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dinopopduck · 3 years

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Ezekiel Only Being Unaffected By Certain Kinds of Magic

Let’s just start with me saying this isn’t exactly a new theory. It’s the demigod thing, and it’s a fairly popular one. If you haven’t heard of this headcannon, I put as much as I can find here. If you have, I found a bunch of new stuff that I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so reading this isn’t a complete waste of your time, I hope.

I tried to keep this from becoming wordy, but it got really long anyway, because there was a lot to talk about here.

Ezekiel being unaffected by magic is sort of an ongoing thing in the show. He is influenced by it much of the time, such as by Santa’s Hat, Pan’s Flute, Prospero’s spell, lycanthropy, etc. When it comes to the stuff he was seemingly completely immune to, there is one link that connects them all.

Apple of Discord: Everybody knows this one. The Apple is a Greek artifact, meant to turn you into the worst version of yourself, and Ezekiel was only one completely unaffected. It’s blamed on “he’s already the worst version of himself” or whatever.

Zeus Lightning Bolt: the episode where Ezekiel ends up decked out in Greek armor, and is sent to pick up Zeus’ Lightning Bolt, which was freaking out and zapping everywhere. He picks it up just fine, and he’s then able to hand it off to Flynn. It may have been purely because of the Greek armor he was wearing, but Flynn did not seem so sure about that working.

Cindy’s Love Potion: Ezekiel is able to be near the potion without becoming obsessed with Cindy. At first, it’s blamed on him being obsessed with himself, then later Jacob tells Ezekiel that he was already in love with Cindy. It was an obsession, not a love, potion you literally spent the episode proving that blah blah, he didn’t even recognize her at first blah blah, anyway, I have a better reason.

There are two Greek mentions in this episode. First, the potion project itself is called Project Aphrodite, a Greek goddess. Second, the sunflowers; when asked, Jenkins mentions how sunflowers are a Greek symbol of unrequited love. In addition, “love” potions may have originated in Greece, or at the very least, were common enough to have multiple sites claim that, lol. At the end of the season, where each librarian uses their gifts to turn Apep mortal, this greek potion is what Ezekiel ends up using.

See a pattern here? Everything that he was completely unaffected by was Greek in some way. So, he has an immunity to these kinds of artifacts, but why? I vote demigod.

Anyway, moving on.

Here’s some magic he could have been immune to, or could not have been. Its pretty debatable.

Fortuna: Technically a Roman Goddess, but the show does acknowledge how similar they are to Greek Gods. He may have been affected by the spell, but broke out of it pretty quick. Some think he may not been affected at all; slot machines aren’t exactly fair, especially in a casino that exists to cheat completely. As for Ezekiel getting so upset over losing, what he says, “Not the guy that loses, I’m the guy that wins” sounds very similar to what he was saying in Point of Salvation, but that’s a whole nother topic.

Alternately, he was affected and this point shouldn’t be here. I don’t know, I’m not the writers.

Libris Fabula: He was a little bit affected, just far less than the others, as he acted pretty much the same. He did get a barely noticeable clothing change, became luckier than normal, and was just able to cast a spell for some reason? Speaking out that spell, it froze the guy, and a certain Greek God does have the ability to put people to sleep. Not really the same thing, but worth thinking about. Maybe. More on that later.

Most people think he was immune, but he could have just been similar enough to the character he was portraying that he didn’t need to change a whole lot.

These ones are barely worth mentioning, because have other reasonable (though I guess your definition of reasonable may be different from mine) explanations, but you could see them as magic immunity as well:

Silver Screen: Ezekiel gets into character the least, while Cassandra and Jacob are out singing and calling people by their character names. Maybe less affected, maybe just a spoilsport. Probably the last one.

Point of Salvation: Was the only one able to remember previous loops. Since they were in a video game, it’s explained that since he was the first through the door, he became the player while everyone else became NPCs. I mean, sure.

Christmas Thief: Saint of Thieves only used his truth telly power on Ezekiel’s mother, not him. Ezekiel did not feel obligated to say anything. Could just be that the guy wasn’t talking to Ezekiel. Or, earlier in that episode Ezekiel tells his mother he doesn’t steal anymore (at least for anything other than the Library, I assume, cause he still kinda does) and therefor that made him immune to the spell, since it only works on thieves.

Image of an Image: Both Cassandra and Ezekiel got their pictures taken, and Cassandra was the only one affected by the transfer spell. However, Ezekiel wasn’t one of the “chosen ones” because he snuck in, and jumped in front of the camera while Eve (one of the “chosen ones”, who was later able to be affected) turned away. Either that, or he just didn’t have time to feel the effect, since his picture was taken after Cassandra’s, and Eve’s was placed in manually.

That’s all the possible instances of magic immunity I could think of.

Next, we have some other stuff that is relevant to this point, but wasn’t necessarily artifact/magic immunity.

Prophecy Cube: Created by the Oracle of Delphi, who is from Greek mythology. This isn’t about whether Ezekiel was affected by something, as he was still able to use the prophecy glass/get stuck in the cube. Rather, it’s about the Zeus Challenge in the cube. They probably would have died in there, but luckily, Ezekiel had just happened to steal, and keep on him, the exact thing they needed to get through– a bunch of golden coins, and a prophecy that ensures at least one coin can’t be destroyed. Luck? Prophecy? Divine Intervention? Plot convenience? Okay its probably the last one but STILL

Also, Ezekiel getting pissed at Zeus.

Zeus’s Bolt (again?): There is a promo image I think for season 4? that has each of the Librarians holding their tools. Jacob had his axe, Cassandra had a notebook, Flynn had Excalibur, all normal, except for Eve and Ezekiel. Eve had this big staff thing I didn’t recognize, and Ezekiel had Zeus’ Bolt for some reason?

Lightning, just, in general: If there is wild electricity in an episode, Ezekiel is probably around.

Examples:

City of Light: Gets shocked and knocked backwards into Jacob by a very electrified fence, gets up right afterwards and is fine.

Broken Staff: The Zeus Bolt thing, you get it.

Image of an Image: Ezekiel electrocutes Jacob. Jacob was not really fine. He lived, though.

Point of Salvation: Ezekiel electrocutes Jacob part 2 Electric Boogaloo, but this time on purpose. He was not fine. He died. But don’t worry, he lived.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Mentioned a little bit above, Ezekiel, Jacob, and a student get stuck in the Zeus Challenge, and Ezekiel uses some coins he just so happened to steal recently. Throwing them on tiles shows whether or not lightning will strike if it was stepped on. Seriously, why is it ALWAYS Jacob?

The Dark Secret: Ezekiel is the one sent to wrap a cord around a lightning rod constantly being struck by lighting. “Why am I bloody doing this”, he asks? I mean, Zeus probably isn’t going to kill his descendent(?), right?

Werewolves: Have you heard of the Lycaon of Arcadia? It’s a Greek myth. Basically, this dude named Lycaon wants to test how smart and all-knowing Zeus is. To do so, he kills his own son, cooks him, and serves him to Zeus to see if he notices, ya know, no biggie. Zeus was like “wtf man” and brings the son back to life, and turns Lycaon into, you guessed it, a wolf. So, Zeus creates a werewolf of sorts, maybe one of the firsts. In Fangs of Death, Ezekiel just so happens to be the one (main) character to be turned into werewolf. So, if he was a descendant of Zeus, imagine how big of a “fuck you” that was to the god. That all being said, Ezekiel was turned by an Egyptian god, so that might not have been intentional. Also, they may have just been avoiding turning Jacob, because there is already a werewolf named Jacob and they didn't want another Twilight reference in that episode.

Family/Name: Ezekiel is adopted, and his adoptive mother mentions how she took him in off the streets. Because of that, we don’t know who his birth parents are, and whether or not he, or anyone else, knows is unknown. Soooo, we can take some creative liberties as to who his parents might have been.

As for his name, it carries some religious connotations. It should be remembered though, the meanings I’m talking about here are Biblical, not Greek, so again, might mean nothing for this argument. “Ezekiel” is “God’s Strength” or “God will Strengthen”. Jones might also be something like “God is gracious” or “God has favored”, thought different sites say different things. However, I’m pretty sure the name Jones came from his adoptive mother, and apparently Jones is a common last name in Australia. His first name is more relevant, because all of his siblings have themed names; Mercy, Charity, and Honor. So, either his mom named him differently because she knew something we don’t, or he already had the name before she adopted him. Either way, this probably means absolutely nothing. But what are we here for? To analyze a dead show like an English teacher analyzes the color of curtains in an 100 year old text. If it wasn’t for all the other stuff, I probably wouldn’t think about this too much.

Okay. So Greek stuff, lightning, and Zeus himself come up a LOT when it comes to this guy. So is Ezekiel the son of Zeus? Possibly, but a more popular theory is that he’s Zeus’ grandson. Because Zeus’ son just so happens to be Hermes; god of things such as luck, travel, money, trade, and most importantly, thieves. Oh, and animal husbandry/shepherds and sleep, I don’t know how much those apply but I will try.

Time for some comparisons, honestly most of these don’t even need to be explained so I’ll keep it short-ish, cause this shit has gotten way too long already.

Luck: Ezekiel, especially in the first season, likes to rely on luck, and tends to be very lucky in general. Examples where this is mentioned include Fables of Doom and Apple of Discord. “Smarter to be lucky then lucky to be smart!”

Travel: We can assume that he ended up traveling in his previous job (that being heists all over the world) fairly often, even before the Library. Becoming a Librarian with a teleporting door increased that of course.

Money: Steals very high-value items to sell. Also apparently likes to take money from his coworker’s wallets. And probably everyone else’s.

Trade: The aforementioned high-value pieces he steals are traded/sold for money. In Christmas Thief, we find out he kept none of the money or items, giving it away to others who needed it. That kinda fits this category, I think.

Thieves: I really don’t need to explain this. Unless you haven’t seen the show.

Animal Husbandry/Shepherds?: Basically the care of animals. Um, well he doesn’t keep cows or anything, but he has a tendency to “adopt” magical creatures that need help. Stumpy, Nessie Jr., maybe Frankenstein’s Monster as well?

Sleep: I mentioned earlier how Ezekiel froze a guy (not really in an icy way, just couldn’t move) by hitting him with his coin. Hermes is able to send people to sleep with his Caduceus (the snake wand thing). Yeah, it’s not really the same thing, though you could consider being frozen a kind of sleep. He could have just been lucky enough to find a magical coin, and lucky enough to figure out how to use it at the exact right time without even knowing what it did. It’s a stretch either way, really, and was never explained in the episode at all. Yeah, I can't find anything else that fits.

Hermes is considered to be a thief and trickster, and a lot of the things he is god of are Ezekiel’s main occupations. With all those similarities to Hermes, frequent events related to lightning and Zeus related things, and immunity to Greek artifacts, we can conclude that he is perhaps the son of Hermes, taking after his father in abilities and getting visits from grandpa.

Alternatively, his somehow IS Hermes, but I doubt that. He’d probably be way more powerful. He was also able to see the future with Prophecy Glass, which Jenkins claims is impossible for immortals to do (although in that case he was talking about a Prophecy Cube, but close enough). It’s more likely that he is a demigod.

Okay, that is all I can think of that is relevant. I binged the series about two months ago, and have been thinking about this theory. I went ahead and re-watched the episodes that I mentioned in more detail, as well as parts of others that I remebered. The reason I bring this up is because I may have missed things. I did not rewatch a majority of the episodes, more that I looked at a list of episodes on wikipedia and tried to remember what happened in them, watching clips and episodes if I needed to.

The show was cancelled, so we’ll probably never get a confirmation as to who Ezekiels’ birth parents were, and as such, you can’t prove me wrong! That being said, if I got any facts incorrect in this, please tell me so I can fix it. I’m not well versed on Greek Mythology, in fact I know basically nothing, and did the research as I went along. So again, there could be more. This is just what I found in like, less than a day of searching.

Join me next time on “How is Cassandra magical, where’d she get it from? Also, were we ever gonna meet her parents?” And “In the first episode of season 3, Jacob is just able to hit a heavy punching bag of its chain, across the room, at bullet speed, just because of a shift of his wrist, and later in that episode do the same thing to Apep, and it’s just…never addressed or spoken about again? Like wtf man?”

I'm probably not doing that

If you managed to get through all of this, thank you, and I hope this wasn’t too painful to read.

#the librarians #ezekiel jones #greek #hermes #zeus #this took so long #magic #magic immunity #theory #headcannon #demigod #curse of cindy #apple of discord #broken staff

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normal-thoughts-official · 3 years

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I. t. a

Ahhshshsh I had forgotten how much I loved Diego and Vaaryn <3

I have so many questions about Vaanti traditions but I'm also glad pb didn't went into too much detail because I just don't trust them 😬

Also no, with junior I meant Alesteir (but I DIDI IT! In book 1 he was like "grace, mc, you both are the only worth saving here" and I was like "yes, i won these interaction"... though in the second book I think I spit on him lmao)

And Gurgi was nice, i loved those interactions are like,, very normal but in weird situations Ahshhshs

OMG WE GET TO SPIT ON HIM???? ICONIC CANT WAIT. when grace slapped his face it was so <3 god i miss grace sm. its chapter 6 of the 3rd book WHERE IS SHE

also ugh i wish i were u i love diego and varyyn so much what the fuck

also im proud to say that now for the first time i actually have a theory re: what the hell is going on. i just got to the part where we crash that weird timeless vaanti party and the clockmaker explained to us the thing about the island's heart and i think that we (the MC) are said heart. mostly because she said that the heart came in the form of that spirit and that spirit is us, because

it looks exactly like us dudndidm

im pretty sure its meant to look like us because when craig thought zahra was the ghost thatd make no sense because the ghost's form looked so different from zahra's, BUT it would make sense considering choices always operates assuming the MC will be female even when they give us the option to not make it so, and female MCs' form's options did look like zahra if all u had was the outline

but i also have other reasons for believing that, such as:

we were born in la huerta (and didnt even know it) on jan 1st (pretty emblematic date, the beginning of all or whatever) and we seem to have no discernible past. even rourke couldnt find anything about us, and we seem to have, like, no memories or family or anything from before this trip

the endless/we can control and reset time within the island and ONLY IN THE ISLAND as hes said in book 2's epilogue

we are canonically immune to time loops

we changed the island's hearts without a problem but when quinn did she got possessed by the bizarre screaming thing

so yeah i think we are the island's heart (not sure how exactly we took human form and ended up in college but it's a work in progress okay) and i might be wrong but hey at least ive managed to fucking put something together for the first time!!! jdndjdndixn and thatd be a pretty good plot twist but idk

also oh my god that scene where craig thought zahra was dead was so heartbreaking wtf, one m/f couple. ALSO ive just met kele and i really hope choices doesnt pull some bullshit with him because i love him and im pretty sure hes the only native american character choices has had so far. also not to be a ho but hes so pretty 👀👀👀👀

on a sidenote ive been a little disappointed by most of the embers of hope 😔 other than raj's most seemed kind of flavorless, altho im very happy that in craig's he didn't miraculously get drafted and instead his happy future showed him that it was okay that it didn't go the way he expected and hed still make it big. and it still showed him struggling with his depression but overall doing better which i quite liked. it was no miracle future

but i felt like sean's could've been so much more and diego's was straight up disappointing like dudndi 😭 i wanted at least diego to be able to stay in the island. literally why would anyone want to go back to capitalism when they can stay with the vaanti. especially since diego said many times that he felt like home in elyys'tel and that he's never felt like this before, and his family are pieces of shit anyway but then its like "he got famous and then his family wanted him back!" bruh. thats not exactly a happy ending

a n y w a y sorry it took so long to reply i was really busy and then i forgot until u sent me the other one and then i forgot to reply to that one too 😭😭😭😭 its fine I'm fine

#ask #identity thief anon #endless summer #es

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mamabearcatfanfics · 4 years

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More Than Words - One

“Please, please, please, please, please Kagome!”

She looked up from her laptop to roll her eyes at the dark haired man leaning over her desk, his violet eyes beseeching, hands together as if in prayer.

“You would think by now Miroku, that you of all people would know that when a lady says no, she means no”, she said dryly, dropping her attention back to the computer screen in front of her. It was boring work, but if everything wasn’t just so, the tender documents could be rejected, and she really didn’t want to open that can of worms with her project manager.

“But Kagome”, he continued pleading. “She’s amazing, gorgeous, an angel!” His eyes misted over as he gazed off into the middle distance. “I think it’s her. I think I’ve finally found the love of my life.” Kagome snorted, and his eyes flicked back to hers. “You don’t believe me?” he said with a wounded expression.

“Miroku”, Kagome sighed, “you probably spoke to her for a maximum of what, two minutes, tops? And that was to order coffee. How is this girl any different from the temp secretary you took out on a date after the office Christmas party three weeks ago? Or that girl you abandoned me for last Friday night when we went out to karaoke? I’m not going to hound some poor woman minding her own business into giving you her number just because you have the unfortunate habit of falling for every pretty face you see!”

Miroku shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. This was different. When my fingers touched hers, it was, like, I don’t know, a spiritual connection.” He sighed, leaning against Kagome’s desk, his hand over his heart. “She owns me, body and soul.”

“Oh my god Miroku,” Kagome chortled, pushing his hip off her desk. “If you were any cheesier I’d need to run out and buy wine and crackers! You do realise that you sound like someone out of one of those trashy romance movies on daytime TV? Next you’ll be writing sonnets and saying you were struck by Cupid’s arrow.” She got up from her desk to move over to the filing cabinet, rifling through the files. “I still don’t see why I need to be involved anyway - just ask her for her number herself if you’re so desperate!”

Miroku sighed, hanging his head despondently. “I’ve been banned. By her guard dog.” Kagome looked at him questioningly. “The barista.”

“You got banned from a café by the barista? What on earth did you do!?” She held up her hands, the file in them covering her view of Miroku as he opened his mouth to explain. “No, don’t tell me, on second thoughts, I don’t want to know!”

“Kagome, I’m begging you! Just talk to her. If she doesn’t want to give her number to me, I’ll admit defeat. I just need to know! What if I did all your filing for the next week?”

Kagome shook her head. “No way! I’ve only just got all my files back in order from when you meddled with my stuff when I was on leave.”

“I’ll walk your dog.”

“I have a cat.”

“I’ll do your tax return for you.”

“I’d like to stay out of prison, thanks very much.”

“I’ll, I’ll… “ Miroku looked around the office, as if searching for inspiration, his eyes alighting on Kagome’s much loved pink coffee cup, sitting empty and forlorn on her desk. “I’ll buy you coffee for the next month!”

Kagome stared him. “You’re offering to buy me coffee for a whole month?” He nodded. “And this is whether she gives me her number or not?” Miroku nodded again. Kagome bumped the filing cabinet drawer shut with her hip, then placed the folders on her desk, turning back to him with a gleeful expression on her face.

Miroku’s face fell when he realised exactly how much that this might cost him in monetary terms. Kagome loved her coffee; she was rarely seen without her favourite coffee mug in her hand. And she did a lot of overtime, often working back late at the office, weekends too when a tender was due.

Kagome grinned even wider and slapped him on the shoulder. “Miroku, my lovestruck friend, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

☕💘☕

Kagome walked towards the tiny hole in the wall coffee shop a few blocks away from the office. It was literally only a door and a window wide, the exterior painted in matte black, with a white awning shading the customers waiting outside in the hot Australian summer sun. The business name adorned the glass window, a simple red circle with black text in a strong block font - Black Dog Coffee.

There was a line of people heading out the door waiting patiently, some chatting quietly, but most looking down at their phones. As she got further forward in the line, she was amused to notice that everyone followed the same pattern – a step towards the woman taking orders, stating their name and order and paying, then two steps to the left while they waited for their coffee. The woman at the cash register didn’t take another order until the first one had been filled, yet no one complained. That was kind of odd, but the line was moving fairly swiftly, so she guessed it worked, even though it wasn’t how cafés usually took their coffee orders. It was hard to see what was going on from her position in the line, stuck behind a tall guy in a business suit. She decided to look up reviews for the coffee shop online while she was waiting.

‘This coffee is the absolute bomb, but don’t piss off the barista!’

‘Was recommended to me by a friend. Coffee is amazing.’

‘Kinda weird. They only sell coffee, roast their own beans I think. The barista is something else!’

‘Would wait in line all day for this coffee!!’

‘Worst experience ever. Got BANNED because I tried to order more than five things. And they have no food, just coffee. WTF! Pretty sure the barista was in the yakuza – that guy has tatts for days! 0/10 would recommend.’

‘Follow the ordering protocol and you’ll be sweet – best coffee in the downtown financial district.’

‘OMG – best coffee EVER! I’m now a daily customer.’

Hmmm. She tried to peer around the tall guy in front of her, but she couldn’t see anything; the afternoon sun was reflecting off the glass covered office building nearby, getting in her eyes and making her squint. She fanned her face with her hand. Man it was hot. You could fry an egg out here on the cement. She hoped the coffee was worth the freckles she was probably getting on her nose right now. The tall guy stepped forward to make his order, and she caught a glimpse of the woman behind the cash register.

Long glossy brown hair with thick bangs, and a bright smile. Her brown eyes, highlighted by bright pink eyeshadow, sparkled with warmth; she was giving her total attention to the current person she was engaging with. She wasn’t much taller than Kagome herself and the tight black t-shirt she was wearing with the name Sango embroidered on the pocket accentuated her generous curves.

Kagome sighed. Miroku was nothing if not predictable – he loved curvy ladies. But how was she going to ask for this woman’s number without causing a disruption – everyone seemed to be on board with the ordering system, and if the coffee was as good as the reviews promised there was no way she was going to get herself banned from coming back.

She glanced down to the time on her phone, and then to the opening hours printed on the tiny shop window. It was almost closing time. Maybe if she hung back for a little while and caught the woman after they’d shut up shop? She groaned internally, trying not to think of the work still waiting for her on her desk. She should have held out for two months of coffee.

The tall man stepped to the side. Crap, she needed to order.

“Good afternoon ma’am. What would you like?” The woman’s smile was wide and welcoming.

“Uh, a large latte please, no sugar”, Kagome said, holding up her credit card ready to tap payment.

“Name please?”

“Kagome. That’s K – A…”

“That’s okay, I know how to spell it.” Kagome watched with interest as the woman wrote her name on the coffee lid in curving characters. Was that hirigana? She vaguely recognised it was her name being written from the two terms of Japanese she did in high school. A grunt came from her left, and she realised with a little start that she was meant to move to one side.

She stood in front of the gleaming commercial espresso machine, eyes closing as she savoured the rich coffee aroma. It smelt amazing, rich and full. Not burnt. It was a little hard to see the barista; her view was blocked by towers of takeaway coffee cups in various sizes. But those reviews that mentioned him had made her curious now. She stepped to the side a little more. Ah, there he was.

He was taller than her - she guessed she’d come up to just above his shoulder, but then she wasn’t exactly tall herself at 5’2”. He had long dark hair, looped back in a low ponytail, with a choppy fringe and slightly longer forelocks on either side of his face, tanned skin that was complemented by the white collarless t-shirt he wore under a denim apron. His expression as he looked downward to make the coffee was stern, but she didn’t see what he had to be so grumpy about. Maybe he was just hot? Maybe he just took his job very seriously? He moved out from behind the coffee machine and her eyes widened at the sight of his forearms, revealed by the shirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows. They were covered in tattoos from the wrist; dark sleeves of swirling black water flowing up his arms, broken only by pink and red cherry blossoms, with a hint of green and yellow. Then he looked up.

His eyes. They were hazel, for want of a better description, but such a light hazel that they almost looked golden. With the late afternoon sun behind her, lighting his face, they almost sparkled like citrine quartz. He placed the lid on her coffee, then set it down in front of her.

“Kagome.”

He’d pronounced her name right. Ka-goh-meh. She was so used to the way most Australians butchered her Japanese name, a way for her parents to honour her Japanese grandfather, that she was immune to its mispronunciation, but he’d said it just right. Just. Right. His voice was deep and a little husky. He made that small grunting noise in the back of his throat again, his strong dark brows lowering a little, and she realised in embarrassment that she was staring at him.

“Uh, yes, I’m sorry, yeah that’s me! I’m Kagome.” Idiot. Of course he knew that, it’s not like there was anyone else standing right in front of him waiting! She reached out for her coffee where he’d placed it on the edge of the counter, and then backed away, pink cheeked, as another person stepped to the side to wait for their coffee.

She moved to stand in front of the shop next door, taking out her phone for something to do while she waited for closing time, slowly sipping her coffee, which was glorious by the way. But she couldn’t give herself over fully to her enjoyment of the taste, unable to control her wandering eyes.

‘Oh my god, he’s gorgeous! I’ve never seen anyone with eyes that colour before. And that’s so much ink on his arms - that must have hurt like a bitch! I never would have picked that a guy would get cherry blossom sleeves, but they don’t look girly on him at all - the exact opposite really. I wonder if they go all the way up his arms? God, now I’m imagining him with his shirt off - bad girl, Kagome! Maybe the cherry blossoms are a cultural thing? I think he’s Japanese, and I’m pretty sure that’s my name in hirigana on the coffee lid, but I don’t want to make an assumption just based on that and his looks. I wonder what he’s thinking about? He doesn’t look unhappy or angry exactly, just… determined? Maybe he just has resting bitch face.’ She snorted a little at that thought, then sighed. ‘His movements are so graceful and fluid, it’s like watching someone do tai chi or something. Oh, he has such nice hands - strong fingers. I could watch him make coffee aaaaall day.’

She gazed dreamily, sipping at her coffee slowly, the phone in her hand forgotten. Golden eyes suddenly met hers, one eyebrow raised in a puzzled expression. ‘Oh shit, he’s looking this way. He’s noticed that I’m looking at him. Abort! Abort! Oh fuck… This is all your fault Miroku!’

She turned tail and fled, almost running back to the office. The reviews had been right. The hot coffee was amazing, but the hot barista? Yeah, he was definitely something else. She knew she would be back first thing in the morning to get another coffee. And it wasn’t just because the coffee was amazing and that he was beautiful to look at. There was something about him. She wanted to get to know him better.

Miroku was waiting for her out the front of their office building. “So, did you get it?” he asked eagerly.

“What?”

“Did you get her number. Sango’s number?”

“Uh…” Shit. She’d been so flustered when he had suddenly looked up and met her gaze that she’d turned tail and fled without remembering why she was waiting there in the first place. Damn. Heat washed across her cheeks, and she flicked her gaze away from Miroku’s.

“Our calm and collected Kagome blushing? Oh, there must be a good story behind this – do tell!”

“No story. You’ve ordered coffee from there before – I didn’t want to do anything to upset the system and get banned like you did! There just wasn’t an opportunity today – I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Miroku poked her in the ribs. “But surely that wouldn’t make you blush Kags! C’mon, spill.”

“There’s nothing to tell!” she spluttered.

Suddenly Miroku burst out laughing. “Oh ho ho, I get it. You were so busy perving at the guard dog making the coffee that you forgot what you were there for.”

“Shut. Up.”

Miroku grinned at her. “Aw, little Kagome finally got a crush on someone. Were you struck by Cupid’s arrow?” he teased, throwing the phrase she’d used before back at her with a note of triumph in his voice. Kagome squirmed under his knowing gaze, and he chuckled. “Looks like Cupid’s been pretty busy with his arrows around that coffee shop, huh?”

Kagome made a growling noise in the back of her throat, then the corners of her lips curled up in a knowing smile. She blinked at him innocently, raising her takeaway cup.

“You may be right Miroku. You may be right. And I’m thinking the best way to get to know him will be to buy coffee. Lots of coffee. I hope you’re ready to pay up, buddy!” She sipped her coffee and patted him on his suddenly slumping shoulders as she walked past him into the foyer of the building and back to her desk full of filing, savouring every last drop.

☕💘☕

Inuyasha pondered as he polished the already gleaming coffee maker. Sango had just left for the day, after balancing the till, and he was doing a final clean up, ensuring everything would be ready for 7am opening.

That girl. Kagome. She’d been staring at him. Usually that made him feel intensely uncomfortable. Growing up in an orphanage had internalised that being stared at was a bad thing, because pain caused by kids much larger and stronger than him usually followed close behind. That was until he’d been there so long that he was the large and strong one, handing out punches to anyone picking on the tiny ones. But he hadn’t got that uncomfortable feeling from her when she’d stared.

He knew he was considered attractive by some people. But her looking at him hadn’t given him that slimy creepy feeling that being ogled purely for looks gave him either. She had looked at him like he was a puzzle she wanted to work out.

He tried to picture her in his mind’s eye, but all he really remembered was dark shining hair like a corvid’s wing, and very blue eyes. She’d been small too, very petite. He rolled her name around in his head, as it tugged on a memory, and he suddenly thought of the rhyming game from his childhood about a bird caught in a cage. It was fitting – her mannerisms reminded him of a little bird - a wren, with bright inquisitive eyes. And when he’d looked up at her and caught her staring, she’d flapped her wings in fright and flown away. He chuckled. He hoped she wasn’t caught in a cage of some sort. No one deserved that.

He shut off the lights to the tiny shop, and walked into the studio behind it, flopping down on his bed with his laptop, ready to spend another evening struggling through his online English class. A little orange fluffball of a kitten jumped on to his lap, trying to sit on the keys, and he pushed it off.

“Shippou! Dame!”

The kitten settled down next to his thigh, snuggling against him and purring, and he turned his attention back to the screen. It was hard, learning a language this way, but he was determined. He had escaped his own cage, and he was never going back.

☕💘☕

PART TWO

#Bearpluscat fanfics #inukag fanfic #inukag modern au #inukag coffee shop au #I'll be posting every couple of days in the lead up to White Day!

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luciferloveschloe · 4 years

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s5 thoughts

okay, holy crap. so this is probably going to be long and rambly, and i’m writing it without having seen a single gif set or reaction from the fandom – scary. anyway, more below the cut! also spoilers, obviously.

first of all, asjsdklasjsjsjajkfds – i loved it so freaking much. canon deckerstar, fucking finally???? that sweet kiss in ep5? them not immediately breaking up again and instead working together on the issues they’re facing!? omg. it had so many amazing moments, and so many great stories for our characters, and so many little weird things that have always defined this show, and i am so so happy with it!!!

have some thoughts on every ep! i’ve only seen it once so this is far from elaborate meta, but i have to scream into the void somewhere before i dive into the madness of my dashboard. a little cautionary: there’ll be a bit negativity, but I’ll always put it in brackets so you can skip it easily.

5x01: really sad devil guy

i guessed mr. said out bitch would turn up in hell, and it was such a cool episode! i loved how they interwove it and showed lucifer ruling hell and them solving the case at the same time. and how michael showed up? they almost had me fooled there that it was actually lucifer. well done!

(the thought that it has already been thousands of years for lucifer again is so incredibly sad, like i really can’t think about it for long. an old otp of mine was separated for 20 years and i’ve always found it unbelievably cruel, so thousands of years is just… i don’t care that he’s used to greater spans of time, i really can’t think about it for long. and i don’t like that everybody just accepted that he’s gone now. that there was no rescue plan or anything like that.)

5x02: lucifer! lucifer! lucifer!

friggin’ michael, seriously. amazing scene with the wings though! and chloe bringing burgers and fries to the penthouse, omg. and that ending with her shooting him?? and that she knew something was wrong since their first kiss? i screamed. you go girl!! i was getting kinda worried through the episode but this ending was perfect. and a nice little nugget of knowledge regarding what they’re thinking about lucifer in heaven. very curious what michael’s grand plan turns out to be and what god’ll have to say to all of that!

(maze though. i get she’s going through a lot and i do emphatize with her but the constant scheming… i don’t know if i’ll ever really warm up to her.)

5x03: diablo!

the clowns in the hell loop, lmao. and their actual reunion and lucifer’s soft smile and chloe immediately embracing him again and them holding hands – someone hold me. of bloody course everything went to shit right after, but this was so very sweet! and lucifer bonding with dan, amazing. and the meta of course, lmao. their confrontation at the end ripped my heart out, but it hurt so good.

(the michael/lucifer fight wasn’t as spectacular as i’d hoped, but whatever!)

5x04: it never ends well for the chicken

unexpected, but totally awesome! such a fun ep, and i love that we finally know the backstory for his ring! and step-satan, yay!

(trixie kinda playing lucifer for maze felt a little icky, though, and i’d have loved it if they confirmed that she actually believes in him being the devil.)

5x05: detective amenadiel

again, lucifer and dan bonding, amazing! the case was pretty fun too, but amenadiel’s revelation was the best by far. i’ve never exactly thought of the whole miracle/immunity situation like that, but it’s such a great interpretation. it’s not that lucifer finally has a challenge in chloe, it’s that she’s the only human with a chance to see him and love him for who he really is, and… damn. if that isn’t some big romantic shit. and i bloody loved the kiss at the piano!!

5x06: blueballz

these little loved up idiots holding hands and flirting on the case?! aiaiaiai can you tell i’m still smiling from ear to ear??! lucifer being jealous and tribe night and the guys collectively trying to calm charlie down… amazeballs. also dan reveal? did not see that coming, not at all, but it was a nice punch to the gut after they finally got along again and lucifer even wore his stupid bracelet. and new devil face, again! this one’s actually a little bit scarier than the last one. and the deckerstar sex scene, for real, without interruption? loved it, loved that chloe was apparently on top and his awed little “incredible…” – be still my heart!!

(i mean i’m greedy and it could have been longer or more explicit but i get that filming these scenes sucks and that’s what fanfic is for, anyway.)

5x07: our mojo

i melted at the morning after scene!! and did not see the mojo storyline coming at all, but it was fun, and they’re such a great team together! dan’s scene at charlotte’s grave was so powerful. and the scene in the flower shop, I could only think of @thewolffgang’s fic! chloe hyping lucifer up was so sweet, but then it was so scary seeing him paralyzed like that. that sweet penthouse balcony scene, and then dan trying to ruin the evening. i don’t know what it means that he’s not vulnerable around her anymore (and i don’t necessarily like it) but i hope they’ll resolve it together in the second half of the season.

5x08: spoiler alert

just, holy crap. these last episodes really had me at the edge of my seat. watching lucifer realize chloe’s been kidnapped?? painful, but good shit, good good shit. him thinking they’re too late and chloe is already dead? god, no. that little “detective?” broke my heart. but him doing all the detective work? amazing. i was so bummed for ella though!! i really thought pete was a good guy, but oh well. so creepy, omg. i’m so grateful that there was no cliffhanger with chloe’s rescue. i really, really liked how god showed up at the last second. can i have the next episodes now, pretty please??

(what was the point of charlie’s flu, though? and wtf does michael think he’s doing? and maze, really, with the questionable alliances?)

overall i feel like s4 felt a little tighter or more coherent, but i don’t care because deckerstar is finally canon and there’s a ton of great potential for the next half and i’m so deliriously happy because of that. yay! going to check my dashboard now, wish me luck!

#my posts*#lucifer spoilers #s5 #lucifer on netflix #so excited to hear what everyone else thinks

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just-jellyfish · 3 years

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Expanding on the SCP post. Did anyone want this? No. Am I going to anyways? Yes.

Reverse flashlight

Class: Safe [just put it in a box lmao]

A 7-inch long flashlight of yellow and black coloration

Runs on AAA Duracell batteries

Emits darkness instead of light, and any shadows that should be cast are illuminary instead

When shined in someone’s eyes, it has the same effect as a regular flashlight, which includes: impaired eyesight and dark spots in the field of vision

{idk about this one it’s probably been done before}

Rubber band that can stretch forever

Class: Safe [put that bitch in a box]

Doesn’t break

The snapback could definitely kill a man

Pretty self-explanatory lol

{someone’s probably already done this too}

Person who is immune to all ailments except strep throat

Class: Euclid [they wanna walk around]

Yes, this includes the SCP-008

Yes, this also includes SCP-610

Yes, this includes all of those anomalous diseases

It’s literally just strep throat

Soap bottle that never runs out

Class: Safe

Soap is of pink coloration

Papaya scented

If it runs out it literally just fills back up like someone was pouring more in

Can’t unscrew the top of the bottle

{dear god I hope no one’s done this yet}

The Purple Beach

Class: Keter [it’s literally an infinite beach wtf are you gonna do?]

The beach only appears to those who are alone or in groups of six or less

Really long and complicated and I’ll probs just give it it’s own post

Holy Painting

Class: Safe [put that bitch in a box]

A painting in a church that you can enter by jumping through it.

When you do, you enter this church that’s surrounded by a garden and a dance hall.

The more time you spend in this painting world, the less likely you are to get out

People start showing purely physical characteristics akin to biblical characters, such as Jesus and Mary

Most common transformation is to an angel

This can range from the stereotypical angels to actual Biblical rings of eyes and fire angels

It depends on the person, and what they’ve done in the past

This is based off a super wack dream I had, so it’s strange and kinda cliche.

{probably already been done before}

The Blue Whale Game

Class: Euclid

A time loop that is experienced by 13 teenagers (ages ranging from 15-18) in ███, Japan

A commercial town by the coast

Usually lasts about a year

Every time all thirteen of them die, it resets to April 12th 2012

Has so far reset 13 times

All teenagers have an application on their phones called the “The Blue Whale Game”

An app game that instructs it’s players to complete certain tasks that will erode away at their mental health, and eventually compel them to commit suicide.

However, none of the teenagers have actually ever killed themselves yet and instead are usually murdered by the admin of the game.

Cursed Parachute to A Shitty Pocket Dimension

Class: Safe

One of those red, blue, yellow, and green parachutes with the handles from elementary school

Y’know the ones

If ya do the thing where you lift it up and then sit on it

Y’know the thing

Then you get transported to this pocket dimension where you get tossed in the air like a dodgeball on a parachute

I really hope that everyone knows what I’m talking about

The only way to get back to our dimension is to crawl through a hole in the ground

{trust me this idea is good I swear}

More Coming Soon

#scp #scp ideas #i'm too stupid to actually write these #someone else do it

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teddystrap · 5 years

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[神なる君と] 天津国星縁尊 (Mikoto) + Final thoughts

Finally!!!!!!! I sacrificed one night’s sleep to finish this route, but I did it! ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و

I had originally planned to spread it out over a couple of days, but there was a lot of recap of stuff we already know here, so I got kind of impatient and rushed through some of it. So apologies if some of the minor details are off. I got all the important bits I think.

- Amatsu-kunihoshi-en-no-Mikoto -

Is it just me or does his silhouette give off a HAIR METAL / 1970s Alice Cooper vibe???

Mikoto is the former God of Kunihoshi Shrine who gave his position over to Sakuya for some reason. He is kind of a comedic/jokester character, but occasionally reveals a deeper and more serious side, much like Yakumo-nii-san.

His route happens if Sakuya chooses to help him grant his wish instead of investigating the school haunting rumours. Her first task is to time-skip slightly into the future, on hoshimatsuri night, to take a message for future-Mikoto.

After she arrives she sees her future self running along the river searching for Mikoto and crying. Yorihito stops her from talking to her future self, and tells her that Mikoto is under the tree in the shrine. She finds him and passes along the message, which is to ask him if his wish has been granted.

He replies yes, but he wishes he had done a better job and made ‘her’ understand his actions.

Back in the present, she asks Mikoto what that’s all about but he doesn’t want to tell her. The rest of the route is basically her process of figuring out his secrets.

The side arcs in the other routes are briefly recapped here, except each one now reveals something important about Mikoto’s worldview. Following the order that they appear in:

I. Yorihito/Nisei

This time Mikoto tells them straightaway that Nisei has travelled here from the past through a time warp, and has to return. Sakuya accepts his views, and he tells her that every beautiful meeting has to eventually end in parting, and that the memories not only tie us to the future, but they also drive us forward... It’s kind of like his ‘going away speech’ in a way, but Sakuya doesn’t know that at this point.

II. The Sanshin incident

‘YOU no DOGEZA = VERY BEAUTIFUL datta-ze!’ #yuri

The Sanshin tell Sakuya that they sympathise with Mikoto, because he has been on the receiving end of much hate and anger from people whose wishes he wasn’t able to grant.

Later Sakuya asks him if he hates people, and he turns the question back to her. She replies that people come in many different personalities, and he agrees. He thinks that it’s his misdeed that he wasn’t able to save everyone. But Sakuya feels that he has done nothing wrong - to which he thanks her and says that her kindness has saved him time and again.

III. Aki/Kunugi arc

‘You...! Be my grrrl.’ #kunugi

This ends in pretty much the same way as in Yakumo’s route. Aki tells Sakuya that things worked out for the best, because love between a human and a supernatural being is bound to end in tragedy. Sakuya realises that there are other alternative endings besides ‘happily ever after’. She ofc thinks of Mikoto,... and so she goes and asks him if he has ever been in love. He tells her that gods have to love everyone and everything equally (including Yorihito and miscroscopic bacteria lol).

Then he tells her that she is very important to him, and that he prays for her happiness.

IV. Fuu-san

After hearing rumours about evil spirit moaning in the old school building, Sakuya wonders if Rei is having stomachaches XD.

Anyway, here Fuu-san again confides in Sakuya about his friend Yuuya, and she wonders if there’s a way to ease his pain. Mikoto says it’s possible to erase his memories, but Fuu-san would refuse to do so. He believes that there are some painful histories that one just has to live with - and surprisingly Sakuya accepts his view. I feel like she is accepting too much in this route XD.

.: Going back to Mikoto’s backstory, we already know about the 1000-year-old love story between the miko and the Great Demon from the other routes, but we missed a few key points which are revealed here:

1. The sesshouseki itself is not the Demon’s remains. It’s a fragment of a star that was used to absorb the Demon’s curse/evil energy. And Mikoto is the living embodiment of this stone.

2. The Demon’s remains are actually buried under the *magical tree* in the yard of the shrine. And his spirit communicates to Sakuya and others through this tree.

3. The 1000-year promise: Before the Demon’s death, Mikoto promised to watch over his remains to prevent the curse from escaping. This would only work for 1000 years, so after that time, Mikoto promised to absorb all the curse energy himself and disappear from the face of the earth.

What actually happened is that 10 years ago on hoshimatsuri night, when Mikoto was supposed fulfil his promise and disappear, he hesitated and started crying under the tree, because he was afraid of death. Child Sakuya came over to comfort him, and ended up in the energy transfer danger zone.

So, to save her from dying from the curse, Mikoto decided to make her a Goddess 10 years later to build ‘immunity’, and then on hoshimatsuri night transfer all her curse energy back onto himself and disappear as promised. At first he didn’t want to tell her all this, but she’s super しつこい so eventually he told her everything.

Sakuya found herself falling for Mikoto and didn’t want him to disappear, so she asked Yorihito how to prevent his plan from working using her Goddess powers. On hoshimatsuri night, she successfully stops Mikoto from fulfilling his promise, and seals it with a kiss.

Because the curse energy remained in her body, she grew weaker and weaker and died three months later. THE END.

...

Lol j/k.

Good end: Mikoto can’t get over Sakuya’s death, so 1 year later on hoshimatsuri, he decides to use the same time-travel method (and the power of Sakuya’s amulet) to go back in time and stop her from thwarting his epic disappearance plan. Everyone supports him - except Yakumo, who thinks that Mikoto shouldn’t force his own plan against her will. He wants Mikoto to do what makes them both happy, even if it means defying Fate.

Sooo, Mikoto goes back in time... to 11 years ago, before hoshimatsuri night. He finds child Sakuya on the shrine grounds, and gives her an amulet and sends her away, telling her NOT TO COME HERE TONIGHT.

...With that taken care of, nighttime comes and he proceeds to fulfil his promise. But to his surprise, Sakuya shows up again - to give him back his amulet and tell him to stop being an #emosadface. He is all like #headpalm #Orz #omgthismustbeFATE.

In that moment he decides that, instead of letting the curse transfer take place this time, he will try to fight it so that no-one has to die. Basically the same thing that Yuzuru did for Yakumo in all his routes = Zzzzzzz (fight the curse while sleeping). At the last moment, he tells Sakuya that he’s going away for a while, but promises to meet again someday.

...

Loop back to the beginning of the game, except in this new alternative future, 17-year-old Sakuya has a more enlightened view on religion and shittier luck in omikuji. In the shrine, she meets Mikoto once again - and this time she remembers him from her childhood meeting, and he is willing to tell her the whole Kami Naru Kimi to story, with no secrets.

[Thoughts] Let me first take a moment to marvel at the coherence of the whole story......

...Ok. Moving on.

Mikoto’s route wasn’t as much a tearjerker as I thought it would be. Or maybe I was just too tired/brain-dead to cry at 3am _(:3」∠)_. It also doesn’t feel much like a romance love story. I mean Mikoto was preparing for his *ultimate demise* and in no mood for a relationship for the most part lol. So a lot of Sakuya’s actions/thoughts felt very one-sided.

It was nice that the recaps of the four side story-arcs were kept short (I guess for the benefit of those who didn’t see all of them? not sure if possible to get to the hidden route without unlocking all four events, but anyway).

Piecing together the info from the other routes, I had some guesses as to what the ‘full picture’ was... but this route totally took it in a different direction than what I was expecting. I kind of figured from Sakuya’s surname (「神」 and 「木」) that she’s the descendant/reincarnate of the spirit who lives in the tree, who must be Mikoto’s old lover from 1000 years ago. Lolol was I wrong about that XDDD - although I think my version would’ve made a more romantic story. ^_~

Overall, I like how the route challenged/changed Mikoto’s views about the impenetrability of Fate. You come away with the feeling of understanding a lot more: why gods exist, the true purpose of prayer, why individual wishes are/aren’t fulfilled, the role of free will, etc.

‘I have come to show you the Truth... with my really nice hair’ ;)

(It does make me sad that in the good ending version of events, some of the characters probably never got a chance to meet - e.g. Narumi & Mikoto, Yuzuru/Rei and everyone else.)

As I feared, there was no clear explanation for Rei’s existence. In the ending it’s revealed that he is/was a 生霊 (a soul that got separated from a living body), and that after Narumi failed to send him off to the other world during hoshimatsuri, he ended up in hospital and was able to recover his body (and some temporary memory loss) with Aki’s help.

...Which STILL doesn’t explain who he is, and how he landed in this condition, AND in his own ending why he disappeared for 10 years and came back as a living human... Unless I missed something in my haste, but I doubt it. Otomate was probably counting on the fact that nobody would fall in love with Rei so nobody cares. But I want some answers damnit!!

Also, Yorihito makes a brief appearance here in his human form. #wtf O_o

...This is probably where Yakumo’s catchphrase ‘細かいことは気にしなくていい’ comes in handy. スルーしようと思います...

IN SUMMARY, ranking of routes from favourite to ...less favourite (there were no bad routes, I honestly enjoyed all of them and I thought all the characters were awesome in their own way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯):

Yuzuru > Yakumo > Mikoto >/≃ Narumi ≃ Rei

Ranking of side arcs from fav to less fav.:

Fuu-san > Aki/Kunugi > Sanshin > Yorihito/Nisei

ハイ終わり― +(人*´∀`)+゜:。*゜+

[N.B.] I actually started KamiKimi as a break from Diabolik Lovers More Blood - I’m about 3/4 of the way through Mukami Ruki’s route, and can confirm that this guy has no redeeming features whatsoever. It’s doubtful whether I’ll be able to sit through the rest of his story to get to his (hopefully sweet) ending. At least KamiKimi was a nice world where Sakurai Takahiro’s character is actually ahem *NOT AN ASSHOLE*.

(Low bar, I know, but DLMB challenges my view of common decency every time I open it...)

(Also Mikoto cried/had many emotional outbursts towards the end of the route, which is a side of Sakurai-sensei that I have never heard before. Not sure how I feel tbh. Like Sakuya in the game, I actually prefer his funny/lighthearted persona more.)

Also I’ll probably be busy with exams + school stuff for most of this month, so it would be a good idea to go for more fun/relaxing games that are not so heavy and tragic.

One recent discovery is an old game by Broccoli called 「恋戦隊 LOVE& PEACE the P.S.P」 , which is based on the Power Rangers concept (all my childhood dreams are coming true...! *≧ω≦*) ... I previewed a chapter or so and it seems absolutely hilarious, although it’s not fully voiced so the reading part will be a P in the A but HIT ME UP YO.

And ofc, there will always be drama CDs to save the day...

#otome #otome game #otomate #idea factory #psp #visual novel #romance #kami naru kimi to #mikoto #sakurai takahiro #otome review #wafuu #supernatural #dlmb #mukami ruki

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survivorsusie007 · 4 years

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Poker Alliances, Buffs, and Fire Tokens oh my!

Oh, we are back, and this season looks to be worth the hype... at least to the 27 people that are die-hards like us. The person that looks the most excited is, in fact, Jeff Probst. Home boy is beaming his dimpled ageless smile from ear to ear like all of his children are home for the holidays. He looks on with a gleam of admiration in his eyes and a warmth allover his body. Buuuut, he also has that knowing Papa Bear flinch, knowing that it is about to go DOWN!

The boats are separated into male and female, and you just know that CBS isn’t going to do this right now. #metoo Some of the cast is certainly worse for the wear getting off their little row boats and time has indeed taken a bit of a toll on them. It is certain that Rob and his dad bod (not hating - actually loving!) was fed more than the island rice on his stint with Sandra on Island of the Idols. Fortunately for us, his hat and gold chain still fit and he is ready to do his thang.

The tribes break down by drawing buffs. Of importance: Rob is separated from both his wife and Sandra. Almost immediately, Sandra (shockingly) has beef. She feels betrayed and cannot believe that Rob didn’t tell her that he was returning to the show after shacking up together for the last month or so. She makes him (and Amber) her first attack.

After popping some champagne and throwing their glasses into the sand (wtf), Jeff reveals that there is a new twist in the game with “fire tokens” of which no one immediately knows the true power of. He also announces that the game has recognized inflation and they’re now playing for TWO MILLION DOLLARS

Now it’s time for the first reward AND immunity challenge.

Basically it’s water wrestling in teams of two. Same sex teams swim out to retrieve a large ring and have to return to their respective starting pole. The Red team wins in a not overly close race. To add to the twist of the season, the losing tribe WILL go to tribal council, but not until the following night.

Off to the respective camps they go and resident builders Wendell and Rob take charge for their tribes. No real drama ensues. These are veterans,.. they’re not going to go rogue and start drama minute one or go search for an idol. Buuuut Denise and Adam do go off for quite some time to talk strategy and Chris asks if he can be her Malcom 2.0. The tribe notices and they rightfully believe they’re off on an idol search and now there is a double-edged sword target on both of their backs.

But, as the tribe spends the rest of the day yo-yoing about everyone except Parvati and Rob, they realize that the larger threat on hand is breaking up the relationship of Jeremy and Natalie. Adam received 1 vote, Denise 2 and Natalie received the rest.

Off to Extinction she goes, but not before bequeathing her fire token to Jeremy.

Back at the other camp, everyone is getting busy building and dissecting relationships. Yul, the stealthy strategist, reveals that he remembers seeing a “Poker Alliance" transpire on tv. He gets Sophie on board and they quickly form a nerd shield alliance. Home boy’s still got it.

Out in the land of extinction (or whatever they call it) Natalie hikes to the furthest spot per her clue and learn how she can receive fire tokens. She makes it there and finds an immunity idol good for the next three tribals, but has zero value where she is. She is to give it to someone back at camp, if she chooses, in exchange for one of their fire tokens. She decides to send this Sandra’s way - because why not give it to the Queen herself. It’s a solid way to get immediately close with her and she knows that Sandra won’t sit on it and will make some shit happen.

Time for another challenge.

This time the team will all take a boat out and then go through a series of obstacles before making it back to shore where they will have to unlock a combo and release three rings to subsequently get linked on poles.

The red team looks like they have it in the bag as the blue team got v. hung up in the boat portion. However, once reaching the “get the team over the barrel” portion of the race, Rob channels his inner Navarro cheerleader and heaves the crap out of every member of his team getting them back in the race.

The red team already has one of the three rings looped, but in comes Jeremy who throws a ring like a little kid at a bumper bowling party, but nonetheless seals a victory in three very awkward throws.

Red team will be heading to tribal.

Sandra and Yul pretty much lead the conversation with Sandra’s goal being to hurt Rob (aka Amber) and Yul to breakdown the Poker Alliance (aka Amber, Kim, or Tyson).

At tribal, you can cut the tension with a knife. Everyone is nervous and it’s only the true veterans that seem to be coming out the gate aggressively. In the end Sandra/Yul get their way. Amber receives 5 votes, Kim gets 3, and Nick 1.

Amber drops off her fire token for her hubs and off she goes to meet up with Natalie. I’m pretty confident the next clue will lead them to free Reem from the island who I don’t think ever left.

Until next week

#survivor #season40 #jeffprobst #winnersatwar #survivorwinnersatwar #survivors #bostonrob #navarro #survivor40

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spamzineglasgow · 4 years

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(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

youtube

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

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ts-akhmim · 4 years

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Episode 7 “It's a Hot Mess Express “ - Scott

People are so hard to work with. I get they don't like this challenge truly I do but I just wish they wouldn't keep shutting down every idea I had. It's... annoying. I get that I'm also the problem here. Because if an entire room full of people is saying you're wrong then you're probably wrong but still. I dislike being shut down. I've just been feeling kind of isolated since my name was written down. Even in my own alliance it seems like everyone thinks less of me for being paranoid. It doesn't help that I'm not entirely pop culture savvy so a lot of their convos I'm a bit out of the loop on. Part of me wonders if it's cause I'm in a male dominated environment? I don't think they are sexist but I do think that I'm being unintentionally ignored. Like throughout the duration of this confessional I have submitted 6 ideas/comments to the group and they've either been left in the dust or dismissed. That has to mean something right? Is it my personality? Did I come on too strong with my enthusiasm? Do they think I'm bossy? Socializing doesn't exactly come naturally to me. If anyone had met me 4 years ago you'd probably be in the know. You know that ability where you can pick up what people imply, whether through body language or through hidden meanings. I don't. I literally was born with out that ability and it has done whatever the opposite of wonders are for my life. At first I thought it was fine, I thought hey no big, everything is good, people like me eventually. But then I played Malaysia... A lot of great things came out of that game, a lot of good friendships and memories but in a way it sort of haunts me. When the confessionals came out, for the first time ever I saw what people thought about me. Sure they liked me eventually but they also disliked me. Like really really didn't like me at all. It was my first real interaction with people outside of the treatment school I went to, it was my first real interaction with the rest of the world and people hated my guts. Don't get me wrong I always suspected I was disliked but... to see their actual written thoughts on paper was hard. Of course as they got to know me they started to like me but I couldn't forget that it wasn't always like that. That at one point they looked at me or their screen or whatever and saw a pest. And that's my biggest fear, that I'm the problem. That no matter where I go people see me and are filled with dread or disgust. That people are always wishing me some from of ill because I'm bad at conversation or sort of creepy. Well at least they came to their own conclusions now, maybe they pulled their heads out of their asses or because it wasn't me they were actually able to function. God this spiraled, I only wanted to complain about how shitty my tribe was being not go on this full blown existential rant. Fuck me am I right? I'm not sure what this is going to contribute to the game. There is no hashtag big moves or fun comments but like I already typed this up so I'm not going to delete it like a pussy.

Ok now we can talk whew. UMMMM not Connor fucking up Duncan's perfect record! Now that I'm over the shock, thank you Connor because I'm 95% sure that obsession is the reason Duncan did the most to make sure Devon voted me instead of him back on Thoth https://giphy.com/gifs/mamovie-stalking-octavia-spencer-eavesdropping-j5uEVYERR0ncYlJ36e Really pleased with how the game is shaping up tbh, assuming I don't lose another music video challenge hahaha. I would LOVE a final 3 with me, Ali, and Devon but I know that's a long way off so I'm just focusing on the here and now. My biggest concern is protecting Ali. Essentially Duncan hit me up to work with him, TJ, and Jordan and I was very much like lol not sure about that. Mainly because Jordan and I don't have a strong relationship? And Duncan was like yeah but he wants to get to know you better and I'm like https://giphy.com/gifs/week-wtf-moments-QjIz1AqkGTszK If that's the case, that needs to come from Jordan and then it's between me and Jordan. Why someone else is interceding on Jordan's behalf is very dicey to me but I'm not that surprised because that continues to be a theme with Duncan: getting me to fit into plans that best suit him. Y'all know DAMN well Jordan Pines don't wanna go to the end with me and the feeling is mutual. But I HAVE to make it work with Jordan or Duncan will get pissy. He literally was like ok well who are you close with and I felt a serious feeling in my gut to not mention Ali. So I said oh I talk to Adam a lot but I wouldn't say I trust Adam. So after telling Ali all of this lmao, we decided I needed to go back to Duncan and say yes because it would keep me in the know and keep both of us safe. Also it allows me to keep an eye on Jordan and Duncan at the same time so we truly stan. And the gag is I'm not scared of Jordan Pines and I welcome the challenge of getting him out so love yall for letting me in through the front door hahaha My new issue is just timing. We'll be ok if we win this next challenge but if not, I could see that alliance targeting Ali. Obviously I have a plan and will put the vote on someone else but I really want to prolong turning on that group for as long as I can. I don't wanna spook TJ and I know killing Jordan will leave me with a pissed Duncan and I really don't need that based on how seriously he's playing. So I'm hoping I can finesse somehow? Maybe one of them gets idoled out at merge and then a blindside on the other won't be as messy. But yeah I keep feeling like the walls are closing in, in terms of allies, and I'm working HARD to make sure I have an exit strategy at all times haha cause fuck these men I'm trying to win again. I "love everyone" which means I have no problem voting out anyone

So let me just make sure i got this right, connor tried to get people to vote for me, they all told me, he "planned" with me to go for liam, then....he votes for duncan and he goes home unanimously? little did he realize when he went around and gave a feeble attempt at rallying people to vote for me, i had already rallied everyone to go for him and made sure everyone knew he was a liar and couldnt be trusted, you know im a firm believer in loose lips sink ships and i absolutely used my big mouth as my weapon to sink his ship. Even if there turns out to be some majority alliance that did this all without me then well...i guess that's another story but im still taking my hard earned credit because either way i got what i wanted one way or another so im here for it, sorry gal! i now find myself in a position i hope i can make some moves with, duncan already just made a vague to comment to me about how "it only takes 4 now" which he's right, and he mentioned autumn, himself, me, and ali. Which, that's a 4 I would love to go forward with for the time being, i like to think ive had good genuine talks with them 3 in particular, and now we can start get together maybe lock something in and if we make it to a merge or even another swap we at least have something to work with with each other, but we'll see, we gotta focus on immunity first now, id love to win just to for sure see any of the other people who lied to me go home oop so while i may be feeling ok now i just have to remember to simmer down and play smart and make the right connections with the right people i need and saying the right things to whomever needs to hear it, because that's what i do best in these type of games to stay alive, i feel like my intuition has been leading me ok so far this game so im just gonna keep basing my decisions off that and charging forward PERIOD and ill damn sure do it with or without the help of the tomb because a bitch can not get in ive tried over and OVER at this point im back to pounding on the door of it just hoping if im annoying enough yall will let me in!

i'll do a proper game confessional later but me and dan are both judges for the svalbard music video challenge and its so sad that we cant talk... its like... this could be us working on a music video if things were different kjlsdfa its missing dan and jake hours

Whew! Sorry about that what happened was I ran out of anxiety meds a few days and that rant was the commutation of being with out sanity pills for three days! Everything is fine! I am fine! People are fine! I am sorry to the future Thoth 2.0 tribe, you are all great, I just get very spirally when I am without some sort of stabilizing force! Sorry to the hosts for using this as a diary this is not a diary this is survivor... Anyway this time I have some more constructive things to add! Okay so things are fine. Dan and I continue to bond, though he had to call me out on being bad at communication in order for our relationship to progress. I get it was like a check point or whatever and frankly I appreciated it. Like I said in my rant yesterday I have massive paranoia when comes to interacting with people and whether they like me or not, so constructive feedback while annoying is always helpful. Plus through research I found that he values a good social game so the fact that he's reaching out and telling me what I'm doing wrong is probably a sign that I'm not a lost cause :D. It turns out we have a few mutual friends our lord and savior John Coffey and also Sarah,... Lynn to be specific there are like a shit ton of Sara(h)s so should probably clarify lol. I want to work with him. I know he's in the majority alliance with the brawn tribe, which also contains Jakey and Jordan. Considering the fact that the beauties are slowly but surely getting eliminated, their favor would be helpful to me and mine. However, I know for sure that one of them wrote my name down. Honestly probably both of them. I know I keep harping on this fact but I just really really don't like the idea of looking like an idiot by aligning with someone who wanted me dead or wanted to fuck with me. If we do lose this challenge we are going to have to figure out who to keep or who to eliminate, I feel like it should be between those two. Mostly because I'm not exactly comfortable with a brawn majority. Like I know how people are saying tribe lines don't matter and while they don't, advantages do. And what more advantageous than being in a majority alliance? If we get rid of a brawn that would make it 4 brains- 4 beauty - 5 brawn. Which seems a bit more fair lol. Also RIP Connor remember how I said he was a threat? Welp I guess this is why they don't ask me for cast assessments :/ and also cause I was dead for like several years.

absolutely nothing has happened in fact i was kinda in a ~mood~ today so i feel like my social game took a big L because i didnt feel like talking to anyone and i was busy so i kept being that bitch to responding once an hour ..... but in other news i finally accessed the tomb, and once i started using more than one brain cell at a time i was able to get in and it was actually about 10x easier than i was making it out to be im not sure WHY i was struggling so much but of course, to no surprise i finally get in and the pedestal is empty AGAIN. Now there's not only at least 1 idol from the last time i went in the tomb gone, but there's possibly a second too, if not an advantage that can easily be played against me. At this point all i can do is try and recover a little bit, tomorrow ill have to just try more with my conversations and hopefully one of the people i can somewhat trust is the person who has whatever was in their time time around but probably not, it's never that easy

okay so i have a video confessional from earlier uploading which is kind of a recap of the last two rounds BUTTT!! liam just finished editing our video and i love it!! he did so good and our tribe all tried our best... im just hoping the other tribe didn't go bananas all out, because if they didn't we should hopefully win... i really wanna win immunity because otherwise i feel like adam is gonna be the vote and i dont want that anymore KJASDFA. i would just be sad because idk who the alternative would even be.... so basically we better win immunity KJLSADFA

Me: Alright everyone, make sure you film horizontally!!! Devon: Fuck you

Honestly!!! I take back what i said about Kendall. I feel like we’re making some strides to work together??? Or she’s playing me? I’m hoping to stir a Devon vote this round because I think he threw the vote on Kendall to piss me off, but who knows. I wanna talk to Jakey and see what he thinks about a me/him/augusto/Amir alliance to get through this vote? Idk I trust him but who knows!!!! Maybe everyone is lying to me???

okay... i know i said god is a woman and her name is autumn but its time for the remix. god is a woman and her name is alyssa's mum because alyssa's mum just rescued us from defeat in that challenge JKASDF the judges were kinda unnecessarily harsh but we move on. basically for the other tribe's tribal, i hope jake/dan/devon live... hopefully another scary old school person goes but tbh who knows what is going to happen?! im just so happy to have made f13, i said i'd come 14th in my intro so we love surpassing my own expectations

the immunity challenge went well, we won, which is good because i just didnt feel like going to tribal council because im honestly unsure what the hell is going on, i wanted to feel good about the connor vote because obviously that was my plan from the start however he just made it a little too easy by not talking to a lot of people allegedly, up until right before the vote, i dont think there'd be an easy vote next time we go to tribal, unless ... it's me... am i the easy vote?? i wanna really think im not but its just always too quiet to me when we dont go to tribal there's also lots of talk and speculation about a possible merge at 13, but me and my vivid imagination aka paranoia think maybe another swap of some sort could still happen even if for just another round or 2, i never knew with you sneaky hosts!! also i know we won in the challenge but we wouldve won in the challenge by even more if liam used more footage of my video i sent in i feel like i got no screentime!!! but of course i kept my big mouth shut for once because there's no i in team so ill try not to throw too much of a diva fit but listen... i tried to give yall a DEATH DROP, and i pulled a wig ruveal by snatching off my hat, and i was giving you a whole tik tok dance i made myself..... but there was no way i was doing more than beyonce's part so he didnt have much to work with so touche .... the full version i made will just be deleted scenes for myself ill reflect on when im more mature and think to myself "what the fuck was i doing?"

So not to my surprise, we end up losing the challenge AGAIN!! I've just accepted that I really don't have any luck in this game. I was really hoping that we'd just win every challenge until the merge because I'm over going to tribal and voting people out. I feel like going to the amount of tribal councils that I have has left a huge target on my back. But at the same time, I'm playing the game more than other are. Maybe I have that going for me, who knows. Anyways, the Thots alliance is deciding on either Devon or Dan for this vote. I basically told them I was good with either, even though I would perfer to keep Devon so that I at least have more of an opportunity to rebuild our relationship. I've made it very clear that if the group as a whole wanted to do Devon that I'd write his name down to prove that I trust this group moving forward. So we decide to go with Dan for this vote, and this doesn't really sit well with Jakey. I'm not surprised by that, since I know he's wanted Kendall out for awhile now. But he is really adamant that he doesn't want Dan to go. Which I get, he thinks that Dan would trust him moving forward. When it comes to Dan though, his social game lacks so much that it's like "I don't even know if I can trust him moving forward". And I think the fact that Jakey more so wants to target Kendall this round instead of Dan is a strong sign for me. I'm pretty positive he has an idol since the brain one has been found and he's lied to me about clues before. So this has me thinking, maybe it's a good time to get Jakey out this round? Thinking about it numbers wise for the future, we don't really need Jakey's vote for a majority this round since the four beauties and myself makes 4, and if we bring in Devon that's 5. Plus, I don't even think that Jakey's under the impression that he would... get voted out this round. He seems offly confident that he's staying, just that Dan's going. But I like to think he'd let Dan be a sinking ship and go.. Idk I'm gonna try to pitch this to Amir and see what he thinks. I kind of tried to hint around it to Augusto that Jakey wasn't cool with it, but Augusto kind of turned a blind eye at that. And I don't trust Kendall with my thoughts since she's very blunt... so I wouldn't be surprised if she leaked my plans. Similarly to what Devon did when I voted him out last week. I'm hoping that Amir will see where I'm coming from and that he might be open to that concept. For all I know, I could be voted out this round. And honestly, that'd be the smart move for them to make because my perception in the game so far has been pretty spot on. I think my self awareness this time around has been an asset for me, so I'm hoping that I can get by this vote and hopefully enter the merge soon.

Coming back into the game, I knew I needed to open up a bit and start to Slither earlier than I would imagine. After throwing a vote onto Kendall, I broke down any chance between the Beauty and Brawn working together to knock out myself and Scott. I haven't told anyone about my vote, and don't plan to. Going into this vote, Dan should be the obvious choice. OG Brawn hasn't suffered any additional losses in numbers, and I'm just too close with Augusto/Amir/Kendall to consider flipping. In preparation of tonight NOT being a swap, I established an alliance with Amir and Augusto. They are a duo in every sense, but attaching myself to them sets up the opportunity to at least CONSIDER voting out Scott next round. It would have to be between him and Scott.

All I got to say is oof… I genuinely thought I was on vacation after the last round like I’ve been SO bad about talking to people or at least that’s how I felt cause I was operating at 60% instead of the 110% I do when I socialize. That being said, I have my goals that I want to stick to and see happen. Dan needs to leave this tribal so I can get Jakey out next even if Dan leaving makes me really sad. Dan leaving takes a number away from the Brawn and a number away from Jakey, who I am able to get out by keeping Devon and having him/Kendall/myself/Amir vote for him if we happen to lose again. The alliance of me/Kendall/Amir/Jakey/Scott went on call last night and it was deadass an hour and a half long call where everyone was like “idk who should go but I’m fine with whatever” although… that certainly wasn’t the case. I, personally, made points that were pro-Devon such as Devon not having any clear allies to reunite with at merge and things like that and EVENTUALLY at the last 5 minutes of the call, we decided that Dan leaving is the better option. Scott and I even discussed a Brawn having to go before we even did the call so yeah. One thing I could tell though? Jakey was not having it. I understand his frustration but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. I voted out AJ to prove that I am not here to play by tribal lines and you said you would do the same but here we are… Amir called me last night telling me about how Jakey was trying to strong arm him into voting Devon out because Jakey didn’t want to do Dan… like sir, I’m? I’m very happy that Amir came to me and confided in me to kinda spill out his emotions like that makes me <3 but it also made me wanna pop off at Jakey because I don’t like those approaches in games hgfjdks even if I do really like Jakey, I was just ugh gjfdks. That aside, I feel like I am doing good about getting information and building friendships out here like I’m DEADASS is almost every single alliance on the tribes I’ve been a part of and while I don’t get tons of info from direct sources (ie. Jakey), I get the information from close allies (ie. Amir) which in a way can be even better? That being said, I’ve been way too good at forming friendships that every vote makes me feel really bad? With Dan for example, I adore that man like even if he isn’t the most talkative he’s just amazing. But does Dan benefit my game as much as Devon? Not really, even if Dan wanted to align. I’m sticking to my promise of doing what I have to do and be a little bit more cutthroat than I usually am because I do genuinely want to win this game and I’ll do what it takes to get there. Honestly, I’d be SHOOK if we do not merge next round or the round after ghfjdksm but I’m just trying to plan ahead and look at my connections. My Thoth connections are Amir > Kendall > Devon > Scott > Jakey whereas my Hathor connections are Autumn > Duncan > Adam (?) > TJ > Jordan > Liam M > Ali. If we do merge, making a secret thing with Autumn would be KEY just to have another person in my corner but also I need to connect with a Brawn to be good with them yknow? It’ll definitely be interesting and I can see the merge being messier than a taco bell bathroom BUT I’m hyped at the same time?

How is it already Day 16? There seems to be something seriously wrong with that. Anywho, I've let myself take a quick step back on the social game these last few days. I think I've put in the work to cement a couple strong groups here and can put myself in a good spot, but now I can avoid being the person that probably would be seen as a huge threat in the near future. Once merge hits (which I'm hoping is this next round), I'm going to have to go back to bringing that social game to a 9 (10 is where the Alyssa threat level begins), but right now I'm hopefully putting myself in a good place. In the event we don't have a merge and have one more vote on Hathor, I really think I need to make a move on Ali. I realize I keep saying this and I'm going to feel awful when he sees this all, but he is such a HUGE threat, and I can't let him skate by to where there's no room to stop him. I made that mistake last time in letting the person I knew would win get too far without me being able to stop them. Not this time. Ain't no fucking way.

This may very well be my last confessional lmao. I’m just feeling very paranoid about this vote and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone votes for me except for Jakey. Or if he even flips to the majority against me. And honestly! I’ve come to terms with it. I really tried my best in the game and I can’t be mad about how I performed in this game specifically. I understand I’m a threat in these games and if people are worried about me end game, quite frankly they should be. I know that I’ve played Tumblr Survivor one too many times and should have quit while I was ahead. I know I’ve talked about working with Kendall and killing Devon, but honestly idk who is voting where. I think I’m going to try to just go with what I think is majority (against Kendall) and just hope to god I’m not going anywhere. I hate having this defeatist attitude, but if I get voted out I’m going to have zero hard feelings and take it in stride. I guess I’m just not cut out to win tumblr survivor ❤️

Our video was so iconic, SHOUT OUT TO ALYSSA'S MOM!!! I should really be making sure im fortifying the bonds i've made but im really just happy to be on break and not have tribal. I've only been to tribal once within a 7 day time span instead of the 4 times in 7 days the brains endured before. I will say i was positively shook to get the vote from connor, but i never thought i could play a perfect game anyways lol. I'm hoping to god that dan or jakey go, i dont want the brawns over here to have other options than autumn and i come merge. Im surprised at myself because im starting to really want to stick with all these people come a merge, i suppose we'll see how it goes and how my attitude changes moving forward.

Sooooooo I actually felt kind of bad about voting for Dan until he was throwing my name out :/ I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I'm kind of nervous now. Like Jakey told me this and he did the same thing to AJ. Also I haven't heard anything from Scott yet... that's sketchy right? Ugh I swear if I'm voted out then Alyssa's mom, I will meet you in the Denny's Parking lot for a fight. I'm not afraid to throw hands at the elderly, ask Drew.

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We love when men listen to me an in turn we win immunity! This is now the second time that's happened lmao cause I sure did make everyone commit to a time block so we didn't play ourselves in the endurance challenge and I sure did suggest Telephone as the song choice so wooooo Not a lot has happened and I don't have a lot of time to talk to begin with but I have a strong feeling we are not merging tonight lmao. Tbh I look forward to another day on Hathor it's very chill over here, all things considered. Also I need a couple chill challenges the next two rounds cause ya girl is moving, graduating, and leading an underground movement all at the same time so don't set me up with a crazy time-consuming challenge lol

I feel vindicated. Starting off in this game, I was not doing so well gameplay wise. Flash forward, I've been a big contributor physically, and socially too! I've got big plans, and I will carry this tribe again if I have to!

(may've already submitted this but i'm worried i submitted it for day 18?)

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ok let me just start by saying: im in an emotionally FRAGILE state at the moment writing this right after the winners at war finale.....SPOILERS IF YOU HAVENT SEEN BUT I HAVE TO SAY IT....NATALIE AND WINCHELE ROBBED, as inspired as i am by my aries sistren natalie and think she should've won, im even more upset for my fellow beauty sister michele because lowkey? i absolutely LOVE the way michele plays, because in my own head at least i like to think i at least play slightly similar, i like to lay low and just adapt to where i see i can fit the best, anywho thats all ill say on that, back to THIS game dan being voted out last round, was kinda meh, i had the tiniest conversation with him during one world and he did end up giving me some tea about the brawns, but i couldve easily tried working with him later on against the beauties, PLUS him leaving means that none of those false beauties left, which is bad for me because i want them all gone oop and ive worked hard over here trying to make sure everyone knows they are threats even if theyre not working together, they went against me and lied to me, which means i cant trust them or work with them, which means i need to make sure no one else does either it's very nice though duncan has approached me and asked who i was comfortable with incase we did go to tribal and he said him and jordan pines were pretty close and honestly jordan is the only one ive been on a call with this whole game which is fine because anyone who knows me knows i dont care for calls much in this game and that usually hurts me so im hoping its not hurting me this time but truly, im not sure people are approaching me way more with information and plans then they ever have so im hoping thats a good sign, espcially with duncan saying he basically wanted me to be in the know with him, i think i can trust him as of now going foward and i hope the same about jordan pines, because first of all i love his energy and him as a person my fellow stoner crackhead, and second of all let's be real i definitely want to use him as a shield later on cmon the guy has a season named after him, forget denise being the queen slayer, i want to be the king tamer also in good with ali and autumn i think?? i personally enjoy my short little convos i have with them frequently so i just hope we're on the same page, but idk the little voice in the back of my head is telling me it all seems too good to be true almost like a perfect illusion and maybe duncan is tricking me trying to talk to me about "keeping this tribe strong", so i guess we'll have to wait until the next time we go to a tribal together to find out so yeah in conclusion, sorry to dan, and plot twist of the century im rooting for jakey to not be voted out the other tribe? even though im still convinced he could be making me his number 1 target especially if he gets in kahoots with kendall, but im hoping i played them against each other enough during the one world so that didnt happen

What do ya know....another tribal council. After only being exempt from one tribal, this has become somewhat of a routine. I am extremely confident in the numbers this round. I'm under the belief that everyone will be writing down Jake's name, and Jake will likely be writing down my/Kendall's name. Still, I believe there is a worry about idols. I would hate to be idoled out by Jake after everything I have worked towards...I can't afford to throw my vote on Kendall or Scott with the merge coming up so soon, because it fractures my game going into a potential merge...Somewhat of a "all or nothing" bet tonight.

Me @ the brawns who have been on this tribe: https://media.giphy.com/media/szPZ2NXIGCMcE/giphy.gif

So a couple new developments: 1. Jordan offered me a final two which I'm sooooo excited to see how that's going to turn out. I've really connected with Jordan this game (which admittedly I didn't think would happen before this game), but he's been the person I've confided in the most out here. So I really think this is going to be the start of something amazing. 2. With this F2 deal, Jordan told me that Amir/Jakey knew each other outside of this game. This is bad for me both because Jakey is supposed to be my other guy with Jordan, but also Amir is the person I'd want to target come merge (which should be next round). I have zero connection to him, he's proven to be good at comps, he's won this game before, and he doesn't add into my plan of having numbers on every side. So now I'm in a spot where I think I'll probably have to make a move against potentially my closest / other closest ally in this game. Being safe right before the potential merge feels amazing and opens a lot of opportunities, but is extremely scary knowing who is going to merge. Hopefully come to merge, I have a chance at the merge idol to avoid anyone else having the chance at getting it, because I need some added knowledge in this game.

I am so fucking pissed at Devon. WHY ARE YOU ON THE BRAINS IF YOU HAVE NO BRAIN CELLS!!!!!!! dsfjkaafkjdaldjfjadksjads Great now I get to die!

I don't know why Jakey wants to kill me. I am not a threat. Like at all? Most of the strategies I come up with are bad and I am barely social? Sure I guess I can win like a challenge or two but not enough to be physical? I mean I'm trying to kill him but like... honestly he started it 2 rounds ago. I am a paper tiger worse I am a paper giraffe. Sure I'm tall but basically harmless and only sort of evil. At least I remember why I hated him so much. I don't hate him NOW, I'm 22 years old I have better things to do then hate some guy for trying to win a game. But I am annoyed and inconvenienced by this. Maybe a little hurt too because the only reason I can think to get voted out is because my personality sucks so much that he doesn't see a future where we can work together. Which is fair I guess? But I can't be that awful right? God this game is a constant existential crisis... Also I think people are annoyed with me for being paranoid and shit. Oh I'm sorry people who's name isn't getting written down, I'm sorry I'm not more pleasant while I'm in fear for my metaphorical life.

It’s a MESS ITS A FUCKING MESS SCOTTIE WANTS DAN OUT DAN WANTS DEVON JAKEY WANTS DEVON DEFON WANTS DAN AUGUSTO AND KENDALL WANT JAKEY AMIR WANTS NOT JAKEY OR AUGUSTO OR KENDALL I literally don’t have number in this game and I’m going to get fucked on at the merge

Okay so Augusto basically told him that his name was an option for this vote or the next one and Kendall told him that the brawns are bringing up his name and said that he was the throw away vote So now my gut is telling me dan did it and jakey was in on it But I don’t care, if that’s the case Everyone on this tribe wants a brawn out, EVERYONE I just have to make sure it’s not jakey Because Augusto and Kendall want jakey now and I refuse it Rn it seems they r okay doing dan It seems everyone is cool doing dan So I’m happy with that

Jakey is fucking strong arming me r u joking Ndbdjdjsns Jakey talked to scottie And got scottie to want devon So now they’re gonna try and call the alliance tmmrw and change to vote back to devon over dan And if Augusto and Kendall don’t want to Jakey wants to pull brain and brawn to vote kendall like sir I’m literally getting strong armed, and he can’t see why people want dan out I could make a move rn But should I even I probably shouldn’t If they try to get kendall I will flip it on him

don’t know what to do I’m pleading so hard with jakey rn like hey it’s not good for me to go into merge with 6 brawn 4 beauty (dysfunctional) and 3 brain (dysfunctional) And I said I want to do dan is that okay like jakey u need to choose a side, brawns, or this tribe And he goes If u decide to do dan Then I’m gonna unite dan and Scott and Devon and vote kendall So if that’s the case, I’m sending u home theres no way around it then

Throw back to last night when I hung up on jakey to call Augusto and told jakey that I was taking a shower but literally I was gone for an hour and needed an excuse fast so I told him i shaved my ass call that strategic ass shaking

Okay so this tribal. Everyone on my tribe thinks jakey is evil and he’s just going to go back to the brawn tribe, which is like, wtf, he literally voted in minority on purpose and gave us leverage on him. Like he literally has put himself on the line multiple times. He ratted out the brawn majority over and over. Like jakey is not loyal to the brawns on the other side at all. The people on this tribe don’t give a shit and my opinion isn’t being heard at all, Kendall won’t budge and Augusto won’t budge, and Scott wants to keep devon. Can I just say scott is a rat, he is playing every single person. Jakey trusted him soooo much . Anyway, everyone wants jakey out for literallt no reason and jakey trusts me 100% and jakey is the best way to get info from the brawns on the other side. Anyway, KDJDKSN KDNDKD we are getting dirty. Jakey has an idol. And I told him he was the vote and I made it sound like it’s all Scott’s decision cuz I’m really tight with Kendall and Augusto, so now, jakey wants to idol out Scott Basically, it’s time for a cluster fuck and it’s time for chaos So at merge jakey and I will play from Opposite sides

so jakey fking tried to flip the vote and he blew up the 5 person alliance to devon and hes fucking up my game so much nkwejfnkew god maybe i will try and get him out at merge even tho i love him, i basically had to ccreate this narrative that jakey thinks that me jakey scott and devon are voting kendall but jakey is actually voting out scott jesus christ thi round gave me a migraine i have a case of the lie-abetes

I- there's nothing else to say hahaha the boys don't even talk game. So when I know something y'all will know something

People are paranoid as hell about a merge. What is there to be paranoid about, honestly? I've just tried to come into this game and have a good time and I think I've achieved that. No one is really looking at me as a threat right now, and there's still plenty of time left to play.

okay so i filmed a video confessional earlier which i will upload but adam just woke me up to the fact that we might be merging tonight?! which is so exciting and kinda crazy.... and the days line up with montenegro for us to be merging... at merge i think all my "laying low" can finally be for something and i can transition the bonds i've been making into making stuff happen. i've also been hosting a game during these quarantine times and i've realised people that do too much making SUCH deep bonds during the early stages become the people the jury is mad at in the endgame. i feel like im the middle ground, people feel close to me (and I would like to think I've come across as likable) without everyone thinking im their soul sister closest ally. at merge i think my "close" people who i can somewhat rely on are: autumn, jake, dan(?), jordan(?) and adam? like i have a core of people with various connections, which gives me some cover. its just about then feeling out the rest and seeing who i can trust amongst the rest... particularly the unknowns of augusto/kendall/scott/amir (assuming they are all at merge). like that is going to be the most important part of the merge stage for me, is figuring out which of them i can trust (and i do think dan and/or jake's opinions can help with this, because brainstorming with autumn helped me figuring out this hathor swap tribe).

i'm excited for merge... i do think i have early juror written all over me but i am also very excited. its time to emerge from the shadows and stumble my way into the light

live fast die young merge boots do it well. i literally am a clown, i got excited by my guess going so well and now i literally am a target the size of the sun exclusively because of my own actions what was i thinking KJASDFA honestly at this point? i embrace it, i push the 'im a shield' narrative and i trot on my little trotters to being mayor of ponderosa. this season i chopped of my own head so will not be the winner and the king, but hopefully i can be a kingmaker? also if me winning the tiebreak sends jake home i literally will be so unspeakably frustrated with myself i will literally... scream. HE PROBS HATES ME. i'm praying he lives i will feel so bad if he doesnt KLASDF

i literally... can not believe i am so stupid my lack of braincells really boggles my mind

So I was really hoping that we would win this challenge today because I like everyone on this tribe. But of course with my luck in this game, we lose AGAIN. And it's a shame because I like the Thots Alliance and i feel bad voting out Devon. I know he's someone who trusts me and although I don't 100% trust him, I know that he's someone I can depend on. Plus he makes a really good goat at the end, so it'll make winning more of an obstacle for me without him there. To my surprise however, Kendall and Augusto approach me with the idea of voting out Jakey. I really like Jakey and I practically see him as my #1 here, so voting him out would be difficult for me to do as well. We've discussed the idol together, he gave me his CBS all access account info to watch the finale, and hes one of the very few smart people in this game. So on a personal level, this is a hard decision to make. However, from a game perspective, it might be the right call. Jakey's setting himself up to be a swing vote at the merge, and the fact that he campaigned for Dan to stay and was adamant on not voting him out shows that. When it comes to Devon and I, I would prefer to not vote Devon out but if I needed to in order to show that I trust an alliance moving forward I would. So the fact that Jakey doesn't see it like that is alarming to me. In addition to that, I know that Jakey has lied to me multiple times in this game. He purposefully gave me the wrong idol clue for one of the matches, and when I called him out on it he bluffed it up. On top of that, I know for a fact that he voted for Kendall during the AJ vote. And the fact that he's trying to play it off on Devon goes to show the lengths he would go to make sure he controls everything. And on top of that, he wants us all to tell Devon straight up that he's going. Like... did he not learn from my story when I tried to do that? It can't happen. From a game perspective, voting out Jakey is the more logical choice to make. He can navigate better in a group of people and is aware of whats going on. Devon on the other hand, doesn't even know where the idol is or how to look for it. Devon is someone who you can take into a merge and know what he's going to do. Jakey is more unpredictable. And I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to rally up troops to blindside me when that time came. From a personal perspective, I prefer that Devon goes just because of the lack of trust between us and the fact that I don't ever see myself fully trusting him. Sadly I have to lose this battle in order to win the war at the end. So I'm going to vote Jakey out tonight and really hope that it doesn't come to bite me in the but or that he doesn't play his idol (i know he has one, its obvious with how paranoid he's been)

Guess I’m gonna cry because we lost… by a tiebreaker… it was sad. I feel especially awful because had I not made the mistake of repeating a name on my list during my 8th guess, we could’ve very well have won… but no one needs to know that! It just blows because going into a potential merge in a 7-5 scenario is NOT it. Plus like, their only vote was a unanimous vote for Connor which like… love Connor, but a rock could vote Connor out. I wanted to see tension, I wanted to see idols played, I wanted to see hands thrown, I wanted to see lines drawn, and I wanted to see messiness but all I ended up seeing? Disappointment. I hate it here deadass (‘:

Aside from being kinda sad we lost, I do feel super secure. Last round, I wanted Dan to leave to get rid of Brawn numbers and have the best chance to get Jakey out and now I have that! I know Amir is on the fence but I know Kendall and Devon would be all for it (Scott is as well, but I didn’t really know how much he’d be about it until this round) so it needs to happen. While I adore Jakey as a person and we’ve connected a lot, our strategic games don’t align at all since he doesn’t tell me much of anything? Most of his info goes to Amir or Scott and I’m being selfish here but I want all the tea (‘: plus him playing double agent with the Brawns at merge is not what I need if we’re going into the merge with not enough numbers. Not only that but Adam is a wildcard in terms of if he’ll work with me or not but Jakey being there with us makes it so Adam wouldn’t want to so there’s that. Girl… i sound like a whole ass gamebot wtf ghfdjnms

It’s so weird like I am extremely proud of the game I am playing but I still feel inadequate as a player? I know I shouldn’t compare myself to others because I’m ME but my two closest allies (Kendall, Amir) are playing so much better? Amir is able to get all the tea in the world and form those important game connections which I don’t feel like I can yknow? With Kendall, she is just so bold (and beautiful) with her gameplay in a way I could never like she doesn’t mind being the secondary target, she talks to everyone and talks game with everyone, and stuff like that. So in a way, I’m probably not a major threat to people because those two icons are here BUT I also don’t know if that’ll make me seen like a non-factor… that’s just how I feel going into merge and it’s kinda mehhh idk ;-;

MERGE IS COMING. TOnight actually, people are speculating, but im the only one with the certainty that its tonight and im feeling wonderful. I think if I play my cards right Im gonna have a lot of options come merge. God pending Kendall does not die tonight (hopefully her beauties keep her alive) im gonna suggest we secret pair beware this shit and tsart working from opposite sides to keep each other safe. That will allow me to pick of people Im not working with, while hopefully ensure that people im not with who are with her will be detered from targeting me. Thats my plan but who knows what the true dynamics of merge will be. Ive been playing quiet so far but im about to become the star of teh show, my ego just cant take it.

i really feel like by getting a five i got jake voted out and i want to scream i literally am gonna be out for blood if he goes

youtube

#BackWithVengeance

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survivor-kuwait · 5 years

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Episode 6 - "Going to bide my time before I could take a shot at any of them." - Maynor

Damn, between Renee and Chloe to get the choppy choppy and it's Renee. the two people I have been speaking to. Wtf. Also clearly Chloe has not been stepping up that much with the social game. i need to find better people to align with.

Well, that didnt go according to plan and now Im by myself. I really trusted Renee in this game. Like I dont have anyone else in this game like that kind of connection. If Im being honest i dont think any of these people really want to work with me 🤷‍♂️ There like 3 people i feel like i can trust but they might just be total bs but theres Ian, Matt S, and Timmy. Even tho i feel like Timmy is gunna want to kill me soon. The only good thing is that i know F2,G2 were hits. So i need to guess at 5 am for 2 days to have all the hits me and Renee discovered. Hopefully no one has found this one either. Cuz i feel like i really need an idol if I end up in warzone again.

God not being us to Skype is really causing me inactivity. Hopefully it doesn't bite me in the ass.

These people are dumb. That is all. Miss you Renee :(

Can i just scratch everything i said before? Im just gunna play a solo game from now on and not care about anyone else. No one really seems they want to play with me. So im just gunna be a floater in the game to try n make moves happen. Hopefully if i end up in warzone these people would actually try and talk game then waiting to the last ugly minute to is so annoying. The only person i hope voted with me is Matt. I really enjoyed talking to him so hopefully he is trustworthy. Like i also want to believe Trace voted Cloe but he doesnt seem someone you should trust but he was the one to tell me it was between Renee and Cloe so like he told the truth but maybe not the way he was voting. Rant down for now. Might have more.

Renee was voted out at the last Warzone, my initial reaction was she was voted out because she had won multiple immunities and people wanted to pick off others that were perceived as challenge threats. This is partly influenced by my prerogative to vote off people who can beat me in challenges. My whole premerge game is about me being perfectly average in challenges, I don't do the best but I don't do the worst. I'm always a solid contributor to my tribe, this format has me second guessing that motif I have for myself. I questioned Corey when he was added back into the Nar chat as to why Renee was voted out, he reminded me of the fact that he felt Renee has had it out for him since the get go. I believe him in that sense because he did say that to me on founding day of Nar. If Corey fully swayed that vote to go to Renee because of those reasons that's a player I want to ally with and be my shield. I think there were ulterior motives going on behind it though. That being said, I do want Corey to see me as a long term partner in this game, I shared with him the fact that I have an advantage, but not my true advantage. I told him that I have a double vote, a double vote is probably the weakest power any one could have in Survivor but seems powerful in a Warzone type setting. Letting him know I have a "double vote" endears him to my side, without him actually knowing I have a pretty strong advantage, The Topaz Idol. It's like a double vote but more like a multiple vote. Chloe keeps surviving and I am so fucking here for it, the more her tribe wants her gone the better it is for everyone on Nar if we can fucking stick together, I don't trust them to stay strong but who knows how people will hide when their neck is at risk. Chloe is an "easy vote" shield but also a vote with Nar the more Ma'an, henceforth will be refered to as "Mane", wants her to be booted.

okay uhm.....so this confessional is coming after the tribal council in which renee was voted out. i was completely blindsided and not in the loop at all about the vote there. i ws told by literally everyone that the vote was chloe and that she was 100% going out. so when renee's name came up 6 times, i was completely shocked. corey told me that the reason i was left out of the loop for the vote was because i'm close to madison and madison is close to renee. so they didn't tell me so tht i wouldn't tell madison. hmm....seems fishy! let's just say i came out of this tribal council not trusting anyone but madison. i'm glad she is my partner and i'm gonna try and get us both immunity this round so that we don't risk going to another tribal bc i could def see us becoming a target soon

youtube

I had my masters exam today so i couldnt spend all day doing it which sucks. I only got up to 31. I dont think imma win immunity. Im most likely going to warzone and Imma be going home most likely if Madison/Jacob/Kage are in there. It sucks. Imma keep trying but i also work at 5pm and challenge is due at 7 so i lose 2 hrs there and its 3:20 right now. And cuz all this I havent eaten at all today.

What I have learned from this challenge is that both the movie Sausage Party as well as Female Genital Mutilation have more average searches per month than World Hunger..by a large margin too, and if that doesn't show what's wrong with this world then I don't know what will.

Corey sending me a message ‘i want to touch up on the vote from last night’ I said okay amd what happened? He has not responded at all. Like you lied thats the simplest answer. Because Renee and I werent coming for you so there wasnt a main reason that I could think of to take out Renee. But gunna be nice and play like oh no worry, i understand. Going to bide my time before i could take a shot at any of them.

This is it, corey and devon are safe, nehe isnt. If I can get chloe and others on board nehe will go home tonight. However.... nehe told me he has an idol, so that complicates things. Ideally I can blindside him and we’re good, but doubting that I just have to make sure the other votes dont land on me. Which means... subtlety. Never my strong point.

Ah shit here we go again. Last tribal really left me with a lot of pieces to pick up and I’m really wishing we had done the easy thing and voted chloe. I like her but I worry that I won’t be able to salvage a relationship with Maynor and Madison who I do like. I’m content with being honest about flipping, even tho I did sort of augment the circumstances. It’s better than doubling down and saying I voted for chloe when I didn’t. And truly I do wish I had voted with them so I hope I can convey that. Being back with Adrian is interesting because he is super close with Corey and Corey sort of has some followers here who I don’t really have strong relationships with without him connecting us. I also feel really nervous about playerslike him and Nehe who are bringing old game shit in, and I don’t want to be collateral damage in their wars against one another. I’m ready to do my own damage.

With immunity again after last week's tribal council, I am feeling pretty good. Devon, Ian and Trace are immune with me and there p much couldn't be a better group of immune people (Trace and Adrian are interchangeable). I hope, from those who are at tribal, Madison, Matt, Adrian and Cullan make it out unscathed. Renee leaving last week was a success to me. I took the first shot and I didn't miss. It also gave me 5 people who I built trust with who will want to use me as an asset later on (those who were part of the plan). As for this tribal council, Maynor or Thomas leaving is ideal. We left Maynor out on the vote this week so I don't know if he'd flip easily to the other side (sort of like Chloe voting with us to get Renee out). However, to keep 4 available immunity positions in our tribe, ideally it's someone from the other side that leaves. I have not interacted with Thomas once nor Stevie (but Stevie is Owen's capricorn tribe mate). Those two boys leaving would be fine by me. I hope there are fights and drama and whatnot as the more things happen and we focus on other people's business, the more I can fade back into the background after getting Renee out last week. With Nehe at tribal this time, who knows. Ian and I have gotten really close and I hope to get far with him. He told me about his double vote and we made our loyalty/alliance to one another official I guess? I also am part of a 4 person alliance, termed "Golden Boys" of Devon, Adrian, Matt and myself. I am trying to set myself up as much as I can so that when we merge or tribes get swapped around, I have people I can rely on. We'll be down to 17 people tomorrow night which is still a very big number and way too early to be loud or making flashy moves. I'm in the process of uncovering an idol or some power of sorts and believe I will have it tomorrow because I have 4 hits on it as of today. I will tell Ian about it. I trust him. I am staying alert and continuously developing my social game to the best of my abilities.

I’m so happy I am safe this round! Kait, Owen, and I are the only ones on our tribe who have been immune every round. I would love for us to group together to keep each other safe, but also I know out of the three that I am the weakest one. But for the time being it seems like at least an okay idea. I will try to make it happen and see where it goes because we could all be good together and work something out because when merge comes people will try to target those who have been safe for the longest time. At least naturally that’s what i would try since they are more likely to win individual immunity. I just hope things work out well for the next couple of rounds.

So I learned lots of things from Matt in this warzone. It looks like it was gunna 5-5 vote last time but he flipped last second not wanting it to be a tie. Im some what upset cuz Renee left but Matt wants to play with me so I feel like I can trust him. I hope. Turns out that Madison actually did vote with me last time so she is in my good side again and i feel bad for doubting she was with me. This vote I want it to go my way. Im hoping i can pull it off. My target is still unknown for right now. Im not the only one that feels like Nehe is a snake. Adrian and Matt know that he is a sneaky player. Tbh I would want to target him sooner rather than later.

I'm starting to think Madison is sitting out all of these challenges to get into the warzone to try to build relationships to propel herself forward if she makes merge, it's a risky strategy but would have huge pay off if it works. I'm gonna go ahead and subvert her expectations by pointing that out to Corey and hopefully get the rumor mill going against her. I see you and I don't like it.

So the vote looks like its gunna be Nehe and Im okay with that. I dont really trust him after he lied to me about the first vote we were together. It may bring my schances of immunity down to 3 but its worth having people to trust in this game.

Love the safety again...naturally I don’t have much to say because I haven’t gone to tribal in a while and I’m so thankful for that. Tbh I’m assuming Chloe will go tonight because it’s the easiest vote but who knows. Hoping it’s someone from the other tribe though that way there can still be 4 safe on my tribe. But also I want a twist tonight.

Tirns out I dont need to plot, we’re voting nehe tonight. Thanks Cullan. However, in case of an idol play I’m voting thomas, plausible deniability and all that.

Ok, so this vote I am controlling very well in my favor as long as I’m not the one going home. I believe I have everyone on Nehe and Nehe is voting Thomas. Nehe thinks all of Nar is voting with him to vote out Thomas who is inactive so let’s hope I don’t get blindsided.

#survivorstarzone #episodes

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lotrewrite · 7 years

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LOT Chat Recap

So the chat went very well! I have grouped the subjects into thematic categories for everyone's ease.

A few up-front things for everyone:

Scheduling

Everyone will have two more weeks to revise their drafts or send in comments. Writers, please send me the edits you want me to make to your episode outline, which will be posted to the outline doc; you can also start drafting your final episode. If writers have any further questions about your episode, send in submissions or asks and they can be discussed by the group on this page; I am also always available to talk by messenger. Readers, please send in your comments and questions on episodes. I will be posting "let's talk about these three episodes" posts every day for the next week so that people can submit specific comments about those episodes if they have any additional comments to make.

We will have another chat on Saturday June 24 at 1PM EST (unless people prefer a different time)

Fully written episodes will then be due on Friday, July 28. We will then have two weeks of editing and proof-reading, with the goal of posting the complete season to Ao3 by August 15.

Format

As people are welcome to start drafting their episodes ASAP, we need to decide on format. I will post a separate post in regards to this question with a poll.

Recap

Queen B

We're using the "Queen of Bialya with mind control powers" version, with an amulet instead of "pheromones" because it corresponds with Amaya's symbolism-wise; Queen B is from 2016

Motive: she's sensitive about the fact that she's illegitimately in power, which is why she isn't in Bialya

Legends could use in the Roman Republic episode where she's pretending to be a Queen; that’s why she has a feud with Mari, who has been helping undermine her power base by helping prove that she's not legit; she wants the spear so she's legitimately the queen of Bialya, which is why she joins the Legion (also because messing with Amaya will interfere with Mari)

Femme fatale style villain, which would make the scene in episode 16 where instead of seducing/convincing/mind controlling the guard, she just punches him, SO MUCH FUNNIER (like she saunters up, you think she's gonna use her powers, she smiles all seductive - and WHAM)

We need to pump up her role in the various episodes - she can take Merlyn's place as the "person who snarks with Darkh"

Amaya

Needs more development of her plot where she’s thinking about her future and trying to think of whether she should change it or not

Episode 10: Amaya and Queen B fight - Queen B hints at things, building up Amaya’s curiosity

Episode 13: Queen B has more revelations for Amaya, telling actual facts

Amaya is thinking about changing: the destruction of her village and the fact that Mari grows up in the foster care system

That means we can have her start to angst about changing things in the Tudor episode (14) and New York (15); maybe a scene in 14 where she does research about her future secretly and then in 15 more debate about changing it, with the events of 15 inspiring her not to change it

that way we have a 5-part arc for Amaya about it

and her later confrontations with Queen B in 18 and in Doomworld work stronger because of it because Queen B’s taunts don’t work as well any more

Compass

They pick it up in Episode 8 from Constantine in return for helping with the Crusade; Lily gets brought in to use her micro-tech knowledge to amp it up but really because Stein wants her around, but otherwise I think we can limit the references to it to "so Gideon says the compass goes to Y time period" – but it should be referenced consistently after Episode 8

Lily first appears in Episode 7 just like in canon, possible reference to present day Clarissa

Lily first gets picked up in episode 15, and ends up having her fight with Stein about him hiding her aberration status in episode 15 so that 16 starts with them still fighting; she can just be brought in as an "expert" in technology to help calibrate the compass, not because she’s an aberration – Rip can reveal it to her because he’s a Time Master and objects

Relationship with Stein: he’s still a workaholic, tries to over-interfere with her academics, distant but proud of her accomplishments and they bonded over their intelligence, he’s a good mentor figure; she’s pissed off that he didn't tell her about the aberration thing - it makes her feel like he didn't trust her, and she presumably had to fight HARD to get to a position of academic achievement where she felt he respected her instead of humoring her because she's his beloved daughter; a case of "daddy knows best" when it comes to the aberration issues. And she can be like "this is just like when you came to my dissertation defense!" It also explains why she forgives him in episode 16: she's kind of used to him being a bit of an oblivious tactless dumbass

Oculus – Spear

The Oculus' destruction and the scattering of the spear pieces are somehow connected – they were using the spear to power the Oculus; when it exploded, they scattered

as a Time Master, Rip knows where to find them – the piece he finds in the time loop with the 81 people is one of the pieces from the Oculus; the pieces want to get back together and are powered up by one of them being used

they don’t whisper and cannot be used to guide to each other – they don’t work by “wishes” per se, they just allow people to make changes to the timeline (good luck in succeeding in changing history to your will); only the spear together can you “wish” a new world into existence

The spear pieces weren’t “always there” – they were scattered there

Re-work the pilot so that the piece Rip gets is from the Oculus and maybe we can scatter the information that they had been powering the Oculus with the spear into episode 4 (Eo's explanation) and episode 8 (Constantine can do a bit of an info dump, he's a magical character)

Len

Len ends up just hovering in the background in a lot of the episodes and he never seems to get any lines that talk about his bitterness/resentment, so we need to use him more.

He is connected to the Oculus and that's why putting the spear back together = we see him more

Len’s appearance guide:

First few episodes, we have ONLY "visuals" of Len, just momentary glimpses, through episode 5, but nothing more - no comments, just blink-and-he's-gone.

Episode 3 is our first appearance of blink-and-miss-him - thematically appropriate since we're also bringing in Amaya

More blink-and-miss appearance in the next two episodes

We have the "funeral" episode as the turning point between “blink and gone” and “talking” next episode

Then in episode 6 we have our first appear-and-talk Len, the big moment where Mick is taken aback and is surprise (like in canon, where Mick has to give a gruff "You're not real"). But at that point, he's still only showing up briefly.

Len starts showing up more as the episodes go by; episode 6 through 10 we have him saying things TO Mick and Mick trying (and failing) to ignore him

Episode 10 being the episode where he's talking enough with Mick that the others notice

Episode 11 they test Mick for hallucinations, but Len's still there

Episode 12 Len doesn't do much, but the audience finds out he's real

Then from episode 13 to 16, Len should really be written as a full member of the cast just one that no one else can hear but Mick.

In Episode 14 L!Len steals the piece while O!Len is around, which is when O!Len realizes for the first time that Legion!Len is around; we could have a scene with O!Len asking Gideon "WTF was that"

NOTE: once Len is a full cast member, he can have scenes by himself, he doesn't always have to be tied to Mick or to another cast member, but before that, when he's just a hallucination, he shouldn't appear solo

Episode 16, he argues with Mick and leaves to go with the Legion!Len, who he discovers can also see him

Episode 17 is the episode where he helps Legion!Len fight the Legion

Episode 18 O!Len comes back and re-joins Mick's side, but isn't able to convince him not to go with Legion!Len in episode 19

Episode 20, Mick discovers Len is real

Episode 22, everyone else does and Len gets resurrected

Bambi

Decision made that Bambi survives; Pan will fix the details

Because Bambi survive in episode 2, there will be a line in the very end of the finale, when they crash land in LA and there are dinos there, just as the scene is fading to black we get a Ray voice-over going "wait...Bambi?!"

because that would be A, hilarious and B, a good tie-in to show that time is broken and they didn't land in a different part of the multiverse

Pencil

It's a convenient device that Nate would have around that the audience won't immediately go "ah-ha! mysterious item gets mentioned! will be important!"; him waving around the pencil in the pilot is a nice, easy way to bring it into the audience's view - but not emphasize it

It's his "lucky" pencil that he only uses for important exams; think of the kid who has a pencil box where he lovingly keeps that ONE PENCIL that he passed a test with and he uses it ONLY for tests

Nate inadvertently creates his own closed time loop: the spear is scattered through time and appears in Nate’s possession, which he thinks is a gift from his grandfather – it immunizes him from the changes in time (Nate tells his grandfather "you gave me your lucky pencil"; his grandfather who does not' have a lucky pencil gets weird about it then grabs a random pencil from the mission ( the spear piece) and gives that to young!Nate thereby completing the circle)

The JSA is there on a legitimate mission that is being messed up by the spear piece being there but since they're IN the time period, they don't realizes it's being messed with; the Legends, however, realize something is wrong and figure out that those weird glowing sticks might be involved and go looking but also try to help fix the original mission, which they mess up and show how unprofessional they are; however, in the end, they manage to help the JSA complete their mission and in the process, Henry grabs the spear piece he doesn't know it's a spear piece because the legends never shared that info

He takes the pencil because Nate told him he gave him his lucky pencil and Henry didn't have one but he doesn't want to disappoint his grandson so he picks one up going "this is a good memento of a really weird mission" and the Legends realize that that's how Nate got the spear piece in the first place it plays on the nature of time travel

the pencil is a closed time loop - it's a really nice way to play with time travel without being too cliche - it's the "being your own grandfather" trope but funny

the fact that we have two "time loops" in the early episodes - but not really in the later ones - could be a symptom of the timeline freeing itself from the "set" history of the Time Masters

which would be really cool thematically, with the Legends being set up by their various experiences in season 2 to actually start /deliberately changing history/ in season 3

Nate

Nate's hemophilia resolved with Gideon just saving his life, but doesn't fix his hemophilia

would be really funny to have Nate cameo in Doomworld by literally doing the same thing he does in the pilot - breaking into the mayor's office and babbling about history something. except this time it's Darkh; but then darhk would kill him, but it'd be undone by the end of Doomworld

Ray breaking his suit

The full sequence is episode 6 (damage) episode 7 (overshadowed by Invasion) episode 8 (breaks) episode 9 (unsuccessful repair; acknowledge that he won’t be able to use it) episode 10 (can't use it all; trying new personas).

Because it's his screwing up in episode 6 that causes it, but it doesn't fully break it. and he's not a big player using his suit in Invasion, which we're mostly leaving alone

In Episode 9, he’s trying to put the suit back together but has only gotten parts of it to work; he shrinks due to an error and is worried he won’t be able to get big again – should have a moment at the end of the episode where Ray acknowledges he won’t fix it any time soon and realizing he needs to try to be a hero in a different way to set up the episode 10 montage

Ray montage

in terms of visuals, the scene should probably focus on Ray in the center, with whoever commenting doing so from off-screen

Ray tries to give himself powers; "I'm going to Captain America myself" "Remember how that went for Bruce Banner?" - a good way to point out that the Marvel universe are comics in DC

dress him in the GL outfit and he's explaining to someone that "so it'll be based around this ring -" "won't work"

dress him as the Blue Beetle for a second before he goes "naaaaah"

booster gold and Gideon advises against

We should have him in a superman costume at one point but with no "s" and he's saying "I dunno, maybe if something went in the middle?" (that is also a Powergirl reference - the superman outfit but the "s" was a chest-window or the "atom" LOT symbol, and then you have someone (Jax?) off-screen going "no, man, no")

possibly one piece outfit, Naruto outfit - Mick offscreen just goes "NO, haircut"

Vikings

Jax says Stein is his dad, possibly a mentor instead? Or a specific reference to multi-cultural Vikings

the changing vs. preserving history argument

They are split up as sara, ray, amaya for preserve and mick, jax, stein for change, but by the end of episode 13, it ends up as mick, jax, stein, amaya vs. sara, ray, rip once rip's brainwashing is removed and amaya hears about her future from queen b

Cameos

Jason Blood in the background for a few episodes

I think the references to Poison Ivy not returning their calls and then having a discussion of Poison Ivy in Doomworld worked really well using Kendra three times was also really great

the Lanterns should also be foreshadowed more, if they're going to appear (one reference to the Lanterns in our rewritten Invasion, so if we have maybe one more somewhere, it'd be enough)

References to the other rogues: both in the future and mick, len, and lisa talking about them

Need to fill in reference in filler episode (Selina Kyle? Someone else?)

Trauma

Should have some scenes dealing with the trauma Ray went through while surviving in the cretaceous period and dealing with the effects Rip's brainwashing had - both characters would try to deny it, powering through until they break (Ray when his suit breaks for good in episode 10 - he mentions that he feels empty without his suit and all alone like he did in the Cretaceous period)

Rip and Mick should definitely have a moment to discuss brainwashing, if possible

Ray's suit is some symbolism for his psychological journey

Episode 3

Possible move to D Day or using the 1942 occupation of the south of France because of the Allied invasion of Morocco

Episode 10

Stein goes undercover as a Brit as well, and that's how they find out that the Legion are influencing the Brits; That way he gets stuck on the British ship and can't form Firestorm until the climatic battle moment

episode 8

Zatanna and Madame Xanadu should appear briefly in the beginning (wild goose chase montage when they’re trying to hire someone other than Constantine)

The organization should be 1, Rip being chased; 2, intro sequence; 3, Constantine sequence with Zed getting the vision; 4, they go after Rip and I think 4, the feudal Japan sequence, should be longer, with more chasing and action sequences, as well as a scene where the Legends lose Rip to the Legion because Ray’s suit breaks and where Rip thinks Eobard is friendly before realizing he’s not;

needs a scene where the Legends return to Constantine and he offers them the compass in exchange for help with the Crusade, THEN intersperse the Rip interrogation with the Legends defeating the Crusade

#recap #episode 3 #episode 10 #episode 8 #episode 5

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hellofastestnewsfan · 4 years

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Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

One of the many dreadful side effects of our collective distancing is quiet, a miserable, seismologically registrable quiet. The white noise of everyday life—the humming of your local bar, the turning of car tires—is lost. In its place is the unpleasant silence of a whole world stuck on pause.

Let’s fix that. Today, we offer a playlist, assembled by three of our music critics: Hannah Giorgis, Spencer Kornhaber, and James Parker. They each picked a few tracks, each tuned to one of the very specific moods you might be experiencing during this period of self-quarantine.

A kitschier newsletter might ask you to now turn up your bass and fill the aforementioned void with sound waves from your speaker. But we’ll just leave this Spotify link here and let you decide what to do next.

For perking up without wanting to go anywhere:

“Party” by Planet 1999

Pop music’s caffeine tastes sour lately—it’s too brash, too silly, and too in love with the physical world—so instead I’ve regulated my energy with gentle, abstracted substitutes. In the video for this happy-slurry dance track, folks in casual wear bop around a digital purgatory, which feels awfully relatable. — SK

For when all you can do is stare out the window like the lead of an indie movie: “Cut Me” by Moses Sumney

As the days stretch on, so does the space for constant rumination. Thankfully, “Cut Me,” the fourth single from Moses Sumney’s græ: Part 1, washes over you with all the force and reassurance of a hot shower. Cry if you need to; nothing is more human. — HG

For a boost to the immune system: “Misfit Love” by Queens of the Stone Age, live in the studio at The Henry Rollins Show, 2007

Look at this band, these dudes: the greasy, druggy, stylish, heavy, humid closeness and consanguinity of it all. Look at them building this sick, sick groove in successive loops of wonder, in layers of inevitability, in a kind of scowling ecstasy, as if they’re inventing not just music but the idea of music. Inhale this; get it deep inside your body. This is medicine. — JP

For post-videochat melancholy:

“Where Are You Judy?” by Andy Shauf

The fantastic new album by sleepy-voiced strummer Andy Shauf is about spending a night out at the bars yet remaining stuck inside one’s own head. Here he fantasizes about an ex calling him up to reconnect, and it’s a weirdly comforting reminder that pre-quarantine freedom had its quiet madness too. — SK

For when you can’t concentrate: “Sex” by the Necks

In this general glut of horrible news, horrible numbers, and pestilential vibes, it can be—let’s put it mildly—hard to focus. The Necks are an Australian improvisational trio, and “Sex” is a nearly hour-long voyage into the galaxy that Miles Davis discovered with In a Silent Way. Slow, twinkling, irreversible build; beckoning theta-states. Whatever you’re doing when you put this on, you’ll start to do it better. — JP

For when only Morrissey will do: “My Hurling Days Are Done” by Morrissey

Forgive him his trespasses, as he might—actually probably wouldn’t—forgive yours. A yodeler on the Alp of himself, calling in his lost sheep, his black sheep, his whipping boys, in that rich and curling tenor, this, ah, complex individual is still in magnificent voice, and still capable of writing superbly, as demonstrated by this cut from his new album, I Am Not a Dog On a Chain. — JP

For a dramatic lip-sync session in the mirror: “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” by Céline Dion

Sure, this is one of the strangest songs ever written, but just think of it as an ode to the outside world, which you’ll see again … someday. — HG

For an important reminder not to text your ex:

“Si Veo a Tu Mamá” by Bad Bunny

Listen, I get it—social distancing has made dating really weird! But that’s no excuse to go full “Marvins Room.” Instead of Drake, let Bad Bunny be your muse: “Si Veo a Tu Mamá” is a rueful message to a lost lover who’s already moved on, but it’s also a bouncy introduction to the Puerto Rican phenom’s incredibly fun new album, YHLQMDLG. Rather than yearning ad nauseam, Bad Bunny looks forward. Do the same, and dance along. — HG

For your eerie but life-affirming walk around the neighborhood:

“Happy Cycling” by Boards of Canada

How did the ambient musicians of Boards of Canada anticipate this experience 22 years ago? The stores are closed, the gulls are jeering, and yet you pace ahead to thwart leg cramps. Five minutes in, the endorphins assemble, the creepiness lessens, and there’s an unidentifiable new feeling that might even be related to hope. — SK

For your personal happy hour:

“Stay Flo” by Solange

Solange’s collage-like 2019 album When I Get Home has never made more sense. It’s like she’s trying to remember the chaos of the outside world, rhythm first, and ends up conjuring some fresh, bizarre, and ultimately pleasing sense of order. — SK

For breaks from the news:

“What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye

Because obviously. Gaye voiced Vietnam-era outrage, but never has a sigh of “WTF” sounded so consoling or pure. — SK

For when you’d rather be on a different planet: “Celebration Station” by Lil Uzi Vert

Lil Uzi Vert isn’t subject to the same rules as the rest of us. Where we might trudge through life, the 25-year-old Philadelphia rapper glides. That’s never been more obvious than on the long-awaited Eternal Atake, his recent chart-topping second studio album. Uzi immediately followed it up with a separate 11-track record, Eternal Atake (Deluxe) – LUV vs. The World 2. It’s nearly impossible to pick just one song from the extraterrestrial experience that is the double release, but “Celebration Station” is a roller coaster unto itself. The run from 1:49 to 2:11 will roll through you with so much energy, it’ll feel almost like wind blowing through your hair again. — HG

For thinking about when it’s all over:

“One Love Jam Down” by Papa Michigan & General Smiley

“The social barriers come down / Together in a one-love jam down.” We’re told that there likely won’t be a V-E Day on this thing, no single joyful scream-of-the-whistle moment where we all rush into one another’s arms and orgiastically reverse the months-long damage of social distancing. But we can dream—and the combined bass-synth squelch on this 1980 classic of positive reggae can keep our dreams juicy. — JP

Listen to this on Spotify. What song do you find yourself returning to in this tense moment? Send us your own pick (along with the corresponding quarantine mood), and we may highlight it in a future edition of the newsletter.

CHANNARONG PHERNGIANDA / SHUTTERSTOCK / THE ATLANTIC

What to read if … you just want practical advice:

How the pandemic will end

The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

Here’s how many people have the coronavirus in your state

How you should get food during the pandemic

One question, answered: Why doesn’t the U.S. have a national lockdown?

Other countries—including Western democracies such as Italy, Spain, and France—have responded to the coronavirus crisis by shutting down entire regions or the nation as a whole. America, which currently has the most known COVID-19 cases of any country, has not.

Two health-law experts explain how America’s federalist system limits its response options:

Constitutional authority for ordering major public-health interventions, such as mass quarantines and physical distancing, lies primarily with U.S. states and localities via their “police powers.”

Today’s Atlantic-approved self-quarantine activity:

Try last year’s six-part British drama Years and Years, an eerily timely—and oddly comforting—series about family life against a backdrop of constant crisis. In the show, “simply carrying on is portrayed as the key to survival,” our critic writes.

What to read if … you’d like to read about something—anything—other than the coronavirus:

The wellness movement is booming—and so are opportunities to profit from it.

We are continuing our coverage of the coronavirus. View all of our stories related to the outbreak here. Let us know if you have specific questions about the virus—or if you have a personal experience you’d like to share with us. In particular, we’d like to hear about how the pandemic has affected your family life—whether that’s child care, partner relationships, or any other family dynamic.

This email was written by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, with help from Isabel Fattal. Sign yourself up for The Daily here

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