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cosmiciaria · 3 years

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Assasin’s Creed III Remaster review - Spoilers! - Long post!

I wanted to keep this spoiler free, but as this game is such a narrative experience, I don't think I'll be able to. I'll try to keep them at minimum, but be warned: there are major spoilers ahead. By the way, this game is almost a decade old, so y'all had plenty of time to get spoiled beforehand. And if you're reading this, it's because you like this game and you probably know how it ends.

Review under the cut because this is way too long.

As always, I express my feelings and impressions regarding my experience with a game – I write it because I like writing reviews instead of, I don't know, recording a video for YouTube. I'm not a YouTuber and I feel safer behind a keyboard where people don't point out about my weird accent (the accent every Hispanic person has when they speak English). Since the pandemic started, I found refuge and comfort in AC games, with Syndicate being my first contact with the franchise, and Unity solidifying my love for it. I found strength and weaknesses in all the installments I've played, which are almost all of them by now (excluding the first AC with Altaïr, the new saga with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, and Rogue). I've also platinumed three of those games I've played, and I'm on my way to platinum this one, so I think I can speak from a deep fan standpoint by now.

Since Syndicate, I studied from up close each of the protagonists of the mainline games. I felt drawn to Arno because he looked like one of my oc's (and his girlfriend looked like my oc's girlfriend as well); I wanted to learn about Ezio because he's a fan favorite; I wasn't at all impressed by Edward but ended up growing fond of him; I respect Altaïr for what he means to the Brotherhood; but I can safely say, that I haven't felt as attracted to a main AC protagonist as I felt with Connor.

From the moment I knew he was a native American (such a bold choice, it seemed for me) I felt instant attraction – but not the, idk, physical (he's a cutie I give it to you), but because of what he could bring about as a main character. A perspective we don't usually get to see, and personally, as I'm not American, a point of view to educate me on a different side of history. I wanted to see what they could do with him as the star of the game, I wanted to play with him and understand how someone like him could rise up and become a protagonist of such a well known and beloved saga of games. I applaud this decision from Ubisoft, whether they did it because they wanted to look progressive or not, I don't care, I'll always cherish that the protagonist of a famous videogame is a Mohawk. And with the American Revolution as the main stage, no less. Such an important scenario to strengthen the virtue of independence, patriotism and love for a country, going hand in hand with a character that represents America even more than the Founding Fathers.

(Also I'm a Hamilton Fan Trademark so I couldn't stop singing random parts of songs while playing this game, it was a nightmare every time Lafayette appeared on screen because I JUST HAD TO start mumbling Guns and Ships)

I lunged blindly into this game – I'd only spoiled myself the very ending because I played Black Flag before – so imagine my surprise when I first saw Haytham, Connor's father, as the main protagonist.

So here's the deal. Let's clear this out of the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game. It was what I expected and more.

But.

Yes, there's always a but in AC games, you know the drill.

As I kept playing with Haytham, charming though he was, I kept thinking to myself "ok but when does Connor come into play". I also already knew Haytham was a Templar, so the end of the first few sequences didn't catch me by surprise – actually, what caught me by surprise was that there was no mention of Assassins or Templars during the "prologue" with Haytham, instead you're left to believe they're all Assassins until he prays to the Father of Understanding and you realize with a gasp "oH NoO!".

You play with Haytham the first three sequences. One of these have the most memories out all of the sequences more or less. This whole thing can take up to three to five hours depending on how much time you wish to put into exploring or completing the optional objectives. And still no signs of Connor.

Connor does come eventually – as a child – by sequence 4. It's not until the end of sequence 5 that you get to play as (almost) adult Assassin Connor, so maybe five or six or even seven hours into the game and you're barely starting.

I know what they did here. I understand. And this is what I meant when I said they were going for a 'narrative experience'. To make you play as Haytham before, to lure you into a false sense of safety believing he was an Assassin working for a just cause, to make you feel invested in his relationship with Ziio – only to discover he's one of the bad guys, that will eventually give birth to our true hero of the game – it sediments everything perfectly. It tells you everything you need to know to understand these characters and their motivations. I can see where they're going and some of it can be quite predictable, but it was done right. On the narrative aspect at least.

I got used to Haytham by the time we switch to Connor, we're used to his cloak and his three pointed hat – his accent, his sassiness, his everything. You grow fond of him and you think, hey, maybe it isn't so bad to not play as Connor, I can roll with this – until the sudden change happens. The game completed its purpose: let you know and care for Haytham, only to strip him away from your hands and bring you the real protagonist with an interesting background that didn't need to be told, but it was instead shown to us players. What a better way to tell a story.

But the problem is – most of Haytham's memories are fillers. For starters, the very first memory where you appear in the opera house (similar to that one at the end of Black Flag… mmm) serves as a tutorial for climbing and killing with the hidden blade. Then the whole memory on the ship to Boston – completely expendable and removable, the story doesn't suffer from it. All the memories used with Haytham as tutorials – how to shield from an open line of fire, how to use ranged weapons, how to sneak and find stores and viewpoints, how to use horses and walk on snow, fricking Ben Franklin – everything, everything could've blended in better. You could still tell the story you wanted in only one sequence playing with Haytham, and end it the way it does end in sequence 3, without avoiding any important detail to frame Connor's backstory as well – but instead, this part with Haytham does feel like it overstays its welcome, and by the end you're just hoping it ends soon, it drags on for too long, and there's no real sense of thread pulling the strings together here, everything just kind of 'happens'.

But the never-ending prologue doesn't end there (badam tum tsss), because Connor still isn't an Assassin. Connor is not Connor actually, as I had been led to believe prior to playing this game: his real name is Ratonhnhaké:ton, which I wish it was used more often than it was. Ratonhnhaké:ton is like four or five years old when you first play with him, and his village is assaulted by what we assume are Charles Lee's men, a Templar and companion to Haytham. Ratonhnhaké:ton swears revenge upon these putrid British invaders and he grows up resenting the death of his mother, who died in the fire provoked by these Templars.

Not even knowing what a Templar or an Assassin is, Ratonhnhaké:ton is sent by one of "the spirit guides" (actually, Juno, one of the Precursor people) to seek the Brotherhood. When he's around 14, he sets out of his village into the wide world and finds Achilles, who will become his Assassin mentor – that is, after completing a set of tasks that yet again seem to go on forever. Ratonhnhaké:ton turns into Connor to cover his true origins, a name I thought it was random, but by the end I realized how wrong I was.

It isn't until Connor turns 17 that he becomes a fully-fledged Assassin – and you might think, well, Ezio became an Assassin at the same age – yes, but it didn't take him five sequences to reach there. I can't believe I'm defending Ezio.

It's not that I didn't enjoy playing as Connor when he was a kid, no, and I also don't think that part of the game should be skipped since it shows his people, family and friends – maybe comprised, yes, into only one sequence – the real problem here is the fact that first you need to play what could be considered the longest prologue ever, even longer than Kingdom Hearts 2's one, and you're teased with grasping the real protagonist but no, because there's still more 'prologue' to cover with Connor's rise to the Brotherhood. The real, real story, begins in sequence 6, and even then you still have a lot of tutorials to listen from the NPC on duty.

And if you do the maths – you're halfway through the game – halfway! – and you're just starting. The game has twelve sequences and the meat of the plot is on the last six. Then, why did I play all the previous parts?

For the 'narrative experience' thing I talked about. They wanted to lay the groundwork for a better, compelling storytelling, and I can appreciate it, but not when it hinders the pace of the game this way.

That is, certainly, my biggest issue with the game. The pace. If you're going to give me such a slow start, introducing characters non-stop, and only give me resolutions, discoveries and action packed sequences on the later half, then the story isn't balanced at all – I understand that at some points you need to slow down and sink in what's going on; you can't also introduce ten characters in one cutscene because that's just bad story telling – but the memories of this game are clearly not well organized and weren't thought with the player in mind, but rather with the story in mind. To think that the first mission you do as a full Assassin is to receive more and more tutorials on how the fast travel points work and how you can lower your notoriety (as far as gameplay goes in this mission, it's only walking around at a slug's pace to follow the NPC giving you instructions) it does feel like a slap in the face after all the things and hours and effort you put into it to finally reaching this point (which, I remind you, it's by sequence six!).

It's at this point where I can't blame people for not following through with this game. I have plenty of friends who abandoned it even before reaching this part. And I found myself having trouble to return to it: I only wanted to go back to it because I knew I had to like Connor, I knew he wouldn't disappoint me as a character.

Boy, was I RIGHT!

Now, to be honest, I may be biased, like I said: I was instantly attracted to Connor due to his backstory and I wished to see what he could bring to the table. And I have to say, he didn't disappoint me at all.

Maybe you know or maybe you don't, but up until this point, my fave Assassin was Arno: he showed weaknesses and he suffered the consequences of his actions, to the point of no return, that rendered him vulnerable and a mere human being. And I love me a good vulnerable character who knows their limits and strives to get out of that pit. I love me a good, compelling character that has growth and agency and isn't made of cardboard or has a one-dimensional personality. And Connor delivered on this front.

Connor might very well be my new fave Assassin. I'm sorry, Arno. I still love you babe. But Connor… I never found myself rooting for a character more than I did with him. I wanted him to succeed, I wanted his people to be saved, I wanted to see his ideals become a reality – and he's got so much agency, he's a storm when he comes into a scene, his naivety mixed with the brutality of his killings, the simplicity of his reasonings – he's an idealist, and he fights for it, whether we like it or not, and that devotion to his own creed is at least respectable, let alone admirable. He's never downplayed for his upbringing or his ethnicity, he works among the most notorious people as if he was another one of them, he's well respected in his community, he shows kindness and always offers a helping hand to those in need, but never doubts to plunge his blade into this opponent's throats, fearlessly, he doesn't mind telling George Friking Washington to shut the hell up and not follow him because he'll kill him (there's such a pleasure in a native reprimanding enslaver Washington) – he's, simply put, a great hero.

I've seen many complain that he's boring, or that the actor who played him, Noah Watts, delivered lines in an emotionless way – the only thing that could make him 'boring' is the fact that he's not a lady's man like Ezio was, and to my eyes that's a plus. He speaks slowly and modulates well in English because that's not his mother tongue, and I can appreciate when a company puts these little details, like his way of speaking changing throughout the game as he gained more confidence with this new language he was learning to use. As non-English native speaker, I certainly can commune with the feeling of adapting my tongue and my brain to a new language, and I also know that I speak weirdly to those who are native, maybe I don't have the same intonations, and maybe I sound emotionless as well, who knows, but I can't think of a better portrayal of a non-English character speaking English in videogames than this one. They remained faithful to his culture, and even though I noticed Noah didn't speak Mohawk as fluently as English, I can still feel pleased with the fact that Connor speaks in his mother tongue in all of the scenes he interacts with Mohawks (that's something they did better here than in Unity, where not a single character has even a French accent. I switched the language spoken to French in my subsequent playthroughs, much to my disappointment, because I really liked the Canadian actors). I know subtitles may seem threatening to some, but I wish they did this more often: deliver more lines in the original language of each of the protagonists. It shows care and respect. And I think this game excels at respect.

So, yes, I liked Ratonhnhaké:ton, as you can see. Maybe a lot. Too much.

I also really, really enjoyed his relationship with Haytham.

When Haytham appears back in to the fray it's when the plot picks up. Their interactions are gold: I love the rivalry, I love that Haytham is constantly testing his son, and I love the tiny bits that may show or make us believe that Haytham has a soft spot for him – I love that we never truly know what's going on through Haytham's mind, why does he do the things he does – but what I enjoyed the most about these two fighting together is the fact that they represent opposing forces, a clash of interest, and they bring back the concept of the blurred line between the Templars and the Assassins, their different methods. Haytham represents the collectiveness of the Templars, through him we learn of what they truly uphold as right and just, and behind some of his reasonings you can see sense and understanding – you comprehend his goals, you get to know your enemy, your antagonist, which is something, for instance, the Ezio trilogy lacks (because Templars bad bad pium pium die Templar bad guy) and Unity and Rogue tried to do but ultimately ended wasting its potential. I never understood Templars more than I did through Haytham, and sometimes I found myself nodding at some of his statement, like 'hey… huh… he's not that wrong about this…'. But still, we're led to believe that the good guys, the Assassins, are never wrong, so we pull through with Connor – only to realize that yes, Haytham was right in many aspects, and yes, Haytham has lied to us and he needs to be stopped.

It's here when my love for Connor reached its ultimate stage: when he denies both his father (Templars) and Washington (for whom the Assassins were working). It's here where you see the true agency of this character. It's not black or white, as Ezio's games were; it's not that he was expelled against his will from the Brotherhood like in Unity; it's not that because of a clash of interest now he resorted to the Templars, like in Rogue; no, it's the philosophy of the very first AC game with Altaïr: Templars and Assassins are one and the same, they only differ in their methods, and when Connor comes to this realization, his struggle is visible and he puts his people first. Like always.

He remains true to his personality. He's grown, he's seen the truth, but he must make a decision. And after all, we're here because we want to see him protect his people. That's his real main driving force and we root for him because of it.

Now, I've spoken a lot about our main character. But, what about the secondary ones?

Achilles, Connor's mentor, hides more than he's willing to share – but slowly his backstory unfolds. In his homestead, Davenport, you're able to build a community with different townsfolk that you can invite to live with you through special sidequests, which combine plot and gameplay seamlessly. Through the homestead missions, you get to know Achilles and the other inhabitants and you see them thrive and grow into a tight-knit community close as family. I daresay that these missions were my favorite out of the whole game, and seeing the town grow not only in NPC's walking around but also in sounds, steps, people working and laughing and dogs barking and kids playing, gave me all the fuzzy and cozy feelings of a warm blanket in winter. Most of Connor's innocence and kindness is shown through these missions, and there are also some really good jewels hidden there, like the quest that asks you to guide the pigs back inside – damn. This game gave me very good laughs.

On a gameplay level, this game is light years away from its predecessors – the parkour alone has been revamped and revitalized, making it more fluid. Free running now isn't a chore anymore. Now you can hunt, which is a great part of Connor's backstory and culture, so it's good to see they blend gameplay with plot like this. There's a crafting system that took me ages to understand, but thankfully I got the hang of it. The combat is pretty much the same (counter kills always for the win) and the difficulty remains quite easy, as the games that came before. I wasn't looking for a challenge so I'm fine with it. Now, if you're looking for a challenge… the optional objectives got it covered for you. Because, good lord, they made these stupid main missions so much unnecessarily HARDER and IMPOSSIBLE to complete without having three or four ragequits and sometimes you have to restart up to ten times. To be honest, I never found myself more enraged with the optional objectives than I was with these missions, and I thought Unity's optional constraints were stupid ass complicated, I was wrong. This game. Must be. The most. Annoying. Piece of videogame. To platinum.

Apart from the 'oh I want to die optional objectives' thing, you have naval missions – which, yes, you guessed it, take place on a ship – I guess they were testing the mechanics for a (not so far away) future pirate game, because I can see the seeds of what later Black Flag came to be. It's serviceable and it fulfills its purpose, but as I don't like ships much, I left it on hold for the endgame.

If you don’t dig the naval missions nor the main missions, there’s plenty to do in this game: you have the aforementioned homstead missions, the club challenges (which can take... quite a while), the underground fast travel points (a nice change of pace, though you can easily grow tired of them), the liberation missions, which will see you help liberate a city from Templar control and recruiting a new Assassin apprentice, much like in Brotherhood and Revelations; taking Forts, hunting like there’s no tomorrow, courier, delivering items and message delivery missions, a ton of collectibles, etc, etc.

You might realize I stopped talking about the plot by the time I reached sequence 6 – yes, it's because I'm a little upset with it.

I said that we're here because we want to see Connor protect his people and triumph against the Templars. Yes. We receive that, yes. Amidst. A thousand. History. Lessons.

In my Ezio's Collection review, I complained that in Revelations we were shoved history in the face – I hadn't still finished AC3, because then I would've mentioned something about it. Connor comes across all the important figures of the American Revolution in such a contrived way – he acts as a guardian angel of this revolution, aiding each of the emblematic characters that took part in. I can roll with it in my suspension of disbelief (how come this one person was present at every major event, you know), what I can't roll with is the fact that he was present at the Declaration of Independence – this is some Ken Follett level of bs of probability of something happening to a character. Besides, it's always latent though never truly explicitly addressed, but Connor's skintone was something that should've deterred him from even speaking to someone like Washington – let alone, be present at the moment they signed the Declaration. He does mention at some point that freedom and this new nation was only for white men, and that he acknowledged that slaves deserved as much freedom as everyone else was fighting for; I'm glad he addressed the elephant in the room, though I'm also glad they didn't make the whole thing about it, because normalizing a character like this as a main protagonist was the main idea, I think, when they chose a Mohawk to represent the American Revolution. Still, that someone like him was able to achieve all he achieved in a plot like this, it only means he has some kind of Main Protagonist Shield, otherwise I doubt this could've served as a realistic story for anyone else in the same situation as him. It's, uh, a little hard to believe, that's all. Whereas I can see Arno existing within the historical frame of the French Revolution, without being the one that let the guillotine fall on King Louis' head, this one was a little more far-fetched.

I haven't touched upon the Desmond part – the present day of this game is more, uh… present than ever. And I loved it! I loved it because it delved deep into the Precursor's lore, and also it fleshed out Desmond's relationship with his father, and we actually do shit with Desmond – though that part of the Brazilian stadium, huh, for a company that paid too much attention and consulted with experts on the Mohawks, they clearly left Brazil out of their investigations. I forgive them, they tried.

The music… didn't have as much personality as other installments, it was kind of there, and right now I can't evoke a single theme except for the main menu one, so there you go, it's quite forgettable for my taste, sadly.

I forgot to mention that: this game looks gorgeous. I played the Remastered version of the game, and sometimes it looked like it was done for the PS4 instead of being a remaster (it does look better than Black Flag which came afterwards!). Lighting is magical, the trees breathe life into the screen, the water effects are crystal and realistic; many times I felt like was horse-riding in a Last of Us game (yes, I just compared Ubisoft to Naughty Dog, don't hit me). Davenport Homestead is my favorite location, now more than ever, because it's not only beautiful, but it also means home.

This game accompanied me in a very important moment of my life: I sprained my ankle and I spent a week in bed recovering, while also pondering about my job and the prospects of my future; I took many decisions while playing regarding what I want for my life. I cried at the end because I realized I had become too attached to the characters and because I was so sad to see Connor keep losing things. It all comes full circle by the end. It's a very mature ending, maybe a little unfulfilling, but reality is often disappointing and not everything needs a happily ever after.

All in all, my major complaint goes to the structure of the game and the poor organization they gave to it (AND THE OPTIONAL OBJECTIVES DAAJKSDAD). But Connor as a character in itself made it all worthwhile for me. And I'll always cherish him. I know he won't resonate with everyone, but he resonated with me.

#videogame review #review #assasins creed iii #ac3 #aciii #connor kenway #ratonhnhaké:ton #ubisoft #haytham kenway #assassins creed #assassins creed 3

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holisticalecsecareanu · 3 years

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This interview by ERA News Beta speaks to Alec about a varied number of subjects to do with his film casting and debut in GOC, but farther than that, Alec speaks in great detail about his journey in Romanian theatre, his views on the state of Romanian theatre today, his acting philosophy.

I found this an incredibly revelatory article about Alec because you don’t fully realize, until an interview like this, the depth and breadth, not only of his intelligence, but of his strong beliefs and views regarding his chosen profession. It’s very different going from little snippets in interviews where Alec discusses mostly just one project, to this really comprehensive presentation of who he is as a person and an actor. Also, obviously being able to discuss such complex subjects in his native language, I believe, really allows him to open up more comfortably.

He has a -LOT- of strong feelings and responses to the questions the interviewer asks and he expresses them eloquently, intelligently, and also pretty bluntly, sometimes. It shifted, a little, and not in a bad way, who he is in my head, or rather, it fleshed out who he is in a way that all the quick sound bites and magazine interviews don’t.

I know, from this, that he will never strop striving to push himself and his abilities, to discover new and different ways to learn in his craft. This interview also goes a long way towards explaining how Josh, Francis, and he, formed such a bond, because I believe they also hold these beliefs and commitments to the roles they take on and the projects invest in. It’s almost like kismet because what are the odds that these three individuals would have the same kind of approach to the story they were telling? I think that is why God’s Own Country is such a superlative and luminous film.

Also, the Fight Club production sounds KICK ASS and I wish I had seen it and I can’t believe someone didn’t tape it!

And, yes, that photo, because it never, never ceases to rock every aspect of my world.

This interview is in Romanian but, at least on Google, there is a Google translate button that appears. I have also provided the Google translated version below; am not able to vouch for it’s accuracy, but at least it is something!

Thank you if you’ve read this far. :-D

Google Translation of Interview Below. :

The first British film brings a London agent to Alec Secăreanu

There is also news that one of the young aspirants managed a movie in Hollywood, and for a second people hold their breath, dismayed, wondering "what the hell is this?", Before the engines start again. and to see life beyond its course - Radu Iacoban once said to me, referring to an entire generation, actors who are making their way to a glory that neither they nor we know much about yet . It could have the American endorsement or the greatness of the European trophies, in any case it will no longer be possible to rely on the applause of those who built their illusions in the theaters where they were taken by force or on the admiration of those who dreamed of the two hours of the program. television of yesteryear.

Alec Secăreanu is not one of the 10-15 actors who appear constantly in the distribution of each of the films of the new wave, fueling the impression that only a few people have managed to finish the theater institute in Romania lately. But it has the merit of entering Tyler Durden's mind. And to enter Tyler Durden's mind is courage, especially since it is a dark mind, split into two completely separate universes, and in each of them reigns revolt in all its forms, revolt against the system, against consumer society, against to an absent father and, therefore, against God himself. It's an even greater courage to do this after a perfect director has already passed by, who explored his corners, in tandem with an iconic actor.

The first six rounds of Fight Club demonstrations were, at the end of last year, an absolute success in Bucharest, so the complete version follows, with sophisticated projections made by Les Ateliers Nomades - the company that made the famous mapping on the Parliament Palace - and imagined stunt figures under the guidance of experts from the Gladiator Association, which works in the good tradition of its illustrious founder, Szobi Csech. It's like we lost sleep. Anyway, Tyler Durden doesn't sleep either… Alec Secăreanu certainly sleeps quite a bit himself, since in the meantime he finished filming the first feature film in which he took the lead role, a kind of Brokeback Mountain with a farmer from Romania, the debut film of the British director Francis Lee.

There were nine weeks of filming in Yorkshire, enduring the "bipolar weather" of England, during which time he learned, among other things, to cut the hooves of cattle, to make cheese, to witness the birth of lambs. Oleacă already knew from the Fight Club. And in few percussions I surpass him, after Alexandrul Dabija's Requiem, from the National Theater in Bucharest. In addition to stories about the British system, a show business performance machine, news about new theatrical productions in Bucharest or evaluations of Romanian theater in general, from Alec Secăreanu I found out that there is an online radio that takes you far, Nice Cream FM , and something even more interesting, that there is Radiooooo, with five "o's", which allows you to choose from the map of the world what kind of music you want, in decades, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. «You can understand your decade and your country and listen to, say, Mongolian music from the '60s. It's something like Wikipedia, users are still uploading music, so they've already reached an impressive database, "says Alec.

Rep: Actors of your generation make most of the film and most make film outside. Ana Ularu, Iacoban, Bucur… a long series in which you have just been included, in the most honorable way, with a British production, a kind of Brokeback Montain as far as I understand, a love story that happens on a farm and involves a character born in Romania

Alec Secăreanu: The first feature film in which I had the main role, "God's Own Country" is Francis Lee's debut film. I really wanted a Romanian for the role, because the character in this story is Romanian, and the director wanted everything to be as authentic and organic as possible. Of course, the character has only a line or two in Romanian, not at all significant, by the way, for the story, so they could take absolutely any other actor who speaks English with an accent. But he wanted everything to be organic. The casting director from Romania gave more than 40 rehearsals and, a few weeks later, the director came to Bucharest and wanted to meet about 13 of us, a group from which he chose three actors. The three were in London for a final test, a so-called chemistry test with the other actor, the one who had already taken the role.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE EXTREMELY STRONG NERVES THOUGH, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH. PROBABLY THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO GET USED TO AS AN ACTOR IS TO BE REJECTED. YOU GO TO DOZENS OF CASTINGS, TO HUNDREDS OF CASTINGS, YOU GET FIVE OR TEN PERCENT OF THEM, TO THE OTHERS YOU ARE REJECTED AND, MOST OF THE TIME, IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.

They are simply looking for something else, the sooner you understand this system, the better. To keep your lucidity and show signs of mental health. And you have every reason to protect your health, since, in the end, the tool you work with is yourself and, if you break this tool or if it is defective, it no longer serves you properly. My character's name is Gheorghe Ionescu, he is a young Romanian farmer who went to work in England, who ends up working somewhere, in an isolated complex in Yorkshire, and there he meets a guy, the boy of the farm owners. An unexpected meeting for both of them, surprising, a friendship and a fascination are linked and the two end up living a love story, although neither of them identifies as a gay person. In fact, the film does not want to be a gay movie, but, rather, a story about people, a plea that some encounters are love. A very interesting creative connection was created between me, my colleague, Josh O'Connor, the director Francis Lee and Joshua, our operator.

We had two weeks of rehearsals, in which we discussed very well each stage of the script, each sequence, what happens to the characters, the history of each of them. When I started working, everyone in the frame knew what to do. I filmed a lot of exteriors, on which occasion I got to know very well the weather in England, which is dementia, you

have four seasons in one day, it starts with snow, followed by a storm, then hail, then the sun rises, then again it snows a little and so on. In fact, the weather was a real problem at the connections, because I was starting a frame in the sun and when I resumed it, it was snowing outside, so things didn't fit.

THE TWO WEEKS OF REHEARSALS HELPED ME BUILD THE CHARACTER, BECAUSE I HAD TO WORK ON THE FARM, I LEARNED TO WORK WITH COWS, SHEEP, TO WITNESS THE BIRTH OF LAMBS, TO CUT THE HOOVES OF CATTLE, TO MAKE CHEESE , LOTS OF THINGS. IF THIS THING WITH ACTING DOESN'T WORK… I LEARNED SOME EXTREMELY USEFUL THINGS, WHAT CAN I SAY.

Rep: I understand that the benefits were even greater, you chose an invitation to the British actors' union and a London agent…

Alec Secăreanu: I had the opportunity, for nine weeks, to work in a healthy system from the ground up, starting from the way the union works, to the fact that the actors from the British schools learn notions of personal discipline from college, in a broader framework for the management of the profession. I was treated as a member of their union. A month and a half after I finished filming, my agent received an email from the union asking if I had been paid for the work done, so that the warranty that had been withheld from the producers at the time could be released. in which they announced the film. What can I say… welcome to Romania!

I told them that I am not part of this union, they told me that such a contract in the UK guarantees me these rights and allows me to become a member. I'll be back on the 20th for a series of meetings, and we'll probably finish the talks on this occasion. In the meantime, I also have an agent in London, in addition to those who represent me in Romania. I started the relationship with my agent from Romania, Alexandru Harsany, from RAA (Romanian Artists Agency), two years ago, when I was just returning from Venice, where I stayed for about three months, at the Art Biennale, where I was a performer in an installation built by Alexandra Pirici. Alexandra…, a perfect artist… two days ago completed a performance that will be presented at the Tate, in London…

Returning to my professional path, my stake, I once told my agent, is to work abroad, because in the country, unfortunately, you have nothing to do. You just have nothing to do. Seven to eight films are made a year, which usually have the same cast. In fact, if you look at Romanian films from the last ten years, you might get the impression that only 15 actors have graduated from the University of Romania lately. Beyond this shortcoming, there is no market, the options are few, I do not understand how many of my colleagues manage. Well, I'm in this situation too. Outside, once you have a major project, some doors open, everything goes on.

HERE, I HAVE COLLEAGUES THAT PEOPLE RECOGNIZE ON THE STREET, BY SUBWAY AND BY BUS, WHERE THEY ARE MAINLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE TAXI MONEY. IT'S FRUSTRATING.

I worked with my agent in Romania, I updated my casting photos every six months, which means to make available to potential producers a picture of the state, in which you must be relaxed, not to frown and to highlights your features as best you can. We have updated, to the necessary standards, the video materials or CV presentations, ie that series of things without which you have nothing to look for at the door of a casting director or an agent. While filming in England, the producers there issued a press release announcing that they were filming and that they had a certain distribution. At time number two, Alexandru's mail exploded, hundreds of requests, questions and offers came, sent by casting directors, agents, an entire machine was set in motion.

During the filming in London, I had five days off at one point, and the producers arranged for me to meet with some other directors, agencies, to see how things worked. They are somehow looking for unpolished stones, hoping to find the next great talent. We don't have this culture. I know only one casting agent who goes to shows or to UNATC, to see new faces, and that is Domnica Cârciumaru. The others always work with the same people, and that's especially because they don't know other people, they don't look to see what actors there are on the market, they don't care. Romanian agencies do not have casting databases, for example.

There are real platforms out there for that. Our casting directors work from project to project. 'What I need, a 40-year-old woman. Where else have I had a 40-year-old woman? Aha, in the gum commercial. Well, let's call that one too - that's how things work. In London I had meetings with three agencies and I opted for a rather large one, The Independent, which deals not only with actors, but also with directors, screenwriters, a total of about a thousand people. I liked that it works as a boutique agency, they have 40 agents, every week they meet and discuss the projects that are on the market and to which they have access and then they try to promote the people they represent. In addition, this agency is open to the States. We will see…

Rep: Returning closer to home, you have a few shows in Bucharest, including Fight Club, one of the revelations of last season. The first six rounds of Fight Club demonstrations were an absolute success, so the full version follows…

Alec Secăreanu: In addition to the most recent premiere, Fight Club, we have an extraordinary show at Godot, «Flowers, Girls, Movies or Boys», which we have been playing for ten years with great success. It is one of the first texts written by Mimi Brănescu, he being a basic actor, but lately he has reshaped himself on dramaturgy and screenwriting. A show about relationships, which follows the evolution of two couples, from the moment when future lovers know each other, until a little later, when they may lose love. It's a good, funny text, it catches the audience very well. I'm one of those lovers, a filthy neighborhood wannabe, the kind who feels like he knows them all, and obviously he's not.

His evolution is very interesting, he hits a person he underestimates, in any case he did not expect to have such an impact on him. The girl is from another social class and this very conflict between social classes arouses him and makes him get closer. In time, however, the two realize that they do not have much in common.

I KNOW, I KNOW, THERE'S A THEORY THAT OPPOSITES WOULD BE DRAWN, BUT THEY'RE MOST LIKELY DRAWN TO THE POINT WHERE THEY REALLY HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON. THEY MAY NOT EVEN MEET AT ALL, AND THAT'S THE STRANGENESS OF THE COUPLE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT.

I have another show at the National Theater, Requiem, directed by Alexandru Dabija, entered the seasons last year, things are going well. We expected him to be selected in the National Theater Festival, but it seems that was not the case. It is a text Vişniec, first placed in Romania, with references to an area that seems to be of great interest to Dabija now, more precisely the area of war, the world of soldiers. Vişniec was also interested in this form in one form or another, if we think of "The Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War".

most spectacular staging of this text. There was another show, once in France, he told me that he had seen it, but that it is much more extravagant. Dabija thought of an image show, there are costumes, there is scenery, there are quite a few actors on stage, about 20, some of them employees of TNB, most of them - collaborators. It is sung, it is sung beautifully, the music is by Ada Milea, some songs are really very nice, it is a kind of music specific to the instruments with which it is played: an accordion, a big drum - where I play… We have some marches and various others pieces that lead to the military music area.

I play the role of a soldier who still believes in victory. The story takes place in a cafe Chez Vişniec, a place where soldiers meet who are preparing to return home, who dream of the triumphant march and the glory of reception in their cities. All sorts of people gather at this cafe, some who have never believed in victory, others who have believed, there are some who still believe that victory is possible - all sorts of psychologists synthesized from this theater of war.

What did not delight me about this text is the fact that the characters do not have an evolution from one end of the show to the other. A logic does not have to exist, it is an area of the theater that Vişniec has accustomed us to, but the characters, although very vehement, with a very strong speech, were suitable for a well-deserved development.

Rep: Do you believe in victory? Or have you not fought your big battles so far?

Alec Secăreanu: No, the great battles did not take place. But we started with a few fights, some of which we lost, others we won, others are still contested. I lost, for example, the struggle with the idealism I had at the end of college. I was very disappointed when I finished college, very disappointed… I had high expectations from the Romanian theater market, I hoped to have a vision, a coherence, a general enthusiasm. Of course, everyone wants to be part, at some point, of a movement that means something. I'm still part of the independent theater area, so I never relied on the state theater to do anything for me.

BY THE WAY, I THINK THAT THE STATE THEATER HAS ENTERED A KIND OF SHADOW CONE, IN THE SENSE THAT, AT LEAST THAT IS MY IMPRESSION, IT HAS BECOME MANNERIST, IT HAS NO IMAGINATION, IT HAS STUCK IN SOME RECIPES THAT SEEM TO WORK AND, WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, NO ONE SEEMS WILLING TO DEVELOP NEW THEATRICAL EXPRESSIONS.

And in the latter case, the high hopes and high expectations were primarily for them, because they manage the funds needed to do that. Every year they have to put on a number of shows and I look in amazement that they are not trying to discover anything, they are systematically going to areas where they have been before, they only walk on dirt paths. It's not the commercial that has to bring the world to the theater. There may be a commercial area, but I think it is our duty, of artists, actors, directors, to push the boundaries a little, to invent new ways.

But the independent theater is currently identifying itself as an area of precarious means. You do shows that catch the audience - logically, otherwise you can't finance yourself, the setting is, most often, modest, consisting of two chairs and a table - since there is no money for something more sophisticated, the costumes are also as they are - most often the actors come with their clothes from home. It's a poor theater, let's face it. If you try to look for what is happening in the independent theater, the first time you notice the lack of funds, and you notice it as a spectator and it would not be your job as a spectator to see things like that. It can be seen that the director made a kind of compromise with the money to make this show. While in the state theater a lot of funds are lost.

There are exceptions, of course, but my huge frustration is that you see shows with extraordinary budgets and you don't understand why the money went for such a show, which doesn't bring anything new. While in the independent theater there are so many ideas and so much desire to work, but there is no funding for their realization. I was really talking to someone the other day, because we're looking for funding for Fight Club, and I was asked, okay, beyond funding, what's the business? Let's get along, we're talking about an art form, and monetizing art in this brutal way is harder to imagine, because our stake is to try to develop new theatrical languages, we need grants, state aid, maybe even the private area, the effort is not made for a show to be sold like this, to fill the halls.

If you want that, you have a party, you call the world, you play a few more instruments, you say three more poems and that was it. Either way you want to go, the discussion inevitably reaches the area of the diseased system, which you have little to do, except to try to build it from scratch.

I have a cultural association with some colleagues. We realized in 2007, when we finished the University, that there is no point in hoping, that we will not receive any kind of help from the theaters, where even now the places are blocked.

I WOULDN'T SAY THEY AVOID YOUNG PEOPLE, BUT RATHER THAT THEY ARE WARMER WITHOUT US. THERE ARE A LOT OF EMPLOYEES IN THEATERS WHO DO NOTHING, BUT KEEP THE SEATS BLOCKED, TWO OR THREE SEATS APPEAR ONCE EVERY THREE YEARS.

IT'S A KIND OF SLAVERY, PEOPLE WORK IN A WELL-GROUNDED SYSTEM, WHICH NO ONE REALLY WANTS TO CHANGE.

In fact, the same situation is in every state institution, many people who receive a meaningless salary. And these are not theater companies, to say that they are families, but they are state institutions, financed from the budget. One is an independent, self-financing theater company and theoretically is allowed to do whatever it wants with its money, and another is a budget-funded theater, obliged to function for the public and to educate it, to arouse it, to motivate it. . If you put the same pieces of Caragiale and Chekhov every year, and only that, and only that…

Rep: There are all kinds of public calls lately for the elimination from the scene - from various scenes - of the generation we call, coded, "golden", as we saw calls of some intermediate generations, I would not know how to define them , to finance somewhat less intellectual productions, which have at least some connection with the public. Where is the truth? And with the golden generation, what should be done, ideally, from the point of view of the new wave you represent?

Alex Secăreanu: Who else is today a consumer of magazine theater, for example? They are nostalgic, and they know where to find their shows, and they somehow look for them by virtue of inertia. I have no problem taking care of established actors. I appreciate them as history and there are some from which I had a lot to learn, because they are better than me. Victor Rebengiuc, for example, with whom I worked for a short film called Casting Call, written and directed by Conrad Mericoffer, is a man from whom I learned a lot. The story follows an elderly actor, who is called to a casting, but it is not necessarily about the elderly actor, but a generic meditation on the condition of the actor, because we are all, in fact, in the same situation. I played, Paul Ipate, Victor Rebengiuc and Sergiu Costache.

I learned a lot in the short time I spent with Rebengiuc, how to behave in a team, how to approach a role…

IT'S LIKE CHESS. IF YOU PLAY WITH SOMEONE WHO IS BETTER THAN YOU, YOU LEARN FROM HIM. IT'S NICE TO HAVE SOMEONE BETTER BEAT YOU, BECAUSE YOU LEARN FROM HIM.

There are cases, however, in which it would be in the best interest of the actors in question to give up, as is the case of Radu Beligan, for whom I have a huge respect, but who has advanced a lot in age, goes through natural stages of life, to simply remember the lines, it is simply no longer possible. What we want from this story is already doing him a disservice. It's just an example. With reconfigurations and reinventions it is harder… but actors like Victor Rebengiuc and Marcel Iureș believe that they went in different ways from the very beginning, they wanted more than they were offered and they looked for more.

In this profession you never stop searching, because as soon as you get the impression that you know them all, you enter a very dangerous area, an area where you don't come up with anything new, and the viewer feels that. You have to surprise him, he has to see you doing something new, otherwise there is no stake.

Rep: Fight Club… You were able to get into Tyler Durden's mind, a courage, probably, after his twisted imagination was once explored by David Fincher, with the iconic film released in 1999. What you found there ?

Alex Secăreanu: Fight Club… is a story that, for me, started many years ago. I read Chuck Palahniuk's book in 2006 and I thought that this book must be a theater show. The idea bothered me for many years, until last year, when the stars lined up, I said it would be time to do it, especially since I found an exceptional team. We developed ideas, we had a lot of meetings in which we kept challenging the imagination, to see where the story can take us, and finally we were ready to put everything into practice. Sure, we hit the funding. Arcubul financed us for the show, which is a complex one, with multimedia elements, videomapping, fight scenes, music,

It was a test for us first of all, to see if our ideas work, if the team works. After the first six rounds, we realized that we are on a very good road, which must be continued. We can bring new elements to the theater, we can develop new languages in the theater, we wanted from the beginning to make an experience for the spectator, a one hundred percent experience made for him. We wanted the spectator, when he left the theater, to feel that he had received a punch in the stomach. We got pretty close to the goal, all the people said, after the show, that they lived that thing that we felt when we were little and we watched a karate movie, and after the movie you wanted to jump around the house, to give more and you a fist, try another scheme.

He left absolutely no one regardless of this show, which is very important. We need some more money to set it up the way we thought it would. The amount is not large for a state theater, but huge for an independent theater. About 60,000 euros. Usually, in the independent theater you say, come on, how much do we have, 5,000 euros? Let's do it, we come home with more clothes, we cut another set, we give up that one, the other one and we did the show. When you have thought of an artistic approach in a coherent way, you cannot make concessions like this. You can not. There are elements, means that you absolutely need to build your convention fluently, to say what you wanted to say.

THERE ARE ALSO PRODUCTIONS AT TNB OF ONE MILLION EUROS, APUS DE SOARE, THIS ONE FROM TEN YEARS AGO OR WHEN IT WAS MADE, TWO SEASONS WERE ALSO PLAYED AT REVEDERE.

There is also a record amount for a show that has never been played before. I don't know how much the funding was, but let's remember that in the year of Caragiale, a theater wanted to do D'ale Carnavalului somewhere, at the Metrorex Halls. They equipped a hall with bombers, cars, an entire fair built from scratch, and the show was never done again

#alec secăreanu #alec on stage #interview #fight club #fight club: play #he's so intelligent #how is that fair #goc #god's own country #goc film

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secretstories · 4 years

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Wrote this while I was at work. I hope you all enjoy

Eve woke to the feeling of something wet and slimy on her face. It wasn’t exactly the most pleasant way to wake up, and she jolted upright in a near panic for a moment only to be accosted by another round of slobbery slime and a paw to her stomach.

She grunted and spat out a protest arms flailing.

“Waffles! Waffles Stop!” Her sputtering turned to laughter, and the laughter made the dog even more excited, as his tial began to wag, and he stepped forward, planting a paw right on her boob. The party stopped right then as she turfed the dog to the side frowning at him though she didn’t mean it, “Ouch.”

Waffles wagged his tail and rested his chin on her bed.

“Thanks for that.” she grumbled, rubbing her chest with the flat of her right arm, “Not like I needed that or anything.”

He licked her hand and he couldn’t help but grin as she ran a hand over his ears and through his fur.

She closed her eyes waiting for the best part of her morning: the realization that she captained a spaceship. The grin that split her face probably should have torn it in half joker style as she leaped from bed ready to live out another day of the best job ever!

And what did her enthusiasm get her, the sudden and jarring realization that she was missing a leg.

The realization as she tumble dof ballance and went plowing into the floor with a loud crash. She lay there for a second, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating her stupidity before a large nose appeared in her vision, and she got licked from forehead to chin by a big pink tongue.

She sighed, and sat up.

“Ouch.”

That was probably going to leave a bruise. Not that she didn’t already have enough of those.

SHe turned to find waffles rolling her prosthetic access the floor, using his snout to roll it. She grinned and thanked him, rubbing his ears as she locked the leg into place, running her fingers across the cool blue carapace that made up the sleeve. There was a whirr as the Stee-eye leg connected, and she flexed the two human toes.

From there she was finally able to climb to her feet and limp over to her closet and the mirror.

She threw the closet open and inspected her clothes. She could either look professional today….. Or like a complete idiot.

She thought about it for about .25 second before deciding.

Complete idiot it was!

Nonchalantly,she pushed aside the hanger than held her pristine grey uniform, and its single star on the shoulder and rummaged in the back for something fun to wear. She had plenty of star-wars t shirts, and other sci fi paraphernalia, but today felt special. She didn’t know why but it just did.

Ah! perfect !

She reached in and pulled it out.

It was a dress, just above knee height and slimming, but the best part about it was that it was made to have a pattern like R2-D2 on it, and AND.

IT HAD POCKETS.

She tossed it back on the bed and went rummaging for some shoes. She got bored five seconds in and just grabbed her heelies. They wouldn't match for dam but she loved them and anyone could fight her if they disagreed. She paused, then again, if she were to fall, she might just flash everyone her underwear.

She sat there thinking for a moment before deciding.

Compression shorts, perfect.

She pulled the clothes on, gave herself a cursory look in the mirror, smoothed down her short blond hair, adjusted her eyepatch and then walked towards the door throwing it open and…. Having an immediate heart attack.

After a moment of panic she leaned against the doorframe, “Simon! What did I tell you about waiting a few feet AWAY from my door.”

Simon stepped back,his head tilted one dark eyebrow raised , “Sorr, Admiral.”

“You don't have to call me that when I’m not in uniform you know.”

“I feel more comfortable this way.” He said, his light british accent dusting the words

She shrugged, “Whatever makes you comfortable I guess.” And then she rolled off down the hallway.

Simon jogged after her, “Ma’am i…. Well not to …. Tell you how to do your job.”

Sh rolled her single eye upward, “You always tell me how to do my job Simon. So lets not make pretences.”

He paused and ten sighed, “Maybe formal wear would be more….. Appropriate for a working environment.”

“It's casual friday simon, besides, it wouldn’t kill you to break one regulation every once in a while.”

“It might get me fired.”

She tilted her head to look at him, “Your commanding officer would have to report you simon…. Now Remind me who your direct commanding officer is?”

He sighed, “You.”

“Damn straight it is.”

She turned the corner and nearly rolled into a pipe, dodging out of the way just in time to plow into Angel who was making her way up the hall. The two of them toppled over and plowed into the floor.

Angel looked up at her with an expression that was neither shocked nor surprised, but grinned, “Well I didn’t expect this, this morning, but I’ll take it.”

Eve quickly sat back blushing so hard she could eel her entire body tingling, “I um…. I don’t think so.”

Angel shrugged, brushing her long dark hair away from unusually perfect skin, “Your loss.”

Eve rolled her eyes but then grinned.

“Nice dress.”

“You know the best part.”

“What?”

“IT HAS POCKETS!”

Angel laughed at her, and together they moved up the hallway talking quietly. Angel had been one of her best friends for a very long time. The marine had once been an olympic figure skater before joining the marine, and even now Eve liked to joke that she was far too pretty to be a marine mostly in front of the other marines who took the teasing in good grace.

“Where you headed.”

“Had to take to krill this morning.”

Angel snorted, “Watch out, she is on one today.”

“Why?”

“She just recently learned about spontaneous human combustion, and now she is worried that we are all going to explode into flames.”

Eve frowned, “She does realize that has only happened like…. Maybe fifty times in all of human recorded history if not less.”

“Trey telling her that.”

“She shrugged, I guess.”

Together they walked their way into the infirmary, and even from here they could hear the high shrill voice, “SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION. Because apparently humans can just BURST INTO FLAMES. Oue of all the things i have to deal with, your insides getting inflamed and exploding, your immune systems attacking itself, random cells growing in clumps but NO. NOW i have to worry about EXPLODING INTO FLAMES.”

They came around the door just in time to see a scene of carnage. Krill was standing on one of the beds brandishing a scalpel, and Dr. Kade was standing just below her his dark hair rumpled and his glasses askew over his handsome face. He looked so done.

“Morning krill.” Eve said walking up to the bed, “Bit early for a mental breakdown.”

“NO IT IS-”

“Should I mention that we aren't exactly sure if that can happen or not. Mostly likely is they accidentally set themselves on fire and no one could find evidence otherwise.” She wasn’t sure if she was lying or not, but anything to get Krill to calm down when she was in one of her moods.

She stopped, “Really.”

Eve glanced over at Dr. Kade and winked forgetting for a moment the wink was mostly negated by the fact her other eye was covered, “yeah,totally.” Dr Kade added, ‘Forgot to mention that/”

Eve patted the little alien on the shoulder, “Alright everyone can just calm down. I came to bring you this, mysurvey.” Krill took it an Eve patted her hand, “hopefully the morning goes better eh.”

She turned and wheeled fro mth room, nearly crashing into the doorframe, hearing a loud sigh from Dr. krill as she went.

Angel and Simon followed her down the hall and into the mess hall.

Maverick was already there his trey piled high with a small mountain of food, but that shouldn’t have been surprising. A mountain of food for a mountain of a man. He was over six feet tall, and had muscles for days. He probably needed like 3000 calories just to fuel all that.

“Slow down, Mav.” Or you might hurt yourself

Mav turned to look at her, his one blond eyebrow raised, “Look who's talking. I saw you put down two pizzas by yourself just the other day.”

“Brain food.” She announced walking over to the waffle maker and grittle.

Naozumi was there too this morning, looking like the god of the sun as usual. Everyone said he should have been a model and not an engineer, but he settled for making the gre engineering jumpsuit look like a runway accessory.

“Morning Naozumi.” She said, upturning a bottle of syrup over her pancakes.

“Morning, Admiral.” he said his voice a booming base that echoed around the room

“How my girl doing this morning.”

“She’s alright, the left compression filter will need to be changed on our next go round, but other than that, she seems happy.”

Eve grinned, “Excellent, just what I like to hear.”

She turned and took her seat at the table with the marines Angel, Maverick, Jackson soon to be joined by Naozumi and, eventually Kanan came to join them, her highly polished red carapace glowing slightly under the overhead lights.

She turned to look at Eve, “You seen my brother doay.”

Eve shifted in her seat, “Sunny…. No I haven’t Seen him.”

Kanan grunte shrugging her large shoulders, “Guess I’ll find him later.”

“Probably down in his little workshop, did you check there?”

Kanan shook her head, “No, I didn’t. It isn’t urgent, so it can wait.”

Eve was the first to finish eating, inhaling her pancakes like it was a last email before jumping up and wiping her mouth clean. Gotta run guys. They nodded to let her go and she jogged out the door and down towards engineering nearly slipping down the stairs when one of her wheels caught But she caught herself on the railing and hurried downward.

“In for a surprise this morning.”

She paused and looked up to where Conn was lurking, her tendrils billowing and undulating in the darkness.

“You are freaky, you know that. Like really freaking creepy.”

The starborn smiled, her lips parting to show a spiral of circular teeth, “I know.”

Eve shivered and continued her way downwards hurrying through a maze of small passages before she finally made it into the little room at the very base of the ship. She paused in the doorway watching him as he wrecked shoulders hunched, the blue of his carapace glowing bright in the light above.

She shuffled her feet a bit nervously before knocking quietly on the metal, “Knock knock.”

Sunny turned his bright gold eyes brightening when he saw her, “Eve… I have something for you.”

She brightened up, “Wait, really…. But it isn't like… a holiday or something?”

He stood a good foot taller than her, walking over his hand behind his back golden eyes shining bright, “Does it have to be a holiday for me to make something for you.”

She shifted her feet feeling guilty, “But I didn’t get you anything.”

He huffed, “Eve, I don’t want things, I just…. This is one of the only ways I know how to show you that I care.”

She pause, “I don’t know watching both the star wars trilogy and prequels with me was pretty long-suffering of you.”

He laughed and shook his head before reaching behind his back and pulling out.

A spear.

Her eyes widened a bit, and she took its warm metal in her cold hand. It was beautiful, “you made this.”

“He smiled, just for you…. Because you’re short.”

She rolled her eyes at him stepping bac and spinning it around in one hand before over hand swiping and snapping it back to the right.

“Do you like it.”

She spun it around again and pointed it at his throat, “You, me, dueling circle, after work.”

“It's a date.”

She blushed then stammered then swallowed hard and managed to squeak out, “I… ur, yeah.”

Sunny just did the Drev version of a grin at her.

It was just then that the alarms overhead began going off, red lights that blinked and roared.

“Shit!”

She turned and raced up the steps, Sunny hard on her heels.

Her implants buzzed, “Admiral, Kree pirates spotted harassing a civilian transport vessel.

She changed her direction and raced towards the docking bay, “Get a darkfire prepared for me, I’m on my way.”

They acknowledged and then dropped off, but by the time she made it, a team was already waiting for her. Heedless of how very public the cargo bay was, she kicked off her shoes and stripped off her dress leaping into the flight suit and puling it on so familiar with the suit it might as well have been a second skin.

From there she ran over to the suit station and was fitted into a space flight suit helmet under her arm as she ran to the ladder leading up to the darkfire cockpit. Sunny stood just below the ladder, “Kick ass out there.” he said.

She grinned at him as she slid into the cockpit pulling on her helmet with a hiss as the canopy lowered over her.

“Prism, play Danger Zone.” She said into her mic, and the AI responded.

She left the music quiet and the line open so she could hear, but the beat of the music road inside her,and her hands clenched tight around the controls as the darkfire rolled into position in the airlock.

“Airlock depressurization in three.”

She waited, her heart hammering in her chest, feeling the sudden prickling.

She sighed she always had to pee before things like this. Then again, it could have been worse, the last flight she was on, her ovaries had felt like Darth Sidious was using force choke on them. There is nothing worse than flying a fighter jet when your body can’t tell the difference between cramps and needing a toilet.

Sound was sucked from the world as the airlock opened, and she gunned the engine, roaring silently into space and out towards the distressed transport ship.

The kree never saw her coming.

After all, she was the best pilot in the fleet, and she loved to fly.

None of them ever stood a chance

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parkersfm · 4 years

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[ charles melton, cis male, twenty-six ] did you see RILEY PARKER? looking as broke as ever. rumor has it HE is usually -CHOLERIC and -REFRACTORY but is also known to be +INDIVIDUALISTIC and +BOLD. we’ll see about that. they kind of remind me of BAND TEES STAINED WITH MOTOR OIL, GREASY DINER FOOD AT THREE IN THE MORNING, SPITTING BLOOD INTO THE BATHROOM SINK AT AN UNDERGROUND PUNK CLUB. maybe because they’re an AQUARIUS. they’ve been living around here for TWO YEARS. i wonder when they’ll make it out… [ sam, 23, she/her, est ]

it is i, sam, here with the emo cousin who was born rich, but isn’t anymore. details are under the cut and feel free to message me if you would like to plot!

STATS

FULL NAME: riley ignatius parker-worthington

NICKNAMES: literally everyone calls him parker and most people don’t even know that it isn’t his first name.

GENDER + PRONOUNS: cis male + he / him

DOB + AGE: january 31st, 1994 + twenty - six

ZODIAC: aquarius

HOMETOWN: alderley edge, cheshire, uk

OCCUPATION: auto mechanic

FUN FACTS: he has a tongue piercing + has a pet rottweiler puppy named heroin bob.

HISTORY

riley ignatius parker - worthington was born and raised in alderley edge, a small and affluent village in england’s northwestern county of cheshire. he’s the youngest of four boys, so he has three older brothers.

his family, the parker - worthingtons, are one of the richest in not only the uk or england, but the entire northern hemisphere. throughout a history that spans over 150 years, the family business which began as a small architectural firm expanded its reach to areas such as real estate, banking, oil, and mechanical engineering and is worth approximately 60 billion usd.

he was under constant guard at worthington manor, but not by his parents. raised by nannies and educated by private tutors, he went through most of his childhood prohibited from leaving the property and training to one day occupy a prestigious spot in the family company.

it was a very sheltered life and he rebelled against it from the start. being the unplanned child ( along with his twin brother ), his parents went through the motions of hiring private tutors and grooming him to be a successful businessman, but he was still quite young when he figured it out : they didn’t really care. their eldest sons were already the heirs, primed and eager to carry on their legacy of wealth and power. their youngest sons were simply the spares, and they were treated as such all their lives.

he began acting out the moment he realized it, refusing to participate in a game that would always be rigged against him. his parents viewed him as a problem? fine. he could be a problem.

he was kicked out boarding school ( several times ), he got a sketchy back alley tattoo, he was failing every single one of his classes, and the only thing he showed any real interest in was music. he had been taking piano lessons since before he could even reach the pedals and had a natural talent for it. his instructor ( the only adult he ever really liked ) actually believed that he could become an accomplished classical concert pianist, and he wasn’t necessarily uninterested in that path...until he discovered punk music at the age of sixteen.

he was seventeen and attending boarding school in switzerland when he snuck off campus one night and never came back. he went to seattle, los angeles, new york city, houston, miami, and several much smaller dots on the map. his parents cut him off when he ran away from home, so with the sleek black card in his wallet suddenly rendered completely useless, he had to learn how to fend for himself and he did. he worked several odd jobs in order to pay for courses in auto mechanics, he bought a motorcycle, and he learned how to how to cook, clean, and take care of basic household issues like leaky faucets and squeaky hinges.

settled in crawford about two years ago on a whim. he works as an auto mechanic at a local shop, but he also does some freelance handyman stuff on the side and even makes some money from paid gigs with his band every once in a while.

PERSONALITY

has this very intentional standoffish, stoic, don’t fuck with me vibe, but...he’ll also hold the door open for a total stranger and help an old lady cross the street.

guarded. his bandmates wc wink wink are probably his closest friends and two of the very few people he would admit to caring for. his parents never said the words i love you to him. no, not even once.

will say exactly what he’s thinking. he doesn’t coddle anyone and he won’t lie to spare anyone’s feelings either. if someone fucked up, then he’s going to tell them so, but it’s usually out of an honest desire to help rather than rubbing someone’s mistake in their face.

stubbornly independent. would rather struggle in silence than ask for help.

never under any circumstances will he talk about his family, especially his parents.

EXTRAS

has the thickest, most posh british accent.

pretends like his favorite beverage is jack daniels whiskey when it’s actually the quintessential british cup of tea ( he doesn’t even drink coffee because he doesn’t like it ).

fluent in english and korean ( although he’s really rusty ) & knows some german.

he literally never watched movies or television growing up so 100% of throwback pop culture references will fly right over his head.

has a pet rottweiler puppy named heroin bob ( harry for short ).

his motorcycle is a norton that he basically built from scratch all by himself so it’s his child and he is very protective.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

his bandmates / roommates * wc on the main seeking bassist!

his messy on / off relationship * wc on the main

cousins ( he’s half korean and half white for reference )

friends

party friends who can only stand each other when drunk

clients ( either at the auto body shop or his freelance handyman work )

former bandmates maybe

ex friends / enemies

these are just a few base ideas and i’m open to brainstorming other things!

#crawford:intro

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futuresandpasts · 5 years

Text

Futures & Pasts | MRR #426

So you’ve probably heard by now that Maximum Rocknroll is going to be ceasing its print publication very soon (there’s two more issues left as of this month). Thirty-seven straight years of putting out an all-volunteer-staffed, internationally distributed punk zine EVERY MONTH is completely mind-boggling & I feel genuinely honored to have been a small part of that history for the past four years. They’ve given me a really important platform to write about all kinds of weird & obscure music on the fringes of DIY from all points in time, where I had a page or two in every issue to slip in feverish praise for forgotten Messthetics geniuses and early ‘80s one-single femme-punk wonders and contemporary mutant disco tape freaks in the midst of interviews with, say, any number of D-beat bands.

I'm hoping that if you’ve ever read my column, you’re not among the (many, many) people who dismissively say things about how they haven’t picked up an issue of MRR in years, or like to argue that MRR doesn’t cover anything interesting or relevant anymore, etc. If by chance you are, I’d like to recommend throwing MRR a couple of bucks for their final print issues as a small acknowledgement of the fact that I’ve made all of my columns available to read online free of charge, without you ever having to touch the smudged newsprint pages of an actual copy of the magazine. You can also still pick up back issues, including #426 (November 2018), where this particular column first appeared.

I was struggling a little bit to figure out what truly new (as opposed to newly reissued) music to write about this month, but I got an email completely by chance from my friend Aubrey in LITHICS as they were passing through the UK on their European tour, and she recommended that I check out this band called HANDLE that they had just played with in Manchester. Totally serendipitous, because their six-song demo collection Demonstrations is so completely my thing—all sharp, clanging incantations built from bass, drums, keyboard, and voice, with rhythm at the forefront even as everything else is collapsing around it. “Rubber Necks” and “Step By Step” both lock into propulsive grooves from mutant disco beats and harsh metallic percussion that intersect with a deep, menacing bass throb and urgently yelped and chanted vocals to skirt the line between the deconstructed danceability of early ‘80s New York groups like LIQUID LIQUID or BUSH TETRAS, and the more abrasive, confrontational scratch and scrape of their No Wave cohorts in DNA or THEORETICAL GIRLS. HANDLE somehow manage to be disjointed and tightly-wound at the same time (think of the delicate balance that TRASH KIT and SHOPPING pull off, if you’re looking for reference points from the 21st century), crafting truly anxious sounds for uncertain futures. Can’t wait for them to take the steps toward a proper physical release, because it will absolutely set things on fire when they do. (Absolute Fiction, absolutefiction.bandcamp.com)

After a handful of cassettes that appeared over the last few years, Canadian oddballs TOUGH CUSTOMER recently made their vinyl debut with the four-song Darlene EP on Sweet Rot, in the “slightly less new by the time y’all read this” category. Their austere-yet-playful, bass-driven vibe recalls the effortlessly cool minimalism of early ‘80s art-schooled heroines like OH-OK and Y PANTS, with flashes of KLEENEX-esque free-associated absurdism—“Mash” seems to follow a fairly standard post-punk combination of needling guitar, steady bass pulse, and kinetic drumming, until you start to wrap your head around the fact that lyrics are basically all about potatoes. Each song ends up subtly bending itself into similarly unexpected forms and sometimes more than once, whether it’s via the band hopscotching through the sneaky, shifting rhythms of “Drum Farm”, or the structure provided by the significant negative spaces between sparsely struck notes in “Clean and Clear” (the highlight of their 2015 debut tape The Worst, presented here in an even more tightened up version), or when a legitimately wailing guitar solo in “Soul Patch” breaks up the otherwise taut push/pull that’s been constructed. I can’t really think of many other modern post-punk adjacent bands who are this deep into their own self-defined and uncurbed musical universe, and that’s definitely to TOUGH CUSTOMER’s credit. (Sweet Rot, actualtoughcustomer.bandcamp.com)

The one-off 1979 single from the HAND GRENADES was self-released and packaged in a minimalist sleeve with no personnel credits or identifying information, which posed all sorts of questions as to who was behind the record and where exactly they had come from. Going strictly from audio cues, both sides of the 7” showcased a ramshackle post-punk sensibility in line with the DESPERATE BICYCLES, the HOMOSEXUALS, or SWELL MAPS (not to mention some nasal and vaguely British-accented vocals that sounded kind of like a bedroom-recorded Peter Perrett of the ONLY ONES), which lead many people to understandably reach the conclusion that the HAND GRENADES must have been a product of the same “it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it” school of late ‘70s UK DIY. In reality, they were actually from Long Island, and by the early ‘80s, they’d transformed into the new wave/power-pop group the SPONSORS, abandoning any hint of scratchy Messthetics aesthetics to write songs with skinny-tied titles like “In and Out of Love” and “Love I Can’t Wait”. Truth is stranger than fiction, but despite geography, the lone HAND GRENADES record has rightfully been regarded as a touchstone of UK-minded shambolic late ‘70s/early ‘80s art-punk and also one that unfortunately tends to fetch collector scum prices these days, so praise be onto Last Laugh Records, who just reissued the single as a 12” EP (Demos to London) with the addition of two previously unreleased tracks. “Demo to London” and “Coma Dos” from the original 7” tick off seemingly every box on the UK DIY checklist—charmingly fidelity-challenged, treble to the extreme, shaky single-note guitar, BUZZCOCKS hooks thrown slightly off-kilter, plenty of FALL-worthy repetition. On the unreleased side, the scrappy pop of “Cocoon” could almost pass for the TELEVISION PERSONALITIES stripped of their more psychedelically mod leanings, while “Murder” repeatedly cycles through the phrase “murder in the U.S.” over some wiry econo-punk to a biting and almost RONDOS/early EX-ish effect. Beyond mandatory! (Last Laugh, almostreadyrecords.com)

With each new vinyl reissue sourced from the first half decade or so Flying Nun’s back catalog, I’ve been holding out hope that Auckland’s darkly angular post-punk poster children THIS SPORTING LIFE would be the next in line to have their long out-of-print records brought back into circulation. And this summer, at long last, it finally happened… well, sort of. We’ll have to settle for the new Alms for Children CD anthology, which collects the group’s two proper Flying Nun releases (1982’s Show Me to the Bellrope LP and 1983’s In Limbo EP), the debut 7” from 1981 that was issued under their original name of ALMS FOR CHILDREN, and a number of previously unreleased live tracks—digital is definitely better than nothing at all in this case. Along with Stratford’s NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS and Christchurch’s the GORDONS, THIS SPORTING LIFE were a part of the early ‘80s New Zealand underground faction that fell more in line with the serrated nihilism of bands like the FALL and JOY DIVISION, in contrast to their jangly, SYD BARRETT/VELVET UNDERGROUND-worshipping peers. The FALL influence is particularly apparent in the tracks drawn from their mid-period, like “Wasting My Time,” where a rickety keyboard line fights for space on top the sort of stripped-down and flipped-out rockabilly rhythm that Mark E. Smith and company continuously revisited for a good forty years or so, with Gary Charlton’s vocals wavering between deadpan and desperate in equal measure. Other highlights of an already stacked compilation: the otherwise-unreleased “Suspicious of You,” with cavernous, razor-edged bass heightening the paranoid tension suggested by the title and lyrical content, and the frenetic, jagged pop sensibility of “Total Loss,” which features some unexpectedly chiming acoustic guitar that almost adheres to the general conception of the whole “Flying Nun sound”. I don’t think I’ve ever recommended a CD-only release in over three years of doing this column, but there’s a first time for everything. (Failsafe Records, almsforchildrenthissportinglife.bandcamp.com)

#handle #tough customer #hand grenades #this sporting life #futures & pasts #maximum rocknroll

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years

Photo

Book Of Genesis - From The Latin Vulgate - Chapter 7

INTRODUCTION.

The Hebrews now entitle all the Five Books of Moses, from the initial words, which originally were written like one continued word or verse; but the Sept. have preferred to give the titles the most memorable occurrences of each work. On this occasion, the Creation of all things out of nothing, strikes us with peculiar force. We find a refutation of all the heathenish mythology, and of the world's eternity, which Aristotle endeavoured to establish. We behold the short reign of innocence, and the origin of sin and misery, the dispersion of nations, and the providence of God watching over his chosen people, till the death of Joseph, about the year 2369 (Usher) 2399 (Sal. and Tirin) B.C. 1631. We shall witness the same care in the other Books of Scripture, and adore his wisdom and goodness in preserving to himself faithful witnesses, and a true Holy Catholic Church, in all ages, even when the greatest corruption seemed to overspread the land. H.

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This Book is so called from its treating of the Generation, that is, of the Creation and the beginning of the world. The Hebrews call it Bereshith, from the word with which it begins. It contains not only the History of the Creation of the World, but also an account of its progress during the space of 2369 years, that is, until the death of Joseph.

The additional Notes in this Edition of the New Testament will be marked with the letter A. Such as are taken from various Interpreters and Commentators, will be marked as in the Old Testament. B. Bristow, C. Calmet, Ch. Challoner, D. Du Hamel, E. Estius, J. Jansenius, M. Menochius, Po. Polus, P. Pastorini, T. Tirinus, V. Bible de Vence, W. Worthington, Wi. Witham. — The names of other authors, who may be occasionally consulted, will be given at full length.

Verses are in English and Latin. HAYDOCK CATHOLIC BIBLE COMMENTARY

This Catholic commentary on the Old Testament, following the Douay-Rheims Bible text, was originally compiled by Catholic priest and biblical scholar Rev. George Leo Haydock (1774-1849). This transcription is based on Haydock's notes as they appear in the 1859 edition of Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary printed by Edward Dunigan and Brother, New York, New York.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Changes made to the original text for this transcription include the following:

Greek letters. The original text sometimes includes Greek expressions spelled out in Greek letters. In this transcription, those expressions have been transliterated from Greek letters to English letters, put in italics, and underlined. The following substitution scheme has been used: A for Alpha; B for Beta; G for Gamma; D for Delta; E for Epsilon; Z for Zeta; E for Eta; Th for Theta; I for Iota; K for Kappa; L for Lamda; M for Mu; N for Nu; X for Xi; O for Omicron; P for Pi; R for Rho; S for Sigma; T for Tau; U for Upsilon; Ph for Phi; Ch for Chi; Ps for Psi; O for Omega. For example, where the name, Jesus, is spelled out in the original text in Greek letters, Iota-eta-sigma-omicron-upsilon-sigma, it is transliterated in this transcription as, Iesous. Greek diacritical marks have not been represented in this transcription.

Footnotes. The original text indicates footnotes with special characters, including the astrisk (*) and printers' marks, such as the dagger mark, the double dagger mark, the section mark, the parallels mark, and the paragraph mark. In this transcription all these special characters have been replaced by numbers in square brackets, such as [1], [2], [3], etc.

Accent marks. The original text contains some English letters represented with accent marks. In this transcription, those letters have been rendered in this transcription without their accent marks.

Other special characters.

Solid horizontal lines of various lengths that appear in the original text have been represented as a series of consecutive hyphens of approximately the same length, such as ---.

Ligatures, single characters containing two letters united, in the original text in some Latin expressions have been represented in this transcription as separate letters. The ligature formed by uniting A and E is represented as Ae, that of a and e as ae, that of O and E as Oe, and that of o and e as oe.

Monetary sums in the original text represented with a preceding British pound sterling symbol (a stylized L, transected by a short horizontal line) are represented in this transcription with a following pound symbol, l.

The half symbol (1/2) and three-quarters symbol (3/4) in the original text have been represented in this transcription with their decimal equivalent, (.5) and (.75) respectively.

Unreadable text. Places where the transcriber's copy of the original text is unreadable have been indicated in this transcription by an empty set of square brackets, [].

Chapter 7

Noe with his family go into the ark. The deluge overflows the earth.

[1] And the Lord said to him: Go in thou and all thy house into the ark: for thee I have seen just before me in this generation. Dixitque Dominus ad eum : Ingredere tu et omnis domus tua in arcam : te enim vidi justum coram me in generatione hac.

[2] Of all clean beasts take seven and seven, the male and the female. Ex omnibus animantibus mundis tolle septena et septena, masculum et feminam : de animantibus vero immundis duo et duo, masculum et feminam.

[3] But of the beasts that are unclean two and two, the male and the female. Of the fowls also of the air seven and seven, the male and the female: that seed may be saved upon the face of the whole earth. Sed et de volatilibus caeli septena et septena, masculum et feminam : ut salvetur semen super faciem universae terrae.

[4] For yet a while, and after seven days, I will rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and I will destroy every substance that I have made, from the face of the earth. Adhuc enim, et post dies septem ego pluam super terram quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus : et delebo omnem substantiam, quam feci, de superficie terrae.

[5] And Noe did all things which the Lord had commanded him. Fecit ergo Noe omnia quae mandaverat ei Dominus.

[6] And he was six hundred years old, when the waters of the flood overflowed the earth. Eratque sexcentorum annorum quando diluvii aquae inundaverunt super terram.

[7] And Noe went in and his sons, his wife and the wives of his sons with him into the ark, because of the waters of the flood. Et ingressus est Noe et filii ejus, uxor ejus et uxores filiorum ejus cum eo in arcam propter aquas diluvii.

[8] And of beasts clean and unclean, and of fowls, and of every thing that moveth upon the earth, De animantibus quoque mundis et immundis, et de volucribus, et ex omni quod movetur super terram,

[9] Two and two went in to Noe into the ark, male and female, as the Lord had commanded Noe. duo et duo ingressa sunt ad Noe in arcam, masculus et femina, sicut praeceperat Dominus Noe.

[10] And after the seven days were passed, the waters of the flood overflowed the earth. Cumque transissent septem dies, aquae diluvii inundaverunt super terram.

[11] In the six hundredth year of the life of Noe, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood gates of heaven were opened: Anno sexcentesimo vitae Noe, mense secundo, septimodecimo die mensis, rupti sunt omnes fontes abyssi magnae, et cataractae caeli apertae sunt :

[12] And the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. et facta est pluvia super terram quadraginta diebus et quadraginta noctibus.

[13] In the selfsame day Noe, and Sem, and Cham, and Japheth his sons: his wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, went into the ark: In articulo diei illius ingressus est Noe, et Sem, et Cham, et Japheth filii ejus; uxor illius, et tres uxores filiorum ejus cum eis in arcam :

[14] They and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle in their kind, and every thing that moveth upon the earth according to its kind, and every fowl according to its kind, all birds, and all that fly, ipsi et omne animal secundum genus suum, universaque jumenta in genere suo, et omne quod movetur super terram in genere suo, cunctumque volatile secundum genus suum, universae aves, omnesque volucres,

[15] Went in to Noe into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein was the breath of life. ingressae sunt ad Noe in arcam, bina et bina ex omni carne, in qua erat spiritus vitae.

[16] And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in on the outside. Et quae ingressa sunt, masculus et femina ex omni carne introierunt, sicut praeceperat ei Deus : et inclusit eum Dominus deforis.

[17] And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased, and lifted up the ark on high from the earth. Factumque est diluvium quadraginta diebus super terram : et multiplicatae sunt aquae, et elevaverunt arcam in sublime a terra.

[18] For they overflowed exceedingly: and filled all on the face of the earth: and the ark was carried upon the waters. Vehementer enim inundaverunt, et omnia repleverunt in superficie terrae : porro arca ferebatur super aquas.

[19] And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. Et aquae praevaluerunt nimis super terram : opertique sunt omnes montes excelsi sub universo caelo.

[20] The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered. Quindecim cubitis altior fuit aqua super montes, quos operuerat.

[21] And all flesh was destroyed that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beasts, and of all creeping things that creep upon the earth: and all men. Consumptaque est omnis caro quae movebatur super terram, volucrum, animantium, bestiarum, omniumque reptilium, quae reptant super terram : universi homines,

[22] And all things wherein there is the breath of life on the earth, died. et cuncta, in quibus spiraculum vitae est in terra, mortua sunt.

[23] And he destroyed all the substance that was upon the earth, from man even to beast, and the creeping things and fowls of the air: and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noe only remained, and they that were with him in the ark. Et delevit omnem substantiam quae erat super terram, ab homine usque ad pecus, tam reptile quam volucres caeli : et deleta sunt de terra. Remansit autem solus Noe, et qui cum eo erant in arca.

[24] And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days. Obtinueruntque aquae terram centum quinquaginta diebus.

Commentary:

Ver. 2. Of all clean. The distinction of clean and unclean beasts, appears to have been made before the law of Moses, which was not promulgated till the year of the world 2514. Ch. --- Clean: not according to the law of Moses, which was not yet given, but such as tradition had described---fit for sacrifice; (M.) though they might be of the same species as were deemed clean in the law, which ratified the ancient institution. --- And seven: (Heb.) simply seven, three couple and an odd female, for sacrifice after the deluge: one couple was to breed, the other two perhaps for food. H. --- Some imagine, that there were fourteen unclean and four clean animals, of every species, in the ark, because the Sam., Sept., and Vulg. read, "seven and seven." Origen, &c. --- But our Saviour, sending the Disciples to preach two and two, did not appoint a company of four to go together, but only of two, as is generally allowed. Mark vi. 7. C.

Ver. 11. Seventeenth day. On the tenth, God had given the last warning to the wretched and obstinate sinners, to whom Noe had been preaching, both by word and by building the ark, for 120 years; all in vain. This second month is, by some, supposed to be the month of May; by others, that of November. Usher makes Noe enter the ark on the 18th Dec. 1656. The waters decreased May 17, mountains appear July 31, he sends out the raven Sept. 8, and leaves the ark Dec. 29, after having remained in it a year and ten days, according to the antediluvian computation, or a full year of 365 days. The systems of those pretended philosophers, who would represent this flood as only partial, affecting the countries which were then inhabited, are all refuted by the plain narration of Moses. What part of the world could have been secure, when the waters prevailed fifteen cubits above the highest mountains? To give a natural cause only for this miraculous effect, would be nugatory: but as waters covered the earth at first, so they surely might again, by the power of God. H. --- Fountains and flood-gates. These are the two natural causes which Moses assigns for the deluge, the waters below, and those above in the sky or firmament. Heaven is said to be shut when it does not rain, (Luc. iv. 25.) so it is here opened, and flood-gates, or torrents of rain, pour down incessantly. But God attributes not the deluge to these causes alone; he sufficiently intimates that it would be miraculous, (v. 4. I will rain,) and still more emphatically, (C. vi. 17.) Behold I. Heb. "I, even I myself, do bring on a flood of waters." The idea which Moses give of the flood, corresponds with that which he before gave of chaos, when earth and water were undistinguished in one confusing mass. c. i. 6. The Hebrews look upon it as a continual miracle, that the earth is not always deluged, being founded, as they represent it, on the waters. Jer. v. 22. Calmet and others have proved, both from Scripture and from philosophical arguments, the universality of the deluge, against Isaac Vossius, &c. H.

Ver. 16. The Lord shut him in, by an angel besmearing the door with pitch, to prevent the waters from penetrating, while Noe did the like in the inside. C. --- Thus God supplies our wants when we are not able to provide for ourselves, and though he could do all by himself, yet he requires us to co-operate with him, and often makes use of secondary causes. W.

Ver. 24. Days: counting from the end of the forty days, when the deluge was at its height. C. --- In all the histories of past ages, there is nothing so terrible as this event. What became of all those myriads of human beings who perished on this occasion? We know not. Some have charitably supposed, that, although the far greater part perished everlastingly, a few who had been incredulous while Noe preached, opened their eyes at last, when it was too late to save their bodies, and by sincere repentance rescued their souls from the flames, and were consigned to do penance, for a time, in the other world. These heard the preaching of J. C., or believed in his redemption, while they were yet living, and so deserved to partake of his mercies, and joyfully beheld his sacred person when he came to visit them in their prison of purgatory. 1 Pet. iii. 19. He came and preached to those spirits that were in prison: which had been sometime incredulous, when they waited for the patience of God in the days of Noe, when the ark was a building: wherein a few, that is eight souls, were saved from drowning by water. Whereunto baptism, being of the like form, now saves you also, &c. See F. S. Bellarmine, &c. In these last words of S. Peter, we may also notice, that the ark was a figure of baptism, which is so necessary, that without its reception, or desire of it at least, no man can be saved. It is also a figure of the cross, and of the one true Church, as the Fathers remark, with S. Aug. de C. D. xv. i. M. &c. S. Greg. hom. 12 in Ezech. &c. --- This is so striking that it deserves to be seriously considered. It was only one, though God could have ordered many smaller vessels to be made ready, perhaps with less inconvenience to Noe, that we might reflect, out of the Church the obstinate will surely perish. S. Jer. ep. ad Dam.: In this ark all that were truly holy, and some imperfect, like Cham, were contained, clean beasts and unclean dwelt together, that we need not wonder if some Catholics be a disgrace to their name. The ark had different partitions, to remind us of the various orders of Clergy and Laity in the Church, with one chief governor, the Pope, like Noe in the ark. It was strong, visible, &c. and pitched all over with the durable cement, bitumen, and riding triumphant amid the storms, the envy of all who were out of it, till at last it settled upon a rock. So the Church is built on a rock, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail: she is not less obvious to the sincere seeker, than a city built on the top of the highest mountain, &c. We might here take a retrospective view of the chief occurrences and personages of the former world; we should observe the same order of the things from the beginning,---the conflict of virtue and vice, the preservation of the true faith and worship of God among a few chosen souls, who preferred to be persecuted by worldlings, rather than to offend God. They contended earnestly for the fiath once delivered to the Saints, to Adam and Eve, once innocent, and afterwards penitent. We behold original sin, and the promised remedy for mankind; while the rebel angels are abandoned, without redress. There was kept up a communion of saints: sacrifice to the one God was performed generally by the heads of families, who were priests in the law of nature. Even Cain, though a bad man, through hypocrisy, chose to offer sacrifice before he had quite broken off from the society of the faithful, and resolved to become the father of all excommunicated persons, and of all seceders. C. iv. 16. He was admonished by God that he had free will, and might merit a reward by a different conduct. His sentence, as well as that pronounced upon Adam, and upon all mankind, before the flood, reminds us of the particular and general judgment; as the translation of Henoch sets before us the happy state of the blessed, and the immortality, of which it was an earnest. See Douay Bible, where the chief mysteries of faith are pointed out as the creed of the Antediluvians. Even the B. Trinity was insinuated, or shewn to them, at a distance, in various texts: the unity and indissolubility of marriage were clearly expressed; the true Church continued in Noe, while the chain of schismatics and heretics was broken, and Cain's progeny destroyed. In this period of time, we may discover what the ancients so often describe respecting the four ages: --- the golden age is most perfectly found in Paradise; but only for a few days, or perhaps only a few hours, during which our first parents preserved their innocence. The silver age may have lasted rather longer, till the murder of Abel, or 128 years, when Cain began to disturb the peace of the world. From that time, till the giants make their appearance, we may reckon the age of brass. But that of iron had continued for may years before the flood. The like deterioration of morals we may discover after the deluge, and again after the renovation of the world, by the preaching of the gospel. For some time after these two great events, things bore a pleasing aspect; Noe was busy in offering sacrifice to God, Christians wee all one heart and one soul, enjoying all things in common, and God gave a blessing to the earth, and confirmed his covenant with men. Then Cham, Nemrod, and Babel appear, heresies in the new law break forth, and disturb the lovely harmony of mankind: but still a sufficient number preserve their integrity, till about the days of Abraham and Arius, in their respective periods, and may be said to have lived in the silver age, when compared with the brazen insolence of the great majority of those who came after. The iron age of these two periods, may be dated from the persecution of Epiphanes against the Jews, when so may apostatized from the faith, and from that much more terrible persecution which will be raised against Christians by Antichrist, the man of sin, (of which the former was a type) when the charity of many shall grow cold, and Christ will hardly find faith upon the earth. To that age may just be applied, those strong expressions of disapprobation which God made use of before the flood. G. vi. 3. 6. 12. He will punish the crimes of that age with a deluge of fire, and say, The end of all flesh is come before me, &c. v. 13. Time shall be no longer. Apoc. x. 6. H.

#book of genesis

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in-madhouses · 6 years

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drink up your movements (still i can’t get enough)

Niall Horan to Aahna Deakins: just a heads up

Aahna Deakins: ??

Niall Horan: i think caroline wants to have sex with you

Aahna Deakins: i mean i already knew that

Niall Horan: …

Niall Horan: what?

Aahna Deakins: seen

Niall Horan: ‘m gonna kill harry

Aahna Deakins walks onto the set that first day of filming and Niall just knows he’s fucked. Like, proper, up the arse, without lube, fucked.

And he doesn’t think that very often. Not since he was twenty and earning minimum wage as an english lit teaching assistant who auditioned for a small role in a tv show but ends up being cast as Remus Lupin.

Three and a half critically acclaimed seasons later, he’s one of the more successful actors in the British young adult genre, earns more than the average person’s annual income in a month, and oh, right, is on first name basis with JK Rowling. A feat he’s sure he’ll never top considering that he was an avid Potterhead growing up. (He still has his first copies of the books, creased, weathered, and now, signed by the author herself, sitting on his shelf along with every script that he’s ever received.)

Life is, more or less, good. But after weeks of whispers proclaiming everything from new characters being added to the cast to the producers planning a genderswap episode, things take a sudden nosedive.

Their red stamped ‘Confidential’ scripts made clear that some of the rumours were true; they were adding a character to the show but said character is only there for a backdoor pilot that spills over multiple crossover episodes within the latter season of Marauders: Mischief & Mayhem. If it were any other show, it would be easy to assume that the writers were getting lazy; a whole six episode arc to introduce characters and a plot that will depart for its own show? Seems ridiculous, but the idea is solid and the script is tight, so tight, that apparently Rowling herself greenlit the crossover slash spin off.

Now, by all intents and purposes, Niall and Aahna should have gotten along fine. She’s a model turned actress with a strong work ethic while he’s a seasoned veteran by now, having worked with a lot of people in his time being on Marauders. Being one of the four titular characters kind of guarantees that he’s a given amidst the revolving faces of extras and guest stars. But for some reason unknown to man, Aahna Deakins completely just… gets the better of him.

He recognises her from pictures and billboards when they have their first table read, tall and tan, all lean muscle and sharp edges, her face as mysterious as it is expressive.

When he looks her up, he finds her tweets sharp and witty, her instagram lined with humour, and her presence in the tabloids a staple. And for that alone, he realises that they would mix about as well as oil and water. The fact that they share about 50% of their screen time together doesn’t help. Every scene, every table read, every small discussion turns, at some point or another, into a ridiculous debate and often time (more than a little) raised voices.

He’s not sure how, or who, starts it, but they have full on shouting matches about inflection and intention and everything in between. And it’s not like he’s the oddity who doesn’t play well with his cast members, he gets along with the cast members like a house on fire. She gets along great with everyone too, moving into Harry’s guest room because they go way back and she’s not about to make any property commitments in London until she knows for sure that her show is getting a full season order.

And that’s where things go from bad to worse for him because it means that they live in the same apartment complex and he’s practically a permanent fixture over at Harry’s.

Harry Styles to marauders doing marauder-y things (plus liam): nialler why’d u call 12 times

Niall Horan: slight emergency, am out of beer

Harry Styles: just come over u never had a problem with that b4

Niall Horan: deakins there?

Harry Styles: look do u have any idea how big a deal this is for her

Harry Styles: she did two pilots that got axed before they aired in the states

Harry Styles: and that one movie that basically made a loss in the box office

Liam Payne: didn’t she win a bafta for that?

Louis Tomlinson: nah

Louis Tomlinson: she won the baftas by going on the red carpet with her girlfriend

Harry Styles: *ex gf

Harry Styles: they broke up at the after party

Harry Styles: it was a mess™

Zayn Malik: i still got pictures from that night… that i don’t… understnd what’s going on

Harry Styles: lol yeah u were pretty fucked mate

Louis Tomlinson: i maintain i had nothing to do with that

Liam Payne: wow that girl’s not having a good year is she?

Harry Styles: yeah so maybe u guys should like go easy on her

Zayn Malik: i’m out with her and caroline rn wot u talking about

Louis Tomlinson: i don’t have a prob with her

Liam Payne: i literally have like two scenes with her

Niall Horan: seen

Harry Styles: did you just type ‘seen’

Harry Styles: that’s not how you seen someone, u just seen them

Harry Styles: !!!

Louis Tomlinson renamed the group niall old man horan™ cant work tech

Niall tries to be nicer to her, he really does, but Aahna Deakins doesn’t quite make it easy for him.

She’s… a bit of an enigma.

On one hand, she’s just the type of person he wouldn’t mind as a friend; a sense of humour, the ability to draw the line between on and off screen relations, and an oddly in depth knowledge on history and mythology. (They had a twenty minute row on set about lycanthrophy which had to be escalated to some staff writers before they reached a resolution that she was indeed correct, despite the fact that he’d been the one playing a werewolf for most of his on-screen career. Where is the justice?)

But on the other hand, their similar interests; a passion for food, books, and golf doesn’t stop them from arguing all the time. And it doesn’t quite matter where they are either; on scene, in the studio, at the apartment, even while grabbing lunch with the cast. There’s apparently always something to disagree over.

Suffice to say, it drives everyone a little bit crazy. Especially Harry, who is caught in between more often than not.

“Oi, five-year-olds! We were trying to get some work done here?” Harry hollers, rolling his eyes.

Aahna’s in midst of running lines with some of the boys at Harry’s when Niall decides to pop by for a beer and they (naturally) find something or another to bicker about.

“Oh, I’m a five-year-old?” Aahna asks, incredulous, “I’m not the one who needed seven takes to get one line right,” she shoots a glare at him as he plops down on the couch, a beer in hand, intentionally close to her despite the copious amounts of space available literally anywhere in the living room.

It’s evident at that point, that no work is going to commence in the space anytime soon.

“I wouldn’t have needed seven takes if you didn’t keep breathing down my neck about my bleedin’ accent,” Niall jabs her in the ribs with his free elbow, “Christ, you give a model one acting gig and she thinks she’s Helen fucking Mirren.”

Niall’s not quite sure why, but the need to rile her up as much as she does him is overwhelming. It isn’t even hypothetical, when it comes to Aahna, he’s condescending and he’s obstinate to a point of being obnoxious, and he can’t seem to help himself. He’s tried to isolate where the antagonism is coming from, because it really is out of the ordinary; her presence, on set and in recent times, in his life, somehow nettles him more than it should.

But he isn’t sure what it is about her. Isn’t sure why he’s reacting the way he is.

Aahna just… gets under his skin.

“Don’t you have your own apartment to muck around and drink and do nothing in?” Aahna huffs at him, voice condescending as he plucks the script out of her hands.

“Well if I did that, who would you have to distract from learning your lines?” Niall shoots back, voice dripping with something not quite pure annoyance.

“Alright you two need to cut it out!” Harry is pretty much frantic at this point. “And Lou, stop taking shots. It’s barely sundown! What is wrong with you?”

Louis simply shrugs and tilts his head back, tequila shot glass in hand and refusing to look even a little bit guilty for not helping the situation even at all.

“Many things, primarily his overwhelming desire avoid responsibility,” Zayn shrugs.

“Oh, blow me Malik,” Louis snaps.

“Not for free.”

Life falls into a bit of a schedule like that. They work, they bicker, their friends slash cast mates break up the tension of their bickering, and they all end up getting drinks together or watching some kind of documentary at Harry’s whilst playing a drinking game at his expense (they take a shot everytime he points out an inaccuracy).

And it works, until they’re about halfway into filming the third episode when something just snaps in him.

“Can you stop it with these accusations?”

“It wasn’t an accusation,” she hisses back, the line of her jaw going taut as she walks off set, heading, he’s guessing, away from him. Which of course, only leads to him trailing behind, matching her large strides.

It’s the same old song and dance.

“Really?” Niall taunts, unable to help himself, “Sure as hell sounded like one.”

“Well, it wasn’t.”

“Alright, then.”

“Just shut up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just shut up!” She snaps, taking a step forward at him as if to issue a challenge. And suddenly they’re all too close. The inches separating them feel like a ravine. An abyss from which he’s not sure he’ll recover from.

“It wasn’t an accusation, it was a observation,” she says finally after the silence lingers one second too long between them, “You come in and you do the scenes without a thought; you know your character, you know Remus by heart, and that’s great for you, but some of us don’t have a five season contract to tide us over.”

Niall grits his teeth at that.

Her lips purse at the silence and when she finally speaks, he’s sure it’s just to provoke him some more.

“You’re maddening,” she says, sounding equal parts exasperated and defeated.

“What, so I can’t argue with you but I can’t be agreeable either?”

“Well, maybe it’s too late to be agreeable.”

“Well, maybe it shouldn’t be.”

The glare that she throws him is heated and harsh, “Why do you care so much?”

She’s got him there, he has to admit.

And so they stare at one another like that, breaths uneven and face tinged pink from anger.

Before he knows it though, he’s crashing into her like a tidal wave; mouth on mouth, skin on skin, and searing heat all over.

It’s not just a kiss, it’s a head rush. It’s a fight. It’s… akin to a flood, and it’s as though he’s waited his whole life to feel it. Part of him knows that they were just seconds ago shouting themselves hoarse at one another, but she’s pulling him in closer and all Niall can hear his blood rushing in his ears, blocking out everything but the smell of her, the taste of her, the feel of her.

Her lips are pressing up against his, ravenous, matching his intensity.

He’s glad that they’ve actually gone into overtime for the scene and the studio is mostly empty at this time of night because when they finally stumble into his dressing room, the door slams behind them with all the subtlety of police sirens in the dead of night.

“Fuck,” she gasps, pulling back as though reality hit her like a tonne of bricks. Her eyes wide and frenzied, lips red, hair wild around her head. Niall is certain that if they were to be walked in on, they would look to an outsider, guilty as sin.

Her blouse is halfway buttoned and barely hanging off her shoulders while his belt buckle is undone and fly already down.

“Fuck?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “Fuck!” She reiterates herself slightly louder, running her hands through her already wild hair.

Niall breathes out a shaky laugh, “Someone’s eloquent tonight.”

“Oh like you think of a better word to describe,” she motioned the space between them a little too frantically with her hand, “… whatever this is?”

“I’ve got a couple off the top of my head, yeah.” He shrugs, looking her straight in the eye.

There’s a silence. And then…

“Oh shut up,” she instructs, taking a step closer before tugging on his jumper and pulling his lips back down onto hers.

Niall Horan to niallofficial is a shitty twitter handle: seriously

Niall Horan: which one of you bellends got Sierra involved

Harry Styles: ???

Niall Horan: someone told my agent

Niall Horan: who apparently is also deakins’ agent (thanks btw harry)

Niall Horan: that i’m being difficult on set

Niall Horan: now she wants to ‘talk to me’ tomorrow at her office

Louis Tomlinson: … have u evn checked twitter since u created your acc?

Louis Tomlinson: mirror.co.uk/things-getting-fired-up-between-niall-horan-and-model-actress-aahna-deakins-on-marauder-set

Niall Horan: oh

Liam Payne: don’t think ‘oh’ is gonna fix this one mate

Niall Horan: this explains that email from the execs

Louis Tomlinson: i can’t believe u read those studio memos

Harry Styles: not to abruptly change the subject but i need 2 talk about this thing with me n ains

Niall Horan: my agent is about to rip me a new one for on set behaviour

Niall Horan: which by the looks of the mirror article, the whole world knows about by now despite it being a closed set and everything

Niall Horan: but by all means commandeer the chat to talk about your love life

Louis Tomlinson: either get together or dont

Zayn Malik: ur not exaclty an authority on the subjct tommo

Harry Styles: i have booze

Louis Tomlinson: in the car now

Liam Payne: swing by to pick me up

Zayn Malik: me too

Niall Horan: getting in the elevator now

Ainsley Williams to Niall Horan: You should look at Twitter right now

Ainsley Williams: Everyone is so frenzied

Ainsley Williams: By the way, what were you boys up to last night?

Ainsley Williams: Apart from your drunk tweets

Ainsley Williams: Harry called twice to tell me he really enjoys scones

Ainsley Williams: Hello?

Niall is a little nervous as he makes his way to Sierra’s office at five past noon. The woman is a hardass agent who’s great at sniffing out opportunity (not that he’s needed for much from her in the past four years). She books his appearances, endorsements, and despite him never being interested, never fails to send over scripts for killer movie roles.

By proxy, she also works as his publicist, although they have more of a you stay out of trouble and I don’t have to put out any fires type of relationship.

And now he’s five minutes late to see her.

Sierra I didn’t get to where I am today by sleeping in Jones, is going to rip him a new one. He knows it. He can feel it in his bones. Niall can just imagine, and he groans at the thought of it, her utter annoyance at him. First he makes headlines for being a diva on set and not playing nice with the newcomer and then shows up to a meeting late? She’ll have his left nut and then some.

He reaches her office door a good three minutes later despite the near jogging pace he’s been walking at and silently curses Harry’s complicated love life. He’d told Aahna to stay at Ainsley’s so that he could have a lad’s night but ended up mostly just whining about how he doesn’t quite know where he stands with Ainsley.

Sierra’s assistant waves him in and he takes a deep breath before pushing the door open, surprised himself to find Aahna already in the room and apparently trying to reason with the older woman.

“Mr. Horan, how nice of you to join us,” Sierra greets his entrance sweetly, sarcasm simmering just beneath the surface of her voice.

Niall shuts the door behind him, rolling his eyes ever so slightly. The woman is a great agent, he can’t argue with that, and an expert negotiator too, but she’s definitely got a short temper and a flair for dramatics.

“Do sit down.”

Niall slides into the chair next to Aahna, intentionally avoiding her gaze considering that they hadn’t discussed their rather… explosive row few days prior. Not that they had much to discuss; they yelled, they had a bout of angry shagging, and kind of just left things at that.

It helps that they hadn’t needed to be in the same room together since. Up until this point that is.

“You wanted to talk to me?” He almost chokes out the words, voice a little worse for wear after the night of heavy drinking.

Sierra raises her eyebrow before letting her stare flit between her two clients, as if gauging something.

“Well, it has come to my attention that there’s been some… trouble on set,” the older woman starts saying, “Now, I don’t normally interfere in these matters but neither of you have publicists or managers, and no one is pointing fingers, but filming might need to go into overtime for two weeks.”

Sierra takes a long breath and exhales rather theatrically before continuing, “Would I be wrong to assume that this is because you two can’t seem to get your scenes wrapped satisfactorily?”

Niall sighs, “Is that what she told you?”

The woman frowned, “Is that incorrect?”

“That’s hardly—”

“Aahna, you’ve had your say, now I’d rather hear his,” Sierra says curtly before diverting her attention back to him.

Niall takes a deep breath before non committally saying, “Well, there was never a problem like this until she came around.”

“Oh, piss off!”

“Language, Aahna!” Sierra snaps, glaring at her sharply for a moment before resettling her gaze on Niall, exhaling crossly, “You were saying?”

He pauses for a moment, feeling his co-star’s rage boring holes into the side of his head. The co-star he does not at all like but shagged in his dressing room. (But there’s no way he’s discussing that with Sierra. Or anyone really.)

“We just… rub each other the wrong way,” he settled on saying, “And maybe that’s stalled production a little but—”

“Oh, so this is my fault now?” Aahna interjects.

“You can’t just conveniently skip over the part where you constantly insult how I play my character and think that that’s not going to have an effect on production!”

“Forgive me for trying to have a civil discourse—”

“And here we go again with the accusations—”

“For the last time, it’s not—”

“All you need to do is show up and read your lines—”

“We’re on the same team here, you wank—”

“If you two could restrain yourselves!” Sierra interjects, her voice the loudest Niall has ever heard. She pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales, taking her time to (he’s guessing) let all three of them calm down.

She declares crisply, voice slightly acidic, “Do you think we can find it within ourselves to act our age?”

“I wasn’t the one tweeting obscenities at midnight,” Aahna rolls her eyes, crossing her arms like a petulant teenager.

Technically, she’s right. (He’d seen some of her meme retweets of their video that’s making its way around the internet and things got… a little more heated online. The boys and the booze didn’t help, obviously.) But he’s not about to let her know that.

“Are you fucking kidding me?! I wasn’t the one retweeting vines—”

“Obviously, you didn’t even know what a vine was before—”

“WOULD YOU BOTH. JUST. SHUT IT?!” Sierra explodes, her voice cracking with shrill exasperation, her eyes blazing at the indignant lack of respect in her two clients.

They’re both immediately silenced, words dissolving off of their tongues at the volatile frustration of one Sierra Jones. Niall suspects that their agent is way past pinching the bridge of her nose in dramatic silence. So they sit there under her steely gaze.

After a moment or two, she states as a matter of factly, “I’ve come to a conclusion that you two idiots need to sort this out yourselves.”

He hears Aahna scoff derisively.

Niall blinks at that, slowly and deliberately, contemplating his agent’s words and willing her to continue that sentence because honestly, he imagines that paying her 20 per cent of his income would warrant a better solution.

“You two clearly have personal issues that you need to resolve outside of the set,” Sierra says, eerily calm as she flips through some files, some scripts, and stacking them all together, “If these little outbursts are of any indication, your antagonism towards one another clearly goes beyond work.”

Niall reluctantly turns to meet Aahna’s confused gaze as they both pull into the same trail of thought, all of five minutes with them and they’ve somehow driven their agent completely mental.

“The only way I see fit to remedy this situation is to forcibly give the two of you time together to straighten things out.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, his head fills with apprehensive dread. More time together did not sound like a solution. If anything, it spells disaster, and clearly, Aahna thought so too.

They both speak out at the same time;

“The more time we spend together is just more time spent fighting.”

“Wouldn’t throwing us into The Hunger Games be faster?”

“Is that even necessary when we’re already halfway through the season?”

“If we’re already behind schedule that hardly sounds like a good idea.”

Ignoring them both, Sierra rearranges the stack of her files patiently and stands up, tucking them into her oversized purse before pushing a button on the phone on her desk, “You can leave for the rest of the day, Andrea, I’ll be working remotely.”

“Hang on,” Niall asks as Sierra walks around the table toward the door, “Did you just say ‘forcibly’?”

She swivels around to face them as she reaches the door.

“I don’t know about you kids, but my Twitter feed today is 80% people asking if the two of you are having hate sex,” Sierra’s no nonsense eyes snaps over to his mirthlessly, as though issuing a challenge, “And I’m not saying that hate fucking is going to fix this… whatever it is that’s going on between you two, but it might be something to think about in the next few hours.”

They’re both out of their seats at this point.

They have definitely, definitely, driven their agent to the brink of insanity.

“You’re kidding.”

Sierra tight lips lifted slightly into a satisfied smirk, “I don’t ‘kid’.”

“You can’t just lock us into a room together and force us to get along.”

“Watch me.”

And with that, she is out the door with a rather decisive click echoing behind her slamming the door shut.

Aahna turns to look at him, “Did she just—”

“Lock us in her office together? Yeah, I think so.”

Niall’s eyes fly shut in disbelief, head lolling back and frustrated groan leaving his lips as she lunges forward toward the door to rattle the knob inconsequentially.

She turns around, a slip of paper that Sierra somehow slid through under the door in her hands.

“This is a nightmare,” she declares, passing him the piece of paper.

Office is soundproof so yell away.

Snacks and water in my left drawer.

Cleaners have the keys. They come at four.

DO NOT BREAK ANYTHING.

A rather tense, momentary silence fills the room. While Niall resigns himself to their fate, it seems that Aahna has other thoughts, fidgeting with the doorknob some more and getting really up close and personal with the door in general.

When he doesn’t seem at all bothered to help, she snaps at his direction, “What are you even doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Vegetating, or something equally productive.”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Niall kicks his legs up onto Sierra’s desk and places his hands behind his head.

“So you’re just going to not look for a way out of this?”

“She said that the cleaners are coming in a few hours,” he shrugs, enjoying the fact that the whole situation seems to have her more on edge than him.

And on edge she proves to be, making a ruckus and a whole production out of trying to unscrew the hinges and then moving onto attempts to break the doorknob. After about twenty minutes of her basically exhausting herself and him making mindlessly unhelpful comments, Aahna slumps onto the sofa.

It’s uncomfortable to say the least, but only because they’ve never really spent any time alone together. There are always other cast members around, or crew members, or… other people in general. And the last time they were left alone, well, that didn’t really fix anything.

Niall never would have thought in a million years this is what his career would result in after taking on Remus Lupin.

He had prepared himself for pulling all-nighters to get scenes just right for rather difficult directors or falling in love with guest stars on the show over table reads on otherwise unremarkable Wednesday nights or piling laughingly into taxis with the cast and crew after a night out and having good-naturedly bemused drivers who’d chuckle and ask to take selfies with him. But he hasn’t quite done any of those things.

He’s never been one for rash, near-reckless errors in judgment so he doesn’t quite know why he expected life to change.

But it didn’t, for so long, that he got comfortable and now he doesn’t know what the protocol is when you don’t get along with a co-worker, get into their pants that one time, be involved in a bit of bad press, and then get locked in a room with said co-worker.

So they just sit in silence for a few minutes, the tension palpable, and it’s turning him into a bit of a mess honestly, sitting there with his phone dead and nothing to do to distract from the fact that the last time they were alone together, things got a little… out of hand.

He tries not to think about it, he really does, but the way she drapes herself onto the sofa and a lack of things to occupy his mind with makes it a pervading thought; the way she had kissed him back, hard and rough and unexpected. The way his hands moved from her waist, lower and lower, like they’d been there before.

Niall starts shuffling through some of the scripts on Sierra’s desk to have something to do, but none of them hold his attention for long. His thoughts revolve mostly around how the last time they were alone together, his heart raced and his head swam and his blood seared.

The slow-going and low-simmering… something that he feels for her has inexplicably expanded. Exploded. Gone from an itch he couldn’t quite scratch to a blistering burn he couldn’t ignore. He thinks that liking someone isn’t a prerequisite for wanting them. Which is why he finds himself blurting out, “So the boys may or may not have also suggested that we should fuck.”

Aahna raises her eyebrow at his direction from the couch slash casual sitting area in Sierra’s office where she’s taken up permanent residence in the past ten minutes, casually swiping on her phone.

Her expression ripples with surprise and then disdain.

“Why exactly do the boys think we should fuck?”

“I didn’t tell them that we technically already did if that’s what you’re worried about, they just think that some platonic fucking might actually help us be in the same room as each other without wanting to kill each other.”

And also they thought it might be good for me to stop being a soppy romantic and just get laid, he thinks. But he doesn’t say it.

“Right,” she says, but there’s something a bit off about her voice, “The platonic fucking in your dressing room didn’t exactly help us with Sierra today now did it?”

“It’s just a thought.”

“Uh huh.”

The pause that follows is heavy and full of all kinds of something he can’t name.

“This was a mistake,” he groans.

“What’s that mean?”

“What?”

“You said ‘this’ was a mistake,” she replies casually.

His heartbeat is beating fast, faster than it should be, and his palms are damp.

“What’s ‘this’?” She stands up, “Suggesting that we fuck? Or…did you mean something else?”

A muscle in his neck ticks, lurches, jumps.

“You started this,” he snaps.

“Look, I’m not a phase, okay, I’m not your crisis or your fucking spiral because your life is so God damn—”

He can tell that it’s about to turn into one of their angry yelling matches that got them into this predicament to begin with so he just nips it in the bud because he’s still slightly hungover and really isn’t in the mood, “Look, just forget I mentioned it!”

“It’s just a thought,” he’s also on his feet by now.

“Okay,” she nods in a tone that suggests she may not be okay with it.

Her gaze softens and looks genuinely alight with some kind of curiousity. But he catches the tail end of some unknown emotion flitting across her face as she takes another step forward.

“So let’s dissect it. You think we should, as Sierra so eloquently put it, have angry hate sex to solve our problems?”

He hesitates and clenches his jaw, unsure how she can be so blasé about the whole thing.

Tension hangs in the air between them like thick velvet curtains, heavy and all-consuming. The intensity of her gaze far too intoxicating to be uncomfortable.

“No, I’m—what do you think is happening here?” he hedges, his frustration mounting.

“I think you’re propositioning me for mindless totally non-timing consuming sex.”

Another step.

“Non time consuming?” Niall sputters, taking a step forward, a choked-off huff of frustration building at the base of his throat.

“Someone was pretty eager the last time,” she shrugs.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he huffs, completely lying.

They’re so close to one another now that he’s almost afraid a flicker of eyelashes would betray him. But she’s standing her ground, so he just waits for her to argue with him instead.

She doesn’t.

Instead she tugs on his shirt collar and fully closes the gap between them.

Their lips, as if entirely of their own accord, start to move furiously against each other and sort of just… work, in an unexpected and unexplained harmony.

Like a melody and a lyric that shouldn’t fit but flowed beautifully together.

Her throat hums in agreement beneath his lips.

Taking that as a go ahead, he moves his hands from beneath her shirt to lift her onto the solid surface they hit, Sierra’s desk. In turn, she wraps her legs around his waist, pulling him closer and smirking as he groans into her mouth, his growing arousal rubbing against her.

Aahna all but swallows her exhale as he slides his fingers into her, the sound that rips from her throat mid way between a grunt and a groan.

“You sure you want to talk about eager?” He all but challenges, a streak of confidence bordering the line of arrogance rearing its head as his fingers move against her obvious enthusiasm.

“Well, I haven’t had dick in a while, what’s your excuse?”

Her fingers are digging into his shoulders the way they are and her voice all raspy and out of breath shooting electricity into every corner of his body.

Niall can’t seem to think or breathe at their proximity. Nevermind that he’s being stupider than he’s ever been in his life, she whimpers as he groans, and his mind is blissfully blank, so he continues the teasing, rubbing and stroking and flicking.

“Okay, you have about five seconds—” she starts to say before he hastily covers his mouth with hers.

He lets his tongue push past her lips at the same time he pushes into her and the sound that comes from her throat is so fucking intoxicating that he‘s not sure of anything anymore.

Niall grips both sides of her hips tight, moving slowly inside of her, giving her the only thing he’s got that she wants and it pisses him off to be honest, how well they fit together. And by the way she’s leaving fingernail crescent marks down his back, he’d say she feels it too. They are scorching and sweaty and utterly out of breath, lips lazily locked. He’s stretching and drawing out the whole ordeal further than he thought himself capable of, eliciting sounds from her that play a soft symphony around the still room.

She pulls her head back to let obscenities freely tumble out, her breath hitting his skin in ragged huffs.

Aahna practically keens for more, her cheeks impossibly flushing and her muscles tight beneath him. It’s all heady and sensual and way more than he can take so in one smooth motion, he slides out and flips her over to bend her over the desk.

He thrusts into her, deliberately frantic, each pump leaving her more of a quivering mess than before, her knees shaking and barely holding her body upright.

As her body begins to spasm, his thrusts grow more desperate, barrelling her towards the release they both crave.

A dozen or so strokes later, he’s there too.

It takes them both by surprise, the sheer intensity of it. They pant together, recovering slowly, still tangled and reeling, neither moving more than what it takes to claim the next gulping breath.

Caroline Davies to Niall Horan: u fucking deakins yet?

Niall Horan: WHAT

Niall Horan: NO

Caroline Davies: care to explain y not?

Niall Horan: care to explain where this is coming from?

Caroline Davies: cos

Caroline Davies: u should get on that

Caroline Davies: or under that

Caroline Davies: or behind that

Niall Horan: i WILL block you

Caroline Davies: lol like you know how

Caroline Davies: also, i mean, if u wont i will

Niall Horan to Aahna Deakins: just a heads up

Aahna Deakins: ??

Niall Horan: i think caroline wants to have sex with you

Aahna Deakins: i mean i already knew that

Niall Horan: …

Niall Horan: what?

Aahna Deakins: seen

Niall Horan: ‘m gonna kill harry

The first time they consciously agree to have angry hate sex, in Sierra’s office no less, Niall thought it’d be a one-time thing, an interesting experiment culminated from a hangover and not having had sex in… a while.

But then the second and third time go by, and it occurs to Niall that there might be some real science behind the whole hate sex theory.

Things actually begin to drastically improve after they start shagging out their frustrations on the regular. When they agreed on something without yelling a good few minutes about it first, Louis chokes on his tequila shot. (It’s at the pub at the corner of the studio and the boys decided that everyone needs to take a shot whenever he and Aahna ‘go at it again’ and it spectacularly backfires when they take a preemptive shot just as she says, “No, I think you’re right.”)

A few more weeks and a few more tucked away in a dusty corridor rendezvous later and they’re all at the production wrap party, hosted by the studio after the final scene of the season has been shot.

It’s a Tuesday and they’re out with some of the crew at a little bar smack down in the middle of London. Aahna’s been ordering round after round of brightly coloured cocktails, all of which named after incredibly explicit sex acts, and between the outrageously short dress she has on and the sound of her saying things like, “hit me with a screaming orgasm” and “get me a couple of leg spreaders”, Niall thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s been thrust into a very special kind of hell.

And he can’t stop fucking staring.

It’s so easy to see now that she’s more than just a persona. Not just an empty, shallow, airbrushed mask. Not just a famous for being famous type influencer slash model slash actress.

She’s blatantly jagged and simpering and unapologetic about how she is.

And she’s smart too, not a lot of people have the nerve to move their entire life across oceans to fight her way into Hollywood (albeit it didn’t pan out as well as it could have). And he doesn’t doubt for a second that she’d had to fight tooth and nail for her Marauders audition as well. That she probably had to call in favours, made some unpaid appearances, turn down “comeback” runway opportunities. Basically, really really want it.

As Aahna throws her head back, laughing from across the room at some joke the ridiculously tight v neck t’ shirt by the bar just made, Niall thinks that they need to talk about their whole provoke each other and then press each other up against walls situation. His mind is slightly befuddled by the fact that they’ve been low-key shagging for the past month or two yet she’s flirted quite openly with the bartender for the past hour and the half.

(He’s also a bit confused about the fact that he can’t find any internet searches that addresses her sexuality head on. There’s little to no indication that she’s even ‘into the d’ as the kids say.)

Her laughter carries itself across the room and Niall fights the urge to go over and drag her away from the dark-skinned, broad-shouldered bartender.

Said bartender has high cheekbones and eyes half-lidded to go along with his lazy trying hard to play it cool demeanor. His posture is perfect, a little too perfect for a man standing by the bar at some shi shi up and coming hotspot in London. If it weren’t for the pub full of who’s who at the studio, Niall might think that he’s one of those tries too hard to be dangerous prep school boys peddling designer drugs with a carefully crafted layer of apathy.

Distracting himself from the scene, he busies himself with the tedious task of talking to some studio executives. Someone has to, considering that Harry and Ainsley have disappeared god knows where together, Zayn and Louis are going round with a bottle of tequila making cast members take shots and Liam is deep in conversation with one of the directors.

He’s mid polite laugh when out of the corner of his eye, Niall sees her meander out the backdoor all hips swaying and dress swirling and alone.

A few seconds go by and he excuses himself to follow, but something, or rather someone, stops him before he even makes it to the door.

“So how long have you two been fucking?” Caroline asks bluntly.

He’s not sure how Caroline of all people would know, but in hindsight, Aahna did leave his place the other night to meet her for a drink in one of his t’ shirts.

He raises his brow and feigns nonchalance, “Me and Mark from finance?”

“You and Aahna, bellend.”

He laughs, “What makes you say that?”

“Because you have that look in your eye.”

“What look?”

“That ‘I want to fuck the shit out of you’ look.”

He looks Caroline straight in the eye and is incredibly proud of himself for not cracking, not even a little, “I do not have an ‘I want to fuck the shit out of you’ look.”

“You do and you so want to hit that,” the blonde says, all smug.

I’m already hitting that, he almost says, the words on the tip of his tongue just balancing perfectly before it swan dives him into trouble.

“No, you want to hit that,” Niall chuckles out instead.

“We get along too well for there to be any sexual chemistry,” Caroline shrugs, “The two of you on the other hand…”

“There’s nothing but animosity between us, Care.”

“Can I point out that hate sex is a known cure for situations like this?”

“Yeah. No,” he says before sidestepping her and pushing the door open.

He’s pretty sure she’s grinning like the cat that caught the canary and Niall isn’t sure if he’s the canary in the situation. The London air hits him like something out of a literary scene, a little nippy but a much appreciated break from the suffocating interrogation by the hands of one Caroline Davies inside.

Just as he recalls why he headed out there into the back alley to begin with, a line of cigarette smoke wafts into his view.

“Don’t you have better things to do than play babysitter and watch me smoke a cigarette whilst sipping on your tonic water?” Aahna remarks, a cigarette between her fingers and a layer of indifference around her.

“Excuse me?”

Niall may be twenty-five and enjoys the occasional beer or two (that often don’t end at two) but he’s also old fashioned and refuses to crack one open until the sun goes down to the very least.

“At least I’m not drunk at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, at a company party.”

“I like to chase my cocaine high with gin, it goes down real smooth,” she hums, mocking the judgement in his voice with a line of smoke to his face.

“You realise that this isn’t Models R’Us anymore, right?”

She flashes him a smile that a journalist once called ‘equal parts make your slacks tighter and stop a baby elephant in its tracks terrifying’ in the Daily Mail and informs him in a sickeningly sweet voice, “First of all, it was a joke. And second of all, it’s a party, old man Horan. Loosen up.”

“I’m not—” He cuts himself off, expression visibly hardening as she effortlessly pushes his buttons.

There’s a pause as he collects his comeback and she leans in, as if to whisper a secret.

“Careful,” she simpers, narrowing her eyes, “Might give yourself an aneurysm there.”

“I don’t think you’re in a place to give off health advice, Deakins.”

She almost chokes on the smoke as she cackles at his statement, “Oh, like you are? Mr. three knee surgeries and clearly needs glasses but doesn’t wear them?”

“Just…” he says tiredly, “Shut up.”

“You shut up,” she snaps back, but without any real bite in her voice.

“I’m not the one trying to peddle an STD to poor unsuspecting bartenders.”

“Oh come on,” she drawls, “Getting chlamydia from me has been the highlight of your year.”

“I was wondering what that rash was,” Niall plays along as they grin at each other, sharp and feral, as though not realising who it is exactly they’re bantering with.

She drops the cigarette to the ground and their lips lock.

She tastes of cigarettes and sin. And her mouth is just the way he remembered, hard and warm, tongue flickering against his as he pulls her body close. It’s wet and messy and a little bit desperate the way their teeth clack together and their tongues urgently wanting more, but they stumble blindly into a storage room of some sort.

She arches up into him with a whimper when he moves his way down her neck.

He sinks blunt teeth into her sternum right where the fabric of the top crosses over on her chest and she whines at the contact. Her body already erupting in goosebumps.

“What are we doing?” He asks as he slides ad hand up her skirt between her thighs.

“I don’t know; what do you think we’re doing?” She gasps between breaths as she grinds against his fingers.

He’s not even touching her in earnest yet, just teasing, keeping her on the edge, ghosting over her skin.

“I thought you weren’t into this?”

“What, this being dick?” Aahna asks, contempt in her voice.

The disdain, obvious and unforgivingly sharp, would have bothered him if he didn’t quite enjoy feeling her body react to his touch so much.

He uses that as opportunity to slip his fingers into the thin fabric that is her underwear, using the pad of his thumb to rub gentle circles into her just the way he knows drives her crazy.

“Well, there’s this concept called bisexuality. I’m sure you’ve— fuck,” she moans throwing her head back as his fingers slide into her.

Her cheeks are flushed and bright while her eyes keep on fluttering, struggling to stay open.

The sounds escaping her throat as he continues to finger fuck her makes things so much better and so much worse at the same time. When he feels her insides clench at him and her breath shudder into his shoulder, reaching her release, he’s ready to burst.

For a moment there’s nothing but the sound of their harsh breathing, and she sighs into his neck. And then, she lifts her head and leans back against the wall, sly smirk dancing on her lips, “You know, they say once is a mistake and twice is a pattern.”

“Yeah, and what’s seven and a half?” Niall jokes weakly, his pants so tight he’s surprised there’s any blood going to his brain at all.

“Good practice,” she says as her hands slide from their spot on his back and down to the front, undoing his belt and unzipping his trousers with a certain finesse that’s getting him impossibly harder, “I mean, giving a blowjob isn’t exactly like riding a bike.”

He forgets what they’re even talking about when she gets down on her knees in the dingy little storage room.

Niall Horan to CALL TIME IS 12PM DONT FORGET: did empire just reschedule the shoot?

Niall Horan: i swear tommo, if you’re hungover and lied about the baby being sick again…

Niall Horan: guys

Harry Styles: why do u even have a twitter acct if ur never gonna use it

Niall Horan: what?

Louis Tomlinson: for once it is not my fault thank you very much

Zayn Malik: a and h are stuck with the bobbies

Niall Horan: what?!

Liam Payne: aahna saw a cyclist get hit and run-ed, she called harry after she called the ambulance, he goes over because he’s an idiot, they get recognised, twitter blows up because the interwebs think aahna and harry hit the cyclist, and now they’re giving a statement at scotyard

Louis Tomlinson: and that’s what you missed on glee

Niall Horan: the cyclist ok?

Aahna Deakins: thanks for the concern, horan

Niall Horan: and why would you stop if you weren’t the one to hit him

Aahna Deakins: it was a corner

Aahna Deakins: he could have gotten run over by other cars!

Harry Styles: didn’t you stop for a guy who got hit by a car once?

Louis Tomlinson: because he was chasing his dog?

Zayn Malik: at like 2am at night or some shit?

Niall Horan: i’m not a lone female driver nor a celebrity yet at that point

Niall Horan: and he got hit because his dog jumped out of his car and he ran after it

Aahna Deakins: wow was the dog okay?

Niall Horan: that’s beside the point

Louis Tomlinson: the owner still sends him pics every christmas

Niall Horan: THE POINT IS

Niall Horan: it could’ve been one of those staged scams where you get robbed blind

Niall Horan: or you could’ve gotten caught in a fan mob

Niall Horan: have you no sense of self preservation, deakins?

Louis Tomlinson: aww look at nialler all concerned for aahna

Harry Styles: i call that growth

Zayn Malik: look how far they’ve come

Liam Payne: 😍😍😍

Niall Horan has left the chat

Aahna Deakins to Niall Horan: we’re secretly fucking on the regular

Aahna Deakins: does that answer your self-preservation question

Niall Horan: THAT IS NOT THE SAME THING

Zayn Malik to this is your reminder to stop getting tattoos before they replace the whole cast: we’re heading over to pick ‘em up

Zayn Malik: make sure they dont get mobbed cause of harry’s fans

Liam Payne: so we can all get mobbed together apparently

Niall Horan: no

Louis Tomlinson:

As much as he loves his job, Niall is glad when things wind down. It’s mostly post-production work once all the scenes are shot and the cast get to take a little break. Not like anybody actually takes breaks; Harry and Zayn usually have promotional commitments or other projects that they jet off to, as does Ainsley, Liam almost exclusively has some West End or Broadway gig, Louis disappears into his role of on duty father and occasional boyfriend depending on the state of his on again off again relationship, and Caroline does quite a fair bit of radio.

For Niall though, it spells out a chance to settle in and recharge. Maybe get some golfing in. Playing someone on screen is like having someone in your head, and it’s exhausting. So he fulfills contractual appearances, does an interview or two, and reads scripts for movie roles he knows he won’t take because trying to purge one character out of his head is hard enough.

If he’s feeling particularly restless, he dives into a bit of writing.

He’d hit a wall with one particular piece he’s been working on a while ago and wasn’t sure where he’s going with it. But between shelving it and the hectic filming season, he thinks he might just be able to get back into the groove of it.

He’s reading through the pages when his phone buzzes violently by his side. Niall wedges the mobile between his ear and shoulder, answering on autopilot more than anything.

“Hello?” It’s Aahna’s voice, sounding like she’s calling from the middle of Glastonbury or some rave or whatever the young’uns are into nowadays.

Except her voice sounds terrible, gasping and raspy and all wrong.

He shoots upright from his former position on the couch.

“Deakins?”

“Yeah— I’m just— Hang on— I can’t deal with that right now, can you please get her from the loo so we can get out of here?”

There’s a shuffling and some shoving sounds coming from the other end, but then she’s back before he can question it or voice his worry.

“Sorry— We’re kind of next to bar fight. Anyway—”

“Did you just say bar fight?”

“Yeah, Harry’s been away for a week now and he hasn’t called to check in with Ains so we went out for some drinks where she basically whined about how she doesn’t know what they are and then Caroline thought it’d be fun to instigate a fight between these two guys who kept buying us drinks,” she rushes through the whole thing like it isn’t a big deal, “It’s a whole ordeal.”

“Yeah?” Niall says, having no idea where she’s going with the call.

The background noise seem to be getting louder and he eyes his car keys from his living room couch, wondering if he should go pick them all up before it morphs into a social media frenzy and another one of those things that the studio execs send them all emails about with exclamation marks in the headline.

“Yeah,” Aahna shouts back over the phone, “You remember that time when I told you that Harry’s new coffee maker was voice activated?”

He smiles at the memory of it, dropping the papers in his hands to his side, “Yeah, that was a fun morning. Spent fifteen minutes yelling at the damn thing before Harry asked me the hell I was doing.”

She laughs at that, “I swear you’re like a seventy year old in a twenty five year old’s body.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Niall’s finding it hard not to raise his voice to match hers at this point.

“Nothing, I was just calling to let you know that watching Caroline manipulate guys into a fisticuffs was really fun,” she shouts back, louder this time, “Almost as fun as watching technology stump you.”

Niall goes warm all over at that. He blames the chilli he wolfed down earlier that she left for him last night.

She’s stayed over at his almost every night since Harry’s been away, doing away with the cloak and dagger of sneaking in and out to avoid questions or suspicions.

It’s been surprisingly domesticated. She brings over takeout, they watch something or another on the telly, they fuck, they bicker all over his apartment that he feels her breath lingering in corners when she leaves for whatever responsibilities she has for the day, and it’s been sort of just… nice.

The intimacy of it all should feel like too much; the cuddling after sex, the falling asleep wrapped up in one another. But he can’t find it in him to to care. Not when his blood is still getting back to their path not south of his body and his sheets have yet to cool from their exertions. Besides, they’d agreed that they weren’t hurting anyone with their arrangement so there’s no point trying to fix something that isn’t broken and that’s just been that.

When he opens his door about an hour later, it’s Aahna. Leather jacket over a thin romper (ridiculous for London weather, in his humble opinion) hair all blowsy and too much leg showing.

No wonder some pricks was buying her drinks all night. But he doesn’t tell her that, obviously.

“You need to tell Harry you’re not dead,” she pushes past him into the apartment, kicking off her shoes and hanging her jacket at the hook next to the door habitually, without him prompting her to do so she goes.

“What?”

“He’s been texting me to check up on you this whole week because none of your socials show signs of life and it’s driving me insane.”

He stares after her as she makes her way to his living room, confused. He does a few InstaStories on set here and there but those are more contractual obligations for promo than anything.

“And it’s not like I can tell him you’re fine because I’ve seen you practically everyday,” Aahna continues, “When I tried to flip the subject on him for leaving Ainsley hanging yet clearly not being dead because he’s texting me like clockwork every day, he accused me of not looking out for you, because apparently it’s a neighborly obligation to ensure that you haven’t accidentally bored yourself to death or something.”

“I don’t need looking out for,” Niall frowns.

“Good, ‘cause I’m apparently doing a shit job,” she jumps on the couch, lying flat with her feet propped on the armrest. She cocks her head looking over at him, “Although in his defence, your socials have been particularly dead and that’s not— Wait, what is this?”

She yanks out the scripted version of his story from beneath her.

“It’s nothing,” he says, as he goes to snatch it out of her hands.

“Niall James Horan, are you actually looking to expand your curriculum vitae?” Aahna cocks her eyebrow up as she leafs through the first few pages.

“Give me that.”

“Are you auditioning for a film?” She asks again, eyes skipping across the words on the pages, and ignoring his previous statement.

“No. It’s nothing,” he repeats defensively, tugging at the script, feeling nervous and oddly self-conscious about it. But Aahna has got an inexplicably strong grip and she weasels out of his grasp, script still in hand, jumping off the couch to read more of it without his limbs getting in the way.

“Where’d you get this from?”

“It’s not—”

“Niall, this is good,” she looks up at him, eyes alight, “This is really good. You should do it.”

He starts trying to explain that it isn’t a movie, just a silly thing he’s been working on and off over the years but he trails off before he can let the words out.

He can’t believe it, but the sleek, sour, and at times, inexplicably charming co-star, Aahna Deakins has, over the weeks, gradually gone from a veritable thorn by his side to somewhat of a begrudging friend. (Well, a friend who ruthlessly mocks him every available opportunity and then jump into his bed when no one is looking. That sort of friend.)

She’s just staring at him and they’re just silent, which neither of them are used to.

“It’s just a thing I’ve been fiddling with,” he finally admits, “I’ve been writing it for a couple of years, it’s not… It’s not anything.”

“I’m five pages in and I’m hooked, why aren’t you pitching this to the studio?” Aahna asks, confused.

“It’s barely a done script.”

“Then finish it,” she says, as a matter of factly.

“Sure,” he says with a shrug.

She looks at him pointedly, “I mean it. You need to show this to Sierra or something.”

“Alright.”

“You better,” she says, pushing the thick wad of paper flimsily stapled together into his chest as she turns to head to his kitchen as though it was hers. Although at this point, with all the take out and beer she’s bought over, it might as well be.

“If anything, you should do it for me,” she grabs a beer out of the fridge.

“For you, huh?” Niall sets the script down, trailing behind her into the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she knocks the beer cap off the corner of the bar counter with ease, “To impress me.”

“Trust me, I’m trying,” he says under his breath.

She cocks her head at that, and he takes the opportunity to snatch the beer from her, “Forget I said that.”

“Alright,” she says, mirroring his tone from earlier, smirk on her lips, smug and proud.

He’s moved closer to her without realising.

“You do, by the way,” she plucks the beer bottle back from his hands effortlessly.

“What?”

“Impress me.”

He says nothing for a minute, just looking at her. And she’s just looking back at him. Too much space between them. His heart, still thudding from the panic of her finding the script to begin with, slowing finally.

“Now,” she says, breaking their prolonged eye contact, “Let’s talk about getting Harry off my back about you; how do you feel about fashion shows?”

Niall Horan renamed the group can we pls stop renaming the group chat

Louis Tomlinson renamed the group horan and deakins sitting on a tree

Niall Horan: what

Louis Tomlinson: oh im sorry

Louis Tomlinson renamed the group #teamdrowningindeniall

Louis Tomlinson: better?

Niall Horan: first of all, you’re not using the hashtag right

Niall Horan: second of all, pretty sure this is cyberbullying

Louis Tomlinson: first of all what do u know about hashtags

Louis Tomlinson: second of all no is not

Louis Tomlinson: everyone saw the fashion show photos

Niall Horan renamed the group stop it or i’m calling old bill on you tommo

Louis Tomlinson renamed the group lmao old bill cant help that ur in love with aahna

Liam Payne: hahahahahahhahahahah

Harry Styles: could’ve been worse

Harry Styles: he could have started a fb couple page for u

Niall Horan: …

Louis Tomlinson: if i weren’t so happy ‘d be upset i didn’t think of that first

Zayn Malik: link us as soon as it’s up

Niall Horan: thanks, harru

Niall spends a good five minutes under the stream of the too hot shower water just staring at the tube of face wash. The body wash, her brand that leaves him smelling a little too coconut-y and a little more moisturised than he likes, swirls down the drain as he contemplates the face wash so innocently staring back at him.

It’s the exact brand he uses, one that you can’t just get out of any Boots or Tesco. No, his face wash is one that you could only get at its boutique brand outlets.

And he knows he’s overthinking it. Knows that it’s stupid to get all worked up over a simple face wash. He can’t help it though, a few weeks of under the radar shagging has left him even more unnerved than before they were working out their onset aggression.

He makes a gargantuan effort to push the thought away; the thought that Aahna went out of her way to get him his face wash to keep at her bathroom. The thought that even though filming for the season has wrapped and for all intents and reasons they wouldn’t be seeing much of each other anymore, she still got his face wash to keep at her place.

The thought that their level of intimacy now is almost on the edge of being caught. (She insisted that she needs to make Harry’s place look lived in by the time he gets back and Niall goes over to help her out with that except they just ended up fucking on the couch with some mindless cop drama playing in the background.)

He’s cleaning up in her bathroom and there it it, his face wash just sitting there in the shower. Like it’s been there waiting for him all this time.

Niall shuts off the water and steps out of the shower, face wash be damned. But when he walks out to the living room, she’s just lounging on the couch, scrolling through the Netflix queue in the ratty t’ shirt he was wearing earlier and his heart swells with some kind of feeling he hates to admit.

She settles on some documentary on greek mythology and he wonders for a moment if she is Persephone; an abstract idea he dreamed up and kidnapped, now kept captive in his mind.

(And he knows right then, that he is completely and utterly fucked.)

#wow this one got away from me #niall fic #fic: and they'll hang us in the louvre #fic: louvre #niall smut #niall horan fanfiction #keep reading

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wineanddinosaur · 3 years

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Wine 101: Australia

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by Whitehaven. From the sunny bays and lush green vineyards of Marlborough comes to a new world Sauvignon Blanc that only New Zealand can offer. White Haven’s winemaking philosophy centers on the pursuit of quality without compromise, a principle that is supported at every step, from vineyard to glass. Whitehaven uses only Marlborough grapes in our wines, ensuring that only truly authentic Marlborough character is in every bottle. Inspired by a dream, try Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc. Your haven awaits.

On this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses all things Australian wine. Beavers explains that Australia has so much more to offer than just Shiraz. Though each of Australia’s 60 wine producing regions produces Shiraz, the island also grows some of America’s favorite wines, such as Merlot, Cab Franc, Sauvignon Blanc, and even Chardonnay. Beavers also walks listeners through the rich history of how wine first landed in Australia, thanks to a man named James Busby.

Beavers then serves as a personal travel guide as he takes listeners on a journey through the six states where Australian wine is grown. From the Adelaide Hills to the Hunter Valley, Australian wine ranges in everything from terroir to price. Tune in to learn more about how and why your new favorite wine will likely come out of Australia.

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‬Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and what was classical music back in the day? It wasn’t even really classical, right? It was just like “Yo, Bach just dropped his new cantata.”

What’s going on wine lovers! Welcome to Episode 8 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. I’m the tasting director of VinePair. It is Season 2, and how are you? Almost 3,000 miles away from New Zealand is this huge continent, this huge island — the largest in the world — called Australia. They make wine, and we have to talk about it. It’s a little bit crazy. Let’s do this.

It’s big, it’s hot, it’s a continent, and it’s an island. It’s Australia! It is one of the most unique places on earth. Now, New Zealand’s pretty damn unique. We know the biodiversity of New Zealand is crazy. You imagine a place that didn’t see humans until about 800 years ago, and those two islands have been existing for a long time. It’s just crazy. It’s very similar in Australia. It’s just a very different place. Eighty percent of wildlife in Australia is indigenously unique to Australia. You don’t see these species anywhere else. New species are being discovered every couple of years. The Great Barrier Reef is generally regarded as the world’s largest living organism. That’s insanity. It’s the only continent that’s a single country. It’s also the largest island on the planet. If you set it on top of the United States, it’s basically the size of the United States. It’s crazy. When it comes to wine, it’s nuts. This is such a big country, such a big continent, it has six states. Like we have the United States, it has states. But to have six states? Each of them is just huge. That’s the thing about Australia, there’s so much to talk about with Australia that I, as usual, can’t get to it in 20 minutes.

We’re going to have a discussion about Australia, because there are 60 wine regions in that country, and I can’t get to all of them. Even though there are certain varieties that thrive or do well in certain wine regions, the Australians do not discriminate when it comes to grapes. Almost every grape you can name, they have in Australia. In the ‘90s and the late ‘90s as well as the early 2000s, Australian winemakers were considered flying winemakers.

They are a kind of winemaker that is so voracious for information and experience that when their harvest is over in the Southern Hemisphere, they fly to the Northern Hemisphere for harvest and start working in Europe, the United States, and other wine regions. It’s crazy. Some of them never come back to Australia. They stay in Argentina or in California, but they’re some of the most focused, confident winemakers out there. What’s really crazy is, even though there are appellations, I believe their wine regions, like New Zealand, it’s not a definite controlled appellation system. You have these areas and these regions that have vineyards in them with names of the regions, and wine is grown there. But it’s not a full-on controlled appellation system. There’s no way to go through the system to help you guys understand what’s going on.

We’re just going to talk about everything that’s happening. There are no indigenous vines in Australia. There wasn’t a hybrid thing going on there. I’m saying this because it’s so far out there from where vines were that it’s just crazy how European vines made their way to this place, and at some point, started making great wine. None of that would have happened if it wasn’t for the son of a gardener from Edinburgh, Scotland, named James Busby. This guy loved agriculture. When he made it to New Zealand, and then eventually Australia, he fell in love with the place so much that he decided this is where I’m going to grow wine. He had an interest in wine. He actually went all over France, Germany, and Spain to learn about wine. He wrote some books about viticulture, and it was his mission in life to bring the vine to Australia and make it work. He had already done it in New Zealand. He actually was one of the first winemakers in New Zealand where he would sell his wine to British troops. I mentioned that in the New Zealand episode.

James Busby is the father of wine or the prophet of wine or the dude who started the wine thing in Australia. Once he thought vines could grow and wine could be made in Australia, in 1830, he went back to England and proceeded to tour all over the continent of Europe, learning about vines, learning about wine. He ended up taking a bunch of cuttings back to Australia. Basically, he just got the whole wine industry started in Australia. It’s thought that he brought 680 vines. All individual vines are probably a group of one grape, a group of another grape. At this moment, here is this legend, I don’t even know if it’s real or not but it’s a really cool story. The story is that when James Busby was in France, he was in the Rhône region and he got vine cuttings of what they at the time called “Scyras.” He brought that and a bunch of other grapes back to Australia. The Scyras grape was actually Syrah. Since it was labeled Scyras, at some point, the Australian dialect or accent became Scyras into Shiraz. We’re going to talk a lot about that in another episode. That’s a cool, little fun story. I’m not really sure if that’s true or not, but I like it.

Another little fun story about Australia is they’re the ones that invented the bag-in-box by a winemaker named Thomas Angove. In 1965, he was inspired to create this bag-in-box based on a product that was already in the market, but for battery acid. It was a bladder that had battery acid in it, and it was covered by a box, and he wondered what else would we get in that? Wine. Brilliant. If you look at Australia, and you train your eye down towards the southeastern corner of the country/continent/island, that southeastern chunk of Australia, that’s where all the wine is made. There is some wine being made in the southwest, but just not as much. We don’t see a lot of that coming onto the market. We’re starting to see some wines from the Margaret River, but we mostly see wines coming from the southeastern part of the country. These wine regions are in states. And as I said, they’re huge. In the southeastern part of Australia, you have South Australia, the state of South Australia, the state of New South Wales, the state of Queensland. Then, you have Tasmania, which is an island just off the southern coast. That is where the majority of the wine is made even though there are grapes that are doing very well and very popular in certain regions. The Australians plant every grape. There’s Tempranillo from Spain happening in Australia, Riesling, Roussanne from the Rhône, of course, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon blanc, Cab Franc. You name it, it’s being grown in Australia. And if the Australians can make a grape work, they’re going to run with it. However, because of the popularity of Shiraz, almost every region basically grows Shiraz. As I said, there are other grapes.

Let’s get to some of these wine regions so we have an idea of what we’re looking at when we see a bunch of wine bottles from Australia. In this southern east section of the country, in the western corner of this section is the southern part of the state of South Australia. This is where the majority of wine that you will see in the market comes from. It’s responsible for almost half of the annual production of wine in Australia. There are a bunch of wine regions in this area. The ones we’re going to see are a couple of valleys. You have Barossa Valley, which you’re going to see everywhere. It is one of the oldest wine-growing regions in Australia. This is the home of Penfolds, which is the winemaker that made a big statement on the American market. This is a very old historical site, all dry-farmed, meaning it was never irrigated to this day. It is a big deal. We’re going to see a great big, inky, beautiful Shiraz coming from this area.

Barossa Valley‘s neighboring region to its west is a fine wine region called the Adelaide Hills. This is a region that actually has two subregions in it, Piccadilly Valley and Lenswood Valley. Now, I don’t know if you’re going to see that on labels, but it shows that there is terroir here. Whenever you see these subregions, they’re saying not only is Adelaide Hills awesome, but these two places are special for a reason as well. This region is also known for Shiraz, but the Shiraz here — as full-bodied as it is — can get a little bit spicy and almost close to what it’s like in its home in the Rhône of France. Also, what’s done here are sparkling wines made from primarily Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Going north, the Adelaide Hills are part of this mountain range. To the north of that is another valley called Clare Valley. Clare Valley is historically very important in Australia. When we do the episode on screw cap versus cork, we’re going to talk a lot about this place. Clare Valley is known for extremely popular, wonderfully age-worthy, crisp and deep Riesling. It’s just amazing how Riesling works in this area. And there are a lot of others — you’re going to see McLaren Vale, which is going to be coming more onto the market with a really kind of spicy, herby Shiraz. There’s also Eden Valley, which is just south of Barossa Valley or neighboring Barossa Valley, and they do Rieslings as well. That’s stuff to keep an eye out on. The Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, you’re definitely going to see.

There’s also a region way down south towards the coast called Coonawarra. That place is known for its Cabernet Sauvignon, not necessarily its Shiraz. We’re going to see more from Coonawarra on the market.

East of the state of South Australia, you move into the state of Victoria. Now, this place is crazy populated with wine and wine history. There are 800 producers in Victoria, and Victoria is pretty small. They’re all packed in there. I think there are 20 wine regions just in Victoria alone. There’s a good amount of wine from Victoria on the American market. You’re going to see them from regions with names like Rutherglen, Alpine Valley, Beechworth, King Valley, Sunbury, Mornington Peninsula, Bendigo. But the one region in Victoria that is making a big noise on the American market is the Yarra Valley. This is very exciting, guys. This is a place where they decided it was a good idea to blend Shiraz with a white wine called Viognier. The result is just awesome. It’s this beautiful, bright, berry fruit, red wine. It has depth to it. Then, you feel this sort of clean, white acidity just running through it. It’s a very cool thing. That’s kind of the one places in Victoria that is standing out.

All the other places I mentioned and there’s more of them, of course, Shiraz, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc. There are all kinds of grapes being grown in this area. However, Shiraz basically rules the day. Yarra Valley is unique because of that blend of Shiraz and Viognier. You’re not going to see a lot of it right now, but it’s coming. The Bendigo region in Victoria is doing really awesome Cab, and there’s a place called the Goulburn Valley. The unique thing about that area is they’re messing around with Roussanne, which is great. There’s not a lot of it in the American market, but it’s coming, and it’s delicious.

Then, we go north from Victoria into the state of New South Wales. There’s a lot of wine-growing regions here, too. What is blowing the minds of people in the wine industry right now from this region is a valley called Hunter Valley. In this valley, they grow grapes called Semillon. If you remember our Bordeaux episode, you’ll remember that Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc is the blend of Bordeaux. Somehow, this native Bordeaux variety over in the Hunter Valley of Australia makes incredible wine. Semillon that can age — well, so far they’re saying like 20 years, which is wild. It develops into this beautiful thing that if you sip an old Semillon, sometimes, you think that it’s just a bunch of oak, but it’s not. It’s just the age of the wine. It’s a very unique place with a very unique wine. Since the area is so popular, the surrounding regions are starting to get a little bit of recognition as well. This region was originally known mostly for Chardonnay. There’s still good Chardonnay coming out of that area. The climate of that area — warm days and cold nights — it brings a fruity, juicy round Chardonnay. It’s very fun and very enjoyable stuff, very good.

There are more places like Heath Coat and Henty and the Grampians, and there’s actually the Pyrenees. It’s actually a joke, because the Pyrenees is just low-lying hills. There’s wine everywhere in Australia and we’re going to see more of it. Australia never backed away from our market. We backed away from Australia. I think at some point we got overwhelmed, overstimulated, I should say, with the Shiraz — the big inky, full-bodied Shiraz. Of course, Malbec comes into the market and replaces that big inky with Malbec’s big inky.

The thing about Australia and what their focus is going forward is they want to show us on the American market that they are not just a big Shiraz ocean. They want us to know that they can be fine wine and smaller producers. There are a lot of wine regions that we’re going to start seeing in the future from Australia that are small. Some of these wine regions have 20 winemakers in them. What they’re doing is they’re focusing. The Australians are good at this. They are focused, and they are confident. When they hit it right, they hit it, and they just keep on hitting it right.

We’re going to start seeing a lot more of Australia come onto our market, but it’s going to be more expensive. That’s just the way it has to be. It’s because it comes from a long way away, and it’s usually in the smaller yield. The thing is, we have to get used to the idea that Australian wine that’s going to blow our minds is going to be a little bit higher in price.

The thing is, I think we should be open to the idea of tasting these wines because Australia isn’t all just Shiraz. Australia is all kinds of stuff. I would say there’s Riesling, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chardonnay. Those four really do well all across the wine-growing regions of Australia. As I said, Tempranillo, Cab Franc, there are so many other vines that are being grown and blended. We just have to wait and see.

Again, this is a very general overview of Australia because of how intense it is. This season, we’re going to have a couple of episodes that will reference Australia, and we’ll get more information on the history of the place. This will get you started in Australia with some regions that you already will see, and an idea of just opening your mind for what’s to come from the land down under.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps get the word out there. And now, for some totally awesome credits. “Wine 101″ was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darby Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by Whitehaven. From the sunny days in lush green vineyards of Marlborough comes a New World Sauvignon Blanc that only New Zealand can offer. Winehaven’s winemaking philosophy centers on the pursuit of quality without compromise, a principle that is supported every step from vineyard to glass, Whitehaven uses only Marlborough grapes in our wines, ensuring that only truly authentic Marlborough character is in every bottle. Inspired by a dream, try Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc. Your haven awaits.

The article Wine 101: Australia appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-australia/

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johnboothus · 3 years

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Wine 101: Australia

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

‬Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and what was classical music back in the day? It wasn’t even really classical, right? It was just like “Yo, Bach just dropped his new cantata.”

The article Wine 101: Australia appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-australia/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-australia

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jpstadtlander · 5 years

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The Ter'roc: Evolution - A Book About Our Alien Humanity

My loyal fans will know how long I've been "taunting" them with my sci-fi masterpiece "The Ter'roc" (a novel based on the short story in Ruins of the Mind). Well, it's finally becoming a reality. I'm in final editing now and we hopefully will be able to set a release date in the upcoming months though that release date will realistically be early 2020. Those who are just now hearing the name Ter'roc or have heard it before and have no idea what it's about... here's your chance to find out. The Ter'roc is not just another book I'm writing. It's the book. I have created an entire universe (think Star Wars, Star Trek, that kind of thing) with multiple unique species and cultures that go back billions of years. What really sets this universe apart from all others is the concept that humans were created by this species (Ter'roc) two hundred thousand years ago. It details elements in our history and how our religions, morals, intellect and technical advances came into play through their guidance. It also shows how (in this book) we have never been alone in the universe and we are a mere extension of the Ter'roc. I've decided that I am going to have to create a website - sort of a glossary that talks about the history, culture, and details about the Ter'roc. But it won't come out until the book is released. For me, it's been a deeply fascinating and intellectually stimulating story to weave. So, I've decided to take a moment and give you a peek inside the book, even if it is at least a year before you get to see the real thing. Here's a brief timeline that I have drawn up of this new universe: FYI: Gaia is the Ter'roc name for Earth.

The Preview

Wales, UK, 8304 B.C.E. Eògan had been working for the past four days on the foundation for his new hut that would soon house his young family. He was pounding on a stone so that it fit just right in the wall. His father, Faolan, was helping him carry stones from the nearby field to the building site and had gone off to retrieve some more. Eògan looked up to where he expected his father to be returning, carrying a few more stones in his make-shift sling. He was surprised to see another man coming toward him that he didn’t recognize. Wiping his hands on the grass, he stood up and walked over to meet the stranger. "Greetings," said Eògan. “Good day. I am Oushahn. I am looking for work.” the man replied, his accent was thick, strange. Eògan looked around the site, then looked at Oushahn. “Well, I could use some help working on this foundation. Can’t offer much at the moment, except a warm fire and some food.” “A warm fire and some food would be wonderful.” The two men and Eògan’s father worked for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Come nightfall the three men were huddled around a fire outside the perimeter of the new fieldstone foundation. Faolan looked at the foundation behind him. “Men, we did good work today.” And he nodded toward them. “Helping is important,” said Oushahn. “It binds us together, enabling us to become better people and understand one another. It also helps with tasks we might not be able to do alone.” “I agree,” replied Eògan who looked up from the fire at his newfound help. The man’s eyes were glowing an iridescent blue. Eògan turned around to see if there was a light behind him that might be reflecting off Oushahn’s Oushahn’s eyes, but there was not. “Oushahn, your eyes . . . are glowing.” “Yes, that tends to happen at night.” He replied, calmly. Eògan looked at his father confused and cocked an eyebrow. “Why?” he asked. Instead of answering Eògan’s question, Oushahn said, “Do you believe we are alone here?” Then pointing to the stars, he asked, “Do you suppose there might be something out there, other than just us?” Eògan looked at his father and then at Oushahn, asking straight-forwardly, “I believe that the stars are the gods watching us. If there were others, would you know anything about it?” “I can teach you a great many things if you want to learn,” Oushahn replied, poking at the fire, again evading Eògan’s question. A moment of silence passed over the three, the fire crackling in front of them and thick smoke wafting in Oushahn’s direction. Finally, Eògan said, “I would like to learn whatever you can teach.” “As would I,” said Faolan. The two men listened to Oushahn tell of the mind’s ability to control objects, explaining how an ancient people had been around since the dawn of time that his people called “The Bereshit” and how the human existence, the mortal body, was just an illusion. Oushahn taught them of the importance of the stars to tell the days of the seasons and how the power of the sun could be harnessed to do great things. The United Kingdom, 2856 B.C.E. The caravan proceeded slowly over the rolling hills of the large British isle across the countryside that would one day be called the Preseli Hills. There were six horses leading the caravan. The two trailing horses of the six pulled a large wooden cart with solid wood wheels that Iodocus sat upon with his co-bogadh Seisyll. They were both in a hypnotic state, focusing on the massive stone that floated behind the cart. Each took turns in about thirty-minute shifts, concentrating on the levitation of the forty-foot slab. Light as a feather, bright as a star. Iodocus thought in a half-trance, seeing not a massive stone floating behind them, but rather a loose feather that he kept moving in his mind from side to side to catch the wind just right and keep it afloat as it followed the caravan. There were five other similar caravans following suit across the hills toward the site of the ancient circle. Iodocus was one of seventy from three different tribes who had been taught the old ways passed down through ancient times through the knowledge of the fathers. The Bogadhs had been taught that the power of the mind could move objects much larger than anything a normal man could move. It took years of training and mental discipline to master bogadh and as such those who could use it were highly revered. The teams were part of a collective group that followed the path laid out by their families who believed that long ago they were given instructions to build a bogadh structure that would one day send a message to the heavens. Detailed drawings on stone tablets had been kept for hundreds of years in the families that laid out how stones were to be cut, what materials they must be made from and how they must be aligned with the stars. Although Iodocus and his brethren did not completely understand the full breadth of their project, it was an honor to serve on it and help to build it to its completion. Only the high priests of each village knew the full plan that would one day laid out in the circle of what would one day be Wiltshire, England and how it would connect with the already old structure in Sí an Bhrú in the future land of Ireland. Sí an Bhrú had been built almost five hundred years before. There was very little left of the timber circle that had been created many generations ago in the circle that Idocus was to place the new stones in. They did not know back then that the wooden circle would both rot and fail to truly focus the bogadh energy. So for two generations, Iodocus’s tribe had searched with that of the two neighboring people to find stones that would truly work for the structure, and only in these western shores had they been able to find them. It was decided that the teams would cut out the massive stones using groups comprising hundreds of workers with seventy people in the caravans to transport the stones to the circle where they would once again be cut, to make many more stones and maneuvered into place. Egypt, 2603 B.C.E. The intense Egyptian sun beat down upon the parched sand. A lone buzzard circled in the distance, no doubt finding a rare meal in this unforgiving, scorched land. Abarax sat on the veranda in the sliver of shade provided from the Egyptian sun. He was looking at a drawing he had been working on for the pharaoh. His son sat beside him playing a game that his mother had taught him with a stone ball and a cup. The boy continued to push the ball across the decorative mat covering the floor and the ball made a ‘pop’ sound as it entered the cup, eliciting a laugh from the child. Again and again, the ball popped into the cup, prompting more laughter. Finally, his father looked at him, annoyed. “Imhotep, please. I’m trying to work. I must have this drawing done by tomorrow’s meeting.” “Why are you always drawing?” asked Imhotep. “Come. Sit up here on my lap and let me show you.” The boy walked over and sat on his father’s leg. He looked at the drawing up, then down. “Do you know what it is?” asked his father. “No.” “See this? This is a structure that has four triangles of walls coming to a point. It’s called a pyramid. This is important in the evolution of our people because it helps us focus. I am attempting to show the Pharaoh how the rays of the sun can be used to harness energy. Though the pharaoh’s visions are a bit skewed, he believes that a pyramid will help it guide his eternal soul to Ra.” “What is Ra?” “Ra is the word our people have given to what they believe is the God of the Sun. In truth, Ra is the ishkan, a plane of existence beyond this one where we live with one another after we die.” Abarax continued, “Do you see the sharp angles? If built from the right materials, they can help to focus our energy to achieve more than it would be capable of normally. There is a pattern here, but it is something that I will most likely not be able to complete in my lifetime. See these other pyramids? If perfectly aligned to these stars, they will help to enhance the ability of the ishkan that are buried far below and perhaps one day protect us.” Imhotep studied the drawing and pointed to a small building. “What is that?” “That is where we are now—the palace.” “Then those buildings, um . . . pyramids must be huge!” the child looked out over the plains of sand. He tried to imagine enormous pyramids standing in the distance but found it hard to visualize. “How could we build something that big,” he asked his father. “Ah, that is where a special gift comes in that few people know about. Do you know that the energy I spoke to you about—if we use our minds in a very special way, utilizing special tools, we can actually move stones, stones much larger than anything you can imagine, simply by pushing them with your mind. It’s called telekinesis. Our minds are capable of much more than most people think. However, my little Imhotep, this is a secret known only to a few, and, you must help me keep that secret. Can you do that?” “Yes, father. I promise.” China, Current Henan Province 2698 B.C. Tian was dressed in his summer robe and sat upon a log outside his home. He had finally finished working on the garden he had tended for the last four hours. Having enough time to relax, he pulled out his flute and began working on a song he had been writing for the last five months. Tian was a simple farmer who found peace in his garden and his flute, something that didn’t require him to worry about his crops or his daily stress. Times were tough in his village and beyond. Fighting to protect one’s land was a way of life. He had been playing his flute for twenty minutes when he saw a bright light flash, so bright that he had dropped his flute and shielded his eyes with his hand. Completely silent, the light faded away and he saw a man dressed in yellow robes walking toward him. Tian stood up and stumbled back, tripping over his top step and falling onto his porch. He pushed himself farther backward with his hands, trying to pull away from the strange man who appeared about two hundred feet away. Tian finally stood up to look at the man as he glided over to him, stopping about five feet from his front steps. The man looked normal enough, but his robe made of yellow and silver silk garnished with small black dragons was magnificent and intimidating. “Who are you?” Tian asked in fear. “I am Huang-Di. I have come to unite your people,” the man said. Read the full article

#aliens #historicalfiction #history #human #humanity #newworld #planets #sci-fi #science #space

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lodelss · 3 years

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Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.” — Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6. So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol Harbor, where it remains. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble.

* * *

I was homesick. That’s my excuse. I had been in Los Angeles for six months, writing for TV shows set in England. I woke up every day 5,000 miles from home, in a city of sweltering tarmac and traffic jams and palm trees, to try and explain how British people speak and think. I fell asleep every night to the radio from home, listening to the logic of xenophobia capture the political mainstream as my country circled the drain. I watched my British friends who are Black or brown or who were born overseas trying to stay brave and hopeful as racism became more and more normalized. I was homesick, and people do silly things when they’re homesick.

So yes, I went to see the Downton Abbey movie.

Specifically, I went to the Downton Abbey Experience, a special screening where you could spend a few hours in a mocked-up Edwardian drawing room, nibbling on tiny food and pretending to be posh. I was expecting it to be rubbish, forgetting that this was Los Angeles, where talented actors and set dressers can be had on every street corner. I couldn’t help but be a bit charmed by the commitment: the food was terrible, but two of the waiters had concocted an elaborate professional-rivalry backstory, and the accent-work was almost flawless. It really did feel as if you’d stepped, if not into Downton itself, then certainly onto the show’s set. And I finally understood. The way Americans feel about this is the way I feel about Star Trek and schlocky space opera. This is their escape from reality. This is their fandom. Not just Downton Abbey — “Britain.”

I do try to resist the temptation to make fun of other people who take uncomplicated joy in their thing. The British do this a lot, and it’s one of the least edifying parts of the national character. Fandom is fine. Escapism is allowed. No semi-sensitive soul can be expected to live in the real world at all times. But watching the whitewashed, revisionist history of your own country adopted as someone else’s fantasy of choice is actively uncomfortable. It’s like sitting by while a decrepit relative gibbers some antediluvian nonsense about the good old days and watching in horror as everyone applauds and says how charming.

I decided not to be charmed and sulked on an ornamental sofa, angrily eating a chocolate bonbon and resenting everyone else for having fun. This was where I met the only other British person in the room, a nice lady from Buckinghamshire in a fancy dress. What did my new friend think of the event? “I don’t like to complain,” she said, “but I’m sitting here in a ballgown eating bloody bread and jam. Honestly, it’s not worth the money.”

Which was the second-most-British thing anyone said all evening. The most British thing of all had been uttered half an hour earlier, by me, when it dawned on my friend and me that we really should have worn costumes. “It’ll be alright,” I said, “I’ll just take my accent up a bit posher and everyone will be pleased to see us.” Living in a place where all you have to do is say something in your normal accent to be told you’re clever and wonderful is all very well, until you start believing it. This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy. It doesn’t even constitute a personality. I know that there are a lot of British expats who will be cross with me for giving the game away, and chaps, I really am so terribly, terribly sorry. But you and I both know that someday we’ll have to go home, and people won’t automatically be pleased to see us just because we said some words.

This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy.

I write for TV shows set in Britain, or a fantasy version of it, and American Anglophilia is endlessly fascinating to me, as it is to most British expats. It comes in a few different flavourways (ed.: Normally we’d edit this to the u-less American spelling, but in this particular case it seemed appropriate to let it go). There’s the saccharine faux-nostalgia of Downton fans, the ones who love The Crown and afternoon tea and the actual monarchy. They tend to be more socially conservative, more likely to vaporize into angry drifts of snowflakery at the mere suggestion that there might have been brown people in the trenches of the First World War. But there is also a rich seam of Anglophilia among people who are generally suspicious of nationalism, and television is to blame for most of it. The idea of Britain that many Americans grew up with was Monty Python, Doctor Who, and Blackadder; today it’s Downton, Sherlock, Good Omens, and The Great British Worried-People-Making-Cakes-in-a-Tent Show. And of course, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, which technically take place in Middle-earth and Westeros but, in practice, are set in the version of medieval Britain where all epic fantasy tends to settle — in days of olde when knights were bold and brown people didn’t get speaking roles but dragons were fine.

(No British expat can honestly criticize a franchise like Downton for taking advantage of the North American fascination with Englishness, not unless we can say we’ve never taken advantage of it ourselves. Occasionally we catch one another at it, and it’s deeply embarrassing. Not long ago, waiting for coffee in the morning, I listened aghast as an extremely pretty American lady with her arm around an averagely-attractive Englishman explained that their dog was called something not unlike Sir Humphrey Woofington-Growler. “Because he’s British — my boyfriend, I mean.” Said British boyfriend’s eyes were pinned on the middle distance in the full excruciating knowledge that if he’d given a dog a name like that at home, he’d have got a smack, which would have upset the dog.)

Lavish Britscapist vehicles like Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia are more popular with Americans than they are at home. Trudging through Finsbury Park in London on a cold morning last Christmas, a poster advertising The Crown had been gleefully tagged “royalist propaganda” by some local hero with a spray can. My American friends were confused when I explained this to them. “Don’t you like your royal family?” They asked. No, I explained. We like Hamilton. The stories we export lay bare the failing heart of Britain’s sense of itself in the world — the assumption that all we have to do, individually or collectively, is show up with a charming accent and say something quaint and doors will open for us, as will wallets, legs, and negotiations for favorable trade deals.

This is a scam that works really well right up until it doesn’t.

* * *

It was irritatingly difficult to remain uncharmed by the Downton Abbey movie. I found myself unable to work up a sweat over whether there would be enough lawn chairs for the royal parade, but I rather enjoyed the bit where the Downton house staff, snubbed by the royal servants, decided to respond with kidnapping, poisoning, and fraud. There was also a snide rivalry between butlers, a countess with a secret love child, a disputed inheritance, an attempted royal assassination, a perilous tryst between closeted valets, a princess in an unhappy marriage, and Maggie Smith. It was disgustingly pleasant right up until its shameless closing sequence, where fussy butler Mr. Carson and his sensible housekeeper wife had a conversation about whether the Abbey would last into the next century. Yes, said Mr. Carson, sending us off into the night with the promise that “a hundred years from now, Downton will still be standing.”

And there it is. It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair. As the British Empire went ungently into its good night offscreen last century, many great English houses were repurposed, sold, or demolished in part so that families did not have to pay inheritance tax on the properties. Highclere Castle — the estate where Downton Abbey was filmed — is an exception and remains under the stewardship of the Earls of Carnavron, who live on the estate. They can afford to do this because a lucrative show about a lost and largely fictional age of aristocratic gentility happened to be filmed on the grounds. Let me repeat that: the only way the actual Downton Abbey can continue to exist is by renting itself out as a setting for fantasies of a softer world. Which is, in microcosm, the current excuse for a government’s entire plan for a post-Brexit economy. With nowhere left to colonize, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.

It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair.

The uncomfortable truth is that America doesn’t love Britain the way we want to be loved. That white-innocence fantasy of rolling lawns and ripped bodices is only palatable (and profitable) because Britain doesn’t have much actual power anymore. Our eccentricities would be far less adorable if we still owned you. If we were still a military-industrial juggernaut on the scale of Russia or China, if we were still really an imperial power rather than just cosplaying as one for cash, would the rest of the world be importing our high-fructose cultural capital in such sugary sackloads?

I don’t think so — and nor does Britain’s current government, the most nationalist and least patriotic in living memory, which has no compunction about turning the country into a laundry for international capital and flogging our major assets to foreign powers. American businesses already have their eyes on the National Health Service, which will inevitably be on the table in those trade deals a post-Brexit British economy desperately needs. In one of its first acts in power, the Johnson administration shoved through a controversial arms deal selling a major defense company to a private American firm, which is somehow not seen as unpatriotic.

This summer, Black Lives Matter protests are boiling around a nation that has never reexamined its imperial legacy because it is convinced it is the protagonist of world history. Conversation around what “British” means remains vaguely distasteful. “Culturally our stories are of plucky underdogs,” historian Snow told me. “But actually our national story was of massive expenditure on the world’s most complex weapon systems and smashing the shit out of less fiscally and technological societies.”

“Nations themselves are narrations,” wrote Edward Said, pioneer of postcolonial studies. Britain’s literary self-mythologizing spans several centuries. During the Raj, teaching English literature to the Indian middle and ruling classes was central to the strategy for enforcing the idea of Britain as morally superior. The image of Britain that persists in the collective global unconsciousness was founded deliberately to make sense of the empire and romanticize it for ordinary British citizens, most of whom had neither a complete understanding of the atrocities nor the voting rights that would make their opinion relevant. Britain wrote and rewrote itself as the protagonist of its own legends, making its barbarism bearable and its cultural dominance natural.

Bad things happen to people who have never heard a story they weren’t the hero of. I try not to be the sort of person who flashes the word “hegemony” around too much, but that’s what this is and always has been: a way of imposing cultural norms long after we, as my history books delicately put it, “lost” the British Empire. The stories are all we have left to make us feel important.

The plain truth is that Britain had, until quite recently, the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. We don’t have it anymore, and we miss it. Of course we miss it. It made us rich, it made us important, and all the ugly violent parts happened terribly far away and could be ignored with a little rewriting of our history. It continues to this day with tactful omissions from the school syllabus — in 2010, Education Secretary Michael Gove, later one of the chief architects of Brexit, pushed to teach British children a version of the “exciting and appealing” Imperial history that cast their country as heroic. According to one 2016 study, 43 percent of the British public think the Empire “was a good thing.” For most British people, the Empire came to us in pieces, in jingoistic legends and boys’ adventure stories with as many exclamation points as could be crammed on one book cover. The impression I was given as a schoolgirl was that we were jolly decent to let the Empire go, and that we did so because it was all of a sudden pointed out that owning other countries wholesale was a beastly thing to do — of course old boy, you must have your human rights! Really, we were only holding on to them for you.

The last time Britain truly got to think of itself as heroic on the world stage was during the Second World War. The narrative with the most tenacity is the “Blitz Spirit” — of a plucky little island standing firm against impossible odds, pulling together while hell rained down from above, growing victory gardens and sheltering in the stations of the London Underground. Those black-and-white photographs of brave-faced families wrapped in blankets on the train platforms are instantly recognizable: this is who we are as a country. Most Britons don’t know that soldiers from the colonies fought and died on the frontlines in France. Even fewer are aware of the famine that struck India at around the same time, leaving a million dead, or of Britain’s refusal to offer aid, continuing instead to divert supplies to feed the British army as the people of India starved.

What all of this is about, ultimately, is white innocence. That’s the grand narrative that so many of our greatest writers were recruited to burnish, willingly or not. White innocence makes a delicious story, and none of its beneficiaries wants to hear about how that particular sausage gets made.

* * *

Many of the biggest narrative brands of Britain’s fretful post-colonial age are stories of a nation coming to terms with the new and eroding nature of its own power, from James Bond (a story about a slick misogynist hired by the state to kill people) to Doctor Who (which I will defend to the death, but which is very much about the intergalactic importance of cultural capital). We are a nation in decline on the international stage; that’s what happens when a small island ceases to own a third of the earth. Rather than accepting this with any semblance of grace, we have thrown a tantrum that has made us the laughing stock of world politics, the sort of tantrum that only spoiled children and ham-faced, election-stealing oligarchs are allowed to get away with.

In this climate, the more pragmatic among us are seeing that what we actually have to offer the rest of the world boils down to escapism. Fantasy Britain offers an escape for everyone after a hard day under the wheel of late-stage capitalism.

There’s no actual escape, of course. Good luck if you’re a refugee. Since 2012, the conservative government has actively cultivated a “hostile environment” scheme to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants, highlights of which include fast-tracking deportations and vans driving a massive billboard reading “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST” around the most diverse boroughs in London. Seriously. If you want to escape to actual Britain you need at least two million pounds, which is how much it costs for an Investor Visa. Non-millionaires with the wrong documents can and will be put on a plane in handcuffs, even if they’ve lived and worked in Britain for 50 years — like the senior citizens of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the West Indies as children with their families to help rebuild the nation after the Second World War. In the past five years, hundreds of elderly men and women, many of them unaware they were not legal citizens, have been forcibly deported from Britain to the Caribbean. The subsequent public outcry did almost zero damage to the government’s brand. In 2019, Johnson’s Conservatives won a landslide victory.

“Take your country back.” That was the slogan that Brexit campaigners chose in 2016. Take it back from whom? To where? It was clear that the fictional past that many Brexit nostalgists wanted to reclaim was something not unlike the syrupy storylines of Downton Abbey — quiet, orderly, and mostly white. But to make that story work, British conservatives needed to cast themselves as the plucky underdogs, which is how you get a Brexit Party representative to the European Parliament comparing Brexit to the resistance of “slaves against their owners” and “colonies … against their empires,” or Boris Johnson bloviating in 2018 about Britain’s “colony status” in the EU (although he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still “in charge” of Africa).

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What really won the day, though, was the lie that leaving the EU would leave us with 350 million pounds per week “to spend on the NHS.” Boris Johnson rode up and down the nation on a big red bus emblazoned with that empty promise. The British people may not trust our politicians, but we trust our National Health Service — almost all of us, from across the sociopolitical spectrum, apart from some fringe internet libertarians and diehard neoliberal wingnuts, most of whom, unfortunately, are in power (though they couldn’t get there without promising to protect the NHS).

After the COVID-19 lockdowns end, Brexit is still happening. The actual changes don’t come into effect until 2021, and Boris Johnson, whose empty personal brand is forever yoked to this epic national self-harm project, is clearly hoping to sneak in a bad Brexit deal while the country is still reeling from a global pandemic. Leaving the EU will not make Britain rich again. It will not make us an imperial power again. In fact, the other nations of Europe are now taking the opportunity to reclaim some of the things we borrowed along the way. Greece wants the Parthenon Marbles back, more than two centuries after a British tourist visited Athens and liked them so much he decided to pry them off and ship them home. Spain has made noise that it wants Gibraltar back, and we’ll probably have to give it to them. So far, the only way in which Britain is returning to its days of High Victorian glory is in the sudden re-emergence, in communities ravaged by austerity, of 19th-century diseases of poverty, and now of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in Europe, after Johnson’s government pursued a disastrous “herd immunity” strategy that transparently invited the elderly and infirm to sacrifice themselves for the stock market. British kids are not growing up with a sense of national heroism; they are growing up with rickets and scurvy. As a great poet from the colonies once wrote, it’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is for the sneering Eton thugs you inexplicably elected to stop stabbing you in the back.

As it happens, I want my country back, too. I have spent enough time baking under the pitiless California sunshine. I have been to Hot Topic. I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency.

I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery. I don’t believe that Britain is Great in anything but name, but I do believe it can be better. I do not care to be told that I am any less of a patriot because I choose to know my country, or because I can imagine a future where we do more than freeze in the haunted house of our past glories, stuffed with stolen treasures and trapdoors we never open. It’s where I’m from, where my family and friends live, and where I hope to grow old and die. It worries me that we have not even begun to develop the tools to cope with our material reality, one in which we are a rather small rainy island half of whose population currently hates the other.

* * *

Since we’re all talking about myths and revisionist history and the Blitz Spirit, here’s something else that never makes it into the official story.

Those working-class Londoners sheltering in tube stations during World War II? They weren’t supposed to be there. In fact, the British government of the late 1930s built far too few municipal shelters, preferring to leave that to private companies, local government councils, and individuals and when the first bombs first fell, the hardest hit areas were poor, immigrant, and working-class communities in the East End with nowhere to go. Elite clubs and hotels dug out their own bomb shelters, but the London Underground was barricaded. On the second night of the Blitz, with the flimsy, unhygienic East End shelters overflowing, hundreds of people entered the Liverpool Street Station and refused to leave. By the time the government officially changed its position and “allowed” working-class Londoners to take shelter down among the trains, thousands were already doing so — 177,000 people at its most packed.

Eventually it was adopted into the propaganda effort and became part of the official mythos of the Blitz, but the official story leaves out the struggle. It leaves out the part about desperate people, abandoned by their government, in fear of their lives, doing what they had to — and what should have been done from the start — to take care of each other.

This failure is the closest thing to the staggering lack of leadership that Britain, like America, has displayed during the weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. As I write, more than 42,000 British citizens have died, many in our struggling NHS hospitals and countless more in care homes. On the same January day that the Brexit treaty was signed, Boris Johnson missed the first emergency meeting of COBRA, the government’s effort to determine a response to rumors of a new and horrifying pandemic. Johnson went on to miss four subsequent meetings, choosing instead to go on holiday with his fiancée to celebrate Brexit as a personal win. As vital weeks were squandered and the infection reached British shores, it emerged that the country was singularly underprepared. Stocks of protective equipment had been massively depleted because, with everyone’s attention on Brexit, nobody had bothered to consider that we might have to deal with a crisis not of our own making. Worse still, the National Health Service was chronically underfunded and hemorrhaging staff, as migrant doctors, nurses, and medical professionals from EU countries fled a failing institution in a hostile culture. In the years following the Brexit referendum, over 10,000 European medical staff have reportedly left the NHS.

Over 10 years of wildly unnecessary cuts to public services, successive Tory governments deliberately invoked the Blitz Spirit, promoting their economic reforms with the unfortunate slogan “we’re all in this together” — as if austerity were an external enemy rather than a deliberate and disastrous choice imposed on the working poor by politicians who have never known the price of a pint of milk or the value of public education. Today, it is perhaps a signal of the intellectual drought in British politics that the slogan “We’re all in this together” has been recycled to flog the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Their other slogan — plastered resentfully on podiums after a decade of decimating the health service — is “Protect the NHS.” The National Health Service is perhaps the last thing that truly unites every fractured shard of the British political psyche, and the Tories hate that, but 10 years of gutting hospitals, scrapping social care schemes, and blaming it all on the very immigrants who come from overseas to care for us when we are sick has not made the British love socialized medicine any less. Every Thursday night across Britain, since the lockdowns began, the whole country comes out to applaud the healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day to fight on the front lines of the pandemic. The mumbling rent-a-toffs the Tories shove up on stage to explain the latest hopelessly ineffectual lockdown strategy have no choice but to clap along. Because, as the murals mushrooming up around the country attest, the best stories Britain tells about itself have never been about Queen and Country and Glory — they’ve always been the ones where the broke, brave, messed-up millions of ordinary people who live here pull together, help each other, and behave with basic human decency.

* * *

I’m not arguing for us all to stop telling stories about Britain. For one thing, people aren’t going to stop, and for another, stories by and about British people are currently keeping my friends employed, my rent paid, and my home country from sliding into recession. And there are plenty that are still worth telling: if you want to shove your nose against the shop window of everything actually good about British culture, watch The Great British Bake-off. If you like your escapism with a slice of sex and cursing and corsets, and why wouldn’t you, curl up with the criminally underrated Harlots, which does an excellent job of portraying an actually diverse London and also has Liv Tyler as a trembly lesbian heiress in a silly wig. And if you want to watch a twee, transporting period drama with decent politics, I cannot more heartily recommend Call the Midwife, which also features biscuit-eating nuns and an appropriate amount of propaganda about how the National Health Service is the best thing about Britain.

I was supposed to be home by now. Instead, I’m in quarantine in California, watching my home country implode into proto-oligarchic incoherence in the middle of a global pandemic and worrying about my friends and loved ones in London. Meanwhile, my American friends are detoxing from the rolling panic-attack of the news by rewatching Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia. The British film industry is already gearing up to reopen, and the country will need to lean on its cultural capital more than ever.

But there is a narrative chasm between the twee and borderless dreamscape of fantasy Britain and actual, material Britain, where rents are rising and racists are running brave. The chasm is wide, and a lot of people are falling into it. The omnishambles of British politics is what happens when you get scared and mean and retreat into the fairytales you tell about yourself. When you can no longer live within your own contradictions. When you want to hold on to the belief that Britain is the land of Jane Austen and John Lennon and Sir Winston Churchill, the war hero who has been repeatedly voted the greatest Englishman of all time. When you want to forget that Britain is also the land of Cecil Rhodes and Oswald Moseley and Sir Winston Churchill, the brutal colonial administrator who sanctioned the building of the first concentration camps and condemned millions of Indians to death by starvation. These are not contradictions, even though the drive to separate them is cracking the country apart. If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by.

There is a country of the imagination called Britain where there will never be borders, where down the dark lane, behind a door in the wall, David Bowie drinks gin with Elizabeth Tudor and Doctor Who trades quips with Oscar Wilde and there are always hot crumpets for tea. This idea of Englishness is lovely, and soothing, and it makes sense, and we have to be done with it now. If Britain is going to remain the world’s collective imaginative sandbox, we can do better than this calcified refusal to cope with the contradictions of the past. We can liberate the territory of the imagination. We can remember what is actually good about Britain — which has always been different from what was “great.”

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

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How Universal Picture is reinventing its classic monsters

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How Universal Picture is reinventing its classic monsters

There’s nothing new under the sun, especially not in Hollywood. The recent wave of reboots, remakes and revivals seems to show no sign of stopping.

The Invisible Man, based on HG Wells’s novel and the 1933 Universal movie starring Claude Rains, is the latest film to update an iconic property. Elisabeth Moss now plays a woman haunted by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who has become her invisible stalker – turning the monster into a symbol of toxic masculinity for the #MeToo era. The original Invisible Man was a more straightforward mad scientist, and once part of the Universal movie monster lineup that included Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein. The studio’s own sequels and reboots created the concept of iconic characters showing up in each others’ films long before Avengers: Endgame marketed itself as the “most ambitious crossover event in history”.

It all began with a man named Carl Laemmle, or “Uncle Carl” to his employees. As founder and president of Universal Pictures, he oversaw the studio’s early years, and made hundreds of horror classics, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein(1931).

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM The signature Universal style was heavily influenced by German Expressionism, thanks to the German-American Laemmles, who employed filmmakers from their homeland such as Karl Freund, the cinematographer for Dracula. Looming angular sets and nightmarish lighting made these monster movies as visually striking as Expressionist classics’ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922).

This stylistic choice made even their romantic melodramas like The Man Who Laughs (1928), which was directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni, look like a horror film. Joaquin Phoenix wouldn’t have won his Oscar this year if not for Conrad Veidt’s titular carnival freak character, Gwynplaine, since the creators of Batman’s nemesis the Joker in 1940 were directly influenced by the image of Veidt’s character, who was disfigured with a permanent grin.

Lon Chaney became the studio’s first star in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), cementing his reputation as the “Man of a Thousand Faces”. His skill with makeup, as well as his affinity for pantomime as a child of deaf parents, allowed him to transform physically into his silent film roles. He brought a degree of sympathy to “monsters” like The Hunchback of Notre Dame‘s Quasimodo. Frankenstein and Dracula launched the careers of two struggling middle-aged foreign actors – Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi and Anglo-Indian Boris Karloff.

Lugosi was fond of mentioning his past as a respected actor in his homeland, regardless of how accurate that was. It’s certainly true that he had to leave Hungary in 1919 because of his activism in the actors’ union, after the country’s failed Communist uprising. Eventually Lugosi found his way to Broadway as Dracula. A kind of Robert Pattinson of his time, Lugosi attracted many female admirers through the role, including the “It Girl” of 1920s Hollywood, Clara Bow. After the film version, however, he resented how the role led to him being largely typecast for the rest of his career. His strong accent didn’t help, and over the years he ended up in more and more B-films.

Boris Karloff had acted in 80 films before being cast in a role Lugosi had rejected: Frankenstein’s Monster. His name was left off the credits in favour of a question mark as a promotional gimmick, and he wasn’t well-known enough to be invited to the premiere. He was looked upon as more of a human prop than a serious actor. No one could have predicted that the 43-year-old would become a star – not least because he had no dialogue, and looked unrecognisable after four hours in makeup every day. But “the dear old boy”, as Karloff referred to the monster, kicked off a long career as a horror star.

They tried to cast Karloff in The Invisible Man as well, but pay disputes allowed British-American actor Rains to step in and deliver an implausibly impressive breakout performance as a character whose face is only seen for half a minute. Even though the perspective has now shifted from the “man” himself to one of his victims in the 2020 reboot, it’s not the first alternative take on the classic. Universal came up with the gender-swapped sequel The Invisible Woman and the war propaganda film Invisible Agent during the 1940s.

SEQUELS, TIMELESS IMAGES All of the more successful Universal films inspired sequels, of varying quality. Unanimously considered one of the best sequels in cinema history, and probably one of the best monster movies, was Bride of Frankenstein (1935). James Whale, who had also directed the first Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, lived openly as a gay man. This has led to film scholars reading homoeroticism into the sequel he directed, where Dr Pretorious (played by Ernest Thesiger) tempts Dr Frankenstein away from his wife to create another unnatural life form.

Whale’s inspiration for the Bride was Maria, the female robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Elsa Lanchester’s towering black and silver hair in Bride of Frankenstein became one of the most timeless images in horror, and her character allows for a more sympathetic take on the central creature than the first film. The Monster doesn’t speak in the original Frankenstein, but him learning to talk undeniably lends pathos to the character in this sequel, when he poignantly tells Dr Pretorious “I want friend like me.” By giving him a voice, Whale transformed the Frankenstein story into a paean to the outsider.

Although the Laemmles were ousted from Universal a year after Bride of Frankenstein, the success the studio had experienced in the 1930s allowed Uncle Carl to take on a heroic cause. He sponsored hundreds of Jews from his home town of Laupheim and Württemberg, paying both emigration and immigration fees to ensure they escaped Nazi Germany. Laemmle also used his contacts in the House of Representatives to ensure and facilitate immigration to the United States for those fleeing the Holocaust.

Adecline in Universal’s horror output after the Laemmles’s departure led to undeniably gimmicky films like Son of Frankenstein (1939), which united Karloff and Lugosi and made the Monster mute again. Eventually, producers turned to another genre altogether: comedy. The comedy duo Abbott and Costello had been working in films since 1940, and became a guaranteed box office draw over the course of the decade. When they made Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Lou Costello hated the script, and allegedly said his five-year-old daughter could write better jokes. There was trepidation about bringing back Lugosi as Dracula and Chaney Jr as the Wolf Man in this comedy. But audiences disagreed with Costello, flocking to a film where the humour and the horror both had room to breathe.

This success kicked off a series where Abbott and Costello met the Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the Mummy, with diminishing returns. Universal managed to produce one more classic movie monster in the Fifties – Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) – and dabbled in 3D technology. Lugosi, by now severely addicted to methadone and morphine, was living in obscurity and near poverty when one of the most infamously terrible directors of all time decided to champion him. Ed Wood, the Tommy Wiseau of the 1950s, used Lugosi in the low-budget flicks Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space. These Z-movies would eventually inspire a cult following when they were rediscovered in the 1980s. Martin Landau also won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton’s film Ed Wood (1994).

Karloff was luckier than his old co-star, and worked consistently until his death in 1969. He showed up often in films by Roger Corman, the indie genre film producer who launched the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese, among others. He also narrated the classic Dr Seuss cartoon How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Karloff, who suffered from emphysema, only had half of one lung still functioning while he performed his final roles, and required a wheelchair and oxygen between takes. He died of pneumonia in England at the age of 81.

It wasn’t until channels like WABC-TV began playing Universal monster movies late at night in the late Fifties, and Maila Nurmi introduced them as the campily glamorous horror host character Vampira, that they gained their legendary status. These late night marathons created a new generation of fans, and the films’ relevance resurged. Director Guillermo del Toro became one of those fans when he saw Creature from the Black Lagoon at the age of six. He tried to make an official reboot of the Universal series but was rebuffed: “I went to Universal and I said, ‘Can we do the movie from the point of view of the creature?’ They didn’t go for it. I said, ‘I think they should end up together.’ They didn’t go for that, either.”

Instead, he made The Shape of Water, which won the Best Picture Award at the 2018 Oscars. This subversively romantic take on a movie monster was far more critically acclaimed than Universal’s own hamfisted attempt at re-launching their own franchise, The Mummy (2017). This latest woman-centric spin on The Invisible Man will provide a far different take from Rains in 1933, and won’t include the stylistic German Expressionist sets or lighting that once defined a Universal film’s look. But as the studio’s history proves, the original monster movies were constantly reshuffled, reinvented and written into crossovers to suit changing tastes. The story of Universal classic monsters is one of reinvention.

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capecodcurmudgeon-blog · 6 years

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For the people of the modern Czech Republic, the Munich agreement of 1938 was a betrayal. “O nás bez nás!” “About us, without us!”

Nazi propaganda depicting German Anschluss with Austria

Intent on avoiding war with Nazi Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain had convened in Munich that September, to resolve German claims on western Czechoslovakia. The “Sudetenland”. Representatives of the Czech and Slovak peoples, were not invited.

On September 30, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London, declaring “Peace in Our Time”. The piece of paper Chamberlain held in his hand bore the signatures of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Édouard Daladier as well as his own, annexing the Sudetenland, to Nazi Germany.

To Winston Churchill, it was an act of appeasement. Feeding the crocodile (Hitler), in hopes that he will eat you last. For much of Great Britain, the sense of relief was palpable.

In the summer of 1938, the horrors of the Great War were a mere twenty years in the past. Hitler had swallowed up Austria, only six months earlier. British authorities divided the home islands into “risk zones”, identified as “Evacuation,” “Neutral,” and “Reception.” In some of the most gut wrenching decisions of the age, these people were planning “Operation Pied Piper”, the evacuation of millions of their own children, in the event of war.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland the following September, London mayor Herbert Morrison was at 10 Downing Street, meeting with Chamberlain’s aide, Sir Horace Wilson. Morrison believed that the time had come for Operation Pied Piper. A year to the day from the Prime Minister’s “Peace in our Time” declaration, Wilson protested. “But we’re not at war yet, and we wouldn’t want to do anything to upset delicate negotiations, would we?”

Morrison was done with the Prime Minister’s dilatory response to Hitler’s aggression, practically snarling in his thick, East London accent “Look, ’Orace, go in there and tell Neville this from me: If I don’t get the order to evacuate the children from London this morning, I’m going to give it myself – and tell the papers why I’m doing it. ’Ow will ’is nibs like that?”

Thirty minutes later, Morrison had the document. The evacuation, had begun.

Next weekend, Superbowl 52 will be played at U.S. Bank Stadium, in front of a crowd of 66,655.

Forty-five times that number were mobilized in the first four days, primarily children, relocated from cities and towns across Great Britain to the relative safety of the countryside. BBC History reported that, “within a week, a quarter of the population of Britain would have a new address”.

What must that have sounded like?

Zeppelin raids had killed 1,500 civilians in London alone, during the ‘Great War’. Since then, governments had gotten so much better at killing each other’s citizens. As early as 1922, Prime Minister Lord Arthur Balfour had spoken of ‘unremitting bombardment of a kind that no other city has ever had to endure.’ As many as 4,000,000 civilian casualties were predicted, in London alone.

BBC History describes the man in charge of the evacuation, Sir John Anderson, as a “cold, inhuman character with little understanding of the emotional upheaval that might be created by evacuation”.

Children were labeled ‘like luggage’, and sent off with gas masks, toothbrushes and fresh socks & underwear. None of them knew to where, or for how long.

The evacuation of all that humanity ran relatively smoothly, considering. James Roffey, founder of the Evacuees Reunion Association, recalls ‘We marched to Waterloo Station behind our head teacher carrying a banner with our school’s name on it. We all thought it was a holiday, but the only thing we couldn’t work out was why the women and girls were crying.’

Arrivals at the billeting areas, was another matter. Many kids were shipped off to the wrong places, and rations were insufficient. Geoffrey Barfoot, billeting officer in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, said ‘The trains were coming in thick and fast. It was soon obvious that we just didn’t have the bed space.’

Kids were lined up against walls and on stages, and potential hosts were invited to “take their pick”.

For many, the terrors and confusion of those first few days grew into love and friendships, that lasted a lifetime. Others entered a hell of physical or sexual abuse, or worse.

For the first time, “city kids” and country folks were finding out how the “other half” lived, with sometimes amusing results. One boy wrinkled his nose on seeing carrots pulled out of muddy fields, saying “Ours come in tins”. Richard Singleton recalled the first time he asked his Welsh ‘foster mother’ for directions to the toilet. “She took me into a shed and pointed to the ground. Surprised, I asked her for some paper to wipe our bums. She walked away and came back with a bunch of leaves.”

John Abbot, evacuated from Bristol, had his rations stolen by his host family. He was horsewhipped for speaking out while they enjoyed his food, and he was given nothing more than mashed potatoes. Terri McNeil was locked in a birdcage and left with a piece of bread and a bowl of water.

In the 2003 BBC Radio documentary “Evacuation: The True Story,” clinical psychologist Steve Davis described the worst cases, as “little more than a pedophile’s charter.”

Eighty years later, the words “I’ll take that one”, are seared into the memories of more than a few.

Hundreds of evacuees were killed because of relocation, while en route or during their stays at “safe havens”. Two boys were killed on a Cornish beach, mined to defend against German amphibious assault. Apparently, no one had thought to put up a sign.

Irene Wells, age 8, was standing in a church doorway, when she was crushed by an army truck. One MP from the house of Commons said “There have been cases of evacuees dying in the evacuation areas. Fancy that type of news coming to the father of children who have been evacuated”.

When German air raids failed to materialize, many parents decided to bring the kids back home. By January 1940, almost half of evacuees had returned.

Authorities produced posters urging parents to leave the kids where they were, and a good thing, too. The Blitz against London itself began on September 7. The city experienced the most devastating attack to-date on December 29, in a blanket fire-bombing that killed almost 3,600 civilians.

Sometimes, refugees from relatively safe locations were shipped into high-risk target areas. Hundreds of refugees from Gibraltar were sent into London, in the early days of the Blitz. None of them could have been happy to leave London Station, to see hundreds of locals pushing past them, hurrying to get out.

This story doesn’t only involve the British home islands, either. American Companies like Hoover and Eastman Kodak took thousands of children in, from employees of British subsidiaries. Thousands of English women and children were evacuated to Australia, following the Japanese attack on Singapore.

By October 1940, the “Battle of Britain” had devolved into a mutually devastating battle of attrition, in which neither side was capable of striking the death blow. Hitler cast his gaze eastward the following June, with a surprise attack on his “ally”, Josef Stalin.

“Operation Steinbock”, the Luftwaffe’s last large-scale strategic bombing campaign of the war against southern England, was carried out three years later. 285 German bombers attacked London on this day in 1944, in what the Brits called the “Baby Blitz”. You’ve got to be some tough cookie, to call 245 bombers a Baby Blitz.

Late in the war, the subsonic “Doodle Bug” or V1 “flying bomb” was replaced by the terrifying supersonic V2. 1,000 or more of these, the world’s first rocket, were unleashed against southern England, primarily London, killing or wounding 115,000. With a terminal velocity of 2,386mph, you never saw or heard this thing coming, until the weapon had done its work.

In the end, many family ‘reunions’ were as emotionally bruising as the original breakup. Years had come and gone and new relationships had formed. The war had turned biological family members, into all but strangers.

Richard Singleton remembers the day his mother came, to take him home to Liverpool. “I had been happily living with ‘Aunty Liz and Uncle Moses’ for four years,” he recalled. “I told Mam that I didn’t want to go home. I was so upset because I was leaving and might never again see aunty and uncle and everything that I loved on the farm.”

Douglas Wood tells a similar story. “During my evacuation I had only seen my mother twice and my father once,” he recalls. “On the day that they visited me together, they had walked past me in the street as they did not recognise me. I no longer had a Birmingham accent and this was the subject of much ridicule. I had lost all affinity with my family so there was no love or affection.”

The Austrian-British psychoanalyst Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, commissioned an examination of the psychological effects of the separation. After a 12-month study, she concluded that “separation from their parents is a worse shock for children than a bombing.”

January 29, 1944 Operation Pied Piper For the people of the modern Czech Republic, the Munich agreement of 1938 was a betrayal. “O nás bez nás!” "About us, without us!"

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topsolarpanels · 7 years

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Encyclopaedia Westerosa: the biggest Game of Thrones mysteries, solved

How big is Westeros? What is wildfire? And how rich are the Lannisters? Ten things you didnt know about the biggest show in the world

Warning: this piece contains spoilers for seasons 1-5 of Game of Thrones .

When George RR Martins stabby saga was adapted for TV in 2011, perhaps the biggest topic surrounding it was: why would any self-respecting adult watch a fantasy series about dragons, zombies and sorcery? Well, six seasons in, the folly of that way of thinking has been exposed like a member of the Nights Watch trapped north of the Wall. Game of Thrones is now a global preoccupation.

Much of that success is down to the detailed world created by Martin and brought to vivid and sometimes visceral life on the demonstrate. From the frozen north to the intrigue-filled chambers of Kings Landing, Westeros is a place steeped in mythos and mystery, familiar yet so alien. Even now, theres still so much we dont know about the place, so many questions that need answering. But while youve already read 713 blogs about whether or not Jon Snow has carked it, there are deeper mysteries about Game of Thrones that have never been properly addressed. Ahead of the proves season six premiere, we get to grips with Westeross biggest hows, whys and whats. Answers are coming …

Why is a White Walker able to walk ?

All white on the night. Photograph: Allstar

The blue-eyed ghouls in dire need of a dermatologist definitely have the appearance of being dead all exposed skeletons and rotted bits but are they? And, if so, how is it that they can move around and stab things in the face? It is possible to stimulate nerve and muscle electrically and cause it to contract even when isolated from the body, says Dr Matthew James Mason, university physiologist at Cambridge. If the brain dies that doesnt mean that all the other tissue of the body immediately dies, too. But, despite their appearance, White Walker arent mindless zombies, so brain death cant have resulted. My guess is that they arent dead at all, says Mason. If they look like they are decay, perhaps their immune system is compromised. Are they just frost, scurvy-ridden wretches in need of a hug? They probably require medical help and sympathy, argues Mason. Poor sods. The next time you assure one, then, perhaps chuck it an orange and a coat and dont be so quick to judge, yeah? LH

How rich are the Lannisters ?

Warriors Dance: Tywin Lannister. Photograph: HBO

They fund wars, boast one hell of a property portfolio and own actual gold mine. If a Lannister always pays their indebtedness, it can be safely assumed theyve got a few quid in the kitty. Dr Charles Insley, senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Manchester, guesses drawing a parallel with a real-life example may be the key to finding out how many. Richard Neville[ 1428 -1 471] was the richest peer in England on his death, says Insley. Nevilles sister Cicely was also married to Richard, Duke of York, and it was the collective wealth and therefore capability to buy subsistence that constructed the Neville/ York confederation so dangerous. The Nevilles are likely to be worth more than the crown. All sounds very Lannisterian, right? But come on how rich would the Nevilles/ Lannisters be in todays fund? Billions?$ 2bn doesnt seem too little, I suppose. So, the most influential family in Westeros is only half as wealthy as Donald Trump? Thats not fretting at all. LH

Is it really possible for winter to last a generation ?

Snow help at all. Photograph: Helen Sloan/ HBO

House Starks ominous catchphrase winter is going is partly a callback to an extended cold snap 8,000 years ago when White Walker had the run of Westeros. How could one winter last 100 years? Scientific theories include the planet wobbling on its axis or having an eccentric orbit; writer George RR Martin himself says its only down to sorcery. In our world, there is a( comparatively) recent precedent a 70 -year Little Ice Age spanning the 17 th and 18 th centuries that refrigerated western Europe. It went on for several decades, crops failed, the Thames froze over, explains Professor Jim Wild, space physicist at Lancaster University. Research presents it also coincided with a period of unusually low sunspot activity. Less solar energy can have a major consequence on climate patterns. If winter is coming again the poor serf of the north should start saving up for a package vacation to Dorne. If I saw myself in that situation, Id start heading south, says Wild. It should be a bit warmer nearer the equator. GV

What is it with all the castrating ?

Conleth Hill as Varys and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. Photograph: HBO

Daenerys Targaryens army of Unsullied soldiers are upper-class warriors who were castrated in infancy that are intended to attain them more focused, loyal and fearless. But is this really what happens when your tackle is chopped off? Dr Shaun Tougher, reader in ancient history at Cardiff University, is sceptical. We do assure the idea that eunuchs are chaste and loyal, but we also assure the inverse: that theyre tormented and frustrated. Eunuch soldiers arent at all common in history, but the idea of eunuch generals is quite prevalent theres a very famous Byzantine eunuch general called Narses in the 6th century AD. Because of their status as luxury objects, many eunuchs who originated in the slave trade ended up serving at court, like wily manipulator Varys. Varys is in some ways the archetypal court eunuch. Although I was quite surprised when it was revealed that his castration was done by a sorcerer. Seems like the notion of using a mans lunchbox for sorcery purposes is a pure cock-and-balls narrative. SR

Could person genuinely become a dragons mother ?

Dragons den. Photograph: HBO

From the ashes of a Dothraki funeral pyre, Daenerys Targaryen emerged with three ferociously loyal newborn dragons hanging off her. In the real world, newborn lizards are genetically hardwired to be much more independent. Weve hatched dragon eggs here, explains Matt Cook, lead keeper at Chester Zoo, currently home to six Komodo dragons. But if you were to try and approach them, they would attack you rather than snuggle your hair. Theyre intelligent but they have to be selfish because its genuinely the only way to survive. They may never truly love you but it is possible to develop your dragon. Daenerys hollers Dracarys! when she wants some barbecuing done but Cook favor a system that involves a traffic cone, a audio clicker and a tiny meaty reward to wrangle his charges. They tolerate humans, genuinely, he says. Once they get to a certain size, they know theyre the upper part of the food chain so they can be quite arrogant; they think theyre untouchable. But they can also be very chilled. Khaleesi does it. GV

How long would it take to build the Wall ?

High and fighty: The Wall. Photograph: HBO

482 kilometres long. 213 metres high. 91 metres thick. In reality, a wall of this size constructed entirely of ice would collapse under its own weight. But this is Westeros, a world where dragons roam and Little Fingers accent is never questioned, so lets crunch some numbers. Its estimated that when building the Great Pyramid, a workforce of, on average, 14,567 people running 10 -hour days laid around 180 blocks per hour. Now, if the ice bricks making up The Wall are a metre squared, it would contain in the region of 9,342, 606,000( thats 213 x 91 x 482,000, maths fans ). At a sensible-sounding 180 blocks laid per minute, it would take the same workforce 51,903, 367 hours to construct The Wall. Thats 5,921 years. So, we have to assume Brandon the Builder who legend has it enlisted the help of giants had a much larger workforce than this. Even with 100 times the pyramids workforce, 14,567, 000 employees, it would take over 59 years to build. All sounds like a little bit of a faff, genuinely. LH

Why is the Seven Kingdoms in debt ?

A loan in the dark: Jamie and Cersei Lannister. Photograph: HBO

A costly five-way civil war has forced the Seven Kingdoms to go cap in hand to the Iron Bank Of Braavos. Dr James Davis, senior lecturer in medieval history at Queens University Belfast, watches a parallel with Edward III, who borrowed heavily from Italian banks. But he was a step ahead of the Lannister dynasty. Edward III was quite canny: at the same as fighting a war he was developing parliament to extract more taxation without too much unrest. At the heart of every medieval king, whatever their aspirations, it was always about where you could get the money. Davis suggests that the Seven Kingdoms needs to abandon its feudalist structures and fast. There isnt much sign of development of trade and industry. It absence stable laws that would allow entrepreneurism to emerge. Otherwise a peasants revolt is a possibility only around the corner: In a real society, thered be more riots. SR

Whats my best opportunity of beating The Mountain in a duel ?

Fight the power: Hafthr Jlus Bjrnsson, left, as Gregor The Mountain Clegane. Photograph: Alamy

Even in Westeros, a land not exactly lacking in murderous mercenaries, Gregor The Mountain Clegane is a lethal legend. So how would a layman go about tackling him in a trial by combat? Martin Oz Austwick is the founder of the English Martial Arts Academy, offering class in historical European swordsmanship. His strategy? Like the Red Viper, choose a long weapon to try to match the range of the Mountains terrifying greatsword: A spear would be good, although Id personally favor a quarterstaff. Also, forgo armour to allow yourself greater mobility and focus on injuring Cleganes massive hands: if he cant wield his weapon, he cant cleave you in twain with it. One debate in our community is whether targeting hands is an acceptable technique, says Austwick. It might seem dishonourable but against the Mountain, doing the British thing and being polite would be your undoing. So my advice would be to fight as dirty as you can. GV

How big is Westeros ?

In continents: one of Game of Thrones filming locations. Photograph: Alamy

George RR Martin has stated that Westeros is roughly the size of South America, which would make sense for a continent with climates that range from the frozen wastes north of the Wall to the balmy water gardens of Dorne in the south. Utilizing measurements given in the series, the width of Westeros is calculated to be around 3,000 miles the distance from the tip of Norway to the Red Sea and with a population of 20 -4 0 million. The topography stimulates sense for the most part, reckons Simon Willcocks of Ordnance Surveys consultancy and technical services squad. All kinds of stuff from deserts to river deltas, marshy bog, mountain passes, but nothing outlandish. But if Westeros is so big, how come the main characters manage to keep bumping into each other? Its a very long and narrow continent with few roads and river intersects, reasons Willcocks. As for Essos, a continent that Varys seems to traverse at will but that has taken Daenerys at the least five series to cross well, thats for another day. SR

What is wildfire ?

Burning down the House: Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister.

Joffreys victory at the Battle of Blackwater Bay during which the king-youd-love-to-slaps forces defended Kings Landing from Stannis Baratheon owed largely to Tyrion Lannisters procurement of an explosive known as wildfire. The resultant blue-green flames tore through Stanniss fleet like a longsword through the back of Ned Starks neck. But what the blaze is it? Dr Richard Henchman, senior lecturer in theoretical chemistry at the University of Manchester, draws comparisons to the historical episode of Archimedess fire to destroy Roman ships, which utilized mirrors to focus the sunlight rays into deadly beams. It is also similar to Greek flame, a Byzantine weapon able to burn on water, reminiscent of a crude kind of napalm. From a compositional standpoint, though, wildfires colouring suggest a copper compound. Perhaps what we have is a copper oxide/ magnesium thermite? It looks like sorcery to me, says Henchman. Oh. Never mind then. LH

Game of Thrones Season 6 starts 2am, Sunday 24 April and repeats 9pm, Monday 25 April on Sky Atlantic

This article was amended on the 15 th April to country the workforce necessary to build the wall in 59 years is 100 times that used to build The Great Pyramid , not 10