#this was the first batch of me trying out a new rendering style

[dabbingintoart]

Also realized that I never posted this either lol

#this was the first batch of me trying out a new rendering style #I can not tell you how I did this because I don’t remember how I did it #assassins creed 2 #assassins creed #ezio auditore #ac ezio #artists of tumblr #my art #artists on tumblr #digital art

[nitewrighter]

First Meeting of Genji and Tracer maybe?

I haven’t forgotten all the kiss prompts but I wanted to gear-shift to something a little more punchy!

-------

“I don’t know about this…” Genji mindlessly brushed his fingers along the handle of Ryū-Ichimonji as he walked down the hall, “I’ve never really thought of myself as a teacher...”

“You said you wanted to get off the bench,” Reyes walked alongside him, both hands in the mono-pocket of his hoodie. He had a way of carrying himself that made it easy for the eye to scan past him, despite being head of Blackwatch, but Genji drew the eye, bare skin and metal, and stark black, white and red prosthetics, and so in their walk virtually all Overwatch staff in the hallway gave them an unnaturally wide berth, first a natural reaction to Genji’s appearance, then a flinching recognition of Reyes. “This is the best Jack and I can do for you,” Reyes went on, “Besides, she was in the RAF before this, so it’s not like she’s coming into this with no combat knowledge.”

‘The best Jack and I can do for you,’ Genji glanced away from Reyes, his eyes narrowing in thought, So you show Jack one hand with me, while keeping the other behind your back with McCree. I’m the ‘accountability’ agent, but McCree and Moira... they’re still Blackwatch. They’re still working. His ‘real’ agents. Genji wondered where McCree was now. Was it an ‘errand’ this time or a ‘vacation?’ It wasn’t as if it was sanctioned by Jack either way, but it wasn’t like Jack would look too closely or question it so long as the cyborg ninja was accounted for. 

“Hey,” Reyes spoke and Genji was forced to pull himself out of his bristling silence, “Being a part of Overwatch isn’t just cutting through shit with a sword. You have to show you can work with people, and not just Blackwatch.” Reyes gave a short snort, “Though, let’s be real, saying you worked with Blackwatch is a bit of a stretch.”

Genji kept his eyes fixed away sullenly. “So she’s not the only one learning, here,” he mused. 

“Now you’re getting it,” said Reyes, smiling.

“You don’t know when Blackwatch’s suspension is ending, do you?” Genji’s voice was level but it wiped the smile from Reyes’s face in an instant. 

“Can’t say that I do,” Reyes flicked his own eyes forward, down the hall, “But that doesn’t mean I’m sitting on my hands, Shimada. You can believe me when I say I’m working on ways to get you back out there, because Talon’s only going to get bolder while we’re wrapping ourselves in red tape. But you have to show me, Jack, and all these UN pearl-clutchers you can adapt. Do you understand?”

“Mm,” Genji gave a single nod as they exited two automatic doors out to the training area, where a cluster of training bots where doddering around in various directions.

“Had ‘em cue up your usual warm-up,” said Reyes, putting his hands on his hips, “Think benchwarming got you soft?”

Genji gave a short scoff before drawing Ryū-Ichimonji from his back, but Reyes could hear the smile in his breath beneath his faceplate.

----

“Wow... Blackwatch!” Tracer’s eyes were wide as Mercy and Winston stood next to her in the elevator, “I heard all about the--I mean, everyone heard about Venice but--blimey! Are we sure it’s all right?” 

“We’re approaching this as a sort of... rehabilitation from suspension,” said Mercy, “And don’t worry, I’m very well-acquainted with your future teacher and I can assure you that Genji Shimada holds himself to a very high standard as an agent.” 

“I know that but....I don’t know if I’m cut out for any of that ninja stuff,” Trace glanced down at the chronal accelerator glowing in her chest, “This thing doesn’t exactly make it ea--easy to sneak around.” A brief ripple of glowing blue chronal feedback bloomed around her on the word ‘easy’ and her shoulders bunched up self-consciously, “Sometimes I don’t know if I can pull off that... speed-up thing I did back with the prototypes...”

“The accelerator reacts to your nervous system,” Winston chimed in, “We can worry about safely discharging the chronal distortion later, but it’s perfectly safe and stable as it is right now! All you need to worry about is keeping a cool head!”

“Cool head,” Tracer said firmly, “Right.”

“But if anything feels wrong you should tell us immediately,” Mercy quickly added.

“Gotcha, gotcha,” said Tracer, nodding. The three of them stood in a nervous, excited silence for a few seconds.

“Is he nice?” Tracer asked, looking at Mercy, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can deal with the ‘tough love’ types, but I guess I’m just not really sure what to expect with all this Blackwatch stuff...”

“Oh he’s wonderful,” said Mercy beaming as the elevator dinged and the doors opened, “And I think, while both your situations are very unique, he’ll definitely understand what you’re going through. He’s basically had to re-learn how to coordinate his body, too!”

Tracer’s shoulders slumped with some reassurance as they stepped out into the open air of the training area, “Well that’s a relief,” she said, with a lopsided smile.

“Oh yes. He’ll be a great teacher. He’s patient, and attentive, and really quite funny once you get to know him, and he’s very---”

Mercy was cut off by a snarling, roaring, cybernetically warbling scream as a red, white, and black blur rushed past them on the training grounds. Tracer, Winston, and Mercy watched in some combination of awe and terror as Genji Shimada tore through a batch of training bots like a hurricane. 

“Very--um...” Mercy’s words turned halting as Genji dove and slid under one bot and became a whirlwind of blades and kicks, slicing up the training bots closing in on him, before sending the poor training bot he had dived under into the air then springing into the air himself. His wires whipped around him as he twisted in the air, sending the training bot flying back with a kick that made it shatter against a wall. 

“Very--” Mercy tried to regain her composure and speak quickly but winced as she was cut off again by the screech and clatter of metal, the loud scream of a broken vocal box on one of the training bots as Genji jammed both sword and wakizashi into it before ripping it outward and rendering the training bot an explosion of broken metal parts. Mercy looked sharply over to Tracer, whose mouth was hanging open in a petrified gawk.

“He’s very...” Mercy was trying to eke words out of herself as Genji sliced off the head of one training bot with his sword then stabbed it through with his wakizashi before pivoting and smashing another training bot’s head with the skewered head of its compatriot. “...enthusiastic?”

Genji’s breaths were ragged and his forearms were quaking with how hard his hands were gripping his sword and wakizashi, surrounded by the sparking broken bits of training bots, his shoulders rising and falling with his breaths. Tracer, Winston, and Mercy all flinched to attention at the sound of clapping next to them and looked to their right to see Gabriel Reyes stick his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistle shrilly before clapping some more.

“Attaboy, Genji! Still got it!” Reyes called out to Genji and Genji seemed to pull himself out of a blood-drunk haze (or at least the robot-destroying equivalent of a blood-drunk haze), looking over his shoulder and then flinching to awkward attention himself as he noticed Reyes was now accompanied by Mercy, the gorilla, and... the newbie. 

His student.

Who looked about ready to either throw up or piss herself or both from what she had just seen him do.

Reyes was still clapping and smiling obnoxiously, Genji awkwardly lifted his wakizashi (smaller sword was less threatening, right?) and gave a small wave.

“Uh... yo,” he said.

“Er--excellent form, Genji!” Mercy raised her voice so he could hear her but it came out as a squawk, her desperation to try and diffuse the situation obvious in every intonation, “Very... efficient!” She had that ‘everything is going wrong but for the love of god be strong, Angela’ deliriously forced smile on her face, which he had seen both at 3 AM in the lab and at press conferences going down in flames.

“Thank you?” said Genji, sheathing both his sword and moving to walk toward them but then stumbling over a piece of broken training bot. He quickly recovered, straightened himself up to full height and walked briskly over to them before giving a stiff bow.

“So glad you could join us, Oxton,” said Reyes, turning to look at Tracer, his hands on his hips.

“Reyes?” Mercy’s voice was steel wire-tight, “May we speak?”

“Sure, Ange, what--” Reyes started but Mercy grabbed him by the loose sleeve of the hoodie and practically dragged him through the doors of the training area’s control room.

“Wait, shouldn’t we--” Tracer started feebly after them but the steel doors of the room slammed behind them. Tracer, Genji, and Winston all vaguely made out the muffled sounds of Mercy yelling at Reyes on the other side of the doors. 

“What were you thinking?! What was that?!”

“What are you yelling at me for? I just thought he should get a little warmed up and the newbie should get some idea of--”

“Some idea of what?! We’ve only barely scratched the surface of the effects the chronal disassociation is having on her physical abilities and you’re throwing up these warzones like---”

“Hey, I just set up his usual training bot session, Doc, you got a problem with Genji’s style, you take that up with him--”

“I don’t have a problem with Genji’s ‘style’--! I--Don’t act like you don’t know what you’re doing---! Is this some other play?! Are you--”

Winston cleared his throat. “We should probably...”

“Right..” said Tracer a little sheepishly.

The three of them edged away from the steel doors. Genji glanced over at Tracer, who didn’t seem to know whether to even look at him as they walked themselves out of earshot of the argument.

“So you’re the new recruit from the flight program,” said Genji, folding his arms and trying to sound as casual as possible.

“Ah...y-yeah!” Tracer blurted out. She cleared her throat and stuck her hand out, “Lena Oxton! Callsign Tracer! Reporting for du--” blue light suddenly flared brightly around her from the glowing object on her chest and she seemed to catch herself, clearing her throat, “er... reporting for duty,” she said extending her hand again, which had somehow jerked back to her side with the blue glow.

Genji moved to extend his organic hand, found that that would be awkward with the hand Tracer had chosen to shake with, then hesitantly extended his prosthetic. She shook his hand so hard it jostled up his whole arm before she caught herself and withdrew her hands to her side, clearing her throat.

“Ah so that’s...” Genji started.

“Yeah it’s a thing,” said Tracer, glancing down.

“Well...” Genji gestured up and down himself, “This... is also a thing.”

“I can see that,” said Tracer with a bit of a nervous giggle. They both gave a glance to Winston. 

“Oh!” Winston perked up and started unconsciously signing as he spoke, “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. Winston. I’ll be on the science team overseeing Tracer’s condition with the chronal accelerator. Along with Doctor Ziegler. So we’ll be watching while you’re training together!”

“I see,” said Genji, “And you’re...”

“From the moon,” said Winston.

“From the moon,” Genji repeated, both of them silently agreeing that they didn’t have to go into the ‘gorilla’ part of things. He glanced back at Tracer. “Look--” Genji started but then caught himself, “I--if I scared you back there...”

“You didn’t scare me!” Tracer blurted out.

Both Genji and Winston gave her steady looks and Tracer stiffened her shoulders slightly, “I mean... y’know it’s... nothing I can’t handle. Really!” she put her hands on her hips and huffed, “You’re pretty tame compared to some of the things I’ve seen,” she said. She was trying to inject an adventurous sense of swagger into her voice, but her youth undermined a lot of that. 

Genji tilted his head slightly, studying her, and she made eye contact but didn’t sustain it for too long. He was used to that at this point. The red eyes were off-putting for a lot of people, but then his eyes flicked to Winston, then down at the chronal accelerator glowing in Tracer’s chest. There was something simultaneously familiar and alienating standing in their presence, and hearing the faint muffled sounds of Ziegler and Reyes arguing on the other side of the door, there was a spark of kinship between the three of them. Three people who wouldn’t have any place in the world without Overwatch.

“So how do we start?” said Tracer.

“Start?” said Genji, “Now?”

“Well, Doctor Z said you already went through all this stuff to re-learn coordination with all your...” Tracer gestured up and down at him, “Whatnot. And I figure, the sooner for me, the better, right? So lesson one, Teach! Let’s hear it!”

“Uh...” Genji rubbed the back of his head.

“Perhaps you could begin with assessment?” Winston suggested, “Establish what level of combat training Tracer should start with?”

The fastest way to do that is sparring, Genji thought and he got a horrifying mental image of Ziegler and Reyes emerging from their argument in the control room only to walk in on him punching Morrison’s beloved time-hopping newbie in the face.

“The first step to training is.... establishing the training space!” Genji blurted out. He vaguely remembered some lectures from his Shimada clan trainers indicating something similar, but the force that propelled those words from his mouth were more of the ‘70% panic’ variety.

“Establishing the training ground?” Tracer tilted her head.

“You can’t train in a cluttered space,” Genji pointed at the countless broken bits of training bots strewn across the training grounds, “You can start by cleaning those up.”

“...isn’t that your mess?” said Tracer.

“Who’s the teacher here?” said Genji, folding his arms.

“Right! Of course! Sorry!” said Tracer with a sharp salute before zipping off in a blue streak. Genji flinched hard at how inhumanly fast she moved and she seemed to catch herself as well, skidding to a halt on her heels. “Winston!” she called out excitedly, “Did you see that!? I did the thing! I did the speedy thing again!! I didn’t even think about it!! You’re such a good teacher, Genji!”

“I know,” said Genji, trying to look off stoically as Tracer zipped around the training grounds, picking up broken training bot bits and laughing between flashes of blue light.

“...you don’t know what ‘the speedy thing’ is, do you?” said Winston, very quietly.

“No,” Genji replied, also very quietly.

“You’re making this up as you go along,” Winston said flatly.

“It’s called ‘adapting,’” said Genji. He could still feel Winston’s eyes on him, skeptical. “I can adapt,” Genji said, mostly to himself as Tracer threw a bunch of training bot parts into a recycling bin with a loud clatter.

#overwatch #overwatch fic #genji shimada #tracer #angela ziegler

[hyakunana]

IT IS FINALLY TIME!

Commissions OPEN until September 14th

Opening 5 new slots!!

Please read my Commission page if interested!

______________________________________

WILL DO/MIGHT DO/WON’T DO

I WILL DO

Character Fanart

OCs

Action scenes

Armor (with proper references)

Creatures (with proper references)

NSFW (with restrictions)

I MIGHT DO (aka “out of my comfort zone, it can take longer than usual”)

Robots, Mechas, mechanics in general

Animals and Furries

Landscapes, pieces focused on scenario

Mild Gore/Horror

I WON’T DO

NSFW depicting minors

Bestiality

Severe gore

Copy another artist’s style

Pieces for commercial purposes

Ideas that goes against my personal values

______________________________________

Softwares

Paint Tool SAI (Thumbnail and Rough Sketch)

Procreate

Payment + Contact Info

Discussion about the commission art and negotiations shall be done through the e-mail [email protected].

Payment will be done through invoice. No refunds.

Selection Process

Commissions are not first come, first serve. Rather, while commissions remain open, all commission requests will be reviewed and emails will be sent out to commissioners that best meet the slot criteria (detailed order, proper references, clear idea of what you would like, etc). As I have a limited number of slots, other commissioners who do not receive an email for the first batch will instead receive an email to be placed in a reserve slot/waiting list. Please understand that this process is not intended to be unfair to anyone but is in place to better streamline my work.

Commissions will remain open for a week and then close as I sort through emails, so please do not expect a response until after this time period.

Commission Process

Once the payment is confirmed, I will begin and the client will be updated at each stage of the commission process. Please note:

I attempt to update daily and so updates will be frequent. As such, it is required that the client be able to maintain steady communication in order to confirm if anything needs to be corrected before I proceed.

In order to keep a consistent schedule, clients will have 24hrs to respond for approval/changes. If I do not receive a response within that timeframe, I will continue the commission and any corrections at previous stages will be subject to the correction fee.

I typically do not do commission work over weekends.

The art process is separated into the following steps:

Thumbnails (for complex pieces/comics)

Rough Sketch

Clean Sketch

Lineart

B&W Render (for render pieces)

Flat colors

Lights and Shades

Photoshop edits.

My available time to work on commissions is around 4 hours per day. I try to work on a consistent schedule but between some of the process steps, I may take a break of one day.

All commission wip samples are sent at a lower resolution than the final result. Final PNG files are only sent after the client’s confirmation that no corrections are needed.

Corrections

If the client asks for a correction after the approval stage has passed (i.e. asking for a pose to be changed when the lineart is ongoing), then an additional fee for the correction will be applied. The fee is contingent on how complex the correction will be and the process will be resumed once the payment is confirmed.

Posting

The final art will be posted on my main social medias (Hyakunana on tumblr, HyakunanaArts on twitter) at a lower resolution.

The client must inform if the commission is to be kept private or if they wish to remain anonymous in the post.

After the process is complete, the client has the right to use the commissioned work for their own personal use. As the artist, the commissioned work can be used by me for portfolio purposes.

Any questions, feel free to ask through inbox or e-mail!

#commission #art boost

[justanotherpersonsuniverse]

Every Rose has its Thorns by Ether Solrac

So, remember when I mentioned how the Cyberpunk Mafia version of Rose managed to Kick Anakra’s ass? I decided to try and turn it into a full scene. It’s not much but I hope you enjoy it.

...

“God Damn it!”

The sound of broken glass rang through the establishment as everyone fell deathly silent to the outburst. Sitting at the bar was a woman decked to the nines in a vintage black mobsters outfit, with the exceptions being the classic fedora was replaced with a pirate’s tricorn cap and her right leg had been replaced with a mechanical peg leg, the end of which looked suspiciously like the muzzle of a rifle. The entire ensemble was littered in scrapes and tears. Her right hand was bloody with several pieces of shattered glass embedded in it. the counter was a mess of hard liquor and blood.

“Please, my love, you’re making a scene” her companion tried to soothe her fury, her short red hair was a mess and her own similarly styled suit was likewise in a state of disrepair.

“They were CHILDREN, Cali!” the woman shouted back in response, the burn of alcohol deep in her breath. “They were children and they turned ‘em inta robots!” she couldn’t stop herself from throwing herself into her still bloody hands, staining her face in her distress. “Gods! what woulda happn’ if we neva reached ‘em…”

“But we did. You’ve got a good heart Raka, but hurting yourself like this helps no one.” She grabbed a nearby napkin and, dabbing it lightly into her own glass of water, she began to try and wipe the blood away from her beloved’s face.

“She’s right you know” spoke a teen from behind the counter, her short blond hair and bright blue eyes radiated innocence but the tired upright way she carried herself spoke of the maturity gained through countless experiences she bore witness to far too young.

“Oh, what da fuck do you know Lass? Sitting here in ya wee cubby. When da fuck hav ya fought on the front lines. What I saw today nobody should hav to suffer and yet here ye be offering drinks to the fuckin corporate weasels that are makin this city a livin hell.” A few patrons with corporate logos stitched into their clothing turned their heads, trying to avoid attention. “Yeah, that’s right I’m talkin about you fuckers sittin’ with yer arses in here like ya don’t know what ya do.”

“I like you Anakra, out there you’re one of the good ones and I respect what you do. In here though? You’re just another person. There are no flags within these walls, and I will not have a fight in my garden.“ Her posture tensed and you could see the motors of her mechanical pack begin to hum to life.

“Oh! So the wee lass wants a brawl does she? Well bring it the fuck on then!” grabbing the nearby bottle of scotch she smashed it across the counter to create a makeshift weapon.

“Raka what the fuck are you doing? Stop this at once!” the red-head cried out, desperate to get things back under control.

“It’s alright Caline, I’ll be gentle” the teen replied all too serenely. “It’s been a while since I had to enforce my rules and she looks like she need to let her aggression out anyways.”

In an instant a mask flipped into place over the teens face and with a quick pass of her hands she released a spray from her gloves directly into the rowdy woman’s face. the world began to slow down for Anakra as the small bar began to melt away and thorny vines began to surround her from all sides, snaking into existence before her very eyes. At the center of the infestation stood the girl, a brilliant pink shining like a towering mass of flower petals much like her namesake.

One blink and the girl was upon her, landing a solid blow to her chin before vanishing in the next blink. Another tick of the clock and Anakra felt a sharp pain in shin of her flesh and blood leg, nearly toppling her over. And finally when she had almost managed to gather her bearings, she was met face to face with the girl in her armored splendor, her mask giving off the mystical fury of a fay with its glowing pink eyes burring into her very soul, and intricate vine carvings looking like the ancient tattoos of a warrior. It was the last thing she saw before, with one final hit, she was out like a candle that tried to hold its ember against an entire storm.

To everyone else however, the fight was over before it ever began. The gas brought the woman into a deep haze, and with a few precise strikes to her nerves, she was rendered unconscious before she could ever throw her first punch.

The victor removed her mask, but instead of the smile of a victor, there was only the tired eyes of someone still fighting a much longer fight. Pulling a small container from bellow the counter, she passed it on to the red head who was attempting to gather her partner from the ground.

“Here’s a fresh batch of healing salve from Max, it should help with her injuries. Make sure you take some yourself, don’t think I didn’t see you wincing earlier” the teen said.

“Thank you, Rose. I’m truly sorry about her. The last mission really wasn’t a good one” Caline replied, Anakra’s arm strung over her shoulder.

“I understand. Honestly, I really do feel the same way she does, but this place has to be neutral. She may not like it, but a lot of these people don’t have a choice when it comes to who they work for. I’ve seen entire families disappear overnight because someone refused to cooperate. The best I can do is make sure that they’re truly safe here.” She sighed, rubbing the space between her eyes “..But to think the Bourgeois could do something like that to their own daughter… Her and her friend will be safe here, you have my word.”

“There was never any doubt about that. She speaks harshly but I know she trusts you too. She just hasn’t touched a bottle so heavily like that in a long while. She wears her heart on her sleeve but damn it if she doesn’t have a dagger ready in the other.”

“It’s why this city needs her. She’s crazy as all hell, but she cares. I’ve rung up Luka and he’ll bring the hovercar around now to get you two.” She pushes a few buttons in her gauntlet and a new bottle pops out, a small heart shaped thing with an almost luminary pink mist within. “Take this too, maybe it’ll give her a chance to let off some steam in a better way. I hope you don’t mind me taking Juleka for the night either, it’ll give you some privacy and honestly I need something to cheer me up too.”

The red-head’s face blushed a red almost as deep as she gingerly took the small bottle from the teen. A small honk could be heard from outside. “That would be our ride I suppose, that boy is a little too good a pilot for his own good. I suppose this is a good night, enjoy the rest of your evening.”

“Oh, I will, just as I’m sure you’ll be enjoying yours” she smirked as the blushing woman made her quick retreat.

With that the teen began to shut down the counter, she had a date line up with a certain goth warrior after all.

——-

OHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO NICE

THANK YOU

That ending with the Love Potion was hilarious, also, fUCKING TRIPPY WOW I LOVE THEM EFFECTS Rip Anarka 

#Mafia au #submission #writing #ether-solrac #rose lavillant #anarka couffaine #caline bustier

[ask-de-writer]

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT : Part 77 of 83 : World of Sea

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT

Part 77 of 83

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

140406 words

copyright 2020

written 2007

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users   of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may   reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information   remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in   my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical   compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

New to the story?  Read from the beginning.  PART 1 is here

///////////////////////

Kurin turned to face the pure white Great Sea Dragon by the rail.  “Blind Mecat, you and I talked once about whether I could trust what Captain Barad told me.  What did you tell me about trusting him?”

Blind Mecat’s mellow voice answered, “I said that you would have to make up your own mind, Little Fish.  I also said that I trusted him.”

“Thank you, Cat.  Now, Captain Barad, why did you get the Ord and whose idea was it?”

“Mister Morgu first approached me about getting revenge on the Longin about nine Wohans ago.  The Ord was to be the agency of that revenge.  The plot was to kill you as a covert means of striking at the Longin. The circle of the conspiracy was very small.  Only myself, Mister Morgu and one other, chosen by Mister Morgu and unknown to me, actually knew the real reason for obtaining it.

“Everybody else believed that it was for the fishing experiments that it actually was used for.”

“A moment, please Captain.  Captain Sarfin, these parchments detail the exhaustive experiments carried out.  Their failure, along with the reasons for it, and the disposal of the Ord.  Your honor will notice the highlighted passage where one spine was reported as lost overboard.  Note also the witness statements that Mister Morgu was involved in that loss.”  Sarfin took the new batch of parchment and spent a few minutes reviewing it with Captain Sula.

Sula looked up grimly and said, “You are admitting to the plot against Kurin?”

“We are not done yet, Captain Sula,” said Kurin softly.

“If you wish to spare his life, I hope not,” Sula said dourly.

“Captain Barad, please continue,” Kurin asked.

“Even I did not know who Mister Morgu recruited or how he did it.  I left those details to him.  I did not know about the making of the deadly awl in that sewing kit.  Chena’s death came as complete shock.  It was a totally unnecessary test, and done without my consent.  When Merk, Master Selked’s apprentice was found dead the next morning, I guessed who had made the deadly tool but still did not know what it was.  I just let the normal course of events conceal the cause of his death.

“I stopped by the sickbay to look in on Tanlin’s condition and there I found Kurti being put on the invalid list for a resistant lung parasite infection.  I took her in as my cabin- girl because it was the lightest duty on the ship and she,” Captain Barad paused and his shoulders shook as he appeared to fight for control, “hated being useless.  She began by mending things in my cabin.  Apparently, she approached Master Selked for a sewing kit and got the deadly kit in all innocence.  She never needed the awl for the light work that she did.

“We kept her illness secret from the crew and hoped that one of the treatments would take.  I’d have married her were it possible but she was Grandalor born and the Law is clear.  Besides, we had no time.  Her fatal attack had a sudden onset, as some parasite bored into a vein and her lungs began to fill with blood.

“The whale sang for her, leaping and calling for hours.  Tanlin woke as Kurti failed.  Tanlin had lost all memory of the people of the Arrakan fleet.  She remembers all else.  Blind Mecat says that those memories are gone forever.  In every other respect she is whole.  At first, because of the great similarity between them, I looked in on her progress and tried to help.  It was swiftly apparent that she and Kurti were nothing alike, still, as I worked with her, I fell in love again.  All of this time the kit sat on the shelf in my cabin, and neither I nor any other guessed it’s deadly nature.

“I had never thought to love anybody after Teralat died of fire cough twenty five Gatherings ago.  Suddenly, I fell in love twice in quick succession.  There was no impediment to marrying the Lady Tanlin, and I did so.  We had an Arrakan style Wedding Feast at the Longin food booth.  That is crucial to understanding what followed.

“This is the part that the Court will find hard to accept.  I was bothered by the plot to harm Kurin.  It preyed on me.  I took my wife and Master Selked into my confidence about the scheme.  Each had serious and different objections.  

“Master Selked pointed out that my hate was for Captain Mord Halyn, not the Longin.  Further, I was holding a grudge for the one time that I had bested him completely.  No real basis for a grievance.

“Lady Tanlin’s objection was likewise fundamental.  Captain Mord and Kurin were both invited guests at our Announcement Feast.  Under Arrakan Law and Custom, all grudges between invited guests and the celebrators die at such a feast.  If they do not, all the vows taken at the feast are forsworn and the couple must part and can never marry each other again.

“To keep my wife, I declared the plot done and issued Logged orders that if the deadly spine be found, it must be turned in to Doctor Corin for destruction.  Any other use being mutiny.  Remember, I did not know that it had been made into a sewing tool.

“During this same time, the sorry mess with Silor Elon was playing itself out.  I felt that I owed him an assist because he was my eyes and ears aboard the Longin for the last five Gatherings.  We went and picked him up.  I was going to send him to the Arrakan fleet, where I do believe he would have done well.  I should have just let him sail away.

“Mister Morgu somehow recruited him.  Morgu did know about the kit but had lost track of it.  He ran a number of audits and inventories of the tool stock, apparently trying to find it.  He finally realized that the kit in my cabin was the only kit not checked and sent Silor to get it.

“When Silor, who had been ordered to stay out of sight, jumped ship with Mister Morgu, Tanlin realized that something was very wrong and came to me in the Captain’s Council.  That was when I left my proxy with Captain Mord.  I was trying to let you all know that my grudge with him was over.

“My whole crew searched the Gathering, trying to find either Mister Morgu, Silor or both.  We failed.  Later, we found that they had hidden inside one of the floats of the Gathering rafts.  The next day, we caught up to them just moments after they had accomplished their goal.

“All that we could do was watch and pray to the Dragons that Kurin had not eaten the poisoned part of her lunch.  When she collapsed into Captain Sula’s arms, we knew that we were doomed.

“Neither myself or my ship are popular.  I was certain that the rush to rid the Naral fleet of us would have little to do with Great Law or fleet Law.  Events have proved me correct.  You have earned your name as Sarfin the Wise and even you failed to see the flaws in what you all did.

“I had arraigned a link up with the Fauline in her Spring Waters.”

Sarfin interrupted with, “They lay a charge of ramming to enforce piracy against you.”

“I know that, your Honor.  It is not true.  You know that they had a hull-secured loan with us.  Due to a survivorship clause in favor of the Naral fleet, that loan is registered in the fleet Archive.  They were over two Gatherings in arrears.  The unpaid interest alone was somewhat over ten thousand Strong Skins.  I also know that they failed to pay their full share tax this Gathering, pleading poverty.

“They gave us a payment of one thousand Strong Skins, two thousand five hundred glue blocks and a small, one and a half ton, Hag.  They had it in their holds during the Gathering where I learned of it from an informant in the Fauline’s crew.  

“They lied to you about inability to pay their share tax.  They also gave us information about the blatantly illegal Edict of Outlawry and the search for us.  In return, we gave them a full quitclaim on the loan.

“At that point, they seized both myself and the Lady Tanlin.  They also attempted an attack on the Grandalor with a prize crew smuggled aboard ostensibly to help load the payment.  Our crew took exception to the attempted capture, took the prize crew prisoner, and rammed the Fauline at an oblique angle with a bowsprit hook-out.  This damaged the main mast’s running and standing rigging, disabling the ship.  After our crew got us back safe aboard, we saw the Coriolis storm coming, so we rendered aid.  We fixed the rigging and some minor hull damage.  

“We did not charge for that.  The price of not doing it would have been a ship and all the lives aboard.  Some things are too costly to leave undone.”

Urson interrupted sarcastically, “So says the most notorious Captain of the whole fleet.  I have known Captain Skua for many Gatherings and I find his account to be far more credible.  It is, after all, only your word against his.”

“We do have three impartial witnesses,” said Kurin calmly.

“They are separate from either ship.  They observed the encounter and are present to testify.”

“Impossible!” snapped Farrol.  “No other vessel was in sight to provide these mythical witnesses!”

“Dark Iren, are you, Blind Mecat and Frath mythical?” Kurin called out lightly.

“The last time that I looked, no.  None of us are mythical,” Dark Iren replied in a voice seemingly too soft for so large a creature.

“A question of fact, not opinion, then,” Kurin said with the surety of one who already knows the answer.  “Did your Orcas report the encounter between the Fauline and the Grandalor to you?”

“Indeed they did, matters of conflict between ships can have major ecological consequences.  Such confrontations are reported in full detail.”

“Did Captain Barad’s account seem substantially true to your reports?” Kurin inquired.

“All of his facts and the order of them are accurate.  My reports were more detailed, of course.”

“Thank you, Dark Iren,” said Kurin and turned to Blind Mecat and Frath. “Blind Mecat, were you accompanying Frath as he was steering the recent Coriolis Storm?”

“Of course, Little Fish.  You know that.  I asked Frath to steer it nearly nine hundred miles out of its planned path in order to have speech with Barad and Tanlin.  I had to be there for two reasons. One I just gave you, the other, and most important, was to ensure that the storm would still meet its ecological goals.”

All of the audience except for Sarfin, Barad and Tanlin were outraged. “Ecological goals!  That storm hit and scattered our fleet!”

Sarfin threw a bucket of icy water on them by calmly asking, “And whose world is it?  Do you really think that Sea manages itself?  These Dragons make it possible for us to live at all.  Trust them.  They actually do know what they’re doing.”

Frath said, “Thank you, Captain Sarfin.  I do try to miss fleets when I can.  Humans are now widespread across the surface of Sea and it is not always possible.  The storms are necessarily big.  Curiously, Tanlin upbraided me for exactly the same thing even though the Naral fleet was trying to hunt her down and kill her.”

“Where were you, during the encounter between the Grandalor and Fauline?” Kurin requested.

“Blind Mecat and I were about twenty yards under the surface, directly beneath the ships,” Frath answered.

“Then you couldn’t have seen or heard what happened aboard either of those ships!” Farrol exclaimed in triumph.

Blind Mecat replied, “Incorrect.  Sight is a limited sense at best.  Our hearing and echolocation are both very precise.  Two echo pings occupying less than one tenth of a second in total are sufficient to locate every object larger than one inch in length on both ships. The same two pings also allow us to count the number of persons, find their location, orientation, state of health and when they last ate. This includes those up in the rigging.”  She regarded Farrol for an unnervingly sightless second and added, “We’re not just big, we are very good predators.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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#SEA DRAGON’S GIFT #Part 77 of 83 #World of Sea #Written by De Writer

[sweetsmellosuccess]

The Sátántangó Experience

How exactly does one prepare to watch a 7.5 hour film? A bit like what you might do in preparation for major surgery: Pack a bag of necessities (in this case, water and protein bars), kiss your loved ones goodbye, and try to make peace with your god. Or, maybe less dramatically, treat it as you would a long train journey, one that takes you through some harrowing terrain on half a rutted track before depositing you to your eventual destination.

Of course, this sort of conception of time is entirely relative: If you have to drive somewhere that takes half an hour, it feels unduly long; but if the trip were normally three hours long, and you somehow found a shortcut that would cut the time down to 30 minutes, you would be flying on dulcet wings for that amount of time, and think you were blessed by angels. In other words, spending an entire standard work day watching one film might seem excessive, but it all has to do with your expectations.

In my case, I was at Philadelphia’s newly renovated Lightbox Theater at the University of the Arts to take in Béla Tarr’s magnum opus Sátántangó, all glorious 450 minutes, in a new 4K restoration (it’s currently playing at select theaters across the country). Armed with my snack survival kit, and safe in the knowledge that we would get intermissions at roughly 2.5 hour intervals, I settled in to watch what has been described as a masterpiece in cinephile circles, and currently resides at number 36 in the most recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll.

Tarr’s beyond-bleak film is broken up into 12 segments, each having to do with a failing farmer’s cooperative in Hungary during the last throes of communism in the late ‘80s. Each section has its own feel and perspective  —  some of them are more lighthearted, others are desolate beyond measure  —  but all expertly shot in low-contrast black and white (by Gábor Medvigy), which renders the people and landscape in various tones of drudgery grey.

It originally opened in America as part of the 1994 New York film festival, at a time when Hungary was undergoing a transformation from Communism to shaky democratic capitalism, so it served as a kind of epigraph to the era, a showcase, as it were, as to the imperfections of a political system built on a promise of human egalitarianism that proved to be depressingly difficult to put into practice.

The landscape makes up a lot of Tarr’s vision, the flat, moody farmland upon which the collective has been toiling, and the unceasing rain and wind that constantly pelts the characters as they venture outside for one business or another. As the film opens, the collective  —  made up of three couples; a curious “doctor” (Peter Berling), who spends his time spying on the others, making copious notes in his stacks of file folders, and daily drinking his considerable body weight in Palinka (Hungarian plum brandy); and the cagey Futaki (Miklos Szekely B.), who has to walk with a cane from an unspecified accident, but seems a bit more shrewd than the others  —  is anxiously awaiting their annual wages, which come all at once and is meant to get divvied up amongst the members equally.

Early on, there are various halfcocked plans from individuals to try and steal the small fortune for themselves, reflected in much idle talk about meeting that evening and decamping for parts unknown, but that ultimately come to nothing. However, when word reaches the group that the mysterious Irimiás (Mihály Vig, also the film’s composer) is, in fact, not dead as they had been told, but alive, and returning to the collective he started, the group dynamic is thrown akimbo, with various members fretting for their future, and, one, the owner of the local bar (Zoltán Kamondi), furious at the thought his business will be taken from him. 

Just why they respond like this remains vague. In ensuing segments, we see Irimiás, along with his associate, Petrina (Dr. Putyi Horvath), navigating through a police interview  —  where the local Captain informs them they will be working for him now in ways unspecified  —  though it appears the collective had very actively planned on not having to include their former leader (and his right-hand man) in their financial arrangements. As for the non-collective characters, including the aforementioned barkeep, and various prostitutes sitting idly around, the collective is virtually their only business, such as it is, so they, too, await this potential flood of cash eagerly.

As the segments begin to collect, they also begin to fold upon themselves: Scenes that we see from one vantage point in an earlier segment are revisited later on, from the perspective of a different character, enabling a thrilling moment of realization that the stream of time we’re following has breaks, jumps, and hiccoughs throughout. Never more poignantly than a moment with a young girl peering into a window of the bar  —  one of the only lit buildings in the otherwise dismally dark countryside  —  watching the adults inside drunkenly dancing and cavorting.

About that girl. Easily the most emotional moment of the film involves her, but not first without the audience paying a heavy price, depending on your empathy for other creatures. Before the film screened, during its introduction, we were made aware that there was a scene of animal cruelty involving a cat somewhere in the proceedings. The sympathetic presenter, himself a cat lover, suggested looking away for parts of that segment, though a friend of mine in attendance who had seen it before assured me looking away wasn’t really an option. Fortunately, he also told me that the cat in question wasn’t actually hurt, and was still alive at the time of a 2012 interview with Tarr.

Needless to say, my worry about this poor cat dominated my experience in the early going: Every time I saw a feline in the background of a scene, I worried that it was coming up, such that it was almost a relief when it finally happened. The situation is this: Estike (Erica Bók), the young daughter of one of the local prostitutes, caught up in her world of half-fantasies after being sent out of their apartment by her working mother, holes up in an attic with a grey tabby. At first, she pets and cuddles him, but eventually, she desires to control him, bend the cat to her will. To the cat’s increasing discomfort and fury, she grabs him by the front paws and rolls around with him, all the while muttering how she alone can determine its fate. Looping up the poor fellow in a net bag and hanging it from a post, she goes downstairs to mix a batch of milk with some rat poison powder and force feeds him until he dies (though in actuality merely tranquilized).

Wandering around the farm that night with the stiffened body of the cat tucked under her arm (a prosthetic, the director assures us), Estike runs into the doctor, shuffling outside to refill his giant jug of brandy, shortly after peering through the window of the bar. Eventually, she lies down amongst the deserted crumble of a bomb-blasted church and takes the poison herself.

As gruesome as the segment becomes, its haunting evocations permeate the rest of the film (though not immediately: in a jarring juxtaposition, the very next segment takes us back to the bar, where everyone is still dancing wildly about to a loopy accordion refrain —  only towards the end of this extended scene do we see the face of the soon-to-be-dead Estike peering inside). Eventually, Irimiás does indeed return, in time to give a moving eulogy for Estike, while at the same time transitioning the group towards his next vision, a new farm some distance away where he assures them they can finally live freely and thrive. All he needs to achieve this goal for them is the money they just received from their previous year’s efforts.

With nowhere else to go, and no other plan on the horizon, the members of the collective dutifully deposit their wages on the table in front of their leader. He sends them out to pack their things so that they may meet with him in a couple of days at the new farm he’s selected.

Gathering their miserable belongings, the group reassemble and trudge down the muddy road on foot, as the rain pelts down on them without ceasing. Distressingly, the members don’t have any proper rain coats  —  in an earlier soliloquy in the bar, Kráner (János Derszi) laments that his leather coat is so old and stiff he has to bend it in order to sit down  —  so they wear their woolen winter coats, which do little to keep them from getting soaked in the heavy fall rains.

As they make their way to this new destination, it’s clear that Irimiás is up to something. Most obviously, he could make off with their wages and move on, but it turns out his scheme is less direct than just taking their hard-earned money for himself.

Towards the second half, Tarr’s penchant for long, elegantly composed shots gives gradually away to more adventurous camerawork, including a single steadicam shot in the woods that’s like something out of a Sam Raimi film. There are extensive elliptical shots with the camera spinning slowly on an axis, this particular effect never more effective than when after the group arrives at their new farm, yet another dilapidated series of box-like concrete buildings. Once they dump their belongings and lie on the floor of the unheated, broken-windowed main house, trying to sleep, our narrator makes one of his occasional VO appearances to describe in intimate detail the dreams each character is having.

It’s a shot that could have served as an excellent final salvo, one would imagine. Indeed, by the last hour of this opus, time and again, Tarr arrives at what might be considered a conclusive moment  —  in this, the confusion is aided by his particular style: It turns out many films end on a superbly composed, static long shot  —  only to keep the narrative flowing, circling back, eventually to the original farm, where the doctor, having just returned from a stint in a hospital, begins to narrate, again, the original opening lines. Such is the perfection in this device (the segment is titled “The Circle Closes”) that once you finally arrive there, it’s clear there could be no other ending that would have sufficed.

When finally the film ended, it was later in the evening. I met up with my compatriots also in attendance, and the three of us ventured back out into the city, heading to a bar where we could nurse a beer and attempt to articulate the tangled mass of feelings and impressions of the previous nine hours. In one of the very few bars in the city that still allows smoking, appropriately enough, we debated about the film in an atmosphere swirling with the poisonous fumes of an earlier era. It seemed hopeless, but still necessary, somehow; like bidding farewell to someone already in a coma.

#sweet smell of success #ssos #piers marchant #films #movies #satantango #bela tarr #hungary #communism #Mihály Vig #philadelphia lightbox theater

[vapormaison]

2019 Best Press 3/4:  カタカナ・タイトル + Kanji Title by TANUKI

While for many vaporwave vinyl is doubtless equal parts collector’s item and audio source, I don’t want to lose sight of the goal of this blog here: developing a canon of the genre for high fidelity enjoyment. That said, when I come across something remarkable or noteworthy about a particular piece of wax, even if it is not a “purely audiophile” object, I want to make mention of it.

And TANUKI’s カタカナ・タイトル + Kanji Title wax release is not only noteworthy, but contends for hi-fi consideration despite it’s status as a picture disc.

But let’s back up slightly.

Going back to the previous thesis on why we buy records, sometimes you just want to own a vinyl just because. Just because you’re a collector trying to compile a discography on wax — or, better yet, just because you truly love the album art. For me, カタカナ・タイトル + Kanji Title (Double EP) was undoubtedly all of the three “just be-causes”.

A while back, I noticed that the LP was going into its 3rd press, and decided to snap up a copy because I like Tanuki, I like Lum, and because of those other just becauses. Unfortunately the only format available was not the pink vinyl, but the picture disc. As I’m sure is well-known (because audiophiles are very loud about things they dislike), picture-discs are a big no-no in the audiophile community. This is because while a beautiful objet d’art, a serious listening session of a picture disc release will usually produce greater amounts of surface noise than any other type of vinyl. You can, of course, with the right system, neutralize and mitigate this process slightly, but true-blue hi-fi heads pursuing that elusive muse of “pure sound” would never give a picture disc a second look.

I’m not one of those people.

Tangentially, I’ve heard whispers of ghosts of rumors from when I was living in Shenzen, China — that various record suppliers (small batch Makers) are working out manufacturing and material processes that minimize these issues on pic discs to create appealing records that cover all the bases: hi-fi suitability, collector oriented visual esoterica, and price. I should also admit I have no idea where those companies are in terms of R&D and/or producing these. I end up catching a lot of very fast talk from extremely motivated enthusiasts, but Chinese is still as elusive a language to me at times as “pure sound” can be. With that in mind, however, it’s logical to surmise that advances in technology will eventually render the differences between picture discs and traditional black wax undistinguishable. So long as the world isn’t destroyed in some cataclysmic climate disaster (very real possibility), or -- as we are watching evolve now: World War 3. My view is that it’d be pointless to dismiss the format out of hand when there are active attempts to innovate it as we speak.

That all said, I know what to expect when a contemporary, big-label picture disc plays. During my college days, I used to spin wax at the university radio station. One of the previous catalog managers had a fetish for this “collectible” format, and was convinced he was doing the station a favor by purchasing all these vinyls, noting a pre-supposed resale value later. I remember throwing these on the well-worn Technics SP-10 we had as our main turntable, and listening to the occasional scratch, frequent popping, and constant surface noise, that for the uninitiated (bless you), sounds like a sustained “cracking” in your Rice Krispies — or for those born in the analog age, CRTV static.

So when I sat down with the Tanuki picture disc, I had this laundry list of preconceptions and prejudices about the format. I thought that I could listen to a moderately scratchy record once or twice, keep it as more a visual boutique item and then eventually include in an article where I bemoan the poor quality of the genre’s releases.

But then, I actually listened.

And it sounded… well, I won’t get ahead of myself. Here’s the full review:

THE MUSIC

BABYBABYの夢 — is doubtless the reason why many of us have bought the EP from a sonic perspective —especially if the band-camp reviews are indicative of trends. I still maintain that this is the Mariya Takeuchi sample/remix work par excellence. Tanuki hits all the essential notes here, a genuine respect and love for the sound-staging of its original source, Yume No Tsuzuki. I still get echoes of the original arrangement in my system, (ever so slightly) with a bright and dance-infused collection of unique sounds — particularly in that delicious, wide mid-range — that flesh out the track into its own sort of masterpiece.

何がGoin' On — the curatorial and conspiratorial side of my brain tells me that Goin’ On will probably go down as one the under-appreciated vintage bangers of this era of future funk. I can envision hipsters two or three decades from now sussing out a neophyte with pretentious questions about this track’s pitch-shifted sample draws from. It has that sort of vibe that you know hits with a certain subset of electronica fans — rich & vibrant, making the tweeters on your system work out in all the best ways — it’s just great.

がんばれ — Tanuki is at his best when he gets playful with brass samples. I firmly believe that the titans in this genre each have their go-to piece in their best arrangement — like Dan Mason’s creative vocal array, or greyL’s manipulation of micro-samples. For Tanuki, it’s whenever her gets a horn — synthesized or otherwise, into his production workflow.

ファンクOFF — continues Tanuki’s magic act, taking another city pop track more iconic for its soulful electric guitar riff and turning it into the most slap-worthy single on this EP. I prefer it when Japanese pop samples are fundamentally re-imagined, although I can see how the perfectionist tweaking of someone like Yung Bae is more appealing for some. Tanuki is undoubtedly one of the innovators of this genre, and there’s no more solid evidence of that talent than this track.

腕の中でDancin’ — if I ended up hosting a sort of mythical vaporwave grammies or something like that, (I’m available, folks!) I would probably go off on a Ricky Gervais style rant on how artists aren’t in touch with “the people” (read: me) because all we really want are more remixes of Meiko Nakahara songs — who given her impact on City Pop should have way more play in this genre than she does. This one, like most of the Meiko mixes I’ve heard, is a banger with an absolute fire bass riff punctuated throughout.

Radiant Memories — this might be my first certified “hot take” in the publication (they’ll be many more, I imagine) — but as far as I’m concerned this is the superior Plastic Love edit. I’ll just leave my thoughts there, so they can soak in with a portion of the fanbase who split my reddit account on an open fire of downvotes for suggesting that other artists than Macross 82-99 (Praise be upon him!) are allowed to touch this song as well. While Macross’s mix is definitely the more up-temo of the two, and that for some is the very essence of the genre, this slightly down-mixed version is both the perfect conclusion for the EP and ideal antithesis.

THE LISTENING EXPERIENCE

Signal to Raise ratio on the following albums:

カタカナ・タイトル + Kanji Title:  ~61.9db (1 db MoE)

Tron Legacy, Daft Punk:  58.4db

Love Trip, Takako Mamiya, Kitty Records Press: 65.8db

(ratings based on averages 5 minutes of sustained play on the testing unit, the machine actually complied this data on its preset, which is another fascinating part about this sort of vintage press-testing tech). The margin of error is because the machine, according to my mentor Dr. Juuso Ottala formerly of Harman International, informs me it was never meant to give accurate readings of picture discs, and to add about a dB of error margin.

One of the benefits of growing up in New England and, subsequently, New York, is that there are no shortage of heritage professional audio brand HQs in operation around a 200 mile radius from Manhattan to Boston. Off the top of my head, there’s Harman/Kardon, Boston Acoustics, Bose, NuMark, Marantz, and Rane headquarters within an hour’s drive from my two hometowns. Early on in my audiophile quest, I got my hands on some cool vintage gear — vinyl lathe testing equipment that has collected dust in both an old Harman technician’s storage unit, and now my parent’s basement. Over the holiday, I recently brought it out to do some surface noise testing on it to get a rough confirmation of what I was explaining in yesterday’s hi-fi guide. The innards of the machine looks eerily like a plinth-less linear tonearm and plate pair attached to a monitor. After making sure I’m not violating some kind of Harman International trade secret, I’ll post it on instagram.

Wanting to also get a firm idea on just how good my ear-test sounded, I grabbed another picture disc vinyl I had received as a gift a few years ago from my brother — the Tron Legacy OST. While I found the film passably enjoyable, my own preconceptions about pic discs, and a general exhaustion with french house — left me with no discernible desire to spin the thing. I hadn’t even broken the seal on the plastic wrap, so it seemed like as good as a blind test as any. I also grabbed what my ears tell me is a “good”, “heavy” press, a 1982 original dead-stock copy of Takako Mamiya’s Love Trip LP pressed by Kitty Records Japan. I’ve played it maybe a half dozen times since I bought it, so it’s as close to “new” 80s audiophile pop record as you can get. The Japanese are infamously anal about low SNR on their vinyl.

And, well, the results speak for themselves. The sweet spot for most black vinyl records is between 60-70db depending on age, weight, and a host of other frankly uncontrollable factors that aren’t worth getting into detail here, as I’d go on forever. The main takeaway here is that Neoncity’s and Tanuki’s record sat at the low end of the audiophile vinyl reference spectrum. Which in itself is a remarkable achievement for a pic disc. It’s worth taking a look at Tron Legacy, which just barely scratches 8db above a cassette tape, and 7db a Japanese vinyl from 1982.

This is all in an effort to say: damn, this is pretty good.

This also somewhat counters the usual “picture discs sound like shit” narrative that’s prevailed pretty consistently in the audiophile community. Tron Legacy? Yeah, that probably sounds like shit if I could bother to suffer through a listen. But whoever Hong-Kong based Neoncity is using actually makes “good” — if such a qualifier needs to be attached — image-pressed records. And that devotion to audio fidelity should be rewarded.

It might be time for me to re-asses picture discs on the whole, and that mind-expanding moment is something I owe to the fine folks at Neoncity.

#bestof2019 #bestpress

[tenscupcake]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - An Honest Review

I’d like to preface this review by saying I am an unabashed Kingdom Hearts geek. Like, through and through. I played KH1 when I was just a tween, and have picked up a copy every installment since (in some cases, even bought the entire console just to play that one game). I still have CDs of the game soundtracks, a few discs which have nearly burnt out on replay in my car. Sanctuary After the Battle will forever make me cry, whether or not I’m watching the cutscene that goes along with it. I’ve replayed most of the titles multiple times. Wasted away hours on YouTube watching Story So Far recaps and funny commentaries about the games in preparation for KH3. Like millions of other enthusiasts, I have been eagerly and patiently (all right, sometimes not so patiently) awaiting the arrival of KH3 since the moment I first finished KH2 – 13 very, very long years ago.

At around eight o’clock on premiere night, I took my place in line at my local GameStop wearing my Kingdom Hearts t-shirt and pajama pants, brandishing the miniature Kingdom Key clipped to my lanyard. Finally holding that blue case in my hands was absolutely surreal. One of those natural highs it took me hours to come down from. Tears welled up in my eyes at the first few somber piano keys as the title screen faded into view.

Lots of people asked me, in the weeks and even months leading up to the release (because believe me, at any opportunity, I would not shut up about how excited I was about this game), if I thought it would live up to the hype. Pfft, I thought. People outside the KH fandom never understand. Of course it will. Sure, the series has had its weak links, its hiccups (the battle system in COM and the perpetual re-releases of old games with minor tweaks, to name a couple). But with the compelling cinematic storytelling and uniquely delightful gameplay of the main series’ smash hits - KH1, KH2, and BBS – in their repertoire, I knew the team at Square was capable of pulling this off. To me, it was just a given that it would be epic. That playing it would be worth all the years of waiting. I had absolutely no doubt in my mind this game was going to be lit. As. Hell.

I’m only saying all this so as not to give the impression I went into this game looking to find flaws, to nitpick it. Or with the expectation of being disappointed. In fact, quite the opposite.

I wanted to love this game. To me, loving KH games is one of very few constants in my life. I was supposed to love this game. I needed to love this game.

But the truth is, I didn’t.

That statement has been pretty difficult for me to come to terms with.

In what few early reviews and videos I’ve found of people discussing their thoughts on the game, I’ve found fans to be quite split: with some unreservedly loving, others downright hating the game.

I fall somewhere in the middle of the polarized fandom. I did NOT hate the game. It was actually a good, if not great game. But putting it on a sliding scale of satisfaction and disappointment, I would say it’s tipping toward the latter. And as it’s taken me hours of mulling, reading, and discussing with other players to characterize and articulate precisely why, and because I think I owe it not only to the series and the characters therein, but also my younger self to leave no stone unturned, this review is going to be a long one.

I’m finding it easiest to break it down by category:

Graphics.

This game is beautiful. It was sort of a dream come true to meander around in real time with the gorgeously, smoothly animated versions of Sora and the gang that we’d previously only been able to see in the rare cinematic cutscenes at each game’s beginning and end. Most of the Disney and even Pixar worlds and characters are rendered to nearly the same quality as their film counterparts. I often found myself just standing in place for a while, admiring it all. The vivid green landscapes of Corona, the beaches and sprawling sea in the Caribbean, the towering cityscape of San Fransokyo. And walking on water where the sky meets the sea? Stunning.

Gameplay.

All in all, this game is pretty damn fun to play. It was all I thought about during long days at work: I couldn’t wait to jump back into the action. Pounding on Heartless still brings me back to the good old days. And who doesn’t want to run up the side of buildings as Riku and Roxas demonstrated so epically, so long ago, in the World That Never Was? Soar to sky-high Heartless as easily as you can lock onto them? These new movement aspects brought an almost superhero-esque quality to the game, reminiscent of Spider-man’s wall-crawling or Batman’s grappling hook, that, if a bit unrealistic, I found to be immense fun. And compared to previous games, worlds are no longer cordoned off into many separate areas, and with the sheer scale of them, KH3 experiments with a quasi-open-world style that is rather freeing.

I also really appreciate that the character interactions with your party and with NPCs felt much less clunky. For one thing, they FINALLY did away with the press X-to-progress text-only conversations that were so prevalent in previous games, with all the dialogue left to voice actors. Even minor NPCs that only show up one time were given a voice, making every interaction that much more immersive. Transitions from cutscenes to the action were also much more fluid, and Sora and his current teammates talk to one another as you pow around. Even if it’s just a warning from Goofy you’re going the wrong way, or a heads-up from Donald there’s an ingredient or lucky emblem nearby, it was still a new feature I was glad to have.

Combat-wise, this game has a lot going for it. This installment brings nearly all the combat styles we’ve seen up until this point: magic, combos, form changes, flowmotion, shotlock, companion team-ups, and links. And it even introduces a few new ones on top of all this: the ability to swap between three different keyblades at will, and the new Disney parks-inspired attraction commands, where you can summon roller coasters, tea cups, and spinning carousels to your heart’s content. What this enables is for the player to never get bored during a battle. With so many options to choose from in each new enemy encounter, you never have to stick with the same combat style or get stuck in a rut of just mashing X to hack and slash everything. All things considered, Sora’s got some pretty sick moves this time around. Whipping out Thundaza, watching lightning explode across the screen and zap all the enemies in sight with it? Wicked. Floating above the ground, wreaking ethereal, glowing havoc with the Mirage Staff? Awesome. Surrounded by a sea of Heartless, locking onto 32 different targets at once and unleashing a flurry of lasers to slash through them all? Amazing. Thumbs getting fatigued fighting the third maddening iteration of Xehanort? Give yourself a break from the chaos in a giant, technicolor pirate ship, watching it thwack your adversary on every rock back and forth.

On one hand, the hefty damage most of these combat options deal gives the game an almost Ratchet and Clank-esque ‘blowing shit up’ vibe, which is undeniably fun. But, this array of choices does become a double-edged sword. With grand magic, attraction commands, form changes, and team attacks all fighting for space atop the command deck, they tend to pile up quickly. It’s not at all uncommon to rack up three or four different situation commands after only about 30 seconds of fighting. Sometimes, the constant need to make a choice, especially in a busy battle, can be more of a burden than a blessing. Having to shift between situation command selections on top of attacking, blocking, and accessing your shortcuts can be a bit cumbersome.

Unlike in previous games, there also aren’t many consequences for over-using special attacks. In KH2, your drive gauge ran out and needed to be slowly refilled. You also ran the increasingly high risk of morphing into the near-helpless Anti-Sora by relying too much on drive forms. But here, no matter how many times you’ve used a special attack, your MP will reload in a few seconds, and you can easily just ignore the situation command for Rage Form when it pops up. In BBS, it felt like it took a good while to power up to a form change, whereas in KH3 it seems like you can spend just as much time in a powered-up keyblade form change as in regular combat.

And, because so many of these situation commands are so powerful and frequent, they tend to dominate the entire battle, making the combat in the game much easier than previous games. Bordering on too easy. Where in other entries in the main series, I usually had to die several times on each boss in Proud mode before I devised the right strategy to defeat them, I rarely died at all in this game. On the surface, that isn’t such a bad thing. As I like to say a lot of the time, when I play a game “I’m here for a good time, not a hard time.” But there comes a point when the combat is so easy that it no longer gives you that sense of accomplishment when you progress past a tough batch of heartless or a particularly merciless boss – you know, that punching the air, whooping to yourself sort of pride. I was definitely missing that, at times.

Believe it or not, I think the Disney attraction commands, though powerful, and at first hilarious, were a bit too extra. After only a few hours in they just became annoying, and I was doing my best to ignore them when they popped up, even wishing I could turn them off. Now and then, I’d accidentally trigger the Blaster or the raft ride and just roll my eyes while canceling back out of it. Because it doesn’t really feel like you’re doing any fighting, let alone the real-time keyblade-style fighting uniquely special to this series. And forget trying to effectively aim while you’re in one. After a while the only thing I found them useful for was, as I mentioned earlier, taking a break from a fight when you’re fatigued, as they give your thumbs a break and cause you to take much less damage. While they were cool at first, my final impression of this addition to the combat was all flash, no substance.

I was one of the few who actually liked and took advantage of flowmotion in DDD, and was excited to see it brought back here. But this, too, turned out to be mostly another annoyance. I’m not sure if it’s because the actionable objects are so much more spread out in KH3, or because they actually built in restrictions on combos here, but I was unable to keep a flow going at all. After only one successful strike after leaping off a wall or pole, the blue glow of momentum vanished. It didn’t feel like “flowmotion” at all, just a one-and-done special attack that tended to kill any rhythm I had going moreso than facilitate it. So while conceptually and visually it was promising, I unfortunately no longer found it very useful.

Also, and I realize this is completely subjective, but I found the form changes to be stylistically underwhelming overall. I thought the drive forms in KH2 (especially Master and Final) were visually and stylistically cooler, and seemed to have more finesse.

Worlds.

When I was whisked away from San Fransokyo and landed in the final world of the game, I found myself disappointed by the number of worlds I’d been to, expecting there to be a handful more. Though, when I counted the worlds up, the tally was at nine. So I asked myself why it felt like so little, when nine didn’t seem like a small number. But, tallying up the worlds in previous games, KH1 had 13, KH2 had 15, and BBS had 10. Which does put KH3 on the low end of world count. Also, in all three of these previous games (especially KH2 and BBS), you had to return to these worlds more than once, usually unlocking new content and/or areas each time, leading it to feel like there were more worlds than there actually were. Though KH3 has a comparable length of gameplay to complete the story, it definitely does feel like it comes up short in terms of variety of worlds you get to visit. As a result, some of the worlds where you spend 3 or 4 hours at a time can start to feel like they’re dragging on a little bit. And on the flipside of that, there are certain worlds that you technically do visit in KH3 I did not include in the world count, because you are there for such a fleeting amount of time, or in such a tiny portion of the world – e.g. Land of Departure, the Realm of Darkness. Worlds that would have been awesome to get to actually explore! And perhaps the biggest letdown of all, though you get to visit Destiny Islands and Radiant Garden via cutscenes, there is no play time in either. Serious bummer.

As far as the worlds they did choose to include, the selection admittedly left me ambivalent. I was really glad to see Toy Story, Monsters Inc., and Big Hero 6 included, but wasn’t over the moon about any of the others. I was really counting on having a Wreck-It-Ralph world (I mean, how perfect would that be?), and would love to have seen them tackle Zootopia, Wall-E, Meet the Robinsons, or the Incredibles. I’d even settle for a return to Halloween Town (shameless NBC fangirl, what can I say). The Emperor’s New Groove could have been pretty damn funny. Even A Bug’s Life or Finding Nemo could have offered some unique gameplay opportunities. Certainly better content to work with than Frozen, at any rate.

As far as the plot/experience within the worlds, I also found it to be a mixed bag. I did enjoy all of them, even ones I did not expect to enjoy too much (i.e. Frozen and Pirates). Honestly, though, I found myself a bit bored in worlds where they followed the plot of the films too closely, to the point that it felt like an abridged re-hash of the movies. I know they’ve taken this approach before with earlier Kingdom Hearts games, and I may sound like a hypocrite for only critiquing it now. But I think even in stories where they did do this earlier, like Tarzan or Aladdin, they executed the re-tellings more successfully. The plotline was altered just enough to ensure Sora was a part of the action through and through. After playing those games, Sora was indelibly inserted into those films in my head. To where the next time I watched them, I was jokingly asking myself “Where’s Sora?” But that was not the feeling I got here. In worlds like Corona or the Caribbean, Sora was just sort of jammed into the plot where he didn’t really fit. In many of the longer cutscenes, I actually forgot Sora was even there – even forgot I was playing Kingdom Hearts. Sora didn’t really feel needed. I definitely found it more enjoyable to be part of a new adventure with the characters – like what was done with Toy Story and Big Hero 6, where Sora was able to play more of an active role in progressing the subplot. It was nice to feel like I mattered!

Extras.

These were hit-or-miss for me. I actually screeched with excitement when Sora and the gang ran into Remy, and enjoyed the scavenger hunt for ingredients. And while cooking with little chef was a treat I wouldn’t want to see cut from the game, I found most of the cooking mini-games to be simultaneously too short (less than 10 seconds each!) and needlessly hard to master (especially cracking that egg).

Admittedly a Disney and Disneyland fanatic, I also got a kick out of the lucky emblems (aka hidden mickeys). I thought they were one of the most fun collectibles we’ve seen to date in the franchise.

Which brings me to one of the more controversial extras in the game: the gummiphone! While a lot of people are ragging on the inclusion of this dynamic, I enjoyed it. The Instagram loading screens were a little jarring at first, but they really grew on me. And being able to point the camera at Goofy, Sully, or Hiro and watch them pose for a picture in real-time was nothing short of adorable.

Another thing that surprised me? The game’s occasional self-awareness. I almost included a separate category for this, because I’ve never seen another game do this, and did not see it coming! But the “KINGDOM HEARTS II.9” title screen gave me a good chuckle. It doesn’t make up for all the 1.5, 2.8, 0.2 nonsense we’ve had to put up with, but it’s at least nice to see they can poke fun at their own ridiculousness. And when Sora laments how long it’s been since he’s seen the folks in Twilight Town; then Hayner, confused and even a little creeped out, says “It hasn’t been that long”. Simply acknowledging the vast disconnect between the short time that’s passed in-universe since KH2 and how egregiously long the fans had to wait – well, it had me in stitches. It was morbid laughter, sure, but refreshing nonetheless.

Um, the folk dancing in the square in Corona? Literal funniest thing ever.

One thing that I really missed? Closing keyholes. Finishing worlds wasn’t the same without them.

At this point in the review, I’ve covered basically every aspect I can think of save for one: the story. I’ve purposely saved it for last, because it’s the most important aspect of the series to me, the one that can make or break a Kingdom Hearts game.

From the categories I’ve judged thus far – content, visuals, gameplay, extras – I’d probably give this game a solid 8 or 9/10. I had some issues with the overly cluttered combat, the difficulty level, and the slight disappointment with which worlds were included and the ways they chose to play out the subplots in each. But in the grand scheme of things, all these complaints are minor, and don’t detract from the fact that it’s just plain fun, in a new league with some of the most entertaining and most beautiful titles out there.

But that’s exactly it. Beautiful graphics are the new bare minimum for this generation of console gaming. If a game released for the PS4 or Switch isn’t visually outstanding, it runs a real risk of faltering behind the competition. There is no shortage of beautiful games on the market in 2019.

And if I want a fun game, I can pop back into Mario Odyssey or get a group together to duke it out in Super Smash Ultimate. I can easily download a dozen fun platformers on Steam for less than 50 bucks.

Yes, KH3 is really beautiful, and really fun.

But that’s not why I was so excited to play it.

A legion of kids and teenagers stuck with this series well into their twenties and thirties, never giving up on the release of the next installment. Trudged through handheld games and blocky graphics and clunky battle systems and convoluted plot lines. Why? Well, of course I can’t speak for all KH fans, but for me, and all the ones I know personally, it’s because of the story. It’s always been what, in my mind, sets KH apart from any other video game I’ve ever played. It’s the only game series that’s ever made me cry. The only one I’ve ever owned merchandise for. The only one I’ve ever been so invested in that I can discuss it with friends, even acquaintances, for hours on end. The only one that’s made me care so much about the characters that they feel like my friends. With how much time has passed since I started, maybe even my kids. No pun intended, the series has heart. It contains the same sort of magic that going to Disneyland as a child did. Or, it used to.

Kingdom Hearts 3 didn’t need to just be a great game. It needed to be a Kingdom Hearts game. One that built a wove a compelling story filled with intrigue and emotion from the first hour. One that did justice to all the characters (and by now, there are a lot of them) that we’ve grown to love over the last 17 years. One where a prepubescent kid can yell a speech up at a threatening villain that makes you believe, harder than you’ve ever believed, in the power of friendship. One that instills a childlike optimism that no matter how dark the world gets, as long as someone keeps fighting, good can still triumph over evil. One that tugs on the heartstrings in just the right ways, at just the right moments, to manage to make you cry – repeatedly – over a gang of outspoken, angsty kids with clown feet.

The thing about the story in KH3 is: it’s not inherently a bad story. Sure, it’s a mess, it doesn’t make much sense, it leaves you with more questions than answers, it’s incredibly cheesy, and it retcons a good deal of lore from previous installments. But many of these things could be said of other Kingdom Hearts games. The fact that these descriptors apply to KH3 isn’t what disqualifies it as a worthy entry in the series, in my mind.

For the most part, it’s not the story itself I found disappointing. After all, think about how a summary sounds on paper: reunions with long lost characters, long-awaited battles, conclusions of lengthy character and story arcs. 

The biggest problem wasn’t so much the concept of the story, but rather the execution.

First of all, the pacing. The pacing was terrible. Almost nothing happens the first 20-25 hours of the game. I can think of maybe two scenes that got me on the edge of my seat, gripping my controller in the hopes it would advance the plot further: the scene with Mickey and Riku in the realm of darkness where you get to play as Riku for a few minutes (sadly the only time in the game that you do), and running into Vanitas in Monstropolis. Nothing. Else. Happened. Sure you run into Larxene in Arendelle, and goof around chasing Luxord in the Caribbean, but none of this is actually relevant to the plot we care about. Certainly not the plot the story is telling us to care about from the beginning.

And that leads me to the second issue – how vague your objective actually is. The ultimate objective of the game seems clear enough: rescue Aqua from the realm of darkness, maybe worry about the other two Wayfinder trio once we’ve found her, and defeat Xehanort. But this is not Sora’s given objective. Rather, it’s to find the ‘power of waking.’ Which is not explained, either to Sora or the player. Sora, on the other hand, appoints himself to another mission entirely: contemplating the unfairness of Roxas’ disappearance, he seems to mainly be focused on finding him and restoring him to a physical existence. However, this mission is starkly at odds with the canonical explanation of Nobodies in general and Roxas, specifically. The last time we saw Roxas (chronologically speaking) he reunited with Sora, and as far as we know, he’s still part of Sora. So, the mission to “find” Roxas as if he exists as an entity in the real world is perplexing. Second, lacking hearts, Nobodies can’t exist as a whole on their own. So even assuming we can “find” him in Sora, how far we going to bring him back without splintering Sora into a Heartless and a Nobody again? Even according to the series’ own complex lore, it doesn’t make sense. Therefore, the first half or more of the game seems aimless, not really knowing what we’re meant to be doing, or how. It’s hard to be invested in a story with no clear objective. Not something we can easily get on board with like “Find Riku and Kairi” or “Track down the Organization.” Just “Go find the power of waking.” Okay.

And while a lot (and I mean a lot) happens in the last 4-5 hours of the story to tie up loose ends, it’s crammed together in such a jumbled rush that it’s almost impossible to appreciate any of it.

After collecting Aqua and Ventus, long lost characters reappear on screen one right after another assembly-line style, to the point that none of them feels special or poignant anymore.

Not only that, but the characters who are brought back, many of them beloved protagonists from earlier installments in the series, are not given any time to shine.

It was promising when they let Aqua fight Vanitas in the newly restored Land of Departure. Ven is her friend, her responsibility; it was her fight. But with this taste of getting back a playable character from the franchise, I expected that as the plot progressed, it would open up plenty more chances for past protagonists to take the stage. That we’d be able to step back into the oversized shoes of other playable characters we’d missed. That when (or if) others returned in all their glory, they’d get to strut their stuff.

But that is precisely the opposite of what happened.

I mean, Ventus didn’t get to steal the spotlight for the final clash with Vanitas? By definition, his natural foil?

Terra didn’t get to exact his revenge in an epic showdown with Xehanort, the guy who stole his body and enslaved him for more than a decade?

Roxas and Axel, reunited, couldn’t team up to pound on the Organization members that tormented them? Instead, after his surprise entrance, Roxas got hardly any screen presence at all, and Axel’s epic new flaming keyblade got destroyed, making him sit out most of the fighting after all the build up that he was training to fight?

Oh, and you know who else was utterly useless through the final battles, demoted once again to a damsel in distress despite years of hype that she’d wield a keyblade in this installment, and multiple cutscenes indicating she, too, was training to actually fight? Yup. I don’t even need to say the name.

And to only get one small boss fight as Riku, when in the previous installment he had half the screen time?

The heroes we’ve missed for so long and longed to return to the screen are not resurrected with the dignity and respect they deserve. They are relegated to side characters, who are either completely sidelined for the final battles, or else just hacking away mindlessly in the background as you marathon one ridiculously easy “boss” after another Olympus Coliseum-style.

Speaking of resurrecting characters: the manner in which they brought some of them back was so nebulous it was impossible to understand, let alone experience any sort of emotional reaction.

For one: Roxas. For starters, it’s pretty lazy writing to have Sora be the one pursuing his return (however that was supposed to happen), only to have that pursuit peter out completely, and for Roxas to just appear at the final battle with no resolution or explanation of how. (Nor the satisfaction of fleshing out how Sora achieved it.) But more importantly, where did he come from? There was no scene in which he emerged from Sora’s being. So, where was he? Also, I get that they must have used the replica Demyx/Ansem brought Ienzo as a vessel for him, but how does he have his own heart now? There was no evidence to indicate Sora or Ven lost theirs again. This is a pretty glaring plot hole.

Second? Naminé. This one really came out of left field. No one had even spoken about Naminé the entire game, save one throwaway line. Then all of a sudden, near the very end of the game, everyone cares about bringing her back, too? Even Sora, despite his hours-long obsession with bringing back Roxas without a word about Naminé, sees a newly empty vessel and asks “Oh, is that for Naminé?” All I could do at this point was laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

Even more confusing? Xion. She was a replica, with no heart, no personality... a walking vial for Sora’s memories. How on Earth did she get brought back? What was there to bring back? And what was the point? Xion always felt far more like a plot device than an actual character.

At this point, so little made sense and so many characters had appeared in a row with no regard for continuity or maintaining canon that my heart was really starting to sink. It all felt like it was meant to be fan service. Bring back everyone’s favorite characters: they’ll love that, right? But the issue is they did it no matter what rules they had to break, or canon they had to ignore. Sure, I wanted a lot of these characters back, I think a lot of people did. But not at the expense of good writing.

Even if one completely excuses the hole-filled poor writing that got us there, it didn’t even feel real that we had these awesome characters back. Because they just sort of existed, as high-def cool anime hair and porcelain skin and not much else. Not only did they not get to show us what they’re made of in epic fight sequences, but there was no meaningful dialogue from any of them. Where was Terra giving his friends any sort of recollection of his time as Ansem’s guardian? Riku and Roxas making amends? Aqua thanking Sora for keeping Ven safe? A brofest about protecting their friends between Riku and Terra? Axel saying anything at all meaningful to his best friend when he finally saw him again? For all the reunions we got, it was shocking how little substance there actually was in any of them. 

It was an insanely rushed ending, with stunted, shallow dialogue, and awkward tears that felt forced rather than genuine.

KH3 is to KH1&2 what Moffat Who is to RTD Who. A lot more flash, a lot less substance, and hollowed out characters that no longer provoke deep emotion.

Characters’ emotions were not handled well in this game. Like when Sora, notorious for being a persistent optimist, dissolves to hysterics and claims he’s “nothing” without his friends. But we never get to see this sharp departure from his M.O. (because he has lost his friends over and over throughout the series without reacting this way) really wrestled with. It’s just swept under the rug after a single line from Riku. It’s okay for characters to hit rock bottom: in fact, it’s good for them. But such episodes have to be properly fleshed out, or they won’t have an impact.

Also, just my two cents? Making your characters cry is not a shortcut to get your audience to cry. It’s a lazy way of demonstrating feeling. In the writing world, there’s something called “show, don’t tell.” Making characters cry left and right with hardly any time devoted to the proper dialogue and action is the equivalent of telling, rather than showing. This series is unique to me precisely because it’s the only video game to make me cry (repeatedly). But I didn’t shed a tear in this game. And I think that is so telling. I always think of this behind the scenes video I watched for Doctor Who, in which they filmed different versions of a (very) emotional scene. In one of these versions, the Doctor properly breaks down and cries. David (the actor) upon seeing this version played back to him, said: “I worry if you see him breaking down, it stops you breaking down, as well.” He was onto something there. They didn’t end up using that take in the episode, and I think everyone would agree it was the right call. I’m not saying crying is inherently bad and always to be avoided. In fact, the opposite: it can be very powerful if used sparingly, and at the right moments with the right build-up. But overusing it, with no apparent regard for characterization nuances, basically making it your only method for tell your audience a character is emotional? It’s a little insulting. You also need good dialogue, good acting (or in this case, good animation and voice acting), and proper timing if you want to strike a chord with anyone.

Which, speaking of, I thought both the dialogue and the voice acting in the game as a whole left something to be desired (and seemed almost painfully slow?), and I think a big reason why emotional moments tended to ring hollow.

Onto another aspect of the story: how it ties in to earlier installments in the series. There was a fair amount of speculation going into this game whether or not smaller, handheld-console based installments and extra nuggets from mobile games and re-releases would be relevant in KH3. But regardless of which side of the argument fans fell on, the fact remains that many fans had only played KH1 and KH2, possibly BBS, prior to playing KH3. Many people don’t have the money or the interest in playing on multiple handheld consoles (me being one of them, though I toughed it out in this case) or cell phones, nor the tireless dedication and yes, more money, to purchase games a second time for Final Mix versions and secret endings. This is not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean they are bad fans, or less deserving of playing or enjoying KH3. Someone should not have to be a zealous super-fan to be able to enjoy a video game, or any form of entertainment. If you show up to Avengers: Endgame without having seen some of the previous major installments in the film franchise, you are probably going to be confused. I don’t recommend doing that. But is it necessary to have re-watched them all 20 times, speculated for hours on blogs and message boards, and read decades worth of Avengers comics to be able to understand it? Of course not. Though some insufferable comic book elitists insist they’re better than everyone else because they know more about the Marvel universe, the fact is you don’t have to be a Marvel super-fan to enjoy the films. That’s how it should be. Because it’s okay to be a casual fan of something. Content creators normally recognize this, and respect all of their audience. But here, there was critical information from pretty much every spinoff handheld game that you needed in order to have any idea what was going on. There wasn’t even any recap system like in KH2 (the static memories) to get you up to speed on what had happened in the series up until this point. Not to mention the location of the final boss fight, as well as the very last cutscenes centered around a mobile game/movie that I had never even heard of until I was in the middle of playing KH3. Now I am something of a KH geek as I said, so I’ve sat through Union Cross now and done my best to understand some of the more obscure lore. But, call me crazy, I don’t think it’s fair to expect every single person who plays the game to do that in order to understand it. Games are supposed to be fun, not homework.

Which brings me to my last point: this game was supposed to be the end of the saga as we know it. Whether it’s the end of the series or simply the end of this story arc and subsequent games will follow a villain besides the many iterations of Xehanort is yet to be seen (as of me writing this), but it was established this game would be the end to the main trilogy so far. And, to have that end be the main character swanning off on his own (as some have speculated, possibly to his death)? With everyone else from the series partying on the beach like someone important isn’t missing? As someone who came into this game expecting closure, I felt completely blindsided by this ending. After all he’s been through and all the sacrifices he’s made, Sora deserves better.

Kingdom Hearts 3 was visually and mechanically a blast, and credit should go to the developers, artists, and designers where credit is due. But as a fan who plays this series not for graphics or flashy gameplay, but to immerse myself in the story, I’m left feeling cheated. The way the plot unfolded and the way the characters were handled did a disservice to both long-time fans of the saga and to the characters themselves.

I always have a hard time with this, but if I had to put a number to it? I’d say maybe 6/10.

It hurt just to type that.

I’m not giving up hope in the franchise. If there’s ever a KH4 (which still seems unclear right now), I’ll probably still play it. I’m trying to give the creators the benefit of the doubt: they were under a lot of pressure to create a great game, and had too much time in development on their hands and too many sprawling ideas and tried to do too much at once. I’m all for second chances. But if they want the trust of fans like me back, they’re going to have to earn it.

Over the last couple months as I’ve put together this review, I’ve found myself in doubt. Even, dare I say it, like a bad fan, though in principle I vehemently reject the notion someone is a bad fan for disliking an installment of any franchise they love. Am I just too old for Kingdom Hearts now? I wondered. Was I romanticizing the series the whole time, and it’s not as good as I’ve built it up to be in my head? After all my time spent waiting, am I being too critical? I tortured myself over it. So, a couple of weeks after finishing KH3, I popped in the 1.5/2.5 HD compilation into the PS4 and restarted KH2. I had to see if it even came close to the hype I’d built in my head in the 8 or 9 years since I played it last. Almost 60 hours of gameplay later, I can say with confidence that I had not romanticized it at all. This game is amazing. I didn’t mind watching 30 minutes of cutscenes at a time because everything is so compelling. So the graphics are dated, but who cares? The combat is FUN without ever being cumbersome. It’s just the right level of difficulty that there are still some battles and bosses that require multiple attempts and the journey continuously instills a sense of pride and accomplishment. It has so much heart. I still teared up in the same places I used to as a teenager.

KH2 is still a perfect 10/10, and playing it again with fresh eyes only made me realize just how disappointing KH3 actually was.

There’s an old adage that it’s the things we love most that hurt us the most. I wouldn’t feel so let down, or compelled to write 6800 words why, if I didn’t love this series with all my heart. I’ve seen a lot of fans insulting and belittling anyone who dares to criticize the game online, and frankly I’m baffled by that. I critique and discuss all forms of entertainment I enjoy: and that includes both the strengths and weaknesses, the successes and flaws. And I guess I tend to associate with people who do the same. It doesn’t make us bad fans, but passionate ones. I’m not sending hate mail to Square telling them the game unequivocally sucks. I don’t have any ill will towards them or think they’re irredeemable writers or developers. I’m simply recording and posting my honest thoughts to help myself process how I’m feeling, and perhaps others if they choose to read them.

I’m genuinely happy for the fans who loved the game and felt it worth the wait – I don’t want to pick any fights with them (so please don’t pick any fights with me, either). I’m sadly - believe me, no one is sadder than me to admit this - just not one of them.

#kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 3 #kh meta #kh3 #kh #idk if any of my followers play but #there aren't many places i can post such a long review #so my old blog seemed an appropriate place #written by yours truly

[haeroniel-doliet]

Turns out its a helluva mess when i start messing beyond flat colors!! Might be a sign to not do so much again (but yet .. practice to get to where im one day happy??)

Like ive done as much as i know how to do at this point in time to the portraits (still gratuitously bloody shame on me :') ) oh except for a background bc WHAT does one DO for a character shoulders up portrait background??? Settled for now on a gradient old school photo style lmao

I like the fix it one as is, a lot (but also i liked the lineart for the portraits better i think) and idk, imngonna try give it a light bit of shadows and lights, maybe step away from a lot of blending bc i think i think thats where i went wrong on the other one

Like, they look fine, but they also look. Meh. Like ive used too much blur tool (i havent, i tried using kritas wet brush thing and it looks....ok close up but the effect is no good when zoomed out like posting size APPARENTLY) and its all noncommittally washy.

(cont'd over thinking)

Am i gonna 'render' them a third time??? Do i have the mental strength?? Bc i think maybe trying for something not so, "realistic" could do me better, like a little more cell shady. But also i dont?? I dont know how to cell shade? I dont watch anime or cartoons v much and my style isnt that cartoony or clean lined?

Maybe on the fix it i can try a more....... Conservative and less blended shade/highlights? (And if i like it/learn smth new go back and re re do the portraits same style) I also just. Idk. How does one make it not look so. Flat and meh?? Im doing basic color stuff ok i think, ive got a bit of texture but its still? Eh???

Honestly i could just post them and move on but i dunno, i have the energy to problem solve a lil bit so why not?? (Not tonight. Im gonna sleep on this all)

Why post shit im not 100% proud of? (Ngl kinda been in the mood to take down that first sketch of the fix it bc it looks nowhere near as good as what i fixed it up to but ....... Ah fuck it i was happy w it when i did it so eh)

Why why why oh why is art so hard?????????

I wanna try and become one of those cool artists who post multiple fun things yknow, like u get inspired and can draw it beginning to post in one evening! Im probably way over thinking and pushing myself to some standard of unrealistic perfection i have for myself...

(also i like thumbnail doodled out like, all these things i wanna draw for a really nice fic i read and even after editing some i have like 8 bits i wanna draw?? 4 as like a mini comic bc i havent done one since i was a child and i think itd be kinda rad if i learned to draw short comics for fic scenes i like??? But yeah basically in one inktober post there would only be 5 ideas (a lil more complicated on average i do give for granted but like. Those took me WEEKS) but yeah i just. I wanna draw them. Even if itll probably take me for fuckin ever... (And i didnt even finish off the last two inktober batches, oh. And i have a uni thesis to do ew) .... I wanna push myself to draw faster (less iterations to get it right) and so i can have rly solid and good and quickly done drawings to then color in as i learn to for future?)

Ugh man. You know what i need to do/shouldve been doing before i jumped into coloring original stuff?? I shouldve done colored studies. Like ive been drawing scenes both from reference and original on the inktobers and i think thats why my drawing/character stuff has gotten decent. I really should just whip out like prettily colored movie screencaps and work on painting studies of them. That would really fix up why i cant figure out lights and shadows and blending in coloring! No horrid tutorials just figuring out how can i make it work for me

And you know? You know what it is okay to have pieces that are from before i figured it out right? Im gonna try a slightly different thing for the fix its (if i hate it, theyre good as flat colors too) and yes they dont have a background either please love of god someone tell me how to add random backgrounds bc im not in the mood of scene building further but they float in off white space atm.

If i learn smth ground breaking and can QUICKLY do a bette rendition of the portraits, sure the perfectionist wins. But maybe just maybe. It would be fine to post them as they are. Yea, they look roughly as lifeless as my first big painting/that dinluke poster redraw. And maybe thats okay. Because hi if i do dedicate to doing like a good few color focused studies of star wars scenes as a treat i can come back stronger and have a better piece???? Its about growth babes. YEA

Alright i said to myself thats it in gonna go sleep on it and continue tomorro but. I thought id slip in here a secret surprise for anyone unfortunate enough to have clicked read more... And i got a little whiplash opening the picture bc it looks. SO WRONG but the more you look at it its like ... Fine. Ok judge for urself and tell me pls, first and second attempts at 'rendering' the portraits (the darker bground was the first attempt just going by gut, the lighter one after trying to watch like 1 tutorial and using more brushes and just generally trying rly hard!!)

yes ive clearly fixed issues in the sketch differently in both so they... look... like different expressions?? idk man idk idk idk see now this small they look differently off!! god the curse of the zoom in and out and perception.

#art woes #but make it extra long because im DISTRESSED at not being able to just whip out ideas from my brain to page and it look good in one try #long and rambly and probably doesnt make much sense no pressure or expectation for anyone to read lmao #love yall kiss kiss time for bed itll be easier after sleep #did include a pic of current progress at the v bottom eheheheh

[aion-rsa]

Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 11 Review: Devil’s Deal

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This Star Wars: The Bad Batch review contains spoilers.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 11

The Bad Batch take a back seat in their own show, and it turns out that’s a good thing in “Devil’s Deal,” which was directed by Steward Lee and written by Tamara Becher-Wilkinson. The clones’ brief appearance is full of quality character moments, but this story is really all about the Twi’leks. Once a rebel leader against Separatist invaders, guerrilla fighter Cham Syndulla is now mellowing out under the Empire but that doesn’t last very long.

The Bad Batch continues to insist that it’s not only a visual successor to The Clone Wars but also part of the wider Star Wars animated universe, with its own stable of recurring characters. While readers know I’m usually resigned to the self-referential nature of Star Wars rather than overjoyed by it, “Devil’s Deal” does a good job of answering some truly interesting questions and reintroducing a few compelling characters, a puzzle piece making a wider story feel more complete.

The Empire has come to Ryloth. Wary of an all-out martial takeover of a people known for open rebellion, Vice Admiral Rampart chooses the subtle route. He’ll court both the corrupt senator and tired guerrilla leader. That leads us to the major cameos of the episode: Hera Syndulla — one of the lead characters of Rebels — as a young girl, and her mother, Eleni. And Chopper’s there, too!

Stream your Star Wars favorites right here!

The first third of the episode sets the scene. Then, Hera’s uncle Gobi invites her along on a job to buy a stockpile of weapons from the Bad Batch. But Crosshair has been tracking them, and all of the major players end up in an ambush. By the end of the episode, the balance of power on Ryloth has shifted dramatically. (It seems to be canon that Senator Orn Free Taa survived the laser bolt to the head, which looks unlikely on first viewing. We’ll see if the assassination attempt requires any canon reshuffling, especially since a lot of this episode hooks right into the canon novel Lords of the Sith, which features Taa as a supporting character and is set a few years after this episode.)

I can’t hide some bias here: I love Hera in Rebels and in the novels. Her steadfast sincerity and skills put her up there with Luke Skywalker in terms of good-hearted characters I love to root for. In this episode she does, in a way, become the Skywalker character: she’s the child’s perspective in lieu of Omega, fitting in that long-standing and beloved Star Wars tradition of a kid who just wants to fly away from her planet. But she’s certainly not trying to get to an Imperial academy. As much as she seems to love her planet and her parents, she’s still a kid in a contested zone, surrounded by fighters, with plenty of reason to want to both escape and fight for peace. While it’s clear Hera believes in the cause enough to spy for the freedom fighters, the episode is also subtle with how much she knows about what’s going on. Her parents both attempt to protect her from the subtle takeover and use the information Hera gathers in their own plans.

We know Hera will go on to be a leader in the Rebellion and the New Republic, a position that sees her out-living most of her best friends as well as the father of her child. Her gaze into the stars is full of a future of adventures but also sacrifices, and The Bad Batch allows for that to quietly sink in.

Her characterization on its own is fun, too. When she briefly meets Omega, I was skeptical the two would sound like real kids, with all the imaginative leaps and unrestrained curiosity that entails. Of course, these are also both kids who spend most of their time with adults, and Hera articulating how she feels emotion is an integral part of flying is a nice mix of enthusiasm and precision. I’m glad these two characters were given the chance to interact at all. But what really sold me on them was Omega’s takeaway: “She’s kinda strange. I like her.”

Read more

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Star Wars The Bad Batch: Omega Origin and Identity Explained

By John Saavedra

TV

What Star Wars: The Bad Batch Reveals About the Rise of the Empire

By Megan Crouse

Overall, the episode shines in part by simply giving the Twi’lek’s story enough time to breathe. Everyone gets a bit of perspective at least sketched in, from Cham and his family to clone trooper Howzer. It felt very realistic, the older generation capitulating while the younger ones take the torch. It shows instead of tells how there’s tension between the groups but the Empire is also relatively confident, therefore giving the a Twi’leks long leash, such as when Rampart leaves the Syndullas alone in the refinery. (I’m also biased toward the environmental message that tends to come with the way the Empire is the one putting up smoke-spewing factories in the name of providing jobs.)

Fan favorite droid Chopper is the only one who feels a little out of place, the cuts to his nonsense dialogue too much of a cutesy callback to Rebels (and to the fact that he’s played by series executive producer Dave Filoni.) I’m also not entirely sure why Gobi took Hera along — did he really simply want to give her the chance to take a more active role in a cause they both believe in, or was he putting her in danger for a more selfish reason?

As for Crosshair, he’s just a subtle attack dog, but I’m more okay with that when the Bad Batch are off screen. His brainwashing makes him frightening, and although it means he’s one of the few characters who doesn’t make a conscious choice, sometimes it’s okay to just let a villain be ominous for a while.

Seeing the Syndullas was just a fannish joy, I can’t lie. I also appreciate that, while Eleni does canonically die fighting the Empire, it isn’t shown here. Instead, she gets a small but definable part, tactful and observant. Cham pretty much coasts on his characterization from The Clone Wars, but also gets some good moments. “Their lives, much like yours, have been surrounded by war far too long,” Cham tells Hera, and it’s pretty obvious it’s Cham himself who’s tired.

The lighting, textures, and music in this episode all stand out, too. Each note perfectly sets the scene. In particular, I was impressed by the lighting on Ryloth’s canyons and the detailed, natural-looking scar on Howzer’s face. For all that he’s also wearing styled armor and has a memorable face, Howzer looks less like a stock character than any of the Batch.

Maybe I can’t put my Hera bias aside, but that’s okay. “Devil’s Deal” benefits a lot from the canon around it, but it also skillfully sketches in the state of the war while providing entertaining action and truly moving character moments.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[ask-de-writer]

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT : World of Sea : Part 77

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

140406 words

copyright 2018

written 2007

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

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Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions. All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

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New to the story?  Read from the beginning.  PART 1 is here

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Kurin turned to face the pure white Great Sea Dragon by the rail.  “Blind Mecat, you and I talked once about whether I could trust what Captain Barad told me.  What did you tell me about trusting him?”

Blind Mecat’s mellow voice answered, “I said that you would have to make up your own mind, Little Fish.  I also said that I trusted him.”

“Thank you, Cat.  Now, Captain Barad, why did you get the Ord and whose idea was it?”

“Mister Morgu first approached me about getting revenge on the Longin about nine Wohans ago.  The Ord was to be the agency of that revenge.  The plot was to kill you as a covert means of striking at the Longin. The circle of the conspiracy was very small.  Only myself, Mister Morgu and one other, chosen by Mister Morgu and unknown to me, actually knew the real reason for obtaining it.

“Everybody else believed that it was for the fishing experiments that it actually was used for.”

“A moment, please Captain.  Captain Sarfin, these parchments detail the exhaustive experiments carried out.  Their failure, along with the reasons for it, and the disposal of the Ord.  Your honor will notice the highlighted passage where one spine was reported as lost overboard.  Note also the witness statements that Mister Morgu was involved in that loss.”  Sarfin took the new batch of parchment and spent a few minutes reviewing it with Captain Sula.

Sula looked up grimly and said, “You are admitting to the plot against Kurin?”

“We are not done yet, Captain Sula,” said Kurin softly.

“If you wish to spare his life, I hope not,” Sula said dourly.

“Captain Barad, please continue,” Kurin asked.

“Even I did not know who Mister Morgu recruited or how he did it.  I left those details to him.  I did not know about the making of the deadly awl in that sewing kit.  Chena’s death came as complete shock.  It was a totally unnecessary test, and done without my consent.  When Merk, Master Selked’s apprentice was found dead the next morning, I guessed who had made the deadly tool but still did not know what it was.  I just let the normal course of events conceal the cause of his death.

“I stopped by the sickbay to look in on Tanlin’s condition and there I found Kurti being put on the invalid list for a resistant lung parasite infection.  I took her in as my cabin- girl because it was the lightest duty on the ship and she,” Captain Barad paused and his shoulders shook as he appeared to fight for control, “hated being useless.  She began by mending things in my cabin.  Apparently, she approached Master Selked for a sewing kit and got the deadly kit in all innocence.  She never needed the awl for the light work that she did.

“We kept her illness secret from the crew and hoped that one of the treatments would take.  I’d have married her were it possible but she was Grandalor born and the Law is clear.  Besides, we had no time.  Her fatal attack had a sudden onset, as some parasite bored into a vein and her lungs began to fill with blood.

“The whale sang for her, leaping and calling for hours.  Tanlin woke as Kurti failed.  Tanlin had lost all memory of the people of the Arrakan fleet.  She remembers all else.  Blind Mecat says that those memories are gone forever.  In every other respect she is whole.  At first, because of the great similarity between them, I looked in on her progress and tried to help.  It was swiftly apparent that she and Kurti were nothing alike, still, as I worked with her, I fell in love again.  All of this time the kit sat on the shelf in my cabin, and neither I nor any other guessed it’s deadly nature.

“I had never thought to love anybody after Teralat died of fire cough twenty five Gatherings ago.  Suddenly, I fell in love twice in quick succession.  There was no impediment to marrying the Lady Tanlin, and I did so.  We had an Arrakan style Wedding Feast at the Longin food booth.  That is crucial to understanding what followed.

“This is the part that the Court will find hard to accept.  I was bothered by the plot to harm Kurin.  It preyed on me.  I took my wife and Master Selked into my confidence about the scheme.  Each had serious and different objections.  

“Master Selked pointed out that my hate was for Captain Mord Halyn, not the Longin.  Further, I was holding a grudge for the one time that I had bested him completely.  No real basis for a grievance.

“Lady Tanlin’s objection was likewise fundamental.  Captain Mord and Kurin were both invited guests at our Announcement Feast.  Under Arrakan Law and Custom, all grudges between invited guests and the celebrators die at such a feast.  If they do not, all the vows taken at the feast are forsworn and the couple must part and can never marry each other again.

“To keep my wife, I declared the plot done and issued Logged orders that if the deadly spine be found, it must be turned in to Doctor Corin for destruction.  Any other use being mutiny.  Remember, I did not know that it had been made into a sewing tool.

“During this same time, the sorry mess with Silor Elon was playing itself out.  I felt that I owed him an assist because he was my eyes and ears aboard the Longin for the last five Gatherings.  We went and picked him up.  I was going to send him to the Arrakan fleet, where I do believe he would have done well.  I should have just let him sail away.

“Mister Morgu somehow recruited him.  Morgu did know about the kit but had lost track of it.  He ran a number of audits and inventories of the tool stock, apparently trying to find it.  He finally realized that the kit in my cabin was the only kit not checked and sent Silor to get it.

“When Silor, who had been ordered to stay out of sight, jumped ship with Mister Morgu, Tanlin realized that something was very wrong and came to me in the Captain’s Council.  That was when I left my proxy with Captain Mord.  I was trying to let you all know that my grudge with him was over.

“My whole crew searched the Gathering, trying to find either Mister Morgu, Silor or both.  We failed.  Later, we found that they had hidden inside one of the floats of the Gathering rafts.  The next day, we caught up to them just moments after they had accomplished their goal.

“All that we could do was watch and pray to the Dragons that Kurin had not eaten the poisoned part of her lunch.  When she collapsed into Captain Sula’s arms, we knew that we were doomed.

“Neither myself or my ship are popular.  I was certain that the rush to rid the Naral fleet of us would have little to do with Great Law or fleet Law.  Events have proved me correct.  You have earned your name as Sarfin the Wise and even you failed to see the flaws in what you all did.

“I had arraigned a link up with the Fauline in her Spring Waters.”

Sarfin interrupted with, “They lay a charge of ramming to enforce piracy against you.”

“I know that, your Honor.  It is not true.  You know that they had a hull-secured loan with us.  Due to a survivorship clause in favor of the Naral fleet, that loan is registered in the fleet Archive.  They were over two Gatherings in arrears.  The unpaid interest alone was somewhat over ten thousand Strong Skins.  I also know that they failed to pay their full share tax this Gathering, pleading poverty.

“They gave us a payment of one thousand Strong Skins, two thousand five hundred glue blocks and a small, one and a half ton, Hag.  They had it in their holds during the Gathering where I learned of it from an informant in the Fauline’s crew.  

“They lied to you about inability to pay their share tax.  They also gave us information about the blatantly illegal Edict of Outlawry and the search for us.  In return, we gave them a full quitclaim on the loan.

“At that point, they seized both myself and the Lady Tanlin.  They also attempted an attack on the Grandalor with a prize crew smuggled aboard ostensibly to help load the payment.  Our crew took exception to the attempted capture, took the prize crew prisoner, and rammed the Fauline at an oblique angle with a bowsprit hook-out.  This damaged the main mast’s running and standing rigging, disabling the ship.  After our crew got us back safe aboard, we saw the Coriolis storm coming, so we rendered aid.  We fixed the rigging and some minor hull damage.  

“We did not charge for that.  The price of not doing it would have been a ship and all the lives aboard.  Some things are too costly to leave undone.”

Urson interrupted sarcastically, “So says the most notorious Captain of the whole fleet.  I have known Captain Skua for many Gatherings and I find his account to be far more credible.  It is, after all, only your word against his.”

“We do have three impartial witnesses,” said Kurin calmly.

“They are separate from either ship.  They observed the encounter and are present to testify.”

“Impossible!” snapped Farrol.  “No other vessel was in sight to provide these mythical witnesses!”

“Dark Iren, are you, Blind Mecat and Frath mythical?” Kurin called out lightly.

“The last time that I looked, no.  None of us are mythical,” Dark Iren replied in a voice seemingly too soft for so large a creature.

“A question of fact, not opinion, then,” Kurin said with the surety of one who already knows the answer.  “Did your Orcas report the encounter between the Fauline and the Grandalor to you?”

“Indeed they did, matters of conflict between ships can have major ecological consequences.  Such confrontations are reported in full detail.”

“Did Captain Barad’s account seem substantially true to your reports?” Kurin inquired.

“All of his facts and the order of them are accurate.  My reports were more detailed, of course.”

“Thank you, Dark Iren,” said Kurin and turned to Blind Mecat and Frath. “Blind Mecat, were you accompanying Frath as he was steering the recent Coriolis Storm?”

“Of course, Little Fish.  You know that.  I asked Frath to steer it nearly nine hundred miles out of its planned path in order to have speech with Barad and Tanlin.  I had to be there for two reasons. One I just gave you, the other, and most important, was to ensure that the storm would still meet its ecological goals.”

All of the audience except for Sarfin, Barad and Tanlin were outraged. “Ecological goals!  That storm hit and scattered our fleet!”

Sarfin threw a bucket of icy water on them by calmly asking, “And whose world is it?  Do you really think that Sea manages itself?  These Dragons make it possible for us to live at all.  Trust them.  They actually do know what they’re doing.”

Frath said, “Thank you, Captain Sarfin.  I do try to miss fleets when I can.  Humans are now widespread across the surface of Sea and it is not always possible.  The storms are necessarily big.  Curiously, Tanlin upbraided me for exactly the same thing even though the Naral fleet was trying to hunt her down and kill her.”

“Where were you, during the encounter between the Grandalor and Fauline?” Kurin requested.

“Blind Mecat and I were about twenty yards under the surface, directly beneath the ships,” Frath answered.

“Then you couldn’t have seen or heard what happened aboard either of those ships!” Farrol exclaimed in triumph.

Blind Mecat replied, “Incorrect.  Sight is a limited sense at best.  Our hearing and echolocation are both very precise.  Two echo pings occupying less than one tenth of a second in total are sufficient to locate every object larger than one inch in length on both ships. The same two pings also allow us to count the number of persons, find their location, orientation, state of health and when they last ate. This includes those up in the rigging.”  She regarded Farrol for an unnervingly sightless second and added, “We’re not just big, we are very good predators.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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#SEA DRAGON’S GIFT #World of Sea #Written by De Writer #Part 77

[hentaigame406]

This funding activity RPG feels directed toward people that struggle to have as a result of sophisticated games.

It is hard to separate talking about hentai games from discussing the other matches because the programmer has clearly created a love letter to favorite match's work. But hentai games is not a easy retread. It adds ideas and mechanics that alter your way of believing concerning its own duelist-style beat. hentai games is just a small game, requiring less of a investment of frustration and time. It seems educated for more casual players--people who've been interested in this brand of practical experience, however, who possibly fought from the twitch reactions department--whilst nevertheless hitting all of exactly the same nerves that are essential. You play a part, voiceless being akin into a spirit than a individual, who leaves that which generally seems to be always a sort of astral plane as a way to venture into a sterile, noxious environment. There, you meet various characters that provide ordinarily spooky, mysterious addresses in regards to the gradual degradation of the world and the religious zealots who populate it. Practically, only about anybody you stumble around wants to murder youpersonally, and in your white spirit-ish kind, you are little fit for them--one struck will destroy you. To survive, you want a greater human body, and this is the point where the identify hentai games comes out of. You're ready to inhabit the corpses, or shells, even of several hard warriors you find on the way, that create you a little less prone to prompt death. The four shells at the match each play with a little differently in one another, delivering a set of various character builds you are able to switch between as you can play with. Each also has unique special perks you are able to unlock at a way by spending currencies you earn from killing enemies--monies it is possible to permanently get rid of in the event that you're killed and usually do not recover them from the very own dead person. The four shells retain hentai games approachable, as you just need to learn to deal with each one (or just your chosen ), rather than worry about creating the stats of an rpg style character develop. Combat at hentai games owes its inherent basic principles to additional games, working in the exact very same way. You've got a more quickly light strike and a slower heavy attack, together with a back-step you could convert to some roster to regenerate your enemies. How much you can swing your sword and what number of times you may dodge are dictated by means of a endurance gauge, which immediately re-fills when you're not swinging away or rolling like angry. Gleam parry and riposte that is nearly exactly like famous attack, but with a various function that is essential. If you may time a parry accurately, the riposte attack you buy subsequently simplifies wellness, which makes it the most dependable way to cure your self at the match --otherwiseif you are hooked on consumable things you find across the world. You can not activate the parry unless you build up a meter, however, that you just are by dealing hurt. While harden is actually a defensive ability which offers you options for waiting and letting your competitors come at youpersonally, the device pushes one to actually be more competitive, landing strikes and generating parries so you can stay living. What that puts hentai games aside from the inspirations could be that the"harden" ability, one thing inherent to a spiritual sort that you bring to every one of the cubes that you occupy. After you sew, you turn to rock, allowing you to tank a hit before the stone breaksup. Blocking a bang using harden will also usually stagger your competitor as their blow off pops you off , putting them marginally off-balance. Harden has a quick cooldown, so you can not put it to use --it is meant for tactical activations, particularly since you are confronting a volley of blows off or even when you're in the center of your attack animation. You are able to begin a swing and then harden mid way through, dismissing your opponents' attacks and that means you are able to property your own. The harden potential provides a completely new collection of fundamental strategies to hentai games fight. Hardening permits you to turn into a Trojan Horse, baiting your enemies to attack you therefore you're able to get in under your own guard. Notably with rougher supervisors, the key to success is all but always to harden your self which means it's possible to evaluate a bang when you'd otherwise be eviscerated. Utilised mid-fight, it might permit you to scatter your way through enemies, keeping your string of devastating strikes going although knocking your prey off-balance and mitigating any punishment that your aggression could earn you. Harden creates hentai games combat setting and deliberate, and combined with a rather forgiving dodge that renders you nigh-on invincible, also lessens hentai games difficulty--without even fundamentally tipping you off that the match is slightly less barbarous than its inspirations. And then that seems to function as the alchemy that the developer is searching to get. hentai games seems as a great match, forcing one to build expertise, analyze enemies, attentively dole out resources, also intelligently mix aggressive and defensive drama with. But it's also one at which you are able to dodge via almost any enemy strike or ignore them altogether by visiting score a complimentary strike. These abilities still allow fight to feel intense a lot of time in hentai games, but the match does not expect you to spend defeating one boss. The major drawback of hentai games beat system is that it is simple to turn out to be too reliant on hardening to gradually chip away from directors and enemies, 1 slice at a moment. One boss fight boils into just about turning into stone, landing on a hit, then dodging to avert some reprisals, also replicating that method for 5 or 10 minutes before it is around. This combination is truly a viable strategy in a lot of the fights from the match, plus it can turn battles against several of your tougher opponents in to drawn-out, plodding slogs at which you never feel as though you're in any actual threat. And as you get yourself a smattering of shells and weapons, there are definitely major incentives to sticking using only one of each for most of a jog as possible unlock damage and upgrades increases. I'd loved to have spent time with the large Martyr Blade and also even the fire-infused Smoldering Mace, but still being comfortable together with the first sword you happen making it a lot a lot more dependable for profitable struggles and avoiding the punishment of death. hentai games enormous focus out of combat is on quest, and it's part of every single other approach to this game. You may spend the majority of your time researching the Earth, and since you do, you will soon happen around its three temples that are enormous, that stand since Zelda-like dungeons and house three Sacred Glands that you want to claim from the bosses inside of. Each and every temple is markedly different from others also some gorgeous, inventive locales to resist through, for example a profound, icy cave, even a flaming crypt, and also a twisted obsidian tower which would be at home in a match such as Control or hay two. Each and every spot feels special into the obstacles in, and investigating them is an cure because you're rewarded using lore and weapon upgrades for checking every nook. You're perhaps not simply exploring the actual space of hentai games, however also what you will find there. This succeeds in a different approach, which empowers one to try those items you stumble across from the game and to deepen your knowledge of those. You might find a bizarre mushroom, a hunk of rotten meat, or even a batch of dubious moonshine, however, you will not discover just how any can affect you personally until you things them on mind . Using an item uncovers its properties, but continued to use it assembles mana, which makes it longer effective. You can also develop mana with inconsequential things --use a little lute enough times and you're going to get really good at playing with it, though it serves no intention apart from to listen to a quick bit of tunes and possibly amuse the occasional non-player character. The technique pays off experimentation and encourages your curiosity, assisting ground you into hentai games earth in some trendy ways. Snacking on a mushroom made me poisoned and then immediately killed in a early fight, but afterwards having a couple much more (despite my better judgment), my mana built toxin mushrooms provide me toxin resistance. You discover Effigy things which enable you to modify between cubes while you're outside in the world, nevertheless, also you take damage every single time you summon you --if you don't develop mana using all the effigies, which cuts on the penalty. You also can unlock additional lore tid bits on objects that the more you utilize themfurther play-up the sense you're learning about hentai games globe because you ramble throughout it. You can learn more about the shells that you find, which is where the dripfeed of hentai games story primarily resides. Since you uncover perks to the cubes, you are treated to"glimpses" into their former lives and individuals they certainly were, that show links to additional characters that you encounter and give you a bit of advice regarding what exactly is happening in the world through your shells' experiences. In normal mode, however, you'll have to make that the key leaps all on your own, and after 1 run through the match, I am not sure the narrative actually comes together into anything much coherent compared to a number of fascinating lore tid bits from cubes, item descriptions, and also small snatches of dialog. And it's actually a number of the quest which hentai games Madness most. The swampy world that links the dungeons all tends to check the same, along with few clues regarding where one area is connected to the other, or how they link together. Now you only need to make the journey at all those three temples to progress the game, yet I drifted around for a time hoping to find the appropriate path forward, usually inadvertently reverted back ground I'd by now covered, or twisting up right back where I started out. There are also occasions when enemy placement can really feel frustrating or cheap. hentai games really likes to ambush you together with combatants you can not see till they show up, so much so that it's simple to get overrun by some things, forcing one to hurry back through big, confusing areas that may feel as a drag. hentai games is built to put you through a gauntlet whenever clear a dungeon, forcing one to run back all the way to the starting time when confronting a fresh onslaught of enemies, and rescue things are merely distant enough that dying feels irritatingly restrictive should you make an error or get trapped at a large part. Together with hentai games placing a top on healing products, you can easily find yourself fresh outside of roasted rats and medicinal mushrooms, so which makes you to pretty much related to a blessed split to make the journey into another checkpoint.

Nevertheless, hentai games succeeds a lot more frequently than not in capturing the particular feelings inherent to great games. The spins it contributes towards the mechanisms do properly to help this sort of game become more approachable than most, while retaining exactly precisely the very same atmosphere of mystery and foreboding which produces the style itself intriguing. hentai games makes for a powerful introduction, a demonstration to get new players of exactly what many are finding so fascinating about other matches and also people who . However, hentai games can also be a crafted, weird, and deceptively deep game on its own appropriate that rewards one for wandering its own twisted paths and hard its deadliest foes.

#video games #video game #games #mobile games #android games #pc games #online games

[colleydogstar]

A Ranger’s Tale - 4 - The Necromancer

Story and all other character by @rollem-bones. As mentioned before, the log has a mix of 1st/3rd person tenses due to play styles.

Our story continues...

The Standing Stones are left behind after Pritchard explains to Donnell and Salicia the changes in the plan due to the arrival of walking dead and unsettled spirits. Donnell takes point as the four of you continue into the woods, veering off the clearer paths for ones less traveled. The smell of the forest is clearer with each step as you grow more accustomed to your shift in form. Pritchard remains after Donnell, and you nearby, while Salicia is tasked with bringing up the rear. "I will presume that the undead are not something that you're familiar with," Pritchard tells you, a hand resting on the pommel of the rapier he carries at his side. No fencing foil, the weapon is very clearly that by the heft and shine of the cutting edge. In some ways, it does remind you heavily how real things are, despite the fantastical happenings.

 Rhodie sniffs at the air, slowly getting used to the scents her new canine nose picks up. She shakes her head, "Where I come from, the undead are restrained to fiction. Either coming in minion style, or contagious, where a bite or scratch can result in death and joining their ranks. Very popular with the horror fiction genre, not really my cup of tea." She keeps a hand near her belt and knife, after seeing Pritchard's readiness. This really is going on, isn't it? So much to take in already.

 A twig snap. The sound of Pritchard's steady breathing. Salicia's steps behind you. Donnell is quiet, but you are downwind of him and can catch his scent. Something spicy was nearby. You aren't sure what it is, but it's a strong musk. Probably an animal of some sort. "I see. I can't say these will be contagious, though whatever animates them could certainly bring a fresh corpse to stand as a long dead one." He puts a hand on your shoulder. "Remain close to use should something arise."

 Rhodie's ears perk, head turning toward the snap, then looking back as she hears the steps of her new friends.. she hopes she gets to classify them as friends, they're all she's got right now. Her head turns toward the musky smell, before she closes her eyes hard and tries to focus. She tries to take a few steady breaths, almost jumping at Pritchard's touch. "Ah! S-Sorry. Yeah, I'm not planning to run off from you three anytime soon. Just.. trying to get used to these senses."

 Pritchard laughs quietly, nodding. "I suspect they're intense and quite different from what you remember. Donnell should be able to help you with that," he says. He puts his hand back on his rapier pommel. "I apologize for startling you. That was about the opposite of what I was trying to do."

 She lets out a small laugh, "Honestly, I'm a bundle of nerves right now, trying to deal with all this. Something was bound to make me jump at some point. But yeah, wow.. can smell you three, the forest, some kinda animal's musk, like, I dunno, a spice?" She shakes her head, "My nose is giving me all this input as a demi, and my brain is still trying to process it like a human, if that makes sense?"

 "It's a deer," Donnell calls out to you, sure he can hear you from up there. He stops and raises a fist. Pritchard and Salicia stop. The older demi sniffs the air, a distinct smell of potpourri wafts in the air. Incenses, spices and tobacco, like cinnamon and fire hangs in the air. "Dead are near. Prepared dead," the older man speaks. "Steel yourselves."

 "A deer, huh, never actually smelled deer outside of coo-" She hushes when Donnel raises his fist, stopping with the others. She sniffs at the air, scents that sort of remind her of some of the stores in the stripmall back home. Prepared dead, yeah that sounds like something that could be trouble. She grips her knife hilt.

 "There, Forward and leftways," Salicia calls out, making to push past you, axe held with her hand behind the beard of the blade. Donnell moves to the side, his own blade coming out. "Stay back and down, Rhodie," Pritchard says, taking your shoulder and pulling you away from Salicia and Donnell. Amid the trees, what looks like a person made of dried leather, cracking and heavily tanned, nude as the day it was born, rushes like a feral chimp toward the group, silent but for the sound of its feet and hands slapping the soft ground.

 Rhodie doesn't have to be told twice, as she moves to the back. She can feel her heart pound as she sees the creature..this former person... rushing toward them. She draws her knife, and keeps it ready. Always have your weapons ready with zombies, cause you never know how many there might be. "Geezus, that thing is real."

 Donnell drums his open hand on his breastplate, interposing himself against the rapidly approaching husk of a corpse. It never reaches him as Salicia strikes out from behind a thick tree, her axe drives it to the ground, splitting its back open and releasing a powder of incense and spice into the air.

 Rhodie watches in stunned silence, at the teamwork between Donnell and Salicia. Her eyes follow the incense into the air as it's released. Her ears flick, and she starts looking to her sides and behind just in case.

 Pritchard slips past you, releasing your arm as he approaches the body. "Simple construct, most likely a sentry to keep the animals away." He crouches down. "Rhodie, come here," he says. "Oh boy, the lad's teaching," Donnell cracks a joke, though he keeps his blade out all the same while Salicia stands a few feet away, scanning the forest for more signs of threat.

 The Setter moves forward to join Pritchard. Hearing Donnell crack a joke is actually helping her a little, as she still finds him a bit intimidating. She keeps her own blade ready, making sure not to cut herself by accident as she kneels down next to Pritchard. "So.. that's an undead?"

 "Prepared undead," Pritchard clarifies. "One type of many. The work of a necromancer. The body is preserved and prepared. The organs removed, and a ritualistic batch of herbs and other components are used to entrap a primal force inside of the creature." He points to the wound, where what looks clearly like cinnamon tumbles from the torn, leathery hide. "They don't do much more than tear with their hands, but a human hand that doesn't fear getting hurt or damaging itself can muster a great deal of strength."

 Rhodie nods, trying to take it all in. "So I'm taking it the trick is to gut it so that the trapped force inside can escape out, rendering the body inert?" She has to admit, that is the oddest use of cinnamon she's ever encountered. "No active pain receptors, so a simple cut or blow won't do much to delay them?"

 "You're perceptive," Pritchard says with a smile. "And no internal organs, no blood to drain. To fight it, you need to disable one before dealing enough of a wound to let its internal ritual be disrupted. Salicia's axe was more than heavy enough to tear deep into it." He stands up. "Animals will tear at it now, no need to leave concern for this. Rhodie, do you think you could follow a trail that smells of this?" he asks, pointing to the corpse

 "I try to be a fast learner when I can," Her tail has started wagging at the praise. She replaces her knife and looks up at Pritchard. "Me? I...OH! Right. I'm a tracking breed now." She looks at the corpse, then Pritchard, then back at the corpse, and nods. "OK. Gimme a sec." She leans down to take a closer smell of the body and elements used to animate it. Ok, Rhodie, relax, and let that new inner dog do its thing." She pulls away from the corpse, standing as she closes her eyes so she can focus on scents alone.

 The scent comes easily across your nose. You can smell it here, on the trees, moving away from you. Your mind translates the information. Older scents away from you, getting stronger, lingering on trees and the ground. They pull you along, sniffing. Here, to there, starting to dart from spot to spot on your spry legs, claws digging into the dirt, small breasts left to bound a little with your eager chase being given. You are, for a time, lost in the scent. Though you suspect your friends are behind you every step of the way as you dash through the forest to find the source of the aroma.

 She catches the scent. Rhodie thinks to herself 'OK, new me, you're wanting to run these woods, show them where to go,' as she lets that canine-side take over. She moves swiftly and nimbly, heart pumping, a thrill of exhilaration as she chases the scent.

 Away you run, following the scent until you find the scent growing stronger and stronger. You chase it. You have to. And in hunting it, you find a strong source of the scent. Bounding around a tree, you careen into something soft and leather. You tumble to the ground, a tangle of limb and fur and spill onto the forest floor. As your head comes back on straight, you find yourself looking at one of the dried out, sewn up husks of the dead. And nearby, a second, and a third starting to turn their sewn up faces in your direction. And that's when you realize you are all alone, too caught up in your tracking to keep with the others.

 Rhodie's tongue hangs out as she runs, having to admit that she's really enjoying this chase! Focus on chasing the scent, follow it! The grass and ground against her paws, the wind in her fur, and she can tell she's closing in on it. She's got this, she's going to find-"OOF!" Face first into something, and tumbling backwards. "Hnngh.. ow..." She shakes her head looking up at the zombie, and frowns... then she sees the other zombie. And the third. "Ah... guys? I think I found more! ...Guys? Guuuuuuuuuuys?" She looks around, then back at the zombies. "...Aw hell." Good job, Canine-Rhodie, you went too deep into dog. She begins scooting backwards, drawing her knife as she tries to get back to her feet.

 The undead you careened into starts to untangle itself back to its feet. The other two make steps toward you. Then all three rush toward you. You can fight here, but it might be more in your favor to do some running rather than trying to fight three monsters.

 Fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or.. FLIGHT, DEFINITELY FLIGHT. Other than Shaun of the Dead, she's never been a big zombie fan, and seeing them up close and personal has reminded her why. "GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" She howls as she tries to run away from the trio. She has no idea what direction she came from, and knows full well she might wind up more lost. But better lost than dead, right?

We'll see how well you fare with running. What aspects do you see to help you run? And stunts, should you have them.

 And run you do. Fast as your paws can carry you. You sprint at a pace that would've made you a star in high school, maybe even college. The body you've taken as your own built for this kind of springing and sprinting. You haul ass away from the undead, who you can hear trying to follow you from behind. They're damned quiet, however, with mouths shown shut and the old growth forest floor a soft one. You run and run and run, feeling the wind in your hair and a burning starting in your thighs when you feel a cold wind whip around you and you hear the sound of splintering wood and the whip whistle of something flying through the air past your ears.

 Rhodie's breathing speeds up, more due to fear than being winded, as her body feels like it could run the entire cross country course back in high school and then go for a jog after. She skids to a halt as she feels the wind snap past her, looking back toward the sound of the breaking wood, and almost instinctively ducks down in case there's anything else coming at her. "Crapcrapcrapcrap!"

 One of the dead struggles, held transfixed by several thin lances of ice that have partially splintered the bark of nearby tree. Two more come running for you. One jerks backwards as an axe hurtles end over end and embeds itself into the creature's chest with a wet cracking sound. The third you don't see almost reach you in your cursing as two heavy arms wrap around you to pull you away the moment the last one meets a cloud of razor sharp ice that hurtles around you. As you peek through the arms of a person you can tell by smell is Donnell, you see the three undead still technically alive, but pinned and soon split open like sackcloth dolls by Salicia and Pritchard.

 Rhodie struggles as she's grabbed, breathing panicked and swift until she catches the scent. "D-Donnell? OH THANK GOD." She looks out at the pinned zombies, iced and axed, and then buries her face in those arms for as long as he lets her. This has not been her day.

 You're scooped into the air like you're, well, a teenaged girl sized person. "Got you, gel," Donnell tells you before putting you back down after some time letting you bury yourself in his arms. He's still wearing a breastplate after all and it isn't the most comfortable of holdings. "You ran too damn far," he says, his voice is quiet, he doesn't want to chide while Pritchard and Salicia are busy putting down the undead. "They can't keep up, and I'm a bit heavy to be chasing young ladies. You may be one of the Wanderers, but don't go thinking you're something safe or special now. I've met one before who thought that way. They ain't here no more to help. You hear me?"

 Rhodie nods, "I just... I let the new instincts over take me. By the time I snapped out of it, I'd lost you three. I'm sorry." Her tail tucks. He's right, she knows he's right. ...Wait, he mentioned meeting one before, but now is not the time to follow-up on that.

 Donnell's hand claps heavy on your shoulder. "Don't be sorry, gel, be better," he tells you before giving your shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "My own daughter's about your age. Anything happens to you and I'll never be able to get it out of my head." He releases your shoulder and looks out to the others. "You two, the gel's going to show us where she found these three. Whomever's making these got blood on their hands. No forest takes this many people so fresh."

 Rhodie tilts her head, "You have a daughter in her 30s? Huh, didn't think you were THAT old, looking good for your age then." ...Aww, he does care. That's good to know too. She nods, and starts to retrace her steps. Focus, don't run this time, let your party stay with you. "They were back over here. I ran nose first into one of them."

 "Thirty?" Donnell asks, giving you a curious look. "Don't pull my leg, gel. Lest I ask you to tell your secrets to my wife," he jokes before you start off to hunt down the source of the scents. Returning back to where you saw the trio. And this time you keep closer to your team. As you grow closer, you happen to see some distance away, toward the edge of a lake, a small cottage set up on a short stilts.

 "No, really, I just turned 30 last October. Wait.. what did you THINK I was?" He holds up a hand and tries to wave it off. Focus on the objective here, Rhodie, or get killed. As they approach she narrows her eyes, and leans forward to stare at the cottage. "....looks like a residence. Bit raised up, but definitely a house or cottage."

 "No, really, I just turned 30 last October. Wait.. what did you THINK I was?" He holds up a hand and tries to wave it off. Focus on the objective here, Rhodie, Ooc She on the He -_-

 "You look barely old enough to join the Order," Donnell admits. "Still a wet behind the ears gel." Though, despite his explanation, you do lead on well enough for the others to see the cottage. "The cabin is Lord Silberschmidt's," Donnell says, stroking his mustache and staring at it from the tree line. "There is magic here. Being bent toward some will. I wouldn't doubt that the lord's cabin has been repurposed during the winter months," Pritchard adds coolly.

 Barely old enough to.. what all changes did she go through?! Rhodie snaps out of it when Donnel begins to explain who the cabin belongs to, and she frowns. "So that rules out taking off and nuking it from orbit, I guess." She pauses and thinks to clarify, "Ah.. get to a high ground and wiping it out from afar. So i guess a necromancer more than likely wasn't on the Lord's Guest List. What do we do now?"

 Donnell thinks. "Salicia. I don't wish to bloody your hands," he starts. The woman raises a hand with a smile. "Don't worry yourself old man, Rhodie," she says, "Want to come with me? I could use a fast pair of legs for this."

 Rhodie nods, "Yes, ma'am!" She moves to follow Salicia, leaning her head to whisper. "Salicia... how old DO I look?" It actually is kind of bothering her now. It shouldn't be TOO out there if she got younger, right? She did get turned into a dog girl after all.

 "Why do you ask?" Salicia asks. "Either way, you look old enough to be a woman, though I doubt you've seen twenty winters. Slip of a thing you are." She moves around through the brush at the edge of the lakeside clearing. She twirls a small francisca around her hand. "Now listen, I need my cloak, then I need you to go to the door and knock on it. See what attention you can get. Get the craven dead fondler to stand in the open."

 Not even 20 winters. So she's back to her teens. Great, Prime. She winces at the 'old enough to be a woman' bit. "We should probably discuss this after dealing with zombies and we're back to safety." She listens and nods, taking the cloak off and handing it back over to Salicia. "Knock on the door, be a huge distraction, lure out a creep. I think I can handle that." She heads for the door, but doesn't knock quite yet, waiting for Salicia's go ahead.

 Salicia stands at the forest edge. Her arm back and at her side. She nods to you. You know that somewhere that Pritchard and Donnell are also watching and waiting. You may not be alone, but now more than ever does it feel like being alone at a door of a cabin most likely containing a man who has literally made corpses walk and do his bidding.

 Rhodie takes a steadying breath. "OK.. Distraction... distraction... ah." He starts pounding on the door, and shouts. "BIKINIGRAM FOR SATAN! GOT A SPECIAL DELIVERY OF TELEGRAM BIKINIS FOR SATAN HERE! HEY! HEY! ANYONE HOME?! I GOT A BIKINIGRAM FROM A DR. STEEL OUT HERE AND SOMEONE NEED TO SIGN FOR IT!"

 A lake in the middle of a very old forest can get very, very quiet as afternoon has started sinking toward dusk. The moment hangs in the air as at the least three figures stare at you for your choice of outburst. Footsteps creak on floorboards on the other side of the door. Slow and methodical, patient in their approach. You can smell the scent of cloves and sweat and the iron tang of blood coming toward you from the other side of the cabin door.

 Rhodie's nose scrunches at the smell of blood. Yeah, definitely someone home. She keeps pounding, "LISTEN PAL, I CAN'T STAY HERE ALL DAY! I STILL GOT THREE OTHER DELIVERIES TODAY OR THE GOOD DOCTOR'S GONNA MOUNT MY HEAD ON A TOY SOLDIER!" She steps back from the door as she hears the footsteps get closer, readying herself for the next part.. unless this person just blasts her. That would kinda suck.

 "Whatever are you barking at, cur!" The door opens and a tall woman in a flowing black dress stands in front of you. Her skin is pale against the sheer fabric, and a stole around her neck creates a keyhole effect that puts a rather prominent amount of cleavage on display. Her hair, golden in the setting sunlight, hangs down around her shoulders as she looks down at you. From the forest, Salicia hurls her axe. The blade nears the necromancer, clearly about to claim her head when it sparks against the faint aura of sigils that glow and spin in the air, dropping the blade to the ground harmlessly. It makes the woman flinch away, and when she's looking back at you, it's with a distinct hellfire in her eyes.

 Rhodie just sort of stares as the axe bounces off. "Oh... thaaank goodness you have protection spells up to ward against assassin! The Doctor would have hated to see such beauty extinguished because of his timing of sending a love letter." She says, carefully inching away, clearly intimidated by the woman.

 "Your corpse will dance for me," the necromancer speaks. She raises a hand toward you. Fight or flight triggers in you, giving you the chance to get the first lick in, or running like hell away.

 Rhodie has a knife, but has no idea if those sigils are going to protect her from attacks or just thrown ones. "Sounds like fun, PASS!" She goes to dive under the extended arm, and use her knife to pin the woman's dress to the floor to buy some time to escape.

 The knife thunks into the floor of the cabin, stabbing through the long gown and into the floorboards. She twists and looks down at the knife. "Cur!" she shouts at you and coils her hand out at you. A cold wind comes into the air as she directs a beam of the purest black at you.

 Rhodie lets out a very canine YELP as she slams her body against the side of the cabin to avoid the purest black blast. Her canine side shouts to try and bite her, but trying to bite people shooting the blackest black times infinity at your head may not be the best option! She instead opts to get the hell out of dodge. Her run is on all fours for a moment as she scrambles back up to her feet, and runs as fast as her body can take her.

 As you run, Salicia is running in the opposite direction. The trio work as a team as you watch them. When the necromancer goes to pull the knife from the cabin floor, ice forms over her hand. Her free hand aims for Salicia, held up to ward against another hurled axe. The distractions, and being held to the ground keep her from escaping from Donnell's blade. She lets out a shriek that is cut short to a gasp, eyes wide, slumping, breathing out her last as her blood runs onto the floor of the cabin. Even from the treeline you can smell it. You can get a taste of the terror and the adrenaline in your nose. And the truth that someone has just died in front of you of an impalement by a man that not a few hours ago held you safely.

 Rhodie does not stop running til she's reached the treeline. She's away, she's safe, she.... just helped kill someone... Hooboy. The irish setter girl slumps to the ground as the scents her nose. Those scents, they probably aren't going to be leaving her mind for a bit. She looks back toward the cabin, and then turns away again, feeling sick.

 Time seems to tick on. The sun goes down and brings darkness with it. A hand touches your back. "Now there, gel. You been looking away some time," Donnell's voice speaks gently in its gruff tones. The smell of his tobacco smoke starts to edge the iron tang of blood. "You should come inside. We'll stay here the night. Salicia and Pritchard cleaning the cabin of the corpsetaker's materials."

 Rhodie tenses slightly, but is finding the smoke, even with her dislike of it, a welcome distraction from the blood. "Donnell... I just helped kill someone and I'm kinda freaking out about it." She shakily stands, using the tree for support. "Is everyone OK?"

  Donnell nods, taking his pipe into hand and keeping his free hand on your back. "You're just a girl," he says quietly. "Lost and in the rain." He looks back to the cabin. "Everyone is fine, you had a quick thought, pinning the showoff's dress to the floor like that. Held her still. And you stayed clear of that magic she was tossing around. You did good, gel. You did good."

 Rhodie nods, and holds out her hands. Not shaking as bad as earlier, but still not entirely still. She winces again at the girl comment, but knowing she helped counts for something today right? She shivers and begins the walk back toward the cabin. "...I'm not supposed to be a girl, you know."

 "Supposed to be?" Donnell asks, turning to walk alongside you. "What all does it matter what you're supposed to be? You are what you are, and that's what matters, gel." He looks at the lake. The body is gone, the blood on the wood is gone, but the mark is still in the floor. "All I see is a strapping young woman who would be fine to stand with the Order. A bit overeager and she bites off more than she's ready for, but give her some years and I'd warrant she'd give Sally in there a run for her money."

 "This strapping young woman was an average middle-aged man until last night," she says as she walks. Rhodie pauses at the mark, but shakes her head, and tries for now at least to move past it. "I'm gonna wind up dead like the last Wanderer you said you met, and I don't want that being on you all. You're letting me tag along, and all I can think of is wanting to go home."

Donnell has a little laugh. "The way you run, the way you handled that blade, the look of sick on your face." He looks up at you from the shoreline. "Come on here and take a puff of my pipe. And you tell me what sort of old man you are." There's an air of challenge in the demihuman's eye.

 That... gets Rhodie to laugh lightly herself, and she waves a hand, "Nooo, thank you. I didn't even smoke when I was human." She looks at her paws. "I don't know this body at all. None of it is familiar, and the senses are..." She looks to the older demihuman, "Can you teach me how to deal with...with..." She motions to her ears, and her nose. "These!"

 Donnell laughs, but he nods. "I can try," he says. "I just do. It's what we all do. You hear, you can smell. The humans and their lesser senses don't catch on. Mostly, you try and wait a bit so they catch on, use that time to think about what you're going to do when things happen. Humans always think they know what's going on. We know more, but letting them in on that don't do us

any good." he laughs as he talks. "You got springs in you, gel, means you can go fast when you want to, not that you got to. So take your time and think it out."

 Rhodie lets that soak in. "Yeah, the stuff I pick up on now I'd never have back when I was human. I just... gotta be able to process it." She flexes her toes as he talks about her speed and springiness. "Yeah... yeah I am kinda quick now." She looks out at the lake, and then takes a breath. "...Is there a mirror inside by chance?"

 Donnell just nods. Inside the cabin is a pleasant setting, clearly established as a fishing lodge. A large framed portrait of a stag headed man looks down over the small fireplace, wherein a gentle and warm fire burns. You find a mirror in a small room that you would swear looks like a relatively modern bathroom, however you know there was no plumbing from the outside. In it is a mirror, and there you can finally see the young canine woman you've become. Like Donnell, your features are not fully feral animal. Much as human faces aren't the same as other apes, there's a distinct, if subtle difference that clearly shows you aren't just some animal.

 Rhodie walks inside, pausing to look at the portrait. Clearly the Lord the others had been talking about, and owner of the cabin. She goes to the bathroom, raising an eyebrow at the modernness of it. "...weeeeeird..." Then there's the mirror. She closes her eyes and steps forward toward it, opening them to look at her new reflection. There's a major disconnect, not seeing her old self, and instead this new canine woman. She just stares, and the longer she stares the quicker her breathing starts to become. She can feel her hands shaking, but she grits her teeth, head raising up as she tries to clench her hands into a fist. "Still you, It. Is. Still. You." She says to reassure herself.

#Ask Rhodie #Rhodie #Ranger's Tale #Rhodie's Tale #Irish Setter

[aion-rsa]

Best Holiday Gifts for Geeks in 2020

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To quote indie rock legends The Mountain Goats, 2020’s mantra seems to be “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.” We will all collectively breathe a sigh of relief once New Year’s Day hits, and a side effect of wanting the calendar to change is the desire to just get the holidays over with as soon as possible. Reality being what it currently is, most of us can’t (nor should we) see our friends and family right now. But that doesn’t mean we have to humbug our way through the next month. Small seasonal commemorations, even if it is just you and a tree straight out of A Charlie Brown Christmas, will be the norm this Yuletide. And that’s not ideal, but it’s okay given our circumstances.

Online shopping makes the arduous task of gift-purchasing, for those who can this year, easier—and safer—than ever before. Taking all of these factors into account, we’ve compiled the following geeky gift guide of largely inexpensive items that will make anyone’s holiday a bit brighter. Whether you are shopping for loved ones or just treating yourself (you deserve it, especially this year), these nerdy items will bring a smile to your face as we endure the end of 2020 together, with thoughts of better days to come at the forefront of our minds.

Star Wars: The Child: Animatronic Edition

Price: $59.00

The breakout star of this year’s Toy Fair (whoa, February feels like a million years ago), Hasbro’s animatronic replica of The Child exists somewhere in that uncanny valley between Furby dolls and Disney park professionalism. In other words, this is as close as you’ll ever get to having your own Baby Yoda to hug, and the character’s inherent cuteness is absolutely on display here. A terrific value for its reasonable price tag, The Child features screen accurate sounds and movement that somehow avoids the clunky creepiness that far too often bogs down these types of toys. (Remember the animatronic E.T. from a few years back? Shudder). There’s also fun features build into the bebe, including one that puts him to sleep when you lie him on his back. Love him or loathe him, and if it’s the latter you are a monster, Baby Yoda is here to stay. This toy is a loving tribute to the mysterious asset, and a must own this holiday season.

Buy the Star Wars: The Child Animatronic Edition here

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Gremlins Countdown Calendar

Price: $39.96

Over the past couple of years, Advent calendars have become more popular than ever with licenses from Star Wars to Harry Potter offering up a fun way to countdown to Christmas. Jakks Pacific has done these one better, by presenting a Gremlins calendar that covers through New Year’s Eve. This monster of a product features 31 collectibles—everything from Gizmo wearing a Santa hat to the Electricity Gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch to slime packets because gross. Better still, the packaging folds out to recreate the movie theater from the original film in which you can seat your new Gremlin pals as they plot their next bout of chaos.

Buy the Gremlins Countdown Calendar here

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View

Price: $22.70

If you’re the type of person who revels in Star Wars Expanded Universe minutiae, and if you are reading these words you probably are, The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View is the book for you. Del-Ray’s second volume of stories that tell stories on the fringes of what we witnessed on screen in the original trilogy has gathered a jaw-dropping assortment of writers (among them Amy Ratliffe, Kate Cook, Charles Yu and original Rogue One screenwriter Gary Whitta) for this anniversary collection of 40 stories — one for each year since the film hit theaters. Weaving together familiar events and characters with the larger Star Wars mythos, these stories aim to present new perspectives on familar events in Empire. An audacious task that would seem blasphemous were it in less talented hands.

Buy Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View here

Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

Price: $17.99

The second of two non-canon Doctor Who films released in the 1960s, this adventure sees the Doctor, his niece Louise and granddaughter Susan, and an unwilling policeman named Tom who stumbled upon the Tardis while trying to catch some jewel thieves, thrust into a future where the Daleks have ravaged the Earth. This being Doctor Who, 2150 London looks nearly identical to its 1966 counterpart—right down to its hilariously incongruous product placement. Peter Cushing delivers a charming performance as the Doctor, even though the heavy lifting action wise is left to Bernard Cribbins as Tom. (Cribbins would return to the franchise in the revival series as Donna Noble’s lovable grandfather Wilf). Unlike its predecessor, 1965’s Dr. Who and the Daleks, this film moves along at a swift pace, with some fun betrayals and story developments that are better than they have any right to be. The real stars of the show here though are the Daleks—louder and more inept than we’ve seen them before or since. This movie is an absolute oddity, mostly disconnected from Who lore at large yet campy and fun enough to please the most finicky Whovian. For a stocking stuffer this year, you can do no better.

Buy Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. here

Back to the Future: The Official Hill Valley Cookbook

Price: $22.95

Featuring recipes for Hoverboard Cookies, Maggie McFly’s Biscuits and Cider Jelly, and Doc Brown’s Time-Altering Chicken Pot Pie, Insight Edition’s Back to the Future cookbook aims to bring you the best dishes and cocktails in history. This one is perfect for a movie marathon of all of Marty and Doc’s time travel adventures!

Buy the Back the the Future: The Official Hill Valley Cookbook here

Red Dwarf: The Promised Land

Price: $29.39

Unpopular opinion alert: This year’s best sci-fi revival wasn’t Star Trek: Picard but Red Dwarf: The Promised Land. Airing in the U.K. on the appropriately named Dave channel, this new feature-length special brought back Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, and The Cat for an adventure that contained (future) echoes of classic Red Dwarf installments like “Queeg” and “Dimension Jump” while telling an entirely new story—one about what happened to the rest of the feline race that spawned from Lister’s smuggled cat from the show’s pilot. Unlike recent iterations of the show, this standalone tale mostly focuses on new bits instead of rehashing the past. As a result, Red Dwarf hasn’t been this good since original co-creator Rob Grant left in 1993 following the show’s epic sixth season.

Buy Red Dwarf: The Promised Land here

Aliens Bishop Reaction Figure

Price: $14.99

Part of Super7’s retro-inspired Aliens line (all of which is worthy of your attention), this 3 3/4 Bishop figure lets you recreate the moment when the Alien Queen ripped the poor android in two. Truly a fun toy for the entire family.

Buy the Aliens Bishop Reaction Figure here

The Child Chia Pet

Price: $19.99

Is this Baby Yoda-inspired Chia Pet the only good thing that happened this year? Because it certainly feels that way.

Buy The Child Chia Pet here

Japanese Spider-Man T-Shirt

Price: $25.84 – $28.19

Thanks to Disney+’s Marvel 616 documentary series, the world is finally discovering the magic of Toei’s Supaidaman series. Otherwise known as Japanese Spider-Man, the tokusatsu show featured a very different version of Spider-Man fighting monsters and the sinister Iron Cross Army with the help of his giant robot and Spider-Car. Seriously. It’s amazing. While vintage merchandise from the show goes for a small fortune and a Blu-ray release weirdly doesn’t exist, the best way to show off your love for this unique take on Spidey is the above T-shirt, available in sizes from small to 2XL. Yeah yeah yeah, wow!

Buy the Japanese Spider-Man T-Shirt here

The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian

Price: $31.99

From Abrams Books comes a lavish behind-the-scenes visual tour of the world of The Mandalorian. Writer Phil Szostak’s fascinating, matter-of-fact writing style gives this hefty tome most of the weight here, but it is the production art and model work by Doug Chiang and associates that will take your breath away. Yes, there are early concept designs and insights into Baby Yoda (which is what this book primarily refers to the character as), but equally interesting are the little details— from costume facts to detailing the creation of the series’ creatures. Since this release only covers the first season, we can expect future volumes. Endlessly merchandising Star Wars, that is the way.

Buy The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian here

The post Best Holiday Gifts for Geeks in 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 23 With Guillermo Rauch: What Is Next.js?

We’re talking about Next.js. What is it, and where might it fit into our web development workflow? Drew McLellan talks to co-creator Guillermo Rauch to find out.

Today, We’re talking about Next.js. What is it, and where might it fit into our web development workflow? I spoke to co-creator Guillermo Rauch to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: He’s the founder and CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform for static sites that fits around a Jamstack workflow. He’s also the co-creator of Next.js. He previously founded LearnBoost and CloudUp, and is well-known as the creator of several popular node open source libraries like Socket.io, Mongoose, and SlackIn. Prior to that, he was a core developer on MooTools, so we know he knows his way around JavaScript like the back of his hand. Did you know he once received a royal commission from the King of Spain to create an ice sculpture out of iceberg lettuce? My smashing friends, please welcome Guillermo Rauch. Hi Guillermo, how are you?

Guillermo Rauch: I’m smashing freaking good, thanks for having me.

Drew: I wanted to talk to you today about the whole world of Next.js, as it’s something that obviously you’re personally very knowledgeable about, having been involved as a co-creator right from the start. Next.js is one of those project names that has been on my radar while working in the Jamstack space, but it isn’t something that I’ve actually personally looked at or worked with too closely before. For people who are like me, who perhaps aren’t aware of what Next.js is, perhaps you could give us a bit of background into what it is and what problems it tries to solve.

Guillermo: Next.js is a very interesting member of the Jamstack universe, because Next.js actually started being a fully SSR-focused framework. It started getting a lot of adoption outside the Jamstack space where people were building very large things specifically when they wanted to have user generated content or dynamic content or social networks or e-commerce, and they knew that they wanted SSR because their data set was very large or very dynamic. It fell under the radar I think for a lot of people in the Jamstack world, but later on Next.js gained the capabilities for static optimization.

Guillermo: On one hand, for example, if you wouldn’t do data fetching at the top level of your page with Next.js, your React page would be … Also by the way, for those who are not fully in the know, Next.js is simply React framework for production, but has this capability of doing some rendering. Then when you get in static optimization capabilities, if you wouldn’t define data fetching at the top level of your page, it automatically exported as HTML instead of trying to do anything with server rendering.

Guillermo: Then later on, it also gained the capability for static site generation, meaning that you can define a special data hook, but that data hook gets data at build time. Next.js became a hybrid, very powerful dynamic and static framework, and now it’s been growing a lot in the Jamstack space as well.

Drew: People might say that React is already a framework, you certainly hear it described that way. What does it actually mean to be a framework for React?

Guillermo: That’s a great observation, because I always point out to people that React at Facebook and React outside of Facebook are completely different beasts. React at Facebook actually is used together with server rendering, but even their server rendering, for example, doesn’t use Node.js, it uses a highly specialized virtual machine called Hermes which communicates to their sort of production hack and PHP stack and answers all this advanced and exotic Facebook needs.

Guillermo: When they open source React, it’s almost like open sourcing a component. I always call it like open sourcing the engine, but not giving you the car. What happened is people really wanted to go and drive with it, they wanted to get to places with React. In the community, people started creating cars, and they would embed React as the engine, which was what the driver, the developer was after in the first place, make React the fundamental part of the car. Things like Next.js and Gatsby and React Static and many other frameworks started appearing that were solving the need for like, “I actually want to create fully loaded pages and applications.”

Guillermo: Whereas React was kind of more like the component and the engine for specific widgets within the page, this was certainly the case for Facebook. They will broadly and publicly admit that they invented it for things like the notification batch, the chat widget, the newsfeed component, and those components were React routes that were embedded into the contents of the production existing app with lots and lots of lines of code and even other JS libraries and frameworks.

Guillermo: What it means to create a framework for React, it means you make React the fundamental part of the story, hopefully and this is something we’ll try to do with Next.js, the learning curve is primarily about React with some added surface for Next.js, particularly around data fetching and routing. We also do a lot of production optimizations, so when you get React, when you get Create React app, which is sort of like, I like to call it a bootstrapped car that Facebook gives you, maybe the needs for production are not really met. Or if you try to do it yourself by configuring Webpack and configuring Babel and configuring server rendering and static generation, it’s also hard to put together a car from scratch. Next.js will give you this zero config and also production optimized set of defaults around building entire big things with React.

Drew: So it’s like it almost puts a sort of ecosystem around your React app with a collection of pre-configured tools to enable you to-

Guillermo: Correct.

Drew: Hit the ground running and do static site generation or server rendering or routing.

Guillermo: Correct, and you used a word there that is very, very key to all this, which is pre-configured. We’re fortunate enough to draw the attention of Google Chrome as a contributor to Next.js. One of the leaders of this project, her thing is that when they were working on frameworks internally at Google, they faced a lot of the same problems that the community and open source are facing today. There were many different competing initiatives at Google on how to scale and make really performant web apps out of the box.

Guillermo: You would join as a Googler and you would be given a framework with which you would create really big production ready, very high performance applications. Shubie was part of a lot of those initiatives, and what she found is that there’s two key ingredients to making a framework succeed at scale. One is pre-configuration, meaning that you come to work, you’re going to start a brand new app, you should be given something that is already ready to go and meets a lot of the production demands that are known at that given point in time.

Guillermo: On the other hand, the other really important step that we’re working towards is conformance. You can be given the most highly optimized production ready pre-configured framework, but if you go ahead and, for example, start introducing lots of heavy dependencies or third party scripts or use very inefficient layouts that take a long time to paint and so on and so forth, then you’re going to make that pre-configuration sort of go to waste. By mixing pre-configuration with conformance over time, the developer is not only having a great starting point, but it’s also guided to success over time.

Drew: It seems that a characteristic of Next.js, that it’s quite opinionated, the UI layer is React, it uses type script, uses Webpack, and those are all choices that the project has made and that’s what you get. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you couldn’t swap out React for Vue, for example, within Next.js.

Guillermo: That’s a good point, where technical decision making meets sort of an art. On one hand, I’d really like to claim that Next is very unopinionated, and the reason for this is that if you specifically go to github.com/vercel/nextjs and the examples directory, you’ll see that there’s almost like a combinatoric explosion of technologies that you can use together with Next.js. You’ll see fire-based, you’ll see Graphic UL, you’ll see Apollo, you’ll see RedUX, you’ll see MobX, in the CSS space there’s even more options.

Guillermo: We have a default CSS port that’s embedded, but then you can use two flavors of it, one with import, one with style tags which we call Style JSX, which resembles very much like the web platform approach to Shadow CSS. The reason I mean unopinionated is we want Next.js to stay very close to the “bare metal” of the web, and not introduce lots of primitives that if the web from 10 years from today would be incompatible with. Then if you look at the examples, you’ll see that there’s all these other technologies that you can plug in.

Guillermo: The base level of opinionation is that there is React and you’re not going to be able to replace it, at least anytime soon. Then there is the concept of you should be able to create pages, and this was kind of like a new thing when we first launched it, which was everyone is trying to create single-page applications. What we realized is like the internet is made up of websites with lots of pages that create distinct entry points via search engines, via Twitter, via Facebook, via social networks, via email companions, like you always guide the person toward an entry point, and that person that comes through that entry point shouldn’t have to download the burden of the entirety of the application.

Guillermo: Then that path led us to implementing server rendering, then static generation for multiple pages, et cetera, et cetera. That other base level of opinionation is Next should be a framework that works for the web, not against the web. Then on top of that, React was missing data fetching and routing primitives, and we added those. There’s a level of opinionation that has to deal with like everybody needs a router, so might as well have a router built in by default.

Drew: The big advantage of having those defaults is it takes away a lot of the complexity of choice, that it’s just there, it’s configured, and you can just start using it without needing to think too much, because I think we’ve all-

Guillermo: Exactly.

Drew: Been in situations where there are far too many choices of what components to use, and it can be overwhelming and get in the way of being productive.

Guillermo: Exactly.

Drew: What sort of projects do you see people using Next.js for? Is it for basically any situation where you might build a production React app, or is it more suited to particular types of content heavy sites? Does it matter in that sense?

Guillermo: Yeah, so this has been an age old debate of the web, is the web for apps, is the web for sites, is it a hybrid? What is the role of JavaScript, et cetera, et cetera? It’s kind of hard to give a straight up answer, but my take on this is the web was evolved always to be a hybrid of content that is evolving to be more and more dynamic and personal to the user. Even when you say like a content website, the high end content websites of the world have code bases that are very much comparable to apps.

Guillermo: A great example here is like New York Times, they’ll give you embedded widgets with data analysis tools and interactive animation, and they’ll recommend what story to read next, and they have a subscription model built in which sometimes gives you part of the content and sometimes counts how many articles you’ve read. Like if I told you this when the web was invented, like Tim Berners-Lee would be like, “No, that’s crazy, that’s not possible on the web,” but that’s the web we have today.

Guillermo: Next.js is answering a lot of these complex modern needs, which means you’ll see lots of e-commerce usage, you’ll see lots of content with that. E-commerce meaning, by the way, not just like buy items, but experiences like the largest real estate websites on the web, realtor.com, zillow.com, trulio.com, that entire category is all Next.js, then content sites. We just onboarded washingtonpost.com as a customer of Vercel and Next.js, we have then a third category that is more emergent but very interesting, which is full apps and user-generated content, like tiktok.com, and kind of like you would think the original single-page application use case as well being quite represented there.

Guillermo: Next.js sort of shines when you need to have lots of content that has to be served very, very quickly, has to be SEO Company optimized, and at the end of the day, it’s a mix of dynamic and static.

Drew: I’ve previously spoken to Marcy Sutton about Gatsby, which seems to be in a similar sort of space. It’s always great to see more than one solution to a problem and having choice for one project to the next. Would you say that Next.js and Gatsby are operating in the same sort of problem space, and how similar or dissimilar are they?

Guillermo: I think there’s an overlap for some use cases. For example, my personal blog rauchg.com runs on Next.js, it could’ve just been a great Gatsby blog as well. There is that overlap in the smaller static website sort of space, and by small I don’t mean not relevant. A lot of dotcoms that are super, super important run on basically static web, so that’s the beauty of Jamstack in my opinion. Because Next.js can statically optimize your pages and then you can get great Lighthouse scores through that, you can use it for overlapping use cases.

Guillermo: I think the line gets drawn when you start going into more dynamic needs and you have lots of pages, you have the need to update them at one time. Although Gatsby is creating solutions for those, Next.js already has production ready live solutions that work with any sort of database, any sort of data backend for basically “generating” or “printing” lots and lots of pages. That’s where today customers are going to Next.js instead of Gatsby.

Drew: One of the problems that everyone seems to run into as their JavaScript-based solution gets bigger is performance and how things can start getting pretty slow, you have big bundle sizes. Traditionally, things like code splitting can be fairly complex to get configured correctly. I see that’s one of the features that jumped out at me of Next.js, that it claims that the code splitting is automatic. What does Next.js do in terms of code splitting to make that work?

Guillermo: Your observation is 100% right. One of the biggest things with the web and one of the biggest weights on the web is JavaScript, and just like different materials have different densities and weights irrespective of the actual physical volume, JavaScript tends to be a very dense, heavy element. Even small amounts of JavaScript compared to, like for example, images that can be processed asynchronously and off the main thread, JavaScript tends to be particularly bothersome.

Guillermo: Next.js has invested a tremendous amount of effort into automatically optimizing your bundles. The first one that was my first intuition when I first came up with the idea for Next.js was you’re going to define, for example, 10 routes. In the Next.js world you create a pages directory and you drop your files in there Index.js, About.js, Settings.js, Dashboard.js, Termsofservice.js, Signup.js, Login.js. Those become entry points to your application that you can share through all kinds of media.

Guillermo: When you enter those, we want to give you JS that is relevant for that page first and foremost, and then perhaps a common bundle so that subsequent navigations within the system are very snappy. Next.js also, which is very, very nice, automatically pre-fetches the rest of the pages that are connected to that entry point, such that it feels like a single-page application. A lot of people say like, “Why not just use Create React app if I know that I have maybe a couple routes?” I always tell them, “Look, you can find those as pages, and because Next.js will automatically pre-fetch ones that are connected, you end up getting your single-page application, but it’s better optimized with regards to that initial paint, that initial entry point.”

Guillermo: That was the initial code splitting approach, but then it became a lot more sophisticated over time. Google contributed a very nice optimization called Module and No Module, which will give differential JS to modern browsers, and legacy JS that’s heavy with polyfields to other browsers, and this optimization 100% automated and produces massive savings. We gave it to one of our customers that we host on Vercel called Parnaby’s, I believe if I’m not mistaken, it was something very, very significant. It was maybe like 30% savings in code sizes, and that was just because they upgraded Next.js to a version that optimized JS bundles better.

Guillermo: That was kind of the point that we were going over earlier, which is you choose Next.js and it only gets better and more optimal over time, it’ll continue to optimize things on your behalf. Those are, again, pre-configurations that you would never have to deal with or be bothered with, and the research of which you don’t ever even want to do, to be honest. Like I wasn’t obviously very involved with this, but I look at some of the internal discussions and they were discussing all these polyfields that only mattered to Internet Explorer X and Soho, I was like, “I don’t even want to know, let’s just upgrade Next.js and get all these benefits.”

Drew: There is sometimes great benefits on there with sticking with the defaults and sticking with the most common configuration of things, which seems to be really the Next.js approach. I remember when I started writing PHP back in the early 2000s, and everybody was using PHP and MySQL, and at the time I’d just come from Windows so I wanted to use PHP and Microsoft Sequel Server. You can do it, but you’re swimming against the tide the whole way. Then as soon as I just switched over to MySQL, the whole ecosystem just started working for me and I didn’t need to think about it.

Guillermo: Yeah, everything just clicks, that is such a great observation. We see that all the time, like the Babel ecosystem is so powerful now that you could become, for example, a little bit faster by swapping Babel for something else, but then you trade off that incredible ecosystem compatibility. This is something you touched on performance earlier, and like for a lot of people, build performance and static generation performance is a big bottleneck, and this is something that we are very diligent in improving the performance of our tools incrementally.

Guillermo: For example, one of the things that Next.js is doing now is that it’s upgrading its default from Webpack 4 to Webpack 5, which has some breaking things, and that’s why we’re first offering it to people as an opt-in flag, but later on it’ll become the default. Webpack 5 makes incredible performance improvements, but we’re not sacrificing the Webpack ecosystem, we incrementally improved. Sure, there were some very small things that needed to be sacrificed, but that’s an incredible benefit of the JS ecosystem today that a lot of people are glossing over, I think, because maybe they see, “Oh, we could’ve done X in Soho, maybe it was a little faster, or maybe MPM in Soho would take less time.” They pick up some details and they miss the bigger picture, which is the ecosystem value is enormous.

Drew: The value of having all the configuration and the maintenance and that side of it done by a project like Next.js rather than taking that on yourself by swapping to using something else is incredible, because as soon as you move away from those defaults, you’re taking on the burden of keeping all the compatibilities going and doing it yourself. One of the things that I’ve been really interested in with Next.js is there are options available for either doing static site generation or server-side rendering, or maybe a hybrid of the two perhaps. I think there’s been some recent changes to this in a recent update, can you tell us a little bit about that and when you might choose one or the other?

Guillermo: Yeah, for sure. One of the key components of this hybrid approach combined with the page system that I described earlier is that you can have pages that are fully static or pages that server rendered. A page that’s fully static has the incredible benefit of what I call static hoisting, which is you can take that asset and automatically put it at the edge. By putting it at the edge, I mean you can cache it, you can preemptively cache it, you can replicate it, you can make it so that when a request comes in, it never touches the server because we know ahead of time, “Hey, Slash Index is a static.”

Guillermo: That’s a very, very interesting benefit when it comes down to serving global audiences. You basically get an automatic CDN out of the box, especially when you deploy the modern edge networks like Vercel or AWS Amplify or Netlify and so on. Next.js has this premise of if it can be made static, it should be static. When you’re first starting a project and you’re working on your first page or you’re kicking the tires of the framework, might as well make everything static.

Guillermo: Even for high end needs, so for example, vercel.com, our own usage of Next.js is fully static. It’s a combination of fully static and static site generation, so all our marketing agency pages are static, our blog is statically generated from a dynamic data source, and then our dashboard which has lots of dynamic data, but we can deliver it as shells or skeletons, all the pages associated with viewing your deployments, viewing your projects, viewing your logs, et cetera, et cetera, are all basically static pages with client-side JavaScript.

Guillermo: That serves us incredibly well because everything where we need a very fast first-pane performance is already pre-rendered, everything that needs SEO Company, already pre-rendered, and everything that’s extremely dynamic, we only have to worry about security, for example, from the perspective of the client side which uses the same API calls that, for example, our CLI used or our integrations use, et cetera, et cetera. A fully static website, very cheap to operate, incredibly scalable and so on and so forth.

Guillermo: Now, one particular thing that we needed with our blog was we wanted to update the data very quickly. We wanted to fix a typo very quickly and not wait for an entire build to happen, and this is a very significant benefit of Next.js, that as you straddle from a static to a dynamic, it gives you these in between solutions as well. For our blog we used incremental static generation, so essentially we can rebuild one page at a time when the underlying content changes.

Guillermo: Imagine that we had not just a couple hundred blog posts and we had lots of blog posts being generated all the time and being updated all the time, like I mentioned one of our customers, Washington Post, in that case you need to go more toward full SSR, especially as you start customizing the content for each user. That journey of complexity that I just described started from I have one marketing agency page, to I have a blog that has a couple thousand pages, to I have tens of thousands or millions of pages. That’s the Next.js journey that you can traverse with your own business.

Guillermo: Then you start as a developer to choose between perhaps less responsibility to more responsibility, because when you opt in to using SSR, you’re now executing code on the server, you’re executing code on the cloud, there’s more responsibility with more power. The fact that you can decide where you use each kind of tool is I think a very, very interesting benefit of Next.

Drew: Just in practicalities of combining the static site generation and the server-side rendering, how does that work in terms of the server element? Are you needing a dedicated platform like Vercel to be able to achieve that, or is that something that can be done more straightforwardly and more simply?

Guillermo: Next.js gives you a dev server, so you download Next and you run your Next Dev, and that’s the dev server. The dev server is obviously incredibly optimized for development, like it has the latest fast refresh technology that Facebook released, where … Actually, Facebook didn’t release it, Facebook uses it internally to get the best and most performant and most reliable hot module replacement, such that you’re basically typing and it changes are reflecting on the screen, so that’s the dev server.

Guillermo: Then Next gives you a production server called Next Start, and Next Start has all the capabilities of the framework for self-hosting. The interesting thing about Vercel is that when you deploy Next to it, it gets automatically optimized and it’s 100% serverless, meaning there’s no responsibility whatsoever of administration, scaling, cashing and cashing validation, purging, replication, global fail over and so on and so forth that you would have to take on when you run Next Start yourself.

Guillermo: That’s also the great benefit of Next.js, so for example, apple.com has several different properties, subdomains and pages on dotcom on Next.js they self-host, due to very, very advanced and stringent security and privacy needs. On the other hand, washingtonpost.com uses Vercel, so we have this sort of wide range of users, and we’re extremely happy to support all of them. The nice thing about where serverless is headed in my opinion is it can give you best of both worlds in terms of the most optimal performance that only gets better over time, with the best developer experience of like, “Hey, I don’t have to worry about any sort of infrastructure.”

Drew: The Next.js is an open source project that’s being developed by the team at Vercel. Are there other contributors outside of Vercel?

Guillermo: Yeah, so Google Chrome being the main one that actively submit server PRs, help us with optimizations and testing it with partners, like very large Next.js users that are already part of the Google ecosystem, for example, due to using lots and lots of apps, so they need to be involved closely as partners. Facebook, we maintain a great relationship with the Facebook team. For example, fast refresh, we were the first React framework to land that, and they helped guide us through all the things that they learned of using React and fast refresh at Facebook.

Guillermo: We work with lots of partners that have very large deployments of Next.js apps in the wild from all kinds of different sort of use cases, like imagine e-commerce and content. Then there’s just lots and lots of independent contributors, people that use Next.js personally, but also educators and members of front infrastructure teams at large companies. It’s a very, very wide community effort.

Drew: It sounds like the concern that somebody might have, that this is being developed in a significant part by Vercel, that they might have the concern that they’re going to get sort of locked into deploying on that particular platform, but it sounds very much like that’s not the case at all, and they could develop a site and deploy it on Firebase or Netlify or…

Guillermo: Yeah, absolutely. I like to compare it a lot for like the Kubernetes of the Front End age in a way, because at the end of the day I am a firm believer that … Kubernetes is something that pretty much almost everyone needs when they need to run LinUX processes, like you were talking about opinionation and you’re saying it’s a good technology, it’s very much not opinionated, but there is some opinionation that we kind of forget about. It’s like at the end of the day, it grew out of running a specific demons of LinUX programs packaged as containers.

Guillermo: Next is in a similar position, because what we take for being the universal primitive of the world as a React component, obviously it’s opinionated, but we do think that for lots of enterprises, just like they all gravitate towards LinUX, we are seeing the same thing towards React and Vue, but Vue luckily has NUXt too, which is a very awesome solution, it’s equivalent in ideation and principles as Next. We’re gravitating towards these platforms like Next.js, like NUXt, like Sapper for the Svelte ecosystem.

Guillermo: I think these should be open platforms, because again, if everybody’s going to need this, might as well not reinvent the wheel across the entire industry, right? We very much welcome that position, we welcome people to deploy it and reconfigure it and rebuild it and redistribute it and so on.

Drew: Just recently a new version of Next.js was released, I think version 9.5. What significant changes were there in that release?

Guillermo: The most awesome one is, as I was saying earlier, a lot of things start static and then become more dynamic as things grow. This was the venture for WordPress, by the way. WordPress in the beginning was based on a static file database approach, and then grew into needing a database, kind of like what you described with how PHP evolved to be more and more MySQL. What’s nice about Next.js 9.5 is that it makes incremental static generation a production ready feature, so we took it out of the unstable flag.

Guillermo: This feature allows you to make that journey from static to dynamic without giving up on all the static benefits, and without having to go full for server-rendered dynamic, so it stretches the useful lifetime of your sort of static. The way we use it at Vercel, for example, as I mentioned, it’s like our blog gets fully pre-rendered at build time, but then for example, we’re actually in a couple minutes about to make a major announcement, and when we blog about it we want to be able to tweak it, fix it, preview it, et cetera without having to issue a five to 10-minute build every time we change one letter of one blog post.

Guillermo: With incremental static generation, you can rebuild one page at a time. What could take minutes or even seconds, depending on how big your site is, now takes milliseconds. Again, you didn’t have to give up on any of the benefits of static. That’s perhaps the thing I’m most excited about that went stable on Next.js 9.5, and specifically because the JS community and the React community and the framework community and static site generated community have been talking about this unicorn of making a static incremental for a long time, so the fact that Next.js did it, it’s being used in production and it’s there for everybody to use, I think it’s a major, major, major milestone.

Guillermo: There’s lots of little DX benefits. One that’s really nice in my opinion is Next.js, as I said, has a page system. You would argue, “Okay, so let’s say that I’m uber.com and I’ve decided to migrate on Next.js, do I need to migrate every URL inside over to Next.js in order to go live?” This has become a pretty important concern for us, because lots of people choose Next.js, but they already are running big things, so how do you reconcile the two?

Guillermo: One of the things that Next.js allows you to do in 9.5 is you can say, “I want to handle all new pages that I created with Next.js with Next.js, and the rest I want to hand off to a legacy system.” That allows you incremental, incremental is the keyword here today, incremental adoption of Next.js. You can sort of begin to strangle your legacy application with your Next.js optimized application one page at a time, when you deploy and you introduce in your Next.js page, it gets handled by Next. If it doesn’t match the Next.js routing system, it goes to the legacy system.

Drew: That sounds incredibly powerful, and the incremental rendering piece of that, I can think of several projects immediately that would really benefit that have maybe 30-minute build times for fixing a typo, as you say. That sort of technology is a big change.

Guillermo: We talked to one of the largest, I believe, use cases in Jamstack in the wild, and it was basically a documentation website and their build times were 40 minutes. We’re doing a lot in this space, by the way, like we’re making pre-rendering a lot faster as well. One of my intuitions for years to come is that as platforms get better, as the primitives get better, as the build pipelines get better we’re going to continue to extend the useful lifetime of statics. Like what ended up taking 40 minutes is going to take four.

Guillermo: A great example is we’re rolling out an incremental build cache, as well, system. I sort of pre-announced it on Twitter the other day, we’re already seeing 5.5 times faster incremental builds. One of the things that I like about Jamstack is that the core tenet is pre-render as much as possible. I do think that’s extremely valuable, because when you’re pre-rendering you’re not rendering just in time at runtime. Like what otherwise the visitor would incur in in terms of rendering costs on the server gets transferred to build time.

Guillermo: One of the most exciting things that’s coming to Next is that without you doing anything as well, the build process is also getting faster. On the Vercel side, we’re also taking advantage of some new cloud technology to make pre-rendering a lot faster as well. I think we’re always going to live in this hybrid world, but as technology gets better, build times will get better, pre-rendering will get better and faster, and then you’ll have more and more opportunities to do kind of a mix of the two.

Drew: Sounds like there’s some really exciting things coming in the future for Next.js. Is there anything else we should know before we sort of go away and get started working with Next.js?

Guillermo: Yeah. I think for a lot of people for whom this is new, you can go to nextjs.org/learn, it’ll walk you through building your first small static site with Next.js, and then it’ll walk you through the journey of adding more and more complexity over time, so it’s a really fun tutorial. I recommend also staying tuned for our announcement that I was just starting to share on twitter.com/vercel, where we share a lot of Next.js news. Specifically we highlight a lot of the work that’s being done on our open source projects and our community projects and so on. For myself as well, twitter.com/rauchg if you want to stay on top of our thoughts on the ecosystem.

Drew: I’ve been learning all about Next.js today, what have you been learning about lately, Guillermo?

Guillermo: As a random tangent that I’ve been learning about, I decided to study more economics, so I’ve been really concerned with like what is the next big thing that’s coming in terms of enabling people at scale to live better lives. I think we’re going through a transition period, especially in the US, of noticing that a lot of the institutions that people were “banking on”, like the education system, like the healthcare system, a lot of those, like where you live and whether you’re going to own a house or rent and things like that, a lot of these things are changing, they have changed rapidly, and people have lost their compass.

Guillermo: Things like, “Oh, should I go to college? Should I get a student loan?” and things like that, and there is a case to be made for capitalism 3.0, and there is a case to be made for next level of evolution in social and economic systems. I’ve been just trying to expand my horizons in learning a lot more about what could be next, no pun intended. I’ve found there’s lots of great materials and lots of great books. A lot of people have been thinking about this problem, and there is lots of interesting solutions in the making.

Drew: That’s fascinating. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Guillermo, you can find him on Twitter at @RauchG, and you can find more about Next.js and keep up to date with everything that goes on in that space at nextjs.org. Thanks for joining us today, Guillermo. Do you have any parting words?

Guillermo: No, thank you for having me.

(il)

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Smashing Podcast Episode 23 With Guillermo Rauch: What Is Next.js?

We’re talking about Next.js. What is it, and where might it fit into our web development workflow? Drew McLellan talks to co-creator Guillermo Rauch to find out.

Today, We’re talking about Next.js. What is it, and where might it fit into our web development workflow? I spoke to co-creator Guillermo Rauch to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: He’s the founder and CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform for static sites that fits around a Jamstack workflow. He’s also the co-creator of Next.js. He previously founded LearnBoost and CloudUp, and is well-known as the creator of several popular node open source libraries like Socket.io, Mongoose, and SlackIn. Prior to that, he was a core developer on MooTools, so we know he knows his way around JavaScript like the back of his hand. Did you know he once received a royal commission from the King of Spain to create an ice sculpture out of iceberg lettuce? My smashing friends, please welcome Guillermo Rauch. Hi Guillermo, how are you?

Guillermo Rauch: I’m smashing freaking good, thanks for having me.

Drew: I wanted to talk to you today about the whole world of Next.js, as it’s something that obviously you’re personally very knowledgeable about, having been involved as a co-creator right from the start. Next.js is one of those project names that has been on my radar while working in the Jamstack space, but it isn’t something that I’ve actually personally looked at or worked with too closely before. For people who are like me, who perhaps aren’t aware of what Next.js is, perhaps you could give us a bit of background into what it is and what problems it tries to solve.

Guillermo: Next.js is a very interesting member of the Jamstack universe, because Next.js actually started being a fully SSR-focused framework. It started getting a lot of adoption outside the Jamstack space where people were building very large things specifically when they wanted to have user generated content or dynamic content or social networks or e-commerce, and they knew that they wanted SSR because their data set was very large or very dynamic. It fell under the radar I think for a lot of people in the Jamstack world, but later on Next.js gained the capabilities for static optimization.

Guillermo: On one hand, for example, if you wouldn’t do data fetching at the top level of your page with Next.js, your React page would be … Also by the way, for those who are not fully in the know, Next.js is simply React framework for production, but has this capability of doing some rendering. Then when you get in static optimization capabilities, if you wouldn’t define data fetching at the top level of your page, it automatically exported as HTML instead of trying to do anything with server rendering.

Guillermo: Then later on, it also gained the capability for static site generation, meaning that you can define a special data hook, but that data hook gets data at build time. Next.js became a hybrid, very powerful dynamic and static framework, and now it’s been growing a lot in the Jamstack space as well.

Drew: People might say that React is already a framework, you certainly hear it described that way. What does it actually mean to be a framework for React?

Guillermo: That’s a great observation, because I always point out to people that React at Facebook and React outside of Facebook are completely different beasts. React at Facebook actually is used together with server rendering, but even their server rendering, for example, doesn’t use Node.js, it uses a highly specialized virtual machine called Hermes which communicates to their sort of production hack and PHP stack and answers all this advanced and exotic Facebook needs.

Guillermo: When they open source React, it’s almost like open sourcing a component. I always call it like open sourcing the engine, but not giving you the car. What happened is people really wanted to go and drive with it, they wanted to get to places with React. In the community, people started creating cars, and they would embed React as the engine, which was what the driver, the developer was after in the first place, make React the fundamental part of the car. Things like Next.js and Gatsby and React Static and many other frameworks started appearing that were solving the need for like, “I actually want to create fully loaded pages and applications.”

Guillermo: Whereas React was kind of more like the component and the engine for specific widgets within the page, this was certainly the case for Facebook. They will broadly and publicly admit that they invented it for things like the notification batch, the chat widget, the newsfeed component, and those components were React routes that were embedded into the contents of the production existing app with lots and lots of lines of code and even other JS libraries and frameworks.

Guillermo: What it means to create a framework for React, it means you make React the fundamental part of the story, hopefully and this is something we’ll try to do with Next.js, the learning curve is primarily about React with some added surface for Next.js, particularly around data fetching and routing. We also do a lot of production optimizations, so when you get React, when you get Create React app, which is sort of like, I like to call it a bootstrapped car that Facebook gives you, maybe the needs for production are not really met. Or if you try to do it yourself by configuring Webpack and configuring Babel and configuring server rendering and static generation, it’s also hard to put together a car from scratch. Next.js will give you this zero config and also production optimized set of defaults around building entire big things with React.

Drew: So it’s like it almost puts a sort of ecosystem around your React app with a collection of pre-configured tools to enable you to-

Guillermo: Correct.

Drew: Hit the ground running and do static site generation or server rendering or routing.

Guillermo: Correct, and you used a word there that is very, very key to all this, which is pre-configured. We’re fortunate enough to draw the attention of Google Chrome as a contributor to Next.js. One of the leaders of this project, her thing is that when they were working on frameworks internally at Google, they faced a lot of the same problems that the community and open source are facing today. There were many different competing initiatives at Google on how to scale and make really performant web apps out of the box.

Guillermo: You would join as a Googler and you would be given a framework with which you would create really big production ready, very high performance applications. Shubie was part of a lot of those initiatives, and what she found is that there’s two key ingredients to making a framework succeed at scale. One is pre-configuration, meaning that you come to work, you’re going to start a brand new app, you should be given something that is already ready to go and meets a lot of the production demands that are known at that given point in time.

Guillermo: On the other hand, the other really important step that we’re working towards is conformance. You can be given the most highly optimized production ready pre-configured framework, but if you go ahead and, for example, start introducing lots of heavy dependencies or third party scripts or use very inefficient layouts that take a long time to paint and so on and so forth, then you’re going to make that pre-configuration sort of go to waste. By mixing pre-configuration with conformance over time, the developer is not only having a great starting point, but it’s also guided to success over time.

Drew: It seems that a characteristic of Next.js, that it’s quite opinionated, the UI layer is React, it uses type script, uses Webpack, and those are all choices that the project has made and that’s what you get. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you couldn’t swap out React for Vue, for example, within Next.js.

Guillermo: That’s a good point, where technical decision making meets sort of an art. On one hand, I’d really like to claim that Next is very unopinionated, and the reason for this is that if you specifically go to github.com/vercel/nextjs and the examples directory, you’ll see that there’s almost like a combinatoric explosion of technologies that you can use together with Next.js. You’ll see fire-based, you’ll see Graphic UL, you’ll see Apollo, you’ll see RedUX, you’ll see MobX, in the CSS space there’s even more options.

Guillermo: We have a default CSS port that’s embedded, but then you can use two flavors of it, one with import, one with style tags which we call Style JSX, which resembles very much like the web platform approach to Shadow CSS. The reason I mean unopinionated is we want Next.js to stay very close to the “bare metal” of the web, and not introduce lots of primitives that if the web from 10 years from today would be incompatible with. Then if you look at the examples, you’ll see that there’s all these other technologies that you can plug in.

Guillermo: The base level of opinionation is that there is React and you’re not going to be able to replace it, at least anytime soon. Then there is the concept of you should be able to create pages, and this was kind of like a new thing when we first launched it, which was everyone is trying to create single-page applications. What we realized is like the internet is made up of websites with lots of pages that create distinct entry points via search engines, via Twitter, via Facebook, via social networks, via email companions, like you always guide the person toward an entry point, and that person that comes through that entry point shouldn’t have to download the burden of the entirety of the application.

Guillermo: Then that path led us to implementing server rendering, then static generation for multiple pages, et cetera, et cetera. That other base level of opinionation is Next should be a framework that works for the web, not against the web. Then on top of that, React was missing data fetching and routing primitives, and we added those. There’s a level of opinionation that has to deal with like everybody needs a router, so might as well have a router built in by default.

Drew: The big advantage of having those defaults is it takes away a lot of the complexity of choice, that it’s just there, it’s configured, and you can just start using it without needing to think too much, because I think we’ve all-

Guillermo: Exactly.

Drew: Been in situations where there are far too many choices of what components to use, and it can be overwhelming and get in the way of being productive.

Guillermo: Exactly.

Drew: What sort of projects do you see people using Next.js for? Is it for basically any situation where you might build a production React app, or is it more suited to particular types of content heavy sites? Does it matter in that sense?

Guillermo: Yeah, so this has been an age old debate of the web, is the web for apps, is the web for sites, is it a hybrid? What is the role of JavaScript, et cetera, et cetera? It’s kind of hard to give a straight up answer, but my take on this is the web was evolved always to be a hybrid of content that is evolving to be more and more dynamic and personal to the user. Even when you say like a content website, the high end content websites of the world have code bases that are very much comparable to apps.

Guillermo: A great example here is like New York Times, they’ll give you embedded widgets with data analysis tools and interactive animation, and they’ll recommend what story to read next, and they have a subscription model built in which sometimes gives you part of the content and sometimes counts how many articles you’ve read. Like if I told you this when the web was invented, like Tim Berners-Lee would be like, “No, that’s crazy, that’s not possible on the web,” but that’s the web we have today.

Guillermo: Next.js is answering a lot of these complex modern needs, which means you’ll see lots of e-commerce usage, you’ll see lots of content with that. E-commerce meaning, by the way, not just like buy items, but experiences like the largest real estate websites on the web, realtor.com, zillow.com, trulio.com, that entire category is all Next.js, then content sites. We just onboarded washingtonpost.com as a customer of Vercel and Next.js, we have then a third category that is more emergent but very interesting, which is full apps and user-generated content, like tiktok.com, and kind of like you would think the original single-page application use case as well being quite represented there.

Guillermo: Next.js sort of shines when you need to have lots of content that has to be served very, very quickly, has to be SEO Company optimized, and at the end of the day, it’s a mix of dynamic and static.

Drew: I’ve previously spoken to Marcy Sutton about Gatsby, which seems to be in a similar sort of space. It’s always great to see more than one solution to a problem and having choice for one project to the next. Would you say that Next.js and Gatsby are operating in the same sort of problem space, and how similar or dissimilar are they?

Guillermo: I think there’s an overlap for some use cases. For example, my personal blog rauchg.com runs on Next.js, it could’ve just been a great Gatsby blog as well. There is that overlap in the smaller static website sort of space, and by small I don’t mean not relevant. A lot of dotcoms that are super, super important run on basically static web, so that’s the beauty of Jamstack in my opinion. Because Next.js can statically optimize your pages and then you can get great Lighthouse scores through that, you can use it for overlapping use cases.

Guillermo: I think the line gets drawn when you start going into more dynamic needs and you have lots of pages, you have the need to update them at one time. Although Gatsby is creating solutions for those, Next.js already has production ready live solutions that work with any sort of database, any sort of data backend for basically “generating” or “printing” lots and lots of pages. That’s where today customers are going to Next.js instead of Gatsby.

Drew: One of the problems that everyone seems to run into as their JavaScript-based solution gets bigger is performance and how things can start getting pretty slow, you have big bundle sizes. Traditionally, things like code splitting can be fairly complex to get configured correctly. I see that’s one of the features that jumped out at me of Next.js, that it claims that the code splitting is automatic. What does Next.js do in terms of code splitting to make that work?

Guillermo: Your observation is 100% right. One of the biggest things with the web and one of the biggest weights on the web is JavaScript, and just like different materials have different densities and weights irrespective of the actual physical volume, JavaScript tends to be a very dense, heavy element. Even small amounts of JavaScript compared to, like for example, images that can be processed asynchronously and off the main thread, JavaScript tends to be particularly bothersome.

Guillermo: Next.js has invested a tremendous amount of effort into automatically optimizing your bundles. The first one that was my first intuition when I first came up with the idea for Next.js was you’re going to define, for example, 10 routes. In the Next.js world you create a pages directory and you drop your files in there Index.js, About.js, Settings.js, Dashboard.js, Termsofservice.js, Signup.js, Login.js. Those become entry points to your application that you can share through all kinds of media.

Guillermo: When you enter those, we want to give you JS that is relevant for that page first and foremost, and then perhaps a common bundle so that subsequent navigations within the system are very snappy. Next.js also, which is very, very nice, automatically pre-fetches the rest of the pages that are connected to that entry point, such that it feels like a single-page application. A lot of people say like, “Why not just use Create React app if I know that I have maybe a couple routes?” I always tell them, “Look, you can find those as pages, and because Next.js will automatically pre-fetch ones that are connected, you end up getting your single-page application, but it’s better optimized with regards to that initial paint, that initial entry point.”

Guillermo: That was the initial code splitting approach, but then it became a lot more sophisticated over time. Google contributed a very nice optimization called Module and No Module, which will give differential JS to modern browsers, and legacy JS that’s heavy with polyfields to other browsers, and this optimization 100% automated and produces massive savings. We gave it to one of our customers that we host on Vercel called Parnaby’s, I believe if I’m not mistaken, it was something very, very significant. It was maybe like 30% savings in code sizes, and that was just because they upgraded Next.js to a version that optimized JS bundles better.

Guillermo: That was kind of the point that we were going over earlier, which is you choose Next.js and it only gets better and more optimal over time, it’ll continue to optimize things on your behalf. Those are, again, pre-configurations that you would never have to deal with or be bothered with, and the research of which you don’t ever even want to do, to be honest. Like I wasn’t obviously very involved with this, but I look at some of the internal discussions and they were discussing all these polyfields that only mattered to Internet Explorer X and Soho, I was like, “I don’t even want to know, let’s just upgrade Next.js and get all these benefits.”

Drew: There is sometimes great benefits on there with sticking with the defaults and sticking with the most common configuration of things, which seems to be really the Next.js approach. I remember when I started writing PHP back in the early 2000s, and everybody was using PHP and MySQL, and at the time I’d just come from Windows so I wanted to use PHP and Microsoft Sequel Server. You can do it, but you’re swimming against the tide the whole way. Then as soon as I just switched over to MySQL, the whole ecosystem just started working for me and I didn’t need to think about it.

Guillermo: Yeah, everything just clicks, that is such a great observation. We see that all the time, like the Babel ecosystem is so powerful now that you could become, for example, a little bit faster by swapping Babel for something else, but then you trade off that incredible ecosystem compatibility. This is something you touched on performance earlier, and like for a lot of people, build performance and static generation performance is a big bottleneck, and this is something that we are very diligent in improving the performance of our tools incrementally.

Guillermo: For example, one of the things that Next.js is doing now is that it’s upgrading its default from Webpack 4 to Webpack 5, which has some breaking things, and that’s why we’re first offering it to people as an opt-in flag, but later on it’ll become the default. Webpack 5 makes incredible performance improvements, but we’re not sacrificing the Webpack ecosystem, we incrementally improved. Sure, there were some very small things that needed to be sacrificed, but that’s an incredible benefit of the JS ecosystem today that a lot of people are glossing over, I think, because maybe they see, “Oh, we could’ve done X in Soho, maybe it was a little faster, or maybe MPM in Soho would take less time.” They pick up some details and they miss the bigger picture, which is the ecosystem value is enormous.

Drew: The value of having all the configuration and the maintenance and that side of it done by a project like Next.js rather than taking that on yourself by swapping to using something else is incredible, because as soon as you move away from those defaults, you’re taking on the burden of keeping all the compatibilities going and doing it yourself. One of the things that I’ve been really interested in with Next.js is there are options available for either doing static site generation or server-side rendering, or maybe a hybrid of the two perhaps. I think there’s been some recent changes to this in a recent update, can you tell us a little bit about that and when you might choose one or the other?

Guillermo: Yeah, for sure. One of the key components of this hybrid approach combined with the page system that I described earlier is that you can have pages that are fully static or pages that server rendered. A page that’s fully static has the incredible benefit of what I call static hoisting, which is you can take that asset and automatically put it at the edge. By putting it at the edge, I mean you can cache it, you can preemptively cache it, you can replicate it, you can make it so that when a request comes in, it never touches the server because we know ahead of time, “Hey, Slash Index is a static.”

Guillermo: That’s a very, very interesting benefit when it comes down to serving global audiences. You basically get an automatic CDN out of the box, especially when you deploy the modern edge networks like Vercel or AWS Amplify or Netlify and so on. Next.js has this premise of if it can be made static, it should be static. When you’re first starting a project and you’re working on your first page or you’re kicking the tires of the framework, might as well make everything static.

Guillermo: Even for high end needs, so for example, vercel.com, our own usage of Next.js is fully static. It’s a combination of fully static and static site generation, so all our marketing agency pages are static, our blog is statically generated from a dynamic data source, and then our dashboard which has lots of dynamic data, but we can deliver it as shells or skeletons, all the pages associated with viewing your deployments, viewing your projects, viewing your logs, et cetera, et cetera, are all basically static pages with client-side JavaScript.

Guillermo: That serves us incredibly well because everything where we need a very fast first-pane performance is already pre-rendered, everything that needs SEO Company, already pre-rendered, and everything that’s extremely dynamic, we only have to worry about security, for example, from the perspective of the client side which uses the same API calls that, for example, our CLI used or our integrations use, et cetera, et cetera. A fully static website, very cheap to operate, incredibly scalable and so on and so forth.

Guillermo: Now, one particular thing that we needed with our blog was we wanted to update the data very quickly. We wanted to fix a typo very quickly and not wait for an entire build to happen, and this is a very significant benefit of Next.js, that as you straddle from a static to a dynamic, it gives you these in between solutions as well. For our blog we used incremental static generation, so essentially we can rebuild one page at a time when the underlying content changes.

Guillermo: Imagine that we had not just a couple hundred blog posts and we had lots of blog posts being generated all the time and being updated all the time, like I mentioned one of our customers, Washington Post, in that case you need to go more toward full SSR, especially as you start customizing the content for each user. That journey of complexity that I just described started from I have one marketing agency page, to I have a blog that has a couple thousand pages, to I have tens of thousands or millions of pages. That’s the Next.js journey that you can traverse with your own business.

Guillermo: Then you start as a developer to choose between perhaps less responsibility to more responsibility, because when you opt in to using SSR, you’re now executing code on the server, you’re executing code on the cloud, there’s more responsibility with more power. The fact that you can decide where you use each kind of tool is I think a very, very interesting benefit of Next.

Drew: Just in practicalities of combining the static site generation and the server-side rendering, how does that work in terms of the server element? Are you needing a dedicated platform like Vercel to be able to achieve that, or is that something that can be done more straightforwardly and more simply?

Guillermo: Next.js gives you a dev server, so you download Next and you run your Next Dev, and that’s the dev server. The dev server is obviously incredibly optimized for development, like it has the latest fast refresh technology that Facebook released, where … Actually, Facebook didn’t release it, Facebook uses it internally to get the best and most performant and most reliable hot module replacement, such that you’re basically typing and it changes are reflecting on the screen, so that’s the dev server.

Guillermo: Then Next gives you a production server called Next Start, and Next Start has all the capabilities of the framework for self-hosting. The interesting thing about Vercel is that when you deploy Next to it, it gets automatically optimized and it’s 100% serverless, meaning there’s no responsibility whatsoever of administration, scaling, cashing and cashing validation, purging, replication, global fail over and so on and so forth that you would have to take on when you run Next Start yourself.

Guillermo: That’s also the great benefit of Next.js, so for example, apple.com has several different properties, subdomains and pages on dotcom on Next.js they self-host, due to very, very advanced and stringent security and privacy needs. On the other hand, washingtonpost.com uses Vercel, so we have this sort of wide range of users, and we’re extremely happy to support all of them. The nice thing about where serverless is headed in my opinion is it can give you best of both worlds in terms of the most optimal performance that only gets better over time, with the best developer experience of like, “Hey, I don’t have to worry about any sort of infrastructure.”

Drew: The Next.js is an open source project that’s being developed by the team at Vercel. Are there other contributors outside of Vercel?

Guillermo: Yeah, so Google Chrome being the main one that actively submit server PRs, help us with optimizations and testing it with partners, like very large Next.js users that are already part of the Google ecosystem, for example, due to using lots and lots of apps, so they need to be involved closely as partners. Facebook, we maintain a great relationship with the Facebook team. For example, fast refresh, we were the first React framework to land that, and they helped guide us through all the things that they learned of using React and fast refresh at Facebook.

Guillermo: We work with lots of partners that have very large deployments of Next.js apps in the wild from all kinds of different sort of use cases, like imagine e-commerce and content. Then there’s just lots and lots of independent contributors, people that use Next.js personally, but also educators and members of front infrastructure teams at large companies. It’s a very, very wide community effort.

Drew: It sounds like the concern that somebody might have, that this is being developed in a significant part by Vercel, that they might have the concern that they’re going to get sort of locked into deploying on that particular platform, but it sounds very much like that’s not the case at all, and they could develop a site and deploy it on Firebase or Netlify or…

Guillermo: Yeah, absolutely. I like to compare it a lot for like the Kubernetes of the Front End age in a way, because at the end of the day I am a firm believer that … Kubernetes is something that pretty much almost everyone needs when they need to run LinUX processes, like you were talking about opinionation and you’re saying it’s a good technology, it’s very much not opinionated, but there is some opinionation that we kind of forget about. It’s like at the end of the day, it grew out of running a specific demons of LinUX programs packaged as containers.

Guillermo: Next is in a similar position, because what we take for being the universal primitive of the world as a React component, obviously it’s opinionated, but we do think that for lots of enterprises, just like they all gravitate towards LinUX, we are seeing the same thing towards React and Vue, but Vue luckily has NUXt too, which is a very awesome solution, it’s equivalent in ideation and principles as Next. We’re gravitating towards these platforms like Next.js, like NUXt, like Sapper for the Svelte ecosystem.

Guillermo: I think these should be open platforms, because again, if everybody’s going to need this, might as well not reinvent the wheel across the entire industry, right? We very much welcome that position, we welcome people to deploy it and reconfigure it and rebuild it and redistribute it and so on.

Drew: Just recently a new version of Next.js was released, I think version 9.5. What significant changes were there in that release?

Guillermo: The most awesome one is, as I was saying earlier, a lot of things start static and then become more dynamic as things grow. This was the venture for WordPress, by the way. WordPress in the beginning was based on a static file database approach, and then grew into needing a database, kind of like what you described with how PHP evolved to be more and more MySQL. What’s nice about Next.js 9.5 is that it makes incremental static generation a production ready feature, so we took it out of the unstable flag.

Guillermo: This feature allows you to make that journey from static to dynamic without giving up on all the static benefits, and without having to go full for server-rendered dynamic, so it stretches the useful lifetime of your sort of static. The way we use it at Vercel, for example, as I mentioned, it’s like our blog gets fully pre-rendered at build time, but then for example, we’re actually in a couple minutes about to make a major announcement, and when we blog about it we want to be able to tweak it, fix it, preview it, et cetera without having to issue a five to 10-minute build every time we change one letter of one blog post.

Guillermo: With incremental static generation, you can rebuild one page at a time. What could take minutes or even seconds, depending on how big your site is, now takes milliseconds. Again, you didn’t have to give up on any of the benefits of static. That’s perhaps the thing I’m most excited about that went stable on Next.js 9.5, and specifically because the JS community and the React community and the framework community and static site generated community have been talking about this unicorn of making a static incremental for a long time, so the fact that Next.js did it, it’s being used in production and it’s there for everybody to use, I think it’s a major, major, major milestone.

Guillermo: There’s lots of little DX benefits. One that’s really nice in my opinion is Next.js, as I said, has a page system. You would argue, “Okay, so let’s say that I’m uber.com and I’ve decided to migrate on Next.js, do I need to migrate every URL inside over to Next.js in order to go live?” This has become a pretty important concern for us, because lots of people choose Next.js, but they already are running big things, so how do you reconcile the two?

Guillermo: One of the things that Next.js allows you to do in 9.5 is you can say, “I want to handle all new pages that I created with Next.js with Next.js, and the rest I want to hand off to a legacy system.” That allows you incremental, incremental is the keyword here today, incremental adoption of Next.js. You can sort of begin to strangle your legacy application with your Next.js optimized application one page at a time, when you deploy and you introduce in your Next.js page, it gets handled by Next. If it doesn’t match the Next.js routing system, it goes to the legacy system.

Drew: That sounds incredibly powerful, and the incremental rendering piece of that, I can think of several projects immediately that would really benefit that have maybe 30-minute build times for fixing a typo, as you say. That sort of technology is a big change.

Guillermo: We talked to one of the largest, I believe, use cases in Jamstack in the wild, and it was basically a documentation website and their build times were 40 minutes. We’re doing a lot in this space, by the way, like we’re making pre-rendering a lot faster as well. One of my intuitions for years to come is that as platforms get better, as the primitives get better, as the build pipelines get better we’re going to continue to extend the useful lifetime of statics. Like what ended up taking 40 minutes is going to take four.

Guillermo: A great example is we’re rolling out an incremental build cache, as well, system. I sort of pre-announced it on Twitter the other day, we’re already seeing 5.5 times faster incremental builds. One of the things that I like about Jamstack is that the core tenet is pre-render as much as possible. I do think that’s extremely valuable, because when you’re pre-rendering you’re not rendering just in time at runtime. Like what otherwise the visitor would incur in in terms of rendering costs on the server gets transferred to build time.

Guillermo: One of the most exciting things that’s coming to Next is that without you doing anything as well, the build process is also getting faster. On the Vercel side, we’re also taking advantage of some new cloud technology to make pre-rendering a lot faster as well. I think we’re always going to live in this hybrid world, but as technology gets better, build times will get better, pre-rendering will get better and faster, and then you’ll have more and more opportunities to do kind of a mix of the two.

Drew: Sounds like there’s some really exciting things coming in the future for Next.js. Is there anything else we should know before we sort of go away and get started working with Next.js?

Guillermo: Yeah. I think for a lot of people for whom this is new, you can go to nextjs.org/learn, it’ll walk you through building your first small static site with Next.js, and then it’ll walk you through the journey of adding more and more complexity over time, so it’s a really fun tutorial. I recommend also staying tuned for our announcement that I was just starting to share on twitter.com/vercel, where we share a lot of Next.js news. Specifically we highlight a lot of the work that’s being done on our open source projects and our community projects and so on. For myself as well, twitter.com/rauchg if you want to stay on top of our thoughts on the ecosystem.

Drew: I’ve been learning all about Next.js today, what have you been learning about lately, Guillermo?

Guillermo: As a random tangent that I’ve been learning about, I decided to study more economics, so I’ve been really concerned with like what is the next big thing that’s coming in terms of enabling people at scale to live better lives. I think we’re going through a transition period, especially in the US, of noticing that a lot of the institutions that people were “banking on”, like the education system, like the healthcare system, a lot of those, like where you live and whether you’re going to own a house or rent and things like that, a lot of these things are changing, they have changed rapidly, and people have lost their compass.

Guillermo: Things like, “Oh, should I go to college? Should I get a student loan?” and things like that, and there is a case to be made for capitalism 3.0, and there is a case to be made for next level of evolution in social and economic systems. I’ve been just trying to expand my horizons in learning a lot more about what could be next, no pun intended. I’ve found there’s lots of great materials and lots of great books. A lot of people have been thinking about this problem, and there is lots of interesting solutions in the making.

Drew: That’s fascinating. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Guillermo, you can find him on Twitter at @RauchG, and you can find more about Next.js and keep up to date with everything that goes on in that space at nextjs.org. Thanks for joining us today, Guillermo. Do you have any parting words?

Guillermo: No, thank you for having me.

(il)

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