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marvel-download-tutorial · 4 years

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How to Download Marvel comics for free!

I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while especially since we’re all stick inside but last week Marvel made the shitty decision to transition various print titles to digital only, meaning they’re directly taking revenue away from local shops rather than delay the titles, so since Marvel thinks digital comics is such a cool idea I’m gonna show you how to download as many as you’d like! (oh also this is for windows only, idk how to do it if you own a mac but also you’re rich anyways so who cares buy the comics richie)

I don’t want to take money away from the people that need it, not the actual companies of Marvel and DC fuck them they’re dying and they deserve it, but for my own rationalizing I want to take a minute to plug the Hero Initiative, basically what it is an organization that provides for comic creators that are having hard times, comics are a rough industry and you don’t get into it to get rich, I won’t go into it too much you can read for yourself but it’s been endorsed by Stan Lee, Justin Ponsor, Mike Grell, Skottie Young, Rags Morales, a lot of big names, so I’d ask if you do follow this guide and download some comics for free please consider donating to the Hero Initiative (they also sell autographed prints and you can commission some really famous artists)

anyways onto the good stuff! I’m going to be doing a fairly brief but easy to follow guide, there will be links at the bottom of the post so look for those, I’ll probably be making a few other posts with some more info so also check back for those if my blog is still here

What do I need?

You’re going to need 4 basic things if you want to do this as easily and safely as you can

1) a good anti-virus

2) anonymous web browser (Tor)

4) a safe and reliable source for the comics

4) a torrent program to download the comics

Also optional: VPN

Anti-Virus

it’s good to remember when torrenting that no one is your friend, everyone is out to trick you and no one cares, honestly you should also have a good anti-virus though, I’m not really gonna tell you which one you should have but Norton 360 is pretty good but say that in a room of CS majors is the quickest way to start a fist fight, honestly just google it, you’re gonna have to do some research, but really you’re good as long as you don’t go with Avast or Kaspersky, I’m going to go over typical tricks and traps later to ensure safety, this is just basic overall security thing

Anonymous Web Browser (Tor)

next we’re gonna download Tor (you can do this before getting a VPN, like I said either one is going to put you on a list but using one to cover you getting the other at least mitigates it lol) Tor is a great open source project that allows for basically complete anonymous web browsing, it’s a project dedicated to privacy and disruption of corporations ability to control every aspect of our lives, also a friend of mine bought K off silk road with it once in highschool, really not too much you need to know about it before using it, just download it, let it configure and you’re good, also use Duck Duck go that it comes with, don’t switch it to chrome or anything, Duck Duck go is anonymous search service which better lends to Tor’s protection

Where to get the torrents

Now this is really important because you can have everything else set up but without a safe reliable source none of this is gonna do any good, but this is the dangerous part, torrent sites are notorious traps (I bricked more than on family PC on limewire) and this is why I said earlier to remember these people are not your friends and are out to hurt you, don’t click banner ads, don’t believe pop ups, make sure your virus protection is on and it’s a very good idea to have an adblocker on, also look out for another post I’ll be making on what download buttons to trust for different popular torrent sites

when talking comics (and remember specifically only Marvel comics) there’s no other name out there than Nemesis43, he is a god and he’s going to be your new best friend, there are groups and sites out there that do comic scans that you have to pay to join or like apply to join, that shit’s dumb as hell and I’ve never used them once and I’ve got more comic than I can read in my lifetime, you don’t need em and you especially don’t need to give them money, donate to the Hero Initiative instead

Nemesis has moved around a bit in the past (if you remember the WWT debacle) right now the main site for him is ettv (there will be a link at the end of the post) sites a bit barren but he’s there, he also has a reddit he gives updates on very rarely, generally if he moves he adds where his new home is in a text doc in his recent uploads, I fully trust him and his uploads, he’s been doing this for years and I’d never have a second thought downloading from him, also because he uploads so much he’s often very highly rated and verified on whatever site he’s on

The second place I’d recommend is getcomic (again there will be a link at the end), now this is very important, never donate to them, they kinda suck, basically they’re plugged into a bunch of different scanner groups and just steal those scans and put them up and then ask for donations, basically they’re just an aggregate (Nem kinda is too but he doesn’t ask for donations and stuff), they usually use browser downloads which are a complete pain so I’d really recommend Nemesis over them but they do have TheComicGuy on torrent galaxy for larger files but that updates a lot less frequently then the main site, again I trust these guys (as long as you’re on the actual site) but don’t trust any banner ads or pop ups, also for downloading they give multiple options, a lot are very sketchy, just use the main server

also there’s other sites like readcomics or newcomics, never used em, don’t like em, use at your own behest

On sites like ettv you’re gonna want to use the magnet, someone years ago told me it was safer and I just believed them and have always used em, not sure if it’s true but it’s worked so whatever, really you shouldn’t be too worried about this stuff and if you follow this guide you’re going to be way over prepared to download comics, really no one cares about comic torrenting, movies, video games, tv shows that’s the stuff people really get caught on, this is just nerd shit

I’m going to be making another post showing how to use these sites, and other sites comic can be found on so look back at my blog for that

Torrent program

This is pretty basic, just get utorrent, it’s what I’ve always used, it works, whatever, definitely look this up with a VPN on or on Tor, it’s simple to use, I’ll be doing a short tutorial on how to make it even safer

Lastly this one is optional but a pretty good idea, for more than just this

VPN aka Virtual Privacy Network

honestly you can get the anonymous web browser (Tor) or the VPN first, their both going to help cover you downloading the other and honestly both are going to put you on a list for googling them (which is why I suggest looking for someone who just already has the .exes ((I always keep them on a thumbdrive for when I have to reset one of my computers)), I might try to make a google drive with em but also I might not bc that sounds like work and I’m already typing all this up), anyways I’m not really gonna explain what a VPN is, there’s a lot of resources that can explain it better than I can but basically it masks what you do on the internet, there’s a lot of choices when picking a VPN but the big thing I looked for when choosing mine was 1) non-US based so it’s harder for US investigation agencies to request stuff for them or get anything from them 2) one that doesn’t keep logs, honestly they all do even if they say they don’t, but you wanna look for one that hasn’t turned over many logs to US agencies and 3) unlimited peer 2 peer connections which is complicated but basically means you can torrent stuff anonymously and with decent speed. Like Anti-Virus there are a ton of different VPN’s out there, you really have to do research because there are actual accounts of FBI agencies crating VPN’s telling people they’re anonymous when really they had direct access to all the info, I haven’t done any research but NordVPN seems kinda like one of these, really the more they advertise the more suspicious I am, Just google “best vpn 2020″ and look at like 5 lists and read the the stuff, personally I use IPvanish which unfortunately is US based and while it gave over logs in 2016 even thought they said they didn’t keep any but now they’re owned by a new company that super double promises they don’t (again who cares they all do) but they’ve allow P2P and use 256-bit AES encryption

I wanna take a second to mention that this isn’t going to be free, this is the only place you’re going to be spending money (besides donating to Heroe Initative of course), a good VPN is about $100 a year which all in all isn’t terrible, technically you can just get by on the anonymous browser but this gives you an extra layer of security to pretty much ensure you won’t get caught and plus in the ever worsening internet hell world a VPN is becoming more and more important, I’m sure you can find articles about it but yea you don’t technically need a VPN but it’s useful for more than just this

How to work it all

Ok so this is gonna be a little stream of consciousness, as this all kinda has been, so sorry but I’m gonna try and explain it as best I can and also feel free to ask any questions on this blog, I’ll check back eventually I’m sure

So first thing first, make sure you’re virus protection is on and you’re connected on your VPN if you’re using it (you can google “what is my IP” to double check it’s working) then load up Tor, let it load and connect up and whatever, then go to https://www.ettvdl.com/user/Nemesis43 (I’m just gonna show this with Nemesis43, maybe I’ll make another one for getcomics but that’s pretty straight forward, also nem is better)

now remember we’re only here for Marvel comics, so scroll past all those thousands of other comics this would work exactly the same for, I’m gonna go for Ant-Man #4 which was released on the 13 as a digital only comic despite the first three issues being physical copies and now sit on my shelf forever unfinished making me look like a complete penis

it may take a while but it’s going to look like this, click on the blue words, it’s gonna take you to a page that looks like this

now from here we’re going to get the magnet link, right click and select copy link address, I like doing this because it limits my interactions with the page, note the advertisement at the top telling me I need a VPN despite thinking I’m in Guadalajara (which for legal reasons I am)

just copy that and then go to utorrent and click the add link

it’ll open a little box, it should add the link automatically, if it doesn’t just hit ctrl+V

hit ok and it’ll load it up, it might need to download some metadata but after that it should be good, oh also it might bring up a window basically asking where you want to save it and what to name it, you can set all that up in preferences, I did so I just turned that window off and can’t be assed to turn it back on, just hit ok if you don’t wanna bother with that stuff, it’ll go into your downloads by default

and that’s it really, it’s that easy, I might make another thing talking about how to make utorrent more anonymous or whatever so look for that, but stock it’s fine, also when it’s finished downloading it’s gonna start seeding (like uploading to someone else) I’ve always been a scumbag and I never seed but Nemesis seeds stuff so much you really don’t need to anyways, just select it and hit the stop button (the black square on the tool bar)

here are all the links I could think of

Hero Initiative

download Tor

here’s a guide for VPNs

download utorrent

song I found recently that I like

getcomics

Nemesis

so yea that’s pretty much the basics, be smart, be safe, any viruses you get are on you but I hope you found this helpful and feel free to ask any questions

oh and also this is all parody and I’ve never actually torrented anything, I don’t even own a computer

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jelloopy · 4 years

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The Forgotten Bird

What if our favorite Plane Jumping Embezzling Janitor was more than just that?

Here’s my crazy long one shot of Clint McElroy being the Forgotten 8th member of the IPRE Crew. Be warned it is 8.2k.

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No one really knows who Clint McElroy is.

He seemingly popped up out of nowhere one day and continues to show up at random times and places. Little did the IPRE gang know that Clint was also on that mission with them. He was with them every cycle, every attack from the Hunger. He just disappeared after 48 long years when he learned about the Voidfish.

Like the others, he was chosen for the simple 2-month excursion into space to explore the outer reaches of the planar system to potentially see what lies beyond it. He shadowed under Davenport in the year after finding the Light of creation. Helping him figure out how bonds work and assisting him with any sort of research. He met Barry while he worked at the institute as well. Never got to know him too well but worked alongside him in a few research projects. On the Mission, he was “Lieutenant”, second in command under Davenport.

He knew the mission was risky but his family supported what he did and urged him to go. So he waved his goodbyes from the hull of the Starblaster and went to his room as they took off. He is thankful most days that he didn’t see the attack as they exited the atmosphere. The last thing he saw of his homeworld was his family’s smiling faces and that’s all he needed. So when they reentered the atmosphere only to see a planet that wasn’t their own he didn’t know how to feel.

When Magnus died at the end of the first cycle as they retreated from the Hunger and he was so afraid of what that meant. Just as the sinking feeling of losing a member of his crew began to set in they all were repositioned. Magnus was back. Clint was in his room on the ship. Everyone was still in their Red Cloaks from the first departure. How was this possible? No one knew. But as the next few years went by they fell into that routine of trying to find the light before the Hunger could.

Some years they found it before the Hunger others took months and the Hunger had already spotted it. But every year within the first 2 weeks the sky would be filled with eyes for just a second. Those eyes, filled with fear, hunger, and hatred, burned into the crew. At that moment the clock started to tick. They had one year. In one year’s time, the Hunger would fill the sky and decimate the planet.

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47 years they had been doing this. 47. This cycle was fun though. They were at a place called the Legato Conservatory. The locals said that the light of creation was in the mountain. So to follow their tradition on the planet the crew decided they could spend some time mastering certain arts to appease the mountain in order to get the light. They could have some fun. So everyone got to work. Magnus worked on carpentry, Merle danced, Taako gave motivational speeches, Davenport sang, Barry played piano, Lup played the violin, and Lucretia and Clint took painting lessons.

The year passed and they all submitted their works with pride. There was a moment with Barry and Lup that Clint saw growing over time and was ecstatic to see it coming to fruition. Everyone’s submissions were accepted and yet there was no Light of Creation. This made everyone in the crew on edge. Later that night Clint saw Magnus go for a jog probably from the nerves.

However, the next night after the crew submitted their pieces Clint went to investigate the cave himself. When he peered into was greeted by a weird sort of jellyfish. The creature somehow gestured in a way as if to say “follow me” to him. So he did and it lead him into the cave. Looking around he notices a bunch of other creatures like the one he was following that start to float towards him. They are larger than the one he is following but stop short and float away as the smaller one in front of him hums and glows as if saying ‘he’s cool, he’s with me’.

As they make their way further into the cave he spots another smaller creature with the duck that Magnus submitted in its tendrils and chuckles. Finally, they reach a back corner of the cave and Clint understands why the jellyfish brought him here, the painting he submitted leaned against the wall. He smiles as he approaches it.

The painting pictures a park from their home planet. Three boys are playing around in the sunlight, laughing. The smallest one in a blue shirt chasing what seems to be his older brother in a green shirt grinning ear to ear the whole way with joy in their faces. The last one who looks to be the oldest in a red shirt is hiding behind a big tree watching the other boys chase each other. Sitting in the foreground on a blanket leaning against one another is a man and a woman watching the whole scene take place.

“That’s my family. My wife ‘n I, then my three boys running around,” he says.

The creature hums softly. And floats closer to the painting touching a tendril to the man in the frame.

“Yep, that’s me alright,” Clint assures. The tendril moves over to the woman.

“That’s my wife Leslie. An absolute wonder of a woman. Always supported me. Took care of the boys. Never failed at bringing a smile to my face,” Clint tells the creature. Some tears start to well up in his eyes as he talks, smiling the whole time. The creature hummed a soft tone and glowed blue for a moment, brushing up next to Clint. It then pointed towards the Boy behind the tree.

“That’s my oldest Juice. His real name is Justin but when he was like 10 he had an obsession with drinking juice for a while so it just stuck. He’s such a good kid, always lights up a room when he enters, crazy funny too,” He explains, now sitting on a rock next to the painting. A few tears have begun to fall. The creature now points at the boy being chased in green.

“Ahh, Travis. He’s very passionate. Horribly afraid of spiders though. Insanely funny too. He and Juice butt heads some times but that’s what brothers do am I right?” He wipes a tear from his cheek as he chuckles. The creature finally points at the smallest boy in blue.

“Now that’s baby Griffin. Spoiled Lil shit he is. Never will not bring up the fact that he has his “own birthday”. See Justin and Travis both share a birthday but they were born 3 years apart oddly enough. But Griffin got his own. He’s a little ball of energy. Used to help me out with stuff for the Institute before the Mission.” Clint can only smile looking at the painting now. He wipes a few final tears from his eyes and stands up.

“Thank you for bringing me here to see this.” he turns to the creature, “I was hoping I’d see it again. Before we left this world.” He begins to walk away when the creature grabs his wrist and seems to hug him. Clint is very confused but goes with it. The jellyfish hums and glows bright colors but eventually let’s go.

He visits again the next night but doesn’t tell the others about where he went the night before or tonight. This night as he is leaving he trips. He trips into the pool of water that most of the baby ‘voidfish’, as the crew wants to call them, are chilling out in. They all shine bright and hum a shrill note as they scatter away from him. He sits up in the pool wiping the hair from his eyes and spits out some water.

“Damn I knew I was old but not that old!” he chuckles, looking at his voidfish friend while getting up. The voidfish hums another tune and glows what he can discern as happy colors. He leaves the cave making sure to not trip next to the second pool of voidfish on the way out. He only goes back once in a while, especially after he sees Magnus with another voidfish a few nights later.

The last few days of the year go on by, the crew is searching for the Light of Creation still and everyone is on edge. He tries to keep the peace as much as he can.

However, about a week after his last visit to the cave he notices something weird while attending another submission ceremony. When the students offering was taken he still remembered the offering while everyone else forgot. Then when it was accepted and everyone remembered he still never forgot. He was very lost for a while and decided to attend a few more to test this. It wasn’t until a student’s submission was declined that he realized that he was in fact not under the effects of the voidfish. He tested it some more and asked Magnus if he could remember the submissions. When he got a very quizzical look from Magnus and an offer to take him to Merle to get his head checked out he also became very confused.

It wasn’t hanging out around the voidfish that made him immune to their effect. Magnus was proof of that. So he brought it up in conversation one night. He slipped the question into the conversation about whether Magnus had drunk any of the water from the pools in the cave. Magnus denied ever having done so to his memory and Clint had his answer. If you drank the water that a voidfish has been in the effects of the memory alterations is nullified! He didn’t know what to do with this information. It was all so fascinating.

He didn’t tell anyone. Not yet at least. He knew his crewmates and its not that he didn’t trust them it’s just that they could become very thoughtless and reckless at times and he didn’t know what they would do. Plus nothing would come of it since when they would leave this world the Voidfish wouldn’t even be in their grasp. He would just wait until the next year to tell anyone about it.

That was the plan until Magnus smuggled Fisher onto the Starblaster and didn’t disappear. That changed everything. Still, no one knew what Fisher was capable of anyway, besides wiping memories and sometimes giving them back.

Halfway through the next cycle, Clint hit a very grim point mentally. He was deeply depressed. He missed his wife and kids so much it pained him beyond belief that it had now been almost 50 years without them. Had they survived the Hunger’s attack? Was Leslie alright? How old were the boys now? Had they gone to College? So many questions he would never know the answer to. In this time no one really knew what to say or how to act. Clint was really the only one with any attachments back on their homeworld. Besides Davenport or Merle, everyone was really too young to have really set in stone a family. Davenport tried his best to comfort him, Taako made him his favorite meal one night in an attempt to cheer him up, Merle offered some medicinal options to help him out a tad, and Barry tried to offer his condolences but they fell on flat air.

To Clint, he was utterly alone at this moment. He had memories yes but he would never get to hold his wife again. He wouldn’t get to see his boys grow up.

In a spark of inspiration after seeing Fisher while walking about the ship, he realized what he could do by the next cycle. He could wipe everyone’s memories of him and just disappear every cycle. Being around the crew reminded him too much of what he left behind. Plus he would just respawn the next year on the ship if he died or not so what was the difference. He can live a little. Thankfully he was in his room when the ship left their homeworld so he didn’t have to worry about respawning in the same room as everyone else. That was the new plan.

He spent the rest of the year writing down every memory possible that he needed the crew to forget. He didn’t mind if he would run into them in the years to come because they wouldn’t know who he was. He could say “Hi” then disappear. When the last few days came around he was finally finished with the journal full of memories of himself.

Standing in front of Fisher’s tank he made sure he drank a little bit of the water just in case. He hesitated for a moment. Should he do this? It’s a drastic decision but if it was needed it could be reversed. He could just have a good few years and when he decided he could sneak some of Fishers water into the tap and bam they all remember him no big deal!

He did it. Right as the Hunger made its first appearance. He dropped the journal into the tank and waited.

No one called his name to make sure he was alright. So he waited. He would have to until they re-entered the atmosphere and landed when he could see if his plan actually worked. So that’s what he did.

Upon finally landing he ran from his room with a bag of personal belongings and jumped ship. He ran into the nearby woods but stayed close though, just to make sure it had worked. Merle was the first one to exit the ship and was alone, he decided it was time to test it out. He set his bag and cloak on a low nearby branch and walked out. He acted as a curious native to hopefully catch Merle’s attention. And it worked thank the gods. Merle called out to him,

“Hello, sir! Do you speak common?”

“Oh! Uh hello! Yes, I uh, speak… Common?” Clint replied acting startled by the dwarf, trying to seal the deal.

“Ah! Well, that’s great! I guess you’re wondering about our ship here! Do not worry we are just humble explorers!” Merle explained.

“Well, that’s nice. I suppose… I’ll be on my way now don’t want to disturb your eh… exploring. Nice to meet you though!” Clint said walking back into the woods away from the ship. He needed to get away quickly. Merle shouted a goodbye as they parted ways.

When Clint traveled far enough away he cheered with excitement. His plan had worked! They don’t remember him! He felt a pang of loneliness for a moment but shrugged it off in favor of finding shelter. He was free to live life as a tourist, a nobody.

Clint repeated this for the next 18 years. As soon as they would land he would jump ship as fast as possible and live his life whether it be in a new town or out in the woods. He would have his own adventures.

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When they went into cycle 65 something extremely unexpected happened. The ship was attacked and they went down, hard. When Clint woke up he was thankfully on the ship and only had a few bumps and bruises. He was shaken from his hazy stupor when he heard Lucretia’s voice ring out through the ship calling for everyone. When no one answered Clint began to get worried along with Lucretia. He ran out and found her in front of her room with her own cuts and bruises. She saw him and backed away already preparing an offensive spell.

“Wait wait wait! Don’t attack! I’m not an enemy! I can help you!” he shouted holding his hands up. She eyed him up and down and dropped the spell for a moment.

“Don’t move. I swear to the gods I will magic missile your ass so fast if you do.” she threatened. Clint swallowed and nodded his head. He was with them for about 50 years he knew what she was capable of. She began to back away and call out for the rest of the crew while running around the ship. She came back into the hall minutes later extremely flustered. No one was with her and Clint hadn’t heard any responses from the others.

“Have you seen anyone else on this ship?” She demanded.

“N-no I swear.” He answered hands still up in the air. “I can help you through. You don’t know me but I know you and I can help.”

“What the hell does that mean how do you know me.” She faltered.

“It’s really hard to explain. I don’t know where everyone is but we obviously need to last the year until we can regenerate next cycle.” Clint offered.

“How do you know about the cycles… what is going on? Who the fuck are you?” She has tears in her eyes. Clint feels so much sorrow for her. She was only 16 coming on this mission. She’s too damn young to have been going through any of this. She reminds him of Travis though and he can’t just leave her stranded like this. He would have to just wipe her memory of him from this year when the Hunger comes around at the end of the year.

“Look we need to get this thing into the air and away from here I can explain more later but we need to not die for now.” he tries to compromise with her. She looks him up and down again and breaks.

“Fine let’s go but you better fucking explain what the hell is happening or you’re not going to like how you end up.” She starts to walk towards the helm of the ship. He follows in-suite and takes a moment to survey the situation before getting to work.

He is able to start the engines but is unable to get in the air. He takes a lap of the ship, making what repairs he can. The worst was the Bond engine at the stern of the ship. Though it could start up it there was no power going to the thrusters. He was able to fix it enough to get them in the air for a while and that’s all he needed. Someone obviously knew that the ship was here since the rest of the crew was missing. They needed to hide.

Lucretia watched in confusion as Clint bounced around the Starblaster working on the repairs. How the hell did he know how to fix the bond engine let alone anything about the ship at all? While he worked she cleaned up the helm and readied the ship for the ascent. They made it a good distance flying around the planet aimlessly until they were attacked again. He made quick repairs as they flew leaving the steering to Lucretia. She could at least aim away from the enemy. Obviously neither of them were as good as Davenport but they survived.

Once in a while, they would find a place to hide and make semi-proper repairs to the ship but as soon as they had any downtime they were back on the run from this relentless attacker.

In the short resting periods, that they did get, he tried to explain his situation as simply as he could to her. He took these times to write down their experiences as well, so he could wipe her memory in the new cycle.

He loved his team. He really did. But he was having a blast living his own life from the non-stop mission that had stolen his family away from him. He had time to cope without the concerned looks from his crewmates. Most likely he would do this for a few more years then let them remember everything and deal with their wrath then.

For now, he had to make sure Lucretia survived the year. It was drawing to a close and they were still on the run. He taught Lucretia everything he could about the ship in that time. So when the Hunger appeared in the sky he gave her the order to fly out of the atmosphere as he went to “check on the engine”. Really he ran to Fishers tank and dropped the small journal into it and waited.

When they re-entered the atmosphere he heard Lucretia’s cry of relief. They- She had done it. She survived on her own the entire year. The crew was so worried about her. She was more than just a mess at this point. She had to live an entire year on the run, ‘alone’ without anyone to help her with the ship.

Clint hid in the ship for the first day to figure out what the hell happened to everyone in that last cycle. He overheard them debriefing with Lucretia, saying that four giant statues killed them? They judged them on the sins they had committed? That’s insane. After he learned what happened he jumped ship and continued his lonesome adventures.

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The end of cycle 82 threw him for a loop though. When the hunger appeared he saw a humanoid figure in a red cloak fly up into the air and destroy the first tendril from the Hunger. He couldn’t believe what he had just seen. But before he could even begin to process what had happened he respawned on the ship.

He grabbed his small go-bag and went to his normal spot where he jumps ship as soon as they land when he overhears a conversation in the helm. Davenport is yelling at Lup and Barry about something. He finally hears something about them becoming Liches when he has to jump because someone was walking down the hall near him.

When he found a place to settle down for a little while he tried to process what he heard. Barry and Lup became Liches? What does this mean for his disappearing act? How did the Voidfishes powers work with undead beings? I guess he will figure out when that comes to pass if ever.

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Something weird happened around cycle 90 though. He doesn’t stray too far from the ship this time and see’s Barry die within the first week. He makes sure to distance himself a little more just in case anything with memories pops up with Barry being a Lich and all. That was until he was laying in a big grassy field one day and a Lich in the IPRE robe appeared over him.

“Clint.” It says.

“Uh who?” he replies. His heart jumped into his throat and his stomach sank.

“Cut the shit Clint what the fuck did you do. Why does no one remember you?” It demands.

“Ahh fuck. Barry?” Clint asks quickly.

“Yes, it’s fucking Barry now answer the damn question, they all think I’m insane.” Barry shoots back.

Clint sits up and sighs. There was no escaping it now. He spilled the beans and told Barry everything. There was no point in hiding it.

Barry now sat next to him. Seeing him in a Lich form was very odd but he got used to it after a while. A sigh came from him after a minute of contemplation.

“Well fuck… Shit man. That’s a lot. How long were you gonna keep this up for?” Barry asked.

“I don’t know. As long as I needed I suppose. It’s been fun living out here on my own. None of yall really had anything to leave behind. That’s why you all were chosen to go on the mission besides your expertise. Me? I had a wife and kids. I left them behind. I don’t know if they survived that attack, Barry. I know you all know about them but I can’t just not miss them. I miss Leslie’s hug, reassuring me the mission would go fine and that I’d be back home in no time. I miss my boys. Justin’s big ol’ smile, Travis’ dumb jokes, Griffin’s insane laughter. I miss them. I never got to see them grow up if they were able to. I don’t get to be by the love of my life anymore. And being out here alone has let me cope in my own way.” Clint explained, looking down at his hands.

“God damn Clint. I’m… I never thought of it that way. I knew you missed your family but. Damn, I’m so sorry man.” Barry tried his best. He didn’t know what to say.

“This is kinda why I left Barry. I know you mean well but it makes me feel broken and weak when you guys don’t know how to deal with me. I’m not trying to be the stereotypical guy who has to hide his feelings it just got to be too much. I wasn’t going to be gone forever. I’m gonna come back one day. I just want it to be on my terms. Please don’t take this as me blaming you because by all means its the opposite. I made this decision on my own. Plus you have Lup now and I can only hope that she makes you just as happy or more than Leslie made me. You two are amazing together.” He doesn’t know what to say anymore either.

Barry lets out a small “thank you” before they sit in silence for a while. Later on, just as the sun is about to set, Barry turns to Clint as he gets up.

“Well. Your secret is safe with me Lieutenant. I appreciate you telling me all that. Just come back when you’re ready alright?”

“I will bud. Thank you.” Clint nods at him as he floats away.

For the rest of the year, Barry and Clint meet once in a while to talk. It’s pleasant. Clint is happy to have someone to talk to again that he knows. They exchange all sorts of stories over the next few months. One day though Barry rushes into Clint in the woods. He talks so fast it’s a blur. Once Clint got him to calm down Barry explained.

“I don’t know what it means or how it works but when Lucretia and I sing a certain tune the rest of the crew hears static. I don’t know if its a big deal but its wicked weird.”

“Alright, that is really weird. What is the tune?” Clint questions him. Barry hums the tune and Clint can hear the notes just fine. He grunts and leans against a nearby tree, thinking. How is this possible and what does it mean.

If Lucretia drank Fisher’s water that would mean she remembers Clint but she obviously doesn’t. Did she ever go in the cave with the Voidfish? Yeah! With Magnus that one time near the end of the cycle. So was it possible she accidentally drank from the pool too? Well if she did she would remember Clint. Then it clicks for him

He fell into the smaller pool of voidfish. That must be where the baby voidfish swim. It’s possible that when Lucretia was in the cave with Magnus that she accidentally drank from the Adult pool and can remember music from the conservatory. The adult voidfish must stay in one pool while the babies stay in another until they grow up.

Clint turns back to Barry and lies to him. He doesn’t know why but he does, “I don’t know how she knows the song but can’t remember me. I already told you what I know about Fisher. So it is pretty weird. I’d let it go though I doubt there’s anything to worry about.”

Barry nods in agreement and begins to float away. “Yeah your probably right. It is pretty weird though. Oh well, I’ll see you later!”

Later that night the Hunger entered the atmosphere and then cycle 92 began.

This next time around he watches them as they all learn artificing and get to create their own magical items.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For the next 7 years, he lays low and lives out his own adventures. Staying in various Inn’s in nearby towns, learning different trades here and there, and overall just having fun

Cycle 99 was different right off the bat though. He hadn’t even had the chance to jump ship when the crew found the Light of creation and began discussing how to split it up. He listened in and learned what their plan was. It was actually a really good plan that could end the chase. He still jumped ship though and was awestruck with how similar to their homeworld it was. The only difference was the sky and the lack of one sun. He found a village to live in fairly easy and chilled out in a nice Inn for a while.

After 10 months of being on this planet, Clint heard word of some war for a powerful item start to spread. Everywhere he went that’s all anyone could talk about. He realized that it was probably from the plan of splitting the Light of Creation. After a year passes and the Hunger was nowhere in sight a dawning realization fell upon Clint. He could settle down again! Not start a new family, he was too old for that nor was he ready, but to find somewhere permanent to live out the rest of his years.

Another year passes and he finally settles down in Phandalin. He lives on the outskirts of town and works with the local authorities to make money from time to time. Within the first few days of being in town, he hears word of some man falling out of the sky on the outskirts of town. Other than that he lives in relative peace.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then after 10 years Barry, Taako, Magnus, and Merle roll on into town talking about some guy named “Gundren”. Clint follows them into the bar and spy’s on them trying to figure out how they’re doing. When Taako, Merle, and Magnus leave Barry behind Clint decides it’s time to figure out what’s going on.

“You and those guys here to look for those powerful relics?” He asks, approaching Barry who turns and looks him up and down.

“Not to my knowledge. Don’t know anything about ‘em personally. Just here on some escort business.” He replies and gestures to the bartender for a drink.

“Well, you ever wonder about who created them? Some say its a group of powerful wizards, others say it was an evil Lich. What do you think?” Clint prods. Barry obviously isn’t going to just come out and say that he made the relics. So Clint has to try and trick him into it.

“Look pal, like I said I’m just here on some escort business. I could give less of a shit about those stupid relic things.” He snaps at Clint.

Clint moves away and leaves him to be. Something isn’t sitting right with him though. There is an odd feeling in his gut so he heads home and packs a bag.

About two days later he looks out his window to see a trail of fire leading into town. He grabs his bag and a nearby horse from the stables and ditches town. Whatever that was, wasn’t good.

By nightfall, the entire town has been reduced to a sea of black glass. Clint watches though as three figures crawl out of a hole in the glass lugging a fourth behind them. He watches as they talk for a while then a glass ball comes from the fucking sky and flies them away to somewhere. Nearby though he spots movement in the woods and sees a flash of red. He knows that color anywhere. Must be Barry.

Clint mounts his horse and shouts for Barry as he rides towards where he saw the cloak. A few seconds later Clint and his horse are frozen in place. A red-robed figure comes out of the woods. When the figure sees Clint the spell is dropped and Clint calms the horse down.

“Clint, what the fuck are you doing here?” It asks.

“What am I doing here? Barry? What the fuck are you doing here?! What just happened with Taako, Magnus, and Merle? Why aren’t you with them?” Clint pressures.

“Listen you need to come with me. I’m not surprised that you don’t know yet. I’ll explain when we get somewhere safe. I can’t have her listening in somehow.” And with that, he simply turns around gesturing for Clint to follow him. So many more questions flood Clint’s mind but he gives up and just holds them for later.

After a long trek, they arrive at the entrance of a cave in the middle of nowhere. Clint ties the horse away to rest and goes in with Barry. The inside is insane. Papers everywhere, words scribbled on the wall, a fucking human floating in a tank?!

“Now I hope you’re going to explain all of this, because… What. The. Fuck.” Clint says just staring around the cave taking everything in.

Barry does explain. He explains everything that happened in this cycle. What Lucretia did, what she's created. How he is trying to stop her and what he has to do, to do so. Clint is in awe. Lucretia knows about everything now. What Clint did. And she is using it against the crew too. This is why he didn’t want to tell anyone. Something bad was bound to happen with that information.

Barry turns to one of the cave walls where the seven relics are listed and crosses out the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet.

“Holy shit. You were the guy that I heard about falling from the sky? Oh, fuck Barry. and Lup? I’m so sorry man. I’m sure she’ll turn up. But that’s a lot to take in holy shit.” He begins. They discuss all the implications behind everything that has happened.

“Wait there’s something I still don’t understand. Did you say that potentially there is a second voidfish? Not just Fisher?”

“Potentially yes. So everyone in the Bureau drinks Fisher’s ichor and they are able to learn about the Bureau and the Relics. But they just went to the base with one of the members of the Bureau so I don’t think Lucretia is going to let them drink Fishers Ichor unless she has a backup to keep everyone from remembering the mission.” Barry posits.

“But if there is a second voidfish then how am I able to remember everything. I haven’t drunk any of the second one’s ichor, as you call it.” Clint pushes.

“Well, that’s the question really. Because obviously Lucretia drank Fishers Ichor meaning she remembers you. But I think what happened was that she didn’t write you into the first story because she couldn’t remember you just like the rest of us. Maybe she just wanted to leave you be when not writing you in the second time around? It could be possible that she worded the journal to be that just the crew forgot each other. No one else in this world knew who we were so there wasn’t a point in deleting us from the world. So I guess she just left you out of the crew as you kinda wanted?” He shrugs. Clint hums in agreeance, thinking of the implications that this means for him.

They spend the next few days together talking about potential plans for Barry. Clint ends up leaving and goes to search for a new place to live. He liked living in a peaceful town. He misses the crew dearly but there was obviously too much drama for him to get involved again. After about a week Barry has a rough plan and Clint leaves to find another place to settle down.

He ends up in Never Winter and is chilling out in a nearby Inn when he hears screaming. He runs out of the building and follows some people down to the train station where he sees the tail end of a train seemingly disappear out of thin air. He looks over into a nearby field and sees about 6 figures get up after a while. Once again he recognizes Taako, Magnus, and Merle. He keeps his distance and instead works on keeping the peace around the town. As he debriefed with the local militia he met a young boy named Angus who claimed to be the world’s best detective. It was odd, but he reminded Clint of Griffin back home. Always curious and a bit vain at times, it brought a smile to his face.

He ended up not liking Never Winter that much so he skipped town and headed towards Goldcliff. A Town he had heard nothing but praise for. It was now no surprise when all of the sudden vines began causing havoc around the bank. So he stuck around and met Captain Captain Bane who brushed him off. Yet no more than five minutes later those three boys came rolling up. Clint watched from a distance as Magnus tried to chop the vines, then as Merle sweet-talked the plants and got them inside. He saw when someone jumped from the top floor and flew away, he watched a few minutes later as the boys got carried out looking like actual shit.

He never got to see them race but he heard stories of what happened. He was too busy helping clean up the dead vines from around the Bank and repairing what he could. He did go and visit the cherry blossom tree that sprouted from the race though. He saw the two women at the base of the tree and he knew that they had made sure that the boys were safe. He thanked them and made his way out of town.

On his way out Barry in his Lich form appeared out of nowhere and lead him back to his hidey-hole. Barry explained what had been happening. The Oculus and the Gaia Sash had been found, he was suspecting something was happening with the Philosophers stone soon so he has been combing radio signals for any word on it.

Clint found it funny but fulfilling that he ended up running behind the boys and helping clean up after them. He just happened to be where ever they were. He talked it over with Barry and decided that he would make it his job. When he could he would follow the boys and clean up what he could in their wake.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He couldn’t do much when the incident at the Miller lab happened but he was watching, just in case. He followed them with Barry to the town of Refuge. He watched in the woods while the four of them stood there talking about the town and what was happening. The statue of the boys in town was so amazing it made him tear up a little bit. He watched the reunion after the town caught up with the timeline, smiling the whole time.

When it came time for Wonderland Clint became very anxious. Barry told him what he knew of the place and it worried him. This was Barry’s relic after all, but the two Liches that ran the joint where a force to be reckoned with. It was decided that Clint would deter anyone from coming into the area, while Barry followed the boys inside to try and help them out. When they finally came out and he didn’t see Magnus but a fucking mannequin in his place he became extremely worried. He stays behind a-ways and follows them to Barry’s cave. He overhears everything Barry tells them. This was not in the original plan but it might just work.

He listens to Barry now in his body forget everything and Merle and Taako talk to the Mannequin about the Bureau. He stays and just listens to what’s happening. He figures something big will happen when they go back to the base so when they leave the cave Clint chooses to go back to Goldcliff. It seems like a fortified enough place to be if hell breaks loose. He doesn’t know what is going to happen but he does know it isn’t good. The sky has been becoming darker and darker by the minute. Not only that but the saturation of everything around him has been sucked away.

He makes it to Goldcliff faster than he thought was possible, but he makes it in time just as the first wave hits the city. It’s the Hunger. It’s back with a vengeance. He runs through the town and banging on doors urging people to weaponize themselves and run for the Trust. The Hunger’s tendrils strike the earth and hundreds of Black opal Soldiers come flowing out of them. The insane and horrible noises already has enough people running throughout the streets. He sees the Hunger’s soldiers grab people from their families. What’s weird is that people seem to be running into the creatures. Clint can see them though, so he starts pulling people out of the fray and pushing them in the correct direction. He tries to gather the attention of as many of the figures as he can. He fights well with what weapons and spells he can.

He takes out dozens as he makes his way towards the Trust himself. He reaches the Cherry Blossom tree from so long ago and finds the two women who are actually dryads protecting a young girl from the Hunger’s soldiers. He helps the taller one defeat a few before he shares a moment of comradery with her and he takes the young girl to the trust.

When he gets to the Trust he finds out the doors are closed but manages to get the girl inside after a lot of convincing people through whispers. He turns and goes back to fighting the soldiers. There’s a small lull of enemies until four figures come tumbling towards him. He readies himself for the fight when his heart sinks.

He recognizes them.

He can’t even begin to process it when Justin lunges towards him, hands like knives swiping at him, slashing with animalistic movements. He can’t hurt him. Not his son. He plays on the defensive side, trying to figure out what to do.

In the meantime, Leslie has grabbed broken pieces of wood from a nearby rubble pile and is beginning to advance. Travis and Griffin are following in suite.

Seeing them like this brings all of Clint’s worst fears to light. They arent is family. But they are. Just corrupted. The Hunger took them. For the last 111 years, he has been mourning for them. He’s had time to cope but this changes everything. They didn’t die. They were taken by this evil world eating being that’s been chasing his crew for 100 years.

And here they are. His family. But not like he remembered them. He can’t do it. He isn’t strong enough for that. He can’t hurt his boys. His wife. He can’t. He won’t.

He quickly casts hold person on all of them, and immediately starts to prepare to cast Imprisonment. He won’t have to fight or hurt them. They freeze in place and barely move when the hold person spell wears off and the Imprisonment spell takes over.

Clint falls back and catches his breath. He looks up at his family tears flowing. All he wanted to do was see them again but not like this. Whatever was going to happen this time around needed to happen quickly. He hopes to the gods that he either dies now and stays dead this time time around or that the crew figures out to start over in the next cycle.

He slowly gathers enough strength to stand back up. He walks over to Leslie. She is just as beautiful as the day he left her. Her face is filled with rage as shes frozen in place from running at him. Clint caresses her cheek one last time and kisses her forehead. He moves over to his boys one by one and does the same. None of them deserved this fate. He will figure out how to avenge them. In the meantime he leaves them be. They don’t need to die a second time.

He walks back towards the two Dryads from earlier and joins them in fighting the Hunger’s soldiers. One by one they all work together slaughtering the figures. Back to back, throwing weapons back and forth, and covering for eachother as they prepare spells.

He doesn’t know how long he has been fighting for but it feels like hours when the Hunger creatures just stop in place. They begin to glow white and slowly float into the sky turning into nothing. He takes a moment to catch his breath. Sitting down he looks around. Hurley and Sloan, as he now knows, join him in sitting down. No one knows what the hell just happened but they do know that they fought long and hard. They deserve to rest.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While helping slowly repair someone's home in Goldcliff Clint feels a tap on his shoulder. Wiping sweat from his brow he turns around to find Barry. They embrace, laughing about how they survived. Barry explains that they did in fact finally win. That the hunger was gone for good and they were safe.

“So does everyone… you know… know?” Clint asks as they walk back to his makeshift house.

“Clint, buddy? The universe knows, about everything.” Barry replies slapping him on the back. They make their way to the newly named Bureau of Benevolence.

When they arrive Clint sheepishly greets everyone and is surprised to be met with a dogpile of hugs. Here is nothing but smiling and laughter filling the room.

“Holy shit Clint it is so good to have you back.” Davenport exclaims, releasing him from a hug.

“I would say that its great to have all of you back!” Clint jokes, “Barry told me the basics of what happened when we arrived here. We have a hell of a lot to catch up on.”

Lucretia nervously laughs, “I suppose we do, huh?”

Clint walks over to her and scoops her up in a deep embrace. “Its alright. You know? Everyone fucks up. You just happened to follow in my footsteps and then out do me.”

Once everyone is settled down in what seems to be a very luxurious lounge area they begin to tell their own stories. Lup’s is very brief , Barry and Taako sit next to her acting as guards. Very understandable. Clint already knew Barry’s story but there were a few things he had forgotten to mention before so it was a bit eye opening. There wasn’t much to Davenport’s story though he was most impacted by Lucretia’s wrong doings. Everyone already knew Lucretia’s story too, she just filled in some small blanks here and there even though she wasn’t very keen on talking a lot. What she had done was still pretty fresh and she didn’t want to make her case worse.

Then it came to Taako, Merle, and Magnus’ stories. Those three idiots had everyone rolling with laughter and crying within two minutes. Taako mainly joked about his whole experience, but that was just his way of coping and everyone knew it. He had gone through a lot of shit that he wasn’t ready to talk about and they all understood that. Magnus and Julia’s story hit home for Clint, he was silently bawling as Magnus explained it. He felt Davenports hand on his back as he cried. Then Merle with Mavis and Mookie, how he spoke of them resembled how Clint spoke of his own boys. Clint smiled, he knew how Merle felt.

“Did you say Mavis?” Clint interrupted a moment.

“Yeah that’s my daughter.” Merle affirmed.

“No shit? She have red hair, teenageish, glasses?” He asked.

“Uh, yeah actually. You know her?” Merle questioned.

“Surprisingly yeah! She was in Goldcliff on that day and lost her glasses. Sloan and Hurley Protected her from the Hunger and I lead her to the Goldcliff Trust.” Clint explained.

“Holy shit. Thank you Clint! Thank you for protecting my baby. I had no idea that you were the one who did that!” He jumped over to Clint and bear hugged him.

Last but not least Clint shared his story which was shorter than everyone was expecting. The only thing they were really surprised about was him helping Lucretia during the Judges cycle. Other than that it was a bunch of jumping from Inn to Inn, meeting new people, catching low life thieves here and there, and so on. The night continued on with Taako and Lup cooking everyone a big dinner. They stayed up until the late hours of the morning joking and just being family once again.

“We really need to go to therapy huh?” Clint jokes at some point and everyone agrees. But life goes on. Clint is back with his family. Sure they grew apart and started living their own lives but they still talk and that’s what matters. Taako has his school, Merle has his camp for adventurers, Magnus made a school for dogs, Barry and Lup are now Reapers with Kravitz, Lucretia is helping people, and Davenport is doing what he loves.

He may have been the Forgotten bird but at least he isn’t lonely anymore. He gets to live on his own still in a cottage out in the woods with a nearby town that calls on him for help every once in a while. Life is good.

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bi-outta-cordonia · 4 years

Text

In Another World, Part II

The continuation of the Colt x MC piece I was hoping to finally put out for @rodappreciationweek. The week itself is over, so this is just me slamming chapters up hoping to finally do a thing I’ve been thinking about for a minute!

Part I --> here!

Ride or Die: A Bad Boy Romance. Colt Kaneko x f!MC(Deidre Wheeler). PG-13, with warnings going out to Brandon’s rancid vibes. ~4k words.

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Seventeen, eighteen—her keyboard clacks in steady strokes, each letter spelling out a larger plan that should take no more than three years and some change to complete if she works hard enough. Every orientation event is over. Every “meet and greet” has long since burned the flames of excitement out her bones. Extracurriculars, plus honors programs, plus a few personal hobbies will fill her free time in between classes. But the main question again…

Seventeen credits or eighteen credits?

Deidre’s hands hover over the keyboard and she chews her lip.

“I know it’s not my business…” Deidre tosses a look back at Ingrid, her pouty lips pursed and her brow drawn. Ingrid glances pointedly at the open document on the computer screen. “We’re definitely still doing the competition thing, right? Pushing each other or whatever?” Deidre nods slowly. “Which is cool! But like…I don’t want you to burn out before we really get into it!”

Deidre frowns. “You’re taking seventeen credits.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I’m doing my lab first!” Ingrid waltzes up and clicks to the next screen, displaying the course load Deidre painstakingly puts together months before the first day of classes. “Do your lab first, duh. You already have a bunch of high school credits for the 100 levels.”

“But I’d still have to drop a class,” Deidre says.

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “God, I respect you so much but you can really be irritating.”

Deidre balks. “Alright—”

“Here, take a bullshit class and you can keep your seventeen.” Ingrid clicks a few buttons and lands on a page describing a philosophy class. She squints at the screen. “Blah blah blah, classical and modern conceptions of love, blah blah. You just need to get an A and you’ll be solid, yeah?”

Deidre shakes her head and turns her attention back to the screen.

“A look at the ways in which classical and modern conceptions of love and romance have changed over the natural course of time. What the course aims to do is interrogate how love has been defined and shaped by society and cultures. Bring an open mind and an equally open heart to a two day a week lecture!”

Seems simple enough.

Day one doesn’t fully prepare her for the sheer amount of bodies filling every concrete path between her and the rest of Langston. The way she works out her schedule, serious classes take place Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. “Bullshit electives” (Ingrid’s words) occupy her Tuesdays and Thursdays for the time being. One class that focuses on life skills and the other is apparently a philosophy class about love.

A comfortable pair of jeans and even more comfortable sneakers gets her through the throngs of people jockeying for space on the sidewalks. Some souls are brave (or foolish?) enough to bike through the madness but she remembers her favorite self-defense trick from her father—throw them bows.

Deidre shoves her way to Terrence Hall and wanders around the building twice before she finds the lecture room. “Room” because it’s small like a classroom and filled from front to back with desks. The age of the building shows in some of the dusty corners and faded paint on the walls. A good number of her peers sit scattered throughout the room, some leaning on desks and carrying on with casual conversations. A few of them eye her as she walks in. Their gazes immediately catch her old shoes and even older jeans. It’s almost funny how the braids and brown skin are the last things they see—at Mar Vista, it was the first but she at least had four years to show them all the money their parents had still couldn’t afford them a brain like hers.

She takes a seat in the front and rummages through her bag when she sets it down. Notebook, lead pencil, laptop open and ready—a long ten minutes pass and the professor walks in holding a cup of coffee.

He’s a small man and most certainly older.

“Thirty of you this year! Much less than I usually get for the fall semester,” he exclaims. His eyes scan over the class and the collective mood drops in an instant. Most of the students are sophomores. A lot of them are just trying to bang out electives first and this was one of the easiest classes the university offers. “Well, anyway—introductions, yes? As many of you should know by now, I am Professor Pines.” Some of the students giggle. “Yes, yes, terrible name, isn’t it? Regardless, I’d rather not spend too much time reflecting on my family’s awful choices in naming conventions.”

He hands a stack of papers to a girl in the front who passes the papers back. A steady stream of motion fills the room as students pass around what she assumes is the syllabus. When she receives her copy, she purses her lips:

20% for quizzes—

15% participation—

15% mid semester report—

25% group project—

25% final exam—

She almost groans along with the rest of the class when they all see it—group project. Professor Pines seems a bit too gleeful despite knowing he’s just cast them all to their doom.

“The basics of the course first,” he starts. “As this is a philosophy class, most of the materials we’ll be working with are going to come from a variety of readings we’ll be doing, examining facets of love and romance across multiple sources to answer that big question that hangs over us all—what exactly is love? What does it entail and how do we define it?” The professor clasps his hands behind his back and looks out over each student. “There are about a thousand ways to describe love but I want to have you all truly engage the topic. How we see it, experience it, and demonstrate it varies wildly and I’m eager to see what the lot of you come up with. Now, if you could all—”

The door opens and the professor stops for a brief moment. He continues with his next topic but it’s hard not to notice him digging through the papers on the table near him as he searches for a spare syllabus for his newest student.

Deidre sits up and thinks the weird boy from the frat party might recognize her as he scans the room for a seat. His eyes find her for all of a second before he struts down the path and takes a seat at the back of the room. She sucks her teeth and turns her attention back to the professor.

He goes on for a long while covering the basics and answering questions as he goes. Most of the students are just using the class to fill up electives—her included. Engagement seems like it’ll be interesting compared to her other classes but at the very least, she’s going to put some effort in. She took top spot back home and she’s going to have to work hard for even the smallest chance at achieving that out here.

“Before I let you all go, I just want to ask…” Professor Pines steeples his fingers, eyes intently watching the class. “What is love?”

His gaze rakes across the length of the room, each student slinking down in their seat and holding a careful breath as they gauge whether he’s the sort that will call on people or let them speak on their own. The silence lasts for a few more minutes until Deidre raises her hand.

The professor beams and the classroom lets out a collective sigh.

“Love can defined in a number of ways but the most basic would point to it being a psychological effect between individuals with well-defined social bonds,” she answers. “It can be a series of emotions, complex affections, and highly specific in terms of behavioral patterns defined by the parameters of a person’s relationship with the object of said love.”

Professor Pines nods approvingly and looks up. “Yes? In the back?”

“It’s a collective of impulses disguised as particular receptors in the brain that dictate meanings behind specific actions.” Deidre turns around in her seat and catches the boy from the party bringing his coffee to his lips for a sip. “Doesn’t always have to be deeper than that—sometimes the brain just does weird shit and we run around trying to add meaning where there doesn’t need to be.”

The class buzzes and Professor Pines seems even more giddy.

“Ah, a realist!” he says and the boy shrugs. “I always get one! Perspective is going to be key here, both in your understandings of the material and of what you take away from this class.”

Deidre raises her hand. “But the whims themselves would become receptors based on the emotional bond between the individuals in question, wouldn’t they? People can act out of a sense of impulse but love requires those impulses be tailored to prior experience with an individual.”

The boy snorts. “Not necessarily. People can say or do something under the guise of love but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. It’s the brain assigning meaning to whims.”

She bristles. “The presence of whims would require a prior interaction that shapes it.”

“Does it? I mean, I don’t believe in that ‘love at first sight’ crap but the existence of such narratives makes a pretty strong case for love being just the brain trying to find ways to assign meanings—”

“Which still can be explained through a prior interaction because ‘love at first sight’ still requires some form of meaningful—”

“And there’s the idealist,” the professor says, nodding thoughtfully. Professor Pines continues, “I don’t really want to keep any of you any longer, so please make sure to read over the syllabus.” He pauses for a moment, glancing between the front and the back of the room. “I have a feeling this is going to be an interesting semester.”

Deidre glances around and sinks a little in her seat at the other students tossing looks between her and the boy from the party. When she looks back at him, he lifts a brow and takes a languid sip of his coffee.

“Don’t ask me about that,” Deidre snaps. “I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“That bad?” Riya snorts.

“He’s a douchebag! He actually tried to pull some bullshit devil’s advocate crap day one of the entire semester and he wouldn’t even tell me his fucking name at the party!” Deidre dodges a couple rushing out the dorm and ignores Riya’s cackling.

“I mean, he sounds pretty hot…”

“Riya!” Deidre yanks her phone away from her ear and glares daggers at it. Her teeth grind as Riya’s raucous laugh rings through the tinny speakers and she lets out a roar that has heads turning her way. “You’re being a bad friend!”

“You have a crush on him! Look—Deidre—”

“I’m hanging up on you. Hand to God, I will absolutely end this call right now—“

“Oh my god, stop being dramatic.”

“And of course he shows up ten minutes late to class with Starbucks in hand—didn’t even give a fuck about everyone staring at him or the fact that he chose to further disrupt everything by walking his—” She fumbles her keys at first but eventually jams the metal into the door, “—stupid—dumb!”

Ingrid sits up but Deidre only gives a small wave as she quite literally throws herself on her own bed. She puts Riya on speaker and tosses the phone on her nightstand.

“Dee?”

“Hey Riya!” Ingrid says. Her eyes dart between Deidre and the phone. “Everything okay?”

“Deidre’s got a crush.”

“Shut up.” Deidre rolls over and faces the wall. “There’s a douchebag in my class.”

Ingrid pauses for a long moment. “Like frat boy rich douchebag or just regular smegular rich douchebag?”

“She’s got budding sexual tension with a boy that’s probably as smart as she is.”

“Riya—” Deidre pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Oh, mood.” Ingrid readjusts her glasses. “If he’s as hot as the dude you saw at the frat party, I’ll be the first to say you should go for it.”

Deidre braces.

“Speaking of which—”

“Riya.”

“You wouldn’t believe it but it just so happens—”

“I’MHANGINGUPTHEPHONEGOODBYE.”

A profound silence hangs in the room like the most uncomfortable and bloated thing in the world. Ingrid keeps penning away on her notebook and occasionally peeks at the textbook lying open next to her. Deidre lets the silence fester as she gets up and digs through her bag, pulling out notebooks and textbooks to get started on her own work.

An hour passes before Ingrid speaks up. “Ohhhhh…it was the hot guy from the frat party, wasn’t it?”

Deidre pointedly ignores her.

Three hours and seventeen minutes. She times herself only because it’s necessary. Darius used to joke and say she was going “beast mode” when she got so into her work that time just stops existing as a concept.

Even if time stops existing, hunger doesn’t so it comes as no surprise that her tummy growls when she finally shuts her last textbook. Day one and she’s already diving deep—perfect. She stretches as she gets up and grabs her keychain.

The dining hall is something else entirely. A bevy of appetizing foods fill the buffet and even more is served by the dedicated cooking staff, of which are all chefs of significant renown if she remembers correctly from the online facilities tour.

Stepping through the doors almost feels like stepping into another dimension. Extensive wood finish fills in every panel of the floor, mahogany furniture with fine leather seats make up a sitting area, and ornate paintings hang on all the walls. Her stomach gurgles again when the smell of baked chicken wafts in her nose. Deidre makes a beeline towards wherever that smell leads her.

Rotisserie chicken, beans and rice, steamed vegetables perfectly seasoned, freshly prepared mango and passionfruit juice—

It isn’t even the most delectable thing from the kitchens: lobster bisque, the freshest produce, the most tender cuts of steak, oysters, and even more. Savory and sweet collide in a mesh of flavorful smells that sets her appetite from moderate to desperate. She swipes her card for her meal and carefully dodges students shuffling about the dining area.

“Oh, right…” she mumbles.

Seems like every person decided now was a fantastic time to get dinner. The dining hall is packed from top to bottom with students. Some sit in groups with textbooks and laptops out on the tables. Others sit off on their lonesome reading from books while absently shoveling spoonfuls in their mouths. There’s a group of extremely attractive girls that waltz past flanked by some fit boys all wearing identical shorts and boat shoes.

Deidre takes a few tentative steps forward and scans the room carefully.

There’s a butt in every seat. Some eyes dart towards her as she walks past but they don’t seem to mind her presence. Or maybe they just don’t care.

She finds an empty seat and moves to set her tray down when a girl clears her throat. The smile that spreads across the girl’s face is sickly sweet—she’s clearly not happy seeing a face trying to squeeze into such a big space and her eyes noting the simple style of Deidre’s fashion makes the smile spread a little wider.

“I’m waiting on some friends. Sorry,” the girl says, clearly not apologetic.

Deidre stares at her for a moment before shaking her head and turning back towards the packed dining hall. She starts her hunt anew when a hand touches her on the square of her back.

“Hey, Deidre, right?” She turns around and finds Brandon’s face. His gaze roams uncomfortably, where he looks she isn’t sure but she’s just as equally sure she doesn’t want him to do that. “Where’s Ingrid?”

“Uh, studying,” she says. “How’ve you been?”

He shrugs. “Day one, so nothing really exciting yet. How about you? First day of college going well?”

“Yeah, just—” She nods towards the full room, “—looking for a place to sit. I didn’t think so many people would be here.”

Brandon’s hand slides a little further up her back and there’s a pressure there that feels like he’s trying to guide her. Her feet lock in place even though her body sways and when she locks eyes with him, he’s staring at her like he’s trying to gauge his next move.

“You should come sit with me and my friends,” he suggests. He points out a table full of students with laptops sitting out. “We’re all STEM—engineering mostly. Ingrid said you were mechanical engineering, right?”

The whole reason she goes to that frat party is to try out new things as a young adult. Life here doesn’t have to be all about hitting the books, it’s about exploring and Ingrid attempts to give her that on the first night. Going back inside was for Ingrid’s sake then and for the remainder of the party, Brandon couldn’t seem to keep his eyes to himself. He wants to get to know her and she should try getting to know him but there’s just something so strange about this.

Her eyes dart around the room and a piercing gaze connects with hers.

The weird boy—the douchebag in the leather jacket.

He’s holding a book but he’s got it hovering over the table like he’s about to set it down. His gaze flits to Brandon behind her and he makes a subtle nod at the empty chair in front of him. He’s got his feet in it.

“Uh, actually…” Deidre steps away from Brandon and tries not to sigh in relief as his hand falls away from her back. She musters the best sheepish smile she can handle. “I just saw a friend! I’ll see you later!”

She wants to kick herself—she doesn’t want to see him again if she can’t help it. But it doesn’t matter now, getting away is all that’s important.

The weird boy moves his feet quickly and sits up in his chair. His gaze lingers on Brandon while she sits down and lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding in.

“Is he gone?” she whispers.

He doesn’t answer her for a while. Eventually, he leans back again and opens up his book.

“You’re good.”

Silence fills the void between them as he occasionally flips through his book. Her confused stare morphs into an annoyed glare and she digs into her food once it becomes clear he’s done his one good deed of the day. Savory food fills her belly bite after bite and she swears to try the fried plantains next time. It won’t be anything like how her mom used to make, she’s sure, but the thought fills her with a sense of nostalgia.

She wonders what her dad’s doing right now.

He’ll be getting ready for work soon. The three hour time difference is still something she hasn’t gotten used to just yet but he doesn’t seem to mind getting “good morning” texts at six o’clock.

She sighs—he’ll have to find something to occupy his time now that she’s gone. He’s truly alone this time around.

Deidre looks up and the weird boy is staring straight at her. She hates his look almost as much as Brandon’s.

“What?” she says around a mouthful of food.

“You keep making weird noises and I’m debating on whether or not I want to ask what’s up with you,” he responds.

“You just—” She swallows her food. “I’m fine. Thank you for letting me sit down.”

He keeps looking at her and she tries her best to pointedly ignore him. Every so often her eyes dart to the book in his hand—Mount Washington by James Ashton.

“What’s really up with you?” Deidre looks up at him. He shuts the book and sets it next to his already empty tray. He crosses his arms and leans on the table, subtly glancing over her shoulder. “You were way too chipper for an eight o’ clock in the morning elective so I’m assuming you’re either new to campus or...”

His lips quirk when she narrows her eyes.

“Or?” she asks, already aware of the answer. “I’m a ‘nerd?’ God forbid someone takes their education seriously around here…”

He shrugs. “You still haven’t said what’s wrong with you.”

She chews on a bit of chicken slowly before swallowing, eyes finally connecting with his again. His are black as the night and striking. There’s nothing wrong with admitting he’s handsome in a boyish way. He tilts his head and her face grows a little warm.

“I was thinking about my dad,” she finally says. “It’s been the two of us for a while and I’m wondering what he’s going to do now that I’m not home.”

A small silence hangs between them.

“Where you from?” he asks.

“LA.”

The boy snorts. “Bullshit.” She fixes him with a questioning look and he shakes his head. “I’m from LA. I knew Mar Vista sounded familiar—you went to that prep school. State of the art or some shit.”

“It wasn’t all that, I promise you. Where’d you go?”

“Just a little further north—H.H. Huntington. Public school though, so nowhere near as fancy as what you got.” His face softens a bit though not nearly by much. “I left my mom back home but she’s had a year to figure out the benefits of having a house to herself by now. Your old man will get there soon.”

There’s a part of her that can’t help but think it’s a little sweet that his hard gaze softens further at the mention of his mother. Babies all grown up and flying out the nest is how their parents will see them. She wonders if her dad will even recognize her when she comes back—wonders if the boy’s mother has already accepted the young man that now walks through the doors when he comes home.

“You seemed pissed about earlier today.” His voice brings her back and she stabs at a piece of broccoli.

“In class, you mean,” she clarifies.

“Studious types—you can’t stand being wrong.”

“I wasn’t wrong—”

“And neither was I,” he interrupts. His eyes dart over her shoulder once more and she turns a bit just to follow his gaze. Brandon sits over with his friends and turns the minute her body starts shifting. The boy drums his fingers on his arm. “You done yet?”

“You were valedictorian, weren’t you?”

Her brows draw. “Why?”

“Chipper for an eight o’clock and you’re scared about the semester already…” He glances back over his shoulder. “And I told you Langston doesn’t take average kids.”

The boy is so weird. Not weird like Brandon is, which is the kind of weird that makes a person want to double bolt their doors. He’s weird in the sense that there’s a constant game of hot and cold that seems to fuel his every word. He’s perceptive—he remembers her mentioning Mar Vista despite only speaking to her for a total of two minutes. The last time she speaks with him (prior to dinner), he prods at her like an asshole kid poking at a hornet’s nest. His ability to pick things apart is apparent and—

Her brain literally stops.

Langston is filled with money. Langston is money. Average students means average in status only and it’s an extremely competitive school to get into.

Deidre’s eyes rake over the boy—his face, the leather jacket, the backpack slung over his back, and the white motorcycle helmet he holds in the other hand…

“You were…” It’s like the wheels are turning and his gaze immediately meets hers.

“Go on,” he quietly urges.

“You were the valedictorian of your school,” she manages.

He cracks a smile that she can only describe as vicious—she’s not sure why. “Yeah, this semester is about to be hilarious.”

She bristles. “You’re a dick.”

He smirks like he’s proud of it. “I’m walking you home, aren’t I?”

Deidre scoffs and turns away. Day one and she’s regretting some of her decisions already.

“I don’t even know your name,” she says.

“I don’t know yours either.”

“I tried to ask you at the frat party and you just blew me off,” she counters.

The boy shrugs. “My roommate wrapped up her date and I didn’t want to waste any more time. I guess I could tell you now but it’s way funnier thinking your name is...” A wicked smirk spreads across his face.

She looks at him. “Is what?”

“Stacy,” he says and laughs at the indignation on her face.

“It’s Deidre.”

“Or Becky,” he keeps prodding. “But ‘Deidre’ is nice. I bet people say it right.”

She sighs. “The first time, sure. But then they see the face that goes with the name and it’s impossible to get them to do it again.”

He goes quiet for a second. “Colt. And, no, it’s not short for anything. My last name’s the one that gets butchered though, but I’m not telling you that.”

Colt. His name is “Colt.”

“I prefer thinking of you as ‘the weirdo’,” she teases.

“Most girls save that kind of talk until after the first date.”

Deidre sucks her teeth.

“You think you can get away with things because you’re a smartass,” she bites.

“No, I get away with it because I’m cute. But if you want to go head to head over this, I won’t stop you.” Colt stops—they’ve reached the halfway point across campus. She looks up at him and feels one side of her brain wrestling with the other in the form of an oncoming headache. They stand there awkwardly (mostly on her part) until he nods down the path leading to her dorm. “Be careful, alright?”

So strange—one minute he’s a smartass and the next he’s being a white knight. Deidre wraps her arms around herself and nods.

“See you on Thursday…” She says, turning down the path. A quick glance over her shoulder and he stays rooted there until she gets a safe enough distance across the quad.

#playchoices #choices #colt kaneko #colt x mc #rod choices #choices rod #ride or die #ride or die: a bad boy romance

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nyupreservation · 4 years

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How to Make a Box: Part 1

This is the first of a two part series. This post gives instructions for making the trays for a drop spine box. Part two, posted later this week, will go over constructing the case and completing the box.

One way I have been spending my time working from home is practicing making drop spine boxes. The rehousing project I am working on uses these types of boxes, and while they are not being made in-house, I will be making them for a couple items.

I have only ever made one box like this, back in school. The how-to had seeped away over the years, so fellow conservator Lou Di Gennaro took me through the steps again. The instructions he gave me came from the North Bennet Street School and can be found over on the BPG Wiki. Though the instructions are out there for anyone to find, I thought it could be helpful to actually see the process.

What you’ll need: - Board: We generally use 98 point board, though my supply at home is slightly thinner. You’ll need enough to make two trays, a case, and a spine piece. - Cloth: You’ll need enough cloth to cover the trays of the box as well as the case. You can use a couple colors or just one. -Bone or teflon folder -PVA -Some weights -Ruler

At home, I have a small assortment of supplies, including a stack of pre-cut binders board. I picked a smallish book off my shelf that fit the pre-cut size closest--not having a board shear at home, this would limit the amount of cutting board by hand I would have to do to get everything to the right size.

The first step is to measure the book. The instructions on the BPG Wiki have calculations you can use for that, and it is explained there better than I can type up here. Some people also just go off the book in hand, which is what I did for this exercise. I measured the three dimensions of the book--height, width, and depth/thickness. I made sure to take the measurements at the widest part of the book so the box wouldn’t be too tight.

The next step is to cut board for the trays. You’ll need two trays - one tray that fits your book (lower tray), and one that’s slightly bigger (upper tray). For the lower tray where your book will sit, the base just needs to be about the height and width of the book, but leave a smidge of extra room for the cloth covering and adhesive. You’ll need two walls for the head and tail that will be the width of your book and the thickness of your book plus one board thickness. Because the book will be sitting on a board and these walls will be flush with the bottom, you need that extra thickness measurement.

The longer wall on the fore edge will have that extra board thickness added to the depth measurement as well. The length of this wall will be the length of the lower tray plus two board thicknesses, as it needs to be slightly longer than the base. The head and tail walls will attach to it to form the corners of the tray, so you need the extra.

For the base board of the upper tray, add 2 board thicknesses to the height and 1 to the width to account for the walls and cloth covering. For the walls of the larger tray, add 1 ½ board thicknesses to the depth. If you find yourself making a lot of boxes, and you’ll be using the same board, adhesive, and cloth, you can create a jig to help you with all these measurements.

To assemble the trays, put PVA on the edges of the large tray piece, and attach the walls. The head and tail walls will also get some PVA on the edge where they meet the fore edge wall.

Use a bone folder to work in any excess PVA, and the tape up the exterior corners with blue tape to help it hold as it dries, then repeat on the other tray.

Once dry, take the tape off and sand the corners. The tape may take a little of the board with it when you remove it, so sanding can help smooth out the surface. It’s also a good idea at this point to check the fit of your trays. If it’s off, it’s a whole lot easier to take it apart and start over at this stage! Make sure your book fits in the assembled smaller tray, and that the larger one fits over the smaller.

Next, you’ll need to cut the cloth to cover the trays. Before you start, plan out your cloth! I had limited supplies of cloth at home, so I had to be careful I had enough to cover the trays and to do the case covering afterwards. I did two-tone, where the cloth for your trays is a different color than the cloth for your case, partly because of my limited supplies, but also because it looks fun.

To measure the cloth, be sure to square one side, and then give yourself a margin for turn ins. I just used the width of a ruler, about one inch on the left side and top of my cloth. Then take one of your trays, and measure head, fore edge, and tail by rolling the tray along the cloth, then mark the end and give yourself another inch margin on the other side.

The height of the cloth should be three measurements of the depth of the tray. Do the same measurements for the other tray, and be sure to label which piece of cloth is for which tray.

Once you have the cloth cut, you can adhere it to the lower tray. Put PVA on the exterior of all sides, then press it onto the cloth and begin to roll. Be sure to hold the tray with the interior facing you as you go.

Really work the cloth onto the tray as you go, smoothing with your bone folder and getting rid of any air bubbles. You want the cloth to be tight around the tray.

When the cloth is securely on the tray, it will be hard for it to sit on your table. To help with this, you can snip the covering at the bottom corners. Just gather the cloth with your fingers and snip at an angle. Don’t get too close to the tray, as you want to make sure the cloth still covers the corner.

Repeat this process on the upper tray.

To continue covering the trays, there are a series of cuts that need to be made to the cloth so it will fold over correctly. This is the diagram from the BPG Wiki/North Bennet Street School instructions that I used to learn:

I know these diagrams look confusing! Hopefully seeing them in practice will help.

The back corner cuts are pretty straightforward so I like to start there. You just need to cut the cloth here so that it can fold over the walls and adhere to the interior without bunching up at the corners.

For the cloth that will be covering the top of the tray:

And for the cloth on the bottom:

Once all the cuts are made, you can adhere everything with PVA. This is where the cuts start to make more sense and you can see the purpose for each little one.

Next, you’ll add some cloth the size of the missing center area, so the surface of the tray is a more uniform thickness. Some people do a bit of mitering throughout this process, to ensure that the entire surface of the tray has just one layer of cloth. I haven’t done that in my example, as I feel it just adds another layer of confusion for this exercise and on a box this size the overlap is minimal.

The cloth you add to the center here can be any color. It doesn’t have to match because it gets covered later on. Though I should note that if you’re using a lighter color like me here, you probably don’t want to go with such a dark green, because it is still somewhat visible under the next layer of light colored cloth! I learned that one the hard way.

Next, cover the base of the tray again with your original cloth color. It needs to be the size of the base of your tray, with a bit overhanging.

Do this for the other tray, then hooray! Your trays are all done. It’s a good idea to let the trays sit for a little while and let everything dry. Which makes this a good place to take a break. Check back Thursday to see how to make the case of this box and put it all together!

#boxmaking #conservation #bookconservation #cons4life #conservationathome #boxes

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eponymous-rose · 4 years

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(I’d rather this not be reblogged, just in case!)

I’ve had a funny conversation a couple of times this week, once with my cousin and once with my physical therapist, so I thought it might be fun to go over this: when I mentioned I wasn’t teaching this quarter, they both stared at me in shock and said, “And you’re still getting paid?” To be fair, I absolutely would’ve asked the same question before I started. This job is so weird I never would’ve guessed what all falls under it!

So here’s a little glimpse into what goes on in this particular professorship:

So, hey, there are different ranks of professor. I’m an “assistant professor”, which is about as junior as it’s possible to get, but I won the dang lottery and somehow finagled my way into getting the words “tenure-track” tacked on before that. This means that over the next six years, everything I do will be scrutinized (culminating in a "summary” of several thousand pages reporting on every single aspect of my job performance), and at the end of it, after about nine months of progressively higher-ranked people in the university voting and deliberating, I have a chance to be granted tenure, which comes with a promotion to associate professor rank and Extreme Job Security. The criteria here are basically being able to prove that I’m one of the foremost experts in my field in the country and hitting research/service/teaching goals, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a second here. Promotion (often many years later) to full professor requires proof of being one of the foremost experts in the field on the planet.

Also, if you don’t get tenure, you get fired after that six-year period. Some universities are dicks and hire three or four assistant professors for every tenured position they want to fill and just fire the spares after getting six years of work out of them. My university has an extremely high tenure rate (mainly because anyone who seems unlikely to make tenure will either have some sort of intervention on their behalf, be granted an extra year to make up the difference, or will be asked to quietly resign before deliberations start), and my department hasn’t denied anyone tenure in decades.

So! What the hell do I do? Well, universities in the U.S. that are particularly research-heavy are referred to as “R1 universities”, which is the situation I’m in here. This means that the majority (often the vast majority) of my time is not spent teaching: it’s all about doing research, to the point where I will not be teaching more than one class simultaneously. In my field, that research can look like a lot of different things:

There are indeed people who work with beakers and range hoods and snazzy lab coats: these researchers in my field might be doing stuff like growing snowflakes in the lab and using that information to figure out the conditions under which different kinds of snow can form. Also there’s chemistry? I don’t know this side of it too well. Professors’ roles here, apart from the science, include ordering the right equipment (which includes getting quotes from various suppliers) and hiring lab technicians and folks to keep the equipment up and running.

Some folks do intense numerical modeling: if you’re studying the atmosphere, you can’t just try your experiment on one Earth and compare how it’s different on another Earth, since we only have the one, so what we do instead is use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to create simulations. These can be as detailed as looking at the flow of dust in the millimeters above the ground, or as broad as simulating the whole atmosphere of the entire planet (or other planets!). On top of the science, these professors often have to negotiate for supercomputer time (a precious commodity), purchase massive computational resources (e.g., a server room hosted locally), and sometimes hire dedicated I.T. support just for their research.

I work a lot with large datasets: if we have information about the conditions under which tornadoes happened over the past 15 years, what patterns can we pick up that forecasters might be able to use? What is physically, fundamentally different about tornadoes that happen in different places? This kind of stuff really just needs a decently specced desktop machine and some know-how, and a lot of research in our field involves sitting and thinking. Also in this category is the pure math and physics work in the field, where people bury themselves in impossible-to-solve equations to try to figure the best way to wrench them into things we can solve. This is probably the closest to what most people think of when they hear “research”.

Fieldwork. Think Twister. Coordinating large numbers of people, who may be on the ground, driving, in the air, in the ocean. Also, coordinating instruments that might be stationary or might be buoys or drones or something else. We’re a public university; we don’t have the cash to buy our own airplanes, so profs in this scenario have to rent time on research aircraft owned by organizations like NASA or NOAA, or rent time on boats, or hire folks to develop and build new instruments. Massive amounts of organization goes into this, and all stages from inception to execution are generally overseen and organized by the professor.

When any or all of these approaches come up with groundbreaking results (you’re expected to have that kind of result happen a couple times a year), it’s time to write a paper and get it published in a prestigious academic journal. That process can take between four months and a year, depending on a bunch of different factors, so often a professor is juggling a few different projects in different states of done-ness.

What you’ll notice in all this is that professors generally have to come up with the money to do this stuff. New profs generally get a starting budget to get them off the ground, but most of that winds up wrapped up in personnel and start-up costs (e.g., buying computing resources or space for a lab). For the rest of it? Grants.

Grants in my field right now are a bit of a mess: it takes months to put a proposal together, it’s chaotic and complicated as hell, and there’s only about a 10-15% success rate, so you can do the math on that one. In my field, grants range from “small” ones supporting a few years of the pure-science stuff (typically a few hundred thousand dollars that mainly goes toward paying several people’s salaries over several years, but also covers things like journal publication fees - it costs several thousand dollars to publish one paper in an academic journal) to much larger ones supporting field campaigns or long-term projects (rarely, several tens of millions of dollars if you’re talking projects with multiple aircraft and such). I get paid for nine months of the year, and have to come up with the remaining three months’ salary on my own.

The other thing, though, that grants pay for is graduate student salaries! My department pays students quite well (more than enough to afford the rent on an apartment here, which is saying a lot), and also provides full benefits and a complete tuition waiver. Grad students in my field are essentially in an apprenticeship situation: they pick an advisor and work with that person for typically about seven years. During that time, they have to hit certain milestones (nine months of classes, plus a few courses sprinkled throughout the remaining six years, giving presentations, passing exams, doing a defense, writing a dissertation---essentially a book of their research results), and if you’re thinking this is putting a horrifying amount of power in the advisor’s hands, you’re absolutely correct. The imperfect but step-in-the-right-direction solution my department’s adopted has been to give each student a committee of professors, where one leads the research but the others are always available for new ideas or to resolve problems or speak up on behalf of the student. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year or two off from their main research project to work with another professor, either here or elsewhere, and explore new research ideas.

Professors are responsible for teaching their students what they need to succeed, and our department has famously exceptional graduate students and graduate student mentorship: profs teach students how to do research (often guiding them through a Master’s project, then letting them take the reins and backing off to an advisory role for the remaining years of the PhD), which includes having them publish their results as the lead authors of their own scientific journal articles. Profs also pay to send students to conferences to showcase their research and introduce them to the people who’ll help them in their future career (one of the reasons I traveled a bunch this quarter was to meet some folks who might be good contacts for students who don’t want to just shoot for a job in the US). Some students will get to go on field campaigns, flying on research aircraft or, I dunno, driving tanks into tornadoes. Some will be more interested in non-academia pursuits and might spend some time shadowing insurance analysts or taking extra entrepreneurial classes in the business school or working hands-on with forecasters during the height of severe weather season. It’s our jobs as professors to know the job market, to know the right people, and to know our students well enough to help them get where they’re going. This department takes this Very Seriously, to the point where it eclipses research as our Top Priority, and the general understanding is that getting a grad student position here sets you up for life.

So! Part of my job this time of year is recruiting graduate students based on my budget. For some folks, that means actively advertising wherever possible and getting super involved in the visiting student weekends (we fly prospective grad students out here to visit before they make their decision, and there’s always a fair number of students who haven’t settled on an advisor yet). Some folks are absurdly lucky and study fields that are considered particularly cool and interesting, and the top students actively seek them out and will cold-call or send e-mails or introduce themselves at conferences (look, turns out it’s hilariously easy to sell someone on “come study tornadoes!” and even a newbie like me has to choose between several particularly strong candidates). Either way, the graduate student hiring process involves a lot of internal debate---we’re not a huge department, so we typically can only send offers to a little under 10% of the folks who apply each year---that mainly centers around making sure each student has a supportive research “home” waiting for them here, based on funding and how much time each faculty member might have. Professors need to coordinate grant budgets (or startup funds, or stopgap funds in the increasingly common situation where no grant money could be secured for a given year) to make sure students have any equipment they might need (cool stuff like supercomputer time, servers, equipment to take to the field, accessibility aids, but also mundane stuff like office space and desks). We also have to coordinate with the university to make sure international students can get here and stay here under the correct visa status.

Right now, I only have one graduate student, and he’s currently undergoing the barrage of first-year coursework, but we meet weekly and he’s started playing around with some data analysis and reading some of the big papers in the field (he’s coming in from mechanical engineering, so the math is familiar but the vocabulary is funky). I’ve developed short- and long-term learning goals for him, culminating in putting together a proposal for his master’s research in June, then converting his early results to a scientific journal article to help him hit the ground running, because he’s brilliant and he’d be able to pull it off without breaking a sweat.

I’m also on the committees of two second-year Master’s students, so my responsibilities there include reviewing their proposals and, in one case, helping her put together an application for a major fellowship that would put $100,000 toward her education, which means she wouldn’t be beholden to any given research grant and could study any topic she liked. I’m also co-advising a postdoctoral researcher---his primary advisor is a specialist on snow, which is his area of interest, but I’m a specialist on some of the methods he uses to study snow, so I’m consulting with him on that side of things. I’m also working with a couple of particularly motivated final-year PhD students who want to run a multi-day Python and machine learning workshop for the department. Heck yeah.

Apart from research and advising, another facet of being a professor is the nebulous category often just referred to as “service”. Volunteer work, essentially. Right now, I’m reviewing scientific journal articles, typically 2-4 at a time (down to one right now, although I anticipate a flood right before the holidays). This is all done as volunteer work, but it’s honestly the easiest way for me to keep up with the latest literature, because yeah, you can’t just sit in a room and think if you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about. And when even a small field has a dozen or so major academic journals putting out a couple dozen articles each a month that you have to stay on top of... reviewing can be a great way to get the highlights. Sometimes I also get to review other people’s grant proposals, which is really helpful! Still, I wish journals would pay us for this work---someone did a poll on Twitter and found that folks in our field spend on average about 6 hours per review. That adds up!

I also tend to help out with conferences, either doing logistical stuff like deciding what the major topics are, and who gets to speak when (and who probably shouldn’t be given a microphone...) or coordinating the judging of awards for student presentations. That sometimes involves weird event planning stuff like trying to find a venue and speakers and transportation for a formal dinner, or hiring caterers and dealing with competing hotel quotes for room blocks, or cold-calling reasonably famous people and asking them to volunteer their time (or offering them an honorarium) to Skype in to a room full of people.

I’m also on a few national committees that are working to define the priorities of some of the big professional organizations: mainly I work in my particular subdiscipline, but also with diversity/equity/inclusion and early-career support. Some of that is as simple as running social media accounts or helping to design surveys. I’ve recently been assigned to help audit a major organization’s commitment to diversity, which could be pretty interesting. It all sounds like a lot, and a lot of it’s coming to a head lately just because of conference timing, but it usually slows down to one or two hours a week of work in the off-season. I like this kind of stuff because it’s a relatively low-effort way to meet scientists all over the world that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

We’re also hiring a new faculty member right now, which is... hilariously complex. Every aspect is basically done by committee and the entire department has to agree on who to interview and, eventually, who to hire, because hiring someone for this position is potentially choosing your coworker for the next 30+ years. Interviews are two-day endurance training for the poor candidates, who get face-to-face meetings with every member of the faculty, on top of more specialized interviews. We’ve had about 120 competitive applications thus far. It’s... a lot.

And just because I’m not teaching actively right now doesn’t mean teaching isn’t eating a lot of time: there’s some fun logistical set-up to do! For instance, the class I’m co-teaching starting in January features a lab where we take all the students over to the engineering buildings to set up some instruments in a wind tunnel. Gotta make sure we’ve timed it right so they can actually give us the wind tunnel! We’re also coordinating the timing and the schedule so that both instructors are actually around for the parts of the class they’re teaching. For three of the five weeks I’ll be teaching, I have the previous instructor’s materials to work with, but the other two weeks are all new material (and a lot of ad-lib based on how students do with the first chunk of the class). I also haven’t done anything related to this class since I took a comparable class over a decade ago, so, uh. Better study up.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching an entirely new class that’s never been offered by the department before. That involves building a syllabus, figuring out what each lecture will be about, coming up with contingencies in case some lectures get cancelled, writing exams and assignments and lectures and (since it’s a programming class) making sure everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software and data for the big final project. And, because I’m me, I’ll also be coordinating the whole thing with a special office in the university that does long-term testing of teaching effectiveness---they’ll send someone over to spend a few minutes chatting with the students midway through the quarter, then work with me on recommendations and improvement. I figure it’s a new class being offered for the first time, so we might as well get in on the ground floor of longitudinal pedagogical study. Also, I don’t actually know this programming language yet. Little more studying to do, there.

So... yeah. This job is absurd. It’s a million different jobs, the vast majority of which I’ve had no training for. And I adore it. Nobody cares where I am or what I’m doing at any given time, as long as I get results and as long as my students are succeeding. As someone who loves nothing more than bland, repetitive tasks repeated over and over again, it’s not exactly in my wheelhouse... but I love how hard it makes me think, and I adore being pushed this far out of my comfort zone and knowing I actually have the resources and the know-how to succeed. Every single day is something completely new and exciting and bizarre. Hell, every hour. It’s pretty fantastic, and utterly terrifying.

#i'd rather you didn't rebagel just because there's some me-specific stuff in here!#eponymous job tag #eponymous academia tag #long text post

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crankyfacedknitter · 4 years

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I think I can make masks now?

I may be late on the bandwagon for making masks, but it’s been...a process. Three months ago I didn’t sew at all. I took two sewing classes (How To Use A Sewing Machine and Make An Apron, which was all straight lines, materials pre-cut, etc.) and picked up a few fat quarters of quilting cotton along with some remnants on a whim. A few days later, the lockdown was upon us.

Two weeks later I ordered a sewing machine, the same one I’d used in the classes, so at least I knew how to work it. It arrived two weeks after that.

I watched videos about what made an effective mask, what shape to use, what were ideal materials, how to fit them, what wasn’t working. It became clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to help our front-line workers. I couldn’t get elastic, cotton, interfacing, the plastic stuff to put in the middle that turned out to be unbreathable. I didn’t have fabric scissors or a ruler, only a retractable tape measure. My iron made noises like a disgruntled koala, and spat white stuff out with the steam. Bias tape, twill tape, shoelaces all sold out. I made some prototypes, held them together with hoodie strings.

A friend posted a mask pattern she was using, being an experienced sewer, along with material guidelines (thanks to her degree in the subject). It took me two weeks to decipher that it wasn’t any different from what I’d heard before, there were just charts and maths reinforcing the decision to use two layers of higher-density (quilting) cotton, plus at least one layer of cotton flannel for moisture absorption between them, for civilian usage, not medical. There were four sizes, which seemed reasonable. They didn’t really fit. I didn’t know what alterations to make.

I learned how to make bias tape, using larger pieces of fabric. I pulled out top sheets from the linen closet that no longer had a fitted sheet to go with them, and used it for bias tape and more mask attempts. They were lumpy, and even with wire for the nose let too much breath out to fog the glasses. I got frustrated.

A week later, I decided to try to work on my basic sewing skills. Surely that was the problem, right? I made a project bag with a zipper and box corners. I learned that a zipper foot would have made that easier. I made a Japanese-style knot bag and learned that sewing patterns can have basic construction mistakes the same as knitting patterns. My printer made the pattern pages different sizes, but only slightly. (Still haven’t found a solution for that.) I helped my youngest make the same pincushion pillow and fabric boxes that I had made. I sewed an altar cloth, and a pincushion-and-thread-catcher to hang off the side of the table for all the loose threads that just accumulate when you sew. They weren’t perfect, but they were better.

I bought a new iron, and a folding mat to put on the table so I didn’t have to set up a whole ironing board in another room. I got a pair of good scissors, and a magnetic pin dish (HIGHLY REC). I bought new thread, not relying on the stuff in my repair kit that had been there for years. Good thread, still plain white and black (they were running out of that too, online). I made bias tape, burnt the shit out of my fingers, and ordered a bias tape making kit so that process wouldn’t have so much swearing or sweating involved. (It’s been two months. It will be here soon.)

I found a different mask pattern. Someone took the Olsen pattern and made the nose cuts deeper, the chin longer but curved, the sides more swooped. They made it in 7 sizes. Surely one of these would be big enough for my fat face! I made the largest size. It was like going to the store as a kid, with your mom, and sticking your little face into the biggest bra cup you could find. Okay, scaling down. Make the next size down.

It was still taking forever. I was still making stupid mistakes, like sewing it wrong-sides together, or putting the nose wire pocket on the chin, or cutting out two pieces and one was backwards, so to fit its mate, one of them was wrong-side out. Cut two inner linings. Cut two flannels. Cut two outer pieces. Cut a bias strip for the nose piece, fold in half and sew the short sides shut. Cut four lengths of homemade bias tape, and sew them down on one short side and one long side. Ironing between every assembly step. I could get through about one mask, maybe the cutting-out of a second, before my brain and body shut down, overloaded. I had to take a week or more off of sewing in between sessions, because it took too much energy. I was also helping two kids work remotely, and figuring out how to cook every meal like I was living in the country again, only without the extra chest freezer for resources. It was...a lot. It continues to be a lot.

I labeled the sizes so I could keep them straight, other than the basic measurements they were labeled as. It worked out as XXXS, XXS, S, M, L, XL, XXL. By the time I got down to working on the M, I realized that what I should do is cut out all the pieces at once, not include the flannel or interfacing, and just make some basic fit prototypes. By now I’d gotten a single roll of poly-cotton twill, so I didn’t have to use the bulky homemade bias tape for ties, and that helped, too. Just cut out the paper patterns all at once. Iron all the fabrics. Mark out the patterns on the fabric, all at once. Cut them piece by piece, all at once. Measure out the ties and melt the edges shut, all at once, and so on.

I got through the last four masks in two days doing that. They fit better, and it seems on this pattern, I’m a S/M, my kids are S/M and XS/S, and my husband still thinks he needs the biggest size. I think he’s a L.

I got a rotary cutter (we already had a self-healing cutting mat, although small) and some more quilting cotton once our state opened up on Monday (don’t get me started). I’m still using the sheets, as they’re actually soft and dense and a neutral color, and good for linings. I ditched the fiddly tailor’s chalk and got out a sharpie. I folded the sheet so I only had to cut once for both sides. I actually pre-washed all my fabrics, which I hadn’t done before, and was startled by how much they shrank. Makes sense with what happened to the fit prototypes after washing.

I’m learning how to make this easier on myself. I think I’m getting better at it.

Time to iron, and mark out XS, S, M and L patterns. I’m just going to do a bunch, and keep them in piles according to sizes. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them all yet, but it looks like we’re in this thing for the long haul. I think I’m finally ready to help.

#masks #sewing #covid #crafts #there are many things like it but this one is mine #I also got some flannel to make pajama pants out of for me and my kids #I probably over-bought but the extra flannel can be used for masks #hm i should probably get more flannel

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fancifulwritings · 4 years

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The Song Remains The Same

after quite a long time (i am so sorry this took so long to anyone that’s been following for a while) here’s chapter 17! i’ll probably start working on the next chapter almost right away, but i’m more than happy to have any recommendations/wants to write next, my ask box is always open!

A small panic fell upon the room. No one said anything, but they all knew the cause. The word, the simple word of problem, didn't sit well with anyone. Things had seemed to be going so well. What could this so called problem be? What had they done?

One by one, they all looked at Jimmy. Those who had been together at that dinner, the one that seemed so long ago after the concert, knew he liked to push buttons. Bonzo might not have been there, but his head still turned. The dynamic between Robert and Jimmy wasn't lost to him. They fought like cats and dogs, like true brothers. It got on everyone's nerves back in the day. Even Jimmy, for a few moments, wondered if he was the one to blame. He didn't think he had overstepped, not yet at least.

Calypso, of course, felt the most nervous. She was the less sure of this whole thing. Her footing into their world was weak. She might have been the once to cause this, but that didn't guarantee her a place. One word from Robert and she would be sent packing. An eternity, alone, stuck forever at twenty-one, with her so-called soulmate refusing anything to do with her? It sounded like hell. Her thoughts, after focusing on Jimmy causing this, naturally turned to herself.

John Paul, like everyone else, thought it was Jimmy. It was where his thought stayed for the longest. But then they turned away from them. Perhaps this was no one's fault. Perhaps it was something to do with Robert. Had he not shared that their stay had a limit? Did he need a few moments to himself? John Paul understood why his house was so far out into the woods. Sometimes a man just needed his time to himself. Was that it? Or did Robert had prior arrangements he needed to uphold?

The anxiety stayed over the room for a few seconds. Robert noticed this, watched everyone's eyes and heads shift to Jimmy. It was amusing to him. But he didn't let it sit longer for a moment. That felt a bit too cruel to do to them. He burst out laughing before he could talk, though. All of them were too easy to wind up, even all these years later.

"They're not real problems, not problems like we used to have," he said with a roll of his eyes. A few more chuckles left his body before he could talk again. "Just a few things that need to be taken care of. Physical problems, not social ones, lads. You lot need to calm down just a little bit," he said.

Once he finished speaking, silence again fell over them. They were waiting for him to announce what these problems were. They were all wracking their brains. No one could think of what was wrong. The few moments of silence, as Robert collected himself from his laughing fit, seemed to be a bit too much for some people.

"Well, will you spit it out lad!" Bonzo roared with a smile. "I know we technically got forever and all, but I don't wanna sit here that long, waiting for you to find your words," he said. There was a clearly playful tone in his voice. It brought a smile to Calypso's face.

There interactions seemed so lighthearted. Robert's own face had a smile growing, one that was different from his laughing. It was a fond smile, Calypso realized. He had waited years for this. Robert had gone years and years, likely praying for one more day with his best friend. How many times had Robert dreamed that Bonzo was alive again? It was touching. Calypso counted herself lucky that she got to see this wishes and dreams come true.

"Well, first, you lot are disgusting. You're absolute pigs!" He said with a smirk. "And while this is partially about the dishes, don't think me and Calypso will be doing them all ourselves, it's actually about how much you eat. Though, Bonz, I do expect a thorough cleaning of your room before you leave, I remember what your hotel rooms looked like," he said. There was a twinkle in his eyes. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Robert had missed teasing his best friend.

"And you haven't been eating a grossly inappropriate amount, especially for a bunch of twenty something year olds," he said. Calypso thought for a moment he was getting more comfortable with the whole situation. That was immensely good. It made her feel a bit more at east. "But I hadn't planned for," he paused to count them all off, "five guests plus me. I had just enough or about a week or so," he said.

His thinking, then, was that it would be enough time to hide out. The people he interacted with on a normal weekly basis of course knew who he was. But they also didn't make a huge fanfare of who he was. The town, no doubt, would be swarmed with Zeppelin fans after the concert. People seeking out him or any of the other two. They would make a huge deal out of who he was. Robert was passed the age, at that point, of wanting people to make a deal out of who he was. So he had wanted to hide away for a week. But now that was all gone out of the window. He hadn't exactly planned for this.

What was the problem with the food? None of them exactly got it. Surely they all had the funds to go out and get the food. Robert couldn't be that low on cash that he couldn't afford to eat. "Now, mate, you're not telling me you're broke, are ye? Because I think anyone of them," Bonzo pointed to everyone else, "can afford a bit of groceries."

To that, Robert only tutted and shook his head. Surely everyone else would get it. But even Calypso wasn't piecing together what the food problem was. "Do I need to show everyone a mirror?" He asked with a sigh. "We can't exactly go out like this. Unless someone has enough cash to buy stock in a grocery market, I'm not exactly sure how we can go about getting food," he explained.

Calypso realized he was right. The one thing that had her in constant awe, she had forgotten. Without any real interaction with the outside world, she had momentarily forgotten it wasn't 1970-something. It was easy to do, being surrounded by all their faces for only twenty-four hours.

Robert very much was right. They would need a large amount of food, an insane amount so they could stay hidden for a little bit. Six months to feed on just strictly three meals a day was going to be a lot for anyone. Someone who hadn't prepared? Someone who couldn't exactly go out in public like they were? If anyone used their card, they could be found out immediately.

A card gave a name, and with the increasingly familiar face, the cashier was bond to recognize them. That was assuming that no one stopped them in the shop because how much they looked like whatever member of Led Zeppelin. The voice, the looks, the everything about them would give them away. There was only so much they could lie their way out of. They still held a bit of popularity. If they didn't, the reunion concert wouldn't have been a big deal, or a deal at all. If they didn't, Calypso never would have fallen in love with the band.

"I can do it," Maureen piped up after a moment. They all turned to her, a bit confused. How could she do it? To that, she just laughed a bit. "No one knows what I look like, who I am. No one's gonna think twice about me. I might be young again, but I wasn't the famous one, remember?" She said with a grin. "And I think I've got more than enough money in my bank account to cover it. Well, John does, but you all know it's the same difference," she said with yet another laugh.

In that moment, it was pretty easy to see that Robert felt a fool. All of them did, Calypso included. After a few seconds, Robert busted out laughing. How could that be forgotten? He'd managed to project his problems onto everyone, and not everyone shared them.

It wasn't like he had forgotten about Mo. If asked about it, he would defend himself. He knew she was here. It was more that he had simply forgotten she wasn't famous. Sure, she had been in that one scene in their movie, ages ago, and a few pictures here and there, but how many people really knew what she looked like? She was the only one in their little group with easy access to a bank account who wouldn't get caught.

That didn't solve their next problem. As much as Robert would love for the answer to be Mo doing everything, it just wouldn't work. It also wouldn't be fair to her and Jonesy's bank account.

"The other little problem is a little less life or death, but it'll certainly need to be solved," he said. "None of us have proper clothing. I feel like I'm drowning in my old man's suit whenever I get dressed. And poor Bonz doesn't anything besides what's literally on his back," he paused to chuckle, "it might look like 1973, but we can't wear the same outfit for days on end anymore. He'll reek."

This was not a problem that had occurred to Calypso. It wasn't even really a problem, more a dilemma they needed to fix. The food issue had been somewhere in the back of her mind. After all, Robert had mentioned last night he didn't have enough food for all of them. The fridge and cupboards were becoming more and more bare as she watched him cook.

Eventually, she would have voiced her concern about the food to Robert. But he had beat her too it, before it was a truly pressing matter, so she didn't have to think about that. Having four full grown men in a house without food and those same four fully grown men couldn't leave sounded like something out of a nightmare.

Clothing wasn't something that would have ever crossed her mind. It simply wasn't a problem. She'd packed as much clothing as she could fit into her luggage. Whenever she ran out, she could have just laundry. The rest of them didn't have that sort of luxury. Their clothes didn't fit them anyone. Bonzo had it the worst with the one singular suit he wore that was obviously just a bit too big for him. It had been fitted for a much larger Bonzo.

Calypso glanced around the table and the clothing issue become more apparent the more she focused on it. Robert sat adjusting himself, no longer comfortable in the casual outfit he had on. With the long curls that cascaded to almost halfway down his back, the button up and slacks combo he had on looked out of place. Once again, he embodied a 1970s rock star but his clothes suggested retired dad.

Jimmy looked just as equally out of place and simply wrong as Robert did. He'd always been the skinniest out of the band, even now. But the clothes he was currently in ate his small frame. It was almost like his clothes were swallowing him up until nothing was left. The silver locks were gone, placed by his dark mop of hair, and it a startling difference for Calypso.

Jonesy didn't appear too out of place. His clothes were too big for him, just like the rest of them. But, as far as Calypso was concerned, he'd always dressed rather normally. His build and hairstyle could easily just be a normal, everyday. It was part of the reason he had been able to blend in with a crowd and escape back in the day.

"I don't need any clothing," Jimmy said after a moment of silence.

Bonzo scoffed at that idea. "What? You just gonna deal with what ya got until we all see your ass?"

That was met with an eye roll from Jimmy, barely noticeable underneath his wild fringe. "No, I still have most my stuff from back in the day. It should all fit just fine now. No need to give you the privilege of my bum." Jimmy chuckled as he spoke. "That is, whatever didn't end up in museums or archives."

That struck Calypso as a bit odd. Why would he bother keeping all of that? It wasn't like he thought he should keep it around so that if he lost the weight he could wear it again. No old man could want to wear his clothing from the 70s, could he? Especially one that probably hadn't taken the best care of himself. What condition would the clothes even be in?

As Calypso mulled over her thoughts, something clicked inside of Robert. None of the rest of them had kept their clothes. That was what normal people did. Got rid of their clothes as the fashion changed drastically and they out grew things. There was only one answer.

"You little slimy bastard, you were always ready for this to-" He began, anger apparent in his voice, before he was cut off.

"Boys, let's not fight right now. We've done enough of that, I think," Maureen said quickly. "It doesn't matter why Jimmy doesn't need anything. Just count it a blessing none of us will witness his bum." She gave a cutting glance to Robert, almost daring him to challenger her.

"Alright, well, that settles one out of four of us," Robert said. His voice gave away his clear annoyance. "One or two of us might be able to sneak out, but not all of us. That's asking to be recognized, no matter how good we disguise ourselves." At that, Calypso couldn't help but chuckle. How exactly could any of them disguise themselves?

After a moment, Jonesy spoke up. "I can go for myself and Bonzo," he said. Robert cocked his head a bit quizzically at the statement, as did Calypso. There was something so sure in his statement, in his voice.

"It's not the first time I've done it," he said with a laugh. The statement might have been meant as clarification, but it didn't seem to clarify anything, at least for Calypso. Robert's head remained cocked as well.

"Someone, back in the day, liked to under-pack for tours. It was a chronic condition," Jonesy said as he shot a look toward Bonzo. "Whatcha pack for that one American tour? Two briefs, a singular sweater, and maybe three pairs of shorts?"

"And what was on me back!" Bonzo pointed out.

"Yes, yes, of course. How could I forget that important detail?" Jonesy asked with a playful smile painted on his face.

"Not everyone loved life on the road, you know. I had a family!" He replied, seemingly in defense of himself. This apparently was an age old fight, though maybe not started by the issue of clothing.

Robert rolled his eyes at the comment. "We all had families, my boy, that is besides Jimmy." Bonzo turned a bit red, but didn't bother to respond with anything. It was obvious that this fight was one they had time and time again, and had been settled long before Calypso had come along.

"But, either way, John Paul will go clothes shopping like the old days," Robert said with a smile. The feeling in the room lightened a little bit at that.

"Well, I think you should obviously go, Robert," Calypso piped up after another moment. In her mind, who else could go for him? He was too tall for Jonesy to be able to accurately judge what size he might need.

Jonesy and Bonzo had an almost similar sense of style, or Bonzo just put up with Jonesy's clothing choices. That alone told her that Jonesy didn't have practice buying for Robert as well. Robert seemed a bit pickier than that. And Jimmy seemed to have checked out about the clothing problem, not wanting a thing to do with it. He'd probably shame them all for not simply keeping their clothes.

Once it was out of her mouth, though, she regretted it. Everyone turned to look at her. It was as if they had forgotten she was there. Which, she couldn't fully blame them for. That wasn't the reason for her regret, though. With everyone leaving the house, she'd be left with Bonzo and Jimmy.

It wasn't like she didn't like either man. It would just, it was an uncomfortable thought. She didn't know them too well. Bonzo had literally just come back from the dead. If she stayed… She'd feel like she was getting in the way of a long overdue reunion rather than bonding with people she'd be trapped with.

"Well, I suppose you're right on that," Robert said as he looked at her with a smile. "But," he began as he put a hand on her thigh, "I'll only go if you agree to go with me. A pretty girl like you will distract the paparazzi from an old man like me." He had a toothy grin on his face that she couldn't say no to, one that showed off his missing tooth.

Her gut told her to say no. Calypso could already tell exactly what Robert was thinking about. It was a ploy for him to buy her more clothing. That was something that made her a bit uncomfortable. Having things paid for by other people just wasn't something she was used to. Could she really manage to get the word no out of her mouth, though?

"Well, of course I'll go," she said with a bright smile. Her face didn't show a single sign of her internal fight. She'd regret it later, give the look he gave her, but now wasn't the time to worry.

#the song remains the same #robert plant fanfiction #robert plant fanfic #led zeppelin fanfic #led zeppelin fanfiction

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sapienveneficus · 5 years

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Elsie Fest 2019: A Broadway Music Festival Sans Broadway

Another year, another Elsie Fest. This year marks the Broadway festival's fifth anniversary, and it also happens to be the fourth Elsie Fest I've been able to attend. Coming off a the high of 2018's festival, this year's event had some mighty big shoes to fill. Did it succeed? In a word? No. I had fun last night, don't get me wrong, but I couldn't help but be disappointed by several aspects of the event. Let me break it down for you.

For those who haven't been to Elsie Fest, there's a rhythm to whole thing that's important to explain right at the top. The seating at the venue is, for the most part, general admission so people line up well before the gates open to secure the best spots near the stage. I joined the line about 2 hours before opening and, therefore, managed to snag a pretty good spot. I laid out my blanket, sat down, and took part in the hour-long showtunes sing-a-long lead, once again, by our favorite dynamic duo from Marie's Crisis. This hour of fun was a highlight for me; it always is. But this year especially it proved to be one of the few celebrations of Broadway to be found at this Broadway music festival. More on that later.

As the hour came to a close, and the guys from Marie's Crisis were wrapping things up on stage, I took a look around the venue. I couldn't help but notice that it wasn't as full as it had been the year before (or the year before that). That observation got me thinking, why was attendance down this year? After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with a few potential causes.

First up, timing. Elsie Fest has always been on a Sunday. Since the show moved to Central Park back in 2017, it has specifically been the Sunday smack dab in the middle of Columbus Day Weekend. For any international readers, Columbus Day is a federal holiday (like a bank holiday) here in the US that falls on the second Monday in October. So, for the past two years, Elsie Fest was been held in the middle of a 3 day weekend. Which meant it was generally easy for folks in the tri state area to make the trip into the city. Also, falling on a Sunday evening meant it was easy to get Broadway folks (even those currently in shows) to stop by since most shows only run a matinee on Sundays and typically have Mondays off. By choosing a Saturday this year, the organizers made it harder for some regular attendees to come out (people tend to have things to do on Saturdays plus, for some, it's the Sabbath), and they cut down on their talent pool significantly because they wouldn't be able to get anyone currently working on or off Broadway.

This segues nicely into the second reason for the potential dip in ticket sales, namely the featured performers. There weren't really any big names this year. Last year, for example, we had Sutton Foster, Joshua Henry, Grant Gustin, Matthew Morrison, Alex Newell, Nick Jonas, Zachary Levi, Casey Cott, Rufus Wainwright, Jodi Benson, and performances from Be More Chill and The Prom. This year, up until about a week before, the only big-ish name attached to the show was Gavin Creel. I say a week before because last week they announced Cynthia Erivo. I'm guessing she was added last minute in a desperate attempt to sell tickets. Which sort of worked, the venue wasn't empty, but kinda proves my point. By having this on a Saturday they weren't able to bring in the talent that they had in years past and, without those big names, they weren't able to bring in as many attendees.

Finally, the third reason for the lackluster ticket sales was New York Comic Con. This doesn't require much in the way of explanation. This weekend was New York Comic Con. Lots of the big panels, sales, and cosplay events fall on Saturday, and it's not a stretch to assume that NYCC and Elsie Fest are drawing from similar, if not the same, pools of people. So that probably hurt sales a bit as well. Though I suspect the two other reasons were larger contributing factors.

Okay, back to the show itself. After the sing-a-long, we were shown a quick trailer for High School Musical: The Musical – The Series. (You are not misreading what I wrote, that's the show's actual title) After the trailer, two of the kids came out to sing Breaking Free. Their performance was super cute, and I was reminded of the fact that HSM debuted in early 2006. Which means that all the tweens and teens who grew up with this film series are now fully-fledged adults. And they were out in the audience, in full force, singing along. It was a sweet moment to witness. And, not going to lie, I was singing along as well. I have a soft spot for the series myself. It'll always remind me of my first year of teaching. My students were obsessed HSM, and I was right there with them.

Next, Dyllon Burnside came out and performed an RnB version of Luck Be a Lady from Guys and Dolls. This number was okay. Dyllon's got a great voice and the woman who came up with him to dance as Luck was talented. But the performance had a rocky start because there wasn't an introduction. Someone just said into a mic, here's Dyllon Burnside, and then it started. I remember standing there thinking to myself, “Who's Dyllon Burnside?” I googled him today and found out he's on that Ryan Murphy show, Pose. It might have been a good idea to give that info up front. Anyhow, like I said, his performance was okay. RnB is not my cup of tea, but he had a good voice and a commanding stage presence so I could put up with that style for a single song.

After Dyllon, the composer of The Lightning Thief, Rob Rokicki, took the stage with a few backup singers. He performed Good Kid, The Lightning Thief's opening number. This performance was an example of how the timing of this year's festival hurt its lineup. Rob's a composer with a passable voice, not performer. And this song needs a cast of performers to be done properly. Unfortunately, Rob’s talented cast couldn't be there because it was Saturday night, and they had an evening show to do over at the Longacre. So we, the audience, were stuck with Rob. No offense to Rob, he seemed like a sweet guy, but he's not a performer. He should have been there to introduce his cast, not perform in their place.

After Rob, came the first set of the evening, a series of songs performed by Anais Mitchell, the composer/creator of Hadestown. I should probably begin this paragraph by explaining that I have not drunk the Hadestown kool aid. I have seen show, I did not like the show, but that is a matter for another post. Going into this set, I figured Anais would do a song from Hadestown and then take a few other Broadway tunes and put her folksy spin on them. That is not what happened. She sang 4 songs from Hadestown, and then a medley of songs from her newest album. To put it bluntly, her set was bad. Even if I liked Hadestown, which I do not, I would still have to be honest and say that she really missed the point of the festival. She was there to celebrate Broadway in general, not her show in particular. It'd be like Lin Manuel Miranda showing up and performing a whole bunch of songs from Hamilton. I mean, that'd be AMAZING, but I would have to be honest and admit that he would also have missed the point. What she should have done was a song from Hadestown, probably at the beginning, and then pick other Broadway songs. She could have told stories about showtunes that evoked special memories for her or demonstrated how certain showtunes might have folk elements hidden within them. What we didn't need was an ad for Hadestown/her latest album, but that was what we got. It was a real shame.

After Anais, Ariana DeBose took the stage. Thankfully, they gave her an introduction this time. Ariana's not a name yet, but that may change after Spielberg's West Side Story opens next year. (She's playing Anita) She kicked off her set with an RnB version of Shall We Dance from The King and I. Ariana is one of the artists who's been working on the R&H Goes Pop project on YouTube. Again, RnB is not my genre, but it was a good way to raise the energy there in the venue (as it at plummeted during the previous set) and to showcase her talent. Ariana has great tone, an impressive range, and real stage presence. So while I didn't enjoy the song itself, I was impressed with her performance overall. The next song she did was Invisible by Jason Robert Brown. It's a song off his latest album that he wrote for the Ronald McDonald House. This song was also done in an RnB style and, at this point, I started to worry that her whole set would be like this. Her next number was a medley of pop songs that dealt with cheating. It was fun, high energy, but again, it wasn’t Broadway. She could easily have used this to transition into Cell Block Tango or any other showtune about cheating (there are quite a few), but, alas, that wasn't the case. Instead, she covered Cold Play's Fix You. It was a great cover, don't get me wrong, but still not a Broadway song. At this point, I'd gone from starting to worry to full on worrying. Where were the showtunes? This is Elsie Fest, it's the one music festival for Broadway fans where their music is celebrated. That's why I love it so much and keep coming back year after year. So when her next number started off with All That Jazz from Chicago, I thought, “Finally!” but then she mashed it up with a few other Broadway/pop songs all sung by various “Divas” and my excitement diminished. Despite all of that, I held out hope that she'd close out her set with a song from West Side Story. It only made sense to get the crowd excited for next year's remake, right? Nope! Instead, she mashed up Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby with Beyonce's Naughty Girl and I think an third song I didn't recognize, who knows? At that point, I was just glad to see her leave the stage; what a disappointment.

Gavin Creel was up next. He began his set with a mashup of hits from all the shows he's been a part of. I heard Put on Your Sunday Clothes, What Do I Need With Love, Ilona, Bad Idea, You and Me (But Mostly Me), and a moment of I've Got Life. This was a great way to kick things off; a reminder of all he's accomplished on Broadway thus far. Next, after a joke about always finding your light onstage, he performed Moving Too Fast from The Last Five Years, a personal favorite of mine. Then he did a song he wrote for a showcase he'll be putting on sometime next year. After that, he sat down at the piano to do Something Wonderful from the King and I. He ended his set with The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In. Now, I knew he'd do something from Hair. I'd been hoping it'd be either Going Down (if you really want to hear someone gush about his version of that song, check out Seth Rudetsky's review on YouTube, it's delightful) or Where Do I Go?, but he chose the closing number instead. Not a bad decision, but it's not a song that can be performed solo. So, as it came time for the female lead's part in the song, I figured Cynthia or Ariana would come out to join him. That's the sort of thing that happens a lot at Elsie Fest. People will pop into each others sets to help out. Last year, famously, Will Roland, Grant Gustin, and Darren Criss teamed up to do Sincerely, Me during Grant's short set. And who could forget Aaron Tveit popping up during Leslie Odom Jr.'s set to duet with him on What You Own? But, for some unknown reason, Gavin tried to do the whole song by himself which just didn't work. So his strong set ended on kind of a sour note. I will say, Gavin's approach to crafting his setlist was perfect. He chose a good variety showtunes (old and new) and gave us a taste of what might be coming next for him. People working on set lists for next year ought to take notes. My only critique would be the lack of a female voice during his last number. Other than that, flawless.

Next, the cast of the upcoming show, Jagged Little Pill, took the stage. I had been looking forward to their performance as the show's been generating quite a bit of buzz since its out of town tryout last summer in Boston. At last year's Elsie Fest, both The Prom and Be More Chill performed two numbers a piece. So, with that blueprint in mind, I figured Jagged Little Pill would do maybe a lesser known Alanis song first and then end with a big hit. They started their set with Forgiven. It was a lesser known song that utilized the entire cast so it made for a strong opening number. I figured they'd end with something more well know like, You Learn or You Oughta Know. So I was genuinely shocked when they left the stage after only performing one song. What happened to their second song? Did they run out of time? Or, if for some reason they were only allowed one number this year, why did they choose such an obscure song? This was their chance to get the audience fired up for their new show, and by only performing Forgiven, they failed to do that. It was such a bizarre choice.

Cynthia Erivo, the lady of the hour, was up next. I'd missed her set at Elsie Fest 2016 so I was all the more eager to see which songs she'd choose to perform this time around. I figured she'd have to do one from The Color Purple, but the rest was anyone's guess. Would she go modern? Classic? A mix of both? There was no way of know, but I was excited to find out. She came out on stage, full of poise and grace, wearing these adorable cat-eye glasses and greeted the audience in such a sweet way. She seemed genuinely thrilled to see us all. She kicked off her set with Elvis's Can't Help Falling in Love. She sang it beautifully, but it was an odd choice. Then she sang Ain't No Way by Aretha Franklin. Again, she sang it flawlessly; this is Cynthia Erivo we're talking about. Everything she sings could be recorded and used as part of a master class in vocal performance. But where were the the showtunes? We were 0 for 2, and I was starting to get that worried feeling again. Then Darren came onstage with his guitar and accompanied her on Miss Celie's Blues by Quincy Jones. Also not a Broadway song, but it was featured in the film version of The Color Purple so it was a sort of nod to Broadway, I suppose. Then she did One Night Only. Finally, a showtune! Not one that I happen to like, but that point, I was desperate for something, anything. Next, she did a slowed down version of I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston, and I sighed internally. It's not that I don't like the song, I do, but it was yet another pop song. Clearly, no one had given the night's performers any sort of guidance so they were just singing, whatever. Cynthia followed up the Whitney Houston number with Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. If you're thinking to yourself, that's not a showtune either, you would be correct. The Lauper tune was how she ended her set. Again, like everything she performed, she sang it beautifully. My issue with her set was the overall lack of Broadway. This is Elsie Fest, a celebration of Broadway music. As a Broadway fan, that's what I want to hear. If I wanted to hear nothing but oldies, I'd go to an oldies music festival, if I wanted to hear all rock and roll, I'd go to one of those festivals, and so on and so on. I come to Elsie Fest for the showtunes, both old and new.

The last set before Darren's was Michael Feinstein's. Right off the bat, saving Michael's set for so late in the night was a very bad idea. He should have gone first or very nearly first when the audience was fresh and more forgiving. Michael is a very wealthly older gentleman. I don't know how he made his millions, but he was able to buy and open the cabaret club 54 Below so he's clearly got a few pennies tucked away. Maybe he flashed a few of those pennies to get such a prime timeslot, but that was a mistake. The audience was bored to tears by his set. Standing there while he performed I started to feel like the whole night up to that point had been a bit of a lousy dichotomy. Either listen to pop and RnB sung beautifully when all you want to hear are showtunes, or listen to showtunes sung poorly. I was standing there thinking, “Isn't there an option C? Didn't I pay to attend option C?” Yeah, Michael probably had a lovely voice back in the day, but that day has long since passed. He started his set with A Lot of Living to Do and then gave the audience a lecture on why Bye Bye Birdie is so important to the history of musical theater. Next, he did I Only Have Eyes for You from 42nd Street. He'd lost the crowd at that point. People were BORED. Then, after another lecture, he did the St. Louis Blues, badly. Then he put together I Don't Want to be Lonely Tonight with One Less Bell to Answer. The next song he did cannot, apparently, be googled so it will have to remain a mystery. Finally, at long last, he closed out his set with a Frank Sinatra medley. Darren came out to join him, which woke the audience up (some had literally laid down and gone to sleep). Looking back over his set, all 6 songs (5 too many if you ask me), I can't help but draw the conclusion that he gave the organizers of Elsie Fest an inordinate amount of money for a chance to perform. I hope they spend it wisely next year.

At long last, it was time for Darren's set. He had to go on 20 minutes late so we'll never know which songs he was forced to cut from the lineup. All I do know is that the 7 songs he chose were all winners. He kicked things off with a Glee song, Everybody Wants to Rule the World. It was excellent, pop at its finest. Next, he did Waving Through a Window and the crowd lost their minds. Fear not, I was right there with them; cheering and grinning like an idiot. If the crowed seemed keyed up during the Dear Evan Hansen number, they found a new stratosphere of joy to reach when he next performed Wait for It from Hamilton. It felt like suffering through all the bad sets that night had been worth it, almost. Next he pulled out his guitar and started to perform Wig in a Box and, I kid you not, I almost started crying. It had been a long night, full of disappointments, and Darren's set was pure perfection. He then paused, midway through the song, to bring out Lena Hall. What a treat! She sang her verse powerfully and then, Darren paused again to introduce John Cameron Mitchell, and the three of them brought the song home. I felt so euphoric at that point that I lack the words to properly describe it. What a historic moment! How do you follow something like that up? By taking things back to Hogwarts! First Jamie Lyn Beatty joined Darren on stage to perform Harry from AVPM. Next, Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez performed Granger Danger to riotous applause. Then, for the final number of Elsie Fest 2019, the entire Star Kid crew came out do do Goin' Back to Hogwarts. It was such a special moment; being in that crowd of fans singing along 10 years after the musical blew up online. After team Star Kid took their final bows, Darren thanked us and said he hoped to see us back next year.

Final thoughts, I hope to see him back next year too. But I also hope the organizers of Elsie Fest take a good hard look at how things went this year, and make some changes. First off, the festival needs to be held on a Sunday. To put on a festival, you need attendees and performers, and you're not going to get enough of either on a Saturday, you're just not. Second, they need to start booking talent now. They need names to bring people in. Because, even if fans are available, they're sure as heck not making the trip to see Michael Feinstein, someone who will be in a Spielberg film next year, and a kid from Pose. I'll even leave a few suggestions here: Ben Platt, Jonathan Groff, Lin Manuel Miranda, Jessie Mueller, Alex Brightman, Ethan Slater, Renee Elise Golsberry, Telly Leung, Eva Noblezada, George Salazar, Jenn Colella, etc. Third and finally, they need to have a good long think about what they want Elsie Fest to be. If they want it to remain a celebration of Broadway, then they need to book performers who are committed to that vision. If they want to change the vision, they need to let the audience know ahead of time so they can make an informed decision when buying tickets. To be perfectly honest, I felt a bit duped this year. I had paid for one thing but had gotten something else instead. So, there you are, Elsie Fest organizers. Do those three things between now and next October, and you'll have a successful festival in 2020.

#elsie fest #Darren Criss #HSM #anais mitchell #hadestown #ariana debose #gavin creel #jagged little pill #cynthia erivo #avpm #star kid #broadway #2019 #the lightning thief

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computersciencegothic · 5 years

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Is it a silly prank, a Pagan ritual, or a genius discovery about the next era of mass transit? In a picture posted to Flickr by artist James Bridle—known for coining the term, "New Aesthetic"—a car is sitting in the middle of a parking lot has been surrounded by a magic salt circle. In the language of road markings, the dotted white lines on the outside say, "Come On In," but the solid white line on the inside says, "Do Not Cross." To the car's built-in cameras, these are indomitable laws of magic: Petrificus Totalus for autonomous automobiles.

Captioned simply, "Autonomous Trap 001," the scene evokes a world of narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars. It could be mischievous hackers disrupting a friend's self-driving ride home; the police seizing a dissident's getaway vehicle; highway robbers trapping their prey; witches exorcizing a demon from their hatchback.

Self-driving cars aren't there yet, but the artist-philosopher-programmer's thought-provoking photo is a reminder that we'll have to start thinking about these things soon. If a self-driving car is designed to read the road, what happens when the language of the road is abused by those with nefarious intent?

Bridle has carved out a space for himself among those thinking 10–100 years in the future. His website Booktwo.org is lousy with philosophical treatises, thought experiments, creative code, and art projects. His "collaboration with technology" Five Eyes was part of the V&A Museum's privacy-oriented show All of This Belongs to You, which also included the remains of whistleblower Edward Snowden's smashed hard drive full of leaked documents. Bridle has spent the last decade making drones more relatable, uncovering the mysteries of weather prediction, and otherwise trying to elucidate the invisible technologies—usually military in origin—that rule our world.

Recently Bridle has become fascinated by autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars will be available to the public soon. Singapore is considering the purchase of a fleet of 300,000 driverless taxis to replace the 780,000 manned ones currently clogging their streets. Google's self-driving car initiative, now called Waymo, has been investing in the technology since 2009. Elon Musk's Tesla is already implementing limited automated features in the United States, and even slow-moving large scale car manufacturers like Ford are getting into the game. If driverless cars become anywhere as ubiquitous as the horseless carriage, innocuous vandalism like the Autonomous Trap is just the beginning the problems engineers will have to solve.

Now Bridle is trying to build his own self-driving car, and made the sardonic artwork Autonomous Trap 001 in the process. He's released all the code developed in pursuit of the DIY self-driving car here. We spoke to Bridle to learn more about the circumstances behind this vague photo series and better understand his apprehension and curiosity about the robot chauffeurs of the future.

Creators: What are we looking at here? Can you give me a brief explanation of Autonomous Trap 001?

James Bridle: What you're looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice. In this case it's being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car's vision system into believing it's surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.

Is this actually an autonomous car, or is it conceptual?

I don't actually have a self-driving car, unfortunately—I don't think any have made it to Greece yet, plus the cost issue—but I do have a pretty good understanding of how the things work, having been researching them for a while. And the one in the picture is a research vehicle for building my own. As usual, I've got totally carried away in the research, and ended up writing a bunch of my own software, rigging up cameras and building neural networks to reproduce some of the more interesting currents in the field. Like the trap, I wouldn't entirely trust what I've built, but the principles are sound.

Where did you take these pictures?

I made this Trap while training the car on the roads around Mount Parnassus in Central Greece. Parnassus feels like an appropriate location because, as well as being quite spectacular scenery and wonderful to drive and hike around, it's the home of the Muses in mythology, as well as the site of the Delphic Oracle. The ascent of Mount Parnassus is, in esoteric terms, the journey towards knowledge, and art.

What is your role in the project and is there anyone else involved?

It's just me. I did a project last year called Cloud Index Index which used satellite imagery and machine learning to explore politics and computational thinking, and I had a lot of help on that, particularly from Gene Kogan, another artist who works with machine learning. This time I wanted to do it all myself—mostly to show that I could, and therefore, in theory and accepting an immense amount of privilege and good fortune, anyone can. These technologies are for everyone: you can read the papers, repeat the findings, study the code, build your own tools. This radically reshapes the way you understand and interact with the world, and is something I think is quite crucial to propagate in the current age.

Why did you create Autonomous Trap 001, besides poking fun at an incredibly hyped technology?

It's part of a body of work / research / writing / fooling about to explore and understand the contemporary technologies of automation, in order to better use them, and in some cases to disrupt and oppose them.

Self-driving cars bring together a bunch of really interesting technologies—such as machine vision and intelligence—with crucial social issues such as the atomization and changing nature of labor, the shift of power to corporate elites and Silicon Valley, and the quasi-religious faith in computation as the only framework for the production of truth—and hence, ethics and social justice.

The Trap falls into the category of resistance, while the attempt to build my own car is a process of understanding how the dominant narratives of these technologies are produced, and could be changed. I don't see why cab drivers of the future shouldn't be chalking white lines on side streets to derail self-driving Ubers which are putting them out of work, and I also think we need more eyes and hands on the tools which are shaping all of our futures.

Were there any unexpected challenges in creating the piece?

I ran out of salt, and had to drive back to the nearest village to buy a few more kilos. Luckily, salt, unlike bandwidth and computational power, is a pretty cheap resource. Also, I should have pulled my trousers up for the video.

This is Autonomous Car Trap 001. Do you have more planned?

I have a habit of numbering things, but yes, there will definitely be more. Like the Drone Shadows, which proliferate to this day, consciously starting a series seems to have generative effects.

Where does this fit in your larger body of work?

It's all part of the same attempt to understand the world and act in it, if that doesn't sound too pompous. This work follows directly from projects on machine vision, artificial intelligence, militarized technology, big data etc.—as well as more, shall we say, poetic interventions into emerging technologies. It's one big rolling project, with occasional bouts of specific obsession.

What's next for you? What other projects are you working on?

This body of work is in part in preparation for a solo exhibition which opens next month in Berlin, at Nome Gallery, called Failing to Distinguish Between a Tractor Trailer and the Bright White Sky. I'll be showing a bunch of different outcomes of the research, including interpretations of the machine vision systems I've been building, and the results of the self-driving car training—and hopefully connecting them to some of my more mythological interests.

I've also got a new commission opening in London next week, as part of Convergence—a series of billboards in East London continuing my search for the Render Ghosts. Beyond that, I'm mostly working on writing projects about the new dark age and the relationship between technology, knowledge, understanding, and agency.

Keep up with James Bridle's work on his website.

#technology #tech #stem #steam #engineering #software #machine learning #cs #compsci #computer science #programming #coding #math #mathematics #fae #witchy #magic #cars

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momtemplative · 4 years

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One-Act Play

It was the summer of 2004. I was living at 940 North Street in Boulder, in the strange kind of rental property you can only get away with in your twenties. It was dilapidated and half-swallowed by shrubbery, but also rustic and quaint, a slice of woods in the middle of town. (A raccoon had babies in my ski boots out back.) It was few blocks from the mountains and a few more blocks to Pearl Street. I used to ride a hand-me-down bike that was heavy as wrought-iron down to the Trident Coffee Shop on Pearl Street and pretend I was a “real” writer.

(I parked and tripped over the very same bike during the very same summer to greet my buddy, Lisa, and her friend, Jesse, who were enjoying a drink at an outside table at the Corner Bar. That was the first time I met Jesse, and the summer of 2004 is when our romance began. But that story is for a different day.)

I had just quit my job after a year of working as a receptionist at a chiropractic office. I’d had it with a passive-aggressive boss and no growth potential. I was living with my former African drum teacher and his girlfriend. They ascribed fully to the phrase you-only-live-once and they buzzed with a sort of free-spiritedness that would make my mom cringe. So when I quit my (responsible if people-pleasing and self-sacrificing) job, fate had it so I was living with them, with their input that said, Good Riddance. Now what do you really want to do?

In a bold act of maternal generosity, my mom wrote me a check that covered tuition for the entire month of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa’s Jack Karoac School of Disembodied Poetics. (Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder, CO.) I signed up for one week with artist /dancer, Michelle Ellsworth, and used the extra on rent and groceries. (I’d been in Colorado for all of two years and I was barely able to make ends meet even before my new status of being unemployed.)

I picked Michelle randomly; I liked her picture in the brochure. I can envision her now, as clearly as if I had a Fotomatic print of her in my hands. Clear blue eyes like crystals you hang in the window to shoot rainbow-slivers into the space. A wide, shiny smile. She spoke to our crowded class with a quick, giggly cadence, like the tick of a wound-up clock. Any details blur into the oblivion of non-essential memory, but her imprint, like that of a fossilized leaf on a river stone, hasn’t faded in the slightest.

Our assignment was to write a one-act play about anything.

940 North was entirely furnished in one afternoon from the Habitat for Humanity Thrift store, and its décor was mostly provided by an old lady’s estate sale. I had emptied out the closet in my bedroom to make a writing nook. I had an ancient laptop and a borrowed printer. We definitely did NOT have Internet; I had to use the computers at the college for that. This was still an era where Internet could be used intermittently and intentionally—for checking email and other specific to-dos that required only a finite amount of time. This was before Internet was available and necessary for us to receive continuously and at a heavy drip.

I had not slacked. I didn’t procrastinate. To the contrary—I cleared my calendar for this assignment, took it way too seriously and tried WAY too hard. I wanted so badly to be awesome at this, but after two complete afternoons, I could barely pinch out a coherent sentence.

On the due date, Michelle said, “Ok, let’s go around and have everyone tell us about their play.”

Bla, bla, bla, blur, blur, everyone did their assignment, no problem, until the spotlight landed on me with, it seemed, the sound of brakes coming to a screeching halt. I cleared my throat and shifted in my chair.

“I didn’t finish it.” I said. I felt a clenching desire to fold up and hide. The back of my skull droned like the sudden onset of a fever.

She smiled without a fleck of irony. “Then tell me what you did instead.”

Okay...? So many eyes on me...”Honestly? I re-organized my closet. Then I stared at a blank screen. Then I ate a bunch of potato chips. Then I typed a few words and printed a page, tossed it into the trash, hung out with my roommates and cleaned my toilet. It went on like that for hours, two full afternoons.”

“Well then that’s your play,” Michelle said, giddy with the proposal. “Anyone want to help Heather out with this one?” Four hands from four complete strangers shot up.

Low, behold, later that week, the five of us lined up on stage like human-cogs in the grand machine that was to be our performance.

I, PERSON ONE: typed furiously on a typewriter, then I pulled out the paper and handed it to the person to my left. Then I started again, and it went on like this.

PERSON TWO: crumbled up the paper and threw it into a bucket of water, then put a hand out my way for another paper to crumple and dunk. Our movements were stiff and mechanical.

PERSON THREE: pulled the paper out of the bucket, squeezed it then smoothed it flat on a towel. Then she looked up to pretend-talk to an invisible person, while pulling another paper from the water.

PERSON FOUR: grabbed the wet paper from the towel and handed it to the next person. Then he shoved a handful of potato chips from a bag open directly in front of him into his mouth, before grabbing and passing another one.

PERSON FIVE: placed the wet paper overtop a balloon that was held steady onto a table with tape, and then another wet paper and another.

It went like this, a factory line going going going through at least six cycles, each of us doing our part to assemble a visual-thought from beginning to end, without fighting or judging—just reporting.

When the last piece of paper whizzed out of my typewriter and was handed to the next person, I froze. Then, each of the four remaining performers did their respective actions and froze, until PERSON FIVE was the only one moving. He plastered the final wet paper to the balloon and held it up for observation. Then the scene went dark, and, applause.

The idea that there is information (dare I say wisdom, creativity) in the non-doing, the over-doing, and everything in between, shattered my archaic notions of black-and-white thinking. It created grand pockets of space for curiosity to germinate. Curiosity— the grand antidote to perfectionism.

I could not undo this teaching even if I tried.

I pull it out now as a sort of valuable overlay to everyday life. It breathes oxygen into the mundane moments, and works as sort of a salve when shit doesn’t go as planned, which is the New Normal. Let the record show, I’ve had young kids in my life for the passed decade-plus, so I’m accustomed to lack of control. And yet, I’ve always also had certain chunks of the day when I was guaranteed some sense of command over my own actions. While Ruth was in preschool, 12 hours a week, I worked and did adult life, making choices that actually happened. At a bare minimum, I had that.

Now we are dwelling in the land of a thousand distractions, with no reprieve. There is no boat off this island. No departures in the near future. It often feels like the how the day unfolds is entirely up to some larger sources that I have utterly no influence on. Is Ruth in the mood to play independently for any stretch of time today? Is she up for watching a TV show while I do a little writing? Will she spend more than five minutes on an art project without descending into coloring her eyeballs with face paint or covering an entire palm in glitter glue? One never knows. One can only pray.

Truth: It took me an hour to write and send a three-line email this morning. The staggering disruptions became almost comical. Ruth fell down FOUR separate times. This is an extreme example, almost as if her nervous system could sense my focus was elsewhere and ran a smear campaign against Mom Completing Any Singular Task. But, if perhaps a lighter version, this is a typical day.

Before Michelle, I may have regarded these off-script moments as those of non-doing, small fails to wrestle with until I can get my “actual shit done.” But today I can see there is so much more there. Choices, aggravation, empathy, my physical body, the body of my wild-puppy preschooler, suppressed laughter, expressed laughter, suppressed annoyance, expressed annoyance—all are contained in these moderately priced moments.

Then you add a blizzard. In the last four days, we’ve gotten multiple feet of snow. The world is covered in a suffocating wool blanket, itchy and hard to breathe underneath. The snow outside—higher than the dog’s belly!!—squeezes us between the walls of this house, everything inside seems tighter and louder because of the outside’s sound-deadening insulation.

So there’s my one-act play for today.

#momtemplative #HeatMamaWords #OneActPlay #COVIDwords #michelleellsworth

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euteh · 5 years

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How long have you been using your current smartphone? The answer for an increasing number of consumers is years, plural. After all, why upgrade every year when next year’s model is almost exactly the same as the device you’re holding in your hand?

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone sees this as an opportunity to sell sustainability. A chance to turn a conversation about ‘stalled smartphone innovation’ on its head by encouraging consumers to think more critically about the costs involved in pumping out the next shiny thing. And sell them on the savings — individual and collective — of holding their staple gadget steady.

Its latest smartphone, the Fairphone 3 — just released this week in Europe — represents the startup’s best chance yet of shrinking the convenience gap between the next hotly anticipated touchscreen gizmo and a fairer proposition that requires an altogether cooler head to appreciate.

On the surface Fairphone 3 looks like a fairly standard, if slightly thick (1cm), Android smartphone. But that’s essentially the point. This 4G phone could be your smartphone, is the intended message.

Specs wise, you’re getting mostly middling, rather than stand out stuff. There’s a 5.7in full HD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 chipset, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable via microSD), a 12MP rear lens and 8MP front-facing camera. There’s also NFC on board, a fingerprint reader, dual nano-SIM slots and a 3,000mAh battery that can be removed for easy replacement when it wears out.

There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack: The handy port that’s being erased at the premium smartphone tier, killing off a bunch of wired accessories with it. So ‘slow replacement’ smartphone hardware demonstrably encourages less waste across the gadget ecosystem too.

But the real difference lies under the surface. Fairer here means supply chain innovation to source conflict-free minerals that go into making the devices; social incentive programs that top up the minimum wages of assembly workers who put the phones together; and repairable, modular handset design that’s intended to reduce environmental impact by supporting a longer lifespan. Repair, don’t replace is the mantra.

All the extra effort that goes into making a smartphone less ethically challenging to own is of course invisible to the naked eye. So the Fairphone 3 buyer largely has to take the company’s word on trust.

The only visual evidence is repairability. Flip the phone over and a semi-opaque plastic backing gives a glimpse of modular guts. A tiny screwdriver included in the box allows you take the phone to pieces so you can swap out individual modules (such as the display) in case they break or fail. Fairphone sells replacements via a spare parts section of its website.

Despite this radically modular and novel design vs today’s hermetically sealed premium mobiles the Fairphone 3 feels extremely solid to hold.

It’s not designed to pop apart easily. Indeed, there’s a full thirteen screws holding the display module in place. Deconstruction takes work (and care not to lose any of the teeny screws). So this is modularity purely as occasional utility, not flashy party trick — as with Google’s doomed Ara Project.

For some that might be disappointing. Exactly because this modular phone feels so, well, boringly normal.

Visually the most stand out feature at a glance is the Fairphone logo picked out in metallic white lettering on the back. Those taking a second look will also spot a moralizing memo printed on the battery so it’s legible through the matte plastic — which reads: “Change is in your hands”. It may be a bit cringeworthy but if you’ve paid for an ethical premium you might as well flaunt it.

It’s fair to say design fans won’t be going wild over the Fairphone 3. But it feels almost intentionally dull. As if — in addition to shrinking manufacturing costs — the point is to impress on buyers that ethical internals are more than enough of a hipster fashion statement.

It’s also true that most smartphones are now much the same, hardware, features and performance wise. So — at this higher mid-tier price-point (€450/~$500) — why not flip the consumer smartphone sales pitch on its head to make it about shrinking rather than maximizing impact, via a dull but worthy standard?

That then pushes people to ask how sustainable is an expensive but valueless — and so, philosophically speaking, pointless — premium? That’s the question Fairphone 3 seems designed to pose.

Or, to put it another way, if normal can be ethical then shouldn’t ethical electronics be the norm?

Normal is what you get elsewhere with Fairphone 3. Purely judged as a smartphone its performance isn’t anything to write home about. It checks all the usual boxes of messaging, photos, apps and Internet browsing. You can say it gets the job done.

Sure, it’s not buttery smooth at every screen and app transition. And it can feel a little slow on the uptake at times. Notably the camera, while fairly responsive, isn’t lightning quick. Photo quality is not terrible — but not amazing either.

Testing the camera I found images prone to high acutance and over saturated colors. The software also struggles to handle mixed light and shade — meaning you may get a darker and less balanced shot that you hoped for. Low light performance isn’t great either.

That said, in good light the Fairphone 3 can take a perfectly acceptable selfie. Which is what most people will expect to be able to use the phone for.

Fairphone has said it’s done a lot of work to improve the camera vs the predecessor model. And it has succeeded in bringing photo performance up to workable standard — which is a great achievement at what’s also a slightly reduced handset price-point. Though, naturally, there’s still a big gap in photo quality vs the premium end of the smartphone market.

On the OS front, the phone runs a vanilla implementation of Android 9 out of the box — preloaded with the usual bundle of Google services and no added clutter so Android fans should feel right at home. (For those who want a Google-free alternative Fairphone says a future update will allow users to do a wipe and clean install of Android Open Source Project.)

In short, purely as a smartphone, the Fairphone 3 offers very little to shout about — so no screaming lack either. Again, if the point is to shrink the size of the compromise Fairphone is asking consumers to make in order to buy an ethically superior brand of electronics they are slowly succeeding in closing the gap.

It’s a project that’s clearly benefiting from the maturity of the smartphone market. While, on the cellular front, the transformative claims being made for 5G are clearly many years out — so there’s no issue with asking buyers to stick with a 4G phone for years to come.

Given where the market has now marched to, a ‘fairer’ smartphone that offers benchmark basics at a perfectly acceptable median but with the promise of reduced costs over the longer term — individual, societal and environmental — does seem like a proposition that could expand from what has so far been an exceptional niche into something rather larger and more mainstream.

Zooming out for a second, the Fairphone certainly makes an interesting contrast with some of the expensive chimeras struggling to be unfolded at the top end of the smartphone market right now.

Foldables like the Samsung Galaxy Fold — which clocks in at around 4x the price of a Fairphone and offers ~2x the screen real estate (when unfolded), plus a power bump. Whether the Fold’s lux package translates into mobile utility squared is a whole other question, though.

And where foldables will need to demonstrate a compelling use-case that goes above and beyond the Swiss Army utility of a normal smartphone to justify such a whopping price bump, Fairphone need only prick the consumer conscience — as it asks you pay a bit more and settle for a little less.

Neither of these sales pitches is challenge free, of course. And, for now, both foldables and fairer electronics remain curious niches.

But with the Fairphone 3 demonstrating that ethical can feel so normal it doesn’t seem beyond the pale to imagine demand for electronics that are average in performance yet pack an ethical punch scaling up to challenge the mainstream parade of copycat gadgets.