#the hubris of a world like this would be UNREAL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dent-de-leon · 1 year

Note

If you are considering prompts, how about a widomauk with:

4. “Would you like a hug?”

Hi!! Oh thank you, this is such a sweet prompt and it works so well for widomauk

Molly looks like he’s just fallen into a deep sleep. Wildflowers bloom to life all around him, sprigs of bluebells and unfurling ferns and blossoms of moonflower beside morning glory. Until he’s laying on a flowerbed, peacefully resting in a sea of verdant greenery.

Caleb can’t help thinking of childhood fairytales. Stories of royalty charmed into eternal sleep, denizens of the fey born among flowering fields. A prince or princess locked away, caged by a nightmarish monster. A cursed spirit finally set free.

Here in all this ruin and decay, Molly is glowing and radiant, surrounded by new life. So ethereally beautiful, he seems unreal. Like a dream. His hair falls in long flowing curls, threaded with budding blooms of soft baby blue, delicate petals unfurling in his lovely violet locks, spilling over the spirals of his ram horns.

They all watch with bated breath, congregating around their long lost friend. A chorus of gasps and soft sighs as Molly begins to stir; his tail flicking idly, swishing to and fro. He twists and turns in aborted little movements, fidgeting as he slowly comes to wake, caught in this strange patch of sun and the scent of a calm ocean breeze, cradled safely in the Wildmother’s embrace.

Dark lashes flutter. Brilliant red eyes finally open and Mollymauk Tealeaf looks at the world again for the first time in the longest time. Once upon a time--

That spark of Molly’s life thrumming under Caleb’s hands, resonating with his very soul. Pouring an endless wellspring of tumultuous magic and emotion into this one spell, this last chance. Molly’s heart beating faintly in time with Caleb’s own, their souls inexorably bound as he wills this infernal blood to flow. Daring the Matron to just try and take him—He’s ours. And he’s coming home. A fervent promise. A crushed stone and tearful kiss. Kneeling over Molly’s still, lifeless form and wishing he had anything left to give.

It’s chilling, to lose Molly’s last shard of a soul like this. His light snuffed out in the empty carcass of a dead empire, one more lost soul claimed by the wrath of the gods and hubris of wizards. To fade away into nothing here in the dark, banished to the astral sea, so far from the light of his beloved moon. Alone. Empty.

When his Transmuter stone was alight with the soft glow of arcana and hope, Caleb swears he could see Molly bathed in the light of full moon, lucent and beautiful. A ghost of his still lingering soul, or else a vision sent by the gods to torment him. And if he strains his ears, he can just barely hear that familiar, haunting voice, Molly singing softly to soothe his anguished heart.

“For the dead yellow king, a throng came and song. On the longest day of rain, he would rise again. Long, long may he reign."

Molly stumbles forward, wobbly and wide-eyed in wonder as a newborn faun, and Yasha’s strong, steady arms are there to catch him, holding him tight as he takes his first fumbling steps back into the world.

“Molly. Mollymauk Tealeaf.”

They all hold their breath, time suspended in a single moment that stretched on for all eternity. A soft cry, a sharp intake of breath. And then, in the gentlest voice, so soft and full of tortured longing, “Love.”

Everything was worth it, just for this. For Yasha’s sob of relief that breaks off in a warbling laugh, for Molly’s own breathless chuckle as she wraps him up in a warm embrace, holds him tight and vows to never let go. From there it's all a rush, a flurry of tears and laughter as they all embrace Mollymauk.

Caleb is spellbound. He simply can’t look away as Molly spins around and tilts his head up at the starscape shimmering above, tail swishing in glee. Eyes twinkling with mirth as he watches Jester dance around drawing ornate silks in midair.

Caleb can hardly breathe. He’d just kissed him, lost in the moment of gutting, grievous pain and guilt ridden grief. But now that Molly is here, awake, he finds himself too afraid to reach for him. As though Molly’s soul might slip away at any moment. As if the spell would be broken by his touch.

He holds himself back. He is content to watch, to let the others have their moment with the dear friend they all lost. They are—more deserving, certainly. Caleb has no right or claim to Molly’s attention, not when they were never particularly close to begin with. Not when he did not even have the courage to present his own offering at the ritual—not when it was his magic that failed Mollymauk when he desperately needed him most.

All that time, that wasted effort, pouring every ounce of sheer willpower into that ritual, channeling all the arcane power he’d painstakingly honed since childhood, and still, it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. He gave everything, and he was still too weak to many any difference.

He is happy just to have this chance to see Mollymauk wake again, to hear his warm burst of laughter and watch their little family all flock to embrace him. It is enough of a joy to admire the tiefling from a distance, to bask in that spark of light he always carried with him.

He doesn’t need anything else.

But then Molly turns and meets his gaze from across the Astral Sea, gleaming red eyes shining bright. He starts forward, just a step, hand cautiously outstretched—reaching for him, of all people.

Caleb’s heart seizes.

Yasha is there beside her tiefling still, angelic wings enfolding him in soft feathers and ethereal light, sheltering him from the wreckage of Lucien’s decaying husk in this city of bones.

She catches it, that moment that passes between them, enthralling and electric. Yasha, who had fallen to her knees beside Caleb only moments before, choking back tears as she begged him to do something, anything, to save him—

When Molly hesitates, Yasha gives his hand a reassuring little squeeze.

“It’s okay,” she says, promises. But it’s Caleb she’s looking in the eye, her gentle voice just loud enough to reach him. “Go on.”

It's all the encouragement Molly needs. He gently pads forward barefoot, tail swishing in glee, a slow smile spreading across his face. Long, sweeping folds of red velvet wrapped around him, the ostentatious red coat draped over his bony shoulders. Hands bunched up in the rich crimson fabric, reveling in the feel of something tactile and real.

Words fail Caleb, now that this gentle soul is standing proud before him. Now that he can finally see the warmth of Mollymauk's beaming smile again.

"I. Would...would you like a hug?" he babbles, eyes downcast and cheeks flushed, suddenly very aware of all the eyes on him, of Yasha's soft smile and Jester's delighted gasp.

He still doesn't trust that any of this is real.

But even as he falters, Molly crept closer, nestling into the crook of Caleb’s shoulder, settling into the solace of his still trembling arms. And when Caleb's breath caught, doleful eyes stinging with the blur of hot tears, the tiefling nuzzled into his neck, burying his face in the soft folds of a cozy scarf, sighing in sheer content.

“Magician,” Molly murmurs, soft and bubbling with warmth. Then, nuzzling closer, eyes lighting up, “Magician!”

Caleb can't help but chuckle softly as Molly reaches for him, claws gently skimming over the place where his heart lay.

"It is good to see you too, Circus Man."

#widomauk #mollymauk #i hope this is kinda what you were looking for! i do love the circus man and magic man being soft so much #at any given moment i am thinking of the sheer romance and love of caleb's resurrection ritual #something about magic being how caleb expresses love and the purest form of this is him trying to bring back the loved one they all lost--

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dustedmagazine · 6 months

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Dust Volume Nine, Number 10 (Part Two)

Ogala Opot and his red-hot nyatiti

Well, all right then, Tumblr has decided we only get 10 audio clips per post, and audio is kind of what we do, so...two posts! (First one here.) Enjoy.

Earth — Earth 2.23 Special Lower Frequency Mix (Sub Pop)

Earth 2.23 Special Lower Frequency Mix is a collection of five remixes that accompanies Sub Pop’s anniversary reissue of Earth’s magisterial 1993 debut Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version. The personnel on Earth 2.23 includes Justin K Broaderick (Godflesh, Jesu), who you might have guessed would have an affinity for the band’s work, as well as two contributions from a previous collaborator The Bug, aka Kevin Richard Martin, but the collection also shows the reach the band’s sound has into both less and differently heavy spaces with, respectively, an appearance each by Built to Spill’s Brett Nelson and the grime artist Flowdan. While Broaderick’s melodic, crunching take on “Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine” is the highlight here, Netson’s murkier, more strictly droning version of the same song and Martin’s propulsive, Flowdan-featuring abbreviation of “Seven Angels” —here simply “Angels” — demonstrate just how far Earth’s musical lineage branches.

Alex Johnson

Angelika Niescier / Tomeka Reid / Savannah Harris — Beyond Dragons (Intakt)

With its boldly exposed structures, rough textures, and load-bearing elements, alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier’s music is like a skyscraper under construction. Nothing is covered up, and you can tell exactly how it fits together. In settings like this, there’s no hiding, so the choice of musicians is key. Niescier has chosen well. Cellist Tomeka Reid has a simpatico orientation towards forms that are complex, yet economical, and her strong classical foundation brings out the music’s chamber dynamics. Savannah Harris treats drumming as a martial art, which is to say that her playing is strategic, disciplined, and quite capable of laying you out.

Bill Meyer

Parish / Potter — On And Off (Null Zøne)

Shane Parish (Ahleuchatistas, etc.) and Michael Potter (The Electric Nature, etc.) are hardly an obvious duo. Parish is a restless explorer with fearsome chops; Potter spreads heavy sounds around like a mason distributing bricks and mortar. But they’re both guitarists, improvisers and Athens GA residents, so why not take a joint dive into the deep and see what comes up? In the case of this tape, a plausible melding of aesthetics that are allowed to churn into oneness, one track per side. While one is electric and the other acoustic, that’s not really what registers; rather, it’s the way the two musicians make stillness out of motion, stirring spidery patterns and slow magma into a rotating swirl of buzz and stutter. Turns out there’s still something in that water down there.

Bill Meyer

Soft Punch — Above Water (Bad Friend)

Soft Punch is the solo project of DC’s Rye Thomas, a one-time touring member of Pash and Tereu Tereu, laid low by illness and now unable to travel. That all sounds like a bummer, and it probably is, but the album, Above Water, is an unexpected joy, beginning in the Akron Family-esque choral surge “Let’s Begin” and going all the way through to the Maps-like wistful, but crescendoing, electronics of “Now’s the Time.” Pay special attention to “My Aim Is True,” whose hubris in name-checking Elvis Costello’s classic album pays off in perfect, tremulous lyricism. Thomas sings from inside a magic, glittering cavern, an unreal place where the world’s hurts can be contemplated without damage, and both the hurt and the solace are beautiful. “Here Comes the Chorus” is spikier and full of rhythmic spine, redolent of Wolf Parade at its indie-ruling peak, while “Still Songs” flutters baroquely, elaborately against swathes of strings, like Jeremy Enigk’s Return of the Frog Queen. These are all pretty heavy references but let them stand. This is the good stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Various Artists — Thum Nyatiti: Recordings from Western Kenya, 1930-1970 (Dagoretti)

This new compilation gathers 16 archival cuts that feature masters of the nyatiti, an eight-string lyre found in Western Kenya. The instrument has a distinctive sharp, percussive tone to it, sounding somewhere between a marimba and a banjo as it pursues hypnotic, repetitive patterns of quick-tempo’d picking. It is played with minimal accompaniment, usually a droning, blues-adjacent vocal line, sometimes percussion, but the main element is the picking. Dr. Pete Larson, who runs Dagoretti Records, sometimes plays the nyatiti himself; his curator on this project, Michael Robertson, has selected these historic recordings with considerable knowledge and care. Two cuts come from Ogola Opot, widely considered the father of the style. He cuts through decades of static to deliver “Onyango Wasera,” a track that is somehow both sprightly and spiritual, then returns with the more subdued “Ginaa,” rhythmic but with a melancholy air. Other well-known players—Captain Oluoch, Opondo Mugoye and Okelo Mugubit—are represented as well. Captain Oluoch’s “Aduor” is rough and impassioned, the vocal more of a shout than a croon, and very powerful. As you might expect, nyatiti playing is primarily a live art, common at weddings, funerals and other celebrations about the Luo people. These recordings were made by colonizers, British and Indian entrepreneur, seeking to document a disappearing art. This collection continues their work, extending these spare and haunting songs to a still wider audience.

Jennifer Kelly

Scott Yoder — Wither on Hollywood & Vine (Cruisin’)

Glam rock isn’t as much of a thing as it used to be, but Scott Yoder is bucking the trend, decked out in eyeliner, capes and leather. His latest album Wither on Hollywood & Vine hazards big, tone-bending guitar chords, reeling melodies and a taste for the dramatic. “Sugar on Your Lips,” with its keening, 1960s-style organ surge, its slow climaxing chorus and its florid vocal style recalls all the young dudes and their low-sparking, high heeled heyday. “Silver Screen Starlet” dips into the blues, a bent brooding boogie lurching into view, while “Gold in the Hills,” maybe the disc’s best, blows out an acoustic country rock song into day-glo colors. Restraint is overrated. Bring on the excess.

Jennifer Kelly

#dusted magazine #dust #scott yoder #soft punch #dagoretti records #shane parish #michael potter #jennifer kelly #bill meyer #Angelika Niescier #tomeka reid #savannah harris #Bandcamp #earth #alex johnson

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aesterblaster · 8 months

Note

For the ship game! Bachisagi, hubris

A/N : Honestly for these had to remember it's not asking for full on fics just what comes to your head first TT so sorry

tw for homophobia

Hubris: Excessive Pride, Defiance of the Gods

When it came out that famous soccer player Isagi Yoichi, main playmaker of the experimental Blue Lock project, was dating Bachira Meguru a fellow player...a man...all hell broke loose. Not even Anri could pr her way out of a just slightly off screen kiss that managed to get onto Blue Lock TV. There was an outpouring of outraged fans, some fangirls of either of the boys who were simply upset that they'd never have a chance, some claiming that the repressive enviornment had changed their behavior and this was more proof BLLK was unnatural, and still others simply sending in death threats.

Isagi was completely unaware of this. He thought that maybe, just maybe he was far away enough from the prying eyes of the camera...but he didn't know they were in the common areas too. He thought they were just on the field until he used his reward points to get his phone back. If there was one thing Isagi Yoichi was, it was prideful. He couldn't deny that watching people react to his skills was as validating as it was unreal, seeing the love pour in from around the world only made him more motivated to keep going and to defeat Kaiser. But this time when he looked up his name on Twitter all he got were clips of him kissing Bachira.

His cheeks went red. Fuck. He hastily scrolled through the tag past the frankly violating fanart that had been posted at light speed, past the wild speculations and accusations, all the way to a comment from one of his old teammates. "Always knew that guy was off..he was always looking at me weird during practices. Fucking disgusting. I hope he gets kicked out of there soon and seen as the fluke he is, he's just there to try and make the other guys date him." Isagi stared at that one for a long time, he frankly couldn't even remember who this guy was and now he was claiming Isagi was eyeing him? "Why does every good player have to be a homo these days this is actually sickening..just imagine what they do off camera..." Isagi turned off his phone, he'd seen enough, he had a match tomorrow he should be training for that.

Yoichi kicked like he meant to break the goal in half, he kicked like he was trying to behead someone, he almost broke the image generating collar of the fake goalie. He just wanted to get rid of everything he was feeling welling up inside of him like a bucket trying to hold its own under torential rainfall. He felt disgusted at himself, like his pride had been marred and he'd been caught commiting a crime. What would his parents think? What would Ego say? How the hell did that even get online in the first place. Isagi let out a scream of pure anger as he angled his kick towards a camera in the corner of the room. He knew those bastards were watching him even now and making jokes about his tantrum. He had to score next match..he had to crush the opposition..he had to prove himself..he was better than them.

"Is this...a bad time?" Shit. Isagi didn't turn around, even though he really really wanted to. He just kept his back to Bachira, his breathing slowing as he tried to weigh his options in his head. "Y'know, I was wondering if you were coming to lunch, all the good stuff is going to be gone soon.." AKA, come with me, I want to spend time with you. Bachira felt so smart when he came up with those little code words and phrases to talk to Isagi without letting the producers and sponsors of Blue Lock know everything...Isagi marveled at how useless that was now.

"I already ate. You can beat it, I want to practice alone."

Bachira stiffened. Isagi was never this blunt with him, sure he was shy sometimes but there was a new edge to his partner's voice that made his eyebrows furrow in confusion. "Isagi..."

"Meguru-" Isagi never called him Meguru. "just get the hell out. I need to actually focus." If only he could see the way Bachira's heart sunk when he said that, if only he turned around and saw his amber eyes glossy with held back tears, maybe he would've been a little kinder. "I said fucking beat it damn it! Didn't you hear I already ate? We need to start being serious. This is a competition and only one of our egos will win. If you practice with me all the time you'll know everything right?! My prefrences, my likes and dislikes, why I do what I do......"

It had taken so, so long to get to this point. So many hours of talking in front of the screens and watching replays of matches, so many small touches and compliments, so many moments spent awkwardly questioning if they both felt the same way. Only to be ripped apart as one instant on some viral tv show they barely even asked to be on. "So fucking leave."

In that instant, Isagi didn't know Bachira had already left.

:After The Match:

Bachira knew exactly what Isagi was upset about. He saw the clip after Hiori mentioned it to him in passing ("Oh and I didn't know you two were a couple. That explains a lot.") and he was similarly horrified by people's responses. But there was one key difference between Isagi and Bachira.

Bachira had been through this type of thing before. He had been kicked and bullied and called names for doing things no one else understood. He'd been called weird and gross and abnormal before. And his only response was to keep going. He couldn't stop these people from calling him horrible things and he sure as hell couldn't please them. If some team wanted to drop their offer because he loved someone and they loved him back then so be it. He'd be damned if he stopped showing up for his boyfriend.

So he went to watch his match on the benches. The way he got so riled up during the match, staring at the field like a man on a mission, the amazing goals he scored when no one saw him coming..it all reminded Bachira why he loved Isagi so much in the first place. Just seeing him explode with speed and purpose across the turf got his heart racing and his looks when he blocked someone before stealing the ball were only comparable to a supermodel. The angles he managed to hit the ball at, the spin he put into it, all of it made Bachira proud to be Isagi's boyfriend. He just had to wait until he was back to prove it.

"Isagi! That was amazing!" Shit. Isagi couldn't turn his back this time so he just tried to wave him off. There were showers in the common areas too after all.

"Bachira.." There was nothing more he wanted than to collapse into his arms, his whole body felt like it was burning from the inside out, like he had been running from something his whole life. God, why was he so perfect with his two toned hair and sculpted muscles? Why was he so gentle, wrapping around Isagi like a warm blanket after a hard day? "You're making this so hard."

"What avoiding me after that kiss was caught on TV?"

"Y-you know about that!? Bachira we have to stay apart until this all cools down I- I can't waste my carrer."

Bachira only hugged him tighter. "You think they're gonna stop. But they won't. You're scared, I get it. I kind of am too. But there's no way I'm letting some people online who've never even touched a soccer ball tell me to stop kissing you." Isagi gently pushed away to create just enough distance to stare into his eyes, it was his turn to get teary.

"Fuck, I-I..are you sure?"

"Yeah. I am." And right there, in front of a well placed camera, Bachira kissed Isagi Yoichi, top soccer player and emerging super star. And he was planning to do it again and again, as long as he let him.

#blue lock #bllk #asks #isagi yoichi #bachira #bachira x isagi #bachira x isagi blue lock #bllk fanfic #bluelock

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talenlee · 1 year

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I posted 1,470 times in 2022

That's 899 more posts than 2021!

67 posts created (5%)

1,403 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@jkrockin

@lillyofthewoods

@bace-jeleren

@bisexuhellvevo

I tagged 65 of my posts in 2022

#unreality - 30 posts

#goncharov - 28 posts

#shirts - 2 posts

#city of heroes - 2 posts

#custom magic cards - 2 posts

#how to be - 2 posts

#goncharev - 2 posts

#decemberween 2022 - 2 posts

#don't be a coward about eating spiders lily - 2 posts

#fell off a bed - 1 post

Longest Tag: 129 characters

#i always wonder if scorsese knew about this or if matteo was basically smuggling this stuff in under 'things are weird in russia'

My Top Posts in 2022:

I still don’t know how to tumblr well, I don’t know how to check tags, and I don’t know how to queue things conveniently and I fear any day now a youths is going to find out I don’t know how to do geebleforpz and that’s actually how 99% of you use this site

6 notes - Posted August 30, 2022

hey do you have a hard time writing stories down and also completing things and also like tactile objects you can paw at

here is a suggestion for a thing you can do that involves like, doing something material with your hands:

Get some index cards.

On each card, write something that happens in your story. Maybe it happens a lot maybe it happens once. Maybe it’s a whole ass scene idea, whatever.

Then, you have all your ideas for bits in your story. You can lay them out. You can put them in order. You can look at if some things can’t go next to each other or in that order, so you can rearrange them. And any time you want to write, even a little, you can take one of those cards, and write the thing it tells you about.

And then when you do this, you’ll see sometimes a card needs more or you need another card before it, and that’s okay! It’s totally okay to wobble them around. And it has a physical ritual to it; each card is a little spell you’re casting, summoning the text into the world, and any time you do JUST WHAT IS ON ONE CARD, you are finishing something.

15 notes - Posted November 21, 2022

and for his hubris, the gods cursed him to have thigh-highs that he could roll most of the way up but which would always slide down just a little bit, every time; the curse of sissyfuss

16 notes - Posted August 30, 2022

my cis friends please please please shut up up up and listen to trans commentators when they talk about the trans themes. It’s possible the story is intensely homoerotic and also the whole broken mirror/unmaking theme plays into a powerful trans allegory, and it’s really unbecoming (see what I did there, Andrey) to act like anyone talking about the importance of one themeset to themselves is an infringement on yours.

18 notes - Posted November 21, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

God damnit I don’t like her but this is such a good way to phrase it. don’t make me like Mariella damnnit

https://uquiz.com/quiz/oQFsA5?p=3809618

31 notes - Posted November 21, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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kammartinez · 8 months

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I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea.

In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down.

***

Bouvard and Pécuchet is at heart a simple novel, though its episodes could branch out, fractal-like, into infinity. There is a reason Flaubert never finished it, despite working on it for at least eight years before dying of a stroke at the age of fifty-eight. Originally titled “The Tale of Two Nobodies” (literally “The Two Woodlice”), its protagonists are two copy clerks, who, in the middle of nineteenth-century Paris, meet on a bench on a boulevard. Superficially, they are complementary opposites: one short, one tall; one ascetic, the other sensual. In a deeper sense, they are the same: office workers who perform questionably meaningful tasks while trying to cling to a bare sense of individuality. They strike up a friendship—they are amateurs, dilettantes, believers in progress. They are, in Flaubert’s imagination, men of their time. As they grow bored with their jobs of rote reproduction, they set out to fill their leisure with the pursuit of knowledge:

They learned about discoveries, read prospectuses, and their newfound curiosity caused their intelligence to bloom. On a horizon that receded further each day, they glimpsed things at once strange and wondrous.

(I am relying here on Mark Polizzotti’s translation.) After Bouvard receives an inheritance from a recently deceased uncle, the two men hatch a plan to remove themselves from the city’s bustle and the drudgery of their work. They will use the money to buy a modest estate and live a life of freedom as country squires: “No more writing! No more bosses! Not even rent to pay! For they would own a house of their own! And they would eat chickens from their own farmyard, vegetables from their garden—and would dine with their clogs still on!”

Liberated from the office, they now can do whatever they wish. Why not tend their own garden, as Voltaire’s Candide once exhorted? Well, curious minds that they are, they want to learn the best way to make the garden grow. So they turn to books, and become case studies in the dangers of overestimating one’s own intelligence. If they are gardening, they think, why not turn to agriculture, too, and make better use of their land? Their plants die. Why do the plants die? Because, Bouvard and Pécuchet conclude, they didn’t sufficiently understand the hard sciences—and so their study of chemistry begins. Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

Commentators have remarked on the static structure of the novel: the reader must be willing to hear the same joke told repeatedly in different variations—a joke that punishes its pitiful protagonists over and over. Each time, this odd couple believes that they are close to a breakthrough, or at least to something like fluency, in their newly chosen field. But when difficulties emerge, failure follows quickly: “They gave up.” This futility is matched by, or even enhanced by, their optimism. Each time they surrender, they find something else to become engrossed in. Is this perseverance, or life as a great chain of distractions? And have they tricked themselves into thinking it matters?

***

What is distraction? Maybe it is just the need to be diverted: from the direction you originally set out on, from what it was you thought you wanted to do. After all, to desire something requires projecting yourself into the future—how do you know you’ll still want it when you get there? And along the way there are so many attractions, way stations, spots of time. Even an annoyance can be a pleasure: a fly keeps buzzing around your head while you try to write the next sentence, a ringtone interrupts the movie, and—it’s you. Just this one time you’ve forgotten to turn your phone off. If only the world would stop bothering you, you could finally get down to work.

Bouvard and Pécuchet, you may think, aren’t exactly distracted. In fact, at times they seem nearly maniacal in their thirst for knowledge. But isn’t the idea that] they are potentially interested in everything a kind of curse, something worse than indifference? As fast as they find a passion, they can be drawn away from it. They are avatars of the societal affliction Flaubert called la bêtise—mankind’s universal stupidity. Their curiosity has no staying power—it’s just the dirty runoff of a Zeitgeist that tells them to improve themselves, improve the human race. Their distraction implies a lack of concentration, the mark of a bad student. And they are tragic because they want so much to be good, to get the right answer. All the worse that they’re not reflective enough to see that all the spinning of their wheels will never lead anywhere. (But how could anyone think that and keep going?)

Now that I no longer work a forty-hour-a-week job, I tell many people I am writing a book. It is going along, I say, but slowly. How is it that so many chores, parties, trips, assignments, and plainly wasted hours intervene? Not everyone is distracted from their most cherished goals. But I think everyone is distracted from something—it is desire’s shadow, trailing behind our self-presentations. By beginning anything, we create the possibility of detours.

***

Today, it’s a commonplace to call the internet the ultimate distraction. While putting off writing this piece, itself already a distraction, I maintained a powerful ability to introduce obstacles to its completion. Recently, during another attempt to write, I snapped to my senses hours later, as if smash-cut through time, and realized I had been watching skateboarding videos on YouTube. I have never skateboarded in my life—I am not certain I have ever even attempted to put two feet on a board. I binged a Thrasher series called My War, about skaters who have struggled with a particularly difficult trick and persevered. I watch a skater known as Jaws ollie a massive twenty-five-step staircase in Lyon, tear his MCL, and come back, months later, to essentially jump off the side of a building repeatedly until he lands the trick. There’s no way this can be good for your body, but I find myself strangely compelled by the almost religious dedication. In their pursuit to hurl themselves down large flights of stairs, the skaters are committed.

I close the browser. There is an entire genre of commentary based around the idea that computers or the internet are having a deleterious effect on our attention spans, even on our reading comprehension. We are never present, the platforms having gamed out our interests better than we can ourselves. We contemplate putting our phones in automatically locking pouches before we sit down to dinner. I’m not sure it’s so simple—everywhere, a lot of work seems to be getting done, and every day we seem to be faced with more text to read than ever. I return to my document. I take some disparate phrases from my notebook and start to arrange them into the lines of a poem. Even doing something ostensibly virtuous, I am still attempting escape. I start looking at one of the pdfs I have open in Preview: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

All that we should do is just do something as it comes. Do something! Whatever it is, we should do it, even if it is not-doing something. We should live in this moment. So when we sit we concentrate on our breathing, and we become a swinging door, and we do something we should do, something we must do. This is Zen practice. In this practice there is no confusion. If you establish this kind of life you have no confusion whatsoever.

Ah, turning to Zen—a bit of a cliché, I think, but still. Haven’t I been doing something, even sitting in front of this machine? I’ve at least been the swinging door, letting the rest of existence pass through me.

***

Flaubert did an immense amount of research for Bouvard and Pécuchet. While writing the novel, Flaubert read around fifteen hundred books in all the subjects that his Nobodies attempt and abandon. Perhaps Flaubert, in some sense, became one of la betîse himself, because he would never become a master of agronomy, anatomy, or pedagogy—only a master of the pen, an “homme-plume,” as he called himself in his letters. And the more he reads, the further he gets from completing his universal book.

Even the protagonists, having learned something despite themselves, can’t help but become melancholy, like Flaubert. In their defeat they become strangely sensitive, easily disturbed:

Then their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable to tolerate it. Insignificant things saddened them: newspaper advertisements, a burgher’s profile, an inane comment overheard by chance. And reflecting on what was said in their village … they felt upon their shoulders the weight of the entire world.

In order to write an essay on a new topic, often one has to sail a little in the dark. I am not a Flaubert expert. I can write this essay only as an amateur: the breadth of scholarship on one of the giants of the novel is too daunting for me to do it otherwise—I would have to give up before I began.

Research easily becomes its own distraction. Fiction writers are not unfamiliar with this crisis, having placed their character under a tree, then specifying what kind of tree it is, then wondering if that tree would be in flower at this particular time of year, whether it grows in the particular geographical region where the story takes place. We can become masters of rationalizing the inessential.

There’s a kind of comfort in toying with a large body of knowledge, the way in which you can avoid writing a paper by entering a rabbit hole on Wikipedia—beginning on the front page and finding yourself reading about Byzantine dynasties, or non-Newtonian fluids, or Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century. Maybe this activity, even if it never gets us anywhere, is something closer to play. And without it, at least from time to time, we become dull.

***

Despite all the hand-wringing about distraction, it’s asked less often what it is that what we want to attend to in the first place (or, if answered, numbingly conventional—we want to “be more productive”). Today, being distracted usually has a negative connotation, because it most often means “not working,” whether you’re watching the World Cup from a browser window stashed behind your spreadsheet or you’ve decided to go to the bar on a Tuesday night instead of staying in and writing your three hundred words or polishing your presentation or organizing your sock drawer. A common idea of distraction presupposes that you’re turning away from something more important that you ought to be paying attention to instead. And you ought to be working all the time.

In order to succeed in a hypercapitalist society, we must focus. And to focus usually means to specialize: acquiring a skill, becoming a special version of ourselves—a person with a “bit” that distinguishes us from the cross section of people who otherwise share our Google AdSense data metrics. It can be hard work to become this particular, outward-facing self. The idea returns to me to the old chestnut of Marx’s in The German Ideology, imagining a different way of life:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

We live in nothing close to this hypothetical society, and we may never. But if Marx’s hunter-fisherman-shepherd-critic (an animal lover!) can be really envisioned, it’s clear that he is not distracted. Whatever he does is what pleases him. He is always where he wants to be.

***

There is a curious kind of essay that exists now, that is half-literary, half-personal: My life with author X. A year of reading author Y. The hope is that the personal touch might refresh the dusty pages of the classics—or, more likely, that great literature can buttress a first-person narrative that doesn’t quite cohere into a finished story, not yet quite heroic enough. An earlier version of this essay had more of me in it.

During Bouvard and Pécuchet’s brief turn as authors, they experiment with comedy and pick up Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 A Journey around My Room, a “travelogue” of sitting still (it was written while the author was under house arrest) that blows up mundane details to mock-heroic proportions. They are quickly discouraged:

In this kind of book, it seemed, one must always interrupt the narrative to talk about one’s dog, one’s slippers, or one’s mistress. Such a lack of inhibition charmed them at first, then struck them as imbecilic—for the author erases his work by shining too much light on himself.

It feels good to erase myself, at least for a while. Still, something weed-like in me wants to make myself visible, to be a voice as attractive to you as Flaubert’s was to me.

***

Flaubert rose late, around ten, and took his time in the morning. At eleven, as one of his biographers, Frederick Brown, reports, he fortified himself for his task:

Unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The family then lounged on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them indoors, or climbed a steep path through woods behind their espaliered kitchen garden to a glade dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury that once stood there. Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside orchard, they would argue, joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down the river. Another site of open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century pavilion. After dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel. In June 1852, Flaubert told Louise Colet that he worked from 1 P.M. to 1 A.M. A year later, when he assumed partial responsibility for Liline’s education and gave her an hour or more of his time each day, he may not have put pen to paper at his large round writing table until two o’clock or later.

Among the many things he is famous for, Flaubert is known as a perfectionist, a meticulous craftsman refining the rhythm of each sentence until it possessed the cold polish of a gem. He complained frequently of his slow progress in his letters—the legend is that he wrote at a pace of about five words per hour.

But can all the time spent at the desk truly be accounted for? Is it possible that, despite his protestations, Flaubert was simply … goofing off sometimes? I will leave that question for the experts, but I know I have been prone to say the work was going very slowly when, in reality, I was doing something else.

And wasn’t that time that Flaubert spent before he set down to work, the time of a cup of cold chocolate and then the orchard, watching the sailboats pass by, a very good time after all?

***

Commentators have speculated that Flaubert considered appending to his novel a document he had written some years before, the so-called Dictionary of Received Ideas, a compendium of the banalities and clichés of his time—the nineteenth-century French equivalents of telling people that New York City rent is too damn high or that our country is more polarized than ever. The brilliance of the entries, which are alphabetically arranged, is in their teetering on the brink of being taken seriously:

ILLUSIONS: Claim to have many. Lament having lost them. IMAGES: Poetry always contains too many of them. IMAGINATION: Always vivid. Guard against it. When one has none, denigrate it in others. To write novels, all you need is a little imagination.

Flaubert never finished Bouvard and Pécuchet, but he left notes about how it might end: After a climactic confrontation with their village neighbors, who have put up with their eccentricities for long enough, the two Nobodies finally feel defeated. Exhausted and penniless again, they decide to return to their first love: copying. They “smile when they think of it.” The Dictionary, the fruit of their renewed scrawling, would both demonstrate their “learning” and release them, blissfully, from thought.

According to Flaubert, the use of the dictionary was not just to collect people’s stupidities—instead, it was to make one afraid to speak at all, since whenever you open your mouth, you may immediately find yourself saying something that isn’t your own. It takes immense effort and concentration to become new. Still, one wonders what Flaubert would have done for material if everyone had simply shut up.

***

I’m staring out my window at my desk—surely a timeworn part of the writing process. It is late summer now. A female cardinal, its colors muted but beautiful, has gone away after spending the day as my main attraction. I’m wrapping this up, getting ready to go to dinner. Wondering how this got started, how and why I wrote several thousand words about something I still know rather little about, really. And thinking about everything else that could have been in it (Thoreau, the class where I first read Flaubert, every terrible thing I saw and felt because I came of age “online”) that I left out. I think about how much more I enjoy starting things than finishing them. I’ve always wanted to feel full of potential, more even than needing that potential to be realized, maybe. As you get a bit older, disappointment arrives to fill that space. But it gives things their contours, too—if you’re committed, you chip away against that newly evident limit. Hoping to go a little further next time.

***

In 1875, Flaubert, stymied by his research for and the slow pace of Bouvard and Pécuchet, began a side project. He wrote the stories that would later be collected in the volume known as Three Tales. The first and the most famous is called “A Simple Heart.” It is both connected to and completely unlike his encyclopedic monument to human stupidity. The tale focuses on the sad, slow life of a woman named Félicité, the housemaid of a well-to-do widow in a Norman town much like the one Flaubert grew up in. Félicité has few distractions to speak of, because her life has virtually no pleasure. For a modest sum, she “did all the cooking and the housework, she saw to the darning, the washing and the ironing, she could bridle a horse, keep the chickens well fed and churn the butter.” She toils thanklessly for her mistress for years, appearing, to the bourgeoisie that frequent the house, to be indistinguishable from the furniture. For Félicité, anything that disrupts this backbreaking monotony is something to be savored in memory: the man who tried to court her when she was a young woman, a dangerous encounter with an angry bull in a pasture, even the death of her beloved nephew, a sailor, on the other side of the globe. These detours from daily routine are, in fact, the signature moments of her life.

When Félicité receives a parrot from a neighbor, a gift that reminds of her of her nephew and the New World to which he might have sailed, it is a balm from beyond: something to care for that is not merely a matter of survival, something harboring a mystery, however small. After its death, the parrot is stuffed and becomes a kind of object of religious adoration for Félicité. She imagines that she sees it, her last vision, at the moment of her death.

For a man who spent his time cursing the world for its idiocy, this is a moment of remarkable imaginative sympathy, and of love. The fugitive moments in between our lifelong undertakings, whatever their ultimate worth, may be what we are searching for all along. Maybe we are distracted because we are still learning how to live.

#psychology #writing #reading #books

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kamreadsandrecs · 8 months

Text

***

Even the protagonists, having learned something despite themselves, can’t help but become melancholy, like Flaubert. In their defeat they become strangely sensitive, easily disturbed:

***

It feels good to erase myself, at least for a while. Still, something weed-like in me wants to make myself visible, to be a voice as attractive to you as Flaubert’s was to me.

***

Flaubert rose late, around ten, and took his time in the morning. At eleven, as one of his biographers, Frederick Brown, reports, he fortified himself for his task:

And wasn’t that time that Flaubert spent before he set down to work, the time of a cup of cold chocolate and then the orchard, watching the sailboats pass by, a very good time after all?

***

#writing #reading #books #psychology

0 notes

theroofcat · 1 year

Text

I posted 821 times in 2022

32 posts created (4%)

789 posts reblogged (96%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@temtv

@snowylynxx

@yummygummysouls

@wolfythewitch

@gallusrostromegalus

I tagged 128 of my posts in 2022

#art reference - 10 posts

#roof rambles - 6 posts

#art tutorial - 5 posts

#tw death - 4 posts

#unreality - 3 posts

#technoblade - 3 posts

#tw food - 3 posts

#pokemon violet - 2 posts

#spoilers - 2 posts

#pre tags - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 132 characters

#sqh and mbj bouncing ideas off each other while sqq points out potential plot holes and lbh makes notes on how character would react

My Top Posts in 2022:

Going into Turnabout goodbyes with my only decisive spoiler and clue being that Phoenix cross examined a parrot.

4 notes - Posted July 15, 2022

Fuck it, petition to tell every Dream SMP cc that they are loved because no one got to tell Techno

Fucking spam all their tts, we need to tell them

They are loved

And would not be forgotten

6 notes - Posted June 30, 2022

https://chng.it/hbbJ8zSPfd

Let's make him immortal in the game he loved <3

12 notes - Posted July 3, 2022

When you have to recon almost all of your story because new lore dropped and YOU DIDN’T REALIZE THAT THE OTHER PART OF THE OTP WAS AN ASSHOLE. BITCH I THOUGH ESPRESSO WAS SIMPLY CONCISE LIKE WIZARD. NO, THE MOTHERFUCKER IS AN ASSHOLE, I JUST DIDN’T REALIZE IT BECAUSE I WAS SO FOCUSED ON HOW MADELEINE WAS AN ASSHOLE. BITCH BOTH HAVE TO HAVE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, I THOUGH I WAS ONLY DOING MADELEINE BUT GOD DAMN IT I GOTTA DO BOTH.

31 notes - Posted January 21, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Loopzoop fic idea, where Zenigata is helping Interpol officers with a case about a crime lord. He has his hands in drugs, weapons thief and potentially an entire cash of information for several human traffic rings. Zenigata was asked to join on the idea that he has the most experiences regarding thieves so he could make a plan to break into the crimelords house.

The crime lord works with Interpol, completely in his own hubris of not being able to be touched and mocking them by giving them information they normal would not have been able to get. The main detective for the crime lord wrangling is a gruff older woman with two agents, someone that Zenigata knew in his earlier career who asked him to come as a favor to finally nail down some human traffickers that Zenigata encountered on a Lupin case and was happy to help her get the information, even if it was a little illegal.

The heist goes off and the the detective thanks Zenigata only for the crime lord to come in, absolutely pissed asking how the help the detective got his most valuable card out from under his nose. Zenigata steps in and the crime lord stops in his tracks, although probably not for the reasons that Zenigata wanted.

Because that crime lord takes a step back and looks at pops, who was in a good suit because this was right after the heist at the crime lords party, who has broad shoulders, build like a house, has a handsome voice and just stood up to him. The crime lord is gone, hit in the heart with the most infatuation in the world. Because frankly, Zenigata is handsome and very much eye candy, he just does his job very well.

So the confrontation ends and everything is back to normal.

Except Zenigata keeps getting gifts of varying usefulness, expensive meals being paid for him, good hotels rooms. His wardrobe was replace with formfitting, well tailored, suits that allowed Zenigata good movement. The Lupin case squad was having a crisis and the Interpol interns where having a time watching Interpol officers do a doubt take at Zenigata. Even Fujiko and Lupin both took a double take at the inspector, Lupin more so than Fujiko floored at how Pops looked. Zenigata is a little bit embarrassed that moment with Lupins gangs jaws on the floor gave him the biggest confidence boost.

Nobody knows what is going on, least of all Zenigata, until it finally culminates into Zenigata having to go to a high society party to stop Lupin and the crime lord side tracks him with a dance and a deal.

Come home with the crime lord and he’ll make sure Lupin isn’t a problem.

Now, ignoring the fact that completely insults everything Pops prides himself on as a detective, the crime lord was clearly not talking about putting Lupin in jail. Zenigata obviously refuses, saying that he would never stop chasing Lupin. The crime lord is fairly quick to connect the dots about Zenigata loving Lupin, lets him chase after him.

Afterwards Zenigata can’t seem to stop running into the crime lord, at this point understand what the crime lord wants after the fifth time asking him to dinner. Mean while Lupin is not quite throwing a hissy fit at Pops attention being taken away from him, while Jigen, and Fujiko are genuinely starting to get worried at the crime lords harassment of Pops even thought he’s said no several times.

It gets to the point where the crime lord kidnaps Zenigata, leaving nothing behind to point to where he went, and this was right after a heist by Lupin so no one noticed until Yata tried to call him. Que the task force looking everywhere before giving in a calling the Lupin gang to see if they have Pops. The Lupin gang are on it, checking with the interpol team as they both try to find the detective. Its not until Yata hears an intern talk off hand about how Zenigata helped get the crime lord files that it clicks.

Yata books it back to the room the task force and Lupins gang had been sharing, holding up a tablet article about the crime lord hosting a party, boasting about being the riches man in the world. The crime lord is stand in font of a paint that if you didn’t know it would look like a random mans silhouette.

They had found Zenigata.

They started to set up a plan, with Yata and the Interpol team being the main distraction while the gang stole back Zenigata along with enough evidence to put the crime lord in jail and Yata not so subtly asking them to take all of the crime lords money too.

They get to the party and split up, Fujiko and Jigen finding the money while Goemon found the evidence. Yata and the Interpol group are causing enough of a ruckus, with the paparazzi capturing the drama.

And here Lupin finally finds Zenigata, with his back to him bathed in moonlight and a purple dress shirt with black dress pants that fit him right. Lupin at this point knows he loves Zenigata and finds his breath taken away at Zenigata.

It crushes him when Zenigata looks horrified that he was here, the pot in his stomach growing as Zenitgata told him to run, that the crime lord would kill him.

Que the crime lord showing up with a gun, talking about how Lupin took Zenigata away from him. Lupin roaring back that Zenigata is his own person, not something for him to steal away. Yata with a gun saves the day and everyone come out of it happy. With the task force shipping the crime lord off to jail and looking the other way as the lupin gang takes off.

Fujiko and Jigen manage to find and take almost all of the money, a good 30 billion in total with all the land, paintings, jewels and liquid cash. They both sent Pops a billion each without the other knowing or the gang so they where very flustered when Pops confronted them about it and how Yata forces him to use the money to have good service when on cases.

And after all of this, Zenigata and Lupin meet again, bathed in moonlight and loving each other quietly and without the larger gifts and such.

They all retire with the sotry ending with Zenitgata and Lupin sleeping under the moonlight.

feel free to write this!!! just tag me so I can cheer you on!!

53 notes - Posted May 16, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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eldritchqueerture · 3 years

Text

Point of View - Original Statement Fic

Point of View (5004 words) by LadyNikita Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Original Statement Giver(s) (The Magnus Archives) Additional Tags: Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), this was intended as the eye but evolved into the vast as well, happens, cosmic horror, attempt at Eldritch Madness, unreality, Discussions of pointlessness and meaninglessness, Canon-Typical The Vast Content (The Magnus Archives), from the eps about space, Mentions of Death, Compulsion, discussions of free will (kind of), Dissociation, Panic, Mentions of addiction, Leitner Book (The Magnus Archives), except it was not possessed by Leitner, Pretty Colours <3, Neurodivergent Protagonist, Queer Protagonist, because I can project a bit as a treat, Can Be Read Without Prior Knowledge of the Podcast (I think)

Summary: "Humans crave understanding. They strive towards knowing more and more, that’s what all science is about, isn’t it? To study, to learn and understand; to seek answers to questions. But are we really equipped to handle the answers we seek? Even if we were able to reach them, are our minds advanced enough to grasp the truths about the world we live in? What if there are things just beyond our understanding, lurking in the shadows of reality, peeking into our world just enough to feed on us, on our uncertainty and our pathetic scrambling towards answers that would only bring madness?" --- Statement of Lyria Ellison regarding a different point of view and the dangers of knowledge.

Notes: Hiiiiii <3 I've been reading Lovecraft recently and as much as I hate the dude, The Colour Out of Space gave me so much inspiration that I immediately sat down and produced this in one sitting. I've been meaning to play with the concept of eldritch madness for a while; something about this trope is really appealing to me and I'm really enjoying my attempts at shaping it with words. Lyria is a preexisting OC of mine, I will give some background on her in the end notes because I love her very much. This is a form of practice for me; I'm playing with horror themes and I'd like to get acquainted with them to better incorporate them into my overall writing. Therefore I will accept constructive criticism if anyone wants to give it, but only in the form of DMs, either on Tumblr (your-queer-vampire-dm) or on Discord, if we know each other through a server. All of the warnings I think should be mentioned are in the tags, but if you think something should be added then please tell me!

Date: May 10th , 2018

Name: Lyria Ellison

Subject of experience: A different point of view and the dangers of knowledge.

—

How do you start telling a story that changed your heart, your mind, and your soul so profoundly that you can barely still function in a society? How do you say all that without sounding borderline insane? Nobody knows what I’ve seen, what I’ve been through. I know they would all say I’ve hallucinated it all and should seek treatment. But I know it won’t help. I know… I know so much now. Too much and not enough. Never enough. I know what happened was real . I don’t have proof so I’m guessing you won’t believe me either, but I need to tell someone about it. So I might as well tell you.

My name is Lyria Ellison and I’m a neuropsychology major. Ex-major, I should say. I dropped out after… Yeah. I dropped out; there’s not much point in continuing studying things about the feeble, insignificant human brain. Utterly pointless venture.

Humans crave understanding. They strive towards knowing more and more, that’s what all science is about, isn’t it? To study, to learn and understand; to seek answers to questions. But are we really equipped to handle the answers we seek? Even if we were able to reach them, are our minds advanced enough to grasp the truths about the world we live in? What if there are things just beyond our understanding, lurking in the shadows of reality, peeking into our world just enough to feed on us, on our uncertainty and our pathetic scrambling towards answers that would only bring madness?

Just a year ago, I was convinced I was going to finish my degree. I was so passionate about it too, eager to learn more and more, to research and seek knowledge. Curious and fascinated by the world around us. What a foolish thing it was to give into that drive. My mind was open to the supernatural, although I always approached it scientifically; I never said the supernatural existed, but I also never said it didn’t. It was plausible; all in all, every scientist must accept that there is still a vast amount of knowledge we don’t have about the world.

The ignorance was a blessing. But I shall not get ahead of myself.

It started around December last year; my dad had died, and my girlfriend, Shawala, and I were clearing out his house. There wasn’t really anyone else to do it; my mother had passed a couple years prior, I had no siblings, and extended family was out of the picture as well; and my dad had gathered a lot of things in his adventurous life; he was a traveller, and he loved the world, loved learning about it, just like me. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with it all; my dad meant a lot to me back then, and Shawala proved an excellent support at that first shock. She promised to do some first view assessments of the ground floor, while I went to scope out how things looked in the attic.

It’s always either basements or attics, isn’t it? I used to read horror, Lovecraftian was my favourite – how ironic, isn’t it? How stupid . How utterly ignorant. The hubris of the human race at its finest.

Anyways, the attic was half-lit from the small windows in the roof, and dust was swirling in the faint light of the afternoon sun. It was cold here, but I didn’t pay much mind; the house was old, and it wasn’t surprising that there was draft. To say the space was cluttered would be an understatement; I could barely walk around the numerous boxes, old furniture, crates, and overflowing bookshelves; all of which made something in my chest curl tight, bringing tears to my eyes. I steered my steps towards the nearest bookshelf; I’ve always been a bookworm, fascinated by nearly any tome I came across; I’ve been reading popular science books since I was eight. So naturally, I was drawn to the books, taking huge steps above the cardboard boxes and careful not to hit anything else.

The books were old, of course, and dusty. Some of them had loose pages, and I treated them very gently, almost reverently. I have a little bit of a bookbinder streak, and I decided I would take them home and try to put them back together. As I rifled through them, I saw they pertained to a vast variety of subjects, from poetry, drama, and history, to science, metaphysics, and maths. The deeper I looked into this stunning collection, the more reverence rose in my heart; at my fingertips I had the oldest and the biggest accumulation of knowledge I had ever seen. I saw some books dated back even two hundred years ago.

At that point Shawala called me to check if I was alright. I put the book I had in my hands back and my knuckles brushed against the black leather cover of the next one on the shelf. I felt pleasant tingling in my palm at the touch and my heart leaped at the prospect; I didn’t know why – the book seemed ordinary enough on the shelf and there was no title on its spine.

I sometimes wonder if I could have just left it there and gone downstairs; chosen to come back later and then maybe, it wouldn’t have enticed me as it did. If, by that point, I had had any choice left on the matter.

Alas, intrigued by the book, I placed my palm on the spine and took it out. The leather was soft and smooth, probably sheep, with familiar subtle grains all over the texture. I remember it striked me as odd that it was warmer than the rest of the books in the drafty attic, but I shrugged it off. The front cover had a title, small but visible in the centre, etched in gold – Punctum Visus .

I, by all means, cannot read or speak Latin, but I figured it was something to do with vision. I opened the book, an unknown anticipation buzzing in my stomach. The pages were worn and old, their texture was slightly rough but pleasant under my fingertips; as I opened the front page, I saw the title again, this time in thick but still elegant, black letters, and the smell came up to my nostrils.

I tried to describe it in my head countless times after. I always loved the smell of old books, and I knew it very well, so it came to me as a surprise to realize it wasn’t the only smell I could feel from the book. It was… cold, somehow, distant but prickling at my nose, a little bit the way peppermint tastes. It reminded me of the night sky and distant stars somehow. The smell awakened an unease within me, as I couldn’t quite place what it was and why it seemed so weird , but it wasn’t by any means unpleasant. It was… enticing. Like a promise of a mystery.

I breathed it in again through my nose, closing my eyes, and for a moment I lost all feeling in my body. I was untethered and immaterial, somewhere in deep darkness that seemed to envelop me whole. It felt cold on my mind, stretching it thoughtlessly in the empty vastness, and I saw distant flickering lights of stars. Before I could form a coherent thought, I was back in myself, panting and shaking, staring at the front page of the Punctum Visus . I looked around with shaky breaths; the attic looked the same, and Shawala’s steps on the stairs reached my ears, with her voice calling my name. A shiver passed down my spine, causing goosebumps to bloom on my skin; was it the draft, the dread, or the excitement I couldn’t tell.

I knew I had to read this book, no matter what it took for me to do so.

I took it home, almost forgetting about the rest of the books upstairs. It had spent the next month laying in my room, as I dealt with the formalities and moving the rest of things that weren’t sold from the house either to my place or to charity. After the day we left the house for the last time, I collapsed in my bed, exhausted, but instead of closing, my eyes fell on the book unassumingly waiting on my nightstand.

A surge of excitement passed through me, waking me right up. I sat up and reached for the book. It was still warm; I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad, but warm it was. I think it made me subconsciously assign it more… being? Like, even before I knew anything, I somehow subconsciously accepted that it was more than just an object; that it was, in a sense, alive on its own. I brushed my fingers on the cover, feeling the texture of the leather and the etching of the letters. In the meantime during this month I had checked the meaning of the title – Point of Sight; a position from which a thing is or is supposed to be viewed. It makes so much sense now.

But then I didn’t know what dangers it held; or I didn’t want to think about them. I do remember feeling anxious, my hands trembling every time I opened the cover, but it was so mingled with exhilaration of the certainty I was discovering something important that I must have disregarded it. As I turned the pages, I wasn’t surprised to find the text in Latin; though I still felt a pang of frustration that it meant I couldn’t read it for now. I rifled through the pages, looking curiously at the letters that formed words yet unattainable to me. There was a hunger inside of me; a hunger to Know. As I turned the pages past various symbols, illustrations of the constellations, and of Earth, I determined it must be some sort of a metaphysical work. The point of view on the world around us.

Normally I just skim through works like this and leave them. While they are an interesting read sometimes, they’re not my favourite genre and, looking objectively, putting in the effort of learning a whole language just for the sake of reading a treatise on the meaning of cosmos by an unknown author seems strange at best. But somehow it seemed obvious to me that I had to read it. It called to me, sang into a part of my being that begged to be filled, promising knowledge that would finally leave me satisfied. I know now that it’s impossible. Once you’ve tasted the hunger for knowing, you will never find satisfaction; it’s like an addiction. You just crave more and more, and the knowledge never ends. After a certain point you know too much and when it all connects, when it starts to make sense… you slip. I didn’t know that, even though maybe I should have. I didn’t know what those things I was feeling meant then and I didn’t stop to question them; I gave into it as soon as it touched me. I was stupid.

What followed were a busy couple of months. Every waking moment that wasn’t spent keeping up the pretence of being interested in my major (back then I only thought it a brief hyperfixation, of course, and wouldn’t have called it a pretence at all), I was learning Latin online or staring into the incomprehensible words on the pages. This period of my life is a blur; I remember my friends checking up on me if I was alright, since I wasn’t particularly social anymore. Shawala got progressively more worried, but it fully escaped my mind to care. I know that staring thoughtlessly at the book took up more and more of my time; once, I remember, I returned from my classes at three PM and took the book out; when I came back to myself it was well past midnight. That’s when I started to feel truly uneasy about it. It was the second half of April; I looked back on what I’ve been doing these past months and this cold dread started creeping up to my throat. I realized I didn’t know why I wanted to read the book so much and I remembered the “vision” or the hallucination I had that first time in my dad’s attic. I had set it aside completely as unimportant, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why. I started shaking and theorizing in my head about the book being able to influence my mind somehow, to control it. Had my actions not been my own? How much of it was my own will and how much was the book? Was it even possible for it to influence me like that; could it be that it was supernatural in some way?

The house became cold, unnaturally so. It was dark and all the windows were closed, but a chill draft managed to find its way into the corridor I was in anyway. I sank to the floor and hugged my knees, trembling in panic. I was all alone in the flat, everyone I knew was surely already asleep in their homes, and I was small and weak in the face of something that maybe could have controlled my mind. I suddenly became aware of the leatherbound book in my hand, and I threw it along the corridor at the front door with a whimper, as far away from me as possible. The book thumped against the door, then the floor, and opened on a random page.

I’ve read enough horrors. I knew that the page would be significant, and that knowledge made me sob and hug my knees tighter. I didn’t know what was happening; I felt like I’d just woken up from a months-long dream… and perhaps I was right. The recent past felt alien.

I felt tears sting my eyes and that’s when the smell reached me. Again that mixture of old paper and peppermint cold, distantly sweet but freezing the blood in my veins. My breath came in ragged and shallow, and tears streamed down my face as I stared at the open book that was calling me in an inaudible whisper. The logical side of my mind was trying desperately to make sense of it, to assign the dissociative feeling to my father’s death and yeah, it was plausible, but somehow it just didn’t feel right. The whispers sounded again, swirling around my head, the golden sound almost touching the back of my neck, making me wince. It was enticing and promising, but this time, I felt terror instead of excitement. Disregarding how my mind was trying to rationalize the situation, I knew the book was cursed somehow. I knew that I was its victim. And I knew that I would not be strong enough to resist it.

I don’t know how much time I sat there, trembling, and sobbing into my knees, before I calmed down from the panic and decided I had to do something. I had to find out what this book was and how it found itself into my dad’s library. I couldn’t remember seeing anything in his diaries that would mention it at all, but then again, I didn’t read them all cover to cover. On wobbly legs I carefully made my way back to my room and searched the Internet until the sun started peeking out of the window; I found nothing about any book titled Punctum Visus . I tried all the libraries that I’d known of, that had their assortment online, all the research databases; nothing.

So, at the crack of dawn, with a fast-beating heart, I stood in the door of my room, staring out into the corridor, where the book still lay by the front door, unmoving. The golden strings of a wordless melody made it to my ears; it promised an explanation; that this time if I looked close enough, I would find what I was looking for.

What was I looking for?

Where else could I find the answers if not in the book itself?

I could feel its cold fingers slowly wrap around my mind, steering me to come closer. It called me with a hypnotising voice that awakened all the red signals in my brain, telling me to run and hide, but I didn’t. The voice meant danger, but I knew it also meant knowledge.

Dangerous knowledge. The pull dragged me through the corridor step by step; I hadn’t been fighting it as strongly as I could have had and I was about to start, since I was getting closer to the book, but suddenly I felt the chill of the influence let go, hovering close but out of reach. It was still compelling me to come, to Look, but I could move my own limbs. I had a choice to make.

Knowledge of danger. Did I believe my own warning thoughts that I would regret looking into the book? Did I take my own logical, rational side seriously? Was I ever good at resisting my own impulses?

I’ve never been addicted to anything, but then again, I never really had the opportunity, as it were; my friends were more of a no-alcohol types and I really ever smoked cigarettes once. I’ve never seen drugs in real life. So who’s to say if I’m not an addictive personality? And this, this was addictive. The thrill of mystery, the exhilarating process of learning, the anticipation of the answers.

Was it ever really my choice?

No supernatural force guided my steps that night; no cold fingers made me kneel next to the book and carefully cradle it in my arms, looking at the page with a shaky breath and tears in my eyes, as if I was coming back home like the prodigal son. But I’m sure it was by some paranormal means that this time I could understand the text on the pages.

I honestly don’t remember what it said. As I read the unfamiliar words, the meaning presented itself in my mind, not entirely unlike that first “vision” I had in the attic; as soon as I started reading I knew that I had made the choice and there was no turning back. That cold draft enveloped me, sat on my skin, and started to bite; I felt that smell again, stronger than ever before, something intangible but unmistakably inhuman . It was then that I realized that’s what had felt wrong to me about the smell since the beginning. It was inferior and alien. My hands started shaking as my eyes, glued to the text, moved now on their own down the page, drinking the words in. I was terrified out of my mind, but the pleasant tingling along my nerves was back, the anticipation of the promised understanding.

My mind was drowned with the tide of knowledge. This was just a prologue; a true discovery would require preparation, but I was almost ready. The voice said I was chosen, that I was a perfect candidate to bring It what It needs and that I would be rewarded. I cried tears of amazement and horror at the sheer scope of the voice – it seemed to encompass the entire world. I couldn’t comprehend it, but I didn’t know then that it was a blessing. I wanted to know, I craved to know what It was and how I could be of use to something so powerful, so huge. Divine. That was a word that crossed my mind, as much as I don’t like that. I don’t like many things, but I can’t change any of them.

The voice said I’m on the right path. I would Know and Understand. First, I needed to do something. As It told me what that was, doubt started to creep up to my mind. What was I doing? What was happening? How could this be real?

I came to on the floor by my front door, the cursed book in hand, with a tear-stained face and a bloody nose.

I knew what I had to do to get ready and, as I calmed down and went over everything in my head, I was surprised by how trivial it was. Honestly, by this point I was kind of afraid It would tell me to hurt someone, so I was glad this was just about reading a bunch of words in a specific location at a specific time. I was aware of the fact that this was most probably a ritual, and I was quite apprehensive. I kept arguing with myself in my head, over and over whether I should follow through, but deep down I knew that I would, no matter what I told myself. This part, I think, scared me the most; how compelling the promise of knowledge was, how reverently I’d found myself thinking of the book and its owner (which I assumed was the voice), how fanatical some of my thoughts sounded. I’ve never been religious, never really felt idealistic either. I was always focused on facts, on the here and now. Can knowledge be an ideal? Can you be a fanatic of Seeing and Knowing?

How much had I changed since I’d found Punctum Visus in that old attic.

I found a good, quiet spot, on the north-west side of the New Forest National Park near Southampton. I told no one about this, deeming it unimportant. I would come back after my big discovery, I would explain everything. I laugh at myself now; at my naivety.

The night of April 28 th was clear, and the starry sky looked back at me as I parked my car on the road in the forest and locked it. I tied a piece of a long red string to the wheel, not to lose my way in the forest, and started to walk forward. I held the book close to my chest, as if it could protect me from the dark, eerie outlines of the trees, swaying gently on the wind and whatever the darkness around me held. I didn’t light the torch; the moon was nearly full, bathing everything in its gentle light, and besides, for some reason it seemed that the crude yellow light would somehow break the sanctity of what I was about to do. I could see the ground in front of me and managed to lose sight of my car and everything else besides trees pretty fast.

I stopped when I found a small clearing. The moon was high in the sky, shining down on me like a big eye; I didn’t know why this comparison seemed the most fitting, but it did. I took a deep breath, feeling a chill plant little dots all over my skin, making my hairs stand on end. The wind died down and the trees froze, as if in anticipation. I felt something watching me closely; I was not alone here anymore.

The realization made my breath catch in my throat and the last streaks of sanity broke through my thick skull. Run! Drop the book and run! I didn’t. My hands trembled, my muscles tensed, and I stood there, frozen with fear as something stared at me, seemingly for eternity. Something bigger than me, bigger than anything I have ever seen was watching me, waiting. My eyes dropped to the book in my arms. The black leather was warm, as always, but this time I felt a pulsating sensation from it. A heartbeat.

I screamed. The book landed discarded on the ground, and I stumbled backwards and tripped, landing in the grass as well. It was cold and wet, and it glistened with something in the faint moonlight. At first I took it for water, but upon closer inspection I saw it was the grass itself that glittered – a shy rainbow, glowing iridescently in an impossible way. I froze, stunned, for I have never seen such colours before. It seemed utterly alien, something unfitting for the human eye to see; simultaneously beautiful and horrifying.

As I looked around, I noticed that everything alive in the forest – the trees, the grass, the bushes, the plants – had taken on that iridescent mixture of faint light that prickled my eyes and sent a shiver of terror down my spine. It was beautiful, utterly gorgeous in a way that nothing a human eye can perceive could be. It was horrifying in how different, alien, and other it was. My senses could tell this is not of the Earth; not of this reality, not of this world; everything in me that still had common sense tried to recoil from the inferiority of this magnificence and the danger it brought, but I had abandoned common sense a while back. Maybe even when I touched the book for the first time. I stared then, breathless and trembling, at this scenery as if from a fairy tale and decided to lock away my rational thoughts. I wanted to See, to Know; I wanted to experience and if this was the death of me then hell, it was a pretty good way to go. To behold such a sight, I thought, was a reward in and of itself.

Of course, I had no idea what any of it meant. I slowly rose to my knees and patted the ground down until I felt the book. It still pulsated with this heartbeat and the letters etched in the leather glowed with golden light. My hands were sweaty, and I didn’t know whether I was shivering from fear or the cold. I opened the book on the first page.

What I saw was not what I had expected. I remembered that the first page, after the titular one, was the beginning of the introduction, that much I had understood, but now it was a big picture in black and white; a night sky, with an almost full moon and strewn with stars. It was a shot from the ground and treetops could be seen at the edges of the picture. As the book swayed in my hands, the stars glittered, and the perspective shifted ever so slightly, as if it was in 3D. Stricken by a surge of dread and cold certainty, I looked up. My suspicion was right – the picture in the book depicted the exact image that was now above me. I gasped quietly and looked down at the book—

And this is where things started to really go horribly, horribly wrong.

The book was gone. What’s more, the ground was gone too and suddenly everything was not where it should have been. I blinked but it did nothing to ease the dizziness; and when I composed myself enough to register what I was seeing I froze, the most intense horror I have ever experienced crushing my body from all sides and inside out.

I realized that I was Seeing. I was finally Seeing, and I Understood it all.

I don’t know how to convey in words what I saw. I don’t believe it’s possible; humans were never made to see and understand such things. I should have never touched the book, I should have never asked for knowledge. All my life I believed that knowledge was the point; it was a tool, and it was power. I don’t know what I think anymore. I think some knowledge should always be hidden because we were not made to know everything. We can’t , it’s physically impossible for us to comprehend.

For one moment in my life. For one moment I became something else, and I saw the world in the way It sees the world. For one moment I shared a mind with an eldritch being, a thing that is Fear itself, and I saw the Earth through Its Eye. I can’t… I can’t tell you just how horrible it is. How… How meaningless; we’re all intertwined things, guided by strings of web that lead us through life, and we’re all connected in this maze of fear . We’re not individuals; we’re not special. We don’t have souls and none of our experiences matter. We’re just fear. These… These entities are a part of all of us. They’re our fear and they live inside of us, inside of every living creature that can feel fear. Can you comprehend that? How can you be sure you are yourself when there’s a cosmic entity, a power as old as life itself, living you ? And no one has any idea. Nobody knows and if I tell someone they’ll think I’m crazy. Sometimes I think I’m crazy. But deep down I know what I saw. I know it was real. And I’m terrified. I’m terrified because I know that this Being of eyes that I became a part of watches everything I do. I feel Its presence here very strongly, and I guess it makes sense. It will never leave me. It’s a part of me, just like the rest of them; just like they’re all a part of every one of you, yet you have no idea. But I know. And I know I’m all alone with that knowledge, the knowledge that I can’t comprehend, but I know I could in that one moment. It’s a very lonely place to be and I’m scared.

I’m scared as I have never been before; this fear doesn’t leave me anymore. Every second of every day I’m aware I’m watched by something as great as cosmos. I’m aware I shared my mind with that being and it makes my skin crawl.

I don’t know what to do now, but I don’t expect any advice from you. I’m leaving the book with you, as proof. Its heart doesn’t beat anymore, and I’ve seen what I was supposed to.

Don’t read it.

Notes: If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving me a comment!! For people interested in a little bit of background: Lyria is a D&D character I have created that still awaits her chance to play in a campaign. She's an arcane scholar that has a dark little secret of actually being a warlock of a being she doesn't know a lot about. She's in love with knowledge and she seeks to learn about her powers as well as the world around her. I'm currently DMing a Ravenloft campaign and I just couldn't miss the fact how much potential for a corruption arc she has. Then I listened to TMA and I was like, she would definitely become the Avatar of the Beholding.

#i discovered you can copy tags straight from ao3 #ive been using that site for how many. 5 years now #:|#anyways #tma #the magnus archives #tma original statement #cosmic horror #niki.writes #lyria elerieth #goes in my oc tag because thats technically an au #im really happy with this one guys!

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hoochieblues · 3 years

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100 Days of Writing: Day 14

Do you have figures/creatures of folklore in your WIP? If not, can you think of something that would fit?

@the-wip-project

Tricky one to answer with fantasy, bc I feel like it depends whose folklore you consider: are concepts that diegetically have their reality questioned counted, or are we looking more at things we’d understand as irl folklore? Is a werewolf still a werewolf if it’s a symbolic state transformation that - in the world of the story - appears as consciousness transference (like GRR Martin used warging) or is shamanic practice/”magic system” handwaving not folklore?

Short answer is that I really dig exploring things in stories that are true in multiple different ways. What first pulled me in about Dragon Age was the moral ambiguity and the whole ‘our organised religion talks about the big bad in terms of sin and hubris but, in actuality, the big bad will literally erupt out of the ground and eat you’ thing.

Long answer below the cut.

My fic writing adventures explore that concept, bc a big part of the FoD universe is my Tabris challenging the belief system she grew up with - one that taught her a ton of value judgements about race, identity, sexuality, and what it means to be “good” and why you’re told to be. Some she unlearns, some she struggles with, some she keeps, but folklore - and the point at which reality and myth intersect - is a recurring them. Also, yes, obvs there are dragons and werewolves and all sorts, bc it’s a DA fic.

In original fiction, I like the same things. One thing I’m currently trying to finish is a novel(la?) in which the protagonist spends time with a non-linear-time alien species thought to be extinct/unreal, and they have to unpick what is and is not real, and “when” it happened. The blending of (made-up) folklore and ‘facts’ is super fun, especially looking at the irl mythology that influenced me.. including but not limited to the fae (for wonky passage of time and perceptions of reality), and werebeasts (for physical transformation and sexuality) but also incorporating at real ways folklore and particularly orally transmitted history has been “lost”/destroyed by colonialist/settler societies and then coopted and discredited.

So I feel like folklore is an ever present thing, because some aspect of what ‘monsters’ are is always within us and always a part of how we see the world... or how it sees us, if we’re unlucky.

#100daysofwriting #writeblurble

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absolxguardian · 4 years

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T H E F E A R S

I mean what I said. These things, these forces, they are our fear. Deep fears. Primordial. Always looking for ways to grow and spread.

I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works.

And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour.

Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like -

An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.

Sometimes you impulse buy a kid’s rock painting set from Micheal's of all places and end up using it to make sigils for all of the Fears.

Close ups under the cut (also poetic descriptions drawing from my headcanons about the Fears).

The End. Death. Terminus.

The oldest of all the fears. All other Fears are simply layers separating the fear from it’s source- the fear of death. It was created because of fear, and fear was created because of it. It is the end, the stopping of it all, the force we fight against every day with every breath.

Primary Avatars: The Reapers/Death, The Sybil (Oliver Banks), and The Speaker (”Jane Doe”)

Ritual: It has no need of one, all threads must be cut one day.

Allies: They are all its children.

The Hunt.

The End’s firstborn. It was born in the time before sapience, when fear was simpler. But that was still enough. It is a fear for animals, of being hunted down and killed, of being prey.

Primary Avatars: The Hunters and predators [mundane].

Ritual: The Everchase

Allies: The Flesh, The Slaughter, The Desolation, and The Eye.

Enemies: The Vast and The Buried.

The Vast. The Falling Titian.

The child of The End and the twin of The Buried. It began as an animal’s fear, of the fall that shatters your bones of the sea you cannot cross for it is not yours. But with sapience, it evolved. It is falling, heights, lighting, and the Not Yours that surrounds Yours. But also a human’s own insignificance and the true emptiness of the world. It is too much space.

Primary Avatars: The Fairchild family and The Lightning’s (Michael Crew).

Ritual: The Awful Deep

Allies: The Lonely, The Flesh, The Eye, and The Dark.

Enemies: The Buried.

The Buried. The Center. Choke. Too Close I Cannot Breathe

The child of The End and the twin of The Vast. It did not evolve as much as its despised sibling. It is suffocation, and the dirt that fills lungs. But with humans, it became more complex, more existential, as it always does. Those brains can find more in caves than suffocation or the dark. While even an animal fears a small space in case they get trapped and fall to a hunter, only humans could create constructs to bind and crush each other with. It is when there is too little space.

Primary Avatars: The Pit and The Gravedigger (Hezekiah Wakely)

Ritual: The Sunken Sky.

Allies: The Lonely, The Dark and the Web.

Enemies: The Vast, The Flesh, The Eye, and The Slaughter.

The Dark. Mister Pitch. The Forever Blind.

A direct child of The End. The fear of the dark- for it is scary because we cannot know. We cannot see the threats that may hid in its embrace. With the life-giver being a star, it has come to oppose all life and heat. It wishes for blind eyes.

Primary Avatars: The Church of the Divine Host, The Rayner, and the Black Star.

Ritual: The Extinguished Sun.

Allies: The Vast, The Buried, The Stranger, The Spiral, and The Dark.

Enemies: The Eye.

The Desolation. The Lightless Flame. The Devastation. Blackened Earth.

The End’s child. While it sure does love the destruction aspects of fire, it is not just fear of burning. It is the fear of pain and the fear of loss- of power, possessions, or loved ones. It lacks the motivation of The Hunt or the Flesh and destroys more than just lives, unlike The Slaughter.

Primary Avatars: The Church of the Lightless Flame, The Flame’s Messiah (Agnes Montague), and natural disasters [mundane]

Ritual: The Scoured Earth.

Allies: The Slaughter, The Hunt, and the Buried.

Enemies: The Flesh and The Corruption.

The Lonely. Forsaken. The One Alone.

The End’s youngest solo child and a fear for humans alone. It is the complex webs of society on top of a simple fact- you need the pack to survive. Not to mention that the simple physical brains of humans abhor isolation as well. Isolation, both emotional and physical, strip away one’s mental and physical wellbeing and often driving them to drugs. And simple physical isolation will strip away one’s connection to reality itself, so The Lonely feasts on that unraveling mind just aware enough to fear the fall.

Primary Avatars: The Luckas family.

Ritual: The Forsaken.

Allies: The Buried, The Vast, and The Spiral.

The Flesh. The Meat.

The child of The Hunt and its successor. It is a fear for animals, but those that never know freedom or a game to try to escape. Their path is set, they are the animals raised and slaughtered by humans for meat, with no risk to themselves. They are to be eaten their flesh in a form unconnected to their own appearance, consumed by those who know not how to prepare them. While humans are not raised like that, their separation from The Hunt makes them quiver at the idea of being consumed in any form. With all their knowledge in this era, humans are coming to understand that they may be no different than animals- just organic molecules animated by electricity. The Flesh also feasts on that philosophizing.

Primary Avatars: The Eurachist [mundane] and slaughterhouse workers [mundane].

Ritual: The Last Feast.

Allies: The Hunt, The Corruption, The Desolation, The Stranger, and The Spiral.

Enemies: The Slaughter and The Buried.

The Slaughter. Violence. War

The child of The Desolation and The Hunter. It the anticipation of uncertain violence. It is violence that isn’t committed for the direct benefit of the murder and/or specifically because of the victim. It is found in both frenzied killers and in the steely, impersonal murder of armies. It rules over all the fear that comes from war, and eats heartily from all the conflicts humans keep creating all by themselves.

Primary Avatars: War Ghosts, The Piper/War, and soldiers [mundane].

Ritual: The Risen War.

Allies: The Desolation, The Hunter, and The Web.

Enemies: The Flesh and the Buried.

The Eye. The Beholding. Ceaseless Watching.

The Hunter’s least favorite child. An animal fears being watched because it means a predator may be observing, but humans have taken that fear as an end onto itself. It is watching, recording, and servailing. It feasts on the scraps of other Fears, reliving the trauma of their victims.

Primary Avatars: The Archive (The Magnus Institute), The Archivist (Jonathan Sims), and The Heart (Elias Bouchard)

Ritual: The Watcher’s Crown

Allies: The Web and The Hunt.

Enemies: The Dark, The Stranger, and The Spiral.

The Stranger. I Do Not Know You.

The child of The Dark, sapience extending the unknown to the other. It is the fear of what is not quite human. But the fear of the humans that are not quite you? Humans spend so much time creating reasons and convincing others to fear eachother. So much mundane fear of the other exists that The Stranger could survive on that alone.

Primary Avatars: The NotThem/dopplegangers, The Circus of the Other, The Deliverers, and bigots [mundane].

Ritual: The Unknowing.

Allies: The Dark and The Spiral.

Enemies: The Eye.

The Spiral. The Twisting Deceit, Esmentiaras, It Is Not What It Is.

The Dark’s other child, for one cannot know if one cannot trust their senses. It is the fear of madness, of unreality. It induces this fear by warping reality, leading its victims to believe they are the ones at fault.

Primary Avatars: The Distortion (once Micheal, now Helen Richardson) and The Worker in Clay (”Gabriel”).

Ritual: Our Great Twisting.

Allies: The Dark, The Stranger, The Web and The Flesh.

Enemies: The Eye.

The Corruption. Filth. Crawling Rot.

The child of The Flesh (but born before The Flesh) and The End. It is a collection of things that are unrelated in reality (bugs, rotten food, poison, mold, decay, and disease), but are associated in the mind of humans lacking knowledge- death without a clear cause and corpses.

Primary Avatars: The Hive (Jane Prentiss) and Pestilence (John Amherst).

Ritual: Unknown.

Allies: The Flesh and The Web.

Enemies: The Desolation.

The Web. The Spider. Mother of Puppets.

The child of The Corruption and The Buried. It is the fear of being restrained, but in a more metaphorical sense than The Buried. It is the fear of manipulation, being controlled, and that your will is not your own. And, from its other parent, spiders.

Primary Avatars: The Binding Table, The Spider Horde, and The Patriarch (Raymond Fielding).

Ritual: This world is almost identical to the Web’s, so why bother?

Allies: The Corruption, The Spiral, The Eye, and The Slaughter, The Lonely, The Buried, and The Dark.

Enemies: The Flesh and The Lonely (their relationship is complicated).

The Extinction. The Terrible Change. The Future-Without-Us.

The child of The Stranger and The End, this Fear is still emerging. It developing as humans confront their old hubris about the end times. It is the end of the world, but with no holy rapture. It is an end that isn’t the end of all life, just the end of them. It is the fear of being replaced by another species. It is the fear of how they will ruin themselves. It is the collapse or radical change of society. It is taking all forms of change from the dominions of the other Fears and bringing it into its own.

Primary Avatars: The emergence of true AI [mundane], climate change [mundane], and nuclear weapons [mundane].

Ritual: Many theorize that it seeks to end the world as it is known and replace humans with another sapient species to begin the cycle again.

Allies: The Stranger and The Desolation.

Enemies: Many avatars seek to disrupt its emergence as it would shatter the balance between the powers. They also fear the possibility that The Extinction wouldn’t repopulate the world with a new sapience species right away, setting them back eons.

#tma #the magnus archives #the fears #my art #my writings #rock art

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madamhatter · 4 years

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diverse-hearts inquired: ❛ can’t you see, what you’re doing to me? ❜ - chu angst for ships sentence prompts | accepting | @diverse-hearts continued from this prompt/spin-off plot written by mira.

A/N: Reader’s discretion is advised. Sophie’s inner thoughts (and subject matters in BSD + plot points in HMC) will allude to human experimentation).

Nicotine plastered her palate for the past two months. Suspiration for the young woman, partially, resulted in a cloud of smog choking out from her throat. However, having a cigarette dangling from her gritted teeth wasn’t ever her fashion. The taste and scent of someone else’s regretful, nerve-ticking smoking clung to her clothing and respiratory system.

As kindly as the habit-holder was in opening windows and turning his head at every opportune moment, the frequency spiked upon the most recent and inopportune news. A hard grit of a cigarette against his teeth, blazing azure eyes obscure and chill in the moment when together they shared solitude.

Distraught struck his chords whenever their initials conversations referenced their “arrangement.” As lightly as it could be put, the heiress didn’t shed her bluntness for those moments. Yet, hesitance overwhelmed her as she bit down her tongue, only speaking of two things, amicability and tolerance, towards the shared future.

Perhaps it was the recoil of what little she comprehended in his reactions. Was he not infuriated, if not more, about his freedom being stripped? For any affiliates within the organization or friends outside of the Port Mafia’s association, the executive hadn’t shied from his own moral weakness to his hubris, wealth, and dalliances.

Was fidelity to the Port Mafia that blinding to these sacrifices? Was there nothing wrong with these arrangements as she saw it? Was there not a better option to be stuck with, of all people? ...Or was she too presumptuous to think this upcoming commitment would impede any of his bad habits?

Why was she hung up over it when she expressed it differently? She should’ve swallowed her pride and be thankful for these conditions. It could be utterly worse.

He has a name, Sophie. Consciousness reminds her, refusing to drag herself longer into the dissociative state of her memories. He didn’t do anything to be referred to so loosely and detached. This wasn’t any of his doing.

Chuuya Nakahara.

A slow glance over her shoulder, shadows swallowed the entire penthouse. The slim figure of the Port Mafia executive not too far from her, shiny expensive black shoes moving and advancing towards her. The conversation before led down the steep slope of unanswerables and undesirables Sophie and Chuuya never wanted to know. Argument imploded and she refused his questions, preferring cold, soaked clothes rather than her raw, bleeding heart exposed.

As for how they ended up once again here, it was simple.

The day now was drenched in the heavy afternoon rain. All seemed lost when the storm clouds gathered, but her plans were cut short by fate itself when Chuuya rushed her out from the incoming downpour and into his abode.

They only exchanged a momentarily glance across the street, walking down paralleling sideways with vastly different companies. Businessmen versus accomplices, loud, coordinated conversation versus discretely ominous orders, legal prowl versus illegal jurisdiction. Practically night and day.

His posey was escorting him back to his penthouse while her associates were planning for a midday celebration. Plain-faced, the heiress held herself back and prevented herself from frowning. Yet, a spark came when she finally saw him. A smile couldn’t be produced, but for once, she was lively to be in someone’s acknowledgment -- even if so far away.

Their faces were going to pull away, keeping to their lanes. Alas, once a droplet traced the rim of his fedora, and their eyes continued to connect, something moved in him--. Had the men around him commented about her? Had they been aware? Or was she simply that pathetic looking for him to intervene?

She wasn’t sure if the men around him alluded to their current situation, or if Chuuya would’ve mentioned it. Fiancée and fiancé had never left their lips, but she could only imagine how strange and unreal it would’ve sounded from someone else’s. Yet, it didn’t change the fact his presence parted the sea of men around her and he escorted her elsewhere.

In the gallant gesture, only the chilling stillness of reality sank for them as they entered his penthouse. It was now only two hours into this abrupt and extensively maddening clash that she placed her foot down.

He had questions, demands, just like her, but some could be answered with theories. Like how was it them, of all people, and not the mafia boss’s son? Sophie’s own conclusions were drawn immediately if only based on her little understanding of what Chuuya possessed underneath his regal facade.

An experiment, that is what all of this is. A volatile cocktail boiling and pooling in a cauldron of uncertainty, brewing something unexpected and unknown that could spell for disaster. Her thin sharp white nail tips prick against her thumb, brows lowered as she grimaces in her thoughts. Seeking out an umbrella to take out, she bites down her tongue. Two abilities with no limits, one so desirable and in the spotlight, while the other went barely noticed for years...until the right people wanted it.

What more can they want? It’s only a sick experiment. It isn’t like they haven’t wanted to perfect ability users before. I remember it. I remember how she tore apart multiple men and stitched them together like dolls, trying to find the most powerful and most manipulable creation. And then there was me, both the obstacle and main ingredient to her damn slaughterhouse she called an experiment.

For all that she thought of, memories blurred in crimson and cold blades pressed against her neck, her body violently shivers. But, she catches herself as she holds onto her arms, bowing her head. Inhaling deeply, keeping her thoughts together, it was only then that Chuuya caught up, still unwavering to stop what had now dissolved into an argument.

“Mister Nakahara, enough!” Sophie pinches the bridge of her nose, snapping her head back. Both of her brows raised with her facade having a crack. Ferocity and turmoil twisted in her stomach, yet it had been long dormant since her teenage years. However, at this rate, it wouldn’t be long until she completely reawoke.

“I understand that the entirety of what is going on is beyond bewildering as it is irksome! There are plentiful and reasonable doubts about why this arrangement exists when there is no precedence for it to exist.” Her nostrils flare.

“I just don’t see why you’re reacting the way you are reacting the way you are!” Her hands finally drop, balling into fists. Out of every damn person in the world, why did it bother him--? Her eyes fix to the ground, blinking. The issue itself already was that it was her, of all people, he had to be with... But, he didn’t-- he never responded with offense until I spoke.

Every precaution to veil her emotion vanishes, her eyes, first sharp and defensive, now growing wide and clueless. Her lips part but, nothing comes out. All that she fixes on, besides his face, was the familiar heat and touch of his lips from encounters before.

Several instances of conversation during formal hours didn’t compare to the off-hours. All this started with her near devotion in dragging his intoxicated body to safety. Their encounters grew more from that besides her constant worry -- it was a back-and-forth of small discoveries and exploration about what normal life could’ve been.

The shenanigans outside of their duties -- their relationship branched off the moment she recognized him as Chuuya, not Chuuya Nakahara of the Port Mafia. To her, it broke away the mundane and harshness of their lives, when they were just two young adults who wanted more to experience, to live on the brighter side of a life they couldn’t have.

A slowly stirred pot of friendship that might’ve meant..

No, no! That’s not right. So what if we-- and ..No! Stubbornness would always refuse to negotiate with the truth.

❛ can’t you see, what you’re doing to me? ❜ The question of the hour, Chuuya finally asks. And what a fitting question that could’ve been redirected to him.

Swallowing her doubts, the young woman finally exhales and stares at the redhead. Her hand slowly reaches for the doorknob. For a moment, her eyes look to the ground and she frowns, before returning to face him.

Forwardly, and pushing all emotions aside, she finally spoke.

“No, I can’t,” she lied.

Intent on leaving, she unlocked the door, throwing in her final words. “It was a pleasure to be in your company today, Mister Nakahara. I do need to get used to it. Take care of yourself.”

At this rate, she wasn’t going to stop and look back. Her mind was flooded with the reality of her emotions, something she would never dare accept. If she did, she might’ve finally broken her facade.

#( checkbooks inquiries and much ; answered asks )#( verse: taken by a stranger | BSD )#( for he who destroys with touch && she who makes life with breath ; misfortune and sorrow fill the air | chuuya && sophie )#diversehearts #human experimentation tw #human experimentation /

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blazehedgehog · 5 years

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Any thoughts on Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neil, and Laura Dern reprising their roles for Jurassic World 3?

The more I am required to interact with the Jurassic World movies the more I begin to hate them.

Spoilers ahead for the first two Jurassic World movies.

The first Jurassic World was an okay movie, I guess, at least I thought so right after I saw it. But the more I chewed on it, mulled it over in my head, the less I began to like it.

The original Jurassic Park had its problems, but they were only problems I ever noticed after reading the book. Alan Grant’s characterization, for example, was all over the place in the movie. In the book, he’s supposed to be this luddite cowboy out in the desert, and they touch on that in the movie with him being “bad with technology” but I feel like they really smarten him up a lot otherwise. But the movie still had so much heart, and personality that it didn’t really matter.

Jurassic World didn’t have that. It’s a dumb movie, full of dumb people, making dumb mistakes, and not in the “oh no, my hubris!” way, but in kind of the crummy horror movie way. No, don’t run up stairs, you’ll be trapped with no exit. The whole near-future angle is also dumb, with all of the holograms and the weird explorer balls. It makes the whole thing unreal in a really bizarre, unnecessary way.

Instead of being smart, and cool, and “near-future”-istic like the first movie, it’s bland science fiction in the worst way. They may as well have added flying cars. And there are no real characters in that movie, just archetypes. You know who all these people are the moment they appear, you know their story arcs, because they aren’t humans. They’re cookie cutters. It’s a thin line to string you along to the next CGI dinosaur attack.

Nothing about it feels human or believable. It’s the sort of monster movie Spielberg was originally trying to avoid making.

And Jurassic World 2, Fallen Kingdom, takes everything awful from that first movie and ramps it way up. The movie barely even feels like it has a story; I believe I’ve described Fallen Kingdom as feeling “like a two hour movie trailer.” It’s all these little sequences that seem like they are designed to be chopped up and posted on Youtube.

The worst part, though, is the fan service. The first Jurassic World had some fan service, because characters end up stumbling across the original Jurassic Park visitor center, now run down and reclaimed by the jungle. Also the ending to that movie is essentially a big tribute to some of the most iconic scenes of that first Jurassic Park.

But Fallen Kingdom goes extra super hard on that stuff. It straight up remakes multiple shots from that original movie, 1:1, verbatim. It repeats lines from that movie over and over and over. It’s desperate to make us appreciate how much it loves Jurassic Park instead of trying to be its own movie. And it’s INCREDIBLY embarrassing.

The whole movie is factory-made for fanboys to gush over but it’s really just a hollow, vapid, pointless waste of time. It was birthed out of a boardroom by executives wearing five-figure suits looking at marketing charts.

It’s like the worst version of the sequel syndrome we used to get. Back in the day we’d get something like Ghostbusters 2, which recycles almost all of its story beats and humor from Ghostbusters 1, and people would go “Ugh, that’s a bad movie.”

But now, you wait 10, 15, 20 years until it there’s a sufficient bank of nostalgia, and suddenly making something like Ghostbusters 2 starts looking more like an “inspired tribute.” They aren’t recycled gags, now they’re references to things that make me feel appreciably younger, when things were better, and therefore that makes it good!

That’s what those two Jurassic World movies are in a nut shell. Cheap sequels rebranded as pop culture idolatry.

And very recently, like just two weeks ago, they released a brand new short movie that aired on TV to show what happened to the world after the end of Fallen Kingdom while setting up this third movie. It’s called “The Battle at Big Rock.” Essentially, dinosaurs are growing in population all around the globe, and some campers in California nearly get killed in an attack.

And just, like, the gall of this short. You get the impression this is leaning in to a “Planet of the Apes” direction, that because dinosaurs are back, humans as a species might be at risk of being overthrown on the food chain. And just the whole angle where it’s this scary carnivore attack but they play up the kid being the hero is really weird. And wild dinosaurs don’t even make sense in the context of what happened at the end of Fallen Kingdom anyway.

It feels like its pretending to be important and intelligent but it crumbles to dust under even the smallest scrutiny. The whole Jurassic World franchise is fraud.

The fact they’re bothering to bring the original cast back for Jurassic World 3 says everything I need to know about where their priorities lie. At best, it’s going to be another movie that breathlessly worships Jurassic Park, referencing all of its iconic lines, referencing all of its iconic scenes, and having no identity of its own besides “dinosaurs are cool and scary and also I guess it’s the future?”

At worst it’s going to pull a Star Wars and bring the original cast back just to kill them all off in weird, unsatisfying ways, because ooh, the drama! All of your favorites are dead! Take that! NOW we’re deep and worthy of your respect!

But all it’s going to be is more fanboy drivel. A franchise to sell shirts, and hats, and toys.

Jurassic World can jump up my butt.

#question #jurassic park #jurassic world #colin trevorrow #battle at big rock #steven spielberg #universal studios #mattshuku #questions

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burnouts3s3 · 5 years

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Jump Force, a review

(Disclaimer: The following is a non-profit unprofessional blog post written by an unprofessional blog poster. All purported facts and statement are little more than the subjective, biased opinion of said blog poster. In other words, don’t take anything I say too seriously.) Just the facts 'Cause you're in a Hurry! Publisher: Bandai Namco Developer: Spike Chunsoft Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP): 59.99 USD How much I paid: 99.99 USD for the Ultimate Edition. Bundle Includes: 3 Days Early access. Lobby Vehicles to ‘ride around in’ that’s purely cosmetic. Season Pass that unlocks 9 DLC characters to be announced and released at a later date. Rated: T for Mild Blood, Suggestive Themes and Violence Number of Playable Characters: 43. 4 Original characters. 39 Characters from Established franchises. Number of Stages: 7. Each Stage has a transition that changes when a character hits an opponent with a specific attack. Can I play offline: Yes. Controller Support: Yes. It was compatible with my Rock-Candy Xbox 360 controller. Keyboard and Mouse controls are available but are very awkward and the game was clearly designed with a controller in mind. How long I played: 18 Hours. 10 Hours to beat the story mode while watching the Cutscenes. UNSKIPPABLE cutscenes. 7 Hours just messing around and playing online matches. Microtransactions: 39.99 Season Pass that unlocks 9 DLC characters to be announced at a later date. Dual Audio: No. Only Japanese Audio with Subs available. What I played on: My PC. Performance Issues: For the most part, I got ‘mostly’ 60 FPS when I was playing online or running around. However, the FPS dips when there’s a cutscene playing to the mid 40’s even the high 30’s. Too bad however beautiful the particle effects are can’t adjust the wooden facial animations and stiff body movements. 3 Crashes within my playtime. My Personal Biases: I’ve followed the saga of Son Goku and friends. I’ve watched Naruto Uzumaki become the Hokage. I’ve watched Yusuke Urameshi journey from boy to man. I’ve watched Gon, Killua and Kullapika go on their various hunting expeditions. I’ve watched Yugi Moto become the king of games. And I’ve watched Light Yagami become defeated by his own hubris. In other words, I’ve been waiting for this game a ‘very’ long time, and have played previous games such as JStars Victory Vs. My Verdict: As much fun as it is seeing characters like Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro beat the pulp out of My Hero Academia’s Deku, the limited roster, worn out gameplay from the Naruto Shippuden and Dragonball Xenoverse games, the laughable animation, idiotic story mode and the ever anti-consumer practices of Bandai Namco are bogging this game down. If you’re a fan of Shounen Jump, you’ll sure to have fun. But, if you’re patient or you want more characters consider picking up Jump Ultimate Stars or JStars Victory Vs and wait for a sale. Jump Force, a review

In celebration for 50 years, Weekly Shounen Jump has announced a new crossover game. Made with collaboration between Publisher Bandai Namco and Developer Spike Chunsoft, “Jump Force” arrives to bring together various characters found in Shueisha’s long running publication.

Can the game live up to the vast legacy it has inherited? Let’s find out in this review of “Jump Force”!

The Umbra cubes, cosmic cubes capable of granting those great power, have spread throughout the world. Thanks to the villain, Kane, and his lovely assistant, Galena, he has recruited the villains from Shounen Jump and replicated them. All the meanwhile, normal citizens have become “Venoms”, possessed by evil impulses. But just as Frieza fires a laser beam, ending your life, Trunks comes in, uses and Umbra cube and grants you great power to help combat evil.

Jump Force is an Arena fighting game similar to games such as Dragonball Xenoverse or Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm. Players pick between 3 characters and attempt to lower their opponent’s (shared) healthbar to zero. In addition to physical attacks, they can spend the abilities gauge to use a variety of ranged or close up attacks. In addition, whenever players take damage, they fill up the ‘awakening’ bar. Using half an awakening bar will allow players to unleash an ultimate attack, an ability that deals more damage than regular abilities. Using a full awakening bar will ‘transform’ the character to a powered-up state. For example, Goku will transform from his base form to his Super Saiyan form.

The other two characters can be called upon using the left trigger. Simply pressing the trigger will swap the character while holding it down will call them for an assist attack. Unfortunately, you cannot change the order of which characters you switch to and must cycle through said order to access the characters. (For example having a team order of Goku, Vegeta and Piccolo means that Goku cannot switch to Piccolo without switching through Vegeta first). Be careful because if you switch while both characters are on screen and the opponent is able to hit both, you’ll receive double the damage.

Customizing your character is nothing new for Bandai Namco games such as the various DBZ Xenoverse games and Naruto: Shinobi Striker, but the mechanic remains impressive here. Allowing you a vast customization between characters allows different playstyles and gives your individual avatar the ability to learn various techniques such as Vegeta’s Galick Gun or Yusuke’s Spirit Gun. However, certain techniques, such as anything related to Jotaro or Yugi are unable to be learned by your Avatar character.

Similarly, the defense system returns. Using the mobility meter, characters can dash towards or away from the opponent or teleport out of a combo behind the enemy. Most of the time, using the guard button will block most attacks. But, characters can either grab the blocking opponent or hold down either the smash or heavy smash button to break through the opponent’s guard.

While most of the characters play similar to one another, some of the characters have slight variations. For example, similar to his manga counterpart, Sanji will be unable to deal damage to female characters. Similarly, when Gon connets with an opponent with his Ultimate attack, he will become unplayable for the duration of the match.

Learning said techniques can be used by spending the in-game currency which allows you to easily unlock abilities, skills that aid in battle such as boosting attack power or various costumes for your avatar. In-game currency can be earned by either playing through the story or playing online.

The Story will not win any awards unless the Razzies suddenly announce a video game category. It’s a pastiche of clichés, tired tropes and nonsense as players slog through another world ending plot with stupid villains, stupid twists and characters acting like morons. For some reason, Light Yagami figures out the twist that even the dumbest of us can figure out 5 seconds in. Not helping matters are the rest of the characters acting like complete idiots with Sanji being the focus for some reason.

Say what you will about the current state of fanfiction, bad fanfiction is at least INTERESTING.

This combines the worst of Mary Sue fanfiction with the most boring and bland cliches possible. I understand orienting the game for Western audiences meant having to borrow notes from the Avengers and Justice League, but the characters expositing non-stop about the predictable plotline isn’t helpful. Worst yet, Developer Spike Chunsoft has forgotten a vital component for any story cutscene, the ability to skip them. So, be prepared to watch as characters drone on and on during the cutscenes figuring out the plot.

Just the same, the artstyle is going to alienate some longtime fans. While using the Unreal engine to render things such as particle effects, fire and energy beams is a delight to behold, said delight is replaced by revulsion watching the stiff character faces barely emote when watching a cutscene. These animations make Mass Effect: Andromeda look like the Witcher 3.

Half the time, the characters don’t even talk. RYUK DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A VOICE! What’s odd is that in the non-essential cutscenes, when the characters barely move and don’t have voices, the writing actually improves. Seeing various characters from different franchises interact with each other, brings a small delight to a mess of a game. Watching Zoro tutor Asta while Kenshin watches on or seeing Deku be a student to Kakashi’s lectures is the stuff of fan dreams. It’s too bad these moments are few and fleeting. And while 42 Characters in a base game is nothing to sneeze at, fans of Shounen Jump crossover games have already called out Developer Spike Chunsoft. While more famous franchises such as Dragonball Z, Naruto and One Piece boast a whopping 6 representatives each, more obscure franchises are either not represented or have a meager 1 character, such as City Hunter’s Ryo Saeba or Fist of the North Star’s Kenshiro. Meanwhile, mainstays from previous Jump crossover games such as Dr. Slump’s Arale, Kochikame’s Ryotsu, Bobobo’s Bobobo, D Grayman’s Allen Walker, Reborn’s Tsuna Sawada and Gintama’s Gintoki are all missing (though there is speculation they would be added later as Downloadable Content locked away with a paywall). And yet… God, it’s just such a fangasm seeing characters from different franchises duke it out with one another. Seeing Jotaro fight with Deku. Seeing Asta cross blades with Dai. Seeing Goku trade blows with Kenshiro is just one of my biggest dreams. There’s a germ of an idea here but it’s botched by piss-poor execution. I’m just so sick of games I would’ve loved missing the mark and not reaching their full potential. Caveat: Shounen Jump, Shueisha and Bandai Namco have a rare opportunity on their hands. Having the ability to have a character as old as Seiya have a fist fight with a modern character like Deku is one of the rare privileges a company can have alongside with Marvel, DC Comics and Nintendo. So, it’s unfortunate when Bandai Namco and Spike Chunsoft drop the ball and start limiting the roster, overpopulating it with familiar franchises instead of obscure ones and start nickeling and diming its customers with stupid DLC policies. Say what you will about the (very) imperfect JStars Victory Vs (which was also developed by Spike Chunsoft and published by Bandai Namco), the one thing that game did right was introduce a plebian like me to series such as Medaka Box, Assassination Classroom, The Disastrous Life of Saiki K, Toriko and Beelzebub. And while I did enjoy the extensive customization and gained a sick sense of pleasure whenever I finish off an opponent with DIO’s Road Roller, part of me couldn’t help but wonder when Kinnikuman is going to get the recognition he deserves. Maybe when Shounen Jump has its 55th anniversary, they can give its vast legacy of characters a game worthy of 50 years. We’ll always have Jump Ultimate Stars on the DS. Verdict: Rental or Wait for a Sale

#jump force #bandai namco #spike chunsoft #goku #vegeta #luffy #naruto #shounen jump #shueisha

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tinyshe · 3 years

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RFK Jr. Opens 'CIA Can of Worms'

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola, October 02, 2021

Story at-a-glance

February 10, 2021, Instagram banned the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for “sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”

The real reason Kennedy is being censored is because he understands and exposes the global technocratic agenda that is pushing us toward global totalitarianism

The corporate media are indistinguishable from the CIA when it comes to matters of domestic and foreign matters. The CIA has also played an important role in furthering the technocrats’ agenda of global domination since its inception

Big tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon are also deeply connected to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. They serve important surveillance and data harvesting functions without which the technocratic agenda cannot not be realized

The core of the technocratic power structure includes entities such as the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Institute, the Brookings Institute and other think-tanks

This article was previously published February 27, 2021, and has been updated with new information.

February 10, 2021, Instagram banned the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney, founder of Children's Health Defense, and co-founder and president of the environmental group, River Alliance. According to Instagram, his account was removed for "sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines."1

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention over the past year, when privately owned social media companies started censoring users in earnest, often at the request of government officials, thereby qualifying themselves as bona fide instruments of fascism.

As described in "Fascism Definition With Examples,"2 a hallmark of fascism is an economic system in which government controls private corporations and where "a central planning authority directs company leaders to work in the national interest, which actively suppresses those who oppose it."

The welfare of the population at large is subjugated in such a system in order to achieve "imperative social goals." This could, for example, be the goal to vaccinate the entire population against COVID-19, which will ensure the vaccine industry can profit rather than go bust. Public health be damned.

Of course, the entire premise of a mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 is that it will protect people and prevent unnecessary deaths from the virus. But a hidden, underlying agenda is revealed by the fact that injuries and deaths from the vaccine are either suppressed or shrugged off as collateral damage in the name of the greater good.

In other words, dying due to poor health is unacceptable and must be prevented with a vaccine, whereas dying in good health and at a young age due to vaccine injury is a perfectly acceptable price to protect the vulnerable. The end result is the same: People die. The only differences are how and why people die, and whether or not big business, which funds politicians, can profit in the process.

Don't Trust the Medical or National Security Establishment

In the November 16, 2020 Ron Paul Liberty Report above,3,4 Kennedy talks about evidence suggesting his father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated by a CIA agent hired as a security guard.

He goes on to review some of the history of the CIA — how it was initially established as an espionage organization tasked solely with intelligence gathering, only to transform into a paramilitary agency engaged with the overthrowing of democracies around the world and other nefarious and antidemocratic activities.

He also touches on the infamous CIA program called MK Ultra, in which individuals are brainwashed to carry out orders, including murders, against their own will.

CIA and Corporate Media Are One and the Same

The CIA's role in the current flood of censorship may be more significant than most people imagine. In the Off-Guardian article,5 "Opening the CIA's Can of Worms," Edward Curtin highlights the close ties between the CIA and corporate mainstream media.

The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.

He cites Douglas Valentine's book, "The CIA as Organized Crime," in which Valentine states that "The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy." Curtin describes the media as "stenographers for the national security state's ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people," adding that:

"For all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished."

While information warfare and psyops have been par for the course for a long time, it's only in recent years that more people have started really noticing it, and it's only become blatantly obvious in the past year or so, thanks to the rapid expansion of individuals, groups and topics being silenced.

In the past year, even licensed medical doctors and award-winning scientists have undergone the modern version of being tarred and feathered online, followed by expulsion from their web-based communities for the crime of asking commonsense questions and speaking truth to power.

Guilt by Headline

The aim and purpose of the kind of information warfare we currently find ourselves embroiled in is to "win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity," Curtin writes. Again, in regard to COVID-19, the purpose is clearly to get everyone to buy into the necessity of getting vaccinated and to reject objections, no matter how logical.

That the CIA-run media, medical establishment and national security apparatus are all working in tandem on this issue, and using classic propaganda tactics, is unmistakable. Curtin writes:6

"Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: 'Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.' Notice the lack of the word alleged before 'false virus claims.' This is guilt by headline.

It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram's ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram's parent company …

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order."

Curtin disagrees with journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, who argue that social media companies really don't want to censor but are pressured into it by hubris-filled, power- and control-hungry corporate media personalities.

There's more to it than that, Curtin says, pointing out, "These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so."

He argues that they're all "part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus — a system, a complex — whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many," and that, it is this that makes the CIA and media "parts of the same criminal conspiracy."

Who Pulls the Levers of Control?

"To argue that the Silicon Valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense," Curtin says, because:

"These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today."

Indeed, many suspect Facebook is the public-friendly version of DARPA's Lifelog, a database project aimed at tracking the minutiae of people's entire existence for national security surveillance purposes.7 The Pentagon pulled the plug on Lifelog February 4, 2004, in response to backlash over privacy concerns.8 Yet that same day, Facebook was launched.9 Coincidence?

Whether by fluke or preinception collaboration, there can be no doubt that Facebook now fulfills the Lifelog purpose of surveilling, tracking and data mining its users both on- and offline.

Similarly, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other major tech companies are also tied to the "military-industrial-intelligence-media complex," to quote Curtin's term. All provide invaluable surveillance and censorship functions, and without them, the totalitarian control system we now find ourselves caught in wouldn't be possible.

"The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives [tech companies] its marching orders," Curtin writes.10

"That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies …

All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have.

In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world's wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship."

Operation Mockingbird: The Great Reset

What Curtin is talking about is the same elite 0.001% of the global population I've written about before. While the specific identities of the individual string-pullers are difficult to discern, what's clear is that there is an international "deep state" whose plans are implemented in a coordinated fashion around the world, seemingly at a moment's notice, as we saw when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

Within days, all the world's leaders sang the same tune. The same message was stated in dozens of languages, often verbatim, as if they were reading the same cue card. Looking at global nongovernmental agencies makes it easier to ascertain who these cue card writers might be, as they form a vast, intertwined web that keep circling back to each other.

We can discern, then, that the core of this technocratic power structure includes entities such as the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Institute, the Brookings Institute and other think-tanks, just to name some of the most obvious.

Members of these exclusive "clubs," many of which are by invitation only, include leaders from major industries, corporate media, political offices and the military-industrial complex.

As noted by Curtin, "They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship." The CIA, as you might suspect by now, has also been part of this "deep state cabal" from the very beginning.

And, if the CIA and corporate media are two sides of the same coin, we can deduce that the global psyop currently underway has the purpose of ensuring the successful implementation of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — two terms that describe different aspects of the same agenda of enslavement.

While it may seem unrelated to some, the vaccine agenda does play an important part in this scheme, especially long-term, which is why vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine voices are now being slapped down at a furious pace. It's not the sole reason for their silencing, however.

The Real Threat Kennedy Poses

As Curtin points out in his article, Kennedy is not censored simply because he's raising questions about vaccines, Bill Gates or the drug industry in general. No, it's because he's a direct threat to the highest echelon of this hidden global power structure that seeks to take control:11

"His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.

To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state's assassination of both his father and his uncle.

It is why his wonderful recent book, 'American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,' that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces."

According to Kennedy, the CIA murdered his father. The reason they did was because he was a powerful and popular politician who, like Curtin says, "could have … tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords."

In other words, he knew the CIA was the figurative center pole holding up the pole tent, and if you yank that out, the roof caves in. They couldn't let that happen.

Connecting the Dots

Kennedy discusses many of the same topics covered in the Ron Paul Report in his much longer interview with Patrick Bet-David, above. In both interviews, he reviews his family's tragic yet heroic history, but he also gets into the topic of vaccine safety and the folly of ignoring published science showing there are significant problems — and the fact that the medical establishment refutes and denies these problems without ever presenting any actual counter-evidence.

Kennedy also discusses data suggesting the COVID-19 lockdowns may have caused more deaths than the virus itself, as well as the civil rights issues involved. Like many other experts, he believes the lockdowns are scientifically indefensible and when the final tally comes in will have killed far more people than COVID-19.

Based on a recent cost-benefit analysis12 of global lockdowns, Kennedy is correct. Data suggest the cost for lockdowns in Canada — in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years and Wellbeing Years — is at least 10 times greater than the benefit.

In Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns. So, yes, pandemic measures are robbing the public of more life and fruitful years than this virus ever could.

In his interview with Bet-David, Kennedy also delves into known side effects of vaccines that in turn drive a highly profitable chronic illness industry, the lack of safety studies for vaccines, the irresponsible practice of testing vaccines against false placebos such as another vaccine, and the vaccine industry's indemnity agreement with Congress that further prevents safe vaccines from ever being developed.

He also talks about the aggressive advertising of drugs and vaccines which, as a side effect, allows drug companies to influence media coverage of their products; the questionable integrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci how mortality data are conflated to falsely inflate influenza deaths as a marketing ploy to sell flu vaccines, the dangers of 5G, modern-day electronic surveillance and social media's data harvesting; and the detrimental influence of Bill Gates' so-called philanthropy.

As Curtin notes, Kennedy's observations, which help people connect the dots, ultimately point people to the core problem of our day, which is a hidden control structure that is seeking to destroy the American Constitution and rob us of our rights and freedoms, if we let them.

At the end of the day, that's what all of this censorship is about. That hidden power structure does not want us to realize what's being done to us, because then we might rebel. And, if that happens, the jig is up, since there are far more of us than there are of them.

A Well-Informed Humanity United Is the Answer

This is precisely why we must never stop seeking out and sharing this type of information. Those who buy into the propaganda are quite literally helping their soon-to-be jailers erect the prison bars around them. It's self-destructive, which is why we need to help those we care about to understand the bigger picture and not get locked into details of differing opinions that don't matter.

As noted in Kennedy's October 24, 2020, online speech,13 "International Message of Hope for Humanity" — which kicked off a day of protest against the coup d'état by the technocratic elite — we must shed our imaginary fears, reject media fearmongering, insist on freedom of speech and engage in the democratic process.

"The only way we can win it is with democracy," he said. "We need to fight to get our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. Notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine."

Kennedy also stressed another crucial point, namely the need to unify. We must put aside our quibbles over nonessential things like race, religion and political affiliations, and stay laser-focused on the real enemy.

"What the Big Tech villains … want us to do is fight with each other. They want Blacks fighting against whites. They want republicans fighting against democrats. They want everybody polarized. They want everybody fragmented because they know that if we all get together, we're going to start asking questions and those are questions they can't answer …

If you're a republican or democrat, stop talking about that. Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity …

The free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.

You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history — the battle to save democracy, freedom, human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us, simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with …

And I pledge to you: I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them for our children."

And, that, right there, is why Kennedy, like his father and uncle before him, is a target for elimination by the technocratic-CIA-media-drug-industrial-political-military complex. The good news is that the more people know and understand who the real enemy is, the lower the risk is for those in the know.

After all, the CIA cannot assassinate an entire country, or the entire world. At a certain point, silencing people becomes moot because too many people know the truth already. I believe this is the case with Kennedy at this point, which is why the worst they can do is try to limit his reach on social media. And with your help, even those efforts will ultimately fail.

Sen. Warren Threatens Amazon to Ban ‘The Truth About COVID-19’

Since the publication of my latest book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” which became an instant best seller on Amazon.com, there’s been a significant increase in calls for censorship and ruthless attacks against me.

Most recently, so-called “progressive” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in an outrageous, slanderous and basically unconstitutional attempt to suppress free speech, sent a letter to Amazon, demanding an “immediate review” of their algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation.”

Warren specifically singled out “The Truth About COVID-19” as a prime example of “highly ranked and favorably tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wants to see banned from sale.

Two days later, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., followed in Warren’s footsteps, sending letters to Facebook and Amazon, calling for more prolific censorship of vaccine information. Even President Joe Biden has recently used a debunked report as his sole source to call for my censorship.

Sadly, these attacks are being levied by the very people elected to safeguard democracy and our Constitutional rights. Essentially, what they are calling for is modern-day book burning. This is a democracy, not a monarchy.

#health

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