According to the artist, when it was suggested that a smile might benefit the look of the finished portrait, Attaché Nohell reportedly replied, "I thought the purpose of this was to be honest."

Super fun commission of @waterloggedsoliloquy's OC Sicely Nohell (they/them) and their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad lusus figure Commanding Officer.

Pathologic 2 ending thoughts

i don’t really use tumblr much anymore, but i recently finished Pathologic 2 and i have thoughts on the ending, which i felt was somewhat incongruous with the rest of the game’s themes and ideas. and tumblr felt like the right place to put a long-form post about it. so, here i am, haha!

MAJOR spoilers for Pathologic 2 below, obviously. this post will probably only be interesting to you if you’ve already played the game, so if you haven’t, be warned! hehehe!

okay, so. i have a lot of thoughts about the ending stuff, but basically it boils down to: i think the ending as presented would have been a good ending for a different game.

quick summary: towards the end of the game, Artemy learns that the Polyhedron, a physics-defying tower and architectural wonder, is rooted into the ground with a long metal spike that pierces the Living Earth. destroying the Polyhedron would therefore open a gaping wound in the Earth, spilling rivers of blood that could be used to mass-produce a cure for the plague. however, doing so would not only destroy the Polyhedron, but also kill the Living Earth, and by extension the Kin. alternately, Artemy can choose to preserve the Polyhedron, which would prevent the Living Earth from bleeding out and dying; but it would come at the cost of the lives of everyone in the town, since the plague would then be unstoppable.

so, the ending choice is principally about this: you have to choose between preserving the magical wonders of the world, the Kin and the Polyhedron and the Living Earth, but at the expense of the actual living humans of the town; or, you save the town and all its mundanities and its ordinary people you've worked so hard to protect, but at the expense of your cultural heritage and all the magical, impossible things of the Steppe. do you choose a world that is dreamlike, enchanted and strange, even if there is no place for regular humans in that world; or do you choose an ordinary, realistic world, one in which there is life for common folk but not for magic and fairy tales?

here’s what irks me though: this dichotomy is not at all what the game is about. or, to be more precise, it never felt to me personally like this was what the narrative was setting up. the choice as presented is fine in a vacuum! there’s nothing wrong with telling a story that creates this kind of clash between magic and realism, and asks you to choose between them. but it doesn’t feel congruous with the rest of the game’s story. let me elaborate.

so, part of what’s going on here is that the game is asking you to make a sacrifice. as the game itself repeatedly tells you: “you can’t save everyone”. either the Kin, the magical steppe creatures, and the Polyhedron are destroyed; or, the ordinary humans of the town are destroyed. you can’t protect both. Pathologic 2 goes to great lengths to show you that you are not a magical fantasy RPG hero who can complete every quest, rescue every NPC, overcome any obstacle and get the Perfect Ending. that’s the whole point of the overly punishing hunger and exhaustion mechanics; that’s why you die so easily in combat, why you’re always running out of time, and why the game is perfectly willing to punish you for every single mistake you make. it’s not a game about being the chosen one, who has magic powers and is uniquely capable of saving the day. right?

except... it kind of is precisely that, if you think about it. Artemy’s story is very clearly a traditional “chosen one” narrative! he is the sole inheritor of his father’s legacy, he is the town’s only menkhu, and so much of the story revolves around his spiritual journey. over the course of the game, Artemy undergoes a coming-of-age of sorts, reconnecting with his heritage, unlocking the secrets of being a menkhu, brewing magical tinctures that slow down and ultimately cure the plague. multiple characters make it explicit that Artemy is important - Foreman Oyun, Aspity, Isidor, and various minor characters of the Kin (like Nara) all talk at length about how Artemy is special, and his role (should he embrace it) is to lead the Kin once he is ready. and the entire conflict with Rubin revolves around the fact that Rubin isn’t the “chosen one” the way Artemy is!

this whole plot thread reaches its climax when Artemy ventures into the Abattoir to seek answers. there, he undergoes a series of harrowing spiritual experiences. several really important things happen here, and i want to focus on two of them.

firstly: upon reaching the central chamber of the Abattoir, Artemy is tasked with performing “surgery” on three seemingly random objects: a candlestick, a fingernail coin, and a spindle of thread. he has a metaphysical conversation with the odongh he meets there and then “connects” these objects into a living, beating heart, and the heart speaks to him. this scene is either hallucinatory or supernatural (or both), but it doesn’t matter which; the point of the scene is that Artemy has finally learned to read the Lines, learned to see how seemingly disparate objects can be spiritually connected into a singular whole. he takes three items that appear to have nothing in common, and he forges a beating heart out of them, a living thing. as Artemy himself learns:

This system isn't symmetrical. It's not just "Nerves, Bones, Skin." Or "Nerves, Bones, Flesh." Or "Spirit, Hair, Blood." Any triad is correct.

Truth is not a set point, but an intersection and confluence of many small truths. Knowing this, I can match and connect anything.

furthermore, shortly after leaving the Abattoir, Artemy has a dream in which he returns there and speaks to the ghost of Isidor, his father. here, he learns a difficult truth: that Isidor intentionally brought the plague back to the town, believing - essentially - that it was necessary for the town’s growth. the decision seems monstrous. Isidor justifies it thus:

This town was… connected wrong. Its parts were tied with artificial seams—so different, so awkward. One could say that Simon, the Mistresses, and I held it all together by force.

So I tore it apart, so you can sew it all back, better than before. Because you're better, and smarter, than I am.

so here we have the high point of Artemy’s spiritual journey, the part of the story where he finally understands why things are the way they are, and what it is he must do.

and this is where things start going wrong, in my opinion.

because all of this, all of what we’ve seen, seems to point in one very clear direction: Artemy will find a way to connect the Kin, the Town, and the Polyhedron into a single coherent whole. it fits so perfectly! Artemy learns that there is a way to mass-produce a cure, but doing so would require him to destroy the Polyhedron and the Living Earth. it appears as though the Polyhedron, the Living Earth, and the Town cannot all coexist; something must be sacrificed. but this choice is presented right after we’re told that Artemy’s destiny is to “sew it all back, better than before”. it is presented once we’ve seen that Artemy can connect a coin, a candlestick, and a spindle of thread into a living, beating heart, no matter how impossible that may sound. knowing this, he can match and connect anything.

and yet, he... doesn’t. the game does not end with a solution that connects the Kin, the Polyhedron and the Town. ultimately, Artemy fails to sew it all back together - and it’s not just that he fails, it’s that the game itself seems utterly unconcerned with that possibility once it heads into its final act. the mere idea that there could be a solution that “connects things right“ goes unexplored. even if the game wanted to be pessimistic and suggest that it can’t be done after all, it should at least acknowledge the thought! the game does admittedly have a focus on the idea that “you can’t save everyone”; this is one of its core motifs. so, fair enough! but since it fails to address that cynicism, it feels less like a statement on the game’s part and more like a lack of awareness.

but that’s not all! there’s a second thing that really bugs me. see, there’s another major event that takes place in the Abattoir: Artemy finally has his fateful encounter with Nara, the Herb Bride who has haunted him throughout the game, insisting that their destinies are intertwined and that he will one day kill her. here, Artemy finally comes to understand what it all means. in the depths of the Abattoir, Nara is waiting for him; the other Herb Brides give Artemy a menkhu’s knife, and they task him with cutting open Nara’s body without killing her:

We know how to open things up. Our way. You know how to open things up. Your way. Do you want to know why the sand pest passes us by? Show yourself.

Cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living. You can do it, if you know the Lines.

Artemy follows through, and he converses with Nara even as he cuts into her flesh; they talk to each other right until the end, when Artemy retrieves a spindle of thread from her body, and she dies.

now, this scene is somewhat tricky to interpret; Artemy must show that he can “cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living”, but in the end, Nara does die. so was he successful or not? well, i would argue that he is; even though Nara dies, he proves that he is able to read the Lines with such precision that she can speak calmly with him until the very end.

more importantly, this scene is the high point of a recurring theme in the game: Artemy’s skill as surgeon.

on Day 1, the very first part of the game, Artemy is sent by his old friend Bad Grief to perform surgery on Piecework, one of the thugs in Bad Grief’s gang. Piecework has gotten in a fight and been stabbed in the gut with a lockpick; without Artemy’s intervention, he will die. you can choose to save him, flub the surgery and kill him, or ignore the sidequest altogether; in any case, this early quest introduces the player to the surgery mechanic and serves to establish Artemy’s unique skills as a surgeon.

on Day 11, the last day of proper gameplay, you have a repeat of this encounter. while pursuing the main quest for the day, you wind up in a pub, where a gang of local bandits have set up shop. they threaten you and order you to rescue one of their pals, who has been shot in the stomach and is about to die. here you again perform surgery to save a man’s life, but this time you don’t do it through the usual surgery minigame - it happens entirely through dialogue choices, and i’m actually not even sure if it’s possible to fail this interaction. in any case, you retrieve the bullet from the man’s stomach and inform his friends that he’ll live.

so what’s the point of all that then? well, the way i see it, the point of all this is to foreshadow a climactic conclusion: Artemy will remove the Polyhedron without killing the Living Earth.

the game spends a lot of time setting this up! on Day 1, Artemy saves a man by removing a long metal spike from his gut non-lethally; in the Abattoir, Artemy proves his spiritual growth by demonstrating that he can “cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living”; and on Day 11, the game throws yet another surgery vignette at you in a scene that frankly feels a bit out of place otherwise.

all of this feels, to me, like it's foreshadowing and setting up one very obvious result: Artemy, having mastered not only practical surgery but also the art of reading the Lines, of being a menkhu, is the one person who can remove the Polyhedron without killing the Living Earth! the game spends all this time explaining that in the Steppe culture, cutting open flesh, or the earth itself, is taboo: only a menkhu is allowed to do so, because a menkhu is someone who knows how to read the Lines, who knows how to cut in a way that will not harm the Living Earth. the culmination of the story, therefore, needs to be that Artemy puts this exact skill to use. that was the point of his character arc, right?

except... no, it isn’t. in the end, there is no way to surgically extract the metal spike from the Living Earth. the only two choices we are presented with are: botch the surgery, or leave it be.

...

in the end, i feel that the ending(s) of Pathologic 2 aren’t appropriate conclusions to the ideas, motifs, and overall narrative progression we’re shown throughout the earlier parts of the game. Pathologic 2 is in many ways brilliant, and i do not hesitate to call it a masterpiece, aforementioned criticisms notwithstanding - but that’s precisely why i cared enough to write all this down! it’s a story that gets into your head, really stays with you, and maybe that’s the reason why i have such strong feelings about the direction the story takes in its final act.

if you reached the end of this post: thank you so much for reading it! i hope you enjoyed my thoughts, and i hope you have a great day!

Through Thick And Thin

Fandom: Sonic the Hedgehog

Type: hurt/comfort, platonic fluff

Word count: about 2700 words

Author’s notes: this year was a mess. But I’m grateful for a few things that happened to me in 2020. One of these things is getting into the Sonic fandom, which helped me find joy in being creative again. Another is a budding friendship with someone really cool, that I can only hope will last for a long time.

This fic is kind of a gift to that person for New Year’s Day. To everyone, but especially to you O, I wish a happy new year and many good things to come.

- - - - -

It was not an easy morning.

Shadow had always been an early bird. He never needed much sleep compared to other mobians, thanks to his bio-engineered origins. This was both a blessing and a curse, depending on the days.

Being able to stay up most of the night during missions proved useful more than once. On the other hand, when ugly thoughts would assail him and sleeping them away was not an option, well… It was suddenly much less interesting.

On this last day of December, the hedgehog could not shake uneasy feelings. Between Eggman’s plotting and his own personal issues Shadow always had rough times, but this year had been… a lot.

Walking silently in the empty corridor, careful not to wake up anyone in the household, the dark mobian reached the kitchen and started preparing hot chocolate. Since most of his friends knew about his sweet tooth he didn’t bother hiding it anymore, and Rouge always made sure they were stocked up on cocoa.

While waiting for the milk to warm, he glanced at the clock on the wall. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The eerie calm of early hours often made Shadow slightly uncomfortable. Despite his introvert side enjoying the peaceful solitude, it was also a moment where his thoughts would simmer in his mind, either awoken by confuse dreams or simply emerging as the day started. He would often put some music or read a book to avoid thinking too hard about it.

Didn’t always work, though.

Taking a deep breath the hedgehog felt some relief at the sweet scent of chocolate. He took a small sip before moving to roll himself in blankets on the large couch. With a long and noisy yawn he reached for the remote and pointed it at the large TV screen in front of him. Maybe there was something nice to watch while waiting for his roommates to get up.

- - - - -

When Shadow opened his eyes again, sunlight was gently glowing through the translucent curtains of the living room. Which meant it was probably kind of late already. It seemed he fell back asleep at some point.

With a frown, he rubbed his dishevelled quills and took a look at his phone. Almost 11am, and no sign of Rouge or Omega... This was odd, especially since they planned on spending the New Year’s Eve together.

That’s when he noticed an envelope lying on the small coffee table, next to his now empty mug. It was plain kraft, with a small card inside that only offered an address and the words “At noon, don’t be late hun”.

Obviously from Rouge. She loved putting mystery and drama in everything she did. Shadow huffed and shook his head.

Irredeemable.

Did that mean his friends got up without waking him and prepared some kind of surprise? However silly it was, this simple envelope brought some warmth to the hedgehog’s heart. He got up to take a quick shower and prepare for the day, a small smile peeking at the corner of his lips.

- - - - -

The location was one Shadow didn’t particularly recognise, a small intersection in a popular part of the town. Since Team Dark lived in a suburban area and their job at G.U.N was usually all over the world, his knowledge of the city was lacklustre. Right as his phone displayed 12pm a text popped up on the screen.

Rouge Right behind the shoes store, a cafe.

The striped mobian rolled his eyes with a hint of amusement. Even for something as simple as a New Year between friends, the bat couldn’t help making some kind of fun game to play. Shadow would gladly proclaim it futile and childish, but he actually enjoyed these quirky adventures his best friend always peppered in his life.

What he saw next filled him with pure joy. Of course Rouge wouldn’t choose a random cafe to meet. She had to make it extra one way or another, and she just knew how to please him.

The Gentle Garden Chao Café & Flower Shop

Almost giddy at the idea of having some sweets surrounded by chao, the ultimate lifeform stepped into the small establishment. A quick glance around made him happy beyond words: soft muted lights and warm colours complemented vintage furniture, large potted plants adorned all sides of the place, and —most importantly— chao of every kind were all over the place, either walking, being cuddled by clients or sleeping on small pillows.

In the back of the room was a large counter, behind which a massive chalkboard displayed both the cafe menu and prices of various flower arrangements.

Before Shadow could go and talk to the barista, a familiar face caught his attention. Rouge was there, sitting nonchalantly and sipping some drink in the most ostentatious way possible.

The hedgehog smirked and sat in front of her.

“So...?” he started with a raised brow. “So what? Did you think I’d let you stay home for this special day?” Rouge huffed between two exaggerated sips. “It’s just New Year’s Eve, not an anniversary or something...” Shadow said, glancing at the table.

He realised an order of white chocolate cappuccino —his very favourite drink— and forêt noire —one of his favourite sweets— were set in front of him. For a second he felt something rise in his chest. A mix of gratitude and that odd yet pleasing vulnerability he could only feel with his closest friends.

“I know it’s just the new year.” the bat leaned on the table, her eyes both tender and serious. “I also know you haven’t been doing great lately. It’s been a difficult time, and of course it won’t magically be over as midnight comes, but...”

She looked in the distance, her eyes piercing through the windows and their cold winter lighting. Shadow could very clearly feel the bittersweet essence of her expression. This year had also been hard on her.

“We’re in this together, y’know.” she resumed, turning a gentle smile towards him. “And while I can’t resolve every problem we have, I can at least invite my emo bestie to enjoy some chao and indulge in sugary treats!”

The hedgehog chuckled at this, then raised his cappuccino mug. “Let’s have a good time, then. To us bitches.” he said with a knowing grin. “To us bitches!” she exclaimed happily. ”Now drink that ‘ccino, we have chao to cuddle.”

Some laughs and friendly banter later, two chao had found their way on Shadow. One was sleepily nested on his legs while the other was playing on his head, brushing his quills curiously.

“You really have your way with them, just like Omega...” Rouge remarked. She loved the little creatures very much, but she never seemed to attract them as easily as her two partners. No one really knew why and she honestly didn’t mind. It was fun enough to observe them from a distance: no risks of ruined haircut or having one mess with her wings.

“This is the best.” the hedgehog whispered, his voice full of emotion. His friend chuckled. Shadow was endearing in many ways, but his love for plants and creatures was unparalleled in an extremely wholesome way.

“Did you ever consider adopting one?” she asked before biting into her remaining pastry. Shadow’s expression became slightly somber as he looked at her. “I…” he sighed and scratched the sleeping one’s head. “I always wanted to, I guess. Even on the Ark, once we learned about them with Maria, we used to pretend having one. There was a plush, I don’t remember its name. We would play parents, bring it along for walks across the Ark, this kind of things.”

Rouge nodded sympathetically. Maria was less and less a sensitive subject as years went by, but Shadow was still defensive about these memories. Sharing them was one of the most intimate things he would do, and she felt honoured every time it happened.

“Maybe one day.” the hedgehog shrugged with a tired smile. ”Right now our lives are too dangerous. I can’t raise one properly as long as we keep fighting and going on missions Chaos knows where. – Let’s hope we get Eggman and his clique once and for all, then!” Rouge said with a grin. “Can’t wait to have you pester us with photos of your ugly little baby.”

The genuine laugh that followed made the bat beam with happiness.

- - - - -

The very specific atmosphere of New Year’s Eve was not lost to the two mobians as they strolled in the city. Streets were bustling with activity, but in a way that felt distinct from other winter holidays. The ambient anticipation was less frantic, almost… solemn. Instead of rushing for gifts and food, people seemed determined to enjoy the final hours of this year.

Shadow found it interesting, not without its charm. He was more used to strolls in mountains, lonely forests and small paths undulating through fields. The buzzing activity of the city was something else —very nice, though. Plus Rouge knew every neighbourhood surprisingly well, and offered him little fun facts and stories about all sorts of buildings and places.

“It’s a real shame we don’t get more free time between G.U.N and Eggman.” the bat lamented. “There are so many nice spots I’d love to visit with Omega and you. – We do have vacations once in a while.” Shadow replied. “Yeah, but they’re either ruined by some apocalyptic event or by an intense need for rest.” she sighed. “We can’t enjoy the Museum of Arts if we’re falling asleep every two paintings.”

The dark mobian nodded. Technically Omega and him didn’t need a lot of sleep, but being world-saving heroes brought its own kind of mental fatigue. Moments of calm and respite were too few and far between.

“Well. Next time we have some days off we’ll organise a Team Dark afternoon.” Shadow offered. “An exhibit or two, some games at the arcade. Maybe a small concert at a cafe. – Oh my. Hun, I’m impressed to see you take this kind of initiatives.” the bat replied.

The hedgehog gave her a friendly nudge. “Shut up, can’t let you make all the decisions. – I don’t see why not.” Rouge shrugged with a knowing smile.

They suddenly stopped. Without really realising it, the duo had reached the large avenue leading back to their house. As they exchanged a glance, Rouge winked. “Omega must be waiting for us. Let’s move!” she said cheerfully.

- - - - -

An immediate wave of relief filled Shadow as soon as they passed the front door. “Finally some warmth.” he sighed, removing his large coat and thick scarf. “I was expecting your lowered body temperatures.” Omega’s robotic voice answered from the kitchen. “Hot tea and biscuits are ready for immediate consumption. Made with love.”

Rouge snickered and Shadow repressed a chuckle.  Both knew Omega was absolutely unable to cook anything without setting fire to it, so the biscuits were probably store-bought. They still appreciated the gesture greatly.

Everyone gathered around the table, remembering stories about the now-ending year and its numerous developments. Adrenaline-filled fights, obscure investigations and exhausting assignments went alongside hilarious mistakes, glorious teamwork… and even celebratory moments with all the other heroes of Mobius.

“Okay, but the award for the best party of the year still goes to Knuckles’ surprise birthday.” Rouge said confidently while helping Omega put on a colourful crochet beanie. “Ughh please. Let’s not talk about it.” Shadow groaned, knowing exactly where this was going. “It was extremely fun. The fireworks accident made it over 200% better than any other celebration.” the robot insisted. “Oh right, I almost forgot about that!” the bat laughed. “Poor Knuckie, having to deal with a fire hazard on his cherished island…”

Memories of the furious echidna shouting frantically brought a grin to Shadow’s face. “But!” Rouge added, ”I mostly remember someone having a few drinks too much and— – NOPE!” the hedgehog exclaimed as he brandished his hands. “No talk of this specific event shall happen in this house. Ever.”

Omega tapped his fingers on the table as he eyed his smaller friend. “It is a shame I did not record it for ulterior viewing.” Shadow’s glare was so intense the former badnik recoiled slightly.

“Oh well, it’s all in the past now.” Rouge mused teasingly. ”Good times, good times...”

- - - - -

The closet was absurdly full of useless trinkets and Shadow was very, very close to “fix” it with a Chaos blast.

Of course he wouldn’t, knowing how preciously Rouge kept all those odd items from her past. Jewels, foreign souvenirs, postcards, old plushies, photographs… All her memorabilia was kept there, in a mismatched mess mixed up with cleaning supplies, spare beddings and various tools.

“They should be somewhere near the bottom!” the bat shouted from across the flat. The hedgehog growled, his eyes desperately scanning the clutter in front of him. Finally he found what he came for.

Fairy lights. The essential accessory to any LRCS —Living Room Camping Session.

Shadow walked back to the main room, where a drying rack and several chairs formed a structure covered by sheets and blankets. Omega was evaluating whether the improvised tent was big enough for him. “It is perfect, Rouge. We will be able to fit within the designated comfy area.” he said before crawling underneath the colourful construction.

The hedgehog carefully hung the string of lights around and inside the tent before plugging it. Rouge grabbed some snacks and scuttled against the large robot, who fiddled with the remote until a title screen showed on the TV.

“Are we really watching this?” Shadow asked hesitantly. “Shadow. We all know your inclination for romance between organic beings. Please come cuddle so we can start the movie.” Omega said. “Don’t tell me you suddenly decided to hate cheesy fiction, sweetie.” Rouge added. “I would rather perish than lose your snarky remarks and teary-eyed spee— – Alright, I get it, I’m coming.” the hedgehog replied with a frown. “This better be good, though.”

It was everything but good. Outbursts of laughter and incredulous stares followed one another as the movie —a romantic parody of the famous blockbuster Attack On Mobius— kept getting more and more absurd. Omega threatened to turn himself off as he struggled to find any reasoning behind what was happening, and Rouge almost choked on her pop-corn near the end of the second part.

When the credits started rolling, the three buddies snuggled together. The winter night cold was no match for a group hug and thick quilts. Shadow eyed his phone and hummed.

“It’s almost midnight. – Does that mean we have to prepare a wish?” Rouge asked in a sleepy voice. “We don’t have to.” the hedgehog replied, glancing at his two friends.

Has to be an odd sight, he thought. A haphazard team with so many differences, united by pure luck in a challenging world. Chilling together in a makeshift tent in the middle of a flat like nothing else mattered. He closed his eyes and took a moment to appreciate the warm feelings. Being surrounded by such amazing souls for whom he really mattered. Knowing all the affection and dedication hidden behind that seemingly cold name, “Team Dark”.

“I wished for a pony.” Both Omega and Shadow looked at their bat friend with tilted heads. “What? They’re cute, I dunno.” she shrugged with a shit-eating grin. “What would you guys wish for? – Dual plasma swords.” the robot replied. “Maybe I should ask Miles when we cross paths again.”

Rouge rolled her eyes, then shouted curse words as she realised midnight was mere seconds away. Omega startled, making the whole tent fall on the team. The striped hedgehog quickly covered his muzzle with his hands, trying to suppress an irresistible laugh. No matter how hard life was, no matter the obstacles in his way, one thing was certain as the year came to an end.

Friendship was all he could wish for.

BLOGTOBER 10/17/2020: SPOOKIES

What do we watch, when we watch movies? This question was sparked by my SOV experience with the very different, and differently interesting BLOODY MUSCLE BODYBUILDER FROM HELL and HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5. Within the Shot On Video category, one can find inventive homemade features that are driven entirely by blood, sweat, and the creators' feeling of personal satisfaction. The results are sometimes fascinating, in their total alienation from the conventions and techniques of mainstream filmmaking, and after all, one rarely sees anything whose primary motivation is passion, here in the late stages of capitalism. But, all this talk about what goes on behind the camera points to a discrepancy in how we consume different kinds of production. The typical mode of consumption is internal to the movie: What happens in it? Do you relate to the characters? Are you able to suspend your disbelief, to experience the story on a vicarious level? One hardly needs to come up with examples of films that invite this style of viewing. Alternatively, we can experience the movie as a record of a time and place in which real people defied conventions and sometimes broke laws in order to produce a work of art. SOV production is usually viewed through this lens, where the primary interest is not the illusory content, but the filmmakers' sheer determination to create. We find some overlap in movies like EVIL DEAD, which simultaneously presents a terrifying narrative, and evidence of what a truly driven team can create without the aid of a studio, or any real money to speak of. See also, Larry Cohen's New York City-based horror films, in which a compelling drama with great acting can exist side by side with phony but beautiful effects, and exciting stories of stolen footage that would be dangerous or impossible to attempt today. I'm thinking about these different modes of consumption now because I just watched SPOOKIES, a legitimately cursed-seeming film whose harrowing production history has superseded whatever people think about what it shows on the screen. The lovingly composed blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome includes a feature-length documentary that attempts to explain the making of the film--which is accompanied by its own feature length commentary track by documentarists Michael Gingold and Glen Baisley. The very existence of this artifact suggests a lot about the nature of this movie, in and of itself. The truth behind its existence is as funny as it is tragic.

I'm not going to do a whole breakdown of the tortured origins of SPOOKIES, which is much better told by the aforementioned documentary. To summarize: Once upon a time in the mid 1980s, filmmakers Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran and Frank Farel conspired to make a fun, flamboyant rubber monsterpiece called TWISTED SOULS. It was wild, ridiculous, and transparently fake-looking, but it was loved by its hard-working creators; as a viewer, that soulful sense of joy can rescue many a "bad" movie from its various foibles. Then, inevitably, sleazoid producer Michael Lee stepped in--a man who thought you could cut random frames out of the middle of scenes to improve a movie's pace--and ruined it with extreme prejudice. Carefully crafted special effects sequences were cut, relatively functional scenes were re-edited into oblivion, and the seeds of hatred were sown between the filmmakers and the producer. Ultimately, everyone who once cared for TWISTED SOULS was forced to abandon ship, and first time director Eugenie Joseph stepped in to help mutilate the picture beyond all recognition. Thus SPOOKIES was born, a mangled, unloved mutation that would curse many of its original parents to unemployability. For the audience, it is intriguingly insane, often insulting, and hard to tear your eyes off of--but in spite of whatever actually wound up on the screen, it's impossible to forget its horrifying origin story as it unspools.

As far as what's on the screen goes: A group of "friends", including a middle-aged businessman and his wife, a vinyl-clad punk rock bully and his moll, two new wave-y in-betweeners, and...a guy with a hand puppet are somehow all leaving the same party, and all ready to break into a vacant funeral home for their afterparty. Well, this happens after a 13 year old runaway inexplicably wanders in to a "birthday party" in there, that looks like it was thrown for him by Pennywise, and he has the nerve to act surprised when he is attacked by a severed head and a piratey-looking cat-man who straight up purrs and meows throughout the picture. Anyway, separately of that, which is unrelated to anything, the island of misfit friends finds a nearly unrecognizable "ouija board" in the old dark house. Actually this thing is kind of fun-looking, having been made by one of the fun-havers on the production before the day that fun died, and I wonder if anyone has considered trying to make a real board game out of it...but I digress. Naturally, the board unleashes evil forces, including a zombie uprising in the cemetery outside, a plague of Ghoulie-like ankle-biters, an evil asian spider-lady (accompanied by kyoto flutes), muck-men that fart prodigiously until they melt in a puddle of wine (?), and uh...I know I'm forgetting stuff. One of the reasons I'm forgetting is because of this whole side story about a tuxedo-wearing vampire in the basement (or somewhere?) who has entrapped a beautiful young bride by cursing her with immortality. That part is a little confusing, not only because it doesn't intersect with the rest of the movie, but because sometimes it seems contemporary--as the bride struggles to survive the zombie plague--and sometimes it seems like a flashback, as our heroes find what looks like the mummified corpse of the dracula guy, complete with his signet ring. So, I don't know what to tell you really. Those are just some of the things that happen in the movie.

Some people like this a lot, and have supported its ascendance to cult status, which is a huge relief when you know what everyone went through to make this movie, only to have it ripped away from them and used against them. I found SPOOKIES a little hard to take, for all the reasons that the cast and crew express in the documentary. It holds a certain amount of visual fascination, whatever you think of it; something of its original creativity remains evident in the movie's colorful, exaggerated look, and its steady parade of unconvincing but inventive creature effects. But then, you have to deal with the farting muck-men. What was once a scene of terror starring REGULAR muck-men, that sounded incredibly laborious to pull off, became a scene of confusing "comedy" when producer Michael Lee insisted that the creatures be accompanied by a barrage of scatalogical noises. Apparently this was Lee's dream come true, as a guy who insisted everyone pull his finger all the time, and who once tried to call the movie "BOWEL ERUPTOR". But, of all the deformations SPOOKIES endured, the fart sounds dealt a mortal injury to the filmmakers' feelings, and even without knowing that, it's hard to enjoy yourself while that's happening.

Actually, all the farts forced me to ask myself: Is this...a comedy? Like for real, as its main thing? As the movie slogged on, I had to decide that it wasn't, but I was distracted by the notion for around 40 minutes. I was only released from this nagging suspicion when the bride makes her long marathon run through throngs of slavering zombies who swarm her, grope her, and tear off her clothes, before she narrowly escapes to an even worse fate. The lengthy scene is strangely gripping, and sleazy for a movie that sometimes feels like low rent children's entertainment. Part of the sequence’s success lies in its simplicity; it is unburdened by the convoluted complications of the rest of the movie, whose esoteric parts never fall together, so it seems to take on a sustained, intensifying focus. The action itself is unnerving, as the delicate and frankly gorgeous Maria Pechuka is molested and stripped nearly-bare by her undead bachelors, running from one drooling mob to another as the horde nearly engulfs her time and again. Actually, it feels a lot like a certain genre of SOV production in which, for the right price, any old creepy nerd can pay a small crew-for-hire to tape a version of his private fantasy, whether it's women being consumed by slime, or women being consumed by quicksand, or...generally, women being consumed by something. I wish I could describe this form of production in more specific or official terms, because I genuinely think it's wonderful that people do this. Anyway, Pechuka's interminable zombie run feels a little like that, and a little like a grim italian gutmuncher, and a little like an actual nightmare. Perhaps it only stands out against its dubious surroundings, but I kind of love it--and I'm happy to love it, because apparently the late Ms. Pechuka truly loved making SPOOKIES, and wanted other people to love it, too.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable place where I land with this movie. On the one hand...I think it's bad. It's so incoherent, and so insists on its impoverished form of comedy, that it's hard to be as charmed by it as I am by plenty of FX-heavy, no-budget oddities. Perhaps the lingering odor of misery drowns out the sweet joy that the crew once felt in the early days of creation--which is still evident, somehow, in its zany special effects, created by the likes of Gabe Bartalos and other folks whose work you definitely already know and love. But I feel ambivalent, about all of this. On the one hand, I can be a snob, and shit on people for failing to make a movie that meets conventional standards of success. On the other hand, I can be a DIFFERENT kind of snob--a more voyeuristic or even sadistic one--and celebrate the painful failures that produced a movie that is most interesting for its tormented history and its amusing ineptitude. I'm not really sure where I would prefer to settle with SPOOKIES, and movies like it. (As if anything is really "like" SPOOKIES) With all that said, I was left with one soothing thought by castmember Anthony Valbiro in the documentary. At some point, he tells us how ROSEMARY'S BABY is his personal cinematic comfort food; he can put it on at night, after an exhausting day, and drift to sleep, enveloped in its warm, glowing aura. He then says that he hopes there are people out there for whom his movie serves that same purpose, that some of us can have our "milk and cookies moment" with SPOOKIES. Honestly, I choke up just thinking about that.

2020-08-01: Juiced! (Part 1)

August 3 (Monday Morning)

It's been several days since the last adventure, and Norm has been laying low to evade detection from folks who may aim to do him harm. The rest of the party, unencumbered by such thoughts of self-preservation, seek out their daily work orders as usual. And with the arrival of a new day, Q goes by Daffodil and accentuates their safety vest with lots of blinged-out yellow stuff. Snazzy! Lucky swings by the lizardfolk restaurant to grab some spell components like mushroom powder, saffron, and fat.

Back at HQ, Bob the Modron has three things on the docket today. The mayor wants to meet with SHART, Silas wants to discuss another undercover criminal investigation, and there are several complaints from the locals demanding to know when the sewer will be fixed after it was damaged by the appearance of the outhouse.

Since only one of those items is clearly a sanitation issue, the party opts to repair the damaged sewer first. They trek up toward the intersection of Thirty Oaks and West Champion Ave and find the area already cordoned off. A group of people in SHART vests are rudely telling passers-by to move along.

While the populace might not know better, the party notices something suspicious about these people. First off, no one in the party has seen these workers before. Secondly, aside from their work vests, the impostor SHART workers don't seem to be doing any actual work. They're just chasing everyone away from a hole in the street.

Lucky approaches the apparent leader of the not-SHARTs and asks him about starting work on the repairs. He tells her that Dave has some urgent business that the party needs to go back to SHART HQ to address. So Lucky calls the guy's bluff.

She pretends to cast sending and puts on a convincing one-sided conversation. Lucky gets the guy's name (Garry) and proceeds to write down a message "dictated" by Dave. According to Lucky, this is confidential information that Dave needs Silas to have ASAP. She stuffs it in an envelope and instructs Garry to give it to Silas.

Unfortunately for Garry, this is what the letter that's destined for Silas says: "This is a stick-up."

As Garry saunters off to have his unexpected encounter with the justice system, Daffodil sneaks past the work perimeter and listens for sounds of work. They hear sounds, but not the kind that would normally be associated with repair work. Amid the din of shuffling, scraping, and thumps from below the street, Daffodil hears the familiar voice of Holden Harcourt barking orders.

Daffodil hops into the broken sewer and stealthily works their way toward the sound of Holden's voice. The sounds of flowing sewage mask Daffodil's approach, and they come to a chamber where Holden is directing ratfolk to relocate several heavy chests of treasure.

Spleenifer and Lucky follow behind Daffodil, but Spleenifer's armor is not conducive to moving stealthily. And thus, Spleenifer ends up blundering right up to Daffodil and attracts the attention of ratfolk. The party's scent is familiar these particular ratfolk, who begin chanting excitedly about the arrival of the people who brought back foods from the Land of Plenty Beyond Wall.

Holden is irked that his task has been interrupted, but tries to play things cool. Just walk away for a while, he says, and there could be some monetary reward in it for the party. But the party says "nope!" and negotiations go sour. Holden unleashes a cloud of magical darkness and tries to escape with the ratfolk and treasure.

"I don't like the dark," Lucky says and counterspells away Holden's tactical retreat. Ultimate power move right there, folks! So now Holden is back at the negotiation table, but he still has one card up his sleeve when the party demands to know where Trashpit is.

Trashpit was captured and imprisoned by Holden to ensure the cooperation of the ratfolk. If the party wants to see Trashpit alive, they're going to have to give Holden and the other ratfolk a few hours to finish their work uninterrupted. Only then will Trashpit be returned.

Conveniently, the party's assorted magical abilities are able to repair the sewer issue in about the time it takes for Trashpit to be returned. Trashpit is weak and famished from being caged up and not fed very well, but Daffodil digs through their pack and finds a length of hemp rope that is for... Other Purposes. But they also find a handful of maggots in some food that wasn't packed properly. Trashpit feasts upon the offering and then has a joyous reunion with his favorite Tall Lady. Daffodil and Lucky excuse themselves from the reunion because they don't want to see a reunion tithe getting collected.

While Spleenifer and Trashpit are basking in the post-tithing glow, Trashpit mentions that he was being kept in a warehouse of some kind where people would bring in lots of rings. More than could reasonably fit on all your fingers, even if you had more than the usual amount of fingers. Bags and bags of rings. And with that, Trashpit collapses into a blissful slumber in Spleenifer's arms.

Once out of the sewers, Lucky suggests taking a detour by the constable's office to see what's become of Garry (and also to see what Silas needed). And Garry's fate involves pretty much what you would expect to happen to someone who gives a robbery note to the constable. Yep, Garry's in jail.

Silas is happy to see our band of crafty adventurers, because they have gifted him with a source of information who gave up all sorts of information. Silas's original plan was to ask the party to keep an eye out for potential break-ins during their daily work-activities. There's been a rash of burglaries, but the only things stolen were rings. No one saw the burglars, but several of the houses had empty bottles of JUICED! energy drink nearby and/or some intestinal skidmarks on the window frames.

But thanks to Garry (who insists he isn't directly involved in this stuff, of course), Silas knows of a place that you DEFINITELY don't want to go to if you have rings and want to keep them. He gives the party an address of where crimes are almost certainly going to be committed tonight, and asks the party to stay away. Everyone except for Spleenifer is fluent in winks and subtext, and thus makes a plan to do the exact opposite of what Silas is suggesting.

Lucky casts Seeming and outfits everyone with an ostentatious amount of rings on their fingers, before splitting the party up to make appearances and get noticed about town. Hilaria accompanies Lucky on a date to acquire a perfectly-balanced sword, before going out to a nice dinner at a place where the lights really glint off the all the jewelry.

Daffodil, meanwhile, will play a show at Uggo's Rag Shack. Spleenifer's never been to a place where dancing was conventionally allowed or encouraged before, so she wants to see what the fuss is about. But first, Spleenifer needs to offset the potential sinful allure of dancing by placing lots of wreaths on the headstones in the cemetery.

By sunset, the wreaths are on the graves and Daffodil is playing some excellent metal music on their hurdy gurdy. The crowd is thoroughly amped up when Spleenifer arrives. Daffodil notices an older man in the audience eyeing their rings more than the other people.

Once the bass drops, Spleenifer feels the music course through her body. "Glory be to God," she yells to the dance floor. "Let's do the lawnmower!" She then plants her face upon the ground and mows through the crowd to raucous cheers.

After the conclusion of the song, Daffodil takes a break to mingle and keep an eye on the mysterious stranger as someone puts on a Barbena Bloodkith single to keep the dance floor hopping. The stranger's eyes still nonchalantly follow Daffodil's rings wherever they go.

The stranger leaves with bulky backpack around 10PM that night, which is COMPLETELY COINCIDENTALLY (wink wink) the time the party retires for the evening at a house in a crime-infested neighborhood. The party sets up some traps, Home Alone style and waits.

Lucky casts Mage Armor to appear like a nightgown and then claims the largest bed in the house. Spleenifer meditates in prayer in another room, while Daffodil is couch surfing. The scene is set!

Around 1 in the morning, the mysterious stranger sneaks through Daffodil's window. Ever the consummate performer, Daffodil feigns sleep as the stranger starts looking for stuff to loot. As he leaves the room, he hits the tripwire Daffodil left and falls flat on his thieving face.

Everyone leaps into action with various levels of preparedness. Spleenifer and Daffodil jump into the hallway with weapons drawn, while Lucky stumbles into the hallway after having fallen asleep. Lucky helps the wannabe thief up and then goes back to bed.

The thief tries to explain away his presence by saying he had the wrong house and was actually trying to visit a special friend for some nighttime activities that special friends have been known to engage in on occasion. Daffodil's ears perk up at the mention of special friendship. It just so happens that Daffodil has some "special friendship rope" in their pack!

But don't worry, dear readers! Things are not about to take a turn in that direction! It turns out that the party is only interested in getting information out of our restrained special burglar friend! Daffodil runs point on the interrogation, with Spleenifer offering "moral support" by standing ominously in the shadows of the hallway with her quarterstaff smacking against her palms in an uncomfortably meaty fashion.

The burglar claims his name is Yance Elbereth, a trader of antiquities. He's working with some other people to steal a bunch of rings for his boss, a woman he knows only as Z. Apparently Z is working with Brynnan, but she would like some sort of leverage over him to ensure his continued loyalty. There was a magic ring Brynnan was looking for, and since no one knew exactly what sort of ring to look for, they just took all the rings they could find and hoped one of them was the one Brynnan needed.

Daffodil searches Yance's backpack, and finds some stuff that corroborates his story. There are spell components, vials of drugs, lots of rings, and a battered ram's horn. When they ask about the ram's horn, Yance says that he was contracted by Brynnan to retrieve a horn like this. From Yance's account, Brynnan recently came into a lot of money which is how Yance is getting paid to find the horn. He was planning on visiting Brynnan later and using the horn as a pretext to search for the ring.

If Yance is some sort of double agent, he could be useful to the party. Daffodil releases Yance and sends him on his way into the night. Minus several of his possessions, which Daffodil is keeping as payment for their trouble. They take a fancy cloak, the spell components, drugs, and rings, but leaves the ram's horn and the bottle of JUICED! with Yance as the adventure concludes for the evening.

Stay tuned next time for more!

For the week of 14 October 2019

Quick Bits:

Absolute Carnage #4 is pretty damn big as we head towards the conclusion. Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Jay Leisten, Frank Martin, and Clayton Cowles set up near insurmountable odds for Eddie and Spider-Man to face, as Carnage inches closer to victory. It’s very daunting, especially as we potentially see hope fade as other dominoes fall into place. Though a shock revelation might lead to something good for the conclusion. The tension mounting and the continued blend of the rest of the tie-ins to the main story are very entertaining.

| Published by Marvel

Absolute Carnage: Avengers #1 gives us a lead-in to how the previously symbiote-afflicted heroes got to Venom in Absolute Carnage #3 in addition to a bit about beacons in New York and San Francisco calling all symbiotes to feed something. It’s more elaboration on some details between panels for the event, but it’s rather entertaining and covers an element that was otherwise glossed over in the main series. Great art from Alberto Alburquerque, Guiu Vilanova, and Rachelle Rosenberg.

| Published by Marvel

Aquaman #53 reveals more about Thomas Mauer and his history in the founding of Amnesty, complete with some really weird powers regarding manifesting beasties. Then, a reunion of Arthur and Mera is basically aborted as Black Manta attack. Kelly Sue DeConnick, Robson Rocha, Eduardo Pansica, Daniel Henriques, Julio Ferreira, Sunny Gho, and Clayton Cowles continue to deliver one of the best stories from DC.

| Published by DC Comics

Archie #708 sees everything start to come together as all of the disparate story threads begin to converge somehow with Fox Forest. Nick Spencer, Mariko Tamaki, Sandy Jarrell, Matt Herms, and Jack Morelli really build tension here, with a rather spooky feel for what’s going on.

| Published by Archie Comics

Batman #81 continues this next stage of Batman’s assault on the “City of Bane” as all of his “kids” work together to try to take down his father and he attempts to bring the fight to Bane himself. Tom King guides us through a narration essentially putting together some of the missing pieces in Gotham Girl’s story and further protections that he left in the city after Batman’s “breaking”.

| Published by DC Comics

Bettie Page Unbound #5 serves as a coda to the first arc, from David Avallone, Moy R, Ellie Wright, Sheelagh D, and Taylor Esposito. It gives a bit of perspective on Bettie’s trip through alternate realities, while dealing a bit more with the spies who’ve been chasing her.

| Published by Dynamite

The Black Ghost #2 is firing on all cylinders. The story that Alex Segura, Monica Gallagher, George Kambadais, Ellie Wright, and Taylor Esposito are telling here is incredibly compelling, going deep into Lara’s downward spiral following the death of the Black Ghost and all of the mounting problems in her life. There’s a very interesting theme of the intersection of solving a mystery and obsession, complete with the black hole of alcoholism, that just grabs you.

| Published by New Wave Comics

Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda #2 concludes this opening arc from Jim Zub, Lan Medina, Craig Yeung, Marcio Menyz, and Joe Sabino. We get an interesting mix of Okoye and Janet facing their greatest fears, while elaborating further on the current state of the Sentry. I like this quick, two-part introductory arc structure, further giving this title the feel of a specialized group for certain threats.

| Published by Marvel

Captain Marvel #11 concludes the “Falling Star” arc, revealing more fallout from the first arc and the sheer damage that it’s done to Ripley after she fell into the Nuclear Man’s reality. Kelly Thompson, Carmen Carnero, Tamra Bonvillain, and Clayton Cowles develop a rather demented look on “heroism” here that is quite disturbing.

| Published by Marvel

Chastity #2 unveils more of the human trafficking operation that Chastity has found herself in. It’s not very pretty, but there are some nice funny moments to break up the dark subject matter. Leah Williams, David Maine, Bryan Valenza, and Carlos M. Mangual are telling an interesting story here.

| Published by Dynamite

Contagion #3 continues to escalate the terror of the fungus plaguing New York, and now possibly beyond. There are appearances here of some very interesting near forgotten characters that are nice to see. Great art from Mack Chater, Stephen Segovia, Veronica Gandini, and Andrew Crossley.

| Published by Marvel

Cult Classic: Creature Feature #1 is an interesting start to this second series. You don’t need to have read Return to Whisper before this, but I still highly recommend that series. Here Eliot Rahal, John Bivens, Jerrie, Monahan, and Taylor Esposito kick off a rather hectic beginning with alien creatures. The art from Bivens, Jerrie, and Monahan is wonderful.

| Published by Vault

Dark Red #7 continues to develop the current state of the vampires after taking out the Nazis who were trying to take over, while Chip works to get the little were back to her werepeople. Definitely an interesting society that Tim Seeley, Corin Howell, Mark Englert, and Carlos M. Mangual are creating here.

| Published by AfterShock

Excellence #6 concludes the first arc in rather spectacular fashion. Brandon Thomas, Khary Randolph, Emilio Lopez, and Deron Bennett have been doing some excellent character and world-building in this story and it really pays off here as we get a confrontation between Spencer and his dad, followed by one hell of a revelation that practically changes everything. Great stuff here.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Gideon Falls #17 begins “The Pentoculus” as things start to coalesce again into a sort of “normalcy” in both of our “main” Gideon Falls realities, even as something horrible takes hold of Sheriff Miller’s father. Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, Dave Stewart, and Steve Wands establish even more horror here and the feeling that something more is very, very wrong.

| Published by Image

Guardians of the Galaxy #10 catches up with the new baby Magus as we find out that the new incarnation might be as dangerous and deadly as the earlier ones. Also, what Donny Cates is doing with Rocket just cuts to the core.

| Published by Marvel

Hit Girl: Season 2 #9 is the first part of “India” from Peter Milligan, Alison Sampson, Tríona Farrell, and Clem Robins. It sends Mindy off to the street of Mumbai where she’s trying to deal with a bizarre child trafficking/labour ring, and finding out that her actions may have caused more complications than good. There’s a very different feel to this new arc so far.

| Published by Image

Inferior 5 #2 sure is...something. I’m still not entirely sure of the experiments or the characters or the setting, but Jeff Lemire, Keith Giffen, Michelle Delecki, Hi-Fi, and Rob Leigh are doing something that might be interesting here when we see a broader picture. It’s very “huh?” issue to issue so far. The back-up featuring Peacemaker, though, continues to be very compelling. Especially as it reveals that he may well be completely insane.

| Published by DC Comics

The Island of Doctor Moreau #2 concludes this adaptation of the HG Wells story from Ted Adams, Gabriel Rodríguez, Nelson Dániel, and Robbie Robbins. Other than a few minor changes, it’s fairly faithful to the original. The story here is mostly told in double page spreads from Rodríguez and Dániel and they’re absolutely beautiful.

| Published by IDW

Justice League #34 reminds us that revenge isn’t necessarily the correct path to take all the time, or possibly any time, as the endgame plays out across the different timelines and the combined forces gather for one final push against Perpetua. Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Bruno Redondo, Howard Porter, Hi-Fi, and Tom Napolitano lay out a wonderful tale of the final battle and a stupid, selfish act that has possibly doomed everything.

| Published by DC Comics

Killer Groove #5 concludes what has been an excellent crime tale from Ollie Masters, Eoin Marron, Jordie Bellaire, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. There’s an incredible nihilism here that feeds into a very fitting end.

| Published by AfterShock

KI-6: Killers #4 gains a bit of a title change with the “KI-6″ bit in this penultimate issue of the series. Not really sure why, but it doesn’t ultimately make a difference for the story being told by B. Clay Moore, Fernando Dagnino, José Villarrubia, and Jeff Powell. We get a nice bit of the Jonin’s history before the two rival groups of former Ninjas show up.

| Published by Valiant

The Marked #1 begins a new series from the Sonata team of David Hine, Brian Haberlin, Geirrod Van Dyke, and Francis Takenaga. It blends magic and tattoos as we learn of the history of a group of magicians who have defended the world from evil through the eyes of their newest recruit Saskia. Beautiful art as usual from the Haberlin/Van Dyke team.

| Published by Image / Shadowline

The Mask: I Pledge Allegiance to the Mask #1 is kind of a strange return for the property, in a story from Christopher Cantwell, Patric Reynolds, Lee Loughridge, and Nate Piekos. It’s dark and deranged, which fits very well overall. While it does follow on from the previous stories, all that you really need to know to enjoy this story itself is revealed here. The political element adds an even greater feeling of being put off-balance.

| Published by Dark Horse

Midnight Vista #2 very nicely develops what Oliver remembers of his abduction and the fallout that has been happening in the ensuing years since he’s been missing. Eliot Rahal, Clara Meath, Mark Englert, and Taylor Esposito are doing some interesting things here, especially as other forces are trying to guide Oliver’s story.

| Published by AfterShock

Psi-Lords #5 elaborates a bit further on the societal structure of the Gyre and the various gangs on it, while we see one of the Starwatchers try to turn Steve. It’s interesting as we get a little bit that gives us more of an insight into the ties to the broader Valiant Universe here and some very nice character building. Renato Guedes art remains phenomenal.

| Published by Valiant

Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons - Chapter II: Painscape #2 guides us through some of Rick’s history with D&D, creating some horrible characters that anyone who’s played the game will be familiar with, and an entertaining dungeon crawl. I’m still loving how perfectly Jim Zub, Troy Little, Leonardo Ito, and Crank! are integrating D&D into Rick and Morty.

| Published by Oni Press & IDW

Rumble #17 follows a similar format as last issue’s selection of three stories, only this time there are only two stories, with one split between two different creators. That two-part story is a wonderful crossover between Rumble and Head Lopper, with Andrew MacLean and James Harren handling the line art. It’s pretty great overall, with a natural melding of the two properties, and very nice to see Harren’s return. 

| Published by Image

Savage Sword of Conan #10 begins a new arc from Roy Thomas, Alan Davis, Cam Smith, Chris Sotomayor, and Travis Lanham. It’s wonderful to see a new Roy Thomas story and the art from Davis, Smith, and Sotomayor is great. The story itself is interesting, drawing from some traditional Conan elements of a tavern fight and being hired as a bodyguard.

| Published by Marvel

Savage Tales: Red Sonja Halloween Special is essential if you’re reading the ongoing Red Sonja series. It works well on its own as well, but for readers of the series it builds on Sonja’s trip to the tower of sorcerers in her youth and gives some great insight into her past. Wonderful work here overall from Mark Russell, Jacob Edgar, Dearbhla Kelly, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.

| Published by Dynamite

Something is Killing the Children #2 is even better than the first issue, fleshing out our monster hunter a bit and causing all sorts of complications for her. There are some great characterizations here, nicely capturing some of the reactions from people experiencing the tragedy of a lost or murdered family member. James Tynion IV, Werther Dell’Edera, Miquel Muerto, and AndWorld Design are doing something great here.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Star Wars Adventures: Return to Vader’s Castle #3 gives us a central story of Ventress hunting a quarry, illustrated by Nick Brokenshire. I’m still very much enjoying how Cavan Scott is using the central tale and its context to elaborate on what he, Francesco Francavilla, and AndWorld Design are doing with the framing story.

| Published IDW

Steeple #2 features all of the charm and humour of Giant Days, but then adds some rather over-the-top supernatural elements that just manages to elevate that charm and humour further. John Allison, Sarah Stern, and Jim Campbell are delivering a rather wholesome look at monster hunting and finding common ground with your local hooligans and Satanists.

| Published by Dark Horse

Strayed #3 advances towards oblivion, as Lou finds the flower-maker and the Premier enacts another piece of his plan for total control. Carlos Giffoni, Juan Doe, and Matt Krotzer continue to tell the heartbreaking tale of this brave little kitty being used and abused by his humans. It’s really sad as to how monstrous humanity is.

| Published by Dark Horse

Superman Smashes the Klan #1 is really damn good. Inspired by the radio serial of the same name, Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru, and Janice Chiang present a wonderfully nuanced tale of the struggle that a young Chinese family have moving to Metropolis and the overt and casual racism that greets them. The characterizations of the family are impeccable, giving us what feels like very real people, and it makes the story even more heartbreaking when you see what’s happening to them. Especially through the gorgeous art from the Gurihiru pair.

| Published by DC Comics

Tales from the Dark Multiverse - Batman: Knightfall #1 is the first of these one-shots examining some of the most popular events of the DC Universe as they played out in dark reflection. Your enjoyment of this will definitely be predicated on how much you enjoy the grim and gritty Batmen who went wrong during Metal. As a story, though, Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgins, Javier Fernandez, Alex Guimarães, and Clayton Cowles give us an interesting one, with some nice twists, and a suitably bleak Gotham. The art from Fernandez and Guimarães is really good.

| Published by DC Comics

Teen Titans #35 gives us new perspective on the traitor to the team, with Adam Glass, Bernard Chang, Marcelo Maiolo, and Rob Leigh building up sympathy for their decisions, even if they are somewhat demented. It also continues to point that what Damian has been doing is rather villainous. The shades of grey are fairly interesting.

| Published by DC Comics

Trees: Three Fates #2 delves a bit more into the mystery of the dead man and also a great depiction in the past of the romance blossoming between Klara and Sasha. Warren Ellis, Jason Howard, Dee Cunniffe, and Fonografiks are building a very compelling story here, complete with some interesting big ideas to make you wonder about Sasha.

| Published by Image

Vampirella #4 is still rather odd, told in a rather disjointed way that’s pretty much Priest’s style to its natural extreme. Weird stuff with the nuns and all sorts of temptation. The art from Ergün Gündüz remains a huge draw for this story.

| Published by Dynamite

X-Men #1 begins the first wave of the “Dawn of X” titles in this next stage of the brave new world the X-Men have found themselves in, from Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu, Garry Alanguilan, Sunny Gho, and Clayton Cowles. It’s much more “normal” compared to the HOXPOX event, operating more standard hero/villain conflict and setting up the continued threat of Orchis, but there are still moments to bask in the new with Magneto and the potentially unsettling as we see Corsair react to all of his family together and the strangeness of Krakoa. This feels like a way to make more traditional X-elements work within this new framework, giving us a great start.

| Published by Marvel

Other Highlights: Absolute Carnage: Scream #3, Absolute Carnage vs. Deadpool #3, Aero #4, Analog #9, Ask for Mercy - Season 2 #3, Captain America #15, Crazy #1, The Crow/Hack/Slash #4, Dead Beats, Death-Defying Devil #3, Firefly #10, History of the Marvel Universe #4, Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - Alliance #2, Lucifer #13, Marvel Action: Black Panther #4, Once & Future #3, The Realm #15, Sparrows Roar, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #4, Titans: Burning Rage #3, Wonder Woman: Come Back to Me #4

Recommended Collections: Bad Luck Chuck - Volume 1, Black Hammer: Streets of Spiral, Calamity Kate - Volume 1, Coda - Volume 3, Critical Role: Vox Machina - Origins - Volume 1, Gideon Falls - Volume 3: Stations of the Cross, Goddess Mode, Gogor, Justice League Dark - Volume 2: Lords of Order, The Life & Death of Toyo Harada, Ms. Marvel - Volume 1, Planet of the Nerds - Volume 1, Robots & Princesses - Volume 1, Runaways - Volume 4: But You Can’t Hide, Spider-Man: City at War, Star Wars: Tie Fighter

d. emerson eddy still thinks that Pumpkin Spice was the most underutilized of the Spice Girls.

‘The Dialectic of Sex’ supports trans inclusion. Here’s why.

The dot points:

DoS states that while gender is rooted in biological division of childrearing labour, there is no reason for this to continue in a modern society

DoS comments on a divide between actual equality-seeking feminism, and “reformers” who want discriminatory protective laws

DoS states that feminists must seek equality for not only female people, but non-female humans who are also oppressed by systems which enforce biological sex division, such as childhood

DoS condemns the way that women can be physically divided into “castes”, and turned against each other to reinforce patriarchal values

DoS states that all of “men’s” culture and “women’s” culture must be merged

DoS argues for free availability of both contraceptives for women, and artificial reproductive technology & acceptance of non-biological offspring, as a requirement for ending the reproductive servitude of female humans

DoS claims that there is no biological basis to strict homo/heterosexuality based upon the sex of the other party; instead, Firestone believes that in a non-patriarchal system, the sex of a person’s romantic partner would have no major role in sexuality

Go through the readmore for the quotes and full summary.

DoS states that while gender is rooted in biological division of childrearing labour, there is no reason for this to continue.

I often reference Simone De Beauvior for her 1940’s writing ‘The Second Sex’, which contained the quote, “not all females are necessarily women”. And ‘The Dialectic of Sex’ in its entirety is actually dedicated to Ms De Beauvior; Firestone discusses her ideas in the first chapter, and builds upon them.

“Unlike economic class, sex class sprang from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equally privileged. Although, as De Beauvior points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system - the domination of one group by another - the reproductive functions of these differences did. […] The need for power leading to the development of classes arises from the psychosexual formation of each individual according to his basic imbalance, rather than […] some irreducible conflict of Life against Death, Eros vs. Thanatos.”

This view, that the functions of biological reproduction led to the patriarchal system, are inherent to radical feminism. Ms Firestone discusses this at length, but does not agree that a system rooted in biology is required, or even good.

“Though a sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away women and children will be free. On the contrary, the new technology, especially fertility control, may be used against them to reinforce the entrenched system of exploitation.”

Fertility control here refers to the at-that-time-current issue of women’s access to contraceptives and abortions without a husband’s approval. But ultimately, Ms Firestone wishes to completely disregard with biological sex’s role in childbearing and society:

“But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute. […] ‘Natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origin in nature.”

DoS comments on a divide between actual equality-seeking feminism, and “reformers” who want discriminatory protective laws.

In the second chapter, ‘On American Feminism’, there is one very interesting tidbit discussing the differences between feminists who truly want equality, and “the reformers” who want discriminatory protective laws.

“Even worse than the conservative feminists were the increasing number of women who, with their new-found bit of freedom, jumped enthusiastically into all the radicalisms of the day, the various social reform movements of the Processive Era, even when at odds with feminist interests (Consider the old debate about discriminatory “protective” labour laws for women. Margaret Rhondda, Britain’s leading post-World War 1 feminist, put it this way: ‘One may divide the women in the women’s movement into two groups: the Feminists and the reformers who are not in the least Feminists; who do not care tuppence about equality for itself.’)”

I’m sure plenty of TERFs would state that intersectional and trans-positive feminists are the sort who “jumped enthusiastically into all the radicalisms of the day”; however, the question of who is the real feminist side, and who are the “reformers”, depends on what is really “at odds with feminist interests”. If trans exclusion is, as I believe, at odds with feminist interests - then TERFs are the reformers; but otherwise, we are.

DoS States that feminists must seek equality for not only female people, but non-female people who are also oppressed by systems which enforce biological sex division.

Things get interesting in the comparisons of childhood to femininity:

“In each case a physical difference has been enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear “natural,” even instinctive, an exaggeration process that enables easy stereotyping: the individual eventually appears to be a different kind of human animal with its own peculiar set of laws and behaviours (“I’ll never understand women!” … “You don’t know a thing about child psychology!”).” & “The interrelated myths of femininity and childhood were the instruments of this oppression.”

Radical feminism here, Ms Firestone discusses, requires the breakdown of not only the idea of femininity, but the idea of childhood; the “modern” family unit of the 1970’s & 80’s keeps a male member in charge of a fertile female person and their offspring; this is the ultimate root of patriarchy.

But then, she says something very very interesting about feminists having to stand up for children:

“We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution or we will be subject to the same failing of which we have so often accused men: of not having gone deep enough in our analysis, of having missed an important substratum of oppression merely because it didn’t directly concern us.”

Since the oppression of children and women is intimately linked, feminism must stand for freedom of children from mistreatment and parental oppression. I would argue that very much on the same vein, the oppression of women is reliant on the punishment of gender-variant people, and particularly “males” who take on women’s social roles. As a result, feminists must stand for trans women’s rights as well; else they are guilty of “having missed an important substratum of oppression merely because it didn’t directly concern us”.

DoS condemns the way that women can be physically divided into “castes”, and turned against each other to reinforce patriarchal values

In the chapter, ‘Sexism: The Racism of The Family Of Man’, Firestone discusses how black women and white women have historically been turned against each other due to their different levels of privilege and legitimacy as women.

“The black woman is jealous of the white woman’s legitimacy, privilege, and comfort, but she also feels deep contempt: white women are “frigid bitches” who have it too easy, leaving black women to do all their white woman’s work - from supplying their husbands’ sex/passion needs and taking care of their children to doing the literal dirty work (“help”). […] [T]he white woman’s contempt for the black woman is mixed with envy: for the black woman’s greater sexual license, for her gutsiness, for her freedom from the marriage bind. For after all, the black woman is not under the thumb of a man, but is pretty much her own boss to come and go, to leave the house, to work (much as it is degrading work) or to be shiftless.”

A mirror of this kind of mutual antagonism among women due to patriarchy would be transgender women and cisgender women. Transgender women are, understandably, often jealous of cis women’s legitimacy, privilege, and safety; cisgender women feel envy for the ways that transgender women aren’t oppressed, and they are. Much like the white woman in the above example by Firestone, cisgender women are objectively wealthier and safer than counterparts on average; but their attention is drawn to the ways that they are limited, that transgender women aren’t, precisely to create antagonism and divide women.

Firestone summarises it very succinctly, I believe:

“Their long antagonism makes it hard for them to trade the valuable (and painful) lessons they have learned about The Man.”

DoS states that all the way from the culture of romance to in academics, typically “men’s” culture and “women’s” culture must be merged together, for access by all, and changed in order to do so

The following two chapters are on the topic of sexual and romantic love in a patriarchal world; on the idea that “romantic” love itself in heteronormative culture treats the woman as an object.

“He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies. Though she knew his love to be false, since she herself engineered it, she can’t help feeling contempt for him. […] She feels cheated. She has gotten not love and recognition, but possessorship and control. This is when she is transformed from Blushing Bride to Bitch, a change that, no matter how universal and predictable, still leaves the individual husband perplexed”

Firestone also discusses specifically how the strong US culture of no platonic contact plays into this patriarchal system.

“1) Eroticism. A prime component of romanticism is eroticism. All animal needs […] for love and warmth are channelled into genital sex: people must never touch others of the same sex, and may touch those of the opposite sex only when preparing for a genital sexual encounter […] Isolation from others makes people starved for physical affection; and if the only kind they can get is genital sex, that’s soon all they crave.”

These issues in living in the patriarchy are, for all intents and purposes, universal; you are labelled either a subject or an object in romantic love. This happens on a cultural level; there is nothing inherently objectifying about female love; Firestone goes as far as to say that the issue is that “Men can’t love.”

In the next chapter, Firestone moves onto examining the impact of the “sex role system” on art:

“[T]he difference between the “male” approach to art and the “female” is not, as some like to think, simply a difference of “style” in treating the same subject matter (personal, subjective, emotional, descriptive vs. vigorous, spare, hardhitting, cool, objective) but the very subject matter itself. The sex role system divides human experience; men and women live in these different halves of reality; and culture reflects this.”

This essentially describes how men’s art (“high art”, technical design, etc.) is so wildly different to authentic women’s art (and it has a long discussion on the difference between “authentic” women’s art, and art created by women in a men’s environment).

The next chapter, ‘Dialectics of Cultural History’, branches this argument out even further: not only does the sex role system corrupt romance, love, and art, it corrupts our technology and our society:

“[M]odern science has been determined by [sex duality]. […] C. P. Snow was the first to note what had been increasingly obvious: a deep fissure in cultural - the liberal arts and the sciences had become incomprehensible to each other. […] These are some of the modern symptoms of a long cultural disease based on sex dualism.”

The discussion also centres on the way that an artificially masculine “pure” science is in fact dangerous; by labelling social sciences and caring “women’s” subjects, there is a significant risk:

“As long as man is still engaged only in the means - the charting of the ways of nature, the gathering of “pure” knowledge - to his final realization, mastery of nature, his knowledge, because it is not complete, is dangerous.”

Firestone is also very optimistic on the current state of this, arguing that we may not be “in the transition pre-revolutionary period, in which the three separate cultural streams, technology (“applied science”), “pure research” and “pure” modern art, will melt together - along with the rigid sex categories they reflect.” Again, there is a call for the complete reunification of the sexes at all levels of society.

DoS argues for free availability of both contraceptives for women, and artificial reproductive technology & acceptance of non-biological offspring, as a requirement for ending the reproductive servitude of female humans

The chapter ‘Feminism and Ecology’, primarily discusses the problem of overpopulation and proposes that limiting birth control for women is not only bad for women, it’s bad for the world; it is selfish, and patriarchal. There is also a brief discussion on the use of artificial reproductive technology; it in fact argues that:

“[U]ntil the decision to not have children or not to have them “naturally” is at least as legitimate as traditional childbearing, women are as good as forced into their female roles.”

The note on having children “naturally” was discussing primarily IVF in this time, as it was a new issue. But the point remains that not only is contraceptive highly important, but artificial fertility is also highly important. Firestone is positive about the possibilities of new technology to reproduction:

“Artificial reproduction is not inherently dumanizing. At very least, development of an option should make possible an honest reexamination of the ancient value of motherhood.”

Given lack of quotes to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that DoS doesn’t support the application of artificial reproductive technology to allow “male” people to fully take on women’s roles in society.

DoS claims that there is no biological basis to strict homo/heterosexuality based upon the sex of the other party; instead, Firestone believes that in a non-patriarchal system, the sex of a person’s romantic partner would have no major role in sexuality.

With this, we reach the conclusion. Firestone gives 4 demands for any alternative system to the patriarchy:

1. The freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology. by every means available, and the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women. […] To thus free women from their biology would be to threaten the social unit that is organized around biological reproduction and the subjection of women to their biological destiny, the family. […]

This ultimately supports “males” taking on women’s childbearing and social roles as a method of freeing women from biological servitude.

2. The full self-determination, including economic independence, of both women and children. […] We are talking about more than fair integration into the labour force; we are talking about the abolition of the labor force itself under a cybernetic socialism, the radical restructuring of the economy to make “work” i.e., wage labor, no longer necessary. […]

This one is a socialist demand; but note that it demands economic independence for both women and children. Presumably this includes male children (who may, in this post-revolution world, become women).

3. The total integration of women and children into all aspects of larger society. All institutions that segregate the sexes, or bar children from adult society, e.g. elementary school, must be destroyed.

This relates back to the idea of discriminatory “protective” laws being against feminist interests; protecting women by targeted discrimination does not necessarily equate to feminist interests, in Firestone’s view.

And the final, and most interesting one on a trans-inclusive front, is this:

4. The freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually. […] In our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality - all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.

“Humanity would revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality” - that’s right, Firestone here thinks that rigid gender-based sexualities come directly from the patriarchal society we live in. Firestone believes that we’d all have indefineable polymorphous, not necessarily sex-related sexualities in a truly equal world.

ION BEAMS AND ATOM SMASHERS: SECRETS OF MOON ROCKS On July 20, 1969, as Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder from the “Eagle” lunar landing module, he found himself surrounded by a sea of grey -- an expanse of powdery dust no human had ever seen in person. The iconic print made by his left boot marked but the first step on a long journey of discoveries about the Moon and our own world -- both of which hold secrets that scientists are only beginning to uncover. Fifty years after the Apollo astronauts collected samples of Moon rocks and dust during their forays across the lunar landscape, there are still mysteries to be solved, and one University of Arizona scientist is looking for answers. Jessica Barnes, an incoming assistant professor in the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, was recently selected by NASA to receive access to preciously unopened Moon rock samples. Under NASA’s Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis, or ANGSA, program, Barnes will be granted access to Apollo 17 sample 71036, which contains almost four ounces of rock. Several samples from that mission were initially processed under nominal laboratory conditions, protected from air exposure by a nitrogen cabinet at room temperature, and placed into cold storage within one month of return. “When these samples were brought back, the curators had the foresight to say, ‘In this moment, we don’t have all the methods to answer all the questions these samples could help us answer,’ and so they locked some away for future study,” Barnes says. “They realized that future technologies would allow us to do things that would have been impossible at the time, and that people would come up with new questions. It’s really exciting because we’re at that point in time now.” Barnes is on a quest to find out where water came from in the early solar system and how it has evolved over time. Previous research, including some of her own work, suggests that certain space rocks known as carbonaceous chondrites brought water with them when they impacted Earth and Mars, and potentially some of the larger asteroids. It is no coincidence that Bennu, the target asteroid of the UA-led OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, is a carbonaceous chondrite. “To understand where water in the solar system came from, and particularly how it ended up on Earth, Mars, and in the asteroid belt, we have to consider the Moon,” says Barnes, whose current research focuses on tracing water meteorites, including some of Martian origin, and Moon samples collected during Apollo 11, 14, and 17. “Understanding how life on Earth began is intimately tied to the story of how water arrived here. Lunar samples are critical pieces in this puzzle because unlike Earth, where the oldest rocks have largely been erased by plate tectonics, the Moon’s ancient rock record is still intact.” About 4.6 billion years ago, when a swirling nebula of gas and dust began collapsing into a disk that would give rise to our solar system, the rocky planets and the carbonaceous chondrites were developing in different places and at different times, Barnes explains, which poses a problem for the scenario involving early asteroids as harbingers of water. “It was only 10 years ago that water was discovered on the Moon, not only on the surface, but also inside minerals,” Barnes says. “In science, that is a pretty short timescale, and we don’t have it all figured out yet. How much water is there? Did it come from the Earth during the great impact that we think created the Moon, or was it given to the Moon later? Is it distributed uniformly or in patches within the Moon’s mantle?” To find answers to such questions, Barnes, who wasn’t even born when the Apollo astronauts crisscrossed the lunar surface on foot and with their rovers, is using technology that wasn’t invented until the early 2000s. “When you first receive your sample, you don’t know what you are looking at, so you start with a visual analysis,” Tom Zega says, pointing to a simple dissecting microscope, like the ones used in introductory science labs. Zega is an associate professor of planetary sciences, and materials science and engineering, and co-investigator on the ANGSA project. He also is director of the Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility at the LPL, a state-of-the-art facility designed with one goal: extract as much information as possible from samples, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Studying a piece of Moon rock under an optical microscope is only the first step in a series of analytical techniques UA researchers have at their disposal. At the end is a 12-foot-tall transmission electron microscope, or TEM. Funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, its serial number is “1” because it is the first of its kind in the world with this exact configuration. Its 200,000-volt electron beam can probe matter down to 78 picometers, scales too small for the human brain to comprehend. “If you want to know what an atom from the birth of our solar system looks like, I can show you,” Zega says. To get a sample to where it gives up that much detail of its origin and history, however, requires a suite of complex instruments and expertise that no single discipline can provide. “Today, all the interesting science happens at the intersection of various fields,” Zega added. “In my group, we have cosmochemists, quantum chemists, astrophysicists and astrodynamics, among others. This work requires a unique mix of knowledge and skills. Take the TEM, for example: it’s a quantum-mechanical tool, so you have to be an expert in physics, materials science and chemistry, all at the same time.” Another instrument, called an electron microprobe, allows researchers to discover certain properties of a sample by scanning it with an electron beam. As it does, a spatial image of the sample emerges, in this case revealing an abstract, speckled landscape of light and dark areas that cosmochemists can read like a map. “Heavier elements appear brighter, and lighter elements appear darker,” Zega says. “So this tells us, for example, where and how much iron there is compared to oxygen in a lunar sample.” When Barnes moves to the UA this fall, after wrapping up her current research at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, she hopes to be able to expand the capacities of the Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility with a next-generation NanoSIMS instrument, which stands for nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry. The beauty of this technology, she says, lies in its ability to analyze isotopes, essentially different “varieties” of chemical elements, at very small scales -- less than one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. Measuring the composition of different volatile elements such as hydrogen and chlorine in the rock tells the researcher something about the chemical make-up of the magma from which the rock crystallized and how its chemistry evolved over time. “These data allow us to understand the chemistry of the Moon’s interior,” Barnes says. “Ultimately we are able to say something about how the Moon evolved and where its water came from.” The possibilities don’t end here. To a curator during the Apollo days, a focused ion-beam scanning electron microscope, or FIB-SEM, would have sounded like utter science fiction: By smashing the bonds between atoms inside the sample with a beam of heavy gallium ions, the instrument works essentially like a nano scale excavator, Zega explains. “Except that compared to other FIBs, which act like shovels, this one is a scalpel,” he says. FIB-SEM allows scientists to cut out tiny pieces from a sample with high precision and analyze only those pieces. This technique recently enabled Zega’s team to discover a grain of dust forged in the death throes of a star long before our solar system was born. “What we want to know from our samples is, how well do they conform to how we think the solar system formed based on astrophysical models?” Zega says. The same applies to the origin of the Moon, Barnes says. “It’s not just analytical instruments that have improved. In the last 10 years, major advancements in impact simulations and numerical modeling have allowed the community to simulate the speed, size and number of the bodies that might have been involved in creating the Earth-Moon system.” Analyzing samples from extraterrestrial bodies goes beyond the origins of the Earth and the Moon, of course. They are critical pieces in the puzzle because they allow scientists to test hypotheses about formation processes in the solar system based on simulations and models. “We have had lunar samples here for decades,” says Timothy Swindle, director of the LPL. “Our faculty have been studying the composition of the Moon for a long time, and what’s so special about these samples is that they were valuable 50 years ago, and they will be valuable 50 years from now.” “Being able to study these previously unopened samples is like a whole new lunar sample return mission,” Barnes says of the value of studying 50-year-old Apollo samples. “Not only do we get to be a part of the history of opening these samples, but we also will be using this opportunity to study how curation practices, such as ambient versus cold storage, affect our ability to measure a lunar water signature. “It’s exciting because this has never been done before.” TOP IMAGE....A NanoSIMS isotope ratio image showing water-bearing minerals (colors) in a sea of water-poor glass (black) in Apollo sample 10049. These were the last phases to crystallize from the lava as it cooled on the surface of the Moon. The scale bar on the lower left measures about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. (Image: Jessica Barnes) LOWER IMAGE....Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt stands next to a steep-walled crater named Shorty on Dec. 13, 1972. The UA's Jessica Barnes is among the scientists selected by NASA to be granted access to previously unopened samples, including some collected during NASA's last manned mission to the moon. (Photo: NASA)

Trouble’s Afoot - Looking For Parking

A combination of various alternative and indie influences, converging in a very special way.

Trouble’s Afoot is a music project that was conceived by Jordan Cooper, a musician based in Queens, NY. Jordan has a special fondness for indie rock, folk, and other styles, making for an incredibly diverse attitude. Now, the project is actually a 3-piece band, which means there is more room for different sounds and textures! The line-up consists of Jordan Cooper (lead vocals, guitars, and multiple other instruments), as well as Dave Fox (Bass, backing vocals, some guitar) and Christopher Roberts (Drums). The group has a really unique sense of chemistry, and together, these 3 guys are able to combine many different styles. From alt-rock to indie, to pop-rock, anything goes!

“Looking For Parking” features 12 tracks, each blurring the lines between various genres and definitions. In fact, one of the most notable aspects of this particular release is definitely the sheer sonic variety that you will encounter on this here record. The opening song, “A Boy My Age” is a short track (clocking in at under two minutes). After a quirky acoustic intro, the band chimes in at full blast!

“You Say But You Don’t Know” follows with a really infectious guitar riff. This song makes me think of some of the best early British Invasion bands, including The Kinks and The Who (well, before they turned into 70s stadium rock gods!)

The third song on the album is named “Sarah Made A Serenade”, and it has a really cool alt-rock / post-punk vibe, with catchy guitar melodies and great vocal lines. This one precedes “Every Right Hand,” another song under 2 minutes, which packs a lot of energy, in spite of the small footprint! The song leads to “Don’t Be An Idiot.” The attitude of this song is just as upfront as its title, with memorable melodies and great hooks that won’t get out of your mind so easily. This has a cool punk-garage attitude that makes me think of early Cloud Nothings or Wavves!

“And I’m Gone” has a really cool 60s vibe - this song really makes me think of some early Rolling Stones or The Byrds, with a really organic sound and cool vocal arrangements that match the music to perfection.

Coming next is “All I Ever Wanted,” a song with a personal set of lyrics. This is a song about looking for a change - about wanting to overcome one’s backgrounds and “get out,” hopefully somewhere better. “Cellar” is a song that sort of makes me think of Nirvana, not much so for the sound, but for the intriguing lyrics - I like the child-like energy of the wordplay, and somehow the receptiveness of the later motif really works on favor of this track!

“I Care About You” is the classic boy-meets-girl song. This is a very earnest love song, which reminds me of the way I felt when I was a teenager, struggling to really share my feelings and go talk to the girl I had a crush on! Ultimately, this is a very sweet song, with a really cool arrangement and a nice vocal performance to liven it up.

“The Usual Way” is a really edgy track, which immediately strikes for the catchy melodies and a great intro that makes the main chunk of the song even more enticing!

“Everyone Believes Me” is one of the most poignant tracks on the record, and perhaps one of my favorite ones. I love the combination of quality music and good lyrics, and I can definitely relate to the sense of inevitability of life’s end in loneliness, really exposed in the last two lines of this track: “Like all of you, I’m Lined up to die / No one’s ever on my side.”

Last, but decidedly not least, “Dust Town” is a perfect curtain closer for this release. It brings the record full circle, and it really goes a long way, with a poignant and direct arrangement. This song could almost be a lyrical “Cousin” to “All I Ever Wanted” because the themes definitely intersect!

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed the sound and feel of this release! This album has a fresh, young sound, yet it has a tone that reminds me of some of my best records from the 60s, and from the early punk bands of the late 70s as well! In addition to that, this album also makes me think about some of my favorite modern indie groups, such as Cloud Nothings, Courtney Barnett and legends like The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys.

Find out more about Trouble’s Afoot and do not miss out on this project. You can listen to “Looking For Parking” directly through Bandcamp at the following link:

https://troublesafoot.bandcamp.com

We also had the chance to ask the band a few questions: keep reading to learn more!

I love how you manage to render your tracks so personal and organic. Does the melody come first, or do you focus on the lyrics the most?

I’m a songwriter and my songs were written on keyboard and guitar. Sometimes I write lyrics and the melody kind of forms in my head as I sing them to myself, sometimes I find an interesting chord progression and then work a melody onto that, that’s how You Say But You Don’t Know was written.

My drummer took care of the beat. I could not even tell you what he’s doing!

Do you perform live? If so, do you feel more comfortable on a stage or within the walls of the recording studio?

Answer: I stopped performing live regularly around 5 years ago; I find it a stressful endeavor, though I still like to do it once in a while. Being on stage is incredibly uncomfortable, and being in the walls of a recording studio is also uncomfortable. Being on stage is exciting though, sometimes euphorically so, and being in a recording studio is artistically fulfilling (you feel like you’re working on something special, at least when things are going well.) That being said, the hourly cost of a recording studio assures that you can’t feel too comfortable in one.

I’m probably most comfortable in my bedroom studio, but that environment leads to a lot of laziness and procrastination, whereas recordings from a recording studio have a certain urgency and focus to them.

If you could only pick one song to make a “first impression” on a new listener, which song would you pick and why?

Answer: I Care About You. I struggle to find a flaw in it. It rocks my brains. I love my vocal performance (a rare thing for me to admit to), I love how revved up and energetic the band is, I think the mix holds together the most, and I’m really proud of the lyrics. I also love that I put in a recording of my bass player yelling “YYYEAAAHHH!” at the very end. Easy to miss, though.

What does it take to be “innovative” in music?

Answer: I think more about this in a lyrical sense than on the music side of things. It still amazes me to hear songs on the radio with lyrics YOU’VE HEARD 1,000 TIMES BEFORE. I will not let a song out into the world until I’m reasonably sure no one has heard these words sung before. And to do that, I think of specific things from my life that no one else could possibly know about (see: A Boy My Age) or have said already, and hint at them in the lyrics. I do wonder, however, if the general public is concerned with this stuff, considering who the popular artists are these days.

Any upcoming release or tour your way?

Answer: I’d love to go on tour but I don’t know how to do it! And I can’t afford it! It’s 2018, how can anybody? But I do have exciting new releases coming out very soon. My musical project with my girlfriend, Kristen Gudsnuk, which is called “Sally,” has a three-song EP finished up, which will be released shortly on our Bandcamp page and streaming everywhere. It was made in fancy, fancy studios and sounds like a million bucks!

The next Trouble’s Afoot release is already being worked on, it’s a sort of sequel to Looking For Parking, culled from the same drums and bass sessions of that album (12 more songs.) A little darker, a little more focused too. After that, the 3rd Trouble’s Afoot album, made mostly in my bedroom, is called Party Guy, and is a concept album about having a bad time at parties. It’s the most ambitious, exciting music I’ve ever done. It’s actually almost complete, but my gut tells me it’s a perfect “3rd album” instead of a 2nd one.

Anywhere online where curious fans can listen to your music and find out more about you?

Answer: Oh, you bet. My two Trouble’s Afoot home-bases are Bandcamp and Soundcloud. My Bandcamp has all of my official complete albums (including a children’s album I made a long time ago!), but my Soundcloud is full of live songs, demos, instrumentals, etc. It’s exciting!

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/troubles-afoot

Bandcamp: https://troublesafoot.bandcamp.com/music

My main website is www.jordancoopermusic.com, if you are in need of songwriting or composer services. I’ve done music for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and countless Youtube shows, podcasts, etc.!

october 29, 2020, 1:24am

after watching some episodes of other shows, i settled on an episode of david letterman's netflix series with dave chappelle. it was powerful to watch something that referred to events happening this year that have touched my life, that have affected so many lives. and empowering to hear him amplify so many of the values that i have also come to embrace, including community. 

it made me think about my life in the small town i stayed in after college. this town made only slightly bigger by the university that brings in a more diverse range of thinkers and characters than the town itself could ever hope to boast about. i was drawn to this place because i wanted to be closer to thick clusters of trees and farther from dense throngs of people. the electricity of the city had worn me out by seventeen, and i craved an escape from the pace of consumerism that felt foreign and overwhelming to me.

but as i got older within the smaller town's limits, i recognized more and more about how my experiences fit within a bigger context. how certain things that had been more subtle or more covert in pittsburgh were obvious in a place still glaringly white, and glaringly conservative. and the more i realized about the way the town operated, and the way the country operated, and my own place within all of that, i felt more and more disconnected from my literal community. from the place where i liked the trees more than the people.

still i managed to make friends. characters paraded in and out of the tiny gas station on a corner at one of the four intersections in town where i worked part-time for several years. people spoke to me because i was just about the least threatening person, and i was in a subservient role. i had a welcoming aura that had been inviting strangers to open up to me from the time i was a teenager waiting on buses in downtown pittsburgh. that trait followed me into my twenties, and into various customer service positions. as a cashier, i didn't have the freedom to walk away from a customer who decided to unload about his day, his life, his opinions about the state of the country. there was a sense of marginalization that i always felt. a feeling of subversiveness just beneath the surface. and so community for me came to mean the group of people whom i had gravitated toward. whom i had chosen to talk to and listen to. people who stuck around and became close to me, spent time with me, allowed me into their lives and into their families and into their hearts. before long, new friends became people who were precious to me over a decade, and that time grows longer still with so many friends i had the pleasure of meeting in this tiny vortex of interesting and predictable people.

as i get older, i want to be more active in my community. i already know i have a talent for talking with people. for listening. and i know how many people i learned about just from that passive role as a cashier at a gas station. so imagine what i could accomplish with a bit more intention. i've never been much for schmoozing. i also don't believe in selling anything to people. but i know we all have needs, and i believe in working toward making sure everyone's are met. and i know that we stand a much better chance of accomplishing that if we work together, rather than against each other.

there are times that i have really fucked up with people. times when my ego or my perspective has gotten in the way of using a better approach to create dialogue. times when i've talked at someone. or times when my feelings got the best of me, and i spoke before i thought well enough. i think thoughtfulness is definitely something that improves with age and experience, especially if we're conscious about strengthening that muscle. when someone hurts me, there is the part of hurt that is all ego. that is painful. and forgiveness seems always to have two parts--one for forgiving the other person for being human and doing what humans do sometimes which might be lashing out, or projecting, or doing what wounded creatures do. the other for forgiving myself for reacting and getting mad at the person for being human and doing what wounded creatures do. and anyone who denies me permission to make mistakes is not really my friend. but anyone who is not my friend is not my enemy either. and again, ultimately we are both trying to achieve something with progress. with shaping the world around us (and within) toward what we want it to be. and while i cannot control how the other person advances with their own sense of forgiveness, it's never a bad time to engage in some self-reflection and re-evaluate what i have the power to grow within myself, improve within my own behaviors. what the other person does is up to them. and i want only never to hinder their growth. so sometimes stepping back, stepping away from someone is necessary. but the door for dialogue should never close. 

and i think that relates to the bigger picture. the bigger society that we're all a part of. 

tonight, i was thinking as i hung up the fiona apple poster in my room, the construction paper matting badly faded. the cheap plastic poster frame misaligned and taped at the corners to hold it all together. i was thinking about giving permission to people to make mistakes. allowing it. when that idea first comes into my mind, it comes with the assumption that people will learn from their mistakes, and become better. smarter. more compassionate. but there is an error to that thinking, because it assumes that people must be better than what they are, and that they are not worthy of forgiveness unless they evolve from their mistakes. we punish a child with the intention of teaching them to think and behave more appropriately. but children repeat behaviors, pushing the extent of our boundaries and still receiving forgiveness because it takes time to learn certain lessons. if that patience is not applied to adults, then everyone is doomed to failure. not only that, but we withhold love from people we deem as not acting right.

somewhere in my heart i know that i have to love my neighbor. and somewhere else in my heart i don't want anything to do with him unless i enjoy interacting with him.

friends are neighbors we choose, and it can be harder when they disappoint us. but only because we become so used to them that when they let us down we take it personally.

if we allow people to make mistakes, and accept that they will, and accept that it might take a long time for them to learn...how does that inform our expectations for leaders?

dave chappelle had a skit talking about an interaction he had with a transgender woman that did not paint her in a very kind light. and i was very upset with him. i wasn't the only one. but when he went on to continue making specials, i refrained from watching because i didn't want to support someone transphobic. i didn't want to risk that he would keep telling those kinds of jokes. but he ended up addressing that bit in a later special. i ended up coming back to him, because there was always something about his honesty and delivery, his artistry, that i was drawn to (like so many people). in the interview with letterman, he asks chappelle about if he wants to be a leader, acknowledging how letterman himself looked to dave for some sort of guidance. some sort of catharsis following the murder of george floyd. and it made me think about the leaders that the people choose versus the leaders that are groomed for us.

joe biden is the democratic nominee in our two-party presidential election, the results of which will be determined by an electoral college whose structure, like so many other things in this country, is in terrible need of revision. the people who are openly unenthusiastic about biden refer to his history, his involvement with legislation that was, like so many other things in this country, terribly imperfect and influenced by the politics of the time. biden had to change. as a public figure, as a political figure, he had to change with the times and with what the idea of a democrat meant, otherwise people like bernie sanders would stand a chance, and the two-party system would finally shift toward something more pluralistic, and the powers that be want to remain the powers that be. so while people condemn biden for his past, here i am wondering on one hand isn't he allowed to be imperfect? while at the same time wishing we could have had better leaders altogether from the start. leaders who were ahead of their time. leaders not so influenced by the politics and trends of the time. leaders who really make all of us feel confident they will be good for all of us. be what we really need in that office.

i guess what i'm saying is chappelle for president? but really what i'm saying is there has to be a balance between the degree of accountability a person holds for their behaviors and a degree of permission that we grant to people to learn from their mistakes and do better. and we shouldn't be electing anyone to office who hasn't demonstrated that they can learn from their mistakes. who remains the same self-interested, self-absorbed, capitalist pig they always were. i have every faith that chappelle will continue to evolve as a human being, because his craft and his passion are connected with that continuous journey of learning and experiencing and reflecting. i don't have as much faith in biden. but i want to. i want this not to be just another swing of the pendulum back toward the left before another shift toward the right again. i want our political arena to have more diversity. more progress. to really be for the people. even though that's not really the way it was set up. those were the words that were used, and they represent a good vision. a good potential.

i don't know what for the people really looks like. there are some examples around the world, but every place has its issues. no place on earth is perfect. (though ikaria might be close to it. and some of those other blue zones where people live the longest, happiest lives.) 

i have no power in what happens next. the presidential election is in five days. i've cast my vote. millions of citizens have. maybe the outcome has already been decided, and this election business is more of a farce than we realize. but i still have no control over what happens, and i have to focus back on the arena where i do have power. myself. my own backyard. my own community. my own friends and family. my work. so that's what i'll do. and i'll always feel grateful for people like chappelle who are willing to speak up about things many of us have a hard time with, even within our communities. thank goodness for unofficial leaders who open up the spaces for us to keep the dialogue going. especially when they can help us to laugh. because we're all dealing with so many of the mistakes people have been allowed to make for hundreds of years.

How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World

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Ebb Software’s long-awaited horror shooter Scorn is designed to make you squirm in your seat from the second you lay eyes on it. Set in a gruesome world of bone, flesh, and sharp steel, the game is meant to be repulsive, but it’s also absolutely entrancing. The imagery is visceral and gory — from tendrils of meat hanging down from big, grotesque statues to the bloody creatures crawling all over the walls to the webby, diseased-looking membrane covering the skinless protagonist’s head — but you also can’t look away.

According to game director Ljubomir Peklar, the game’s visual style is meant to challenge what we generally consider to be beautiful.

“Human beings are conditioned to like the external beauty of their bodies and see the internal organs, bones, and tissue as something repulsive. It’s a reflex,” Peklar said of the game’s art direction in an interview with Rock.Paper.Shotgun in 2016. “Our existence as a living organism is at the core of the game and human anatomy is the primary subject. Therefore we referenced many different parts of it as a starting point, then we morph, combine, and exaggerate them, change the shapes until we get something visually appealing. It’s not always about functionality but interesting forms that make sense for what we are trying to express.”

It’s clear the team at Ebb is trying to express a deep fascination with the organic while also making sometimes literal connections between living things and machines. Take the game’s main weapons, the pistol and shotgun, which are living organisms with mouths where you’re meant to insert the bullets. There are ribbed cables that run through structures resembling organs, while leaking phallic-shaped mouths protrude from the metal walls.

Scorn‘s challenging and disorienting art style could make it a defining work of horror gaming, but even if it’s not, it’ll certainly be one of the most visually interesting games on the Xbox Series X when it launches later this year. You can see what I mean in this trailer of the game running on the next-gen console:

It’s no secret that this Gothic hell is heavily inspired by the work of two of the greatest surrealists to ever touch a canvas, the Swedish artist H.R. Giger, who you may know best for his designs for the sci-fi horror movie Alien, and the Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, whose grim creations are particularly responsible for all of the gore in the game’s environments. This isn’t the first time their work has shown up in some form in a video game, but Scorn could very well be the most faithful of the bunch.

Giger most famously collaborated with developer Cyberdreams in the early ’90s, providing access to his artwork for the psychological horror point-and-click adventure game Dark Seed and its sequel Dark Seed II. But the use of Giger’s work in that game can only be described as “quaint” when compared to what Scorn is doing. After all, the technological limitations of the time prevented Cyberdreams from truly building something out of Giger’s art, forcing the team to instead use his airbrushed paintings as backgrounds in the game to set the mood of the somewhat peculiar plot.

“Actually I think no one really did it the right way,” Peklar says of past adaptations of Giger’s work in an email to Den of Geek. “I don’t remember too much of Dark Seed, I played it a very long time ago. I do know that the artwork was just H.R Giger’s already established work collaged into the background. It was not designed from the ground up to be a setting in a game.”

Peklar asserts that no one has done what Scorn has set out to do. Peklar is not only interested in capturing the look and feel of Giger’s twisted work but also the meaning behind the pieces.

“Giger’s visual influence can be seen in many forms, from movies to games, but only superficially, to represent aliens, monsters maybe some strange planet, etc. Nobody truly dealt and realized Giger’s work thematically,” Peklar says. “His work is the most fascinating part but always sidelined, never the focus.”

Director Ridley Scott might take issue with Peklar’s comments, especially since so much of Alien‘s world is based on Giger’s unique vision, but even those movies don’t quite delve into the full breadth of the artist’s work, which often portrayed human beings in a physical, often erotic, relationship with machines, a style the artist called the “biomechanical.”

Indeed, you can see Giger’s “biomechanical” style in the way Scorn‘s protagonist “plugs into” an exoskeleton made of bone in the XSX trailer or how he sticks his arm inside of a terminal, veins like spaghetti running through the “computer’s” circuits to activate a machine in gameplay footage from 2017.

“It’s not about alien worlds, no matter how many people think that’s what his art is about,” Peklar explains. “There is a much more important subtext to it. It’s about the interweaving of human beings and technology. The organism as a structure that defined our existence up to this point, fused with our own mechanical creations in a ridiculous dance of libido and death. Freudian concepts that both move and terrify us.”

If Giger’s work emphasized the symbiosis between the living and the mechanical, the less well-known Beksiński was more interested in man’s connection to death. Many of his pieces, which often depicted dystopian settings riddled with skeletons and corpses presided over by red, bleeding skies, seem to have a singular focus: the apocalypse and what comes after.

Beksiński loved to paint decaying bodies and skeletal figures stripped of the features that once made them human, like faces and skin. One particularly haunting painting depicts a man’s eyeballs spilling — or perhaps growing out like roots — from their sockets in messy ropes of red. Beksiński’s work is likely the most responsible for Scorn‘s faceless protagonist, whose body is mostly made up of skinless muscle tissue and nerves, with the bones of a naked ribcage protruding from his chest.

Peklar tapped concept designer Filip Acovic to create the look of Scorn, from the levels to the protagonist to the weapons, but the goal wasn’t to just produce a “mere homage to Giger” or Beksiński, as the director told Shacknews in May.

“[Giger and Beksinski] are certainly the two main visual influences but their work was not chosen because it looks cool but because different aspects of their work relate to various themes and ideas in Scorn. We also tried to create our own style,” Peklar told Rock.Paper.Shotgun.

Peklar tells Den of Geek that he believes “the art style should always be in service of the themes and the ideas of the game.” But what is Scorn actually about? Peklar is more secretive about the game’s plot, which will unfold through environmental storytelling as opposed to cinematics. In fact, the director wishes he could have kept the game’s whole existence a secret for much longer than he did.

Since Scorn was announced in 2014 for PC, it has gone through two Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns and was initially set to be released as a two-part experience before announcing a full release on Xbox Series X and Xbox Game Pass in May.

“The reason you heard about the game in 2014, 2016, and 2017 was because we were running out of resources so we had to show it and gather interest so we could convince people to invest in the studio. I said it quite a few times, if I had the all the resources needed to develop the game without public knowing about it I most certainly would. You would be probably hearing about the game for the first time now and thinking it’s a new game.”

Yet, six years of cryptic trailers haven’t betrayed the secrets of a game that was “designed around the idea of being thrown into the world.” Like the Giger and Beksiński pieces that inspired him, Scorn‘s macabre dreamscapes may defy explanation, according to Peklar.

“Like the best of nightmares, that surreal imagery will start playing with your psyche the more you play the game,” Peklar told Shacknews. “When you wake up from a nightmare it’s really hard to define what you dreamt, only snippets remain, and the feeling of anxiety. That is something we are trying to recreate.”

In the Shacknews interview, Peklar compared the feeling of traversing through Scorn‘s work to the hectic opening Dario Argento’s horror masterpiece Suspiria: “It’s a montage of sights and sounds that creates the uneasy feeling. Nothing is set up story-wise and nothing truly graphic is happening. It just is.”

While Peklar looked to horror classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill for the environmental storytelling that ties Scorn together, Peklar told PC Gamer in 2017 that he wasn’t interested in a scripted story for the game:

“We are not trying to push traditional plot-driven narrative. That is where these games fail for me. Writing an interesting story requires a good writer, and game developers or writers that specialize in games writing are not very good. If they were, they would write a book or a screenplay. That’s the right medium for the job. Games for me are about interactivity and telling you a story through it.”

Ultimately, what Scorn‘s story is about may not be as important as what players take away from it. Peklar says that he’s ultimately happy to let “players to give their interpretation of the game.”

Giger and Beksiński aren’t the only influences on Scorn, according to the director, who says filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Dario Argento, and John Carpenter are also major inspirations.

“Cronenberg’s main concept that puts our organism at the center of human existence and Giger’s bio structures intersect in many ways,” Peklar says. “Lynch’s surrealness captures the strangeness of the world we inhabit and an oneiric sense of our own being.”

Peklar also cites surrealist writers Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, whom he says “mostly dealt with the absurdity and weirdness of human existence in this mysterious universe.” Then there’s horror writer Thomas Ligotti, “who deals with all the horrors that come with it,” and the dystopian J.G. Ballard, who “bounds it all together in technological nightmares of sex, violence, and decay.”

What we’ve seen and heard of Scorn so far points to this year’s most twisted game, perhaps even the most uncomfortable visual experience ever released on a console. As I rewatched the footage of the game in preparation for this article, I wondered whether Peklar was worried that gamers would find the finished product too revolting to complete or even play at all. Then I was hit with an even darker thought: was there anything in Scorn that was too fucked up for even Peklar?

When I ask Peklar whether there’s been anything he decided to cut from the game because it went too far, the director simply answers, “I’m hoping for that day to come. Either my imagination is too limited or I have become too numb.”

Scorn is out later this year for Xbox Series X and PC.

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Machine learning for everyone startup Intersect Labs launches platform for data analysis

Machine learning is the holy grail of data analysis, but unfortunately, that holy grail oftentimes requires a PhD in Computer Science just to get started. Despite the incredible attention that machine learning and artificial intelligence get from the press, the reality is that there is a massive gap between the needs of companies to solve business challenges and the availability of talent for building incisive models.

YC-backed Intersect Labs is looking to solve that gap by making machine learning much more widely accessible to the business analyst community. Through its platform, which is being launched fully publicly, business analysts can upload their data, and Intersect will automatically identify the right machine learning models to apply to the dataset and optimize the parameters of those models.

The company was founded by Ankit Gordhandas and Aaron Fried in August of last year. In his previous job, Gordhandas deployed machine learning models to customers and started working on a tool that would speed up his work. “I actually realized I could build a version of the tool that was a little more advanced,” he said, and that work ultimately led to the foundation of Intersect Labs. He linked up with Fried in October, and the two have been working on the platform since.

Intersect’s goal is to move analysts from purely retrospective analysis to creating models that can predictively determine business strategy. “People who live in SQL and Excel, they are really good at pulling the data of the past, but we are giving them the superpower of seeing the future,” Gordhandas explained. “All you need is your historical data, upload to our platform, and answer two questions.”

Ankit Gordhandas and Aaron Fried of Intersect Labs. Courtesy of Intersect Labs.

Those questions essentially ask what the model should predict (the outcome variable). From there, Intersect begins by cleaning up the data and ensuring that the various columns are properly scaled for data analysis. Then, the platform begins constructing a range of machine learning models and evaluating their performance against the target output. Once an ideal model is identified, customers can integrate it into their other systems through a REST-style API.

What’s interesting here is that Intersect can get better and better at identifying models over time based on the increasing diversity of datasets that it gets access to. Plus, as researchers identify new models or ways to tune them, the platform can potentially proactively improve the models it had previously identified for its customers, ensuring that they stay at the cutting edge of the field.

Today, the platform can handle one table of standard rows and columns for processing. Gordhandas said that the company intends to expand in the future to “image processing, audio processing, video processing, unstructured data processing” so that the platform can be applied to as diverse a set of data sources as possible

Gordhandas says that Intersect is attempting to sit in the middle of more specialized machine learning platforms that are limited to hyper-focused niches, while also offering more analytical power than comparably simpler solutions.

Certainly the space has seen a proliferation of options. New York City-based Generable (formerly Stan) uses Bayesian modeling and probabilistic programming to improve drug discovery, while Mintigo uses AI modeling to improve customer engagement. A huge number of other startups target different stages of the data analysis pipeline as well.

In the end, Intersect hopes to make these tools more widely accessible. The company has a couple of early customers already, and is going through the Y Combinator accelerator this batch.

Interview: Understanding the Swiss Made K1 Automatic Movement With Creator Jonas Nydegger

At the heart of each timepiece is a movement. It is an engine whose development has been continuously improved upon since the 16th century. Literally, hundreds of years of human skill and innovation are contained in modern-day mechanical movements, while most timepieces sold to mainstream consumers are, in fact, more like appliances and tools that have efficient, electronic mechanisms in them. Mechanical watches on the other hand are for people who can’t help but love a well-made machine.

Only a small number of companies around the world have the ability to manufacture or assemble mechanical movements, and still fewer have the ability to design them from nearly the ground up. THE+ and its in-house watch brand Horage represent just such a rare company. The THE+ is headquarters in the Swiss city of Bienne/Biel, a split name because it rests on an intersection between German and French-speaking Switzerland. It is also home to many of the world’s old names in Swiss watchmaking. It is where Rolex produces its movements and where much of the Swatch Group is headquartered.

More than a decade ago now, the same Swatch Group announced intentions for its in-group watch movement maker ETA to cease selling movements to a number of brands. At the time, ETA was one of very, very few companies to produce Swiss Made mechanical movements that it would sell to companies who could put them in their own products. ETA didn’t want to supply as many brands as it was, and the Swatch Group and the Swiss government are still today debating the actual terms of what ETA’s duties to the marketplace actually are.

In any event, for quite some time ETA did stop selling so many movements to brands outside of the Swatch Group and concurrently called upon the Swiss watch industry to invest in new and innovative companies that can make movements. This is precisely what happened — and THE+ is just such a company. What THE+ is not is one of many companies whose answer to ETA’s call to action was to simply copy ETA movements. Legally, patent or other protections on ETA mechanical movements have long since expired. While ETA continued to develop fresh technology, its mainstay movements used in a large number of globally available wristwatch movements could now be legally copied by anyone who tried hard enough to replicate them. This aforementioned approach as help supply a lot of mechanical movements, but THE+ had a different idea. It wanted to not only offer an alternative to the ETA mechanical movement experience but also to offer one that was wholly distinctive — and at a competitive price point.

This latter point is crucial because, indeed, a large universe of available mechanical movements do exist out there, but not at price points that would allow them to sell for anything close to as low as what an ETA-equipped watch could go for. For example, if a watch movement alone costs $3,000 for a brand to purchase, at what price point must the final retail price be for that brand to earn the desired profit margin? The answer is quite high.

Watch brands not able or willing to produce their own Swiss Made movements, but that want a less-than-generic experience for consumers in a $5,000 USD and under product, do not at this time have too many options. THE+ and its in-house designers developed and made K1 automatic movement system, now a 10-year-old answer to that problem. The K1 automatic movement is both an original base Swiss Made automatic and a platform for a host of modules, which when placed over the base can modify or add to the core time-telling functions.

Horage watches mostly feature K1 automatic movements, with various modules that add features and complications. I’ve worn at least two watches with the K1 and found them to be really impressive. I certainly put the K1 up there as one of the most desirable Swiss Made movements at this price point. I also think that, with so many watches having used ETA and similar movements over the years, a lot of brands could benefit from the novelty and new artistic opportunities that something like the K1 can offer.

Now let’s hear from THE+ itself, namely K1 movement designer Jonas Nydegger. We rarely interview actual movement designers, so I hope you enjoy this deeper look in the Swiss Made THE+ K1 movement.

aBlogtoWatch (ABTW): Horage and the K1 movement already have a story to tell with over 10 years of history. Jonas Nydegger, you’ve been a pivotal individual in the foundation of the company. Tell us a little about your background and just how things came to be with Horage and the K1 movement?

Jonas Nydegger (JN): I am fascinated by the development and production of mechanical objects. My drive is filed by an interest in technical production. In school, I studied watchmaking and apprenticed as a watchmaker. I later moved on to studying production engineering with a focus on watch movement construction, and later I studied system engineering. Over the past 15 years, I have met many fascinating craftsmen that inspired me to stay on this path. In my early years, I worked with companies on projects that implemented a lot of incorrect strategies and made costly operational mistakes. I learned a lot about what not to do, and these hard lessons helped me when I eventually ran projects of my own. Jumping ahead to K1, I was literally thrown into the deep end, as it was and is a massive movement project, but I knew how to navigate the pitfalls from previous experience.

The founders of Horage — Tzuyu and Andi — are two very open-minded and forward-thinking individuals and early on trusted me and let me take the lead with K1. In addition, Andi has challenged me to look further into the future and what modern watchmaking can look like. Tzuyu is the strategic mastermind behind THE+ our production firm and, aside from that, Tzuyu is also the best cook I have ever met — and I love to eat, so that makes me happy. I am appreciative of the opportunity Tzuyu has given me each and every day.

Tzuyu has shifted her focus to Horage brand-building and has given me the reins to the movement projects. We have an amazing young team, and we have a lot of fun making movements — things just keep getting better.

ABTW: How rare is it today for a watch brand (or any company for that matter) to build a movement from the ground up?

JN: Extremely rare. Just have a look at the market. The movement game is only set up for the big players to be a part of. There simply are not enough talented engineers on the market. Add in the cost of investment, and the risks are catastrophic. What we created with K1 is something very remarkable.

ABTW: Considering the extremely high cost barrier to entry, how easily can one access information and talent to see the project through to completion?

Making movements has three big variables at play; cost, talent, and time. Excellent engineering can reduce cost and decrease time to market by a few years, but finding a sound educated team willing to invest their time and their futures in such projects is an anomaly. The reason there is not more talent is that too many brands made too much money selling old technologies over the past 40 years and not investing in the future of watchmaking. No investment in future watchmaking means fewer apprentices being trained and, ultimately, the entrepreneurial spirit of an entire industry is left to die. Great movements take years to come to market, and there are few that have the balls to do something like K1.

ABTW: From the perspective of consumers, what is special about the K1 and why should they pay attention to it?

JN: K1 is a very interesting movement due to it being a first to have configurable modularity. Early on, we showed this modularity through various campaigns, and with our Multiply watch customers were able to configure the complications of their finished watch and still can today. The modularity of the design means it delivers a consistent dimension across all functions applied to it. This means that Horage, or any brand for that matter, can reduce stock, time to market, and be more agile in shifting production to markets demand on best-selling products. This means the work and financial investment becomes much easier for Horage to manage, and this brings a ton of value to the customer — better prices for increased quality as well as better spec’d watches leading to a more product diversification overall.

In the end, the brand is more flexible, reactive, and expedites product development time, and all this means customers get not only more value but also more of what they desire most. This means customers’ money can go into products they love rather than products a brand needs to market to make room for new stock. K1 is not a clone, but rather made from the ground up, in-house by us. It is built on the latest advancements in global production technologies such as more flexible production processes, new coating technologies, and new advancements in escapements like our silicon escapement that has a host of advantages, including anti-magnetism, increased power reserve, and fewer service intervals than traditional escapements.

ABTW: From a watchmaking performance perspective, how does the K1 movement compare to popular industry movements people known well?

JN: When it comes to performance, we have sound confidence comparing K1 with the latest and most advanced movements that are available on the market today, especially when one looks at the new generations coming to market from the big groups that have long power reserves as well as new escapement and hairspring technology. We achieve a comparable power reserve but deliver a more stable frequency of 3.5 Hz compared to hacked standard movements with a reduced frequency to 3 Hz.

Looking at one competitor’s newest movement that delivers around 70 hours of power reserve and is 5mm-high, on the surface it appears very close to K1; however, it is not modular and can only be spec’d to a standard three-hand and date complication. K1 can deliver much more with a big date, small second or center second, and power reserve indicator. Of course, there are other premium movement makers, but a premium movement comes at a premium price and is reserved for brands in the upper echelon of the luxury watch market. K1 has been designed to offer premium performance at a more digestible price point.

Service-wise, K1 is extremely stable, with modern construction, and the parts are easy to assemble, which means that should it need servicing the turnaround time is very fast. We recommend a service interval comparable with other industry-standard movements. However, we are confident that a run-time of up to 10 years is easily achieved before needing a full service inclusive of part lubrication.

ABTW: From a technical perspective what is interesting about the K1 in terms of architecture, materials, or construction?

JN: As relayed earlier, K1 is modular and this modularity brings efficiency, flexibility and lower cost to HORAGE and this inevitably leads to a greater value offer to the customer. K1 is a modern and compact movement. It is 25.6mm (11.5 lines) wide and 4.95mm high and this mean a multitude of watch sizes can be developed from a petite or small casual watch up to any size one would like. Currently the smallest possible watch we have is the 32mm Omnium and in such a size you can utilize every spec of K1.

From the early 1980’s until now there have been 3 standard movements produced by ETA, those being the 2892, 2824 and the 7750. The 2892 and 2824 are basic movements that offer a standard 3 hands and date. If a brand wanted to have a better spec like big date, power reserve indicator or others they would always have to buy a module to be assembled on top of the standard movements. This means that the movement is getting thicker and the watch case needs to change to accommodate this. However this is a costly exercise for a brand because for each and every spec, dial or face they need an entirely new case. That means a huge amount of case stock is needed to accommodate different movement specs. Planning for what the consumer is going to gravitate towards makes it nearly impossible to get the case stock correct and this means that if a product with a power reserve indicator is performing better than a 3 hand/date a brand cannot react quickly enough to the demand and then has to invest more heavily in marketing the dogs of the line. With our brand Horage we wanted to have this flexibility and felt others would appreciate such a movement.

K1 offers five specs that can be combined in 18 different face variations. This means all can be delivered within the same movement dimensions and that a brand needs only one case size per model for all model specs. Faster reaction to market demand can be achieved and the burden of inflated inventories can be avoided.

We looked to the car industry for our modular approach where such methodologies have been standard for decades. However, there simply has not been a lot of new movement development in the watch industry over the past 40 years and why such concepts are new to the watch industry and the watch enthusiast.

ABTW: From a watch brand perspective, what makes the K1 an attractive and affordable option for their upcoming timepiece project.

JN: The first point is availability and because Horage has K1 in-house it is available and doesn’t need to be sourced by a third party. Currently, there are extremely limited options on the market to brands looking for an up to date modern movement. If one wants to play in the same league as the big movement groups, then investing in the development of such a movement like K1 is needed. K1 is price-competitive with the new calibers coming to market from other makers. However, a comparison cannot be made to the basic shelf movements of yesterday that a brand can pick up for 70 Swiss francs. With new technologies and the desire for more precision and smaller movements, the cost of production of small-batch runs has dramatically increased. The sky is the limit when it comes to cost, however, the challenge is delivering a stable, modern movement at a competitive price — and this is something K1 delivers.

This price difference is seen in the final consumer price of products; many micro-brands are purchasing old technology that is easily obtainable and selling watches in the $500- $1500 range, depending on materials at play. With a K1 movement, the market entry could be as low as $1500 and then move up from there depending on what modular functions are utilized, what decoration is applied to the movement, and overall construction of the completed watch. Horage utilizes the very best materials available and has a start price of around $2,200 USD. There are many more costs that come in after the movement and materials, such as 904L stainless steel that is 8-10 times the cost of regular 316L, but the brand’s value statement starts with the movement.

Florian Serex, who has been a mentor to me, as well as a creative addition to the K1 project, was the one that saw the opportunity of combining the functions and decorations associated with a manufacture movement with the advantages of industrial reliability and scale. Thanks to his creative mind, forward-thinking and vast industrial knowledge, K1 is a hybrid of manufacture and industrial movement. Without him, K1 would not have seen the light of day. However, every fire needs a spark, and Stephan Kussmaul, the first engineer involved in the K1 project, birthed the idea of modularity — so their combined ideologies delivered a killer movement.

ABTW: There are a few other brands in the market turning out new calibers rather quickly, which makes one think that it might be easier than one thinks. How do these quick turn around calibers compare to what you are doing? How do these brands limit the invested time needed to bring a caliber to market?

JN: If a brand has an internal team and has gone through the development of a first movement, typically 7-10 years, and brought it to market, then it becomes easier to develop future movements. There is a ton of learning with a new movement, and the lessons learned can save a lot of time on crucial processes. However, this is a multi-year undertaking, and enough time must be taken to ensure stability. Brands should stick to one or two workhorses and limit their risk by not continually developing new movements. More movements mean less quantity per movement.

That leads to smaller batches which generate higher cost and less stable production quality. This is the line drawn when one compares a manufacture movement to an industrial movement. An industrial movement like K1 is designed for scale, performance, reliability, and cost reduction, but a manufacture movement means more new movements can be created in less time, but one sacrifices reliability, performance, and cost. We have taken the positive attributes of both manufacture and industrial movement and moved the needle a little further into the future.

Learn more at the Horage watches website here. Learn more about The Plus here.

The post Interview: Understanding the Swiss Made K1 Automatic Movement With Creator Jonas Nydegger appeared first on Wristwatch Journal.

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