#inspiring to finally finish it by the last season of suck session and all the talk of logan's piss motif
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Lord Tywin did not, in the end, shit gold.
so, let’s talk about the recurring motif of shit concercerning the lions of casterly rock/king’s landing. the tywin connection is perhaps strongest and most obvious, yet the appearence of either literal poop or poop talk comes up with all the other lannisters too, barring only myrcella and tommen.
i counted at least 9 mentions of the joke about tywin pooping precious metals. (8 in the main series plus 1 in the world book) this includes the title joke in his death scene, and then there are over 10 more references to tywin dying in the privy.
we’ve also got:
one of our first descriptions of joffrey’s bad personality is jon snow’s summation of him as “a little shit”. not literal poop in this case, but i thought the choice of insult was interesting. (in fact, i believe this is the only time that term is used this way. no non-lannister could ever be so shitty.)
tyrion’s first job from tywin being putting him in charge of all of the drains in casterly rock, presumably including the ones from the privies.
tyrion asking “why does a bear shit in the woods?” in response to cat’s question of why littlefinger would lie to her
bronn telling tyrion he won’t “m'lord you every time you take a shit” in the same chapter where tyrion tells the vale mountain clansmen that his “father’s smiths shit better steel” than their weaponry.
walder frey deeming tywin and stannis “both bungholes who think they're too noble to shit” (”think” meaning walder knows better, that tywin does shit and it’s probably just as gross and stinky as frey poop)
tyrion listing “magnificient destriers shit everywhere” as a reason his battlefield days were done (or so he thought)
tyrion telling varys he should wear his rugen disguise to court and that it would make cersei “soil her smallclothes”
tyrion choosing to poison cersei with laxatives so that she’d be too busy shitting to bother him during court business.
tyrion deeming his predecessors, lords arryn and stark, “too honest to live, too noble to shit” (in this case i think he’s using “too noble” in a different sense than walder frey did, implying that shitting is practical and immoral, like any competant lannister would like to be)
the king’s landing riot on the day of myrcella’s departure starting with multiple clods of dung being flung at joffrey.
joffrey’s crown then being “dung-encrusted” as tyrion attacked him after they escaped the riot
tyrion telling varys and bronn that joffrey was not fit to sit a privy, let alone the throne
catelyn comparing jaime’s honor to the contents of the bucket where he’d been forced to piss and shit in his dungeon cell. an implied shit-for-honor metaphor which he returns to several times, twice in that last chapter with her and repeatedly (at least 7 times, the magic number!) in his own pov.
tywin’s horse taking a shit in the throne room right before he made his grand entrance post-blackwater
tyrion being trapped in a room smelling of “blood and shit and burnt flesh” when he was warehoused with all the other wounded and dead/dying immediately post-blackwater
tyrion saying cersei treated him like a mushroom on his sickbed post-blackwater because she “keeps me in the dark and feeds me shit”
tyrion thinking of the upcoming royal wedding and its pie, believing that doves especially love to shit on him, a sentiment repeated on the wedding day
a king’s landing urchin trying to throw manure at tyrion, and later tyrion telling sansa they must keep the curtains closed on his litter to avoid those fecal projectiles. (the kingslanders seem to be very fond of dung-throwing since tyrion was told they also threw it at his vale clansmen as they were sent home)
jaime recalling that the mad king shit himself in his last moments (meaning jaime’s kingslaying and tyrion’s kinslaying came with the same odor)
jaime noticing the abundance of horseshit in the stables of the outlaws’ inn he and bri and cleos visit
jaime recounting that brienne had to clean him when he soiled himself in the saddle post-mutilation
on jaime’s first return to harrenhal he notes “Someone had dug a privy trench in the very spot where he'd once knelt before the king to say his vows.” (gotta love all the obvious symbolism in jaime’s pov. “it was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.”)
tyrion wishing the father’s statue would fall and “crush joff like a dung beetle” during the royal wedding ceremony
jaime explaining the stink of the capital to his northern escort as “Smoke, sweat, and shit. King's Landing, in short.” (kl being a setting associated with the lannisters, perhaps even moreso than never-seen-yet casterly rock.)
jaime correcting a man at the gates of kl who thought tywin shit silver instead of gold
the hound saying sansa “shit on the Imp's head and flew off.” when learning of her escape
jaime seeing a crow shitting on blessed baelor’s statue as he and cersei spoke to mace tyrell at tywin’s funeral
tyrion seeing a pile of horse dung on the old valyrian road and thinking of his father down in some hell
tyrion telling duck and haldon "Pissing is the least of my talents. You ought to see me shit." as his means of introduction
even kevan gets into the poop game telling jaime "I was hanging outlaws and robber knights when you were still shitting in your swaddling clothes”
cersei then tells jaime that kevan will have his hands full at darry “teaching Lancel how to wipe his arse.”
cersei dreaming of keeping tyrion’s severed head in her chamber pot to pee and poop on
tyrion describing the smell of old volantis: “There's fish in it, and flowers, and some elephant dung as well. Something sweet and something earthy and something dead and rotten.”
tyrion thinkling the mud in the poorest part of volantis was the color of “a baby’s nightsoil”
tyrion noticing dung carts pulled by dung-tattooed slaves and almost walking into elephant dung until jorah snatched him aside
jaime meeting shitmouth on his 2nd return to harrenhal
cersei being disgusted by all the sparrows befouling baelor’s plaza “with their pigs and goats and nightsoil” (nightsoil = human poop euphemism)
jaime recalling merrett frey being branded by wenda the white fawn and “the kettles of shit his fellow squires made him eat once he was returned” (presumably in a figurative sense)
genna telling her husband he could wipe his arse with the deed to riverrun for all the good it did while the blackfish still held the castle
edwyn frey’s plan in jaime’s riverrun war council involving shit-smeared arrows
jaime describing the freys’ messy siege camp with “raw brown mud, mixed with horse dung and torn up by hooves and boots alike” and only “flies, horse dung, and Ser Ryman's gallows, standing forlorn” left after their departure
tyrion thinking the people laughing at his fall in his and penny’s show on the ship would “have laughed hard enough to shit their breeches along with him[tywin]” if they’d seen him kill his father
then tyrion and penny being trapped during the storm with her dog and ever-shitting pig (and the ship’s creak sounding like “a constipated fat man straining to shit”)
tyrion again experiencing the “stink of blood and shit” in the slavers’ camp amid the bloody flux
tyrion thinking the yunkish supreme comander looked “as formidable as a loose stool”
tyrion and penny having to clean yezzan’s pools of slimy, bloody shit after he contracted the bloody flux
doing all that in “a miasma of sweat, shit and sickness inside yezzan’s pavilion”
one of the second sons offering to behead tyrion and toss his corpse in the latrine pit upon his arrival in brown ben’s tent
cersei smelling the essence of kl upon her release from baelor’s sept: “the scents of sour wine, bread baking, rotting fish and nightsoil, smoke and sweat and horse piss. No flower had ever smelled so sweet.”
cersei later slipping, during her walk of shame, in “something that might have been nightsoil”. which was probably not so sweet
cersei walking on, after she could see the red keep ahead, through mud and dung, bleeding and hobbling
brown ben plumm telling tyrion he’d have to shit into a bucket bc of too many eyes at the latrines
tyrion telling penny “Fight or hide or shit yourself, as you like, but whatever you decide to do, you'll do it clad in steel."
some of these are just turns of phrase or everybody poops situations included for the sake of comprehensiveness, but i do think the sheer amount of lannister-related poop references is meaningful. does it mean anything that tyrion, as tywin “writ small”, (and tywin’s most unfavorite lannister) is the child of tywin with the most shit references (or is just that he also has the most pov chapters?)? or that cersei, tywin’s other heir (and tyrion’s other abuser) ends up trapped in a privy after being dosed with laxatives by tyrion, and then tywin dies in a privy after being shot by tyrion? or that myrcella and tommen, the most innocent lannisters, are not so associated with shit?
this imagery does have different meanings with each character. for tyrion it’s usually about his father and society at large shitting on him, for jaime it’s mostly about his solied honor and the dishonorable characters he interacts with, for joffrey and cersei it’s about the common people they disdain reacting to them, bringing them down by dirtying their bodies, human waste connecting the lannisters with those they rule, not so different after all. and for tywin, poop regularly ruins his moments of glory whether it’s his entrance to the throne room, his death failing to shit gold, or his very smelly funeral. but for all of them it is a humanizing element, showing they are just as gross and vulnerable as anyone else. jaime is no golden god, he’s a disabled knight at one point too weak to wipe his own butt in the immediate aftermath of his injury. perhaps that is the real lasting legacy of tywin lannister: a load of reeking shit which can be gilded like gold but never truly mistaken for perfection.
#valyrianscrolls#asoiaf meta#asoiaf#tyrion lannister#cersei lannister#Jaime Lannister#Tywin Lannister#Joffrey Baratheon#kevan lannister#lancel lannister#genna lannister#Pride of Lions#ive had this sitting in my drafts since pretty much the start of this blog#inspiring to finally finish it by the last season of suck session and all the talk of logan's piss motif#(c)lsb#didn't lj-cuts have an endpoint so you could put a visible conclusion tl;dr below?#anyway i wish tumblr readmores worked like that#long post#sh1tpost
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Body Shots (Pierre Gasly)
Inspired by (and beta read) by the amazing @limp-wrist-max thank you Mea!
Masterlist
Word count: 3.5k
Recommended song: “Lucky You” by Sim Dane
Vacationing in Milan had its perks. Fine dining, luxury stores that were prime for window shopping, and the proximity to your best friend, to name a few.
When you'd touched down in Milan you had had no intentions of visiting Pierre. You had just finished your exams for your summer class and had a week before the next semester started up, so you had simply booked the cheapest ticket and boarded a plane.
The intent had been to have some good wine, good food and unwind. Pierre saw your Instagram story minutes after you posted it and recognized the bakery you stopped at for lunch. And once he found out you were only a few minutes away from that weekend's grand prix, he had ideas that didn't involve you reading a novel all day.
Pierre had insisted that a last minute cancelation by a family friend had left a paddock pass unclaimed and had suggested you take it.
"You're my best friend, it'll be fun to have you experience a weekend through my eyes for once instead of sitting in the stands. Come visit me."
Something in the inflection of his voice made the simple request rub you raw. He missed you. It had been months since your last get together and you couldn't blame him. The last year had been rough for him and he rarely had anyone physically at his side to help him through it.
Inviting you instead of one of his parents was about more than your current proximity to the track. He hadn't missed a beat in asking you, not hesitating to consider anyone else being with him this weekend.
Your stomach had turned as you climbed in a cab Sunday morning, not out of fear of something going wrong but because of the nagging feeling that something was about to change.
You'd known Pierre since you were kids. Your brother had raced in karting before pursuing another dream, but in the few short years you'd hung around European tracks you had managed to forge a bond with one of your brother's rivals. That friendship carried on regardless of the distance that separated you, kept alive by visits in the off season and once a year trips to the racetrack at Silverstone.
Pierre met you at the gates and you had barely seen him since.
A decent qualifying session saw the Frenchman start P10 on Sunday's race. He didn't hide the fact that he was disappointed, but come time for his final meeting with the team you'd never guess he was anything but ecstatic.
You had to be conscious about your mouth hanging open when Pierre stepped into the garage in his fireproofs with his suit half undone. The tuft of blond hair peeking through his backwards cap floats on an invisible breeze and he bounces on his toes. His brow furrows when he is handed a data sheet, listening intently to what the engineer points out.
Butterflies riot in your stomach when Pierre catches you staring and winks. You pray he writes the blush on your cheeks off as the heat and he must, because he raises his eyebrows and flexes a bit.
You laugh to cover the way you want to do nothing but strip him out of that tight fitted white shirt. Your crush was getting out of hand. Pierre's shameless, friendly flirting only escalated matters.
You told yourself it was nothing. He was like this with every girl he met, making a fool of himself to earn a laugh. You were no different, except maybe that you were a constant where most other women only got to enjoy his playful personality for a short time.
You're treated to a few long minutes of watching Pierre prep to climb into the car before he's heading out on track to line up at the grid.
The race starts off fine, Pierre's pace is better than expected. One of the Haas's breaks down at the pit entry and Pierre's strategist decides to bring him in for a fresh set of tires. A kiss seems like the proper reward for their stroke of brilliance, which affords Pierre the advantage when the pits close soon after.
Restarting on lap 28 is nail biting. Hamilton, Stroll, and Pierre make up the podium places. The entire garage gasps when Stroll goes wide at turn four. Hamilton serves his penalty and Pierre inherits the lead. Sainz jumps on the opportunity to attack.
Pierre defends brilliantly until the final lap. The team erupts when he crosses the line first, bringing home the win.
Red, white and green confetti sticks to his skin as he sprays the champagne over all of you. In the heat of it all, Pierre sits on that top step and shakes his head. You already know that the photos of him being snapped from all angles will be gorgeous, the sun shining down on the first French grand prix winner in decades.
A legend in the minds of his people and in yours.
You could scarcely believe it yourself. Your best friend had finally, after years of being pushed down, won a grand prix at the temple of speed. Red Bull had been wrong, just as you'd insisted when Pierre cried over losing his seat and his friend in one weekend. But god, did Pierre rise above it all.
Pierre catches your gaze just before he leaves the podium. A lifetime of emotion swirls around him like an enigma, begging you to find out what it was hiding. Your wave is barely more than a lift of your hand but Pierre notes it nonetheless, tipping his trophy in your direction.
You wait patiently on the sidelines as Pierre poses for pictures with his team on and off the track. His attention constantly falls on you, his grin widening each time he sees you tucked under the arm of an enthusiastic mechanic or crew member. Alpha Tauri was a family and you were an honorary member thanks to your connection to their driver.
An action packed hour of cameras passes before Pierre is able to break away. As soon as he's given the go ahead he passes his trophy off and marching to you. You're both practically running by the time you meet in the middle. You crash into him and he lifts you off your feet in a crushing hug.
"You did it," you whisper, overwhelmed by his success now that you've gotten the chance to celebrate with him. "I'm so proud of you."
Pierre laughs as he sets you on your feet. His smile is wider than you've ever seen it and you're sure his cheeks must be sore.
"Wish they allowed us to bring a friend up there," Pierre says softly, a smile melting into a sly smirk. "Seeing you doused in champagne is an image I wouldn't forget."
You shake your head, caught up in his ceaseless flirting. He had no idea that his honeyed words and gentle touches lit something inside of you, rattling your brain and making it impossible to form a coherent sentence. Instead you snatch the black and gold Pirelli cap off his head and place it on your own, earning you a peal of laughter.
"Looks better on you anyway." Pierre runs a hand through his sweaty, champagne doused hair, leaving bits sticking up at odd angles.
Someone calls Pierre's name, far enough away that there's no rush. Pierre's hands remain planted on your waist and yours stay wrapped around his neck. By the way his bright blue eyes bore into yours, you swear he's thinking the same thing you are.
"Thank you for believing in me," he murmurs, gaze falling to your lips.
"I knew it was just a matter of time," you tell him, inching up on your tiptoes. Tempted by his win, you want to ruin the best friendship you've ever had. You want to discover if the lips you spend far too much time dreaming about felt as soft as they looked. You want to know how it feels to be lost in Pierre, newly minted race winner, and find out just how he dealt with the adrenaline and euphoria of his incredible drive.
"Well done mate!"
Max Verstappen startles the two of you apart. You take a healthy step back and drop your gaze to the ground to hide your burning cheeks.
"Thanks." Pierre accepts the Dutchman's embrace and claps him on the back. "Sucks I didn't get to fight you for it."
"There will be more chances in the future. And I didn't expect to see you here, that's a nice surprise." Max knocks you with his shoulder, tipping you off balance. On instinct you latch onto Pierre's arm to steady yourself. You wait a heartbeat too long to remove your hand and both of you find anywhere to look but each other.
"So where's the party?" You ask, searching for a distraction from the way your palm still burns.
"Definitely not at Red Bull." Max shudders and you laugh because that's what you do when someone is being over dramatic. It rings hollow in your ears.
"I hear there's a few guys with adjoining rooms at the hotel who bought plenty of booze," Pierre says. "You and Dan wanna come by?"
"Is that really a question?" Max grins, already typing out a text as Pierre feeds him the details.
**********
"You should do body shots," Max suggests, which earns a roaring laugh from Daniel and a half hearted one from Pierre.
"I don't think so," Pierre says, "there's no one here I trust enough to let that happen."
"Not even your best friend?" Max gestures to you and shoots you a wink when Pierre glances over. "I think she's trustworthy."
"No thanks." Pierre holds up his plastic cup and salutes Max before draining it to the dregs.
Pierre's immediate refusal hurt more than it probably should have. You hadn't expected him to jump at the offer but having him shut the idea down so thoroughly hadn't been what you wanted either.
Max notes your pouty lower lip and speaks on your behalf. "Come on mate," Max insists. "You just won your first prix, live a little! It's not like you've got anything to lose, she's your best friend."
"That's exactly why-"
"Shut up, it would be fun! Wouldn't it?" Max says this last bit to you, a wild grin on his face.
Max expects you to turn red and object. That was his end goal. But what the Dutchman hadn't counted on was how drunk you already were on Pierre. On his smile. On his bright blue eyes, swirling in the aftermath of his unlikely triumph. And mostly on the not-so-sneaky way he glances at you every few minutes.
"Let's do it."
Pierre blinks, searching your face for any sign of distress. "Wait, are you serious?"
"Yeah, why not?" You shrug, suddenly fearing that you'd read him wrong and he really was against this whole thing. "Unless you don't want to-"
"Get the vodka," Pierre interrupts, nodding to Max though his stare remains pinned on you. Pierre latches onto your wrist and drags you around the room until he finds a table long and sturdy enough for his liking.
"This a good height for you?"
The coffee table is low enough that you'd have to kneel. Luckily getting on your knees isn't something you'd mind doing for Pierre. You lick your lips without thinking. Pierre's pupils blow wide, black swallowing the swirling oceans of blue.
"Sure," is all you manage.
"Good." Apparently neither of you were able to focus on speech. You work together to clear the empty plastic cups and used napkins from the surface. Your hands brush when you both reach for the last cup and you just catch the way Pierre's breath hitches.
You and Pierre have danced this dance since you were teenagers. Each of you knows the steps by heart. The only difference is tonight neither of you were poised to bow out before the final lift.
"Beep beep, bitches!" You yank your hand away when Max's shout reaches you. Pierre's hand lingers in front of him, outstretched as if your palm remained grazing his thumb.
Max holds the bottle of vodka over his head as he wades through the crowd. "You're all about to be very, very entertained."
"Where's your chaperone?" You ask Max, searching for Daniel in the low lighting. You press your palm to your thigh, dissipating Pierre's lingering heat.
The Dutchman waves you off. "Went to get us more drinks. Pierre, isn't it kinda hard to do body shots if you're still fully clothed?"
"Who says I'm the one getting undressed?"
Max's grin dimples his flushed cheeks. "I mean you can ask her to take her shirt off in front of all these people if you want to."
"No," Pierre responds quickly. "Fine. I'll do it."
When Pierre strips off his shirt he gets more than a few whistles from men and women alike. That tended to happen when someone was built like a Greek fucking god, you supposed. Whoever voted for People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" and decided on Michael B. Jordan had clearly never laid eyes on Pierre, with his bronzed skin, endless expanses of muscle, and brilliant cheshire grin.
Michael B. Jordan who?
Pierre hands the team branded shirt off and lays out on the table. He pillows an arm under his head, bare bicep flexed as he gets comfortable. Leaning in to kiss along the hard muscle was out of the question, however tempting it was.
Pierre looks up expectantly. "You coming?"
Holy shit, this was actually happening.
"Yeah, I'm coming." You sink to your knees and Pierre laughs.
"Up here." He pats his thigh with his free hand and beacons you forward. "Please."
Screw it, you've already thrown your friendship out the window. This night ended either in heartbreak or awkwardness, might as well get your money's worth.
A few whoops break out above the music. The bassline isn't the only thing thundering in your chest as you straddle Pierre's thighs, hands braced on his chest.
"Okay?" Pierre whispers for your ears only. You nod with what you hope is a charming smile.
"Alright move," Max says, shooing you back until you're resting on your haunches. Max flicks the cap off the bottle and you grab it to take a long sip.
Max gapes at you and you wipe a hand over your mouth. "Close your mouth, you'll catch flies."
Pierre's thighs tense beneath you in response to your bold declaration. Dozens of Pierre's friends and team members gather around. For all you care, Pierre is the only person in the room.
"Last chance to back out," Max warns. You're too busy tracking the drop of liquid that falls from the neck of the bottle to splash onto the crease of Pierre's abs to bother responding.
"Pour it out." Pierre's chest sinks with his demand, doing nothing but sparking your imagination, creating images of him heaving beneath you. You'd sell your soul to recreate the way you're currently poised above Pierre's hips with a little less clothing and no audience.
Max gives up hope on you replying and dribbles the alcohol up Pierre's abdomen, stopping just below his pecks.
"Have at 'er-"
Your tongue is on Pierre's skin before Max has finished his sentence. You feel the muscle tense beneath your tongue, going rigid at the first contact. The burn of the vodka doesn't even register as you lap it up, catching the drips that fall over his sides.
You aren't sure either of you is breathing. Salty sweat mingles with the sharpness of the alcohol, an afterthought barely worth mentioning.
Blame the liquid courage or blame the high from Pierre's win, but you were confident Pierre was enjoying this just as much as you.
Planting a hand on Pierre's hip, you steal a glance up at him to find him locked on you. You take that as permission to continue, dragging your tongue flat up his stomach and continuing well past where the vodka had been poured. Up between his pecks, over the curve of his throat that bobs beneath your tongue, over his chin until you meet his lips, already parted and waiting.
Neither of you pay the shouts cresting around you any heed. You've both waited too long for this, endured too many almosts and what ifs to let the opportunity slip through your fingers. Your sticky hands cradle Pierre's face, angling it in a way that's to your liking so you can explore more of his mouth. He tastes like whiskey and mint, the juxtaposition of hot and cold scattering your thoughts. One of Pierre's hands finds the nape of your neck when you gasp for air, refusing to let you end the moment.
And it's pure, unending bliss that floods your veins when he nips at your lower lip, swollen and surely reddened from his kiss. His thumb sweeps across the back of your neck while you both fight to catch the breath currently evading you.
Daydreams didn't hold a candle to the real thing. One taste and you were addicted, craving as much as Pierre was willing to give.
"Hey," he murmurs, the corners of his mouth tugging up in a stupidly gorgeous smile.
"That was nice," you tease, tangling your fingers in the silky blond strands of his hair. "I wouldn't be opposed to doing it again."
"Me too. Maybe somewhere where it's just us though. I wouldn't want to scandalize my team any further." You manage to steal another sweet peck before Max hauls you off Pierre.
"Fucking finally," Daniel says, clapping when you're upright again. "Do you know how long I've been trying to orchestrate this? The two of you really are dumber than a box of rocks. I can't believe all it took was Max suggesting body shots to get you two to kiss."
The arm that wraps around your waist feels right. Pierre hasn't hugged you like this before, with his chin resting on your shoulder and his nose nuzzling your neck, but it already feels like home.
Pierre ignores Max completely in favor of pressing a kiss to the shell of your ear. "Why don't we go back to my room? I'll pour more alcohol on myself if that's what it takes to convince you."
You're just about to take him up on the offer when one of his team members taps his shoulder. He glances at them impatiently, which the man thankfully doesn't take personally.
"They want some photos with you holding your trophy," he explains, handing a shirt and the star shaped interpretation of the Italian flag to Pierre. "It will only take a few minutes, they promised not to keep you long."
Of course everyone knew exactly where your minds were. Sanity had long since left the premises, tangled up in crisp white sheets. Pierre's entire team and half the Red Bull garage had seen what had gone down while the prix winner was sprawled on that coffee table. There would be no chance of denying it in the morning.
And while you'd never imagined that the first time you'd kiss your best friend would be directly preceded by licking copious amounts of shitty liquor off his super-heated skin, now that you'd experienced it any other way seems forgettable.
Pierre sighs and runs a hand through his hair. "I mean, I already have my trophy, but…" your stomach lurches when you realize he means you. Pierre catches the way your mouth hangs open and he shoots you a grin before accepting the real trophy.
"You carry it," he says, not giving you much of a choice as he thrusts it into your hands. "I'm occupied."
You're about to point out that his hands are, in fact, free and that the more likely reason for insisting you carry the trophy was his usual post-race laziness when he slings an arm around your shoulders and tucks you tight to his side.
"Is this okay?" Pierre asks when you involuntarily stiffen. God, it was more than okay, it was perfect, it had just caught you by surprise. You'd only kissed him a handful of minutes ago and Pierre was already wrapped around your finger, smitten as if you'd been a couple for years.
"Yeah no, it's perfect. Simply lovely," you say quickly, stumbling over your words.
"Can I kiss you again?"
Your answer comes in the form of a hand on his chest, stopping him in his tracks. You prop the trophy on your hip and smile up at your race winner.
"You don't have to ask that ever again. My answer is always yes."
#pierre gasly#pierre gasly oneshot#pierre gasly x reader#formula 1#formula 1 rpf#f1#formula 1 fantasy#formula 1 fanfiction#formula 1 fanfic#formula 1 fic#f1 fanfic#f1 fanfiction#f1 fic#f1 fantasy#f1 rpf
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ACOSF USA BOOK TOUR NOTES
Hey y’all! I just attended the LiveTalks Los Angeles event with Sarah J Maas and Eva Chen!! I took lots of notes so I wanted to share them with you all! They’re a little incoherent on the page, so it might seem a crazy, they jumped topics a lot. Feel free to chat with me about what she talked about! But first.
MY RULES:
NO SHIP OR CHARACTER SLANDERING. I know that we all may have different opinions. I will not offer my opinions here, this is purely informational for those of you who did not have the opportunity to attend this event.
PLEASE NO ARGUING IN MY COMMENTS OR ASK BOX WITH ME OR ANYONE ELSE WHO COMMENTS
Acknowledge that I am not perfect and may not have written down everything perfectly. I did my best while still trying to enjoy the event.
I AM NOT SARAH J MAAS AND CANNOT INTERPRET WHAT SHE MEANS
I’m tagging this with #acosf spoilers and #acosfspoilers just in case.
If you understand and can abide by these rules, keep reading below the cut, and enjoy!
SJM said it was weird doing this event from her living room where you might be able to hear her dog in the background or her son trying to get into the room.
ACOSF started as a passion project while she was writing ACOWAR! It was never anything she thought she was going to publish. (more on this later)
About reading and writing growing up
in middle school, she read a lot of fantasy
in high school, she didn’t read as much, but wrote A LOT. it became her fixation, almost an obsession.
in college, she only really wrote on vacations (she had a very healthy social life hehehe) but her junior year is when she found her balance between schoolwork, writing, and socializing.
there was no plan B for her!! it was always to be an author. if it didn’t happen right away, she was going to find a job that would get her by until plan A could come to be.
her favorite author growing up was Garth Nix. She longed for books about badass women. She got to meet him and write a blurb to be on one of his books! She cries when she meets her favorite authors.
Talk about character names!
her character names come from everywhere and nowhere
sometimes she’ll just hear a name in her head and think “that’s it!” (Rhys, for example)
she needs to know the name to write the character
if the name doesn’t immediately come to her, she spends a lot of her time on baby name websites and makes lists until it clicks
sometimes the names just... connect. sometimes she doesn’t mean for them to.
it will always be uncommon. never “Frank” lol
Writing about Nesta!
on a “surface level” she loves writing when Nesta comes out to fight. for example, her favorite scene in this aspect to write was the bog scene. As soon as she got to it, it flowed out of her. The final product was almost identical to the first draft. She wrote it in one session, from the terror & tread to the “who am i?” to when she emerged--she went YES. MAJOR Mic Drop moment for her.
going deeper: definitely her overall journey was one of the favorites she’s ever written. From the dark place she’s in at the beginning to the very end.
Writing about Nesta meant so much to her because of her own mental health. She channeled a lot of her own feelings and went on the journey with Nesta.
it was a lot of “how do you face mental health in a fantasy world without therapy and medication”
it was easy to get into Nesta’s mind but emotionally intense.
ACOSF’S BIG MESSAGE: LEARNING TO LOVE YOURSELF AND OTHERS. YOU ARE WORTH OF LOVE.
YES there is a book planned for Elain!
As soon as Nesta and Elain came onto the page again in ACOMAF, she knew they’d get their own journey.
Nesta grabbed her by the throat in book 1
She was originally contracted for only the first three books but realized there was more she wanted to explore. Essentially the “what comes next” after ACOWAR in this new world with out the wall.
FUN FACT: while editing ACOMAF/writing ACOWAR, she drunkenly told her editor at the time, “hey guess what happens next?”, and it turned into a two hour conversation about everything she wants to happen for Nesta, Elain, Mor, Azriel, etc. TWO WEEKS LATER, she gets a call saying they want to buy the stories!! Obviously, she said yes.
This allowed her to start planting the Easter eggs for these stories in ACOWAR. She knew she did not want Nesta to be sympathetic at the beginning of the book! But she did not want people to hate her.
She always has one eye on the horizon for future books.
If she could visit one court for a day, which and why?
She LOVES the season Autumn, it’s her favorite. “BUT EVERYONE IN THE AUTUMN COURT IS AN ASSHOLE”. She would want to visit the Autumn Court when no one is there so she can enjoy the beauty of Autumn.
But also she would want to go to the Summer Court because she has a thing for Tarquin but only if it’s not gross and humid.
She would ALSO want to go to the Day Court for Helion and all his libraries.
ESSENTIALLY she would want to go everywhere but Spring because Tamlin sucks and is an asshole lmao.
BEAST FORMS
SJM’s beast form would be something totally not cool or majestic like a sea otter.
Nesta’s beast form would be something terrifying and beautiful like a snow leopard/dragon hybrid, a griffin, or a sphinx. **WANTS SOMEONE TO DRAW THIS**
FUN QUESTIONS
Nesta’s favorite smutty book would be JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. She reads these books for the distraction, of course, but also for the comfort they gave her that everything turns out okay for the characters.
Nesta’s Starbucks order: cappuccino- something simple, nothing with too much sugar or whipped cream. Elain’s would be a Frappe- something delicious and sweet. SJM’s is a flat white, iced or not, but never after 2PM.
SJM usually listens to classical music and movie scores while she writes, but she’s gotten used to write in silence so that she can listen for her son’s shenanigans with Josh.
“Stay Together for the Kids” by Blink 182 semi-inspired the scene when Nesta and Cassian go back to her family’s cottage. She can hardly explain why.
WRITING ADVICE
Write what you love, not what you think you should be writing.
Give yourself permission to suck. Her first drafts are shit and are usually accompanied with an email that says “I know I need to fix this, this and that” lol.
WRITE THE DAMN THING. Vomit on the page!
YOU CAN’T FIX A BLANK PAGE.
Her least favorite part about the publishing process is the first pass of copy edits, those last minute checks and balances. But once it’s off to the printer, it’s not her problem anymore.
She’s every publisher’s worst nightmare because she sends it off to the printer at the LAST possible minute.
For reference: Throne of Glass was finished almost... a year and a half? ...before it hit shelves, but ACOSF was finished this past fall.
MAIN CHARACTER TALK
All of her heroines have a piece of her.
SJM’s personality is a hybrid of Bryce and Nesta.
Feyre and Nesta got most of her in terms of learning to be empowered.
She has to have a connection to them in order to write them. It’s an out of body, method acting experience.
MISCELLANEOUS
She said “CC2 is a year from now.”
She started writing ACOTAR in 2008 before she published TOG.
She loves the story and dynamic of Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Cassian is Elizabeth. Nesta is Darcy.
And that’s all I have, folks! Thank you for reading, I hope you got something out of this!
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Hey everybody! I’m back again with another Dewey fic! I don’t know how many of you have watched how I met your mother but this fic is inspired by a episode in season 6 with Lily and Marshall. So enjoy!
P.s. be aware: Major fluff ahead :)
Every cloud has
a silver lining
You slowly open your eyes. You can tell it’s still early morning but the sun is slowly coming up. You look to your left and see Dewey still fast asleep, snoring lightly. His arm his draped over your waist holding you close.
Recently he had been trying to book a new band to preform with. As much as he loved preforming with the kids, he had been looking for a more mature band that he play with at bars to earn a little extra income.
He’d finally found one and had quite a few trial runs with them to see if it was gonna work out. So far it was looking good. This meant he was coming home a lot later every night and although you missed having him in bed, you were glad he was enjoying his new band.
He came home particularly late last night and must of been completely exhausted as he’s still wearing the same t-shirt and his jeans have been tossed carelessly in the corner.
Realising you weren’t going to get anymore sleep, you decide to be responsible and get up to do some chores around the house. You slip carefully out of Deweys grasp without waking him, thankfully he’s a heavy sleeper. You smile at his sleeping form, straightening out the sheets and pulling them up to his chin.
Your first priority is to start a pot of coffee and get yourself some much needed caffeine. As you start the pot you gather your favourite mug and open the fridge.
“Damn” Your out of milk.
You decide to head down to a little store down the street to grab some. Quickly you pull on a hoodie and leggings and rush out the door.
After grabbing milk from the store you begin to stroll back to the apartment. On the way you pass a small deli. You know this deli is known for not having the best hygiene in the past, but you also know it’s Deweys favourite place to get a chicken sub, so you head in, order two sandwich’s and walk back to the apartment taking in the 7AM sun.
As soon as your back, you pour yourself a big cup of coffee, add a splash of milk and even though it’s early you dig into your own sub. Dewey as always was right, the sandwich was delicious. You would be returning for more.
After eating you get into the chores. Loading the dishwasher, sweeping, cleaning the bathroom and sneaking into your bedroom to grab the dirty laundry including Deweys discarded jeans and starting up the washing machine.
After all necessary chores are finished, you consider what to do next. You had some errands to run but did you wake Dewey to come with you? You decided he’d be pretty tired and needed a little more sleep (plus you didn’t want to bring a grouchy boy with you:). So you quickly got ready to go leaving a note by the coffee pot as you knew that’s where he’d likely head first.
“Gone to run some errands, be back soon. Chicken sub in the fridge xx”
After that you leave the house heading into town to begin your errands.
Several hours passed and you begin to feel hot, but you brush it off that the store just didn’t have air conditioning. Pretty soon your stomach begins to cramp resulting in discomfort for you.
As you leave your final stop, it hits you. Running to the nearest public restroom, you make it just in time before you begin to spill your guts into the nasty toliet bowl.
When the vomiting finally subsides, you sit back and take a breath wondering what have caused you to upchuck the contents of your stomach.
Oh no. The chicken sandwich. The same chicken sandwich you had left for Dewey. Panicking you whip your phone from your pocket and call Dewey, begging he’d answer before it was too late. He didn’t.
Jumping up from the ground, you Olympic sprint willing to make it home before it was too late. You burst through the front door, dropping all your bags and dashing towards the kitchen.
You reach the kitchen and see Dewey standing by the counter. He smiles as you enter panting to catch your breath.
“Hey there beautiful, wait wh..”
You interupt him, “Did you eat the sandwich yet?”
“What?”
“The sandwich in the fridge..did you eat it?”
“Yea, just now”, he gestures to the crumpled wrappers on the counter top.
“Crap”
“Whats wrong babe? Why so flustered?”
“Because I..” , your mad dash home has upset your protesting stomach and you cover your mouth, rushing to the bathroom and dropping on your knees and more vomiting ensues.
A concerned Dewey is quick to follow behind stopping in the door frame, surprised to see you with your head stuck in the toliet bowl. When you finally get a minute you turn to him and groan, “that’s why”.
Dewey frowns “you mean the sandwich?”.
“Yep”. He opens his mouth to say something else but stops as you push your face back into the toliet bowl. He sits behind you pulling your hair back and rubbing gentle circles on your back.
You stay like this for a while, until your body finally stops heaving, completely draining you of any energy you had. Exhausted you lean back into Deweys arms and he places a kiss on your sweaty temple.
Dewey is surprisingly a good nurse. He takes you out of the bathroom and changes you into one of his t-shirts and a pair of sweatpants. He brings to the coach, lays you down and you doze off for several minutes. You wake up a few minutes later as you feel your favourite blanket being draped over you. You look around and see Dewey has left a glass of water and some saltines on the coffee table, as well as lined trash can on the floor. He gently squeezes himself underneath your head so it rests on his lap. Gently running his fingers through your sweaty hair until you fall back to sleep.
The next few hours pass as a blur. Napping on and off, Dewey trying to persuade water into you and of course the trash can is made use of several times. Each time Dewey is right there helping you through. After a particularly long vomiting session, Dewey cleans your mouth with a wet flannel as you fall back into his chest.
“Thanks Dew”
“No problem, you can repay the favour later” he laughs nervously.
“I’m sorry honey, I didn’t real..”
“Hey, hey don’t worry, it’s not your fault”.
He’s silent for a few minutes. “Hon, what time did you eat your sandwich?”
You think back to that morning when you’d eaten the cursed sandwich. “Around 7”
“Ok and it hit you around 2pm, right”
You nod confused. “It’s now 5pm so..”, He counts up on his fingers mumbling to himself.
“That means I have approximately four hours until it hits me, around 9pm”
“But baby you have a gig tonight”, you remind him. “Maybe you should cancel?”
“No, no I can’t, their deciding tonight if this is gonna work out”
He thinks to himself again. “The gig starts at 7:00. I can preform for about an hour and then head home before it hits”
“But what if it hits early, what are you gonna do then?”
“I’ll just have to be prepared”
You laugh to yourself “what are you gonna do? Line your guitar case?”
“That’s not a bad idea actually”. You roll your eyes, it didn’t sound like the best idea but you knew you couldn’t convince him otherwise.
About an hour later Dewey gets up from the coach and gets ready to go. He returns in a matter of minutes and crouches down to your level to kiss your forehead.
“Alright, I’ll be gone for a few hours, will you be ok”
“I’m more concerned for you, will you be alright?” You say taking his hand.
He smiles, “it’ll be fine”
He places a kiss on your hand before leaving. As soon as he leaves you lie back down and pass out.
Dewey arrives at the dive bar and sees the roadies setting up but no band. He approaches one of the roadies and asks where they are and is disappointed to discover they’re running late.
When the band finally arrive, they start to preform. The whole time Dewey is anxiously watching the time. When it approaches 8:45 he realises he must stop now before it’s too late. “Alright everyone thank you!”, Dewey announces into the microphone.
“Finn what are doing?” asks the drummer as the band watches Dewey hastily packing up his guitar.
“I’ve gotta go”
“But we’re not finished yet” the base player says.
“Sorry dude, but I need to go”
“Finn, you leave now and your out of the band. For good” the keyboard player says.
Dewey pauses considering his options. He really needed this band but did he risk publicly embarrassing himself out by puking over the crowd.
Dewey shrugs. “Oh well, you guys suck any way”. He walks out of the bar without another word. Heading straight home ready to face the torturous night ahead.
He arrives home, slamming the door causing you jump and sit up.
“Hey sorry y/n didn’t mean to scare you”
You sit up and yawn. “Hey Dew how was it?”
“Horrible, terrible, dreadful, awful”.
“Really how come?” You sit up straight listening intently.
“Well, lets just say I don’t have a band anymore”
“Aww Dewey baby I’m sorry, come here”, you open your arms for a hug, but he shakes his head and rubs his eyes.
“Sorry baby, but I think I’m just gonna head to bed before the night gets worse.” He turns and heads into the bedroom without saying another word.
It was rare Dewey was upset, but you could tell he was. He also never refused a hug from you, in fact it was rare he wasn’t touching some part of you. You wait a few minutes before deciding to go check on him.
Dewey is fast asleep on top of the covers when you enter. He’s curled up to his side, still fully dressed. You pull of his shoes and jeans and drape a thick blanket over his sleeping form. Leaving a lined trash can at his bedside in case the food poisoning hit, before climbing in next to him and thinking long and hard.
The next morning Deweys eyes slowly opened. He looks around the room and takes in his surroundings. Then he realises, he didn’t get sick. In fact he feels good considering the good nights sleep he got.
It’s then you slowly emerge from the bathroom and see Dewey smile.
“Honey it’s a miracle, I didn’t get sick”
You smile back “no baby you didn’t”
Dewey then takes in your face, your smiling but your eyes are filled with tears and a few have spilled down your cheeks.
“Y/n what’s wrong?” Deweys asks concerned gesturing for you to come over. You sit down opposite on the bed and take a deep breath, smiling as you begin to speak.
“Baby, I’m pregnant”
#dewey finn#dewey finn x reader#dewey finn fanfiction#school of rock#school of rock fanfiction#dewey finn fluff
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fallback - chapter two
series masterlist
chapter 2: flashes (august 2017)
this story was previously untitled - many changes happened from original published draft :-)
HEADS UP: tom doesn’t rlly appear in this chapter - he is mentioned in a flashback and at the end --- i also got a bit carried away w this chapter.
if you have any requests on what you want to see in following chapters or in any ‘extra’ sections of this story (ie: how tom and bea met, their first kiss, interviews, or generally any specific or general moments for Bea or between her and family/friends/tom/etc) please feel free to message me either personally or go to my ask page and send your requests :-)
One reason why love is a difficult word for Bea is because everything she ‘loves’ and everything she enjoys have a good side and bad side to it. For example, acting and being famous. She loves spreading joy by creating entertainment, the idea she has inspired or encouraged people, acting and creating new worlds and characters and bringing them to life, meeting new and a large amount of people, all the travelling opportunities, and being recognized for her talent. But she hates how her whole childhood has been and probably the rest of her life will be characterized by the media scrutinizing and criticizing and magnifying everything she has done. She despises how the media acts towards females – such as focus on their fashion or bodies – and hates how sometimes, the media have terrible questions and stray away from the movie and it’s behind the scenes or from the important stuff.
In this instance, Beatrice thinks she mostly loves premieres. Yes, she hates how some media outlets, not all, have the most boring or sexist questions. She hates the amount of flashing lights that she swears is deteriorating her vision. And yes, she’ll prefer to be in pajamas, watching Netflix rather than going to a premiere. But, she loves the ability to celebrate the project with the cast and crew and families and friends, being able to meet fans at the red carpet, seeing the excitement and hype for the film, seeing how the film actually turns out, and something about how the premiere symbolizes the end of a project. She’s always excited to move onto the next project. The premiere is something that combines all the reasons she loves acting, even just a little bit, in a few hours of an event.
One thing she loves the most about premieres is the pre-premiere tradition Logan and Bea superstitiously follow. It started back when Logan lived with Bea rather than her then-boyfriend-now-fiancée and they had the best premiere they ever attended. Ever since then, Logan makes sure to have breakfast ordered to the house whilst Bea has all the skin care supplies prepared.
“WAKE UP BITCH!” Logan screamed from the foyer, using her spare key to call Bea. As this is Logan’s first time not seeing Bea immediately when Logan comes in, she assumed she was asleep. “I GOT THE CROISSANTS.”
Bea was currently trapped under Noah’s sleeping state, his breath reeking of the alcohol from last night. She has been trying to get to the bathroom to change into sweatpants rather than booty shorts and look somewhat more presentable for the last hour. “Noah,” Bea groaned, shaking him slightly, making him stir slightly, “can you move?” She asked gently, slightly annoyed.
He stirred, “No” he whined. “We have time and I want you with me.” He mumbled.
“I told you yesterday,” She sighed, “Logan and I have this tradition. I spent the last few days with you non-stop…I need time with Logan.” Noah begrudgingly moved, groaning at the loss of contact. Bea never knew someone could be this clingy.
Bea slipped into the bathroom, quickly slipping on a sweatshirt to cover up her bandeau and sweat shorts rather than her booty shorts. Tying her hair up into a messy bun, she quickly ran downstairs. “Sorry, sorry,” Bea profused as she met Logan who’s already eating her own chocolate croissant, “Noah’s a heavy sleeper.”
The interior designer and stylist rolled her eyes, “I don’t get why you’re with him.” Logan was skeptical and knew something was up with their relationship from the very beginning, but Bea doesn’t like to open up and Logan knows Bea likes her distance. It just sucks – Bea is an world renowned actress and knows how to lie about how she’s feeling pretty amazingly. In fact, Logan knew something was up as Bea often drowns herself in work whenever she feels upset – and for the last year, Bea has been working non-stop that Logan has barely seen her maid of honor.
“It’s fine.” Bea mumbled, finally taking a bite out of the creamy deliciousness of the croissant.
Logan grabbed Bea’s wrist. “That’s not an answer.”
“Yours wasn’t a question.” Bea poked her tongue out, “Okay I know you don’t like him, so let’s move on.”
“You’re getting it wrong.” Logan groaned, “He’s okay. I don’t like him for you.”
Bea decided just to swap topics, she can’t handle confrontation like this because it asks her to directly confront her own personal, conflicting emotions – not a character’s, but her own. “So, since we haven’t seen each other since our last wedding planning session, what else have you and Will decided?”
The girl sighed at her best friend not opening up to her. Bea is Logan’s personal diary and knows everything – Logan just wants to help her as much as Bea helps Logan. “So, I want you to go wedding dress shopping with me in a bit. I got an appointment at this boutique I’ll send you the address for, but they let you customize your gowns so I’m planning on doing that too.” She noted, “That in mind, I’m getting you an early maid of honor slash birthday gift that day too.”
“Babe!” Bea exclaimed, “You don’t have too!”
Logan smirked, “Trust me. It’s a good gift but it requires extreme effort on your part.” Bea scrunched her eyebrows, “Good effort! Promise.” The actress scrunches her eyebrows, skeptically, before Logan physically swipes at the air and acts as if it swiped away the conversation. “But William absolutely loves the bakery you chose, thank you so much. And none of the bridesmaids are hating the dress design you picked.” Logan decided on designing the dress and just asked Bea to choose which design goes to which bridesmaid and which designs should be created.
As soon as the breakfast and wedding talk was finished, it’s been an hour and the two found themselves sitting on Bea’s L-shaped couch with skins masks, milkshakes, and their hair up in buns for a deep condition. The TV was playing ‘Bachelor In Paradise’.
April 12, 2016
Tom and Harrison came back from the outside, sweating from their previous game of basketball – both shirtless. “What’s this?” Harrison asked, eyes bewildered as they saw Bea and Logan lounging with skin masks, their wet and recently showered hair up in towels.
“Premiere day.” Logan stated, “It’s our pre-premiere tradition, we always do this.”
“Want to join?” Bea inquired, sitting up more to look at Tom and Haz. “We have some extra masks.”
Tom and Harrison shrugged, making Bea and Logan rub their hands together to look like they are scheming something. Tom sat next to Bea and Harrison sat next to Logan, not wanting to third-wheel the blossoming couple. “Mask me!” Tom exclaimed, opening his arms after grabbing Bea to straddle his lap, making her chuckle.
“Wait, y’all need to take quick rinse because you two smell bad and rinse your face real quick.” Bea instructed, climbing off of Tom’s lap and causing the two boys to stand up, “Oh, and don’t forget that it has to be relatively quick. We have to end this a little earlier because we have to pick up your family at the hotel.”
Tom’s head fell back, “Oh shit, yeah.” Tom noted, “Thanks.” He smiled dreamily, holding his gaze with Bea as his heart blossomed. He couldn’t wait to get Bea to meet his family, especially as she was the celebrity crush of his brothers and they doubted their relationship. His stomach felt butterflies, especially as she remembered something so dear to him – he’s always been a major family person. He knows she’s nervous to meet them, but that’s why her extra effort means a lot to Tom. “I would give you a kiss, but I don’t want to mess up your face mask.” He motioned to the face mask, glossing over her face. Bea responded with a dimpled smile and by closing her eyes particularly tight to motion she got the intent behind the message.
Eventually, the two boys were in sweats and the girls were placing the face masks on their faces. Tom had dragged Bea into his lap once more – making her laugh, and once she finished putting the mask on, he held her closer and let her cuddle into his shoulder.
“These feel so good what the fuck?” Tom exclaimed, “How come I never did this before?”
“Mate, yeah what?” Harrison asked, “Is this some glorious American thing?” He teased, making the two girls roll their eyes.
Bea lifted her head off of Tom’s shoulder, making Tom rub her shoulder, not exactly wanting her to leave his embrace. “They say beauty is pain, but your own beauty depends on your own choice, so choose well.” Harrison rolled his eyes whilst Tom chuckled, staring at Bea with stars in his eyes.
“What show even is this?” Harrison eventually asked, eyes widened in surprise but also enjoyment, seeing a girl cry on screen for what felt like the hundredth time as she cried about being ignored by a guy named Jared.
Tom answered, having watched sections of this season when it came out with Bea. “Re-runs of Bachelor in Paradise.”
“Literally the best show out there.” Bea teased, making Logan motion to the sky, as if praising God for blessing the world with the show. “It’s basically all the rejects of Bachelor and Bachelorette on one island, screwing each other over – both in a bad way and in another way.” Bea raised her eyebrows suggestively.
“Sounds like Love Island, but with more purpose.”
“I don’t know!” Bea screamed at Logan who’s been chanting for a couple for the last ten minutes, “Listen, it’s just – I hate speaking in that accent so I just, I don’t know! I get annoyed at her!” Bea then started doing her best southern-belle accent, which due to her cameo role in a Western television series, caused her to be pretty damn good.
Logan chuckled, doing her own best southern belle accent. “Do you think you’d ever do bachelor in paradise?” Before Bea could answer, she took a sip of her strawberry milkshake – “dude, I would so leave William for the show – like just for the show. I’ll go to the dream location, get the payout for drinking and dishing, and then go home back to William.”
“Wow, I know what I’ll be saying in my maid of honor speech now.” Logan threw a pillow at Bea.
“Okay, time to shower. I dibs first!” Logan exclaimed, standing up and running to her old room, now converted to a guest room.
Almost as if her disappearance started a machine, as soon as the bathroom door in her old room closed, Noah came out of the room, wearing just sweats and an open robe, walking down the stairs sleepily. “What are you wearing?” He asked, chuckling.
“Face masks, want one?” Bea smiled at her boyfriend, who grabbed a tissue and approached her. Grabbing one tissue, she wiped her face of some of the green junk and pressed his lips to hers.
“Not really, no.” He said, after pecking her lips.
Bea playfully pouted – trying to ignore her own disappointment at her ruined face mask, “That was my face mask.”
Noah pouted in response, leaning in to kiss her once more. “Sorry, candy girl.” He fell back onto the seat beside Bea, turning to look at the TV. “Oh, is this this nonsense show you always try to show me?”
The brunette nodded in response. “Alright, I’m gonna grab a bowl of cereal and then head out to meet Colin.”
Bea nodded, “Sounds good.”
Like machine work, Logan came prancing down the stairs as Noah walked into the kitchen. “Hi Logan!” Noah called out as he walked towards the kitchen island, oblivious to how Logan hates him. Logan, however, caught a glimpse of his chest. “Oh, so that’s why you’re dating him.” The actress rolled her eyes and threw a pillow at her.
Hours later, Bea and Logan were moisturized and in the middle of getting ready by Logan’s friend and fellow stylist (who happens to be Bea’s official stylist) gave them their outfits and doing their hair and make-up. In particular, Ines managed to get Marc Jacobs to customize a dress inspired by Raven’s iconic superhero outfit. It was a long, dark blue, evening gown with a leg slit that starts about five inches away from Bea’s underwear. The hip has a built in belt, reminiscent of the belt from Raven with gold and red jewels. There is another red jewel at the curve of the deep V-Neck allowing some coverage. The dress had no sleeves, but the back has an attack black cape. The outfit was wrapped together with strappy ankle booties. Logan, on the other hand, wore something less intricate; a black, cold shoulder, knee length cocktail dress with a ribbed waist matched with nude heels.
Currently, Bea was bent over her chair – Ines applying her concealing foundation to her shoulder to continue and hide her break up tattoos from the public, as instructed by her publicist. Bea has a clean image – part of it was being an actress everyone watched and can watch grow up on screen. They do not want to see a tattoo on her. While Ines was covering up her pinky promise tattoo with ‘promise’ in RDJ’s handwriting on the back of her shoulder, her assistant Camille sprayed temporary purple hair dye in Bea’s hair before throwing it up in a clean bun. The makeup was already done – Bea wore purple lipstick, very slight contour, brightening mascara, a subtle cat eye, and had a diamond shaped red jewel on her forehead like Raven whilst Logan had a deep red lip, an aluminum eyeshadow, and a killer cat eye. Logan had her hair up in her natural ‘black girl curls’, as she calls them, but in a contained bun. Now, all they’re waiting for is Bea’s two tattoos (the pinky promise and the ‘Coraline’ key with a bumble bee flying through the hole on her foot) to be covered and her purple bun to be finished.
“God, I don’t even know why you’re famous.” Logan always teased Bea, and this teasing is partly why she’s so down to earth. “Like cool, you won 100 academy awards, baftas, whatever award, and acted in thousands of shit, but like – wow you don’t deserve all this attention. So much hate. You got two break up tattoos and only an idiot does this.”
The actress gaped her mouth in fake offense, throwing a spare makeup wipe at her best friend. “Okay star interior designer, tell me, when did I not take you to any of them?”
Logan putted her lips out – “Perks, I guess.” She popped the ‘p’, making Ines and Bea laugh even more. “Okay, but seriously – I’m proud of you. Legit I love all the reviews of this film.” She noted, pulling out an article on the phone she’s been playing with for thirty minutes rather than continuing their tea session. “’Bea Downey is a literal superhero as she saves the DCU’”
One thing Bea never learnt? How to take a compliment without making a joke out of it. “But I’ll never be as good of a super hero as the dancing zebras somewhere in South America.” Logan smirked.
“Okay, we’re done.” Ines sighed, looking at her two works of art. “Photo and Insta story time.” Bea and Logan were littered all over Ines’s portfolio, mainly Bea through promotional tours and premieres. “Okay, okay, remember the time you took us out for coffee and ran into William and knocked his trays of coffee ove-YAS QUEEN!” What can they say – Ines is the ultimate hype queen.
Eventually, the two were entering a van. “What’s up Big Ray?” Logan called out while Bea kissed both his cheeks to greet the security guard and driver who’s been protecting her since she started, and her uncle beforehand. “Do you remember our first time riding a limousine?” Logan sighed, “now we’re stuck in a damn van, Ray!” She joked with the big man, who laughed and flipped her off.
“Next time you should be on the red carpet with me!” Bea invited, both jokingly and seriously, “Logan keeps insulting me and being ungrateful.” She teased, earning a kick to the leg from Logan.
Big Ray heard the audible thumb of heel against ankle, “Hey, don’t touch the merchandise.” He joked, making both of them chuckle.
Text from Noah: hey – colin and ray and I got here few minutes ago. Looking for my favorite and best looking accessory <3 I think your uncle is waiting for you at the gate?? Spoke to him for a bit, but he didn’t seem to move. Love you, pls get here soon.
“What the fuck!?” Logan called, “No man should call a girl his accessory.”
Bea was about to protest, until she heard even Big Ray sheesh. “Yeah, hate to break it to you and love the guy, but yeah.”
“Also love the fact he had no emojis or nicknames in your phone.” Logan observed, “Just saying.”
Bea was known to put emojis next to important names in her phone; her family had emojis they themselves picked out, Logan got the hand rock symbol, Tom and Harrison had the British flag while Tom was also named ‘tommy boi’. “I invited you because I love you, not because I want a psychoanalysis.”
“I’m here to support you, and if supporting you means that you need to hear a psychoanalysis, I’ll be glad to provide it.”
Another text popped to her phone before she could reply. Facebook Message from Harrison Osterfield (nickname: hazzy): Tuwaine, the twins, and I are tuning in!! don’t forget to remember us when ur being interviewed….we want them shout outs
Facebook Message from Harrison Osterfield (nickname: hazzy): kidding xx love you loads, miss you, and wishing you all the best xxx
She smiled, her cheeks turning pink and her heart feeling lifted; she felt blessed to have a friend like him, even if they weren’t as close as before. Typing out a quick and loving reply, the sounds of screams slowly came into earshot – even three blocks away from the premiere.
“Here we come.”
Bea opened up the window, greeting each and every one of them as best as she could, occasionally recognizing one of them from a previous conversation. Observing the heat, Bea started reaching into the pre-packed stash of water bottles (that Big Ray always packs, because he’s paranoid) and gently throwing them out the window. “Hey! Stay hydrated! Take care of yourself!”
“Ooh, I’ll pass them out, you sign them.” Logan thought of, making Bea immediately agree and take out a sharpie.
As they ran out of water, Bea opened up her iPhone and went to Instagram to make a quick story. “Hey guys!” She greeted the camera, “I’m entering the venue right now and already see so many of you. I know not everyone could make it here tonight. However, if you are here – please please please hydrate and find shade and take care of yourself. Additionally, thank you all so much for your support – if it’s attending the premiere or waiting until the last day, thank you so much for everything. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you guys.”
“Okay, you’re here.” Big Ray grinned, letting them go as now the red-carpet security will now have direct responsibility of watching them. “Have fun and don’t get into too much trouble. I’ll be in the green room if anything wrong happens. But if anything bad happens, I’m blaming red carpet security.”
Bea smiled fondly at who felt to be an honorary second father. “Thank you Ray.” She smiled, pressing a kiss on each of his cheeks once more. “Plus, I bet you it’ll be Logan who’d do anything.”
Logan flicked her best friend and the two exited the car.
Flashes and flashes of lights drowned them, but the two knew how to swim.
“Beatrice!” A paparazzi screamed, “Bea!” Another one followed. Bea did some quick poses before running over to the fan area; in particular, a fan who looked scarily familiar.
The ginger was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Philomena!” Logan separated now, wandering around the carpet until she spot sight of someone who made her rage. Yes, she loves him for Bea, yes, he’s so kind – but he broke Bea’s heart once, she’ll be a damn terrible best friend if she lets him do it again.
Running as best as she could in her nude stilletos, she was quickly next to Bea who was talking to a group of ten fans, getting to know them personally. “Hey Bea,” Logan whispered, grabbing her attention.
“Do I need to get interviewed now?” Bea quickly asked, knowing the drill of the events. “I thought I would have more time with fans – I always get-“
Logan interrupted her with two words that made all the air leave Bea’s lungs.
“Tom’s here.”
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@charismas-world
#tom holland imagines#tom holland imagine#tom holland fanfiction#tom holland#tom#holland#imagines#imagine#fanfiction#tom holland fanfic#tom holland fan fiction#fan fiction#fanfic#fan fic#oc#ocxth#oc x tom holland#thomas holland#tom holland series#series#fanfiction series#fan fiction series#fanfic series#fan fic series#tom holland stories#stories#fanfiction stories#fan fiction stories
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For that fic ask thingy... tell us about Lillies 😊😘
Hahaha, what all 15 questions? Okay, let’s do this 🙅🏻♀️
1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?
It must have been during one of my TGW rewatch sessions that I realized that after ep 1x13 they never mentioned Spellman and Diane being threatened by him again (I guess they were still experimenting with the characters and this storyline only served to show a more vulnerable side of her and to introduce us to her conflict of being pro gun control but still enjoying to carry at the same time). And the idea for the fic just popped into my head and wouldn’t let me go again, so yeah, here we are 😄
The most important thing to me was to do it in a respectful and realistic way, I never wanted to write about the topic of sexual assault for the assault itself, rather wanted to show those characters trying to wrap their lives and their relationship around it and moving on together, if that makes sense. That’s also why the bigger part of the fic takes place after the incident.
2: What scene did you first put down?
Well… I did start with the first chapter and took it from there, I find that this is the easiest way for me to write because I can build up the suspense more easily when I do it like this. The first scene that I pictured in my head before I even began the outline though was their fight in Chapter 11, that was the scene that wouldn’t let me go and eventually made me write it all.
3: What’s your favourite line of narration?
Hmm, I think it’s a tie between “Skin against skin, their embrace was the peak of intimacy in the purest and most innocent way.” in Chapter 38 and “And all those realizations, all those great things about this wonderful man who was standing there, waiting for her, waiting to agree to spend the rest of his life with her and the huge declaration of love he had just wordlessly told her with the way he was looking at her and the fact that she was finally able to hold that gaze, they shot hot tears into her eyes.” from the wedding chapter. That first one really reflected the deep level of trust between them, even though she wasn’t ready to sleep with him again, and I liked the contradiction in the term peak of intimacy. And the latter, I don’t know. It summed up their journey in this story, how he helped her overcome those insecurities, how he gained her trust over the course of this and, tbh, I also just really liked the image of her, walking down the aisle to him…
4: What’s your favourite line of dialogue?
Okay, there are certain parts of dialogue that I liked, but for stand-alone lines it would either be “You’re not a victim, Diane. You are a survivor.” (Chapter 28) or “Diane, you never needed anyone to save you. […] But I’m glad you let me help you save yourself. Because I love you.” (46, proposal chapter) (side note: this line was one I wrote towards on from a very early chapter. I thought about making it the last line for quite a while, thought about putting it in his vows but then settled on this), both said by Kurt because I needed him to believe in her strength at a time in which she couldn’t do that for herself. I like the empowerment of her independence in those lines. They really sum up how I wished to portray a woman who was forced to go through something like this. Like a survivor instead of a victim and as someone who didn’t need a knight in shining armour to save her from the pain. That was really important to me.
5: What part was the hardest to write?
God, so many 😂 The nightmares and their aftermath were very, VERY difficult though. Most of Kurt’s and Will’s dialogue with Diane in the greater part of this were incredibly difficult because I remember just sitting in front of the screen and thinking, What the hell are they supposed to say? I realized how intuitively you fall into the clichées of ‘How are you?’s or ‘If there’s anything I can do…’s and that sucks. Because it’s obvious that they’re not good. And it’s obvious that someone like Diane would never reach out for help if they don’t just give it to her without another word of questioning, as they end up doing. So, yeah. That was hard. But I wanted to do it right, so I guess it was at least worth it 😅 at least I hope so.
6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?
One, that it was my first. I had almost 40 chapters of it written when I began to post it because this was all new territory for me, fanfiction, this particular fandom and their response to new writers, general perception of a difficult topic like rape… And then, of course, my own response to writing about it. I mean, as a writer, you really don’t just need to dive into those characters’ heads but also into your own to put at least a few emotions into it. I didn’t know if this was going to bring me down really bad, if I would cry during the process (fun fact: I did. Three times, I think) and if I could even go through with it and finish it at all. I also went through a lot of major life changes when I started to write this and I think that not only my writing changed a lot over the cause of it, but I as a person did, too. It’s very close to my heart. I associate certain chapters with the states that I was in when I wrote or edited them and that makes it pretty special 💕
7: Where did the title come from?
Okay, I really don’t know how to answer that. I’m really, really bad at coming up with titles. Actually, I think that this didn’t have a real title up until I started posting it because then I had to name it somehow. I’d referenced both the infamous white calla lilies and the smell of gunpowder a lot already at that point and I kinda just thought that they were sweet symbols for the two of them 🤷🏻♀️ I played around with several different titles and when this came out of nowhere, it felt right. It made sense because it was like a theme, threading through the story, and it sounded melodic and I honestly was just glad that I didn’t have to name it something too long and too ridiculous, like I did now with most of my other fics 😶
8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of this?
Difficult question. I think that (sadly), most women have had to deal with sexual assault at some point in their lives. I saw my friends and family reacting to my stories in similar ways Kurt does in the fic.
On a lighter note, a guy I really loved inspired lots of the happier parts in it. And my best friend, my own, female Will Gardner, she’s in a lot of it, too 💕
9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?
Only in my head. Regarding whether or not I would have Kurt shooting Spellman, if I would kill Spellman off at all, if they should get married in the end, if I would write about Diane handling a rape case when she’s better (found the middle ground on that one in the epilogue, but this could have been an entire storyline) and so on. But the version I uploaded is the only one I wrote, though I did consider writing a sequel for it until I decided that the two of them had suffered enough in this alternate universe, so I created a new one around my idea and Everything’s gonna be alright was born.
10: Why did you choose this paring for this particular story?
Okay, first of all, I’d say that I chose this story for the pairing and not the other way around, and yes, I think there’s a huge difference in that.
I wanted to unravel them. They’re such amazingly complex characters, both incredibly proud and I really wanted to make them vulnerable (as I’m typing this, I’m very aware of that this makes me sound like a freaking psychopath). And the no. 1 thing, apart from politics, that always drove Kurt and Diane to each other was the (sexual) attraction between them. And while it is of course another layer of the depth of their relationship, another level of their bond, I wanted to explore the characters in a state where that bond was no easy way out. Two people that tend to choose physical attraction over having to deal with their emotions, who choose make-up sex over talking through their problems (sans season 3 of TGF because they’re perfect now), I wanted to explore what would happen if they couldn’t do that anymore, put them in a situation in which they had to confront major issues in another, healthier way.
11: What do you like best about this fic?
Oh God.
I tried to make it emotionally deep and respectful regarding the heavy topic. I tried not to rob Diane of her independence, rather wanted her to find additional strength in Kurt instead of completely making her depend on him. I wanted her to work this out in realistic timing and I didn’t want to rush their way back to physical intimacy. I wanted him to react to her pain and her ways around it, find his own mechanisms to deal with those and to the pace she set with it in the right way. And I don’t know if I did all that, but I’d like to hope so.
And I really like Chapter 38, because I think it underlined a lot of that.
And I ended up really liking the title of the fic.
12: What do you like least about this fic?
Hah, definitely the first few chapters. I mean, the characterisation was alright I guess, but my writing was just awful. Like, I never love my writing but sometimes it’s exceptionally bad, as it was in those first few chapters. Sometimes I scroll through them and want to rewrite it all, but it’s part of the journey and that’s why I don’t do it.
13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?
I always listen to music when I write and the first thing that comes to mind here is Debussy’s Clair de Lune. And not just Clair de Lune, no, I mean the YouTube extended version that keeps on going for an hour. Over and over again. That’s why I referenced it in the proposal chapter, it really deserved to be mentioned at that point.
I also listened a lot to Lana del Rey and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds during Chapters, I dunno, ten to thirty, I guess, for the angsty mood (honourable mentions: Tomorrow never came, Young and Beautiful, Art Deco and Blue Jeans; Into my Arms, Henry Lee and Where the Wild Roses Grow (ironic, I know)) and the song Firefighter by Cigarettes after Sex.
And for the happier Chapters after that lots of Cigarettes after Sex and Beach House (literally cannot put what their music does to me into words. It’s art, almost magical, really) (honourable mentions: Apocalypse (please do yourselves a favour and listen to this song), Sweet and Sunsetz; Myth, Space Song and On the Sea (over and over again during the epilogue)), Florence and The Machine AND Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Lots of great music.
14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from this fic?
Huh. Well, it might sound bitchy or self-absorbed, but I mostly just write what I want to write. I want to study characters that I love and I want to write in a way that might hopefully touch people on any level, whether it’s humour or angst, I kinda just like the idea of writing words that make people feel things.
But if anyone’s learned something regarding the subject and their views about it, I’m more than happy and thrilled about that, though I wouldn’t put the praise for that on myself but rather on the ones who learned, you know? ‘Cause it’s one thing to write, it’s another thing to learn from reading. That requires more effort on the readers part IMO. I just can’t say that it was my intention to write something that holds major life lessons or revelations, I really just wanted to write and reach people emotionally by doing that and to maybe give them something they would enjoy by doing something that I enjoy.
15: What did you learn from writing this fic?
That love doesn’t solve all issues solely by itself and that it’s only enough if every involved party works to let love stay a beautiful thing instead of letting it grow to become something painful.
I learned a lot about sexual assault and how it’s handled in the social system when I did my research.
I already knew that if bad things happen to you, they still don’t need to define you if you don’t let them, but I learned that it’s not a bad thing if they shape you in some ways.
And I learned how much I missed writing until I did it again for this fic. And I learned that, oddly, my writing is able to touch some people. And even though I don’t want other people’s feedback to be my motivation when I write, I learned how wonderful it is to have strangers reaching out to you when they take joy from something you love to do.
—–
This is long, but yeah. Thanks for the questions, honey, this was very nice ❤ I feel all warm inside now, ew, feelings, ugh.
#fanfiction#fanfic#ask#can i tag mchart?#i'll just do it#mchart#thanks for the ask!#i loved this#lilies and gunpowder
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Farewell NYC
So we are here in this moment in time.
I am heartbroken to be leaving the city, but it is what it is and I know I have a lot more work ahead of me. It is time to reset, reflect and reevaluate the trajection, the path and review what worked. and didnt work.
I'm sad because, like always I TOOK SO MUCH FOR GRANTED! It's not til you leave a place that you realize how many people you've connected with, how lucky you are to find the work that you have, and to be able to chase your dreams everyday. Most adults gave up on that a long time ago and adjusted to "settle down life".
I'm sad because I wanna finish teaching the kids and studios I've connected to. I'm sad because I didnt get to have a drink one last time with everybody. And to be honest, goodbyes just suck ass.
I'm so lucky to have worked in some of the most respected organizations, that support and respect me and continue to invest in me and my growth as an artist.
Im sad because I finally found someone that put up with my shit and takes it calmly and even though we have our differences, he listens and does his best to get me, but also challenge me in my thinking. I could let go and trust he wasnt sleeping around with all the girls in the scene. Maturity isnt anything to do with age, but how much shit life has thrown at you and how youve managed to handle it.
Im sad I never performed at Carnival or set a piece at Carnival. I never got a regular teaching slot at the big 3. I got to sub though. I fucked up some opportunities by not living into my biggest self and playing small. I didnt challenge myself everyday. I didnt set SMART goals. I didnt lose weight. I didnt get booked by a big name agency. I didnt practice. I didnt session as much as I could have. I didnt enter battles.
I did get to be in the room and work with people I really respected. I got to live an artist life on my terms. I got to pick and choose what I did day to day. I got to be totally selfish and create my own little world. I got to explore all the random avenues of creativity, underground and major stage.
Being surrounded by so much talent and greatness all the time is a double edged sword...of constant inspiration and next level challenges, and constant "Im not good enough" and depression. It's so very important to not get too caught up in the rat race but to focus on your own goal and your own progression. That quote or meme about being your own competition is absolutely what needs to be focused on.
Also to structure your life a bit better. Understand the seasons that an artists year goes through and prepare and plan accordingly. Write down dates to present and work backwards.
You will nneed to set yourself up with a better chunk of money to "adult" properly. Credit ratings, tax, rent deposits, equipmemt, promotional content, business cards, business accounts. Think bigger and do bigger. You have all the skills already. Why are you so scared, why are you being lazy, thats not usually you at All!
Love the ones youre with. You dont know when the next time will be so just take each moment as it is because that's all you may have.
TREAT EVERY JOB AS THE FIRST AND THE LAST.
GET PREPARED in your downtime. Learn a new skill each year. Dont stop growing.
Find boutique agencies that cater to your look and style specifically.
Find a signature look & style.
Stop asking when - Say I CAN AND I WILL.
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New Year’s Gift
Characters: Yoongi X You
Genre: Fluff, Suggestive(?)
Word Count: 1246
Song of the Day: GOT7 - See the Light
A/N: Ever wondered why Admin Ham was kinda quiet these past few days? That’s because I got myself busy writing this overdued half-sin so I hope you guys will like it as much as I did writing it., wanted to stretch this one out a little more and turn it into a full-scale smut but i don’t think i can take that much nosebleeding in a day. based on this prompt i found @fyotpprompts #blessminyoongi2k17
Being a writer, to you, meant that days are mostly spent inside your humble abode rather than outside of it; while being a famous photographer, to Yoongi, meant that all those hip n’ happening new year parties during this time of the year will steal himself busy from you, but that wasn’t the case this holiday season, specifically for your boyfriend.
It was one of his rare nights off in which he decided instead of working, it’ll be better to spend the remnants of the year at your place where his favourite vanilla-scented candles are almost-constantly lit, your place where he could obviously stare at you adorably wandering around different parts of the apartment, chasing after the good omens in order to maintain the inspirational flow; Yoongi really adored that side of you.
Yet tonight, you were lacking a reference. What exactly, that even you wouldn’t know, but you always had references that’d kickstart your writings; be it a word from the dictionary, a song playing on the radio, the color of the sky, or even B-cuts from Yoongi’s DSLR. You mostly came to conclusion that you were just lazy for the night, so you got off your writing desk and went out of your room, suddenly yearning for the company of your photographer man as you lethargically approached your living space.
And there he was, leaning against the arm rest of your sofa with his legs up in a cross. Min Yoongi, in his reading glasses, lips a focused pout onto reading the book within his hands, one of your books as a matter of fact, that he didn’t even notice you walking towards the sofa until you landed beside him and snuggled yourself into a warm hug with the man currently in complete peace, unquestionably disrupting whatever he was doing, not that he’s complaining though.
“And here I thought, you were going to actually make me spend the whole night here finishing this book; not saying that it’s boring, but I’d rather spend that time with the author of it.” Yoongi cooed, putting the book and his glasses down by the coffee table before hugging you back into a snugglier embrace. “Why the sudden break, though?”
“I’ve been writing the whole day, thought I should call it a night and cuddle my boyfriend for the rest of the year instead.”
“Man, you writers and your choice of words.” You lightly chuckled at the compliment as Yoongi gifted you with a gentle peck by your temple, keeping his gaze locked down towards you right after as you propped your head up upon his chest.
“I just realized this is our first hug in a while after you got back from that months long expo thingy.. I’m glad you took tonight off instead of working; I really missed you.” Your confession a gentle touch to his hearing as you swiped his bangs up to reveal more of his face that you’ve been longing for the past few months.
Yoongi meekly blinked at you before his pair of cat eyes were slowly filled with mischievous sparks the longer he had stayed silent; face still a calm manner, but now with a noticeable hidden agenda buried within as he added to your statement, “That would also mean it’d been a while since we last kissed, right?”
This opportunist little smart ass, a thought flashed; a playful smile arose your features as you attempted a game of hide n’ seek but before you could even get off his body and run away, Yoongi was quick to pull you back onto him as he went straight for your giggly lips, letting you straddle him while he gently cupped your face and lead the kiss away.
You allowed yourself to fall limp upon landing on top of Yoongi, letting your body to fully lean against his torso; not even your hands were making any effort to roam restricted areas of your desires, soul much too drunk on his cherry lips before your boyfriend slowly parted ways shortly after, his face but a few inches away still from your own as he groaned.
“You’re really beautiful from up close like this, baby.” Yoongi hummed against your cheek, eyes already heavy with lust, turning you into a flustered mess with his light flattery paired with his ethereal light brown eyes staring intensely right back at your own.
Softly biting onto your lower lip, Yoongi tugged desperate permission as you obediently obliged and allowed access. Tongue against tongue, lip upon lip, you felt like blistering hot sand just melting deep into Yoongi’s mold. Both of you went on with your fervent french-kissing through half-lidded eyes, there was just something really sultry about looking down to a pair of fucked-out eyes that’d send tingling aftershocks down to your core.
You never got yourself involved with Yoongi in a make-out session lasting this long before; the both of you usually moved through the phases way faster than this, but you kind of liked how slow pace Yoongi was going that night with him finally deciding to break away from the kiss before latching his blessed tongue onto your everywhere else but your lips, giving in to your favored past time move.
“Y-Yoo.. ” You gasped for air, not managing to form even the first half of his name; your whole existence high on the rush of hormones as your boyfriend continued spreading frustratingly slow wet kisses along your jawline.
“Stay still, baby.”
Yoongi growled against your skin, the low vibrations of his timbre sending immediate chills straight to your head; one arm locked around your waist to prevent you from running away while the other rested at the back of your neck, pulling you even closer to him. Landing playful kitten licks right at the weak spot behind your ears, you harshly sighed at the bold move as you balled up the hem of his sweatshirt and applied a gentle tug, wanting to see even more of him now that your patience was running thin the longer the night had grown but apparently Yoongi was set on being a tease; curse you, Min Yoongi, why did you have to be so goddamn good at this, you internally whined.
He had begun biting and sucking purple tulips onto your neck not long after the trails of wet kisses before it; the sensation of his markings felt so sinfully good, it was fair to say as if literal fireworks were exploding into the night sky, along with that familiar sound of it dispersing back into the ground registering quite clearly into your senses. Hallucinations never felt that real before.
“Am I lacking sleep or am I actually hearing fireworks?”
“Probably your lack of sl--” Yoongi finally paused his little devouring session, mildly surprised that he could hear the said fireworks as well. A quick glance at you with swollen lips, a quick glance towards the balcony, and a last quick glance towards the wall clock had him finally smirking back at you. “Happy new year, baby.”
“Did we just missed the countdown and accidentally made out like nobody’s business thirty minutes into new year?”
“Made?” Ignoring the fact that the both of you did miss the grand countdown, Yoongi was more irked by your choice of words once again and was lightning speed on his feet to carry you up bridal style as he head for your bedroom with haste. “I’m not done with you yet, girl.”
We’re accepting scenarios, imagines, reactions, and ship requests. Do check out our guidelines for more info and drop by our ask with your request!
#scenario#scenarios#bts scenarios#bangtan scenarios#bts#bangtan boys#yoongi#suga#yoongi fluff#yoongi scenarios#bts fluff#bangtan fluff#kpop#suga scenarios#suga fluff
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CHIODOS
It’s nearly impossible to expound on the “process” of writing without coming across like a self-important shithead. I only mention this because I’m about to attempt to do the former without doing the latter. Though I’ve maybe already hamstrung myself by referring to the act of pressing buttons on a laptop as a “process”—and I certainly haven’t helped my case by putting quotation marks around “process,” nor by using the word “expound.” Come to think of it, that “nor” is also ringing awfully pompous to me, even if in a technical sense “nor” was the grammatically correct word to use there... And there I go informing you what’s “grammatically correct,” which makes me sound like a total asshole.
Nevertheless, making this text be a thing is indeed contingent on a sequence of mental formulation and ritualistic preparation and elementary discipline, and when you put all of those things together, the noun which most accurately describes the result is indeed “process” (I consulted my thesaurus for a less ostentatious term, but only an officious wanker would describe writing as a “procedure”).
The first aspect is probably self-explanatory—“mental formulation” is basically just a douche-y way of saying “thinking about stuff.” Naturally, I have to develop an idea in my mind that I think is worth putting into words before I, you know, put it into words. Despite the schizophrenic tangents these pieces often swerve into, I assure you a significant amount of forethought goes into what they should ostensibly be about before a single letter is typed. So no matter how insensible the missives in Life on a Shelf may seem at times, I assure you that all of them are hatched from an embryonic guiding vision which was subjected to vigorous cerebral computation before I expelled it onto the page. Or something.
My “ritualistic preparation” these days involves brewing a pot of coffee while my laptop boots up, then stepping out onto my balcony to smoke a cigarette. I assume other writers have their own routines (although I can’t fathom how anybody gets anything done without coffee and cigarettes). As for me, a Camel Blue and five minutes of pensive silence are the ideal trappings to activate the creative headspace I need to be in to get down to business, and a glug of Pacific Northwest Blend with plenty of creamer supplies a constructive intermission whenever I need to gather my thoughts before finishing a sentence… like I just did after I typed those ellipses.
These elements are easily managed—I think about stuff all the time, and I’ve been known to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee even when I’m not writing. In fact, “elementary discipline” is the sole truly daunting component of the “process” (“pretentious fucking quotation marks again”). Though you might imagine the most challenging aspect of being a writer is generating quality material, this is absolutely not the case. Have you ever browsed the Romance section at a bookstore? Next time you do, select any novel with a bare-chested cowboy or highlander on the cover and read the synopsis on the back; you will promptly ascertain that something as otiose as quality never factored into that author’s process. Admittedly, I’ve never written a Romance novel, but I’ve read enough of them to deduce their methodology: devise a serviceable plot which strikes the delicate balance of sappy and rapey that is essential to the genre, concoct a couple names like Liam O’Shaughnessey and Analisa Winthrope, then start cranking out pages. Whether or not the finished product turns out any good is basically irrelevant; it got written. And ultimately, that’s all that matters.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue, my friends: the only difficult thing about writing… is actually writing. As in, sitting down and fucking doing it. Whether you have ideas or not. Whether you have time or not. Whether you even want to or not.
I am battling against all of those things at present. I don’t have any concrete concept of where this piece should go, despite having already listened to the trio of Chiodos discs I own two times each. I suppose I do technically have time because I’m not at work and I’m not asleep—however, it is currently 2:49 a.m., so I’m only a couple hours away from officially being up Stupidly Late. And if I’m being totally honest, I don’t particularly feel like writing this right now. Actually, I haven’t much felt like writing anything lately.
Popular legend asserts that Jack Kerouac authored On the Road in a single marathon, chemical-fueled session. That particular work has of course accumulated a mythic significance, and the integral way its unorthodox genesis factors into the iconography of The Beat Generation’s magnum opus cannot be overstated—there’s just something irresistibly romantic about the notion of a writer so driven to immortalize his masterpiece that he hammered away at it non-stop until he purged the whole thing out of his head and onto the page. On the Road’s putative origin story is such a renowned facet of its existence, it hardly matters anymore that the accepted account of Kerouac composing the novel in one fever-dream sitting is pure hyperbole. It actually took him three full weeks to type the thing, and he was only able to do it that quickly because he had been sketching out the manuscript in his journals for several months beforehand. I’m not pointing this out to belittle the impact of Kerouac’s most revered literary contribution—although I personally found On the Road prodigiously underwhelming when I finally read it, I still concede that crafting an entire novel in three weeks is a duly impressive feat. Even so, for our purposes here, I would like it known that the quixotic notion of writers routinely hunkering down and hammering out text in a frenetic slit-jugular gush is absolute bullshit.
The truth is this: writing is almost never borne from lightning-in-a-bottle surges of inspiration. The vast majority of prose is instead borne from endless, maddening hours spent agonizing over a single word. An entire afternoon spent obsessing over one sentence that will inevitably undergo further alteration when you re-read it the next afternoon and realize it’s still not sitting quite right. Days and nights and months and years whose elapses become measured in pages—days and nights and months and years spent toiling in seclusion. Writing is lonely, punishing work that yields limitless frustration and only sporadic satisfaction. It is the most bi-polar of artistic expressions, a drug that poisons as often as it cures, and you never know which trip you’re in store for from one fix to the next. To be a writer is to give your heart to a mistress who demands steadfast devotion while she repeatedly punches you in the face, yet you keep coming back for more because every now and then she gives you a really awesome kiss instead. Asked what advice they would give to aspiring wordsmiths who wanted to know the secret to living a happy life as a writer, one prominent author is said to have remarked: “Don’t be a writer.” This quote is possibly apocryphal, but when I heard it, I believe it was attributed to Sylvia Plath—or maybe I just assume Sylvia Plath said it because she ended her life by sticking her head into her fucking oven. And, frankly, I don’t think she chose an entirely unreasonable course of action. Because, goddamn, this shit really hurts sometimes.
I am not Jack Kerouac. I did not shape my debut novel in one sitting, or even in three weeks. It took me five grueling years. Once I garnered the interest of an agent, I spent another several months editing my tome to the more marketable length she advised me to trim it to, then spent an additional several months patiently waiting while she shopped it. It was a protracted and sometimes excruciating interval. But one of the things that kept me afloat while I was laboring on this intensive undertaking was my presumption that its consummation was bound to feel like the afterglow of an epic make-out session.
Regrettably, it has not.
Since I finished the book, I have instead found myself in the grip of an acute postpartum depression. I do not feel triumphant, I feel lethargic and uninspired. This is a turn of events I did not foresee—throughout the half-decade I spent striving to complete that project, in the back of my mind I was simultaneously making grand plans to commence a new endeavor, and to subsequently start churning out huge chunks of pages on this one (or at least finish the goddamn letter “C”). And now, at last, for the past few months I have had several hours a day to fill with whatever artistic activities I choose… but I haven’t particularly desired to spend any of those hours doing anything artistic (the most significant feat I’ve been able to muster thus far is re-watching the first three seasons of Miami Vice).
I think I know what has instigated this listlessness. While I was working on the novel, my exclusive goal was its completion; the success or failure of that mission rested solely in my hands. However, my present goal is considerably loftier: I want the thing to get released so I can begin the career I’ve been chasing for two decades… and this is something I have absolutely no jurisdiction over. The outcome of that mission will be decreed by the prospective publishers who will determine the course of the rest of my life, faceless strangers who have the capacity to shatter all of my dreams simply by emailing the word “pass” to my agent.
Which many, many, many have already done.
I am incredibly grateful to be as far along on the course as I am. I am incredibly grateful that a representative at the most prestigious literary agency in the world read something I wrote and found enough merit in it to decide, “this guy doesn’t suck.” I am prouder of the novel I produced than I have been of anything I’ve ever created, and there are passages in it that are so good I can hardly believe I’m the one who wrote them. The manuscript represents an impeccable embodiment of the vision I had when I first sat down and started plucking away at it all those years ago, blissfully unaware of the weight and scope of the expedition I was about to embark on because it was a journey I had never taken before. I bumbled my way through the early chapters as I struggled to gain purchase on the story I wanted to tell, I gradually got to know my characters, and along the way I fell in love with some and grew to despise others, just as I hoped my eventual readers would. Writing the book was a revelatory experience—I became intimately acquainted not only with my craft, but also with the vastness of my passion for it. I drew upon reserves of endurance I did not even know I possessed, consuming innumerable days grinding on the text for six hours straight, breaking away only to go work an eight-hour restaurant shift, then coming home and writing some more until the sun came up before finally collapsing into my bed to sleep for five hours so I could wake up and do the exact same thing again the next day. It took literal and figurative years off my life, but I wrote a novel. And even better, when it was finished, I realized I had somehow written one that I think is pretty goddamn fantastic.
But I’m not basking in victory at the moment—I’m fucking terrified. Because now, after dozens of rejections, there is an increasingly strong chance that no one will ever read my pretty goddamn fantastic novel and this aspiration I have been working toward my entire life will culminate in failure.
I understand that every successful writer surely weathered numerous rebuffs before someone believed in their work enough to green-light their publishing career. My cognizance of this should probably provide me some measure of solace, perhaps assure me that I am in good company and merely going through another step of the “process.”
Except that’s not how I feel right now at all. Right now, I feel like I did the best I could, but the best I can do simply isn’t good enough.
And since we’re putting it all on the table here, I can freely admit that some of my melancholy stems from all of this happening while I’m counting down the final weeks of my thirties. I’ve never placed much significance on age-related milestones—sure, I was depressed when I turned 30, but that was mostly because I was still recovering from a recent break-up; I was also depressed when I turned 35, but that was mostly because I started that birthday eating alone at a Denny’s at two in the morning, which is an inherently depressing way to kick off your birthday irrespective of the year. I realize that being 40 is roughly as inconsequential as being 39 in the scheme of things. Only, it’s kind of fucking not.
It’s not so much the age itself that unsettles me—most of the time, I still conduct myself like an 18 year-old with an advanced record collection and an excessive proportion of grey in his beard; I’ve even grown out my belly and my hair again, so whenever I put on a Slayer shirt I don’t look a whole lot different than I did when I was actually 18. No, the aspect of turning 40 that I find discomfiting is purely internal: I can’t help myself from holding the general assumption that someone who has been on this planet for 40 years should probably have their shit together. And I know I do not. In almost every conceivable realm of my existence, I am behind the curve of innate anthropological evolution: I have not married or procreated, my current vocation is in an industry where even my superiors are at least a decade younger than me, and I still regularly stay up until 5 a.m. eating Doritos while I binge-view Friday The 13th films (in case you’re thinking of investing some time in the franchise, be cautioned that Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is not merely the worst entry in the series by a massive margin, it is an absolutely unredeemable piece of shit; I’ve only watched that one like 20 times).
When you’re young, 40 seems inconceivably ancient. And no matter how intimately you stay in touch with the edition of yourself who thought that way, sometimes 40 seems inconceivably ancient when you’re 39, too. That clichéd adage “you’re only as old as you feel” delivers no comfort whatsoever on the nights you come home at three in the morning after trudging through nine hours of the food-service work you’ve been slogging in the trenches of for ten years, when you’re depleted and sore and desperately wishing you had some other skillset to realistically earn a decent living, and you evaluate your throbbing feet and your aching back and your weary brain and conclude that if you truly are as old as you feel, then you might have accidentally blinked and turned 65 during your shift. I’m uncertain if I’m old enough to accurately classify myself as old, but I am certainly too old to accurately classify myself as young, and I am old enough to be painfully aware of this.
Consequently, I’m probably also too old to be listening to Chiodos, an archetypal emo ensemble whose musical ethos predominantly evokes a more symphonic incarnation of My Chemical Romance, with intermittent screamy-growly vocals and plenty of requisitely-unwieldy song titles like “I Didn’t Say I Was Powerful, I Said I Was A Wizard”. It’s unlikely I will ever see Chiodos live since they split up in 2016, though I can presume with minimal imprecision that if I did go to one of their shows I would be older than every other person there. Tellingly, the group’s eldest member was only 30 when they disbanded, which suggests that even the dudes who actually played in Chiodos deemed their music unsuitable for people my age.
Despite my cultural incompatibility, I do like Chiodos, and I think a few of their tunes may even merit the designation of awesome. I don’t know if this justifies owning three of their records—the only one I spin with any regularity is 2014’s Devil, mostly for the scorching cut “Ole Fishlips Is Dead Now”, a balls-out metal opus whose bridge section is as thrillingly brutal as its title is silly. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things about the band’s sonic and imagistic aesthetic that strike me as silly, so I’m not sure I entirely understand why I like them. Further, I’m not sure I’m even supposed to like them. In a very real sense, Chiodos embodies the epoch when I officially stopped being part of the demographic that music for young people is aimed at: their debut record—2005’s All’s Well That Ends Well—was released the summer after I graduated from college to presumably take my first steps into proper adulthood (although, I spent most of that summer smoking pot and playing Tekken with my then-girlfriend from two in the afternoon until sunrise, which may not have necessarily qualified as “adulting”).
As such, my initial awareness of Chiodos was primarily defined by my not being aware of them at all. They were exactly the sort of outfit that headlined the Vans Warped Tour the very first year a line-up for that festival was announced which forced me to concede I hadn’t heard of any of the bands performing at an event I had once attended religiously. I don’t think I even registered this sea-change at the time (I think I mostly just grumbled, “dude, the Warped Tour line-up sucks this year”). Yet as Chiodos and I continued advancing on our separate paths, I gradually became conscious that my alt-rock era had officially come to an unceremonious end and a legion of skinny-jean-and-eye-liner-wearing dudes with injudicious haircuts and a multiplicity of neck tattoos had seized the mantle. Since this new crop of youth-medium-t-shirt bands—Falling In Reverse, Sleeping With Sirens, Pierce The Veil, et al—looked so ridiculous to me, I naturally assumed they also sounded ridiculous; upon further inspection, many of these bands do, indubitably, sound ridiculous. However, somewhere along the way, I began to accept an uncomfortable truth: my inability to wholeheartedly appreciate the music of the alt-young is more my fault than the bands’.
It would be extremely narrow-minded of me to sum up what we’ll call the emo scene—for lack of a better term—as “loud songs about girls” (especially since the inclusion of pretty songs about girls between the loud songs about girls is precisely the reason so many girls like the bands in this genus). Nonetheless, on a fundamental level, the vast majority of the music in that canon is indeed characterized by myopic lyrical musings about assorted stages of the boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl paradigm. Even the heaviest track in the Chiodos catalog (the afore-mentioned “Ole Fishlips”) features a chorus that begins with the lines: “I want to forget you / You’ve broken everything I love, took all my light and turned it into dusk.” Granted, that’s a damn solid stanza, but it’s not one I can presently relate to. Those words don’t evoke anything in my current existence—the last time someone took all my light and turned it into dusk was a full five years ago; I can barely remember what that felt like now, let alone what being in love to begin with felt like. As much as I appreciate some of the music crafted by acts of Chiodos’ ilk on a purely “that rocks” level, it simply doesn’t resonate with me on an emotional level. The most pressing concerns in my world aren’t centered around whether any of my foxy co-workers like-me-like-me or not; I’m a lot more worried about how I’m going to pay my rent in a few years when my body is too broken down for me to be their co-worker anymore.
Which brings about a more imperative revelation that is just now dawning on me: there isn’t a whole lot of modern rock I can relate to. People of my advanced age are ostensibly supposed to listen to bands like Coldplay, whose music has never spoken to me at all—near as I can tell, most of their songs are either about how exhilarating it feels to discover a great new organic juice bistro or the simple pleasure of trying on an Abercrombie & Fitch v-neck that fits you just right. There aren’t too many rock frontmen writing tunes about wrestling with an uncertain future while the mounting impediments of middle age conspire to diminish their tenacity. Maybe that’s why most of the new records I get excited about are still by death metal bands, whose tunes eschew any musings on situational angst or starry-eyed ardor in favor of graphic elucidations of the various phases of the deceasing process (being violently killed, decomposition, the ensuing sexual defilement of one’s corpse, etc.). Perhaps it’s depressing that I think about dying a lot more frequently than I think about girls these days, yet the fact remains that my particular juncture of the mortal cycle is sorely underrepresented in the contemporary rock register. Aerosmith’s “Dream On” was written way back in 1973; what the fuck have you done for me lately?
When I hear a twenty-something vocalist plaintively bemoaning insecurity about his place in the world, it doesn’t elicit a poignant response from me anymore—now I just sort of meh-shrug because I know he has plenty of time to figure his shit out (and, besides, I find it difficult to sympathize with the amorous woes of any dude with flawless cheekbones who belts out those songs every night to a sea of female fans so devoted to him that they’d willingly gouge out the eyes of the person standing next to them if he told them they could touch his penis afterwards). An audience of that singer’s peers is wholly in synch with that species of nebulous life anxieties, so they are undoubtedly buoyed to ascertain that a musician they esteem is going through the same trials as them. But I am no longer in that audience, no longer a peer. I can hardly blame any of those bands or their fans for my being a man staring down his 40’s; they didn’t do that to me, time did. Regardless, I have become increasingly incapable of forging a sincere connection with them, which makes it tough for me to take them seriously since they ply their trade via an art-form that is the most singular connective tissue of my being.
I’m of course minimizing for humorous and dramatic effect. There are plenty of more recent outfits whose work has invigorated me over these last few years (if you want me to name names, I’ll happily toss out Modern Baseball, White Lung, Pity Sex, TV Ghost, Moon King, Thee Oh Sees, and Warpaint, among others). Still, I am perpetually reminded that as I segue into my future, most of the truly significant musical figures in my life are destined to remain those who came into my life in my past—especially when I consider that out of the six upcoming concerts I currently have tickets for, not one of the bands I’m going to see was formed in this century.
Chiodos was a very good band. Perhaps even a great one. They authored some creative, impressively-technical music that was executed by a cast of clearly skilled players. Devil is a consistently killer record from start to finish. Judging by how many of their stylistic flourishes I’ve noted in the work of several similar outfits that arrived in their wake, Chiodos is probably terribly important to a large number of people a generation removed from me. Nonetheless, as much as I enjoy a lot of their tunes, Chiodos is just not terribly important to me—I am writing about them here simply because they are the next band in my library.
What is important to me, however, is overcoming this dismal miasma that has settled over me. I have no desire to spend my 40’s the same way I spent most of my 30’s: ever-crawling dejectedly onward, all the while recognizing my destiny like a beacon on the distant horizon and wondering when I will reach it, inexorably waiting for the life I want to live to finally begin. After facing numerous setbacks—the worst being a deal that was actually on paper awaiting signatures, one that my agent was forced to pass on to protect me because of an untenable small-print proviso which ceded absolute ownership of my work to the publisher—the status of my authorial career is thus: my best option now is to craft another novel and restart the process from scratch. The challenge this poses is fresh and staggering: now I know precisely how difficult it is to write a novel, how long it takes, how much of myself will be devoured along the way. And I will have to plunge into this undertaking without any assurance that eventual success will ensue, since it did not the first time.
Yet if I have any prayer of meeting that challenge, first I have to dissipate this fog that has enveloped me. I cannot complete the task until I begin it in earnest. So maybe, just maybe, if I can coax myself to finish an essay about a band that doesn’t mean anything to me, I’ll be able to coax myself back to pursuing the desire that means everything to me.
It’s time for me to sit down again. And fucking do it. Whether I have ideas or not. Whether I have time or not. Whether I even want to or not. Like chaste Analisa Winthrope—who initially resists the brutish advances of that notorious rogue Liam O’Shaughnessey, until she beholds the throbbing nucleus of manhood beneath his kilt and finally yields to the humid yearning in her loins—I must succumb to my passion.
Because writing isn’t something I do. It’s what I am. Sure, those punches in the face are never pleasant. But, man, when I get those kisses instead…
This probably isn’t the best installment of Life on a Shelf I’ve ever composed. It might not even be a particularly strong one.
But that’s basically irrelevant. It got written.
And right now, ultimately, that’s all that matters.
April 5, 2018
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#Triatus: it’s been a while...
Not only did I take an 8+ month triatus from racing, but evidently from writing about it, too! This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been training or busy. In fact, quite a few things have happened since my last 2016 triathlon:
Half marathon PR (:05 is :05, baby!)
Marathon PR (five whole minutes!)
some fun albeit wet winter riding and climbing, so rainy here in Cali this winter!
A winter training weekend with my new racing team for 2017, Team Freeplay, such as amazing group of ladies!
a fun and festive “hens weekend” in Palm Springs
a half marathon non-PR but it was my third fastest time on arguably the toughest course I’ve raced and a 2nd OA finish
a WEDDING! Mine :) it was incredible and perfect
Leading up to the nuptials, I was doing a pretty solid volume of training, semi-structured even. I did have a bit of wedding hangover from the lack of structure and routine the week of and even a bit immediately following, but within a week or so was back at it, aided by the awesome performances of so many friends at 70.3 Florida. Always so inspiring to watch people race, and it helps get me back in the mindset.
I was most worried about coming back on the bike given the run training that I’d done in preparation for the half marathon. Perhaps some of my best yet. I had been riding with the guys a good bit throughout the winter and rejoined the group rides after only a short wedding hiatus feeling pretty strong. Coach then had me do a “crash week” on the bike, logging 250 outdoor miles and 6.5 Kickr hours across nine days. I felt great and was really enjoying it. The only thing that started to surface was the result of the rainy season really leaving. This meant that the super bloom equated to super allergies. Windy, long rides outdoors often left me out of commission for the rest of the day or longer and didn’t help recoery sleep.
As the weather improved, and my outside time expanded to upwards of ten hours or so in a given weekend riding, running, swimming and leisure-riding, my allergies wreaked havoc. I couldn’t breathe. Ever, it seemed. Brushing my teeth was a cardio/anaerobic event. Sleep was intermittent at best. The resulting sloppy trail runs left me bruised and scabbed from tumbles. My cycling still seemed okay, strong even, but my running felt like it was really taking a hit. Intervals were a joke and a half. I was miserable and also concerned that some of my symptoms felt like an overreach for simple allergies.
I finally broke down and scheduled an appointment with an allergist, and also started a regimen of local honey. Desperate times called for desperate mesasures. The allergist diagnosed and prescribed much of the typical for what I was experiencing, but a bit stronger than the OTC remedies that I was maxing. And then the curve ball: asthma. And an inhaler; for all that wheezing, shortness of breath and tight chest. How could I underperform on a breathing test? I could only say to the allergist “but I exercise a lot.” It threw me off, but I shouldn’t have been totally surprised, as both my parents have asthma, and I specifically remember my Dad - a very active and fit individual - carrying an inhaler for as long as I can recall. It was also partially a relief and an end to a paranoid pursuit of googling things like “symptoms of Lyme disease” as I’d wondered if I’d been ineffective cleaning up after long jaunts on trails.
I had some interesting (weird?) internal battles that followed during workouts and also my first triathlon back: Folsom International. I didn’t want to be in a haze of medication so I opted not to take any pre-race but to have it for when I finished. I hadn’t done any open water swims yet on the year, so made sure to get transition set up early enough that I had ample time to swim in the water and adjust to the coldish (mid-60s) temps and murky composition.
The swim started in deep water because of debris from branches and sticks at the lake entrance. My start wave was the last and a bit large, and I started near the front from wide right (typical). The horn sounded, and I started swimming and felt pretty good. Until I didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it was the water (temps or murkiness), the aerobic effort, or my respiratory limitations, but I felt out of breath very quickly. I then started to panic, not eased by the sense of crowdedness. This was exacerbated by the goggles I’d selected, which had limited periphery and fogged up terribly. I couldn’t see anything, and the buoys I was trying to spot were *white* versus the typical neon orange or yellow. I moved to the far right, which helped, but I ended up implementing a lot of tarzan swimming and breast stroke. Mostly as I swam through large patches of the same kind of debris as was near the shore, moving sticks and branches away from my neck and head. It felt like I was being choked by them. If there had been more kayaks or if I could see them, I might have called it a day in the water. Fortunately and unfortunatley, I have experiences like Ironman Wisconsin and Escape from Alcatraz to pull from, where I was in a crappy swim situation for much more than 1,500 meters!
I was SO excited to be done with that swim, and just wanted to pedal and climb on my bike. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to get on my bike so badly. I had a blast riding the rollers and the bigger, steeper climbs further out on the course. On one of these longer, steeper climbs in the last half of the bike, I rode past a young twenty-something from an early start wave and gave her kudos. She responded by confirming that there were only two more ladies ahead of me. That was exciting considering that I’d started last! I passed one more about five miles up the road. We then went off-roading through a gravel section before getting back to transition where I noticed that the most recent pass had caught up and was right with me.
The run was on trails, which got me super-excited to get to the run portion of the race. You can’t really be a stickler about pace on trails, so it’s all about effort, chasing people and having fun. I had a sense of urgency departing transition since the other gal was young, and therefore I assumed she’d be fast ha ha! Plus, I had one to catch! I started off feeling okay and progressively felt better as I traversed the changing terrain throughout the run: soft sand, single track, steep fire trails and everything in between. Some folks coming back the other way encouraged me that the other lady was not far ahead. I really wanted to ask: how many minutes and how old is she? If she were younger, there was a good chance that I was actually in the lead. Did I have a buffer?! I felt amazing the last mile or two and dropped some guys that I’d been running it in with, though did not catch the other female (spoiler alert: she was not younger and got me by 2′).
After I crossed the finish line, I immediately launched into a terrible coughing and wheezing attack. It was at this moment that I realized I’d left all my meds - inhaler included - at home. It was scarry with my obliques cramping through the violent cough fest, leaving me struggling to breathe.
I didn’t wait around too long before heading home, and my other allergy symptoms had already started to unleash. Home was not close and I wanted to be there so, so badly. I was also starving, but not about to stop for food because I didn’t want to delay my arrival home. The two-hour ride home (Sac Saturday traffic FTW) was an emotional rollercoaster. I felt like now my issues had names and that was affecting how I thought about them. Like they were a real thing that owned me. I felt like I had this dependency now, like I was vulnerable. I hate that. I’ve always liked to feel independent and tough. This didn’t feel that way. The old me, before I knew I had a thing with a name, would have said “I feel like crap, so I’m promising myself a beer, tacos and a hot bath when I get home; until then, I’m putting on my big girl briefs and sucking it up.” This internal dialogue made me upset, mad.
Over the following days, deciding that I don’t like being dependent on things and that this affliction bothered me less when I thought I was just “feeling like crap,” I decided to forgo the meds. I felt good enough without them, but still needed to use the inhaler when I had episodes that called for it.
My run came back around over the weeks following and I started nailing my run workout targets. Some of this was the resolution that I was done feeling like crap and it was time to get it done, but it also helped that the temperatues were heating up and the allergens clearing the air. I freakin’ love the hot weather (don’t let me forget this in two months:) ), and have been spending time in the steam room at the gym to assist. This has been a good impetus for me to log a couple short bonus swims each week, post-swim steam room time!
I will say that I’ve continued to struggle on the bike. Trainer rides, and some outdoors, where I’ve had tough targets. It’s the balance of relying on the legs versus the lungs. Being what I’d consider a softer and more noodly* athlete compared to my more muscular counterparts, I’ve always relied on my lung power (cardio, cadence) to get me through tough sessions and intervals. After finding myself gasping through many a trainer workout and feeling on the brink of tears, I’ve had to learn how to lean on my legs, and that burns!
*this is not for lack of trying! I love my strength training sessions, and make a concerted effort to get a lot of daily protein by way of protein powder in smoothies, hardboiled eggs, greek yogurt, nuts and legumes, salmon. etc
It’s frustrating because my Instagram feed is too many ladies raving about their amazing trainer sessions and these workouts they’ve conquered to achieve their goals and how they feel so great about themselves. And how FUN it is! It’s tough to think about that during a session where you feeling like you’re dying and it’s the furthest thing from fun. My conclusion is that they’re simply not working hard enough if they’re having that much fun, ha! There have been - during and after trainer sessions - a lot of near-tears and declarations to quit triathlon altogether and other things found in the “dark place.” It’s been a learning process so far this season to reconcile how I use my body (legs vs lungs and in between) to achieve the targets set forth. Should be an interesting season...
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
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Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News)
"Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra)
"On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel)
"Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube)
"Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer)
"Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku)
"To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports)
"Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam)
"From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer)
"The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint)
"The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel)
"Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku)
"My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun)
"Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube)
"Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed)
"Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic)
"In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian)
"Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium)
"Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance)
"I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker)
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku)
"In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium)
"Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer)
"We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News)
"Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra)
"On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel)
"Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube)
"Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer)
"Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku)
"To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports)
"Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam)
"From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer)
"The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint)
"The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel)
"Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku)
"My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun)
"Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube)
"Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed)
"Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic)
"In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian)
"Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium)
"Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance)
"I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker)
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku)
"In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium)
"Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer)
"We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News)
"Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra)
"On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel)
"Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube)
"Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer)
"Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku)
"To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports)
"Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam)
"From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer)
"The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint)
"The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel)
"Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku)
"My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun)
"Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube)
"Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed)
"Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic)
"In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian)
"Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium)
"Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance)
"I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker)
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku)
"In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium)
"Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer)
"We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
Link
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News)
"Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra)
"On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel)
"Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube)
"Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer)
"Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku)
"To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports)
"Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam)
"From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer)
"The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint)
"The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel)
"Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku)
"My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun)
"Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube)
"Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed)
"Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic)
"In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian)
"Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium)
"Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance)
"I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker)
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku)
"In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium)
"Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer)
"We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.
As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.
No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...
- Simon, curator.]
-------------------
Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"
Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News)
"Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."
Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra)
"On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."
Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel)
"Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"
Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube)
"Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."
How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer)
"Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."
Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku)
"To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."
The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports)
"Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."
'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam)
"From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."
Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer)
"The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."
Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint)
"The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."
Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel)
"Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."
In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku)
"My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."
The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun)
"Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."
Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube)
"Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."
Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed)
"Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."
A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic)
"In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"
Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian)
"Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "
Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube)
"In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."
Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium)
"Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."
Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance)
"I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."
The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker)
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."
Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku)
"In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."
Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium)
"Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."
The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer)
"We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."
-------------------
[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]
0 notes
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