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rpgsandbox · 4 years ago

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Broken Compass is an Adventure Role-Playing Game inspired by the great movies and games of the genre, from the Mummy all the way to Uncharted, passing through Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider... and it's BACK with all new Seasons starring fearsome pirates and daring gentlemen!

In Broken Compass you play as an Adventurer in search of great Treasures, a man or woman of action, ready to risk it all every day, just so they can get to the finish line before their bitter Rival!

Broken Compass is the latest game by Two Little Mice, Riccardo Sirignano and Simone Formicola, and is completely illustrated by Daniela Giubellini. The same team already funded the Adventure Journal of Broken Compass with two successful Kickstarter campaign, and created “Household”, winner of the Italian award for Best Role-Playing Game of the Year 2019.

*Close to 100 pages of QuickStart available for free download, plus an all new Season Preview: Your Adventure begins now!

I know that look when I see it.

Don’t tell me: you’re looking for a Temple of Doom, or maybe hunting some bastards who don’t realize that that statue belongs in a museum! No, not a word, you’re one of those tomb raiders, or maybe you’re looking for your father, who mysteriously vanished some time ago. Or you need to “borrow” the Constitution to unearth some clues on a National Treasure. Perhaps you were just hiking peacefully when you happened to find the City of the Dead or maybe even El Dorado!

I can see it on your face, you’re an Adventurer. That smug grin tells me you’re itching for a lesson you clearly didn’t understand the first time around. Eyes on the Treasure, nothing else matters to you. And those bruises, the scratches on your cheeks, that torn-up shirt and dusty hat... It’s clear that harm’s way is your trade and reckless your middle name!

That’s why I like your lot. No matter what you’ve gone through, how many beatings you’ve taken, how many rope bridges have given way under your feet or how many poi- son darts have come shooting out of the walls, you can never get enough. The Treasure may be far away and hidden, but you never give up the hunt.

Broken Compass is a Role-Playing Game in which Players take the role of Adventurers in search of a Treasure. Adventurers in Broken Compass are men and women of action, traveling the World to face the Challenges of great cities and wild, unwelcoming lands alike. Adventurers risk their lives every day, driven by their will to discover, learn or obtain something priceless to them.

Broken Compass is based on the highly cinematographic Fortune System: a set of game mechanics that use small pools of six-sided dice to determine the outcome of any task that might entail risks or end in accidents. To succeed, you don’t need to roll high totals. Your aim is to roll two-, three-, and four-of-a-kind results, which become Successes.

If 1999 isn't enough, feel free to pick a different time to go Adventuring! Broken Compass offers three Seasons, all set in a different eras, and each of them comes with a new Setting, new Rules and a whole 6-Episode Season ready to play. All you'll have to do, is pick the right hat, and you're ready to go.

The Adventure Journal of Broken Compass was already funded over 100.000€ last year. The goal of this KickStarter Campaign is to produce two more Season "Jolly Roger" and "Voyages Extraordinaires", and all the accessories that will grant you the best gaming experience!

We are proud and happy to say that we successfully delivered all the rulebooks of our previous campaigns right on time, and all the feedbacks were great. That means a lot to our team!

The following mock-ups picture products at the final stage of development. The final products may slightly differ.

Season 2: Jolly Roger (More than 200 pages, full color, hard cover, 15x23 cm or 5.9x9 in). Jolly Roger will provide you all you need to go on great Adventures in the Caribbean Sea in the golden age of piracy. Includes additional rules for Dueling, Gambling and Naval Battles, as well as a ready-to-play On Demand Season. Soft touch cover.

Season 3: Voyages Extraordinaires (More than 200 pages, full color, hard cover, 15x23 cm or 5.9x9 in). The expansion Voyages Extraordinaires takes inspiration from Jules Verne’s adventure classics like Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days. Includes additional rules for managing Missions and Wagers, Extraordinary Inventions, as well as tips for creating Adventurers’ Clubs and Expeditions, and a ready-to-play On Demand Season. Soft touch cover.

Spin-Off: What If (PDF only). What If is a brand-new Spin-Off for Broken Compass, a digital rulebook that will get richer and richer, the more Stretch Goals we (hopefully!) will reach. The main goal behind this Spin-Off is to give you directions and suggestions to help you mold the Broken Compass system based on your needs. It will include useful techniques and tools to write your own rules to create different gaming experiences, tailored for a variety of settings. Each What If in the rulebook will be a new, unique, and incredible expansion, that will open worlds of possibility for your gaming experience... beyond anything reality can offer!

Broken Compass: Adventure Journal - Corebook (240 pages in full color, hard cover, 15x23 cm). The shining star of our first campaign! The corebook features the full set of game rules, the setting "1999” and a ready-to-play Episode! All neatly binded like a travel diary of old, with Soft Touch cover that feels like leather, rounded corners, elastic band closure, ribbon bookmark, and elastic pencil-holder (with pencil). A manual you can bring with you everywhere you go to live great adventures on demand!

Season 1: Golden Age (208 pages, full color, hard cover, 15x23 cm or 5.9x9 in). Golden Age will bring you straight to the heart of Adventure, to the golden 30s that set the scene for our childhood dreams, and the stories of the man in the hat. Includes new equipment and rules to manage Supernatural Menaces, as well as a ready-to-play On Demand Season. Soft touch cover.

Spin-off: LuckTales (224 pages, PDF only, Kickstarter exclusive). LuckTales was our first Spin-off, and it features Episodes and Compendiums created by partners, friends and fellow designers. Includes 11 ready-to-play Episodes, additional rules for Teen and Kid Adventurers, a list of weird equipment and artifacts and much more!

Fortune Master Screen (hard cover, four panel, full color, 23x60 cm). Features summary tables for all the main game rules and can be closed in the shape of the manual.

Season Screen (hard cover, three panel, full color, 23x60 cm). Features summary tables all the Seasons' additional rules.

Pirate Dice set (9 d6 + dice pouch). Each face on the dice has a custom symbol (the four compass points, the Broken Compass logo and the pirate skull) to make it easier to recognize when you roll two-, three-, and four-of-a-kind.

Caribbean Map and World Map so you can visualize your travels.

Name in the Credits. We will add your names in the credits of the new rulebook (Jolly Roger and Voyages Extraordinaire). PLEASE BE AWARE we will use Kickstarter names for this purpose.

During the crowd-funding campaign, you can get all Broken Compass manuals at a heavily discounted price. You can also unlock unique rewards that will probably be never put on the market otherwise!

The estimated delivery date is December 2021. PDF will arrive sooner, approximately on October 2021!

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Kickstarter campaign ends: Sun, May 30 2021 10:59 PM BST

Website: [Two Little Mice] [facebook]

#RPG #kickstarter #Broken Compass #Two Little Mice

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themaninthegreenshirt · 5 years ago

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Evelyn Waugh's guide to wine [1948]

The first and essential thing to be borne in mind about wine is that it is something made to be enjoyed. The pleasure it gives is the only ultimate test of any vintage. The corollary of this is that, like all the good works of man, its pleasure is enormously enhanced by knowledge and experience...

The titles of connoisseur and epicure are by no means synonymous. An epicure seeks pleasure for its own sake, not knowledge... A connoisseur is a scholar and a specialist. He requires an abnormally sensitive palate which is capable of causing him as much pain as pleasure. Indeed, of recent years it has caused much more pain than pleasure…

Let us give all honour to the connoisseurs, as to pre-eminent athletes. If we have not their peculiar gifts, it is a mistake to simulate them. There are those who drink their wine so anxiously, in fear of being caught out in a bad judgement, that they fail to enjoy it... Let us rejoice, rather, in the fermented juice of the grape in all its vast variety. After all it is the wine merchant's function to know all the niceties of his trade. His service is to find his customers the wines they enjoy and having studied their idiosyncrasies, gently lead them towards something better in the direction they have taken. It would be a poor librarian who was always seeking to press Virgil and Dante upon readers in search of a novel...

The reputations of certain vineyards have not been capriciously or arbitrarily fixed. They rest on the considered judgement of generations. In general it will be found that the more wine becomes a part of one's life the more one's tastes gravitate towards the famous vintages. But do not set out with any preconceived snobbery. Drink copiously of what you enjoy, because you enjoy it: keep your curiosity alive to find if there is anything you enjoy more...

Champagne

Whatever purpose is served by cocktails is more nobly served by champagne in its naked beauty... Its uses are limitless from launching ships to reviving the moribund. It is acceptable at every hour of the day and night; it can be drunk with every variety of food. Drunk in excess it has the least direful consequences. If I were confronted with the appalling decision of having to choose one from all the fermented liquors of the world to be my sole companion and stay for the rest of my life, I should choose champagne.

Bordeaux

The wine of the whole area is good and eminently suited to day-to-day drinking. To find the finest wines we must particularise and choose from the châteaux of the Médoc which in 1855 were judged and put into various legal categories. There have been slight changes in quality since due to the relative care that has been bestowed on certain properties, but the 1855 categories still stand as a very fair judgement. Three châteaux alone - Lafite, Margaux and Latour-were placed in the first class. There are many connoisseurs who would now give equal eminence to several wines that were then classed as 'second growths,' but what must be borne in mind, and is sometimes not realised, is that to be classed at all is the mark of wine that stands among the finest the world produces. A wine in the third class is not a 'third-rate' wine. It is rather as though a committee had decided that Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare alone among writers, stood in a class apart. They would not thus make Milton and Tolstoy second rate writers...

White Bordeaux… are strangely neglected in England and America. Many dubious liquids appear under the name of 'Sauternes' and many wine drinkers are inclined to dismiss them all with a single perfunctory nod of recognition towards Château d'Yquem. By false analogy with champagne, their sweetness, all their own, natural and deeply scented as the rose, is held against them. There are four or five château bottled Sauternes which can stand slightly behind, perhaps, but in the same first rank as Youem. The taste for them, once acquired, is immensely gratifying and personally I find them incomparably delicious after champagne, to drink very slowly when the thirst is entirely quenched.

Burgundy

The system of land tenure in Burgundy greatly complicates the problem of recognizing its fine wines from the outside of the bottle. Wines greatly dissimilar are entitled to the same communal title... The Château Margaux of a given year is a definite, invariable wine; two bottles of authentic Chambertin of the same year, blended by different merchants, may be very different indeed. Again, the only security for the amateur wine buyer lies in dealing with a wine merchant of the highest reputation who studies his customers' tastes.

Sherry

Sherry is a name much misused and even in the strictest sense applicable to a great diversity of wine from Manzanilla, as pale and dry as old paper, to the heavy, sweet, brown wine sold under a variety of names, often as 'East India' or Solera… I do not, myself, find that the richer and sweeter sherries serve any purpose that is not more perfectly fulfilled by port, but this is purely an individual judgment. Nothing can be more delicious than a glass of pale, very dry fino, chilled at noon in the height of summer. It makes an admirable apéritif before and at the beginning of dinner. Like all good wine it is best enjoyed in tranquillity; the 'sherry party' of recent growth is an abomination to me. As long, however, as people continue to entertain between six and eight in the evening, they will find Amontillados and Amorosos a useful knock-about stand-by, less deleterious and less expensive than cocktails.

Port

Port is the wine proper to the heavy drinker, and it may be admitted that whereas champagne, claret, burgundy and hock are all entirely beneficial and indeed, in a Well-ordered constitution, essential to the digestion of food, port, and the very finest port at that, can be slightly deleterious. Its charm insidiously invites excess, and excess of port, though not in itself harmful, sometimes discloses latent infirmities. The heavy port drinker must be prepared to make some sacrifice of personal beauty and agility. Its martyrs are usually well content with the bargain and in consolation it may be remarked that a red nose never lost a friend worth holding and that by universal testimony the sharpest attacks of gout are preceded by a period of peculiar mental lucidity.... No one, I think, ever contracted gout by port-drinking. What can be said is that those who are naturally gouty may find their weakness aggravated by port. Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and philosopher. The particular qualities of British university scholarship - its alternations of mellow appreciation and acid criticism -may be plausibly derived from the habits of our Senior Common-rooms...

Port is, of course, designed to be drunk after dinner. It should be drunk at the table; only so in the masculine calm which follows the retirement of the women, when the decanter travels from hand to hand round the bare mahogany, can it be enjoyed at its best. The best of all tables for wine-drinking on winter evenings are those excessively rare eighteenth-century pieces made the shape of a semi-circular arc which fit across the fireplace; some of them have brass tram-lines and a little wheeled carriage to carry the decanters. He is a fortunate host who possesses such a piece of furniture; he must, however, confine himself strictly to male company, for no body of men once established there can be persuaded to leave for the chintz and chatter of the drawing-room...

Hock

Shall we ever, I wonder, drink good hock again?... No one can say what the future of these wines will be. Perhaps they will survive only in memory. They were the product of centuries of devoted skills directed against the hostile forces of nature; if these forces are reinforced by the malice of man there is little hope.

A word may not be out of place here about wine which is 'corked or, more correctly, 'corky' or bouchonné. I have heard people complain their wine was 'corked' when they found a fragment of broken cork floating in the glass. When wine is truly corky the cork is diseased and foul-smelling, and the wine is more or less tainted. It should never be drunk in this condition. Any respectable restaurant or hotel will immediately exchange a bottle found affected...

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully; she turns her back on a rough approach. For the sot or neurotic who drinks merely for the kick.' 'kick" is the mot juste. Wine has attracted as many false suitors as the art of painting. Do not let impatience with the charlatans lead you into thinking all discrimination affected. Even the matter of dress is important. It is difficult to enjoy a good wine in a bad glass. A good glass is large and thin and clear; the best are slightly tulip-shaped. I have drunk a lot of claret out of an army mug and enjoyed it, but only half as much as I should have done in gentler circumstances…

All that I have written may seem to some readers to apply to an Arcadian age which can never return. Leisurely entertaining, profuse expenditure, a worldwide choice in the market - all these may seem the condition of a past age. We are all poorer and likely to remain so…

If we cannot afford to drink fermented liquor more than once a day, let us drink with our dinner. A half-bottle of sound, unambitious red wine nightly does not cost more than the accumulated short drinks which the average man consumes in the course of the day. If you cannot afford even that, emigrate to a wine-growing country or become ascetic. Do not become that pitiable type of modern life - the man who never keeps anything 'in the house' but likes stopping for 'quick ones' at public houses. If you can afford, sometimes or often, more than this minimum, build round the central fact of the dinner wine - add a glass of port after or a glass of sherry before the meal; choose a slightly more interesting main wine. Choose your friends from people of similar tastes and when you entertain them, build more ambitiously. Ensure that the food, however sparse and simple, shall be what will enhance the wine and not destroy it. These are the foundations on which the restoration of good living can be built, until perhaps we shall one day see the return of days of plenty, and wine fully honoured in all its splendour.

#Evelyn Waugh #writers #literature #booze #champagne #drinking #wine #alcohol

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mybiasisexo · 4 years ago

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Ring the Alarm

Genre: Angst | Marriage!au

Pairing: Lay x Reader

Length: 4.4k

Warning: Language | Adult Themes | Infidelity

Summary: Nobody said marriage was easy--and your marriage with Zhang Yixing is proving that. When you find out about his indiscretions, you have two options--leaving him is easy, but can you leave the life you both made together? Based off the song Ring the Alarm by Beyoncé

Author’s Note: This one... This one is definitely a WIP. Something I’ve discarded but will be coming back to and finishing. I love this plot, but I know a lot of people aren’t going to agree the the ending I have in mind. Listen to the song, okay? That’s what I’m basing it off of *shrugs*. Also, I drew heavy inspiration from the movie Girl’s Trip,

MASTERLIST

credit

Marriage was never easy. It took commitment, honesty, trust, and a lot of sacrifice.

You were always aware of this.

Once you reached the age to truly understand, you watched the weight of marriage burden your mother and your mother’s mother. Understood that the title, Wife, was a job, an occupation that carried on all of your life.

Yet, that never stopped you from saying yes.

Never stopped you from allowing that magnificently shiny ring to slide upon the third finger on your left hand, shimmering with the promise of forever.

Maybe, you assumed it would be different—your marriage. Maybe you were too young and naïve, believing that your love was stronger than those before you. That your love was based on something so magical it could withstand all of life’s trails and tribulations.

You were wrong, of course. But at the time, it hadn’t seemed so bad; especially when it was Zhang Yixing you were promising to share your life with.

Zhang Yixing was a rising mogul. He had started his own music label and it had blown up, skyrocketing the pair of you into high-class fame.

Through out it all, you had been by his side. From the time he was making beats in his basement, to the moment he won his first award.

You were the one who provided a roof over his head when he was solely focused on the music. The one who supported him financially when he didn’t have a dime to his name. The one who provided words of strength and courage when he was losing faith in himself. It was you who singlehandedly carried him to the top, allowing him to wear the crown as long as you were able to be by his side.

Because that was what love was.

But love was quickly overshadowed by greed. You both became too preoccupied scrambling to the top of the totem pole to remember why you had began climbing in the first place. The contracts you both signed with love soon became a business contract, you two only partners professionally.

Money had a certain power that overtook everything, and money was something that Yixing had a lot of—that the both of you had a lot of.

That’s no excuse though. No valuable reason for your husband of nearly six years to be cheating on you.

~*~

Once a week, you meet you with your closest friends, Seulgi and Irene, for lunch. Today you decide to eat at an upscale restaurant in downtown. You have known the two since high school and they have been your biggest supporters in life.

“How have you been?” Seulgi asks after you all have ordered, stretching her hand across the table to place it over your own, giving it a comforting squeeze. You smile softly at her, knowing full and well that she has caught on to the fact you’ve been hiding something that’s troubling you. She has always been extremely sensitive to other’s emotions, allowing her to read anyone like a book. It is what makes her such an amazing psychologist.

She also knows not to pry. A major rule of yours is that your marriage—like all marriages should be—is between your husband and yourself. You refuse to share the nitty gritty details of your relationship, even to your best friends.

“Surviving,” you reply simply, taking a sip of your hot tea.

The answer is telling. Both women share a quick concerned glance. Before they can inquire further, the food arrives and conversation is shifted to lighter subjects: updates in your lives since the last get together.

About halfway into the meal, Irene receives a message on her phone. She glances down distractedly before doing a double take, her eyes widening from shock as she stares at her screen.

“What is it?” Seulgi asks curiously. You find yourself leaning forward in an attempt to catch a glimpse at what shook her, but she swiftly snatches the device so that only she can view the screen. Her eyes flicker over to you and an odd sense of foreboding dread causes your stomach to drop.

“I just got some pap pics….” She starts slowly, eyes drifting back to you warningly. “Brace yourself.”

“Why would I have to…?” She hands you the phone and you blink a few times, not fully comprehending what you’re being shown. Squinting, you enlarge the image, zooming in to clarify that the man in the picture is indeed your husband.

Making out with another woman.

There’s four pictures in total. The two are apparently at some club. The woman—who’s back is conveniently facing the camera—is sitting on Yixing’s lap. His hands get lower and lower with each picture until they land solidly on her ass.

You sit the phone down and close your eyes, breathing through your nose as you rub your temples in frustration.

Careless. Selfish.

“I…am so sorry,” Seulgi murmurs. Tears can be heard in her voice, your pain being felt by her.

Irene is a bit different though.

“So, what are you going to do?”

Irene is the hard ass. The realist. She doesn’t believe in playing games, always cutting through the bullshit to get right to the point.

She would have made an amazing lawyer.

But instead, she gave her talent to a gossip magazine. It pays just as well with less the paper work and she is brilliant at it. Irene is always on top of the newest celebrity drama. She has a wide variety of connections—yourself being one of them—and isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty to uncover the truth. She is so good at her job that sometimes celebrities willingly give her information, because having an article written about you from her is how you know you made it in this cutthroat industry.

That is how she got the pictures. She has personal paparazzi that do most of the digging for her. Yixing is one of the most famous Chinese men in South Korea, so it makes sense to you that if they had spotted him doing something sketchy—because the world is aware of your marriage—they would capture it and send the proof to their boss immediately.

Sighing, you lean back against your chair, staring out the window that reveals a beautiful sunny day, a day too lovely to have to deal with this bullshit.

“I can’t believe he would do this to you,” Irene rages on, fury spilling out of her. She has the most disdain for Yixing. Ever since you first met him, she was always telling you how he was bad news, a no good low life that would only bring you down with him.

At this moment, you wish you had listened to her.

“This is just horrible.” You play with your wedding ring as Seulgi continues. “After all you’ve done for him, he does this in return.”

“You’re going to leave him, right? I mean, the man is cheating on you—”

“I KNOW!” You finally snap loudly, instantly shutting your friends up. In a much quieter tone, to not draw attention, you add, “I’ve known for a while.”

“You… already knew?” Seulgi clarifies. Realization dawns on her and she shakes her head in disbelief. “You already knew.”

“For how long?” Irene presses, her anger tripling and you’re glad that, at this moment, she is your friend, and not a journalist. She has to have realized that she stumbled across gold with these pictures. She holds enough evidence to ruin your martial image and make herself richer beyond her dreams. “How long has he been hurting you like this while you just allowed it to continue?”

“It’s not that simple,” you defend yourself quickly. “You know our entire career is based on our marriage….”

“Do you at least know who she is?” Seulgi asks.

“His secretary.” You sneer. “The cliché bastard is fucking his secretary.” Your hands tremble as a wave of emotions hit you like a tsunami. They come so rapidly, you can barely register them all: hatred, disdain, anger, embarrassment, betrayal—you don’t think you’ve ever felt so much at once.

“These pictures were taken by my people,” Irene begins quietly. “I just asked and they are positive they were the only ones there, but if I don’t do anything with them, they’ll sell them to another source who will. You know this.”

The severity of her words hit you full force, knocking the breath out of you.

She leans over the table, making sure to look you dead in your eyes. “I need to know. Do you still love him?”

Her question throws you off. Do you love Yixing? You assume there was once a time when you truly did. You gave up everything to be with him. Gave up your dreams to help him reach his own. Took his last name as your own, giving your life to him. No one does any of that without love being involved, blinding them from making any rational decisions.

But that was a long time ago.

You are in love with a different Zhang Yixing. One who fought for what he cared about, and cared deeply about a lot of things. Loved deeply.

The man you are tied to now is nothing more than a mere shadow of the one you fell in love with.

Knowing this, your stare remains fixed, unwavering as you answer truthfully. “No.”

She takes a deep breath, nodding to herself as she leans back. “I can stall, but not for too long. If you really don’t want to leave him, and I understand why, you at least have to talk to him. Let him know what his actions are about to unleash, because once this hits the press, you will know no peace. It’s going to get a lot tougher for you. You’ll have to fight harder than you ever have.”

It isn’t until Seulgi slides into the seat right beside you and rubs your face do you realize you’ve been silently crying. Your breath shudders as you inhale and give into being weak for a moment, sliding your arms around Seulgi’s waist and leaning into her in a tight embrace.

“Can you send those to me?” You ask Irene, who nods before doing as you request.

“What will you do now?” She asks after your phone lights up with her notification.

“Confront him,” you say without hesitation. This conversation is long overdue. “Let him know how much of a bastard he is.”

“Then…?” She presses, an eyebrow raised.

“Then I guess we’ll see.”

~*~

The car rolls to a stop in front of Zhang Studios and you sigh as you gaze up at the building. It isn’t an over the top skyscraper, but it stands strong of wealth. The concrete building hovering over you fills you with nostalgia. You both worked so damned hard to get this place and now he’s using it against you.

His office is on the top floor. It is made for a boss, what with it’s icy glass doors and floor to ceiling windows that overlook downtown. On his desk, beside his nameplate, sits a picture of you both from your honeymoon, smiles huge and eyes locked, still utterly drunk in love.

The look in your eyes in that picture is the complete opposite of what is churning in them now. Ignoring his secretary’s protests, you swing the door open in time to catch Yixing bid farewell to the three other men in lavish suits that are also in the room. It appears you entered at the end of a meeting.

One of the men is a friend: Kim Jongin, and as they all turn around to see who entered, he smiles dazzling at you. He approaches you, taking your hand and kissing it.

“it’s so nice to see you.” He greets.

“You too, Jongin. It’s been a while.”

“That it has, but I’m looking forward to your anniversary dinner. I’m sure it’ll live up to the expectations”

You internally wince at the reminder. A date you should look forward to, only fills you with dread.

“Have the Zhang’s ever disappointed?” You ask with a wink.

The rest of the men bow in farewell before heading out after Jongin. You make sure to lock the door behind them so that Miss. Becky can’t attempt to interrupt.

Slowly, you approach Yixing as he unbuttons his jacket and takes a seat. Your heels clack loudly against the tile floor, empowering you with every step.

“My dear,” he begins quietly and you nearly sneer at the pet name. “What brings you here unannounced?”

Without saying a word, you plop the manila folder holding his incriminating pictures on his desk before him. He raises an eyebrow questioningly before humoring you and pulling them out. His jaw tightens as he scans the images and you catch it. It’s only a second, if you hadn’t been studying him so hard you would have missed the shock that pinched his face.

After a moment of silence, he sighs, tossing the folder back on his desk in defeat. His eyes scan his luxurious office before finally meeting yours.

“I guess apologies are in order.”

“Save it,” you spit. Your arms tremble with the anger flowing through your veins and it takes everything in you not to get physical. “You careless bastard.”

“I deserve that,” he says quietly. “Where did you get those?”

You scoff. “Does that really matter right now? That’s you, my husband, making out with someone who sure as hell isn’t me, just days before our anniversary. You selfish asshole!”

Your words are biting. He rests his elbows on his desk, his head on his balled up hands. “What can I do to fix this?”

You walk up opposite him, placing your palms solidly on the desk as you loom over him with narrow eyes. “Get rid of her. I don’t care how. I want her gone.”

He groans your name in protest, sinking back into his chair.

Left flabbergasted by his response to your request, you straighten up. He takes you in with slightly wide eyes as you laugh bitterly. “You know what? Never mind.”

Turning on your heels, you make your way to the door before spinning around to face him again. “What are we doing, Yixing? Huh? We both know this sure as hell isn’t a marriage, but we agreed to at least be a partnership! Yet you can’t hold up your end of the bargain, let alone your pants! All you ever care about nowadays is your company and yourself!”

“Come on now, you know that’s not true.” Yixing rises from his chair and walks over to you, but each step he takes forward, you take one back until your back collides with the door. Cornered, Yixing reaches up to cup your shoulders, rubbing them soothingly. “Hey, look at me. I’m sorry, okay? You’re right. We agreed to at least be partners and I’ve failed you. I’ll get rid of Seungwan, all right?”

Hearing her name makes your heart pang. You glare at him. “You promise?”

“Consider it done.”

“There’s also the pictures….”

“We’ll discuss that later. But we have to be stronger than ever at the dinner. Be more of a team.”

“I’ve always been a team player, Yixing, you know that.”

His smile is sad. “All the same.”

Tired of arguing, you merely sigh, resting your head against the cold door while closing your eyes. “Thank you.”

Suddenly, Yixing’s warm breath can be felt against your neck. Eyes springing open to see him leaning closer to kiss you, whether it is your cheek or lips, you aren’t sure, blocking your vision. The thought of him touching you in any way makes bile crawl up your throat, so before he makes contact, you unlock and open the door in one swift motion, sliding out before he can touch you.

~*~

The anniversary dinner is four days later.

The last couple days are nerve racking. Having to make the final details to the party with those haunting pictures hanging over your head has you stressed to the point where you can’t eat. The leading cause of your stress—your husband—has been the polar opposite of you. His nonchalant behavior isn’t reassuring in the slightest, although he promised repeatedly that his mistress, Son Seungwan, had been let go and he had zero contact with her since. You want to believe him, at least the last part, but your trust is completely gone.

Unfortunately, you will have to put a little faith in him tonight. The party will be held at your shared mansion to show your solidarity. You are not just celebrating six years of marriage, but also the birth of your baby—Zhang Studios. Your home will be filled with important people, and their testimonies from tonight will help you once your story breaks out, which will be in a matter of time.

The day of is spent making sure everything is perfect, not a speck of dust is lingering in the air. Yixing is gone most of the day, taking care of some things at work. He trudges in around six, much to your dismay.

Guests start filing in around seven, greeted by the happy couple.

Irene and Seulgi arrive together and rip you away from your husband. You catch him frown as he watches you rush down the hall, he is just as much not a fan of the duo as they are of him.

You pull them into a deserted hallway for some privacy, hugging them briefly in greeting before getting to the point.

“Any updates?” You ask Irene.

“The pictures have been bought and will be released in the next couple days. The article, from what I’ve heard, will make Lay out to be a money hungry sex-crazed monster, painting you as a helpless victim. It’ll be perfect for whatever you decide. You leave him; you’re freeing yourself from a wicked man. Forgive him and you’re a saint.”

You’re pleased with either outcome of the situation, although it means you have only a couple days to decide what you want to do. Lay is Yixing’s celebrity name, the name the world knows him as. It is unlucky Lay is going to be ruined by Yixing’s careless actions.

“Alright. Thank you girls for coming. I need all the support I can get tonight.”

“I would say ‘happy anniversary��,” Seulgi begins. “But I don’t think you’re too happy right now.”

Her comment brings out a smile, albeit small, and she pulls you into a side hug, rubbing your arm comfortingly. “You look sexy as hell though.”

That draws out a genuine laugh.

You soon reunite with Yixing in time to welcome more people.

Once everyone has arrived, you all settle around the dining room table that is big enough to sit all of your close family, employers, and celebrity friends. Yixing and yourself placed at the center of one of the long sides, agreeing that the closer you are the more in love you’d appear. You try to maintain your warm façade, but you can feel it slipping with every conversation you find yourself getting dragged into. You consider yourself quite the actress, you’ve been pretending to be happy in a marriage for years now, yet you don’t know how long you can keep this up, what with Yixing’s hand practically glued to your knee, a hand that has been tainted by the other women he touched—who knows how many he has been with, though you have a feeling Seungwan wasn’t the only one.

You push the thought out of your mind, instead focusing on the food that starts to be brought out from the kitchen. The smell draws out noises of delight from the guests and you’re relieved and proud of the response.

The atmosphere is pleasant as everyone dives in but it only takes a few minutes for everything to crash. Yixing suddenly begins coughing on his wine, startling everyone and gaining their attention. You pat his back in concern as he attempts to clear his throat, teary eyes narrowing on something ahead of himself.

Trepidation drips down the back of your neck as you follow his line of sight, zoning in on a beautiful girl in a soft red gown that hugs her comfortably. Her long wavy ashy brown hair cascades down her back from a low ponytail and her thin burgundy red lips lift smugly as she watches the way Yixing reacts to her presence.

Slowly, you drop your hand from the man beside you, letting it fall limply to your side as you glare at the woman who should not be here.

The nerve.

Yixing catches his bearings, but he can honestly choke for all you care. His shock at seeing his mistress consumes him to the point he doesn’t even register the attention he has garnered to the situation. The silence causes your ears to ring as Son Seungwan struts to the best of her abilities to one of the last empty chairs.

“Sorry I’m late,” she apologizes, not sounding sorry in the slightest.

Trying your hardest to seem unaffected, you toss your napkin on the plate in front of you and lean over to your husband as you rise off your seat to stand. “Lay, a word.”

He follows silently, bowing towards your guests apologetically as he follows you to the closest room to get some privacy. Once inside, you scan it to realize you chose his home office, which is fitting, because you have business to handle.

“What the fuck is she doing here?” You ask as soon as the door shuts, spinning on him.

He sighs, running his fingers roughly through his hair. “I don’t know—”

“I told you to handle this!”

“I did—”

“Does her waltzing in here like she picked out the wallpaper in the dining room look handled, Yixing? Huh?”

“I don’t know why she is here! I didn’t invite her!” Yixing counters, voice rising to match your own.

“Well I sure as shit didn’t invite her!” You run up to him and lower your voice. “I want her out of my house. Now!”

He sighs again. “We can’t do that. Not without causing a scene. She’s obviously bitter about how things ended between us. This is probably payback.”

There’s a brief silence as you put together his words. Finally, you think of something. “If she’s not leaving now, we’ll just have to speed things along.”

His face pinches in confusion. “How?”

“By doing our speech! The one we need once we’re asked for statements. God, must I do all the thinking around here?”

With that, you shove him aside to get to the door, but he quickly blocks it with his body, causing you to nearly collide. His chest heaves as he spreads his arms out, leaving you with no exit.

Cornering you, he uses it to his advantage and in a small voice says, “you have every right to be angry at me. I’m sor—”

“Move,” you order through gritted teeth. A staring battle soon commences, him going all out, giving you those wounded puppy eyes that you’ve always fallen for time and time again. the longer he gazes at you the harder you begin to tremble from emotion. You are so close to breaking, so close to losing your sanity. Not being able to handle it for much longer, you whisper, “please.”

It’s not the response he’s hoping to receive, but he knows that’s all he’s going to get. So, he throws you a small smile before opening the door for you.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you inform, hoping he can’t hear the tears in your voice. “I’ll meet you back there.”

You check him long enough to see him nod and turn down the opposite end of the hall, towards the bathroom. As you reach for the knob, it twists and the door opens on it’s own, revealing the one person you have no intention of interacting with.

Son Seungwan.

She appears just as taken aback as you, but catches herself quickly, throwing you a mocking smile.

“Quite the party you have here.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” you say politely.

“I never said that,” Seungwan clarifies, eyes wandering over the hall. Irritation pricks at you, but you restrain it as best as you can, all things considered. “What I am enjoying though is this home. It is so beautiful. I bet you spent millions on it.”

“Something like that,” you reply.

“Well, I’ll tell you, it’ll look even grander once I start my home renovating.”

“I beg your pardon?” Is this girl crazy?

She finally meets your gaze. “Oh, Lay didn’t tell you?”

“Just get to the point,” you sigh, truly exhausted by everything that’s happened in the past twenty minutes. Crossing your arms over your chest, you wait for her response.

“He promised me a lot of things, you know? Promised to whisk me away, promised that I was the only one in his heart, that he didn’t feel anything towards you anymore and that he was going to divorce you so that he could be with me.”

You raise an eyebrow at her statement. So maybe he liked this one a little more than you were giving him credit for. Unfortunately for her, you know your husband too well.

Leaning in a bit more you look her dead in her eyes. “Take this from somebody who has been with Lay a bit longer. He loves to make promises just so he can break them. That’s how he operates, Dear. He whispered all those sweet nothings in the midst of ecstasy because he had something to gain from it, but all those words were just that—nothing. And, ironically, so are you. But, by all means, keep telling yourself that Lay is in love with you, because if he truly were, he’d be with you now, instead of celebrating his marriage to another woman.”

You can see her eyes gloss over with tears. Your words sting, but she has to know. A feeling of pity hits you as she sniffs and quickly brushs a tear that slipped away. For a brief moment, you see yourself in her, understand exactly what she’s going through.

It vanishes when she snarls. “You’re wrong.”

“And you’re delusional.” You’re quick to snap back, patience gone entirely.

“At least I’m not the only one.”

You crack a smile at that. “Oh, Honey. I am fully aware of the predicament I’m in. I know who Yixing is, and where we stand. But I’ll humor you, say he really did mean all those things.”

You lean in until your noses touch and whisper, “you’ll have to pry all of those things from my cold dead hands.”

You storm off, back to the dining room, joining a visibly uncomfortable Yixing. The relief is evident as you sit beside him

#lay scenarios #lay scenario #lay #exo #exo scenarios #exo scenario #lay oneshots #lay oneshot #exo oneshots #exo oneshot #lay fanfic #lay fanfics #exo fanfic #exo fanfics #lay drabbles #lay drabble #exo drabbles #exo drabble

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welcometomy20s · 4 years ago

Text

February 7, 2021

This is Part two of the introduction of Nijisanji. I have written for an audience who has just gotten to know vtubers through hololive and wants to explore more. This part cover all of Nijisanji members who has debuted in the year 2019.

2019 Part 1 (Jan-Apr)

Warabeda Meiji - Another eleven year old, but likes FF14 and K-On! So frequently described as an 11 year old third season. But she is genuinely cute! And a really good singer, so much so that her K-On cover gets banned for being too close!

Gundou Mirei - Actually a teacher, but definitely a ditzy and lazy one, that is incredibly sexual to an uncomfortable degree, you know, a fan favorite, including of mine. Watch her 3D streams and you will be amazed. Has a ship with Shoichi as mentioned before, even though she’s a self-professed bisexual. It’s odd but, you know, it works!

Yuzuki Roa - Kind of innocent devil like Towa, but more like a kid than an older sister. Really like Belmond. Was friends with Chitose, a retired member, and got a costume based on her a bit, and maybe is retiring herself, considering she hasn't uploaded for quite a few months now. Well, whatever. She’s cute and innocent.

Onomachi Haruka - Another of the rare, truly seiso people in the team, but can go wild if the vibe goes that way. Lost and found a llama in minecraft once.

Seto Miyako - Kind of a quiet girl who might be psychopathic... you know the type. Her true tendencies pop up during gaming. Also tweets a lot... make sense.

Kataribe Tsumugu - Basically retired, but her concept was so shocking that it took Naruse Naru’s return of old design to push her into the bottom of the list.

Otogibara Era - She’s a Cinderella if she has gone completely out the window. People routinely separate the original Cinderella side as Era, and her true side as Gibara.

God, how do I describe her. Gibara is just great. Her adult comments are something to behold, let’s say she gels with Tamaki very well. She returns to monke often, and does other types of screams too... seriously look at her gacha stream and witness Gibara in her full glory. Also incredibly lazy and definitely cannot live by herself.

But as you have guessed it, she is an incredible singer. (It might be the case that incredible singing is associated with madness) Had knockout hit with her 3D stream, trending number one on twitter and 30,000 US dollars in superchats!

Lize Helesta - Queen of Shizuoka, I mean Heleste kingdom. Usually behaves like an empress, but as with most royalty has a real competitive spirit, so she knows how to badmouth when she needs to. So, she’s a really stingy person as well... not really fitting for a royalty, but you do know some people that act like that.

She’s a strange person. Look at asphalt or a handstand in order to sleep. Friends with Ange, who was a childhood friend, even with an age difference. Also does radio stuff with Lulu as well. Reveres Mito, wonder why. Again, incredible 3D debut.

Ange Katrina - Nice low-middle voice with a smooth upper body, and surprisingly small but that got fixed as 3D started. Think she’s cute, but blushes when people agree. Just a cool gal who I enjoy very much... her streams, I mean.

Inui Toko - She’s a cerberus, and now works at a cafe. A little bit out there, but definitely a tsukkomi. Usually does little gaming outside Minecraft, so mostly talks and sings. A unique laugh and loves Ensemble Stars. Hangs out with red and blue people, like Lize, Ange, Roa, Ayame, Suisei and so on. Actually is boing boing, Ange felt betrayed.

And as mentioned above, a great singer, and can play many instruments as well!

Saegusa Akina - High tension singer, who is quite sickly and is terrible with girls. But he got better as time went on and the ship with his gen mate Manami started to sail. Actually he hangs around with many girls... maybe it’s just Manami?

Arizona Manami - Ito Life’s daughter... so you know what she looks like. Calls herself the queen of sensitivity, and yes she does very suggestive streams... but she’s pretty innocent and childish... so she’s kind of like Melody in a way. Has a very fond-looking relationship with Akina as mentioned above.

Suzuhara Lulu - Just your typical art student. She’s a rich girl, so she knows very little about the outside world. Definitely has stamina of a thousand horses, famously played 11 hours of Dark Souls, then straight onto 10 hours of Ring Fit, and never got phased. Seriously, she never gets phased. She rode the freaking snake without a problem! Apparently really beautiful in real life, really has large expressions.

There’s a rumor going around that she’s actually some kind of an eldritch god... and I don’t know where that comes from at all. Look at her, she’s such a sweet gal, look at her dancing and singing... she’s a true idol, that’s what she is... (don’t hurt me.)

Yukishiro Mahiro - First-year high-schooler. Good variety of content. Her personality is of a rude kouhai. One viewer described her as a bad-tempered chihuahua. Really likes Kanae, which is okay, I guess. There’s not much more than that.

2019 Part 2 (May-Aug)

Ex Albio - A hero from a different world. Originally portrayed as a rude snarky figure, much like Kazuma without charm or luck but with perseverance. Got his fame through his noob Minecraft experience, as with Minecraft servers, they are ripe with collab opportunities, so he started to collab especially with Ars Almal, which he thinks as a mentor... and so they both talk in high register. Eventually became a couple.

Has a thing where he questions something and immediately denies it, which is quite funny. Eventually got a dark alter version due to the imagination tournament I talked about earlier, which brings the fact that he can’t fight until tragedy occurs.

Levi Elipha - Actually only six years old, and apparently dense, like physically dense. Great singer and good physique, does some English songs as well.

Nui Sociere - A 25-year old witch, but more like a NEET with an addiction to horse racing. Very much like Megumi in terms of magic abilities, but capable of melee.

Kind of sounds like Doraemon when she screams... usually plays JRPG... and well, just look at her. Damn... well, least you have something to look forward to.

Hayama Marin - Hayame is Hayame. She’s just a little kid with a pure mind. Yeah.

Hayato Kagami - CEO of a toy company, so called that. Polite and diligent, but like a CEO of a toy company, completely becomes a boy when getting a bit excited.

Actually is a great singer, maybe a trained singer as well. As a good example of rich getting richer, fans have a tendency to throw red superchat, a typical stream might hit 10K USD, even though there’s nothing particular going on.

Yorumi Rena - Idol magician, but no actual proof of her magic abilities. Plays APEX a lot. Very much an outgoing person with lots of collab from everyone. Hakase calls her mama. Sleep promptly at midnight, except when ARK was involved.

Also makes 8-bit art proficiently, does all her loading screen. A bit of a lewd mind.

Hakase Fuyuki - HIgh school girl who likes to experiment, but it’s obvious none of it ever works. Tries to ship Yorumi and Kagami, and calls him papa. Just absolutely in her own world and everyone is just privy to it... also incredibly bad at gaming.

Mayuzumi Kai - A white hacker. Very cool, but has a thing for comedy, almost to the level of Joe Riikichi, but laughs very little himself. Make sense, since he lost his parents at an early age and lived in the system, therefore is a night streamer. Very good with kids as a result, and very kind and polite as well.

Ars Almal - A mage who specializes in lightning. Started out by apologizing, gets bullied for her round face, usually by Shiina. Cute voice with toxic words with a knack for pranks and taunts. Actually is quite boing boing. Good at Minecraft construction, but get rough and dirty under the wheel, as in Mario Kart. Became a kitsune, and then immediately got compared to Fubuki... much like Fubuki in a sense.

Aiba Uiha - Another idol who is a bit out there, has a tendency to be clingy. Also has a large physique... kind of a denatured Lulu is what I’m getting at. Sisters with Ara Chae, incredibly bad eyesight, apparently. I can see that, actually.

Eli Conifer - A flower fairy and maid with a unique phrasing. Likes to immerse herself in games, very knowledgeable, especially with teas, and also handy at housework, and superb at drawing and singing. Ryushen and Rion think she’s a badass, and they might not be entirely wrong on that aspect, actually.

Kokoro Amaiya - Dragonborn, I think. But there’s no dragon anymore. Has that mumble-speak that people really don’t like. She’s very much kid-like in a sense, uh, so get put into the loli category much like her fellow peer. Incredibly weak.

Ratna Petit - Adventurer with an independent streak. Does games and ASMR, tries to be grown up during collabs, but retreats into a kid in solo streams. Got the infamous random deletion of the account that Kiara famously got.

Nijisanji ID Gen 1

Taka Radjiman - Another CEO, this time a food CEO. Usually streams games, but much like other CEOs here, a pretty good singer as well. Obviously a good cook as well.

ZEA Cornelia - She’s an automata. ZEA is short for Z-type Executive Automation. Likes to sing, and sung many songs including La Vien en Rose by IZONE! I really like her, her streams are bit odd and ZEA can carry a stream like no another.

Hana Macchia - A design student, much like Lulu. Likes drawing as you expect, also like gaming as well. Does some barista stuff as well, a kind of the ambassador of Nijisanji ID, since her father is American and her mother is Japanese, and she lives in Indonesia.

Papa Macchia appears on stream from time to time, and apparently was the progenitor of Hana’s gaming prestige as he played Doom and Half-Life. She’s on the cute side of things, but blushes when she gets called that. Also cries in horror, but screams in excitement... just overall a well-rounded in strangeness. I really like her.

2019 Part 3 (Sep-Dec)

Sukoya Kana - Incredibly smart, but also has an otaku and perverted side. Likes acting, as you might have guessed and bad at housework. Has a quiet voice, but gets savage when a game is involved. Pretty good at english as well. Does a radio show as well.

Oh, yeah, likes to throw up. It’s a thing. Also plays drums. She’s pretty cool.

Shellin Burgundy - Before Kanata did her PPT intro, Shellin was the first one. Professes himself to be a detective, but little lightheaded for that. Good narration voice, though, which means he’s a good singer as well. I kind of like him. He’s good.

Hayase Sou - An outdoorsy girl who likes cosplay and road biking. Kind of talks like she’s middle age, but she acts pretty young. And of course she likes shotas.

Fumi - It took over a year for her to debut. She’s a hikikomori gundam otaku and a goddess. A bit airheaded and pretty bad at gaming, and since she is 67, gets called grandma infrequently. She’s fun to watch. Has a ship with Nagao.

Hoshikawa Sara - Half Japanese and half English. Definitely a cool and tough, ready to take whatever sex jokes and insults you throw at her. Hangs out with Mahiro a lot, or with male members like Yumeoi, Ebio, Shellion or Kanda. Has a wide voice range, with a wide personality as well. There’s a sense of healing to her, honestly.

Obviously gets fangirled by many, including Matsuri, whose frequently red superchats her much to her confusion and relative embarrassment.

Yamagami Karuta - She’s a tengou in training, since she is filled with desires, mostly to connect with people. This is real, apparently. Has a ship with a staff member...

Matsukai Mao - Smartest devil... no, she’s an airhead like the rest of them. Apparently she can spit out crude oil... which is pretty useless. Definitely an unlucky, miserable person who needs to be protected at all times, and she relishes that like the devil she is.

Hangs around with Luis a lot in real life, apparently. Also plays APEX and stuff.

Emma August - Demon Lord that was thrown in an uprising, living with Morinaka Kazaki, and got a new house in February of last year. An alcoholic and a masochist, who gets berated by Kazaki of all people. Definitely not a loli, that’s for sure.

Luis Cammy - An expert thief, which excites Shellin very much. Seen as the leader of the gen, but found out to be much of a kid as the gen mates, especially around Shellin. They are a couple now, apparently. Oh yeah, she did an Outlast stream with a cat outfit and invited Shellin because she was scared? Now there's a loli version of her... yikes.

Fuwa Minato - A host, but a teetotaler, because of health problems... yet drinks Monster energy like it’s no business. A bit out there, as Nijisanji people are. A bit of a trickster, a bad boy if you will... right there with being good at games as well. He’s pretty cool.

Shirayuki Tomoe - When I first saw her, she felt like one of those people in mahjong tournaments. Well, she’s a queen of the night, so night-time streamer, although she has daytime streams as well. Strong drinker. Talks about SM, but also effortlessly friendly and a lovely person. I think she’s attractive, but I can see why people call her cute. She hates bugs, loves cute things, odd thoughts... feels like an aunt to me.

Very bad at reading kanji, not that she’s good at anything else. Likes to practice, hence preserved her way in the Mario Kart tournament. Does talk and ASMR streams with a third of her viewers being women. Likes Mirei, makes sense. Oh, she’s a nudist.

And don’t forget the relationship between Kana and her. Purported to be the most real of the ships of any vtubers. I believe it’s called Crossick. I don’t know too much.

Gwelu Os Gar - Presenter for the elf kingdom, hired as a presenter, since Nijisanji got so big and there’s only so many Kakeru around. Unfortunately seen as boring, and transitioned into kind of a Maimoto character.

Already married, I don’t know why that’s significant but there you go. Oh, and an actual dad! That is pretty significant. Although Setsuna also has a child, and had to retire to take care of the little baby. Teaches math to others, so that’s cool.

Mashiro - Recent high school graduate. He’s a boy. Yes, he has heels and boobs, but he’s a boy. And yes, he is a bit out there, stealing candies from the office.

Naraka - Another oni, and a loli-baba. Obviously a fan of the fellow oni, Mikoto... which has a queen kid relationship. And yes, her chest is smaller than Mashiro... sad.

Kurusu Natsume - 19-year old college student who likes music and sheep. Very smart and very normal. Has an ASMR test stream, which was pretty fun.

Nijisanji ID 2nd Gen

Rai Galliel - An interdimensional policeman. Likes cheese, but hate porridge due to only eating one for four months. Likes baking, pretty cool personality, if a bit straight edge.

Amicia Michella - A freelance illustrator, so the drawing is superb. Like sleep but also sports. Also penguins. Likes to play horror games pretty calmly. Raises two dogs, well one of them passed away late last year. Sang a 10cm cover?

Miyu Ottavia - A business student, and likes otters and is optimistic. Mostly plays RPG and online multiplayers. Tries to be cool, but look at her! She’s very cute.

Riksa Dhirendra - A 24-year-old freelancer and works as an editor and translator. Looks mean, but is actually a very decent gut. He is pretty competitive. Plays RPG.

#nijisanji #vtuber #long post

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so-shiny-so-chrome · 6 years ago

Text

Witness: Sacrificethemtothesquid

Creator name (AO3): sacrificethemtothesquid

Creator name (Tumblr): sacrificethemtothesquid

Link to creator works: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/works

Q: Why the Mad Max Fandom?

A: It's hard to put it into words. I went into the movie anticipating car chases and explosions and came out enraptured. Max and Furiosa's dynamic was incendiary and I couldn't leave it alone.

Q: What do you think are some defining aspects of your work? Do you have a style? Recurrent themes?

A: My style is long. Too long.

Q: Which of your works was the most fun to create? The most difficult? Which is your most popular? Most successful? Your favourite overall?

A: Length & Breadth was the big project, and it's been a huge journey to see it finished. It wins for most difficult because I had no idea what I was doing or if I could even finish something, and it blows my mind that it resonated with people. My favorite has always been Seven Thousand And One. It hit me so hard and it was so intense to write. It was done in a day and when I came out of it, I was staggering.

Q: How do you like your wasteland? Gritty? Hopeful? Campy? Soft? Why?I

A: am a firm believer that gritty and soft or gritty and hopeful aren't mutually exclusive. I like sinking my teeth into the ugliness of the world. I wrote enough awful grimdark edgelord dreck when I was growing up depressed and it seemed like there was no end in sight. I like that I've learned there's always an up somewhere, even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment. Also I like to break people and put them back together. The harder the breaking, the bigger the healing.

Q: Walk us through your creative process from idea to finished product. What's your prefered environment for creating? How do you get through rough patches?

A: I write down just about every idea I have. Usually they'll come as blips and scenes that I build around later. I find that I write best when I'm supposed to be doing anything else, and the more important the anything else, the easier it is to write. When I hit a rough patch, I step back and let it sit, or jump into another section that feels easier. For me, hitting a rough patch usually means I'm grinding at something that isn't necessary. @thebyrchentwigges gave me some of the best advice I've ever gotten, and that was to start in the middle of the action. It's okay to set the scene, but I can write 10k of buildup without blinking, so dropping myself right into the meat usually cuts away parts that weren't necessary in the first place.

Q: What (if any) music do you listen to for help getting those creative juices flowing?

A: I'll come across one song that hits just right and then I'll listen to that on repeat until it loses its power. I guess it's like a kind of meditation? There's no set process to finding The Song, but the Discover Weekly algorithm on Spotify usually delivers. I've got playlists saved for each story.

Q: What is your biggest challenge as a creator?

A: Length and making less of it. I'm working on being concise. It isn't going well.

Q: How have you grown as a creator through your participation in the Mad Max Fandom? How has your work changed? Have you learned anything about yourself?

A: I had bits and blobs for other fandoms that never really got posted, but I never really committed to anything until people started showing up for L&B. "Thank you" feels absolutely grossly inadequate, so I keep writing things hoping people understand their presence means the world to me. I feel like a toddler presenting macaroni art - I made it because I have no idea how to express how much I love you.

Q: Which character do you relate to the most, and how does that affect your approach to that character? Is someone else your favourite to portray? How has your understanding of these characters grown through portraying them?

A: Furiosa. She's so powerful. I don't think I'd ever seen a woman be so angry and raw, and it was like looking into the sun.

Q: Do you ever self-insert, even accidentally?

A: I think it would be hard for me to write if I didn't.

Q: Do you have any favourite relationships to portray? What interests you about them?

A: As brutally called out by @fuckyeahisawthat: "Dude rolling around in grief and self-loathing, hopelessly besotted with a hypercompetent killer woman".

Q: How does your work for the fandom change how you look at the source material?

A: It forces me to dig deep into canon, which always leads to interesting places. Having that level of familiarity and knowing how much work and worldbuilding it involves makes source richer. The thing I love about George Miller is that I KNOW he's done an insane level of worldbuilding; the problem is that he doesn't SHARE the details of it, so I have to go spend thirty hours becoming an expert in oil cracking just to call something "guzzoline". I like knowing the other 70% of the iceberg, and I think overthinking.

Q: Do you prefer to create in one defined chronology or do your works stand alone? Why or why not?

A: I'm such a global thinker that even if I do manage a one-shot, it can't exist in a vacuum. If I have more than one fic in a fandom, it's going to adhere to an established timeline because otherwise, there'd be nowhere for the plot to go.

Q: To break or not to break canon? Why?

A: Canon is canon is canon. I need to have my work fit seamlessly into the source material and the more solid the canon, the greater the challenge to adhere. For me, it's actually easier writing within a more solid and comprehensive canon, since it helps set the parameters for the story and lets me focus on the emotions.

Q: Share some headcanons.

A: Valkyrie lives.

Q: If you work with OCs walk us through your process for creating them. Who are some of your favourites?

A: Because I keep religiously close to canon, I tend to avoid OCs. That being said, if the story requires them - my Repair Boys, for instance - I try to make them as canon as possible. I look at the existing characters - the ones on-screen for half a frame, the ones mentioned in the production notes, etc etc - and build from that. I'm pretty fond of Keno. I couldn't give my Capable the arc she deserved without him. In my original work, I walk them around in my head and do vignettes from their point of view. What are their influences, what are their weaknesses, if they a choice of things, what they would choose. They're people - think of your best friend or your partner or that weird guy on the bus - and get to know them that way.

Q: If you create original works, how do those compare to your fan works?

A: Strict adherence to canon. I'm always worldbuilding in my head for something. Nothing about being alive exists in a vacuum, and I'm fascinated by paths of influence. It's an endless game of "why?" and "and then what?"

Q: Who are some works by other creators inside and outside of the fandom that have influenced your work?

A: All creators have their own unique take and for me, the variety is what gets me excited. One of the best parts about fandom is that someone else will always bring up something you'd never think of on your own. The MMFR fandom is incredible because there's so much talent. I haven't come across a single piece of work that left me underwhelmed. As a reader and content consumer, it's spoiled me completely, and as a writer, it's set the bar very, very high. It's been a huge honor to be part of this community.

Q: What advice can you give someone who is struggling to make their own works more interesting, compelling, cohesive, etc.?

A: Don't assume you have to write everything in one unbroken line. If you've got ideas for a scene, write that first. Connecting scenes later might still be a drag, but you'll have a better idea of what that connection should look like. I like thinking of my work as a quilt: I know the general pattern and what each square looks like, but once the squares are done they'll need shuffling.

Q: Have you visited or do you plan to visit Australia, Wasteland Weekend, or other Mad Max place?

A: We went to WW16 and WW17. It was so powerful to put faces to names and have actual meatspace time with people I'd come to love online.

Q: Tell us about a current WIP or planned project

A: Fandom-wise, I'm doddering along with an amorphous thing for Dragon Age Inquisition. My main focus (read: the thing I'm procrastinating on) is an original work. It started out being about wizards and now I think it's a murder mystery. It doesn't really know what it is, so neither do I.

Thank you @sacrificethemtothesquid

#Mad Max Fandom Creator Spotlight #Mad Max Fandom Spotlight #mad max fanfic author spotlight #mad max fanfic #mad max fandom #fury road fanfic #fury road fandom #sacrificethemtothesquid

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ivyhanlon-blog · 6 years ago

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Is that ELIZABETH OLSEN walking down Old Town Front Street? Nah, IVY HANLON just looks like their identical twin! The THIRTY YEAR OLD AQUARIUS has been a NATIVE for THIRTY YEARS. On their good days, IVY is ARTISTIC AND ACCEPTING, but if you catch them on a bad day, they may be HYPERVIGILANT AND FLIPPANT. Keep your eyes on this MUSICAL BUDTENDER/DRUGDEALER. Wonder what they’ve been up to lately in Sunnymead!

PINTEREST [ x ]

CHARACTER INFLUENCES: Meredith Grey ( Grey’s Anatomy ), Phoebe Buffay ( FRIENDS ), Liv Moore ( iZombie ), Fiona Gallagher ( Shameless ), Marissa Cooper ( The OC ), Lorelai Gilmore ( Gilmore Girls )

Ivy grew up privileged and lucky, besides the fact that she was white, she was also upper middle class. Her father is an architect, her mother a pediatrician running a relatively successful practice with the other pediatricians/family doctors in Sunnymead. She grew up going into Mammoth & other ski resorts closer to Sunnymead , having a ski pass and premium benefits. Her parents loved each other, she had a few younger siblings who came after her – they all wanted for nothing. Everything they wanted, they got. While this would’ve made some people bratty and even stuck up, Ivy was always so appreciative and in awe of it all. She was born with a wonder for the world, a curiosity for it and a love for the nature she grew up in. It was no surprise when she got into the arts.

At first it was all painting, dancing, and ice skating but the minute she got her hands on a piano – it was her calling. Ivy first love was the piano and the music of Chopin ( Tchaikovsky came next ), she quickly practiced, practiced and practiced. Their large home in the mountains was filled with Ivy’s mistakes & music. She was getting good, it was easy to see, and even easier to nurture. Her father especially sat with her, helping her work out the kinks in her technique or tips to get through a piece that was particularly difficult. He always cheered her on. They had dreams of Julliard, they had dreams that Ivy was more than determined to fufill.

In Highschool, she was known as an artsy kid, outgoing and fun, a little out there sometimes. Ivy came out to her school and parents as bisexual and growing up in a progressive household, she was accepted. Ivy refused to be ashamed of who she was and what she loved, she loved and loved and gave and gave. Friends who didn’t have money would be paid for, people who didn’t have lift passes or couldn’t afford meals, would always be fed and taken care of. Ivy still had that laser focus for school and for her music, because all that mattered after it was Julliard. Was becoming a pianist. Was doing what she loved and learning how to do it better.

( illness tw ) Her mother started getting sick when she was 16. At first, it was little things, like her memory fading, her sleeping in – something she never did, especially on weekdays when she had work. Then came the pain, hours she would hear her mother sob, she would sit at the foot of her parents bed. Sleep next to her but not cuddle her out of the fear of her mother causing her mother more pain. Ivy missed her second round of Julliard auditions in New York to be by her mother while she screamed, as doctors struggled to find what was wrong with her. As her mother couldn’t work, they drained through their savings looking for treatments and trying them, her father missed work being there for her mother, as well losing income.

They assured her, she could still go to school. She could still go to music school. While Ivy got into several prestigious music schools, including the Berklee College of Music and the Jacobs School of Music at the University of Indiana – she decided to stay in state. Even though her ambition was great, even though her music was everything – her family was always more important. She had to make sure her siblings were taken care of and pick up the slack her father seemed to be letting go. Still, her parents, her father, assured her it was just a rough patch. That they’d get her treatment, that they’d land on their feet okay. That money wouldn’t be an issue, that they’d take care of each other.

( gender dysphoria mention ) Ivy believed it, why wouldn’t she? Her family had been there for each other for the past two years, it had been more than hard, but they had made it. Off to college she went. College was an amazing time for her, while she wished to be at one of the better music schools, again Ivy was happy with what she had. It was in college she learned more about herself, her gender, how it all came together and clicked. While Ivy had always had body image issues, they never were the same as her friends who were girls talked about – at least not all of them. Nonbinary, femme, the words rolled off her tongue and felt right, and she fit in the definitions as well much better than she ever had when she had labeled herself a woman. Ivy started to shape the sort of person she was, and it felt amazing, she felt that maybe it was a blessing in disguise not going to music school as maybe she wouldn’t have found what she did in San Francisco At the same time, she always wondered what if. Still, being at school was wonderful, around other trans & non-binary people, around people who knew more than her & could educate her out of her bubble. The world felt infinite, she didn’t feel as tied to California & Sunnymead anymore, and thought maybe when her mother got better, when they found proper treatment for her – she could reapply to music school and go then.

It’s why when her father left her mother, sick & disabled, during her junior year of college that Ivy’s world fell apart. Everything she knew about her family – gone. Ivy went into action immediately, letting her anger & sadness be turned into fuel. Ivy adapted to her circumstances, taking on the role of caretaker for her mother and her siblings. It was by the grace of generous friends, selling their beautiful home, and Ivy taking a job as a pianist at Snowfall, dropping out of college, that they weren’t left homeless and hungry. She didn’t give herself time to grieve, she didn’t give herself time to cry. Ivy learned about her mothers condition, learned about CRPS, learned her mothers medical history back and front. Learned how to deal with insurance companies. Learned how to go to parent teacher conferences and go to her sibling’s IEP meetings. Ivy got guardianship of her underage siblings just to help her mother out, who had become bedridden due to the pain.

Deep down, Ivy was crestfallen, angry, in disbelief, angry again. How could her father do this? Just leave? Her may have sent child support, but there was no contact. He left them ALL. All because her mother’s illness became too much for him. As the bills started to pile up as the family wasn’t as good at downsizing as they needed to be ( Ivy included, sometimes ) and Ivy didn’t have the heart to tell them half of the time, she got another job as a Budtender in the best ( and only ) Dispensary in Sunnymead. The job was perfect for a variety of reasons – despite the good pay and tips, it would allow her access to cannabis that helped ease her mothers pain at a discounted price. Before the interview she had prepared, thoroughly, everything depended on it and when she got in she almost cried. It was then, at 22, her love for cannabis wasn’t just recreational but a true appreciation. She watched as her job helped get her mom medication that seemed to be the only thing that actually eased some of the consuming pain. That was everything.

Her mother always pushed her to continue pursuing piano, and while they had sold almost everything else valuable to rake in money for the family – the one thing Ivy kept for herself was her piano. The beautiful black Steinway they could barely fit into their now single family home, Ivy will play for her mother to lull her to sleep when she asks. Her relationship with the piano is complicated now as it sometimes reminds her of her father, but she wants nothing more to reclaim it for herself. Ivy immerses herself in other arts as well, oil painting being one of her favorite mediums when she can get her hands on it.

( drugs tw ) Something Ivy did to generate more income as her siblings need money for college is drug deal. While Ivy has a kind, generous heart, she does what she has to do and tries to scam richer families & people passing through from out of town, by selling them weed at an extremely high price. She scams them, shamelessly, and sometimes also sells LSD, Adderall, and/or cocaine. If her work knew she was doing this, she’d get fired, but at this point Ivy needs to do it as her work hours sometimes still don’t pay all of the bills.

Ivy may come off as childish, sometimes too impulsive or even wild, but truly she picks and chooses her moments to be this way. They’re limited and while she can be a kindred soul, Ivy in other elements away from people her age is a completely different person. At least, it’s a different facet of her personality. She’s still generous, she’s still kind, but she’s also rather blunt but private about her own issues. She’ll be honest about some things, but other things, she keeps to herself. Ivy comes off rather composed though excited about life, intrigued about the people around, and she is because reality hits her way too often. Seeming carefree and having a very hippie like mentality about some things as well as being vocal about her support for cannabis, gender expression & sexuality but Ivy doesn’t let herself lose herself completely in anything like she used to. She missed her old life, nostalgia often being an emotion that keeps her up at night, because she misses being able to actually breathe and take in everything around her without worrying about the next thing that’ll happen. A human who wants to desperately live in the moment, like she used to, who constantly feels anchored to Sunnymead. It’s a feeling that she’s trying to come to terms with because she knows she’ll have to endure it until her mother has either passed away or gotten a proper caretaker. Some days she still feels like wasted potential and on those days, she does anything she can to distract from her own mind. The question of what if is always hanging on her tongue, but she does her best to just find beauty & comfort in the now. In her surroundings and the people around her.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

Ride or die best friends!!!! THey’ve been best friends they’re whole lives and they’re basically family at this point!!

Coworkers!!!!

Hookups/Friends with Benefits

Other LGBTQ people in town wanna link up for a JAM SESH Or just smoke Sesh!!

Other musicians!!

Enemies since Day one. They see each other and it’s ON SIGHT they’re ready to RUMBLE

People she sells drugs to!!

People who know her family/knew her dad

Hiking / roadtripping buddies

Ivy’s always down to babysit so she could babysit your characters kids or cousins or something!!

EXES!!!

someone give me a brotp THANKS idc what it is

#i tried.jpeg #ivy lowkey killed me for using 'musical' as a adjective for her FWJIWFEJI #sunnymeadintro

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malakjewelersnc · 2 years ago

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Everything You Need To Know About Chocolate Diamond Engagement Rings

Jewelry Store in Charlotte

If you are someone that is into unique diamonds and diamond engagement rings, chocolate diamonds will have you hooked!

Chocolate diamonds have gained a lot of popularity however even today a lot of people are unaware that such a diamond exists.

An amalgamation of two of the finer things in life- chocolate and diamonds, this vibrant stone is a treat to both the wearer and the spectator.

What Are Chocolate Diamonds?

A Chocolate diamond is a high-quality, fancy-colored diamond that gets its name from its bewitching color and aura. The hue of this diamond comes from the pressure applied, during the formation process.

Even when the color of brown and chocolate diamond is strikingly identical, Jewelry stores in Charlotte NC and other famous jewelry stores around the world classify them as two different variants of a diamond.

Only when brown diamonds have a certain hue, tone, and saturation to quality, they can be classified as chocolate diamonds.

Le Vian Jewelers are the flagbearer of chocolate diamonds in the diamond industry. Where the rest of the world was dealing in brown diamonds they introduced chocolate diamonds as a new category.

Historical Front:

You will be amazed to know that chocolate diamonds are not only named so due to their color but due to the actual influence of chocolate. Le Vian elucidates that one of his close friends Bill Furman used to bring him a batch of chocolates every day after work. His passion for chocolate and the enthusiasm with which he ran his business inspired Le Vian to name his diamond after chocolate, the brownstone that was as luscious and as scrumptious looking as the sweet treat that chocolates are.

Chocolate Diamonds Vs White Diamonds

Chocolate diamonds are among the highest quality brown diamonds whereas white diamonds are associated with natural colored diamonds. Both being highly durable still has certain values that set the two apart.

Chocolate diamonds are naturally more opaque than regular white diamonds and therefore, they are not shiny enough.

Since chocolate diamonds are rarer than white diamonds they are more popular among women today. Jewelers in Charlotte NC are widely acclaimed for their white diamonds, but since the popularity of chocolate diamonds, a lot of brides have accepted the darker version of the age-old diamonds.

Pros & Cons Of Chocolate Diamonds

One of the biggest perks that come with chocolate diamonds is their color, which instantly adds to the uniqueness of your ring. If white diamonds are not your choice of stone, you can opt for chocolate diamonds instead.

Not only rare, but they are also rationally priced. So, if you want a diamond that is both unique and cost-effective chocolate diamonds are for you.

Moreover, they beautifully complement different metals, which is yet another advantage of buying these diamonds.

Choosing a Chocolate Diamond Engagement Ring:

Where To Buy Chocolate Diamonds From?

Chocolate diamonds are exclusive to the brand Le Vian which means you won’t be able to find them at any store except for the ones that deal in Le Vian diamonds.

Are Chocolate Diamonds Available In Different Shades?

Brown diamonds are available in a few different shades, ranging from darker brown to a slightly golden and richer tone. The variety enables you to choose the best ring for yourself after looking up a huge variety of brown diamond rings.

Does Le Vian have exclusive rights to brown diamonds?

Chocolate diamonds are a variety of brown diamonds which are exclusive to Le Vian but brown diamonds are not. They are easily available at any jewelry store. Charlotte Jewelry stores are one of the most well-known jewelry stores in terms of colored diamonds, and their brown diamond jewelry collection is one-of-a-kind.

Caring For Chocolate Diamond Rings:

Chocolate diamonds need similar care as any white diamond would. Weekly alcohol rubs are a great way to keep your diamonds in good shape. Also, avoid wearing it while doing manual work to retain its finish for long periods of time. Chocolate diamonds are the sub-variation of brown diamonds that are widely in demand. If you are looking for an engagement ring to propose to your woman this year, Malak Jewelers has one of the best collections for you. Steer through their unique collection of diamond rings to find the one that resonates with her idea of a dream ring

Credit:-

Source: https://malakjewelersnc.blogspot.com

#Jewelry stores in Charlotte NC #Charlotte Jewelry stores #Jewelers in Charlotte NC #Engagement Rings Charlotte NC

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deepestpoliceeagle · 4 years ago

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Best Free Game For Mac

There are many free iPhone and iPad games available for a free download, choosing free Mac games can be a daunting task. To make your task easy listed below are some of the best free Mac games which you can download right now. Games like Team Fortress 2, Shadow Fight 2 and Touchgrind can be played on your Mac for hours without paying a dime. The next best game for macOS on the list is Fortnite Battle Royale. This popular battle royale game is played by more than 78.3 million players every month. Unlike the above-mentioned games, Fortnite Battle Royale is completely free to play. Mac App Store is the simplest way to find and download apps for your Mac. To download apps from the Mac App Store, you need a Mac with OS X 10.6.6 or later. Reviews have shown Civilization V to be one of the best Steam games for Mac for years, and Civilization VI should become available soon. Better enjoyed on intermediate to powerful machines. Starcraft II is one of the best free games for Mac, which lets you command one of three space-faring armies and battle them against each other for victory. Action Games for Mac – TOP 5 – This is our first classification of Mac games in a top. The Mac Action Games category has cumulated 146 titles. Because of this we have decided that action games must open this series of Tops. We rank games based on the number of downloads. Therefore, all we need to do is to organise the leaderboards.

Best Free Games For Macbook Pro

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Since the early days of Apple, Macs have not been known for their video game support. While Apple was focusing on their beautiful operating system and tightly controlled experience, Windows was branching out into an open platform that gave rise to highly innovative video games.

However, over the past few decades, the gap between platforms has been reduced significantly. Apple today has an impressive library of good games for Mac, thanks to a more popular hardware platform, and even released its own subscription model for gaming — Apple Arcade.

Gaming tools in one package

Nothing can hamper your game if you have Setapp installed on Mac. Pick the apps to optimize Mac’s performance and play uninterrupted.

So now that gaming on Macs is both viable and compelling, what are some of the best Mac games in 2020?

The Story Of Gaming On Macs

The main reason that Windows PCs enjoyed a greater selection of games than Apple is simply due to hardware. Apple has always produced their own proprietary hardware and software, which has allowed it to maintain a higher degree of control over how its systems physically look while ensuring its design standards are upheld for a consistent experience.

Contrarily, Microsoft made its Windows operating system open to run on a wider selection of hardware. For example, Dell could assemble its own hardware and then licence the Microsoft operating system accordingly. By opening up to more flexible hardware, Windows PCs were able to take advantage of the latest graphics and CPU innovations upon release — something critical in the early days of video game development. More importantly, Windows had a greater user base, which simply meant it was a more attractive business opportunity to develop games for the PC over Mac.

That was until Apple Macs started to borrow from some of the same open hardware architecture as PCs. Suddenly, video games made for PC could be easily ported to the Mac platform, which was becoming capable of running games smoothly due to newer, more powerful hardware.

That said, your hardware specifications are still an important consideration when looking for the best games on Mac.

The best hardware for Mac games

Generally speaking, video games fall into three broad categories — indie games (casual, made by one or a few people), e-sport games (competitive games which are usually fairly accessible to run), and blockbuster games (often requiring powerful hardware to run smoothly).

Almost any modern Apple Mac, including MacBooks, made in the past 5–10 years can run indie games without hassle. However, e-sport and blockbuster games may require you to pay more attention to the Mac’s specifications before attempting to run them.

When deciding if your Mac is going to perform well for gaming, consider some of the following:

Ensure your Mac has a dedicated graphics card (GPU). Many Macs, and especially MacBooks, use onboard graphics chips, which are built into the CPU unit. While efficient, these are usually not powerful enough to run really taxing games.

Aim for at a quad-core CPU, as many modern games take advantage of the extra cores over older units

Demanding games will usually call for a minimum of 8 GB of system RAM, but if you’re a multi-tasker or creator you might want 16 GB instead

Ensure you have enough hard disk space, as newer titles can take up a lot of storage. If you plan to have multiple games installed at once, you’ll want at least 256 GB of fast storage, preferably SSD over HDD.

Now that you know what kind of hardware is best for gaming, it’s time to look at some good games for Mac that will run well on your machine.

The best Mac games in 2019

The library of available games for Mac is constantly being updated with new and exciting titles — especially on the popular digital store called Steam and the App Store game collection.

However there are a few Steam games for Mac that really stand out — many of which were critically acclaimed titles on Windows PC before being ported across.

Here are some of the best Mac games in 2020 to get you started:

Diablo 3 is an action role playing game (ARPG) that’s all about loot. Level up your magic-wielding hero and slay thousands of demon-spawn in the search for more powerful gear and items. You can even play online or cooperatively with friends. Best for intermediate to powerful machines.

Cuphead is a retro-styled run-and-gun for up to two players which lets you tackle an increasingly challenging roster of bosses. Known for its beautiful cartoon-style graphics, Cuphead is a pleasure to look at while being fairly simple to run, and is one of the best Steam games for Mac. Ideal for basic machines, including MacBooks.

Fortnite is one of the world’s most popular online games for Mac, which finds you landing on an island and fighting other players to be the last standing. The addictive recipe of land, loot, shoot, and survive has become a world-wide phenomenon — especially as one of the top free games for Mac.

Civilization VI is one of the best games on Steam, period. It’s the latest instalment of a long-running series that lets you build entire civilizations from scratch. Advance through the ages, expand your empire, and use resources wisely to defeat your opponents through a variety of means. Reviews have shown Civilization V to be one of the best Steam games for Mac for years, and Civilization VI should become available soon. Better enjoyed on intermediate to powerful machines.

Starcraft II is one of the best free games for Mac, which lets you command one of three space-faring armies and battle them against each other for victory. It’s also one of the most popular online games for Mac ever.

Those are just a handful of the many exciting titles to land on Mac in recent years, with more being added every day. Even if you have an older Mac, you might be able to game comfortably without paying for costly hardware upgrades.

However, given that Macs don’t always have the same hardware options as their more powerful PC counterparts, it’s important to ensure your Mac is best prepared for high-speed gaming. This is especially critical for e-sport games, such as Fortnite, where one small hiccup or performance hit could cost the match.

Thankfully, you don’t need to be an advanced Mac user to optimize it for faster performance — developers have spent years making clever apps that can do just that for you.

Set up your Mac for gaming with CMM X

Disk cleanup and protection against malware — all you need for a perfect gaming environment. CleanMyMac X gives you just that.

Troubleshoot your internet connection

If you're playing any online game, the first thing to check is that you have a strong and stable connection. Many users mistake slow performance with their hardware, when in fact it can be isolated to their internet.

Best Free Games For Macbook Pro

Unfortunately, mousing over the WiFi icon in your menu bar doesn't tell you enough. That’s why WiFi Explorer was created. This app presents a much richer view of your network status with a few must-have features:

See the band, range, signal quality, and security status of all available networks in your vicinity

Use the network analyzer to identify channel or coverage conflicts. This is very useful for apartment buildings where WiFi routers are competing with each other for signal.

View simple recommendations by WiFi Explorer to improve your connection based on best practices

If you’re still running into issues, make use of the extensive help manual, which can help guide you through the troubleshooting process

Optimize disk space for your Mac

When you’re running out of disk space, the best games for Mac can begin to crawl because there’s not enough room to write new data to the drive. CleanMyMac X is a lightweight app that lets you manage your disk space and maintain your Mac for optimal performance. Some of its best features allow you to easily:

Uninstall any app from your hard drive, including a shredder function to leave no trace behind. See a simple list of apps that you don’t use often, making it easier to determine what should go and what should stay.

Perform a disk cleanup in just a few clicks, removing any unnecessary or fragmented files that can accumulate over time

Protect your Mac from malicious software with the Malware Removal tool. Based on the most up-to-date attack libraries, your games can run at full speed without being hindered by background viruses.

Optimize the performance of your Mac by letting CleanMyMac X run a series of scripts designed to surface some extra power

Monitor your Mac game performance

Half of knowing how to improve your Mac’s performance is understanding what the bottlenecks are. Instead of blindly speculating, use iStat Menus to see your current Mac status at a glance while playing the best games on Mac. iStat Menus is a fully fledged system monitor that integrates seamlessly with the menu bar. Some of the core features let you:

See an overview of your Mac’s status, including CPU and GPU usage, fan speeds, temperatures, and more

Customize your view, ensuring you’re only seeing the information you care about. Either minimize each figure to an icon in your menu bar or expand them into a single clickable window that provides more information.

Experiment with different color schemes, including a dark mode that’s easy on the eyes

Configure alerts that trigger when certain system performance criteria are met. For example, if your GPU temperature exceeds a specific figure, you can be notified.

It may sound like a lot of preparation, but when it comes to gaming you know that the extra performance can go a long way.

The best part is that WiFi Explorer, CleanMyMac X, and iStat Menus mentioned above are available for a free seven-day trial through Setapp — a subscription service for Mac which gives you access to over 150 powerful apps. Just head over to the Setapp homepage to get started, and you’ll be playing the best games for Mac right on your current laptop in no time.

Setapp lives on Mac and iOS. Please come back from another device.

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Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.

Read on

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hong-kong-art-man · 4 years ago

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‘In For A Penny, In For A Pound’ —— The Benevolent Adrian Cheng And His Venturesome Heritage Preservation Project ‘State Theatre’ In North Point

While new buildings are faceless, old buildings have a soul and smile. It was said the old buildings sang and new buildings have no music in them. While ordinary businessmen were ambitionless, a cultural tycoon had a dream. When the senior had no art in them, a young hero already used arting up to rule his kingdom. Let me tell you the great stories of the 68-year-old State Theatre in North Point of Hong Kong Island and its new master Adrian Cheng(鄭志剛) who deserves Hong Kong’s applauding recognition.

In Hong Kong, property developers are richer than the rich as land is scarce in our city. Very few developers however understand the almighty dollar that glitters is not gold. What should glitter is that a city, through their developments, contains art and culture: a spiritual accomplishment and that Hong Kong can retain a wonderful richness of our past, not just collective memories of the beautiful things that are gone, but the actual historic preservation, being the great endeavour which seeks to conserve buildings of cultural significance. Adrian Cheng is the rare exception who knows a city cannot shimmer without art; and art is also the important opportunity for a business to help the public know what an enterprise is like and become smitten with it. Art promotes emotional interactions and can foster all kinds of warm relationships with the organisation. Apart from the impact on corporate identity and substance, art and culture are a good way for a business, being the member of a community, to contribute to the social, spiritual and economic well-being of Hong Kong. Adrian knows the above inside out.

Adrian is my admirable friend who is a critical expert in art. At about 40 years of age, he is the young heir to his late grandfather Cheng Yu-tung’s multi-billion business conglomerate New World Development. He himself founded K11, a first-class property brand representing the daring approach to combine art museum and shopping mall into a solid work. Adrian majored in East Asian studies at Harvard University and later spent about a year in Japan studying Japanese culture.

An eager pursuit for perfection is the most leading cause of industriousness in artists, and also in an exceptional ‘businessman artist’ like Adrian Cheng. He probably loves sunrises and hates sunsets. He enjoys working round the clock. He is the driving force—for himself and his company teammates in respect of making art a fusion of property dreams.

In 2020, New World Development, to fulfill the dream further, announced that it embarked an unrivalled architectural conservation project for an old theatre, the culturally shining State Theatre, formerly called Empire Theatre, in North Point which is the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. This 68-year-old film and concert theatre was opened in 1952 by a Russian Jew Harry Oscar Odell. International and local renowned musicians, singers, choirs and opera groups like Peter Pears, Isaac Stern, Vienna Boys’ Choir and Teresa Teng all proved their artistic importance there. The venue sorrowfully ceased activity in 1997, and now looks sad.

In the 1950s, the sea water in North Point was a vivid turquoise blue. From the stylish dwelling houses on the slope of lush greenery, one could see the blue sky with puffs of clouds that looked like cotton candy. The Chinese Civil War in the 40s forced many moneyed persons to leave Shanghai, the richest city in the Mainland, and they settled in North Point of Hong Kong. North Point was developed as ‘Little Shanghai’. Shanghainese brought with them along King’s Road a string of trendy restaurants, dance clubs, beauty salons, department stores and amusement parks. Against this background, there was a demand for a prime and classy theatre in which concerts, dramatic performances and films could be delivered.

Built in 1952, State Theatre, as the iconic entertainment hall of fame, had an ‘advanced’ electric-power escalator taking the audience to the 1300-seat auditorium. The theatre building also possessed 2 charming characteristics. The State Theatre features a captivating ‘parabolic exoskeleton truss’(拋物線型桁架) at the roof that supports the entire structure. It looks like a dinosaur spine. This reinforced concrete arch beam roof and its vertical hangars remain unique to the world’s cinema appearances. The theatre also features a distinctive curved façade with a beautiful relief mural(蟬迷董卓) by the late Chinese artist Mei Yutian(梅與天)(about the ancient legend of a beauty seducing a cruel official) as well as small square windows with projecting concrete frames which are typical of the 1950s modernist architecture.

I miss being a child in the 1960s and there are a lot of personal good memories. “One day in your life, you remember a place, you come back and you look around…”. When I went back to North Point a few weeks ago, what I missed was not the area itself but my childhood. As a boy, I ate a lot. I ate 6 times a day and 4 were snack times. I was committed to eating small bites of cheap food sold by the street hawkers outside State Theatre, no matter how much stomach capacity it required. There was a mouth-watering variety from the food found outside the theatre: fish ball, egg waffle, marinated duck gizzard, grilled squid and poached peanuts. Those North Point snacks remembered me somehow.

I am sure Adrian will not put back these hawker carts to the revamped State Theatre. Most certainly not, we would not re-invite the great artists who once performed in the Theatre as most are not alive. I am confident that because of Adrian, I will be, after a few years, able to walk into State Theatre which will show us that architectural beauty as well as cultural vibrancy will not perish in Hong Kong!

MLee

Animated State Theatre “No.7 Cherry Lane” Acknowledgement: VEVO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUXWx8vIQM

香港故事《由春秧街說起》 Acknowledgement: RTHK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BsnlU-IMyo&t=16s

State Theatre Acknowledgement: Globmedia Chu Hai College https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEtig3FzjXk

Adrian Cheng Interview Acknowledgement: CoBo https://youtu.be/PVGnaq8Cy3A

#Adrian Cheng #鄭志剛 #Cheng Yu-tung #New World Development #K11 #State Theatre #Empire Theatre #Harry Oscar Odell #Harvard University #Peter Pears #Isaac Stern #Vienna Boys’ Choir #Teresa Teng #Parabolic Exoskeleton Truss #Mei Yutian #Chinese Civil War #Little Shanghai

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years ago

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VinePair Podcast: How New Zealand’s Wine Industry Is Leading on Sustainability

The growth of the New Zealand wine industry over the past few decades is one of the great success stories in the world of wine. What’s all the more remarkable is that that growth has come along with a nationwide commitment to sustainability, shepherded by Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand, founded in 1997 and currently certifying over 96 percent of the nation’s vineyard land.

On this week’s episode of the VinePair Podcast, Adam Teeter, Erica Duecy, and Zach Geballe are joined by Clive Jones, winemaker and general manager at Nautilus Estate, to discuss New Zealand’s dedication to sustainability, learn more about grape growing and winemaking in the island nation, and examine how the wines have changed and evolved over the last few decades.

Listen online

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Listen on Spotify

Or check out the conversation here

Adam: From Brooklyn, New York. I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Jersey City, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

Adam: And this is the VinePair Podcast. And guys, it’s another week of Covid.

Zach: Well, not for our guest, spoiler warning.

Adam: I know. Seriously, they’re the only country that’s really done it really well. which is probably why none of us will get to go there anytime soon. ‘Cause we’re all basically infected, even if we’re not, if you’re from America, I think it’s just assumed that you have Covid. So what are you guys drinking this week?

Erica: So this week I got a hold of a bottle of Plantation Rum. It was their 20th anniversary rum, and I made an Old Fashioned with it, and, oh goodness. So good. Rum Old Fashioned is my favorite. I know it’s my thing. And now that we’re moving into a little bit colder days, that’s all I can really think about having. I’ve been going between bourbon and rye Old Fashioneds and rum Old Fashioneds, depending on the day.

Adam: I want to tell you, Erica, I want to commend you right now because that’s not what I thought you were gonna say.

Erica: Oh, really?

Adam: I thought you were going to humble brag a little bit about that whiskey you drank this weekend that you let us know about at the editorial meeting. And I got super jealous, and I was like OK. Do you want to tell us what that was anyways?

Erica: Oh yeah, it was the Yamazaki 18, and that’s a really hard bottle to find. There’s not many of those around, so that was incredible. I mean the finish —

Zach: Where did you have that?

Erica: I had it upstate at a friend’s house and the finish on that whiskey is — it just goes on for many, many minutes and it is the most pleasurable whiskey I have ever had.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, you talked about it in the editorial meeting and I was like, man, this sounds ridiculous. Yeah. So I was, I was pretty jealous, but yeah, I wanted you to talk about it anyways. Zach, what about you?

Zach: Yeah, well thanks, Erica, for not leading with the incredibly delicious, incredibly impossible to find single malt.

So I this last week was drinking — I’ve been on a real Alsatian white wine kick. I taught a class on Alsace last week. And so, especially Alsace Pinot Gris, which to me is a category of white wine that I love, in part from being kind of exposed to it by visiting there a couple of years ago, and really is to me a quintessential fall wine. Because they’re often a little bit richer in style, not oaked, but the Pinot Gris as a variety is essentially red grapes that we make into white wine.

So it has a little bit of that kind of savory, earthy character to it inherently, even when it’s vinified white. And in particular, I think probably [the Zind-Humbrecht] Pinot Gris that I had a couple of nights ago, which is one of the top producers in Alsace. And it makes a lot of different wines but they’re just, it’s hard to say entry-level, but their basic Alsatian Pinot Gris is really delicious. And yeah, that’s kind of where I’ve been.

Adam: Amazing. So for me, I had this really cool drink. So on Sunday, since it was a long weekend, we went out to Governor’s Island. And, for those who are not familiar with what Governor’s Island is, it’s an old military base in the New York Harbor on an island obviously. It’s been turned into a public park and you take a ferry to get there, and now it’s actually really nice because thanks to Covid actually, they’re restricting how many people can be on the island at the same time. So you make reservations online and then you’re on a ferry that instead of being packed to the gills with people is actually very nicely spread out.

And you get to the Island and you have lots of space. You can rent bikes, you can do other things. And while it’s technically illegal, we did bring some alcohol with us. You’re supposed to only buy it from vendors on the Island, but we did bring some in and one of things we brought which I thought was really delicious — and I have to give credit to Aaron Goldfarb, one of our writers for introducing it to me — is Low Ball.

It’s this cider made by Shacksbury. And what’s amazing about this Low Ball is they have figured out how to use cider and make it taste like whiskey. And so they’ve created a Highball in a can, that is cider-based. So they age the cider in whiskey barrels for — they don’t say how long, I’m assuming it has to be longer than two or three months — but they age the cider and then they bottle it, carbonate it, and they add lemon to it, and a lot of the other quintessential whiskey Highball flavors. And it’s just absolutely delicious. It’s 5 and a half percent alcohol. Right. So it’s the perfect level of alcohol for walking around a large park basically. And just hanging out and very refreshing, really delicious. I was very impressed by it, and definitely plan to keep it on hand in the future ’cause it’s just, it’s really, really good.

Erica: That’s what I’m saying.

Zach: It reminds me, I wrote a piece for VinePair a few months ago on cocktail beers with the same basic idea of how do you transmit these kind of classic cocktail flavors through beer.

And I think someone I talked to talked about doing some things with cider, too, but I don’t think it made it to the final cut of the piece, but it’s definitely interesting to see just how much, how deceptively whiskey-like, or rum-like, or tequila-like, you can make a beer or a cider just through things like the aging vessel, and a little bit of creative, adjunct ingredients. But yeah, it’s definitely nice to have that flavor without all the booze.

Adam: Absolutely. Well, so let’s get into today’s topic because I’m really excited to have this discussion today. So today’s podcast actually is being sponsored by a New Zealand wine, and we are really lucky to have as a guest to talk all things New Zealand wine with us this week Clive Jones, a Nautilus Estate winemaker and general manager. Clive thank you so much for joining us.

Clive: It’s great to be here.

Adam: So most important question for you right off the bat, when it comes to New Zealand, where do you all get your same sense of humor from?

Clive: We need to be well-balanced, and we’ve got chips on both shoulders. Yeah. We’re a reasonably friendly bunch, I guess. And we take what we do seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. And perhaps that is where the kind of kiwi sense of humor comes from.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, I have to thank you for giving me my favorite television show so far in Covid quarantine, “What We Do in the Shadows.” Which is just an amazing, amazing show. Yes, I love the New Zealand humor. It’s absolutely amazing.

Clive: But have you seen the movie?

Adam: Yes, I’ve seen the movie as well, which is amazing. The movie is amazing and now it’s even funnier to me because they’re on Staten Island as opposed to being in Aukland, but it is a really hilarious, hilarious show.

But in all seriousness, so it’s really exciting to talk to you about New Zealand. Obviously, I’m assuming most people who listen to podcasts are familiar with New Zealand wines, maybe some more than others. Erica, you have traveled to New Zealand twice. I know a big fan of the wines. I’d love you to just give us a little bit of an overview of what makes New Zealand so special when it comes to wine and why more people should have it on their radar in terms of a winegrowing region, if they don’t already.

Clive: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean Zealand’s a long, skinny country down the bottom of the South Pacific. So you’re never very far away from the sea, even Central Otago, which is our most inland wine region. It’s still only two, two-and-a-half hours’ drive from the sea. So, we’ve always got this moderating influence from the ocean, so we’re definitely a cool climate. Even in the warmer parts of New Zealand, we’re definitely classified as cool climate. And we always get this vibrant refreshing style for our wines. Most known for our white wines, and Sauvignon Blanc particularly, we produce such a distinctive style that really has taken the world by storm. But we also make aromatic wines. Pinot Gris, more recently Albariño, Riesling, Gewürztraminer, and our Chardonnay is probably our best-kept secret. Chardonnay is one grape that grows actually throughout New Zealand. And again, with Chardonnay we can produce certainly nice complex wine, with that hallmark freshness, that freshness that gets you back to that seeking glass. And then on the red wines, really Pinot Noir is the major focus on the South Island of New Zealand and in the bottoms of the North Island. As it gets a little bit warmer up towards the middle of the North Island and a bit further north, then you can find a Syrah or Cabernet.

Adam: So New Zealand’s always been obviously a really great wine-growing region, and you did mention one wine that we have to talk about, which is Sauvignon Blanc. And I feel it’s now just become standard for Americans to expect that if they want a Sauvignon Blanc, it should come from New Zealand, and more specifically from Marlborough. What is it that’s made this wine, you think so attractive to us? That Americans are just so obsessed with it, and how has that impacted wine in New Zealand across the board? I mean, obviously I’m assuming it helped a lot of people grow their wine businesses, but what else has that done for New Zealand wines as a whole?

Clive: Yeah, look, I’m still completely amazed — you know, we’re not used to traveling around the world when you can see your face in the trade shows. Where you’ll get someone, if they haven’t tried a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, before you give them a glass you say try this and their first reaction is “Wow.” And we get this particularly with Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, it’s got this natural high that’s the climate, the soils. You know, the variety just sings in this particular region.

And you know we do get quite distinctive characters that they’ve got good vibrancy, they’ve got quite powerful fruit flavors, so for some people they can actually be a little bit too bright in a way. But they’re so refreshing, and just delicious into the type which is the most important thing for wine, I believe. So yeah, it has taken the world by storm. I think a couple of years ago, about 28 percent of Sauvignon Blanc sales in the U.S. were from New Zealand, which is quite remarkable given the size and scale of our industry. Could well be more than that by now.

Zach: So let’s talk a little bit about sustainability and grape growing in New Zealand, because I’m fascinated by this. But I know that sustainability is a huge focus. I think probably for New Zealand as a country as a whole not just the wine industry, but can you talk a little bit about kind of how that manifests in the winemaking or in the grape growing, and maybe why it’s maybe more prevalent in New Zealand than say other parts of the world?

Clive: Yeah, well we made that call early on, I guess, so our sustainability program was initiated in 1997. So it’s been going over 20 years now. And the focus was that at the start on water use, waste streams, pests, and diseases. So it’s kind of monitor, measure, reduce, repeat. So really monitoring your inputs and outputs and making sure you’re doing it in the most sustainable way possible.

And so we set up the certification Sustain Winegrowing New Zealand, and we got a really good takeout from the industry to the point where we are now at about 96 percent of our vineyards are certified sustainable through sustainable wine-growing. And then there’s another 7 percent that are operating under other sustainability programs, site organics, or biodynamics. There’s a little bit of overlap there because some people take some certifications, but in more recent years, I guess we kind of look to broaden the scope of our sustainability program and we’ve reviewed it and kind of checked our wines up with the United Nations sustainability goals. And so we’ve introduced other aspects like climate change, people, and soil along with our waste, pests, disease, and water. And that sort of relates to that three-pronged approach to sustainability. You’ve also got heavy economic sustainability, and you’ve also got social sustainability as well, you’ve got to look after the people.

So the system has always evolved. And we were world-leading certainly, and particularly with the high level of takeout of sustainability with the New Zealand wine growers, and we can’t rest on our laurels. We’ve got to keep evolving and making sure that we’re doing the right thing for sure.

Erica: So you mentioned that there are a couple different aspects of what those focus points are, but can you just go through, I think there was six focus points that I saw, and talk through what each of those are?

Clive: Sure. So, pests and disease, so that’s monitoring any pesticide use, anything you have to use on the vineyards to control any pests and disease. This powdery mildew detritus that can affect grape vines, so we need to be able to monitor that, and mitigate those fits. So that’s in our spray program, but it’s all about doing it reactively, not based on the calendar. So, you’ve really got to justify anything you put onto the vineyard. Most of our vines in New Zealand are irrigated, and that’s driven partly by the fact that again, we’re a long skinny country down the bottom of the South Pacific. One of our big secrets is it’s windy, and Erica, you may have experienced a half-blown waster when you were here, I’m not sure when you were here, what time of the year.

When the wind gets up it really sucks the moisture out of the soils. And we’ve got a lot of vineyards started in riverbeds, and very stony soils. So, we’ve got quite sophisticated monitoring systems in the vineyards. So we continue to challenge how much water we use and look at reducing our usage. Waste is any sort of waste stream that we generate throughout the process of winegrowing. So I can relate to composting all of our skins. So that’s a quite common practice, producing a compost that goes back on the vineyards.

Climate change. It’s becoming more and more topical and we are starting to see it in New Zealand, but manifesting itself as a bit more variability over here rather than necessarily getting hotter. I mean, yes, we have had some warmer seasons but I did a vintage in Burgundy in 2004 and this year I’ve noticed that — I traveled just before harvest — this year I noticed that the company I worked for had finished harvest before the date I left the country last time. So in 14, 15 years the harvest has come forward almost a month. In New Zealand, we’re not seeing anything like that, though we may be up to a week earlier in the warm season, but we are seeing a bit more variability so we could get more frosts. We could get more rain during the harvest period. So we are starting to think about how and what we can do to mitigate that, both from a practice point of view on the vineyard but also reducing our carbon footprint.

So, we aren’t missing any impact we have on climate change. And we’ve got a goal of being net zero emissions by 2050 — which has been lead by the government. The government has set that as a goal for New Zealand as a country and in the wine industry where you see if we were ahead of the pack, we we want to match that, we want to make sure we were ahead of the game in terms of achieving that.

Obviously, soil’s really important. And now, with a lot more understanding on the low grounds part of the grapevine and how important that is — James Milton, who’s a well-known winemaker in New Zealand, he’s actually biodynamic but he says you’re not standing on the roof, you’re actually standing on the rooftop of another kingdom. And the low-ground kingdom gets all that microbiological activity, that is just so important. And then maintaining the health of the soil, as well as the health of the plant that you can see above the ground.

And also people, we’ve got social responsibility. We need to look after the people that are working in our vineyards and wineries. We rely on a seasonal labor that comes in from the islands. So we have a government-sponsored scheme that facilitates people coming in from the islands to work a season in the vineyards.

Now they come in and they work for a three- or four-month period. They work very hard, and they’re great workers, and they leave their home that may be one of the Pacific Islands. They’ll go and be in the community, take a cash injection that helps them maintain a lifestyle at home. That’s only a quick overview of the six elements, but those are the elements that we decided to focus on as an industry for sure.

Erica: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I was in Central Otago in January before the pandemic, and it was fascinating to me to see over the span of 10 years just how much the wines have changed.

And this article that we’ll be publishing this week, I’m looking at the Pinot Noirs of Central Otago and how vine age and winemaker know-how over that period has really created a revolution for the Pinot Noirs. So 10 years ago, the wines were what some people called “fruit bombs.” They were much more fruity and bright, and now, through this confluence of both the winemaker know-how and the older vines have become these incredible world-class wines with just so much complexity and beautiful structure. So I am working on this piece and have been thinking a lot about the evolution of not just Pinot Noir, but all of New Zealand’s wines over the past 10 years, and wanted to ask you, how have the wines of Marlborough and the Sauvignon Blancs, in particular. changed during that span?

Clive: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the unique thing about this, you get one chance a year to make wine and every year is different. So every year you learn something, so you’re able to apply those learnings back on to whatever you experience in the future. And certainly Sauvignon has evolved, probably it was more of the green grassy spectrum when it first took the world by storm back in the late ’80s. As we work on our chemistry managements and understand one of the distinctive characters about Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is the set of aromas that are called volatile files. And we discovered how to measure those, and there’s three chemical compounds with rather long names, but they give the, basically the passionfruit, passionfruit skin, and the boxwood-type characters. And we’ve measured them and now know that they are particularly responsible for things distinctive of Marlborough character. Yeah, and of course once we measured them it’s like well with a lot of things with wine, if this much is good than more is better. So there was a sort of swing to really great fruit-driven, punchy wines that kind of licked out of the glass.

They went too far, they were almost overpowering and you got almost a slight sweet character coming out of them. But we also found out that those compounds are relatively unstable. So they’re very, very important, but you can’t rely on them themselves. So you want a mix of flavors and aromas and, and a lot of the wines you see from the Marlborough area, and the Sauvignon Blanc area, regional leads because that’s what we’re trying to assemble all of those different flavor options and putting them together in a blend. The whole concept of blending is one plus one plus one doesn’t equal three, it equals four. So you get the synergistic effect and the different components working together to make a wine that’s, at the end of the day, more balanced and more pleasurable.

But I’d certainly say — same for Pinot Noir in Marlborough — that we’d gone through this 20-year period of having the right vines and the right clones on the right sites. And, so much of the structure our wine is coming from fruit. Whereas in the early days, you did have those fruit bombs that were sort of propped up by some nice oak character. Typically these days, they’re falling into the background and we’re getting much more structure from the fruit itself. And vintage plays a huge part of it.

Zach: Clive, I want to ask a very straightforward question, but to me, it’s one of the questions that comes up the most with New Zealand, which is why does everyone there use screw caps?

Clive: Well, I mean, it comes back to that we make these fresh, fruity, vibrant wines and for us, a screw cap is at the moment, the most appropriate closure that preserves those. Plus the fresh aromatics. And it was driven from the fact that we used to think that all the rubbish corks would seep down to the bottom of the South Pacific.

Yeah, and we did have a mess of problems with the cork taint, which just ruins wine. The cork industry has done a lot to improve that, but the wines with a screw cap do age. They evolve, they evolve probably a little bit slower, but they do evolve, and they evolve consistently.

So you can open a dozen bottles of a 10-year-old wine, and then they’ll all taste the same. Whereas if you’re making a dozen bottles of 10-year-old wine on the cork, you’re much more likely to get some variations. And it’s convenient, too, you don’t have to rush around to find a corkscrew, you can just pop it off and you’re away. So, yeah, we’re sold on screw caps at the moment.

Adam: And Clive, is that mandated? Or is that just an agreement that everyone’s doing it?

Clive: There’s no regulation at all. It’s just, that’s the way people feel as the best closure for our one wine cellars.

Adam: Wow. How, how large is the New Zealand wine industry?

Clive: We’ve got, just under 40,000 hectares. So what’s that about a hundred thousand acres? So we are very small. I’m just trying to think of a direct comparison to that, but we’re a drop in the ocean compared to California as a state by itself. So I think we make somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of the world’s wine but we do make more than we can drink ourselves. Because we’re only a population of 5 million, so that’s why we we do seem quite well for our season and look for people to help us out consuming it.

Adam: So I mean obviously, in the early days when you started thinking about sustainability, it wasn’t as much on the forefront of consumers’ minds. But now it very much is, amongst our readers, et cetera. How have you seen that change in terms of the consumers that you’re interacting with? Twenty years ago when you guys were talking about sustainability, did you find that you had to explain more to consumers what you were doing and why, and is it now a lot easier for them to understand why you would do this and actually value it and be willing to pay more for it?

Clive: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we have the sustainable certification logo on the back of our bottles. It’s part of every conversation I have with wine buyers or consumers directly, if you’re in that situation. So it is important.

And look, in New Zealand we’ve got ahead of an awakening about the Maori culture, the indigenous people of New Zealand, and they actually have a really strong philosophy on sustainability as well to say they have a couple of concepts. One of which is called tikanga whakapapa, so that’s our equivalent to terroir if you like. Another word beginning with T that is perhaps difficult to explain, but sort of the broad translation is, tikanga whakapapa is it’s a place where you stand, a place where you feel empowered if you need to. It’s the foundation, it’s your place in the world.

And that makes so much sense from a winegrowing point of view, if I’m standing in this vineyard making wines from this piece of soil. And, you feel really connected to it and that relates, Erica, to how much progression you’ve seen in the wines in the last 10 years with a real much deeper understanding of sight and how it influences particular wine styles. And the other concept that the indigenous people use is kaitiakitanga, and that’s about guidance and protection. So and that sits really nicely with sustainability in terms of the wine industry.

So, you’re managing an environment where the people are closely connected to the land and nature. And the simplest way of putting it as, as they say, you don’t inherit the land from your parents, you borrow it from the children. So it’s about making sure that, in fact, we’re being smarter about preservation as well. We’re also starting to improve it and restore and you start with your restorative agriculture as a bit of a new bus. And it’s not just about maintaining the current situation, we want to make it better. So we’re getting frank heading ahead of the garden.

Erica: I was going to say, I think that was one of the things that really came across to me when I was in New Zealand earlier this year is just this commitment to both stewardship of the land and the transparency of the terroir and really looking at the site specificity, looking at the specific vineyards and what is the message that they are trying to convey. As I visited a dozen different vineyards and talked with all the winemakers, I think I’ve never been to a wine region where literally every single person I talked to was on board with the idea of this continuous improvement of this forward-thinking idea of passing along a better place. It was just such a unifying experience that I haven’t found in any other wine region or frankly, any other country that I’ve traveled to, where literally there’s an entire community that is thinking and committed to moving forward in pretty much almost the exact same direction. Some people are doing biodynamics, some people are doing organics. Some people are doing the other sustainability programming, but it’s really a unifying characteristic of the winemaking community.

Clive: Yeah. Look, we, we are a cooperative community of winemakers, we help each other out. We share our knowledge. We understand. When we’re traveling overseas, often the first conversation we have is about New Zealand. Thankfully more people know where we actually are now. Since The Lord of the Rings came out. But yeah, it’s a conversation about New Zealand. It’s a conversation about region and perhaps variety, and often the conversation about your brand is well down the track in terms of what we’re talking about. So we do have this community feeling and yeah, absolutely the industry has grown tremendously, but it’s still relatively young. And I guess probably in the last 10 to 12 years, there has been the opportunity just to perhaps — not focused so much on growth, but understanding of the resources we’ve got and how to keep the beast out of the vineyards and also help to protect and preserve them. So there’s a little bit of maturity coming into the industry from that point of view.

And then also I think now if I think back 20 years, particularly with Pinot for instance, we’d be going, “Yeah, let’s look at some Pinots. Let’s look at a lineup of Burgundy” and say, well, how close are we? Are we making wines like this yet? And now we’re actually going, we absolutely respect and aspire to the wines of Burgundy, but we’re not trying to make wines like Burgundy, we’re trying to make the best New Zealand Pinots that we can. And we’re much more confident in our sites and our style. And so it’s more about celebrating what we’re doing and, but still respecting the history of the Old World, but we much more self-confident in what we’re doing ourselves. We’re not trying to make Burgundy. We’re trying to make the best New Zealand unites that we can.

Adam: That’s really awesome. Well, Clive, I want to thank you so much for joining Erica, Zach, and myself to talk a little bit about New Zealand wine. It’s been really interesting to get your perspective and to learn a lot about sustainability and just what the country is doing as a whole.

Clive: Thank you. Pleasure. And hopefully Adam and Zach, you might get to come down and visit sometime. Of course, Erica, you too.

Zach: Yeah. We’ll have to take the podcast on the road.

Adam: Totally. So guys, Erica, I need to hear from you now that we’ve heard from Clive, so you’ve been twice, right? I mean, what’s it like? I mean, I’ve obviously always seen it in the Lord of the Rings and things like that, but I’ve only seen the amazing pictures of New Zealand and I can only imagine what it’s like to actually be there. And then to also see what the vineyards look at, but I’d love if you could tell us what your impression was when you went and why so many people are so enamored by it.

Erica: Yeah I mean, for me, New Zealand was really the place that changed my life from a perspective of falling in love with wines. So I had been to many wine regions before as a travel guide book editor, as a travel writer. And when I went to New Zealand, the wines and the wine community, the collaborative nature of the people, and just frankly, the incredible beauty of the place —it just struck me so viscerally that by the end of this trip that I was on, a couple of weeks in, all over the, North Island and the South Island and then ending up in central Otago, by the time I left, I said, you know what? I think I want to go into wine. So it had a huge impact on me. And that was a decade ago.

I mean, it really is one of the most gorgeous places that you could ever travel to. The people have the incredible sense of humor that you mentioned, but are just so cool and easy to talk to. And there’s this no tall poppies kind of idea. Have you heard this expression? So, what it is, is that people don’t want to stand out and talk about themselves. And so like Clive was saying, people don’t want to talk about their brands. They don’t want to talk about their individual winemaking and to shine a light on the amazing things that they’re doing.

They actually have a hard time, the winemakers, coming over to the States and talking about how great their brands are, because that’s just not part of the culture. And so too, as a journalist to try to pull out the information about the very cool things that they’re doing, all of the trials that they’re doing, all of the amazing experiments and their individual vision is very difficult, but, these winemakers are among the most humble people that I’ve ever encountered in wine. And it feels like an underdog situation where as a journalist, I just want to do my part and tell the stories of the incredible wine that’s being made. This place that does not get the level of attention that it should. And from my perspective, how the Pinot Noirs have evolved over time, I think they’re frankly, some of the most exciting wines that are on the market today.

The article that I have coming out, it’ll be a couple of days after our podcasts launches, is really talking about how the wines have evolved over the past decade and what makes them among the most exciting in the world. So I’ll leave a couple spoilers. I won’t spoil the entire piece, but I really think it’s been one of the most pleasurable experiences in my career to watch the evolution of the wines from this country really get to the level where they can compete among the world’s best.

Adam: That’s awesome.

Zach: And I think what’s cool about New Zealand, and Clive mentioned this as well, and it’s an important point not just for New Zealand, but I think for a lot of other, younger wine industries is getting to that point where you are confident enough in the wines you make, in the quality of your fruit, of your terroir and of your wine-making people that you can say, Hey, we’re going to make the best possible wine we can and we’re not trying to make some that tastes as much Burgundy or Sancerre or whatever European wine people might be most familiar with me from this variety or these varieties.

And I think new Zealand’s a great example of that. I think there are some other ones that we’re seeing as well from, from other parts of the world where winemakers and wine regions have said, “we’re confident that we can make an amazing, delicious, interesting, complex, world-class wine. That is its own thing. And that has slightly different flavors and it has slightly different aromas than what you might be familiar with, but it’s as legitimate an expression of these varieties as the place where they might’ve originated or might’ve first become famous.” And that is, I’m sure, something that you feel Erica. And it’s something that I, as not someone who’s traveled there, but as someone who has tasted plenty of New Zealand wines over the last decade plus have noticed as well. And again, it’s just super exciting.

Adam: I mean, I think it’s a really good point. I think the biggest thing, right, that you should just be asking consumers is, is it delicious? And if it’s delicious and it’s enjoyable then why does someone else have to say “oh, and it’s also so Burgundian in style.” Right. That shouldn’t matter. It should just matter that the wine is really, really good.

And so, yeah, I love that answer, too, Zach, and I’m glad you brought it up. I thought the way that they talked about that was really interesting. And I do think it is really amazing. And we have a lot to learn from this country in the way that the entire country has really embraced this idea of protecting the environment. I know a lot of it does have to do with the fact that it’s such a gorgeous place. They want to protect themselves, but I wanted to ask Clive as well (but then I thought, well, I don’t want to get political here) but what have they done in New Zealand that really has forced the entire population to believe in all of this and to really realize that this is something that’s so vitally important? And what can we learn as citizens of the U.S. and take back from what they’ve done and say, here’s what New Zealand is doing? And here’s why it’s just as important here, and here’s what we’ve got to do to get you to believe in it as well.

Zach: Well, I mean you could look at some other things that they’ve done in New Zealand in the last, say, seven or eight months, better than us and maybe get a sense for, I don’t know, maybe just science being a thing that’s taken more seriously.

Adam: I mean, look, they do have a pretty amazing leader. She’s pretty awesome. So yeah, I do think they do just understand that when you need to listen to experts, you listen to experts. You don’t say that you’re the expert when you’re not. But anyways, guys, this was great. And I want to thank Clive again for joining us and New Zealand wines for supporting the podcast. It’s really amazing. This was a really great excuse to talk about a wine region I know Erica really loves, that I need to learn more about. Zach, I know you’ve never been there, as well. So yeah, thanks, this was a great conversation, as always. I’ll see you next week.

Erica: Thank you.

Zach: Sounds great.

Adam: Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe, Erica Duecy, and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also to give a special shout-out to my co-founder, Josh Malin, and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again right here next week.

The article VinePair Podcast: How New Zealand’s Wine Industry Is Leading on Sustainability appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/new-zealand-sustanability/

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johnboothus · 4 years ago

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How New Zealands Wine Industry Is Leading on Sustainability

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Adam: From Brooklyn, New York. I’m Adam Teeter.

Erica: From Jersey City, I’m Erica Duecy.

Zach: And in Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe.

Adam: And this is the VinePair Podcast. And guys, it’s another week of Covid.

Zach: Well, not for our guest, spoiler warning.

Adam: I want to tell you, Erica, I want to commend you right now because that’s not what I thought you were gonna say.

Erica: Oh, really?

Erica: Oh yeah, it was the Yamazaki 18, and that’s a really hard bottle to find. There’s not many of those around, so that was incredible. I mean the finish —

Zach: Where did you have that?

Erica: I had it upstate at a friend’s house and the finish on that whiskey is — it just goes on for many, many minutes and it is the most pleasurable whiskey I have ever had.

Zach: Yeah, well thanks, Erica, for not leading with the incredibly delicious, incredibly impossible to find single malt.

Erica: That’s what I’m saying.

Zach: It reminds me, I wrote a piece for VinePair a few months ago on cocktail beers with the same basic idea of how do you transmit these kind of classic cocktail flavors through beer.

Clive: It’s great to be here.

Adam: So most important question for you right off the bat, when it comes to New Zealand, where do you all get your same sense of humor from?

Clive: But have you seen the movie?

Erica: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I was in Central Otago in January before the pandemic, and it was fascinating to me to see over the span of 10 years just how much the wines have changed.

Zach: Clive, I want to ask a very straightforward question, but to me, it’s one of the questions that comes up the most with New Zealand, which is why does everyone there use screw caps?

Adam: And Clive, is that mandated? Or is that just an agreement that everyone’s doing it?

Clive: There’s no regulation at all. It’s just, that’s the way people feel as the best closure for our one wine cellars.

Adam: Wow. How, how large is the New Zealand wine industry?

Clive: Thank you. Pleasure. And hopefully Adam and Zach, you might get to come down and visit sometime. Of course, Erica, you too.

Zach: Yeah. We’ll have to take the podcast on the road.

Adam: That’s awesome.

Erica: Thank you.

Zach: Sounds great.

The article How New Zealand’s Wine Industry Is Leading on Sustainability appeared first on VinePair.

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source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/how-new-zealands-wine-industry-is-leading-on-sustainability

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