is a good option.

To take a momentary detour, one question raised by their' contribution to military history is: what did Gjallarhorn use before creating the mobile suit(s) that preceded the Geirail? The Gundams' role is implied to have ended fairly sharply after the War, with the Alaya-Vijnana and other attendant technologies becoming heavily restricted, even erased from popular knowledge. But there must have been some lag between the War's conclusion and the production of a new mainline 'suit, and with only nine Valkyrjas, Gjallarhorn surely had to rely on something else in the meantime.

We have no official answer to this and while it is feasible the Gundams were phased out of use more slowly, in light of there only having been 72 to begin with and an attrition rate somewhere in the region of 50%, I would like to propose an alternative.

I have mentioned before that the Garm Rodi used by the Dawn Horizon Corps pirates is an odd outlier in that it is named for a piece of Norse mythology but does not (in the present) belong to Gjallarhorn (the other exception, the ship Skidbladnir, can be explained as belonging to somebody interested in their history). I'd also like to draw attention to the torso armour, which features a 'letter-box' detail corresponding surprising well to the Geirail. It also has curved shoulder armour akin to the Grimgerde, which is in turn the obvious inspiration for the Geirail's arm design (the Hexa-frame Enzo has shoulders that are much closer to both, so this part may not mean anything).

Moreover, the Garm is stated to be a versatile machine, matching the Graze line's general-purpose approach, so I don't think it would be incongruous if it were positioned as Gjallarhorn's 'grunt' machine during the War and the start of the Post Disaster era. If nothing else, it's fun to imagine the line essentially evolving from a Zaku into a Leo.

Returning to canon concerns, the Valkyrja frame mobile suits are named after the Valkyries from Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre, in order of appearance:

Brünnhilde

Gerhilde

Ortlinde

Waltraute

Schwertleite

Helmwige

Siegrune

Grimgerde

Roßweiße

So far, in the Iron-Blooded Orphans anime, spin-off manga and 'Mobile Suit Variations', five of these 'suits have been confirmed extant, or previously existing:

V03-0907 Oltlinde

V04-0630 Waltraute

V06-0526 Helmwige

V07-0126 Sigrún

V08-1228 Grimgerde

(Please note, the official name Oltlinde has an r/l transposition error altering it from Ortlinde; presumably it should be the latter, but I'll continue using the official version to avoid confusion.)

This leaves V01-???? Brünnhilde, V02-???? Gerhilde, V05-???? Schwertleite and V09-???? Roßweiße unaccounted for. Technically only a single Valkyrja frame, Grimgerde, appears in the anime itself, since 'V08Re-0526 Helmwige Reincar' is merely Grimgerde reskinned for disguise purposes – which does nicely demonstrate how the frames can be re-adapted to different sets of equipment as required.

Of the known Valkyrjas, Oltlinde alone is stated to have remained under Gjallarhorn control since the Calamity War. Grimgerde, while associated with them via McGillis, appears to have been in private hands prior to the start of the series, and we don't know anything about the current status of Waltraute, Sigrún or the real Helmwige. As far as I can tell, it is never directly stated if there is interest in the Valkyrjas from collectors as there is in the Gundams, nor whether they too are 'phantom machines', stricken from the official record. However, the statement that not many people know about them suggests the latter may be the case, likely feeding the former.

The Valkyrja frame mobile suits

V03-0907 Oltlinde

Height: 18.8m Weaponry: Dáinsleif Valkyrja Double Blade, Shield Binder Status: Intact, under Gjallarhorn control

Piloted by Jizil Jizin, an officer in Gjallarhorn's Ollerus internal security unit, Oltlinde is the only Valkyrja still under its original ownership. Just as several Gundams were passed down the family lines of their pilots, Oltlinde has stayed in the Jizins' control up to the present day, as part of their service to the Nadira family, the descendents of Gundam Gremory's pilot.

Formerly equipped to operate a Dáinsleif mass-driver, it was stripped of this ability when Dáinsleifs were banned following the Calamity War. The remains of the firing mechanism were reworked into a pair of swords, one of which has a rare metal blade, that can be combined into a double-bladed staff.

The large antenna on its head and the pronged shields over its left shoulder operate as a detection system to locate distant enemies, with the binder specifically tracking Ahab wave reactions. Despite the switch to close-quarters operation, in Jizil's hands it proves very effective, easily holding its own against Gundam Astaroth and even breaking the Gundam's giant Demolition Knife over the course of the battle. It also weathers a heavy blow to its back, and the fight ultimately ends in Astaroth's favour purely due to Jizil's voluntary surrender (thus providing a view of where the cockpit sits in the 'suit's torso).

Each Valkyrja mobile suit has a design loosely inspired by a different set of historical armour. Exactly what Oltlinde is going for, I am not sure. The 'feather' on the helm and the half-cape design put me in mind of the Renaissance, and if we consider its original use as a Dáinsleif mount, we're likely looking at an archer of some kind. This, together with the Swiss cross on the shoulder, makes me wonder if William Tell was an influence here.

Regardless, its appearance demonstrates a concern for aesthetics that characterises the Valkyrjas. They are clearly intended to look good, indicating a conscious attempt to build 'heroes' (Sigrún's kit manual goes so far as to state they were developed as "symbols of those who wished to win the Calamity War"). While the Gundams certainly became this, they are not so universally committed to looking the part.

Out of fiction, Oltlinde is the fourth Valkyrja to receive a 1/144 High Grade model kit, as part of the Premium Bandai sub-brand.

V04-0630 Waltraute

Height: 18.5m Weaponry: Valkyrja Uchigatana, Valkyrja Wakizashi Status: Unknown

In contrast to Oltlinde, Waltraute's inspiration is instantly apparent: a samurai, equipped with a uchigatana and a wakizashi short sword. Both these are rare metal weapons and are/were used in tandem during attacks. The layered construction of the armour helps reduce the mobile suit's weight, thus retaining a high degree of agility along with increased resilience.

One interesting titbit from the official description is that it was designed to escort friendly mobile suits and act as a 'lynchpin' for the battleline. Once again, we have a Valkyrja assigned a supplementary role, with Waltraute providing close-combat support where Oltlinde supplied ranged cover. This raises the possibility all nine served in this capacity, at least briefly, and that there are other linked dynastic relationships like the Jizins and Nadiras. However, it is equally likely this detail merely describes intention, not actuality.

And that's all the information we have on Waltraute. Created for the MSV and featuring only as a collectable fighter in the short-lived Mobile Suit Gundam IRON-BLOODED ORPHANS G game, its exact capabilities and current status are a mystery. So far, it doesn't even have a kit to its name.

V06-0526 Helmwige

Height: 21.1m Weaponry: Valkyrja Buster Sword, Electric Shock Horn Status: Unknown

The weird thing about Helmwige is that we know what it looks like without it ever having actually appeared. Recreated by the Montag Company in order to disguise the Grimgerde following events at the end of Season 1, the original Helmwige's contribution comes purely in the form of technical data. Nevertheless, in the absence of any reason to believe otherwise, let us assume the Helmwige Reincar is a 1:1 replica of the real deal, excepting perhaps the colours.

Immediately, the biggest distinguishing feature is Helmwige's sheer bulk, not just in terms of the increased armour, but also due to it wielding one of the biggest weapons in the IBO canon. The Buster Sword is so huge, Helmwige comes with a collapsible bracket to allow it to be carried over long distances, new, larger hands (more closely resembling those of a Graze) to accommodate its grip, and extendible 'hooves' to provide extra stability when using it under gravity. Other Valkyrja 'suits seem geared for agile hit-and-run tactics. Helmwige is built to take a stand.

The Gundams count among their ranks machines fitted for a wide variety of fighting styles; it therefore makes sense their competitors would likewise feature diverse configurations. But this also underscores why the Gundams beat out the Valkyrjas. It is maybe unfair to use Helmwige Reincar's performance during the battle with mobile armour Hashmal as a baseline for comparison: nobody present is ready for Hashaml's speed or power, whereas we would expect pilots contemporary to the War to have been better prepared. Even so, the way Barbatos Lupus takes and uses the Buster Sword, swinging it rapidly, one-handedly, without needing extra thrusters or a bracing stance, shows the overwhelming advantages of a dual-reactor frame.

We later see Helmwige Reincar matching strength with another Gundam in space, so the equation is not unbalanced simply by normal energy output. It is the bursts of power Gundams can generate when they exceed their limiters that allows them to outclass other 'suits, something the Valkyrjas simply aren't capable of.

As a final note, two of Helmwige's features not shown in action are the detachable club forming the lower hilt of the Sword and the electro-shock generated by its horns. These, together with the protective plate that can be raised to cover the 'suit's face, emphasise its status as a front-line fighter. Whatever its disadvantages relative to the Gundam equivalent, it remains a formidably engineered machine and the bruiser of the line.

V07-0126 Sigrún

Height: 18.4m Weaponry: Valkyrja Rapier, Valkyrja Round Shield Status: Unknown

Sigrún is another product of the MSV, again only appearing as a fighter in the mobile game, although it did receive a mainline 1/144 HG kit. Like Oltlinde, it is stated to have fought in the War, albeit only on a few occasions. Its current whereabouts are not mentioned.

Once more we see a rare-metal primary weapon, here a 'rapier' that can drill through enemy armour (or so the game attack animations imply; the drilling is not stated in the kit manual, although it follows from the design). The rapier is specifically a penetrating weapon, rather than the more common blunt-edged crushing approach to overcoming nano-laminate armour. To aid in stabbing opponents, Sigrún's shield can launch anchor-cables from four cardinal points, entangling a target. The game shows Sigrún hurling its sword at the trapped foe; I assume yanking them closer would also be feasible.

Its design is inspired by knights of the Middle Ages, with the winged helm in particular evoking Germanic origins, which is fitting for the line's operatic naming scheme. It also possesses an increased number of high-output thrusters, adding power to its close-quarters combat style.

One additional detail that intrigues me is the extended rear antenna on the helm. On other Iron-Blooded Orphans mobile suits, such additions usually indicate a unit operated by a squad leader (see for instance the commander variant of the Spinner Rodi). This could mean Sigrún was designated for similar use, either as part of a group of Valkyrjas, or while leading other types of 'suit into battle.

V08-1228 Grimgerde

Height: 18.5m Weaponry: Valkyrja Blade x2, Valkyrja Shield x2, 110mm rifle Status: Destroyed

So far, we have seen Valkyrjas emphasising long-range bombardment, defence, heavy-duty melee, and close-range attack. Grimgerde (out of fiction, the first Valkyrja to have been designed and the main example of the type) follows Sigrún in being equipped for fast, up-close fighting.

Exactly what we should conclude from its twin swords being so similar to those wielded by Gundam Bael is unclear. They are not completely identical and while we might reasonably suggest McGillis Fareed used Grimgerde in order to copy Agnika Kaieru's fighting style in preparation for taking control of Bael itself, there doesn't need to be any deeper connection at the point of manufacture. It's a decent shape for a sword to be! Still, the closeness of the resemblance stands out, albeit without pointing to any particular explanation for itself.

This aside, Grimgerde displays features common across the different Valkyrjas. In the Urdr Hunt mobile game campaign, its monocular sensor eye is exposed briefly by retracting the main visor and lowering the faceplate, something Grazes can also do to enable more precise targetting. The cockpit appears to be of the standard type used by all Gjallarhorn 'suits. And in addition to the two back-mounted main thrusters (of a type shared with all save Helmwige), smaller jets are located in Grimgerde's heels, granting it extremely high mobility on the ground.

More distinctive are the arm-mounted shields, which house the swords when they are not hand-wielded, and the long-barrelled rifle, which is used precisely once and then abandoned as McGillis dives in to assist Tekkadan during their descent through Earth's atmosphere. The rifle can be stored on the rear 'skirt' when not in use and suggests Grimgerde was intended to operate at mid-range as well as close-to. Taking a cue from descriptions of various Gundams, I imagine this weapon was meant for taking care of pluma swarms ahead of tackling a mobile armour's main body.

The swords can be extended directly from the shields, permitting swift alternation between attack and defence. Indeed, Grimgerde was built for high mobility, taking full advantage of its lightweight frame. This comes with the downside of requiring expert piloting to control the 'suit's centre of gravity: mistakes can lead to attacks without the strength to penetrate enemy armour. Since McGillis is an excellent pilot, we have proof that, used correctly, Grimgerde can overpower a Gundam in a straight fight (even if it must be noted he keeps Gaelio mentally off-balance throughout). Here we see the advantage of rare-metal weaponry, as the swords slice into Kimaris' armour, gouging long cuts and detaching various pieces.

How precisely the Montag Company came into possession of the Grimgerde is never explained. We do not know if McGillis brought it to them when he made the company his cats-paw, if he sought them out because they already owned it, or if he used them to acquire it. They are the ones who refitted the 'suit as Helmwige Reincar, using historical data McGillis presumably had access to via his position, but this only raises a separate set of questions. From Kimaris' resurrection as Gundam Vidar, we know that Ahab reactor signatures need to be concealed in some manner to prevent identification. Or, rather, we know Vidar's signature was confounded by the addition of a third reactor and can infer this was necessary to scramble its identity. Yet Helmwige Reincar does not sport an extra reactor, meaning it should in theory still register as Grimgerde.

The idea that swapping armour can be sufficient to disguise a mobile suit is already present thanks to the Turbines changing their Hyakurens into Roueis. There, though, we're talking about a mass-produced frame; for the relatively unique Valkyrjas, you wouldn't necessarily expect the same trick to work. Compounding this issue, we don't get a clear idea of how well the trick works in the first place. The Turbines are concerned with avoiding instant recognition, given Hyakurens are distinctly Teiwaz mobile suits. How well the change resists long-term scrutiny is never relevant. Likewise, because McGillis' enemies were aware of his involvement in the Battle of Edmonton from the start of Season 2, there's no sense in which the deceit concerning Grimgerde is actually tested.

For my own part, I like the idea mobile suit signatures are more than purely the Ahab reactor's frequency. Perhaps the half metal used to shield electronics in the frame interferes with the pattern, altering the detectable waves, and so inserting additional plating could be sufficient to scramble the code. Or perhaps that is overthinking things and McGillis simply abused his position further to create a new record in the central database for Helmwige Reincar, hence the V08Re-0526 ID number. Or perhaps both were necessary to sustain the illusion? There's got to be a lot of room to work if very few people remember these 'suits existed in the first place.

Needless to say, as the Valkyrja, Grimgerde has received kits of its original form at both 1/144 and 1/100 scale, and a 1/144 HG rendition of Helmwige Reincar. It is also the only Valkyrja frame 'suit to be confirmed destroyed, suffering fatal damage from Kimaris Vidar in a rematch that left it split in two.

Concluding thoughts

The history of the Valkyrja frame is alluded to via a single, brief panning shot in Episode 22 of the anime. Beyond this, it has no bearing on the plot and Grimgerde's status as a unique rarity is never especially relevant, not even to cast the 'suit in a mysterious light. In spite of this, their backstory adds a pleasing complexity to what we are told about the Calamity War.

The Gundams sit at odds with Gjallarhorn along several axes. They are proof of the hypocrisy of the organisation's public anti-augmentation stance and the social taboo it instigated around the Alaya-Vijnana. Their very names belong to a different mythology than the one whose iconography Gjallarhorn embraces. By contrast, the Valkyrjas – intentionally-created symbols that proved insufficient to the task they were supposed to embody, or at least never got the chance to show whether they were – fit in perfectly, becoming the basis for the means to enforce the post-War order. Whether intended this way or not, the peripheral details nicely compound Gjallarhorn's self-interested motives and performative presentation.

Beyond this, the Valkyrjas are just good designs. A neat unifying theme and a distinctive, elegant aesthetic that has them standing out from other IBO mobile suits. While I do not believe there's any great desire to see designs produced for all 72 Gundams, it would be really cool if we saw the full set of nine Valkyrja frames completed some day.

[misshoneyimhome]

GIRL this Willy content is going to drive me mad I swear! I am needing a lil fic about maybe you meeting the fam for the first time on this international trip and you’re so excited, but also nervous because in Toronto he’s a star but in Sweden he’s the fucking sun!! And he looks so happy and fucking good that he’s willing to take you just about anywhere he can find to take away the nerves and get you to loosen up and enjoy yourself😭😭💀💀

Oh bb! Your wish is my command! ❤️ bc let’s be honest, this kind of scenario has definitely been on my mind a lot as well! 

I might have been a little too excited about the idea, so I apologise in advance for any mistakes and errors 😅

➼｡ﾟ

We are Family I William Nylander

One hour.

In just one more hour, the plane would land in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. And as the minutes ticked by, you could sense your breaths becoming uneven, and your leg trembling with anticipation.

The reason for your anticipation? This journey wasn’t just about the destination itself; no, it held a lot more significant to it. It was the other place on earth your boyfriend, William Nylander, called his home.

Willy, your boyfriend of about six months, or maybe a bit longer or shorter - the dating phase and the decision to commit had been a bit of a whirlwind, so you weren’t entirely sure, for exactly how long you’d been together.

You'd first met William a couple of months before the playoffs and hit it off immediately. His energy yet calm and confident demeanour was unlike many others you’d ever dated, and you were captured in an instant.

But dating an NHL player during the playoffs, was close to the impossible and it had been nothing but challenging. However, somehow, amid the chaos of that time William had made his way directly to your heart, and he had found comfort in having you around. You’d quickly become his anchor throughout the tumultuous period.

Then, during the off-season, both of you felt the need for some space. Not that there were any issues between you; it was simply a desire for some individual journeys and some time to think and breath apart. So, William had travelled across Europe with friends and family, while you pursued your own adventures with some girlfriends.

However, upon returning to Toronto and meeting up again, there was no doubt: you both wanted to be together, romantically committed and all that came with it. William, as unbothered as ever, wasn't really one to overthink it, but you had had your doubts whether he truly meant it, or if you were just another fling. But then just like that, all your concerns were suddenly gone, as William asked you to join the Global Series tour, where the Leafs would play two regular season games in Sweden.

He had practically pleaded for you to come along, now that you'd officially been together for months, and he was eager to introduce you to his family. Which, for the record, and in your opinion, was a monumental step for your relationship, considering how much his family meant to him. And to top it off, you’d be meeting them in what he referred to as his home country.

As you knew he was a bloody star in Toronto – in Sweden, he was the fucking sun. He was a walking monument within the sport, and though you were used to the attention in the Canadian city, it was nothing compared to his status in the Swedish hockey world.

So, as the vibrant city came into view, your nerves were on edge, and your excitement beaming. You were longing to see William, and soon you’d be in his arms again.

**

After landing, you wasted no time grabbing your luggage and swiftly hopped onto the Arlanda Express, a quick 20-minute ride that placed you right in the heart of Stockholm. Here, William welcomed you with the most radiant smile on his wonderful face, pulling you into a deep, affectionate kiss. Despite the lingering effects of jet lag, you couldn't care less.

The team, naturally, had travelled together and arrived a few days earlier to tackle their own jet lag a head of the games. They went for team meetings before heading out to dine together, embracing the finest Swedish customs. And all the Swedish players were even invited to a premiere of the Börje Salming tribute movie, accompanied by family and friends – which had been a truly special occasion. And amidst hockey training and probably a fair share of media engagements, William had planned to devote his time to you.

So, on the following day, once you'd somewhat adjusted to a more normal state of mind, William took you out. Sensing your nerves, he made every effort to keep you distracted and calm, showcasing the most splendid places and attractions in Stockholm and introducing you to the renowned concept of Fika, Swedish style.

You could sense his pride in sharing this part of his life with you, and despite the dull, grey weather, the time spent together in his "home" city was what mattered most. And eventually, you found yourself completely at ease in his presence.

Up until the next crucial moment: meeting his family.

William loved his family very much. He cherished every single one of his relatives deeply, and to put it mildly, there were quite a lot of them. And naturally, he had invited the whole clan to the major hockey event.

"Hey," he spoke in a gentle voice as the two of you were getting ready in the hotel room. "Baby, please try to relax," his soft chuckle filled the room, but his words didn't immediately ease your nerves.

"Willy, I’m trying… but I'm meeting your parents," you replied with worried brows. You could feel how your nerves were showing, despite your best attempts to stay calm and confident by wearing your favourite outfit.

"I know, and I get that you're nervous. But there's really nothing for you to worry about."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course! Besides, I'm just really happy that you're here.” He stepped a little closer, and gently wrapped his arms around your waist. “This means the world to me. You're finally meeting my parents, and I'm just so excited, you know…"

There was no falsehood in his words. His eyes shone like bright Christmas lights, and his smile was wider than you’d ever seen before.

"I know, I'm excited too – I just really hope they’ll like me… I know how much your family means to you. The worst thing would be if we couldn’t be together, because they didn't approve of me, and then, you'd have to choose, which would be even worse, since-"

William interrupted your ramble with a kiss.

"They'll definitely like you, don't worry," he almost whispered, keeping your faces close while his arms enveloped you. It was a gentle, heartfelt moment as the two of you stood motionless in the serene room. Only the sound of your synchronized breaths filled the small space between you, his rhythm guiding yours.

And gazing into his eyes, a realization began to dawn. William wouldn't have you meet his family if he wasn't absolutely certain it would go well.

And so, you made your way out of the hotel, heading towards the restaurant where you'd meet a part of his closest family, both of you unable to contain wide smiles. His hand tightly held yours, providing the reassurance you sought. And with each step towards the door, all you felt was joy, simply being by his side.

***

"Hey!" a group of incredibly good-looking Swedes exclaimed as you headed towards the back of the restaurant, where William had ensured there was enough space for everyone and allowing a degree of privacy.

"Hej," William addressed his parents as they approached, exchanging hugs and kisses. "Mom, Dad, this is my girlfriend, y/n."

"Hello, y/n," the two tall Swedes smiled, extending their hands for you to shake, which you accepted eagerly before speaking.

"Hej, hur mår du? Det är verkligen trevligt att träffa er båda," (Hey, how are you? It’s really nice to neet toy both), you greeted as confident as possible, earning astonished wide eyes from your boyfriend, leaving him completely baffled. This he had not expected.

"Vi är mycket bra, tack. Det är fantastiskt att träffa dig ocks��," (We’re very good, thanks. It’s really wonderful to meet you too), his mother replied with a beautiful smile, and you couldn't help but chuckle as William stood stunned beside you.

"When did you learn that?" he exclaimed with a laugh.

"What?" you innocently asked. "I just wanted to pick up a few phrases… you know, to impress you." You flashed him a sweet smile, while his parents responded with hearty laughter. "Besides, all that effort to see that look on your face? Totally worth it."

"Oh, I like this one," his father Michael remarked, before all of you continued to join the rest of the company.

William was genuinely impressed. Mission accomplished. And so were his parents. Bonus points.

You had practised a few sentences just for fun, aiming to make an impression and show how much you were in fact interested in getting to know this part of your boyfriend better. And it seemed your plan had worked.

Although following along with the Swedish conversations was challenging, William, his parents, and sisters made an incredibly sweet effort to involve you in everything. They were exceedingly kind and welcoming, and it didn't take long for you to feel like a part of the family. What a relief.

"You know, y/n, Willy couldn’t stop talking about you all summer," Stephanie chuckled.

"Oh, come on, let's not go into that," William almost whined.

"Oh, we're definitely going there, big brother," Jacqueline chimed in with a grin, before adding, "He was glued to his phone, waiting for you to text or call..."

"Why hasn't she called me?" Stephanie playfully mimicked her brother's whiny voice, prompting Jacqueline to continue.

"Should I call her?"

"What if she doesn't pick up?"

"What if she does pick up?"

His sisters teasingly taunted him, recalling how much William had talked about you during the off-season. And amidst their banter, there was nothing but laughter from your end. Despite William's potential embarrassment in that moment, or as much as he could show, you found yourself incredibly happy. Not only was his family immensely sweet, but you also discovered that he had been thinking about you as much as you had been thinking about him. Furthermore, he had even shared details about you with his family.

"Alright, enough," William chuckled. "Just because I'm finally in love and happy, doesn't mean you get to give me a hard time."

And with smiles and laughter, the girls relented from their teasing.

For you, however, your heart skipped a beat. Warmth filled your entire being as you absorbed his words. In love.

****

After a delightful evening of dinner, conversation, and mingling, you and William found yourselves back in your hotel room. A serene silence enveloped the room as both of you slowly unwound, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere.

"Hey, are you okay?" your boyfriend inquired as you were about to join him on the bed.

"Of course," you reassured him with a soft smile.

"You're just unusually quiet... Was tonight not okay?" he probed, a hint of concern in his voice.

With a smile slowly spreading across your face, you knelt on the bed in front of him, lightly pressing your lips together before speaking.

"Willy, tonight was perfect. Your family is wonderful, and I've never seen you this happy," you said with genuine sincerity. "Not even when the team made it into the second round."

William chuckled in response, but he could read you too well, and he sensed there was more. "So, there's nothing else on your mind?"

Once more, you pursed your lips, briefly glanced down, then locked eyes with his once more.

"Did you truly mean it?"

"Mean what?" he asked, curiosity dancing in his eyes.

"That you're in love with me?"

William's smile widened at your question as he leaned closer, gently cupping your cheek with a hand.

"Absolutely, y/n/n," his voice tender and soft. "In fact, I think I love you."

With your heart overflowing with affection for this man, you closed the distance between you in a heartfelt kiss, before pulling back just a tad.

"I love you too, Willy."

[esta-elavaris]

Post one of two where I dig into all of the tools I use to write and keep track of different projects, as well as my overall word count, and the pros and cons of those tools. This one is just tech-y. That wording alone should summarise how much of the technical aspects I really know a whole lot about ✨

Masterlist for this challenge.

Laptop

This one is laughably self explanatory. Mine’s a fairly cheap Lenovo one that I got purely to write on and browse the web – my old previous one, an absolute dinosaur, just about holds it together enough to run The Sims 4 but I keep it purely for that, and the lag is insane. The newer Lenovo one is the one I do my writing on, though.

Pros --

It’s easy to use, because being able to write in documents is pretty much a priority for a laptop to be usable. I have Microsoft Office on there, it doesn’t lag, and it can do anything I need it to – including posting and uploading in a manner that is seamless and non-clunky. My laptop is just about the only thing I’ll post from, because trying to format a post on a tablet or a phone can be an absolute pain in the backside, so everything I write for others to read has to go through my laptop before it’s seen. Same goes for things like quickly researching something, or finding background music without the process being a bit annoying and filled with having to close apps and find other ones.

Cons --

It’s not much good for writing in the wild, the one I have is juuuust too wide to fit conventional bag or laptop cases, and I’m not particularly fond of the idea of hauling it into the city centre or whatever – on public transport no less – just to write in a cafe or a library.

Also, because of the ‘pro’ listed above in terms of being able to quickly and easily switch between doing different things, it is way easier to get distracted on there than it is elsewhere. One quick question for Google turns into scrolling tumblr way too easily when I’m on a laptop – and because mine is few years old now, the battery life isn’t particularly stellar. Also hate the amount of times I turn it on to quickly get some words down only to find it’s updating itself.

AlphaSmart 3000

This has been one of my newer pieces of tech – but only in the sense of how long I’ve owned it, rather than how long it’s been available. There’s a bit of a backstory to this so you’ll need to fact check me, but basically these were available for a long time at a very fair price, up until a company realised how much of a cult classic they were among writers in all senses of the word, bought the rights to the tech, and ramped up the price to something that was quite frankly ridiculous. So now if you want one new, you’re talking a few hundred quid.

It’s essentially solely a word processor, as distraction free as you can possibly get. It has a non backlit screen where you can only see around three or four lines of what you’re working on, and a keyboard. Mine takes three AA batteries, and other than that there’s a cable slot plugging a printer wire into it, to then either attach to a printer or to a laptop. I’ve never tried it with a printer, but with a laptop you open a word document when it’s connected, press ‘send’, and it begins transferring everything you’ve written to that document. Incredibly simple.

I got mine for £80 used on eBay, and it turned into an almost disaster. It arrived in an absolute state, with an instruction manual that was riddled with mould, and a cable that was incorrect. And the batteries it’s supposed to take did not fit. Actually almost cried because I thought I’d been scammed out of a significant chunk of cash. Luckily for me, my brother is a legend and flew into fix-it mode and began researching the shit out of them – despite the fact that it’s far beyond his realm of interest – to try and see what he could do. All he could find, for the most part, were YouTube videos showing how to rig a rechargeable battery into it, which would fix the fact that the batteries mine were supposed to take just did not fit at all, but it was a bit beyond the realms of trying. And if you want to buy a rechargeable one for it that’s specifically designed for it, you’re talking a grand – and it has to come from the USA, so shipping and customs would be delightful.

In the end, he broke one battery trying to wedge all three in there, then successfully managed it on a second try – with the third one being at a very precarious angle that has me dreading the day those batteries need changed, because I can’t see it being easy. But that’s where we get to the pros and cons.

This is the state of the kinda-sorta held together battery compartment on mine:

Pros –

The battery life, because it’s so fantastically limited in what it can do – is great. We’re talking years, depending on use. There’s a lithium battery inside that can be changed by pulling it apart, but I haven’t had to do that, and it should last way longer than the AA ones, which already should last at least a year. Maybe less for me given my situation, but we’ll see.

I also really, really like the fact that it only shows three lines of what I’ve written on the screen. It stops me from self-editing as I go and keeps me in a constant flow, and the fact that literally all I can do is write means it’s so easy to get in the zone and not end up fancying about on Spotify or YouTube instead. I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how much I can get done on it thanks to that simplicity.

What’s great for me personally, but might not be as good for others, is that it also doesn’t have word count capabilities. It’s not on the screen as I type, and there’s no button I can push to tell me what it is, either. So not knowing what the numbers are looking like up until I’m finished and sending it to my laptop really helps me focus on the story itself, rather than an arbitrary number. I’ve also found that because of how much I get in the zone with it, and how little I can see of what I’ve written, I consistently find that I’ve written more than I expected when I finally send the document to my laptop and get it ready for posting – usually by over a thousand words, sometimes even underestimating the count by half.

Another thing I like is that it can store up to eight files – the buttons lining the top reading files one through eight – so I can switch to working on different things seamlessly, without being stuck only working on one thing ‘til it’s finished as I use it. It also saves and stores things automatically, there’s no save button, and I even found that once my brother got the batteries wedged into it, there were files on there from the previous owner (nothing salacious, sadly), so I can be fairly confident that if my tenuous battery set-up does fail me, the stuff written on there will be safe until I can get ‘em back in there.

Cons –

Thanks to the situation I mentioned with the price, unless you’re willing to splash the cash on a brand new one (and, despite how happy I am with mine, I really can’t say that would be worth it) you are taking a risk if you choose to buy one used, and you’ll be very limited in what you can do to fix it because so much of the tech is either discontinued, extortionate, both, or requires a willingness and the knowledge required to improvise. I really am dreading the day when I have to try and get the wedged-in batteries out of mine without breaking the damn thing, and then replacing them. Because of the fucking mould that was in the instruction manual I got with mine, too, I had to scrub it before use, and I also had to go on Amazon and buy a new wire because the one I was sent was incorrect. That only cost a fiver, but still, for £80 you should be able to reasonably expect more.

The battery issue, for me, doesn’t end there, either. I got it for distraction free writing in the wild, and because the batteries are in mine so precariously, the battery compartment cover doesn’t even close – I had to tape it shut – so I’m just not confident enough that nothing will go wrong to shove it in my bag and haul it across the city to write with.

It is older tech, so the documents also don’t transfer instantly. When I send mind to a document, it writes it out line by line on the open document on my laptop – so when I have a long chapter, that can take a while, and I’ve found I can’t do other things on my laptop while that transfer is happening. Not the end of the world, I usually spend that time crocheting or reading, and the AlphaSmart screen does tell you what percentage of the document has yet to be transferred, so you can keep an eye on that and guess how much time you’ve got left to wait. Because the screen isn’t backlit, it also means no writing in the dark, which I don’t mind when I have other options for that, but if I had to choose something to be the only thing I could ever write on, that fact would put it out of the running.

Like I said, too, the lack of word count capabilities might be a turn off for some. It has spell check capabilities that I’ve never used, so I’m not sure how good that is (or if you can switch between languages/forms of English). And this does lead me into a somewhat related point next, that’s a mixed blessing in my case.

Because of the three-line format of the screen, formatting can be an issue – nor can you italicise or bold out certain lines or words. Now, I’m very open about the fact that I don’t edit my fanfics (or anything that isn’t the novel) as much as I necessarily should. I scan for typos, I make sure it’s good, I make sure it’s coherent (things still slip through the net every now and then) but I just cannot write the amount I do, and really prioritise my original novel, if I’m going to spend hours and hours on editing when it comes to fanfic. It’s not ideal and I suspect people won’t like to hear it, but I just cannot afford to make it a top priority, it is what it is.

That being said, anything I write on the AlphaSmart does have to end up going through more of a meticulous editing process. The way the screen works means there have been plenty of times where I send a document to my laptop, and see that what I thought was one paragraph ended up being a wall of text that took up a whole page. Typos also slip through more easily because the keyboard is older and sometimes a little clunky, and I have to go back and edit in italicised words bit by bit, because I just write them *like this* on it, and then change it to being like this once I can format. So that’s a mixed blessing, for sure.

All in all, I’m not sorry I bought it. I do wish I’d had less issues with it, but considering when it first arrived I thought I’d paid £80 for a paperweight, it worked out all right in the end, and I am getting a lot of good use out of it. I’m a little disappointed because I did buy it for the purpose of writing out in public to tide me over while I saved for a new iPad (my current one’s battery life is so shot it seldom works unless actively plugged in), and it’s no good for that thanks to my own specific issues, so I think if I’d known how it was going to go before I got it, I wouldn’t have bought it at all...but given how it’s helping my output, I’m still glad that I did.  

Tablet, tablet pen & keyboard –

When my AlphaSmart disaster happened, I ended up having to do what it was supposed to replace and bought a new tablet. But after hearing recommendations for others, I decided not to swing for a new iPad (couldn’t afford that anyway – Ghost had just announced a new tour with UK dates, and I subsequently had to penny pinch because there was no way I was missing that), but go for a new tablet. Like I said, the AlphaSmart was meant to help me get back to writing sessions in public, it ended up being no good for that, so even when I got it working, it didn’t fix that problem.

In the end, I got the Lenovo Tab M11, which had the Lenovo Tab Pen included. It was like a quarter of the price of a new iPad, and I’m so incredibly happy with it! It was a bit of a learning process because I’ve only ever used iOS, but that’s pretty much my only complaint. I do intend to only use it for writing, music, and maybe a YouTube video here and there in a pinch, because I really want to save the battery capabilities on it as much as possible and streaming over years and years is what I think fucked up my iPad, so I can still use that for Netflix, and the tablet (which I’m using to write this) for more creative pursuits.

Pros –

The battery life is amazing – I use a Bluetooth keyboard to write on it so that was a concern, but I’ve had it for a couple of months now, and I can count the amount of times I’ve charged it on one hand. I had to get OpenOffice to use on it so that I wouldn’t be constantly emailing drafts between devices, which I don’t completely trust because of all of the AI bullshit going on these days (I did disable AI mining on Word on my laptop), but that’s a risk with most word processors these days, which is a rant for another day. And at least now I’m not losing drafts due to forgetting to save.

Because, like with any tablet, it’s more of a switch up to stop typing and scroll through different apps and then go back to typing – compared to a laptop – it’s way more difficult to get distracted on a tablet. In comparison to the AlphaSmart, too, formatting is a breeze. I can see the paragraphs I’m writing, I can italicise or bold words with keyboard shortcuts just like on a laptop, it’s all very easy and hassle free. I also have spell check more easily available – although the autocorrect feature (which I haven’t yet figured how to disable) can be an absolute pain in the arse when I have to retype the same thing three times before it accepts that I know what I’m talking about. Usually. But the flip side of that is that it corrects the things I do genuinely fuck up with 0 effort from me, eight times out of ten.

It’s also very easy to have music playing on the tablet as I write, especially with the keyboard I favour which has a volume/mute dial, so unlike the AlphaSmart I don’t have much need to pick up other devices if I want background noise. I can even post from my tablet if I really want to, in a pinch, so I could keep posting updates if I’m off in another city without having to haul my laptop with me. It’s just a little clunkier, but given the convenience it adds, I’m not mad at that. Plus, OpenOffice can do everything Word can do, so I have way more control over font and all that, compared to the AlphaSmart.

What I was really surprised to be so pleased with was the pen! I mostly got it because it came with it, and buying the option without it wasn’t that much cheaper, and I was curious. I ended up being so glad I did!

It does take a bit of getting used how to use it without the screen detecting your hand rather than the pen, and therefore closing the page you’re trying to write on, but 90% of the time that’s more on me than it. I love making lists when it comes to organising my writing, it also helps me draft my vague ideas/flowcharts for how I want a chapter to go without wasting paper, it’s how I’m currently keeping track of everything I want to get written before the end of the year, and it’s nice having all of those notes on one app so I’m not struggling to find misplaced notebooks, which is a constant habit of mine.

I also really like the word count aspect of this one, too, because like the AlphaSmart, the word count isn’t readily available on the screen until I scroll through a document – so it’s kind of the best of both worlds, I can check if I really want to, but I can also ignore it and it’s not always drawing my eye as I type. I know I could probably make it so that the count isn’t permanently visible on documents on my laptop, too, but I’m not ready to make that leap just yet – especially nowadays where my laptop has been more and more relegated to editing rather than drafting. I’m developing a good little system here!  

For the price, I really can’t argue with how good I’ve found it to be. Honestly, it could’ve been £100 more expensive and I wouldn’t have been mad about it. I now no longer need to drop a few hundred quid on a new iPad in 2025, and I think I actually prefer this for writing compared to my old iPad, even when that iPad was new. But I never had one of the pens for the iPad, and mine is a few years old now so I don’t know how a newer one would hold up. Still, I’m thrilled with it. I’ll be really scraping to find cons for this one.

Cons –

As I’ve said, if I don’t want to be emailing drafts between devices, I do have to have online storage capabilities turned on for drafts, which I don’t entirely trust for AI mining...but honestly, I don’t trust anything with that these days – not emails, not anything that isn’t a USB stick, and even then, word processors are proving to be assholes about it now, too. But that’s less a drawback of the tech than it is just the way AI is at the moment.

The pen does take a bit of getting used to, and I do have to stop myself from getting annoyed when I go to write something on the note app only to find it’s zoomed the page out dramatically or closed the app entirely because it’s detected my hand rather than the pen, but I’m finding the more I use it, the less that happens, so that’s more on me than the tech.

Switching between typing to scrolling through apps is clunkier than on a laptop, but like I’ve said, that’s a good thing for me.

With all of this explained, I am getting to a system that I’m really enjoying, and is making writing so much easier and more fun for me. As things stand, I usually map out chapter notes etc. on my tablet in the drawing/notes app with then pen, then I do my drafting on either the AlphaSmart or tablet, depending, then I go to the laptop for the edits and the posting. I have found that this makes writing and general way easier, too, because the process of picking up the AlphaSmart or tablet and writing is way quicker and more streamlined in terms of time compared to a laptop. Always with the AlphaSmart, and usually with the tablet, the draft I’ve been working on is literally a button away and then I’m going. The laptop takes a bit more fiddling around, since I use it for so many other things.

I did intend to get into more here – Bluetooth keyboard, notebooks, and the system I use to track my word counts across my ridiculous number of projects, but this is already getting ridiculously long, so I guess you’re all getting a part two. I do hope some of this was helpful in some way or another, though!

Dividers by cafekitsune.

[ladyseaforth]

Feline Arch Part 3.

Vincent Renzi x reader/oc

Here’s part three! Hope you enjoy!

It is evening and they have sunk two bottles between one another. Rich scarlet slips down the throat, leaving the lips tinged with purple and flavour. Kissable.

Your back faces the fireplace, one leg draped over Vincent’s lap. His hand rests upon your shin mindlessly, his chest shaking as he laughs at something Sandra said. His wine flicks in the bowl like the crest of a crimson wave. You study it loosely, head rocking on the sofa.

You are down to your loose linen shirt. The heat of the fire permeates the room, swelling the atmosphere with a tangible energy. Everything feels simultaneously far away and alarmingly close.

Studying Vincent’s profile, you smile as your eyes trail over the sweep of his silver hair, down his gently curved brow, his glittering eyes, his pinkened nose, small, quick lips. You study his lips as, every so often, he loses himself in his native language; you follow the foreign mouth shapes and sounds with rapture. The gestures he makes with thin, sculptured hands when he gets over enthused.

You turn your head to Sandra as though it were on a hinge, your movements lagging and unrefined. With a fist under your cheek, you absorb the lightness in her features and the colour that has returned to her face. Samuel-be-damned.

She quickly catches on to your slow, sleepy gaze and grins, “Have we already outdrank you? For shame!” Sandra cackles at your expression, your own smile widening into a falsely seductive, wine stained smirk. You feel Vincent’s gaze upon the side of your face now.

“Not at all!” you retort, perhaps a little louder than you intend. You hear Vincent’s light chuckle, shy and boyish as he runs his hand up and down your shin. Sandra tilts her head teasingly, arched eyebrow over narrowed, blue eyes.

“I just didn’t have dinner,” you acquiesce, eyes dropping to your glass and running a finger round the rim. The small whine elevates in the room, a soft, ringing background to the conversation.

“Help yourself to anything in the kitchen,” Sandra offers, almost pleading, “I have not been up for using, or eating, anything; it will expire if not.” The tone simmers down a bit, the gravity of the situation returning to you all. You cease your finger’s movements on the glass. Vincent shifts.

“Perhaps, Sandra,” Vincent begins, “If you are up for it, we could go over a few developments in the investigation? It can wait until tomorrow - if not - I just thought you would like to get ahead of things.” His words drift away awkwardly and he clears his throat. Sandra looks suddenly lost in thought. You look between them.

“I can give you some space for that,” you offer, sliding your leg off of Vincent’s lap and placing yourself the right way up. “You guys will want to talk in private.” You search for eye contact with Sandra, who looks up at you and smiles gently, small and fragile. Vincent fiddles with his, now, unoccupied hands. His expression is mild.

“I’ll go for a walk around the house, won’t be far,” you gather up your wine glasses and head over to the kitchen sink, carefully placing them to the side. Something to worry about in the morning.

“Please be careful, the snow turns icy when the temperature drops at night,” Sandra says, elbows resting on her knees. You turn to her as you put your coat on and nod reassuringly. You sway slightly as you put your boots on and hope the pair aren’t watching, that they won’t stop you from getting that breath of fresh air you feel you need.

“See you soon,” you wave to them, and open the door. You carefully descend the steps onto the driveway and close the door beyond you, officially out of the space. The moon is bright and clear in the starless sky, a sign of the cold night ahead.

Vincent watches every inch of you as you disappear from sight, putting every part of you to memory before turning back to Sandra, who is watching the floor.

“How significant are these developments?” she finally asks, face stolid and resigned. Vincent sighs gently.

“Quite significant, but nothing we cannot work around,” he responds, training his face to remain neutral and unworried. “Shall I begin?” Vincent continues. Sandra nods solemnly and waves her hand, gesturing to start. And so, Vincent does.

The facts and discrepancies pile up, extracting the very air around her.

…

You stand and stare at the very site where Samuel is meant to have fallen. The ground is churned with the amount of footfall it has received, after the body was removed. Tomorrow they do tests with a sand-filled dummy to see if the way Samuel fell could be natural. That it was a sudden suicide. Or whether it was something else.

That is what Sandra said to you. Whispered over the fireplace. Her face had remained somewhat impassive. You stared into the blue.

The drop was extensive. Injuries consistent with a collision upon the shed’s corner, before finally slumping to the snow-covered ground. But it had to be checked all the same. They were to take it step-by-step.

You think of Daniel, worry about him tucked in his room. Wet pillow and misty-eyed in the dark as strangers invade his home. As they descend to determine whether his mother could have killed his father or not. Unable to look these strangers in the eye.

And Vincent would watch like a hawk. Staring eyes locked on everything they touch in Sandra’s house, anything they move, they affect. He will protest. Be the ever-intercepting lawyer, he will be good and he will be present. And you will watch him.

A chill runs through you, the sky vast and stretching over your head. What must it have been like to simply fall? To become a dead-weight, helpless and loose? At the mercy of gravity. At the mercy of it all.

…

You return to a household in darkness, safe for the last burning embers of the fireplace. Shrugging your coat off and hanging it on the rack at the front door, you see Vincent’s shape in the dying light. He is still on the same part of the couch that you saw him before. He looks over at you and gives a tight smile.

“Eh, Sandra has gone to bed. It will be a long day tomorrow,” Vincent begins, “she said she told you what will be happening?”

You nod slowly, “yes, the tests. Things to do with a dummy and seeing whether Samuel’s fall was accurate.” Vincent nods in response and shuffles a couple of papers that sit before him upon the coffee table. Silence falls upon you both.

“Do you think there is anything suspicious about Samuel’s death?” you ask, suddenly and without much thought. You shock yourself. Vincent’s head jerks up, lamp like eyes fixed on your own. He blinks a couple of times and frowns.

“Do you think there was?” he retorts, head tilting and gaze full of scrutiny. A lawyer at work. You blink back at him and hold your ground.

“I do not know all of the details or what the police find difficult to believe about the fall. What I do know is that Samuel was a bastard,” you speak firmly, holding eye contact with all the conviction you can muster. Vincent looks back, face unmoving.

“And why was he, as you say, a bastard?” he asks, thumbs running up and down the paper. You shift your weight and step forward. Vincent is forced to tilt his face upwards to maintain eye contact with you. He waits.

“Did you ever meet him?” you look down into Vincent’s face, intense and searching. He inhales deeply as his eyes traverse your face. Pupils flickering.

“Oui,” he admits, “once, or twice. A long time ago.” You lean down a little further, face coming closer to his own. You can feel his exhale on your face, ghostly wisps of air.

“Then you will already know that he was a bastard.” You hold his gaze, ensuring that the words hold enough weight to your satisfaction. Once content, you break away, turning to your haphazardly packed bag that lies at the foot of the other sofa.

“I’m taking this couch, by the way. Hope you’re ok with that,” you add rhetorically, not looking for a response. You hear Vincent shuffle a little behind you, placing down the papers.

“Yes, that is fine by me.” You hear him pull a blanket off the back of his sofa. You keep your back to him as you open your bag and pull out an old university t-shirt for your pyjamas. Still, you do not turn as you unbutton your shirt and throw it to the side, replacing it with the t-shirt. Yet, you turn to look at him before slipping off your trousers.

Vincent lies upon the sofa, blanket over his body as he faces you. His eyes flicker listlessly over you, seemingly without much control. The colour of his cheeks undecipherable in the darkness, the fire reduced to smoke. You turn away again and unbutton the waists, letting the pair drop to the floor. You step out of them and pull a blanket off of the back of your sofa.

You lie down and draw the blanket over yourself. You lie so that you face Vincent, whose vision continues to be dusky and unsettled. “Goodnight, Vincent. I hope you enjoyed the Merlot tonight,” you quip into the dark, only catching the glinting whites of his eyes.

A brief silence follows, and so you turn over to face the couch. You settle your head into the decorative cushion and exhale slowly. Eyelashes almost brushing the material.

“I enjoyed having a drink with you.” Vincent utters gently into the silence. He clears his throat in the following quiet.

You hear a similar shuffling, him finding a comfy position to lie in. You let his statement be the last word.

The tension only melts when sleep takes over.

…

The dummy makes a dull sickening thud as it collides with the shed, slithering onto the wet ground.

There are people standing at the top of the balcony, looking down over the pulley system which repeatedly throws the human form off the edge, and jerks it back up again for another go.

Vincent is on top of everything again. Surveying the scene, making sure they’re being good to the house, to Sandra. Asking ‘is this really necessary?’ or challenging a decision to photograph Daniel’s bedroom. He is protective, more than a proactive lawyer.

They pull the dummy up again, discussing it in their little group. ‘Yes, the head did collide off the corner but that does not account for this injury…’ and ‘there are discrepancies between the angle of the window frame and his collision with the shed…’ and ‘the marks on his skull allude to a blow more like this…’.

Marsha and Sandra were unable to force Daniel to stay away from the house whilst these experiments were being done. The boy had cited a fear of going alone to take Snoop for a walk, considering what had happened the last time. So he settled somewhere in the house, no doubt listening to the repetitive thumps of a dead weight beating the earth. The replicated sound of his father’s body meeting death.

You found yourself without a purpose, having made three cups of tea in the past hour alone. You had tried to write whilst all the commotion went on but achieved little. Sandra was determined to oversee her household, appearing stoic but frequently giving in to confusion and panic. You texted Salomé under the table, reassuring her of your whereabouts when she came back to an empty apartment.

The time dragged on as the house, Sandra and the fall were scrutinised bit by bit. The anatomy of it all laid bare and vulnerable. And heavy with suspicion and concern, it was.

…

It was a good week of this before they decided to conclude with the results they had recorded.

After a week, a meeting summoned you back to the city. You promised Sandra you would come back in a bit to see how everything was. That she was to call you if the investigation proceeded any further. She had nodded, eyelids heavy and her expression set, save for a small smile and accompanying squeeze of your hand.

Vincent watched you from afar, employing a new habit of standing at the opposite side of the room to you. In a thick, knitted jumper and hands shoved in his pockets, he looked you up and down as you said your goodbyes to Sandra. After a hug, you glanced over to him and met his gaze.

“When will you be heading back to the city?” you ask, picking up your scarf and arranging it around your neck. He shrugs, woolly shoulders jutting up to his ears.

“I am unsure,” Vincent begins, “possibly in the next day or so. The police may return again so I have to be near. They’re already making conclusions, and they’re being incredibly heavy handed about it.” He tries to keep his body language open, cooperative.

His eyes follow the winding material at your throat. You smile plainly. The cold air outside muffles the windows.

“Of course,” you say, “you are very dedicated.”

Sandra laughs at the expression upon his face, Vincent’s cheeks giving in easily to the rush of blood. He chuckles in response to his own reaction, tugging the sleeves of his jumper up his lean forearms. Vincent ducks his head as he approaches you.

“Do you have much writing to get back to?” Vincent ventures, “I presume you will be equally occupied.” His adam’s apple bobs under his pinkened throat. Tendons stretching into the collar of his expensive jumper. He reminds you of a nervous boy in a man’s body. Out of his element. You want to see him in court. You want to see him in his territory.

You smile wider, trying to catch Sandra’s eye, but find that she has turned away in favour of tidying the kitchen counter. Turning the labels of the jars, bottles, boxes of food items so that they face away from her. You look back and Vincent’s eyes glint.

“There’s always more writing to get back to,” you quip, meeting his gaze with a grin, “and you never really stop. I’m always writing - in my head.”

Vincent’s shoulders jump with a small laugh and he nods, bobbing his head in understanding. The conversation stalls quietly, the ticking clock in the empty kitchen becoming the primary sound.

“If you need me to transcribe anything for you, or write out any documents for your records or anything really,” you find yourself saying before your brain can catch up with you, “let me know. I want to help you out.” You smile restlessly, tucking a loose lock of hair behind your ear.

Vincent arches an eyebrow, somewhat taken aback. Sandra turns away from her food rearranging and looks to you in an amused surprise. A sparkle coming back to her eyes.

“With Sandra’s case, that is. I want to make sure you have more than enough hands for everything that’s happening,” you add, glancing between Vincent and Sandra. His face visibly warms and he nods again. Sandra’s eyes crinkle with mirth.

“That is a very kind offer, thank you,” Vincent says, “there is not much to do at the moment until the police conclude their findings but I will keep you in mind.” His eyes search earnestly into yours, trying to communicate his gentle gratitude.

Keep you in mind. One could only hope.

You blush lightly, and without having anything else to say, you duck your head in an awkward bow and reach for the door. As you descend the steps, you hear Sandra call from behind you, “Have a safe drive, liebe! Send my love to Salomé. I hope to see you in the city soon, we can write together.”

You turn and grin, waving your hand, “I will see you soon, Sandra! You will be a free woman soon,” you promise, eyelids fluttering under the bright sky.

Sandra laughs through the doorway, the shifting figure of Vincent disappearing behind her. As the door closes and you settle into your battered car, you continue to hear her laughter in your ears.

Flying towards the city, both your hands on the wheel, the atmosphere feels light but heady. It was a sign of things to come.

It would only be the very next morning that Sandra would be charged with the murder of her husband. The evidence stilted and accusatory.

The court beckoned.

——————

[beautifulpersonpeach]

HYBE stocks are down so that means investors didn't believe HYBE's payola mediaplay of Jimin renewing his contracts. ONLY RM SIGNED HIS CONTRACT. It's shameful how you ot7s try to force people to doubt Jimin. Forcing people to think staying with the company after all the sabotages is good for him are we in upside down land? Well no and the stocks show it. Armys swallowed the purple koolaid but the investors live in the real world.

***

Please stop sending me asks like this.

Your ask is a very good example of something my friends and I were just talking about. This is the thread (linked here) that prompted our conversation.

Please read it.

HYBE is down ~5% in the hours following the contract renewal news.

Anon, I don't know how old you are or if you have your own bank account, but nobody who knows what they're doing looks at stock movements in isolation. It's a relative metric, by definition. And here's a few things that have happened in the last 48 hours that explain what stocks moved relative to:

The Market - All major Korean stock indices are down on the mixed resolution by the US Fed this week. It's a trend consistent with market movements in every country that does significant trade with the US and/or denominates trade in USD.

The Index - The index for entertainment companies (ex gaming) on the KRX is down ~3.5% over the same period.

The Peers - HYBE's closest peers for our purposes, i.e. JYP, SME, YG, Kakao, etc, are down on average ~6.5%. YG is the outlier here down ~13%. Excluding YG, the average return over the same period is HYBE's peers being down ~4.5%.

At market open following HYBE's contract renewal news there was a massive options call with a volume of about 8K at depressed prices relative to yesterday's closing. By its characteristics it's likely an event-triggered options call made for profit-taking. This is normal for retail and institutional investors who trade in liquid names. Excluding the options volume, HYBE's actual stock performance over the same period, is that they're down ~2.5%.

Meaning, HYBE actually outperformed their peers and the index (ex gaming) following the contract renewal news. The total entertainment index (including gaming) was only down ~1.9%, and so HYBE underperformed that index when you include gaming companies. But that's not a peer group that's usually considered for k-pop companies anyway.

So the stock movements you're referring to, are in effect showing the opposite of what you think.

*

This might be hard to believe, but I'm actually very neutral on HYBE. I have my own opinions about how they run their business, how the sub-labels are managed, etc. But when I see things I don't like, I don't go looking for any sliver of disjointed information to uphold my previously held belief. It's a sign that you're a living, breathing, thinking being, when the introduction of new information challenges a perception you have, you're able to meaningfully deduce the implications, and arrive at a more informed conclusion.

The new piece of information we received in the last 24 hours, is that HYBE's board has approved the resolution to renew BTS's exclusive contracts. Given the size of the payout to BTS, this is a customary requirement to finalize the renewals process. For the nature of company disclosures like this, there's the expectation of a time lag between when a deal is announced and when it closes, but the fundamentals of the deal do not change. The time lag is typically to hash out technicalities and to allow for other considerations (which we know in this case involves limitations due to 2seok's military service), but the fundamentals of the announcement do not change else HYBE will be charged for misrepresentation in their disclosures and for market manipulation at the Board level.

Basically, if HYBE was not at least 100% sure these renewals would be completed, that press release would literally be corporate suicide.

The quality of conversations here would be so much higher, whether in akgae or ARMY circles, if people actually knew what they were talking about.

Please don't spam asks like this in my inbox again. Take those ramblings to a blog that can tolerate it. I have extremely little patience for akgaes in general.

[girlactionfigure]

🔥 Sat night after Shabbat - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

( 1 / 2 )

LAG SAMAYACH, a happy Lag b’Omer, the celebration of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the mystical portion of the Torah.

▪️MERON RISK.. Security officials discussing the possibility of canceling even the tiny bonfires allowed at the Meron Tomb of Rashbi, due to direct threats of rocket and drone fire at the area.

▪️OBJECTION VIDEO IS FAKE.. on Friday a video was released supposedly from a reserve soldier in Gaza (with a mask on) saying the soldiers are sick of the situation having lost their jobs and homes and should consider rebelling against the IDF General and Defense Minister.

.. HOWEVER, the person who made the video was tracked down and arrested.  NOT in Gaza, NOT in the army!  The video was a fake, the trying to convince people to rebel orders - a crime.  He has been arrested.

🔸DEAL, ROUND 33.. the negotiation talks are expected to resume next week in Doha, Qatar when delegations from Hamas and Israel will arrive to present their positions. The head of the Mossad presented to the mediators the guidelines approved by the cabinet, and agreed with the Prime Minister of Qatar and the head of the CIA to meet again.

.. Senior Hamas official Muhammad Mardawi clarifies: “The ball is in Israel's court regarding the end of the war. A permanent ceasefire is the only way to reach a deal. Any proposal presented to us must include a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.”

.. A senior Hamas official denied to Reuters the reports of renewed contacts in Cairo for a hostage deal.

▪️TUNNELS.. Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hangabi: So far we have found 11 tunnels on the Philadelphia route between Egypt and Gaza, and we have no evidence if our kidnappers were taken out of Gaza.​​​​ (( The Israeli Representative to the ICC said 50 tunnels.  50, or 11?  Or??? ))

▪️A NOTE ON THE IMPOSSIBLE STANDARD OF THE COURT.. (( As many have noted, the court used as some of its reasoning that Israel is instructing Gaza civilians to move out of the combat zone.  Moving civilians out of a combat zone is wrong, and keeping civilians in a combat zone is wrong.  Per the court - if there are civilians, combat is illegal, if civilians are moved it is illegal.  Defense is therefore illegal in enemy territory - regardless of whether they attacked you. ))

.. Leader ofIsrael Our Home party, MK Avigdor Lieberman: "As I warned, the decision of the Israeli government to appear before the International Court of Justice in The Hague was a serious mistake and falling into a trap with a predetermined end.”

🔥🔥Sat night after Shabbat - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

LAG SAMAYACH, a happy Lag b’Omer, the celebration of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the mystical portion of the Torah.

( 2 / 2 )

▪️PIECE OF AID PIER BREAKS AWAY.. beaches in Ashdod, US landing craft sent to rescue it also beached in Ashdod.  US says 4 pieces or vessels broke away due to weather, asking the Israeli Navy for help.

▪️US ATTACKS YEMEN.. Saudi Al-Hadath network: in an attack in Yemen yesterday by the US, two Iranians and about ten commanders and terrorists of the Houthis were killed. Among the Houthis who were killed were those who returned from a military college of the Iran Revolutionary Guards.

▪️PROTEST - HOSTAGES & ANTI GOVT. RALLY.. The Kaplan protest area / Begin gate in Tel Aviv, 100,000+ protestors for “deal now” and “govt. resign”. Chants - “The people do not forget Netanyahu the murderer.”

.. and is being broadcast LIVE on Al Jazeera.

⭕ ANTI-TANK MISSILES from Hezbollah at a house in Shatula, 2 houses in Metulla, and a synagogue in Dovev.

⭕ HEAVY ROCKET from Hezbollah HITS the Kiryat Shmona industrial zone.  Significant damage.

⭕ ROCKETS FROM Hezbollah at Northern communities - 10 attacks over Shabbat.  At least one was a barrage of 30+ rockets.

⭕ SUICIDE DRONES from Hezbollah at Northern communities - 6 attacks over Shabbat.

⭕ ROCKETS from Hamas at near-Gaza communities - 1 attack over Shabbat. 1

♦️JABALIYA - central Gaza.. A very big advance - the IDF controls most of the area - most of it is occupied and the rest is controlled by snipers. The next stage - capture of the west of the area.  Rumors say that a commander of Hamas, Iz a Din Al Haddad, is hiding in the west area.

.. Captured and destroyed lathes for the production of rockets.

.. Arrests of men of fighting age for interrogation.

🔅 Sat night Lag b’Omer - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

🔥LAG SAMAYACH, a happy Lag b’Omer 🔥

⭕ EXPLOSION OVER MERON.. An explosion was heard over Miron, due to an interception.

▪️MERON LIMITED LIGHTING DELAYED.. due to the security situation (see item above) and the riot (see item below), permission and safety for a tiny lighting by the Boyaner Rebbe has not yet been approved.

▪️A FEW HUNDRED RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS.. violated the Home Front Command safety ban on entering the Tomb of Rashbi in Meron and rioted when ordered to leave by police - basically trashing the holy site in throwing things at the police.  They were forcibly removed - putting both themselves and the security forces at life risk.

▪️TEL AVIV PROTESTS.. lit large fires in the road (NOT in honor of Lag b’Omer), at which point the police declared the protest illegal and called on demonstrators to disperse.  The riot police, mounted police, and water cannon moving in after they refused to disperse.

▪️ON THE FAKE OBJECTION VIDEO.. (( Commentary by right-wing Channel 14 )) “For many months, the left side of the political map called for a mutiny in the army.  They encouraged refusal and made it legitimate, and called to refuse an order to serve and refuse to obey the political echelon.  Now that it comes from the right (a very wrong and serious thing!) those who did it until a few months ago in the name of 'democracy' are shocked and angry.”

🔸DEAL, HAMAS UPDATES.. Hamas: “Osama Hamdan, told the Al Jazeera network: We do not need new negotiations” (( because EU countries and the ICJ and ICC are doing their job for them. ))

▪️JEW UP FOR EXECUTION IN IRAN.. The request for a retrial of Ervin Nathaniel Kahrmani, a young Iranian Jew who was sentenced to "retribution" (execution) on the charge of "premeditated murder", was rejected by the Iran Supreme Court.

▪️POLICE / CHABAD CONFLICT IN LOD?  Brief report that police are not allowing people to enter the Chabad neighborhood for a planned city Lag b’Omer event - with thousands crowding the police-closed entrance.

♦️COUNTER-TERROR - TULKARM (Samaria).. firefight between terrorists and the security services of the Palestinian Authority in Tulkarm, terrorist Muhammad Ahmed Khatib was killed.

♦️IDF ATTACKING IN CENTRAL RAFAH

♦️IDF WAVE OF ATTACKS - SOUTHERN LEBANON - The Air Force has launched another wave of attacks in southern Lebanon, and is now attacking the targets of Problema al-Sha'ab and Al-Hiyam

[princessanneftw]

Why Princess Anne will be the King’s bedrock of support

The royal world has changed once again – but the industrious Princess Royal will keep the show on the road

By Camilla Tominey for the Daily Telegraph

Over the years, she has tumbled down the line of succession to a lowly 17th place in the Windsor pecking order.

On paper, the Princess Royal may not be the most prominent royal, lagging well behind her nephew Prince Harry and her brother the Duke of York – even though they are no longer “working” royals.

But when it comes to putting in the hours on behalf of the family Firm, few could dispute Princess Anne’s status as one of the King’s most stalwart supporters.

As the 75-year-old monarch on Monday began what Buckingham Palace has described as a “schedule of regular treatments” following his cancer diagnosis, his 73-year-old sister was the first to ride to the royal rescue.

With typical gusto, the grandmother-of-five put her best foot forward to carry out an investiture at Windsor Castle at 11am on Tuesday, before turning her attention to three further royal engagements.

After handing out gongs to the likes of media doyenne Elisabeth Murdoch, conductor Ivor Bolton, tenor Nicky Spence and wheelchair rugby league player James Simpson, the Princess made her way up to the Midlands for yet more pressing of the flesh.

On Tuesday afternoon, she was due to visit Nottingham West Primary Care Network at Eastwood Primary Care Centre in her capacity as patron of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, as well as popping in on woolmaker GH Hurt and Son.

She then plans to travel the 128 miles back to London to present The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at the Science Museum.

Although the jobs will have been in the royal diary for months, they reiterate the importance of the Princess’s role as the Royal family’s resident trooper.

Last year, she was once again crowned the hardest-working royal, clocking up an impressive 457 engagements, 32 more than the 425 carried out by the King.

Not that there is any sibling rivalry between the pair. Although they used to “fight like cats and dogs” when they were little, according to Ingrid Seward, the veteran royal author and commentator: “Charles and Anne’s relationship is very good now.

“They have a great mutual respect. Before the prospect of Charles marrying Camilla became a possibility, the late Queen always thought it would be Anne at Charles’s side, acting as a sort of incognito Queen. Elizabeth II always had that vision – that Anne would play a hugely significant supporting role.”

Her bond with the King was plain to see during their mother’s funeral, when the Princess was the only woman to join the solemn march behind the coffin for the procession to Westminster Abbey.

As her brother’s eyes threatened to overflow with tears, his characteristically calm and collected sister looked him straight in the eye with a silent show of support.

In her 2022 book The Palace Papers, the journalist Tina Brown even went so far as to suggest that “there are plenty in palace circles who believe she is the best king we will never have”.

Stalwart, straightforward and surprisingly down to earth (despite being an unapologetic stickler for royal protocol), the Princess’s popularity within the household and beyond has been built on her reputation for getting on with it with little fuss or fanfare.

As Valentine Low explained in his 2022 book, Courtiers: “That was Harry and Meghan’s downfall – there was too much ego. Anne has no ego. She recognises that this is the job, and you just get on with it.”

It is a testament to the Princess’s work ethic that Buckingham Palace has stressed that the King will not need to use counsellors of state – royals authorised to carry out the monarch’s official duties should they be incapacitated or overseas.

Historically, they are the sovereign’s spouse and the next four people in the line of succession who are over the age of 21. Until recently, the King’s were Queen Camilla, Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice.

Amid concern that Princes Harry and Andrew no longer undertake official royal duties and that the former does not even live in the country, a change was made to the Regency Act of 1937 to include the Princess along with her youngest brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh.

Both will be expected to increase their workload in light of the King’s cancer diagnosis, which has forced him to cancel all forward-facing public engagements to minimise any health risks.

As heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales will also undertake royal engagements on behalf of his father along with the Queen.

Yet with the Princess of Wales also out of action until after Easter after undergoing abdominal surgery, the monarchy has never looked more “slimmed down”.

Naturally Anne was one of the first to identify the potential pitfalls of stripping back the number of “working” royals.

“Well, I think the ‘slimmed-down’ [monarchy] was said in a day when there were a few more people around to make that seem like a justifiable comment,” she said in an interview last year.

When it was put to her that the world changes, she added: “It changes a bit. I mean, it doesn’t sound like a good idea from where I’m standing, I have to say. I’m not quite sure what else, you know, we can do.”

The royal world has changed once again – and as ever, industrious Princess Anne is front and centre of efforts to keep the show on the road.

[accio-victuuri]

sharing this article from today about HB. 🤍

Nominated for "Best Feature Film" at the Golden Rooster Award: "Hidden Blade": a hidden arrow that breaks the unspoken rules of box office for literary and artistic films

A classic is a kind of work,

It continues to give rise to clouds of criticism of it,

And keep getting rid of it,

It never completes what it has to say.

Hidden Blade, whose global box office is still rising, is the box office ceiling for domestic literary and artistic films. The background of this performance is that serious films have encountered an era of shallow reading, the industry and the public have been torn apart, and box office has become an undercurrent sweeping everything. However, because literary films do not conform to the shallow entertainment psychology, their niche nature is predicted by bloodthirsty and crude evaluations, and they are ahead of schedule. They are killed by film placement rate.

The true mission of film���Making culture visible

The turbulent clouds and red color in the broad field of vision are somewhat incompatible with the festive atmosphere of the Lunar New Year. Released on the first day of the Lunar New Year, it is a kind of performance art in itself... It is very cliché, and it is exactly the same as the self-deprecation of super commercial films. As a spy war literary film, "Hidden Blade" has achieved a breakthrough in innovative expression of Chinese films, and its heterogeneity is unique among domestic films.

The dramatic tension of too many movies relies entirely on scenes and special effects, which disappear once they leave the theater. "Hidden Blade" creates a huge psychological magnetic field, which is still exciting even if it is separated from the audio-visual environment. The tone threshold of "Hidden Blade" is not some kind of contempt for the audience, but the ultimate respect for the audience, history, and movies.

Literary films are a type of film relative to the concept of commercial films. They focus on artistic expression and cultural connotation, and try to pursue higher aesthetic values ​​and cultural significance. Their production is also different from commercial films: commercial films pursue commercial interests or mass entertainment, and take the movie box office as the main goal, while literary films focus on the artistry and cultural connotation of the film.

Transgressing norms and offending common sense, art films are pioneers of film. They often fail but expand the boundaries of film. There are two literary classics in the history of world cinema, "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Westward Journey". They failed miserably at the box office when they were first released. However, they accumulated a large number of die-hard fans through the later dissemination of images. After years of accumulation, they became indelible classics.

The core of the value counterattack between the two works is still that gold will always shine.The former's exploration of human nature and social systems has created a milestone in modern cinema, while the latter's postmodern deconstructive stream of consciousness has won resonance in an era of subversion of tradition.

As a cultural carrier, movies are the most intuitive and transparent value expression of the thoughts of the times. Although most of the classics handed down from ancient times are not the true understanding of the thinkers' era, they have been accepted by the public after years of precipitation. As a result, classics continue to increase in value over the course of history. This is the power of classics and the reason why we respect classics.

As early as in "The Death of Romance", Cheng Er used lines to express his feelings, "Movies are made for the audience of the next century." Look, for artists who break through the context of their times, the feedback they receive from the times is often lagging or misaligned, although this misalignment itself is precisely the connotation of the avant-garde. Yes, art films have always been a disadvantaged group in the industry that suffers at the box office.

In contrast to the tragic box office situation, the ambition and strength of literary films in film art awards. This is also the reason why "Hidden Blade" recently swept the 36th Golden Rooster Awards, with 8 major nominations and caused controversy among public opinion.

The existence of "Hidden Blade" is indeed an isolated example of a domestic literary film. With a box office of 931 million, it is not only the highest-grossing film in director Cheng Er's career, it is even several times the total box office of all his previous works! It's so stunning that "Hidden Blade" has always been criticized by the public, expelled from the art film camp by default in the name of "removing the highest score"!

"No one knows your name, but your achievements are immortal." The grand proposition of the unknown hero in "Hidden Blade" is more sentimental about family and country than any of Cheng Er's previous works. And does this main theme of "greatness, light, and justice" fit in with the art film's original understanding of "the world, society, and life" for individuals and the authorial expression of film language?

"Hidden Blade" is not the first of its kind to draw on commercial marketing for a literary film. At that time, "Fireworks in the Day" was announced as a romantic suspense film, and it received similar reviews and received double box office revenue. It can be seen that only true literature and art dare to joke about "super commercial films".

Cheng Er responded to this joke in an interview with "China News Weekly", "I was editing the film that day, and then they came in with their mobile phones to show me, and said that everyone still thought it was too literary, and I said let's just type a line. Come out - a super commercial film. This is a joke, and indeed no one put such a slogan in the trailer."

He said that he just found it interesting and that there was nothing to rebel about and it was not worth rebelling against. Confidence and relaxation are often qualities of an artist. These qualities make people stand out like fireflies in the dark, allowing the public to quickly pick them up from the crowd. And Cheng Er slowly titled a serious film "super commercial film" because of his humor.

Movies are not just an art of light and shadow | they are also an art that can cultivate people

Low box office is not the standard for art films. “When art is dressed in shabby clothes, it is easiest for people to recognize it as art.” However, this is not an essential representation of art, but the quality of the audience that needs to be improved. The complaints faced by "Hidden Blade" are the same as those faced by literary films as a whole, which is the contradiction between the film's authorial expression and public acceptance.

But does literature and art have to be a niche? Does it deserve to be obscure and slow-paced? Come to think of it, no one is more qualified to answer than "Hidden Blade", who has boiled the black water into a world of wealth and led the public's aesthetic appreciation with niche art!

The most representative narrative style of Cheng Er's films is "flashback narrative", which established his unique creative and imaging style. It invites the audience to participate, rely on brain supplements to build together, and gain the pleasure of decoding. It is a true "understanding", and it is easy to be confused if you don't understand. Such films pursue aesthetics and reflection, and are usually aimed at more mature and artistic audiences.

Movies are products of the cultural industry and are essentially consumed cultural products. In the context of the influx of capital and hot money into the film market and the industrialized mass production of film culture, commercial films are certainly high-return cultural snacks tailored for audiences. Even the creators of literary and artistic films are hard-pressed to avoid being judged by box office success . "The concept of influence or even kidnapping.

It is common for literary films to sell less than 5 million yuan. From Chen Zheyi softly asking the sky, "Why are elegant and gentle people scolded?" to Huang Xufeng angrily choking netizens, "I have no merit but hard work." There is no antidote in the world. The reason why literary and artistic films are criticized is often because in the fast-food era of shallow reading, literary and artistic films have to embrace the sinking market and attract non-target audiences in order to pursue box office.

But movies are just products? No, it is still a cultural expression and a carrier of social values. Comparing movies to products, then literary and artistic films are obviously not fast-moving consumer goods. When facing capital and the market, how can they be in line with the public while not losing their authorial nature? Cheng Er said, "Good-looking art films are also good commodities, and excellent commercial films are also a kind of art."

When it comes to art, most people may think that art is highbrow, aloof, and far away from daily life. And this is not the case. Yu Hua said in the roadshow of "The Mistake by the River", what does it mean to understand? In fact, it is whether it can overlap with our own life experience. If there is overlap, you can understand it. If there is no overlap, you can't understand it. That's normal.

In this explanation, understanding or not understanding is not profound. And Cheng Er has always said that the audience should not be underestimated. People who watch movies are influenced by their own likes and dislikes. Whatever they feel is what they have. Whether they understand or not is not that important.

The audience should not be too demanding to understand, and the artist should also be down-to-earth. Art for the sake of art is not true art. "Hidden Blade" is not only a literary film, but also a literary footnote to Chinese films, because it truly expresses the cruelty of history but is still full of artistic beauty. Cheng Er is very familiar with the history of the Republic of China and knows the intricate relationships between characters.

"Hidden Blade" is composed of real historical details as fine as twists and turns. When I say I can’t understand it, I’m not expressing disdain, but living in China, it’s difficult to understand the history of 5,000 years of civilization, but there is absolutely no threshold for mastering the history of the Anti-Japanese War! It is understandable that one cannot appreciate the narrative technique due to aesthetic differences, but the Internet atrocities of selling one’s soul for five cents and tainting the theme of the film are unforgivable.

There is no universal set of aesthetic rules in the world, but artists try to legislate aesthetics. Every era has its own branded dogma, until the next generation of artists establishes their own profession. Therefore, Gombrich exorcized art and said, "There is no art, only artists." He hoped that the world would stop enshrining art in shrines and use mystery and sacredness to Feeling separates oneself from the work.

There is also a similar "death of the author theory" in the literary field, which means that the author is as if dead when the work is born, and the interpretation and evaluation of the work are left to the readers. That is, there are a thousand Hamlets for a thousand readers, and there is no standard answer.

Just like we cannot require every movie to go straight to the international film festival awards, but also to hit the hearts of the audience and be a classic that will be passed down forever. We cannot require every movie viewer to have high film literacy from the beginning, and to be able to get the spiritual resonance of the creative intention. The growth of movies, filmmakers, and movie audiences requires more tolerant soil and space.

Of course, there is really little space left for literary and artistic films in theaters now! No matter at home or abroad, when the public unanimously agrees that "artistic films deserve low box office", please understand that the industry should leave some room for exploration for artistic films. Allow them to be ignorant of the customs, and only on the soil of tolerance can viable artistic flowers bloom.

Social aesthetic value orientation︱The purpose and driving force of movies

"A lame dog walks through the bombed street scene." One day, Cheng Er took a pen filled with ink and wrote this sentence on the paper. At that time, no one, including himself, knew it, but it was becoming the starting point for a movie called "Hidden Blade," and this moment of brutal aesthetics became the famous scene of the movie.

Personal aesthetics are free, but social aesthetics has a paradigm. Education and social culture will influence and standardize aesthetics and shape aesthetic orientation. Different eras and different environments have different aesthetic orientations, and different aesthetic orientations make people make different value choices. That is to say, no matter how free the aesthetics and how diverse the values ​​are, as long as the rice is sown, it will never grow into tares.

Art and commerce are the two legs of movies. Art movies are full of vitality, and commercial movies are lively. When the leg of literature and art is lame, it is not unfair that Chinese films have been reduced from regulars on the awards podium at international film festivals to regulars on the red carpet.

Yes, there is indeed a "silver-like pewter tip" in the name of art. When artistic conscience is marginalized by desire, the so-called art becomes only a barren and pale flower shelf that cannot withstand scrutiny and argumentation. But "Hidden Blade" allows us to see how an exquisite literary film is polished and shaped, and even simple film layouts contain shooting skills.

Generally, it is the director's habit to record the scene first, then the actors perform, and the cameraman follows the camera movement, but this is not the case on Cheng Er's set. Wang Yibo once mentioned that the crew respects the actors very much. The filming scene is very quiet. Once the mood enters the state, the photographer shoots directly. After the scene is finished, the filming will be finished. The filming will never interrupt the actors' brewing emotions.

In the later stage, Cheng Er slept directly in the studio and only did one thing every day, cut, cut, cut! Thanks to his almost fanatical work status, Cheng Er didn't even get exposed to the sun last year! It took seven years to sharpen a sword, just for a different Chinese movie. Incorporate the main melody into genre movies, and use the language and audio-visual rhythm of genre movies to achieve innovative expression of the main melody theme.

"A truly good movie must be more commercial than commercial and more artistic than art. For me, what I have always wanted to do is to be more commercial than commercial and more artistic than artistic." Cheng Er said this and did the same.

Cheng Er's images are full of subtle metaphors. Puppet Manchukuo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, the spiritual narrative about the city in "Hidden Blade" permeates the architectural language of Rongzhai, No. 76, No. 567 Xiafei Road, Central Market, and Man Mo Temple; it is hidden in Japanese, Shanghai dialect, The mixture of pidgin and Cantonese arouses emotional resonance and deep thinking in the audience.

The Puppet Manchukuo, which only exists in the dialogue between Watanabe and Mr. Ye, is like a ghost with the chill of a daydream; the isolated island in Shanghai, which occupies the main part of the film, exudes luxury and inconsistency in its exquisiteness; and Hong Kong, as the hub of the international anti-Japanese united front, is full of human fireworks, revealing a simple and soothing world.

Dark clouds are pressing down, devastation is everywhere, and at the end of the tunnel, the historical information in the image of the current situation is compressed into a minimalist narrative, waiting to be decompressed. Until the dark wormhole of the theater, the historical words in the spy war narrative rushed towards us...

The anti-Japanese drama consumes misery, the anti-war themes are reproduced in large numbers, and the massacres cause psychological discomfort... In the past, expressions of the history of national suffering often followed the rules of exposing cruelty, exposing blood, and even exchanging violence for violence. What is shocking about "Hidden Blade" is that it uses beauty to overcome ugliness. It is amazing: It turns out that suffering can be interpreted calmly, with warmth and depth! "You can't get involved in the frame," is the domineering determination of the man behind the scenes.

Light and heavy, cold and warm, it completes the unfinished soul judgment on a country's sin of aggression in reality. In the sense of cultural export, "Hidden Blade" integrates the isolated history of China's anti-Japanese resistance into the world narrative of the great history of World War II.

It is a message from the times to the times. In the theater, "Hidden Blade" makes us feel the power of literature and art. After walking out of the theater, you will naturally understand what the merits of the unknown are!

[copythatblogs]

when people talk about the new rules for 2026 i hear them say it’s gonna be an “engine formula” a lot. what does this mean?

FORMULA EXPLAINED - Part One Engine Formula

When referencing the FIA's new set of rules & regulations for the 2026 season, you may hear people talking about something called "engine formula".

Engine Formula is all the parts that are put together to make the engine work like components and batteries.

The 2026 engine is to be a 50/50 split between internal combustion engine and electrical power, dropping the MGU-H (which i'll cover soon) and massively upping the MGU-K (which will also be covered soon) to a power output of 350kW or around 469bnp.

The current hybrid (engine) set-up includes the energy store, the V6 engine, the turbocharger, and two other components.

Said components are the MGU-H and the MGU-K. Let's start by focusing on:

What they are

What their purpose is

MGU-H Motor Generation Unit - Heat The MGU-H is a compound of the hybrid-electric internal combustion engine. (this is literally just the name of the engine) Its job is to convert heat energy from exhaust gas into electrical energy. - Acts as an anti-lag system for the turbocharger.

MGU-K Motor Generation Unit - Kinetic The MGU-K is a kinetic energy recovery system connected to the crankshaft with the main task of converting kinetic energy into electrical energy. Much like the MGU-H but different. - Kinetic energy is the energy an object has because of its motion. - The crankshaft is another engine component. It is a piston that converts the linear motion generated by the engine into rotational motion. (in simpler words, it converts the vertical movement of the pistons into horizontal rotational movement which drives the wheels via the gearbox.)

For 2026 they plan on completely dropping the MGU-H system and upping the MGU-K system to have a significantly larger power output (as stated above). Removing the MGU-H is the most significant change being made to the engine as they are literally removing a whole component.

They are making this drastic change as they deemed it "too complex, with too little road relevance for manufacturers." - essentially, a bit too difficult for manufacturers (the people that make it) to understand completely how to make it, as they are more used to working on engines build for the roads. Hence "road relevance".

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

That's a wrap for part one of "FORMULA EXPLAINED" by copythat!

Thanks for your read! If you're new here, have a quick read at my intro post for this series.

*all feedback and constructive criticism is welcome!*

also, if you'd like to - follow my Instagram! @/copythatblogs

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Joseph Figliolia

Published: Dec 1, 2023

If you’ve followed the debate over treating gender-distressed youth, then you know that evidence-based policy changes, along with general public understanding, often lag the latest research. Such a gap might be less significant in other medical subfields, but it has incredibly high stakes in youth gender medicine. Given the nature of the treatments and their implications for the long-term physical and psychological well-being of underage patients, keeping up with the research is crucial—especially if the assumptions underpinning gender-dysphoria guidelines are proven false.

While the wheels of change move slowly, signs suggest that the Netherlands is beginning to grapple with the disconnect between its outdated gender-dysphoria guidelines from 2018 and new epidemiological data and other countries’ systematic reviews of evidence. While the Netherlands is only one country, it holds symbolic importance in the world of youth gender medicine. The country pioneered the use of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “gender affirming” surgeries) in its original “Dutch protocol,” a document that established eligibility criteria for youth and a corresponding medical treatment pathway. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of youth gender-transition practices can be traced to the supposed success of the country’s original protocol. Dutch clinicians have also made extensive contributions to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standard of Care 8 (SOC8) as well as the Endocrine Society’s 2017 clinical-practice guidelines, which many professionals consider the definitive treatment framework for gender-distressed youth.

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) adeptly chronicles the Netherlands’s burgeoning national conversation over youth gender medicine, tracing its rise to three recent catalysts: a medical publication in a Dutch-language medical journal; a new paper in a Dutch legal journal arguing that the 2018 Dutch protocol would not hold up as a genuine “standard of care” in civil litigation; and a (liberal) Dutch public broadcaster’s release of a two-part documentary series featuring methodological experts who highlight the weaknesses of the original protocol.

The first trigger-point in the Netherlands’s trans discourse was a medical paper by researchers Jilles Smids and Patrik Vankrunkelsven. Smids and Vankrunkelsven penned the paper in response to a clinical lesson—an overview of the treatment process for trans-identifying youth, with case studies of three youth—published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine, which concedes that a surging number of patients have been referred for gender issues, that the more complex youth cases have involved adolescent-onset (rather than childhood-onset) dysphoria, and that patients often present with other psychiatric symptoms. Despite these concessions, the young people described in the clinical lesson were all ultimately treated with, or were awaiting, “gender-affirming” medical interventions. Specifically, two of the youth had gone on to take puberty blockers, while one was awaiting the start of a more targeted menarche-blocking medication.

This concession and the doctors’ treatment decisions are relevant because critics of affirmative-care practices in the Netherlands and elsewhere contend that today’s cohort of gender-distressed youth is clinically distinct from the population in the original Dutch protocol. Critics also charge that even the findings of the original Dutch studies for trans youth, which have more narrowly defined eligibility criteria (e.g., including only patients with childhood-onset dysphoria, without other psychiatric conditions, and with family support), don’t hold up under scrutiny.

In their critical paper, Smids and Vankrunkelsven take the clinical-lesson authors to task for painting an incomplete picture of the state of scientific knowledge on youth transition, and for sidestepping the international debate over what constitutes ethical care for gender-distressed youth. Smids and Vankrunkelsven seem perplexed that the clinical lesson’s authors would endorse puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as the default treatment approach for youth when systematic reviews, including England’s NICE review, have concluded that the evidence for these interventions’ safety and effectiveness is weak. Smids and Vankrunkelsven added that if the authors used the same GRADE system used in many evidence reviews to arrive at treatment recommendations—a methodological framework for developing summaries of evidence and assessing their reliability for making clinical-practice guidelines—they would have been highly unlikely to recommend cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers as part of routine care, especially given the known cost-benefit breakdown: guaranteed fertility complications and sexual dysfunction, reductions in bone density, and possible hindrance of brain development, compared with largely inconclusive mental-health benefits and reductions in gender dysphoria.

Smids and Vankrunkelsven also criticized the clinical lesson for failing to distinguish between clinical presentations with adolescent-onset and childhood-onset dysphoria because the first group was notably not the target of the original Dutch treatment protocol, and the developmental course of this group’s dysphoria is essentially unknown. Moreover, the adolescent-onset cohort tends to have higher rates of comorbidities, which were exclusionary criteria in “the Dutch protocol.” This is crucial because trans identity and the desire for body alteration may be a maladaptive coping mechanism for underlying mental-health problems. Any clinician who would conflate these two populations is technically running a new, uncontrolled experiment.

Smids and Vankrunkelsven also noted that the true regret rate in the emergent cohort of adolescent-onset-dysphoria sufferers is unknown because some research suggests that regret can take up to eight to ten years to manifest. Yet, the clinical lesson’s authors say that 98 percent of youth who proceed from blockers to cross-sex hormones keep taking cross-sex hormones over “the long term”—quite a claim, considering that they followed up with natal males only as far out as 3.5 years, and with natal females at 2.3 years, after first intervention.

The final two concerns that Smids and Vankrunkelsven raise involve puberty blockers. First, they challenge the lesson authors’ dubious assumption that puberty blockers provide a “pause button” and are part of the diagnostic phase, rather than the first step in transitioning. Only 1.4 percent–6 percent of Dutch youth prescribed puberty blockers for gender dysphoria stopped taking them; the overwhelming majority proceeded to take cross-sex hormones. In fact, interrupting puberty might hinder natural developmental processes that could allow kids’ dysphoria to resolve itself, while taking blockers might crystallize their cross-gender identities. Smids and Vankrunkelsven’s other concern is that the clinical lesson’s authors claimed no cognitive effects of taking puberty blockers—this despite a study of individuals with precocious puberty finding an IQ reduction of seven points after they spent two years on puberty blockers.

The second catalyst for the Netherlands’s recent reconsideration came from a Dutch legal journal, Nederlands Juristenblad, which published an article by Lodewijk Smeehuijzen, Jilles Smids, and Coen Hoekstra arguing that the country’s current national guidelines for treating gender-distressed youth—again, the 2018 Dutch protocol—fail to meet the legal definition of a standard of care. The authors note that case-law precedent has established that a standard of care must be evidence-based, follow a reproducible and properly designed methodology, and have a limited “ethical dimension.” By limited “ethical dimension,” the authors mean that a standard of care’s credibility comes from its medical expertise. If guidelines are primarily mediating questions of ethics that stand outside the bounds of their medical expertise, they are less credible.

The 2018 Dutch protocol did not follow national guidelines for developing an evidence-based standard of care, and it failed to commission a systematic review of existing evidence. Moreover, as SEGM notes in its analysis, the committee overseeing the development of the 2018 Dutch protocol failed to control for conflicts of interest; Transvisie, a Dutch patient-advocacy group, took public credit for lowering the eligibility age for a mastectomy to 16 and reducing the role of psychological assessment in patients’ ability to access gender-affirming care. The 2018 protocol is not based on an assessment of the existing research and is at odds with treatment recommendations in England, Finland, and Sweden, all of which completed their own systematic reviews.

As the article highlights, other changes made to the 2018 Dutch protocol were not based on evidence. These included removing childhood-onset gender dysphoria as a key eligibility criterion for accessing care; lowering the age of eligibility for cross-sex hormones to 15 and mastectomy to 16; allowing youth with “non-binary” gender identities (identities that fall outside of the man/woman binary) to medically transition;  and adopting the ICD-11 diagnostic terminology of “gender-incongruence” over gender dysphoria, which no longer requires psychological distress as a prerequisite for receiving medical care for gender issues. The 2018 Dutch protocol thus radically diverges from the guidelines of the original Dutch protocol, which imposed strict limitations on who was eligible for care.

Smeehuijzen, Smids, and Hoekstra contend that at the heart of the debate over the 2018 Dutch protocol is a fundamentally ethical, rather than medical, question: What is the proper societal response to a gender-incongruent child? Given the very weak research supporting affirming-care interventions and concerns that puberty blockers might sustain dysphoria, questions about whether it’s better to intervene early with irreversible medical procedures or allow dysphoria to resolve itself naturally, and concerns about prepubertal minors’ ability to consent, the debate over best practices is as much about ethics—and philosophical anthropology—as it is about science. For these reasons, the authors argue, the Dutch Handbook of Health Law does not grant medical guidelines special authority to resolve ethical dilemmas that fall outside of the scope of medical expertise.

The final turning point in the Dutch trans debate was the release of the new two-part Dutch-language documentary, the Transgender Protocol (Parts 1 & 2, with English subtitles), which has drawn activist groups’ ire for criticizing the affirmative-care model. Part 1 covers the scientific origins of the original Dutch protocol; Part 2 focuses primarily on the impact of puberty blockers on brain development.

Part 1 challenges the safety and efficacy of the foundational Dutch studies and interviews five Dutch experts (four research methodologists and one professor of child psychology) who criticize the existing evidence. This segment also highlights the hostile intellectual climate surrounding gender-transition procedures, which stifles scientific debate. It includes commentary from experts in other European countries and stories from those who have detransitioned.

Part 2 underscores the puberty-blocker controversy and the unsettled science about the drugs’ impact on the developing brain. According to the documentary, Dutch researchers as early as 2006 acknowledged the role that puberty, and associated hormonal changes, play in brain development. Despite this concession, the researchers never engaged in robust follow-up work to understand better the cognitive impact of halting these developmental processes, in part out of fear that unwanted findings would bring an end to puberty-blocking interventions.

While it’s far from guaranteed that Dutch officials will make changes to the 2018 protocol, the documentary has thrust the controversy into the Dutch public consciousness. Concurrent calls from the Dutch medical and legal establishments to reform existing practices to align more closely with those of other European countries is also a step in the right direction. 

Given the stakes, change will arrive too late for some. But late is better than never.

[beardedmrbean]

The holiday property market along Bulgaria's Black Sea coast is experiencing a shift away from its previous dominance by Russian buyers, now attracting a blend of younger Bulgarian professionals and retired Europeans. According to a comprehensive report by BTA, half of the buyers for seaside apartments are Bulgarians under 30, primarily from the IT sector, while the other half consists of retirees from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Demand is particularly strong for two-bedroom apartments within gated complexes, with average prices starting at 1,900 euros per square meter. Maintenance fees, which cover amenities like pools and gyms, no longer deter buyers, who typically spend around BGN 60-70 per month on these services. Ukrainian investors are also entering the market, focusing on new residential developments near the sea.

This snapshot of the summer holiday market in Bulgaria was detailed by Atanas Argirov and Stefka Kalcheva, members of the National Association "Real Estate" Management Board.

In Varna, residential property prices have surged by 60 percent over the past two years, prompting a shift in buyer interest towards vacation homes. Atanas Argirov notes that holiday property prices have also risen, albeit more slowly, by 25 percent during the same period, indicating a stable upward trajectory despite lagging behind residential real estate.

The preferred locations in Varna include areas around the city center like "Sts. Constantine and Helena" and its surrounding districts. These locales, increasingly structured as residential hubs, appeal due to proximity to amenities such as large supermarkets and easy access to Varna and Vinitsa districts. The trend shows an almost equal number of permanent residents and vacation property owners in these areas.

In Golden Sands, demand for vacation properties is also on the rise, particularly within closed aparthotel complexes used mainly as second homes rented out during the summer season. Despite limited year-round inhabitation, interest remains high, with several new residential projects underway in "Sts. Constantine and Helena" and ongoing development in the Golden Sands area.

Buyers in Varna predominantly favor two-bedroom apartments, which account for about 40 percent of all real estate transactions in the city. Larger units with more than three rooms are preferred by IT professionals, who utilize them not just as residences but also as workspaces, reflecting a growing trend towards multifunctional living spaces. Security and amenities in gated communities attract over 80 percent of buyers, with rising maintenance fees posing minimal deterrent.

Approximately 60 percent of new buyers in Varna and its surrounding resorts are aged between 25 and 35, many of whom work in the IT sector. Bulgarians make up the majority of purchasers, while retirees from Western Europe constitute a smaller yet significant demographic, alongside buyers from Ukraine and Israel. The departure of Russian buyers has led to a smaller foreign presence in Bulgaria's real estate market, with Ukrainian investors beginning to play a more prominent role, particularly in high-end developments near Alen Mak and Manastirski Rid.

In the Burgas region, interest in vacation properties is steadily growing, with Bulgarian citizens accounting for 50 percent of transactions. The remainder includes retirees from Germany and a diverse mix of buyers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, and Russian-speaking countries. This influx has partially offset the decline in Russian buyers, who face logistical challenges in utilizing their Bulgarian properties due to visa and transport restrictions.

Property prices in Burgas have seen a modest increase of approximately 5 to 6 percent since the beginning of the year, aligning with inflation rates. Despite a balanced market without significant peaks, industry experts predict a slight rise of 2-3 percent in housing prices by year-end, totaling an increase of 4-8 percent for 2024.

Sozopol, Nessebar, Sunny Beach, and Primorsko remain favored destinations for vacation property investments, with a growing interest from Ukrainian buyers in Pomorie. The profile of buyers in Burgas skews towards younger Bulgarians aged 35-45 seeking second homes, while foreign buyers, particularly from Poland, are also prevalent. Financing through mortgage loans is common, with expatriate Bulgarians and EU residents contributing to a significant portion of purchases.

In both Varna and Burgas, two-bedroom apartments are the preferred property type among buyers, offering flexibility for seasonal use. The appeal of closed complexes lies in their security and maintained amenities, with additional fees, including maintenance costs, posing minimal concern for new buyers. Prices are influenced by proximity to the sea, with properties closer to the beach commanding higher values. However, affordability remains a consideration, with lower-priced options reflecting their distance from coastal areas and historical town centers.

[ask-healthy-light]

Since Twilight was still enamoured by Solar's sudden forwardness, she did not notice he had started to slow down to read the document that caught his eye, which he noticed had been written many aeons ago; and he wondered how the paper was still in such amazing shape after such a long time, until he remembered that the Empire's disappearance meant it had not been subjected to time for many an Age.

As he looked around, he realised that within the archive, Twilight and he could find documents that would not have stood the test of time, unless a line of beings over Ages invested a lot of time and energy to preserve the collection; but although Solar knew that a lot of knowledge was lost because of the War of Shadows, he realised that many smaller archives such as these could have been spared.

When the significance of where they were standing and the importance of the paper he was holding in his hooves dawned on him, he turned to Twilight, and helped her to understand what was around them; and she stopped sorting to think about what Solar told her, while he continued reading the document he found that mentioned Dragons, which he thought was unusual to find in the Empire, of all places.

Just as Twilight gasped in shock and amazement, and nearly froze where she and Solar stood, he took a moment to look for other pages of the report he found, which he hoped could paint a more complete picture of how a Dragon could have reached the Empire this long ago; for while a Dragon was not the strangest being to end up within these borders, it was too great a distance to be a planned flight.

Fortunately, when Twilight managed to snap out of her stunned and speechless state, she asked Solar what he was looking for, since she could have found it while she was sorting everything; and to his surprise, when Solar asked her in response to look for any papers mentioning Dragons in the Empire, it only took her a brief moment to pick the remaining pages, in order, out of the piles around her.

With the entire collection now together, Solar grabbed a small binder to store the pages, before he quietly asked Twilight to do the same for any other documents they were able to find, and continued helping her sort all the other loose pages; for while he had a feeling it was important for them to understand what was written within, he would not start reading until they could take time to do so.

After Solar put the binder underneath his wing to make sure he would not lose it, he turned back to focus on the countless documents that were hovering around them, briefly glancing over at the title of every report to look for what the Doctor had asked them to find; but whereas Solar lagged behind a moment ago, Twilight could now not keep up, as she could not stop looking at Solar in admiration.

Only when Solar started to run out of binders to store the countless reports they were finding, and he started to look around for more, did he realise that Twilight was lovingly looking at him with a bright smile on her face; but her smile turned to silly and embarrassed giggling when Solar glanced at her with a smile on his own face, and slyly asked her whether she saw something nice to look at.

It did not help a bit that Solar sweetly nuzzled Twilight's neck in return, and they both burst out in laughter as they went back and forth between trying to sort and organise, and teasing each other over how dearly they loved one another; but after they took a moment to get all their laughter out, they took a deep breath, and told themselves that they would have to finish their tasks here first.

With their full focus on finding and fixing what fairly frequently was forgotten or fumbled around, though they did have to store multiple papers in fewer binders by using coloured paper as a spacer, they found the documents for Meadowbrook; and they quickly sorted the rest of the books and folders as well, but they left before they got into a debate over the best sorting method for the archives.

At that moment, a Nurse walked past them, and Eclipse politely stopped them to ask:

"Could you let the Doctor who was treating the Bearded know we found the documents she asked for?"

(Thanks for reading! And if you enjoyed, please reblog! Thanks in advance!)

Send an ask or request! | Start at the beginning! | Next part!

Featuring: Solar Eclipse and Twilight Sparkle as Twilight Eclipse from @asktwilighteclipse

[the-hubworldian-chronicles]

Cup-Rose Angel

Rose for short, member of nobility on the Inkwell Mainland, orphan of a decorative teacup and coffee mug. Cup-Rose is the only Hubworldian character to have officially time traveled - decided by a chronological distance of over 120 years and significant jet lag effects of travelling - though she did not have full control over the situation.

Born in the Cuphead Territory during 1909 to the Lady of the Land and her Lord consort, Rose is more durable than her mother but more ornate than her father and has a fully connected head, body and neck. In 1919, both parents and Rose’s closest handmaiden died via an anonymous assassination shortly after the birth of twin brothers who more closely resembled their father. This attack caused the remaining family to split up as though she had to train to take over her mother’s title, the young cups were taken to their great-uncle who lived and studied on the smallest of a colony consistent of three and a half islands.

Shortly after coronation, Rose sought out an abandoned studio to turn into a small college as was tradition set by her Grandmother. After contacting Kate the late estate agent (try saying that five times fast) she was given permission to explore the lobby of the studio resulting in an unknowing scene change to the mid to late 1960s alongside a costume change caused by what she thought was construction tar dripping into the bowl of her head.

Shortly into the complications of being a cartoon twice over she encounters another “Angel” type character though this one was blonde and if not for the posters the resemblance would be lost. Regardless she seemed familiar and they hunkered down together. During this time she encountered the Ink demon and through nothing but wishful thinking formed a bond between them, though it’s safe to say that after what Wilson did this has been lost to the cycle.

After being lured to a secluded boardwalk Rose and Mani (pronounced “Mah Knee”) were ambushed by the first to use the name Alice Angel and though one escaped, Rose ended up falling to the inky depths. Waking up in the back office of a casino.

At the mercy of the Devil himself she ended up being saved by his boyfriend who told him that it would be “entertaining to see patrons’ reactions to a dove-winged devil taking their orders.” She was tested and given a waitress role in the dining hall almost on the spot but negotiated a protection clause where she could reciprocate physical contact with harm to mortal customers and staff below her level, though at the time it wasn’t very useful. Running between tables and counters whilst at the same time avoiding the more carnal customers when she could was payment for the loan on an old bungalow as though her status of life was debatable she could not leave hell.

About six months in she was delivering papers to the same back office when she noticed a loophole in an immortality contract thanks to her training from nearly a decade prior and spoke out. The look on the customer’s face said it all and once the fine print was added and policy changed she was half-interviewed and half-interrogated resulting in a promotion to “Floor Manager” which took the more physical aspect of Dice’s job and placed it onto her, partially because they expected her to shatter.

Oh something shattered alright. It was a confrontation between her and an abusive patron who had been grabbing at young ladies all night and she took over for his table to tip the power into her favour. If being a lawmaker only teaches you two things, it’s how to spot loopholes and how to make them. The second he grabbed her wrist and went to slap her she dragged him out front and gave him one round the face. He then threw her across the ground and, somehow over the threshold of hell.

She returned home the following night, after closing the casino but to the surprise of everyone, grandmother included, she was there to open in the morning, right on time. She continued to bounce between ink machine, inkwell and its hell for the next two years until she was deemed too embarrassing by the [REDACTED] and pulled from her bed in spring of 1930 to be [REDACTED] for the next seven years, experiencing the modern age until [REDACTED] waking up [REDACTED].

[jcmarchi]

Deepfake misuse & deepfake detection (before it’s too late) - CyberTalk

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/deepfake-misuse-deepfake-detection-before-its-too-late-cybertalk/

Deepfake misuse & deepfake detection (before it’s too late) - CyberTalk

Micki Boland is a global cyber security warrior and evangelist with Check Point’s Office of the CTO. Micki has over 20 years in ICT, cyber security, emerging technology, and innovation. Micki’s focus is helping customers, system integrators, and service providers reduce risk through the adoption of emerging cyber security technologies. Micki is an ISC2 CISSP and holds a Master of Science in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA with a global security concentration from East Carolina University.

In this dynamic and insightful interview, Check Point expert Micki Boland discusses how deepfakes are evolving, why that matters for organizations, and how organizations can take action to protect themselves. Discover on-point analyses that could reshape your decisions, improving cyber security and business outcomes. Don’t miss this.

Can you explain how deepfake technology works? 

Deepfakes involve simulated video, audio, and images to be delivered as content via online news, mobile applications, and through social media platforms. Deepfake videos are created with Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), a type of Artificial Neural Network that uses Deep Learning to create synthetic content.

GANs sound cool, but technical. Could you break down how they operate?

GAN are a class of machine learning systems that have two neural network models; a generator and discriminator which game each other. Training data in the form of video, still images, and audio is fed to the generator, which then seeks to recreate it. The discriminator then tries to discern the training data from the recreated data produced by the generator.

The two artificial intelligence engines repeatedly game each other, getting iteratively better. The result is convincing, high quality synthetic video, images, or audio. A good example of GAN at work is NVIDIA GAN. Navigate to the website https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and you will see a composite image of a human face that was created by the NVIDIA GAN using faces on the internet. Refreshing the internet browser yields a new synthetic image of a human that does not exist.

What are some notable examples of deepfake tech’s misuse?

Most people are not even aware of deepfake technologies, although these have now been infamously utilized to conduct major financial fraud. Politicians have also used the technology against their political adversaries. Early in the war between Russia and Ukraine, Russia created and disseminated a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy advising Ukrainian soldiers to “lay down their arms” and surrender to Russia.

How was the crisis involving the Zelenskyy deepfake video managed?

The deepfake quality was poor and it was immediately identified as a deepfake video attributable to Russia. However, the technology is becoming so convincing and so real that soon it will be impossible for the regular human being to discern GenAI at work. And detection technologies, while have a tremendous amount of funding and support by big technology corporations, are lagging way behind.

What are some lesser-known uses of deepfake technology and what risks do they pose to organizations, if any?

Hollywood is using deepfake technologies in motion picture creation to recreate actor personas. One such example is Bruce Willis, who sold his persona to be used in movies without his acting due to his debilitating health issues. Voicefake technology (another type of deepfake) enabled an autistic college valedictorian to address her class at her graduation.

Yet, deepfakes pose a significant threat. Deepfakes are used to lure people to “click bait” for launching malware (bots, ransomware, malware), and to conduct financial fraud through CEO and CFO impersonation. More recently, deepfakes have been used by nation-state adversaries to infiltrate organizations via impersonation or fake jobs interviews over Zoom.

How are law enforcement agencies addressing the challenges posed by deepfake technology?

Europol has really been a leader in identifying GenAI and deepfake as a major issue. Europol supports the global law enforcement community in the Europol Innovation Lab, which aims to develop innovative solutions for EU Member States’ operational work. Already in Europe, there are laws against deepfake usage for non-consensual pornography and cyber criminal gangs’ use of deepfakes in financial fraud.

What should organizations consider when adopting Generative AI technologies, as these technologies have such incredible power and potential?

Every organization is seeking to adopt GenAI to help improve customer satisfaction, deliver new and innovative services, reduce administrative overhead and costs, scale rapidly, do more with less and do it more efficiently. In consideration of adopting GenAI, organizations should first understand the risks, rewards, and tradeoffs associated with adopting this technology. Additionally, organizations must be concerned with privacy and data protection, as well as potential copyright challenges.

What role do frameworks and guidelines, such as those from NIST and OWASP, play in the responsible adoption of AI technologies?

On January 26th, 2023, NIST released its forty-two page Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) and AI Risk Management Playbook (NIST 2023). For any organization, this is a good place to start.

The primary goal of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework is to help organizations create AI-focused risk management programs, leading to the responsible development and adoption of AI platforms and systems.

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework will help any organization align organizational goals for and use cases for AI. Most importantly, this risk management framework is human centered. It includes social responsibility information, sustainability information and helps organizations closely focus on the potential or unintended consequences and impact of AI use.

Another immense help for organizations that wish to further understand risk associated with GenAI Large Language Model adoption is the OWASP Top 10 LLM Risks list. OWASP released version 1.1 on October 16th, 2023. Through this list, organizations can better understand risks such as inject and data poisoning. These risks are especially critical to know about when bringing an LLM in house.

As organizations adopt GenAI, they need a solid framework through which to assess, monitor, and identify GenAI-centric attacks. MITRE has recently introduced ATLAS, a robust framework developed specifically for artificial intelligence and aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

For more of Check Point expert Micki Boland’s insights into deepfakes, please see CyberTalk.org’s past coverage. Lastly, to receive cyber security thought leadership articles, groundbreaking research and emerging threat analyses each week, subscribe to the CyberTalk.org newsletter.

[layingeggs]

Simulated lag artifacting

The blender render preview has a lot of artifacting in it that doesn't show up in the final render. But I think it's very pretty and I'd like to be able to use it in my final animations. I've been told that this can be done with shader nodes. But I don't really understand shader nodes. I understand characters and animation, but the math of 3D art is often too much for me.

Nonetheless, someone on another site showed me a potential 'simulated lag artifacting' shader. I mentioned that on here and fellow tumblr user @berozova asked to see it.

Here is a screenshot of the shader nodes. I admit, this sort of thing is beyond me.

As it was explained to me, and as best as I can repeat that explanation, the noise texture connected to vector math add connected to the vector of my image texture node causes the pixel distribution of the noise texture to be randomly moved up and down in a pixel noise pattern.

But, it only moves each pixel up on the x and y axis from the starting point of 0. We want it to go below 0 as well as above, so that the noise is centered, because otherwise it's pushing the texture slightly diagonally.

That multiply and subtract bit changes a range of 0 to 1 into a range of -1 to 1. Think about it:

1 x 2 - 1 = 1

0 x 2 - 1 = -1

0.5 x 2 - 1 = 0

It's a simple bit of math that converts a range of 0 to 1 into a range of -1 to 1.

That Value node is in there because the effect is too intense without multiplying it by a fraction. The UV Map node is there I think because we want this applied to the UV coordinates and not to the texture directly? Because it's the UV coordinates that determine where the texture is applied to the mesh?

I hope I haven't fudged a crucial detail here. But that is as best as I understand it for now.

Here is the result, on my character Mimi. I feel bad for her making her do all these experiments. I think she's just happy for attention and play, but as her parent I do worry of course. Now, as you can see, there is a runny watery effect to the textures, similar to what you can see when previewing your animation in blender. But there are some crucial differences.

If you look up close to her face, you see that it's not just the edge of the eyes that are getting watery and runny. But pixel noise is just spreading around randomly as well. And if you look at the bells on the ends of her clown hat, some white lines have randomly appeared there. I checked my texture image, and there are no white pixels around the bell texture at all. It's all either dark grey or transparency.

The second issue becomes clearer when we directly compare to the intended thing we're trying to simulate.

This is the render preview of my animated Mimi. As you can see, it's not just the textures that are being warped, but also the mesh itself. This completes the watery effect. If you only warp the textures, then you have the runny textures contrasted against the sharp crisp clear mesh.

This is a funny effect, isn't it? To me, it almost looks like an afterimage. But surely that's impossible? I enjoy animating my characters with low framerate and constant interpolation. If an afterimage were produced from that, then you would expect to see some significant distance between the two images, wouldn't you?

Overall, I would like to learn how to control the watery effect, but I'm going to put these experiments down for now. I have other things I want to get done, including other 3D art experiments. (I'm currently trying to figure out shape key animations in godot and also creating multiple distinct shape key animations associated with a single mesh!)

Thank you for your help Mimi!

As I said, I don't think she's bothered by being made watery, with or without unwanted texture bleed. But I am responsible for her and I have to make sure to take care of her.