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betelgeusessonajblog · 4 years

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Carlos’ Final Day....

You knew this was coming

@thelostandforgottenangel not sorry!

Carlos rubs his eyes a little as he steps out of a portal, he groans a little then blinks “I need to get used to that.” he thought as he shook his head. It takes a minute before his vision adjusts to the normal light “Ah much better.” he smiled before pocketing the bottle that was in his hands.

He had decided to surprise AJ and, Raph after hearing both had managed to recover quite a lot since he’d last heard from them.

Carlos walks down the street as he pulls out his phone then dials AJ’s number, wanting to see if AJ was free so he could visit them.

After a few rings it goes straight to voicemail, Carlos thinks for a moment ‘Hm he must be busy with Raph.” so he decides to leave a voicemail “ Hi, Alex it’s me. I’m guessing you’re spending time with Raph. I’m so glad that you and he are doing much better. I decided to stop by Monstropolis to surprise you tonight but since you’re busy I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll be staying at the MonStar hotel. I’ll see you tomorrow, have fun!” he said as he hung up then decided to check AJ’s Facebook page.

He smiled a little as he saw a new photo of Raph and, AJ that the young lizard had posted not too long ago with the caption ‘Spending the evening with my hubby’ underneath it.

Carlos exits his account then puts his phone away as he began walking down the street “I have time before I have to head to my hotel.”

He spends the next twenty minutes walking around, exploring the city as he never truly got the chance to do so whenever he did visit.

Carlos stops in front of a fast food stand and decides to grab a bite to eat, he pulls out his wallet to grab some money but groans a little “In all my excitement I forgot to go to the ATM and get this world’s currency.” he muttered.

Just then a woman with black hair in a bun approached Carlos “Excuse me but are you having some issues with money?” she asked as Carlos looked at her.

“Hm? Oh yeah, I suppose you could call it issues. In all my excitement to visit my son and, son-in-law I forgot to change my currency.” Carlos replied, chuckling a little in embarrassment.

The woman reaches into her trench coat and pulls out her purse “Allow me to buy you something from the stand.”

“Oh I couldn’t possibly do that.” Carlos replied as he held up a hand

“I do not mind as long as you can repay me.” The woman smiled

“....Oh...Alright. I am rather hungry and I have some time before I have to head to my hotel. Not for another half hour.” Carlos said as the woman approached the food stand and begins ordering herself and, Carlos some food.

Soon she hands a hamburger to Carlos whom takes it with a smile “Thank you so much. I’m Carlos Garcia, by the way. I never got to introduce myself to you.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Garcia.” The woman smiled “You may call me Miwa.” she said as she took a bite out of her food.

Carlos nodded “Miwa? That’s nice. Japanese?” he asked

Miwa nods “Yes, that’s right. My father named me it after my late mother.” she explained as she and Carlos ate together.

“I am so sorry for your loss.” Carlos said with a sincere look on his face “Losing someone is never easy.”

Miwa nods in agreement “Yes, that is true.” she shook her head “But we live for those that are no longer around.”

Carlos nodded “That’s a nice sentiment.” he smiled. He pulls out his phone to check the time “Oh, it’s almost time for me to check into my hotel.”

"May I offer a cab service? I use this company all the time, they are very reliable.” Miwa said with a smile

“Oh that’d be appreciated, I don’t know any companies in this country.” Carlos chuckled.

“May I borrow your phone to call the company? That way you can save it to use later.” Miwa asked to which Carlos nodded, the idea sounded reasonable to him.

Miwa took Carlos’ phone then dialled a number into it, she spoke briefly to someone on the other end before hanging up “They’ll be here within the next five minutes. Luckily a driver was in our vicinity.”

“Oh that is great. I hate having to stand around for long periods of time.” Carlos said with a smile.

Miwa nods a little in agreement “We should get going, they’ll be wanting to park nearby.” she said as she started walking off.

Carlos nodded as he followed Miwa towards a nearby store “outside here?” he asked

Miwa nods a little “Yes, I often stand outside this store whilst I wait on them.” she replied with a smile “plus it is a nice way to watch something on the TV whilst waiting.”

Carlos turned to look at the store, noticing it was an electronics one “Oh that is a nice idea.”

Whilst Carlos’ back was turned, a van pulled up behind him and, Miwa. Without hesitation, Miwa pulls out a syringe and stabs Carlos in the neck, he quickly passes out and is dragged inside the van.

Hours later Carlos groans as he wakes up in what appeared to be an old warehouse, his hands shackled above his head “Wh...where....”

Before he could fully grasp where he was or what was going on, something stabbed into his side then began to zap him. Carlos screamed out in agony as he felt the electricity run through his body.

Soon the zapping stopped as Carlos panted heavily, he looks up and sees Miwa standing before him “M-Miwa...?? What are you...”

“My name is not Miwa, you fool. My name is Karai.” Karai said as Carlos’ eyes widened in horror realising who it was

"Wh-what do you want from me??” Carlos asked, his voice trembling a little.

“You are going to spill everything you know about your son and the turtle.” Karai said with a smirk

"You must be insane if you think that I would ever betray my son and his husband.” Carlos replied before getting punched in the gut, causing him to grunt

Karai spends the next three hours trying to get Carlos to spill anything that could help the Foot win against Raph and, AJ but Carlos would just toss out useless information about AJ like how he has a passion for playing the guitar.

Karai slams her fist onto a nearby desk “STOP WASTING OUR TIME AND GIVE US THE INFORMATION WE WANT!!” she shouts

Carlos’ face was badly beaten and very bruised, his left eye had swollen a little, he spits some blood onto Karai’s chest “I told you, you stupid bitch....I would never betray my son or son-in-law.”

Karai growled as she went to punch Carlos again “Do not bother, Karai.” a voice called out as Shredder appeared from seemingly nowhere.

Karai looks at Carlos then walks towards Shredder “I have been at this for three hours now, he has given no useful information.” she said with an annoyed tone in her voice.

Shredder walks towards Carlos whom was trembling a little “If you wish to make it out of here alive, you will comply with our demands, lizard.”

Carlos inhales deeply “I...am...NEVER going to betray my family.” he replied as he trembled a little.

Shredder shook his head silently before looking at Karai and, in Japanese, tells her to bring Carlos’ cell phone over. He looks back at Carlos “You might as well say goodbyes now....” Shredder said as freed Carlos’ hands

Carlos drops to his knees, blood dripping from his mouth as he panted. He looks up at Karai as he takes his phone, his hands shaking as he dialled AJ’s number once again and...once again...only reaching his voicemail. Part of him was hoping AJ would be able to answer this time, hoping he could tell AJ personally his final words but decided to just leave one final voicemail for the young lizard “Al-Alex…I’m so sorry honey to call again….something happened and I’m…I’m not gonna be around anymore.” he took a deep breath but it still came out shaky “Alex….you have no idea….just how proud of you I am. Of the life you’ve built for yourself with Raphael…..I am so glad I took you in as my own son….You were the best thing to happen to me since Ollie….I want you to promise to keep doing your best….no matter what happens to me, okay? Tell Roger that I love him so much and he’s an amazing young man. Raph….Raph is an amazing partner….and I was proud to call him my son-in-law. I know he’ll keep you safe when I’m gone. Never forget how much you meant to me, Alex. I love you….I love you so much.” as Carlos finishes his message to AJ, Shredder looks at Karai and gives her a nod.

Karai quickly grabs some wire that was on the nearby desk then wraps it around Carlos’ neck and begins to choke the life out of him. He drops his phone onto the ground as Karai did this. He begins to struggle, attempting to break free. He wasn’t ready to die, not yet. There was so much he wanted to do and, experience. He wanted to live, he wanted to see his family again.

Karai tightens the wire around Carlos’ neck, she then puts her foot on his back as she pulls upwards causing a loud CRUNCH to be heard as his windpipe was crushed, killing him in seconds, the life quickly draining from his eyes.

Shredder stomps on Carlos’ phone as Karai lets go of Carlos, causing his lifeless body to drop onto the ground with a thud. Shredder looks at two nearby Foot ninjas “Hold his body up.” he says to which the two ninjas agree.

They each grab an arm then hold Carlos’ body up, he looks at his bladed arm then in one swift motion cuts Carlos’ midsection open causing his guts to drop out, blood pouring onto the ground “....Take his body and string him up. I want them to find him.” Shredder instructed some Foot ninjas whom all nod then carry Carlos’ body away.

A while later the Foot members wrap wire around Carlos’ neck then hang him up. Luckily for them this was the quiet hour in the street so no one saw them. Carlos’ body was soon hanging, blood dripping from his guts.

Meanwhile.....in the Netherworld....Carlos lays in the middle of a street, he sits up and rubs his neck “...wasn’t...I just...” he muttered as he stood up and begins to look around. it was clear to him that this wasn’t AJ and, Raph’s world....nor was it the Monster World....

Carlos walks backwards as he looked around until someone tapped him on the shoulder causing the lizard to turn around to see who it was.

Carlos’ eyes widened as he saw a young dog-like monster standing in front of him. The dog-like monster had two small horns on his head, his eyes were a light blue colour, his body was muscular “...Hello...love...” the monster said.

Carlos began to tear up “O-Ollie...??” to which the dog-like monster nods smiling as Carlos quickly wraps his arms around Ollie. The two share a long, loving kiss before they pulled away, Carlos places his forehead against Ollie’s “Ollie...I...I am so sorry for...”

“Sssh....Carlos....not once did I ever blame you for what happened to me...I should’ve tried to keep fighting but I was just so broken....” Ollie said as Carlos lightly caresses his face “I was....sent here to help you with....dying.”

“...so...I really died...” Carlos said as he began to sob softly, Ollie wraps his arms around Carlos “I...I didn’t want to die, there was so much I....”

“I know, love...I know...” Ollie said as he lightly rubs Carlos’ back, trying to soothe the lizard.

“Wh-What about Alex....?? He...” Carlos started to say before Ollie kisses him on the lips gently

“Alex is going to be okay....he’s a strong kid....I’ve been watching over you for some time. I am so proud of you for helping him out when he needed someone....” Ollie said as he pulled away, taking Carlos’ hand into his “....Why won’t we go start our afterlife together?”

Carlos looks at Ollie’s hand then at Ollie, nodding a little with a small smile “At...least I get to be with you again, Ollie...”

The two walk off together, hand in hand heading off to start their afterlife together. For once....Carlos felt truly happy....he finally had the love of his life back. They stand in front of a door, Carlos was nervous about whatever it was that was behind it but Ollie gives him a reassuring smile before they walked through it, a bright light engulfs the pair as they share another kiss.

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swifty-fox · 4 years

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dude! more history rants, that was great!! I honestly probably learned more in that than I ever have in a history class

dude! Learning about history is SO much better when the person you’re listening to has a genuine passion for it! My Russian prof used to take his shoes off and bang on the table to prove his point, he would imitate historical figures down to the Russian accent (with great skill he lived in the USSR through the entire nineties which if you know anything about nineties Russia that is a FEAT. His wife to be at the time ((now a german history prof at my college)) was offered a ride in a helicopter by the Russian mob. She declined)

Russian history is also just such a rich and dramatic and WILD history. Theres so many things to focus on like an entire semester was spent JUST studying the revolution and that was only an introductory course

Anyways since I’m here and can rant lets talk about two fun things! Lenins name and his family as well as Vasily Grossmans greatest and most controversial works!

So Vladimir Lenin is a pretty iconic name. A pretty cool name in fact! Really rolls off the tongue and strikes FEAR into enemies hearts.

Did ya know it’s not his fuckin name? Nope! the guy straight up chose a new last name for himself! This former law student (oh yeah he wasn't even a politician no wonder the fucko didn't know how to run a country) was actually born Vladimir Ulyanov!

but why the name change? Ulyanov is still pretty easy to say, still pretty memorable. Rolls of the tongue so on and so forth.

this, ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between and beyond, is because of Lenins older brother Aleksandr Ulyanov!

(this guy has better hair than i could ever hope to, thanks diluted slav genes)

now sweet Aleks here was also four years Vladimirs Senior and was also a revolutionary! (seems like it ran in the family)

Not only was he a revolutionary but he was a MASSIVELY FAMOUS ONE and kinda helped set the ENTIRE downfall of the soviet union in motion long before the revolution was even a whisper of a thought.

How you ask? well uh.

he tried to kill Tsar Nikolas II’s dad.

yes, that Tsar Nikolas who later was overthrown and was executed by firing squad. Sorry the Romanovs are all very very dead we found all their bodies the animated movie was very wrong.

Anyways, sweet kolya’s father was Tsar Alexander III and he was known throughout the land as the Peacemaker!

(also yes they're both called Aleksandr. Russians only have like. Ten names to choose from)

wow sounds like he must be a great guy with a nickname like that huh? Why would anyone wanna kill him! Sadly, the nickname is only because Russia entered no wars under his rule. He was in fact, a huge bastard. Outside of being physically and emotionally abusive to his family (he would often berate Nikolai for being weak which definitely led to some of his issues with his authority and pride being questioned later on...) he was incredibly reactionary and heavy handed when it came to ruling. he opposed ANY movement that might minimize his authority as emperor. He was famous for executing a LOT of anti-imperialist terrorists.

he also looked like this

not to insult bulldogs but this guy sure looks like one.

Anyways, Aleksandr Ulyanov helps devise a plot wherein he and a bunch of other revolutionaries will ride by Tsar Alek’s carriage and chuck a bomb through his window and then boom no more emperor. basically, it was the 1887 version of a drive by shooting.

Naturally, it failed, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about this! Anyways, All the conspirators were captured and sentenced to death. (5 were later pardoned none of which were Lenins brother.) They were all hanged.

Although Lenin was involved in politics before this to some degree, this action really radicalized him and really got the ball rolling for the eventual Soviet Union. Talk about butterfly effect.

Alright time for history lesson part TWO!! Lets talk about Vasily Grossman and his work In The Town of Berdichev! Though more technically I will be talking more about the film adaptation titled Commissar(1967).

quick background time! Vasily Grossman was born to a Jewish family and due to prosecution (of both Jewish people and Ukrainians) at the time was forced to conceal his heritage. He actually studied to be a chemist at first and was quite successful until he transitioned later in life to being a writer and reporter! His accounts of the Ukrainian famine are the some of the most detailed accounts as well as the most controversial (to the Russian state) he also was a war reporter for WWII and intensively documented the ethnic cleansing going on. Understandably.

he was strongly supported by Maksim Gorky! (yes that Maksim Gorky, famous writer, and the man who helped develop the entire soviet education system that kinda was just brainwashing and propaganda. Reportedly later in life he considered that to be one of his greatest regrets((he was also a massive homophobe too because same sex relationships were actually legal for a while there in russia!))

Long story short, Vasya believed strongly in several things. he believed in the human spirit, he believed in supporting his Jewish brethren, he believed strongly in mother Russia and the communist party. But more than that he believed that those who do not learn from our mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

Thus came about his work. I’ll post a quick plot summary here from Wikipedia of the movie. it’s a really good film honestly I highly recommend it.

“During the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), a female commissar of the Red Army cavalry Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordyukova) finds herself pregnant. Until her child is born, she is forced to stay with the family of a poor Jewish blacksmith Yefim Magazannik (Rolan Bykov), his wife, mother-in-law, and six children. At first, both the Magazannik family and "Madame Vavilova", as they call her, are not enthusiastic about living under one roof, but soon they share their rationed food, make her civilian clothes, and help her with the delivery of her newborn son. Vavilova seemingly embraces motherhood, civilian life, and new friends.Meanwhile, the frontline advances closer to the town and the Jews expect a pogrom by the White Army as the Red Army retreats. Vavilova attempts to console them with a Communist dream: "One day people will work in peace and harmony", but the dream is interrupted with a vision of the fate of the Jews in the coming world war. She rushes to the front to rejoin her army regiment, leaving her newborn behind.“

- White army was the anti-soviet army during the revolution. Red Army was the soviets. Pogroms were targeted areas of ethnic cleansing against Jewish peoples, namely they were villages or towns that were wiped out.

this film was banned for something like forty years for anti-soviet sentiment. But why? it seems pretty damn pro-soviet doesn't it?

Well firstly lets talk about how oppressive the soviet regime was by this point! In 1967 Russia was in the dying throes of Stalins regime. Yes he had died a little over a decade earlier but the government was still very much being run by his ideals. All independent newspapers were banned. EVERYTHING every single piece of art, literature, news, commercial, WHATEVER, had to be state approved. And by god was it hard to get things approved. Grossman routinely wrote of his frustrations and struggles of getting anything published because if a Russain character was portrayed as anything but a happy go lucky communist then it would be censored. Grossman first ran into this issue when he was reporting on the iron and coal mines in siberia. the conditions were terrible but Grossman had to lie and say everything was fine. It let to a real crisis of ideals for him.

The first red mark against this movie is that well, it focuses on a woman. It’s an incredibly feminist movie, with the idea of motherhood and duty and the strength of a woman being just as much if not more than a man. (for reference a Commissar is like an army Officer)

Secondly, she abandons her post! to have a child! In communist Russia NOTHING comes before your duty to the motherland. But again she eventually realizes that the call of her country is stronger than the call of this simple maternal life and she does go on to fight so why is this a problem?

Well ultimately, it boils down to the final scene.

"One day people will work in peace and harmony" she says. An entirely pro-soviet message. But then it is instantly contradicted by footage of the holocaust. This is a visual representation fo Grossman saying that although the communist ideal is strong in the soviet union that they are being blinded by false enemies, prejudices and will find themselves committing such atrocities (of course they already are but again he DID still support the Soviet State) Basically it was a warning to the Soviet Party! Learn from the mistakes that were made and gentle themselves!

And this, this was a criticism of the Soviet party! And thus, it was shelved for nearly twenty years.

It finally was shown again in the late 80′s

Grossman, after attempting to publish his magnum opus, Life and Fate, had his flat raided by the KGB and all his notes, manuscripts, letters, books, publications, and pretty much his life's work were confiscated. Grossman died in the mid 1960′s of stomach cancer not knowing if any of his writings or best works would ever be seen or published again.

Thankfully they were found and published and his massively important legacy lives on in the people who know about him. But his story is a very bittersweet one indeed.

you can watch the full movie here with English captions!

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(tw: imagery of holocaust, some anti-semitism (if i recall) some children without any clothes bathing if i recall (its not weird but I know it was shocking for me to see at first))

(maybe I’ll talk about the TRUE story of Rasputin another time...)

#swiftytalks #russian history #again i dont have my notes on me also i went to PAX for half of the movie so i missed some of it #fact checked by google again but still mostly word vomit #every day I say that Lenin was a BITCH #discussions of antisemitism #as always #because russia #Anonymous

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homespork-review · 4 years

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Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 3)

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to PM, WV, and AR in the far but not that far future. WV is trying to obey the letter’s direction to give the package to PM but AR keeps shooting. Yet WV and PM take cover behind a rock and WV is able to complete the task. The letter calls PM “Miss Mail Lady” so we now have a gender.

Back to Dream Jade. She flies to another golden tower and peers in on John sleeping. This bedroom is also defaced like his one in the waking world, plus there’s a creepy harlequin doll next to him. She isn’t sure if he got her present or if she even sent it, so she decides she’ll ask later.

CHEL: Dream John is fitfully asleep, but Jade intends to let him wake up on his own. Here, it’s established that Dream Jade does not know everything waking Jade does, as she decides she needs a system to remind her of things, which in the waking world she has (remember the COLORFUL REMINDERS).

The moon on which the city is now revealed to be placed is moving close to Skaia, the gargantuan sphere of cloudy blue sky mentioned by Nannasprite as the crucible of creation. Apparently it’s not safe to be outside during the “eclipse”, so Jade heads back to her tower.

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to John alchemizing a bunch of stuff, some useful and some never to appear again. One of these things is a Cosbytop computer and that hasn’t aged well. John feels like it’s both his birthday and Christmas and though he thinks that’s impossible these pages came out a few days before Christmas. This fourth wall wink and nod comes up during another alchemizing frenzy.

CHEL: He contemplates a “1980s time-lapse montage” but instead we have to sit through him alchemising everything item by item.

GET ON WITH IT!: 12

Though he does come up with some useful stuff, including a rather snappy suit. By combining his glasses with the PDA he gets hands-free internet, and the sledgehammer, telescope, and Sassacre book together create the TELESCOPIC SASSACRUSHER, an extremely powerful weapon which unfortunately he can’t lift. Nannasprite’s ectoplasm and the gushers make healing candies, and ectoplasm, the fake arms, and the PDA solve the giant hammer problem by making REMOTE GHOST GAUNTLETS. One of the funnier items is a steam-iron-hammer he calls the WRINKLEFUCKER.

Dave, meanwhile, is STILL strifing with Bro, who apparently doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the fact that the city is being flattened by meteors around them. Not doing a good job of showing “yes, this fight should be taken seriously”.

TIER: Neither does Dave for that matter, fucks given remains at a cool absolute zero on this roof.

GET ON WITH IT!: 13 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6

CHEL: At least it’s captioned FINAL ROUND now. Surrounded by watching crows, Dave hurls himself at Bro, and their collision results in the snapping of Dave’s sword, the bisection of Lil Cal (hooray!) and, somehow, the splitting of the picture of the record on Dave’s T-shirt; not cutting the cloth, turning the picture of a whole record into one of a broken record, which it will remain for the rest of its time in the story. Lots of analysis has been done by fans about how this represents Bro’s abuse shattering Dave’s true inner self, but in the context, it just looks like even sillier cartoon physics than we already had, if one even notices it (in the rush of visuals it’s easy to miss the first time round). It probably doesn’t help that Bro never actually says anything (nor do either of the other living adults), so we don’t really know what his thoughts on the matter are.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 12

Dave goes flying, rolling and skidding across the roof, landing in a rather battered-looking heap but with no serious harm done, and Bro chucks the game discs at him and… flies off on a hoverboard which I guess he has? Yet again, not adding to a serious tone here. Are hoverboards normal in this universe? Like the sylladexes, it was never established. Dave messages John, matter-of-factly telling him “bro just kicked my ass”. It’s still unclear how literal John thinks this ass-kicking is.

BRIGHT: This is apparently a universe in which some form of combat with one’s guardian is apparently routine, so John might well be thinking of Dave’s strifes with Bro as just a more intense version of a normal practice. On the other hand, by that same token, there’s nothing at this stage to say it isn’t just a more intense version of a normal practice. In fact, both John’s and Dave’s reactions suggest this is the case.

The problem really comes later on. If Dave’s situation is going to be taken seriously, then so should everyone else’s. Right now, although there are suggestions that all is not well, the tone of the text takes none of these situations seriously. It keeps everyone on a more even footing.

CHEL: Back on the golden moon, the eclipse is happening; during same, the moon and Jade’s tower thereupon, which are chained to the planet, swing right inside Skaia, surrounding it with clouds. On the surface of the clouds, we see images of events which happened earlier, including John’s house in the Medium, Rose’s house aflame, the tree in the desert, and the meteors falling on Dave’s city. This, we gather, is from where Jade obtains her mysterious information!

Dream Jade types messages to John, while the Dreambot types them out on a keyboard in the real world so he can actually get them. We proceed to see the same conversation about the package and SBurb we saw when Jade was first introduced, but this time I think a recap of it is actually pretty useful, especially the reference to the explosion. What happens is a little hard to parse, but as far as I can make out, a cloud shows a vision of a meteor emerging from a space portal, and the meteor actually emerges from the vision, becoming a cloud in the process. Said cloud-meteor then passes into a vision of Jade’s island when the volcano was still active and strikes down as the real meteor did in that time period. Jade, in her tower, hears it; I guess this is why it’s not safe to go outside during the eclipse?

In the volcano vision, we pull into a close-up shot of the lava-filled crater beneath the volcano, and a very familiar featureless canine head starts to emerge from it. Creepy.

Jade leaves the tower to check, and finds a vision of the lava with a blossom-like lit-up spirograph emerging from it, but when she tries to look, vision-Bec blocks her view of it, as the real Bec flies back and forth in front of the Dreambot. She messages John again, saying Bec doesn’t want her to go near the meteor crash site.

In John’s dream tower, the bed is empty; Dream John is now hovering outside it, eyes firmly shut. Jade sees him and drifts toward him, while John’s eyes slowly open. (This bit fuelled a fair amount of shipping at the time.) We see again the shaped clouds and the slowly approaching silhouette of Jade, revealing this to be the time when John fell asleep earlier, and at the exact same moment, real Jade and real John awake.

Again, we have a repeated conversation, this one being the one where Jade implores John to wake up. Now we know what she meant! Again, I think recapping this is reasonable, but maybe it could have been trimmed down so we just got the important points? That should have been done with all the repeat convos, really.

TIER: Personally speaking the little blurbs of repeated conversation shown during the flash would've gotten the point across without having to completely rehash the conversations.

With Jade awake properly, we get another convo rehash (now with proper context from both sides). Jade then consults her COLORFUL REMINDERS, as the visions of past and future events visible in the clouds as she sleeps can get very confusing very fast and the things help her put everything into usable info! With is fitting because dreams are trippy and easily forgotten. Jade notes two things: that this time there wasn't that much of future being shown, and that this is the first time that her dog guardian Bec has shown up a dream.

Bec has apparently never let Jade wander into the weird temple that is such a strange landmark of her island, but with the overpowered pooch taking a nap at the feet of his master's corpse, this is a good a time as any to try and pull one over him!

As Jade zip lines towards the temple and Rose continues construction on John's house, we cut back to Dave in the aftermath of the strife.

Dave is slightly saddened by poor Cal's “unfortunate” bisection (personally I was hollering because fuck that thing Jesus). His strife kind has also been turned into a ½ bladekind, courtesy of Bro fucking up his shit blade. Fucking rude man.

BRIGHT: Fighting with half a sword never seems to hinder Dave, but it still seems a silly thing to do when Bro quite possibly knew Dave was headed into heavy combat. It’s funny at the time though!

FAILURE ARTIST: When I first read Homestuck, I was sad Bro didn’t seem to care about Lil Cal, but with later revelations...would be better if that puppet never existed.

TIER: Dave attempts to grab the beta that he worked so hard for, but wouldn't ya know it his dang inventory is all filled up. Mostly with useless crap, as Dave admits as well. After a quick setup change for his modus, Dave finally has the beta! Congrats!!

CHEL: *looks pointedly at GET ON WITH IT count*

TIER: While Dave attempts to pester her, Rose has finished building up John's house, which marks the end of how much more she can help John as his server player. There's not much else to do for her till Dave shows up. She's also nearly done with John's gift, that'll show him that Rose is the God King of, and I am quoting right now “facetious sentimental gestures”. That's a peculiar and slightly worrying sentiment to have. What an adorably wordy yet cheeky little goth.

With that, we jump back a few months into the past, when it was Rose's 13th birthday. She's opening a package from John (signed under his old handle ghostyTrickster) containing the gift of knitting stuff (yarn and knitting needles) and a very dorky yet endearing letter from the blue boy. What a goof.

Rose is then pestered by one of the trollslum inhabitants, this one by the name of grimAuxiliatrix! They type Like This, And I Think It's Very Neat. Also quite verbose this one. Like personally I kinda need to carefully read and reread their words to get what the fuck they're trying to get to. In this case, it's politely bitching about humans while weird time related fuckery gets explicitly name dropped. Mainly the weird situation that is the trolls being/not being from the future. It's as confusing as it sounds.

CHEL: I think here’s the first indication that the trolls aren’t just other humans. Meanwhile, notice that one of the names in the Trollslum is “centaursTesticle”. Lovely. That character will, as the handle suggests, be the source of a LOT of CALL CPA PLEASE points. But anyway.

GA: No We Arent From "The Future" GA: But We Are All Already In Agreement That You Dont Get It And Never Will TT: I thought you said we spoke in the future. GA: We Did GA: Your Future GA: For Me It Was Only A Couple Minutes Ago TT: I understand. TT: You exist in some temporal stratum through which you have communication access to various points of my timeline. TT: It's not that complicated.

TIER: While that confusing thing keeps happening, we jump on over to a younger Dave, whole record shirt and dumb not-Kamina anime glasses wearing. He too is opening a birthday gift, which consists of his iconic aviators and a letter as well. The letter is just as endearing as the one John sent to Rose. Might just be my bias talking concerning how much John is undoubtedly and unchallenged my favorite character overall.

CHEL: I think so too, but I’m still giving him a point for him telling Dave his “gay butt stinks”, even though he is a twelve-year-old boy - it never gets called out or presented as bad that the kids say -ism-based insults until near the end, and that part has its own problems which we’ll get to then. The rest of it’s cute though.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 11

I’d like to bring up another webcomic which is known for its incredibly offensive humour; R. K. Milholland’s Something Positive. Specifically, I’d like to contrast the offensive humour of it with the offensive humour of Homestuck. In S*P, the point of the offensive humour is that the characters saying or doing the offensive thing are horrible people who should not be emulated, and even they disapprove strongly of homophobic/racist insults. Here is one of the tamer examples, from 2003 (so later comics have no excuse). Please note the character saying all this is both very drunk and very frustrated by having read a lot of terrible writing at the time, and his decision to do this comes back to bite him later.

In contrast, the point of Homestuck’s offensive jokes seems to be that either offensive things are inherently funny or the writer doesn’t realise why they’re offensive.

John tells Dave he thinks he needs to get out of his brother’s shadow, showing no concern for Dave’s actual wellbeing; more evidence that either they don’t know about the strifes or don’t care. The gift John has given is the glasses worn by Ben Stiller, which John suggests could replace Dave’s current anime shades. John worries that they’re “sort of a shitty present”, which again makes me wonder about the Egberts’ financial status - we weren’t able to find an actual figure for them but those things would cost thousands, so what the hell makes him call them “shitty”? How much did Hussie think movie memorabilia cost? Name of the count aside, we’re using it for when their economic statuses are weird in general, so here we go again:

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 8

TIER: Dave too is dealing with a trollslum inhabitant, this one by the name of adiosToreador. It's around here that the trolls typing starts to get head tilt worthy. As Dave so eloquently puts it, toreador types like a tool. I mean, lOOK AT THIS, lOOK ME IN THE EYES, aND TELL ME THIS AIN'T RIDICULOUS.

CHEL: AT opens by telling Dave he’s awful, and Dave responds with frustration at having to deal with the trolls yet again. He complains that he’s “wasting good material on you guys” and that there’s no substance to their trolling; he also mentions one of them thinking he was a girl, which I think is the original source of the fandom’s popular female-to-male transgender Dave headcanon.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think it’s just that Dave is a popular character.

CHEL: I don’t know, it started well before the fandom started getting really enthusiastic about assigning identities to everyone, from what I saw, but maybe.

TIER: My two cents concerning this matter is that it's probably a combination of the two. Dave seems to resonate quite well with a great majority of the fans, so from what I've seen they more readily project onto him.

AT: i KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE, AT: oR WILL DO, aCTUALLY, AT: iT'S THE MOST AWFUL THING, tHE WORST YOU CAN EVER DO,

CHEL: The readers immediately start wondering what this thing is, but Dave is unconcerned, and immediately accuses AT of perving on him. Here is where the CALL CPA PLEASE count really starts to ramp up, because on one hand, yes it’s hilarious to watch the tables being turned, but on the other, this coming out of a boy who literally just turned thirteen that day is… uncomfortable for a lot of adult readers, especially since we know his home has obscene material lying around all over it and as mentioned before that can really mess up a kid, even if Bro was not in fact putting him in his movies directly.

TG: and i want to know exactly when i got to clear some space in my calendar for when some fuckwit blunders out of a magical phone booth and makes a ballad-inspiring play for my throbbing beef truncheon AT: sHOULD i BE PERTURBED BY THESE ALLUSIONS, TG: no man TG: look TG: i just need to know when to be there TG: when the stars come into alignment and your flux capacitor lets you finally sate your meteoric greed for crotch-dachshund TG: i wouldnt want to miss it and cause a paradox or something TG: itd suck if the universe blew up on account of you missing your window of opportunity to help yourself to a pubescent boy's naked spam porpoise AT: uHHH, AT: oK, THIS IS SORT OF STARTING TO UPSET ME, CALL CPA PLEASE: 5

TIER: How many words does a 13 year old need for his private parts? Asking for a friend. I get that Dave is a little gremlin but holy shit y'all.

CHEL: To quote Hiveswap, “SOUNDS LIKE SETUP TO ‘RIDDLE’ OR PERHAPS ‘JOKE’.” Or maybe a really weird rewrite of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I just realised the (in)appropriateness of that song title. Anyway, I’m giving one CPA point for each of those elaborate descriptions. AT, perturbed, announces his intention to leave, but Dave continues.

TG: we're motherfuckin entrenched in this bitch TG: you and me TG: welcome to nam TG: now grab my hand and shimmy your soggy ass off that muddy bank before charlie gets the fuckin drop AT: uHHH, wHO, AT: wHO'S CHARLIE, TG: hes the guy whos gonna read our vows TG: im feeling pretty friggin MATRIMONIAL all a sudden TG: take a look down by your foot see that little bottle TG: stomp on that shit like its on fire TG: noisy ethnic dudes are flipping the fuck out and waving us around on chairs til someone gets hurt TG: im your 300 pound matronly freight-train TG: and my gaping furnace is hungry for coal so get goddamn shoveling AT: oH MY GOD, CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9

Hey, our first double point assignment! Two points for using the same racist joke again, as if it wasn’t offensive enough the first time. And another one for the fat joke.

FAILURE ARTIST: Lifting the newlyweds on chairs is a Jewish tradition so I guess Hussie’s antisemitism didn’t start this year.

CHEL: Isn’t stepping on a bottle a Jewish thing too? Does that count as more than one anti-Semitic joke or is it all part of the same one?

FAILURE ARTIST: Yeah, that’s also a thing. But I’d say it counts as one big joke.

CHEL: Does the Vietnam joke count as a separate one? I’m not sure what the general attitude to those is since about half of 20th-century British comedy revolves around WW2 jokes and no one minds those.

TG: thats what you see TG: a kaleidoscopic supernova of all your hopes and dreams all swishin together TG: radially effevescing arms of more little boy peckers than you can imagine TG: turning out insane corkscrew haymakers of a billion dancing vienna sausages strong CALL CPA PLEASE: 7

CHEL: All the counts aside, I can see what Hussie was going for and the general idea’s still amusing, culminating in one of the funniest bits in the comic when all this leads up to adiosToreador [AT] blocked turntechGodhead [TG] - I think we’ve all wanted to be Dave here. I’m fully aware that this sequence was meant to be somewhat uncomfortable, but given that Hussie later tries to tell us that Dave’s home life scarred him for real, yet he presented this as funny, it adds to the general feeling of Hussie berating the reader for laughing at the comedy. I think he was just trying to pander to the woke side of the fanbase with that, but we’ll get to it when we get there.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13

FAILURE ARTIST: We go to AIMLESS RENEGADE, who has finally run out on his clip without hitting anyone. Apparently, some nitpicker on the forum (not me) pointed out the AR’s gun is magazine-fed, not clip-fed, but AR doesn’t give a shit about that.

CHEL: “A clip is not a magazine, a mag is not a clip; neither is a grip a stock, and "stock" does not mean grip.”

FAILURE ARTIST: AR examines the murals and declares the amphibian and reptilian images illegal pictography. AR arms themselves with a rocket launcher but wonders if they should befriend WV and PM - particularly PM. However, AR decides the two have committed too many crimes that make AR’s carapace steam. AR dresses as a judge (to complement WV as a mayor and PM as a mail carrier) and declares order in the court. AR wants to go down the moving platform to catch WV and PM but it isn’t operating right.

Closer to present time, Jade puts her gift to John on top of the monument. The gift disappears, just as Jade planned. Back in the future, PM looks at her drawing showing where she’s supposed to go. The drawing seems to be inaccurate until the tower is shot down. It turns out AR accidentally launched a rocket at it. AR tries again to hit the criminals but is distracted by PM’s beauty. Instead, AR shoots the mobile station. WV throws a can of Tab and PM grabs the package in a clever callback to SBaHJ’s sock ruse comic.

PM gets the package to the Appearifier and Sendifies it into Jade’s toddlerhood, back when Grandpa was alive and shooting butterflies. Inside the package is a letter from John, a too-big t-shirt with a blue ghost on it, and pumpkin seeds. So we have the root of Jade’s friendship with John and the others and her interest in gardening. That’s a very elaborate time loop.

CHEL: Get used to elaborate time loops. Anyway, the letter’s painfully adorable again. John thanks Jade for her years of friendship and for being the reason he met Rose and Dave. He gave Jade pumpkin seeds because future Jade had been upset that her pumpkins kept disappearing so he wanted to help her grow more. Unfortunately his declaration that three people is “almost like, TOO MUCH FRIENDSHIP” was cute at first glance, but given how he has no contact with anyone but them that we see, it becomes a tad creepy. Did he not expect to ever have any friends, or more than one friend? The implication that Dadbert kept him locked in his room all the time is looking more and more likely!

We cut to a cartoon sound effect, WHOP, and You bear the vicious brunt of this story transition directly in the face, “you” now being Archagent Jack Noir. The sound effect is the result of Dad Egbert punching Jack in the face. Jack pulls a switchblade, but Dad retaliates by lighting Jack’s hated jester hat on fire, throwing it to the ground, spraying shaving cream on it, and stomping on it. Jack immediately sets Dad free.

Jade is instructed by the prompt to “Play guitar to summon giant lily pads”, which she does, and it works… somehow? I’m not sure how that happens. Anyway, she uses the lily pads to hop over to the frog temple, finding in it a wall covered in tiny lime green glowing symbols.

Cut back to Dave, who has finally succeeded in installing the beta, and not a moment too soon as Rose’s room is now full of red light, soon to be aflame. Rose is calm enough to join Dave in a SBaHJ joke, and we go into the act-ending animation, [S] Enter.

Dave dramatically sips his fortunately-really-apple-juice and draws cartoons as the game loads, while Rose plays with Vodka Mutini and Jade scurries through the temple. For clarity’s sake, I’ll describe each character’s actions in a separate paragraph.

"Homestuck - [S] Enter [End of act 3]" (Watch on YouTube)

In Rose’s burning house Dave quickly deploys the necessary machinery. There’s so little safe room left to use that he has to throw Rose’s bed into the burning forest for one, put one in the observatory, and put the third on the nearby roof; fortunately Rose is able to get to them all. Dave uses the wizard statue to knock open the Cruxtruder, then drops it outside, breaking its hand off and sending the hand flying. He moves the cruxite to the lathe, where Rose produces a totem for her entry item, a bottle. Rose flings the dead Jaspers into the Kernelsprite and Dave grabs the Eldritch Princess doll to put in too, but the flying wizard statue hand knocks the entry item into the nearby waterfall. Rose leaps out over the drop, successfully catches it, and is in turn caught by a long purple tentacle....

Flaming whirlwinds approach the house; Rose swings the bottle to shatter it, and the meteor lands.

In the temple, we see an enormous flower atop another countdown device, noting four-and-a-half minutes till disaster, but Jade suddenly falls asleep again, waking up with only nineteen seconds to go. Unlike John randomly falling asleep mid-battle, this has been happening often enough to seem to be a legitimate problem with a story-based cause. Keep an eye on that.

Dave, meanwhile, is still in his room, which is now filled with crows. He seems flustered at first, but in a later shot he’s back at his computer with a crow perched on his head, seemingly fine.

Back at John’s house, Nannasprite opens up his newer copy of Sassacre’s book and starts to inscribe the very message we read earlier, so she didn’t in fact know about it during her life. Seems odd that she’d bother doing this rather than just saying it, though, especially since when she finishes, she drops the book into the chasm, where it plummets through grey clouds, emerging over a dark-blue land scattered with tiny lights and black rivers. John, covered in oil, runs up the many stairs of his remodelled house, smashing imps left and right with single blows from the WRINKLEFUCKER and directing the SASSACRUSHER with the GHOST GAUNTLETS to take on the ogres. When he reaches the top, he slams his hammer down one last time and bounces upwards to the spirograph portal, entering whatever’s on the other side. Fade to white.

Generally, a very good flash! Exciting but doesn’t sacrifice useful information for drama, and now two characters have reached their current goals but more is still going on. Lovely music too. I think the Flash animations are one of Hussie’s greater strengths here.

FAILURE ARTIST: The animation was what drew me into Homestuck and this is a particularly good one.

CHEL: A couple of static pages wrap up the Act; we pan out from John’s house to see it and the pinnacle it’s perched on are now looming above the same dark-blue land covered with thick clouds that the book fell onto, which we now see is in fact an entire very small planet. Curtains close.

So that’s the end of Act 3! What does everyone think?

FAILURE ARTIST: It was fun seeing Jade and the Exiles but sad thinking about how underutilized they ended up. Especially poor AR.

BRIGHT: This is where the elaborate time loops really started to kick in, and I’ve gotta say, I’m not a fan. I recognise that they’re a key feature of Homestuck, but I found some of them too confusing on my first read through. (Though they do make more sense on subsequent reads.)

I think on the whole this Act is quite well paced. I really loved the bits with Jade, and a lot of nifty background info gets introduced without being infodumped.

TIER: I wasn't even aware that webcomics on the internet were a thing at this point, but I do believe that it's around here that Homestuck's popularity was starting to pick up, no? This chapter went a lot deeper into the strangeness of the game to!

FAILURE ARTIST:

Homestuck was popular but I don’t think it became a phenomenon until Act 5 when the trolls were fully introduced. Lots of people even skipped Acts 1-4 and the Intermission to get to them. I think a lot of the pre-Act 5 fans were my age (20s) while after that many were teens or tweens. Admittedly, I didn’t do much in the fandom except check the SA thread until Act 5 came around.

CHEL: I don’t think I got into it until Act 6 - I remember the first time I got further than a few pages in I gave up when the Alpha kids got introduced because it was way too complicated.

As for my thoughts on the act, well… Before, I was able to more or less chalk up the racist/sexist/fatphobic/homophobic remarks as being from the characters’ mouths (they are, after all, twelve to thirteen years old) and not the author’s, but they don’t really get called out by the narrative and Hussie has sufficiently drained my goodwill that I have to complain, and I suspect after recent events that it actually was him speaking there, if you get my meaning. Most of the dialogue is still as sweet and funny as I remember it being but those bits really taint it. Hypothetical rewrite would definitely remove those.

I’m in two minds about keeping Dave’s hurricane of euphemisms to AT for said hypothetical rewrite; on one hand, considering his home situation, it’s worrying, but on the other the whole point of the joke is to make AT uncomfortable and it’s hard to do that without making comments that would also make the reader uncomfortable. Maybe if Dave’s home life was adjusted a bit the reader would be more easily able to assume he just picked them up from Urban Dictionary.

Speaking of Dave, his storyline here is where we really start to see a thing which is a recurring problem with the comic. Namely, reliance on theme and symbolism over what is actually happening. If Hussie was indeed trying from the beginning to portray Dave’s situation as serious abuse, then he shouldn’t have chosen to represent said abuse with ridiculous cartoon physics while literally portraying Dave as unharmed onscreen. Dave’s behaviour does hint at some issues, but they’re easy to pass off as related to other things, and swords so sharp they cause printed pictures to change are not most readers’ first assumption for the cause.

Other than those, though, I think we’re still mostly fine; none of the problems are problems with the underlying structure of the story, so it wouldn’t require a huge retooling. That state of affairs will continue on for another couple of acts, but when it fails, it fails.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13 CALL CPA PLEASE: 7 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 GET ON WITH IT!: 13 GORE GALORE: 0 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 14 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 0 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 2 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9 TOTAL: 79

#homestuck #Homespork #homestuck review #homestuck meta #homestuck reread #let's read homestuck

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secretshinigami · 6 years

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Sacred Image

Author: complicatedmerary For: izaori Pairings/Characters: Light Yagami, Teru Mikami, Kiyomi Takada, Ryuk Rating/Warnings: Just to be safe, Teen and Up; some alcohol mentions and Halloween spookiness! Prompt: 1. Light having a crisis over people wanting to be Kira for Halloween, because ‘Kira’ doesn’t have a look and honestly? How rude, 2. Ryuk really wanting to go trick or treating but Light is like um no? Who do you think I am? And 3. Takada and Mikami having a conversation about Kira and/or Light, impressed and devoted to how much work he’s done for the world. All prompts used for one single fanfic gift at the same time. Author’s notes: Hello, my Kira! After rough drafting all the prompts provided and feeling unsatisfied with my attempts, I decided to merge all the prompts in one for the ultimate fanfic experience. This fanfic is super AUy in a way, because the kidnapping never happened and the Light/Mikami/Takada trio are all alive. I hope you enjoy my gift to you, I had a lot of fun!

It had been seven years since Light Yagami defeated Near and Mello, becoming a greater God than he was before. With no enemies on sight, Kira-supporting laws flourished in Japan and several countries around the world have accepted his doctrine. One of the most notorious legislatures concerned children’s education on Kira’s ideology, where mandatory Kira-based civics classes were enforced fully once the legislatures passed. Not too soon after the laws were implemented, broadcasting programs like NHN and Sakura TV began discussing further indoctrination with family-friendly children shows that taught the basic teachings of Kira and encouragement of a crime-free household. With crime rates sinking lower by the year, the appearance of a developed utopia had become a reality and Kira supporters could not be happier for their God cleaning up the world.

Kiyomi Takada opened up the champagne bottle carefully, no excessive leakage spilling on the carpet in sight. She poured her glass along with Teru Mikami’s and she sat beside him, legs delicately crossed.

“To Kira,” She raised and clanged her glass against his, sipping some champagne after the toast.

“To Kira,” Mikami echoed the sentiment back, except he did not take one drop, only playing along for her sake. Takada knew he rarely drank and that was not going to change any time soon. However, Mikami was aware since the beginning of their friendship that Takada’s desires should not be denied. If Takada wanted something, she was going to get it, no matter what. This was not an exception; if Takada wanted to toast together, there was no harm in doing so.

“Let’s hope Kira fulfills several crime-free years in the future, the world has never felt safer.” The twinkle in her eyes reflected an unadulterated happiness so contagious, even Mikami could not help a barely there closed half smile from forming on his face. It was incredible that the same woman who furiously yelled at him after he revealed that he was “T” all along was now exchanging smiles with him as if the big fight between never happened. He was not forced to apologize (not like he felt sorry either way), she simply got over it and resumed business.

“I couldn’t agree more; we serve God and receive a clean society in return.” His attention was not on Takada anymore, but instead on the news broadcast announcing the recent deaths of two petty thieves who attempted to rob a store.

Takada may or may not have sneaked those names before the toast after watching the live broadcast on her phone, she really did not show any expression that pointed any fingers at her.

A couple minutes later, Takada and Mikami’s phones rang at the exact same time, which meant one thing only: Kira wanted to see them.

“Hello?” They spoke simultaneously, taking in the words of God as if they were holy words. “Wait, what do you mean a blasphemy has occurred?” Takada was the first to lose her cool. “Alright, we’ll be there soon.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Light Yagami paced around the hotel room, fuming with each passing minute. If only he knew who was behind this monstrosity; there were a lot things he could not forgive and this became one of them.

What a mockery, Light scoffed in his head. If I didn’t know any better, Kira detractors are still on the rise despite their unpopular stance. I’ll show them you can’t disrespect the God of the New World without suffering the consequences.

A knock on the door assured him that his most devoted followers have come and he welcomed them inside, albeit letting them know it was not the time to get too comfortable.

“Light, you sounded terrible over the phone, what kind of blasphemy are we talking about here?” Takada asked him straight to the point, no wasting any time.

Light was not exactly amused by her assertive tone, but he made no comment on that. “I received some questionable newsletters over email and when I found out, I was sickened to my stomach.” He opened his laptop and revealed a slideshow of a man wearing a ghoulish mask and a black cloth surrounding him. A few slides also presented him as a soulless demon by adding unnecessary flashy colors in the form of moving pictures. Underneath, it said, “True Form Godly Kira Costume.”

The shocked tension overwhelmed the room, both Mikami and Takada stunned at the sight.

“That’s not it,” Light broke the silence. “I also saw unflattering political portrayals of legislatives with the same caption. Not only is it blasphemy, they are asking for outright anarchy.” This was not the time to lose his composure, but it was hard not to. These detractors wanted to taint Kira’s image with vile inaccuracies to provoke him into action, which was undeniable. However, the unfortunate outcome about this was actual Kira supporters praising their creativity and announcing on social media that they were purchasing the costumes for Halloween to prove how much they worship Kira. He knew some Kira supporters were not smart, but not like this, common sense was nonexistent to them. First of all, Kira was an entity with no concrete look because Kira should be consider a sacred figure for all inhabitants in this planet. And lastly, why would they dress up as Kira for Halloween, cheapening his efforts for the sake of a trend? Not only was it disrespectful to Kira’s image, it was disgustingly offensive.

He was thankful that Misa Amane never did anything like this to prove her love for him during their long relationship. If she wasn’t six feet under at the moment, he would have asked her if she thought any of this was flattering or not, but dwelling too much on her was not appropriate when his current girlfriend was expressing concern.

“Light, please don’t turn around too fast, but there is an enormous carved pumpkin floating above your head.”

Flabbergasted by her statement, Light turned to look behind him slowly, and sure enough, there was a pumpkin above his head, floating like a threat. His face was getting pale, not knowing what to expect.

Suddenly, Ryuk became visible with an emphasis of his glowing eyes and Light took a step backwards out of shock, almost tripping on the glass coffee table.

“Ryuk, what the hell is your problem? Can’t you see I’m having a conversation?” He was furious.

“Don’t be such a pain, I’ve been stuck in the kitchen for too long, it is not my fault you are boring me right now.” Ryuk released his signature Shinigami laugh.

Those words were dangerous and it was best to alleviate the situation. “What do you want, Ryuk?” Light questioned him.

“I want to go trick-or-treating!” Ryuk said excitedly. “The kids have bags of treats and apples dipped in caramel or candy. They look good and I want my hands on them! You really should take me outside and let me get them.”

“Ryuk, why would I do that?” Light pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. “I’m thirty years old, I have better things to do than trick-or-treating with bratty children.”

“Aw, that’s too bad,” Ryuk pouted. “But, just remember, I’m losing my patience.” And with that, he returned to the kitchen, entertaining himself with the appliances.

Light rolled his eyes. “Anyway, we should find out who is spreading these inflammatory images against me and get rid of him.”

“Do the pictures have a copyright logo?” Takada looked over the laptop.

“I suppose they do,” Light raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“If I can find the copyright, I can find the owners, and from there, I can find the photographer.” Takada sat down and zoomed in on the pictures. She was quiet for a few moments. “Oh, my God, I know who they are. Mikami, you should come over here.”

Unsure on what Takada found, he looked over the picture and searched for her concern. “What exactly am I supposed to look for?”

“Do you know any intellectual property lawyers?”

Mikami was taken aback. “I do. Why?”

“They can be sued for not getting permission from Kira to produce an image of him. They should not own the intellectual rights to his image and they should not get any money from it. I’m not an expert on this, that’s why I need the lawyers to confirm. Can you contact them and say that Kira’s spokeswoman needs legal advice?”

He nodded. “First thing in the morning. I just hope you know what you are doing.”

I hope so, too.

While Mikami and Takada continued to discuss about further clues that could uncover the identity of the person behind the creation of the costume, Light looked at them thoughtfully and realized he was in good hands.

He walked towards the kitchen to find a Ryuk spinning around. He cleared his throat and announced something he thought he might never say in his entire life. “Come on, Ryuk, let’s go trick-or-treating.”

#fanfiction #submission #teru mikami #kiyomi takada #alcohol /#light yagami #ryuk #death note #L's Death Day 2017 #ratings: teen #pairings: none

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sciencevillain · 7 years

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Redbeard Represents Love

I was re-watching the Faith deduction scene the other day, and had a sherlockian moment where the camera zooms in dramatically on your face and your mind flashes back through moments that suddenly all fit together like the last twist on a Rubiks Cube. Someone might have said something similar about Redbeard before, but I’m not gonna wade through meta to go find out. It’s about time I make my own meta, so (moriarty voice) welcome... to my first meta.

Thesis: Assuming that EMP is real, Redbeard represents Sherlock’s attitude towards love, and acceptance of his love for John. When Redbeard is a dog, Sherlock still lives in “sentiment-is-a-quality-of-the-losing-side” land. When Redbeard is a human, Sherlock overcomes his fear of expressing love, and no longer views it as a childish weakness.

Where do we start? ASiB, of course. Cue Sherlock beating Irene Adler at her own game through exploiting her love.

gif credit

Sherlock’s got it all figured out. “Sentiment”, or love, is nothing but a chemical. And he doesn’t need it. He doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t need people, and he likes it that way. At least, that’s what he’s convinced himself.

In TGG, Sherlock exposes his feelings about love again, this time to Moriarty. The dialogue, because I couldn’t find gifs:

JM: “I'll burn the heart out of you.”

SH: “I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one.”

JM: “But we both know that's not quite true.”

Here he is, entangled in a web spun by Moriarty himself, with John Watson at the center of it like bait, and he’s blind to his own sentiment. Even Moriarty has recognized Sherlock’s feelings for John Watson, and yet Sherlock is still in denial. This denial is hurting both him and John, as Moriarty takes advantage of Sherlock’s ignorance. Granted, Moriarty might also see sentiment as a weakness in itself, but either way, Sherlock’s not handling the whole “sentiment-thing” very well.

In fact, in the very next episode (THoB), we see this:

In denial that he emotionally needs John. ‘Nuff said.

I think we could also casually connect John to Redbeard, and to Sherlock’s sentimental side, since the whole reason this conflict with his emotional side has risen is because of John.

Also, there’s this.

gif credit

Comparing John to a pet, which one gets sentimental about. Subtext = loud.

(Side note: If Redbeard hasn’t been mentioned before season 3, he could be solely a creation of Sherlock’s mind palace, supporting EMP-after-TRF theory...)

Now that we’ve taken a look at Sherlock’s underdeveloped emotional maturity (or shall we just say unhealthy attitude towards/fear of love?), let’s talk about Redbeard. The dog shows up in Sherlock’s mind palace as a way of comforting himself, and calming himself down. That, to me, is pretty solid evidence that Redbeard represents love, sentiment, and Sherlock’s emotional side in general. His emotional side is so suppressed that it’s not even human. He views sentiment as a chemical defect, so far removed from himself that it’s represented by a separate being, a different species. Sentiment, he has decided, is no better than the instinctual behavior of a dog.

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The line “they’re putting me down too, now” speaks volumes. He’s buried his sentiment (represented by Redbeard) so deeply that it feels like he’s killed it, aka “put it down”. But if his sentiment was totally dead, he would die too. His subconscious is slowly realizing that living without love is “no fun”.

Next stop: TSoT. Sherlock calls Mycroft during the wedding, as if he’s trying to touch base with the man who represents everything cold and machine-like he tries to be. As if he needs to remind himself to keep his sentimental side on a tighter leash. (Actually, if Sherlock’s in his mind palace right now, then Mycroft could straight-up just represent his cold calculating “I-think-I’m-a-sociopath” side. It’s a battle now, between the judgemental brother and the loving dog. His mind is resisting the possibility that sentiment is important and necessary, since it’s spent so long shunning it.)

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To which Sherlock replies, “I’m not a child anymore.”

Ouch. He’s basically saying that the devastation he felt as a child for losing the dog he loved was just stupid sentiment. A chemical defect, which he has grown out of. As a side note, perhaps Mycroft encouraged and/or caused Sherlock’s fear and dismissal of the value of love? He’s certainly using Sherlock’s memory of love to criticize / belittle him. Anyway, even though the deepest crevices of his mindpalace have recognized that suppressing his sentimental side is slowly killing him, Sherlock himself hasn’t figured it out yet. He can’t figure it out, because if he accepts his emotional side -- and his feelings for John, how will he make it through John’s wedding day? If love mattered, then his feelings for John would have to matter. If he accepted the love and humanity within himself, he’d fall to pieces at the heartbreak of John choosing someone else.

No, he has to squash that part of himself. Alone is what keeps him safe, after all. Except... there’s the fact that Mycroft mentions Redbeard at all. This shows that Sherlock’s too-cool-for-love facade is slipping. Redbeard is slipping through the cracks, and now Mycroft has noticed.

Time to look at season 4.

Redbeard is getting closer and closer to the surface. In what the casual viewer is supposed to think of as “reality”, Sherlock keeps getting flashbacks of Redbeard and Eurus.

One of the interesting things about TST is how much Sherlock lets his emotional side hang out. It’s like he’s experimentally poking his “Redbeard” out, to see if letting it out will ruin everything, or save him. He even admits to using a dog for a case just because he likes it. Imagine the Sherlock of season 1 admitting something so purely sentimental like that!

I’m really distracted by the fact that right after Sherlock compares the dog to John, John’s first thought is that Sherlock likes the dog. (cue middle schooler voice) like, like likes it/him.

Anyway, so much subtext here.

The dog, which lowkey represents his emotional side just as much as Redbeard does, only on a slightly closer-to-the-surface level... is not moving. It must be said that Mofftiss didn’t plan for the dog to not move, but they still kept it in the episode, and chose what dialogue to shape around it.

Here they are, the main characters in Sherlock’s mind palace, standing around staring at his emotional side like “how do we make it move? how do we get the ball rolling on embracing your emotional side?”.

To which Sherlock replies, “slow but steady, not unlike John.” So he’s working on coming to terms with the okay-ness of sentimentality, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Just like his relationship with John is very... slow-burn.

Back to the flashbacks.

Redbeard is coming to the surface of Sherlock’s mind, little by little. Along with this, we get to see Sherlock acting more and more based on sentiment than on cold, hard reason. He listens to the advice of a dead ex-assassin just because he’s so in love with John that he doesn’t stop to think.He relies on John saving him to survive an otherwise deadly situation with a serial killer. I wouldn’t call those cold-hard-reasoning decisions. I’d call them desperate acts of love. Whether you ship johnlock or not, you gotta admit Sherlock is full of sentiment in TLD. He allows it to consume him. He might even be subconsciously trying to prove himself right about sentiment being a stupid chemical, even if it destroys him. All the while, his memories of Redbeard grow a little bit clearer... but they’re still, in the end, memories of a dog. He doesn’t trust his sentiment yet. In fact, he has the recurring memory of the dog being killed. Like how as a child he repressed his love and emotions in order to be like Mycroft and impress him. It’s becoming clearer (although not anywhere near actually clear) that repressing his emotions like that was as tragic as drowning a dog.

TFP: When Sherlock finally changes his mind.

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Enter Eurus stage right. She represents Sherlock’s cold, calculating hard-logic side. Yeah, that used to be Mycroft’s job, but Sherlock’s view of his cold calculating side has changed. It’s no longer the nice business-suited rich guy older brother. It’s an isolated lunatic that hurts people over and over again, because it doesn’t understand love.

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In fact, it views love as an irrational, harmful thing. Sound familiar?

Interestingly, Mycroft shows more sentiment in this episode than usual. This episode is definitely EMP, so we can safely say that Mycroft’s change of personality is Sherlock’s mind realizing that even Mycroft is human, and needs to express emotional things that aren’t always perfectly logical and calculated, otherwise he’d be no better than Eurus.

It’s also interesting that Mycroft invited Moriarty to Sherrinford. It’s like all three of these super cold, calculating people are scheming against Sherlock unlocking his loving side. They all represent road blocks on the way to emotional freedom.

Another interesting point is THIS CRAZY (but easily overlooked) MOMENT.

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This gif doesn’t have the caption, but they do say redbeard. What the he*l? Here’s my thoughts on the villains saying that word.

Moriarty used Sherlock’s sentiment against him (targeting his friends to get him to kill himself) in TRF, and Eurus uses Sherlock’s sentiment against him in her horror-maze mocking the value of love. So they’re in cahoots to “burn the heart” (aka emotional side?) out of Sherlock. With Moriarty, it worked. But in Sherlock’s mind palace, against Eurus, it doesn’t. More on that later.

Eurus isn’t healthy. Just like suppressing love and humanity isn’t healthy. What she calls “emotional context”, she says, “destroys you every time.” But she’s wrong.

When Eurus... (who used to be a therapist! Sherlock previously viewed his love-suppressing calculating side as something that kept him sane and healthy, like a therapist tries to do!) ... Euros shoots John. Pause a second to remember what she represents in this meta. That shot John. And finally, Sherlock’s mind palace realizes it. The part of himself that he has devoted his entire life to constructing, like an iron wall to keep out love, is actually what stopped him and John from going further with their relationship. Now that he’s identified the problem, he can start tearing down that wall.

In fact, this starts a domino-effect of realizations. Living like a heartless machine is so dangerous that John, who represents his love and humanity as well as representing in-real-life John, tries to warn Sherlock about Euros’s “reprogramming” thing. Euros is hurting him and his family and everyone he loves. It’s not protecting them, like he has believed for so long. So the revelation gets crazy and turns into a psycho murder-maze, manipulating Sherlock and John again and again...

until...

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what?

Until Sherlock chooses sentiment over cold hard reasoning. The murder-maze is designed so that every single time he has to solve a puzzle, his sentimental side is put at odds with his cold-machine side. To give in to sentiment would be going against who he’s comfortable being, but to go with the “logical” solution would be barbaric. Monstrous. The tables have turned! Now love, code-word Redbeard, is the sane thing to do, while cold-hard-reasoning is the less-than-human chemical defect character flaw.

Fitting, isn’t it, that Mycroft tries to persuade him to shoot him instead, which would represent clinging to his cold calculating side further. But Sherlock’s done with that. He’s arrived at the very heart of Sherrinford, his mindpalace’s way of keeping his sentimental side buried deep down under lock and key, and is ready to bust his sentimental side out of mind-prison forever.

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BOOM. His cold-hard-reasoning-protects-me-and-those-I-love side (aka Euros) freaks out. This isn’t who Sherlock is, is it? He can’t just do that! But he does. He actively chooses love and self-sacrifice and other mushy gushy things over logical deductions, with the belief that it will be more useful.

Suddenly, he wakes up in a totally different place. Good. He’s even closer to accepting and embracing his humanity/love as a positive thing. John (remember what he represents?) is still trapped at the bottom of the well, though. He’s not quite there yet.

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Eurus mocks his sentimentality, but her power over him has weakened quite a bit. He’s already messed up life and potential relationships too many times due to “Eurus”, aka his obsessively cold-calculating-side. John Watson is too important, and he’s not going to let fear of expressing love hurt the person he loves most.

Until Sherlock’s mind stops pretending his emotional, human, loving side is a stupid dog...

and accepts it as a valid part of being a human being...

Only then does Sherlock’s mind palace make the permanent decision to accept his loving side as good and necessary. In fact, he uses sentiment to save the day.

...by comforting his somewhat shell-shocked, somewhat childish, let’s-be-like-Mycroft-and-supress-our-emotions-in-favor-of-cold-facts side, because that part of him doesn’t go away. It just becomes less all-consuming.

and, of course, by rescuing John in the well, as a way of un-doing the suppression of his loving side in the death of Victor Trevor.

Finally, his two sides can be equally respected.

And Redbeard, the code-word for love, is a human being worthy of equal status to any other aspect of himself. That’s the real reason why Redbeard became a human being. To show that Sherlock has changed, and is ready to love John (helps that Victor Trevor is a John mirror too, right?). All he has to do now is wake up.

P.S: Next up on my meta-writing list is Eurus’s cryptic song, which ties in to Redbeard theory pretty well. This meta post has gotten too long already though, so I’ll save it for next time.

~~~

This is my first time tagging people for a meta, so let me know if you do/don’t want to be tagged, and feel free to tag more people! I just tagged anyone I think is interested in tjlc. @marathecactupus @sherlockians-get-bored @goodmythicalmail @the-7-percent-solution @sherlock-overflow-error @loudest-subtext-in-tv

#sherlock #sherlock meta #tjlc #redbeard #emp theory #redbeard theory #emp #meta #tfp #johnlock

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mbcoldstorage · 5 years

Link

The Winnipeg-based artist makes multi-media work at the intersection of film, poetry, politics, and architecture.

by Mónica Savirón | 19 MAR 2019

Rhayne Vermette; courtesy of the artist. Punchers, burins, blade knives, and guillotine splicers invade Rhayne Vermette’s working space. Born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba, and residing in Winnipeg, for this self-taught artist, collage, photography, and film are the tools that demolish the house of rhetoric. Inspired by architects who infused a reinterpretation of building with wood, glass, and stone, Vermette questions methodological foundations and surroundings—in her case, to make the towers fall. What once was defined as path and pillar do not govern the artist or her work. She breaks down structures that mirror the dysfunctional models and causalities of closed structures. Her schemes and patterns are not affixed or in service to a system. Instead, she shows what is beneath the logic of

make-sense

enunciations, and their own relational dynamics. By deconstructing edifices of rules, meaning takes its power back. Scratches, flares, glue, and tape are the weapons of the artist’s anti-language.Highly laborious and musical, Rhayne Vermette’s works are moving fragments of a whole that transform themselves both poetically and politically. A female character in a film (

Take My Word

, 2012) will continue evolving in another a year later (

Full of Fire

). Each image is a composition of movable motifs that respond and react in disregard to categorical, self-contained conventions. The artist choreographs shifts and alterations in what had been previously built up as truth or context, stratification and alienation. In one of her first films,

Tricks are for Kiddo

(2012), multiple little pieces of 16mm found footage gets overlapped in varying densities and taped to clear leader into different positions. An animation results from reshooting the collage on an optical printer while running the film at constant speed. Scenes that were not meant to convene are assembled together over the flying carpet of the celluloid strip, unmatched juxtapositions in the stream of consciousness.

Tricks are for Kiddo

, by Rhayne Vermette; courtesy of the artist. 2012, 2 minutes, HD from 16mm, color, sound,The concept of rebuilding from what is broken or left out also resides behind Vermette’s

Black Rectangle

(2013), a film that relates to Kazimir Malevich’s painting

Black Square

(1913). The Kiev-born artist adopted the cracked, non-representational, geometric form as a “refuge” for the cultural and social revolts that would lead to the October Revolution. Both protecting and hiding, in Vermette’s film black rectangular sections adhered to transparent celluloid act as barricades or curtains. The placement of each element within the frame is marked by the white spacing that surrounds or cuts them, as in 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s theory of

espacement

between words on a page (

Poem. A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance

, 1914). Thanks to these delimitations, clusters of similar materials manage to show their own singularities. A closer visual connection comes from Marcel Broodthaers's interpretation in 1969 of Mallarmé’s poem, a translation in graphic forms: black blocks substitute the words, their width stretching in relation to the original type size. In

Black Rectangle

, the obstructing shapes take over the optical track field of the 16mm frame, and create an ominous, seemingly destructive, popping and cracking sound when they travel through the gate of the film projector. Ideas of place and absence translate into visual and audible breaks in the action through rhythmic repetition or silence, an idea developed in Jacques Derrida’s chapter

Différance

(

Margins of Philosophy

, 1972): “An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself... this interval is what might be called

spacing

, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space.” Vermette’s body of work pushes this theory towards a feminist perspective: what matters is not the story that gets repeated as believable, but who is allowed to talk and what their silences speak to.

Kazimir Malevich’s

Black Square

, 1913. Reproduction from the State Tretyakov gallery, Moscow.

Excerpt from

Poème. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard

, by Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897: “WILL ABOLISH / AS IF / An insinuation / in the silence / in some close / acrobatics”.

Image from Poème.

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard

, by Marcel Broodthaers, 1969.

Caption:

Black Rectangle

, by Rhayne Vermette; courtesy of the artist. 2013, 2 minutes, HD from 16mm, color, sound. Indexes of power, the quick images’ shallow depth is brought into the open in Vermette’s work by aggregating layers, both in space and in improbability. The shards of celluloid she brings together from inside the frame or the sprocket hole area, and the sequential cuts, being sharp or dissolved, shed light on materiality and memory. Similarly, the sounds mixed from different sources and at equal volume levels interfere intelligibility. Vermette’s web of sounds mirrors the frustration and aggressivity that take place in communication. Wavering from high to low, and from left to right, sounds have the effect of implacable, movable wind around obelisks of Babelian misunderstanding. By shifting hierarchy among sounds, Vermette may baffle expectations of inattentive listening. A different approach to perceiving sound allows for the creation of new expressions and, therefore, new ways of thinking. Existentially and syntactically, tacit subordinations (“the way things are”) have no part in the calligraphy and cartography of the artist’s work. Constructions are, ideologically and formally, torn down—the beginning and the end of disbelief. It is inevitable to associate Vermette’s interest in structures, or her detachment, with the Structural/materialist film movement. The repeated use of contrasting patterns and geometric shapes at different exposures and focal lengths speaks to a methodology in which time affords dimensionality. The most important aspect of the presentation of an image is its framing and the passing time between moving parts: the entr’acte. The process and its artificiality are the film. The square or rectangle that surrounds the image is the same of a window, of a house’s wall, the artist’s room, and the flat table she works on. Vermette is interested in what those spaces permit, and how they can be animated through scale, perspective, duration, and imagination. She challenges materials and constructions, and breaks them down to chaotic configurations that, in turn, become a vindication of basic forms. Through fixed camera-pointing, loops, and transitions, perspective gets displaced. “Only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is,” we hear in Vermette’s film

Les Châssis de Lourdes

(2016), made with footage the artist’s father had shot in their family home. The quote is from David Byrne in his film

True Stories

(1986) after his band’s concert,

Stop Making Sense

, and regarding the nature of the chronicles published in tabloid newspapers at the time. His narration is a fitting and cohesive explanation of the metaphysical concerns that ignite Vermette’s work: the evolution of aspirations through time and experience or, what is the same, the pursuit of life after catastrophe.

Still from

Domus

, by Rhayne Vermette; courtesy of the artist. 2017, 15 minutes, HD from 35mm, 16mm and Super-8mm, color, sound.Vermette’s work as a whole is neither experimental nor documentarian or fictional, but something mutable that brings together elements from all those categories, a kind of multi-media architectural settlement of the mind where ruins and reigns collide. For Vermette, the film frame is not a cage or rigid container, but one of those homes whose structures are capable of swinging during earthquakes, adapting to the changing phases, morphing and readjusting, moving along. This is reminiscent of Japanese building design, but also of Italian Carlos Mollino’s work, which Vermette has studied for many years, and served as inspiration for her films

Turin

(2015) and

Domus

(2018). Reflecting on a utopian architecture, and with the versatility that mixing 35mm, 16mm, Super-8mm, black and white paper copies, and negative film affords,

Domus

frees itself from plots, maps, and models. Vermette recites stanzas that channel the free spirit of her subject, inspired by artist Al Jarnow’s time-lapse, stop-motion film

Celestial Animation

(1985):

In this space,divided by time,defined by light,we wait. Through what filter does a dream emerge instrument of precision a constructive prosceniumfor a perspective of vision waiting by night in the shadow of its framea darkness crowds the landscape and crouching behind this cold partitionborn from memoryand new to my languagehe comes.

Vermette utilizes cutter knives to craft line-based compositions on celluloid the way Mollino used pencils to sketch his buildings. Mollino had a Surrealist eye, and the dream-like two-room apartment he designed and built in Turin, the Casa Miller, was the set to stage his photographic work. He manipulated negatives, prints, and Polaroid film to achieve, if nothing else, at least his conceptual desires. An image of the interior entrance of this apartment became the front cover of the leading architectural journal

Domus

in 1937. In his photographs, the arrangement of furniture, fabrics, shapes, and bodies highlights what his vision as an artist was about: the creation of spaces that bring closer material architecture and sentient beings, shelters to be sentimental shells meant to last. Vermette sees this same potential in the malleability of celluloid, its organic ability to transcend. Connection and progression do not happen naturally, though. They need to be conjured, repeatedly, and often incited by failure. That is the case in

Tudor Village: A One Shot Deal

(2012), a film where Vermette explores the town’s sounds, and her experience trying to capture with her camera a lunar eclipse. Embracing mistakes and defeat, her meticulous work reflects on those aspects of the artistic process that are outside control. The deviations and strangeness of derailing lead the way to wider reach and depths.In search of that place that resembles the trace of the heart, Vermette’s work draws a consistently evolving trajectory. Now in preparation of a scripted film with an all-female crew, she questions her familiar modus operandi, switching the order and routines of her creative process, the labyrinth’s corridors and itineraries. Actors and performative acts further the implications of art as destruction, testing models of command, pushing the artist’s creative walls, and expanding the terrain as in a panoramic shot. The art of architecture in film is no other than light projected in the darkroom of the mind, a sensorial space for the construction of other words, worlds, and politics, those beyond the burned house in the time of rebirth.

Rhayne Vermette transferring the final scene of

Domus

. Image by Ed Ackerman.

The Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF, will present the special program "Enfolded Space: The Work of Rhayne Vermette" on March 20 with the artist in attendance.

Under the title "Armed Woman at Desk," this piece will appear in a forthcoming collection on the work of Rhayne Vermette, edited by Stephen Broomer, and published by Sightline Books.

***

The Very Eye of Night

is a series of columns on nonbinary and female avant-garde film and video artists. The title refers to Maya Deren’s last completed film.

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satelliteofmstielove · 7 years

Text

K19 Hangar 18

Aliens or something, I don’t know

General notes

I always remember that this movie is K19 because it’s Hangar 18 and that for some reason strikes me as mildly funny. From the title I expected it to be about airplanes, but it’s actually about spaceships. Made in 1980, starring people from things. Nothing really to note about the episode. Everyone’s here for the whole thing this time, so let’s get a-rollin’.

Prologue

Joel pops up from under the desk sounding like he hit his head.

No real intro this time, no Mads. Joel just tells us the name of the movie and we go straight into Movie Sign. Maybe they were pressed for time this week.

Movie pt. 1

I can’t tell when the guys get into the theater because the version I’m watching is such bad quality. Any black backgrounds make it impossible to see the guys. Later on they started putting a slight filter on the movies to make the silhouettes stand out better.

At 3:22, Joel asks why made-for-TV movies always look different than normal movies. Tom informs him, correctly, that Hangar 18 was shown in theaters. Why is that, actually? It is related to how they’re shot? There’s even a difference in look between different types of TV shows, so I assume that’s why. Does anyone want to inform both me and 1989 Joel?

When the movie astronauts are checking switches and things on the space shuttle at 5:39, Crow asks Joel if he remembered to check their switches and things. Joel doesn’t answer. Several seconds later at 5:47, Servo asks him the same thing, and he says no. Servo seems slightly distressed but lets it be.

Crow’s comment about the movie satellite makes Tom/Josh laugh at 7:26.

Joel messes with the on-screen controls at 7:43, but again, you can barely see him.

Something about Crow’s incredulous tone at 9:10 is really funny.

When you can finally see them, Joel and bots look like they’re sitting closer together than usual.

At 9:54, Joel makes a joke about prune-flavored Tang, and Josh laughs mockingly at it.

So far this whole movie has been half black screens. VHS movie played on UHF TV x old VHS recording + YouTube upload = hard to see.

76° at 6:13, when the time and temperature come up at 12:46. Looks like the Twin Cities are making their way toward summer.

Tom calls commercial at 13:25, Jeopardy-style, and Joel commands it more forcefully at 13:31. They don’t fade out until 13:38, though.

Joel reads the setting caption at 13:47, and Crows remarks a bit petulantly that he can read.

Holy crap, those are big lights on that police car. Also, why does this guy have such a strong Southern accent when they’re in Arizona? And I’m already sick of these captions.

As they leave the theater, Crow says he wants a soda, as if that’s the reason they’re leaving. Servo says he wants some saltines.

Host Segment 1

Crow’s wiggly fidgeting is cute. He’s such a little kid in the first few seasons.

Joel tells Crow he’ll need to borrow some of his RAM chips later to increase computing power for some other part of the ship. He doesn’t explain which, but maybe it would be common knowledge for Crow. Apparently, a dangerous meteor shower that could puncture holes in the ship is heading their way, and somehow the extra RAM chips with help with that? Maybe he can use it to increase the ship’s shields (which may or may not exist), or maybe he needs it to calculate a course away from the meteors or something. By the way, is it still called a meteor shower if it’s in space?

The bots have been really into irritating Joel in the past few episodes, and the trend continues here with Crow asking “Why?” and “So?” to everything Joel says. At first he seems sincere, but it quickly becomes clear that he just wants a reaction. It’s not clear if Joel catches on, but either way, he continues patiently explaining.

I love it whenever the bots cuddle up to Joel. Crow seems to know it’s cute and is using to his advantage.

Joel mentions that if he dies from lack of oxygen, the bots with have no human to play Parcheesi with, and implies that always ends badly. Having seen how the bots get along when Joel’s not around, I can imagine how that goes.

Mid-morning pleasure stimulation? Okay…I mean, I’m sure that’s not weird but it sounds weird.

Crow finishes off the whole thing with the classic “Daddy, what’s Vietnam?” and laughs, telling Joel to lighten up. Joel does not think it’s funny and finally snaps. Joel’s interesting; he’s almost impossible to rile, but once riled, he’s got something of a temper. You can see it in segments like his attempted barbershop/soda fountain in Giant Gila Monster [402] and the end of Castle of Fu Manchu [323]. Here he actually tells Crow to go get his belt! I can’t tell if he’s really going to use it on Crow or if he’s just playing along with Crow’s game by being the angry dad. Hope it’s the latter.

Similarly, I can’t tell if Crow’s reaction is real or if he’s still just in little kid mode. Again, I hope the latter is true.

Movie pt. 2

Crow is making sounds of pain as they come into the theater. Joel tells him to quiet down and Tom teases him and laughs about the ordeal. I guess he really did use the belt. That’s the not the right way to discipline your robot children, Joel.

He also seems to be fixing Crow’s arms or something. They are kinda flimsy.

At 29:57, Crow says something about a “safety seal” and Servo barks like a sea lion. Just made me laugh.

Joel says when he was in 4th grade, he had the same kind of biohazard suit from the movie at 30:31. I’d doubt it, but it’s not impossible, especially given that a) Joel’s weird and b) this show takes place in a version of reality where satellites, robots, and mad science are a pretty casual affair. So who knows? But Joel also says it didn’t have the big mask, so he might have just been talking about a regular raincoat. (Or maybe it was a joke, because riffing. But that’s no fun.)

30: 56- I love Crow’s straightforward approach to things, hahaha.

At 31:09, they’re talking about Meatloaf (the singer) and Crow mentions he likes ketchup on his meatloaf. It’s not related to the joke, but it makes me imagine tiny baby KTMA Crow trying to eat meatloaf at the table with his dysfunctional little arms, which is oddly adorable.

The aliens really do look like Uncle Fester…when the guys sing their version of the Addams Family song (at 36:43), you can hear all three of them snapping (well, at least two). The bots must be able to generate snapping noises.

At 39:20, Joel mentions “Joe Namath Netted Slingshot Briefs”, which become a running comment throughout the rest of the series, especially the Joel era. I’m not getting a picture for this one; I think the BVDs picture from the last entry was enough trauma for all of us.

Wow, mentions of Jackie Coogan and Tor Johnson back to back at 39:55. Little did they know then how many opportunities they would have to talk about Tor Johnson (so many episodes, including The Unearthly [320], Bride of the Monster [423], and The Beast of Yucca Flats [621]). By the time they got to Jackie Coogan (The Space Children [906]), though, none of these original three were there. Here’s a picture of Jackie Coogan for no reason.

Now this airport guy has like a half-Boston, half-Southern accent. Though it is in the southern half of the country, Arizona is not really The South, filmmakers.

At 44:49, Tom goes on making fun of the possibly-crazy airport guy for so long Crow mutters that Joel spanked the wrong bot. That prompts Servo to ask him how his “bot” is; Crow doesn’t respond.

Crow makes a zing! joke at 45:22, and Joel tells him to “take the laugh” like Dr. F told Larry in the previous episode. Crow says it hurts when he laughs, which makes me wonder how badly Joel spanked him with that belt. Oof. Tom also mentions that load pan-emptying will hurt later. The more I hear about load pans, the more I don’t want to know the details.

As they leave the theater, Crow says he need to get a pillow for some unspecified part of him.

Host Segment 2

Joel attaches what he calls a coupling device to Crow’s head so they can look through his memory and decide what’s worth keeping.

The first memory in the list is “On”. I’m not totally sure what that means, but I’m assuming it’s a necessary function. Maybe it’s the code that allows him to turn on?

Crow knows how to play Heart and Soul? I’d like to see that.

Nobody wants to go through “load pan training” again. My earlier sentiment about load pans has not changed. I would also like to see Tom and Crow’s bunk beds. What do you think the membrane that Crow mentions is? Apparently it’s less pleasant than load pans.

Nobody wants to keep the King Family specials.

They don’t feel like keeping a bunch of Highlights magazines, STP commercials with Mario Andretti, every episode of Punky Brewster, Lyle Waggoner’s penile implant show (???), Joe Something-or-Other’s business school (I wonder if that’s a local thing), Robert Vaughn’s Helsinki Formula, Aaron Gray’s cellulite show, or George Hamilton’s skin care hour. They do, however, want to keep a still of that one Farah Fawcett poster. I won’t bother to put a picture of that here because you’ve probably already seen it.

Joel smiles when Crow makes his buzzer noises.

He asks Crow where he picked up these weird infomercials, and Crow tells him he fell asleep while watching TV23 one night. It sounds like the Brains thought their channel played too many infomercials.

Movie pt. 3

I guess stunt driving isn’t part of the training to become a government agent. Also looks like their car was a Pinto.

The Apache Plaza Joel mentions at 58:03 was local mall in St. Anthony that was damaged by a tornado and then snowmelt. River Place is another spot in Minneapolis.

At 58:43, Crow notes that aliens have nipples like Joel does, as a human. Joel says his are a little more ”pouty.” I don’t know what that means, but ew.

Ah, thank you, movie, for cutting away instead of showing them cutting into the alien, proving once again that you are better than City on Fire. But you can really stop telling us where we are every single time we change locations. If the time is important, fine, put that, but if you’re just moving between places we’ve already been several times, you don’t need to tell us again.

Time and temp pop up again at 1:02:09, 75° at 7:15.

Tom calls commercial at 1:03:12.

Crow makes a good point at 1:05:44- why did it take them so long to even try to figure out where the government was hiding the ship?

Hey, a swear bleep at 1:08:45. The guys react to it, obviously knowing they would have to cut it out for the episode. Servo proceeds to make some “ship” jokes.

You know, these government agents would be a lot less conspicuous if didn’t wear suits everywhere. Also, even if the brakes don’t work, wouldn’t the car, you know, slow down if he stopped pressing the gas? Cars don’t just maintain momentum forever even if they can’t stop. And I’m already predicting this whole petroleum plant thing is going to explode in firey ball of death, killing the new set of G-men, while the astronauts get away.

Wow, Crow makes the same guess at 1:11:28.

Well, I was sort of right. Crow was more right than I was.

Crow’s little “c’mon, c’mon” as they leave the theater is adorable.

Host Segment 3

They’ve hooked Crow up to the coupling device again, and take a look at his first memory ever.

For some reason the memory isn’t from Crow’s point of view…Anyway, Joel sings a song while finishing Crow up, then whacks him lightly to turn him on. His first sound is a baby cry until Joel whacks him again. Joel tells him name and he asks why, and Joel tells him it stands for “Cybernetic Remotely Operated Woman.”

Current Crow is very surprised to find out he’s a woman, but seems to get over it very quickly.

Joel tells him he’s actually a hermaphrobot because he ran out of parts. Why would running out of parts mean that he had both- you know what, never mind.

I guess being a woman or hermaphrobot turns Crow into a stressed mother.

But it’s actually a joke anyway ha ha ha, Joel made a fake memory to tease him. Joel tells him that he only made him in the first place so he could play that joke on him in the future. Harsh, man. Joel’s kind of a big jerk in this episode.

Movie pt. 4

Hey, it’s the plot-relevant radio station, like Invention Exchange from Giant Gila Monster [402].

Crow makes another good point- will the people inside the spaceship survive? It didn’t get burnt up on re-entry when it landed, so maybe they will. OoooOOOOOoooo mystery….

At 1:34:31, Crow also makes a call-back to City on Fire [K16].

Oh, they did survive. Did the guys preview this movie, or are they just that eerily smart? Maybe one of them had seen it before in the past?

Conclusion

This segment is very short, just the guys mentioning that the fan club is almost up to 1,000 members, and showing off the fabulous demon dog that 1,000th member can win. They mention it’s from the opening credits. Demon dogs will show up again in the next season in The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy [102].

Is Crow carrying something over his shoulder? I can’t tell what it is.

The credits cut off in this recording, so hopefully there was nothing terribly interesting or new.

Thoughts on the Movie

Forgive me the unkindness, but his movie is full of mostly rather ugly people. And Darren McGavin looks like the general from The Iron Giant, and/or Tommy Lee Jones. Which makes sense because the general from the Iron Giant looks like Tommy Lee Jones. Beyond that, I don’t know how I feel about this one. It’s really not that bad, it’s just sort of dumb. I feel like it would have made a more interesting television series than a movie. It has some good moments, but it felt like it was trying to tell two different stories. The longer the movie went on, the more it seemed to lose its focus. On the other hand, I actually cared some when Lou died, which is more than I can say for a lot of movies, even non-MSTed ones. Ending was kinda stupid, though.

The other main thing that kept bothering me was why the government kept letting the astronauts poke around and potentially muck up the their big cover-up. Why do they even let them out of D.C. or Houston or wherever they were? (I really should remember because of the excessive captioning.) Can’t the Feds just keep them where they are until they’re done lying about the U.F.O.? I mean, that doesn’t sound legal, but neither does tampering with and lying about important scientific information to keep people happy until the election, and they’re already doing that. Half the plot could have been avoided if they’d just been smart enough to stop Bancroft and Price from running around. I guess that’s why they didn’t. But that’s not a good enough reason to suspend my disbelief on that point.

Oh yeah, and then it gets into the tired old sci-fi trope of the aliens who are almost exactly like humans and trying to explain with actual science. I don’t have any real problem with human aliens in fiction (Superman, for example, has never bugged me), but when they try to pretend like it makes any sense, that’s where they always lose me. The whole “humans are descended from them” just doesn’t work for me. If the two species were able to breed, wouldn’t they have needed to be very similar to begin with? Then that brings us back to the parallel evolution thing, which makes very little sense in an attempt at hard sci-fi. So yeah, not quite a bad movie, just a mediocre one. It would probably make good material for a modern riff.

Review

This one was alright. It seemed like they were a little distracted by a semi-watchable movie, so there wasn’t much riffing. I didn’t laugh a whole lot during this episode (favorite riff- Tom: Maybe they’re just a couple of yahoos from Arkansas.) The spots they did riff had a lot of energy, but they seemed to lose it as the movie went on. Maybe the movie wasn’t stupid or infuriating enough to keep them firing. That’s another good reason they wrote and practiced the riffing when they moved on to the wonderful world of cable.

Not related to the review, but I have a question for my six or seven readers. I mentioned a lot more of my thoughts on the movie in the notes this time- is that annoying, or do you prefer it that way? I got back and forth about whether I should include that there. On the one hand, it’s part of the experience of watching and episode. On the other hand, it’s not really the purpose of this guide. I’ll do whatever works better for you guys, so let me know if you have a preference. Thanks!

#MST3K #KTMA #K19 #Hangar 18 #ACFGEG #This one was so much less of a slog than the last one

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mhsn033 · 4 years

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‘Loyalty is really important to us’ – Biffy Clyro on the fall-out behind their new album

List copyright Warner Recordsdata

List caption The band fashioned in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, as teenagers

“Existence has a unfamiliar behavior of supplying you with stuff to reveal about,” says Biffy Clyro’s frontman, Simon Neil. “There’s repeatedly something to space the cat amongst the pigeons.”

The band’s closing album, 2016’s Ellipsis, used to be written after Neil suffered a chain of bereavements and went through a duration of crippling creator’s block. Before that, the recording classes for 2013’s Opposites were overshadowed by drummer Ben Johnston’s alcoholism, which nearly drove the Ayrshire band apart (he’s since recovered), and by Neil’s partner struggling a chain of miscarriages.

Things weren’t fairly as bleak as they wrote and recorded their ninth album, A Celebration Of Endings – but there used to be a seismic disruption within the band’s internal circle that “in actuality shook our bones to the core”.

‘Money practice’

“Loyalty is de facto foremost for us,” says Neil, “and there were two prolonged-term working relationships we had, that deteriorated in strategies that we could per chance well not absorb envisaged.

“One man used to be in the very, very internal circle. He’d labored for us from the very originate and I idea the connection would closing ’til the day I died,” he says. “Nevertheless we had the worst plunge-out ever and the connection splendid ended uninteresting in its tracks.

“It is an extraordinarily sensitive thing to chat about and I create no longer are attempting to disrespect him by naming him, which potential of I enact worship there’s two sides to every memoir.

“The diverse person had been a portion of our crew for years – and in state that they mainly [chose] cash over working with us, which I realize at a clear level, but that used to be in actuality an behold-opener for me. I felt love we could splendid been a cash practice or no matter for 12 years.”

The community were pressured to “re-review everything,” he says, however the technique ended up being releasing.

“We mentioned, ‘In actuality, all we need is the three of us’.

“And, attempting relief now, I’m fully pleased, which potential of every album needs a spark. While you do not desire something to gain off your chest, it might per chance per chance be exhausting.

“Nevertheless after we parted strategies with these other folks, I felt so focussed. It in actuality cleared my mind. And that has in actuality been a beautiful realignment in the closing yr.”

List copyright Getty Images

List caption The band absorb headlined the Reading & Leeds festival twice

The trio, accomplished by Johnston’s twin brother James, met as teenagers in Kilmarnock, playing first as Screwfish forward of morphing into Biffy Clyro by the time they attended college in Glasgow.

The origins of the establish live shrouded in mystery (even though the most life like explanation is that it derives from Sir Cliff Richard’s authorized pen, aka Cliffy’s Biro) but their musical upward thrust needs no explanation.

Mixing stadium-willing choruses with bone-crunching riffs, they’ve established themselves as must-learn about festival headliners; while quieter songs love Many Of Terror and Rearrange brought them unusual, mainstream audiences at the turn of the decade.

Their industrial breakthrough used to be accomplished when Matt Cardle covered Many Of Terror as his X Ingredient winner’s single in 2010; even though the band handiest and not utilizing a doubt believed they’d made it when Courtney Like grabbed them at the NME Awards to pronounce they were her daughter’s authorized band.

“Her dad used to be indubitably one of many explanations we began making song,” Ben Johnston recalled later, “so as that used to be mind-blowing.”

All this success used to be accomplished hand-in-hand with their Scottish street crew – which is why closing yr’s personnel adjustments hit them so exhausting.

The autumn-out is at some level of the unusual legend. The Napoleonic price of Live Of pummels house the scathing goodbye: “It is probably going you’ll per chance well per chance no longer know the excellent scheme to be a legit friend / You is more likely to be ill-willing.”

Neil is extra reflective on Opaque, on the opposite hand, suggesting the door is originate for reconciliation. “You took the cash and urge,” he sings, “Nevertheless you’ve got made it true / There’s peaceable time.“

Leap of faith

Extra mainly, the album bristles with the boldness of a band who’ve survived a crushing blow.

The major single, Immediate Historical past, doubles as their unusual mission assertion. “That is the sound that we plot,” bellows Neil, resolute, even because the song ditches the band’s signature guitar riffs for a pounding digital beat.

“The irony wasn’t misplaced on me,” laughs the singer, “but that is precisely the sentiment: We’re repeatedly going to be a 3-fragment, kick-ass rock band, but we’re repeatedly going to absorb diverse flavours to what we enact.”

Biffy’s experimental turn must not advance as a surprise to followers. On their very first single in 2001, they were wilfully eclectic – switching from the pop-rock title be aware (27), to a darkly-coded steel opus (Instructio4), forward of ending on a sweetly-strummed acoustic ballad (Breatheher).

They’ve obtained better at song titles in the intervening 19 years, but their urge for food for whisk has remained fixed.

Neil says he deliberately goes out of his formulation to hear to song he doesn’t love or realize, to cease him writing by rote.

“I’m able to also write a song impressed by Nirvana in my sleep,” he says, “but I are attempting to in actuality feel uncertain about what I’m doing. That is a key thing – taking a jump of faith.

“So I’m listening to fairly heaps of extinct college Tina Turner in the intervening time, and pretty heaps of hip-hop.

“Then there is a band from the States known as Imperial Triumphant, who are form of death steel but their album begins with a barbershop quartet. And then they’ve jazz trombones and trumpets playing in actuality brutal riffs.”

Immediate Historical past, he says, used to be abruptly impressed by the clattering industrial funk of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation.

“The production of that album, or no longer it’s so messed up,” he enthuses. “It is indubitably one of many most avant-garde pop files, indubitably one of many most life like-recorded items of song I’ve ever heard.

“Clearly, our song doesn’t sound love Janet Jackson, but or no longer it’s about getting your self out of that zone of sticking heaps of guitars on things. Let’s transfer forward, let’s shatter unusual ground.”

List copyright Warner Recordsdata

List caption Biffy Clyro (L-R): Ben Johnston, Simon Neil, James Johnston

Neil has been impressed to use that message to all facets of his lifestyles. He sees the coronavirus lockdown as a large reset button, bringing communities together and per chance reversing the politics of individualism.

“I’ve felt a strength from the reality we’re all talking,” he says. “There’s moments for the length of this lockdown the build I’ve felt less on my own then I ever absorb. I insist we absorb all woken up, and we’re at a unusual stage of decency.”

He recognises “there are peaceable portions of these that need division” but believes fairly heaps of us absorb a newfound scepticism for the “counterfeit prophets” who “don’t have faith the consultants, or don’t think in science” and “promise to repair your total complications in a single fell swoop”.

“And so we’re embracing stuff that we’d by no device absorb embraced forward of. Treasure the Shadowy Lives Topic protests: I insist the cause they’ve taken such root this time, and can unprejudiced no longer be brushed aside, is thanks to lockdown.”

‘Younger other folks in nursery college’

Those beliefs absorb seeped into his song for the first time. Several songs on A Celebration Of Endings relief activism, most particularly The Champ, which rails against the “grey man” who by no device stands up for himself and in the atomize loses “every minute thing that you just would repeatedly cherished”.

Lyrics love these were written as a response to Brexit and the Scottish referendum, but “the that device of them absorb changed beyond recognition,” says Neil, and he is itching for the likelihood to reveal them with an viewers.

For now, though, he’ll absorb to verbalize material himself with a stay circulate, organized for 15 August in an “iconic Glasgow venue”.

In preparation, he’s been living in a bubble with his band-mates for the last few weeks.

“We were the first these that noticed every diverse when that first section of lockdown lifted, and we were hugging every diverse love we were teenagers in nursery college,” he laughs.

Without a viewers to keep in mind, the band were indulging some of their extra routine solutions for the live efficiency, with loads of stages and space-u.s.a.being constructed within the venue.

“Develop no longer gain me scandalous, I’d enact something else so as to stand on that stage and absorb my ego stroked and reveal with thousands of alternative folks,” the singer laughs. “I cross over all people so, so essential, but it’s about making the most life like of a essential space.”

And when the band enact gain relief in the road next yr, how will the unusual legend match into their stay uncover? With 9 albums below their belt, are there any songs that could per chance gain dropped from the setlist without disappointing followers?

“I create no longer assume we’ll fairly be Springsteen stage but our next tour it will be a two-hour uncover,” says Neil.

“I’m able to also unprejudiced no longer apologise for that, or no longer it’s far a true space to absorb – which potential of there’s heaps of bands that also cease with a song from their first legend 20 years in the past, so I in actuality feel in actuality fortunate that folks join with our unusual songs as effectively.”

Biffy Clyro’s unusual album, A Celebration Of Endings, is out on 14 August.

Observe us on Fb, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you occur to’ve got a memoir suggestion e-mail [email protected].

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ateamymm · 5 years

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Fort McMurray’s 2018 Real Estate Market in 7 Charts

The Fort McMurray Housing Market in 8 Charts: 2018 vs. 2017

After what we have been through since 2014, it’s easy to understand why, if you are a homeowner, you might be tempted to despair.

Or as a potential buyer, you may have been delaying your purchase up until now.

Perhaps like me, you want to understand the Fort McMurray real estate market better!

If any of these are true, you’re going to love the info in this blog...

Introduction

It’s clear that we’re in one of the later stages of a significant housing market correction.

In our last article, we wrote about a large group of potential sellers who cannot sell because their mortgage balances remain greater than their home values, and we showed that that group is rapidly reducing in size.

In the new year, I’ll write about the 2019 market and things to watch for.

But in this blog article, I’ll use 7 charts of MLS®️ data to separate fact from fiction for the year that has just passed. We’ll drill down into the details and we’ll abstract to the bigger picture to answer the following question:

“How has this year (2018) compared to last year (2017)?”

The seven charts we will look at are as follows:

Sales

Expiries

New Listings

Inventory

Discounts

Days to Sell

Distribution of Sales

Let’s get started with sales (transactions):

1) Sales[efn_note]The interpretations of any MLS® data used are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of the Fort McMurray Real Estate Board or its members. There is plenty of my opinion here, but the data we are using is super accurate.[/efn_note]

[caption id="attachment_29759" align="aligncenter" width="849"] Chart 1: Monthly MLS®️ Sales[/caption]

Important note: The December 2018 point in all of these charts is month-to-date only, and at the time of writing it is December 10th, so we shouldn’t compare this year’s December figures to last year’s as last year's are for the whole month of December.

So far in 2018, there have been 1,057 transactions vs. 952 in all of 2017. If this December produces a total of 50 sales[efn_note]In all of the charts and tables in this post, data is sourced with the following criteria: All property types without condo fees that are not vacant lots. The data covers only the following areas: Abasand, Beacon Hill, Dickinsfield, Downtown, Eagle Ridge, Grayling Terrace, Henning Ridge, Parsons North, Prairie Creek, Stone Creek, Thickwood, Timberlea, Waterways and Wood Buffalo[/efn_note], the 2018 total will be 1,092. This would represent a 15% growth in sales volume year-over-year.

The majority of these sales, as is typical, occurred between April and August. In fact, as you can see in the above chart, that period was particularly busy vis-a-vis 2017. We also had a little run on inventory last Christmas, with foreclosures, in particular, being snapped up (we currently have approximately 40% fewer foreclosures on the market this winter compared to last winter, by the way).

During Christmas 2017 and late spring/early summer 2018, for us agents on the ground, it felt busy at times, and in some price ranges throughout the year, there has not been a ready supply of quality listings.

Sales volumes have dropped significantly in November and December this year compared to last year, and what we hear day-to-day is that is related to decreasing confidence, which in turn is a result of the pipeline capacity issue coming to a head - possibly impacting fundamentals (corporate investment decisions), and certainly impacting the already-frayed nerves of our community.

If I were a guessing man, I’d say that the pipeline bottleneck would temporarily affect local housing market sentiment, more than it would impact long-term fundamentals, as it is an issue that has been priced into housing market expectations for years now and is getting far more media attention these days because of urgency.

2) New Listings

[caption id="attachment_29760" align="aligncenter" width="843"] Chart 2: Monthly New MLS®️ Listings[/caption]

This time last year, we wrote an article called “The 2018 Fort McMurray Real Estate Market”. In it, we pointed out that inventory had started to fall earlier in 2017 than in previous years and that, in large part, was due to the rate of new listings falling significantly in Q3 and Q4 2017. You can see that in the above chart (follow the green line).

The theory was that lower prices were causing homeowners not to sell (or not to be able to sell).

2018 has seen a consistent continuation of that process: In total, there have been 2,445 MLS®️ listings so far this year as opposed to 2,929 last year. At this rate, the reduction in the rate of new listings will be 15%.

In a typical year, of course, we see a rush of new listings from January to July. As you can see this year, however, the rate of new listings was remarkably consistent throughout the year. This makes sense as foreclosures, divorces or job losses make up a higher fraction of listings these days, and so perhaps sellers have less choice as to timing their listing than before (life determines timing instead). It also stands to reason that those sellers might be more motivated to sell their listings as opposed to have them expire (see later).

We have seen how sales and new listings have changed, but what about their interaction?...

The new listings to sales ratio is a measure of how “hot” or “cold” a market is (whether it favours sellers or buyers). The magic ratio for a balanced market is 2 : 1. This assumes that for every two new listings, one of the sellers is motivated to sell at any price and the other will allow their listing to expire.

New listings to sales ratio (2017) = 2,929 : 952 = 3.08 : 1 => Buyer’s Market

New listings to sales ratio (2018, YTD) = 2,445 : 1,057 = 2.31 : 1 => Balanced/Slight Buyer’s Market

This fits our experience as REALTORS®️ this year: For many price ranges and property types, prices have been relatively stable and negotiations haven’t tended to favour buyers as much (more on that later).

3) Expired Listings

[caption id="attachment_29762" align="aligncenter" width="701"] Chart 3: Monthly Expired MLS®️ Listings[/caption]

In total this year so far, 1,075 MLS®️ listings have expired versus 1,645 in the whole of 2017. This means the rate (over time) at which listings are expiring is down approximately 28%. As mentioned earlier, we suspect that this is because a higher than normal fraction of listings are being listed by people who need to sell, or at least have a strong want (having waited for some time to move).

Typically, the number of expired listings grows as the year continues, with the majority coming off the market in Q3 and Q4. That was certainly the case in 2017. This year, the number of expired listings has been relatively stable as the year has gone on.

Now that we have information on sales and expiries, we can look at the ratio of the two (sales: expired listings):

For all of 2018, the ratio was: 962:1,362 = 0.7:1 (In 2017, The A-Team’s sales to expiry rate was: 66:17 = 3.9:1)

For 2018 (YTD) the ratio is: 1,057:1075 = 1:1 (For 2018 (YTD) The A-Team’s ratio is: 93:21 = 4.4:1)

1:1 indicates a balanced market, with higher ratios putting negotiation power in the hands of sellers, so as you can see, we have more evidence of a balanced market for the market as a whole (parts of the market are still in a buyer’s market - see later).

4) Inventory (Stock of Active Listings)

[caption id="attachment_29757" align="aligncenter" width="851"] Chart 4: Monthly Active MLS®️ Listings (Inventory)[/caption]

Today’s inventory figure is almost the exact same as it was twelve months ago to the date, but the preceding year looked very different…

2017 was more similar to what we are used to seeing (during the boom, and the first years of the bust).

In 2014, 2015 and 2016, the number of listings peaked in Sep/Oct at 934, 1,047, and 887 respectively. Last year, inventory peaked in June at 945. This year it peaked early again, but only at 668 listings. The stock of listings, was in fact, incredibly flat throughout the year.

Easily our favorite measure of the market is the absorption rate (months of inventory). It is calculated by dividing the stock of inventory by sales. It can be broken down by property type (see later) as well as by time.

As a guide, for most of 2018, the absorption rate hovered around 10 months of inventory. 5-6 months of inventory is indicative of a balanced market, so 10 months put us firmly in buyer’s market territory.

Let’s calculate the absorption rate for the market as a whole, for each of the months in 2018 so far (we’re taking data from the active listings and the sales charts):

All the way from January through to October, the market was more or less in balance (5-6 months is the magic number). As mentioned earlier in the article, there were times during the busy season when the market felt quite competitive (our listing agents and buyer’s agents were in multiple offers). And towards the fall, it was challenging as a buyer’s agent to find quality listings.

This chart leaves us with a question through: What about November?

Inventory rose between October and November, in part because of weaker sale figures, and in part because of a lot of new multifamily listings coming as projects in Abasand started to be completed. I can tell you that that trend has continued in December and for the same reasons.

Right now, everyone we talk to is asking if we think the pipeline bottleneck is going to impact the market. We’re not allowed to attempt to predict the future so it’s tough to answer. In a way it already has, through lost confidence and sales, but the real question I think people are asking is “will it affect the market over an extended period of time?”...

The big message forming in this blog is that (for most property types, at least), the buyer’s market appears to be behind us - that’s the bigger picture. In my mind, the pipelines bottleneck has been known about by firms and households for some years now, so the fact that it has come to a crescendo, maybe isn’t changing the fundamentals of our housing market (wages, unemployment, interest rates, rents) and it’s more so playing with our emotions.

Intermission!

So far, we have seen strong evidence that the market should be delivering balanced market results. This is because sales are up, new listings are down, as are expiries. We have seen that inventory was fairly flat through the year (which is highly unusual), at there were times during the year, when the months of inventory nudges into seller’s market territory.

The next two charts will look a little bit more at the “results” side. Who have negotiations typically favoured this year, and does it reflect the graphs we have inspected so far? And what about days on market? Have listings sold quicker this year vis-a-vis last year, as you might expect?

At the end, we will take a little look at the distribution of sales by price range in 2018 versus 2017.

5) Discounts

[caption id="attachment_29763" align="aligncenter" width="839"] Chart 5: Average Monthly Sale Price to List Price Ratio for Fort McMurray MLS®️ Sales[/caption]

The sale price to list price ratio is shown above as the percentage of the list price (at time of offer) that the sale price was negotiated at. If you subtract the percentage from 100%, you get the average discount that was negotiated that month.

For example, in June 2018 the ratio was 97%, which means that properties sold for an average discount of 3%.

Both for 2017 and for 2018, the average discounts have been 3.6%, and there’s not been a discernible trend in either direction for each year. It is a bit of a mystery, given the results in the first half of this blog, because that average discount is still in buyer’s market territory. It’s possible that it is a hangover from years gone by - that buyer and seller expectations are lagging behind the reality of, for example, the absorption rate (see earlier). It’s also possible that even though we are in a balanced market, those buyers and sellers acting in the marketplace are not nervous about prices going up, and that the sellers that remain are particularly motivated. This explanation lines up with our day-to-day experience.

6) Days to Sell

[caption id="attachment_29761" align="aligncenter" width="843"] Chart 6: Monthly Median Days to Sell for Sold Fort McMurray MLS®️ Listings[/caption]

In general, this year’s median days to sell has been very similar to last year’s, and it has followed the same pattern of a slow rising throughout the year, with homes selling with a median days to sell of about 50 days in the spring, and 70 in the winter. This is indicative of a buyer’s market.

7) Distribution

[caption id="attachment_29758" align="aligncenter" width="715"] Chart 7: Distribution of MLS®️ Sales By Price Range[/caption]

There has been very little change in the distribution of sales between 2017 and 2018 YTD between $100,000 and $800,000. In each of the three highest price tranches above that, there have been fewer sales, whereas, in each of the lower price ranges below it, there has been growth in sales volumes.

A Look Ahead at 2019 - The Devil is in The Detail

All of the charts in this blog lump the different property types together and it’s important not to draw the conclusion that because the market, in aggregate, appears balanced (or balancing), that different parts of the market aren’t behaving in different ways.

For example: What about condos?

What about luxury homes?

I’m pretty excited to write our next article over the holidays. It will look ahead at the 2019 real estate market in Fort McMurray and highlight some themes to look out for. We’ll also dive a little deeper to see how different segments of the market are behaving right now, as we cross into the new year. AND, we’ll take a good look at how prices of different types of properties have compared this year versus 2017: What they have been doing in 2018 and what they are doing right now...

...It’ll be an essential read for anyone thinking of buying or selling in the next little while (follow the blog so as not to miss it).

Please have a lovely Christmas time; enjoy lots of cake for me, as I find myself on a diet.

If you’d like advice specific to you, please contact us so we can assign a specialist buyer’s agent or listing agent to help inform you so that you can make the best decisions for you & yours.

Thank you for reading: If you have found this article informative, please share it :)

Fort McMurray’s 2018 Real Estate Market in 7 Charts is courtesy of The A-Team Real Estate

#Real estate #Realtors #Talented Realtors

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years

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IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II political shuffle, China and Albania found themselves joined in an alliance of necessity. Neither country was keen to make cozy with the capitalist West or Stalinist Russia, so pickings were slim. The resulting period of “eternal friendship” between China and Albania lasted as long as their prevailing political ideologies roughly aligned — from around 1958 to the early 1970s. Anouck Durand’s photocomic Eternal Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Zuba, uses this brief moment of attempted political harmony as the context for an invented narrative based on the real-life experiences of Albanian photographer Refik Veseli. During the war, Refik’s family helped the Mandils, a Jewish family, evade Nazi capture. In the process, Refik formed a friendship with Gavra Mandil and learned photography from Gavra’s father, Mosha. After the war, the Mandils resettled in Israel. Due to Albania’s strict censorship policies, Refik struggled to maintain contact with Gavra after the move.

Eternal Friendship pairs a diary-like narrative written in the voice of Refik with archival photographs, a combination that explores the intersection of personal and national history. The book opens in 1970, when Refik visits China at the behest of the Albanian government. He has been dispatched with a delegation of state photographers, ostensibly to learn the trichrome photographic printing process. The trip itself is part of a state propaganda campaign to promote a sense of unity between China and Albania. Refik, who is not a state ideologue, goes with the private purpose of sending a letter to Gavra from China, thereby bypassing the Albanian censors.

Early communist states idealized photography as an inherently socialist art form grounded in science and capable of pure representation. Photography was touted as a tool of the revolution, one that could prove the viability of the communist project. During the period covered by Eternal Friendship, the production and distribution of photography was tightly controlled by the Chinese and Albanian governments. Each state published only images that supported the narratives they intended to tell about themselves — stories of collective strength, advanced industrial technology, and military power. The photographs used by Durand depict parades of people carrying banners with slogans such as “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people” and “Welcome comrades of the heroic Albanian people.” Other images show smiling partisans holding rifles or threshing wheat, smokestacks rising from industrial iron latticework, ballistic missiles, and anti-aircraft cannons. Eternal Friendship contextualizes these images in a manner that subverts and repurposes their original function. Propaganda photographs are used not as evidence of China and Albania’s “eternal friendship,” but as evidence of the Chinese and Albanian governments’ attempt to construct such a friendship.

The most obvious level of subversion at work in Eternal Friendship comes from the insertion of photographs into the book’s larger narrative. One picture depicts Refik and the Albanian photographer Pleurat Sulo standing among a line of smiling workers outside of a factory. In context, this photo is transformed from evidence of a strong and satisfied working class into a picture of a man posing so that he can get a chance to mail an unedited letter to his faraway friend.

But Durand also uses text to call out the staged nature of the photographs. Refik’s delegation poses with various locals in a series of photographs accompanied by a caption reading, “The Chinese have provided us with new cameras: a ‘Red Flag’ for each of us, the local replica of the Leica. The scenes to be photographed are also provided.” Elsewhere the book reveals that Albanian photographers had at this point long been using Kodak film, which was superior to the putatively new trichrome printing process they were taught by the Chinese. “We hope they won’t take away our Kodak film,” Durand writes in Refik’s voice.

Eternal Friendship repeatedly juxtaposes personal story with the tendency of communist art to eschew the individual and highlight collective struggle. The book does not include Refik on every page, nor do the pictures follow any sort of continuing action. Instead Durand intersperses photographs of Refik and his delegation with collective partisan imagery. Yet the text never ceases to comment upon each image from Refik’s perspective, explaining the constrained and constructed nature of the trip. Refik was sent to China to learn a new printing process, but he was also sent to generate photographic evidence of political cooperation. He fulfilled the latter mission, but the story of his personal reasons for making the trip undercut the very documentary evidence that he has produced.

Durand also cleverly crops archival images to invoke his motif of individual versus collective. One of the first pictures she includes is a painting of the two nations’ leaders, Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxha, clasping hands. The accompanying text reads, “The friendship of brotherhood … solid like granite … unites our two countries. China and Albania.” This is most probably the intended message of this painting at its creation. The following page is a photograph of a stadium, filled with people, above which hang the portraits of each country’s respective leader. Durand divides this image into two panels, inserting a thin white gutter through the center of what was once a single image, separating the leaders’ portraits. On the following page, Refik is introduced with the same technique. What appears to be a larger photograph of a parade is cropped to focus on individual marchers to whom we are introduced: Refik Veseli, Pleurat Sulo, and Katjusha Kumi. The text, in Refik’s voice, comments on the strangeness of being “on this side of the camera.” In this way, Durand invites us to examine the individuals within the photograph of the collective whole.

Finally, the very use of these photos is subversive, as both governments attempted to destroy these archives when the Chinese-Albanian relationship deteriorated and each sought to erase the evidence of their former relationship. Some pictures used by Durand bear marks of the attempted destruction in the form of scratched-out and burned faces. Once the state is no longer interested in publishing (or even preserving) the images, their function switches from propaganda to evidence. In the 1970s, the farce of an eternal friendship between China and Albania might have been believable. But presented in the context of the 21st century, knowing that this period of cooperation barely lasted 20 years, the claim deflates.

The latter portion of Eternal Friendship is devoted more exclusively to Refik’s history and his friendship with the Mandils. The images in this section include pictures from Refik’s personal collection — sentimental photographs and individual portraits that one might find in a family album. Instead of the plain white background and grid-like placement utilized in the first part of the book, these images appear as though imprecisely pasted atop blue construction paper. While the pictures are aesthetically placed, they are neither perfectly aligned nor divided by consistently-sized gutters. This portion of the book resembles a scrapbook more than a comic book. Durand also includes a letter written by Gavra nominating Refik’s family as “Righteous Among Nations,” which ultimately enabled the two to reunite in 1990.

This letter of nomination is, like the state propaganda photographs, a sort of fabrication. The sentiment may be heartfelt, but as with any political document, it is molded toward a specific purpose. In this respect, it parallels the photos in this section, which one might expect to be more personal than those documenting Refik’s visit to China, but which remain just as beholden to ulterior purposes. Refik’s family photographs are staged: the children are corralled to sit still just like the factory workers. The subjects are carefully posed and smile for the camera. Ironically, there are more seemingly candid shots in the first portion of the book.

As with the propaganda photos, the personal photographs contain multiple meanings that Durand sets out to reveal. One image shows Gavra and his sister standing in front of a Christmas tree. This was taken by their father to be used as advertising for his photo studio, and later repurposed as evidence of their Christianity designed to forestall Nazi harassment. A picture of Mosha and Gavra standing next to one another and smiling appears at first to be a generic family photograph. Its true import is revealed, however, by the accompanying text: “With Mosha (left) finally out of hiding in the basement: freedom!” Without these captions, a viewer would be unlikely to discern that these seemingly mundane pictures depict years of elusion and evasion — hiding in cramped basements, false identities, and even time in prison. One of the final images in the book was taken in 1990, when Gavra and Refik are reunited at last. It is among the only seemingly candid photographs in this section. Other people in the photo are not looking at the camera, and one person (either Refik or Gavra) holds his hands above his head in celebration, even though this obstructs the composition of the photo.

In this way, Durand primes us to rethink the propaganda photos she has shown us earlier. Even though we know these photos were staged, this does not change the fact that these people did meet and stand among one another. The artificial impetus of these meetings need not necessarily have precluded authentic connection. Nothing prevented Refik from enjoying the company of the factory workers. Put another way, if the family photos are as staged as the propaganda photos, then it follows that the propaganda photos are at least potentially as authentic as the family photos.

Eternal Friendship is a project of archival recontextualization. It does not merely revise or define the meaning of the images Durand selects, but situates these pictures within multiple contexts. The state propaganda photo offers, in addition to its intended purpose, a glimpse of Refik’s visit to China and evidence of the state manipulation of history. The studio advertisement becomes a tool of escape and subversion. A nomination letter functions as a political plea, but also serves as an authentic testament of friendship. In this context, it becomes impossible to definitively state what the archive shows about the past. While telling a compelling personal story of friendship, Eternal Friendship also explores the flexible nature of the image. Photography constructs histories, about ourselves and about our societies. But what a photograph reveals changes with time, and it is often not a single story.

Will Moore is a PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, where he studies nonfiction, essays, and comics. His comics, interviews, and critical reviews have been published in The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, and ImageTexT.

The post Recontextualizing the Archive: On Anouck Durand’s “Eternal Friendship” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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medproish · 6 years

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Kanye West, pictured in 2015, has come down with a case of the Twitter fingers. (Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)

It is the Year of Our Lord 2018, which means absolutely nothing is normal on Twitter: Bernie Sanders tweeted about Cardi B, that photo of James Comey with Method Man and Ghostface Killah is still making its rounds, and Kanye West, who recently reactivated his account, is spewing the equivalent of those inspirational Yogi Tea bag quotes.

The rapper’s musings come days after the Hollywood Reporter published an interview in which he claimed he was writing a philosophy book. We shared our theories on what it could include, and it seems we already have an answer. In the middle of Wednesday’s Twitter blast — does this man not know how to thread his tweets? — Kanye wrote: “oh by the way this is my book that I’m writing in real time. No publisher or publicist will tell me what to put where or how many pages to write. This is not a financial opportunity this is an innate need to be expressive.”

Weird? Absolutely. But Kanye has always been ahead of the curve, whether through his music or online nuttiness. Since joining Twitter in 2010, he has shared his thoughts on everything from airplane water bottles to creative ownership. A majority of the tweets have been deleted, but nothing is ever truly gone from the Internet.

In honor of Kanye’s most recent case of the Twitter fingers, here are six distinct eras of his time on the social media site. (This is obviously not exhaustive because dear God, who would do that to themselves?)

The era of ridiculous things like water-bottle hatred and cherub-imagery desire (2010)

Kanye cemented his status as fantastic follow when he tweeted the following in October 2010: “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.” Who among us hasn’t been in his shoes? The sentiment was so #relatable that it even ended up — albeit misdated — on a ceramic mug that you can buy online for a whopping $16.99.

In July of that year — the month he signed up for an account — Kanye shared his disappointment at ordering the wrong Persian rug: “I specifically ordered persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh.” We’ve . . . all been there?

He also tweeted that day about needing a luxury horse, according to Jezebel, and about how Twitter was “designed specifically with me in mind just my humble opinion hahhhahaaaahaaa humble hahahahhahaahaaaa.”

Yeah, okay. We haven’t all been there.

The era of not being humble (2012)

If that last tweet didn’t do it for you, let’s be as clear as possible: Kanye West holds himself in extremely high regard. He said as much two years later: “you may be talented, but you’re not kanye west.” Need another mug?

At least he’s honest. In what Wired called an “86-tweet-long monologue” that January, Kanye shared stories from his youth and admitted, “Being a celebrity has afforded me many opportunities but has also boxed me in creatively.” If you’d like to treat yourself to a full version of the tirade, the Hollywood Reporter published it here.

Kanye then deleted all his tweets later that year, leaving only the elusive, “BE BACK SOON.” Might it have been due to the influence of one Kim Kardashian? That’s the year they started dating, after all.

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian attend the Time 100 Gala in April 2015. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The era of being really normal (2014)

For the 10th anniversary of “The College Dropout,” Kanye wrote several grateful tweets looking back at his debut album.

“Ten years ago today we finally released what had been my life’s work up to that point: The College Dropout,” he wrote, according to Rolling Stone. “I say ‘finally’ because it was a long road, a constant struggle and a true labor of love to not only convince my peers and the public that I could be an artist, but to actually get that art out for the world to hear.”

He added: “Ten years later, I am still the same kid from Chicago, still dreaming out loud, still banging on the door. The doors may be heavier, but I promise you WE WILL BREAK THEM.”

The “I’M SO LUCKY” era (2015)

The nickname “Kimye” referred to a married couple by this point, and Kanye’s approach to Twitter completely changed. He posted intimate photos of Kim when she hit 30 million followers in March and captioned one of them “SWISH!!!” That got the word trending, because of course it did.

The rapper’s love for his wife has long been evident on his social media. He even returned to Instagram in February 2018 just to wish her a happy Valentine’s Day. She is currently the only person he follows on Twitter.

The era of attacking Wiz Khalifa (2016)

Ah, yes, the return of “Swish.”

Kanye started a fight with fellow rapper Wiz Khalifa in January 2016 when Kanye changed the name of his then-upcoming album from “Swish” to “Waves,” which Wiz claimed dishonored Max B and the Wave movement. (The album, eventually titled “The Life of Pablo,” happens to include a song called “Waves.”) Because Twitter beef is hardly ever handled directly, Wiz had subtweeted his remarks and Kanye responded in the same manner.

Many of the tweets referred to Amber Rose, Kanye’s ex-girlfriend and Wiz’s ex-wife, while others called back to Kanye’s ego problem, as he said things like: “I am your OG and I will be respected as such.” But it wasn’t all bad, because he apparently also respected Wiz’s style — “I went to look to your twitter and you were wearing cool pants” — and eventually apologized. All Kanye wanted was “peace and positive energy,” guys.

The modern era of unsolicited guidance (2018)

Aaaaand . . . he’s back! After reactivating his account Friday, Kanye spent much of Wednesday morning going on and on about how to live life. Do not give in to fear, he says, for it makes people manipulative. Don’t play chess with life. Don’t follow the crowd — follow your heart. And most importantly, “just stop lying.”

This sage-like wisdom is apparently an online version of his philosophy book, but that doesn’t mean he won’t delete the tweets eventually. We’ve included a few images below for your viewing pleasure.

(Kanye West/Twitter)

Kanye West is apparently working on a philosophy book. Here’s what it could include.

Here’s why Chicago is actually a great name for Kimye’s baby

Your guide to the Kanye West Twitter fury unleashed on Wiz Khalifa

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minnievirizarry · 7 years

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What Is Social Listening & Why Is It Important?

By now businesses know social media isn’t just a broadcast platform. A successful strategy is built around reaching the right people at the best time with the most insightful content. In order to achieve this, you need to sharpen your social listening abilities in addition to your verbal communication skills.

There’s often some confusion around what is social media listening and it often gets mixed up with social media monitoring. While they are somewhat similar and work best together, the two shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Social listening goes beyond monitoring and replying to incoming questions or comments about your brand. It’s about extracting key insights from social conversations that you can apply to your overall strategy.

If you’ve been confused about social listening or how your brand can successfully utilize it, we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything you need to know about the art and science of social media listening:

Sprout features mentioned in this article:

Social listening

Trends report

Twitter listening report

Social media monitoring

Smart inbox

Social media management

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands, and then leveraging them to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences. It’s more than watching @mentions and comments pour in via your social profiles, mobile apps or blogs. If you’re only paying attention to notifications, you’re missing a huge group of people that are talking about you, your brand and your product.

So how does social listening differ from social monitoring? Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights, described it perfectly:

“Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.”

Monitoring collects every social mention and action, while listening requires analysis and reflection. With the latter, you can:

Track overall brand health

Create content your audience craves

Generate ideas for marketing campaigns

Improve your customer experience

Drive strategic product decisions

Don’t worry–we’ll go into detail on each of these a little later. But for now, it’s important to have a thorough grasp of how social listening and monitoring differ.

The key difference is with monitoring, you’re compiling a list of social media engagement instances with the intention of taking an immediate action—reply, like or route the message to sales or support. With listening, you analyze the bigger picture behind all the conversations and integrate your learnings into your social strategy.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Tracking mentions and notifications is key to an effective engagement strategy. However, analyzing the context and larger trends around those conversations through social listening can give you valuable insight to better speak to and serve your target audience. But you may ask: what social conversations should I listen to?

Let’s take a look at Twitter. Over 25 billion social interactions take place on Twitter each day, so it offers a breadth of consumer, industry and cultural insights unlike anything else. With that type of volume, most companies don’t have the ability to go through every Tweet about their brand or industry. Plus, looking at these Tweets individually makes it difficult to see larger trends or themes.

That’s where listening comes into play. With social listening, you don’t treat every Tweet like a task. You look at the aggregate of a collection of social media messages. Here’s a simple way to think about it.

A Social Listening Example

Let’s say you own a smoothie shop and you source your fruits from a couple different vendors. A customer comes in on Monday and orders a peach mango smoothie. After tasting it, they complain that it’s bitter. You apologize and give them a refund. Friday, someone else comes in and orders a peach mango smoothie and tells you it’s amazing.

Next Monday, another customer comes in and orders a peach mango smoothie. They complain that it’s not sweet enough so you give them a refund like the customer from the previous week. A similar trend continues on for about a month.

If you were to look at these situations on a case-by-case basis, it’d be easy to write them off as one time issues. You quickly become aware of the problem and solve it on the spot. That’s monitoring.

But after a month, when you realize all the complaints are coming in on Mondays, you can see a trend developing and conclude there’s probably something wrong with the fruits coming in on Mondays. With that knowledge, you can go to the vendor and let them know there’s a problem with the fruits. From there, they can diagnose the issue and get it resolved so you can stop losing money on refunds. That’s social listening.

Social media listening allows you to see things at a bird’s eye view. As social media marketers, it’s easy to get consumed with responding to incoming messages one by one. This is particularly true if you deal with hundreds or thousands of questions and comments per day. While monitoring and responding to social messages is important, you also need to use social listening to see the bigger picture of what’s going on with your brand on social.

What Can You Do With Social Listening?

Now that you have a better understanding of social listening and why your brand needs it, let’s take a look at the ways you can actually put it to use.

Track Overall Brand Health

One of the biggest benefits of social listening is sentiment analysis. According to our research, social media is people’s top choice for customer care.

If you want to get the general consensus for your brand or a specific campaign, social media is the place to go. But it only works if you actively pay attention to what people say. Both social media monitoring and listening come into play here, but in different ways.

With monitoring, you see feedback in real time and can immediately act on it. When you just want to get a general feel for how well received a new product, announcement or other update is, social media monitoring can give you a great overview. For instance, if you notice a surge of negative Tweets about a product, it’s a good indicator something went wrong.

Through effective social listening, you go beyond the basics of only seeing unhappy people or those upset with your brand. Based on the aggregated data, you start to see how negative or positive sentiment impacts your brand overall, particularly on social media.

Let’s take Chipotle for instance. As you probably know, the restaurant chain has had a few major setbacks due to a string of customers getting sick after eating at their restaurants. With each outbreak, customers took to social media with less than favorable comments.

At that point, Chipotle didn’t need a report to tell them the sentiment around their brand on social was negative. What they could do, however, was use social listening to see just how impactful the hit was to their social media presence every time an incident occurred. If they were to monitor the change in sentiment before, during and after the outbreak, they’d have some major insight and data into how much they potentially lost as a result.

Key takeaways

Learn how sentiment impacts your brand: Use social listening to uncover the larger implications negative and positive sentiment have on your brand.

Listening is always on: Don’t wait for a crisis to happen. Start using social listening right now. This provides historical data on how people feel about your brand over time. Then it allows you to account for seasonality, product releases and other trends.

Understand the why: When you see sudden shifts in how people feel about your brand, dig into why it’s happening. Does it correlate with a new product release? Was your website down for a period of time? Or maybe a news story broke about your brand. The more you understand, the easier it is to fix negative sentiment or capitalize on the positive.

Create Content Your Audience Craves

Content is the most important part of any social media strategy. If you’re not sharing content your audience wants to see, then it’s nearly impossible to get them to stay engaged or convert into leads.

Often times, the quest for finding the best content to share is the result of trial and error. The strategy for many brands, particularly in the beginning, is to post a variety of articles, photos and videos and see what sticks. But with social listening, you identify topics your audience cares about without having to guess. Here’s how.

Use an analytics tool like our Trends to see which hashtags, topics or keywords people use when speaking to your brand. This will give you a great understanding of how your target audience talks as well as the phrases they associate with your brand.

Use this data to craft personalized social media content that uses the type of language your audience is familiar with. You can also use your analysis for other areas of marketing such as in landing pages, ad copy or blog posts. For instance, based on the screenshot above, the coffee shop might craft a Tweet or Instagram caption like “Craving a Hot & Delicious Cup of Coffee? Try Our New Flavorful #sproutblend to Power Up Your Morning!”

Another way this data comes in handy is for optimizing your social media posts for search. All of the major social networks use algorithms to determine which posts to surface for different search queries. Using the right combination of related hashtags and keywords could increase your chances of showing up when your target audience is searching for content related to your industry.

Key takeaways:

Look for content trends: Social listening gives you an aerial view of the conversations your audience has about your brand and industry. In order to use this to your advantage, look for trends in what they’re talking about and build content around it.

Listen for pain points: The best converting content is the type that attacks a particular pain point of your target audience. With social media listening, you can uncover some of the most common pain points your audience experiences and create content that directly addresses it.

Find related phrases: Rather than looking at the keywords and hashtags mentioned with your brand individually, look at related phrases to understand how to better speak to your audience.

Generate Ideas for New Marketing Campaigns

Successful social media campaigns start with identifying opportunities in the marketplace. Is there a void between what your customers want to see on social versus what’s being offered by competitors? Social listening helps find those opportunities. Let’s take a look at how a large retailer put this strategy to use.

In 2016, Marshalls launched its Pin Pal campaign on Pinterest and YouTube. They started with analyzing the boards of its Pinterest followers. Then Marshalls recruited social media influencers to hand-deliver boxes containing products to select followers inspired by their own Pinterest boards.

vimeo

Marshalls shared the moments and boxes on its social channels as well as its the influencers and winners.

Key takeaways:

Look for trends in the content your audience shares: Marshalls noticed a trend of its followers pinning images of sought-after decor and fashion items. The brand determined there was enough interest around the theme to build an entire campaign. Instead of looking at your audience’s social media posts individually, look at them as a whole and try to find common themes you can turn into a campaign.

Capitalize on UGC: Have your social team tag any social media posts from customers that promote your brand as user-generated content. Monitor the rate that UGC is being shared by your audience over time. If there’s a significant amount, it might be worth creating a new campaign that encourages or rewards followers for promoting your brand.

Stay on top of trending topics: Social listening goes beyond tracking trends and conversations related to your brand. You also need to be on top of what’s going on in your industry and around the world. For instance, our social team uses the Sprout Social Twitter Listening Report to create our annual hashtag holidays calendar. By analyzing the volume of messages containing specific holiday-related hashtags, they identify which non-traditional holidays marketers need to pay attention to the most.

Improve Your Customer Experience

As your company grows, social listening will become increasingly important. Growth creates a new set of obstacles that can potentially impact your customer experience. The challenge is differentiating problems that only affect one or two customers from larger issues that could completely halt your growth.

This is where social listening comes in handy because it’s less concerned with the one-off issues. Instead, the focus is around spotting larger trends that need to be addressed. Let’s look at a real-life example to really paint the picture.

At the end of 2016, a Tesla customer sent a Tweet about how one of the superchargers (the stations where people recharge their Tesla vehicles) was always full from people leaving their cars charging for hours. The founder of Tesla, Elon Musk quickly replied.

You're right, this is becoming an issue. Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parking. Will take action.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2016

The reply from Musk is an example of social media monitoring. He saw a negative Tweet and responded. But take note of his response, specifically the first sentence.

You’re right, this is becoming an issue.

This clearly wasn’t the first time Tesla had heard of this issue. A quick Twitter search reveals several Tweets before and after the one from Loic with people experiencing the same issue.

@elonmusk @TeslaMotors there should be a button on tesla supercharger station which allows you to page owners of cars that are full #tesla

— Mehmet Akcin (@mhmtkcn) October 23, 2016

@TeslaMotors Northampton Supercharger all stalls full at lunch time today. Great to see so many #Tesla in one place. More stalls required?

— TeslaBill (@Tesla_Bill) September 30, 2016

By monitoring a combination of keywords like “Tesla” and “supercharger,” the company can easily see trends in the number of people Tweeting about this issue. This screenshot is from our Twitter listening report, which you can check out with our Enterprise plan.

And here’s the best part about this story. Six days after the Tweet from Musk, Tesla published this blog post.

We designed the Supercharger network to enable a seamless, enjoyable road trip experience. Therefore, we understand that it can be frustrating to arrive at a station only to discover fully charged Tesla cars occupying all the spots. To create a better experience for all owners, we’re introducing a fleet-wide idle fee that aims to increase Supercharger availability.

Had Tesla ignored the trend of customers complaining about this issue, it would’ve been easy to write it off as an isolated incident. While we can’t be sure if social listening was a part of Tesla’s strategy, it’s clear that someone was paying attention to the growing demand from customers, which is exactly how social listening is supposed to work.

Key takeaways:

Listen for new opportunities: Tesla received consistent feedback about a specific issue. Rather than defaulting to a generic apology, the company used it as an opportunity to improve the customer experience. Your brand can use social listening to do the same thing. Look for trends in complaints or issues from customers and think of ways to resolve it with new features or policies.

Monitor and listen: While social listening and monitoring are different, they work best in tangent. As you start to notice trends from your social listening, use it in your monitoring efforts. For instance, in Musk’s Tweet he lets the customer know the company noticed a multiple customers were having the same issue, and he had plans to resolve it.

The need for listening grows as your brand expands: In the early stages of Tesla when there weren’t as many of their cars on the road, the lack of spaces at the superchargers likely wasn’t as big of an issue. But as the vehicles became more affordable and widely used, a new challenge presented itself and was vocalized on social. Follow Tesla’s example and prioritize listening as your customer base and business grow. Use developing trends from listening to help inform changes your company needs to make as it expands.

Drive Strategic Product Decisions

Producing innovative ideas for new products or marketing strategies requires quite a bit of research. In addition to your current R&D process, mix in social listening to see how your customers feel about current or past products. Through social listening, you can answer questions such as:

What features did they like or dislike the most?

Why did certain products outsell others?

What new products does your audience want to see?

After releasing the book Troublemaker by Leah Remini, the marketing team at Random House used social listening to help understand why the book was so successful. The goal was to understand how they could use the information to attract more readers. They also wanted to apply their learnings to future releases.

Social listening revealed that beyond the controversial topic of the book, Scientology, readers were more enticed with Leah. They resonated with the honesty and authenticity she used to tell her personal story.

Just finished audio book "Troublemaker" by Leah Remini. Love her # this is what brave looks like

— Carol Young (@bendabook) March 14, 2016

Based on this knowledge, the Random House team setup Q&As and chats through Goodreads for Leah to answer questions from readers, because data showed readers wanted to hear more from her.

Thanks to social listening, they were able to pivot away from marketing the book as a Scientology tell-all piece, to a story about Leah and her experiences.

Key takeaways:

Look for the not-so-obvious trends: Random House didn’t go into the social listening campaign expecting to find that users were primarily intrigued with Leah rather than the topic of the book. With your brand’s listening campaigns, don’t get tied down to strictly monitoring obvious trends. Look beyond the surface and find the hidden gems.

Go beyond brand name: In addition to your brand name, incorporate product names, public figures related to your company and other keywords and phrases that can give you more focused and specific insights.

Use the data: Once Random House uncovered why people loved the book, they took action. Follow their footsteps and outline actionable steps your brand can take to put the data to use on current and future efforts.

Perfect Your Strategy With Social Listening

With the help of social media listening tools, you can see benefits at nearly every aspect of your business. Your sales team can gain insights into what customers like the most about your products and services. Your marketing team can get ideas for content and marketing materials based on trends in your customers’ behavior. Your R&D team can easily access feedback on what your target audience thinks about your products as well as those of competitors.

And similar to the Tesla example, when customers see your brand actively listens, they become more comfortable sharing honest feedback and recommendations. Those suggestions could help your brand experience faster growth and more satisfied customers.

And once you start building social listening into your strategy, be sure to employ a social media management tool like Sprout Social to make the process as efficient as possible.

This post What Is Social Listening & Why Is It Important? originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from SM Tips By Minnie https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-listening/

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dream-love210 · 7 years

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In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of the year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells.

When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police…

Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla…She flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await her further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing a letter...She looked up--and of course no dark spectacles and make-up could for a moment fool her.

Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before, and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, “A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.” And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa’s case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending her a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire… I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

She seemed also calmer than before; her self-control had improved. During the previous meetings, and throughout their marital life in Zembla, there had been, on her part, dreadful outbursts of temper. When in the first years of marriage he had wished to cope with those blazes and blasts, trying to make her take a rational view of her misfortune, he had found them very annoying; but gradually he learned to take advantage of them and welcomed them as giving him opportunity of getting rid of her presence for lengthening periods of time by not calling her back after a sequence of doors had slammed ever more distantly, or by leaving the palace himself for some rural hideout.

In the beginning of their calamitous marriage he had strenuously tried to possess her but to no avail. He informed her he had never made love before (which was perfectly true insofar as the implied object would only mean one thing to her), upon which he was forced to endure the ridicule of having her dutiful purity involuntarily enact the ways of a courtesan with a client too young or too old; he said something to that effect (mainly to relieve the ordeal), and she made an atrocious scene. He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her than an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succombed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore...Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught…

What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of this dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness--and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection--but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.

Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first sold her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden--rose, black araucarius, rusty, greenish hydrangeas--one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in theme came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her--prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron--and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object--a riding boot in his bed--establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead--but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave--and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced--as soon as the visitor left--by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains… But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to the Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared.) That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. “I do have some business matters to discuss,” he said. “And there are papers you have to sign.” Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the rose. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white manilla, brought certain documents from Disa’s boudoir. Upon hearing the King’s mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by this excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycenes. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot.

They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner-though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.

“What are you plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)

He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.

Why America? What would he do there?

Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.

“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York--I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”

He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does it matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in this arms for a moment.

He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Flyer collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note 80).

When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about who, presumably, are still alive?”

“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”

“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”

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