#its super cool if a... meatier

[monstermaster13]

Don’t Be A Moron On The Internet.

Once there was a league of really horrible people known as the League of Idiots, these guys belonged to a website called Moron-Barn, a website ‘dedicated’ finding out lulcows and making them look like idiots when in actually they were the idiots, sometimes picking on people that didn’t deserve it in the slightest such as Mariana Hanks who they kept shaming and misgendering even though she had the right to use male pronouns because there was no rule that said she couldn’t use those pronouns.

The members consisted of PutridKid…an ex super-sidekick who was a grotesque subhumanoid with puke based powers, Baconator whose only power was turning into bacon that was extremely burned, Rock-Hard-Arby whose only abnormal trait was that he was cursed to have skin that constantly cracked like it was made of marble, and Skroat Sneeb…who had only had one power and that power was very much just being a walking sex joke. These guys very much hated Mariana for being different and picked on her for being interested in weird things, their biggest forum thread was nothing but old screencaps of her comments that they took out of context.

One night Mariana decided she had enough of being treated like well…you know, by them and decided she wanted to get revenge so she called on the powers of darkness, the darkness influenced her and turned her into a being that could punish them for their actions, she used her supposed real form to fool them, looking as gross and ugly as possible. After posting a screencap from last year, Skroat was about to find out just how wrong he was…’This post from a year ago is from a video that is a repost of a video that doesn’t exist any more but that doesn’t stop me from saying how I like that she admits to being crazy yet she gets offended at being mispronouned. Male is a sex.’

Skroat of course was ignorant and he didn’t think that it was right for a woman to use male pronouns, but because he had been taught to be a biggot by the others. ‘You’re a woman, yet you use male pronouns?’ ‘There is no law against that but there should be one against you.’ Mariana responded. ‘Well too bad, huh?’

That’s when he knew he screwed up, as Mariana’s eyes glowed a supernatural greenish glow and she transformed into her actual real form which was more attractive. ‘Gotcha. That short, dumpy hairy form of mine…yeah, that is a disguise to distract you from what i’m actually like.’ ‘So that ugly form is a disguise?’

She smirked as she looked over at him…’Since you like to misgender me and you think that digging up my past is cool, how would you like to see what it’s like to be female? Since you’re not going to do anything good with your current form how about I give you my ugly form?’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ before he had the chance to even react he heard a gurgling sound coming from his stomach which inflated and developed some hairs on it, as the hairs travelled up his arms which also broadened as his hands shrank in shape but also became a bit meatier as his fingernails lengthened.

The hairs also spread onto his legs which contorted into a more womanly pair as two round formations slowly blossomed on his chest which formed into bossoms that were at least more than two triple C cups, and he also gained some pimples on his back, as he gained some furo n his body as well.

He groaned as his rear plumped up, splitting his ratty jeans down in the middle and making them into shorts as his feet shrank and enlarged, he knew now that he messed up and he tried to take back his words, but now the words of ‘if she didn’t comment on it, she would have been forgotten very easily’ were echoing in his mind and making his mind react to this, now the male pronoun ‘he’ didn’t seem right to ‘her’. She groaned as her shoulders retracted in size and her neckline altered, her hair turning from its ratty auburn color to a dark brown and growing messier as she developed pimples on her face while her eyebrows thickened and her nose enlarged, her skin became softer and paler too.

She didn’t recognize herself anymore…as she found herself starting to think that she was Mariana and this was natural, ‘Skroat’ sounded like a name someone who was trying to be gross was using, ‘Mariana’ looked at herself for a bit as her features warped to look like the real Mariana’s ugly form. Her privates retracted but she didn’t need those anyway, sex was never an issue to her as her voice changed, and developed a British accent.

She looked a bit like a humanoid gorilla but she didn’t mind, she didn’t care for beauty, she was now Mariana and she was okay with that. Meanwhile the real Mariana turned to PutridKid who seemed to be hyperfixated on cows…’Oh you like cows, huh? Well then..how do you like this?’

Mariana clicked her fingers and as she did, PutridKid noticed that creme-ish fur was creeping up his arms which were bulking up, and then he felt a tingling sensation in his hands as his fingers hardened and fused together, resembling flexible hooves more than hands as his stomach enlarged, causing several of the buttons on his shirt to pop up and one of his jean buttons also popped off too as his legs enlarged.

“Am I turning into a cow?”

“Well actually not just any cow…a certain cartoon cow.”

He gulped as his privates retracted and he saw four nipples of sorts forming below his stomach which formed into teets, which formed into an udder which burst the front of his jeans open, exposing his new udder to everyone. His whole body slowly gained weight with each passing minute, making him heavier and heavier and making his clothing tighter and tighter, finally..with a rip his pants tore off, exposing his much rear and udder to everyone who was watching him and laughing.

But that wasn’t all through, he noticed his legs altering too as his socks ripped open to allow his feet to alter, becoming hooved feet to match his hands as a tail like that of a cow emerged from his rear. He panicked as two brown spots formed on his back. Two short yellow horns emerged out of the top of his head as his ears became bovine-like, his eyes widened as his face slowly pushed into a bovine muzzle…even though he was a cow, he could still talk and was intelligent, but his voice altered and changed…to sound like Charlie Addler doing a female voice, as he or rather ‘she’ at this point knew who she was becoming, she was becoming Cow from the Cartoon Network show Cow and Chicken.

PutridKid…or rather…just ‘Cow’ now cried out but she found it wasn’t so bad as she forgot all about being a part of Moron-Barn and just remembered being a lovable sister to ‘Chicken’ and a ‘fairy princess’. ‘I am sorry for what I did. I didn’t know.’ ‘It’s alright, you made a mistake and bet on the wrong side.’ Mariana turned towards Baconator, who seemed to be trying to demean her.

“Oh so you like trying to roast me, do you?”

“Uhhhh…I don’t know, yeah…I do.”

‘Well since you like roasting pigs so much, how about you actually become one?’ She concentrated her dark powers on him and she did, Baconator found himself bloating up as his skin turned a much pinker than normal tone, he looked at his chest and he reached out to touch it only to found two round formations slowly developing on them, blossoming out into what was commonly known as breasts.

He panicked as he looked at his hands which had softened, his whole body plumped up as his clothing contorted into a glamorous blue gown and a mink coat as his hips flared out, his back arched as his hips flared out and his feet slowly became two-toed trotters that could still fit in shoes, as his shoes became a pair of red sandals. He panicked even more as his privates retracted. But the panic began to subside when he heard the word ‘Piggy’ in his head, which made him think differently about this situation, or rather ‘Miss Piggy’ because he began to think he was this ‘Miss Piggy’ in question.

His neckline altered as his hair lengthened, turning from brown to blonde and growing down to his shoulders as his ears shifted to look like those of a pig, eyelashes blossomed around his eyes as eyeshadow was applied around them and his eyes in general turned blue, his nose enlarged and began to reshape itself…his face pushing into a cute sort of half porcine snout/muzzle as his voice feminized, inside his mind the name ‘Miss Piggy’ was echoing and now that’s when he realized, he wasn’t born a he…but a ‘she’, she was now Miss Piggy, then again she had always been Miss Piggy. Miss Piggy looked at the clothes in her ‘former self’s’ wardrobe and threw them out. ‘Ick, how passe and gouache. I can’t imagine anyone wearing these in public.’

When her transformation finished she felt much better and she apologized to Mariana..’That was terribly rude of me to judge you based on what you like. Please forgive moi.’ ‘No worries, I forgive you.’ Mariana hugged them and then used a spell to vanquish the forum thread all about her to the forum graveyard, where it was buried and then taken all the way up to forum thread heaven where it was allowed to rest in peace and move on.

“Thank you for understanding…”

‘And now there’s one more thing left…’ Mariana concentrated as she shifted in form once again, this time turning into Demi Moore and using a spell to erase her ugly form to make it so she never had that form. ‘This is much better. I hated that ugly form anyway, it was too short and I couldn’t show off how awesome I am in that form, too short and hairy for my liking. Now this is way sexier, this is my new natural form. But that doesn’t mean I cannot be male if I want to, oh no.’

And thus with that Mariana had finished what she had set out to do as the rest of the MoronBarn admins and members eventually found out what appeared to their ex-members and got transformed as well, rumor has it that some of them went into hiding afterwards after the site got found out and reported for being a den of harassment and everything-LGBTQIA-phobia, and another rumor has it that the head admin in charge of the site already had left this universe long before it started.

Like with all stories here comes a vital lesson, remember..if you ever try to dig up a dead forum thread by using screencaps that are of a post from a year ago and if you ever try to attack anyone for identifying as another gender or even another species, there will be hell to pay, anyone can use any pronoun, a man can use ‘she’ and a ‘woman’ can use he or even they, and there is no law that says that he or she can’t use pronouns that fit them.

[lich-slap]

Not to get into any of the discourse right now (The post I just rebloged says my opinions on the topic better than I ever could) but, can we appreciate how great it is that Misfits and Magic won't be D&D? (it will be a system called Kids on Brooms)

Look, I love 5e, I really do, and I've always loved bending genres. Buuut a lot of D20's campaigns would've been more interesting game-play wise if they were done in another system. (Like actual murder mystery-rpg Mice and Murder would've FUCKED, y'all).

In the Q&A its said that from now on the campaigns will have "the game system best suited for that season's story". And that's so cool!!!! A major actual play like D20 switching to what will possibly be mostly indie games???? That's fucking huge!

There are sooo many cool indie TTRPGS out there! I hope we get an all magical-girl season with Glitter Hearts! And I get chills just thinking about what a Brennan Lee Mulligan City of Mist game might be like (though since it is a majorly urban fantasy setting, I'm unsure if it has a chance :()

It's really nice to see D20's push for more diversity in the industry go beyond casting and crew to the actual systems being used. It's something we can't get from other actual plays (on the regular, at least) because of contractual obligations. WoTC has ruled this industry for too long! There are other games!

#dimension 20 #im sure future seasons of fantasy high/unsleeping city will keep 5e #and maybe new seasons will have 5e too! who knows! #but for now I'm glad to see a change of pace #'there are other games' I say as a High Fantasy nerd who DMs 5e and plays Pathfinder 2e #pf 2e isnt indie exactly but I will take a moment to shout out it here #it has a more robust rules system and more developed interplanar lore than 5e as well as a ton of variation in classes and races #its super cool if a... meatier? gameplay experience is what you're going for and 5e homebrew isnt cutting it anymore #on the other hand if you think D&D is too complex I've heard wonders about A Dragon Game! #hmm if you reblog this give a shout out to a non-D&D system you think should have more recognition #maybe we will manifest it into D20 together #misfits and magic #the unsleeping city #a crown of candy #mice and murder #fantasy high #tiny heist #escape from the bloodkeep #brennan lee mullingan

[chubbydrawer]

Polar Trouble

Tom had been looking forward to this all week! He always loved going to the zoo and seeing all the amazing animals! He always wanted to work there too but it was a long distance so I sadly didn’t see that happening anytime soon. Tom was a 21 year old blonde with blue eyes and fairly lean with a bit of muscle. His hair was short and swept to the side. His skin fair with light hair on his body. He always dressed in plaid button ups red being his go too! And always paired it with some straight cut jeans and converse! He looked good and he knew it! He arrived at the zoo parking lot and walked to the gate,handing his ticket to the clerk. He walked in seeing all the amazing decorations in the zoo! It was near the holidays and was a nicer winter day unusually in the 50s it was a perfect day to walk and see the animals! He rand to the first exhibit and stared at the amazingly huge wolves prancing around showing off to the public! They were so so beautiful! Wolves were his second favorite animal! His first being ....BEARS!!!! He got soo excited! He loved bears sooo sooo much! They were big and fluffy and he always wanted to hug them! He practically ran to the exhibit showing off different types of bears! He first saw the beautiful grizzly chowing down on some grub. He looked happy and stared at Tom for a second. It was almost as if he gave him a wink! He moved next to his favorite bear! The polar bears! He loved them for their beautiful white coats and great swimming ability! They looked so friendly and cuddly! But when he arrived at the display...they were gone!

“What! Where did they go!?”

One of the workers there came up to him, he was clean cut and maybe late 20s. He had a mini paunch and a nice trimmed mustache and green eyes matching his chestnut brown hair. “Hey bud! Sorry to burst your bubble but the polar bears won’t be displayed in their habitat today, they are getting check ups right now.”

“Awwww man that’s a bummer, they are my favorite things to see in the zoo! Maybe next time I guess.”

He started to walk away when the worker called out to him

“Hey buddy wait you a second! I’m not really supposed to do this but I know where the polar bears are housed right now which isn’t a bit behind their habitat! I can take you there real fast if you want a quick look at them!”

“ Oh my god really!!!? Thank you thank you sooo much!”

“It’s no problem it sucks when you can’t see your favorite animal and travel all this way!”

“ it def does, Tom btw!”

“Nate! Nice to meet ya!” He holds out his hand and Tom shakes it firmly.

Ton follows Nate to the back room and they open the door to a room with big cages filled with big comfy beds and food and water. And there were the bears! They roamed casually around the cages getting food and resting!

“Wow they are soooo beautiful! They are even bigger uo close!”

“They certainly are! It’s a pleasure working with them! They are all super friendly and playful!”

One of the bears came up to the cages shoving their nuzzle through the bars and licked Tom’s arm. He giggled at that

“Wow they are friendly! I wonder what it is like to be them. Just chilling everyday and swimming and being big!”

“Are you sure you’d want to find out what it would be like?”Nate smirked.

“ well duh!wouldn’t it be cool to become and animal you loved whenever you wanted!?”

“ I suppose it would be pretty neat! Want to check out one of the cages? It’s pretty big and comfortable I’ll show you how we designed it!”

“Sure!”

Tom walks inside before hastily hearing the cage door shut behind him! He runs back putting his hands on the bars!

“Hey what are you doing!?” Just then Nate pricks his finger with a needle!

“OW what the hell!”

“I’m gonna help you live a fantasy!”

“What are you talking about!”

“Just sit back and enjoy the ride bud!”

“What ride? Let me out!”

Tom suddenly began to feel funny. He got super warm and began to sweat. “Wha-what’s going on! D-did you drug me?” He felt a tad woozy.

“No Tom I just gave you a simple prick. It does have side effects however!” Nate couldn’t force back his smiled he grinned ear to ear looking at Tom’s belly.

Tom looked to where he was staring and yelped! His once flat stomach was pushing into his button up making it tighter and tighter! He hesitantly touched it expecting it to be bloating but his fingers winked into his soft flesh. He shrieked once more and felt it surge forward more, further tightening his shirt.

“What did you do to me!”

Nate didn’t reply just stared at Tom drooling! He watched as his belly swelled even bigger now starting to make the space between his buttons gap. His pecks also started to soften more becoming plumper and soft to squeeze. Fuck he was swelling with fat! His now basketball sized gut blended with his lauded forming love handles stretching wider over the sides of his pants. His pants got tighter and his belly pressed into the button of them. He felt and he grew a fat pad, it pressing into his jeans. His thighs filled the space quickly making his pants tighter and making them make audible groans of being stretched too tight.

“My my what a fine specimen you are!” Nate snickered

“”Please, stop this!”

“Why? Then fun is just beginning!!

Tom watched as Nate shrank smaller. He looked up to see Nate wasn’t shrinking, he was getting taller! The fat piled on as he grew 6 foot and the 7 feet tall. PING!!!! PING!!! PING!!! His buttons popped off his belly one by one as it release his belly from its confines sending it surging down with a jiggle, the force popping his pants button off! His hands we bigger and looked much meatier! His nails also looked longer and more sharp! His converse were growing uncomfortably tight. He flexed his toes and as he did so giant feet ripped out the front! He stuck his foot out and noticed it was gigantic and covered in fur. It look like a paw! He shrieked again bumping up against the cage wall! His body shook as he grew thicker. RIIIIP! His ass burst from the seat of his pants as his thighs ripped open the seams, his body was much hairier now! Patches of white fur sprouting out of the rips and tares. He watched as his belly grew furrier and whiter. His big moobs quickly bursting the last of the buttons releasing them to sit on his giant gut. His face got rounder and his neck thickened. Looking at his hands he saw they were full on paws with pads and big claws! He watched as his nose and mouth uncomfortably pushed out in front of him creating a muzzle. He screamed loud, his voice deeper and raspy! His duck pressed through his pants growing bigger as well as his balls to match his bigger size. A tail sprouted above his giant ass and the fur quickly covered what bare skin was left. He stood there now a full sized fat polar bear in only his underwear and a shirt only hanging by a thread.

“What have you done!” Tom’s voice bellowed!

“Don’t worry it’s reversible! I wanted you to fulfill your dream of being big and cuddly! Now you are the very thing you love!”

“I-I like it but I don’t want to live in a zoo forever!”

“I have a proposal for you!”

“What is it.”

“How about you be like this for three days to get comfortable I’ll change you back and we can find a more easier way for you to switch from human to bear whenever you want! It’s more of a spell that gives you the power to do so! You can live in a dorm with me and work here! Sometimes as a person and other times preform as a bear!”

“Sounds intriguing. You sure I’ll be able to switch whenever I want?”

“Of course we have another guy here who loves being a grizzly, he was out earlier today. May have gave you a wink!”

“This is crazy but-I’m in!”

Nate opened the gate and walked into the cage and gave Tom a big cuddly hug! “Welcome to the zoo fam big guy!”

Tom blushed and felt his own fat furry body! He could get used to this!

#chubby #maleweightgain #fat #bigboy #gainerart #exjock #big boy #curvy #thick #oc #bear #beartf #beartransformation #furrytf #fatfur #polar bear #polar bear tf

[bryanastar]

Editing is Hard: Writing Update 10

Howdy Tumblr! Happy tenth writing update! If you’ve been following this blog from the start, you’ll have seen my journey from starting a novel, to getting stuck on said novel, to abandoning said novel, to writing short fiction, to getting said short fiction published. I don’t know why I’m so grooved by a tenth writing update, but I just think it’s cool.

Anyway, this is not a blog post about my writing blog. This is a blogpost about my writing progress, so let’s get on that!

Novels:

I didn’t any novel writing last week, but I did make a cool book cover.

Short Fiction:

My main project over the last week has been trying to get a short story of mine edited. It’s been hard without any outside critique, so I’ve had to rely on pure intuition to get it done. Now, editing a short story often means breaking said story, causing it to look worse before it looks better, so currently, my story has actually come undone once more and I have to refinish it.

Mostly, I’ve been working the flow between the meatier sections of the story and the points in between that serve as the connective seams. The individual sections of piece itself, I feel, are really well written, but as a whole cohesive piece, they feel to me a bit stitched together. The seams are all obvious to anyone taking more than a cursory glance, basically. Once I finish this edit, I will hopefully finally be able to send it out for publication (though I might have an outside reader look it over before I send it out). I’m super excited for this story, since I genuinely feel like it’s one of my best, and I see some great potential in its future!

That’s all for now. See you next week Tumblr!

#teen writer #creative writing #writeblr #young writer #writing #writblr #short fiction writing

[cuttlefishkitch]

hello! i haven't talked to you before, but ron said that i could ask you for some advice on writing eds? (i'd like to know things to avoid/common things that could come up in everyday life that would be good to mention/the sort of aids and stuff they'd have maybe?/anything else you think is relevant)

Hi! Sorry this took so long, a combination of ADHD and chronic pain slowed me way the fuck down. Thank you for being patient! 

EDIT: WEIRD HEEL THINGS I FORGOT!!

So, before I get into this I should probably say I technically haven’t been diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS for anyone reading) because it’s one of those syndromes that takes forever to get diagnosed with (it took a friend of mine’s mother over 30 years to get dxed). Many doctors, and everyone I know who does have EDS agree with me that it’s probably what causes my chronic joint pain and some of my other chronic issues. But just because three separate doctors have said “Yeah Probably” doesn’t mean I’m diagnosed!! Only a geneticist can do that!! And they had two-three year waitlists BEFORE the apocalypse happened.

I am diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), Small Fiber Neuropathy, and potentially misdiagnosed with Fibromyalgia (once I get properly tested for EDS I might get undiagnosed with this because I don’t have most of the main symptoms of Fibro, but I got diagnosed with it anyway because it’s what doctors misDX you with when they don’t know what’s wrong with you and don’t want to do more tests).

All that said, I’ve done a lot of research about EDS (mainly because it’s the only thing that explains all my symptoms since doctors seem incapable of doing so), and know a few people who have either confirmed or suspected EDS, so I’ll link to some stuff, talk about the symptoms that often come with EDS, explain how the symptoms I have affect me, because just because someone’s not diagnosed doesn’t mean they aren’t having symptoms, and probs elaborate a bit about writing physical disabilities and chronic pain in general because it’s super important to me! 

So RESOURCES aka how to make sure your post never sees the light of day because you’re linking things and tumblr hates it when people give other people information!!

Youtubers! If you want to know about the day to day of living with EDS or any disability or chronic illness I super suggest finding a youtuber that makes videos about their life. My EDS favorites are

Jessica Kellgren-Fozard

Annie Elainey

Amy Lee Fisher

Websites! If you’re asking random folks on tumblr I’m assuming (and hoping) you’ve already done the basic WebMD google searches and looked over the seemingly ridiculous lists of symptoms and related conditions, so here are a few websites that are made more for people than for doctors.

The Ehlers Danlos Society

OhTWIST (That’s Why I’m So Tired)

ChronicPainPartners (the fact that they have an entire section of articles called “Dealing with Doctors” should really tell you something)

Books! If you feel like doing actual reading! I suggest reading books written by people with Ehlers Danlos, to get a feel for how they portray themselves. I’m not saying steal, but it’s probably a good point of comparison to see how your portrayal feels. (haven’t actually read these b/c my ADHD doesn’t let me read)

Ria Ruse by Morgan S. Ray (a superhero book with a disabled super MC!!)

Mysteries of Maybelle by Imani Benfell (Imani is still in high school and has already written and self-published a book cause she didn’t have enough representation for herself how cool is she!!)

Bodies in Motion by Liana Brooks (tw for pregnancy problems and miscarriages in the link, because it’s a blog post talking about integrating EDS symptoms into the story without explicitly naming them as such)

OKAY, now for some rambling about EDS SYMPTOMS!!!

Ehlers Danlos is one monster of a genetic condition in complexity and variety. There are THIRTEEN different identified types of EDS, it often comes with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and/or POTS, and can lead to various other conditions like gastroparesis, chiari malformation, craniocervical instability, and/or bad teeth. So if you’re going to be writing a character with EDS consider what other comorbid conditions they might also have. I’m mainly going to be talking about Hypermobile EDS (hEDS) because it’s what I probably have and what I’m most familiar with. That said there is a lot of overlap in symptoms with the other varieties.

I started typing this section and realized I was going to have to break it down even more so we’re going to talk about Chronic Pain, Unstable Joints (Dislocations and Subluxations), Skin Things, Mobility Issues, and Other Weird Shit and how those things get addressed separately.

Gonna get the Other Weird Shit out of the way first. Because EDS is a malfunction of connective tissue it can fuck up all sorts of random things. For instance, I and many other people w/ hEDS have trouble swallowing. Shit gets stuck in my throat, I sometimes choke on and have to cough up food, and pills can be hard to swallow, which sucks cause I take A Lot Of Pills. If it doesn’t cause full-on gastroparesis it can cause IBS or other digestive problems b/c the digestive tract is mostly made of connective tissue. It can potentially cause heart problems even if they aren’t as big of a risk as in some other forms of EDS. Premature osteoarthritis is common because what you need is more joint pain. And Fatigue OH BOY THE FATIGUE. And of course the headaches, can’t forget those pesky migraines can we!

AND piezogenic papules!! I completely forgot!! Piezogenic papules are little white bumps that appear when you put weight on your heel. In some people they hurt, but in others they don’t. They’re technically tiny little herniations of fat peaking through the fascia in the heel. They were added as part of the diagnostic criteria for hEDS in 2017!

Now for Skin Things cause it’s not as big a thing in hEDS as it is in other forms. Basically, in a lot of forms of EDS, the skin is extra stretchy and extra delicate. It bruises and tears easily, people with the extreme versions of this can accidentally scratch something into an open wound if they aren’t careful. My skin is pretty soft and sensitive, I def have the typical velvety skin, and as is pretty par for the course of someone with hEDS my skin is a little stretchy, and sorta delicate. I’m not as tissue-papery as some people get, but I almost always have at least one mystery bruise or scrape b/c existing is hazardous. Most of scars are also pretty normal, unlike the extremely papery and atrophic scars (though I have a few tiny acne scars that are atrophic) that are common with other kinds of hEDS. Something that I DO have is Lots of Stretch Marks, all over my thighs, and even down to my calves. Which wouldn’t be abnormal, except for the fact that I’ve never been over 145 lbs and I’ve never been pregnant. Having a lot of stretch marks or striations in the skin without due cause happens because the structure of the skin isn’t as strong as it is in people with a normal amount of connective tissue.

I don’t have to worry as much about my skin but people that do are usually very careful with adhesives because they can irritate or tear the skin, which sucks when you need a lot of bandaids cause your darn skin won’t do its job.

Now on to the meatier stuff and since I’m mostly working backward let’s do Mobility Issues!! These can happen in loads of ways, but a lot of what causes these in people with EDS are the other two things I wanna talk about. Unstable joints lead to increased risk of injury when doing stuff people with fully functioning joints can do.

For context, I’m an ambulatory wheelchair user, meaning I can walk, but a lot of the time it’s better if use a chair. Mine is mostly for my POTS symptoms, but the fact that my legs aren’t also in absolute agony is a big plus. I use a custom manual wheelchair with a SmartDrive (b/c I’m very fucking fortunate and have good insurance) whenever I leave the house and have to be “walking” for more than a few minutes at a time. I can’t fully self-propel in a manual chair because it would be damaging to the joints in my arms and hands, but the smaller chair is easier to maneuver in less than accessible spaces (like almost everywhere). There was about a month-long span where I used a very cheap and very bulky electric chair while I was waiting on the ideal set up I have now. Before that, I also briefly used, and sometimes still use, an up-right posture cane.

People with EDS have widely varying mobility issues because of how uniquely it can manifest. My cane only gave me a little help with balance because if I used it in any prolonged capacity any pain it took away from my legs was relocated to my arms, and as an artist, my arms are more important to me!

If you’re going to write a character with EDS having mobility issues as a result of their EDS the best thing to do is to narrow down their specific needs. Are their knees complete and utter garbage but their shoulders and wrists strong? Maybe they can get away with using a cane. Can they not stand for longer than 5 minutes because of the vertigo from their POTS? Maybe they need a manual wheelchair. Would propelling themself damage their back and arm joints? An electric chair might be necessary! Plenty of people with EDS use all sorts of combinations of these aides to get around their life, consider how your character’s good and bad days would be. Do they have back up plans if they overestimate themselves? There can be a lot to manage, but don’t let it scare you off! Sometimes I try and make it into a resource management game (because I’m a game designer and that’s what I do), to make evaluating my energy and mobility needs more fun!

But now let's tackle some of the reasons those mobility aides might be needed. Unstable Joints.

Ever stepped wrong and rolled your ankle? It hurts for a few steps and then kinda fixes itself, or maybe it bothers you for the rest of the day and you put it up and ice it when you get home? When I was walking around outside my house that would happen AT LEAST once a month, usually more. Some times I’m sitting wrong and when I get up my knee isn’t a knee anymore and decides to just give out from under me. My knuckles are made of unruly popcorn and they Don’t Want To Stay Home!! Oh! And my shoulder is more often out a little out of its socket than it is fully in.

Unstable joints lead to Dislocations and Subluxations of varying intensity, and some people get them more frequently than others. Some can be severe enough to necessitate hospital visits and even surgery, some subluxations are so banal (like my fUCKING SHOULDER) that you just learn to live with the pain.

If a character is going to be in high action, combat-heavy scenarios, chances are they’re going to be popping out joints left and right. Hell, depending on the severity of their joint laxity they could be doing the same sitting at a desk. Again, it’s incredibly varied. I’d suggest setting some sort of baseline for yourself, of what a character’s joints can and can’t stand up to, and maybe do some research on which joints are most likely to pop out in general (hips and shoulders are big culprits being the wacky ball and socket motherfuckers they are). Then maybe have something pop out or hold up every so often when it shouldn’t cause hey! EDS is kinda just like that! Unpredictable!

Some ways people manage joint laxity is with braces, KT tape, and physical therapy. Braces come in many different forms, since I’m currently getting pretty much no treatment for my shitty joints I use mostly compression braces made for sporty people. It really is amazing how much a bit of tight fabric can do to keep my wrist in place.

More specialized braces often have solid parts to prevent the joints from hyper-extending (bending the wrong way) and causing further damage. If you ever see someone with what looks like diamond shaped rings around a bunch of their finger joints, chances are those are Ring Splints, and are there to keep the finger shaped like a finger. I want to get my hands on some and get some on my hands Very Badly, because my fingers hyper-extend SO MUCH when I type, and it makes my hand pain way way worse.

KT tape is another thing people often use. It’s stretchy tape you put on your skin and it basically functions kinda like a second ligament as well as reinforcing the joint and keeping the bones mostly where they’re supposed to be. The problem with this is a lot of people with EDS have very sensitive and fragile skin like I mentioned before, so KT tape can cause allergic reactions, chronic skin irritation, or just straight up take the skin with it when someone goes to remove it. Hence a lot of folks are really careful with it.

Physical Therapy is kinda the best (and only) treatment for joint laxity aside from Very Invasive and sometimes Highly Experimental surgery. It focuses on strengthening the muscles around the joints so they can do the work all those bone ropes made of body glue can’t. The problem is finding a physical therapist that 1) knows what EDS even is, 2) knows you have it, and 3) knows how to treat it without doing stuff that’ll Phucking Hurt You Worse!! Because exercising wrong with EDS can do Permanent Damage!!!

Again most folks use a combination of all of these things, or have next to no access to them b/c healthcare sucks.

Anyway, on to one of my favorite topics, Chronic Pain!! One of the reasons this post took me so long!!!

Chances are if your character has chronic pain as a result of their EDS there are gonna be some things they hate, including stairs, rain, thunderstorms, stairs, hills, uneven terrain, oh and did I mention stairs??? It’s going to vary person to person, but almost everyone I’ve met with pain from EDS has complained about their knees. For me the most debilitating pain is in my fingers and wrists. They’re by far my least stable joints but I use them constantly for stuff like drawing, typing, and sewing.

Because my joint pain is so wide spread, like most people’s with hEDS, it effects every single part of my day to day life. I can’t carry a heavy ceramic plate, open a bottle, or even use my computer without pain. It’s practically impossible for me to get comfortable in any position be it sitting or laying down, and as you can imagine that makes it hard to sleep a lot of the time. Moving too much hurts, but so does sitting still. I’m constantly taking braces on and off or cracking/stretching my joints so they pop back into place and hurt less.

Also being in pain makes everything else That Much Worse. I get tired way faster than I did before my pain was this bad (I had chronic pain for a while before actually realizing it wasn’t normal to not be able to walk down the block without feeling like your foot bones are trying to escape). My sensory issues and anxiety disorder are more easily aggravated because my base level of comfort is way worse. It fucks with my depression. And OH BOY does it make my ADHD worse because being in pain is fucking distracting as hell and makes it harder to make decisions and switch tasks. Also my ADHD often makes my other symptoms worse cause I forget to take my meds, don’t drink enough water, or can’t find my fucking braces because the item eating black-hole that comes with ADHD stole them. The intersection of mental and physical disabilities is probably a rant for another time though, so back to chronic pain.

Does it suck? Yes, undoubtedly. Is this incredibly debilitating? Of course it is, I spent the last several months unable to feed myself without assistance because there was a staircase between my room and the kitchen and I could only manage to climb it once a day. Is it overwhelming? Definitely, I’ve frequently broken down crying from a combination of pain and frustration because I’m having a bad day and there’s no relief to be found. Am I able to predict when it’s going to rain with uncanny accuracy because any change in barometric pressure makes me feel like every bone in my body is trying to kill it’s neighbors? You bet your fucking ass I am!! Does it sometimes make me irritable, angry, and occasionally dismissive of when abled people get cold or a temporary injury because the stuff they’re complaining about is my life every single day and all avenues of treatment and recovery I have could take years and still not entirely solve my issues? Yeah, and while I deserve a little extra patience I also have to be sure to check myself because I don’t want to turn into someone who’s nasty to be around. Do I sometimes need to sleep for 17 hours straight because it’s raining, I have migraine, and I’m in too much pain to be conscious? Yup, sometimes a few days in a row. Does living in constant pain mean I’m unable to do all the things I want to and does that sometimes make me wanna curl up in bed and never leave? Yeah, it happens.

But! And here’s the big important but, that’s not everything! I still write, draw, and talk to my friends!! It might take me a little longer but I get there. I’m still happy and excitable and make the time to write out five page long posts about EDS because it’s something I’m passionate about! My chronic pain doesn’t stop me. I refuse to let it. I never really wanted to go mountain climbing anyway, so I’m perfectly happy being able to make it up and down the six steps in my house, even if sometimes I have to sit and bump down them on my ass, or crawl up them like a cat. Chronic pain isn’t all I am. It isn’t a fate worse than death. It isn’t the only thing your character should talk about (though I do talk about my pain a lot cause I’m a complainer about almost everything). You can have your character be hindered by their pain, realistically they would be. You can have them seek comfort, support, and relief. Other characters can commiserate and be sympathetic, but it doesn’t mean their whole life is going to be one big pity party, that would be incredibly fucking boring. I know I’d be bored out of my mind.

All that said dealing with chronic pain, especially from EDS, is Complicated. Physical Therapy is the gold standard, but like I said before it can be a long and difficult process, and isn’t always accessible. Stabilization methods like I talked about before can help prevent pain, or reduce it by keeping bones mostly where they belong. Heat and cold help joints, relax muscles, and reduce inflammation but keeping them applied is rough and the relief doesn’t always last. Doctors prescribe anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and sometimes even anti-epileptic medication to help manage pain, but everyone’s mileage with those varies. And I’m not at all qualified to talk in-depth about narcotics or other heavy duty pain-meds, but suffice to say the war on drugs fucked shit up for people that legit need that kind of help BIG TIME.

Now for my closer/bonus rant about EDS and Disability Writing in General!

Everyone always says write what you know, so if you really want to do disabled people justice, get to know disabled people! Make friends with disabled people, get involved with advocacy groups, consume content made by disabled creators both about disability and not! Disabilities are so fucking diverse, even EDS is such a complex disorder, and comes with so many potential co-morbidities, that practically everyone with it has a unique experience. There’s no way I can fully explain everything in a tumblr post. Hell, even if I could talk to you for hours probably couldn’t give you enough info to answer all your questions (especially since I’m still in diagnosis hell :,) ), so talk to a wide range of people with EDS and other disabilities!! I know it sounds like a lot of work but trust me, disabled people are some of the strongest, raddest, coolest, people you will ever meet that it won’t feel like it.

And don’t be afraid either, the fact that EDS and other disabilities are so wildly varied means that you have a little bit of wiggle room with your character’s experience. There’s so little disability rep out their I think people are WAY to scared to try their hand at writing it. So long as your character is a fully developed person in addition to being disabled, you give some logical thought as to how it would affect their life, and you don’t make their disability the butt of any joke it isn’t difficult to avoid ableist writing. PLEASE WRITE MORE DISABLED PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC PAIN/CHRONIC ILLNESS!!

Okay that’s it, again sorry it took so long for me to get back to you! My fingers were being little pests about it, and my ADHD (which is honestly more disabling than everything else a lot of the time lmao) was being an asshole! Hope this helps, and feel free to ask me more questions if you need clarification! It might take me a bit but I do love talking about this stuff.

#neela-chaan #ehlers danlos syndrome #EDS #hEDS #hypermobile ehlers danlos #disability #writing advice #disability writing #Chronic Pain #asks #SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG IM JUST SLOW #also i'm sorry the formatting is such a wreck #my adhd won't let me go back and fix it #and i've already spent way too much time

[guitarsreview]

The best Guitars ever

 Fender’s newest Strats and Teles  may not be as exciting or revolutionary as Chevy’s new Corvette (which has been around about the same amount of time), but I’m still incredibly impressed how Fender manages to provide a fresh spin on those electric guitars every few years or so. And they manage to do this without sacrificing the essence of those models too, so they appeal to modern players and vintage purists alike.

The new American Performer series is a great example of how they approach this, providing performance upgrades that expand the tonal versatility of classic models like the Strat, Tele, Jazzmaster and Mustang, while keeping original features that got it right from the beginning.

The American Performer line is true to its name. The guitars are made at Fender’s Corona, California, factory and are designed with the needs of gigging guitarists in mind, from playability and versatility to cooler-than-usual styling.

Even better for working musicians in today’s challenging industry conditions, the models are all impressively competitively priced, even though they offer a multitude of custom upgrades that most competitors would sell for a pretty penny extra.

Features

Selections for the Stratocaster HSS consist of 3-Color Sunburst, Aubergine (both with rosewood fingerboards), Black and Satin Surf Green (both with maple fingerboards), while the Telecaster comes in Honey Burst, Satin Sonic Blue (both with rosewood fingerboards), Vintage White and the incredibly cool shiny copper Penny (both with maple fingerboards).

The real beauty of these instruments lies deeper than their striking looks. Both feature newly designed Yosemite single-coil pickups that blend Alnico 2, 4 or 5 magnets in various installation positions, which are shellac-dipped (as is the case with many '60s Fender pickups) for open-sounding tone, and wound to provide optimum tone for their respective positions.

The Stratocaster HSS has a Double Tap humbucking pickup at the bridge with a coil-splitting function that is engaged via the lower tone knob’s push/pull pot. Both models are equipped with a Greasebucket tone circuit that maintains gain and clarity when you back down the Tele’s master tone or the Strat HSS’s bridge tone controls.

Playability and performance upgrades to both models include 22 jumbo frets installed on the necks, which have a 'Modern C'-shaped profile, 9.5-inch radius and satin finish. New ClassicGear tuners provide an ultra-accurate 18:1 ratio and super-smooth feel.

Today's best Fender American Performer deals

Purists and perfections will particularly appreciate the elements Fender didn’t change. The American Performer Telecaster has a vintage-style 'ashtray' bridge with three brass barrel saddles, which Tele enthusiasts insist is essential for definitive Tele tone.

The American Performer Stratocaster HSS has a six-saddle vintage-style synchronized tremolo bridge, and the late-'60s/'70s-style oversized headstock is a welcome detail for discriminating tone connoisseurs - just ask Jimi, Ritchie or Yngwie. Both models feature alder bodies as well.

Performance

The tones are ballsy and full-bodied, hitting the amp’s front-end with Manny Pacquiao punch and singing with Freddie Mercury sweetness. The coolest aspect about the Strat HSS’s pickups is that the output is perfectly balanced between the humbucker’s dual-and split-coil settings as well between the full humbucker and middle/neck pickups.

While the jumbo frets certainly measure meatier than typical medium-jumbo frets, they don’t feel overly big under the fingertips, providing satisfying fast and smooth action and maintaining body and sustain when pushing bent notes to the limit. The 'Modern C' neck profile is slim but feels substantial and solid in the player’s hands. These are some of the most comfortable stock Strat and Tele necks I’ve ever played.

The overall construction quality is immaculate and flawless. The necks fit super-snug into the body pockets, every screw is perfectly installed and the overall attention to detail is shockingly good for guitars in this price range - and beyond! Whether you’re looking for a first Strat or Tele or considering an upgrade, the American Performer series models are very worthy contenders.

·         New Yosemite single-coil pickups are individually voiced to each model and installation position.

·         The Greasebucket tone system maintains clarity and consistent gain no matter where the tone knobs are positioned.

·         The Stratocaster HSS has a DoubleTap humbucking pickup at the bridge with a coil-split function accessible via the lower push/pull tone knob.

·         The Telecaster has a vintage-style 'ashtray' bridge with three brass barrel saddles that deliver classic Tele twang.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Fender’s American Performer solidbody guitars offer gigging guitarists incredible value for a US-built instrument with upgraded features and classic essentials that discriminating players demand.

[figureinthedistance]

LOVED knives out. i knew i cld trust rian johnson!!!! i loved it so much. im like so ecstatic 2 see what 2 me represents the first good cinematic whodunnit since the 70s. the throwing up thing was silly + incongruous but ultimately wasnt used in any really annoying way. everything else was perfect. like i love the cozy mystery genre SO much + think it is rlly hard 2 translate 2 screen, partly bc visually communicating clues + stuff jst isnt as effective as having it in writing. but also bc of the complete disdain fr the genre so everyone who touches it feels like they need 2 either make it a satire or make it super edgy + grim + noir-adjacent. it is the stupidest fucking source material 2 use fr that! u cannot make poirot edgy! ok this is jst me ranting abt how much i hate sarah phelps but like yea knives out was great it wasnt abt satirizing or transcending the genre but it wasnt jst an unambitious homage either + where rian jonson made tasteful decisions 2 subvert tropes it was rlly effective imho. SPOILERS! going in w a very basic knowledge of the premise which was essentially "a rich old patriarch is murdered during a family gathering" (always a solid setting!!) i rlly did jst assume christopher plummer was gna be an asshole bc in all the other versions of this story ive read he has been i feel like. so i thought it was rlly nice making him a good likeable character. like jst 2 avoid relying 2 heavily on archetypes. + while the layabout entitled charming ne'er do well son who has been suddenly cut off from family funds IS very much an archetype, the fact that he wasnt given a redemption + the audience werent expected 2 be ultimately sympathetic was rlly refreshing. also it feels 2 reductive 2 call this a 'subversion' of the genre lol but the fact that it had a pretty clear + unpretentiously delivered political message was rlly interesting. jst bc in my mind murder mysteries are so completely reactionary + the fact this was based in a super rich family didnt reassure me they werent going 2 follow the formula of "the murder is the only issue in these ppls lives, apart from maybe some secondary petty grievances, + once the murder is solved order will b restored". but that was very much not what this film was abt! which was rlly cool + what i have always idealistically wanted from the genre. daniel craig was... fun. idk he was a real character study character but there wasnt enough space in the film fr that study. i think thats an issue in film as opposed 2 books in this genre that i so far have not seen surmounted. like its jst hard 2 buy in2 the gifted detective characters if u dont have the narrator spending pages describing their background, various idiosyncrasies + Redemptive Moments of Humanity. but it was a good performance + from what insight we were able 2 have in2 the character i liked him a lot. such a solid serial detective name as well!!! the plot itself was good but i feel like i wish there was some meatier red herrings + misdirects. again its difficult fr a film 2 have space for that, which sux, bc resolving red herrings is always the most interesting + satisfying stage in the mystery solving arc fr me . the last shot was... SO good i loved it so much. i jst loved how he embraced the technicolor goofiness of the genre.

#also the fact tht theres talk of a sequel may allow benoit blanc 2 flourish...

[recommendedlisten]

Recommended Listen has gotten into the seasonal swing of things when it comes to highlighting great music that didn't receive a proper review, may have slipped this sole scriber site by since the last solstice or equinox, or in the case of more complex artists like Björk and Fever Ray, just needed more time to digest on the senses. At this point in the year, it's especially been remarkable to see how many new efforts have been released in the days since every publication has already shored up their best album accolades. There's a solid argument to be made that calendars don't matter so much anymore (nor do year-end lists...), and that it's actually a great opportunity to grab listeners' attention just as the competition for it dwindles. Winter's a great time to catch up on all of that, so here's 10 albums to keep you company for when the weather outside is frightful.

Angel Olsen - Phases [Jagjaguwar]

Today, we known Angel Olsen as a shape-shifting indie rocking siren, but her master craft has seen her sound evolve significantly since she entered the music world’s conscious nearly a decade ago. As a collection of B-sides, rarities and covers spanning the course of her entire career, Phases is aptly titled in that it uncovers these hidden gems that span back as far as her days strumming sparse acoustic folk songs into a hollow space into tape, all the way to her fully formed My Woman sessions that left a couple of standouts on the cutting board. For the Angel Olsen enthusiast, it’s more than just a collection of odds and ends, as even the songwriter’s lost tracks are better than most of her contemporaries, and for the novice, it’s the perfect introduction that makes it easy to catch up on what one might be missing if they’ve not paid attention to her already. 

Björk - Utopia [One Little Indian]

Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura arrived in the dead of winter, and really offered no consolation from Mother Nature’s wicked ways. It was a devastating breakup album inspired by the dissolution of her marriage, and for the first time in a very long time since concentrating the past decade of her creative force on boundary-pushing sound into the future did we get to hear from a more human, intimately vulnerable side of her psyche. Its follow-up Utopia is the natural extension of the emotional wreckage Vulnicura left in its wake, but from a polar opposite end. The Icelandic alternative innovator jokingly has called it her “Tinder album” because of the way it finds her rediscovering what love is through the distracting noise of modern technology, and the validity of our emotions in spite of it. Putting the compositional purity of golden harps, flutes, and fluttering strings at odds with Arca’s deconstructed electro-pop sounds like a commentary on her pursuit for an inner Utopia, and her sung wisdom suggests she’s found it.

BROCKHAMPTON - Saturation III [Empire / Question Everything, Inc.]

Saturation III concludes a series of homemade mixtapes released by the rising rap “All-American boy band” BROCKHAMPTON throughout 2017 that increasingly along the way found the Internet-bred collective growing more confident in their rhymes, style, substance, and individual identities. By now, they’re no longer a message board secret, as we find them here coming to terms with that new found success in full bravado. Ringleader Kevin Abstract leads the circus by gussying up production in a way that branches he and the pack away from already-spurning sound-a-likes and even the hip-hop influences they looked up to two chapters ago by making their beats gleam in the spotlight, and every member an avenue to speak to it. In short, it’s got as many rhymes to celebrate with as it does to take seriously. For those who were trolled by BROCKHAMPTON’s self-made rumor that it might be the group’s last album, Saturation III instead makes its presence known like like their own take on “Auld Lang Syne”, seeing that 2018 should be an even bigger year for this crew of cool kids.

Charli XCX - Pop 2 [Asylum / Atlantic Records]

We may never get another proper full-length album out of Charli XCX again, but that’s alright if she continues to keep turning pop on its ear as she did throughout 2017. Capping off a year that included the SOPHIE-inspired twisted breakup mixtape Number 1 Angel and her standalone standout “Boys”, Pop 2 sounds like the closest thing to a culmination in the UK superstar’s pursuit of experimenting with style and substance. Its guest list features a who’s who of “it” makers (indie darlings Carly Rae Jepsen Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, rap and R&B futurists Cupcakke and MØ) on top of production PC Music’s A.G. Cook that swirls Charli XCX and friends in fizzy effervescence of big-hooked Europop, post-trap fog, and rave light dimmed down to the minimal. Its cohesion that pieces together Charli XCX’s most daring recent fashion statements, and leaves behind an icy cool sheet on the speakers that glistens with her star power.

Fever Ray - Plunge [Mute Records]

Fever Ray’s 2009 self-titled debut album contrasted what the Knife had made before it in its dense, dark matter, and focus on an electronic pulse that slotted her work in perfectly with the cruel witchhouse hunting of those times. The morbid creature Dreijer had created gave a visual alter ego to everything that her other work was not by indulging abrasive minimalist textures as frightening as the stage outfits Dreijer adorned when publicly supporting the effort. On her sophomore follow-up Plunge, Dreijar sounds as if she’s rekindling her spirit with what the Knife detached itself from in those final moments, however, in face-melting appreggios and staccato’s sputtering blood on the dance floor, without losing any of the grotesque, fetishizing spectacle of human error. With her electronic freak show, Fever Ray shines a spotlight on our sociopolitical climate -- A strange sexual tension that’s hard to fuck in, yet insatiably adventurous.

Gingerlys - Gingerlys [Topshelf Records]

In a vastly growing sea of dream-pop, it should be easy for any new artists to get lost in its waves, but Brooklyn quintet Gingerlys not only stand out -- They do so almost effortlessly on their self-titled debut. It’s a 30-minute breeze of melancholic euphoria framed in a colorful atmosphere of shimmering keys and the duality of crisp jangles and hazy reverb between guitarists Collin O’Neiil and Matthew Richards soaring over rough romantic tides on the shoulders of singer Jackie Mendoza’s clandestine coo. It’s dream-pop with a sparkling pep in its stride despite its faded reflections, and in the winter months when colder weather, shorter days, and being held captive by the occasional snowstorms if you so happen to live outside a sunshine state, their sunny melancholia is a suitable substitute for your vitamin D deficiency.

Glassjaw - Material Control [Century Media]

Most bands out of the early Aughts post-hardcore and indie-emo scene have made big ados about their comebacks for the sake of the cash grab. Material Control, the first new album in 15 years from seminal Long Island scene wrecking balls Glassjaw, really doesn’t need to preemptively bank on hype to get itself over, having initially dropped within days of its announcement and given even their loyalists no satisfaction in predictability. The effort finds vocalist Daryl Palumbo, guitarist Justin Beck and new-ish rhythm recruits in bassist Travis Sykes and drummer Chad Hasty accentuating the heavier -- albeit, weirder -- moments in their sound. While they’ve never really been of the more melodic ilk of post-hardcore, Material Control is a modern day reassessment of that in the way sludged riffs battle for space with meatier basslines, the occasional unattended live wire, and mathematical metal chaos. This is the kind of hardcore album that gives your brain a workout when the outdoors leaves your physical energy contained.

Lemuria - Recreational Hate [Asian Man Records / Big Scary Monsters / Turbo Worldwide]

For their first album since 2013′s listmaking The Distance Is So Big, DIY scene staples Lemuria went into business for themselves by recording the album in secret with just the faith of their fanbase (who’d pre-ordered something, but weren’t sure exactly what it was until it was announced) fueling the journey. The experiment is evident on the Buffalo indie-punk trio’s fourth full-length Recreational Hate. Here, they bridge together a happy medium between the super chunky pop-punk riffs of their early work and an adulting alt-country twang that finds a safe place for their music and their existential anxieties with Saddle Creek new schoolers Big Thief and Hop Along. Working with production pro Chris Shaw -- who has recorded in the past with Nada Surf, Weezer, and Wilco -- in the studio has further fleshed out Lemuria's sound to fill bigger spaces beyond their usual digs. In a day in age when the element of surprise in late-year releases isn’t like it used to be for Bey, hearing one of indie rock’s most beloved underdogs pull it off on their own terms is well worth celebrating, and to the benefit of diehard listeners at that.

Lost Film - Broken Spectre [Self-released]

No, Western Massachusetts is not just a bunch of bands who have a bed of fuzz pedals at their feet. Lost Film, the moniker of Easthampton songwriter Jimmy Hewitt, is living proof that not every sound coming out of the 413 is drenched in dense layers of reverb. On latest mini album Broken Spectre, he instead opts for crisp cut layers of guitar pop that paint its wintry calloused surroundings with light pastel hues and faded rays. Normally, you might expect this sort of indulgence in sun sounds from bands dreaming up an escape from their concrete jungles, or tempted by the brink of the beach, but take into account while listening that Lost Film calls home an area defined by sleepy college towns, strip malls, and the occasional back road sprawl home, and you’ll realize it’s not very difficult to hear how the isolation of suburbia can have the same effects of malaise. When snowed in and hibernating, Broken Spectre sets you adrift to some place in the air.

Special Explosion - To Infinity [Topshelf Records]

To Infinity, the debut full-length from Special Explosion, couldn’t be more true to advertising in what the band call themselves, the album’s title, and their categorization as a “dreamo” band. The Seattle five-piece, who has been quietly building an arsenal over the years in the forms of EPs and singles, mechanically assembles them in awe-striking form here, and for the spectating listener who prefers their rock to indulge in all of the beauties of life, this is most definitely experienced in the big bang universe of their sound. At any given point, the music can rumble and burst in with the enormity of post-rock mountains soundscaped with grace and intimidation, an aurora borealis of electric synapses and folk strings reflective of Hundred Waters, and the eerie solace of something much bigger than that which can be captured by any sound at all. To Infinity and beyond, Special Explosion’s escape into the unknown is one of this season’s most welcome ways to embrace the cold void around you.

#angel olsen #bjork #charli xcx #fever ray #gingerlys #glassjaw #lemuria #lost film #special explosion #lists #features

[chardscarf12-blog]

What the Label Won't Tell You: How to Buy a Good Bottle of Olive Oil

[Photographs: Max Falkowitz unless otherwise noted]

Have you ever tasted a tomato leaf?

As a bona fide black thumb who’s never taken to backyard gardening or the great outdoors, I sure haven’t. But ‘tomato leaf’ is a big tasting note in the olive oil industry, apparently, and at Cobram Estate’s reception lounge in Woodland, California, technical director and chief olive-oil maker Leandro Ravetti tells me it’s a common characteristic of oil made from picual olives. A minute before, I’d swigged a dram of chartreuse oil from a plastic pill cup, and sure enough, it tastes vividly of ripe tomato flesh warm from late-summer sunlight. There’s also a touch of bitter and bracing, as if I’d just mainlined a pile of fresh basil leaves. No—not basil, the taste is meatier, muskier in that compelling tomatoey way, but also inescapably verdant. It’s a breezy October morning and all I can think about is my sudden roaring hunger for raw tomatoes on toast.

Huh. I guess that’s what tomato leaves taste like.

Olive oil is one of those foods we embrace on faith. Science says it’s good for you, chefs say the quality stuff makes other foods come alive, and pretty green bottles of it can hit $40 on store shelves. We accept the idea of ‘good’ olive oil the way we accept the idea of ‘grassy’ flavors, despite never munching on blades of grass. But what is good olive oil? What makes it good, what should it taste like, and how do you shop for it if you can’t taste it beforehand?

These are the questions I came to California to figure out. Little did I realize the answers have as much to do with the weird world of food supply chains as they do with growing olives.

Most people can tell you how to spot a good tomato, but the traits of good olive oil, a food many of us eat every day, are surprisingly opaque. Take Colavita, which is Amazon’s best-selling extra-virgin, and at 29 cents an ounce you could call it the Two Buck Chuck of cooking fats. If you shop at a major American supermarket, you’re likely buying a commodity extra-virgin like Colavita. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but you should know what you’re paying for.

To vastly over-generalize the byzantine global olive oil trade, large commodity olive oil companies buy oils from all over, then blend them into a consistent product. The brokers and aggregators they buy from are in turn buying smaller lots of oils from regional producers, which are in turn buying harvests of olives from dozens to hundreds of small farms. A three-liter tin of commodity extra-virgin could conceivably contain oils from thousands of orchards, which is pretty cool when you think about it, but consider that for every one of those sources, there’s that many more ways for the processing to have gone wrong, or for the oil to have been mishandled. Assuming, of course, that it’s actually pure olive oil sitting in there, and not, say, adulterated with half a dozen refined fats.

Amazon says that bottle of Colavita is "imported from Italy," which is a clever way of saying the bottle itself was shipped from Italy without guaranteeing the provenance of the oil inside. If you squint at the back label though, you’ll see a fine print disclaimer: "Contains oil from one or more of these countries," with a legend you can use to decode the country codes printed on the bottle itself.

By olive oil standards, this is actually pretty responsible labeling! Other brands aren’t as above-board. The famously fraudulent global olive oil industry has little interest in arming consumers with actionable information about their product. Agents along a complex supply chain often blend Italian oils with olive oil from other countries and sell it as pure Italian. Companies stretch good batches of extra-virgin with tasteless soybean or safflower oils, or blend in oil made from older olives that’s refined just enough to make it palatable. A 2014 congressional report on adulterated foods, including olive oil, details these scams.

Fraud aside, even 100% pure extra-virgin olive oil will deteriorate in the bottle, and if it’s stored improperly or sits on a supermarket shelf for a year or two, it could taste rancid before you break the seal. Regulations exist to combat these practices, but they’re rarely enforced. After all, olive oil is a commodity governed by the iron laws of capital; for much of the industry, yield and profit matter far more than quality.

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

Then there’s the minority: small-batch boutique olive oils made by skilled producers around the world, either directly from their own olive orchard or from nearby sources. If Colavita is the Two-Buck Chuck of olive oil, these specialty brands are the natural wines and grower Champagnes. They’re intense and complex. They taste vividly of olives and give you a sense of place. They are, theoretically, good olive oils. You can expect to pay $1.50 to $3 an ounce for these, a price that reflects not just ostensibly higher quality olives, but the higher cost of labor, manufacturing, and distribution that accompanies artisan food production. Of course, there’s no guarantee that a $40 bottle of olive oil will actually be good, or if it is, that you’ll like its particular character. Like any specialty food, the relationship between price and value gets tricky on the high end of olive oil.

So what if you just want reliably good olive oil—less expensive than the boutique stuff, but still responsibly made, fresh, and delicious enough to make you smile? You know, like a good table wine, a bottle in the $15 to $20 range that has a lot going on but won’t break the bank. Brands like Manfredi Barbera & Figli's Frantoia, California Olive Ranch, and Cobram—where I visited—excel in this category. These are companies that sell olive oil in the vicinity of 75 cents an ounce, about triple the price of that Colavita, but half the price of a super-premium bottle.

Just like in wine, a lot of California companies are making good olive oil these days. California Olive Ranch is the biggest, but since launching in the US in 2014, Cobram Estate is one of the fastest growing brands in the category. It’s actually an offshoot of an Australian company called Boundary Bend, founded by agriculture school buddies Rob McGavin and Paul Riordan in 1998, that’s captured 30% of the Australian olive oil market. In addition to loving flat whites and having funny accents, Australians are big fans of olive oil; the average Australian consumes 1 3/4 liters per person per year, compared to just under a liter per person in the US. (Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards consume about 10 times that American figure, just so you know.) Boundary Bend’s success in Australia has translated to winning dozens of international olive oil competitions and a $360 million valuation.

So when Cobram’s PR team offered to fly me out to see their Central Valley orchard and factory firsthand, I was intrigued. I’m skeptical of press junkets, but the Cobram people pride themselves on transparency, from their on-site lab that reports findings to the California Olive Council to more than a dozen peer-reviewed industry papers on olive oil science. Besides, I’ve liked their olive oil for years. The first time I tried some, as an editor at a magazine that received free food samples several times a day, I swiftly palmed the half-liter office bottle to hoard in my home kitchen. It lasted about a week.

In a stark departure from the big commodity brands, Cobram Estate is completely vertically integrated: the company grows olives (directly or through contracts), picks them, mills them into oil, then bottles and ships them, all on-site. Most of California’s olive oil companies work the same way, but thanks to Boundary Bend’s vast coffers, Cobram has been able to expand aggressively, scale up production, and invest in pricey equipment. The idea, McGavin says, is to couple stringent boutique standards with a massive supply of raw material, using advanced technology and industrial scale to raise the standards of oil-making while keeping competitive with larger commodity brands. Here, then, was a chance to see what ‘good’ olive oil means at both ends of the manufacturing spectrum, and how they might meet in the middle.

A mechanical olive harvester looks like a car wash on wheels. As the 14-foot-tall leviathan rolls through the orchard, it swallows olive trees whole while rotary bristles inside the arch whack olives off their branches. While the harvester trundles down the row, a truck drives in tandem one row down, and a conveyer belt on the harvester reaches over the trees to deposit fistfulls of olives into the truck’s hopper.

The olives that Cobram is harvesting the morning of my visit are a mix of green, purple, and black; while color is an indicator of olive ripeness, Ravetti’s team relies more on the olives’ oil accumulation, flowering times, moisture levels, and other environmental factors. In July, the team starts testing olives, lot by lot, to determine the order in which they’ll be picked. Then they work out an action plan with president of US business, Adam Englehardt, to match that picking order with the factory’s capacity. California olive season runs a tight eight weeks in October and November, and once it starts, picking, processing, and milling becomes a 24/7 operation. Cobram’s factory sits in the middle of their 475-acre orchard with 10 different olive varieties planted, though as most of those trees are too immature to bear fruit, 90% of the company’s olives right now come from nearby growers that in many cases have exclusive contracts with Cobram.

With an orchard that size, scheduling picking and milling becomes a massive challenge of logistics and engineering, Englehardt explains. That’s because every olive is milled the same day it’s picked, usually within just a few hours, so it can be blended into larger batches for a consistently fresh product. Olives left off the tree too long undergo an enzymatic process called hydrolysis, where triglycerides (fat molecules) in the presence of water break down into diglycerides and free fatty acids. Meanwhile, oxidation breaks down chemical bonds in fatty acids, releasing peroxides that further break down into other compounds that cause rancidity in oil. Eventually the olives ferment, and after that, rot, and every stage of this degradation introduces off flavors to the finished oil. This happens a lot in regions where small commodity olive growers have to wait for space in a nearby crushing facility to become available. If the facility is backed up enough, the olives turn before they can get crushed, and the resulting oil will have to be heat- and chemically-refined in order to be edible. So once the olive is off the tree, the clock is ticking.

Cold-pressed olive oil is just that: olives crushed and ground into an oily juice, solely with mechanical pressure. About 20% of an olive’s fresh weight is oil, McGavin explains, but the oil itself is essentially flavorless. You have to rupture an olive’s oil sacs so the fats can marinate with the fruit’s flavorful skin, flesh, and seed. Cobram grinds the olives into a paste for about 45 minutes using a traditional hammer mill, which works on the same basic principle as those giant car crushers, then runs the paste through a 3,000 RPM centrifuge to separate out the now olive-infused oil.

But the clock ticks on. For one, the newly freed oil needs to rest so any residual water and solids can separate out. But even once you’ve removed any hydrolysis-inducing moisture, fresh oil in the presence of air will keep oxidizing. So after Ravetti’s team takes initial readings of the fresh oil and tastes it to see which batches to blend it with, it gets piped into steel tanks for cold storage, which are flushed with nitrogen to halt further air exposure. Sitting in these tanks, sequestered from heat, light, and oxygen, is as close to cryogenic storage as olive oil gets. But even under optimal conditions, the oil is deteriorating: you can’t halt oxidation completely, and enzymatic activity that began the minute the olive was crushed continues on, though at a slower pace. As we talk through the forest of tanks, Englehardt says that they aim to keep oil in this condition for no more than a year.

We move on to a smaller room with some crates on wooden pallets. Englehardt explains that these are boxes of bottled oil, ready to be shipped. “Is this it?” I ask, surprised by the meager size compared to the giant tanks we just left behind. He nods. Even the minimally air-exposed act of transferring olive oil to nitrogen-flushed bottles accelerates the oil’s deterioration. “We try to keep only four weeks’ worth of inventory in these bottles,” he says. The rest is sitting in cold storage as oil or still on the tree as whole olives.

Extra-virgin olive oil is generally defined as 100% cold pressed olive oil with a maximum of .8% acidity and no sensory defects. Virgin olive oil, the next grade down, allows up to 2.5% acidity with minor defects. Beneath these two tiers lie an assortment of lower quality grades that all require heat and/or chemical refinement to taste palatable; these make up the bulk of the commodity olive oil market.

You can measure acidity—and a whole host of other related critical factors, such as peroxide counts and signs of pests or disease—in a lab, but sensory defects come down to a tasting panel of experts trained to look for flaws like rancidity, barnyard or alcohol flavors, and ‘fustiness,’ a sign of fermentation. Nancy Ash is one of those experts. In addition to working as an California Olive Oil Council, a regional trade organization dedicated to raising standards for the California oil business and communicating those standards to the public.

“An olive oil that shows no flavor defects and passes chemical analyses such as acidity tests can be called extra-virgin,” she says, “but a passing grade just means you didn’t fail. It could be a D; would you be happy with a D?” An oil that lacks manufacturing defects could still taste bland, unbalanced, or just plain unenjoyable, yet it can earn the same grade as an award-winning bottle. That may be for the best, since the alternative, maybe something like a Robert Parker-esque point-based scoring system, is probably more cumbersome and subjective than it’s worth. The bigger issue, Ash goes on, is that since olive oils deteriorate over time, the grades they receive from a tasting panel aren’t necessarily reflective of what you get when you open a bottle.

“Even the best extra-virgin olive oils are going to taste rancid three years later.” For regular cooks in search of great olive oil, this is the most important thing to keep in mind. If you buy or receive some fabulous bottle of extra-virgin olive oil, don’t save it for special occasions in the back of the cupboard. Use it now, while it’s fresh and punchy and delicious. It’s not a collectible.

[Photographs: Vicky Wasik]

So what, then, is a regular American cook to do? Ash’s biggest piece of advice is to seek out oils with best-by dates as far ahead into the future as you can find. Very small specialty producers may put harvest dates on their bottles, but larger companies working with multiple lots and orchards, as well as the commodity giants, mostly go by bottling dates. In the EU, a best by date is typically 18 months after the bottling date, while in the US it’s closer to two or three years. A far-in-the-future best by date doesn’t guarantee an oil has been handled well along the supply chain, but it at least increases the likelihood that the oil in the bottle isn’t too old. Dark bottles are more resistant to heat and light deterioration than clear, and even though small bottles might cost more per ounce than three-liter tins, they’re generally preferable; once you open the bottle and expose the oil to air again it’ll begin to degrade even faster, and unless you’re cooking restaurant-sized batches of food on the regular, you probably won’t finish a hefty tin of olive oil before those flaws become noticeable.

Ash goes on to explain how California producers are getting more technical on labels to build demand for higher quality oils. The California Olive Oil Council has launched a pilot program of an endorsement seal for certain brands. Some producers are putting harvest dates on their labels, and others are listing polyphenol counts, which range from 150-200 on the lower end up to 600 or so. Higher polyphenol counts generally correlate to oils that last longer, Ash says, but that’s not a guarantee, and some may find the bitter, pungent taste that comes with super-high counts to be unpalatable. Cobram’s Australian division prints antioxidant data on each bottle, and McGavin says that once the US team gets enough data, they’ll replicate the practice here, possibly even this year.

For Cobram, coming to America was about more than venturing into a new market. With orchards in opposite hemispheres, the company enjoys the nifty advantage of two separate growing seasons roughly six months apart, which translates to fresher olive oil year-round.

Which has me thinking, finding a bottle of good olive oil is a lot like buying a tomato after all. Buy from reliable purveyors, seek out what looks fresh, don’t rely on fancy names and labels, and trust your instincts. After all of one day in a field and a few months spent thinking about olive oil, I don’t feel qualified to say what good olive oil really means. But I know it involves a lot more than the words ‘extra-virgin.’

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

When it comes to oils that she keeps in her pantry, Ash admits she’s a biased source—many of her favorites are made by friends, clients, or both. But she says she happily "blind buys," that is, orders without tasting the new batch to make sure she’ll like it, from Katz Farm, the Sicilian-leaning Bondolio, Grumpy Goats, and Frantoio Grove. I was also curious about great olive oils made in Europe, so I reached out to Nick Anderer, the founding chef of New York’s Marta, Martina, and Maialino, a trio of Italian restaurants from Danny Meyer that specialize, unsurprisingly, in high-end regional Italian specialty foods. Every fall, he and his team place advance orders for the first pressings of the following year’s olives from a small list of Italian producers he’s come to trust year after year.

“I’m looking for oil that’s alive,” he says. “I want vibrancy; I should cough if I’m tasting it raw, and I want peppery and grassy notes that feel very present.” Beyond that general principle of robust intensity of flavor, Anderer prefers different producers’ oils to finish different types of food. “For red meat dishes, I want more of a gut punch of bitterness,” he says, so he reaches for a high-polyphenol Tuscan oil by Laudemio. But an oil that strong would be overkill on, say, delicate fish or vanilla ice cream. His “rounder, almost drinkable” oil of choice for those foods is an unfiltered bottle from Capezzana, a deep-green oil that’s “super rich on the tongue,” ideal for a simple pasta like aglio e olio. He’s also a fan of Olio Verde, a Sicilian oil made exclusively from Castelvetrano olives, as its brininess works wonders with seafood. And for special occasions, he breaks out his bottle of Manni, a super-premium bitter Tuscan oil that mostly sees action in the fine dining restaurant market.

If you’re just starting to explore the world of high end olive oil, go try something similar. Hit up your favorite Italian restaurant—or Spanish, or Greek, or New American, or Lebanese—and ask what olive oil they keep in the kitchen. Then splurge on a few bottles, buy some pita or baguette, and get to tasting as much as you can. After all, they say olive oil is good for you.

This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.

Source: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/02/what-the-label-wont-tell-you-how-to-buy-a-good-bottle-of-olive-oil.html

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

[metavanaj]

What the hey, AJ? | First Assault [Volume: January 2019]

YES, THE TITLE IS COMPLICATED.

Hi - if you’re reading this, you know the drill. My name’s MetaVanAJ, insert quirky catchphrase and/or ‘your mum’ joke here. Welcome to the first volume of ‘What the hey is AJ play...ing?’ Yeah, the title isn't the greatest but hey it rhymes...mostly. I just thought I’d use this as quick way of communicating what I’m playing (or going to play) at the moment, & hopefully give some quick recommendations, to pique your interests in some really good stuff. As much as I would love to do a video version of this, I feel I would lose the spontaneity behind the idea; once I get my shit together I’ll do one of these in video form, someday. The only reason I’m writing this now is because January 2019 is so jammed packed with excellent NEW titles (despite most of this article being about ports & remakes), that I literally won’t be able to keep up. And I can’t even keep up in an off-season so this is just exponentially worse. So, ‘what the hey is AJ playing’ in January 2019?

Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

(Platform(s): Switch | Release Date: Jan 18th)

Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is taking another core title hostage so please buy this game. Joke aside, I am still looking forward to this title. Like everyone else, I’m a bit iffy and uncertain about how the gameplay is shaping up but I’ll be picking this up day one. Why? For one reason only, of course: Suda51. You see Goicha Suda is a brand - he is a different, ‘special snowflake’ and he makes different ‘special snowflake’ games. His name has been slapped on various works the past decade, and then some, but he actually hasn’t directed a game since 2007’s No More Heroes, on the Nintendo Wii. Travis Strikes Again marks his return to the directorial seat, albeit an odd-way to do so. But hey, this means pure unadulterated Suda-vision, the same vision that gave us Killer7 and No More Heroes; meaning narrative-wise we’re up for, what the kids call, some wacky shit. That and being able to blast through this with a bud, in co-op, will ease any of the pain, if the gameplay isn’t to mechanically engaging. Pain divided...is worse - why would you subject your friend to that?

Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition

(Platform(s): PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC | Release Date: Jan 11th)

I saw someone call the ‘Tale of’ series the McDonalds of JRPGS - I don’t think that’s an accurate metaphor but hey it’s an interesting way to open up a paragraph, no? Tales games tend to be a bit ‘same-y’ but it’s a bloody excellent formula and the fact they’ve released so many of these over the years just goes to show the formula works. Don’t like the characters, story & setting of one Tales game? Play the next one - gameplay remains the same, fundamentally. I won’t dive into the gameplay deep here but let's just say the ‘action’ is pretty decent in this ‘action-RPG’. Personally, you can’t go wrong with any Tales after Tales of the Abyss (Symphonia didn’t click with me, my bad). Apparently, Vesperia is one of the best in the series, so if it’s half as good as Abyss, and what I’ve seen of Xillia, then this is definitely worth a buy - especially on Switch, so you can take this bad boy on the go. Don’t worry, high-frame lovers: it was 60fps on the 360 in 2008, it’ll a good time, trust me. And this is one also has a dog with an eye patch in it...and a pirate midget. The definitive edition also adds all the extra goodies from the japan exclusive PS3 port, which is all the more reason to pick up a copy now. LIKE RIGHT NOW.

New Super Mario Brothers U Deluxe

(Platform: Switch | Out now!)

Eh, I’m not super excited about this game in particular but moreso the idea of the game itself. Shocking fact: New Super Mario Bros. games have been decent this entire time. The games have no spunk, in terms of story and presentation, but boy is the level design tight & fun. If you’re looking for a good 2D platformer on Switch, get Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, or hey even Shantae ½ Genie Hero. The other big 4-player party-style offerings however, have been kinda meagre offerings. Super Mario Party looks boring and soulless, Kirby: Star Allies is patronisingly easy to a point of being ‘unfun’ (and that’s for a Kirby game), and I forgot how to casually play Smash without crushing people’s dreams. Super Mario Bros. U is a great platformer and even greater with a few buddies but I’m not clamouring to get it at full price. I still strongly recommend it though if you’re just looking for some 4-player platform ‘em up fun. Comes with Luigi U too, that’s nice - surprised they didn’t charge us for it, all over again. That’d be almost as bad as charging a full 80 Australian dollars for it...oh wait.

Resident Evil 2 [2019 remake]

(Platform(s): PS4, Xbox One, PC | Release Date: 25th Jan)

Legitimately thought, I don’t need to sell you this one. You saw the trailer, you’re probably already hyped that Resi is ‘returning to its roots’; whatever that means. Personally, I haven’t touched Resident Evil up until recently, as I am a big baby when it comes to jump-scares. I know their coming but I still go through the physical shock of getting scared by set jumps. The titles I have been delving into (and loving) of late, have been Resi 4, 5 & 6...all at once - and I wonder why I can’t tame the backlog? Anywho, that’s why I am excited for the Resi 2 remake. Why should YOU be excited? The Resi 2 remake takes from all the best components of the series, and smooshs them together to create something extraordinarily beautiful -  the actual horror elements and sense of claustrophobia through environmental design from the first three classic games, the tight gameplay formula from the modern Resi formula (4, 5, 6) and the beautiful new engine from Resi 7. Resident Evil 2 (2019_ is like a best hits album of everything the series has achieved so far. Play it, yeah - you owe it to yourself.

Kingdom Hearts freaking III

(Platform(s): PS4, Xbox One | Release Date: 29th Jan)

At this point, you are either on the Kingdom Hearts hype train, or you live in beautiful bliss of the Kingdom Hearts hype train. I got in an abusive relationship where whenever I thought about Kingdom Hearts 3, I would angrily playthrough the entirety of Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix again. I’m better now - I spend my days now complaining about Dream Drop Distance like a good boy now. That being said: I’m a fan like everyone, I’m getting this Day 1, and I payed an extra 20 Australian dollars, on top of full price, for the deluxe edition. If you’re wondering why you should buy Kingdom Hearts 3, all I’m going to say is it’s going to be epic. It’ll have a rippling behemoth impact on anyone who’s touched a game from the Eastern shores, like Final Fantasy XV did, at its release. If you’re a newcomer, obviously start with Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, as they are the finest action-RPGs I’ve ever played, in my short time on this earth. But if you’re even remotely invested in the series, you’re already drooling - that fabled release of KH3 is so close I can practically taste it. It tastes so good. I SWEAR TO GOD THOUGH IF I SEE ‘FLOATY COMBAT’, I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’ll DO. I’ll see you at the end of it all...

Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal

(Platform(s): PS4, PC | Release Date: 18th Jan)

Woah, that last one got a little emotional there. Anyways, this one’s an easy sell: BOOBS, BUTTS, ANIME BABES, & BODACIOUS BLADES. Senran Kagura Estival Versus was a interesting musou that showcased some promising gameplay elements; I actually had to activate more than two brain cells at once, during my playthrough. Shocking, I know. Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal is a remake of a 3DS game (Senran Kagura Burst), which consists of gameplay more akin to a 3D-Beat-’em-up. It simply looks like a bit of a meatier Estival Versus so I’m keen to check it out & see how deep the game mechanics well is. If you’re looking for a fun light action romp too, you should as well. The presentation, which I won’t delve into here, is often what is a bit of a turn off for newcomers - I personally have never been swayed by it either way it. Sure, it’s a bit saucy but it doesn’t detract from the fact that whatever the Senran Kagura series tries its hand at, is often a pretty fun & polished experience, albeit a slightly shallow one. This one isn’t necessarily a ‘must get’ but they’re not charging full price so it is definitely worth an investigative playthrough, if you can get past the ‘fan-service-y’ presentation.

Well, that’s it for the first volume of ‘What the hey, AJ?’ Next time, I hope to adapt this into video form & hopefully spin in a few funnies, as well as just tighten up the structure. Next time, probably won’t be all new releases either - I’ll probably end up doing another just if I find that everything I’m playing, at any given time, is amazing. I have, and always will be, MetaVanAJ - stay cool, fools. Actually, that was mean calling my audience fools. Stay cool, individuals.

[thebibliomancer]

100 Days of Comics! 023/100: Superboy and the Ravers #13 (1997)

Ha ha, what??

Today’s rummage into the mystery box brings us a Superboy (the one from the Reign of the Supermen - y’know with the sunglasses and jacket? Hip, teen Superman clone?) book. But sort of like a team-up book.

See, a friend introduces Superboy to a neverending space rave for superpowered individuals. And the people invited to join the rave are given hand stamps that allow them to teleport to and from the party.

Okay. So that’s the overall concept. What’s going on in this issue? There are two main threads. One of them follows Superboy. ‘Cause it is his book.

Apparently in the previous issue, Kindred Marx, the proprietor of the rave, was arrested. So. Never-ending party is winding down on Ogyptu, planet of the unmoving giants. And Superboy is left holding the doggy bag. As in, what to do with Rex the Wonder Dog. They can’t leave him on Ogyptu. Nothing to eat. But he doesn’t have his own stamp. And he can’t give him to Half-Life and Pyra to watch. She might eat Rex.

That particular problem is solved when a weird girl called Sunny or possibly Kay shows up and teleports away with Rex. So. Uh. Problem solved.

Later, Superboy is sulking in Hawaii about how Kindred Marx got arrested when fellow Raver Aura shows up. They talk about maybe forming a real team instead of loosely associated partygoers. But then their hand stamps activate and teleport the two to the space prison Starlag.

Kindred Marx teleported them there to break him out of jail. THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE HANGS IN THE BALANCE. ‘oh fine’ says Aura, before starting a prison break.

The other and meatier plot of the book revolves around Hero Cruz. He has the Dial H for Hero Dial, fittingly enough. With it, and thanks to hypertime, he can take on the powers and appearances of different heroes. Last issue while in a big metal Colossus-esque form, he got badly injured and had to be welded shut so he wouldn’t instantly die when he returned to his meat body.

But after a few days of recovering, Sparx takes him to her special secret spot.

And then they instantly get attacked by a harpy. Yay! A bird person! This comic just got bumped up a letter grade!

The harpy accuses Hero of being a thief and attacks. He dials H for Hero and becomes Captain Elastic. Who is not the Elongated Man or Plastic Man or Stretch Olsen, I guess.

But then the harpy changes into Volcano Girl. And then Sister-Scissor Limbs. And she wants the Dial. And Hero gets super possessive of it.

The attacker, now the Cobress claims she used to have the Dial and that it changed her so that she can switch forms without it. That the dial will steal Hero’s soul. But primarily that she has dibs to it.

She touches the Dial and it lets off a big SHABOOM and Harpy/Volcano Girl/Sister-Scissor Limbs/Cobress has reverted to a human form who after some struggle remembers her name as Dial V for V-I-C-K-I.

One of Sparx’s sisters (or whatever) takes Vicki in for as long as she needs.

So its possible that the H-Dial might be dangerous and might bork the user’s mind but that’s not what Spark brought Hero to her special secret spot for. Spark confides that she thinks Hero is only attracted to her as Sparx, not as D.C. Force but hey she can stay powered up as long as he wants so-

No, no. She should be true to herself and Hero should be true to himself.

And the truth is that he’s gay.

Bam. That’s where this issue ends.

I had no idea this book was even a thing. Like. Its a book about an endless rave that Superboy goes off to to blow off steam and the cool people he meets. I peeked at wikipedia and apparently this book only lasted 19 issues and most of the non-Superboy characters ended up fading into obscurity. Bit of a shame. They seemed like a nice bunch.

Although the book’s concept (or at least the title) definitely feels like an idea of its specific time period. Like someone said “Superboy is a hip, young Superman and all the hip, young people are going to raves. Someone write Superboy going to a SUPER RAVE.” And then someone did it. Because that’s the comic biz.

#100 Days of Comics! #Superboy and the Ravers #Dial H for Hero #Superboy #i can't believe there's a comic about superboy's wild nights

[learningtobushmechanic]

Motorcycle adventures

Somewhere in February I started going for motorcycle lessons. I used to ride a little Jonway scooter inherited from my older brother. It was the best. The first time I got on it I pulled the throttle open and skidded on the side of it - almost down a hill- But it was fine. A few scrapes on me and a paint-job not so perfect anymore. I could go anywhere cheaply and attempted longish distances on it only to have it break down and meet strangers who help me turn it on its side in their VW Jetta’s boot whilst the girl in the back tells me she’s coming down from TIK and if I wanted some ‘Cadburys’...

In February or March, I went for two or maybe three? motorcycle driving lessons with Biker Basics in Athlone. When I called for the first time to book an appointment Ruth went out of her way to assist me in finding me a fast appointment. Its run by Lloyd Castle (an ex motorcycle traffic cop and his son Lyle) They are super lovely and took care to get me through the motions and learn the basics. They found it very amusing that I had somehow managed to cheat the system - having received a full fledged motorcycle license when I had done my scooter license years before (apparently the 250cc scooter engine qualified me to ride motorcycles too).

I was overly careful and a bit nervous and was reminded of having to learn clutch control on a car all over again. But instead of weeks of practice it came to me in the two or three sessions and I started feeling comfortable and in control.

I was researching and scouting the internet for motorcycles at this point whilst at the same stage reading motorcyclists blogs doing long overlanding trips. I am a massive fan of Steph Jeavons and her adventures on Rhonda the Honda http://www.stephmoto-adventurebikeblog.com/. Its her excitement and confidence that made me think I could do something similar - her adventures also steered my choice of motorcycle to a dual adventure bike.

At this stage, I knew nothing about the insides of a motorcycle, but nervously looking to buy one. Completely embarrassed and afraid at the thought of having to look at and assess the ones I was interested in. But somehow I had become adamant and confident and more serious about this idea. I read pages and pages of checklists on what to check, what it must look like, feel like, sound like. 

At one stage I called a service shop in Bellville and said, ‘Im gonna ask you a strange question but I don’t really know what to do otherwise.’ I asked if he would come out with me to check out a nearby bike and he was completely cool with it, and agreed to go with me after work. Quite late in life, I am starting to realize that one should always ask for help if you think you can’t manage by yourself. People can be so kind. Especially bikers have some kind of special love for someone who shares their love. Whoever knew I could so easily be accepted into a group of kind strangers? But one should know when to ask for help and when you will be better off trusting your gut. I am perhaps a bit notorious for my stubbornness. For wanting to do things myself. I like to rely on myself and I like to learn things and I completely abhor any form of ‘mansplaining’. 

In March, and after much stress and back and forth and lots of support and driving around by my friend Tona, I acquired a 1996 Honda Baja (which is pretty much a close sibling to the XR250L). I only now in retrospect have realized that I should probably not have fallen in love with a bike that does not get imported to South Africa. True, its spares and parts are all replaceable with the xr250l but it still makes wiring diagrams a little more confusing and everything a little less easy. Finding a service manual for the Baja has proven to be impossible (unless I can get better at reading Spanish or Japanese). The Baja was made for a Japanese and generally Asian market. It originally comes with double headlights a meatier alternator, a steel tank but mostly they are identical on the insides.

I am not too sure about its history. It is in a very clean condition, with 32000 kms on the clock. It seemed to have had two owners in its life. The mystery about how it came to be in South Africa is still a point of fantasy for me. My hopes are it was driven down to Southern Africa and that I might now return it to its home country.

#jonway #honda #honda baja #steph jeavons #1996 xr250l #xr250 #mansplaining #motorcycle #overlanding

[sharkchunks]

Design Analysis: The Alien Films

Giger’s original alien design is fairly well recognized as the pinnacle of the art, so sequel decay was inevitable. Once you have something perfect, anything you add to that perfection will alter it and by definition make it imperfect. The further the Alien films diverge from the design above, the worse the designs get, sometimes by fractions, sometimes by great leaps. This is not a comprehensive list of all changes made to the design over the years, but a look at the directions other artists took. Essentially, a brief Fall of the Roman Empire for alien design.

Giger’s only “hands-on” involvement with the series to make the final cut was on the first film. His most impressive creation for that movie is, in my opinion, the Space Jockey, the truest fusion of flesh and machine, literally grown into the ship despite what unbelievably horrible ideas future movies would try to retcon into the series. But the alien itself is the most enduring work. The elongated head, the inner toothed tongue, the mechanical components within the meat of the creature, its ribs, its inexplicable back-pipes, it all manifests as a symphony of disturbing elements that, when combined into a humanoid figure, speak of pain, wounds, death, cruelty and danger. This is widely known.

What fewer people (including future creature designers) realize is that one of the most critical features of the alien is that it is aesthetically displeasing. It is not sleek. It is not cool. It is ugly. It doesn’t fit together right. It is not streamlined not conventional in color or form. Where Giger designed the Space Jockey to be oddly beautiful, he went for something in the alien itself that makes it hard to look at. Some consider this “cheap” or “incomplete.” I’d argue that it was not only intentional but one of the most critical features of the design.

The original alien was never meant to appeal to us. It was made to scare and disgust us. The original film is the only time it did so successfully. Commentaries on the series suggest that the repetition of the design in further movies made it less impressive, that it was done to death. This is not true because the original design only appeared in one film. Though that design too is demystified by now, the films did not need to suffer from any inevitable decrease in horror. That decrease is intentional.

James Cameron didn’t want to make a horror film, he wanted to make an action thriller with some horror elements. His alteration of Giger’s designs helps elucidate this. The design of the aliens from Aliens is close to Giger’s with three critical embellishments: The arms now have bony protrusions at the elbows, the dome has been removed revealing the ridged head, and the design has been normalized and streamlined. The alien is no longer grotesque, it is awesome.

The original alien looks dirty and ragged by comparison. This was not a mistake by any means. Aliens is not about hurting the audience like its predecessor, it’s an action movie and the turn from horror to action was extremely successful.

Cameron then took Giger’s aesthetic, more or less, and designed his own super-alien, the Queen. Little attempt at horror remains, if any. This is an epic beast made to appeal to the eye with smooth curved structures and spines that follow the form naturally and elegantly. It has less of a mechanical influence, and no sign at all of Giger’s ugliness. Its use in the film is similarly unhorrifying, it’s an intense escape followed by one of the greatest fight scenes in movie history. Cameron diverged from Giger and Scott, but what he made was a new expansion of the universe that was all his own, and in typical fashion for the director, it amazed audiences and proved highly influential ever after.

Giger was invited back to design a new iteration of the alien for the third film. He set out to perfect his original design, and did so artistically but not cinematically. His new design introduced an even more horrifying tongue that would enter the victim’s throat, and with shark-tooth-like barbs, come back out bringing their guts with it. It had a visible, moving brain under its dome, and it lost the back tubes in favor of a more animal-like structure. It also had new artsy elements that brought it further into Giger’s developing aesthetic. The filmmakers elected not to use it.

Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis took over. Students of Stan Winston who had implemented Cameron’s concepts, they redesigned the alien into a near-fully organic beast. The only remainder of its mechanical elements are the repeated flutes on the side of the head. The rest is all animal, with inhuman legs and feet. Its cheeks are no longer messes of visible mechanisms, but rumpled skin. And it is sleek. It’s streamlined. It is, in essence, what the alien would look like had it been originally designed by someone other than Giger.

Alien 3 attempted to bring the series back to horror. That might have been a mistake but we can give the creators the benefit of the doubt and instead of criticizing the aspects of the film that have already been criticized ad nauseam, focus only on the design. Basically, it’s meatier and meaner and although it has lost Giger’s surface, it does retain his basic concepts and yields an appropriate movie monster for a very dark film. It would be brilliant had it not followed such vastly superior works.

Gillis and Woodruff returned for the fourth film and further organicized the creature. They took the Alien 3 design and regained the tubes, and made the back of the head a little less round. While the alien from 3 was alternately red or black depending on the lighting, the Resurrection beasts were generally greenish-brown or grey depending on whether they were computer generated.

But look at its cheeks and neck. The region on the sides behind its mouth. The clumpy skin of the third alien is now a total ugly mess, and not ugly in Giger’s way. Just a mess of blotchy crud. Its arm has little trace of the underlying tubes and mechanics, it’s just a bumpy human arm. Alien 3 took the creature into animalistic design, but 4 began to turn it into a mess.

The newborn has no mechanical elements whatsoever, or even any trace of them. It bears only the slightest resemblance to Giger’s design and that’s okay. It had a new purpose- To be gross. Not grotesque, necessarily, but icky. There it succeeded. Its face was also more expressive, at times almost human. Its sunken eyes, its bat-nose, the bloated filigree on the sides of its head, all contribute to something appropriate to the film this creature was designed for.

Notably, the creature was designed with genitals, which were censored from the film for being too much, the director said, “even for a Frenchman.” The Newborn represents the end of the series. The alien has gone everywhere it can go, and retains nothing of what made the original what it was. Evolution is inevitable but I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had the ADI team that handled the latter two films honored Giger’s new designs, or kept his originals, or designed new works of their own along his guidelines instead of simply making the aliens closer and closer to blobby animals.

Prometheus provides another succinct view of what happened- Giger’s original derelict ship was a misshapen bony surrealist sculpture. It had no visible means of flight, it had nothing to even compare to any vehicle ever designed. It made no sense. It hurt the brain to think of as a spaceship. Prometheus featured a similar ship- But made it work. It was streamlined and curved naturally instead of bent and ugly, it was a mechanical ship and not something that might have been grown. That’s what happened to the alien over the years. It was cleaned up, made sense of, and turned into something normal. But the final insult was yet to come.

That’s the finale of Prometheus. Look at it.

Now look at the original:

Now back to deacon:

How did anyone, especially Ridley freaking Scott, think this was acceptable? It’s a god damn cartoon. I mean literally! It’s what Gary Larson spoofed the aliens into!

It has no surface detail, just some bumps like what a child might push into a lump of clay. Its pointy head is a joke. And its inner jaw is based on the goblin shark’s:

The goblin shark is notable in two ways- One, its jaws are horrifying. Good. Reason two- It looks like Jerry Lewis.

It’s goofy! It’s silly! The prominent upper maxilla looks absurd and funny despite its sharp spiny teeth. The goblin shark is certainly bizarre and bizarre is often good, but in this case it turned the iconic alien, the greatest design in the history of creature effects, into an absolute total JOKE.

Never mind the squid. Never mind the plain white tentacled blob that replaced the chestburster. Never mind the idea that the brilliant concept of a pilot grown into its ship was made into a white guy in a suit. Never mind the dull serpents or the atrocious uncreative bumpy makeup on Fifield. Ignore all the problems with Prometheus because this is about the design of the adult form alien. Look what they did to it.

Resurrection ended the alien’s tenure as the greatest monster. But it did not make it into a joke. The deacon is a poorly sculpted, plainly painted, uncreatively applied, horribly conceived, silly, pathetic, absolute low point of creature design in cinema. That’s where the alien ended up.

This is one of the greatest plummets in art. From the pinnacle to the nadir. So what comes next? Alien: Covenant, appears from its trailer, to be even more of a remake of the original than Prometheus. The same plot, slightly different specifics. Of its true story and creatures, only time will tell. But I have the lowest expectations. I expect the worst, for the alien to go from joke to insult. Or further insult, all things considered.

The trend in cinema (among other things) right now is to take whatever was good once and ram it into the ground as hard as possible. I don’t know what more they can do to the alien after the pointy headed atrocity above, but I have a feeling we’ll find out.

But I also have hope. Worst expectations but a glimmer of hope that we’ll see the redemption of this creature. Giger is dead, and the world is poorer for it. I hope Scott has found someone new, an unknown artist as Giger was in the 70s to come to fame as the next great surrealist. I hope we’ll see the birth of a new form of horror cinema. I hope a great many things every time an alien movie comes out.

My mother was pregnant with me when she saw Alien. I drew it over and over as a child. I studied it above all other films and designs as an adult. I grew up with the alien on every level. I don’t know what will come next, and I will go in with an open mind.

But I can’t help but feel that the iconic monster has hit rock bottom, and it’s about to crash through the stones down into hell.

#alien #hr giger #giger #prometheus #creature design #long post #spoilers

[jesusvasser]

Mercedes-Benz Aims Electric Silver Arrow at Heart of Pebble Beach

The Mercedes EQ Silver Arrow could have easily become the second all-electric Maybach. After all, it is every bit as lavish and extroverted as Mercedes-Benz chief design officer Gorden Wagener’s 2017 Pebble Beach effort, the open-top e-power Maybach 6.

But while the 6 paid homage to the marque’s grand pre-war tourers and cabriolets, the EQ Silver Arrow—revealed Friday evening at a Mercedes event at Pebble—is a tribute to Mercedes’ most extreme ultra low-drag single-seat race car, the historic W125. The W125 in 1937 established a 268-mph world speed record on a German Autobahn that held until last year. While its ancestor was powered by a compressor-driven 5.2-liter V-12, the wildest EQ creation to date boasts a bunch of electric motors good for an aggregate 550kW (737 hp). The 2018 EQ Silver Arrow is very nearly street legal, sporting full-width head- and taillights and a variety of driver aids.

This Pebble Beach concept is in all probability a one-off eye-catcher to demonstrate the potential of the newly founded EQ division. The driver sits at the center of the experience. The shape of the tall rollover protection fin is a mix of vintage Le Mans and modern Formula 1. Access to the driver’s seat is via a front-hinged canopy. From behind, the Mercedes looks like the Batmobile reinvented.

The minimalistic front wings stretch over and around the bespoke 255/25R-24 Pirellis, the rubber laser-etched with a three-pointed-star tread pattern. The rear multi-spoke alloys are shod with even meatier 305/25R-26 tires. To smooth the airflow, the rose metallic wheels are covered by flush semicircular body-color elements attached to the Rolls-Royce-style fixed-center hubs. The car’s carbon-fiber chassis is a monocoque in the purest sense of the word; the flat-bottom triangular shape is just wide enough for the single-seat cockpit with all the modern conveniences.

Mercedes claims there is ample leg- and shoulder-room for the driver who is secured by a four-point harness. The leather-covered seat is fixed, but the power-operated pedal box can be moved. While the Alubeam paint is matched to perfection by the brushed aluminum interior trim, the solid walnut-with-pinstripe-inlay on the floor is a bit of an oddity.

From the driver’s point of view, the instrumentation of the ultimate Mercedes EQ is positively space age. The main display is a curved panorama screen that also serves as canvas for a 3D projector positioned close to the driver’s head. This high-definition, full-color system knows all the tricks, is driver programmable, keeps an eye on traffic, and has several specific (futuristic) talents like lane guidance for inductive charging.

Thanks to a generous helping of equally futuristic artificial intelligence, the EQ Silver Arrow can also stage a race against historic or current silver arrows, showing the car’s position versus its competitor on a given circuit. Hit the Virtual Race Coach button, and an invisible co-driver will talk you through one lap after the other, doing its best to improve your skill. A large touchscreen on the square steering wheel hub is the key interface between driver and machine.

There are three basic modes to choose from: Comfort, Sport, and Sport Plus. The choice of background music played by the sound generator includes the dulcet tones of Lewis Hamilton’s W09 F1 car, and pre-war factory racer Rudolf Caracciola’s SSKL. The 737-hp output comes from dual electric motors backed by an 80-kWh battery pack. The combination is good for a claimed 250 miles of silent yet inspired cruising, on the European cycle.

If size matters, the EQ Silver Arrow has its bases covered: it’s the world’s longest single-seater, measuring 208.6 inches from tip to toe, or 1.7 inches longer than today’s S560 sedan. At a mere 39.37 inches tall, however, it could cruise under most toll barriers without even ruffling the driver’s hair. Put in perspective, the distance between the front axle and the pedal box exceeds the total length of a Smart ForTwo. Amazingly enough, the batteries, motors, and performance electronics are cooled by air sucked in through various black intakes. The only weather protection for the driver is a low, heavily swept windshield—and the mandatory crash helmet. Integrated in the trailing edge of the roadster is a finned diffuser and two active spoilers that also act as air brakes.

“Eight decades ago, the silver arrows pioneered the era of ultra high-speed motor cars,” says Wagener. “Today, we pay tribute to these incredible machines with the EQ Silver Arrow. Its key missions are unrivalled performance, ultimate driving pleasure, progressive luxury, and the seamless fusion of digital and analogue styling elements. Furthermore, the Pebble Beach concept lets you catch a glimpse of the unique form language Mercedes is preparing for the all-electric EQ family of cars.”

Though this new concept may show us Mercedes’ future design language, aside from the single-seat layout, there are many impractical realities to a production EQ Silver Arrow. No roof, no place for luggage, and no creature comforts are three clear indications that the Benz that could have been a Maybach is bound to remain a one-off. But we know for a fact AMG has completed the preliminary feasibility work on an all-electric car in this space, so the idea of a high-speed, all-electric super cruiser halo car is still alive and kicking in the zone between Untertürkheim and Affalterbach.

The post Mercedes-Benz Aims Electric Silver Arrow at Heart of Pebble Beach appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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