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guccifloralsuits · 4 years

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hi we were talking about books yesterday and i was wondering if you have any good fiction recommendations? 😇😇😇

Yes, I have so many! I broke them down into relative categories, so there’s a little mix of everything. Please read the actual synopsis before diving in though, as some have major trigger warnings.

Books considered “classics”

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: a book which I come back to in hard times of my life. There’s something so…necessary about this story. Prose style was great. I would rec this book to every person I know.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virgina Woolf: I read this when my life seemed to be changing faster than I could keep up. Beautifully written. Came at a time when I needed it.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: written as a prequel to Jane Eyre and a modernist masterpiece honestly. THE original meditation on the ideal of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The Color Purple by Alice Walker: you’ve probably heard this name from the adaptation. Let me tell you. This book deserves all of its acclaim. I think I’m gonna re-read soon.

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austin: this is super mainstream for The Literary Circles but it’s for good reason, this book is just? Fun? An honestly enjoyable read? plus when I was taking my SATs way back when they had an essay section, I could use this book for literally any prompt they gave

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: this book is wild. Everyone is a messy bitch who lives for drama & I love it. I just finished it and omg

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: my emo teen- girl rebelling ass ate this shit up back in high school. Is this book overrated? I don’t care. I love it for nostalgic value anyways

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood: startling beautiful lines. I have almost half this book underlined. A popular read in recent times, with good reason.

A picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: I fundamentally disagree with everything written in this book. That is exactly the point. About being gay & sinning. I would not recommend this as a ‘light’ read though. Easy to get swept up in Wilde’s sharp wit & not catch the intentional malice behind what he says, underneath.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I just. Love this. That’s all I have to say. Yeah.gif

All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren: The nihilism of Oscar Wilde but set to a political backdrop in the 30’s with stylistic prose akin what you’d read from Hemingway. Probably not for everyone’s taste. But right up my alley in terms of political intrigue. If ur a stuffy English Major with who likes books about corruption, you’ll like this.

Popularized books that are worth the hype they had:

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls: there’s something so…engaging about the way this is written. It’s pretty much about kids who have to act like adults for their shitty parents. I couldn’t put this down though.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn: as with all her novels, this gets dark. This gets ugly. An absolute thriller, & I can’t recommend her books enough. (You might know her from Gone Girl & Sharp Objects. This story follows similar tone). Honestly I rec anything by Flynn.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman: you’ve probably heard of or seen this movie. Well guess what? the book is even better.

YOU by Caroline Kepnes: aka the adapted Netflix series where dan from gossip girl plays plays joe, who is basically Dan but Unhinged. But like, the books are great. “Hidden Bodies” which is the sequel to this is even better, in my opinion. Just plz don’t romance Joe cus you saw penn badgley in a Netflix poster & were thirsty 4 him

Lesser Known/underrated books which could use your love:

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley: A reimagining of King Lear, set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s. Powerful and disturbing

The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers: specifically for classical music lovers. Basically a long meditation on supernal mysteries of music, specifically Bach’s intricate Goldberg Variations (you’ll wanna have the Glenn Gould recording to hand), & those of the DNA molecule (especially as a code to be broken) It gradually dawns on you that the two couples listening to the music and studying the molecule are themselves engaged in something strangely molecular and musical. You won’t always understand this book, but it keeps taking your breath away.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn: did I buy this book solely because of this tumblr post? Yeah. But it was easily one of the best decisions I’ve made. The way he manipulates letter-language is wild. Woah. Highly recommended.

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window & Disappeared by Jonas Johnson: a 100 year old dude escapes his nursery home a steals a suitcase full of drug money then goes on a giant crime spree. HIGHLY entertaining. We stan a King

The Sellout by Paul Beatty: probably the greatest satirical comedy written within the last 50 years. I said what I said.

Children’s/teen/YA books you should absolutely read

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster: wonderfully creative, beautifully told. Takes abstract constructs and turns them into concrete beings and landscapes in amazing, engaging ways. Please read this. One of my all-time favorite books. Takes the protagonist, Milo, on a fantastical adventure borne through boredom on what he though would be another average day. Seriously. I love this book. So much.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman: another beautifully creative foray into a parallel universe where something Not Quite Right lurks beneath a pretty surface. If you’ve seen the movie adaption - great. Still read the book. It’s absolutely worth it.

Love that Dog by Sharon Creech: technically free verse poetry from the perspective of a young boy dealing with the loss of his pet dog who has to write poetry for a class assignment from his teacher. This is…so good. Oh my god. Oh my god? Poetry for non-poetry people.

The Giver by Louis Lowery: Listen. I know you were forced 2 read this in primary English. I know you probably hated it on principle. But this shit was all that kept me going, when I was younger. It made me feel so understood, before I could define trauma or the meaning of depression. This book made me feel seen.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky: ya know what? Fuck 2013 tumblr for dumbing this book down into a basic ass Grunge Anthem. I have never seen a book so adequately grapple with how awful romanticizing trauma can be. This book goes into the horrible side of adolescence in a way that’s genuine, and in a way which doesn’t put trauma/mental illness on a pedestal. I needed that shit, when I read it. I still love this book today. The lines will stay with you forever, after you read some of them.

All the Bright Places, by Jennifer Niven: this was another one of those books that I read in an essential time, which lodged into me afterwards. About two teenagers who meet while standing on the bell tower of their school, both contemplating suicide. Highly recommend. Prepare to cry.

You didn’t ask for Poetry but I’m including some because I am poetry TRASH:

Rice by Nikky Finney

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

One Big Self by C.D. Wright

LOOK by Solmaz Sharif

Poetry for people who think poetry is inaccessible to them:

New American Best Friend by Olivia Gatwood

Our Numbered Days by Neil Hillborn

Depression & Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim

There are literally SO SO SO many books I could also add, but these are the ones that came to mind. Bolded ones are those I especially love. Happy reading!

#book recs #classic literature #children’s literature too #if I could only rec one #I’d pick phantom tollbooth #followed by Their eyes were watching god #words #srry if ur on mobile & this is a long post #quarentine things #recs

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rpf-bat · 5 years

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Come With Your Arms Raised

Pairing: Mikey Way x Reader

Genre: Angst

Summary: Written for Inktober 2019, Day 4. Prompt: “Freeze”. You’re a traffic cop, doing what you do every day - pulling people over who drive recklessly. But, the driver you stopped today, is no ordinary perp - he’s Mikey Fuckin’ Way.

You took your job with the New Jersey State Police very seriously. You’d become a cop, because you wanted to protect people. You’d been a little disappointed, to be honest, when you were first assigned to the traffic division. But, you soon realized, that negligent drivers, caused accidents that left people injured every day. If you could prevent an innocent passenger from getting hurt, by pulling someone over, who was driving under the influence, or at a reckless speed - that was a good thing, right?

So, when you saw the black car flying down I-78 at 95 miles per hour, you turned on your siren, and started tailing behind it immediately.

The car pulled over without a fight. You were relieved - you didn’t really want to get into a high speed chase. You parked your patrol car and got out, planning on asking the driver for his license and registration. But, as soon as you opened your car door, the driver opened his, too.

A lanky man with hair dyed blonde, got out of the vehicle, and started running down the side of the road, away from you.

“Freeze!” you demanded, pulling your pistol from its holder. “Stay right there, and put those hands up, where I can see them!”

The man, surprisingly, complied. He stopped running, and stood in the grass, holding his skinny arms aloft.

I don’t think he’s armed, you realized, and put your own weapon back in its place. You approached him with caution, still worried that this might be some sort of trick.

“Are….are you gonna pat me down?” the man asked nervously. Something seemed oddly familiar about his voice.

“I am now,” you huffed. Why couldn’t he have just stayed in the car, like a normal person?

“Keep those hands up,” you barked, and began to pat the man’s pockets. You couldn’t feel a gun on him, or a knife, or anything like that. Just a wallet. Phew.

“Alright, you can put ‘em down,” you shrugged. “May I see your ID, please?”

“Yeah, alright,” the man acquiesced, pulling it out of the wallet, and handing it to you. You noticed immediately that his license was issued by the state of California. He’s a long way from home.

You glanced back up at him. He was just standing there, quietly. Not resisting, or shouting at you. This was a little unusual, for someone who’d just tried to bolt. The more you looked at him, the more certain you were, that you’d seen him somewhere before.

On TV, maybe? you guessed. If he was from Cali, he might be a celebrity. You’d seen a lot of young Hollywood types in the news lately, being arrested for DUIs. Should I make him do a breathalyzer?

You glanced back down at the license in your hand. Date of birth, you read, 9-20-1980. Date issued, 9-1-2013. Name: Way, Michael James.

“W-wait,” you gasped. “You’re Mikey Way!”

My Chemical Romance had been your favorite band, when you were a teenager. They had their roots right here in the Jersey scene, which you loved. But, you knew that all the members (aside from Frank Iero), had moved out to the West Coast, to pursue their career, years ago.

“You know my band?” Mikey blinked.

“Know you,” you scoffed. “Are you kidding me?! I saw you on Warped Tour, way back in 2004. It was my first concert.”

You’d been fifteen. You couldn’t believe, that ten years had passed since then, already.

“Wow,” Mikey blinked. “You were following us for a long time, then.”

“Yeah, but I heard you officially broke up, last year,” you frowned. Their last actual record release, had been four years ago. You’d bought it, but you hadn’t actually listened to it, in too long.

“We did,” Mikey frowned back. “Hey...it’s kind of cold. Do you mind if I sit back down, in my car? I promise I won’t try and drive off. If you’re going to write me a ticket, go ahead.”

Of course it was cold. It was February in New Jersey.

“Alright,” you nodded, and started walking with him, back towards his car. “What are you doing back in town, anyway?”

“I was supposed to start recording an album for my new band, Electric Century,” Mikey explained.

He’s making new music? you blinked. Wow, cool! But, I need to keep this professional. I can’t go asking for his autograph….he was still driving recklessly, and I do need to write him a ticket for that.

“But if you’re supposed to be in the studio,” you wondered, “why were you out here, driving like that? I clocked you at 30 miles over the speed limit.”

“I know,” Mikey sighed. “That was careless. I’m sorry. I’ll happily pay, however much you decide to fine me. I was just….trying to get away from my bandmate, David.”

“Get away?” you repeated. “Why?”

“Well…..,” Mikey hesitated. “He said we were going to record, but then he tried to make me….make me go to….”

Your eyes fell on something in the passenger’s seat of his car. A small, plastic baggie. And a needle. You’d arrested far too many people for possession, to not recognize what this was.

“Oh, fuck,” you swore softly. “Mikey, no.”

Mikey stood quietly behind you, his face filled with shame.

Oh, no, you thought. He had been your idol, when you were a high school kid. Now, to find him doing something like this….?

You couldn’t hide the disappointment on your face. A lot of people in Hollywood abused substances. You knew that. Hell, you’d watched the documentary, where Mikey’s brother, Gerard, admitted to abusing them himself. But, somehow, you’d still expected better from him.

“That’s why you ran from me,” you realized. “You didn’t want me to find this.”

“Are you going to take me to jail?” Mikey asked softly.

“You’re not putting up a fight,” you sighed, looking back at him. “You stopped running, when I told you to freeze. You could have gotten away, easily. Do you….want to be arrested, for this?”

“I know that what I’m doing to myself, isn’t right,” Mikey acknowledged. “I know it’s going to get me killed, if I keep it up.”

“So, why keep doing it?” you asked.

“I’ve been using narcotics, to deal with the pain I was in, for a long time,” Mikey confessed. “After My Chem broke up, I just felt….adrift. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life anymore. I guess I got depressed.”

“There are better ways to deal with depression,” you sighed, “than this.” You gestured to the paraphernalia in the car seat. You didn’t even want to look at it.

“You’re right,” Mikey frowned. “That’s exactly what David was trying to tell me. As soon as I got off the plane, he started trying to talk me into going to a rehab facility.”

“That’s why you ran away?” you guessed.

“Yeah,” Mikey nodded. “I jumped in my car and just started driving away from his house. I didn’t want to admit that he was right….that I have a problem.”

“It sounds,” you said carefully, “like you’re admitting it now.”

“But, I know, that that’s no excuse, for driving recklessly, the way that I did,” Mikey apologized. “I’m sorry, Officer.”

“You can call me Y/N, if you’d like,” you smiled.

“Are you….not going to arrest me?” Mikey blinked, confused. “I mean, I’m guilty. The stuff I’ve got on me, is something that gets you a lot more, than just a ticket.”

“If I were to take you downtown for possession, right now,” you explained, “you could be facing up to five years in prison.”

“Shit,” Mikey gasped.

“But….I don’t want to do that,” you decided, staring deep into his soulful brown eyes.

“Why?!” Mikey demanded. “Because I used to be in a band that you liked?”

“No, it’s not just that,” you shook your head. “Mikey….I can see that you know, that the direction in life that you’re going, is not good.”

“It’s awful,” Mikey admitted. “I’m not proud of what I’ve been doing in the past couple years, at all.”

“I want to give you a second chance, to turn your life around,” you offered. “Go back to David’s house. Let him check you into a rehab clinic. Stay there for as long as you need to. Get clean.”

“I should,” Mikey whispered. “I should have listened to him, from the beginning.”

He stood in the winter wind for a moment, contemplatively. You watched the breeze blow through his short hair.

“.....you’re really just going to let me go, Y/N?” Mikey asked.

“I’m going to be checking up on you,” you assured him. “If I find out that you didn’t stick with the twelve step program, and I find you out here again, with this stuff on your person….there won’t be a second chance. I’ll have to bring you in, and carry out the full extent of the law.”

“I understand,” Mikey said gratefully. “Thank you so much, Y/N. I’m going to pull myself together. I mean it. Next time you see me, I’m going to be in a much better state of mind.”

“I want to see you perform onstage with Electric Century,” you replied. “I want to see you keep shredding bass, like I know you can. So, go get well, Mikey Way. Take care of yourself.”

“When I’m….well enough, to do something like that,” Mikey promised, “I swear I’ll send you a ticket.”

You watched him get back into his car, and drive off, into the setting sun. You knew you had made the right decision. Your job was to help people - and the help he needed, wasn’t handcuffs. His music had saved your life, when you were younger. You felt peace, knowing that you may have just played some small part, in saving his.

#mikey way imagine #mikey way x reader #inktober #cops au

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rpgmgames · 6 years

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November’s Featured Game: Shooty and the Catfish

DEVELOPER(S): Daniel ENGINE: RPGMaker MV GENRE: Adventure, RPG WARNINGS: Course Language, Gore SUMMARY: Shooty and the Zaat are a dynamic duo solving monstrous mysteries!

Play the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Sure! So my name is Daniel, I guess technically I am an animator. I started out making flash cartoons around 2000 just for fun and became a professional animator in the advertising space around 2007. I have been working in media ever since, both in studios and as a contractor working under the Visitors From Dreams label which is also the label I use for my game development. I started dabbling with RPG Maker in around 2002 but I never got very far. Once I got into the media industry I wanted to pick it up again but with Mac being what almost all my work was done on, at home and in studio I didnt get the chance to actually get into it properly again until MV released, infact I was so excited that I purchased MV the day it dropped and immediately begun development on my first title Flatwoods. Ironically Shooty and the Catfish was developed on a PC, but I digress.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Daniel: Shooty and the Catfish is set up pretty simply. The 2 lead characters, Shooty and Zaat run a sort of monster investigation unit out of their home. They get calls to different desitinations to deal with different monster problems. I really wanted it to feel like it was set up in a similar way to a lot of cartoons from the 80s, where every episode had a pretty similar but still managed to feel like a little self contained adventure. I have thrown in some little elements of an larger narrative but they are light until the final episode. Originally the series was pitched to Frederator for Cartoon Hangover, it got a little ways into early development but then Youtube changed its algorythm and animation on the platform became a struggle and the project was dropped. I didnt want to waste all the work I had done on the concepts and so I eventually tried to find a way to work them into a game, its taken me quite a few years to get as far as I have with development, but I would be even further back if I had tried to animate it all alone. I created Flatwoods to try and get a small project out, you know, to get some experience with the engine, little did I know how much more I had to learn!

How long have you been working on your project? *Daniel: I pitched Shooty and the Catfish back in 2013 from memory, but it didn't start to take shape as the project you currently see until the last 12 months. In that sense I am incredibly happy with how quickly the game has come together.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Daniel: So many things have influenced my work its not funny... Where do I even start? Shooty and Zaat have a bit of a Finn and Jake thing going since when the project was originally pitched to Frederator and thats what they were looking for at the time. Resident Evil 4 (the closest any game has ever come to perfection imo) was the inspiration for the games ammo based combat system. Demons Souls originally derailed the project when I tried to emulate its non linear hub based design (you will notice the demo takes place on a single island instead), that created all kinds of balancing issues though so thats all been stripped back and is what lead to the decision to make the game episodic instead. One element from Demons Souls that remains in the game is a diverse mix of linear and looping level designs when it comes to mapping. The game also features towns that have layouts based on unused maps from the Pokemon GS 97 Spaceworld demo since they never made it into any of the actual games in the series. Pokemon GS also influenced the games visuals. I'm not a big RPG guy, but I played a hell of a lot of Pokemon growing up and Gen 2 is still my favorite. Trying to get MV to emulate the limitations of the Game Boy Color was quite the hurdle, I still cant believe I got it working as well as it is. I also have a lot of cameos from other peoples RPGM games, so there's that. Its a big ol' mixing pot of ideas and inspirations.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Daniel: Countless, the biggest challenge is always scope though. I originally wanted the game to be like 3 hours long tops, now its well in excess of that and that's before I have even put in meaningful NPC interactions. That's why I have decided to break the game up into episodes, each one should be around an hour which is much more my jam. I don't have a lot of free time so I tend to gravitate towards games that are tight and short, I think that's why I am so determined to keep this game in nice manageable chunks. Now that the game is shorter I don't need levelling so I am starting to tone down the RPG elements. One change always leads to another, but episode one is getting damn close to completion. I say this before I have even had the chance to announce the game's going to be episode on my own blog, ha ha. Episode 1 January, The Great Spore Chore! Keep your eyes out for it!

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Daniel: As mentioned above a lot has changed, I feel the biggest change was when I tried to move the game from being episodic into one adventure after playing through a bunch of other RPGM games for ideas, it all started to feel a bit aimless and the storytelling techniques I had planned when it was episodic weren't translating well as the game progressed. So I guess now the game is episodic again we have come full circle! So many ideas seemed good on paper but ended up not really being fun or adding anything in practice. Oh yeah, and the transition from Game Boy green to color was a big one based on feedback from the demo. Some people were finding it hard to tell what elements were interactable, doors in particular, I hope that color has helped minimize that issue. Key items will also have an animation on them so they are hard to miss. I'm not a fan of hunting for items in big maps, it's certainly not something I want to subject people too in my own projects.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Daniel: This project has had a few key people involved. Outside of myself I have worked with 2 musicians. One is an old school friend who did music for my animations back in the early 2000's. He has contributed a bunch of really cool EDM which makes up most of the games OST. On top of that there is also a number of optional bosses (one per episode) that have music composed by Secret Agent Ape who worked on Soma Spirits and a bunch of other upcoming games. I have been really lucky to get to work with such rad dudes.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Daniel: I love designing enemy battlers, my process usually involves me drawing a weird shape, sticking some eyes and a big goofy nose on it and trying to come up with a stupid pun to use for a name while listening to bands like Yes or Klaatu. It's bliss. I have a lot of people ask me why I have limited myself in terms of resolution and color palette, and it comes down to one of the important things I told myself when I got into game making as a hobby was that I would stop if it ever started to feel like work. I spend my days doing heavy visual effects and compositing, sometimes doing complex character animation. I want to keep that stuff as far away from my game development as possible. Ironically working within the incredibly restrictive limitations of the Game Boy has ended up being incredibly liberating and keeps things feeling fun as opposed to feeling like more of what I do all day to pay the bills.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Daniel: I always enjoy checking out demo's of upcoming games. Both Heartbeat and Virgo and the Zodiac's demos blew me away from a technical standpoint on the MV front. I still find it hard to believe those demos were made with the same engine I'm using. I guess it really shows what can be done when the engine is in capable hands. I wish I had more time to play actual full releases, I mean Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass just came out and I have no idea when, if ever I will have the free time to play it because its such a commitment. I feel like I am missing out on some great stuff.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Daniel: I guess I relate to different characters in different ways. Slim Grim is the one who hands out assignments to Shooty and Zaat, he is pretty much done with life, over people and the world itself, I think thats something we all have a bit of inside of us. Shooty is a very positive individual, his solutions to most problems is a bullet with a smile, and I think theres a bit of that in all of us as well. Zaats a bit of a cheeky smart arse, so I guess in a lot of ways I am most like her as a person. One of the episodes also features Gerkinman who is and has been a sort of self insert in my work since 2001 so I guess technically I relate to him most... ha ha, but thats cheating!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Daniel: I wish I had done a better job keeping the project focused. I feel like a good few months were spent making the game bigger in ways it didnt need to be.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Daniel: All of my games are loosely connected, taking place in the same world. None of them tie directly into each other, im not big on the cinematic universe concept that seems so popular right now, but events in my previous 2 releases and the 5 planned episodes of Shooty and the Catfish are loosely connected in ways people who take the time to look can find. They are also tied into around 17 years worth of animated shorts I have released. I have no plans on stopping now!

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Daniel: Well, theres quite a few things... Mapping for all 5 episodes (outside of towns) is complete, so when Episode 1 is done I will be immediately rolling into Episode 2. I am aiming to have an episode out every 2 months which should be doable with so much of the game already finished. I also have a couple of short films I am looking forward to being able to invest some time into, things have slowed down in recent months due to freelance but I am eager to get to animate some of my own work again. I am also eager to see the comments sections on Lets Plays. Both Flatwoods and Hazmat got a bit of Lets Play action and a couple of those have some pretty substantial comment sections. The amount of theories people try to put together for these projects is staggering. I could never write something as entertaining as what the speculations in these comment sections contain in terms of what my games mean, it cracks me up and I find it quite flattering that random people have put more thought into elements of my stories then I have. Makes me want to keep things deliberately vague just to encourage more of it. Lastly I will be releasing all the build files for the project so if anyone wants to make fangames or whatever they have direct access to all of the core files used to build the games. Im a big fan of the concept of a mod community, and while RPGM doesnt exactly allow for that, id love to see people do similar things to my work as whats been done with a lot of LISA fan games.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Daniel: I don't know about being afraid exactly. I am curious about how my business model for the episodic releases will go over. I was planning on releasing them at $1 an episode and $4 for the bundle when it's all complete. I know some people think thats still charging too much, but some people have also told me im not charging enough and that it lowers price standards accross the board for RPGM content. The way I see it if I can cover the costs of Steam and the music I commissioned then I've done alright since this project was for fun, but that's just me.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Daniel: Just keep at it and set yourself small goals. If your working on a big project break it up into manageable sections. Take things one map at a time, ya know what I mean?

Question from last month's featured dev @overcast-rpg: If you could choose an RPG Maker gamedev to release another game; which one would you choose and why? *Daniel: Oh that's an easy one, The Catamites. I love Space Funeral, it's easily my favorite game made in the engine, and while The Catamites has developed countless games since its release, they have all been in other engines. It would be fun to see them return to the engine after all they have learned about game design since Space Funeral's release and to see what they would do.

We mods would like to thank Daniel for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Shooty and the Catfish if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#rpg maker #rpg maker games #indie games #free games #pixel games #shooty and the catfish #games #gotm #game of the month #november #november 2018 #inktober 2018 #gotm 2018 #game making #game development

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callyneelise · 4 years

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Derek

In the fall of 2013 I was starting Halloween Horror Nights, per usual, and found out I was assigned to the Evil Dead maze. 2013 was a tough year for me. I had a lot of drama going on and as HHN started I wasn’t in the best place mentally. As we began our run for the season I kept mostly to myself. But not even a week into the run a group of guys performing in our maze befriended me. Three dudes who all saw me for me, recognized me as a nice albeit unique human, and made effort to include me and enjoy my company. Amongst those friends was Derek Stockwell. He had moved from Ohio and was blindly following a career in the arts with zero money and with no plan whatsoever. We both attended the after work dinner meet ups and wouldn’t order anything because neither of us had the money and this relation helped us bond rather quickly. Derek, along with my other bros I had bonded with, became a life long friend.

In 2014 I got Derek a job at my Starbucks. I remember closing with him. He would go into the lobby to mop and he’d sing while doing it. It was the most peaceful and beautiful way to end my shifts, listening to his beautiful voice sing celtic style fireside songs. And that year for my birthday Derek surprised me by bringing an ice cream cake to my apartment…I hate ice cream cake, but the gesture was so sweet I ate two slices right then and there.

In 2015 I had a rather self indulgent birthday party at Round One, where all these boys, Derek included, came to celebrate with me by posing for silly Japanese photo booth pictures and singing karaoke on little personal stages. So…

in 2016 I (with the help of his best friend) did some sleuthing and found out when Derek’s birthday was (he refused to tell us) and I threw him the best damn surprise party a gal could throw. He was indeed surprised when he arrived. We spent the evening playing video games and singing more karaoke.

And in 2016 I went through an awful break up and my little group of friends, that included Derek, fell apart right before my very eyes. I did my damnedest to keep us together but life has a way of pulling people into a million different directions.

But even after that Derek was still around. He’d reach out to me occasionally and we’d hang out, mostly getting high and watching Harry Potter. I would bring him coffee from Starbucks and he’d sing for me. We’d cute out together over his many adorable rodent pets. And he’d pep talk me through my sorrows of love.

Derek and I related on a lot of levels. He and I were both raised in very religious backgrounds but had grown and evolved to think differently than our initial upbringing. We both struggled daily with depression and were very open about it with each other, maybe too candidly. We both struggled in the relationships department. (lol) We both had a deep yearning for creative outlets and both connected deeply to music. (The same types of music to be specific.) And we both felt a daily struggle to be understood. We didn’t even understand each other. But we didn’t have to understand each other to relate. And thats what we were urning for. Someone to relate to. Thats how we stayed close.

I used to get annoyed with Derek because he would rationalize EVERYTHING. I hated it. He’d lay out facts and then make a game plan based off the facts. Meanwhile I was over here dwelling on the many thoughts and feelings I had attacking my every choice. But Derek was always smarter than me in that way, so I looked to him when I needed clear concise thinking. And the best thing about him was that he could have that logic while still having empathy for my feelings. He was so emotionally beautiful in that way. Most people can’t do both. Derek did.

In the last few days I have seen and read a lot of very beautiful things about Derek. But something I keep seeing is people saying how they wish they had reached out more. How they wish Derek would have reached out more. That they wish he knew how loved he was and how alone he wasn’t. But here’s the thing everyone… Derek KNEW he was loved. He knew it! And I say that with a factual truthiness that Derek himself would agree with. All those memories you guys are posting, all the laughter, all the good times, all of that is what assured Derek he was loved and not alone. Derek was tired. He was exhausted by a pain too powerful for any person to fight. And it is sad. It’s so sad it physically hurts my body to think about it. And he used that damned logic of his and figured out a solution. Not a good one. But one that made sense to him. So as I miss my buddy I am trying to remind myself that he knew he was loved. That I and all of his friends and family made sure he knew just how loved he was. I have the pictures and videos to assure myself of it, since Derek isn't here to point it out for me. I’m trying to work through this tragedy the way Derek would advise me to. How he would want me to. I know Derek knew how loved he was and now he is resting. No longer suffering in pain but resting peacefully and with all the love in this world to keep his memory alive.

Lastly, I speak directly to Derek: I love you buddy. I’m so sorry you were in so much pain and I’m so sorry we couldn’t find a way to ease it for you. I’m missing your voice, your singing. I’m so glad you recorded yourself singing. I will listen to it often, especially at night when I’m struggling to ground myself. I’m lonely without you buddy. The others have found their match but I haven’t and not having you to keep me company during this experience is hard. Caring for all the critters in this world is a lonelier business without you. I’m heartbroken that our little group we had will never be the same, even though I know you’d tell me it would never be the same regardless of your presence or not. I remember when you said to me you wished it could be like old times. And I agreed. We were so stupid lol. You once tried to comfort me by telling me that people from your past whom you missed would occasionally show up in your dreams, and that that was enough. So I look forward to seeing you in my dreams buddy. I miss you terribly and I love you immensely. Stay strong sir and rest well.

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aliravaleria13-blog · 6 years

Text

My community: Musicians

Photo by Scarlett Hart, Copiah-Lincoln Community College/Copiah-Lincoln Community College’s Concert Band has been selected as one of only four bands nationwide to participate in the 2019 Percy Grainger Wind Band Festival in Chicago, Illinois.

As each individual, I am part of a community that is very important to me, which is the musician community. I have been part of this community for around 6 years and I have enjoy all of it. There are many aspects of this community that I am going to explain, because I want people to understand the importance of this community and the impact that it has in society. This community is a large one. There are lots of musicians all around the word, but we all connect to each other by being part of this community, which makes us special.

Photo by Circle of Flutes non-profit association in Washington, powered by Squarespace.

Also, there are plenty of instruments to play. In fact, there are 1500 instruments. In my case, I just play one, which is the flute. I became interested on this instrument because I was curious about how it works and how could it make a pretty sound using wind. There are different types and categories of flutes, and their prices varies over the $100. Depending of the musician level, is the flute recommended. This helped me to integrate more in my community, because I started to see people with other kinds of flutes so I decided to investigate about them.

Photo by: “Music Delight School - Pasir Ris - Singapore.”

In this community, there are also schools. Some of them can be just like a regular school with music classes, others can be a whole music school program or lastly, an after school program. It is where the students become musicians from an early age until they decide not to. It helps musicians to develop professionally and socially. They can interact with others students, which makes them an active member of the community. Also, it helps them to understand music concepts better, as well as improve their personality. It can as well help to create aspects of leadership, citizenship and others.

Photo by: “Music Therapy.” HMS School, Michael Norris

The music community can also help people more than a social way. Many people has this question, “Does music therapy exist?” and the answer is yes, it does exist. The concept of music therapy is to help patients with different illness to engage with the music and help them with their motor skills, or with mental health. It an important aspect of this community that people does not know about. Music goes more further than just a song or a concert, it consists on making a differences like this one, trying to be part of an issue that affects families, the health, and doing something good for it.

Photo from: Redacción, La. “Vigente Legado De Ludwig Van Beethoven a 190 Años De Su Muerte.” La Unión

Like in every community, there is people who inspires us to be part of the music community. We have many of musicians that are important and even famous, like Ludwig Van Beethoven. He is one of the most recognize compositors in our community. What makes him different form others is his story. His father was alcoholic, he has a difficult childhood. He became a great musician at an early age. But, several years later, he lost his audition. It is an inspiring story, because he is one of the most famous compositors, no matter all the obstacles he had to face.

Photo from: “Finger Lakes Concert Band and Finger Lakes Symphony Orchestra Holiday Concert.” The Hochstein School - Music and Dance Education., 2018

There are also different classifications of music groups. Some of those are: band, orchestra, and symphony, and there are differences. The band consist of wind instruments, like flutes, trumpets, saxophones, etc. An orchestra is all about instruments like violins ad cello; it can have a few of wind instruments, but those are the mains instruments. The symphony is very similar to the orchestra, but it is more advanced. Each one has their director that guide them during rehearsals, concerts, and recitals. It is important to mention that there can be more classifications, but these three are the most common ones.

Photo from:��“Best Day Jobs for Musicians.” Careers In Music | Music Schools & Colleges, 3 Jan. 2017

In this community, there are also jobs for us. One of the most common is music teachers. There are 5.05 million music teachers in the United States. It is a hard job to do, because it is like trying to teach a new language. It also includes teaching the history of music, how to read it, play an instrument, etc. The average salary goes around the $52,407. Another job includes what was mention before, as therapist. There are 5,00o music therapist in the US. And plenty of jobs more that involves our community members to have a future in what they like.

Photo by: “ASPIRING 10-YEAR-OLD RUMSON MUSICIAN.” The Journal, 28 Oct. 2013

Even though there are some children who are very talented from a very early age, the recommended age to start being part of this community is at age of 10. Before this age, the kids can go to different music schools and programs to shadow others. It helps them to have an idea about how being a musician is and to give them an idea about what instruments they are interesting on. In some programs, there admission exams, which requires the possible member to have a reasonable thinking skills, which a 5 year old would not have and that is one of the reasons why this recommendation is.

Photo by: Goussy, Therese. “Can Classical Music Help You Study?” Sphinx Organization, 29 Mar. 2018

Many people believe that there are benefits when we study while listening to music, which is right. But, we must be sure which kind of music we listen to that would help us to concentrate. Study reveals that the best choice is listening to classical music, because it does not have any lyrics that would confuse the person with the material they are studying. Also, because the classical music is relaxing instead of pumping, which is what the person needs when studying.

Photo by: JMendezMusic. “Sad Piano Music (THIS WILL MAKE YOU CRY / Saddest Piano & Violin Ever!).” YouTube, YouTube, 13 Jan. 2014.

Like in every community there are obstacles and hard days in this one as well. There can be form financials to mental. Instruments, uniforms, and classes are expensive and taking care of them too. There will always be costs that some people can’t afford. Another obstacles is in their minds. They think that they are not good enough or that they would not go any further. This can make many musicians to quit, which is not good for the community.

Photo from: “5 Amazing Reasons Music Is the Best Gift To Humans.” Youth Tune, 27 Aug. 2017, youthtune

Being part of this community has benefits too. It helps to improve our health. It is known that it helps to decrease pain and increase our memory, which is important. It also helps our immune system, which helps with preventing illness. Having something that does good to our health should he priority for everyone. Another benefits outside the health, is monetary. People who are musicians has opportunity to scholarships. It is a benefit to have this because it would pay your studies. We all know how hard can it be to find scholarships that fits our financial needs, and it is an important point to mention that by being part of this community there are opportunities for it.

Photo by: Admin. “Why Learning to Read Music Isn't Required to Be a Musician.” Lincoln School of Music, 4 Apr. 2018.

To be a goo musician we need dedication. We have to practice every day, go to our classes, practices and be able to receive advices from other members of our community. Without dedication, no one can succeed in this community. it is important to take from our free time even just a few minutes to practice and try to get better. Try to find someone who is a better musician and try to equal them, in order to improve our abilities in the music. It is not a competition, but we have to always give our best and become role models for those member who needs help.

Photo from: Dreams time, 2018

We meet new people being in this community, specially if we are in a music school, because people see new students every day. It is an important point, because those friends can help you if you have any doubt about an assignment or does not know how something is supposed to play like. Also, they can spend your free time between classes with you. They will critic your performance in a good way to help you improve in whatever you are having troubles with.

Photo from: Boyer College of Music and Dance

There are different types of performance. The most common one is band concerts. It consist of musicians sitting on their assigned chair and playing their instruments while being directed. Another one is the recitals, which are more likely to be individually. There are also competitions, in which bands go and try their best to win a prize. In marching band, the musicians are walking and doing a few dance movements. Each of this types of performance are important and has to be taken seriously. They must have discipline and respect for the professor and other alums if they don’t want to be punished or expulsed, they have to follow the rules.

Photo by: Block, AJ. “Doctors Now Prescribing Music Therapy for Heart Ailments, Brain Dysfunction, Learning Disabilities, Depression, PTSD, Alzheimers, Childhood Development and More.” Didge Project, 4 Sept. 2016.

In conclusion, to me and every musician, our community means everything. We dedicate time and effort to become better ever day. We take out community like something important as well as the other members that are like us. Even though there are difficulties, we try to overcome every bad situation, because we love what we do, and we want to help our community to make it better every day that passes. It is interesting to be a part of a community that shares beautiful things like the music and connects people and cultures.

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glitterysummerkitty · 6 years

Text

Jake Gyllenhaal

Source- http://replicant.co.vu/post/123763589053/jake-gyllenhaal-in-enemy-2013

Taken from- Giphy.com

Jake Gyllenhaal One Shot

Requested by Anon

Pairing- Jake Gyllenhaal x Reader

Warning(S)- NONE

Your eyes flew open and the very first thing that your groggy mind registers is the sweat that covered every inch of your skin, drenching your t- shirt as well. You run your hand over your face as you try to recollect what the dream was about but nothing came to recollection except for the blunt awareness of the frightful feeling that rode your galloping heart.

Sadly this had become a thing now, which was quite frustrating. Generally speaking you didn’t have issues with sleep but whenever Jake wasn’t home or was gone for a long duration, these nightmares became a recurrent occurring. You usually never had any recollection of the dreams and were always left with this terrible anxiety and no sleep.

Sighing you turn around on to your side and reach out to grab our phone which you had placed on the night stand. You roll over so that you were lying on your stomach now as you pressed the phone to life. Jake’s goofy face comes staring back at you instantly easing some of your anxiety.

You chuckle as you slide your finger against the screen to scroll through the texts and mails before going for messenger. Pulling out Jake’s contact you began typing a text.

‘Are you still up?’

You tap on the send button and wait. After a moment of silence you get up and lean against the headboard, listening to the mild distant drone of the traffic that flitted through the glass windows in the stillness of the night.

A few more quite moments pass before the typical ping of the phone alerts you to an incoming text. Quickly you pick up the phone and check Jake’s reply.

‘I am but that’s because I am on the other side of the country where people are only beginning to contemplating bed time. What’s your excuse for being up so late missy?’

Jake’s reply made you laugh, especially the smiley which bordered on questioning and chastising as if he were some parent talking to his child, reprimanding for being out of bed after it was way past bed time.

‘The bed is too cold and too empty for me to sleep in. Come to me.’

You add a pouting smiley (or at least that’s what it looked like) at the end before sending it. This time you didn’t have to wait long as the bubble popped indicating that he was typing a reply.

‘Aaww... My baby is missing me. <smirking>’

You roll your eyes at the obvious teasing and begin tapping at the screen.

‘Duh! Why? Aren’t you missing me? <sad, pouting>’

His response is almost instant again but it comes in instalment and you feel a twinge of guilt knowing he was busy, probably talking to someone, yet was replying.

‘Of Course’

‘I miss you baby’

‘Tell me’

‘What can I do for you’

‘To help you fall’

‘Asleep’

Sliding back between your sheets you wait for the string of incoming messages to stop. You bite your lip as you read the texts before typing your response.

‘Aaww... You’re so cute. <kiss> <heart>’

‘I know.’

‘But what exactly did I do to deserve a compliment? <confused>’

‘For wanting to help me back to sleep from other end of the country. Duh!’, you roll your eyes again before sending your answer.

‘Oh! <grinning>’

‘Anything for you babe.’

‘Now tell me what can I do?’

‘Bed time story, lullaby or phone s**.’

‘Personally I would chose the last option because it’s highly effective <wink>’

Despite the fact that no one was seeing this you felt your cheeks get hot. If Jake was still texting it clearly meant that he was in a place where he probably couldn’t call. Presuming he was surrounded by people, you couldn’t believe that he was typing these things. Anybody could be reading this and what would they think!

‘Wouldn’t you know all about that?! <eye rolling>’

‘<grinning>’

‘As much as your third option appeals to me, I am going to settle for you singing to me. Your voice always soothes me.’

You smile to yourself as you wait for his reply. Five minutes go by and Jake doesn’t reply leading you to think that probably he had to get back to work or something. When another five minutes had passed you had begun to think if Jake had mentioned anything about filming at night when the phone suddenly goes off, filling the dreadful silence of the room with the cheery ringtone assigned for your boyfriend’s number.

“Hey. You called. I was just trying to recollect if you had mentioned anything about a night shoot.”, you said, listening to the chaotic noise in the background.

“Night shoot?”, Jake snorted, “No. I am out at this bar with the cast and man is it crazy in here!”

“Ya well, the loud music and the boisterous laugh and cheering in the background kinda gave it away.”, you laugh.

“Ya! It’s insane. Sadly I am too tired to try and enjoy anything. Too tired.”, he whined into the phone making you laugh. His ‘s’ came out with lisp and you know he was wasted. In the background you could hear a woman at the bar tender for another shot.

“Oh baby... Why don’t you tell them that and call it a night? I am sure they would understand.”, you said.

“Na. Can’t do that.”, he sighs before somewhat languidly continued, “It’s the last day--”

Jake stopped himself rather abruptly, making you raise an eyebrow in confusion and suspicion. After taking a moment to compose himself he speaks into the phone again and this time he sounded more awake than he had just a few seconds ago.

“Ahmm... It’s one of the extra’s birthday.”, his statement came out more as a question as if he was trying to convince himself. You sensed that Jake was trying to hide something but you couldn’t guess what it was.

“Anyway.”, he continued, “More to the point. Let me to sing to you baby.”, he tried to veer the topic away from his slip.

Instead of replying immediately you think about whether to ask him about what he was hiding or to let it slip for now. Choosing to let him succeed in his endeavours to change the topic you simply hum in answer. You almost hear him sigh in relief before the noise in the background begins to fade gradually. Soon the noise was barely audible and you assumed Jake had moved to a place less noisy. And then you heard his beautiful voice croon into the phone.

***

When the next time you opened your eyes, you found yourself lying parallel to the head board (however that happened!), the sheets were creased and crumpled and the alarm kept buzzing non- stop.

Shutting the alarm clock you slide out of the bed and feel something solid and smooth beneath your feet. Looking down you find your phone lying screen down on the floor. You bend down, groaning, to pick it up before getting ready for work.

The day drags by slowly and nothing eventful happened at work. At first you were glad you didn’t have much work but then as the day rolls by you find yourself dreaded by the lack of work because now that you didn’t have anything to occupy with you found your mind wandering back to the man, who for some reason, was completely unavailable to you over the phone. You realised that he would be very busy considering there was only one more week left to finish filming the movie.

While you understood the situation, it didn’t necessarily make you feel better. You still missed Jake and today was one of those days when you just craved the presence, physical or virtual, of the man you loved so much.

Evening comes and you drag yourself out the office and head towards home knowing what was awaiting for you at home- loneliness and more loneliness. You even decided that you would beg, if it comes to that, Jake to sing to you before you would go to bed.

As you unlocked the door to Jake’s house, you were greeted by a blissful and excited Leo. You immediately bend down to pet the dog who leaped onto you and began to lick your face. While this should have struck you as odd, it didn’t, because Leo always greeted you in this manner when it was home. When it was home! You realise a moment too late that this time Jake had taken Leo along with him. If Leo was home that meant...

You felt your heart accelerate in pace as you rushed into the house and threw your jacket and bag on the floor. You begin to look around and walk into the kitchen trying to contain yourself. This was too good to be true and you could feel your heart swell painfully with hope.

“Leo gave the whole surprise away didn’t he?!”, Jake chuckled, seeing you standing wide eye near the entrance to the kitchen.

Tears begin to slide down your cheeks (happy tears of course) as you run across the floor towards Jake and throw yourself at him. Jake catches you in time and holds you tightly against his chest.

His strong arms were real, his smell was real, his voice was real, his lips felt real but it was so hard for you to accept that he was standing in the kitchen for real.

“Oh my God! I can’t believe you are really here.”, you weep into his chest.

“Hey...”, Jake says softly pushing you a little so that he could see you face. He wipes at your tears with his thumbs as he whispers sweet things to calm you.

“I am so sorry I just missed you so much and I didn’t expect to see you here at all.”, you babbled.

“It’s alright baby. I am here now.”, Jake whispered as he stroked your hair.

“We finished filming a week before and I wanted to surprise you so I didn’t tell you anything although I was higly tempted.”, he chuckled.

“I love your surprise.”, you sniffed.

Jake laughs before whispering in your ears, “Tonight I will make sure that the bed is neither too cold nor too empty, baby.”

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cloudjumpervalka · 6 years

Text

sometimes and by that i mean a lot of the time, i remember how much elsa means to me as a character. in general she’s very mediocre in comparison to others, but she was there for me when i was hella depressed and she’s like a form of comfort for me now.

i was following the production of frozen for the longest time, let’s say about 5ish years before release? i was excited for it, i was disappointed in the changes made, i refused to believe the original elsa and anna leaked design images were real because they looked so bad, i read the script when it leaked and was mad at the conveluded plot.

but the movie came out during the semester of art school i got severe depression through. i had always dreamed of going to art school and working in the animation industry and i had a single thought that went in my brain a week before the semester started. it said i would never be good /enough/. it kept playing back over and over when i would turn in assignments. i did well in school, but the workload was a lot when you decide to take 3 studio classes at once. i started getting overly picky with what i considered to be good enough in my work and eventually stopped turning in assignments. sometimes i would have them “done” but it wasn’t good enough so i didn’t bother

i was living with my grandparents at the time and locked myself in my room to be alone a bunch. i didn’t socialize in classes and who i considered friends were out of reach. i had just started dating my bf a few months prior and the time zone/distance/etc was a new experience altogether. i was constantly scared i would lose my friends not just to distance but other personal reasons not meant to be shared on tumblr. my grandparents gave me my distance and i just spent a lot of time alone. i remember skyping with dean and staying up all night with him bc i didn’t want to be alone.

i got more depressed over time, i was just sad. i would try to fill the void with buying things i had left at home with my parents. i remember i would drive out to the mall. i would get a pretzel to eat. eat it outside the disney store, maybe buy something after. if not disney merch, i would go buy clothes. i had not been eating much aside from the almost daily pretzel and lost about 40/50 pounds within a span of 3 months. i just thought i was losing weight for walking around the city to go to classes and spent a majority of the money i had saved up over my childhood on clothes that i have never been able to fit in aside from those few months at the end of 2013.

the day the game grumps released that one wind waker episode about dans ocd story was released during this time. i watched that episode and immediately started crying bc i knew i wasn’t okay. i had completely changed in a span of about 2 months at that point. i was sad and didn’t know what to do. i constantly wanted to not exist and spent a lot of the time crying and sleeping and starving myself. i called my mom and asked for help. parents tried helping but they didn’t understand at the time what depression meant on that level. i told them maybe i could handle school better if i dropped one of the 4 classes i had. and of course i dropped the history class and not any of the studios. i made schedules and plans to complete the semester but i still. felt overwhelmed and not good enough and lonely and sad and frustrated at these emotions because i couldn’t just focus like a normal person. i lies to my parents to my grandparents to a lot of people that i was continuing my work but i stopped doing 2 of the remaining 3 classes altogether. ended up with withdraw failures in them.

the last class was my life drawing class. i enjoyed it a lot. i took a train into the city to go to it. i found peace in the hour listening to music to get there. i would talk to dean before he went to bed on my way there and greet him in his mornings when i went home. i thought i could handle it and it was going well. besides for the assignments that were meant to be done at home. we had a final that was meant to be an illustration showing our learned skills in the class in a 24x36in size. not bad at all. i got the paper, had the sketch. i just had to do it. but i didn’t. when i was in that room at my grandparents place i felt nothing but emptiness. so i filled it whatever i could think of

my hyperfixation of things soon moved to the release of frozen. i had followed it previously and was excited to go see it. i had bought the classic dolls for the main characters the day they were released and left them in box in case i didn’t like the movie and wanted to sell them. my immediate family came to visit my grandparents for thanksgiving that year and i asked my mom if we could go see frozen at it’s earliest showing on release day. she agreed because i lied to her saying my figure drawing class had been cancelled for the holidays (it wasn’t bc we were meant to show progress on our finals)

i cried so hard so fast bc whatever i was feeling i felt through elsa. i projected so much onto her and i fell in love. it gave me a second wind. i bought the frozen soundtrack and would sing along to let it go on the way to the train station. i felt like i could overcome my depression as simple as that. but circumstances don’t work like that

i never turned in that final despite it being the assignment where “if u don’t turn it in u fail”.

i dropped out of art school, telling my parents maybe i wasn’t meant for art. i’m not good enough to make it in the industry if i’m like this. i was gonna go home and go to the local state college instead. get a degree in something ... useful.

i left art school with a total gpa of 0.9

elsa is a character that’s just. i never understood the popularity frozen had. it has problems. it’s ... not that great honestly. but elsa stood out for me. she was some sort of proof to me i could be happy.

a lot has happened in the past 4 years, but i can say i’m honestly happy. i have a lot of good things going on. though i think the most important to this story i guess is ?

i’m graduating with my bachelors in art in may. my gpa is back at a 3.6. i took 3 studios classes this semester on top of 2 art history lectures and made it through. i thought so little of myself and my abilities over the years. i never thought i’d graduate college at that point i was at 4 years ago. when i applied to my local uni, i had to appeal to get in because of my low gpa from those 4 semesters of art school. i spent 2 years there not knowing if i even wanted to do art again. but i realized this is something that’s always been a part of me. it’s who i am? and i want to use this talent i had to. make it in the industry. my dream for as long as i can remember is to make media for kids who feel lost and alone. it’s always been my dream and i won’t let anyone or anything keep me from trying my hardest to make it happen, which includes not letting myself stop me.

i don’t know what the future holds but i’m excited to see where it takes me

and it just happens to involve me and my fleeting hyperfixation on elsa asking for the olaf’s frozen adventure limited edition elsa doll for chrismas because i want to say i look at her and think everything i just said

but in reality i just go shheeeees my wiiiiiiiife i looooooove herrrrrrrrr

#jesse writes an essay about their life #i think this is worth it for the last sentence #pls if u wanna know more about me i guess #jesse thoughts

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buttermybooks · 7 years

Photo

HI HELLO IT’S ME AND I AM BACK WITH ANOTHER AWESOME POST! I am so excited to have the opportunity to share a playlist from the amazing Emily Barr; inspired by her upcoming book THE ONE MEMORY OF FLORA BANKS.

This book first hit my radar when an arc showed up in my grab bag from YallFest in November. Immediately after we got the book, @thebookblr started reading it, and LOVED it. Taking her word for it, I dove right in and also LOVEDDDD it. I absolutely flew through this book, finishing in 4 hours, and then cursing myself for not savoring it more!!!

I will leave a link to a playlist inspired by her time writing this book, as well as a little background from Emily on each song that was included. Buy links and Synopsis below the cut!!

(To listen to the playlist on spotify, click here)

Flora Playlist

I listen to a lot of music when I write: it’s best when played loud. Music helps me block out the sound of the outside world: it’s too easy to be distracted by letters dropping on the doormat, the slamming of a car door, a conversation in the street.

When I need to blast out words to beat a deadline, I blast out opera. It helps that I don’t speak Italian or German so no stories impinge on the one I’m writing. The operatic voices become beautiful instruments. If I need to sink into a deep and meditative period of concentration - to iron out troublesome plot wrinkles - I drift over to sweeping classical music: Brahms, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich or Chopin. I played the cello for year, and cello music is my comfort blanket.

However, early on in the process, when a book is beginning to take real shape, when ideas are bubbling faster than I can type them, when my characters can be anything or do anything, and I simply have to follow the threads and see what happens; this is when certain songs and certain albums become addictive. They start to soundtrack the novel. I played the songs on this playlist throughout the process of writing Flora Banks. I played them when I stopped writing, closed the laptop and had to get on with the day to day domestic chores. I can never quite switch off from thinking about the book I am writing, so all the while these songs were playing, a little bit of my brain was thinking about Flora Banks.

1: Glacier / John Grant / John Grant and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra: Live in Concert

This whole album is sublime. Witty, tender, hugely melodic songs and a full orchestra. Some songs are dark and some are romantic. John Grant is a wonder. He writes songs from the heart and sings them beautifully. He has had his demons and been close to the brink. He is also a huge lover of Scandinavia. In fact, I used him as the inspiration for the character of Toby in Flora Banks. Glacier is actually a song about the conflict between the church and gay rights, but the message is clear: be brave and find your own answers.

“Don't listen to anyone; get answers on your own

Even if it means that sometimes you feel quite alone

No one on this planet can tell you what to believe

People like to talk a lot, and they like to deceive”

And when one is brave in the face of adversity, wonderful things can happen:

“This pain

It is a glacier moving through you

And carving out deep valleys

And creating spectacular landscapes

And nourishing the ground”

2: Looped / Kiasmos / Kiasmos

I played this album endlessly while writing this book. Every note of it matches Flora’s adventure. It is subtle and it reveals more with each listen. I love the pulses and the swooping strings and the periods of calm and the bursts of danger. The album is full of looped musical phrases that build and fall away and build again. There are some structural similarities to Flora in this respect. This particular song soundtracks Flora’s boat trip, away from the town and out in to the Arctic wilds.

Kiasmos is a duo and features the legendary Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds. Which leads us on to…

3: 3055 / Ólafur Arnalds / Arnalds: Eulogy for Evolution

I first listened to this album just before I first travelled to Svalbard in 2013. It’s by turns elegiac and joyous. This song in particular hits the spot. You can hear those Scandinavian winds and the piano is so delicate. Then in come the drums when you’re least expecting it.

4: Everybody’s Talkin’ / Iggy Pop / Après

I love Iggy Pop: seventy this year and as charming and as charismatic as ever. Thankfully he managed to survive the 2016 (Cohen! Bowie! Prince!) In 2012 he put out this album of covers. Most of the songs are French and Iggy croons throughout in his deep and croaky tremolo. Nobody could have predicted an album of such melodic easy listening. In it’s own way, it’s a pretty punk thing to do. I play this album a lot while cooking and it always made me smile. This song feels Flora like, especially when she is leaving Penzance.

“Everybody’s talking at me

I don't hear a word they're saying

Only the echoes of my mind

People stopping, staring

I can't see their faces

Only the shadows of their eyes

I'm going where the sun keeps shining.”

5: Where is my mind? / The Pixies / Surfer Rosa

I love this song. This song is playing in the opening scene, in which Flora is feeling out of place at a house party. The title is apt but completely unintentional - I just love the song. A dose of Pixies is good for the soul. Frank Black’s voice blows away the cobwebs.

6: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) / The Beatles / Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I adore The Beatles. How did they do so much in so little time? Aside from their massive cultural impact, they simply knew how to construct a song and perform it perfectly. When The Beatles hit Spotify for the first time, I binge listened. It soundtracked the whole of Christmas. Flora listens to this album when she’s left home alone. The album also contains the song ‘She’s leaving home’ - something I only noticed while compiling this playlist.

7: Atmos VIII / A Winged Victory for the Sullen / Atmos

This album is hypnotic. It’s sort of ambient, droning, glacial, electronic classical. It hums and purrs and scrapes and whooshes. It’s meditative and clever. This song sounds like it’s echoing in a cathedral. Play it as loud as you can and let it hit you in the chest. To me this is what Svalbard sounds like.

8: The Beigeness / Kate Tempest / Everybody Down

I am in awe of Kate Tempest! She was born in 1985 and has already achieved more than most do in a lifetime. She is an award winning poet, an insightful novelist and a gifted rapper. She writes about real issues and is a fearless role model for young women. I love this song. And I like the message: stand up for yourself and don’t fade into the beigeness. Be heard and be seen. I think Flora has some of that spirit. Tempest’s follow up album ‘Let them eat chaos’ is a masterpiece. I am following her career with interest: I can’t wait to see what she’ll do next.

9: How Long? / Julia Holter / Have You in my Wilderness

Again - an album I played over and over. Julia Holter is brilliant and this is such a polished album, simultaneously complicated and accessible. It feels like looking into somebody’s mind and not quite understanding the thoughts and feelings that are there. This song gives me goosebumps. It is woozy and intimate and her voice is spellbinding.

10: Northern Lights / Ola Gjeilo - Voces8 / Ola Gjeilo

Gjeilo is a young Norwegian composer and his work is gorgeous. Last summer my partner Craig and I spent a week in Tromsø, which is in the Arctic Circle in Northern Norway. There’s a cathedral in Tromsø, and it’s s a magical place beside the water with spectacular acoustics. Through the summer they run midnight concerts: we went to one and heard a mixture of Bach, Mozart and traditional Norwegian music. It was still light when we got there, and just a little bit dusky as we walked back over the bridge to our hotel. This piece - although it’s called Northern Lights and so is from the opposite end of the year - takes me straight back to that evening.

About The Author:

Emily Barr (www.emilybarr.com) began her career as a journalist at the Guardian before realizing that she was drawn more toward books. After taking a year to go backpacking for a column assignment, she returned home with the idea for her first book, the New York Times bestseller Backpack, and never looked back. She has since written 11 additional books for adults. The One Memory of Flora Banks is her young adult debut. Emily lives in Cornwall with her partner and their children. You can follow her on Twitter @emily_barr.

Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Flora Banks has no short-term memory. She lives under the careful watch of her parents, in a town she is familiar with, among people who are equally familiar with her story. She has not been able to recall any part of her past since she was ten, when the tumor that was removed from her brain took with it her ability to make new memories. That is, until she kisses Drake, her best friend's boyfriend, the night before he leaves town. Miraculously, this singular memory breaks through Flora's fractured mind, and sticks. Flora is convinced that Drake and their shared kiss are responsible for restoring her memory and making her whole again. So when an encouraging email from Drake suggests she meet him on the other side of the world, Flora knows with certainty that this is the first step in reclaiming her life. With little more than the tattoo "be brave" inked into her skin, and written reminders of who she is, how old, where she lives, and why her memory is so limited, Flora sets off on an impossible journey to the land of the midnight sun--Svalbard, Norway. There she is determined to find Drake, and to explore the romantic possibilities and hopeful future that their reunion promises her. But from the moment she arrives in the arctic, nothing is quite as it seems, and Flora must "be brave" if she is ever to learn the truth about herself, and to make it safely home. Rich with psychological twists, powerful moments of hope, despair, and confusion, and a landscape very much a character unto itself, FLORA BANKS is an emotionally compelling and immersive read that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, the depths of the human heart, and the power of the human mind.

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sandy-af-kattegat · 5 years

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My HeadBangers, welcome from Catania, Sicily: Krigere Wolf

“Vision of Death”

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Well my HeadBangers here we go with some Italian black/death metal and those deep growl vocals that I love so well.

First I want to look at their bio (taken from their site), it’s basically a 2 man band with occasionally a drummer and backup, it’s very interesting and I like how they have it broken their bio down by year. It gives us a clearer picture of what happened from day one.

2007: Rick Costantino starts the project as a one man band for some months, while in 2009 the moniker is changed to KRIGERE WOLF.

Former KRIGERE WOLF line-up consists of Rick Costantino as bassist/singer and Joe Cantagallo as guitarist. Lately drummer Frozen will join the band in order to release the debut full “The Ancient Culture to Kill”, printed and distributed in 2012 via ARMED GOD RECORDS (Bologna).

2013: Line-up change: Salvatore Martino Testa (drums) and Francesco Bauso (guitar) join the band to release the self-produced single “Victory of Satan’s Warriors”.

2014: KRIGERE WOLF signs with South Korean underground label FALLEN ANGELS PRODUCTIONS, being one of the first bands in its roster. S. M. Testa leaves the band for personal reasons and Riccardo Grechi takes his place. With him on drums and the contribution of F. Bauso on guitars KRIGERE WOLF releases its second full length “Sacrifice to Valaskjàlf” on the 1st of February, 2014. In the meanwhile Rick C. gets in touch with Magnus D. Andersson, Marduk bassist and sound engineer at Endarker Studio (Sweden), who will take care of the mastering of the album.

At the end of 2014, Fallen Angel Productions includes KRIGERE WOLF in a split album alongside three other bands: Waldschrat (Austria), Notre Amertume (France) e Antiquus Scriptum (Portugal). The two tracks contained in “The Beginning of the End” are written and played by Rick C. as a one man band. One year later, Rick meets Salvatore Leonardi (guitar), Dario Petralia (drums) and Gabriele Catania, talented extreme vocalist, assigning him the role behind the microphone.

2015: The band works on a second single called “Solar Storms”, released exclusively in digital version.

2016: With the same line-up KRIGERE WOLF enter the studio to record “Infinite Cosmic Evocation”, very dark and primordial work, approaching to a renovated well-finished sound. M. Devo Andersson is chosen one more time to mix and master the album. “Infinite Cosmic Evocation” is a way more introspective record than the previous one, composed of a strong sinister energy.

2018: Fallen Angels Productions will release E.C.A “Extermination Cult Alliance”, split album with japanese band Sabbat.

2019: Out the MCD “Eternal Holocaust” released by “Lower Silesian Stronghold” (Poland).

Let’s meet the band:

Rick Costantino – Drums, bass, lyrics

Salvo Leonardi – Guitars

Salvatore Martino Testa – Drums (Live Sessions)

“Sacrifice to Valaskjalf”

youtube

I absolutely am loving Rick’s growl vocals. When I listen to a band that has deep, dark, growl vocals, I like to listen to songs as old and new as possible. Try it, listen to the voice from one year to the next, from one song to the next. This way you can tell a fricking great vocalist, and Rick is one of them. Thanks Rick for the growls.

I also like to put at least 3 songs on here so my HeadBangers can get the feel of the band. I had one comment saying I shouldn’t put so many on here but, this is how I bring my music to my MetalHeads, if you don’t like it whatever…

“Unholy Magical Throne”

youtube

I’m putting the guys contact info on here, check them out and give them a follow:

Contacts: http://www.facebook.com/KrigereWolfOFFICIAL [email protected] http://www.instagram.com/krigerewolf_official [email protected] http://www.facebook.com/maniinfacciapromotion http://www.instagram.com/maniinfacciapromotion

My thoughts:

Well my HeadBangers here’s a two man band, with great growl vocals, and oh let me just say these two have swag, yeah they do, look at them a couple more badasses to add to the Metal List. One thing I’ve always wondered about the area of Black Death Metal is where do they come up with these songs. I know some bands get them from personal experiences, but I think some go a lot deeper than that. I’ve talked to some bands that just follow the prevailing gloom and doom of Death Metal songs. I’m good at reading people, (it can be a bad thing but, it has helped me in life alot). Then I run across a band that I can sense there is a lot more too. It’s in their eyes, that deep, far away look and you know there is more behind those eyes, the way they pronounce every word in the song, the way they stand and walk. There’s more to a song than words, it’s how it’s delivered and how the vocalist feels it inside. How the band acts with each other. Pay attention my HeadBangers to your favorite band when they perform. Watch them, feel the vibrations and see what you come up with.

Well my HeadBangers that’s it for this week. Join me next week for another band and another song. Until then, don’t stand to close to the fire if you can’t handle the burn………

Week 55 – Krigere Wolf My HeadBangers, welcome from Catania, Sicily: Krigere Wolf "Vision of Death" Well my HeadBangers here we go with some Italian black/death metal and those deep growl vocals that I love so well.

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littledonkeyburrito · 7 years

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He just looked at me and my tiny serious expression and said, “No.”

1. What was the reason behind the last time you wore a bandage? I think the last time I wore a bandage was when I hurt my wrist in karate training when I was like 16. I really don’t get injured often.

2. What music artist have you listened to a lot lately? Genitallica. I love their music, so long as I don’t listen too hard and translate the lyrics haha. Then again, they’re barely more dirty than Despacito...

3. Have you ever been to a karaoke bar? Yeah

4. Who is taller, you or your best friend? She is. I am little.

5. When did you last go to a library? I think I went to a library in 2013 to print some documents and get them signed by a JP. That would have been the last time. I can’t believe I remembered that.

6. What did you last purchase at a gas station store? I think the last time I went to a gas station was when my Dad was visiting and we drove through the south of spain. I probably just bought a drink or something.

7. Which time zone do you live in? Central European. GMT +1

8. Do you remember what you wore yesterday? I had to think about it for a second but yes, I do.

9. When did you last lose your voice? It got husky a few times while I was travelling in Central America due to being drunk in clubs/loud bars and attempting to have a conversation with someone.

10. What was the last thing you looked up on the Internet? Give me a sec to check my search history... Last thing I googled was “Dahl Barcelona” because I was trying to find contact info for a shipping company

11. How much did you spend the last time you went out for food? I think it was about 20 euro which tbh was a bit more than I’d like to have spent. I don’t go out much though so it’s not like it broke the bank.

12. What was the last thing you purchased online? A sleeping mask for my brother for his birthday because he does shift work like I used to so I understand the need for a comfortable sleep mask.

13. Do your celebrity crushes tend to be more of actors or band members? Actors. I don’t follow many bands.

14. When was the last time you were at a coffee shop? I have no idea. I don’t drink coffee so I would only ever go if the people I’m with go. The last time might have been that super pretentious coffee place my friend dragged me to in Cartagena in Colombia.

15. Where is the farthest you’ve travelled this week? This week? To the grocery store.

16. Is your first language something other than English? No.

17. Are you a good cook? I’m alright. I like my food but I don’t know how other people feel about it because I don’t cook for others. Tbh I barely cook for me aside from the noodles I make.

18. Did you ever take music lessons for singing or playing an instrument as a child? I took drum lessons for most of highschool.

19. When’s the last time you ran? In the airport in Panama City when I almost missed my connecting flight to San José 20. Do your jeans have rips, tears, and holes in them? No, I don’t like jeans with holes in them 21. Do you celebrate 420? No. 22. Do you get the full 8 hours of sleep a night? When I’m not working/travelling, yes.

23. Have you ever been on your school’s track team? No, but I made it to districts for javelin/shotput a couple of times, and to regionals once. 24. Do you own a pair of Converse? I own a few 25. Did you copy and paste this survey? Sure did. No shame. 26. Do you eat raw cookie dough? When the opportunity arises 27. Do you wear your shoes in the house? Sometimes when my feet are cold I just won’t take them off when I get home. But not in a carpeted house. 28. At what age did you find out that Santa wasn’t real? I approached my dad at approximately age 7 because I’d been having this debate internally about whether santa was real and I was conflicted about it. So I went up to him and straight up asked, “Dad, tell me the truth. Is Santa real?” He just looked at me and my tiny serious expression and said, “No.” “Easter Bunny?” “No.” “Tooth Fairy?” “No.” “Okay thanks,” and then I continued with my life 29. How many phones, house phones and cell phones are in your house? Just my 1 mobile phone.

30. Who would you call first if you won the lottery? I’d message a bunch of people but the first call would be either mum or dad, depending on what time of day it was. 31. Last time you saw your best friend? February. 32. Are you in high school? Fuck no, thank god 33. How do most people spell your name? Maddy. And then sometimes people get my last name wrong even though it’s really easy and not that uncommon. 34. Would you wear a boy/girlfriends clothes? Around the house I suppose I probably would 35. Will you keep your last name when you get married? Probably. Would maybe consider hyphenating if they had a cool name 36. When was the last time you left your house? Yesterday. 37. Do you have a dishwasher? No. My last 2 apartments had one and I never used it anyway. 38. Would you survive in prison? I hope I’d be able to keep my head down enough to not get shanked 39. Who is the youngest in your family? I have a little cousin that’s 14 I think. 40. Do you know anyone with the same name as you? I know several people with my first name but I’m not actively friends with any of them. When I was in grade 10 at school, there were 4 of us, each with slightly different spellings. 41. What’s the last thing you purchased? Groceries 42. What brand are your pants right now? C&A. I stood in the corner of the shop googling for like 10 minutes to find a comparison chart for australian and spanish jeans sizes. 43. Ever been to Georgia (the state)? Just in the airport. The accents are so thick and southern that I couldn’t understand the girl working at maccas 44. Do you watch movies with your parents? Mum and I would often watch movies together when I lived in Aus. Either at her place or at the cinemas. 45. Do you get your hair cut every month? I get my hair cut every 2-3 months. 46. Do you go online everyday? Yep

47. Have you ever experienced something paranormal? Aside from the party pirate ghosts that apparently haunt my apartment, no. 48. What’s the longest amount of time you’ve been stuck in traffic? I don’t think it was the longest but when I left the San José airport in the cab we hit bumper to bumper traffic almost immediately and it took an hour and a half to get to my hotel.

49. Have you ever been to New York City? Not yet 50. What is the most amount of money you’ve spent on a meal before? Probably when my brother and I took mum out for her 50th birthday and we took her to a nice fancy place. I think in all it was close to $100 per person and of course we paid for mum too. 51. What’s your worst travelling experience? Oh god I’m sure I have a few but I can’t really think of any off the top of my head. Getting sick in India in 45 degree heat wasn’t fun. And then having diarrhoea during my flight stopover in southern china (read: squat toilets) was even less fun.

52. Have you ever dealt with noisy neighbors or roommates? How did that go? At one of my old apartments, my bedroom shared a wall with the bedroom in the apartment next door. They often had sex at like 3am which was super frustrating, especially considering I was still a virgin at the time and was like, “wahh why can’t I be the one getting laid” and then they stopped banging and started arguing and sometimes it sounded like it was getting violent. Anyway, my flatmate and I called the cops on them once because it sounded like she was attacking him and like throwing stuff at the walls. Cops came and spoke to them. They stopped fighting. Month or so later they started banging again. That was not a fun place to live. 53. Who was (or is) the teacher that gave you the hardest time in school? Nah, my teachers loved me. The trick is to suck up to them at the start of the year and from then on so long as you get okay grades you can basically do whatever the fuck you want and they won’t care. I could literally just get up and walk out of class and not come back and they wouldn’t even question it. Actually, I often did but it was usually for a music lesson. But a lot of the time I would go to my lesson super early because I was bored and my drum teacher didn’t mind helping me skip class. 54. How do you feel when you meet someone with the same music taste as you? It’s fun to drive with those people 55. What is the strangest thing you’ve ever seen outside of your house? A couple were fucking on my street a couple of months ago at like 5am. I only looked because I was still half asleep and didn’t recognise what the sounds were until it was too late 56. How reliable is your internet connection? Better than Australia 57. What’s something that makes you incredibly nervous? Confrontation 58. What’s the latest you’ve ever stayed up to finish homework/a project? 2 nights without sleep. Here’s a tip kids: Don’t start a 10,000 word research assignment 2 days before the deadline 59. What is the worst thunderstorm you’ve experienced? I grew up in the sub-tropics so there’s been quite a few. I fucking love storms and floods (so long as people aren’t hurt and homes aren’t destroyed) 60. How quickly can you write an essay? Doesn’t matter because I don’t need to 61. Have you ever had problems falling asleep in class? Yes, actually. It always took me way too long to fall asleep in class. 62. Have you ever been on the barrier or front row at a concert? Yeah, that time @aturinfortheworse got hi fived by Jack Black at a Foo Fighters concert and I didn’t because I have little arms. 63. If you have a job, who is your least favorite coworker/manager? From my old job, my least favourite was probably one of my staff, Dave, because he was such a pain in the ass and always made problems and bitched about people and thought he could do my job better than me.

64. Are your parents supportive of you? Yes. My parents are pretty great. 65. How often do you take the train to go places? Whenever I have to go somewhere that’s not walking distance and not the airport (I bus to the airport)

66. What is the closest grocery store to your house? The closest big grocery store is Carrefour but I don’t go there because it’s right on the tourist strip.

67. When was the last time you colored with crayons? At a mexican restaurant in Panama City called Orale. The table is covered in paper and you get a pack of crayons. Keep in mind that this place is really really not designed for kids considering the amount of tequila they give you. When I went there at the start of my trip I was talking to a guy in Spanish but the music was too loud for me to hear him properly so I just handed him a crayon and told him to write it down. It legit took me over an hour to realise he was hitting on me...

68. Have you met anyone famous? Just at conventions

69. Do you have any special talents? I am weirdly good with money. I can be on the exact same salary as someone else, have more bills to pay than them and somehow I’ll still always have more money than them. I don’t even necessarily hold back in my day to day life. I don’t know how but money stuff just always seems to work out well for me. I suppose that’s a talent. A very useful one.

70. Have you ever been to a nursing home? No

71. What kind of job did your mom have when you were growing up? She had a few different jobs here and there when I was a kid, mostly in retail I think. But when I got to highschool, she went back to college and studied her ass off and now she does really well as an architect (side note: I accidentally wrote arquitecta which is spanish) and she loves her job. It’s great to see her succeed. I’m very proud of my mama.

72. Have you ever known anyone that’s been on TV, including you? There was a guy that came like 3rd or 4th on The Voice a couple of years ago that I went to school with. I also went to school with a girl who now has like 3 olympic gold medals for swimming so presumably she was broadcast on tv.

73. What was the most interesting animal you have seen in the wild? One time an echidna literally knocked on our door. I’ve also seen dingoes, sea turtles, goannas, baby foxes, koalas, kangaroos, wallabies and so much more because I grew up in the Australian rainforest. More recently, I saw sloths.

74. What was the first video game you ever played? Crash Bandicoot 2 on playstation1

75. What is the one thing you own, that if it got lost, you would be bummed? My passport because it would be expensive and a pain in the ass to replace.

76. What do you find yourself buying all the time? Flights. Haven’t bought any for a while though because I’m running out of money.

77. When was the last time you got a real letter in the mail? A few months ago from my health insurance company.

78. Were you born in the state you live in? Not even close. Firstly, I live in a province. Secondly, I was born in a county.

79. What is your favorite cheese? Probably camembert or brie. I like those soft cheeses. Also a big fan of feta.

80. What color are your jeans? Black. When I travel, I assume people think I only have one pair of pants when in reality I’ve probably got 4 pairs of black jeans on rotation that are not the same at all.

81. Do you get embarrassed when the buzzer at the airport goes off on you? I always dress so that it won’t go off. Except one time back in aus I had to go to the domestic airport and go through security to drop some documents off with one of the bosses on his flight changover and I completely forgot I was wearing steel capped boots and was so confused when it went off.

82. What does your last received message say? “NOICE”

83. What’s a smell that makes you feel ill? Puke

84. Have you ever deliberately tripped someone? When I was ~14 some boys at school were playing some tackle ball game thing and one of them ran right by where I was was so I stuck my leg out and tripped him. He got up and kept running. I hobbled to a seat, half thinking I’d just broken my goddamn ankle. It wasn’t broken but it did swell up so much over the next couple of hours that my friend told the teacher and they forced me to go the first aid room. Then my shin/ankle got the most colourful bruise I’ve ever seen in my life. I wish I had photos of it because it was fucking spectacular. I think the last of the bruising took about 3 weeks to fade.

85. Do you have any boxsets for TV shows? I had the boxsets for Buffy and Angel but I gave them to Mum when I moved

86. Are you tired? Usually

87. What was the last TV show you watched? Luke Cage

88. Is your door open right now? No

89. What was the last conversation you had with someone about? Whether I should agree to look after someone’s cat for a week

90. What was the last parcel you received? Probably a tshirt I ordered online a few months ago

91. Is the person you last messaged single? They both are, yes.

92. What color is your favorite bra? Red

93. What is the newest addition to your wardrobe? A red tshirt with little white birds on it

94. Do you have any currency that’s not your native country’s? I currently have 7 different currencies on my shelf, and I had 4 others when I was in Australia

95. Were you messaging someone right before you fell asleep last night? No.

96. Did you have any unread messages when you woke up today? Yep - it was a photo of their cat.

#Other potential survey titles:#4 pairs of black jeans on rotation that are not the same at all #Yep - it was a photo of their cat.

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tipsbyfarah · 7 years

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The healing phase

After a long and painful journey in so many jobs with so much hostility and losing myself along the way, the next period was labeled with my emotional numbness.

Here I must say this is a soft spot about me, I get emotionally attached easily to jobs, tasks and work. As far as I was concerned, everything was personal all the time.

Saying goodbye on the last job was weird, I felt differently, it was my choice to leave that horrible place, yet it did not really felt like much of a choice I have made too.

I wished so bad for my career life to surprise me, you know, I kept waiting for the plot twist. It gotta get better from here right? I mean it certainly could not get any worse.

Rock bottom my friends, I have hit rock bottom.

Everywhere I went, friends and family would ask the same question, are you working now? Where? I was always in between jobs, getting fired from one or leaving another. And the thing about this question was, that I should not have to explain myself or my choices.

I can’t share what I have been through casually, so I have made fun of myself, and enjoyed couple of laughs at my own expense, I mean why not?

Someone told me that the greatest people are those who don’t take themselves seriously, at that point, I did not know how to perceive myself at all.

My best friend at the time asked me to try Reiki magical healing powers. I told her: Girl, am not gonna pay money I don’t have for some I don’t even know to tell me stuff I already know!

Speaking of rock bottom, yeah it was dark, I was angry, sad, depressed and taking it all on my self and those around me, continuously wondering what’s the point of my life?

Every job experience that had added value to my skills, have harmed my soul in even bigger ways.

I have mad a decision to not work in start ups or with Bahraini managers. Enough was fucking enough.

My cooling off period was not long, in the same week I got two calls around the end of September 2013, One from an insurance company about a graduate development program and the other was from an amazing agency called 4Spots.

The insurance company called first, I googled, liked what I have found to begin with, I was aiming to join such a program since before I have graduated.

I went to the interview with the recruiting specialist and the former Head of HR (many he RIP). It was a very short and brief interview, but it was enough to show me that even in my state of despair, there was still hope.

The Head of HR asked me for the reason I left mum last job, I stumbled for few seconds and I said: well, I haven’t received my paycheck for few months. And as I went on to explain further he raised his hands and he said: well, that’s a reason enough for me.

They told me that they are meeting other candidates and the process will include a second interview and a test. The program was set to begin on Jan 2014.

I read about the company more and the first batch of the program, but eventually decided to not keep my hopes up.

Later that week, I got the call from 4Spots. The vacancy was Social Media manager, before I applied, I consulted google of course and I did my own Linkedin stalking of the staff.

The more I found out about this group of people and this (at the time) 6 years something agency the more I liked it.

It checked both items on my list: - Not a start up - No Bahraini managers

As a bonus point, the location is in Amwaj island, literally 10 minutes from home *yay Me*!

I met with the manager who had explained the role to me and the agency’s culture and basically what to expect working here, I loved marketing and been involved in social media as tasks from previous jobs, it was more a chit chat than an interview. I told him I knew Zainab Al Arab from uni, was not sure if she would recognize me, he encouraged me to greet her and talk to her, which I did.

The atmosphere was comforting, nice it smelled of freedom, intimacy, trust and mutual respect. Most of which was strange to me in a work environment.

The more I read and found about it, the more I wanted to join the team, but, you know me ( did not wanna get my hopes up).

Later that week I was offered the post and I happily accepted. Yes, I was confused and filled with what if the insurance company called? What would I do?

But there was still a long shot, I was not sure of my chances, and here, God had offered me something that matched my requirements 100%.

My heart told me to take the job and I listened. I started working at 4spots.

I was shy at the beginning, observing my surroundings and the way people dealt with each other. I still do that, I give myself the chance to know the best way to deal with each different individual.

It was an open space, all of us sharing huge tables sitting next to each other.

The client I was assigned to work with was a local bank, the team wanted to hire a local person that can better understand and relate to the bank culture.

I was happy. I loved the open free way of running the tasks assigned to you and the lack of micro management which is essential for one to be creative.

One day at a time, the team grew on me, strange feelings of comfort, job security were introduced into my vocabulary. I was learning from everyone everything I can about team work and my specific role.

I enjoyed long existential conversations with people from different backgrounds and interests.

Previously I have had issues with managers who don’t set boundaries with their employees, but this was not an issue at all, respect was the foundation and trust was given to each person. Everyone would do their work cause they loved what they do, the managers did not have to impose respect, respect was already there accompanied by the trust and care they show to all of the employees.

This place have taught me how to regain my dignity that I have lost and how to respect myself all over again.

I discovered Amwaj island and Muharraq with them in a way that I have never done before.

Because of this safe calm creative passionate environment I have found my way to the old me that I have lost for struggles and hostility of my old jobs.

One of the rituals there was “groove time” which is basically allocating the last 2 working hours of Thursday for a speaker that could be one of the team or an outsider, the topics were different and doesn’t necessary have to be related to work.

One of the employees had a presentation - if I remember correctly - about the affect of spoken words on people. And when the female co-founder\manager asked about whose turn it is to do a presentation next week I raised my hands cause I was interested at the time in similar subjects, I still remember the look on her face, she was surprised, I was still the new girl in the team, I told her I want to do something about the effect of the body on the mind. She accepted.

That was the real me, passionate about work, team spirit and presenting things.

The company wanted to register me at GOSI, but I was still registered under my old employer, which started a series of emails between me and my old employer as they were dragging this simple task for reasons beyond my comprehension. When the secretary called me, she told me to was related for my late paychecks that they had to pay me as I was under the sponsorship of ministry of labor and they had to pay me first before officially terminating my employment.

When I went there to sign the papers. I was perfectly calm knowing I have moved on, I was in a better place.

One afternoon with the team around tea, smiling at each other, exchanging stories about work, clients and life on lunch time worth more than all the dark months I have lived before.

My client was a tough one, we made a plan and I had to prepare the content on a weekly basis to be approved by them in addition to their events and national day holiday posts.

I attended few meetings with the team some for my clients, some for theirs. The place was always busy and the door is open to welcome friends, previous employees, clients and everyone!

At the beginning of my second month there, the manager told us that one of the groove times would host Waleed Hashim, Reiki master.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the same person my friend has previously suggested I see about my rock bottom and I refused.

The irony of this was just too much when I told her she said: God has sent him to your work place cause you have to listen to him whether you want to or not.

The second month was as great as the first month if not better. At this point I managed to get to know most of the team members and that was such a comfort while dealing with my client, their impossible requests and the restrictions they imposed on social media, I guess they have never received the memo about social media being a fun medium!

Anyways, one day I was working on next week content, I had my headphones on, completely indulging in the task. When suddenly the busy office sounded through my loud headphones strangely quiet.

I left my head up to see the whole team observing me, I had a mini heart attack, got embarrassed and laughed and they were laughing even louder. My face was tomatoe red.

I did what I always do, I was humming and singing along to my playlist and they were observing what they later told me my soft voice and my oblivion of the world around me. Someone told me they thought it was music played.

On that day my heart was both happy and aching, I related to my old job when the same thing happened and they reported me to the manager and did not have the courage to be hostile and hateful to my face in contrast to all of this love and acceptance I was overwhelmed with by this team.

I was on the verge of tears, the comparison was painful but at that very moment I knew that coming to 4spots was not random or a coincidence.

That was God well for me to purify my soul from all the dark places I have been.

The more I got to know the team, the wider I felt my heart open and my mind expanding and I found myself calling this place the home I belong to.

On Waleed lecture, he introduced Reiki and energy along few cosmetic rules. He said the life you want is the life you have blessed and lifted, and you will never get what aspire to get unless you are perfectly content with what you have now.

I was in a fun phase of my life, beautiful place, beautiful people. So, I got a call for the second interview from the insurance company.

Yep, Waleed called it first , be happy and content, things will fall into your lap ! A week after the interview I was informed that I was chosen, I was suppose to be happy about this right? I mean it was the DREM JOB. Well, I was not.

For someone who was not me, the choice was obvious, but for me it was not.

I was finally in a good place, I was healing, yeah I had a tough client, yeah the offer was tempting but I valued my new found inner peace over everything.

No one could relate to my struggle to make a decision. Stay or leave?

I knew a girl from the first batch of the program so I reached out for her and asked her about the work environment, culture, people and all that mattered to me the most. Will I fit in?

When we ended the conversation, I knew I had to make the difficult call. I talked to the manager about this and gave him my one month notice, I was aching inside, I was not completely sure but when things fall on your lap, you should follow through right?

I was anxious about this conversation and he surprised me as the main concern he had was if I truly wanted to join insurance? Was it something I am excited and happy about?

He asked me to keep to from the team and he will tell them after the national day holiday. Well since it was a secret, people started to find out one at a time.

My brain at the time still did not have adjusted as quickly as my heart, I still expected the worst so I expected a mean reaction about me leaving in three months time, but I was far from right. They were beautiful inside out, each and every person.

The last few weeks were special, in a place who loved caked and celebrated everything I had the pleasure of celebrating Christmas with the team before I was waived goodbye with a cake.

I ordered cake in jars for my last day for the whole team to say thank you for the encouragement and the beautiful experience and the impact they had on my journey.

I still have the team card from the goodbye gift they gave me hanged on my mirror “ You will always be connected to us”

Now, while reflecting on my past life, I know for sure that 4Spots was an important and vital phase for me.

I owe them so much for the healing energy they bestowed upon me and allowing a smooth and assuring transition for me to the corporate world.

Thank you team for Everything 💜

Love, Farah

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matargashty · 7 years

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Blue Whale Challenge not a game but a death trap

Blue Whale Challenge

The Blue Whale Challenge assigns daily tasks for 50 days that include inflicting self-injury and watching horror movies. On the 50th day, the admin asks the youngster to commit suicide.

Blue Whale Game: It must be noted, however, that there still is no confirmation of the existence of the game, and suicides linked to it are from personal accounts of families/friends of those deceased.

The reality behind the theory of killer game ‘Blue Whale’

The Blue Whale game or Blue Whale Challenge is believed to be a suicide game wherein a group of administrators or a certain curator gives a participant a task to complete daily — for a period of 50 days — the final of which is the participant committing suicide. Participants are expected to share photos of the challenges/tasks completed by them.

These daily tasks start off easy — such as listening to certain genres of music, waking up at odd hours, watching a horror movie, among others, and then slowly escalate to carving out shapes on one’s skin, self-mutilation and eventually suicide.

There is still uncertainty over how a participant plays the game. While some say the user has to install some app on their smart phone, others say it’s via social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook where the administrators get in touch with the participant after those interested throw out postings on social media asking for a “curator”. A number of different hashtags act as signals for the anonymous curators.

It must be noted, however, that there still is no confirmation of the existence of the game, and suicides linked to it are from personal accounts of families/friends of those deceased who claim they have seen their loved ones performing tasks. While reports of suicides linked to the game have surfaced across the globe, authorities claim that the origin appears to be in Russia, which has reportedly seen about 130 related deaths and at least two arrests.

Schools as well as police officials in Europe and America have begun issuing advisories to parents urging them to be vigilant and to keep an eye out on what their children are sharing on their social media accounts.

DOWNLOAD BLUE WHALE GAME (SUICIDES) CHALLENGES (TASK)

Blue Whale is the world’s largest living animal. The largest blue whale ever discovered is 108 feet long that mean it is bigger than 3 large school buses and same size of a passenger plane but this is an animal and we are not here for it. The reason behind making this post is a game and its name is Blue Whale Game. I hope all of my friends probably know about this game if not then don’t worry TechkyUniverse is here to give you each and every detail about blue whale game.

What Is Blue Whale Game ? It’s a game !!!

It’s a Russian game made or created by Philipp Budeikin. The blue whale game is launched in Russia in 2013. Blue whale game known by many languages like “Wake up at 4:20 am, “F 57” and much more. In this game, the player has to complete 50 tasks given by admin of this game. After completing all 49 tasks, the 50th task is to kill yourself.

How Blue Whale Game Works?

This game works by chatting with admin and player for an example if you are playing blue whale game then the admin will contact you on chatting application like WhatsApp, Facebook or messenger. He will give you 50 per tasks to do (1 task per day) and would say to show me proof of that task.

A teen boy comes across the online game, The Blue Whale. He is given one challenge after the other. He accomplishes every task and keeps on moving to the subsequent levels. The final and concluding challenge asks him to commit suicide. He clicks himself on top of a building and jumps. If police speculations are to be believed, this is what led to the death of the 14-year-old Mumbai boy four days ago. This is the first death in India, which is being linked to the infamous Blue Whale game.

from Matargashty http://matargashty.com/blue-whale-challenge-not-a-game-but-a-death-trap/

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Miley Cyrus and Her Minstrel Show

Miley Cyrus on stage during her “Bangerz” tour (photograph by Karina3094 via Flickr)

Why bother being disgusted by Miley Cyrus? I ask because there has been a deluge of recrimination hurled at her for the Billboard magazine interview in which she is said to have thrown hip-hop under the bus by remaking herself as a homespun country girl reaching out across the partisan divide to speak to supporters of the current president. Her transformation has even been called creepy. Reading through all the revulsion, what emerges for me is an uncomfortable, but relatively obvious truth that has both little and everything to do with Cyrus: that hip-hop culture is — in its mainstream, highly commercialized versions — precisely constructed to be a kind of costume one can put on and take off. That young white pop stars take on persona associated with people of color and shed them at will should not surprise us.

Sherronda Brown describes what Cyrus had done as a kind of minstrel show, concluding that “The ease with which she is able to achieve this almost seamless transformation is evidence for why cultural appropriation is a form of violence.” This seems more heat than light. But given this allegation, I have to remind myself what precisely a “minstrel show” is. There isn’t clear consensus on how it was structured, but there is broad agreement that it was a national art form that existed in the early years of the twentieth century and consisted of white people in makeup, or blackface, performing the role of blacks. There was often dancing, an exchange of jokes, singing, speeches and slapstick musical skits or satiric interpretations of popular plays. It was a kind of entertainment that was rooted in white supremacy and schadenfreude — demeaning others to secure and confirm one’s place in the social hierarchy while finding pleasure in all that. However, looking at what Miley Cyrus has done, I don’t see that kind of willful humiliation, but rather a kind of mercenary American calculus for achieving success: to pick up the traits, styles, and dress of a group with which to identify to profit from that identification — emotionally, socially, financially, or in terms of cultural capital. Cyrus took one of her star turns via hip-hop because mainstream, commercial, hip-hop dangled from populist, overly-produced videos is a culture that is the coin of the realm. There is at least $10 billion to be had.

MIley Cyrus in an earlier, more PG phase (photo by Mike Schmid via Flickr)

As pointed out by Chelsea Stone at Teen Vogue, Cyrus sliced into this pie, collaborating with hip-hop producer Mike Will Made-It on her 2013 album Bangerz, and has previously working with Snoop Dogg and Timbaland. More than her working relationships with hip-hop producers and rappers to identify with hip-hop, there was the costuming and performance: the bandana ties around her head, the twerking, the wearing of gold fronts, the sneering and throwing up gang signs, and the crotch grabbing. This playing dress-up has (rightly) earned resentment. As Dodai Stewart writes about Cyrus, “She can play at blackness without being burdened by the reality of it.” So Dodai makes it seem that Cyrus is slumming: hanging out for the weekend, getting her crunk on, only to get sober later and show up respectable to wherever she is expected.

But while her behavior is racialized, and exists within a long history of whites taking advantage of black culture, borrowing and stealing it for profit (I often think of that record producer who once said that the success of the Doobie Brothers was based on them being white men who sang like they were black), this is also an American issue: we reinvent ourselves all the time. Think of Don Draper, the main character in the TV series Mad Men — a man who reinvent himself with the theft of someone else’s name. Perhaps because the origins of our reinvention are so ugly and the theft so blatant, in the new iteration of ourselves we often express disgust and horror about who we were.

How Cyrus’s influences have been interpreted (image by Mariah McKenzie via Flickr)

But that appropriation is carried out by an entire culture, so when a white woman apes the hard-won inventiveness and discoveries of black people, many of us are livid. Some are made even angrier when she disavows the connection. In the infamous interview Cyrus says, “I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock’ — I am so not that.”

Still, I don’t see how is this violence — that is in the typical usage of the term to refer to the use of force to hurt, harm or kill, to use something with destructive intent? That accusation assigns to Cyrus much more malevolence than she has shown. She’s a 24-year-old pop singer who was a child television star and grew up in a family headed by a celebrity musician. That may sound like a delicious cocktail to drink, but I know it’s poison, and she drank it for a long time.

Now she insists, “The fact that country music fans are scared of me, that hurts me. All the nipple pastie shit, that’s what I did because I felt it was part of my political movement, and that got me to where I am now. I’m evolving, and I surround myself with smart people that are evolved.”

Of course, she’s said that hip-hop pushed her away, though she willfully associated with the Dirty South/crunk sort of hip-hop, the kind that is associated in the popular imagination with drug dealers and pimps and strip clubs. There are many kinds of hip-hop that are much more politically active and aware, such as “Alternative” and “Conscious” rap. She chose something else because it was profitable and maybe even fun to play in the dark.

Miley Cyrus performing in Vancouver in 2014 (image by Rob Sinclair via Flickr)

I think we waste time and energy denouncing Miley Cyrus. I don’t think it’s worth writers, fans, and cultural critics being angry now, when she was doing this several years ago, as if hip-hop — and by extension black people — have been demeaned and worse still, abandoned because Cyrus has moved on. Black culture is much wider and deeper than commercial hip-hop; they are not synonymous. It’s a mistake to buy what it’s selling: that it is representative of some deep black authenticity that gets eroded every time a white person adopts its language and tropes. Long ago it became a commodity in a culture that thrives on commodity consumption and presumes we are smarter because we are nimble, eclectic, and constantly in motion flitting from taste to taste.

The hip-hop of Snoop, Ludacris, Timbaland and others who are similar has long showed us that its culture is structured to allow a few people to profit extravagantly from it, precisely by copying the tropes and styles of the genre. Even Snoop complains that most rappers these days sound the same to him. However, he’s only apparently referring to the top of the food chain — the commercial acts — and isn’t cognizant of hip-hop’s underground, or its international following.

Miley Cyrus during the “Bangerz” tour (photo by Karina 3094 via Flickr)

Cyrus does not lend credibility to hip-hop, nor can she take it away. When she says, “I like to surround myself with people that make me want to get better, more evolved, open. I want to be super clear and sharp, because I know exactly where I want to be,” that is not a betrayal as much as a change of lanes for a millenial who understands lane changes to be necessary to get where you want to be.

Why should we care what she does? She is both warm and indifferent simultaneously, the definition of millennial coquettishness: “This record is a reflection of the fact that yes, I don’t give a fuck, but right now is not a time to not give a fuck about people,” she says. “I’m giving the world a hug and saying, ‘Hey, look. We’re good — I love you.’ And I hope you can say you love me back.”

Yes, this is ridiculous, but no less ridiculous than the brand of hip-hop that said we could pretend our way to stardom — fake it till we make it. And now we can’t help but fake it.

The post Miley Cyrus and Her Minstrel Show appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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alisteningjournal · 7 years

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Last week, on the suggestion of a journalist from Australia, I listened to “The Radicalisation of D” while having breakfast one morning.

This track is haunting–– I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and have listened far more times than (strikes me as) healthy. It is the blackest shade of black; a modern day horror story or an episode of The Twilight Zone without any punchline. At sixteen minutes, it’s offensively long for a song that’s a few notes and chords that alternate back and forth, performed only by a guy and a guitar.

Guy + guitar is the most elemental form of our conception of popular music. There are, when you think about it, really only two modes of musical performance: times when there is a central performer, and times when there isn’t. Pop music is (mostly) the former. Instrumental music: jazz, jam bands, post-rock, string bands, orchestras (in other words, niche genres that appeal at their core to other musicians) are the latter. (We’ll ignore electronic music today, which seeks a third place, where the music comes from no one and nowhere, but often just ends up hovering between points Y and Z).

The point being that in popular music there’s always a story, because at the center of what you’re consuming is a singular person. Whether the story is true or not, is connected to that person or not, it exists, because that person is opening their mouth and using language. Language creates images. We attach ourselves to the images in order to make sense of our lives.

The guitar remains static throughout the piece. It seriously doesn’t change at all. Maybe at some points Liddiard strikes it a little harder, plucks with more vigor, but ultimately, the music is not the driving force here. Intonation and storytelling are essentially the main focus of “The Radicalisation of D,” like the rest of Strange Tourist. The intonation is one long rise, from a soft, almost spoken monologue to the very last verse, where Liddiard is howling so hard that you can barely make out what he’s saying through his West Australian accent.

The words meanwhile are the hook, snaking back and forth through ominous images that squirm with tension one moment and then seem to release a second later, only to come alive again in the next line. This excerpt from the end of the first verse, when D is a young boy, is a good example:

They find some car keys, Go outside and search a V8 car And there's a Beta tape in a brown paper bag, Hid under a seat, Hit play on the VCR machine And start to hear flute music Now there's two girls on a farm somewhere, Playing with a labrador Which rolls onto its back, like it has Been through this before and It's the last time D hears flute music, The last time he thinks about girls He sneaks home about 10 o'clock Gets inside using the dog door

In one memorable moment, D finds a King Kong doll on the side of the road after he gets sent home from school for throwing rocks at a girl he likes. He picked it up, and “it roars ants when he shakes it,” so he throws it out.

The arc of the song is a progression on this theme. Think of the opening scene of Blue Velvet, after Jeffrey’s father collapses on the front lawn, when the camera zooms into a nest of insects swarming in the grass. The repeated message that Liddiard hammers home is “there is a sickness underlying everything,” from ants and tape worms to institutionalized racism.

II.

On April 16, 2013, I took the subway into downtown Boston. The green line was closed beyond Hynes Convention Center, so I got out and walked along Newbury Street. The barricades that had been erected along Boylston Street for the marathon were still there. Police in neon yellow jackets milled around behind each one.

I had attended college in downtown Boston for four years and a month before graduation, someone bombed the city’s banner event. I already felt like the world was ending; this didn’t help. Though I had recovered from the depression that had plagued me for much of 2012, I was burning out hard as the end of my formal schooling approached. I’d given everything I had for twenty-two years. I needed to rest.

As I approached the Common, I saw the news crews. They had set up along the entrance to the Public Garden on Boylston Street, trying to get a tiny sliver of the distant Copley Plaza, where the bombing occurred, into the frame.

I was a journalism student. I’d come downtown to find some kind of work to do, to be useful. I went to the college radio station. My friend Henry was there, along with the new director he’d begun a fling with several weeks earlier. She was tense, maybe because she was trying to produce news breaks under pressure, maybe because she was trying to produce news breaks under pressure with Henry lounging around, or maybe because the city where we lived had been bombed less than a day before.

She and Henry were talking about what the tape they’d managed to get. They were juniors, still a year from graduation, and I felt like there was something vaguely unrealistic about the way they talked about it, like this was another assignment they were trying to score highly on.

I knew right then that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. I can’t remember if I said much of anything, but I know I didn’t stay long. After I left, I walked up Huntington Avenue to avoid the news crews. When I’d reached the other end of reflection pool outside at the Christian Science center and I sat on a grassy strip that looks out onto Massachusetts Avenue and began to cry. I felt like I had no idea what I was doing anymore. I was horrified by everything that was happening. Five months earlier, I’d sat in the same newsroom while news broke about the massacre at Sandy Hook; five months before that, the Aurora Theater massacre. Without noticing, life had become a bloodbath broken only by long stints of sleepiness in which I was absorbed into other things.

The morning of the bombing, Sheep had slept over. When we woke up, we watched five minutes of the marathon and then disconnected the Internet, declaring it “for losers.” She worked on a school project; I washed the back deck. It was spring time, we had each other. No matter how scary the future seemed, at least we had each other.

Then, the panicked calls from friends and families. We plugged the router back in. We sat there on my futon just going over update after update, unable to turn away. Sheep asked if it was a terrorist attack and I said, “don’t say that, we don’t know yet.” I saw a picture of a man in a wheelchair with the bottom part of his legs blown off–– just sticks of bone where his calves should be–– looking dazed like I felt, like I would feel for the rest of the week.

There’s a moment from the “The Radicalisation of D” that clicked with this period this morning. After D is expelled from school, a man steals an APC and drives through the streets of Perth.

Channel 7 gets the scoop again, There's a man gone crazy He stole an APC from the army base And closed down half the city D's been expelled from school and he's quite happy Staying in bed He keeps track of all the updates, Surfing networks instead This tank arrives at police HQ about 8am It makes pancakes out of 5 or 6 patrol cars and then Runs out of diesel near a Castrol service station And there's a standoff Then he's teargassed and Not heard of again

The end of that week, while Dzhokar Tsarnaev was hiding in a boat in a backyard Watertown three miles from my apartment and waiting to die, I was awake from two in the morning until they arrested him at six that night, following EVERY SINGLE UPDATE on my laptop. At a certain point, the reputable outlets couldn’t keep up with my voracious need for information so I began to look at Reddit, where people were throwing around possibilities about what was going on, armchair investigators had their scanners tuned to police bands, and everyone was engaged in an act of digital nail biting.

I wonder now how I can square this person addicted to the violence with the person I was earlier in the week, a journalism student who felt to fragile to be a journalist. Without a doubt, that week affected my course in the last four years. I haven’t found a real journalism job since.

III.

When I first heard “The Radicalisation of D,” I was reminded of the song “Oh Comely” by Neutral Milk Hotel. “Oh Comely” is also just a guy and a guitar. (There some horns at the end, but ignore that for a second.)

In the 33 1/3 for In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Kim Cooper recounts the recording of that song, which was just Jeff Mangum alone on a stool with an acoustic guitar. The rest of the band, along with everyone else in Rob Schneider’s house, had been crammed into the console room and watched him––improbably–– lay out the whole fucking song in a single take. Cooper points out, and I’ve confirmed, that at the end of the song Neutral Milk Hotel horny player Scott Spillane can be heard in the background shouting “HO-LEE SHIT!”

When I first began learning guitar, I would practice with songs I knew that were two or three chords, like “Oh Comely.” I never managed to pull that song off in front of anyone because there’s a ferocity to singing it. You can’t do it while trying to imitate Mangum’s intonation. You have to feel out the expression of each syllable and make it into your own.

I have not tried to play “Radicalisation of D” but I can tell that it’s a similar challenge, complicated by Liddiard’s thick West Australian accent that renders words in a warped, chilling, shivers-down-my-spine sound. In that very last verse, when Liddiard let’s out a heavy “Cliff has a beautiful WYYY-FFFFE” it’s with the intensity of Jeff Mangum singing “We know who our enem-eeeees AAAAAARRRRRR.”

It’s also in moments of restraint: “be proud of me my son, ‘cause I am finally off the fags,” “something inside D finds all this very, very strange,” “he’s got pictures of Adolf Hitler, antique copies of Mein Kampf,” “he finds five Valium in a Winfield pack, in a duffel bag in the hall.”

The theme of the repulsive darkness, or the ugliness, underlying contemporary society is not new: alienation is one of, if not the, defining them of Modernism and its subsequent movements. What strikes me about “The Radicalisation of D” is that it is a story about how a person becomes aware of that lurking sickness within all things, and the life he lives as a result of it is off-screen, written in the history of the guy with the guitar.

Most of the scenes in the song, the severed Kangaroo leg, the doll roaring with ants, the bestiality tape, the old black alcoholics in the park, even Werner the Jew Burner, are taken from Liddiard’s life and reconfigured with an eye towards understanding a person like David Hicks, an Australian citizen arrested and imprisoned as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo Bay.

The depressing series of unfortunate events that make up D’s life are the radicalization, and the songs final image, of the burning twin towers seen on television, is the catalyzing moment.

It may have been the catalyzing moment for me, as well. Before the Boston Marathon Bombing, the only other terrorist attack that even pinged my radar was 9/11. That day, we were called into the cafeteria of my school before recess and told that a plane had struck the Twin Towers in Manhattan.

“But,” the principal said, “no one’s sure just yet if there’s been an attack, it might just be an accident.”

At lunch that day Henry (a different Henry), said when I asked why kids were being taken out of school that day, “because parents are worried that the school might be a target.”

My own father didn’t pick me up until after the school day ended. I went home and sat in the TV room on the white couch, watching CNN for what felt like the first time. There were the images we were all familiar with of greasy black smoke billowing out of buildings, matched with new names like “Al-Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden.” I see myself as though I were outside of my body at the time, not in it: I’m laying on my stomach, my mouth twisted into the sad grimace that Sheep knew how to defuse so well with her intimacy. But this was nearly a decade before I’d meet Sheep.

My dad came into the TV room: “Everything ok Till?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I understand it’s upsetting.”

I don’t remember much more comfort than that. I’ve never known how to express my emotions.

America talks about that day as the end of an era where everything felt safe. I don’t know if I see it that way. I still felt safe, certainly, for most of my adolescence, or at least I remember a feeling of safety...

But I also feel just barely conscious of a kind of dark, horrible life hiding in the world around the safer, more comfortable one that I have lived in. Were it not for a supportive family I myself might be living a very different life at this very moment. There are people like D alive this very moment, people who walk the edges of our comfortable world and can see its sickness. Yes, they are depressed, but they are depressed because they see all the darkness, and none of the light that comes from human relations.

I think that I’ve been so stuck on “The Radicalisation of D” for the last week because it’s where I’m at right now. I feel vulnerable. And when I’ve felt vulnerable in the past, I too have wondered if there isn’t someway to feel less vulnerable by transmuting it into righteous fury. One of the few write-ups that exist for this song posits that it, “dares to suggest that [people drawn to terrorism] might be right.” But no, that’s not wholly correct. That’s the marxist filter looking a capitalism and saying, “you did this, you made us this way.”

Gareth Liddiard is not so politically ideological, at least not in “The Radicalisation of D.” As he repeats throughout the song, “you are living in a nightmare that you can’t bribe your way out of.” I keep returning to that line when my mind is at rest, whenever I’m feeling particularly harried. No, I’m not going to spend my way out of the rut int dirt that puts me up close and personal with the disgusting looking things underneath every day life. But how?

The answer to this question seems to be in who you surround yourself with. D himself has no one; emotionally stunted and abused, the only friends he seems to feel uncomplicated about are the alcoholics in the park.

But look at who D is now: he is Liddiard. A man who, while I can’t fully judge his happiness from knowing so little about him, seems to have a stable life. A girlfriend he loves. Work that allows him to explore the darker things that trouble him in a (what strikes me as) healthy way. I always fall back to something that John Darnielle (yet another guy with a guitar) once said, or quoted: “we don’t write to remember, but to forget.”

For more information on the content of “The Radicalisation of D,” refer to this line by line breakdown by Gareth Liddiard (via the Wayback machine).

#the radicalisation of d #gareth liddiard #strange tourist #boston marathon bombing #terrorism

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