#until some popular idea of what it means coalesces or whatever | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

septembercfawkes · 4 years

Text

The Hero's Journey Explained: The End

For the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about the Hero's Journey (the beginning and the middle), and today I'm back to talk about the ending of the story structure.

Reward: Seizing the Sword

During The Ordeal, the protagonist faced a trial that pushed them to the brink; they died, perhaps literally or, more often, figuratively (the old them died). Almost always this comes from having to confront some inner demon, a weak characteristic and/or a greatest fear (which plays into the theme). Now that they have faced such a crisis, they will be rewarded for it as they are reborn into something greater.

If they did die, literally, they will somehow come back to life--maybe through CPR, a prayer, or a magical item. If it was figurative, they'll be revived through a sudden realization, new information, a heightened level of determination, or perhaps something else.

The Reward may be something concrete--maybe the protagonist literally seizes a magical sword that will make her a more powerful fighter. But it can also be more abstract, like the personal revelation that brought him "back to life." Typically the Reward is what the protagonist truly came to the Special World for (whether or not she was fully aware of it at the time). In Star Wars, Luke rescues Princess Leia and gets the plans of the Death Star. In The Hobbit, the heroes regain the mountain and get treasure. In The Lion King, Simba finally realizes on a personal level who he is--the son of a king and true heir to the throne--as he gets to speak with his father one last time.

In a lot of stories, the Reward may be multiple things, something concrete and something abstract.

There is usually a moment of euphoria and celebration. Sometimes a bunch of people celebrate, like all the heroes going out to a tavern for food and entertainment. Or it might be more personal, like Simba racing to get back to Pride Rock as the music score crescendos happily.

After Mulan discovers the Huns are still alive, she rushes to tell the others, to tell the emperor even. No one listens to her because she is a woman (and a dishonorable one). But this leads to an idea, and a rebirth: a Mulan who now recruits men to dress and act as women to save all of China, including the emperor. A situation where being feminine can save everyone when being masculine can't. As the men act and fight disguised as women, we get that beat of euphoria, laughs, and celebration.

In Spider-verse

After The Ordeal, Miles has deep personal insight as the thematic statements coalesce. Miles doesn't need to fear that he won't meet others' expectations; it's his choice what to do and become; and that choice is put into action by a leap of faith.

Empowered with these epiphanies, he's ready to be Spider-man. After receiving these abstract rewards, he "seizes the sword" by grabbing concrete ones: venom-striking his way out of his hold, turning invisible, getting his own spider suit.

He has been reborn as something greater: Spider-man.

The Road Back

But the story isn't finished yet, because this new hero with her new abilities needs to prove herself by being put to the test. She came to the Special World and got what she needed, now she must use it against greater antagonistic forces, before she can truly return home to the Ordinary World.

After the celebration, it's time to get refocused. The hero may fully rededicate himself to the Adventure, and The Road Back may function as yet another threshold to cross--to something deeper, bigger, more dangerous, or different. Just as the hero has been reborn, the other antagonistic forces may have gained more power as well, sometimes even as a consequence of The Ordeal and the Reward. This may be a moment of retaliation. An antagonistic force that seemed to have been defeated may raise its ugly head again. The hero may have to draw upon and gather more strength.

The Road Back is a turning point that propels us toward the final climax of the story.

It is also another term that I think some people get confused about (and I personally think that is because of its name). This is not the denouement. This is the path leading to the climax. The reason it is "The Road Back" isn't because the story is over, but because the hero has learned whatever and grown however they needed to in order to do what is necessary to finish the story, and now they need to get back on track, on that road, to do that.

With that said though, a quick search online will show that with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, some people say that the Hogwarts Express is "The Road Back" or that The Road Back takes place when Harry is unconscious after facing off Voldemort, but that doesn't make sense, since Vogler, who wrote the updated Hero's Journey states himself in his book that this takes place before the real climax. So I would argue, that he would argue, that The Road Back is the trio having to go through the trapdoor (and I would argue The Ordeal was when Harry faced Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest--which is a key part people seem to like to forget about when mapping it out online).

However, with that said, there are probably other variations of the Hero's Journey out there, which is why I mentioned at the beginning of this series that I was using Vogler's model, which is one of two of the most popular resources on the Hero's Journey.

But as always, the important thing is that you understand the shapes and structures--that's more important than arguing over terminology.

In The Hobbit, The Road Back is when there is conflict between the dwarves and the Lake Men and Thorin, which will lead to the Battle of the Five Armies (the climax).

In Spider-verse

Now that Miles has become Spider-man, he's ready to get back on track. He heads to the collider to face the antagonistic forces--which are stronger and more deadly than before, and his appearance is welcomed as his friends all take on the villains and try to stop the collider.

The Resurrection

Now this is the climax. Remember how the hero was reborn? Well, this is the moment to prove it.

Often at a critical point in the Resurrection, there will be an echo of The Ordeal--that crisis that betrayed our hero's weakness earlier. Here, they will be tested again (spoiler: and probably succeed this time). Can a woman honorably defeat the Huns and save China? Can the rightful Lion King take his place in the Circle of Life? Can Harry defeat Voldemort, when he had to be rescued by a centaur last time they met?

If there was a literal death and revival from The Ordeal, you may see it appear again here, but it won't be an exact copy. At my time of writing this, Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker just came out. You know what I watched for? The death and rebirth moment during The Ordeal (which takes place at the remnants of the Death Star). You know what I watched for during the climax? The echo of it. It's there. (Also worth noting is that both were foreshadowed at the climax of act I.)

In some stories, the Resurrection may be the hero simply facing physical death one more time--one more, most dangerous time.

The climax is the final test of the Special World; often it's when the hero has to take what she has learned while there, to succeed. This means Mulan must succeed using the skills she learned as a soldier, while looking like a woman. In Legally Blonde, Elle must win the case by using what she learned in law school as Elle.

In The Hunger Games, the final test of the Special World is when Katniss is told she must kill or be killed by Peeta. She uses what she knows about the Special World to defeat the true antagonistic forces, at their own game.

As Vogler puts it, the Resurrection "should reflect the best parts of the old selves and the lessons learned along the way."

Yes, lots of other things can happen during the climax, but this final test is the crowning moment that proves Resurrection. In order for the hero to make it back to the Ordinary World, they must show they are someone new.

During the climax, the protagonist should almost always be the most active hero. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this, but they are rare. And when I say "active," I mean the hero is the one that defeats the main antagonistic force. In a lot of stories, you will have a "showdown," where the hero and villain go at it one on one. If the hero does not defeat the antagonistic force, they usually will have learned something very valuable from the experience, or if more tragic, they die (literally or figuratively) because they haven't learned something valuable.

In some stories, the major climactic moment may be the hero making a significant choice that illustrates how he or she has changed.

And there may be multiple climactic tests--often one for the inner journey and one for the outer, but sometimes these things overlap in the same moment.

And usually during the climax, the hero has to make or at least be willing to make, a big sacrifice (such as being willing to give up his or her life).

In Spider-verse

One by one the heroes take on the villains--who are stronger and more dangerous than ever before--and begin to return to their proper dimensions, until eventually, there is a showdown between Miles and Kingpin. This is the ultimate test--both of the inner journey and the outer journey. Kingpin knocks Miles down. Will he persevere? Will he get back up? Yes! Because he has learned not to quit. Using his new Spider-man skills, he defeats Kingpin and saves all of Brooklyn. He is fully resurrected.

Return with the Elixir

This is the denouement. In a traditional Hero's Journey, the hero now leaves the Special World to return to the Ordinary World, having gained something valuable to bring back, the "Elixir." Unsurprisingly, this can be literal, figurative, or both. A literal elixir might be a healing potion that will help loved ones back home. But a figurative elixir is the wisdom the hero has gained. He gained knowledge from The Ordeal, but when he exercised that knowledge in the real world, he gained wisdom. He is now ready to return home a changed person.

Vogler adds, "Writers will sometimes put their heroes through an experience at the Return that was difficult or impossible for them at the beginning, so the audience can see how they have changed."

In some stories, the hero may choose to stay in the Special World, but in either case, she has usually grown and changed and gained some kind of Elixir, as she returns to a sense of safety (relatively speaking).

The denouement validates changes that took place. Sometimes this is done through rewards and punishments. The hero is honored while the villain experiences poetic justice. And like in all falling actions, any significant loose ends will be tied up.

Harry, who started the story unloved and powerless, returns to the Dursleys having learned that he is loved so powerfully, it can even defeat the evilest wizard of the Special World.

Bilbo returns to the Shire with wisdom and treasure.

Katniss goes back to District 12, having gained insight on who the true enemy is, having saved Prim, and having gained allies--and not to mention the rewards she brings to her whole district for having won. (And Seneca is punished by death.)

Mulan returns home bearing gifts from the emperor, as the most honorable woman--and person--in all of China.

In Spider-verse

After defeating Kingpin, all of the changes are validated and loose ends are tied up. We see Kingpin caught in a web and handed over to police. Miles makes up (somewhat) with his dad. But most importantly, we see Miles implementing the Elixir--by not quitting. He applies himself in school and turns in his essay--two things he wanted to quit when in the Ordinary World. He says, "I'm doing all sorts of things I never thought I'd be able to"--because he's persevering.

The Hero's Journey is one of the most popular story structure guides, but I hope through this process, you have also seen one of my points: That really, most of the guides are saying nearly the same thing, just from a different perspective, with different terms and emphases. They simply have their own methods of slicing and dicing.

But knowing multiple approaches can be helpful in planning and troubleshooting your own work. The Hero's Journey emphasizes the protagonist's adventure and growth, more so than some other guides. It also brings more mindfulness to certain features the others may not. For example, it might be that something feels off in your story because you don't have a Meeting the Mentor moment, and as you look at your own story through this structure, you might realize that. You might realize that you need to develop your protagonist's arc more, too.

However, as I said in the beginning, I also feel like this structure has weaknesses. As I've touched on, the terms themselves sound very specific, but what they are describing is rather broad, which can be confusing. Also, the terminology seems to emphasize the climax of the middle, rather than the climax of the end--but maybe that makes sense if this structure is more protagonist-focused, if what the story is "really about" is the protagonist "dying" and being "reborn." But the ambiguity can create confusion (The Road Back is pre-climax, for one, not post-climax).

While the Hero's Journey mentions antagonistic forces, it doesn't put hardly any focus on what they are doing, unlike the 7 Point Story Structure, which includes two pinch points, which are specifically antagonistic-focused.

I would say that the main thing is to find the story structure that best suits your understanding, and then refine it and test it through the other story structures. Remember, what matters is your understanding of it, rather than the exact definitions and terminology.

#writing tips #writing tips and tricks #writeblr #hero's journey #writing help #writing reference #story structure #the hobbit #the hunger games #spider-verse

316 notes · View notes

thestarsofdragons · 4 years

Text

So, Necromancy

Since I’ve been RPing stuff to do with Vardijurn, one of two necromancers in my clan, it’s high time I go over my lore on the subject. My lore on this is partly my ideas and partly inspired by others! My shade lore in general is strongly inspired by the shade flight lore posted to the FR forums by Ragnarok42, The Earth necromancy is inspired by canon and @the-true-earthshaker‘s earth necromancy lore with some twists of my own, and anything to do with Arenji follows the lore laid out by Desmondtiny on FR paired with my overall fourth wall breakers/gamebreakers lore. FR forum links will be in a reply!

There are three ways to go about necromancy, three paths to getting the power to animate a dead body and drag its soul back from death. The Shade, The Earth, and Arenji.

1. The Shade

The Shade is hungry, it’ll take whatever it can get.

This is perhaps the easiest one for just anyone to pick up using, indeed it can happen all on its own where shade energy coalesces. Unfortunately, it is also the most hazardous. Creatures raised with the Shade often return wrong, and/or go mad. Pockets of shade corruption in the world are the primary cause of the roaming undead monsters around Sornieth, especially the stranger and more vicious ones. A low level of corruption inherent in Imperials - due to a bit of shade corruption in the essence that Lightweaver made them with originally - is what is responsible for Emperors forming and for the Imperials own unpredictable lifespan. The Rat kings are an excellent example of wild shade necromancy that I could do a meta for all of their own.

So, really, all you have to do if you just want something to stop being properly dead is to put some shade energy near it and wait. Doing this will not result in whatever you raised listening to you or really caring about much other than trying to fill the horrible emptiness it feels inside it and causing as much destruction as possible, however. In addition, whatever you raised with this method will have no soul or memories of its life, it’s just a maddened shade-infested corpse.

If you want a sensible undead slave you’re going to need to channel the shade energy somehow, and if it was a dragon or other element-linked creature then carefully adding a bit of their original element’s energy back to them may be wise as well. Be careful doing this, though, get it wrong and they will go mad from the conflict of elemental and shade energy, so stick to simpler creatures and shade energy alone if you’re a beginner.

If you want to actually bring a person to undeath, however, you’ll need to catch their soul and tether it back to their body. Shade energy enables you to do this forcefully without all the rigmarole of making them have to want to return to their body that one may have to do for other methods. Cast the right spell and the shade will reach through to the realm of the dead, ensnare the soul you need, drag it right on back to its body, and force it to stay there. It’s recommended to use the minimum amount of shade energy and highest amount of elemental energy possible if you wish to bring back a person, as the shade you use to raise them from the dead will infuse their body and soul and partially corrupt them. The more Shade you had to pump into them to bring them back, the more corrupt they will be. Unfortunately for you, the more damaged the target’s body and the longer they were dead, the more shade energy is required to bring them back. In addition, the longer they were dead the less memories you can restore.

Be careful with using the Shade for necromancy, however. The more you channel it, the more of it will seep into you until eventually you are no longer yourself. Channelling the magic through runes instead of directly through yourself will forestall your eventual corruption, but contrary to popular belief it will not prevent it. Using this method, you will fall.

___________________________________________________

2. The Earth.

The Earth remembers. It remembers far longer than you ever will.

This method is easiest to access for those born into the Earth flight, with native Earth magic. However it is accessible to others; if they move to Earth, pledge their allegiance, learn the right things and ask the right questions, they may find what they seek.

This method is more stable in many ways than the Shade. Less danger to the caster, less dependant on the death being recent, less risk of madness as there’s no shade to cause it.

Neither of these things mean it’s easy or without risks.

One of the complications, for instance, is that you still have to get the soul. And this time you can’t force it so easily, you’ve got to lure it back, trick it or make it want to return. Without the soul you will be left with a husk and unpredictable results: some do nothing, some are slave to the necromancer’s will, some go mad. I never said there was no risk of creations going mad, just less.

Another thing: The dead must have been buried if they were not of Earth element themselves as the Earth must be shown in order to remember. Show the Earth the fallen, tell it your intentions, ask it to aid you, ask it to remember.

Once you’ve got the body and the soul and you’ve bound them back together, congratulations you can hug your once-dead uncle again now. However he might not be quite the same as before... Memories effect these undead; their own, the caster’s, and The Earth’s. For this reason Earth necromancy is often performed not by one lone caster but by a group of family and friends of the one being raised. By doing so you feed your memories into the Earth and into the Necromancy, and can form quite a stable undead this way. The raised will be quite sane and probably quite similar to how they were in life, and will remain so. They may loose some of themselves as you age and die, but the Earth will remember for you, and they will likely outlive you a very long time unless they choose to raise you as well. Some families are entirely undead, having raised eachother as the time came.

Raising someone you don’t know isn’t especially advisable, the only memories available to go into that are their own and the Earth’s and this is not enough for their mind to be particularly stable when they return, especially if they’ve been dead for, say, a few generations.

See, memories tell them who they are, how they’re supposed to act, what they’re supposed to do. As those memories fade, as the memories in their soul fade, as the rocks that remember weather away, as the living who remembered them die... They loose who they are. And as they loose who they are, the empty void inside them drives them to madness, to hunger, to destroy. Earth undead too become monsters, if not properly formed or maintained.

It’s also worth noting that Earth undead tend to be a bit slower and heavier than other undead, the stone weighs them down.

___________________________________________________

3. Arenji.

All the world runs on chance and possibility, some of us can change the dice.

This route is not widely available - indeed it is available only to female Arenji spawn, a rare subspecies of skydancer blessed with Arenji’s power. These dragons, like any follower of Arenji, can see the true way Sornieth works and have the power to manipulate that to some extent. Amongst their abilities, comes necromancy through a rather unique path.

See, it’s a lot easier to raise the dead when you can turn to the RNG behind the game and simply ask to have them back.

It’s still not an entirely simple process, requiring runes and time and special spells using the potent magic that Arenji gave them. Many spawn will choose to bind the one they raise to their command when they do it, so approaching a spawn with your dead uncle may not have the result you expected. Still, he’s alive, right? Just don’t be fool enough not to fully pay the one who raised him... She knows death well, he walks beside her and all her sisters.

So you take your uncle back home, he doesn’t want to leave her but you make him come with you. Everything’s fine at first. But over time... He becomes hungry, so hungry... And desperate to leave, to find her. he tears your home apart, he’ll tear you apart if you stop him, he’s wild, a monster, so you let him go. But you follow him, follow his path of destruction all the way back to her, where he stands, calm, placated, sane. This time, he refuses to come home with you. It’s him again, and he loves you, and he’s sorry, but he must stay here.

___________________________________________________

So a few options, and many ways it can go wrong. All normal forms of undead seem to have one common flaw - as soon as something goes wrong, they become endlessly hungry. In truth though they are not hungry - they’re hollow. There is a hole deep in their being that they cannot fill whatever they do, that their mind cannot process so it seems like hunger and it drives them mad. That void, unfortunately, is where life is supposed to be. When working correctly the magic used to bring them to undead fills it - the shade, memories, probability and the spawn’s presence. But as soon as anything begins to go wrong... Well, then that void begins to open up.

There are other ways to mess with the dead, and perhaps a way to bring back true life... But those are for another time.

#necromancy #necromancer #FR #Flight Rising #FR lore #lore #my lore #long post

13 notes · View notes

vosh-rakh · 5 years

Text

After the fall of Nova Orsinium under its last king, the coward Shorab gro-Goreg, the people who found refuge and prosperity there were scattered to the wilds. The usual suspects, in the usual places, of course: orcs, goblins, ogres, various beast races, returning to subsistence nomadism, afraid to try to reintegrate into the Empire that allowed this to happen. Their hopes for a homeland crushed yet again, another sacking punctuating another era. Though the spirit of the orcs is strong, often after such downfalls it requires a generation or two to recuperate and replenish its courage.

And so halfway through the second century of the fourth era, Malacath’s people grew sick of their suffering and sought to restore the pride of their people. Naturally the Trinimac cult, still prevalent even after the days of Gortwog gro-Nagorm, used this opportunity to reinsert their ideas into the popular consciousness. They were weakened after their loss, and would likely never again rule as they did, for the people learned from their elders that all the pride of Trinimac means nothing without the survival of Malacath. But the old mer god would forever remain relevant in the eyes of the orcish people.

Orsinium today is not just a city, but a kingdom. Its heart is hidden. Since this iteration’s inception, the policy was that the world outside the Dragontail and southern Wrothgarian mountain ranges could not be trusted, and should be interacted with minimally. We produce ourselves most of our needs, and whatever else is acquired via the proxy of Orsinium-allied khajiit caravans. But not even they are trusted with the capital city’s true location: they are met at strongholds near the border, and our people take it from there.

In fact, there are few citizens of the lands of Orsinium who know where the city lies. Even the city’s residents, who likely travel little, could probably not tell you. Those who are trusted by the king, Gortwog gro-Torug (a pseudonym held by every king of Orsinium; his true identity is a well-kept secret) to be the interface between the city and the rest of the kingdom are sworn to secrecy upon fear of death and a blood price only Malacath himself can exact.

The strongholds of Orsinium are legally all named after the city itself, to further confuse potential invaders. But as this is not conducive to travel or administration, many have colloquial names, either as derivatives of “Orsinium,” the names of local legend figures, or the name of the dominant tribe of the stronghold.

Further, due to the heightened diversity of races in the Nova Orsinium, the races left in its wake were likewise varied, and developed their own tribes before the reunification in the late 150s. As both a strategic effort to concentrate the population into more easily defensible positions, as well as encourage integration of every race of Orsinium, tribes of orcs, goblins, ogres, argonians, dunmer, etc. were forced to coalesce into singular, larger strongholds. This policy has not been without criticism, as the years between the Nova Orsinium and ours has given each surviving tribe to develop very specific cultures, which leads to conflict within these amalgamated strongholds.

Take for example the Tergut-Molg Stronghold, so named after the Tergut tribe of orcs and the Molg tribe of goblins, located in the eastern tail of the Dragontail mountains, near the Imperial border between Hammerfell and Skyrim. In the early days there was much conflict between the tribes, which was difficult to resolve due to the fact that their populations were roughly equal, and both cultures were fairly competitive. Initially, the Tergut chieftain Surga gra-Mokhra assumed she would be the chieftain of the stronghold, which quickly led to unrest among the Molg goblins, led by their chieftain Giknirh.

It was not until the shamans of Tergut met with the shaman of Molg, following visions of peace both parties witnessed in dreams, that they convinced Surga and Giknirh to cease their fighting and work together. United as one stronghold, one tribe, under two chieftains, the tension lessened and the fighting stopped. Among the older generation there is still underlying enmity, but the current generation is accustomed to the harmony brought by integrating the tribes as one.

In fact, by working together for the good of both of their peoples, Surga and Giknirh grew fond of each other, and Surga bore his child: a goblin-orc, the first of many. That child would be called Ogash gor-Giknirh. That child is me.

It was early in my life that it was made evident that I was ill-suited to the typical work of the stronghold, and especially what was expected of me as the child of not one but two chieftains. I was meant to represent the best of both tribes, Tergut and Molg, but I felt an affinity for neither. My height found me lacking among my orcish peers, while my bulk found me mocked by the goblins. I lacked the strength of character and leadership of my parents. So I was trapped in a world that did not value me. Or trapped in a person that was not valuable.

I had almost come of age the night I left. Earlier my mother Surga came to me and told me of what was expected: I should forge myself a weapon befitting a chieftain, and that creation would mark me as an adult, an orc, a leader.

But I felt I was none of those things. Even as I grew and was nearly finished being a child, I was scolded always by both my mother and father, never quite adequate, always lacking in the skills they wanted me to have. I was not quite welcome as orc nor goblin. And I was certainly far from a leader. I sheepishly did as I was told, I took scorn in obedient silence, I withdrew from conflict like a mouse.

And so I left. That night I packed my few personal possessions and left in secret, fleeing from duties I could not uphold with the Skyrim-bound khajiit caravan.

The caravansary tried to strike up polite small talk in orsimeris, but soon discovered my generally reticent muteness and proceeded to joke amongst themselves in their own tongue. I could not be sure, but by their occasional glances my way, it seemed that their topics occasionally involved me. It seemed as though they would deride me too, just like the orcs and the goblins of Tergut-Molg. But perhaps this was just my fate in life.

Several days later we arrived in the nord city of Markarth. As the khajiit went about their business trading outside the walls, I decided to explore within. It was a strange, ancient place, made of stone and brass. But the populace seemed much newer, as if they had simply moved into this convenient locale and called it home.

The air was filled with their voices, speaking a language I didn’t know. The khajiit seemed to know it, as they spoke it well enough to trade. But these humans and elves spoke it like they were born with it on their tongues. To me, it was meaningless noise, accented by children shouting, doors slamming, women laughing, and the familiar sound of hammer-on-anvil.

I avoided that sound due to the circumstances of my recent self-imposed exile. So I wandered the rather vertical layout of the city, marveling at the apparent age of its structures juxtaposed upon the bustling modernity of its culture. But slowly I began to notice something, words that occasionally interrupted the hammer’s rhythm. Words I knew.

Most of them were words my mother would have preferred I didn’t know. Words I picked up from the other children, often used when whispering to themselves about me. But some of them were normal words, albeit frequently punctuated by the curses. The exact...phrasing I won’t write here, but things to the effect of “Worthless! Thinks me a fool,” “Damn Imperial layabout apprentice, can’t forge a bloody nail,” “Waste of my time.”

This sparse information in a sea of static must have overwritten my fear of the forge, for I found myself there, watching the orc smith shaping metal into a sword. I stood there, looking in for a moment, following the hammer with each blow, as it forced the steel into shape. Despite myself, I was mesmerized. Something meaningless, a raw chunk of metal from a mountain, was being given meaning, heated and beaten into something with purpose.

I kept watching until the man, presumably the aforementioned apprentice, looked up from shoveling coal into the forge at me. He said something in that nonsense language to the orc, who looked up from her work to see me. But I was already gone, running in the direction I hoped was towards the gate.

I couldn’t find it. I ran around and around, up and down, but every time all I found were more nords looking at me like I was a dog let loose. Eventually I saw someone come out of a huge pair of stone doors, a guard perhaps, and I squeezed past them to get inside.

The interior was enormous, the stonework intricate. I kept running, hoping to find somewhere to hide, somewhere I could fall apart in peace. I ran left through another set of doors and I stopped in my tracks in awe. It was an enormous chamber, with domed towers reaching to the vaulted roof inlaid with that strange brass-like metal in intricate angular patterns. They glowed like lighthouses, illuminating armed brass statues keeping eternal watch from atop stone pillars. The colossal brass doors further ahead leered at me from across the bridge, daring my cowardice to challenge their impossible weight. Even the air was ancient, reeking from the dust of the past. I was absolutely enthralled by the size of everything - the structures and the time since they were constructed.

But I was pulled from my reverie by the shoulder. It was an elf, tall and sharp, his features cloaked under a hood. He asked me something with the static words that buzzed all around this city. I pulled away, staring at him in fear. He seemed to take note of my race and change tack. “Speak orcish?” Old word for the language, not used by the people of Orsinium anymore. But I nodded, terrified of what he would say.

“Not be here,” he said, almost sounding like the lower orsimeris of the goblins, and his throat struggling with the consonants. “I do careful study in here. You stop careful study. Okay?”

But the levee finally burst, and I wasn’t able to hide away, and that made it worse. I was crying, begging and apologizing in rapid-fire orsimeris choked by tears and snot and sobs. The elf tried to console me, then chastise me, but threw up his hands in capitulation, saying some swear in what seemed like yet another language I couldn’t understand, and looking away from my crumpled body on the floor, rubbing his pointed chin in either thought or frustration.

Not long after, two nord guards ran in. I couldn’t see them through my tears, but I heard the jingling of their armor and their hurried panting. I looked up and wiped away my tears, but the world was still blurry. They shouted something at me, then said something to the elf, pointing my way. The elf was still in what seemed now certainly like contemplation. Finally, he said something, and I registered only one thing, a name: “Moth gro-Bagol.” The two guards shook their heads and left.

They returned a moment later with an orc in a smith’s apron. Moth, presumably. He spoke with the elf for a moment, before shaking his head and pointing behind himself. The guards seemed to complain before hurrying off again, but Moth stayed behind.

As they waited, Moth looked at a table in what looked like some kind of magical workstation of the elf’s. He delicately picked up a yellow-petaled flower, then came to me, squatted down, and held it out. The elf protested, but Moth payed him no mind. I was in the death throes of my breakdown, the tears and screaming subsided into numb weakness. I stared blankly at the extended offering, and then shakily reached out to accept it. Moth smiled and stood as I began to fiddle with the flower, sniffing it (it smelled minty, I recall) and gently manipulating the stem and petals.

Several minutes later the guards returned, with another orc in two. It was the woman who ran the smith outside. My eyes widened and my fear crushed the flower in my fist. (This evoked another exasperated exclamation from the elf.) As soon as she laid eyes on me, the woman said, in good (albeit distinctly colloquial) orsimeris, “Oh, it’s you.” She walked up to where I sat and grabbed me under the arms and pulled me to my feet roughly. “Idiot brother didn’t bother to learn to speak orcish,” she said as she grabbed me under the chin, tilting my head this way and that. I sorely wished it was Moth who spoke orsimeris.

His sister shook her head and began the process of roughly patting me down. “Steal something, did you, little goblin?”

It was only after she came up empty from the search and took her hands off me that I was able to mutter, “I’m not a goblin.”

“It’s a joke. They have those where you’re from?” But she was not smiling. She sized me up, towering over me as she considered me. She said something in the other language to the elf, Moth, and the guards.

“What did you say,” I asked, what little confidence that urged I speak fading with every word.

“That you’re not a thief, far as I can tell. You do anything else wrong, boy?” She leaned in, grabbed me by the shoulders with her calloused hands, and stared me dead in the eyes.

“I’m not a boy,” I objected, with a bit more heart.

“Oh. What’s your name, little goblin?”

“I’m not a... My name’s Ogash. gor-Giknirh.”

“gor-Giknirh? What kinda tribe is that? ... You from Dragontail?”

“Yes.” This interrogation had completely worn me meek at this point.

“Thought so. You may not be a goblin but you got a goblin name.” She let go of me and stood up again with a grunt. She said something to the others. The guards seemed to argue something, but Moth spoke up with a counter. Slowly the others agreed to whatever he said.

The woman began to walk away, yelling back to me, “My brother Moth is going to escort you out of the city, you waste-of-my-time.”

I nodded, although she wasn’t there to see it. I was shaking from the encounter, but I was relieved it was over, and that Moth was the one who would see me out. He beckoned me closer with a wave of his hand and nodded towards the door. I slowly followed on shaky feet, the guards keeping a close eye on me until I left their sight.

I followed Moth through the city, the traversal of which he made look easy in comparison to my mindless wandering and frantic running. He stopped me at one point, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and stuffed something into my hands. It was a dagger wrapped in a simple leather sheath. I looked up at him, eyes wide. He held a finger to his lips, and gestured putting something inside his apron. I understood and stuffed the gift in my pants.

He waved goodbye at me after he saw me through the gate. When I turned away from him and the city, I saw one of the khajiit caravaners prick her ears and tilt her head at me. It was late then, and after spending the day haggling with the local traders, the khajiit were sitting around a fire and telling stories.

When I got close enough, the curious woman called out to me in orsimeris: “Where have you been?” Of course, I did not answer. After some more prodding by the others, they again realized the futility of talking to me and gave up, returning to their own company.

That night, as I lay on my bedroll in my tent, the fire extinguished at the khajiit purring in their sleep, I quietly removed the dagger from my pants and slowly unsheathed it. It was made of that beautiful brassy metal from the ruins. I gazed at its glory in awe, reminiscing on the greater things I had seen inside the keep. Then I began to wonder if it was real, if what happened today was real. I ran my fingertip along the blade before pain pulled it away, slowly beading with blood. I dropped the dagger on the bedroll and sucked on my finger and fanned it in the air.

Content that it was real, that the things I saw were real, that there were truly things in this world more ancient than my father’s father’s father many times over, and larger and grander than anything in our simple Tergut-Molg stronghold, I sheathed the dagger, returned it to its hiding spot, and fell asleep.

#tes #tesblr #my writing #oc: ogash gor-giknirh #orc #orsimer #orsinium #wrothgar #hammerfell #skyrim #markarth #khajiit #goblin #trinimac #malacath #gortwog gro-nagorm #torug gro-igron

21 notes · View notes

chiseler · 5 years

Text

Happy Cal Stewart, Yankee Comedian

There was very little that was original about Cal Stewart’s routine. He was simply very good at embodying what had, on the vaudeville circuit, become a well established stock character type. But thanks to some fortuitous timing, Stewart, and his alter ego Uncle Josh Weathersby, became perhaps the most popular and influential comedian of the early recording era. His fame was on a par with Mark Twain’s or Will Rogers’s, but his stardom was a direct result of the advent of the phonograph.

The only thing known about Stewart’s parents—and this only by way of his death certificate—was that they had immigrated from Scotland and settled in Charlotte County, Virginia, where Stewart was born in 1856. By his own account—and I should note here that his accounts tended to change depending on his audience, the weather, and the time of day—Stewart left home early and wandered the country, picking up jobs here and there as he went. He was a miner, a lumberjack, a short order cook, and traveled with a medicine show. More than anything, however, he worked a series of low-level jobs for the railroads, where he earned a reputation as a colorful storyteller.

Although by most accounts Stewart had no fixed address, he spent a lot of time in Decatur, Illinois. Decatur was a major railway hub at the time, and the locals came to consider him one of their own. He was so familiar a presence around town he came to be dubbed Happy Cal Stewart on account of his lighthearted demeanor regardless of the circumstances. The moniker would stick, at least for a little while.

His skills as a storyteller soon began landing him side jobs as a public speaker, and in the 1870s, while working on a train that was carrying a touring production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from stop to stop, Stewart volunteered to fill in for an actor who was regularly too drunk to perform. Despite that brief taste of the limelight, Stewart continued working for the railroads until 1894, when the combination of a railroad strike and an accident that cost him a finger and several toes convinced him to look for other work.

Given his background, personality and the times, vaudeville seemed the obvious next step. He began by working in blackface and as a general purpose comedian, impressionist, and storyteller. It was around 1896 that his Uncle Josh character began to emerge.

Now, lampooning New Englanders (particularly the accent) in lowbrow American entertainment can be traced back to the late 18th century, but in the decades following the Civil War it coalesced into a stock comic character, a farmer who was both naive and shrewd, a little uptight but rustic. For some reason, all these characters seemed to be named “Uncle Josh.” There were dozens of Uncle Josh comedians out there on the circuit long before Stewart came along, all with different last names. A few of them, in fact, came to be mighty popular. Although Stewart would later claim his own Uncle Josh character just came to him naturally, he had plenty of predecessors to build on.

Initially Stewart’s Uncle Josh Weathersby hailed from New Jersey, but he quickly transplanted him to the north, smack dab in the middle of the fictional rural Yankee town of Punkin Center. And though originally the act was designed for a male and female comic duo, with that hick Uncle Josh matching wits with a sophisticated woman from the city, soon enough Stewart went solo, turning the routine into a comic monologue about the assorted small adventures, tall tales and colorful characters in and around Punkin Center.

“One day Harold Wheeland had a bunch of colored Easter eggs he wanted to hide from the kids, so he went into the barn and stuck ‘em under his brown hen. Well, I’ll tell ya, when that rooster came into the barn and took one look at what was goin’ on, he marched right across the field and beat up a peacock.”

By 1897 Stewart’s vaudeville routine had become popular enough that Berliner Recordings invited him into the studio to record a cylinder for them. The result was “A Talk by Happy Cal Stewart, The Yankee Comedian,” in which he essentially edited his standard vaudeville monologue at the time down to about three minutes. The job earned him a check so of course he took it, but he likely thought, with sound recording being such a novelty at that point, it would be the last one he ever did.

About six months later, Edison’s National Recording Company conscripted Stewart to record a series of twelve Uncle Josh discs. Most of them were, likewise, condensed vaudeville routines, like “Uncle Josh’s Arrival in New York,” “Uncle Josh in Society,” and “Uncle Josh’s Invitation to Visit His Farm.” He also recorded several comic songs including “I’m Old But I’m Awfully Tough” and “Paper from Your Own Hometown.”

The discs were a hit, and Stewart became an overnight national sensation, at least in late 19th century terms. He relocated to New York. Although he didn’t leave vaudeville completely behind him, his efforts were definitely concentrated on becoming a recording artist. Without anything resembling an exclusive contract with Edison, and considering he was paid a flat fee for every cylinder he recorded, he soon began recording for Columbia, Victor, Berliner, and a dozen other little recording outfits now long since forgotten, often recording the same monologues for several different labels.

Which brings us to his laugh—the sort of half cackle, half chuckle that soon became Stewart’s trademark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5StJh8M_I

Stewart’s Uncle Josh almost never laughed during his live stage routine, as he had an audience right there to take care of that for him. Once in the studio, however, having lost that live audience and moreover having lost a number of the visual gags that were part of his act, he had to do something, so in essence he provided his own laugh track.

In the very early recordings there’s almost a desperation about it, with Stewart letting loose with a cackle every time he pauses to take a breath. It becomes a distraction and at times overwhelms the story he’s telling. As he cut more and more discs—and this may be where his genius as a performer lay—he came to better understand the art of recording. The laugh became a more genial chuckle, and more carefully placed. While at first he was laughing with every breath, soon it was with every punchline, and later still only with every third or fourth punchline. Some historians have argued that Stewart’s laughter was deliberately dropped in the recordings at specific points to give listeners themselves a pause in which they could laugh at home without missing any of the material. Whatever the case, the stories once again took dominance and, as much as his laconic vocal mannerisms, the laughter merely became part of Uncle Josh’s personality.

Uncle Josh discs became so popular that whenever anyone put one on the Victrola in a store, small crowds would gather to listen, while other people, it’s said, would call friends and family to play them over the phone.

In 1901, Stewart divorced his first wife and married his second, Florence, who performed with him whenever he went back to the stage, and collaborated with him on the recordings. The latter is more interesting, because while female comic actors were commonplace in vaudeville and female singers commonplace on early Edison and Columbia recordings, Florence may have been the first female comic actor to appear on record.

In the years following the turn of the century, the recording industry was changing quickly, not only in terms of technology, but in the way artists were treated. Up to that point, as mentioned above, Stewart was paid a flat fee for each cylinder recorded, meaning he had to scramble from studio to studio in order to make any money. It was exhausting work, and Stewart found himself spending most of his waking hours in recording studios. But in 1903 Columbia, who had been touting Stewart as one of their top-selling recording artists since the late 1890s, offered him an exclusive contract. The pay was good, but better still the work was easier and it left him with the time to return to the stage now and again. He also had more freedom in terms of what he recorded. Along with his wife, he collected a small ensemble of actors and began recording more elaborate sketches. Uncle Josh remained front and center, but these new discs included several characters and sound effects. Bestselling discs like “Uncle Josh Buys an Automobile” and “The Moving Pictures Come to Punkin Center” soon followed.

That same year, 1903, a publisher conscripted Stewart to write down some of his most popular monologues, which they released as a book entitled, obviously enough, Punkin Center Stories. Stewart was a bit of a writer as it was, having already published a handful of Westerns, but by most accounts he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the book from the start. Uncle Josh was definitely in the oral tradition, and the stories were supposed to be spoken and heard, not read. Stewart rarely wrote the monologues down and they changed and evolved as he told them.

Apart from some aesthetic discomfort, the Punkin Center Stories led to other problems. Using the stories as scripts, other comedians began recording and releasing their own versions of Stewart’s monologues, usually with unremarkable results. Stewart, needless to say, never saw a dine from any of these imposters.

Unlike songwriters who received residuals when their compositions were performed by other artists, Columbia’s contract offered Stewart nothing by way of royalties . Demanding his monologues be treated like musical compositions, in 1911 Stewart left Columbia and signed with Edison’s National Recording Company, which did offer to pay royalties. Just to ensure he’d get something out of the deal, Stewart began writing and recording more original comic songs.

In 1914, Stewart married his third wife, an actress and violinist. Only problem there was, there seems to be no record of him ever divorcing Florence. Florence did suddenly disappear from his recordings, and while the new wife never appeared on record, she did perform with Stewart onstage. Although there were some mutterings about it in some of the trade papers of the day, some wild speculation about Uncle Josh and his two wives, it doesn’t seem to have become much of a scandal. Not enough to hurt his career, anyway.

In 1916, Stewart suffered a small stroke and collapsed during a recording session. He recovered soon enough and finished the session, but a few weeks later while doing his vaudeville routine in Chicago, he collapsed onstage again. This time doctors were able to determine he had a brain tumor.

Stewart continued recording Uncle Josh records as he could until his death in 1919. He was later cremated and buried in that third wife’s family plot in Indiana.

Stewart was the first great spoken word comedian to have reached the top thanks to recording technology. Although all but completely forgotten today, for two decades he was one of the most popular comedians in America, and without him, well, we might not have any of those great Red Foxx records. We can also blame him for Garrison Keillor.

by Jim Knipfel

1 note · View note

aimmyarrowshigh · 6 years

Text

Making A Galaxy Far Far Away: An Aesthetic Photoset Tutorial

Requested by @geleixi (and varying amounts of time ago by @rockett-to-the-purple-moon, @thenameisgreed, @pizzaplanethq, and probably others who sent nice messages that I went “Oh, what a nice message this means so much I LOVE IT SO MUCH I’M TOO ANXIOUS TO ANSWER IT WRONG I’ll just do it later” and then promptly NEVER answered it.)

Brainstorming & Photo Collection

Picking a Color Palette

Choosing Images from Collection

Coloring

Textures & Effects

First off: I am not even going to remotely pretend like graphic design is a Thing I Am Better At Than Anyone Else, because that would be patently false and ridiculous, but I also get a fair number of Asks about making photosets/aesthetic posts, so here we are. I’m planning to do a separate one, maybe, for how I do the Cartoon Girls All Grown Up and Nancy Drew Dream Games series, because the “brainstorming and photo collection” part is so different that it inherently affects the rest of the process.

BUT I also feel like I don’t see a ton of tutorials that go through the brainstorming/finding images part of making aesthetics, and I tend to think of my Graphics Style(TM) as “DEEPLY Uninterested in washed-out faux sepiatone grimdark Tumblr Coloring?? + Not Good Enough At Masks To Do Negative Space Well,” which might be some people’s level of ~graphics design passion(TM)~ too, so. That’s the ride for which this ticket has been bought.

Brainstorming & Photo Collection

Obviously, the specifics of this are totally different for every aesthetic, but all of the GFFA/swworlds start from the same seed: Star Wars Aesthetic.

Star Wars itself has a very particular Lookque, imo: it’s not quite retrofuture, it’s not quite dirtpunk, it’s not quite scifi, even. There are the insanely sumptuous (and hella culturally appropriative) queens of Naboo and the ramshackle toppled AT-AT where Rey lives on Jakku and the not-even-subtle-at-all-jfc Nazi inspiration of the Empire and First Order and the straight-up millennial Tumblr witch Goffik look of the Dathomir Witches and Zabrak siths and the blue, blue water of Scarif. There “isn’t” a unifying aesthetic through Star Wars, and yet, as Gareth Edwards said, there’s a LOOK and FEEL to Star Wars: if you go a little too far to the left or right, it isn’t Star Wars anymore.*

*That said, this tutorial talks about Crait, which was invented by Rilo Jon, who went both too far left and too far right but mostly... too far-right. BA DUM BUM! Anyway.

So part of what makes Star Wars Look Like Star Wars, to me, is that it ISN’T ever Too Scifi. There’s a realism in all of Star Wars’ disparate planets -- their looks, anyway; like, talking about how Crait, in this case, makes NO ecological sense as a planet AT ALL is another post entirely. (IT MAKES NO SENSE.) It’s different from, like, Doctor Who, which I think revels in its “we can make these aliens and planets look like WHATEVER” more? Star Wars tends to be very like... “we want to use practical sets and effects.” Even for planets that only appear thus far in Clone Wars and Rebels? So it’s definitely part of the intention of SW’s Aesthetic.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY, my first step with each planet is to figure out the best way to represent it using as much real-world photography as I can and how best to channel the ~spirit of Star Wars~ in the graphic. Sometimes I fail miserably. CURSE YOU, NAR SHADAA. But most of the time it helps provide a Framework for the rest of the brainstorming and photo collection.

SO. FOR CRAIT. (For another example/totally different look and process, I wrote up a little about Haruun Kal on its post here.)

Crait has the definite benefit of appearing in one of the movies, so the first part of photo collection was to screencap TLJ. I took the caps using the 1080p digital release at a 20-frame frequency, so even once I deleted the aps that weren’t of Crait (moving the Canto Bight frames into a folder for Cantonica, of course!), I had like... 1500 images just from TLJ to start the brainstorming and collection with.

First, I trimmed down those ~1500 screencaps to 168 caps that were distinct enough from one another to give me a sense of “what happens” in the scene and, more than that, “What Crait Looks Like.” Then, because there’s additional canon material of Crait besides TLJ, I saved the unlettered images of “Star Wars: The Storms of Crait” from comic penciller Mike Mayhew’s blog @mikemayhew -- if those hadn’t been available, which they’re usually not for planets that appear in the comics (THANX MIKE MAYHEW!!!), I would have taken and cropped panels from the comic at both 100% and screen-fit/60% sizing that had utility for a graphic about planet scenery and not character.

THEN, I looked at Wookieepedia and MSW. Crait was based on the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, so I Google image-searched that. There weren’t actually very many images of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats that I super loved, so I ended up saving images of other salt flats as well, particularly the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

THEN there was the issue of the red minerals, which were entirely fictional and not part of any real-world salt flat. BUT, there IS real red sand... so I saved some images of red-sand dunes (mostly Mui Ne in Vietnam). I also went through my Star Wars Stock Folder to find images of crystal caves and mines that I’d either saved for other planets in the past, but didn’t end up using, OR just saved because there are so fucking many crystal-based planets in SW.

Each of my big graphics series has its own Stock Folder for unorganized images that just strike the right Vibe~ and might be useful someday, in addition to every planet (or cartoon girl, or US state for the Nancy Drews, etc) having its own folder for specific/organized image collection.

My Star Wars Stock Folder:

So there were already a lot of crystals, star destroyers, blasters, and bunkers that were actually in snow but whatever it was white and crystalline, to work with. I added some workable Crait-like images from the stock folder to Crait’s collection, too.

AND THEN, finally, I LOVE the vulptices, so I searched for (and found!) some of the concept art and 3D modeling images from ILM, and I put those in the folder, as well.

I also saved this, hoping I’d be able to make it work because it’s SO CUTE, but I couldn’t, but here LOOK HOW CUTE:

And then, lest I stay in the image-collection rabbithole forever, I said, “OK, that’s enough.” I ended up starting to actually MAKE the Crait graphic from a collection of 272 images:

Picking a Color Palette

Obviously, the dominant colors of Crait are red and white, so the aesthetic had to be based in red and white. My first instinct was to make a duotone aesthetic using only red, white, and black/grayscale. Something like this:

Which... I don’t hate, or even dislike. It’s definitely more in line with popular Tumblr aesthetic, uh, aesthetics. But I usually don’t like landing on that kind of coloring because it ALWAYS, ALWAYS whitewashes people of color (and jeez, it even whitewashes white people -- look at the model in the fourth frame down on the left, or Luke in the bottom-left.) The “vibrance -100 + Selective Color Red>Red + 100″ always ends up doing the above example to, in this case, Poe: turning him into a licorice man.

So then trying to correct THAT either whitewashes the FUCK out of him/people in general:

(Toning down the red)

Or introducing other colors back into the graphic as a whole:

(Upped yellow and cyan.)

So I nixed that coloring before I even started. (These examples were made after the fact purely to serve as examples.)

I went back to the drawing board, AKA the Crait image folder.

But looking at the collected images -- especially the screencaps and the panels from the Storms of Crait comic -- I was struck by how much Crait also incorporates yellow and blue. (Note that I really, really wanted to try to include Trusk Berinato and Bail Organa... but we’ll talk through why that didn’t work out.) I LOVE @droo216‘s bright, almost jewel-tone edits which I 100% know I don’t have either the patience or skill to make, but I liked the idea of trying to make Crait’s aesthetics in a primary colors + black/white scheme.

Which I actually really like! (Again, made post-facto as an example.) But again, red vibrance DiD tHe tHiNG!!! to Poe and ESPECIALLY to Finn and Bail.

So a high-vibrance look emphasizing bright colors was a no-go. Besides, going back to the source material: high-vibrance and high-energy are the opposite of what the planet of Crait is about. It’s a dying husk of a planet, being killed slowly by its own ecology as the salt in its crust dries out everything beneath it, sucking up water until everything either evolves into living crystal-dogs or goes extinct (thank u Rilo for not including dune-worms, this is the one thing you did right). Crait wouldn’t be vibrant.

But... aha! It’s also distinctly layered. I’ve done three-panel swworlds aesthetics before, so I decided to do that for Crait, too: first a mostly-white graphic like the salt crust, then white+red+yellows in the middle, and finally a dark layer of almost entirely red like the mineral mines.

Choosing Images from Collection

With the color palette and “feel” decided (dying at the surface, then growing richer and redder and angrier as the photoset moved downwards), I was able to choose images.

NEKKID PHOTOSETS SANS ANY EDITING! XXX! But for reference to see both cropping and for reference on choosing.

TOP IMAGE, MOSTLY WHITE:

L-R, TOP-BOTTOM:

I saved this image from my dash at some point and have been tossing it into planets’ folders every time there’s a white-based color scheme. It almost got used for Ilum, but at the last second wasn’t. I felt like it fit the coalescence of Rey’s Force strength here, and also the kind of “last wisps” of Luke Skywalker, well.

“Lifting rocks.”

I’m actually still not 100% whether I should have landed on a vulptex here, but dammit they were one of the only good parts of TLJ. This vulpie baby is on the salt surface, looking out at the blinding sun, so she seemed like a good fit compared to the other caps of vulptices -- the ones loping on the canyon surface at the end were all very motion-blurry.

Carrie in that gorgeous coat in homage to Harrison in Blade Runner makes me weepy, and those were some of the most beautiful shots in the movie. This one had a good balance of white and black, so it could be placed around any level “busyness” in the surrounding photos. Especially since I suckkkk at negative space.

I saved this image to the Crait folder like the day it was announced as a planet in the upcoming Episode VIII and given its first peek. I love it!

Hi, salt flats, and also Star Wars spaceships. I actually had a lot of trouble with the level of green in this image, but the ~essence of Star Wars is PEW PEW SPACE BATTLE, so.

This is an ice sculpture in real life! It reminds me of the vulptices and is cool as hell.

The Millennium Falcon! I toyed with different caps that showed it in actual battle, but the blue would have been hardest to work with in this photoset compared to the others below. Plus, now I can save a bunch of Falcon-in-flight pictures for use on planets that only appear in the novels or comics.

NECESSARY, ICONIC, PERFECT, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAPPENED ON CRAIT.

Fine, this is a snowy mountain and not a salt flat, but I liked the striations in color and gentle variations in grayscale.

This was the palest/least Bright Blue sky of all of the Falcon screencaps from Crait.

I tried a few screencaps of Crait from TLJ, but I landed on using the full-panel image of Crait from Storms of Crait. It has the cleanest definition of the “planet from space” options we have of Crait.

This is a promo image, not a screencap. It’s a much crisper view of the ski-speeders. I love the vivid color difference.

The blue-and-yellow additions to the color scheme didn’t work out, but I did still want to include Storms of Crait. This shot had a little more blue in it than I would have liked, but it has Leia in a ski-speeder back before the salt caused them to rust out, too!

Remember when it seemed like the Crait battle’s new AT-ATs would be super cool and like, do more than stand there menacingly behind Kyle? Me, too.

POE! DAMERON! HAS! NEVER! DONE! ANYTHING! WRONG! IN! HIS! LIFE!

KYLE! HAS! ONLY! EVER! DONE! WRONG! IN! HIS! LIFE!

I tried out like five different tiny-frame-difference screencaps of the ski-speeders kicking up red minerals, and I decided that this one, with a clearly defined spray of red surrounded by white and bluish sky, suited the placement here best: there’s red in the panel to its left as the main color, but minimal red in the above- and below panels.

I wanted to include actual Connix, but she’s wearing yellow and only ever shows up surrounded in brownish-black darkness, so here, have one of my standard Fashion Rebel Officer Stand-Ins instead -- the red and white obviously played a part in picking this shot over the rest of the options from the photoshoot.

I LOVE this slightly mystical shot of a Rebel pilot slash astronaut on a rain-slicked salt flat. How perfect?!

As we get down to the bottom of this middle panel, I wanted to include more destruction and more presence of yellow and orange. This image has a good balance of “negative space” in the sky and salt flat, and then the explosion of Nodin Chavri’s ski-speeder (I think?) ties in well to...

Finn and Rose, post-collision. I wanted to include Rose, and the almost JJ Abrams-esque white starburst in the center of this cap is a good balance to the spray of red around a ski-speeder two panels above.

Luke on Crait in the Rebel Alliance...

And Luke on Crait in the Resistance.

This was a kind of “????” moment of characterization -- and general direction -- in TLJ, but Luke surrounded by red as an old man would fall right below Luke as a young man, on his first mission after the Battle of Yavin, when the three graphics were aligned.

I wanted to use the straight-up concept art of the vulptex, but the black around it was TOO black, if that makes sense? So I layered it over a darkened cap of the vulptex who leads Poe to Rey and freedom. This is one of the very rare shots that I use an edited base image.

Han and Chewie! I had to include Han and Chewie. The unlettered panels from Storms of Crait that show the mineral mines are stunning; I highly recommend heading over to Mike Mayhew’s page and taking a look. The detailing of the crystals is something I wish I could have captured better at this scale.

This is one of the red-sand dunes I saved! Crait doesn’t have any living vegetation, but the drama of the black, stormy sky and the red sand drew me in here.

Some CGI crystal caves... I saved these ages ago for use on Ilum or Dantooine, I think? (Same with what will be #11 below.) I don’t love using CGI, but I think the crags on these crystal growths suited the images from canon!Crait.

A screencap of the TIEs chasing the Falcon through the mines. This was honestly one of the most visually stunning parts of TLJ, and it’s so split-second that most people missed it AND most of the screencaps have a lot of motion-blur. I’m really pleased that this one came out so crisp, and I knew I had to use it as an “anchor image.”

Finn, full-on, in red. I’m realizing belatedly as I write up this tutorial that I showed Poe face-on and Finn face-on, but I stupidly chose to show Rey only from a distance. I AM A FOOL! A FOOL!

Aren’t these resin crystals amazing? The full-size image actually shows them surrounded by snow, by the tree-stump they’re on wouldn’t fit Crait, so I cropped in closer on this image than I did for most of the Crait set.

Another shot of the Falcon in the mines. I like the way the framing of white sunlight here echoes...

Leia’s face, a bright spot in the dark, watching out over the salt flat. :(

(See #5 above!)

And again, the homage of Carrie’s coat looking like Harrison in Blade Runner made me sad, so I THREW IN ANOTHER HAN AND CHEWIE. The mining equipment here shows more detail than in the screencaps above, too.

Coloring

Like I mentioned waaaay above, in the intro: I never use set colorings for photosets. (Except Halloween Spookstravaganza, because jeez so many of those screencaps are like 240p VHS rips and it’s just not worth putting in Effort(TM).)

That said, I think one thing that I do differently than I see in most tutorials is this first step:

I ALWAYS start Aesthetic photosets by arranging the images and then *BRINGING THE CONTRAST ALL THE WAY DOWN.* This is especially helpful on photosets that include a mix of real photography, CGI screencaps or art, and/or comics panels, but it’s also just useful in general for photosets that use images from a wide variety of places.

The reason I do this is because it helps to “smooth out” the differences in light source, color balance, etc., that are part of the raw base images. For this set, it also helps to define the variations in color between very similar shades: the craters on Crait, the wisps of clouds, etc.

In some cases, I’ll do two layers of Contrast -50. For Crait, I did a later of Contrast -50 and then a layer of Contrast -15.

Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Contrast Layer View] > Paste As New Layer.

Now, the “smoothed” version is placed as a layer above the raw layer. From there, it depends on the look of the photoset what I do -- sometimes, I leave it as-is, but I almost always lower the opacity on the “smoothed” layer until the level of contrast and balance looks consistent across the whole photoset. For Crait, I ended up with the “smoothed” layer set to Lighten 100%.

Selective Color time. There are two ways I usually start this: either one color at a time -- especially for Aesthetics like Pheryon that will essentially be monochromatic -- or, in this case, I looked at the balance of the three main colors that would carry through the entire Aesthetic.

REDS

Cyan -100 (This brightens the vivacity of the red.) Magenta +100 Yellow +100 Black +35

BLACKS

Cyan 0 Magenta 0 Yellow 0 Black +100

WHITES

Cyan 0 Magenta 0 Yellow 0 Black +100 -- This is NOT my usual setting for adjusting white, and since white is one of the main colors in the Crait Aesthetic, it might seem counterintuitive to make the white darker instead of brighter. However, this will help to make next step of color adjustments “take” on the white/whitish surfaces a lot more easily, and it will also help to balance out the bluish sky areas with the white background areas. (I’m not sure this explanation makes sense? But it’s what I did.)

Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%.

“Hue” is more effective for smaller, more incremental color adjustments -- for BIG SWEEPING COLOR CHANGES, “Color” tends to work better. But it totally depends on the photoset! Try both, and see which you like better.

I feel like this is kind of the step where my process of making aesthetics stops being any different from most tutorials -- but this has been HUGELY helpful for me, a non-graphic designer-person, to be able to create a kind of “base image” that has very similar color values, brightness/contrast, and vibrance.

Sometimes this step helps to create really extreme color differences, such as in the Raydonia Aesthetic, and other times, I use it to just adjust one or two color-values so that there’s more consistency in, say, shades of yellow or shades of green, as in the Takodana Aesthetic, for which I just wanted to create a more cohesive palette of green in particular... it started out with a zillion greens, and I wanted to bring it all together into one “aesthetic.”

I think this step, and the reasoning behind it, are why SO MANY PSDs for aesthetics rely on a layer of either gray or sepiatone-ish set to Darken or Multiply as one of their key layers. But I’m just not about the grimdark life, and if I’m making an AESTHETIC OF A THING, I want the aesthetic POST to actually HAVE THAT THING’S AESTHETICS, you know?! I want to use the colors of the thing that I’m saying is meant to evoke the visuals of the thing!

Anyway. Now you have your BASE IMAGE. Often I’ll Merge All here, just for my own sanity.

Then I go in and make any other other adjustments on a “coloring” level that I think will help with the “vibe” I’m going for! For this Crait set, I definitely needed to bring the brightness up so that the white and red popped. However, bringing up the brightness also swallowed a lot of the detail in the white surfaces -- especially the planetary surface of Crait in that bottom-right space -- so I decreased the contrast again.

Brightness +70 Contrast -50

And then I go in for the macro-level adjustments of color using any mix of Selective Color, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance that works. For Crait, that was more Selective Color, because since I had decided on my color palette, and it sadly did not include blue, I needed to start by taking out as much of the blue, cyan, and green that I could.

And I’m ngl, I told myself the WHOLE FREAKING TIME I was making this photoset that I needed NOT TO DELETE THE PSD RIGHT AWAY LIKE I USUALLY DO so that I could write up all the settings for this step.

But it was a reflex. And I deleted the PSD right away like I always do.

So suffice to say, I just futzed with the levels one at a time until the RED was brought up a little, the YELLOW was brought up a lot, and everything else was brought down and/or hue-adjusted to sliiiide into being yellow, red, or black/white.

Another Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%. I think I also DUPLICATED this layer and set it to SOFT LIGHT 50% and then duplicated it again to SCREEN 50%.

I could have left it like this, but I am me and I am nothing if not Extra All The Time, so I opened up my folder of light textures (and other textures) and decided to Go To Town.

Textures & Effects

For your Aesthetic-Making Purposes, here are the three I used on the Crait set:

The first two were set to Screen 100%, and the bottom one was set to Burn 15%. I layered them in this order.

It still looked incomplete, so I decided to use this POWDR Element from Creative Market, which is actually like 5400x5400 pixels and which I’m not going to share here because I paid for it and don’t want CM to revoke my access or whatever, but it looks like this, only HUGE:

I also set this element to Burn 15% and moved it around the image until it looked the way I wanted it.

Textures and effects aren’t In on Tumblr anymore, but I really like using them -- they add, not to be cheesier than usual, texture to an aesthetic post, and I think that they can also help less-skilled graphic-makers like me to hide any myriad of imperfections in coloring, sharpening, whatever. I’m an especially big fan of this noise element (set as a pattern on Screen), so I’m going to share it here even though I didn’t use it on the Crait set:

Most of my textures have been saved over the last literally twenty years since I started making fannish graphics and photosets, largely from defunct old LiveJournals, but there also used to some great sources for them on Tumblr and still are live sources for them on DeviantArt. Just search around and you’ll find what you want! :)

In conclusion, I think it’s infinitely more fun NOT to rely on premade PSDs or standardized Settings, but I also recognize and fully respect that if I made graphics differently, I would probably get easily 5-10x more notes on each post than I do. But I make graphics the way that’s fun for me, and I just try to learn a little something from every set I make. The GFFA Planets/swworlds in particular have been something that I started, originally, because I wanted to catch up and learn about Star Wars planets that I felt like I was missing because I don’t have any fannish history with the Old EU, and I wanted to learn about them in a way that helped me feel like I was engaging with the SW source material AND making the enormity of the canon more accessible to other newish or casualish fans, like I was two years ago when I started this aesthetic series. I like making aesthetics that are genuinely inspired by the aesthetic of the thing that I’m calling it an aesthetic of, so even when it ends up just looking like rainbow barf (CURSE YOU, NAR SHADDAA!!!) I’m having fun.

THAT SAID, here’s how the time breakdown for the Crait set works out:

TOTAL TIME INCLUDING IMAGE COLLECTION AND SCREENCAPPING: Est. 20 hours.

COLORING AND ACTUAL GRAPHIC-MAKING PART: 7 hours.

WRITING UP THIS TUTORIAL: 5 hours.

So, um, if you are so inclined, here is my Ko-Fi link. I post at least two graphic sets every week, sometimes up to 25 (usually during October).

I hope this was helpful at all! I had a good time thinking about my process in-depth like this, and I would love to get tagged in any aesthetics you might try making using a similar method! :)

#**#*g #*swworlds #|franchise| star wars #*star #25 #**fav

57 notes · View notes

ellenlucasonlinedatingblog · 6 years

Text

Welcome to Impurity Culture: Emily Joy and Hannah Boning on Sex and Relationships Education for Evangelicals and Exvangelicals

Heather Corinna

Meet Emily Joy and Hannah Boning, the columnists behind Impurity Culture, a new biweekly feature on Scarleteen.

Over at @impurityculture on Twitter, Emily Joy and Hannah Boning have started using the medium to provide bite-sized remedial sex and relationships education for evangelicals, exvangelicals and others whose understanding of both has been poisoned by purity culture. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of work with many users struggling from the same place, so we were excited to see what Hannah and Emily were doing.

We’ve invited them to come over to Scarleteen and work with us, and are thrilled to be rolling out a bi-weekly column from them starting next month. I thought I’d get this started by giving our readers a chance to get to know them and the work they want to do in the world.

Let’s start at the beginning: how do you define purity culture? And what kind of personal impact has it had on each of you?

Hannah: Purity culture is a set of beliefs that places an emphasis on sexual purity and teaches that sex is allowed only within a monogamous marriage. It’s usually based in evangelical or fundamental Christian beliefs and emcompasses a whole range of restrictions and rules on sex and sexuality. It’s mostly a list of what isn’t acceptable — instead of what is — and it puts the threatening language and concept of “sin” on anything considered unacceptable. This results in a lot of sexual shame and pain for a lot of people, such as deeply internalized guilt for being queer, being unable to enjoy sex and thinking you’re broken or a million other things.

Emily: My super-short definition for purity culture is as follows: abstinence until heterosexual, monogamous marriage — or else. Your mileage will vary on what exactly constitutes the “or else,” depending on the particulars of your faith community. Sometimes it’s “or else God will be mad at you” or “or else no one will ever want to marry you” or “or else you’ll have a terrible sex life” or even “or else you’ll go to hell!” But there’s always an “or else.” There’s always some kind of threat. Secondary characteristics of purity culture often include an emphasis on male leadership, modesty in clothing for women, and eschewing common ways of dating. Combined, these things and more coalesce to create an environment ripe for sexual dysfunction, shame, and abuse.

Hannah: Emily and I both grew up in purity culture, and both have had to deal with the challenges of discovering our queerness and learning how to be sex positive when we’ve been taught to essentially distrust and hate our sexual desires.

Emily: When I was 13 years old my parents sat me down, gave me a purity ring, and pressured my impressionable adolescent self into promising that I wouldn’t even kiss until I got married (to a man, of course). This along with the rest of the church’s teachings on sexuality set me up for years of heartbreak, repression, and dysfunctional relationships that I’m still recovering from now as an adult, even though I’ve been married for three and a half years and have had very positive sexual experiences. I’ve seen my family fall apart, my friends’ relationships and marriages end in shambles — hell, I didn’t even know I was queer until after I got married — all because of consequences that can be traced directly back to purity culture. This is work that matters to me at a deep soul level, and I am trying to excavate my own trauma and chase my own healing as I help others do the same.

Purity culture does so much harm to so many people. Who do you think purity culture hurts the most, or who has the toughest challenges getting out from under it?

Emily: I don’t know if you can objectively say who purity culture hurts “the most,” especially given the severity of it can vary so greatly by family and by faith community. I think it’s possible to identify compounding factors that can increase trauma, though — such as growing up in purity culture as a woman, a queer person, a person of color, a person with a disability, etc. For example, the reality is that purity culture was created to protect white womanhood and white reproductivity, so especially when it comes to instances of sexual abuse, women of color are abused at a higher rate, but believed less often. They’re also often sexualized in a way that white women are not. Purity culture compounds and validates these inequities. Queer people, men and women and non-binary individuals, are often completely erased from the purity culture narrative, relegated to an appendix about changing your sexuality at the end of the most popular dating books if mentioned at all.

People often ask about whether purity culture hurts men, too. I believe it does. I have a lot of male friends who grew up in purity culture and have struggled to have healthy relationships because the ways that they were taught men were “supposed to be” in romantic relationships with women were so dysfunctional and unnatural. They also believed they were monsters for having normal sexual urges or looking at porn, which is really sad. I think different people are hurt differently, but unlearning the negative messages you received, whatever they happen to be, is extremely important work no matter what.

What do you think surviving and recovering from purity culture, and relearning basic ideas about sexuality and intimacy, asks of people? What do you think people working through impacts of this need?

Emily: I like the language of rehabilitation because I think it allows us to think of the journey out of purity culture as one of healing. Purity culture is a disease most of us inherited by no choice of our own, and that some of us “chose” — but I deeply question what it means to freely “choose” something in a context that says everything else is sin and will send you to hell.

I think we need to first and foremost be gentle with ourselves. The head, the heart and the body operate separately in this process, because we’ve been taught to parse them all out and compartmentalize them. I think the journey out of purity culture is the journey of bringing those three aspects of the self into greater coherence, and that’s a process. At first, you might mentally understand that having sex before marriage won’t send you to hell, but being actually able to have sex, or have sex without feeling guilty about it after, might be elusive. That’s okay. Give yourself time and understand that brainwashing on the level of the American purity industrial complex doesn’t go away overnight. Also, we need to compare notes. We need community! We need others who are on this journey so that we know we’re not alone and so that we have a safe space to ask questions and get feedback from people who aren’t going to look at us like we’re recently-arrived Martians. I also think for those who can afford it, a quality therapist is an invaluable resource here. The reality is that the teachings about relationships found in purity culture are, by and large, the exact opposite of healthy relationship advice. So having professional help to untangle that can give you a great head start.

Hannah: I love Emily’s language of being gentle with yourself. Purity culture is a form of trauma, and it has a physical impact. As Emily said, the physical healing from purity culture can be harder than the mental healing. There’s a lot of vulnerability and risk in learning how to trust your body, and it takes time. You have to be patient with yourself in that process, and having a community around you who can remind you to be patient and gentle with yourself is so important.

What do you think can be done to heal our culture from all this? And how can quality sex ed help?

Hannah: Sex ed usually doesn’t even exist within evangelical or fundamental religious environments. I went to public school, so I took sex ed in school and I got the basics. A lot of people don’t even get that. You aren’t taught things like language about body parts or how to have safe sex or how to have queer sex or what sex should feel like. If you don’t have that knowledge, it’s pretty impossible to take ownership of your body and your sexual experiences. I’ve heard so many stories from friends who have dutifully waited until marriage to have sex, and then endure painful sex because they don’t know that sex shouldn’t be painful. Emily and I both had to teach ourselves sex ed — we both had to google what the clitoris was in our twenties. How do we have good sex and know what we want if we don’t even have the terminology to talk about our bodies? Sex education is a first step towards being able to take control of your sexuality.

Emily: Every single study out there proves that abstinence-only sex education does not work. It doesn’t stop people from having sex outside of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage (as if that were somehow a healthy goal), and it often leads to young people having riskier and less-protected sex when they do become sexually active than they would have been without having been exposed to abstinence ideas or ideals. The states with the highest emphasis on abstinence-only sex education have the highest teen birth rates. And that’s if you get any sex ed at all, which if you were homeschooled like me, you didn’t.

One of the main answers is to do away with purity culture in general, and abstinence-only education in particular. Take the whole thing and dump it all in the trash. Don’t even keep a little bit. Replace abstinence-only with mandatory, comprehensive, age-appropriate, sex-positive, consent-based, LGBTQIA+-affirming sex education for all. Is that going to happen? Not in most of our schools, and certainly not in very many of our religious communities. So right now, it’s up to individuals and organizations that care to do the work, and it’s up to people to take control of their bodies and their sexualities as they can. Empowerment starts with education. The more of us that do this work publicly, openly and without shame, the better. I hope that leads to a culture shift, but that’s the work of generations, not of one lifetime.

Who else is doing some of this work?

Hannah and Emily: @seelolago who tweets at @noshamemov and her website No Shame Movement is an absolutely invaluable resource (and gives the important perspective of a woman of color) when it comes to undoing the shame of purity culture. Jamie Lee Finch (@jamieleefinch and http://www.jamieleefinch.com/) is also doing great work at the intersection of purity culture and embodiment, and explains her work as being “a relationship coach between people and their bodies,” which I love. As Impurity Culture we think of ourselves as specializing specifically in the sex ed department of purity culture recovery — actively empowering people with the real-life knowledge to replace the false facts about sex and sexuality that are such an integral part of purity culture.

Who else isn't doing the work but you should or could be?

Hannah: In general, I feel like churches aren’t doing this work. Sex is still a bit of a taboo topic in religious contexts, but even the “progressive” churches aren’t always talking about sex. There’s a lot of people who have deep trauma from the purity culture teachings they received in the church. A lot of these people leave the church entirely, and a lot stay, and churches need to learn how to help the people who stay and develop better ways to talk about sexuality for future generations.

Emily: Yeah, I think “progressive” and “liberal” churches could be doing a lot better job. If you’re styling yourself as a community for spiritual formation guess what? That includes talking about sexuality in a healthy and sex-positive way. It’s not enough to just not actively traumatize people (and sometimes “progressive” churches don’t even manage that). I do want to give a shoutout to the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ and their Our Whole Lives (OWL) sex ed curriculum, which is nothing short of amazing. I was just perusing their textbook for 18-35 year-olds this weekend and I was floored at how comprehensive, affirming, and sex-positive it was.

Can you also talk about this a little bit as specifically feminist work?

Emily: It seems in a lot of cases, even so-called “secular” or non-religious news media outlets, that this foundational idea of purity culture, abstinence until heterosexual marriage, is sort of sacrosanct. It feels like objecting to it, even from a feminist standpoint, isn’t something you do in polite company, because it’s viewed as an untouchable religious belief and an integral part of so many of the various religious institutions that make up what we collectively call The Church in the United States. This is intensely feminist work. As much as we might wish optimistically that all girls and children of all genders are growing up in households and communities that affirm their sexualities and provide a supportive structure from which they can make their own age-appropriate sexual decisions, that is simply not the case. And until that is the case, this must be part of the agenda of feminism. When you explain purity culture plainly, it does feel antiquated and outdated — like it should be obsolete in the year 2018. But it’s not. And we can’t forget that there are still new victims of purity culture being created every day.

Hannah: This feels like such important feminist work. To me, feminism is about advocating for equality and autonomy for all folks of all genders, and your feminism should also be working against inequality in any form. As Emily mentioned earlier, purity culture has roots in protecting whiteness and has a deep investment in heterosexuality, so any work that’s attempting to dismantle purity culture needs to be working against racism and homophobia as well. Emily and I are both white, able-bodied, cisgender women, so we both have a lot of privilege and also can only speak to certain experiences of purity culture. We tend to focus mostly on how purity culture affects women, because that’s our experience. Purity culture is all about patriarchy and sexism, and so we see the work of Impurity Culture as attempting to dismantle patriarchal ideas about sex and sexuality. Purity culture teaches that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to her, that it’s the property of her husband and she should keep it pure for him until marriage. We hope to empower women with this work, to help them claim autonomy and ownership over their own bodies, and to allow women to make their own choices about their sexual lives.

Emily Joy Allison-Hearn is a bisexual married polyamorous poet and yoga teacher who also happens to have a degree in theology and apologetics from Moody Bible Institute. Emily works and writes at the intersection of faith, sexuality and religious trauma, and her passion is to help people break free from purity culture and empower them to embrace sex-positivity in their everyday lives. She tweets too much at @emilyjoypoetry and her other work can be found at www.emilyjoypoetry.com.

Hannah Boning is a queer theologi from MeetPositives SM Feed 4 https://ift.tt/2N102UT via IFTTT

#IFTTT #MeetPositives SM Feed 4

0 notes

trishagraziani7-blog · 6 years

Text

10 From The greatest Competing Gamings For Android, IPhone And Apple ipad.

Whatever time of year you go, one of the best techniques to save cash is to organize your travel therefore you complete and also begin in the exact same place, preventing drop-off fees. Making sure your legal professional is actually competent in his or her area as well as is capable of securing the enthusiasms from your gathering in court of law is the most ideal means to discover the beneficial car crash attorney. When you see the section of the other cars and truck guide to the left behind up until your car goes to a slant of concerning 45 levels to the kerb. Anyone which is actually played the original Project Cars recognizes that is actually a very challenging activity, and the follow up follows suit. When car parking, the near-vertical rear end window also produces that quick and easy to evaluate where the back of the automobile is actually. In spite of the variety of horns roaring at all of them, the motorists actually don't care they're going the wrong way. His group targeted car parks, mainly in Essex, stocking wait as unintended vehicle drivers activated their remote locking. The i20 readies at shutting out wind and road sound, which helps make this relaxing on a lengthy ride. Like the majority of GM vehicles along with an HUD, you can readjust the brightness level from the HUD and the place (up or even down), however the HUD does not sense background lighting. People might assume our company are actually placing sexual activity right into the opening arena for no excellent reason," explains senior activity designer Damien Monnier. Whoever you are and whichever sector of the industry you're in, possibilities are your next auto is going to have some factor of liberty. Business automobile chauffeurs might succeed to consider the plug-in hybrid e-tron style, which blends reduced running costs with good functionality. Customers had been recommended to switch off of fuel cars and trucks in a relocate to lower carbon dioxide discharges under the final Work government, which has actually created ministers restless certainly not to penalize those which bought diesel cars and trucks. Right here are actually 4 science-backed ways that silence is good for your brain-- as well as how creating time for that can make you experience less worried, more targeted and even more creative. The Kia Optima user interface permits vehicle drivers pay attention to popular music via the vehicle's resources while permitting Android Vehicle take over the monitor for Google Right now cards or Google.com Maps navigation. Another element is actually the business cars and truck market, which is abnormally huge in Britain and represent one-half of all brand-new car sales. In Great, which is actually also concerning identity, he buries his charm in the taken out, troubled Halder as well as progressively our experts see this really good man completely transformed. In Dishonored 2 our company eventually get to listen to Corvo as well as Emily talk for the first time, and it's bad-- a minimum of for Corvo. VW go as far as pointing out that independent automobiles would spare a million lifestyles every year. Pros have actually been increasing more and more concerned about the impact from gasoline on nitrogen oxide amounts, with concerns improved due to the Volkswagen shame, when this surfaced that cars produced more dangerous seethes while driving in comparison to had actually appeared in lab examinations. Apple and Google's cars and truck user interfaces are created for touchscreens, therefore while the control handle operates, that is actually not optimal. Vehicles would certainly steer closer to every various other, enabling the 80 to 90 per-cent of unfilled street space to become made use of. In The Really good Revolutionary she reveals our company the aspect where the heaped-up dissatisfactions as well as chances as well as oppositions from individual lifestyles coalesce right into wilfully homicidal social action. That drives home how the United States automotive sector gradually yet certainly damaged on its own - a number of the complications they experienced are actually key flaws that have an effect on every sizable range fully grown provider. A few of the most ideal distributors of automobile paint and also physical body job supplies provide totally free sessions as component of their organisation version, this is a wonderful possibility for you to obtain in as well as know a little bit of specialist expertise from the people who do door beating and also automobile art work for a residing. . My auto unit possesses a lot of difficulty in that, and that still does not work totally to my choice. Having said that, since brand-new automobile purchases have been up an amazing quantity this year the car creators are not too troubled. Your credit report is a large portion of your loan expense; unless naturally, you are among the few individuals that actually pay cash money for their autos. The result will be actually a large decrease in the expense from cars and truck insurance policy fees, baseding upon distinct investigation through insurance firm Swiss Re and also the innovation group Below. I'll always remember just what the said upcoming: 'Your bike really isn't below this's under the vehicle - and the cars and truck's driven off'. If you are actually seeking to save on liability car insurance, after that take a look at the major markdowns we must give. The Captur has six air bags, including pair of that operate the size of the automobile at window level, and this assisted that make a fine score when this was wreck evaluated by private safety physical body European NCAP. As with the VW ID idea, the EQ is actually not simply a show automobile, yet a sign from Mercedes creating a whole brand new sub-brand from power vehicle.

0 notes