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sneeperspoi · 10 months

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One of my favourite aspects about Sniper and Spy's relationship (platonic or romantic) is how they both have a mutual understanding of like, quiet time and what it's like to genuinely feel this certain flavour of solitude:

Sniper has a lot of his work done completely alone; hiding, playing the waiting game, and all that jazz, while Spy has a somewhat similar experience. Sure, his espionage lifestyle has a more active role at times, but his job still requires maintaining distance (physical and emotional) from both clients and targets. Both are dedicated to their work enough that they'd avoid getting genuinely personal with people altogether— even if they wanted to, they know it'd negatively impact their abilities to perform. Sniper having the mindset of having "a plan to kill everyone you meet" and to just "take the shot", and Spy being described as a "puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in riddles" is telling of how much of a wall either can put up and any given time.

Now, I'm not saying that the other mercs don't know what it's like to be isolated or that they could never relate to Sniper or Spy in that regard, but their roles aren't necessarily fundamentally built around it, y'know? They aren't required to hide away or to work solo (you could make the joke of "then why are there always 5+ snipers and spies on my team at any given time??" but shhhh this is more in the context of the lore/comics lolol).

I feel like this concept of them realizing their niche similarities and how "hey, maybe I'm not really alone in this world" has so much potential. Like... the idea of them not really participating often in team activities or usually hiding away (in a van and smoking room perhaps?) is great, but to add on the angle that they now have someone who finally understands?? To finally have someone that you don't have to explain anything to?? It hits differently. They could have a smoke together, not saying a word the whole time, and consider it a successful hangout— they don't expect anything from the other, or feel the pressure to act differently because they just get it, and know why things are the way they are.

There's so much angst potential too, forbidden friends/lovers who both know the consequences if things go sour. Maybe they've suppressed so much of that desire to have a relationship (platonic or romantic), that when they finally admit that this is the case (realizing they both feel the same way), something clicks and they try to make it work. Don't even get me started on the potential "hey, maybe I can trust you" aspects either lmao. Regardless of what direction you take though, their relationship growing feels special and unique.

The media too often depicts the whole "can't get close to no one. I don't need friends" attitude as mostly negative and something that needs to be fixed... but with these guys, they're just allowed to be like this. Not saying that there are no cons to this attitude ofc, but it's not necessarily a thing they have to change about themselves or each other or anything. I guess it's refreshing to see that there are still characters out there who can be loners and just be content about it. Unless of course, you want to go down that route. Love that type of angst, but it's nice to have that option without it feeling too OOC. Ugh, there's like so much to explore and deconstruct and so many directions to take this fr fr

((Also, I realize now it's kinda like being an art kid and that moment when you finally meet someone where you don't have to explain why you keep drawing the same old soggy men who shoot each other cuz they just understand. Artist to artist communication lol))

#As always this isn't the only to interpret them!!!#I've seen some amazing stuff where they both despise each other for their differences and never relate #I've seen stuff where they switch this dynamic up (i.e. Sniper is a social butterfly or Spy is like the bossy leader)#and both are valid!#Hope this rambling does make sense though #literally been thinking about it all week haha.#ALSO may or may not be one of the aspects I've been exploring in my own fic #sniperspy #sniper tf2 #spy tf2 #tf2 headcanons #meramblings #mefanficy

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supermarket-goblin · 3 months

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They briefly mentioned jokingly about the teens being the four horsemen of the apocalypse so here's sort of my idea of the line-up.

Scary I think is clearly Death. She was the strongest in the party for a while, she was the one Willy picked to hold the Doodler, she has a spell in her arsenal called Circle of Death, she prided herself for a long time on the darkness inside of her. I don't think more of an argument needs to be made.

Normal I think is pestilence. He is notoriously a stinky guy, for one. But also, throughout the season, he has developed a bit of a "everything bad that happens is my fault, everything I touch goes wrong" sort of mentality, which in my head, is a pestilence/disease thing, a bad thing, spreading as it moves.

Taylor, I think, is war. He is so into samurai and ninjas and all that stuff. But also, war isn't just battlefield fighting, not anymore, cold wars, all involved with sneaking and espionage and that's what Taylor was good at and, since becoming a rogue, has specialised in.

Which leaves Famine for Linc. I think this one maybe doesn't fit as well as the others but I'm going to make it work. Famine usually refers to a lack of food, but if you take it to mean a general lack, starving for something. I think, Linc is lacking a couple of different things at the moment. Self-confidence, drive, connection with his family, specifically Grant. You can tell this from the way he interacts with his parents, his friends, the world and their mission.

I also don't think they'd have horses, maybe they'd have themed shoes and outfits, a themed teeny the teen outfit, all that jazz. I think also maybe it's an inherited role. Like, Linc being Famine makes more sense if Grant was Famine first. Terry Jr giving it Scary because she's his only descendant of any kind, her only truly accepting it after his death. Sparrow and Lark sharing the responsibility, the legacy of Chosen One falling upon Hero, the legacy of Pestilence hence falls to Normal. Taylor has his legacy explained to him the first time he ever meets his dad. Maybe it's something the Kiddads picked up in their work at DADDIES.

#normal oak #dndads taylor swift #lincoln li wilson #scary marlowe #dungeons and daddies #dndads s2

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justforbooks · 1 year

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In a spoof obituary written while he was still in his 40s, Barry Humphries, who has died aged 89, described himself as “an ancient comic” who had long since become “a self-indulgent and inaudible has-been” with no sense of progressive social relevance.

The Republic of Australia’s Art Squad had, he said, banned Humphries’ work in his native land. He had endured his last years of “exile and obloquy” in the tarnished splendour of “a Lusitanian spa”, where he occasionally gave clandestine performances to his dwindling, reactionary and hard-of-hearing followers. He was survived, the obituary concluded, “by innumerable wives, great-grandchildren and creditors”. It was a generally appropriate death notice of a satirist who delighted in guying both himself and his critics.

Never a genial humorist, there was always a whiff of sulphur in his comedy. “What is there to say about me?” he would gull his interviewers. “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I am Church of England – I wash my car on Sundays. There must be some way you can jazz me up.” This was Humphries disguised as a candid interviewee. Being oneself, he would add, is a form of disguise.

There were many other disguises. One minute he would be a monocled Edwardian dandy or a mad scientist or a sad, sexless suburbanite. The next he would assume the mask of a beach bum or a shady art dealer or an embittered intellectual. But the most famous masks of all were his hellcat, the housewife megastar Dame Edna Everage, and his alcoholic political freeloader, professional adulterer and family man Sir Les Patterson.

Humphries grew up in suburban Melbourne, the son of Louisa (nee Brown) and Eric Humphries, a prosperous builder. He was an old boy of an exclusive school (or as he put it: “self-educated; attended Melbourne grammar”) and was briefly a student at Melbourne University. He began his extraordinary career on the back of an arts council bus touring the country towns of Victoria in 1954. It was his first professional role – the lovesick Duke Orsino to Zoe Caldwell’s Viola in Twelfth Night.

At each town, a patron of the arts, often the lady mayoress, would welcome the company over refreshments. Later, to help pass the time on the bus, Humphries invented a character to lampoon these municipal occasions. She was a drab, mousey and relentless hostess, simply named Edna.

The character was thought amusing enough to try out on stage in a Christmas revue in Melbourne. So it came about, on 13 December 1955, that Mrs (as she then was) Edna Everage made her stage debut – a volunteer hostess for the Melbourne Olympics, six feet tall, with brown basilisk eyes and a large chartreuse cabbage rose pinned on her charcoal suit. Her family – husband Norm, son Kenny, daughter Valmai, and mother (in a twilight home) – were given honourable mention, although their miserable fates in Edna’s triumphal backwash were not yet evident. Humphries, then as always, wrote the script.

The sketch was only a moderate success, but enough to point Humphries away from dramatic acting and towards the revue, music hall or cabaret. Also in 1955 he married Brenda Wright, and the following year they moved to Sydney to join a London-inspired theatre of “intimate revue”. He had found his metier, although Sydney satire was still too bland and self-congratulatory to satisfy his dandiacal rage. What Australia still needed, he said, was not mild satire, but a heroic act of espionage.

He finally found it playing the anguished Estragon in a 1958 production of Waiting for Godot. Humphries tramped the streets of Sydney in a sandwich board advertising the play, stuck Godot stickers on posts and windows, and scoured the scrap yards for trash with which he designed the stage sets. The audiences received the play with overwhelming indifference, but Humphries said it changed his life.

When he returned to revue, it was a new Humphries and a new Edna. She became at last a fully ad-libbing monologuiste, teasing if not insulting her audience. This was Edna’s breakthrough. She never looked back.

Australian theatre, however, remained in the doldrums. One critic said there was better theatre in a march-past of lifesavers on Bondi beach. In London, meanwhile, Beckett, Brecht, Osborne and Pinter were leading “the great uprising” from Sloane Square to Stratford East. Humphries found it irresistible.

His first marriage having come to an end after a couple of years, in 1959 Humphries married the ballet dancer Rosalind Tong, took a steamer to London – and into a decade of obscurity (and deepening alcoholism). He found some small parts, notably the undertaker in the original production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960). But his future fame lay with the one-man shows which at that point only his faithful Australian audiences would even contemplate. Three years after arriving in London, he returned to Melbourne and staged, in mid-1962, A Nice Night’s Entertainment, in which he again paraded Edna and her family, along with some of his other creations, from a tortured, expatriate-hating journalist to a nose-picking, guitar-toting beatnik.

The popular success of the show emboldened Humphries to try out his characters in London – at the Establishment Club in May 1963. It was a flop (or as he put it, “a highly successful five-minute season”). He returned to small roles, notably in Frank Norman’s A Kayf Up West, at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1964). He also created for Private Eye the randy hobbledehoy Barry (“Bazza”) McKenzie, whose boozing, vomiting, urinating adventures, narrated in comic-strip form in a largely invented vernacular, reflected and mocked Humphries’ life in the swinging 60s. A film based on the character, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was released in 1972, and a sequel, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, two years later, with Humphries taking several small roles in each; in the latter, the Australian prime minister of the time, Gough Whitlam, apparently invests Edna as a dame.

Humphries did two more Australian tours before testing the water in London again. The first – in 1965 – was the triumphant Excuse I, which filled huge Australian theatres for weeks on end. No one-man show had ever done such business in Australia. It was on this tour that Humphries introduced the gladioli-hurling finale. The next tour – the 1968 Just a Show – introduced further variations. Edna now abandoned her dowdy appearance and came on stage smiling like a shark in a red Thai silk coat over a green dress. (“Am I overdressed?” she asked, looking around. “No, I don’t think so.”) She also began entering from the stalls chatting to her “possums”.

The enormous success of Just a Show encouraged him to try again in London – at the Fortune theatre. Once again the show was a flop. Harold Hobson dismissed it in one devastating sentence: “Most of Barry Humphries’ Just a Show will give pleasure to most Australians in London.”

The great turning point in Humphries’ career came in 1970 when he collapsed, an alcoholic wreck. That June, he was arrested in the streets of Melbourne’s leafy, affluent Camberwell and charged with being drunk and disorderly. A sensible magistrate adjourned the case for six months, ordering that charges be withdrawn if there were no further “incidents”. Humphries booked into a private hospital specialising in alcoholism. The man who for more than 10 years had started the day with a “grappling hook” (brandy and port) became an abstainer – and one of the great comedians of his age.

Still he had not yet conquered London. His Australian shows of the early 1970s (A Load of Old Stuffe, in 1971, and At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It, in 1974) further refined Edna. She was now a name-dropping predator of radical views and treacly-trendy sentimentality, wearing glittering scarlet hotpants split to the groin. Soon critics were ransacking the dictionary for adjectives to describe her: psychotic, hysteric, Dionysiac, Amazonian, crypto-fascist, anally obsessed, a piranha, a hectoring Medusa, a blue-rinsed beast of Belsen, the Australian daughter of Torquemada.

As her curtain raiser, and to incarnate his disgust with alcoholism, Humphries also created a new character, half Sir Toby Belch, half Apeneck Sweeney – exuberant clown and revolting drunk, the cultural attache Sir Les Patterson. Staggering down the aisle, whisky in hand, he would invite his audience to give Edna the clap she so richly deserved.

In 1976 had come yet another assault on the West End, this time succeeding sensationally when Housewife-Superstar opened at the Apollo. It ran to packed houses for four months and almost 500,000 people saw it.

This was the first of Humphries’ enormously popular one-man shows in London, which included A Night With Dame Edna (1978-79) and Back With a Vengeance (for a number of seasons 1987-89 and 2005-07). Critics now acclaimed him as the greatest one-man showman since Charles Dickens and perhaps in the history of theatre.

He reached an even wider audience on British television, including two series of The Dame Edna Experience (1987-89) for LWT, a highly successful comedy chatshow in which Dame Edna interviewed celebrities – or delivered monologues interrupted by total strangers, as she herself described it. On both stage and screen a silent, doleful background presence was provided by her “New Zealand bridesmaid” Madge Allsop, played from 1987 to 2003 by Emily Perry.

The US took longer to conquer. In 1977, Humphries presented Housewife-Superstar at West 55th Street, off Broadway, where the critics dismissed it as “abysmal”, “pointless” and “like the litter on 42nd Street, something worth missing”. It was to be 20 years before the New York critics submitted to the Humphriesian tornado. In 2000, he was awarded a special Tony for the “theatrical event” of the year – a category invented for the occasion since his show, Dame Edna: The Royal Tour, was neither play nor musical. His success led to subsequent US tours, and a role in the TV comedy drama Ally McBeal in 2002.

In March 2012, Humphries announced a farewell stage show, Eat Pray Laugh!, which toured Australia, the UK and the US. It featured his best-known characters – Dame Edna, the stoic old convalescent Sandy Stone, and Sir Les Patterson (with a bit part for his brother, Gerard, a paedophile priest). But in an eerie finale, there were glimpses of other unforgettable creations: among them Lance Boyle, the trade union racketeer; Brian Graham, the 1960s Sydney executive and closet homosexual in navy blue shorts and long white socks; and Phil Philby, the lefty experimental film-maker.

Before the final curtain, Humphries himself took the stage, thanked the packed house, and ambiguously urged them to come to his final “farewell”. In a wave of emotion while the band belted out “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye”, his tearful fans delivered a standing ovation.

In 2015, Humphries was artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret festival, where, with characteristic panache, he announced that he had banned the use of the word “fuck”, which too many comedians, including some good ones, use in a desperate attempt to get a laugh. (Humphries himself had often done so.) The patrons, he said, would be relieved and delighted by his new espousal of censorship.

As intended, the resulting controversy generated enormous publicity for the festival, but nonetheless he continued “to defend to the ultimate my right to give deep and profound offence”. Remarks of his on transgenderism – including dismissing it as a fashion – led in 2019 to the Melbourne international comedy festival dropping his name from its major prize, the Barry award.

Perceptions of what was considered either cutting edge or decadent in the jazz-infused music of Germany of the 1920s and 30s had fascinated him since finding a bundle of sheet music in Melbourne. In Australia in 2013 and in London seasons in 2016 and 2018, he explored it in the show Weimar Cabaret, with the chanteuse Meow Meow.

Humphries was based permanently in London from the late 1960s, although he visited Australia frequently, maintaining good relations with fans, friends and family. “To live permanently in Australia,” he would say, “is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one’s mother.” He collected art and books, describing himself as a “compulsive bibliomaniac”, and owned 25,000 volumes.

Over the years, he made recordings, wrote books, a novel and a volume of verse, and in 2007 he held an exhibition of his paintings in Melbourne. He had roles in several films, including Finding Nemo (2003) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). He dismissed most his books as trifles and promotions, but not his autobiography More Please (1992), which is less a comic story of an actor’s life than a de profundis or an alcoholic’s almanac; it is also noteworthy for its piety towards his family. It won the JR Ackerley prize for autobiography in 1993. Humphries was the subject of several biographies, including John Lahr’s Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation (1991), One Man Show (2010), by Anne Pender, and my own book, published in 1991, The Real Barry Humphries.

He was appointed OA in 1982 and CBE in 2007.

From his marriage to Rosalind, Humphries had two daughters, Tessa and Emily. In 1979, he married the artist Diane Millstead, and they had two sons, Rupert and Oscar. Following his third divorce, in 1990 he married Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet Stephen Spender. She survives him, along with his four children.

🔔 John Barry Humphries, comic actor and scriptwriter, born 17 February 1934; died 22 April 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Barry Humphries #in memoriam

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verdemoth · 10 months

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new guy! the outfit design actually comes from an older character i’m repurposing.

Their relationship to the other characters is as a genuinely formidable though quite reasonable antagonist working against them, and later as an ally after they develop a friendly relationship with some of the protags and also fall from grace. Some character info below the cut:

Esvareen is a young fellow (~19 equivalent) living an average life in the colossal spaceship-city the story takes place in. Their neighbours and coworkers know them as a demure and anxious but amicable individual.

The greater factions of the city know them by the alias of Passepartout, the mysterious informant for a local crime boss whose expertise lies in cyber espionage and reconnaissance. They’re very skilled at digging up whatever the boss needs, be that dirt on individuals, security data, floor plans, private records, and etc. They’ve also been linked to the distribution of malware, usually of the more discreet and often overlooked kind to aid in their work.

They’ve managed to keep these two identities wholly seperate, with no one but the crime boss aware of their double life. And the boss and them go way back, so Esva was feeling pretty comfortable with this whole arrangement.

That is, up until the boss was incapacitated and left Esva with the responsibility of overseeing the whole operation. Which none of the henchmen nor Esva themself are super jazzed about. The boss’s subordinates don’t know or trust them, and Esva has rarely interacted with them in person and is wary of them all in turn. There’s been accusations that Esva manipulated their way into leadership and caused the boss’s downfall, or at least is undeserving of the position. And since they won’t even show their face, they could be anyone.

To try and retain command, they’re now having to directly participate in schemes and heists, making them more vulnerable to attack or identification. And ohhhh buddy, they’ve made so many enemies in all the factions. Past targets of the boss who would just loooooooooove to get their hands on Esva, either figuring out how to blackmail them into changing allegiances or just to pay them back in blood and pain for all the headaches their digital attacks have caused. And they don’t trust that their own men won’t stab them in the back to claim their authority. All they can do is try to play the part and keep everything under control (and their adversaries subdued into inaction) for as long as they can.

#image #my art #my characters #char: esvareen #set: space placeholder #btw they’re the same species as Vis! that one deerboy i have in another setting #their design is based on various hyena species as well as the pyrrhuloxia/desert cardinal

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your-absent-father · 1 year

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~WIP INTRODUCTION~

All the great love stories

Progress: drafting

Genre: darkish romance, kind of everything also

Themes: love, the act of love, who is deserving of love, sacrifice, what is destiny, death, meaningness of death

Tropes: unhinged women, sun and moon couple, himbo male lead, unhappy ending

Content warning: gore, body modification, murder

All the great love stories is a six short story collection about love, tragic love to be exact. The settings change, characters motivations change but the end will always stay the same. You cannot change it. Even if you wanted to.

The short stories:

Villain of the kingdom

Lila Cane was going to die in two days. She was quite fine with that. She had had a good life with highest of highs and lowest of lows. She had experienced power no woman before her had experienced. With that power, she had had enemies more powerful than any man could ever get. Maybe there was a fascination to defeat the woman that killed the king and put so many of the most powerful men to her mercy. She had put up a good fight, one that bards would sing about for next few centuries. Now, as a captured woman of those who bested her, she can now die a villain’s death, like she had always meant to die.

Lila Cane, also known as the "mistress of the night", was the most powerful witch of the kingdom, killing dozens by just one swoop. Now, after the king's youngest daughter defeated her, she awaits for her death in a cage similar where she escaped years before, a castle a king put her in. She was ready to die, and give the new queen, her own half sister, the villain to kill off, until she meets a mysteriously kind guard who takes Lila by suprise.

The sound of gunshots

Someone shot the owner. That was the rumour going around town. Someone shot the owner of the local cabaret club. Just two bullets to the head and chest and he was gone. All of it felt like a Tuesday morning. There were more murders in the town than there were people coming in. Most people wondered why they left the body just to lay there in the sofa that became his resting place. More sensible killers would have gotten rid of the body. Only explanation was that the killer had been alone, and the heavy owner was too much to carry alone. That’s why everyone had come to the same conclusion: The killer was one of the performers.

The cabaret club Mistress is under inverstigation. The owner, sleezy guy whose hands never left a beautiful woman, had been found dead with three bullets trough his head. Every single person had been sure that one of the perfomers, miss Cane, the best singer of that side of the river, being one of the prime suspects. Everyone was sure, except a rookie cop Silas Altman, who has grown fond of Miss Cane. Some might even say that the fondness could lead Mister Altman too far in the world of jazz and vices.

Worst luck of the century

The letter sat on the doorstep with blood on the envelope. It was addressed to the king pin, the biggest the town had seen in centuries. Everyone was sure that it was a warning from the rival gang, warning that they were fighting to take over the city. The king pin already tried to attack them, but the men from the operation were nowhere to be seen. Maybe the war was already starting. People rushed to the kingpin’s office in panic. They feared the future, the war that would happen if the letter was what they feared.

One day, a bloody letter arrives to the most powerful man's office, after a missioin of espionage in his rivals party. Four men and his daughter were suppose to infiltrate into the society, kidnapping the rivals son being the goal. The letter recounts how it all went wrong, resulting to only one of the men being alive, waiting in terror and writing the last warning to his crime family back at home; do not let the daughter back into the family.

Last moment of color

Soulmates have always been real. It was just a normal fact you were taught at school or mentioned at a dinner table. One day you will find your soulmate and you had all the time in the world together, bonded together till their final breath. Lila Cane had always waited for those moments to start, looking at the red string she, like everyone else, had in their finger, that would lead her towards her soulmate. She had been happy, till a timer appeared to her arm.

Lila Cane always loved an idea of soulmates, especially the fact there was someone to her too. All of it changed when a timer appeared to her arm, that quickly became Lila's obsession. She needed to find her soulmate before the clock stopped ticking and she would stop at nothing to do so. Nothing.

Life beyond

People were starving, in every corner of the planet that was left sill holding on to the place that only wished for their death. The areas people could live were getting smaller and smaller, now with too many people to feed, even tough the population had been dropping since ever before. People needed solutions, someone to help in the doom that was waiting for them. The needed someone like the witch in the maze.

While all of earth seems to die, one place in the most deserted place in the earth, looks like nothing has happened. After a group of survivors come to ask for help, they come to see a maze made to keep everyone else out, and a cyborg more than happy to help to help them in.

Hero of the story

Lila Cane couldn't die.

Lila Cane has been locked away in her castle for years. She has been abandoned there for years now, but even without food or nothing else necessary, she is unable to die. So, she is rotting inside her tower, refusing to leave but being unable to die. Luckly, or unlucky to Lila, a young travaller, a bard named Silas Altman, accidently finds the tower and seems not be affected by the spells Lila throws at him.

Tag: WIP: atgls

Say if you want to join the taglist!

#wip: atgls #writeblr #writing #wip introduction #wip intro #book #wip

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theageoftheunderstatement · 2 years

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Pitchfork Review of The Car: 8/10

Written by Matthew Strauss, 20/10/2022

To make a point, or at least the sort of point that Alex Turner might try to make, then it’s good to get a little lost. The 36-year-old singer is in the midst of transforming Arctic Monkeys, one of the biggest rock bands of the new millennium, into a lovesick, debonair lounge act. At their recent live shows, throngs of fans go mad at the hint of a familiar drum beat or guitar riff, scenes that might lead you to suspect England had won the Euros, not that a wry group of Northerners had taken the stage in flared pants to sing about space hotels, espionage, and, sure, looking good on the dancefloor. After the heights of 2013’s AM, a swaggering album that rejuvenated Arctic Monkeys’ career, Turner turned inward and upward on 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, exposing his fears and desires obliquely, through the concept of an elaborate resort in the cosmos, watched over by Big Brother and populated by desperate ghouls dancing to the sultry notes of piano and synthesizers. It’s the most intimate Turner had ever been, opening up with the safety of fiction and metaphor.

The Car, their seventh studio album, is filled with detours, non sequiturs, and lost trains of thought, held together by Turner’s undulating vocal lines and an orchestra always at the ready like a wind-up toy waiting to be stirred to life. But, as with its predecessor, the more time you spend in its maze, the clearer its themes become: The Car is an album of love, longing, and doubt, and the obfuscation serves to bolster its core belief that the simplest truths are the hardest ones to discover.

The objects of Turner’s fascination on The Car are hazy, making his writing all the more rich. He is not strictly heartbroken or smitten, but there are often distant lovers in the periphery. He is not wary of the techno-future, as was the case on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, but modernity is not fully spared, like when he sings, “The simulation cartridge for City Life ’09 is pretty tricky to come by,” burying a sentimental message about the carefree past in something more foreboding. And he works in plenty of autobiographical lines that could easily apply to a man who’s been in the public eye for the better part of two decades. But just as soon as he reveals something personal, Turner quickly pivots away from the thought. Nothing is concrete, and that’s a key point of The Car. Things are not what they seem; blink and you’re gone.

One thing that is consistent across the album is that Turner is spooked, channeling paranoia through lyrics about spies and, even seedier, show business. On “Mr Schwartz,” the titular character is a commanding presence, if a bit of a mystery. The world around him bursts to life, and when Turner elegantly sings a line like, “Wardrobe’s lint-rolling your velveteen suit and smudging dubbin on your dancing shoes,” it’s clear that this man is of great import, catered to by his devotees as if he’s Jay Gatsby, but nothing untoward ever happens. The feeling of being in the wrong place or that something is amiss continues on “Sculptures of Anything Goes,” a song whose arrangement conveys the sensation of being trapped in a dark room, alone with anxieties and echoes, as Turner sings about foreign television performances and stark hallways. Everything is mixed-up, not wrong or bad, but peculiar, itching for a stasis it can’t reach.

The music of The Car matches the uncertainty of the lyrics. After the opening “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” which could soundtrack a French noir film from just about any era, the band bursts into technicolor on the funk-inspired “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am.” On first listen, it’s like going from a café in the rain to a carnival. The transition works, however, because of the passionate performances from the band—drummer Matt Helders hums along on the former track like a jazz percussionist, while Turner leans into the ludicrousness of the latter with wah-wah riffs to match. Other adventures include “Jet Skis on the Moat,” which could pass for an Isaac Hayes cover, and “Body Paint,” a blast of baroque pop that has all the swagger and bravado of an AM cut without any of the lurid desperation. By its climax, you can hear some of the scrappy band that rocked out in the mid-aughts, mixed with traces of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’s sumptuous glamor.

With regularity on The Car, Turner will begin an idea that he does not finish, or he’ll introduce something totally different just when you start following along. He has become a master of turns of phrases that don’t necessarily cohere but still feel right: “There’d better be a mirrorball for me”; “Village coffee mornings with not long since retired spies”; “Lego Napoleon movie written in noble gas-filled glass tubes underlined in sparks.” These lines serve as dramatic punctuation to the times when Turner is more open: “And if you’re thinking of me I’m probably thinking of you,” he sings in “Body Paint,” bringing the song to a halt. It’s as if it’s the one line Turner truly wants to deliver and he’s crafted an entire song around it just to muster up the courage to sing it.

Turner sings much of The Car in falsetto. He began his career close to his speaking voice, matching his unbridled, true-to-life observations of days and nights in Sheffield. Over the years, he would expand his range, but when he’d switch to a higher register, it was almost like a send-up, embodying the hip-swinging showman who can poke fun at rockstar machismo while still behaving a bit laddishly. Now that falsetto is nearly the standard on The Car, Turner has collapsed the irony and remove, and he is singing that way for some of his most sincere moments. It’s as if what had previously been an escape is now a reality. A way of being vulnerable with more than words. Earnest misdirection.

#review #arctic monkeys #the car #pitchfork #it's the second highest score they've given to monkeys' albums #the highest remain the 8.1 for tbhc and the second highest is 8 for the car and am

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ao3wasntenough · 9 days

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Crack one shot. Mini not Sam is now sort of prowl spy, well prowl kind forced him. He became eyes when prowl can seeing other boys doing and when they doing something Sam will report to prowl but well...

*Sam spying all Autobots mainly that very rebel ones and no one seeing except jazz*

Jazz: come on Sammy don't tell prowl

Sam : sorry jazz it's duty

Jazz: not even I give you this? *jazz from no where pull out 500 dolar (I not really know how currency work in U. S)*

*Sam give jazz deadpan look but in side he wants take the money*

Sam : jazz, you know it's ilegal , right?

Jazz: of course not as long no one seeing it. So what you say you take this and not tell prowl. You can buy new polish

*Sam doing inner battle but well he give up fast and take the money*

Sam : I hope you not tell anyone about this

Jazz; of course it will be our secret

That’s exactly how it goes everytime, it’s a little game they play, Jazz lets Sam try and “spy” just to bribe his way out of it. Helps build up Sam’s skills and build a fun relationship

If Prowl and Sam didn’t work so well together I’m sure Jazz would have tried to convince Sam to work with him in espionage but even Prime wouldn’t want Sam to become seen as a espionage tool by the government

#transformers #minicon!sam #transformers bayverse #cybertronian sam #minibot!sam #🧂#tf jazz

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asknarashikari · 14 days

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Continuation from the last ask.

After Houou got his life back to normal and has been informed about what has in the last 6 months, the Autobots send more Autobots/Maximals/Decepticons/Predacons to protect the Gotchard Cast because plot Houou doesn't have anybody and also to protect the Mini-cons from getting into the villains hands. Houou is assigned Big Convoy, the One-Man Army Maximal, Silverbolt, the chivalrous Eagle Wolf Fuzor, Knock Out, the gay snobbish Decepticon medic who cares a lot about his paint job, and Sky-Byte, the Shark Decepticon poet, scholar, and brilliant and cultured military general desperate for approval. In addition to Houou, the other Gotchard Cast members get one more Autobot/Maximal and Decepticon/Predacon except Houtaro who only gets one more Decepticon/Predacon due to Soundblaster being his assigned Autobot. Houtaro is assigned Ransack, a tough-talking and straightforward warrior grasshopper Decepticon. Rinne is assigned the all female Autobot team, Torchbearers that combine to form Victorion, that consist of Pyra Magna, the thoughtful fire truck leader, Jumpstream, the loyal supercar, Dust Up, the active sports car, Stormclash, the violent helicopter, Skyburst, the merciful helicopter, and Rust Dust, the upbeat motorcycle, and the Decepticon combiner Megatronia, who consists of Megaempress and all 4 of her female guards. Spanner is assigned Scuba, the loner and skilled squid Maximal, and BW Dead End, the ideal ammonite Predacon soldier. Lachesis is assigned the Autobot combiner Elita-Infin1te, comprised of Elita-1, Moonracer, Firestar, Lancer, and Jazz, the expert Autobot who admires Earth's culture, along with the Predacon Combiner God Neptune comprised of Halfshell, the greedy-yet-generous tortoise leader, Scylla, the lovesick squid of pristine beauty, Coelagon, the wise coelacanth, Terrormander, the youthful manta ray slacker, and Sea Phantom, the tough shark with limbs who favours surprise attacks. Renge and Sabimaru are assigned the Autobot combiner of the Build Team, Landfill, compromised of Wedge the bulldozer, Heavy Load the dump truck, construction Grimlock the excavator, and Hightower the crane truck, along with Scourge, the ruthless and cunning Decepticon/Predacon warrior who looks like Optimus Prime. Also helping this group are the Spychangers, Cybertronians that specialize in espionage, Guard City, the Autobot Combiner, and Brave Maximus, the new base of operations for all of the Cybertronians assigned to the Gotchard Cast and can turn into a space ship for transport needs.

What are the Riders reaction to seeing all of these newly assigned Cybertronians going to Gotchard Cast to protect them and the Mini-cons from the hands of evil villains like Megatron or anyone else.

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seraphim-seeker · 1 month

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Another AU! (I really need to go to sleep more lmfao)

Ricochet and Jazz (Meister) are brothers and both have Minicon pals, Rico has his and Jazz had Enemy. They were all a great team, doing a lot of honestly illegal things to stay alive and make money while also helping others when they could. But things changed when they were doing a job and they got caught so naturally they make a run for it, they get far really quick and back to their hideout spot in an abandoned factory. Unfortunately they got followed and someone brought the old building down, Rico, Meister and Rico’s Minicon make it out…except Enemy; Meister panics and starts going through the rubble trying to find them…to no avail and it just breaks him.

Years later he’s Jazz now and with the Autobots and Rico’s with the Cons so we got sibling issues but on top of that a new Cassetticon shows up and they seem awfully familiar to Jazz, so when on a Mission to do some Espionage he’s caught but a Cassetticon but not just any Cassette; it was his old Minicon pal: Enemy, he was so happy to see they were alive but they didn’t want to hear and how they don’t forgive him for leaving her for dead, Jazz explains he didn’t and how he searched so many times but Enemy wasn’t having so she uses her special hypnosis on him then leaves. When he’s found moments later by the rest of the Autobots he’s just saddened and shaken. Now he must fight his brother and his old friend

#nova’s rambles #transformers #transformers au #transformers jazz #transformers enemy #transformers ricochet #maccadams #I like Jazz Angst

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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Okay mostly know Indy from clips(Disney hurry up and put the films on plus) but didn’t Indy try to save artifacts so that the NAZIS and Soviets wouldn’t have them?

While we don’t have to take stuff like the British museum, but after all these church burnings, statues being destroyed, and other shit (especially in the Middle East) I would prefer artifacts to stay in a secure place rather than being at the mercy of emotionally immature people.

Sorry this took so long, keep getting distracted by things and people. Mostly people.

Ya the British Museum bit is a quality observation since there's a post on here that goes over that situation perfectly, guy from I believe Iraq visiting the museum and crying in front of an exhibit of stuff from "home" cue the ignoramuses with no capacity think of any possibility beyond 'white people bad' displaying a stunning lack of critical thinking skills and outright ignorance, until someone points out that if someone had bothered to read the article they would have seen they were tears of joy.

For Indy, the first movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' he finds the Jewish artifact generally referred to as the "Ark of the Covenant" got the broken OG 10 commandments tablets, some manna, and Aaron's staff in it, manages to get that away from the Nazis because just because they hate Jews it doesn't mean they won't try and take advantage of their sacred artifacts.

Winds up in storage in a warehouse in the US that holds all kinds of things that are on the do not touch list.

In regards to the movies it's the only thing he did not get back to it's rightful owners.

Temple of Doom, the whole thing was with stones that were somehow magical and provided prosperity to the village where one of them was, their sacred object gets all three but loses two when they start getting charged up off of Indy's grumpiness but he saves the one that belongs to the village and gets it back to them.

Last Crusade at the opening (RIP River Phoenix) there's a cross he's trying to retrieve from a guy that will pretty much just sell it on the black market, not an object with any specific owner other than maybe the Vatican and he says it belongs in a museum.

Which I can agree with given the type of object it is, to a point, maybe ask the Pope if it's ok.

Then it's looking for the literal Holy Grail, which can't leave the spot in well they used Petra for the outside shots so let's go with that, so it's still where it was when he started just underground a bit maybe.

Crystal Skull, took it back to where it belonged and the aliens took off in their space ship since they needed the last one's head before they could do that.

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, I can't think of any artifacts that he specifically recovered and took away once he was old enough to know the score, went in to a mummy's tomb as a child with TE Lawrence and a few other folks who did stuff but he was like 8 what could he do. Same with meeting up with Teddy Roosevelt on a safari in Africa with several other big names if you know names from that time.

Tolstoy's Bible might count, but he traded Tolstoy his baseball cards for that so fair deal (wild thing to say) got to hang out with the last round of Hapsburg's in Austria too, really top quality show.

Kinda jumps from childhood to him late teens, riding with Pancho Villa meeting Remy (RIP Ronny Coutteure) who wants to go back to Belgium since well that whole first big tussle with Germany and Austria Hungary known as WW1 is going on and he wants to defend his home, so lot of WW1 stuff there not much archeology, do get a episode with Tim McInnerny playing Kafka that's a lot of laughs but that's an espionage thing, whole episode played out like Kafka wrote it fun stuff.

After all that he goes back to the US, and there's no archeology at all, rocket building with Goddard, college dorm mate with Elliot Ness, learns Jazz from some of the masters in a episode featuring Harrison Ford (finally) Civil rights stuff here and there.

But ya, all of the stuff he finds winds up in the hands of it's rightful owner.

As unproblematic archeologists go he's up at the top I'd say.

Think Spielberg did that all on purpose, ark thing works for him since he's Jewish so he can decide what he wants there.

_______________________

This was long, sorry. Hope it's a bit interesting at least.

#anonymous

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pluralsword · 1 year

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A Contrast of Prowls

The nice thing about writing Prowl (we do have more plans for her) in our orig cont Autosignet Cycle stuff is that we get to reclaim and enjoy the Prowl/Arcee dynamic as a t4t aesthetic crush thing in Honey I'm Cheering for You But No (might do more with that and have at least Aileron involved) with prowl being a sweetspark (who went from librarian to shipping logistics specialist and the last we saw of her she was unemployed trying to figure out her life and aesthetics with the help of Arcee, Aileron, Greenlight, Wheeljack, and Jazz) rather than a cop. Cops aren't really a thing that prewar Cybertron and the Autobots have in our orig cont stuff, instead they have collectivist public/community services and goods (and thus no poverty or ultra wealthy), deescalation and mental health specialists (helping with the mental health component), and at most bodyguards, intelligence analysts, and as a last resort the armed pacifist military (who really only get involved with fighting hegemonic militia/military threats). Seeing more gal Prowl content has led us to wanting to give her a bigger role later in the Autosignet Cycle during the Great War, specifically as a commando/espionage agent, who of course by this point is dating Jazz. :3

We say all this because after reading EXRID, Prowl comes off as having been absolutely awful to Arcee and we just can't enjoy the ship people have of the two because of the way they trust/don't trust each other and the tension there. Not saying people can't ship them ofc but it just really feels like a situation where Arcee had to find her way out of a toxic situation while rebuilding and redefining herself. Whereas Prowl only cared about her to the extent that she was able to perform a use to his dirty work and idea of what the Autobots should be, and did not want her breaking away from that, which she of course did. It just... reminds us of how trans women get tokenized by a violent hierarchic society that doesn't actually care about us when we're seen as useful to the military industrial complex, while still actively hurting us. We think that read is very much intentional by Barber even if he wasn't familiar with the history, he meant it for Arcee's story (see: OP #21 where Victorion astutely observes that Arcee wants to stop being a warrior, and Arcee says earlier during the Titans Return one-shot to Prowl that she doesn't really feel as into fighting to kill/battle as she used to be, while the OP series shows she still clearly enjoys sparring since she does that to honor Sideswipe's life and death) because of how opposed to her Cybertronian societal structures were. Spoilers but we're actually going to write Prowl as a bit of an antagonist at the end of Addendum because of all this and other things and will have a later Addendum Nexuses story that involves Arcee and her loved ones and friends taking down what's left of the New Institute in the Autobot fold under Prowl's command (still figuring out how that would look after the end of IDW1).

(As an aside, separate from this a dear trans gal friend of ours exposed us to a read of IDW1 Prowl and Tarantulas as trans gals who are deeply buried in the androcentrism they grew up with to the point of not really having words for their trans contexts during the canon run of the story. We might have that be something that is navigated later at least regarding Prowl, who btw is kinda remorseful about how she treated Arcee by the time we reach the not yet released end of Addendum, but she hasn't figured out fully how to treat her better.)

So yeah, stay tuned for that. :3 Actually have spoons to work more on Rekindling Flight because of this. BTW for those who don't know Prowl in our orig cont is primarily green and is chubby.

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