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nemolian · 3 years

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Study confirms superior sound of a Stradivari is due to the varnish

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A 1729 Stradivari known as the "Solomon, Ex-Lambert" on display at Christie's in New York in March 2007.

Along with Andrea Amati and Andrea Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari dominated the so-called Golden Age of Violins (roughly 1660 to 1750), and the instruments they crafted remain the gold standard today in terms of acoustic quality. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma has long favored a Stradivarius instrument, as does violinist Joshua Bell. But scientists have been arguing for years about precisely why these instruments have such superior sound. A recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie confirms a theory dating back to 2006: the secret lies in the chemicals used to soak the wood, most notably borax, zinc, copper, alum, and lime water.

I've written extensively about this topic in the past. The (perceived) unique sound can't just be due to the instrument's geometry, although Stradivari's geometrical approach did give us the violin's signature shape. One hypothesis is that Stradivari may have used Alpine spruce that grew during a period of uncommonly cold weather, which caused the annual growth rings to be closer together, making the wood abnormally dense. Another prevailing theory has to do with the varnish: namely, that Stradivari used an ingenious cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees—or perhaps salts or other chemicals.

Then again, the difference may be all in our heads. A player's instrument preference is highly subjective, and there's some evidence of so-called "psychoacoustics" at play: that is, we've become so awed by the name Stradivarius that it influences how we evaluate or respond to the sound of one of Stradivari's instruments.

In fact, a 2012 double-blind study of 21 experienced violinists found that most of the subjects preferred playing the newer instruments; the Stradivarius ranked last in their preferences. Most of them couldn't tell the difference between the old and new instruments, with no significant correlation between an instrument's age and its monetary value. "Rather than searching for the 'secret' of Stradivari, future research might best be focused on how violinists evaluate instruments, on which specific playing qualities are most important to them, and on how these qualities relate to measurable attributes of the instruments, whether old or new," the authors concluded.

The varnish theory dates back to 2006, when Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A&M University, made headlines with a paper in Nature claiming that it was the chemicals used to treat the wood—not necessarily the wood itself—that was responsible for the unique sound of a Stradivarius violin. Specifically, it was salts of copper, iron, and chromium, all of which are excellent wood preservers but may also have altered the instruments' acoustical properties. He based his findings on studies using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the chemical properties of the backboards of several violins (the backboard is the instrument's largest resonant component).

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Close-up of the sculpture of Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) in Corso Garibaldi, Cremona, Italy.

Elena Piccini/Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images

In 2007, physicist George Bissinger of East Carolina University used a 3D scanning laser to produce detailed and quantitative measurements of the acoustic properties of several Strad violins—essentially mapping out how they vibrate to produce those heavenly tones. Bissinger hung each of the five violins by elastic bands, then struck the wood of the top plate with a little hammer while recording and measuring the vibrational modes with the scanner.

He specifically wanted to measure the in-plane and out-plane motion: the in-plane motion is the source of much of the sound energy, and this converts into out-plane motion, which produces the rich tonal sounds we associate with fine violins. In addition, he hired a world-class violinist to play each of the violins used in the study for an hour to get the feel of the instruments and then offer subjective ratings for each one. The musician's subjective analysis was then compared to the objective acoustical data. The resulting measurements were sufficiently detailed to reconstruct the stiffness properties of the wood used to make the Strads, according to Bissinger.

CT scans

In 2008, Berend Stoel from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands collaborated with a luthier named Terry Borman to take CT scans of several Strads, along with several modern instruments for comparison. The aim was to study the density of the woods used, since differentials in wood density impact vibrational efficiency and thereby the production of sound. Stoel had developed a computer program that noninvasively calculated lung densities in people suffering from emphysema, and he adapted it to study wood densities from CT scans.

There wasn't much significant difference between the average wood density of the classical and modern violins used in the study. But the density differences between wood grains of early and late-growth wood was significantly smaller in the classical Cremonese violins compared with modern violins. "Our results clearly document basic material property differences between the woods used by the classical Cremonese and contemporary makers," the authors concluded.

More evidence in favor of Team Varnish came from a 2016 study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA). They studied how a varnish's chemical composition, thickness, and degree of penetration into the wood affected the acoustics of the instrument.

As I wrote for Gizmodo in 2016:

They used samples of Norway spruce tone wood cut from the same tree and coated the samples with different kinds of varnish: two of their own making, and two used by German master violin makers. Then they conducted vibration tests of the samples over time, using x-ray tomography to measure the effects.

The researchers found that all the varnishes increased the wood's dampening ability—that is, how well it absorbs and stops vibrations. That extra damping, compared to unvarnished wood, leads to a warmer, mellower, and aesthetically pleasing sound. The varnishes favored by German luthiers performed slightly better in that regard, and also made for better sound radiation (louder tones).

A 2017 study by Taiwanese researchers compared the maple used by Stradivarius with modern, high-quality maple wood. Their analysis showed evidence of chemical treatments in the form of aluminum, calcium, and copper, among other elements. And thanks to the decomposition over time of a wood component called hemicellulose, the Stradivari and Guarneri instruments used in the study had 25 percent less water than modern instruments. "This is fundamentally important because the less moisture, the more brilliant the sound," Nagyvary told The New York Times.

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Violinist Adrian Pintea plays a 1729 Stradivari known as the "Solomon, Ex-Lambert" in 2007 at Christie's in New York.

Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

This latest study analyzes trace chemicals preserved in the maple wood used to make the soundboards of Stradivari and Guarneri instruments. The research involved a rare collection of Cremonese wood samples of spruce and maple used by Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati, and the results were then compared to modern spruce and maple tonewoods, as well as woods from antique Chinese zithers and less exceptional old European violins.

They found traces of borax and several metal sulfates in the wood samples dating between 1600 to 1750. As David Bressan explained over at Forbes:

Borax, also known as sodium-borate, occurs naturally in evaporite deposits produced by the repeated evaporation of seasonal lakes. Borax is still used today in various household laundry and cleaning products, and in the past was used also as an insecticide and fungicide, killing pests. Copper and zinc sulfates, often associated with copper ore, likely served the same purpose. Alum, an evaporite mineral containing sulfur, aluminum, potassium and sodium, was added to the mix to form a weak acidic environment in the wood, preventing mold growth. Halite, common table salt, was added as moisture control, keeping the wood too dry for microbes and fungi, and at the same time preventing the deformation of the instrument caused by humidity fluctuations.

This is welcome news to Nagyvary, who co-authored this latest paper. "This new study reveals that Stradivari and Guarneri had their own individual proprietary method of wood processing, to which they could have attributed a considerable significance," he told Texas A&M Today. "They could have come to realize that the special salts they used for impregnation of the wood also imparted to it some beneficial mechanical strength and acoustical advantages. These methods were kept secret. There were no patents in those times. How the wood was manipulated with chemicals was impossible to guess by the visual inspection of the finished product."

Nagyvary still thinks more research is needed to shed further light on the connection between the chemicals used to treat the wood and the sound quality of the finished instruments. "First, one needs several dozens of samples from not only Stradivari and Guarneri, but also from other makers of the Golden Period (1660-1750) of Cremona, Italy," he said. "There will have to be better cooperation between the master restorers of antique musical instruments, the best makers of our time, and the scientists who are performing the experiments often pro bono in their free time."

DOI: Angewandte Chemie, 2021. 10.1002/anie.202105252 (About DOIs).

via:Ars Technica, September 16, 2021 at 07:00PM

#IFTTT #Feedly #Ars Technica

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jeks-tgs · 4 years

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Surprise, Dr. Jekyll!!

(For @darling-dolly-darlene uwu)

Henry had been sick with anxiety for the past month or so. Hyde, his idiotic, stupid, fool of a counterpart had fallen asleep after a rather... ahem.. intense hookup. He hadn't left in time, and when Hyde suddenly spasmed in agony, the couple he'd bedded with had leapt up, concerned and startled. When Henry had coughed the last remaining bits of green fluid over the side of the bed, the pair had stood, staring in shock, and it wasn't until Henry had lifted his head that he realized just how fucked he truly was.

And so, after hastily tugging on Hyde's clothes, he'd fled, the man and woman chasing after him for a good bit, shouting for him to come back. Obviously, he hadn't listened, not wanting to end up in Bedlam, thank you very much. Ever since then, he'd been terrified, jumpier than usual, enough so that the Lodgers were starting to notice. Of course, they just added this to their little roster of insults, and for once Henry was glad Frankenstein had turned them all against him. What could he say if they'd shown concern? That he was near ill with panic because a couple he'd indirectly had a threesome with had seen him transform from Edward Hyde into Henry Jekyll?

So, his panic remained, and only grew over time, waiting anxiously for Scotland Yard to burst through the doors and drag him, kicking and screaming, to Bethlam Royal Hospital. His only relief was, ironically, treating Frankenstein. It was easy to forget his troubles when he was being harrassed by an old woman, having to out all his focus on not throat-punching her the next time she called him a slut. Hyde's hisses that, technically, by proxy, Jekyll was a slut, he could do without, though. It was during one such insult-filled checkup that the other shoe finally dropped.

"-just a hack doctor, an industrialist slut groveling at the boots of the wealthy!" Henry's eye twitched, it getting harder by the second to keep his smile in place. The Lodgers were being extra stubborn today, refusing to leave while he treated their oh-so-valiant hero. As Frankenstein started up with another batch of repetitive jabs, Henry bit back a sigh. Could today get any worse?

"Oi!!"

Henry stiffened as all the Lodgers turned to look in the direction of the unfamiliar voice. Well, unfamiliar to them. Henry knew that voice. It had shouted repeatedly at him as he had fled. Shaking with dread, he turned to see that, yep, Hyde's 'friends' were in the doorway, looking livid. Henry paled as they marched towards him. This was it. This was the end of his life. They would grab him, throw him into a police coach, and then he'd be Moreau's new neighbour, tested on each day until the insanity truly did set in—

"You leave our Jekyll alone, you ol' hag!!" Henry squeaked, startled, as the man slung his arm over his shoulders, the woman moving to lean against his side. His mouth opened and closed, akin to a fish being told the most shocking news imaginable, unable to speak. The Lodgers seemed even more surprised than Henry was, and the look of shock on Frankenstein's face admittedly gave Henry a maliciously gleeful sort of feeling. "Henry is brillian', unlike you, ya deadbeat parent!" The woman's voice was thick and slurred, and if it weren't for the fact that Hyde knew that was her natural accent, Henry would have assumed she was intoxicated.

"That's right, ya old bint," The man gruffed, scratching at his bearded jaw as he eyes the old woman with cold disinterest. Henry had by now turned from pale to a vibrant red, so fast he was worries his blood cells would experience whiplash from it. He stammered, unable to form a full word, let alone a proper sentence. The Lodgers were looking at the duo with more interest now, and when the woman casually wrapped an arm around Henry's waist, rubbing his hip soothingly, a few murmurs and titters broke out. Needless to say, Henry was humiliated. Frankenstein shook herself out of her shock, grinning, "Well, I guess my 'slut' comments weren't far off!"

Quick as hounds catching a whiff of blood, the two stormed over to the old scientist, gritting their teeth. It was almost hypnotizing, watching the way they seemed to weave around one another, and Henry tugged at his collar, ashamedly admitting to himself that, yes, he did find their aggressive coordination and brash attitudes attractive.

"Now you listen 'ere, bitch!!" The Lodgers gasped as the woman got right up in Frankenstein's face. "Tha's our boy, ya go' tha'!? Don't say anothe' wor' abou' 'im, or I'll knohk yer damn 'ead off!!" She leant back, her partner easily stepping around her to take her place.

"Lay off!! He's done nothin' but care for you, you wretch!!" He spoke slower than his lover, his accent implying he was possibly from Kent, or maybe Sussex, and Henry only grew a darker shade of red as Hyde teased him about liking the way it sounded. "You've got some nerve, comin' into a man's home and disrespectin' 'im! He's a fine gentleman, and jus' because he knows when and where it's appropriate to show the real 'im doesn' mean he's some stuck up prat! If anythin', it makes 'im smarter, knowin' how to play the game to keep those he cares about safe!" He narrowed his green eyes at her as he growled lowly, "Unlike you, he actually knows what it takes to survive. Then again, I wouldn' expect a spoil' rich girl who ran away from all her problems to understand that." With that final jab, he turned and strolled back to the woman and Henry, the two wrapping their arms around him and pulling him out the door as he sputtered. It wasn't until they were alone in a hallway that he hesitantly asked, "You.. aren't.. turning me into Scotland Yard..?" The pair looked surprised by his words. They shared a look, then cracked up laughing, leaving poor Henry even more confused.

"An' lose th' bes' shag in all of London~?" The woman asked, causing Henry to squeak with embarrassment. The man leant in next, purring in his ear, "What kind of stupid twat gives up a 'two-for-one' deal~?" Henry uttered a soft, "O-Oh, dear..", earning a chuckle from the man. He patted the doctor's back, beaming, "Come on, then, there's drinks to be had, gettin' to know each other, all the fun parts!"

"W-Wait, I–!! I don't even know your names!" Henry complained, not sure if he should be disturbed by how quickly a fond sort of exasperation was settling in his chest.

"Tom Bishop," The man rumbled, and Henry was flustered to admit he liked the sound of it.

"An' I'm Chasity Bishop," The woman crooned, and Henry realized with a jolt the two had matching copper bands on their fingers. Henry groaned, uttering, "Edward Hyde, what have you gotten me into?" The two only laughed, pressing closer to either side of them. As they approached his office, Henry shyly wrapped his arms around their lower backs, the two smiling softly as they recalled a certain blond who loved to do the same.

"I know Hyde has mostly been drinking brandy and gin with you, but all I've got is red wine, I hope that's alright?"

#tgs #tgs au #polyamory #daylight trio #is that what they're called?#daylight trio and moonlight trio?#I'm love them #Mod Jeks

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a-silent-symphony · 4 years

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Metal behemoths Nightwish: “David Attenborough wrote to personally decline appearing on our album”

The arena-filling group's golden-lunged singer Floor Jansen talks album nine, Swedish lockdown and why the world's greatest conservationist turned them down

With the exception of maybe Rammstein – and we’re only quantifying this statement because they own flamethrowers and we do not – no band in European metal can rival Nightwish for their popularity in mainland Europe.

Formed in Kitee, Finland in 1996 by top hat-wearing keyboard player Tuomas Holopainen, the band welcomed Dutch-born singer Floor Jansen in 2012, by which point they were seven records into their career. The addition has seen the symphonic metal band become bigger, grander, more expressive and increasingly ambitious. She’s such a force that she’s become a Dutch TV personality, appearing on the musical talent showcase Best Zangers.

Their recent ninth record, the infuriatingly stylised ‘Human. :II: Nature.’, is their first double-release, the second half featuring lush orchestral music over the band’s core metal. Listen to album highlights ‘Harvest’, ‘How’s The Heart?’ and ‘Noises’ – rarely has a modern metal band’s music been infused with such power and glory. Tellingly, despite being released within the very centre of storm COVID-19, the record entered the charts of Finland, Spain, Switzerland and Germany at Number One.

With that in mind, we decided to check in with one of Europe’s favourite heavy metal bands. Your guide for the duration will be Floor Jansen and her massive lungs. She will roar and you will quiver…

Hello Floor. Can I tell you what I really like about the new Nightwish album? There’s so much misery and ugliness everywhere right now, and yet your record is so ornate, grandiose and – dare I say it – hopeful…

“We were definitely going for that. There are so many different instruments on the record and so many different parts. Nightwish is quite complex music, really, and so it was important for us to have real emotion in the songs; something that cut through everything. The dynamics were really important to us. The songs needed space. Sometimes what you don’t put into a song is as important as what you do. There are nine songs on this record and eight orchestral suites. Without dynamics it would have been a very relentless listen.”

Can we go way back? I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that your voice is properly, brilliantly amazing. When did you realise you could sing like that?

“I guess when I was a teenager. There was a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and I auditioned. I didn’t get a very important part in it. You know how it is – the popular kids get all the best parts and that wasn’t me. But even just being stuck in the background, I absolutely loved it. I didn’t know I was any good, though. I was pretty badly teased at school, so my confidence was quite low.”

Do you want us to fuck someone up? Why were you teased?

“I was taller than everyone else and my dialect was different. I was just… different.”

Do you think that experience has had any lasting impact on you?

“I do… but, to be honest, only really positively. I can’t say I look back fondly at those years and certainly not at the people who were doing that, but I do think I stand on more stable legs in adulthood because of it. I don’t want my daughter [three-year-old Freja] to have to go through that, though.”

Do you ever have the classic revenge scenario where you’re standing onstage in front of thousands and thousands of people screaming your name and think, ‘Well, I won, didn’t I?’

“All the time. Especially now I’m on this Dutch TV show that has really increased my popularity in the Netherlands. I sometimes wonder if those people would even remember me and I don’t spend that much time thinking about them. You have to live for yourself – I’m almost 40, y’know!”

Tell me more about the TV show. I love the name! Beste Zangers!

“It translates as Best Singers! It’s not a contest or anything like that. It’s a collection of singers of different styles and backgrounds who sing each other’s music to one another, or collaborate on cover versions of songs that have inspired us. It’s a really nice show, and all about a love of music. It’s prime-time Saturday night television and it’s completely changed my life! It’s really benefited Nightwish too. We were already doing well in Holland and playing arenas, butt it’s definitely increased our profile, which is brilliant for me after 24 of nobody in my home country paying me any attention!”

The new Nightwish record was released on April 10, making you one of a tiny number of bands who can attest to the realities of releasing an album at the epicentre of a global pandemic. How has that been?

“We were one of the very first bands who had to cancel a tour. We were actually supposed to start in China. I should be there right now. Very early on we realised that the tour wasn’t going to happen, even though the illness was at that point contained in one continent. Then the global fuck-up that resulted in an illness becoming a pandemic happened. I still can’t believe that it has happened, really. It feels so incredibly unnecessary…”

I’m detecting you have an opinion about how this has all played out? You live in Sweden, right?

“I do. I emigrated five years ago, from Holland.”

Sweden’s approach to handling the virus has been very liberal – there’s been no mass lockdown, as there has been in elsewhere in the world. Do you think they took the right approach?”

“Partly. At the same time, I’m not a scientist, so what do I know? It’s all about following the science.”

I’d like to remind you that there’s a species of beetle named after you. Last year scientist Andreas Weigel named the newly discovered insect Tmesisternus floorjansenae. It’s fair to say you have more scientific credibility than almost any other heavy metal singer…

“Okay – well, in lots of ways the Swedish approach makes sense to me. Sweden is a big country with not that many people. It makes sense to me that the approach would be different to in the UK or back in Holland. Then again, a big city is a big city, whether it’s in Sweden or anywhere, and if people from the cities start moving away then I think we have to be careful. During Easter there were people everywhere near where I live, on the Gothenburg side of the country, next to the sea. Sweden is a big enough country that there’s enough space for people not to be locked down – but you head to a touristy place anyway? That I don’t get. It’s stupid.”

Speaking of space – you’re married to Hannes Van Dahl, the drummer in military history obsessed, Swedish metal titans Sabaton. Onstage he plays his drums sat inside the cockpit of a tank. I presume you have badass military stuff lying all around your house?

“Oh, everywhere. All over the house.”

Really?

“No!”

I heard that you have horses, though. It doesn’t seem fair to me that you’re allowed to have horses, but your husband can’t have a battleship in the garden…

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. Horses are nicer than war. I have two – Lily, named so after my mum, and Auri, named after my bandmates’ Tuomas [Holopainen] and Troy [Donockley]’s side project – and also a character from The Kingkiller Chronicle series of fantasy novels by Patrick Rothfuss.”

I think it’s fair to say that you’re not the only member of Nightwish that bloody loves nature. The band just teamed up with the conservation charity the World Land Trust. Tell me about that…

“They’re a great organisation. The video for the last song on the album, ‘Ad Astra’, was filmed in conjunction with them. They work to preserve our planet by buying up areas of land and preserving them. I think it’s hypocritical that we’re telling Brazil that they need to save their rainforest when European’s have absolutely decimated their own. But at the same time, we really do need to save the rainforest or we’re facing a climate crisis. The World Land Trust works with governments to find alternative financial outlets for local people to stop logging and deforestation. You can’t just say to people, ‘Stop doing this’. You need to consider the human impact, then the environmental one. We found out about them via David Attenborough being a patron…”

Please tell me he’s a fan…

“We tried to get him to speak on the album. We wrote him a letter and he wrote one back, declining, but it was very impressive that a man of his stature would write personally to us and explain that he just didn’t have the time right now.”

You can’t like all animals, Floor. There must be one you’d like to see eradicated from the face of the earth…

“No! I love all of them. I love cats. I love dogs. I love birds in all their splendour!”

C’mon…

“Okay, okay… I don’t really like snails. We grow vegetables and they eat my crops. They’re disgusting. I don’t wish them death, though! I just wish they’d go somewhere else!”

#Floor Jansen #nightwish #Human. :II: Nature.#2020 interviews

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mediaeval-muse · 5 years

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Why “Anglo-Saxon” is a racist term, even in academia

I received a message from @shotofstress asking about the term “Anglo-Saxon” and why it’s bad, even in medieval studies scholarship, so I thought I’d post something publicly so everyone can know. And just as a note, I’m largely drawing on research collected by my colleague, Dr. Erik Wade (who is mildly tumblr famous).

For the sake of clarity, I will be using the term “Anglo-Saxon” in this post.

TW for racism and transphobia.

The term “Anglo-Saxon” was originally used to describe the language of early medieval English peoples (now “Old English”), but gradually became more of a term to describe the time period and inhabitants of England from c. 500-1066 AD. During the early part of this medieval period, following Rome’s withdrawal from England, Germanic peoples from Scandinavia invaded England and settled there. “Anglo” and “Saxon” refer to 2 of these peoples, but there were others, such as the Jutes. In many early medieval texts, you can see “Angle” and “Saxon” in things like law codes and chronicles, but they largely die out during Alfred’s reign (8-9th cent) and are replaced by the broader term, “English,” in the attempt to create a proto-national identity. The hyphenated term “Anglo-Saxon” was never used by medieval people to describe themselves. It’s an invention by modern scholars, gaining popularity around the 19th century... which is also when England stepped up its imperial agenda.

As white people came into contact with people of color more and more, they began to form a collective white identity to try to unite against others and justify their superiority. Early medieval scholars were not immune to this racism. In fact, many of them used their expertise in medieval studies to try to justify white superiority. See this excerpt from Jacob Abbott's 1862 History of King Alfred of England, for example:

Here is an example from Dexter Hawkins, "The Anglo Saxon Race," published in 1875.

Here is an excerpt from a commencement address given n 1875 at Syracuse University by Dexter Hawkins, "The Anglo-Saxon Race: Its History Character and Destiny."

Many of these early scholars also supported racist “science” such as phrenology. It’s quite easy to see how their scholarship was informed by their ideology, and not the other way around.

Another prominent example involves the creation of the Early English Text Society, an organization that many scholars still rely on to this day for definitive editions of medieval primary texts. EETS initially saw itself as promoting Old English literature as part of an explicitly colonial mission. They said "We are banded together to trace the springs [...] of the language that shall one day be the ruling tongue of the world."

In the 1950s, the term WASP (”white Anglo-Saxon Protestant”) first appeared to describe a social group in American society with a lot of political and economic power. Race is inextricably linked with social influence and power. Although the term became one of disparagement, I still hear stories from my colleagues of it being used against people of color (to exclude them).

So, it’s not just a case of the term being misused by politicians or imperialists or “scientists” of the day. This racist history is embedded within our own field of academia.

Since the 19th century, the term has been adopted by various white supremacist movements to uphold a racial hierarchy. Stormfront once published something on their site, proposing a connection between swastikas and "Anglo-Saxons." It also lists Beowulf as essential reading. Here’s a tweet from this year from a white supremacist who uses runes and the term to claim an ethnic past that technically never existed:

Even if academics use the term nowadays in a more or less “benign” manner, students and scholars of color are still being targeted by people who wield “Anglo-Saxon” as a weapon against them. Many of us do not want to give white supremacists the idea that we’re on their side - white supremacists have continually looked to the medieval past to legitimize their worldview, and if we don’t address our own complicity in white supremacy, our classrooms will continue to attract these students and alienate others. Here’s an example. Michael Drout is a major scholar, and though his tweet isn’t making fun of the current ISXX debacle, look at the way it’s worded, and the response:

White supremacists are emboldened when scholars use the term “Anglo-Saxon.”

And it’s not just people outside academia. Here are some links by scholars of color detailing how the academy itself upholds whiteness and white supremacy:

https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3

http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2019/04/public-medievalism-and-rigor-of-anti.html?m=1

http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html

Here is an email from a scholar JUST THIS WEEK which claims to want to reclaim the term from racists, but gets transphobic along the way.

Those who claim we “can’t let racists appropriate our term” is woefully ignorant. Racists have been using it for centuries, and in most cases the racists were scholars. In my opinion, the term cannot be reclaimed. It has gone the way of the swastika, and even of runes and Thor’s hammers. They are linked to white supremacy, and it’s more important that we prioritize real people and their safety than hanging onto an archaic term.

For those of you who might be shocked to learn this, know that I myself was ignorant of the racist history until recently, and I have been "Anglo-Saxon” to describe the things I study. For that, I am embarrassed and I apologize to anyone I have hurt. Hopefully, my future actions will help make up for any damage I caused. You can do the same. The future of the field is one that does anti-racist work, and this is one of the steps. It isn’t the only thing, but it’s a good start.

#medieval #tw: racism #tw: transphobia

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thecomicsnexus · 5 years

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Absent Friends

WATCHMEN #2 OCTOBER 1986 BY ALAN MOORE, DAVE GIBBONS AND JOHN HIGGINS

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

Laurie Juspeczyk visit, or had to the Nepenthe Gardens retirement home to see her mother, Sally, the original Silk Spectre. She only came because she been forced to visit, transported by Jon since she hadn't wanted to attend the funeral of Eddie Blake. Sally shows a large sense of sympathy for Blake.

During her conversation with Laurie, Sally remembers the night that the Minutemen were taking their group photo in 1940. The group discussed about the war in Europe, until the original Nite Owl stopped the discussion and they all headed down to the Owl's Nest, except for Sally who stays behind to change her clothes. The Comedian stepped into the room and interrupts her, attempting to sexually assault her to which Sally clawed his face. Blake brutally attacked her, intending to rape her, before Hooded Justice walked in. He viciously attacked Eddie, but lets him go when Eddie says to him "This is what you like, huh? This is what gets you hot...".

At Eddie's funeral, Adrian Veidt recalls the first meeting of the Crimebusters, held by Nelson Gardner, Captain Metropolis, in April, 1966. Nelson attempt to recreate another team of masked adventurers since the Minutemen's breakup in 1949. However, The Comedian deride Nelson's plan as "bullshit" and accuses Nelson of trying to seek personal glory as akin to "playin' cowboys and Indians." Nite Owl II (Dan Dreiberg) defends Nelson's Crimebusters idea by saying that he and Rorschach had made some success together fighting criminal gangs. Though Rorschach agrees with his partner, but he sees the group as more of a "publicity exercise" and too unyielding. Ozymandias speaks in that the group only need the right person coordinating them. The Comedian continues to mock the group's intentions, especially Veidt's, and arguing the Crimebusters would not make a difference in a world heading towards nuclear apocalypse. He then burns Metropolis' presentation board and leaves the room with nearly everyone following. Nelson, in vain, begs them not to leave, telling them that someone had to "save the world."

Doctor Manhattan recalls "V.V.N. Night" - the celebration of America's victory in the Vietnam War due to Manhattan's intervention - in Saigon with Blake and discussing his strange attitude toward life and war, how he sees it all as a joke, although admittedly not a "good joke." He mentions how anxious he is to leave the country. A Vietnamese woman approaches Blake and telling him that she is pregnant with his child. She also asserts that Blake has a responsibility to the child. Blake doesn't seem to care, saying how he will forget them and their entire country. The woman angrily breaks a glass bottle and slashes Blake's face. Blake impulsively shoots her, while Manhattan stands watching. Blake then lash out Manhattan for not intervening to save the woman and accuses him that he doesn't care about human life. He then walks away to look for someone to heal his face as he laments over Manhattan's loss of touch with humanity.

Dan Dreiberg recalls how he and The Comedian worked riot control during the 1970's Police Strike in New York. The streets are crowded with angry rioters, but The Comedian and Dreiberg (as the Nite Owl) clear the streets after The Comedian throws a gas bomb into the angry mob. Looking at the devastation, Dreiberg asks Blake, "What's happened to the American dream?" Blake replies while starting into the foggy streets filled with riot gas, "It came true. You're lookin' at it."

As the funeral ends, Dan drops The Comedian's smiley face badge into the grave. A man in a trench-coat leaves flowers on Blake's grave and walks to his apartment. The man is suddenly ambush by Rorschach, who leaps out of the man's refrigerator. Rorschach identifies him as Edgar Jacobi, a former villain known as Moloch the Mystic. He questions him about Eddie Blake, and Jacobi explains that he attended Blake's funeral out of compulsion because Blake broke into his home one night while he was in bed, babbling about how it's all a joke that he doesn't get it. Blake mentioned an island with writers, scientists and artists, and he says that he did bad things before leaving. Rorschach doesn't consider the retired villain as Blake's murderer. He then informs Jacobi that he found him using Laetril, a faked cancer cure medicine that is widely illegal. Jacobi defend himself that he is diagnosed with cancer and was desperate. Rorschach leaves Jacobi alone but will be seeing him again.

Rorschach goes to the cemetery at night to pay his respects to Eddie Blake. Finishing with his journal entry, he leaves the cemetery with a red rose.

UNDER THE HOOD

Chapter III Hollis Mason becomes deeply interested in the Hooded Justice's actions and decided upon himself to become a super-hero, known as the 'Nite-Owl'. The name was based on his habit to work out as much as possible. Although his first exploits were largely unspectacular, it has aroused a lot of media interests simply because at the time dressing up in a costume and protecting a neighborhood had becoming something of a fad.

Within several months since the appearance of the Hooded Justice, several other costumed vigilantes began to appear: Silhouette, Mothman, the Comedian, Captain Metropolis, Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter), and Dollar Bill. Hollis reflect on each of their background and how people thought of them. Regardless of the heroes' reasons and their faults, Hollis believed them to be "doing something because [they] believed in it."

Chapter IV On the suggestion of Captain Metropolis, Sally Jupiter and her agent Laurence Schexnayder, the heroes band together to form the Minutemen in 1939. However, the Minutemen did not last long. The Comedian's attempted rape of Sally Jupiter resulted in his departure from the Minutemen and Sally's decision not to press charges against him, as persuaded by Schexnayder for the group's image. The Comedian soon changed his flimsy costume for leather armor following an unconnected stabbing incident, and became a war hero in the Pacific Theatre during World War Two. Hollis personally hoped that America have a better class of hero than the Comedian.

Problems for the Minutemen further deteriorated. In 1946, a newspaper exposed Silhouette's lesbian relationship with a woman and the group was forced to expel her on Schexnayder's persuasion. Six weeks later, Silhouette was murdered along with her lover by one of her former enemies. In the same year Dollar Bill was shot dead by bank robbers. In 1947, Sally quit crime-fighting and married Schexnayder, and gave birth to her daughter Laurie in 1949. By then the villains that the group fought were less interesting to fight. Their enemies were either imprisoned or moved to less glamorous activities. Among those is Moloch, who began as a stage magician at the age of seventeen and became an flamboyant criminal mastermind before moving into impersonal crimes such as drugs, financial fraud and vice clubs. Hollis concluded that the Minutemen was finished, but it didn't matter. The damage had already been done.

REVIEW

Just so you get a sample of the level of detail in this novel, Rorschach’s speech balloons are normal in the flashbacks and are weird in present day, as he wasn’t unhinged at that time.

This issue is very strong. When these things happened in the film adaptation, I actually saw couples leaving the theater (I think the movie may have had the wrong ad campaign and people thought this was a super-hero story).

There is a vast use of mirrors and reflective surfaces in this issue, following the theme of “reflections” and “flashbacks”.

The use of flashbacks is also justified to understand the ongoing mystery as to who may have killed the Comedian. Usually Flashbacks are hated because they stop the story, but in Watchmen... some characters live everything at the same time, making the term “Flashback” inaccurate. In any case, the Flashbacks are part of the murder mystery, and so is the supplementary material.

To be continued...

#dave gibbons #dc comics #john higgins #alan moore #watchmen #comics #review #1986 #modern age #vertigo comics #the comedian

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michaelmyersmalewife · 6 years

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DYAD | ii. contact

words: 2k+

ship: venom symbiote/reader

warning(s): none

you can also support this fic on wattpad & ao3

"You'll be staying here with our other volunteers for now."

You struggled to keep up with the dark-haired woman ahead of you, barely being given the chance to observe your surroundings. It was obvious that you were in a lab somewhere beneath the Life Foundation's main building, but other than numerous people donning lab coats scurrying throughout the room, you had no idea what to expect. They had already stripped you of what little clothes you were able to keep, favoring to put you in a mildly uncomfortable hospital gown. Now you were trailing after a particularly talkative doctor, though your attention wavered after the first five minutes.

The woman (Dr. Skirth, you remembered her brief introduction from earlier) lead you to a room separate from the larger lab. It was almost maze-like, the numerous glass cells acting like a hall of mirrors. You could see that some of the cells were already occupied by three - maybe four - people, their forms roused by your sudden entrance. Your attention lingered on them until Skirth stopped a few feet in front of you, almost causing you to crash into her had you not been careful. She whipped around to face you, the hair that was held in a loose bun nearly falling out of place. A small, joking smile appeared on her face, hand facetiously shielding it from outside view.

"It doesn't give you much privacy but it'll be your home for the next few months."

You gave a halfhearted snort.

She cleared her throat, scanning the card attached to the lanyard that hung around her neck and quickly punching in numbers into the cell's door.

"We'll be coming back for you in the next half hour to take some initial diagnostics so go ahead and get comfortable."

You nodded, taking a seat on the surprisingly soft bed. She seemed nice.

The cage-like "room" in front of you is more than a little simple - a clear, glass box with a notably frame-less mattress on the side farthest from you. It felt...sterile. Even your old cell back in the ward came with more than this. But it was clean and not meant to be shared, which was a definite improvement. But you couldn't help flinching internally at the sound of hearing the door lock itself shut. Somehow, it felt as though you had gotten yourself trapped again.

Take a chill pill, won't you? You're not there anymore. He doesn't know. you thought to yourself.

He doesn't know where you are. And that's enough for you.

When Dr. Skirth said half an hour, you didn't think they would be so on the dot. You didn't do much - though there wasn't much for you to do to begin with besides watch your fellow recruits be taken out for examinations.

You were on the verge of falling asleep when Skirth returned. She looked a little more disheveled from when you last saw her, this time flanked by three other official-looking scientists (at least, you assumed they were from the stark white coats they wore). There was something unnerving in how silent they were. Looking around, there was probably one other person in the cells that seemed to catch the vibe. They said nothing as they brought you out, leading you once again through the labyrinth of a facility that was the Life Foundation.

So far you hadn't passed by anything telling you what exactly you'd be doing here. The lab seemed disappointingly generic. They hadn't even bothered to answer your questions on the trip to the lab, but you didn't expect them to anyway. You just wanted out, and if this was your ticket to a place where nothing - no one - could find you, then so be it.

The entourage of scientists had taken you to yet another overwhelmingly sterile room. The fluorescent lighting was almost blinding but you could tell that you were in some sort of examination room a doctor would have, only much larger. It had the usual - a long padded table, a weight scale, and a height chart. But to one side was a treadmill and an MRI scanner. But that wasn't what set you on edge. One wall was a huge mirror - a one-way mirror no doubt. If you hadn't already felt like a lab rat, you did now.

Behind you you could hear chatter from the group of researchers, Dr. Skirth among them. You couldn't hear what they were saying, but the woman quickly parted from her colleagues, gripping the clipboard in her hands as she entered the room.

"Alright so before we get started on the tests I have to ask you a few questions. Nothing serious but answer truthfully, please." She said, setting the clipboard down on a nearby table in favor for a thin stack of papers. "We just wanna get a good idea on where you are in terms of health."

"Sounds good." you nodded.

"Are you currently taking any drugs? If yes, for how long?" she paused for a second before quickly adding a "Prescription also count, by the way."

You had been sober for over a year, (not entirely by choice, but it was for the best) and it was one of the few things you prided yourself on.

The rest of the questions went about the same route. You didn't really do much during your time in your previous confinement. It was the first time you genuinely tried behaving, and this time around you were glad it actually paid off.

After putting away the papers, Skirth handed you a long band, instructing you to place it just below your chest.

"Don't worry, it's just heart monitor."

In the back of your mind, you thanked yourself for making it a point to use the prison gym when you had the time. The tests weren't particularly grueling, they were fairly easy - if not basic. After measuring your height and weight, the real tests were only comprised of jumping jacks, push-ups, and about 20 minutes on the treadmill. It was a test you couldn't mess up, yet the thought of scrutinizing scientists (and although this was a small possibility, Drake) being on the other side of that mirror distracted you. Thankfully, not distracting enough to make you slip, only enough to make you all the more determined to do your most. That entire time Skirth had seated herself in front of a monitor, taking brief glances at the monitor in front of her while scribbling down whatever data appeared on her clipboard. About an hour had passed before she declared the "test" over. You were tired, but only just a little out of breath, gladly taking the bottle of water Skirth handed you.

"You did good! Definitely better than the ones we've gotten so far."

You couldn't tell if it was a thinly veiled compliment or not, so you opted for a shy smile.

"There's showers in the room over there so if you wanna clean yourself up, be my guest."

You gladly took the offer. You could feel the thin layer of sweat sticking to your skin, and you hated it. The water wasn't particularly warm, but it wasn't freezing either. You didn't care anyway. You just focused on the feeling of water running down your exhausted body. The extent of your exhaustion hadn't hit you until then, but the feeling of your tense muscles finally being able to relax was more than welcome.

Before you knew it, a week had already passed.

You hadn't done much, you and the other subjects were subjected to daily exercises (though, only you and maybe one other person were handling it without complaints) and psychological examinations (those went about as well as you expected). You still didn't know your real purpose as a test subject, and asking the others had gotten you nowhere. They knew about as much as you did. Not even Dr. Skirth was willing to give you a hint, and she was by far the most easygoing researcher in the lab. You didn't want to think much of it, but the situation rubbed you the wrong way.

You were about to exit the communal showers when you heard muffled chatter from outside the room. You hoped the sound of the water running would mask your eavesdropping but at the same time your ears strained to make out what they were saying. You recognized Dr. Skirth - she didn't sound too happy, as she was trying to talk over the voice of a man. It wasn't until she quieted down that you realized the voice belonged to Carlton Drake.

"It's been six months at least, I think it's about time we introduce the symbiotes to the subjects."

"And I'm telling you they aren't ready! You saw how they reacted to the -"

"An unfortunate setback but that's all it was."

A minute passed and the gap in conversation would've felt far heavier had it not been for the cascade of water.

"We've had this talk before, Dora. You know my reasons."

You were really starting to hate him.

You hadn't heard anything after that, but you didn't exit the showers until you were sure you heard the door to the other room click shut.

Skirth was sitting at one of the tables, running a hand through loose strands of hair and staring at a corner of the room with an empty gaze.

"You okay?"

She flinched, quickly turning around to face you.

"Y-Yeah, yeah..uh, just wait for me outside, okay?"

You couldn't sleep that night.

It was rare for you to get so worked up so easily but it was nagging at your brain for the rest of the day. There were about a million questions popping up in your mind as you tried to get just a minute of rest. Why was Drake so insistent on borderline harassing people in the name of this "experiment" of his? But more importantly, what the fuck is a symbiote? A new drug or something equally questionable? With a company like the Life Foundation, you couldn't begin to fathom what they were planning.

You sighed, turning over once more in your bed, staring at the blacklights that lit up the room in a dim, blue glow.

The next week isn't any better. If anything, it felt worse.

The physical tests continued on as normal, only this time you noticed there would be..exceptions. The first one they took was a tall, thin man with long stringy hair. You hadn't spoken to him much in your time in the cells, but you and the others had formed a strange solidarity in knowing you were each subjected to these secretive circumstances. When he didn't return one day, everyone noticed, and none of you were in the least bit comforted no matter what excuses the scientists gave you.

You thought it couldn't get any worse until it kept happening. By the end of the week they had replaced half of the old subjects with new ones, one being a particularly feisty woman with long black hair that nearly always fought back the men that would take her away for her tests.

You dreaded the day your turn would come - it was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before they carted you off to who-knows-where to supposedly dispose of you somewhere. And when that time came, you were quiet, calmly trailing after Dr. Skirth and two other men that accompanied her. She said nothing, but she held the same solemn - almost fearful - expression you had seen her with a few days ago. It made your stomach turn.

You entered a different room from the main lab you had grown used to.

It was fairly large, still keeping with the theme of smaller rooms made from clear glass. Monitors and tanks littered the space, though you couldn't see what they held. You would've been a little more than nervous upon being led to one of the rooms and left there by yourself. But the fact that Carlton Drake once again appeared in the room along with a larger group of scientists made your pulse quicken. You didn't trust him at all, and after the past week's events you didn't have a reason to. You scowled, leaning against something that looked like a small, horizontal tank. Drake approached the glass wall you faced. He smiled, though it seemed genuine, the smile wasn't reflected in the look in his eyes.

"So we meet again!" God he sounded like a comic book villain.

You shrugged. "So you gonna tell me what I'm really doing here now?"

Drake chuckled. "Patience is a virtue."

You drummed your fingers against the tank impatiently. The tank tapped back.

You shot away from it, swallowing a yelp as you tried to recover from the surprise. Drake still held that amused expression that was quickly becoming annoying. Your head twisted to the glass, frantically hoping someone could tell you what you were trapped in a room with. This couldn't be that thing he mentioned earlier, was it? You gathered your composure as best you could but you couldn't hide the nervousness growing in your gut.

"Wh-What is that?"

"That," he smiled "is the future."

#venom x reader #venom/reader #venom #venom fanfic #venom symbiote #dyadfic #takenbytheweeds #takenbytheweeds fics

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themusicenthusiast · 5 years

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Thursday, April 18th, 2019 - Snow Patrol Doesn’t Give In to Technical Difficulties, Overcoming to Satisfy Dallas Fans at the Kickoff Show of the North American Leg of the Wildness Tour

Photos by Jordan Buford Photography The lengthy drought was finally coming to end for the residents of North Texas who were Snow Patrol fans. The headline tour the UK-based indie-rock/alt-rock outfit is currently in the midst of was precipitated by the release of Wildness (out via Polydor Records) nearly a year ago – Snow Patrol’s first new album in nearly seven full years. There was also the tour they did supporting Ed Sheeran’s North American tour last fall, though that provided their fans with but a meager taste of what they craved after Snow Patrol’s years long absence from the Lone Star State. That was all set to change on this Thursday night, the band finally bringing the Wildness Tour to North America – about half of the twenty-one dates already sold-out – with Dallas serving as the launching point for the trek. South Side Ballroom was hosting what was poised to be a spectacular night, the band having already toured extensively around various parts of the world -- most recently South America -- ensuring they were in prime touring shape, while the break they got afforded them what was surely some much needed rest, allowing them to be in peak form for this next round of shows. While not sold-out, fans packed into the venue in droves, those lucky enough to arrive early getting treated to a delightful set from Ryan McMullan, while the trio that was We are Scientists put on an intense show, being thorough in warming up the sizable audience for whatever the band of the hour had prepared. What was interesting about the audience was how relatively diverse the makeup of it was. There were those who had likely been fans since Snow Patrol’s work became so acclaimed, circa the early to mid-2000s, while others in attendance had probably just been born around that time or shortly before. The single constant among the throng was how elated they all were to finally see Snow Patrol (again), their adoration for the group spilling over.

Several false starts excited the spectators that much more, the lights dimming a handful of times as the stage hands got everything in place, resulting in ample cheers and applause before disappointment set in as the lights illuminated everything once more. Then, at 9:38, it was officially on; a snowflake filling the screen at the back of the stage as drummer Jonny Quinn, bassist Paul Wilson, multi-instrumentalist Johnny McDaid and guitarist Nathan Connolly made their way on stage. Gary Lightbody completed things, the most boisterous fanfare having been saved for the frontman and guitarist who portrayed himself as being rather effervescent, kindly smiling and waving at everyone as he greeted them. It would have made sense that Wildness would be put on full display, allowing fans to experience much of that record in the live environment. However, after so many years away, most fans probably could have cared less about that, instead preferring to hear many of the classics they had missed so. Well aware of that, Snow Patrol opted for the more familiar for their first string of songs, beginning with “Take Back the City”. It was a striking opener on many fronts. For starters, taking the lyrics out of context, it felt like an appropriate welcome for them and to everyone. “I love this city tonight. I love this city always…” One got the sense that they had every intention of leaving their mark on the city; and it also highlighted the superb harmonies the band is capable of. On acoustic guitar duty for the moment, McDaid chimed in along with Connolly and Wilson, the three of them not only providing the backing vocals but also bolstering what Lightbody was doing as he paced around the stage, belting out a few of the lines in an incredibly impassioned manner.

Immediately electrifying, it was evident that Snow Patrol meant business. With that opening number one could feel the magic and compelling nature this music has, the past ten plus years since the release of A Hundred Million Suns having done nothing to diminish it; the intimate rapport with the audience being felt right away. Snow Patrol was there to entertain and deliver a memorable experience for all that had turned out, and they certainly got off on the right foot. That said, the first half of their set was plagued by some technical difficulties. It became more noticeable as they moved along; Lightbody spending a few moments fiddling with some of his equipment in hopes that it just required a simple fix, but to no avail. They handled it like the seasoned veterans they are, though, not even calling attention to it for a while, while the frontman never missed a beat, basically just shrugging it off and going about things as normal.

Prominent as the keys were during “Crack the Shutters”, that spellbinding love song boasted a robust rhythm section, Wilson really grooving to it as he strode around stage right, his movements seemingly calculative, as if he were waiting for the most opportune moment to strike. Indeed, he did as the track approached each crescendo. Upon finishing it Lightbody extended an official greeting to everyone, and also offered some insight to his appearance. Those closest to the stage had probably noticed he was lacking some shoes, instead just going barefoot. “…I’ve been wearing the same shoes for a year…” he remarked, adding that he wound up trashing them after they wrapped their South American tour. The lack of footwear seemed extra enjoyable to him. “Empress” was the first of a decent handful of cuts to be performed from Wildness; and given that it came after some older material, it was nice to see how it stacked up against those past works. This newest release is comprised of some of the most solid songs that Snow Patrol has produced, and even if there was a year’s long gap between albums, their signature sound wasn’t affected. “Empress” alone possesses that stellar indie-rock vibe that has proven to be a hallmark of the bands’ work, while also offering up a healthy serving of rock ‘n’ roll through the steady, pummeling percussion and the roaring guitars, both of which feel bolder than ever. That was particularly true when hearing that one live, the majestic scope of it being enthralling, while it simultaneously provided everyone with some serious rock.

If there was one positive to the trouble they were experiencing on stage, it was that it allowed Lightbody to conduct himself in a more natural manner, his affable demeanor leading one to appreciate the musician even more. He was handed a new guitar after that aforementioned song, laughing after having a quick chat with the tech that brought it to him. “So, I asked our guitar tech if this guitar was working, and he said, ‘You’ll find out in a minute’.” Even if he was dissatisfied with what was happening, he never seemed irritated by it, the quintet just going with the flow and taking things as they were. “This is a very appropriate song for this moment,” Lightbody quipped. “Don't give in. Don't you dare quit so easy…” he crooned as “Don't Give In” got underway, that more restrained number definitely taking on new meaning with the then current circumstances.

It didn’t go off without a hitch either, and again Lightbody just laughed it off. “This is the first night of the tour. Can you sense it?!” he asked afterwards, grinning and chuckling. He said it perfectly though when he stated that everybody was in it together, and that was, indeed, the shared mentality. “Open Your Eyes” capitalized on that. That cinematic masterpiece earned the strongest reaction from the spectators up to that point, especially as it hit its striking final minutes. Motioning with his hands, soon raising his arms into the air, Lightbody silently implored everyone to just let the music course through them and give themselves wholly to the song. They did, most of the crowd echoing along to that final refrain. A few minutes later Lightbody provided some backstory to this leg of the tour, noting they had been scheduled to fly into Dallas from Los Angeles the previous day, though bad weather had delayed that. “Bullshit!” one fan bellowed to that remark, referring to the severe weather that had been forecasted though never came to fruition. “There were, like, four hundred and fifty flights cancelled from LA…” the singer responded. “I was trying desperately to get here…” he added, joking that he was even considering one of Leonardo da Vinci's Flying Machines as a mode of transportation to Dallas. That daylong delay had resulted in them missing soundcheck for this show, Lightbody admitting that was the cause of so many of the problems they were having, owning that reason rather than passing things off on it.

Again, it shed light on who he really is and made him all the more likable. Pointing out a guy closer to the front, he declared it his job for the night to make the stone-faced gentleman smile. “You were dragged here?” Lightbody said as he briefly conversed with the man, realizing his job had just become that much more challenging. So, he did the only thing he could do: he dedicated the next song to the man. “I’m a time traveler from the future, and I met you and this song is about you,” he joked, using that as a segue into “Life on Earth”. Another song orchestrated on a grand scale, it allowed the spectators to fully appreciate the intricacies of Snow Patrol’s music. That was noticeable at every turn this night and it allowed the music to be so much more breathtaking, the way that Connolly, Wilson, McDaid and Quinn so artfully alternated between the more serene moments and the absolute precision they required to cutting loose and demonstrating the full extent of their musical prowess and how dynamic they can be.

That marked the end of the first half of their set, and before carrying on Lightbody swapped out some of his equipment, seeming assured that would remedy the issues and promising the next bit was “going to be great.” The difference was noticeable and immediate. The next number sounded so much clearer; every note, beat and word more pronounced, leading to an all-around lusher sound. It was Snow Patrol in all their glory; and while nothing had sounded bad up to then, it was evident that they firing on all cylinders at that point, eager and ready to make up for everything that they thought they had been lacking thus far. Seizing upon that newfound momentum, they even bridged a couple of the songs into the following one, further empowering themselves. Quinn and Wilson unleashed their full might on “Shut Your Eyes”, the rhythm section sounding surprisingly dominant on that one. Subtle as it was, one could even feel those sonorous notes shaking them; while “Heal Me” stood out as the most pleasantly surprising song of the night. It was self-described as being Lightbody’s favorite new song to perform live, he and his bandmates putting an exceptional amount of gusto into it. The recording itself is great, serving as another perfect example of how well Snow Patrol produces cinematic sounding pieces of work, but live it transcended that. That was present, though all the instruments sounded fiercer, a little rawer than what was captured in the studio, transforming “Heal Me” into a roaring beast that left everyone awed.

The best had been saved for last, those mesmerizing chords that begin “Chasing Cars” eliciting some deafening fanfare that was only outdone when the final line came around and was abruptly ceded to the crowd who didn’t miss a beat in collectively singing, “…Would you lie with me and just forget the world?” That song alone reinforced the staying power that music has, “Chasing Cars” being a song that everyone has surely heard before, even if they weren’t entirely sure who was responsible for it. It has aged exceptionally well over the last dozen plus years, still being a definitive piece of indie-rock (and a timeless one at that), the lyrics epitomizing just what an intimate and honest song should be; Lightbody’s emotional investment in his delivery of those words being unquestionable. “Take care of yourselves; we’ll see you again,” the singer stated as they moved along to the closing track of their 79-minute long set, which concluded in an exuberant fashion; the spectators getting to participate one more time as they sang and clapped along.

A few patrons took their leave at that point, no doubt wanting to beat the masses in getting out of the parking lot, which can be hectic to say the least. However, most were steadfast, certain that an encore was coming and eager to get the most out of this experience. While Snow Patrol did adhere to the routine that the encore has become, Lightbody didn’t hesitate to poke fun at it. Upon returning he joked about how typical an encore was of the arts and entertainment industry, laughing that the performers just go backstage and are like, “…Please, please like us!” he said in an exaggerated and desperate tone. Elaborating further, he even seemed keen on the idea on just playing every song in one setting, though acknowledged people would still wonder why there was no encore, so it’s better to just keep up the charade. McDaid was the only other member accompanying him for the first song of the 9-minute encore; the words “What if this is all the love you ever get?” filling the screen behind them.

The most bare-bones song of the night, it enraptured the audience in a way they hadn’t been at any other point. “What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get?” was another brilliant example of one of their songs transcending itself in the live environment, those lyrics that challenge one to reevaluate any relationship they’re in, to not take it for granted and embrace every aspect of it being exceptionally potent. A truly special moment, it was a pleasure to hear what is one of the best offerings from Wildness live; Connolly, Wilson and Quinn rounding things out for one last enchanting love song that felt like the perfect ending to their relatively brief but incredibly memorable time in Dallas. It may not have been the cleanest show of Snow Patrol’s career, but it was an awesome one nonetheless. You can’t fault a band for any technical difficulties that may occur, so all that is just beside the point. What isn’t beside the point is how resilient the five of them remained in the face of the obstacles that were suddenly thrown their way. I know I touched on that earlier, but it was still insightful to see how they handled it and wonderful that they didn’t let it affect them by getting flustered or upset. You just had to love them even more after witnessing that; and nothing ever sounded terrible out in the crowd.

The well curated set -- one comprised of some of the most stellar material they’ve churned out over their career -- they had planned helped in guaranteeing that everyone was transfixed with what they were playing, the overall structure of it having an excellent ebb and flow that took the listener on an emotional journey. It hit most if not all of the highlights and spanned a respectable amount of time, and while Snow Patrol made the wait fans had to endure well worth it, concertgoers leaving happy and content, it still seemed to pass too quickly, everyone already hungry for more. Hopefully they won’t have to wait as long between the next tour of North America. A significant voice in the indie-rock world for the better part of a couple decades now, Snow Patrol has managed to retain the high-profile spot they managed to position themselves in, and this performance just reinforced why they are still all too worthy of it. Some of the new stuff they played came across as being instant classics of theirs, while the smash hits and old favorites they had lined up were as marvelous now as they were upon first hearing them. Maybe even more so. It’s rare to find music that is capable of continuously impressing like that and that just speaks to how skilled this collective of musicians is when it comes to penning genuine, emotive music that connects with everyone. Something that resonates with the listener at their very core, and because of that, Snow Patrol evoked the quintessential concert experience this night, one where every soul in the building was unified by that music, feeling like they were part of something much bigger, even if it was for but a moment. This leg of Snow Patrol’s tour will run through May 21st, when it concludes at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, CA. Other notable stops include a performance at The Anthem in Washington, D.C. on April 26th; New York, NY’s Terminal 5 on April 30th; The Riviera Theatre in Chicago, IL on May 7th; and The Joint at Hard Rock in Las Vegas, NV on May 18th. A complete list of their tour schedule and additional info for each show can be found HERE; and be sure to check out Wildness in iTUNES or GOOGLE PLAY. Set List: 1) “Take Back the City” 2) “Chocolate” 3) “Crack the Shutters” 4) “Empress” 5) “Don't Give In” 6) “Open Your Eyes” 7) “Run” 8) “Life on Earth” 9) “Make This Go On Forever” 10) “Shut Your Eyes” 11) “Called Out in the Dark” 12) “Heal Me” 13) “Chasing Cars” 14) “You're All I Have” Encore 15) “What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get?” 16) “Just Say Yes” Note: ”The Lightning Strike (What If This Storm Ends?)” appeared on the set list though was not performed.

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xellychan040 · 6 years

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DBZ Fic Saiyan History: An Overview by Daokin, 3rd Class

Fandom: Dragon Ball (Z, GT, Super) Characters: Yamoshi (mentioned), The Vegeta Lineage (mentioned), Bardock (mentioned) Word Count: 5704 Warnings: Character death. Referenced violence and warfare, Massively AU, Canon vs Fanon, Akira Toriyama Has No Sense Of Scale (And I foolishly try to fix it)

Summary: May Rutaba and Yamoshi guide our race to glory among the stars.

Notes: I wrote this in around three days motivated solely by spite. Did you know Saiyans only ruled planet Vegeta for, like, half a decade? And the Vegeta line only stretches back TWO generations? I did. And now I'm filled with nerdish anger.

I always felt slighted that DBZ never really had a space traveling arc outside of the Frieza saga and maybe GT, and any time space was talked about in show the scale was ridiculous. You could reach the edge of the universe in a day, in one of the movies.

Anyway, this whole silly endeavor started because I wanted to write a Planet Vegeta never explodes/The Saiyans don't work for the PTO AU. And when I went to research the Tuffles and Yamoshi's legend I stumbled upon the official Daizenshuu timeline and had my very delicate suspension of disbelief shattered utterly. And thus...... This. It's all fanon and conjecture on my part, with a dash of abusing sub/dub inconsistencies (like yamoshi appearing either 1000yrs ago or 3000yrs ago), but for my purposes, it works. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Final note. I'm ignoring all the time patroller stuff for the most part. So Xenoverse and Heroes don't apply to this au. Read it here or on ao3 for better formatting

Salada Golden Period(circa. 3000 years ago)BCA 2240

Modern, pre-space faring period.

In terms of advancement, it’d probably be half a century or so more advanced than humanity’s current society on Seeded Planet 359, colloquially known as Earth. Incidentally, there are some similarities with Earth’s ancient pre-space faring cultures, namely Roman and Greek city-states in terms of infrastructure and politics.

At this point, there's no central government. Large clans absorb smaller clans in a complex fiefdom of constantly rearranging territories.

BCA 1840

Some 400 centuries after, Overlord Yasai conquered and unified most other clans and their territories after a prolonged period of infighting. It pacified the infighting for several decades, but Yasai’s brutal, totalitarian policies caused their own internal problems.

BCA 1790

An upstart Warlord named Rutaba challenged Yasai for change. It’s not clear if he won, but his actions contributed to a unified central government in which Saiyan citizens could participate.

Salada and Saiyans

Brief overview

Modern evolved Saiyans have been on Salada 400,000 years. Civilization, as it was known before their mass exodus of the planet, was around for an estimated 12,000 years.

Salada native, pre-Dark Age Saiyans had long life spans, with particularly powerful, healthy Saiyan’s living to at least 800. Loss of information and vital data archives makes it unknown if lifespan estimate can be lengthened.

It was during the last 3,000 years of Salada’s existence that many advancements and cultural shifts took place.

In the Saiyan home solar system, Salada was the perfect distance from its parent star to reflect a perfect amount of Blutz waves from the moon. Adding to the rarity of full moons, coming once or twice every century, Saiyans transformed into Great Apes retain all sense of self. Though naturally and culturally conditioned to seek improvement and challenge through battle, the balanced intake of Blutz waves made Salada Saiyans less aggressive overall than compared to their Planet Vegeta and post-Dark Age descendants.

Planet Salada itself was naturally abundant with resources and wildlife. Its large size supported a plethora of climates, regions, and a diverse terrain. Even during population and technology booms, along with massive Saiyan appetites, Salada remained able to support its occupants.

Birth of Yamoshi

BCA 1540

Not enough information remains in Data Archive to accurately confirm, but Yamoshi seems to have come from a distant branch of the Yasai Clan tree. Possibly related to Overlord Yasai.

A hypothesis from historians posits Yamoshi’s lineage also includes a link to the Rutaba Clan

Separating Fact from FictionAccounts of a Golden Warrior from the post-Golden AgeFrom the files of Daokin, 3rd Class Historian. Age 729

Little is known about Yamoshi, despite his long, varied life. In the chaos of Salada’s last few decades, not all historical accounts made it into the Saiyan Ark’s data bank. Time, distance, and outside influences have corrupted certain data files and entirely lost others.

What data has survived bolsters certain empirical evidence from witness accounts, though possibly somewhat embellished with folklore elements.

Considering his possible lineage, Yamoshi is hypothesized to be the son of lesser royalty. Though there are many accounts of his varied travels, it’s impossible to determine if he was an Ambassador of sorts or merely a renegade aristocrat looking for adventure.

What is known, however, is Yamoshi’s actions gained him five companions, each powerful Saiyans of note. Much of their backgrounds are lost to time, but what survives suggests they were all from varying clans and castes, but extremely respected in their endeavors.

There are many testaments to Yamoshi having an honorable disposition, yet a few accounts hint at a mischievous and determined personality.

During Salada’s most turbulent years, Yamoshi and the five other Saiyans are the ones responsible for managing to suppress the initial aggressive outbursts from Blutz wave infected Saiyans.

Space EraTechnological Boom (200 years later)BCA 1590

Evidence of an Advanced Race is found. Further investigation reveals Advanced Race as possible Seeders, releasing their DNA on viable worlds in hope distant descendants will evolve there.

Saiyan spacefaring begins to close-by neighboring planets in the solar system and star system. Scientists work to learn more about their Seeder Precursors.

Cosmic Disturbance Looms

Renewed civil unrest

BCA 1240

A neighboring sister sun in the closest solar system begins to give off an unprecedented amount of energy. Solar flares and emissions begin to have disastrous effects on Salada’s home solar system, shorting out technology and disturbing the delicate Blutz wave output.

Any plans to colonize planets in the current solar system and star cluster is put on hold.

The unpredictable surge of Blutz waves creates an uptick in aggressiveness. Pockets of infighting begin away from capitals. Fear for the future spreads.

A massive lash of solar energy during a rare lunar event sends the 1/4 of the population into a berserker state. Mass casualties. Panic and anger sew the seeds of a civil war.

Attempts to pacify populous is met with mixed results.

Exoplanet colonization plans are reopened when scientists discover a star map left behind by Advanced Seeder Race. Locations of viable, possibly genetically compatible, evolutionary similar life-supporting planets are found. As the civil unrest grows and star system situation worsens, a new plan for a large, race saving Ark is drawn up.

The scramble for resources to construct an unprecedentedly large starship capable of voyaging through unexplored dark space begins just as war breaks out.

Certain individuals of strength from various walks of life band together to stifle the fighting. As the Blutz wave influx gets stronger, their efforts become less effective.

The Saiyan Ark is finished just at the peak of fighting, which is beginning to have a disastrous impact on the planet. Scientists estimate the neighboring sun’s next massive energy outburst will have dire consequences for the entire cluster, Salada will not be spared, even if it survives the fighting.

The rush to fill the Ark with a varied populace begins. Resources and gear to survive the long voyage and subsequent landing on Seeded planets are loaded.

A direct Yasai clan successor is among those chosen to go into cryo.

Ascension in DeathYamoshi Becomes LegendBCA 1190

Yamoshi, leader of the pacifying group is nearly overtaken by Blutz wave affected Saiyans. To protect the Saiyan Ark while finishing preparations, he had led a full assault on the devolved, berserker state Saiyans infected by overexposure to Blutz waves. By now, most of the population not protected by Salada’s capital were afflicted by Blutz waves, the odds Yamoshi was up against were astronomical.

Many of Yamoshi’s pacifying group were killed in the conflict, but he and his five companions managed to lead their soldiers into pinning back the aggressive Saiyans far from the capital’s borders, holding the line far away from the Ark.

The standstill did not last long, a break is formed in the protective circle as several Saiyans reach an unnatural Great Ape transformation through the Blutz waves despite no full moon. With no other alternative, Yamoshi and his five companions return to the Ark and warn the remaining unaffected Saiyans to take off while they launch another assault with no hope for survival.

Determined and set on course for what is almost assuredly a suicide mission, Yamoshi and his companions band once more together to buy as much time as they are able.

Just before take off, Blutz wave infected berserker Saiyans nearly destroy all hope of take off for the Ark. It is saved only when Yamoshi unlocked an unprecedented level of power, ascending forms into a Golden Warrior that the Ark can safely leave Salada.

A 787 Year Long Voyage BeginsUncharted Dark Space, Salada Home System Destruction, and Near ExtinctionBCA 1180 - BCA 403

Though Saiyans had been beginning to explore their solar system and star system with a fair degree in success, they were nonetheless ill-prepared for a venture such as this. Even with revamped FTL engine designs based on Seeder Precursor technology found and the translated star maps, without any warp gates or reliable knowledge of what lied in wait in the darkness of the stars, there was slim hope they’d all survive the centuries-long drift.

Harsh galactic elements, dwindling resources, and other obstacles make space travel fraught with chances of utter failure. Even running on revolving skeleton crews while the rest of the population sleeps, there was little that could be done in the event of a disaster.

Even with lengthy lifespans and hearty physiologies, Saiyans skeleton crews were not mentally or emotionally equipped for prolonged, comparatively slow space travel. With much trepidation, they eventually set the Ark on autopilot, following the preprogrammed charted path towards the nearest seeded planet. The Ark’s population monitoring programs were also adjusted; in the event of critically low supplies, life support will cut off non-critical persons and redirect resources to both younger civilians and important crew.

This turned out to be a wise choice when several centuries in the Ark collided with space debris and lost valuable resources along with a batch of sleepers.

Anomalous Energy Detected Est. BCA 975

About 200 years into the voyage, the Ark’s sensors pick up a massive explosion of energy originating from Salada. The cause of the energy is unknown, but consensus says the unstable neighboring sun wasn't the culprit.

Point of No Return, Saiyan Home System is Destroyed Est. BCA 844

Unstable Sun gives off another dangerous flare, the energy readings far eclipsing previous outputs, triggering a chain reaction. Entire star system takes massive damage. In the unlikely event Salada managed to survive the infighting and previous energy emissions, there was little hope the planet would survive that final pulse.

Planet Fall on Planet Plant10 years after reaching Tuffle Home SystemBCA 393

Destination reached at last. The Saiyan Ark has finally made it to a Seeded world, there was hope for survival after centuries of strife.

However, the landing had its own complications. The Ark had sustained massive damage on it way into the system, losing several hundred sleeper pods, some housing leaders and Saiyans in positions of authority or holding critical knowledge. Though pre-take off designs had implemented each sleeper pod with its own nav system towards the Ark’s destination and its own limited resources, there was no guaranteed chance of survival. Of the pods lost, only 34% made it to Planet Plant intact. Of that number, only 28% of their passengers survived.

Upon atmospheric entry, the Saiyan Ark collided with the in-progress Tuffle orbiting Dyson band, inflicting damages and casualties to both races. The collision veered the Ark off course causing the massive starship to crashland in the arid red deserts of Plant, several Kilometers from a large Tuffle metropolis.

Saiyan Dark Age400 years of lost culture, costs of acclimatization.BCA 394 - BCA 3

The journey through Dark Space had taken its toll on the Saiyan Ark and its inhabitants.

Not only was a sizable percentage of the limited population lost, but electrical storms and the rough landing had damaged many of the starship’s computers, losing large chunks of valuable information. What resources were left that didn’t get used or lost en route was wouldn’t support the surviving population, even small as it now was.

Another unforeseen, problem was the effects of the latent Blutz wave overexposure. Combined with the prolonged cryo sleep and depleted nutrients meant generations of unprecedented Saiyan health problems that would linger at a genetic level.

Increased aggression, mental and hormonal imbalances, drastically shortened lifespans, and reduced fertility were among the most prevalent ramifications.

From a cultural perspective, many things were lost as well. A majority of lives lost en route to Plant had been older Saiyans through a combination of resource rerouting and other factors. 67% of the sleepers that awoke on Planet Plant were Saiyans in their early adolescence to early adulthood.

On top of the changes brought on by unbalanced hormones on a new planet, young Saiyans were left without enough elders in authority who could offer guidance through this turbulent period of settlement. Few of the survivors were mature enough to help the younger or new generations cope with natural biological and emotional changes, let alone the unnatural changes brought on Blutz wave overexposure and prolonged cryo sleep.

An even greater detriment would be insufficient technically skilled Saiyans. While on Salada, many Saiyan’s had lived partly on the fat of the land, yet modern, technological convenience still played a major part in even the most simple aspects of society. The rough reentry had damaged part of the Ark hull where Saiyan’s most suited to help the population settle had been sleeping.

Though they had brought along DNA banks of viable food sources like livestock and produce, they had little means to produce them, even if they had landed in a more fertile area

While the surviving Ark crew attempted to salvage what they could, there was little to do for the star ship’s damaged computers and archive banks. Art, sciences, family trees and bloodlines, key documents, and various more would be lost for years to come.

Stripped of the advantage of several millennia's worths of knowledge, the Saiyan survivors would have to make do with word of mouth instruction, hard work, instinct, and the goodwill of their new world-mates.

Settling In and Continued Losses

Planet Plant was not kind to its new residents. For the Saiyans of Salada, who were used to an abundance of natural resources brought by plentiful jungles, the harsh, barren deserts of Plant could provide little.

Already weakened from the prolonged sleep, it didn’t take long for several Saiyans to go into critical condition due to starvation and malnutrition.

And still, others had begun having unexplained, violent outbursts. It was quickly discovered those with more moderate to severe cases of latent Blutz wave overexposure were susceptible to heightened ambient Blutz waves generated by Plant’s twin suns. Already pumping out an imbalance of aggressive hormones from the increased exposure back home, the surviving Saiyan’s biology had no time to slowly acclimatize to Plant’s sudden assault on their endocrine system. Over time, the increased Blutz waves would affect every Saiyan on Plant, continuing on to affect subsequent generations as well. It was an unideal outcome, but one they could do little about.

From insufficient food, shelter, and medical care, Saiyan numbers began to falter. Lifespan estimates soon followed.

However, Saiyans are resilient. They pushed on through by whatever means necessary, yet it would be generations before they could truly make Planet Plant a hospitable home.

First ContactForging RelationsBCA 394 - BCA 3

Tuffles were not unmoved by the plight of their new neighbors, yet they were still cautious. The average Saiyan stood a full head and shoulders above most Tuffles, possessed large predatory fangs, and were several times stronger, even weakened. Still, the Tuffles sent out aid in the form of food, water, and supplies.

Eventually, due to the Saiyan’s current inability to repair their Ark, the Tuffles negotiated a trade: Ark components in exchange for Tuffle technology (namely food processors, agriculture and livestock based genetic modification, and small-scale terraforming tech).

While the Tuffles had already mastered limited space flight, they’d yet to perfect FTL engines. The Ark along with recovered Seeder Precursor data would launch their technology decades ahead. So much so, that their ambitious Dyson band was completed in half the time of their previous best estimate. Within this time period, Tuffles would advance even beyond their own expectations, converting the singular energy harnessing Dyson band into two gigantic scale orbiting stations. If Planet Plant was viewed from their moon, it would appear to have two planetary rings.

In a show of good will, the Tuffles had used a combination of replication and cloning technology to salvage, and in some cases cross breed DNA of Salada life forms, slowly introducing it to Plant’s ecosystems. Several species of Salada livestock and plant life were once again made available to Saiyans, genetically improved to support Saiyan metabolism even while on emergency rationing. The Saiyan starvation epidemic was drawn to a slow halt now that they had a limited, but nutrition and calorie-packed food source.

It not only gave Saiyans a chance to be self-sufficient, but it allowed the two races to maintain a respectable distance from each other. There was much to do before either side would regain some semblance of normal.

Tuffle ExpansionReaching the StarsAge 217

While combing through the Ark’s recovered databanks, Tuffle scientists restored as information as they could. By orders of their King, they were to especially be on the lookout for references to The Seeder Precursors, seeing as they were possibly the Tuffles’ ancestors as well as the Saiyans’.

Seeing as their Technology Age was already far eclipsed many other sapient species around their current age, the Tuffles decided to combine the wealth of information they received with their advanced capabilities and literally reach for the stars. While certain aspects of the Saiyan technology were less advanced, the fact that only several generations ago Saiyans were once seasoned star voyagers and colonizers put the Tuffles behind several centuries.

It was a gap they were most eager to close, for various reasons.

With the completion of their two orbiting stations and the harnessing of near limitless renewable, clean energy, the Tuffles set their sights high. Close by, just beyond the solar system they had surveyed and marked several exoplanets with habitable atmospheres; each an excellent opportunity to expand.

Starships when under construction, routes were charted and teams underwent exceedingly difficult training all in preparation for the upcoming journey. It wasn’t long until the first fleets and Exploration teams left the safety of Plant in search of an expanded frontier. Every Tuffle left on Planet waited with bated breath as the Exploration team sent back data compiled from the journey as well as each individual landing.

While given longer to prepare under favorable circumstances, along with a much smaller distance between destinations, the Tuffles found colonizing new planets to be more of a challenge than previously expected.

Some planets had climates and terrains that, while technically livable, would be difficult to settle. When scientists back home got word of the slow progress settling, they got together with politicians, financial backers, and the Exploration teams to come up with a plan of action to speed things up.

The answer came in the form of the Saiyans.

Upliftment or ServitudeAge 224

Despite the unbelievable strife the Saiyans had gone through, they showed marked improvement. With Plant as their new home, both pre and post-Salada born Saiyans would never quite be the same as their ancestors, yet their eventual adaptation to their surroundings was nothing short of phenomenal. Due to the extreme climates of Plant’s vast desert areas and dangers associated, Tuffles never bothered to settle far beyond the natural borders of their plentiful oases, and yet Saiyans, once the starvation crisis was addressed, had managed to nearly adapt overnight. Blutz wave overexposure or no, all Saiyans were sturdy and survivalist, taming the harsh lands and building small if low-tech, villages that were meant to last.

That adaptability, along with their immense strength gave one Tuffle scientist an idea.

After the initial first contact and aid given in return for valuable data, Tuffles and Saiyans seemed to have come to a mutual, somewhat unspoken agreement of indifference towards one another. It was somewhat exacerbated by the races’ first shared full moon, many Tuffles made wary by the Saiyan’s large, imposing transformations. But it seemed it was time to once again open up methods of communication. Another deal was struck, the rerelease of reconstructed Archive Data from the Saiyan Ark in return for help on the expansion of the Tuffle Frontier.

With their powerful bodies and quick ability to adapt to various environments, the Saiyans would act as the heavy movers and shakers in paving the way to settle more unruly landscapes. As if controlled by muscle memory from another time, Saiyans seemed to slide right back into the motions of space travel and territory expansion despite most Saiyans having never even set foot on a starship before.

It was an exciting time for all parties involved. Once again, progress marched forward at a speed Tuffle scientists never dared dream of. As for the Saiyans, the chance to test themselves against new challenges and return to their place beyond the stars beckoned them forward with little hesitation.

Things were moving for the Saiyans who stayed in the desert as well. Even with the Saiyan Dark Age officially ending just over 200 years ago, the release of data files was the most effective balm on Saiyan culture. From technical blueprints and scientific dissertations to a surprising amount of literature and history texts, the Saiyans were awash with the rediscovery of their culture. In fact, the emergence of the Cultivar Historia— a data drive containing notable lineages and bloodlines or cultivars — would soon play a major role in the future of Planet Plant.

And yet, what goes up must come back down. Back on the expanding frontiers, the Tuffle exploration teams were being urged to speed up their already incredible progress. Much of their speed in settling frontier worlds depended on the skill and effort of their Saiyan counterparts once Tuffle teams finished time extensive terrain scanning to ensure the safest route of action. But at the behest of their superiors, the exploration team slowly began to lessen the amount of preliminary scanning on new worlds, sending out Saiyan teams without extensive knowledge of potential dangers or obstacles. In the end, Tuffle superiors got the numbers they wished for, exoplanets settled and viable at an exponential rate, but at the cost of dozens of Saiyan teams.

While Planet Plant, and in particular Tuffle cities, were being flooded with resources and myriad of cosmic treasures, the Saiyan death toll began to quietly rise.

A New LineageThe Rise of the First VegetaAge 276

Since their landing on Plant, Saiyans had adopted a more tribalistic way of life, with descending from a combination of modified military ranks and individual skill level. The higher in rank you were on the Saiyan Ark, the more likely you were to assume a leadership position after landing, with a similar outcome if you were equipped with skills that would help the population survive various obstacles during difficult periods. It was a lifestyle that more or less remained unchanged as the centuries rolled by on Plant, however, the appearance of the Cultivar Historia brought another, more obscure facet to leadership:

Bloodlines.

It was revealed that, barring a few cases, most of the Saiyans currently holding positions of authority were able to trace their family history to cultivars listed in the Historia. However, none would hold so impressive an ancestor to their name other than Vegeta the First, an off-world team leader on a particularly treacherous exoplanet. An exoplanet that had claimed the lives of at least half a dozen Saiyan teams in the process of settling it. When Vegeta returned home to Plant bearing the news of more losses, he was informed of his connection to Salada Royalty. Fitting, as his name was a modern translation of Overlord Yasai’s.

Burdened by the loss of many strong Saiyan lives and now in possession of this new information, Vegeta would formulate a plan for the future of his race.

Not even half a year later would Vegeta set his plan into motion, rallying both on-world and off-world Saiyans together under one goal: Saiyan Dominance.

Saiyan RevoltClaiming the PlanetAge 277 - Age 287

When news of a Saiyan in the frontier had been killed by a Tuffle after an unexpected complication during a routine mineral site survey, Vegeta used the resulting outrage to spark a mass protest against the Tuffles’ continued disregard for the Saiyans.

Leaving the deserts to march into the Tuffle metropolis where the Royal Tuffle family ruled, Vegeta, backed by the flames of Saiyan discontent from his large group, challenged the king to a formal audience to listen to their grievances. However, the Tuffles took this as an act of aggression and stopped their advancement with a large cadre of guards. Vegeta, out of patience and taking this as a refusal to hear his people out, decided there was no possible avenue for diplomacy and signaled his group for a preemptive strike.

That was the start of a war that would last ten years. Both sides would take heavy casualties, however, Tuffle cities and civilians would take the brunt of the carnage as the entire planet became a battleground. While the Saiyans had sheer power and increased durability to their advantage, the Tuffles compensated with their far greater numbers and technology.

Particularly detrimental to Saiyans were the Scouters, which the Tuffles used to avoid and prepare for sneak attacks or ambushes. Another crucial tool on the battle feild was Energy Siphons, technology that absorbed Saiyan battle energy in a limited radius and converted it to power barriers and heavy artillery.

Saiyans fought back with scorched earth tactics, targeting manufacturing facilities that weren't yet protected by the Tuffle military, either ceasing or slowing down production of arms and materials. They also employed pack hunting strategies to corral and guide Tuffle squads into pinned positions, after which they placed the Tuffles under continued fire, systematically destroying their Energy Siphons until they were stripped of all protection.

When word reached those who were stationed off-world of what was happening on Plant, there was an immediate divide between Saiyan teams and Tuffle Explorers, smaller scale battles ensued over the control of the outposts. There was a mixed bag of wins and losses on both sides, with the resulting winners taking command of the starships stationed on the exoplanets, loading it with resources and materials, before returning to Plant to aid their people.

The war waged on, both sides in a deadlock with contested territory constantly falling in and out of hands.

However, the stalemate wasn't long to last. Nearly 8 years into the conflict a major tide would turn as the moon reached its zenith, rising full in the sky and unleashing its full force of magnified Blutz waves, triggering transformations for Saiyans everywhere on the field. In a strange echo, Vegeta was once again en route to the Tuffle King’s encampment when the moon broke cloud cover. Breaking through the King’s protections, Vegeta slaughtered the guard station there, eradicated the royal line and took the crown. A decisive victory for the Saiyans and a death knell for the Tuffles.

Tuffle resistance became scattered and thinned out. With their king dead and a majority of their cities devastated, the Tuffle army began to lose all sense of cohesion as they were picked off. Finally, in another ironic echo, having lost all ground, the Tuffles scraped together as many survivors as they were able and made their escape off the planet in a fleet of starships. They ran to the far edge of the star cluster, to a small planet they had surveyed with long distance scan but were years away from any settlement plans.

Planet Plant now belonged to the Saiyans. Vegeta was hailed as the new King for his strength and roll in their victory and Plant was renamed in his honor.

It was now time to rebuild.

Neo Saiyan RenesainceA new culture is born from the ashesAge 337

From the day of the Saiyans’ victory, there came a 50-year long renesaince. As they rebuilt the planet and moved into abandoned Tuffle metropolises, the Saiyans also worked to blend rediscovered culture with their current culture.

First order was establishing the royal court with the newly crowned King Vegeta at its head. Those that proved themselves in battle were made generals and commanders of the newly made official Saiyan Army. Those with impressive Cultivars were also given impressive titles, such as advisors or councilors with wide jurisdiction. Still, more Saiyan individuals would make names for themselves as they repurposed Tuffle technology or updated designs on Salada blueprints.

Outside of the court, many common Saiyans began to explore a wealth of new opportunities.

Even with the long war, the material and resource surplus from off-world remained in decent condition, and Saiyans from all walks of life took advantage. The newly named Planet Vegeta was once again flooded with unceasing progress.

As the skylines rose higher, quality of life became comparable to Salada during its Space Age. Birthrates and life expectancies were also on the rise. It wasn't long into his rule that the next Vegeta was born, thus setting the stage for the new Saiyan royal line.

War on the Frontier The Start of 200 Years of Conflict Age 339

Of course, the animosity between the Saiyans and the Tuffles would not be so easily forgotten. Far off in the edges of the star cluster where the Tuffles had been forced to run, they came into contact with roving bands of unaffiliated space mercenaries. Trading what they could spare for new technology and expendable men, the Tuffles began a slow campaign to reclaim their lost exoplanets and the resources there. The aim was to build a stockpile of material in hopes of sieging Planet Vegeta to reclaim it in the future.

During the time spent rebuilding on Planet Vegeta, the Saiyans hadn’t paid much attention to their claimed exoplanets, only sparing a handful of soldiers to be stationed on each outpost to continue mining for resources. But as the Tuffles began to make their way back to their home system, the lightly guarded outpost turned out to be excellent listening posts. The stationed Saiyans sent back word of incoming hostiles, after which generals sent back reinforcement towards the various outposts.

This would be one of the first opening volleys of a series of prolonged skirmishes. The Tuffles and their occasional mercenary allies would keep the Saiyans on high guard but would fail to make any decisive wins against them. Any and all plans to launch an orbital bombardment, while occasionally working on an outpost, failed when it came to Planet Vegeta. Vegeta the Second, now a decorated general himself, had commissioned the retrofitting of the Tuffle Dyson Band into serving as the Saiyan Space Fleet’s barracks and deploy station, but also an anti-orbital defense turret.

Once again, Saiyans and Tuffles came to a deadlock in the form of a series of back and forth ground wars on various exoplanets. The Saiyans growing stronger with each battle as the Tuffles raced to make their technology more devastating, building prefab military bases with ginormous Energy Siphons that stifled battle power in large, kilometer-wide radiuses.

Though the less bloody than the first Saiyan-Tuffle war, it was no doubt costly.

ArmisticeBrokered PeaceAge 709

During the birth of Vegeta the Fifth, the intergalactic community could no longer allow things to continue as they were. Merchant and civilian class starships were being caught in the crossfire, dealing millions of credits in damages and loss of uninvolved lives. The fighting was beginning to seep outside of the star cluster, causing major disturbances in the progress in construction of a warp gate.

After an unfortunate incident in which a cruiser class starship carrying an important figure was blasted over the atmosphere of a Tuffle controlled exoplanet, the Galactic Patrol was called in to negotiate a ceasefire.

Though several generals and advisors called to show the full force of Saiyan might against the Galactic community at large, the King and his moderate members of court worried over an extented war theater while they were already locked into a conflict. Finally, after months of tense negotiation, an Armistice was declared.

At least in an official capacity. Unofficially, the Tuffles and Saiyans still fought small, undeclared skirmishes, but only on exoplanets not belonging to either side or isolated dogfights between starships.

Current Era

Age 710 - ongoing

On Planet Vegeta, progress still marches forward but at a much slower, organic rate. School and military training are heavily linked, with young Saiyans receiving a general education until their 12th year, after which from the onset of puberty onwards far into adulthood, most continue on into the military.

Birth castes factor into a Saiyan’s individual projected career path within the military, with 3rd classes typically filling in as infantry or leading small infiltration squads. 2nd class Saiyans are usually promoted to officer rank fairly soon, with the 1st class and Elite typically groomed and trained to become generals and councilmen from birth.

Should a Saiyan decide not to follow a military career, there’s some light stigma against the individual not being “Saiyan enough”, but as time lowers the genetic aggression brought on by Blutz wave overexposure, the stigma has lessened into generally light-hearted teasing. There’s also a practical reasoning in that a society would function very long with no other infrastructure beyond a military arm. And thus various other careers and academic ventures are offered elsewhere.

As our Saiyan society stands now, we are at a precipice of joining the galactic community at large. Though some argue for continued isolation from the Intergalactic Government, other say it’s only a matter of time.

Author Notes and Dedications

Daokin, 3rd Class Historian. Age 716

Well, this textbook has been a long time in the making. Since before the birth of my son Bardock, even. He’s five now, and a handful, just as brutal as his mother ( haha ). Not a day goes by that I don’t need my mate to rescue me from his roughhousing.

Speaking of my mate, thank you Commander Parsni for putting up with me as I whined more than our toddler when my deadlines loomed. I know more than once you were tempted to ( and nearly did ) frag me out my misery. Yes, but even this un-Saiyan recluse has something to live for, and my passion has always been our lost history. I hope it serves our next generations well.

May Rutaba and Yamoshi guide our race to glory among the stars.

Resources

The Salada Canticles, Vol. 3

Conflict Chronicles: An overview of notable wars in the cosmos, Argus Nox

Tracking the Past: Ancient Civilizations, Dar Ech

Cultivar Historia, Potaro, 2nd Class

Beyond Our Reach, Straba, Tuffle Scientist

#xelly writes #dragon ball z #dbz #saiyans #yamoshi dbz #saiyan culture #meta or reverse meta #please read it on ao3 or gingko

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fallen--lilith · 3 years

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Fate Chapter 4

Trigger Warning/Needles and mention of drowning I just want to apologize that Vegeta isn't in this much so far. It's not like this will only be a 13 chapter story... I think. It might be off since I'm the oldest in the family and never had tortuous older brothers ( I feel like the brother being the youngest is whole other type of assholes??) Not to mention we don't know who Kakarot really is? So just as super preface he's like an asshole but still really goofy. Think America from Hetalia. ( only way to describe it) Also fuck staying with lyrics to a song for chapter lyrics.

Word Count: 1527

Chapter 4: Take Care of Yourself (TW/Needles)

"100 credits? Last time it was only 40!" Peppa yelled as she slammed her fists on the medical stall's counter. "I should--"

"Yeah well, the ingredients for the medicine are getting hard to come by and I can't survive on the few weaklings that require this junk. So you can pay up or go die in an alleyway way. I don't care." The stall owner said as he held out the payment slot.

"This is bullshit." She said, but she desperately needed the shots. She could feel herself already withering away from the inside out. The female saiyan migraine was growing worse and arguing over price wasn't really helping anyone. It wouldn't have been too bad if ground control could have done their job and figured out where they could have landed beforehand. This was a predetermined stop after all.

She reluctantly placed the cracked scanner lense in the slot and paid for the medicine. The owner smiled and handed her the kit. "Have a nice day" he said when she snatched it out of his hands and shoved it in her tote bag.

She then met up with her sister who was just now finishing buying some fancy meat for dinner as per tradition.

"Hey, I thought you were going to wait, so I could pay." Peppa huffed as she took Sutal's tote bag also, so Sutal could carry the meat.

"Oh well, your pay was cut and you were taking too long. " the older sister replied.

"Oh well, the damn stall over charged me for the kit and wouldn't back down." Peppa groaned. The two started walking. "Most outposts charge at most 50 credits. It's probably some dumb tax The Elite decided on to cut out the weaklings or some shit."

"Does Prince Gag-eta know how much it costs to even keep you alive? Maybe you should be mates with him just to get fre--OW!" Sutal rubbed her arm where Peppa had punched her as best as she could.

Peppa's face was burning red with embarrassment. She shifted the two tote bags more comfortably. "I don't need help from that idiot. Once I figure out how to surpass Raditz without him crying I'll be fine. Besides, just because we're friends doesn't mean we'll end up as mates." Nothing in her voice sounded convincing.

"Yeah, and that's why you've started putting your hair up in a ponytail huh sissy? Because your friend looks at every woman that does this new trend? " Sutal smiled wider. Peppa couldn't answer because no matter what, it would have been taken the wrong way.

"I swear the dispensary gets farther than everytime we come to visit." Peppa changed the topic. There was a four way path and Peppa had to stop and think which way the dispensary was. Sutal then took the lead and went right.

"How can you forget which way every time? We've walked this way a thousand times as kids." Sutal commented, though she lightly laughed and remembered what the scientists suggested to jog her sister's memory. "Remember racing with Raditz and Kakarot to see father first when he landed? The winner got to ride his shoulders."

Peppa clenched her fist tightly around a tote strap. It was hard for her to pull that memory but it sounded very...similar. But she was remembering…. That's good. "And the losers clung to his arms or leg right? The ol' man carried us like it was nothing all the way. What a sight it must have been..."

They continue to reminisce, well more so Sutal than Peppa, til they arrived at an meat dispensary for the Saiyan army. "Mother, We're home!" They said at the same time as they bowed in sync. If there was one thing everyone loved was seeing the Saiyan twins in sync so well.

"Girls!" Gine turned and took off her gloves and gave them a big hug. "I've been getting a little worried since it was getting late...Peppa! What happened to your face? Who do I-"

Peppa blushed. "Don't worry. I already took care of them and the swelling had already gone down. Kakarot is supposed to bring me something to help with it. "

"We also got dinner for tonight since most of us are going to be home." Sutal added. "We're going to head home afterwards to get this bad boy to cook."

"Both of you are too nice!" Gine smiled with stars in her eyes.

“My, my, the both of you have grown quite big and strong, just like your father. Time flies so fast doesn't it, Gine? " An older Saiyan woman joined them. She was heavier than the mother, but twice as sweet. Gine let go of her daughters and they bowed to the woman.

Gine rubbed their heads. " I know right? I don't know what's scarier. Seeing your kids leave the planet never to be seen again or thinking they'd come back with a potential mate." The older women laugh.

After some more small talk, the daughters made their way their to their childhood home. The best way one could describe Bardock and Gine's house is homely, yet cramped. There wasn't much décor as a typical Saiyan home, but military medals from all the members growing up were proudly displayed.

Sutal began preparing the meat as Peppa got out her medicine kit and laid it out on the kitchen table. 3 different shots every month and the kit only lasts 7 months. What they did exactly was confusing to her. It had something to do with proteins and keeping her solid? All she was certain of was that if she missed a month, she came down with a terrible fever.

She tied the medicinal band around her left arm and used her teeth to tighten it enough to cut off circulation. After tapping the inside of her elbow to find a vein, she injected her first shot. Injection hurt like hell but she didn't make a single peep.

"What was it like… being separated into orange goo? Is it like drowning?" Sutal asked as she prepared the meat. She hated needles just like her younger brother, so starting the cooking was a good distraction, but she also hated the silence.

Peppa took the band off and flexed her muscles to get the first serum pumped into her system. "It's hard to describe because downing…your brain is connected to your body. AND there's that primal fight to survive even if you can't make it…and it's easy for someone to pull you out." She looked at her hand and flexed it in and out of a fist.

"This is like...being a great ape but deeper. You're alone with your thoughts but you're in nothingness. No body, no physical limitations, you come back as if you're born yesterday health wise. You, yourself have to pull your soul out of the sea of life... it all depends on how selfish you want to be. I wonder if it's the same for the prince though when he's in great ape form...I heard being able to control Oozaru takes a lot of trai-" Peppa pondered as she put the band back on and began getting ready for the second shot.

“Heyo! What smells great? It's making me-"Kakarot burst through as he always does. However he wasn't expecting his sisters to be home before him but rather Gine. Peppa also had just so happened to finish administering her second and was holding it in the air. It took the coronal one look of the needle for the color his face to to drain... Before he could utter another word the tall Saiyan slumped to the ground, passed out.

Peppa doesn't quite remember, but Sutal once told her as a kid that while she was sleeping Kakarot had somehow made little rings on Peppa's skin with an alien fish. When Peppa woke up, Kakarot told her how she was going to grow mushrooms in those spots. She nearly scrubbed her skin off til Gine stopped her.

Peppa dragged him to the living area and little by little got him on the couch while Sutal cut off a few pieces of meat to add to an epsom salt mixture. Both were crackling like witches during their tasks. However, Peppa cut short and got real quiet. Sutal was so caught up she didn't realize she was the only one laughing now coming out of the kitchen with the flask.

"I wish I had a recording of that. I've never seen him fall so fast." Sutal said as she entered the living room. She stopped in her tracks when she saw who had also just come home.

There stood their father, Bardock in the living room with a disapproving look on his face. "What are you two up to now?"

#Fate: a dbz fic #Vegeta x Oc #Dragonball fanfiction #dbz fanfic #tw//needle mention #trigger warning needles

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gammaprimesmw · 3 years

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TRANSFORMERS FANFIC - SEPARATION Pt. 1

I started this sometime in 2019 as a sort of backstory for a pair of Transformers characters I brought into a mass-crossover roleplay server on Discord. It's loosely based on the continuity of my ill-fated Transformers Genesis fic, but it exists within its own micro-continuity. Any future fics I write will likely either be set in a micro-continuity of my own making or tentatively set in an official one.

For at least two million years, a brutal civil war had been raging on the distant planet of Cybertron. What began as a coup d'état launched by what was once a mere terrorist organization has since escalated into a planet-wide battle between the planet's new, dictatorial regime and a dwindling band of freedom fighters led by the bearer of what was once seen as the symbol of office for the planet's true leader. This small band of rebels would come to call themselves the Autobots, and the oppressive regime they sought to topple would become known as the Decepticons.

"How exactly are we gonna get off this planet, Prime?" asked a warrior in the form of a teal ground vehicle resembling a classic sports car. "Even a single space-capable scout couldn't make it past that Decepticon blockade."

"Dash's got a point, boss-bot," added a white and blue vehicle driving alongside the Autobot convoy. "That blockade's coverin' the planet like an Insecticon swarm on an Energon crystal."

"During the Age of Colonization, eons before this war began, Cybertronian engineers developed technology that would allow us to travel across the stars without need of spacecraft," replied the heavy red, silver, and blue vehicle leading the group. "The only terminal of this 'SpaceBridge' has, thus far, survived the ravages of war."

"Even if such a thing works, are you really plannin' to just flee the planet?" asked a sturdy-looking red vehicle with maize-colored accents. "This is our home, Prime! We can't just give up on it!"

"Ironhide, I have no desire to simply surrender this planet," the one called Prime replied. "Though I do intend for us to relocate, I do not intend to surrender. We will fight on, but our prospects for victory are grim should we remain here. We will establish an off-world base from which to retake Cybertron. In so doing, perhaps we will re-establish contact with the lost Cybertronian Colonies."

"With all due respect, Optimus, can we really be sure that the SpaceBridge will work as intended?" asked a white and red medical vehicle. "It hasn't been used in four million years."

"Ancient Cybertronian technology is astonishingly resilient, Ratchet. Were I uncertain of the SpaceBridge's functionality, I would not have informed Prime of its existence, nor would I have provided the coordinates of its location."

While the Autobots continued their trek to the ancient SpaceBridge Terminal, Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, watched them from his throne room in the city of Kaon, smirking as he did so. "So...the Autobots are still trying to escape the inevitable," he said to himself before turning to face a powerful dark blue and white robot who was manning the nearby computer terminal. "Has their destination been calculated, Soundwave?"

"Affirmative, Lord Megatron," the faceless technician droned.

"Excellent. Deploy the nearest Eradicon squad," the powerful Decepticon leader commanded as he rose from his throne. "I shall join them. In the meantime, Shockwave is in command of this fortress."

"Fear not, Lord Megatron," a purple, cycloptic robot replied with a salute. "Kaon shall remain as you leave it."

"I have the utmost faith that it will, Shockwave. You seldom disappoint," Megatron commented before transforming into a vehicle resembling a dual-rotor helicopter with a large cannon mounted on its underside before flying off toward the Autobots' location.

“Autobots, alert,” announced a flyer in the form of a gray and maize UAV-like vehicle. “Skybolt is detecting incoming Eradicon units.”

The word ‘Eradicon’ immediately brought about an uneasy feeling among all the Autobots. It wasn’t because they feared these Decepticon shock troopers though. It was because of what they were: former Autobots and Cybertron civilians that had been subjected to Spark extraction and, when necessary, modifications to make them more combat-capable. Each one was governed by a Teletraan-Class Artificial Intelligence that was completely subservient to Megatron. Because these drones were once friends, it was particularly hard for the Autobots to fight against them. Even the steely Optimus Prime would falter somewhat when being confronted with them.

One Eradicon in the form of a bulldozer-type vehicle transformed and fired on Dashlane and Jazz, who responded by transforming themselves and drawing their weapons. The cool-headed white and blue warrior fired a couple shots at the Eradicon, who blocked them with the half of its shovel that was attached to its right forearm. Dashlane, meanwhile, was a bit more hesitant to fire, recognizing this now mindless drone as his former mentor Landmine. He briefly flashed back to his last moments with the elder Autobot as he was being dragged away by Shockwave’s minions before shaking the memory away and firing. He, like the others, had to remember that these things were no longer their friends.

Skybolt, meanwhile, had not been sentient long enough to truly understand the emotional connections his comrades had with the Sparks that once occupied the Eradicons’ shells. He scanned the Landmine Eradicon for a weakness, eventually pinpointing one on his lower back and firing a missile into it, sending the drone falling forward as Dashlane and Jazz backed away. “You’re lucky, kid,” Dashlane commented before taking a deep breath and shooting the Landmine Eradicon in the back of the head. “Fighting these things doesn’t take the kinda toll on you that it does on us.”

“Skybolt is unfamiliar with Eradicon Units’ previous identities,” the flyer replied, his voice largely monotone.

“Like I said, you’re lucky. You have the good fortune of not knowing these guys as your friends,” the teal warrior said with a sigh before aiming in the direction of more approaching Eradicons. One of these took the form of a black and red moped that looked as though it had additional weapons and parts grafted onto it that were never originally intended to be there. This moped transformed into an equally patched-together robot, which scanned the Autobots in front of it before locking onto Skybolt. “Vulnerability detected,” it announced before being tackled by Dashlane. “Not that you’re gonna get the chance to exploit it, buddy,” the warrior growled before shooting the drone in the face. “I’m not about to let the ‘Cons turn him into another science project like you.” He fired again, aiming for the Eradicon’s chest this time and blasting a hole through the original armor that was not covered by the grafts. “Hate to do this to something that was once somebody’s friend.” he sighed before picking the drone up and hurling him at his fellow Eradicon, who simply blasted him away before aiming its weapon at Ironhide and Ratchet and charging up for another blast. Optimus, who was directly in front of them, transformed into his robot mode, performing a backflip over his companions as he did so. He then proceeded to hold his Energon Axe in front of his chest to shield himself from the brunt of the blast.

“Wheeljack! Perceptor! Proceed to the SpaceBridge and activate it. Jazz, Ironhide, Skybolt, and Dashlane will cover you.” the Prime ordered before jumping into the air and bringing his weapon down on the Eradicon, slicing it in half before returning it to his Subspace Storage Pocket and staring down at the remains of what was once an innocent civilian. “I derive no pleasure in having to desecrate your now Sparkless husk.” he remarked sadly before looking up. “This war must be ended...before other innocents are subjected to the same fate,” he continued, his optics narrowing as he heard a familiar pair of helicopter rotors. “Megatron must be stopped…”

While Optimus prepared to face his approaching nemesis, Wheeljack, Perceptor, and those assigned to cover them continued to make their way to the SpaceBridge, remaining in robot mode with weapons drawn as they did so. Soon enough, they would hear the screech of approaching jet engines as a group of Seekers swooped down and opened fire. Ironhide, having the toughest armor of the group, positioned himself to take any shots being aimed at the two scientists he had been asked to cover. “You two git to the control panel an’ try to git that SpaceBridge online! The rest o’ us’ll deal with these Decepti-Creeps!” the red warrior barked before firing on the gray and red Seeker leading the group. The other Seekers would break away from the formation to attack the other Autobots.

Dashlane backed out of the way as one of the Seekers, who was decked out in a black, red, and silver color scheme, attempted to dive-bomb him. The Seeker transformed into his robot mode before crashing into the ground and glared at the teal Autobot before drawing an Energon Sword.

"Nightshade, It's been a while. I guess your boss finally decided to hide behind bots who aren't just mindless drones."

"Heh...I see we are in agreement regarding Starscream's cowardice and seeming inability to learn from past mistakes," Nightshade responded. "Of course, this does not equate to a potential alliance, Autobot."

The Seeker charged forward, using his blade to block Dashlane's plasma blasts before leaping upward for an aerial slash attack.

Dashlane slid out of the way before the enemy's blade could make contact with its intended target, avoiding being completely bisected but still losing his right shoulder pad. He gritted his teeth, inwardly thanking Primus that his whole arm wasn't severed as he took aim and rapid-fired several plasma bursts into the junction between the Decepticon's torso and right shoulder. While not doing as much damage as a charged shot, these bursts did push Nightshade backwards as they hit, eventually pushing him into a nearby light post. Dashlane would follow this up by charging at the Seeker swordsman while charging up for another shot, which he would fire point blank while punching him in the same junction he had weakened with his previous shots.

"You're braver than Starscream. That's for sure," the Autobot smirked. "He'd turn tail-rudder and fly by now."

"Indeed, and that is precisely why I am more deserving of the position of Seeker Commander. That, and I am far more loyal to Lord GAH!"

The boastful Seeker's comment was interrupted by a sharp pain as a missile struck him from behind, blowing off his left wing upon detonation. Nightshade growled before turning to face his new assailant. "Skybolt, I presume?"

"Affirmative, Decepticon Warrior Nightshade."

"I did not anticipate such underhanded tactics from a glorified Teletraan Backup Module. You would make an excellent Decepticon. I will be sure to inform Lord Megatron of your accomplishment. He could use more competent--"

This time, Dashlane interrupted Nightshade's long-winded speech by delivering a powerful punch to the Decepticon's face.

"Mute it, motormouth! Sky's not about to become a 'Con!" Dashlane countered before delivering another punch that knocked his opponent down.

Skybolt, meanwhile, picked up Nightshade's discarded sword and studied it for a bit before activating it to block a barrage of laser fire from a cackling Seeker in navy and white with gold accents.

"Decepticon Warrior Triggerhappy, why are you still permitted to engage in combat?" Skybolt asked, making a perhaps feeble attempt to taunt the crazed Decepticon the way his mentor would.

"Uhh....'Cause I can blast you into spare parts!" Triggerhappy replied before cackling and unleashing another wild hailstorm of blasts, doing more damage to the surrounding environment than any of his targets.

"Maybe you could if you paid more attention to your targets than the sound of your weapons," Dashlane smirked before transforming into vehicle mode and driving toward a trio of incoming Seeker Drones, causing Triggerhappy to fire on them while attempting to blast him.

"Alert! Ally fire," one of the drones announced in the usual monotone before one of the stray shots hit its wing and caused it to crash. Dashlane swerved out of the way as the downed drone crashed into the road, destroying the guard rails as the impact caused it to explode.

Triggerhappy growled in annoyance. "Stupid Autobot! You made me blast one of our drones!"

While the warriors continued to battle the Seekers, both Sparked and drone, Perceptor and Wheeljack worked together to get the SpaceBridge terminal online.

"SpaceBridge control system interface successful," came the pleasant, but fairly monotonous, voice of Teletraan 1 through a speaker on the control panel. "Diagnostic commencing."

Both scientists waited patiently while their base computer AI scanned the SpaceBridge's systems, their expressions turning from excited to concerned as a maniacal cackle sounded in the distance and was followed by an approaching jet engine.

"Oh scrap....Triggerhappy," Wheeljack groaned.

"Your concern is indeed warranted, Wheeljack," Perceptor spoke in agreement. "While his targeting skills may be questionable, his propensity for collateral damage is not."

"I think I know what you mean, Percy," Dashlane replied after returning to his robot mode and firing a charged shot on Triggerhappy's left wing. Skybolt, meanwhile, watched for a bit while accessing his memories regarding Nightshade's swordplay techniques. It didn't take too long for him to settle on one that seemed like it would be effective: The Aerial Slash. All the while, though, Triggerhappy continued to spray ammunition everywhere, with one of his stray shots hitting Skybolt before he could perform the technique.

Another stray shot, meanwhile, struck the SpaceBridge control panel just as a portal was opening. This stray blast managed to strike vital control systems on impact, causing Perceptor's optics to widen with a sense of worry that bordered on a mild panic. Teletraan's words only heightened the scientist's anxiety.

"Alert! Destination control failure. Wormhole magnitude extending beyond acceptable limits."

Dashlane and Skybolt, who were closest to the terminal, soon felt themselves being pulled toward the open portal.

"Skybolt! Dashlane! You must make a concerted effort to escape the vortex before its yield increases...if possible," Perceptor instructed.

Dashlane and Skybolt both attempted to transform, figuring they'd have a better change with the increased speed of their alternate modes.

"Skybolt is...unable to...transform....Maximum speed....is limited."

"You and me both....kid."

"Perceptor, any idea where those two are gonna end up?" Wheeljack asked as he watched his friends' futile attempts to escape the increasingly powerful pull of the destabilizing wormhole.

"The SpaceBridge portal has grown dangerously unstable. In its current state, its endpoint is impossible to determine. Given the exponentially increasing level of subspace distortion, there is a probability of interdimensional transport that further complicates their current situation."

"Gah....Can't that bot explain things in a way that the less scientifically-inclined can understand?" Dashlane asked out loud before being pulled through the vortex, disappearing to parts unknown.

"Oh no! Dashlane! Perceptor, we gotta shut this thing down!"

"Agreed, Wheeljack. If it is allowed to remain open, it will further destabilize," the red-hued scientist said while trying to remain upright as the ground beneath him began to shake. "It's already adversely affecting the structural integrity of this facility."

"Critical alert! Energon conduit overload detected," Teletraan announced as Skybolt was pulled into the portal. "Detonation imminent."

"Scrap! We gotta roll," Wheeljack called out as he transformed into his white, red, and green racer mode and revved his engine. Perceptor soon followed suit, assuming the form of a halftrack scientific research vehicle. Both quickly accelerated to top speed and drove away as the building housing the terminal collapsed further.

"I don't think the other bots are gonna like this," Wheeljack said with a heavy sigh. "The SpaceBridge is scrap, and Dashlane and Skybolt are missing."

"Indeed. It will be imperative that we concentrate all efforts on their retrieval, as well as securing an alternative means of relocation. For the moment, the latter objective seems far more viable."

"If I can get that Vanguard Class Deep Space Transport we found up and running...and retrofitted for combat, we might be able to at least start looking for our future offworld base."

"Given your history of assigning simple, yet intuitive designations for your scientific endeavors, it would not be illogical to assume you have done so for this project."

Wheeljack chuckled, allowing Perceptor's words to distract him from his worries about Dashlane and Skybolt. "You know me all too well, Percy. I call it 'The Ark.'"

"Again...Simple, yet appropriate. Perhaps if...fate...is in our favor, we will locate our friends....and they will be online and well. Yes, I am well aware of how patently unscientific my previous statement was, but...I want to hope."

"Yeah. It's a good thing you didn't delete your emotions the way Shockwave did."

"If taking such an action would result in a similar abandonment of scientific ethic on my part, it is not one I'd ever be willing to take."

TO BE CONTINUED...

#Transformers #fanfic #writing #youtube

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist (And What It Has to Do With Aliens)

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

I’m endlessly fascinated by stories of the quirks that were built into the TV system where the well-laid plans of the system simply fell apart because it was asked to do too many things.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote about one of them, the tale of how radio broadcasters were able to shoehorn an additional FM station into the radio because of the proximity of TV’s channel 6 to the rest of the radio feed.

So when I was informed that there was another oddity kinda like this involving the TV lineups, I decided I had to take a dive in.

It’s a tale that centers around channel 37, which was a giant block of static in most parts of the world during the 20th century.

The reason for that was simple: it couldn’t fend off its scientific competition.

1952

The year that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission opened up the television system to use UHF, or ultra high frequency signals. The practical effect of this addition of bandwidth was that the total number of potential TV stations increased dramatically, from 108 to 2,051, overnight. The first UHF applications were granted on July 11, 1952, according to The History of UHF Television, a site dedicated to the higher-frequency television offerings.

The radio telescope at the Vermillion River Observatory, near Danville, Illinois. Image: University of Illinois

The radio telescope that became a headache for the television industry

Within a 600-mile radius of the city of Danville, Illinois, population 31,246, are numerous major cities—among them Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Toronto, and Washington, DC.

Nearly the entire length of the Mississippi River fits into that radius. If Danville was located just a little further to the east, the radius would also include Philadelphia and New York City. For all intents and purposes, a 600-mile radius from Eastern Illinois covers basically the entire East Coast except the state of Florida and the Northeast.

(Importantly to this story, New Jersey generally does not fall into this 600-mile radius.)

But there was something located in Danville that was important enough to scientists that they didn’t want to share it with anyone else.

And that thing was a 400-foot-wide radio telescope, operating along the 610 MHz frequency. It was something of a monster of astronomy at the time, operating 12 to 16 hours per day, and researchers at the University of Illinois aimed to keep it that way.

The research that led to the creation of the radio telescope was, basically, an accident—but a fundamental one that taught us more about the universe than we might have learned with a mere optical telescope.

In 1931, a radio engineer and Bell Laboratories employee named Karl Jansky was trying to uncover the source of static that was interfering with radio waves … and found it had an extraterrestrial source, particularly at the center in the Milky Way galaxy.

Jansky wasn’t an astronomer, but an engineer, and despite discovering a new field of astronomy, his position at Bell Labs did not allow him to pursue it further.

George Swenson of the University of Illinois, who helped build a radio telescope for the school. Image: National Radio Astronomy Observatory

But after World War II ended, others eventually did pursue radio astronomy, including George C. McVittie, a British cosmologist who built the astronomy department at the University of Illinois in the 1950s, and George Swenson, who helped to build the university’s radio telescope.

Speaking to the Royal Astronomical Society as part of an oral history in 1978, McVittie, who played a central role in the creation of the telescope, stated that the device was developed in the late 1950s with a goal of being cost effective:

Well, we wanted to build this parabolic cylinder. I sent George Swenson on a tour of radio astronomy outfits in the world, Australia, England and so on, and he came back with the idea of the parabolic cylinder, a fixed transit instrument that sweeps out the sky simply by the earth rotating. And we decided for engineering reasons that we could only build a really big one if we had a frequency round about 600 megahertz. Otherwise, the perfection of the reflector, if we went to a shorter wavelength, was not something that you could [do] by the acre, at least not at that time, which was the late 1950s. And so we picked upon this 610 megahertz band as the observing frequency.

(The telescope was more expensive to maintain than to build, McVittie added.)

The area around the 610 MHz band has, over the years, gained a reputation as being important to scientific research because of its placement in the context of two other frequencies important to radio astronomy, 410 MHz and 1.4 GHz.

As space and astronomy writer Bob King of Universe Today put it in 2013: “Without it, radio astronomers would lose a key window in an otherwise continuous radio view of the sky. Imagine a 3-panel bay window with the middle pane painted black. Who wants THAT?”

There was just one problem—the sudden, high popularity of television made the general bandwidth area where the telescope operated, 608-614 MHz, a bit of a hot commodity. It was literally the spot where channel 37 was supposed to go—and broadcasters wanted access to that channel.

It threatened to cover up a key window.

The number of stations that had been allocated to use channel 37 in the U.S. in 1952, according to The History of UHF Television. One of those communities was Paterson, New Jersey, located within the New York City metro area—which is relevant to this story. In the end, no channel 37 actually ended up on the air in analog form in the U.S., though you may find a digital equivalent today thanks to differences in how signals are allocated.

Image: Patrick Tomasso/Unsplash

Why the existence of channel 37 became such a problem for scientists

At the time the University of Illinois had built out its radio telescope, television was still in its infancy, and not every TV could actually access UHF signals. But soon, UHF went from optional upgrade to standard feature on television sets, and that meant this radio telescope was in the way.

Fortunately for the scientists that relied on this telescope, they had the support of the global community. A meeting of the International Telecommunication Union in 1959 set aside a series of frequencies that were important for different scientific and technical uses. One of those frequencies was where channel 37 sat.

The University of Illinois, wanting to protect its radio telescope investment, went to the FCC basically immediately after the ITU meeting. In 1960, it asked that channel 37 be allocated to radio telescopes exclusively.

As McVittie recalled, fellow scientists considered the push to block out an entire television channel a big ask:

Most of our radio astronomy friends said, “Look here, you two, Swenson and McVittie, you are just crazy. Do you mean to say you are asking the American public to give up one television channel for science? Who ever heard of anything so absurd?” So we said, “Well, the channel isn’t being used.” “Yes, that’s true, it’s not being used very much but it is being used in the neighborhood of New York, and places like that.” So I said, “We’re not in the neighborhood of New York.” Anyway, we got laughed at.

The FCC disagreed with the university’s assessment, feeling that it was too early to make such a call.

But just a couple of years later, stations were starting to call the FCC up for access to that specific station—particularly one directly outside of the antenna’s 600-mile radius, in New Jersey. (According to reports from the era, prospective broadcasters wanted to put a Spanish-language network in the spot.)

Because of FCC rules and limitations elsewhere, the city of Paterson had no other options to bring a TV station on air other than channel 37. But even with the channel being located hundreds of miles away and targeted at the New York City market, there was concern among scientists that even far-away interference could get in the way of scientific research.

The regulators, faced with a conflict that pitted a niche use case against a massive commercial windfall, tried to come up with a compromise. The compromise included:

No stations on channel 37 within a 600-mile radius of the antenna until at least 1968, allowing one specific scientist, McVittie, to complete a survey of radio star sources he was doing on the 610 MHz frequency.

No stations anywhere listed under channel 37 could air anything between midnight and 7 a.m. Keeping in mind time zones, this effectively would give McVittie four hours a night that were open to allowing for such research.

The FCC’s attempt to balance science and commerce was not well-accepted by said scientists, who took their story to the media.

The controversy was such that it appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Not the top, of course.

What initially was seen as an absurd ask, even a silly one, gained momentum among fellow scientists. A letter sent to the FCC in regards to the debate puts the passion around the conflict into focus: “The FCC Docket suggests an appalling lack of comprehension within the FCC of the nature and needs of radio astronomy and yet the Commission has power to cripple and perhaps even destroy radio astronomy.”

That’s from an October 1963 document from the FCC that announced the commission’s decision to bar the use of channel 37 in the U.S.—while encouraging its neighbors in Canada and Mexico to do the same.

(The FCC did defend itself against the observer’s claim, writing: “Assertions charging the Commission with a lack of comprehension of the nature and needs of radio astronomy and implications that the Commission might cripple and even destroy radio astronomy are unjustified and can not be supported by facts.”)

The FCC agreed to a 10-year moratorium on channel 37 being used, which eventually became permanent.

The fun part about this is that McVittie, who helped to set the wheels in motion for the blanket ban of channel 37 in the U.S., never learned exactly why the FCC made the decision to flip its mindset on this issue. He speculated that media attention put the issue in front of the average person, allowing for wide-scale public support to mount up in favor of radio astronomy:

Somehow the news got around that here was this new way of listening to little green men on Mars. This is what radio astronomy seemed to the ordinary public. And the FCC was preventing it from being developed in the United States. We got rumors, George particularly from friends he knew, that gradually a huge accumulation of letters arrived at the FCC, protesting against this nonsupport of this new science, whatever it was. And that this finally persuaded the FCC that they’d better give in. Nobody knows.

Fortunately, we have the document explaining its thinking, and the thinking was essentially this:

It is probable that channel 37 operations at Paterson, New Jersey would interfere with observations at Danville to a certain extent. Also, (since interference from different sources would probably not occur simultaneously) the situation would be complicated by interference from other channel 37 stations if authorized. Moreover, any interference which would exist, even though for only a small percentage of time, might occur at critical times in the observing process. To the extent that observation programs would be interfered with, the time of completing them might well be substantially increased, so that a longer period of protection would be required to achieve the same results.

In other words, the commission didn’t necessarily know how putting channel 37 on the dial was going to impact scientific research in the long run, so best not risk it.

Ultimately, channel 37 went completely unused throughout the analog era in much of North America as well as most other countries—with a handful of exceptions, particularly in the Caribbean countries of the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. (Today, channel 37 technically can appear as an over-the-air digital channel, but it is usually a so-called “virtual channel,” allowing a network to be positioned there no matter its position in the spectrum.)

In the end, the scientists won.

2000

The year that the FCC allowed for the use of wireless medical telemetry services (a.k.a. devices that allow for the tracking of patient vitals, like heartbeat, wirelessly) on the same band as channel 37. “Despite existing constraints in these bands, this allocation is flexible enough to allow spectrum to be available for medical telemetry services in all locations while protecting radio astronomy and government operations currently operating in the allocated spectrum,” the commission said at the time. Despite occasional rumors that the spectrum would go unlicensed eventually, it has yet to happen.

The tale of channel 37 reflects one thing: Without resistance, a commercial use case will usurp a noncommercial use case for a given resource.

A 1963 op-ed in The Harvard Crimson put it best: “Because the communication industries try to send strong signals to all parts of the globe and radio astronomy tries to receive weak extra-terrestrial signals, the growth of these two fields must inevitably lead to conflict.”

Think about this in terms of other things that have nothing to do with astronomy, like the internet. A year or two ago, there was a big conflict involving who owned the .org top-level domain, with commercial interests attempting to hone in on something intended to support nonprofits. The only reason it didn’t happen, just like the Channel 37 saga, was because people in the world of nonprofits and technology came together to lobby against it.

Ultimately, in the case of channel 37, scientists were able to save a small sliver of what was mostly going to be otherwise used commercially. Perhaps it looked like static to everyone else—but it was worth fighting for.

Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist (And What It Has to Do With Aliens) syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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sinrau · 4 years

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On Friday, Donald Trump and his wife Melania attended an early Independence Day celebration held at Mount Rushmore.

This article first appeared on Salon.

There were fireworks, a military flyover, and “patriotic” songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

The entire spectacle embodied the worst kind of superficial juvenile patriotism.

More than 130,000 Americans are dead from the coronavirus pandemic. The country teeters on the edge of a second Great Depression. A neofascist regime rules in Washington. Donald Trump is in thrall to Vladimir Putin and Russia and in doing so actively betrays the United States and the American people.

Music and fireworks and loud planes are distractions for a country facing an existential crisis.

Donald Trump’s early July 4th celebration had little to do with uniting America in a time of trouble and pain. Instead the gathering at Mount Rushmore was just a Trump campaign rally in disguise where the Great Leader spat out his usual themes of racism, neofascism, authoritarianism, ignorance, violence, Orwellian doublespeak and lies, Christian fascism, white identity politics, and other right-wing dreck to his red hat MAGA political cult members.

Throughout his time in office, Donald Trump has made it clear through his words and deeds that be views his personal interests to be the same as the nation’s.

Such thinking is like that of King George III and the other despots who the founders rejected with the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and the United States Constitution.

In the end, because he is a malignant narcissist, Donald Trump thought that all the pageantry was to honor him and not the country’s birthday.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign advisers have suggested, apparently not facetiously, that they want his face added to Mount Rushmore. They are enabling his delusions of grandeur.

History sometimes has a dark sense of irony and coincidence all its own.

Because he does not read and is proudly ignorant, Donald Trump most certainly does not know that “The Star-Spangled Banner” channels his white supremacist and racist values. If Trump knew such a thing, he would likely love the song even more.

Francis Scott Key’s anthem has a third verse which is rarely sung, after the ones we have all heard before sporting events and on other occasions.

The lyrics are:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion A home and a Country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As many historians have documented, “hireling and slave” refers to self-manumitted Black people (that is, slaves who freed themselves) who served with the British military, fighting to liberate other enslaved Black people in America.

In the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Key is celebrating the Colonial Marines who were burned alive or drowned in Baltimore Harbor.

Trump would find much to admire about Key, who owned Black human property during the time he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” and was an enthusiastic defender of white-on-Black chattel slavery.

Like Donald Trump, Key was wealthy. He was also a friend and adviser to Donald Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson, who was not merely a white supremacist but literally a slave driver. Jackson also ordered that Native Americans be expelled from their home regions to endure a death march later known as the Trail of Tears. While serving as a general prior to being president, Andrew Jackson led a military campaign against the Seminole nation and the free communities established by self-manumitted Black people in Florida.

The racism and white supremacy embedded in “The Star-Spangled Banner” provide a soundtrack for Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party in other ways as well.

Donald Trump leads a movement that is waging a counterrevolution against the civil and human rights of Black and brown people in the United States and around the world.

To maintain and keep power, Trump and the Republicans have embraced the white supremacist ideology, politics and symbols of the Confederacy. This began in the 1960s with a backlash against the civil rights movement, first with 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater and then with Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” meant to appeal to white racists uncomfortable with the civil rights movement. More than five decades later, right-wing appeals to racism and white supremacy are in some ways less restrained with the rise of Trumpism.

As part of that strategy Donald Trump and his party are defending the legacy of the Confederacy and its statues and other monuments to white supremacist terrorism.

Trump recently issued an executive order proclaiming any person who dares to “vandalize” American statues, monuments or memorials can be charged with a federal crime and imprisoned for up to 10 years.

Trump is also refusing to change the names of military bases that bear the names of treasonous Confederate military leaders. He has even threatened to veto the military’s 2021 budget if such changes are made.

Here are the president’s own words from his failed “comeback” rally in Tulsa:

The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statues, and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform their demands for absolute and total control. We’re not conforming…. This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose a new oppressive regime in its place.

The repeated use of “our” is a signal to the fact that Trump views white America as his tribe. Nonwhites are explicitly and implicitly not welcome. In essence, Trump behaves as though he is only beholden to those white people — his MAGA cultists and “real Americans” — who vote for him.

Trump has retweeted and shared videos of his supporters yelling “white power!” and of white people brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter and other human rights protesters. In the last few weeks Trump has also shared videos on Twitter of Black people attacking white people. Of course, he provides no context for the latter.

The goal here is twofold. First, to mobilize his voters by exciting decades-old or centuries-old white nightmares of a “race war” and possible Black “domination” over white people. Second, to encourage acts of political violence by his right-wing followers against his and their “enemies.”

Writing in the Washington Post, Greg Sargent explains this:

With nearly 125,000 Americans dead and cases spiking again from a pandemic that Trump horribly mismanaged, and amid the most pronounced civil upheaval in a half century, Trump’s propagandists want to convert disorder to his advantage.

That’s obvious enough. But the true nature of it is often shrouded in euphemisms — Trump is “stoking division,” or “throwing a match on gasoline,” or some such phrase, which implies Trump is a passive bystander to societal conflicts that he’s merely cheering on for cynical purposes.

It’s much worse than that. Trump and his propagandists are actively trying to engineer violent civil conflict, by signaling to white Americans that they are under siege in a race war that they’re losing.

The rub is that this signaling requires actually saying this in one form or another. And that forces Trump and his propagandists into a position where they must be cagey about his actual intended meanings when he does things like tweet out supporters yelling “white power.”

Trump and his propagandists want a lot of white Americans to think they need to take sides in a race war.

In total, Trump and the Republican Party’s dedication to causing pain and harm to nonwhite people is not collateral damage or coincidence: Such outcomes are integral to permanently maintaining society-wide white privilege and white power. This embrace of racism is so extreme that social scientists have shown that Trump supporters and other white conservatives would rather America be an authoritarian society than live in a democracy where they would have to share power with nonwhites.

The Confederacy shared such goals as well. In his infamous Cornerstone Speech in March 1861, shortly before the first battles of the Civil War, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

From the founding to the present there is a terrible reservoir of racism and white supremacy that now provides the raw energy and fuel for Trumpism and the Republican Party in post-civil rights America.

America will need another revolution and founding to fulfill its hopeful potential as a true “we the people” multiracial democracy. Donald Trump and his movement of racist reactionaries stand against such progress and are actively working to send America back to a time when white men’s rule was (at least in their minds) uncontested, universal and eternal as the natural order of things in America and around the world.

On this Fourth of July weekend Donald Trump is grandly reminding the world that patriotism is the last refuge of traitors and scoundrels. Trump may wrap himself in the American flag and other vestments of “patriotism,” but his heart and mind are truly of the antebellum South and Jim and Jane Crow America. Trump claims to be a greater president than Abraham Lincoln. Trump in his delusions believes he is as great as George Washington. But Donald Trump is really a 21st-century Jefferson Davis, president of the treasonous Confederacy. May he be remembered in the same ignominious fashion.

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the-master-cylinder · 4 years

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Charles Band decided to go after the media market in a different way. He was beginning to make a picture called SWORDKILL in 1982, about a samurai who was frozen in ice, when he realized something. “I had watched all these foreign film representatives take my pictures, license my pictures, and basically go to Cannes and Mifed [the two major foreign film markets), rent an office and make sales, and make a huge commission on basically the fruits of my labor. I thought if I was going to have any control at all, I should go to the foreign marketplace and sell my own stuff, especially since over the years my pictures did very well for everyone. They were very commercial.

“I got many letters from French distributors and Japanese distributors, congratulatory letters saying here’s a copy of our advertising campaign as a momento. So I kind of knew some of the players. I decided to take SWORDKILL, which was just about to shoot, and a couple of other pictures, which I was going to make later that year, and hang my shingle in some hotel room in Cannes and actually begin doing it myself.”

Band came up with the name Empire and the company was formed as Empire International, which, with the aid of Band’s promo reel, was also able to raise funds for upcoming, incomplete projects as well as SWORDKILL. In order to pre-sell domestic rights on an independent picture, one needed to guarantee a certain amount of “p and a” or prints and ads expenditure, so Band figured he ought to set up a modest U.S. theatrical distribution organization and begin to distribute these pictures in order to later sell them to the burgeoning U.S. video market.

Parasite (1982) Retrospective

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) Retrospective

Ghoulies (1984) Retrospective

Empire is widely perceived as the new American International Pictures, and you as the new Roger Corman. Is that a fair assessment? Charles Band: It’s funny, all these categories, independents, mini-majors, B movies, C movies, I don’t know. We can never be like AIP because the times are different. AIP started out making B pictures to fill double bills they were originally the second feature at a drive-in. That whole market is gone, and maybe the analogy here is that much of what we do fits into the video pipeline. Maybe that’s the new market that allows us to cover most of our downside, but I just feel that we’re here to make good movies. There weren’t too many AIP films, or Corman films, that were good movies. There were many of them, and there were some with all sorts of interesting cult appeal . Some launched careers of a few of today’s big stars. But in terms of track record, if you look at both bodies of work of those two distribution-production concerns, there aren’t too many good movies. I hope that by the time we’re into ’87, at least one out of every two or three of our pictures will be considered a well-made film, and that will last 10, 20, 30 years, forever.

In terms of budgets, Empire seems comparable to AIP. Charles Band: It ‘snot written anywhere that a good picture must cost a ton of money. You don’t have to spend $20 million on a film. We made a small picture last year called Re-Animator. and not only did it get good reviews , but it did well for us as far as its profitability. It’s a picture that cost just about a million dollars, and it had a lot of talent and quality. As we get better, our pictures will get better, and not necessarily more ex- pensive. Our aim is to make real good movies.

What happened with both AIP and Corman is that after they had discovered a talented director or star, they couldn’t hold on to him once the studios offered him work. Can you keep that from happening at Empire? Charles Band: Not only can we, we are. You can be real smart and draft a contract that commits people for two or three films, but the only thing that’s going to bring people back is how you work together. With a few exceptions, the other independents and studios have a very repressive atmosphere. It’s very tough to get pictures made there, and when they’re in the process of being made, rarely do you get to sit down with the studio head, or anyone who understands pictures, for that matter. Those people who are running the studios, for better or worse, are not filmmakers.

The Alchemist (1983) In 1955, young waitress Lenora (Lucinda Dooling) finds herself inexplicably driving down the California highway to an unknown destination. This doesn’t bode well for Cam (John Sanderford), the hitchhiker she picked up, because he has to endure her somnambulist driving. The duo eventually end up at a graveside in the woods and meet alchemist Aaron (Robert Ginty), who is just as shocked to see them as Lenora appears to be the reincarnation of his wife who was murdered nearly 100 years earlier.

The Alchemist was your first directorial effort, how did that come about? Charles Band: Well, I wasn’t the director when that film first started. The guy who was responsible for the trailers on VHS was producing the film at the time and after about three days of production, he called me up and said that the current director wasn’t working out and could I parachute in to help finish the film. The original director had shot about 2-3 days of work and I then finished about 6-7 days of shooting. I have no memory of the director.

The late Robert Ginty was the star of The Alchemist and at the time was coming off success with The Exterminator. What was he like to work with and what was his appeal as a leading man? Charles Band: I had no input in casting Ginty. He was already on board. What I do notice is that with a lot of leading men there is no simpatico in them. Ginty was a very human actor with simpatico and it was sad that he left us so soon. He did come across as an “Everyman” sort of guy.

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Ghost Warrior (1982/1984) a.k.a Swordkill A deep-frozen 400-year-old samurai is shipped to Los Angeles, where he comes back to life. Dazed and confused, he goes on a rampage. Can the female scientist and her colleague who revived him stop him before it’s too late?

Trancers (1984) Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a police trooper in the year 2247 who has been hunting down Martin Whistler, a criminal mastermind who uses psychic powers to turn people into mindless “trancers” and carry out his orders. Deth can identify a tranced individual by scanning them with a special bracelet. All trancers appear as normal humans at first, but once triggered, they become savage killers with twisted features.

Before he can be caught, Whistler escapes back in time using a drug-induced time-traveling technique. Whistler’s consciousness leaves his body in 2247 and travels down his ancestral bloodline arriving in 1985 and taking over the body of an ancestor, a Los Angeles police detective named Weisling. Once Deth discovers what Whistler has done, he destroys Whistler’s body—effectively leaving him trapped in the past with no vessel to return to—and chases after him through time the same way. Deth ends up in the body of one of his ancestors: a journalist named Phil Dethton.

With the help of Phil’s girlfriend—a punk rock girl named Leena (Helen Hunt)—Deth goes after Whistler, who has begun to “trance” other victims. Whistler plots to eliminate the future governing council members of Angel City (the future name of Los Angeles), who are being systematically wiped out of existence by Whistler’s murder spree of their own ancestors. Deth arrives too late to prevent most of the murders and can only safeguard Hap Ashby (Biff Manard), a washed-up former pro baseball player, who is the ancestor of the last surviving council member, Chairman Ashe (Anne Seymour).

Deth is given some high-tech equipment, which is sent to him in the past: his sidearm (which contains two hidden vials of time drugs to send him and Whistler back to the future), and a “long-second” wristwatch, which temporarily slows time, stretching one second to ten. The watch has only enough power for one use, but he later receives another watch to pull the same trick again.

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During the end fight with Whistler, one of the drug vials in Jack’s gun breaks, leaving only one vial to get home. Jack is forced to make a choice: kill the innocent Weisling (who is possessed by the evil Whistler), or use the vial to send Whistler back to 2247, which would strand Jack in the present. Jack chooses to inject Weisling with the vial, saving the lieutenant’s life but condemning Whistler to an eternity without a body to return to. Jack then decides to remain with Leena in 1985, although observing him from the shadows is McNulty, his boss from the future, who has traveled down his own ancestral line, ending up in the body of a young girl.

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Interview with actor Tim Thomerson

Tell us about this journey of Jack Deth. Tim Thomerson: I got this role as a character named Rogue in Metalstorm (1983), and we started working, and that was my first time working with Charlie Band. I had a lot of fun with it, Charlie was fun to work with, and kind of left me alone, which I like. I don’t like a lot of direction. We had quite a lot of fun doing it and then this idea for TRANCERS came up. This is still Empire now, so fast forward to late 1984 early 1985. The FUTURE COP was the original title for TRANCERS, so I went to Danny (Bilson) and Paul (De Meo), and we had meetings together. They were fans of these Philip Marlowe type detective guys, so we were all in love with that genre, and I always liked Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart, just a fan of that particular character. Charlie wanted to do this cop that comes from the future in LA today, meaning from the year, 20-something. So Charlie didn’t really care what we did with the character from what I remember, so Danny and Paul wrote up this guy Jack and so that’s how that was born. When the character transformed into the other body that was named Philip, it’s a tribute to Marlowe. That was Danny and Paul’s idea, to write it up like that, and for there to be some kind of dialogue and kind of the crispy kind of way of saying. You’ve seen that movie right?

Many, many times. Tim Thomerson: Yeah, so for what it is and for the time that it was shot, it’s a pretty classic B movie I think.

The opening of the film is great, the cross between the future and the past and that noir-like feeling is easy to get on board with. Tim Thomerson: I think it really had its own feeling about it. I thought that while we were shooting it, even though it’s a silly ass movie. But it just had a feeling, you know? Charlie was great to work with on set, and was funny, had a winning personality, and Helen was just a hilarious girl. She really is a funny chick. The performances were really good too; you can tell they got along.

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The Dungeonmaster (1984) Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron) is a skilled computer programmer who lives with his girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing), and “X-CaliBR8,” a quasi-sentient personal computer that Paul programmed and which he interacts with via a neural interface. Gwen is jealous of Paul’s unusually close relationship with X-CaliBR8, to whom Paul has given a female voice, and fears that their relationship will be destroyed by Paul’s reliance on X-CaliBR8 for his various day-to-day activities. One night, Paul and Gwen are both transported to a Hellish realm presided over by Mestema (Richard Moll), an ancient, demonic sorcerer who has spent millennia seeking a worthy opponent with whom to do battle. Having long defeated his enemies with magic, Mestema has become intrigued with technology, and wishes to pit his skills against Paul’s, with the winner claiming Gwen. Arming Paul with a portable version of X-CaliBR8 (which takes the form of a computerized wrist band), Mestema begins transporting Paul into a variety of scenarios in which he must defeat various opponents. Most of the challenges involve Paul using his X-CaliBR8 wristband to shoot people, monsters, and objects with laser beams. After Paul completes Mestema’s various challenges, the two engage in a final battle, which takes the form of a fist fight in which Paul kills Mestema by throwing him into a pit of lava. After Mestema dies, Paul and Gwen are transported back to their house, where Gwen expresses her acceptance of X-CaliBR8 and suggests that she and Paul get married.

David Allen on the stop-motion for the “Stone Canyon Giant” David Allen first became involved in directing an episode of Charles Band’s DUNGEONMASTER almost two years ago, as a test for working with Band on THE PRIMEVALS, a property they have in development together. Although Band had already directed his segment of the film, no clear story had been worked out. The film had been sold on the basis of its premise-a showcase of effects sequences-and it had to be delivered quickly. Band suggested doing a sequence which featured a large statue brought to life (as in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS), and Allen agreed.

Allen spent two days on location, shooting mostly in continuity without storyboards, then three weeks, off-and-on, in the studio to do the effects. According to Allen, the finished segment is “heavily footnoted with explanations for why it didn’t turn out better. We’d do something and think it was okay and then get the shot back from the lab-but we’d already be working on a new shot. A couple of shots are okay, but there are so many below-par scenes. I wanted to go back on location almost a year after the original shooting and redo the first shot of the statue in Dynamation-a split-screen effect all on the original negative. A good first shot would have better set the stage.”

Allen would also have liked a chance to introduce the statue “more poetically, with music,” but he never had an opportunity to speak with the film’s composer, Richard Band. “A pause for mood and atmosphere would have given the sequence some intelligence, but in the time allotted I didn’t think of it.”

Besides doing animation for his own segment, Allen provided two effects for other sequences of the film: for an exploding car, Allen took an explosion he had photographed years ago and superimposed it on the shot, for the conclusion of the film he provided a shot of the evil magician falling into a lava pit. “Band came up with that at the last minute–the film was written as it went along. I did it for a few hundred dollars, using a six-inch doll, some old cliffs I’d used long ago, and oatmeal. I didn’t think it would work, but with all the fire and smoke I put in there it came out, maybe not wonderful, but credible.”

Although dissatisfied with the final result, Allen nevertheless enjoyed the experience. “I learned a lot,” he said. “I got the camera where it needed to be. I enjoyed getting everything done in two days. I was scouting locations sometimes only twenty minutes ahead of the camera crew.”

Interview with Jeffrey (Paul) Byron

This was your second adventure with Band’s band; were you excited to be back in the B-movie saddle? Jeffrey Byron: Sure! I had a great time on METALSTORM and every actor likes to work. So doing a second movie right afterwards was great.

Seven chapters and seven directors Jeffrey Byron: Indeed. It was il fun and unique experience and was ahead of its time. It was a clever idea. It was like doing se ven separate films, which was very cool.

What was your favorite segment and why? Jeffrey Byron: That’s easy! The one that I wrote (SLASHER) about the serial killer. My older brother Steve Stafford directed it, and I was able to hire some close actor friends to be in it. It was a blast! Being directed by my brother Steve was a great experience. He is a talented filmmaker and in some respects this segment inspired him to get more and more directing jobs Plus I got to hire some great actor friends to be in the segment I wrote. That was gratifying as well.

Do you have insight or back story as to the name change? Jeffrey Byron: I don’t recall how that happened. That was up to Charlie Band. He was a wiz at that kind of stuff. He came up with all the rates. I assume he changed the title because he got more traction with THE DUNGEONMASTER, because of the popularity of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

As in METALSTORM, you had to square off against Richard Moll, but this time as an ancient demon. Was he a more worthy nemesis this time round? Jeffrey Byron: Richard and I got to know each other on METALSTORM, so we had a warmer rapport on the second film. We had a perfectly good relationship on the first film, but we knew each other better by the time we did this film and he was a pro so it was a great experience

Any RAGEWAR trivia or lesser known facts you can share with us? Jeffrey Byron: All the scenes that were shot in my characters apartment..were actually shot in any actual apartment!

What was next for you after THE DUNGEON MASTER? Jeffrey Byron: Quite soon after I jumped into the soap opera world. They had been chasing me down for awhile and I finally agreed to do ONE LIFE TO LIVE. After I left that show. I went on to do ALL MY CHILDREN, THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and finally PORT CHARLES. I did other work in between but the soaps were my bread and butter.

The Dungeonmaster was a try-out of several different directors. Charles Band: “It was a fun idea. I’ve always done things a little differently and we had a number of directors at the time who all wanted to direct features. We were getting pretty prolific and it was exactly that. I think there were seven directors, if I’m not mistaken. There were more that we were actually looking at but seven wound up directing seven little chapters in this Dungeonmaster film. I would have to think real hard to remember who directed what, but that’s what happens. We made a strange little film.

“It’s actually a fun film to watch. Part of what low-budget films suffer from is you usually are relegated to one location because that’s all you can afford. Unless you are really adept at story-telling and casting, you need to make these movies much more character-driven. Dungeonmaster’s one of those films which diverts you with seven or eight different environments. If nothing else, it certainly looks colorful! It made a great trailer, that’s for sure.”

Savage Island (1985) Women who have been captured and sold as slave labor to a South American emerald mine hatch a plan for revolution and revenge.

Empire seems very loyal to its people given a few pictures, everybody gets to direct. Is that a deliberate policy? Charles Band: Definitely. It’s rare that talent is Just born overnight. It takes time and it’s crazy for a big company to gamble with its resources on a new director. If it turns out wrong, it makes no sense going and spending the time. It makes more sense to educate people here and pay for the tuition, so to speak. Some turn out to be wonderful and some take more time. I can’t think of one that we’ve worked with so far that hasn’t picked up the Empire banner and shown promise.

People like Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon, and other directors who have had good experiences with us and are now making their second or third film with us this year, find that our whole directive here is making movies. That’s where all our energy goes. We’re passionate about making movies. That makes their lives much easier because we can work well together. David Schmoeller just finished a picture for us called Crawlspace that turned out very well, and he has had several offers to go elsewhere to make pictures. Well, he has turned them down to make two more pictures back to back for us. I don’t know if the offers were for substantially more than what we’re paying him, I Just know that the experience on Crawlspace was real good for all of us. and good for him creatively. Once a script is approved and we know what we’re spending on a picture, we give the directors total free reign to make their movie.

Re-Animator (1985) Retrospective

Zone Troopers (1985) In Italy in World War II, four members, led by their grizzled sergeant (Tim Thomerson), of an American military patrol are lost behind enemy lines. They discovers an alien spaceship that has crash-landed in the woods, along with its crew. The alien pilot is dead, and one of the aliens has been captured by the Nazis, hampering efforts of the aliens to return home. A larger Nazi unit, with scientific and medical personnel, also investigate the crash and seek to capture the alien’s technology and use that to win the war. However, the aliens side with the Americans after the Nazi’s actions to their crewmember.

Another popular title was Zone Troopers. How did that come about and where did the concept come up? Charles Band: Well, I had Danny Bilson and Paul Le Meo, who wrote Trancers and the stars of that film Tim Thomerson and Art La Fleur on board. I also had a wonderful Production Designer and Art Director and it also gave me an opportunity to go back to Italy as I grew up there. Some people don’t realize that the likes of Crawlspace and Troll were, along with Zone Troopers, filmed in Italy rather than the USA. It was a great set-up for about three years as we got some good films made, but then things changed and the dollar and lira value changed, so it became difficult to continue to film there, but we are very proud of those films.

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Zone Troopers was also directed by Danny Bilson, who had an interesting time of it. “We had a German army of Italian-speaking extras,” Bilson recalls. “We had to have these Nazi SS troops come across a meadow, and they looked like Girl Scouts. Trying to be Mr. Director, I went to show them how to do it. We’ve all played army when we were little kids, and you know how to do it, but when I was right in the middle of showing them, I slipped into this big pile of cow slop. Paul (De Meo) cried out helpfully, ‘But do you want them to fall in the cow shit?”’

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“We had a lot of fun with the Italian prop men,” De Meo chimes in, “One of them came up to us and asked where he should put these two bottles of gin. We wondered what the bottles of gin were for and started looking through the script, thinking that maybe we forgot something. It turned out that somewhere in the script was a description that said two GIs are playing gin. Another time, a prop man bought a pineapple because he didn’t know that was a‘40’s term for a grenade.”

Bilson is very happy working for Empire. He calls it a secure environment that constantly provides an opportunity to work. He feels that the experience he and others are gaining will build confidence and lead to better-made films. Paul De Meo compares the working atmosphere with “almost being like working at Warner’s in the ’50’s. There are lots of people making lots of movies In all kinds of genres.” Bilson Is particularly proud of the fact that he’s been able to work in low-budget, exploitation films without “ever having to do a women-in-prison film or a slasher movie nothing I would find morally objectionable. That’s just not our meat-and-potatoes.”

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Do your writers come up with concepts? Charles Band: Most, if not all. of our projects come from my titles and concepts. That’s a reward for me, to get to dream things up and then assign various projects and concepts to writers and see the picture get made and distributed. So, it’s a little different than the way other people work where they have 200 script submissions a week and they hope to find one and develop it. We’re lucky enough not to be looking for any projects. If anything good comes along, we’re here to read it. We still have our hundred script submissions, but basically, we’re Just looking for good writers. Very few of our projects Just walk in the door perhaps one in the last year. We have hundreds of concepts we’ve been developing over the last few years, and those are the ideas that will become movies.

It sometimes seems that the lack of control works out well when you have a Stuart Gordon around, but there are some films Eliminators comes immediately to mind that needed somebody to step in and say, “This isn’t working.” That script Just didn’t seem ready. Charles Band: True, but that’s the script’s fault, not the director’s. It’s impossible to predict how a project is going to turn out. You can do all the right things and it Just doesn’t work. On the other hand, you can make 500 mistakes and suddenly the picture works. You want to make sure you have the best script possible, but sometimes things are rushed, and that shows. It always comes down to the script. Sometimes the script reads real well but it Just doesn’t play that way. Eliminators was one of the best scripts we’ve ever had here. It reads great. Why the script reads so well and the picture isn’t so good to some, the picture is fun and works; to others, it’s disjointed if you read the script, you’ll find a really well-written, fun script, very cohesive, very weird. I have no defense, or no explanation for why some pictures work and some don’t. The best we can do is to make certain we start off with a good script and that the talent we assemble is right, then hope for the best. You just don’t know. You don’t even know when you see the dailies. There are some times when you see the dailies and you’re in love with every shot, and it gets put together and it just doesn’t work.

Trancers was one of the best things Empire has done and I was surprised it didn’t do better. Charles Band: So was I. It was one I directed, so I was anxious to see it work. But it was the least effective of all the first year’s pictures. That’s another sad thing: There’s no telling which picture is going to work.

Was it supposed to be the first in a series? Charles Band: Yes. I always wanted to make an inexpensive series, not something that would cost tons of money and be hard to get off the ground. We could have made two of those movies a year. I love the character of Jack Deth and the whole thing would have been fun to do. We were even close to doing another one in spite of the first’s failure, just because ‘why not?’ But we’ll come up with something else someday. Tim Thomerson’s a major talent and no one’s used him right except us in Trancers .

Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson have written another film that will begin production soon, Journeys Through The Darkzone (1986). Bilson will direct. “It’s about these guys who work on a dumping fishing station where people get their anxieties out through recreation,” Bilson reveals. Then people start disappearing from this colony on this water planet. It’s a little like Outland. An investigation leads to this attraction, which is an alien machine which can project you into an alternate reality to satisfy your fantasies. But it has hidden dangers.”

The pair are currently scripting Arena (1989), which they describe as Body and Soul in space. Arena is based around a fantasy sport and involves a bid for a new champion, racketeering and space gangsters.

The Caller (1987) One night, an unusual stranger in need asks a woman living alone in a house in the woods if he can use her phone. It soon becomes clear that they’re playing a strange mind game and that there’s something very wrong about the woods.

The History of Empire Films Part Two Charles Band decided to go after the media market in a different way. He was beginning to make a picture called SWORDKILL in 1982, about a samurai who was frozen in ice, when he realized something.

#80sFilms #BAND #EMPIRE

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loneberry · 7 years

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The Sterkfontein Cave System: Our Collective Dream Machine

[Excerpts transcribed directly from journal. The poetic momentum picks up toward the end…]

The next day I was set on going to the Cradle of Humankind [outside of Joburg, South Africa]. On the way to the site we stopped by the Rosebank mall so Lily could get a new e-cig. I stayed in the car and finished reading the Sixth Extinction. Eventually we made it to the Sterkfontein Caves, in time for the 2 PM tour.

The tour was decent, the guide was knowledgeable. she told us about the discovery of Littlefoot and Mrs. Ples. it is hypothesized that Littlefoot likely died by falling into the cave, perhaps while running away from a predator. the entrance of the caves would have been hard to spot because wild olive trees grow around the openings of dolomitic caves. sometime 2.5 million years ago Littlefoot vanished into a vast Darkness. his remains calcified. the shape of his feet indicate that Littlefoot probably lived in trees. the fossils reveal these old hominid species did not dwell in caves, nor did they use controlled fire, though the earliest evidence of a fire-wielding hominid was discovered in the same cave system, dating back to around 1 million years ago.

Entering the Sterkfontein Caves through a cunt-crack in the earth: the hominid’s collective oneiro-womb—repository of a precious ancient record

what a thrill it was to learn all this! the path to the cave was line with stones that depicted the timeline of the universe, Earth and the history of our species. we entered the cave through a fissure line with wild olive trees. on the descent there was a caged area where Littlefoot had been discovered. the path through the cave was well-lit but at one point during the tour the guide turned the lights off to give us a sense of how dark the interior is. the first major chamber was cathedral-like. the guide shined her light on various highlights: elegant stalactites and stalagmites, glittering crystal deposits in the wall, some hidden rock formations that looked like the three wise Kings, another of Mary and her baby, a lone bat that chills near the area just beyond the small crawlspace…

Is this lone bat solitary or gregarious? I can’t tell. It must like humans though…

she told us about the water about how the water level had risen from heavy rainfall, pointed out a fence now underwater and told us a story of a young diver from Wits University who died tragically while exploring the cave in the 80s. He had only been married for three months.

it was Lily’s first time in a cave so she was mystified by the beauty of it all.

July 10 more days have passed, look how far behind I’m falling. What can I do but continue where I left off? While touring the caves it became clear to me that the Maropeng museum might be worth seeing. I raised the possibility of asking someone for a ride to Lily. She said "if you want to ask, okay." I wasn’t shy about these things, as I was an experienced hitchhiker and had hitched rides as recently as last summer (in Iceland). A middle-aged blonde white woman asked me who I was and where I was from. She said she and her husband are South African, but that she lives with her family in Dubai. I looked at the two teenage blonde girls. Twins? No, they responded. I asked the mother if they had plans to go to Maropeng after the tour. "Yes, do you need a lift?” “Yeah, me and my friend Lily [points] want to go, but our driver isn’t coming until later.” The husband said there wasn’t enough room, but the daughters responded that we could squeeze into the backseat of the car. I stayed close to the family for the rest of the walk to secure our ride.

After the tour there was the option to walk around a path and look at the important paleo-anthropological sites. We walked around the sites with the family then squeezed into their car. On the 7km drive exchanged details about our lives. They seemed somewhat racist to me, called Mandela “insane” and were eager to hear gossip about his wayward grandson, who Lily and I mentioned we had fortuitously met the night before. I asked the family what living in Dubai was like. The daughters spoke of ostentatious wealth, how one of their friends had hired a private jet to vacation in Greece.

At the museum I was thrilled to discover that the first exhibit was about the 2013 discovery of Homo naledi in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave. A newspaper story about the discovery – which mentioned an ad for “tiny spelunkers” – had inspired the title of my my book of dream poems: Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. there was a documentary about the discovery, text consisting of speculation about the behavior of Homo naledi. Were the bodies of the dead disposed of intentionally, thus making homo naledi capable of “ritual” behavior, previously believed to be exclusive to Homo sapiens?

There was a cut out life-sized image of the team of six “underground astronauts” – Lily took a photo of me posing with them:

A team of UNDERGROUND ASTRONAUTS meeting their missing 7th TINY SPELUNKER / these woman recovered HOMO NALEDI bones in the CHAMBER OF STARS

A sense of euphoria washed over me while contemplating my life.

The dream of being trapped in Qatar, which I dreamed six months before waiting there for my layover, how strange.

The newspaper story I read that inspired the title of my book, how I never dreamed I would see the cave system where the bones of Homo naledi were discovered, how the story had set my imagination alight – a new hominin species named after stars ("naledi” means “star” in the Sotho-Tswana languages). How quickly our knowledge of the past is being revised! the museum still said Homo sapiens are 200,000 years old, that we all go back to a single point of origin in East Africa (present-day Ethiopia) – but the recent discovery of 300,000 years-old Homo sapien fossils in Morocco rewrites this narrative.

This info is already outdated!

In the museum there was a foam cutout of the “Superman crawl” – the small passageway the tiny spelunkers had to pass through to retrieve the remains of Homo naledi.

How strange, all around us: these crawlspaces created by nature.

Everything must be aligned perfectly for fossilization to occur. Inside the dolomitic womb a fleeting being is transmogrified into a permanent record.

These caves – this cave system – is a dream machine.

It eternalizes forms to ignite our imagination.

for millions of years, wayward hominids have drifted into this dream machine.

Which links to the history of our species have been lost forever?

How eerie it was to see a painting of what scientists believe a Homo naledi band looked like while dumping the corpse of a dead kin into the cave.

2.5 million years ago the star children disposed of dead bodies in the cave as a ritualistic behavior, a possible sign of symbolic thought

At what point did our species become aware of death?

Do the monkeys know they will die? What does it mean to them?

At what point did our species begin to mourn?

Oh how I wish I were there when the first word was uttered!

At what point did grunt become word?

Does life always evolve towards intelligence?

I didn’t want to miss anything. Everything I’d been reading and thinking about converged on that moment – the timeline of life. The explosion of life when the angiosperms [flowering plants] arrived on the scene. The history of the five mass extinctions, the last, during the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs. Had the dinosaurs lived, we probably would’ve wiped them out too, like the other megafauna inhabiting the continents before we arrived.

In one part of the exhibit there was an interactive display where you could call extinct animals. The landline telephone: already a technology going extinct. In the center of the display was a rotating life-like dodo bird. It was the first extinct animal I called. The phone rang a few times. Impatient, I hung up. Was this a joke? You call the dodo, no answer, she is gone. No, I just hadn’t waited long enough. I called again.

The dodo answered. It was not a dodo at all, but the wispy voice of a woman speaking as the dodo. She narrated, in the first person, the dodo’s rise and fall, and concluded with the haunting phrase “… as dead as a dodo. Extinction is forever.”

Then I remember Cixous’s Hyperdream – which is so much about the technology of the landline telephone, a kind of psychic umbilical cord that connected her to Derrida. When JD died, the phone line was cut.

But what is the dream of the dead Beloved?

It was as though…

A line had been reestablished.

Extinction is not death but the death of a form

A form that has outgrown the world.

In the sixth extinction: a world altered by humans.

Humans still dream of the forms they have wiped out.

This exhibit is a dream of lost forms, from the earliest hominids to the dodo.

What holiness is left, a race to the end some saw it coming, some tried to save the golden tree frogs and disease-mottled bats, but everywhere we went, extinction followed. How or why, we don’t know. It wasn’t capitalism – it wasn’t a system external to and created by humans, it was us. Even our closest relatives – all the other hominin species – we drove to extinction.

The Neanderthal lives inside me. From the beginning, I was hybrid.

What is there to say about the museum? I could talk about all the things I learned, answers to my questions on why or how we became bipedal – or how we grew language – but I would never make it to the present moment.

It was 5 PM. We were leaving the museum. I was looking out on the horizon. The sun was setting, the sky was cloudy but there was a hole in the clouds, light was seeping through, it looked as though God was shining her golden rays on the Cradle of Humankind. Ecstasy!

God was illuminating the land beneath which lies the most precious of all records.

my heart aches with awareness of the limits of my knowledge – all I will never know, I want to know it all but more than wanting to know it all I want to have been there. I want to have seen the forms I will never see except in the dream-reconstruction. All reconstruction is a dream. I want to know the holy moment when oblivion swallowed our ancestors forever. It took millions of years to get from Littlefoot to here, to grow the knowledge and technology to dig up, reconstruct and date these remains.

What is dead is inside me.

Littlefoot with your thumb-like big toe, swinging in the trees – I am you, from the future! Your expired form lives inside me! How much of you there is in me, I do not know. Perhaps they have not sequenced your genome yet, like they have the Neanderthal.

Sunrays from heaven– You light the land! Our dream machine! The hominid’s collective oneiro-womb!

The mind thinks space, I see, I saw, my mind grew. It kept growing.

All we will never know – auto-luminous corals in deepwater zones.

How terrible, how marvelous – the first seafaring humans setting sail, not knowing where and arriving at what we now call Australia, wiping out the marsupial megafauna [already, new fossils have revised this history!].

This mad species we call Homo sapiens, with its lust to go beyond, always beyond.

Its lust to discover in tandem with its death drive.

To push, and push. Brains and their appendages. Digging to know itself– like psychoanalysis on the scale of our species.

1 million years ago we learned how to use fire. We imagine this gave our ancestors more time to think, and over the course of a million years the sum total of that intense cogitation brought us here, to smartphones and tumblr blog posts.

Imagine all the forms sacrificed to get to this form– do I even deserve it? To live. Imperfect forms died. We killed them. I am the sum of all those deaths.

Life Life exploding–they say it took 10 billion years, from the birth of the universe, to arrive at life on Earth.

And all that time…was the universe readying itself–without knowing?

My head hurts–it all had to be just right.

Why did I get this chance?

Circle back to the light: The Cradle of Humankind illuminated by God’s spotlight

What did I do to deserve this chance to be born to see the resting place of our early ancestors to see the fynbos biome and those marvelous ancient angiosperms–their fuzz and wiry tentacles–the defense mechanisms of living alien plants from another time.

Believe me, universe, when I say I take none of it for granted This chance to love To live To witness these endemic plant species, which grow nowhere else on the planet. None of it has been lost on me.

Beauties of the fynbos bioregion

Now I weep just thinking how improbable it was that I should be born–that I could be given this chance to see and learn.

You are alive.

You can’t be aware of everything.

You read. You forget. Dream. Forget your dreams.

Life…& on….& on…

We left. The sun was setting. Suddenly I was sleepy. When we got home I fell asleep. Was I incubating what I had just seen–in a dream?

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neogandw · 7 years

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NOW IF YOU ALLOW ME TO SHILL FOR A MINUTE HERE.

Presenting one of my favorite steam games, now entirely free to play, AWESOMENAUTS.

Ever felt like playing a MOBA-like game, but felt intimidated by steep learning curves, memorizing meta builds, going for optimal strategies and just plain affraid of being shouted at by your team mates because you didn't go for that specific thing at that specific time and now the entire base is on fire because of your blunder?

Yeah, me too, DOTA and LoL are great, but sometimes one does not feel like dealing with that ammount of preassure, for people like me who prefer their games simple, fast paced and chaotic, boy do i got the game for you.

GAMEPLAY

Awesomenauts prides itself on being a simplistic MOBA style game, in fact, its not even traditional in that sense, as it prefers another approach: if you are fan of megaman-like games you'll find this one great, because the gameplay is very much jump and shoot style 2D platformer gameplay!

As it is a team based 3v3 game, you can join up with random people online or friends to duke it out in splitscreen, online or even against bots, you are not limited on how you want to play your game, even giving you power to edit the configurations of the private matches if you so desire: want to give everyone all the upgrades at once? would you prefer for an infinity of creeps to fill the battlefield? how about a random character per death? the choice is yours to take.

It is also very simple to learn, you don't need to learn the meta mindset of advanced players to play the game, as the shop system only requires you to pick your 3 favorite upgrades -tailored to each specific character- for each of your abilities, and these abilities take effect not by numbers, but by altering the functionality of their abilities to your favor: want bouncing dynamite sticks? slowdown on top of healing? a faster shooty gun or a stronger shooty gun? Big double buzzaws that cause a slowdown on the enemy? You got them.

STORY

The game is also filled to brim with lore, though unlike most games out there, the lore of the awesomenauts is mostly a comedic epic, the game is self-stylized like a 90's cartoon where everything was build to be incredibly awesome.

In awesomenauts, you control the titular squad, a ragtag bunch of misfit aliens from across the galaxy, each one with a reason to fight:

“Riding his combat walker onto the battlefield, comes Derpl Zork. The nephew of Blabl Zork, president of Zork industries. Derpl Zork lacks his uncle's business-smarts. In fact he lacks any kind of smarts, managing to get his IQ rated under the level of plankton in the official galaxial IQ test.

Nevertheless Derpl is the heir apparent to Blabl's galaxy-spanning business empire. This is something that doesn't sit well with Blabl, not well at all. Dreading the day Derpl would inherit the company and run all the hardfought accomplishments into the ground, Blabl put Derpl in charge of fieldtesting the new Specialized Universal Secretary Interface (S.U.S.I. for short) in one of Zork Industries' combat walkers. Asking Derpl what form of devastation should be issued forth from his vehicle of destruction he simply drooled and said: "I wuv cats!"

Now Blabl is anxiously awaiting the day that Derpl would suffer a fatal blow on the fields of battle but as of yet Derpl's combat walker has proven to keep making up for its dimwitted driver. “

”Once part of the soviet space program, Yuri was a monkey, experimentally shot into space during the 1960's cold war spacerace. Mysteriously, monitoring soviet scientists suddenly lost track of monkey Yuri's spacecraft.

Puzzled by its sudden disappearence, Soviet space-command wondered what had become of their beloved test-pet Yuri. Little did they know that Yuri's spacecraft had entered a warpfield anomaly and was transported hundreds of years into the future!

Also, the warpfield's radiation boosted Yuri's mind to superintelligent levels. The new, more intelligent, mad and slightly sadistic Yuri quickly grasped the situation and modified his broken rocket into an equally mad timetravelling supercomputer jetpack.

With the jetpack translating everything Yuri says and does, enemies are never quite sure who is in control, the mad scientist monkey, or the computer it created? “

“Ted McPain was one of the great heroes of the first AI Wars, a long time ago. He has led his squad of elite super soldiers, the Killer Koala’s, against many opponents and has been decorated as an outstanding soldier a hundred times over. His ultimate achievement, during the climax of the First AI Wars, was a solo operation onto the AI’s battle station Starstorm. This mission ended in Ted McPain single handedly unhinging all of the station’s crucial power couplings, effectively making sure the station wouldn’t be completed before the end of the war. Ted McPain eventually died when he sacrificed himself to save the Sunny-Daisy Alien Orphanage from a band of bloodthirsty dinosaur zombies in 3021. Ted’s heroic deeds would never be forgotten.

He lived on as he became the star of various video games: Ted McPain I through XVII, Ted McPain: Zombie Blast, Ted McPain vs. evil Ted McPain and Ted McPain Unicorn Dance Karting.

When Voltar The Omniscient learned of the violent dimwitted video game star, he brewed up a plan that would backfire horribly. He created the Materializotron XT8000 with which he wanted to bring back the war hero of old to be his personal assistant. Extracting Ted McPain’s digital essence from his video games, Voltar managed to materialize a life-size flesh and blood version. The Ted McPain that appeared though was missing his pants for unknown reasons. Voltar waved the issue aside saying “Stop asking stupid questions! He looks fine to me.”

“Yoolip has been a scientist for the greater part of his life on the transistor planet Calias. Creating wondrous inventions and contraptions like the dog aura reader, the nightmare-to-VHS recorder, the random number phone, the cereal-to-milk ratio calculator and an actual time machine. One day after combining the time machine into some comfy slippers, he teleported to the Mesozoic era and found himself surrounded by some scientist hungry velociraptors.

Barely escaping the predators he lost one of his slippers. Being stuck in time he spent years to craft a new slipper to travel forward in time to return to his beloved granddaughter, Ayla. He joined the Awesomenauts team to finally spend some quality time with her and eat some over-engineered pancakes. “

This is a game that does not even attempt to take itself seriously, as the characters will crack a joke or a reference in the middle of battle to your ears' delight.

MUSIC

speaking of ears, how about checking out the sweet tunes of the awesomenauts?

Extended Theme Song

8-bit Yoolip

Electronic Supersonic Cybertronic Rocco

Ted McPain's Theme

I'll make you a star

Nibb's Killing Spree

Sentry's Killing Spree Theme

Deadlift's Killing Spree

Eye of Aguillon

Chucho Krokk’s Killing Spree

Lonestar’s Killing Spree

Raelynn's Killing Spree

FREE TO PLAY? MORE LIKE FREE TO PAY AM I RIGHT

Actually no, awesomenauts's Free to Play system is actually very simple, similar to other MOBAS of its kind it uses the standard 3 hero rotation, but a a bonus, you can try all of the characters in full whenever you want against bots, see who you like from the get-go and decide who you want to buy next.

Adding on to that, the game gives you the in-game currency by doing what you do best: play the game, and it doesn't even have to be vs online opponents, you can just pop it in with 3 of your friends (or even alone if you're lonely) and fight against an enemy team of bots, win experience for your characters to unlock their upgrades and songs, and parts to obtain cosmetic upgrades.

The only real aspect that requires money is merely cosmetic: costumes for each character that are simply visual, add voice lines or change their theme songs.

The things that matter can be obtained through gameplay alone, but one can opt to buy the all nauts pack on steam, this merely unlocks all the nauts to be played at any time though, not their upgrades, which require XP.

But if you get the game on steam and use one of the following codes (don't worry, they can be used up to 50 times each)

WVHE-9CLM-9KPH 9MQT-3JS7-NMCR CHCP-3HHX-X5Q5

You'll get a character entirely for free: the elite sniper raelynn.

These codes can be obtained if you play the game long enough, if you use your own code to invite people, their achievements give you loot too, free loot for everyone!

So feel free to jump into the action, there is nothing to lose and tons of fun (and salt or memes) to be had, bring your friends, bring your friend's friends, bring your grandma even.

It's time to get awesome!

#awesomenauts #free to play #get it now

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