#writing ava vexes me though

[limerental]

sacrifice

a post-tw3, pre-tw4 witcher ciri origins fic with healthy hints of avallac'h/ciri

Several years after disappearing through a portal to the heart of the White Frost, Avallac'h finds Ciri on the brink of death and must choose to act to save her.

He discovers her body in the grey wash of a downpour, the rain pooling on tiled stone in the courtyard, lightning cracking above the shadow of the old keep that clings to the mountains.

The rain does not touch him as he strides ahead, his footsteps loud in the puddled water, and when he reaches her and stoops, the rain leaps away from her body as well. Not enough to dry her but enough that when he turns her to her back, the pelting raindrops do not sting her pale, familiar face.

It’s her. Of course it is. It could be no other.

She’s been outside the Spiral for years, alive or dead, unreachable even by his probing magic, and then as suddenly as she’d vanished as she stepped boldly into the portal, he had felt her exist again. Like a breath long-held, her resurfacing is a painful sort of relief.

To see her body, to confirm what he’s feared, is anything but.

The soot darkening her eye sockets has run down her cheeks, black tears interrupted on the left by the grooves of scar tissue. He had watched her apply it that morning on Undvik, tallow and soot, ignoring his offer of more sophisticated cosmetics. She wanted to make an impression, gruesome and wraith-like and deadly.

She had, but he hadn’t told her so. He’d told her such foolish theater was unnecessary. Pitted against Eredin and against more substantial threats, intimidation alone would not suffice for her survival. Wild-eyed and furious, she had never looked more like Lara.

She resembles her now in another sense, cold as a marble statue.

He touches his gloved hand to her chin, parts her lips to lean close enough to feel puffs of breath against his ear. Her heart rate is ponderously slow, her skin like ice. If the rain had not melted it before he arrived, her body would have been limned in frost.

Why here?, he does not need to ask, the thin windows of the vacant Witcher keep seeming to squint to watch the events in the courtyard below. Kaer Morhen is unchanged since he last was here, the marks of Eredin’s assault left unrepaired. The remaining Wolves have not returned since, leaving the place to go fallow.

Instinct has dropped her here– a place she once felt safe. Or, he reminds himself, there’s the more grim possibility that she has come here to bury herself among Witchers, to let the elements weather her bones to the same scattered rest as the others here.

There was a time he may have carried her from this place against her wishes, lay her somewhere more worthy, spent an age carving a grave marker, but all that marble in memoriam and even the Aen Seidhe have forgotten Lara Dorren’s sacrifice. And Cirilla is not her, never has been, falls short of her, exceeds her.

Avallac’h will grant her the end she wishes. Turn aside and forget.

Cart before the horse, he thinks, as her eyes move behind the lids. There’s a sound from the back of her throat, and she wakes, or the approximation of waking, weak gaze tracking across the bruised sky.

“Zireael,” he whispers, and her brow furrows. She looks without seeing him. Her lips are blue, and sighs of fogged breath rise from them. It’s some time before she seems to recognize him.

“I closed the doors,” she manages, her voice a ruin.

“I know,” says Avallac’h.

He had guessed as much after the chill ceased its spread, and though he slipped through dozens of worlds, he found no new sign of the White Frost. No sign of her either nor any indication that she lived. It’s been years of wandering since then.

“Of course you know,” she sighs. “You know most everything.”

She’s teasing him with her last breath, the absolute child. He wants to shake her by the shoulders, reprimand her, force her to be serious. There’s nothing to be done to save her. He does not have to whisper a diagnostic spell to know that she’s burnt herself close to nothing, sapped every ounce of Source energy that holds her atomic structure together.

She must see it on his face.

“This it, then?” she asks. “It's just as well. No Witcher ever died in his bed, they say.”

Her eyes close, like maybe she can hasten the end. Declare those last, trite words and leave him gripping a corpse. He had waited too long to sit at Lara's side, the humans having discovered her body first, taken the babe, and not lingered over her burial.

His pride had blinded him. He had thought let her know what her choice has wrought. The cold she has doomed the world to. A petty, shameful desire. She had died alone, but he was left to live in chilled loneliness and regret. If he had only stepped in sooner, forbid her from visiting Cregnannan, made demands, done one thing differently, then maybe–

In the years since she vanished, he's doubted the choice to let Zireael go to her death, rather than giving in and letting the Frost consume it all. Why shouldn’t every world end the way his did?

The girl in his arms still breathes, though her lungs sound full of water.

There’s nothing to be done now, except perhaps–

Somewhere beneath this crumbling fortress lies a series of chambers, long locked away and dusty with disuse. There’s a cobwebbed laboratory still equipped with forgotten instruments and mutagenic substances. It’s primitive and ugly and beneath him, but if by some chance, he could find what he needed there, then there may still be a small hope for the girl. WIth her genetic material close to unraveling, further mutation may just stabilize her.

Why did you come here, Zireael? Avallac’h does not ask. To hide somewhere safe or to die in peace, it does not matter. Something has led her here, and by proxy, it’s led him. Perhaps Fate has intervened yet again.

“There is something we can try. Given where we are,” he says, rousing the girl with a touch to her cheek. She blinks into the rain, seeming to finally notice where she lies, the silhouette of the keep’s towers lit by streaks of lightning. “It may kill you either way. They say it killed three in ten.”

Even sluggish on the brink of death, Cirilla’s quick mind catches on his meaning.

“You aim to…”

“Give you what you want, yes. What you begged for as a child.”

She’s not one any longer, he knows. She hasn’t been for a long while.

“I don’t want that anymore,” she says weakly. “I just wanted it all to mean something.”

“Would you rather I allow you to die?” He feels he must offer her the choice. If she nods her head, he may deny her anyway.

She turns her face against his arm as though to shield herself from rain that does not touch her. He wants to press his fingers back through her damp hair but doesn’t.

“Fine,” she says. He’s not sure that she knows what she’s agreeing to.

She groans as he lifts her in his arms. It’s a marvel how light she is, how someone who has weighed on his mind so heavily could feel like nothing.

Of course, Avallac’h does not know the recipe or the process. What use could he have for some dh'oine mage's monstrous formulae? If he did, he’d find a more elegant means of mutation. He doesn’t have the time.

Places hold memory the same as the mind does, and he follows the impressions of Kaer Morhen's grisly past deep into the bowels of its laboratory.

As he lays her on a stone plinth and binds her arms and legs with metal cuffs, he thinks of ancient, ritual sacrifices. How she had taken a deep breath, terrified, and turned toward the swirling portal that would take her to the heart of the Frost.

He leans to kiss her hair and knows she may hate him afterward. More than she already does.

And when she next wakes with a sudden gasp, for better or for worse, Cirilla no longer looks at him with Lara's eyes.

[silicabeast34-blog]

Four Loko, Joose, and Sparks: An Abridged History of Caffeinated Alcohol

Remembrances of Four Loko — the super-caffeinated, alcoholic energy drink available in every convenience store for a narrow window of time before intervention by the Food and Drug Administration at the end of the aughts — are their own genre of internet content.

It is, if there is such a thing, the internet’s beverage, even years after the demise of its original formula. “If you can remember your Four Loko experiences, it wasn’t a Four Loko experience,” comedian Kady Ruth recently tweeted, in response to a question from comedian Akilah Hughes asking for stories about the drink’s golden age. “Why tell, when you can show a photo series?” dancer and YouTuber Ava Gordy replied, attaching an image of herself surrounded by Four Loko cans and wearing a gas mask. Photos from Four Loko’s golden days are scattered around on Tumblr and Imgur, captured with the high-flash, red-eyed weirdness of disposable cameras and early iPhones.

In an oral history of Four Loko, published on Grub Street last summer, the team of Ohio State buddies who created it explained how the product went from a small production run in 2005 to a splashy New York City debut in 2009 to more than $100 million in revenue in 2010. In short: They made the cans tall and they gave them a neon camouflage print to make them stand out. Plus, they raised the alcohol level as high as they legally could for a malt beverage.

2010 sounds like such a long time ago that I was honestly surprised when one of the Gawker pieces about the moment mentioned the fact that Obama was president. I wasn’t old enough to drink or permitted to have more than one other person in my car at the time, but even I feel a bubbly sort of weakness in my chest reading a blog post about the founder of Ron Jon Surf Shops getting arrested for driving under the influence of Four Loko or a blog post about Chuck Schumer comparing Four Loko to “a plague” devastating the country.

Four Loko was beloved, and it is beloved in death. But why? What’s so great about caffeinated sugar-water full of booze, in a can, retailing for $2.50, other than the obvious? The drink is infamous, and maybe an important cultural moment, but it’s not unique. There were also micro-eras for the nearly identical drinks Sparks and Joose, and the vodka Red Bull got almost two decades. In fact, there’s a long history of people trying to showily ruin their nights or their lives with disgusting combinations of chemicals dreamed up for some business purpose that doesn’t especially concern them. Caffeine and alcohol shouldn’t mix, but they have always mixed.

“People are always looking for a way to get high,” William Rorabaug, a historian at the University of Washington, tells me. “Throughout history. It seems to be part of the human condition.”

The last super-boozy generation was the baby boomers, he explains, but their children got into a health kick — yoga, meditation, bicycles, running — mostly because they saw a lot of bad stuff happen to their parents and older siblings as a result of alcohol, and because they preferred marijuana. Mothers Against Drunk Driving got big in the 1980s, and heavy alcohol consumption dipped throughout the 1990s. It didn’t rise again until about 2003, he says, when “very sweet mixed drinks” that went down easy and would mess you up with sugar and alcohol at the time became more popular.

Philip Dobard, vice president of the National Food and Beverage Foundation, explains to me that the drinking age was lower when he was a teenager, which was in the 1970s, and that he really liked drinking Long Island iced teas. Though they’ve been rebranded as premium cocktails in recent years, Long Island iced teas used to be Diet Coke and the leftover dregs of various well spirits. “It was the vodka Red Bull of its day,” he reminisces. “It was high alcohol, not particularly high caffeine, but caffeine. It was a test of one’s humanity. A test of one’s mortality. You’re young and healthy and you’re not familiar with loss. Injuries, when they occur, quickly heal.”

“It was a test of one’s humanity. A test of one’s mortality. You’re young and healthy and you’re not familiar with loss. Injuries, when they occur, quickly heal.”

A current fact sheet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about mixing caffeine and alcohol states that it makes drinkers feel too alert (when they should feel sleepy and want to stop drinking or at least sit down and not risk “alcohol-attributable harms”). It also points out that “caffeine has no effect on the metabolism of alcohol by the liver ... (it does not ‘sober you up’) or reduce impairment due to alcohol consumption,” and some studies have found people who mix caffeine and alcohol are three times more likely to leave a bar while still heavily intoxicated and four time more likely to attempt to drive home.

But caffeinated alcohol and the type of high it provides is communal, Dobard notes. It’s almost charming, to want to strip yourself of inhibitions in the presence of people you like. “I don’t think that impulse is new,” Dobard adds. “I think the commercial forces are new.”

He’s right. The vodka Red Bull was invented in the late ’90s by none other than … Red Bull, which chased athletes in ski towns and the rave scene on the West Coast by giving cases of free energy drinks to bartenders, even paying them thousands of dollars to put it on the menu. The first mainstream alcohol and fortified caffeine beverage was an industry plant.

As Haley Hamilton noted in MEL’s recent oral history of the vodka Red Bull, combining alcohol with caffeine has a two-part effect: “The alcohol can dull the effects of the caffeine (boring), or more problematically, the caffeine can dull the effects of the alcohol, meaning you can drink way more than you normally would without feeling super-hammered.” Dobard is not personally familiar with Four Loko, but sympathizes with the plight of a generation that just wants to get as drunk as everyone else got to.

“There’s nothing inherently illicit about combining caffeine and alcohol,” he points out, adding that coffee liqueurs and coffee-based cocktails have been around for hundreds of years, commonly used as post-dinner digestifs. “The problem occurs when there’s so much of one or the other and it’s so available that it becomes easily and widely abused as a substance. That’s typically when government agencies step in and recognize it as a public health risk.”

(In 2010, the New York Times offered the following very funny, very ahistoric thought on the demand for Four Loko: “It has long vexed club-hoppers and partygoers: how do you stay awake while drinking alcohol late into the night? For years, alcohol and soda sufficed.” Imagine if we’d just cool-mom-blind-eyed everyone for choosing to drink gas station cocktails instead of doing cocaine!)

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan commented on the persecution of Four Loko in 2010, writing that it was part of a “full-blown scapegoating operation,” and pointing out the obvious: “Isn’t the real issue here that kids are stupid?”

Caffeinated alcohol is a distinctly American flavor of stupid. We do it over and over.

That’s a fair question. Budweiser’s alcohol-and-caffeine drink BE was a hit in the United States in the early to mid-aughts but flopped immediately when tested overseas in 2006. Caffeinated alcohol is a distinctly American flavor of stupid. We do it over and over.

A can of Joose, which is 23.5 ounces, contains approximately 380 calories. (Compared to modern Four Loko, which is 660.) While both had 12 percent alcohol by volume and were fortified with caffeine, Joose had a few differentiating features, beyond the fact it was 40 cents cheaper and covered in skulls.

Sparks actually preceded both, and MillerCoors voluntarily removed the caffeine in 2008, before Four Loko even hit its stride. In the two years between its $215 million acquisition from the McKenzie River Corporation and this quiet surrender, Sparks had a 90 percent share of the “alcopop” market, which meant that with its death, Four Loko was primed to become an easy hit.

Today, even in the midst of the “wellness” boom, young people still post exuberantly about knocking back cans of Four Loko and making bad decisions, even though the caffeine has been removed and the current drink is no more dangerous than a wine cooler. In June 2016, long after Four Loko had been rereleased sans caffeine, the strange college journalism platform Odyssey Online published a guide to matching Four Loko flavors with your personality. “Gold Loko is a VERY IMPORTANT new flavor,” the possibly underage author wrote. “The people who drink these LOVE to live on the edge. They aren’t afraid of the challenge (of the added 2 percent alcohol volume).”

But it’s not special. None of it is special. I was a straitlaced high school soccer player during the Four Loko years, but I do remember, with a warm sort of disgust, the acrid taste of college ingenuity — tequila and blue Gatorade, whiskey and strawberry-kiwi Snapple, etc. There was no reason we couldn’t have chosen slightly less revolting combinations, except for the fact that it was kind of romantic not to. In 20 years, are you going to post throwback pics of a rum and Coke? It’s not shorthand for anything, and you would probably drink one now.

In November 2010, one of Four Loko’s creators, Chris Hunter, defended the drink vehemently to Fast Company, arguing that it had the same amount of caffeine as a Starbucks coffee, less alcohol than most craft beers, and less seductive packaging than a Bud Light Lime, and that dozens of other alcoholic beverages were available in the same 24-ounce cans. Asked about a widely publicized incident at Washington State University in which nine college students ended up hospitalized, with Four Loko cited throughout the police report, Hunter got even more defensive, telling reporter Austin Carr:

The police report showed there was supposedly illegal drugs at the party. That was mentioned about 14 times in the police report. There were multiple mentions of hard liquor, but there were only a few, maybe 2 to 3, mentions of Four Loko. It’s really unfair to say our drink was the cause of this.

The same month, his company reached a voluntary agreement with the New York State Liquor Authority to stop shipping Four Loko into the state, and the FDA issued a public warning about caffeine as an “unsafe additive” to alcoholic beverages, as well as private letters to four manufacturers — including Four Loko’s Phusion Projects — that stated, “[The] FDA is not aware of any publicly available data to establish affirmatively safe conditions of use for caffeine added directly to alcoholic beverages and packaged in a combined form.”

The FDA’s letter was sent to Charge Beverages Corporation (which made drinks called Core High Gravity HG Green and Core High Gravity HG Orange), New Century Brewing Company (which made the fortified beer Moonshot), and United Brands, which made Joose.

Jonathan Howland, a community health researcher at Boston University, told Science Daily just after the ban on Four Loko, “Although several manufacturers of caffeinated beer have withdrawn their products from the market, there is no sign that young people have decreased the practice of combining alcohol and energy drinks.”

There have been other gross party beverages meant to recapture the thrill of alcoholic energy drinks without drawing the same unwanted attention. Whipped Lightning, a combination of sugar, heavy cream, grain alcohol, and artificial flavoring had a brief heyday. Forty-proof chocolate milk did not quite. The super-cheap bottled sangria brand Capriccio had a moment, which the company leaned into, saying, “Believe the hype!” MEL’s Miles Klee recently sampled every flavor of a Mark Cuban-endorsed juice-box wine cooler called BeatBox, which has hideous, brightly colored marketing materials and a low price point, but concluded that its 11.1 percent alcohol content wasn’t really enough for anything other than an “unremarkable, if quietly pleasant weekend.”

In fact, even the FDA seems to be over the whole incident. When asked whether it would involve itself in the rise of alcohol-infused cold brew — such as those offered by the California-based Cafe Agave or the forthcoming offering from Skyy Vodka, announced March 15 — a spokesperson said the agency only considers products on a case-by-case basis, when action seems called for, and would have to get back to me.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/15/18265724/four-loko-history-joose-sparks-red-bull-vodka-caffeine

[vskpop]

About EXO’s recreational drug concept and SM’s turn to “edgy” aesthetics

A note: I love EXO. If I didn’t, I would just dismiss everything they do, ignore them and SM Entertainment and live a happier life. You can read me whining about how Ex’Act changed my life here. I will write about everything I love about The War very soon. Still, your favourite is #problematic. Let’s go.

A second note: I don’t think that EXO members have much liability in this, or that they had a say in it.

Over the years, SM Entertainment was never the biggest offender when it came to cultural insensitivity, appropriation, downright racism. As the trend in k-pop shifted to a grittier, more aggressive and hip-hop influenced image, the aesthetics of their products started moving away from the preppy, polished look they tended to have.

In the past few months, the victims of SM’s attempt at a rougher image have been several: NCT became street urchins in Limitless (complete with WinWin in braids), Hyoyeon tried the aggressive boxer concept (cornrows and black people used as extras attached), and Henry’s latest single was pretty much a textbook for contextless appropriation (at least he apologised).

Then there’s EXO’s new single, KoKoBop. In the video, EXO can be seen eating pieces of candy and then tripping; I’m sure you don’t need me to explain that they are mimicking taking drugs.

This video comes just weeks after one of the biggest groups in k-pop, Big Bang, was hit with a drug scandal of gigantic proportions, and that fans of rival groups (including EXO) were the first in line to attack him and YG Entertainment.

In a country where drug consumption is criminalised and punishable with up to five years in prison, it’s quite something that the company that made its name with reputable, clean-cut, safe-for-tweens products resorted to what is fundamentally a concept glamourising recreational drug use.

There are problematic aspects to having this kind of concept in itself - especially considering that teenagers make up the most of EXO’s fanbase - but what irks me the most is how shockingly hypocritical it is of SM Entertainment to pretend their idols are perfect human beings with no flaws (or bodily functions) and at the same time market them as drug consumers just for the aesthetic of it.

Imagine if a member of EXO was actually caught doing drugs: how would the public react? Would their fans be tweeting “my drug is EXO!” like they are doing today or would they recoil in horror and say that the member is “cancelled”?

What’s possibly an even more disturbing tidbit of this is the fact that member Kai is wearing locs. The thing in itself is a pretty basic example of cultural appropriation, but it’s even worse when considered in the context of the “drugs” concept.

At the same time as being culturally disrespectful, the styling ties a connection between drug use and black people. Who is most frequently associated with locs, and what kind of performers are the inspiration for KoKoBop’s aesthetic? Black people. What is the metaphor linking EXO styled as they are, and the tripping-on-supposedly-candy concept? Doing drugs. It’s just an absolutely terrible, superficial, racist approach on all fronts. If you need a refresher on the so-called “war on drugs” in the US and how that predominantly affected black people, Ava DuVernay’s The 13th is for you.

We could also throw in the fact that Kai has always been singled out as the “dark-skinned” member of EXO, something that has followed him and vexed him since debut. He is the only one to have gotten appropriative hairstyles - the braids in Wolf, and now the locs - in the whole of EXO’s career. I want it to be a coincidence too.

Finally, while I hardly believe that the members had a say in the making of the music video, the fact that they themselves called this a “reggae concept” is quite telling as to the language that was used within the company/production regarding what they were going for. A reggae concept, you know. Because people who make/listen to reggae music are drug users.

It’s laughable that SM thought it would be OK to use drugs to give an “edgy” image to their boy group, especially a society that would make pariahs of EXO if they actually took drugs, and in a company like SM, who have been making a business model of burying their heads in the sand when their acts do something less than honourable (Super Junior Kangin’s various DUIs were dealt with by simply removing him from the face of the Earth).

I don’t blame it on the fans that SM will get away with this concept and that everyone will love it, even though a little more critical consumption of material would be a welcome sight in the k-pop fandom.

It’s just disappointing to see a company that arguably has millions in budget and tens of members of staff working on concepts still managing to get it so wrong. EXO deserve better than this.